Lumière and Company #2

Film by Film [Hypothesis Cont'd]

Lumière and Company [John Boorman, 1995]:

Soldiers on parade.  An image from the past - the actuality as documentary - as if some unknown cameraman had just happened to be on-hand to record footage of the Easter Rising of 1916.  Suddenly a man in contemporary clothing walks through the perimeter of the frame.  He carries film equipment; lights and cables.  The illusion of the past is suddenly shattered.  This is not the reality, but a re-enactment.  Not a moment of actual historical interest, but a gesture, to the past from the present.  Just as these modern-day actors and extras are playing the part of historical figures, Boorman, the contemporary filmmaker, is playing the part of the pioneer.  His film, in its very construction, is likewise a gesture to the past from the present.  Like the film by Vicente Aranda, Boorman's short is an observation of a working film-set; in this instance, Neil Jordan's production of Michael Collins (1996).  Again, one thinks of the spirit of revolution (or insurrection) as a shorthand for the artistic and cultural revolution of the cinema itself.

Like the films by Allouache, Angelopoulos, Costa-Gavras, etc, Boorman has his actors (or specifically Jordan's actors) break the fourth wall - acknowledging the presence of the camera (and with it the perspective of the audience) - because it is the device itself, the film camera as an artefact, or antique, that holds such fascination and makes it possible for the audience to enter these olds worlds, to traverse time and space, or to explore this terrain, both geographical and psychological in nature.

Lumière and Company [Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1995]:

There is a quote that states, "The image, alone capable of denying nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us."  Ulysses' gaze - the title of another film by Angelopoulos, depicted, literally, herein - is the gaze of our own restless curiosity; our fascination with this device that makes possible the manipulation of time and our own ability to document "the self"; the memory of our own recorded myths and legends, forever real, because we've seen it, on-screen.  The question is, does the film depict the "history" (our history, or that of Angelopoulos) acknowledging the perspective of cinema, or is history becoming cinema as the cinema becomes past?  I don't know!  But the stare of the actor is intense.  More intense than any actor in a film by Stanley Kubrick; the camera more focused, more intent, than in the films of Robert Bresson.  The combination of the two forces burn a hole through the screen; transforming and transfixing, terrifying and provoking, making this particular viewer shift, uncomfortably, as the gaze of the character becomes more like an accusation than a questioning glance.

Again, like in the previous segments by Boorman and Allouache (and several other segments to be discussed at a later date), the notion of the subject itself turning the attention away from its own natural spectacle to the action off-screen is, in some small way, an acknowledgment that it is the camera (or those of us on the other side of the lens) that remains the real point of interest.  While the name 'Ulysses' brings to mind Odysseus and Homer's epic tales, I was reminded more of the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and that image of Ulysses as an old man, having seen his greatest exploits now behind him, becoming weary with the modern world.  This Ulysses, like the figure on screen, is restless to once again look beyond the horizon, to explore, to uncover new mysteries and adventures.  Therefore the face of this man becomes the personification of the art itself; once an infant (as below), now stunned or destroyed by the hundred-years of horror, wonder and amazement that its gaze has been a witness to.

Lumière and Company [Juan José Bigas Luna, 1995]:

A simple, static observation.  A woman sits in a field, nursing her baby.  Immediately, it conjures the image of the Madonna and child.  This kind of earthy sexuality is often at the centre of Bigas Luna's work, but there is nothing leering or perverse about this display.  It's provocative - without question - but never erotic, nor sensationalist.  If we can infer anything from this film at all it is the natural act - the nurturing of the child by the mother against this backdrop of a freshly ploughed earth - and the idea that this subject - impressionist in nature - is worthy of historical documentation.  It's taking the medium, by now more accustomed to large-scale spectacle, action and adventure, and bringing it back to the most quiet and intimate of everyday scenes.  If we look at Bigas Luna's film on a more symbolic level, then there might even be a more significant meaning to what is being depicted.

Is the director acknowledging that the cinema of the Lumière's - as re-created here - was a moment of birth, now nurtured, a hundred years later - as if to suggest that the history of film is still in its infancy - or perhaps that the cinema itself has given birth to something new; the prospect of the digital cinema, soon to be fully realised with the liberations of Festen (1998) and The Idiots (also 1998).  This baby (now eighteen-years old at the time of writing), as once a representation of the new cinema of the burgeoning twenty-first century, is still growing; still unsure of what it wants to be.

