Searching for Sugar Man, a documentary about a long lost American musician who is rediscovered by his fans in South Africa, has been the subject of much praise. But having grown up in South Africa, I could not help being irritated by its conceits, despite enjoying the film. The latter have stayed with me while the entertainment value has waned.
I first encountered Rodriguez when I was 14 in 1978 in South Africa. In terms of Western pop culture we were very isolated. The Beatles had been banned some years ago and we’d only had TV for two years. But there were many chinks in the apartheid regime’s armour and the Rodriguez album Cold Fact somehow slipped through. The cassette I had sounded like Dylan but was more haunting, and there were names of drugs in titles and psychedelic references. There was even a song called ‘The Establishment Blues’. This was heady stuff for a young boy in South Africa. It was strange for me to witness such a small cultural breath of my past blown up to such mythical proportions – as this film does in so many ways.
To keep it simple, there were generally two types of young white boys in South Africa in those days: those who played rugby, drank beer and got into fights; and those who listened to music and smoked dope. The latter crowd all knew the Rodriguez album forensically but we listened to a lot of other stuff and when I moved to Johannesburg in 1979 I discovered punk and everything changed. Us dope-smoking army dodgers thought we were cool and that apartheid was wrong. But our position was an extremely comfortable one – much like looking at the slaughter in Syria now but not doing anything about it, or people from Hampstead on Radio 4 being shocked about teenage pregnancy. We were nothing more than liberals. Those white South Africans who did make an effort to overthrow the regime made real sacrifices. I can’t imagine Joe Slovo or Albie Sachs were smoking joints and listening to ‘The Establishment Blues’ while operating for uMkhonto we Sizwe. Equally you’d be hard pressed to find a single African from those times who owned a Rodriguez album.
If you knew nothing of the tumultuous times in the 70s and 80s in South Africa, this film would have you believe that Rodriguez and his fans played a significant role in bringing down the regime. There’s good reason why they didn’t interview anyone who actually made sacrifices or lived in the township wars. They would never have heard of the guy. The myth perpetuated by the film and its nostalgic characters would have been laid bare and the subject of the film would have been far less relevant than they suggest. I know the film is about a tiny minority of liberal white guys but we’re led to believe that there were millions of them – there weren’t – and that they were somehow influential – they weren’t. What we’re left with is pure nostalgia for what was for most people a very dark time. Except for us Rodriguez fans. Well, it was kind of dark but we still had servants.
Passion Pictures, the people behind this film, are good filmmakers and the narrative is very well crafted. But it is like giving a documentary a Hollywood makeover – not in terms of production gloss but in terms of myth-making to suit the needs of entertainment. The claims of Rodriguez fans somehow being on the frontline of anti-apartheid activism are insulting to everyone who actually did something. The film plays into the nostalgia of middle-class white guys who like to think that they made a difference by simply having a counter-cultural attitude. It’s not true and the truth and joy in the film of finding a long lost musical hero is built on a serious conceit. But you can still enjoy the film. I did, but it’s nothing more than a fairy tale.
Mark Aitken
For more information on Mark Aitken’s latest film, about a Mexican mental asylum run by its patients, please visit deadwhenigothere.org.
When considering the origin of life on Earth, it’s worth thinking of the planet as a giant petri dish. Between 3.9 and 3.5 billion years ago life began to evolve. It’s unknown exactly what started the conversion of the primordial soup into the single-celled and then multi-celled organisms that would first populate the seas and then climb out of them, but there are two main theories. Abiogenesis suggests life naturally began to evolve when the surrounding conditions of the soup, the temperature of the Earth, cloud cover and so on, became ideal for the amino acids in the quagmire to start to coalesce. The other, exogenesis, requires an outside element, some kind of cosmic dust (rather than, say, a dissolving 8-foot albino humanoid) falling to Earth in a meteorite and starting off the chemical reactions.
The exogenesis theory is part of the notion of panspermia: that life – in the form of dormant bacteria (perhaps from the disintegration of older planets) floating through space – might seed a planet like ours and lead to the long process of evolution. More fanciful ideas of exogenesis and panspermia involve fully formed aliens (rather than bacteria) landing in spaceships and using the planet as a laboratory to create new life or give the existing fauna a push in the right direction.
This science-fictional concept was at its most popular in 1968 thanks to the book Chariots of the Gods: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, written by Swiss author Erich Anton Paul von Dä;niken, who, not long after the publication of his most famous pseudo-scientific work, was arrested for other successes in the fields of fraud and forgery, in particular the embezzlement of $130,000 over a twelve-year period. The uncredited co-author of the book, filmmaker Wilhelm Utermann, found fame for disseminating another story that captured the imagination of the public a decade later – the adventures of the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music.
Chariots of the Gods puts forward the theory that aliens visited the Earth in ancient history and had a hand in forming religions and civilisations. The popularity of this notion in the late 60s was further bolstered by the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the same year. Kubrick’s film shows aliens playing an active role in evolution, leaving a black monolith in prehistory, which inspires our primate ancestors to first pick up tools, and another on the moon to act as a calling card, suggesting that modern man, having found this second monolith, should travel on further to the next sign post on the galactic road.
All of the above, in a tangential way, brings us to the $120 million entertaining sci-fi epic Prometheus. Including elements from the science and pseudo-science I’ve talked about so far – the film mixes elements of panspermia, exogenesis, Chariots of the Gods, alien star maps and so on – Prometheus is a prequel to the seminal (and I mean that in every sense of the word) sci-fi horror film Alien (1979). Its status as part of the ongoing Alien franchise is something that the filmmakers became ambiguous about as the film neared release, which is understandable given the failure of many recent prequels. Furthermore, ‘prequel’ implies a direct narrative link to an existing story, which Prometheus doesn’t specifically have; the film certainly puts some of the 1979 film’s events in motion but it doesn’t end in a way that immediately sets up the plot of Alien, so using the term ‘prequel’ could lead to disappointment.
That said, I think any fan of Alien who sees Prometheus is much more likely to be disappointed not by the lack of explicit joining of dots, but rather by the poor quality of the dialogue and plot details that drive the film forward. There are lamentable lines of dialogue such as a geologist defining his character with the immortal line, ‘I’m a rock guy, I fucking love rocks’. Another problematic area is the cavalier attitude the characters display while on a scientific mission (compared to the miners in the original film, who might be forgiven for their actions): they open their helmets in an alien environment; finger the exogenic slime in a subterranean chamber; and try to befriend extra-terrestrial snake creatures when they rear from said obsidian goo… These are dumb movie characters acting in dumb movie ways and saying dumb movie lines; something that was not true of the original Alien films but did characterise the Alien vs Predator spin-offs, which this new film was supposedly created to replace and eradicate from our memories.
