The Berlinale loves women, on screen and off. For the second time in the past three years there were more female members than men on the competition jury, this time led by Wong Kar-wai, whose martial arts epic The Grandmaster (starring a ravishing Zhang Ziyi) opened the festival. But it was the subtly winning style of on-screen actresses such as Paulina Garcia, who received the Silver Bear award for her performance as grounded but brave middle-aged Gloria in Chilean director Sebastian Lelio’s competition entry of the same name, and Isabella Rossellini’s radiant presence (when receiving the Berlinale Camera award) that captured the media’s attention, and created some quiet sparks during an otherwise largely uneventful 63rd edition of the festival. What’s more, looking at the films on offer, women not only seized opportunities to breach social conventions but, more often than not, gleefully plunged into misery and destruction, both physically and emotionally.
The youngest discovery among the group of on-screen heroines was Austrian actress Melanie Lenz, who plays an overweight teenager doomed to fall in love with her middle-aged doctor (Joseph Lorenz) at a diet camp in the final act of Ulrich Seidl’s female-led Paradise trilogy.
Read Pamela Jahn’s interview with director Ulrich Seidl.
Meli is the 13-year-old daughter of Teresa, who went out on a quest for sexual bliss in a beach resort in Kenya in the first episode (Paradise: Love), while Meli’s aunt, who drops her off at the camp in the opening sequence, scourged herself for the love of Jesus in the second part, Faith. With her family either far away or busy praying, Meli relies solely on her ebullient roommates to read the signs and follow her heart. That nothing good can come from that is as predictable as the unadorned visual style, considering Paradise: Hope is a Seidl film, and a gruff one at that.
Labelled with an equally misleading title, but to more shrewdly amusing effect, was Canadian critic-turned-director Denis Côté’s eccentric Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, which starts off promisingly, but gradually loses momentum, as well as character depth, before an unexpectedly superb, if bitchy, ending. Pierrette Robitaille as Victoria, who has been discharged early from prison for a life sentence, and Romane Bohringer as Vic’s former cell mate and now lover, Florence, who has her own agenda for consistently soft-selling Vic’s mounting fear that she will eventually drop her, both give convincing performances as the outlaw couple trying to make a new start somewhere in the Canadian forest. But Côté doesn’t quite manage to keep the viewer interested in his deceptive directing choices and the film’s enigmatic atmosphere, so much so that one doesn’t really care anymore when the trap that has been carefully laid out eventually snaps shut.
Unsurprisingly, prospects seemed no better for the group of German immigrants who, in the summer of 1898, set out on a journey to find their fortune in the Canadian goldfields around Dawson City in Thomas Arslan’s carefully constructed, weirdly chaste and slow paced German-language Western Gold. The film centres around enigmatic Emily (Nina Hoss), a self-reliant and hands-on divorcée amidst a bunch of peculiar male characters, who turns out to be the most driven member of the group, willing to push ahead at all costs.
Read Pamela Jahn’s interview with actress Nina Hoss.
Arslan, who is best known for documenting Berlin in the 1990s in his unobtrusive trilogy of character studies (Brothers and Sisters (1997), Dealer (1999) and 2001’s A Fine Day), has a meticulous eye for characters continuously in motion and on the move, and here successfully brings the clinical distance and landscape poetics of the Berlin School to bear on what is essentially an ensemble costume drama, carried by yet another remarkably restrained performance from Hoss.
Not strictly part of the official festival programme, but screened in the German Cinema – LOLA@Berlinale section, which showcases preselected films for the German Film Award, Margarethe von Trotta’s cinematic portrait of Hannah Arendt stood out for its astuteness and skill in capturing a persona as prolific yet elusive as the German-Jewish philosopher (played by Barbara Sukova), whose theory of the ‘banality of evil’ made her both famous and vulnerable. The film follows Arendt as she travels to Jerusalem to report on the infamous Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker. Irritated by the staging of the trial as well as by her own and others’ interpretation of the proceedings, Arendt eventually gets caught up in her own judgement of the ardent Nazi and anti-Semite as he manages to disguise the role he played in the Holocaust. Trotta, by contrast, has crafted an extremely lucid, tense and unsettling drama. It’s also an incredibly tender film without ever being sentimental.
One of the most impressive films in the international competition was Harmony Lessons, by 29-year-old first-time Kazakhstani director Emir Baigazin. In its essence, Harmony Lessons is a twisted school-bullying revenge drama revolving around introverted 13-year-old Aslan (Timur Aidarbekov), who is targeted by his ruthless classmates. In return, Aslan vents his anger and frustration on cockroaches and other pests and insects that he uses as guinea pigs for the cruel little scientific experiments that he conducts in his room. Things seem to get slightly better when a student arrives from the city and helps defy the bullies, while palling up with Aslan. However, when a murder takes place at the school, the main suspects are easily found, transforming both the characters and the plot into something deeper, darker and more mysterious. With its existential overtones and the creative assurance of a young director who seems to have little to learn from any arthouse veterans, Harmony Lessons is an inventive, genre-defying film located on the borderline between the real and the imaginary, and deserves more attention than it received in Berlin.
Shortly after I moved to Birmingham, the Museum and Art Gallery held an exhibition of Arts Lab posters. Set alongside august oils and wispy Pre-Raphelites, these artfully slapdash screenprints were a revelation, living, multi-coloured proof that the city had once had an underground. It seemed inconceivable that people had gathered in a converted back-street youth centre for performance art and Oshima movies. The era of New Labour felt like a long way from the countercultural tumult of the late 60s when Arts Labs sprang up all over the country, inspired by the example set by Jim Haynes at Drury Lane. David Bowie started one up in his local pub, and commented to the Melody Maker: ‘I never knew there were so many sitar players in Beckenham.’
Ad hoc collectives wary of any form of administration, the majority of these places fizzled out or splintered within a couple of years. One of the main things that sustained Birmingham’s Arts Lab through the decade was its film programme, led by local boy and Lab co-founder Tony Jones along with Peter Walsh, a student from Ireland who had got a bit of a name for himself showing Andy Warhol films at college. They cobbled together a rudimentary cinema from local building sites and fleapits, and began screening the kind of work that wouldn’t get an airing elsewhere in the city: their opening festival in 1970 included Dušan Makavejev’sLove Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967), Joe Massot’s Wonderwall (1968) and shorts by Jonas Mekas and Ed Emshwhiller.
For more information about the Arts Lab events at Flatpack, please go to the Flatpack website.
