Spectacular Attractions

I Have Moved

2008-09-16T10:50:00.004+01:00

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

2008-09-03T21:45:00.007+01:00

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

2008-09-02T11:11:00.001+01:00

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

2008-09-01T00:41:00.015+01:00

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

2008-08-28T18:01:00.008+01:00

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.

Avalon

2008-08-26T22:10:00.001+01:00

"Oshii Mamoru's Avalon is one of the most sophisticated and
visually achieved movies ever made about intersecting levels of reality."

Tony Rayns

[Plot synopsis: Ash is one of the greatest players of the game Avalon, a virtual battle simulation that has attracted many devotees and addicts all trying to reach its highest levels. Ash works solo, with memories of the days when she was part of a team whose leader was lost in the game. Hearing rumours that there is a more advanced level of the game that can be attained with potentially deadly consequences, Ash decides to become part of a new team.]

I've been dithering over whether or not to use Mamoru Oshii's Avalon on a film studies course, on a week devoted to cyberculture and virtual embodiment. After taking a good look at it, I'm still dithering. Avalon is a tricky one. Is it a beautiful, enigmatic and elusive masterpiece that I just didn't connect with, or is it a stodgy, pretentious mess with little substantive to say about the way we interact with virtual spaces and lives. If you don't recognise the name of its director, Mamoru Oshii, you've probably heard of the anime classics he lists on his c.v., most notably Ghost in the Shell (1995) and its extraordinary sequel, Innocence (2004), which must surely rank as one of the most sublimely beautiful bits of animation ever crafted: take any frame, blow it up and frame it. It looks perfect throughout. Animation encourages that kind of carefully composed precision in its imagery - if you have time and tools to make something look exactly how you want it, why not take control of every element and make sure it is composed exactly how you want it? Paint over it if it goes wrong. Avalon is Oshii's fourth live-action feature, but the first to get any kind of international recognition or release. Shot in Poland with an all-Polish cast (Oshii likes Polish cinema, apparently, but seems to have modelled his environments on a gloomy, post-war Eastern European template gleaned from movies rather than any kind of futuristic Warsaw), it contains many elements that are far from "live". Soaking almost everything (food seems to come out quite colourful) in sepia tones adds to the vintage look (though it could also be that the US DVD has altered the colour of the film) and shows Oshii exerting an animator's control over his images. CGI is used quite sparingly, and is closely integrated with the themes of the film. If the tendency with digital effects is towards excess, to show off with grand scale what can be done with a few pixels and mouse clicks, Avalon seems to go in the opposite direction. Its every move is economical. Rather than creating a virtual world that is radically different from the filmic real world, Oshii makes them visually similar. In the virtual world of the game, characters who are killed disintegrate into a shattered two-dimensional oblivion like stain-glass pictures, and in several shots (see below) Oshii fractures the illusion of the simulation by inserting these succinct perspectival tricks into the 3D world to immediately mark it out for what it is - a Plato's cave of flat data experienced as actual space.

In an interview with Tony Rayns in Sight and Sound, Oshii stated:

I wanted to create characters in the same way that I do in animation. I did a lot of digital work on Ash's face during the post-production, which went on longer than the actual shoot. I felt free to alter expressions to give me exactly what I wanted to see on screen.

This is all very well, but it does give the film a certain coldness, probably not in the service of its themes of alienation and emotional disconnect (although it certainly contributes to that), but in order to get everything neatly composed. Whatever, the tidy compositions of nearly every shot, and the aesthetic similarity between Avalon and the external world of its gamers cumulatively facilitate the interpretation, which is there if you want it, that none of this is real, that everything we see is just layer after layer of fabrication with no externally real reference points. Oshii himself is vague on the subject, so make of it what you will - what is probably most important is that you cannot know for certain what is real, imagined or simulated when you watch this film. While The Matrix trilogy gives you a pretty strong sense of the divide between the solid and simulacrous environments in which each scene takes place, Avalon makes that division increasingly fuzzy and suspect. This is mostly because no sequences are privileged with cinematic techniques that might traditionally be associated with filmic realism - in that sense, I suppose, we're back to an animation-style aesthetic again.

So, let's assume that you're familiar with ideas of virtual reality, and that old science fiction chestnut that said virtual reality turns out to be more seductive, sensual and downright exciting than the glum, organic place where your skin and bones are situated. Avalon retraces these generic tropes, but it doesn't seem like an insider's view of the addictive rush of playing at being a superhero in an alternative reality: I feel as certain that Oshii is not a gamer as I am that Woody Allen doesn't know any East End crooks. I never got a sense of why these characters were so obsessed with a game that offers actual deathly danger as opposed to the fantasy of danger, which is surely the point of video games: we play them to avoid the incursions of unpleasant realities into our lives, not because we want to risk our necks every minute of our spare time. And, of course, with her lithe physique and classy mid-1960s Anna Karina style, Ash just doesn't look like someone who spends most of her time jacked into a games console. This piqued my suspicion that Oshii doesn't care about the actual impact of technology in society. He hasn't researched patterns of behaviour amongst people who spend a lot of time on the internet, and he hasn't extrapolated his future world from the current state of things simulacrous. He treats the concept of virtual reality as a philosophical metaphor, a means to question our own solipsistic interactions with the world around us.

I should add that I watched this on a Region 1 DVD, brought to me by the good people at Miramax. Now, it's OK that they've produced their own English language version. It's not even a problem that they've added a Blade Runner style voice-over to some of the quiet scenes to make it a bit easier to follow what's going on. It's not a problem, because I'll be switching over to the original Polish language track and turning on the English subtitles. Thanks for including both versions, Miramax, but would it have been too much trouble to offer English subtitles that don't include the voice-over narration sequences?! That way, I won't have to have inaninities like "Is this what they call reality?" popping up on my screen every time there's a gap in the dialogue. It may not be entirely Miramax's fault also, but let's blame them anyway, that despite being made almost three years earlier, it didn't get a release until 2002, meaning that it seemed to trail like an imitative latecomer behind The Matrix, Dark City, Existensz in a chain of popular movies about manufactured realities usurping, er... real ones. This is unfortunate, because it's certainly an interesting film that haunts you in a way that films you can't quite figure out often do. It's a goal-orientated quest narrative in which a tightly-clad heroine seeks to reach a plateau of gaming achievement through skilful, choreographed violence, and in that sense it is quite conventional. It lingers in the mind because of the unnerving doubt that that goal might just be a fleeting, futile or vapourous one: you're never sure what is at stake, what can be won, and any victory could be an empty one. This is the masterstroke of the movie, because it calls into question the value of the virtual reality that it might otherwise privilege, but at the same time it undercuts (deliberately) the potential for thrilling spectacle that its generic identity may have promised. So, will my students find it a provocative talking point, or will they hate me for not letting them watch The Matrix instead?

Review at Midnight Eye.

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

2008-08-20T14:23:00.012+01:00

This was one of those films that I saw about fifteen years ago, and which had become one of those hazy memories where you wonder whether or not it really happened. My memory was not helped by the film's surreal, dreamlike quality, created primarily through the use of pixilation. This rarely used animation technique is nothing to do with computer animation (that's a different kind of "pixel"), but a way of moving live actors frame by frame as if they were stop-motion puppets. Norman McLaren used this effect in Neighbours (1952). One can only imagine the discomfort of actors required to hold their position between exposed frames while their bodies, faces and surrounding puppet models are incrementally moved with painstaking care.

The Adventures of Tom Thumb may be just a simple tale of a little guy who, separated from his parents, goes on an odyssey, escaping from a grotesque laboratory (featuring creatures that look rather like extras from Quay Brothers or Svankmajer movies) into a quasi-medieval miniature world that is in conflict with the giants who have birthed Tom. But it suggests that more is going on. The opening shots show the fertilisation machines that send Tom down a conveyor belt to be delivered to his mother in another dimension. Animation, dealing as it does with the incarnation of things as living beings, is the perfect medium for such a mechanistic image of conception. Tom is tiny, like an undeveloped foetus. They seem surprised to find him alive. His parents inhabit a grim and grimy post-industrial town that looks like the worst of British social realist depictions of Northern working class squalor (enough adjectives in that sentence?). The simple happiness which Tom gives to his new folks is disrupted when he is abducted and taken off to a vivisection facility, from which he is shown an escape route into a toxic waste dump peopled by medieval peasants his own size, who live in fear of the giants (who are portrayed, like Tom's parents, by live actors). Befriending Jack (the Giant Killer), Tom is reunited with his parents, before finding himself back in the "laboratorium", where, from what I can work out, he is able to be reborn, full-size, to the same parents in more illustrious circumstances. Did I get it right? If anyone has a different understanding of events , please let me know. Sometimes the intricacies of plot escape me when I'm entranced by the animation.