Boorman on-hold

 

Exorcist II: The Heretic [John Boorman, 1977]: 

A few months ago, I promised a series of notes on the films of John Boorman, using quotes from the man himself.  My thoughts on Catch Us If You Can (1965) went up almost immediately and were supposed to be followed, a week or two later, by a similar post on Leo the Last (1970).  Although I do intend to complete this series eventually, I'm just not the mood to continue with it at the present time.  When I started the project back in June, I felt as if I'd hit a wall with my own writing, which I'd never been very happy with in the first place.  As an alternative, I decided to transcribe the Boorman reflections and to translate the French article on M. Night Shyamalan, just to keep the blog active.  Over the last two months, I've gotten back into the habit of writing for myself.  I've seen a lot of great films in the last few months, and I really want to commit my considerations on these films to the blog, while I still can.  I know this intensity will soon pass (as it always does) and I'll be left with nothing to say, so I'm really pushing myself to complete these shorter capsule reviews, irrespective of how potentially interesting (or uninteresting) they might appear to anyone visiting the site. 

The Boorman films that I'd planned to write about, the aforementioned Leo the Last, Zardoz (1974), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Excalibur (1981), are easily amongst my favourite films, and are really the key works of Boorman's career alongside Catch Us If You Can, Point Blank (1967), Hell in the Pacific (1968), Deliverance (1972), The Emerald Forest (1985), Hope and Glory (1987), The General (1998) and The Tiger's Tail (2006).  It's still my intent to write about these films in the near future, but for now, the time needed to go through the chapters of Boorman's book and to retype the passages as written just takes too much effort, and is a time that I could be using to continue with my own critical studies.  Unlike my aborted 'One-Hundred Favourite Films' series, which I started last year (2012), but abandoned when I realised how awful the writing had become, I still have every intention of returning to Boorman, if only to use the project as an excuse to explain why Exorcist II: The Heretic is not only a misunderstood film, but a rather brilliant one.

Catch Us If You Can

 

Quotes from John Boorman on the making of a film

 

Plus some additional notes of my own

 

 

"The first Beatles film had come out and was a big success.  Nat Cohen [Anglo-Amalgamated Films] leapt on the bandwagon and sold Warner Brothers on doing a film with the Dave Clark Five.  He got a price from Warners for the States that would more than cover the budget, and the rest of the world was his.  Would I be interested in making it?  David [Deutsch, producer] said that to have a feature under my belt would help me to get the Glastonbury film made.  The real lure was that I would have carte blanche.  As long as Dave and the band were in it, I could make whatever film I wanted.  Since the film was already in profit, in a sense, Nat didn't care what the picture was like as long as it cost less than Warners were paying for it.  But it had to be done right away, to be shot before the band's next American tour."  (p111)

 

"I was still unsure.  Could I devise a story that would fit?  I decided to enlist the help of a writer.  Charles Wood was busy writing the second Beatles film.  I went to another of our circle, Peter Nichols.  I proposed the Dave Clark idea to him.  He was gloomy about the prospect and reluctant to take it on.  Nevertheless, he agreed to meet Mr. Clark, and we went together to the large suburban house he had recently acquired in North London."  (p112-113)

 

"When we arrived, we had some fragments of a story, but in conversation I began to improvise and surprised myself at how interesting it got.  A trip across England, a roaming couple, encounters with, well, I wasn't sure yet, but the hypocrisies of the sixties ripped open, laid bare, the lies, the exploitation.  Nonsense of that sort.  Dave said, 'We want to be stuntmen.'  He claimed to have done this work before his musical career took off, though in the event, he was too clumsy and slow to do anything of that nature in the film.  I proposed that the band would not be seen playing their instruments, that their songs would be on the soundtrack only.  They would play characters."  (p113)

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

"We sat in a room for three weeks and we wrote the script.  The Dave Clarke Five were stuntmen making a commercial promoting meat.  At the time, there was an advertising campaign for milk featuring a sprightly girl, Zoe Newton - 'drink a pinta milka day' - and we invented a variation on that.  'Meat for Go' was our slogan."  (p113-114)

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

"The Meat Girl is manipulated by an Ad Executive (a Merlin surrogate) and she feels trapped.  Dave Clark is disgusted with the situation and he and the model run away together.  They are pursued across England by the advertising people and encounter a swathe of types from the burgeoning sixties, mostly drawn from my documentary experience.  Marian Knight and her friends played beatniks squatting in an abandoned village on the Salisbury Plain that turns out to be an army training ground.  (I had seen this place during my military service and stored it for future use.)  They meet an elegantly depraved middle-aged couple in Bath (the Glastonbury experience)."  (p114)

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

"They had in mind a haven, an island off the coast of Devon to which they flee.  The final disillusionment comes at low tide when it ceases to be an island.  Their dreams shattered, the girl goes back to the Ad Man and Dave drives off with the lads.  We drew a portrait of a shallow materialistic society, controlled and manipulated by advertising, where youth was a commodity.  It was a bleak picture, but expressed as comedy; Peter's pessimism was tempered by his comic gift." (p114)

