Joe Baltake

In Memoriam

I only learned today that Joe Baltake passed away last year. A former film critic for the Philadelphia Daily News, among other publications, Joe was the author of one of my absolute favorite film blogs, The Passionate Moviegoer.

Focusing mostly on classical Hollywood cinema, the blog offered a valuable perspective on actors and moviemakers from that "golden era" of film, as well as other, more modern facets of film culture and film appreciation. Throughout his writing, Joe's knowledge and personable style of criticism was always self-evident, and his absence is another great loss for the once thriving blogosphere.

The Films of Jack Lemmon [Joe Baltake, 1977]:

Alan Parker

In Memoriam

Truth be told, I was never a great admirer of the late Sir Alan Parker. That he actively denied the existence of the British independent film industry and campaigned for it to be dismantled and siphoned off to the big American studios, bemoaned the rise of both the BFI and Channel 4 Films, and spent much of the 1980s sneering at far more interesting and creative filmmakers, like Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway and Sally Potter, forever puts a black mark against his name for me. In many ways his championing of commercial cinema, his toadying to a Hollywood that rejected him as soon as he proved unfashionable, and his disdain for personal films from marginalized communities, makes him an unwitting architect of the current cinema, in which the corporations won.

More personally, I also find a lot of his work to be quite boring, conservative, and politically shortsighted. As stuffy and outdated as analogous works by Sir Richard Attenborough, such as Gandhi (1982), Chaplin (1992) and In Love and War (1996).

Parker's breakthrough film, Midnight Express (1978), is famous for its violent racism, its historical inaccuracies, and its homophobia. His later films, Mississippi Burning (1988) and Come See the Paradise (1990), respectively attempt to grapple with the violence of the civil rights movement and the unlawful internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, but they do so as a means to provide purpose to their white savior protagonists. As a result, stories that should give a voice to African American and Japanese American experiences become a frame to examine stories of white guilt and the journey of white characters in recognizing their own racism as bad. His penultimate film, Angela's Ashes (1999), is a work of poverty porn that casts English and Scottish actors and attempts to reinforce the myth of the grey and dreary Ireland, with its drunks and destitution, at a time when Dublin was becoming one of the most vibrant and exciting cities in Europe, while the less said about The Road to Wellville (1994) and his final film, The Life of David Gale (2003), the better.

In the middle of his career however, Parker directed three films that I find hugely interesting and that still stand out as incredibly creative and engaging pieces of cinema. Produced almost back-to-back, Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982), Birdy (1984) and Angel Heart (1987), demonstrate the great range that Parker's career had, even at its most middling, moving as the three films do from a surreal musical fantasy, to a coming-of-age psychological drama, to a supernatural horror tinged with the influence of film-noir. All three films are steeped in atmosphere and the kind of slick, graphic imagery that was born out of the director's background in commercial advertising.

While Parker was an avowed disbeliever of the "auteur" theory, as demonstrated numerous times in his smug documentary film, A Turnip Head's Guide to The British Cinema (1986), the three films in question have enough visual and thematic similarities that they nonetheless prove the validity of the theory so despised by Parker and his contemporaries. Each film in this vague triptych focuses on a psychologically damaged young man who has been affected by war and its lingering influences. Through their grappling with a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, the men each retreat into a fantasy world of their own creation, where they invent and assume a new identity that works to alleviate their pain and disillusionment.

The Wall, an adaptation of the titular 1979 double-album by Pink Floyd, deals with a rock star lost in an abyss of alcohol, drugs, and creative burnout. Trapped in a hotel room between tours and becoming increasingly disconnected from the world around him, he's haunted by memories from the past: the death of his father during World War II, his overbearing mother, the break-up of his marriage and the image of himself less as rock star than a totalitarian dictator leading his fans into a culture war of violence and extremism. It's a dark, terrifying work, that uses the mental illness of the central character to create tortured, horrifying imagery, some created by Parker and his collaborators, others using animations designed and directed by Gerald Scarfe, the illustrator and designer of the original album cover.

Like the album, the film's depiction of women is tinged with the abusive misogyny of the central character, while his later slide towards dictatorship finds Parker and Scarfe playing with intentionally fascistic iconography that they connect back to the cruelties of the UK education system, as the character's self-hatred, on a subconscious level, is turned outward, against marginalized communities.

