Mrs F often chides me for the amount of time I spend on the internet, either updating Agitation or browsing other film blogs. “You’re an addict,” she’s declared on more than one occasion, raising her eyes from the PSP and her fourth solid hour of Star Ocean. I would always respond that I wasn’t and mutter something inaudible along the lines of “fine one to talk”.
I’ve now been without internet access for the past two weekends and I realise my wife’s right. I am an addict. I’ve been having worldwide web withdrawal symptoms like you wouldn’t believe. Last week wasn’t too bad – I managed to get three reviews online using other computers (I’m hoping to get a review up later today to coincide with Asia Argento’s 35th birthday) – but the weekend was a bit edgy. It probably didn’t help that I watched the emotionally shattering anime ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ on Saturday afternoon then spent the evening writing 1,000 words on it. On Sunday, gave myself the day off anything movie related and ploughed through a Peter F Hamilton doorstopper.
The most annoying thing is that what little time I’ve had to log on at work has been used putting material on Agitation and not reading the blogs of friends and fellow film writers. To everyone I’d normally engage in discussion with via comments sections, my continued apologies. I’ll be solvent again on Friday and hope to have the connection re-established pretty quickly.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
PERSONAL FAVES: There Will Be Blood
Posted as part of Moon in the Gutter’s Paul Thomas Anderson blog-a-thon.
Upfront warning: SPOILERS – barrels of ’em.
Critics have found in Paul Thomas Anderson’s work many points of reference with other filmmakers’. And with good reason. ‘Boogie Nights’ is a prime example: the aesthetics of ‘Goodfellas’ welded to the narrative infrastructure of ‘Short Cuts’ with a final scene that plays like a love-letter to Tarantino.
The adjective most critics trotted out for ‘There Will Be Blood’ was "Kubrickian". Again, with good reason. The more I watch it, the more I’m convinced that ‘There Will Be Blood’ is Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.
Wait! Put the phone down! No need to summon the men in the white coats. Tear up those committal papers. I can explain.
The lengthy prologue of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ has a large black monolith turn up at the dawn of evolution. This is where mankind is at: they’re apes, huddling in packs, unable to find a way to disable, let alone dine on, the lumbering mammals they have dimly identified as a source of food. Stronger packs attack them. The encounter with the monolith changes everything. One particular ape finds a bone, picks it up. A few tentative experiments and the ape realises it can smash other bones with it. Synapses fuse; possibilities open. Hey, you can also use the bone to fend off the aggressor pack. You can bash their skulls in with it. Hey, if you can use it to kill other apes, you can use it to kill mammals. Violence follows: violence, carnivorous instincts and the application of the first tools. An ape flings a bone triumphantly into the air. Match cut: a spaceship drifting elegantly through the silent emptiness of the galaxy.
Kubrick’s genius (ever so slightly borrowed, it has to be said, from Powell and Pressburger’s ‘A Canterbury Tale’) is to edit out the whole bloody and ignominious history of human development while brilliantly suggesting it. To omit wars and genocide and greed and disharmony and transport us seamlessly to a point at which humanity has ventured beyond the stars.
‘There Will Be Blood’ basically fills in the gap. Well, some of it. It fills in the gap where mankind is just about ready to shuck off its agriculturalism, embrace industrialism and the internal combustion engine with a teat-sucking dependency, and fast-forward itself towards advanced technology while at the same time irrevocably fucking up this planet.
Has mankind ever made a more self-destructive discovery than oil? How many wars, how much politicking? Had anything before oil inspired quite so much greed, made money a god quite as intrinsically? The central conflict of ‘There Will Be Blood’ – business vs. the church – doesn’t need any explanation. Anderson’s genius is that he shows both belief systems, both forms of worship, as inherently flawed. And, just to make things even thornier, inherently intertwined.
We first meet Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in 1898, digging for gold. He’s alone, in the wild, cold and unshaven and squatting where he’s made camp, bedraggled and a barely recognisable figure of a man, his appearance not too far removed from one of Kubrick’s apes.
The finding of it almost kills him, but he strikes lucky. The gold finances his next enterprise: prospecting. He’s running his own outfit, employing some men. They strike oil. Then tragedy strikes. One is killed in an accident, orphaning an infant son. Another jump ahead in time: to 1911. Plainview is passing the boy, H.W. (Dillon Freasier) off as his own, the angelic lad a deal-clencher as the loquacious and persuasive Plainview establishes himself as a contractor. It’s at this stage of his career that the weasly Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) approaches him demanding cash up front for the location of an oil-rich area of land. Paying up – but not before threatening the lad with severe retribution should this information prove false – Plainview and H.W. inveigle themselves into Paul’s homestead. This is where Plainview meets Paul’s twin brother (and fire-and-brimstone preacher) Eli (also Dano) and the two men find themselves at odds.
For all that Eli bashes the Bible with the best of ’em, it’s Plainview who emerges as an almost Old Testament figure – or at least a corrupted and perverse parody of one. Plainview abandons and betrays the son who isn’t his son and mistrusts and finally murders the brother who isn’t his brother. For all that Eli is as obsessed with money as Plainview, for all that his sanctimonious behaviour belies a snivelling cowardice and a petty desire for one-upmanship (at one point he attempts to humiliate Plainview in a travesty of baptism which the oilman has been forced into in order to complete a business deal), Plainview commits the film’s greatest act of hypocrisy: the man who profits from and then turns his back on a false son commits murder when a familial deception is perpetrated on him.
‘There Will Be Blood’ is a deep and troubling film that, for the most part, plays out as supremely entertaining and sometimes darkly funny, particularly in its divisive final scene which I know that some people vehemently hate but which I found so uproariously inspired that almost stood and applauded in the middle of the cinema. "Draaaaaiiinnnnnage, Eli boy!" Fantastic. And don’t get me started on "I drink your milkshake". Also, is it just me, or does the Plainview of this final scene seem to revert to the apelike figure which opened the movie?
You can watch ‘There Will Be Blood’ and take it as a morality tale, as a study in greed, as a comment on the loneliness and soullessness of the financially successful. You can take it as a comedy as black as the oil itself. The more you watch it, though, the more emerges. It’s a film that grows on you, even if (like me) you thought it was a bona fide masterpiece first time round. Again, it’s comparable to the oil: it bubbles up slowly from the depths only for its last scene to burst across the screen like a geyser, Day-Lewis’s incendiary performance searing the whole magnificent thing into your mind.
Kudos, too, to Robert Elswit’s awe-inspiring cinematography (like Day-Lewis, his work on the film earned an Oscar) and Jonny Greenwood’s often daringly experimental score, Anderson only deviating from Greenwood’s music as Plainview starts his drilling operation in celebratory style (and again for the end credits) to the stirring strains of the Brahms violin concerto. ‘There Will Be Blood’ claims the piece the way ‘2001’ claimed Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’.
When Mikhail Lermontov wrote his great embittered ironic novel, its protagonist Pechorin setting the archetype for the anti-hero in Russian literature (and perhaps in literature as a whole), he called it ‘A Hero of Our Time’. So here’s to Daniel Plainview, a hero of our time. Here’s to Daniel Plainview, huckster, oilman, miser, misanthrope and murderer. Here’s to Daniel Plainview who, perhaps more than anyone in cinema since Kubrick’s apes, truly points the way to the stars.
Upfront warning: SPOILERS – barrels of ’em.
Critics have found in Paul Thomas Anderson’s work many points of reference with other filmmakers’. And with good reason. ‘Boogie Nights’ is a prime example: the aesthetics of ‘Goodfellas’ welded to the narrative infrastructure of ‘Short Cuts’ with a final scene that plays like a love-letter to Tarantino.
The adjective most critics trotted out for ‘There Will Be Blood’ was "Kubrickian". Again, with good reason. The more I watch it, the more I’m convinced that ‘There Will Be Blood’ is Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.
Wait! Put the phone down! No need to summon the men in the white coats. Tear up those committal papers. I can explain.
The lengthy prologue of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ has a large black monolith turn up at the dawn of evolution. This is where mankind is at: they’re apes, huddling in packs, unable to find a way to disable, let alone dine on, the lumbering mammals they have dimly identified as a source of food. Stronger packs attack them. The encounter with the monolith changes everything. One particular ape finds a bone, picks it up. A few tentative experiments and the ape realises it can smash other bones with it. Synapses fuse; possibilities open. Hey, you can also use the bone to fend off the aggressor pack. You can bash their skulls in with it. Hey, if you can use it to kill other apes, you can use it to kill mammals. Violence follows: violence, carnivorous instincts and the application of the first tools. An ape flings a bone triumphantly into the air. Match cut: a spaceship drifting elegantly through the silent emptiness of the galaxy.
Kubrick’s genius (ever so slightly borrowed, it has to be said, from Powell and Pressburger’s ‘A Canterbury Tale’) is to edit out the whole bloody and ignominious history of human development while brilliantly suggesting it. To omit wars and genocide and greed and disharmony and transport us seamlessly to a point at which humanity has ventured beyond the stars.
‘There Will Be Blood’ basically fills in the gap. Well, some of it. It fills in the gap where mankind is just about ready to shuck off its agriculturalism, embrace industrialism and the internal combustion engine with a teat-sucking dependency, and fast-forward itself towards advanced technology while at the same time irrevocably fucking up this planet.
Has mankind ever made a more self-destructive discovery than oil? How many wars, how much politicking? Had anything before oil inspired quite so much greed, made money a god quite as intrinsically? The central conflict of ‘There Will Be Blood’ – business vs. the church – doesn’t need any explanation. Anderson’s genius is that he shows both belief systems, both forms of worship, as inherently flawed. And, just to make things even thornier, inherently intertwined.We first meet Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in 1898, digging for gold. He’s alone, in the wild, cold and unshaven and squatting where he’s made camp, bedraggled and a barely recognisable figure of a man, his appearance not too far removed from one of Kubrick’s apes.
The finding of it almost kills him, but he strikes lucky. The gold finances his next enterprise: prospecting. He’s running his own outfit, employing some men. They strike oil. Then tragedy strikes. One is killed in an accident, orphaning an infant son. Another jump ahead in time: to 1911. Plainview is passing the boy, H.W. (Dillon Freasier) off as his own, the angelic lad a deal-clencher as the loquacious and persuasive Plainview establishes himself as a contractor. It’s at this stage of his career that the weasly Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) approaches him demanding cash up front for the location of an oil-rich area of land. Paying up – but not before threatening the lad with severe retribution should this information prove false – Plainview and H.W. inveigle themselves into Paul’s homestead. This is where Plainview meets Paul’s twin brother (and fire-and-brimstone preacher) Eli (also Dano) and the two men find themselves at odds.For all that Eli bashes the Bible with the best of ’em, it’s Plainview who emerges as an almost Old Testament figure – or at least a corrupted and perverse parody of one. Plainview abandons and betrays the son who isn’t his son and mistrusts and finally murders the brother who isn’t his brother. For all that Eli is as obsessed with money as Plainview, for all that his sanctimonious behaviour belies a snivelling cowardice and a petty desire for one-upmanship (at one point he attempts to humiliate Plainview in a travesty of baptism which the oilman has been forced into in order to complete a business deal), Plainview commits the film’s greatest act of hypocrisy: the man who profits from and then turns his back on a false son commits murder when a familial deception is perpetrated on him.
‘There Will Be Blood’ is a deep and troubling film that, for the most part, plays out as supremely entertaining and sometimes darkly funny, particularly in its divisive final scene which I know that some people vehemently hate but which I found so uproariously inspired that almost stood and applauded in the middle of the cinema. "Draaaaaiiinnnnnage, Eli boy!" Fantastic. And don’t get me started on "I drink your milkshake". Also, is it just me, or does the Plainview of this final scene seem to revert to the apelike figure which opened the movie?
You can watch ‘There Will Be Blood’ and take it as a morality tale, as a study in greed, as a comment on the loneliness and soullessness of the financially successful. You can take it as a comedy as black as the oil itself. The more you watch it, though, the more emerges. It’s a film that grows on you, even if (like me) you thought it was a bona fide masterpiece first time round. Again, it’s comparable to the oil: it bubbles up slowly from the depths only for its last scene to burst across the screen like a geyser, Day-Lewis’s incendiary performance searing the whole magnificent thing into your mind.Kudos, too, to Robert Elswit’s awe-inspiring cinematography (like Day-Lewis, his work on the film earned an Oscar) and Jonny Greenwood’s often daringly experimental score, Anderson only deviating from Greenwood’s music as Plainview starts his drilling operation in celebratory style (and again for the end credits) to the stirring strains of the Brahms violin concerto. ‘There Will Be Blood’ claims the piece the way ‘2001’ claimed Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’.
