Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

 Recent Activity

Do you like reading and/or cult British comedy shows and horror? If so, you might have the time to leaf through this incredibly long critical study I wrote on the spoof horror series Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004), which has been published by Horrified Magazine. Titled – with tongue partly in cheek! – "Hell Hath Fury: The 'horror illuminatum' of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace", the essay aims to explore the potential influences and ways in which genre and horror fiction are used and referenced as part of the show's conception and delivery. You can read it here.

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace [Richard Ayoade, 2004]:

Writing this has occupied quite a bit of my free time over the last couple of weeks, so I'm hoping now to get back into the habit of updating the blog as regularly as I'm able to. I've noticed that since blogger changed its interface recently, the font sizes for some of my older posts have been affected. The text on some posts is now incredibly small, as small as footnotes! I'm hoping to fix some of these issues shortly, mostly because they irritate my OCD. The text on "Darkplace" is a bit of a long ramble, so it's much appreciated if you do take the time to look at it. Stay safe.

After Darkness Light

Performance in the age of Covid-19

One of the best filmed performances of recent years, Taylor Swift, live from the 2020 Academy of Country Music Awards, shows us everything that's wrong with the way TV producers and directors have traditionally recorded live music. Forced by restrictions around the Covid-19 pandemic to rethink the usual conventions, the producers of this year's event have embraced minimalism as necessity, recording performers on stage for an audience of no one, holding the gaze of the performer in shots that last for more than a fraction of a second, and in the process creating something that allows musicianship, songcraft and personality to rise to the surface. The result pushes musical performance towards something approaching great theatre; studied, dramatic and visual.

Since I don't pay much attention to Award Shows and competitions around art, I can't say how consistently the approach and aesthetic was carried over the course of the entire evening. This clip caught my attention primarily because I'm quite fond of Swift and found her recent album, "Folklore" (2020), a brilliant collection of songs and stories. In watching the performance here, you can appreciate Swift as both songwriter and storyteller. It's not just her words and voice that take us on a journey into the lives of these characters, which she sketches across the song in question – "Betty", a narrative that continues across two further songs from the "Folklore" album – but her body language, vocal intonations and facial expressions as well. It's a complete performance.

Taylor Swift, live from the 55th Academy of Country Music Awards [2020]:

Appearing relaxed and clearly enjoying the opportunity to perform and to bring her song to an audience, even a "virtual" one, Swift is charismatic and charming. As she sings, she's able to capture both the voice of her teen-boy protagonist, as he moons and whines over a girl who (rightly) doesn't want to know, as well as projecting her own withering contempt and amusement for this poor narrator, his chauvinism and entitlement picked apart with a subtle glance or a cold shrug of the shoulders. It's always been apparent that Swift had talent, but with "Folklore" she really shows potential to be one of the great troubadours, a singer/songwriter able to move effortlessly between both narrative and confessional-based songs.

However, what's most remarkable about this is the way it's filmed. As a music fan, the main thing that has always bothered me about live coverage of musicians and performers is the frequent cut away shots to members of the audience. While an establishing shot of the audience to begin and end a performance is good for creating context, TV directors will often cut to a crowd shot simply to enforce a sense of excitement or atmosphere; in the process, denying us the sight of the musicians on stage. Similarly, how often have we seen performances where a director cuts to a wide shot of the band performing during a great solo, excellent bass run, or a rhythmic drum fill, instead of going in close? It's like the people charged with filming live performances have no idea how music works or is created. We don't need to be reminded of the audience every three seconds. For those not fortunate enough to be attending live, the drama is on the stage, not looking up at it.

The approach adopted by the producers of this year's Academy of Country Music Awards is reminiscent of director Jonathan Demme's approach to his landmark concert film with the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984). There, Demme made the decision to keep audience shots to a minimum, holding the camera on the performers and cutting between shots only when necessary to emphasize a musician, a new song, or a change in staging. This way, the director was able to preserve the integrity of the on-stage performance, which the audience is there to see.

