Yearly Archives: 2010

Check it out, Features

The Virtues of Restriction: The Hide and Other Cinematic Enclosed Locations

The Hide

Format: DVD

Date: 11 January 2010

Distributor: ICA Films

Director: Marek Losey

Writer: Tim Whitnall

Cast: Alex Macqueen, Phil Campbell

UK 2008

82 mins

On the Isle of Sheppey, birdwatcher Roy (Alex Macqueen) settles into a remote hide in the hope of spotting a rare sociable plover to add to his checklist of ornithological species recorded in the British Isles. With his buttoned-down appearance, use of a pen that was given to him by his mother, and habit of talking to a photograph of his wife, Roy does not seem like someone who is well-suited to spending time with others, but he soon has company in the hide when he reluctantly takes in the mysterious Dave (Phil Campbell) during a downpour. The two men engage in awkward exchanges, which are indicative of their opposing social backgrounds, although they eventually bond over chicken paste sandwiches. However, it soon becomes apparent that his new acquaintance may not merely be a man out for a stroll without the appropriate attire, although Roy’s own behaviour is odd enough to suggest that audience loyalty should not be too readily placed.

The concept of strangers engaging in a combative, yet subtly humorous, game of psychological cat-and-mouse in an enclosed location is by no means new, but with its barely concealed class warfare, Marek Losey’s debut feature The Hide makes for a particularly British addition to a rapidly growing sub-genre. The Hide was adapted by Tim Whitnall from his own play, and the roots of this cinematic tradition could be seen to be theatrical; Wait until Dark (1967), in which an Oscar-nominated Audrey Hepburn plays a recently blinded woman who is terrorised by a trio of crooks searching for the stash of heroin that they believe to be in her apartment, originated as a 1966 play by Frederick Knott. Sleuth, Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 play, was filmed by Joseph L Mankiewicz in 1972, then again by Kenneth Branagh in 2007, and revolves around the battle of wits between an ageing mystery writer and his wife’s young lover, with their psychological duel taking place around the former’s country estate. Robert Altman’s screen version of Donald Freed and Andrew M Stone’s Secret Honour (1984) concerns one man in his office, with the man being Richard Nixon (Phillip Baker Hall) and his stream-of-consciousness monologue taking in the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation.

However, some formidable cinematic talents were exploring the cramped confines of restricted space before the aforementioned theatrical transfers. One of the earliest examples of the sub-genre is Alfred Hitchock’s Lifeboat (1944), which concerns the survivors of a ship torpedoed by a German U-boat, which has also been sunk by engaging in combat with their vessel. The survivors pull another man out of the water, but when he turns out to be the captain of the German U-boat, discussion turns from how the group will survive to what they should do with the enemy in their midst. In 1954, the Master of Suspense would deliver Rear Window, a classic thriller concerning a wheelchair-bound photographer (James Stewart), who spies on his neighbours out of boredom, only to come to suspect that the resident across the courtyard may have murdered his wife. The more socially conscious Sidney Lumet also weighed in with 12 Angry Men (1957), which takes place almost entirely in a jury room where 12 nameless men decide whether a teenage boy accused of murdering his father is guilty; Lumet employed telephoto lenses to enhance the sweaty atmosphere of the room as juror 8 (Henry Fonda) gradually persuades the others to reconsider their verdict.

The seemingly restrictive elements of films set in confined spaces (one location, small cast, emphasis on dialogue over action) has made the sub-genre extremely appealing to independent filmmakers working with limited resources. However, these films often break the unwritten rules of the sub-genre; James Wan’s Saw (2004) opens with two men waking up at opposite sides of a filthy bathroom, with a dead body between them, while Simon Brand’s comparatively little-seen Unknown (2006) begins with five men coming around in a locked-down warehouse with no memory of who they are or how they got there. However, Saw segues into flashbacks to show how the captive men came to be in their predicaments, while Unknown alternates between desperate escape attempts and the parallel FBI investigation. Even Quentin Tarantino’s legendary debut Reservoir Dogs (1992), which takes place in an abandoned warehouse where a gang of sharp-suited criminals have arranged to rendezvous following the heist, is interspersed with flashbacks to the ill-fated jewellery store robbery and the assembly of the crew.

Two independently financed examples of the sub-genre that do not play as fast and loose with its conventions are Vincenzo Natali’s ingenious Cube (1997) and David Slade’s gripping Hard Candy (2005). In Cube, six strangers wake up in a cubical maze and have to use their combined skills to defy a series of death traps in order to escape, with Natali offering ingenious science fiction on a bargain-basement budget by utilising the same set repeatedly and simply redressing it. Hard Candy opens with an establishing scene in a trendy coffee shop as 14-year-old Hayley (Ellen Page) meets up with charming photographer Jeff (Patrick Wilson) with whom she has corresponded on the internet, but soon relocates to Jeff’s suburban home, where his underage ‘admirer’ drugs and tortures him, convinced that he is a paedophile who uses internet chat rooms as a virtual hunting ground. Hard Candy flirts with the morally questionable ‘torture porn’ of the Saw franchise in a scene in which Hayley freezes Jeff’s body from the waist down in order to emasculate him but, as with The Hide, the film is more interested in toying with the sympathies of the audience, suggesting that Hayley may have accused the wrong man.

If the contemporary confined space films that have emerged from the independent sector have been conceived as vehicles for directors to prove their creativity, the major studio productions that have followed their lead have served as showcases for established stars, as with Rear Window and Wait until Dark in earlier eras. In Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth (2002), Colin Farrell’s slick hustler unravels due to taunts from the sniper who has him in his sights, while in 1408 (2007), John Cusack’s cynical writer spends a night in a ‘haunted’ room at a New York hotel, encountering some instances of paranormal activity before descending into madness as the décor of the room comes to reflect the demons within his own psyche. Both stars acquit themselves admirably, although the studio trappings of Phone Booth and 1408 entail that the audience never has any doubt that the trapped protagonist of either film will not fail to find a way out of their respective predicament.