When Mikhail Lermontov wrote his great embittered ironic novel, its protagonist Pechorin setting the archetype for the anti-hero in Russian literature (and perhaps in literature as a whole), he called it ‘A Hero of Our Time’. So here’s to Daniel Plainview, a hero of our time. Here’s to Daniel Plainview, huckster, oilman, miser, misanthrope and murderer. Here’s to Daniel Plainview who, perhaps more than anyone in cinema since Kubrick’s apes, truly points the way to the stars.Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The Ninth Configuration
Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 8 of 10 / Overall: 73 of 100
Remember that scene in ‘The Exorcist’, early in the film before Regan goes all blotchy and foul-mouthed and starts using religious paraphernalia as an aid to onanism, where Chris MacNeill is hosting a soiree – a low-key, intimate affair for a handful of friends including, you know, such everyday types as movie directors, theologians and an astronaut – and a clearly out-of-sorts Regan blunders into the party and, prior to urinating on the carpet, looks the astronaut dead in the eye and says emotionless, “You’re gonna die up there”?
Well, the astronaut in question is Captain Billy Cutshaw and he doesn’t die up there. He doesn’t even get up there. The man wigs out quite spectacularly during the countdown, causing the mission to be aborted. Thus it is it he finds himself in an asylum operated by the US army situated in a fairy tale castle somewhere in Washington State, ruled over by archetypal hardass Major Groper (Neville Brand). Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) is the rogue element amongst the patients/inmates – all the others are serving men. All have seen combat. All have been invalided out of active service due to their psychological problems. Naturally, the army thinks they’re faking and renowned psychiatrist Colonel Vincent Kane (Stacy Keach) is assigned to the facility to assess them.
In addition to the antagonistic Cutshaw, he meets Lieutenant Reno (Jason Miller), who is obsessed with staging the entire works of Shakespeare with a cast of dogs and agonises over whether to cast a Great Dane as Hamlet (geddit?); Captain Fairbanks (George di Cenzo), one of whose multiple personalities manifests as a nun and tries to exorcise a Coca-Cola vending machine; Major Nammack (Moses Gunn), whose nominally normal behaviour is magnificently undermined when he shows up in a Superman costume with a large letter ‘N’ on the tunic instead of an ‘S’ (given Nammack’s ethnicity, the meaning is wincingly apparent); and Fromme (a cameo by writer/director William Peter Blatty), who has convinced himself he’s the facility’s medical officer and has developed an obsession with his stethoscope.
Not that the actual MO, Colonel Richard Fell (Ed Flanders), cuts much of a reassuring figure. His uniform stolen by Fromme, he drifts through the first half of the film trouserless and his most introspective moment comes when he regards the skull on his desk and admonishes it, “What are you looking at me like that for? I told them not to operate.”
Remember that hoary old chestnut you had to debate in English Lit: how mad is Hamlet? That’s the $64,000 question that Cutshaw puts to Kane. When Kane defers that he’d prefer to hear Cutshaw’s hypothesis first, the astronaut obliges. Cutshaw posits that Hamlet fakes madness as a cathartic staving off of actual madness; that Hamlet’s princely status allows him to perpetrate extremes of behaviour under the guise of mania which would have been unthinkable for a commoner to get away with – and had that not been the case, he would have fallen prey to genuine madness. Kane is struck by the theory and determines to allow the inmates free reign.
‘The Ninth Configuration’ is a deep and probing film about madness, doubt, faith, comradeship, the existence of God and the complex, dichotomous relationship between good and evil. Entire scenes consist entirely of intellectual and/or theological dialogue. More than half of the film’s two-hour running time remains firmly entrenched within the same location. There’s a revelation in the last third that most directors would have delivered with tablecloth-pulling legerdemain but which Blatty treats as another element of the cerebral discourse. Nothing even remotely resembling an action scene happens until the last fifteen minutes, and then only after a certain character has done everything possible to avoid conflict.
If this makes ‘The Ninth Configuration’ sound heavy, challenging, bizarre or downright WTF, that’s because it is. It’s all of these things – in spades! It’s also achingly funny for at least 90 minutes, only steering into fully dramatic territory towards the end.
With the possible exception of ‘Castle Keep’ – the weird and subversive odd-movie-out in Sydney Pollack’s filmography – I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything quite like ‘The Ninth Configuration’. While the setting and military iconography of ‘Castle Keep’ – which also stars Scott Wilson – inhabit similar territory, Pollack’s film (made over a decade earlier than Blatty’s) is concerned less with the human mind and the immortal soul and more with anti-authority/counter-culture antics and surreal, borderline slapstick humour.
One day, when it has truly reached the audience it deserves, book-length critical studies will be written about ‘The Ninth Configuration’. All manner of speculation and theorising will occur. Readings and interpretations will be posited. Screeds of text – academic, literary, arcane and esoteric – will be dug up to support said theses. There will be debates, disagreements and denunciations. I’ll waiver my opportunity to be at the forefront – to really start to analyze the film, I’d have to discuss too many of its mysteries, mysteries that should yield themselves up to the viewer slowly, ambiguously and perplexingly – and settle instead for banging the drum for ‘The Ninth Configuration’ as an overlooked and underappreciated classic: off-the-wall, utterly unique, a true one-off.
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 8 of 10 / Overall: 73 of 100
Remember that scene in ‘The Exorcist’, early in the film before Regan goes all blotchy and foul-mouthed and starts using religious paraphernalia as an aid to onanism, where Chris MacNeill is hosting a soiree – a low-key, intimate affair for a handful of friends including, you know, such everyday types as movie directors, theologians and an astronaut – and a clearly out-of-sorts Regan blunders into the party and, prior to urinating on the carpet, looks the astronaut dead in the eye and says emotionless, “You’re gonna die up there”?Well, the astronaut in question is Captain Billy Cutshaw and he doesn’t die up there. He doesn’t even get up there. The man wigs out quite spectacularly during the countdown, causing the mission to be aborted. Thus it is it he finds himself in an asylum operated by the US army situated in a fairy tale castle somewhere in Washington State, ruled over by archetypal hardass Major Groper (Neville Brand). Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) is the rogue element amongst the patients/inmates – all the others are serving men. All have seen combat. All have been invalided out of active service due to their psychological problems. Naturally, the army thinks they’re faking and renowned psychiatrist Colonel Vincent Kane (Stacy Keach) is assigned to the facility to assess them.
In addition to the antagonistic Cutshaw, he meets Lieutenant Reno (Jason Miller), who is obsessed with staging the entire works of Shakespeare with a cast of dogs and agonises over whether to cast a Great Dane as Hamlet (geddit?); Captain Fairbanks (George di Cenzo), one of whose multiple personalities manifests as a nun and tries to exorcise a Coca-Cola vending machine; Major Nammack (Moses Gunn), whose nominally normal behaviour is magnificently undermined when he shows up in a Superman costume with a large letter ‘N’ on the tunic instead of an ‘S’ (given Nammack’s ethnicity, the meaning is wincingly apparent); and Fromme (a cameo by writer/director William Peter Blatty), who has convinced himself he’s the facility’s medical officer and has developed an obsession with his stethoscope.Not that the actual MO, Colonel Richard Fell (Ed Flanders), cuts much of a reassuring figure. His uniform stolen by Fromme, he drifts through the first half of the film trouserless and his most introspective moment comes when he regards the skull on his desk and admonishes it, “What are you looking at me like that for? I told them not to operate.”
Remember that hoary old chestnut you had to debate in English Lit: how mad is Hamlet? That’s the $64,000 question that Cutshaw puts to Kane. When Kane defers that he’d prefer to hear Cutshaw’s hypothesis first, the astronaut obliges. Cutshaw posits that Hamlet fakes madness as a cathartic staving off of actual madness; that Hamlet’s princely status allows him to perpetrate extremes of behaviour under the guise of mania which would have been unthinkable for a commoner to get away with – and had that not been the case, he would have fallen prey to genuine madness. Kane is struck by the theory and determines to allow the inmates free reign.‘The Ninth Configuration’ is a deep and probing film about madness, doubt, faith, comradeship, the existence of God and the complex, dichotomous relationship between good and evil. Entire scenes consist entirely of intellectual and/or theological dialogue. More than half of the film’s two-hour running time remains firmly entrenched within the same location. There’s a revelation in the last third that most directors would have delivered with tablecloth-pulling legerdemain but which Blatty treats as another element of the cerebral discourse. Nothing even remotely resembling an action scene happens until the last fifteen minutes, and then only after a certain character has done everything possible to avoid conflict.
If this makes ‘The Ninth Configuration’ sound heavy, challenging, bizarre or downright WTF, that’s because it is. It’s all of these things – in spades! It’s also achingly funny for at least 90 minutes, only steering into fully dramatic territory towards the end.
With the possible exception of ‘Castle Keep’ – the weird and subversive odd-movie-out in Sydney Pollack’s filmography – I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything quite like ‘The Ninth Configuration’. While the setting and military iconography of ‘Castle Keep’ – which also stars Scott Wilson – inhabit similar territory, Pollack’s film (made over a decade earlier than Blatty’s) is concerned less with the human mind and the immortal soul and more with anti-authority/counter-culture antics and surreal, borderline slapstick humour. One day, when it has truly reached the audience it deserves, book-length critical studies will be written about ‘The Ninth Configuration’. All manner of speculation and theorising will occur. Readings and interpretations will be posited. Screeds of text – academic, literary, arcane and esoteric – will be dug up to support said theses. There will be debates, disagreements and denunciations. I’ll waiver my opportunity to be at the forefront – to really start to analyze the film, I’d have to discuss too many of its mysteries, mysteries that should yield themselves up to the viewer slowly, ambiguously and perplexingly – and settle instead for banging the drum for ‘The Ninth Configuration’ as an overlooked and underappreciated classic: off-the-wall, utterly unique, a true one-off.
Monday, September 13, 2010
A Serbian Film
Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Eurovisions (Serbia) / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall: 72 of 100
"This is a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government. It’s about the monolithic power of leaders who hypnotise you to do things you don’t want to do. You have to feel the violence to know what it’s about."
These words are Srdjan Spasojevic’s, quoted in an article in The Guardian following the withdrawal of his controversial feature ‘A Serbian Film’ from London’s FrightFest horror movie festival. Westminster Council ruled against it being shown uncut and the BBFC stipulated 49 cuts (totalling four minutes of screen time) to comply with current guidelines for an 18 certificate. Ian Jones, the co-director of FrightFest, made this statement: "FrightFest has decided not to show ‘A Serbian Film’ in a heavily cut version because, as a festival with a global integrity, we think a film of this nature should be shown in its entirety as per the director’s intention."
Not that I had a ticket for the screening anyway, but I already knew where to look on the internet (tip of the hat to a gentleman of my acquaintance). I’d been putting off watching it, because everything I’d read about ‘A Serbian Film’ convinced me it would be graphic, unpleasant and difficult to watch; that it would be one of those horrible ‘2 Girls, 1 Cup’ kind of things that you can never unsee. Did I actually want to let this film into my head?
On the other hand, this is a film blog. I’m passionate about film. I believe directors should use the medium to the fullest of its possibilities and engage with an audience at whatever level they feel their work needs to connect at. And as such censorship can only ever be a negative tool used by moralists and prudes. I have never understand why, if the members of the BBFC see all manner of films in their uncut form, none of them are ever irredeemably corrupted and turn into chainsaw wielding psychotics with a predilection for rape, cannibalism and running away from exploding buildings in slow-motion. And why, if violent movies have no effect on them, do they get to demand cuts and exercise the bureaucratic power over filmmakers and then justify their interference by claiming that they are protecting us, the great unwashed public, from the very dangers to which they have proved completely immune.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are some vile pieces of exploitative trash out there which deserve to have an 18 certificate slapped on them. There needs to be a rating system. But the BBFC, in providing this rating system as well as having the authority to demand cuts by essentially holding the film itself hostage (no cuts, no rating; no rating, no release), gets to play judge, jury and executioner.
The censorship of any form of art is a step along a certain path. At one end of the path there’s tutting and curtain-twitching and grumblings about whether there’s any need to show those kind of things (for those read anything from graphic violence to two people of the same sex kissing). At the other end of the path there’s book burning, imprisonment, a fatwa. They’re poles apart, these types of behaviour, but the same mindset, the same prejudices, the same phony and sanctimonious sense of morality connects them.
But of course these comments contextualise the piece of work threatened by censorship as art. Was ‘A Serbian Film’ art? And by art I mean an aesthetically and intellectually valid work. Or was it just another entry in the increasingly generic torture porn movement? I’d read a lot of things about it, and a few reviews/articles had hinted at content that promised to push the envelope about as far as it had ever been tested in terms of what can be depicted onscreen.
