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Features

The Red Shoes: No Art without Sacrifice

The Red Shoes

Format: Cinema

Date: 11-30 December 2010

Venue: BFI Southbank

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Writers: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Based on the fairy tale by: Hans Christian Andersen

Cast: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine, Ludmilla Tchérina

UK 1948

135 mins

In 1948 when The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger’s lush, hallucinatory Technicolor fable of dance’s inexorable power over the dancer, was released, ballet was still on the lower rung of high culture in the UK, its practitioners badly paid, its status as art still questioned by many, and it was lagging behind its European counterparts in resources and respect, if not in talent and drive. The hugely successful film, along with the emergence of stars such as Margot Fonteyn, would help put British ballet on the cultural map; years later, it is still The Red Shoes that seems to communicate the inherently magical, fantastical and otherworldly qualities of ballet to film fans who would otherwise not be interested in tutus, pointe-work and dying swans.

But while The Red Shoes, with its fantasy sequences and Andersen fairy-tale inspiration, is cited as illustrative of the darker powers of dance – of its capacity to beguile and obsess and break the hardiest spirit – much of the film also focuses on the sheer hard work and make-do camaraderie of daily life in a mid-20th century touring ballet company, the nuts and bolts of preparing a work for the stage and the personal dynamics that go with it. This magical multiplicity will always be for me the film’s greatest achievement. The Red Shoes is a film about making ballet that not only contains an entire ballet, but that has about it the very quality of ballet itself – its romantic absolutes, its melodrama, its broad strokes. It is a dreamlike and stylised fable about ambition and sacrifice that simultaneously contains some deeply felt moments of empathy and understanding of injustice, selfishness, disappointment, and dishonesty. It is a strange Chinese Box of a film that required real dancers Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Ludmilla Tcherina and Leonide Massine to play out the story of their art form’s impermanence and cruelty, their questionable acting layered with the gorgeous veracity of their dancing.

Watching the new, restored version is a sumptuous and intoxicating experience, the film’s hues almost dangerously high-contrast, and the cinematography’s exaggerated qualities highlighted more than before. While it was hard to remember to switch from fan to critic in the warm darkness of the BFI cinema (and I am a Red Shoes fan, a proper, tearful, spellbound type of fan), my recollection of this viewing is that the heightened detail brought about by the new print had an interestingly alienating effect, bringing to the fore perhaps a warning about trusting too much to formal beauty, forgetting, as in Joanna Newsom’s song ‘En Gallop’, ‘truth that lacks lyricism’. Or, more bluntly: this is theatre, believe in it too hard and there will be nothing but emptiness left when the curtain lowers, especially for a woman, whose abandonment of the home is bound to bring hardship (‘Life passes by… love passes by,’ as Anton Walbrook’s Lermontov says when describing the ballet’s synopsis to composer Julian (Marius Goring).

I have never really liked the interpretation of The Red Shoes as merely cautionary tale, though, for not only does it downplay the film’s non-naturalistic, allegorical style, it also propagates the binary and simplistic myth of the creative life as one of domestic or emotional sacrifice, when the truth is more complex and personal than that interpretation – which has acted as a get-out clause for many a relationship as well as stymied careers through guilt and blame – allows. At the same time, this message runs through The Red Shoes and cannot be ignored, whatever we think of it, and the themes of sacrifice and fulfilment, while universal, are perhaps heightened by the physical and mental intensity of a practice such as dance. If there is a darker side to ballet as portrayed in The Red Shoes, it might well be in its more ‘real’ elements, rather than in any supernatural or magical force: in the tension and constant competition between artists, in the physical extremes of a dancer’s life and in the actual stories, often of young, vulnerable, talented people, from which Powell and Pressburger might have drawn their source material.

It was not necessarily easy to come by such source material, however, for if ballet was a questionable art form, film was decidedly seen as low-brow. As The Red Shoes has passed into cinema legend, feted by Scorcese (who helped raise the funds for the film’s restoration), De Palma and many others, and film as a medium has attained an artistic status possibly unimaginable to critics of the 1940s, it’s amusing to read about Moira Shearer’s initial reluctance to take part in the project at all. According to her account in Meredith Daneman’s biography of fellow ballerina Margot Fonteyn, Shearer, then a very promising 21-year-old dancer, felt that a film role was nothing short of artistic compromise – and possible career suicide. ‘Wretched man – he was always hanging around the theatre,’ she said of Michael Powell. ‘I didn’t really want to do it.’ Shearer was eventually persuaded into the role by Royal Ballet founder and British ballet visionary Dame Ninette de Valois, who, while reportedly hating the film, recognised its potential in bringing her young artists (Helpmann was also in the company) and ballet in general to a wider audience, in particular an American one. It is perhaps noteworthy that, while The Red Shoes is often read from a gender studies perspective as the story of a woman, Shearer’s character Vicky, symbolically torn between the wills of two men, in reality it is a woman, de Valois, who seems to have dictated to and manipulated dancers such as Shearer and Fonteyn with the ruthlessness characterised by the impresario Lermontov in the film. With the exception of Marie Rambert appearing very briefly in the Mercury Theatre scene, the presence of powerful women in British ballet of the period is rather lacking in The Red Shoes, and Shearer’s resourcefulness and resilience as an artist and personality are of less dramatic interest to Powell than the tragic heroine that Vicky becomes.

But for every Shearer – who, incidentally, did seem to ‘have it all’, with a flawless dancing career followed by happy domesticity – there would have been many others whose lives as dancers took darker, unhappier turns, with careers brought to an abrupt end by injury or poverty, and the spectre of age and obsolescence always waiting, with creaking joints, in the wings. And the compulsion to dance at the cost of all else, forever, mythologised in the Ballet of the Red Shoes, brings to mind Margot Fonteyn, whose adulation and success masked a troubled, anguished personal life, and whose joy in dancing seemed often to be tinged with rivalries, anxiety, loneliness and, as she carried on dancing into late middle age, physical pain and weakness. Daneman makes the comparison between the two, often competing, dancers in a perhaps simplistic way, but in doing so makes quite a case for the Red Shoes myth – even if, as a dancer and dance critic rather than a film one, she’s compelled to describe the film’s story as ‘corny’.

The Red Shoes was presented in a new digital print at the BFI Southbank, London, on 11-30 December 2009.

From a dance practitioner’s view, of course, the narrative of The Red Shoes is overplayed, histrionic, unrealistic; even for admirers of Powell and Pressburger’s aesthetic it can seem quaint, a stylistic exercise lacking in emotional resonance. But to isolate any one element of The Red Shoes is to miss its unique ability to convey a kind of total effect similar to that brought about by dream, or music, or memory. The power of dance lies in its capacity to create this effect, through the evocative movement of a human frame, bones and muscles in tune with melody and harmony, discipline honed to invisibility so all that we see and hear is a porcelain-skinned young woman opening the door onto a painted street scene and – at one with the tentative oboe line of Brian Easdale’s score – fluidly gliding into being. It is a fleeting effect, and one we chase after, in dreams, in love, as spectators of art, and (for some of us) as artists; The Red Shoes, in a way, lyrically documents this pursuit, celebrates the poignant, youthful fervour of those who pursue. Is it dark, though, or dangerous? Despite the outcome of The Red Shoes, I like to think that Powell and Pressburger do not ever really make that judgement for us.

