Shanghai Express

Thoughts on the film by Josef von Sternberg

The history of the cinema is defined by two icons of industrial engineering: the train and the bridge. In the oldest surviving fragment of film, Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888), photographed by the mysterious and enigmatic French film pioneer Louis Le Prince, the bridge itself becomes a symbol. Not just a geographical setting chosen for narrative purposes, but something more significant.

Conventionally, the bridge is a link between places and people, allowing individuals to travel outside of their own location, and to experience something different and new. However, a bridge can also provide a theoretical link between psychological and sociological states, such as the before and after. For Le Prince, his bridge linked the pre-cinema to the post-cinema worlds, marking the point at which this new medium, as then still in its infancy, connected us to new cultures, ideas and expressions.

After the bridge came the train and with it the journey; this vessel that transports ideas, characters and emotions, moving like a narrative from a beginning to an end. The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière would film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896); the first blockbuster. The arrival of the train was like a heralding for the coming of cinema; or more specifically, the becoming of cinema; this medium that had the potential to show us the world as we'd never seen it before; to instil feelings of shock and awe; to transform and transport us through a succession of moving pictures.

A few years later, the English filmmaker George Albert Smith would direct A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899). Here, the phantom ride of a camera attached to the front of a train prowling along the tracks on its journey to somewhere, is intercut with a scene of a heterosexual couple inside a carriage, stealing a chaste kiss as the train enters the titular void. In figurative terms, the tunnel itself is like a stand-in for the cinema; a darkened space with a light at the end. The light glows bright as we approach it, like the light of the screen. However, it's the innovation of the film and its early use of narrative cutting that makes Smith's work significant.

A Kiss in the Tunnel [George Albert Smith, 1899]:

From here, trains would be a significant feature of the early cinema. From John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) to Buster Keaton's The General (1926), and beyond, the two innovations would reflect one another, becoming mirror twins. Both trains and the cinema are communal activities; we share these journeys with other people. Both are passive; we remain in our seat and watch the world turn. Both can create a feeling of anxiety, discomfort or inertia, and both can offer a room to dream.

In Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932), this relationship between trains, the cinema and the experience of dreams, finds the perfect expression. Set mostly aboard the titular locomotive as it attempts its journey from Peking to Shanghai, the narrative of the film mirrors the progression of a train along the tracks. As the journey is diverted or draws to a halt, so too does the film. When the train reaches its conclusion, the film ends.

If the narrative is a mirror to the journey of the train, then the train is a mirror to society. Its passengers, representing a broadchurch, become a microcosm of one faction of society. Among them we find different social classes, hinting at the layers of this culture, the hierarchy and the inequality of wealth. We have soldiers and entertainers, staff and travellers, the frail and even religion. In this context, they become merely representative. Rather than depict conventional character traits, their roles within the film exist to embody certain principles or political characteristics, stating their position and ideologies through dialog, the way protagonists in theatrical plays often do.

Thrown together, these characters will be tested by a subsequent turn of events, which works to upend and debase the social order that the earlier scenes dictate.

Shanghai Express [Josef von Sternberg, 1932]:

As a work of narrative cinema, Shanghai Express is more than adequate. The story is well paced and well developed, introducing relationships, back-stories and characteristics that are each carried through and "paid off" in the final act. The twists in the plot are surprising and help introduce political themes, intrigue and a moral complexity that it might otherwise have lacked. In short, it's engaging, balancing serious themes, hints of violence and contrasting witty banter in a way that feels cohesive.

However, where Sternberg's film is more remarkable is in its iconography, its aesthetics, and in the symbolic or metatextual elements of its construction. To this, Shanghai Express is a film of symbols; a narrative wherein each development of the plot expresses not just a narrative function but a projection of the characters' psychological states. The film is almost specifically constructed around these elements; every facet of its story, from the setting, to the backdrop, to the train itself, facilitating a means for these characters to make sense of their own emotions, turning the film into a genuine psychodrama.

That the film is set during the period of the Chinese Civil War connects less with history than it does with the idea of a divided territory; not just geographical, but psychological. The China as depicted in the film is an occupied territory, but occupied not just by the political rebels, colonialist agitators or the decadent and the damned passengers that define its narrative, but occupied in the same sense that thoughts, fears and desires might occupy our daily existence. These characters are in a state of conflict, and as such, "occupy" a state in conflict; making the catastrophes and the debasements that occur along the way not just literal but figurative as well.

Like The Silence (1963) directed by Ingmar Bergman, Shanghai Express is a dream play. The characters, both here and there, are trapped in a physical space that becomes a kind of psychological limbo. Fittingly, The Silence begins with a train journey through a heightened, almost surrealist landscape of war and devastation; another occupied territory. Is the war real or metaphorical? Is it something that occurs outside the perspective of these characters or within? Is it a projection of their own fear, their trauma or the state of anxiety that holds them captive, or is it simply a dream; a conjuring of the unconscious mind?