Stop Making Sense [Jonathan Demme, 1984]:

While not as clever as Demme's staging of the Talking Heads concert, the way the performance of Swift has been recorded is nonetheless similar in its attitude and approach: keeping the camera fixed upon the artist and her unseen harmonica player; backlighting the whole thing to give the performance a distinct and entirely visual "look"; highlighting the performer – her words and music – against the blackness of the backdrop, and in doing so, creating a visual implication of the light emerging from the darkness: post tenebras lux. Along with the sight of the empty auditorium that begins the clip and the resounding silence that closes it (no audience means no applause), this aesthetic aspect, born from necessity, provides a powerful reminder of where we are as a culture as we approach the final act of the year 2020.

This is the first example I've seen of one of these new, post-Covid showbiz events, where audiences and excess have been banished in the name of social distancing. I know there have been other Award shows, premieres and festivals conducted in a similar way, however, not having a lot of time for such things, I can't say whether or not these recent examples have resulted in anything as fresh and exciting as this. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see how these institutions have been forced to adapt to the challenges of maintaining a thin veneer of normalcy, while at the same time protecting people against a global pandemic, and how this has resulted, at least in this example, in a new and better visual language for recording. As the first films and TV shows produced under conditions of Covid begin to appear over the next six to twelve months, it will be interesting to see what effect, if any, such restrictions and limitations will have on the kind of images and scenarios we see.

Taxi

"Midday. I've gone for croissants and married the baker in despair."

Notes on 'the Auteur'

When people discredit the "auteur" theory, it always seems to be based on an assumption that it implies a director is the only person responsible for the making of a film. This is obviously not true. As we're often told, film is a collaborative medium. And yet, even the most democratic of creative endeavors still has someone leading the project, acting as the funnel through which ideas are channeled, shaping the work from the ground up. Admittedly, having read very little critical theory, my conception of the auteur theory never seemed inherently specific to the role of the director. Yes, many directors are, or at the very least will be seen as "auteur" filmmakers, especially those that also write or conceive their own work. However, this isn't to say that the director is always the auteur.

For me, when we claim a film is the work of an "auteur", we're really saying, in the most plain and mundane terms, that it has an author. That despite the countless number of individual crew members, performers, producers, and financiers that may have contributed to the making of a film, that there was someone at the center of things, shepherding the project through to completion. This "auteur" could be the director, the writer, the producer and even the lead actor.

Think of the films of action stars like Tom Cruise, Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme, among others. They may work with directors that have a reputation for being "auteur" filmmakers, but there is nonetheless a consistency to the kind of subject matter these performers return to, an autonomy to how they're filmed and presented, a level of control over how the material is shaped and distributed, all of which go beyond the familiarities of their directors' prior or subsequent works. These actors are the authors of their respective films, their image and, to a large extent, their own legacies.

By contrast, in the modern Hollywood, the author of the work is often the studio and its army of executives. In the films of Disney®, including works by Pixar and Marvel Studios, the role of the writer, producer and director is to facilitate the creative wishes of the studio executives. They're not creating their own personal vision; they're creating a product that the studio has the power to approve or decline. In television, the series creator, or showrunner, is generally the "auteur." For instance, everyone recognizes a Ryan Murphey production when they see one – from Nip/Tuck (2003-2010) and American Horror Story (2011-present) to the more recent Netflix distributed Hollywood (2020), they have a consistent style, politics and casting – regardless of who writes or directs the individual episodes.

