REVIEW: Reality (2013)

Big Brother made a big impact on reality television when it began, but the response of filmmakers has been fairly sparse – only the Charlie Brooker-scripted Dead Set and the Christmas special to Extras has dealt with it in any interesting way. Now Matteo Garrone, whose previous film Gomorrah took a comprehensive and fascinating look at the underdogs of the Neapolitan crime world, has made a film about the ‘Big Brother effect’, in the process winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

Luciano (Aniello Arena) is a fishmonger in Naples who lives modestly with his wife (Loredana Simioli) and kids. Always looking for a way to improve his situation, he is involved in a few petty scams, aided and abetted by his wife. Urged by his family to try out for Grande Fratello, the Italian Big Brother, because of his ability to entertain everyone around him, he auditions. However, during the selection process and the long periods of time waiting for the phone to ring, Luciano becomes obsessed with the bright future that is surely coming…

Opening with a fantastic aerial shot surveying Naples before zoning in on the carriage of some newly-weds on the way to their plush, over-the-top wedding reception, Garrone is playing from the beginning with fantasy and reality. The first few frames look gritty and urban but as the camera starts to follow the wedding carriage, there is a hint of airy extravagance. Anyone familiar with Fellini will recognise the sound of a breeze on the soundtrack, marking the passage from reality to fantasy. And then Alexandre Desplat’s score kicks in – quirky and ridiculous but somewhat recognisable.

The wedding is tacky and overdone with ribbons being cut and pigeons being released, a crowd of well-wishers bustling and shouting and taking awkward group photographs. However, as the wedding ends and the guests return to their homes, the film moves again into a more sombre, more realistic style in a nice touch suggesting that Garrone is in a more compassionate, humanist mood. The exterior of the apartment building looks stagy and brightly, cinematically lit, but when the camera enters each apartment, everything is a Lynchian green and mundane, even bleak. Public events, like a wedding, are opportunities for everyone to escape from reality, and as a performer it is here where Luciano excels, but in the end we all have to return to the everyday drudge. That Luciano, having caught a glimpse of fame and fortune, cannot settle back into his everyday routine is the main subject of Garrone’s film.

Luciano is an unusual character and the fact that he is likeable to entirely down to Arena’s fantastic performance and Garrone’s careful, sensitive handling of the film. It is very similar to Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima, except for the key fact that Anna Magnani is obnoxious and irritating while Arena is thoroughly endearing and tragic. Luciano gives up his fish stand and more, all his long term prospects sold in pursuit of his five minutes. Garrone romanticizes Luciano’s hopes and dreams - Desplat’s brilliantly adaptable score recalling here the good times of Cinema Paradiso – managing so well that you end up hoping that Luciano gets the call even though you know that the show is awful and Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante), a former Big Brother contestant, is clearly having a tough time of it. At one point, we see Enzo suspended ridiculously from a wire, swinging above the dance floor in a nightclub, something that might be approaching caricature if it were not so grimly plausible. Even though we know that Big Brother is not ideal for Luciano, we nonetheless wish him luck because he wants it so much.

Hence, a very funny prank midway through the film is, in a way, infuriating – every disappointment takes a toll and every silver lining rekindles one’s hopes. This is beautifully expanded into a comment on that ultimate ‘hope’, the afterlife, when Luciano mistakes two mourners for Big Brother scouts. Raised on Hollywood films, just like Luciano (one can imagine), we are unwilling to come to terms with the possibility of failure, again, just like Luciano. Ultimately, the film is about everyone’s hopes and dreams – the comment on today being the fact that our dreams are often as shallow as reality TV fame.

However, despite the somewhat garish colour scheme and the skewed perspective, Reality is a deeply compassionate film which does not laugh at Luciano, instead sympathizing with him, since his ambition is such a long-shot. Even Enzo (Luciano’s future) is a tragic figure, hurriedly visiting two weddings almost at once, always working and always surrounded but nonetheless he does seem to genuinely help Luciano, taking photos with Luciano’s daughter and helping him get an audition even though he is already late. And though the film takes a darker turn during the final act, it never judges or mocks, delivering an ending that is graceful, kind and note-perfect.

Reality seems like a typical satiric look at our obsession with celebrity and there are moments when it is – when one auditioning hopeful is asked why she wants to be on Big Brother, her reply, “to be rich and famous”, is rewarded for being a rare sincere answer. However, Reality proves to be unexpectedly likeable and kind-hearted, an insight into a man who becomes obsessed with celebrity (he is briefly, horrifyingly glimpsed in a DIY diary room) which aims for universal truths rather than easy targets. Against expectation, it makes you care.

Monthly Film Challenge Part 4: F For Fake (1973)

This month we look at a film that is a lot more fun: Orson Welles’ audacious F For Fake, which sees the great man having the time of his life with a cinematic format that can often prove to be a piece of work: the essay film.

Before you watch F For Fake, there are a few things that it might be worth reading up on, such as: Howard Hughes, if you don’t know, was a billionaire tycoon and famous recluse and allegedly deeply mysophobic; Clifford Irving wrote a fake autobiography of Hughes that fooled America; Orson Welles did an infamous radio version of “The War of the Worlds” that also fooled America; Pauline Kael, a highly influential film critic in the 1970s, wrote an article that claimed that Orson Welles took credit for the greatness of other people’s work in Citizen Kane – which deeply offended Welles; Oja Kodar was Welles’ mistress at the time of filming.

F For Fake begins as an apparent documentary on fakery and charlatans and much of the film’s running time focuses, though this is hardly the word, on Elmyr de Hory, a brilliant forger of paintings, and his biographer and subsequent rival Clifford Irving. However, the film is far from a straight biographical sketch as Welles freely moves where his myriad interests take him. The film is often incredibly fast-paced and it is easy for the inattentive viewer to get lost, with the cutting and the voiceover creating the impression of an improvisation in which Welles changes the subject, apologizes for not making much sense, calls it “mumbo-jumbo” and starts again for a different perspective. We often see Welles sitting at a dysfunctional editing table, trying to hammer the film into shape. This gives the impression of a film making itself right there in front of you, allowing the film to feel incredibly new and unique.

However, there is more, much more, to F For Fake than the ramblings of an eloquent master filmmaker, even if half the fun of the film comes from the fact that Welles is an infectiously bubbly and good-natured host. The film begins with a few magic tricks and this is what sets the film’s tone best – F For Fake is a film in love with trickery and it is all about what cinema can do to trick, such as when Welles’ clever editing creates a dialogue between two people who are not in the same room that results in the suggestion of a major revelation. Earlier in the film, he shows the effect that Kodar has on a series of men as she walks down a busy street, the film gleefully cutting and freezing while Welles claims that the actors were real people and gave their reactions at unawares and for free. Welles will promise, “During the next hour everything you will hear from us [Welles and his collaborators] is really true and based on solid fact.” Later, he will even repeat it in writing, yet we are never sure that we can trust him, especially because he is so excited by the subject of fakery. Ultimately, F For Fake keeps the viewer at unawares almost throughout, preferring that they question everything they see.

