To complement our Apocalypse theme this month, you can listen to Alex Fitch’s podcast on the Sci-Fi London website, 3.16 – Apocalypse (cinema) now. In a pair of on-stage interviews recorded at this year’s Sci-Fi London 10 festival, Alex Fitch talks to a couple of filmmakers about their recent takes on the apocalypse in film: Dekker Dreyer, whose film The Arcadian stars Lance Henriksen and Brian Thompson, and mixes the iconography of shamanism with elements of the road movie in a post-apocalyptic setting; and Maxi Dejoie whose film The Gerber Syndrome is an Italian take on 28 Days Later…, using a pseudo-documentary style to follow a member of a biohazard clean-up crew who is scouring the streets looking for the contagious, and is the first overtly political zombie film in a long time. In the latter interview, Alex and Maxi are also joined by Gerber producers Claudio Bronzo and Lorenzo Lotti.
With a healthy mixture of provocative and cheerful films in competition, and higher-calibre entries than last year in the other strands of the Official Selection, Cannes 2011 was in many respects one of the most exciting and adventurous editions in recent memory. A good handful of titles, especially those of a significantly darker variety, stood out in the usually strong Un Certain Regard strand. But it was films like Urszula Antoniak’s Code Blue, screened in the Directors’ Fortnight, and Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter, which deservedly won the International Critics’ Week Grand Prix, that truly raised the bar for any new and emerging directors setting out to infuse the bleak reality of psychological drama with something deeper, richer, more mysterious and profoundly unsettling.
Despite the rather grim and gloomy subject matter of the best titles on show, there was a sense of buoyancy about the future of US indie cinema, owing to the fine quality of the films and some magnificent performances, most notably the one by Michael Shannon in Take Shelter, his second collaboration with the director since Nichols’s acclaimed 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. Shannon plays the troubled construction worker Curtis LaForche, a loving husband and father, who slowly looses touch with reality as he becomes haunted by nightmares and apocalyptic visions about a fatal cyclone whose exceptional strength causes devastation on an unprecedented scale. Being the son of a paranoid-schizophrenic mother, Curtis decides to seek the help of a doctor, but as the hallucinations grow, he scraps the advised psychological treatment and instead takes out a risky bank loan to rebuild and fully equip the shabby storm shelter in the family’s garden. Shannon makes the story work, with support from an equally convincing Jessica Chastain as the caring wife who is desperate to understand her husband, while Nichols’s remarkably assured directing style creates a deep sense of unease about an unsettling near-future, in the vein of Todd Haynes’s Safe. Shot with a careful eye for colour, light and framing, and refined with an array of stylish visual effects, the film impresses most in the way Nichols manages to keep the tension at a nerve-racking level in a film that deliberately refuses to give much space to hope and optimism.
The hot tip from Sundance, and hence eagerly anticipated, was the debut feature from writer-director Sean Durkin. In Martha Marcy May Marlene, Elizabeth Olsen plays Martha, a young woman who escapes from an abusive cult’s commune somewhere in the woods, and tries to re-connect with her previous life while staying with her well-off older sister Lucy and Lucy’s husband in their expensive lake house. Deftly balancing past and present, and withholding any information that is not absolutely necessary to our understanding, Durkin slowly builds an air of dread and panic around Martha, who might simply be so scarred that she is beyond the help that she’s been offered. Although the story is not highly original, and is at times a little clichéd, overall Martha Marcy May Marlene is a subtly horrifying film, and one of the highlights in the Un Certain Regard section.
Less subtle, yet with a confident, fiercely restrained handling of the material, Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (screened in the Critics’ Week) was a powerful, intense, but tough-to-watch portrayal of Australia’s most notorious serial killer, John Bunting, who killed 12 people between 1992 and 1999. Shot on location in Adelaide and with a disturbingly charismatic Daniel Henshall in the lead role, Kurzel has crafted a brutally naturalistic, stomach-churning, small-town drama so rich in psychology and attention to detail that tension fills nearly every scene. There is no denying that the film is brutal and sadistic to the extreme, as it does not claim that there was ever a deeper emotional or factual reason behind Bunting’s actions other than his sheer pleasure in killing. Consequently, quite a few people left the screening towards the end, but as the festival went on, this turned out to be a good sign: the same happened at almost all the films that impressed the most.
Walk-outs were also the general reaction to Code Blue, Urszula Antoniak’s dark, chilling drama about a middle-aged, emotionally sealed-off nurse, played by a disturbingly excellent Bien de Moor. Afraid of intimacy, she ultimately gives in to a dangerous and overwhelming longing as she engages with a neighbour after they witness a crime. It didn’t help that the director’s notes gave warning that Antoniak’s intention was to make her audience uncomfortable. However, everyone who managed to sit through the thoroughly compelling 81 minutes of one woman’s desperate struggle to connect to the world around her left the cinema safe in the knowledge that Antoniak clearly is a talent to watch.