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

"Three weeks to write it.  Three weeks of pre-production.  We called it Catch Us If You Can.  David Deutsch helped me put a crew together.  It was Tony Woollard's first picture as a designer.  David Tringham's first time as a first assistant director.  Manny Wynn was an Israeli who had worked with Tony Richardson.  It was his first outing as a Director of Photography.  He was fat and prickly.  He was scornful of my television background.  He argued about my choices of camera set-ups.  For long periods, he refused to cooperate.  'You work out what you want and when you're ready I'll give you the stop.'  He was sure I would have to beg him for help.  When I was ready, he would step in with the light meter."

 

"It was the best thing that could have happened to me.  The camera was my tool.  I had lived with it, day in, day out, for years.  I taught myself how to design feature scenes, to break down sequences into set-ups.  The choices of where to put the camera are infinite, but I always knew exactly where to place it and how it should move, and if I didn't, I learned it was a sign that something was wrong with the scene itself.  Solve the problem and the camera would find its proper place."  (p116)

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

"Inevitably, I was having problems getting a performance from Dave.  I cut his dialogue to a bare minimum.  I had to play him silent and taciturn.  Often this came off as sullen.  There was nothing light-hearted about him, nothing youthful, nothing graceful or rhythmical - and he, a drummer.  I used Barbara [Ferris, lead actress] to get us through the scenes.  This made him resentful.  He thought I was favouring her at his expense.  Barbara, in turn, was insecure about how she looked.  With the right make-up and lighting and the correct angle, she could achieve moments of beauty that real life denied her, but her voice was thin and would not carry emotion.  Her face and eyes were expressive of subtle feelings, but she lacked the effervescence, the exuberance that might have coaxed something from Dave.  So I had to play her as somehow in thrall to the Ad Executive, and therefore unable to respond to Mr. Clark's saturnine presence."  (p116-117)

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

"Just before the film opened, I gave a press interview in which I said Catch Us If You Can was not a great film.  The wrath of Wardour Street [centre of the British film industry, at that time] fell about my head.  Nat Cohen was in paroxysms of word-groping rage.  David Deutsch said, 'Don't you know that every film is great before it opens?  In fact, great is the very least you can say of it.'  But I knew it was not.  However brilliantly Peter and I had decorated the surfaces, it had a hollow centre."

 

"Four months from the day Peter and I sat down to start writing, the picture opened.  It was greeted with kindness by the critics.  Although it was sucked along in the wake of the Beatles movie, the young audience was perplexed by its pessimism.  It opened shortly after in the States under the title Having a Wild Weekend.  Pauline Kael praised it inordinately in The New Yorker, which gave it and me a degree of credibility in Hollywood.  I returned to the BBC and my family, remorseful and a little wiser." (p117-118)

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

All quotations taken from Adventures of a Suburban Boy, published by Faber and Faber, © John Boorman, 2003

 

---

 

For me, the key scene in Catch Us If You Can takes place quite early in the film, towards the beginning of its adventure.  Having broken free from the production - from the shackles of the commercial and its professional responsibilities - the two main characters hit the road.  After tearing a path through the busy London streets in a white E-type Jag that they stole from the location, the characters first engage in a variety of random activities (each intended to illustrate how supposedly youthful and rebellious they both are) before eventually finding themselves, uncharacteristically, at a botanical garden.  Here, Boorman's camera frames a lone apple on a delicate branch, turning the object, through the significance of the shot, into a symbol: the forbidden fruit?  The characters, in this sense, are surrogates for Adam and Eve, but their Eden is an artificial creation.  Nature as a manufactured space, existing in a glasshouse, hermetically, like in a bubble.

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

  

The characters themselves are also trapped within a manufactured environment of their own.  They live and exist - as even the most two-dimensional of characters do, to some extent - but without any real sense of freedom or spirit.  In leaving the 'commercial' (the production) mid-shoot, the characters are also in a sense escaping from the snare of fiction.  They're breaking the fourth wall of their own existence; leaving the unreality of the film - the location with the camera and its crew - and emerging into the reality of the world itself.  Here, the fake glamour and the play-acted exuberance of the advertising industry ("Meat for Go") jars against the grim actuality of sixties Britain.  The cold wintery landscapes, the despair and hostility; the scars of war and commerce, all captured in desolate black and white.