F For Fake is a film of many subjects, one of which is a questioning of art. Elmyr de Hory is frequently heard saying that if a painting hangs on a wall for so many years, then surely it is art. Elmyr de Hory’s fake paintings have apparently always fooled the experts. These so-called experts are one of the targets of the film – people who dictate the taste of their culture by their own opinions, and yet these opinions are rarely based on fact and can often be contradicted. Remember that Welles had a grudge against Pauline Kael at the time. Welles asks who the real fakers are; people who can paint like Picasso or the experts who arrogantly claim that their work is Picasso. But Welles goes further than this, stating that if the artist himself cannot tell a genuine work from a fake then what does it matter whose signature is on the painting. And, similarly, why should Picasso have all the acclaim and all the riches when other, impoverished artists are just as capable. Welles suggests a difference between genuine art and art for commerce and sees the experts as complicit with the market, turning art into golden investment opportunities via the cult of personality. For Welles, art is less to do with who and more to do with truth. And this is what leads us to the film’s best scene, a beautiful and profound sequence in which Welles visits the cathedral at Chartres, “the premier work of man perhaps in the whole Western world and it is without a signature.” Welles muses aloud on this cathedral, his words moving from praise to ruminations on art in general and on to man and life and death. Art, Welles’ own personal conception of the term, is movingly reaffirmed while its critics are questioned.

Welles presents a version of his own autobiography, in which he emphasises his own falsehoods: the lies that allowed him to act in the Gate Theatre in Dublin despite being an inexperienced sixteen year old and the infamous broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” The effect of this broadcast is made clear: “I didn’t go to jail – I went to Hollywood.” He identifies strongly with Elmyr de Hory, whose own fakery was a result of his destitution after “experts” disregarded his own original paintings. Clifford Irving’s representation of Howard Hughes equally mirrors the original conception of Citizen Kane, which was to have been a fictionalised biopic of Hughes. In a few telling sequences, Welles goes to Las Vegas and points his camera at a hotel penthouse window, presumably where Hughes was eking out an existence. He looks at a series of Hughes myths, developing the idea that the truth will never be discovered from behind the series of myths and lies propagated by Hughes and others. Ultimately, a lot of F For Fake is unclear and a lot of the joy of the film is down to Welles’ own embracing of the fluidity of fiction and fact. At once, he presents a shot of himself reciting poetry about man and truth while distorted through a curved glass (suggesting “Through the Looking Glass”, The Lady From Shanghai and distorted truths) and yet cocks his gaze at the camera and mumbles ‘pretentious.’ As anyone can see, the running time of F For Fake is 85 minutes and even Welles himself delights in “lying [his] head off.”

As is probably obvious from the above, F For Fake is a fast-paced ideas-packed essay. It is a film that rewards multiple viewings and yet is always a lot of fun. Orson Welles delights in simply being a spinner of tales, the more convoluted and confusing the better. We often see him sitting down at a restaurant regaling assorted people with his stories and at times, the film suggests what it would have been like to have had dinner with Welles, his chatter moving seamlessly, and sometimes not so, through a wide range of topics, all interesting and all told with verve and humour. Indeed, a lot of the value of F For Fake is simply how enjoyable it is. Thematically complex and somewhat dark, F For Fake is probably the most fun you will have with an essay film. Exuberant, playful cinema at its finest.

So give it a go and tell us what you think.

Next month: La Chinoise

See also:

La Jetee

Un Chien Andalou

The Seventh Continent

DVD REVIEW: Year of the Horse (1997)

Year of the Horse is a 1997 concert film following a tour by Neil Young and Crazy Horse directed by indie icon Jim Jarmusch, probably best known for Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Broken Flowers. How could it not be unique?

Filmed ‘proudly’ in Super 8, 16mm and Hi-8 video, Jarmusch attempts to show the truth behind the band – how they get along, how they play together and the thirty years of history behind them. The film mixes footage of Neil Young and Crazy Horse from various different times with original concert footage from the 1996 tour.

All of this seems fairly conventional and the film’s opening minutes don’t do anything spectacular – there is a cringingly square lift of the famous opening intertitle from Scorsese’s The Last Waltz exhorting the viewer to play the film loud, footage of the band on stage and old footage of them charmingly setting a decorative arrangement of flowers on fire in what looks like a small hotel room and then complaining to the maid because they didn’t expect the blaze to get as big as it does. However, it’s not long before things get a little more Meta. Guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro challenges Jarmusch, wondering how one filmmaker, and an artsy-fartsy one at that, can possibly contain all of what Neil Young and Crazy Horse means in one little movie and a few snappy questions. Sampedro likes this theme and will repeat this same idea throughout the film, but it seems that Jarmusch does too. As a result, Year of the Horse becomes an attempt to capture the essence of the band, their camaraderie and their music in a unique and innovative way.

So it is probably best to read Year of the Horse as an experiment by a trendy filmmaker stuck with a cumbersome format – the concert film. When there isn’t an inadvertent distillation of a historical or cultural moment (the Summer of Love and Woodstock in the otherwise tedious near-four hour Woodstock or the symbolic death of the previous in the haunting Gimme Shelter - not to mention the actual death accidentally caught on camera), there isn’t really much reason to watch a concert film. They bring across neither the feeling of being at a concert nor even the quality of the music played. Nor are they visually interesting since few people go to concerts for the visuals alone. Film is a versatile medium but, I suspect, the concert film is a stretch too far. So what can Jim Jarmusch do, caught as he is with an unrewarding cinematic style and a mass of important information to get across with only an apparently paltry 106 minutes to do it in?

Someone, I forget who, says during an interview that the Crazy Horse sound is elusive and, when it is there, it is as if all four musicians are playing as one. The music takes over for a golden moment, the musicians merely existing through their instruments rather than performing. Jim Jarmusch seems to be trying to capture this miracle of synchronicity, loading the film with long passages in which Neil Young, Frank Sampedro and Billy Talbot endlessly improvise, their guitars squealing and screeching. The film runs through ten songs from the 1996 tour and in each we see long drawn-out riffs, which may or may not represent that one sound. After a while though it all sounds the same.

When he’s not doing that, Jarmusch shows us scenes of the band when they are not playing on stage, often unplanned, seemingly improvised sequences to which the band members talk or argue or mess around. These include the aforementioned sequence in which they set some fake flowers on fire but also a scene in which they all get high and another in which they fight about ‘parts’ or ‘sets’ or something. Sampedro lounges in his hotel room, watching Robocop 3 on TV and then complains about this film’s inability to capture what Crazy Horse is. Soon Young calls, asking for help with his computer that he hasn’t yet worked out how to use. Then Jarmusch reads some nasty passages from the Old Testament to a rather dumb Young. Jarmusch is attempting to film the band with their guard down, to capture their being and not just the performance, since years of experience is revealed through tiny moments, not floods of information. Fair enough, but the finished film is a messy assemblage of unrelated bits and pieces, falling way short of profundity but hitting the mark with pretension, becoming a dull and rather unlikeable portrait.

A late experiment, cutting between old and new footage of the band playing “Like A Hurricane”, shows that Jarmusch was trying to do something interesting, but ultimately the film represents more about Crazy Horse and life on tour than Sampedro would probably have been happy with. The film sort of captures the tediousness of life on tour and the egos that will inevitably clash when thrown together for long periods of time. Individually, the band members talk about their great friendship and onstage chemistry but together they just seem to get on each other’s nerves. Just as Young has been singing “Like A Hurricane” throughout the long years and each song played here has a long, indistinguishable guitar riff, life in a rock band can be tiring and repetitive.

Concert films are rarely rewarding and, it seems, self-conscious and artistically insecure concert films are even less so. Neil Young and Crazy Horse are great musicians and a lot of their songs are classics, so listen to a CD. It won’t come across in Year of the Horse.

