Tokyo Days

Thoughts on the film by Chris Marker

A video camera operated by the filmmaker encircles the woman, the actor Arielle Dombasle. She asks her companion, filmmaker Chris Marker, what lens he's using. He responds: "35mm." The actor complains that the perspective with a 35mm lens will look awful. "Marlene Dietrich refused everything under 100mm", she jokes.

Already the subject is the image. How the image, its presentation, the choice of lens, can flatten or change perspective, altering reality. Most amateur or hobbyist photographers don't think about lenses or their effect. It's more about capturing the image; recording what is there in front of them. Even here, it's the actor who voices a concern, rather than the filmmaker. But why? Because the actor isn't playing a role but playing herself. She wants to be seen the way she is, as she was at the time Marker turned his camera upon her. Or is this a part of the act?

There is a question of reality verses perception here. Several images throughout the film seem chosen specifically to show how reality can be transformed into an unreality by the way it's captured and recorded. These images include: a burlesque of a tree top canopy, warped and distorted when seen as a reflection in the polished brass of a musical instrument; three young men on a video recording, their faces obscured by deliberate pixilation; an escalator replicated ad infinitum by the mirrored walls of a shopping complex, and so on.

Tokyo Days [Chris Marker, 1988]:

It's often been said that there was something almost extra-terrestrial about Marker. Something not quite human. He approached his role as a filmmaker as if he were an alien anthropologist attempting to make sense of humanity and how it works. Cultures and sub-cultures recorded, not as a means of promotion or celebration, but almost as an effort to understand how humans work; their differences and foibles picked apart and juxtaposed against images that depict realities, but also figurative interpretations of reality. The unreality of life exposed as a social construct.

In this context, it seems fitting that the film begins with automatons; robot mannequins "performing" in a shop window. In these first few shots we have a thread of objectification; the subject displayed and exhibited for an audience, who, like us, stare at these objects of curious interest through the glass.

Spectatorship is close to voyeurism. Like watching a film or series, either at the cinema, or at home on a television or mobile device, we remain passive and inert. We watch from a position of remove, trapped behind the glass. The automatons for Marker aren't merely lifeless objects programmed to perform, but something else. They provide a self-reflexive function, expressing in both a real-life and cinematic sense the Guy Debord-ian notion of the society of the spectacle. Their performance is an imitation of human behavior. Behavior that Marker will later contrast against actuality footage of real people working, but also, in a sense, performing.

Tokyo Days [Chris Marker, 1988]:

Film, like all art, is essentially a lie. Though it may succeed in revealing some personal or universal truth, it does so through manipulation and contrivance. Marker understands that if he shows interior shots of commuters travelling by train and then cuts to an exterior shot of a different train travelling along an elevated platform, the audience, versed as we are, consciously or not, with the "rules" of conventional montage, will make an association, connecting the interior to the exterior as if one and the same, even if the reality may be something else.

For Marker, his focus, his discreet observation, at least in the context of the title and presentation, seeks to find an element of truth or reality. But even this is being constructed, consciously or unconsciously by the filmmaker. Every edit, every choice of shot, every juxtaposition of sound and image, is a construct, and as such belies the reality. Marker plays with this notion in the juxtaposition between robots programmed to perform a retail function and the human beings conditioned into performing a role as part of their day-to-day lives. By simply contrasting images, manufacturing in the process a layer of commentary, or even criticism, Marker shows how life, work, experience, etc., have become a performative ritual; a simulacrum, more programmed than truly felt.

On the train, Marker pans his camera between images of two women. The first looks like a woman from the then present; her clothes and hair representative of 1980s fashions. The second woman seems to have been transported from the distant past. Her hair and clothing, from what we can see of it, belongs to a different age. Is this observation an actuality? Was this the reality as Marker saw it? Or is the contrast contrived? Are the women real people, caught by Marker's intrusive, objectifying lens as they go about their daily commute, or are they actors or models hired by the filmmaker to create this sense of time overlapping; of one generation seeing itself reflected through a window into the past?

Tokyo Days [Chris Marker, 1988]:

At a slim twenty-minutes in duration, Tokyo Days feels at times like a postscript to Marker's earlier monumental film essay, Sans Soleil (or Sunless, 1983). There, the filmmaker again captured everyday scenes of Japan, and found within the comparative unreality of its culture, in contrast to the staid traditions of western Europe, the foundation for a far greater meditation on consciousness and human memory. By comparison, Tokyo Days feels relatively slight; its montage of observational imagery recalling something of a vlog or travelogue. Less a documentary, as the critical categorizations of the film dictate, than a precursor to Instagram stories; where short clips and images are curated by the user to create a kind of narrative.

