Vérité April 2014

ISSUE #13

V é r i t é APRIL 2014 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS The Directors of Amer are Back with a Vengeance

also...

The Beats in Cinema / Studio Ghibli Retrospective / White Dog / reviews / and more...

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Editor’s Letter

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nce upon a time, film fans in the UK could enjoy a remarkably diverse selection of films, from all eras, for little to no cost, courtesy of innovative television scheduling. Regular seasons of silents, classic Hollywood noirs and musicals, weekday early evening screenings of 50s Science Fiction and 60s Horror were commonplace, right up to the late 1980s. Cult and world cinema strands like The Film Club and Moviedrome introduced viewers to films they’d never heard of, or had a chance to see, even during the boom years of video.

And it wasn’t just the films themselves; there were documentaries and one-off arts profiles of film movements and directors.

Now of course, DVD - and most recently Bluray - sate a new generation of film fans who never experienced that era; companies like Arrow, Nucleus, Second Sight and Masters of Cinema regularly release outstanding restorations, often of films it was unimaginable would ever be available in such a format. Just recently I enjoyed The Long Goodbye (a film I hadn’t seen since those days of TV film viewing as a teenager) and enjoyed not just a brilliant

transfer of the film but a range of amazing extra content, including an old Channel 4 Altman documentary.

The work these companies are doing is invaluable, culturally, but under new legislation from the BBFC their existence and financial viability is under threat.

The Video Recordings Act has proposed new rules that will mean companies may have to submit additional content for certification that would previously have been included without charge, at considerable cost. For some of these independent labels, it could be the difference between having to put out a bare bones release or, in the worst-case scenario, going under.

These special editions are a goldmine for fans and when you’ve spoken to anyone involved in putting them together, you realise how painstaking and costly the business can be.

Understandably at Verite we are huge fans of these releases, which is why we are supporting a petition to reverse the new guidelines. If you are a fan of the work these companies do, and want to see them thrive, we would urge you to get over there and do your bit to ensure they survive.

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Thanks for reading, Jordan McGrath & David Hall

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“I’m not a preacher or a teacher or a messenger. I’m only doing film and the consequences of what you think about, that is for you as a spectator to know.”

Margarethe von Trotta

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Contents Features

Columns

All the Colours of the Dark - p8

The Man Who Conquered the World - p56

Stuart Barr talks to the rising giallo maestros Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani about their new film Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears.

Evrim Ersoy continues his expert analysis into filmmakers we should be watching. This month’s subject: Oliver Hermanus.

Reviews

Blue Ruin - p68 Tracks - p69 We Are The Best! - p70

Beyond the Naked Lens - p18 Robert Makin investigates the various attempts to capture the essence and characters of the Beat Generation on film.

Masters of Cinema - p60

David Hall takes an in-depth look at Samuel Fuller’s seemingly forgotten satire, 1982’s White Dog.

The Wind Rises - p71 The Motel Life - p72 Frank - p73 Pioneer - p74

Beautiful Dreams- p24

In Defence... - p64

As rumours of Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement circulate, Ben Nicholson reminisces about his wonderful contribution to cinema.

Clarisse Loughrey defends Casey Affleck’s dissection of celebrity. Asking the question ‘Did you miss I’m Still Here’s humour?’

Visitors - p75

Join the Conversation

@veritefilmmag

facebook.com/VeriteFilmMagazine

ALL THE COLOURS OF THE DARK Stuart Barr meets the directorial duo behind recent giallo valentine Amer and this year’s follow-up The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears

words and interview by Stuart Barr

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russels based directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have been making films together since 2000. Collaborating on a series of self-produced short films led to their first feature, Amer (the French word for ‘bitter’) in 2009. A distinct sensibility that mixes genre and experimental styles of filmmaking is evident from their earliest shorts, through to their second feature, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (L’étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps).

I met the filmmakers in London as they promoted Strange Colour for 2013’s London Film Festival. Given the dark and obsessive nature of their films, they are both surprisingly young and open. Forzani does more of the talking during our interview, but only because his English is more confident; Cattet frequently requests clarifications and offers suggestions in French.

I first met the pair in 2010 when Amer screened to a packed crowd at the Glasgow Film Theatre during the London FrightFest festival’s now annual trip north of

the border to the city’s Film Festival. It would be fair to say the film polarised opinion, but standing outside the GFT in the snow and slush they were happy to talk Italian horror and Kenneth Anger with an excitable cult cinema fan. Three years later they immediately endear themselves to me once more by remembering this chat.

Amer was a strange and heady concoction, highly esoteric and wilfully obscure. At heart it is an art film that explores the sexual identity of a woman at three stages of her life, as a child, a teenage woman and an adult. It was the style of the film that really set it apart and gathered it a small but ardent fan-base – while baffling and even alienating many more, using a visual language, editing grammar and aural cues drawn from the subset of Italian thrillers commonly called giallo.

For Italian audiences, giallo (collectively gialli) denoted any thriller regardless of origin, but outside of Italy the term has been used to identify a sub-genre of Italian films characterised by elaborate mystery plots

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(often with sado-sexual elements) made with an emphasis on style. Invariably a gialli would feature a mysterious gloved killer, extended stalking scenes, and violent, bloody murders. The most internationally renowned exponents of the form are Mario Bava and Dario Argento.

I would call Amer a pseudo-giallo in that it took the style of these films but omitted the key narrative crime/ mystery elements. It was a rare chimera of a movie and, at least in the UK and US, seemed too art-house for large swathes of the core horror audience, and too steeped in obscure genre for mainstream critics and audiences. Their new film is more a neo-giallo. The stylistic flourishes continue (if anything they are even more pronounced) but this time there is a story framework that is more obviously giallo-esque. Strange Colour opens on the closed eyes of its protagonist –a telecoms executive played by the striking looking actor Klaus Tange. The man is asleep on a flight into Brussels. As the camera slowly moves into an extreme close up, the audience is invited into a dream world of fantasy, desire and death beginning with a locked-room mystery as the protagonist returns home to find his wife has seemingly vanished.

I have long held the opinion that giallo - like film-noir - is less genre than style, a view that is open to debate but

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one I put to Hélène and Bruno. Forzani nods. “It is very difficult to give a definition of giallo. You have the Umberto Lenzi giallo [which] are more like [Henri-Georges] Clouzot films. Then you have the Argento giallo, the whodunit style. It’s more about style, giallo yes? About this sixties/seventies period. More about architecture, Mediterranean. And it is very difficult to define them. So yes, to have a precise definition as a genre, it’s not possible.”

“Each time we are asked a definition of giallo, but it is very difficult. Because one movie can be considered by some as a giallo, but by other people not at all. In this film there is the game with the whodunit structure. There is more of the entertainment ‘stuff ’ of the genre movies, but for us it is the same approach but the storytelling is the difference. The same intimate story is told through that giallo vocabulary… and we don’t see the movies as giallo. Giallo is a part of them, is a face of them, one aspect of them, but it’s not the whole aspect.”

With digital equipment opening up filmmaking to many that previously could not have contemplated filmmaking due to the expense and practical challenges of the art form, the work of filmmakers attracted to the visual possibilities of the medium stands out. Because

the best gialli were so stridently and operatically stylish, it is natural the genre has inspired and influenced ambitious directors. While too geographically spread out in origin, and too diverse in theme and style to be a movement, there has been a noticeable upswing in giallo inflected films (and indeed television as anyone watching American Horror Story and Hannibal will attest). While there have been examples of facsimile gialli as Frederico Zampaglione’s unreleased Tulpa (which bafflingly chose to replicate the poorly post -synched dialogue of 70s Italian genre film) and Dario Argento’s depressingly inept Giallo, the more interesting examples have tried to take that style into the 21st century. Forzani is appreciative of Frank Khalfoun’s 2012 remake of Bill Lustig’s notorious 1981 film, Maniac. “When I saw this movie, I thought it was the giallo of the 2010s, because you have that elegance in mise-en-scène, all the work around the murder, it’s done in one-shot and its very graphic. It’s Drivemeets-giallo for me.”

Strange Colours was a long time gestating, in fact its origins predate Amer. Cattet tells me that they began writing the film in 2002, not long after they had made their earliest shorts, but the technical complexity of the project made it too expensive for a first feature. Thus

Amer became their debut – which allowed them to finance Strange Colour as its follow up. I put it to them that the two films form a kind of diptych, each suffused with the same DNA but expressing different aspects of the filmmakers themselves. “We haven’t been thinking about it,” says Cattet, “because it is instinctive when we are writing and making the movie. We try to have a balance between our two universes.” Bruno adds, “After we came back to [Strange Colour], we have seen that there is a similarity, because it was a male point of view because the protagonist is a male - and desire. So it was like a brother and sister, and it was a nice, as you say a diptych, because we are two, a male and a female. It was a way for me to enter her universe and she enter my universe.”

I ask the duo about misogyny, accusations of which have long dogged giallo style films from the work of antecedents like Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, through giallo films themselves, and on to the oeuvre of Brian De Palma – the closest equivalent in American cinema. In Strange Colour there is a repeated image of a straight razor caressing a woman’s nude body that recalls Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper (a film this writer finds vile, but which has its enthusiasts) and

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Ruggero Deodato’s equally notorious but more politically complex House on the Edge of The Park.

For Forzani and Cattet, Amer and Strange Colour each express and explore sexuality, fantasy and objectification from opposing feminine and masculine viewpoints. Forzani is keen to explain that this is made symbolically explicit in each. “In [Strange Colour] the knife goes between the legs of the woman, in Amer it was the knife goes between the legs of the man. So for us, Amer and [Strange Colour] are like the Yin and the Yang. They complete each other. And in Amer the man was the object of desire, in [Strange Colour] it is the woman who is the object of desire. We are in a fantasy universe and it is the subject of the film, the clash of fantasy and reality.”

If Strange Colour shows more of Forzani’s influence than Amer, it is still far from a traditional thriller. From the starting point of a mysterious disappearance, the film fractures its narrative into a series of vignettes. As its central male character investigates, he discovers other strange events in his apartment building that are presented as a series of partially self-contained episodes. The narrative fractures into shimmering shards turning the film into a kaleidoscope of imagery and edits. Influences from experimental film can be clearly found in a section

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where repetition of shots and layered editing conflate victim and killer into the same personality. In another section a woman receives a mysterious gift and is stalked in a scene taking place in one small room. This section is contracted in the fashion of Forzani and Cattet’s early shorts, using still frames. I found this reminiscent of Jan Švankmejer, but Cattet explains the original decision to make shorts in this way was forced by practical considerations, “Because we didn’t have money, [shooting still frames] was the only way to have the 35mm grain.”

Forzani adds that Hélène is a fan of the work of French experimental director Chris Marker, “It comes from [Marker’s film] La Jetée… Švankmejer we have discovered later, but at the beginning it is more like La Jetée. And the black and white sequence in Strange Colour was the ultimate step in our work with stop frames.

It was…” as Forzani searches for an English word, Hélène steps in, “the conclusion.”

Amer was a film of many exteriors, Strange Colour (apart from a superb section in which a detective attempts to tail a mysterious woman and has the tables turned) is a film of interiors. The large art nouveau apartment building in which the film is set becomes a gothic labyrinth of hidden passages and filled with dark

shadows like Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel, it is an impossible space in which temporal and physical laws bend and break. In fact the building is a construct made of a number of different locations, most in Brussels.

The filmmakers explain that architecture is one of the most important aspects of both Amer and Strange Colours. And the contrasting styles of each film are in fact personal, in Amer the chief location, a large house overlooking the Mediterranean, was a house Forzani grew up near. “It was a way to enter this fantastique universe of my everyday life of when I was a child.” The art nouveau exterior of the apartment building in Strange Colours is one they walk past daily, but it performs a similar function as he explains, “When we walk during the day in Brussels and you pass by an Art Nouveau house you are in another period. It’s like a bridge to a fantasy universe.”

Hélène sees the art nouveau architecture as both feminine, and thematically in keeping with the film. “Art Nouveau [has] a lot of curves. It’s like a labyrinth. We wanted to tell the story like a labyrinth. It was the perfect style. In Art Nouveau the women are always like a goddess. And so it was perfect for the subject.”

“Do you know Harry Kümel, the Belgian director?” asks Forzani, “that architecture reminds me sometimes

of his films Malpertuis and Daughters of Darkness. That kind of gothic style of seventies Belgian films.”

I ask the directors how they work with actors. Strange Colour in particular contains many sequences that are clearly meticulously constructed in the edit. This must present challenges for actors? “In fact, we have two kinds of actors, professional and non-professional,” Hélène tells me, “with the non-professional it is… easier. Because they don’t have any experience so they trust us directly and it’s okay. But with professional actors, they aren’t used to work in our way, because we are really precise.

Technically it’s heavy, they have to be precise, and they have to follow the camera and not the opposite. Usually it’s the camera that follows the actors, here it is not that, so they have to be precise to accept this rule and to be the character. Maybe it’s harder for them.”

“And we don’t give them the total script,” Bruno adds, “just the main character has read the script, for the others they have just read their part. We don’t want them to intellectualise the story. ‘Ah maybe I am the double of him, so I have to play it like this’. We want something very instinctive, we want something very raw, and we don’t want them to intellectualise. It is in the editing that we construct the labyrinth but not with them. What we

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usually do is we do a shot, a first take where they are neutral. And after ‘sad’, and after ‘angry’, ‘drunk’… and we build the character in the editing.”

At this point they reveal an influence I did not expect.

“It’s from Stephen Frears, he is doing that,” says Bruno, and laughs when he sees my surprise. “In fact, we have learned that way of directing actors from the way of Stephen Frears. But we are not doing Stephen Frears’ movies. All the takes are in a different mood and after we construct it in the editing.”

When Amer was released in 2010, it was greeted with indifference from mainstream critics. I wonder if this may have changed for the release of Strange Colour as since the release of Amer there have been some very notable and well received British films mixing perceived high (art) and low (genre). Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin and especially Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio have been met with great critical acclaim.

“Yeah, maybe.” Forzani seems unsure. “It is true that with Amer we were alone. But actually [with Strange Colour] we were inspired by Satoshi Kon.” Forzani and Cattet have both acknowledged Kon a Japanese filmmaker behind the ambitious anime films Perfect Blue

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and Millennium Actress as an influence. Forzani has seen traces of Kon’s work entering the mainstream through films such as Inception and Black Swan. “We are not ‘mainstream’ like that, not blockbuster, but it is the same roots.” He is encouraged by the success of these films, to think that audiences are more open to non-traditional and elliptical methods of storytelling that studios and critics give them credit for. “With Inception, some audiences didn’t get the film directly but they enjoyed being lost.”