There were, of course, a number of established directors on view, and among them Terrence Malick gave us one of the most enigmatic, yet ambivalent films of the competition. Much has been said about The Tree of Life since the very first press screening, and even more so after the film received the Palme d’Or at the end of the festival. However, there were other films in the Official Selection that deserve a mention here, and I don’t mean Lynne Ramsay’s eagerly anticipated but ultimately disappointing We Need to Talk about Kevin, or Lars von Trier’s latest offering, Melancholia, which, sadly, I missed. One of the most intriguing and endlessly disquieting films I did see was first-time Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s Michael, about the everyday life of an outwardly normal paedophile who keeps a little boy imprisoned in his basement. Featuring great performances and giving a real sense of how bizarrely ordinary the situation appears to this couple, the film neither judges nor dismisses its central figure. Instead, Michael builds on small, often uneventful, yet subtly affecting scenes that progress towards an appropriately restrained climax. Schleinzer isn’t afraid of throwing in some well-placed moments of humour and irony in what turns out to be a deftly crafted, intelligent thriller that conveys a quiet, visceral intensity similar to Michael Haneke’s early masterpieces.
While the Un Certain Regard section was patchy, there was more room for excitement and an overall much stronger selection than last year (although in retrospect that didn’t seem difficult to achieve). Nonetheless, it has to be said that although Gus Van Sant’s Restless, which headlined the section, might go down in history as a guilty pleasure for some critics, it certainly didn’t live up to its expectations for most of us. By contrast, Miss Bala, Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo’s follow-up to I’m Gonna Explode, was an unexpectedly sophisticated, yet thrilling drug-related crime drama, despite the fact that it was slightly overlong. Also worthy of note was Oslo, August 31 by Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, whose debut feature Reprise impressed me five years ago. Vaguely inspired by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel Le feu follet, Trier’s second feature feels much more mature, not only because of the time that’s passed, or the film’s melancholic subject matter: a day in the life of recovering drug addict Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), who is only two weeks away from leaving rehab and re-entering the real world. In fact, with the help of cinematographer Jakob Ihre, who has done a brilliant job painting a haunting portrait of Oslo in early autumn, Trier has pulled together a curious and skilful blend of gloomy, slow-burning art-house lyricism and a raw, intense character study to form an accomplished whole.
No film, however, weirdly enthralled and puzzled me as much as Sion Sono’s latest offering, Guilty of Romance, which screened in the Directors’ Fortnight section. Divided into five chapters, the film focuses on three main characters: Izumi, an unsatisfied, bourgeois housewife who is diving in and out of forbidden worlds of sexual pleasure; Kazuko, a married, lower-middle-class cop; and Mitsuko, a highbrow professor by day who turns into an uninhibited prostitute by night. All three become dangerously involved in the mysterious murder case that Kazuko is called in to investigate. In spirit, Guilty of Romance seems closest to the extravagant Love Exposure, although visually and rhythmically it is very much of a piece with all his work so far. Cruel, darkly funny, dazzlingly imaginative, flagrantly absurd and strongly compelling, Guilty of Romance remains an exaggerated conceit, but one I’d happily see again.
As part of Watch Me Move – On the Big Screen, a special animation season that runs throughout July and August and complements Watch Me Move – The Animation Show in Barbican Art Gallery, the Barbican explores the work of some of the most influential filmmakers in animation, starting with Jan Švankmajer from Thursday 16 to Saturday 25 June. The screening of Alice, a wonderfully sinister interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s story, on Thursday 16 will be followed by a Q&A with Jan Švankmajer and Peter Hames. The director’s latest film, Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010), a comic, surreal take on psychoanalysis, screens on Sunday 19.
Mark Stafford and Virginie Sélavy interviewed Jan Švankmajer by email.
Q; You have said you were ‘steeped’ in Prague and yet the city rarely features in your films. In what way has Prague, and being Czech, influenced your work?
Being Czech definitely didn’t have any influence on my work. What did influence it was that I spent my childhood in Czechoslovakia, particularly in Prague. A personality is formed by its mental morphology. For artistic work this is absolutely fundamental. Prague appears in my films quite often. You will find it in Alice and in Surviving Life (Theory and Practice), but this is not the Prague of the tourist guide books, but the Prague of my childhood. You won’t find ‘the sights’ but chipped walls, the dirty staircases of blocks of flats, mysterious cellars, hidden courtyards, the suburbs.
Q: Is it true that you had a little puppet theatre at home as a child and that this was common in all Czech families? How important has this been for your work?
Yes, it was quite a common toy. For an introverted child it was an amazing gift. I could use puppets to play out all life’s injustices, correcting them, taking revenge. Puppets have accompanied me throughout my life. It may be that everything I do is just a puppet play.
Q: Alice was your first feature film, why did you choose to start with Lewis Carroll? How important is he as an influence on your work in general?
Alice belongs to my mental morphology. Before I made up my mind to do a feature-length film I was circling around the subject. I made Jabberwocky and Down to the Cellar and only then dared to shoot the whole of Alice. Personally I think that Lewis Carroll’s Alice is one of the most important and amazing books produced by this civilisation.
Q: Although it is not an adaptation, your Alice feels very close to the book, and in particular brings out the sense of menace and aggression that is present in it but is often overlooked in insipid versions such as Disney’s. Was that an important aspect of Carroll’s work for you?
So far all adaptations of Alice (including the latest by Tim Burton) present it as a fairy tale, but Carroll wrote it as a dream. And between a dream and a fairy tale there is a fundamental difference. While a fairy tale has got an educational aspect – it works with the moral of the lifted forefinger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realisation of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realised dream.
Q: Around the time of Alice, you said you were interested in a dialogue with your childhood. Do you still feel this way?
Yes. Of course I wouldn’t cut myself off from the most important source of my work.
Q: Do you feel animation can best represent the world of childhood, dream and imagination?
Animation is, so far, the only way of breathing life into inanimate things. Children’s games work with the same magic. This kind of magic is the point where childhood and animation intersect with each other.