While not as deep or insightful as Sans Soleil, or other films by Marker – such as The Grin Without a Cat (1977) or the prescient Level Five (1997) – the experience of Tokyo Days does eventually build to something that seems quietly profound. In its final images, Marker turns his camera on a string quartet performing for an impromptu audience. As the musicians play, Marker cuts first to shots of passengers on a ship: migrating souls travelling like the filmmaker between dimensions of time and space. As the public performance, impassioned and beautiful in its sensitivity continues, Marker then cuts to nature footage recorded off a video monitor. Here, we see images of whales, lizards and of course the filmmaker's avatar, cats. This juxtaposition of forms works to underpin the expression of the film and its observation on modern existence.

The sequence here is as casual and spontaneous as any other sequence in the film; however, its placement at the end of things is deliberate. Once again, Marker is bringing the film back to the notion of performance: of society as spectacle. The musicians and their performance speak to one of our greatest achievements; the ability to express through art something fundamentally human; something that comments on and enriches the human experience. But even this is in direct competition with those earlier automatons, who performed for absent shoppers behind their wall of glass. As Marker travels around Tokyo gathering these images and scenes, he seems to be observing a society that exists simultaneously between the boundaries of past, present and future.

The Year in Film 2019 - Part Six

The Possessed [Luigi Bazzoni & Franco Rossellini, 1965]:

Watched: Aug 06, 2019

This ticked a lot of boxes for me. I love films and stories about characters arriving at a strange, ghostly location, and finding themselves enveloped in the mysteries and conspiracies that exist beneath the polite veneer of a society. Here, the location itself becomes a character; the coastal village and its atmosphere of off-season emptiness, the wintery desolation of places and the sense of somewhere that's fallen into ruin and disrepair. Every architectural space, every backdrop, adds to the haunted, forgotten quality of the film and its central mystery. Some critics have cited The Possessed as a giallo, or even a proto-giallo, featuring as it does a central character plunged into an investigative mystery surrounding a disappearance and death. I'm not convinced by the comparison, as The Possessed seems more interested in the aftermath of a crime, in the unspoken air of tragedy and shame that follows it, than in the crime itself. This is a distant, subtle film, that feels closer to Antonioni than it does to Argento, with the wintery landscapes and modernist shot compositions adding to the feelings of desolation and melancholy that permeate the narrative, and recalling with it the experience of a film like Il Grido (1957) or Red Desert (1964). Co-writer and director Luigi Bazzoni would go on to direct the actual giallo The Fifth Chord (1971) as well as the strange and mysterious Footprints on the Moon (1976). Those later films were photographed by his cousin, the now legendary Vittorio Storaro, in vivid, saturated colours and with a focus on dense urban environments. Conversely, The Possessed, photographed by Leonida Barboni in a high-contrast black and white, lacks the more ornate stylization of those later films, however, it's no less masterful and intuitive in its direction, design and cinematography, or in the development of its lingering mystery.

Cops Vs. Thugs [Kinji Fukasaku, 1975]:

Watched: Aug 06, 2019

Despite the implications of its title, the film sets out to blur the moral and ethical lines between its characters to such an extent that no clear delineation exists between the protagonists or antagonists. "Good guys" and "bad guys" are absent here; there's just survival, with both sides doing whatever it takes to persevere. Much more than a postscript to director Kinji Fukasaku and screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara's earlier series of films under the title "Battles Without Honor and Humanity", Cops Vs. Thugs is a brilliant and engaging work in its own right. Shot in the same loose, docudrama style as the analogous "Battles..." series, Cops Vs. Thugs has a gritty urgency to its scenes of action and drama that seems deferential to the influence of The French Connection (1971) by William Friedkin. Filming on mostly real locations with handheld cameras, presenting statistics and information on screen as if presenting genuine facts, and generally placing the film's fictional narrative within a wider framework of actual post-war Japanese history, Fukasaku and his collaborators elevate what could've been a fairly conventional or even generic Yakuza movie, into a bold, morally complex study on loyalty and corruption.

