Cambridge Film Festival Review #3

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INSIDE

Drama and reality combine in a fictitious 24 hours in the life of musician and international cultural icon Nick Cave.

20,000 DAYS ON EARTH: 20.20 & 22:30, 2nd Sep

Tom Waits and John Lurie in DOWN BY LAW Interviews with legends of fantasy and horror Lionel Rogosin , the maverick of indie cinema

REVIEW

Down by Law

You might well find yourself coming back to DOWN BY LAW when you’re looking for a chicken-soup film...

Jim Jarmusch’s first three films marked the “ready, steady, go” of a powerful filmmaking career. With PERMANENT VACATION, a fidgety, crumbling examination of adolescent discontent in 80s New York, he was ready to have his say. With the three-part STRANGER THAN PARADISE, a pared down precursor to Doug Liman’s SWINGERS, Jarmusch found his feet.

But it wasn’t until DOWN BY LAW, the elliptical, groovy forefather to the Coens’ O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? that he really got going. In this film, his characters have matured and his set pieces are richer, yet he still rejects the narrative conventions that often handicap great character-led pieces, an example from the comedy/jailbreak genre being Sidney Poitier’s STIR CRAZY. The confident execution of VACATION and PARADISE contrasts with the awkwardness of its players – the characters in DOWN BY LAW are made in their creator’s image.

In PARADISE, nobody can scream, so Screamin’ Jay does it for them. In DOWN BY LAW, John Lurie’s “Jack” demonstrates to Roberto Benigni’s “Bob” the silent scream of someone who’s too cool to emote. The film opens with the excellent Tom Waits song Jockey Full of Bourbon, which has since been cheekily bastardised for Dylan Moran’s Black Books. The early scenes follow the achingly cool surliness of Waits and Lurie through a New Orleans painted by Edward Hopper turned goth. To those who only know him from LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL and found the film abhorrent, the casting of Roberto Benigni as Bob, the comic relief, might be disheartening. However, his detractors must prepare to forgive him. Jarmusch tends to pick his players from his social circle, and the combination of Benigni, Waits and Lurie is almost too good to be true.

The early scenes of DOWN BY LAW make use of a certain low angle reminiscent of Yasujirō Ozu’s “tatami shot”, but in this case better termed a “beer crate shot”. It plants us on the sidewalk with Waits, in a bed with a prostitute or on a jail bunk by Lurie, forming an intimacy and conspiracy with the characters so that by the time the frequency of bird-in-a-tree shots increases, our gaze is detached but affectionate. Benigni’s capacity for memorising and conveying classical poetry is much exploited, and the celebration of the music of language extends in one scene to exuberant Absurdist logorrhea. Lurie’s lovely leitmotifs dissipate towards the middle of the film, which finds the trio sharing a prison cell, and “what do you do?” mingles with “what did you do?”.

The omission of the actual escape process should not be mistaken for a penny-dreadful deus ex machina; a digression into logic and cunning would break the fateful flow. Silence pours into the film like swampwater into a canoe, and the characters fill it with soliloquy babble. Finally, Bob finds a fairytale ending when he meets Nicoletta, played by Benigni’s actual wife. Their rapport is so profoundly, simply and warmly bared as to suggest that this has all been a dressing up game between adults, played out at Mr and Mrs Benigni’s house.

You might well find yourself coming back to DOWN BY LAW when you’re looking for a thinking man’s chicken-soup film - then again, if you’re not used to his work, you might leave the screen irritable with questions. But don’t take those questions to the director, who will respond in the style of Beckett when interrogated on the characters in Waiting for Godot: “Maybe they owe you explanations. Let them supply it. Without me. They and I are through with each other.” And if you don’t even feel like ever watching his films again, that’s okay – neither does Jim Jarmusch.

- Rosy Hunt (Editor-In-Chief)

See DOWN BY LAW on 3rd September at 11.00 (BIG SCREAM - BABIES COMPULSORY) and 22.30 (NO BABY NEEDED)

Finsterworld (“FINSTERWALDER”)

REVIEW If you love Stella Gibbons, The League of Gentlemen, Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World or the French photographer Bernard Faucon, you will relish the cruel comedy of Frauke Finsterwalder’s FINSTERWORLD. The director created this world with her husband, the hipsters’ hero Christian Kracht, who also wrote the screenplay; citing Edgar Reitz’ HEIMAT trilogy as a key inspiration. HEIMAT is known for its subversive commentary on German culture.

However, where Reitz hurled us along several branches of a gnarled family tree, FINSTERWORLD spans three generations in a modern day setting. The youngest characters see the Holocaust as an incomprehensible legend; the parents drown themselves in consumer decadence and shun their legacy; and the grandparents were post-war babies, now living with the amoral memory of the 1930s as a golden age.

The jewel in the cardboard crown of FINSTERWORLD is Fassbinder favourite Margit Carstensen. This magnificently versatile and authentic actor also appeared in Crispin Glover’s IT IS FINE! EVERYTHING IS FINE, which shares many of FINSTERWORLD’s conceits – from its preoccupation with postHolocaust guilt to its gaudy audio dub. Strong supports include Corinna Harfouch, who played Frau Goebbels in DOWNFALL: she waxes winsome as the Sandberg family matriarch. Carla Juri, who recently enjoyed her big breakthrough in Charlotte Roche’s WETLANDS (FEUCHTGEBIETE), displays a remarkable range as schoolgirl Natalie, her nuanced deadpan giving way to burgeoning catharsis. Equally charismatic is Sandra Hüller as the naively optimistic documentary filmmaker Franziska, whose blinkered worldview sets her up for repeated failure.

The narrative threads are drawn together into a web of synchronicity, with the Sandberg family lurking at the hub.

Editor Andreas Menn nimbly trips back and forth between the various strands, which unravel in the second half when almost every character meets a tragic fate. FINSTERWORLD draws on myriad artistic influences from that period of moral conflict in the swinging sixties, when creators such as Günter Grass depicted the German struggle with post-Holocaust identity through a magical realist lens. Cinematographer Markus Forderer’s use of colour is tastefully saturated in the style of Wes Anderson, Instagramming eternal sunlight onto

SCREENINGS 16.00 ON 4 SEP 11.00 ON 6 SEP each outdoor scene. The lost highways and dread suburbia are empty – no extras, no ambience. Bavaria’s mountains are tucked away, the personality of the “Freistaat” bleached by hyperreal sunlight until it resembles the Italian utopia where Finsterwalder lives part-time. Composer Michaela Melián, singer of the German new wave band FSK, constructs a wonderfully kooky score – a cynical, synthetic take on the “Penguin Café” style.

The German language itself has a key role to play in FINSTERWORLD. The dialogue is carefully structured into deceptively quaint terms, which may be lost in translation.

The older actors took naturally to their lines, but the younger cast members endured a culture shock in the stripping of colloquialism. Finsterwalder felt that it was important, though, for those young characters representing the endurance of fascism to use the stylised language of those civilised, educated Doric pillars of society.

Kracht plays Palahniuk with certain conceits – just as Tyler Durden sold liposuction soap, Claude the pedicurist bakes callus cookies. The filmmakers cite the symbolism of the podiatry as an allusion to the blisters and scabs which have formed over the fissures in post-Holocaust German society.

Bombed, crumbling German cities were plastered with layers of concrete; the mass graves and trenches filled and forgotten.

That which was buried haunts us still.

Several characters share a tendency to apologise that will feel familiar to the guilt-ridden British audience member.

But each courtesy is a fraying harness on a feral beast – each woman character has her moment of primal rage but only one character, Georg, truly explodes. These frequent apologies – for something so simple as a forgotten scarf – are deceptively shallow, and in fact bear just as much gravitas as that powerful line in EASY RIDER, “We blew it.” But if FINSTERWORLD has any message, it is that we have not blown it – we never had it in the first place – we must own our heritage, our faults and our cruelty, return from the dusty street to the wild woods and accept our dark nature, to embrace that which gives us joy for our short time in this world.

- Faust Lerner

LESSONS LEARNED screens as part of the LIFE LESSONS short film strand at 20.20 on 2nd Sep and 23.00 on 3rd Sep

INTERVIEW INTERVIEW

Toby Froud’s dad worked with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop as the concept artist for THE DARK CRYSTAL and also LABYRINTH, in which Toby costarred. Toby now works for Laika Entertainment, a stop-motion and animation company in Portland, Oregon. Animator Harry Hunt spoke to him about his work.

Harry Hunt: How did you find the process of funding the film through Kickstarter?

Toby Froud: It was an amazing experience, I have certainly learned a lot from running the campaign.

I went into Kickstarter not knowing whether it was going to work – I just knew I wanted to be honest and try to show my intention of how serious I was about this project. I think showing Digby, as he’s known now, was what really helped. By showing a character like that in the Froudian style, something that I feel people have wanted for years but really not seen since Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, people were able to connect to the idea of puppets again.

Toby Froud: “Lessons Learned”

HH: CGI is a touchy subject these days, on the one hand seeming to threaten the old ways of puppetry and stop motion, but at the same time generally paling in comparison. It was gratifying to see that only a very light touch of the mouse was evident here. Had you more time and money, would you have attempted to make it completely non-digital?

TF: I agree that CG has become a hot subject regarding characters and the over use of it to realise fantasy worlds.