As indicated, films that take place in a confined space usually find increasingly frayed tempers resulting in irrational action, with John Hughes’s high school detention drama The Breakfast Club (1985) and Kevin Smith’s convenience store comedy Clerks (1994) standing out as rare humorous entries in a sub-genre that is better exemplified by the almost unbearable claustrophobia of Wolfgang Petersen’s submarine classic Das Boot (1981), which dives ‘down below’ with the crew of a German U-boat during World War II. It is also a sub-genre that, in contrast to most other forms of cinematic escapism, is becoming logistically smaller as opposed to bigger; 2010 will also see the release of Buried, in which Ryan Reynolds wakes up to find that he has been buried alive inside a coffin with only a cell phone and a lighter to assist him. Although this thriller by Rodrigo Cortés sounds like the finale of George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988) stretched to 90 minutes, it does at least promise to add a political dimension to the sub-genre in that the trapped character is an American contractor working in Iraq. The Hide also offers some social-political commentary, with Roy’s discussion of his redundancy and how it has soured his marriage, but it works primarily as a taut, low-key thriller that utilises the confined space of its titular location – not to mention the sparsely atmospheric sounds of the moor on which it is situated – to unsettling effect.

John Berra

This article is part of our ‘Confined Spaces’ theme.
Features, Festivals

Magic Lanterns

Comrades

Flatpack Festival

23-28 March 2010, Birmingham

Flatpack website

Title: Comrades

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 27 July 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Bill Douglas

Writer Bill Douglas

Cast: Keith Allen, Dave Atkins, Stephen Bateman, Vanessa Redgrave, Alex Norton

UK 1986

183 mins

Paris’s Cinémathèque française was closed. I was left staring at locked doors, an expanse of concrete and a poster for a Jim Carrey retrospective. Lemony Snicket wasn’t part of the plan. It was Lanterna Magica I wanted, not Ace Ventura. Still, I resolved to re-trace my metro ride and find my phantasmagoria. The exhibition – ‘Lanterne magique et film peint – 400 ans de cinéma’ – was fairly humble by the standards of a national film institution. Narrow and dimly-lit, the room presented long wooden cabinets simply filled with slides and magic lantern apparatus spanning nearly four centuries. There were some projections and cornered-off screening rooms but, on the whole, the viewer could leisurely pore over and ponder these illuminated glass artworks: from grotesque 18th-century caricatures to delicate, ethereal paintings of polar expeditions; from sentimental 19th-century stories of childhood illness to playful sequences on a skipping rope; from religious didacticism to diabolical, dancing figures of death. Links from the magic lantern to early cinema were plain to see: a painted Muybridge-like sequence of Loie Fuller echoed the Lumière Brothers’ Serpentine Dance (1896); a staged photographic enactment of a lunar voyage mirrored Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902). But with a primarily static presentation of the exhibition, it was left to the imagination to bring the majority of the slides to life. It was an enthralling, wonderful experience to spend a few hours trying, but I was eager to experience a full Lanterna Magica show for myself. The magic lantern bug had started to bite.

Luckily, two months later these enchanting slides came to life for real at Birmingham’s Ikon Eastside Gallery, as part of a special event organised by Flatpack Festival. The show demonstrated Flatpack’s continuing fondness for proto-cinema and early cinematic pioneers. Last year, artist Kevin Timmins presented his bicycle-powered phenakistoscope and filmmaker Mark Simon Hewis talked about making a life-size zoetrope. This year, magic lanternist Mike Simkin and his wife, Teresa, brought their Lanterna Magica to Flatpack audiences. There were travelogues with speeding trains and boats sailing across the channel. There were dancing American sailors and Victorian fairies. And there was my particular favourite: a dissolving view slide, which provided a feast of mesmerising, hypnotic optics, water pouring out of an ornate fountain. Like a strange 19th-century prog-rock video, the vision elicited a round of oohs and aahs from the assembled viewers. Happily, audience participation was actively encouraged as the lanternists asked for sound effects and heckles. This re-enactment of a historical show tied in nicely with the festival’s aim to explore not only film itself, but also how people view film. Elsewhere in the programme, there was a particular focus on the 30s’ cinema-going experience with a bus tour of art deco Odeon cinemas and a talk by Juliet Gardiner sharing surveys and diaries of everyday film enthusiasts. The limited technology – slides were mechanised with cranking handles; they accidently appeared upside down and back to front; they became stuck and were freed to a series of cheers – created a refreshing change from the uniformity of modern cinema experiences. There was a real sense of wonder rippling through the Ikon.

Read about the short films shown at Flatpack 2010.

It was this same magic that had bitten Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas back in the 1960s. Preceding the magic lantern show, Flatpack hosted a screening of Lanterna Magicka (2009), a documentary exploring the rather fraught making of Douglas’s epic film Comrades (1987), which was released on DVD by the BFI last year. Comrades tells the tale of the 19th-century Tolpuddle martyrs punctuated by magic lantern shows and pre-cinema illusions. (Mike Simkin himself acted as lanternist for the production). Douglas was an avid collector of proto-cinema paraphernalia; the London flat he shared with friend Peter Jeffries soon became an extension of his ‘brain’, filled with books, slides and advertisements relating to Lanterna Magica. Douglas continued to be enchanted by the ‘magic’ of the lantern’s optical effects until the end of his life, taking an escapist delight in the aesthetic and technology of the past. And this escape provided a perfect retreat from Thatcherite Britain – the thinly-disguised allegorical target of Comrades. Douglas’s extraordinary collection is now housed at the University of Exeter. After the screening, directors Sean Martin and Louise Milne explained how thrilling it was to visit and film this archive, the embodiment of ’30 years of tenacity and obsession’.