I took the plunge and watched the film.
Yes, ‘A Serbian Film’ contains some scenes that are hard to stomach. Yes, it pushes the envelope. Yes, it’s shocking and nasty and provocative. Kudos, then, to Spasojevic for having the courage of his convictions in bringing it to the screen. Because ‘A Serbian Film’ is not a work of exploitation. It was not made with the intention of being controversial for controversy’s sake, nor is it a gross-out exercise in bad taste like many entries in the torture porn cycle. For all that it’s gut-wrenching, sickening and wired into the most venal depths of man’s inhumanity to man, I would not make the mistake of bracketing ‘A Serbian Film’ as torture porn.
A glib review could make use of a "no, actually it’s porn porn" gag, but that would be to miss the point. Spasojevic makes his nominal hero Milos (Srdjan Todorovic) a former pornographic actor and sets the narrative in motion when the cash-trapped Milos, now a husband and father, accepts a dubious offer to participate in a mysterious project that is part skin-flick part reality-TV. These choices are metaphorical. Pornography represents objectification and depersonalisation. Men and women are reduced to things to be positioned in a specific way, made to perform in a specific way, their identity and individuality ruthlessly subjugated towards an equally specific end: the gratification (sexual and/or fiscal) of others.
Any serious analysis of ‘A Serbian Film’ has to begin with its title. Just as Kieslowski’s ‘A Short Film About Love’ and ‘A Short Film About Killing’ give you the subject, intention and aesthetic right there in the title, thus ‘A Serbian Film’. Short of calling it ‘A Unapologetically Nasty Film About Serbia’, Spasojevic couldn’t have been more explicit. Nor is it question of the critical viewer needing to know up front that the film is intended as a political metaphor in order to see beyond the dark and unpalatable things Spasojevic unflinchingly depicts: two scenes in which Milos converses with Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic) – the director of the project in which he has reluctantly agreed to star – cement the political agenda emphatically and unambiguously. Beyond this, the quality of filmmaking is self-evidently intelligent, focused and purposeful. The performances are awards-worthy. The overall effect is shatteringly powerful.
You may have read about the film’s most contentious scene (I’m not giving anything away, purely because it would involve a description I’d rather not make myself type up, but if you really want to know, it’ll take you about 30 seconds on Google); conceptually it’s the single worst thing in ‘A Serbian Film’. But not viscerally. There’s a moment close to the end, all the more horrifying for the audience being way ahead of Milos in terms of the revelation that awaits him, which is even more awful and despairing.
It should be noted that most of the terrible stuff happens after the halfway mark. Spasojevic doesn’t catapult the viewer headlong into depravity; instead, he takes his time in establishing character, motivation and context. This for me is the key element of ‘A Serbian Film’: at no point was I ever in doubt that Spasojevic had anything less than a definite and valid agenda.
I’d hesitate to recommend ‘A Serbian Film’ in the traditional sense of the word. But I wouldn’t warn anyone off it either. I’d offer caution and be interested in hearing their opinion afterwards. I don’t know if I could watch it a second time. I don’t think I’d need to.
(Addendum: click here for a Total Film article on the withdrawal from FrightFest, including a video interview with Srdjan Spasojevic.)
Category: Eurovisions (Serbia) / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall: 72 of 100
"This is a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government. It’s about the monolithic power of leaders who hypnotise you to do things you don’t want to do. You have to feel the violence to know what it’s about."These words are Srdjan Spasojevic’s, quoted in an article in The Guardian following the withdrawal of his controversial feature ‘A Serbian Film’ from London’s FrightFest horror movie festival. Westminster Council ruled against it being shown uncut and the BBFC stipulated 49 cuts (totalling four minutes of screen time) to comply with current guidelines for an 18 certificate. Ian Jones, the co-director of FrightFest, made this statement: "FrightFest has decided not to show ‘A Serbian Film’ in a heavily cut version because, as a festival with a global integrity, we think a film of this nature should be shown in its entirety as per the director’s intention."
Not that I had a ticket for the screening anyway, but I already knew where to look on the internet (tip of the hat to a gentleman of my acquaintance). I’d been putting off watching it, because everything I’d read about ‘A Serbian Film’ convinced me it would be graphic, unpleasant and difficult to watch; that it would be one of those horrible ‘2 Girls, 1 Cup’ kind of things that you can never unsee. Did I actually want to let this film into my head?
On the other hand, this is a film blog. I’m passionate about film. I believe directors should use the medium to the fullest of its possibilities and engage with an audience at whatever level they feel their work needs to connect at. And as such censorship can only ever be a negative tool used by moralists and prudes. I have never understand why, if the members of the BBFC see all manner of films in their uncut form, none of them are ever irredeemably corrupted and turn into chainsaw wielding psychotics with a predilection for rape, cannibalism and running away from exploding buildings in slow-motion. And why, if violent movies have no effect on them, do they get to demand cuts and exercise the bureaucratic power over filmmakers and then justify their interference by claiming that they are protecting us, the great unwashed public, from the very dangers to which they have proved completely immune.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are some vile pieces of exploitative trash out there which deserve to have an 18 certificate slapped on them. There needs to be a rating system. But the BBFC, in providing this rating system as well as having the authority to demand cuts by essentially holding the film itself hostage (no cuts, no rating; no rating, no release), gets to play judge, jury and executioner.
The censorship of any form of art is a step along a certain path. At one end of the path there’s tutting and curtain-twitching and grumblings about whether there’s any need to show those kind of things (for those read anything from graphic violence to two people of the same sex kissing). At the other end of the path there’s book burning, imprisonment, a fatwa. They’re poles apart, these types of behaviour, but the same mindset, the same prejudices, the same phony and sanctimonious sense of morality connects them.
But of course these comments contextualise the piece of work threatened by censorship as art. Was ‘A Serbian Film’ art? And by art I mean an aesthetically and intellectually valid work. Or was it just another entry in the increasingly generic torture porn movement? I’d read a lot of things about it, and a few reviews/articles had hinted at content that promised to push the envelope about as far as it had ever been tested in terms of what can be depicted onscreen.
I took the plunge and watched the film.
Yes, ‘A Serbian Film’ contains some scenes that are hard to stomach. Yes, it pushes the envelope. Yes, it’s shocking and nasty and provocative. Kudos, then, to Spasojevic for having the courage of his convictions in bringing it to the screen. Because ‘A Serbian Film’ is not a work of exploitation. It was not made with the intention of being controversial for controversy’s sake, nor is it a gross-out exercise in bad taste like many entries in the torture porn cycle. For all that it’s gut-wrenching, sickening and wired into the most venal depths of man’s inhumanity to man, I would not make the mistake of bracketing ‘A Serbian Film’ as torture porn.
A glib review could make use of a "no, actually it’s porn porn" gag, but that would be to miss the point. Spasojevic makes his nominal hero Milos (Srdjan Todorovic) a former pornographic actor and sets the narrative in motion when the cash-trapped Milos, now a husband and father, accepts a dubious offer to participate in a mysterious project that is part skin-flick part reality-TV. These choices are metaphorical. Pornography represents objectification and depersonalisation. Men and women are reduced to things to be positioned in a specific way, made to perform in a specific way, their identity and individuality ruthlessly subjugated towards an equally specific end: the gratification (sexual and/or fiscal) of others.
Any serious analysis of ‘A Serbian Film’ has to begin with its title. Just as Kieslowski’s ‘A Short Film About Love’ and ‘A Short Film About Killing’ give you the subject, intention and aesthetic right there in the title, thus ‘A Serbian Film’. Short of calling it ‘A Unapologetically Nasty Film About Serbia’, Spasojevic couldn’t have been more explicit. Nor is it question of the critical viewer needing to know up front that the film is intended as a political metaphor in order to see beyond the dark and unpalatable things Spasojevic unflinchingly depicts: two scenes in which Milos converses with Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic) – the director of the project in which he has reluctantly agreed to star – cement the political agenda emphatically and unambiguously. Beyond this, the quality of filmmaking is self-evidently intelligent, focused and purposeful. The performances are awards-worthy. The overall effect is shatteringly powerful.
You may have read about the film’s most contentious scene (I’m not giving anything away, purely because it would involve a description I’d rather not make myself type up, but if you really want to know, it’ll take you about 30 seconds on Google); conceptually it’s the single worst thing in ‘A Serbian Film’. But not viscerally. There’s a moment close to the end, all the more horrifying for the audience being way ahead of Milos in terms of the revelation that awaits him, which is even more awful and despairing.
It should be noted that most of the terrible stuff happens after the halfway mark. Spasojevic doesn’t catapult the viewer headlong into depravity; instead, he takes his time in establishing character, motivation and context. This for me is the key element of ‘A Serbian Film’: at no point was I ever in doubt that Spasojevic had anything less than a definite and valid agenda.
I’d hesitate to recommend ‘A Serbian Film’ in the traditional sense of the word. But I wouldn’t warn anyone off it either. I’d offer caution and be interested in hearing their opinion afterwards. I don’t know if I could watch it a second time. I don’t think I’d need to.
(Addendum: click here for a Total Film article on the withdrawal from FrightFest, including a video interview with Srdjan Spasojevic.)
Revenge of the internet service provider
Having managed to get the T-Mobile content lock successfully removed and post my contribution to the Cinema Viewfinder David Cronenberg blog-a-thon, I found myself disconnected from T-Mobile just hours later and I am now temporarily without telephone and internet access at home.
Long story, and I don’t want to start scraping away on the world’s smallest violin and bore you all with my financial woes, but Paula’s firm recently changed their payroll arrangements. Used to be I got paid on the last day of the month, the mortgage and a couple of other bills went out, we shopped for food, fuelled up the car and that bank balance basically flatlined until Paula got paid on the 10th. Now, though, for reasons best known to themselves, Paula’s workplace are paying their staff on the 25th.
We knew about this a few months in advance and did our best to budget accordingly, including changing the dates of a few direct debits. Nonetheless, something had to give and I was faced with the choice of either not paying my car insurance or not paying T-Mobile. Not paying the car insurance would have been tempting fate, so I called T-Mobile, explained the situation and even managed to scrape enough together to make a small grace payment.
Obviously, it wasn’t enough for them and my account has been suspended. Unless I benefit from a lottery win or unexpected inheritance in the interim, I won’t have internet access at home until at least the 25th.
How much material appears on the blog between now and then depends on the availability of friends’ computers. It might be a bit catch as catch can for the next two weeks.
I’m still busily preparing reviews and I’ve set myself a deadline of 10th October for completing Operation 101010 (ie. 101010 finished on 10.10.10). I’m confident I’ll get the remaining films watched the reviews written by then, but whether they all get posted on The Agitation of the Mind in time is something I wouldn’t put money on … even if I had any right now.
So, this post is just to apologise for the absence of Something For The Weekend yesterday (it would have featured Julie Christie in ‘Darling’) and for the fact that I won’t be able to leave as many comments as I normally would on my favourite blogs. Please bear with me; normal service will resume soon.
Long story, and I don’t want to start scraping away on the world’s smallest violin and bore you all with my financial woes, but Paula’s firm recently changed their payroll arrangements. Used to be I got paid on the last day of the month, the mortgage and a couple of other bills went out, we shopped for food, fuelled up the car and that bank balance basically flatlined until Paula got paid on the 10th. Now, though, for reasons best known to themselves, Paula’s workplace are paying their staff on the 25th.
We knew about this a few months in advance and did our best to budget accordingly, including changing the dates of a few direct debits. Nonetheless, something had to give and I was faced with the choice of either not paying my car insurance or not paying T-Mobile. Not paying the car insurance would have been tempting fate, so I called T-Mobile, explained the situation and even managed to scrape enough together to make a small grace payment.
Obviously, it wasn’t enough for them and my account has been suspended. Unless I benefit from a lottery win or unexpected inheritance in the interim, I won’t have internet access at home until at least the 25th.
How much material appears on the blog between now and then depends on the availability of friends’ computers. It might be a bit catch as catch can for the next two weeks.
I’m still busily preparing reviews and I’ve set myself a deadline of 10th October for completing Operation 101010 (ie. 101010 finished on 10.10.10). I’m confident I’ll get the remaining films watched the reviews written by then, but whether they all get posted on The Agitation of the Mind in time is something I wouldn’t put money on … even if I had any right now.