The Silence [Ingmar Bergman, 1963]:

Shanghai Express [Josef von Sternberg, 1932]:

Unlike Bergman's film, the backdrop of civil war in Shanghai Express has a historical context. It relates to actual events, but its function within the unfolding melodrama of its characters is no less vague and enigmatic than the fictional wars that Bergman depicts, both in The Silence and in his later film Shame (1968). It is still, to some extent, a vague projection unfolding through the windows of a train. The characters react to it, but mechanically, as if function compels it. They exist always as if sleepwalking through another person's existence.

It's here that I'm reminded of a later film that took great influence from Sternberg's work; Lars von Trier's post-war allegory Europa (1991). Like Shanghai Express, Europa's drama is connected to a train that becomes both an embodiment of the structured narrative and a microcosm of the world in miniature. Its characters are political or philosophical representations that exist to present sides of a specific argument relating to the Second World War, culpability, innocence and the state of post-war Europe. Both films treat historical conflict as psychological conditions; their respective destinations less geographical realities than a state of mind. Both films are coded, stylised and have a dreamlike feeling where characters are robbed of personal agency.

Europa [Lars von Trier, 1991]:

Trier and his co-writer Niels Vørsel make their intentions explicit by creating a framing device around hypnosis. Their film physically takes place while in a state of trance. Sternberg and his screenwriter Jules Furthman are less literal, but the results are nonetheless the same. The atmosphere of the film is stilted, deep and thick; its characters like sleepwalkers moving without recourse; somnambulists lost in some nigh time enchantment that plays out through the window/screen.

In keeping with this, Sternberg's film has the feeling of an endless night. It isn't; bookending sequences are set during the daytime. But it's the impression of the film as something existing within the twilight between sleep and waking, the dreamlike artificiality of the performances, the expressionist gestures of the cinematography and the psychodramatic aspects of the narrative as some internal conflict that the central characters must overcome in order to find a kind of peace, that leave the greatest impression.

Viewed through the prism of Europa, it's much easier to read Shanghai Express on a similar, more expressionist or psychological level. Trier's cynicism means that he ultimately desires to destroy his train, and to destroy the bridge that allows it to travel between two worlds. Sternberg is less cynical. His film reaches a conclusion befitting the films of this period; reaffirming the intentions of characters and moving towards a kind of happiness or hope. Even though the war is still raging, and lives are being lost, it doesn't matter; the war, in this context, always existed as a projection of the inner conflicts within the lives of these characters.

Just as the tunnel in Smith's film provided a necessary function in allowing its two protagonists to share a romantic moment, so too does the civil war of Shanghai Express. Does this make the film weaker, or more exploitative? I couldn't say. However, I found the experience of the film more fascinating, emotionally engaging and beautiful in its design and direction for the way it unfolds in this world of night time shadows; this nocturnal suspension of actual time, wherein characters are trapped, forced to engage with a projected narrative that facilitates a form of emotional transcendence.

The Year in Film 2019 - Part Four

Happy as Lazzaro [Alice Rohrwacher, 2018]:

Watched: May 04, 2019

The furious social commentary of the film put me in mind of an old quote attributed to the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard; or more specifically, to Godard's character in his own great masterpiece, First Name, Carmen (1983): "When shit's worth money, the poor won't have assholes." The sentiment reverberates throughout Happy as Lazzaro, where the saintly nature of the central character, held, along with the rest of his fellow villagers, in a perpetual cycle of poverty and subservience, like hostages to their own employers, gives an added weight to the film's condemnation of capitalist exploitation. Like M. Night Shyamalan's much maligned but brilliant The Village (2004), Happy as Lazzaro plays with the perception of time and the idea of characters imprisoned, not by lock and key, but by manipulation; by the intentional withholding of information by those in positions of power. In both films, the subsequent revelation as to the true nature of events hits the audience like a sucker punch. It breaks the spell of the film's earlier, more pastoral or otherworldly sequences, and has the potential to leave its audience disarmed and disoriented, unsure of where we are or what we're seeing. Supernatural elements surface as the film does something extraordinary with its central character, the titular Lazzaro, who, like his near-namesake, rises literally from the dead to become a living mirror to the heartlessness of people, and the unending cruelty that defines us as a species. With Happy as Lazzaro, writer and director Alice Rohrwacher announces herself as a clear descendant to filmmakers like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Robert Bresson; finding an analogous push/pull between unscripted naturalism, bordering on the documentary, and something more artificial, stilted and austere.

