I Have Moved

For various reasons, I have moved this blog from its Blogspot origin to a new home at Wordpress. Many thanks to all those who have read and commented on what I've written so far, and thanks especially to Tuesy for organising the switch and making my pages less messy. I hope you'll like the new look, and I apologise for any fiddly inconvenience caused by updating a link. You can find the new Spectacular Attractions at http://drnorth.wordpress.com/.

Age Has not Withered Them

Just as I did with Flicker Alley's Georges Melies boxset, I need to pay my respects to another magnificent collection, Edison: The Invention of the Movies, from Kino Video. It took a long time to arrive in our university library, but I finally got to crack it open today. It's going to take a long time to get through it. Including documents and commentaries and interviews with historians, there must be over 20 hours of things and stuff spread across these four discs. You can either watch the films in isolation, or have them embedded in a series of sharp and detailed commentaries by the likes of Charles Musser, Eileen Bowser, Michael Wallace, Paul Israel and others.

From say-what-you-see titles such as Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze and Mr. Edison at Work in his Chemical Laboratory, to spectacular fictions such as Jack and the Beanstalk and The Teddy Bears, this is essential viewing for anyone remotely interested in early cinema, and I look forward to forcing it on anyone who isn't remotely interested.

The images above are from the earliest serviving camera tests made by Edison and W.K.L. Dickson. It's called Monkey-Shines no.1. If a monkeyshine is a kind of naughty practical joke, I can't really see one in here. Instead, we get a ghostly figure flickering in and out of focus, threatening to sputter out at any moment, and struggling to break into imagistic life. It is completely beguiling to look at, amongst the most riveting ten seconds of film you could hope to see. It's as though this long-dead being is trying to force its presence out of another time and into ours, fighting against the ever-increasing temporal gulf. Of course, this effect is not part of the art, but a side-effect of the camera's in-progress design. The imperfections, scratches and age-damage of these artefacts are signs of their historical distance from the present time, but they can take on a kind of beauty all of their own, as in the way Carmencita's dance seems to be showered with fireflies.

I can't wait to plough through the rest of this set. It feels important, edifying and educational. There's not many times you can say that about a bunch of movies, especially one that includes boxing cats...

Boop-oop-a-doop

Sometimes I like to add supporting shorts to my viewing schedule, and this usually means digging into some cartoon DVD box sets. For a while I've had a Betty Boop collection on my shelf that I bought in the US last year and never got round to giving much attention, but the other night, I needed something to lighten things up after watching Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jesus, so I dipped into a bit of Boop. I'd noticed that Betty's merchandise has been enjoying a bit of a revival, but I'm not sure how many of her new fans have actually had chance or inclination to view her actual films. It turns out my boxset doesn't include much of the earliest stuff, when Betty was actually a dog, or her first appearance in human form in 1932's Any Rags. But there are examples of beautiful, innovative animation in each cartoon, in contrast to the slightly less progressive sexual politics: having said that, it's probably easy to poke disapproving fingers in the direction of Betty Boop: she is a scantily clad cabaret perfomer, barely aware of the effect she's having on the slavering males who interpret her openness as availability. She is almost always held in the centre of the frame to emphasise that she is an object of clear and transparent spectacle, but on the other hand she is granted a level of independence and romantic (i.e. "sexual") appetite. She is a character in her own right, rather than a Minnie Mouse or a Daisy Duck, who exists as only a slightly modified version of a much more significant male other. Either way, Tuesy and I had some fun trying to untangle the innuendos and implications of the cartoons - is avuncular sidekick Grampy really just devoted to Betty out of pure friendship, or is he expecting something in return when he tidies her entire home following a particularly rambunctious party in Housecleaning Blues? And whose is that baby?......

I don't know enough about Betty to blog about her at any length, but I thought I'd go through one of the shorts that stood out to me in a bit more detail rather than attempting a complete survey. So, these are initial thoughts that may be subject to modification at a later date (surely that's what blogging is for, though...).

Betty Boop's Rise to Fame (1934) begins with a reporter interviewing Betty's creator, Max Fleischer about his star actress, with Fleischer illustrating her talents with clips from three of her earlier outings. In live action inserts, we see Fleischer himself drawing Betty and bringing her into hip-swivelling life before our eyes.

It's unlikely that Fleischer himself animated Betty, or even that anyone could do that kind of work single-handed, but positing him as a lone artist with singular life-giving powers was a common trope of early cartoons, as Donald Crafton makes plain in his superb book Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928:

"Part of the animation game consisted of developing mythologies that gave the animator some sort of special status. Usually these were very flattering, for he was pictured as (or implied to be) a demigod, a purveyor of life itself."

