Writers: Robert Longstreet, Onur Tukel, Michael Tully
Cast: Rachel Korine, Brian Kotzur, Robert Longstreet, Onur Tukel, Michael Tully
USA 2011
80 mins
A highlight of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, Septien has its UK premiere on October 2 at Abandon Normal Devices festival in Liverpool.
A resolutely strange confection meshing Southern Gothic, black comedy and outsider art, the film tells the story of Cornelius Rawlings, an itinerant sports hustler, who returns to his family farm following an 18-year unexplained absence, disrupting the lives of his already unhinged brothers, Ezra, a neat freak with a thing for Jesus, and Amis, an artist fixated on the profane. The appearance of their high school football coach throws in further dark forces and pushes the possibility of redemption into a tight spot the film resolves with a refreshingly original flourish.
Funny, awash with a warm 80s glow and constantly confounding genre expectations, the film is assured a cult following, managing the rare feat of being both compassionate and hip. Kate Taylor caught up with Michael Tully, Septien‘s writer-director, who also stars as Cornelius in the film.
Kate Taylor: Let’s start with art and the Daniel Johnston-esque illustrations that fill the film and its poster. Where did they come from?
Michael Tully: Onur Tukel, who plays Amis, did the all the original artwork himself. For three months he went on a bender and he was sending me scans. He sent me the first eight and asked if I had any notes. ‘More sandwich on the dick?’ I didn’t know what comment I could give to him, so I was like, ‘different colours maybe, mix it up?’
He’s a writer, director and obviously a super-talented artist. I met him in 2001 with his movie Ding-a-ling-Less, which stars Robert Longstreet, who plays our other brother. I fell in love with Robert and wondered why this guy was not a star. Hanging out with Onur, he had this commanding presence at the Q&A. Both Onur and I had beards at the time and I thought we should play brothers on a farm in a movie, although neither of us were actors. It was one of those kernels that just stays in your Word document of ‘Movies I Wanna Make’. It was number 800.
How did it rise to the top?
Last winter, I saw Onur in a short he’d made where he’s in front of the camera and that kernel just popped. Then I had a brainstorm with David Gordon Green over an Irish coffee at Sundance. All the outlandish things and the crazier ideas came out of that brainstorm, and something happened. I have eight scripts that are lifelong projects, and I thought, are we gonna make this one?
For the next few months, Onur and Robert and I started bouncing the story around and created this skeleton, and then fleshed it out more and completed the casting. Rachel Korine, Harmony’s wife, just has this presence that you can’t really train to have or teach. We needed a pretty girl in the movie to lighten the mood somewhat because it’s a bunch of repressed male weirdos.
Initially I wanted to keep it in a Word document as ‘things I wanna see in a movie’. Because if you shoot it, it could be boring and maybe not add up to a film. I wanted a Terrence Malick magic-hour vomit. But then Onur’s and my storyteller instincts came out. And at that point I finally opened Final Draft and tried to make a story out of it.
One of the pleasures of the film is how it sidesteps clichéd story patterns. Were you thinking about genre?
It was trying to defy genre. Lately at film festivals there’s been all these panels where filmmakers are told that they need to have a target, know their audience and know exactly what they’re making. And I thought, fuck that, let’s make something that we don’t know if it’s going to stick. So it was a kind of reaction against the system.
When our distributors in the States were putting it through Video On Demand on the television you have to check the genre box, and no one knew which box to check. Some people are calling it a horror film, some people are calling it a comedy.
In audience Q&As, the fact that the film doesn’t go far into a violent realm often comes up. I think that there’s enough negativity and violence in the world that to be able to create this sense of danger and violence without it ever getting graphic was a challenge. And it was important to try to do that. To have the sense of tension without going into ‘and now they cut his throat off.’ Who cares about that?
You mentioned the Malick magic-hour vomit. Was there a particular reason that you shot on film?
Aesthetically I wanted it to have this timelessness, to feel like time stopped on the Rawlings’ farm in 1986 when Cornelius left. When he shows up again they’re all back in 1986. It’s not a period piece per se but we don’t have cell phones and we tried to make that feel organic, where the audience isn’t just wondering where they’ve gone. It was important visually for it to feel like an 80s film. Or 90s. A late 20th-century movie.
The other thing is, when you’re shooting a movie and the film camera’s rolling the stakes are higher, no matter what. I was trying to make this trick shot that’s very hard to do [Tully performed all of the film’s sports stunts]. Even if you’re shooting in video the sun is still going to go down, you still have to make your day, so it’s still a battle. But when you’re told ‘we have five takes, try to make this Mike’, the stakes are way higher. So when that shot goes in and the crew looks at each other, there’s a sense of unity that doesn’t happen on video.
There is a lot about shit, toilets and the return of the repressed. Where is that coming from?
Honestly, not to be flippant, but I think part of the challenge to make this movie was how preposterous a premise can we start with and make a convincing movie that people take seriously? So it’s not like the joke’s on the viewer, we want people to be genuinely moved, but we were thinking of very elementary juvenile ludicrous elements. So when the preacher emerges from the porta potty, a valid question is, ‘is he the personification of shit?’ I think Robert was the one who was the most faeces-obsessed in his contributions to the script.
Throwing these things out there but also making it sincere was a real challenge and I thought it was fun to try to do that. To say this is like an eighth-grader was asked to write a mystery story and try to make it a sincere genuinely affecting film. In the final shot I wanted people to be thinking, ‘I feel a sense of resolution and I am emotionally affected but my brain is telling me I should not be feeling this. Why am I actually moved right now?’
Mark Stafford talked to legendary Italian director Ruggero Deodato at the fifth edition of Cine-Excess in May 2011, where Deodato was a guest of honour.
Mark Stafford: When I first saw Cannibal Holocaust it depressed me, it’s such a nihilistic view of humanity. Where did it come from?
