With my last posting having said, "there is hope but not for us", along comes the teenage band I Can't Go On, I'll Go On competing in Bandslam. Certainly a film many cuts above the rest of post-post-modern teenage existential Beckettian angst (and with David Bowie's approval)...And in the month when 'keep the kids employed over the summer break' films abound, the question once again is begging: what effect does the cinema have on us? Dance Flick falls way short of Mel Brooks or Jerry (Airplane!) Zucker parodies while bravely travelling the hazardous route of political incorrectness in an attempt (some might say oftentimes feeble, unfunny and joyless) to make teenagers think about what political correctness really means in their lives. (one rather jarring scene proclaims street cred to be more important than inner respect). Funny gag? "You're wearing a pink shirt to a drive-by?"-"It brings out the colour in my eyes." Or the all-singing/all-dancing Joffrey Ballet's new opus: "Your Momma Died in a Car Crash" along with the Nick Nolte/Mel Gibson/Amy Winehouse drink-driving jokes (I think I left someone out..) Real life is always more excruciating, horrible, funny and downright depressing than any film could possibly hope for.
Would we assume that after seeing Todd Graff's well-crafted slasher thriller A Perfect Getaway that everyone we meet on holiday may be out to cut us up into mincemeat? Unlikely, given the expert 'tongue in cheek' tone of the film causing us both to giggle and toe-curl for a brisk 98 minutes.
So why are else are films there? To un-depress us? Quite obviously in many cases. Does it matter that Jacques Demy's 1967 French musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefortseems lacking the socio-seduction undercurrent of the director's 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? Can films make us go and rob a bank, mutilate another human, encourage sexual activity with a four-legged creature etc etc? Some censors would have us believe that this is absolutely so. That an Annie Liebowitz photo of teen pin-up Miley Cyrus bearing a tipple of nipple is somehow different to a Renaissance nude. As Hungarian director Béla Tarr Collection believes: "What is film for? It's not about telling a story...but about getting closer to people and understanding everyday life...human nature and commenting on our sins and how we betray one another." Tarr creates parallel worlds in black and white where time moves very slowly indeed and where estranged people meet in the rain and have discussions that both embody meaning and yet seem inconsequential as in Damnation (Kárhozat) where "things have an order in the world and you can't upset them." As the director himself acknowledges of The Man from London (A Londoni Férfi): "almost a silent movie". Reality stares people in the face yet often they still fail to see it. Is that where cathartic celluloid comes in to play?
Gross-out Taxidermia directed by György Pálfi finally arrives in New York (Tartan in the UK last year) at Cinema Village.
25 year-old director Antonio Campos (Afterschool screened at last year's London Film Fest) acknowledges a huge debt to legendary American long-form doco filmmaker Frederick Wiseman especially Near Death: "the colloquialisms and cliched phrases that appear over and over when people grapple with mortality and loss." In Afterschool "I wanted to examine a community that has become accustomed over time to an almost abnormally sheltered and safe existence that has to confront the sudden impact of a violent death on its own grounds." Set in an elite American high school, for much of the film camcorder window images, including the corridor death of two beautiful girls shot by the main male character, fill the otherwise black widescreen canvas. With a Certificate 18, it's a film most teenagers won't be allowed to see. Yet they are precisely the ones who should. Many of the images are disturbingly graphic but the overall effect (for most) will not be one of titillation or voyeurism but of profound debate of their peer world.
Campos' Borderline Films
Rolf de Heer's 1993 Oz film Bad Boy Bubby gets uncensored, uncut director's version UK Blu-ray (and SD) release by Eureka with director and actor audio commentary.
Teenage bullying - just one of many these days.
Helen (another film that must be seen on the big screen) gets more screenings at the BFI Southbank.
Louis Theroux - The City Addicted to Crystal Meth in his customary non-judgmental and un-moralistic style documents the substance abuse prevalent in Fresno, California.
Japanese director Nagisa Oshima is given a BFI retrospective The Art of Transgression with all his feature films (many rarely seen). In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida) 1976, is based on Japan's most notorious sex crime (1936) where a woman was found wandering the streets with her decapitated lover's penis. Strangely, the many graphic sex scenes you'd think would be erotic or arousing just aren't. Whether because three decades on many of us are so used to such scenes is hard to tell. The images of Catherine Breillat, someone more contemporary, most certainly are erotic.