Symptoms [José Ramón Larraz, 1974]:

Watched: Aug 10, 2019

Like Vampyres (1974) and The Coming of Sin (1978), Symptoms is another film by José Larraz about the symbiotic, possibly psycho-sexual relationship between two women, where the motivating factors of jealousy and desire lead to bloodshed. There are obvious parallels to Roman Polanski's more widely known and influential psychological drama Repulsion (1966), with the same emphasis on a vulnerable young woman suffering an emotional crisis after she finds herself isolated against an overwhelming world, but Larraz, less ashamed of the lurid, exploitation elements of the sub-genre, does something more interesting with the material. While Polanski used the striking looks and naive presence of Catherine Deneuve to engender a sense of vulnerability – reinforcing the character as both beautiful and innocence and as such a natural victim to the predatory whims of the patriarchy – Larraz casts Angela Pleasence, a no less beautiful actor, but one with a more unusual or otherworldly look. While equally terrorized by forces both within and without her control, Pleasence doesn't play into preconceptions about female vulnerability; she isn't used as a prop or model, the way Deneuve is. Polanski set his film in swinging London, where "Jack the lad" predators stalk the concrete jungle, and every automated sound, from construction work, to passing traffic, to voices in overheard conversation, present a potential threat. By contrast, Larraz's sets his film in the lush and bucolic English countryside. The setting gives the film a pastoral fairy tale-like quality, subverting the expectations of the genre and re-emphasizing the dislocation between the character and the natural world. In this regard, a closer point of comparison might be Robert Altman's obscure but brilliant psychological drama Images (1971), a film that is in every way superior to Polanski's more influential forebear. While the film suffers from the usual languors and lapses in logical clarity that mar Larraz's best work, Symptoms nonetheless remains an interesting and thought-provoking film, defined and elevated both by its beautiful cinematography and by the incredible performance of Pleasence in the lead.

Frankenstein [Bernard Rose, 2015]:

Watched: Aug 18, 2019

The career of Bernard Rose is an eclectic one. From his beginnings as a director of music videos in the 1980s, he produced such bold and memorable clips as the Martin Scorsese influenced "Red Red Wine" by UB40, the impassioned and sensitive LGBT+ related "Small Town Boy" by Bronski Beat, and the infamous "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. His film career has been similarly varied and provocative, moving from films about classical composers – Ludwig van Beethoven in Immortal Beloved (1994), Niccolò Paganini in The Devil's Violin (2013) – to a film about the noted Welsh drug smuggler Howard Marks – Mr. Nice (2010). He's also written and directed several films based on the works of Leo Tolstoy – among them the big budget Anna Karenina (1997) and the micro-budgeted Ivans Xtc (2000). However, it's his work in the horror genre that Rose his best known for. In each decade of his career, Rose has produced one horror film that really stands out among the competition. From cult classics, like Paperhouse (1988) and Candyman (1992), to the hugely underrated political meta-horror Snuff-Movie (2005), Rose has worked to redefine the conventions of what horror cinema is capable of. Only the dreadful found-footage horror Sx_Tape (2013) strikes a wrong note. Bouncing back from that particular film, Rose has created perhaps his most thought-provoking and singular work with this updating of author Mary Shelley's 1818 novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus." Some attempts to place the story in modern setting strike a false note and strain credibility. Nonetheless, this is an oddly engaging adaptation of Shelley's text, which weaves the familiar themes of motherhood, abandonment and doctors playing God, but adds additional commentary on the plight of those marginalized from mainstream society. One sequence, occurring as a dream, is so haunting, and redolent of the poetic and elemental influence of the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, that it has remained etched in memory.

A Pistol for Ringo [Duccio Tessari, 1965]:

Watched: Sep 05, 2019

I must hold Alex Cox responsible for this one. It was through reading Cox's exhaustive "10,000 Ways to Die: A Director's Take on the Spaghetti Western" (2009) that my interest in the film was piqued. Cox's writing style is direct and conversational, knowledgeable without being condescending and intelligent without falling into pretense. Discussing the film in question he was able to skillfully establish the cultural and aesthetic value of the work, as well as its storytelling capabilities, making the experience of the film seem both accessible and exciting. Directed by Duccio Tessari, a screenwriter who previously contributed to the writing of Sergio Leone's middling but influential first western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), A Pistol for Ringo is devoid of many of the more iconic conventions that would become prevalent in the Italian westerns, post-1966. The "Leone-isms", as defined by later masterworks like For a Few Dollars More (1965) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) – which established the extreme close-ups on eyes and hands, the operatic soundtracks, the extreme widescreen compositions and the prolonged build-up to a brief stand-off – are absent here, with the film instead showing a more pronounced influence from later, post-studio American westerns like Warlock (1959) by Edward Dmytryk or Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Led by a charismatic turn by the actor Giuliano Gemma, A Pistol for Ringo isn't simply one of the best Italian westerns, it's one of the best westerns period! Beginning with a brutal bank robbery that establishes the various characters and their relationships through scenes of action presented as plot-development, the film eventually settles into a quietly dramatic siege picture that uses the confined nature of the setting and the dynamics between characters to generate some extraordinary intrigue and tension. As the robbers take hostages at a hacienda, the title character begins a game of deception, pitting both captors and captives against each other.

