Calvaire

What I said yesterday about SPOILER ALERTS and how the kind of cinema Fabrice du Welz makes renders them kind of irrelevant? Well, same goes for today’s post.

‘A Wonderful Love’ is a about a male stripper who turns up at the home of an unhinged woman, ends up with a fork in his throat and is mistaken by her, during his death throes and in the immediate aftermath, as her new suitor, a man she cooks for, dotes on and goes to bed with.

‘Calvaire’ is about a singer, Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas), who turns up at a run-down guest house owned by unhinged former comedian Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), is mistaken by Bartel for his long-absconded wife and ends up – … well, watch it and find out.

Marc makes his livelihood wearing a pantsuit and a cape, shaking his not-very-sexy thang for little old ladies at a retirement home and crooning his way through syrupy ballads. Despite the dearth of talent and/or personality – seriously: Simon Cowell would fucking demolish this guy – Marc’s something of the heart-throb: an octogenarian tries to get him interested in a little snu-snu in the film’s teeth-grittingly embarrassing opening scene; later, the retirement home’s matron (Brigitte Lahaie – yes, that Brigitte Lahaie) practically throws herself at him. The curiously sexless Marc snubs her overtures, gets in his van and heads off for a big Christmas bash he’s got himself invited to where he’s hoping to schmooze with record execs.

It’s probably no bad thing that Marc never makes it to the Christmas party: the humiliation he’d have suffered at the hands of the record execs would have been nigh on unwatchable. This, after all, is a guy edging in middle age, drives a crappy old van and whose choice of reading material includes Theresa Wassif’s ‘Cliff: A Celebration’.


He does, however, suffer a certain degree of humiliation (I’m using the expression “certain degree” ironically, by the way) at the hands of Bartel. Who, although clearly deranged, is easily the more likeable character. An aesthetic choice du Welz evidently intended from the get-go. In an interview included as one of the DVD’s special features, he states that his intent was to mix up the clichés of religion and the clichés of the horror movie; to subvert and provoke; to leave matters open to interpretation; and to set himself strictures within the genre: “no bimbo with big breasts, no music and most importantly no sympathy for the main character”. To make a horror film “without twist or payoff or boring stuff like that”.

Does he succeed? Oh, hell goddamn yeah!

‘Calvaire’ – a.k.a. ‘The Ordeal’, but the original title works better – starts out in immediately recognizable fashion as our, ahem, hero finds himself stuck in the backwoods after his van gives up the ghost. He encounters a strange type called Boris (Jean-Luc Couchard) who is desperately searching for a lost dog. Searching, in Boris’s understanding, consists of walk-running through the forest with his head hunched into his shoulders alternately shouting the missing pet’s name (Bella) and whimpering pitifully. Nonetheless, Boris agrees to escort Marc to Bartel’s guest house. Bartel behaves in an over-familiar manner towards Marc. He promises to work on Marc’s van, but deliberately procrastinates. His behaviour grows increasingly eccentric. Marc fills the time wandering the countryside. Bartel warns him against going into the village. Out walking, Marc happens upon a farm, where he witnesses something unsavoury going on in the barn. Something the RSPCA would take a very dim view of.

So far, so any-redneck-horror-movie-made-in-the-70s (and fucked over remade by Platinum Dunes in the Noughties).


It’s a scenario we’ve seen before. Many times. Short of Bartel plucking away at a banjo, bird-dogging his sister or calling Marc “boy”, the set-up couldn’t be more familiar. Which is exactly what du Welz wants you to think. Because what follows – for all that it contains a spattering of moments guaranteed to earn the approbation of the torture porn aficionado – is less a reworking of well-worn tropes than an abstraction and subversion of them.

In the film’s most daring, bravura and gloriously bonkers sequence, Bartel – shotgun slung over his shoulder – barges into the village pub (a grubby little place filled with burly and surly types) and warns all and sundry to stay away from his “wife”. After he departs, one of the regulars seats himself at the piano and pounds out something that sounds like the funeral march as if re-orchestrated by The Smiths. One great hulking brick shithouse of an individual stands up and starts rocking back and forth. Another fellow joins him. Soon all the drinkers have paired off and, facing each other, sway unsteadily, arms akimbo. It takes a while to realize they’re dancing.

In the interview, du Welz identifies this as the key scene: if you accept this scene, you can deal with what happens next. If not, you’re likely to pronounce the film “shit” and leave the movie theatre. The most low-key scene post-dance is Boris’s delighted reunion with his “puppy”, his beloved Bella. Bella’s a cow. Marc seems to be the only person cognizant of this fact. Bartel shares Boris’s high spirits and declares this another example of the miracle of Christmas, the first being the return of his “wife”.


Then the villagers turn up and the last stretch of ‘Calvaire’ comes on like ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Straw Dogs’ stuck in a blender with a pinch of ‘Taxi Driver’ thrown in (you’ll know what I mean the moment the overhead shot starts) and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Only with a crucifixion scene and a deconstructive finale that leaves you feeling vaguely disconcerted. As if your perception of things has been temporarily skewed with no guarantee that you’ll entirely return to seeing the world the quite the same way as before.

‘Calvaire’ is enigmatic, horrifying and funny – often all at the same time.

A Wonderful Love

The opening sequence of Fabrice du Welz’s deliciously twisted 20-minute short depicts hunched-shouldered middle-aged frump Miss Lara (Edith Lemerdy) making her way home through a bleak urban landscape of shadowy underpasses and featureless apartment blocks. A maze of grubby corridors leads to her equally grubby apartment. From a fridge that looks like it was last cleaned when dinosaurs were roaming the earth she takes a birthday cake and cuts herself a slice.

What happens next takes us into SPOILER ALERT territory (although du Welz makes films so unconcerned with traditional narrative conventions that the concept of spoilers really doesn’t impact on his work): a chap named Joe (Philippe Resimont) turns up “for the party” and, when he realizes that there are no guests, just the hostess, shrugs and gets down to business anyway. Business being a male stripper, in case you were wondering. Miss Lara gets rather hot under the collar and invites him to stay for birthday cake after he’s finished gyrating and making lewd gestures. Joe avers that he’d rather just get paid and in the ensuing contretemps Miss Lara stabs him in the throat with a dessert fork.

Miss Lara quickly rectifies this misunderstanding by simply ignoring the fact that Joe is a male stripper for hire with a fork sticking out of his neck, blood bubbling from his lips and the life slowly ebbing out of him, and happily conducts herself as if the two of them are playing house and it’s all very cosy. However, Miss Lara soon comes to believe that his ardour is cooling and, overlooking the fact that it’s because he’s dead, seeks relationship advice from her local butcher (Jackie Berroyer), and picks up an ox tongue from him while she’s there. The butcher advises that she and Joe need to “spice things up”, which Miss Lara takes to mean engaging a swinging couple, while his apprentice Adam (Jean-Luc Couchard) – an earnest young man with a John Merrick-style cranial deformity – unsubtly carries a torch for Miss Lara. Oh, and then there’s the small matter of building superintendents Mr Ottman (Alfred David) and Mr Fulci (Noel Godin) who want a word with Miss Lara about the smell emanating from her apartment.


‘A Wonderful Love’ is a viewing experience akin to watching an episode of a soap opera co-scripted by Mike Leigh and Eli Roth, co-directed by David Lynch and Gaspar Noe and mashed up in the editing room with the butcher’s shop scenes from ‘Delicatessen’. It’s also – and I didn’t expect this of du Welz based on my recollections of ‘Vinyan’ – pretty damned funny.