Wry editorials in the Lab’s print publicity give you some idea of the financial and logistical challenges they faced, describing how postal strikes and press disinterest had helped limit that month’s admissions. ‘Needless to say,’ they continue, ‘both Flesh and Danish Blue did not seem to suffer from any of the difficulties listed above,’ a nod to the importance of sex (or the faint promise of it) in attracting punters. Happily the Lab managed to build a film audience beyond the soft-core crowd, drawing ‘middle-class culture vultures’ as Pete Walsh described them, as well as the more regular denizens who could more often than not be found sleeping on the premises too.
Part of what attracted me to the Lab was its multidisciplinary nature, but I was quickly disabused of the notion that this was a melting pot for art forms; like many such places, it was pretty territorial. According to Pete Walsh, ‘it was an unusual bunch – I don’t think people held similar views across the board at all,’ and given that film accounted for a good chunk of revenue and helped to subsidise the music, visual arts and theatre programmes, it’s no surprise that there were tensions between the different areas. There were times, though, when these parts came together to form something greater. One-off happenings took over a canal basin or half-built library with music, fire and projections, and on a smaller scale Tony Jones remembers creating a perforated cinema screen for Bruce Lacey to jump through during one of his performance pieces.
The way the film and print workshop sparked off each other was an example of this process at its pragmatic best: as Pete Walsh put it, ‘we liked their work, and they were interested in film, so we would ask them to do posters’. Like the cinema, the press was built from scratch with various pillaged materials by two science students who had taught themselves how to print. The free-wheeling, fragmented results make today’s film marketing look pretty tame by comparison, and it’s easy to imagine the incongruous effect they had when plastered in concrete underpasses.
The Lab posters are often in the back of my mind when we produce our own flyers and brochures, perhaps with half an eye on posterity – when the events are a dim memory, people will still have marketing materials to remember us by. One advantage we have today, of course, is the internet. Postal strikes are unlikely to knock a hole in our audience figures, and the web offers a cheap route to international connections and visibility. On the other hand, plenty of things have not changed. This brave new digital phenomenon of crowd-funding is not a million miles from the Lab’s campaigns to buy a new projector or repair the roof, with the common thread a desire to provide an outlet for the unexpected.
Following the film programmes through the 1970s and into the early 80s, you can see the shift in focus from the avant-garde to auteurism. The increasingly chunky bi-monthly catalogue includes extensive programme notes on the various seasons – some of them honest enough to slate the films they’re supposedly advertising – and can lead to wistful daydreams about a Sunday afternoon double bill of McCabe and Mrs Miller followed by an Ivor Cutler show. There’s even a Dennis Hopper retrospective and photo exhibition in there, with the vaguely optimistic note ‘possibly including a visit by the man himself’. In fact Mr Hopper did materialise in Birmingham, AWOL from a screening at the NFT and trailing an enormous entourage which included his parents.
This legendary misspent weekend became an expensive last hurrah in the Lab saga. By that point it had made the tricky transition from DIY volunteer-run outfit to West Midlands Arts’ biggest client, but on the horizon was a cost-cutting merger with Aston University, which would see the organisation stripped right back to a single-screen venue and film workshop. Tony Jones had already moved on to set up a cinema in Cambridge, which would go on to spawn the Picturehouse circuit recently purchased by Cineworld for £47 million. Pete Walsh continued to programme the place, now known as the Triangle, until its closure in 1994 when he moved on to the Irish Film Institute in Dublin. The legacy for Birmingham was not the glistening three-screen arthouse picture palace they might have dreamt of, but a generation of film lovers marked forever by strange and wonderful movies.
Pete Walsh died in December 2012, and the quotations in this piece are taken from an interview recorded in Dublin in 2009.
Lacking the market influence of the major Hollywood studios, for much of its existence the modern Spanish horror film has been overshadowed by its contemporaries. Generally regarded favourably by both fans and critics, Spain’s genre output includes several genuine classics like Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) – the most successful Spanish horror film ever made – and the Guillermo del Toro-produced hit The Orphanage (2007), as well as a number of cult favourites and a great many competent but lesser efforts. With leading lights Amenábar and del Toro moving on to other things – Amenábar away from horror entirely (with The Sea Inside, 2004, and Agora, 2009) and del Toro on his twin path between big-budget studio pictures (Blade 2, 2002) and smaller, intensely personal Spanish-language films like The Devil’s Backbone (2001) – it was left to Catalan director Jaume Balagueró to carry the standard for the contemporary Spanish horror scene.
By the time he released his most successful film, [Rec] (2007), Balagueró was already a key figure in the Spanish genre, thanks to his acclaimed debut feature, The Nameless (1998). That success boded well for his future, but his attempts to move into the world of international horror have been dogged by problems. Despite its critical applause, The Nameless would not be released in the USA until 2005, when it was dumped direct to video. Balagueró’s English-language follow-up, Darkness (2002), was heavily (and somewhat pointlessly) trimmed before receiving a half-hearted theatrical release in the US in 2004. His next film, Fragile (2005) starred Calista Flockhart, but sat on a shelf for five years. By the time it finally appeared, any international interest in the film had long since dissipated. Both films are stylish, atmospheric ghost stories that should have an audience, not least of all because of their casts: Darkness starred Giancarlo Giannini (Hannibal), Anna Paquin (X-Men, True Blood) and Lena Olin (Alias), while Fragile featured Richard Roxburgh (Van Helsing, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and Elena Anaya, who was also in Van Helsing.
Following these setbacks, it’s not entirely surprising that Balagueró returned to Spain – and to the Spanish language – for his next project, an instalment in the Films to Keep You Awake (Películas para no dormir) series. Mainly funded by Filmax, the company most heavily associated with Spanish horror, and overseen by genre legend Narcisco Ibáñez Serrador, the series brought in six well-known directors, including Balagueró, Paco Plaza and Álex de la Iglesia, with each one handling a single episode of roughly 60 minutes in length. Balagueró’s contribution, To Let (Para entrar a vivir, 2006), is one of the finest in the series, but unlike his previous films, he downplays the supernatural, atmospheric angle in favour of brutal violence and nerve-shredding tension. The film’s central characters, a young couple in search of a new apartment, find themselves at the mercy of an insane landlady who has decided they would be the perfect tenants for her crumbling old block of flats, whether they like it or not. Their would-be neighbours are already home, chained and gagged in their maggot-ridden kitchens or filthy bathrooms in a twisted version of domestic bliss. Following To Let, Balagueró delved further into the world of explicit violence with the hectic, blood-drenched [Rec] and its 2009 follow-up, [Rec] 2, both co-directed by Balagueró and Paco Plaza. Like Cloverfield (2008) and George Romero’s lacklustre Diary of the Dead (2007), Balagueró and Plaza took the ‘found footage’ approach, with the handheld cameras lending the already frantic material another shot of adrenaline. Following [Rec] 2, Balagueró and Plaza decided to direct separate sequels, the first of which – Plaza’s [Rec] 3: Genesis – was released in 2012. Balagueró’s contribution, [Rec]: Apocalypse, is scheduled to appear in 2013.
