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H O P E L I E S AT 2 4 F R A M E S P E R S E C O N D

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BOOK TITLE VO LU M E .1 N U M B E R . 3

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EDITORIAL “And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things.”

Martin Scorsese

NON-IPAD READERS PLEASE CLICK HERE http://hopelies.com/the-hope-lies-periodical/periodica l-3-vol-1-num-3/periodical-3-supplements/periodical-3 -introduction/ The universality of the feelings evoked in watching a childhood unfold on-screen is second to none in all of the cinema. Be it in the works of Maurice Pialat, or the films of Ana Torrent, or an unlikely gem from Dennis Hopper's back catalogue, any number of disparate movies are connected by that one centerpiece: the world projected via the eyes of a child.

While many lesser works flirt dangerously with feelings driven too heavily on nostalgia (for what is more dangerous than the head being led by a heart filled with sentimentality), the films assembled herein are connected by a mutual sense of detachment from the usual tropes of a world portrayed through rose tinted spectacles.

Harsh upbringings defined by warfare and the welfare system sit alongside the wide-eyed spectacle of Technicolor childhoods.

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S TAFF E DITOR -I N -C HIEF - A DAM B ATTY C ONTRIBUTING E DITORS - M ARCELLINE B LOCK , P HILIP C ONCANNON P ATRICK G AMBLE , S IMRAN H ANS , C HRISTINA N EWLAND , C RAIG W ILLIAMS .

C ONTRIBUTORS - A DAM B INGHAM , M ARK C OUSINS , N EIL F OX , T OM G RATER , N EIL M C G LONE .

C ORRESPOND VIA THE FOLLOWING E MAIL - ADAM @ HOPELIES . COM T WITTER - @ ADAMHOPELIES

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MAURICE PIALAT

L’ENFANCE NUE AND OTHER TALES OF GROWING UP ADAM BATTY

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It is perhaps appropriate that one of the cinema's great, almost forgotten tales of unrelenting rebellion comes from a filmmaker who spent his entire career avoiding convention.

Maurice Pialat, the French director who in 1987 won the Palme d'Or for his Under The Sun Of Satan spent 40 years building one of the most unusual bodies of work in his national cinema. Though only ten features deep, his oeuvre as a collected work stand firm as an interconnected, woven structure, that build upon themes and ideas in a manner one might associate more closely with a Malick, or a Kubrick, than an unpresuming figure who, like those American filmmakers, straddles the outside skirting of trends and waves in the collected cinema.

Not a figure of the Nouvelle Vague, nor even a product of it, sans the ability afforded by the presence of one Francois Truffaut to see his debut feature through to completion, Pialat's tenure as a major player in the French cinema began in that most tumultuous and defining year for his home country, 1968, although one might not derive such a feeling from the man's films themselves. While L'enfance nue may open with a protest march, it is one

“Like a painter, Pialat has a talent for being able to evoke a wealth of emotion and feelings with a single image” that is about as far removed from the student uprising of Paris, Mai '68. On the flip-side, this moment is the closest the film comes to associating itself with the cinema that aligned itself with the radical political movements sweeping thru Paris in the late 1960s. It would be too easy to correlate a link between Pialat the outsider and Francois his protagonist in L'enfance nue.

As the film opens we join the action mid-way through one of what one might presume to be a regular occurrence in the life of Francois, the ten-year old boy around whom the rest of the picture revolves. Francois outstays his welcome at a foster home, and is moved on by the social worker that is the one constant adult presence in the boy's life. While portrayed gently, there's a burgeoning anger underlining these early sequences, an anger which underscores the tone of the picture that follows. Anger might actually be the wrong word.

Frustration might be better. Frustration over the fact that no one person is truly to blame.

Francois is an wieldy child, but only because of his background. His background features a mother who couldn't cope, which then led to an unconfirmed (on-screen) number of foster parents who struggled to tame the tainted and damaged boy. It's a vicious circle, an Ou-

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Francois almost falls out of frame as a gang of influences take centre stage.

roboros of a childhood state, and one which can only be met with passionate hopelessness from all who witness it, be it Pialat as the observant filmmaker, or the audience of the finished product.

The skillful portrayal of the life form-based pick 'n' mix that is the foster process of Northern France in the mid-1960s plays out like a dystopian vision of the kind of scene Ken Loach might have constructed in the early years of his own career. A sequence of realism presented with the painterly eye of a master-constructionist (such was Pialat's approach to form and composure), the combination of the everyday with the visionary makes for a startling final product.

Pialat's occasionally fractured approach leaves a number of casualties in its wake.

From the friends of Francois that briefly appear in one sequence only to never be seen again, to the multitude of random people whom we, and Francois, encounter throughout the picture. Introductions are waylaid for the sake of immediate immersion. This is built towards in the general construction of the picture. Minimal credits open the film, and similarly close it, while the general rhythm of the picture is askew and unpredictable (echoing the mentality of the boy portrayed). Non-diegetic music is absent, while there’s a nod to contemporary formality with a Delarue-style pop song that appears during the film’s wedding sequence and bridges a transition to another place and time entirely. Pialat’s world is one 5

littered with memorable faces, but they don't look like film stars, or even actors. It’s surprising to note that Pialat rejected vérité outright, given the manner in which he shunned overt, unreal aesthetic stylization and celebrated the kind of small, universal moments that fill the most ordinary of lives.

Loulou; Maurice Pialat’s Ode To Young Love

In keeping with his painter roots, Pialat has a talent for being able to evoke a wealth of emotion and feelings with a single image. See, the desks that greet the opening beats of Passe ton bac d'abord (Graduate First), a later film on growing up from Pialat, in which the sight of school desks permanently scarred with the pen and compass etchings born of the hands of former students tell a million and one tales of youthful abandon. It's simple and evocative but far from nostalgic in the lazy, dangerous sense.

That film, the spiritual sequel to L’enfance nue, follows a group of teenagers a decade on from his debut feature, occupying the same geographical location (the northern France town of Lens). It's through Passe ton bac d'abord that Pialat's overarching vision can be seen most clearly; for what is Francois' plight if not one of a young boy enraptured by disillusionment? In the later film we see the people who would have been his contemporaries and counterparts in school, play and life in general come to similar conclusions about their own places in the world, the difference between the two, Francois and the rest of his contemporaries, being that the latter come to said conclusions when society says it's okay to do so. What better analogy for the career of Pialat himself then, the man who sat on the fringes of numerous waves and movements and trends in cinema, instead of giving in to the temptation of convention.

Kent Jones summed up Pialat’s discordant approach to his surroundings wonderfully in a 2004 portrait of the artist in a Film Comment profile of the director; “To say that Pialat marched to the beat of a different drummer is to put it mildly. In fact, he didn't really march at all. He ambled, and fuck anybody who got it into their head that they'd like to amble along with him. Or behind him. Or ahead of him.”

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CHILDREN AT WAR PHILIP CONCANNON

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There are many unforgettable scenes in Schindler's List, but one in particular remains seared in the memory of everyone who has seen Steven Spielberg's 1993 film. As he watches the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto from a safe distance, Oskar Schindler's eye is drawn to one figure amid the chaos. It is a little girl, wandering alone and confused through the streets as homes are sacked and people murdered by Nazi soldiers all around her. Schindler is transfixed by this vision, and the moment proves to be a turning point in the drama, as his conscience is triggered and he is forced to confront the true horror of what is being perpetrated by his countrymen. This girl gets under his skin and pierces his heart, and she has a similar effect on the audience.

The girl in the red coat is a singularly powerful image for two reasons. One is the simple fact that she provides one of the few flashes of colour in the film, with her scarlet coat standing out brilliantly against the monochrome background. But the other reason is perhaps more fundamental – it is our reaction towards seeing a child in peril. Our immediate response is to feel protective towards children, to reach out and pull them away from danger, and being unable to do anything to prevent harm coming to them is an agonising feeling. Many adults die in war movies, but there's a particular cruelty involved when the purity of a child is at stake. When Oskar Schindler later sees that same red coat lying motionless on a pile of bodies, the image represents the death of innocence.

This idea of childhood being corroded by war is an undeniably potent one, and many filmmakers have utilised it. In fact, some of the most daring and emotionally wrenching war films ever made push that idea to the forefront, making young characters their leads and allowing us to view the destruction and inhumanity of warfare from their point of view.

Spielberg himself did this in his underrated 1987 film Empire of the Sun, an adaptation of JG Ballard's extraordinary World War II experience, which sticks rigidly to the viewpoint of 12 year-old James (Christian Bale), who is separated from his parents when the Japanese invade Shanghai. James initially treats all of his experiences as a grand adventure, as if the world is a giant play set designed just for him. When he discovers a crashed plane he doesn't think about the context for its appearance, he simply jumps into the cockpit and imagines himself as an ace pilot. From his privileged and cosseted perspective, Jamie doesn't understand the seriousness of what is happening around him, and his determination to cling onto childish things is what eventually changes his life. When he and his family are fleeing Shanghai during a bombing raid, James drops his toy plane and in stopping to retrieve it he loses his mother. Moments later, he sees a man getting shot at point-blank range, and in that second it feels like something has altered inside him.

The rest of the film shows us how Jim (as he is called by the American scavengers he teams up with) is forced to grow up by the circumstances he finds himself in. As he witnesses 8

Aleksei Kravchenko as the child soldier at the heart of Elem Klimov’s Come And See.

more violence, suffering and death he begins to understand what war is and develops a sense of independence and determination that he has never needed to possess before. He learns he truth about human nature and the often selfish lengths that one must go to in order to survive. The boy becomes a man in front of our eyes, an effect partly facilitated by Bale – whose work displays a grit and complexity uncommon in child performers – but largely down to a director who truly understands the way children see the world.

Such a gift is a rare and valuable one for a director to have, and another filmmaker who was capable of it – even if he infrequently showed it – was Andrei Tarkovsky. This great Russian director was somebody who could film the world in a way that made us feel as if we were seeing it for the very first time, as if it was something simultaneously alien and familiar, which is surely the key to depicting a childhood perspective. Although Mirror is an abstract film that largely consists of childhood memories, the only Tarkovsky film that truly deals with childhood experience is his 1962 debut Ivan's Childhood. From the very first scene, war is depicted as an intrusion on its protagonist's idyllic existence. The film opens with a gorgeous sequence in which Ivan (Nikolay Burlyaev) dreams of his dead mother, but as he shouts the word "Mama!" he is awoken from his reverie by the sound of explosions and gunfire. As an errand boy for the Russian army, Ivan has been forced to take on the role of an adult, but the flashbacks and dream sequences that Tarkovsky inserts act as constant 9

reminders of his boyishness. When he is told by his superiors that he is to be sent to military school, his reaction is to run away; a childish response someone determined to be treated as an adult.

the top of the sky. The river was also burning. It was night, bombs were exploding, and mothers were covering their children with whatever bedding they had, and then they would lie on top of them. Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it."

What effect does witnessing such atrocities have on a young man’s mind, his soul? In Come and See, Aleksey Kravchenko’s face becomes a mirror for man’s inhumanity.

The film depicts the German assault on Belorussia, in which 628 villages were burned to the ground, their inhabitants raped and murdered. Florya’s whole world comes crashing down on him – literally so in one of the film’s earliest scenes, when bombs explode around him and his young female companion Glasha (Olga Mironova), deafening and disorienting them both. They attempt to recreate some semblance of normality when they return to Florya’s eerily abandoned home village and sit down in the kitchen to eat, but normality no longer exists. The house is swarming with flies, and when they leave Glasha is aghast to see naked corpses piled up behind the house. Florya doesn’t see them, his eyes are fixed on the road ahead, but soon he witnesses more than his share of horrible acts. The population of a village is locked inside a church, which is then burned to the ground; a young woman is dragged into the back of a truck to be gang-raped by soldiers; Florya is forced to pose for a picture with a gun pointed at his head by cackling Nazis.

Young boys often fantasise about war and romanticise their potential roles in it. They see themselves as fighters and heroes, playing out the games they've imagined with their friends on a large scale. You can draw a straight line between Tarkovsky's Ivan and Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko), the central character in Elem Klimov's Come and See. Both desperately want to be part of the fight for their country, but both are exposed to realities that they are not prepared for. Florya finds a rifle and enthusiastically runs into the woods to join a band of partisans in their fight against the Nazis, but his subsequent experiences expose him to a brutality and savagery that completely strips away any notions of heroism.

Surely there have been few films that have expressed the hellish truth of what war does to people as vividly as Come and See. The film was originally commissioned as propaganda, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Great Victory, but there is no real sense of victory here, just a deadening litany of horrors. Klimov drew on his own childhood experiences for the film, and even suggested that he had toned down his recollections to make them more palatable for audiences. "As a young boy, I had been in hell," he said. "The city was ablaze up to 10

By this point, the boy's expression has become fixed in a traumatised grimace that stands as one of the most famous expressions in cinema. The things he has seen are beyond words, but they are etched into every line on his prematurely aged face, and one look into his eyes reveals a soul in torment. Ivan doesn't live to see the end of the war in Ivan's Childhood – he is hung by the enemy off screen – but Florya does survive Come and See, and the last shot sees him walking into the woods with his partisan brothers. This might suggest that Come and See has a relatively happy ending and closes with a note of hope, but I'm not so sure. I wonder what lies ahead for Florya, and what kind of peace he can find when he has experienced death so many times over?

One of the constant factors among all of these films is that they separate their young characters from their parents, forcing them to face the world alone. Two more recent war pictures take a different approach, with parent-child relations being key to the drama. In 1998's Life is Beautiful, Guido (writer/director/star Roberto Benigni) is an Italian Jew who is sent to a concentration camp along with his family. Throughout their time in the camp, Guido maintains a fiction for young Joshua (Giorgio Cantarini) that all of this is a game, and that the soldiers have created elaborate rules that the inmates must follow in order to win a spectacular prize. A decade later, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas similarly centred on a young boy's inability to comprehend the truth of the Holocaust. 8 year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the son of a camp commandant (David Thewlis), but he strikes up a friendship with a young boy of his own age who languishes on the other side of the fence.

Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) explains to Bruno that the men he sees are not simply farmers wearing odd pyjamas, as he imagined, but prisoners sentenced to death.

Claude Lanzmann, who made the momentous documentary Shoah, has said that no fiction film should be made about the Holocaust, for fictionalising and reconstructing such an event only serves to trivialise it. This is an accusation that both Life is Beautiful and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas had to face. Despite becoming a huge hit around the world and winning three Oscars, Life is Beautiful was criticised by many for drawing slapstick comedy and cheap sentimentality from such a sombre subject, and Steven Spielberg was said to have been close to walking out of a screening in disgust. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas didn't make anything like the kind of impact that Benigni's film did, but some critics reacted just as violently. Manohla Dargis said "See the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family," while Stephanie Zacharek wrote, "At the end, I wasn’t bawling, just dying to get the hell out."