“There was a French film from Leos Carax, Holy Motors, people didn’t get it, but they had fun watching it.

Y’know it’s like a Lynch movie, you don’t get it the first time, but you are fascinated by it.

I have the feeling they [film critics] think that audiences are just stupid, brainless sheep. People are more open sometimes than we think.”

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice a guest director credit to Peter Strickland at the end of the film. This is both a tip of the hat and an in-joke as Forzani and Cattet have ‘borrowed’ a scream by actress Eugenia Caruso from Strickland’s film. ‘Like the character played by Toby Jones had done our movie’ says Forzani.

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Check out the teaser issue of CultTV Times... covering everything from NCIS to anime!

Broadcast the news – the first full issue of Cult TV Times will be available to buy soon at Culttvtimes.com Follow us on : (@CultTVTimes) for the latest news and issue updates For subscription enquiries contact: subscriptions@culttvtimes.com VERITE APRIL 2014

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The

Strange

Music of your Body’s Tears 16

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words by Justin Harries

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lundering the past can be a tricky business.

From Kenneth Anger onward, filmmakers may have utilised pop music for ironic and iconic effect. But when re-appropriating soundtracks, they can leave themselves open to all manner of flack. Composer Ennio Morricone claimed that cinema’s foremost pick ‘n’ mix practitioner Quentin Tarantino “…places music in his films without coherence”. Since then, the couple have kissed and made up, but the questions arising from the statement linger.

Loading up on allusions demands a rigorous approach to escape accusations of lazy post–modern posturing, and there are no other directors more concerned with the art of alluding than the Belgium couple Cattet & Forzani.

Their subject for dissection is the giallo, a perversely sensual and stylishly violent Italian ‘filone’ (genre) that bloomed in the early ‘70s. Cattet & Forzani filter this cinema of cruelty through the lens of avant-garde directors such as Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage, deploying mosaic narratives that teeter on the cusp of comprehension in order to break the filone down to its visceral components. The resulting baroque visuals may be the primary inspiration for the directors, but music is also an essential ingredient, sifting seamlessly from haunting lullaby to psychedelic squall with schizophrenic aplomb.

So do their audio choices for their latest excursion, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, match the precision with which they construct their images?

By selecting Riz Ortolani’s theme to the pivotal glam giallo So Sweet, So Perverse (1969), Cattet & Forzani acknowledge the influence of the scribe Ernesto Gastaldi upon their work. The screenwriter would later work with the brothers Martino on a series of gialli starring Edwige Fenech (after whom Cattet & Forzani name their elusive heroine) that inform Strange Colours’ psychosexual lean-

ings. The unwanted floral gifts and lacerating couplings of The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (otherwise known as Blade of the Ripper) are visually referenced, but its Bruno Nicolai’s fuzz sitar workout from All the Colors of the Dark that makes the audio cut. Gastaldi was in a paranoid state of mind for Alan Lado’s début, Short Night of Glass Dolls, Morricone’s distending morass of strings used for Strange Colours’ one moment of humour.

The remainder of the choices are lifted from non-giallo sources. Peppino De Luca’s driving ‘Rito a los Angeles’ from Massimo Dallamano’s The Secret of Dorian Grey can also be heard in 2004’s Ocean’s Twelve. Guido and Maurizio de Angelis provide more energy with Enzo G. Castellari’s crime drama The Big Racket (1976). With its clean, chorused bass, Nico Fidenco’s score for Joe D’Amato’s sleazy Confessions of Emmanuelle (1977) points toward the eighties.

But it is Morricone who provides Strange Colour with its vital theme - the haunting “Erotico Mistico” from Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s obscure Maddalena (1971). Edda Dell’Orso’s orgasmic exhalations arise from a wash of organ and Gregorian wailing (provided by I Cantori Moderni di Alessandroni), bridging the divide between the ecclesiastical and the orgiastic. Used by Cattet & Forzani to signify the literal penetration of a spatial mystery, the piece pulses at the centre of Strange Colour.

For filmmakers who are so exacting regarding their visual references, it’s surprising that Cattet & Forzani utilise music in a less rigid manner. They claim that their films are visceral rollercoasters, and that alone may protect them from the ire of Ennio. Not that he should complain - the 1981 release of “Chi Mai” from Maddalena reached number 2 in the British charts when adopted by the BBC as the theme for the BBC’s The Life and Times of David Lloyd George.

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BEYOND THE NAKED LENS Does the life and work of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs translate to the screen? Robert Makin looks back at cinema’s various attempts to capture the beat generation

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words by Robert Makin

he original Beats were obsessed with the power of the written word and had very little time for the moving image. However, the movement’s three main figureheads, authors Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allan Ginsberg, have inspired and influenced generations of filmmakers.

Their non-conformist lifestyles and ground-breaking approach to creativity has never been an easy thing to transpose onto the big screen. Many have tried and most have failed. Truth be told, no matter how amazing it’s framed and edited, watching someone type just isn’t very exciting for cinema audiences.

As far as I’m aware, there is only one truly authentic Beat Generation film originating from the era that was fully sanctioned by the movement and involved several of

its most prominent representatives. Directed by celebrated photographer Robert Frank, Pull My Daisy (1959) is a thirty-minute insight into the world of the genuine Beats.

Written and narrated by Jack Kerouac (taken from the third act of his play Beat Generation) it also features Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and weirdly enough Delphine Seyrig, future star of Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966) and Daughters of Darkness (1971). Robert Frank would go on to cast Ginsberg and Orlovsky in his seminal underground feature Me and My Brother (1969), whilst revisiting the legacy of the Beat movement in 1983 with another short entitled This Song For Jack.

Nothing too dramatic happens in Pull My Daisy. It’s set in an old New York apartment (although filmed on a

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High School Confidential

sound stage) and mostly revolves around a railway worker, his wife who’s desperately trying to impress a local bishop, and their chaotic bohemian friends. It’s a playful, naturalistic and affectionate portrayal of the Beats that completely contradicts the sensationalized depictions of what the press and Hollywood were calling Beatniks - an amalgamation of the words Beat and Sputnik.

What we can now refer to as Beatsploitation Cinema has very little to do with the original creative community of scribes and artists that were closely associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. Beatsploitation films more or less proclaimed to be shocking exposés of the nocturnal coffee house scene and its deviant clientele, feeding into Middle America’s fear of an emerging counter culture that was nomadic, irresponsible and lived for kicks. The fabric of civilised society was fraying at the edges and these hep talking hoodlums were pulling the thread.

These were cautionary tales that warned of the dangers of living a carefree bohemian lifestyle. As far as Hollywood was concerned, Beatniks were a sub culture of murderers, rapists and drug addicts with a fondness for coffee, Jazz, and bad poetry. The allure of caffeine, BeBop, and spontaneous prose was leading young America astray. But by conforming to a safe, secure and reasonably Middle-Class suburban existence it was less likely that you would end up in prison, addicted to drugs, or dead

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and buried in a ditch.

These films were predominately a ridiculous and misguided bastardization of the Beats ideology. They’re also far too entertaining to be completely dismissed. In all fairness it’s no wonder B-Movie producers were drawn to the coffee house scene for inspiration and perceived it as ripe and fertile territory for their warped crime dramas.

Especially when you consider the original Beats open and liberal attitudes to sexual relationships and recreational drug use, the scandal surrounding Lucien Carr’s involvement in the death of David Kammerer, and the fact that William S. Burroughs shot his wife in the head.

High School Confidential (1958) is one of the earliest examples Beatsploitation, with its pot-smoking, drug dealing delinquents, and an abundance of hilarious hipster slang. Highlights include the hip history of Columbus arriving in America and the recital of a Jazz poem entitled “Tomorrow is a Drag, Man”. The Beat Generation (1959) features a script by Richard Matheson, a theme song by Louis Armstrong, an anti-abortion sub-plot, a serial rapist called The Aspirin Kid, Vampira reciting poetry, a song and dance number, and some seriously odd shifts in tone.

The Rebel Set (1959) sees a coffee house owning Beatnik organising a robbery that goes horribly wrong, The Bloody Brood (1959) stars a charismatic Peter Falk as a

A Bucket of Blood

nihilist criminal killing for kicks with a deadly hamburger, and The Prime Time (1960) follows an innocent teen dragged into debauchery by a depraved cool cat artist known only as The Beard.

Roger Corman’s classic horror-comedy A Bucket of Blood (1959) is without doubt the best of the bunch.

Inspired by Vincent Price shocker House of Wax (1953), and expertly transcending the confines of its extremely low budget, this superb black comedy is an excellent and ageless swipe at pseudo intellectual hipsters, desperate to perceive themselves as being interesting without actually doing anything particularly interesting.

Also worthy of attention is Curtis Harrington’s enjoyably odd and enchanting Night Tide (1961). A fresh faced and pre-psychosis Dennis Hopper plays a young sailor on shore leave that falls in love with a mysterious fairground employee he meets in a Jazz club who may or may not be a homicidal mermaid.

The initial Jazz club scenes feel incredibly authentic and Harrington avoids resorting to Beatnik caricatures, managing to invoke the allure of smoke filled basement bars and serendipitous nocturnal discoveries. He also does a great job of capturing the desolate gloom and dense haunting atmosphere of a misty, out of season coastal town with a certain amount of visual subtlety.

Very few films have captured Beat-era New York with

such daring and sincere emotional honesty as John Cassavetes’ directorial debut Shadows (1959). A milestone of independent cinema, it fearlessly breaks countless Hollywood taboos in both style and theme, and not to be reactionary and shocking, but honest and real, something that Hollywood in the fifties wasn’t exactly known for. It’s an evocative and distinctive movie that retains its strange power. There’s nothing else like it.

It’s a shame studio bosses didn’t have the balls to get Cassavetes to direct The Subterraneans (1960), Hollywood’s first big budget attempt at adapting an original Beat’s work. Based on Jack Kerouac’s short novel, the inter-racial relationship at the centre of the story is vetoed, changing the African American character of Mardou Fox into a white French woman. In fact it’s so laughably sanitized it makes you wonder why they even bothered.

Not wanting to be left behind in the counter culture stakes, British cinema during the early sixties made its own attempts at Beatsploitation, most of which were about as lurid and threatening as a Woolworth’s commercial. Apart from a superb opening sequence scored by John Barry, Beat Girl (1960) is particularly underwhelming.

Whereas The Rebel (1961) brilliantly satirises the bohemian art world in all its deluded pretentiousness as Tony Hancock’s office clerk runs off to Paris to hang out

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with exotic continental Beatniks and become a genius.

Guy Hamilton’s The Party’s Over (1963) is another strong contender, with a stunning opening sequence of post party Chelsea Beats gloriously drifting across the Chelsea Bridge like jaded phantoms. Plus a charismatic Oliver Reed as an agitated bohemian who describes himself as a dead fly in the soup at the banquet of tycoons, with nuisance value, born to stick pins in pomposity. I wouldn’t doubt it for a second.

William Burroughs was the first of the Beats to fully embrace the medium of film. He created a number of experimental avant-garde shorts throughout the sixties (William Buys a Parrot, Towers Open Fire, 1963, The Cut Ups, 1966) with the help of abominable showman Antony Balch, a famed British film distributor, director of Horror Hospital (1973) and the man who would eventually persuade Burroughs to narrate the 1968 re-release of Haxan: Withcraft Through The Ages (1922).

But the Beats would eventually give way to the hippies and other such teen tribes. No matter how precious and significant Wholly Communion (1965) thinks it is by capturing Beat poets reciting live at the Albert Hall, who really gives a shit when the rest of the world is setting fire to their guitars and dry humping jukeboxes?

By the late seventies there was a resurgence of interest in the Beat Generation, who were now looked upon as counter-culture godheads. Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds (1979) tried to make sense of it all, and Burroughs: The Movie (1983) was shortly followed by Kerouac: The Movie (1984).

In 1980 John Byrum directed Heart Beat based on the autobiography of Carolyn Cassady, starring Nick Nolte as Neal Cassady, John Heard as Kerouac, and Sissy Spacek as Carolyn in a complicated love triangle; the Beat Generation as soap opera.

What Happened to Kerouac? (1986) takes a comprehensive look at how a literary icon ended up a bloated drunk living at his mum’s house. Heavy Petting (1989) has Ginsberg and Burroughs bickering like an old married couple. Ralph Bakshi’s rare excursion into live action This Aint Be-Bop (1989) stars Harvey Keitel as an aging hipster wondering where it all went wrong for himself and the Beats.

In the Quantum Leap episode Rebel Without a Clue (1990), time travelling do-gooder Dr Sam Beckett enlists the help of Jack Kerouac in dissuading a waitress from joining a gang of Hell’s Angels and ruining her life, whilst Dean Stockwell gives an impassioned explanation as to what On The Road meant to him and his peers and, let’s face it, he should know. The Beats had finally found

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prime time acceptance whether they wanted it or not.

David Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of William S. Burrough’s controversial Naked Lunch is by far one of the most creatively articulate and accomplished attempts at bringing the Beat Generation to the big screen; it’s also one of the most enjoyable.

From the Saul Bass inspired opening credits, the foreboding score performed by Ornette Coleman and conducted by Howard Shore, and a career best performance from Peter Weller, it’s a gooey, sticky and thoroughly weird homage to one of American literatures most warped and original minds. An engrossing, poignant and darkly surreal interpretation of Burroughs’ life and his work, although some of the special effects now look like a disgruntled Euro Disney employee has dropped Ketamine and taken out his frustration on one of the Animatronic attractions.

Another upstanding adaptation of Burroughs writing is the animated short The Junky’s Christmas, following Danny the car wiper’s desperate attempts to score on Christmas with unexpected and surprisingly seasonal results. Then there’s the ridiculously obscure Taking Tiger Mountain (1983). Based on Bladerunner: A Movie, William Burroughs’ script treatment of Physician and science fiction author Alan E. Nourse’s novel The Bladerunner, it stars a very young Bill Paxton in a tale of militant feminist scientists from the future attempting to kill the Welsh Minister of Prostitution. Gus Van Sant’s amusing short The Discipline of D.E (1983) is also another worthwhile rendering of Burroughs’ writing from the early eighties.

Not nearly as interesting is The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997), based an eight-page letter by Neal Cassady to Kerouac and starring Keanu Reeves. It really doesn’t add up to much, with most of the cast looking embarrassed and awkward. Equally dreadful is Beat (2000) with a mumbling and misplaced Kiefer Sutherland as William Burroughs and a cringe worthy Courtney Love as his unfortunate wife, Joan. It’s ludicrously bad and self-imploding with countless moments of unintentional humour - too many to list here.