Another tenacious, obsessive lanternist to make an appearance at this year’s Flatpack was Julien Maire. Maire is a French artist preoccupied by the mechanics of technology and the possibilities of illusion. Unlike Douglas, who sought a refuge in the escapist fantasy of early cinema pioneers, Maire looks at ways to reinvent and expand on the concept of the magic lantern. In his projection-performance, Demi-pas, Maire uses a computer-assisted projector, which he has dismantled and rebuilt in order to project fantastically intricate, multi-layered motorised slides. By adjusting the focus to highlight different layers and by using mechanical devices, Maire creates a live performance within each slide. Demi-pas presents a simple story of one man’s daily routine, but the effects are far from ordinary; real-life water boils and fizzes within the slide as the man cooks his dinner; drawings appear outlined through a mini etch-a-sketch; rain droplets spatter onto the screen one by one.

Read about Flatpack 2009.

Flatpack presented work by three different types of people inspired by the magic lantern – a historian, a filmmaker and a performance artist. Those still glass slides I saw in Paris came to life; and they did so in so many different ways and formats. Flatpack put on a magical, joyful spectacle and simultaneously raised illuminating questions about what constitutes a ‘film’ by programming events based around proto-cinema technology. After all, cinema itself is born out of the illusion of rapidly juxtaposing still images, but how many festivals are exploring and celebrating this fact? It is an important technological element of film but also a key to understanding the potential playfulness provided by film. At the beginning of Comrades, an itinerant lanternist knocks on doors to promote his act as ‘a show for the family, a show of comical pictures and colour: endless rollicking laughter’. Here is a description befitting of the Flatpack experience and the possibilities of film itself.

Eleanor McKeown

Check it out, Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada

Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada above the 49th Parallel

Bruce Peninsula

Dearest Cineastes of the Celluloid Ecumenical Order that is Electric Sheep:

I launch this colonial report on the art of cinema from the northern-most tip of the Bruce Peninsula in the Dominion of Canada above the 49th Parallel. Since landing on these remote shores of the Niagara Escarpment, I have borne witness to a wide array of fine cinema in addition to the flora and fauna of this magnificent UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. I am touched by the spirits of my long-dead Brethren of the Holiest of Orders when they, with their Black Robes and Rosaries, first traversed this grand Peninsula and penned their anthropological tomes oft-referred to as The Jesuit Relations.

With one road in and one road out, it is here, where a thin layer of soil allows some of the oldest trees to rest atop rock formations chiselled by the Great Spirit during the last Ice Age, that I can peacefully experience all that cinema has to offer. Like my Jesuit brethren, my flesh and soul will be pierced – not by implements of aboriginal torture, but rather through the feats of technology that deliver a means of experiencing cinema of the highest and lowest order. Nailing my feet to the floor of my rustic cabin, I attempt, for the umpteenth time, to sit through Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó as white-tailed deer feed upon lichen and moss affixed to boulders; magnificent orbs dotting the terrain like fossilised pellets expunged by the prehistoric Lepus americanus.

And just as the Jesuits experienced the wrenching pain of flagellation, I too alternately experience the Heavenly heights of pure orgasmic pleasure when at dusk, with the newly re-mastered Blu-ray of North by Northwest cued up, I notice a bulky figure on hind legs dining greedily from the bird-feeding trough. Hungry blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) fret needlessly as their convenient source of nourishment is snorted back. ‘Fear not, little ones,’ I call out, ‘The delectable treats will be replaced by morning and the noble Ursus americanus will retreat into the forest and out of the gun-sights of the locals (Hosers bobus dougus mackenzieus Canadianus) who, ensconced within the venerable Royal Canadian Legion Hall, prepare for the Great Hunt over a breakfast of rye shooters and Molson Canadian beer chasers’.

A strange brew, indeed!

Aptly, I pen my exploration of cinema from the village of Tobermory, a hamlet in Upper Canada that was named by its Irish, Scottish and British pioneers after the town in the Hebrides where Powell and Pressburger’s film classic I Know Where I’m Going was set. Coincidentally, the colonial namesake played host to the North American premiere of the aforementioned picture in the late 1940s wherein hundreds of peninsula denizens journeyed via ox-cart to celebrate the picture’s entry into our Dominion above the 49th Parallel.

When I first happened upon this Garden of Eden during one of its six weeks of summer, throngs of vacationers bloated the population of 300 to 30,000. Due to the overwhelming number of churches on the Peninsula, I had automatically assumed this was a pious community, but an overwhelming joy enveloped me when a sign hanging from a local business caught my eye as a beacon of unimagined permissiveness – ‘GS Watersports’. With salacious elation, I was most familiar with ‘GS’, an acronym for ‘golden showers’ and ‘watersports’, also in the quaint parlance of avid fetishists at such délicieux newsgroup cyber-hideaways as ‘alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.sex.fetishes.golden_showers’.

I approached a seemingly friendly and comely young lass at a souvenir and ice cream stand on the sidewalk near ‘GS’, pointed to the sign and queried her regarding the village’s spécialité de la perversion. She curtly informed me that Tobermory is – due to clear water, unfathomable depths, ancient rock formations and hundreds of shipwrecks – one of North America’s most sought-after scuba diving locales. I furthermore asked her why transport companies in the early days of the colonies used the tip of this deadly peninsula as a key port. Alas, a horrendously porcine American family who wished to order triple scoops of frozen dairy product interrupted her and she was unable to provide an answer. The question regarding so many ships going down in an obvious death trap is a mystery to me, but current residents seem grateful to the long-ago-drowned and rather boneheaded seamen, whose sacrifices provide locals a livelihood beyond hunting, trapping, fishing, fucking and boozing.