Pixilation is a strange thing. Ordinarily, when live and animated performers share the screen, they are recorded separately then composited using optical processes. They therefore occupy distinct spaces and express very different modes of being and moving. When the human actors are also moved frame-by-frame, the effect is unsettling, a jerky unnatural kind of movement. It brings puppets and people onto the same ontological plane. Watching it for a while, it put me into a kind of trance with the uncanny oscillation that occurs when familiar things are rendered strange by a trick of the eye. Model animation can make objects seem haunted. The presence of the animators' hands, edited out of the process to leave only the interstitial images that comprise the finished film, can be sensed but not detected. It is stranger still when applied to people. When objects are brought to life, there's a powerful display of the power of moving images to instill the inanimate with the illusion of being, but with people, the effect is deaden them, to make them seem somehow less alive. The animated object and the objectified actor meet somewhere in the middle, on equal ground.

See also: Frankie Kowalski, "Instinctive Decisions: Dave Borthwick, Radical Independent." Animation World Network.

Paranoid Park

2008-08-20T09:10:00.003+01:00

I'd heard mixed reviews of Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, so perhaps I was surprised to find it riveting, hypnotic and beautiful (there's a poster-quote for you). GVS seems to have found that delicate equilibrium between the formal experiments of Gerry (2002) and Last Days (2005) and the subject matter that obviously interests him (the moral dilemmas and looming life-choices facing alienated teens), but which became rather cloying in Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester. It deploys remarkably vivid techniques (particularly slow motion and a sparkling soundtrack of musicalised ambient noise) to convey its lead character's subjective experience and his perceptual disconnect from the people around him.

Van Sant's skillful marriage of form, tone and content is exemplified in the central incident at the core of the film (do not read on, not even the rest of this sentence after the parentheses, if you haven't seen the film and don't want to know any plot details!), the bissection by train of a security guard. In Blake Nelson's novel, the guard is knocked down and killed by the train during a scuffle, but Van Sant's decision to restage the death as a bravura sequence of baroque violence, during which the guard is cut in half, living long enough to crawl pleadingly towards his accidental killer, pushes the film into a new zone of oneiric excess. In a film that constructs a strong tinge of naturalism, this moment, briefly going all Dario Argento on us, could easily have overpowered the surrounding drama, but instead it effectively lodges in the memory as a bizarre and imposing memory that will haunt our central protagonist forever, regardless of whether he eventually takes responsibility for it. (See here for more on the distinctions between book and film.)

Van Sant has suggested that this event, sitting temporally and dramatically in the middle of the film, represents all of the divisions and separations contained in the film - divorced parents, the gulf between adults and youth (Alex's parents are seen almost entirely in long shots, and his mother's face is never shown), and the binary oppositions of confession/concealment, guilt/innocence, conformity/individuality. The death of the guard doesn't really need all of this symbolic freight: it is important enough that it stands as an extravagantly shocking fragment of time that stays as Alex's personal secret and permanently separates him from others.

It's a separation that Van Sant enforces with overwhelming bursts of ambient sound, extreme slow motion and compositions that isolate Alex or hide his face from view (even when we can see his face, it is often difficult to read - a blankness that emerges as troubled contemplation rather than listless unconcern), but also with his signature following shots, illustrated below with examples from Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005) and Paranoid Park :

The shot from Gerry is no doubt a tribute to Bela Tarr's Sátántangó, with tumbleweeds standing in for Tarr's flurries of litter. I thought perhaps that Van Sant was using this shot to suggest that he was observing, following and being led by his protagonists, rather than positioning them along pre-ordained lines of action. It's certainly unsettling to have faces hidden, backs to the camera and destinations unknown. But, particularly in Elephant and Last Days, the impression of ineluctible lines of fate drawing people towards a mortal destiny is difficult to shake. Elephant's tracking shots bring the film's scattered characters gradually into deadly coincidence, while in Last Days Blake's wanderings in the woods are more circular, repetitive and searching. It seems that Van Sant has found a range of different meanings for nearly identical shots, and by the time we get to Paranoid Park, it has become part of a more varied visual syntax that comprises a picture of Alex's conflicted state of mind.

There are problems with Paranoid Park. It is dismissive of Alex's girlfriend, portraying her as needy, self-absorbed and desperate for social acceptance. By portraying her as a needling representative of the forces of conformity, Van Sant misses out on a chance for compassionate consideration of the forces that alienate, control and define her. It's reminiscent of the crude, embarrassing moment in Elephant where a group of chattering schoolgirls casually puke up their lunches in a synchronised display of eating disorders that makes them easy targets for laughter rather than dismay. But I'd hate to see Paranoid Park considered the runt of the litter in Van Sant's great run of fascinating, exploratory movies.

Miscellaneous Catch-up

2008-08-18T20:20:00.011+01:00

At first I thought I had a cold, but it turned out to be a nastier bug than that, so my blogging slowed down a little, as did my work routine. You don't want to hear the gory details.

Some random things to tide things over until I can devote more time. I want to blog a bit about Wall*E and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, both of which, especially the latter, I liked a lot. But I'll save that for another day. Just three initial thoughts on Wall*E:

a) The first section, with Wall-E pottering about alone on Earth, is so engrossing that it's a shame when the humans appear and the chasing around starts.
b) People who think this movie is bleak really need to raise their bleakness threshold.

c) I don't appreciate a lecture on consumerism handed to me by the Disney Corporation. But I suppose I'll just have to suck it down this once.

Has anyone read Werner Herzog's blog? I added it to my list of links in the right hand column of this page. It's graced with the terrible pun "Werner Herzblog", and I can't work out whether or not it's for real. It reads like a parody of Herzog's distinctive, deathly-serious-but-suspiciously-wry speech patterns, and features some wonderfully terse entries. Here are some favourites:

December 20th, 2007
Question:
What do the mice do when the snow storm hits?
Answer:
They spit at almighty God and persevere.

August 15th, 2007
I was offered a drink called a Snapple Iced Tea yesterday. There was a sketch of the sun on the label. A note next to this sketch informed me that this picture was not to scale. Another reminder of how completely ignorant and gullible advertisers take us for. I refused this drink, even though I was severely dehydrated at the time. I have also noticed that certain toilet tissues use images of babies on their packaging. This is highly misleading, as babies are the only people who do not use toilet paper.
Thinking about this further, it could be said that certain invalids are also exempt from using toilet paper. I have no doubts that the severely disabled will soon appear on television extolling the virtues of various toilet papers.

I suspect it's not real. I wish it was, but I don't care if it's not. It made me laugh.

I'll also put a shout out for Tativille, one of the most beautifully designed websites that's ever been dedicated to a French comic film-maker. The interface is designed after the set of Playtime, which I'm very excited about inflicting on my students this year ("isn't it just Mr.Bean with subtitles?!"). It's also slightly cold and irritating, perfectly in keeping with the central thesis of the film...

Day of Wrath

2008-08-13T23:49:00.006+01:00

[This post contains spoilers about the ending of Carl Dreyer's film, so don't read if you plan to watch it - although you might say that the outcome seems inevitable, even fated, from the start... ]

I can't be the only one who was a little perturbed by Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath. Set in 1623, it deals with the repercussive effects of accusations of witchcraft in a small village. Characterised by Dreyer's noted austerity in the mise-en-scene, dialogue and tone, it hinges upon the desire between a young wife Anne and her stepson Martin. We learn that Anne 's mother had been accused of witchcraft, but was spared execution in return for her marriage to the Absalon, the minister in charge of the investigations. The first section of the film covers the arrest, trial and execution a woman charged with witchcraft, a harrowing sequence that establishes the punishments awaiting: the weight of these scenes looms over the duration of the film, representing the threat of discovery for any transgression within the community. Haunted by the execution, which coincides with the start of her affair with her stepson, Anne comes to wonder if she has inherited the power to summon the living and the dead from her mother.

