Vérité - December 2013

ISSUE #9

V é r i t é DECEMBER 2013 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

AMERICAN H U S T L E And the Golden Age of American Cinema

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The 70s Through a Lens / The Return of Paranoia / Scorsese Presents / reviews / and more...

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EDITED BY

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DIRECTOR OF DESIGNER STEPHEN CARTER PHOTOGRAPHYRE BRIAN A. KATES, A.C.E. PRODUCTION

Editor’s Letter

T

he onslaught of Top 10 lists that have flooded the internet over the last couple of weeks can only mean one thing, it’s time to say goodbye to another year. 2013 has showcased an outstanding range of films, many discussed within our pages. However you won’t see Vérité’s Top 10 quite yet, as we want to let the year run its course before cementing our favourites (look out for that in January’s issue).

Of course 2013 will always be close to our hearts as it saw the conception – and birth – of this magazine, but we won’t be celebrating the end of our first year and breaking out the bubbly just yet as we have another issue for your film-loving eyes to pore over!

A big component of Vérité’s mission statement is to ‘celebrate the films and filmmakers that inspire and excite us’ and within the American market you’d struggle to find a more diverse and – over the last few years – consistent filmmaker than David O. Russell. His latest, 70s heist caper American Hustle, finds its way to UK cinema screens this month – so we are grabbing this opportunity to highlight the director’s fantastic career, which David Hall does so eloquently on page eight.

Given this is the final issue of the year, we thought

we’d go out with a bang and give you something rather special. Using American Hustle as a catalyst we decided this December edition would be dedicated to the last Golden Age of American cinema, the rockin’ 1970s. Stuart Barr guides you through Hollywood’s modern obsession with 70s porno chic (page 14), Jordan McGrath chronicles the evolution of the ‘Paranoia Pic’ and wonders if we may be about to see a resurgence of the sub-genre (page 20) and James Rocarols goes hunting for the lost gems in the first of a two-part series on buried treasure from that fertile era of creativity (page 28).

We’ve also got an interview with cinema icon Alan Rudolph as well as an article on Mark Cousins’ new film Here Be Dragons, the latter from new contributor Sam Moore. And not forgetting the monthly staples – our Master of Cinema coverage, In the Frame, In Defence and Evrim Ersoy highlighting yet another fantastic and obscure director.

Finally we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the incredible support you’ve given us over these last eight months. We’ve grown in scope and audience and a huge part of that is down to you all. 2013 has been an incredible start for us and 2014 will be even better!

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Thanks for reading, Jordan McGrath & David Hall

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“For any director with a little lucidity, masterpieces are films that come to you by accident.”

Sidney Lumet

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Contents Features

Columns

A Fine Madness - p8

The Obscure Poetry of Andrew Kam - p56

With American Hustle hitting UK cinema screens this month, David Hall takes a look at the career of its director David O. Russell

Evrim Ersoy continues his expert analysis into filmmakers we should be watching. This month’s Subject: Andrew Kam.

Reviews

Big Bad Wolves - p68 Fill the Void - p69 Floating Skyscrapers - p70

Rarer than the Unicorn - p14 Stuart Barr submerges himself in porno chic as well as delving into Hollywood’s obsession with the 70s sex scene.

Masters of Cinema - p60

Robert Makin analyses this month’s fantastic MoC Release, which is the first installment of the Martin Scorsese Presents series.

Klown - p71 Inside Llewyn Davis - p72 The Patience Stone - p73 Nebraska - p74

Paranoia Strikes Deep - p20

In Defence... - p64

Jordan McGrath chronicles the ‘Paranoia Pic’, it’s influences and why he feels we could soon see a resurgence of the sub-genre.

C.J. Lines takes the reigns this month and gets nostalgic over a camp, trash 70s musical extravaganza.

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The Missing Picture - p75

Join the Conversation

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A FINE MADNESS With 70s comedy-thriller American Hustle set to raise David O. Russell’s stock yet further, David Hall traces the unlikely trajectory of the ‘New Eccentric’ who almost got away

words by David Hall

A

t one point it seemed as though David Owen Russell was destined to become the first casualty of what CityArts (and former NY Times) critic Armond White termed the ‘New Eccentrics’; the promising cluster of directors (Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola) who emerged in the 90s, and the first collection of US filmmakers to marry independent sensibilities with commercial savvy since the ‘movie brats’. But the critical opprobrium brought to bear on his existentialist screwball farce I Heart Huckabees – plus the accompanying furore that followed two leaked YouTube videos from the set of that troubled production, indicating the director to be a man of, shall we say, confrontational sensibilities – effectively stalled what had, until then, been a meteoric rise.

In 2013 the picture is rather different. O. Russell, in his more frequent public appearances and online

round-table discussions, seems to have battled most of his demons (although his amusing, zero-filter reaction to Emmanuelle Riva’s besting of Jennifer Lawrence at the BAFTAs is amusing proof his prickly sensibility is still intact) and come roaring back into the game.

There’s no small irony that the film that represented his critical and commercial rehabilitation was his for-hire gig The Fighter (2010); the director stepping in for the departing Darren Aronofksy, who left to make the thematically similar The Wrestler (2010). An old-school boxing movie, as pugnacious as they come, with grand gesture performances and an on-the-ropes message of positivity in the face of familial insanity, The Fighter is a film delivered with a heavy side-order of manic hysteria and off-kilter comedy; a tonal juggling act that goes on throughout all of his work. Silver Linings Playbook (2012), his divisive romantic comedy, treated mental illness not with solemnity but big-hearted humanism and a lightness of touch –

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I Heart Huckabees

“O. Russell struggling to maintain a consistency of tone in a film that seemed to represent a fairly extreme detour. It’s as if he took a sideways look at what friends and associates Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson and (especially) Charlie Kaufmann were doing and sought to capture some of that meta-magic.”

reconnecting with some of the maverick spirit of his early, funky oedipal comedies Spanking The Monkey (1994) and Flirting with Disaster, albeit with a more mainstream focus.

Now he seems set to cement his reputation further with American Hustle, reteaming with previous leading men Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper (along with Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams) for a 70s FBI caper that looks like a demented mash-up of Boogie Nights, Goodfellas and Argo, delivered with remarkable speed and proficiency for a man who essentially spent half of the noughties on the side-lines. And yet, in terms of critical status, something’s still amiss. There’s a sense of grudging respect toward O. Russell’s comeback. There are still doubters; those for whom his visceral, daring war pic Three Kings still represents the zenith and that his subsequent career has been one of false starts, misfires and studio compromises.

His journey is a wayward one that has so far defied (or simply not inspired) much analysis. A non-film school attendee, relatively late to the film game (like Tarantino, with whom he shares certain pop cultural and music obsessions, if little else) he’s a tough nut (literally) to crack.

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He doesn’t really have a trademark aesthetic or immediately distinctive visual style, and his scattershot, burlesque broadness is in stark contrast to Wes Anderson’s measured mannerism or the formal minutiae of Coppola or Paul Thomas Anderson. Also, O. Russell’s cinematic influences – and naturally there are a fair few – tend toward the shaggier end of the 70s – Albert Brooks, Paul Mazursky, Elaine May, Hal Ashby and Henry Jaglom.

Spanking The Monkey, his outrageous, assured indie feature debut – in which an emotionally confused young man ( Jeremy Davies) and his mother (Susan Aibelli) begin an incestuous relationship after a leg injury leaves her incapacitated and reliant on his care – came after he abandoned a promising career in academia, made a short film and held down a series of typical fledgling LA screenwriter jobs. Appearing at the tail end of that audacious period of American independent cinema before Miramaxisation took over; it’s still a film that surprises now, introducing key themes that weave in and out of his subsequent work – uneasy comedic detours, sexual dysfunction and familial tensions.