 

Although these characters embark upon this journey in an attempt to escape the confines of a (social) scene and situation that is both lifeless and restricted (more a prison sentence than an actual way of life), their ultimate dream of freedom is no less hollow or self-absorbed.  While the characters converse in a disconnected call and response that illustrates their inability to co-exist, the girl, Dinah, talks of a life of solitude, only punctuated by brief moments of grandeur and decadence.  She cites The Great Gatsby as a point of reference and talks of "parties that go on for days."  "On the mainland" she adds, "people would watch the lights [and] sometimes, they'd hear a snatch of music and laughter on the wind."  The dream - the great pursuit that drives these characters to the end of the earth - is no less empty and superficial than their own imprisoned existence under the control of the Ad Executive as they go about replacing one form of isolation - one "bubble" - for another.

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

 

The characters in the film aren't really interested in the reality of the world, as it exists, away from the façade and the false exteriors of the commercial industry, but to create an ideal; a place where their narcissism and distorted vision of the world as reflected through the influences of music, films and literature can be nurtured, without work or responsibility.  They cling to this dream, this end goal, while continually being reminded of the struggles and the suffering of the human condition (of real-life) as it unfolds as a rolling montage through the Jaguar's refracted windshield.  The smog of London, the dirt and decay, the swathes of burnt-out "drop-outs", hounded or rounded up by armed soldiers in what appears to be the start of a civil war, and the marked landscapes of nuclear winter, dead trees, drifts of snow, floods and ruined vehicles, ambush these characters with a vision of reality, exaggerated for the purposes of metaphor and creative critique, but no less intended to strip away the lie of the "swinging" sixties, where every character - from the decadent middle-class couple, with their 'film-buff' fancy dress, to the stuntman's former mentor, now living as a would-be John Wayne on a dilapidated mock cattle ranch - are presented as people hiding behind a pretence or fabrication (a "dress-up" culture where everyone plays a part).

 

It is through this Adam and Eve symbolism and the obvious representation of an artificial Eden (in contrast to the more devastated natural landscapes seen later in the film) that Boorman and Nichols are able to present the notion of advertising (and the influence of the pop-culture in general) as the new religion of the twentieth century.  As characters, Dinah and Dave both find themselves unsatisfied with the world that has been given to them, and through the rejection of this world, must suffer the indignities of a world outside of their own self-contained setting; a world where people actually have to fight and struggle to survive.  Their eventual surrender - their retreat into the controlled, heavily mechanised world of the entertainment industry - is in many ways a retreat into the world of illusion; a return to what Boorman calls the "shallow materialistic society, controlled and manipulated by advertising, where youth [is] a commodity."

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

 

The comments of the director may paint the film as a decorative failure, but Catch Us If You Can strikes me as a quintessential Boorman project, and remains, in my opinion, a good introduction to the filmmaker's oeuvre.  It establishes not only the anti-corporate/anti-establishment satire of later films, such as Leo the Last (1970), Zardoz (1974), Where the Heart Is (1990) and The Tiger's Tail (2006), but also offers the first of Boorman's visual contemplations of the landscape; where the setting, or the contrast between the noise and the squalor of the inner city and the calm and serenity of the countryside, becomes an almost mythical quest to rediscover the essence of existence.  The journey of the film - which takes its characters literally to the end of the earth - is also a journey into the past; into a part of the world untouched by civilisation - untainted by fashion - and existing almost out of time.  In this sense, the emphasis on the landscape (or the natural landscape) is consistent with the elemental/environmental concerns of films such as Deliverance (1972), Excalibur (1981), The Emerald Forest (1985) and Beyond Rangoon (1995), where the atmosphere of a place (the location) is imbued with a kind of energy, or a living spirit, as much a central character as the figures on-screen.

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:

What Boorman categorises as the film's major failings - the lack of exuberance or youthful vigour, the coldness of its central characters - are for me its greatest virtues.  The emptiness of these characters, where their rebellion is less an act of revolution than a brief moment of self-aware panic, gives a greater weight to the film's critique of the shallow decade; where the protagonists - despite having their every wish and whim catered for by a management of dedicated svengalis - are left wanting more.  The lack of vitality and the insecurity found in the performance of Barbara Ferris for instance, gives her character a feeling of sadness that is entirely overwhelming.  She may not charm or seduce her stoical companion as the screenplay entailed, but instead offers a portrait of a young woman more or less imprisoned by the nature of the "scene", the environment.  The sadness of this character is the sadness of all characters who, having been turned into icons - not just by the advertising industry, but by the presentation of the film - are robbed of their own identity, becoming simply "the girl", the symbol of this pop culture of glamour and hedonism that is at odds with her own feelings of loneliness and isolation.