Released in Spain in late 2011, Sleep Tight (Mientras duermes) is Balagueró’s sixth feature film, and the first he hasn’t at least co-written himself. This time the script was prepared entirely by Alberto Marini, a Filmax executive who has worked with Balagueró on most of his films, as ‘director’s creative assistant’ (Darkness), story editor (Fragile), co-writer (To Let) or co-executive producer on the [Rec] movies. The film centres on César, played by Luis Tosar, a concierge and building manager obsessed with one of the tenants, Clara, an attractive young woman whose sunny disposition provides a sharp contrast with the unstable, chronically unhappy doorman. Ever since he took up the position, César has been sending her a steady stream of offensive, threatening letters, texts and e-mails. As she continues to rise above his torments, César goes even further, until things begin to slip out of his control.
Like To Let and the [Rec] films, Sleep Tight abandons the supernatural elements that appear in his first three feature movies (The Nameless avoids the overtly supernatural, but still takes place in a world haunted by ghosts with sinister cults attempting to summon an evil messiah figure). By removing the infected zombies of [Rec], Balagueró has moved even closer to a realistic world, although admittedly it’s one populated with twisted individuals like César and the landlady from To Let, who is another variation on the twisted parental figures that appear in Balagueró’s earlier films. It’s difficult to view César as one of those, but it’s probably not a coincidence that these characters do very similar jobs. César is one of the hundreds of faceless employees that most people don’t notice as they go through their lives, whether they’re taxi drivers or cleaners. Some of the building’s tenants – most obviously Clara – will stop and chat to talk to him, but most of them simply ignore him. Even the one tenant who complains endlessly about César has no idea of what he’s really like, content to dismiss him as another lazy employee. It’s this attitude that allows him to go largely unnoticed, even when the police are in the building and apparently closing in on their suspect. It helps that César is skilled at masking his true personality, appearing to be a friendly, helpful man. Thankfully, Luis Tosar (Cell 211) is more than up to the task, changing between genial and malevolent with remarkable fluidity but never slipping into a scenery-chewing caricature.
Foregoing the frenzied rush of the [Rec] films, Sleep Tight is deliberately paced, with Balagueró ramping up the tension carefully, concentrating on atmosphere rather than adrenaline. It’s an approach that works well, and the film is every bit as compelling and uncomfortable as The Nameless, a film it resembles somewhat. Some recent Spanish horror offerings – The Orphanage being the most obvious example – have featured cathartic, emotional conclusions, but it’s good to see that Balagueró has (with the exception of Fragile) managed to resist that trend, turning in an appropriately downbeat resolution.
Even though my eyes were shut I knew for sure that someone was standing above me, watching me. The mental image was crystal clear, clearer than actual vision, as strong as the unmistakable sensation of being stared at. I felt my whole body shake like mad under this enormous, trembling pressure as I tried to move under a fog of tingling static. I was physically straining to wake up – my will battling with my inert body: ‘Move! Do something! The unconscious has taken me hostage!’
I wrote the description above in a letter to a friend almost ten years ago, following a night of intense sleep disturbance. Jetlagged after a long journey I had gone to bed in a strange room and rather than falling into sleep, I seemed to slip sideways into a quick-fire series of dreams. These were set in my bedroom and peppered with periods of lying awake, unable to move my body. Throughout the night, in this sleep-wake state, I was visited by visions of a pale-eyed demon with a claw-vice grip. It was not the first time I had experienced this kind of ‘nightmare’. I have had similar episodes since childhood. They feel real unlike any other kind of dream, and terrifying.
This is sleep paralysis, a very common parasomnia experienced by up to 50% of people at some time in their lives. While in REM sleep (dream sleep) a sleeper’s muscles are effectively paralysed to prevent them physically acting out their dreams. This very sensible precaution usually ceases before the sleeper wakes. Sometimes, however, the process falls out of sync. A sleeper may become conscious while still in a state of paralysis, finding themselves awake and aware, but trapped in a sleeping body which will not respond to commands. Often this can be accompanied by hallucinations – visual, auditory, tactile, even olfactory. It’s as if a door to the dream-state has been left open, and some elements are allowed to leak out into what feels like the ‘real’ world.
Last summer, during a period of insomnia, I was getting sleep paralysis episodes once or twice a week. I was struck by how… cinematic the experiences were. Researching the phenomenon, I became fascinated by the recurring themes in experiences that are reported. These include the sense of a malevolent presence in the room, often lying on or pressing the chest of the sleeper. It has been suggested that this sensed ‘presence’ is at the root of many mythological characters, from the sex-crazed incubus in Western Europe to the demonic kanashibari in Japan (allegedly the inspiration behind the Sadako character in The Ring).
To kick off the project I put out a call for interviewees. I was inundated by accounts of sleepers visited by sinister visions and a sense of ‘overwhelming, ancient evil’. Words like ‘fear’, ‘isolation’, ‘loneliness’ and ‘helplessness’ cropped up frequently, as did emotional associations between sleep paralysis and ‘the feeling of being dead’. With the support of Wellcome Trust, I devised The Sleep Paralysis Project, a cross-platform project designed to navigate and express the experience, cultural history and scientific background of sleep paralysis across film, live events and an online resource. The project was launched at London Short Film Festival in January, with a sold-out event at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre. In this evening of film and discussion a psychologist, a neuropsychologist, a filmmaker and a psychoanalyst all presented very different angles on the subject. A series of curated shorts offered other impressions of sleep paralysis and associated areas. These included Paul Vester’s classic short Abductees, a lively animation documenting memories ‘recovered’ during hypnosis as well as new experimental work from Emily&Anne and cinema iloobia.
Another key element of the Sleep Paralysis Project is the creation of a short experimental documentary, currently in production. Inspired by science documentary, 20s surrealism, Hammer horror and musical theatre, the film is created in collaboration with arts and technology collective seeper and artist-composer Dominic de Grande, who is writing a quirky, original soundtrack. Live action film, stop-motion animation and projection-mapped sets combine to create an evolving visual environment, in which perceived reality is constantly in question.
Perhaps the greatest fear is a fear of madness, and the incredibly convincing realities conceived in sleep paralysis are a chilling taste of what our brains are capable of. And what better medium than cinema to capture and communicate the flickering, fearful illusions of the mind’s eye?