Us [Jordan Peele, 2019]:

Watched: May 04, 2019

Like the director's first film, the zeitgeist capturing horror commentary Get Out (2017), writer and director Jordan Peele's second feature, Us, never really betters its amazing prologue. Finding a balance between contemporary horror movie cliché and social satire, this opening sequence creates an atmosphere that is unnerving and pervasive, perfectly evoking a feeling of plausible suburban dread, both in its fairground setting – itself a kind of self-aware acknowledgement of the film as "thrill ride" – and in its observation of the family dynamics; the curious child, the distracted parents and the constant threat of something insidious existing just beyond the frame. The sequence is also necessary in establishing many of the key themes and characteristics that develop throughout the film. The hall of mirrors, set as it is in the façade of a fairytale kingdom, connects back to everything from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865) and its follow-up "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" (1871), to films like The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Orphée (1950); that notion of the 'magic mirror' that transports a character to a literal underworld, as well as the usual connotations to self-reflection, identity and duality of the mind. While the subsequent home invasion sequences and the third act twist into something more elaborate if far-fetched are clever and brilliantly executed, they pale in comparison to this opening scene. With Get Out, I thought Peele's ideas, both in his subversion of conventional genre iconography and his engagement with the current politics of identity, were brilliant, but the film was let down by a bland, televisual aesthetic. Working here with cinematographer Michael Gioulakis, best known for his excellent work with directors David Robert Mitchell and M. Night Shyamalan, ensures that Peele's imagery is now as powerful as his ideas. Despite some obvious flaws, Us is a bold and singular experience, confirming Peele's reputation as an exciting and ambitious new voice in American genre cinema.

Unicorn Store [Brie Larson, 2017]:

Watched: May 05, 2019

In a year when Brie Larson would go on to achieve enormous pop cultural significance with her starring role in the blockbuster superhero movie Captain Marvel (2019), it seems especially incongruous to be discovering her first feature-length work as director; the small and defiantly unusual Unicorn Store. Representing a complete creative antithesis to the kind of cinema typified by Marvel's flashy, big-budgeted CGI adventure, Unicorn Store is an intimate, heartfelt, visually creative comedy drama film that combines genuine twenty-something existentialism with more fantastical or magical realist elements. Scripted by Samantha McIntyre, Unicorn Store captures something of the millennial experience in a way that feels genuinely authentic, at least in regards to the experience of middle-class suburbanites who leave the supposedly liberating institutions of college and university only to find themselves back at home, living with parents, and struggling with low-paying temp jobs that offer little outlet for the kind of creativity and expression that childhood promised. As a contrast to much of the current crop of American independent cinema, which is blandly shot and unremarkable, looking more like television movies than something directed with personality and style, Larson's film has a bold visual aesthetic that practically bursts with glitter and rainbows. The stylization extends from the personality of the central character, the struggling artist Kit, meaning that in this instance the content dictates the form. However, the result is still a confident and exciting work that suggests Larson could have potential to be a bold new voice in American cinema. I found the film both funny and moving, connecting with the character's sadness, her sense of failure and disillusionment, and her eventual move towards something approaching hope and self-acceptance. Ultimately, it's a film about belief and the need to believe in something greater than the world around us; about having a purpose, no matter how personal or irrational it might seem, which draws and connects us to other people.

The Usual Suspects [Bryan Singer, 1995]:

Watched: Jun 06, 2019

It's hard to believe there was ever a period when films like this would dominate the cultural discourse. In a world where hundred-million-dollar blockbusters are expected to gross billions in revenue, and predictably lead to the creation of an actual franchise of follow-up installments that run and run until the series exhausts itself, only to then be remade and rebooted as the process begins again, it seems entirely alien that a film that cost $6million to produce and grossed only $34million world-wide, once impacted the popular culture as significantly, if not more so, than The Avengers (2012), Wonder Woman (2017) or Joker (2019). While the creative success of the film and its legacy has been largely tainted by the separate sexual assault allegations leveled at both director Bryan Singer and the film's co-star Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects nonetheless holds up as a fantastic piece of comic book noir. From the very first frame the film grips the audience with a sense of mystery as we find ourselves faced with a seemingly senseless crime, conflicting timelines, an unreliable narrator and a character who acts as a surrogate for the audience, piecing together the clues. The screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie is brilliant; it's clever without being conceited, and compelling without becoming unnecessarily convoluted, always finding the right balance between tone, story and the playful manipulation of the audience. In the presentation of the mysterious Keyser Söze there is a touch of Dr Mabuse: the criminal mastermind created by Norbert Jacques and made famous in three films directed by Fritz Lang between 1922 and 1960. This similarity works to connect the film to the influence of German expressionism and by extension the legacy of the American film noir.

