Schalcken the Painter (1979)

Schalcken the Painter [Schalcken the Painter [Leslie Megahey, 1979]:

This is a film I first saw around four years ago. At the time I found it slightly disappointing, especially compared to some of the other BFI Flipside titles released for the same genre. I’d expected a more cinematic horror film, like later Flipside titles, Symptoms (1973) and The Appointment (1982), whereas this is very much a TV production in scale and scope.

As such, it’s limited by its exclusive use of studio interiors and lack of establishing shots, which gives the film a very stagey, hermetic quality. It also fumbles its biggest horror set piece by having lead actor Jeremy Clyde show terror in an artificial, slightly pantomimic fashion, which struck me as unintentionally amusing (and as such robbed the sequence in question of its power to shock and unnerve.)

However, a recent rewatch of the film without those earlier expectations made me appreciate it a great deal more. It’s a slow, sombre film with incredible period aesthetics and a restless nocturnal mood. The whole film feels almost suspended, as if the characters are sleepwalkers passing through a nighttime reverie; an eternal ‘dark night of the soul’, where the themes of guilt, betrayal, unrequitable desire, temptation and the certainty of death, haunt the characters like ghosts in the shadows.

 

Schalcken the Painter [Leslie Megahey, 1979]: 

Made for the TV series ‘Omnibus,’ Megahey’s film is based on an 1839 short story by Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter.’ At first glance, it’s a film that feels very much akin to the kind of stylised arts docudramas pioneered by Ken Russell for the BBC. And yet, it has a tone and a subject matter much closer to the films that Lawrence Gordon Clark produced for the long running ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ series.

Having first aired on the BBC on the 23 December 1979, Megahey’s film is an unofficial part of the same tradition of ghost stories for Christmas, though its blending of fact and fiction, as well as its intentionally more restrained and stilted direction, gives it a very different tenor to a film like A Warning to the Curious (1972) or The Signalman (1976).

Esteemed actor Charles Gray voices Le Fanu and his dry, objective delivery helps to establish the historical basis of the film as well as the biographical backgrounds of the various characters. The film is fiction, but it maintains a tone of factual reportage, weaving figures and details from real life into the escalating horror, which gives an illusion of plausibility to the later instances of the supernatural or the unexplained.

 

Schalcken the Painter [Leslie Megahey, 1979]:

The period detail is exceptional, with many shots functioning as pictorial recreations or references to the Dutch masters in both design and mise-en-scene. The design of the fashionable home of Schalcken’s mentor Gerrit Dou, as well as the flat compositions and the emphasis on framing through open doorways, each recall the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, while the scenes outside the house employ the chiaroscuro lighting of Rembrandt van Rijn.

The Flipside release features in-depth interviews with writer and director Leslie Megahey (who passed away in 2022) and cinematographer John Hooper, which cover the background and production of the film. In the great BFI tradition, the release also contains two short films that explore similar themes of the Gothic and the fantastique: The Pit (1962) and The Pledge (1981)

Elvis (2022)

Elvis [Baz Luhrmann, 2022]:

If we think of the image of Presley slumped in his penthouse suite, catatonic on a cocktail of hamburgers and prescription pills, with his bank of television screens blazing through the darkness, we get a close approximation of the experience and presentation of Luhrmann’s Elvis – a flashy speed-run through a century of American pop cultural history.

Rather than depict a linear presentation of Presley’s life, Luhrmann gives us a disorganized montage of competing scenes, sounds, events and images, all cut together as if we’re channel surfing (or as if our attention is being pulled in several different directions from one scene to the next.) The whole film feels as if each scene is being broadcast individually and simultaneously across a wall of television monitors, and we, as the audience, are having to scan from screen to screen then back again; the disorienting cacophony of sounds all mixed and remixed as if we’re hearing everything all at once and are left to pick out snippets of conversations, music, voices, until they’re drowned out again, or our attention focuses on something else.

On a level of technique this all sounds audacious, reminiscent (on paper at least) of the experimental approach Oliver Stone brought to his earlier films, JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). Unfortunately, Luhrmann lacks the focus of Stone as well as his depth and conviction. While he throws everything at his multi-media recreation of Elvis as pop cultural icon, it’s not exactly clear what the point of it all is?

