So where are we now? Cogito ergo sum? But not for me, say some. George Gershwin bought a depressed mate an upright piano in the American depression. I guess the British equivalent is getting an honour from the Queen, one of the few ‘keep on going mate’ encouragements you’re ever likely to receive in the Kingdom. My dear recently departed Mum would have loved the ‘Mam as in ‘ham’ not quite ‘corgi’s eye view’ doco Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work about Palace goings on. Even if you’re not a fan, you have to admit that Her Majesty makes you feel good about yourself (no matter who you are or where you hail from) and that you kinda trust someone who has seen more than her fair share of political shenanigans over the decades that would lead other less able mortals to far more than HM’s ‘gin debonnet’ tipple. You also believe that she has to make similar decisions about the mundane problems as suffered by her subjects such as plumbing (she doesn’t get a government handout either). Though whether that’s shown in the series remains to be seen.
London always slides as slowly as possible into Christmas around this time of year. Conspicuous consumption disguising a lackadaisical work ethic (New York remains ever vigilant as well as merry) only to wake up in the New Year and realise that it was all a succession of inebriated, optimistic one night metaphorical stands (or as Woody Allen might say, getting off on one leg is better than no leg off at all). Exacerbated this time by the gloomy economic/housing market/labour loans scandal news headlines forecast that any self-respecting, moderately intelligent undergrad laughs off as déjà vu from at least a year ago.
Pressure on Bank as house prices fall
Donorgate: 10 Labour bosses knew
However, does anyone remember a lead article in The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006:
Revealed: cash for honours scandal">Revealed: cash for honours scandal
"Des Smith, a council member of the trust that helps recruit sponsors for academies, disclosed that if a donor gave sufficient money, he could be nominated for an OBE, CBE or even a knighthood." The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006
Tate gets £50m for a new ziggurat
Zaha Hadid Puts the Fun Back in Funicular
If you’re feeling the blues then be heartened that Stephen Fry (a man not without numerous detractors I have discovered) won an Emmy in the States for his documentation of his own depression The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive. Brave man. He’s also done the script for Kenneth Branagh’s filmic adaptation of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Not well-received at all by Brit crits but I’m yet to see it, so I’m off the hook :) Poor Kenneth, his Sleuth received a critical mauling as well last week. I guess he doesn’t need our sympathy, but I’ve always admired the man for his tenacity and very un-English ‘go-gettingness’. I don’t think he ever got much encouragement either, ‘why don’t you direct another one of those nice plays Ken and forget about all that film nonsense’ they probably said. Maybe after his Emmy Stephen Fry’s BBC QI series will now get a BBC America slot for those Yanks hungry for mental stimulus.
Happy anniversary (FT article)
Police get little ray of sunshine
But prescription drugs only work for some people, some of the time. They will never the cure the ludicrous failings of government policy inflicted upon you or the envy and jealousy of others towards you. I still believe that Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971) could have been made yesterday without any historical anachronisms. It’s possible, of course, to cure or at least monitor yourself but it ain’t half easy. You’ll just have to wait for my book (and of course read this blog every week) on that one to emerge from its cocoon. Arm yourselves for the ‘Don’t kill the caterpillar!’ campaign. In fact it’s quite a pre-Christmas soul searching milieu in the cinema and on DVD without a lotta laughs. Even on Tele, Jack Dee’s (he’s the nice Brit ‘comic next-door’ who never smiles) Lead Balloon is a ‘The Office’ take on the shittiness (I’m sorry, damage limitation management) of everyday middle-class life.
Oz director Andrew Dominik (Chopper) garnered crits’ acclaim for his The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (also LFF)this week. Is it worth the 160 minutes of your time in the cinema? I’d have to concur, yes. You can read the whys and wherefores of this flic elsewhere but it’s quite rare for a mainstream film to be treading the turf of say more art house Robert Altman and his McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Terence Malick’s oeuvre being the most obvious comparison. Actor/playwright Sam Shepard pops up as Frank James (brother senior) but Dominik’s film has none of the wry humour found in Shepard’s plays. Nor does it have the grit and gruellish humour you find in Sam Peckinpah’s films. Dominik’s film is a forlorn character study, one of envy and idolatry from the viewpoint of 19 year-old Robert Ford (Casey Affleck). You may start wriggling in your seat as it trundles forth but the last 50 minutes really has you hooked with its shuddering contemporality. Ford’s celebrity after shooting James, soon wanes, but as we know James’ never dies. When the legend becomes truth should we print the legend? Few directors, if any, have really succeeded in docu-dramatising JOHN Ford’s paradox. “Men must have legends else they will die of strangeness,” wrote Dominik’s compatriot Oz poet Les Murray. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is, as always, breathtaking often using one of those 3D postcard effects around the edges of the film frame. Could his work have been a little stranger, though, to reinforce the paradox? Decide for yourself.