Monkey premiered to great acclaim at the Sundance film festival and O. Russell was quickly co-opted into the

Silver Linings Playbook

The Fighter

Weinstein fraternity, making Flirting with Disaster – one of the great underrated 90s comedies – which features one of Ben Stiller’s most sympathetic performances as Mel Coplin; a conflicted father and husband who won’t decide on a name for his son until he can discover the identity of his own biological parents. Spurred into action, he hits the road accompanied by his wife Nancy (Patricia Arquette), their baby and – in an unlikely situation mined for maximum comic and sexual effect – Tina (Tea Leoni), the single and sexually neurotic adoption agency employee helping him on his quest.

A farcical road movie riff with a more commercial sheen than Monkey, it still contains an undercurrent of quirky kink; Stiller gets a boner when he dallies with a stocking-clad Leoni in a motel corridor, then ravages his wife to parlay her suspicions; one of the gay cops the trio meet on route turns out to be an old classmate of Nancy’s and fixates on her ample post-pregnancy bosom. Russell juxtaposes drama and farce to winning effect (particularly when Lily Tomlin and Richard Jenkins, as 60s acid casualties still wanted by the FBI, turn up) and refuses to demonise his characters, displaying evident affection for their kooks and neurosis. The success of those two

pictures landed him his biggest gig so far – the Warner Brothers backed Gulf War comedy drama Three Kings.

Adapting John (U-Turn) Ridley’s screenplay, this Seirra Madre influenced guys-on-a-mission movie and anti-war farce sees a group of bored US soldiers Archie (George Clooney), Chief (Ice Cube), Troy (Mark Wahlberg) and Vig (Spike Jonze) uncovering a stash of Kuwaiti bullion hidden deep within enemy territory. Naturally things turn out badly for the quartet, but in unexpected ways that force the men to confront some of the ugliest truths about the country (and administration) they are fighting for.

Three Kings introduced an ambitious side to O. Russell’s filmmaking technique, with an aesthetic closer to that of his contemporary David Fincher (trippy, intense visuals desaturated stock and a sickening bullet-punctured lung trajectory). But it’s the moments of gruff humour and intense human interaction that linger longest – Jonze being admonished for his constant, casual racism, a late night phone call Wahlberg makes to his wife that leads to a devastating torture scene thrumming with humanity, desperation and cruel irony and the amazing sequence that begins after the bullion raid, where an

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innocent, unarmed woman pleading for help is shot dead in front of the men. Kings deepened O.Russell’s growing flair for mining comedy from the darkest materials and showcased his willingness to engage with taboo topics from a humourist’s perspective – eschewing dour solemnity. Although there were hints of political satire in Flirting, this (alongside Huckabees) remains the directors most explicitly political work – pummelling the US administration and spending 50 million dollars of studio money on perhaps the most stridently anti-American war film since Alex Cox’s Walker (1987).

The resulting film was a monster hit but, away from the plaudits, fault-lines were beginning to show in O. Russell’s journey – set reports of fistfights and violent arguments emerged; suggesting the director was a liability, an ego-maniac with a hair-trigger temperament.

“Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are existential detectives who you could hire to investigate the meaning of your life. They are formal, they wear suits, they are Paris-trained and their clients include Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg. Their ostensible nemesis is Isabelle Huppert. Hilarity ensues. – O. Russell describes I Heart Huckabees to his financiers.

Hilarity did not ensue on I Heart Huckabees – neither on a troubled set or in the resulting film – which rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. Attempts at zany farce can create a noxious, unpalatable cinematic atmosphere, one notoriously tricky to filter and sustain, and Huckabees sees O. Russell struggling to maintain a consistency of tone in a film that seemed to represent a fairly extreme detour. It’s as if he took a sideways look at what friends and associates Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson and (especially) Charlie Kaufmann) were doing and sought to capture some of that meta-magic. A scattershot farce talking sideswipes at corporate America, liberal panic and the post 9/11 psyche, as well as an inquisitive Buddhist treatise on the nature of existence; the finished film is a very mixed bag – but a recent viewing reveals a much less hysterical and shrill work than I remembered.

Ridiculous in synopsis and laboured in construction it may be, it’s also an audacious and striking film with some stellar work from a diverse cast, all dancing to the director’s crazy tune. Its chief flaw is O. Russell’s reliance on excess philosophical verbiage to introduce the films’ bewildering amount of ideas and Schwartzman’s hero is a touch marooned (and forgotten at times). Still, there are pleasures. Dustin Hoffman displays puppyish vulnerability under a silly Beatles wig, Jude Law’s saturnine corporate twerp – Schwartzman’s nemesis throughout – has his

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unctuous charm decimated in an awful scene where he vomits in a boardroom retelling a fatuous Shania Twain anecdote, Naomi Watts gamely sends up her perky girlnext-door qualities, and Lily Tomlin is a riot (even more impressive given the shit she had to swallow from the frazzled director). The films’ standout character though, is jaded firefighter Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a supremely straight-faced and very funny turn from an actor that O. Russell seems to instinctively ‘get’ as a performer.

Bruised after the films’ lukewarm reception, O. Russell didn’t exactly disappear, but he certainly slipped form view. His sole directorial credit in six years was Nailed (2008) – a wacky-sounding, star-heavy political satire that remains unseen due to contractual and union issues – before his rehabilitation to much acclaim with The Fighter, based on real life junior welterweight boxer Mickey Ward’s (Mark Wahlberg) life story.

Given that he was second choice director, and working to someone else’s script (three people in fact) The Fighter cannot be read as any kind of master plan comeback. But it feels like O. Russell used this vehicle as a way of working out what direction his career was to take next. It’s a conflicted and lumpy film, erratic in tone and structure, and it’s evident that the battles outside the ring are the ones that really interest the director – the fraught bickering and tensions caused by Mickey’s extended family, particularly his mother Alice (Melissa Leo), and his older half-brother Dickie (Christian Bale). The brutal fight sequences have a visceral intensity, but are edited in such a choppy, dizzying style that they fade from the memory. There are very few quiet moments in The Fighter, which is dominated (indeed practically capsized), by Bale’s extremely broad performance but there’s no doubt he makes for an excellent contrast with Wahlberg, who underplays throughout with quiet grace. Away from the scenery chewing of Bale and Leo, Amy Adams (a canny piece of casting) delivers a revelatory performance as Mickey’s girlfriend.

With Academy kudos and box-office glory restored, O. Russell delivered his next film quickly and with renewed clarity and focus. Silly, sometimes sappy and with a (seemingly) cavalier attitude towards its central themes of bipolarity and depression, Silver Linings Playbook is a return to the screwball comedy terrain of Flirting with Disaster, but delivered with more confidence and authority, powered by a career-best performance from a likeable lead and an explosive turn from a newly-minted star.

Bradley Cooper stars as Pat Solitano, a former teacher on release from an institution (having dished out a near-fa-

American Hustle

tal beating to his estranged wife’s lover) and back living under the care of his exasperated parents. Pat now has a restraining order and must stay away from his ex, which rather complicates his big plan to reconnect with her and get his old life back. When Pat is introduced to his friend’s wife’s sister, recently widowed Tiffany ( Jennifer Lawrence) who has her own history of problems and medication use, he asks her to get a letter to his ex who is a mutual friend. She agrees, but only if he becomes her dance partner for a local contest they have no chance of winning.

Russell’s light touch and note-perfect casting prove disarming and at times unexpectedly moving. Pat is not a bad guy but his situation means he’s not always sympathetic. He’s not mister hilarious crazy guy either. He’s frequently bullish, rude, and inappropriate and, as we see, prone to violence. His goal is misguided. Yet you can’t help rooting for him. Despite many critics misgivings, Silver Linings Playbook is a sincere and uncynical film (yes, really) that is occasionally shrill and prone to bluster and sentimentality. It feels like the director’s most personal film to date and is definitely his most heartfelt.