The joys of cinema and nature are ever so boundless on these far Commonwealth shores. As I write these words of welcome to this regular column for Electric Sheep, I prepare to view a magnificent new Criterion Collection DVD entitled The Golden Age of Television and look forward to providing you next month with a personal history of American anthology television and a detailed review of the above mentioned masterwork of home entertainment – small screen gems worthy of a large screen.

And this then, dear readers, is how I plan to explore the world of cinema from these colonies. Armed with Blu-ray, DVD and laserdisc players, a battery of remote controls, my trusty laptop, a strong satellite wifi signal courtesy of the Canadian Coast Guard, a roaring fire in my stove, a Baikal semi-automatic shotgun on my lap and picture-window views to remind myself of the flora and fauna when I briefly avert my eyes from the high definition screen, I hope Рin this quiet paradise of our fine Dominion Рto illuminate, inform, tantalise, engage and perhaps, to entertain you in the wonder of what was, over one hundred years ago, wrought by the immortal Brothers Lumi̬re Рwhen moving images first passed through light, and magic appeared, as it always should, larger than life itself.

Greg Klymkiw

Next month: The Golden Age of American Television
Check it out, Reel Sounds

Reel Sounds: Ominous Silences – Knife in the Water

Knife in the Water

The story of Krzysztof Komeda provides a very good argument for US health reform. While in the States at the end of the 60s to compose the music for Rosemary’s Baby, the Polish jazz pianist sustained severe head injuries in a random accident. Lacking any health insurance, he was unable to get treatment and immediately put on a plane back to Poland. He died shortly afterwards without regaining consciousness. He had been one of Poland’s most celebrated jazz musicians, and the first to start a modern jazz group in Poland. His distinctive style was characterised by a mix of the cool school of Gerry Mulligan and the Modern Jazz Quartet, mixed with the bebop he’d witnessed at tiny jam sessions in a basement in Krakow. Under the influence of his years spent composing film scores, his 1965 album, ‘Astigmatic’, was noted for its unique approach to structure, and came to signal a whole new European influence on the development of jazz.

Markedly different from the Wagnerian approach of most Hollywood composers at the time, notably in the way it attaches leitmotifs to specific characters or themes and so on, Komeda’s music for Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962) acts more like punctuation, breaking up the tension of the dialogue scenes almost theatrically. But, as Steven Shaviro has commented, the most noteworthy thing about what he calls the ‘scansion’ of the soundtrack is its frequent recourse to silence. Tension is built up, not by the hysterical maximalism of Bernard Herrmann, but through gaps and absences. It is the horror of reading a crucial life-or-death document, partially blacked out by the censor’s pen. At what we might consider the dramatic climax of the film there are no swirling crescendos of discordant strings, no pounding brass or crashing cymbals, just a wandering bassline, circling, seemingly aimlessly, around some indistinct tonality, never quite resolving itself, or finding its home.

Robert Barry

Check it out, Short Cuts

Short Cuts: Puppetoons

Puppetoons

Flatpack Festival

23-28 March 2010, Birmingham

Flatpack website

On Sunday 28 March, as the clocks sprung forward and the hangovers kicked in after a raucous night of plasticine revelry, some brave souls dragged themselves out of bed for Puppetoons: a celebration of Georges Pal’s puppet marvels from the 1930s and 40s. Pal’s charming stop-motion techniques were spotted by the electronics company Philips, who were looking for an offbeat way to promote their radio sets and decided to commission a series of commercials. The resulting films – imagine the woodentops sashaying to jazzy trumpets and Latin American rhythms – provided a lovely Sunday wake-up call. The programme also presented some of Pal’s work from the 1940s, which saw his retreat from war-torn Europe to the world of Paramount Pictures in America.

Read about the short films shown at Flatpack 2010.

His best-known film, Tubby the Tuba (1947), which tells the tale of a ruddy-faced and ostracised tuba trying to find his way among a group of sneering, snooty orchestral instruments, screened alongside Pal’s most controversial character, the racially stereotypical Jasper. Following Jasper’s in a Jam (1946), which featured a smoldering Peggy Lee number, came John Henry and the Inky-Poo (1946) – Pal’s attempt to re-balance the racial stereotyping found in his Jasper series. Indeed, at the time, the African American magazine, Ebony, praised the latter as ‘that rarest of Hollywood products that has no Negro stereotypes, but rather treats the Negro with dignity, imagination, poetry, and love’. Personally, I did not find too many positives in a tale focusing on a worker’s struggle and death on the railroad (!) but the animation and beautiful soundtrack (this time supplied by the powerful Luvenia Nash Singers) once again supplied a visual treat. The final film in the programme was Tulips Shall Grow (1942) – a tale of a smitten and be-clogged Dutch couple and their windmill, which is suddenly besieged by The Screwballs, an army of malevolent nuts and bolts. An allegory for the Nazi invasion of Europe, the film was in some ways a sentimental fairy tale, but it was also incredibly touching as the couple were eventually re-united, their windmill came back to life and tulips grew back among the fields. Knowing that Pal himself fled Europe during World War II made the subject matter doubly affecting. Puppetoons provided a great and rare opportunity to see the work of an immensely talented animator and one who, for various reasons, provided a lot of political food for thought.

Eleanor McKeown

Read our feature about Magic Lanterns at Flatpack 2010.
Check it out, Film Jukebox

Film Jukebox: Lali Puna

Lali Puna

Lali Puna have been offering an irresistibly lovely, off-kilter take on electronic pop music for well over a decade. Combining glitchy electronica with guitar pop the band create gorgeous pop songs, held together by Valerie Trebeljahr’s airy vocals and The Notwist’s Markus Acher’s rhythmic guitar. Hailing from Weilheim in Germany, the band have been a staple of Berlin’s Morr Music roster, with intelligence and invention being at the forefront of their musical output. Their new album ‘Our Inventions’ is out now. For more information, go to the Lali Puna webiste. Below, they tell us about their favourite films. LUCY HURST

Valerie

1. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
A girl’s film, I know: love story, Audrey Hepburn, happy ending. I know. But it is my favourite film. It’s heartbreaking when Hepburn sings ‘Moon River’ on the stairs and when it rains in the end. The 60s were such a great decade!