Monthly Film Challenge Part 3: The Seventh Continent (1989)

This month, we turn our attention to a film that is less formally innovative, but yet serves as a good introduction to a kind of discursive cinema that will return again and again in subsequent articles. The Seventh Continent attempts to have a conversation with its audience, asking them questions and suggesting answers rather than giving them. The film is in many ways a debate about the modern world, though one that is philosophical more than political. Many will disagree with the film’s suggestions yet the film is of value for its willingness to engage its audience, rather than merely sedate them with mild entertainment and easy answers.

The Seventh Continent is the feature film debut of Michael Haneke, the troubling and always controversial director of Hidden and The White Ribbon. This first film bears all the trademarks and preoccupations of Haneke’s later work alongside a deeply disturbing and challenging worldview. The Seventh Continent is the first part of Haneke's 'Trilogy of Glaciation', a term he was to regret, and is followed by the unconvincing Benny's Video and the repetitive 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.

Georg (Dieter Berner) and Anna (Birgit Doll) are a professional couple, each married to their careers and to the accoutrements of life. They are, as far as they know, content. The only thorn in their side is Evi (Leni Tanzer), their young daughter, who frequently pretends to be ill or blind as a form of rebellion from their cold and oppressive existence.

The film is divided into three parts, each following them through one day, one in 1987, one in 1988 and the last in 1989. Georg and Anna awaken to the sounds of the news, always another international incident, which they blithely ignore. While Georg dresses, Anna goes to wake Evi up for school. They all breakfast together before climbing into the same small car to be individually dropped off by Georg on his way to work. Anna writes a letter to Georg’s parents, detailing how fine they all are and how it looks like Georg might get that promotion after all. Back home, they have dinner and berate Evi about her latest outburst. Then they go to bed.

Their second day, in 1988, is almost identical, though the seeds of discontent appear to be growing. The third day, in 1989, details their desperate attempt to escape from the shackles of routine and consumption. However, the odds are staked against them and success, at best, appears unlikely.

In Part One, the critique is strong and convincing. By watching these people going through their everyday activities, it becomes painfully clear how tedious our lives can be. Part Two follows them in another day – one that could have been the exact same day as all the shots are similar and all the actions familiar. While this may sound almost impossibly dull, Haneke lends these events his usual intellectual weight. The shots are usually fixed, with the camera kept tight on it’s subject, so that the sight of Georg tying his shoelaces becomes a mediation on the nature of time, routine and obsession, rather than conveying character or space. As is always the case with Haneke, the passing of time is captured by extremely long takes, which may become tests of endurance to the uninitiated, but remain powerfully expressive nonetheless.

The fact that Haneke not only refuses to cut away from these activities but also shows them twice allows him to create something of a dialogue with the audience. Open-minded audience members are encouraged to engage with the film. By making us watch everyday details, by confronting us with the mundane without any of the usual comforts such as an exciting story or interesting characters, Haneke gives us the space to think about how we lead our lives. The Seventh Continent is certainly conversational, although it is one that is fiercely chaired by Haneke. It makes for a tough watch, and Haneke is certainly a malicious filmmaker, but the result is fascinating and persuasive.

With Part Three, Haneke gives us an alternative to deadening routine and capitalist consumption. Though Georg and Anna may appear content with their lot in Parts One and Two, Haneke uses quiet, ambiguous moments in which a dinner guest and later Anna burst into tears, without any apparent reason. It seems that though, on the surface, everything is fine, once the characters find a moment to reflect, they see things the way they really are. They realize what they have lost and how unimportant the things that have distracted them really are. Part Three shows Georg, Anna and Evi, locked up in their apartment, quietly resolved to sort their lives out. Intended as an attempt to escape, what they end up doing is destructive rather than constructive and it is pursued with the same deadening sense of repetition and routine that had made their lives previously so insufferable. Ultimately, desolation closes this profound and unsettling mediation on the way we lead our lives and the weight of a soulless, mechanized world.

Fascinating as it is, The Seventh Continent is not without its flaws. Many shots do go on too long, becoming merely a measure of Haneke’s own self-indulgence. Part Two is largely a repetition of Part One and somewhat labours the point. As in the majority of Haneke’s work, screens - televisions, computers, windows – are ever present, with the unhappy news of foreign lands constantly being ignored by Georg and Anna, uncaring precisely because they are trapped with their own problems. Though it is an important point, Haneke’s presentation of it may only diminish what is a vital critique.

The film also uses some awkward symbolism. Early in the film, Evi pretends to have suddenly become blind while at school. Though one of her teachers quickly outsmarts her, the metaphor is loud and clear. Evi may be pretending to be blind, but her parents actually are blind, only they don’t know it. As a result, the film is a little hectoring. Haneke would go on to make Funny Games, one of the most pompous and wrong-headed diatribes in cinema, so a touch of the polemic should always be expected with Haneke.

The Seventh Continent is a rumination, an artistic expression of malaise in which it’s characters approach freedom with the same deadening ritual with which they approached their dead-end lives. Critics of the film have suggested that it is merely an intellectual whinge without any real substance or message and that Georg and Anna should just get over it. However, the film was based on an actual case in which an Austrian family committed group suicide. The Seventh Continent plays as an examination of discontent, it is not, no matter how hard Haneke would like you to believe, real life – although it was initially based on an actual murder case in Austria. Not everyone can shrug off his or her problems and the film is committed to showing that the way we live is not necessarily for everyone. As a presentation of the vacuous routines and the inescapable entrapment of a modern, urban society, it remains a powerful work.

The Seventh Continent, despite its flaws, is an essential film for anyone who wants something more from their cinema. Not only will it make you question the way you live your life, it will also chip away at your preconceptions about what cinema is – art, essay or entertainment. Bearing in mind that, with Hidden and The White Ribbon, Haneke was to learn how to be subtle, The Seventh Continent shows an artist who is in the process of becoming the great filmmaker that he is today (that foolish shot-for-shot American remake of Funny Games notwithstanding) and is a valuable film on many levels.

So give it a go and tell us what you think.

Next month: F For Fake

DVD REVIEW: Scanners (1981)

David Cronenberg’s early cinema was largely an exploration of body horror, a subgenre that dealt with infections and other invasions of the body usually with state-of-the-art special effects. Cronenberg’s first two features dealt explicitly with viruses, while The Brood and Scanners were much more about mental disorders that had disturbing physical manifestations. Cronenberg’s best body horror films, Videodrome and The Fly, married these two strains and coupled them with an intriguing philosophical approach. Scanners is an early suggestion of the great things that Cronenberg would go on to do, but it remains interesting in its own right.

Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is a rootless derelict who is captured by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan, who gives a great hammy performance as a scientist just on the verge of madness), who believes he can help him. Cameron has a severe mental condition; he is a Scanner, which means he can hear people’s thoughts and enter their minds through telepathy. Evil Scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) is recruiting people like Cameron in order to take over the world. Ruth recruits Cameron to find Revok and kill him…

If you know anything about Scanners, it has probably got something to do with the scene in which Darryl Revok causes another Scanner’s head to explode. The film was originally marketed on the shock value of this scene, with a teaser trailer that showed the preview audience’s reaction. The anecdote of how the brutally realistic head-explosion was achieved is recounted on all five of the cast and crew interviews on the DVD. One could be forgiven for thinking that there is little else of interest in the film itself apart from that one short, early scene.