Q: You have a clear interest in the materiality of the objects, in textures, shapes and surfaces and it is always wonderful to see how you bring to life very ordinary and often old, broken or discarded objects, which can become unfamiliar, menacing or amusing. Why are you particularly interested in that type of objects?
I like things that have passed through human hands. Things that have been touched. Such things are charged with emotions that are capable of revealing themselves under certain, extremely sensitive circumstances. I collect such objects, surround myself with them and in the end I cast such ‘fetishes’ in my films. That’s also the reason why I don’t like computer animation. Virtual reality doesn’t have a tactile dimension. Objects and figures created on a computer have no past.
Q: Did you feel there was a political aspect to Alice because of her rebellion against authority?
An absurd court hearing with Alice (‘off with her head,’ shouted the Queen) obviously recalls the political trials of the 50s. Of course Alice, compared with the accused from that time, doesn’t respect the official script. It was just a minor analogy, I didn’t shoot the film because of that. But each imaginative work has got within itself, from its very essence, a subversive charge, because it knocks down the notion of lived-through reality as the only one possible.
Q: In your latest film, Surviving Life, you tackle Freud, who has been a big influence on your work. The film makes a lot of play about the battle between Freud and Jung, and is not particularly respectful of either. How do you see Freud now and what is attitude to psychotherapy?
I read a quote somewhere that a person can only really make fun of things he truly loves. It is the same with my psychoanalytical comedy Surviving Life. Psychoanalysis is for me in particular an amazing system of interpretation. I am not that much interested in practical therapy.
Q: How much of the film’s imagery came from your own dreams?
The whole film in fact originated on the basis of my dream. The beginning of the film (the first dream) is my authentic dream and then the dream about soldiers is a dream from my childhood.
Q: How much of the film’s mischievous opening section (where you confess that Surviving Life is only an animation because you couldn’t afford live action) is true?
It is true, although it didn’t turn out that way. My producer claims that we didn’t save anything; on the contrary, by using animation the shooting period became longer. But animation brought a new symbolic level into the film and thus enriched it imaginatively.
Q: You have said that Surviving Life would be your last film but we have read that you are currently working on a project called Insects, is that true?
I have pulled out of the drawer the film story of Insects, which I wrote in 1970, and which couldn’t have been made at that time – that’s why it finished in the drawer together with many other projects rejected by the censors. Some of which I have since completed: Food, Conspirators of Pleasures, Lunacy. Now we are going to try to do Insects. The story: amateur actors in a small town are rehearsing the play by the Capek brothers The Life of Insects and their destinies mingle with characters from the play.
Q: You created work over 45 years under an oppressive regime. How does working under a capitalist system compare with working under a politically repressive system?
That stupid censorship had, after all, one advantage: at least now I have a supply of stories and screenplays, although even nowadays it is not easy to make them. This utilitarian, profit-chasing civilisation, doesn’t need authentic work. The new iconographic art is now advertising and mass culture, because if advertising were to fail, civilisation would collapse, and mass culture is supposed to entertain the masses in their free time so that they don’t think about their poor lot and take to the streets. I don’t intend to do either.
Q: There is a quote from you that we love: ‘Unless we again begin to tell fairy stories and ghost stories at night before going to sleep and recounting our dreams upon waking, nothing more is to be expected of our Western civilisation.’ This was written in 1987, what is your view on this now?
I don’t have anything to change on this. Only the possibility that it might happen seems to me even more distant.
If you’re watching television and there’s a series of news reports occasionally interrupted by zigzags of old-fashioned static and if, on the television, there are fires in foreign streets, and a superficially calm but increasingly panicked newsreader talking about disorder / a mystery disease / environmental disaster / scientists being flummoxed / authorities losing control / calling for people not to panic / populations being evacuated and / the growing tension between Made-upia and Inventedland; in other words if you have the distinct impression that what you are watching is the teaser, trailer or prologue for the long-awaited apocalypse, then I have one extremely important piece of advice to offer: buy a dog.
Preferably an Alsatian, or German Shepherd, but the breed doesn’t really matter. Just buy a dog. Even a mongrel. Better still a telepathic mongrel. Start stocking up on food and other essentials: water, a generator, generator fuel, warm clothing, torches, guns, ammunition and dog biscuits. Board up the windows, clear wall space to make room for art treasure to be purloined from deserted and unguarded national art galleries, get yourself a shopping trolley if you’re thinking of going mobile and put down some newspaper and a water bowl.
Why? Dogs make survivors happy. No dog and you just might as well not bother surviving the cataclysmic (but often vaguely defined) event at all. You’re just going to be in a grump.
Evidence:
Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) in I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007) is having a grand old time of the end days with his dog. He tools around Manhattan in a sports car, hunts elk, plays golf off the deck of an aircraft carrier, watches Shrek so many times that he could act in it (playing any of the parts) and kills the odd unconvincing CGI zombie. OK, he’s going a little stir crazy and he’s upset that his wife and child were killed, but when his dog gets infected and he has to kill him, that’s when it really all goes wrong. That’s the moment he properly loses the will to live.