You can see this in James Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906), where the frame incorporates Blackton's hand drawing a series of chalkboard caricatures, and Winsor McCay was a major presence in his own cartoons, either in live action sections showing the animation process, or in the priceless moment at the end of Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) where he enters the frame to hitch a ride on the back of his pet brontosaurus. Crafton puts it beautifully when he states that appreciation of early animation was dependent upon "vicarious participation in the ritual of incarnation." That is to say, audiences were included in the processes of construction and always invited to contemplate the artifice of animated characters, even if they were being presented with an exaggerated or mythologised version of those processes.

Fleischer exerts his control over Betty at every turn, but the diegesis suggests that, once drawn, she is independent of the artist. This is that neat compromise between a depiction of the animator as a powerful being, and the need for his creations to seem to have a life of their own. Fleischer sets out a series of backgrounds for Betty to dance in (each one recalling one of her earlier films), proscribing the spaces in which she can perform. When Betty dances the hula, a cutaway to the reporter's hand shows his pen gyrating like a curvy butt. Her sexuality spills out from the cel into the real world, an effect to which Fleischer himself, as Betty's good "Uncle Maxie" seems to be immune: he administers and sets the boundaries for the allure she will inflict on others, but keeps a professional distance. It is his spell that is being cast, and Betty is his intermediary.

The film concludes when Betty, harrassed by the Old Man of the Mountain and his somewhat tentacular beard, flees the frame and escapes by jumping back into the safety of Uncle Maxie's inkwell.

Again he offers a paternal protection from the dangerous sexual opportunities to which he had introduced her in the first place. Pimp. In other Betty cartoons, the relationship between creator and creation is not as explicitly obvious as in this portmanteau piece of her greatest hits, but its a tidily condensed statement of how things work.

Betty Boop article at Bright Lights Film Journal.
You can see some of her work at Vintage ToonCast.
Better-than-most history at Wikipedia.

Vengeance is Mine

I'm not always inclined to post about entire movies, especially as most of what I post here is initial responses on a first viewing, partly to try and get my own thinking in order, and hopefully to share some unvarnished points of interest that make a contribution, however tiny, to the knowledge sediment that is the blogosphere (there must be a better word for it - any ideas?). So, I thought I'd say something about just the closing shots of Shohei Imamura's Vengeance is Mine (1979). I don't think I'm giving too much away about the plot that isn't given away at the start of the film, but obviously I'm talking about the ending, so don't read on if you want to go and watch it: you can always read about the film from far more well-versed commentators with these links:

Jasper Sharp Essay
Movie Martyr
Midnight Eye
Roger Ebert review
DVD Beaver

When I'm introducing new students to the study of film form and giving them sequence analyses to carry out, I always warn them not to attach fixed meanings to particular formal techniques or types of shot, mainly because meaning is always a fluid thing inflected by context of the film and the particular proclivities, interests, intertexts and expertises brought to the film by each spectator, but also because there is simply no easy connection between a type of shot and the inference that is designed to be drawn from it in every case. Each close-up, each match cut or tracking shot must be taken on its own terms as part of a broader formal system. The last few shots of Vengeance are a good example of a series of freeze frames which are specifically significant to this film rather than the ritualistic enactments of a constant piece of filmic syntax. To be a bit less convoluted about it, the same shot will do different things in different films.

Vengeance is Mine is a largely factual account of a notorious Japanese serial killer, Iwao Enokizu (in real life the killer's name was Akira Nishiguchi, and you can learn a litte more, but not much, about his case here) filling in the details of how he spent the last 78 days of his crime spree on the run prior to his apprehension. Much of the story is told out of sequence, but the ending shows his wife and father, who have explored but ultimately resisted consummation of their mutual attraction throughout the film, scattering Iwao's bones from a mountain overlooking the city in which he'd lived. As each bone is thrown, it stops dead in the air, failing to fall to earth as expected.

The effect is achieved by means of simple freeze-frames, a basic technique which is peculiar to cinema, often as a way of adding emphasis to a particular shot, allowing it to be inspected more closely than other images and therefore to be privileged, making it an indicative image of a broader theme. The rest of the film has been constructed in a starkly realist fashion, cataloguing events in a soberly distanced and seemingly unemotional way. This is probably the only instance where an expressionistic formal flourish is allowed to come to the fore and issue a powerful statement. What makes it most striking is that the two characters in the scene seem to be able to see the bones stopping in the air, which is obviously not possible and contrasts with the diegetic logic of the rest of the film.