The Big Screen: The Story of Movies and What They Did to Us
By David Thomson
Allen Lane 595pp £25
Jazz on Film: Beat, Square & Cool
By Selwyn Harris
Moochin’ About/Jazzwise Magazine £25
The Future Revisited: Jules Verne on screen in 1950s America
By Françoise Schlitz
Chaplin Books £14.99
In spite of rumours of the demise of printed books and related ephemera, wondrous things continue to be delivered through my letterbox and my heart stirs at the thump on the mat when a padded envelope of unknown contents materialises. This month’s Cine Lit looks at three such recent deliveries.
David Thomson is one of cinema studies’ most prolific authors. By turns enthusiastic, irascible, grumpy, opinionated, personal, fair-minded and judgemental, he is above all deeply passionate, informed and honest. His writing is a joy to read and maintains a rare balance between populism and elitism. A critic and contextualist, Thomson is one of the best cinematic authors that we have. As the author’s modest rear dust jacket description has it: ‘David Thomson has a fair claim to be the greatest living writer on film.’ Can’t imagine who the greatest dead writer is – answers on a postcard please. At any event, it is obvious that any new book from Thomson is to be reckoned with and paid attention to. His propensity for magnum opuses – as evidenced by his authoritative Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Whole Equation, his history of Hollywood – now continues with The Big Screen. His polemical, probing style with its breezy narrative structure and insightful, often provocative, observations has been fashioned over many years. Thomson has been a sharp-eyed critic and writer on film for decades, his first publication arriving in 1967. The new book takes a God’s eye view of movies; it is international in scope and all-encompassing in theme. The reader is taken on a mighty journey from the beginnings of the film industry and through the succeeding decades with stops taken along the route to look at the rise and influence of academic film studies (pro and con) , cultural and social change before, during and after the wars and how these anxieties and pleasures were reflected on the screen and embedded in the textual codes. It ends with a wonderful epilogue reflecting on projection, screen and narrative, which, like the book, is suffused with misgivings about the present and future state of movie-going as a communal cultural experience. The Big Screen is a terrific ‘can’t put it down’ account written by an author who holds back few punches – all at once loveable, charming, irritating and unpredictable. A classic.
In an earlier column I enthused over the terrific CD box set of Jazz on Film: Film Noir and its accompanying booklet. How could this gem be bettered? Well… it has. Moochin’ About has just released a gorgeous new five-CD box-set with another informative 30-page booklet, Jazz on Film: Beat, Square & Cool. Featuring more lost or hard-to-get soundtracks remastered to a high standard, it includes such hipster efforts as The Connection, The Subterraneans (imagine A-Team’s George Peppard as Jack Kerouac! Score by Andre Previn), Shadows (a Cassavetes classic, score improvised by Charles Mingus no less), Paris Blues (score by Duke Ellington) and another wonderful four titles. Lovingly prepared and beautifully presented, this is a must-have set.
Finally, a rather unique title from a little-known publisher. Chaplin Books has released Françoise Schlitz’s The Future Revisited, an examination of Hollywood’s film versions of Jules Verne’s novels with a focus on Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Mysterious Island and Journey to the Center of the Earth – a film seen in childhood which mesmerised me. Schlitz takes a multi-disciplinary view of the films and culture in which they were produced, with an emphasis on how Verne’s original novels launched readers into travels to imaginary places and provided them with newly imagined – but somehow plausible – experiences therein. She then goes on to deliberate how these spectacles and marvels intersected with, and were translated into, works that served the concerns of modernism, capitalism, notions of progress and consumption, all in aid of American post-war hegemony. Cinematic textual challenges to gender, politics, domesticity, innovation and science itself are winkled out of the films in question and an interesting account has been articulated. If at times the book has the whiff of a re-worked Ph.D thesis, what with its initial insistence on articulating methodologies and justifying certain contextual approaches before the unfolding of the narrative proper, it is nonetheless interesting for all that and provides a welcome perspective on a rarely examined aspect of film history.
James B. Evans
GONE… BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
You’ll pay a premium for securing a copy of this terrific title, Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness, Michael Stark’s illustrated history of drugs in the movies. It was a seminal study on the topic, and subsequent writers have borrowed generously from Stark’s research and thorough overview of the topic – though not always acknowledging him. The book was published by Cornwall Press in New York in 1982 and has long been out of print. It pops up on ABE and Alibris from time to time and I was lucky to pay £10 for it a few years ago on Charing Cross Road – you know the Charing Cross Road that used to have lots of used bookshops before the days of designer coffee shops and eateries. It is essential, along with Harry Shapiro’s out of print Shooting Stars: Drugs, Hollywood and the Movies (Serpent’s Tail, London) and the equally essential, though still available Addicted: the Myth and Menace of Drugs in Film by the ubiquitous Jack Stevenson. Save these books! JE
Occurring in January, the IFFR feels like the season opener for the annual round of international film festivals, with one foot in the past year and one in the future. Some of the films have played at other film festivals, with their European premieres taking place at Rotterdam, while others are fresh out of the production house for their world debuts, all of which serve to presage the offerings for upcoming festivals in 2013.
The very broad and encompassing catalogue evidences a film festival dedicated to excellent – I hesitate to say ‘art house’ – world movies. And what an eclectic bunch it was. Space permits only short observations on a select handful of works, so I start with two of my favourites: Oh Boy directed by German first-timer, Jan Ole Gerster, and another first feature by Cameroonian (by way of Los Angeles) director Victor Viyuoh, whose harrowing but moving film, Nina’s Dowry is a terrific and unforgiving look at oppressive village life in Cameroon, where wives are bartered for and treated ‘less well than cattle’. The story of the heroine’s journey to freedom – for which she pays a high price – is a wonderful testimony to the human spirit and a salutary lesson to Western audiences. The more so, as Viyuoh informs us that the story is based very closely on a relative’s terrible, true story. Not an easy watch, but an essential one.
Viyuoh’s film takes place far from the world of contemporary Berlin, where Jan Ole Gerster sets his narrative about a slacker-hero’s journey through the social strata of the city. A Candide-like figure, he goes on a simple and ultimately fruitless search for a cup of coffee, during which time he comes to a profound self-realisation. Shot in black and white, with a terrific jazz soundtrack, Oh Boy introduces a real talent to audiences. Gerster displays a very assured, mature and confident hand, and his film carries the DNA of all those off-beat counter-cultural films by the likes of the BBS gang. The film has garnered a fistful of awards on the Festival circuit in the last months: Best Film, Best Actor, Best Direction and Best Script. Keep an eye out for the release of these films and for future works from both of these impressive new talents.