Ruggero Deodato: Cannibal Holocaust was made 30 years after the concentration camps, when I saw those photos it took me several months to recover. It’s 60 years ago now, but those are the things that should be of real concern to us, that’s where the real evil is. The thing that gets me is, say, there’s 1000 people and 100 people with guns, and the ones with guns say ‘Dig your own graves’. Even if they had no weapons, 1000 against 100, why didn’t they just attack? I’ll tell you why, it was terror. And that really got me thinking of what terror does to people. It’s the same in my film, these four individuals terrorise the Indios, and their terror keeps them from mobilising.
My film is fiction. Why do people react to CH, but don’t react to an American soldier being beheaded? Forget my film for a second, do people have no recollection of what happened in history? Public executions with people being torn apart by horses, and even the guillotine! There would be an audience, people clapping and cheering. I’m not that terrible! I’m annoyed that there is a reaction to violence in my films but no reaction to the terrifying violence happening out there every day. Why do people only wake up when they see a piece of fiction, and say ‘Oh, that’s horrible’? There are horrible things that are far more serious because they’re real. Everybody wearing rose-tinted spectacles. That makes me angry.
The worst film that I’ve seen is that French film about an execution and the worst thing in that is that they don’t tell you when. You’re there and they come to grab you and that’s it. You’re gone. That’s the film that creates the worst anxiety for me.
Cannibal Holocaust is released on DVD and Blu-ray on 26 September by Shameless Screen Entertainment. Read the review.
Cannibal Holocaust presents a pretty hateful view of documentary makers, as opposed to fiction filmmakers. Is that just the logic of the film, or did you genuinely feel angry with TV journalists at the time?
It’s the media. For example, the children of a family have been horribly killed, the journalist asks the mother, ‘What do you feel?’ I think, what do you think she feels? She’s lost her kids! What do you want from her? You want sensation, you want something to increase your audience, that’s what I’m against. To get back to your question, when I wrote it I was very angry about these filmmakers. With fiction, if I do something in one of my films, everybody says that I’m an evil criminal bastard. If the press show the same thing, they are praised to the skies. I’m guilty of that as well, I understand it because if you were to throw me out of a plane with a film camera I would carry on filming. Why do we have so many views of the planes and the buildings on 9/11? If people see someone being stabbed and they have a camera, they’re going to film it.
You pioneered the faux-documentary techniques, and the ‘found footage’ idea that ages later got used on The Blair Witch Project. How do you feel about its success?
Everyone went to see Blair Witch because of what happened on the internet, which was very clever, and there are parts of how it’s shot that are very interesting. But when people leaving the cinema were interviewed they said, ‘an Italian guy made this film 20 years ago’. So everybody wanted to interview me, from Japan and everywhere, and from this Cannibal Holocaust was reborn!
Do you regret the animal cruelty scenes, if only for the effect they’ve had on the success of the film?
The same rose-tinted guys. They don’t make the connection between the food on the table that mummy has cooked from the supermarket, and the fact the animal has actually been killed. When you go to a Third World country people kill animals. I saw pigs and rabbits being killed growing up on a country farm when I was young. My son has not seen this because times have changed, he hasn’t had the experiences I have, for him it all comes pre-packed.
I’ve always been curious about Michael Berryman, he’s turned up in a couple of your films…
He’s nice. He lives with 14 wolves. He was born at five months. I love him. He’s a quiet man, a sweet man. But he has no issue with doing terrible things on screen, because he lives in the countryside.
*****
Thanks to Ruggero Deodato, Paul Smith for setting up the interview and Shameless Entertainment for their translation duties and bearing the brunt of
Deodato’s annoyance at being asked the same damn questions over and over.
During an interview with Xavier Mendik later during Cine-Excess, Deodato went into the stuff he wanted to talk about: his father-son relationship with Rossellini (both Taurus, both realists), his debt to Cartier-Bresson, his politics (‘I am an anarchist. I am a liberal. I am a democrat. I vote.’), the nature of Italian cinema. ‘Italian film has always been dominated by formula, neo-realism dominates, dies, comedy dominates, dies, Spaghetti Westerns, comedy westerns, police films, the same. At the moment group comedy is king. Now and then a great idea for a film comes along, we wait for them to come along so we can all follow them.’
Writer David Flusfeder was born in Summit, New Jersey, but now lives in South London. He has been a film projectionist, a TV critic and a poker correspondent. He’s written scripts and an opera and is the author of six novels. His latest, A Film by Spencer Ludwig (4th Estate), is a hilarious, heart-breaking father and son on the road story, which takes in police and prostitutes, film festivals and gambling, as the duo attempt to make sense of each other’s lives. It therefore won’t come as a surprise that David Flusfeder can’t quite decide if he’s the father or the son in Howard Hawks’s Red River. Eithne Farry
Like jazz – which, coincidentally or not, is the other cultural form invented in America – the Western is a male form. (Women in Westerns are generally just there to signpost the way to redemption or fall: the schoolmarm or the prostitute, the girl from back east with her dainty ways, or the doomed saloon singer.)
In Red River (directed by Howard Hawks, 1948), John Wayne and Montgomery Clift play the ruthless rancher and his adopted son out on an epic cattle drive. The movie climaxes in a fight between them, broken up by the civilising girl with a shotgun.
Wayne and Clift sit, abashed and bruised, in the dirt. ‘You better marry that girl,’ Wayne says. Their dispute is over; through the intercession of a woman and the intimate violence of a fist fight, the father finally recognises the son as his equal. He draws the new brand for their ranch in the dust, their initials together, like lovers’ carved into a tree. ‘You don’t mind that, do you?’ ‘No.’ And both smile, then look away, feeling an equivalent truth, an equal love.
As the director John Ford said after seeing the movie, ‘I didn’t know that big son of a bitch could act’.