Most of the humour derives from Edith Lemerdy’s performance. She nails the character, gets the joke and delivers a strangely winsome charm even as she’s scaring the crap out of you. The whole thing is shot (by du Welz’s – thus far – regular DoP Benoit Debie) as a genre fan’s picture book. The angles, the edits, the pure look of the thing – there’s no doubt that ‘A Wonderful Love’ is the work of people with a deep, abiding and, best of all, irreverent passion for horror movies.

Tonally, the humour is more blatant (Mr Fulci indeed!) and the situations more self-evidently milked for their satirical potential than anywhere else in du Welz’s limited filmography. The humour in ‘Calvaire’ is darker and more organic, more intrinsic to character and setting. The humour in ‘Vinyan’ is non-existent. However, there are already elements of ‘Calvaire’ on display and even a hint, in a scene of sexual desperation that kills the morbid laughs like an ice cube down the back of the neck, of the powerful sense of loneliness and disenfranchisement that characterizes ‘Vinyan’.

‘A Wonderful Love’ is worth tracking down. It demonstrates that du Welz was already fully cognizant of his medium and well on the way to developing a thematic consistency. It’s sick, twisted and often guiltily funny.

But mainly sick. And twisted.

Du Welz week on The Agitation of the Mind

Last year, I reviewed Fabrice du Welz’s ‘Vinyan’. I found it “a very good film that only just falls short of greatness. There seem to be a lot of people out there who didn’t like it. But maybe that provides the measure of the film: it gets under the skin, lodges itself in the back of the mind and leaves a nasty little imprint on the memory.”

Du Welz’s debut feature ‘Calvaire’ arrived from LoveFilm at the weekend; one of the extra features was his short film ‘A Wonderful Love’. Details are sketchy and it doesn’t seem to have attracted much internet buzz as yet, but his next film ‘Alleluia’ is due to start shooting early this year. It’s been described as a road movie based on the true story of 1940s serial killers Martha beck and Raymond Fernandez, and is set to star Beatrice Dallé.

In anticipation, I’m declaring it du Welz week here on The Agitation of the Mind. I’ll be reviewing ‘A Wonderful Love’ tomorrow, ‘Calvaire’ on Wednesday and posting an overhauled version of my ‘Vinyan’ review. Friday will wrap up with some links and resources.

Join me. Expect things to get creepy.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

Feeling very much like a companion piece to ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’, made a year later, ‘The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave’ also inhabits a world of aristocratic characters, gothic castles, madness and dark family secrets. Also like ‘TRQKST’, ‘TNECOotG’ flirts with the suggestion of supernatural goings on before settling down into a more traditional giallo format.

The first half of the film depicts the insular lifestyle of British nobleman Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen), alone and undergoing an emotional breakdown in the sprawling family estate after the death of his flame-haired wife, the Evelyn of the title. Plagued by thought that Evelyn had been unfaithful to him, Lord Al integrates with the grieving process by way of picking up red-heads at strip clubs and other insalubrious venues, taking them back to his place and torturing and murdering them.

His personal physician Dr Timberlane (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart), who realizes that Lord Al is having “episodes” (but not to what extent!) warns him off red-heads but advises him to marry again. Which is kind of like advising an alcoholic to stay off the whisky but to keep his eye out in Oddbins for any decent offers on vodka.

When he’s not cruising for women, consulting with his doctor, hanging out with his cousin George (Enzo Tarascio) or paying off his groundsman Albert (Roberto Maldera) – who is also Evelyn’s brother – to keep quiet about his nocturnal activities, Lord Al is tormented by visions of his dead wife. At a séance, he spirit seems to appear but he faints clean away before things can progress.



Thus the first third or so of the film. Then Lord Al meets the voluptuous Gladys (Marina Malfatti) who is not a red-head (she’s blonde) and therefore avoids a nasty fate back at the castle. Quite the contrary, actually: Lord Al proposes to her. And so we come to the next part of the film, wherein his lordship decides to restore the castle, his helpful Aunt Agatha (Joan C. Davies) – yes, he has an aunt Agatha; by this point I was expecting Jeeves to put in an appearance and say something like, “I took the liberty, my lord, of putting the J&B on ice” – hires some staff, and he and Gladys move in together. Cue dead bodies, the disappearance of Evelyn’s corpse from the crypt, increasingly aggressive behaviour from Albert, and deeply suspicious behaviour from just about everybody else.

‘TNECOotG’ tests the patience a bit in its early stages, mainly because Lord Alan’s such an unlikeable character; also, there’s very little in the way of suspense. However, Miraglia exploits the longueurs of this section by sneakily seeding character traits and motivations inimical to the latter stage of the proceedings. And when he’s finally able to cut loose with the tense set-pieces, hellish storms and burgeoning body count, rest assured that it’s good, sick, cynical fun all the way. Red herrings, scheming relatives, and a welter of murders (including death by foxes, death by snakebite and death by poisoned champagne) – it’s like Agatha Christie on hallucinogenic substances.

The film is beautifully shot and the score’s decent. The ending is fairly guessable, even if the mechanics of it are worked out differently to what you might expect, and the last-reel exposition is kept mercifully succinct. Miraglia plays fair: all the clues are there and he doesn’t fob the audience off with something completely arbitrary (I’m looking at you, ‘Case of the Bloody Iris’). Where it loses points is in the performances: Steffen’s is one-note and that note wears thin very quickly; Tarascio and Rossi-Stuart are average; and all Malfatti’s given to do is flounce around in a series of diaphanous and cleavage-revealing outfits.




Arguably the best turn comes from Erika Blanc; unfortunately the script stashes her away for most of the running time.

Taken as something of a trial run for ‘TRQKST’, ‘TNECOotG’ is worth watching. As part of that small sub-set of gialli set in England, it’s arguably in the same league as ‘What Have You Done to Solange?’ and ‘All the Colors of the Dark’, even if it doesn’t quite hit the heights of, say, ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’.

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND (BIRTHDAY SPECIAL)

With Sarah Polley, Michelle Forbes and previous SFTW starrer Rachel Nichols sharing a birthday today, here's a trio of pictures and a raised glass of pinot grigio at chez Agitation. Many happy returns, ladies.

Murder in a Blue World

Take a look at these three shots from Eloy de la Iglesia’s 1973 oddity ‘Murder in a Blue World’. The first shows a group of rather anti-social young men driving around at recklessly excessive speeds late at night. In the second, these selfsame gentlemen have paid a surprise visit to a middle class family and gearing up to do some unspeakable things. The last one shows a recidivist undergoing a radical experiment in aversion therapy.

Remind you of anything?

Or should I say: remind you of anything you might have viddied at the old sinny, o my brothers?

Fifteen minutes in, I was ready to write off ‘Murder in a Blue World’ as a stylish if incoherent rip off of ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Then, just as the gang are gathering outside the home they are about to invade, de la Iglesia not only acknowledges Kubrick’s controversy-magnet but gets all meta about it. He cuts to the family watching TV. The announcer discusses the next programme: a screening of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, namechecking the director, studio and year of release, referring to it as “a symphony on the theme of violence”.

Later, de la Iglesia has his central character, Anna (Sue Lyon), read ‘Lolita’ as she sits in a bar. These are the only two Kubrick references in the big and they’re about as unsubtle as a falling anvil, but they’re nonetheless telling. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ informs the film’s aesthetic, from concepts (youth out of control; a government who resort to totalitarian methods; an aversion therapy programme finally revealed as a failure) to set-pieces (violence against a family; a retributive beating doled out to a gang member who questions the leader) to production design. The ‘Lolita’ reference inverts the concept of Lyon playing a 14-year old nymphet in Kubrick’s earlier film (she was 16 at the time of shooting) by having her disguised as an older woman for a key scene in ‘Murder in a Blue World’ (she was 27 when de la Iglesia’s film was made).