Many of the ‘old masters’ of cinema have lately raised their lenses above the parapet and offered new works. Not – unhappily – with great results. De Palma fizzled out with his rather over-wrought Passion (2012), Copolla’s Twixt (2011) is painful, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree (2011) was a failure, and now comes one of my favourites, Bernardo Bertolucci with his Me and You (I e te).
Me and You is released in UK cinemas by Artificial Eye on 19 April.
The film tells the story of an oddball 14-year-old boy who hides in the cellar of his home to avoid going on a ski trip with his fellow students. He is joined by his beautiful half-sister, who is an addict trying to quit. She shatters his tranquil world and many familial truths come to light. This synopsis makes the film sound like it is rather perfunctory and that the director is merely going through the aesthetic directorial motions. It is. And in this, it is somewhat reminiscent of his 2003 film, The Dreamers, which also got critical short shrift for many of the same reasons. Poor Bertolucci – now wheelchair bound – should have taken note. Sexy adolescents and their world are probably something beyond his directorial grasp these days – and it pains me to say it.
Not had enough of elder cinematic statesmen working with nubile young actresses? Then Alicia Scherson’s The Future (Il futuro) is right up your alley. Intertextual to the last, the film stars the ageing action star Rutger Hauer playing…yes, you guessed it, an ageing action star! Named Maciste, he is prone to hiring ‘lady companions’ to cavort about in the nude doing Last Tango in Paris type things (and with the same attempted existential gravitas). A beautiful young thing is induced to throw her lot in with a couple of Eastern European lowlives, who her brother has befriended and taken in to their parent-less house. These two small-time crooks believe that Maciste has a fortune stashed somewhere in his mansion, and recruit the beautiful young thing – after they both have sex with her – to become an object of sexual interest to Maciste. His interest in her amounts to ritually anointing her body in oil, a la his old Italian peplum films. All this body-oiling is voyeuristically captured in loving detail by the camera – the better to titillate audiences. In all honesty, it is a great role for Hauer, and even the creaky plot is acceptable enough, but the whole composition of the film and the outlandish gratuitous sex give it a distinctly unintended campness. It’s a strange brew that is a cross between a 9 1/2 Weeks (1986) or 1987’s Angel Heart (with intellectual aspirations) and a Last Tango in Paris (1972) with a heist plot thrown in. Could become an unintended classic of its type – art-house drive-in kitsch.
Finally, speaking of drive-in aesthetics (can’t help your roots!) I come to the intriguingly titled Misericordia: The Last Mystery of Kristo Vampiro, a weird post-modern Mondo-type film by Khavn de la Cruz. The voice-over narrative is provided by one Kristo Vampiro, who in his ceaseless search for blood follows a camera crew to the real-life cock fights, self-flagellation and acted crucifixions so beloved of certain groups of Filipino believers. In between, the film crew spends time at the rock bar, Hobbit House, where all the servers are dwarves – and a ringside brothel provides entertainment. All this to the accompaniment of a mouth-organ soundtrack. Who could ask for more?
Cast: Aneurin Barnard, James Cosmo, Wunmi Mosaku, Jake Wilson
Ireland 2012
84 mins
I always wondered if I would be able to offer safety and protection to those I love if confronted with the need to choose physical violence. Being an ex-cop/ex-athlete’s son, I received plenty of dirty pugilistic tactics in those halcyon days when folks didn’t bat an eye over playground scuffles. I eventually put Dad’s counsel to use on a particularly vile bully. It worked so well that my opponent’s face was exquisitely rearranged and from that point on, nobody, I mean NOBODY ever bothered me again. I knew I was able to employ similar techniques if it ever happened again and went through life with no worries. But that’s ME. What could/would happen if I needed to protect someone else? Could/would I be able to do it again? Would it be different? Worse yet, what if I was not able to deliver the goods? That’s very scary. That, I can assure you and this, I believe, is a key element permeating Ciaran Foy’s stunning feature film Citadel.
As an adult, I encountered an especially dangerous situation. After an extended sojourn across the Atlantic, I returned to discover my apartment had been burgled. It was an easy place to burgle, but unexpected since my beloved and I lived in a ‘protected’ building. Bikers and dealers lived there and as such, was one of the safest places for anyone to live (save for the potential of being caught in crossfire which, thankfully, never happened). But, burgled we most certainly were. The immediate concern was twofold. Whoever did it wasn’t especially concerned about the ‘protected’ aspect of the building and might well have been completely insane (we lived round the corner from an outpatient clinic specializing in emotionally challenged mental defectives), or, worse, the perp was a junkie (most of whom wouldn’t be stupid enough to hit a ‘protected’ domicile). This was someone who simply didn’t give a rat’s ass. They must be feared at all costs. One must be prepared to do whatever it takes to stop them in their tracks.
Worst of all, I had the gnawing feeling that the psycho would return.
Each night I’d rest easy with a baseball bat beside me and, sure enough, soon after the burglary and in the pitch of black, I heard a huge crashing sound. Lo and behold, a dark figure stood at the foot of the bed. Springing into action, I grabbed the bat and threatened to crush the whacko’s noggin like a watermelon. As quickly as he appeared, he disappeared.
A funny thing happened after this incident. My initial exhilaration immediately transformed into complete and total terror when thoughts of what could have happened had I remained asleep or if, God forbid, I tussled with the fucker and screwed up. And here’s the rub – my fear had nothing to do with what could have happened to ME. It had everything to do with what might have happened to my wife. Scenarios danced through my brain and I became so paralyzed with fear that I insisted we move in with friends until we could pack up and move as pronto as possible.
The worry and fear I experienced over this has only multiplied exponentially now that I’m a father. Could I? Would I? Damn straight! I’d be a take-no-prisoners pit bull if either my wife or daughter needed my protection. No fear in that at all. It’s the other fear, the one that cuts deep. That’s the fear none of us want to feel.
The greatest fear, they say, is fear itself and now, my fear boils down to this: What if I failed to protect? What would the consequences be? Not to me, per se – I don’t give a shit about ME, I care only about protecting those I love. How would this fear transform itself in the aftermath of FAILURE to deliver protection? These are very real things we all, to varying degrees, must deal with. They also happen to be the very things that drive Citadel, one of the best films of the year.
I’ve been blessed to see the movie a few times now and after my first helping, I’m equally blessed to have had a chance, via Skype, to interview its talented writer-director, Ciaran Foy.
Klymkiw: I was so lucky to see Citadel on a big screen at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. For me, it’s definitely a Big Screen experience and even though so many independent genre films get relatively modest big screen exposure at festivals and in limited theatrical runs for an eventually larger life on the small screen via DVD, VOD, etc., I can’t help but assume you crafted the picture with Big Screen at the forefront.