He should count himself lucky though. In The Omega Man (Sagal, 1971), an earlier adaptation of Richard Matheson’s first novel, which itself is a kind of science fiction melding of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, poor old Robert Neville (here played by Charlton Heston) doesn’t get a dog at all and spends the whole film in a chronically bad mood. Superficially, he does the same kind of stuff Will Smith does. The opening sequence involves Heston in a sports car, the wind in his thinning hair, and he also watches a film so often he can recite whole tranches of it, but whereas the young bereaved father’s love of Shrek is understandable, Heston’s enthusiasm for Woodstock (Wadleigh, 1970) is bewildering. It could be ironic, because Heston is constantly uttering bitter and not very funny one-liners. Even when he gets himself a new car and conducts an imaginary conversation with the car salesman, he gets jipped. ‘You cheap bastard,’ he yells over his shoulder to thin air. The art treasures he hoards go unnoticed (the bust of Caesar is reduced to a hat stand) until the anaemic ‘survivors’ of the plague, a pseudo-religious cult called the Family, decide to destroy them. Heston looks mildly annoyed, but he doesn’t tell them to stop, plead or anything like that. His one reason to be properly cheerful is his relationship with Lisa (Rosalind Cash), but even this has an uneasy edge in keeping with the extremely confused racial politics of the film. On the one hand, one of his main enemies is a black man, turned white by the plague, who has a particular animus towards the Honky, and on the other there’s Lisa, anticipating a Blaxploitation vibe that will definitively appear that same year in Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Rosalind Cash will go on to star in Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (Crain, 1976). Heston’s discomfort comes in another of his one-liners to Lisa about his good old Anglo-Saxon blood, which is going to cure Lisa’s brother, the non-Anglo-Saxon Richie. His determination to hole up in his house and his refusal to countenance any attempt at accommodation with the Family, even when a cure is at hand, has the echo of the credo of a right-wing survivalist who appreciates the simplicity that the apocalypse offers.
Somewhere in between the two, but actually the first attempt at an adaptation of Matheson’s book, is the Italo-American production The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. Filmed in Rome in 1964 and directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, the film is brave in giving us a dour version of the End. Life for Price’s Robert Morgan is drudgery and loneliness. Here’s a typical day: up early, collect corpses, get some gasoline, take corpses to the pit, burn corpses, lunch. Make wooden stakes, kill vampires while they sleep, collect garlic. Home before dark, repair boarding, loud jazz and a sleepless night of listening to the demented cries of people who want to kill you. Price is superb, his hang-dog features and his deadpan voice-over never stray towards the inviting pastures of camp, there to frolic the way a bare-chested Heston occasionally does in The Omega Man. There’s even a moment when he looks glumly at a sports car before deciding on the station wagon because it’s easier to load it with corpses.
His dog turns up halfway through the film, offering Morgan a brief moment of joy and happiness, but unfortunately he too gets infected and Morgan must stake him and bury him. It is while doing this that he meets another survivor who will bring about his ruin. As in I Am Legend, the death of the dog is a crucial moment.
But why? What is it with dogs and the end of the world? This is not (entirely) a facetious point. The dog in I Am Legend is partly a link to Neville’s family (the puppy is handed over by the daughter just before their helicopter explodes), but it is also an iconic vision of a man paradoxically alone while still being in command. When nature has gone wrong and society breaks down, the last man on earth regains an element of mastery via man’s best friend. He even gets on the poster.
For Morgan, the dog simply represents happier times and uncomplicated company. He chases the dog for a significantly longer amount of screen time than he does the woman he meets. And whereas the dog is a possibility of salvation denied, the woman is his downfall. The dog in John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009) is initially a threat, but ultimately a sign of normality returning and the proper relationships (man, dog, family, etc.) that had melted down, being restored.
Based on a Harlan Ellison novella and directed by L.Q. Jones – one of those actors you see in tonnes of Westerns but can’t name – A Boy and His Dog (1974) is set after World War IV and features a baby-faced Don Johnson playing Vic, an amiable rapist, who is accompanied and helped by his telepathic dog, Blood, as they wander the post-apocalyptic wasteland. As in the other films, the lone survivor is offered various alternative societies to join or to be threatened by – The Family in The Omega Man, the new hybrid society in The Last Man on Earth and, perhaps most terrifyingly, Vermont in I Am Legend. After encountering various scavengers, Vic is lured by a young woman, Quilla June, into an underground city where his semen is to be drained from him and used to impregnate the women of the community. The film plays on the extremely dangerous ground of A Clockwork Orange (1971) in making society so grotesquely awful (for obvious satirical effect) that the rapist becomes morally preferable, if not heroic, in at least being honest. The true horror is normalised by the harmless (and sometimes not so harmless, cf. the last line of the movie) banter and bickering of boy and dog and the black humour the film liberally indulges in. Ultimately, Vic doesn’t want female companionship, a family, love. He wants his dog, the occasional rape and freedom. It might well be the end of the world as we know it, but Vic feels fine.
The 2011 Edinburgh International Film Festival starts on Wednesday 15 June and invigorated by the appointment of a new artistic director, as well as input from guest curators and various collaborations, its 65th edition looks set to open new directions and offer an innovative festival experience to its audience.
Opening with the UK premiere of John Michael McDonagh’s Irish comedy-thriller The Guard (starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle), the programme includes Alex de la Iglesia’s latest, The Last Circus, which we’re very much looking forward to, and Norwegian director Andre Ovredal’s mock doc The Troll Hunter, which sounds very intriguing. This year, the festival celebrates its documentary roots with a third of the programme paying tribute to the genre, led by Liz Garbus’s portrait of the chess legend Bobby Fischer against the World.