Deakins’ Oz camera compatriot Christopher Doyle who made his name in Asian cinema (Wong Kai-Wei, Chen Kaige) is DP on Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Invisible Waves out on DVD. (I wrote of Pen-Ek’s latest Ploy (The Times BFI London Film Festival last time.) Invisible Waves has the same existential pace as Ploy but Doyle’s input gives the film a real strangeness. “The film is about intention,” says Doyle on the excellent DVD extras, “it’s not a film it’s a relationship.” Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano is hitman Kyoji who takes a cruise ship to Phuket laying low from a recent job in Hong Kong. Scripted by Prabha Yoon, Pen-Ek initially wanted to make a ‘Clint Eastwood’ film noir style film. “Every place in the world is an island that must be linked through human travel...and this [idea] effectively conveys many themes,” says Yoon in his interview. Chris Doyle stresses the importance of the locations and the whole film has an intriguing Buddhist/Jim Jarmusch curiosity, fluidity and calm. Well worth seeking out this DVD from Tartan Films (but there's no link on their site).
Captain Ahab (Capitaine Achab), LFF and still no UK distributor, is based on Melville’s classic C19 Moby Dick, directed by Philippe Ramos, and narrated through five characters. Though much shorter, it has a feel akin to The Assassination of Jesse James allowing the characters to seep into the camera rather than the other way round.
Doco A Very British Gangster (Sundance Fest 07) is directed by one of Britain’s best known investigative journalists Donal MacIntyre. Welcome to Manchester and the well violent world of the Noonan crime family. MacIntyre spent 3 years with this lot and the doco never sensationalises them, though there are a few too many atmospheric camera tricks and Nina Simone’s Sinner Man over the final credits is a bit much.
The Killing of John Lennon, Andrew Piddington’s film journeying into the mind of Lennon’s assassin Mark Chapman is on release this weekend. (You’ll have to wait til Saturday for my pensées on that).
Hotel Harabati is French director Brice Cauvin’s first feature having worked as an assistant to many of the famous helmers. It opens with the classic script premise, an abandoned bag of money/a couple/what next? And Cauvin really keeps your interest with that even though not much happens in the first hour. With one eye on the money, you realise with the other eye that the film is much stranger and existential than you initially assumed. “I realised that there is always a betrayal in the rational explanation of things,” says Cauvin in his Director’s Statement. “Sometimes things seem to make sense, but often they just don’t. What I like in a written piece is that each spectator can chose his or her position. The truth can be found in the sum of the explanations.” He’d even prefer not giving his film a title. There’s a very simple slightly off-kilter score by Philippe Miller, too.
More existential delights with the master of them all Russian Andrei Tarkovsky and a re-issue of The Sacrifice (Offret) this week by Artificial Eye (including talks etc). I hadn’t seen this film in almost 20 years, and for those who don’t know, Tarkovsky is like a god to filmmakers. So much has been written about this extraordinary artist including his own book Sculpting in Time, Faber and Faber was the UK publisher but it's not on their website but Time Within Time is there . “Today the world is developing on a strictly material plane,” he wrote way back then. “The sole means of returning to a normal relationship with life is to restore one’s independence vis-à-vis the material things of life and consequently reaffirm one’s spiritual essence.” Watching it older and wiser, I realised why the professor feels he has to burn down the remote family home at the end of the film (probably not a good idea to take teenagers to this, unless of course, they’re like me and wrote about Liliana Cavani and Fassbinder for their A-Levels!). It becomes less about art and more about living and survival as you view it with age. But even as a youngster the poetic power of Tarkovsky’s vision will effect you. This is one director whose work you absolutely must see on the cinema screen. If you can’t attend some of the documentaries, there is a consummate Tarkovsky Companion available on DVD.
For a Lawrencian (that’s DH Lawrence) of life, Kino (in America) issues the DVD of Lady Chatterley this week, released here by Artificial Eye.
Baader’s Angels: Women’s Roles in German terrorism (ICA) is a brave and interesting pre-Christmas season of four films exploring the Red Army Faction (RAF) in 1977 Germany and whether or not armed struggle is the road to freedom. Greater Freedom-Lesser Freedom (Grosse Freiheit-Kleine Freiheit, 2000) directed by Kristina Konrad is an unsensationalising double portrait of a German RAF and a Uraguay woman doing the same in her country.