In fact, Prometheus can’t help but evoke the first AvP movie (2004), which echoes Chariots of the Gods with the existence of an ancient Mayan-style temple covered in alien symbols built beneath or before the Antarctic permafrost; this was designed as a weapons testing ground and discovered by a group of archaeologists, led by the titular head of the Weyland Industries corporation. That film received a worse critical reception than Prometheus has and certainly is the less impressive film of the two, but it also contained the input of some of the creators of the original Alien, in this case, the writers rather than the director.
There is one thing that AvP does better than Prometheus: the lighting of the sets. Much of the atmosphere of Prometheus is undone by overly lit chambers, in contrast to the stygian locales of Alien, which allowed the eponymous creature to hide in the shadows and create a genuinely disturbing world. One of the reasons for the existence of Prometheus seems to be to render some of the unused designs H.R. Giger had produced for the original film, such as the wall relief depicting the messianic original alien, a giant head in a mysterious cavern and more of his archetypal biomechanoid set designs. While it’s great to be able to see these on screen finally, having them too well lit destroys much of the atmosphere that made the first film so great.
Prometheus tries to be scientifically credible – the recent discovery of extremophiles, creatures that can withstand environments we didn’t believe could sustain life, improves the odds of finding life on another planet or moon – but it ultimately disappoints for having loftier aims than its predecessors, which it doesn’t realise in nearly as satisfying a way. In its characters and scenarios, Prometheus mines the rest of the franchise. Ripley’s iconic flame-thrower makes a return, as do mad scientists who mix alien DNA with humans – previously seen in Alien Resurrection (1997) – and an emotionless android who acts both in the interests of his human colleagues (as did Bishop in Aliens, 1986) and against them (as did Ash in Alien), and meets the same fate as one of his fellow robots. All this means that you could see the franchise itself working as panspermia, with characters and plot elements dispersed among the sequels where they take root and grow in different directions. Prometheus sows the seeds for a possible sequel, and leaves the door open for its makers to try and correct their flawed creation through further evolution in a future Prometheus 2.
A man in a scrap yard cuts a gash in his leg and then shoves in a metal rod. Later he finds maggots in the wound, runs down the street screaming and is hit by a car. And we’re off.
Released in 1989, actor/director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo is an utterly inspired and darkly hilarious black and white romp. According to Wikipedia, there is a story but it is only sketchily revealed as the film progresses, and even if you’re glad of a synopsis, you’ll be perhaps healthily distrustful. Stuff happens certainly, but the whys and the wherefores are almost beside the point. The point is the energy with which the film is shot through and the inventiveness and downright oddness of Tsukamoto’s vision.
The man with the rod in his leg (played by Tsukamoto himself) pursues the couple who were driving the car and exacts revenge upon them by turning the bespectacled man (Tomorowo Taguchi) gradually into metal. It starts with his electric razor hitting something in his cheek which tings, then there’s a demure-looking woman at the railway station who turns into a metal-infected demon. From the very beginning, we are in a universe of extreme physical craziness. Parts of the film feel like elaborate dance numbers, a danse macabre of metal, flesh, wires, sexual organs, memories, television screens, guilt, rust and blood that sprays as black as oil. The acting is exuberantly physical and pitched operatically high, wavering between terror, agony, wheezing anxiety and all-out panic. The dialogue all the while blankly denies this. As Taguchi undergoes a metallic rupturing in the next room, he reassures his wife: ‘Nothing’s the matter.’ There is a dream sequence in which the bespectacled Taguchi is anally raped by his wife with a snake like probe. But to say ‘there is a dream sequence’ is to misleadingly suggest that there can be such a distinction between dream and reality. In Tetsuo, reality is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
Often compared to David Lynch’s Eraserhead and the early work of David Cronenberg, Tetsuo is actually in a league of its own. In comparison, Lynch’s film is a stately, brooding work of quiet desperation, and Cronenberg, although thematically radical, is stylistically conservative, often filming with TV movie reserve. Tsukamoto directs like one of his possessed characters. Everything is thrown at the screen from stop-motion animation to camera trickery: the camera races down streets and through alleys and the percussive soundtrack hammers along with growing intensity. Although the comment that a film resembles a music video is often meant dismissively, here the comparison is perfectly apt.
The pace of the film ends up having a logic of its own as it rushes headlong towards a collision between the now almost totally transformed victim and the demonic joyous fetishist. This is what the narrative really is: a process of initially vicious but energetic mutation. There is sex and there is the idea that we are perhaps just machines anyway. The drill penis seems like a literal realisation of our own violent idiom, talk of screwing, nailing, banging, etc., which reduces (or promotes) sex to a kind of carpentry. We are machines that use machines. From the car to the electric razor, we are already intimate with machinery and metal. The naked lunch of forks scraping against teeth reveals our daily internalising of metal. When the main character is remembering something (usually having sex with his wife), we see it through the stroboscopic screen of a portable television set.
And yet, the horror is, in this metaphoric resemblance, becoming identical to a machine. While we see ourselves becoming increasingly reliant on technology and ever more intimate with it (a blue tooth you stick in your ear, a touch pad), Tsukamoto’s maniacal insistence takes the relationship between man and machine to a literal, if bonkers, conclusion. The Godzilla-like monster that threatens to destroy Tokyo and the world at the end is merrily apocalyptic. The film ends with the cheeky letters stamping out ‘GAME OVER’.
A far more conventional film than its predecessor, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer was made in 1992 with a significantly bigger budget and yet is still mad enough for many. This time round, Tomorowo Taguchi plays Taniguchi Tomoo, a sort of Japanese Mr Bean, similar to the role he played in the first film, but now with a wife, Minori (Keinosuke Tomioka) and child. Shin’ya Tsukamoto once more plays the catalyst for the story, Yatsu, the leader of a violent skinhead cyborg army who kidnap Tomoo’s child and by enraging him cause him to start changing into a terrifying metal weapon. Whereas Tsukamoto’s first film was a low-budget anarchic helter-skelter of accelerated mutation, Testuo II is sporadically and superficially punk. The Iron Man disdained to have a story, but Body Hammer has a familiar-to-the-point-of-bog-standard thriller plot of the weak-willed family man being pushed to the edge by ruthless violence. If they do an English language remake, Liam Neeson can play Tomoo.