The POV shots, eyeline mathes and reverse shots, connect the shots of the flying bones to the faces of the people throwing them and watching them fly. They become increasingly frustrated at the failure of the bones to return to the ground and be reclaimed by the land. It appears that, even in death, Iwao's memory cannot be banished. The legacy of his killings and the shame and abuse that he heaped upon his family will always hang over them, whatever rituals of expurgation and excommunication are performed. This seems like an obvious point that would have been made anyway - his execution concludes his life but it is clear just from the looks on their faces that his family have been deeply affected by events. I think that the use of such an anomalous technique is a self-conscious point of stylisation that pushes the closing statement beyond the diegetic space of the film and out into the audience. That is to say, it shows that the effect of the murders will resonate beyond the lives of those directly involved and send shockwaves into wider society. By unsettling the structure of the film itself, the viewer can be jolted out of an externalised engagement with the story: the viewer is usually protected by being a voyeuristic onlooker, a watcher who cannot be watched, and the fictionalised characters of the film cannot witness the mechanics of the film that tells their story, but in this case Imamura connects the two zones by having them both see something impossible at the same level, with all protective boundaries ruptured.

The Curse of Chucky

My research on cinema and puppetry is taking me to some odd places. If, for instance, you've never seen a kung fu movie performed entirely with glove puppets, I suggest you give some attention to Legend of the Sacred Stone. At the moment, I'm sketching the first draft of a section on devil dolls and killer puppets (seemed like the easiest place to start!), which has meant delving into the kind of stuff that wouldn't normally land on my "to watch" list. The three hours of When Puppets and Dolls Attack, a compilation of clips from the work of Charles Band, has not been a highpoint of my cultural life. Band's work at Full Moon Features has, as far as I can tell initially, received no sustained critical attention at all - perhaps the films are not arch enough to push them into the respectable sectors of trash film, and not good enough to stand up on their own merits, but for my purposes, they include an extraordinarily fetishistic playing and replaying of the motif of the killer puppet. I'll put this in my "to do" pile to write about at greater length another time, save to say that there is an entire ants' nest of movies in which murderous dolls play out their slalk-and-slash roles with numbing repetitiveness and manic persistence, carrying on a strain of cultural work that has been in play for as long as there have been puppets to be spooked by. And if The Gingerdead Man is one of the limpest puns in movie history, at least its sequel has one of the neatest (see image to the right).

Anyway, The Passion of the Crust (oh, I'm still chuckling about that one...) is not what I wanted to write about. I've been wading through the Child's Play movies, a cycle of films that I had never seen before, despite being firmly within the range of their target age-group of clueless teens first time around. For those who've never had the pleasure, the five (so far - a remake and franchise reboot is rumoured to be in the early stages of production) Child's Play films follow the fortunes of Chucky, a doll possessed with the spirit of a dead serial killer who desperately wants to quit the plastic body and find a fleshy one in which to be reborn. His attempts to perform the necessary voodoo ritual are always thwarted; despite his skill at offing the human obstacles to his progress with a variety of household implements, he just can't seem to get his hands on Andy Barclay, the little boy who first receives the demon doll as a birthday gift.

Let me lay my cards on the table, although I don't usually like to reduce my judgements to a qualitative assessment: the first three Child's Play movies are rubbish. Derivative and predictable in their cycles of slashing, stabbing and jumping out of the shadows, tiresome in their dogged, unkillable persistence. Oh, and clunky in their execution, perfunctory in their plotting and scripting. The only point of research interest for me has been to notice the ways in which the films use puppets as figures of fear and recepticles of animist superstition. Chucky is able to get away with murder because he can always slip into "Barbie mode" (a witticism that is only cracked in the much sharper episode 4) and become inert, indistinguishable from an ordinary plastic plaything. Therefore, the films play on the doll's loaded potential to spring into life at any moment, a simple jack-in-the-box fear generator that is endlessly replayed. In many sequences, Chucky is invested with a sense of life not just by the magic of animatronics that allow his facial features to contort with malice, snapping him out of the smiley congeniality of his factory settings, but by mediating his image through shot selections that are usually reserved for human characters in dialogue. For instance, the back-and-forth of this over-the-shoulder, shot/reverse shot sequence from Child's Play 3 builds suspense over when Chucky will fulfil his side of the filmic bargain and enter the conversation with the barber who has yet to realise that the doll is alive and preparing to take a razor to his throat.

Cute. But the analogy of film with animistic power, the ability to endow inanimate objects with an impression of life, and the correlative use of puppetry as a shorthand for that power, is an interesting one to me at the moment, not least because it is so frequently invoked in horror films.