2. Princess Mononoke & Spirited Away (1997 + 2001)
I love Studio Ghibli, it began with a Totoro figure that I bought in a museum without knowing anything about it. When I found out where it came from I tried to get as much information as I could about director Hayao Miyazaki. I can’t decide which is my favourite out of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. They are both very impressive with gorgeous images and strange stories. They’re best seen in the cinema, I saw Mononoke in a tiny cinema and one part was missing – but even then it was good.

3. Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Sequels and series are usually really bad but Lilo & Stitch: The Movie captured my heart from the beginning. The story sees a little girl adopting a small blue alien monster (Experiment 626) from dog pound. Monster Stitch was programmed to destroy but in Hawaii there’s not much to destroy. I usually hate all the newer Walt Disney films from the start after seeing the posters, but Lilo & Stitch is really different.

4. Full Metal Village (2007)
This documentary examines a small town in northern Germany, Wacken, home of one of the biggest heavy metal festivals – the Wacken Open Air. It is about the locals (a farmer, a young girl, some old women and one former festival organiser) dealing with the festival and its fans. It shows how the locals and the metal fans get along and even harmonise. The film gets a special note because it’s directed by a Korean woman, who has created a sort of Heimatfilm.

5. Fargo (1996)
I don’t just watch romantic and animated films all the time… There is a place for science fiction and heavy dramas too as well as dark comedy such as Fargo. It is great to see Frances McDormand as a pregnant sheriff and William H Macy as a salesman who thinks he’s in control but everything just gets worse and worse and worse. Great dry sense of humour.

Markus:

6. Badlands (1973)
Hypnotic and minimal, Badlands is a very quiet and very violent movie with intense colours, American landscapes and Carl Orff. A nightmare but very beautiful…

7. Stroszek (1977)
Bruno S is a very impressive character. One will never forget him after seeing this movie.

8. The Apartment (1960)
I don’t like romantic comedies at all. Maybe that’s why I like this movie so much.

9. Yi Yi (2000)
Yi Yi tells the story of a family. It’s very long, so at first, it might seem to be very boring, but actually it’s one of the most absorbing and haunting movies I know. I just wish it would be possible to see more films by Edward Yang.

10. Jan Švankmajer – Every movie
Švankmajer is a surrealist animator from Prague. He made all sorts of films, long and short, and in a way these are all parts of one story. Aside from the incredible artistry and fantastic visual experience, they also have great original music.

Festivals

Terracotta Festival 2010: Preview

Vengeance

Terracotta Far East Film Festival

6-9 May 2010

Prince Charles Cinema, London

Terracotta website

Following the first Terracotta last year, festival director Joey Leung has once again been scouring the Far East for his second mixtape of Asian blockbusters and mysterious oddities. As before, his MO is to provide a short, yet eclectic program that demonstrates the wonders of Eastern cinema, one accessible to both film geeks and casual viewers.

Terracotta will open with Asia’s biggest name – Jackie Chan. Little Big Soldier (2010) is his latest action movie, and although it’s another buddy movie of sorts, this time set in ancient China, it’s an assured return to form for the veteran martial artist. The festival will close with another spectacular period piece, Bodyguards and Assassins (2009), a lavish crowd-pleaser that follows an assassination attempt in 1905 Hong Kong. For those tired of headache-inducing 3-D cartoons, the Far East proves there’s nothing wrong with the old-fashioned way of delivering thrills.

While Chan is a household name, Leung is keen to highlight emerging talents such as Huang Bo, star of Cow (2009), a Chinese black comedy about a peasant tasked with saving a cow’s life during World War II. ‘This little-known film has won some major awards and is set to take off internationally – we were glad we got to it early!’ explains Leung. He also uncovered Japan’s Fish Story (2009), a sci-fi comedy set in several different time frames about punk rock and meteorites: ‘These two films are must-sees for people out to discover something different.’

Leung has also acted on feedback from last year’s festival and added late-night horror screenings and documentaries to the Terracotta programme. The Thai film Meat Grinder (2009) is an Asian take on Sweeney Todd, retelling the gruesome fable with a noodle-seller who starts harvesting human meat for her legendary soup stock, while Phobia (2008), also from Thailand, is a collection of four supernatural tales. But Terracotta is also set to educate, not just entertain, with a double bill of documentaries profiling In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle and exploring the impact of the yakuza on Asian cinema. Director Yves Montmayeur will be on hand to talk about these films as Leung is hoping to get behind the scenes of Asian cinema: ‘The awareness of who’s who helps those new to the genre navigate the vast offering of films. What’s important to us is that we bring in the next generation of film fans and students.’

Those who have fond memories of Johnnie To’s Sparrow from last year’s festival will be pleased to hear that the director returns with another French-inflected crime tale. In Vengeance (2009), a French chef (played by musician/actor Johnny Hallyday) jumps between Macau and Hong Kong in a tough, near-wordless quest for revenge. It’s To back to his hard-boiled best, revisiting the starkness of Exiled and Election while mixing in shades of Memento.

Manga fans will be able to catch the spectacular conclusion of the 20th-Century Boys trilogy based on the award-winning series by Naoki Urasawa as well as the entertaining family adventure K-20: Legend of the Mask (2008). There’s also animé in the form of Summer Wars (2009) and the usual strangeness from South Korea with the light-hearted musical Antique (2008), so somewhere within the 15 handpicked films is a movie guaranteed to pull you into the weird and wonderful world of the Far East.