Network DVD has a Cuban perspective on the class struggle with their releases from ICAIC, Cuba’s equivalent of the BFI (British Film Institute). Humberto Solás’s A Successful Man (Un Hombre de Éxito) (Region 0) follows two leftist brothers pre and post Spanish Civil war, one who compromises and becomes a senator, the other refusing to relinquish editorial control of his newspaper. This film is far more than polemic and the female roles far better observed than many of their American counterparts. Interesting, sparse music score from Italian contemporary ‘concert hall’ composer Luigi Nono.
Beloved (Amada)
Cecilia (Cecilia Valdes)
The Twelve Chairs (Las Doce Sillas)
Empties (Vratné lahve) (LFF, distributed next year by UK’s Portobello Pictures) is an extremely funny Eastern European Czech unemployment movie. Yes, really. Jan Sverák of Oscar winning Kolya fame directs his dad (also scriptwriter) as a retired teacher who gets a supermarket job as a bottle recycler supervisor in the post-Communist era. That is until he’s ousted by technology. “Historically, we’ve been between Germany and Russia and the only thing we could do is laugh!” said Sverák in a post-screening Q & A. “This film’s allowed me to buy a new shirt,” he quipped. Co-producer Eric Abraham initially clicked with Sverák at a festival because “we both agreed that awards should be given for what’s on screen, and not be about the struggles of the filmmaker.” The use of classical music in the film is also superlative with a cheeky Mahler in-joke at the end and a Swan Lake for plastic bottles.
The visually sublime Silent Light (LFF a couple of blogs ago) by Carlos Reygadas opens in cinemas this weekend. A must see on the big screen. And LFF films we may not see here are The Lighthouse (Mayak), Japan’s The Mourning Forest (Mogari No Mori)- Cannes Grand Prix this year, China’s Tuya’s Marriage (Tuya de hunshi) and Sri Lanka’s Sankara. These are all beautiful, meditative films about our existence, the last three perhaps too indulgent sometimes in the imagery of cinema. But The Lighthouse directed and edited by Tarkovsky devotee Maria Saakyan is just that bit more special. The grainy look she initially intended (she claims :)through post-production came spookily true when the original master negatives were lost and everything had to be re-constructed through copies. Familiar story – an unspecified war with a granddaughter trying to persuade her grandparents to leave their Caucasus mountain village for safety. In person, Saakyan has that blissful air of having just flown with the cranes and this her first feature has that same quality of cinematic dance. I very much look forward to her second, apparently a comedy.
Brit TV soap/primetime director Joanna Hogg’s first feature Unrelated (LFF and winner of the 10th FIPRESCI International Critics Award) couldn’t feel less British. Her acknowledged influences are more the likes of Ozu and Japanese cinema. “I’m not interested in plot,” she said over breakfast, “in each moment there’s a little story. The complete antithesis to the Robert McKee school of screenwriting that I feel patronises audiences.” There are only two small camera moves in the entire film; the rest are static set-ups with no music score. Fortysomething Anna (Kathryn Worth) goes on holiday to an Italian village finding a motley bunch of Brits. There is a plot, of sorts, but what I found more fascinating was watching these characters exist within the film frame. Even if you know no English, there is a universality in their reactions that would speak in those tiny ‘moments’ Hogg referred to.
Mikio Naruse (BFI DVD)
One of the DVD peaks of the decade has to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz, originally a 13 part German TV series with an epilogue. (Criterion US set) Based on the 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin, Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) gets out of jail, tries to go straight in the tempestuous Berlin inter-war years but is drawn back into the vortex of humanity’s hopelessness, waylaid by Reinhold (Gottfried John) and his schemes but befriended by streetgirls Eva (Hanna Schygulla) and his beloved Mieze (Barbara Sukowa in her first major role). I remember watching this, also some 20 years ago I think on SBS TV (Australia’s then new multi-cultural channel with the irreplaceable David Stratton as their movies guru). It’s a momentous achievement on Fassbinder’s part but above all totally heartbreaking for the viewer. If you stay the course of the 15 or so hours you will never forget the experience. There’s an excellent disc of extras (making of, interviews etc), but most interesting being the restoration process. The series was shot on tiny 16mm negative film stock and with Arri’s new digital scanning and correction, cinematography Xaver Swarzenburger could finally achieve the look he originally wanted. Though the image is sometimes grainy, this analogue grain together with the sad, mellow browns creates a perfect period/psychological state. “It was all ‘hand-made’,” says the then 22 year-old editor Juliane Lorenz, “there were no mobiles and no computers!” The tabloid press at the time dismissed the entire enterprise as too darkly shot (a forerunner technique for many mainstream films in later decades)amongst many other numerous criticisms.