 

Through the development of the film, the hopeful Dinah finds that the real world is even less forgiving than her own manufactured existence.  In her life under the guidance and control of the Ad Executive she is used and exploited, but she is also shielded from the poverty, the ruin, the violence and the discontentment of the modern world.  She realises through the course of her journey that those outside of the bubble are as desperate to get in and she was desperate to get out; that their own lives, in many ways, are an attempt to create a bubble of their own; that her life - which to Dinah is cold and cruel - is from the outside something to aspire to.  Faced with the ultimate disillusionment, she accepts the lie that's been sold to her, and embraces it.  This feeling of cynicism, of the characters seeing through the façade of a world created to protect, imprison and ultimately exploit them, is a theme that Boorman returns to in his later films, Zardoz and Leo the Last, but it is really the film's brutal and satirical depiction of the pop "industry" and the commoditisation of the youth culture that for me gives the film its lasting relevance.

Boorman on Boorman

A few months ago, I posted a recommendation of the film director John Boorman's excellent memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy (Faber and Faber, 2003), in which I considered the idea of one day offering a loose commentary on Boorman's work using quotes from the man himself.  This will be in lieu of an actual blog 'retrospective' - something I once deliberated - but nonetheless still intended to add to the critical discussion of Boorman's work, which at present seems non-existent.  The 'series' will begin in a few days with some quotes on the making of a film that Boorman himself has largely rejected, but which for me ranks as one of the greatest British films of the 1960s, Catch Us If You Can (1965). 

Earlier this year, I referred to the film as "a 'road movie', but a road movie punctuated by Boorman's typically surreal lyricism", before further defining it as "a formless narrative full of car chases and fancy dress sequences, underscored by an aching loneliness and an atmosphere of cold, wintery despair."  It was a film sold as a pop-musical, post-A Hard Day's Night (1964), but is really punctuated by "a feeling of intense sadness; where the spirit of youthful rebellion is already being sold as a pop commodity, and where the characters try to escape into a mythical landscape of rural, post-industrial decay."

 

John Boorman directing Barbara Ferris, Catch Us If You Can (1965): 

Boorman, for me, is one of the great British filmmakers.  A fascinating eccentric committed to maintaining that "lost grace in the film-making process, where the material things of the world – money, buildings, sets, plastic, metal, people – disappear into a camera and become nothing but light and shadow flickering on a wall."  While Boorman is primarily acclaimed for films like Point Blank (1967), Deliverance (1972) and to a lesser extent Hope and Glory (1987), the full breadth of his vision can be found in films like Catch Us If You Can, Leo the Last (1970), Zardoz (1974), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), Excalibur (1981), The Emerald Forest (1985), The General (1998) and The Tiger's Tail (2006); the majority of which are still awaiting their critical reappraisal.

Key Films #14

Excalibur [John Boorman, 1981]:

The forest - an exterior lit like an interior - becomes a character in its own right. By day, the trees and foliage shimmer in shades of emerald.  At dusk, an ochre-hued fog enshrouds the trees like slumbering giants, becoming the gatekeepers to another world.  At dawn, the violent flare of an artificial sun casts its crimson glow off the glistening armour of a pale and wounded knight.  The forest, like most of the locations used throughout the film, is a place of magic and miracle; an iridescent kingdom of shadows and light.  While the storytelling is somewhat straightforward in its reiteration of this fabled tale, Boorman's film is nonetheless successful in its grandeur and its decadence.  In its imagery - which is vivid and unforgettable in the pure spectacle of colour and movement - but also in its scale.  The Arthurian legend has been told countless times, both in film and other media, but no other filmmaker has successfully captured the magic and the wonder of these stories with the same vibrant and flamboyant approach that Boorman achieves here.  His Excalibur is, at its purest, an epic of theatrical design and Wagnerian excess. 

This spirited and poetic film captures the true power and majesty of the silent cinema, but with all the sound and fury of that post-70s indulgence. As an experience, the film strikes a continual chord whenever I see it, transporting me, to another time, another place; leaving me captivated by its plot and larger-than-life characterisations, or thrilled by its vision.  In terms of the filmmaking craft Excalibur is without a doubt a work of great passion and imagination, and a great testament to the unsung talent of John Boorman, a true visionary, and one of the cinema's most misjudged and maligned auteurs.

The Phantom Heart [Philippe Garrel, 1996]:

A scene we've seen before.  The two protagonists - a married couple - attempt reconciliation, but they know, as well as we, that the situation, for them, is hopeless.  The scene in question occurs quite early in the film and establishes something of a consistent tone; a feeling of desperation or distance; the sense of something reaching an untimely if no less inevitable end.  As ever, the dissolution of a relationship presents the end of something, but also a new beginning.  The chance to move on, to start afresh, to find similar expressions in the arms of another; to avoid the same failures and faults; to ask ourselves, without sarcasm or pity, 'where do we go from here?'  This is a question that Garrel has returned to in several of his films, from L'enfant secret (1979) and Liberté, la nuit (1983), to She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps (1985) and The Birth of Love (1993).  In all these films, his characters are trying to reconcile the experiences of the past with the responsibilities of the present; to make sense of where their lives are heading; to learn from their mistakes. 