My first reaction was as follows. The film leaves things ambiguous. That is, at the end of the film, a viewer might see it as a picture of stubborn men eradicating troublesome women in line with a fiercely guarded and hypocritical religious mandate to rule and repress the people it is charged with ministering to. At the same time, it allows space for the interpretation that supernatural forces really have been at work, and that, however harsh, the punishments are at least meted out to the correctly accused. This later interpretation is allowed by the way that Dreyer piles up a series of coincidences. As she goes to her death, the old witch threatens one of the clergy that she will destroy him from beyond the grave; sure enough, he is soon lying on his deathbed. Testing out her powers to summon people, Anne whispers Martin's name and he appears behind her as if bidden to materialise. Later, when she says she has thought about what might happen if her husband were dead, Dreyer cuts to Absalon walking outside, struck by a sudden deathly pain in his heart. Finally, when Anne reveals her affair with Martin and appears to wish her husband dead, he promptly keels over - is this the supernatural enactment of her will, or a sudden shock to an old man's stricken ticker? By cutting between Anne's ennunciation and the achievement of her wish, Dreyer makes an analog of her power to make things happen, and enshrines in montage the possibility of supernatural agency. Of course, I'm not suggesting that Dreyer is justifying the mass persecution of women - the scenes of torture clearly elicit sympathy for the tormented woman cornered by rhetorical systems that prevent her from offering any workable defence. But the problem with witchcraft accusations was not that they misread the evidence, but that there was no evidence. I hope it's not hubristic to announce that, since it's impossible to summon the living and the dead by power of the mind, there's no point entertaining the notion that it might have been.

Then I figured it out. Sorry if I'm a bit slow on the uptake. What Dreyer is really doing is simulating the sort of mindset that might accept the existence of evil spirits - Anne herself may even come to believe that she has this power, choosing to interpret the coincidences as evidence of dark forces at work. It conveys the tortuous circular logic that constructs connections between distinct phenomena and from them builds an association (just as montage editing can do), in turn reinforcing the tortuous, circular logic that permits an irrefutable inquisition to take place. As such, the condemnation of the witchcraft trials is that much more hard-won as a result.

See also Carl Dreyer.com
There's a meticulous comparison of the Criterion and BFI DVDs of the film at DVD Beaver.

The Rain Before it Goes to Earth

2008-08-12T21:46:00.010+01:00

In Jonathan Coe's latest novel, The Rain Before it Falls, a character describes the joy of appearing as an extra in Powell and Pressburger's Gone to Earth. Her excitement at getting close to Jennifer Jones is a hint at her burgeoning sexuality, but the recollection fits in well with the books central themes of memorialisation, and the power of photographic records to record some, but crucially not all, of the truths of a particular moment. The film gives her a glimpse into the past lives of herself and her friend. Coe illustrates the sequence vividly:

"I can describe exactly the clothes that Beatrix found for us to wear for our appearance in the film. This is not a feat of memory on my part: it's because I have the film on tape now, recorded from the television some years ago, and she and I can be seen quite clearly in one of the earliest scenes. Oh, the excitement, of glimpsing myself - just for a few seconds - on the big screen, when I saw the film with my parents when it was first released! We went and saw it four or five times in a single week, just for that thrill. (And most of the time we were almost alone in the cinema, for it was not a popular film, not popular at all.) And then the poignancy of glimpsing myself - of glimpsing both of us - once again, when the film was rereleased almost forty years later, and I saw it with Ruth at that cinema near Oxford Street shortly after our dinner party. [...] Since then I have seen it many times - so many times; it is the only moving record I have of Beatrix at all, the only one where she is not frozen in time. It is precious to me for that reason, mainly, although there are other reasons too.
Our little appearance takes place in what I believe the film-makers call an establishing shot. A sculptor is seen chiselling the date - 20 June 1897 - on to a memorial stone, against a background of bright blue sky. Behind this, already, we can hear the noise of horses' hooves clip-clopping along the street. We then cut to the street itself - the bottom of the High Street, at its junction with Wilmore Street, so that the old Tudor guildhall and buttermarket buildings are also in view - and there, immediately, you can see Beatrix and me, standing in the left-hand corner of the frame, laughing and talking together."

The description of the scene continues for a couple more pages. But as soon as I read it I knew that I was going to find a copy of the film and check whether or not this shot exists, and whether or not our two characters are visible in its left-hand corner. And here, with apologies for the dodgy old VHS quality, is, I think, the relevant shot:

It is a little spooky to see fictional characters transported into another medium. Maybe Coe anticipated the little frisson that would greet readers when they saw the film, as if throwing in an uncanny authentication of the story told in the novel. In the book, the dying Rosamond leaves a series of tapes for a blind girl whose family relationship is initially mysterious. On these tapes, she describes a series of photos that mark out key moments in her life. But the images never tell the full story, and sometimes they obscure it. Coe pulls off the neat trick of offering us, in this moment from Gone to Earth, a concrete example of an image that lies to us - it is, of course not Rosamond and Beatrix in the left hand corner of the frame. The image has just been borrowed and put to a new fictive purpose. I'd love to hear about more examples of books describing, and re-imagining scenes from actual movies.

Satyajit Ray's Alien

2008-08-12T16:52:00.004+01:00

One of the joys of a new research project (you know, apart from the obvious pleasures of sitting indoors on a sunny day, at a desk, reading through a stack of books on the off-chance that one of them might contain something relevant and/or comprehensible) is finding those tangential nuggets of information that, even if they don't add much to the central drive of a piece of work, provide a diverting avenue of distraction for a while. For instance, I'm reading and writing about film and puppetry at the moment, which has led me into the interesting zone of animatronics. Maybe this is common knowledge to film buffs, but I'm never afraid to admit my ignorance (I'd be close to mute if I was), so I was surprised to find out about Satyajit Ray's The Alien, an unmade film which the great Indian director claimed was an inspiration for Spielberg's E.T. Maybe I'll blog about it a bit more when I know more (though that doesn't usually stop me), but I could always just draw your attention to Ray's own account of the film's unsuccessful production, beautifully set out here at World of Ray.

There Will be Fireworks

2008-08-12T13:29:00.009+01:00

I'm not going to blog about the Olympics. This is not the place, and aside from the badminton, I'm not really gripped by the Games. What I saw of the opening ceremony (did anyone watch all four hours?) was truly spectacular, especially the giant globe with acrobats running all around its surface, in clear breach of the laws of gravity.

There was also a spectacular aerial fly-by shot of Beijing with overhead views of fireworks making the shapes of footprints in the sky striding across the city. Wow. And wow again. So, it was kind of a disappointment, but a bit less of a surprise, to learn that the fireworks were not detonated "live", but were pre-prepared using computer-generated effects and inserted into the live feed for the ceremony broadcast around the world. Does that spoil things? The one in the picture below was apparently real, but the fireworks in the flyby were added digitally. They even corrected the animation to simulate the look of Beijing's famous smog.

We shouldn't be surprised to learn that such a capability exists, but is it cheating? Does it break a contract of trust with the viewers that what we see represents the skilfull marshalling of talent in the arena rather than the editing suite? It is telling that the man chosen to direct the ceremony was Zhang Yimou, the film-maker who has recently discovered a wearisome interest in serried ranks of CGI warriors and similarly synthetic renderings of Chinese history. It is tempting to see in this manipulation of the ceremony's global reception a summation of China's willingness to favour the image over the reality, of perception over actuality. CGI fireworks won't go off out of synch. They will only behave as planned, with no embarrassing varables to make you lose face in the eyes of the world. Just like the little girl who was not cute enough to be seen singing a song at the ceremony, but whose voice was commandeered by another kid, this was a telling replacement of actuality with image. How cute.

P.S. Check out Bob Rehak at Graphic Engine's intelligent response to the CGI "scandal" at the Olympics. Mitchell Whitelaw's blog entry is also fascinating.