The Coming of Sin [José Ramón Larraz, 1978]:

Watched: Jun 15, 2019

The inference of the title, The Coming of Sin, creates an inherent tension within the presentation of the narrative and in the relationship between its three central characters. By seeking to personify "sin" as a characteristic in the flesh and blood form of a living person, co-writer and director José Larraz succeeds in taking his story out of the literal reality and creates instead a figurative representation that suggests something symbolic, almost mythical. By turning "sin" as a concept into a physical harbinger, Larraz cuts the film free from the restrictions of conventional drama and instead suggests something closer to the psychodrama. In this sense, it's a film in which characters become representations; where the struggle that exists between the protagonists is meant to externalise an internal point of view. Like his earlier film, Vampyres (1974), The Coming of Sin is a work that straddles the line between the arthouse and the grindhouse, proving itself to be another hard sell for both factions as it appears too salacious or leering for high-brow audiences, and too esoteric or languorous for the populists. On one level, the film is filled with scenes of soft-focus, softcore erotica, suggestive of analogous works by other European provocateurs such as Walerian Borowczyk and Tinto Brass, and films like The Immoral Tales (1974) or Salon Kitty (1976), where sex and depravity were treated as selling points, but packaged with creative cinematography and appeals to historical or psychological depth. The Coming of Sin undoubtedly takes great pleasure in depicting its lengthy scenes of sex and nudity, but it also features intelligent themes, strong emotions and an emphasis on smaller, observational scenes, which establish the world of the film and the relationship between the characters. The psychological subtext is as rich here as anything found in a film by Ingmar Bergman.

The Year in Film 2019 - Part Three

El patrullero (Highway Patrolman) [Alex Cox, 1991]:

Watched: Mar 17, 2019

If one filmmaker dominated 2019 for me, it was Alex Cox. Earlier in the year I read his 2008 memoir, "X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker", and greatly enjoyed its informative and always self-deprecating approach. I purchased two more of Cox's excursions into the literary world, his 2017 book "I am (Not) a Number: Decoding the Prisoner" and 2009's "10,000 Ways to Die: A Director's Take on the Spaghetti Western", and found both to be of a similar value. Inspired by the books I was also watching and re-watching Cox's films. Of those that were new to me, his films The Winner (1996), Revengers Tragedy (2002), Searchers 2.0 (2007) and Bill the Galactic Hero (2014) are either excellent or better than their reputations suggest, however one film stood out as a definite highlight. Filmed in Mexico following Cox's departure from Hollywood, El patrullero – or Highway Patrolman as it's commonly known – ties with Walker (1987) as the absolute pinnacle of the filmmaker's career. Scripted by Lorenzo O'Brien, El patrullero takes the mythos of the American western – where the lone lawman attempts to remain moral and just as he fights corruption and criminality in a lawless border town – and contrasts it against the conventions of the road movie. The tone is anarchic, carefully mixing between scenes of broad comedy, character development and gritty violence, while the filmmaking is ambitious and creative. This was the period when Cox was shooting his films "plano secuencia", meaning every scene is filmed in a single, carefully choreographed take. The result is a complete masterpiece of narrative, theme and aesthetics, and one of the absolute great films of the 1990s.

Phantom Lady [Robert Siodmak, 1944]:

Watched: Mar 24, 2019

The title hints at something supernatural, putting us in mind of certain analogous Val Lewton produced horror films, such as The Leopard Man, or The Seventh Victim (both 1943), but this isn't the case. Instead, Phantom Lady could be described as a "proto-giallo"; a film noir that predicts many of the conventions and practicalities that would go on to define that particular sub-genre of Italian murder mysteries so popular during the 1960s and 1970s. While it doesn't have the black-gloved serial killer or the stylised death scenes, there is nonetheless something about this story of a bystander taking on the role of amateur-sleuth to investigate a grisly murder, as well as the subsequent confession of the killer, whose grip on sanity has unraveled into tortured exposition, that recalls the practicalities of later films by directors like Mario Bava, Dario Argento and others. Films like The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Deep Red (1975) specifically, which capture something of a similar atmosphere, as well as 'cat and mouse' scenes of the "hunter" becoming the hunted. While not as powerful in its emotional drama or as inventive in its storytelling as his later film, The Killers (1946), the imagery of director Robert Siodmak is at its peak here, as the film blends the mystery and procedural elements with a thrilling descent into a third-act psychodrama.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest [Gore Verbinski, 2006]:

Watched: Mar 26, 2019

Dispensing with plot to an even greater degree than the original film, the likable but otherwise thinly-sketched Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), director Gore Verbinski's first sequel to the long-running franchise builds on its greatest strength (i.e. Johnny Depp as the irrepressible Captain Jack Sparrow) and runs with it, creating a narrative that exists for no other reason than to place its central characters into situations that allow for much comic misunderstanding, stunts and orchestrated suspense. The result, a non-stop cavalcade of action and comedy, feels less like a Hollywood blockbuster than something possessed by the cinematic spirits of Jackie Chan, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. It's a film that places the emphasis on spectacle; upping the ante on what the first film was able to achieve and creating a series of visuals and set-pieces that are thrilling, original and brimming with imagination. For me, "Dead Man's Chest" is the absolute pinnacle of the first three "Pirates" films, and is a work that marks the beginning of Verbinski's run as a genuine "termite artist"; a filmmaker working within the mainstream that is nonetheless able to invest his films with ideas, images and scenarios that are subversive, eccentric, or defiantly anti-mainstream. In its scope, ambition and pure force of vision, it's a definite precursor to Verbinski's subsequent fantastic oddities, The Lone Ranger (2013) and A Cure for Wellness (2016).