Foy: That’s very true. I think especially so in terms of the soundscape. Sound was an important big screen element when you’re going into a 5.1 sound mix.
Yes, the aural landscape, if you will, is alternately subtle and jarring, but it seems to me that your visual design always felt bigger than life and yet, in so doing, captured life and reality so much more powerfully than many similar genre films.
Yes, we had a fairly extended series of preparatory discussions about the aspect ratio and at first I was thinking in terms of the aesthetic and practical pros and cons between a 2:35 landscape or something closer to 1:85. Trying to capture Tommy’s agoraphobia was a big part of this and my initial feeling was to go wider. At the same time, I really wanted to build in much longer, more extended takes to capture Tommy’s condition. However, working within modest means you begin to realize that cinemascope-styled frames need more lights, more art direction, and that extended shots take longer to plan and shoot, especially with actors getting their marks and so on. We eventually settled on the 16:9 aspect ratio.
And of course, planning within exigencies of production doesn’t have to mean compromise, but actually allows you to use your palette in ways that are far more effective in terms of capturing what you wanted in the first place.
Yes, and though to capture agoraphobia the feeling was to go wider, I eventually agreed with my cinematographer that it was best to choose wide angle lenses and often shoot close up, using a claustrophobic approach to capture Tommy’s terror and heighten it for the audience.
Yes, even the wider exteriors felt like Tommy was boxed in amongst all those endless towers in the housing project he wanders through.
I also loved punching in close on Tommy and using the camera to allow us to be staring directly at the fear in his eyes.
The film affected me on so many different personal levels and as such, almost by extension, I couldn’t help but feel that the film was deeply personal. Did it come from something very close to you?
I tend to describe Citadel as 50% psychological horror and 50% autobiography. When I was a teen I was the victim of a vicious unprovoked attack by some young thugs in Dublin after seeing a movie. I was beaten repeatedly on the head with a hammer and threatened with a dirty syringe. The attack left me with this condition of being agoraphobic. My battles with it, my recovery and my love for genre films are all things that eventually led to Citadel. I should say that the project had a somewhat more straightforward genre incarnation, but as I discussed it with people we’d invariably get around to where it was coming from and they’d say, ‘Oh, why don’t you tell that story.’
The horror in your picture, especially the stuff with Tommy dealing with his fear, kept forcing me forward to literally move to the edge of my seat, lean forward and thrust my point of view ever closer into the image.
I always wanted to present an extreme version of a subjective experience and as I wanted to put the audience in the mind of an agoraphobic, I think I was forced – to do anything like this, really, you are forced – to do so within the realms of genre. To put an audience into the very state of being an agoraphobic, I think that fantastical genre films work best because agoraphobia itself puts you in a state that’s just so irrational. It’s an irrational fear because you’re seeing things in the shadows that aren’t there and hearing things that aren’t there, so what I wanted to do was make sure that everything was witnessed from Tommy’s point of view. In fact, I never cut to an angle that Tommy couldn’t see.
Yeah, when I first wrote about the film, I’d only seen it once and was sure of that, but for some reason, not 100% sure.
Well I broke that rule once because I figured that if I didn’t show what happens to a particular character, everyone would think he was going to come back at the end.
I’m totally crazy about Aneurin’s performance as Tommy. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, really – you captured so many great shots of him inhabiting the role so totally that I even remember his body language in those seemingly endless shots of Tommy pushing the baby carriage through the projects.
Yes, I’ll always remember young fathers pushing baby carriages in the working class neighbourhood I grew up in. This is why it was so important to cast someone very young – someone in his late teens or very early twenties. The problem with that, though, is so many actors in that age range are so extroverted, confident and good-looking that many of them have a hard time carrying themselves the way they need to since they themselves haven’t had times in their lives to experience failure.
So how did you guys work together? How did he prepare?
Well, as it turns out, Aneurin had similar experiences as a teen with constantly being bullied, so he understood Tommy very well in addition to attending group sessions specifically with agoraphobics. It was great, really. Aneurin and I had developed a short hand about things like what would be going through your mind if you were anxious or paranoid.
I recently talked to William Friedkin about the intensity of the performances in Killer Joe (2011). He went into a lot of detail about using sense memory with his actors, and I’m like, ‘Whoa!’. Sense memory is, to my way of thinking, potentially a dangerous place to go – even for professional actors. Then again, ‘Danger’ is Friedkin’s middle name. You and Aneurin, on the other hand, had some mega-sense-memory going on – so much so that it’s in body language where it really pays off.
When I was in film school I was lucky to have access to a counsellor. One thing I’ll always remember is when she talked about body language. She said that when you’re scared, your body says you’re scared, but if you walk through the worst area imaginable and look like you know where you’re going, the thugs, the street predators don’t see you. What they see is fear. I remembered that and thought, so what if there was a creature that was blind, but could see fear? That was the original predator I sketched out in the early versions of the story. That’s what really began that weird fusion of escapist films I love, the iconography and the experience I grew up with.
Well, it takes a lot – and I mean a lot to scare me when I’m watching horror movies. The constant tension inherent in both the mise en scène and the performances contributed to a movie that frankly scared the living shit out of me.
I do think that the entire shoot contributed to that also. The shooting was chaotic. Locations would be lost at the last minute and new ones found that I’d not even seen before going on set – everyone was anxious. There was not a lot of time to do many takes and we had to do everything possible to keep up the pace of shooting five pages a day. In the mornings, we’d all be in the zone – a totally paranoid state because none of us ever had time to get down from it. The tension was there morning, noon and night. It really affected everything. The thing that was scaring me to death was continuity. Shooting in Glasgow, snow fell when we least expected it. We’d shot a good chunk with no snow, but luckily we were at a point where it was relatively easy to come up with the notion that it snows overnight while Tommy is sleeping. Oh, and with all the snow – Glasgow is a hilly city and often the ice made it useless to get the trucks to some of the locations.
I can understand the positive effect this would have in terms of capturing what you needed to, but how do you practically get through all this?
Your crutch is your storyboard and it’s always your storyboard that gives you this sense of confidence that if you shoot what’s on the page it will make sense in the edit. When certain locations became inaccessible and we had to change them, I’d often have to throw storyboards out of the window and that was scary. When I started to see the rushes, it was a great boost to my self-confidence.
I’ve had the good fortune to work with many filmmakers who do use storyboards and just the process of creating them and knowing all the shots needed to piece the film together effectively was always helpful when they invariably needed to be tossed. Storyboards are springboards you can use to launch yourself into uncharted territory.