James Franco does a spot on (if slightly too immaculate) impression of Ginsberg in Howl (2010) that documents the first performance of the seminal poem and the obscenity trial that resulted from its publication. It’s definitely coming from a good place, but unfortunately the extremely literal and already dated animation cheapens an otherwise good film.

When mainstream Hollywood finally got around to green lighting a big screen adaptation of Kerouac’s

generation defining On The Road in 2012, it’s no surprise that they got it so completely wrong. Not only is On The Road seriously miscast, it’s also extraordinarily tedious and an absolute chore to sit through.

Far superior in every way is the recent Kill Your Darlings (2013). A compelling and believable account of Ginsberg’s freshman year at Columbus University and his initial encounters with Kerouac, Burroughs, and Lucian Carr, an epochal year that would end with the brutal murder of David Kammerer.

Director John Krokidas has a firm grip on the material, which rises above most dramatizations of The Beat Generation by simply being well made and convincing.

Thankfully, he doesn’t forget to be entertaining either.

Within the dramatic and anxious lives of the disaffected and dissatisfied young beats, Krokidas leaves room for some memorable moments of perfectly pitched humour.

The only thing that ruins it is the distracting use of contemporary music that’s jarring, disorientating and a cheap and obvious ploy to pull in a younger audience.

Nevertheless it’s a very likeable film and one of the best efforts at bringing the Beat Generation to the silver screen.

But the accolade of The Ultimate Beat Generation Film has to go to Chuck Workman’s absolutely excellent and invigorating American Masters biography The Source: The Story of the Beats and the Beat Generation (2000). Mixing archive footage and interviews with dramatized readings, it stars Johnny Depp as Jack Keroauc, Dennis Hopper as William Burroughs, and John Turturro as Allen Ginsberg.

The choice of actors is a stroke of genius. Why on earth hadn’t anyone thought of this before? This is the cast that should have made On The Road. Depp substantiates that he was born to play Kerouac, and he does so effortlessly.

Dennis Hopper perfectly radiates the intense weirdness that Burroughs cloaked in his fifties formal wear.

As Ginsberg, John Turturro performs one of the most astoundingly powerful and raw interpretations of Howl you’re ever likely to experience. It’s more than obvious throughout the duration of The Source that these are people giving new life to something they have a deep admiration for; that community of social exiles desperate for change and for truth. Those nocturnal, subterranean renegades of the written word who took the greatest risk of all, they dared to dream.

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Beautiful

Dreams

As a Japanese master retires, Ben Nicholson pays tribute to his unique vision and enduring creations

words by Ben Nicholson

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n 2010, when Hayao Miyazaki’s aquatic animation Ponyo finally arrived in UK cinemas, I saw it in a screening filled to the brim with children. As is often the case with the films of Studio Ghibli, the sublime animation and bewitching narrative had cured the theatre of all restlessness, but there was a single moment when one little girl exclaimed out loud that I’ve never forgotten. Overnight, the seas had risen and now lapped at the doorway of the house in which the magical Ponyo and her five year-old human companion Sôsuke were sheltering. Intrigued, the two pint sized heroes plunged their heads beneath the surface and surveyed the newly waterlogged land inhabited by all manner of sea creatures. At that moment, an audible gasp came from the seat in front of me, followed by the awestruck words that have served, since that day, as a perfect and pithy description, for numerous reasons, of Ghibli’s very best work: “What a magical world.”

Miyazaki’s new film, The Wind Rises, is a historical epic featuring less of the fantastical than audiences may have come to expect from his oeuvre, but there is a poignant resonance to it all given that it will be the great director’s final piece. The film’s protagonist, real-life Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, is afforded the occasional flight of fancy in which he constructs an imaginary version of his idol, Italian aircraft designer Caproni (much as Miyazaki has here imagined his own hero, Horikoshi). Jiro and Caproni speak idealistically of aeroplanes as ‘beautiful dreams’ and it is difficult not to draw parallels between their aspirations and that of their writer. This association is at its most affecting when Caproni declares that he is retiring and that this will be his last creation. It is impossible not to feel a pang of sadness that we’ll not experience another of Miyazaki’s own beautiful dreams.

Having harboured childhood aspirations of becoming

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a manga artist, Hayao Miyazaki fell in love with the first colour anime feature film, The Tale of the White Serpent, in the late 1950’s and dedicated himself to a life in animation. He got his first job at Toei Animation in 1963, where he first met long-time collaborator Isao Takahata. After two fruitful decades, in 1985 the two men co-founded the now internationally renowned Studio Ghibli in concert with publishing behemoth Tokuma Shoten. The entertainment company were more than happy to back this new venture due to the enormous success they’d achieved with Miyazaki’s previous feature, the ecological sci-fi Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It was a film that first encompassed many of the recurring themes and motifs that would inhabit his work for the next thirty years, not least the wind. It blew through the valley in which Nausicaä’s people lived, cleansing them of the poisons of the Toxic Jungle. It blows the hat from Jiro Horikoshi’s head in The Wind Rises, leading to his first encounter with lifelong love, Naoko. More importantly, ‘ghibli’ comes from the Arabic word for a particular Mediterranean wind, otherwise known as the Sirocco, which was chosen as a name due to their desire to blow

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a fresh breeze through the world of Japanese animation.

It would be difficult to argue that, as Miyazaki lays down his pencil, they’ve not achieved what they set out to do.

From their first film, to the release of Miyazaki’s last, Studio Ghibli have cultivated an exceptional reputation in the world of cinema. Their determination to stay true to traditional hand drawn animation when other studios have almost entirely defected to computer generation is not only admirable, but when the films look as exquisite as they do, it seems inspired. In 2003, smash-hit Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, not only becoming the first film from a non-English speaking country to do so, but the first traditionally animated winner since the inception of the category.

What Ghibli are capable of is a marvellous, timeless aesthetic which is impeccably intertwined with a knack for crafting worlds and stories that are equally enduring.

The first film produced by the new company in the mid 80’s was Miyazaki’s aerial adventure Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which had some similarities to his previous sci-fi Nausicaä whilst also drawing inspiration from the travails of Welsh miners. It was an enormous hit in Japan but did

not receive a wider release for some time afterwards and despite generally being well reviewed, it has never gained the same kind of status that other later Miyazaki pictures did. Conversely, Takahata’s first film for the studio, which was released as a double feature with Miyazaki’s second, not only received universal critical acclaim at the time, but still often occupies an exalted position in audiences’ favourite animated films. Both Grave of the Fireflies (Takahata) and My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki) are concerned with a pair of siblings, but the diverging styles and influences of the two directors are distinctly illustrated in these two films, which were to originally be viewed together. Takahata’s work is largely based in a more grounded world than that of his friend, with Italian neorealism often cited as a defining influence and as such, his tale of two children sees Seita and Setsuko struggling to survive during the last few months of World War II. Grave of the Fireflies is often described as an anti-war film despite the director himself disagreeing with that particular reading, and intending a somewhat different effect.

Whilst there are occasions upon which Takahata has

embraced the more fantastical potential in his chosen medium - the magical raccoons of Pom Poko are a gleefully light-hearted example - his style has generally remained realistic and with 1991’s Only Yesterday he even made a film for Ghibli which was aimed directly at a mature market. Miyazaki, on the other hand, has managed to unite children and their parents in their adoration of his stunning combinations of myth, adventure and unadulterated storytelling charm. When the duet of Fireflies and Totoro was a box office flop due to the difficult subject matter of Takahata’s film scaring audiences away, it was the merchandising of the now hugely recognisable mystical characters in Miyazaki’s film that saw them break even. The Catbus and the eponymous woodland spirit proved ever so popula, while Totoro became a legend of his own. Featuring as the studio’s logo and iconic mascot, he also featured in Pixar’s Toy Story 3 and even had an asteroid named after him.

My Neighbour Totoro, as with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, fuses various recurring elements of its creator’s style following young sisters Satsuki and Mei as they move with their father out into an old house in

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a rural Japanese community. There, the advancement of modern life is evident, but through Totoro and his magical friends the young girls’ positive feelings are brought to bear on nature and a traditional way of life. The film features no villain (as is the case in most Miyazaki films) and is interested not in a battle between good and evil, but in experiencing the wonder of the world around the characters. It’s a stirring theme that he has broached throughout his career and is one of the reasons that the little girl’s comment in Ponyo stuck with me so. When Ponyo and Sôsuke poke their heads beneath the water, what they see is not fantasy but nature in all its awe-inspiring glory. It is in making the natural world such an intrinsic and beloved part of his films that Miyazaki shows the true elegance of his environmentalism.

Nausicaä contains a heavily environmental message in which the titular protagonist - who is effectively a natural scientist - expounds the virtues of living harmoniously with the planet when nature is threatened by militarised and industrialised humanity. Equally, Laputa and the enormously successful Princess Mononoke contain similar scenarios as natural idylls must be protected from the encroaching destruction of civilisation. In Ponyo, the little girl’s wizard father condemns humans for spoiling

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the sea, and “treating [her] home like their empty black souls.” The befoulment of natural water is also alluded to in one of Spirited Away’s many endearing scenes that see the entire bathhouse repulsed by a guest who appears to be a stink spirit. In fact, as the loveable Chihiro reveals, he is in fact a river spirit that has been polluted by all of the rubbish dumped in his waters.

It is not just environmentalism that colours Miyazaki’s stories, however, but pacifism, feminism, the unrivalled power of love, and a preoccupation with flight that has clearly followed him through from his own childhood.

It is rare that a film of his will arrive in cinemas without a sequence sailing through the air: the likes of Nausicaä, Kiki (from Kiki’s Delivery Service), Haku (Spirited Away), and even Totoro are capable of flight by some means or other including spinning tops, technological gliders and broomsticks. Concurrently, many of Ghibli’s films involve elements of aeronautical warfare from giant troop carriers to dogfighting. Both Howl (he of the Moving Castle) and Porco Rosso are involved in individual aerial combat and whilst Jiro does not have good enough vision to become a pilot in The Wind Rises, he still dedicates himself to the design of magnificent flying machines.

Along with his messages of caring for the planet and peace amongst humanity - and his joyful exploration of our desire to be airborne - one of the most consistently enjoyable aspects of Miyazaki’s films are his terrific female protagonists. In a medium that has seen Disney princesses take centre stage, it is a truly amazing to see an animation studio whose films parents can so happily take their young daughters to see. When a girl leaves a Miyazaki film wanting to be the princess, parents can be pleased; she will not have been a pretty teen dressed in pink and lacking agency, she will have been a well-rounded character who followed her heart and her moral compass and almost always attained her targets. Nausicaä, Sheeta (from Laputa) and San (Princess Mononoke), for instance, all provide excellent alternatives to the typical notion of a princess. Chihiro, Satsuki, Mei and Ponyo all have personal quests to complete, while Kiki exists in a film filled with professional women. Ghibli films favour placing women in positions of power such as military commanders, industrialists, pirate captains and business owners. Indeed, there is often a sense of many of the male characters in his films being somewhat ridiculous and rarely as wise as their female counterparts.

Strangely, many of these defining characteristics are

lacking, or at least blurrier than usual, in his final offering which brings Miyazaki’s journey full circle in what feels like the most personal film of his career. His life began, in a sense, with the creation of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter and his career now concludes with it. At the same time, there are many similarities to be drawn between Jiro’s fictionalised pursuits and Miyazaki’s real ones.

Luckily for audiences across the world, the master animator - who can rightly be mentioned in the same breath as Disney himself - certainly managed to soar during his time at the sketching board. Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind could easily hold their own against the greatest films of all time, let alone animations.

Studio Ghibli will of course be left in capable hands.

Isao Takahata’s first film as director for almost fifteen years was released in 2013, whilst Hayao’s son Gorō is one of several tasked with taking up his father’s reigns.

Whether or not the company will scale the same heights as it did with Miyazaki Snr remains to be seen; fortunately the timelessness of his stories and the enchanting nature of his exceptional imagination will undoubtedly abide. Sayōnara, Miyazaki-san, thank you for all those beautiful dreams.

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Cinema through a

Child’s

eye

words and interview by Neil McGlone

A

nyone who knows anything about film will know the name Mark Cousins.

Whether through his work at the BBC in the early 90’s hosting Moviedrome (19972000) or his own series Scene By Scene (1996-2001) where he got to interview some of the world’s greatest directors (then later actors) and had them analyse scenes from their own movies. Or maybe they’ve heard of him through some of the great work he does with kid’s charities in Scotland including the 8½ Foundation he founded with Tilda Swinton or, more probably, from his own films he’s made as a director, such as his epic 15-hour personal journey through cinema, The Story Of Film: An Odyssey (2011).

I’ve had the great pleasure, and indeed honour, to have known Mark for the past three years and, in November 2012 I received an email from him asking if I’d be interested in being a researcher on a new film he was making.

This project was to become A Story Of Children And Film (2013).

In connection with the release of the film, Mark has curated a season of films around the theme of childhood which includes 17 titles, many of which feature in the documentary. The season runs from April to June at both the BFI and Edinburgh’s Filmhouse before going on tour at selected cinemas around the country.

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Verite: A Story Of Children And Film is about to be released in cinemas this month and I wonder if you can start by telling me how the idea for this film initially came to you and about the pre-production process when deciding on a structure to follow?

Mark Cousins: I wasn’t planning to make any more films about cinema. The Story Of Film had taken such a chunk of my life, and had been so tiring, since it was made on such a low budget, that I wanted to get back to what I used to do - make films about other things. But then I filmed my niece and nephew playing one morning, after breakfast. It was a simple 11-minute shot, but they were such fun to watch. When I looked back at the shot, I saw a whole range of childhood behaviours and emotions in it - shyness, stroppiness, showing off, violence, etc. - so I thought that I could expand that little shot into a feature length film about childhood. The extra footage would be film clips from around the world.

What I liked about this idea was that it was, in a way, the opposite of my previous films, all of which are road movies. This film would be rooted in one room. It would have no structure, no story. This scared me - and some people told me that it wouldn’t work - but I like that fear, so went for it.

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For some years now you have done a lot of work with children; your first ever piece for BBC Scotland, you co-founded the charity Scottish Kids are Making Movies, your work with Tilda Swinton for the 8½ half Foundation and of course, your debut film The First Movie (2009) features kids – what is it about children that endears you to them?

There are five things I think. I love the unpredictability of children. Jean Renoir said that you should leave a door open on the set so unpredictable reality can enter. Work with kids and it’s not so much a door that is opened to the unpredictable - the walls fall down.

I like using static frames, no camera moves, so, within these frames, to create a contrast, you want a maximum of movement or “unframed” action - kids are great at the unframed.