The characters are all too familiar to us, a ‘dime novel’ as Fassbinder described it, but it was the director’s dream since a teenager to film this book. It’s a territory also explored by Hungarian playwright Ödön von Horváth whose plays I produced in London, characters caught on the dangerous edge of things grinning as they fight for a footing on the rocks. “Reality isn’t real, one day it’s this then it’s that,” says Biberkopf. Peer Raben’s score is a bittersweet waltz of the spirit; Berlin Alexanderplatz is a New World but only for the strongest swimmers. “Give me your heart so I can throw it in the dirt,” says Reinhold to Biberkopf in the hallucinatory epilogue.
Facets (US DVD) Heimat also Our Hitler
Golden Door (Nuovomondo) my blog (Optimum DVD), (US DVD)
One of, if not the most extraordinary film you’ll ever see about an artist’s life is Brit Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch (Eureka DVD)(New Yorker DVD). At 210 minutes (originally telecast over two nights in 1974 and released in cinemas in a shorter version), Edvard Munch is arguably the best film there is about an artist’s life. I can think of Love is the Devil about Francis Bacon, Ken Russell’s oeuvre, The Quince Tree Sun, Camille Claudel, and Henri-Georges Clouzet’s Picasso portrait. Using actors in a documentary style – some dramatised, some interviewed to camera with an English narration (Watkins)- and using only Munch’s Diaries, Watkins succeeds in engrossing the viewer in Munch’s depressing world, his lack of acceptance by the public, disillusionment in love, and disillusionment of the sexually, morally repressive and hypocritical Norwegian society in the late C19. Maybe not a good idea to see both Berlin Alexanderplatz and Edvard Munch over Christmas. As is usual with Eureka, excellent print and large (80 page) informative booklet, but there are no disc extras.
Peter Watkins homepage
Eureka also has two exhilarating (I thought so) science fiction animation releases by Frenchman René Laloux, Gandahar (1988) and Les Maîtres du temps (The Time Masters, 1982). US distributor Harvey Weinstein championed Gandahar (interesting all post-production was economically done at North Korean studios in Pyongyang) but gave it an English language dub in an Isaac Asimov translation and asked for changes to Gabriel Yared’s brilliant score. The genius of these films is that they work both on a child’s imagination and an adult’s without ever compromising for either. Both explore the question of where and who is the enemy and who is it exactly we are worshipping. Maîtres has unforgettable characters. The little blobby shrews can read your telepathic “smelly thoughts”, and Piel is a child orphan from another planet forever cocooned in within the eco-system of an egg-like shell and parented through a microphone device from the outside world. The ‘baddies’ colonise by accelerating planets into the past so the inhabitants are unaware of the transition. Minimal extras but again good booklets. Not that cheery a vision of the cosmos either, so be prepared for the kids’ possibly awkward questions.
Facets (US DVD)Fantastic Planet
But there’s always Frank Capra’s comedy It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) shown almost every year on TV but now re-released in a brand spanking new digital print from Park Circus. Now there’s a good night out (nation-wide from Dec 14). It’s basically about an angel, Clarence Odbody, who’s only hope of getting wings is if James Stewart’s George Bailey stops wanting to kill himself and believe that his life truly is wonderful.
Samaritans DVD tie-in
2-Disc Collector's Set (US)
It really is a fantastic script with the simplest of ingenious moments like the opening’s alternate blinking stars in the sky speaking as angels, the crow in Bailey’s bank (did Pasolini borrow this for his Uccellacci e Uccellini? Capra was Sicilian and it might make Northern Rock depositors smile), and the Charleston scene as the dance floor divides into a pool. I hadn’t noticed this bit of trivia before but Stewart doesn’t really give the impression he’s a true smoker. And when you think about it, the idea of a studio greenlighting a movie whose star lead is committing suicide at Christmas is quite unbelievable then as of now. Is it all a bit home spun jolly American values, though? Well, not really. If anything, it chastises the worst of American consumerism and champions American’s grass-roots goodness. I can't say I believe in its world view (money does actually make you happy despite what anyone tells you) but I wonder if exiled German playwright Bertold Brecht liked it? I’ll try and find out. Till next time my loyal readers...
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