O. Russell, now 56, seems to have finally found his groove. It may well be that collaboration, particularly

with strong writers whose material he can shape to his own perverse sensibility, suits him much more than going it alone as writer/director. A chronicler for our hyper-detailed, uncertain, often over-emotive, frequently jaded times, his championing of human eccentricity and neurotic behaviour seems particularly of the moment. His best work explores troubled characters in ways that allow for cracks of humility and humour to shine through, even when their behaviour verges on madness.

It will be interesting to see where American Hustle fits into this pattern. Word from the initial screenings has been positive and the masterful first trailer – with the principle cast dolled-out in finest cocaine chic from the decade taste forgot, and Bale sporting a Bobby Charlton combover and middle-aged paunch – suggests another tangled tale of thorny personal relationships and barmy misfits; possibly his broadest to date. O. Russell, in a wayward and unpredictable career, has now spent twenty years in an industry where second chances don’t come easily, taking risks, pissing people off, backing the odd risky horse, sometimes falling but always ready to get back in the saddle. You could say he’s something of an American Hustler himself.

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RARER THAN THE UNICORN Mythologising sex in the 70s

“The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is, rarer than the unicorn and I have ever had one.”

"Fear of Flying” Erica Jong

Stuart Barr gets down and dirty with porno chic words by Stuart Barr

F

rom one angle, the 70s looks like a golden age for sexual liberation, experimentation, and fun, especially in the good old US of A. A short period where the introduction of accessible birth control, the loosening of social structures engendered by the counter-culture led to a polymorphously perverse bacchanal. The twenty-four hour erotic cabaret was brought to a decisive end by the shadow of AIDS and HIV. At least that is one myth of the 70s, and an attractive one for those of my generation who grew up terrified by the UK government’s monolithic ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign in the 80s.

From the perspective of the 21st century, the era has taken on a nostalgic fantasy glow and over the last decade become a rich source of inspiration for filmmakers. I’m

old enough to remember the 70s; I remember it as three channels on TV, test cards, a hideous pair of brown corduroy flares my mother bought me, Brotherhood of Man on Top of the Pops, hot summers and cold winters. But for filmmakers looking back to that decade, and in particular wishing to explore the impact of the 60s’ cultural revolution on sex and the sex industry, the decade has an altogether fleshier hue.

When looking at films about sex in the 70s, or at least with a strong sexual element, the field is dominated by American topics and Cinema. The sexual liberation and freedom of the period has featured in countless pictures: rock ‘groupies’ in The Doors (1991) and Almost Famous (2000); swinger parties in The Ice Storm (1997) and Auto Focus (2002); gay hustling in Summer of Sam

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Taxi Driver

Hardcore

(1999). These titles are just the tip of the iceberg, but for contemporary films that appear to put sex and the 70s at the centre of the narrative one topic dominates – pornography.

One of the strongest ‘myths’ of the era is that of ‘porno chic’ – when I say myth, I mean in the sense of a ‘sacred narrative’ rather than ‘false belief ’, although that may be a matter of opinion. Porno Chic is a term used to cover the Golden Age of Porn, which lasted from the early 70s until the early 80s. This was the age of the porn theatre, the sleazy strips and grindhouses of New York’s 42nd Street or Downtown L.A. that formed a backdrop for films as diverse as Taxi Driver (1976), Hardcore (1979) and The Exterminator (1980).

In order for pornographic films to screen in a US theatre, they had to skirt the unwanted attention of the US Supreme Court and a variety of local regulations. To do this they had to be more than simple stag reels, so films of the period featured production values, had scripts, and were often shot by professional crews moonlighting for cash in hand. A number of respectable directors’ careers

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started in porn. Before The Driller Killer (1979), Abel Ferrara shot a porno with the charming title 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976). In the documentary Inside Deep Throat (2005), noted horror director Wes Craven claimed to have shot a number of X-rated films under pseudonyms. Following his early experimental films, David Cronenberg tried to get a gig directing porn for a Canadian company, only for the producers to decide a horror film would be a better fit for his particular sexual sensibilities - the result being the eerily prescient venereal horror of They Came From Within aka Shivers (1975).

Pornographic movies were made across North America (and often imported from Europe), but the two main centres of production were California’s San Fernando Valley and the mean streets of New York City. It would be naive to think that the producers of these films were setting out to fight the powers of censorship and repression through the medium of the skin flick, but porn did become a battleground for the chattering classes to explore issues of freedom of speech versus objectification and exploitation. Pornography became both the object

Boogie Nights

of attack for radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon and Gloria Steinem, but was also defended by ‘sex positive’ feminists such as Camille Paglia, Susie Bright and Annie Sprinkle.

Looking at recent films about the period and the sex industry, it is striking how many of them aren’t really about the porn industry. The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) fashions the story of the Hustler publisher into a heavy-handed freedom of speech tract (albeit one anchored to a tremendous performance by Woody Harrelson), Rated X (2000) coasts on the stunt casting of Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen as pornographer brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell (who achieved success with 1972’s Behind the Green Door), this year’s Lovelace based itself largely on ‘Ordeal’, the harrowing memoir of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace, but is really far more about domestic abuse. Only Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakthrough Boogie Nights (1997) really engages with its subject.

Many films about porn follow a similar trajectory to the rock biopic; it’s all fun and games until the third act

dive into dire consequences. Boogie Nights is an ensemble drama, but revolves around the character of Eddie Adams aka Dirk Diggler (a terrific Mark Wahlberg).

Loosely based on real-life porn star John Holmes, Adams falls in with a porn company that becomes a surrogate family to him. Benevolent director/producer Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds in a rare return to form) is the de facto ‘father’, veteran porn star Amber Waves ( Julianne Moore) the matriarch.

Boogie Nights largely follows the template of the epic gangster movie and is particularly indebted to Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Apart from being a great piece of entertainment, it is interesting for being one of the few mainstream movies about porn to genuinely view the porno chic era with affection. During the film, Adams/Diggler does fall from grace, not as a direct result of porn, but due to drug abuse. Outside of his nurturing and protective porn family, Adams finds the world a scary place, but when he returns chastised and wiser, he is welcomed back into their arms.

Another refreshing aspect of Boogie Nights is that

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Wonderland

“Stephen Saydian’s astonishing film Cafe Flesh (1982) directed under the name Rinse Dream - which is the sort of thing one imagines Cronenberg would have made had he got to make porno.”

rather than portraying porn performers simply as victims, and those behind the camera as immoral abusers, the film shows them as rounded and moral characters. After all, porn stars are people too. This is explored in a subplot in which a producer is revealed to be a pedophile. The characters react in horror, they might make pornography but this is seen as an unforgivable moral infraction.

John Holmes was the direct subject of James Cox’s dark and undervalued crime film Wonderland (2003).

Although set in 1981, Wonderland is absolutely a film about the tail end of the seventies, when the good times came to an end, the drugs got bad, and people started to get sick. In a brilliant piece of ironic casting fading former porn star Holmes is played (brilliantly) by fading film star Val Kilmer. By the early eighties Holmes’ porno chic heyday as the star of the Johnny Wadd series was behind him. Seriously addicted to freebasing cocaine, he was suffering from an inability to ‘perform’ on camera and was dangerously embroiled in the L.A. drug scene.

In 1981, after allegedly stealing drug money and in fear

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of his life, Holmes gave up details of an associate and was instrumental in a subsequent robbery that went lethally wrong. Cox’s film is a crime story first and foremost, and a brutal and grim one whose repellent characters failed to engage a wide audience, but it is well worth rediscovering.