In this scene – and I’ll hoist the jolly SPOILER ALERT at this point and let it flutter proudly for the rest of the article – Anna is passing herself off as a spinster (not very convincingly) in order to persuade a gigolo to accompany her back to her place. Anna’s pad (she’s a nurse, by the way) is a sprawling mansion in its own grounds. It’s also the same house ‘The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll’ was filmed in …

… and there’s no way anyone on a nurse’s salary could afford to live there. Even if she worked in the private healthcare sector. Christ, I doubt even Victor (Jean Sorel), the doctor who fancies Eva and is secretly running the aversion therapy experiments in collusion with a shadowy government minister, could afford the mortgage payments.

But I digress. Anna is in the habit of picking up young men, taking them back to hers, making out a bit and then stabbing them in the heart. Casual sex and casual murder all rolled up in one. In addition to disguising herself as an old maid to snare a gigolo, she also passes herself off as a lesbian and visits a gay bar where she picks up a gay guy. Yeah, I didn’t make much sense of that either. Incidentally, gay bars in Europe in the 70s apparently looked like this:

So anyway, while Anna is happily nursing people by day and stabbing them in the heart by night, and Victor (hmmm, wasn’t there another bonkers medico who went by that name?) is happily fucking up sociopaths for the greater good of science/society/the minister’s re-election chances (delete as applicable), the droogs gang of anti-social youths are happily running around causing maybe. Then one of them, David (Chris Mitchum) pisses off the head droog youth and finds himself ass-whupped and exiled from the gang. Licking his wounds, he witnesses Anna dumping a body. He invades her home (maybe she was just house-sitting for the three weird sisters from ‘The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll’), spurns her advances (thus avoiding a blade in the old ticker) and blackmails her. Later, after a motorcycle chase lands him in traction and guess who happens to be on the ward, he kind of wishes he hadn’t.

‘Murder in a Blue World’ was almost a candidate for “Viva la Revolution”. There’s a clear theme of rebellion. The dr—shit, gotta stop doing that. The youths are rebelling against a government that automates everything and disseminates propaganda through commercials: constant soundbites interspersing TV programmes exhort the audience to seek useful enjoyment. Everyone drinks a concoction which is simply called Blue Drink (hence the film’s title) – whether this is some kind of mild narcotic designed to keep citizens stupified is something de la Iglesia never explains, which is a shame: it’s an interesting concept.

Elsewhere, David rebels against the gang he’s in. Anna rebels against the Hippocratic Oath, killing people during her off duty hours and, finally, in the hospital itself. Even the recidivists indoctrinated by the aversion therapy rebel, in the film’s out-of-nowhere but viscerally memorable final scene, against pretty much everything and everyone.

So why didn’t I feature this in “Viva la Revolution”? Simply because it’s never made clear why they rebel. For all that it’s insinuated that the government controls the populace, the iron fist of authority is curiously absent from the film. Even the minister who sanctions Victor’s experiments on felons appears only briefly on a videophone. Most of the characters seem to live an affluent enough life – particularly Anna (maybe the house was an inheritance. But even then, the rates, the upkeep, the insurance!) No-one seems to be oppressed.

‘Murder in a Blue World’ is full of intriguing (if only partly explored) concepts, and its three distinct narrative strands are, individually, quite absorbing. The problem is, it never really seems to cohere. Scenes are ordered as if at random. Subplots are either arbitrarily curtailed (such as David’s blackmail of Anna) or just plain forgotten about (such as the crusading journalist irate at police inefficiency during the murder investigation). If it weren’t for that (quite literally) killer last scene, the film would have been, at best, a nicely shot failure. As it is, it’s a quirky also-ran. I can’t help thinking that if the immediacy and focus of its last two minutes had been applied to the preceding ninety-six, it could have been some kind of demented masterpiece, Kubrick rip-offery notwithstanding.

Pete Postlethwaite

A few days ago, Bryce at Things That Don’t Suck posted a poignant tribute to Pete Postlethwaite. He talked about the film in which he first really took note of Postlethwaite: ‘The Usual Suspects’. “He proved the biggest badass in the room without raising so much as his voice,” Bryce wrote of Postlethwaite’s character, the mysterious Kobayashi; “let alone his fist.”

Pete Postlethwaite was a magnet; put him in any film, be it small scale or big budget, be it a starring role or little more than a cameo, it was virtually guaranteed that he’d deliver the most memorable performance.

For me, it was ‘Brassed Off’ that opened my eyes to the man’s brilliance. It’s an uneven film, veering from affable working class humour to ladled-on melodrama. The dialogue runs the gamut from zinging one-liners to absolute clunckers. Its backdrop is the miner’s strike, which was already becoming the big clichéd backdrop to British cinema when ‘Brassed Off’ came out 13 years ago. (My granddad was a miner; my dad was a truck driver and knew other drivers who had their lorries pelted with half bricks for attempted strike-breaking. No film has yet depicted what that period of time was like in this country.)

The scene that did it for me comes when Postlethwaite’s gruff but avuncular bandleader is laid up in hospital. The other members of the colliery band gather outside the hospital and, much to the chagrin of the nursing staff, launch into an arranged-for-brass version of ‘Danny Boy’. In an exchange of dialogue that by rights just shouldn’t work, Postlethwaite asks the nurse who has arrived to check his pulse and heart rate, “Is it going like shit off a hot shovel?”

“If you mean is your heart beating fast,” the nurse replies drily, “then yes.”

“Aye,” Postlethwaite muses, “allus does when they play that one.”



(i.m. Pete Postlethwaite, 7 February 1946 – 2 January 2011)

VIVA LA REVOLUTION! Day 3: The price of revolution

Viva la Revolution! The Agitation of the Mind joins forces with The Film Connoisseur for three days of revolution on film.

In this final day of “Viva la Revolution”, I’ll be casting an eye over films in which the revolutionary goes up against an oppressive government/state/system/establishment (delete as applicable) to their cost. Where the system defeats the individual, either by breaking their will or killing them outright. This will essentially be the flipside to Franco’s article over at The Film Connoisseur celebrating those films in which the revolutionary achieves his ends.

But this is not necessarily an article about failed revolutions, victory for the oppressor and the destruction of the individual. Sometimes a murder creates a martyr. Others are thus inspired by the resilience of someone who stands firm in their beliefs so passionately and intractably that even the very real possibility of their own death does not deter them.

Then there is the plight of ostensibly very ordinary people (such as the working class George Nada in ‘They Live’, discussed in my first “Viva la Revolution” piece) who, although they might be apolitical, are thrust into situations by the random upheavals of chance or circumstances and find themselves taking action. In direct contrast to the physically imposing and wisecracking Nada, but just as randomly catapulted into a string of life-changing events, is Sam Lowry (Malcolm Pryce), the decidedly ordinary protagonist of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’.

Offbeat, visually arresting, quirky, sometimes funny and often coruscatingly angry, ‘Brazil’ is a film that could only have been made by Gilliam. Partly a riff on ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and partly a howl of frustration against the pettiness bureaucracies of British government, the film starts with a dead fly dropping into a teleprinter and the resulting typo setting off a chain of escalating events as various civil servants either try to cover up the resulting administrative error, or take it as evidence of dirty work and terrorist subversion within the government. When the innocent Jill Layton (Kim Griest) is implicated, Lowry – finding himself drawn to her – tries to save her from the clutches of the Ministry of Information’s counter-terrorist wing, the blandly yet somehow sinisterly named Information Retrieval department.