And it's a film many may appreciate more in the context of the director's work than as standing alone. Usually censored by about one third when shown in Japan obviously the film also had problems in the West. (In 1977 Oshima was charged with obscenity just for publishing the screenplay and stills). A few extracts from Nelson Kim's passionate Senses of Cinema essay give one a better idea establishing the director in the context of: "the condemnation of the "premodern" Japanese mentality: feudalistic, xenophobic, undemocratic, hostile to personal liberty, mired in dead traditions. Second, the importance granted to cinema: the belief that Japanese cinema can profoundly influence the direction of the Japanese nation. (For the better, and for the worse: Oshima has always disdained the great humanist tradition of Japanese film, seeing it as the artistic embodiment of those "premodern elements of Japanese society" he opposes)"
He quotes the young Oshima's writings:
"Reality, however, is always changing. Thus, the filmmaker who is unable to grasp it immediately ceases being a filmmaker and degenerates into a mere crafter of images. Constant self-negation and transformation are necessary if one is to avoid that debilitation and continue to confront circumstances as a filmmaker... "Reality" ...stands for the thing to be resisted, struggled against, overcome. Reality is the way things are, the received wisdom of the social order. The artist pursues a personal vision that will lead to a new consciousness of reality, but once that vision has expressed itself in a particular work, an act of self-negation must occur, to clear the way for new visions...However: the radical filmmaker seeks these goals, but knows that ultimately, they can never be achieved. It is not a question of reforming a certain law, or bringing a particular issue to light. There is no victory over the horizon, only the persistent struggle, the movement of all things."
While Oshima was entering his 'porn period', New York artist Lynda Benglis was the talk of the town with her infamous Artforum ad (1974) fully nude with oversize dildo extending from her genitalia: an era leading up to the founding in 1976 of October magazine by two ex-Artforum gals Rosalind Kraus and Annette Michelson. Benglis'ad was a response to Robert Morris' bondage poster featuring Kraus.
The recent show at NYC's Susan Inglett Gallery travels to Eindhoven and Dublin.
Still in NYC Dorothy Iannone: Lioness, tucked into the back ground floor gallery space of The New Museum of Contemporary Art, is the first ever US show showcasing her erotic 60's and 70's groundbreaking, controversial art. In 1961 Iannone sued the US government to declassify as obscene Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer that she'd brought into the country.
The Nouveaux Pictures/Cine-Excess label is the UK's first ever cross commercial-academic film venture. Brunel University's School of Arts Cult Film Archive has been given the rights to some 300 movies owned by the legendary B-movie producer and film director, Roger Corman. The university's intention to "take trash seriously" in an academic respect and to release the films from the Corman archive on DVD led the university's lecturer in Film and TV Studies and director of Cine-Excess, Xavier Mendik, to seek out Nouveaux Pictures as a joint distributor of its forthcoming titles. The aim of the is to bring the very best examples of cult cinema to both the commercial consumer and to the cult film studies educational sector. Extra features on the label's releases will include university academics discussing the films, many of which have been, or are being remade in Hollywood, but may also have a "retro" appeal to new audiences and are of interest to film studies students. First up is Viva (2007) commenting on sex in the 70s (not simply a symbolic act of liberation for a suburban housewife) - the debut full-length feature by LA-based artist and filmmaker Anna Biller. Future releases will include the Corman-directed Not of This Earth and Attack of the Crab Monsters and Ron Howard's directorial debut feature, Grand Theft Auto a well as a Special Edition of Dario Argento's classic Suspiria.
The BFI runs a Sexploitation season in September.
Discover the BFI Flipside
Also on BFI DVD are the 70s films of director Jack Bond and actress Jane Arden that have been impossible to see for 26 years (1983 NFT retro). All DVDs have excellent accompanying booklets, as you'd expect, with audio commentary from Bond on Separation (1967). Arden committed suicide in Dec 1982. "We weren't people who wish we'd made more films," he says interestingly. And all three films do have that singularity of vision. Arden's own directorial The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) "isn't a work to love. It is a work to puzzle through and to wrestle with," warns Amy Simmons in her essay. And the film's study of schizophrenia derived from an all female stage production is hard slog indeed for the viewer. Far more so than Peter Brook's 1966 film adaptation of his Peter Weiss staging The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. As Simmons point out Arden's film "suggests that the real issues are buried in society's taboos and repressions and that only through a form of madness can proper sanity be restored.