Dumbo [Tim Burton, 2019]:

Watched: Apr 08, 2019

The experience of the film for me was like the world in miniature; the big-top reverie of the American experience distilled to its key essentials. The real pleasure of the film was not limited to the story and its presentation, but more redolent in what the film was able to suggest between the lines of blockbuster expectation. In its tone and intentions, Dumbo is capitalism and candy floss. It's the triumph of the broken, the different, the "other", struggling against uncertain odds. It's maudlin sentimentality. It's love, both between the child and its mother, but also at first sight. It's the struggle of the independent cinema against the unstoppable Disney machine. It's escapism. It's a circus train moving across the landscape in-time to the clamour of musical instruments. It's prejudice and persecution, pre-packaged in such a way that its message will be understood by young children, but not lost on the parents and adults also in attendance. It's a film about understanding. So many of the current crop of "live-action" Disney remakes are films made without style or personal aesthetic. They exist first and foremost as product; the imagery is there to illustrate the story and little else. Dumbo is not only defiantly beautiful as a piece of cinema, its alive with themes and ideas. While the anti-corporate, anti-big business subtext might seem disingenuous given that the film is a product of the Disney™ brand, it's another example of Burton as the "termite artist", biting the hand that feeds him. The small circus becomes a metaphor not just for the family (extended, as in the 'community') but the independent cinema. "Dreamland" as an obvious Disneyland surrogate, represents the mainstream, with its profit driven incentives, callous treatment of artists and emphasis on merchandising. The film even ends with an image of the cinema as a symbol of the great spectacles to come.

Cloud Atlas [Lilly Wachowski, Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer, 2012]:

Watched: Apr 14, 2019

The earnest nature of its message and the eccentricity of its delivery invite ridicule. After all, this is a film that casts recognisable superstars and has them speak in a variety of contrived, even fictional dialects, buries them under heavy prosthetic effects, and even at times indulges in the more controversial practices of gender and race-bending. To see Halle Berry portraying a white character, Hugo Weaving imitating a woman and Jim Sturgess playing Chinese isn't perfect, but it's practical, and plays into one of the more important components of the film; specifically the idea of a small group of "souls" inhabiting different variations of the same characters throughout history. Covering six different timelines and a variety of locations, from the Chatham Islands in 1849 to a post-apocalyptic future world in the year 2321, Cloud Atlas is by far the most ambitious Hollywood film of the past decade. Here, its three directors' cross countries and continents, cross boundaries of style and genre, and even cross the lines of convention and common-sense, delivering a film that for all its fantasy and imagination is focused on a human story of love and perseverance. Like Sense8 (2015-2018), the mostly brilliant TV series that Tkwer and Wachowskis would go on to helm a few years later, Cloud Atlas is a story about connections. Individual narratives find parallel lines that tangle and enfold, while music, words, images and characters echo across time and space. At close to three hours in duration there are many that would argue the film is too slight and simplistic in its message to justify the level of indulgence, but I found it genuinely moving. That the message can be regarded as "prejudice is bad and we should live as better people" was not a flaw for me. I found it beautiful, moving and admirably humanist in intentions.

Blue Black Permanent

Thoughts on a film by Margaret Tait

"I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me."

- The Waves (1931) by Virginia Woolf

At one point in the film, a character talks about a flower that can only grow in one specific location, a heath on the Orkney archipelago. Any attempt to remove the flower and replant it somewhere else results in the flower's slow demise; its sense of being so firmly rooted to that one singular place that it's unable to flourish anywhere else. It becomes an obvious metaphor for the central character, the 1950s poet, mother and housewife Greta Thorburn, whose early death and the mystery surrounding it still haunts the life of her adult daughter, and provides for the audience the emotional center to this strange and personal film.

The only feature-length work directed by the Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait, Blue Black Permanent (1992) unfortunately wasn't the hidden masterwork I was hoping it would be. There's a certain inertness to much of the film, an odd disparity between the various timelines, which are necessary to the conception of Tait's story and her reflection on three generations of women, but it often feels like separate films competing for attention. Perhaps this is the point?