So, this post is just to apologise for the absence of Something For The Weekend yesterday (it would have featured Julie Christie in ‘Darling’) and for the fact that I won’t be able to leave as many comments as I normally would on my favourite blogs. Please bear with me; normal service will resume soon.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Manifestations, telepaths and extreme therapy: The Brood and Scanners
Posted to coincide with Cinema Viewfinder’s David Cronenberg blog-a-thon
David Cronenberg made his first two full-length features, ‘Shivers’ (1975) and’Rabid’ (1976), for a low-budget outfit called Cinepix who started life as a distributor of soft-core porn and whose track record as a production company pre-Cronenberg was, predictably enough, soft-core porn. This accounts for the presence of adult performers Sue Helen Petrie in ‘Shivers’ and Marilyn Chambers in ‘Rabid’.
Taking advantage of tax-shelter opportunities for Canadian filmmakers (but having to abide by stipulations such as only one non-Canadian star per picture), Cronenberg made what has come to be regarded as the odd-one-out in his filmography, the drag-racing drama ‘Fast Company’ (1979), before hooking up with producers Victor Solnicki, Pierre David and Claude Héroux to make the two features which arguably cemented his maturation as a director, defined his intellectual and visceral aesthetic, and propelled him towards a wider audience: ‘The Brood’ (1979) and ‘Scanners’ (1980).
Before we go any further, let’s pause for a SPOILER ALERT. Attempting to discuss these movies without lifting the lid on pivotal plot points would make for a short and rather pointless article. Not that either film deals in M. Night Shyamalan style twists (although ‘Scanners’ ends on a moment of debate-it-to-death-in-the-pub-afterwards ambiguity that Christopher Nolan might well have taken his cue from); there’s more a sense of gnarly inevitability to their big revelations. Nonetheless: SPOILER ALERT for the rest of the article and for other Cronenberg movies beyond ‘The Brood’ and ‘Scanners’.
It’s also worth pausing to consider two defining elements of Cronenberg’s work. One is endlessly rehashed in bargain-basement analyses of the director and is only superficially accurate. The other is a lot more subtle and meaningful. Let’s get the first one out of the way. Let’s take a deep breath, conjure up some images of a decomposing Jeff Goldblum in ‘The Fly’ or a quasi-vaginal slit in James Woods’ stomach in ‘Videodrome’, and say it: body horror. But as Bryce notes in an excellent piece on ‘The Dead Zone’ at Things That Don’t Suck, “the more I think about it, the more I confess that I believe the body horror in Cronenberg to be an elaborate feint, a window dressing for his real obsession, that of the corruption of the mind”.
The second one, a strand of critical thought exposited in the Faber & Faber book Cronenberg on Cronenberg (ed. Chris Rodley), is that Cronenberg’s films contain a thematically or emotionally significant* absent character. Usually these characters are an absent scientist – to some degree Doctors Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) and Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) in the films currently under consideration are absent characters in that they serve a primarily expository purpose and who meet bad ends as a result of their own hubris – or an absent father figure. Discussing ‘The Dead Zone’, Cronenberg says “you could make a good case for saying that God is the scientist whose experiments are not always working out and that the Johnny Smith character is one of his failed experiments”.
Beyond these observations, Cronenberg’s work can also be said to treat, as fairly key themes, the dysfunctionalism of human relationships, the depiction of physical aberration as a metaphor for the sexual imperative, and the concept of the dual personality. Time and again throughout his career Cronenberg has returned to the dual personality theme, which generally finds its expression as either two minds/personas contained in one body (Brundle the insect and Brundle the human ‘The Fly’; Tom Stall the family man and Tom Stall the stone cold killer in ‘A History of Violence’; Nikolai the gangster and Nikolai the undercover cop in ‘Eastern Promises’) or one consciousness and/or an intrinsic genetic connection split across two characters (evidenced most explicitly by identical twins Beverley and Elliott Mantle in ‘Dead Ringers’). It’s this latter that informs ‘The Brood’ and ‘Scanners’.
After ‘Fast Company’, Cronenberg pitched to Solnicki, David and Héroux the basic idea for ‘Scanners’ (then called ‘The Sensitives’). They liked it and Cronenberg got to work on the script. At the time, though, he was embroiled in a custody battle for his daughter (he had split from his first wife in 1977) and work on ‘The Sensitives’ was sidelined as a different, utterly personal, project took over. Kudos to his producers that when he presented an entirely different script – ‘The Brood’ – they backed him to the hilt.
‘The Brood’ is one hell of an accomplished film. The rough edges of ‘Shivers’ and ‘Rabid’ are gone. The facility with actors is apparent (if Art Hindle’s central performance seems a tad bland, it’s only because Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed are delivering the goods in fine style – I’m all for calling it a career best in Eggar’s case). The juxtaposition of genuine intellectual concerns with effective horror-movie jolts and iconography is seamless.
‘The Brood’ is easily Cronenberg’s first fully realised statement as a mature and capable filmmaker. It’s also a film that demands background and context, so cynical is its depiction of the sanctity of the family unit in disintegration; so persuasive is its apparent misogyny.
I doubt there are many people incapable of understanding Cronenberg’s issues with the first Mrs C. If you don’t know the story, here it is in his own words (as quoted in Cronenberg on Cronenberg): “I got a call from my ex-wife saying she had decided for religious reasons to go and live in California and was going to take [our daughter] with her. I’d get to see her at Christmas and stuff, and she was leaving tomorrow. I said, ‘Okay, that’s nice, great, good luck.’ I put the phone down, told Carolyn (I was now remarried) and went to the school and kidnapped my daughter. It wasn’t really kidnapping, but we were still sharing custody. I got a court order which prevented her from taking [our daughter]. And then she left. After swearing that she would never leave her daughter, she signed her over to me so that she could go.” Moreover, at the time Cronenberg was writing the script – and with the ironic timing of Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over’ coming on the radio just seconds after your girlfriend’s dumped you – Robert Benton’s syrupy opus ‘Kramer vs Kramer’ was raking in the greenbacks at the box office. It’s an oft-quoted Cronenberg-ism that ‘The Brood’ was his response to the Hollywoodized sentimentality of ‘Kramer vs Kramer’. Here’s how he describes Benton’s film: “false, fake, candy. There are unbelievable, ridiculous moments in it that to me are emotionally completely false”.
If Cronenberg’s rage fuelled the writing of ‘The Brood’, it’s the rage of Nola Carveth (Eggar) which infuses the film. Nola is the estranged wife of building contractor Frank (Hindle), who has been left as the carer of their young daughter Candace (Cindy Hinds) while Nora undergoes therapy at the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics run by the charismatic but confrontational Dr Raglan (Reed). Forbidden from visiting Nola under the strictures of her therapy, Frank’s life is turned upside down when a series of grotesque murders, seemingly committed by psychotic dwarves (Cronenberg knowingly evokes the iconography of Nic Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’), decimate those closest to him. When one of the “dwarves” expires after an attack, Frank is present at the autopsy which determines that whatever these creatures are, they were not born in any traditional sense.
The protagonists of ‘Scanners’, while gestated and delivered as per normal conventions, were born with dangerously advanced mental capabilities, the result of a drug marketed to pregnant women in the 1950s but swiftly withdrawn once the side-effects became apparent. Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), born a telepath (or scanner), has no recollection of his childhood. A vagrant, semi-cognizant of his ability to link with another person’s mind but unable to control or contextualise it, he is recruited by Dr Ruth (McGoohan) of the government-controlled Consec to infiltrate an underground scanner organisation led by the psychotic Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside). Revok is using pharmaceutical company Biochemical Amalgamate as a cover to produce a drug called Ephemerol. Cronenberg’s proclivity for dualism reaches new heights here. Ephemerol is used by Dr Ruth to placate the adult telepaths in his care (it calms them from the “overheard” voices that clamour their mind during social interaction) and by Revok to inculcate pregnant women in order to produce a new breed and by extension a new world order of scanners.
‘Scanners’ saw Cronenberg painting on his biggest canvas yet. It contains chases, shoot-outs, car crashes, explosions, helicopters, a large cast and a barrage of special effects, including – most infamously – an exploding head. In this respect it’s the antithesis of ‘The Brood’, a small scale and character-driven movie by comparison. And yet the two are intertwined, even in their differences. Whereas ‘Scanners’ has the same drug put to different uses, ‘The Brood’ demonstrates Dr Raglan’s commitment to drug-free (hence, with a tip of the hat to Aldous Huxley, the name of the clinic) therapy designed to force the patient into the very heart of their problem and “out the other side”. Only in Nola’s case, her anger/jealousy is cathartically released in a very physical and animalistic way: she manifests child-like assassins who attack anybody who threatens (or is perceived to threaten) her. Cronenberg takes these pint-sized, facially deformed psychopaths into the most normal and ostensibly safe of settings: family homes, schools. Years before ‘Them’ or ‘Eden Lake’, Cronenberg disturbs the audience with the concept of a child as killer. The revelation that these abominations are not children, however, doesn’t let the audience off. Not one little bit. In fact, it makes it worse. These are the products of a twisted, bastardized, psychologically damaged maternal instinct: not children, but the manifestations of a mother whose emotional mindset is irreversibly negative.
‘The Brood’, then, has a mother who creates monsters of her own volition, whereas the pregnant women in ‘Scanners’ who are exposed to Ephemerol are innocent victims: they have no idea that their children will be born telepaths. The familial schism in ‘The Brood’ is matrimonial; in ‘Scanners’, fraternal. The missing father figure is the estranged maternal grandparent in ‘The Brood’ (an alcoholic whose well-meaning intentions are ultimately futile) and the literal father of whom Cameron Vale has no recollection in ‘Scanners’. Scientists who have, through the tunnel-vision of their respective specialisms, literally created monsters (or at least been present at the birth) provide surrogates for these missing fathers in both instances.
Cronenberg has described ‘The Brood’ as the most autobiographical of his films. Watched back to back, ‘Scanners’ presents as equally so. Viewed with even the laziest of critical faculties engaged, it’s impossible not to see them as companion pieces; variations on a theme. As with everything on Cronenberg’s CV, the obvious knee-jerk reaction is artificially resonant but ultimately an exercise in missing the point. ‘The Brood’ is not misogynistic. ‘Scanners’ is not about sibling rivalry. Both are about the forces – medical, scientific or governmental – that spectacularly fuck up their remit of curing or palliating and instead threaten to destroy the individual and/or the family unit by one crucial misconception: that from the very cause they seek the cure.
*Using the word “emotionally” in an article on David Cronenberg opens up a can of worms, given that his directorial modus operandi is the kind of clinical detachment that would make Ingmar Bergman or Carl Dreyer whistle softly and murmur “Dude, that’s cold.” Nonetheless, I think there’s a case to be made that these absences account for the dearth of emotionalism in the films.
David Cronenberg made his first two full-length features, ‘Shivers’ (1975) and’Rabid’ (1976), for a low-budget outfit called Cinepix who started life as a distributor of soft-core porn and whose track record as a production company pre-Cronenberg was, predictably enough, soft-core porn. This accounts for the presence of adult performers Sue Helen Petrie in ‘Shivers’ and Marilyn Chambers in ‘Rabid’.Taking advantage of tax-shelter opportunities for Canadian filmmakers (but having to abide by stipulations such as only one non-Canadian star per picture), Cronenberg made what has come to be regarded as the odd-one-out in his filmography, the drag-racing drama ‘Fast Company’ (1979), before hooking up with producers Victor Solnicki, Pierre David and Claude Héroux to make the two features which arguably cemented his maturation as a director, defined his intellectual and visceral aesthetic, and propelled him towards a wider audience: ‘The Brood’ (1979) and ‘Scanners’ (1980).
Before we go any further, let’s pause for a SPOILER ALERT. Attempting to discuss these movies without lifting the lid on pivotal plot points would make for a short and rather pointless article. Not that either film deals in M. Night Shyamalan style twists (although ‘Scanners’ ends on a moment of debate-it-to-death-in-the-pub-afterwards ambiguity that Christopher Nolan might well have taken his cue from); there’s more a sense of gnarly inevitability to their big revelations. Nonetheless: SPOILER ALERT for the rest of the article and for other Cronenberg movies beyond ‘The Brood’ and ‘Scanners’.
It’s also worth pausing to consider two defining elements of Cronenberg’s work. One is endlessly rehashed in bargain-basement analyses of the director and is only superficially accurate. The other is a lot more subtle and meaningful. Let’s get the first one out of the way. Let’s take a deep breath, conjure up some images of a decomposing Jeff Goldblum in ‘The Fly’ or a quasi-vaginal slit in James Woods’ stomach in ‘Videodrome’, and say it: body horror. But as Bryce notes in an excellent piece on ‘The Dead Zone’ at Things That Don’t Suck, “the more I think about it, the more I confess that I believe the body horror in Cronenberg to be an elaborate feint, a window dressing for his real obsession, that of the corruption of the mind”.