Of course, this being Tsukamoto, the plot pushes itself over into parodic lunacy. Tomoo has a Rocky-like training montage in which his feeble attempts become metallically assisted. There are stock figures: a mad scientist who wears a white coat and talks about his brilliant brains, just before said brains get visibly blown out, and villains who grin, jibber and sneer. There is a car chase, during which Tomoo pursues the villains on a push bike, mutating as he goes until he is able to ram the car with his bike. It is witty and absurd, but the wit and the absurdity seem to be at the service of a plot rather than being the point itself. The villains dress like punks – one of them obviously gave Laurence Fishburne costume tips for the Matrix sequels – but the film’s radical vision seems to have become watered down, or exhausted itself.
Perhaps this was inevitable. Iron Man was really like watching a ménage á trois between metal, rust and sex. This wasn’t a story about mutation but mutation as story. World destruction arrived at the end, almost as an afterthought, something glibly funny to do with all this power. The cause of the mutation wasn’t explicitly given – the man didn’t get bitten by a radioactive spider or anything like that – and as brilliant as Wikipedia is, the plot is a reading into the film rather than a description of what we actually see. The first film has no characters as such. There is Man and Woman and Metal Fetishist. The limit of all this was that the film didn’t have much to say. It was a disturbing nightmare that left you confused – was supposed to leave you confused.
In Body Hammer, the family has arrived, and with the family comes narrative proper. The beginning, middle and end of narrative are the child, the parents and the holy ghost. A poisonous family romance (we will eventually learn) is behind the whole fracas, a wicked father, fraternal estrangement and oedipal passions. It is Tomoo’s old family that has effectively destroyed his new one. Body Hammer has explanations, exposition for crying out loud, and as such feels like the smaller film, despite having a more ambitious agenda. The concluding apocalyptic fusion is effectively a repetition of the ending of the first film and feels like an admission that it has nowhere to go.
The East End Film Festival opens on 3 July and runs until 8 July 2012. The Tetsuo double bill screens on 4 July at Hackney Picturehouse. For more information please visit the East End Film Festival website.
Carol Rifka Brunt grew up in leafy suburbs of Pleasantville, New York. She headed to Scotland to study English and Medieval History, and ended up with an MA in Philosophy. She started to write in Amherst, America, and now lives on the edge of Dartmoor, where she’s going to stay as long as she can because she can ‘walk right out the front door into the woods or onto the moor or into town’. It’s also where she managed to finish her debut novel, Tell the Wolves I’m Home, a lyrical coming-of-age story, where jealousy and shame, love and loss shape the life of teen June Elbus. EITHNE FARRY
OK, so I’m cheating a little here. I should choose just one of them. But the concept of alter ego is a little hard to pin down. Does it mean somebody who is very much like you or does it mean somebody who embodies who you want to be – someone living a life you aspire to? And aren’t we all just a big mixed bag of different identities anyway?
So, I’m going to cheat and choose two of my very favourite cinematic characters from one of my very favourite films, Harold and Maude, from the 1971 film of the same name. Harold is an aimless, hearse-driving, 20-something gloomy young man. When he’s not faking his own suicide he’s out attending the funerals of strangers. Harold is a worrier. You get the sense that it takes him a long time to fall asleep at night.
Maude is a tiny 79-year-old woman who’s in love with life. She loves people and plants and art and pretty much everything that comes her way. She doesn’t believe in ownership and regularly helps herself to the vehicles of others when she needs them. Everything is beautiful and ephemeral to Maude.
These two meet and before long they are the closest of friends – yes, closest. There’s this moment when Harold presents Maude with the gift of a cheap arcade coin he’s had engraved with the words ‘Harold loves Maude’. It’s a serious, meaningful moment for him. Maude takes the coin, tells him it’s the most beautiful gift she’s ever been given, then promptly tosses it into the lake behind her. ‘So I always know where to find it,’ she tells the wounded Harold. I love that.
Harold is all inwardness and Maude all outward. Harold is who I mostly am, but there is also a little Maude in there. Maude is who I hope to be. In my mind my old lady self will be as generous and loving and carefree as Maude. In my mind I think I will one day leave the worried, anxious Harold behind, just as Maude does in the film. Or maybe not leave him behind, just get him to lighten up.
On one of their first meetings Maude asks Harold, ‘Do you dance? Do you sing and dance?’
‘Uh, no,’ Harold says.
‘I thought not,’ Maude replies.
Maybe that’s what I’m hoping for. That the Maude in me will teach the Harold to dance.
The work of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz may at first appear wildly disparate, ranging as it does from a ghost story (The Ghost and Mrs Muir, 1947), to a satire of the show-business world (All about Eve, 1950), a Shakespeare adaptation (Julius Caesar, 1953), a four-hour historical epic (Cleopatra, 1963), a murder mystery (The Honey Pot, 1967) and an ironic Western (There Was a Crooked Man, 1970). But there is one clear thread that runs through all these films: they are all concerned with the human heart’s seemingly infinite capacity for perfidy and betrayal.
In Mankiewicz’s most famous opus, All about Eve, the ambitious young woman of the title will stop at nothing to get what she wants: become a famous actress. She ingratiates herself into reigning stage star Margo Channing’s circle of friends, playing the sweet and humble ingénue, but in fact ruthlessly manipulating the women and seducing the men to achieve her goal. It gradually becomes obvious that everything about Eve is an act: her modesty, her gratitude, the story of her past – even her name is not real. We will know ‘all about Eve’, the narrating voice of cynical theatre critic Addison DeWitt promises in the opening scenes, as she prepares to receive an award at a ceremony. And slowly the film reveals the truth about the young star we see feted at the beginning: Eve is a construct, her identity nothing but a performance.
The young woman who calls herself Eve is frighteningly driven, and yet Mankiewicz is too keen an observer of human nature not to acknowledge that her treacherous machinations would not succeed if it weren’t for the frailties, weaknesses and blindness of others. Eve’s youthful charms make Margo jealously paranoid; her seduction of middle-aged writer Lloyd Richards, who falls for her apparent innocence and fake tears, is predictable, and his wife Karen, who at that point sees through Eve, is unable to stop the inevitable. ‘How could I compete?’ Karen asks one night, before Lloyd rushes off to the bedside of his supposedly nervous young star. ‘Everything Lloyd loved about me he’d gotten used to long ago’. Mad with insecurity about her age, Margo almost causes what she fears most to happen: that Bill should leave her. As for Karen, she only becomes aware of Eve’s true nature after she’s let the young arriviste manipulate her into betraying her best friend, simply because she thinks the latter needs to be taught a lesson.
