9th Circle of Hell

Scott Walker rarely gives interviews, and in the exclusive studio sessions filmed for 30th Century Man of Walker’s 2006 album The Drift, you see garbage bins with plant pots atop scraping away and racks of meat carcass flayed for sound. (Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the original Planet of the Apes used kitchen utensils banging pots and pans). Walker’s moroseness through rawness long ago attracted French enfant terrible director Leos Carax who asked him to score his 1999 film Pola X. It’s now available from those bastions of foreign film Artificial Eye in a box set that includes his first film Boy Meets Girl (1983) and The Night is Young (1986). Like Walker, Carax is difficult, enigmatic and hasn’t made a film since 1999 with opinions varying radically on the level of his talent. But uniquely talented he most certainly is.

Pola X is adapted from Melville's 1852 novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities (Pola an acronym of the book’s French title and X the 10th draft of the screenplay). Carax updates from New York to modern-day Paris and Normandy. Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu, Gerard’s son) has authored a cult ‘Generation X’ style novel under the pseudonym Aladin. Riding his motorbike through forests in the dead of night he meets a girl Isabella (Katerina Golubeva), who claims to be his half-sister. The rest of the film is Pierre’s descent into hell. He leaves his bourgeois mother (Catherine Deneuve) and blond ‘Laura Ashley’ girlfriend to shack up in an anarchists’ commune. Bit like Shakespeare’s Hamlet really. The lobby music of the huge warehouse is not Chopin but a band thrashing out Scott Walker. His publisher, Marguerite, warns him of his downward spiral to the truth by quoting fin de siècle Austrian writer Robert Musil: “This need to spit the world’s sinister truth in its face is as old as the world itself. One can’t resist one’s era without being swiftly punished by it.”

The Night is Young (Mauvais Sang or literally Bad Blood) has a plot allegedly (Carax says) stolen from Raoul Walsh’s 1945 film Salty O’Rourke. And its feel is definitely Godard American movie hommage: a science fiction thriller à la Godard’s Alphaville in which Alex (Carax regular Dennis Lavant) gets caught up with a jeune Juliette Binoche and a gang trying to steal the vaccine for a young lovers’ disease STBO. His first film, Boy Meets Girl, is shot in beautiful black and white by Jean-Yves Escoffier also cinematographer on Mauvais Sang. Charting the key moments of his newly defunct relationship on a crude Paris map hidden behind a print in his bedroom, Alex (Lavant again) wanders the Paris night time streets and meets Mireille (Mireille Perrier) an aspiring actress. They end up at at a kind of Celebrity Big Brother party for those seeking new ‘sell by’ dates. Carax is much more the romantic anarchist than ideological deconstructionist. Indulgent? Maybe. Seductive? Of course, but make another film soon please.

Look forward to Volume 1 of Optimum’s fantastic Godard collection but more of that next week. A Father’s Day present for recalcitrant outsiders, perhaps? Or maybe this set from Godard’s self-confessed Italian equal Piero Paolo Pasolini. Tartan Video has already issued Vol.1 and Vol.2 is also packaged with a novel, Ragazzo from 1955 for which he was indicted on charges of "obscenity". Also two rare shorts and great trailers.(An overview of his life in this Senses of Cinema essay.) Godard, originally a film critic, was an engineer of cinema, pushing and pulling the medium to break its limits and find new ones. Pasolini, originally a Marxist poet, weaves images and words mixing materials like a fashion designer. My favourite of this set is the black and white Hawks and the Sparrows (Uccellacci e Uccellini) 1966, literally big birds and little birds. Opening with Mao’s quote: “Where is mankind going? Who knows!”, it intelligently pokes fun at all the political ‘isms mixing Fellini (Pasolini worked on Nights of Cabiria), commedia dell’arte, with a wonderful St. Francis of Assisi send up where the two protagonists, Ciccillo and Nino, try to convert hawks and sparrows by learning their respective languages of, well, hawking and hopping. The pair has been prompted to do this by a left-wing intellectual talking crow, by the way, “The road begins and the journey is already over”. He hops along with them for most of the film until they get fed up with him and he meets a tasty end. The music is spaghetti western cult Ennio Morriconi and it’s the only film I know where the opening and closing credits are sung!