However, if the head-explosion quickly and inevitably loses its shock value, the film is still not devoid of interest. Cronenberg’s films have always been powerfully visceral and Scanners is remarkably successful at conveying the gruesome tactility of the telepathy at work, visualizing the invisible mental processes of its characters. In the much more impressive final sequence, in which Cameron and Revok have a battle of the minds the marks of the battle appear physically on the body. This idea refers to the mind-body problem, most specifically to Cartesian dualism, in which it is believed that the mind can exert control over the body. In Scanners, scanning someone can increase their heart rates, cause their veins to burst or, as we know, make their head explode. Indeed, the mind might even become so powerful that it becomes independent of the body and jettisons it, leaving it to burn into smouldering ash.

Aside from an emphasis on visceral horror and the latest (for the time) special effects, Cronenberg is primarily interested in addressing philosophy. Though Scanners is much more of a horror movie and a thriller than a rigorous exploration of certain channels of thought, it does make for an entertaining and nasty film that is full of interesting ideas. It is also of interest as an early sign of what Cronenberg went on to be – his latest two films, A Dangerous Method and Cosmopolis, are largely dialogue-driven though at times the old head-exploding Cronenberg shows through. Similarly, the film is a surprisingly successful mix of arthouse and exploitation, in which the crowd-pleasing money shot might double as the conclusion to a chain of thought. The result is a film that can be thoroughly entertaining and intellectually stimulating.

That said, the film is far from flawless. Cronenberg here is much more interested in making an exploitation horror film than an arthouse film and it does show in the film’s high quotient of shoot-outs and violence, often at the expense of plot or character. As well as this, Cronenberg is not yet as in control of his medium as he would later be. In comparison to his best films, Scanners often feels clunky and amateurish. Stephen Lack and Jennifer O’Neill are rather bland leads. Lack, an artist rather than an actor, has great eyes for the role but little else. McGoohan and Ironside have great fun, though their performances suggest that they thought the script was so much pap and was not to be taken seriously. Cronenberg is noticeably absent from the interviews on the DVD, suggesting that he has moved on from and might even be embarrassed by the film. Scanners can be considered as Cronenberg’s last film in his exploitation period since his next film was the much more arthouse and thoroughly mind-bending classic Videodrome.

Scanners is a decent horror film, an entertaining mystery-thriller with an exploding head and a fantastically visual mind battle, which will divide its audience between those who will laugh and those who will think it effective. The film defies easy categorization, and remains an effective early entry in the back catalogue of one of the most interesting and visually powerful filmmakers working today.

See also:

A Dangerous Method

Cosmopolis

From Beyond

Monthly Film Challenge Part 2: Un Chien Andalou (1929)

So, from an innovative science-fiction/ documentary/ philosophical treatise to one of the best known of the Surrealists’ films, The Monthly Film Challenge turns to 1929’s Un Chien Andalou, a remarkably compact sixteen-minute experimental work from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Unlike La Jetée, Un Chien Andalou is a surprisingly simple work in terms of what it is trying to say. Basically it is the story of a couple’s strained sexual relations and their eventual break-up. Underneath this is a study of how bourgeoisie culture, traditions and education block the way towards true love. What is challenging about the film, however, is the way that the message is conveyed as opposed to the message itself. The aesthetics of Un Chien Andalou are essentially like those of a dream, where the traditional means of telling a story are avoided in order to create a work that may seem practically incomprehensible; and yet is surprisingly clear.

The protagonists of Un Chien Andalou are presented simply as Man (Pierre Batcheff) and Young Girl (Simone Mareuil), just as they are in Buñuel and Dalí’s other great early Surrealist work, L’Age d’or. The film is less interested in them as characters, instead studying them as symbols. Man and Young Girl are meant to stand for all young men and women. The film is essentially divided into four parts, the first three separated by an intertitle that may or may not have anything to do with the events onscreen. There is little point in moving through the film and providing an exact interpretation on what happens in each section, since anyone’s ideas are equally valid as long as they’ve seen the film, but it might instead be interesting to look at some of the ideas thrown up by each part and how they relate to one another.

The first part is entitled “Once Upon A Time” and is only about forty seconds in length and yet it is one of the most notorious scenes in cinema history. It features a graphic close-up of a woman’s eye being slit by a straight razor. The scene was intended to shock a complacent audience, warning them that they will have to do more than simply watch the film – they will have to engage with it. Buñuel, who played the barber in this scene, is not so much attacking the woman’s eye as attacking his audience’s traditional ways of seeing. Similarly, the scene’s title and the imagery of the cloud and the moon suggests a fairy tale feel and brings about certain expectations in its audience. These are subverted by the famous match-cut in which the image of a cloud passing over the moon is followed by an image of a razor passing over an eye. The mix of beauty and brutality knocks the viewer out of their comfort zone and the film’s willingness to trick forcibly reactivates their brain. The viewer must think about the film critically in order to work out what it is that the film is saying. As the opening of the film, this section attempts to put the viewer in the right frame of mind to watch what will then follow.

“Eight Years Later” marks the film’s shift into its second part. As is typical of the Surrealists, this intertitle makes no real narrative sense, suggesting that there is a narrative connection between the homicidal barber and the Man and Young Girl to whom we are about to be introduced. Although there is a symbolic, or possibly even a thematic, link between these people, the intertitle is essentially meaningless. This section is by far the longest in the film and it is full of incident. We are introduced to Man as he cycles shakily down a road, wearing a ridiculous frilly costume and a box tied around his neck. We are made to take notice of the frills and the box by some very deliberate close-ups, showing that Un Chien Andalou does indeed have a reasoning behind it and that the filmmakers are willing to use traditional film language to communicate it. The overall suggestion is that the Man is sexually immature and effeminate. The Young Girl is the opposite. She is sitting at home, clearly ill at ease, her sexual desire for the Man, indicated by intercutting shots of her with shots of the Man approaching, all the stronger because it has obviously never been fully consummated. Her frustration is obvious – she throws down a book she is reading which shows a sexless image of a woman in a bonnet working at a sewing machine. When she sees the Man fall off his bike, she is disappointed again – the Man lies prostrate on the ground, useless. The film is essentially about sexual immaturity and sexual frustration.

The Young Girl’s frustration is suggested further by the highly suggestive sequence in which another woman tries to prod a severed hand back to life. A crowd forms, horrified at this open display of sexuality and yet they cannot turn away. Eventually, a policeman breaks it up and places the severed hand back in its box. This is Buñuel’s critique of the repressive nature of a bourgeoisie society, which is equally horrified and fascinated by sexuality and which needs a police force to keep them a check. This woman is subsequently run over whilst in despair at her suppression, the crowd caring a lot less about her violent death than they did about her sexual openness. This idea of a bourgeoisie society that keeps sexuality chained down recurs later when the Man, in a fit of an animalistic sexual passion, attempts to devour the Young Girl, only to be first fended off by a tennis racket (a symbol of bourgeoisie leisure/distraction) and then held back by the weight of two bishops and two pianos with dead horses inside them. It is clear what Buñuel and Dalí think about what the bourgeois culture does to man’s natural sexuality. Similarly, though the Young Girl openly wishes that the Man would gain sexual competence and even an animal passion, when he finally does she is terrified by him, suggesting that her attempted rejection of her bourgeoisie upbringing has failed. The film is full of suggestive and surreal imagery, which I won’t go through since the joy of this film is that it is entirely up to you.

The second part of the film is revealed to be largely the Young Girl’s dream – one that begins with her mourning the death of her sexual desire in the image of the second woman being run over by a car but which turns into a bourgeoisie nightmare of uncontrolled sexual passion. Though it can be understood in narrative terms as a dream, it charts the inner landscape of the Young Girl, laying bare her thoughts and feelings in terms to her sexuality and her thwarted relationship with the Man.