She Shoots Straight

2008-08-11T14:37:00.012+01:00

On the rare occasions when I get chance to revisit some old Hong Kong action movies, I'm transported back to my late teenage years, when I was freer to indulge in the guilty pleasures of this stuff. Watching Cory Yuen's She Shoots Straight (1990), I was reminded of the times when Hong Kong provided me with a route into a range of cinemas from around the world. I had been a pretty conservative film viewer, preferring my movies to be fast, slick and immediate, but I did make an effort to check out some films which I was always told were classics: I seem to remember Bergman, Tati, Hitchcock, Godard and Kurosawa being a few of my starting points. Once I discovered Hong Kong action films, I found their frenetic eclecticism startling enough to set off a domino cascade of explorations in international film, leading into more interesting, challenging and esoteric quarters. But even if I don't get chance to bathe in its craziness very often, I've never lost a residual affection for Hong Kong action cinema's golden age and the way it shook me out of a complacent viewing position. We often think that "world cinema" (a phrase I'm far from being keen on - it evokes an ethnographic fascination with foreign things and, when used in the UK, ignores the fact that Hollywood movies are also "world cinema") gives us a window into faraway lands and cultures. That may be partly true, but it is a view that is obscured by the cultural specificities of the industry from whence it came, and the audiences for whom it was designed. So, while She Shoots Straight is a formulaic addition to the action movie genre, it goes about its business in a manner that may be disorientating for viewers unfamiliar with the way they used to do things in Hong Kong (of course, you'd never guess it from the packaging and marketing that tends to elide these differences wherever possible).

Joyce Godenzi, a former Miss Hong Kong winner (1984) and wife of Sammo Hung, stars as Mina, a police officer who works alongside her new husband (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), much to the annoyance of his sisters, who are also jostling for position and recognition in the same force. Beginning with the wedding, followed immediately by a dramatic intervention in the attempted kidnapping of a princess, the film bolts together inseparably the twin imperatives of family drama and action adventure. There are plenty of sequences of bodies stretched to their acrobatic limits, and just as muscle and sinew are at full-stretch, so are the emotions.

At the core of the film is a twenty-five minute section in which Mina's husband is viciously slaughtered by a criminal gang, followed by an excruciating birthday party for his mother, throughout which Mina tries desperately to put on a brave face and keep his mother from finding out the true reason for his absence. Next comes the funeral, which the gang attacks by placing a bomb in the coffin, leaving Mina requiring surgery, which she has to endure without anaesthetic because, as she learns for the first time, she is pregnant with her late husband's child. Finally, her insensitive boss arrives to crack jokes and shrug off the tragedy. This cavalcade of torment clearly serves to set up the final section of righteous vengeance, as Mina hunts down and crushes the gang. But if the husband's death is just a narrative device to provide a motivation for some combat scenes, does it have to be laid on so thick, with screaming and crying and wallowing, synthesised music?

Well, this film, along with many others like it, offers a synthesis of body and emotion. Bodies are put to the test, held taut and poised, faces fixed in grimaces or ferocious determination, while an outpouring of emotion accompanies the physical release of punishing combat. This intertwining of physical and emotional tensions is most starkly expressed in the actual pains endured by stunt performers (usually the stars themselves for added authenticity), lingered over with slow motion or repeated shots. Fighting here is a cathartic explosion of rage, but it is firmly established as a powerfully felt spectacle rather than one that can be observed with awed detachment. There is always a danger, I suppose, that the emotionalism is too stark or forced, that it is distancing rather than engaging. It took me a while to acclimatise to the histrionics of this kind of emotional action cinema.

The final showdown is between Joyce Godenzi and Agnes Aurelio. Just prior to their confrontation, Mina's bereaved mother-in-law is callously wounded, refuelling the drive for vengeance, but putting the emphasis on conflicts between women for the protection of the family (Mina is pregnant, remember). Each fighter is out for revenge for the other's killing of a loved one. They kick at each others breasts, legs, bellies and groins, singling out each other's womanly attributes for especially violent attention, perpetuating the fetishistic aspects of the female-focused martial arts film, but re-articulating the central themes - by protecting her unborn child, Mina will honour the wishes of her mother-in-law and the memory of her husband (who wanted a child far more urgently than she ever had: we saw him earlier making holes in a condom!). But this is not an unproblematic restoration of order. Everyone ends bereaved. The film ends abruptly when Mina beats Agnes into unconsciousness and tosses her onto the back of a motorcycle. The end credits roll over a montage of the happy couple, the husband's death and funeral. If you're accustomed to Hollywood action movies, you'll find this unnerving. Where is the nod-and-wink, gift-wrapped happy ending of vanquished foes and nursed bruises, shrugging off the preceding mayhem and getting back to normality? How did this silliest of genres come to be taking things so seriously? It's all part of the intensity, the heightened emotions that filled the films from this period, produced at a breakneck pace that fostered this kind of immediate headrush of bodily and emotional display.

(If you must see it out of context and in poor quality, you can see the fight between Joyce Godenzi and Agnes Aurelio on YouTube here.)

Where are the Wild Things?

2008-08-02T19:42:00.006+01:00

Surely one of the most intriguing forthcoming movies is Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. It has the potential to be a warped and spectacular festival of dark and uncanny thrills. Or, it could turn out to be a big old mess, the smug and self-indulgent mess produced by a bunch of off-the-hook louchebags with more creative freedom than sense and an over-inflated belief in their own abilities. Either way, watching it struggle into life is a fascinating, sometimes skin-crawling, car-crashing clash of studio conservatism and rule-stretching artistic grandstanding. Maybe.

It's difficult to imagine that Warner Brothers expected a run-of-the-mill children's film and merchandising vessel when they employed Jonze and Eggers and let them cast indie-faves Catherines Keener and O'Hara, Michelle Williams, James Gandolfini and an array of old-school animatronic monsters, plus Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs providing the music. But they don't seem happy to release the film as it has shaped up, amidst enticing rumours that kids at preview screenings find out deeply traumatising. It was scheduled to appear late in 2008, but has now been earmarked for an October 2009 release to allow reshoots. Most troubling for me, and probably others including the Puppetvision Blog, is the prospect that producers might impose the replacement of live action animatronic puppets with some CG stand-ins. I'm a fan of puppets - I don't might them looking a bit rough or jerky. Especially in the context of a story like this, they bring the baggage of nostalgic otherness that computer graphics just can't carry. Maybe objections like mine will go the way of the old vinyl vs. digital music debate. People just need more time to warm to CGI. But I'm going to sulk about it for a bit longer.

You can keep up with some updates on Where the Wild Things Are here, including a nice spot of damage limitation by Warner Brothers President Alan Horn. Can you spot the euphemisms in this quotation from his interview with the LA Times?:

"We've given him more money and, even more importantly, more time for him to work on the film," Horn said. "We'd like to find a common ground that represents Spike's vision but still offers a film that really delivers for a broad-based audience. We obviously still have a challenge on our hands. But I wouldn't call it a problem, simply a challenge. No one wants to turn this into a bland, sanitized studio movie. This is a very special piece of material and we're just trying to get it right."

P.S. Here's a YouTube link to some footage of an early Disney computer animation test for Where the Wild Things Are, made by John Lassiter, later head of Pixar, in 1983: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvIDRoO8KnM

Return of the Player

2008-07-17T19:35:00.007+01:00

I must admit that I hadn't noticed that Michael Tolkin had published a sequel to The Player, the 1988 novel that ended up being overshadowed by Robert Altman's celeb-saturated film adaptation. So, I was surprised to find it during a random, time-killing browse in a secondhand book shop. The character of Griffin Mill always felt to me like a writer's punchbag, a morally flaccid suit with neither talent for nor interest in the art of cinema, who had somehow managed to become head of production at a major Hollywood studio. There was a sense of puppeteering in the way Mill mouthed the platitudinous business-speak bullshit that Tolkin was no doubt sick of hearing, but in the sequel, Tolkin has really twisted the knife - how much do you have to hate your main character to afflict him with both impotence and a Viagra allergy? Here, Mill seems to be on his last legs, tormented by family problems, fears of impending financial ruin, doubts about his own talent (even though he is referred to as if he possesses a preternatural understanding of audience, marketing and high concepts), and a tingling sense that the apocalypse is nigh, both for a Hollywood changed irrevocably by new media platforms and dwindling audience :

"The planet is dying. That's why the world expressed Hollywood out of itself a hundred years ago. It needed to hypnotise itself at twenty-four frames a second. Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome, and Hollywood cracked the story. It's all the same thing."

The joke is, once again, that Mill's neat line in soulless ideasmanship eventually reaps the lavish rewards usually reserved for the most heroic of fictional characters. It's as if Mill himself saw Tolkin's first draft, lacking in classic structure and stock characters from the Joseph Campbell template, and re-wrote the ending to suit himself.

For those familiar with the Altman film, there's obviously no equivalent pleasure to that of spotting actual movie stars in their element, barely realising the vicious parody into which their images are being inserted, but there is one enormous cameo at the end, a deus ex machina to tie everything together very suddenly - Mill's grand idea for a money-spinning enterprise to revitalise his fortunes is not movie-related, but implies that if the Mill-types get their hands on the vast information wells of the internet, they will crack the codes for narrativising our very lives, sifting through all of our personal information to glean all of the data necessary for inscribing each of us with a formulaic romantic sub-plot. It's a nuttily dystopic vision, and one which may or may not serve as Tolkin's own personal voodoo doll for every producer who ever knocked him back.

Hulk Smashed

2008-06-13T09:35:00.015+01:00

Peter Bradshaw's film reviews for The Guardian are a joy to read, especially when he's writing about something he hates. His latest publication is a hilarious demolition job on The Incredible Hulk, written entirely in a monosyllabic Hulk-speak. Here's a sample:

"Same old story. Superhero movie give superhero mirror-image antagonist. Like in Spider-Man 3. Idea rubbish in Spider-Man 3. Idea rubbish here. Hulk versus humanity important thing. Cancelled out here. Basic problem ... critic not believe Hulk angry. Hulk just roar. It not look convincing. Not truly seem angry. Critic think about this. Critic decide why. It because Hulk not swear. Hulk just say: "Hulk. Smash" etc. If Hulk shout C-word ... different matter. Then Hulk look angry. Sound angry. Not here. Hulk genteel. Critic remember Ang Lee version. Ang Lee version slagged off. Yet rubbish new Hulk film make that look like Citizen Kane. Critic exit cinema miffed. Film take away two hours of critic's life. Critic not get time back. Ever. Rarrrrr."

It gave me minutes of fun. Almost as good as the time he took Lassie out to the old barn and shot her:

"Come here, girl, I'll have none of this nonsense, we're going home. I'm going to grab you by the scruff of your neck, and ... oh no! The preternaturally intelligent collie has got away from me again! Determined and lovable creature that she is, she's wriggled out of my grasp and got back outside the Odeon again! Barking fit to beat the band! Oh for goodness sake you daft canine, just say what you think about these films on offer! Narnia? King Kong? Hmmm ... wagging your tail. And what do you think about Lassie? ... Oh dear. Has anyone got a plastic bag and some rubber gloves?"
Actually, the one-star review of The Incredible Hulk is just one of four drubbings dished out today to Irina Palm ("awful in the way that somehow only British films can be"), The Happening ("fatuous anti-rational, anti-scientific piece of smuggery"), and Priceless ("gruesomely unfunny and tacky comedy-farce"). Is somebody feeling grumpy?

Carry On Philatelising

2008-06-13T09:06:00.014+01:00

Let's be clear about this: I've never been a stamp collector. I have nothing against those who do, even if there is a popular suspicion of people who can spend a fortune and a lifetime acquiring and studying tiny bits of gummed paper; I just always had other things to be a geek about. But this week I might just change my mind and get my hands on the Royal Mail's latest issue of philatelic (OK, I might be making words up here...) things. With the slightly spurious excuse of marking the anniversary of 1958 (the release of both Dracula and Carry On Sargeant), they've released six commemorative stamps celebrating the output of Hammer Film Productions and the Carry On... franchise.

There can hardly be a more striking indicator of something's passage from cultural anathema to national treasure than its appearance on a stamp, those little paper markers that are safe enough to be seen by the postman or sent to Santa. These films were not always seen through such misty eyes, as Derek Hill's 1958 Sight and Sound review of The Curse of Frankenstein reminds us:

Instead of attempting mood, tension or shock, the new Frankenstein productions rely almost entirely on a percentage of shots of repugnant clinical detail. There is little to frighten … but plenty to disgust.

C.A. Lejeune reckoned that the same film was ‘without hesitation… among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have encountered’, and she wasn't alone in condemning the Hammer films as prurient, sensationalist grotesqueries. What is it that makes them seem so tame and comforting now? In his article "Hammer's Cosy Violence", from Sight and Sound's August 1996 edition, the novelist Jonathan Coe refers to "the sense of blanketing comfort which the very (over)familiarity of the regular Hammer ingredients now induces." If horror is based on the unknown and unfamiliar, perhaps it was only a matter of time before the endless replaying of horrific events in the homely grounds and corridors of Bray Studios in Buckinghamshire would become reassuringly heimlich. Or maybe its because nothing involving Peter Cushing could be as noxiously cynical as the kinds of teen-obsessed, gash-n'-slash McTorture movies that currently preoccupy the centre-ground of the horror genre (hand me my slippers - over there, next to my cardigan).

It's a bit more difficult to salvage Carry on Emanuelle from the bargain-bin purgatory in which it belongs, but Hammer's finest moments can still inspire with a wickedly creative bit of blood-letting. Having said that, who wouldn't want to adorn their next envelope with the image of Sid James dressed as the Sphinx? It's just a good job you don't have to lick their backs anymore. I must say, though, that the sight of the Queen's head looking on impassively in the midst of these scenes is mildly disconcerting...

Funeral Parade of Roses

2008-06-11T17:30:00.030+01:00

"A feverish collision of avant-garde aesthetics and grindhouse shocks (not to mention a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange), Funeral Parade of Roses takes us on an electrifying journey into the nether-regions of the late-'60s Tokyo underworld.

Cross-dressing club-kid Eddie (played by real-life transvestite entertainer extraordinaire Peter, famed for his role as Kyoami the Fool in Akira Kurosawa's Ran) vies with a rival drag-queen (Osamu Ogasawara) for the favours of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya, himself a Kurosawa player who appeared in such films as Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and High and Low). Passions escalate and blood begins to flow - before all tensions are released in a jolting climax." (Plot Synopsis from Lovefilm.com)

It's tempting not to review this film, but just to show a bunch of stills and leave them to stand alone as a recommendation to view the whole thing. Almost any frame can be grabbed and held up as a beautifully composed image, but mostly it becomes fascinating for the barrage of eclectic formal experiments.

While these stills show the exciting variety of shot scales and compositional spectacles, they don't convey the ways in which the mash-up of documentary and fictional techniques drives the film forward. The film provides a mix of extreme narrative contrivance and naturalistic, Brechtian interview with ordinary people and cast members out of character. Peter's interview to camera even hints at the plot twist which has not yet been revealed. Matsumoto wanted to blend together his disparate cinematic influences; he hails from a documentary background, but was fascinated by Italian neo-realism and the avant-garde, and each of these modes complements, comments on or occasionally undermines the others. Moments of apparently naturalistic documentary footage give way to blatant fabrication and vice versa. At every step, the fiction is undermined by images of its construction. Scenes are linked with bursts of leader film or still images. A sex scene focusing on Eddie's ecstatic facial expressions is cut short by a shot of the scene being filmed, revealing that he is writhing alone on the bed. Is this scene telling us that Eddie is acting in adult films, or is it an entirely self-reflexive insert to puncture the fictional bubble? Even his final scene of self mutilation is interrupted by a contact shot of stills of the scene being shot, and a cheerful commentator who asks the viewer: "Frightening, isn't it?"

Whatever it did for progressing the prominence of gay people in Japan, this is less a piece of authentic queer cinema and more an example of captivated sub-cultural tourism. The transvestite body is treated as a fascinating object, shot in fragments during sex scenes, and its always a surprise to see the lead character out of make-up; the camera seems to revel in the illusion that Eddie's face creates. The pleasured look on his face, the gripped sheets, clutched necks, scraped backs and intertwined fingers would look like the average hetero sex scene if they weren't dressed up in the garb of queer cinema. Maybe that kind of passing is the whole point of the film, but rather than allowing the queens the indulgence of full immersion in their masquerade, the film thematises the wearing of masks as a universal human trait to hide our true selves. Many scenes draw comic effect from the incongruity of pretty girls who are also prey to the inconveniences of guy stuff:

In addition, Eddie's traumatic past comes worryingly close to claiming a correlation between incestuous child abuse and homosexuality, but these are minor reservations for an otherwise electrifying, exploratory film that keeps turning up one flourish of visual wit after another.

Read more:

Jasper Sharp, "Funeral Parade of Roses."
Review at Cinema Strikes Back.
Review at Lucid Screening.
Review by Kevin Wilson at Thirtyframesasecond.

Twentynine Palms

2008-06-09T23:22:00.016+01:00

[This post contains major spoilers for those who haven't seen the film.]

What am I to make of Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (2003)? It consists mostly of a couple (David and Katia) based in a motel but exploring the surrounding desert in their Hummer. They argue, buy an ice-cream, swim in the pool, have rough sex, fight in the street, kiss and make up, before being attacked in the desert. David is beaten and raped and, clearly more than a little unsettled by the experience, stabs Katia to death in the motel. The last shot is of David's corpse sprawled in the desert while a traffic cop radios for help, trying in vain to convince headquarters to give a damn.

Dumont claims that the film is an experiment in building tension through a lack of dramatic action, and that the film's sense of escalating menace is constructed in the spectator's mind in response to the films longeurs. This is an interesting proposition, implying that we are so conditioned to expect violence to be encountered in the barren landscapes of America(n cinema) that its absence arouses suspicion, but it is rather disingenuous. If the film aims to document the quotidian minutiae of a couple, with all of their bickering, musing and sexual grappling before smashing it all sideways with random acts of unforeseen violence, then that mission is undermined by a series of portents and correspondences that pepper the film. While it is not obviously signposted that David will end up stabbing Katia to death, in retrospect the structured build-up to this conclusion is certainly in evidence.

The spectral premonition of sexual abuse haunts Twentynine Palms in David's controlling subjugation of his partner in most of their couplings, most troublingly when he holds her underwater to go d(r)own on him. His gurning, groaning orgasms are echoed by those of his rapist. Are we supposed to read this as some kind of poetic justice for David's own barely-suppressed sexual aggression? Earlier in the film, he expressed little sympathy for a victim of abuse on the Jerry Springer show, which is either a cynical commentary on the distancing, dehumanising effects of trash TV, or a character note to inform us that something is not fully functioning in the empathy division of David's brain.

The violent conclusion might lead us to look for clues as to why it happened. Are the attackers a group of disgruntled dog owners? Are they marines from the nearby military base? The military motif, symbolised by the Humvee they drive (Darren Hughes has argued that it's all about the Hummer), crops up more than once. Before stabbing Katia, David has made a messy attempt at shaving his head, mirroring an earlier conversation in which Katia contradicted herself by saying that she found soldiers very handsome, but she would leave her lover if he cut his hair so short. This was obviously a moment that teased a jealous nerve in David, and its difficult now not to see it as yet another structuring device with its reference to an earlier sequence. A scene of each character locking themselves in the bathroom is also repeated:

Katia eventually charges out of the bathroom and leaves the motel room, at which point David grabs her arm to create the illusion that it is he who is throwing her out. When the scene is mirrored at the end of the film, David emerges with murderous purpose, issuing the scream that we have heard him give throughout the film - during sex, while being rammed from behind by an SUV, and finally while slaughtering his girlfriend.

The violent denouement is also foreshadowed by David's aggression towards Katia throughout the film. Wild, grunting sex is one thing, but we see him hit her several times, and a shot of him creeping up on Katia in the pool is clearly designed to suggest the claim he wants to stake on her body. So, I don't think I'm being a naive prude when I feel that this is not a picture of an everyday couple going about the typical couply routines, but a deliberate sequence of narrational cues building up a suggestive picture of a man waiting for an external influence to tip him over the edge into bloody madness.

I find his films engrossing and beautifully composed (yes, that's a cop-out piece of mitigation, thanks), but I find myself instinctively reacting against Dumont's sensationalism, and his suggestion that I need to see a violent movie in order to demythologise the artifice of the usual movie violence. But he shares with Michael Haneke an interest in everybody's voyeuristic fascination in depictions of graphic violence. Everybody's, that is, except for his own. His apparent nihilism is not ours, and his attempts to force spectators to construct their own terror and then torment themselves with it ignores his own role in engineering and administering it. Compare (OK, it maybe an unfair comparison, but indulge me here) this to Christian Mungiu's masterful generation of terrifying suspense out of bureaucratic procedures in 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days (2007), where the threat of discovery looms large but is never fully realised. Which deployment of spectatorial engagement is more productive and revealing: Mungiu's depiction of how a repressive environment causes people to internalise systems of surveillance and police themselves, or Dumont's cyclical exercise in sex-n'-death button-pushing (with the added implication that you devised and pushed those buttons yourself)?

Further Reading:

Manohla Dargis, "Twentynine Palms."

Marcy Dermansky, "Moan and Groan."

Errata, "Twentynine Palms."

Darren Hughes, "The New American Old West:Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms."

Michael Koresky, "Urge Overkill."
Nick Wrigley, "The Polarizing, MagnificentCinema of Bruno Dumont."

The Georges Méliès Blog

2008-06-06T00:41:00.005+01:00

Just a quick note to draw your attention to the heroic under-taking by Michael Brooke to write an analytical review of every single film in Flicker Alley's 173-film Georges Méliès DVD boxset. After receiving my copy (pictured) in the post a few weeks ago, I was hoping to get time over the summer to do something similar, but Brooke's blog reminds me that it was probably way out of my range. I can't wait to spend some quality time with the films, and his work will provide plenty of illumination. Even if you don't have access to all the films, it's a fascinating read. And if blogging was an Olympic sport....

http://filmjournal.net/melies/

Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani Kani

2008-06-04T09:33:00.007+01:00

For the benefit of anyone who just can't get enough football over the next couple of weeks, or who is pining for another seafood-based sports drama, I draw your attention to Minoru Kawasaki's Kani-Goalkeeper [follow this link for the trailer]. Kawasaki's follow-up to his acclaimed The Calamari Wrestler is just another tale of a big crab who finds acceptance when his amazing goalkeeping abilities are revealed to the world. It's one of the many films with a fabulous title and concept, which I haven't seen, and which will no doubt disappoint when I do eventually see it. But for that intervening period, I'm glad that somebody took the time to make a movie about a giant decapod crustacean and his safe pairs of hands. According to its director, it's "like Forrest Gump, but with a crab." What's not to like?

Irony Man

2008-06-04T00:07:00.026+01:00

I could start by fabricating the excuse that I was queueing for the Jia Zhangke screening and it was sold out, but whatever lie I come up with, I ended up foregoing more edifying entertainment in order to watch Iron Man. I'd been softened up by some warm reviews, and the assurance that its politics couldn't have been more right-on if Hans Blix himself had been transformed into a cyborgic weapons inspector and spent two hours of screentime failing to inspect any weapons.

How surprised was I to find out that Iron Man is not the liberal avenger and "ally of the United Nations" that he was purported to be in a Guardian Guide cover story? A bit surprised. This is the latest in a long line of films that deals obliquely with America’s post-9/11 situation, tentatively probing areas of moral ambiguity, but rarely with a whole-hearted commitment. Certainly, it seems to be about an arms dealer who makes a moral choice to withdraw from his position of complicity in the networks of retributive, territorial destruction that his trade fertilises, but it is actually less a fantasy about how a moral interventionism might work and more a vision of how the Bush administration seems to think it already acts.

The film dresses up tortuously complex geo-politics in a fantasy of precision-engineered bodies, a convenient replacement of diplomacy with kicks and punches. To most of us, a Middle Eastern warzone is a distant, scorching, no-go area of torn limbs, twisted wreckage and unreasonable locals. Iron Man can be there at a moment’s notice, picking off bad guys (with no stray “friendly fire”), thumping some sense into those toothless desert types. He can get in and out unscathed and withdraw to his default position of non-involvement, the ultimate in convert interventionism. Surely this is meant to be cathartic, a vision of weaponised body armour that does its job as surely and precisely as the algorithms used to make the CGI happen. Digital effects make it all seem effortless – there’s little in the way of tangible physicality, so there’s an over-compensation in the thudding sound effects and rock-solid violence, and since all the effects are plotted so carefully, there's little in the way of chaos to make it feel like real, rough-and-tumble combat with lives and limbs at stake. If nothing else, this kind of eye-defying, lightning fast action can only show up the elegance of the superheroic mayhem in Ang Lee's much maligned Hulk. In Lee's film, the customary "get me the president" sequence that announces the monster as a national threat finds the Leader of the Free World on a fishing trip, barely interested in news of the green giant that is currently trashing the fixtures and fittings of the military industrial complex. There's a grander political statement in that one moment than in all of Iron Man's hand-wringing.

As a character, Iron Man is not as interesting as Robocop, whose metal prostheses were permanently forced upon him, bringing on an existential crisis that makes Tony Stark's yearning for a cheeseburger seem like a state of luxury. (Neither character is as afflicted as the protagonist of Colossus of New York, which deserves more recognition than it gets, if only for having a mournful solo piano score at a time when the theremin was the 50s sf instrument of choice.) After Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil and Batman, it has become customary to see superheroes grappling with the internal crises created by their public status and physical difference, so it's a big surprise to find Robert Downey Jr's character embracing the diplomatic impunity and celebrity that goes along with his alter ego. It's just a bit of a boring surprise.

P.S. The pun in the title of this post no longer matches the way my argument turned out, but I liked the sound of it, so rather than teasing out some sense of irony from my reading of the film, I thought I'd just leave it there anyway. Who's going to notice?

P.P.S. I should also note that in Iron Man Gwyneth Paltrow ‘tackles’ the most thankless decorative role offered to an Oscar winner since Orson Welles advertised fish fingers. But I have nothing substantive to say about that fact. Unless a sigh of resignation counts as comment.

Extra: Since I published this post, AP at the Movies' review of Iron Man has drawn my attention to an intelligent and far more evenhanded discussion of the film than I could manage here, and it sounds like Dana Stevens has put a positive spin on exactly the kind of thing that energised my little rant about the film:

"[The] middle section, in which the newly energized Tony tinkers with his emerging superpowers like a kid in shop class, is the movie's finest and funnest hour. But when he starts to actually use those powers, zooming to random corners of Afghanistan to save cowering villagers from evil warlords, the movie's sharp intelligence gives way to a dopey wish-fulfillment fantasy. This is what we'd like our wars to be: a clearly defined moral crusade against a bald, glowering meanie who proclaims his Genghis Khan-like ambition to "dominate all of Asia." (With an eye on potential box-office buzz kill, the movie cannily stays away from the mere mention of the Taliban, the war in Iraq, or domestic terrorism.) Tony's invulnerable, omnipotent, impossibly expensive armor is an almost touching overcompensation for the moment of extreme vulnerability in which our country finds itself."

So, is Iron Man a soothing piece of geo-political wish-fulfilment, or a deluding bit of geo-political evasion? The choice is something akin to yours.

Nine Minutes of Cows.

2008-04-26T15:38:00.022+01:00

During a conversation with a friend recently, I found myself trying to describe Bela Tarr's Sátántangó, which I ended up summarising as "seven hours of poor people walking through mud." Remind me never to look for a job in marketing. This dour but droll, slow but gripping film is a hard sell, not least because its running time will put a big dent in your day and requires considerable investment. My attempt to encapsulate the greatness of Tarr's film got me thinking about exactly why it exerts such fascination.

I've been pressed into thinking about it because I've been re-working a core module on film form, and we begin the course with three weeks on 'Image and Editing', looking at three pairs of films that illustrate different types of shots, composition and montage. One week, for instance pairs up Man with a Movie Camera with a Godard film which I haven't fully decided on (Vivre sa Vie has served perfectly well in the past, but I fancy a change this year). It's all a bit breakneck in its coverage, but the aim is to teach the basics of formal analysis across a range of film texts. In a slightly brave/foolish bit of scheduling, I've opted to couple The Bourne Ultimatum with Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies. I want students to be transfixed by it's hypnotic sense of absorbtion and delay, but I know how they've kicked out against 'difficult' films such as Bresson's L'Argent in the past, and I'm looking for a vocabulary that can offer a way into the pleasures of these films in order to reduce the impact that challenging films can have on new students. I hope that doesn't sound patronising - they might be ready for a challenge, but I've stopped being shocked when introductees struggle to get a handle on films which cinephilic orthodoxy cherishes (I'm looking at you, Ozu). Rather than turn my nose up at the apathy of youthful viewers, I'd prefer to get them to feel inspired and flattered by the way 'difficult' films can reward committed spectatorship. It's easy to tell people what to watch, harder to tell them what to see. If I can turn them onto Tarr, I will have done my good turn for cinema this year.

Sátántangó begins with one of the most extraordinary shots imaginable. Nine whole minutes of some cows. Doesn't sound riveting. After all, if you live near some cows, you can probably go and look at them for as long as you like. Perhaps you could even treat yourself to ten minutes of bovine gawking if you really want to push the boat out. Working out just what makes this opening sequence so hypnotic, so unforgettable, is key to understanding the appeal of the whole film.

Sátántangó follows a group of characters in an agrarian collective that is failing at the end of Communist rule in Hungary. They await the return of the charismatic figure of Irimias, who has already defrauded them once and will likely do so again, and they cling doggedly to the belief that he will turn out to be their salvation. The slight story is a pretext for an extended portrait of the disenfranchised townsfolk who find themselves at the blunt, dull end of communism’s collapse. The shot of the cows doesn’t introduce any of these characters, offers no dialogue, and we don’t return to the cows later to see how they're getting on.

The start of the shot is an empty yard, establishing a dramatic space, a vacant stage for some action. The cows mooch out of the barn and out into the mood in their inimitable cowish manner. One of them attempts a frisky mounting. The camera pans to the left slightly, but otherwise remains static. One cow approaches the camera, but it's unlikely that this is in preparation for an explanatory, scene-setting monologue.

Let's face it. There's something a bit silly about cows. Despite being similarly-sized quadripeds, they have none of the elegance and inscrutability of horses. They look kind of stupid, and their over-laden, meat-bearing frames make them unnaturally awkward when trying to go anywhere in a hurry. They're surely easier to direct than chickens however, and pretty soon their casual milling about becomes a more organised movement off to the left. The camera tracks laterally to follow them, picking up a steady speed. All the time, a deep rumbling noise, non-diegetic but seemingly machinic adds an indefinable sense of ... is it menace?

Much of the drama, if I can call it that, seems to derive from this dynamic coincidence of the camera's very deliberate, pre-destined motion and the more random excursion of the herd. The cows seem to know where they're headed, and their journey is allied with that of the camera (one might also suspect that it is the camera which is compelling them to head off); maybe it is this vague sense of pre-destination that leads critics to assign a cosmic significance to Tarr's mise-en-scene in this film, but it certainly creates a gripping union between the shot and its contents - to what extent is the movement "motivated"? What does it contribute to our understanding of the scene? The ambiguity, the sense that this might be significant, stems from the powerfully assured camera movement that converts it from an observed scene to one which has been transformed by the intervention of the cinematic apparatus.

One of the things I like about Tarr is his refusal to engage in the hermeneutic exercises his films provoke in their awed viewers. He's an irrascible interviewee. In response to a question about the existential terror and chaos of his Werckmeister Harmonies (2004), he said: "I just wanted to make a movie about this guy who is walking up and down the village and has seen this whale." This is not to invalidate the kinds of interpretive filler you might want to stuff into the wide open spaces of Tarr's long takes and sparse frames, but it does remind you that interpretation is your job, not a simple following of a crumb-trail of signifiers towards a logical conclusion.