The Art Theatre Guild of Japan: Spaces for Intercultural and Intermedial Cinema
Two-day symposium
30-31 August 2011
Birkbeck College, London
The 40th anniversary of the events of 1968 was marked in 2008 by a resurgence of interest in the phenomenon and, ever since, there has been a wave of activities across the world that have celebrated the peaks of creativity and political activism that flourished in the surrounding years. 1968 was not just an event situated in the West, but parallel equivalents emerged simultaneously in many corners of the globe, Japan being no exception. What differentiated Japan’s 1968 was that it was situated in the wake of a failed revolution against ‘Anpo’, the renewal in 1960 of the US-Japan security treaty, which was vehemently opposed by the Japanese populace. For the Japanese, the 1960s were a decade that was defined by disenchantment and by a reinvigorated and necessary urge to focus on the issue in preparation for the treaty’s next renewal in 1970. The artists of this generation, many of whom grew up in a Japan devastated by the war, acted on their impulse to use artistic expression to contribute to the climate of social protest and avant-garde activity.
The screenings organised in London in the coming months, namely Close-Up Film Centre’s July season, Theatre Scorpio: Japanese Independent and Experimental Cinema of the 1960s, and the BFI Southbank’s August season, Shinjuku Diaries: Films from the Art Theatre Guild of Japan, demonstrate the best of Japanese independent cinema in the age of cultural and political revolution.
The programmes have been put together to counter the traditional auteur-driven notion of cultural productivity. Instead, they focus on the era’s creative spirit, which permeated the arts community. Close-Up’s Studies in Movement: Experiments by Three Filmmakers programme will screen Hausu director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s early shorts and New Wave titan Nagisa Ôshima’s photo-collage film Yunbogi’s Diary alongside collaborative experiments by a student collective, the young filmmakers of Nihon University Film Studies Club. The programmes intend to dismantle the boundaries that have been set up between experimental cinema and narrative features to prove the two modes of expression and their practitioners continuously infiltrated one another. Katsu Kanai, who will be visiting the UK for the first time to introduce his Smiling Milky Way Trilogy, was one of the key filmmakers of the period. He was able to merge fiction and reality, narrative and visual poetry, in a way that revelled in a joyous desire for experimentation. A nun with a machine gun and a man giving birth to his doppelgä;nger from his wounded back are just two out of many images that you will never forget.
Masao Adachi’s Galaxy, screening with English subtitles for the first time, is a masterpiece of surrealist filmmaking, where a sense of narrative melts into the protagonist’s subconscious. The inaugural film at the Theatre Scorpio, an underground art space where dance, theatre and screenings took place, Galaxy was instrumental in launching Adachi’s career as a scriptwriter and pink director. This is where he met his long-term collaborator, KÔji Wakamatsu, who walked past the venue in awe at the queues around the corner, and immediately got in touch with Adachi. The venue quickly became a focal point for all corners of the art scene and a space where artists shared ideas and established collaborations. Close-Up’s film programme is in celebration of this influential theatre, its name given by Yukio Mishima in tribute to Kenneth Anger‘s Scorpio Rising.
Located above Theatre Scorpio was the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka, the centrepiece cinema for the Art Theatre Guild, where a range of foreign art-house films, by directors from Glauber Rocha to Satyajit Ray, and from the Polish New Wave to world cinema classics, were screened to large crowds. One of ten ATG cinemas that were established across the country in 1962, the venue screened films ATG distributed and, from 1967, local independent films that the organisation helped to finance as co-producers. The space was also used for jazz concerts, rakugo comedy and late-night angura theatre. The BFI season in August showcases the early period of ATG productions with their 13-film programme, which includes films by luminaries of the Japanese New Wave, Nagisa Ôshima, Shûji Terayama (whose films will be screened at Tate Modern in March 2012), Toshio Matsumoto and Masahiro Shinoda, alongside prominent titles by lesser-known directors such as Kazuo Kuroki, Akio Jissôji and Susumu Hani. ATG continued to support productions until the late 1980s, a later period that is currently placed under the spotlight in a full-scale retrospective at the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris.
Perhaps due to the interactive nature of the art spaces, where films were placed alongside other arts, the featured titles in the programme have become invaluable records of theatrical happenings and the visual arts scene, as well as testaments to the existence of a participatory environment that unabatedly crossed disciplines. The ATG encouraged prominent playwrights, graphic designers and composers to take part in the production of film: famed graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu took charge of the art design of Double Suicide; Terayama scripted Inferno of First Love; theatre directors Kunio Shimizu and Jûrô Kara took on film directing; and Tôru Takemitsu, Yasunao Tone, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Takehisa Kosugi (whose work is exhibited at Spitalfield’s Raven Row Gallery until July 17) all provided radically innovative soundtracks for films of the period. The importance of the art spaces will be the focus of a free two-day symposium at Birkbeck College (July 30-31), an event that will include a talk by Katsu Kanai and keynote speeches by curators Go Hirasawa and Roland Domenig, as well as three UK premieres of rare films from the period.
Performance art and live art were documented on film, yet in characteristic approaches that emphasised the director’s personal vision rather than clarity in documentation. The infamous ‘rituals’ performed by Zero Jigen feature in Funeral Parade of Roses and The Deserted Archipelago, and Terayama’s theatre troupe Tenjô Sajiki appear in his feature-length ATG films and Double Suicide. Motoharu Jonouchi, an experimental filmmaker whose work is the subject of an entire programme in the Close-Up season, participated in live art events as a collaborator-filmmaker. His film Hi-Red Centre Shelter Plan, to be screened at Peckham’s Flat Time House as part of South London Art Map’s Last Friday events (July 29th), records the notorious live art event at the Imperial Hotel in which Tokyo avant-garde figures such as Yoko Ono, Tadanori Yokoo, Nam June Paik and a naked Masao Adachi participated. Jonouchi’s butoh dance film, Tatsumi Hijikata, which captures the co-founder of butoh dance’s contorted choreographies frame by frame, will also feature in Close-Up’s programme. Kazuo Ohno is the other leader of butoh and his flamboyant costumes will be displayed in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum this autumn. Both feature in Takahiko Iimura’s Cine-Dance films, screened as part of the BFI’s Essential Experiments strand, together with Yayoi Kusama’s body paintings, which feature in her film Flowers; her work will be the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Modern in January 2012.
These seasons, brought together especially for UK audiences, testify to and take part in a renewed interest around the world in Japan’s counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The screenings and events are an exceptional opportunity to encounter these rare works of art, as many of these films are unavailable on home-viewing formats even in Japan. All screenings are accompanied by an introduction by the curators, filmmakers and experts in the field, who will provide a platform for discussion. If you thought 1960s Japan was only about Ôshima, think again; Japan’s avant-garde had many faces, and the screenings will provide vital occasions for an introduction to the exhilarating explosion of creativity that was the post-war Japanese art scene.
1. He doesn’t give interviews, or appear in public and refuses to be photographed, or at least have his photograph used for promotional purposes. Except this one where he wears a big hat.
2. He’s a philosopher. He wrote a book about Heidegger, taught at MIT and spent some time teaching in France. His films have become increasingly ambitious with the years and more self-consciously ‘philosophical’, culminating in The Tree of Life, which takes on nothing less than Life, the Universe and Everything as its subject matter. Add to this the kudos given to an artist who is also something else. Like John Updike working as a doctor in a hospital as well as being a novelist of international repute.
3. He hasn’t made many films. Only five in almost 40 years: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011). A work rate that makes Stanley Kubrick look like Woody Allen means each film appears loaded with expectation as an event. It also adds to the mystique of a man who could probably be making a film a year, but who deliberately chooses his subjects with care and then spends time polishing and fiddling.
However, each of these points is complicated. Why?
1. The nature of being a recluse these days is defined by an intrusive busy-body media and a promotional sausage-making machine that churns out sound-bites and waffle-snacks. Malick’s reticence is now effectively more voluble than Quentin Tarantino’s mouth, standing as a little pocket of stubborn silence in contrast to the twittering overload of the blogosphere. Shutting up has become the new way of saying something, the way not being on Facebook says much more than being on Facebook.
2. The philosopher tag combines with the recluse label in giving Malick an otherworldly feel. It is a kind of back-handed compliment that promotes to dismiss. Ultimately, Malick is as much a historian as he is a philosopher. All of his films have been period pieces and three of them are based on true events: Badlands is a true crime flick, The Thin Red Line is based on the battle of Guadalcanal and The New World is an interrogation of the foundational myths of European America.
3. Although it is indisputable that his output has been limited, each film has resolutely carved its place into cinema history. There are filmmakers who have made more films, certainly, but there aren’t many who have created more masterpieces.
Taken together, Malick’s films create a remarkably consistent universe. A river runs through all his films. There is always a birdcage. A fire burns in every one of his films, usually burning down a house, usually deliberately ignited. Life is lived outside and houses are often foreign environments, to be invaded. The intrusion into somebody else’s house happens in every film.
If the furniture of his cinematic universe is consistent, so is his way of viewing it. In fact, Malick’s style is so recognisable as to veer occasionally towards becoming his own cliché, especially in his later films: the magic hour photography, the use of music and the dislocation of image from sound, often dropping the sound out of scenes that look noisy; the use of voice-over rather than dialogue.
Initially, the voice-over was an ironic counterpoint. Sissy Spacek’s massively unreliable narrator provided a disingenuous commentary to the inarticulate violence and loquacious double-speak of Martin Sheen’s Kit. In Days of Heaven, the commentary luxuriates in its own meandering irrelevance, giving the film some of its most memorable lines: ‘he wasn’t a bad man: you give him a flower and he’d keep it forever’. The Thin Red Line is an oratorio of questions, anxiety and uncertainty. The voice-over in The New World and The Tree of Life triumphs as a mixture of meditation, introspection and prayer – whispered, sighing, internal mutterings – almost entirely does away with the traditional dialogue-rich scene.
Despite diverse subject matter (juvenile crime, poverty, war, colonisation and grief), Malick’s films share some big themes. The loss of innocence is often cited as a central concern in all the films, but innocence is a sticky topic. In Badlands, Holly’s innocence facilitates Kit’s violence, who is in his own way untouched and innocent of the pain he causes. Days of Heaven begins with the protagonist Bill (Richard Gere) launching a possibly fatal attack against his foreman. The paradise of the opening of The Thin Red Line is a truant paradise, preceded by the lurking crocodile and one that, we later learn, exists only via an act of wilful deafness and blindness. John Smith begins The New World in chains and the indigenous peoples are warlike and intent on murdering him.
Innocence is then something that we feel the loss of without ever having fully understood its presence. The Tree of Life begins with loss and grief. A grown son, a middle child, perhaps as a result of a war, has died. The rest of the film is an attempt to understand life through the lens of absence, loss and death. The fifty-minute symphonic opening abandons narrative in favour of a mapping of the origins of all life from the cosmic to the microscopic and finally to the human scale. This is certainly Malick the philosopher, but it is also Malick the historian going back to primary sources, and Malick the scientist. Theological ideas, such as that of a lost Eden, give the film images to work with, just as the quotation from Job sets an overtly religious tone to the film, but Malick is interested in DNA and evolution as well. In fact, although there is a religious striving throughout the film, God is a presence that can only be felt through a series of absences. There might be prayers in the films, but whether they are answered or not is open to question. In the cosmic vastness, there is a big God-shaped hole, fringed with doubt and questioning.
And yet for all the philosophy, theology, etc., Malick is always grounded. This might seem like an odd claim, when viewing the visual poetry that at times is almost overwhelming, but his films can only get to the spiritual via the intensely physical. The sudden sunshine on a waterfall looks magical, but it is real. The upside down shadows of children playing on wet tarmac might make us think of ghosts, and in a way they are, being the projections of projections of projections, but they are also the shadows of the children. The magic hour is just a certain time of day, albeit a time of day when we feel that something is going, has almost gone, is gone. Just as The Thin Red Line, for all its questions and despair, included a thoroughly delineated combat operation, so The Tree of Life always comes back to a young family in 1950s Texas over which the shadow of a death foretold falls.
Even more than the pyrotechnics of the opening and closing sequence, it is this intimate portrait of an ordinary childhood that achieves moments of sublime cinema. The ordinary is elevated, tinged though it is with the elegiac. Two children trying to touch hands through the glass of the window anticipates a moment of final separation. When the children leap from their bicycles and run into the long grass the camera follows them joyfully. Even here, among the games and the energy of youth, Malick is not going to give us an untroubled innocence though. There is sexual awakening, the heartbreaking realisation of parental fallibility and the banal cruelty of siblings. In a sly self-reference, the first word the baby pronounces is ‘alligator’, reminding us of The Thin Red Line‘s very first image: a crocodile slipping under the water. The Tree of Life is Malick’s most magical film, in being his most grounded.
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mary McDonnell, Katharine Ross, Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze, Noah Wyle
USA 2001/2004
113 mins/133 mins (director’s cut)
‘If a Tangent Universe occurs, it will be highly unstable, sustaining life for no longer than several weeks. Eventually it will collapse upon itself, forming a black hole within the Primary Universe capable of destroying all existence.’ – from The Philosophy of Time Travel by Roberta Sparrow (as seen on screen in Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut, 2004).
As the debut feature by director Richard Kelly, Donnie Darko is a stunning statement of intent, depicting the last day(s) of the eponymous troubled teenager who, having narrowly escaped death by UFO (a mysterious, unclaimed jet engine that falls through his bedroom ceiling) due to his somnambulism, spends the next month being visited by an animal totem warning him about the approaching end of the world. Kelly effortlessly mixes a perfect recreation of the 1980s, through subtle direction of his young cast as well as extended cameos by notable children of the 80s – Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze – the well-chosen backdrop of a presidential election (many jokes in the film derive from Michael Dukakis’s claim on office) and a terrific soundtrack including well-known and lesser-known tracks from the period. Indeed, the latter aspect of the film drew comparisons with the work of Quentin Tarantino, another director renowned for creating atmosphere in his films through a well-curated soundtrack, and Kelly’s debut came second in Empire magazine’s list of ‘Greatest Independent Films’ after Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992).
In the original cinema release of Donnie Darko, Kelly expertly combines the eschatological and SF aspects of the script with the depiction of teenage angst and ennui. Donnie’s psychological problems are contrasted with his visions of humanoid demon rabbit Frank, Frank’s ability to conjure wormholes and forcefields, and the billowing iridescent snakes that Darko sees issuing from people’s chests, which display their future paths through life. Almost every aspect of the film is spot on, from the terrific casting of Jake Gyllenhaal as the lead, his real-life sister Maggie as his fictional sister on screen (a sibling double act to rival John and Joan Cusack), to the subtle humour in the dialogue and in visual gags, such as the local cinema’s advertising of an irresistible Halloween double bill: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and The Evil Dead (1981) – two films about resurrection whose leads are also harassed by supernatural forces.
It’s been said that director Orson Welles lived his career in reverse, starting with the finest film that he (and arguable anyone else) ever directed, followed by a downward slide. Unfortunately, in his first three films as director, Kelly has followed a similar path; Darko is excellent but Southland Tales (2007) is absolute drivel and The Box (2009) is a wasted opportunity. Without grilling the director and his collaborators, it’s hard to work out what went wrong. It’s possible that Kelly only had one really good film in him, or made a good film despite himself – as evidenced by the considerably less successful director’s cut of Darko, which bloats the running time by 20 minutes, including scenes that don’t work as well as the original footage (such as an awkward and ill-judged discussion of divorce by his parents) and unnecessary shots of information being both downloaded into Donnie’s brain and superimposed on screen. If you listen to the director’s commentary on the movie (in conversation with Kevin Smith), it becomes increasingly apparent that Kelly always intended to make a less ambiguous film than the one originally released. There’s a lot to be said about the modern phenomenon of the director’s cut – certainly the most famous example, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982/1992), does improve on the cinema release (although 2007’s ‘final cut’ doesn’t) – but just because a director can do a more idiosyncratic cut of a previously released film, it doesn’t necessarily mean he or she should. Unlike Blade Runner, the director’s cut of Donnie Darko thankfully hasn’t superseded the original, otherwise the film’s reputation might be gradually tarnished, but the director has gone on to make underwhelming films that may yet damage his own reputation.
Title: Southland Tales
Format: DVD
Release date: 31 March 2008
Distributor: Universal
Director: Richard Kelly
Writer: Richard Kelly
Cast: Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Wallace Shawn, Kevin Smith, Jon Lovitz
USA 2006/2007
160 mins (Cannes cut)/144 mins (Cinema/DVD release)
First to follow Donnie Darko is the grande folieSouthland Tales, a 144-minute sci-fi comedy that fails to tell a coherent narrative in its interminable running time. Following a disastrous screening at Cannes of an even longer cut (I’ve had the misfortune of seeing both), it led to Kelly writing three prequel comic books to start off the story. For better or worse, George Lucas inspired a generation of filmmakers, and like his most famous film, Southland Tales begins with ‘Episode 4’, a device that may have added to the allure of Star Wars (1977) when it was re-released, but does nothing for Kelly’s confused epic.
Tales is a multi-voiced narrative set in the south of the United States after a nuclear explosion has irradiated Texas and accelerated the advent of a police state and the need for new forms of electrical production. Unlike Donnie Darko‘s sideways travels in time, which make sense at least within the film’s internal narrative (even if it’s not clear what Frank’s predicted apocalypse will entail), Southland Tales sees two characters travel back in time. Unlike Donnie Darko, actor Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) and police office Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) have ended up as their own doppelgängers (something that would reoccur in the sequel to Donnie Darko, S. Darko, in 2009), co-existing with them. In Boxer’s case, his copy has died, but as two Taverners still co-exist, their eventually meeting – in a plot device seen in many other time travel movies, where there are dire warnings about confronting oneself – presages the apocalypse.
So far, so comprehensible. However, Kelly adds florid performances by a range of comedy actors, including director Kevin Smith, Wallace Shawn, Jon Lovitz and Curtis Armstrong, who all play their parts broadly and unsympathetically to each other. Even the moment of apocalypse itself is made absurd by the two Taverners meeting in the back of an ice-cream van, which is used by gun-runner Christopher Lambert in plying his trade. Southland Tales also marks the start of Kelly’s apparent interest in making beautiful women look unattractive – Sarah Michelle Gellar in this movie (which may have destroyed her career) and Gwyneth Paltrow in The Box – and miscasts Gellar as a dumb adult film star (a sci-fi Magdalen, perhaps?) who has foretold Boxer’s messianic potential in her portentous movie script. Elsewhere, Gulf War veteran pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) narrates the tale from his vantage point of a tower-mounted machine-gun outpost, watching the streets for violent crime and terrorist activity, while various stoners haphazardly mount a ‘neo-Marxist’ protest to the current regime. When the only watchable scene in a movie is Justin Timberlake miming to The White Stripes in a beer-fuelled pastiche of a Busby Berkeley musical number (a scene that Kelly hilariously refers to as ‘the emotional heart of the movie’), you know something has drastically gone wrong, and if the preceding sentence has piqued your interest, please do find that scene on YouTube, but take my recommendation in avoiding the rest of this tedious movie…
I haven’t seen Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), but the mixed (and generally unfavourable) reactions to that film suggest that Southland Tales is a similar experience, not only as a broad, ill-conceived comedy postulated as a response to a semi-apocalyptic event inflicted on the American people (Pearl Harbor, belatedly, in Spielberg’s case / September 11, 2001, in Kelly’s), but also as the product of an imaginative low-budget director being given more money than he knows how to spend, with access to a comedic cast he doesn’t know how to direct. Although Spielberg’s subsequent films have included comedic elements – witty dialogue in the Indiana Jones films, for example – he hasn’t done another full-blown comedy again, and on the basis of this, it is to be hoped that neither will Kelly.
Title:The Box
Format: Blu-ray
Release date: 19 April 2010
Distributor: Icon Home Entertainment
Director: Richard Kelly
Writer: Richard Kelly
Cast: Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn, Holmes Osborne, Frank Ridley
USA 2009
115 mins
I’m not going to explore Kelly’s script (about the real-life bounty hunter) Domino (2005), directed by Tony Scott, as there’s nothing about the movie that deals with the fall of mankind, other than Scott’s attention-deficit-disorder style of shooting and editing, but Kelly’s third film, The Box, is a partial return to form and a thematic prequel to Donnie Darko in many ways. Like Darko, The Box effectively mixes a well-conceived recreation of a recent historic era – in this case the mid-1970s – with mysterious presages of doom (here, facially scarred Frank Langella and his acolytes, replacing his namesake in Darko as the disrupter of a suburban household) and autobiographical elements. I don’t know if the high school scenes in Darko are based on Kelly’s own experiences – there is an honesty and reality to them that suggest they are – but certainly the lives of Arthur and Norma Lewis in The Box, as played by James Marsden and Gwyneth Paltrow, are based on Kelly’s own parents, including the former’s role at NASA and the latter’s pedal deformity and job as a high school teacher.
However, while Darko told a relatively straightforward narrative in a beguiling way, Kelly’s adaptation of the short story ‘Button, Button’ by Richard Matheson (previously filmed as an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1986 by Peter Medak) sees the director distracted by too many narrative possibilities, left potentially unexplored by the original short story and TV adaptation. While his overegging of the script in The Box doesn’t cause this eschatological soufflé to completely collapse – as Southland Tales does – it is too complicated for its own good and makes the casual viewer wonder why the director felt the need to over-embellish a memorable story that succeeded due to its simplicity.
The Box is set in Langley, Virginia, in 1976, an evocative time and place due to the celebrations of America’s bicentennial and the first contact of mankind (or at least its robots) with the Martian landscape, bringing with it the potential discovery of life on another planet. The juxtaposition between these events, the arrival of a mysterious man, who offers ordinary couples the chance to earn a million dollars through the pressing of a button in a box, and the subsequent execution of a random stranger, is never fully articulated. The non-terrestrial origins of Langella and his network of remote viewers are never explained either. But the co-opting of some of the style and imagery of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) suggests that mankind’s first landfall on another world (as with the unearthing of the Black Monolith on the Moon in 2001) has initiated a test by a greater intelligence to see if we need guidance from now on. Certainly the aims of Frank Langella’s character are described as a test of our morality, to see if we are worthy of continued existence as a race.
Like Darko, The Box contains a text that ‘explains’ (or rather obfuscates) the nature of travel between different realities: ‘Grandma Death’ / Roberta Sparrow’s The Philosophy of Time Travel in Darko and Human Resource Exploitation Manual, Section 1 – Abstracts (July 1976) in The Box. Both feature exactly the same drawing (which must indicate more than just laziness on the director’s behalf) of a human skeleton moving through dimensions and both contain mention of some kind of watery portal between these places. In an extract from The Philosophy of Time Travel seen on screen in Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut, we read: ‘Water is the barrier element for the construction of Time Portals used as gateways between Universes’, which is applicable to the ‘science’ we see in both movies and suggests both books are possibly one and the same.
In Darko, when a character asks about how time travel can be philosophical, this is entirely apposite as it’s as much about Donnie’s experience and interpretation of the world – indeed the entire movie could be the hallucinations of a disturbed mind (possibly during his last hour of life). This is crystallised in a conversation that the character has with his science teacher; when Donnie asks about how God might influence time travel, his lecturer ends the conversation as it is beyond his remit as both a scientist and a state-employed teacher to answer that kind of question. However, although The Box has an atmosphere of hard science – the male lead character works for NASA, after all – the brief glimpse we have of the book doesn’t even contain good science, including such extracts as: ‘Test subject is submerged in NaOH+Hcl barrier during analysis period of 60 minutes.’ Curious about the chemistry, I googled it and ‘NaOH+Hcl’ is meaningless in this context – it describes the production of water in an acidic chemical reaction. The correct formula is something along the lines of ‘H2O+[C10F18+O2]’, which describes the properties of an oxygen-rich liquid that human beings can be submerged in for long periods of time, as proposed for future space exploration (which is mentioned elsewhere in the film) and shown in other SF films such as James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989), a film that clearly influenced Kelly in its (CGI) depiction of water-based life forms.
The problem is that Kelly wants to have his cake and eat it – he proposes pseudo-science that sounds plausible, but the more you give the audience a chance to examine it, the greater the chance they might realise how daft it is. To try and deflect this realisation, in The Box, Kelly has Marsden quote writer Arthur C. Clarke: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ while staring at a religious canvas in the Renaissance style, suggesting that simultaneously he wants to try and understand the science, dismiss the science as too hard to understand, and attribute a supernatural/religious aspect to it. Continuing the theme of art and religion, in a deleted scene on the Blu-ray we see a triptych of deformed self-portraits by Francis Bacon on a desk in Frank Langella’s ‘Bond villain’ lair – inviting questions about whether an alien possessing the body of a man with a horrifically scarred face is looking for a reflection of himself, or whether his scarification was intended to evoke a literal example of humanity’s self-loathing.
In an additional line of voice-over added to the director’s cut of Donnie Darko, Frank says, ‘pay close attention, you could miss something’. But with Kelly’s scattergun approach to imagery and ideas in all his films except the original cinematic release of Darko, there are so many elements, clues and red herrings, that without clearer storytelling, the audience is more likely to be perplexed than enraptured. Within The Box and its excised footage, there’s the potential for a better film – trying to come up with a coherent edit of Southland Tales would defeat even an expert editor – and a double bill of Kelly’s first and third films makes for arresting viewing. However, the question of what it all means is left unresolved – the workmanlike remake/sequel S.Darko does the original no favours – so unless the director’s next or subsequent project forms a more satisfying trilogy with Donnie Darko and The Box, it is a picture of the apocalypse left unresolved, an ‘apocatastasis’ where one has a vision of the end times but the revelation is interrupted and remains incoherent. Whether the director can show us the end of the world in a way that satisfies the audience is yet to be seen. I wonder if anything interesting happened in his family history in the 1990s that may yield another good film in the future.
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.
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.
Warning: Do not read this if you have a morbid fear of acronyms
We live in times where it doesn’t take too much in the way of paranoid tendencies to view the world we know as a vast cauldron of bubbling stew – a stew filled with malevolent, dangerous and often secret ingredients throwing up a miasma of smoke and reflecting the world through a series of funhouse mirrors, behind which lurk all manner of nefarious and faceless bureaucrats constantly on the prowl, configuring secret plots and recruiting plotters. Like the Trojans, worms and viruses in the virtual world, they lie in wait to strike the unsuspecting. They hide behind the ‘newspeak’ and abbreviations of their secret organisations, societies, government departments, organised criminal gangs and affect us in unknown and unknowing ways. A nasty world indeed.
But spare a thought for those denizens of the secret world of 1960s spy films that mushroomed in the wake of the successes of the first three Bond films. The secret agent/spy film rolled into movie houses like a cinematic tsunami. A world of heroes and villains, plotters and conspirators, villains and arch-villains, goodies and baddies, double agents and triple agents, moles and sleepers. And that’s mostly the men. Female agents and fellow travellers come in an equal number of types – though their form (in all senses of the word) is a somewhat more stabilised (heterosexual) convention. One proof of that pudding is the always anticipated photographic essays that would appear in the rightly named ‘Playboy spread’ featuring fetching images of the ‘Girls of Bond’ with the release of each new film. Rosa Klebb, of course – played by the iconic cabaret artiste and wife of Kurt Weill Lotte Lenya – excepted. Worth noting, but a separate article in itself, is the none-too-subtle practice of the ‘good agent’ converting the misguided female (misguided as to political, cultural, consumerist or sexual proclivities) back to hetero or capitalist normativity through assault, conscience, example or just plain old penis power.
Male villains, on the other hand, are very often ‘othered’ by being depicted as older, disfigured in some physical way or just plain repugnant. Fanatical and megalomaniacal, they are doubly disfigured in mental ways as well. But they make for great baddies, and they and their secret organisations are the focus of this piece. Now while these films depict some ‘good’ government agencies protecting our vested interests, which often have true-life counterparts such as the CIA, FBI, MI5 and 6, KGB, MOSSAD and INTERPOL, there is an equal number of counter-agencies dead set on destroying ‘us’ or controlling ‘us’. They will stop at nothing to de-stabilise and subvert the hegemonic society. Or to simply control access to our earthly pursuits and desires, be it sex, space, mind, food or drugs.
The secret agent/spy/super-criminal narrative in these films may take many forms: the extravagant cinema of excess as in Goldfinger and the Bond franchise – enemies are S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) and S.M.E.R.S.H. (a Russian acronym that means ‘Death to Spies’) – or the more downbeat mundane world of the government agent as portrayed in the films of the Len Deighton and John Le Carré novels. Then there is the enchanted world of the low-budget, spy’sploitation film – many made in Europe – such as Operation Kid Brother (1967), starring Sean Connery’s lesser-known sibling Neil, or the quasi-serious spy films such as the Matt Helm or Derek Flint movies, or the out-and-out comedy spoof (sure sign of the end of a cycle) as in Fathom (1967) or Le Magnifique (1973). In almost all of these films, the good guy usually acts as deus ex machina in successfully thwarting the evil doings of the baddie and his acronymic organisation. And you gotta love these baddies if only for the sheer novelty of their evil societies and enthralling webs of organised crime or political machinations. But irrespective of their purposes, both sides share one secret obsession above all others: let’s call it acronymania. And the nemeses of altruistic government agencies have some of the best and most revealing. So it is that the men from U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) have their opposite in the interestingly named T.H.R.U.S.H. (never fleshed out in the television or film series but revealed in a spin-off novel as Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity). Of course, this common enemy was also shared by the short-lived The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which starred Stephanie Powers as April Dancer.
In the television and film versions of Get Smart! Maxwell Smart of C.O.N.T.R.O.L. had to do battle with K.A.O.S. for five seasons during which, unusually, the acronyms were never revealed. The government men in Carry On Spying (1965) have to contend with agents from S.T.E.N.C.H. (Society for the Total Extinction of Non-Conforming Humans) while in the Morecombe and Wise vehicle The Intelligence Men, the enemy is from Schlecht (a German word for ‘bad’ or ‘ill’). The wondrous Derek Flint, played by 60s favourite James Coburn, works for Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization World Intelligence Espionage) and lasted for two outings, Our Man Flint (1967) and the lesser In like Flint (1967). The laconic – and ageing – Dean Martin played agent Matt Helm in a trilogy of films. His hands are kept busy working for I.C.E. (Intelligence Counter Espionage) and battling with Big-O (Brotherhood of International Government and Order) in The Silencers, followed by Murderer’s Row (both 1966). Helm returned to the screen in 1967’s The Ambushers and 1968’s The Wrecking Crew – while a fifth instalment, The Ravagers, although announced was never made. Could it be that Big-O triumphed?
Lesser ‘quality’ genre films had just as colourful spy rings, evil agencies, secret criminal gangs, nasty villains and femmes fatales. Tom Adams took the role of Charles Vine in three Bond pastiches: Licensed to Kill (1965), followed by Where the Bullets Fly (1966) and ending with the almost impossible to find Somebody Stole Our Russian Spy aka OK Yevtushenko (1968). Sorry, no acronyms in those, but in the name of inclusion I mention these lesser spy film obscurities. The character of Bulldog Drummond – an early prototype for James Bond – was disinterred from his pre- and immediate post-war jingoistic and chauvinistic British grave by the actor Richard Johnson (who had been considered to play Bond) in, first, Deadlier Than the Male (1966) and then Some Girls Do (1969). It is interesting to observe that all actors originally considered for the part of Bond subsequently appeared in spy films: David Niven, Trevor Howard, Cary Grant, Patrick McGoohan, Richard Todd and James Mason.
A feeble 1966 effort to cash in on the popularity of American Borscht Belt comedians Allen and Rossi was The Last of the Secret Agents, a film that co-starred Nancy Sinatra pitting the G.G.I. agents (Good Guys Institute) against the evil baddies, THEM (no further details provided but clearly not ‘us’). Although the outrageously camp Modesty Blaise (1966) is not strictly a spy film, it does involve a clandestine criminal organisation, The Network, of which Modesty (Mam’selle) is head, and apart from her Colt .32, Modesty Blaise has a secret weapon, you might say, in the form of ‘The Nailer’. Using a cunning trick of stripping off and going topless, she distracts the enemy (nails their attention) while her minions carry out her nefarious plans. Couldn’t be simpler.
Of course, many of these secret agent/secret society scripts, from Bond to Helm to Drummond, originated in literary works. Ted Mark’s satyr-like hero, Steve Victor, The Man from O.R.G.Y. (Organisation for the Rational Guidance of Youth) plied his spy trade over the course of 15 books between 1965 and 1981. Big sellers in their day, they mixed cheeky Bond-like shenanigans with one sexual escapade per chapter, brought about by our spy’s day job as a sexual sociologist and supported by academic funding, which more accurately reflects the true meaning of O.R.G.Y. to Victor: Obtaining Research Grants for Yours truly. Ted Mark’s books took advantage of the post-Tropic of Cancer publishing atmosphere of the sexually liberated 60s, and a new class of erotic spy novels emerged. Other publishers followed with the 34-book Rod ‘The Coxeman’ Damon series. Dr Damon is Head of L.S.D. (League for Sexual Dynamics) and works covertly for the super-secret Thaddeus X. Coxe Foundation. Tim O’Shane is the fictional Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. (Tactical Operations Master Counterintelligence Assault Team) and lasted for nine outings between 1967 and 1971. There was also The Lady from L.U.S.T. (League of Undercover Spies and Terrorists), whose enemy was H.A.T.E. (the Humanitarian Alliance of Total Espionage), and The Man from S.T.U.D. (Special Territories and Unique Development), who dated The Girl from W.I.L.L.N.G. (Western Integrated Long Lease Insurance Nonpayment Group). You get the idea! I leave it to readers to decode the acronyms of some other series that emerged in the light of the Cold War and spymania: The Miss from S.I.S., The Man from S.A.D.I.S.T.O., The Man from P.A.N.S.Y. and The Girl from H.A.R.D. In terms of sales though, it was The Man from O.R.G.Y. who topped the poles (no pun intended of course). Most of these acronym-led secret adventure series were optioned by the studios and were considered for film adaptations to cash in on the boom, but once again, among this lot it was Ted Mark’s man who was translated into celluloid with the 1970 release of The Man from O.R.G.Y. aka The Real Gone Girls, directed by James Hill (Born Free, Worzel Gummidge Black Beauty) with a script written by Mark himself and starring Robert Walker Jr. (Easy Rider) as Steve Victor.
So, now that the Wall is down, and the Commies brought to heel, it is reassuring to know that many of the above clandestine secret agencies have likewise passed into history and can now be revealed. As can another little known state secret: Electric S.H.E.E.P. is a secret sleeper organisation whose acronym means Electric Society for the Halting of Effusive and Excessive Praise.
This article will self-destruct in 10 seconds. Good luck, Jim.
James Evans
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