 

 Elvis [Baz Luhrmann, 2022]:

 

One could use Presley as a lens through which to explore the changing landscape of pop culture, race and popular music. There’s a bit of that here, but not as much as you might expect for a film running close to three-hours. You could also look at the story more cynically, presenting Elvis as the establishment’s sock puppet (whose stage-managed persona and ‘scandalous’ hip shaking distracted the masses from the uncomfortable realities of the civil rights movement, the Korean war, the assassination of activists, presidents and presidential candidates, the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal). Luhrmann attempts to broach a bit of this as well, but he’s 1) too enamored with Presley as an artist to not view his role in this sympathetically, and 2) shifts the focus of the film in too many conflicting directions for any of it to land.

For instance, there’s no reason for the film to be told from the perspective of Presley’s manager, ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker. The film presents Parker as the villain, but also allows Parker to present himself as a victim; giving the film an unnecessary conflict between what we see and what we’re told. We get the sense that Luhrmann wants the audience to feel as manipulated and lied to by Parker as Presley must have done in real life, but we don’t really need this, do we? We don’t need this additional level of self-reflection in which Parker gaslights the audience, while the audience becomes a witness to how monstrously Parker manipulates his star. It feels like Luhrmann is going for a kind of Citizen Kane (1941) rewritten by Brett Easton Ellis, but he can’t quite pull it off (it doesn’t help that Hanks as Parker is delivering one of the worst performances of the decade here.)

 

 Elvis [Baz Luhrmann, 2022]:

In this context, the end of the film and how the message is framed feels like insulting bullshit. Luhrmann gives Parker a platform to say it was “love that killed Elvis,” despite the obvious evidence that Presley was killed by his manager and handlers locking him into a punishing contract and schedule, allowing him to become estranged and alienated from any outside support network in order to better milk him as a cash cow, and then getting hooked on junk food and prescription meds. But none of this background matters for Luhrmann, as he ends the film with a montage of the real-life Presley, fully enshrined as a genuine icon, a legend, and not as another victim of the merciless entertainment industry (like Judy Garland or countless others) who was chewed up and exploited for financial gain.

So, what is Elvis for Luhrmann? What drew him to this project beyond a surface level idolization of Elvis and his work? I think the key is in the sequence depicting the production of the so-called ‘1968 Comeback Special.’ It’s here where the film finally snaps into focus, and we get a clear sense of what this all means for Luhrmann. The deconstructive, behind-the-scenes, film-within-a-film aspect of the special; the fourth-wall-breaking, ‘putting on a show’ spectacle of it all; the idea of Elvis as artist (or Elvis as Luhrmann), defying the expectations of his manager and the suits and the corporate sponsors; the idea of authenticity, of the pop star straining not just for artistic expression, but straining to be the voice of a people, to use his pop platform, his voice, his ‘gift’, to say something meaningful, to become protest personified.

 Elvis [Baz Luhrmann, 2022]:

 

It’s a dazzling sequence for Luhrmann and becomes a kind of ‘Rosetta stone’ for the rest of the film, reflecting and refracting seventy years of pop culture history, enfolding the histories of gospel, rock n’ roll, punk rock, hip hop, theatrical performance and more onto the artifice of Hollywood spectacle; onto the format of the musical; on German expressionism; on the music video. All of it mixed and remixed, as Elvis transcends his role as pop star to become a focal point for American history; his voice expressing on behalf of all voices; his pain becoming our pain; his defiance becoming our defiance.

Again, it’s bullshit, and no less insulting than allowing a proxy Tom Parker to say Elvis was “killed by love,” but it’s the kind of bullshit Luhrmann frequently gets away with, 1) because these kind of sequences (both the ‘68 special and the later scenes involving Presley’s residency in Las Vegas) play exceptionally well to his style of multi-media, cinematic bricolage, and 2) because we get a sense he actually believes it.

Eve's Bayou

Eve's Bayou [Kasi Lemmons, 1997]:

A tremendous feature debut from actor turned writer and director Kasi Lemmons. The mood here is slow and sombre, perfectly evoking the sense of an endless, oppressive summer, which feels conjured from a half-remembered childhood, where parental disillusionment and the shadow of death have become distorted by superstition and the supernatural. One of the key films about the home, about family, and about how the foundations of both can be rocked by circumstances. The scene where Debi Morgan’s character re-lives the murder of her first husband as it plays out in the reflection of a mirror, then turns, physically entering the memory itself, is Tarkovsky-level directing. Morgan throughout is incredible and imbues the moments of the supernatural with a genuine emotional plausibility.

Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th [Sean S. Cunningham, 1980]:

While not a great piece of cinema in the conventional sense, the stature of Cunningham's film is really elevated above other the icons of the slasher sub-genre by virtue of its third act reveal. The psychological and sociological implications of the killer's identity provide an emotional weight and dramatic complexity too often missing from films of this nature. Further, the appropriation of influences, from Mario Bava to John Boorman's film of Deliverance (1972), are applied incredibly well.

What’s fascinating about Friday the 13th, perhaps more so than films like Halloween (1978), Prom Night (1980) or My Bloody Valentine (1981) is that it almost becomes a cinematic Rorschach test. If you’re a liberal, you might see it as a film about youth being punished by the older generation for the perceived sin of enjoying themselves. If you’re a conservative, then you might see it as a retribution against the amoral, out-of-control youth debasing themselves and American family values. It's a film that taps into the politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as the cultural mood of the era.

Friday the 13th [Sean S. Cunningham, 1980]:

The context is vague and indirect, but still apparent enough that it can be read into the development of the characters and the themes of the film: i.e. loss of innocence, parental responsibility and wayward youth (as well as the usual horror film connotations to voyeurism and objectification, sex and death, which are all apparent themes.) Similarly, the isolation of the setting as both a physical and metaphysical space, the nightmare of the final girl, the way fear creates wounds, the rebirth of the character “Jason” as he emerges from his watery grave to wreak havoc across further sequels, all seem (intentionally or not) self-reflexive.

More than anything the film also provides something of a reminder that early slasher films were essentially "a vibe." Later, there was an expectation that someone had to die on every third page of the screenplay, but here, as in Halloween, or something like Bava's proto-slasher film A Bay of Blood (1971), the film is content to luxuriate in the atmosphere of its lakeside setting, in the dumb teen preoccupations and concerns of its characters, and in the comings and goings of the staff attempting to get the summer camp up and running. 

The Man Who Wasn't There

The Man Who Wasn't There [Joel & Ethan Coen, 2001]:

Melding a 1940s noir stylisation with a distant 1950s sense of atomic-age paranoia, this much underrated and underseen effort is not just the most imaginative of the Coen brothers' nihilistic investigations into the theme of accountability, but a subjective character study about a man seemingly content to drift through his own existence. Like the similarly underrated A Serious Man (2009), apathy is presented as a kind of hidden bliss here; the characters in both films only smited when they finally attempt to control their own destiny. A masterwork of dark irony, black comedy, and a peerless period aesthetic.

Over the Garden Wall

Over the Garden Wall [Various, 2014]:

Featuring beautifully crafted animation, endearing characters and a storybook narrative, Over the Garden Wall is a little masterpiece of perfectly balanced content and form. Created by Patrick McHale, the dark and often absurd sense of humour, the witty songs, the emotional maturity and the episodes of genuine surrealism (to say nothing of the thematically rich narrative, with its allusions to Dante's Inferno) all result in something that could almost be described as Twin Peaks for children.

Funeral in Berlin

Funeral in Berlin [Guy Hamilton, 1966]:

Director Guy Hamilton is both an underrated master and an underrated master of mise-en-scène, constantly enlivening every terse exchange or moment of surveillance with unique shot compositions and a remarkable use of location. The acerbic wit of Michael Caine's reluctant spy is a huge part of what makes the character so compelling here, as his “anti-Bond” Harry Palmer plays various sides off against one another, while seemingly doing nothing at all.

The Palmer films aren’t merely the “anti-Bond” because they present espionage without action or pyrotechnics, but because they have a greater cynicism about politics and the machinations and manipulations of world events. The titular setting here – grey Berlin, where the ravaged scars of the Second World War stand in contrast against the construction of concrete modernity – is a world away from Bond’s exotic islands and luxury manor houses, but it’s a fitting location for a story that pits the Israeli secret service against former Nazi war criminals, while agents from both sides of the Iron Curtain attempt to manipulate events to their own benefit.

The divided setting suggests the divided loyalty of characters and the people they work for, as interpersonal conflicts are given the same focus as political ones. The sequence where the coffin is transported across the border, and the play on perception and deceptions, seems a precursor to another of Hamilton's films, Live and Let Die (1971) and a reminder of an earlier one, The Party's Over (1964). A quietly complex espionage classic.