I like very much how quickly children’s’ emotions change. I am speedy myself, and love the adrenalin of changing emotions.

I love how uncensored kids are creatively. If they want to draw you as a banana, they will.

Finally, I think that children are like pampered slaves.

In the western world at least, they are given their food, shelter and toys but, in return, they are told when to eat and go to bed, and what to do. I am very interested in

interested in being involved as the film’s advisor/ researcher. We then spent around three months watching films from around the world and exYou also have a great interest in art, with this film changing comments about them. Can you expand you and Timo had a Cezanne print up in the studio on this process we followed and the criteria we whilst making the film and the film itself opens and stuck to when deciding on what was and wasn’t closes with references to Van Gogh. Can you talk included? about their importance within the production of this film?

There were several criteria. I wanted to find films that that tension and I think that most films about kids in some way deal with it.

I think that movies are as close to painting as they are to theatre. Paul Cezanne was great at visual thinking he didn’t just render what he saw, he transformed it by thinking about it. That’s what I try to do, to some degree, in my stuff. I’ll never be anywhere as good as Cezanne, but I can learn from his process. I stuck the picture of his painting on the wall because A Story Of Children and Film had no story. What could we replace story with?

Tonal changes, I reckoned. So I said to editor Timo, let’s try to give our film different tones, the way that this picture has different tones. No journey, but still movement.

After we first met in Telluride in 2012, you then contacted me around mid-November the same year with a pitch for the film asking if I would be

were not well known. I wanted to see cinematic children who were not clichés, not adult fantasies, not so steered by plot that they had no agency. I wanted us to look for movies which felt in some way co-directed by the child, in which the child had a degree of freedom to improvise.

This ruled out animation, and a lot of CGI cinema. Also, I wanted to deal only with pre-teen kids, as when young people enter their teens they often become more selfaware, guarded or keen to conform to trends in fashion, etc. I had a list of films that I would include, you sent me long lists of possible extra ones, I made a short-list of those, and we separately watched them and narrowed them down further. You sent me your strongest recommendations. Then I included some of them in the finished film.

I remember, too, when we met in a pub in London, talking about the geography of A Story Of Children And

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“I was interested in visual rhyme and sonic rhythm, the tonalities of Cezanne, not the exactitudes of film history.”

Film. I wanted to try to use film clips from many parts of the world - Africa, the Middle East, Indian, Korea, etc., as well as more familiar places like America and Europe. That’s why I was so pleased when you sent me, for consideration, the Korean film A Hometown in Heart (1949) and the Kannadan Indian movie Ghatashraddha aka The Ritual (1977). Two real gifts. I also asked friends from Sweden, China and the Czech Republic to recommend films. Of course we failed in our aim to cover the whole world. There’s nothing from Italy, for example, or Portugal, or most of Latin America.

My final requirement was to choose films which are “extractable”, in other words that are not so plotty that some of their scenes can stand alone.

I removed Oz because our producers, Adam Dawtrey and Mary Bell, pointed out that Dorothy in that film was somewhat older than the other kids in our movie. I replaced her with Margaret O’Brien because I wanted at least one child performance from the Hollywood studio system which had some of the elements of realism that we were aiming for.

Apart from that, the selection of film clips didn’t change much. My films seldom change much between first and final cuts.

In an email I think you had indicated that you had felt there was room for about 60 film clips in all (in the end there was 53) and two films I had sent you in late February 2013, Melody for A Street Organ I remember during the viewing process we had dis- (2009) and A Hometown In Heart (1949), ended cussions on more than one occasion about whether up as late additions just before the final cut was put it was too obvious to include films such as The Red together and shown to Channel 4 and the BFI. Balloon (1956) and The 400 Blows (1959). In the original cut I remember seeing there was also a se- Yes. I love the movies of Kira Muratova, and try, where quence from The Wizard Of Oz (1939), which was possible, to include her in my films or writings. I’d heard about Melody For A Street Organ, and then you saw it in later replaced with little Margaret O’Brien from Meet Me In St Louis (1944). Can you speak a little Rotterdam and loved it, and told me of the balloon scene. about your thought process in making these kind of As I knew that we already had a sequence about balloons, I was excited. You sent me a DVD of the film, which was decisions when deciding on the final cut? as good as I’d hoped, and I agreed that the balloon scene

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“I knew that the heart of the film would be the Iranian films, and that Herz Frank’s beautiful Ten Minutes Older should be at its centre.”

was perfect for us.

There was a danger of overbalancing the film at this point. I knew that the heart of A Story Of Children And Film would be the Iranian films, and we already had a few of them, and that Herz Frank’s beautiful Ten Minutes Older (1978) should be at its centre, too. Adding Muratova’s film meant that we also had quite a few movies in the Russian language. This concerned me a bit, but I was desperate to get her into the film.

Once you had agreed the final cut, the postproduction process of editing, sourcing best available film materials, website design, music, credits etc. all followed. Can you speak about this process prior to the initial test screening behind closed doors in Edinburgh in early April 2013.

Timo and I graded and onlined ourselves, as we always do now. He had a major technical challenge in that my 11-minute shot was filmed at nearly 30 frames per second, whereas lots of the other material was 24 or 25 fps. We mixed the sound with Ali Murray in Edinburgh but, on lay-back, Timo discovered that the various frame rates were causing major synch problems, so he had to laboriously cut out frames. Poor guy. The test in Screen 1 in Edinburgh was for us to judge how to treat my

11-minutes of footage, so that its 30fps would suffer least in being downgraded to 24 fps. It suffered a bit - there is a slight softening and edge stepping, but I saw it on a huge screen in Cannes and it looked OK. The music clearances created a lot of work for producer Adam. I’d selected some Messiaen, which had to be approved by his estate, and a lovely, jaunty section from the score of Lubitsch’s film Kohlhiesel’s Daughters (1920).

The paintings by Van Gogh also needed to be cleared more complex work for Adam. The website was designed by the brilliant Iranian film and jazz critic Ehsan Khoshbakht.

Initially the film looked like its World Premiere would be Edinburgh in June 2013, but then came the call from Cannes! Tell me how that felt when you learned that your film would play the Cannes Film Festival and then how your first Cannes experience was with your film and the reception it received?

A degree of hyperventilation took place. The invitation from Cannes came in an email from Thierry Fremaux, the festival’s artistic director. He said that he’d watched the film that morning and that he loved it. I called Adam.

He was a bit lost for words too, partially because we had

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so little time to subtitle the film, etc. Adam speaks good French and I can read it, so we were able to go through the draft titles line by line to get the best sense we could.

I’d been to Cannes 19 times, so to screen a film there, in one of their massive cinemas, was amazing. The audience was full of programmers, curators, and very knowledgeable people, so I was extra worried. I got rather drunk. Emails piled in. So did the reviews. My career subtly changed.

Please can you talk about this season and how you went about selecting the films to be included and the events that will take place around its launch?

The season is managed by Adam Dawtrey and Rod White at Filmhouse. Many of the films I’ve chosen are in A Story Of Children And Film. Even more than it, I wanted Cinema of Childhood to be about films beyond both the mainstream and the art house classics. We are doing a three-film focus on one of the greatest directors Since the Cannes screening the film has played all of children, Mohammad-Ali Talebi, who will come to round the world at various film festivals of which the UK from Iran. Some of the films that I wanted are not available (I’d hoped for a tribute to the great Danish you have either attended or done Skype Q&As. What comments have you received from those peo- director Astrid Henning-Jensen, but we can only show ple that have seen the film and any that have stood one of her movies).

Many of the movies are watchable by children, or teenout to you? agers, but I didn’t want to confine myself to those. The films in the season are all lovely cinematic investigations The most frequent question is “how do I see all these of this, essays in freedom and escape. At the launch, if it films?” The most frequently used word in the discussion works, I’d like to try to do something unusual, a fictional seems to be “poetic”. People are surprised that the film introduction, if possible. We’ll see…! isn’t very factual - in my commentary I often don’t even say who the director is, which is a no-no for films about And what next for Mark Cousins? films. But I was, as you know, interested in visual rhyme and sonic rhythm, the tonalities of Cezanne, not the I’m completing two films. One, Life, Maybe which I exactitudes of film history. I’ve liked it when the discussions address the fact that this isn’t a film about movies so have co-directed with the great Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari. We have each contributed sections to it. Hers are much, as about the relationship between childhood and beautiful. I’m also completing 6 Desires: DH Lawrence movies. Make films about two apparently and Sardinia, which is based on an idea by Laura Marunconnected things. cellino. It is produced by Samm Haillay, Laura Marcellino and Duane Hopkins. I’m also working on two other From April the film will be released by Dogwoof in selected cinemas and initially be part of a season projects, one set in my hometown and Belfast and one in Stockholm. If they work, they will be part of a set of five you have curated at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh movies that I hope to make about cities.

and the BFI before then touring the country.

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Vérité’s Top 5 Mistaken Identity Movies

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5.

Red Rock West (1933) This seldom scene, pulpy Texan noir epitomises the sort of spunky B-movie with a budget that America was so good at producing in the eighties and nineties. In one of his least unhinged leading man roles, Nicolas Cage stars as the pitiable Michael, an out of work drifter down to his last buck. He stumbles into a cruddy watering hole in Red Rock, Wyoming, where the bar owner, Wayne (the late, great J.T. Walsh), mistakes him for “Lyle from Dallas” – a hitman he’s hired to rub out his unchaste wife, Suzanne (a sultry Lara Flynn Boyle). Rather than correct him, Michael takes the money for his own and runs to tell Suzanne that her life is in danger.

A counter-hit is put on the table, more money offered, and an inevitable sex romp ensues.

Directed and co-written by the crucially overlooked thriller filmmaker John Dahl, Red Rock West is the sort of campy, twisty, sexy riot that Lee Daniels could only dream of making. Taking the mistaken identity premise full circle, when Dennis Hopper turns up as the bona-fide assassin, things are bound to end ugly, probably in a graveyard brawl. Luke Richardson

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4.

Intimate Strangers (2004) Released in 2004, Intimate Strangers saw French auteur Patrice Leconte’s continuing his streak of exemplary warped romance fables with an icily sinister edge. Fabrice Luchini is the hermitic accountant William Faber, whose lonesome existence is ruptured when a distressed woman named Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) totters into his office and starts pouring out her heart and soul. She has mistaken him for an attentive psychiatrist, and he doesn’t have the moxie to tell her she’s mistaken. As the chance meeting turns into a recurring appointment, their fallacious relationship blooms into something far more sinister.

Leconte has a deft ability to create thrilling adult movies that do not submit to formula. On the surface, Intimate Strangers is a gentle film about unlikely companionship, but beneath its pleasant veneer and sagaciously voyeuristic cinematography is a story of profound psychological portent. Luke Richardson

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3.

The Big Lebowski (1998) How could this Top 5 list be complete without mention of this indomitable Coen brothers smash?

Cementing his status in cult film royalty, Jeff Bridges stars as ‘The Dude’, otherwise legally known as Jeffrey Lebowski, an affable shirker living the simple life. His humble stoner existence is shook when two thugs mistake him for a millionaire of the same last name and piss on his hallway rug in contempt. Enlisting the help of his potentially psychotic bowling buddies (Steve Buscemi and John Goodman); The Dude sets out on a hapless journey to seek restitution for his spoilt furnishings.

A master class in using a hokey narrative conceit to loosely frame a comedy of errors and eccentricity, The Big Lebowski is the antithesis of the classic “mistaken identity” premise. A sprightly postmodern pastiche of the gumshoe capers, glitzy musicals and romantic screwball comedies of yesteryear. Luke Richardson

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2.

The Lodger (1927) If there’s one filmmaker whose work laid the foundation for the mistaken identity conceit, it’s Hitchcock. While most of you savant Vérité readers would probably expect the likes of North By Northwest or The Wrong Man to bother this month’s top five list, it’s The Master of Suspense’s underpraised silent film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog that takes our tokenistic Hitchcock biscuit.

In a not so subtle nod to the Jack the Ripper folklore, Ivor Norvello plays Jonathan Drew, a reticent young fellow who takes up a room in a London boarding house.

His arrival into town unfortunately coincides with the pandemonium caused by a mysterious lady-killer lurking in the midnight shadows known as “The Avenger”, whom he also shares a striking resemblance. Before long, the witch-hunt congregates at Jonathan’s door stoop. But is he the killer in question or just a reclusive weirdo?

Far from his first feature, The Lodger is a potent foreshadowing of the genius that was still to come from Hitchcock. Beyond it’s timely expressionistic acting and chiaroscuro design, the cinematography is often quite intoxicating, with over-thehead tracking and trick shots that would become one of his many trademarks.

Luke Richardson

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1.

The Great Dictator (1940) Ok, so some of you may be rolling your eyes here, believing our number one choice to be a little bit cliché. But you’re wrong. When it comes to the power and relevancy of the mistaken identity plot, nothing could ever reach the same level of majesty as Chaplin’s controversial 1940 satire on the fascistic reign that was threatening world democracy during World War Two. There really is nothing more to say. Not only is The Great Dictator a peerless mistaken identity comedy (showcasing two of Chaplin’s career best performances), it is one of the best films of all time. Of course, you already know that. But sixty-four years on from its first release, it’s important to keep remembering. Make no mistake, it’s a masterpiece. Luke Richardson

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T H FESTIVAL G E A N D A words by Evrim Ersoy

lways blessed with a diverse and interesting line-up, the 12th Edition of Kinoteka Polish Film Festival sees the festival back in 2014 with a bumper five-week celebration of Polish film, music and visual arts.

The highlights of the festival will include a showcase of New Polish Cinema, including Traffic Department and London Film Festival favourite Ida as well as new films from directors such as Jacek Bromski and Marcel Łoziński. The opening gala of the festival will be Papusza, a biography of the rise and fall of Bronisława Wajs.

The Festival is also host to some incredible sidebar events, especially connecting cinema and music. Perhaps the most interesting of these events is the closing night gala which will be taking place at Union Chapel, which will see the premiere of two short films by the brilliant Quay Brothers, with a live soundtrack provided by the legendary Arditti Quartet. The same event will also see a live performance by Skalpel – a polish DJ/producer duo who are famous for sampling Polish jazz of the 60’s and 70’s and distorting it to create their own unique sound.

Perhaps the two most fascinating sections of the festival are both unique retrospectives. One titled ‘Sex behind the Iron Curtain’ will see the festival look at the attitude to sex and intimacy behind the Iron Curtain with a number of shorts from the Communist period.