It is arguable how detrimental AIDS was to the sex industry, one of the last flourishes of porno chic was Stephen Saydian’s astonishing film Cafe Flesh (1982) - directed under the name Rinse Dream - which is the sort of thing one imagines Cronenberg would have made had he got to make porno. Cafe Flesh is a post-AIDS science fiction porn parable, and a film that radiates wholesale disgust for its own audience. In the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse the majority of the human race has become impotent, if they attempt to have sex they become violently ill. The 1% of the population still able to perform is now forced to act in live sex shows to sate the voyeurism of the “sex negatives”. It is one of the few hardcore films to actually be completely watchable and startling with all the sex cut out (which is how I saw it on

Auto Focus

“It is interesting to reflect on how porno chic was a very American phenomenon. In 70s Britain, hardcore basically didn’t exist. While most major cities had porn cinemas, all were licensed and the material they exhibited classified and cut by the BBFC.” a BBFC 18 certified VHS discovered in a dubious Leith Walk video store). In a strange aside, the film’s excellent score is by Mitchell Froom, who would go on to become a sought-after record producer, working with Crowded House and Suzanne Vega.

What ultimately killed porno chic was technology. In Paul Schrader’s impressively scuzzy Auto Focus (2002), sitcom star and sex addict Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) is introduced to home video equipment by Willem Dafoe’s sleazy AV engineer. Crane then becomes obsessed with filming himself having sex, sometimes with his new friend participating. Cheap consumer video equipment ‘democratised’ porn, it both allowed for an explosion in amateur and ‘gonzo’ pornography and took it out of porn theatres (which were somewhat regulated) and into the unregulated world of home entertainment. The production values went, then the scripts and the plots followed suit. Who needed to spend money making porno on film, or pornos that resembled feature films, when a cheap camera and some video duping decks could allow you to

produce your own?

It is interesting to reflect on how porno chic was a very American phenomenon. In 70s Britain, hardcore basically didn’t exist. While most major cities had porn cinemas, all were licensed and the material they exhibited classified and cut by the BBFC. So British porn theatres showed either heavily cut versions of US hardcore, or the British alternatives, the Confessions films (1974-77), Rosie Dixon - Night Nurse (1978) and the like. The UK had its porn magnates, David Sullivan and Paul Raymond, but they were more successful operating strip clubs and publishing empires than making movies (although they dabbled). British sex films of the 70s are as likely to feature Beryl Reid as they are Fiona Richmond or Mary Millington. To date, Michael Winterbottom’s The Look of Love (2013) starring Steve Coogan as Paul Raymond is one of the only British films to examine the UK porn industry of the 70s. It is, dare I say it, just not very sexy.

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Paranoia Strikes D e Are we witnessing a return to the cinema of suspicion, fear and loneliness that dominated much of 70s US cinema?

Jordan McGrath traces the roots of the paranoia pic and unearths intriguing parallels with the current culture of surveillance and secrecy

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words by Jordan McGrath

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n the final of moments of 1974’s The Conversation, Gene Hackman’s now unravelled Harry Caul sits atop a lonely chair in the corner of his ransacked apartment, playing a melodic symphony of smooth jazz. Francis Ford Coppola’s camera pans slowly across the room towards him – floorboards askew, furniture demolished, the walls scraped and torn into a collage of wallpaper from the passing years. The camera reaches him before once again panning away across the room, the director allowing us to fully submerge ourselves in the horror. It’s one of the most devastating final shots in cinema history. As the credits fade onto the screen (Coppola’s shot still panning) we know Caul’s life is never going to be the same; a solitary and isolated existence of constantly looking over his shoulder, where trust is no longer possible.

Released just two years after the revelations regarding Watergate, The Conversation is an instinctual response to the hypocrisy of government and the deep-bedded fear of new technologies now available in the marketplace, the

beginnings of an increasing fear that an Orwellian state was bleeding into the American political landscape.

Society abets Art, ingraining itself – sometimes unintentionally but always undeniably – within the culture from which it was conceived. Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were the voices of the Beat Generation, Bob Dylan the same for the freewheelin’ 60s. Art in its simplest definition is ‘the production of expression’ and these individuals, like all great artists, used their talents to forum social commentary as a way to express themselves within their chosen medium. Cinema is no different; the 1970s defined the American cinematic landscape. Names such as Pakula, Pollack, Lumet and, of course, Coppola rose into the limelight, each discovering effective methods of tapping into America’s paranoia hangover that lingered in the aftermath of the previous decade. It’s this element that suggests we could be on the cusp of another wave of such paranoia-fuelled pictures, reminiscent of the great work that defined the New Hollywood era.

The 60s and early 70s laid witness to the Cuban missile

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The Conversation

crisis, the assassination of John F Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King Jr, as well as the rise of the Vietnam War and Watergate. The American public began to see cracks emerge in their government and their safety challenged. Trust became a loaded word, secrecy dangerous, with everyone suspicious of the person next to them. It was only a matter of time before cinema found an intelligent way of exploiting this zeitgeist of national anxiety. Holding a mirror up to the American people, cinema began to criticise them as much as their amoral government, successfully shrouding their stories with ‘bigger picture’ metaphors like a cloth over an Augustine Rodin sculpture.

Conspiracies became fetishized and glamorised, mined for entertainment. Socio-political commentary denouncing a controlling government became the perfect formula for high-stakes thrillers driven by a single notion: “They are after you.” Directors traded in tension, with scripts carefully orchestrated to exploit the tiniest amount of

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distrust in their audience.

So what about now? The constant living-in-the-cloud existence led by the global population – cyberspace, CCTV, satellite imagery and mobile phone tracking – indicates that we live in a completely monitored post9/11 world. Then there’s the emergence of figures such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks organisation, and NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, each aiming to create a state of political transparency with government secrets leaking in their hundreds of thousands; dirty deeds and shocking events, exposed.

Once again the hypocrisy of government has been brought to the forefront of discussion, flashbacks to Nixon stating ‘When the President does it that means it’s not illegal’ returning with prominence. And with Snowden’s files on PRISM, the proverbial, oppressive ‘they’ now has a face and the American people know they are being watched. The birth of the Orwellian state Coppola highlighted in The Conversation is now a fully

Out of the Past

formed organisation - the National Security Agency.

However, to see how this will affect future cinema, you have to look at the past – paranoia, like cinema, evolves alongside society. In the 40s and 50s it was film noir; hard-boiled, stiff-collared detective stories that found a way to represent the cultural impact of the Great Depression before transforming into an exploration of the lost idealism and disillusionment of the post-war state of mind.

Men returned from World War II changed, but they also returned to a changed society. Women were now part of the workforce and forming identities of their own – ones not dictated by their male counterparts – therefore noir’s obsession with the masculine fear of loneliness was born. Insecurity was presented on screen, wrapped in a bow in the form of the sensual but deadly femme fatale.

Plus, with the quick rise of the Cold War foreshadowing what would be repeated in the 60s, political paranoia instilled itself within the social consciousness.

People were afraid and depressed, the much-idolised and assured American Dream seemed no nearer than it did before the war and, like always, that pessimism fed into popular culture. Austere, melancholic titles like Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat struck a chord with the general public. Employing the expressionist influences of European filmmakers like Wilder and Lang, they were darker in theme, tone and, of course, aesthetics, more closely representing the mood of the heightened drama, visually as well as narratively. Tales of morally ambiguous, socially amorphous working-class men getting caught up in plots bigger than themselves became all the rage.

The public was drawn to stories of good men having to sacrifice hubris in an attempt to get what they believed they deserved. Characters like Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, whose obsession with the past is only matched by his avidity for

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Night Moves

Three Days of the Condor

the unknowable future after his current ‘Kodak moment’ existence is thrown into disarray with the return of Kathie, played with astute perfection by the gorgeous Jane Greer. Or even The Big Heat’s Dave Bannion, who, after the murder of his wife, becomes a one-man wrecking ball against the oppressive mob, fuelled only by vengeance and his search for the truth. Each are products of their society, representations of men struggling to find their place within the new post-war social order, leaving the lasting ideal of rebelling against ‘the system’. Narratives driven by their socio-political messages aren’t the only similarities between the two cinematic movements of Noir and 70s paranoia either. Noir is, in my mind, the blueprint for nearly every modern conspiracy thriller – a pugnacious man fighting against a corrupt system to right some wrong and expose the truth.