Also debuting at the Festival in 2011 is Reel Science, an exploration of the depiction of science on film, which sounds great. Events include the joint UK premiere of James Marsh’s (Man on Wire) Project Nim as well as a film-and-eye-tracking technology demonstration and the opportunity to watch Christopher Nolan’s psychological thriller Memento alongside top Edinburgh neuroscientists.
Among the guest curators, Gus Van Sant has curated a mini-retrospective of Derek Jarman’s Blue, The Last of England and The Angelic Conversation and Hungarian director Bela Tarr is presenting a selection of film classics from his home country.
We also like the emphasis on music with Sound Tracks, a programme of screenings, discussions, networking opportunities and gigs across the festival, in association with Domino.
Other initiatives include Project: New Cinephila, an experimental platform for established and aspiring film critics. Electric Sheep is very proud to be contributing to one of the panel discussions, ‘Critical Approaches II: Tools, Formats and Experiments’ on Thursday 16 June at the Inspace Gallery. We will also have a stall, come along to meet us and take a look at our new book, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology!
More details on the Project: New Cinephilia event on the EIFF website.
Cast: Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett, Chris Zylka, Roxane Mesquida, Juno Temple
USA/France 2010
86 mins
Gregg Araki made his name in the early 90s with confrontational, riotous films obsessed with teenage sex, drugs, dysfunction and violence. Since then, his work has taken different directions and he has explored various genres and moods, most recently following his acclaimed Mysterious Skin (2004), a sensitive, poetic account of sexual abuse, with the stoner comedy Smiley Face (2007). His latest, Kaboom, brings together the many strands of his work, working them into an outlandish bundle of fun.
Smith (Thomas Dekker) is a young gay college student about to turn 19, who fantasises about his idiotic but handsome surfer roommate Thor (Chris Zylka) and has bizarre dreams that involve men in animal masks chasing and killing a red-haired girl. His best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) is a lesbian who falls in love with a girl who turns out to be a witch. Although Smith and Stella have many sexual encounters with gorgeous-looking young people, the world around them becomes weirder and weirder as Stella’s ex-girlfriend copes supernaturally badly with rejection and Smith’s place in the dark conspiracy of a secret society is gradually revealed.
Virginie Sélavy talks to Gregg Araki about teenage apocalypse, American attitudes to sexuality and David Lynch’s influence.
Virginie Sélavy: Do you see Kaboom as a return to the ‘irresponsibility’ of your early films, in particular The Living End?
Gregg Araki: I don’t know if it’s really the ‘irresponsibility’ of The Living End. I really wanted to make a film that was completely outside of the box and came from a very creatively free space of not being worried about things like, is this too weird or is this too sexy, or mixing too many genres? It was just about letting my imagination run wild and not being constrained by genres, or people’s expectations, or what’s popular in the market place right now. It was really about making an old-fashioned film that could be free of all that.
But it doesn’t seem like you’ve ever tried to make a film to please a certain audience, or according to the market rules.
That is true, I’ve never made an overly commercial movie. I’m very proud of all my movies but some of my movies have been more genre-based, more within a definable box. Kaboom is a mash-up of so many different genres, so many different tones, it has a character with supernatural powers. There’s a sort of joie de vivre in this movie and creative freedom, which for me was very liberating and exciting.
The film feels like a celebration of unbridled youthful sexuality unencumbered by any kind of taboo or prejudice. Was that a conscious thing?
Partly. It is part of my sensibility to view sex and sexuality as a positive aspect of the human experience and all the adventures and sexual escapades that the characters in Kaboom have are an important part of their growing up and it’s really important that they not be judged for them. This sort of freedom in your sexuality, that it’s not bogged down by guilt, judgement, punishment, that there is no negative baggage attached to it, is very unique, certainly in American cinema. American cinema tends to be so puritanical and hypocritical while at the same time being kind of titillating… I feel that this attitude about sexuality is not really represented in American films.
Kaboom has some elements from your early films, the teenage apocalypse and the sexuality for instance, but it revisits them from a comic, fun angle. Why the change of tone?
I’m a different person, I’m older and hopefully a bit wiser. The tone of Kaboom, this sort of joyfulness and playfulness, is much closer to Smiley Face, my last film, because my head is much closer to Smiley Face than it is to The Doom Generation. Kaboom shares with The Doom Generation this wild sexuality and gorgeous 18-year-olds but the sensibility is very different. It’s really a reflection of my own evolution. At a certain age I felt that I’d found my place in the world. When I made my first films I was much more angst-ridden and unmoored, I was more like those characters, insecure in my place in the world, and as I’ve got older there’s been a certain level of figuring out who you are, and this is reflected in my films.
Do you feel it also has something to do with changes in social attitudes to sexuality and to AIDS?
I think that’s had an influence on me and on my films, particularly if you watch one of my early films, The Living End, which is so much about that specific time, late 1980s and early 90s, the AIDS epidemic and the crisis of that time, and things have changed since then.
In a previous interview you’ve said that you saw Mysterious Skin and Smiley Face as fitting together as ‘yin and yang’, one being your first straight, serious drama, the other your first comedy. How does Kaboom fit in relation to that?
I couldn’t have made Kaboom without making those two films. When we were in Deauville, Thomas [Dekker] pointed out to me, ‘in a way Kaboom is almost like your greatest hits, like the best bits of all your movies put together’. And I didn’t realise at the time but it really made sense to me when he said that because there’s a lot of Smiley Face in Kaboom and a lot of Mysterious Skin too. Kaboom is definitely part of the continuum of all my movies.