Lowry undergoes an awakening of his revolutionary spirit as understated as that of Winston Smith in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’: he simply comes to his own realization that the government is wrong, that his colleagues are either bullies or buffoons and that human life has a value beyond mere paperwork. The full corrosiveness of Gilliam’s vision is reserved for the final scene, in which Lowry – arrested, accused, cautioned, questioned and finally faced with excruciating torture courtesy of a man he considered his friend – simply shuts down emotionally and intellectually, retreating into himself; his mind projecting an ideal of the life he was striving towards. “He’s gone away from us,” the head of the Ministry muses.

‘Brazil’ makes no bones about the capacity of the system to crush the individual – either with jackboot, paperwork or both – but the poignant ending is a reminder that even a man reduced to a state of catatonia may be argued to have wrought a pyrrhic victory if something remains within him that clings to the beliefs that drove him.

Sidney Lumet’s ‘Network’ depicts the system (in this case a TV network) first exploiting then defending itself against a one-man revolution staged by news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a man whose revolutionary principles – here a commitment to the truth behind the news stories – lead to his assassination, albeit by an unexpected antagonist. When Beale is pensioned off after falling ratings, he uses his final broadcast to announce that he intends to kill himself. Viewing figures soar. Ambitious producer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) persuades venal corporate honcho Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) to oversee Beale’s new show – in which he rants and raves like a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher – much to the chagrin of his previous producer and close friend Max Schumacher (William Holden).

In the film’s most famous scene, a dishevelled and manic Beale exhorts his viewers to get angry about the state of the country; to go to their windows, open them and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Beale taps into the frustrations of his audience simply by calling it like he sees it and deriding as “bullshit” anything that smacks of falsity, commercialization or corporatism.

His show earns the network an impressive share of the market, enough that Diana is able to push through her pet project, ‘The Mao Tse Tung Hour’ – a documentary series about revolutionaries. In a chillingly funny scene, Diana and a phalanx of her corporate cronies sit around with armed members of the terrorist group about whom they have agreed to make the series; these bastions of anti-capitalism end up arguing as vehemently as any agent or lawyer about residuals and profit shares.

Things take a downturn when Beale makes comments potentially harmful to a deal between the network and Saudi Arabian investors. Network president Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) browbeats Beale into towing the company line. Traumatized, Beale’s broadcasts lose their messianic intensity; a sense of defeatism creeps in. His audience loses interest. Viewing figures plummet. Jensen, blind to the financial repercussions and loss of face in the industry augured by an unpopular show, insists that Beale – now dancing to his tune – remain on TV. Hackett and Diana rope the terrorist faction into a scheme to get Beale off the air. Permanently.

‘Network’ is a fascinating entry in the canon of revolutionary films as (a) it depicts an agitator on the cusp becoming a bona fide revolutionary (the “mad as hell” scene implies that Beale is building a following); and (b) shows an initially complacent system (the network exercise no censorship over Beale just as long as his controversial monologues are analogous to high ratings) suddenly becoming ruthless when he presents an actual threaten (a potentially scuppered deal; loss of viewing figures). That the revolutionary group are corralled by corporate executives into assassinating Beale provides a suitably stark and darkly satirical sting in the tale.

In a perceptive comment on my first post in this series, Samuel Wilson of the excellent Mondo 70 stated: “I agree with you that the rebel is the person who says No. The revolutionary is a somewhat different creature because there's usually a Yes in his agenda; he's interested in replacing one system with another, and that usually leads to the rebels in his camp turning against him. There's no simple good guy/bad guy opposition between the two, but the tension between the two impulses is something you've probably noticed in movies and life alike.”

I’ve probably moved away slightly from the original remit of “Viva la Revolution” in some of my choices, being drawn to rebels as much as revolutionaries. Whereas Franco at The Film Connoisseur has focused many of his choices on films drawn from actual events, I guess what captures my imagination is that initial impulse to stand up against a system or establishment. How that impulses manifests, and how far the individual carries forward a message, campaign or organized display of insurgency, arguably provides another dividing line between the rebel and the revolutionary. Howard Beale – committing in one of his broadcasts the cardinal sin of urging a TV audience to switch off and think for themselves – is on the verge of leading a revolution. Not one of bloodshed, but of freedom of thought and rejection of an industry – television – which too many people (executives, advertisers) have too much money invested in to allow to be challenged.

D-Fens (Michael Douglas) – the anonymous former defence worker (the nomenclature derives from his personalized licence plate) whose one-day rampage through the culturally and economically depleted landscape of contemporary urban America is chronicled in Joel Schumacher’s ‘Falling Down’ – dies without attracting any followers. Except perhaps the audience. Schumacher’s achievement, even though it contributes to a tonally uneven movie overall, is to yolk a serious point about mental instability and the fragility of the individual’s breaking point to a wish-fulfilment narrative where D-Fens’s every outburst (be it verbal or machine gun fire) is guaranteed to raise a cheer from anyone who’s ever been downsized, ripped off, treated contemptuously or stuck in gridlock for hours on end.

Whether trashing a corner shop for overcharging on a can of soda, raging at a fast food franchise employee for serving him a burger that looks nothing like the product on the adverts, punching an obnoxious road user into unconsciousness, protesting against needless roadworks by simply blowing the obstruction up, or going hell for leather at a couple of rich dudes on a golf course, D-Fens does and says what most of us have wanted to do or say at one point, but hold back on due to the very real likelihood of arrest, lawsuits or custody. Of course, D-Fens dies in the end (much in the manner of, say, a gangster in a 1940s Warner Brothers movie having to pay for his sins mortally, never mind how appealing he might have been to the audience) but not before he asks uncomprehendingly, “I’m the bad guy?” It’s a question he’s asking on behalf of the audience.

The difference between D-Fens and any number of big screen vigilantes is that in a world inhabited by his audience, D-Fens would have followers. In fact, it’s not too great a leap from D-Fens to Tyler Durden in David Fincher’s ‘Fight Club’. Whereas D-Fens’s micro-revolution is immediate and on the streets, Tyler’s starts underground. Quite literally. In the cellar of a seedy bar where he starts up a bare-knuckle boxing club which soon attracts a following of disenfranchised twenty-something males from various walks of life. Fight Club provides a cathartic release for their frustrations. It also taps into an anarchistic part of their psyche and soon things move out of the cellar. Tyler instigates Project Mayhem: a campaign of pranks (the destruction of corporate artwork), sabotage (franchise properties are vandalised or bombed) and finally outright terrorism (a plot to destabilize the economy).

‘Fight Club’ is arguably American cinema’s equivalent of ‘If…’. Like Lindsay Anderson’s film, it ends as the revolution begins. Gunfire fills the soundtrack in the last scene of ‘If…’, the explosion as a tower block is destroyed in ‘Fight Club’, a disturbingly prescient image given the 9/11 attacks that happened two years after Fincher’s film was made. The only difference is that Travis in ‘If…’ remains resolute right till the end, whereas the anti-hero of ‘Fight Club’ bears helpless witness to the bombing having faced up to an ostensibly defeated his more militant and extremist alter ego. There are many levels on which this last scene can be read, not least as a punchline that treats the film entire as a gallows-humour joke. But there is also a small strand of ‘Animal Farm’-style satire going on, the original remit of Fight Club spiralling into the darker territory of Project Mayhem (not unlike the gradual bastardization of the animals’ Seven Commandments under Napoleon’s hard-line regime). Whereas the revolutionaries in the other films I’ve looked at today are crushed by the system, ‘Fight Club’ depicts the revolution as something of a Frankenstein’s monster, its creator bringing into being something he ultimately cannot control.