Pigsty (Porcile) 1969, is probably of most interest to cineastes as it’s been lacking a decent print transfer for ages. Tartan’s, as with the others in the set that also includes Oedipus Rex
(Edipo re) 1967, is absolutely pristine. It weaves two stories. One of a young bourgeois son Julian (Jean-Pierre Leaud) afflicted with indifference, his father an ex-Nazi industrialist. "I discovered that even as a revolutionary I was a conformist," he says to his girlfriend who’s off to piss for peace in Berlin. The other story (probably Julian’s hallucination) has a medieval knight (Pierre Clementi) who discovers cannibalism (opening shot of him quaffing a butterfly into his mouth) and thereafter does battle to feed himself. The browns and mauve greys of the volcanic wasteland look absolutely stunning here. Back at the villa, Julian’s father (Alberto Lionello) welcomes old friend Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi) and they enter into a dialectic justifying their political actions. “There comes a time when my abjection of pigs whose bellies can hold an entire social class is purified by regret of the past. And that’s where I’m wrong. When you think about the future [my abjection] becomes even more cynical. And that’s where I’m right, the ambiguity of goodness.” I.e. you can justify anything if you try and always smell of daisies. Of course pigs always receive a bad press and are, in fact, one of the cleanest animals. Julian is so screwed up by this inherited intelligence that he descends into screwing the grunting beasts finally being eaten “out of disobedience” to the social order. “He betrayed us all without ever promising to be faithful.” And it’s all not as hard as you think to watch and certainly more fun than those dialectical materialism textbooks.

Another wayward genius is Mexican (Chilean actually) Alejandro Jodorowsky, so wayward his country disowned his child of 1973 The Holy Mountain when it was revived on the beach at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. “I wanted to wake up [to heal] a society that has been ill since the Middle Ages,” he says of his art. This 6-disc set of his first four films from Tartan is another must for an aging hippy’s Father’s Day for many reasons (Holy Mountain and El Topo available singularly). The three features all have audio commentaries by the director, Holy Mountain (Don Cherry) and El Topo soundtracks are available here on CD for the first time, and the print of Holy Mountain (available only in bootleg copies for years because of Jodorowsky’s falling out with his producer, Beatles manager Allen Klein) is now fantastic thanks to restoration. The before and after are shown in one of the extra features and the colour differences are dramatic, indeed. Kinda important if you’re a visual poet, non? There’s also a feature length doco on the director. Check the Senses of Cinema essay for more info.

Jodorowsky has an extensive theatre background (I wanted to be the Cecil B. DeMille of the happening) that he blends with his rich visual imagination to create “a cinema better than LSD” and says he uses mostly non-actors and interesting weirdos and himself in the lead role. After The Holy Mountain, though, he failed in his attempt to film Frank Herbert’s Dune with Salvador Dali, Pink Floyd, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Alain Delon to name a few. George Harrison was to appear in Holy Mountain but, according to Jodorowsky, objected to showing his ass being wiped on screen! The Holy Mountain is all about the tarot “a great optic language that talks about the present. If you use it and see the future you become a conman,” Jodorowsky believes. The Alchemist (Jodorowsky) turns the Thief's excrement into gold, then offering to try it on his soul. The opening images are similarly provocative and unforgettable like the Toad and Chameleon Circus - real animals - the former in armour, and the latter dressed in Aztec outfits re-enacting the Conquest of Mexico on the real street. El Topo recently had an airing at the NFT in April – wow, but if you can’t track these films down in a cinema, this box set will do very nicely.

For a chill out, you could try the new DVD of the Pet Shop Boys tour Cubism live last year in Mexico City. The director is David Barnard (Björk, Gorillaz) and behind PSB’s cool, bourgeois exterior lurks pure anarchy. Songs about anti-ID cards (heard the latest New Labour anti-terrorism news?), suburbia, AIDS and the imprisonment of relationships with laid back audio commentary by Tennant and co. I couldn’t help humming and jiving along too.