Eve is also not the only one to act out her life, and this could be said about everyone else in the story – it is only a matter of degree. In All about Eve, all is theatre, and the unreal is more real than reality. It is one of the key themes of the film, and one that recurs throughout Mankiewicz’s work, most clearly in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), The Honey Pot and Sleuth (1972). The dialogue in All about Eve makes the parallels between life and theatre abundantly clear; so does Bette Davis’s magnificently flamboyant and volatile performance as Margo. During the star’s stormy birthday party, Karen explains: ‘Margo compensates for underplaying on stage by overplaying in reality’. After an argument, Margo goes off to bed, followed by her boyfriend, director Bill Simpson. ‘Too bad, we’re going to miss the third act, they’re going to play it off stage,’ says DeWitt, watching them disappear upstairs. Later, a row between Margo and Bill is played on the theatre stage. And Eve becomes Margo’s understudy, not just on the stage, but in life too, insinuating herself into the most private aspects of Margo’s life, including her relationship to Bill. But she is not interested in the person that Bill is, or later in Lloyd; she is only interested in them as a director and a writer respectively, both highly respected and successful. Her whole life is theatre. And that is where the line is drawn: no matter how dramatic the rows and reconciliations, there is real love between Margo and Bill. Eve’s only love is theatre.
Eve may be ‘an improbable person’ in DeWitt’s words, but there are many more like her. At the end, Eve finds a young girl in her hotel room, who calls herself Phoebe and dreams of being a star like her. As the actress rests, Phoebe puts on Eve’s coat in her bedroom, holds the award Eve has just won, and admires herself in the mirror, her image reflected to infinity by the multiple mirrors. Eve represents the eternal drive to fill the emptiness inside with applause (like ‘waves of love’, she says), to create one’s self from the reflection in spectators’ eyes, and new Eves will always come, eager to carve out their place in the limelight, no matter what it takes.
Despite the pain inflicted on the other characters by Eve’s deceitfulness, it also has positive consequences. Her perfidy is a catalyst that forces Margo to face reality and make difficult decisions about Bill and her future that ultimately lead to happiness. This nuanced take on betrayal also underpins A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Mankiewicz’s previous, and equally successful and Oscar-winning, film. It centres on three well-to-do women on their way to a picnic on an island, who receive a letter in which the town’s temptress reveals that she has left with one of their husbands. Stuck on the island for the day without any means of finding out which husband has left, they think back on their respective relationships. The threat of infidelity forces them to reassess their marriages, realise what is important to them, acknowledge their problems and try and fix them when they eventually return. In this instance, the possibility of betrayal leads to a happy ending.
In the earlier The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), Mankiewicz was not as optimistic, and the only trusting relationship the heroine of the title can enjoy is with a dead man. Recently widowed, Mrs Muir, played by the angelic-looking Gene Tierney, buys a house by the sea that is haunted by its previous owner, a rugged sea captain played by Rex Harrison. A lovely relationship develops between them, until Mrs Muir is wooed by caddish writer Miles Fairley, and the Captain disappears to allow her to form bonds with the living. Mrs Muir assumes that Fairley intends to marry her and is devastated when she inadvertently finds out that he is in fact already a married man, and that it is not the first time he has behaved in such a way. Giving up on ‘companionship, laughter, love’ after this heartbreaking betrayal, she spends the rest of her life alone in the cottage. But when she dies, the Captain re-appears to take her away. They walk together through the door and into the mist towards the sea in a poignant, bittersweet ending: Mrs Muir could not find companionship among the living because they either tried to control or deceive her, and only with death does she find the love that she craved.
In 1953, Mankiewicz’s interest in treachery took a historical (and literary) bend. With his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, starring Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, James Mason as Brutus and Louis Calhern as Caesar, the director tackled one of the most famous betrayals in Western history. Shot in oppressive, austere black and white, it depicts the bloody consequences of the lust for power in stylised sets, stripped down visuals and charged camera angles. Mankiewicz would return to these historical events with Cleopatra ten years later. In this famous four-hour-long, money-guzzling Hollywood epic, Elizabeth Taylor is the imperious Egyptian queen whose relationships to, first Caesar, and after his death, Mark Antony (Richard Burton), are as politically as personally passionate. The whole story hinges on the multiple betrayals perpetrated by lovers, spouses, enemies, rivals, soldiers and servants: treachery is the motor of this most eventful of historical periods. An early comment made by Caesar as the wily Cleopatra watches him in secret, through hidden holes in the wall, sets the tone from the beginning. Asked by his generals if he intends to trust Cleopatra, he replies: ‘Trust, not for a minute. Trust. The word has always made me apprehensive. Like wine, whenever I’ve tried it the after-effects have not been good. I’ve given up wine. And trusting.’ This, of course, does not save him from the murderous treachery of his political rivals.
The 243-minute original theatrical version of Cleopatra has been digitally restored and will be released in UK cinemas from 12 July 2013, showing at London’s Curzon May Fair and select cinemas nationwide. More information about screening dates and venues can be found here here.
Cleopatra nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox and derailed Mankiewicz’s career, and when he returned to the directorial chair in 1967, it was with a more humorously disillusioned view of human nature, which his last three feature films all share. In The Honey Pot, the rich Mr Fox invites three former lovers to his palace in Venice, feigning a deadly illness and telling each that he will bequeath his wealth to them. All three lovers are disloyal and greedy, and this set-up is the start of a web of intrigue and manipulation that starts in comic mode and ends in murder. Both There Was a Crooked Man and Sleuth pitch two men representing very different world views and morals against each other in a deadly battle of wits. In the former, Kirk Douglas is the unscrupulous outlaw trying to escape from the prison run by Henry Fonda’s upright warden, so he can recover the stolen money he hid in the desert. In Sleuth, Laurence Olivier is the ageing upper-class gentleman playing dangerous games with his wife’s young working-class lover (Michael Caine).