Alan J. Pakula’s incendiary cinematic trifecta of paranoia – Klute, All the President’s Men and The Parallax View – all abide by that simple dynamic but apply it in differing ways to confront and analyse the modern society of the time. Or maybe more fitting, Arthur Penn’s 1975 masterpiece Night Moves, which on the surface

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may seem like an homage to noir, complete with femme fatale, but its theme is that of contemporary American society. Gene Hackman is the lead once again, this time as ex-football star-turned-private eye Harry Moesby, an old-fashioned investigator searching for the runaway daughter of a once-famous actress. He does so, with seeming ease – he’s good at what he’s being told to do but as a larger plot involving a crashed plane and some conspicuous smuggling unfolds, he’s unable to join the dots – very much like The Conversation’s Harry Caul.

Moesby misinterprets situations, is ambivalent to others and doesn’t see the truth before it’s too late. Penn himself has spoken about the mood and structure of the piece being influenced by the Kennedy assassinations in ’63 and ’68, of how Americans were ‘wandering around in a kind of blindness unaware of what we were doing to ourselves’. Penn keeps Moesby, as well as the audience, uninformed and mostly ignorant to the ‘real’ story unfolding, so when the truth is finally revealed we are forced to ask ourselves ‘How did we not see that coming?’

It’s a significant criticism of the American psyche and its inability to read signs and predict situations.

Minority Report

“Shaken, in mourning and vengeful, with a war looming on the horizon – American National Security was redefined by their ‘War on Terror’. The Orwellian eye grew larger, its gaze became more focused and suspicious.”

A film like Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor is much broader and more frivolous, but still makes some interesting observations on the escalating fear of a government influenced by the stiff-arming of corporate America. Not just in its oil sub-plot, the reason given for the attack on Robert Redford’s C.I.A branch, but in the form of Max Von Sydow’s deadly assassin, whose moral compass is dictated by the highest bidder.

All the President’s Men, probably the best-known example of the sub-genre, may be more methodical in its approach, but is way more terrifying, as the biographical nature of the story delivers a true representation of paranoia within the parties involved. Pakula could have easily made a paint-by-numbers biopic, but his decision to focus on the characters, and the effect uncovering such a story has on them rather than just the scandal itself – capturing the essence of suspense completely – was his true masterstroke.

And you can’t underestimate the emergence of digital surveillance, the moment where it seemed America became a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ society. Tapping phones and video technology became all too believable as

a narrative tool, intensifying the distrust already within the nation.

The 80s and 90s didn’t really offer up anything new, most attempts at paranoia thrillers ended up being little more than entertaining homages of classic tropes.

Films like Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State and Michael Mann’s The Insider spring to mind, but fail to linger long.

Fast-forward to the events of September 11th 2001.

America was once again plunged into a state of national paranoia, not so much by the threat of their government but the threat of outside forces. Shaken, in mourning and vengeful, with a war looming on the horizon – American National Security was redefined by their ‘War on Terror’.

The Orwellian eye grew larger, its gaze became more focused and suspicious.

Steven Spielberg’s criminally forgotten Minority Report was one of the first to tackle and criticise the new approach and remains one of the best modern films to deal with society’s paranoia. Set in a near future where, aided by three supernaturally gifted siblings, a special Pre-Crime Police unit is able to predict murders and apprehend culprits before the crime is committed.

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“How will figures such as Assange, Manning and Snowden be represented? As snarling villains sacrificing the safety of their country? Or as modern day Woodwards and Bernsteins?”

Spotlighting how the government sacrifices its citizens’ civil rights to create a fully protected society, this ‘greater good’ approach may seem like utopian bliss but at the cost of a pre-ordained judgement system that raises the question, ‘is it worth sacrificing a few innocents to capture the guilty?’

Despite Minority Report being made as a direct response to the 9/11 reaction, it could very well be more relevant today than it was then. The American public is the most observed and scrutinised in the western world, and given recent revelations regarding the mass monitoring of emails and phone calls, everyone now knows for a fact that they have something to be paranoid about.

Alongside the current economic status, the polarised government parties and the outrageous figures regarding the distribution of wealth and unforgivable capitalism, paranoia will begin to seep deeper and deeper into the zeitgeist and feed through into more films. One question

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this raises is; as this slew of paranoia finds its way onto the big screen, how will figures such as Assange, Manning and Snowden be represented? As snarling villains sacrificing the safety of their country? Or as modern day Woodwards and Bernsteins – exposing corruption behind the curtain of the powers that be?

Of course, it’s easier to analyse the relevance and resonance of real-life events on art retrospectively, but there’s definitely a trend within today’s society comparable to that of the 60s and early 70s. The digital revolution is accelerating at a speed we’ve never seen, technology is becoming practically invisible. With the relevant ease information can be procured and distributed for public consumption, people like Assange and Snowden have a global audience at the click of a button. One question remains though – which is more frightening? What we believe our government to be capable of, or the truth of what our government is capable of ?

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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 DECEMBER 2013

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Lost i n America (take one) In the first of a two-part detour along the roads less-travelled in the New Hollywood era, James Rocarols tracks down some long-lost artefacts from a golden age

words by James Rocarols

T

he flowering of the ‘movie brats’ and New American Cinema holds a special place in the hearts of most cinephiles, even if it seems like we’re all sometimes guilty of overstating its significance. There was always something gratifying about the idea of a cinema that could marry the storytelling, technical and acting proficiency of classical Hollywood with the artistic creativity, expression and experimentation of worldwide art cinema. And the depressing dearth of respectable cinema coming out of mainstream Hollywood in subsequent decades has only increased nostalgia for the age when these two diverse approaches to filmmaking were briefly and blissfully wedded.

Compounding our disappointments is the fact that a great many films from the period remain unavailable for home viewing, stuck in legal limbo or simply

severely undervalued.

The DVD era of the last fifteen years has seen many of the most prominent titles released, with the more recent advent of projects like Warner Archive discs and the emergence of companies like Olive prompting the release of some of the more obscure titles. But many such DVD labels still prefer to stick to the sellable stars, directors or genres - with horror and exploitation having been particularly well served. Such once-holy grails as Messiah of Evil (1973), Rituals (1977) and An American Hippie in Israel (1972) have reappeared in just the last couple of years.

The most inaccessible titles seem to be the ones that slip between the genres, or the strange orphaned works of obscure and unheralded talents. Tracking down and wading through these films isn’t always as rewarding as you might think, and many titles are arguably deservedly

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The Last Movie

“Tracking down and wading through these films isn’t always as rewarding as you might think, and many titles are arguably deservedly unseen. But most discoveries are usually more interesting than contemporary mainstream films, at the very least, and in some cases there are some genuine lost treasures waiting to be unearthed.” unseen. But most discoveries are usually more interesting than contemporary mainstream films, at the very least, and in some cases there are some genuine lost treasures waiting to be unearthed.

Such lost works from 1970s American cinema are at their most valuable when they continue to reinforce the themes, subjects and stylistic developments of the era, perhaps expounding on them in ways that canonical entries neglected to do. But what precisely are the signature characteristics of this cinematic era? For sheer simplicity I’ll opt for the five tenets identified by Wikipedia’s page on New Hollywood Filmmaking, derived from Todd Berliner’s book Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema. Berliner’s five tropes are: meandering and imprecise narratives, appropriation of European cinematographic style, discomfiting themes, irresolution and non-linearity.