A good example of what I'm getting at here can be found in the film in question. Taxi (1998), a knockabout French action movie with aspirations to Hollywood, is directed (and directed well) by the veteran film and commercials director Gérard Pirès. Pirès's work on the film cannot be discredited. While Taxi isn't a great film, it is nonetheless well-acted, the story, thin as it is, remains frequently engaging, and the action sequences, particularly the way the numerous car chases have been filmed and edited, are never less than thrilling. But Pirès's isn't the author of the film, but rather fulfilling the vision of his writer and producer, Luc Besson.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

From the ground-up, Taxi is characteristic of Besson's own work as director, specifically his earlier films, such as Subway (1985) and La Femme Nikita (1990), and it sets the tone and template for many of the subsequent action movies the author would go on to write and produce, including The Transporter (2002), District 13 (2004) and Taken (2008), as well as those films' later sequels. In each of these works, Besson takes typically French characters, humor and settings, and juxtaposes them with very American themes, genres and storytelling devices, and the same is true for the film in question. Taxi is one-part "cinéma du look", one-part Hollywood buddy movie (à la 48 Hours [1982]), and one-part precursor to the "Fast & Furious" franchise.

Like Subway, the film begins with a burst of action. A vehicle speeding through the daytime streets, piloted by our central character. The camera, almost at ground-level, trails behind the vehicle, with loud music used to set the tone for action and excitement.

Subway [Luc Besson, 1985]:

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

In both films, the opening chase sequence is used to establish character and setting. Subway shows off the familiar Parisian settings recognisable from countless films before and since, while Taxi showcases the less familiar, though more exotic highways and byways of suburban Marseilles. However, these opening sequences, or title sequences even, also provide a more important function in expanding but also subverting the expectations of the viewing audience and our perception of the contemporary French cinema.

For a populist like Besson, the intention with films like Subway and Taxi, as well as later films like the aforementioned District 13, is to recreate the idea of the "French film™." To break apart the loftier or more highbrow expectations that audiences outside of France had come to associate with their national cinema, typified as it was internationally by the classic early exports of Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir and Henri-Georges Clouzot, or the subsequent films of the "New Wave" and works by serious "auteur" filmmakers, like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda.

International audiences tend to think of French cinema in these terms: small apartments, relationship dramas, black and white cinematography, poetic ruminations, loneliness, existentialism, and joyless sex. In reality, the French cinema has almost always produced mainstream comedies, low-brow farce, action films, cop movies and gory horror; films that generally made huge amounts of money at the domestic box-office but rarely travelled outside of French-speaking territories. Given an international platform through the success of his earlier work, Besson continued onwards in his attempts to create films that were accessible to the broadest of audiences, forging an image of a new French cinema that was young, dumb and full of fun; where fast cars and fast women (usually with guns) engaged in scenes of full-bodied action; and where there were enough moments of eccentricity and childlike whimsy intercut to give the impression that the films were perhaps more individualist than they really were.

In its best moments, Taxi recalls the legacy of the "cinéma du look": the brief and contentious film movement coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma issue n° 448, May 1989, which lumped together the works of directors Jean-Jacques Beineix, Leos Carax and Besson himself. The characteristics of the "cinéma du look" was an emphasis on youth and subcultures, on alienated characters in a state of rebellion against the modern world, and on the conflict between the lasting legacy of the films of the French new wave and the burgeoning influence of the new Hollywood movies produced during the 1970s and early 1980s. Films like Diva (1981), Subway and Mauvais sang (1986), while markedly different from one another in their attitudes and intentions, were seen to take recognizable Hollywood genres like mystery, film noir and science fiction, and dismantle them, populating them with bored but beautiful characters, self-reflexive allusions to popular culture and a glossy contemporary style.

We see that here in Taxi, specifically in its earlier sequences, which finds in its central character, pizza delivery driver turned taxi driver Daniel Morales, the kind of laid-back, directionless but streetwise dreamer that we might have found in films like Boy Meets Girl (1984) or Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, 1986). That he lives out of a converted garage full of car parts and vehicles in states of repair and works out of a weird brutalist pizza restaurant on the edges of the docks, also helps evoke the further influence of Beineix and Carax, specifically The Moon in the Gutter (1983) and the aforementioned Diva and Mauvais sang.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

Mauvais sang (Bad Blood) [Leos Carax, 1986]:

The Moon in the Gutter [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1983]:

However, the moment the titular taxi inexplicably transforms from anonymous cab to tricked-out hotrod, effectively signals the moment both the film, and Besson's career, shift from quirky "cinéma du look" to brainless DTV action. While the film remains well-made and entertaining, it seems to signal a definite change in direction for Besson, who would never really recapture the same adoration and respect that he'd commanded as a filmmaker during the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, with later works, both as director and producer, failing with both audiences and critics.