The third part of the film, beginning with the intertitle “Toward Three in the Morning”, charts the man’s inner landscape as he lies in bed and reflects on his own upbringing. A second man arrives and berates the Man for his frilly clothes and his sexual incompetence. He punishes the Man by making him face the wall – a typical school punishment, which, like a stream of consciousness, reminds the Man of his schooldays, the site of his education and the beginning of the repression of his sexual drive. This second man is revealed to be his younger, more sexually free self – as indicated by an image of his hands gleefully shaking a cocktail shaker, revealing his lack of concern over masturbation where before an image of masturbation was horrible and eerie, suggestive of self-mutilation such as the image of a hand infested with insects. In the end, the Man kills his younger self when two schoolbooks he is holding turn into guns. A comical funeral is held for the Man’s younger self.

The Young Girl’s own sexual death is considered next, when she sees a Death’s Head moth, familiar from The Silence of the Lambs. That the repressive nature of the Man might be the death of her is suggested when the Man removes his own mouth in order to resemble the Death’s Head moth. Reacting against this, the Young Girl uses her mouth to assert her own sexuality with a series of sexually suggestive gestures, from putting on lipstick to sticking her tongue out. Ultimately, she rejects the Man and leaves the apartment.

The fourth part of the film is not marked by an intertitle but instead by a surprising shift in space. The Young Girl leaves the apartment and is somehow now on a beach. Here, she meets a version of the Man that she prefers. Stripes have stood for a sexual maturity throughout the film, especially when the Young Girl trades the Man’s plain tie for a striped one just before his passionate outburst. Here, the Man is wearing stripes but he is also wearing typically bourgeoisie clothes as well, suggesting a compromise between sexual passion and social strictures that she can accept. He is initially troubled, holding up his watch as if he is aware that their days are numbered. She is not bothered and they embrace. However, their journey across the beach seems rocky and with his final intertitle, “In Spring”, which does the same to the viewer’s expectations as “Once Upon A Time” did earlier, Buñuel reveals that this marriage of convenience can only lead to death.

Though not thematically complex, the joy of watching Un Chien Andalou comes from the ability to decide what to take from it yourself. Technically, the film is brimming with invention and it is an exciting film to watch for the amount of ideas that it throws around. It has a conventional message – true love is thwarted by our repressive society – but it is far from conventional in how it presents this message. Just like La Jetée, it packs a lot into its short running time and it is one of the most innovative and important films ever made.

So give the film a go and tell us what you think. 

Next month: The Seventh Continent

Or see Part 1 of the Monthly Film Challenge: La Jetée

DVD REVIEW: City of Women (1980)

Federico Fellini was one of the best filmmakers in the world – particularly due to his ability to make purely cinematic films without plots and many of the other things that lesser film directors might fall back on. Fellini was not a storyteller but he was a filmmaker. Juliet of the Spirits and Fellini Satyricon are prime examples of films that succeed on visual and tonal inventiveness alone. Neither have stories. City of Women was one of his later films and while it does show a certain unevenness, it has enough of the old Fellini touches to make it entirely worthwhile.

Plot is a pointless word to use but as far as it goes City of Women is about a businessman, Snàporaz (Marcello Mastroianni, often used as Fellini’s filmic alter ego in his best work, including La Dolce Vita and 8½), who steps off a train and ends up caught up in a feminist convention. As Snàporaz wonders through this world dominated by women, his own relationship with women is interrogated and criticized. He is also frequently humiliated. Eventually, he will escape to the apparent idyll of Dr. Xavier Zuberkock (Ettore Manni), who is celebrating his ten thousandth conquest, until the feminists arrive and stop the party.

As with a lot of Fellini’s work, one has to look for meaning in the subtext rather than in the actual onscreen action. City of Women may reflect Fellini’s own ambivalence and bewilderment about the feminist movement that was gaining influence at the time. In the feminist convention sequence, the film is certainly mocking the women. They are hopelessly disorganised and discussions are likely to descend into a cacophony of propagandist sloganeering. Similarly, the sheer range of arguments lead to a slew of contradictions and in-fighting, all hilariously captured by Fellini’s freewheeling camera weaving through the carefully designed sets. These scenes angered many when the film was released, the film in general being regarded as misogynist. However, while Fellini does undoubtedly poke fun at the radicalism of some of the feminists, he is hardly complementary to men. Mastroianni is hilarious here as a lecher who wanders around with a dirty grin, pretending unconvincingly to be sympathetic to the feminist cause. When the women turn on him and thoroughly cut him down to size, the rest of the film becomes a chase as Snàporaz tries to escape from these vengeful women, who are justifiably tired of being treated like pieces of meat.

Like 8½ and Juliet of the Spirit, the resulting journey takes place much more logically inside Snàporaz’ head than outside of it. A lot of the rest of the film concerned itself with Snàporaz’, and Fellini’s by extension, attitudes to women. Zuberkock’s villa is decadent and sexist, but it remains Snàporaz’ dream house – it also recalls the harem sequence from 8½ or the orgy sequence from La Dolce Vita. Zuberkock’s gift to Snàporaz of two women for the night plays out first like a Hollywood musical with Snàporaz gleefully channelling Fred Astaire and moves into the bedroom. Here, however, it morphs to a nightmare for Snàporaz when, instead of two busty, mothering bikinied women, Snàporaz finds himself in bed with a sexually forceful and animalistic incarnation of his previously distant wife Elena (Anna Prucnal). He desperately avoids sex with her and then regresses into childhood via a portal under his bed and a slide – a beautifully orchestrated sequence in which Snàporaz revisits his sexual history through brightly lit windows (read rose-tinted spectacles). As a result, far from being a reactionary diatribe against feminism by an aging sexist, City of Women is a semi-biographical confession and critique of men and their positioning of women into either passive or nurturing roles.

Similarly, the film reflects back on Fellini’s own back catalogue with many scenes that refer back to his previous films, 8½ and Amarcord most frequently. It is open to interpretation if Fellini is inviting us to look back and consider how he represented women in his previous films. This adds a further layer to the film as one gets the impression of an artist reconsidering his legacy – remaking some best known sequences from his other films but with a further level of insight. As a result, City of Women, far from being one of Fellini’s least successful and significant films, is one of the key films in his oeuvre.

As fun and inventive as City of Women undoubtedly is, it is also overlong and some of the sequences just do not work – particularly Snàporaz’ encounter with some young women who drive around listening to techno and doing drugs. It’s a long sequence, which doesn’t really seem to have much to say. A two-hour cut would stand the film in good stead, but otherwise City of Women is a brilliantly made, beautifully lit interrogation of men’s attitudes to women. It might also be Fellini’s funniest films. City of Women is one of his most ramshackle films; yet, for this director, a hint of chaos is always a sign of great inventiveness. Fellini’s films have always worked thanks to their close proximity to disaster.

DVD REVIEW: The Girl From Rio (1969)

Jess Franco is one of the most prolific exploitation filmmakers – almost two hundred directorial credits and counting - and a truly international filmmaker, with co-productions set up all around the world. The Girl From Rio is one of eight films that Franco made for a 1969 release – during a week’s break in the production, he shot a third of 99 Women, without the star. The Girl From Rio is West German/ Spanish/ American financed and was shot cheaply in Brazil. It is a spy adventure laced with sci-fi and Franco’s trademark eroticism.