In connecting the disparate works contained in this article, I may have to dome narrative roaming of my own, which I hope is forgivable. But an apt film to start with is one that exhibits all of Berliner’s traits, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971). So elusive has the film become that it may as well be called The Lost Movie. Even today, screenings of the UK’s only surviving, barely-stitched-together print can cause waves of excitement. Quite why

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the film has been allowed to lapse into unavailability I’m not sure, given than any executives whom Hopper enraged at the time will likely either be dead, or otherwise surely placated by Hopper’s own death. In my opinion the film is a better and more deserving candidate for resurrection than the other infamous Western folly of the era, Heaven’s Gate (1980). The Last Movie is no masterpiece either, though, and for all the genius of the film’s final third, in which Peruvian natives re-enact a movie-making ritual for real, we have to first endure many wearingly extended sequences of cantina drunkenness and resulting streams of inaudible dialogue.

While The Last Movie long ago cemented its status as a mysteriously absent symbol of New American Cinema profligacy, what’s less well known is that Hopper’s fellow highway traveler Peter Fonda also directed a few films, and that he has been similarly unfortunate in terms of his works falling into unavailability. His sci-fi effort, Idaho Transfer (1973) is currently for sale on Amazon, but only as a cheapo grey-market dupe of an earlier VHS. It’s not the most successful film, so you can see why distributors haven’t rushed to release it. It’s a low-budget affair about a group of hippies taking part in a time-travel experiment who, fearing their project is being canned, make the leap into an unknown future America. While they’re free of

The Hired Hand

the societal constraints and stifling older generation, the future Idaho is even more depopulated, barren and inhospitable than it was in the early ‘70s, and the group of idealists is soon scouring the land for survivors, endlessly bickering, and bemoaning their infertility (a side effect of their ‘transfer’) – a consequence which forestalls the possibility of a progressive rebirth for humanity. Hippy sci-fi films had their moment in the early 1970s (Silent Running [1972], Phase IV [1974]) but Idaho Transfer has very little in the way of special effects or sci-fi intrigue to satisfy fans of the genre. The performances are also highly variable, featuring a number of actors for whom this is their only credit. Its modesty is kinda charming, but the film is a curiosity at best.

Peter Fonda’s earlier western The Hired Hand (1971) was also unavailable for many years until it was restored and rereleased in 2001. The Last Movie and The Hired Hand were both the results of Universal’s first round of independently produced auteur films, and both are also examples of a very ‘70s genre that is now sometimes referred to as the Acid western - films that offered a modernist, revisionist dissembling of the Wild West mythos.

Many of these films have been rehabilitated in recent years including Zachariah (1971), Greaser’s Palace (1972) and Kid Blue (1973) but one still strangely missing from

DVD is Monte Hellman’s China 9 Liberty 37 (1978). It’s unusual because Hellman’s earlier westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (both 1966), are conversely more notable for their ubiquity in the home video market as a result of their public domain status.

Those earlier westerns were hammered out in a matter of days under the auspices of Roger Corman, yet remain urgent and provocative twists on the then fading genre, helping shape the notions of the countercultural western at almost precisely the same time as Sergio Leone was instigating his own reformulation across the Atlantic. Hellman’s subsequent foray into the western genre would examine the reciprocal yet occasionally adversarial relationship between European and American cinema, making it a prime and fascinating example of a New American Cinema talent reformulating his idea through a European lens and sensibility. (Even the film’s title, referring to a mileage signpost, reinforces the notion of being situated at the midpoint of two opposing geographical and cultural entities).

Adapting to the realities of the era, Hellman made his third western in Europe, where the action now was.

But where the most famous of the spaghetti westerns featured a lone American in the lead, surrounded by a cast of Europeans, here Hellman reversed the formula by

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positing Fabio Test amid a cast of English speakers. Testi plays Clayton Drumm, a fugitive who’s given one last reprieve if he’ll kill an errant rancher, Matthew Sebanek (Warren Oates). However Drumm is more of a lover than a fighter, and he ends up refusing to kill Sebanek and instead seducing his wife ( Jenny Agutter). Hellman makes no attempt to hide the fact that Drumm is an outsider, leaving Testi’s near incomprehensible accent in place despite the European penchant for dubbing at the time (poor sound recording and inaudible dialogue seems to be an intentional feature of many Hellman films).

Drumm is an effeminate, sexual and emotionally literate man amid a population of uptight, repressed gunmen.

Painted as a pacifist-leaning, pretty-boy pansy yet also positioned as our hero, he spends the film exasperating his masculine adversaries with his unconventional challenging of Wild West orthodoxies. While this makes for a fascinating subtext thoroughly in the tradition of New American Cinema, on the surface the film is less compelling than Hellman’s earlier westerns, with none of the ellipsis and existential asides that made The Shooting a near masterpiece of the genre, and lacking the gumption of most spaghetti westerns or even the contemporaneous work of Sam Peckinpah (who himself has a minor acting role in the film The European influence on American films from the period has been well documented, but it’s clear that certain stylistic inheritances were more widespread than others (perhaps depending on which films had been distributed in America at the time). For example, if we take the French New Wave, reproductions of the naturalistic, breezy romanticism of À bout de soufflé (1960) or Jules et Jim (1962) are far more common than homages to the more intellectually rigorous and formally experimental works of the Left Bank branch of directors (Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, et al). However Some Call It Loving (1973) could be a contender for the convergence of the Left Bank and the West Coast. It was directed by the unlikely figure of James B. Harris, a producer and close associated of Stanley Kubrick who dipped his toe into directing with The Bedford Incident in 1965 but only managed a handful of credits thereafter. Some Call It Loving is easily the most interesting of all the post-Kubrick films he’s been involved with. Apparently Harris came up with the idea on the set of Lolita (1962), adapting a short story by John Collier to meld with Nabokov’s ideas about elusive and unattainable desire.

The film stars Zalman King (the regal star of many

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a cult classic and, coincidentally, close friend of Left Bank figures Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy during the late ‘60s) as a saxophonist called Robert Troy who spends most of his time hanging out in a jazz club with a spaced-out junkie (played by Richard Pryor). This may be largely down to the fact that his home life is so abnormal – he shares his cavernous playboy mansion with a lesbian couple who make him take part in weird, erotic, voyeuristic games.

While browsing a carnival Troy happens across a sleazy sideshow in which a purportedly catatonic woman is presented as a ‘sleeping beauty’, prone and available for punters to try and awaken with a kiss. He promptly buys her and takes her home, where she soon wakes from her slumber and ingratiates herself too readily in the suggestive role-playing of Troy’s housemates, much to his distaste because he’s genuinely smitten with her. In Berliner’s terms, Some Call It Loving certainly defies explanation and easy resolution, and its dreamy, adult fairy-tale ambience is reminiscent of Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961), or more pertinently Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) (with its emphasis on performance and role play), along with a dash of Robbe-Grillet-style eroticism and a smattering of Vertigo-ish (1958) obsessive perversity.

Harris conjures an atmosphere of Californian surrealism that’s rarely seen in American cinema, give-or-take the odd Maya Deren or David Lynch, and you’d think the film’s tonal weirdness would make it an appealing prospect for genre distributors to unearth. However, despite its singular mood and compelling strangeness Some Call It Loving isn’t quite the unblemished cult classic discovery I was hoping for. The film’s many dancing and performance sequences, which range from prom-night slow dances to tangos, tap-dancing and cheerleading scenes, take up far too much of the film’s running time and eventually become wearisome. The film also relies heavily on the presence of Richard Pryor’s, whose stammering, befuddled, jittery performance just manages to balance out King’s glazed soporifics as Troy.

If Some Call It Loving seems like an oddity even amid the uncommon confines of 1970s adventurism, Making It (1971) is a more conventional but no less interesting unseen gem.

Never released on any home video format on either side of the Atlantic, it can only be seen via its occasional airing on the Fox Movie Channel in the US. Phil Fuller (Kristoffer Tabori) is a 17-year-old high school student

who’s unnaturally confident for his age. Unlike most teens he has no problem picking up girls, and indeed women, managing to date both the middle-aged wife of his football coach and a classmate at the same time.