The second retrospective will be a look at the oft-neglected works of Walerian Borowczyk for whom this will represent the first real UK retrospective. Borowcyzk’s unique visuals will be on the big screen both at the BFI and ICA screened through newly restored prints which makes this entire section an unmissable opportunity for film enthusiasts.

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ABU HARAZ director Maciej J. Drygas

Filmed over a number of years, Maciej Drygas’ gentle documentary follows the strife and daily routines of a small village on the banks of the Nile in the middle of Northern Sudan. Like Raymond Depardon’s exquisite trilogy on French life, Profils Paysans, this low-key but high-impact documentary leaves the rhythm of the seasons and the arising issues of the people lead the plot and action impressively creating a world of interesting characters and stories.

IDA director Pawel Pawlikowski

The story of Anna, a novice nun in the 1960’s, Ida follows her story as she discovers a dark secret within her family history, which might alter her entire life. Director Paweł Pawlikowski, using almost entirely static shots, creates a stilted but powerful drama where the performance of the actors takes centre stage. His ability to keep the sentimentality intact without ever becoming mawkish is also testament to his ability considering the dark turns the narrative takes and actress Agata Trzebuchowska gives a powerhouse performance in the lead role, at once naïve and steely determined.

Ida is certainly worth watching on the big screen so one can be struck by its sheer emotional impact.

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Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival 2014 words by James Marsh

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ucked away in the snowy climes of Japan’s northernmost prefecture, Hokkaido, is the tiny city of Yubari. A booming mining town back in the early 20th century, the city shifted its economic focus to harvesting melons when the mines closed, but nevertheless filed for bankruptcy in 1996.

Essentially a ghost town with just a few thousand elderly residents, for one weekend of the year, Yubari is brought ferociously back to life when it plays host to the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival. A riotous celebration of the country’s independent genre film industry, the festival is a four-day onslaught where fringe filmmakers such as Yoshihiro Nishimura and Noboru Iguchi are revered as grandmasters of the medium.

In years past the festival has played host to such dignified guests as Jon Voight, Dennis Hopper, Steve Martin and Johnnie To, while Quentin Tarantino was so taken by the city he named Chiaki Kuriyama’s deadly schoolgirl in Kill Bill Vol.1, Go Go Yubari in its honour.

Now in its 24th year, the festival - as with Yubari itself - has been plagued by financial woes, but a new partnership with Sky Perfect Movie Channel suggests a brighter

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future may lie ahead. Despite the frugalities behind the scenes and the sub-zero temperatures outside, the indomitable spirit of the hosts and attendees remains as strong and committed as ever to bringing outrageous stories of horror, fantasy, action and even sex to the screen.

As ever the programme for the 2014 edition of Yubari IFFF proved as large as it was diverse, boasting a number of competitive categories for short films as well as features, many by young filmmakers either still at university or only a few years into their professional careers. These shorts are always an eclectic melee of avant garde animations, splatter gore horror films and absurdist comedies, varying as much in quality as they do in subject matter.

Adding to the eccentricity of the festival, these X-rated amuse-bouches play happily alongside some of the year’s most prestigious and decorated Hollywood productions, with Steve McQueen’s Best Picture Oscar winner 12 Years A Slave, Disney’s record-breaking animated musical Frozen and Seth Rogen’s star-studded crowd-pleaser This Is The End all enjoying their Japanese debuts as part of the Yubari line-up.

The main focus of the festival programme is the Off-Theatre Competition, a dozen or so mostly Japanese

Gun Woman

language features and shorts, which compete directly against one another for the Grand Prix. The top prize includes 2 million yen (just shy of £12,000), which the winning director is to put towards his next project, with the festival hosting the world premiere of that film out of competition the following year.

Typically, all films playing in the Off-Theatre Competition are world premieres, but this year the Grand Prix was won by Lisa Takeba’s sci-fi rom-com The Pinkie, which had screened to favourable reviews at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam earlier in the month.

The Pinkie tells the story of a young man who becomes mixed up with a yakuza’s girlfriend and has his little finger chopped off. A young female admirer recovers the lost digit, but instead of returning it to its rightful owner, sets about cloning the lad for her own personal use. Takeba’s quirky, light-hearted tone, eccentric plotting and day-glo aesthetic made The Pinkie a worthy winner, but the rest of line-up promised some strong competition.

Kurando Mitsutake’s Gun Woman, starring former AV actress and Yubari regular Asami (The Machine Girl, Robogeisha) was something of an audience favourite, and secured the second prize Special Jury Award. Filmed

in California, mostly in English, Gun Woman is a high concept slice of knowingly schlocky pulp fiction, in which a bereaved surgeon transforms a meth-addicted wastrel into a gun-toting angel of vengeance. As with many of the films screening at Yubari, production values take a backseat in favour of ambitious concepts and spirited execution, for which Gun Woman deserves ample praise.

The third-placed Governor of Hokkaido Award went to Atsushi Ueda’s School Girl Gestation, a typically quirky high school tale, starring Rina Takeda, the young martial artiste from High Kick Girl and Dead Sushi, who recently impressed in Tsuta Tetsuichiro’s straight drama The Tale of Iya. Based on a real-life event that took place in rural Massachusetts in 2008, School Girl Gestation transplants its bizarre tale of a group of female high schoolers who make a pregnancy pact to a small coastal Japanese town. While shooting for the light-hearted and fantastical, Ueda’s film manages to make a poignant comment about Japanese gender roles and family structures as well as the more universal growing pains of teenage life.

The biggest highlight of this year’s festival was doubtlessly the closing film - the world premiere of Seven Weeks, the latest work from legendary director Nobuhiko

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Seven Weeks

Obayashi, whose 1977 psychedelic horror film House has become something of a cult favourite in recent years.

Seven Weeks is an entirely different beast altogether, an epic 3-hour meditation about Japan’s war-time past, reawakened by the earthquake and nuclear disaster of 2011, told through the microcosm of a sprawling family whose ageing patriarch has just passed away. Destined for great things on the world stage in the months to come, it was a rare treat to encounter a new work from a true maverick of cinema completely fresh and free from any expectation or previous interpretation.

Beyond the realms of the prizewinners and commercial big hitters, however, Yubari always proves to be a treasure trove of baffling adventures into cinematic space that sadly may only shine publicly during this single celebration, before disappearing into obscurity forever more. Delightful oddities like Quanah Takahata and Hirohito Takino’s Fuck Me To The Moon, about two roommates who become musical rivals in their efforts to woo the same girl, or Kentaro Nakamura’s Free Kitchen, which charts a doting mother’s efforts to convert her son to cannibalism, may prove difficult to find in the future.

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Outside of the auditoriums, the festival put on a number of film-related events and exhibitions, foremost amongst which was an incredible show entitled Art of Kaiju, showcasing the incredible work of artist Yuji Kaida. Over the years his original incarnations of everything from Godzilla and Gamera to Ultraman and countless other iconic creatures of Japanese film and television were on display throughout the festival, while Kaida was also in attendance to chat with fans and sign his work.

The enduring memories from the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, however, invariably focus on the filmmakers and attendees themselves. For the most part, they are independent artists, outcasts from the legitimate Japanese industry, yet here they are hailed as genuine auteurs, actors and dream weavers, by an enthusiastic - if occasionally befuddled - audience. Where else can you stand in the snow late at night, huddled around a stove fire with, perhaps, an aspiring porn star, a creature FX veteran and an elderly gent wearing nothing but a melon-bear hat and a fundoshi loincloth, as you sip beer and chow down on barbecued deer meat? Go Go Yubari!

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Ghost Hunters

Kelsey Eichhorn continues our partnership with the Swedish Film Institute highlighting some of their personal favourites from their collection. This month’s addition - Searching for Sugar Man

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introduction by Swedish Film Institute

veryone loves an underdog. This is one reason why Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary about American singer-songwriter Rodriguez, Searching for Sugar Man, has been such a success.

Not only is the film about an underdog who, long after everyone has discounted him, achieves unlikely successes – the film itself is an underdog project; director Bendjelloul worked on it for four years and it was almost never finished. When the film was nearing completion the money ran out, and the bits that were left – editing, music and animation – were expensive. Bendjelloul gave up. But after a month or so he told himself it would be a crime against the project, and in particular against Rodriguez, not to complete the film. So he did the last bits himself, came into contact with producer Simon Chinn (who produced the acclaimed documentary Man on Wire, 2008) and submitted the film for the Sundance Film Festival – which agreed to screen it. And the rest is history. Searching for Sugar Man became a worldwide success and won many awards, including an Academy Award for Best Documentary.

But of course the film’s most important underdog is Rodriguez himself. At the beginning of the film he is a mysterious figure: an artist who released two brilliant albums in the early 1970s, which sold so poorly that the record company let him go – and he disappeared. But without his knowledge his music becomes tremendously popular in South Africa, among the young anti-apartheid generation. Rumour has it that Rodriguez has died, but a few fans decide to find out what really happened to the enigmatic artist. It is their search that Bendjelloul depicts in his film. He leaves it as long as possible before revealing Rodriguez himself, which has the same dramatic effect as when Roland Emmerich chose not to show the aliens in trailers for Independence Day (1996); audiences had to wait until they saw the film at the cinema – a perfectly exploited contrast between expectation and reward.

Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary that acts like a feature film, and it has an aesthetic that breaks with the conventional ‘authentic’ style still predominant in Swedish documentaries. It is stylish, elegant and seasoned with wonderful animated sequences. And it also sounds extremely good.

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words by Kelsey Eichhorn

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he world of documentary film is undeniably harsh - there’s high expectation, intense competition and shockingly little financial resource. As narratives, documentary films toil under different conditions than features; held to a different set of rules yet equally high standards. Recently documentary films have enjoyed some resurgence in popularity, with a marked increase in theatrical releases of documentaries over the past decade.

If anything the standards are now even higher, the competition that much more fierce. The best films are those that borrow from their feature counterparts - that embrace the inherently narrative nature of true life and work subtly and tirelessly to enhance and support their stories in a genuine and sincere way.

It is in this elite class that we find Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man (2012). A wistful yet gripping documentary surrounding the search for an impact of a forgotten folk musician, Sixto Rodriguez. Bendjelloul’s film is crafted out of the typical documentary assets (interviews, archival footage and illustrative animation), yet unfolds initially like your standard mystery film. It is obvious from the start that Bendjelloul is a master storyteller, as the film is so carefully and intentionally crafted; attention is paid not only to the content but the aesthetic style of the story.

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From the opening scene, it is clear the narrative structure of Searching for Sugar Man is not your typical factual account. In two seemingly disparate story lines, Bendjelloul cuts between painting a picture of a young minority musician struggling to make ends meet while living on the mean streets of America’s rust belt in the 1960s and the politically-charged music scene of 1980s apartheid South Africa. Through a combination of talking-head interviews, archival footage and the deeply moving tracks from Rodriguez’s three albums (two completed, one unpublished), Searching for Sugar Man delivers a complex and intriguing story bit by bit, inviting the audience to piece together an unexpected puzzle.

The “reveal” of the film - when the two South African “musicology detectives”, as they’re labelled, discover that Rodriguez is alive and living in Detroit, Michigan - is clothed in such emotional significance that it still resonates deeply even with those who already know Rodriguez’s story. Director of Photography Camilla Skagerström’s vision is the key to completing this cinematic trifecta of compelling content, narrative structure and visual expressivity. Smooth pans and simple tracking shots set to Rodriguez’s haunting lyrics consistently draw the audience in, inviting quiet reflection to the story.

Archival footage is utilised prudently in manners both directly relevant and delightfully atmospheric, maintaining

the distinctly cinematic feel of the film.

If the best documentaries are those that subtly imbue their topics with a cinematic perspective, the worst are those that fall prey to the seductions of the field of journalism. The two industries, while undeniably linked, are so fundamentally different that one often becomes the other’s downfall. Luckily, Bendjelloul’s vision resists such simple confusion. While for the most part critically acclaimed, Searching for Sugar Man’s detractors across the board tend to site perceived ‘gaps’ in the story - what happened to the royalty money from Rodriguez’s sales in South Africa? Why don’t we hear about his simultaneous popularity in New Zealand and Australia, where he travelled to play concerts in the 1970s? What about his recent visits to Sweden and Great Britain? These reviewers are missing the point. They’ve seen the film but not understood its story or its power.

It is possible to read into Rodriguez’s story what is expected - a recluse who rather reluctantly reveals himself after years of obscurity answering only the bare minimum of Blendjelloul’s questions. It is natural to expect a cynical, dejected man, bitter at his perceived failure and enraged at the injustice of the life lost (had Rodriguez known of his popularity all those years ago - and had royalty cheques reached their rightful owner - things could have no doubt been very different for the Rodriguez

family). The man that’s portrayed, however, is anything but expected. Returning to the stage in South Africa to play for 5000+ crazed fans that span generations, Rodriguez couldn’t look more at home. He takes his rightful place as a master storyteller, performer and artist with an abundance of humility yet inherent confidence. It is a tale of contentment rather than jubilance, expertly walking the thin line between a feeling of smugness and fulfilment.

Sugar Man is not a biographical documentary. It is not the full account of a musician’s career, nor an investigation into music industry fraud. It is a human story.

There are any number of side-plots that could have been developed out of the film, and doubtless more ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. But Bendjelloul sees in the simple mystery of Rodriguez’s career an honest and empowering portrayal of the nature of fame and the need for heroes. This is the story he chose to tell, and it is a story that not only deserved to be told, it needed to be told. True documentary directors don’t find their stories, the stories find them, and it seems no accident that the telling of the Rodriguez’s story fell to the capable and insightful Malik Bendjelloul.

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The Biting Truth

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An Unusual Talent Oliver Hermanus Evrim Ersoy highlights the relatively new but undoubtedly engaging career of Oliver Hermanus

words by Evrim Ersoy

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t is a testament to the talent of 27-year-old Cape Town filmmaker Oliver Hermanus that he has made the sort of impact it takes others filmmakers much longer to achieve, with only two feature titles under his belt.

Originally a photographer, Hermanus was spotted by Hollywood blockbuster director Roland Emmerich, who put the young man through London Film School and then backed his first feature, Shirley Adams.

Hermanus is an unusual talent; his films are distinctly evocative of the land from which they come. He makes films in Afrikaans and constructs adult stories with three-dimensional characters that can be highly paradoxical. It’s no surprise that his second film won Hermanus the Queer Palm at Cannes and that it divided audiences sharply when it was screened at LFF in 2011.

Hermanus’s first feature Shirley Adams, which he also

co-wrote, can appear on surface an all-too-familiar tale Shirley (played with incredible poignancy by the talented Denise Newman), a devoted and downtrodden mother finds himself caring for her son who is paraplegic after being shot in the back of the neck in a gang fight after school. Shirley has no job, no husband and no money, and the medical bills for Donovan are not cheap. On the other side of the scale is Donovan who is incredibly bitter at his condition and would like nothing more than to die.