Secret agent Jeff Sutton (Richard Wyler) arrives in Rio and is immediately in over his head as he stumbles across a battle between carnival-masked gangsters lead by Sir Masius (George Sanders) and an army of women lead by Sumuru (Shirley Eaton, who previously played this super-villain in 1967’s The Million Eyes of Sumuru). Sutton’s contact, Lesley (Maria Rohm) disappears and Sutton is promptly kidnapped by Sumuru’s henchwomen and tortured.

The Girl From Rio exudes economics. It is a film that is all about retaining a low budget yet attracting a wide audience by appealing to their lowest desires. It is sexually explicit by 1969 standards with lesbianism and bisexuality. There are scenes of torture by kissing, by electric fan and by invisible rays and sound effects stand in for any kind of special effects. The women are trussed up in cheap costumes that are sci-fi/ Gothic/ S&M/ superhero/ silly but always revealing. It was filmed in Brazil because Brazil was cheap and, as Harry Alan Towers admits in the DVD extras, had no union problems. The fighting sequences are all entirely unbelievable and the film frequently uses the same shots more than once.

One can usually spot these kinds of films a mile away – usually they feature a faded star from Hollywood’s golden age and an ex-Bond girl. Here, George Sanders is very much slumming it, and his performance is a mix of resigned humour and boredom. Though how can anyone enliven an exchange like: Sanders: “What happened to your clothes?” Girl: “I lost them.” Sanders looks down and frowns, Franco capturing a moment in which the truth of a real reaction breaks through the performance – probably the only moment of reality in the film. Meanwhile, Shirley Eaton (best known for being painted to death in Goldfinger) plays it straight as a radical feminist who nevertheless makes her female soldiers dress up in skimpy uniforms and, as the finale reveals, clearly does not bother to train them in combat. Richard Wyler does a sub-par Bond impression, wandering through a non-plot with a bemused eyebrow cocked, a plan that seems to involve getting captured and tortured and an apparent harem of women. He also seems to have a problem with punching bad guys, often swinging his fists about a foot away from them – it may have something to do with his manicures, which he goes on about a few times. Maria Rohm gets undressed because Eaton won’t – one lesbian scene makes use of a body double, unbeknownst to Eaton herself at the time. She is still quite unhappy about it in the interview that accompanies the DVD.

Jess Franco’s films have never been plot-driven and many of them are near incomprehensible. Some consider Franco to be an artist and others prefer to think of him as a hack. Some believe that he makes poetic films within an exploitation context and if we could only see them as they were originally intended, instead of the nudity-packed studio edits and terrible English dubbing, we would all see their worth. There was even a claim that Franco’s films were not made to be seen individually and that a four-movie late night marathon is the only way to get into the frame of mind to appreciate them best.

The Girl From Rio has a wandering pace and a lot of supposedly ruminative camerawork – the kind that moves from a tight close-up of one object to another for no apparent reason. The opening scene sort of recalls something from Fellini’s mid-to-late work. To be fair, the film does often feel like it could be the stuff of, admittedly dated, art cinema if it wasn’t so seedy – for your sanity, it would be better to ignore the fact that the prison is reminiscent of the “Year Zero Theatre” in Godard’s political classic La Chinoise, a scene which also features female nudity. The difference is that Godard’s frame of reference is Mao’s Little Red Book, Dostoevsky’s Demons and the writings of Bertolt Brecht while Franco’s is probably films like Hammer’s She and Slave Girls, both cheap but also much more competently made. Also, while Godard engages with an audience that likes to use it’s brain, Franco seems to aim The Girl From Rio at people who like films with their drugs.

Jess Franco has said, “The Girl From Rio is a comic strip in every way.” It is certainly carefully colour coded but it is also paper-thin. It might be fun to pretend that any concern other than economics was behind Franco’s decision to make The Girl From Rio, but in reality it is merely a cheap, dated and rather tame piece of erotic exploitation sleaze that wouldn’t see a re-release were it not for today’s trendy interest in self-proclaimed bad cinema.  

See also:

The Commander

From Beyond

DVD REVIEW: From Beyond (1986)

Stuart Gordon is a horror director who owes his cult credentials to only one film: 1985’s loose H. P. Lovecraft adaptation Re-Animator. A low-budget schlocky horror-comedy with a lot of splatter, Re-Animator has been made harder and harder to be fond of following two unlikeable sequels (Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator), directed by Brian Yuzna, the producer of the original Re-Animator and Gordon’s own 1986 follow-up From Beyond.

With Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton returning from Re-Animator, From Beyond is essentially a re-run of the previous hit albeit with a role reversal. Dr Crawford Tillinghast (Combs) and Dr Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel, channelling Ernest Thesiger from Bride of Frankenstein in more than just name) are working on a machine that can stimulate the pineal gland of any human nearby, allowing them to see visions of a world beyond their senses. Pretorius is apparently killed when the experiment goes wrong and Tillinghast is committed as a crazed schizophrenic.

While institutionalised, Tillinghast meets Dr Katherine McMichaels (Crampton), who is intrigued by his research and who manages to get Tillinghast released into her custody. With policeman Bubba Brownlee (a very good Ken Foree, the lead in the original Dawn of the Dead, now slumming it in Rob Zombie’s terrible movies) keeping a wary eye on Tillinghast, they return to the site of the experiment in order to carry it out again. It is not long before an evil presence from another world starts to affect their minds.

As with Re-Animator, the plot is not essential as Stuart Gordon’s primary concern here are the special effects, which have aged reasonably well. In the 1980s, especially after the innovations in the transformation sequence in the otherwise rather dull An American Werewolf in London, horror filmmakers tackled special effects with élan and ingenuity. Whether the film was serious, as in Cronenberg, or less so, the make-up and special effects were effective precisely because they felt so homemade and weirdly natural. Fake blood will always be more convincing than its spurting CGI counterpart, which has taken a lot of the fun out of these kinds of films, and there is always something likable about a film that puts its actors through all manner of splatter and uncomfortable make-up.

However, as convincing as the majority of the special effects remain, splatter films are rarely well paced and are almost always perched on the wrong side of camp. As a result, From Beyond does not have much of a plot and the actors do not really have very much to do other than gawk at whatever the special effects team throw at them. As well as this, it is difficult to take the film all that seriously as you are constantly waiting for the next gag rather than the next scare. There is little to no suspense and the film is never frightening. With its focus on the pineal gland and abnormalities therein, From Beyond fits into the body horror category and yet it does not manage to convey the same levels of disgust and unease that Cronenberg can without really trying. As good as the special effects are, From Beyond is almost entirely focussed on them to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

Having said that, the film is not devoid of other interests. The actors are all reasonably good, particularly Ken Foree, who keeps the film somewhat down to earth and likable. There is an entire set piece involving a giant worm during which Foree is wearing only very small underwear because, after all, he just got out of bed. Combs continues to show his ability to overact and say ridiculous things while keeping an entirely straight face. Early in the film, he stares directly at the camera, his face twisted in sheer terror, and says, “It bit off his head…like a gingerbread man.” Crampton’s obvious miscasting only adds to the fun and she gamely pretends to be an expert psychiatrist. Sorel is entertaining as the villain almost in spite of the sheer amount of make-up on him. A lot of the film takes place inside a creepy house on Benevolent Street and Combs, Crampton and Foree make an engaging trio, so much so that when the film splits them up and moves to a different location it is much less interesting. Ultimately, From Beyond is undone by messy plotting more than anything else.

From Beyond, despite having the bigger budget and more special effects, seems like a toned down version of Re-Animator. It is not as dark or as funny or as well paced. However, it is reasonably entertaining in the same way as the 1960s Hammer horrors and the 1930s monster movies. Its major flaws are that is not scary enough and that it is too focussed on special effects at the expense of plotting and characterization. It feels a lot more calculated than the surprise hit Re-Animator, the attempt at making more of same betraying the spirit of the original. Though still fun, it is probably best suited for a boring afternoon than a late night.

See also: The Commander (1988) and Scanners (1981)

Monthly Film Challenge: La Jetée (1962)

This is the first of a monthly series of articles that will look at some of the more difficult films available. The series will be a challenge to those who think they know cinema – people who have seen A bout de soufflé and Tokyo Story and get both. The challenge will be to watch the film featured and then read the article and then watch it again – usually the first viewing will be unsuccessful, something I can vouch for by my own experience. These films are nearly impossible to come to cold, and the article is designed to assist. However, these articles are not intended to be the last word on these films, most of which are much too complex to be accurately considered in so brief a time. They are merely meant to be an examination or rumination on these films that are too often ignored or turned off halfway through. The opinions of anyone who watches the film all the way through is equally valuable and welcome. They are difficult films but they remain films that no one who claims to really know cinema can ignore. First up is a relatively less difficult film, Chris Marker’s 1962 classic La Jetée. Please note that there will be spoilers as I will be looking at the film as a whole.

First, let’s begin with what is generally known about La Jetée, a brilliant blend of the science fiction and essay film. It is a film composed almost entirely of still images, as admittedly is all of cinema. Terry Gilliam remade it in Hollywood as Twelve Monkeys and its influence was most recently visible in blockbusters such as Source Code and Looper. Recently, Sight and Sound placed it as the joint 50^th greatest film of all time. It is 29 minutes long.

The plot is as follows: World War III has devastated the world. The survivors live underground where they are under the control of a group of mad scientists who are experimenting with time travel in an effort to save the present with the help of the past and future. One man (Davos Hanich), who has a particular strong memory of a woman (Hélène Chatelain) from the past, proves the most capable of time travel as a result. When he is finally sent back, he falls in love with the woman, but when he attempts to escape the scientists tragedy strikes.

La Jetée is a masterpiece of science fiction, being both palpably otherworldly yet brimming with ideas about the real world. Chiefly, the film is about the nature of memory and of the cinema. The film’s still images present the idea of film at its most stripped down. The film conveys movement and action by increasing the tempo of the editing and by presenting out-of-focus snaps in place of more obviously framed and constructed photographs. The fact that the still images come to feel like a film reveals the mechanics and artifice of the cinema and how easily it plays on our minds. One later sequence in which the time travelling man witnesses the woman he loves waking up is most fascinating and requires a separate paragraph.

In this scene, Marker skilfully fades still images into each other, creating the impression of movement where there isn’t any, revealing that cinema, for all its drama and power, is merely the fact of two images melding into each other and creating the impression of continuous movement. However, there is much more to this revelatory scene that an exposé of the artifice of cinema. Throughout the film, Marker frequently equates images with memories. At the beginning of the film, the beautifully dispassionate voiceover of James Kirk (in the English version, Jean Négroni in the French original) explains, “This is the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood. The violent scene which upset him and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later happened on the main pier at Orly, Paris airport, sometime before the outbreak of World War III.” The use of the words ‘image’ and ‘scene’ where references to memory would be less incongruous consciously reference the cinema and its effect on our minds. The man is marked, hence, by an image/memory and it is precisely this ‘marking’ that allows the man to time travel, a strong image making for a strong memory. This is captured perfectly in the scene in which the woman wakes up. Here, the still images of the woman waking morph into the impression of movement, a strong static image being relived through memory.

When the devastation of Paris is revealed, the very nature of the black-and-white still photography used gives the scene the impression of authenticity, recalling real war-time photography. Marker reveals how easy it is to be taken in by images and how much trust we attach to them. The shift to the underground is matched by a shift into unnatural images as the film moves into science fiction, apparently leaving reality behind. When the man first travels through time, his movement into the past is marked again by a return to natural imagery, a peacetime landscape and a peacetime bedroom. The film comments on how the very realness of the images is what makes them all the more false in the context of Marker’s science fiction, creating the impression of a return to the past without the audience having moved anywhere. While Marker plays with the falsity of his images, his priority, however, is revealing the corrosive effect of images.

This is clear from the opening, describing a man ‘marked by an image.’ In the underground, the lead scientist always wears big goggles, that recall two camera lenses, and the man cannot time travel without a large eyemask. Memories affects human beings as images do, entering through the eyes and corroding and altering the mind. The scientists’ experiments have caused death and madness – with Marker showing one victim of madness lit from beneath, his hollow eye sockets lost in deep shadows, an eviscerated skull. The lead scientist with his camera/goggles may be using the camera as a defence against corrosive imagery or as a new way of seeing. Time travel destroys most human minds as it destroys the ability to distinguish between images/memories and reality, past and present. The man can only time travel because his memory from the time is such a strong image. Similarly, the sequence where the man first finds himself in what might be a museum is ambiguous. He is either travelling through time and through his own memories, the decay of the statues reflecting the passage of time and/or the vagueness of his memories. Later, in a second museum sequence, we will briefly see the man and the woman framed behind borders and set behind glasses just like the exhibits – as if they too are only items for a time since passed. The march of time is both inescapable and unknowable.

This is ultimately the conclusion of the film. The man travels into the future, which is better protected than the past – no memory brings him there. In the future, the man wears sunglasses constantly, as protection from or the result of strong imagery – an image that is not a memory becoming a present that is not a reality. Similarly, when the people from the future appear to him, Marker using scratches and blotches on the film stock to represent the fact they have traversed the fabric of time without the help of the image/memory but by destroying it. The people of the future are able to do this because of some unknowable technology, but the man’s own denial of time meets with a much more tragic outcome. The man returns to the pier at Orly in the end to re-live this childhood moment, to become a part of the image/memory of the girl that has obsessed him for years. However, re-living a moment of time is forbidden to him and his entry is brutally cut short. He is shot down as he runs to the end of pier, which reflects either the end of time or the jumping of point from which he will escape time. The march of time must go on and the man learns that there is “no way out of time.”

Ultimately, La Jetée may be a rumination on aging and the passing of time. The man wants more than anything to return to a site of childhood fascination and innocence. The child is there to be wowed by the airplanes and is instead wowed by a woman. The violent event that so “marked” this child reflects the onset of maturity, its destructive qualities emphasised by the immediately following devastation of Paris: “And soon afterwards, Paris was blown up.” The man’s attempt to return to his childhood and to “that face which was to be a unique image of peacetime [read childhood] to carry with him through the whole wartime [read life]” is fundamentally a denial of time and reality. The man’s death is ultimately the result of his inability to move beyond childhood, to accept the inevitability of aging and death.

So give the film a go and tell us what you think.

See also: Part 2 of the Monthly Film Challenge: Un Chien Andalou 

REVIEW: The Commander (1988)

Directed by Antonio Margheriti, though here credited as Anthony M. Dawson, The Commander is the third in a triptych of Spaghetti War films, following Code Name: Wild Geese and Commando: Leopard. Co-produced by West Germany and Italy, the films were dubbed into English and, in true exploitation style, were initially cheap rip-offs of the Hollywood Wild Geese series.