The Year in Film 2019 - Part Five

Delirium (aka Photos of Gioia) [Lamberto Bava, 1987]:

Watched: Jun 17, 2019

The film is tasteless, without question. An apparently shallow slasher movie full of the usual scenes of women in peril, knife-wielding assailants and over-the-top twists. However, it contains so many elements that I enjoy in movies that I couldn't help being held captive by the experience of it. The giallo sub-genre is one that I have a great affinity for. Even when the films are flawed or middling, I can usually find something in the subtext or execution that elevates the whole experience. In Delirium, the setting, the world of publishing and glamour photography, gives the film a context to explore ideas relating to voyeurism, objectification, desire, obsession and representation. Self-reflexive themes that have characterized the best giallo movies since Dario Argento's landmark debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), and its debts to both Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock and Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni. Delirium isn't as great as those earlier works, but it does at least attempt to provide a meta-commentary on the world of the film. Its emphasis on surfaces and appearance, its world of privilege and affluence and its luxury villas hidden behind the gated suburbs of Rome, make sense on a narrative and presentational level, but they also underpin what the genre is about; chiefly, style and excess. While not as cohesive or coherent as Bava's earlier film, the superior but controversial A Blade in the Dark (1983), nor as shamelessly pulpy as his no-less self-reflexive Demons (1985) and its sequel Demons 2 (1986), Delirium satisfied my expectations. The atmosphere throughout was redolent, the plot random but engaging, and the set-pieces genuinely thrilling.

The Blackout [Abel Ferrara, 1997]:

Watched: Jun 25, 2019

Like many of the films of Abel Ferrara, The Blackout is intentionally messy. Ferrara isn't a filmmaker looking for perfection. He doesn't want the edges to be neat, but frayed and disheveled, allowing the whole thing to unravel and leave the audience feeling confused and disoriented. His protagonists are frequently intoxicated, high on booze and pills, smoking cigarettes and marijuana, speeding on whizz, and the experience of the film becomes as dizzying for the audience as it is for the characters on screen. Scenes lurch and stumble into one another as if assembled at random, or as if significant events have been removed and reshuffled. Characters come and go in a haze, rambling, incoherent, revealing everything and nothing, becoming guides to a neon-lit underworld of drugs and illicit sex, or becoming victims, willing or otherwise. To the casual observer the experience can become alienating, as the audience is thrown into scenes without context, unable to relate to its characters, decadent, violent and unlikable as they often appear. However, there's a method to Ferrara's madness, as The Blackout is a film that's felt as much as it is viewed. Like the director's later film, the vaguely futurist and entirely prescient William Gibson cyberpunk adaptation New Rose Hotel (1999), The Blackout is a hermetic, claustrophobic film about a character effectively imprisoned by their own memories and attempting to piece together the wreckage of their own existence through an investigation into these memories. Ferrara again ties the psychology of the character into a dissertation on images; with Dennis Hopper's mad videographer becoming a kind of Mephisto figure, the devil's agent who calls in the debt owed by the central character's burnt-out Faust. That the protagonist is an actor is significant as the film becomes about the nature of cinema – acting and reacting, faking things that can't be felt – and where the nightclub central to the narrative becomes both a subconscious space and stand-in for hell; the Inferno, after Dante, as a video installation.

A Master Builder [Jonathan Demme, 2013]:

Watched: Jun 29, 2019

Having mastered the live concert film with the legendary Stop Making Sense (1985) and the spoken-word monologue with Swimming to Cambodia (1987), director Jonathan Demme turns his attention to another theatrical standard, the "filmed play." This is how many writers have categorized Demme's A Master Builder, though in truth the term is contentious and incorrect. While the film, a somewhat modernized adaptation, or interpretation, of Henrik Ibsen's 1892 play "The Master Builder", maintains the claustrophobic setting, the heightened or exaggerated performance style, and the feeling of unreality created by the engagement of intentional artificiality that defines the theatre-going experience, the film is not a recording of a live event, but a motion picture that has been shaped and directed for cinematic engagement. The composition of shots, the choice of lens, the use of close-ups and subtle effects work, the changes in lighting and the associations created by the cutting between scenes and images, are done with purpose and intent. That the film is defined by sequences of characters sitting or pacing around sparsely furnished rooms speaking in long, poetic but expositional dialogues doesn't make the film "uncinematic."  The notion that the first rule of cinema is "show don't tell" is horse shit, as in the cinema even the telling is shown. What is cinematic and brilliant about A Master Builder is the power of performance; actors expressing, reacting; telling a story with their voices and facial expressions writ large across the screen. Then merge with the power of the written word as translated into spoken dialog; invested with emotion and room enough for the things left unsaid. These virtues become the film's "special effects." The spectacle of human drama as presented here is more thrilling and innately cinematic than any gritty street drama or act of CGI exhibitionism currently seen at festivals or award shows.