All three films have an interest in gambling and game-playing (highly theatrical games in the case of The Honey Pot and Sleuth) and reconnect treachery to the French origin of the word, ‘tricheur’, a cheat. At the beginning of The Honey Pot, when Fox, as part of the elaborate charade he plans to stage for his former lovers, interviews part-time gambler and would-be actor McFly to be his ‘stage manager’, he asks: ‘McFly, wouldn’t you say that ‘making it’, as you put it, in both Las Vegas and Hollywood, had much in common as gambling ventures?’ Here again, life is theatre, and surviving in theatre is not much different from gambling successfully. Wealth is a façade maintained by characters hoping that this illusion will get them the real thing. And the many secret doors and passages are in keeping with the tricks and sleights of hands they perform. Sleuth marks the culmination of this theme. Olivier’s Andrew Wyke plays cruel, humiliating games with Caine’s Milo Tindle in a mansion crammed with strange toys, including an all-white puzzle and an ancient board game. When Milo seeks revenge, the game turns into a vicious, unpredictable power struggle, alternately dominated by each adversary as they reveal the aces up their sleeves.
But the immoral tricheurs in these films are not the ones who win the jackpot. In There Was a Crooked Man, Kirk Douglas’s gleefully amoral, cynical Paris Pitman thinks nothing of eliminating his accomplices to keep all the money from a burglary committed at the very beginning of the film. Henry Fonda’s Woodward Lopeman could not be more different from Pitman: a principled, idealistic man who believes in rehabilitating the convicts by improving the prison environment. And yet, even though Pitman betrays, cons and manipulates everyone for his own interest, he shows up the limits of Lopeman’s progressiveness and socially determined, rigid moral code, questioning the latter’s plan to hang a 17-year-old accidental murderer. In the end, pushed by Pitman’s destruction of all he had worked for, Lopeman foregoes his moral principles and is the one to profit from Pitman’s crimes – who is the most immoral of the two?
The Honey Pot ends with a similar twist. The mousy nurse of one of Fox’s former lovers, Sarah Watkins, is described throughout the film as the Voice of Morality. She tries to do the right thing, believes love is more important than money, and warns Fox when she thinks he’s in danger. And yet, her very goodness may in fact force the killer to commit another murder. Her innocence is as dangerous as the treachery of all the other characters, because she doesn’t play by the rules of the game – honesty can be just as deadly as dissimulation. And in the end, having done the right thing throughout the film, she performs a little trick of her own, and, as in There Was a Crooked Man, the Voice of Morality ends up profiting from the crimes of others.
The ambiguous morality of the final films and the complexity of human nature throughout Mankiewicz’s work are mirrored in intricate narrative structures: his films are full of flashbacks, labyrinthine plots, dizzying twists and turns and restricted points of view. His work has been criticised as stagey and static, but that may be because he was more interested in human nature than in showy décors. His sets may be often stylised, but they are always used to convey aspects of the story visually. The lighting is expressive, the mise en scène meticulously precise, the dialogue razor-sharp, the narrative structures as dense and convoluted as the human heart. It is theatre, yes, but it is the theatre of life.
My first memory of watching Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is on New Year’s Eve 1983. A family friend had a new VHS player and I, my mum and her partner had been invited round. I remember the images blinking through the fog of cigarette smoke. We were watching in the dark, which was strange to my 11-year-old self. I was drawn into this world of sky-climbing buildings and the euphoric Vangelis soundtrack. I may also have nodded off for some of the time. I could see the clock on the video player shunting through the minutes, then hours, and gradually ease its way towards midnight. No one said anything, no one switched over to the TV for the countdown, no celebratory drink was poured, nothing. The display flicked to 0.00 and I wondered if I was the only one who had noticed. Far from feeling the coolest 11-year-old on the block, I felt cheated, and that, I suppose, is why the memory is so vivid. Now of course, I usually delete this emotionally weighty part of the story and give the cut version, that yes, I saw Blade Runner when it came out, and started my second decade well versed in cinematic sci-fi. Such is our capacity to retrieve and retell memories, to have our own variations of events.
Blade Runner is set in 2019, just seven years away from the time of writing, and the projected reality in the film appears to be close at our heels. Touch-sensitive, zoomable screens mimic Deckard’s (Harrison Ford’s) photo enhancer, and the division between organic memory databanks and digital data spaces is breaking down. Photo albums backed up on flame-proof Flickr, years of diaries turned into blogs or Facebook timelines that we can carry anywhere.
The film leaves you with a nagging feeling, a dark paranoia, that our memories are a key to our sense of knowing ourselves, a way of holding on to valued experiences. When Deckard shows he knows android Rachel’s (Sean Young) personal memories, she is heartbroken.
Deckard: ‘You remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window? Orange body, green legs, watched her build a web all summer, then one day there was a big egg in it, the egg hatched…’
Rachel: ‘The egg hatched… and a hundred baby spiders came out, and they ate her.’
Deckard: ‘Implants. They aren’t your memories, they’re somebody else’s, they’re Tyrell’s niece’s.’
Rachel, close up, in semi-darkness, has a lost, empty look. She shows an attachment to these memories that reveals the success of Tyrell’s project. She actually responds to betrayal as a human would. Of course, psychologists might tell us that memories are retained and pulled out of our mental archives for many reasons, largely involuntary. Nonetheless, for the most part, they feel like they are ours. It’s notable though that I write this at a time when neurologists are successfully implanting simulated memory traces of fear into laboratory mice. Memories now merge with film sequences, images seen before, dreams. We have to double-take and unravel the mess, driven by a need for authenticity. Facebook, with its best friend digital photography, allows this to happen publicly with sometimes thousands of photographs being uploaded to an individual user’s account.
Ridley Scott has released many cuts of Blade Runner. Noticeably, he marked every new video format on the market with a new version. To name some, theatrical versions were distributed on VHS in 1983, as was the Director’s Cut 1992. This was later released on LaserDisc in 1993 and was an early film to be released on DVD in 1997. A digitally remastered version of this DVD was put out in 2006 but with the 2.0 stereo soundtrack. The Final Cut in 2007 was released during the HD format wars and came out on HD DVD and Blu-ray with Dolby Digital Surround Sound 5.1. Each new version promised new answers. Would it finally reveal more of the beloved cult film, more cut scenes, more added scenes? Would Scott make any more suggestions that Deckard was a replicant? But this searching for answers is commensurate with the way the film in its various versions seems to shrug off our questions.