The second one, a strand of critical thought exposited in the Faber & Faber book Cronenberg on Cronenberg (ed. Chris Rodley), is that Cronenberg’s films contain a thematically or emotionally significant* absent character. Usually these characters are an absent scientist – to some degree Doctors Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) and Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) in the films currently under consideration are absent characters in that they serve a primarily expository purpose and who meet bad ends as a result of their own hubris – or an absent father figure. Discussing ‘The Dead Zone’, Cronenberg says “you could make a good case for saying that God is the scientist whose experiments are not always working out and that the Johnny Smith character is one of his failed experiments”.Beyond these observations, Cronenberg’s work can also be said to treat, as fairly key themes, the dysfunctionalism of human relationships, the depiction of physical aberration as a metaphor for the sexual imperative, and the concept of the dual personality. Time and again throughout his career Cronenberg has returned to the dual personality theme, which generally finds its expression as either two minds/personas contained in one body (Brundle the insect and Brundle the human ‘The Fly’; Tom Stall the family man and Tom Stall the stone cold killer in ‘A History of Violence’; Nikolai the gangster and Nikolai the undercover cop in ‘Eastern Promises’) or one consciousness and/or an intrinsic genetic connection split across two characters (evidenced most explicitly by identical twins Beverley and Elliott Mantle in ‘Dead Ringers’). It’s this latter that informs ‘The Brood’ and ‘Scanners’.
After ‘Fast Company’, Cronenberg pitched to Solnicki, David and Héroux the basic idea for ‘Scanners’ (then called ‘The Sensitives’). They liked it and Cronenberg got to work on the script. At the time, though, he was embroiled in a custody battle for his daughter (he had split from his first wife in 1977) and work on ‘The Sensitives’ was sidelined as a different, utterly personal, project took over. Kudos to his producers that when he presented an entirely different script – ‘The Brood’ – they backed him to the hilt.
‘The Brood’ is one hell of an accomplished film. The rough edges of ‘Shivers’ and ‘Rabid’ are gone. The facility with actors is apparent (if Art Hindle’s central performance seems a tad bland, it’s only because Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed are delivering the goods in fine style – I’m all for calling it a career best in Eggar’s case). The juxtaposition of genuine intellectual concerns with effective horror-movie jolts and iconography is seamless.
‘The Brood’ is easily Cronenberg’s first fully realised statement as a mature and capable filmmaker. It’s also a film that demands background and context, so cynical is its depiction of the sanctity of the family unit in disintegration; so persuasive is its apparent misogyny.I doubt there are many people incapable of understanding Cronenberg’s issues with the first Mrs C. If you don’t know the story, here it is in his own words (as quoted in Cronenberg on Cronenberg): “I got a call from my ex-wife saying she had decided for religious reasons to go and live in California and was going to take [our daughter] with her. I’d get to see her at Christmas and stuff, and she was leaving tomorrow. I said, ‘Okay, that’s nice, great, good luck.’ I put the phone down, told Carolyn (I was now remarried) and went to the school and kidnapped my daughter. It wasn’t really kidnapping, but we were still sharing custody. I got a court order which prevented her from taking [our daughter]. And then she left. After swearing that she would never leave her daughter, she signed her over to me so that she could go.” Moreover, at the time Cronenberg was writing the script – and with the ironic timing of Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over’ coming on the radio just seconds after your girlfriend’s dumped you – Robert Benton’s syrupy opus ‘Kramer vs Kramer’ was raking in the greenbacks at the box office. It’s an oft-quoted Cronenberg-ism that ‘The Brood’ was his response to the Hollywoodized sentimentality of ‘Kramer vs Kramer’. Here’s how he describes Benton’s film: “false, fake, candy. There are unbelievable, ridiculous moments in it that to me are emotionally completely false”.
If Cronenberg’s rage fuelled the writing of ‘The Brood’, it’s the rage of Nola Carveth (Eggar) which infuses the film. Nola is the estranged wife of building contractor Frank (Hindle), who has been left as the carer of their young daughter Candace (Cindy Hinds) while Nora undergoes therapy at the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics run by the charismatic but confrontational Dr Raglan (Reed). Forbidden from visiting Nola under the strictures of her therapy, Frank’s life is turned upside down when a series of grotesque murders, seemingly committed by psychotic dwarves (Cronenberg knowingly evokes the iconography of Nic Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’), decimate those closest to him. When one of the “dwarves” expires after an attack, Frank is present at the autopsy which determines that whatever these creatures are, they were not born in any traditional sense.
The protagonists of ‘Scanners’, while gestated and delivered as per normal conventions, were born with dangerously advanced mental capabilities, the result of a drug marketed to pregnant women in the 1950s but swiftly withdrawn once the side-effects became apparent. Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), born a telepath (or scanner), has no recollection of his childhood. A vagrant, semi-cognizant of his ability to link with another person’s mind but unable to control or contextualise it, he is recruited by Dr Ruth (McGoohan) of the government-controlled Consec to infiltrate an underground scanner organisation led by the psychotic Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside). Revok is using pharmaceutical company Biochemical Amalgamate as a cover to produce a drug called Ephemerol. Cronenberg’s proclivity for dualism reaches new heights here. Ephemerol is used by Dr Ruth to placate the adult telepaths in his care (it calms them from the “overheard” voices that clamour their mind during social interaction) and by Revok to inculcate pregnant women in order to produce a new breed and by extension a new world order of scanners.
‘Scanners’ saw Cronenberg painting on his biggest canvas yet. It contains chases, shoot-outs, car crashes, explosions, helicopters, a large cast and a barrage of special effects, including – most infamously – an exploding head. In this respect it’s the antithesis of ‘The Brood’, a small scale and character-driven movie by comparison. And yet the two are intertwined, even in their differences. Whereas ‘Scanners’ has the same drug put to different uses, ‘The Brood’ demonstrates Dr Raglan’s commitment to drug-free (hence, with a tip of the hat to Aldous Huxley, the name of the clinic) therapy designed to force the patient into the very heart of their problem and “out the other side”. Only in Nola’s case, her anger/jealousy is cathartically released in a very physical and animalistic way: she manifests child-like assassins who attack anybody who threatens (or is perceived to threaten) her. Cronenberg takes these pint-sized, facially deformed psychopaths into the most normal and ostensibly safe of settings: family homes, schools. Years before ‘Them’ or ‘Eden Lake’, Cronenberg disturbs the audience with the concept of a child as killer. The revelation that these abominations are not children, however, doesn’t let the audience off. Not one little bit. In fact, it makes it worse. These are the products of a twisted, bastardized, psychologically damaged maternal instinct: not children, but the manifestations of a mother whose emotional mindset is irreversibly negative.‘The Brood’, then, has a mother who creates monsters of her own volition, whereas the pregnant women in ‘Scanners’ who are exposed to Ephemerol are innocent victims: they have no idea that their children will be born telepaths. The familial schism in ‘The Brood’ is matrimonial; in ‘Scanners’, fraternal. The missing father figure is the estranged maternal grandparent in ‘The Brood’ (an alcoholic whose well-meaning intentions are ultimately futile) and the literal father of whom Cameron Vale has no recollection in ‘Scanners’. Scientists who have, through the tunnel-vision of their respective specialisms, literally created monsters (or at least been present at the birth) provide surrogates for these missing fathers in both instances.
Cronenberg has described ‘The Brood’ as the most autobiographical of his films. Watched back to back, ‘Scanners’ presents as equally so. Viewed with even the laziest of critical faculties engaged, it’s impossible not to see them as companion pieces; variations on a theme. As with everything on Cronenberg’s CV, the obvious knee-jerk reaction is artificially resonant but ultimately an exercise in missing the point. ‘The Brood’ is not misogynistic. ‘Scanners’ is not about sibling rivalry. Both are about the forces – medical, scientific or governmental – that spectacularly fuck up their remit of curing or palliating and instead threaten to destroy the individual and/or the family unit by one crucial misconception: that from the very cause they seek the cure.
*Using the word “emotionally” in an article on David Cronenberg opens up a can of worms, given that his directorial modus operandi is the kind of clinical detachment that would make Ingmar Bergman or Carl Dreyer whistle softly and murmur “Dude, that’s cold.” Nonetheless, I think there’s a case to be made that these absences account for the dearth of emotionalism in the films.
Thursday, September 09, 2010
SLIFR quiz
Here's the post that should have appeared last night. Fingers crossed that T-Mobile get the content lock removed straightaway when I talk to them after work.
Assuming that normal service is resumed, I’ll be rounding out the week on The Agitation of the Mind with at least one David Cronenberg review to tie in with Cinema Viewfinder’s Cronenberg Blog-a-thon. After a little something for the weekend (no names mentioned but we’ll be in classic English rose territory), there’ll be another Operation 101010 choice (no titles mentioned but we’ll be heading into dark and nasty territory).
In the meantime, Dennis at Sergio Leone And The Infield Fly Rule has a talent for setting quizzes that separate the cineastes from the sinners. Head over here to check it out.
These, for better or for worse, are my answers:
1) Classic film you most want to experience that has so far eluded you.
Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’. Ideally, I’d like to see it on the big screen with live musical accompaniment. I’ve seen a handful of silents like this and it’s really the only way to see them. Everything is in the visuals and I find they just don’t transition that well to the small screen. This said, I’ll probably have to bite the bullet and watch ‘Potemkin’ on DVD sooner rather than later since I feel like a cine-illiterate for not having seen it.
2) Greatest Criterion DVD/Blu-ray release ever
Am I right in thinking these are Region 1 releases only? Would account for the absence of any in my collection.
3) The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon?
‘The Maltese Falcon’ – it’s the, ah, stuff that dreams are made of.
4) Jason Bateman or Paul Rudd?
Paul Rudd’s done a ‘Robot Chicken’ episode, so that pretty much swings it.
5) Best mother/child (male or female) movie star combo
I’m taking combo to mean starred in a movie together, so I’m going for either Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis in ‘The Fog’ or Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow in ‘Sylvia’.
6) Who are the Robert Mitchums and Ida Lupinos among working movie actors? Do modern parallels to such masculine and no-nonsense feminine stars even exist? If not, why not?
The heavy-lidded world-weary pragmatism of Robert Mitchum can be seen in Chow Yun Fat’s work for John Woo. But a contemporary Ida Lupino? There is none.
7) Favorite Preston Sturges movie
‘The Palm Beach Story’ – imagine a P.G. Wodehouse comedy high on champagne and proscribed substances. Great stuff!
8) Odette Yustman or Mary Elizabeth Winstead?
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, if only for that cheerleader’s outfit in ‘Death Proof’. (Yup, I am that shallow!)
9) Is there a movie that if you found out a partner or love interest loved (or didn't love) would qualify as a Relationship Deal Breaker?
10) Favorite DVD commentary
11) Movies most recently seen on DVD, Blu-ray and theatrically
12) Dirk Bogarde or Alan Bates?
13) Favorite DVD extra
14) Brian De Palma’s Scarface— yes or no?
15) Best comic moment from a horror film that is not a horror comedy (Young Frankenstein, Love At First Bite, et al.)
16) Jane Birkin or Edwige Fenech?
17) Favorite Wong Kar-wai movie
18) Best horrific moment from a comedy that is not a horror comedy
19) From 2010, a specific example of what movies are doing right…
22) Roger Livesey or David Farrar?
Let’s call this one a draw. Both did awesome work for Powell and Pressburger. Livesey rules in ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ and ‘A Matter of Life and Death’. Farrar is intense and brooding in ‘Black Narcissus’ and ‘The Small Back Room’.
24) Favorite Freddie Francis movie (as Director)
25) Bringing Up Baby or The Awful Truth?
26) Tina Fey or Kristen Wiig?
27) Name a stylistically important director and the best film that would have never been made without his/her influence.
Without Scorsese, would John Woo’s ‘The Killer’ or Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ exist?
29) Link to a picture/frame grab of a movie image that for you best illustrates bliss. Elaborate.
30) With a tip of that hat to Glenn Kenny, think of a just-slightly-inadequate alternate title for a famous movie. (Examples from GK: Fan Fiction; Boudu Relieved From Cramping; The Mild Imprecation of the Cat People)
‘Bring Me a Letter of Apology From Alfredo Garcia’.
Assuming that normal service is resumed, I’ll be rounding out the week on The Agitation of the Mind with at least one David Cronenberg review to tie in with Cinema Viewfinder’s Cronenberg Blog-a-thon. After a little something for the weekend (no names mentioned but we’ll be in classic English rose territory), there’ll be another Operation 101010 choice (no titles mentioned but we’ll be heading into dark and nasty territory).