From a single-parent family, he enjoys a frank and equal relationship with his mother, consoling her about her adult love life much more than she’s able to reassure him about adolescent issues. He’s highly intelligent, gliding through classes and achieving top grades while running rings around teachers and authority figures. And he’s also highly distrustful of the reverence for rebellious cultural icons such as Holden Cauldfield, whom he finds to be an insufferably serious and hypocritical role model for his generational peers.

Fuller may be cocky but is generally presented as likeable, and for the most part the film is a rather jaunty high-school romp in the vein of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). But as the film progresses we start to realise he’s not such a likeable guy after all; the wisecracking begins to come across more like heartless callousness, or even cruelty, and he starts to resemble the calculating sociopathic womanisers from films like Rodger Dodger (2002) or Alfie (1966). If Fuller represents the coming generation then it’s a worrisome portrayal; the laid back confidence of idealistic youth actually masks a cynical appropriation of countercultural emblems for personal gain (Fuller browses alternative bookshops just to pick up girls, pretends to be a Buddhist to extricate himself from boring classes, and only uses marijuana to unwittingly

sedate his dates).

Therefore the film is arguably ahead of its time in presenting the values of ‘baby boomers’ as individualistic rather than altruistic, an aphorism that wouldn’t become widespread until after the societal changes of the Reagan-Thatcher era took effect. In the end Fuller does get his comeuppance when he gets a girl pregnant, thereafter finding he has no choice but to conform to conservative structures of law, order and medicine when it comes to dealing with such an earthly issue.

This symbolic positioning of pregnancy as the ultimate downer, biology’s handy way of puncturing the confidence of the Pill-popping younger generation, is surprisingly typical in New American Cinema, and films such as Play It As It Lays (1972) and End of the Road (1970) join Making It in having a significant abortion sequence that serves to discomfit (to repeat Berliner’s term) the audience and remind them that the supposed freedoms of the era are only shallow distortions. Making It was directed by a lowly figure called John Erman, who spent most of his career in TV with the exception of the undistinguished Bette Midler weepie Stella (1990).

Many of the lost 1970s films are directed by such one-hit wonders, and that’s unlikely to be a coincidence.

Without a recognisable industry talent to champion a re-release, or form the basis of a distributor’s marketing campaign, such films find themselves friendless and unsupported.

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True Love in fake places: Alan Rudolph In an exclusive extract from a wide-ranging interview, Neil McGlone talks to one of the great American individualists about his early career words and interview by Neil McGlone

A

lan Rudolph’s career spans some 21 films as a director; numerous collaborations with Robert Altman which include some of his greatest films; The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), Nashville (1975) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) as well as being a co-writer on the film of Alice Cooper’s concept album Welcome to My Nightmare (1975).

He firmly established his filmmaking style with Welcome to LA (1976) with its ensemble performances and emphasis on the importance of music to storytelling. He would go on to make many films utilising the same actors and key creative personnel that would culminate in such great movies as Trouble in Mind (1985), The Moderns (1988), Equinox (1992), Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) and Afterglow (1997).

Alan currently lives in Washington State with his wife of more than 40 years, Joyce.

Vérité: Your father (Oscar Rudolph) was clearly a big fluence on you becoming a film-maker

Alan Rudolph: Movies were always in my life growing

up in LA in the late 40s and 50s – not only watching them like everyone else, but also at the dinner table.

My father joined the film industry as a boy in the 20s when he got an acting job with Mary Pickford. In the late 30s, Cecil B DeMille, no less, deemed him ready for an assistant director position. He made a successful leap to directing when episodic television started around 1950. My favourite part was visiting sound stages in classic Hollywood before that era fully passed. Instead of removing mystique, gazing from inside the genie bottle mesmerized me even more.

Did you always have aspirations to become a filmmaker?

I had few, if any; maybe because it was so ubiquitous or that when I was an impressionable teenager, mostly crap came out of Hollywood. Fortunately, my father took us to foreign films and they vigorously reworked my thinking.

My momentous change came around ’61 when my older brother brought home a motorcycle and brand-new

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The Nightmare Circus

The Long Goodbye

(now ancient) super-8 film camera. I taught myself to make and edit small films and screened them to music by starting the projector and tape recorder simultaneously, hoping for synch.

Film schools were just arriving when I graduated but I likely wouldn’t have applied anyway. College educated me to one fact: I was a self-taught loner and all I wanted was to get on my motorcycle and find something to film.

From your experience working as an assistant director on two films and in television, did this prepare you for making that next step to directing?

Riot (1969) was my first movie as a trainee, shot entirely in a maximum-security prison in Florence, Arizona – it was quite an experience. The top instructions were to never go anywhere inside the walls without a guard and absolutely no running whatsoever. Real sharpshooters were in the towers and real killers on the ground. By the third week the director and star weren’t speaking. So there I was, low man on the production pole, sprinting unaccompanied across the yard and to retrieve our star from his trailer, where he went after each take just to piss off the director - only in the movies!

The Big Bounce (1969) was my second location shoot.

I sensed the picture was awful while we were making it. It bothered me that no one else seemed concerned. I wondered how I would make a feature film, how I could.

A few years later I met the lead singer of a ragged local

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band and quickly fashioned a horror screenplay around his group, Premonition (1972). I raised about twenty-five thousand dollars from strangers, family, friends and myself. The challenge of translating this small amount into a finished movie overwhelmed my interests in the story; I think the whole shoot was just ten days. My father’s long-time friend and great director Robert Aldrich allowed us to film a few sequences in his studio without charge.

How did Nightmare Circus (1974) come about?

I got a call from an acquaintance working on a cheap horror fiasco. Did I want to reshoot the entire movie in a week? After creating unusable footage, the director quit with crew and mostly amateur cast prepaid for five more days. I never read the script or saw the results, but it was another useful learning experience and I’m sure a dreadful piece of work (released under various titles I’m told).

One day while toiling at the typewriter, I received a call from Robert Altman’s office. I had been recommended for an assistant director position and Altman wanted to see me. I explained I no longer worked as one but the caller persisted and a good thing, too. After meeting Altman nothing in my life would be the same.

I was offered The Long Goodbye (1973) as an assistant director after meeting Altman in his office. That same night I saw McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971) then that weekend I saw it four more times. I knew this was a rare

Welcome to LA

Choose Me

opportunity to work with a master and I jumped at it.

A few years later on the set of Nashville (1975), Bob dropped the hint he might someday produce other filmmakers and said I should think of something to make.

I’d been talking with Richard Baskin about fashioning a script around a suite of his songs. Bob knew that, but never brought it up and my only instructions from him were, ‘Don’t make a chase movie.’

emerging and the Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors was Bob’s idea.

Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola and Lucas appeared on the scene around the same time yet they were making very different films to your own.

Filmmakers are all different, just like real life some look in and some look out. Some break new ground while others revise and revisit. Some pursue violence and others And this was how Welcome to LA was born? entertainment, some violence as entertainment. Many go Bob asked me to write the screenplay for Buffalo Bill and for the money and a few for the mysteries.

The Indians (1976). That was enough to set up Welcome My work seems to lack the success gene and popularto LA and we promised the financers to deliver a name ity chromosome. It mostly avoids pop culture references, cast for a budget below a million dollars. which never helps, and is considered off-kilter. The films are cracked romances, quixotic dreams and cosmic jokes, Actors swirled around Altman’s world on a daily basis and filling roles was more through osmosis than formal true love in fake places. They appeal to individuals, not casting. The process for me became one of deciding on a masses, there’s no word to spread. first choice and going after that person exclusively. If all the roles in all my films were surveyed, my guess is that The structure of the story for Welcome to LA is ninety percent have involved meeting only one actor very musical. It’s a series of encounters, sexual per character. and otherwise, that keep circling back to the main I had already worked with Keith, Geraldine, Harvey characters as if the music was commenting on the Keitel, John Considine and Denver Pyle, a grizzled west- action. ern character actor. He was excited to be offered a serious role.