Gerry [Gus Van Sant, 2002]:

Watched: Jul 03, 2019

Every so often, director Gus Van Sant makes a movie that convinces me he's the best American filmmaker of his generation. Gerry is one such film. Dispensing with the conventions of plot, backstory and characterisation, Gerry is a work that finds drama in a changing landscape; the physiognomy of the rocks, the desert sands and the vast oceans of sky, each interceding on behalf of actors that are made small and insignificant by the world around them. In conventional terms, its plot can be surmised in a single sentence: having driven to a remote part of the desert, two friends set-off to explore a wilderness trail by foot, get lost, and attempting to find their way back to civilization, go off the rails. But the experience of the film goes much deeper than this brief summation would suggest. Taking influence from Chantal Akerman's "slow-cinema" masterwork Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and the then-recent films of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, such as Sátántangó (1994), Gerry is a masterpiece of mood and meditation. While actors and co-writers Matt Damon and Casey Affleck do well with their minimal performances, their blank state and restrained emotions suggesting the quiet resolve of two people facing but refusing to accept the hopelessness of their situation, it's nonetheless a film where the prolonged movement of actors wandering aimless towards oblivion, becomes more thrilling than an action set-piece. The trance-like nature of the actors on-screen is in synch with the endlessly drifting camera, the spare soundtrack with its repetitive rhythm of footsteps on dry sand, of deep breaths and the whistling wind. It creates the impression of something almost ambient; a figurative black mirror that the audience experiences but is then free to project onto it their own thoughts, feelings and motivations.

The Belly of an Architect [Peter Greenaway, 1987]:

Watched: Aug 04, 2019

The general perception of the work of Peter Greenaway is of something rigorous and academic; something that's devoid of the warmth and emotion that audiences anticipate when they sit down to watch a film. For many audiences and critics, the cinema, as a medium, has become synonymous with escapism and "storytelling." For Greenaway, who once said the avant-garde visual installations of filmmaker Bill Viola were "worth ten Martin Scorsese's", and who ranks the mysterious Last Year at Marienbad (1961) as his favourite film, the cinema is something else. Structured around lists and numerical strategies, with visual guides and puns woven into the ornate mise-en-scène, the films reduce characters to intellectual or political representations, and position them around a kind of heavily manipulative and deconstructive theatre of cruelty that makes the viewing audience complicit in events. While this can be challenging and even alienating for viewers, I've always felt Greenaway's best films do contain an element of human engagement and identification. They may be ironic in presentation and allergic to notions of melodrama, but they still engage with recognizable themes of guilt, grief, pride and failure. This is certainly true of the film in question, which strikes me as Greenaway's most human film, as well as his most moving. Anchoring his usual decorative stylisation to a genuine character study, the film is less engaged in his usual Brechtian distancing and ironic detachment. Instead, it becomes a study in contrasts between cultures, the past and the present, but more significantly the contrast between the permanence of art and architecture against the fragility and finality of the human body.

The Madman of Bergerac

Brief thoughts on the book by Georges Simenon

This was my first dip into the world of Inspector Maigret, the fictional detective that appeared in 75 novels and 28 short stories by the Belgian author Georges Simenon. As a huge fan of French cinema, I was already somewhat familiar with the name of Simenon from the countless adaptations of his work from filmmakers as varied as Jean Renoir, Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Chabrol, Béla Tarr and Patrice Leconte, but it's only in the last couple of years that I became an active reader of his works.

I'd previously purchased another of Simenon's books - the non-Maigret related "The Snow Was Dirty" (1948) - but never got around to reading it. I stumbled across this book in a shop in St Ives and was immediately intrigued, both by its cover, and the title.

The Madman of Bergerac [Georges Simenon, 1932]:

New translations of all the Maigret books have been re-issued by Penguin Classics, each with an evocative and atmospheric cover image taken from the work of photographer Harry Gruyaert.