Richard Badley

Check it out, Features

Heavy Rain: Game? Film? Art?

1 Comment
Heavy Rain
Heavy Rain

Format: PlaySstation 3

Release date: 26 February 2010

More information on the Heavy Rain website

The relationship between film and video games is a tricky one; while their quality is often questionable, the amount of games that have been transposed into a movie and, on the flipside, the number of games that have been based on film franchises indicates that there undoubtedly a strong bond between the two. With the February release of Sony and Quantic Dreams’ Heavy Rain, exclusively on the PlayStation 3, the cross-pollination of the two formats has moved ever closer.

When Heavy Rain was unveiled at the Leipzig Games Convention in 2008 (yep, it’s taken longer than a film to be realised) it was pitched as a game that was taking brave new steps in the industry, both in content – by offering an adult thriller with a complex plot – and in gameplay – the player shapes the story by making the kind of choices that decide how it will unfold. While cinematic in nature, on a basic level it’s more akin to those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books that were so popular in the 1980s-90s.

The game wears its film pretensions on its sleeve. It is a modern noir thriller that takes its inspiration from the likes of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Se7en (1995), Zodiac (2007) and the original Saw (2004). You play four characters who are all trying to decipher the identity of a serial child killer called the Origami Killer, so named because they leave an origami animal at the scene of the crime: there’s Ethan Mars, whose child has been kidnapped by the Origami Killer and so must go through a series of violent trials in order to find out where his son is being held; there’s Madison Paige, a journalist on the hunt for a good story, who befriends Ethan; Norman Jayden is a drug-addled FBI agent on the killer’s trail; and finally there’s Scott Shelby, a private eye who has his own reasons for retracing the killer’s steps. So far, so clichéd…

OK, so the characters are archetypes, but they grow on you as the game’s compelling narrative and unique story structure develops. The player takes control of each character in a series of vignettes that range from the mundane – taking a shower – to the more violent – cutting off a finger. The player is presented with various options, both in how to act and in what to say, and these trigger how the story develops – make a wrong decision and this can lead to the death of a character, who then will play no part in the rest of the story. Although the identity of the killer always remains the same, there are multiple story threads and finales that can ensue.

To coincide with the launch of Heavy Rain, Neil LaBute made a short documentary, How Far Would You Go?, in which he asked the likes of Nic Roeg, Hanif Kureishi, Samuel L Jackson and Stephen Frears, ‘How far would you go to save someone you love?’ The documentary can be dowloaded for free on the Heavy Rain website.

Heavy Rain is far from a traditional game, but to call it an ‘interactive movie’ is not quite accurate either. It’s certainly immersive, like many other games, but where it is at its best is in affecting the player on an emotional level and to a degree that has not really been done before. In that sense, it is closer to a movie than a game.

The best films engage, challenge, provoke, entertain and often move the viewer, rewarding them for investing in both the story and/or the characters. Games can do this too, with the added appeal of being interactive – although admittedly games predominantly focus on the challenge and entertainment elements above the emotive or provocative. Few games manage to match the capacity of film to deliver on the above attributes: The Godfather or Scarface games, for instance, are evocative of their source material but fail to deliver the emotional gravitas of the films, providing a visceral and action-orientated experience instead.

On this level, Heavy Rain works very well, with the gameplay, narrative and evocative music making it akin to taking part in a dark thriller film; the major difference being that here the viewer is also the narrative’s main protagonists, developing the story as they go. Playing the game, you do feel connected to the characters and having invested in their emotional development you then care what happens to them (often fearing for their safety).

The game is far from perfect, and actually works better as a viewing experience than a playing one (perhaps unsurprisingly it has already been optioned for a film), but as a template for how an interactive format can work beyond the often formulaic structure of video games, Heavy Rain is ground-breaking. As the game’s creator, David Cage, told the Guardian website on release: ‘I strongly believe that interactivity has the potential to become an art, it is just a matter of time.’ If Heavy Rain is an example of things to come, then gamers could be in for a thrilling ride.

Toby Weidmann

Check it out, Features

Pomegranate and Cockerels: The Rich Mysteries of Sergei Paradjanov’s World

Sergei Paradjanov

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 February – 9 May 2010

London + Bristol

The Paradjanov retrospective ran at BFI Southbank throughout March

More information on the Paradjanov Festival website

A few months ago, a little picture caught my eye. Framed on the white wall of a London Georgian restaurant, it was a small black and white photograph: an old, bearded man leapt through the air, his jacket gathered around his arms like a pair of wings. A couple of women stood behind him, hands raised, their stance somewhere between amusement and bemusement. There was something mysteriously arresting about that picture and I couldn’t help but feel intrigued. A couple of months on and a major BFI Southbank retrospective later, I now recognise the soaring figure as Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1990) – a singularly spectacular creator of images. In this case, it was his own vivacious portrait; within his films, an infinite series of majestically beautiful tableaux. The rich red of a pomegranate seeping into white linen; an ornate royal hunting party seated on bold black horses, raising their pistols to the sky; a handsomely beautiful woman, bedecked in a wreath like Caravaggio’s Bacchus, her shoulder covered by a plump white cockerel.

Despite citing Tarkovsky, Pasolini and Fellini as influences, Paradjanov’s aesthetic is not quite like anything else in cinema. Screening before several features at the BFI retrospective, Kiev Frescoes (1965) perfectly demonstrated the potency of his mysterious visions. This film collage is a 13-minute compilation of rushes and tests from a feature, banned in pre-production by the Soviet authorities. Incomplete and fragmented, these scenes might have left the viewer confused and searching for meaning. But despite a lack of context or narrative, the viewer could not help but yield to the image of three immaculately attired military men perched on stools, sceptres in hands, or the sound of luscious water sweeping over floorboards. It was an exceedingly powerful initiation into Paradjanov’s oeuvre: works that delight and indulge in the aural and visual possibilities of film.