I’ve only looked at a small selection of films in this piece. There are a wealth of movies about real-life revolutionaries which pull no punches in depicting their eventual fate: Michael Collins (Liam Neeson) gunned down by an Anti-Treaty Republic in Neil Jordan’s eponymous biopic; William Wallace (Mel Gibson) tortured and executed by his British captors in ‘Braveheart’; Emiliano Zapata (Marlon Brando) lured into an ambush in Elia Kazan’s ‘Viva Zapata!’; Pancho Villa (Wallace Beery) similarly despatched in Jack Conway’s ‘Viva Villa!’

With Franco concentrating on socially-grounded depictions of revolution in cinema, I have chosen to focus primarily on fictional revolutionaries during the three days of “Viva la Revolution”. There are still many films out there with a fighting spirit and a revolutionary message. I’ll be making a point of looking at more of them – and some of those I’ve already mentioned, but in greater depth – during the course of the year.

The revolution continues!

VIVA LA REVOLUTION! Day 2: A very English revolution

Viva la Revolution! The Agitation of the Mind joins forces with The Film Connoisseur for three days of revolution on film.

This is how William Shakespeare describes England in ‘Richard II’:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

These eleven lines have entered the bastion of English literature and popular culture, granting titles to at least three movies. For some people in my home country, they still epitomize what is truly English. They stand as a once-shining beacon, the light from which has diminished down all the years and decades to the twenty-first century where it now exists as a dim penumbra, its flickering radius incorporating ‘The Archers’, cricket, cucumber sandwiches, the aristocracy and tacky royal family memorabilia marketed to easily impressed tourists.

Here’s how the Sex Pistols described in England in ‘God Save the Queen’ – the version that ought to be our national anthem.

God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-bomb

God save the queen
She ain't no human being
There is no future
In England's dreaming

Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future, no future
No future for you

To everyone who’s correctly intuited that I subscribe more to the Sex Pistols than William Shakespeare, award yourself a poster of the queen in gaudy colours with a safety pin through her nose.

There are some countries where you only have to mention their name and revolution comes to mind: Russia, France, Ireland, Cuba, Iran, Cambodia, Laos, Bosnia. Others, you just have to scratch the surface of their history: the American War of Independence, the Algerian War of Independence, the failed Hungarian Revolution, the Boxer Rebellion in China.

When was the last time we had an uprising in England? I’m not talking about the students protesting over fees last month (read the article Francisco posted on The Film Connoisseur yesterday if you want to know how bad students in Puerto Rico have it!) or the miners’ strikes of 1984-1985, or the punch-a-copper-for-peace protest marches of the same decade, or the race riots and National Front sloganeering of the 70s. I’m talking about actual revolutionary behaviour, not the “let’s chuck a paving slab at a police van, loot a couple of shops and then go down the pub” mindset that marks out England as a nation of fair-weather activists.

The answer is pitifully embarrassing: 400 years ago. The English Civil War of 1642 – 1651. Prior to that, Guy Fawkes’s gunpowder plot of 1605 marks the last real attempt to tear the whole edifice down. Just as there are still some people in England who buy into Shakespeare’s “other Eden” propaganda, there are plenty of us who consider it an according-to-Hoyle tragedy that Fawkes failed. It’s just as well, then, that cinema has been able to conduct our revolution for us.

The English Civil War is the backdrop to Michael Reeves’s ‘Witchfinder General’. Social unrest, political upheaval, religious bigotry and backwoods superstition are exploited by Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) as he travels the countryside extracting confessions from women accused of witchcraft. He claims he’s doing God’s work but charges a hefty fee for his services. Hopkins’s false belief is contrasted with that of Richard (Ian Ogilvy), a soldier fighting for the Roundheads under Cromwell who is also devout in his Christianity. His internal conflict between faith and militarism tips in favour of the latter during the brutal climax where he and his wrongly-accused fiancée Sara (Hilary Dwyer) are captured and tortured by Hopkins; the intervention of his comrades in arms turns the tables and Richard’s revenge against Hopkins sees him cross the line, possibly into madness.

Often bracketed as a horror film because of the ostensible witchcraft elements, ‘Witchfinder General’ is a highly political film in which Hopkins’s description of himself as a lawyer rather than the titular witchfinder demonstrates the bastardization of law into a form of free enterprise during lawless times. Factor in Reeves’s equally critical attitude towards the church and the army: ‘Witchfinder General’ takes to task as many British institutions as Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If…’.

Whereas ‘Witchfinder General’ plays out its central drama against the pages of history, ‘If…’ takes that most class-defined of British institutions – the public school (it’s one of the curiosities of the English language that “public school” actually means “private school”) – and uses it as a microcosm for society. The setting itself satirizes the outmoded stuffiness of academia; the interminable routines, inspections and displays of discipline bring to mind the military (the metaphor is made explicit when the students don army fatigues for a “war games” exercise); and the dull and pompous services attended by staff and pupils alike are a commentary on the stultifying traditionalism of the church. The class system itself is represented by the educational hierarchy: the staff are the upper echelons, paying lip service to the church; the prefects are the upstarts and nouveau riche, paying lip service to the staff while lording it over the rest of the pupils who themselves represent the working classes, constantly told what to do and reminded of their place.

One scene that cuts to the heart of English snobbery and social sadism has Travis (Malcolm McDowell) thrashed by a prefect for insubordinate behaviour. Travis is then obliged to thank his aggressor. The polemic is clear: the lower classes are treated like shit by their so-called betters and are expected to be grateful for it.

Travis, however, is not prepared to toe the line. Along with a small group of like-minded free-thinkers, he stages a revolution. Disrupting a church service at which a “Colonel Blimp” type military officer is giving a droningly patriotic speech, Travis’s attack is fought back against when a cross-section of the establishment – teachers, clergy, army personnel – return fire. A laugh-out-loud funny moment has an old dear in a floral print dress and a flowery hat start screaming “Bastards! Bastards!” as she grabs a Bren gun and cuts loose. It’s hilarious, but terrifying. It’s a reminder of how vicious the supposedly educated, defined and polite strata of society can become when their privileged lifestyles are threatened.

The film ends just minutes into the revolution. The counterattack has redoubled and it seems Travis and his comrades are on the verge of being overwhelmed. Nonetheless, they hold their positions, undaunted, guns blazing. The screen fades to black. At an early screening, Lindsay Anderson famously told a feverishly applauding audience, “The rest is up to you.”

‘If…’ is arguably British cinema’s greatest statement on the theme of revolution. It is to cinema what George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is to English literature. Orwell wrote his dystopian vision of the future in 1948 and simply transposed the last two digits of that year to come up with his title. Reapproaching both the novel and Michael Radford’s film version at the end of 2010, it struck me that, on a conceptual level, everything Orwell had written about has come to pass. Big Brother is watching you? CCTV. The Thought Police? Political correctness. The lottery, which the government promotes in order to keep the masses ameliorated with the thought of something better? The National Lottery. Doublespeak? Well, just tune into any given day’s parliamentary debate – these fuckers talk nothing but Doublespeak.