While Taxi attempts and largely succeeds in creating a French film with a Hollywood outlook and a greater emphasis on entertainment and spectacle, it's never quite found the same creative success or cultural legacy as Besson's own action cinema that preceded it, specifically La Femme Nikita and the problematic Léon (aka, The Professional, 1994). Taxi is full of moments of great action, stunts and thrilling chase sequences, but it's also marred by Besson's deficiencies as a screenwriter. Chiefly, the film is shamelessly sexist, with female characters providing no real function to the plot beyond reinforcing the heterosexual masculinity of the central characters, or worse, being mercilessly leered over and harassed by both the protagonists and the camera itself. There's also the usual crass stereotyping and actual racism that frequently turn up in Besson's scripts, as if jokes about all people from South East Asia looking alike will somehow engender sympathy between the central characters.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

Despite these various shortcomings, the film wasn't without interest. Again, it's perfectly entertaining, often amusing, with great car stunts and thrilling action sequences, and a great affinity for character, and the natural atmosphere of its south of France locations. It also features moments that point towards an even better film that might have been: specifically the earlier sequences, which are more preoccupied with the relationship between characters; the subculture of young people that converge on this strange and deeply cinematic pizza restaurant; and the feeling of vibrant, nocturnal worlds existing on the fringes of society. Ultimately however, the film is of most interest in marking and defining the evolution of Besson's career as it developed from respected cult filmmaker to entertainment entrepreneur, and how it illustrates the role of the "auteur", not as the director, but the person shaping the material from the ground-up.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Luc Besson: An Introduction? [26^th September 2019], Possible Worlds: A look at the science-fiction films of Luc Besson [20^th October 2019], The Film Director as Superstar: Or, The death of the author auteur [15^th August, 2020]

The Crystal World

  

Thoughts on the book by J.G. Ballard

"By day, fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jewelled crocodiles glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river. By night, the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown..."

-The Crystal World, J.G. Ballard, 1966

"In his second novel J.G. Ballard drowned the Earth, in his third he burned it, and in his fourth he turned it to crystal. Between 1962 and 1966 he ruined the world three times – though he later made it clear that these works were not to be understood as 'disaster stories', but as 'transformation stories.' 'The geophysical changes that take place [in them],' he said in 1975, 'are all positive and good.'"

- Introduction to the Fourth Estate publication of "The Crystal World", 

Robert Macfarlane, 2014

In many ways "The Crystal World" is a transitional work for Ballard. On one hand, it features enough surface similarities to his preceding novels, "The Wind from Nowhere" (1961), which he disowned, "The Drowned World" (1962) and "The Burning World" (1964), also published as "The Drought", to be taken as an evolution of a specific theme; chiefly, the destruction of the natural world, and the evolution that these ecological catastrophes bring about in characters forced to evolve or regress to either more elevated or primitive forms. However, it also features several elements that mark the direction that Ballard's writing would take in subsequent years, with the interest in physical deterioration, injury detail and the transformation of the human body through decay and destruction recalling the corporeal obsessions of "The Atrocity Exhibition" (1970) and "Crash" (1973) respectively.

Like many of Ballard's novels, "The Crystal World" finds a character arriving in a strange and exotic destination and finding themselves immediately embroiled in a mystery that connects the personal circumstances of the central character to the wider uncertainties plaguing the modern world. In this sense, it can be seen as an earlier, more outwardly science-fiction themed take on the same narrative machinations found in his later, more forensic novels, such as "Running Wild" (1988), "Cocaine Nights" (1996) and "Super Cannes" (2000). There, the mysteries connected to personal and political atrocities, the collapse of the modern consumer society with its order and conformity, and the performative aspect of violence and degradation as a new kind of designer entertainment, whereas the situation here is more markedly phantasmagorical and surreal.