Absolutely, even throwing them away, they still had a use. I remember thinking about Citadel as being a dark, twisted version of Dumbo (1941) with Tommy as our baby elephant who meets a mentor character who gives him a feather, a placebo, and it’s a crutch. Furthermore, even for myself as a director, I’d use the character of Tommy as that feather and the storyboards have a similar placebo effect. I held them so close to my chest and they were my placebos to shoot the film. If I’d gone in without them it would have been a disaster. I actually learned to enjoy going on set not knowing what the location was, winging it, but sticking to the rules of the story and the approach to visuals that the storyboards helped me design.
What’s your first truly indelible movie experience? Were there any movie epiphanies?
Without question it would be the first movie I was taken to, Return of the Jedi when I was five years old in 1985. It was a mind-expanding moment, I loved the idea of being transported to a place I could never see. I was raised on Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis, Verhoeven and genre in general – being transported to worlds that didn’t exist. I was 13, though, when I realized it wasn’t enough to just visit other worlds you couldn’t visit. I got this sense of wonder from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) where I started to ask, ‘Why do I feel like watching this movie?’ It was then that I decided I really wanted to make films. It was feeling empathy with the character. Whether awe, horror, terror, wonder, humour, sadness, catharsis – every emotion I had watching that and other great movies expanded through character. The more real it feels, the more empathy I had for the character. It heightens everything. Being a geek at heart, I of course wanted to make horror, science fiction and fantasy movies.
The dystopian vision of Citadel brought me back to the 70s. I’ve got a couple of decades on you, so my childhood and teen epiphanies occurred in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. Even though your film has a contemporary and only ever-so-slightly futuristic reality, there was something about the squalor of the setting and the terrible beauty of Citadel’s exquisite rawness that kept bringing me back to a bizarre reverse image of this chilling terror I experienced when I first saw George Lucas’s THX-1138 (1971).
Every single one of those 60s and 70s films had an effect on me. Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) and The Omen (1976). When contemporary filmmakers remake films from that period, the new versions have a slick sense of production value that is rooted in the here and now, which makes them less scary. It’s the raw qualities of the 60s and 70s that made everything more real and hence scarier. I think I also always knew my first film would be low-budget – and the low budget was actually going to be essential to capturing those raw, realistic qualities that make genre films so scary.
It’s somehow a time when movies mattered. It’s nice to see movies like Citadel to keep reminding us that they still matter.
If anything, I’d have to say that the 70s are my favourite decade for horror movies.
From its opening scene, Michael Mann’s feature debut announces its concern with a new type of thief. No more the delicate application of stethoscope – an instrument whose early 19th-century invention signalled a burgeoning alliance between the medical profession and the new science of acoustics. Frank (played by James Caan) breaks safes and enters buildings with power tools and complex electronic equipment. If Frank’s criminal activity is newly hi-tech, so too its accompanying music, composed and performed by German synth rock pioneers Tangerine Dream.
Formed in 1967 by Prussian pianist and Dali enthusiast Edgar Froese, by the end of the 70s Tangerine Dream were one of the highest grossing instrumental rock bands in Europe, their oft-bootlegged live shows famed for their pyrotechnics and elaborate laser shows. The early 80s saw the group supplement their barrage of analogue electronics with increasingly sophisticated digital equipment while pursuing a range of major American film projects, beginning with Thief in 1981.
While Tangerine Dream in 1981 were a newly digitised proposition, so too was one of their chief rivals in the sphere of instrumental synth prog, Vangelis, himself on the verge of an equally productive cinematic career with Blade Runner the following year. But from the very beginning, Thief‘s score sets itself apart from the whispy floatiness of the Greek synth maven. With the first sight of Frank’s equipment the synth pads burst into a hyperactivity of competing arpeggiators, syncopated power chords, and reverb-heavy drum machines. The glistening digital sheen of the music already anticipates the gleam of the diamonds being stolen. Tangerine Dream’s music is at once more ‘pop’ and more ‘techno’ than anything you will find on the Blade Runner score.
As in most American crime films, criminal activity is here a synecdoche for capitalism itself. Thief is essentially a film about a struggle between two different forms of capitalism, represented by two different father figures. On the one hand, the old ‘master-thief’, Okla (a stethoscope man, one suspects); and on the other, Leo, a man associated with malls, rentierism, stocks and shares. Both are referred to – either by themselves or by Frank – as his father. Both of these competing capitalisms are, in a sense, musically coded. The new hi-tech capitalism by Tangerine Dream’s digital synths and sequencers, and Okla’s old-school artisanal cat burglary by the very fact that he is played by country music legend Willie Nelson.
Only in the very last scene of the film do we really hear much in the way of ‘real’ instruments – that is, music that would not be regarded as totally alien by someone used to listening to Willie Nelson – on the non-diegetic score of Thief (there is a brief scene of diegetically performed blues rock earlier on) and it sticks out like a sore thumb. As it turns out, Mann only realised late in the post-production process that he would need soundtrack music for this scene and by that time Tangerine Dream were too busy touring to provide it. Instead, the lot fell to Craig Safan (who would go on to write incidental music for the sitcom Cheers).
The track opens with acoustic guitar, soon accompanied by a sweeping hard rock electric guitar solo. The scene it complements depicts Frank’s final triumph against the forces of the new capitalism – a triumph which, in the context of early 80s America can only be regarded as pure fantasy. It is appropriate, then, that the music lends the scene precisely the atmosphere of that bit in every Guns ‘n’ Roses video where the storyline pauses in order that Slash might stand, a propos of nothing, on the edge of a cliff to perform an equally ecstatic electric guitar solo.
‘Know what this reminds me of? Rorke’s Drift. A hundred men of Harlech, making a desperate stand against 10,000 Zulu warriors. Outnumbered, surrounded, staring death in the face and not flinching for a moment. Balls of British steel.’ Dog Soldiers’ (Neil Marshall, 2002)
Pvt ‘Spoon’ Witherspoon may grossly exaggerate the enemy numbers faced during the Anglo-Zulu War’s most famous battle, but as he prepares to help defend a farmhouse from an attack by werewolves the comparison is a resonant one. Holed up with his squaddie comrades deep in the Scottish Highlands, and under siege from lycanthrope adversaries, Spoon draws attention to a trait common to many horror movies: the backs-to-the-wall stand carried out in an ad-hoc ‘fortress’. Complete with a scene where a letterbox becomes the horizontal equivalent of a loophole, enabling a burst of gunfire rather than arrows to be deployed, Dog Soldiers casts the humble farmhouse in the role of a castle, a fortification designed to keep its inhabitants safe and the enemy on the outside. Though predominantly used in horror movies, the embattled-last-stand plot-line also crops up elsewhere: Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), itself inspired by Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959), and Miike’s 13 Assassins (2010), in which a small, rural village is fortified, are notable entries into the non-traditional siege movie.