Pink Floyd – The Wall [Alan Parker, 1982]:

The Wall is a visual tour-de-force and finds Parker creating some of the most striking imagery ever seen in the British cinema. However, more than merely providing a feature-length music video accompaniment to the legendary rock album, the film also works as a self-contained narrative, exploring themes of addiction, mental illness, and the still-lingering damage of the Second World War on the post-war British psyche.

Themes of madness and war trauma continue on into Birdy, an adaptation of a book by William Wharton. Here, a young man, coded though never identified as autistic, takes his obsession with birds to a point where he assumes the identity of one. His interest in flight speaks to the need to escape or transcend his own limiting circumstances and later the devastating experiences of war, and it is in the film's evocation of the character's visions of imagined flight that Parker creates some truly arresting imagery. With a soundtrack by Peter Gabriel and the use of a pioneering, pre-drone "skycam", created by the inventor of the Steadicam, Garrett Brown, the film creates a thrilling expression of the character's potentially psychological flights of fancy.

Birdy [Alan Parker, 1984]:

Elevated by committed performances from Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage as the two friends trying to make sense of the world, both before and after the War in Vietnam, it's unfortunately another film where women barely get a look-in, used instead as props or sex-objects. Nonetheless, Birdy remains a fascinating and creative film that explores wider themes of friendship and survival.

Rounding off Parker's great run of films during the decade is Angel Heart, possibly the director's best film for me, and one that remains an absolute highlight of both the horror genre and the Southern Gothic. Anchored by an excellent performance from Mickey Rourke as the laconic Private Investigator Harry Angel, the bold imagery and narrative of twists and turns mark the film out as both an engaging piece of storytelling and a hypnotic mood piece. Hired to solve the mystery surrounding a music hall crooner from the 1940s who vanished without a trace, Rourke's character moves from the cold, blue-tinted streets of New York, to the ochre-hued and sweltering backwaters of New Orleans, with Parker and his collaborators going to some incredibly dark places in the presentation of violence and potential black magic.

Angel Heart [Alan Parker, 1987]:

Supported by spirited performances from Robert De Niro, Lisa Bonet and Charlotte Rampling, Angel Heart remains a great work, and is proof of the expert genre director Parker could've been had he not seem himself as a filmmaker with pretentions to social and historical commentary. Of the director's other works, I absolutely love The Commitments (1991), Parker's adaptation of the book by Roddy Doyle, which is a much better film about Ireland than Angela's Ashes, as well as remaining a genuinely authentic film about the experience of being in a struggling band. I've also heard good things about Parker's earlier 80s film, Shoot the Moon (1982), which is the only feature-length film of the director's that I haven't currently seen.

I'd happily recommend each of these three films, as well as the later The Commitments, to viewers looking to explore more of Parker's work. Even if his perspective on the British film industry and his rejection of lasting talents, such as the aforementioned Jarman and Greenaway, in favor of championing forgotten failures, like Hugh Hudson or Roland Joffé, both of whom crashed and burned in Hollywood alongside their mentor, the producer David Puttnam, make it difficult for me to reconcile his legacy with anything actually meaningful. Parker and his advertising cronies saw themselves as the great white hope of the British film industry, emboldened by the success of films like Parker's Midnight Express, Chariots of Fire (1981) and The Killing Fields (1984), but outside of the Scott brothers, Ridley and Tony respectively, the movement produced very little of actual artistic worth beyond the 1980s.

As an addendum to this, it's worth acknowledging that it might seem disrespectful or in bad "form" to write negatively about the work and legacy of an artist that has recently passed away, but I wonder why this is a thing? For context, why is it acceptable to say the cruelest things about a person's work and career when they're still alive and able to be hurt by such criticisms (for example, see the critical discussions on George Lucas, M. Night Shyamalan and the late Joel Schumacher, amongst others), but in death, when such words can no longer hurt them, we're expected to play nice? It makes no sense.

Further reading: On your marks, get set... sell out! [Alex Cox, The Independent, 6 July 2003], Alan Parker's New Suit [John Walsh, The Independent, 1 November 1997], The play’s the thing: Peter Greenaway’s Goltzius and the Pelican Company [Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman, 8 July 2014], The Guardian interviews Alan Parker at the BFI [The Guardian, 7 Jan 2000].

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.