The Crystal World [J.G. Ballard, 1966]:

The central concept of "The Crystal World" is genuinely ingenious and results in some of the writer's most startling and original imagery. As the description on the back cover puts it: Through a 'leaking' of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees metamorphose into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down river. Pythons with huge blind eyes rear in heraldic poses. Most flee the area in terror, afraid to face what they cannot understand. But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest: a doctor in pursuit of his ex-mistress, an enigmatic Jesuit wielding a crystal cross, and a tribe of lepers searching for Paradise.

Already the description evokes similarities to "The Drowned World" and the wider influences of writers like Joseph Conrad; where the journey down river and the leftover specters of Colonialism bring to mind a book like "Heart of Darkness" (1899) or Nostromo (1904). However, the jungle adventures of Ballard's story are ultimately less accessible, as the book returns again and again to ecstatic descriptions of vitrified forest canopies turned into celestial stained-glass cathedrals radiating rainbow light, where prolonged exposure to the environment causes wounds to crystalize into jewelled lesions, and where a diamond frost forms on the clothes and skin of those left to wander the crystal world. As such it often pulls in two different directions, on one hand attempting to tell a conventional science-fiction adventure story with a varied cast of characters, each with their own interpersonal motives and agendas, and on the other hand concerning itself with a poetic, often stream-of-consciousness exploration of the world and the circumstances that transformed it.

While the book has never been brought to the screen, "The Crystal World" contains such a visceral and singular approach to both its concept and delivery that an attempt to turn it into a film would no doubt result in something truly extraordinary, if only in terms of its visualization. Some have found parallels and similarities to the imagery and conception of the Alex Garland directed science-fiction horror film Annihilation (2018), which was based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer. VanderMeer's book has also been compared to the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Color Out of Space" (1927) and the 1972 book by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, "Roadside Picnic", as well as it's celebrated film adaptation, Stalker (1979). While I've yet to see Garland's film, there's no denying that it's imagery, even stripped of context, is incredibly redolent of situations and transmutations described in "The Crystal World."

Annihilation [Alex Garland, 2018]:

While I wouldn't hesitate to call "The Crystal World" a work of genius – its conception and imagery is without precedent, and the prose that Ballard develops to bring the world to life marks a quantum leap in the evolution of his writing – it isn't the most accessible or compelling of Ballard's stories, and can often collapse under the weight of its lengthy evocations. Too often the human drama at the frosted heart of the book feels vague and underdeveloped, and the characters thinly sketched and lacking personality. It's simultaneously a better written and more imaginative book than Ballard's earlier "The Drowned World", and a less engaging one.

While its storytelling and general approach can often seem as ice cold and glacial as the image of the petrified forest that Ballard works to explore, there does seem to be something more personal, even inherently human at the centre of "The Crystal World" that is perhaps easy to overlook. While it's pure conjecture on my part, I did wonder if it was significant that Ballard's wife Mary died of pneumonia in 1964, two-years before "The Crystal World" was first published. In creating a story about a man willing to return to a place that is slowly dying, or transforming into a place of cold, loveless beauty, to reclaim the woman he loved, is Ballard in a way retelling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and relating it specifically to the loss of his wife? In this sense, the jewelled forest becomes a kind of phantom underworld: a personification of a state of grief, where life no longer grows.

Following "The Crystal World" Ballard would publish several volumes of short science-fiction stories, among them "The Disaster Area" and "The Overloaded Man" (both 1967), however, he wouldn't produce another full-length novel for four years. When he returned, he did so with the aforementioned "The Atrocity Exhibition", a work that marked a significant change in the author's subject matter and approach. As such, "The Crystal World" is something of an ending, bringing to a close the author's early, more conventional science-fiction period, while at the same time heralding the beginning of Ballard's most creative and controversial peak.