In the meantime, Dennis at Sergio Leone And The Infield Fly Rule has a talent for setting quizzes that separate the cineastes from the sinners. Head over here to check it out.
These, for better or for worse, are my answers:
1) Classic film you most want to experience that has so far eluded you.
Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’. Ideally, I’d like to see it on the big screen with live musical accompaniment. I’ve seen a handful of silents like this and it’s really the only way to see them. Everything is in the visuals and I find they just don’t transition that well to the small screen. This said, I’ll probably have to bite the bullet and watch ‘Potemkin’ on DVD sooner rather than later since I feel like a cine-illiterate for not having seen it.
2) Greatest Criterion DVD/Blu-ray release ever
Am I right in thinking these are Region 1 releases only? Would account for the absence of any in my collection.
3) The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon?
‘The Maltese Falcon’ – it’s the, ah, stuff that dreams are made of.
4) Jason Bateman or Paul Rudd?Paul Rudd’s done a ‘Robot Chicken’ episode, so that pretty much swings it.
5) Best mother/child (male or female) movie star combo
I’m taking combo to mean starred in a movie together, so I’m going for either Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis in ‘The Fog’ or Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow in ‘Sylvia’.
6) Who are the Robert Mitchums and Ida Lupinos among working movie actors? Do modern parallels to such masculine and no-nonsense feminine stars even exist? If not, why not?
The heavy-lidded world-weary pragmatism of Robert Mitchum can be seen in Chow Yun Fat’s work for John Woo. But a contemporary Ida Lupino? There is none.
7) Favorite Preston Sturges movie
‘The Palm Beach Story’ – imagine a P.G. Wodehouse comedy high on champagne and proscribed substances. Great stuff!
8) Odette Yustman or Mary Elizabeth Winstead?
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, if only for that cheerleader’s outfit in ‘Death Proof’. (Yup, I am that shallow!)
9) Is there a movie that if you found out a partner or love interest loved (or didn't love) would qualify as a Relationship Deal Breaker?As much as I love movies, I don’t think I’d leave my wife over one. Having said that, me and Mrs Agitation owe the biggest row of our relationship over POS Nic Cage-starrer ‘Next’; she quite enjoyed it, while I was provoked to new heights of vehemence and profanity at how shockingly bad it was on every level and how egregiously the scriptwriter had cheated at the end. We weathered it, though.
10) Favorite DVD commentary
John Carpenter and Kurt Russell on ‘The Thing’.
11) Movies most recently seen on DVD, Blu-ray and theatrically
DVD: ‘Heart of Glass’. Theatrically: ‘Toy Story 3’.
12) Dirk Bogarde or Alan Bates?
Dirk Bogarde – he hasn’t chalked up 27 posts on The Agitation of the Mind for nothing.
13) Favorite DVD extra‘Great Bolshie Yarblockos’, a documentary about the making of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, available on the Warner Directors Edition Stanley Kubrick box set. Full disclosure: I’m one of the talking heads on the documentary. (Non-egomaniacal choice: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost doing their ‘Man Who Would Be King’ homages on ‘Shaun of the Dead’ or ‘Hot Fuzz’.)
14) Brian De Palma’s Scarface— yes or no?
Yes, for its energy and iconography – although it’s starting to look pretty dated.
15) Best comic moment from a horror film that is not a horror comedy (Young Frankenstein, Love At First Bite, et al.)
“Step away from the bike!” Nic Cage in the execrable (but somehow unintentially hilarious) ‘Wicker Man’ remake.
16) Jane Birkin or Edwige Fenech?
Notwithstanding that Jane Birkin is an incredibly accomplished actress, I gotta go for Edwige Fenech. The evidence is as follows (yup, I am that shallow!):
17) Favorite Wong Kar-wai movie‘Chungking Express’ for its colour and vibrancy, underlined by an understated sense of loneliness.
18) Best horrific moment from a comedy that is not a horror comedy
There’s at least half a dozen in ‘Four Lions’, but I don’t want to hove into spoiler territory.
19) From 2010, a specific example of what movies are doing right…
I’ll hold my hands up and say that this year I’ve seen the lowest number of movies theatrically since I was 18. This isn’t a comment on the quality of new releases, but a conflation of cinema tickets being stupidly expensive and me and Mrs Agitation’s household budget being constrictively tight. Of the meagre 12 features I’ve seen on the big screen, I’d pick ‘Four Lions’ as an example of satirical comedy having the balls to be out and out funny in its treatment of an utterly serious theme, as well as the humanity to make the audience connect with its characters and possibly challenge their own preconceptions.
.
20) Ryan Reynolds or Chris Evans
Ryan Reynolds doesn’t share his name with an obnoxious and self-congratulatory British DJ. Also he’s married to Scarlett Johansson, so the dude must be doing something right.
.
21) Speculate about the future of online film writing. What’s next?
The internet has democratized film criticism. Troll down Agitation’s link list and you’ll find plenty of intelligent, informed, literate and perceptive writers on film, all of whom, unlike salaried writers in the mainstream press, are free of editorial interference and the concerns of kowtowing to advertisers and money men. I’d like to think that what is next is more of the same: that the percentage of the blogosphere given over to film writers remains at a constant. Here’s the risk: if there’s an exponential rise in the amount of film bloggers that’s unmatched by a similar growth in readers, good writers could become disaffected by a drop-off in readers and either blog less or abandon their efforts entirely. (Bryce at Things That Don’t Suck raises this point in his set of answers.) Another worry is that a tweeting mentality will insinuate itself into film reviews leading to a reductive standard of writing across the internet.
22) Roger Livesey or David Farrar?
Let’s call this one a draw. Both did awesome work for Powell and Pressburger. Livesey rules in ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ and ‘A Matter of Life and Death’. Farrar is intense and brooding in ‘Black Narcissus’ and ‘The Small Back Room’.
Applying the same definition from question 5, Ryan O’Neal and Tatum O’Neal in ‘Paper Moon’.
24) Favorite Freddie Francis movie (as Director)
‘The Creeping Flesh’.
25) Bringing Up Baby or The Awful Truth?
‘Bringing Up Baby’.
26) Tina Fey or Kristen Wiig?
By a narrow margin, Tina Fey: smart, funny and oh my God yes I would!
27) Name a stylistically important director and the best film that would have never been made without his/her influence.Without Scorsese, would John Woo’s ‘The Killer’ or Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ exist?
.
28) Movie you’d most enjoy seeing remade and transplanted to a different culture (i.e. Yimou Zhang’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop.)
‘Finding Nemo’ transposed to Russia. (“In former Soviet Republic, Nemo finds you.”)
29) Link to a picture/frame grab of a movie image that for you best illustrates bliss. Elaborate.
‘Whisky Galore’. The old guy in the cap is up to his neck in bottles of Scotch. How can this not equate to bliss?
30) With a tip of that hat to Glenn Kenny, think of a just-slightly-inadequate alternate title for a famous movie. (Examples from GK: Fan Fiction; Boudu Relieved From Cramping; The Mild Imprecation of the Cat People)‘Bring Me a Letter of Apology From Alfredo Garcia’.
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Bring me the head of T-Mobile
For about two years now, my internet access (at home anyway) has been via one of those T-Mobile Web 'n' Walk sticks. Apart from vacillations in upload speed and an occasional tendency to drop out of connection, it's served me fairly well.
Tonight, however, and with the service unasked for and definitely unrequired (I'm over 18; I don't have any children), it's decided to impose a content lock. Blogger? Blocked. YouTube? Blocked. Anything that might return a hit from a Google search along the lines of "hot girl on girl action"? Fuhgeddaboudit! I tried logging in to the T-Mobile website, but the unlock feature didn't work.
After much searching and perusing of forums, I've finally managed to log-in via a proxy site. Most proxies, if the last hour and a half of wasted life has been anything to go by, either don't let you log on to Blogger or let you log on but give up the ghost when you hit the "new post" button.
This one (hiddenkurt.info) has allowed me to create a new post, however the upload and link buttons are missing. Hence the post I had written for tonight (my set of answers to Dennis Cozzallo's latest quiz at SLIFR) complete with links and illustrative material will have to wait until I've had the opportunity to call in at a T-Mobile store tomorrow with proof of age. The fact that you have to be over 18 in order to have a fucking contract with them in the first place seems to be lost on them.
Hopefully The Agitation of the Mind will return tomorrow.
Tonight, however, and with the service unasked for and definitely unrequired (I'm over 18; I don't have any children), it's decided to impose a content lock. Blogger? Blocked. YouTube? Blocked. Anything that might return a hit from a Google search along the lines of "hot girl on girl action"? Fuhgeddaboudit! I tried logging in to the T-Mobile website, but the unlock feature didn't work.
After much searching and perusing of forums, I've finally managed to log-in via a proxy site. Most proxies, if the last hour and a half of wasted life has been anything to go by, either don't let you log on to Blogger or let you log on but give up the ghost when you hit the "new post" button.
This one (hiddenkurt.info) has allowed me to create a new post, however the upload and link buttons are missing. Hence the post I had written for tonight (my set of answers to Dennis Cozzallo's latest quiz at SLIFR) complete with links and illustrative material will have to wait until I've had the opportunity to call in at a T-Mobile store tomorrow with proof of age. The fact that you have to be over 18 in order to have a fucking contract with them in the first place seems to be lost on them.
Hopefully The Agitation of the Mind will return tomorrow.
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Heart of Glass
Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 7 of 10 / Overall: 71 of 100
‘Heart of Glass’ (a.k.a. The One Where Herzog Hypnotized His Cast) is a strange, dreamlike fable that makes an interesting companion piece to Herzog’s earlier ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’. But whereas ‘Kaspar Hauser’ has an enigma (the eponymous man-child) under scrutiny by rationality, science and social mores, ‘Heart of Glass’ depicts a community spiralling somnolently into irrationality until enigma is all that remains.
Mühlbeck, foreman at a glass factory upon which the town’s economy is dependent, dies and takes to his grave the secret of the factory’s prized “ruby glass”. Production ceases. The workers stand around idle. The factory owner and the town elders fret. A mystic, Hias (Josef Bierbichler), descends from the mountains and prophesizes disaster. The torpor that besets the town drains its inhabitants of their humanity.
‘Heart of Glass’ opens with a series of landscape shots, mist drifting across the countryside. Not a word is spoken until about six minutes in, when a quasi-philosophical voiceover murmuringly accompanies the eerily beautiful shots of the natural world. It sets the tone. The dialogue in ‘Heart of Glass’ is deliberately artificial, like listening to a poem being recited over the images.
The images, pace anything Herzog puts his hand to, are often extraordinary. An early scene has Hias crouched in front of a mountain pass, portentously delivering his first prediction. Behind him, shrouded in mist, two bridges precariously span the ravine. Two people will cross, he tells his glassy-eyed audience, one on each bridge; one will be a liar, the other a thief. The camera drifts upwards. Two indistinct figures ghost across the bridges. No further clue is given to their identity.
The first time I saw ‘Heart of Glass’, it frustrated the hell out of me. Paced slower than an arthritic snail on mogadon, elusive and inconclusive in equal measures, I tried to hard to find meaning in the film, searching each frame for clues, symbols, recurrent imagery. The ending fucked with my head as well. A sort-of denouement at around the one hour ten minute mark is abandoned almost as soon as it’s introduced; Hias is made a pariah; retreating back into the mountains, he narrates a story about a forgotten society on a barren island who believe the world is flat until one of their number, having spent decades staring out to sea, begins to doubt. Their story is left as open to interpretation as that of the glass factory and the community it supported. The film ends.
Subsequent viewings have led to me to hazard a guess that ‘Heart of Glass’ is actually a film about the loss of meaning; about ennui, both social and spiritual. Either that, or it’s a zombie film without flesh-munching, action scenes or a Tom Savini cameo. Your guess is as good as mine.
Asked by Paul Cronin in his book Herzog on Herzog whether the whole hypnosis angle was a gimmick, Herzog had this to say:
“Everyone but the lead character – the only clairvoyant one amongst them – was hypnotized before playing their scenes. I stress that the hypnosis was for reasons of stylization and not manipulation. I certainly did not want a bunch of performing puppets for the film. For years people have accused me of wanting to have more control over actors in my films. In the context of what we were doing in ‘Heart of Glass’, I assure you that as a director I would have been much better off having actors who were not in a trance.”