Part of Blade Runner’s appeal for me is its 80s futurist aesthetic merged with noir: Atari in neon; lip gloss with 40s hair rolls; oversized technology. It is a film made for clunky VHS distribution. The format’s very materiality is tied to the materiality of organic memory. It is in keeping with the human attachment to memory that is at the core of the film, where characters are driven by their questioning of the reliability of memory. To remember is a process of betrayal. We seek cogency from memories, but they exist as fragments, an affect, a trace, a sentence or two. The visual field produced by VHS is unstable, blurry, low-grade compared to contemporary formats. In Blade Runner, we see youthful faces against a metropolis that, although illuminated, remains in low contrast, where neon bleeds into incoherency and reds elude us. VHS magnetic tape corrodes with age and use and allows the surface to break down, the image and sound slip away, a dignified erosion. The VHS version of Ford and Young produces a romantic couple melting away with each watch.
What happens off screen is as important as the film fragments that fill our minds in a formulation of the memory of a film. Testament to this is a new generation of VHS collectors. A YouTube search for ‘my VHS collection’ reveals a category of uploads from teenagers discovering their parents’ VHS collection, or showing off their own Ebay purchases. A clip featuring a 1983 print of Blade Runner is a prime example. Here ‘VHS-ness’ is a prompt, a trigger and a way into the nostalgia for these films. The collectors seem to value the materiality of the tapes, fastidiously archiving various indices of authenticity. VHS boxes are carefully set out on makeshift backgrounds; the format involves a shot of the front cover art work, the spine of the tape box, the back, shots of the actual tape, the label and a recitation of the print dates. These collectors also proclaim the originality of their tapes by uploading opening previews and closing credits of their tapes in fierce competition. All this stands in for, and at the same time, is part of, the experience of the collected film. A way of feeling connected to the memory of the memory of the film (perhaps here their parents’) via memorabilia. Perhaps in the face of inorganic forms of digital communication such an activity has a special draw.
With the DVD format in the mid-90s came the remaster, a facelift for VHS. Films viewed through a haze of degrading magnetic tape were suddenly clear and crisp. With each release we have the new and still newer Rachel and Deckard. In Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007), Harrison Ford seems to have defied time. He plays a hyperreal, uncanny Deckard, inorganic, invincible and situated in an immersive, three-dimensional space. The VHS Deckard seemed in tune with time, ageing and decay. To watch a new version is to give in to the rewriting, to turn your back on an intimate connection with your version, your personal favourite. The memory of Blade Runner as was, is corrupted, replaced with fragments of the new, each replicant attempting to supersede the last.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
‘No one would ever pay 25 cents to stand in the rooms he grew up in.’ – The narrator on Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
The Western has its themes as large as the geology of Monument Valley and yet as intimate as a face. Masculine friendship is one of those themes. The plus side is a sense of kinship and solidarity, a closeness, a masculine friendship that runs from Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) and Shane (George Stevens, 1953) to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) and through to the thoroughly unsurprising, though at the time daring Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005). And yet it was always there, that need, that desperate need for companionship and self-realisation that a mere woman could never provide. After all, if women represent anything, they represent the end of the West. Be it Natalie Wood in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) as the confused end of the quest (whether she wants it or not) or Claudia Cardinale in Once upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968), who is not only the instigator for the death or departure of all the male characters but the end of Leone’s epic Spaghetti Western cycle. Women hadn’t featured at all, except in the tired dichotomy of Madonnas (Marisol) or sundry whores.
Friendship is all. It is an emotional connection that you can have while still remaining true to the West. It is as old as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or for that matter Huckleberry Finn and Jim, who in the end would rather go to hell than betray a man he comes to realise is his friend. The chalk and cheese buddy relationship would be the template for the cop buddy movies, in the same way horse operas turned to gangster movies.
The importance of friendship, the centrality of male friendship casts a long shadow though. The vulnerability and emotional neediness that stand behind the ideal of male friendship run against the emotional inscrutability and toughness that represent the macho ideal. The shadow such neediness casts is that of betrayal. Betrayal is to male friendship what adultery is to marriage, it at once contravenes all the rules but at the same time is the necessary definition for the relationship itself. Being married (in the traditional sense) is basically defined by exclusive sexual access, and so being married is about not being adulterous, but then again you can only be adulterous by at first being married. So betrayal is not only a contravention of friendship, it is another expression of it. It is always disappointed love.
Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch (1969) pursues William Holden’s Pike with something like ardour. In the events leading up to the betrayal we see Thornton’s capture taking place in the bedroom of a brothel with a get-in-the-way woman conveniently muddying the waters. The proximity of sex to the key moment, the seed of betrayal, sharpens the sense that in hunting Pike, Thornton is revenging himself against Pike’s betrayal of him. The blood bath that concludes the film also represents a choice that the men make. They turn from the brothel and the boring repetition of heterosexual sex to go out in a blaze of male-bonding glory. Pike will receive his first bullet from a woman who stands watching him from a bedroom mirror. ‘Bitch,’ he hisses as he blows her away. The violence of their demise will be better than sex in that it is irreversible. Instead of the innumerable little deaths of the orgasm, this is the big death of the Gattling gun.
Sam Peckinpah’s misogyny can only really be understood as a sop to his disappointed man love. He is heterosexually gay. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) pits James Coburn as the law man against his former friend and accomplice, played by a beardless and ultimately bare-chested Kris Kristofferson. There is a careful strategic deployment of whores in both The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, but they are only there for the biological ho-hum jiggery-pokery of sex. Love is something that is felt exclusively between men (and therefore so is murderous hate), and women can only get in the way and ruin the fun. It’s significant that in Billy the Kid’s demise Peckinpah refrains from his usual slow-motion bloodletting, as if he couldn’t bring himself to spoil Billy’s beauty.
Masculine betrayal bleeds through into other genres, but generally speaking it tends to be familial. Fredo in The Godfather: Part Two (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) is not the first brother to do a sibling wrong – think On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954): ‘It was you, Charlie’ – but it is a fantastic moment, as the fragile façade of an ethos falls to pieces before our eyes and we realise that this is just bloody mayhem, straight and simple. Not only is family not protected – the rationale behind Vito Corleone’s actions – it is corroded, torn apart. Even in science fiction, Lando Carlrissian’s betrayal of Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) is recognisably that of two cowboy chums with a long history.
The most recent and indeed the most thorough treatment of the topic comes in Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). Robert Ford is a pallid adolescent forever catching the breath of his own surprising emotions. His love for Jesse James is somewhere between fandom and embarrassing teenage infatuation. He spies Jesse in the bath, collects facts about him and fetishistically touches things that Jesse has touched. Jesse is well aware of the boy’s feelings and indeed courts them, disappointed as he is by the quiet anonymity of his own family life and his estranged relationship with his elder brother (Sam Shephard). In fact, James himself is a lost boy, a fact that the casting of a visibly ageing Brad Pitt emphasises. His little boy lost status is seen in his proclivity for practical jokes, little dances, pouty moodiness and occasional tears. Even his violence is childish: he sits on a child and tries to twist his ear off. It is schoolyard bullying writ large but bullying nonetheless and it explains his need for Robert’s adoration, even perhaps his need for death, which he already feels perhaps is coming too late.