Let the Devil Tempt Us

Jean-Claude Brisseau

In Memoriam

According to reports from the French mainstream media, filmmaker Jean-Claude Brisseau has passed away. A controversial figure in contemporary cinema, Brisseau had a style and sensibility that was singular, provocative and often charged with the supernatural. As an early disciple of Éric Rohmer, Brisseau shared his mentor's affinity for scenes of leisurely conversation, where set-pieces would often consist of two characters sitting down in a park or public space to discuss their relationships, the world and the mysteries of the universe. Unlike Rohmer's films however, such scenes were often punctuated by moments of brutal violence, a reverence to genre and explicit sexuality.

My introduction to Brisseau's cinema came in 2014 when I saw his penultimate feature, The Girl from Nowhere (2012). I can't remember what it was that brought the film to my attention but I do remember reading a plot synopsis and finding similarities to two of my favourite films from the same period: Lady in the Water (2006) by M. Night Shyamalan and Ondine (2009) by Neil Jordan. I've always had a personal interest in films about mysterious characters coming into contact with protagonists that have given up on life, and in doing so, bestow upon them a renewed sense of purpose. Added to this a particular fondness for films that deal with myths and miracles from a semi-plausible perspective and The Girl from Nowhere seemed a sure thing.

The Girl from Nowhere [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2012]:

With its phantoms and its haunted memories, its strange encounters and premonitions, its relaxed conversations and discussions on art, the cinema, loneliness and grief, to say nothing of its thread of self-reflexivity, in which the protagonist's attempt to commit his memories to the page creates a subtle mirroring between the content of the character's text and the fantastical story unfolding on-screen, The Girl from Nowhere remains a fascinating and distinctive work. With its micro-budget aesthetic, its use of the director's own apartment as the principle location and its homemade special-effects, it also provided a template for my own work and the kind of films I wanted to make but never did. To this day, an image  from The Girl from Nowhere sits at the top of this very blog and provides a kind of shorthand for the type of cinema I find most bewitching.

Brisseau made other films that I love just as much as The Girl From Nowhere. Sound and Fury (1988) - which takes its title from a quotation from Shakespeare's Macbeth and has a similar juxtaposition between power structures, violence as a means to an end and the supernatural - finds the filmmaker following a line of influence from The 400 Blows (1959) to L'Enfance Nue (1968) with another film about a childhood on the fringes unravelling into brutality. In this film, Brisseau makes his first great leap in the aesthetic union between social-realism and poetic-realism, setting a template for the concerns and images that would come to haunt his later, more controversial features, such as Céline (1992), The Black Angel (1994), Secret Things (2002), The Exterminating Angels (2006) and À L'Aventure (2008).

Each of these films could be described as mysterious, hypnotic, classical and provoking, and would be more than worthy of a full, essay-length analysis of their respective strengths and weaknesses, and how well they deepen and enrich the political, aesthetic and metaphysical dialogues that run throughout Brisseau's work. In lieu of this kind of tribute please accept this small gallery of images taken from my favourite of Brisseau's films.

A Brutal Game [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1983]:

Sound and Fury [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988]:

Céline [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1992]:

Workers for the Good Lord [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2000]:

The Exterminating Angels [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2006]:

À L'Aventure [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2008]:

The Girl from Nowhere [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2012]:

Let the Devil Tempt Us [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2018]:

Brisseau's final feature-length film, Let the Devil Tempt Us, was released last year (re-titled for English speaking audiences as the less compelling "Tempting Devils"). Understandably, sexual harassment allegations brought against Brisseau following the release of his scandalous but hugely successful late-feature, the aforementioned Secret Things, effectively ended his reputation as a respectable filmmaker of merit. Outside of France his work has drifted into obscurity. Very few (if any) English-speaking media outlets have mourned his passing, or used the occasion to open up avenues of discussion surrounding his work. While one must treat allegations of sexual misconduct with the upmost seriousness and concern, the attempts to suppress the films of Brisseau - or those by Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Šarūnas Bartas, etc, etc. - seem reactionary, if not totalitarian, and do a great disservice to the many actors, technicians and collaborators who contributed to these works, and especially to the films produced prior to such allegations being made.