Radford’s vision of Orwell’s classic – despite a few niggling differences – is almost relentlessly oppressive. Winston Smith (John Hurt) works in a government department checking all press releases to ensure they are correctly couched in Doublespeak and do not make reference to “unpersons” (ie. those who have disappeared). The government is referred to as the Party. Citizens refer to each other, depending on gender, as “brother” and “sister” (a change to the more explicitly communist “comrade” in the novel). Every minute of Smith’s waking day is informed by a litany of official bulletins: successes in the campaign against Eurasia (a war which is possibly fictitious but allows the government to turn the focus away from social deprivations); ever higher figures in the manufacture of munitions; increases in the standard of living (despite all evidence to the contrary; the film inhabits a London of wastelands, grimy tenements and perpetually grey skies); denouncements against the seditious underground figure Emmanuel Goldstein (who is arguably as fictitious as the war); televised confessions of traitors; and everywhere – everywhere – the stern, all-seeing visage of Big Brother.

Smith’s rebellion is the quietest – but perhaps the most crucial – example of the revolutionary mindset. He doesn’t take up arms; he doesn’t exhort anyone else to rebel; he doesn’t plant bombs or commit acts of sabotage. All Winston Smith does is to think for himself. In a society so totalitarian that even thinking something contrary to what the Party tells you to think is outlawed. In keeping a diary; in discussing the writings of Goldstein with high-placed party member O’Brien (Richard Burton in his last film role; the movie is dedicated to his memory); and in his relationship with the outspoken Julia (Suzanna Hamilton), Smith commits thoughtcrime. In conducting an affair with Julia outside of the Party-sanctioned family unit, he commits sexcrime.

The punishment exacted by the Party for Smith’s trangressions – which accounts for the film’s gruelling second half – seems monstrously out of proportion to what Smith has actually done. But it’s in these scenes that the violence practiced by a government on the people breaks ground: hitherto, Radford has depicted propaganda, social deprivation and constant scrutiny as the tools of oppression; now, he unflinchingly depicts the very real physical and psychological violence the Party is prepared to utilize to keep the people in line.

If the Party is less evidently an allegory for communism in the film than in the book, then Joy Batchelor and John Halas’s starkly animated 1954 adaptation of another timeless political allegory by Orwell – ‘Animal Farm’. Here, the oppressive ruling classes are personified by Mr Jones, the drunken and bad-tempered owner of Manor Farm, a man who treats his animals like, well, animals. Old Major, a boar with socialist tendencies, calls a meeting and plants the seeds of rebellion in the animals’ minds. Unfortunately, Old Major dies before the revolution is accomplished. Two pigs step up as figureheads: the progressive-thinking Snowball and the bullish (if that’s not a mixed metaphor) Napoleon. Napoleon is appropriately named: he wants leadership and power for their own sake. Snowball, however, educates himself and formulates an agrarian and technological plan designed to increase productivity on the now-renamed Animal Farm.

You don’t have to be a student of Russian history to recognize Napoleon as Stalin and Snowball as Trotsky. Accordingly, the moment the revolution is successfully staged and Mr Jones deposed, Napoleon decides Snowball is a threat and has him run off the farm. Napoleon then employs the equally appropriately named Squealer to tarnish Snowball’s reputation. A few animals sympathetic to Snowball and/or critical of Napoleon are brutally made an example of. Napoleon and his clique of fellow pigs then rule the farm by committee. The novel’s key line – brilliantly conjured visually by Batchelor and Halas – has the other animals looking in at Napoleon and his coterie, who have now moved into the farmhouse, and being unable to differentiate between pigs and men.

As with Radford’s take on ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, the filmmakers make certain deviations from the novel, particularly in relation to the character of Boxer, a hard-working carthorse. His simplistic mindset and unwitting complicity in Napoleon’s rise to power are diluted in the film; likewise, Batchelor and Halas deliver a cathartic finale in which the animals are inspired to rise up again, this time against Napoleon, whereas the novel ends with the pig/men scene.

These, however, are the only punches that the film version of ‘Animal Farm’ pulls. Elsewhere, its evocation of English attitudes – particularly the tendency to moodily bitch about things down the pub instead of doing something about them (pace Mr Jones at his local The Red Lion, a quintessential pub name) – and the less-than-idyllic reality of farm life (fuck ‘The Archers’; this is the real deal) is bang on the nail. The harsh conditions of Napoleon’s regime, the exploitation of Boxer and the corpulent degeneracy of the pigs is brought to life in suitably non-prettified animation. Watching this movie is an experience best described as the anti-Disney.

So far, we’ve looked at films which depict revolutions at various stages; those in ‘Witchfinder General’, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and ‘Animal Farm’ fail (on account of, respectively, the protagonist being driven over the line, the system crushing the free thinker, and the revolutionaries being corrupted by power and the cycle beginning again); whereas ‘If…’ ends just at the point of revolution.

Standing alone in this small canon of films about revolution in England, ‘V for Vendetta’ ends on the bitter-sweet note of the revolutionary’s death and the successful orchestration of his supreme act of anti-establishmentarianism – a grandiose symphony of symbolic destruction that sounds out a siren call to the masses and incites a public uprising. Adapted from Alan Moore’s provocative graphic novel, ‘V for Vendetta’ – directed by first-time helmer James McTeigue and written and produced by the Wachowski Brothers – depicts an England not too dissimilar to that of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. In a piece of reverse casting that is pure genius, John Hurt plays High Chancellor Adam Sutler, the Big Brother-style leader of the Norsefire party. Or you could just say the Party; similarities to ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ are palpable, right down to the omnipresence of Sutler’s stern visage. Parallels with thoughtcrime and sexcrime are also present, the latter particularly emphasized by the Norsefire party’s reversion to the British law, repealed in the 1960s, that made homosexuality a crime. Censorship is rife, as Evey (Natalie Portman) discovers in her work for the British Television Network. Enemies of the state disappear. A curfew is in place.

It’s when Evey breaks the curfew and is caught by members of the secret police that she meets the masked revolutionary known only as V (Guy Pearce). It’s here that the parallels between ‘V for Vendetta’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ diverge. Orwell’s revolutionary, Emmanuel Goldstein, is probably a fiction of the Party and his most meaningful contribution to any campaign of resistance is the authorship of a seditious book. In ‘V for Vendetta’, we have the infinitely more proactive V, who is introduced to us beating the crap out of Evey’s aggressors and – as an encore – blowing up the Old Bailey.

V’s mask is in the likeness of Guy Fawkes, so it’s a foregone conclusion which famous piece of London architecture is earmarked for destruction in the crowd-pleasing and iconic finale. By this time, V has sustained mortal wounds during a clash with secret police during which he discovers the Sutler is as expendable as anyone else and that behind every figurehead there is always a faceless eminence grise wielding the real power. It is left to Evey to active the London Underground train loaded with explosives that destroys the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

I said near the start of this article that there are still plenty of us in England who regret that Guy Fawkes’s attempt to destroy the houses of parliament – an act intended to shatter the very seat of government – failed. It took four hundred years, the efforts of the Wachowski Brothers and about fifty million dollars of American studio money to finally achieve it, albeit only in fiction.

Ah well, you takes your revolution where you finds it.

(Don’t forget to head over to The Film Connoisseur for Franco’s insightful article on the cinematic representations of Che Guevara.)

VIVA LA REVOLUTION! Day 1: Reasons to rebel

Viva la Revolution! The Agitation of the Mind joins forces with The Film Connoisseur for three days of revolution on film.