Though perhaps near incomprehensible to the casual viewer (is there any other kind with this type of film?), the film deals primarily with the aftermath of a cruel South Asian warlord’s violent takeover of an existing corrupt establishment. He drives up the price of his drug shipments, which catches the attention of Colonel Mazzarini (a, even by his mostly low standards, slumming-it Lee Van Cleef). Mazzarini enlists a team of commandos (Lewis Collins and Manfred Lehmann amongst them) to get rid of the warlord. Somewhere along the way, some plastic surgery, a shipment of weapons, a camp Donald Pleasence and a floppy disc full of top secret information get wrapped up in the plot which strings together a series of double crosses and action sequences.

When Sergio Leone made A Fistful of Dollars, it is intended, from a financial point of view at the very least, as a quick and cheap Western rip-off that would be tricked into American cinemas and return a fast buck. Unexpectedly, the film became a hit and established itself as a classic in the emerging Spaghetti Western genre. Italian B movies have since gained a cult following, largely due more to their much higher quotient of sex and violence rather than their quality. Is there anyone who really prefers Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters to Dawn of the Dead or Lamberto Bava’s Demons to The Evil Dead? What made Leone a rare breed was that his films were aesthetically innovative and much riskier than their often sodden American counterparts, to say nothing of the fact that many of his films attained the level of art. With Margheriti and The Commander, we have a Reagan-era action movie knock-off, which clearly aspires to be like films that weren’t any good in the first place.

In the 2000s, Quentin Tarantino took a break from making good films and started a campaign to popularise defunct exploitation and grindhouse films. Quickly tiring of turgid and egotistical knock-off homages like Kill Bill, Death Proof, Planet Terror and Machete, we moved into watching the real things, which goes some way towards explaining why anyone would release or watch The Commander. With tongue firmly in cheek and ready to watch everything with an ironic eye, an audience should find sleazy enjoyment in The Commander. But the film is a laugh-free mess of a film with unexciting action sequences, typically bad performances, clichés presented as if they were innovations, all put together by filmmakers who had no interested in stretching themselves. That is not to say that these kinds of films are all devoid of some guilty pleasures. Silent Night, Deadly Night, from the same label, is a good example of a dodgy, once-controversial film that nevertheless has some surprises of its own. But The Commander is one of those very poor films with which audiences will have to forgive too much and celebrate too little if they are ever going to make a case for its entertainment value.

Never mind that the film openly riffs on Vietnam and America’s military power and that America’s apparent right to intervene in other countries is presented uncritically and that the film is yet another tiresome example of the kind of extreme right-wing militarism that began to infect the multiplexes in the 1980s (Rambo: First Blood Part II, Commando). The film has enough flaws without getting into the politics behind it. The plot, if one exists, is near incomprehensible and the action sequences are cheap. The ending is presented as if it is clever, but it manages to be both contrived and predictable. The filmmakers’ tricks to hide the low budget are all transparent as when they cut away to an obviously decontextualised shot of a ball of flame in order to avoid having to blow up a real helicopter. Elsewhere, the model-work is distractingly obvious. Beyond this, the action sequences are rather repetitive, with someone firing, rolling and firing again, all with little or no visual flair. The characters are void of personality and the dialogue is either superfluous, such as one character’s annoyance about being told where to take a piss, or tin-eared. As bad cinema, that awful term, it excels.

Is a certain degree of quality not something that should be demanded of every film? Why celebrate dumb cinema as if lack of ambition and care were commendable? Is it common sense not to be taken in or is it just snobbery? The Commander raises many difficult and interesting questions, ones that are of particular interest now that it has been released on DVD.   

REVIEW: El Bulli: Cooking In Progress (2010)

El Bulli: Cooking In Progress is a documentary, directed by Gereon Wetzel, about the now-closed Spanish restaurant elBulli and its head chef Ferran Adrià. The restaurant dealt in avant-garde cuisine and the film details the process behind the food, from its conception through to its presentation.

The documentary reveals a year in the life of the restaurant and the key people involved, starting with the closing of the restaurant at the end of the summer season. Adrià and a team of his senior chefs, including Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch, spend the next few months testing out new “concepts”, cooking them a number of different ways and recording the results. Later, as June and the re-opening approach, a swarm of new recruits are brought in to assist with these large operations. We then see the restaurant in action, dealing effectively and quickly with the many different orders, while Adrià sits and meticulously tests the quality of each dish.

El Bulli: Cooking In Progress is a type of process documentary, not unlike Sophie Fiennes’ 2010 portrait of Anselm Kiefer and his work, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow. In both films, the camera, in a detached yet observational handheld style, focuses primarily on the work, or the craft of making art. With crisp, clean digital imagery, these films document the process of creating art. However, while Fiennes’ film allowed at least one tell-all interview with its subject, Wetzel refuses to do anything other than document. Or so he would like us to believe. There are a series of moments that feel staged, including a rather too-clean match-on-action (when a cut between two different shots is bridged by a movement in order to give the impression of continuity), a technique of ‘invisible’ editing primarily used to Hollywood. Some exchanges between the chefs seem scripted, particularly a sequence late in the film in which Adrià talks to the assembled assistants and explains what elBulli is all about. It is a revealing moment but not a particularly believable one.

El Bulli: Cooking In Progress, though cold and detached, is clearly deeply passionate about the elBulli restaurant and haute cuisine in general. The film is deeply serious in its presentation of the process of cooking at elBulli. Without any doubt, it considers cooking an art and food an art form, just as much as painting, sculpting or cinema. When the food is ready to be served, it resembles more a piece of modern art, with a series of photographs of the meals shown over the end credits giving the impression of an exhibition. The film may well have a case to make and it may make you think about food and the nature of art and maybe even film, but not for very long. Similarly, the conclusions one might come to will be of little interest. The film’s treatment is rather facile, but the major problem with El Bulli: Cooking In Progress is that it smacks too much of snobbery.

Ferran Adrià is not so interested in whether his food tastes nice and he certainly is not concerned about giving his customers a meal - the portions are incredibly miniscule no matter how many courses there might be. Like modern art, the benefits are more cerebral. In his pep talk, Adrià says that the main thing is that the food give an emotional or intellectual response, that it shock and surprise. Unlike art, however, food serves a basic need, one that is not open to the vicissitudes of mental processes. As a result, at the risk of sounding like a philistine, it is difficult to agree with Ferran Adrià or with El Bulli: Cooking In Progress. Not that the film tries to convince. Behind the supposedly undoctored reality, which is never achievable whatever the aesthetics, of the film’s continuous documentation, there is a sense of smugness. It is preaching to the converted, safe in the knowledge that anyone who is unimpressed will either have given up long ago or will keep quiet. Instead of being intriguing or even fascinating as it could well have been, particularly as a Godardian exercise in boundary-breaking, the film is hopelessly didactic, overlong and po-faced.

As a side note, the film is also often barely comprehensible, particularly early in the film, when they are trying to put new “concepts” into practise. The film cuts quickly through a series of close-ups of different foods, handheld shots of the chefs cooking them, tasting them and adjusting them, but without any sense of time passing. These sequences are nearly impossible to follow in narrative terms, with the inedible food seen in the “Here’s one we made earlier” type moments nearly indistinguishable from the foods that are either finished or unfinished. Similarly, Adrià has an incredibly stony face, which often makes it difficult to gauge whether any of these trials have been successful or not. The film is also surprisingly unfocussed, giving a lot of attention to the repercussions of a faulty hard drive as if data management is of the utmost importance in a busy restaurant.

El Bulli: Cooking In Progress preaches to the converted and prefers not to look too critically at the idea of haute cuisine. It is pretentious and somewhat unapproachable as well as totally unconvincing. There is an air of snobbery throughout, which is hard to see past. Ultimately, the film has very little worth or appeal.