In The Phantom Heart, the question is once again suggested by the story of these characters - the husband and his wife - and their relationships with the various figures that drift, phantom-like, not just through the remnants of their past experiences, emotions or shared ideas, but through the traces of a dream.  The dichotomy presented here, between the tangible reality of divorce, middle-age, doubt, fragility and responsibility, and the hopes and desires reflected in the tortured affairs, the creative success and the financial security that comes with it, propels the film; gives context to that lingering feeling of emptiness and futility that punctuates every interaction, no matter how positive or genial it might seem.  Like all Garrel's films, there is something almost impossibly hermetic about its structure, its tone and the use of locations.  A personal quality that borders on the autobiographical, in which these characters, their actions and dilemmas, and the personal spaces that define them, seem to be as relevant and significant to our understanding of the material as the emotions depicted on-screen.

 

 

Love is Colder Than Death [Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969]:

The title, Love is Colder than Death, plays beautifully to the violence of the film and also to the influence of film-noir as a facilitator for existential longing, brutality and despair.  As a piece of spoken text, it has the sound of something delivered by Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), or by Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950).  A five word expression that resonates with a sense of longing for unfulfilled romantic desire, full of allusions or suggestions to scenes, situations, characters and dilemmas that would occur and reoccur throughout Fassbinder's later career.  Specifically, through films such as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975) and In a Year with 13 Moons (1978); stories where the general brutality of relationships or the duplicitous nature of human beings when pushed into hopeless situations, make death, by comparison, seem like a relief. 

For the characters in Fassbinder's work, love is colder than death, and in this film the attitude is expressed through a fractured, languorous study of petty gangsters struggling to exist in a word rapidly closing in on them.  The sense of fatalism explicit in the title is therefore perfectly suited to the form of the film, which draws heavily on the second-hand references to American crime pictures of the 1940s and '50s, where the overwhelming cynicism of characters or the general loveless nature of the underworld environment breeds a particular kind of person.  One that lives each moment as if it were their last; where relationships burn hard and fast; and where the sense of place - as in 'a lonely place', or in 'a place to call home' - is forever out of reach.

Viewing Log / 2013 / Week Seven

11/02/2013 - 17/02/2013 

Apologies.  I didn't watch any films during this week.  I injured my back playing tennis.  Nothing serious, but I've had to rest and as such was unable to get downstairs to access the television.  Instead, I spent the time reading and occasionally writing.  My 'book of choice' was movie related.  Adventures of a Suburban Boy by John Boorman.  Even if you don't appreciate Boorman's work as a filmmaker, his autobiography is wonderfully written, wry, candid and ever self-deprecating.  The book offers a great insight into the trials and tribulations of Hollywood filmmaking, the compromises and the disappointments, but is also a great rumination on life; from the exploration of his turbulent childhood during The Blitz, to his years as a documentarian, to his love of nature and the endless Arthurian quests that become a kind of metaphor for the director's personal approach to cinema.  Throughout Adventures of a Suburban Boy, Boorman writes beautifully on the subject of film, the meaning of it, the alchemic nature of cinema and its images, and their ability to transcend time.  His writing demonstrates more passion and reverence for the medium than any contemporary critic. 

The book would have seriously enhanced my respect for Boorman had I not already considered him one of the finest English filmmakers.  My only wish is for films like Catch Us If You Can (1965), Leo the Last (1970), Excalibur (1981), The Emerald Forest (1985) and The Tiger's Tail (2006) to eventually achieve the same kind of recognition as Point Blank (1967), Hell in the Pacific (1968), Deliverance (1972), Hope and Glory (1987) and The General (1998).  It would also be nice if audiences could finally embrace the eccentric genius of Zardoz (1974) and The Heretic (1977).  Boorman is forever seen as a director of lean, "muscular" action movies, and the films that don't conform to this image are often deemed to be failures, but if anything he's a great poetic realist and a practitioner of pure artifice and phantasmagoria.  His films are like fables, full of magic and metaphor, alive with the spirit of nature.

 

 

Last year, one of my big plans was to complete a full blog-retrospective on Boorman's feature filmmaking career, but it didn't happen.  Partly because I couldn't find a proper widescreen copy of Hell in the Pacific and partly because I'm still missing several of his later films.  At some point, I might try to fashion a loose commentary on Boorman's work using quotes from the man himself.  His own elucidations on these films - always humble, always tinged with a sense of personal failure or perilous ambition - will surely be more interesting than any of the markedly more tedious observations that I myself may have mustered in celebration or defence.