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 7 of 10 / Overall: 71 of 100
‘Heart of Glass’ (a.k.a. The One Where Herzog Hypnotized His Cast) is a strange, dreamlike fable that makes an interesting companion piece to Herzog’s earlier ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’. But whereas ‘Kaspar Hauser’ has an enigma (the eponymous man-child) under scrutiny by rationality, science and social mores, ‘Heart of Glass’ depicts a community spiralling somnolently into irrationality until enigma is all that remains.Mühlbeck, foreman at a glass factory upon which the town’s economy is dependent, dies and takes to his grave the secret of the factory’s prized “ruby glass”. Production ceases. The workers stand around idle. The factory owner and the town elders fret. A mystic, Hias (Josef Bierbichler), descends from the mountains and prophesizes disaster. The torpor that besets the town drains its inhabitants of their humanity.
‘Heart of Glass’ opens with a series of landscape shots, mist drifting across the countryside. Not a word is spoken until about six minutes in, when a quasi-philosophical voiceover murmuringly accompanies the eerily beautiful shots of the natural world. It sets the tone. The dialogue in ‘Heart of Glass’ is deliberately artificial, like listening to a poem being recited over the images.The images, pace anything Herzog puts his hand to, are often extraordinary. An early scene has Hias crouched in front of a mountain pass, portentously delivering his first prediction. Behind him, shrouded in mist, two bridges precariously span the ravine. Two people will cross, he tells his glassy-eyed audience, one on each bridge; one will be a liar, the other a thief. The camera drifts upwards. Two indistinct figures ghost across the bridges. No further clue is given to their identity.
The first time I saw ‘Heart of Glass’, it frustrated the hell out of me. Paced slower than an arthritic snail on mogadon, elusive and inconclusive in equal measures, I tried to hard to find meaning in the film, searching each frame for clues, symbols, recurrent imagery. The ending fucked with my head as well. A sort-of denouement at around the one hour ten minute mark is abandoned almost as soon as it’s introduced; Hias is made a pariah; retreating back into the mountains, he narrates a story about a forgotten society on a barren island who believe the world is flat until one of their number, having spent decades staring out to sea, begins to doubt. Their story is left as open to interpretation as that of the glass factory and the community it supported. The film ends.Subsequent viewings have led to me to hazard a guess that ‘Heart of Glass’ is actually a film about the loss of meaning; about ennui, both social and spiritual. Either that, or it’s a zombie film without flesh-munching, action scenes or a Tom Savini cameo. Your guess is as good as mine.
Asked by Paul Cronin in his book Herzog on Herzog whether the whole hypnosis angle was a gimmick, Herzog had this to say:“Everyone but the lead character – the only clairvoyant one amongst them – was hypnotized before playing their scenes. I stress that the hypnosis was for reasons of stylization and not manipulation. I certainly did not want a bunch of performing puppets for the film. For years people have accused me of wanting to have more control over actors in my films. In the context of what we were doing in ‘Heart of Glass’, I assure you that as a director I would have been much better off having actors who were not in a trance.”
Monday, September 06, 2010
The White Diamond
Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall 70 of 100
‘The White Diamond’ opens with a potted history of aviation, before settling into the story of Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical designer who –
No, scratch that. Potted history of aviation, my ass! This is a Werner Herzog film. ‘The White Diamond’ opens with a skilful collage of archive footage depicting mankind’s earliest attempts to get off the ground, often ending in disaster, with Herzog calling time on his oblique history lesson at the point where “the real future of aviation was thought to be the airship. Like the roads now filled with automobiles, the skies would be full of airships.”
This opening section fades out with images of the Hindenburg descending in a coruscation of flames. And on this sobering note, the film settles into the story of Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical designer who pioneers a sort of mini-airship for use in scientific research above the jungle canopies of Guyana.
At first, Dorrington seems an atypical Herzog protagonist. There’s a boyish enthusiasm in his to-camera discussions of the work he’s involved in; he’s passionate but never obsessive. He comes across as too good-natured to embody the kind of crazed jungle-bound undertakings that Herzog portrays elsewhere in his filmography. Put it this way: if ‘The White Diamond’ were a feature and not a documentary, Dorrington would be played not by Klaus Kinski but Stephen Fry.
Gradually, though, Herzog works his way towards the tragic and defining event of Dorrington’s career; the event that still haunts him, that throws its shadow across a decade of his life and over the current project.
In 1993, testing a prototype of Dorrington’s mini-airship, the internationally renowned wildlife photographer Dieter Plage flew above the Sumatran rainforests. His camera became entangled in the canopy and, while trying to retrieve it, Plage fell from the airship. The fall killed him. When Dorrington eventually discusses the event, and the “heaviness” he feels over Plage’s loss, Herzog captures the moment sensitively; his camera is never a voyeur.
Plage’s death makes Dorrington trepidacious when it comes to the maiden voyage of his new airship, not least because he has two candidates eager to test it out and never mind the potential dangers. One – of course – is Herzog himself. The other is Marc Anthony Yhap, one of the indigenous populace who congregate to assist and/or observe. Herzog finds in Yhap the soul of a fellow poet. (The title comes from Yhap’s description of the airship.) The eminently laconic Yhap waxes lyrical about taking off in the airship, drifting slowly and peacefully all the way to Europe to be reunited with his family.
If the kinship between Herzog and Yhap is tangible, the slowly developing friendship between Dorrington and Yhap is poignant and forms the human centre of the film. The final scenes, bathed in the ecstatic truth that Herzog ceaselessly strives for, has Dorrington take Yhap up in the airship. The indigent’s delight is, if not an exorcism of sorts, then certainly a counterbalance to the weight Dorrington has been carrying around since Plage’s terrible accident.
Another moment of ecstatic truth – approaching, in this case perhaps, a spiritual truth – comes when Herzog’s cameras, lowered painstakingly, penetrate a hitherto inaccessible cave behind the Kaieteur Falls which provides roosting for innumerable white-tipped swifts. Call it legend, call it superstition, but the locals believe that said cave is holy, that whatever is discovered in there should never be made public. Herzog, respectful of their beliefs, opts to keep the footage under wraps.
“By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants,” Herzog wrote in his gauntlet-throwing Minnesota Declaration. “Filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts. Tourism is sin and travel on foot a virtue.” He’s absolutely right. And here he proves that the absence of the image can be just as revealing and ecstatically true.
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall 70 of 100
‘The White Diamond’ opens with a potted history of aviation, before settling into the story of Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical designer who –No, scratch that. Potted history of aviation, my ass! This is a Werner Herzog film. ‘The White Diamond’ opens with a skilful collage of archive footage depicting mankind’s earliest attempts to get off the ground, often ending in disaster, with Herzog calling time on his oblique history lesson at the point where “the real future of aviation was thought to be the airship. Like the roads now filled with automobiles, the skies would be full of airships.”
This opening section fades out with images of the Hindenburg descending in a coruscation of flames. And on this sobering note, the film settles into the story of Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical designer who pioneers a sort of mini-airship for use in scientific research above the jungle canopies of Guyana.
At first, Dorrington seems an atypical Herzog protagonist. There’s a boyish enthusiasm in his to-camera discussions of the work he’s involved in; he’s passionate but never obsessive. He comes across as too good-natured to embody the kind of crazed jungle-bound undertakings that Herzog portrays elsewhere in his filmography. Put it this way: if ‘The White Diamond’ were a feature and not a documentary, Dorrington would be played not by Klaus Kinski but Stephen Fry.Gradually, though, Herzog works his way towards the tragic and defining event of Dorrington’s career; the event that still haunts him, that throws its shadow across a decade of his life and over the current project.
In 1993, testing a prototype of Dorrington’s mini-airship, the internationally renowned wildlife photographer Dieter Plage flew above the Sumatran rainforests. His camera became entangled in the canopy and, while trying to retrieve it, Plage fell from the airship. The fall killed him. When Dorrington eventually discusses the event, and the “heaviness” he feels over Plage’s loss, Herzog captures the moment sensitively; his camera is never a voyeur.Plage’s death makes Dorrington trepidacious when it comes to the maiden voyage of his new airship, not least because he has two candidates eager to test it out and never mind the potential dangers. One – of course – is Herzog himself. The other is Marc Anthony Yhap, one of the indigenous populace who congregate to assist and/or observe. Herzog finds in Yhap the soul of a fellow poet. (The title comes from Yhap’s description of the airship.) The eminently laconic Yhap waxes lyrical about taking off in the airship, drifting slowly and peacefully all the way to Europe to be reunited with his family.
If the kinship between Herzog and Yhap is tangible, the slowly developing friendship between Dorrington and Yhap is poignant and forms the human centre of the film. The final scenes, bathed in the ecstatic truth that Herzog ceaselessly strives for, has Dorrington take Yhap up in the airship. The indigent’s delight is, if not an exorcism of sorts, then certainly a counterbalance to the weight Dorrington has been carrying around since Plage’s terrible accident.Another moment of ecstatic truth – approaching, in this case perhaps, a spiritual truth – comes when Herzog’s cameras, lowered painstakingly, penetrate a hitherto inaccessible cave behind the Kaieteur Falls which provides roosting for innumerable white-tipped swifts. Call it legend, call it superstition, but the locals believe that said cave is holy, that whatever is discovered in there should never be made public. Herzog, respectful of their beliefs, opts to keep the footage under wraps.
“By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants,” Herzog wrote in his gauntlet-throwing Minnesota Declaration. “Filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts. Tourism is sin and travel on foot a virtue.” He’s absolutely right. And here he proves that the absence of the image can be just as revealing and ecstatically true.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Even Dwarfs Started Small
Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 5 of 10 / Overall: 69 of 100
The late ’60s found Werner Herzog, just one feature film (‘Signs of Life’) and a handful of shorts into his prolific career, in Africa where, along with filming the commissioned 45-minute film ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’, he start shooting footage for what would become ‘Fata Morgana’. His original concept – which he returned to nearly forty years later with ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ – was to structure the film as a document made by alien visitors who discover that Earth is a ruined landscape.
“… I decided to scrap this idea. The mirages that had taken hold of me and the visionary aspects of the desert landscape were so much more powerful that any single idea for the film I had previously had, so I junked the story, opened my eyes and ears, and just filmed the mirages of the desert.”
If this recollection sounds transcendental, the reality was quite different. Herzog, renowned for making films of visionary genius in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, had a harder time than usual. The man who manoeuvred his way through military blockades during ‘Fitzcarraldo’ on a forged permit document and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of chutzpah didn’t fare so well on ‘Fata Morgana’. He and his small crew found themselves arrested on several occasions, incarcerated in overcrowded cells, mistreated. It wasn’t in the happiest frame of mind that he started work on his next picture ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’*.
“When I returned to Lanzarote to start shooting ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ I was full of bitterness, affected by sickness and the film became a more radical film than I had originally planned. ‘Aguirre’ looks like kindergarten against this one. Somehow I had the feeling that if Goya and Hieronymus Bosch had the guts to do their gloomiest stuff, why shouldn’t I?”
Radical, definitely. ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is a film that divided audiences of the time, particularly in Germany where Herzog was denounced as a fascist. Released during a period of widespread revolts and riots, Herzog’s critics claimed that the film satirised the revolutionary spirit instead of celebrating it.
“I told these agitators that the film had absolutely nothing to do with the 1968 movements, that they were blinded by zealousness and that if they looked at the film twenty five years down the line they might just see a more truthful representation of what happened in 1968 than in most other films.”
Read the above sentence a couple of times. There’s something of a dichotomy in that statement. Herzog is saying that ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is not about the political and social chaos of 1968 – by extension, therefore, it is neither an allegory nor an overtly political work – however, viewed in retrospect it provides a more accurate commentary on the social and political climate it was born out of than many other, explicitly political, films of the time.
Or, I guess, you could just look at it as a movie about some dwarfs who go apeshit and revel in total anarchy. The nominal plot – the film offers little in the way of narrative; it’s more a collage of increasingly bizarre scenes – has Hombre (Helmut Döring) first observe and then participate in a destructive and cathartic day of rebellion while a nameless bureaucrat (Pepi Hermine) tries to cling on to his seat of power while impotently calling for order. The location is some kind of institute or facility. It doesn’t matter which. Take it as a microcosm: for the Germany of 1968, for the Britain of 1977, for the world of today. Works just as well in each case.
Works equally well – nightmarishly so, in fact – if you take everything literally. That way you’ve got only one of two films (to the best of my knowledge) that feature an all-dwarf case – the other being Sam Newfield’s 1938 western ‘The Terror of Tiny Town’ – and certainly the only film whose all-dwarf cast gleefully commit acts of arson and vandalism, throw themselves at or on top of moving vehicles, flick through pornographic magazines, stage a mock religious ceremony with a crucified monkey and laugh themselves hoarse at a camel as it takes a dump.
“… a rumour went round that to get the dromedary on its knees so long I cut its sinews. Very quickly I learned … that you can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. So immediately I issued a statement that actually I had nailed the dromedary to the ground.”
‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is one fucked-up piece of cinema, even by Herzog’s standards. It’s a joyous hymn to irresponsibility, a slap in the face to audience expectations and a fuck-you two decades before the term was even coined to political correctness. If Alejandro Jodorowsky had made ‘A Clockwork Orange’ from a script by Salvador Dali, the end result couldn’t have been any weirder.
* ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ was released before ‘Fata Morgana’ as Herzog was initially hesitant about whether ‘Fata Morgana’ would find an audience.
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 5 of 10 / Overall: 69 of 100
The late ’60s found Werner Herzog, just one feature film (‘Signs of Life’) and a handful of shorts into his prolific career, in Africa where, along with filming the commissioned 45-minute film ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’, he start shooting footage for what would become ‘Fata Morgana’. His original concept – which he returned to nearly forty years later with ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ – was to structure the film as a document made by alien visitors who discover that Earth is a ruined landscape.“… I decided to scrap this idea. The mirages that had taken hold of me and the visionary aspects of the desert landscape were so much more powerful that any single idea for the film I had previously had, so I junked the story, opened my eyes and ears, and just filmed the mirages of the desert.”
If this recollection sounds transcendental, the reality was quite different. Herzog, renowned for making films of visionary genius in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, had a harder time than usual. The man who manoeuvred his way through military blockades during ‘Fitzcarraldo’ on a forged permit document and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of chutzpah didn’t fare so well on ‘Fata Morgana’. He and his small crew found themselves arrested on several occasions, incarcerated in overcrowded cells, mistreated. It wasn’t in the happiest frame of mind that he started work on his next picture ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’*.
“When I returned to Lanzarote to start shooting ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ I was full of bitterness, affected by sickness and the film became a more radical film than I had originally planned. ‘Aguirre’ looks like kindergarten against this one. Somehow I had the feeling that if Goya and Hieronymus Bosch had the guts to do their gloomiest stuff, why shouldn’t I?”
Radical, definitely. ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is a film that divided audiences of the time, particularly in Germany where Herzog was denounced as a fascist. Released during a period of widespread revolts and riots, Herzog’s critics claimed that the film satirised the revolutionary spirit instead of celebrating it.
“I told these agitators that the film had absolutely nothing to do with the 1968 movements, that they were blinded by zealousness and that if they looked at the film twenty five years down the line they might just see a more truthful representation of what happened in 1968 than in most other films.”Read the above sentence a couple of times. There’s something of a dichotomy in that statement. Herzog is saying that ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is not about the political and social chaos of 1968 – by extension, therefore, it is neither an allegory nor an overtly political work – however, viewed in retrospect it provides a more accurate commentary on the social and political climate it was born out of than many other, explicitly political, films of the time.
Or, I guess, you could just look at it as a movie about some dwarfs who go apeshit and revel in total anarchy. The nominal plot – the film offers little in the way of narrative; it’s more a collage of increasingly bizarre scenes – has Hombre (Helmut Döring) first observe and then participate in a destructive and cathartic day of rebellion while a nameless bureaucrat (Pepi Hermine) tries to cling on to his seat of power while impotently calling for order. The location is some kind of institute or facility. It doesn’t matter which. Take it as a microcosm: for the Germany of 1968, for the Britain of 1977, for the world of today. Works just as well in each case.
Works equally well – nightmarishly so, in fact – if you take everything literally. That way you’ve got only one of two films (to the best of my knowledge) that feature an all-dwarf case – the other being Sam Newfield’s 1938 western ‘The Terror of Tiny Town’ – and certainly the only film whose all-dwarf cast gleefully commit acts of arson and vandalism, throw themselves at or on top of moving vehicles, flick through pornographic magazines, stage a mock religious ceremony with a crucified monkey and laugh themselves hoarse at a camel as it takes a dump.
“… a rumour went round that to get the dromedary on its knees so long I cut its sinews. Very quickly I learned … that you can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. So immediately I issued a statement that actually I had nailed the dromedary to the ground.”‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ is one fucked-up piece of cinema, even by Herzog’s standards. It’s a joyous hymn to irresponsibility, a slap in the face to audience expectations and a fuck-you two decades before the term was even coined to political correctness. If Alejandro Jodorowsky had made ‘A Clockwork Orange’ from a script by Salvador Dali, the end result couldn’t have been any weirder.
* ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ was released before ‘Fata Morgana’ as Herzog was initially hesitant about whether ‘Fata Morgana’ would find an audience.
(All quotes in italics are taken from Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin.)
Mini Herzog-fest
It’s Werner Herzog’s 68th birthday today, so what better occasion to contribute a few more of his idiosyncratic and inimitable titles to Operation 101010? The next three days will constitute a mini Herzog-fest; I’m putting all of the Herzog DVDs I own but haven’t reviewed yet in a box and pulling out three at random. Look out for the first review in a few hours.To get things underway, though, here’s some words of wisdom from the Bavarian maverick himself, as quoted in the indispensable Faber & Faber book Herzog on Herzog (ed. Paul Cronin):
“I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger in my opinion is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grand-children will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Friday, September 03, 2010
Suddenly, next summer
Even allowing for my recent splurge of mini-reviews, there are still 32 titles remaining before I can file Operation 101010 under “completed”. If anybody’s crazy enough to propose an Operation 111111 for next year (applying the same rules but bumping everything up to 11, you’d have to commit to watching and reviewing 121 movies during the year!), I doubt I’ll be as quick to throw my lot in as I was this time around. Operation 101010 has pointed me in the direction of some films I might have missed out on otherwise (the Lukas Moodyssons and Alex de la Iglesia’s ‘800 Bullets’ in particular were real finds), but it has seemed at times like a millstone around my neck.
One casualty of Operation 101010 has been a paucity of retrospectives and/or themed months on The Agitation of the Mind. There’s only been the Jeunet retrospective, July’s second annual Shots on the Blog and ‘Terminator’ week as opposed to last year’s Tarkovsky retrospective, the inaugural Shots on the Blog, the Dirk Bogarde fest, the Diane Lane fest, a bunch of spooky entries around Halloween and the month-long Sam Peckinpah tribute that saw out 2009.
True, I’ve got another Halloween special planned and I’m hoping to squeeze in the fourth annual Dirkfest (although with many of his most interesting late period movies still MIA on DVD, I might have to take a very different approach to it), but I can safely predict that finishing off Operation 101010 will occupy most of the rest of the year.
But I’m already looking ahead to next year. Inspired by Tim at Antagony & Ecstasy’s Summer of Blood (a mid-year celebration of all things gruesome and gory that has already established itself as something of a tradition), Kevin at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies’s similarly theme Summer of Slash and Bryce at Things That Don’t Suck’s equally alliterative Summer of Samurai, I’ve already started giving some thought to a possible season for summer 2011 on Agitation.
With an eye firmly on alliterative possibilities, I’ve come up with five options. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where I need YOU. I’m making next year’s centrepiece on the blog completely interactive. A poll has gone up on the sidebar. Voting will run for the rest of the year. My choice of viewing is entirely in your hands. The options are:
Summer of Song. The remit: anything with a musical connotation. Classic Hollywood musicals, biopics of composers or musicians, documentaries about same. Pro’s: the musical is a genre I’ve never really immersed myself in; I stand to increase my knowledge of film and make discoveries. Cons: ‘The Sound of fuckin’ Music’, one of the few films where I’ve found myself rooting for the Nazis (“they’re in the cellar – fuckin’ lob a grenade!”)
Summer of Sin. The remit: anything seedy, sexy, sultry or seductive; anything torrid, tempting, tantilizing or titillating; anything nasty, naughty, nubile or nefarious; anything lustful, lewd, licentious or lascivious; anything rude, rampant, rapacious or recalcitrant … (to quote Jim Carrey in ‘The Mask’, “somebody stop me”. No, really. Please. Stop me.) Pro’s: the opportunity to write about provocative or erotic but still artistically valid films such as ‘Sex and Lucia’ and ‘Lust Caution’ without proving oneself the literary equivalent of a sniggering schoolboy. Cons: failing miserably and proving oneself the literary equivalent of a sniggering schoolboy.
Summer of Sarcasm. The remit: satire of the most scathing ilk; anything that royally and unrepentantly rips the piss. Pro’s: some freakin’ funny movies. Cons: said movies warping my fragile little mind to the point where I take an irreverent and facetious attitude into work and get myself fired (fuck it, I’m willing to take the risk).
Summer of Sci-Fi. The remit: what it says on the tin. Pro’s: a slew of great movies, from ‘Metropolis’ to ‘Moon’. Cons: can’t think of any; even a by-the-numbers opus like ‘Logan’s Run’ has Jenny Agutter in a microskirt. And don’t get me started on Anne Francis in ‘Forbidden Planet’!
Summer of Satan. The remit: anything dark, devilish and diabolical. Anything with Satan in the title or ol’ Scratch as a character, icon or narrative influence. Pro’s: some of the key horror movies in film history. Cons: exploitative trash like ‘Satan’s Baby Doll’ and ‘Nude for Satan’. (I’m only kidding about those kind of movies being cons.)
Right then. Get voting. Go ahead: make my summer.
One casualty of Operation 101010 has been a paucity of retrospectives and/or themed months on The Agitation of the Mind. There’s only been the Jeunet retrospective, July’s second annual Shots on the Blog and ‘Terminator’ week as opposed to last year’s Tarkovsky retrospective, the inaugural Shots on the Blog, the Dirk Bogarde fest, the Diane Lane fest, a bunch of spooky entries around Halloween and the month-long Sam Peckinpah tribute that saw out 2009.
True, I’ve got another Halloween special planned and I’m hoping to squeeze in the fourth annual Dirkfest (although with many of his most interesting late period movies still MIA on DVD, I might have to take a very different approach to it), but I can safely predict that finishing off Operation 101010 will occupy most of the rest of the year.
But I’m already looking ahead to next year. Inspired by Tim at Antagony & Ecstasy’s Summer of Blood (a mid-year celebration of all things gruesome and gory that has already established itself as something of a tradition), Kevin at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies’s similarly theme Summer of Slash and Bryce at Things That Don’t Suck’s equally alliterative Summer of Samurai, I’ve already started giving some thought to a possible season for summer 2011 on Agitation.
With an eye firmly on alliterative possibilities, I’ve come up with five options. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where I need YOU. I’m making next year’s centrepiece on the blog completely interactive. A poll has gone up on the sidebar. Voting will run for the rest of the year. My choice of viewing is entirely in your hands. The options are:
Summer of Song. The remit: anything with a musical connotation. Classic Hollywood musicals, biopics of composers or musicians, documentaries about same. Pro’s: the musical is a genre I’ve never really immersed myself in; I stand to increase my knowledge of film and make discoveries. Cons: ‘The Sound of fuckin’ Music’, one of the few films where I’ve found myself rooting for the Nazis (“they’re in the cellar – fuckin’ lob a grenade!”)
Summer of Sin. The remit: anything seedy, sexy, sultry or seductive; anything torrid, tempting, tantilizing or titillating; anything nasty, naughty, nubile or nefarious; anything lustful, lewd, licentious or lascivious; anything rude, rampant, rapacious or recalcitrant … (to quote Jim Carrey in ‘The Mask’, “somebody stop me”. No, really. Please. Stop me.) Pro’s: the opportunity to write about provocative or erotic but still artistically valid films such as ‘Sex and Lucia’ and ‘Lust Caution’ without proving oneself the literary equivalent of a sniggering schoolboy. Cons: failing miserably and proving oneself the literary equivalent of a sniggering schoolboy.
Summer of Sarcasm. The remit: satire of the most scathing ilk; anything that royally and unrepentantly rips the piss. Pro’s: some freakin’ funny movies. Cons: said movies warping my fragile little mind to the point where I take an irreverent and facetious attitude into work and get myself fired (fuck it, I’m willing to take the risk).
Summer of Sci-Fi. The remit: what it says on the tin. Pro’s: a slew of great movies, from ‘Metropolis’ to ‘Moon’. Cons: can’t think of any; even a by-the-numbers opus like ‘Logan’s Run’ has Jenny Agutter in a microskirt. And don’t get me started on Anne Francis in ‘Forbidden Planet’!
Summer of Satan. The remit: anything dark, devilish and diabolical. Anything with Satan in the title or ol’ Scratch as a character, icon or narrative influence. Pro’s: some of the key horror movies in film history. Cons: exploitative trash like ‘Satan’s Baby Doll’ and ‘Nude for Satan’. (I’m only kidding about those kind of movies being cons.)
Right then. Get voting. Go ahead: make my summer.
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