When groups talk of inclusivity, they often refer to social justice issues regarding representation. More female voices, more transgender voices, more voices from a non-white, non-western background. Such ideals are laudable and worth fighting for. But true inclusivity is also acknowledging that great art can be produced by anyone. From the most virtuous saint to the lowliest sinner, each of us has a story to tell, and a way of looking at the world that is unique, distinctive and possessing of our own inherent truth. Art is a way of looking at the world through different perspectives. Whether the artist comes from a place of vice or virtue, we can still learn something from seeing the world from their particular point of view.

Agnès Varda

In Memoriam

I don't have the right words to pay tribute to Agnès Varda; that endlessly inspirational filmmaker who predicted the new wave of French cinema with her extraordinary debut feature, La Pointe Courte (1955). In that film, Varda took two professional actors - Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort - and placed their scripted melodrama against the backdrop of an actual fishing village; allowing the two strands of a story - one fiction, the other documentary - to contrast and collide. It was a film that advanced on the early concerns of the Italian neo-realists, allowing the actuality of the location and its inhabitants to become not just a counter-point to the conventional drama, but a genuine focus.

La Pointe Courte remains a quiet masterpiece; the debut of a film director who was coming to the cinema not out of devotion to the medium itself, but out of a deep and inquisitive interest in the world, and those that inhabit it.

The Gleaners and I [Agnès Varda, 2000]:

The making of La Pointe Courte [circa 1954-55, photographer not known]:

Unlike her contemporaries of the nouvelle vague, Varda wasn't looking at life through the cinema screen, the theatrical frame or the written word, but through the lens of her own camera. If Rohmer was wrapped up in books and Rivette lost to the stage, and if Godard and Truffaut thought life could only be understood when reflected on-screen, then Varda, more than any other filmmaker associated with that revolutionary period of French cinema, was preoccupied with people.

From La Pointe Courte she would go on to produce a similarly groundbreaking and enduring work in each subsequent decade of her career. Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977), Vagabond (1985), Jacquot de Nantes (1991), The Gleaners and I (2000) and more recently Faces Places (2017), each show the evolution of Varda's aesthetic, from black and white 35mm, to 16mm colour, to handheld consumer-quality video and finally digital. If the equipment was always changing, becoming less cumbersome, less distancing, more free and inclusive, then the technique, the focus and the sensitivity remained the same.

Throughout her career Varda would maintain a photographer's closeness and intimacy with her subject matter, telling personal stories, both from her own life and experiences, as well as the lives and experiences of those existing within the same vicinity. There were other interesting features made along the way, such as Le Bonheur (1965), Daguerreotypes (1976), Jane B. by Agnes V. (1988) and The Beaches of Agnès (2008), as well as short films, installations and photographic exhibitions. Varda's creative energy was inspiring, and her work remains thought-provoking, visually distinctive and essential.

Piotr Szulkin

In Memoriam

The Polish filmmaker Piotr Szulkin passed away last year. At the time no words were shared on the pages of this blog. When the news hit I was taking a break from criticism; busy trying to write a play, which turned into a novel, which turned into nothing. I hoped others might pick up the baton and share some condolences in the name of this singular and distinctive talent, but little, if anything, was said.

Szulkin was a filmmaker I first encountered in 2012. From a UK perspective his work is incredibly obscure. None of his films, as far as I'm aware, have been made commercially available with English subtitles. Of his six feature-length films I've seen only three; but I could recognise in each of them a unique approach to visual storytelling; an unconventional appropriation of populist genre tropes (specifically science-fiction) alongside more recognisable art-house conventions; as well as a strong political subtext, which gave the work a lasting relevance. On one level Szulkin's films were essentially post-modernist B-movies preoccupied with pulp fiction-level subject-matter, such as doppelgängers, Martian hordes, interplanetary prison-ships and post-apocalyptic survival. His imagery was steeped in the neon-futurism of his most prolific decade, the 1980s, defined as it was by the film Blade Runner (1982), and finding an obvious affinity with other works from the same period, such as The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (1981), Liquid Sky (1982), The Hunger (1983), The Last Battle (also 1983), Brazil (1985) and Diesel (also 1985); that aesthetic fetish for dramatic back-lighting, smoky interiors and saturated colour. However his films were also deeply esoteric, blackly funny and charged with an atmosphere of the grotesque.