Filmmakers are relying far too heavily on CG to show the audience everything. The beautiful thing with a puppet is that it is real. Your mind knows that even if it is a puppet, it existed in the world – you could touch it if you were in the scene with it. That is a huge thing for people to believe. You don’t get that same feeling with a CG character. Also, when using a puppet you have to be creative with how you show it. There are so many things to think about. Even simply how you get the puppet to move from one point to another takes a lot of planning; you’re faced as a director with the challenge of showing only the bits of the puppet that look good. I feel they are great problems to have: as a director you end up with some quite amazing solutions, and in the end, fantastic shots. With all of this, though, I do feel CG has its place.

I feel it should be used to expand the world to give more to a physical element. We shot the King’s scene for LESSONS LEARNED against green screen. The King and the stone walkway, the pillars and the Spider character were all there and very real, but the storm surrounding the whole scene was comped in later. We had an amazing VFX guy, Adam C Sager, who comped everything; and David Manuel, a brilliant digital artist who expanded the King’s world to really give it the sense of scale that I was looking for. If I had more budget to work with, I would have done more of that. I hope to use miniatures and other tricks to create larger worlds. But I would always use modern comp and computer technology if I could to enhance a scene. As long as I have a physical puppet in the middle.

HH: This film completed, how big is your lessons learned box now?

TF: I have to say my lessons learned box is massive now. I learnt and grew through this whole process, its been a fantastic journey. I have had so much love and support from people who funded the project through Kickstarter, to the amazing crew that stuck by me and the idea through the creative chaos. I can’t wait to do it again, I’m certainly ready too, but I will be wheeling my trunk of lessons with me – ready to put more into it.

REVIEW

A Most Wanted Man

Director Anton Corbijn was in the screen at Edinburgh’s Cineworld for the UK premiere of his new film A MOST WANTED MAN – an adaptation of John le Carré’s 2008 thriller. The cast includes Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright, Willem Dafoe, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The experience of watching Hoffman on the screen today is for some akin to that of James Dean fans in the 1950s, watching their idol on screen in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, or GIANT, after the event of his untimely death.

The film regularly emphasises that it is depicting not only a contemporary Hamburg in a unified Germany, but a post9/11 world in which the secret service are operating. One that is haunted by the shadows of Cold War-era security practices, and by their informers’ failure to detect the terrorists responsible for planning the 9/11 attacks. It also asks, is the America of Obama different that of Bush in its treatment of its European allies? In the light of the recent disclosures of phone-hacking Angela Merkel’s mobile, there is a definite ambiguity surrounding this question.

Hoffman is extremely impressive in his role as Gunther Bachmann, Unit Head of a small German intelligence unit.

This is an English language film, with all the English-speaking actors wearing the best German accent they can foster.

Hoffman’s is so good, however, that he not only upstages McAdams’ and Dafoe’s performances when he shares a scene with them, but even makes Daniel Bruhl sound like an Englishman putting on a German accent.

The cinematography of Benoit Delhomme is breathtaking. Hamburg has never looked quite as old and new on screen at the same time. Scenes move with clarity and direction from tiny dingily-lit dive bars, to strikingly well-illuminated, highrise, glass window clad bars overlooking the city’s port. And for anyone with a love of Brutalist, post-war architecture, the building in which Bachmann’s unit is located looks at times like a giant, concrete Mayan sacrificial staircase, with balcony upon balcony peering down onto the next spook as he nips out for a coffee break, vainly hoping that no-one’s watching.

Cat and mouse politics play out constantly throughout the film, so much so that the denouement in the final five minutes of the film comes as something of a shock. The film could have concluded in any number of ways, such were the backstories and relationships being played out on screen. Fans of other le Carré adaptations such as THE CONSTANT GARDENER and TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY will not be disappointed with this latest offering to the canon. And Hoffman fans will thankfully get another chance to say goodbye, and appreciate just how damn good this captivating luminary of the screen and stage really was.

- Jack Toye

THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON is back and restored to us in its original multi-dimensional glory! 4 Sep @ 22.30

FEATURE

Meet Lionel Rogosin The Underground American Cinema strand starts with ON THE BOWERY at 18.00 on 4th Sep.

“Probably the greatest documentary filmmaker of all time,” said John Cassavetes of Lionel Rogosin. “He doesn’t care about what anyone thinks – the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, the underground, or anyone else.” This may well account for why Mr. Rogosin never scaled the heights of Hollywood stardom. Like many of his contemporaries, such as Curtis Harrington and Michael Roemer, Rogosin has slid somewhat out of view; several of his films, which are credited with having cast a bright light on the urban America of the 1950s and ’60s, are being screened in the UK for the first time this year at the Cambridge Film Festival. He never attained the appreciation, love and funding he found in Europe when he was in the US – a fact that may have influenced his move to England in the 1980s.