What I liked about "The Madman of Bergerac", beyond the sparse but descriptive writing and its intriguing procedural, was the way the author details Maigret's intuitive thought-process. Finding himself incapacitated from a gunshot wound and stranded in a small town that is completely unfamiliar to him, the book has Maigret piece together the narrative of a serial murderer – and the unlikely conspiracy surrounding them – through the accumulation of seemingly insignificant details; the whole investigation becoming a masterpiece of subjectivity and suggestion.

At one point the character even sends his wife out to play detective, while the reader remains in the company of the bedridden Inspector; an aspect of the plot that makes me think the book may have been an influence on the Alfred Hitchcock directed masterpiece Rear Window (1954).

I've read several other Maigret books since: "The Flemish House" (1932), "Maigret's Madwoman" (1970) and "Maigret and the Loner" (1971). "The Flemish House" in particular is a favourite, featuring the same sparse writing style as the book in question, but capturing the atmosphere and hostility of its location in a more oddly unreal, even nightmarish way. Simenon's descriptions of the port town, the titular house and its dark web of secrets is all black soil, endless rain and peeling yellow wallpaper, implanting imagery that is stifling and apocalyptic; its pitiless view of human cruelty and indifference reminding me of another of Simenon's books, the incendiary "The Krull House" (1939).

Max von Sydow

In Memoriam

For an actor who came to the attention of international audiences through a film in which his character leveraged their own life and survival by playing a chess tournament against the grim reaper, the loss of Max von Sydow feels especially momentous. Though he lived to the grand old age of ninety and had continued to act in films and television almost until the very end of his life, von Sydow's ubiquitous presence, and his commitment to working across all genres and media, had made him something of a genuine avatar for the cinema itself.

Appearing in The Seventh Seal (1957), von Sydow would play Antonius Block, a disillusioned knight returning from the Crusades to a Sweden ravaged by plague. Encountering the literal cloaked figure of Death, the knight challenges the specter to a chess tournament. If he wins, he'll gain his life and freedom. If he loses, then he'll accompany Death to the afterworld.

The Seventh Seal [Ingmar Bergman, 1957]:

A perennial masterwork of existential cinema, The Seventh Seal would mark the first of several screen collaborations between von Sydow and the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, though the two had previously worked together in the theatre. For Bergman, von Sydow would frequently play tortured, insular characters: brooding and out for revenge, like Töre, the wronged-father to a murdered daughter in the medieval-set The Virgin Spring (1960), haunted and on the brink of madness, like the artist Johan Borg in the potentially supernatural Hour of the Wolf (1968), or in retreat from the madness of the modern world, like the sensitive recluse Andreas Winkelman in the desolate A Passion (1969).

Bergman brought out the best in his actors and von Sydow was no exception. His performances for the filmmaker range from the theatrical and mesmeric, like in The Magician (1958), to the subtle and understated, like in Winter Light (1963), but are always in step with the tone and tenor of the film as a whole. While the image of von Sydow's character sat down against a backdrop of crashing waves, playing chess with the figure of Death –  brought to life in the film by the actor Bengt Ekerot – would go on to become one of the most iconic images in the history of twentieth-century cinema, it's his more subtle and humanistic performances in films like A Passion and the earlier Shame (1968) that really illustrate the amazing skill that von Sydow possessed under Bergman's direction.

Throughout the 1960s, von Sydow would continue to work with Bergman as well as other Swedish and international filmmakers, but it was his role as the elderly priest, Father Lankester Merrin, in William Friedkin's controversial blockbuster The Exorcist (1973) that would introduce the actor to an entirely new audience. Von Sydow was only in his 40s when he appeared in The Exorcist, but thanks to the amazing special make-up effects created by Dick Smith and the actor's own convincing performance, he appears at least thirty years older. Von Sydow's performance as the frail priest channeling spiritual light against the powers of darkness, is one of the major highlights of Friedkin's film.

The Exorcist [William Friedkin, 1973]:

Historically, demonic possession movies are often the absolute worst, descending into embarrassing hysterics and unintentional comedy as the inherent ridiculousness of the very concept jars against the attempts to take it seriously. Just look at comparatively recent films, such as The Last Exorcism (2010), The Rite (2011), The Devil Inside (2012), Deliver Us From Evil (2014), The Vatican Tapes (2015) and The Nun (2018), to witness the overwhelmingly low standard of the sub-genre. However, The Exorcist escapes this fate and works as a dramatic feature, in part, because the performances are so compelling.