Their life is not easy. Enter Tamsin – a social care worker who has been sent to help Shirley care for Donovan.

Although the initial encounter is incredibly resentful and tense, the two women slowly find a common ground.

Although the plot might strike some as the re-hash of a scenario played out many times before, Hermanus’s careful direction and the gritty feel converge to create a unique atmosphere.

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The cinematography in the film is simple and unobtrusive; perhaps a touch of Mike Leigh’s observatory style can be detected whilst the desperation in Donovan’s situation is never under-played. Hermanus’s aim here is not to go for cheap emotional manipulation but rather to expose how tough life can be in post-apartheid South Africa – whilst still maintaining a realistic optimism.

The identity of Donovan’s shooter brings a new layer into the story as the truth is harder than any of the family members expect – the nature of the act brings an emotional burden to Adams almost biblical in proportion.

Watching Shirley Adams it is the impassive, non-judgemental, observatory eye of Hermanus which stands out the most – striking images combined with emotional honesty.

Hermanus’s second feature is perhaps indicative of the growth the young director’s experiences between the two films. If Shirley Adams represents Hermanus finding his feet both behind the camera and in terms of writing, then Beauty sees the director-writer reaching further.

Beauty tells the story of Francois (Deon Lotz) who finds himself becoming obsessed with his nephew Chris-

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tian (Charlie Keegan in a very difficult role). From the opening of the film Francois’s gaze is fixed upon Christian and through the running time he slowly but surely starts to unravel because of his obsession.

What is effectively the tale of a middle-aged man’s obsession with a young man, a theme explored in Death in Venice and countless other films, is here given a new spin by Hermanus. The setting of the film, post-apartheid South Africa, is already unusual, but it’s the portrayal of Francois’s drab life combined with his extra-curricular activities that fuse to create a chilling portrait of a man removed from much of society but embracing life.

Francois, at first, is a classic case of repression; he has a family, a successful business and a bitter resentment which surfaces from time to time – but he also attends homosexual orgies in out-of-town locations with a group of men who seem to treat the entire venture like an everyday occurrence. They also exhibit a casual racism and discrimination, banning one of their members for arriving with a young South African man who is clearly gay.

The blandness of the group is a shocking sight, almost like discovering the weekenders in The Shooting Party to

“The film questions the idea of beauty, the nature of existence and the destruction of innocence with a maturity that we don’t encounter often. Its brutal nature is often shocking and engaging.” be violent beasts. Their repetitive re-iteration of a ‘no fags rule’ is both ironic and frightening.

Francois’s obsession inevitably spirals out of control.

First it’s minor transgressions like ruining his daughter’s day at the beach with Francois or trying to create excuses to see Christian more often. However, his pent-up anger will finally be unleashed in a scene that can count itself as one of the more disturbing sequences in film – a brutal assault on Christian which he treats with the upmost casualty.

It’s also to Hermanus’s credit that he does not sensationalize the sequence – and in fact adds more unbearable tension by revealing the aftermath to be almost consequence-free and as ordinary as the rest of the film. The static shots, coupled with the scope shoot, envelop the viewer in this ordinary madness which leaves an unforgettable mark on the audience. The film opens with an incredible tracking shot at a wedding party where we move through the parting crowd to observe Francois observing in turn – and this frame of reference becomes the key point of the whole film. Francois impassive and observing throughout – leaving the viewer to wonder if

behind the observation lay any feelings or emotions. The answer is deftly revealed, culminating in the aforementioned sequence where we discover Francois’s isolation is so severe even an act of belligerent violence does not register within him. He is a man drowned in his own isolation.

The film questions the idea of beauty, the nature of existence and the destruction of innocence with a maturity that we don’t encounter often. Its brutal nature is often shocking and engaging – and it presents a window into South Africa we are rarely afforded. Hermanus’s next work, which is still not finished or released, promises an increased scope for the young director, a reported $5 million budget and a cross-continent shoot had the trade magazines remarking that this new film would be of ‘biblical proportions’.

It’ll be interesting to see if Hermanus can pull off the singularly fixed dissection of character he has achieved in his first two smaller features on a larger scale. Whatever happens, there’s no doubt that he is a talent to watch.

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Masters of Cinema

White Dog Not every man’s best friend is as it seems - David Hall discusses Samuel Fuller’s fascinating film, White Dog

words by David Hall

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he great Sam Fuller’s last American film – supressed by its studio backers Paramount after some earnest but ill-judged intervention by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – has a storyline that could be ripped from a tabloid newspaper or one of those grotesquely compelling ‘true-life’ magazines; actress Julie (Kirsty McNichol) hits a German shepherd on the Los Angeles highway and takes it home to care for it; only to discover the animal has been specifically trained to attack black people. After a near-fatal incident on set while shooting a TV commercial, when the dog savages Julie’s black friend and colleague Molly, Julie takes the animal to Noah’s Ark – a sanctuary run by Carruthers (Burl Ives). Carruthers recognises the beast as a ‘White Dog’, and entrusts it to trainer Keys (Paul Winfield) who sets about

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‘de-programming the beast. Crude, bizarre material for a film, but appropriate subject matter for a filmmaker who started out as a journalist and crime reporter, and even more so in that, surprisingly, it is at least partially based on a true story.

The narrative around Paramount’s decision to muzzle White Dog (the film was unavailable in the US for a decade and slipped out on VHS in the UK in the mid-80s) has always been told as one made along racial lines; that the studio, after rejecting the diligent notes of Willis Edwards, a representative from the NAACP, were threatened with boycott action and decided not to support the film’s release in the US. I’m certain that of equal importance to this decision, backed up by the film’s producer Jon Davison, was the fact that Fuller had delivered a freaky, hard to sell allegorical B-movie about institutionalised racism, animal

cruelty and American ignorance – rather than a classic, easily marketable ‘man against beast’ animal exploitation picture in the vein of Jaws. This is a genuinely strange piece of work, bizarre even by Fuller standards.

The source material, Chien Blanc, is a fictionalised, semi-autobiographical novel published in 1970 by the French writer Romain Gary. Gary’s original tale has the same skeleton as the film, but in all other respects is very different, reflecting as it does his own disintegrating relationship with the actress Jean Seberg, and her obsession with, and subsequent assimilation into, the Black Panther movement. He and Seberg did actually find – and adopt – what they discovered to be a ‘white dog’ but the approaches and themes of book and film are very different and Gary’s original ending was not one Fuller was interested in pursuing. But Fuller only ever did things his way anyway, and by the time White Dog came to the screen, none of the books participants were around to have any say anyway (Seberg and Gary both committed suicide in succession, in 1979 and 1980 respectively).

Fuller was one of the cherished directors of the Nouvelle Vague and with good reason. His films – direct, intense B-pictures – were exactly the kinds of works Francois Truffaut and especially Jean-Luc Godard ,who cast Fuller in his film Pierrot Le Fou (1963), adored. Fuller was not critically appreciated in the States, but his films were cheap and made money, so he was given a free reign to make the kind of pictures he wanted.

It’s no surprise these early films were shot through with intense emotions and despair. Fuller started out in newspapers as a cartoonist in his teens, was reporting on lurid, violent crimes and murders before he was twenty and then went off to fight as an infantryman (notice he didn’t go as a war reporter). The kind of life that a macho director like John Milius wished he had, Fuller actually lived. Where today’s action directors come straight from shooting commercials or music videos, Fuller had – by the time he got round to making films at 36 – seen the evil that men are capable of, and would continue writing and directing about that until his death in 1997. A larger-than-life, bullish character, it took a long while for Fuller and his work to be put into proper context in his homeland, but European auteurs embraced him for his audacity and verve and, along with the fan worship of the French New Wavers, he was also beloved by Wim Wenders who cast him in his 1982 film The State Of Things.

Fuller’s early, aggressive quickies were made on a shoestring, and were mostly successes (Park Row, self-funded, was an exception) but he personally made very little cash. Despite their on-the-hoof style, Fuller had a genuine visual flair and composition; his style and technique favours kinesis and energy. Think of the camerawork in his films;

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always tracking, scoping, swirling; right in the heart of the action. And the terse titles of his best work – I Shot Jesse James, Forty Guns, The Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor – read like lurid newspaper headlines.

White Dog can be seen as Fuller’s horror film but one that eschews the traditional route of ‘animal exploitation’ features. Fuller incorporates some visceral and disturbing sequences; most notably the aforementioned attack on Julie’s friend, and subsequent savage, and extremely graphic, attacks in a church and on the street. Time and again in the film, Fuller and his writer Curtis Hanson subvert cliché, even as their film revels in B-movie dynamics. Interestingly the film switches its focus from Julie to Keys the minute the trainer appears, and the film becomes about this proud, complex man’s personal quest to confront and correct racism wherever he can. And Fuller could easily make a bogeyman of the dog’s original racist trainer, but when he initially appears he seems like an affable pensioner, with two rosy-cheeked granddaughters in tow.

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Ultimately, White Dog is a B-movie shot at a time when Hollywood and the studios had discarded the notion of having supporting features of that kind. It uses the trappings of exploitation cinema – Fuller goes heavy on the zooms and close-ups, uses slow-motion judiciously and the score is ramped up at all the expected flashpoint moments – and Hanson gives his central protagonists some ripe old dialogue, all the while saying some very honest and unmerciful (and uncomfortable) things.

As in much of Fuller’s work there’s sadness at the core of the film, and its despairing and downbeat ending realises the enormity of tackling racism; that it is an ongoing struggle, a continual, exhausting battle against idiocy and indoctrination.

The film’s cult credentials are impeccable. Directed with a freakish and palpable energy by the then 67 year old Fuller; with orchestrated slo-mo death sequences straight out of a late 70s De Palma picture; based on Gary’s highly personal and polemical tract; drafted by the young Hanson fresh off the success of thriller The Silent

Partner (1978); shot by Clint Eastwood’s regular collaborator Bruce Surtees and with a minimal score from the legendary Ennio Morricone (reminiscent of his own work on Lucio Fulci’s Lizard In A Woman’s Skin).

This Masters Of Cinema edition is even sparser than the previous Criterion release. The 45 page booklet reprints Jonathan Rosenbaum’s essay on the film, while disappointingly excising the excellent Armond White piece (‘Fuller Vs Racism’) from the US release which is much more interesting. The booklet also includes an ‘interview ‘between Fuller and the dog (!), plus a few notes on the film and its production. There’s such little existing material about this film, and because Paramount shelved it there isn’t even a theatrical trailer, so a lack of additional material is to be expected. White Dog was a relatively cheaply-made B picture and visually has a slightly made for TV quality to it. However, the excellent night shooting by Surtees is beautifully handled by this transfer, with excellent shadow and detail, and the close- up sequences of the dog reveal a great deal of texture. The picture is

mostly pin sharp and clear. The sound is taken from a mono source, so lacks a little bite and dynamism – but Morricone’s score is well presented and sounds sharp throughout.

While some additional extras to put the film’s troubled history into context would’ve been great, Eureka are to be commended for unmuzzling this lost oddity – allowing it to bear its teeth to a film culture where ‘exploitation’ directors are given millions of dollars and total freedom to make movies about institutionalised racism and awarded with Oscar nominations rather than studio betrayal and cowardice.

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White Dog is available on NOW courtesy of Eureka Entertainment. www.eurekavideo.co.uk

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In Defence...

Did You Miss the Humour?

I’m Still Here

words by Clarisse Loughrey

E

very single time it snows, I post a video on Facebook of Joaquin Phoenix screaming “do the fucking snow angel” while throwing himself down on the ground and flailing his limbs like an upturned tortoise. You’d think I’d get tired of it. But somehow that just hasn’t happened yet. In fact, no amount of viewings of I’m Still Here seem to quell that film’s ability to make me snort tea out of my nose laughing like the disgusting, uncultured human being I am. I guess you could call it my personal Anchorman, except that instead of endlessly quoting “I love lamp” it’s more along the lines of screaming “did someone just human shit on me?” several times over, which seems like significantly less appropriate material for jovial Facebook statuses your aunt can ‘like’.

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I’m Still Here is hands down one of my favourite comedies to stick on during a rainy day. Which is why it confuses me to the depths of my soul when people discuss this film outside the realms of the comedic genre, especially now that people have started lumping it together with whatever the hell Shia LaBeouf seems to be doing these days. You know, the whole performance art thing/ world’s most elaborate attempt to justify plagiarism.

Because I’m Still Here is a comedy, right? LaBeouf ’s “I’m Not Famous Anymore” project is an exercise in humourless brooding, but I’m Still Here is a movie in which a guy, who looks like a shaved brown bear, sincerely raps at P. Diddy the words: “I’m still here, I won’t kneel, I don’t fear, don’t even fear fuckin fear!”

I ask the question, whether I’m Still Here can largely

“While perhaps Affleck and Phoenix’s initial interest lay in exploring the unforgiving nature of celebrity culture, something I can understand lies on a fairly well-worn road, it seems to have developed beyond the two-dimensional into something far more interesting and complex.” be seen as a comedy, because the critical reaction seems to have almost wholly disagreed with me. In fact, the rebound from this film essentially amounted to a bunch of people scratching their heads and echoing the same single phrase of “who cares?” in a tone both sober and entirely sarcastic. And while I realise the danger of pitting myself against more than half of the world’s most esteemed critics, I can’t help but detect just a touch of bitterness in their assertions of ambivalence. A bitterness that I’m pretty sure rose out of the fact these people were furious they just got duped by the guy from Signs and were now expecting nothing short of a masterpiece in return for their embarrassment. Under those set of circumstances, I’m Still Here was pretty much set up to fail.

To make things even worse, some reviewers went so far as to regress into a state of complete denial rather than face their shame, and continued to believe in the film’s truth even though Phoenix and Affleck were both credited as writers; and in light of the fact that Ben Stiller has a cameo in it, in which it’s referenced that he may (or may not) be a nice guy/absolute dick. Like he does in every cameo ever. I’m sorry, am I the only one who saw that episode of Friends where he screamed at the little chick?

It’s essentially a case where a film’s preconceptions have

almost entirely destroyed its own reception. To have so many people fall for this hoax and believe that Phoenix was actually capable of this level of douchery is the resultant product of terrific acting talents and a society which believes Hollywood to be a pit of evil. You see, the issue here is that any stunt pulled by an A-list actor is inevitably going to be approached with an assumption of egotism; and thus Phoenix’s two year-long hoax was automatically interpreted as a call for sympathy for the plight of poor actors downtrodden by the unforgiving media. People resolutely failed to see the humour in I’m Still Here because we refuse to grant actors any sense of self-awareness and so refused to believe that Phoenix could have set out to intentionally mock the ridiculousness of his own existence. Surely he’s far too vain for that?

But in reality, that’s so clearly exactly what he set out to do. Lines such as “hate me or like me, just don’t misunderstand me” come off understandably insufferable when read straight, but look at them with a skewed eye and they become part of an absolutely unforgettable comedic creation.

It’s admittedly pretty hard not to draw comparisons between Phoenix’s performance and the stylings of Zach Galifianakis (beards aside). However, I’d argue Phoenix

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has pretty much taken the man-child character Galifianakis played in The Hangover to the point of total embodiment and to its most grotesque extremity. Watch him sit almost on the brink of tears reading a picture book, yet later demand his assistant to clip his back hair for him. And, in one of my favourite scenes, see him thrilled to learn that bees dance to communicate with each other but trail off, staring out of the window, with a muttered throwaway line of “they’re dying though, huh?”

On paper these all seem like scenes straight out of Galifianakis’ repertoire, but I’d argue Phoenix is no less capable of driving out laughs from these moments; it’s just more surprising coming from an actor who’s so far been associated almost purely with dark and brooding roles. Perhaps I’m Still Here’s failure was a self-fulfilling prophecy of its own first scene, in which Phoenix bemoans being trapped inside the stereotype of “intense and complicated”.

It probably doesn’t help that I’m Still Here doesn’t deliver its laughs on a platter for its audience. It forms part of that special breed of “difficult” comedies, along the lines of Wolf of Wall Street or the kind of thing Lars Von Trier likes to make. The ones that make for an awkward

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experience in the cinema where you constantly have to check yourself for whether it was socially inappropriate of you to have just laughed. Indeed, the Joaquin Phoenix of I’m Still Here represents one of the least glamorous and most repulsive cinematic representations of the rock n’ roll lifestyle. It makes Jordan Belfort crawling across the floor while drool pours out of his mouth look like a night at the Ritz. One scene where Phoenix snorts coke and looks up prostitutes on the internet plays like the world’s best “Say No to Drugs” promotion, as we watch him jump up and down and snigger like a troll who’s so very pleased with himself because he’ll never tell you where he hid his gold. It’s one of the truest representations of what’s actually kind of an underexplored side effect of cocaine abuse: that it just turns you into a gigantic asshole.

Which may be a far better lesson for the next generation than those overly romanticised “fall from graces” we’re used to, the kind Phoenix himself played in Walk the Line (which FYI I adore, but it does unfortunately fall prey to like 99% of biopic tropes).

But “who cares?” Right? I’ll admit to those searching for the great metaphor lying within I’m Still Here won’t

find it presented to them by Casey Affleck on one knee holding a giant velvet ring box. Its greatest flaw is that it meanders a little too wilfully in its long takes and lack of structural narrative, simply finding its joy in spending time with its egotistical protagonist and his increasingly weary friends. Which makes it “not for everyone”, yet still not the unmitigated disaster so many would like you to view it as.

For I’m Still Here, as much I’m trying to get its humour across, is not without substance. While perhaps Affleck and Phoenix’s initial interest lay in exploring the unforgiving nature of celebrity culture, something I can understand lies on a fairly well-worn road, it seems to have developed beyond the two-dimensional into something far more interesting and complex. The media is brutal and sadistic, that we get, but how much is this preyed upon Joaquin Phoenix really deserving of our empathy? He treats his assistants like trash, forcing his supposed close friend to live in a bedroom which could easily double up as a prison cell, whilst constantly berating them for the failures in his own life (including the fact he slept through Obama’s inauguration). He announces his

retirement during a charity play honouring another actor and, on top of that, has the gall to get furious at Affleck for letting him get stuck in scenes with Danny DeVito.

He absolutely believes in his own musical talent with an unwavering arrogance leading to countless scenes in which arguments with friends are broken up with him aggressively rapping at them as they stare back blankly.

Yet, for all of this, there’s a deep sense of melancholy in the film’s closing moments, as the comedic highs of his (now infamous) Letterman interview come crashing down into a total breakdown. Sure, he blames his assistants as usual, yet the following scenes seem him fly to Panama to visit his father (actually Daddy Affleck) and return to the waterfall that the film first showed him leaping off as a child. And, as he walks through the river with one trouser leg rolled up and a rat’s nest of hair on top of his head, we’re left conflicted as to how much of a figure of ridicule he really deserves to be. For a brief moment we’re reminded that behind every unbearable, spoilt actor lies a child searching for lost freedoms. But only so very briefly. It’s up to you to decide if it’s enough of an excuse for wasting P. Diddy’s time.

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Blue Ruin

cert (15)

director Jeremy Saulnier writer Jeremy Saulnier starring Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves

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Review by Paul Martinovic

release date 2nd May

There are few types of stories that lend themselves as well to the big screen as tales of revenge. Obviously the implicit promise of cathartic violence or at the very least some juicy conflict as a starting point suggests that the film is probably going to have to work pretty hard to bore you. However, there’s possibly another reason why revenge is perfect for film: it almost entirely does away with the need for exposition, so often the bête noire of screenplays everywhere. Revenge is elemental, primal: the need to get your own back is a concept the entire human race is familiar with. For a tale of revenge, you hardly need to know if your protagonist is good or bad, gay or straight, or rash or considered, before you understand their motivation completely. In a revenge film, exposition requires little more than: “You killed my father: prepare to die.”

All of which almost certainly undersells the remarkable economy with which indie thriller Blue Ruin sets up its familiar story. We spend no more than a few minutes of screen time with Dwight Evans before he is informed that his parents’ murderer is to be set free, a revelation that immediately triggers a campaign of retribution. In that short time though, thanks to Jeremy Saulnier’s impressively assured direction and Marcon Blair’s superb lead performance , we find out everything about him: namely, that this is a man effectively died when his parents did, and exists now in only the barest sense of the word, leading as he does an entirely solitary existence and subsisting primarily off garbage.

Blue Ruin’s a very good revenge film – the best since Chan-Wook Park’s Lady Vengeance – but in execution feels less along the lines of the grindhouse classic s that have come to be associated with the genre, and more in the tradition of classic noir: at one point a character tells Dwight: “I’d forgive you if you were mad, but you’re not. You’re weak,” which is a wonderfully concise description of the basis of practically every film noir plot ever told.

Perhaps the most obvious touch points, however, are the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple and Fargo: Blue Ruin shares their bumbling protagonists, predilection for none-more-black comedy and a determination to see the carnage through to a grimly logical conclusion.

It’s an exciting, gripping 90 minutes, but beyond the surface thrills you’ll likely leave Blue Ruin marvelling at how expertly made it is. Saulnier’s laconic script is lean and effective; the cinematography (also by Saulnier) is sumptuous, and the acting is uniformly excellent. Even the sound design, all horror-movie floorboard creaks and deafening silences, is thrillingly tense and well-judged.

With Blue Ruin, Saulnier has made a sophomore feature to be reckoned with and announced himself as a film-maker to watch; a name to file alongside the likes of David Michod, Sean Durkin and Ben Wheatley, as directors with the rare ability to coax A-Movie quality out of B-movie subjects and Z-movie budgets.

Tracks

release date 25th April

Review by Kelsey Eichhorn

In the publicity surrounding what is perhaps John Curran’s most popular film, The Painted Veil (2006), Curran often commented that he was drawn towards character-driven stories. He would never, he repeatedly told interviewers, be one of those high-end, fast-paced visual effects guys - he was neither good at nor interested in that sort of storytelling. Curran thus far seems true to his word. His most recent feature, Tracks, tells the story of Robyn Davidson’s epic trek across the Australian desert. The story is fundamentally character-driven, and Curran’s treatment makes it even more so, but interestingly the strength of this film arguably lies not in what the audience learns about the protagonist, but in what remains a mystery.

Adapted from Robyn’s own book by Marion Nelsen, Tracks recounts how the young Davidson travelled 1,700 miles across the barren Western Australian desert. Starting in Alice Springs where she trained the four camels that would accompany her and her dog Digity, and ending in the brilliant turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean, the film meanders through Robyn’s various encounters and experiences never dwelling too long in one place but continually trekking slowly towards an intangible emotional climax.

Road movies (a genre of which Tracks is undeniably part) tend towards polarising ends of a spectrum - either inherently universal tales or fiercely personal experiences. Curran’s film strikes the rare balance of being both.

On the universal end, Tracks is a film that embodies possibility and speaks to the gone-but-notforgotten age of human exploration, of journey and exploration simply for exploration’s sake. On the other hand, Robyn’s character remains shrouded in a surprising level of mystery for such a dominant lead character. She is either unable or unwilling to put into words her personal motivation and it is this enduring question which more than anything else pulls the audience into her world.

The recent proliferation of fast-paced special effects has shed light on a distinctly alternative mode of cinematic story-telling, which finds its roots in the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Michelangelo Antonioni. The “aesthetic of slowness” can broadly be defined as cinema where the force and meaning of the narrative resides not within the traditionally accepted cause-and-effect formula but rather a more thoughtful treatment of time as an aesthetic factor that relies upon perception and the creation of an entire narrative diegesis. To some, this sounds unnecessarily complicated, to others, simply boring. But here’s what’s great about Slow Cinema: it is inherently interactive. Rather than being told a story or directed along a narrative, the audience are invited to create their own tale, to enter the world of the film and to find meaning that resonates personally for them. The result is a far more dynamic and poignant cinematic experience. Tracks is a film that challenges us each individually, pushing us to redefine our understanding of adventure and to examine the nature of human relationships. It may not be new, but rarely is it accomplished with such simple beauty.

cert (12a)

director John Curran writer Marion Nelson starring Mia Wasikowska, Adam Driver, Emma Booth

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Review by Kesley Eichhorn

We Are The Best!

release date 18th April

cert (15)

director Lukas Moodysson writer Lukas Moodysson starring Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin, Liv LeMoyne

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Swedish indie authority Lukas Moodysson has had a rough run of late. It’s probably inevitable when you consider the astoundingly high bar set by his 1998 debut feature, Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål), and the equally impressive follow-up titles Together (Tillsammans) and Lilya 4-Ever.

After all, nothing gold can stay, and it is undeniable that Moodysson’s foray into English-language cinema with 2009’s Mammoth was marked by critical and theatrical disappointment and derision. With his latest, We are the Best! (Vi är bäst!), Moodysson returns to his mother tongue and is back on top form, delivering a poignant evocation of early adolescence that is every bit as whimsical as it is sentimental.

Tomboyish teenagers Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) are not at all popular.

They despise the favoured new disco trend, don’t wear the obligatory mascara and fruity lip-gloss and, while Klara sports a Mohawk, Bobo has somewhat unadvisedly taken her hair styling into her own hands. They’re ahead of their time for the retro-indie feel as they clutch longingly at the fading 70’s punk scene. While the two best friends bond over mutually embarrassing parents and an intense dislike of gym class (which incidentally sparks their later punk-inspired manifesto aptly titled “Hate the Sport”), their personalities are markedly different, as is the case in all great duos.

While Klara is headstrong and impulsive, Bobo is rather less assertive. A fierce sense of rebellion and a definite belief in non-conformity unite the two in an undefined quest for the ethereal meaning of life. Despite no obvious musical ability on either’s part, Bobo and Klara’s fumbling search for direction births their very own garage band - sans the all-important guitarist. Cue Hedvig. A more unlikely recruit could hardly be found: a fiercely religious classical guitarist named Hedvig. Yet misfits have a way of fitting perfectly together and the trio embarks on a series of adventures that run the gamut of adolescent emotions and test the capacity of friendship.

The real power of the film, as with Moodysson’s early work, lies in its authenticity. Devoid of the manufactured drama that drives so many comingof-age films these days, We are the Best!’s punk theme extends far beyond the film’s content to its very aesthetic core. There’s a period-influenced softness to the cinematography that is enhanced by an acute attention to detail. Costumes and makeup are merely the surface level in an elaborate reconstruction of not only a decade but also a way of life - far enough removed to seem foreign yet too close to garner the gilded lens of mystery. Embracing the sense of organised chaos found in the most iconic of punk anthems, the film ebbs and flows with the natural exuberant tempo of teenage life. Ultimately, there is no end destination, no greater meaning extracted from the trials and tribulations our three heroines endure. Instead, the film is refreshingly “of the moment” - aware of, yet unconcerned with, the bigger picture as Moodysson immerses the audience in the pure euphoria of inhibition found in only the truest of friendships.

Review by Ben Nicholson

“All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.” These words were apparently once murmured

by Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, and in turn are what convinced Hayao Miyazaki that he’d found the subject for what would transpire to be his final film. The result feels like a film that is deeply personal to its creator, but a labour of love rather than inspirational storytelling. Fortunately, even when the Studio Ghibli founder is not on top form, he is still capable of moments that lift the heart like few others, and his cinematic adieu, The Wind Rises, proves to be no exception.

Horikoshi came to prominence during the Second World War when he designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero for the Imperial Japanese Navy, the rudders for which were produced by Miyazaki’s father’s company. As such, this is a story that has clearly been with the director for a long time and the subject’s aforementioned aspiration, to design something of beauty, is undoubtedly one with which the auteur identifies. This forms the clear narrative thrust, taking Jiro from childhood through to the design of his first prototype in the pursuit of a plane that lives up to the film’s description of them as ‘beautiful dreams’.

Oddly, it is the dreamlike quality that has pervaded Miyazaki’s work for decades that is conspicuous in its absence from his concluding piece.

Although there are still flights of fancy present in the form of Jiro’s fantasies - first a rocketing spin in a homemade craft and then the design of revolutionary planes - this is very much the director’s take on the romantic historical epic. Jiro’s journey becomes entwined with that of the beautiful, sickly Naoko who becomes something of a muse to him.

It is these moments, particularly a prolonged exchange with paper aeroplanes, in which the heart soars.

The problems arrive in the form of a film that ultimately feels somewhat conflicted. Controversy has surrounded the fact that the destruction rained down by Horikoshi’s creations is largely avoided - a criticism regularly levelled at Japan. This evasion seems unlikely given that pacifism has been a recurring theme of Miyazaki’s work for decades but in fact the consequences of Jiro’s actions are only even touched upon in the abstract and never tackled directly. Horikoshi was suggested to suffer from an inner turmoil regarding his work, but it seems to be something Miyazaki has attempted to allude to rather than explore. This means that it often feel as though there is a hidden dogfight happening in the films heart that is never seen, but its disruption is felt.

Forays into Europe that encounter both a fleeing Jew and the Nazi secret police serve to muddy the waters rather than enrich the context. Equally, the breadth and depth of the central love story never quite convinces. When at its best, however, all of the issues are forgotten while the audience enjoys the sumptuous hand-drawn animation and revels for one last time in the majesty of Hayao Miyazaki.

The Wind Rises

release date 9th May

cert (TBC)

director Hayao Miyazaki writer Hayao Miyazaki starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Martin Short

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The Motel Life

cert (15)

directors Alan Polsky, Gabe Polsky writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Noah Harpster starring Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff, Kris Kristofferson

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Review by Timothy E. Raw

release date 4th April

Left with only a meager $500 after their mother dies of cancer, Frank (Emile Hirsch) and Jerry Lee (Stephen Dorff ) have existed off the grid since they were teenagers. On a road that never ends, and often sleeping in their car, the brothers are used to bedding down in a sleeping bag with a bottle of Jim Beam and living out of cheap motels whenever they can scrape together enough cash. Dealt a bad hand ever since they left home and fled from the authorities, when Jerry Lee loses a leg hopping trains, Frank is forced to remain his brother’s constant companion whilst having to provide for them both.

“All I’ve ever done is fuck up,” declares a broken Jerry Lee when we catch up with them in 1990.

He’s not wrong either. The latest mess he’s left Frank to clean up is a hit and run after he accidentally knocks a kid off his bike, killing him. Wracked with guilt and holed up in hospital after a botched suicide attempt, Jerry Lee is literally laying low while Frank scrabbles to come up with enough money for them to leave town.

Not only is he a survivor, Frank’s also one hell of a storyteller, whose vivid imagination gives his brother a place to escape his tragic life. That Jerry Lee happens to be a talented artist, whose animated illustrations bring Frank’s tall tales to life whenever they’re told to us, neatly conveys the tender intensity of their brotherhood. This device could never be accused of being overly sentimental, given the stories are comic-book Tarantino, featuring the excessively violent exploits of cross-dressing pirates, coke-snorting priests and female outlaws.

The style of the rest of the film is a winter of discontent straight out of Bukowski, focusing on the snow-sludged windows of beat-up rides and rain swirling in the highway wind. Roman Vasyanov’s textured lighting makes him the most exciting indie DP of the moment, and he outdoes himself here, particularly with a one-shot walk-and-talk through a casino that’s moodily lit with every shade of neon and scored to the hustle of blues.

Hirsch, selflessly good-hearted here, makes us sympathetic to Frank’s alcoholism, which is a necessary escape the same way his stories are for Jerry Lee. Dorff, an actor who seems perennially unable to catch a break, gives a superbly reactive performance with a downcast expression that goes from hangdog to heart-breaking in an instant. If Dakota Fanning as Frank’ love interest Annie gets in the way of the love story between two brothers, she affords the film its single most affecting scene. “I just wish it had been me instead of that kid” says Jerry Lee, to which Annie asks, “What would Frank do without you?” Immediately, Jerry Lee’s lip starts quivering in reaction to what they’re all thinking, and the possibilities Frank could have had if his brother didn’t have to cart him around like so much dead weight. This is the kind of film with guys wilfully supressing tears, where a single tear rolling down a cheek feels like a torrent.

Frank

release date 9th May

cert (15)

director Leonard Abrahamson Review by Tom Gore

Lenny Abrahamson’s first three features – Adam And Paul (2004), Garage (2007) and What Richard Did (2012) – appeared to mark him out as a somewhat Loachian chronicler of the new Ireland that emerged during the economic miracle of the Celtic Tiger years and the recession which followed. In particular, he and his frequent creative cohort, writer/actor Mark O’Halloran, seemed to have a natural affinity for those who found themselves on the margins in a newly affluent society; the luckless, afflicted, lonely and downtrodden. His latest work could be seen to represent something of a departure then, eschewing as it does the singularly Irish concerns of his previous projects, (the Emerald Isle does feature briefly as a setting) and working with established stars and an international group of collaborators. Thematically, however, the film once again focuses a sympathetic lens on those outside the mainstream.

The inspiration for Frank came from offbeat author/journalist/documentarian turned screenwriter Jon Ronson’s experiences in the late-80’s as a keyboard player in the band of Lancastrian oddball Frank Sidebottom (aka Chris Sievey) – a quirky singer/comedian with a cult following, who famously donned a trademark (crudely rendered) oversized Papier-mâché head during his performances. In Abrahamson’s film (with an eye on the wider market) this ever-present cranial guise has been retained but the eponymous Frank (Michael Fassbender) has become an erratic, occasionally inspired Middle-American musical savant (Daniel Johnston and Captain Beefheart have been cited as influences). Frank fronts the The Soronprfbs: an obscure (impossible to pronounce) troupe of dysfunctional avant-garde international indie misfits made up of fellow Americans – Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Drummer Nana (Carla Azar), Manager Don (an underused Scoot McNairy) and French bassist Baraque (François Civil).

On Tour in an English seaside town, they recruit Ronson’s alter-ego; aspiring musician Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) an opportunistic local yearning to escape his humdrum surroundings/existence, as a replacement for their suicidal keyboard player. An untalented interloper and avid social media user (his inanely ironic tweets appear on-screen throughout), Jon proves to be a divisive influence and effectively uses the band as a vehicle to realise his frustrated ambitions towards artistic recognition, surreptitiously posting their often wild and fractious recording sessions online and gaining them a measure of notoriety (for which they are ill-prepared) and a festival spot in the process.

Frank mixes the familiar band documentary/mockumentary tropes of personality clashes in the studio and the grinding proximity of life on the road with an overriding quirkiness and a fairly broad (almost slapstick) approach to humour. In spite of good performances from the (mostly) perma-masked Fassbender and a nicely acerbic Gyllenhaal, this lags on occasion and never quite manages to mesh into a coherent whole. Even so, it has enough good moments to make it worth seeing. Time will tell whether it represents a shift of emphasis in Abrahamson’s career or if his focus returns to his native land and stylistic propensity towards tragicomedy and social realism.

writers Jon Ronson, Peter Straughan starring Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal

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Review by Cleaver Patterson

Pioneer

release date 11th April

cert (15)

director Erik Skjoldbjærg writers Erik Skjoldbjærg , Nikolaj Frobenius, Hans Gunnarsson, Cathinka Nicolaysen, Kathrine Valen Zeiner starring Wes Bentley, Stephen Lang, Aksel Hennie 74

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The new Nordic thriller from director Erik Skjoldbjærg proves, if nothing else, why Scandinavian countries are currently the best purveyors of both literary and filmic noir. Pioneer is an exercise in unrelenting suspense that uses its claustrophobic environment to create an air of palpable unease that lingers long after it has finished.

Petter (Aksel Hennie) and his brother Knut (André Eriksen) are commercial divers laying petroleum pipelines in the North Sea during the Norwegian Oil Boom of the 1980s. Whilst on a dive a tragic accident occurs resulting in Knut’s death. Returning to dry land, Petter is wracked with guilt, leading him to begin investigations into the unfortunate events that befell his brother. Unfortunately, his enquiries arouse the suspicions of some very powerful people, who will stop at nothing to prevent him finding out what really happened in the murky and icy depths of the North Sea. The deeper Petter digs, the more hostility he meets from the authorities, eventually leading him to realise that what happened hundreds of feet beneath the ocean might not have been as accidental as he was initially made to believe.

There are several factors why the countries of Northern Europe - not least Norway, where this film’s proceedings play out - stand alone in the genre of noir thriller which has become so popular in recent years. The frozen landscapes, stark weather and sub-zero temperatures lend these places a surreal magic, which also adds to the hostile undercurrents that frequently drive the narrative of the stories that unfold there. Such is the case with Pioneer. Here there seems little change between the pitch black and fathomless environment where Petter and Knut find themselves beneath the sea, and the bleakness of Petter’s life back home as he battles against the increasingly harsh human forces that seem to thwart him at every turn.

It’s these forces that are one of the most disturbing aspects of the film. The figures which take the recognisable form of an archetypal corrupt ‘hierarchy’ who will stop at nothing (even murder) to achieve their ends could so easily have lost bite by their stereo-typicalness. The fact that the story is based on real events lends it a credibility which only adds to its frisson of fear - that these people clearly think they can, quite literally, get away with murder is both unsettling and enthralling. Though the cast overall is strong, it’s Hennie - best known for his starring role in the adrenalin pumping Headhunters (2011) - who carries the film and the viewer’s attention. With marvellous believability and complete conviction he balances the fine line between cool collectiveness and growing hysteria as the increasingly desperate and bewildered Petter.

From its palpable sense of isolation and the frosty air that permeates every aspect of the film, to its Nordic setting and all too frightening but wholly believable premise, Pioneer is a film that haunts your mind long after its termination.

Review by Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg

Film theorist Béla Balázs once wrote that one of the greatest achievements of film was the ability to show a face in close-up. To be able to watch a face in detail gave new representation to how humans view themselves, how we understand and connect with one another. I wonder if director Godfrey Reggio had this in mind in his extraordinary new film Visitors. Most easily classified as a film poem, it is neither documentary nor narrative; like his earlier films, it concentrates on experience, and with an incredible accompanying score by Philip Glass, it is the kind of film experience that requires great patience from the spectator, but that patience and dedication to the technological and emotional experience is fully rewarded.

The film consists of 74 slow-motion (and I mean really slow) shots over nearly 90 minutes, and requires 4k digital projection; that’s 4000 pixels, which means incredible detail. The first is of a gorilla, and the second is of the surface of the moon; obviously, it’s hard not to think of 2001, but the music and the tone of the film quickly push such thoughts aside. The gorilla’s stare is fascinating and unnerving, but draws the spectator in. The remainder of the film is varying shots: some of a building (time-lapse with clouds streaming overhead); some of an abandoned fairground; but most are of human faces.

Varying in age, race and gender, the benefit of such long takes is allowing the spectator to see the huge variety in the human facial form. While at first, the expressions are fairly neutral, as the film progresses, expressions are emoted, funny faces made: but all this in such slow motion that while watching, I almost kept trying to guess what was coming. But then I stopped, and just enjoyed the ride. I want to say that there is a story if you look for it, and perhaps there is; as humans, we always want to find the story in something, even just a series of seemingly unconnected images. But with Visitors, the story (such as it is) might be held in each shot: each human face is a story.

Philip Glass’ music has often been called minimalist, but I would disagree. There is a certain repetition in the score, but that fits perfectly with the images. The music is powerful, but it never overpowers; instead, it provides a rhythm, a means of entry to the pace of the film, and each movement is again its own story.

As these faces cross the screen, staring at the camera and effectively staring at us, the spectator, you can’t help but think: who is watching whom? What would my face look like up there on the screen? What would be my Glass score? In a film world that seems to consistently insist on non-contemplative nonsense, Visitors is an incredibly engaging and stunning film, slowing down to the rhythm of the deepest contemplation and visual and sonic delight.

Visitors

release date 4th April

cert (U)

director Godfrey Reggio writer Godfrey Reggio starring Jeff Pope, Rob Tunstall

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In the All the Real Frame: Girls (2003)

words by Adam Lowes

G

iven cinema’s on-going love affair with the idea of grand romantic engagements and heavy heartbreak, there are still very few films which accurately and realistically capture the minutiae of what it’s really like to fall in and out of love. Hollywood tends to take that notion and give it a lofty and distinctly false veneer, with characters making grand gestures (sometimes in the company of a large audience) as the music swells up around them. Yet we all know that relationships often prosper (or indeed deflate) in less auspicious surroundings.

Take Alvy Singer’s sad conclusion towards the end of Annie Hall that his and the titular character’s love for each other has floundered, resulting in what he characterises as “a dead shark”. It’s a sad and bittersweet admission as they’re seated on a plane escaping the very world Singer detests and the place that Hall feels she can thrive within. No creeping piece of non-diegetic music is required, nor is a tight close-up of each actor. An honest and simple line of dialogue says it all.

David Gordon Green’s sophomore effort,

the little-seen (but treasured by those who have) All The Real Girls also acknowledges that less is more, and is loaded with the kind of telling and subtle moments of young blossoming love which requires nothing more than a simple composition on screen (as characterised here).

In the film, (the woefully underappreciated) Paul Schneider is a young, twenty-something Casanova in a small industrial North Carolina town, leaping from one unremarkable female encounter to another, whilst running with his similarly-aged, aimless pack of friends (which includes Danny McBride in his screen debut).

His head is seriously turned by the arrival of his best buddy Tip’s younger sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel, in her pre-manic dream pixie girl persona). She’s home on a break from her boarding school, and the two swiftly fall deep and hard for each other. Their happiness is tainted, however, as they struggle to reconcile their needs and requirements in that juncture of their lives.

Although the duo’s time together is firmly planted in a recognisable reality, Gordon Green isn’t afraid to gives way to an im-

pressionistic, dream-like atmosphere as his characters wrestle with their emotions. This is best exemplified in a haunting and beautiful sequence of sadness and loss which sees a heartbroken Schneider curled up in his mother’s lap on the porch whilst Mogwai’s remix of their own track, “Fear Satan”, reverberates across a series of shots representing the passing of time as the outside world is speeded up.

But the then 27-year-old filmmaker (showing wisdom well beyond that age) seldom needs to reach for abstract moments to make his point, and a scene which ends with Schneider futilely punching the ground upon being dumped is one of the most nakedly human responses to rejection ever committed to celluloid.

Cynics may accuse the above image of summoning that kind of forced whimsy sometimes evident in US indie cinema, but anyone who has ever existed in that vacuum of intimacy and quiet bliss will know this shot represents the perfect embodiment of being in love, without having to conjure up an artificiality or pomp.

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Jordan McGrath

David Hall

Founder / Editor-in-Chief / Designer

Managing Editor

jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com

davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

thanks: Contributors Evrim Ersoy Stuart Barr Robert Makin Luke Richardson Ben Nicholson Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg Cleaver Patterson Adam Lowes Justin Harries Neil McGlone James Marsh Kelsey Eichhorn Paul Martinovic Timothy E. Raw Tom Gore Clarisse Loughrey

Proofing Luke Richardson, Dan Auty & David Hall

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Image credits: Metrodome - 1,8,10,11,12,13,14,16,17,70,75 / The Works - 23 / StudioCanal UK - 24,36,27,28,29,71 / Dogwoof UK - 30,32,33,34,35,36 / SFI - 52, 54,55 / Eureka Entertainment - 60,61,62,63 / Picturehouse Entertainment - 68 / eOne Entertainment - 69 / House Distribution UK - 72 / Curzon Film World - 73 / Arrow Films - 74

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