And like in Mysterious Skin you also have that supernatural and conspiratorial aspect to the plot, which is connected to sexual identity, although of course in Mysterious Skin it was used to explore much more serious subject matter.
I’ve always been interested in cults and conspiracies. For Kaboom I was fascinated by Scientology and modern cults, that sort of mentality and how that works. It was a lot of fun to explore the idea of Smith living in this world of paranoid conspiracies because frequently when you’re a young person you do feel that the whole world is out to get you. It was cool with this movie to make that feeling, and the apocalyptic feelings of doom that you have when you’re younger, real and literal, take that metaphor, expand it and play with it.
I thought there was a Lynchian element to the weird dream and fantasy sequences. Was he an influence on the film?
David Lynch has always been a huge influence on my movies from the very start, and this movie in particular is my most overtly influenced by David Lynch. I’ve always wanted to make a Twin Peaks-y mystery and I’ve always thought of the red-haired girl in Kaboom as the Laura Palmer of the story, the central person in that other characters wonder what’s going on with her.
The music is very important, as in all your films. How did you choose the tracks?
Kaboom has one of the most incredible soundtracks I’ve ever been lucky enough to assemble for a movie. It has bigger bands like Interpol, Placebo and the XX, all these incredible alternative bands, and a score by Ulrich Schnauss and Robin Guthrie from Cocteau Twins. The movie is like Mysterious Skin in the sense that when you listen to the score of Mysterious Skin, you see the whole movie. So much of the spirit, the mood and the tone of the movie is contained in the music. And it’s the same with Kaboom, you can listen to that music and the whole world of the movie is conjured up.
The final moments of the film are very provocative. Why did you decide to end in this way?
I love the ending of the movie. It’s really one of my favourite endings of all movies. When we had the world premiere at Cannes and the movie ended, the whole audience started to cheer. To me it’s the only ending possible for a movie like Kaboom. It has that energy and it takes place in that stylised universe. It’s the ultimate ending to the ultimate movie.
Gateshead writer Dr Simon Morden is a rocket scientist and one of the few people who can claim to have held a chunk of Mars in his hands (the red planet, not the chocolate bar). He’s edited the British Science Fiction Association’s Focus magazine, judged the Arthur C. Clarke Award and is the author of a trilogy of thrillers set in futuristic England: Equations of Life, Theories of Flight and Degrees of Freedom, starring the immoral, charismatic Petrovitch, a survivor of the nuclear fallout in St Petersburg, and now residing in London’s dangerous Metrozone (all published by Orbit). Below, he explains why his apocalyptic alter ego would be James Cole in Twelve Monkeys. EITHNE FARRY
Apocalypses are like buses. You wait for ages, then three come along at once. It’s no fun dodging flaming meteors, global flooding and the imminent return of the Messiah – but once the last tree dies, the last mountain peak slips beneath the waves, and the heels of the last believer disappear into the clouds? What next? That’s when it gets real.
Post-apocalyptic landscapes: they’re all around us. Just take the wrong turning in town, and the bright lights are suddenly behind you. The boards are up on the windows, the weeds are sprouting in the gutter, and in the distance, a glass bottle kicks against the kerb.
You’re not alone, of course. You might be The Last Man on Earth, but alone? It doesn’t work that way. The ghosts are as hungry as the feral creatures that live in the slowly decaying ruins. There’s nothing to stop you from becoming an animal yourself: post-apocalypses are hard on the weak, the compassionate, the humane.
Which is why my alter ego is James Cole, reluctant time traveller and would-be saviour from Terry Gilliam’s masterful Twelve Monkeys. Cole is an unlikely hero – in fact, there’s a good argument to be had about whether he’s a hero at all, and that the proper hard work is being done by the scientists responsible for the time machine.
So, protagonist or patsy? Cole, haunted by visions of the past, of the future to come, haunted even by the present he finds himself in, behaves… more or less decently. He’s the guy who does his best: mostly crazy, banging around the time-lines like a pinball, he stumbles across enough clues to give the future a fighting chance. He even finds himself unexpectedly in love.
No gunplay. No big explosions. Just, you know, people. I can’t fool myself that I’d be a leader of a band of post-apocalypse warriors, or the lone survivor looking on the works of Man without despairing. But Cole? I could be Cole. So could you.
The Edinburgh International Film Festival has announced an innovative new venture, Project: New Cinephilia, aimed to stimulate debate around film criticism and appreciation today.
The project, which culminates in a day-long event on June 16th, will spark conversation with essays, thoughts and ideas from critics, writers, bloggers and filmmakers who are challenging established modes of thinking about cinema. Remote contributors will publish work via a dedicated microsite, launching on May 17 and co-presented by online cinematheque/social network MUBI, which will host comments and discussion around these commissioned materials in their Forums. Other contributors will participate in online roundtables chaired by Jigsaw Lounge founder Neil Young and Michael Koresky, editorial manager at The Criterion Collection and co-founding editor of Reverse Shot. Koresky will join two other visiting journalists, freelance critic Eric Hynes (Village Voice, Time Out New York), and filmmaker/critic Jeff Reichert (Gerrymandering; co-founding editor of Reverse Shot) attending the event.
Electric Sheep will participate in the session ‘Critical Approaches II: Tools, Formats and Experiments’ on Thursday 16 June at the Inspace Gallery as part of Project: New Cinephilia. We will also have a stall, come along to meet us and take a look at our new book, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology!