There's a more practical consideration that always interests me when talking to other viewers of Sátántangó – how do you watch it? First of all, how do you find the time to watch a seven-hour film from start to finish? Does it hurt? How do you sit? Don't your eyes wander from time to time? Is that OK? Granted, I’ve known people who don’t think twice about marathon viewings of favourite TV shows such as 24, so it’s probably not a physical impossibility for a lot of people, but that kind of episodic narrative, with its evenly placed climaxes, cliff-hangers, hooks and action scenes is altogether less demanding on the attention span – however fiendish the plot of Lost might get, you quickly get comfortable and familiar with the formulaic structure of flashbacks, character profiles and multiple narrative threads, and you usually know how to interpret the information contained in each frame. Tarr’s cows are a conundrum. OK, the explanation for the shot may be this simple: it’s an establishing shot that expresses the dour tenor of the place where the rest of the story will take place. The discomfited cows leaving the yard and trotting into the distance represent metonymically the failure of the farm and its subsequent dissolution. Simple. There are other ways to do this – with a dialogue over a gate between a couple of farmers, for instance – but Tarr’s approach is to hold the shot. Initially, and I’m analysing my personal response here, the shot holds the attention because it has a privileged position at the start of the film – something must be about to happen. As with so many of the shots in Sátántangó, though, this immediate sense of anticipation gives way to a very different experience of cinematic time that provides few cues about how long a shot will last. The average shot length of this film is 2.5 minutes. For comparison, Michael Bay’s Transformers has an ASL of 0.25 seconds (alright, I’m exaggerating, but you get the message). In most narrative films, a shot will last for as long as it takes a character to deliver a line of dialogue that moves the story a few more paces along the path to resolution. Here, the temporal cues are lacking, and the effect seems to be to force an engagement with the space and place that is being presented, and to upset the standard patterns of editing and narration. Now, it’s probably reductive to imply that Tarr is defining his aesthetic against the codes of fast-cut mass cultural entertainment cinema as a reactionary strike at hegemonic Hollywood: unless the director is being entirely disingenuous in interviews, he couldn’t care less what is going on in other movies. But I find it hard to avoid noticing that one of the exciting things about watching a film like Satantango is the realisation that years of honing my visual acuity on Georges Méliès, Shaw Brothers and Robert Altman have not fully equipped me for grasping the significance of a herd of cows getting spooked and wandering off. I don’t want to sound glib – make no mistake, Sátántangó is one of the most extraordinary experiences you can have with a film. And I mean “experience”. Watching it takes time – it will knock out a whole day, and then haunt you for several more. It will make the films you watch in its wake seem frivolous and tepid. Maybe the point of the long takes is that they will lodge in your memory like light on long-exposure daguerreotypes. But the demand for contemplation, the deferral of gratification, the ambiguity about the form that gratification should take, and the sense of weighted time that infuses films like this make for a particular viewing experience that takes a while to appreciate. I came to that appreciation as an undergraduate, tentatively raiding the library for films I had been told were important and baffling myself in the process of trying to connect that supposed importance to my own responses. I found myself watching them through the clutter of other critics' analyses and the sheer force of their canonical freight. I probably forgot to enjoy them or to really let them speak to me directly; the confidence to do so took some time. Hopefully, my own students will find that Tarr's films cut through that resistance by their restful, enveloping pace that is harder to intellectualise and instead urges a surrender to the image. You have no choice but to watch and wait. Keep watching the cows.

Jackie and Woolly: Was it Worth it?

2008-04-20T14:21:00.012+01:00

This is not a personal blog. If it was, I’d be telling you about the shoes I bought the other day, or what I ate for dinner last night (in case you’re interested, the shoes don’t fit properly, and I had seafood pasta). Or something like that. I’m not going to write about that stuff here, but you’ll probably be able to tell quite a lot about me from the fact that one of the most distressing sights I’ve seen in the last fortnight is Jackie Chan's appearance in the latest Woolworths ad.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not naïve enough to be surprised that movie stars take the corporate quid and lower themselves to some publicity whoredom, but this one hurts a bit. Jackie Chan was a hero of mine in my younger years, and was probably as instrumental in getting me interested in international cinema as Godard or Ozu ever were (Police Story and Tokyo Story hit me with equal force around the same time). For a couple of years I’ve had a plan for a book-length study of Chan’s films, incorporating a close formal analysis of some key fight scenes. It’s long overdue, and might remain nothing more than a back-burning pet project for some years to come, partly because writing about Drunken Master doesn’t seem like a short cut to credibility for an early career academic. Whatever else I became fascinated by cinematically, Chan’s career was always worth following, either for a window into the workings of a foreign star system, or for a steady stream of astonishing action sequences. At its best, his fight choreography delivers a kinetic thrill that is hard to find in other action films. Even his lesser films (I have serious issues with almost everything he’s made since Drunken Master II) contained moments of inspired and inventive physical agility or a severely risky stunt or tightly-rehearsed bit of business. In the resolutely lightweight Around the World in 80 Days (2004), a fight in an artist's studio descends into a mess of coloured paint that coheres when a series of misplaced blows leave a vibrant impressionist painting on a bystanding canvas. It's a lovely moment of clarity in an otherwise shaky film, and a neat summary of Chan's persistent amusement at the way screen violence is only ever one derealised step away from slapstick comedy.

It was exciting to watch him falling from a clock tower in Project A (1983) or re-creating Buster Keaton’s falling house stunt in, er … Project A II, but that frenetic eagerness to please, sometimes reinforced by rubber-faced gurning, was occasionally discomfiting – I was, after all, watching a man risk a serious maiming for my entertainment. Chan’s fearless/reckless willingness to take a high fall, heavy blow or near miss for the team is precisely what has been used to market him abroad and differentiate him from American action stars. Consider, for example, the US release poster for his Western breakthrough film Rumble in the Bronx (1995), with its tagline “No Fear. No Stuntman. No Equal.”

It’s certainly true that, along with the remarkable rhythmic structure of his action scenes (maybe I’ll blog more about that at a later date), this element of physical danger is what has made Chan’s films distinctive, so it’s saddening to see that extraordinary physicality, which so succinctly visualises questions of filmic authenticity and embodiment, appropriated to sell some dirt-cheap kids’ clothes.

Now, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Chan has appeared in an advert. He’s no stranger to it, having sold a lot of Pepsi, Hanes T-shirts, Kirin Beer, Visa Cards, Ultra Flex Garbage Bags, and maintained a 30-plus year association with Mitsubishi that has required him to incorporate their wonderful, wonderful automobiles into his films at every opportunity. And this is not subtle product placement. In Wheels on Meals, a car chase is halted to allow a woman to berate the other drivers. With the Mitsubishi logo in the foreground, she complains that she’d be dead if she wasn’t driving such a great sportscar, then gets in and drives off.

I suppose the Jackie Chan Woolworths ad just took me aback because of the incongruous pairing of one of the world’s most bankable film stars with one of Britain’s ailing high street chains, so it was a bit like seeing Gregory Peck schilling for Happy Shopper, or Catherine Deneuve pretending she uses Head and Shoulders. The ad also features a tired old parody of badly-dubbed “chop-socky” movies and an even stupider Karate Kid gag. To watch Chan play into a creaky cultural stereotype for the benefit of an audience whose interest in martial arts cinema begins and ends with “wax on, wax off” is surely something to sigh about.

Having said all this, I’d still rather see Jackie do a couple more appearances with Woolly and Worth than make another movie with Chris Tucker…

Beginning

2008-04-14T17:36:00.002+01:00

This blog started as a way of pooling some ideas that will feed into future research projects and teaching materials. The title Spectacular Attractions matches the name of the new undergraduate module I'm currently putting together, so it will serve as a way of communicating with my students and investigating the potential of e-learning, but I hope it will be of interest to casual/accidental readers. The remit of the course is a focus on spectacle in cinema, from the earliest trick films to contemporary computer-generated special effects.

Bear with me while I practise my blogging. Today, I'm just playing with my formatting, but I'll try and have something worth looking at later this week. For now, let me tempt you with a heads-up for a place that is very dear to my heart (and my office), The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture on the Exeter University Campus. Plugging the gap left by the closure of London's Museum of the Moving Image, the Centre houses a massive collection of books, periodicals and artefacts relating not just to the history of cinema, but also to pre-cinematic visual culture more broadly. My research would have been significantly weaker if I hadn't had this place on my doorstep for the past few years. The catalogue is navigated by a beautiful interface that provides images of many of the Centre's items of memorabilia, including this cute Charlie Chaplin postcard:

I recommend trying a keyword search at the catalogue for Chaplin. There's an extraordinary selection of merchandise - it's amazing what this guy managed to put his face on. Like the Mickey Mouse head, which can be represented by three black circles, Chaplin's features could be distilled to a hat, moustache and eyebrows, making him the easiest star to commodify. Studying the trail of merchandising crumbs left by such a star is a great way to analyse their cultural impact. And where else can you build your own Charlie Chaplin puppet? [To do this, scroll down to "Charlie Chaplin Comic Postcard" and click on it]