Frances Morgan

Features

Vampire Ballet: Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

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Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 April 2004

Distributor: Palisades Tartan

Director: Guy Maddin

Writer: Mark Godden

Based on the novel by: Bram Stoker

Cast: Wei-Qiang Zhang, Tara Birtwhistle, David Moroni, Cindy Marie Small, Johnny Wright

Canada 20028

73 mins

Guy Maddin’s film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a work aimed at both fans of the Canadian director and cinephiles familiar with the subject matter: although the film starts with text introducing each character, it may be somewhat confusing for anyone who does not know the story well. The film skips the novel’s prologue, which describes how Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to sell the Count a house in Britain (the film presents this in flashback later), and starts with the arrival of Dracula by boat to England, juxtaposed with Lucy Westenra deliberating over her suitors and an incarcerated lunatic’s orgasmic fervour over his dark master’s proximity. Maddin belabours the sexual desires of everyone involved – Lucy’s suitors for their potential bride to be, her own lustful longings, Renfield’s pining for his master – by repeating the subtitle: ‘Master I hear you coming. Coming! Coming!’ in increasingly large type. Renfield’s blatant desires are paralleled by Lucy’s polygamist yearnings: ‘Why can’t they let a woman marry three men?’ Lucy may possibly be a virgin bride, but it’s clear she’s a swinger in waiting.

Maddin’s usual skewed sense of characters’ sexuality is contrasted with an intriguing set design almost veering towards steampunk: Lucy’s mother, who in a sense is also undead, is kept alive by a machine – a hyperbaric chamber into which maids must constantly pump air. Maddin’s film refers to the future in waiting, echoing Francis Ford Coppola’s version of the story, which focuses on the dawn of a futuristic century heralded by new technology, while also adding references to fears of the mass movement of immigrants. Mrs Westenra’s chamber also reminds us of the glass coffin from a dream sequence in Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr; Maddin is aware of the history of the vampire, both on film and in literature. Dracula as a metaphor for demonic invasion from abroad was portrayed most explicitly in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, and here it mainly serves to elicit laughter from the audience in the hyperbolic prologue that opens the film.

Just like Ford Coppola’s adaptation, Maddin’s version makes the themes of the novel completely explicit – for example Lucy’s death before her return as a vampire is accompanied by demons dancing around her deathbed, indicating that her soul is taken to hell. Each adaptation of Dracula adds something new to the story, from the misogyny of Van Helsing that Coppola and Maddin’s versions bring to the surface to the themes of plague and malign German politics in Herzog’s. In addition, Maddin depicts the Count as some kind of financial predator – when the men raid Dracula’s lair, one coffin is full of ‘Money stolen from England’, while the cutting of his flesh causes gold coins to fall out. Whether this, coupled with the motif of invaders from the East introduced at the start of the film, has something to do with late 20th-century fears of new Asian super-powers or late 19th-century fears of what was referred to as the ‘Yellow Peril’ is not entirely clear.

Innocence and corruption are paramount themes and are revisited in the second half of the film when Harker’s fiancée and part-time nun Mina reads of his exploits with the succubae in Transylvania in his diary, but all is forgiven later as the young lovers are filled with the joys of spring. The original novel is told entirely from diary entries, newspaper clippings and other pieces of reportage, but Jonathan’s diary is the only one read from here, so it is possible to infer that he is the virgin referred to in the film’s title – which would suggest that while erotic, his encounter with Dracula’s vampire brides was chaste. The ambiguity of the title and the possible audience assumption that it refers to a woman while in fact it’s a man, fit with the concern with (male) sexuality that runs throughout Maddin’s filmography. Far from offending or angering Mina, Harker’s exploits serve to inflame her desire, so that we might wonder if she was sent to a nunnery, as Ophelia was told to do, for having more sexual urges than her fiancé could handle! Since the theme of the story is the (Victorian) fear of female desire, it’s no wonder Dracula himself almost seems to cameo in his own film until the final act, as he is simply the catalyst for the transformation of the two female characters into femme fatales.

Read our interview with Guy Maddin.

Colour and composition are particularly meaningful in the film. Maddin makes interesting choices regarding screen-tinting throughout the movie: the screen goes slightly green after Lucy first meets the Count, prefiguring the start of his malign influence; later the arrival of Van Helsing is announced by the screen turning purple (in colour theory the contrasting hue). Just as Dracula is often present off-screen, in this early scene Van Helsing is initially obscured from vision, first by the hat he is holding over his face, and then by Lucy, positioned between him and the camera. This is a film all about presences and absences, literally in terms of who is on screen and whose presence is felt even when they are not seen, and also in the idea of life and death as presence and absence.

The monochromatic cinematography is contrasted with the orange font of the intertitles and blood from a thorn prick on Lucy’s finger. The most horrific moment of the film is the look of smug satisfaction on Van Helsing’s face when he severs Lucy’s head with a spade. The high-contrast cinematography of this scene, which juxtaposes stark black and white with just a slash of claret on Lucy’s dress following her penetration by her suitors’ wooden stakes, reminded me of Frank Miller’s film Sin City, which featured an equally heady brew of sex and violence on screen. Spot colour is continually used to great effect from green gas seeping in through the vents to the lush scarlet lining of Dracula’s cape and Lucy’s lips when discovered undead in her coffin.

The manner in which Maddin films ballet, an art form all about elegant movement traditionally framed in long shot – i.e. from the point of view of a seated audience – varies from complementing the action to acting almost in opposition to it. His hyperkinetic editing style often seems at odds with the languor of ballet, but I assume this is part of the reason for hiring him to film the production – rather than the fact that Maddin’s silent movie style is contemporaneous with the setting of Dracula (Ford Coppola had Mina and Dracula visiting an early cinema in his version). Some of the director’s signature affectations, such as removing frames here and there to make it look like a time-worn silent film, interrupts the fluidity of certain movements and does the staging no favours, but elsewhere the cuts complement the action, as when the discovery of Lucy’s bite marks is intercut with reaction shots and changes in tinting to convey the characters’ shock. Ballet being an art form (generally) without dialogue, Maddin’s silent movie style suits the project perfectly. As well as being terrific dancers, many of the cast are also great actors – Lucy’s partial transformation into a vampire in the middle of a scene is achieved purely through acting; in contrast, her short-lived respite thanks to a blood transfusion is represented through special effects, a blush appearing superimposed on her otherwise monochromatic cheek.

There is one scene in which another theme of the novel, the rituals of Christianity, is beautifully captured through choreography as Van Helsing, Lucy’s suitors and the maids glide around her deathbed with crosses held aloft. Maddin’s sweeping camera moves make the cinematographer another one of the dancers by necessity – one can only imagine the hours of rehearsal needed to keep the camera moving delicately around the set while the actors wheel around it and each other. In such moments, Maddin’s predictably unusual entry in the Dracula cannon proves to be a peculiarly happy marriage between the wordless world of dance and the rich, dark magic of the director’s art.

Alex Fitch

Buy Dracula – Pages From A Virgin’s Diary [2002] [DVD] from Amazon

audio Listen to the podcast: Alex Fitch talks to Guy Maddin about My Winnipeg and about his career so far from Tales of the Gimli Hospital to The Saddest Music in the World.

Features

Kitanos and Takeshis’

Takeshis

Format: Cinema

Date: 12 February 2010

Venue: Curzon Renoir, London

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Takeshi Kitano

Writer: Takeshi Kitano

Alternative title: Fractal

Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyôno, Kayoko Kishimoto, Tetsu Watanabe

Japan 2005

108 mins

Ever since his feature debut with Violent Cop (1989) 20 years ago, the cinema of Takeshi Kitano has been dominated by the director’s alter ego, ‘Beat’ Takeshi. This is the nickname under which Kitano became famous as a comedian in Japan in the 1970s (as part of a stand-up double act called the Two Beats, so called because of the future filmmaker’s love of jazz music) and thereafter as an infamous radio and television host. It was a convenient means of demarcating a lowbrow celebrity persona from an ambitious and multi-talented creative artist, and Kitano has retained the name for his acting credit in every film in which he has appeared, so that ‘Beat’ Takeshi has become in effect the face of Kitano’s cinema, acting as the director’s surrogate or substitute. As the US critic Kent Jones has noted: ‘the special kick of Kitano’s films… is the man himself. In the distinguished history of actor-directors, he stands alone’.