At the time Scotsman R.D. Laing was proffering his revolutionary hotly debated Anti-Psychiatry movement with the book Primal Scream (1970). Earlier, Ken Loach had directed Kes (1969) and Family Life (1971) heavily critical of current social norms. Polanski's brilliant study of psychiatric decline Repulsion with Catherine Deneuve was 1965, Bergman's Persona (1966). But Jack Bond does comment about critics likening the final scene of Separation to Antonioni's Blow-Up: "I've never seen the bloody film, so to say I've been influenced is absolute nonsense." Bond's Anti-Clock (1979) with its "techno-alienation tropes" using video and surveillance seem dated now, but not when seen in the context of say artist Dan Graham's early video experiments. The voice of Anti-Clock's character Sapha: "This I is simply space. And where the strands of energy cross is a dot. And this dot is the delusion called MY IDENTITY." Chris Darke's essay cites Godard's Numero Deux (1975) and David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983). There's an extra disc with Bond's 2005 re-edit that's 5 min shorter than the original. One US critic at the time wrote that the film "makes [Alain Resnais'] Last Year at Marienbad(1961) look like a TV sitcom in comparison." Andy Warhol having said that the film "is great" snapped away at Bond's head with his Minox camera. There's even an appearance from Nobel physicist Richard Feynman.
"Death is beautiful because we don't believe in it," says Abbas Kiarostami in an interview on the DVD of The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). "If you look carefully, you see everything in opposition to death...the crew eating strawberries, the relation to the town...the trees in the graveyard. Everything has a sign of life. But at the same time, life without opposition, life without the discord of death has no meaning...we have all witnessed the death of others but never our own."
Ta'm e guilass (Taste of Cherry)at the National Gallery (29 Aug)
At many junctures in the adequate though uninspired teen rom/com I Love You, Beth Cooper many homicides nearly occurred. Do we therefore believe, though, that Twentieth Century Fox is promoting reckless endangerment in our youth through this film? Yet the film probably gives kids a better idea of what emotional attachment means than The Time Traveller's Wife whose A-list US indie/major production team somehow manage to make emotional time travel very lugubrious and very unexciting indeed.
Shirin travels around the UK through August: an entire film of faces watching a movie screening. But the faces are those of actors not ordinary people. Would the reverse be more iluminating?
Roni Horn's photo sequence of Isabelle Huppert close-ups and much, much more in The Female Gaze at Cheim & Reid in New York.
"For the first time in world history," wrote Walter Benjamin, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."
Much of humanity looks up to actors on screen and even expects them to embody their TV soap opera characters to the extent of answering to their on-screen names whilst doing their menial supermarket chores. Is that part and parcel of the Faustian pact of success? Has one 'aura' replaced another? Can most people ever do without one? Advertising quite clearly still is effective in seducing people to buy goods and services, particularly in teenage/child markets. But it wasn't until last year (hmmm, didn't I question this earlier than that on my blog?) that British supermarkets phased down the .99 pence/cents wooing of less than the full quid purchasing. Penny less seduction was no more. The new Eddie Murphy vehicle Imagine That is a cine-slave to capitalism with its Rouge Bull product placement and rather dubious 'noir' politics to boot. The imaginary world of 7 year-old daughter Olivia (the cute, sparky Yara Shahidi) is supposed to bring her dad (Murphy) down to earth from corporate high. Most kids, though, are unlikely to find much point in slavering to fetch this magical measuring stick.
Aliens in the Attic most certainly has an imagination recognisable to kids - the younger ones will goo at the shy, not so nasty E.T.esque alien Sparks. Are there other messages landing here? Cynics might say it'd always be hard to tell between most normal people's routine and the ones zombified by the aliens' high-tech (well 'lo' by inter-stellar standards) mind control gadget. "Let's go save the planet and your dumb old boyfriend," gung-ho's one of the kids to his big sister (Robert Hoffman is her great comic dumbo boyf).
More kids' quality downtime and Shorts has writer/director Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids and of course the technically adventurous Sin City with Frank Miller) in fine form encouraging the cyber kid generation to think non-linear through narrative backflips and leaps. More than a touch moralistic the film maybe but so was Wagner's Ring Cycle opera tetralogy (watch some of the festive online) where the gold stolen from the Rhein river maidens and the Ring fashioned from it with all its devastating power is finally returned to them. Don't tamper with the power within our earth! In Shorts the Ring is a magic Rainbow Rock that grants its owner - whether kid, alligator, or the green Booger monster bred from nose snot - whatever wish is desired. The film preaches the downfalls of being careless with such power, picking your nose, lacking self-respect as well as decency towards others. But equally it's enormous fun. And adults (not to mention kids) might just phone text each other a little less and see the world a little more after exiting the cinema. Wishful thinking, I know.