Evoking, either consciously or not, many historical sieges and last stands, from Masada to The Alamo and Leningrad, the alternative siege movie (for wont of a better catch-all definition), utilises many types of architectural structures as their last line of defence. Shopping malls, pubs, supermarkets, brothels, police stations, mansions, tower blocks and underground silos have all been co-opted to (rarely successfully) provide safety from all manner of adversarial forces in movies such as Red Lion (Kihachi Okamoto, 1969), From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996) and 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002). Zombies, vampires, criminal gangs, samurai armies, inter-dimensional entities and drunken, repressed locals have stalked, attacked and sometimes destroyed places not designed to withstand prolonged violent assaults. Even sanctuaries constructed with safety in mind, such as the oil-rich compound in George Miller’s Mad Max II: The Road Warrior (1981), a post-apocalyptic version of the circled wagons defensive technique seen in many Westerns, struggle to keep villainous gangs at arm’s length. Characterised by lengthy sequences set in one location inhabited by diverse, fractious characters, or ones intimate with each other but driven to the edge of breaking point, the alternative siege movie rarely ends well for the majority of its protagonists, even if the enemy is finally repelled. When actual weaponry is spent or absent, anything that can be brandished in its place usually will be. Cricket bats, man traps, gas canisters, kitchen implements and gardening equipment among other things take the place of guns, swords, bombs and shields. After all, when you’re staring death in the face, it’s better to be armed with a kitchen knife than nothing at all.
The zombie movie almost always revolves around a hardy group of survivors being laid siege to, and the Don of the genre, George A. Romero, placed his central characters in increasingly fortified, if not infallible, locations in his original Dead Trilogy. The isolated house in Night of the Living Dead (1969) gave way to the imposing, sprawling Monroeville Mall, replete with a storage room version of a castle’s keep, in Dawn of the Dead (1978), itself, ostensibly, usurped in the safety stakes by the underground silo in Day of the Dead (1985). That all of these places were eventually fatally compromised, from outside and within, flags up the necessity in terms of narrative drive and tension for the line between safety and danger, civilisation and anarchy, and life and death never to be full-proof. Even Day‘s silo – underground, window-free and populated in part by the military – was rendered useless by the actions of an insane soldier, and the foolhardy decision to hold scientific ‘specimens’ below ground. Indeed, internal schisms, the emotional, physical and mental pressures of life-or-death situations and the inadvertent or unavoidable presence of ‘the enemy’ inside a makeshift castle/fort are often as hazardous to survival rates as external threats.
Windows are a major problem for those trapped inside an embattled location, for while they may afford the opportunity to keep an eye on the enemy, they are also a relatively easily traversed entry point. The all-glass façade of the supermarket in Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s short story, The Mist (2007), The Winchester’s eyes onto the street in the rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) and the windows of the Sumners’ home in Straw Dogs are all architectural Achilles’ heels when it comes to fending off attackers. The Lovecraftian creatures drawn to The Mist‘s ‘fort’, the shuffling undead hordes of Wright and Simon Pegg’s horror spoof and the aggressive, insular locals threatening the married couple in Peckinpah’s psychological thriller penetrate the safety barrier, the dividing line between order and chaos, through what should be merely a source of light. The scalding of one of the locals with boiling oil thrown through a broken window by David (Dustin Hoffman) historically references the dark ages and specifically an oft used method of repelling invaders from castles.
Even family movies aren’t averse to conjuring up the ghosts of sieges past, for what are the latter stages of Christopher Columbus’s Home Alone (1990) but a siege movie played for laughs? Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin, a precocious, loveable youngster, finds himself essentially in the same situation as Straw Dogs‘ complex beta male David and the strained but mutually advantageous policeman/prisoner partnership in Precinct 13. His enemy, two bungling thieves, may break in but Kevin’s array of booby traps – internal defence mechanisms – succeed in protecting the McCallister family home.
They say that everyone loves an underdog, and the alternative siege movie gives audiences a chance to root for characters, some sympathetic, some not so, up against the wall with no apparent escape route and no option but to fight for their very existence. Be the presentation horrific, psychological or comedic, the base essence is the same: the survival instinct will kick in, however insurmountable the odds may appear.
Cultural historian Travis Elborough has written witty, brainy books about the vinyl records, the British sea side and the double decker bus. Now he’s turned his attention to London Bridge in America with The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing, which stars London Bridge, fleet street shysters, stiff-lipped bureaucrats, Disneyland designers, a gun-toting sheriff and the Guinness Book of Records. His filmic alter ego is James Mason in The London That Nobody Knows. Eithne Farry
These days practically everybody knows The London That Nobody Knows – Norman Cohen and Brian Comport’s 1967 cinematic version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s wonderfully idiosyncratic study of the capital’s lesser regarded corners and inhabitants. But there was a time, not that long ago, when the film lay almost as neglected as parts of the city it depicts. Or certainly that was how it seemed to me when I first saw it in the early 1990s. And on television at an obscure hour of the afternoon when probably some tennis or horse racing had been rained off.
Thinking about it now, it’s quite possible that I may actually have got the idea of horse racing from James Mason’s attire. Mason, who stars as kind of a stand-in for Fletcher as our peripatetic proto-psychogeographical guide, wears a flat cap and tweed jacket – the mufti of race-goers in his native Yorkshire, if not the world over.
Armed with a rolled umbrella, frequently wielded like a sword, Mason is captured tramping, arrestingly wearily, about a mostly crust-on-its-uppers London – a London whose streets look less swinging for the 1960s than scrofulous with bomb damage. Whole areas appear shabby with torched boxwood and putrefying cabbages and are roamed by packs of terrifying feral meth drinkers. Foraging through the wreckage of the Bedford Music Hall theatre in Camden and the crowded stalls at Chapel Market, Islington, Mason is as quizzical as Sherlock Holmes. And if I’ve ever really wanted to be anyone on screen it is probably him here, poking about in the ruins of a London long since lost.
He can be flaky, insouciantly busking the odd line here and there, and at times a touch too imperious. Meeting toothless down-on-their-lucks in a Salvation Army shelter in Whitechapel, one still rueing the consequences of the crash of 1929, he comes across as a visiting royal killing an hour before cutting the ribbon on a new civic centre elsewhere in the day. But his on-screen presence. And that voice – honeyed as cognac, soft, melancholy, almost viscous with fatalistic languor in parts – who wouldn’t want that?
Travis Elborough
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