Such is the singular nature of Kitano’s stardom – his (national) popularity as an irreverent television personality against his (international) status as a serious filmmaker – that it should come as little surprise that he has himself recently turned his attention to the specificity of his multifaceted artistry. His last three films, each of which is variously concerned with the theme of substitution, have all been defined by their exploration of aspects of Kitano’s own stardom, or at least critical and popular perceptions thereof. Most recently, Achilles and the Tortoise (2008) examined the artistic face of Kitano and his lack of popular acceptance in Japan through the serio-comic life story of a painter forever out of step with modern trends and practices (Kitano has been an avid painter for over 10 years). Before this, Glory to the Filmmaker! (2007) offered a playful, Fellini-esque satirical vision of Kitano as a director whose career has stalled and who cannot settle on his next project. In the guise of a faux documentary, Glory to the Filmmaker! becomes pointedly concerned with ‘Beat’ Takeshi. Indeed, seemingly unbeknownst to the characters around him, he is sporadically substituted in the narrative by a life-size Kitano doll (replete with puppeteers when necessary), a comedic device that underlines the extent to which ‘Beat’ Takeshi is taken for granted as part of the furniture of a Kitano film.

It is, however, the first in this series of what Kitano has self-deprecatingly called his ‘auto-destruct’ cinema that is most thoroughly concerned with the vagaries of Kitano and ‘Beat’ Takeshi, and the particular nature of substitution at their heart. Takeshis’, Kitano’s twelfth film, is given a belated theatrical release in the UK (over four years after its notoriously unsuccessful premiere as the surprise film at the 2005 Venice Festival) and will shock viewers expecting anything like the popular fare of Zatoichi (2003). Indeed, it has been suggested that Kitano acquiesced to remaking Zatoichi in order to gain the leverage necessary for what he knew would be a personal, commercially unpalatable project, having already proposed it (under the title Fractal) as a follow-up to Sonatine (1993), at which time he was strongly discouraged from making it.

Takeshis’ concerns a TV star named ‘Beat’ Takeshi who encounters his double in the figure of a struggling actor called Mr Kitano. Over the course of an increasingly surreal narrative, built largely around Edgar Allan Poe’s proverbial conception of life as a ‘dream within a dream’, Mr Kitano begins to usurp the position and status of his more famous counterpart, seemingly becoming ‘Beat’ Takeshi to the point where the line between reality and fantasy becomes ever more blurred and difficult to determine.

This most self-reflexive narrative is a culmination of Kitano’s representation of himself, of ‘Beat’ Takeshi, within his cinema, and of its consistent subtext of substitution. This theme is given its fullest expression in Takeshis’, but can be traced back as far as Violent Cop, concerned as Kitano’s first work is with the unmooring of identity in modern, post-economic miracle Japan. The titular detective in this film, as in Kitano’s later international breakthrough film Hana-Bi (1997), moves fluidly from police officer to criminal, one substituting for the other just as the central character in Japan’s other key film from 1989, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, develops from man into machine. These pictures were made on the cusp of seismic social change in Japan. They appeared just as the death of Emperor Hirohito and the beginning of a recession were transforming the country, substituting an enormously different nation whose points of reference, both spiritual and capitalist, were being increasingly eroded.

This sense of identity-in-flux can be seen as a particular facet of ‘Beat’ Takeshi within Kitano’s cinema. In the three films he directed in which he does not appear as an actor – A Scene at the Sea (1991), Kids Return (1996) and Dolls (2002) – the personal trajectories embodied by the youthful protagonists differ markedly. They display ideals of self-betterment through a single-minded commitment (generally to sports; surfing in A Scene at the Sea and boxing in Kids Return) that comes even at the expense of personal relationships. In contrast, the characters played by the director evince no such sense of secure identity developed through action. Rather, like Godard’s outlaw couple in Breathless (1959), their sense of self fluctuates according to each event, with the protagonists’ identity remaining in flux throughout.

In Takeshis’, one ‘Beat’ Takeshi literally substitutes for another in a film about internal and external realities, and about the limits of the very notion of existential identity associated with other ‘Beat’ Takeshi protagonists. The point of the substitution in this narrative is specifically to undermine the defining features of ‘Beat’ Takeshi on film, the important detail being that it is the exterior trappings, the accoutrements, of this character that exclusively determine Mr Kitano’s transformation into him. Initially, his rise in status is characterised exclusively by the guns he takes into his possession in order to practise for a film role. He is then further distinguished by his actions with those guns, such as robbing a bank (something that echoes the protagonist of Hana-Bi); and, like almost all Kitano’s characters, by his retreat to the beach. Finally, Mr Kitano’s transformation is crystallised when his body becomes encoded as the cinematic ‘Beat’ Takeshi: that is, when he engages in a prolonged and comically stylised and exaggerated shoot-out against a multitude of opponents amid a veritable hail of bullets, from which he emerges unscathed.

In this moment of extreme comedy, Mr Kitano takes on the bodily impenetrability of the typical ‘Beat’ Takeshi yakuza character, and with it his metamorphosis is apparently complete. However, the spectre of (often self-inflicted) death always haunts ‘Beat’ Takeshi’s cops and criminals, and here the notion of encoding the body, of make-up and performance, is explored thematically as the essence of substitution. One possible starting point for the dream structure of the film is ‘Beat’ Takeshi falling asleep as he has a yakuza tattoo applied in preparation for a television role. It is returned to later as Mr Kitano, now fully ensconced as a ‘Beat’ Takeshi clone, stabs the TV star, and the knife in the attack becomes the stabbing needles of the tattooist as ‘Beat’ Takeshi wakes from a dream.

In other words, the violent attack by Mr Kitano segues into ‘Beat’ Takeshi being made up (constructed, created, encoded) as the genre figure that he is popularly or primarily known as, with Kitano juxtaposing actual and figurative violence in order to illustrate the harm this figure represents for his career. It is thus redolent of the brutality inflicted on Kitano by commentators who can’t see past violence as a defining feature of his work, who have over-valued and fetishised it out of proportion (the specific parodies of Hana-Bi and Sonatine underline this notion). The theories of the French philosopher Michel Foucault argue that the human body can be regarded as a surface for writing, as a site on which social systems of regulation and control can be marked out and openly displayed. In Takeshis’, ‘Beat’ Takeshi becomes just such a vessel. The yakuza tattoo literally inscribes and codifies his body, just as the views of critics and commentators have figuratively performed the same act of violence against his work, his textual body. From what is, in actuality, a sign of imagined completion and belonging to a bigger body, that of the strictly ordered brotherhood of the yakuza, this image becomes, for ‘Beat’ Takeshi, a stain on his identity, an exterior mark of interior decay.

Doppelgänger fiction has been reasonably prevalent in Japanese cinema. Akira Kurosawa’s overt substitute narrative Kagemusha (1980), Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini (1999) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s Doppelgänger (2003) are only the most evident examples predating Takeshis’. Kitano follows Akira Kurosawa and foregrounds the subtext of substitution as it is inherent in a majority of doppelgänger narratives (not only cinematic: Dostoevsky’s The Double, Nabokov’s Despair and José Saramago’s The Double are all about the terror of an individual replaced in the world or the potential liberation of replacing someone else). By relating the idea to his own work and screen image, Kitano introduces the idea of performance and the commodification of the artist – the promulgation of copies or clones that take on their own life in discourse on art and the artist. Like Orson Welles’s art forgery essay and magician’s fable F for Fake (1974), in which the director derides the status of art in the marketplace as an entity given a seal of originality and commercial value by bearing the approved stamp of its artist creator, Takeshis’ sees Kitano lamenting the brand he has become. It imagines, in the aforementioned knife attack, the violence inherent in the substitution of an artist with his/her creation, but also the ease with which this can happen: ‘Beat’ Takeshi over Takeshi Kitano.