Project: New Cinephilia will culminate in a day-long symposium comprising of six interactive sessions which are open to audiences, press, bloggers and film lovers. Topics include new critical approaches to reading film; discussions on how film is consumed in the 21st century and the role of cinema in our daily lives; and a masterclass in how to start your own fanzine, blog or film journal. The day will come to close with a playful 140-character Film Critic Deathmatch, a “battle to the best review†using Twitter.
More details on the Project: New Cinephilia event on the EIFF website.
At first glance, David Fincher’s two explorations of masculinity in crisis, bookending the noughties – Fight Club (1999) and The Social Network (2010) – look similar in the way a Facebook poke might resemble a full-on punch in the teeth. But there are connections. As his most concerted examination of dysfunctional bromance, the films stand alongside his best work, Seven (1995), The Game (1997) and Zodiac (2007), in probing the darker reaches of masculine loneliness. Of course, Alien 3 and Panic Room both feature feisty female protagonists, but they were missteps: the first being a fraught studio-conflict-riven debut and the latter a self-consciously big B-movie. You might think I’m forgetting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), and you’d be right.
The First Rule of Fightbook Is You Have to Talk about Fightbook.
Fincher is a director who needs writers, working best when he has someone else’s powerful voice to put his images to. Seven was scripted by Andrew Kevin Walker and Zodiac featured Robert Graysmith (the writer of the book on which the film is based) as a major character. With The Social Network, the fame and prominence of its writer makes it easy to see this as an Aaron Sorkin production rather than a David Fincher film; and the Academy, for what it’s worth, duly did. Sorkin’s forte, as displayed in his TV work and most especially The West Wing, is quick-fire talk, and that’s what we get in The Social Network: a young man and a young woman talking; young men talking; young men talking together; young men talking to old men; young men’s lawyers talking and then young men talking again; then a woman says something. Add to this the fact that the nub of the drama is litigation, young men talking about what young men said and what they meant when they said it. It’s fast and witty, but there are also the acerbic silences. Mark Zuckersomething (played by Jesse Eisenberg) has the pout of a man whose best one-liners are zinging around the private theatre of his brain. For all the talk, no one actually seems to have a real conversation.
The Second Rule of Fightbook Is You Have to Talk about Fightbook.
Despite the film’s savage satirising of the talking cure and group therapy sessions, Fight Club is nothing if not a talking cure. Like The Social Network, this film is most definitely a talkie, breaking its own first and second rule again and again. Chuck Palahniuk’s first person prose is almost seamlessly cut and pasted into Edward Norton’s voice-over narration. But it’s not just that. The voice is a controlling element of the film, not only explaining what is happening or what the character is thinking, but directing the action. When Norton walks through his apartment, his words make furniture magically appear. His voice can freeze-frame the film. Telephone calls (from call-boxes and landlines, so 1999) are prominent plot moments. The voice is languid, persuasive, funny, deceitful, but in control even as it complains of helplessness and impotence. The second voice is Tyler Durden’s politically ambiguous radicalism. In fact, it isn’t so much ambiguous as wilfully contradictory: authoritarian anti-authoritarianism, fascistically organised anarchism, self-effacing narcissism. Ultimately, the film, especially on a second viewing, is about a man complaining that men (now) talk too much. And complaining. Following the novel more closely, a better ending might have located the whole story inside a group therapy session for ex-Fight Club men, trying to deal with their Tyler withdrawal.
The Third Rule of Fightbook: Only One Girl at a Time, Fellas.
Of course, it would be ridiculous to say that there are no girls in these films. But there tends to be only one significant other, and she is only there to starkly point out a rejection of, or by, the female world. Marla in Fight Club is a taunting, threatening presence who needs to be eliminated. More Tyler than Tyler himself (who anyway is only ever really half Tyler), Marla’s suicidal nihilism needs to be sidelined if the attempt to find a core masculine identity is to be taken seriously. The rejection of the female – ‘we were a generation brought up by our mothers, I’m thinking if another woman in our lives is really the solution’ – allows also for a freer homoerotic fantasy. But this kind of no-girls-allowed masculinity is really a heterosexual homosexuality, full of backslapping and angry repression. Whereas Fight Club wears its man-worries on its bare (but not particularly hairy) chest, The Social Network maintains an adolescent attitude to women, at once fearing them, despising them after the anticipated rejection and then vengefully commodifying them. Girls with names, there are few and but one of note. Like Marla, Erica Albright is the man-child’s worst nightmare, an intelligent, articulate woman who can see through pretence. Just as Fight Club is a retreat from Marla, so Facebook is a rejection of a girl like Erica Albright and initially an act of publicly delivered vengeance. Every other girl in the film is a trophy to be ostentatiously flung in Erica Albright’s face, girls with bigger tits and less lip. The question-mark endings of both films present similarly ironic and uncertain truces rather than genuine resolution.
The Fourth Rule of Fightbook: If This Is Your First Night at Fightbook, You DON’T Have to Fight.