Blue Black Permanent [Margaret Tait, 1992]:

The present-day sequences, which act as a kind of framing device, casting Celia Imrie as Greta's grown-up daughter Barbara, a photographer, with Jack Shepherd as her understanding partner Philip, don't really work, and weigh down the better, more affecting sequences of Gerda Stevenson as the sensitive poet, struggling to find a sense of place. Imrie and Shepard do well in their respective roles, but their sequences are stilted and expositional. They feel more like scenes of actors rehearsing for a play than moments that fit comfortably alongside the more visual and purely cinematic sequences set in the 1950s and earlier.

It's a shame, as these "period" sequences are often incredible and reach for the kind of filmed poetry that Tait achieved in her short films, such as A Portrait of Ga (1952), The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1955) and Aerial (1974). Like Blue Black Permanent, these were films preoccupied with the same themes of womanhood, home, nature and the elements. However, they were unburdened by the more conventional necessity for a narrative with a clear beginning, middle and end, and as such were free to engage in the kind of extraordinary image-making that Blue Black Permanent achieves only in moments.

Blue Black Permanent [Margaret Tait, 1992]:

Tait apparently took the title, Blue Black Permanent, from a type of ink. This makes sense given the personal connection between Greta, as protagonist, and Tait herself as the filmmaker, as both are writers and poets, and their work is central to what is being expressed. However, I think there are further connotations to the title, which might be obvious but are worth repeating.

Firstly, it could be taken as a reference to the sea; to the inky blue and black textures that define it, or at least the perception of it as it moves against the landscape. It could even be taken as an acknowledgement of the dividing line of the horizon, where the night sky as it appears in one particular sequence, reaches out to meet the ocean, itself a kind of black mirror. It also has a psychological connotation; blue like sadness, black like depression; reflecting the heightened emotional state of Greta during the run-up to her final moments.

Joni Mitchell's landmark 1971 album "Blue" features a similar exploration of the colour. The "blues" as at once an expression, the musical sub-genre and as a state of emotion, and of the elemental themes that are woven into a song like 'The River', itself a personal reflection on womanhood and the image of a corporeal escape or transcendence through a body of water. What Mitchell hints at, Tait's film makes clear.

Blue [Joni Mitchell, 1971]:

Cover photography Tim Considine, art-direction by Gary Burden

Blue Black Permanent [Margaret Tait, 1992]:

That Blue Black Permanent doesn't quite work as a complete film shouldn't necessarily detract from its positive attributes, of which there are many. In certain sequences, particularly those focusing on Greta, both the brief scenes of her childhood and in the more fully realized scenes of her later adult life, the film achieves something extraordinary. The impressionist moments that contrast and connect the existential dilemmas of characters to the elemental mysteries of the natural world overwhelm the more conventional or generic notions of character and plot and become an expression. Not something that is understood or needs to be understood, but something that is felt.

"Felt" in the sense of the emotions, the sadness, the longing, the regret, the failure to understand and the acceptance that life is finite and forever running out, but also felt in the way memories are felt as they're triggered by the various senses, the sound of the ocean, the smell of the fields, the cold air against exposed skin or the ground beneath our feet. This aspect of the film is less tangible, but it's the feeling that the film imparts upon the viewer, the emotions of its characters, rather than appeals to storytelling or narrative engagement.

There are even moments in the "present day" segments, flawed as they apparently are, which give a greater potency to those scenes that depict the inner life of Greta and her inability to share her feelings with her husband, friends and children. The hard cut from disco lights throwing blocks of electric colour across the bopping patrons of an Edinburgh nightclub circa the early 1990s, to a window scene reflection looking out across a beach in Orknay in the 1950s, illustrates the emotional connection between Greta and Barbara; mother and daughter each struggling to make sense of their place in the world. In a single moment, as remarkable as the cut from a row of suburban houses to lines of gravestones in a cemetery seen in Tait's aforementioned The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, this moment connects the film's themes of disconnection, absence, womanhood, family, home and death, in a way that is both modest and hugely intelligent.

Blue Black Permanent [Margaret Tait, 1992]:

The scenes shot around Kirkwall in the Orkney islands, where Tait was raised, have a real affection for the rural lifestyle and for the practical, unpretentious socializing of the villagers that descent upon the house of Greta's father. These moments seem to belong to a different film, but nonetheless provide an incredible and deliberate contrast to the more bourgeois, middle-class affections presented by characters elsewhere in the film. Here, we get a sense of Tait's real love for the region and its people as she lets conversations play out, savoring every word delivered in that remarkable accent, enjoying the jokes and the banter as a respite from the interior voices that express something altogether more alienated.