Adam Bingham

This article was first published in the summer 09 issue of Electric Sheep Magazine, which explored the idea of substitute in cinema.
Features

Review of the Year 2009

Let the Right One In

The Electric Sheep team look back at the heroes and villains of 2009.

THE GOOD

Love Exposure
A four-hour long hymn to the redemptive power of love, Love Exposure creates a magnificently alien universe that careers from cartoony farce to serious drama. For all its oddness, the film has an epic, biblical quality, and there is a truth in the characters and their relationships that keeps us gripped despite the marathon length. ELEANOR MCKEOWN

Let the Right One In
This sweet and bloody subtle horror tale charts the relationship between lonely 12-year-old Oskar and vampire girl Eli. There is an ever-present sense of danger whenever Eli and Oskar are together and it is this threat underlying their love that makes the film so touching and melancholy, so real and unsentimental. Let the Right One In perfectly captures the nature of love as a delicate and dangerous balancing act, lovers poised for a fleeting, magical moment between need and defiance, trust and menace, sweetness and violence. TINA PARK

The White Ribbon
Violence is yet again the main subject of Haneke’s excellent The White Ribbon, which deservedly won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. The White Ribbon is very much a German film, and it is impossible to ignore that the overly quiet and polite children depicted here are the ‘Nazi generation’. But, more than that, it is, in Haneke’s words, ‘a film about the roots of evil’. It is a didactic play of sorts, but one in which the names of the culprits are as irrelevant as any direct answers or lessons. The finely crafted screenplay, the stunning black and white photography, the aural landscape, the use of omission and silence make this nightmarish fable one of Haneke’s most accomplished films to date. PAMELA JAHN

White Lightnin’
Merging real-life events and unbridled fiction, writers (and co-producers) Shane Smith and Eddy Moretti have crafted a bold, nightmarish tale of Southern darkness and director Dominic Murphy takes the subject matter to cinematic extremes, using a hand-held camera, bizarre angles and repeated blackouts to convey Appalachian mountain dancer Jesco White’s disturbed state of mind. Intensely imagined and vividly directed, White Lightnin’ is a raw, rabid, howling hillbilly hell trip that doesn’t let up. PAMELA JAHN

Afterschool
If, as is usually the case, high school/college movies are intended as portraits of America in microcosm, then this is the most bilious, vicious picture of that nation I’ve encountered in years. The dark nature of the story is emphasised by visually inventive, oddly framed photography throughout, imitating both the lopsided compositions of amateur cameramen and the disaffected gaze of a sociopath, building a woozy, unhealthy atmosphere, a world viewed through the wrong head. Creepy and smart. MARK STAFFORD

Johnny Mad Dog
Set in an unnamed African country, Johnny Mad Dog opens with a shockingly brutal, surreally violent scene in which a pack of frenzied, coked up, brainwashed children attack a village. The film plunges us into their perception of the senseless chaos and madness of war, avoiding any simplifying, worthy platitudes about the situation. They are both terrible victims of the war and terrifying murderers, childish and vulnerable on the one hand and capable of the most chilling acts of violence on the other. A cross between Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now, this is an extraordinarily powerful film. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

Moon
Duncan Jones’s independent debut feature is a fascinating and visually stunning sci-fi film that explores the alienation and bitter loneliness of space, as well as the very essence of the human condition. Filmed in little more than a month, and refreshingly making use of models rather than relying solely on CGI, the picture beautifully captures Jones’s unique vision, both aesthetically and philosophically. Moon is an instant classic of the genre, as well as one of the most impressive and original films to emerge from the UK in years. SARAH CRONIN

Big River Man
This unconventional documentary charts eccentric Slovenian swimmer Martin Strel’s extraordinary attempt to swim the Amazon. An unlikely champion, the rotund, hard-drinking, 53-year-old Martin combines a day job as a flamenco guitar teacher with a line in swimming the world’s most polluted rivers. The megalomaniac nature of the project, the strangeness of his relationship to his entourage and the spectacular Amazonian scenery make for one of the most enjoyable films of the year, a soulful journey into dark places, lunacy and the extremes of human behaviour that is at turns desperately farcical and profoundly affecting. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

THE BAD

Antichrist
Watching Antichrist, one gets no sense of the artist grappling with his materials, trying to strike a balance between order and chaos. Instead, von Trier seems a confused and desperate director, whose latest film has completely evaded his control. Having made good work in the past, he may well make good work again in the future, and should he do so, Antichrist may come to be seen as an intriguing low in the director’s oeuvre. Considered on its own, however, Antichrist is utter nonsense, an irredeemable mess, and one of the worst films I have ever had the displeasure to see. DAVID WARWICK

THE UGLY

Synecdoche New York
We are asked to sympathise with an outrageously self-absorbed, self-pitying blob of a man who cannot get over the momentous tragedy of his own mortality. Caden’s fixation with death stops him from living life, making him the most bloodless, gutless, humourless, lifeless cinematic character I’ve come across in a long time, and there is no sense of distance or self-deprecation to help us through this bloated, indigestible whine-fest. Structural convolutions fail to fill the film’s empty heart or disguise its stunningly narrow perspective on the world – Kaufman is absolutely incapable to see beyond the confines of a peculiarly North American, white, male, middle-class, middle-aged perspective. Depressing beyond words. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

Features

SECRET CINEMA: THE WARRIORS

The Warriors

Event: Secret Cinema

Date: 6 September 2009

Location: London Fields

Organised by: Future Shorts

Secret Cinema website

You can probably count on the fingers of one transatlanticly befuddled hand the number of times that anyone has mistaken Hackney for New York. Even taking into account epic jetlag combined with elephantine doses of ketamine it would still be a difficult mistake to make. Usually. Thanks to Secret Cinema and their constant urge to impress, the illusion of New York was fixed in the minds of about 2,500 London Fields visitors, most of whom were under the influence of nothing more disorientating than popcorn and good tea. This was the Secret Cinema September screening of The Warriors, their most ambitious undertaking so far.

Secret Cinema is an organisation that specialises in one-off cinema events. Each occasion is something new and each punter gets a special surprise. That’s the secret – you don’t know what you’re going to see or what’s going to happen. For The Warriors, the 1979 New York gangland odyssey, London Fields was transformed with theme park trappings and marauding handfuls of colourful gang members, done up like the gangs from the film – The Baseball Furies, The Punks, The Rogues, The Lizzies, The Hi Hats and The Satan’s Mothers. The gangs do some posing, taunt each other and occasionally break off to be chased round the park by Officer Dibble. The cool cars and cool clothes make gang membership look enticing. Luckily, there is a large fence to keep Hackney’s real miscreants out, so our blankets, mobiles and fancy dress boxes are safe. ‘Yay, Magners me up!’

The magic descended along with the darkness and then we got a rare viewing of Romain Gravas’s video clip for ‘Stress’ by Justice. Rarer still for having its kids-get-gang-kicks controversy blasted out on a big screen with big sound. ‘So French!’ applauded the Green Fiends. ‘Morally Bankrupt,’ mumbled the Flapjack Mafia.