Working alongside the actor and playwright Jason Miller and the child actor Linda Blair, von Sydow lends the film a genuine sense of authority. Rather than coming across as silly or embarrassing, the climactic exorcism sequence, with its grotesque imagery and lurid special effects, is forever grounded by the performances of these three actors, who find something in the claustrophobic domestic setting, redolent as it is in a kind of heightened emotional reality, that recalls the best of Bergman's films and their recurrent existential dilemmas relating to faith and suffering.

The success of The Exorcist would cement von Sydow's international reputation as one of the great screen actors, however, it also succeeded in turning him into a genuine cult movie icon. If von Sydow's work with Bergman was entirely synonymous with the "art house", with elitism and exclusivity, then The Exorcist would open the door to more populist genres, like science-fiction, horror and the fantastique.

Key roles for von Sydow in these movies would include the villainous Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon (1980), King Osric in the medieval fantasy Conan the Barbarian (1982), Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the unofficial James Bond sequel Never Say Never Again (1983), Doctor Kynes in the endlessly fascinating adaptation of Dune (1984), as well as unexpected but always welcome appearances in the Rick Moranis/Dave Thomas cult comedy Strange Brew (1983), the Stephen King adaptation Needful Things (1993), the big budget comic book movie Judge Dredd (1995) and the Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker action comedy sequel, Rush Hour 3 (2007).

Flash Gordon [Mike Hodges, 1980]:

For the rest of his career, von Sydow would alternate between prestige films and blockbusters by acclaimed filmmakers, such as Jan Troell, Bertrand Tavernier, John Huston, Woody Allen, Billie August, Penny Marshall, Wim Wenders, Krzysztof Zanussi, Liv Ullman, Vincent Ward, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Julian Schnabel, J.J. Abrams and Thomas Vinterberg, and bizarre oddities directed by genuine mavericks like Dario Argento, John Boorman, Robert Clouse, Arturo Ripstein, John Milius, Mike Hodges, David Lynch and Lars von Trier.

Unlike a lot of actors, there was never a sense that von Sydow looked down on a particular genre of filmmaking or that he was "slumming it" in his less prestige roles. Like Christopher Lee or Willem Dafoe, Isabelle Huppert or Tilda Swinton, he always seemed fully engaged in whatever he was making, bringing the same level of commitment to films by Bergman or Allen that he did to films by Ivan Reitman or Danny Cannon; always elevating and enriching the role and sometimes even the film itself. Having played his final move against that grim and unbeatable opponent, Death, von Sydow's presence in contemporary and future cinema will be greatly missed.

The Film Map

The History of Popular Film Set to the Art of Cartography

I have a few bits of writing that are almost finished. Hopefully, I'll be able to post them soon, it's just a case of finding a few quiet hours to really look at them and make some necessary final edits. Things have been hectic this past week and fears of Coronavirus have disrupted my regular routine, leaving me feeling anxious. I'm trying to remain rational, but it's one of those things where you can only hope it goes away quickly and we can all get back to normality, or whatever that might be.

To pass the time between posts, I thought I'd share some images from my "Film Map" (not to be confused with filmap, the great tumblr blog that compares location images from films with their real life counterparts ripped from Google maps). I received this map a couple of years ago as a present, but I only recently got around to displaying it on the wall. A shame really, as it was a perfect gift for a movie lover like me and has now taken pride of place in our living room.

It's interesting to think of the cinema as a physical space, like a city, country, or even the world itself. Would certain regions become tourist destinations – playgrounds for the rich elites and subject of countless articles and new stories – while others would become ghettoized, like places the guides and magazines tell you to avoid, but are nonetheless full of danger, intrigue and adventure? If my taste in cinema was a city, what would it look like I wonder? Would it be as eclectic and diverse in its layout as the one pictured here, or would it be more rigid or regimented? It's something to think about.

As a game, see how many of your favourite films you can spot, hidden away along the avenues and intersections, down the highways and byways, or across the streets and bridges. I couldn't photograph the whole thing, just enough to give you a sufficient overview.

Running Wild

Thoughts on the book by J.G. Ballard

"In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom."

The problem with being prescient is that sooner or later the rest of the world catches up with you, leaving your predictions, once innovative and shocking, entirely out-of-date. It could be argued that such a fate has befallen "Running Wild."

Written by J.G. Ballard as a response to the Hungerford massacre, "Running Wild" outlines, in forensic detail, the peculiarities of a strange killing spree. The entire adult population of a gated, upper-middle-class, suburban enclave along the Thames valley, is dead, their children abducted. Over the course of the book, a psychiatric advisor from Scotland Yard will piece together the various clues and oddities surrounding the case until the shocking truth becomes clear.