While it's a film where the imperfections stand out, where the misjudged moments, the wooden dialog, the kitsch dream sequences, threaten to break the spell of the more enchanting passages, the experience of Blue Black Permanent is no less affecting. Despite its flaws, it remains a still relevant film about depression and the effect that mental health related issues and suicide can have on generations of the same family. It's also a film about relationships between mothers and daughters, the connection that women have to nature and the elements, the need for freedom, for independence. Rich themes that are brilliantly evoked and explored by the filmmaker throughout.

In certain moments, certain images, the film succeeds in expressing these different themes and emotions that must have compelled it into being. The poetic sequences – the way the camera lingers on the surface of the sea, transformed by the iridescent sun; its rays of light refracted off the dappled surface into a kind of mirror ball; a cosmic interplay of light and shadow reminiscent of stars in the blue night sky – are beautiful and transportive. Ultimately the experience of Greta and the character of the film itself, recalls the final words of a poem by Stevie Smith: "I was much too far out all my life, and not waving, but drowning."

The Word for World is Forest

Thoughts on the book by Ursula K. Le Guin

With additional notes on Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi

"If the yumens are men, they are unfit or untaught to dream or act as men. Therefore, they go about in torment killing and destroying, driven by the Gods within, whom they will not set free, but try to uproot and deny. If they are men, they are evil men, having denied their own Gods, afraid to see their own faces in the dark..."

- The Word for World is Forest (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin

I've read three books already this year and I'm currently mid-way through a fourth. To say that "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin is the very best of them would be an understatement. It's one of the very best books I've ever read! What I loved about the book, first and foremost, was its humanism. This might sound incongruous given how the focus of the story is partially centred on a race of forest-dwelling alien creatures, but the subtext, and the way the aliens become a kind of stand-in for any indigenous race that has faced prejudice, hostility and extermination, allows Le Guin to explore ever-pertinent themes of racism, war, slavery, deforestation, the destruction of the eco-system, capitalism and friendship.

Apparently written in response to America's involvement in the Vietnam war, "The Word for World is Forest" focuses on the efforts made by Earth colonists to run a logging company on the distant planet of Athshe. The Athsheans are a peaceful race and take a passive view of the humans (or "yumens", as they're known in the book), despite the loggers causing irreparable damage to their environment. It's only after a military presence brought in to safeguard the company's interests begins enslaving, imprisoning and eventually abusing the planet's indigenous population, that tensions boil over into an all-out war.

The book is written from several different perspectives and does well to capture the individual voices of those on either side of the discussion. Le Guin balances the perspectives, moving between characters that are enlightened and sympathetic, to characters that are consumed by prejudice and hate. It's complex and never one-sided, but always clear in its sympathy and support for the Athsheans, and in its lamentation for the violence and destruction caused by humanity in the pursuit of profit and power. A short book, "The Word for World is Forest" could probably be described as a novella, however, it nonetheless succeeds in communicating its themes, politics and positions in a clear and concise approach that would make it suitable for young adults, who might still be susceptible to its lack of cynicism, and its image of a world both defined by and in tune with the hymns of nature.

The Word for World is Forest [Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974]:

Many have seen the book as an early forerunner to director James Cameron's blockbuster adventure film, Avatar (2009). Some online commentators have even accused Cameron of actual plagiarism. While there are obvious similarities between the two works, including both narrative and thematical preoccupations, including a concern with anti-war and pro-environmentalist messages, as well as an obvious attempt to connect the presentation of the alien creatures to the supposedly primitive and mystical tribalism of actual Native cultures, I'd still argue that Cameron's film is leaning more towards the story of Pocahontas than it is to the more recent influences of Le Guin and her work.

That said, there is at least one cinematic descendent of Le Guin's book that immediately stands out. In "The Word for World is Forest", the Athsheans (known as "Creechies" by the human characters) are depicted as pacifist, forest-dwelling creatures, forced into a war with an invading military presence that has turned their home planet into an occupied territory. They're described as being like tiny bear or monkey-like beings covered in a thick green and black fur, wearing only hoods and belts.

The image of these characters and the way Le Guin describes their later war with the "yumens" put me in mind of an earlier but no less lucrative science-fiction fantasy, Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983), and more specifically the presentation of the Ewoks. There's even a city in Le Guin's book called "Endtor", which is remarkably similar to "Endor", the Ewok home world. So far, I haven't been able to find any genuine confirmation that the filmmakers involved in "Return of the Jedi" had read Le Guin's book or taken influence from it, so I suppose we chalk this one up to coincidence or "inspiration"?

Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi [Richard Marquand & George Lucas, 1983]:

Co-written, produced and by all accounts co-directed by George Lucas (albeit, uncredited for the latter), "Return of the Jedi" remains one of the weakest of the Star Wars sequels. Re-watching the film for the first time since childhood, there were several obvious sequences and images that I remembered, most of them relating to the scenes with slug-like gangster Jabba the Hutt. However, it was surprising how inconsequential and unfocused the rest of the film felt, especially considering that its predecessor, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980), is such a masterpiece, and arguably the film that broadened and strengthened the saga to such an extent that filmmakers are still able to build on its influence even today.

While "Return of the Jedi" succeeds in bringing to a close the themes of fathers and family that run throughout the saga (prequel trilogy included), it's still a film that feels as if the screenplay was being written around specific set-pieces and character designs created for no other reason than to sell toys.

However, there's one aspect of the film, apocryphal as it may be, that makes the experience of it, at least from my own perspective, all the more necessary. Attempting to find a link between "Return of the Jedi" and the book in question, I came across a piece of trivia that suggested scenes depicting the battles between the Ewoks and Storm Troopers were modelled on unused ideas and visual set-pieces that Lucas had devised for his version of Apocalypse Now (1979) when he'd been attached to direct the film prior to the success of Star Wars (1977). Hypothetical or not, it was an earth-shattering bit of trivia, and something that made me want to go back and look at the film again.

Apocalypse Now [Francis Ford Coppola, 1979]:

Apocalypse Now has been one of my favourite films since as far back as I can remember. It was a key text in broadening my understanding of what cinema could achieve as an audio-visual medium, and how a talented and ambitious filmmaker could take a text that was almost a century old – Joseph Conrad's colonialist novella Heart of Darkness (1899) – and transpose it onto recent history, elevating it at the same time through a restless experimentation with the cinematic form.

Today it's impossible to think of the film without recalling the surreal, drugged-out, psychedelic insanity of director Francis Ford Coppola's incredible stylizations, from the vivid opening montage of images –  which connect the forest as an almost supernatural entity to the central character, drifting in clouds of war and insanity; transposing the outer-landscapes of south-east Asia to the inner-landscapes of American rock music, drugs and turmoil – to the final sequence, with its scenes of ritual sacrifice, thunder and lightening, and half-glimpsed explosions of primal violence against expressions of genuine poetry. However, there's another version of Apocalypse Now that we never got to see. The one that George Lucas had been attached to direct since the early 1970s.

Working from a screenplay by the American writer and conservative John Milius, Lucas's vision for Apocalypse Now was to shoot the film in a rough, docudrama approach, in black and white 16mm and with non-professional actors. It would've been a marked contrast to the baroque, hallucinogenic approach eventually favoured by Coppola, and would've drawn on the influence of other political films, like The Battle of Algiers (1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo and Culloden (1964) by Peter Watkins.

Culloden [Peter Watkins, 1964]:

The Battle of Algiers [Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966]:

Obviously, the style of these more radical films from the 1960s doesn't necessarily mesh with the images from "Return of the Jedi" as it exists in its current form, but that's not to say we can't still infer some of Lucas's intent for how the battles of his Apocalypse Now might've played out.

Like "The Word for World is Forest", the scenes set on the planet Endor are quite clearly meant to recall something of the realities of the war in Vietnam. What these scenes depict is a rural, apparently primitive or, at the very least, unprepared society, forced into combat with an occupying power that is attacking them with military hardware and weaponry far more advanced and destructive than their own. By using their knowledge of the forest to their advantage, the indigenous, supposedly primitive society, is able to repel the advanced military forces, scoring a victory that is seen as unprecedented.

The fact that Lucas recasts these scenes of battle and bloodshed, earmarked for a more serious or realistic project, with little teddy bear creatures and cloned super-soldiers, shouldn't detract from the political subtext of these sequences, any more than the fantasy elements of Le Guin's book should detract from hers. At the very least, the Ewok sequences from the film of Lucas and Marquand suggest something of what a film adaptation of "The Word for World is Forest" might look like, depicting the same proto-terrorist guerilla warfare that Le Guin describes in her book, but in a vivid, full-colour style.

Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi [Richard Marquand & George Lucas, 1983]:

Seeing "Return of the Jedi" again in the context of Le Guin's book helped to enrich the experience of both. However, it was seeing the film in relation to Lucas's potential vision for Apocalypse Now that was the real revelation. While I may have misgivings about the film, I nonetheless remain a staunched defender of Lucas's filmmaking and rank at least three of the six films he's directed as genuinely brilliant: THX 1138 (1971), American Graffiti (1974) and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005). Larger essay-length considerations of each of these three films should be posted on Lights in the Dusk later in the year.

Despite having purchased a collection of the first four "Earthsea" books a couple of years ago, "The Word for World is Forest" marks my first proper experience reading Le Guin's work. Given how moved and transported I was by the storytelling, its themes and its incredibly visual way of describing scenes and events, I think I owe it to myself to finally delve into these "Earthsea" stories, which include "A Wizard of Earthsea" (1968), "The Tombs of Atuan" (1971), "The Farthest Shore" (1972) and "Tehanu" (1990).