Then the main feature. If you’re going to give people a surprise it pays to put some quality inside the wrapping. The Warriors is pure quality. Happily shorn of arseache-inducing waffle (remember, everyone is sitting out on the ground), the characters are drawn broadly but smartly and the action is happily free of guns and big on running. It also has the most sumptuously glorious lip close-ups ever committed to film. ‘Give me more of that sticky stuff’, shrieked the Southside Pouters as the film’s DJ appeared for the last time to bring the film to a close. They were to be disappointed. The Warriors were home at last and it was time for the assorted posses in the crowd to pack up their recycling and start their own happy treks back to home turf.

Nick Dutfield

Next event: Halloween special on October 31. To sign, up, visit the Secret Cinema website.

Features

RETROFITTING THE FUTURE: GHOST IN THE SHELL 2.0

Ghost in the Shell 2.0

Title: Ghost in the Shell 2.0

Format: Cinema

Release date: 2 October 2009

Venue: ICA (London) and key cities

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Writer: Kazunori It?

Based on the manga by: Masamune Shirow

Original title: Kôkaku kidôtai

Cast: Atsuko Tanaka, Akio ?tsuka, Iemasa Kayumi

Japan 1995/2008

82 mins

Title: Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 24 October 2009

Venue: Sci-Fi London’s Oktoberfest, Apollo Piccadilly, London

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Directors: Hideaki Anno, Masayuki, Kazuya Tsurumaki

Writer: Hideaki Anno

Original title: Evangerion shin gekijôban: Jo

Cast: Megumi Ogata, Megumi Hayashibara, Kotono Mitsuishi

Japan 1995/2007

98 mins

The word ‘retrofitting’ in SF film criticism is usually found in the context of the rich and detailed depiction of the future in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). For those unfamiliar with the term, it means the addition of new technology to existing objects to give them longevity and a continued purpose in the present. In Blade Runner, this meant the addition of neon signs, moving adverts and other modern artefacts to the archetypal art deco landscape of Los Angeles, which made the future look both modern and retro – a futuristic dirigible floats above iconic LA landmarks such as the Bradbury Building while Union Station houses a busy Police Headquarters.

Scott’s retrofitting, which he borrowed from French sci-fi comics from the 1970s, became a template for the renewal of science-fiction films themselves from around that point on. In 1980, Steven Spielberg had released his Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) in a new ‘special edition’, which included seven minutes of new scenes and special effects. As the 1990s saw collectors buying films on DVD with the earnest intention of keeping them forever, Spielberg released a ‘collector’s edition’ in 1998, which was a remix of the two earlier cuts. We can only hope that he won’t feel compelled to reframe each shot for smaller screens in an ‘I-Pod edition’ for the 2010s…

In a similar way, George Lucas’s endless tinkering with his Star Wars franchise is common knowledge – from the addition of the subtitle Episode IV: A New Hope to the first cinematic re-release of the original 1977 film in 1981, through remastering of the soundtrack into various new surround sound formats over the next decade and a half, to the addition of new computer-generated effects in 1997, and again in 2004. Lucas claims that each of these additions are to make the film closer to his original vision, though one might debate whether he has yet to decide what that original vision was, as a 3D version is threatened a couple of years from now. You might also argue that each version was intended to match each decade’s audience perception of what films should be like, first with regards to sound, and later, visual effects.

Science fiction as a genre is often concerned with the future, and at the risk of stating the obvious, the future should always look as futuristic as possible. The problem with envisioning the future is that the world you try to predict is always based on extrapolation of the present, and so 1970s SF looks like a futuristic version of the 70s, 1980s SF looks like a futuristic version of the 80s, and so on. The most extreme 1980s remix of a classic sci-fi film was the 1984 release of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), which added a contemporary pop music soundtrack and comic-book-style colour-tinting to an edited version that was more than an hour shorter than the original.

What Scott got right with Blade Runner was to make a film in 1982 that looked like a futuristic version of 1932, and for that reason has aged as well as any classic film noir. Unfortunately, Scott himself disagrees, and he too tinkered with his film, releasing a ‘final cut’ last year, in which he unnecessarily added a little CGI here and there and reshot certain scenes. I hope he’s happy with the result, but can’t help but worry that he’ll end up in a George Lucas-style loop, making new ‘final cuts’ every decade from now on.

While 1980s special effects have a certain classic appeal, coming towards the end of a century of ‘practical’ special effects on screen and being therefore the product of a refined and specialised industry at the height of its powers, modern special effects are almost entirely reliant on CGI. Unfortunately, bad computer graphics – and by that I mean CGI that is intended to recreate a solid object in a live action film, but is rendered at a time when the budget or the technology was unable to match the demands of the production – date quicker than any other kind of FX, as Lucas himself found out in his first attempt to make a CGI ‘Jabba the Hutt’ in the 1997 special edition of Star Wars. ‘Good’ CGI has existed for as long as the technology itself, as for example in Tron (1982), where the depiction of a virtual world set inside a computer is as visually stunning now as when it was first released, due to the aesthetic acumen of the filmmakers. But even CGI that is used ‘non-realistically’, i.e. in films that are entirely animated or in scenes that are intended to look animated, can age as badly as any other form of animation.

In spite of all this, other filmmakers have followed Lucas’s example and used new CGI to augment existing films. One example of this is the newly released and confusingly titled Ghost in the Shell 2.0, a reworking of Mamoru Oshii’s original Ghost in the Shell film from 1995. Not to be confused with the same director’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), Ghost in the Shell 2.0 is a re-release of the original film in which several scenes have been replaced with CGI versions of the original cell animation. The original version of Ghost in the Shell already included CGI in among the traditional hand-drawn animation, which worked well as it was often used to depict computer animation itself in a world where people interact with computers for work, leisure and out-of-body experiences. In the 2.0 version, additional scenes are now also in CGI, so that it is no longer just used functionally, but also aesthetically. If Ghost in the Shell had always looked like this I wouldn’t find the CGI scenes objectionable, as overall the 2.0 version is a beautiful movie. However, as with some of George Lucas’s additions to the Star Wars franchise, much of this new CGI is simply unnecessary as there was nothing wrong with the original animation. In some respects, version 2.0 of Ghost in the Shell is a better film than the original; in other respects it is a worse film, particularly when the new CGI is distracting from the storytelling.

One of Oshii’s stated reasons for the changes to Ghost in the Shell is that the overall look of the 1995 film doesn’t match the look of his 2004 sequel. The original film was made in the 1990s as the first great realisation of the cyberpunk movement in fiction and manga, reflecting the cool, mirrored glass aesthetic of the genre – a future world illuminated by the blue / green phosphorescence of computer displays and neon light refracted off the soda-lime glass that lines office buildings. By the time Innocence was released, that look was passé; the world of the future is now a burnt orange, reflecting a more autumnal planet that sees humans shedding their bodies for cyberspace like leaves falling from trees. In some respects, Oshii’s motivation is more objectionable than updating special effects to match the presumed expectations of the audience, as this is revision as fashion accessory.

Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone is another ‘new’ animé film that blurs the distinction between remake and update. The latest version of the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise, the film is a reworking of the original animation with the same voice cast, storyboards, writer and director and condenses the first five episodes of the TV series into a 98-minute movie. Revolving around humans who put on giant robot suits to fight gigantic alien monsters called ‘Angels’ who intend to destroy the latest rebuild of Tokyo, Evangelion 1.0 is a very watchable film, although the plot seems occasionally hurried. Like Evangelion, other sci-fi TV shows are being remixed for potential new audiences. The pilot of Stargate: SG1, itself a follow-up to a much better movie, has been just re-released on DVD with new special effects and a new score. The most extreme and absurd, but slightly charming example of this trend is the DVD release of a Doctor Who TV serial from 1964, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which was remade in colour for the cinema in 1966 – the DVD contains new CGI effects added to black and white footage shot 45 years ago!

In the case of Evangelion, the move from TV to higher-resolution cinema screens at least justifies the redrawing and augmenting of the animation with CGI, even though it means that the makers of the franchise have spent the last 14 years revisiting the same material over and over again. For a series that translates from the Greek as ‘New Beginning Gospel’, its audience’s obsession with seeing different versions of the same material verges on religious fanaticism. Following the completion of the TV series, feedback from the audience made the creators realise that fans of the series were unhappy with the dénouement, so they remade the final two episodes as two movies. Not only did these movies repeat episodes from the series, but the second film – End of Evangelion – also reprised the only new material from the first film – Death and Rebirth. Further DVD releases of both these films and the original series saw still more tinkering with the material. Evangelion 1.0‘s proposed sequels will remake later episodes, with changes to the series varying from a redrawing of the original animation to entirely new interpretations.

This is a fascinating idea that takes the concept of a remake or a remix to a meta-textual level – appropriately the new releases are called ‘rebuilds’, adding an architectural nuance to the idea of a remake – where the original plot of a work of fiction is so ambiguous that both the fans and the makers have to keep going over the same material again and again to find some kind of solution that suits everyone. Indeed, each of the new Evangelion films contains a word in brackets within their titles, displaying the ambiguous nature of their themes. This could be the ultimate expression of the trends discussed above – filmmakers keep revisiting the same material and carry the audience along like passengers on a bus, with people disembarking with a version that makes them happy, until there is no money left to be made from the journey or the tyres wear out.

Alex Fitch

Evangelion 1.0 screens as part of the Anime All-Nighter at the Sci-Fi London’s Oktoberfest, which takes place on Oct 23-24 in London. Other events include an Aliens and Predators All-nighter, Sci-Fi Stand-Up and a very exciting event at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. More details on the Sci-Fi London website.

Features, Festivals

DOLLS AND COWBOYS: THE STATE OF GAY CINEMA

Cowboy (Boys on Film 2)

LONDON LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

25 March-8 April 20089

On tour (UK): 18 May-30 September 2009

LLGFF website



DVD collection: Boys on Film 2 – In Too Deep

Release date: 17 August 2009

Distributor: Peccadillo Pictures

The LLGFF is currently on tour around the UK with a selection of 10 films showing at cinemas around the British Isles from Poole to Inverness, Norwich to the Welsh town of Mold between the beginning of July and the end of September. Curated by the British Film Institute, the main festival in London in March/April and the touring programme aim to show the best gay and lesbian films from around the world. I and two (straight) female writers from Electric Sheep watched a selection of the films being screened at the LLGFF, appreciated some and were left nonplussed by many.

Gay cinema appears to be in a state of flux at the moment. Crossover hits such as Mysterious Skin (2004) and Brokeback Mountain (2005) have shown that mainstream audiences will watch gay-themed films, and yet a large section of gay cinema panders to a loyal audience that seems to have low expectations, satisfied simply by gay and lesbian representation on screen. Obviously the LLGFF doesn’t represent all gay filmmaking; for a start, I noticed the absence of Cthulu (2007), an underrated gay horror film that toured both gay and horror festivals in the US throughout 2007. I was also surprised that the LLGFF didn’t host the premiere of Little Ashes, a film that came out in UK cinemas four weeks after the end of the festival and extrapolates the homoerotic potential of the friendship between Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí. It’s a film that had massive crossover appeal due to the presence of heartthrob of the moment Robert Pattinson as one of the leads. However, the publicity for the film was both coy and leading regarding the onscreen coupling of the two characters, suggesting that the distribution company didn’t want the film to appear designed for a gay audience, and was not sure who to market the film for, except perhaps the greying Merchant-Ivory crowd. As a result, the film snuck in and out of cinemas without attracting any of the hysterical tweenagers who fainted at the sight of Pattinson when he was out and about promoting Twilight.

The LLGFF’s selection of the gay and lesbian films made over the last year shows a lack of imagination on many counts and too many films are simply re-treading familiar ground. This isn’t just a problem in lesbian and gay festivals, but affects all festivals that only show one type of film. Horror/’cult’ film festivals also often show a great deal of poor movies, as it is difficult to find enough outstanding recent works to fill the programme of a whole festival. We would have a healthier cinema in general if there were more examples of those ‘specialised’ kinds of movies scattered throughout the year on screens (and not just those affiliated with the BFI). Unfortunately, in the current economic climate, a lack of faith in audiences and dwindling advertising budgets means much horror and gay filmmaking is relegated to festivals only.

Myself and Virginie Sélavy went to the opening film of the LLGFF – Dolls (Pusinky, Czech Republic, 2007) – and enjoyed its mix of teenage high spirits, sex, drunken carousing and adolescent trauma faced with the prospect of unpredictable lives to come. Dolls follows in the footsteps of populist teen soaps such as Skins, but by mixing the drama with an Eastern European road movie, manages to make the material seem fresh. That said, it’s an unlikely film to open a lesbian and gay film festival as the lesbian aspect of the drama is a very minor part of the plot, and ironically, when realised in a grimy toilet that seems more like a gay male fantasy than a female one, is one of the least convincing parts of the film. I’m not saying there should be a sliding scale of ‘gayness’ to justify inclusion in a LGB festival, but the fact that the opening film of the festival is barely gay at all is perhaps reflective of the lack of engaging gay films released over the last year.

Elsewhere, Virginie and Pamela Jahn were unimpressed with Ghosted, the latest film by German experimental filmmaker Monika Treut or with Bandaged, a lesbian update of Eyes without a Face, which promised much but delivered little. I saw Chris and Don – A Love Story, a documentary about the life of Christopher Isherwood as told through the eyes of his partner Don Bachardy, which was earnest and portentous but, barring some kitsch animated sequences, wasn’t nearly as riveting as the film you might expect about the writer of ‘The Berlin Stories’ (filmed as Cabaret) and Frankenstein: The True Story. I also saw Dream Boy, an adaptation of the novel by Jim Grimsley, which is not unlike a teen version of Brokeback Mountain: two boys in a god-fearing rural community fall in love, each having to contend respectively with an abusive father and a rapist/murderer friend. Dream Boy is certainly a watchable film and the two young leads are constantly engaging, but too much screen time is taken up by longing looks, while the director seems unable to let a single scene go by without relentless music filling the air, and a semi-hysterical performance by blues singer Rickie Lee Jones as the mother of one of the boys threatens to unbalance the whole film.

As for up and coming filmmakers who might populate future LLGFFs, one of the shorts that showed at this year’s festival, Bramadero (Mexico, 2008), is also included in Peccadillo Pictures’ collection Boys on Film 2 – In Too Deep. PP are one of the major suppliers of films to the LLGFF and one of the biggest gay and lesbian labels in the UK, so one would hope Boys on Film represents the best gay shorts from around the world. Indeed, the nine short films included in volume 2 have been shown at festivals from Brooklyn to Cardiff, Istanbul to Gothenburg, and include three festival winners among their number. Generally, the quality of the shorts in the collection is quite high, although inevitably like all collections, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

The aforementioned Bramadero is a silent, erotic physical theatre piece bordering on pornography. A more cynical reviewer might suggest it only made it into festivals and collections like these to give audiences some bona fide on-screen penetration, which so many other shorts only allude to. However, as the woeful 9 Songs – Michael Winterbottom’s only unwatchable film – demonstrates, sex is only interesting when it accompanies a plot, no matter how realistic the performance or attractive the performers. But elsewhere in the collection, there is a successful balance between plot, intrigue and eroticism. Cowboy, like Cthulu, mixes the desire of a city visitor for simple country boys with the horrific dénouement of classic horror films like Straw Dogs and Children of the Corn, and it’s both refreshing and disturbing to see this genre given a gay twist. Weekend in the Countryside is a Gallic version of the same, giving the typical French thriller scenario of a visitor to a house in the countryside a homoerotic angle. Lucky Blue, although bogged down by longueurs, and The Island, show the range of quality gay short filmmaking, one being a charming and typically Swedish – reminiscent of early Lukas Moodysson – tale of adolescent romance and the other an amusing CGI-augmented monologue about turning homophobia on its head in a utopian fantasy.

The other four films that round out the collection unfortunately disappoint for a variety of reasons. Kali Ma, which deals with an Indian mother’s revenge on her son’s homophobic bully/object of desire, is spirited but let down by amateurish filmmaking. Love Bite would make an excellent pre-credits sequence to an unmade longer movie but as it is, comes across as a mean-spirited sketch that’s escaped from a BBC3 comedy show. Futures & Derivatives starts well, as a law firm hires a mysterious, brightly coloured Powerpoint expert to create a presentation for a client, but the fantastic dénouement probably only makes sense in the director and editor’s heads, while the tedious Australian comedy Working it Out, about desire and jealousy in an all-male gym, was probably funny on paper but is not in execution. Overall though, since half of the films entertain, titillate and, being short and low-budget, achieve more than the sum of their parts it’s a collection worth seeking out. That said, in both the cases of PP and LLGFF, less is definitely more, and both might do well to think of whittling down their selections of films to offer only the absolute best of gay cinema.

Alex Fitch

Features

CLUB DES FEMMES: SWINGING SUMMERTIME SPECIAL

The Killing of Sister George

Date: Sunday 28 June, 2.30pm

Venue: Curzon Soho, London

Title: The World Ten Times Over

Director: Wolf Rilla

UK 1963, 93 mins

Date: Sunday 5 July, 3pm

Venue: Curzon Soho, London

Title: The Killing of Sister George

Director: Robert Aldrich

USA 1968, 138 mins

Club des Femmes website

Curzon Cinema website

It’s the 1960s and the setting is London. A bobbed-haired girl band play some rockin’ tunes while the crowd below jostles and sways. There’s nothing unusual about this scene, except for the fact that all the punters are women and most of them are real people.

Robert Aldrich chose to film this extraordinary part of his 1968 drama The Killing of Sister George at Gateways, the legendary lesbian bar of the era. As a diverse group of gay women slow dance – without being judged – in the background while the three lead characters (all lesbians) argue, it becomes apparent that their struggles are not so much social as internal.

June (Beryl Reid) is an actress known for her role as the do-gooder George in parochial BBC soap Applehurst. In real life, she is an abrasive hard drinker who dominates her babyish girlfriend, nicknamed Childie (Susannah York). The real trouble starts, however, when George finds out her character is due to be axed from the soap and an arch, sophisticated executive called Mercy (Coral Browne) intervenes, resulting in a darkly comic love triangle.

The film’s humour, which ranges from killer one-liners to near door-slamming farce, is what Sarah Wood and Selina Robertson of Club Des Femmes want to highlight at their summer screening. Sister George and her companions may be considered wicked by some audiences, and obscene by the original censors, who to Aldrich’s horror gave the film an X rating, but to Club Des Femmes they are heroines. ‘The film does ask you to take sides, but read in the context in which it was made, it says a lot about how much a gay character would have to suffer before an audience would sympathise and even empathise’, says Wood. ‘We hope that now, watching it in 2009, it’ll be obvious that it’s pantomime. What gives the film heart is the three wonderful central performances.’

A pantomime-style atmosphere is what Wood and Robertson hope to deliver at the screening. ‘Cheer the goodies, boo the badies’, incites the poster, and Sarah adds that she hopes that a 2009 screening of a film that, due to censorship, has so far been denied a big audience will help bring out the fun of what they call ‘dykesploitation’.’We’re jokingly reclaiming a genre of film, made up of certain tropes and stereotypes, to be read and enjoyed by a dyke audience. The Killing of Sister George was made as a general release film, but we like to encourage audience re-engagement. Watching the film on DVD or as a TV re-run in the lonely isolation of your home is one thing. Watching it with an audience who shares the joke is quite another’, she says.

Coinciding with both Pride and the Mayor of London’s Story of London project, the Club Des Femmes event is also a chance for those with memories of the Gateways club to share them with the audience, thus documenting a social history that for the most part has been ignored.

The other film in Club Des Femmes’ Swinging Summertime programme, The World Ten Times Over (1963), features scenes of another nightclub. Its lead characters Billa and Ginnie work as hostesses in a night spot frequented by rich businessmen. While Ginnie appears to revel in the position, and the riches and attention that come with it, her flatmate Billa has grown tired of it. However, when Ginnie’s boyfriend leaves his wife to be with her and she finds out Billa is pregnant, she too begins to unpick the delusion of her existence.

Wood and Robertson describe The World Ten Times Over as ‘possibly the first British lesbian film’. The relationship between the two women is cautiously developed by filmmaker Wolf Rilla, and the biggest display of affection is the loving embrace that closes this stylish and understated film. Although it features nothing as provocative as the sex scene in Sister George that shows a predatory Mercy drive Childie to orgasmic delirium, the censors were still unhappy, presumably because the film challenges the so-called ‘tolerant’ values of the time, which turned out to be anything but.

In case we get complacent about the times we live in, the screenings serve as a reminder of how quickly the freedom of sexuality in this country could be reversed, and how few of the gay female characters we see on screen nowadays are realistic, entertaining or reflective of the naturally diverse group. As Wood puts it: ‘When you want to make a lot of money the default characterisation is still knee-jerk. The lesbians are still to be hunted by the vampire slayers.’

Lisa Williams

Features

SELF, TRUTH AND CLASS ACCORDING TO JOSEPH LOSEY

Mr Klein

Format: Cinema

Joseph Losey retrospective

Dates: 4 June-30 July 2009

Venues: BFI Southbank (London)

Films include: Accident, The Criminal, Eve, The Go-Between, Mr Klein, The Servant

A restored version of Accident is also released in key UK cities on June 5.

Joseph Losey is not a household name in the UK. American by birth, he left the USA in 1952 after being blacklisted by the Hollywood studios for his leftist sympathies and for having worked with Bertolt Brecht. He subsequently settled in Britain though his first British film, 1954’s The Sleeping Tiger, was released under the pseudonym Victor Hanbury to protect the reputations of some of the cast. His films offer often unsettling insights into the private lives of characters whilst simultaneously providing dissections of the social milieus they inhabit.

He is best remembered these days for The Servant (1963) in which young aristocrat Tony (James Fox in his first screen role) hires manservant Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) to look after him and his newly acquired Chelsea townhouse. Tony’s girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) takes an immediate dislike to him and the situation is made worse when Barrett moves in his ‘sister’ Vera (Sarah Miles) as a maid, who soon proves irresistible to the master of the house. Although it is obvious to the viewer, Tony is unaware that Vera is in fact Barrett’s mistress, and when he returns home one night with Susan to discover them frolicking in the master bedroom he is outraged as much by the implications of incest as by his servant’s act of betrayal. When the real state of affairs is made clear to him, he throws them both out. Finding himself months later in the same pub as Tony, Barrett apologises and manages to work his way back into the house where he lives for a while apparently as Tony’s friend and equal, before bringing about the aristocrat’s downfall.