Piotr Szulkin on the set of his final film, King Ubu (2003), photographed by Rafał Guz:

The first film of Szulkin's I ever saw was also his best; O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985). At the time I wanted to include the film on my list of the year's greatest discoveries, but I couldn't find the words to express how powerful, eccentric and thought-provoking the film was without straining for the usual superlatives. I still can't. O-Bi, O-Ba is a work as strange and enigmatic as its title suggests; a stark, claustrophobic, post-apocalyptic allegory that has shades of fellow Polish filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski's similarly blue-tinted science-fiction psychodrama On the Silver Globe (1989), but with a subterranean survival narrative that predicts later efforts, such as Twelve Monkeys (1995) and The Island (2005). In many ways Terry Gilliam in particular seems a close point of reference here, with both Twelve Monkeys and the aforementioned Brazil feeling like first-cousins to Szulkin's films, with the same emphasis on characters struggling against a dystopian/Orwellian system, and the same retro-futurist aesthetic of old cars, crumbling buildings, filing cabinets and video monitors. Gilliam's more recent film, the flawed but visually interesting The Zero Theorem (2013), is especially redolent of Szulkin, with the shaven-headed Christoph Waltz bringing to mind the look of actor Marek Walczewski as he appeared in both Golem (1980) and O-Bi, O-Ba.

Following my initial viewing of O-Bi, O-Ba, I saw Szulkin's first two theatrical features, the just-mentioned Golem and The War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981). The first film uses the myth of the golem as defined by Jewish legend as a metaphor for persecution, both personal and political. The central character, Pernat, stumbles through a "Kafkaesque" nightmare of mistaken identities, police interrogations and the constant threat of suspicion. In the process, he becomes a kind of on-screen personification of individualism; struggling to maintain a sense of personal identity against an environment of conformity, suppression and assimilation. The world of the film is one of ruin and decay, poverty and desperation, where the sickly sepia-tinted photography, hypnotic tone and sleepwalking performances set a visual precedent for Lars von Trier's first theatrical feature, The Element of Crime (1984), as well as Aleksandr Sokurov's similarly allegorical The Second Circle (1990).

In his next work, Szulkin created a film that felt like a precursor to the pulp sci-fi of John Carpenter's similarly political, similarly post-modernist action movie, They Live (1988). In The War of the Worlds: Next Century, a Martian invasion occurs against an Orwellian backdrop of government control, conformity and the loss of personal freedom. The film contains a strong subtext about surveillance culture and how the television can be used as a tool for propaganda, social distraction and manipulation, which plays beautifully to the final sequences, in which the manipulation of the image, and its ability to present a false perception of events, is powerfully revealed. It's a strange and often cynical film with a message that seems to suggest that rebellion is futile; our role in life - as far as the government is able to control and distort the narrative - has already been cast.

Golem [Piotr Szulkin, 1980]

The War of the Worlds: Next Century [Piotr Szulkin, 1981]:

O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization [Piotr Szulkin, 1985]:

Screenshots courtesy of FilmGrab [https://film-grab.com/category/piotr-szulkin/]

Unfortunately I'm less familiar with the subsequent films, Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986), Femina (1991) and his final credit, King Ubu (2003). Nonetheless, on the strength and originality of the three films listed here, I think it's a shame, if not a tragedy, that the work of Piotr Szulkin isn't better known or more widely available. At a time when most films appear to have been produced by committee, modelled on a pre-existing template and manufactured to satisfy the expectations of genre classification or the USP of a respective "brand", the singularly strange and defiantly eccentric expressions of films like Golem and O-Bi, O-Ba in particular - with their stylised imagery, bizarre characters and heightened atmospherics - feel all the more remarkable.

Attempting to research more about Szulkin for the purpose of this post, I came across the following quote attributed to him on IMDb. It made me respect the filmmaker all the more. The quote states: "You can divide directors into three essential categories: Those who whisper to their actors, those who talk to them, and those who scream at them. You can tell which method a director uses from the results he gets. Those who scream should not make films, period. I'm one of those who whisper." The legacy of the Szulkin's work is just that, a whisper, but a whisper that speaks with more truth, more poetry and more personality than the loudest scream.

Robby Müller

In Memoriam

In general, I tend not to make too many "R.I.P." posts. Other blogs that are more active than mine make such tributes a regular feature of their postings, but given that I'm not a very prolific writer here at Lights in the Dusk, I could imagine such posts becoming overwhelming given the general lack of other content. The sad fact is that too many great artists come and go and if I were to acknowledge each of them this blog would turn into an obituary.