Also in search of, not so much the promised land but their imagined American idyll, are the Mexican/Honduran gang members railroading across the great divide from its southern most border in Sin Nombre (literally 'nameless')- an arresting debut (2009 Sundance Fest awards) from writer/director Cary Fukunaga. Cine grammar isn't what's original here rather it's this young director's ability to have one leaving the cinema remembering every character's name and face. A gift not so common when Hollywood tackles similar themes. (US DVD out Aug 31 through Universal)
Brian de Palma's almost 3 hour 1983 Scarface (re-issued and screened digitally in 60 UK cinemas) is an exception. The electronic score synths up and you think that sounds like Giorgio Moroder, and of course it is. One's forgotten because it's been so badly aped a thousand times through the decades. And there's Pacino. But wasn't he always amazing? Even before this? Yet again, you're kinda astonished to be reminded. OK, The Godfather Part II was 1974. So why do we remember this film like some long lost cinema amigo? Those Pacino eyes leaping through the screen haunt us but we know that very well. The plotline's not that original, De Palma expertly choreographs the camera but it ain't Godard or any number of other European directors tripping off the tongue. I remember loving this old amigo. There must have been something about him! Then the peso drops like a hushed, tense Mexican stand-off: I was at the opera. It was De Palma's hybrid of Sergio Leone's Once Upon in the West (1968) (his Once Upon a Time in America released in the same year as Scarface) and the reality of Coppola. De Palma was directing a Verdi opera. Pacino was Simon Boccanegra, the uncouth savvy ambitious pirate who rose to rule Genoa realising too late that his power lay not in the gold ring on his finger but with the freedom of the open sea that he'd forsaken."The world is yours" trumpets the statue in Scarface's Miami mansion courtyard. Principles were the downfall of this gangster - "all I've got in this world is my balls and my word and I'm not gonna break them for anyone". Never would he kill ever kill woman or child. But his sister is lost forever. Boccanegra's daughter lived. "This feather stirs; she lives! If it be so,It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows/That ever I have felt...Never, never, never, never, never!" rasps King Lear over his dead Cordelia.
Four years later in 1987 (many years gestating prior actually), Brit producer Don Boyd had the inspired notion of asking his wish list of 10 directors to contribute (each given a £50,000 budget) to Aria. Remember this was before classical or any other CDs flooded the market, before Classic FM, before the World Cup Three Tenors. Classical music let alone opera was still considered elitist. This special DVD edition from Second Sight has a fascinating audio commentary from Boyd and 45 minutes of interviews, "you'd never believe it was shot 20 years ago" he says. And it's true. "It had a modern vibrancy about it that isn't anything to do with star attraction or the use of lenses. It's to do with cinema combining with music at its most poetic and its most tragic." Fellini was the first to say yes to the project but had to withdraw due to ill health. Orson Welles accepted but died (having spookily asked for the contract to be sent to his eventual funeral home). But the work of those who survived is breathtaking. Robert Altman gathers an audience of mad inmates asking where does the reality really lie, Julien Temple's is the apotheosis of Los Angeles dream kitsch, Franc Roddam watches the doomed lovers of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde under the Las Vegas glare, and Godard stages a Baroque Jean-Baptiste Lully aria in a gym. All woven together by the last days of great tenor Caruso (John Hurt). The DVD oughta be on sale at every opera performance interval.
Also directing a segment was Nicholas Roeg whose early work as cinematographer pops up in the little seen Richard Lester (Beatles films, The Bed Sitting Room ) pic of 1968 Petulia with its narrative jumpcuts through time that later became Roeg's trademark (Don't Look Now, 1973). "an uncommon movie. Lester is one of a new group of directors who use film to jolt us out of our customary frame of life...She [Petulia] must puzzle out yesterday before getting through tomorrow," allures the film's trailer. A favourite film of Jean-LucGodard's was Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die. As Tag Gallagher notes in his booklet essay (extracted from Senses of Cinema) "Sirk's point is that all we have in life, ultimately, is Will or the lack of it. We can impose our own blindness or faith on objects in ways that make this a worse world or a better one."
a little more to come...
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