The assassination (the word was introduced into English by William Shakespeare to describe Caesar’s death, which included the second most famous betrayal) itself is not a betrayal. The assassination is longed for, wanted. As with Judas, Robert is not so much Jesse’s adversary as his accomplice. He is armed by Jesse, given motivation, cajoled and threatened into it. The scene of the assassination is almost comic in the way Jesse is the director and Robert and his brother (Sam Rockwell) the reluctant actors. Jesse lays down his guns, positions himself with his back to his would-be killers and even gets to become a spectator in his own death as he watches Robert Ford raise his gun in the reflection of the picture glass that he is ostensibly intent on cleaning. An alternative title for the film could be ‘The Suicide of Jesse James Exploiting the Witless Ambition of Robert Ford’.
The true betrayal comes in the aftermath: the exploitation of Jesse’s death for personal gain. Initially, Robert and his brother are traumatised by what they have done, tearful and panicked, but in the space of time that it takes to run down the hill to the telegraph office they have become cocky and assured of their future fame. The theatrical replaying of the murder betrays not only Robert’s friendship with Jesse but also the integrity of the moment. It goes from tragedy via repetition to farce. But then of course the telling of the tale becomes, as with the Ancient Mariner, a curse: ‘By his own approximation Robert assassinated Jesse James over 800 times. He suspected no one had ever so openly and publicly recapitulated an act of betrayal.’ The psycho-drama enhanced by Charlie’s casting as Jesse and his increasingly uncanny portrayal seems like a punishment and already the audience begins to see through Robert’s self-aggrandising version of events, calling out ‘coward’.
By killing Jesse, Robert has only managed to facilitate Jesse’s resurrection via photography and theatrical representation. Robert’s own fame is initially intense but fleeting. He will be forgotten and if remembered, his name will be forever subsidiary to and blackened by his association with Jesse James. It will also make him fair game for the passing psychosis of the man who will kill him. As such the betrayal serves Jesse: he is the beneficiary. Christian martyrdom is, in the final analysis, an immoral aggressive act, a cornering, or better still, given the Chinese box presence of the media in Dominik’s film, a framing.
There is a stock image of the composer of classical music that we will all recognise from countless bloodless biopics: Gary Oldman’s Beethoven in Immortal Beloved, Richard Burton’s Wagner in the Tony Palmer series that bears the composer’s name, and more recently, Mads Mikkelsen’s Stravinsky in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. Each of them cut from the same cast-iron mould of intense, tempestuous, misunderstood genius. Each performance interchangeable with the rest, as though in order to compose classical music one were required to pull just such a personality off the rack and wear it like a gown as condition of entrance to the conservatoire.
And then there are Ken Russell’s films about composers. Such larger-than-life creations as Roger Daltrey’s Liszt (Lisztomania) or Robert Chamberlain’s Tchaikovsky (The Music Lovers) may be caricatural – even comic book – inventions, but they are at least their own caricatures. For all their largeness of life, they speak to some truth about the individual composer in question rather than reaching for some imponderably vague cliché about the eternal nature of artistic genius or some such.
Because of his real feeling for historical periods and the artists of the past, the personalities revealed as much by their music as by the lives they lead, along with the overblown and the two-dimensional (‘Satan himself – Richard Wagner’ from Lisztomania), we also get such enduring and curiously endearing characters as Max Adrian’s irascible Frederick Delius in Song of Summer, and Robert Powell’s febrile, neurotic Gustav Mahler. Such affectionate character sketches genuinely seem to bring to life the world from which their music has sprung.
And after all, it is clearly the music that Russell, who as a boy had harboured ambitions to be a ballet dancer, is most interested in. ‘Oh, I’ll tune to the fields and listen to the music of nature. Forget the immortals, I finished with them long ago,’ crows Delius, and it could almost be a personal manifesto for Russell’s approach to the composer biopic. So we have these beautiful images of the young Elgar horse riding through the Malverns to the sound of his Introduction and Allegro for Strings, or Georgina Hale (as Alma Mahler) frolicking in the Cumbrian hills (standing in for the Alps) to the strains of the Leider eines fahrenden Gesellen. Like all Russell it teeters on the edge of the absurd, the pompous, the bombastic, but somehow this road of excess leads us to some sort of palace of wisdom, opening up the music and bringing it to life.
Cast: Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan, Taner Birsel
Turkey 2011
150 mins
Combining relatively modest working methods with a highly distinctive visual sensibility, the films of Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan eloquently speak of the emotional impassivity that is an affliction of 21st-century living.
Initially a photographer, Ceylan’s first foray into the moving image was the short Cocoon (1995). Shot in striking black and white, with Ceylan also acting as producer, co-editor and cinematographer, the wordless film tentatively hints at the impossibility of companionship, one of the defining motifs of Ceylan’s work. A feature, Small Town, emerged two years later. Told from the perspective of two children, and in four entwined parts running parallel to the seasons, Small Town served notice of Ceylan’s gift for wry comedy and of his distinguished approach to framing characters and landscapes. Cementing Ceylan’s clarity of vision and his sensitivity to the delicate nuances of life, Clouds of May (1999) takes another crisply composed look at the vagaries of country living. An observation of people coming together, briefly interacting and then gently drifting apart again, the film is inscribed with a profound reverence for the lives of its characters.
Generally casting non-professional actors and family members, and continuing to call upon his increasing stature as a photographer, Ceylan brought these elements and his interest in estrangement to wonderful fruition with the autobiographical Distant (2002). The story of two remote relatives (Muzzafer Özdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak) awkwardly thrown together, the film renders modern Istanbul as a desolate, if intermittently picturesque, snow-cloaked metropolis, with the director drawing on Chekhov and Tarkovsky in his analysis of the alienating effects of urban life. The first film of the director’s to be selected for Cannes, Distant was awarded both the festival’s Grand Prix and the Best Actor prize, which was shared between Özdemir and Emin Toprak. The latter award was tinged with sadness as Özdemir, Ceylan’s cousin, was killed in a car crash shortly after the film was completed.