Do these films turn one of humanity's darkest hours into child's play? John Boyne's novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was aimed at a teenage audience, which I think makes some 11

of its simplifications and schematic choices understandable, if not entirely acceptable.

Bruno's ignorance of what is happening on the other side of that barbed wire fence can be viewed as a personification of childhood innocence or a metaphor for the refusal of German people to acknowledge the genocide happening in their name. At the very least, the film doesn't shy away from the ultimate fate of those imprisoned inside the camp, with Bruno finally being consumed by the death machine his father has helped create. It is an awkwardly constructed film with a serious undertone, which Life is Beautiful crucially lacks. While the question of how far we will go to protect our children from the painful truth is a potent one, Life is Beautiful doesn't dare to confront the truth itself. It becomes the Roberto Benigni show, with the Nazis' genocide conveniently failing to intrude too much on their jovial games. It turns the Holocaust into a fantasy, where death, if it happens, occurs off-screen.

So is there any film that finds the right balance between providing a childlike perspective on war and refusing to spare us its grim realities? A film that can mean different things to different generations? There is one, and it comes from an unlikely source. Studio Ghibli is known for its fantastical children’s film, but the greatest film the studio ever produced might be its 1988 adaptation of Akiyuki Nosaka’s Grave of the Fireflies. Isao Takahata’s beautifully crafted animation is a story of survival, set in Kobe after a devastating firebombing raid has largely destroyed the mostly wooden buildings the city consists of. 14 year-old Seita becomes the sole protector to his younger sister Setsuko, and the film documents with a clear-eyed unsentimentality their courageous but ultimately futile attempts to fend for themselves. As Roger Ebert noted in his Great Movies review, the animation style doesn’t strive for any kind of photo-realism, but the actions and behaviour of the two youngsters make them feel vividly real. Viewers of all ages will surely recognise so much in this sibling relationship; the way the older boy sometimes grows irritated with his sister’s neediness and tantrums, but whose love for her is never in doubt.

There’s never any doubt about where Grave of the Fireflies is going either. The film opens with Seita destitute in a subway station, on the verge of death, having already lost his sibling. The film is a slow walk towards death that is filled with images of stark reality (Seita’s glimpse of his horribly wounded mother is shocking), but its two young characters find humour, tenderness and beauty in their moments together. Even as he is scarred by his experiences, Seita remains recognisably childlike and does all he can to shield his sister’s innocence from the harshness of the world they find themselves in. Grave of the Fireflies is masterful in its depiction of the human cost of warfare, and it emphasises an essential truth that all of these filmmakers have discovered. Many great films depict the horror and madness of war, but such tales carry a particular resonance when they are seen through the eyes of those too young to fully comprehend what they see.

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FRANCO’S SPAIN; THROUGH THE EYES OF ANA TORRENT PATRICK GAMBLE 13

The enigmatic vernacular of subversive film created under the constraints of a totalitarian government has often relied upon the purity of youth to break free from the shackles of censorship. During Franco’s reign (1936-1975) there was a distinct lack of self-inspecting cinema in Spain, with filmmakers forced to adopt a more relational aesthetic, becoming the catalyst for their art’s message and utilizing subtle subterfuge techniques to echo the melancholy of a country. One actress during the 1970’s encapsulates this national despondency more than any other – Ana Torrent, the juvenile conduit of Spain’s creative and intellectual struggle for artistic freedom during Franco’s dictatorship.

Audiences will already be familiar with Spain’s autocratic history thanks to the popularity of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, with both films focusing on children drawn to fantasy worlds as a coping mechanism for the bloody conflict of the Spanish civil war. However, Spain’s ‘Pact of Forgetting’ (a political agreement implemented to eschew a potential legacy of

“Children can often make movies feel erratic and unpredictable, yet Ana Torrent's unblinking naivety and genuine inquisitiveness somehow manages to prudently echo the anxieties of a country living under a totalitarian reconcentration camps, forced labor and the execution of ‘unrecoverables’) culminated in a curiously sombre ‘Spanish Spring’ with the customary cultural explosion of inhibited artists noticeably restrained compared to the cinematic output of postGlasnost and Perestroika Soviet nations and other countries awakening from the nightmare of creative suppression.

Like many authoritarian regimes Franco attempted to use cinema to quash radical descendants whilst simultaneously attempting to deflate the country’s negative image abroad. Appropriated and regulated by a staunchly catholic regime that demanded all scripts be submitted for correction, an artificial veneer of 'freedom of expression' was constructed to cloak the fact that issues such as divorce, violence and anti-government sentiment remained taboo. By the end of the 1960’s the festival success of Spanish films led to an increase in production of experimental (and often subtly oppositional) films. By the early 1970’s Spanish cinema was becoming far more sophisticated, moving away from the cheap melodramas and comedies that dominated the box office. This led to the term ‘Francoist aesthetic” becoming increasing employed to describe the allegorical, artistically ambitious and nonconformist films which were 14

With The Spirit Of The Beehive, Torrent can be seen as a child at the centre of a world on the verge of revolution.

emanating from Spain. Amongst the myriad of enigmatic auteurs and oppositional groups that were growing in numbers, one actress - a little girl seemingly at odds with reality - encapsulated this furtive attempt to fathom the mysteries behind Spain’s passive acceptance of this oppressive regime – Ana Torrent.

Ana Torrent’s acting debut occurred in 1973 with a film that would become synonymous with the Francoist aesthetic; Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice). Despite being only 7 years old, Torrent’s hypnotic performance as a young girl fixated with James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) would also catch the eye of Carlos Saura, who later cast her as the young protagonist in Cria Cuervos. Together, these two films bookend what would be a period of Spanish history that many would try to forget. However, through Ana Torrent’s stoic demeanour and inquisitive gaze, we’re presented with an untainted perspective of this aphonic epoch.

Spirit of the Beehive is set in 1940, just after General Franco claimed victory in the Spanish civil war. Director Victor Erice concentrates his tale on a household who have removed themselves from the outside world to wallow in their own self-constructed hive of despondency. The entire family is never once seen in the same shot and the film has often been said to reflect Spain’s national disintegration and sense of melancholy – like downhearted drones unable to fully accept their new queen, yet 15

systematically obligated to submissively exist under this new, discomforting regime. The ‘spirit’ within the title of Spirit of the Beehive isn’t the presence of a metaphorical queen, but the force that prompts humanity to submit to a dictator. The suggestion here is that a fascist society doesn’t occur because of the will of one powerful individual, but because the populace are hard-wired to behave that way.

Cuadrado’s opulent cinematography and told through a concise script that understands silence can succinctly communicate those feelings that are often hard to articulate. However, it’s ultimately Ana Torrent’s laconic performance that elevates this intimate tale of life and death beyond its allegorical template and into a far more expressive and lyrical exploration of Spain's first baby steps as a dictatorship.

Not only does Spirit of the Beehive allow us to witness Spain’s fascist infancy through the sophisticated political allusions of Ana, Erice also permits us to understand Ana’s world through the perspective of a Whale’s film. Recalling the magic and wonderment of your first experience of the movies, the tentative dichotomy between fantasy and fact is wonderfully blurred by Ana’s fastidious imagination.

Within this fragmented family unit live two sisters, Isabel (Isabel Telleria) and Ana (Ana Torrent). The girls visit their local town hall where a traveling showman has brought a print of James Whale’s Frankenstein – a veiled attempt at propaganda endeavouring to justify the violent overthrow of the republican government. Erice actually filmed the girls as they viewed the film for the first time, capturing their genuine sense of shock and awe. Ana is clearly totally mesmerised by the images projected upon the whitewashed stonewall, yet struggles to understand why the monster would kill the little girl by the lakeside.

Her sister, Isabel (your typical antagonist of an older sibling) tells her that nobody actually dies in the movies – claiming that the monster is really a spirit who takes on human form and can be conjured by merely closing your eyes and summoning him. Undeterred by her sister’s ploy to scare her, Ana becomes determined to evoke the spirit of Frankenstein's monster – leading her to mistake a fugitive republican soldier as her very own Boris Karloff.

For Ana, the resistance fighter she discovers hiding in the family’s outhouse ratifies her beliefs. He is just as magical as Karloff’s portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster – another lost soul, ostracised by society and searching for answers.

Whilst Ana unintentionally betrays the rebel to a gun-toting rabble (evoking memories of the lantern and pitchfork wielding villagers of Whale’s infamous horror) she remains certain that his spirit will merely drift into the ether and be reincarnated in another mortal form. On one hand the monster could easily be seen as a lazy metaphor for Franco, yet through Ana’s unusual fascination in him we see it as an example of how we’re inherently drawn to such enigmatic individuals, with Ana the embodiment of

Erice’s film is excruciatingly beautiful, gracefully captured through Luis 16

Ana and Isabel look out beyond the frame in The Spirit Of The Beehive.

the innocence and purity of youth – ripe for exploiting and corruption.

Ana’s obsession with discovering the motivation behind the monster’s murderous act is reborn towards the end of the film. The scene where Whale’s monster accidentally drowns the young girl is reimagined when Ana - running away from her father witnesses Karloff’s gruesome reflection in a stream. Erice adds a degree of ambiguity to this scene; with the audience having previously witnessing Ana consuming a wild mushroom just moments before this abstract illusion. Is this simply a figment of Ana’s overactive imagination, or was Isabel correct, could the spirit of this monster be ubiquitous? However, unlike Whale’s film, Ana’s encounter ends not in her untimely demise, but rather a spiritual awakening – opening her eyes to the persecution and deformation of the solider she condemned to death and a fitting metaphor for Spain’s own precarious situation.

Despite clearly being a piece of anti-Franco filmmaking Spirit of the Beehive’s managed to elude Spain’s boorish censors. They assumed that few people would bother watching such a deliberately slow, thinly plotted and enigmatic film – a fact that was sadly true, with many audiences booing it upon its initial release. However, like all great sagas Spirit of the Beehive has stood the test of time, growing stronger in its isolation and utilising the juvenile confusion of a young girl’s life to elegantly reflect the historical trauma suffered by Spain - presenting issues of changing national

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identity and autocratic suppression in a fresh, intelligent and suitably delicate manner.

Ana’s numerous flights of the imagination and her personal rebellion against the tired and archaic institutions being passed down to her Cria Cuervos allows this would-be murderer to become our spiritual conduit into the sociopolitical unrest that festered within an entire generation.

Two years after Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive, Ana Torrent would return to embody Spain’s tortured conscious in Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuervos. After viewing Torrent’s performance in Spirit of the Beehive Saura describing her as processing “a special look which made you think she was aware of a deeper world” defining her innocuous and untainted demeanor as “somehow adult and reflective”. Whilst Erice attempted to capture the resigned sense of loss that followed the end of the Spanish civil war, Saura looked to mirror Spain’s troubled and somewhat anticlimactic transition towards a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. Cria Cuervos translates as Raise Ravens – a title based on an old Spanish proverb; ‘Raise ravens and they’ll pluck out your eyes’ – a fitting moniker for a film presenting a generation belligerently breaking free from the clutches of dictatorship.

Much like in Spirit of the Beehive the claustrophobic and ornately decorated house of Cria Cuervos plays a major role – presenting Franco’s Spain as an evergreen province of political and cultural repression that had fallen way behind the times. The setting for the majority of the film's action, this hermetically sealed domestic prison of appropriated manners and etiquette could easily be seen as the last vestige of Franco’s Spain - with Anselmo’s demise a paternal metaphor for the end of Franco’s rule. Cria Cuervos has often been seen as a film about newly liberated women, with Anselmo the final male inhabitant of the home. Indeed, when a man eventually attempts to make a claim for the patriarchal throne of the household Ana meets him wielding a fully loaded pistol. Ana and her sister’s improvised games of playing 'house' and Ana’s murderous intentions are clearly a sinisterly playful reproach towards the philandering fascist Spanish male – an aesthetic of Spanish cinema continued in the vibrant gender politics of Pedro Almodóvar’s oeuvre.

It's still very much Franco's Spain when we intrude upon the Madrid household of the recently widowed Anselmo (Héctor Alterio). He dies suddenly amidst the throes of passion with Amelia (Mirta Miller). However, it appears this was no natural death - he was poisoned. The apparent culprit of this calculated murder? None other than his own daughter Ana (Torrent) a wise beyond her year’s girl who blames her father for the death of her mother (Geraldine Chaplin. who also portrayed Ana’s future self – seen by many as a disquieting image of history repeating itself). Tracing

Cría Cuervos perfectly portrays Spain’s transition away from fascism through natural movements, be it that of a child blossoming into an adult or the inevitable passage from life into death. Ana is a 18

Cria Cuervos saw Torrent working under the tutelage of Carlos Saura.

pristine window into this world, a frustrated observer of adult life, affording her an unbiased perspective on the changing fabric of this household. Projecting her intensely solemn opinions on all around her, Ana’s unfaltering gaze unveils the concessions and betrayals of adulthood. Seeing, hearing and feeling more than she should, Ana is sadly impotent to alter the course of these events - restlessly occupying her own awkward adolescence that fittingly mirrors Spain’s state of limbo as it waited for Franco to finally pass away. Saura could not have painted such a vividly authentic portrait of Spain’s stunted state of political purgatory without the phenomenal performance of Ana Torrent - beautifully embodying the sentiment behind future Ana’s (Chaplin) despondent confession; “I remember childhood as an interminably long and sad time” a phrase that eloquently summarises Spain during Franco’s reign.

Children can often make movies feel erratic and unpredictable, yet Ana Torrent's unblinking naivety and genuine inquisitiveness somehow manages to prudently echo the anxieties of a country living under a totalitarian regime. Inspiring a degree of cognitive contemplation that belies her tender age, Torrent‘s performances poetically reclaim childhood as a time of intense sadness, radical ideas and endless confusion with these two magnificent meditations on Spain’s torturous past succinctly characterising the fears, hopes and arrested euphoria of an entire nation.

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FATALISTIC CHILDREN

OUT OF THE BLUE AND THE CINEMA OF DENNIS HOPPER CHRISTINA NEWLAND

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Christina Newland here presents an original academic text exploring Dennis Hopper’s Out Of The Blue.

Children have popularly been used as sentimental device, metaphor, or object of horror throughout the history of the movies – be it their perceived loss of innocence, their vulnerability and victimhood, or their capacity to frighten. Our collective inclination to be fearful of our own progeny, be it through the Freudian uncanny or otherwise, has been exploited to a spectacular degree in Horror, from Rosemary's Baby to The Shining. Yet a small, bizarre handful of international films, largely in the latter half of the 20th century, have predicated themselves not merely on popular cinematic depictions of childhood but on the corruption of children to the point of fatalism, and ultimately their turn to suicide or murder. This has been a sliver of space for children in the cinema not occupied by melodramatic usage; these children have an enormous capacity for rationalist, quasi-philosophical thought, and when they are faced with interminable hardship or corruption, they become overwhelmed with existential despair, even nihilistic tendencies, and eventually, commit suicide. Without the intention of making tenuous connections between films separated by many years, contexts, and nationalities, they do serve to illustrate the late 20th-century generational rift between young adults who are capable of mature, complex reasoning and a hypocritical, failed older generation.

These corruptible parents and elders are found as a common thread, whether it be Rossellini's post-war Berlin (Germany Year Zero, 1948), Bresson's provincial, bourgeois French village (Mouchette, 1967) or a blue collar, recession-squeezed American town at the end of the 1970s.

Dennis Hopper's 1980 independent feature, and his first directorial release in a decade, Out of the Blue, starred Linda Manz (something of a cult icon, as it goes, having just starred in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven) as 15-year-old Cebe, a punk and Elvis-obsessed young girl whose father Don, played by Hopper himself, is doing a stint in prison for accidental manslaughter. Don drunkenly ran his lorry into a busload of schoolchildren, killing several of them. Meanwhile, Cebe's mother (Sharon Farrell) is a junkie waitress, barely making ends meet and constantly inviting men home with 21

her. One might say that life could be better for young Cebe. When Don is released from prison, although Cebe idolizes him, his depraved existence soon comes to bear on the ugly family dynamic, culminating in his attempt to molest her. The hopelessly grim finale shows Cebe's desperate resort to violence and selfdestruction.

faelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970) and King of Marvin Gardens (1972) as Out of the Blue's antecedents.

The film was met with success at Cannes in 1980 but its resolutely miserable and defeatist stance made for a poor box office reception; as one critic pointed out, 'All is generates is audience resentment. The Montreal crowd booed over the closing titles [‌]' Hopper donated much of the 1.2 million dollar budget so he could guarantee creative control; originally cast to star, he became director within the first few weeks of shooting, taking the place of Leonard Yakir and rewriting the script. Although the film was shot in Vancouver and is often referred to as Canadian, it did not actually receive the Canadian government's approval and entered Cannes with its nationality unspecified. This is undoubtedly to do with the deeply American feel to the film, in spite of several of its scenes clearly taking place in downtown Vancouver; it aesthetically so closely recalls the BBS Productions of the early 1970's that its national identity appears to be understandably muddled. It is akin to them both in appearance - the washed-out palette of blue-collar landscapes - and in the isolated, rebellious loners that populate them; one cannot help but to see Bob Ra22

Hopper, always concerned thematically with documenting the counterculture, applies a modern, literal understanding of youthful alienation into his film, inserting all the signifiers of youth subculture (namely, punk). Yet, in spite of the various countercultural activity that distracts and surrounds her, Cebe is no less alienated or 'better off' than Mouchette, surrounded by patronizing and hypocritical “respectables� of her community who secretly and smugly enjoy her degradation. Cebe, like Mouchette, suffers from sexual abuse at the hands of a male authority figure; they are both semi-feral children, on the precipice of oncoming womanhood but subversively and aggressively unfeminine in appearance and demeanour. Both maintain a bristling, hardened outer shell to mask their fragility and suffering, lashing out against the adult world while simultaneously withering with need for its love and protection. In the end, neither find much reason to continue with the flat charade of existence and take their own lives in a tragic fashion. It would be disingenuous to make further comparisons between Robert Bresson and Dennis Hopper; Bresson, while concerned with the social, turns Mouchette into a story of noble suffering, the indignity of poverty and the immense dignity of the spiritual; and in spite of her suicide, Mouchette dies in a sort of peaceful state of grace. Hopper

was a far more primitive filmmaker, adopting cliché and pop-culture currency, guilty of a certain superficiality in the Easy Rider years, if he had not expanded somewhat on it in the decade to come. In Out of the Blue, Hopper is concerned only with the earthly; Cebe dies, not peacefully, but in a gesture of fauxromantic punk nihilism; her death, like her life, is a childish exercise in tough posturing – but the superficiality it speaks of is all the more tragic for it. Much like Billy and Wyatt in Easy Rider, Cebe evidences how clearly “we blew it” as a collective revolutionary movement; how the innocent and naïve are the first to welcome an optimistic youth movement, and the first to be struck down in the face of an ultimately regressive, conservative world, one utterly hostile to change.

Hopper's decision to centre the story around a child is something of an obvious one when considering his long thematic interest in the corruption of innocence; in both Easy Rider (1969) and The Last Movie (1971) he laments the death of the dreamer, and Out of the Blue continues in this vein, using the child as a variant on a fairly common 'death of the sixties' thread in movies from the period.

As Peter Lev writes, this 'became a prominent theme in American films in 19741976 when the catastrophic events of Watergate and the OPEC oil shock as well as the apparent lack of social change in the United States strongly suggested that the moment of social optimism was over. […]

The trend then continued, with films

from the later 1970's and into the 1980's documenting and critiquing the 1960's counterculture.' Hopper, who had clocked his own generation's failure to actuate political or social change as early as 1969, expands on the idea with Cebe, who represents the destruction of innocence as both a traditional cliché and as a product and victim of social movements gone wrong. If Hopper is guilty of stereotype, he infuses Cebe with a multiplicity of meanings, making her a vessel for his statements but also a fully living, breathing being; 'Hopper gravitates to the obvious, the unsubtle, the immediate and current, both in emotion and imagery. What he succeeds in doing is re-informing those elements with raw and unmistakable meaning.' His portraits of family life, while not wildly original in conception, are unsentimental and honestly drawn, reworking American myth into the stuff of tragedy in a more unwieldy, unpredictable manner than atypical 1970's genre revision.

The suggestion hangs heavy that Cebe's parents belonged to the first major generational wave of rebellion, and that they are burnouts of the 1960's; yet they remain as constrained by dysfunction, abuse, poverty, addiction, and all the other foibles of the patriarchal family at its most monstrous. Everywhere we turn in Hopper's universe, we find the vestiges of hope in a subculture of some sort; it may well be that 'the latent function of subculture is this: to express and resolve, albeit “magically”, the contradic-

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tions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture.' If this is so, in Hopper's understanding it never quite manages to succeed. He casts a cynical eye on the regressive working-class (as he does in Easy Rider, where the 'rednecks' serve a similar function) but more poignantly, at the growing political indifference of all forms of subculture; the noncommittal attitude of the punks, their urban world Cebe escapes to as predatory and dangerous; as well as the hypocrisy of the flower-child generation. One cannot fail to mention the startling and amusing irony of a child shouting 'Disco sucks!

Kill all hippies!' from the filmmaker who pioneered the wave of late sixties counterculture movies. But, tellingly, the only lasting remnant from that era in Out of the Blue is the burnt out, drug-addled parents who serve a sorry reminder of the pitfalls of their generation. Even Hopper's presence suggests the ghost of the past, his 'high-wired intensity' and tendency toward substance-fuelled psychosis making him a formidable onscreen presence, poised on the brink of explosion constantly. This presence made him an unforgettable villain in films throughout the 1980's and 90's, most infamously as sexual deviant Frank in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. His very persona suggests the 'death of the sixties' – as one critic notes, 'Hopper (is) [‌] an embodiment of the continuing legacy of that era, of the wear and tear visited by the vicissitudes of personal and public history upon its dreams and ideals'.

By the shocking conclusion of the film, we have seen the consequences of a youth culture which has no agency for social change; a traditional community nakedly bankrupt in its values and unable to put an end to the cruelty of the conservative old world. Children like Cebe, something of an inheritor of Mouchette's alienation, are left defenceless victims of their parents' failure to facilitate change. Any subscription to youth culture, like Cebe's devotion to punk, is simply not enough to fill the void; mere escapism. The note of pervasive hopelessness accompanying Cebe's death shows us a world hermetically sealed in its own poverty and misery; a kind of fatalism that 70's New Hollywood specialised in, when one considers a film like Chinatown (1974). By 1980, these kinds of 'downbeat' attitudes had gone out of vogue, with the rise of the New Right and the depictions of idealized family and childhood soon to become a part of the 80's mainstream. Hopper's film proves to be both searing indictment and sorrowful death knell, suggesting the counterculture's permanent failure to create an alternative life for outsiders like Cebe, who could no longer find their place in the world. Undoubtedly, Out of the Blue also serves to remind us of the type of plaintive, urgently honest, raw filmmaking that we would so come to miss in American cinema in the decades to follow.

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5

LES ENFANTS DE LOUIS MALLE ADAM BINGHAM

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In the history of French cinema the figure of the child and the subject of youth has been a recurring, pervasive feature, a narrative and thematic constant that defines the work of numerous significant directors. From the Lumieres’ home movie Baby’s Lunch (1895) through the harsh coming-of-age rigours of Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and on to the allegorical abstractions of Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004), filmmaking in France has delved into childhood in a myriad of ways and to dramatically different effects. Of the French directors to have repeatedly returned to children and young characters in their films (Truffaut, Pialat, Lamorrise), few if any have offered such a multi-faceted and complex picture of childhood and its problems and pleasures as Louis Malle. Over the course of his career in both France and the US he explored in detail the world of children as at once a strangely insular existence yet one that is perennially subject to outside (adult) forces.

His work probes this ostensible contradiction as reflective of a tenuous, fragile equilibrium, a balance that frequently tips out of control one way or another and sees one world invade the other, usually resulting in processes of maturation whose value or perhaps even point is explicitly questioned, problematized.

Although Malle was always a peripheral nouvelle vague figure, his first childcentred film, Zazie dans le Métro (1960), in fact plays as a gleeful compendium of what are popularly canonized as the defining features of the French new wave (narrative looseness and an episodic structure, location shooting on the streets of Paris, stylistic experimentation, playful approach to genre). Indeed, for a collective that evolved as a cinematic reaction to a perceived problematic parent (Truffaut’s pejorative Cinéma du Papa) Malle’s third feature is a particularly apt point of departure. A story about a young girl left with her uncle for a day in the French capital, it is a perfect paradigm of a cinema that was itself in a kind of figurative infancy, a brash, experimental, insouciant, showy, retaliatory cinema rebelling against preceding norms and thus becoming a figurative adolescent, an unruly and disobedient child.

Rhyming broadly with Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956) in its subjective emphasis on the mindset of a child who lives inside a dream/fantasy world, Zazie dans le Métro looks at the clash of children and adults, but does so as an extended game, a perennial battle of wills (as it were children invading the realm of the adult).

Malle employs a broad, silent cinema, often slapstick aesthetic that literally makes of the film a cartoon, what the director himself termed ‘an exercise in style’, (1993, p.28) and in so doing he reinvents Paris as a giant playground, an amorphous space that is 26

conducive to and commensurate with a child’s eye-view of the world, its potentially direct and simple pleasures and pitfalls. Despite, or perhaps because of, the myriad obstacles that litter her path (especially a Metro strike and attendant traffic jams), Zazie’s boundless imagination transforms physical space and limitations. Indeed, when she is first being driven from the train her uncle and his friend continually demonstrate their ignorance of the capital and its preeminent, defining landmarks, as though Paris refutes or frustrates any logical, commonsensical attempt to map its contours and topography and instead responds to, opens up before, the gaze of those who can see beyond its surface or facade. Childhood here is thus equated with imagination, with release from conventions, from the norm, and Malle celebrates it unequivocally, rhapsodically.

“In the history of French cinema the figure of the child and the subject of youth has been a recurring, pervasive feature, a narrative and thematic constant that defines the work of numerous significant directors.”

In a sense Zazie is cast adrift in an adult world of pettiness and bureaucracy.

But she manages to transform it in her image, something that the film goes on to celebrate to the extent that, ultimately, childishness becomes infectious, even contagious.

The narrative climaxes with a puerile scene of destruction in a restaurant in which the adults regress into infancy and Zazie, the only actual child present, remains almost wholly apart from the calamity around her. Clearly for Malle youth is a state of mind and of being - an outlook and an attitude rather than a physical determinant – and when Zazie boards the train to return home at the end of the film and, in response to a question about what she has done, tells her mother that she has ‘aged’, she means precisely that childishness (rather than childhood) has been negated through its becoming a performative act, the fact that it has been appropriated by those ‘adults’ around her. It is a comic spin on Yin and Yang, as though the presence of one state inexorably entails its opposite, childhood only seen in the light of adulthood (and vice versa), and the fluid parameters of both would go on to be a perennial Malle trait.

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From Zazie dans le Métro to Au revoir les enfants, childhood remained a mainstay in the career of Louis Malle.

The light, subjective register of Zazie dans le Métro was later broadly echoed in Murmur of the Heart (1971), albeit now with an emphasis on a specific context (France’s fraught colonial excursions and conflicts in Indochina in 1954) which Malle uses to throw into relief the coming-of-age story of its young teenage protagonist, Laurent, and his jocular relationship with his older brothers and increasingly incestuous closeness with his Italian mother. Suspended somewhere between a naturalistic, seriocomic evocation of early adolescence and an interior dramatization of sexual maturation and Oedipal crisis, Malle carefully uses this duality to structure his protagonist’s trajectory, in limbo as he is between childhood and adulthood, vacillating between the two poles. The youngest in his family, Laurent is treated as a child by his adoring mother, who smothers him in a way one would expect an infant, and indeed his behaviour with his brothers is very immature and infantile, very childish (food fights, teasing and tormenting their maid) while attempts in vain to lose his virginity bespeak an attempt to grow up and become a man. Ultimately, the (controversial) moment of incest between Laurent and his mother to which the film builds symbolises both a marker of adulthood, as it is the moment when he loses his virginity, and simultaneously a regression into infancy, a pronounced example of a frustrated Oedipal trajec-

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tory that leaves Laurent without the traditional Freudian ascension to manhood and the Symbolic order.

It is, then, figurative as well as literal childhood that Malle portrays in these works, despite an ostensible emphasis on adolescence in Le Souffle au Coeur.

Malle would return to adolescent travails several times in his career in works such as Lacombe Lucien (1974) and his muchmaligned fantastical folly Black Moon (1975), but it was with actual children that he produced his most famous and acclaimed work. Perhaps Malle’s most celebrated drama of childhood is Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987), a Golden Lionwinning autobiographical study of two young boys at a Catholic school in occupied France in 1944. These boys - a Jew being hidden from the Germans and a catholic – form a turbulent companionship that progresses from enmity to competitiveness and ultimately to friendship.

They exist in what is presented at times as a rarefied world, one with its own routines and rituals, and thus, in its picture of childhood during wartime, Au Revoir Les Enfants builds on Murmur of the Heart in order to depict a hermetic milieu that is precariously cut off from the travails of the world outside, the world at large. This is a pervasive Malle trait – one that animates works as ostensibly diverse as Black Moon and especially Milou en Mai (1990), which concerns a bour29

geois family in a country house deliberating on Paris during May 68 - but in Au Revoir Les Enfants it takes on more significant connotations. The universe of the boys in school, with its rivalries, conflicts and almost institutionalised bullying and ostracised outsiders, serves to mirror that of occupied France beyond its immediate educational confines. In this particular aspect of its narrative the film contains overt echoes of Neo-realism, a cinematic movement in which children and childhood were often to the fore, typically as a sign of innocence lost, as in Germany Year Zero (1949), or of potential and hope for the future, as in the final moments of Rome, Open City (1945). In the famous exchange between Father and pupils that closes the narrative of Au Revoir Les Enfants, the one that gives the film its title, Malle makes it plain through the sudden voiceover over of one character looking back at these events as a seemingly distant past the extent to which one’s formative years can shape and even define one’s adulthood and identity.

These are children forced into the harsh glare of adult reality. But Malle’s naturalistic, observational style and decision to frequently eschew close-ups in favour of medium and long shots (a world away from the stylized, hyperactive subjectivity of Zazie dans le Métro) refutes any easy identification or simplistic closeness on the part of the audience. It is as though the camera shouldn’t intrude on their

space, their world of childhood, that in doing so it would curtail or contravene that world and the relative freedoms it affords the children. Indeed when the outside world does begin to intrude upon the boys one finds more closer shots and tighter compositions that work to constrict diegetic space and connote an end to their childhood and its hitherto prevalent freedoms (and the often contradictory aspects of their conflicts therein).

It is worth noting that Malle never sentimentalized children in his work, as Truffaut on occasion did. He was always sensitive to childhood disrupted or negated, even in the fanciful cartoon narrative of Zazie dans le Métro, but also always attuned to the particular joys and freedoms that can be enjoyed by children, always careful to let them be children, be innocent and, if only briefly, be free. His films are less about regarding child protagonists through the eyes of adults than they are about regarding the world through children’s eyes. They look with as well as at their young subjects and allow them first and foremost to be children, without overtly saddling them with representational baggage. That is, they are not merely symbolic, not mere metaphors; they are flesh and blood, carefully delineated characters whose lives are opened out and thoroughly elucidated, their personalities apparent and their formative identities captured and allowed to be understood for what they are. In an essay on the figure of the child on film Robin Wood demonstrates the extent to which children on screen have always fulfilled a host of expressive functions, particularly as a romantic figure, a figure representative of renewal and a ‘vulnerable new life and a desire to look outwards’. (1976, p.195) It is a fascinating study, but the drawback of such an approach is precisely that any or all sense of characters as people, flesh and blood individuals, can become lost. Louis Malle’s work can be seen as a test case for such readings as his films both appropriate and ultimately refute this proposition. In Le Souffle au Coeur Laurent says, in response to being caught reading ‘The Story of O’, that ‘there’s no childhood any more’. It is a sentiment that Malle seems somehow both respectful of and antipathetic to, but it is a marker of the complexity of his work that he does not overtly explore childhood with any such agenda in mind. It is left open in each film as to the precise meaning of, or the attitude to, children, something as true of his controversial American drama Pretty Baby (1976), about a child at the centre of a world of prostitution, as it is of Zazie dans le Métro, and it makes of Malle a key director in this key subject.

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6

THE ACCELERATED CHILDHOOD OF JODIE FOSTER NEIL FOX

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Jodie Foster is a fascinating film star who made the transition from child star through adult superstar to credible director look almost easy. All the while she has endured a lifetime under media and public scrutiny and managed to do so with dignity and privacy mostly in tact.

Within her diverse filmography one film stands out as a perfect storm for discussing Foster the actress and Foster the star. The film in question is David Fincher's Panic Room. Released in 2002 the film is considered a minor work in the Fincher canon. A reason for this may be the strength that Foster brings to the film. Her presence wrestles ownership from someone widely considered an auteur and turns it into a fascinating study of femininity and stardom. Foster wasn't first choice for the role, only taking it when Nicole Kidman injured her knee filming Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! How different the film might have been had Kidman filled the role.

“Within her diverse filmography one film stands out as a perfect storm for discussing Foster the actress and Foster the star�

Jodie Foster's character in the film, Meg Altman, is complex and hard to pin down. Much like Foster herself. A cursory glance over Foster's list of credits throws up a glorious patchwork of the formidable and the vulnerable, the sassy and the subdued.

One commonality is that usually her characters start films alone in some sense. Utterly in some cases, particularly as a child and latterly as a lone parent or career driven woman. Denouements generally involve a complex resolution of this isolation. This is a trait in her characters that can be traced back to her roles as a child star. Indeed it is this period in Foster's life that sets out a framework for her career and her life that still resonates today.

Jodie Foster had already been on screens for a few years in commercials and TV shows before her career took off with a run of films that included Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone and Freaky Friday. A delinquent, a prostitute, an aloof and sassy nightclub singer and a feisty daughter who takes on her Mother's physical body is not the CV of your average 14 year-old actress. 14 years old 32

Even by 1976’s Taxi Driver, Foster was something of a veteran in the industry.

is how old Foster was when she completed that run of films in 1976. But then Foster's life was never average.

By the time she graduated from Yale in 1985 on a break from acting she had been the victim of two obsessive men; one obsession resulting in the attempted assassination of then U.S. President Ronald Reagan. She had also been a French pop star of sorts.

Rumours around her sexuality and the parentage of her children have orbited her since she returned to acting as an adult and broke through as a major star with Academy Awards in quick succession for The Accused and The Silence Of The Lambs.

Increasingly Foster's roles became those previously mentioned of battling mothers and brave women out to defend those she loved. She also became renowned for playing pioneering, ambitious females. In truth, looking back at her early significant roles it could be said she also played women. Her child characters were regularly forced to assume a prematurity or endure shattering losses of innocence. Even in Disney’s Freaky Friday she literally becomes the Mother for most of the film, leading to an accelerated understanding of adulthood and parental responsibility. The maternal, pro33

tective instincts that seem to have influenced her later career choices start to make much more sense in this light and it all increases why Panic Room takes up such an intriguing space in her oeuvre.

in the likes of Adventureland and On The Road might attest.

Foster made Panic Room four years after the arrival of her first child, and one after the arrival of her second. It's her most outright defiant statement of protective motherhood. She plays an initially nervous and scared, newly single mother looking after her diabetic daughter, Sarah, played by Kristen Stewart. Here is where the film becomes even more interesting. Stewart herself is a child star who has gone onto phenomenal success as a young adult star thanks to the Twilight franchise and subsequent romance with co-star Robert Pattinson.

In 2012, echoing Foster and Stewart's relationship in the film, Jodie came out in defence of Kristen following coverage of a troubled time in Stewart's relationship with Pattinson where she spent time romantically with her Snow White & The Huntsman director Rupert Sanders. She defended Stewart's right to be a child and make mistakes, seemingly seeing in the young star a young woman and actress like herself. Maybe she saw someone who did not want to be restricted to a certain image in the eyes of the movie-going public as Stewart’s roles

At the time of its release Panic Room could have been read as Foster defending her own children from the scrutiny of the entertainment media. In the film, under attack from three men she holes up in a seemingly safe place and battles to stop the men coming in and damaging her and her offspring. Patriarchy wants in, but this woman stands firm. During the siege on her new home she frequently risks her life for Stewart's character but admonishes the child when she dare take a similar risk. Over time the film's reading has become more nuanced due to Stewart's transition from child star and now reads somewhat like an attempt by Foster to protect the idea of the child star, the legacy of her own young career and Stewart's future life, from destruction by parasitic pop culture forces.

There's an element of martyrdom with Foster. Her speech upon receipt of a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Golden Globes was accused of being at best misjudged in some elements and at worse naive and ignorant and in Panic Room she appears to be wrestling with some of the complexities and contradictions that reside in her life and career.

She wants to protect her child from harm and mistakes, despite knowing that such

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Fincher, Foster and Stewart on location for Panic Room.

protection is impossible or worse, ultimately harmful. She gradually finds strength on her own but is acutely aware that she exists within a patriarchal structure, showing guilt when her saviour is later captured and a Zen-like acceptance when faced with a brutal death at the hands of a vulgar, murderous man.

These choices as an actor highlight what is clear from Foster's career; she is unlike other actresses and stars. Her recent support of the supposedly indefensible Mel Gibson muddies the water around her further. Even now she slips thorough our categorizing fingers by recently directing and starring with the all but blacklisted Gibson in The Beaver and later this year is due on our screens as a callous matriarch in the futuristic Elysium for Neill Blomkamp (District 9). As mentioned, her early life and roles were not the norm. On screen she went to dark, curious, confusing places and one of the roles in particular, that of the prostitute Iris in Taxi Driver left a residue in her public life. She is her own woman, her own star and if we look back at the cocky, streetsmart Iris, the girl Travis Bickle wants desperately to save in Taxi Driver, we should have known that classifying her was a fool's errand. She was never really a child star. She was never really a child. She has always been and always will be Jodie Foster. Categorise, pigeon-hole, contain at your peril.

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7

THE TENENBAUM THREE SIMRAN HANS

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Wes Anderson is the boy who never grew up. A modern-day Peter Pan, Anderson's films transport us to various Neverlands, preserved universes pickled in nostalgia, universes that seem to exist autonomously, totally independent of reality. Unlike friend and colleague Noah Baumbach, whose films are also flavoured with the taste of fading, or rather, faded youth, Anderson's films do not take place in any sort of world rooted in reality. From period-pieces like the sixties-set Moonrise Kingdom (2012) to the sepia-tinted storybook format of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and Rushmore (1998), from the imagined India traversed by three brothers aboard a toy train in The Darjeeling Limited (2007) to the self-contained universe of the stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), and even the isolated boat at the centre of The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou (2004), each world that Anderson creates is exactly that -- a created childhood fantasy. These fantasies are frozen in time, a physical manifestation of the desire to preserve childhood. Whether Anderson's films can be seen as an idealisation of fond memories, first love or perhaps Freudian desires, every film in his canon seems to betray an obsession with youth. This essay will explore Anderson's fascination with the preservation of youth, a fascination that manifests itself structurally, as well as through his characters.

Perhaps the clearest way in which Anderson's films re-imagine childhood is through their use of framing narratives. Both visually and structurally, Anderson's stories rely on patently artificial frames in order to make sense of the vestiges of childhood trauma that reside within them. Anderson's technique and meticulous sense of composition are anything but child's play; heavily influenced by New Wave cinema, Anderson is an auteur. However, more often than not, these New Wave sensibilities contribute to the artifice that structures his films, grounding them in a childlike aesthetic. Metaphilm's Matthew Kirby, in 'The Commodification of Memory' writes that Anderson "relies heavily on visual structure provided by two recognisable forms, the children's book and the photo album, to compress time and create a collection of moments, rather than motion". As Kirby notes, Anderson's framing devices include the children's book (The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox) and the photo album (or yearbook, in the case of Rushmore), as well as the stage play and the dollhouse. In other words, these narrative frames mimic the stuff of childhood fiction; staged tableaux that contain the series of events they enclose, fixing them in time and space.

The Royal Tenenbaums is presented as a story; the film begins with the literal opening of a book and a prologue, before an opening credits sequence that details the 37

Irene Gorovaia, Aram Aslanian-Persico and Amedeo Turturro play the younger incarnations of the Tenenbaum children.

film's Cast of Characters. As Joshua Gooch in 'Making a Go of It: Paternity and Prohibition in the Films of Wes Anderson' states, "each of the main characters appears in a sate of undress, as though preparing for the stage" (p. 30). A Truffaut-esque omniscient narrator accompanies the prologue, creating a layer of distance between the film and the audience. This distance makes watching the film feel more like watching a play, or reading a novel, only emphasised by Anderson's choice to divide the film into chapters. Indeed, the careful staging and verbose, stylised conversations that take place within The Royal Tenenbaums are dramatic rather than naturalistic; as The New Inquiry's Kartina Richardson maintains, "his films look like stage plays: sets look like sets, the frame becomes the proscenium arch (a symmetry in the set that exaggerates and enhances the frame's boundaries), and the action is kept in the centre of the frame, usually directed out toward the audience in mainly medium or wide shots".

Richardson continues, arguing that this framing "evokes the feeling of both a child's literal interpretation of the world and youthful big ambition" made light of. This dualism is underscored by an irony in the fact that the precocious Margot Tenenbaum is herself a playwright. Like in one of Margot's plays, the film's artifice is made explicit.

"Didn't you at least think the characters were well-developed?", inquires a young Chas

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Tenenbaum when his father reacts indifferently to Margot's play, an ironic comment on the caricatured Cast of Characters that make up the film.

In Rushmore too, the film is framed as a school play, though this time, the chapters are denoted by the changing seasons, marked by the theatrical unfurling of a pair of red curtains. We are introduced to Rushmore's sixteen year-old hero Max Fischer through a montage detailing his extra-curricular activities, as depicted in his school yearbook. Both Max's history and characterisation exist as snapshots, tucked safely within the confines of a kind of photo album. Kirby suggests that "it is as if we are watching the memory of a movie in which the less picturesque parts, along with the plot development have been weeded out", describing Anderson's stylistic choices as

“A Truffaut-esque omniscient narrator accompanies the prologue’ the summation of "an aesthetic collage of invented nostalgia". In deliberately making these framing devices as visible as possible, Anderson's films can be read as fully complicit in their fictionalising of history. I use the term history, for Anderson's stories (all of which he wrote himself) are tied together by the recurring trope of the broken family. Christopher Orr of The Atlantic cites Anderson's "long romance with parentlessness", drawing on "dead mothers (Rushmore, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), dead fathers (The Darjeeling Limited), absent mothers (Darjeeling) [and] absent fathers (Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums)" as reference points.

It is difficult to discern how much of this trope is drawn from Anderson's own experiences; however, his films consistently concern themselves with this idea of the fragmented family, operating from the position of the wounded child. Perhaps then, Anderson does, as Richardson suggests, "hold his films in a state of perpetual pubescence" as a way of evading the pain of the past. His focus on artefacts certainly reinforces this idea. Using overhead inserts (also known as the 'God's eye' shot) of carefully composed tableaux, of "engraved pocketknives, shirts worn backward as smocks, old Stones albums, and forgotten board games" as Kent Jones writes in 'The Royal Tenenbaums: Faded Glory' writes, objects "have weight and presence as tokens of loss".

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Richie Tenenbaum and Mordecai.

In his short film Hotel Chevalier (2007, released as a prelude to The Darjeeling Limited), an overhead insert depicts a miniature tableau of plastic figurines and taxidermic creatures, an image of life stunted and trapped.

Many of Anderson's characters too remain trapped within their frames. In using windows to frame his characters, Anderson creates a 'dollhouse' effect, a shot that has become one of his trademarks. Take for example Royal Tenenbaum, framed by a pair of star-spangled curtains that wouldn't be out of place in a children's bedroom, Richie Tenenbaum framed by a windowpane as he broods on a rooftop, a dollhouse shot of the three brothers aboard The Darjeeling Limited, Suzy Bishop's house turned into a living dollhouse in the opening scene of Moonrise Kingdom. These are stylistic decisions that clearly demonstrate Anderson's fascination with preserving the past. This is never more evident than in Fantastic Mr. Fox, a film that as Tom Dorey in 'Fantastic Mr. Filmmaker: Parataxis and the Positioning of Wes Anderson as Roald Dahl's Cinematic Heir' describes it, revisits "a favoured childhood text with a nostalgic handmade form of movie-making" (p. 171). Anderson's films concern themselves with the symbiotic relationship between style and substance; they can be read as the visual manifestation of the desire to preserve one's childhood.

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8

L'ENFANT DU VÉRITÉ CHILDREN & DOCUMENTARY FILM TOM GRINTER

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Even prior to the dawn of cinema, children and the photographic image shared an almost intrinsic relationship. Prior to the invention of the moving image, when photography merely recorded individual frames that could be reproduced and distributed for public consumption, the portrait of a child was already deemed to be a particularly fascinating one. An early success story that established this phenomenon was Oscar Rejlander’s Ginx’s Baby, a solitary picture of a young child, clad in white, crying. The image, still recognisable today, was first published in Charles Darwin’s The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, “It is easy to observe infants whilst screaming,” Darwin writes on the page. After being reproduced as a standalone image, the prints of Ginx’s Baby went on to sell 300,000 copies to a fascinated Victorian populace.

When the first motion pictures began to be created for audiences at the end of the 19th Century, children were quickly certified as a viable subject matter for the new medium.

The very first films were, in essence, documentaries; the early days of celluloid represent a time during which the very act of recording moving images was a spectacle and the everyday world, no matter how seemingly mundane, was a fascinating object for the film lens to behold. Some of the first films depict common, routine scenes such as workers exiting a factory (La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon), a family frolicking in a garden (Roundhay Garden Scene) and a profile of a galloping horse (Sallie Gardner at a Gallop).

Amongst these early collections of celluloid are two Louis Lumière films that focus on a child character. La Pêche aux Poissons Rouges and Repas de Bébé, both screened as part of the 1895 Lumière Cinématographe in Paris, feature Louis Lumière’s niece Andrée as their star. In the first film, Andrée energetically paws at a goldfish while being held by her father Auguste. In the second, we are privy to the Lumière’s breakfast routine; the young child is spoon-fed by Auguste before he hands her a biscuit, and in an adorable and audience-gripping moment Andrée generously offers the snack to a figure behind the camera. Repas de Bébé is itself considered to be an important early entry in the history of documentary film. As film critic Noël Burch noted, “[Repas de Bébé was] probably the first film to catch faces “from life”.” Both scenes were exceptionally well received at the Lumière Cinématographe, paving the way for more than a century of similar home-videos to be filmed by amateur enthusiasts, and, in the medium’s most recent incarnation, home-edited and uploaded to video sharing websites such as YouTube.

Of the ten films shown on the Lumière’s programme in 1895, four featured children as subjects. This proliferation quickly spread beyond Paris and into further reaches of Europe and the United States. In the first decade of cinema alone, countless films were produced that depicted children in various fashions, with subjects such as tea parties, bathing and pillow-fights amongst the most popular. The latter, in particular, caused a mini sensation at the end of the 19th century, with filmmakers such as Louis Lumière, Sigmund Lubin and Thomas Edison making pillow-fights so copious that they became one of the first common tropes, or perhaps even ‘genres’, of cinema.

As Vicky Lebeau notes in her book Childhood and Cinema, “through the late 1890s and early 1900s, film producers and exhibitors could take it for granted, clearly, that the im42

Mitchell and Kenyon’s portrayal of Edwardian youth serves as a valuable piece of Edwardian iconographia.

age of a child was a source of both amusement and interest to their prospective audiences.”

In cinema’s earliest days of existence, these ‘Child Pictures’ were extremely popular entertainments and thus guaranteed audiences and profits for their makers. But in these first days of film, children also made an impression on screen in guises other than Child Films.

In Mitchell and Kenyon’s Parkgate Iron and Steel Co., Rotherham (1901), a particularly iconic image can be found in the form of a young man making the first ever ‘V’ sign recorded on camera. Much like the Lumières’ La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon, Mitchell and Kenyon’s film captures a common working class scene. Here, we see adults and young men – many young enough to be classified as ‘children’ – queuing for their paycheques from the factory hierarchy. As a documentary, the film serves as a reminder that British child labour laws have changed dramatically since the invention of the motion picture. In 1901, the very end of the Victorian era, in England and Wales 21.9% of boys aged 10-14 were child labourers, and it wasn’t until 1908 that the Children’s Act was passed, preventing children from being employed in dangerous trades.

Aside from entertainment value and historical reference, the depiction of children on film also became of interest for purposes of observation, particularly to scientific minds. In 1896, the Lumières’ presented a film that would add an extra dimension to the Child Film.

Querelle Enfantine, which depicted Louis’ daughter Suzanne and once again Auguste‘s daughter Andrée, was one of the first films to conduct a behavioural study of young children. The camera observes the pair as they have a quarrel over some items scattered on trays in front of them; one child, presumably Andrée, the older of the pair, proceeds to hit the other, then appears to have a pang of conscience and attempts to smooth over the situa43

tion. While audiences revelled in the film’s comedic value upon release, it also represented a fascinating document for the purpose of studying; here, without the need for rigid experimentation or adult intervention, the behaviour of two children in a seemingly natural environment could be observed countless times. As Darwin noted in The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, viewing children in anguish through a photographic lens was a different experience in comparison to a first-hand account. The barrier of the screen provided the capacity for repeated observations, thus offering the chance for a scientific eye to study the child’s psychology.

In the decades since, behavioural studies of children have been conducted in the filmic format by numerous organizations and interested individuals. A particularly fascinating example can be found in the work of French director Francoise Mari. In her 2007 film On dirait que... she took a group of children as her subjects and instructed them to act out the daily work lives of their parents, providing them with the appropriate costumes and props. Ultimately, the film creates intrigue on multiple levels: the children provide fascinating insight into their own psyches, and also into the views they harbour of their parents and their parents’ professional lives. As described in the film’s trailer, this is a film both, “about adults for children,” and, “about children for adults.”

“Children were quickly certified as a viable subject matter for the new medium”

Documentary films featuring children have also been utilised by numerous institutions. There is a rich history of documentaries being produced by government bodies for the sake of propaganda and education, such as the early work of Dziga Vertov or John Grierson’s films for the Empire Marketing Board. The Central Office of Information – the UK’s governmental publicity body between 1946 and 2012 – commissioned a wealth of these types of documentaries throughout its history, many of which featured children as subjects.

From educating families on proper parenthood in a post-war landscape, to instructing the public on topics such as artificial insemination in the 1980s, the COI has shown that children can be effective protagonists in education materials. Now seen as important historical artefacts in political and film studies terms, many of the COI films have been collected by the BFI and released in various anthologies.

Throughout the 20th century, children continued to be featured in educational films produced by governments, behavioural studies produced by scientific minds and experimental filmmakers, and as secondary characters in various documentary films that cast their primary focus on social issues or older protagonists. It was not until 1994 that children were firmly re-established as a profitable and interesting subject matter for mainstream documentary film. Hoop Dreams, still regarded by many as one of the greatest factual films ever made, became an unprecedented success, garnering critical acclaim from a multitude of sources and so much public affinity that by the end of its theatrical run it had become the 44

Peter Gilbert, Steve James and Frederick Marx’s Hoop Dreams is a landmark on the landscape of the modern documentary.

second highest-grossing documentary in US history. The story sees filmmakers Peter Gilbert, Steve James and Frederick Marx follow two African-American teenagers from impoverished backgrounds attempting to graduate through the basketball scholarship system. Originally intended as a thirty-minute short to be aired on PBS, the film spiralled into a threehour epic that took nearly eight years to complete. While Hoop Dreams may have a strong social message, “a revealing and heartbreaking story about life in America,” as Roger Ebert stated in his review, its focus on two young protagonists from an ethnic minority created a touching tale of childhood dreams. The film draws us in through our empathy with their youthful ambition and, once we are fully involved, proceeds to expose flaws in the systems it depicts; institutional blockades to the American Dream.

After the breakout success of Hoop Dreams, a collection of similarly youth-orientated documentaries have seen comparable, if not equally prolific success at the box office. Spellbound, directed by Jeffrey Bitz, followed the exploits of eight young competitors in the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee. The film garnered critical acclaim and while it did not see the same level of commercial success as Hoop Dreams, it achieved one feat that Hoop Dreams could not, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Documentary Feature at the 2004 Oscars. In 2006, Jesus Camp caused a stir by providing a frank yet non-judgemental depiction of an extreme Christian summer camp; the purportedly objective camera lens provoked such a strong reaction from audiences that the camp was shut down indefinitely. In 2010, the French documentary film Babies (or Bébé in its native language – the film itself is reminiscent of Lumière’s film), which followed four infants during their first year after birth, grossed over a million dollars and was applauded as a joyous cele45

bration of life. In recent years, Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s Undefeated is the most prolific documentary to feature younger protagonists, winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2012 Oscars ceremony.

As we move further into the 21st Century, the importance of children to the documentary film medium is shifting emphasis. While children continue to feature as subjects in multiple films, some prolific some niche, it is the child as a receptor that has become the talking point of recent times. Traditionally, documentary films have rarely garnered much attention amongst audiences below a fully-fledged adult age. Seen as an educational and intellectual pursuit, documentaries are perceived to fail to provide the entertainment quality that children – or adults making decisions for children – seek at the cinema or at home on DVD. However, recently this has changed following the proliferation of celebrity-based films, and nature films, aimed at younger audiences.

In particular, the most popular documentaries with younger audiences have been biographical concert films. You can trace the success of the concert documentary right back through the history of the medium. From Gimme Shelter to Madonna: Truth or Dare and more recently Shut Up And Play the Hits, films detailing tours and individual concerts of popular bands have proven to be a hit formula. Over the last half-decade or so, more and more of these concert documentaries have been aimed at younger audiences. The most successful of these films have featured the likes of Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and recently English boy band product One Direction, with the former two films grossing over a hundred million dollars between them and the recently released latter well on its way to a sizeable total.

While the artistic merit of these documentaries has been brought into question, there is an argument to be made that they are positive for the medium. Criticised as fluff pieces designed to sell concert tickets, what they provide is a stimulation of interest amongst younger audiences. Here are factual films, not aimed at older generations, that focus on popular culture; they are liable to breed a new generation of documentary enthusiasts.

Another genre to be a hit with younger audiences over the last decade has been the nature documentary. In 2005, French nature doc March of the Penguins, famously narrated in the English language by Morgan Freeman, grossed over one hundred million dollars worldwide and won the Best Documentary Academy Award. In the wake of this remarkable and surprising success, a host of other nature documentaries have gone on to be box office hits, such as Earth (2009), African Cats (2011) and Chimpanzee (2012).

As we move forward, the developing young audiences for documentaries will create a sustained interest and longevity for the medium. Those currently consuming this content will become the future generation of documentary viewers and filmmakers, and in turn they will continue to feature children in their films. Over one hundred years on from the early Lumière pictures, as much as ever children are fascinating subjects for the camera lens. Children are an empathy window, a way that we as an audience can see the world laid bare; the innocence of a child reveals the true nature of our planet’s foremost joys and darkest evils.

With audiences for documentaries growing, the medium continues to appear as youthful and fresh as it did at the 1895 Cinématographe.

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9

A MANIFESTO FOR THE ESSAY FILM MARK COUSINS In a recent edition of Sight & Sound magazine Mark Cousins expressed an interest in producing a manifesto for the essay film. In late August 2013 he did just that.

It is reprinted here with Mr. Cousins’ kind permission.

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In the last two years I have made three essay films – What is This Film Called Love?, A Story of Children and Film, and Here be Dragons. In the next year, I will make two more – I am Belfast and Stockholm My Love.

In making these, and watching many more – by Anand Patwardhan and Agnes Varda, for example – and after reading Philip Lopate’s book on the essay, I started to make a mental list of the elements of, and the principles behind, essay films. This list is a kind of manifesto.

Mark Cousins

NON-IPAD READERS PLEASE CLICK HERE http://hopelies.com/the-hope-lies-periodical/periodical-3vol-1-num-3/periodical-3-supplements/a-manifesto-for-the-vid eo-essay/

A Manifesto for the Essay Film 1.

A fiction film is a bubble. An essay film bursts it.

2.

An essay film takes an idea for a walk.

3.

Essay films are visual thinking.

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10

WORKING ON A STORY OF A CHILDREN AND FILM NEIL MCGLONE

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Film Researcher Neil McGlone was enlisted by director Mark Cousins to help him realise his vision.In this exclusive account, Neil takes Periodical through the process of being involved such a task. Neil also highlights a couple of his favourite entries in A Story Of Children And Film.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Around two years ago I started exchanging messages with Mark Cousins on Twitter. Initially our conversations focused around his BBC series Scene by Scene which ran from 1996 to 1999. I had the complete series in my little archive and I believe Mark was missing a couple of episodes so I offered to send them to him. This is really how our friendship initially began.

Since then I have been sending Mark little packages of rare films every few months, titles I think that he might like to see or be interested in. Then in August 2012 we met for the first time at Los Angeles airport, in the departures lounge. We were both on our way to the Telluride Film Festival; Mark was heading there with his film What is this film called love? (2012) and I had been invited as a guest by the US director, Alexander Payne. During the festival we went out for a drink a few times and chatted about our passion for films and Mark kindly offered to help to see if he could help find me a job somehow connected with film.

A couple of months after Telluride I received an email from Mark asking if I'd be interested in doing the research on a film he was making about children in film. Attached to his email was a treatment/pitch for the project. It didn't take me many minutes to fire off an email back to Mark to say "yes". A few weeks later we met in Cambridge to discuss the project in more detail and what my role would entail. I would be responsible for finding copies of films, making suggestions and forwarding them to Mark, then when it was decided what the final films to be included were, to source the best available materials for the final edit.

The first thing I did was to go through my entire collection and list all films that featured a child protagonist and sent this to Mark. This initial list included the following films that made the final cut which at the time Mark had not seen; Finlandia (1922), S.E.R. - Svoboda eto rai AKA Freedom is Paradise (1989), At' zije Republika AKA Long Live the Republic (1965), Ghatashraddha AKA The Ritual (1977) ,The Yellow Balloon (1953) and Alyonka (1961) . A number of the other titles in the list also ended up being in the final cut but Mark was already very familiar with those titles and had already identified a large number of these in his initial treatment for the project.

For the next three months, Mark and I watched a large number of films featuring a child protagonist and exchanged emails about what we were watching and comments on various scenes in those films. Then around the end of January 2013, Mark had pretty much decided on what the final list of films would be for the film. Whilst I was attending the Rotterdam Film Festival at this same time, i saw and fell in love with a film at the festival that contained a scene near the end that 50

seemed perfect for A Story of Children and Film (2013). When I came out of the screening I sent a frantic and excitable text to Mark saying that we had to include this! More on that particular film later.

Mark and I met again, this time in London, around the middle of February. We went through the list of films that Mark felt were likely to end up being in the final cut and for ease of reference we went through them country by country. This was not to ensure that all corners of the globe were covered but for one it helped us remember what films we had watched and were being considered, plus it also helped us to think of anything else that we may have overlooked or had not yet seen. It also helped to see if we had a good even spread across each continent and that no country was over-represented. At this discussion I also mentioned to Mark another film that I had just recently seen a few nights previous that a friend had sent me and recommended. I said I felt he should give it a look and that it stood a good chance of being included, even at this late stage.

More on that film later too.

At the end of February, Mark sent me a link via email to the first cut of the film which included his narration but did not yet have opening or closing credits. This first cut of the film is not a lot different to the final cut save for a few minor alterations; there was a clip from The Wizard of Oz (1939) in the first cut but was removed as it was felt that Dorothy looked maybe a bit too old and was replaced with the clip from Meet Me in St Louis (1944) which again of course featured Garland but this time focused more on little Margaret O'Brien, a different clip of The Night of the Hunter (1955) was used in the first cut and only one clip from Long Live the Republic (1965). I can't remember much else being very different.

Now that the final list of films was decided it was my job to source the best quality materials for each clip to be used. Fortunately between Mark and I we had around 60% of the titles already in good quality versions so I only had to get hold of around 20 titles. The whole process of sourcing the titles took less than two weeks so by the end of March, everything was ready to make the final cut. Once that final cut was complete I received an email with a new link to the film and was asked to "fact-check" the film. This meant going through the film in fine detail, checking all the titles were correct, checking that what Mark was saying in his narration was factually accurate and making lots of notes. I think I ended up watching the film about 4 times in all and going back over things to ensure everything was correct even down to debating the issue with the producer about the bird in the Dutch film Kauwboy (2012) which Mark refer's to as a crow in his narration when it is in fact a jackdaw. Mark left it in as technically the jackdaw is part of the crow family and it seemed to perhaps being overly pedantic! There were a few errors which were mainly down to simple things like the film's production year being incorrect in the titles but fortunately nothing else very serious.

The "fact-checking" was pretty much my final role with the film, other than some writing for the website. The film was then submitted to Cannes where of course, the rest is history as they say!

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NON-IPAD READERS PLEASE CLICK HERE http://hopelies.com/the-hope-lies-periodical/per iodical-3-vol-1-num-3/working-on-a-story-of-childre n-and-film/ Working on A Story of A Children and Film

At' zije Republika AKA Long Live the Republic (1965) d. Karel Kachyna

A film from my first initial list that I sent to Mark which was closely followed by an email from Mark requesting to see it. Kachyna's film is not that well known sadly but certainly deserves to be. It features some very inventive cinematography and editing, particularly in its depiction of the present, past and the dreamlike imagery. The film is seen through the eyes of a child, a young 12 year old boy, as the Germans are leaving the boy's hometown and the Russians are arriving. The boy is often seen at odds with others in the film, whether it be other village boys or adults, but his dreams of freedom take on somewhat conventional forms like the scene where he is transported into the air by kite or floats away on a block of ice after being chased by some other boys. There was another Czech film which was considered along with this one, which I was very much flying the flag for, which was PieseĹˆ o sivom holubovi AKA The Song of the Grey Pigeon (1961) by Stanislav Barabas. A debut film from Barabas about the innocence of childhood and how it parallels with the destructive forces of war.

The film was quite similar in style to Kachyna's and for me, has one of the most tragic endings on celluloid. Mark and I discussed both films at length, I particularly felt the scenes with the younger boy in Barabas film were worthy of consideration whereas Mark preferred the scenes with the older boy and in particular a skating scene in the church. In the end the right choice was made with Long Live the Republic as it also now features on more than one occasion in the final cut of the film. It was not difficult to source this film as it is available commercially on DVD in the Czech Republic in a very good print with English subtitles.

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11

LAND OF PLENTY: INSIDE THE NEW AMERICAN NIGHTMARE CRAIG WILLIAMS 53

“We is the spot. Few old fools like the late Ho may not know it, we is what the world is begging for. Big beat, smack, big-assed cars and billboards, we is into it. Jesus come down, He come down here. These other countries just bullshit places right? We got the ape shit, right? Bring down Kingdom Come, we’ll swamp the world in red-hot real American blue-green ape-shit right?”

From Rabbit Redux by John Updike, 1971

1. Does It Look Like I’m Here?

In the first half of 2013, the American cinema witnessed the birth of a new nightmare.

Though somewhat muted by mainstream critical indifference, its arrival was nonetheless pronounced through its youthful obnoxiousness. Together, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain took a battering ram to the national psyche and held up a contemporary vision of the American Dream for audiences in all its inglorious ignominy. The films form a loose thematic trilogy, taking on a subject as old as the country itself, but doing so in a way firmly rooted in the new media and cultural sensibilities of the 21st century. This is satire as immersion; appropriating the aesthetic values and linguistic devices of zeitgeist-defining popular culture forms and turning them in on themselves. They are black mirrors from the heart of the battle.

Despite the defiantly modern cinematic techniques at work, the trilogy is firmly ensconced in American classicism. The films are a part of the continuing artistic narratives of the country; almost like a subconscious fourth arm of the state, holding the nation accountable for the vagaries of a meritocratic society. From Nathaniel Hawthorne to Jonathan Franzen, artists have always engaged in a frantic struggle to define America and, more often than not, it begins and ends with asking what was gained and lost in the transition from the certainties of servitude to the infinite opportunities afforded by personal freedom. At its heart, American art is the philosophy of meritocracy; a querulous marriage between the personal and the political. While the energy and aggression of the trilogy may feel like a cultural revolution, it is in truth a timely stock take in the grandest of American literary traditions.

2. Still I See A Darkness There is scant novelty in the satire underpinning the trilogy, but the aesthetics are built on a manipulation of 21st century popular culture and multimedia imagery. Each film is distinct in its approach, but the collective effect is a culmination of visual representations of materialism in the new American century. This is a uniquely cinematic approach; it is one in which would be near impossible to replicate on this scale in other art forms. Indeed, 54

Haute fashion and perceived success sits at the heart of Coppola’s thesis on young crime.

the substance of the satire is the visual approach. The trilogy is concerned with what surface means in a society defined by how things look. Upon release, all three films faced accusations of shallowness, overlooking the fact that the aesthetics are everything in the worlds they show, and deliberately so.

In The Bling Ring, celebrity culture is a poison that corrodes the souls of youth.

Though the most visually conventional film of the trilogy, the picture is notable for its recognition of the way social media has allowed a certain strata of teenagers to replicate the pervasive imagery of fame in which they immerse themselves continuously. Almost like a twisted analogy of meritocracy in America, the rise of reality television and the resulting democratisation of fame have manipulated the meaning of celebrity, facilitating the proliferation of gossip media. In the suburbs of Los Angeles – coincidentally on the edge of Hollywood, the peripheries of fame – the characters of The Bling Ring see celebrity culture not just as a manual for living but, crucially, as an attainable ideal.

The girls in the film appear to be in a constant state of documentation. Living is synonymous with recording the experiences of life. They assimilate the poses that appear in gossip magazines and display them on social media. They inadvertently create microcosms of the fame machine. Life is a cycle, a reflection of celebrity culture repeated ad nauseam; shopping, clubs, document, repeat. Coppola and cinematographer Harris Savides often show events through frenzied collages of Facebook pictures interspersed with images of the 55

girls’ celebrity counterparts. The Bling Ring removes the blurred lines that delineate real life and celebrity life by ascribing images posted on social media with a sense of cinematic weight.

is a subversive cycle of fame through imagery; girls rob houses to make themselves look like celebrities and the news shows the footage effectively making them celebrities.

“America has a sick fascination with the Bonnie & Clyde thing”, says one of the characters as he reflects on the crimes. In this sense, Coppola taps into the age-old romanticism of the outlaw in American history, bridging the short gap between fame and criminality. It is an idea that has been present in the dark recesses of the American consciousness since the frontier days. There is an inherent attraction in the notion of the losers fighting against the absolutism of the moral order; rendering illegality and culpability a grey area. In God we trust, but in the outlaw we believe. Even in the Old West, the romanticism was propagated through imagery. Is the new media simply the contemporary equivalent of the iconic wanted poster? Fame is infamy, with nothing in between.

However, Coppola knows when to pull back. While the nights out and parties are filmed with an alluring aura, the robberies themselves are tightly framed with deliberate purpose. Savides’ chilly pastels look like the last days of summer. There is a sense of an ending approaching; a tipping point perhaps. In one astonishing sequence, Savides’ camera remains completely still as two teenagers rob the house of reality television star Audrina Patridge. We see the lights of L.A. in the valleys behind the home; it is a timely reminder of life beating on elsewhere. The loud music and fast-paced sequences of the girls partying seem not only to mythologise their lives, but also create a sense of distance from society, just like the gutter press.

The single shot of the robbery is an indication that these are just immature children stealing from other people’s homes.

A third visual technique in The Bling Ring is surveillance footage. The picture contains various sequences filmed on CCTV. They are used in two ways. Firstly, in filling the entire screen, they implicate the viewer as a voyeur; a sobering reminder that, after the glitz and the parties, we are witnessing criminal activity. Secondly, the CCTV footage is played on the news and – like a cyclical pattern of voyeurism - we see the characters watching themselves. Perversely, the unforgiving seediness of the images is transformed by the flash and bang of network news into its own form of gilded glamour. It 56

In Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine brings a pornographer’s eye to proceedings, albeit one with an absurdist bent. The most visually distinctive film of the trilogy, there is an underlying aggressiveness to Korine’s garish aesthetics; an obnoxious rush of colours and obscenities. But the effrontery cursorily hides a modern artist’s approach to popular culture. Spring Breakers is a film about visual representation, finding a moral vacuum in the raunch culture of music videos and connecting it thematically to the lineage of American exploitation film, exposing a cycle of cultural citation and the aspirational stirrings it prompts.

Dwayne Johnson, like Schwarzenegger before him, the archetypical American success story.

Spring Breakers opens with a queasily repellent bacchanalian vision of a beach party taking place during spring break in Florida. The camera is leery, gliding over the partly naked bodies of young women, glowing as the sun reflects off skin glazed with sweat and alcohol. The strangely bravura sequence is deliberately reminiscent of Joe Francis’ Girls Gone Wild series, in which a camera crew would pay girls on spring break to flash for them. It serves almost like a visual overture; a notice of a recurring motif which will appear throughout the film. It is a suitable statement of intent for Korine. Spring Breakers’ narrative structure is curiously operatic; built on repeated and gently manipulated images that inform the events taking place. Motifs are repeated in shifting contexts, with the same images used for both celebratory and condemnatory purposes.

The predominance of the surface in Spring Breakers means that the visual approach is effectively the film’s purpose. While the picture’s substance (or purported lack thereof) has been the subject of significant debate since its release, it is clear that it is a film about the tipping point of the materialist century. Korine constructs the film based on what he arguably sees as the most prominent instigator of everyday material excess in young America; MTV. Moral decrepitude is demonstrated through the lack of delineation between sex and money.

To this end, Korine appropriates gaudy pornographic sensibilities to tell, what is in essence, a familiar tale of classic American excess.

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Korine’s approach to hip hop culture is almost problematically provocative. The visual touchstone for Spring Breakers is the mainstream rap music video; all guns, girls and cars. The director uses these representations to construct the aesthetic palette of the film. The appropriation of these signifiers into a cinematic form inevitably shifts the context. Much like a modern art experiment, it prompts viewers to consider what is gained and what is lost by turning a celebratory, high-impact four-minute music video into a 90-minute film. The initial allure rapidly wears thin and turns to ceaseless sleaze. It is like watching an art form decompose in front of your eyes. Korine allows for the images to intoxicate then corrupt. In the latter, we begin to ponder the subtexts of the former.

Spring Breakers is a film of visual types; of icons and representations. The four girls look and sound so much alike that they are occasionally inter-changeable.

Whether this is a purposeful comment on the inherent misogyny of popular culture is debatable, but Korine does play with this idea. By draping the girls in identical balaclavas, guns and bikinis, they become faceless avenging angels. Like an exploitation film, they are catalysts of sex and violence.

Spring Breakers’ aesthetic deliberately obfuscates the girls’ identity. Their backstory is irrelevant. They are set up as pawns to James Franco’s Alien’s game.

Franco’s Alien is Spring Breakers’ centerpoint. With his capped teeth, braided hair and jewelry, he is an inverted hip hop stereotype. He is also a white, male entrepreneur. This is crucial to the film. By stripping 58

hip hop culture of its socio-political concerns, Korine creates a sub-strata of the culture that is easily assimilated into the middle-class aspirations of white America.

In many ways, this is the film’s most confrontational element. Hip hop culture devoid of its rich history and political context it becomes merely anther visual signifier of materialism to be seized upon.

Taken at face value, the aesthetic approach of Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain is relatively conventional for a summer blockbuster. But, looking at the broader picture, we see the fruits of a director becoming aware of his own visual power, and where that sits in the pursuit of the American Dream. Bay has twenty years of experience directing music videos and blockbuster action films. His style, often replicated by pretenders to his weary throne, has been coarsely referred to by the director as “fucking the frame”. While the degree of directorial cognisance is debatable, the picture raises a number of points about the very purpose of the blockbuster aesthetic. Somewhere in the gulf between inadvertent selfparody and intelligent self-awareness lies a wealth of material ripe for analysis.

By attaching his signature aesthetic to a relatively straightforward crime story, Bay creates a clash of visual sensibilities which helps advance the film’s central thesis. Indeed, the key is the conflict between the director’s polished, finely-tuned camerawork and the grimy seediness of the narrative.

The three protagonists of Pain & Gain are genuinely detestable figures. They are bodybuilding obsessives who perversely equate the strive for physical perfection with the

drive to financial success and the respect that brings in America. Bay’s aesthetics are precise visual renderings of how the men see themselves and their goals. While the director’s queasily sexualised, militarist eye may have seemed repugnant in films that are aimed at a younger audience like the Transformers series, it works in Pain & Gain.

The camera creates physical gods out of the protagonists. Close-ups, slow motion and perfectly calibrated framing show the three as modern day Adonic ideals. Curiously, Bay’s industrialist sensibility makes them appear as signifiers of power; just like a car or a gun. In one sequence, Mark Wahlberg has sex with a stripper over the bonnet of a car. As he thrusts, the car is pushed gradually into another vehicle parked behind. Though undeniably crass, it is the perfect visual encapsulation of the Michael Bay sensibility. Furthermore, the director delights in the imbecility of the film’s male trio. Where he once showed contempt for his characters, with his films serving almost as cinematic dehumanisation tools, he

“Though clearly lacking the technical and intellectual rigour of Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece, Bay takes the final cocaine-addled section of the film as a tonal manual.”

shows in Pain & Gain that he understands them and consequently judges them. In this sense, ascribing their physical prowess with a sense of mechanical functionality seems not only apt, but subversive.

Apart from his own work, Bay uses the final act of Goodfellas as a visual and stylistic touch point in Pain & Gain. Though clearly lacking the technical and intellectual rigour of Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece, the film takes the final cocaine-addled section of the film as a tonal manual, amplifying and manipulating elements as necessary. After the initial set-up, Pain & Gain moves quickly. The picture unfolds in an almost farcical daze of blood, money and muscle. Indeed, the second half of the film is a sensory pummeling, but one that does ask serious questions about the place of the American Dream in the 21st century.

3. Perverted by Language With the aesthetic considerations at the forefront, the dialogue in the trilogy may veer towards the inconsequential, but its use is still in service of the image. As the most straightforward narrative, The Bling Ring favours relative realism, with the adolescent characters

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The gang at the heart of The Bling Ring

speaking in the same affected, shrugging cadences used in teen films. The girls are in pursuit of an image, and the dialogue reflects that, taking the requisite back seat.

One of the notable contradictions of America is the secularisation of Christian dogma.

Religion occupies a curious position in the country; while personal freedom is paramount, it is seemingly held accountable not just by the arms of the state, but by the machinations of Christianity. Much of the country’s social policy is, if not driven, then informed to various extents by religious ideals. This creates an atmosphere whereby any comment of the purpose of any given activity in life carries a degree of theological importance.

In Pain & Gain, Mark Wahlberg’s Daniel Lugo ascribes religious weight to self-help slogans and bon mots. If self-improvement is the cornerstone of the American Dream, then its language should reflect that gravity; thus it takes on theological characteristics. Lugo’s illconceived plan in the film may, in reality derive from his insatiable greed, but he believes it is inspired by the philosophy of motivational speaker, Johnny Wu (played by Ken Jeong).

Wu’s wealth is demonstrative of a booming self-help industry in the US; it has the power to generate its own peculiar brand of theology. Bay is damning; if people are stupid enough to fall for it and use the mottos as guides for living, then language has become meaningless.

Lugo talks a lot in Pain & Gain. The voiceover in the film’s opening scenes is relatively lengthy and sets out his vision of life in slogans and exaggerations. The colossal notion of 60

America is met with equally hyperbolic phrases. Again, religion seeps through the gaps; Lugo is turning himself into “a monument of physical perfection”. Gods, Adonis, monuments; the language of idolatry is used to capture something as trifling as muscles. But it is key to understanding why the characters in Pain & Gain take the actions they do. The film captures the dichotomy in America between material success and the drive towards it. The goal creates a void, and new ideas will emerge to fill that void.

From self-help to scientology; the US is fertile ground for snake oil.

The confluence of spirituality and hedonism is at the centre of Spring Breakers.

For the college girls, spring break becomes a pilgrimage. Korine includes numerous scenes where the characters ponder the importance of the experience, asking themselves questions about its value to them.

But, more often than not, the importance never transcends beyond the experience itself. The deliberate clash between the ethereal, hazy voiceover and the emptiness of what is actually being said is where Spring Breakers derives its comical and satirical edge. Korine douses the film in so much partying that the quieter moments of reflection with their faux sense of spirituality are rendered wholly redundant.

Spring break itself is the film’s equivalent of material success in Pain & Gain, but they are all facets of their respective directors’ visions of the American Dream. The disjointed narrative and mood-driven structure favour mantras over dialogue; vocal motifs which recur just as certain imagery does. Again, the deliberate portentousness 61

of the mantras – repeated whispers of “spring break” – are at odds with the excess but, more so than the hedonism, they define the vacuity at the heart of a generation. The camera may be concerned with the booze, the sex and the drugs, but the language is concerned with the misguided faith the characters put in the value of their experience; which is as scathing as the film can be.

The more traditional language of materialism is found in James Franco’s Alien.

Alien may be another aspect of the girls’ experience but, in many ways, he is its apex.

Like Daniel Lugo in Pain & Gain, he speaks constantly, but Spring Breakers’ more heightened ambiance give him a shamanic quality; his words are dispatches from the far reaches of American materialism. As noted, his use of hip hop parlance is central.

Korine purposefully ignores the social context of the genre – race, injustice and empowerment – and appropriates the materialism of the more mainstream part of the subculture. In a key scene in Spring Breakers, Alien list what he owns; “look at all my shit”. The street parlance is misdirection; he is not speaking about overcoming hardship, he is referring to his success in terms of his possessions. Success is not a concept within itself, the items bought with it are.

Alien’s speech itself is symptomatic of the neo-materialist mindset. It unfolds rhythmically, almost hypnotically; “I got shorts, every fuckin’ colour. I got designer t-shirts. I got gold bullets…look at my shit, this ain’t nothing, I got rooms of this shit”.

It is a compilation of mantras in a film already brimming with them. The linguistics

of success are easily digestible into quotable, repeatable soundbites. Just look at my shit.

4. A Prologue to History When The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Pain & Gain were released, authorial intent became a central discussion point. Coppola, Korine and Bay were each accused of being compromised by the blurred lines between their lives and the subjects of their art. It became a matter of authenticity and questionable intentions. For centuries, writers like Edith Wharton and Jane Austen have been a part of the societies they satirised; the difference with the three directors is that the pronounced visual approach veers towards the celebratory.

The fact that Coppola, Korine and Bay have all shown signs in the past of displaying the exact qualities they satirise in their trilogy further muddies the waters. The key to separating

“The girls of The Bling Ring are in pursuit of an image, and the dialogue reflects that, taking the requisite back seat.” the artist from the art is in the way each film uses new media sensibilities. The more extravagant stylistic moments in The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Pain & Gain are all appropriated from current popular culture forms; from social media to music videos. The directors use the visual language of the zeitgeist to comment on it.

It is one thing to understand the comment, but what of its value? The trilogy’s formal approach may be very modern, but the arguments form a part of literary America’s ongoing engagement with the drama of materialism in the country. Key works in this regard all ask what the American Dream means at that point in time which, in respect of the trilogy, is the first decade of 21st century. The American Dream is not necessarily a measure of success; it is about the contentment that derives from the freedom and opportunity for prosperity. It is an idea that is present to varying degrees in most Western democracies. The difference in the US is that it is vocalised, setting it up to be constantly assessed and measured against the soul of the age.

In his book, Status Anxiety, philosopher Alain de Botton considers the pandemic of concern over one’s place in society to stem from the material development of the 18th century in the West and the subsequent transition from the mental calm of servitude to the opportunities of freedom i.e. the rise of the meritocratic society. By significantly widening the parameters of social opportunity; we have created not only the potential for immeasurable success, but also crashing failure. Flattening the structure of society in this way is irrefutably just; but complexities arise when the delineations between wealth and broader prosperity are removed.

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Alien’s speech itself is symptomatic of the neo-materialist mindset.

In America, the rise of materialism is based on changing expectations. In founding father Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth published in 1758, he imparts advice on how to succeed. Curiously enough, it is the prototype of modern self-help books, full of memorable phrases, mottos and ideals. Indeed, it is the conception of the title Pain & Gain (“Industry need not wish, as poor Richard says, and he that lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains, without pains…”). The trilogy seizes on the contemporary determination of what those expectations are.

De Botton identifies that the new media created longings in its audience. People would see the glamorous lives of film stars on screen and consider their own lives in that context. The advertising industry used this void to propagate those longings. 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted that wealth is not absolute; it is simply relative to desire.

This notion is ubiquitous throughout the social narrative of the 20th century and it inevitably became a point of interest for American artists.

The expectations may be slightly different in The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Pain & Gain, but they are all based on the more unsavoury aspects of the contemporary American Dream; fame, hedonism and physical perfection. Even where the goal is arguably legitimate – like simple financial success in Pain & Gain – the bases for the expectations are lamentable. In their own way, Coppola, Korine and Bay are all noting the way merit has been replaced by entitlement. It is the perfect storm of new media forms and the dichotomy between goals and expectations. It is not so much “look at all my shit” as it is “what about my shit”? The execrable synonym speaks volumes in the 21st century.

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12 . A

IN REVIEW

THE ACT OF KILLING CHRISTINA NEWLAND

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Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary film The Act of Killing is an utterly mind-bending experience; blending traditional documentary footage with the surreality of a Jodorowsky film. Oppenheimer spent 10 years with a group of men in Indonesia, assorted ex-thugs and gangsters who, in the 1960's, helped to carry out the slaughter of 2.5 million suspected Communists (as in: intellectuals, union leaders, ethnic Chinese) in their home country after an attempted coup. If documentary is an attempt at recording truth, whatever subjective and decidedly non-absolutist concept that truth may be, Oppenheimer does so with an unusual and effective method; he asks the perpetrators to make their own fiction film depicting the events of the killings. The films can be in whatever mould or genre the men prefer; they express their fondness for John Wayne, Elvis films, and other Hollywood ephemera that seems bafflingly out-of-place. (Yet also somehow appropriate, perhaps, for men who were once known as 'movie theatre gangsters'.)

Early on in the film, we are introduced to Anwar Congo, a thin, white-haired old man who with shocking and cavalier clarity describes his brutal method for killing Communists; strangulation with a wire and a wooden rod. A moment later, he is laughing and dancing. The fact remains that these men have not only gone unpunished, but in many walks of Indonesian life, are celebrated.

The Pancacila Youth, a Fascist group tied to criminal organizations with a membership of 3 million and astonishing political power, is the force behind this glorification and supplied many of the men who took part in the killings. Under their protection and support, men like Anwar walk free, displaying a frightening capacity for both brazen callousness and precarious denial about their roles in the genocide. The film is striking in its seeming complicity with these men, privy to their most private ruminations and discussions; the act of turning reality into lurid fiction gets straight to the dark heart of the matter. What seems like fiction to these men becomes reality through its rendering as fiction, complete with flamboyant costumes and props. And what begins as a light exercise in macho fantasy – pretending to maim, torture, and murder - soon reveals the horrifying act in full, particularly in one scene featuring the real step-son of a victim in the victim's role. The tension becomes nearly unbearable; the jarring immorality chafes against the precarious filmic fiction where the men take refuge. In the perpetrators, it soon reveals the cracks in their logic; they begin to suffer from cognitive dissonance, varying degrees and brief 65

flashes of conscience, guilt, or self-awareness appearing in fits and starts. It usually disappears just as quickly into their myopic, movie-violent worldview.

But to discuss The Act of Killing purely in terms of its moral stance or documentary conventions is to miss a larger part of the film; its strange bouts of magical realism. A man in drag eats pretend bodily organs for his film, face smeared in fake blood. Anwar and his friend discuss seeing a psychiatrist for 'nerve vitamins' while they fish on the dock and assure one another they are in no way crazy. The inefficient bumbling of old friends often leads to what feels like inappropriate humour; we don't want to find these men amusing. We want to hate them. They make our blood run cold, laugh off their own heinous brutality, cheerfully discuss raping 14-year-old girls. They seem to carry sickeningly few of the natural traits or empathies of common human experience, and yet, we find ourselves both coldly repelled and

“Equally, the men show glimmers of awareness, and a few of them, remorse. Anwar is the most poignant example of this; when he watches himself onscreen, play-acting as a victim of interrogation and torture, he looks up to Joshua, behind the camera.�

equally fascinated by this apparent void. Equally, the men show glimmers of awareness, and a few of them, remorse. Anwar is the most poignant example of this; when he watches himself onscreen, play-acting as a victim of interrogation and torture, he looks up to Joshua, behind the camera. His eyes fill with tears. He says, 'I have done this to so many people....Have I sinned?' He knows the answer, and he lowers his head in shame and despair. Earlier in the film, he describes throwing bodies over a bridge into the river below as 'beautiful – like parachutes!'. The evident contradiction between contrition and brutality, the surreal imagery Anwar conjures, his psychological aberrations, all come to be representative of the film that he features in. The Act of Killing is an unquantifiable film; difficult to hold to similar standards as anything else in its genre, if you could begin to claim it had one. It is a breathtaking, bizarre, and contemplative exploration of mass murder, collective memory, and the ways in which evil is perpetrated, excused, and most importantly, lived with. The final moments of the film show Anwar re-visiting the site of one of his slaughters and retching violently, vomiting out his soul it seems; his body trying to forcibly exorcise his demons in any way possible.

Although his remorse is heartening, it seems unlikely he will ever succeed.

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12 . B

IN REVIEW

A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM PATRICK GAMBLE 67

Directed by Mark Cousins

Irish filmmaker, critic and fellow Periodical contributor Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film is clearly pertinent to this issues’ temporary residence at the ill-behaved children’s table of the movies. An abridged appendix to his fifteen hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) Cousins’ latest is a poetic journey through the annals of cinematic history, forcably grasping the audience by the hand and allowing them to regress through time and once again observe the medium through the innocent and untainted eyes of youth – a rousing voyage of discovery that recalls the unforgettable sense of wonder which accompanied your first experience at the multiplex.

Covering 53 films and spanning 25 countries A Story of Children and Film presents us with a global perspective on cinema. Courting elements of comedy, romance and cultural criticism with the gregarious idiosyncrasy of youth, we’re presented with a lyrical billet-doux to the medium that celebrates both the innocent naivety of childhood and the phenomenal power of film to move us. From Charlie Chaplin's The Kid via an eclectic diversion through classical cinematic terrain such as Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, A Story of Children and Film is an irresistible treasure trove of cinematic references. Amalgamating footage from the instantly recognisable work of auteurs such as Tarkovsky, Truffaut and Bergman, with some of cinema's rarest and lesser known riches, Cousins examines how the purity of children (from every corner of the globe) can act as a conduit in which to whittle down the intricate complexities that often suffocate the world - whether it's be the bitter economic after-taste of war, the humane desire to conform to society's suppressive regimes or simply mirroring the despondency of contemporary life through the adolescent confusion of puberty.

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Cinema itself is merely a baern dwelling inside the faded grandeur of the slowly dilapidating household of the arts - the young pretender in an antiquated dominion bursting with creativity. Cousins effortlessly echoes the medium’s youthful exuberance, vehemently depicting how childhood innocence can organically fashion a natural performance within an art form deliberately designed to falsifying reality; presenting us with an impassioned salutation for the purity of adolescence and the capricious energy that runs through the veins of all great filmmakers - affectionately showning us the maturity and wisdom which resides behind cinema’s otherwise rambunctious veneer .

Following a highfaluting exposition (establishing the doc’s unique way of seeing the world through a frame narrative about the contemplative nature of Vincent Van Gogh’s artistic gaze) Cousins’ camera switches to a far more personal subject, namely his nephew and niece as they play with marbles on the living room floor. What could

“Following a highfaluting exposition Cousins’ camera switches to a far more personal subject”

easily be seen as an incredibly narcissistic and self-absorbed tactic actually reveals itself to be anything but, functioning as a charming window into the way children behave in front of the camera and acting as the perfect launching pad for Cousins’ exploration of what cinema can teach us about children and, equally, what children can teach us about cinema.

Much like Cousins’ The Story of Film each clip is meticulously decrypted and contextualised through a liberal, yet methodical approach. However, in its condensed format, A Story of Children and Film allows Cousins' enthusiasm to radiate far more effectively. Coming across like an excited child himself, Cousins is clearly eager for you join him as he enthusiastically shares his cognisant illustration of a world full of hope, joy and most importantly, imagination. It’s refreshing to witness such a reflective and passionate study of film – culminating in an enjoyable hopscotch through cinema’s short, yet fruitful history that’s destined to provide even the most ardent and cultured of cinephiles at least a couple of undiscovered films to track down and enjoy.

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12 . C

IN REVIEW

THE CANYONS ADAM BATTY

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Directed by Paul Schrader

Starring Lindsay Lohan, James Deen.

Upon first glance Paul Schrader’s The Canyons may appear to be a wooden, overly staged affair, and a picture not aesthetically disimilar to the adult-movie industry that informs the film’s contextual make-up. Alas, this is 21st Century touch-point logic, with the film’s most immediate inspiration actually being the classic Hollywood melodrama (a type of cinema whose influence can be seen on the adult-movie, as luck would have it). Imagine that particular cultural trend crossed with the one that followed it, and it’s own negative, the film noir, and you’re close to the tone of the film at hand. An anti-naturalistic inflection runs through the picture, with the whole work an explicit construct that is constantly reminding the viewer that what they are watching is a movie, and not a legitimate imprint of the real world. The sight of a lost Lindsay Lohan, the perfect ‘model’, to borrow a piece of terminology from Schrader’s beloved Robert Bresson, wandering the halls of her vast, empty, luxurious habitation recalls Bardot in Godard’s Contempt. As Godard did with that film Schrader here takes a fascinating contemporary figure of celebrity and subverts their public persona. He lingers, and focusses, and plays Lohan back in slow motion, offering the viewer the chance to really take a look at a figure so often only seen in the instance captured by a flashbulb.

It’s a film that is constantly referring to the illustrious and infamous history of the city of Los Angeles, which, for all intents and purposes is a city that lives and breathes the movies. The notorious case of the Black Dahlia, in which the most heinous sexual violence was enacted is explicitly referenced, while the cities many empty movie theatres are themselves placed centre stage. The film’s opening credits play out over a montage of “dead” cinemas, abandoned in the current, and “dead” being a recurring adjective throughout these thoughts on The Canyons, while an 71

ultra-modern electronic score plays out. The tag-line “Youth, Glamour, Sex and Los Angeles, circa 2012” comes attached to the movie, laying out it’s creators (there are two of them; novelist Bret Easton Ellis wrote the picture) intentions.

Just how contemporary the films commentary on the end of the cinema is is rather surprising. Many have expressed concern over the death of film for some time now, with such hypothesis’ placed alongside the context of the rise of the digital, but Schrader’s movie takes that one step further. He’s concerned with more than the celluloid vs. megapixels debate, and is instead looking to the nature in which the shape of the very medium itself is changing. The question of how we consume cinema is being asked, as opposed to one of how a filmmaker produces movies .

An examination of the contemporaneous fills every facet of the picture. Schrader and Ellis’s characters bear the names of several contemporary pop culture yardsticks. Christian, Ryan and Tara, the three main players in the picture share

“The tag-line “Youth, Glamour, Sex and Los Angeles, circa 2012” comes attached to the movie, laying out the intentions of it’s creators”

their own christian names with Messrs Grey, Gosling and Miss Reid, three figures that each represent various areas of pop cultural stardom. Christian Grey, 2012′s trash-literature crossover poster-boy, Ryan Gosling, this generation’s James Dean-alike brooding nihilist, and Tara Reid, actress turned full-time celebrity. It is in Christian, played by adult-movie star James Deen, in which the pen of Ellis can most clearly be felt. A preening, arrogant Bateman-alike, Deen’s Christian might just be the key to understanding the picture’s intricacies. As he sits in the office of his psychiatrist, portrayed by filmmaker Gus Van Sant, he is told that ”We’re all actors”, which acts as an emotional epiphany of sorts. We’ve previously seen his emotional balance veer from obnoxious on an affecting level

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(initially he’s the kind of potentially dangerous character that an audience would choose not to spend any time with), to fascinating psychological channel.

Lindsay Lohan, the disaffected child actress turned tabloid whipping girl, plays Tara, the closest figure the film has to a central protagonist. Lohan is filtered through the director’s own cinematic interests. Jeanne Falconetti, the aforementioned Bresson model and the road away from agnosticism inform the character. In fact, The Canyons features the most explicit bearing of Schrader’s influences (as outlined in ‘Transcendental Style In Film’, his thesis-turned-filmtheory-staple) since 1980′s American Gigolo. The power of the close up cannot be downplayed. As mentioned afore, Schrader resorts to technique to portray the true scale of Lohan. Betwixt the physical spacing of Ozu and the meditation on faith in the movies The Canyons almost plays out like a cinematographically captured re-rendering of his ‘Transcendental Style In Film’. The film’s memorable final shot, which features one of the leading characters looking directly to the audience sees Schrader re-appropriate the stylistic trademarks of Bresson and Dreyer in order to further convey his own communication. This moment also serves as a nice reminder of an earlier moment in the movie, as Lohan’s Tara remarks that ”No one has a private life anymore“. That statement already carried with it a number of readings, due to the actress’ own personal life, but one can’t help but feel as though it is with this final look to the camera that the announcement comes full circle.

It’s not merely the theatrical experience that Schrader is declaring passed in The Canyons. One key moment in the film plays out in Los Angeles’ famous Amoeba Music, the largest independent media retailer in the world and a store notable for selling all manner of relic platforms, which, when placed within the director’s grand vision is transformed in to a shrine to another form of a dead medium, with the once mighty heirs to the picture-house, the DVD, the VHS tape, the laserdisc, now damned with the same fortune as that bestowed upon the long-reigning king of popular entertainment. In referring to The Canyons Paul Schrader has said that “We won’t ask anybody’s permission and we will create cinema for the posttheatrical era”. It is perhaps appropriate then, that having witnessed the film play out across a streaming home medium, one longs to have witnessed the director’s latest creation in one of the many “dead” theatres photographed in the movie.

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13

HOME VIDEO The home video market is constantly evolving, with the shifting landscape of movies-ondemand and streaming services seemingly set to soon eclipse the utopia of the DVD and Blu-ray catalogue. An art unto itself, the importance of a physical media-based ought not be underestimated.

In this edition of Periodical we begin a two-part examination of the work of Jacques Rivette, which will overlap with the next edition of the journal.

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Key HomeVideo Titles For This Quarter

Le Pont du Nord Jacques Rivette, 1981

NON-IPAD READERS PLEASE CLICK HERE http://hopelies.com/the-hope-lies-periodical/period ical-3-vol-1-num-3/periodical-3-supplements/home -video-le-pont-du-nord/

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Criterion Collected #2 - Sólo con tu pareja

NON-IPAD READERS PLEASE CLICK HERE http://hopelies.com/the-hope-lies-periodical/periodical-3-vol-1-nu m-3/periodical-3-supplements/criterion-collected-solo-con-tu-parej a/

Supplementary features Director approved special edition.

• New, restored highdefinition digital transfer, supervised and approved by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki • Making “Sólo con tu pareja”, a collection of new video interviews with Cuarón, screenwriter Carlos Cuarón, and actor Daniel Giménez Cacho • Short films by Alfonso Cuarón and Carlos Cuarón • Original theatrical trailer • New and improved English subtitle translation • Plus: A booklet featuring a new essay by Ryan F. Long, and a “biography” of Tomás Tomás, written by Carlos Cuarón

14

ANTI-DOINEL

DECONSTRUCTING FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT’S SMALL CHANGE

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Truffaut with some of the cast of Small Change.

While shot some eight years before his premature death, and while far from his final picture, one cannot help but read 1976's Small Change as a kind of bookend to director Francois Truffaut's career. Truffaut of course broke on to the international stage with The 400 Blows, the 1959 Cannes Best Director award-winning film that helped set the path to the nouvelle vague.

That film revolves around a boy, Antoine Doinel, and his problematic childhood. Audiences would become very familiar with Antoine, and the actor who played him, Jean-Pierre Leaud, as Truffaut revisited the character sporadically throughout the duration of his career, charting the progress of the figure from adolescence through to marriage and his own journey in to fatherhood. But Truffaut's exploration if childhood didnt stop with Antoine Doinel. It didnt even really begin there. Francois Truffaut long held a fascination with presenting childhood on screen. In his earliest attempts at filmmaking he toyed with the idea of adapting a work set within a school starring the actor Yves Montand in the role of a kindly teacher, in a project which reads like a Goodbye Mr. Chips-style affair. Such offers were brought to Truffaut's doorstep thanks to the success of his 1957 short feature, Les Mistons, aka The Trouble Makers, in which the critic turned filmmaker projects a day in the life of a young and in love couple 78

Small Change charts a brief period of time in a small French town, and traces the adventures (and misadventures) of some of the young denizens.

whose romantic intentions are constantly being interrupted by a gang of young boys intent on causing a nuisance. For all intents and purposes Truffaut's cinematic debut,* Les Mistons shows a keen aptitude for the capturing of the very throes of youth, and the spirit of the times. It's impossible not to empathise with the feelings being portrayed.

Rather than leading to the more traditional sounding Yves Montand project, Les Mistons instead saw Truffaut embark upon the first film in his Antoine Doinel Cycle, The 400 Blows. However, some years after his first encounter with Doinel Truffaut would explore similar ground on screen with The Wild Child. Reaching cinema screens in 1970, the film, inspired by factual events, tells the story of a feral boy found in the woods surrounding Paris. The boy, having raised himself from just a few months old, appears to be mute and deaf, and is taken in by an eager doctor who wants to examine and work with the child. In a display of meta-textual casting, Truffaut selected himself for the role of the doctor.

One can't help but read the basic premise of The Wild Child as an overt analogy for the director's thoughts on his own upbringing. While the Doinel Cycle is notable for being a fairly literal adaptation of Truffaut's life, it is through the use of an overt metaphor that he really begins to lay bare the reality of the situation. An adolescence punctuated by tragedy and a sense of wanton abandon, the young Truffaut was very much a "Wild Child", and one 79

The vignette-style structure of Small Change immediately places the film at a structural odds with a number of the director’s other films.

left to fend for himself in many ways. Adopted at a young age by a caring grandmother who soon passed away, Truffaut's relationship with his biological parents was temperamental to say the least. For his path to eventually righten Truffaut would need to pass through the tutelage of one Andre Bazin, the famous founding editor of Cahiers du CinĂŠma. Might it be too easy to suggest that Bazin is the thinly veiled true identity of the doctor portrayed by Truffaut in The Wild Child? Bazin faced as many challenges with the young Truffaut as Itard does with Victor, bailing a renegade Truffaut from military prison, the young man having gone AWOL, not to mention the troubles garnered in his role as the editor who had to face the many disgruntled subjects of Truffaut's landmark essay A Certain Tendency Of The French Cinema.

The gang of Les Mistons rear their heads once again in Small Change, Truffaut's school set drama from 1976. Small Change is the closest finished film in the director's oeuvre to the unproduced Montand project from the 1950s. Alongside Maurice Pialat, who was something of a protege of his, Truffaut helped to redefine the youth drama in the 1970s. In Small Change Truffaut essentially fuses the real with the exageratedly alagorical, which at times verges on the fantastical (See. As a boy of toddler years falls five stories high, only to positively bounce upon impact with the ground below). The alagory extends to this film's troubled child too, as Truffaut portrays an Antoine Doinel-alike without the cheery facade.

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Inverting the images that greeted the dawn of the cinema, the youngsters of Small Change leave behind the tale of abuse that has engulfed their world by train.

The film's third act sees events spiral off in to the serious, and the director tackling the subject of child abuse. It's a sidestep in to the overt for the filmmaker. Prior to the unveiling of this serious bent Julien, the abused child in question, is presented with a punch line. In light of this the sequence in which Jean-François Stévenin, the class's inspiring teacher, delivers a speech to his children on the dangers of poor parenting actually plays at odds with the steady pace of the picture before it (as well as making for a stark contrast to the final moments of The 400 Blows). One can't help but ponder what it is or might be that Truffaut was implying with this sequence. Again, as with The Wild Child, the hyper metaphor reigns. Perhaps it was a remark directed at those who had missed the ultimate point of his earliest feature, whose protagonist was hoisted up as some kind of wunderkind of a new cinematic age, while the problems that the figure faced went largely unnoticed, thanks to the emphasis of the post-script on style and technique over social commentary? Or perhaps Truffaut was directly addressing himself, for failing to truly acknowledge the problems of his own inner self that the character of Antoine Doinel represented?

François Truffaut’s Small Change is available on DVD. 81

FIN

Periodical is published 4 times a year. Contact the editor at adam@hopelies.com.

Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second is a British-based film website concerned with all corners of the cinematic spectrum. The digital/print divide is a key thesis for the website’s meanderings, which also ties in to essentially what it is that we're attempting to do here with Periodical, applying a permanent adaptation to what is all so often written off as the temporary.

Bazin, Hoberman and de Baecque inform our thinking, while the cinema of Bresson, Godard and Scorsese inspire our minds. Š Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second. All images and multimedia elements remain the sole property of their respected owners. lxxxii