What makes a revolutionary? What causes someone to rebel against the accepted (or enforced) order of things? Where exactly is the dividing line between the freedom fighter and the terrorist? How easy is it to cross the line? These questions occupy a middle ground between idealism and activism; between the realization that a government/system/establishment is oppressive and the reality of risking one’s life/taking up arms to do something about it. These are powerful and morally difficult questions. It’s no surprise, then, that filmmakers have responded to the dramatic potential of the revolutionary figure.

Over these next three days, I’m joining forces with Francisco at The Film Connoisseur to present a celebration of revolution on film. Francisco will be exploring the cinematic representation of real-life revolutionaries, including an in-depth appraisal of Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che Guevara biopic. He’ll also be looking at films which celebrate the revolutionary achieving their political or social aims and instigating change.

Here on The Agitation of the Mind, I’ll be kicking things off today by considering what makes a rebel or a revolutionary. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting an article on depictions of revolutionary activity in my home country, with specific reference to movie adaptations of two of George Orwell’s most famous novels. On Wednesday, as a counterpoint to Francisco’s piece on successful revolutionaries, Agitation will sound a requiem for those who died for or because of their beliefs.

But let’s start by asking: what do we mean by “rebel” or “revolutionary”?

Personally, I don’t think anyone’s ever bettered Albert Camus’s eight-word definition: “A rebel is a man who says ‘no’.”

There’s a sliding scale to saying ‘no’. We’ve all probably done it at some point in our life. Ever sat through an appraisal at work that you’ve considered unjustly critical or had a complaint made against you by a colleague that was bullshit and as a result you’ve stood up against your line manager and spoken your mind and refused to take the crap that’s being dished out at you? You have? Congratulations: you’re a rebel. Now imagine that your firm is the government or your line manager is a corrupt despot. Imagine that instead of arguing the toss in a meeting room you’re carrying a gun and hiding in the forests or the mountains. Imagine that instead of possibly losing your job you could possibly lose your life.

Like I say: it’s a sliding scale. The point is, you don’t have to be political, idealistic or reactionary in your mindset. The average joe can become a revolutionary. It just takes a convergence of circumstances. Something that tests your mettle or opens your eyes to the truth. In John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’, transient labourer George Nada (Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of sunglasses which filter out the sheen of “normality” behind which the truth of the world is revealed: everything is propaganda. Behind the images on advertising hoardings, behind the columns of print in newspapers, behind the glossy photos in magazines there are orders: OBEY, MARRY AND REPRODUCE, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT; the design on banknotes hides the reminder: MONEY IS YOUR GOD.

Although pitched, particularly in its second half, on a borderline comedic level, ‘They Live’ is as acerbic, bitter and righteously angry as, say, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ or ‘Network’ (considered tomorrow and Wednesday respectively) in its depiction of a controlling oligarchy who deliberately subjugate and mislead the masses. Nada fights back as bluntly and unsubtly as one would expect of a working class hero, and the majority of his struggle is to open other people’s eyes. The scene where he gets into a five-minute punch-up with a friend who’s chary of donning the glasses is an hilariously satirical metaphor for the lengths to which some people will go for a quiet life – people who don’t want to see the truth and are more comfortable to accept things as they are.

John Carpenter’s work is full of rebellious characters who have no respect for authority and are willing to go the distance if provoked or disenfranchised. Arguably the most iconic of these characters is ‘Snake’ Plissken (Kurt Russell) in ‘Escape from New York’ and ‘Escape from L.A.’ The first film posits a dystopian future where the island of Manhattan has been turned into an open prison, walled off, the bridges leading to the mainland mined and escape attempts across the water quickly terminated by helicopter patrols. The prison, which contains only criminals, has developed its own form of society where the strongest, personified by The Duke (Isaac Hayes), rule and those with special abilities (such as Harry Dean Stanton’s Brain, who has refined the fuel that allows The Duke to run his ramshackle kingdom) are protected as long as their fealty is paid.

Into this environment hurtles an escape pod jettisoned from Air Force One: the President (Donald Pleasance), evading the freedom fighters who have gained control of his plane, finds himself out of the frying pan and into the fire. The establishment responds by recruiting recently arrested career criminal Plissken and coercing him into undertaking a suicide mission. The injection of a slow-acting poison into his bloodstream with the promise of the antidote once he delivers the President from harm – and, more importantly, the diplomatic MacGuffin the President alone has a copy of – is all the persuasion he needs.

‘Escape from New York’ flips the middle finger to the system during every minute of its running time, with Carpenter’s biggest “screw you” reserved for the finale in which, having made good on his side of the deal, Plissken scuppers the President’s ploy for a peaceable solution to the foreign problems threatening his administration. America, it is suggested, is in for one motherfucker of a shit-storm thanks to Plissken’s reactionary stunt; but everything that Plissken has gone through up till that moment leaves you in no doubt that the powers that be had it coming.

The sequel, while inferior on many levels and badly let down by embarrassingly shoddy effects work, certainly ups the ante in terms of Plissken’s final act of rebellion. In a film that follows its predecessor’s narrative arc with the slavish fidelity of a join-the-dots puzzle, Plissken strolls off into the end credits having not just fucked up world peace but pretty much sounded the death knoll for the planet’s future. The message is stark and brutal: shut down; start again.

‘Escape from New York’ was, of course, made as the 70s gave out to the 80s, the door just beginning to close on an astounding decade in American cinema where a new breed of directors were kicking down the doors and questioning the system. German cinema, in the last decade, has been demonstrating a similar renaissance, certainly in terms of movies which shine a penetrating and unflinching light on the darker aspects of Germany’s recent social and political history. ‘Downfall’ was the watershed film in this movement: the first German production ever to depict Hitler. What made it more thorny was that it was even-handed in its approach.

Just as thorny – and for the same reason – was Uli Edel’s ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’, which packs an immense amount of politics, ideology and compromised morality into its two and a half hours. The film charts the history of the group from Ulrike Meinhof (Martine Gedeck)’s transition from crusading journalist to activist, through Meinhof, Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtrau) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek)’s eventual arrest and trial, to the actions of the second generation members. Here, the focus is on explicitly political motives for revolution, and the sometimes awkward but always compelling combination of Bernd Eichinger’s incisive script and Edel’s bludgeoningly unsubtle direction present a depiction of the bastardization of ideology and the crossing of the line from revolutionary to terrorist.

An artistic/intellectual awakening is the focus of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s ‘The Lives of Others’, in which Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a Stasi surveillance expert, is deployed by his weasly boss Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) – himself a tool of corpulent and eminently corrupt politican Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) – to stake out the home of playwright Georg Draymann (Sebastian Koch), who has come under suspicion because of his association with dissident artist Paul Hauser (Hans Euw-Bauer). The old saying “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” gets a two and a quarter hour exposition in von Donnersmarck’s astoundingly assured directorial debut. Essentially, the film is the story of two awakenings: that of Draymann, who is inspired by Hauser to write a potentially contentious article for publication in the west; and that of Wiesler, whose hitherto blind adherence to the party is challenged by the humanitarian values of the man he’s sent to spy on and a gradual realization of the venality of his superiors’ ulterior motives.

If ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ and ‘The Lives of Others’ represent a strand of cinema rooted in social realism and driven by the political failings of recent history, then themes of rebellion couched in sci-fi tropes recall the golden age of that genre when political protest, social disaffection and an exaggerated extrapolation of contemporary issues cast a shadow over filmmakers’ visions of the future. Examples are myriad both in cinema and literature: H.G. Wells contesting the arrogant complacency of the Victorian era in ‘War of the Worlds’ (a subtext utterly neglected by both Byron Haskins’ and Steven Spielberg’s big screen adaptations); George Orwell contemplating the dark side of the socialist ideal in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and ‘Animal Farm’ (of which more tomorrow); Evgeny Zamyatin contemplating a similar theme from within the system in ‘We’; Aldous Huxley pinpointing the production-line slavery of Henry T. Ford’s car manufacturing plants as the genesis of human slavery to the industrial impulse in ‘Brave New World’.

Science-fiction, at its best and most cerebral, has held up a mirror to contemporary issues and had the naked courage to accept that the future, whether postulated as utopian or dystopian, presents a worry prospect. A utopian society is depicted in the under-rated ‘Aeon Flux’. There is cleanliness, social order, and protection from an outside world, 99% of which has been destroyed by a viral pandemic. The ruling dynasty are “descended” from the scientist, Dr Goodchild, who developed a cure. And yet the Goodchilds have become a ruling class, their interests protected by a private army and their power built on a secret hidden for centuries. The eponymous Aeon (Charlize Theron) works for an underground movement, the Monicans, who are dedicated to challenging the status quo. The world of ‘Aeon Flux’ recalls that of ‘Logan’s Run’ (one of the films being considered by Francisco at The Film Connoisseur on Wednesday): aesthetically pleasing, peaceful and seemingly affluent, its citizens wanting for nothing … except personal freedom. And yet people disappear. The Goodchilds rule with an iron fist in a velvet glove. The populace are deceived as a matter of course.

The future of Joss Whedon’s ‘Serenity’ – his big-screen farewell to the unjustly cancelled TV series ‘Firefly’ – is in sharp contrast to ‘Aeon Flux’. This is definitely a dystopia. How so? Well, our ostensible hero Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillon) is the leader of a ragtag group of outlaws reduced to robbing payrolls after fighting on the losing side against the Alliance, a patriarchal government who control a ring of inner planets where the younger generation are effectively brainwashed and “operatives” take care of anyone who questions or threatens governmental supremacy. The further flung planets are the province of Reivers, a vicious criminal society who practice their own form of despotism. Mal and his crew become unlikely rebels when they give passage to a psychic, River (Summer Glau), who has questioned the Alliance. As with the Goodchilds’ empire in ‘Aeon Flux’, the Alliance has been founded on a criminal act and a supposedly “better” society is the product of lies, whitewash and propaganda.

Every genre of cinema has had its share of cinematic rebels – I haven’t even touched on, say, the Zappata westerns; and biopics of revolutionaries, successful or not, seems to be a cottage industry in and of itself – and the films I’ve mentioned in this article are but a random sampling. Some of these I’ve already reviewed on the blog; others deserve in-depth stand-alone pieces.

Tomorrow, I’ll be narrowing the remit to a more specific selection of movies: those which consider an English perspective on revolution. In the meantime, don’t forget to head over to The Film Connoisseur - today, Francisco presents an in-depth and socially grounded analysis of the films 'Romero' and 'Salvador'.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll

In this Spanish-made giallo, genre stalwart Paul Naschy (who co-wrote the screenplay) plays escaped convict Gilles, a man tormented by memories of strangling his lover to death. These flashbacks are filmed in a highly theatrical, almost balletic style, which leaves you wondering whether (a) director Carlos Aured had seen ‘The Red Shoes’ one too many times and (b) this event exists purely in Gilles’s mind.

It’s the first of several ploys Aured uses to disconcert the viewer, not the least of which is a tendency to bounce from one distinct style of narrative to another. Things start off in crime thriller mode as a Gilles – a drifter with a violent past – arrives in a small town. Then we’re in Polanski territory as he’s hired as handyman by Claude (Diana Lorys) – who I’m sure must have been called Claudine or Claudette in the original, since Claude is a bloke’s name; however this is the name given in the English dub and on IMDb, so Claude it is – and meets her sisters, the wheelchair-bound Ivette (Maria Perschy) and over-sexed man-eater Nicole (Eva Leon).

Power games and jealousy seem to be the order of the day, with Claude – hating herself for a disfigurement (the reason for which is never explained) – lording it over Ivette and Nicole, even going so far as to lock Nicole in her room as punishment for getting it on with Gilles.



After about 45 minutes of this, the film gets its giallo groove on good and proper as a masked and leather-gloved individual starts massacring blonde-haired blue-eyed women. The modus operandi is reinforced several times by typically ineffectual copper Inspector Pierre (Antonio Pica), with local GP – and, it would seem, part-time pathologist – Dr Philippe (Eduardo Calvo) popping up to confirm that the killer is in the habit of removing the victim’s eyeballs.

Gilles’s identity is uncovered and Inspector Pierre and the boys in blue head off to arrest him. Gilles, in true ‘High Sierra’ stylee, arms himself and heads towards the mountains. This aspect of the film is curtailed with such unexpected finality that suddenly, with twenty minutes left, all bets are off and it’s an abrupt shift back to the giallo tropes for the double whammy ending.

Or at least, what Aured probably deluded himself during shooting was a double whammy ending. The finale edges into the realms of the ridiculous with Ivette’s nurse, the blue-eyed and blonde-haired Michelle (Ines Morales) heading home at night through the woods even though it’s public knowledge that she’s exactly the type the killer is targeting. The subsequent revelation of the killer’s identity seems to bring things to a fairly guessable conclusion, then Aured pulls something out of the bag that’s so WTF that we’re not so much edging into the realms of the ridiculous as powering at unstoppable speed right into the heart of it.

On the whole, ‘The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll’ is a fairly proficient piece of work, with a nice slow-burn atmosphere during the early stages, decent cinematography, and some well staged death scenes. The use of ‘Frere Jacques’ during these scenes is creepily effective, even if the rest of the score is jauntily inappropriate. Naschy gives the standard Naschy performance, all moody stares, piercing eyes and shirt-removal at every possible opportunity. The ladies of the cast provide eye-candy aplenty.



Certainly not top-flight, and I’d hesitate even to put it in the second tier, but ‘The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll’ is entertaining nonetheless; even its bonkers ending is part of its charm.

For the sake of auld lang syne

To everyone who reads this blog, Happy New Year. A glass of the Isle of Syke’s finest (ie.Talisker) is being raised to all of you. As the Scots would say: slainte mhath.

Last year, Agitation was kind of defined by my questionable decision to undertake Operation 101010. Don’t get wrong, I saw something interesting stuff and one of the categories allowed me a month-long Clint Eastwood fest in honour of the great man’s 80th birthday. But it got to be a drag, particularly in the final stages. I didn’t start having fun on Agitation until 13 for Halloween in the last fortnight of October, and the Winter of Discontent trash movies project that I ended the year with.

I’m going to do 13 for Halloween and Winter of Discontent again this year. Winter of Discontent will chime nicely with Summer of Satan – such was the winner of last year’s poll with 33% of the vote. In addition, and depending on how many of her movies I can track down, August will be a celebration of Barbara Bouchet’s career, programmed to coincide with her 68th birthday. The one other task I’m setting myself on Agitation this year – starting tomorrow – is to work my way, every Sunday, through all the gialli I’ve not seen yet (including, to my shame, the one that started it all: Mario Bava’s ‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much’).



Aside from all this, the year will be starting with a bang as I join forces with Francisco from The Film Connoisseur between the 3rd and 5th of the month for Viva la Revolution, a celebration of revolutionary behaviour on film. Please fly the flag for the revolution, display one of our banners and check out both our blogs.