Viewing Log / 2013 / Week Two

07/01/2013 - 13/01/2013

 

 

 

Catch Us If You Can [John Boorman, 1965]:  Dismissed by most who've seen it as an imitator of Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964), John Boorman's melancholic 'romp' with The Dave Clark Five is, for me, not just one of the director's finest films, but one of the most fascinating British films of the 1960s.  Although sold as a pop musical, Catch Us If You Can has no real musical numbers and nothing approaching an actual 'performance.'  In fact The DC5 aren't even portrayed as musicians at all, instead playing a fictional stunt team, employed by a shadowy (read: 'Orwellian') advertising conglomerate to appear in a large budget television commercial for meat.  During a break between set-ups, the eponymous Clark and his "It-girl" co-star Dinah decide to steal away in the production's E-Type Jag; heading down to Dorset in a vain attempt to escape the crushing realities of professional responsibility.  What follows could be described as a 'road movie', but a road movie punctuated by Boorman's typically surreal lyricism and the not always subtle satire of the script.  While Lester's film showcased the personality of his subject (The Beatles), Boorman's film makes no such concessions.  Instead, he spins a formless narrative full of car chases and fancy dress sequences, but underscored by an aching loneliness and an atmosphere of cold, wintery despair.  Throughout the film there's a feeling of intense sadness, where the spirit of youthful rebellion is already being sold as a pop commodity, and where the characters try to escape into a mythical landscape of rural, post-industrial decay.  The film, in its bold pop-art satire and its atmosphere of 'end of the world'-style devastation, ultimately owes more to the uncompromising cinema of Lindsay Anderson and Jerzy Skolimowski than it does to the more fashionable mod-styling of Lester and The Beatles. 

Man With a Movie Camera [Dziga Vertov, 1929]:  I finally got around to seeing the version with the Michael Nyman soundtrack.  A real joy, since I love Nyman's work, perhaps more so than any other contemporary composer (film or otherwise).  I suppose one could argue that his recognisable sound is too closely associated with the work of Greenaway to do justice to Vertov's kaleidoscopic montage, and I admit, some of the selections here are positively 'jaunty' in contrast to the black and white images of 1920s Odessa and the blur of urban life.  That said, there is something more or less delightfully mechanical about Nyman's rhythms (in a good way), which complement the natural rhythms of Vertov's film.  The nature of the cutting is, to me, inherently mechanized, almost industrial-like; where the images evoke the rattle and clatter of the busy streets, the percussion of trains on tracks, or the whir of engines or other film-related apparatus.  The movement of the images (or the subject matter depicted) suggest the sound of Nyman's music - those honking horns, chaotic strings and frantic piano chords - just as the music itself - slowing for contemplation or played at a faster pace to match the quickening speed of the film - invokes the chaos and congestion of the world as depicted by the cinematograph.  Seeing the film with Nyman's music was a great pleasure, but I've always enjoyed Vertov's work, regardless of its particular soundtrack.  It's attempt to redefine the language of cinema (the "kinography" as Vertov called it) without the influence of theatre and literature (which still dominates the medium) is endlessly fascinating, not just as an essential work of film theory, but as an actual historical document.  A window into this world - this point and place, now lost, forever in time - and into the process of a filmmaker looking to progress the art of cinema beyond the simple creation of an illustrated text.

 

 

In Dreams [Neil Jordan, 1999]:  One of these days, I'll write a serious defence of this film, which for me walks a fine line between genius and insanity, and only really "falls off" during its last-minute coda, which seems like a concession to the studio to make sense of the whole thing.  The ending of the film - or its added addendum - is to my mind a woeful miscalculation; a cheap twist that turns what was, for the most part, a thought-provoking psychological drama into a senseless supernatural one.  The change in tone ruins the effectiveness of Jordan's fairytale iconography, his references to Snow White, the mystery of the sunken village and the clever blurring of gender roles, as the line between protagonist Claire and antagonist Vivian becomes indistinguishable within this  suffocating netherworld of past and present, reality and dream.  Even with its flaws, In Dreams is a film that I still return to again and again; intoxicating, as much for what it could have been as for what it actually became.  I stare at it, like an autostereogram, trying to see the skeletal genius beneath the more overwrought moments of pure melodrama, because to me the film is as fascinating, in fragments, as it is haunting in its approach.  I don't want to say anything else about the film for now, but I do like it a lot, even with its various problems.  Jordan is one of the cinema's unsung image makers, and here, working in collaboration with cinematographer Darius Khondji and production designer Nigel Phelps, he turns in one of his most beautiful and maddening films. 