The film that made his name, ON THE BOWERY, was released in 1956, and was sharp as a knife compared to the bloated pillows grossing millions at the box office. Indeed, four of the five biggest-grossing films of that year ran over three hours long, and featured ‘Great Men’, wealthy families, or both. Rogosin’s debut was barely an hour, chronicled the everyday lives of workers in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and boasted alcoholism and dissolution as some of its most salient themes. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t do particularly well commercially, and was panned by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. But this belied the film’s influence. Time’s appraisal of the film sounds like the description of many documentaries and ‘docufiction’ films that have come since: “This film, without the pity that secretly insults, without the disgust that indirectly compliments, studies its subjects with honest human interest, tries to see what they see in their lives, tries to find what they find in the bottom of the bottle.” Indeed, ON THE BOWERY was selected by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the US National Film Registry.

It marked a slight but definite shift in American filmmaking, too. Rogosin was the first American director to win the Best Documentary award at the Venice Film Festival in 1956, and under his ownership, New York’s Bleecker Street Cinema became one of the city’s most vital art house cinemas, playing a key role in the lives of young directors such as Miloš Forman and Francis Ford Coppola.

As sentiment against American involvement in Vietnam grew, Rogosin found sympathy among a younger generation of Americans; many universities screened his 1965 film GOOD TIMES, WONDERFUL TIMES, a trenchantly anti-nuke film for which Rogosin trotted around the globe to gather material. He’s most famous for his chronicling of marginalised Americans, but he also dabbled in political issues that weren’t directly related to his country: his film ARAB-ISRAELI DIALOGUE attempted to bring about a symbolic reconciliation of an Israeli journalist and a Palestinian poet.

Rogosin’s vision was largely unrecognised by distributors and investors. Despite selling the Bleecker Street cinema in 1974, he remained unable to raise funds for his projects, which were variously about Native Americans, police brutality, Paul Gauguin, and street children in Brazil. He died nearly fifteen years ago, but his legacy now stands proudly as that of a dedicated anti-racist, anti-fascist pacifist who infused every frame of his films with activism and social conscience.

He thoroughly deserves his position as one of the centrepieces of this year’s Cambridge Film Festival.

- Arjun Sajip

Ivan Kavanagh

talks about his film

The Canal

THE CANAL follows David (Rupert Evans) and his family as they move into their new suburban house.

All seems care free and perfect.

However, it wouldn’t be a horror film if problems weren’t afoot. At his work as a film archivist, David spots that his home was the site for a number of grisly murders.

As his marriage disintegrates, the footage plays on his mind and reality and imagination become blurred.

INTERVIEW

Edd Elliott: Ivan, this is your fifth feature and second horror film. What keeps bringing you back to the genre, and what was new for you this time round?

Ivan Kavanagh: I just love the freedom of it. You can really push the medium to its limits in horror films. You can push the sound, the picture and editing almost to breaking point. It’s also the most dreamlike of the genres I think – or at least it has the potential to be. I find it very liberating as a filmmaker. What was different about it this time was that I was working with an editor and a sound designer for the very first time. I had edited and worked on the sound design on all my previous films. I was very lucky to find great collaborators in editor Robin Hill and sound designer Aza Hand, who were willing to experiment as much as I wanted to and helped create what I hope is a very visceral film experience.

The same would go for the deputy producer, Piers McGrail, who I worked very closely with before the film began, carefully planning the look of the film together.

EE: Steve Oram is brilliant in his brief moments as the dry detective, McNamara. How did his character come about?

IK: I wanted there to be some sort of comic relief, as I think the audience needs to take a breather, especially as the tension and fear level rises, so that seeing Steve’s character comes as almost a relief sometimes, as they know that at least these moments in the film will be grounded in some sort of reality and will have a different tone.

I also love world-weary characters in films, you see a lot of them in Film Noir, and I wanted the detective in this film to be a throwback to that. Also, as someone who has suffered from stomach problems most of my life, I relished writing those lines about the detective taking indigestion tablets and complaining about his “acid reflux”. There’s a lot of me in him.

EE: The film concerns itself a lot with voyeurism, particularly the searching out of ghosts and fear. David, the protagonist, is adversely affected by his interest. How do you think the audience will fare?

IK: One of the things cinema does best is to convey that sense of voyeurism. You only have to look at any number of Hitchcock films to find that out, or Brian De Palma at his best. Because this film is almost 100% from the main character’s point of view, the audience sees things the way he sees them. I think when audiences go to see horror films they want to be scared, because it’s a kind of cathartic experience. The only difference with this film is that it has a very dark and disturbing theme at the heart of it, when we realise the truth at the end, ©TAKE ONE 2014 and hopefully the ending will leave people Editor/Design: Rosy Hunt haunted. For me, horror films are not meant to reassure us, they’re meant to scare, haunt Managing Editor: Jim Ross and disturb us.

Deputy Editor: Edd Elliott