Running Wild [J.G. Ballard, 1988]:

When Ballard wrote the book in the late 1980s, the concept of the "spree killing" was something of a rarity in the UK. Crimes like the massacre at Hungerford weren't supposed to happen. Not in suburban England. Among other crimes, we had terror attacks and abductions, domestic violence and robberies gone wrong, but the appearance of something as senseless but seemingly well-orchestrated as the massacre in Hungerford was shocking in its lack of precedence.

The Hungerford massacre occurred on the 19th of August 1987. Michael Ryan, a 27-year-old unemployed handyman and gun enthusiast, shot dead 16 people, including a police officer and his own mother, before shooting himself. His final words to a police negotiator, "I wish I'd stayed in bed", grimly captured something of the banal existentialism of the whole ordeal, and the selfishness of the violence itself.

The Hungerford Massacre (BBC Documentary) [Teresa Hunt, 2005]:

Carrying a handgun and two semi-automatic rifles while dressed in full camouflage, Ryan must have cut a surreal figure as he stalked the streets of this quiet English suburb, opening fire on anyone he encountered. It's the incongruity of the image that's terrifying. Ryan as the displaced soldier of fortune; the relic to some forgotten conflict, wandering suburban streets as if patrolling an occupied territory, searching for a war that only exists in his own tortured mind.

Ballard in particular must have been fascinated by this image and the machinations of this kind of violence that was almost performative in its public exhibition, as the narrative of "Running Wild", sparse and to the point as it is, seems to exist specifically to facilitate a discussion on the senselessness of a crime like that of Hungerford, but also like many of the other senseless spree-killings that have followed in its wake.

It is here where Ballard's prescience has been diminished. Without engaging in spoilers, the mystery surrounding the massacre at Ballard's fictional Pangbourne Village eventually leads to a conclusion that its central character, Dr Richard Greville, and his colleagues on the periphery of the narrative, consider too shocking to entertain. Unfortunately, for those of us that have lived through the deplorable murders of James Bulger and Ana Kriégel, or the massacres at Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Virginia Tech and others, it appears sadly less shocking, instead merely predictive of a kind of violence that is now all too common within western society, and a breed of perpetrator that would have once been considered above suspicion.

Written as a series of journal entries in a largely cold, professional voice, "Running Wild" is never exploitative or salacious in its enquiry. It attempts, quite admirably, to understand through hypothetical conjecture, how a crime like Hungerford, which, from the outside in, appeared totally senseless and without intent, could happen in a setting as incompatible as the leafy narrow streets of suburban England, and in doing so, allows the reader to ruminate on subsequent but similar atrocities, such as the massacres carried out by Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane Scotland, Martin Bryant in Port Arthur Tasmania, Derrick Bird in Cumbria England or Omar Mateen in Orlando Florida.

If the book fails to offer any concrete reasons for why such crimes not only occur but have seemingly become a pandemic in the decades since its initial publication, then it's by no means a flaw. Instead, it's the inability of both the writer and his central character to fully explain or comprehend this expression of violence that makes it all the more unsettling.

Artwork by Stanley Donwood for the 4^th Estate re-issues of Ballard's work [Photographer unknown, 2015]:

What Ballard does arrive at, however, is a theme of social conformity and the notion of violence as an act of rebellion. There's a satirical aspect to this in which the author goes to great and often darkly comic lengths to centre the affluence and cultured leanings of the Pangbourne residents as a stark contrast to the violence brought against them.

Throughout his career, Ballard has concerned himself with the idea of social regression; of seemingly cultivated and civilized societies descending into levels of primal violence and corporeal degradation. In this context, the violence becomes a protest against societal order; an attempt to regain a sense of self by disrupting the organized structure and routine of suburban middle-class civility; a kind of ideological terrorism.

Ballard would return to the same theme in several of his later books, specifically "Cocaine Nights" (1996), "Super Cannes" (2000), "Millennium People" (2003) and "Kingdom Come" (2006) respectively. In each of these books, a random act of violence propels the narrative forwards.

As the world continued to change and crimes like the one depicted in "Running Wild" became sadly more widespread, Ballard continued to ask questions; placing such seemingly senseless bursts of performative violence within a context of political terrorism, the homogenous, depersonalized nature of twenty-first century existence, and the growing rise of the kind of specifically British fascism that ultimately led to Brexit.