Ebru Ceylan has been a contributor to her husband’s films in a variety of guises, and Climates (2006) saw both spouses stepping in front of the camera’s penetrating gaze for an intense and unflinching look at the marriage of a successful Istanbul couple evidently on the brink of collapse. Wilfully blurring the distinction between on- and off-screen lives, Climates makes for frequently uncomfortable and emotionally devastating viewing, revealing Ceylan as a master storyteller who recognises and rigorously investigates the great potential for loneliness and self-destruction within us all. The first of the director’s films to be shot using high-definition digital video, the film captures with enhanced clarity and precision the stunning Turkish locations. The physical details of the protagonists are also beautifully rendered; witness the opening scene of Isa and Bahar frolicking, first playfully and then with the aim of causing provocation, on a golden sandy beach. Such moments lend Climates a pronounced and profound sense of intimacy.
Three Monkeys (2008) expands the unspoken dynamics of a dysfunctional family to society as a whole. Weaving a carefully calibrated maelstrom of violence, moral decay and ruined lives, this gripping psychological drama examines the fall-out from a hit-and-run traffic accident to present a darkly malevolent civilisation slowly suffocating through its own avarice and weakness. This is undoubtedly a dark and pessimistic work, though one still punctuated with flashes of characteristic black humour.
The winner of the Cannes 2011 Grand Prix, Once upon a Time in Anatolia, a title that nods towards Sergio Leone, stands as one of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s very finest achievements. Full of piercing insights and a finely tuned, somewhat macabre wit, this is an epic and rigorous tale of a night and day in a murder investigation.
In a short prologue, three men are drinking and talking. There follows a brutish brawl and hasty confession. A nocturnal convoy of cars is then shown travelling around the countryside as the confessor tries to remember where a body lays buried. After several false leads and a rest in a remote village, the corpse is finally discovered early the next morning. In the course of the long investigation, the hidden thoughts of the main protagonists are gradually themselves also exhumed.
Beautifully photographed in the Anatolian steppes by Gökhan Tiryaki, Once upon a Time in Anatolia is a meticulously constructed police procedural populated by bickering police and hard-bitten prosecutors. Based on an actual event experienced by Ercan Kesal, one of the three writers on the project alongside Ebru and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the film unhurriedly replicates the ebb and flow of human life, unfolding like a fascinating game of chess with clues and gestures ambiguously revealed. In one landmark sequence an apple falls from a tree, the camera tracking it as it bobs and ebbs gently down a stream. The director audaciously decides against showing the actual murder that triggers the search. Ceylan has commented: ‘If you want to find something, you have to get lost. I wanted viewers to lose their usual points of reference, before they slowly become accustomed to the light.’
Citing Chekhov (the film features a doctor, who from initially being a passive observer is gradually revealed as perhaps the key participant in the narrative) and Vermeer as inspirations and influences, Ceylan has crafted a bold and at times testing film whose primary interest would seem to be the concept of truth, and the manner by which we arrive at it.
‘I sometimes wish words could be my friends… you can’t shake hands with words, but they possess a feeling of nostalgic intimacy that even words themselves cannot describe.’ Shûji Terayama
Despite expressing such affection for words, Terayama, avant-garde poet, essayist, screenwriter, director and critic, called out for his readers to discard them in his 1967 collection of essays, Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go into the Streets. In Terayama’s universe, words escaped from the pages and found themselves elsewhere – and one place they found a home was on the screen. Perhaps more famous in Japan for his poetry and abroad for his theatre, Terayama first ventured into cinema as a scriptwriter for Japanese New Wave directors, before directing experimental films. Some readers may have heard his words spoken by the character of Nanami in The Inferno of First Love (Susumu Hani, 1968), screened in last summer’s BFI season devoted to the Art Theatre Guild. Yet, despite his legendary cult status in Japan, Western audiences have had limited exposure to Terayama’s cinematic adventures, a deficiency the Tate Modern will remedy for Londoners in March with their film and performance retrospective, Shûji Terayama: Who can say that we should not live like dogs?’
The moving image was never a mistress for Terayama and nor was poetry ever his devoted wife. Bed-hopping between images and words, Terayama was also attracted to the spontaneity and liveliness of performance-art theatre, the capacity for sonic exploration in radio, and the bodily exertion in boxing and horseracing, for which he provided insightful public commentaries. He never kept these relationships a secret; in fact, what he preferred were chaotic cross-pollinations and rampant art form orgies, with him as the voyeur. The words in Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go Into the Streets were hurled onto the stage in his stage vérité theatre production, and tossed onto the streets, only to get lobbed back onto the cinema screen for his first feature-length film of the same title (1971).
There will be a day-long symposium entitled ‘I Am a Terayama Shûji’ at tate Modern on March 23. This symposium will bring together experts and collaborators, including Julian Ross, Nobuko Anan, Shigeru Matsui, Henriku Morisaki, Steven C. Ridgely, Hiroyuki Sasame and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, to reflect on the diverse media blend created by the Japanese poet, photographer and film-maker, whose stated profession was always ‘Terayama Shûji’.
Terayama not only spoke, but also graffitied his poems onto the walls of Shinjuku and, most memorably, chalked them onto a football pitch, only for the letters to disappear into dust when trampled on by teens. In A Tale of Smallpox (1975) and Les Chants de Maldoror (1977), words are written onto the -image to obstruct our view. If words were indeed his best friends, Terayama certainly found a way to mess around with them, with his art as his playground.
Just as he forced his words to escape from the pages, Terayama saw the confines of the proscenium arch and the cinematic screen as limitations to overcome. In Pastoral: Hide and Seek (1974) and his play Inugami (1969), the walls of the sets collapsed to reveal their artificiality, as if he wanted the cinema, as well as the theatre, to burst out of their illusionary space and invade the streets. For the TV film American, Who Are You? (1967), made for TBS, and screened outside of Japan for the first time as part of the Tate’s programme, unsuspecting passers-by were suddenly confronted with a list of questions, thereby mutating a film shoot into a performance-art ‘happening’, then in counter-cultural vogue. In projections of Laura (1974), performer Morisaki Henriku literally jumped into the screen and appeared as an image. In screenings of The Trial (1975), performers and audiences hammered nails into the screen, most infamously at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1984. Terayama’s cinema refused to stay static, and was never at home when simply projected. It’ll be exciting to see whether his screen experiments, always interrupted by words or actors, still hold any relevance for us today.
Close-Up members get concession discount at the Terayama season. More details on the Close-Up website.
Julian Ross
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