However, Robby Müller, the great Dutch cinematographer famed for his collaborations with Wim Wenders, among other filmmakers, passed away this week, and it seems necessary to break from this tradition and share a few words (and images) about his extraordinary career.

To Live and Die in L.A. [William Friedkin, 1985]:

Müller was one of my absolute favourite cinematographers and was someone who seemed to gravitate towards projects and filmmakers that speak to me on a profoundly personal level.

It's difficult to choose a favourite film photographed by Müller. Throughout his career he brought a style, atmosphere and inventiveness that always seemed right for the specific project. In other words, he served the material. Whether he was working in 16mm black and white, as in Alice in the Cities (1974), 35mm colour, as in Barfly (1987), or pioneering the use of digital video, as in Dancer in the Dark (2000), My Brother Tom (2001) and 24 Hour Party People (2002), respectively, Müller was able to create lasting images that were bold, iconographic and always attuned to matters of light, space, character and location.

Whether collaborating with mainstream Hollywood directors, such as William Friedkin, John Schlesinger and Peter Bogdanovich, or more idiosyncratic, independent talents, such as Alex Cox, Jim Jarmusch and Raúl Ruiz, Müller always seemed to bring a level of craftsmanship that was even more remarkable given the limitations that he chose to embrace.

It's not an overstatement to suggest that Müller could have had the same career as Roger Deakins, Robert Richardson, or more recently Hoyte Van Hoytema; working exclusively on big budget Hollywood pictures for so-called "prestige" filmmakers. Instead, Müller chose to work with filmmakers that were unconventional, controversial and often at the start of their careers. In doing so, he nonetheless succeeded in creating a lifetime's worth of astounding images on small budgets, short schedules and against incredibly difficult filming conditions.

Robby Müller filming Kings of the Road [photo attributed to Wim Wenders]:

Just focusing on his early collaborations with Wenders already illustrates Müller's amazing versatility. Moving from the stylised and Hitchcokian The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) to the almost documentary like travelogue of Alice in the Cities, we can appreciate both his mastery of different mediums and his ability to switch between works of unforced naturalism and painterly stylisation.

The subsequent films that Wenders and Müller made together would only broaden their creative pallet, as the emphasis on landscape, or 'place', became a central concern in a film like Kings of the Road (1976) or the early scenes of Paris, Texas (1984), while the use of colour would become increasingly more daring and expressive, as in the Edward Hopper influenced Patricia Highsmith adaptation The American Friend (1977).

The lasting legacy of Müller is perhaps best surmised by Wenders himself, who in a tribute to his former collaborator, states: "Like no other, you were able to seize moods and to describe situations in your imagery that revealed more about the characters than long dialogues or dramaturgical structures ever could. You knew how to create a distinctive atmosphere for each and every film, in which the respective actors were, in the truest sense of the phrase, "in good hands." For a handful of filmmakers, among whom I was one, you were their most important companion, like Hans W., Jim, Lars, Steve. And you were a role model for a whole generation of young directors of photography."

Below are some images taken from my absolute favourite films photographed by Robby Müller, which I hope illustrate many of the qualities discussed here, as well as providing a chronological record of his stylistic progression, trademarks, characteristics and key works.

Alice in the Cities [Wim Wenders, 1974]:

Kings of the Road [Wim Wenders, 1976]:

The Left-Handed Woman [Peter Handke, 1978]:

The American Friend [Wim Wenders, 1977]:

They All Laughed [Peter Bogdanovich, 1981]:

Repo Man [Alex Cox, 1984]:

Paris, Texas [Wim Wenders, 1984]:

To Live and Die in L.A. [William Friedkin, 1985]:

Down by Law [Jim Jarmusch, 1986]:

Mystery Train [Jim Jarmusch, 1989]:

Korczak [Andrzej Wajda, 1990]:

Until the End of the World [Wim Wenders, 1991]:

Dead Man [Jim Jarmusch, 1995]:

Breaking the Waves [Lars von Trier, 1996]:

The Tango Lesson [Sally Potter, 1997]:

Dancer in the Dark [Lars von Trier, 2000]:

Ashes [Steve McQueen, 2014]: