Scalarama 2014 Newspaper

ISSUE 1

1-30 SEPTEMBER 2014

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Welcome to Scalarama A Celebration of Cinema

Founded and produced by Cinema Nation Cinema Nation Co-directors Philip Foxwood, Michael Pierce Scalarama Producers Stanley Schtinter, Nick Walker Patron Andrea Novarin Contact Studio 20, Clink Street Studios, 1 Clink Street, London SE1 9DG hello@scalarama.com www.scalarama.com @scalarama

Scalarama 2014 Newspaper Editor Stanley Schtinter Production Director Michael Pierce Proofreaders Callum Barton, Will Shutes Design Mike Leedham,Tricia McGrath (2D Design) Contributors Callum Barton, Louis Beckett, Nia Edwards-Behi, Jörg Buttgereit, Ashley Clarke, Jessica Fletcher, Reece Goddard, Ella Harris, Paul Hetherington, Jarett Kobek, Dr. James MacDowell, Robert Makin, Jon Mills, Christina Newland, Chris Petit, Mark Pilkington, Vic Pratt, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Martin Scorsese, Iain Sinclair, Mike Springer, Christoph Warrack, John Waters.

Newspaper Acknowledgements Susan Allenback, Chris Barwick, James Blackford, Jo Blair, Sophie Brown, Jon Burrows, Ewan Cant, James Flower, Alison Geldart, Jane Giles, Steve Hills, Ales Klot, Charles Lane, Sam Meech, Leah Millar, Mehelli Modi,The Quietus, Sarina Rahman, Natalie Ralph, Jill Reading, Adam Roberts, Phil Roberts, Josh Saco, Virginie Selavy, Grace Small, Slim Smith, Juliane Zenke.

Scalarama’s mission is a simple one: to fill the land with cinemas so that everybody can find a place to watch films together.

Established in 2011, Scalarama is now an annual celebration of cinema throughout the whole of September, uniting all types of film initiatives across the UK. Whether it’s full time cinemas or pop-up screenings, long established societies or new film clubs - all are welcome under the Scalarama banner. The season is made up of many hundreds of screenings across the thirty days, each one chosen by a different organisation or individual and at a variety of places, from traditional film venues to re-appropriated spaces - pubs, cafes, galleries, museums, parks, shops, boats...

Scalarama began as a tribute to the Scala Cinema in London’s King’s Cross. Influential in its attitude and programming (and cats!), the Scala officially closed in 1993. But cinemas

© 2014 by Cinema Nation, the artists, authors and photographers.

With the support of the BFI Programming Development Fund

Scalarama 2014 in association with

Please drink responsibly

Now in its fourth year, Scalarama includes more partners than ever, with over 400 events already confirmed and more on the way. Cities and towns including Brighton, Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newcastle and Nottingham will showcase their diverse range of film exhibitors, as the people behind the projectors work together to celebrate cinema.

Full listings of the events can be found at the back of this newspaper, and additional information can be found online through our new partner ScreeningFilm.com, listing every event on an interactive map.

Scalarama Manifesto Where there is a film and an audience, there is cinema.

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Thank you all.

Printed by: Iliffe Print

never die. They live on in the minds of all those who dreamed in them.

Scalarama wants to celebrate the legacy of the people and places that made cinemas come alive, and champion those who still passionately and tirelessly bring people together to watch, share and discuss films.

FILL THE LAND WITH CINEMAS Cinemas can be in bars, cafes, libraries or schools.They can be under motorways, on boats, in petrol stations or on the move.

If you can’t find your cinema, start it.

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ASK YOURSELF WHY DO WE WANT TO SHARE?

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CINEMA IS NOT JUST THE FILM

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JUDGE FOR YOURSELF

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YOUR AUDIENCE ARE YOUR GUESTS

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RESPECT THE DOUBLE BILL

Show it.This is our strength.

Everything around it matters. Create an experience.

Good and bad are redundant. High art, low trash, critic’s choice, family favourite. All films are valid if you believe in them.

Find your audience and engage them.

... and honour thy All-Nighter.

Scalarama also includes a core programme of films, each selected by a distributor or a programming team: reviving old titles, importing rare 35mm prints or marking the release of a new restoration on DVD or Blu-ray. Scratch and sniff (stinking cinema), sevenhour long epics (drone cinema), classic children’s films (yellow cinema) and uncut versions (red, bloody red cinema) - all hit the big screen this September. You can find full articles about titles in the core programme within this newspaper.

If you’re new to this kind of cinema, we hope the paper helps steer you towards a local event, or a new favourite film. It may even inspire you to arrange your own screening. There are tips on how to get started, alongside opinions of what cinema means in 2014.

Scalarama could not have reached and connected with as many people this year without the support of the BFI’s Programming Development Fund. We are also proud to present the season in association with Staropramen. And Scalarama, most significantly, would not happen without the hundreds of exhibitors, cinemas, film clubs, distributors, archives and cinephiles who come together to collaborate each year.

Scalarama exists to connect films with audiences in new and bold ways; for those passionate about showing films to meet and share resources; to bring excitement to communal film watching for a whole new generation.

It is founded on the belief that cinema is vital, and although constantly growing, each individual initiative will always need your support by sharing and attending. If you can’t be there in person, please do join in the conversation online via #scalarama2014, or talk about your cinemas dreams via #beacinema.

Make September your month of cinema adventure.Try out a film or venue you’ve never heard of, discover new people and experiences and start to see film, and the world, in a new light.

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The four roads to Scalarama 1. Start supporting

4. Core Programme

Everyone can be involved in Scalarama, whether you are planning to see the films in the season or are interested in organising an event yourself – Scalarama is a totally not-for-profit event, openly sourced by exhibitors across the country.

Want a flavour of what to expect from Scalarama?

Interested in showing a great film and teaming up with other exhibitors across the UK? Scalarama’s Core Programme was created to showcase the diversity of film, whilst also uniting the film exhibition community and help focus attention during the September season.

If you can’t make the screenings, help Scalarama and all the film exhibitors involved by spreading the word. Or start the discussion about cinemas - What do you want to see? What film would you show? Have you found your ideal cinema yet?

Each film in the Core Programme has been handpicked by distributors or film programmers and all are available to book by exhibitors for screenings throughout September, on a range of formats from 35mm to DVD.

Scalarama provides the tools for you to discover, connect, support and share your cinema ambitions. Check out the Scalarama website and this newspaper to discover all the different types of cinemas out there, and remember, if you can’t find the cinema that suits you, start it...

2. Be a Cinema If you’ve always dreamed of owning a cinema or just fancy showing films to others – but don’t know where to start – now is the time to take action.

With changing technology, cinema is as accessible as ever – but there are still a few things to consider before you start, everything from finding the venue to finding the audience - plus making sure it’s all above board.

Interested in putting on a screening as part of Scalarama? There’s still time - you can submit events all the way up to and throughout September to Scalarama’s Open Programme.

Scalarama’s I Want to Be a Cinema workshops have helped kick off many film clubs and initiatives and take place throughout the year. There are plans to make an online guide, but until then here are our top five links to start you off:

Taking part in the Open Programme is simple – very much like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, exhibitors have complete freedom to show what they want and where they want. Scalarama doesn’t take a cut of your box office, or charge an entry fee.

- Cinema For All www.bffs.org.uk - Independent Cinema Office www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk - British Film Institute (BFI) www.bfi.org.uk - Filmbank www.filmbank.co.uk - Into Film www.intofilm.org

Scalarama has also teamed up with several film distributors to make it even easier to start showing films to others, many offering risk-free solutions to make sure you are not out of pocket. Check out Scalarama.com for the special discounts on DVD and Blu-ray bookings from film companies such as Dogwoof, Third Window, Soda Pictures, Arrow Films, Second Run and Peccadillo Films.

The BFI Film Audience Network operates in nine regions covering the UK so it is also worth checking out their websites to see what they can do to support you in your area. Film Hub regions are Scotland / Wales / Northern Ireland / South West West Midlands / North West Central / North / Central East / South East / London.

3. Open Programme

If you are unable to submit an event in time, why not join in on Home Cinema Day - Sunday 28th September - and give yourself a taste of programming films for audiences in the comfort of your own home!

Arrow Video selected the brain-scrambling ItaloAmerican flick The Visitor and resuscitated a Scala Cinema classic - Nekromantik; Soda Pictures presents the first six features of Jim Jarmusch and Eureka Entertainment are releasing the restored Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari - all titles available on Blu-ray editions in Sept/Oct. Second Run mark the DVD release of Kinetta, the first feature

by Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos, as well picking Daisies to commemorate the passing of its director Vera Chytilová; Park Circus have brought back Polyester in Odorama, scratch’n’sniff cinema at its trashiest and finally the BFI return Children’s Film Foundation films to the big screen as part of their ongoing DVD releases of its back catalogue.

Film programming enthusiasts have selected rare 35mm to tour around the country: Cigarette Burns Cinema and Psychotronic Cinema teamed up to select Last House on the Left, once banned in the UK; A Nos Amours went for the 7-hour masterpiece of Hungarian cinema Sátántangó and Electric Sheep Magazine and Strange Attractor Press will present Saul Bass’ Phase IV with the original uncut psychedelic ending - never before seen in the UK. The re-release of Charles Lane’s Sidewalk Stories, a modern silent film that inspired The Artist, marks a special partnership with Open Cinema, who organise screenings for socially excluded communities and homeless audiences.

Over the next few pages, you will find articles on each Core Programme title. If you are interested in booking any of the films, check Scalarama.com for more information.

Big thanks to everyone who has supported Scalarama 2014, from its fellow founders Andy Kimpton-Nye, Justin Harries and Adam Schofield, to Stephen Woolley, Jane Giles, Helen DeWitt and all those who lived and breathed the Scala; the BFI: James Blackford, Sam Dunn, Clare Harwood, Jill Reading, Phil Roberts, Juliane Zenke; Second Run DVD: Chris Barwick, Mehelli Modi; Arrow Video: Ewan Cant, Daniel Graham; Soda Pictures: Edward Fletcher, James Flower, Louise Rae, Natalie Ralph; Eureka Entertainment: Steve Hills, Kevin Lambert; Park Circus: Mark Truesdale, Nick Varley, Jack Bell, Graham Fulton; Cigarette Burns Cinema: Josh Saco; Psychotronic Cinema: Matt Palmer; A Nos Amours: Adam Roberts, Joanna Hogg; Electric Sheep’s Virginie Selavy, Strange Attractor’s Mark Pilkington; Artificial Eye, Dogwoof: Oli Harbottle, Patrick Hurley; Third Window Films: Adam Torel; Peccadillo Pictures: Kahloon Loke, Tom Abell, Victor Huang, Droo Padhiar, Jason Bradbury; Jo Blair, Charles Lane, John Waters, Susan Allenback, Elke Bludau, Aroma Company: Val Lord, Johanna Payne; Grace Small, Open Culture, Slim Smith, Carlotta Films: Stéphanie Mercier, Céline Cléris; Open Cinema: Christoph Warrack; Jemma Desai, Jennifer Bass, AMPAS: Cassie Blake; Warners: Nicole Wood; Czech Centre: Renata Clarke, Madeleine Mullet, Filmunio: Katalin Vajda, Marta Benyei; Phoenix Fry, Priscilla Igwe, Sam Meech, Rob O’Rourke, Lars Bortfeldt, Jamie Unwin, Alex Vald, Sam Ashby, Rania Bellou, Martin McGrath, Andrew Osman, Allie Humenuk, Elizabeth Taylor-Mead, Andrea Novarin, all of our 2013 Kickstarter Backers! Marketing Store: Claire Hayes, Nikki Guevara; Staropramen: Gurdeep Saini; Morvern Cunningham, Ed Blackburn, Stephanie Oswald, Flatpack Festival: Sam Groves, Ian Francis; Cinema For All: Deborah Parker, Jaq Chell; Independent Cinema Office, Filmbank, Film Hub North: Anna Kime, Chris Black; Film Hub Scotland: Carolyn Mills, Sambrooke Scott; Film Hub South East: Carina Volkes; Film Hub Central East: Eleanor Thornley, Andrew Rae; Film Hub Wales: Hana Lewis; Film Hub South West West Midlands: Tiffany Holmes. Pervasive Media Studio (sorry about the table!), Film Hub North West Central: Sally Folkard; Film Hub Northern Ireland: Susan Picken, Michael Staley, Hugh Odling-Smee; Banshee Labyrinth, Marwood Cafe, Sophie Brown, Broadway: Laura Cubley; Pepo, Rob Hunter, Tiffany Farrant Gonzales, Scott, Tom Summers, Horse Hospital: Tai and Roger. Cinema Museum: Ronald and Martin; Jay Shaw, Mike Leedham, Tricia McGrath, Nadia Attia, Helen Jack, Sam Cuthbert, Tony Paley, Kate Taylor, Carla Mackinnon, Julian Marsh, Phil Ilson, Jim Dummett, Helen Mackenzie, James Mullighan and all exhibitors involved since the beginning and all the ones Scalarama is yet to meet! x

SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

Scalarama Core Programme 2014

the third persona, where all seems so close and yet distant; where the shoulder becomes both a landmark and a friend; where subjectivity is in the eye of a faceless other.

thethirdpersona.tumblr.com

@thethirdpersona

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Daisies

Dir. Vera Chytilová (1966, Czech Republic, 74 minutes). Presented by Second Run DVD.

Vera Chytilová’s classic of surrealist cinema is perhaps also the most adventurous and anarchic Czech movie of the 1960s. A satirical, wild and irreverent story of rebellion. Two young women revolt against a degenerate, decayed and oppressive society, attacking symbols of wealth and bourgeois culture. Defiant feminist statement? Nihilistic, avant-garde comedy? A riotous, punk-rock poem of a film that is both hilarious and mind-warpingly innovative, Daisies remains a cinematic enigma. Refreshingly uncompromising, it continues to provoke, stimulate and entertain audiences and its influence is still felt today.

Ten (10) Things to Remember About Vera Chytilová’s Sedmikrásky A/K/A Daisies

BY JARETT KOBEK I mean, okay, the first thing to remember about Daisies is that no one can understand its original context. That moment is gone, gone, gone. Even people who lived through it cannot remember. They are old and time has rewritten their memory. PrePrague Spring Czechoslovakia is tainted by everything that came after: attempts at reform, Soviet invasion, Normalization.

Any discussion of Daisies must acknowledge that it is impossible to speak of the film in any framework like its point of origin. This is something we should acknowledge with every film, but, given the political situation of this instance, even more applicable than usual.

The second thing to remember is that Daisies is very successful at marrying the components that constitute a motion and sound picture. Most films lean in one direction or another.

Acting, writing, cinematography, sound design. Rare is the film that does it all.

This success dooms any representation or interpretation of the film. It cannot exist outside of itself.

Do a Google search on the film. Look at the images which people have put online.

Acknowledge the fact that these images are curated by individuals who are hard-wired to favour certain visual stimuli.

Like every technology, the camera and its constituent parts embed the ideologies, spoken and unspoken, of their creators. Spoken ideologies are easier because they’re on the surface and present and exist within discourse. Unspoken ideologies are difficult because they are assumptions held to be so self-evident by the technology’s creator that he or she does not realise

that these assumptions even exist. They are believed to be unimpugnable truth.

And so decisions are made about how the technology shall function. The ultimate goal of its proper function is based not in any objective sense but rather the bedrock of ideology. That’s all consciousness is, really: a series of interlocking ideological positions cloaked in righteousness and socalled common sense.

The technology goes forth and spreads its embedded ideologies.

Before you cite human nature as the causative factor of batshit insane Internet commenters, remember that the system of commenting was built to generate advertising revenue at the expense of everything else.

Before you fall to your knees in tears and wonder why the Internet, our wonderful tool of free speech, is used by governments to spy on your banal email, remember that the thing itself is war technology built by The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. You may as well expect a V2 to shower you with flowers.

Assume that the camera was made, consciously and unconsciously, to produce the eroticised gaze. What we take as fact, as a presented image with some relationship to truth, is filtered through a series of interconnected technologies creating an impression that reflects nothing as much as the technological creator’s ideological assumptions.

What constitutes a beautiful image? Who decided? How was the camera’s function shaped in that direction?

All the Internet images of Daisies, particularly those of Marie II (Ivana Karbanová, “The Blonde”) in an entomologist’s apartment, were curated by the unconscious response to the camera’s inherent ideologies as filtered through the unconscious

ideologies of the director and her crew. Which is to say: people capture images of beautiful women not only because of their DNA but also because the camera is very, very good at creating images of beautiful women.

Images captured from the entomologist’s apartment end

up fitting the most literal definition of irony. The scene in question is the only instance in which Vera Chytilová and her husband/cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera are not correcting the camera. It is the only scene in which they are not subverting the eroticised gaze. It is the only scene in which they encourage and participate in it.

Internet images ignore the film’s narrative context, which makes it clear that Marie II encourages the eroticised gaze because it’s a cat-and-mouse game with the entomologist. She stands, left thumb in her mouth, staring off frame. Her huge false lashes ring the eyes of Clara Bow. Her head is crowned with a ring of daises which we assume gives the film its name. She is beautiful, she is everything.

How, as a female character in a film, do you attract a male character within a film? You allow the camera’s unspoken ideology to eroticise your appearance. How do you attract people with high-quality Blu-rays

and Photoshop? Same answer.

What the still imagery loses is everything but the image.

Chytilová’s masterstroke was in casting two young amateurs and using their inexperience to create a feminine motion that one almost never sees on film. This is because the camera is not built to reward the true physicality of women, particularly when they are awkward. Which, being human beings, describes most.

I can’t be sure of the direction that Chytilová gave to her actresses, but I imagine it was something like this: “Deliver every line in a high register singsong. Try to sound like a power tool. Move like a maniacal puppet! And laugh.” Oh god, the laughter. The horrible, horrible laughter.

Chytilová subverts the eroticised gaze by encouraging another thing that the camera rewards, which is the showcasing of slapstick. And this slapstick somehow presents two characters who, for perhaps the first time in cinema, move and act in the way that young women move and act when they’re having pointless fun in the urban environment.

In this regard, Marie I and Marie II are not unique. You can see them whenever you like.

Come to Los Angeles on any Saturday night of your choosing and we will go clubbing on Hollywood Boulevard.

Still images of Daisies create an impression that is best summed up in this paragraph from an ELLE.com article: “Tired of your old under things? The Loved One is just the thing to give you a kick in your panties.

The cult lingerie line looks like it belongs in a '60s Playboy or Vera Chytilová's Daisies - which is just why we love it.”

The third thing to remember is a general consensus

has emerged that Daisies is a nearly plotless film featuring interchangeable characterisations.

This is not true.

There is a plot and it’s fairly simple: two young women decide to be spoiled because the world is spoiled. They go on a rampage until they decide that they no longer want to be spoiled. Having repented, they discover that their individual actions do not stop the world from being spoiled and that not being spoiled is a more ambiguous manner of life.

What has spoiled the world?

Look at the opening and the ending.

The world is spoiled by what always spoils the world.

Men and their technology.

The relationship between the two Maries also features a real depth of accurate portrayal. It’s not in every scene.

But look at the moments set in their apartment.

Watch Marie II and her possibly affected pose of madness. Watch Marie I and her relative sense of responsibility. Watch their interaction. The brinkmanship of being spoiled. That’s also waiting for you on Hollywood Boulevard.

The fourth thing to remember is that Chytilová was thirty-six years old when she made Daisies. It is the film of neither a young filmmaker nor an old one. I believe this is the root of its tonal ambiguity.

On one hand, yes, it is decidedly a feminist masterpiece.

On the other hand, it’s a feminist masterpiece about two young women who are absolutely spoiled and who provoke an unanswerable question: what sort of feminism is this?

Chytilová’s contempt for her characters drips off every frame. But it’s a very peculiar contempt, one comprised of longing

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rajských jíme a/k/a Fruits of Paradise, released in 1969. The first ten minutes are astonishing.

It shares some of the same actors as Daisies, but on the whole it’s not as good as its predecessor. As you might imagine, much fruit is involved.

The tenth thing to remember is that Daisies may possibly be the best film ever made.

There are very few films about which this argument can be made without leaving the debater sounding like a total idiot.

The visual pleasures are enormous. Its use of sound and motion and acting are unmatched. Its intellectual rigour is the real deal. Unlike most films of its age, its underlying politics do not fill one with self-loathing or require excuses.

And, it’s sad that it must be said, but this final point remains a remarkable virtue rather than an accepted norm: it’s a film that is very good about its depiction of women.

Jarett Kobek is Hollywood's PreEminent Author. His books include ATTA and If You Won't Read, Then Why Should I Write?

He still needs an agent.

Screenings: and loathing. The Maries are horrible, they’re terrible, they’re miserable but they’re also ridiculous fun. This ambivalence emerges when you’re neither young nor old, when age has not yet sapped all joy but when the years have made you tired of the noise.

When ideology starts to feel threadbare but the weight of life has not quite pressed one into its opposite.

The fifth thing to remember is that none of the English language commentary, this piece included, was written by people who are native Czech speakers.

Until very recently, the English subtitles of the film were terrible. In the film’s key moment, when the Maries decide that they will be spoiled because the world itself is spoiled, this was translated as “going bad.”

They are “going bad” because the world is “going bad” too.

What does this mean,really?

The Czech words that the Maries use to describe being spoiled are zkažené and kazí.

Kazí literally means spoiled.

Zkažené also means spoiled but with the connotation of things being rotten, decayed, tainted, corrupted.1 One would imagine that 1Thanks

in a film best remembered for its symbolic use of food, there is quite a bit of difference between “going bad” and being spoiled or being rotten.

The sixth thing to remember is that in the whole of Daisies, the only product placement is a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label in the banquet scene.

The film seems so alive, so vibrant, so fresh that we often forget that it was made in a place where Western goods were absolute oddities. We forget that we’re watching a film that addresses our current moment without any of the shorthand crutches that latter day artists (yours truly included) have absorbed from late period capitalism.

This returns us to our first item of remembrance. What is the meaning of Johnnie Walker Red Label in pre-Prague Spring Czechoslovakia?

I have some guesses but no solid idea. I am quite certain that the bottle is not there by accident. I am quite certain that its function is very important. I am quite certain the pertinent question is for whom the banquet was intended.

The seventh thing to remember is that the food, all of the food which generates such relent-

to Ales Kot for the help with Czech.

less commentary, is another aspect of the film with an original context.

Because Daisies is monumental, its symbolism shifts and moves and reconfigures itself to the viewer’s moment. In our era of unfathomable gluttony, when obesity has lost its status as a designer drug and is now the greatest possible shame, one watches the Maries and finds a very fitting commentary. Here is our basic waste laid bare.

Or maybe it’s just thrilling to see women eat, free from shame, free from cares of the body.

One of the reasons why the Czech authorities suppressed Daisies was because it “wasted food.” It’s my impression that much of the commentary on Daisies has considered this to be a figleaf for greater issues of censorship. Perhaps this is true.

Yet in a Libération interview conducted by Julien Gester and dated 26 November 2013, Jitka Cerhová says: “You could not imagine such scenes, where we would walk all over the table and the plates of a sumptuous banquet, we could shock in a country where people would stand in line for hours at grocery stores - in fact I remember how 2 Translation

difficult it was to shoot this scene: not at first, since the food was delicious, but after three days, when an unbearable stench would reign. The final scene of the film is dedicated ‘to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce. ’ This says it all, no?” 2 (Incidentally, this was only the second interview ever conducted with Cerhová. I can find no evidence that Karbanová has ever been interviewed. But absence of evidence is not blah blah blah.)

The eighth thing to remember is that Chytilová’s cowriter was Ester Krumbachová.

There is so little available in English about Krumbachová that I am loathe to make any comment other than to say that she, with a background in costume and set design, played a heavy role in the mise-en-scène. What other contributions, I cannot say.

The ninth thing to remember is that Chytilová directed several films before Daisies and many after. Even in this, our era of digital revolution, very few are available to English speaking audiences.

Probably her second most famous work in what used to be called ‘The West’ is Ovoce stromu

provided by the ever helpful Ms Sarina Rahman.

Tue 02 Sep - 19:30 Wilton’s Cinema Club at Wilton’s Music Hall, London Kino Klub at The Guild Cinema, Edinburgh Filmhouse Tue 09 Sep - Thu 11 Sep QUAD, Derby Tue 16 Sep - 18:30 Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds Thu 18 Sep - 20:00 Cube Cinema, Bristol Thu 25 Sep - 19:00 Magic Cinema, Ort Cafe, Birmingham Fri 26 Sep - 18:00 Screening with Polish Shorts at Polish Community Centre, Birmingham Sat 27 Sep - 18:00 Birmingham Floodgate Illuminations at One Love Community Studios

Daisies is available on Second Run DVD. A retrospective of Vera Chytilová’s films takes place at BFI Southbank in 2015.

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PHASE IV

Dir. Saul Bass (1974, US, 84 mins + 6 mins ) Writer: Mayo Simon, Cast: Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy and Lynne Frederick, tens of thousands of ants.

“Phase IV is a genuinely remarkable piece of graphic storytelling, as precise and yet as wondrous as the visionary title sequences designed by its director, Saul Bass. And what I find so striking when I go back to the picture now, with Saul’s original ending back in place, is the way that it carries the mood of its time: Phase IV feels like a dream landscape of America in the aftermath of the ‘60s.”

Martin Scorsese on Phase IV screening as part of Scalarama

BY MARK PILKINGTON Famed as a graphic designer of posters and title sequences for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Saul Bass only got one shot at directing a feature, and by all accounts didn’t enjoy the process much, but Phase IV is a period masterpiece that serves as both a microcosm of contemporary progressive environmental issues, and a strange, beautiful and intelligent science fiction film.

An unusual planetary alignment in our solar system exposes planet Earth to anomalous electromagnetic fields. Initially it seems that nothing has happened, but entomologists begin to observe odd behaviour on a very small scale: different species of ants, normally aggressive to one another, are joining forces to predate larger animals, including humans.

The ants march across America, destroying whole towns, gnawing through wooden structures and destroying crops and livestock. In an attempt to find out what's going on, and try to stop it, English entomologist Dr Ernest Hubbs (a frothingly good Nigel Davenport), and American mathematician James Lesko (Michael Murphy) set out to observe a colony of the super-intelligent ants from the apparent safety of a geodesic biosphere in the Arizona desert.

What follows is a long, tense stand off between ants and humans, both enclosed within their architecturally expressive command posts: the ants build angular skyscrapers, the humans shelter in a hi-tech buckyball.

While the ants seem to have reached a mutual agreement – to destroy all other life on

Earth rather than each other – the humans wage a battle of their own: Hubbs, cantankerous and autocratic, wants to destroy the ants, while the younger Lesko attempts to communicate with them by transmitting geometric forms at their structures. [As a geometric aside, the film is curious for featuring the first ever crop circle, made by its ant stars, a couple of years before we humans developed our own in the Hampshire countryside].

gles of magnetic tape and piles of computer printouts, looks like a chaotic maelstrom compared to the gleaming, pristine myrmecological world shot by Ken Middleham, who also filmed the insect sequences for The Hellstrom Chronicle. A brooding score, featuring eerie synthesiser sounds from White Noise’s David Vorhaus, further accentuates the mood of alienation and impending ant-nihilation.

Enigmatic and intrigu-

cial success, but Paramount still tried to exert control over the final cut, leading to a quarrel over its ending. For four decades the film closed with a studio-imposed, oblique, solarised psychedelic montage while the original ‘lost’ ending became the stuff of legend, sending fans scurrying to the novelisation by Barry N. Malzberg looking for clues.

Bass’s intended climax was never expected to be seen again, but thanks to some archive

So, a bit like the 21st century then.

But it’s not an entirely dystopian picture: there’s a strongly animist aesthetic at play, as humans run, fly and swim alongside other species, perhaps brought together by their non-ant otherness.

An already remarkable film, Phase IV is made all the more so by being something of a one-off – Bass never made another feature, while writer Mayo Simon only wrote one more (Futureworld, a sequel to Westworld), and a pilot for the Man From Atlantis TV series, before starting an award-winning career as a playwright.

Mark Pilkington is the author of Mirage Men and Far Out: 101 Strange Tales From Science’s Outer Edge and runs Strange Attractor Press.

Screenings: on 35mm (except Edinburgh) and with original ending Sat 6 Sep - 23:30 Rio Cinema, London Fri 12 Sep - 21:15 Leicester, Phoenix Mon 22 Sep - 18:30, Tue 23 Sep - 20:30, Wed 24 Sep - 18:30 Fringe Cinema, QUAD, Derby Thu 25 Sep - 19:00 University of Edinburgh

Although its interiors were shot at Pinewood, Phase IV’s arid, ant-ravaged locations convey a convincing sense of a dying America and, as you’d expect from a first class designer, the film looks exquisite.The two warring civilizations are presented through their contrasting environments: the human, decorated with huge computers, tan-

ing, Phase IV remains ultimately ambiguous as to which future we should choose: the faceless biomechanical harmony of the ants, or the chaotic, destructive but emotionally-rich world of the human?

Nobody can have expected this low-key, philosophical and ultimately rather downbeat film to be a commer-

diving by the folks at LA’s Cinefamily, it can now be seen in a new, crisp transfer as part of Scalarama.

Without giving too much away, Bass presents us with an epic vision of life after antpocalypse, a world where humans are captured, compartmentalised and cybernetically manipulated in a landscape of towering ziggurats.

Fri 26 Sep - 18:30 with Gothic Psychfolk introduction by Mind Colony and post-screening illustrated discussion Chapter Wails at Chapter, Cardiff

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THE VISITOR Dir. Michael J. Paradise (1979, Italy, 108 minutes). Presented by Arrow Video.

The Visitor is the ultimate experience in B-movie madness from Ovidio G. Assonitis, shlock producer extraordinaire and director of such deliciously guilty pleasures as Beyond the Door and Tentacles. Described by various sources as “one of the most mind-altering cinematic experiences of the 1970s” and “the Mount Everest of insane ‘70s Italian movies”, The Visitor brings together an astonishing ensemble cast (Lance Henriksen, Shelley Winters and Mel Ferrer to name but a few) in a hallucinatory intergalactic tale of a demonic little girl and her pet hawk. In the words of one astute reviewer, The Visitor is “the most fun you can have in a movie theatre without risking permanent brain damage”!

BY CHRIS PETIT Wikipedia (edited and rewritten) Film Ventures International (FVI): independent production company originally based Atlanta, Georgia, operating as copycat-slash-rip-off merchants of US blockbusters, plus distribution of Italian genre imports. The 1974 Italian horror film Beyond the Door, acquired for $100,000, did $9 million box office.

Warner Bros failed with lawsuit for copyright infringement of The Exorcist. FVI’s biggest hit Grizzly (1976) did $39 million.

probably more interesting than the results, yet it manages to transcend being forgettable thanks to its Italian refraction, a knowing air and as a cheerful, eccentric lexicon that is happy to rip-off and reference anything it stumbles across, including Welles and Hitchcock. Everyone involved in The Visitor is smarter than the material’s market level, hence its creative tensions and air of slumming. Deadbeat stars fallen

badly made one at that, and no one cares.

The story, a brutal welding of The Omen and The Birds, features important men sitting at long tables plotting world domination and an evil alien child (played

by Paige Conner as the complete suburban brat) who finds herself in a movie with too tight a schedule, held together (just about), by ambitious sequence composition

up for a few days at a time, clearly has no clue about what is going on, even if they have read the script, so they set up camp and draw on the ghosts of performances past. Shelley Winters, who probably only read her own lines in the script, manages her turn looking like she is in another movie. Whole speeches have an air of hasty on-set rewriting, serving as telegraphed plot summaries that

This child must never see the light of day.” Conner is extraordinary as The Visitor, lending her gymnastic and ice skating skills, and offering one of the least sympathetic performances in the history of child acting. Joanne Nail gets the best props (after being shot by her daughter at her birthday party): a wheelchair and a stairlift, and gets thrown downstairs for her trouble.

A surprisingly delicate and almost

on hard times turn up, desperate for a crust. A glum Glenn Ford puts in a couple of days playing a detective as a zombie stroller before getting his eye pecked out by a predatory bird while driving his car in a sequence that inexplicably resembles a car chase when no car is in pursuit.The Italian connection is represented by Franco Nero playing Jesus, of all things, in what resembles a celestial departure lounge. The cutaway future world is decidedly cut-price (fringe theatre with a lot of dry ice).That said, much enjoyment comes from desperate invention. A body thrown downstairs to land in front of the camera is clearly a dummy, and a

(within limitations) but let down by indifferent execution, with the struggle evident between the storyboard’s intentions and what can realistically be achieved for the time and money (about half). One is bound to ask too how much of a hand John Huston had in directing those scenes in which he appeared.

In lieu of the plot not holding together, amateurish energy, contrived sadism and plain weirdness suffice, the last probably dictated less by surrealism on the part of the screenwriters than production pressure. It’s a film that looks like it has its share of dropped shots. The cast, turning

do not enlighten in the way the producers hoped. The plot anyway was never the point and what was is beside the point, as the film increasingly relies on all-purpose reaction shots to hold scenes together, most of them mismatched in terms of framing size, looking like drop-ins, shot without reference to the scene in question.

The film would reward study as an essay in actors’ eye line and cheap post-synchronisation.

John Huston is hired to act because he is tall and can give hammy gravitas to bullshit: “You are the key to their power on this planet, pregnant with a child conceived out of hatred for this world.

certainly hungover Sam Peckinpah is hired to act in one scene, and is given a very long speech, clearly none of which he could remember because his lines are read out (probably by someone else) over cutaways or the back of his head.

About half a line is in sync. In other respects his timing is impeccable.

Given its genre classification, The Visitor consists of a surprising amount of mooching around (Huston’s part is mainly walkthrough), theatrical interludes, and arty reference, with occasional extraordinary moments (the fractured end of a homage to/rip-off of Welles’s shootout in the hall of mirrors in The Lady

FVI moved to Hollywood to produce multiple genre films, with four productions in 1979, including The Visitor, directed by a former assistant to Fellini.

In 1980 FVI acquired the rights to the Italian Great White, spent $4 million on advertising, only for it to be pulled after the first week of release, following a successful Universal suit for copyright infringement.

By 1984 FVI had multiple financial problems after the failure of Great White, poor box office and the pending divorce settlement of FVI boss Edward L. Montoro. Surprising many within the industry, Montoro did a runner with one million dollars of company money. His whereabouts remain unknown; he is believed to be Mexico.

Like a cut-price bad dream, The Visitor combines technical incompetence (soft shots and a very indifferent film stock), a budget sound mix (strident, cranked-up score and most of the distaff lines incomprehensible), awkward generic set pieces shot with an arty eye, and a flatter documentary style owing to access of Atlanta’s public spaces (full basketball stadium and game; airport; hospital; freeway for extended car sequence).

The point is that The Visitor is an Italian movie pretending to be an American one. It is therefore bound to be odd in the way that The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (1974) is, as a Spanish movie set and made in England. As such, The Visitor is better on the eye than the ear (with its tin ear). It should be more awful than it is, like a thousand other conveyor-belt movies whose money hustle is the real story and

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from Shanghai; a shot of hair standing on end). As an evident mess, The Visitor is invariably consigned to the “OMG I don’t believe what I am seeing!” category, one of those films there to be laughed at and consigned to the dreary bin marked cult classic. This is a pity.

What The Visitor succeeds in doing, perhaps not quite unintentionally, is show up the general impoverishment of the host cinema from which it feeds, thereby producing what amounts to its own

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critique. So it is in its own way subversive. (One senses no one took it seriously.) As an anthropological and archaeological document it will prove invaluable to future students of the appearance of late twentieth century American capitalism; the question being: is it really possible for an entire nation, as shown by an Italian, to have had such terrible taste?

Courthouse New Service (edited and rewritten)

Robert Mundy, co-screenwriter The Visitor; executor Curtis Harrington Estate.

Screenwriter Mundy claimed illness kept him from wrapping up film and TV director Curtis Harrington’s affairs, after which he fled the country with $580,000, which was intended to establish a yearly scholarship for film students, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences claimed in court.

After Harrington’s May 2007 death, Mundy maintained over three years he hadn’t been able to settle the estate because of cancer, then a series of ‘small strokes’, finally telling the probate court arthritis in his hands had kept him from adding up the estate’s accounts.

Mundy is also alleged to have kept estate money that Harrington left to two young girls and a man in prison. He is believed to be “somewhere in England or Scotland”.

What happened to Paige Conner?

Living in a land beyond Google, Conner like Montoro and Mundy leaves no trace; a handful of films and no acting credits in the last twenty-five years.

Fast Food (as Tracy) 1989; In the Heat of the Night TV series (as Melinda Mason in Intruders episode) 1989; The Facts of Life TV series (as Lucy in episode Fear Strikes Back) 1981; Little Darlings (as Girl in T-shirt) 1980; The Visitor (as Katy Collins) 1979; The Night They Robbed Big Bertha’s (as Orphan) 1975.

Chris Petit is the world’s leading proponent of post-cinema.

Screenings: Fri 5 Sep - 23:45 introduced by Kim Newman Phoenix Cinema, London Fri 19 Sep - 19:30 Kino Klub at The Guild Cinema, Edinburgh Filmhouse Fri 12 Sep - 22:00 The Light Cinema, New Brighton Sat 13 Sep - late show (time tbc) Everyman Screen on the Green, London Fri 26 Sep - 21:15 Phoenix Cinema, Leicester Fri 26 Sep - 20:00 Watergate Cinematek at Broadway, Nottingham Fri 26 Sep 20:00 Hellfire Video Club at Cube Cinema, Bristol Sun 28 Sep - 18:30 Optic at Soup Kitchen, Manchester Sat 20 Sep - 23:00 Hyde Park Picturehouse, Leeds

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Sátántangó Dir. Béla Tarr (1994, Hungary, 432 minutes). Presented by A Nos Amours. With special thanks to Arva International.

Béla Tarr’s touchstone of durational cinema – Sátántangó. This legendary film, running at 432 minutes – or 7 hours 12 minutes! – deals with the collapse of a collectivised Soviet-era farm in rural Hungary. There is the scent of money in the air; of desperation; and a yearning for meaning and salvation. Who follows who, and why, is wonderfully uncertain. Signature long takes (often as long as a 10 minute roll of film allows!), combined with unrivalled choreography and Tarr’s unique topography offer a sublime cinematic experience. To commit to Sátántangó is to commit to the unforgettable and life-changing: you will have reached the outer limits of cinema. A national tour of a 35mm print.

mine who fought in Castro’s army before fleeing to the U.S. has told me that the film Sátántangó captures the tragicomedy of Stalinist bureaucracy and surveillance better than anything else he has encountered, in

essential truth of the story is more metaphysical than sociopolitical, and a post-Christian and/or post-Biblical context is what dominates. (This context is apparent even in the titles of the first two collaborations between Krasznahorkai and Tarr, Damnation and Sátántangó, and both men have acknowledged in interviews that their last film together, the apocalyptic The Turin Horse, is structured around the six days of creation found in Genesis.)

But surely the playing out of its metaphysical meanings is contingent on the reader/viewer’s sense of his or her own identity in relation to the story’s blighted, godforsaken, and self-centered

written and originally published in the mid-1980s, when Hungary was still under Soviet Communist rule, and therefore a period when Communism couldn’t be addressed directly, even if its bureaucratic manifestations are omnipresent and central to the narrative. It would perhaps be unduly facile to insist that the blatant (albeit twisted and perverted) religious context has replaced the suppressed political context in fixing the moral implications of the story, but it seems hard to deny that this relationship exists on some level.

By the same token, William Faulkner’s Light in August, my favorite novel in any lan-

that category as well as that era for instance, the restless, almost twitching movement of the narrative from one location to the next (which one could also associate with, say, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and John Dos Passos’s The Big Money, both from 1936), reflecting the economic instability of most of the characters.

As someone who grew up in northwestern Alabama and spent the first sixteen years of my life there (1943-1959), I have treasured Light in August, which I first read shortly after I left for a New England boarding school, as the novel that best captures the quasi-totalitarian climate of

film or in narrative prose, whereas Krasznahorkai and Tarr have both suggested in several interviews, no less plausibly, that nothing could have been further from their minds while composing this narrative in its separate forms. For them, it appears, the

characters.Whichever side of the Cold War one happens to be on, or whether one chooses to accept a Cold War context at all, these arguably become the elected meanings more than the projected ones, although it’s important to add that Sátántangó was

guage, has almost never been described as a Communist novel.

Yet if one reads it as a proletarian American novel of its period (1932), one could argue that it bears many of the characteristic attributes, formal and otherwise, that one might associate with

that culture, especially in relation to race. Even though this is clearly not addressed as directly as Faulkner addresses racism in Light in August, it seems no less clear that Tarr and Krasznahorkai recognise and understand this climate with comparable

In most respects, I’m delighted and honoured that a version of the following essay was published in Issue Two of the journal Music & Literature, which is devoted to László Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr, and Max Neumann. In fact, this essay was commissioned by the editors of this handsome special issue, and my only reason for posting my original version is that a few stylistic edits were made, in what I’m sure were sincere efforts to clarify some of the entanglements in my lengthy sentences, that unfortunately yielded some embarrassing factual errors in the piece, as well as a few significant cuts. (It now appears that I read portions of the French translation of Krasznahorkai’s novel before I ever saw Tarr’s film and that Erich Auerbach’s great book Mimesis now includes an analysis of Light in August that no one has previously read; and the remarkable observation from Dan Gunn that I quoted has been deleted.) So, just to keep the record straight, here, for better and for worse, is exactly what I wrote. - J.R.

BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM Part of the greatness of Béla Tarr’s radical film adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s first novel, Sátántangó, is a curious combination of faithfulness and what might be described as the theoretical limits of any possible faithfulness in the “translation” of prose into sounds and images.

There’s something undeniably startling as well as radical about converting a novel that’s only 274 pages long (in its graceful English translation by George Szirtes) into a film that lasts 432 minutes, but the relation between the long sentences of the former and the long takes of the latter is central to that conversion.The experience of following a sentence may not necessarily be identical to the experience of following one or more characters, whether this is on a page or on a screen, but the existential aspect of implicating us in the shape and duration of an event while we attend to it, with all the moral and political ramifications this “collaboration” implies, is common to both experiences.

In certain respects, one might argue that the political and social differences between novel and film are far less important than the separate cultural reflexes of Americans and Hungarians following the narrative in either of its phenomenological forms. A Cuban-born friend of

22 depth, not to mention sorrow and outrage, and regard it no less metaphysically as a blight on humanity. So, whether it’s willed or not, Sátántangó deserves to be regarded in both its forms as one of the great narratives about Stalinism and its effects on alienating people from themselves as well as each other - including, one should stress, the lingering effects of that Stalinism on a capitalist society.

For many years, Béla Tarr and I have had a running debate about the relation of the film (and, by implication, the novel) Sátántangó to Light in August, which also focuses largely on the simultaneous events of a single day in a depressed, flat rural area as seen through the consciousness of several alienated characters - alienated from themselves as well as from one another - including a fallen patriarch who observes all the others named Reverend Hightower (a name and figure that already anticipates some of the structure and vision of Tarr and Krasznahorkai’s film The Man from London), and who might have served as his community’s conscience if they all hadn’t deteriorated into an apocalyptic, post-ethical (and specifically post-Christian) stupor. Both novels are largely centered around shocking central episodes devoted to atrocious acts that, even more shockingly, are described with a certain amount of lyricism - in Light in August, the pursuit, castration, and murder of the racially ambiguous Joe Christmas by a racist named Percy Grimm who regards him as black; in Sátántangó, the torture and fatal poisoning of a cat by a feebleminded young girl named Esti who then kills herself with some of the same rat poison.

Other rough parallels of Sátántangó with Faulkner, if not with Light in August per se, include a narrative that shifts between the separate viewpoints of diverse characters (cf. As I Lay Dying), an important section framed around the consciousness of a feeble-minded and innocent character - Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, Esti in Sátántangó - and a form of black comedy that forms around the meanness, pettiness, and spite of many of the central characters (the members of the failed farm collective in Sátántangó, the Snopes family in Faulkner’s late trilogy - The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion - devoted to their ascendancy).

Béla Tarr doesn’t see any connection between Sátántangó and Light in August, or,

SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014 more generally, between Krasznahorkai and Faulkner; he has told me more than once that he finds the Hungarian translations of Faulkner so inadequate that he doesn’t feel he knows this American author at all, and it’s worth adding that one could also trace

be described as a lyrical and rhetorical delirium around scenes and narrative situations that are virtually static, furious maelstroms that swirl around a void: not just the solitary and flabby inertia and impotence of Hightower and Krasznahorkai’s

Faulkner and Krasznahorkai are profound.The two major characters of Light in August, who never meet - Lena Grove (a pregnant and single young white woman on the road from Alabama, searching in Mississippi for the father of her child-to-be) and

many of Faulkner’s methods back to Joseph Conrad, e.g. the events of one day perceived from the perspective of separate characters, as in Nostromo. (I can also readily acknowledge that the sarcastic wit of Krasznahorkai’s story, which arguably goes even beyond Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy in its sense of absurdist and ni-

doctor stewing in their own juices (which occasions a certain hilarious Beckett-like comedy in Krasznahorkai’s novel and Tarr’s film, which lingers over the seemingly intense labour and straining effort required for an alcoholic to drink himself into oblivion, but only a kind of pitying despair or self-loathing iden-

Joe Christmas (a doomed, bitter orphan of thirty-three with alleged biracial origins who can’t ever discover whether he’s white or black) - are presented generally in terms of the respective styles of The Odyssey and the Old Testament, at least as they’re described by Erich Auerbach in ”Odysseus’ Scar,” the brilliant

hilist farce, seems quintessentially Eastern European, making the apocalyptic pessimism of this novel distinct from both Faulkner and Conrad, even after one factors in the latter’s Polish origins.)

But even so, there are certain similarities between long sentences by Faulkner and Krasznahorkai that are worth dwelling upon. Both convey a certain compulsive movement that can

tification in Faulkner’s), but also the slow-motion progress of a wagon mounting a hill as perceived by Lena Grove in the present-tense opening of Faulkner’s novel, and the relentless way Tarr’s camera follows various characters walking down dusty roads throughout much of Sátántangó.

Nevertheless, the philosophical differences between

first chapter of his Mimesis: seamless and untroubled in Homer, like figures on Keats’s Grecian urn, and turbulent and full of gaps, like expressionist bolts of lightning, in the story of Abraham. As Claire Denis once suggested to me, Light in August may be the best novel ever written about racism, and it’s also a profoundly troubled moral inquiry about the failure of southern Christianity to

13 cope with racism. It boldly alternates pastoral comedy (Grove) with urban tragedy (Christmas), a cinematic form of stillness, presence, and unchanging persistence (Grove, who opens the novel in the present tense) with a very literary form of tortured narrative progression (Christmas).

Here is the way Auerbach summarises the two styles: “On the one hand [meaning Homer], externalised, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feelings completely expressed; events taking place in a leisurely fashion and with very little suspense. On the other hand [in the Old Testament], the externalisation of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasised, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’” 1 Krasznahorkai and Tarr clearly can’t be identified with either of these styles - unless, perhaps, one tries to combine them into some sort of shotgun marriage between, say, Homeric uniformity and suspense, or between allegory and unbroken continuity. As I’ve already suggested, it can’t be said to address Stalinism directly in the way that Light in August addresses Christianity, even though Stalinist bureaucracy and its bureaucratic surveillance, seemingly motored exclusively by mean-spirited selfinterest and giving rise to a form of universal misanthropy, is one of its major sources of black comedy.But in spite of all this, Light in August and Sátántangó both qualify as moral indictments of hypocritical communities, a major source of their common power.

In any case, it’s important to recall that the narrative of Sátántangó originated with Krasznahorkai, not with Tarr; and a 2012 interview with the former

by Paul Morton concludes with a different spin on the issue of a possible Faulknerian influence: Question:“Finally, American readers will surely make comparisons between Sátántangó and Faulkner’s novels.There are the

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long, rhythmic sentences. There is the small dying town cursed by a past and the constant jarring shifts in time. Did Faulkner’s novels, either in English or Hungarian translation, or any of our other writers inform your work?”

Without clarifying whether he read Faulkner in English or in Hungarian translation and before going on to praise Dostoevsky, Pound, Thoreau’s Walden, West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and Thomas Pynchon - Krasznahorkai replied,“Yes, they had an extraordinary effect on me and I am glad to have the opportunity of admitting this to you now. The influence of Faulkner - particularly of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury - struck an incredibly deep echo in me: his passion, his pathos, his whole character, significance, the rhythmical structure of his novels, all carried me away. I must have been 16-18, I suppose, at one’s most impressionable years. […]” 2

ment culminating in The Turin Horse (which Tarr has declared his final film).The fact that the Soviet rule of Hungary was still in force when the novel was written but not when the film was made is already a major difference, even though both Tarr and Krasznahorkai have tended to downplay this distinction in the

grace and acceptance, Lena Grove, associated with ancient Greece, while the latter, distributing its pessimistic despair more equitably and universally among its characters, implicitly refuses to categorise any of them as heroes or villains, or even as positive or negative role models.

Irimiás may be a shabby con-

contrast, Krasznahorkai and Tarr appear to regard the Hungarian hatred of Gypsies mordantly, as an enduring and even comic-absurdist part of the social landscape (such as when the villagers go to the trouble of dismantling their useless furniture so that the Gypsies can’t repossess it before they follow Irimiás to the manor

interviews with each that I’ve encountered.

More generally, the metaphysics of novel and film can’t be the same because sentences can pass back and forth between the physical and the metaphysical, but camera movements are perpetually and necessarily mired in the physical. Dan Gunn claims in his review of the novel for the Times Literary Supplement (June 1, 2012, p. 19), “What starts as a sentence happening inside one character’s head ends inside the stagnation of a puddle or the terror of a cat; the object - a door or a road or a bell – can and does become the actor in its own drama.” Perhaps this is a bit hyperbolic, but it does convey the sort of wayward drift that a sentence by Krasznahorkai can take, and clearly a drift of this kind isn’t available to a camera and/or microphone in the same fashion. Tarr can only witness or accompany the physicality of an actor/character, and metaphysical or psychological omniscience can figure only in the brief, thirdperson voiceovers that conclude some of the chapters. (Similar disembodied male voiceovers take over briefly at privileged moments in The Turin Horse, signaling once again an acknowledgment of the narrative’s literary origins.)

Both Light in August and Sátántangó qualify as metaphysical and allegorical reveries about the perversion of Christianity and fallen mankind, but the former holds out some form of hope for an earlier model of

artist and the villagers deluded fools for trusting him, but there is arguably nothing in the novel or film that suggests they should have given up on the notion of salvation and therefore trusted no one; the speech or sermon delivered by Irimiás over the corpse of Esti may be partially insincere and inadequate in other ways as a form of moral guid-

house), but as little more than a glancing detail in their overall abjection (as it appears to be with the father and daughter of The Turin Horse), not as any cynching piece of evidence in their fallen state.

It’s worth adding that the abjection and miserablism of Sátántangó have become so internalised that its ultimate hor-

❖❖❖ Although the film Sátántangó is rigorously faithful to the novel’s narrative and its narrative structure in most respects, one key difference is the exposition of the enlistment/induction - or, more precisely, re-enlistment and re-induction - of Irimiás as a government spy (along with his sidekick, Petrina), which occurs in the second chapter of the novel, shortly after the release of Irimiás and Petrina from prison, but which we learn about in the film only retroactively and quite late in the proceedings, in the penultimate chapter. Both novel and film feature a dialogue with a captain/chief about their summons and their obligation to do government work, but in the film, the nature of this work is far more opaque and nonspecific; in the novel, there is a direct admission that their “job is to supply information”.3 Existentially, this puts us in a very different position regarding the failed farm collective who stand at the story’s center, whose trust in Irimiás we’re encouraged or at least permitted to share in the film, whereas in the novel we can only regard them throughout as gullible suckers and deluded victims of this false messiah’s charisma.

This suggests that, as Krasznahorkai’s first novel and Tarr’s sixth feature, Sátántangó represents something notably different in their respective careers - even after we add that the overall artistic evolution of both careers seems to veer increasingly towards allegory, a develop-

perishable memory surviving in the society that produced it: […]Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant. 6 The common thread in both apocalyptic visions is the moral specter of spirituality and acceptance - Christian, postChristian, or (in the case of Lena Grove), pre- Christian - in the face of nihilistic evil and destruction.

Even if it’s just a ghost in the (paradoxically) atheistic universe of Krasznahorkai and Tarr, the persistence of that ghost in the very terms of their vision shouldn’t be confused with its absence.

End Notes 1. Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R.Trask, Fiftieth-Anniversary edition, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003, 11-12.

2.“Anticipate Doom:The Millions Interviews László Krasznahorkai,” by Paul Morton,” www.themillions.com/2012/05/anticipate-doom-the-millions-interviews-laszlo-krasznahorkai.html, posted on May 9, 2012.

3. Krasznahorkai, László, Satantango, New York: New Directions, 2012, 27.

4. Ibid., 131.

5. Ibid.,274.

6.Faulkner: Novels 1930-1935[As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August,Pylon], New York:The Library of America, 743.

ance, but it is arguably better than nothing, just as Hightower’s well-intentioned impotence and defeat, however abject, might be regarded as morally preferable to the alcoholic doctor in Sátántangó who concludes the film by physically shutting out the external world as he boards up his windows.

Whatever his ideological limitations as a white Southerner, Faulkner ultimately viewed racism as a metaphysical blight on mankind that turns the racially undefined Joe Christmas into a crucified Christ figure. By

ror becomes the irrelevance of solipsistic fantasy: the death of Esti (“She brushed the hair from her forehead, put her thumb in her mouth, and closed her eyes.

No need to worry. She knew perfectly well her guardian angels were already on the way”) 4 or the doctor listening to the “nervous conversation” between his domestic possessions (creaking sideboard, rattling sauce-pan, sliding china plate) in the novel’s concluding sentence.5 The horror of Joe Christmas’s death, on the other hand, expands and even ascends to become an im-

Screenings: presented by A Nos Amours on 35mm Sat 6 Sep - 11:00 ICA, London Sun 14 Sep - 11:00 CCA, Glasgow Sun 21 Sep - 11:00 Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds Sat 27 Sep - 11:00 Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle

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Nekromantik Dir: Jörg Buttgereit (1987, Germany, 75 minutes). Presented by Arrow Video.

Nekromantik is the one-of-a-kind depraved classic from cult director Jörg Buttgereit.

Never released on home video in the UK (distributors didn’t even dare submit it for classification), Nekromantik plunges the viewer into a depraved world of nihilism and necrophilia – weaving the tale of Rob, a young man who finds himself competing for the affections of his girlfriend with a putrefying cadaver. With his love life quite literally decaying around him, Rob soon finds himself spiralling into a murky existence of disassociation, despair and ultimately, murder. You may think you’ve seen it all, but nothing can prepare you for Arrow Video’s full uncut version of Nekromantik – the film once seen, never forgotten!

An interview between Nekromantik director Jörg Buttgereit and Strange Vice’s Paul Hetherington.

Paul: To open up, I quote from a letter you sent David Kerekes in 1987: “Do you have any good movie theatre’s in England? You know, little dirty ones that like to show this kind of filth?” And on the 30th of July the following year, Nekromantik premiered in the UK at London’s Scala cinema, from which Scalarama takes its name.

On the topic of Nekromantik, which is screening as part of Scalarama, I want to talk about the film at the time of its release. I’m aware that it originally ran for two weeks in Berlin?

Jörg: Yes, at the Sputnik Cinema. This is where the film premiered, far away from where everything ‘happened’. It was a 300 seat theatre and for some reason 500 people showed up, which was totally amazing for me because I wasn’t prepared for that kind of success. We had, I think, one press screening three weeks before (in Berlin), for about 10 or 20 people, and most of the attendees gave the film a very good review. Everyone was supporting the Sputnik anyway, because it was kind of like the Scala cinema: alternative programme, very independent, very much a part of the cinema subculture which was going on at that moment.

Paul: I read that a couple of months before you took Nekromantik to the Scala, a VHS copy of the film had been seized at UK customs. And you didn’t want to take any chances with the print, so drove around with it in the boot of your car until… pretty much until the 11th hour of the screening?

Jörg: Actually the producer, Manfred Jelinski, went by car to London from Berlin, and he took the film print. He had a van with a bed inside, and the festival was starting Saturday afternoon, but Nekromantik – as the final film in the programme – was screening at 7am the next morning. He parked the van, slept with the print, and in the morning took it to the Scala. I’d been sitting there for 15 hours watching movies so I was exhausted when mine finally came on.

Also, I met Clive Barker at that screening. He didn’t stay until Nekromantik… but he saw the poster artwork and asked me: “How are you getting away with this kind of thing? How is it possible!” He was already doing Hellraiser at that point, and I remember seeing the poster later and worrying

that he was doing a similar thing… a beautiful woman kneeling next to a corpse… I thought ‘this guy is ripping me off’! But he didn’t.

Paul: You released Nekromantik and chose not to submit it for certification?

Jörg: To make a film commercially successful, you need certification (the FSK, Germany). Being part of the underground culture, refusing that kind of ‘power’ was natural to me, but when the film started playing in German cinemas, they were onto me. All the authorities tried to get Nekromantik in any way they could, because I didn’t apply, and then of course we had to go to court to get the film back. It’s a long story, and it was even worse with Nekromantik 2.

The main reason I never submitted the film for certification – and still haven’t despite the legal action – is because I was concerned they’d cut the film. I didn’t want that.

Paul: So how did you or Manfred Jelinski recuperate the costs of the first film?

Jörg: VHS sales. For us it was the best way to do it; the prices for video tapes were quite high during that time. I remember selling tapes at the Scala. The fact that we didn’t have the FSK label was also bad for distribution, so we started our own distribution company, and that meant that all the money generated from the VHS sales came straight back to us. The films were very cheap to make, of course…

Paul: And that was JB films, your distribution company? With the Warner Brothers parody logo…

Jörg: Yeah, Jelinski and Buttgereit. And after a while Warner told us they didn’t like that, and they… busted us.

Paul: I think I was introduced to your work by looking at other peoples tape trading lists. Seeing films called “Nekromantik” and “Violent Shit” – I thought WOW, I need to see these films!

It wasn’t until I started working with Cine Film years later, that I returned to your work and it really clicked… what could be done on a small budget.

There’s an inventiveness that sets your work apart from everything else at that time, but I think that the success of Nekromantik owes something to when it was made and released. The counterculture then was very active…underground film and cinema of transgression, punk-rock, industrial music, the fanzine culture and tape trading…

Jörg: That’s also a big part of the influence. The final push I got towards making my own movies was in a small Berlin cinema… I saw John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. And I thought WOW, this is completely independent and has nothing to do with film the industry. It was more shocking than horror movies, and therefore more influential than horror movies. And yeah, I was part of this scene that was based on the punkrock spirit in Berlin, but also very much influenced by industrial culture, which really came from Britain.

When I saw Throbbing Gristle perform, they brought films. They screened stuff before the concert, and during the concert. The music subculture was always connected with film, so for me Nekromantik was always part of this culture, and not wanting to do horror movies. I needed to do something more original, and these transgressive, industrial movies could be inaccessible. Not visually, but in terms of storytelling… or choosing not to tell a story. I was trying to do something in-between.

Paul: And censorship of Nekromantik was worse in the UK than in Germany?

Jörg: I remember going to Glasgow to show it. The police came and they didn’t let me in the cinema with the print!

Paul: But the real problems started with Nekromantik 2… when the Workshop Cinema in Munich was raided; the print seized; and I believe Jelinski had his house raided, with a great deal of materials from / relating to the film being taken? Did you ever get this stuff back?

Jörg: It took two years to win the court battle, and then they had to give everything back. But they never got hold of the negatives. What we didn’t get back was all the money we didn’t earn during the court hearings. But I felt a lot of support from journalists. I think the Nekromantik court case even made it on to the cover of Variety magazine in the US. On a moral level, I knew I would come out on top, and retain my right to expression, but of course it interfered with my work and personal life.

Paul: Was there an underground film scene in Germany at the time? What was it like?

Jörg: There was an experimental film scene: a lot to do with the music that was coming out – the musicians, of course, needed clips. Making film with

a plot was very unusual. In fact, normal American movies – something like Friday the 13th – were actually considered ‘underground’ because horror movies were banned, or heavily censored in Germany.

Paul: Recently, you directed a few episodes of Into The Night. And you also appeared in conversation with Bruce LaBruce.

Jörg: Yes. I shot two episodes: one with Joe Coleman and Asia Argento, and one with a famous porn actress in Germany; Gina Wild.

Paul: In the episode LaBruce says that your stuff was different. It was different then because it was counterculture, but now there is no counterculture...

Jörg: He meant there’s no counterculture left in film. In my opinion, the stage is counterculture. Much of the work I do now is in the theatre. The fact that everything spreads so fast on the internet is nice in one way, but anytime I put out a DVD, it appears online immediately making it hard to recoup costs. You can’t bootleg a stageplay.

Paul: You mentioned Pink Flamingos as a source of inspiration. Do you think you’ll ever be accepted by the mainstream in the same way that John Waters has?

Jörg: I’m known in Germany for my work on radio and in the theatre. It’s funny that Nekromantik will be released in Great Britain. It means that the film is getting much greater exposure now than it did 25 years ago. I don’t know what this means. I have no clue if the film still ‘does’ something.

We will see.

Screenings: Tue 2 Sep - 22:30 Cambridge Film Festival Thu 11 Sep - 19:30 Kino Klub at The Guild Cinema, Edinburgh Filmhouse Fri 12 Sep - 20:50 Fright Club at QUAD, Derby Fri 12 Sep - 21:00 Kneel Before Zod at Nottingham Writer's Studio Sat 13 Sep - 23:30 Rio Cinema, London

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

Polyester in Odorama Dir. John Waters (1981, US, 86 minutes). Presented by Park Circus.

Bad taste meets bad smells! First shown with the gimmick of ‘scratch and sniff ’ cards so audiences could smell what they saw on screen, this outrageous comedy stars drag queen superstar Divine as put-upon housewife Francine Fishpaw, tormented by an adulterous husband, perverted offspring… and bad smells! Co-starring Tab Hunter and Edith Massey, and with a soundtrack that includes Debbie Harry, Bill Murray and Michael Kamen, this is one of John Waters’ (Hairspray, Pink Flamingos) best loved films, now returning to the big screen in the way it was intended.

Screenings: Tue 2 Sep - 20:30 Belmont Filmhouse, Aberdeen Thu 4 Sep - 19:00 Hull Independent Cinema Project at Fruit Sun 7 Sep - 20:30 Dundee Contemporary Arts Sun 7 Sep - 19:30 Rochester Film Society at Sun Pier House Wed 10 Sep - check venues for time The Little Theatre Cinema, Bath; Duke of York's Picturehouse, Brighton; Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton; Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge; Clapham Picturehouse; ArtHouse, Crouch End; Cameo Picturehouse, Edinburgh; Exeter Picturehouse; Greenwich Picturehouse; Hackney Picturehouse; ICA, London; Picturehouse @ FACT, Liverpool; Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle; Errol Flynn Filmhouse, Northampton; Cinema City, Norwich; Phoenix Picturehouse, Oxford; Harbour Lights Picturehouse, Southampton; Stratford East Picturehouse; City Screen Picturehouse, York.

Thu 11 Sep - 20:00 Mayhem Film Festival at Broadway, Nottingham The Reliance, Leeds Fri 12 Sep - 19:30 The Synthetic Love Party at Cube Cinema, Bristol Fri 12 Sep - 22:00 Shock & Gore at Electric Cinema, Birmingham

BY JOHN WATERS Polyester is back in theaters in all its stinking glory after 33 years!

When originally released, it was the first of my movies not to be shown at midnight because video had just come out then, which killed the midnight movie business. Everyone could stay home and have their own midnight movie show, which I was kind of against because I like the tribal spirit of going to a theater, that group audience when everybody was stoned out of their minds.

This film cost $300,000 dollars, which for us was a huge amount of money at the time. It was the first film I shot on 35mm and it was done in a neighbourhood that really hated us as we

shot nearly 24 hours a day. Divine was the star and it took a long time for the neighbours to work out that the man who came in the morning before hair and make up was the same woman who came out the door in the middle of night screaming “Help me, God!” and woke them up.

Divine had a very strong image before as a character that we created for Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble who was basically conceived on film to scare hippies – Godzilla and Jayne Mansfield put together. This time he was playing a character who was the opposite of that, an alcoholic housewife in suburbia, so he started to get very good reviews for the first time.

Also Tab Hunter - the first real movie star we ever worked with was a huge reason the movie

was as successful as it was. People couldn’t believe he would do it.

The make out scene when Tab and Divine actually kissed - people really went crazy in the theatre. It was really brave of Tab to do that.

You can’t imagine then how that was such a surprising thing as it seems like it would be no big deal today, when straight actors love to play gay people and they get to make out and that gives them acting cred.

This film was shot in Odorama, where the number appears on the screen and you scratch and sniff. There had been Smell-o-vision - which Elizabeth Taylor owned the rights to – which was a huge machine in each theater that pumped out the smells (all good smells, which was a mistake in my opinion) but they

couldn’t get rid of the smells.Then there was AromaRama, and I met the guy who owned the patent on that who said, “You can have it as far as I’m concerned.” So we came up with Odorama, which was scratch and sniff.To get the smells, the only manufacturer at the time was the 3M company who had a library of smells, but I wasn’t respectable in any way, I hadn’t made Hairspray then, so we were afraid to tell them about my past movies so we told them it was children’s movie and instead of ordering a million farts, we ordered a million rotten eggs.

So move over Cinerama, move over Sensurround, move over 3D. Odorama is back! The only smell sensation in the theaters to be revived again. I am so happy, I smell like Odorama #10.

Thu 18 Sep - 18:15 Divine Double Bill with Polyester / I Am Divine Eden Court Theatre, Inverness Fri 19 Sep - 15:20 & 20:30 Sat 20 Sep - 12:45 & 18:30 Fringe Cinema at Derby QUAD Sat 20 Sep - 23:30 Rio Cinema, London Sat 20 Sep - late night Everyman Screen on the Green, London Sun 21 Sep - 18:00 PeckhamPlex, London Mon 22 Sep - 21:00 Filmhouse, Edinburgh Fri 26 Sep - 19:45 Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Carlisle Sat 27 Sep - 18:15 Chapter, Cardiff Mon 29 Sep - 20:15 Aberystwyth Arts Centre

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

Following Your Nose

BY MICHAEL PIERCE In the Beginning there was the Smell.

And when God said “Let there be Light” for the first time, there was a slight hint of Odorama #7 as a fuse blew in the darkness.

And before the Big Bang, there was the Big Stink when matter combined to give off a right pong.

And it is a little known fact that the second thing Adam and Eve invented after his-&-her organic underwear was the roll-on deodorant, whilst one of Krishna’s many forms is that of pure scent, which I am told is much like Odorama #8: an infusion of lotus flower mixed with ‘new car smell’.

Ever since the dawn of time, smells have permeated our existence.

Over millennia, pheromones have dictated which fellow creatures will steal our gaze, break our hearts, rile up our babymaking loins and stimulate creative juices. And when the musk dissipates, expensive perfumes allow us to dream that yes we can be within breathing distance of a favourite Celebrity™. Sights and sounds can transport us to different worlds, but it is smell that can hook us by the nostrils and yank us back in time in a (whiffy) jiffy. For me, a childhood spent foraging in sweat soaked vintage comic shops is rekindled whenever I take public transport in August; sniffing the centrefold of a real book.And so, as much as I am dazzled by technology, Kindles and iPads just don’t smell of much.

If you want all of your senses stimulated by movies, you have to sniff your way into a cinema. The fragrance of hot salted popcorn, the allure of your neighbour’s stench, the lucky dip aroma of your seat… this is cinema in all of its odours. And though there are films I’ve seen many times, there’s only one I’ve truly smelt; just one that I’ve lived, breathed and snorted along with the characters.

My friends, that film, the superstar of olfaction satisfaction, is John Waters' Polyester, and Scalarama is proud to present the film in Odorama, smelling better (and worse) than ever before.

First released in 1981 with the gimmick of scratch’n’sniff cards relating to smells within the film, Polyester follows Francine Fishpaw - played by Waters’ muse, the much-missed and never equalled, Divine - a housewife tormented by her porn theater operating husband (whose hands wander as much as his toupée), her deviant children and obnoxious mother. But, worst of all, Francine is constantly plagued by a litany of bad smells. As she comes across each aroma, a number flashes up that corresponds to the cards,

meaning that audience members can fully empathise with “pur, pur Francine”, as her best friend Cuddles (Edith Massey) would say.With each setback, Francine’s domestic sanctity is shaken to its core but through it all she manages to find love, harmony and that elusive Odorama #10.

John Waters’ films are like nothing else in cinema. His characters explode onto the screen and ratchet the shriek level to ‘eardrum melting’. But within their performances is a searing sincerity about the anguish of modern life. His films demand that we fight against notions of taste, normality and suppression enforced by monoculture, and reveal that behind every suburban facade, the human stench of passion, greed and filth still permeate. To encounter John Waters’ films is to be drenched in the moist juices of trash – full immersion necessary. I should admit that the desire to bring Odorama back started as my own selfish demand to experience the film only as it was intended to be seen.After watching it first on DVD, my yearning for an Odorama card to call my own brought forth an unbeknownst force within me - the undeniable stench of destiny. And so it was at that moment, with the sight of Jean Hill’s tyre-biting nun still burning in my retinas that my quest began: Polyester. Odorama.

Big screen.

At that time in 2009, I was working for an independent cinema so it wasn’t hard to enquire about screening the film. But my enthusiasm dwindled when faced with three hurdles: no rights (permission to show the film was blocked following the collapse of the original distributors New Line), no 35mm print existed (in any archives) and, most importantly, no Odorama cards. Polyester was back on my list of pipe dreams. But soon enough, Divine was to shine on my quest, when a

chance meeting with John Waters in London after an interview for Little Joe magazine, meant I had the opportunity to express my desire to bring Odorama back. He reiterated the hurdles but his initial enthusiasm spurred me on, and that day I walked away with my most treasured possession - his business card.

Over the next year, progress was made behind the scenes as Warner Brothers took full control of John’s back catalogue, and on his request, new 35mm prints were made of his films.After running midnight movie screenings at the Curzon Soho cinema for a couple of years, my co-conspirator Nadia and I were invited to put on an event as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and given what every independent cult film programmer dreams of…

A BUDGET! In my mind, there was only one film I would ever want to show and so with the nod from the festival, I raced ahead trying to find someone who would make the cards. Opening a glossy magazine one day, a scratch and sniff card for a BBC TV series Dirty Cities wafted onto the floor and after tracing its production, I discovered The Aroma Company. Although more used to perfume samplers and air freshener promotional displays, the Aroma Company understood the project and have been hugely supportive of this whole endeavour… but I do wonder if they have watched the film yet!

That first production run opened my eyes and nostrils to the world of scents. First through the post was a sample ‘fart’, next ‘petrol’, and finally ‘sweaty shoes’.

Finessing each odour was a lesson in the wonders of technology; turns out you no longer need to scratch and sniff, but ‘gently rub’ and sniff. So, in 2011, the Edinburgh International Film Festival finally premiered the new print of Polyester with the Odorama cards,

extra special for featuring a filmed introduction by Waters, and fittingly, a FIGHT (a real life Edinburgh foot stomper!) and a FLASHER (showing off a wee part of Scotland’s natural beauty).

Following the success of the screening there was talk of a UK tour, but the search for a sponsor to fund the new run of cards sadly ended in vain. Odorama would lie unscratched for a couple of years, despite a steady stream of emails from the film’s fans across the planet, tirelessly searching for the cards. In March 2013 the wait paid off: the superlative Off/Screen festival in Brussels got in touch, wanting to make an order of 2,000 cards for a screening of Polyester with John in attendance. Worldwide interest in the cards was reignited and with news that the UK theatrical rights had passed from Warners to Park Circus, whose mission is to return classics to the big screen, the stage was now set for Odorama to be reborn.

And now in 2014, after months of gentle stroking, it was a glorious day when both Park Circus and Warners (who retained the rights in the US) ripped down all of those original hurdles - making a new 2K digital copy of the film, making it available to book by cinemas across the world and most importantly giving the green light to produce a new batch of Odorama cards. The wind was changing and sweet airs blew in from the continent as the prestigious Cannes Festival put on an outdoor screening of Polyester in Odorama on the beach, returning the film to where it premiered 34 years ago.

So here we are: Polyester in Odorama has returned and will be screened across the UK this September as well as in Portugal, America, Australia and Sweden!

And my ego is satisfied. For me, Polyester will always be the ultimate fountain of knowledge. The film taught me that major emotional breakdowns can be solved by having a big lunch with a friend (a.k.a. half a cake each), that happiness is a picnic in the woods and that handbags make perfect receptacles for ladyvomits. I also learned

the expression ‘nose candy’, discovered macramé and found out that you DO NOT MESS WITH A SISTER OF THE CHURCH. But most importantly Polyester taught me to have a quest, and to not only listen to your gut, but to follow your nose. Sniff out the best in every situation, but also realise when the shit really does stink - but persevere and yes, you too can find your very own Odorama #10.

Scalarama is indebted to all the people who made this revival happen - from John Waters himself, Divine and all the cast and crew, plus those original cards manufacturers, all the way through to the Edinburgh Film Festival family who took that first risk, the Aroma Company who made the new cards to perfect precision, to Off/Screen festival for being bold and beautiful, to Warner Brothers and Park Circus for caring, listening and bringing the film back into the world, and finally to all the exhibitors across the world who have shown and will show the film - because they care about cinema and they care about people. For it is the people I’ve met on this quest that have made it worthwhile, and the bizarre moments that have been created. One partiuclar experience was when someone told me he still kept his Odorama card by his bed, and whenever he is down, he smells Odorama #10 and all is right with the world. Seriously. Cinema makes me feel alive, Polyester makes me very happy to be alive, and Odorama makes me realise I am alive. Because somehow, people coming together, laughing together, and sniffing together, makes this life just that little bit more... divine.

And without further ado, it’s time to flare your nostrils, harness your honkers and start sniffing. Polyester in Odorama delivers the most scent-sational experience cinema can offer, and more. Smell you later!

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

Long live the Children’s Film Foundation!

BY VIC PRATT Once upon a time, as the 1940s ended, decades before the internet was a gleam in a computer programmer’s eye, way, way back when even a house with a flickery, black and white television set was a novelty, British kids found their visual entertainment at the Saturday morning pictures – weekly cinema clubs for the young, featuring cobbled-together assortments of American cliffhanger serials, rootin’ tootin’ westerns, creaky comedies and cartoons, possibly with a sing-song to boot.This tradition had started as far back as the silent era of the 1920s; the 1950s was to be its heyday.

But juvenile delinquency was a hot topic in the post-war years. The public grew increasingly suspicious of the effects of imported entertainments on impressionable children, one

result of which was the removal of American horror comics from newsagents’ shelves around 1954. Amidst this furore, the Children’s Film Foundation was born.A pan-industry initiative set up in 1950 by the owner of the Odeon and Gaumont cinema chains, J Arthur Rank (already a pioneer in the production of children’s films specifically for matinee presentation), the CFF’s notfor-profit mission was to provide thoroughly wholesome home-grown entertainment for young cinemagoers’ matinee screenings.

Respected producer Mary Field, the driving force behind numerous highly-regarded educational films, was appointed Chief Executive; Rank himself was Chairman of Directors. Funding was derived from the Eady Levy, a tax on cinema tickets that was fed back into filmmaking, and independent production companies were commissioned to provide the films for a fixed fee. The decades that followed saw the CFF release a plethora of highly regarded short features, serials, and English language versions of worthy foreign films, with many talented writers, directors and performers – many of whom were well known or would go on to be – contributing to its success.

CFF films were good, clean, fast-moving fun. Rarely longer than an hour in length, they were designed to be high on adventure and kidbased comedy hijinks and low on boring adult stuff like romance or talking-head plot exposition.

Peril for the Guy (1956), made back when children could cheerfully buy as many fireworks as they pleased, combined pyrotechnic fun with the exciting tale of a kidnapped scientist, while The Missing Note (1961) told an atmospheric tale of

three youngsters on the trail of a lost piano via the streets, markets and music halls of London.

CFF films never lacked ambition: Masters of Venus (1962) was a splendid serial about two children who accidentally get locked inside a futuristic space rocket, then fly it to the distant planet of the title – well, you would, wouldn’t you? – told in eight thrilling extraterrestrial episodes.

The Foundation secured support for its mission from within the film industry, and its output often garnered enthusiastic acclaim from journalists, academics and educationalists. But it had its detractors. CFF films were often criticised for their middle-class focus, and its logo was sometimes greeted with groans by those sections of the matinee audience who did not identify with the nicely-spoken goody-two-shoes children they saw on screen. To its credit, the CFF did attempt to move with the times.After Field’s departure in 1959, legislation controlling the use of child actors was relaxed, allowing greater flexibility and effectively expanding the pool of young actors that could be drawn upon, and the CFF was reviewed and revamped.

Everything was now to be shot in colour and, armed with audience surveys, the new powers that be attempted to create films with a broader appeal that better reflected contemporary fads and fashions. Hairier kids with regional accents (banned during Field’s tenure) began to crop up. Go Kart Go (1963) was a fastmoving tale of rival gangs (referred to by the less threatening word ‘groups’ in CFF publicity) building go-karts, in which young Dennis Waterman

The Glitterball Dir: Harley Cokeliss (1977, UK, 56 minutes). Presented by the BFI and Children’s Film Foundation.

A mischievous spherical object from outer space befriends a young boy.

BY CALLUM BARTON A slice of bread and jam, Tuc biscuits, Winalot, half a pasty, a tin of custard, teacakes, floral wallpaper, a Renault 4, a White City back office, a Californian import at the helm. Post-war, no-budget, lo-fi Britain masquerading as post-war, big-budget, sci-fi Hollywood.

Harley Cokeliss’s film is thus a cheap fluke of portent. Our boy-hero Brigadier fends off an Attlee double with the help of engorged silver balls from outer space. Remember that this was the year when two sevens clashed: Grunwick, the Lib-Lab pact, Sutcliffe, the National Front, the Provisional IRA, British Aerospace, the death grip of an empire and Her Silver Jubilee.

Fast-forward two years: Westminster lies back and thinks of the free market, consensus politics croaks it, and Mr. Cokeliss lands his dream gig as second unit director on The Empire Strikes Back.

The moral of this tale?

Be careful what you wish for #YOLO Callum Barton lives and works in Loughborough Junction.

and Frazer Hines took leading roles. Egghead’s Robot (1970) got right up to date, with a young lad (played by Keith Chegwin) training his robot paratrooper to do the housework. In the sequel, The Troublesome Double (1971), the cheeky rascal sneaks the robot into the school swimming gala. Even filmmaking luminaries Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger offered their services to the CFF, collaborating one last time on the splendidly eccentric The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972).

Sadly, though, 1970s television slowly finished off Saturday morning cinema. Kids stayed at home, slouching on the sofa in their pyjamas, while broadcasters served up their own all-morning-long variety of youth-orientated programming; initially featuring those familiar creaky old films, serials and cartoons, the mix was later spiced with new episodic magazine programmes like TISWAS (1974-1982) and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop (1976-1982). A few new releases trickled out, while highlights from the back catalogue were screened on television, before production finally ceased in 1987. Happily the CFF lives on: as advisory body The Children’s Film and Television Foundation, involved in the development of film projects for children, in the fond memories of all those who enjoyed the Saturday morning pictures, and now restored and released by BFI DVD. Vic Pratt is a Curator (Fiction), BFI National Archive. This article was originally published in BFI DVD releases of CFF serials Five on a Treasure Island and Five Have a Mystery to Solve.

Screenings: THE GLITTERBALL / THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW Fri 5 Sep - 18:00 Cambridge Film Festival at St. Philips Church Sat 13 Sep - 14:00 Hotel Elephant, London Sat 27 Sep - 11:00 Rio Cinema, London Sat 27 Sep - 13:00 & 15:30, Sun 28 Sep - 13:30 QUAD, Derby Sat 27 Sep - 12:30 Filmspot at Redoubt Fortress, Eastbourne THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW (only) Sat 20 Sep - 15:15 The Errol Flynn Filmhouse, Northampton Sat 27 Sep - 10:30, Sun 28 Sep - 10:30 The Light Cinema, New Brighton THE GLITTERBALL (only) Sat 6 Sep - check venue for times Picturehouse venues; Birks Cinema, Aberfeldy; Abbeygate Cinema, Bury St Edmunds; Forum Cinema, Hexham; Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds; The Venue, Lincoln; The Arthouse, Crouch End; Lexi Cinema; Notting Hill Gate; Phoenix Cinema, East Finchley; Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle.

Sun 7 Sep - check venue for times Dukes @ Komedia, Brighton; Picturehouse @ FACT, Liverpool Sat 13 Sep - 10:30, Sun 14 Sep - 10:30 The Light Cinema, New Brighton Sun 21 Sep - 11:00 Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre Sat 27 Sep - 11:00 Hippodrome Cinema, Bo’ness

SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

The Boy Who Turned Yellow Dirs: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (1972, UK, 55 minutes). Presented by BFI and Children’s Film Foundation.

The last completed work by the legendary Powell and Pressburger, The Boy Who Turned Yellow tells the story of John who turns yellow one day while travelling on the Underground! Meeting a yellow man who travels via electricity, John has to team up with him to rescue his lost mouse from the Tower of London.

“MELLOW YELLOW” - Final Powell & Pressburger film screens at the Scalarama film festival.

Nestled amongst Scalarama’s wealth of cinephile delights, including the Weimar classic The Cabinet Of Dr Cagliari, Czech New Wave gem Sedmikrásky, Wes Craven’s The Last House On The Left (got to love the OST), the early works of Jim Jarmusch and Saul Bass’s post-psychedelic/hippie ant sci-fi mind-fuck Phase IV comes the final movie from Powell & Pressburger, The Boy Who Turned Yellow.

Unlike the masters’ ’40s cinematic opuses – The Life & Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (’41), A Matter Of Life & Death (’46), Black Narcissus (’47) and The Red Shoes (’48) – their early ’70s effort The Boy Who Turned Yellow (’72) was made on the cheap for The Children’s Film Foundation; almost a return to the slight budget of the “quota quickies” Powell concocted in the ’30s. Since the trail of controversy surrounding Peeping Tom (’60) the once revered filmmaker left Blighty to make a string of far safer movies in Australia (the biggest being the national box office smash comedy They’re A Weird Mob (’66)) before the slightly risqué The Age Of Consent (’69), featuring a nude, young Helen

BY JON MILLS Mirren and a bearded, beach combing James Mason. On his return to England the visionary director was once again reunited with his old sparring partner (the fabulous Hungarian Jewish émigré screenwriter) Emeric Pressburger, which would appear out of the need to work rather than anything else.

19 That the children’s film they made had little of the dialogue or experimental techniques associated with their studio made masterpieces, it did however maintain a degree of the eccentricity that marked Roger Livesey’s endearing Colonel and the crazed “glue man” out from their ’40s war era equivalents.A distinctly English kookiness! The Boy Who Turned Yellow is a playful “quickie” befitting the bright colours and extravagant fashions (floppy bucket hat, fringed suede waistcoat, purple flares; an “I’m A Magic Christian” tshirt; a Jimi Hendrix poster and Jethro Tull magazine spread on the protagonist’s wall) that the early ’70s “yoof” had taken to in the post-psychedelic splashed landscape the ’60s had left behind; dreamy sentiments of Alice In Wonderland and The Wizard Of Oz fitting for juvenile minds fried on infant viewings of The Yellow Submarine. If the plot is inconsequential and the uneven mix of scientific and historical education (at times bordering on a school programme) neither here nor there, The Boy Who Turned Yellow is a rather fun, bright, madcap affair that adults fond of the era will enjoy, even if the yellow electricity eating Nick (short for Electronic) – played by Robert Eddison – is the kind of derailed adult “Post Saville” England has since eradicated.

To this day The Boy Who Turned Yellow remains one of the Foundation’s most cherished films. In an era of “extreme austerity” it even aired on the BBC over Christmas ’84 (only 12 years after it was made) – the first film from the company that the BBC presented on the small screen, gaining record viewing figures.

That it was the last film made by Powell & Pressburger gives this slight piece an air of credence the other Children Film’s Foundation lack, and if disagreements over the aging legends and the Foundation had not occurred one can only imagine what else they could have made, budget and time allowing. As it stands The Boy Who Turned Yellow is a gentle reminder of how slightly odd adults, polite children and extreme fashions ruled the roost in early ’70s Britain.

With thanks to Jill Reading at The BFI Jon Mills, editor of Shindig! magazine.

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI Dir. Robert Wiene (1920, Germany, 76 mins). Presented by Eureka Entertainment.

“The synthetic look in films is not necessarily a misplaced theatricalism. From the beginning of film history, there were painters and sculptors who claimed that cinema’s true future resided in artifice, construction.” – Susan Sontag One of the most iconic masterpieces in cinema history, Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari shook filmgoers worldwide and changed the direction of the art form. Now presented in a definitive restoration, the film’s chilling, radically expressionist vision is set to grip viewers again.

At a local carnival in a small German town, hypnotist Dr. Caligari presents the somnambulist Cesare, who can purportedly predict the future of curious fairgoers. But at night, the doctor wakes Cesare from his sleep to enact his evil bidding…

Incalculably influential, the film’s nightmarishly jagged sets, sinister atmospheric and psychological emphasis left an immediate impact in its wake (horror, film noir, and gothic cinema would all be shaped directly by it). But this diabolical tale nevertheless stands alone now more mesmerising than ever.

In early 1920, posters began appearing all over Berlin with a hypnotic spiral and the mysterious command Du musst Caligari werden - “You must become Caligari.”

The posters were part of an innovative advertising campaign for an upcoming movie

by Robert Wiene called Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari.When the film appeared, audiences were mesmerised by Wiene’s surreal tale of mystery and horror. Almost a century later, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari is still celebrated for its rare blending of lowbrow entertainment and avant-garde art. It is frequently cited as the quintessential cinematic example of German Expressionism, with its distorted perspectives and pervasive sense of dread.

Like many nightmares, Caligari had its origin in real-life events.

Screenwriter Han Janowitz had been walking late one night through a fair in Hamburg’s red-light district when he heard laughter.Turning, he saw an attractive young woman disappear behind some bushes in a park.A short time later a man emerged from the shadows and walked away. The next morning, Janowitz read in the newspapers that a young woman matching the description of the one he had seen had been murdered overnight at that very location.

Haunted by the incident, Janowitz told the story to fellow writer Carl Mayer. Together they set to work writing a screenplay based on the incident, drawing also on Mayer’s unsettling experience with a psychiatrist. They imagined a strange, bespectacled man named Dr. Caligari who arrives in a small town to demonstrate his powers of hypnotism over Cesare, a sleep walker, at the local fair. A series of mysterious murders follows.

Janowitz and Mayer sold their screenplay to Erich Pommer at Decla-Film. Pommer at first wanted Fritz Lang to direct the film, but Lang was busy with another project, so he gave the job to Wiene. One of the most critical de-

BY MIKE SPRINGER cisions Pommer made was to hire Expressionist art director Hermann Warm to design the production, along with painters Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig. As R. Barton Palmer writes at Film Reference: The principle of Warm’s conception is the Expressionist notion of Ballung, that crystallisation of the inner reality of objects, concepts, and people through an artistic expression that cuts through and discards a false exterior.Warm’s sets for the film correspondingly evoke the twists and turnings of a small German medieval town, but in a patently unrealistic fashion (e.g., streets cut across one another at impossible angles and paths are impossibly steep). The roofs that Cesare the somnambulist crosses during his nighttime depredations rise at unlikely angles to one another, yet still afford him passage so that he can reach his victims. In other words, the world of Caligari remains “real” in the sense that it is

not offered as an alternative one to what actually exists. On the contrary, Warm’s design is meant to evoke the essence of German social life, offering a penetrating critique of semiofficial authority (the psychiatrist) that is softened by the addition of a framing story. As a practicing artist with a deep commitment to the political and intellectual program of Expressionism, Warm was the ideal technician to do the art design for the film, which bears out Warm’s famous manifesto that “the cinema image must become an engraving.”

The screenwriters were disappointed with Wiene’s decision to frame the story as a flashback told by a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Janowitz, in particular, had meant Caligari to be an indictment of the German government that had recently sent millions of men to kill or be killed in the trenches of World War I.“While the original story exposed authority,” writes Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler:A Psychological History of the German Film,

“Wiene’s Caligari glorified authority and convicted its antagonist of madness. A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one — following the much-used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum.”

In a purely cinematic sense, of course, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari remains a revolutionary work.

Mike Springer is a journalist, writing daily for Open Culture.

On the Restoration…

A landmark movie of German cinema, a classic of the silent movie genre, an early example of the psychological thriller, German cinema’s first international success after the First World War, a prototype of expressionist cinema, and the stuff of legend - Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari is many things.

Despite its prominent status, for decades the movie was shown in a rather tired old format. Although restorations by the Filmmuseum München (1980), the German Federal Film Archive (Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv) in Koblenz (1984) and as part of the ‘Lumière’ European MEDIA project (1995) brought important aesthetic improvements, all these works came up against their physical limits. Various signs of wear remained – the typical patina of an ‘old silent movie’: dirt, scratches and lines that flitted through the picture like white ghosts, hard contrast, that often reduced the actors’ faces to white surfaces; picture unsteadiness, and a lot of shots with missing frames, resulting in a jump cuts and title cards that were hard to read.The three photochemical restoration approaches relied on different sources, but they all used prints that already contained these defects.

Not until now, almost 20 years after the last restoration, has the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung in Wiesbaden used the film’s camera negative from the German Federal Film Archive in Berlin for the first time, and also gathered together all existing historic prints from film archives worldwide.The digital image restoration in 4K resolution was carried out by L’Immagine Ritrovata – Film Conservation & Restoration in Bologna.

Screenings: Mon 1 Sep - 18:00 Chapter, Cardiff Sun 7 Sep - 11:00 Everyman Hampstead, London Everyman Screen on the Green, London Wed 10 Sep - 19:30 Bijou Electric Empire Forever at the Emporium, Brighton With Live Score by The Plummets Sun 14 Sep - 14:00 Curzon Community Cinema, Clevedon With Live Organ Accompaniment Fri 19 Sep - 22:00 Kino Klubb at Broadway Cinema, Nottingham With Live Soundtrack by Nadir Sat 20 Sep - 19:30 Hippodrome Cinema, Bo'ness With Live Piano Accompaniment by Mike Nolan Fri 26 Sep - 19:00 Filmspot at Redoubt Fortress, Eastbourne With Live Soundtrack by Partial Facsimile

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

The Last House on the Left Dir. Wes Craven (1972, US, 84 minutes). Presented by Cigarette Burns Cinema and Psychotronic Cinema on 35mm.

When two innocent girls head to the big city for their first rock gig, little do they expect their simple diversion to score a bit of weed would go so disastrously wrong for all involved. Released in 1972, Wes Craven’s rough-edged directorial debut Last House on the Left remains as controversial now, as it did then. Suffering for decades under an outright UK ban, before finally seeing an official home video release in the mid ’00s and a few, very limited theatrical screenings in the UK, we are pleased to bring this groundbreaking and nerve shattering nasty to UK screens on 35mm for its largest and longest theatrical run ever. Wes Craven closes the door on the hippie ‘60s and kicks down a new path to the post Vietnam era of harsh brutality, in a movie you won’t soon forget, but don’t worry, it’s only a movie…

BY NIA EDWARDS-BEHI Marking the debut of horror legends Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham, The Last House on the Left is a classic of 1970s American independent filmmaking. For a film that should have hovered around the grindhouses for just a few weeks before disappearing, it was instead remarkably successful. Hallmark Releasing Corporation’s release of the film into American cinemas was almost entirely reliant on clever marketing. Its bold appeal to the youth market was key to that success, with ads claiming ‘Not recommended for persons over 30!’. It was Hallmark who gave the film its catchy title, as well as its infamous tagline: ‘to avoid fainting, keep repeating, it’s only a movie…’ The films for which similar taglines had previously been used, including HG Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red (1965), demonstrate Last House’s exploitation forebears. The film also received a publicity boost when Roger Ebert unexpectedly praised the film. However, relative financial success didn’t stave off controversy, and the majority of film critics blasted the film, variously describing it as “vicious,” “repugnant” and “the sickest film of 1972.” Controversy means cuts, and cuts to Last House on the Left did not only come from censorship bodies. Projectionists, exhibitors and distributors cut the film as they saw fit.

While Hallmark screened the film uncut in its own cinemas, the cinemas run by American International Pictures screened a much shorter version. Others followed suit - when Hallmark received prints back from various cinemas across the country, they would have to re-edit the print to fix the cuts that had been made to the print. Despite this, the film’s presence in America continued well into the 1980s, playing at drive-in theatres until 1985. It is in this same period that the film became known in the UK too.

In the UK, Last House was released on VHS by Replay in 1982, having been outright refused a certificate by the BBFC in 1974. The marketing for this release was particularly smart, making use of the excellent ‘...it’s only a movie’ tagline

on a plain back cover, with further text claiming that the cover has been left intentionally plain to avoid offense, due to the film’s “horrific and violent scenes”. Of course, flip the thing over and there’s a selection of lurid stills from the film. What that cover very much demonstrated though, was an awareness of the conservative culture the film was being released into. Last House was one of the most notorious films of the ‘video nasties’ era, a time when the press, pressure groups and politicians rallied together against the sick filth that was freely available on the relatively new - and unregulated - video market. Come 1983 Last House was on the Department of Public Prosecutions list of films to be seized from anyone trying to sell them.When the Video Recordings Act came into being in 1984, the film, among many others, was well and truly banned, its fans and defenders effectively vilified.

Despite this ban the film did screen in the NFT in 1988, as part of a Craven retrospective, and in Leicester in 2000, as a double bill with the then recently un-banned The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The man behind that screening, Severin’s Carl Daft, fought tooth and nail for the uncut release of Last House, with very little success, despite the support of high profile film critics like Mark Kermode.

The film was passed 18 with mandatory cuts in 2002 when Anchor Bay took the rights to the film, following Daft’s brave refusal to release the film in anything but its uncut form. Finally, in 2008, the BBFC decided that the British public was grown-up enough to handle the film, and passed it uncut.

In 1972, critic Gene Siskel claimed in his review of the film that it “celebrate[d] adult male abuse of young women.” His views were and are not uncommon – it’s very easy to see why Last House caused such a fuss. Yes, the film depicts misogynistic acts, but it is not misogynistic itself, its women the most interesting characters of all. Sadie, Krug’s girlfriend, for example, is a complex ideological cypher. At several points she attempts to express herself in feminist terms, failing miserably at getting them right. Sadie isn’t a feminist, but it’s significant that she tries and wants to be. Sadie is allowed to recognise that she needs “a couple more chicks round here” but she can’t do anything about it, as she’s not ‘her own woman’ as she claims.

Sadie is significant as a misappropriation of feminism, either through a lack of education or a lack of support around her. Last House is shocking and difficult to sit through, but for all its carved chests, pissed pants, chainsaws, drugs and rape, it is so, so much

more than the sum of its parts. One of the finest American films made in response to the conflict in Vietnam, its raw power lies in its almost amateurish delivery. The film’s depiction of violence is, as Ebert put it, “brutal and needless and tragic,” its in-yourface depiction offering neither reprieve nor thrill.

Ultimately, where an even more controversial and problematic film such as I Spit on Your Grave offers a fist-pump ending, a smile on Jennifer Hills’s lips as she completes her revenge, Last House is pure pessimism. The establishment has failed.

Dr. Collingwood’s military training serves him well when avenging his daughter, but it couldn’t protect or save her. The down-trodden underclass have failed: Krug and his gang are a cruel and petty bunch, slaughtered for their actions. The youthful flower-power counter-culture has failed most of all: dead half way through the film, and in the case of brave, resourceful Phyllis, utterly forgotten.The film’s violent scenes may well shock you as you watch, but its sense of pessimism and nihilism is unnerving at a much deeper level. In synopsis, The Last House on the Left sounds gruelling, even shocking, but nothing can really prepare a person for the experience of watching the film itself.

Notes: Elements of this piece previously appeared in Nia’s retrospective of the film for Brutal As Hell (www.brutalashell.com/2012/08/th e-road-leadsto-nowhere-40-years-inthe-last-house-on-the-left).

See David A. Szulkin’s excellent book The Making of a Cult Classic for an in-depth account of the film’s making and release.

See also Adam Lowenstein’s chapter on the film in his book Shocking Representations for a wonderful account Last House’s reflection of the conflict in Vietnam.

Nia Edwards-Behi is co-director of the Abertoir Horror Festival, which takes places every November in Aberystwyth, Wales. She also writes for genre website Brutal as Hell and is in the final stretch of her PhD on the marketing and reviewing of controversial films and their remakes.

Psychotronic Cinema is a monthly cult film event which has been dedicated to bringing the world’s greatest, rarest and flat out weirdest cult movies to Scottish cinema screens for over a decade. While down south, Cigarette Burns flies the battered and bloodied flag of celluloid, screening 35 and 16mm genre magic wherever there’s a projector.

As an exclusive to these screenings, One Way Static Records has been kind enough to press up exclusive flexi discs, collecting the original radio spots originally used to promote Last House on the Left.These will only be available at the screenings and limited to 250 copies.The good chaps at One Way Static have also found some warehouse stock of their picture disc of the Last House on the Left OST.

Screenings: THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT presented by Cigarette Burns Cinema and Psychotronic Cinema on 35mm Wed 3 Sep - 20:45 Prince Charles Cinema, London Sat 6 Sep - 23:00 with Creatures of the Night at Hyde Park Picturehouse, Leeds Sat 13 Sep - 23:30 with Duke’s After Dark at Duke of York’s Picturehouse, Brighton Thu 18 Sep - 21:00 Cameo Picturehouse, Edinburgh Tue 23 Sep - 20:30 with Celluloid Screams, Showroom Cinema, Sheffield Tue 30 Sep - 18:15 Glasgow Film Theatre

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

SIDEWALK STORIES Dir. Charles Lane (1989, US, 97 minutes). Presented by The New Black & Open Cinema.

On a wintry Greenwich Village street, street portrait artist Charles Lane (the writer/director himself) battles a bullying, giant fellow artist, strokes attractive businesswoman Sandye Wilson’s cheek a little more than needed to get those proportions right, then gets stuck with adorable tot Nicole Alysia when her gambler dad gets knifed - all in b&w silence…and without the use of a single intertitle. In homage to Chaplin’s The Kid (and other movies) set in a then-tough Village environment (Lane squats in a wreck slated for demolition) and clearly capturing the plight of the homeless, Sidewalk Stories retains a magical sense of the fable, until a final, startling switch to…Winner of the Prix du Public at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a 15-minute ovation, Sidewalk Stories became a hit independent film around the world, but then disappeared: it’s never been on DVD or home video until its restoration by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata.

BY ASHLEY CLARK In an interview at the 2011 New York Film Festival, Michel Hazanavicius cited a largely forgotten film as a key inspiration for his Oscar-winning silent movie The Artist. Shot in black and white and almost entirely free of diegetic sound, the film, Sidewalk Stories, was the debut feature of New York filmmaker Charles Lane. At its screening at Cannes in 1989, it reportedly received an extended ovation, and a small New York release followed later that year, with a limited wider run in 1990. But after that, the movie was not available on home video in the U.S. It was re-released in France in 2002 - perhaps where Hazanavicius caught it - and finally returned home, to New York’s Film Forum, in a 2k digital restoration thanks to Carlotta Films (also a French outfit).

Shot quickly and cheaply in the winter of 1987, this consis-

tently imaginative and enjoyable film follows a homeless Greenwich Village street artist (played by Lane) who forms a bond with a toddler after he witnesses her father being murdered. While evading the police (his fingerprints are on the knife), he cares for the young innocent, and embarks on a tentative, and touchingly improbable, romance with a beautiful businesswoman (Sandye Wilson) who comes to sit for a painting. Inspired

by Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, the film moves with a clean,

well-paced narrative, leaning on Marc Marder’s flexible score which runs the gamut from lush orchestral arrangements, to faux mariachi, and pre-Seinfeld slap-bass riffs - for emotional shading. The diminutive, wide-eyed Lane is an expressive physical comedian, while his relationship with the tod-

The effect is startling, but till then the quietly radical nature of Sidewalk Stories lies in the dialectical tension between its whimsically nostalgic formal approach and its bold representation of pressing contemporary issues. While The Artist was set in the safely fossilised world of silent-era filmmak-

dler (played by Lane’s own daughter, which explains their magnetic bond) is especially moving.

Yet Sidewalk Stories is far flintier than any top-line synopsis might suggest, and its re-release feels particularly timely given the continuing plight of New York’s multitudinous homeless. The issue of New York’s class and wealth divide, even before today’s extremes, is made apparent from the film’s opening, which cuts from Wall Street types going about their frantic commutes, to the story’s central locale: the bustling strip on Sixth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets next to the basketball courts and opposite the Waverly Cinema (now IFC Center). Here tramps and street artists, including Lane’s never-named character, are hustling and grifting to survive, and it is largely in this world that the film remains. Reminiscent of the unnamed protagonist of Invisible Man, Lane’s artist holes up on the fringes of society - inside an abandoned church - stealing electricity to illuminate his spartan existence.

In the film’s final moments, ambient sound unexpectedly bleeds through, and we hear the clamoring of the collected homeless - suddenly, literally, given a voice.

ing, there’s something genuinely strange about seeing New York - one of the world’s most famously rambunctious cities - drained of sound and colour.Within this monochrome metropolis, Lane engages with the issue of discrimination on the basis of race, and frequently populates the frame with political messages: a huge banner, behind the sidewalk’s row of street performers, calling for the preservation of the Greenwich Village Waterfront; or a Keith Haring poster bearing an anti-Apartheid message, prominently displayed in the Upper West Side apartment of the artist’s love interest.

Elsewhere, the film is slyly satirical about the intersection of

art and commerce. Midway through, the toddler’s doodles become an immediate sensation, fetching high prices.This could be read as a throwaway gag, but is more likely a direct dig at the increasingly infantilised commercial product that had come to represent much American cinema in the Reagan era - at the same time as opportunities for defiantly moldbreaking black filmmakers remained limited. Of course, Spike Lee had made a breakthrough in black-focused American storytelling, but in spite of, say, Do The Right Thing’s political boldness and ambiguity, it used unabashedly populist form and technique to convey its messages. In his 1993 book Framing Blackness: The African American Image on Film, Ed Guerrero astutely places Sidewalk Stories alongside the likes of Wendell B. Harris’s Chameleon Street (‘89) and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (‘90) in the small band of artistically daring films of the era to offer refreshingly original visions of black life.

Ashley Clarke is a freelance journalist and film programmer based in London and New York. His writing has appeared in Sight & Sound, Time Out, Little White Lies and Film Comment, among others, and he is a contributor to forthcoming books The Complete Woody Allen and Directory of World Cinema: Britain Vol. 2. Ashley has programmed at venues including BFI Southbank and Clapham Picturehouse.

Open Cinema The Open Cinema North office is in Ryedale, where each summer a festival brings classical music to rural communities in unusual settings across the North York Moors.The festival’s artistic director Christopher Glynne turned up on the Today Programme recently, playing the piano score of a lost song by the composer Felix Mendelssohn, which had been found in a library after 150 years in the dark.

Open Cinema supports a network of cinemas in some of the most challenged communities in these islands. Many of the best documentaries and dramas our communities programme are made from stories which have taken years, sometimes decades to come to fruition. When We Were Kings was pieced together from a lost cache of 35mm footage of Muhammad Ali’s journey to Zaire to fight George Foreman in 1974. Finding Vivian Maier, released this summer, began when a young filmmaker visiting an auction bought a trunk full of stills, by what was later to be recognised as one of the great photographers of the 20th Century, the Emily Dickinson of her time and her medium.

When Sidewalk Stories lights up screens at Open Cinemas across the UK and Ireland this September, it will mark a similar re-appearance on the cultural landscape. Made with love and favours on the streets of New York in 1989, the film is a nearsilent physical comedy in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Tati and Theatre de Complicite. It seeks out the lives, struggles and genius of people experiencing homelessness in what was a particularly cruel and excluding decade for the urban poor. But rather than commiserate, the film plays to their strengths, and finds transcendence in movement, play, relationship and happenstance.

We seek to work in a similiar way at our film clubs and filmmaking programmes, releasing the creativity and skills of people without access to culture, society, economy, or much in the way of a good time.We’re thrilled to be bringing Scalarama and Sidewalk Stories to these audiences, and look forward to seeing what they make of them, and what they make as a result on their next film projects.Who knows what treasure they will create, and where it might turn up.

Christoph Warrack Screenings: Sat 6 Sep - 20:00 Nobody Ordered Wolves at Hollywood Spring, London w. live rescore Sun 7 Sep - 19:00 Reel Good Film Club at Marlborough Pub and Theatre, Brighton Fri 12 Sep - 20:00 Hotel Elephant, London Fri 19 Sep - 19:30 Moston Small Cinema, Manchester Sat 20 Sep - 19:00 Filmspot at Clinton Centre, Seaford Thu 25 Sep - 19:30 Hippodrome Cinema, Bo’ness

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

KINETTA

Special Event: Sunday 21 September - 17:30 Kinetta + Yorgos Lanthimos Q&A Tate Modern, London

Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos (2005, Greece, 95 minutes). Presented by Second Run DVD.

The first film by Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of Dogtooth, Alps and The Lobster.

Kinetta. A Greek defunct resort town, inhabited during the off-season by migrant workers. Lanthimos studies the cryptic activities of an inscrutable trio (a policeman, a photographer, and a hotel maid) who barely speak and who pass the time by staging reenactments of murders. The policeman with a passion for automobiles, tape recorders and Russian women, investigates a series of recent murders in the area. He enlists the help of a photo-store clerk, a loner who is a part-time videographer, and a young hotel maid, who will be performing the role of the female victims. This oddball trio engages in a succession of murder re-enactments, directed by the cop with exhaustive attention to detail but questionable scientific purpose…We know nothing more of these people. Not even their names.

They will disappear in the first flood of summer vacationers…

BY JESSICA FLETCHER Kinetta, Yorgos Lanthimos’s debut feature film as a solo director, follows the intertwined lives of a photographer (of passport photos and third rate fashion shows), a plain-clothes policeman and a hotel maid during an off-season in the Greek resort town of Kinetta.

The film’s tone is as unsettling as its rhythm. Take the repeated sequence of the policeman and maid staging a fight to the shouted directions of the photographer filming them.To begin with, filming the cameraman filming the couple adds a layer of metacinematic awareness, which detaches the viewer from the action.1 This alienation is heightened, as it is a fight scene drained of the drama one would expect, played at half speed with peculiarly deadpan actors who hit and writhe away from each other in almost silent slow motion. It is unclear why they are staging and restaging this scene: perhaps it is an obscure attempt to help the policeman solve the murders; perhaps it is a pet project of the photographer’s. The deadpan actions, wooden directions and diegetic soundtrack are mirrored in the scenes where the policeman invites a series of Russian girls up

to his room, and proceeds to give them a number of minute directions as they mechanically strip.

These sequences are uncomfortable, yet at times they become almost comical through their duration and repetition, which distances the viewer and makes the human bodies and actions being photographed seem absurd.

In this sense Kinetta is reminiscent of other recent Greek

movies, particularly Attenberg (2010) of which Lanthimos was producer and in which he acted.

Though Lanthimos has said in interviews that he doesn’t see a coherent movement in the recent crop of Greek films, there is a sim-

ilar mordantly comical tone and detached, almost anthropological, viewpoint of human action in both Kinetta and Attenberg.

Lanthimos, and his cowriter Gyorgos Kakanakis, seem less interested in explaining the motives or feelings of characters than in observing their bodies and surroundings. This can perhaps be traced back to their backgrounds in dance theatre and performance

art respectively, where the emphasis is on movement and sets, rather than language. Indeed, in interviews Lanthimos has expressed reluctance to explain his films through language. It is almost inevitable then that speech is re-

markable in Kinetta. Though it is technically comprised of dialogues, because it takes place between two or more people, it could barely be called conversation. The dialogue is oddly void of emotion or even the verbal fillers of phatic speech. Instead it tends to be instructional: the cameraman shouting directions, the policeman telling the women who visit his apartment exactly how to strip.

This idiosyncratic use of language is epitomised in a sequence in which one of the Russian women and the policeman go round his kitchen and point to objects, naming them in Greek and Russian in turn.2 Their post-coital dialogue is obscurely moving in its limitation; it can’t be called a conversation proper, instead it is just a stilted series of nouns, which comes to epitomise the stymied communication of the film’s characters.

Locations are also important in Kinetta, as the title suggests. Cars are often used to emphasise atomised individuals in film – from Trafic (1971) to Taxi Driver (1976) – and Kinetta does just that, moving between car interiors, motorways, a car dealership, and racing track. As well as this, it echoes Jacques Tati’s sound design in Trafic, as car exhausts and shifting gears often drown out voices

and obscure dialogue one would usually expect to hear.

Kinetta occludes much of what one would expect to hear and see. The movie begins just after a car crash; a series of murders are depicted by long shots of abandoned corpses; another car crash occurs, but is an eerily quiet accident, which the camera pans away from, rather than toward.This off-kilter focus typifies the skewed sensibility of the film, which repeatedly chooses to show moments on the margins of drama and disdains explanation.

Jessica Fletcher is a BA graduate in English at University College London and is currently working with A Nos Amours as a researcher.

1 Indeed ‘Kinetta’, as

well as being a Greek town, is also a type of film scanner, and so the title can also be seen to reference the technicalities of film production, particularly that distance that this brings between viewer and subject.

2 It seems to call forward to the opening of Dogtooth (2009) with its recitation of words and definitions setting the tone for the twisted didacticism of the film.

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

Jim Jarmusch

BY ROBERT MAKIN

“It isn’t auteur theory bullshit” Jim Jarmusch in conversation with Tom Waits.

It was during the summer of 1990 that BBC2, one late Sunday night, decided to broadcast Down by Law (1986) as part of the third series of Moviedrome, the now legendary cult movie programme hosted by director Alex Cox between 1987-1994. I was sixteen and it was the first Jarmusch film I’d ever sat through.

Although I was aware of the film’s existence I’d always avoided it. This was mostly due to the trailer that kept popping up on various video rentals. It looked so strange, grimy, and underground, and kept reminding me of the time I accidentally came across Eraserhead (1977) on Channel 4 one terrifying Friday night during the mid-eighties.

I didn’t know much, but I was cinematically aware enough to know that what I was watching that Sunday night was something often referred to as an Art Movie, which meant that this story could go anywhere, usually somewhere bad and incredibly bleak, or could just end abruptly with no explanations whatsoever.

These assumptions only added to the viewing experience.

Not only was it an Art Movie it was a Cult Movie, which meant conventional rules did not apply and anything could happen in the next Stranger Than Paradise

ninety minutes, or absolutely nothing. What surprised me the most about Down by Law was how funny it was, and how that oddball humour counterbalanced an atmosphere of impending doom and melancholy.

It also felt incredibly surreal, without anything particularly surreal happening. The strange music performed by two of its stars, John Lurie and TomWaits, the otherworldly locations within Louisiana, the stunning monochrome cine-

During the introduction of the film Alex Cox remarked,“All of Jim Jarmusch’s films are sort of the same, which is not meant as an insult, since they’re completely unlike anybody else’s. He’s probably the most original director working in the United States…” Has anything really changed?

Renowned for being a true advocate of independent cinema, his independence goes far beyond mere funding, with a constantly unique approach to

Night on Earth

matography created by the legendary Robby Muller, the offbeat verbal exchanges that didn’t seem to serve the plot in any way whatsoever, and the incredibly languid pace made for a strangeand beguiling experience. None of the actors looked like normal actors and none of the film felt like a normal film.Watching nothing happen had never been so compelling, I liked it.

filmmaking and narrative that he has managed to sustain from the very beginnings of his career. Some critics may dismiss his later work as being frustratingly esoteric, selfindulgent, pretentious, and often a case of style over substance, but you could never accuse him of predictability. One thing Jim Jarmusch has never been is obvious.

Permanent Vacation (1980) isn’t the most dazzling debut for such a seminal director, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable. Its sparse seventy-four minutes now form a condensed profile of his obsessions, concerns and trademark stylistic traits that would be more articulately expressed in his future canon of work to the point that it almost feels like a mission statement.

His commitment to avoiding obvious landmarks, capturing a different side of a location that’s rarely portrayed on film, and giving an overfamiliar terrain an otherworldly feel is immediately established within the first few minutes.

Slowed down footage of a bustling New York is juxtaposed by static shots of empty, desolate and decaying urban spaces filled with boarded up windows, broken glass, dirty alleyways and rubble, with no signs of human life.

The young and somewhat

anachronistic protagonist, a moody outcast played by Chris Parker, slowly wanders from one sporadic encounter to another, not sure what he’s looking for but hoping it’s more than he already has.

This is a world populated by random vignettes and modern exiles searching for a story to be a part of. Jarmusch’s deadpan humour makes an appearance when Parker decides to bust a move to an Earl Bostic ‘45 in front of his unimpressed girlfriend in a purposely overlong dance sequence.

The self-referential moment consists of a poster for the 1960 film The Savage Innocents, a movie directed by Nicholas Ray. Jarmusch was Ray’s teaching assistant during his time at NYU. Other cultural references include Ennio Morricone, The Angels’ song My Boyfriend’s Back, and French author Leautréamont.

There’s even a travelling European ready to experience America, arriving at the same moment that Parker is ready to leave.

Permanent Vacation has all the flaws of an average student film.

But it also has all the elements that would be refined for the film that put Jarmusch on the map.

Stranger Than Paradise was released in 1984, the same year as top grossing box office blockbusters Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop. So it’s no wonder it still feels as if it’s been beamed in from a parallel nineteen eighties, with its stark black and white photography, minimal plot and meditative pace. It feels like it’s taking place within the shell of a film noir, where all the killers, cops and gumshoes have disappeared, leaving empty spaces and a deluge of time that no one knows how to fill.

Stranger Than Paradise originally began life as a short (which remains the first act) and was later expanded into a feature.

According to movie lore the original short was made possible by Wim Wenders donating left over film stock from The State of Things (1982), his semi-autobiographical tale concerning a film crew who are left stranded in Portugal... having run out of film stock.

Jarmusch was determined to make something distinctly different, an extraordinary way of celebrating the poetry in ordinariness. First of all he refused to cast trained actors and instead gave the parts to musicians: John Lurie of The Lounge Lizards,

Richard Edson of Konk and Sonic Youth’s original drummer, and Eszter Balint, a young violinist and songwriter from avant-garde Hungarian theatre group Squat Theatre.

Jarmusch then filmed every scene in one take with semiimprovised dialogue and shot it with a predominantly static camera, each scene punctuated by a blank screen. Right from the very first moment he irreverently defies cinematic protocol with a complete disregard for dramatic incident.

Dead Man

When we are introduced to Eva (Balint), who has just arrived in America from Hungary to stay with her cousin Willie (Lurie), there is no shot of her sitting in a plane reading an in-flight magazine then looking out the window, or a montage involving passport control and the luggage carousel. All we are shown is a young woman standing next to a suitcase on what looks like a mound of wasteland, staring out onto an airstrip, as the overpowering drone of an airplane turbine drowns out the world.

What else do you need to know?

Downtown hipster Willie is initially hostile towards Eva’s presence, adamant that having a relative stay in his squalid apartment is not only a burden but detrimental to his cherished lifestyle of TV dinners, trips to the cinema and hustling card games with his best friend Eddie, comically oblivious to the notion that the disruption to his ‘lifestyle’ is actually giving him a life. When Eva and Willie eventually warm to each

22 other and find common ground, it’s their sudden impulse to reunite that literally separates them as they’re both inadvertently planted on different corners of the globe.

Jarmusch’s creative instincts paid off and Stranger Than Paradise remains one of the most original and influential films to come out of the eighties, proving that low-key, experimental, avantgarde underground cinema doesn’t necessarily have to be bereft of humour. It’s also one of the only American films to reflect a cinematically neglected tier of blue-collar life without becoming a sanctimonious morality play. Willie and Eddie no doubt perceive themselves as outlaw hustlers, although their moneymaking schemes are somewhat slight (betting on horse races and cheating on card games).

It’s not the law and incarceration they’re running from, it’s the fear of full-time employment.

Jarmusch’s warping of genre conventions begins with Down by Law, a visually immersive, timeless, absurdist fable of enchanted grit, and the only prison escape movie where the intricacies of the escape are neither meticulously planned nor seen.

It’s all about the interactions between the characters, Zack the DJ (Tom Waits), Jack the pimp (John Lurie), and Roberto the fishout-of-water tourist (Roberto Benigni), inarticulately attempting to survive as they wade through ‘a sad and beautiful world’. One of the last scenes, in which Roberto passionately dances with his newfound love in front of Jack and Zack, begins as something awkward and evolves into something life affirming. It’s as poetic as you could possibly ask cinema to be.

Jarmusch would end the eighties with the endearing Mystery Train (1989), which consists of three tales that take place during one night in a rundown Memphis hotel, all loosely linked by the legacy of Elvis Presley and revolving around the advent of a mysterious gunshot. The film’s triptych uses an overlapping narrative technique associated more often with literature than film, later appropriated by a generation of less subtle directors with more mainstream aspirations. It’s a film completely enamoured with the lyrical magic of nocturnal transience and chance meetings, some that have a prevailing significance over one’s life and some that don’t.

His follow up Night on Earth (1991) does share certain themes and has a similar feel to his previous film, but the accusations of Jarmusch lazily treading familiar ground are unjust and misguided.

It is another anthology, this time taking place during five taxi journeys across five different cities. But

25

SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014 it’s scope is wider, it’s tones are far more shifting, and I always felt it had far more in common with the stories of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolf and Paul Auster, rather than the subdued weirdness of Mystery

heading to France watching New York shrinking into the distance; Willie the hustler dashing to catch a plane as Eva enters an empty room; Zack and Jack walking down two dusty roads in opposite direc-

The Jarmusch Connection Apart from making his name as one of America’s most consistently original and diverse filmmakers, Jim Jarmusch is partial to the odd side project and hidden gem. Here are six of the best.

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas Released on Margaritaville Records in 1996 and directed by Lou Stein, this extremely faithful radio play adapted from Hunter S. Thompson’s classic cult novel is everything the film should have been but wasn’t. I’m still completely miffed why they just didn’t use this script for the movie considering the trouble they seemed to have converting the story to the big screen. Harry Dean Stanton is the narrator, Maury Chaykin is Dr. Gonzo the attorney, and Jim Jarmusch is Raoul Duke. You won’t believe how well it works.

Fishing With John Mystery Train

Train. His next full-length excursion into chatty vignettes wouldn't be until 2003, with the enjoyably uneven Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of short films he’d been making in-between takes since 1986.

No one could accuse Jarmusch of being repetitive when it came to the release of Dead

tions; a train leaving Memphis; a severely drunk, recently unemployed Finnish man sitting sprawled legged on a snowy roadside; William Blake floating off into the unknown…

These are all moments that capture life in transit, that strange place of uncertainty between recent events seeping into your memory and expectations of

Long before there was Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee there was Fishing With John, the fishing programme where nobody ever caught any fish, perfect territory for Mr Jarmusch. Originally broadcast in 1991, this bizarre and very funny show followed John Lurie as he took various celebrity friends on fishing trips, including Matt Dillon, Dennis Hopper, Tom Waits, and Willem Defoe. Jarmusch is in the first episode hunting sharks. It’s a bit special.

Blue in the Face Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s companion piece to their 1995 comedy drama Smoke is a series of improvised sketches, musing and interviews revolving around a Brooklyn cigar shop. Harvey Keitel, Roseanne Barr, Madonna, Michael J. Fox, and Lily Tomlin all feature, but the best bits involve Lou Reed and Jim Jarmusch waxing lyrical on all things tobacco.

Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made Mika Kaurismäki’s 1994 documentary follows Jim Jarmusch accompanying one his heroes, legendary director Sam Fuller, into Brazil's Mato Grosso where 40 years before Fuller had been sent to research and write a script on jaguar hunters. It’s a jungle adventure with some insight into Fuller’s filming process and personality.

Scalarama and Soda Pictures will be partnering on an initiative to bring the early films of American indie cinema legend, Jim Jarmusch, to screens across the UK: Permanent Vacation (1980), Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Night on Earth (1991), Dead Man (1995)

Screenings: Thu 11 Sep - 19:00 MYSTERY TRAIN: AN EVENING OF FILM & MUSIC INSPIRED BY JIM JARMUSCH Vivid Projects, Birmingham QUAD, Derby Sat 13 - 14 Sep: MYSTERY TRAIN (13 Sep with live music in bar) Mon 15, Thu 18 Sep - DOWN BY LAW Fri 26 - Sun 28 Sep - DEAD MAN Tue 30 Sep - Thu 2 Oct - STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1 Oct with intro) Fri 19 Sep - 21:15 DOWN BY LAW + INTRODUCTION Leicester Phoenix Sat 27 Sep - 23:30 MYSTERY TRAIN Rio Cinema, London Sun 28 Sep - 13:45 STRANGER THAN PARADISE / DOWN BY LAW Rio Cinema, Dalston Sun 28 Sep - 13:30 DOWN BY LAW / STRANGER THAN PARADISE Bijou Electric Empire Forever at Duke of York's Picturehouse, Brighton

Year of the Horse Jim Jarmusch documents rock legends Neil Young and Crazy Horse on their 1996 tour, occasionally editing in archival footage with the raw, live performances of 1996 to great effect. One of the funniest scenes involves Jarmusch walking into a hotel room to find Young enjoying RoboCop.

Permanent Vacation

Man (1991), a film that left a lot of people scratching their heads, mainly fans of Johnny Depp. It’s certainly one of Depp’s finest performances, before he succumbed to the unhinged folly of silly voices and face paint. It’s also one of the most enigmatic and original Westerns ever created, along with being one of Jarmusch’s greatest cinematic achievements.

A cryptic and genuinely surreal metaphysical adventure, rife with quotable humour, that proves far more rewarding the second time around. What initially may seem just plain bloody weird, on second viewing often reveals itself to be steeped in cultural, philosophical and humanistic substance. As much as I’d like to think that Down by Law could be his classic masterpiece, the incomparable experience of Dead Man is a just cause for re-evaluation.

The images that linger in my mind the most are those final scenes. Chris Parker on a boat

what might lay ahead. Always moving forward, never looking back.

Robert Makin is a writer, filmmaker and teacher based in London. A version of this article was originally published in Vérité Film Magazine

Int.Trailer. Night.

Anyone who has ever been involved in making a film will know that it is a process that not only involves inspiration and vision, but also hours and hours of fucking about with light bulbs and costumes. Jarmusch’s segment for the film anthology Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002) is a master class in short filmmaking and a humorous insight into the tedium behind the magic.

Down by Law

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

Living Cinema Iain Sinclair is a writer and filmmaker. He was invited by King Mob to select seventy films to screen across London for the duration of his seventieth year. Sinclair spoke to Schtinter about this epic curation, the role of film in his life, and where he thinks cinema is now.

thought “that’s cool”, or “that’s not”; whereas I really wanted and liked the idea of these films being seen in particular places, amongst certain communities. How would they respond to the screenings?

SS: How has the culture of cinema changed?

Iain: Crucially important, because otherwise it’s just self-indulgence. But then maybe the audience now is largely invisible, massive and out there, sampling and attending in different ways.

It’s a different kind of audience, and a different kind of product. The audience has changed. I can’t insist on the nostalgia of an audience that will go and see a live event, even though that event is a film: there’s some sort of paradox in that. The showing of a classic film is a live event, in that there is an exchange of molecules between the members of an audience. There is a unifying organic identity that emerges from watching one of these films together – sharing that experience, even when a quite small number of people are involved. The viewing of great films helps to fix time and place. A film is a calendar event. The audience enter a weird spacetime continuum. Where time is on a loop. A fixed dream: even when our memory of that dreams shifts and changes. We re-edit. I think that is why The Clock by Christian Marclay had such an impact: it used time as an editing device, a very selective (but also random) source of archive. With all kinds of attendant complexities.

Iain: The culture now is utterly different: in the sense that film was once a rarity, a magical happening, a rumour, a mystery that we spoke about, read about, and worked to experience. It involved a physical journey, always an excitement. Even when, as so often, the film that we travelled to see confounded expectations. Film writing combined travel writing with meta-

SS: How important is the response? The audience?

SS: What is that ‘organic identity’?

Iain Sinclair. Photo: Stanley Schtinter physics, philosophy, rant. People like Raymond Durgnat conveyed the impression that filmgoing was a culturally – even morally – significant experience: a duty!

For example, there were endless discussions and debates in pubs in Dublin (where I attended university in the ‘60s). Certain characters were bought drinks for years on the strength of having seen Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind and Pylon in some tent in County Offaly. We would be trying to read Cahiers du Cinéma and Movie (which was an English copy out of Cambridge) - and suddenly one of these starred films was being shown in London. So you’d go to Belfast and get a standby flight for a fiver, and go to the National Film Theatre, and sleep on someone’s floor, and bring that information back… A little report would be written.

The story would become part of the discussion of film that was going on all the time. Whereas now, anybody who has a remote interest in any kind of obscurity can get on a laptop and track it down – so it seems – in a few seconds. But it’s not the same visceral experience.

SS: What is that experience?

Iain: The experience now is of collaging and sampling and reconfiguring material that’s floating about in thin air, up in the Cloud (which is actually a silo in some radioactive desert). We no longer pay our dues to the almost god-like creatures who made these films. And this is a thing that I wrote about in Hackney, That Red Rose Empire, where I thought of Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard as unapproachable and impossible to reach, not realising that they were in Hackney on my doorstep – Welles in Hackney Empire shooting these old ladies in an almshouse, and Godard – literally – when I was here and looking for him, he was a couple of streets away trying to persuade a young woman to walk up and down the stairs, naked, reciting a feminist polemic.

That’s why this year of 70x70 has demonstrated that the business of choosing films to be programmed in surviving cinemas was quite strange within the current climate.

People could have just gone online and flicked through bits and pieces of the films, and

Iain: Something different for each place, each viewing. But I also think, for myself and my fellow enthusiasts, it was to do with a period of making films. The process of making films wasn’t contaminated by commissioning. But now the commissioning process seems to be primary: that refinement of the script, the proposal, dominates the creative impulse.

Production is not there, actually, to help the filmmakers. It’s more to do with careers and sponsorships.

SS: And when it comes to actually making the thing, it’s no longer relevant?

Iain: Well, that’s the conclusion that several people, like Chris Petit, have come to. That making the actual thing is no longer worth it: that the stages along the way are more interesting. The idea being that when it’s still a hot project, you go for it, IMMEDIATELY, with no other consideration. What you do is what it is. You just produce enough material to put on some sort of event. And that becomes the film.

But again, even the Lee Harvey Oswald thing you and Chris did recently (at Oberhausen Short Film Festival) still involves some sort of curatorship, some sponsorship. It’s providing a kind of content that justifies all of those things that go in to the commissioning process.

I find it with writing: I started out completely independently, so I could do whatever I liked. It was feasible to distribute what I did in a small way, because there were outlets, certain independent bookshops who would take this material and hold regular readings. You built up a small community. That was true of film as well.

There were cooperatives, people meeting and using the same facilities, and that created a culture. You have to create the culture to promote and exploit what you produce. Don’t leave it to others, to spurious authorities – simply because they have money or the promise of fame. It’s always a dud bargain.

SS: And that culture has been replaced by business?

Iain: Cinema always was business! Accountants.

Fish pedlars. Con men. The interesting thing about cinema from the off was that it was a huckster operation, a tent show, fairground stuff - combined with people, often migrants, who

saw this as a way of imposing a business model on this pirate industry. Obviously, alongside this, in time, you had visionary artists like Stan Brakhage, filmmakers who believed they could operate with the independence of painters or poets. And that was the side of cinema that attracted me most, and there’s nothing whatsoever to stop that from still existing, which it does.

SS: 70x70: a genuinely independent and monumental film season. Is it important people undertake these kinds of projects?

Iain: Yes, it’s important – to push the improbable. See what happens. In my case, it got much bigger than I imagined. The useful idea, when I started thinking about it, was the decision to avoid going for the “best seventy films”, or the “most important seventy films I’ve seen in my time”, or films that were to do with particular years of my life - but to start extracting films out of my books. The element over which I had most control was the writing. I produced books, by and large, on my own terms. This never applied to films. And finding these films in the books, and cataloguing them that way, achieved another form which was a sort of film novel – the novel of a life by way of film. Film was the dominant influence as I was growing up. From childhood, American cinema was hugely dominant. And then the highpoint of classic European cinema and Hollywood still at its pomp (in the late ‘50s) was so crucial. So where does that stand now culturally, and equally where does that leave me? I’ve lived through this lifespan that paralleled a particular kind of cinema, and that cinema disappeared. You learn a lot from actually doing it, taking those theoretical choices into London cinemas. There is a shape to be discerned that I could not have anticipated - even though I’ve failed to see a lot of the films I chose. The Last Movie is haunting me, it’s coming back in lots of ways from a lot of directions, but I haven’t managed to see it. Maybe, in the end, those are the best ones. As with the old days, films that exist purely in descriptions of them. They become mythical.

Making Cinema The Moston Small Cinema is an independent community cinema in North Manchester. We spoke to Louis Beckett, one of the people behind the cinema and the Miners Community Arts & Music about the process, practicalities and impetus for making a cinema.

So you’re screening Sidewalk Stories as part of Scalarama?

Yeah, the film works in terms of what our place stands for.

Anything else lined up at Moston during September?

All kids films, really. It’s a democratic process…

SS: It’s on tonight! But you’re speaking at the Horse Hospital (London) to help raise funds for them to stay in their current location. It’s so important that we support these kinds of venues, because…

Iain: Yeah, these venues are disappearing. Riverside Studios, Horse Hospital… just going, where these activities could have happened, and did happen…

SS: And where do they happen now? Where will they happen? What are the implications of losing these places that support alternative programming?

Iain: It’s tougher. It doesn’t mean they can’t happen. Find different spaces, use imagination.

But then – how do you get the people into the spaces? That’s the other thing. With so much going on all the time, it’s hard to find a focused audience, unless you contrive a group of people who are doing related things, and build it up from there. The original audience will always be the people doing it themselves. They want to see what else is going on. You have a core audience; they may not share tastes or even like each others’ work, but they support it - like the Mekas film co-op in New York or the group around the Cinematheque in Paris. That’s always how it works – a number of people find some venue and make things happen. That’s always happened and always will do. But we’re in an era where it’s getting harder because the culture is stupider in some ways, less well informed, or shallower in the information they have. And the pressure on bricks and mortar is incredible. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It will be done.

A book documenting Sinclair’s 70x70 film curation will be published by King Mob and Purge on 28th September 2014. Launch event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, on the same date. www.king-mob.net www.purge.xxx

Photos courtesy of Sam Meech Brazil’s Corinthians would vote on everything; even whether or not they stopped the bus if a player needed a pee.

Really? Good! The values and attitudes of some footballers: Socrates, Cantona etc. Working for each other. Very important.

Moston Small Cinema is next to FC United’s new stadium. Is there a connection?

I’m a supporter, and I admire what they stand for. The fans have built FC United, just like a group of us came together to make the Miners Community (and Small Cinema). Neighbouring democracies! At the cinema, I do the manual work with Marsy, Paula (my partner) does all the emailing and social media, and my mother and father look after the financial side.

You live in Moston?

I live down the road in Newton Heath. A lot of my friends come from Moston, and when we got the place we knew most of the people round there.

And what was the impetus for starting the Miners Community and Moston Small Cinema?

It was studio space that I wanted, and to some-

SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014 how involve the community in that. So we started art classes, but it got bigger than that when my dad – who’s a builder – got involved, and said, “Come on! Lets build a café…” And then came the function room, and then the games room, and then we got loads of volunteers in to help build the cinema.

It is an old miners club, and I wanted to keep that history. I am a trade unionist and working class, and I think it’s a really good thing that I got the place and have managed to keep it open.

Today, we had thirty primary school kids in to do a project on the mining industry in Moston and we got the local councillor Paul Murphy to come along. He told the kids that he was going to shut us down, so they were all booing him and then had to deliver a presentation on why the Miners Club should be kept open.

Murphy responded, “Alright, you’ve convinced me to keep the club open,” and the kids were empowered. It’s all about the history of the building, and the last month that’s what we’ve been doing: the history of the area, mining in Moston, and what trade unions do.

I don’t remember campaign being encouraged – let alone taught – when I was that age. Quite the opposite.

Not at all, and that often carries on right through your working life. So Murphy was actually really good; he told the kids to question everything, and pay no attention to ‘authority’.

Coming from a councillor I thought that was especially impressive…

Cult Audience Reece Goddard, co-founder of Certificate X, explores EECE the notion B ofYcultRfilm andG itsODDARD audience.

For a generation of cult movie fans film education came, most likely, from the BBC’s Moviedrome, The Incredibly Strange Film Show and Danny Pear’s Cult Movie books. Significant too were the Psychotronic film and video guides, and crucial above all else: the local video shops.

Poring over the pages of Weldon’s Psychotronic encyclopaedias, and the checklist at the back of the Incredibly Strange Films book… it seemed inconceivable that anyone in the UK would be able to view the majority of these lurid and fantastic sounding titles.

It was possible to own copies of certain films discussed in Peary’s Cult Movies (King Kong!), and thanks to Moviedrome; Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Shock Corridor and Beyond The Valley of The Dolls (re-cut on video), but Behind The Green Door and Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have to remain on the wish-list.

Their unavailability, due to their adult, forbidden or outright ‘banned’ status would only serve to

And you’ve always felt this way? Can you remember a particular moment / movie that made you say ‘hang on a minute…’?

I’ve always thought that if you come together, get organised, you can achieve anything. The music I listened to as a teenager really informed this. Lyrics stick in my mind; The Clash, John Lennon. The working class should stand up for themselves and what they believe in.

Building the cinema with a bunch of volunteers, in a community like Moston… the difference with us is that we don’t want to manipulate people. I want to make the audience think. Screening things like Spirit of ‘45 for example; educating and empowering people through film, in this case at a time when the National Health Service is being undermined. It says that people can and should do something about it.

Moston represents something very important because it’s the kind of project that so many people would like to undertake, but the practicalities and implications of doing the thing are so huge, they’re either overwhelmed by the possibility and / or can’t find the necessary support to make it happen.

That’s what I thought, but when everyone got together, across the area, that was a strength that couldn’t be ignored. Again, it’s all about people getting organised. It’s always been about people getting organised – that’s when things happen. Ignore the people with ‘authority’, and just do it.

When I first got the lease to the Miners, I asked two people on the local council if they could give any help. And the first thing they asked me? “Where is it?” And when I told them it was on the Miners estate they said: “You’re joking. There’s nothing there.” With that kind of attitude places like the Miners Community & Small Cinema struggle to exist – it’s the same with all the pubs disappearing – there’s no fertile ground for ordinary people to share their ideas and become stronger. That’s why you have teenagers indoors playing X-box and smoking weed – that’s their release when there’s nowhere to go.

Moston Small Cinema at Miners Community Arts & Music screens Sidewalk Stories as part of Scalarama on 19th September at 7:30pm.

For more information visit: www.mostonsmallcinema.org.uk

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magnify their desirability, appeal and cult status.

Frequent visitors to the BFI, ICA and Scala in the ‘80s or ‘90s might be privileged to see such cult delights, but growing up in the sticks, in censorship ravaged Britain, meant seeing a copy – any copy – of Zombie Flesh Eaters or The Evil Dead… or knowing that the ‘notorious’ The Devils would be on BBC2s Forbidden Weekend would set your heart racing.

The text accompanying each title in Psychotronic and Cult Movies would not only describe the crazy scenes and bizarre plots of these fantastic films. It also lovingly evoked tales of Times Square audiences; midnight screenings; double-bills; triple-bills; drive-ins; grind houses; art-houses; interactive screenings; underground cinemas; porno theatres (!); and latenight TV showings. Adjoining photos would often reveal store fronts and marquees advertising triple-bills of action films, B-movies and exploitation all under the banner of ‘adult hits’, making areas generally known for crime, junkies and sticky floors sound like the most wonderful places on earth. There was even talk of audi-

The Devils by Ken Russell ences cheering, applauding and reacting to what was happening on screen. Of course, in Britain, we don’t do that sort of thing.

Cult cinema is often born from two seemingly opposing practices: discovery and familiarity, exploration and repetition. In the UK, the local video shops (or wherever you rented your videos from in the early days of the format) provided rows and rows of opportunity for both new finds and repeat viewings. The new medium served to intensify the cult status of particular films through their ‘quote-ability’, while elevating certain moments to iconic status through the rewind facility. For a generation, this is where cult movies were discovered and cinema was explored. An independent cinema may be miles away, but even the smallest village would have a video outlet. Anything that was not available on the shelves could be bought and traded through the bootleg underground. It wasn’t long ago that the only way someone in Britain could view A Clockwork Orange was on a fuzzy, second generation VHS with German subtitles.

A few years ago, it seemed so unlikely that The New York Ripper would, one day, be readily available (through a major commercial corporation) in any home in Britain at the touch of a button. As the wealth, choice and availability of once rare and obscure movies increases, one of the most significant and crucial components of cult film is in danger of disappearing: the cult film experience, the cult itself, which begins with the audience. It’s that obsessive group of hardcore fans that elevate a film to the unique grade of cult status. Of course, a film’s cult can be spread across the globe, as fans discuss upcoming re-releases, quote lines and discuss the minutiae of a fan favourite online. But nothing compares to the shared cultural and community experience of viewing a film on the big screen, with an appreciative audience of similar film freaks. Though, it is through online discussion groups, random retro-screenings and DVD / Bluray releases (from the few companies that care), that films as diverse as Manos, Wake In Fright and Miami Connection are being discovered and probably finding their first audiences.

The ‘cult’ label is also in danger of becoming an over-used and misused term, sometimes by commercially sponsored ‘event’ screenings of popular favourites. Even sponsorship saturated film festivals will have a ‘cult’ section of yet-to-be-seen films, which begs the question; can a film be a cult film before it finds an audience?

This is why events like Scalarama are essential: cinema as an event, an exploration, a sense of community, a gathering of fans and a cult film experience. This is one of the few opportunities for film fans to choose films for other film fans, to screen what they want, and what others want to see. This is crucial in an era in which most people’s knowledge and understanding of film is severely limited to what major distributors dictate, and a viewing experience chosen for them by a series of algorithms on commercial streaming sites.

It can be a struggle to organise cult film events in a city with little-to-no screening or cinema facilities. Truly independent cinemas (those programmed by knowledgeable film fans for other film fans) are a rarity. But, in the wake of the first Scalarama season, it seems as if

small film groups and clubs are springing up every month or so, indicating both the existence of a savvy and hungry cinema audience and the need for alternative programming and practices. facebook.com/certificateXcultFilmScreenings Reece Goddard is the co-founder of Certificate X Cult Film Screenings, who screen a Punks Gone Wrong double bill on Friday 12th September at Moston Small Cinema and Pink Flamingos at the Hug in Leeds on Friday 26th September as part of Scalarama The New York Ripper

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So Bad It’s Good ...what does it mean?

BY DR. JAMES MACDOWELL I am someone who often feels the need to communicate deep enthusiasm for certain films most people would likely agree are bad – say, the notorious Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), the more recent cult hit The Room (2003), Clau-

glance seems to fly the flag for the ultimate instability of meaning, demonstrating the power of audiences to reinterpret texts however they desire. And yet, what such appreciation also quite obviously presupposes is that we can accu-

Sharknado dio Fragasso’s Troll 2 (1990) and Anthony C. Ferrante’s Sharknado (2013). It is common for us to apply the phrase ‘so bad it’s good’ to such films, but much less often do we interrogate what exactly this catchy but curious designation really means.

I believe that one of the benefits of taking ‘so bad it’s good’ seriously is that the concept inadvertently manages to draw our attention to some important issues relating to film appreciation in general – particularly aesthetic evaluation, and the role of artistic intention in that evaluation. And, furthermore, despite the transgressive aura that surrounds these cult

Troll 2 films and their followings, I would argue that in enjoying something for its failures we are paradoxically endorsing some rather traditional ideas about what makes good art.

Firstly, consider the matter of intention. The issue of authorial intention is notoriously slippery, and has become increasingly unfashionable to address. It is now often claimed that it doesn’t matter what the intention behind a work of art is, since it is not the artist but the individual reader who finally decides what a work means and is. Yet the phenomenon of ‘so bad it’s good’ cinema offers us a chance to reassess that assumption.

The image of fans championing movies for unintended reasons – say, gay audiences reappropriating Rock Hudson movies as unintentional camp, or college students getting high in front of anti-drug morality tales – at first

rately gauge what the original intentions of these films were in the first place. Indeed, being sure that we have a firm grasp of a film’s intended effects is crucial to the pleasure of ‘so bad it’s good’. We absolutely must assume that Troll 2 wasn’t intended to be a self-parodying comedy in order to laugh at it in the way that we do, and it is precisely our sense of Sharknado’s intentions (true exploitation or lampoon of exploitation?) that will dictate our response to it.

This should by rights make us revisit this most fundamental issue: on what grounds can we presume to infer intention in general, given that we clearly and necessarily do so regularly? In this way, the category of ‘so bad it’s good’ surprisingly lets us see how central intention is to our interactions with films, and art, as a whole.

Secondly, evaluation. Again, there would seem to be something deliciously perverse and subversive about claiming value for a film based on its incompetence. Yet here too, I would suggest that ‘so bad it’s good’ appreciation is in some senses far more traditional than it initially seems.

When we champion a film for its badness we are practising a form of interpretative competence that values incompetence: a film or filmmaker seems to attempt to achieve something, seems to fail, and yet is valued for this seeming failure. Being so sure that we have worked out its intentions, we are implicitly also sure that for a work to achieve its intentions is one important definition of artistic quality. If we can’t assume that a film intended to achieve certain aims, then we can’t deem it ‘bad’ for failing in those aims, and can’t then recast this badness as ‘so bad it’s good’. But if we can firstly agree The Room

that, for example, Troll 2 intends to be an effective horror film rather than a comedy, and secondly that its failure to be an effective horror film makes it inept, then we have in fact been required to concede – perhaps against our will – that there exist, if not objective, then at least reasonable and broadly-accepted, standards for aesthetic judgment, and that we are participating in them.

Agreeing that there is nevertheless great pleasure to be gained from its badness, meanwhile, does not alter my evaluation of a film, and in this sense ‘so bad it’s good’ is in fact a misnomer. It argues for a re-evaluation not of the film itself, but of the experience the film affords: the film may remain bad, but that experience can be so, so good. So what, finally, is the kind of pleasure such films can offer?

There might seem to be something fundamentally unattractive about treating a film as ‘so bad it’s good’: it suggests a stance of superiority – a proclamation of ‘I am better than this’.

Certainly, the act of enjoying something for its failings does involve to some extent an assumption of one’s loftier aesthetic standards. Yet a large part of me also wants to kick against this characterisation. In order to feel superior to something one must first feel one understands it. And, on the contrary, the one great pleasure offered by virtually every film widely hailed as ‘so bad it’s good’ is that it fundamentally resists every attempt to understand why on earth it is the way it is.

I value, for example, The Room not because it is ‘bad’, but because it is ‘bad’ in very special and very strange ways – ways that seem unique to it alone, and which, even after innumerable viewings, I still feel I can’t quite master: the perplexing way it appears to believe ‘normal’ people behave, the way time passes differently and oddly in its world, the way characters can swing wildly from one emotional extreme to an-

Plan 9 From Outer Space other within the space of a single sentence. That uniqueness, the suspicion that this film still has hidden depths and pleasures, the fact that it confounds my efforts at mastery, is what makes me not just laugh at it, but love it.

The most enjoyable bad movies can do that: they force you to revel in an experience not of superiority, but of perplexity. It’s not just the easily identified failures – bad acting, bad set design, bad framing – that ultimately brings back fans to these films again and again. It’s the opportunity to experience the acute, mysterious, thrilling strangeness that occurs only every so often, when badness manages to create something new – not goodness, exactly, but certainly not merely an opportunity for ironic condescension either. Perhaps call it, rather, pleasurable incomprehension before a spectacle of passionate but befuddling failure.

Less catchy than ‘so bad it’s good’, I grant you. But, by inadvertently prompting us to recognise the importance of intention, causing us to tacitly agree certain criteria for evaluation, yet also offering us an original experience, such films can simultaneously shore-up some of our oldest reasons for finding artworks pleasurable, while managing to offer up a few unreasonable ones of their own devious devising.

Dr. James MacDowell is an Assistant Professor in Film & Television Studies at the University of Warwick

Pop-Up Cinema

BY ELLA HARRIS Pop-up Spectatorship: A return of the Cinema of Attractions Discussions of the directions spectatorship is taking tend to point to the increasing solitariness of film viewing experiences. And indeed it’s arguable that advancements in technology have diminished the prominence of cinemas as spaces of spectatorship. You can now watch films on increasingly miniscule technological devices (your laptop, your iPad, your mobile phone). And, given the dominance which big distribution companies have over cinema programming, this is often the only way to see older or less mainstream movies. But those who lament the communal aspects of cinema spectatorship should look to pop-up cinema as a potential arena for the return of cinematic publics.

The emphasis on inspiring venues and collective experience in many pop-up film screenings is reminiscent of the formats of early spaces of film exhibition. Before the industrialisation of film distribution introduced fixed cinema venues, early screenings, like pop-ups, often took place in converted buildings such as town halls, schools, storefronts and churches. Their programming typically had no fixed schedule and involved a variety of events including music, sing-alongs and even animal circus acts. Film historian Miriam Hansen suggests that the sociality of the activities programmed alongside the film carried over into the watching of the film itself, which therefore also became a public experience, preserving a ‘perceptual continuum between the space/time of the theatre and the illusionist world on screen’ (Hansen, 1995; 139).

Pop-up and other alternative screenings arguably have the potential to resurrect this kind of public experience, keeping open a ‘perceptual continuum’ between the ‘real’ and the ‘reel’. The creative emphasis placed on venue by some pop-up cinemas, and the accompaniment of the film by introductory talks, discussion panels, etc. in others, serve to maintain a dialogue between the world on screen and the world offscreen, making the event of spectatorship an assemblage of the two. Tom Gunning’s term ‘cinema of attractions’ could be applied to popup. It defines a culture of cinema which is “willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator” (Gunning; 1986), a type of spectatorship which extends the film’s world into the public realm in order to encourage collective engagement with it.

Comparisons with early spaces of spectatorship then demonstrate that pop-up cinemas have the potential to foster collective experiences of cinema, in which the issues and imaginaries of film can be disseminated with relevance to the ‘real’ world’. So, while one direction film-watching is taking is certainly towards solitary, miniaturised, spectatorship, pop-up cinema should be considered as an alternative trajectory in the history of spectatorship, one which reminds us of the longstanding place of cinema in the public realm.

Ella Harris is a PhD candidate in Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS:I’m looking for popup cinemas to participate in my PhD research, which will take place between autumn 2014 and autumn 2015. If you have, or work for, a pop-up cinema of any sort and would like to be involved please get in touch. The research will involve ethnography, interviews and potentially a bit of photography and filming of events. I’ll be offering to work voluntarily at events as a thank you to participants for giving up their time.

Email: ellarsharris@gmail.com

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Photo: Iain Sinclair

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SCALARAMA, SEPTEMBER 2014

Home Cinema Day Taking place on Sunday 28th September 2014, Home Cinema Day will be a whole 24 hours dedicated to the experience of communal film watching, encouraging everyone (yes, we mean YOU!) to turn their home into a cinema for the day.

Anyone can take part – just follow these simple 5 steps!

1. PICK… your content: films, TV series, internet video clips – whatever you like.

2. INVITE… your audience: friends, family, neighbours – who ever is available.

3. PREPARE… your cinema: decoration, food, music – however you want it.

4. WATCH… on Sunday 28 September: morning, evening, all day – whenever suits.

5. SHARE…your experience: take photos, tweet, blog – we want to hear from you.

Follow the event on Twitter @homecinemaday or #hcd2014, and find us on Facebook.

Still stuck for ideas?

No worries. Our partner organisations will be providing top-notch recommendations. Keep checking www.homecinemaday.com as we get closer to the big event.

Help spread the word about what we hope will become an annual celebration of communal film watching. Tweet along as your day unfolds, post photos and videos; let the world know about the simple gratifying pleasure of watching your favourite films (or discovering new ones!) with the people you love.

So what are you waiting for… select your films, invite your friends, dim the lights and let the show begin!

----------------------Here’s a guide taking you through each step.

1. PICK First off, what do you want to show? Your favourite film… or let others choose? Have you always wanted to do a TV series marathon of that unopened boxset? Or how

about hooking up your computer to your projector or TV and have your audience select internet video clips?

Anything goes… just make sure you can get the content ready for the big day. Will your film be on DVD or Blu-ray or will you go old school with VHS or even 16mm? Or will it be digital – will you stream it, download it or rent it? We recommend FindAnyFilm.com to find out where you can pick up your films safely.

about seating too… make sure everyone’s comfortable and can see!

Now what other things can you do to make the screening special? Will you theme the screening with decorations, or encourage fancy dress? Will you feed your audience, or get people to bring dishes? And don’t forget, music can really set the scene whilst you are waiting for everyone to arrive… and have you thought about trailers?

It’s your cinema and you are the boss!

2. INVITE

4. WATCH

The hard bit is done for you as the date is already selected: SUNDAY 28th SEPTEMBER. You can hold your screening whenever you want in the 24 hour period – so plan your schedule and start inviting your audience.

Will it be your closest friends, a family affair, your work colleagues…or is it time to get familiar with your neighbours? Text them, email them or maybe create a Facebook event… why not make a poster? – Get the word out early and start getting your RSVPs! Important legal note – Remember, you can’t charge for the screening and it has to be in your own home to people you know.

Understood? Right…let’s get on to the fun bit!

So the big day’s arrived. The preparation’s all been taken care of, so it’s time to relax and start watching. Viewing films with an audience can sometimes reveal a lot about what people respond to. It’s best to be flexible throughout the day…everyone needs a toilet break once in a while!

3. PREPARE So you’ve picked your film and you have people saying they’ll come to your house… now it’s time to make your cinema! Where will it be? In the living room, in the garden, in the bedroom? You don’t have to have a fancy home cinema system – you can huddle around the TV. If you have a projector, why not get out a white sheet and go al fresco?

Make sure you test all your equipment before the big day – we don’t want any Gremlins upsetting your cinema. Also remember to think

5. SHARE We really want to find out about your events, so we encourage you to tweet throughout the day… unless you or your host is strict with using your phone/computer during your screening! Take photos, blog, post about what you are watching, using the hashtag #hcd2014 and see what others are up to.

Be safe and don’t post information with your address – we just want to know what films you are seeing and how you are spending the day.

If you have any questions about the day or need a film recommendation, send us a Tweet to @homecinemaday and we’ll be happy to help out as much as possible. Visit homecinemaday.com for updates and partner discounts - plus check out last year’s Home Cinema Day on Storify for inspiration.

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