Everything changes with the final installments, Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky. Together, these two invigorate the franchise with greater visual invention, a sharper wit and an extreme level of self-reflexivity. Having attained full franchise-royalty status alongside cyclical slasher series such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Friday the 13th, the Chucky movies use their lofty position to look down on their previous efforts, and to try and shift the series to the heritage site of Universal horror. They thus join the ranks of the Scream, Nightmare and Gremlins films as franchises that become so self-referential that they end up chewing on their own tails. This interests me. Can a series of horror films not go for any length of time without getting self-conscious about its own naked repetititivity? Do they always need to turn inwards and act so "knowing"? Either way, the leap in quality from the stolid and ridiculous Child's Play 3 to Bride of Chucky is quite remarkable. Bride may not reach the giddy heights of reinvention and frenetic genre-thrashing of Gremlins 2, but it fixes a lot of the series' original problems by acknowledging the daftness of the diminutive doll's deadly prowess and telling the tale from Chucky's perspective instead of hiding him in shadows. Plus, the addition of Tiffany, his sweet but lethal partner undercuts Chucky's primacy and gives him someone his own size to bicker with. Tiffany, in human form (Jennifer Tilly) is the first to turn Chucky's dollhood against him by locking the little bastard in a cage and treating him like a naughty baby.

There's a long tradition of horror films offering alternative visions of family relations, whether its the inbred rustic nutcase clan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Satan's attempts at child-rearing in The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, or the abortive, cobbled-together union of The Bride of Frankenstein, which the fourth Chucky film repeatedly references (hey, you'll even find clips from Bride of Chucky on the Bride of Frankenstein DVD, just to claim Chucky's place in the heritage of the Universal monster cycles). With Bride and Seed of Chucky, the formation of a new family comes to the fore, with Tiffany reincarnated in doll form and later, their son (or is it daughter? They can't figure out which, leading to another movie reference - is he/she to be named Glen or Glenda?) struggling with his sexual identity and descent from a family of serial killers.

This increased focus on family drama (I'm stretching that definition a little perhaps) is matched by the filmic syntax of human drama, giving the puppets close-ups and reverse-shots to align the spectator more thoroughly with their story, instead of hiding them in the shadows as pop-up monsters. It kills the fear, but it heightens the pleasure.

It's not just the way the film insinuates itself into a nest of external reference points and self-mockery that allows Bride of Chucky to raise its game: the introduction of Ronny Yu (the man behind the delirious, insane and romantic Bride With White Hair films) as director, along with Crouching Tiger's Peter Pau on cinematography duties adds a bit more verve to the imagery, with faster cutting, canted angles and extremes of blue-hued lighting. This is in stark contrast to the flat and perfunctory style of the earlier films - there can't be many sequences less effective in horror film history than the protracted battle in a doll factory that drags out the end of Child's Play 2: the bright uniformity of the strip-lighting throws away the golden opportunities for the hiding places and grotesqueries of the setting, and the leaden set-ups do nothing to make the conflict more dynamic. Ronny Yu at least has some form as an action director, and even if he can't seem to do anything without hyperbolising the moment, at least it shows someone investing the franchise with some effort, care and attention by appearing to make aesthetic choices as opposed to just the most basically functional narrational ones.

Seed of Chucky is less successful, partly because it takes the self-referencing a little too far, but there is fun to be had. Jennifer Tilly plays herself as a self-absorbed, over-eating has-been ("I'm an Oscar nominee, for Christ's sake, now I'm fucking a puppet"), appearing in a film about the alleged Chucky murders, allowing for one of those mise-en-abime shots where the camera pulls back to reveal that the scene we were watching is actually taking place on a studio set, giving us a good view of the cables that work the animatronic puppets. There's a cameo from John Waters, a walking representative of the heritage of trash cinema (and apparently a big Chucky fan), the death of Britney Spears and a scene in which Chucky and Tiffany decapitate their own puppeteer. This latter piece of puppetic rebellion, with the proxy people rebelling against their status as objects on strings is, as I hope my project will eventually demonstrate, a recurrent motif throughout the history of puppetry. That kind of self-reflexivity, the ability to comment on the text from the position of one of its constitutive props, occupying that bordeline place as an animate/inanimate object, not quite in or out of the fictional world, is an embedded property of the puppet. Once Chucky acknowledges his status as a doll (not just a man temporarily trapped in a plastic body), he can come into his own and start performing his true function as the focus of the story and commentator on its construction. But more on that another day. I'm shocked enough that I just wrote a lengthy appreciation of a couple of films I expected nothing from, but maybe I was just pleasantly surprised that they weren't as god-awful as previous form had led me to expect. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.