30 Days of Night [David Slade, 2007]:  The plot is fantastic.  A horde of murderous vampires descend on a small Alaskan town where the sun sets annually for thirty days, leaving the populace in total darkness.  There's a nice atmosphere to the earlier scenes as the sky begins to dim and the bulk of the townsfolk prepare to depart, leaving only our plucky protagonists to stay behind to weather the season.  The slow build-up is effective, calling to mind the low-key ambience of the best of John Carpenter - think Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) or The Fog (1980), though the snowy vistas are far more redolent of his masterpiece The Thing (1982) - but unfortunately the storytelling becomes progressively more haphazard as it lumbers towards its inevitable, explosion-filled finale.  Here, there was a real opportunity to create a serious, contemplative vampire movie that focused on the nightmare of a never-ending threat and the cabin-fever-like paranoia brought on by the solitude and go-nowhere seclusion of the wintery setting.  Even taken on its own terms, as a gory vampire-themed action movie, 30 Days of Night lacks the comic-book style charm of Blade (1998) and Blade II (2002), or the revisionist genre play of classics like Near Dark (1987) or Interview With the Vampire (1994).  This is largely because of the inconsistency of tone (the first half suggesting so much in terms of slow-burning terror, before its third act descent into action and pyrotechnics), but also because the characters are so underdeveloped that it becomes impossible to care anything about their survival.  I don't really want to be too negative here, because, the way I see it, every film is loved by someone (and loved for reasons that are right for them) and it would be disrespectful of me to denigrate the film simply because it didn't conform to my expectations.  So let's just be courteous about it and say this: 30 Days of Night was not the film for me.

 

 

Last Man Standing [Walter Hill, 1996]:  At the time of its initial release, Last Man Standing seems to have been attacked by the critics, not for what it is, but for what it isn't.  Roger Ebert's one-star review of the film seems especially outrageous and is possibly even the most ridiculous thing the critic has ever written.  Ebert literally tears the film to pieces for not being "fun" or "entertaining" (no one said it was supposed to be) and for having a dark and ominous atmosphere, bordering on the unpleasant.  I'm unsure of what reviewers like Ebert were looking for exactly, but the grim tone of the film seems entirely deliberate and is one of the aspects of Hill's work that really stands out (especially when viewed within the context of that ironic, self-referential approach, so popular in American genre cinema circa 1996).  There's an almost exaggerated unreality to the film, suggested by the sepia-tinted imagery, comic book style violence and the sombre mood, which I found, personally, very appealing.  To me, Hill's film should be looked at, not as a gangster film or even as a western pastiche, but as a horror movie, with the Bruce Willis character becoming a kind of supernatural avenger.  A force of nature, corrupting the corruptors.  The visual style of the film seems to reinforce this reading, with its obscured images of figures either disappearing into the dusty smog or framed through bevelled glass; suggesting this prevailing notion of characters barely existing in a world cut loose from society.  A kind of lawless, purgatory-like existence, or perhaps even an outward, 'microcosmic' expression, of the character's tormented state of mind. 

The Changeling [Peter Medak, 1980] :  A superlative supernatural mystery with a political subtext that suggests a still relevant commentary on the greed and duplicity of established government officials and the potential lies and misdeeds that our oldest and most valued institutions are built upon.  Like Pupi Avati's earlier masterwork The House With Laughing Windows (1976) or Antonio Bido's less successful Argento rip-off Watch Me When I Kill (1977), the real horror of The Changeling comes from the implied corruption that exists beneath the surface of a seemingly opulent or affluent veneer.  The disturbing supposition (or realisation) that the terrible sins committed for the sake of power and prestige were protected by the machinations of a crooked establishment that saw the opportunity to profit from tragedy and cold-blooded murder.  It is this subtext of The Changeling that gives the film it's emotional weight.  The manifestation of the ghost is terrifying, but it is the ultimate comprehension of this betrayal (or deceit) that is truly horrendous.  Here, the central character, haunted by ghosts of his own, sees through the eyes of the apparition the sad demise of an innocent, killed for monetary gain.  In its straightforward plotting and its lingering emphasis on slow-burning ambience and suspense, we can see the influence of the film on everything from Hideo Nakata's landmark horror masterpiece Ring (1998) to the haunted house mysteries of The Others (2001), The Orphanage (2007) and The Woman in Black (2012).  Like those particular films, the horror of The Changeling creeps up on its audience, suggested, not so much by an accumulation of jump scares or scenes of endless gore, but by the use of sound and shadow, or by a slow, suggestive movement of the camera, as it prowls through the corridors of the house.