It is inviting to view The Servant as a fairly straightforward case of substitution with Barrett supplanting Tony as master. Their respective names suggest things should be the other way around and Losey’s preoccupation with showing the homoeroticism of their relationship implies a closeness that threatens to overturn the master/servant hierarchy. ‘Apart from the cooking I’ll need everything, general looking after, you know’, says Tony in their initial interview, to which Barrett replies, knowing more than Tony ever could at that stage, ‘Yes I do, sir’. However, the introduction of a third party in the shape of Vera adds a twist to this situation.

Throughout his career, Losey constantly examines the complex dynamics of erotic desire. In The Sleeping Tiger, psychiatrist Clive Esmond (Alexander Knox) invites young criminal Frank Clements (Bogarde again) to stay in his house instead of sending him to prison. It’s effectively a social experiment in rehabilitation, which goes drastically wrong when Frank becomes involved with Esmond’s wife, substituting himself for her husband, whose obsession with his work has made him neglect her. In Accident (1967), the situation is even more involved. University professor Stephen (Bogarde once more) falls for young foreign student Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), but he has already persuaded another of his students, the aristocratic William (Michael York), to ask her out. Stephen is already married, and his wife is expecting their third child. This doesn’t stop him from rekindling an old affair with the daughter of the university provost while another colleague, Charley (the wonderful Stanley Baker), begins an intense affair with Anna. It’s a messy situation with multiple substitutions revealing Losey’s interest in probing the hypocrisies that break out in closed environments: the house in The Servant, the cloistered setting of the university in Accident and the marital home in both Accident and The Sleeping Tiger.

[…]

Jeff Hilson

Read the rest of the article in the summer 09 issue of Electric Sheep. Substitute is the theme of the new issue, with articles on the fraught relationship between Takeshi Kitano and ‘Beat’ Takeshi, the various cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, the dangers of false impersonation in neo-noir Just Another Love Story, the paradoxes of black and white twins in offbeat lost classic Suture, not to mention cross-dressing criminals, androids and body snatchers. Also in this issue: interview with Marc Caro, profile of whiz-kid animator David OReilly, comic strip review of Hardware, and The Phantom Band’s favourite films.

Features

BERLIN DIY PUNK FILMMAKING: JULIA OSTERTAG’S SAILA

Saila

Saila website

Julia Ostertag website

Julia Ostertag is an underground filmmaker from Berlin on a mission to challenge representations of female characters in film, particularly those that are violent and sexualised. Coming from an art school background and finding her early influences in the cinema of transgression, she is a filmmaker whose work elicits a love or hate reaction from the audience. She delights in provocation, and her first feature Saila is further proof of this.

Ostertag recently screened Saila at Schnarup-Thumby, a tight-knit Berlin squat with a strict ‘no photography’ policy – a somewhat different venue to those chosen for the L’Oréal-sponsored 59th Berlinale which opened a few weeks later. The squat provided a particularly intense and appropriate atmosphere for a chat with Ostertag about the film and her intentions. The screening brought together the voluntary and largely amateur team that comprised Saila’s cast and crew for a manic and rewarding evening, which for Ostertag ‘mirrored the two-and-a-half-year filmmaking process itself’.

Saila centres on the title character, a dreadlocked outsider searching for a ‘lost memory’ in an increasingly violent ‘Berlin punk dystopia’, where time and space no longer appear to obey conventional rules. Through a bewildering cycle of psychosexual visions and phantasms, Saila discovers her own violent truth. As Ostertag explains, it could be described as a ‘female revenge film without a specific reason for the revenge’. One of the most dynamic elements of the film is its unpredictability. Ostertag feels that this may come from the challenging method in which it was shot: ‘neither the actors nor myself knew where the journey would take us’, she explains. ‘It was a total challenge and very different from the other shorts and docos I’ve done’, she says, referring to the spontaneous performances and to the unstructured nature of the narrative.

Saila was shot guerilla-style within urban Berlin, in abandoned warehouses, decrepit apartment blocks and industrial wastelands. This shooting style was only made possible through working with a team that knew this side of Berlin from experience – the film’s locations are situated in parts of the city that are completely off the radar for the majority of the Berlin film industry. Ostertag’s choices have paid off handsomely: although set for the most part in a fantastical post-apocalyptic future, the film displays an authenticity and genuinely punk sensibility that is impossible to feign.

The film has been described as ‘probably the Berlin Punk film right now’ and a must-see ‘if you care about the Berlin D.I.Y. scene at all’ (Andreas Michalke, 26 November 2008, berlindiyhcpunk.wordpress.com). Through Saila and her previous films, particularly documentary Gender X (Berlinale 2005) and experimental short Sex Junkie (2003), Ostertag has placed herself at the dark, pulsing heart of Berlin’s underground film scene. Her bold representations of female sexuality and the unashamed insertion of her own personal concerns within these representations (including the decision to perform in the self-sexploitative lead role in Sex Junkie) certainly deserve our attention.

The filmmaker proclaims passionately that Saila and her other films aim to ‘question civilisation’, and that they could possibly provide some answers for ‘middle-class audiences coming to a crisis’. Her films represent characters who willingly thrust themselves at the fringes of society. Ostertag wants her work to provide an alternative in an industry which to her is all about ‘creating films for TV stations’. This ability to question and to challenge through her filmmaking shines through boldly in the complexity of her female characters.

Saila contains one of the bloodiest love scenes in cinema history. It is visually harsh and yet erotically charged, its intensity heightened through the awareness that we are watching local punks on screen, not professional actors. Ostertag points out that at no point did her non-actors feel that things were going too far: ‘Not everyone’s up to rolling around in broken glass. But my actors completely slipped into their roles and the broken glass and the filth never stopped them.’ In spite of the unpredictability of the journey she took her actors on, Ostertag did attempt to prepare them for their roles by showing them films such as Richard Kern’s Submit to Me Now (1987), chosen especially to help her actors discard any assumptions about acting ‘narratively’. Although there is no conventional narrative thread to guide us through the decaying dystopia, we feel compelled to continue through the dark by Saila herself, a damaged and fascinating female character, both fragile and vampy in equal amounts. It is Saila’s predatory side that ultimately wins out, which for Ostertag is the focal point of the story as well as what drove her to make the film.

Ostertag intended the character of Saila to represent a strong female identity, a female sexual fantasy even. Many women in the audience have told her that they find Saila’s character and her sexual encounters a strong turn-on. ‘It’s especially interesting that girls are getting turned on by the aggressive sex’, she says. ‘The way I picture sex is still an important thing for me. But I like it when girls also see the romantic side of the scenes and connect to them on a very strong emotional level.’ Ostertag points out that she has also heard the opposite point of view: some women find her approach to sexuality offensive and believe she is pushing things too far. This is the filmmaker’s response: ‘I can never figure out exactly what it is that they mean by “too far”. Maybe they think that girls are not allowed to have fun in that way, even when it is depicted from a girl’s point of view.’ Ostertag concedes that as a female director it is easier to push these kinds of representations of women further, that as a female you can generally ‘get away with more’. That said, Ostertag also admits that there are very few female directors working with these concerns, particularly in such a visually provocative way.

Siouxzi Mernagh

Want to find out more about the DIY cinema scene in Berlin? Read Siouxzi Mernagh’s article about Berlin squat cinema in the new print issue of Electric Sheep. Our spring issue focuses on Tainted Love to celebrate the release of the sweet and bloody pre-teen vampire romance Let the Right One In, with articles on incestuous cinematic siblings, Franí§ois Ozon‘s tales of tortuous relationships, destructive passion in Nic Roeg‘s Bad Timing, Julio Medem‘s ambiguous lovers and nihilistic tenderness from Kí´ji Wakamatsu. Also in this issue: Interview with Pascal Laugier (Martyrs), the Polish New Wave that never existed and comic strip on the Watchmen film adaptation + much more!