The most obvious difference between the two films is the level of violence. The fighting of Fight Club has been variously described as metaphorical and whatnot, and yet it is there, a visceral, anti-intellectual attempt at life, at connecting. This late 90s wish for violence, for a self-defining and character-building war, is no longer sustainable post-9/11, in the phosphorous light of Fallujah and the Helmand Province. All the boys who really wanted to find themselves in the zing of battle are in The Hurt Locker (Bigalow, 2008) or Restrepo (Hetherington and Junger, 2010). The Social Network verbally spars where Fight Club smashes your face in, both in its content and in its stylistic vigour. And yet the total absence of violence in The Social Network leaves an outline where violence ought to be. Sean Parker’s flinch is a defining moment in the battle between him and Eduardo: ‘I like standing next to you, Sean,’ Eduardo says. ‘It makes me look tough.’ Fight Club‘s psychotic anguish about ‘being men together’ is more violently played out and the images of movie star masculinity (Brad Pitt and Jared Leto) are at least available, but the loneliness of the central characters of both films, their inability to connect, or even look at each other while talking is there throughout. [SPOILER] The ‘suicide’ at the end of Fight Club ought to be real (the statistics for suicide among young white men in the US make for grim reading), but both films reach out for a possibly hopeful resolution.
If only it wasn’t for that last cock, getting in the way of everything.
American artist Al Jarnow started out as something of an accidental animator. Obsessed with capturing light, Jarnow initially created paintings. Like David Hockney’s photographic collages, Jarnow’s works laid out their subjects through squares of colour. Painted street scenes, architectural structures and landscapes were used to illustrate the motion of time, the changing of light and its transformative powers. Buildings were chosen as vessels; it was light that was the subject. Film, with its flickering frames of light and intrinsically temporal nature, was a natural progression. There was more potential for recording and exploring transience. He was also led towards the medium by his acquaintances and the environment of his city: the artistically free and exciting New York of the 1970s. Film Forum, Anthology and the Collective of Living Cinema provided unique platforms for experimentation. And Jarnow was a natural experimenter.
His first attempt at filmmaking – a psychedelic animation of Edward Lear’s poem ‘The Owl and The Pussycat’ – was for a NYU student film, produced by friend Dan Weiss, with drawings by his wife, Jill Jarnow. By necessity he learnt on the project; and by not knowing the medium, he was able to reinvent, challenge and improvise. Over the course of his career, he has played around with Xerox machines, he has produced stop-motion animations with filing cards and, in recent times, he has ‘fallen head over heels into the computer screen’, investigating the possibility of software-generated sequences without beginnings, middles and ends.
There is an elegant precision to Jarnow’s films. His 70s filing-card films stylishly play with geometric patterns. Piles of paper leap up and down mail-slots or shuffle like packs of cards, all the time revealing rotating architectural hand-drawn cubes. As the numbered sheets of paper flip before your eyes, your mind races to discover how it is done before duly giving in to the hypnotic rhythm, counted out on Mozart-written harpsichord beats. Autosong (1976), inspired by his wife’s blue Volkswagen car, is a labyrinthine journey of bends, bridges and hills knotting into abstract tubes and pipes set to field recordings of revving engines. Jarnow looked to the background scenery of old cartoons, rather than the racing hero.
Indeed, Jarnow presents humans as small specks, insignificant in the lifespan of the earth. In the two-minute short Cosmic Clock (1979), an impassive young male figure watches from a hillside as one billion years flash before his eyes. A strange time-lapse masterpiece unfolds as successive space-age cities rise and fall, water levels surge and plummet and ice ages sweep over the land. Architecture (1980) takes a different approach, using brightly painted toy blocks to create a stop-motion representation of urbanisation. Model animals weave in and out as buildings emerge, disintegrate and rocket up skywards. The elaborate city landscape sees the animals disappear as cars move in.
As well as charting the progression of human beings against the backdrop of the natural world, Jarnow also displays a desire to record time as it relates to an individual’s life. Jesse: The First Year (1979) is a playful sequence of photographs showing Jarnow’s new-born son over the course of 12 months, charting changes and growth during a period when the passage of time is sharply apparent. Similar in its personal approach, Celestial Navigation (1984) is one of Jarnow’s most fulfilled experiments. The 15-minute film records light passing through Jarnow’s Long Island studio from 20 March 1982 until 20 March 1983. As blocks of sunlight fall from the windows against whitewashed walls, Jarnow obsessively traces their movement across mornings, afternoons, days, weeks, months. He creates grids, photographic prints and a model of the studio, surrounded by a shining light bulb. He travels to Stonehenge for the summer equinox and produces a map of the landmark. There is a wonderful zoetrope-like sequence as the camera swirls around the stones, sun shining through and shadows cast. The effect of Celestial Navigation is like a fantastically talented jazz trumpeter stepping up to improvise, surrounded by silence as the rest of the band dies away. It is Jarnow’s personal philosophical riff on time and light.
Given the cerebral aspect of his works, it comes as a surprise that Jarnow also worked on many television commissions, including sequences for the mighty children’s television series Sesame Street. Generations of children remember his film, Yak (1970), an educational short about the letter ‘Y’. This commercial work paid for experimentations in the studio while Jarnow has described his personal work as acting like a laboratory for his commissions. And what a fantastic laboratory his Long Island attic became. Self-effacing in interview, Jarnow depicts his filmmaking as starting off on a very personal basis (‘my wife was an audience, my friends were an audience’). The uniqueness of Jarnow’s work rests heavily on its personal quality. Jarnow is an artist driven by an enviable desire to endlessly chase ideas, taking new perspectives and trying out all approaches.
The Al Jarnow programme ‘Celestial Navigations’ screened on Sunday 27 March at Ikon Eastside, Birmingham, as part of the Flatpack Festival.
Eleanor McKeown
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