Paradjanov studied film at the Moscow Film School, VGIK, but his concept of the filmmaker was founded much more on his own romantic sensibility than on a formal education: ‘You torment others with your artistic delight,’ he said in the documentary Paradjanov: A Requiem (1994). ‘You can’t learn [filmmaking]. You have to possess it in your mother’s womb.’ After making several features and documentaries in the 1950s, Paradjanov took a new direction after seeing Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962). Taking Tarkovsky to be his ‘mentor’, he rejected Soviet social realism as ‘submissive works by court artists’ and embarked on Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), a Ukrainian folkloric tale filmed in the Gutsul dialect. His break from social realism and championing of the Ukraine region (he categorically refused to dub the film into Russian) prompted much hostility from the Soviet government. He was blacklisted and imprisoned three times on various trumped-up charges. Although Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors resulted in personal suffering, it was a revelatory moment for Paradjanov, both in terms of style and content, as he explained in Paradjanov: A Requiem: ‘That’s when I found my theme – the struggles of a people. I focused on ethnography, on God, love and tragedy. That’s what film and literature are to me’.

These were themes that Paradjanov would pursue in what many consider to be his ultimate masterpiece, The Colour of Pomegranates (1967). Screening after the short Kiev Frescoes, it was this film that was chosen as the main feature to launch the retrospective. It may have made more sense to open with Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, since it was this project that marked Paradjanov’s adventurous new approach to filmmaking and, of the two, The Colour of Pomegranates is the more accomplished, complete film. Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors is a truly extraordinary film in itself but it loses a little pacing in the final scenes and cannot quite compete with the tender beauty of The Colour of Pomegranates. From a chronological perspective, it would have been beneficial for BFI audiences to see such career progression through the programming. It seems likely that the decision was based on the fact that The Colours of Pomegranates is Paradjanov’s best known film. Sadly, Paradjanov does not enjoy the reputation he deserves – I’m sure many people have sat in the same Georgian restaurant and not known the identity of the man in the photograph. The BFI season was the first-ever opportunity to see his shorts, features, documentaries and unfinished projects all gathered together and it was encouraging to see screenings sold out to engrossed audiences. From the career-spanning material presented at BFI Southbank, it is clear that he is a director who must be considered one of the masters of cinema.

Although the positioning of The Colour of Pomegranates was questionable in terms of chronology, it proved an ideal choice in terms of impact. It is as revelatory a film as Ivan’s Childhood. Inspired by Armenian miniatures and icons, its tableaux slowly evoke – rather than tell – the life of the 18th-century poet and troubadour Sayat Nova. Because of its impressionistic, allegorical approach, many have described the film as non-narrative, but it is, in fact, fairly linear in its storytelling. We see the young poet growing up in a simple, wool-farming community; his time as bard at the court of King Erekle II; his desire for the king’s sister; the loss of this love; his retreat to monastic life; his grief over the death of his mentor, Father Lazarus; and in turn, his own old age and death.

The Colour of Pomegranates

As the troubadour moves towards death, his former muse and childhood self appear among the compositions as he looks back on his life – ‘In the Sun Valley of the distant years, live my longings, my loves and my childhood’ – but the film tends to move forward with few flashbacks. It is more that the linearity becomes lost among the rich symbolism and surrealist touches. As Sayat Nova falls in love with his muse, the beautiful princess at court, Paradjanov introduces interludes of masque and mime artistry as a couple perform a dancing courtship, disappearing and reappearing among hanging woven rugs. The poet’s death is portrayed through a long sequence of allegories: chained workers scything hay; a blindfolded man stumbling through a bleak landscape populated by dancing angels; a swinging pendulum that knocks his childhood self to the ground; the poet laid with arms outstretched among glowing candles as white chickens fall around him. The unique poetry and symbolism of these images can leave the viewer a little disorientated at times – especially those unfamiliar with the traditional culture of the Caucasus – but the opacity somehow adds to the mystery and majesty; and on repeated viewings, the recurring motifs reveal the inner logic of the film and the way that early experiences influenced the elder poet. The colourful woollen yarn, the chaotic farm animals, the literature and the music of his youth informed his artistic conception of the world (‘From the colours and aromas of this world, my childhood made a poet’s lyre and offered it to me’). Sayat Nova’s death scene among the chickens perfectly recalls an exquisitely beautiful scene from earlier in the film, when the child poet lies down on a monastery roof, surrounded by books, pages rustling in the wind, his arms outstretched and staring up at the sky.

Laden with the poet’s suffering and biblical and folkloric symbolism, there is an epic, earnest solemnity to The Colour of Pomegranates; and while such gravity and careful construction could lead to austerity and artificiality, there is also a consuming warmth and sensuality. His effervescent and corporeal sensibility mirrors Pasolini and Fellini more closely than his other mentor, Tarkovsky. The extraordinarily striking actress Sofiko Chiaureli plays the part of both poet and muse, exploring male and female sexuality (Paradjanov was himself bisexual and first imprisoned for a homosexual act with a KGB officer) and the film is joyously abundant with melodic folk music and heightened sounds: the crinkling of books’ pages; the squelch of pomegranate seeds; the dripping of wool dye onto metallic plates; the urgent chirping of bird song. There is almost no dialogue in the film; instead these sounds, intertitles displaying lines from Sayat Nova’s poems and the occasional voice-over convey the message.

The Colour of Pomegranates is an emotionally affecting film and is especially poignant given Paradjanov’s own suffering in prison and the loss of his first wife, who was murdered by her own family after converting from Islam to Christianity. Lost loves and issues of ethnicity, subjects raw to his heart, are treated with immense compassion. And yet, The Colour of Pomegranates is also a film that joyously arouses all the senses: a truly sensory experience without precedent or successor. Paradjanov once said, ‘whoever tries to imitate me is lost’. Given the unique, mystifying, enigmatic visions he sets before the viewer, imitation would be frankly impossible.

Eleanor McKeown

Interviews

Life during Wartime: Interview with Todd Solondz

Life during Wartime

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 April 2010

Venue: Curzon Soho, The Gate, Renoir, Ritzy (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Todd Solondz

Writer: Todd Solondz

Cast: Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson, Ally Sheedy, Paul Reubens

USA 2009

96 mins

A social satirist who returned to filmmaking with a vengeance following the studio interference that undermined his first feature, Fear, Anxiety and Depression (1989), Todd Solondz has since experienced both ends of the industrial spectrum, flirting with mainstream acceptance when Happiness was funded by a studio sub-division in 1998 and paying for Palindromes out of his own pocket in 2000. While his audience has always been relatively marginal, fledgling filmmakers have certainly been taking notes; it could be argued that the scathing high school humour of Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) paved the way for the more widely accepted Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and Juno (2007), while Happiness is an early example of the ‘network narrative’ film that has become the format of choice for independent filmmakers seeking to comment on the social-political fabric of their nation.

Yet, while other films that have favoured the multi-stranded structure have contented themselves with the cleverness of their interlocking story-strands and superstar casting coups, Happiness was an unapologetically raw dissection of the underbelly of suburban society, which asked its audience to empathise with such characters as a paedophile and a verbally abusive phone pest. The frankness with which Solondz discussed such sexual themes led Happiness to be slapped with the restrictive NC-17 rating by the American ratings board, but more than 10 years later the director has returned to the scene of the crime with Life during Wartime, a quasi-sequel that integrates the post-09/11 climate into an already volatile mix, with uncomfortably amusing yet unexpectedly melancholy results.

John Berra spoke with Solondz about the reception of his work to date, the realities of ‘independent’ filmmaking, and his subversive approach to the ‘sequel’.

John Berra: Life during Wartime has a melancholy quality that I did not necessarily expect from a follow-up to Happiness. I read that the film was originally titled Forgiveness and I wondered if the title change indicated an intention to engage more directly with the social fabric of the United States and make a more political film.

Todd Solondz: It is certainly a more overtly political film than Happiness and, at the same time, it’s also very oblique in the way that it is political. The original title actually was Life during Wartime, the other title came about when I thought the movie would never be finished and I didn’t want anyone to know what the real title would be.

None of the actors from Happiness return for Life during Wartime. At first, I thought this might have been a way to communicate how these characters have changed and evolved through their experiences, but some of them do not seem to have changed at all.

When you cast the same actors 10 years later, it becomes all about mortality as people get older, and that of course is a very compelling interest, but that wasn’t what I wanted the movie to subliminally communicate. I was more interested in approaching these characters from a different angle and portraying them in a fresh light, and I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I had cast the same people. That’s what made it much more interesting for me. It’s somewhat misleading to call it a ‘sequel’, because it makes people think that the movie is going to have the same kind of character as the earlier film when, as you pointed out, it’s more melancholy. It’s more of a jumping off point than a direct sequel, and more of a quasi-sequel than an actual sequel.

Sequels are usually made by Hollywood studios to follow films that have made obscene amounts of money, but you have made a follow-up to a film that had a comparatively marginal audience.

It’s very un-Hollywood to make a sequel to a movie that makes no money. It goes against the grain. But Life during Wartime is more a variation on the original. I never had the intention of making a sequel, but when you start writing, things come at you unexpectedly and you never end up writing what you plan to write.

Happiness was released at a time when American independent films were receiving a lot of media attention. Based on the controversy that surrounded the film, I was surprised to find that it only grossed $2.7 million in the United States. Was there really an ‘indie’ boom in the late 90s, or do you think it was more of a media myth?

This is a bit of a conversation; how one defines what is ‘independent’ is also something to be questioned. When the movie happened, it was financed by October Films, which was owned by Universal so, in that sense it’s hard to call Happiness an ‘independent film’. I was pleased that it made as much as $2.7 million. The distribution company that had been set up to release it had run out of money, so the movie was playing without any advertising in motion. But say we had a stronger distributor, how much more money could it have made? 10% or 20%? You’re still talking about a movie that’s only making $3.5 million. It’s always instructive when you get very excited about a movie, and all your friends are seeing it; you go and look at the numbers that Variety or the industry sources publish to tell you how much a movie made, and it’s something of an eye-opener. You will see what actually makes a dent at the box office and what does not, and the consequence at this point is that I have a new script but I don’t know if it will get made. It’s not so complicated and it’s not so expensive, but unlike the days of Happiness, the internet and television cover so many channels that it’s much less typical for this audience to go out and pay $12.50 at the box office, or whatever it is in England. That makes things a lot more difficult. You can count on your fingers how many American filmmakers are able to continue operating as ‘independent filmmakers’, making films that are not dependent on big studio corporations. You can make one film, maybe two, but not many can continue. It’s not a system that is able to support the marginal filmmaker. In France, there is a system set up to subsidise and support the national cinema and independent filmmakers, and that applies to other European countries, but there is absolutely nothing similar in America.

In 2007, Premiere listed Happiness among their ‘top 25 most dangerous movies’. It came in at number 19 in-between Gimme Shelter (1970) and Bad Lieutenant (1992). As your work strives for some understanding of individuals that would otherwise be demonised as ‘socially deviant’, do you feel that labels like ‘dangerous’ undermine what you are trying to do?

I didn’t see that article, but if that’s how people remember the film, I just have to take it as a compliment and leave it at that. People will respond to the film no matter what other people say; at the end of the day, if you are sitting alone watching the movie, you will have a unique connection to it. I’m happy if the movie has a life and I can’t control the way people will respond to the film and what they will say about it, but there are certainly a lot worse things to be called than ‘dangerous’.