Welcome to LA is a street opera like Choose Me Sally Kellerman was around Bob’s office quite of(1984) with songs as stories. Personally, the film celeten and Lauren Hutton took some photos on the set brates Altman’s great influence on me. I was proud of of Buffalo Bill. Keith knew Sissy Spacek, who was just that influence and I wanted it known, I wasn’t hiding it.

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Being in the shadow of a great director was a privilege, not insecurity. Welcome to LA had one large and barely acknowledged effect on the state of movies, aside from displaying a different sensibility, Welcome was one of the first true American independent films of the current era.

It defined today’s movement, what the so-called independent label implies. Bob formed a company exclusively for Welcome’s release. It made us a one-stop enterprise. Here was an American dramatic film with known actors playing in art houses and competing for national space with studio pictures. That wasn’t done then, not out of Hollywood. Mike Kaplan crafted the release and the picture earned back its costs, Mikey also released Remember My Name (1978).

Roadie (1980) is one of those movies that feels like it should be a “cult classic” and have more of an underground following.

After the resounding non-success of Remember My Name, I was depressed and broke. I quickly agreed to direct Roadie and Endangered Species (1982) for new producers, as I had to see if I could work in Hollywood.

I understand Endangered Species was not a particularly pleasant filming experience for you and that at one stage you were locked out of the editing room?

It might have been a completely different experience if the Writers Guild of America strike hadn’t halted all studio production just before we were to shoot, but I doubt it.

When the strike was over a year later, MGM was in deep shit. Their theatrical releases during the strike mostly bombed. The top executive became harsh and abusive.

The second week of filming he shut us down altogether, hating my naturalistic look and they fired the cameraman and lighting crew. I tried to quit but my contract forbade it. The experience lost its essential spirit and never recovered. I tried my professional best, mainly for the actors but it became an out-of-body event, I was already out of my mind.

The original tampering studio boss was fired just before we finished our edit and the new tampering boss demanded more cuts, eliminating my final scene, which had

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put a twist into everything. The new tampering boss was eventually fired and the movie remains what it is forever.

What was the origin of the story?

These mutilations had been going on for decades and were factually documented. FBI, NASA, CIA, cops, cults, and kooks looked into it with no conclusions.

The film almost feels like an early pre-cursor to The X-Files (1993-2002) I’ve never seen The X-Files; these events were true and happening. While filming in Wyoming, we came across carcasses that appeared overnight in a snowy field, organs removed with surgical precision but here was no blood or tracks, NASA thought it was aliens.

You said in an interview regarding Choose Me that “it was somehow the most graceful film for me, the most pure filmmaking. There were no obligations other than to just make this film.”

This was the 80s and many Hollywoodians were beginning to make shitloads of money with the major studios still in control. For me to survive as a filmmaker moving forward meant stepping back which meant going small, like Welcome to LA and Remember My Name, Choose Me was a limited production. Like those films, it took advantage of its limitations and limitations tend to disappear that way.

I wanted the screenplay to come bursting out once I was fully programmed and that meant writing would be the last element of planning. First-time producer David Blocker had to make the budget and schedule without a script. He kept asking what the scenes were about and I said people in inexpensive places talking. The total price was the same as that napkin budget I made.

My basic premise was a pathological liar who only told the truth and the women who love him. Around the third day of writing, I had to drive somewhere and while searching for a baseball game on radio, I encountered a comforting female voice dispensing intimate advice to a caller on one of the first shows of its kind, Dr. Tony Grant. I’d never heard anything like it and thought it

“Altman often said casting is the majority of a director’s work. Actors to me are the real artists in the process, they bring truth to fiction and Choose Me is all fiction, our unreal feel is front and centre.” hilarious, I quickly returned home to mix in a new character with Mickey and Eve, that character became Dr. Nancy Love.

There is a feeling of ensemble playing with Carradine, Warren, Bujold, Chong, Bachau and even Teddy Pendergrass who’s not seen but whose songs play throughout.

Altman often said casting is the majority of a director’s work. Actors to me are the real artists in the process, they bring truth to fiction and Choose Me is all fiction, our unreal feel is front and centre. This unique cast took unique characters and made them believable as well as unique. Teddy’s seductive songs are about only one thing, they define the romantic world that allows our story to occur. The screenplay had a few nice twists, and the look was enticing but it was the actors that made it true.

Every object, advertising hoarding, item of clothing and character tic is weighed with multifaceted significance in the film –was this consciously done by you in pre-production and rehearsals?

Virtually everyone on the production was working at short money to move up in position. The actors just

wanted to do good work, you can’t buy that kind of incentive or spirit, in fact, and we couldn’t buy much of anything!

Our physical world had to validate a fable of romantic yearning. I started with a visual language, moods, colours and touches. Choose Me’s stylized language and design held up from the outset, which made it easier to communicate.

The Choose Me script was spare but fully written. Lesley Ann, Genevieve and Keith developed characters to their liking. I rarely rehearse a scene until it reaches the set, but we’re always discussing character, embellishing and sharing insights.

The schedule was so short that no sooner had we started we were finishing up, like an experience with no middle to it. People were sorry for the exhilaration to end, as the film was the only reason we were together. It was why the production company was in business. When it ultimately succeeded, a significant experience became that much better and everyone involved felt it.

During editing, I wanted to use some old Teddy songs that unfortunately weren’t under Shep Gordon’s control.

This would cost money we didn’t have so to pay for it, I agreed to take a directing job (Songwriter 1984) that everyone was turning down, the kind of situation Kristofferson might say was ‘enough to kill a normal man.’

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Vérité’s Top 5 70s Cops* * As Popeye Doyle and Harry Callahan are the Alpha and Omega of this particular trope, you won’t find them here. This is a celebration of the films and characters that they (and Frank Bullitt) inspired.

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5. ll Grande Racket (1976) No discussion of 70s cops would be complete without an acknowledgment of Poliziotteschi the pulpy, outrageous, unmistakably Italian strand of Eurocrime pictures that never achieved the kind of pop-crossover appeal of the spaghetti-westerns in its time, but has in recent years seen a resurgence in popularity amongst genre fans, thanks to new appreciation for polizia directors like Fernando di Leo, Umberto Lenzi, and Enzo G Castellari.

Palmieri from Castellari’s The Big Racket is particularly notable for combining two defining 70s movie icons into one deadly package, marrying Harry Callahan’s maverick intensity to the dead-eyed self-righteousness of Death Wish’s Paul Kersey. As both of those movies were regularly held up as examples of the action movie as an apology for fascism, it’s little wonder The Big Racket was slammed by many critics as repugnant, with critic Morando Morandini labelling it ‘fascist’ ‘vile’ and ‘an idiot film’.

It’s true that there are moments that are unpalatable and borderline unacceptable, but this is one of the best-made of all polizias, and Testi’s steely performance as Palmieri, alongside some genuinely incredible set-pieces – not least the justly famous shot where Palmieri is trapped in a car rolling down a hill – mean this is still a must watch for strong-stomached fans of the genre. Paul Martinovic

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4.

Sweeney! & The Sweeney (1977 & 1978) While exploitation hipsters in the UK snuggle up to their Fernando di Leo boxsets they’d do well to remember that many of the pleasures of that particular genre can also be found closer to home in the decidedly less fashionable Sweeney movies; with tough cops, convoluted plots, ridiculous hair, risible misogyny, and outrageous violence all here in the same glorious abundance that characterises their Italian counterparts.

While Jack Regan (and George Carter) first became famous, and was in reality probably more effective on the small screen, the Sweeney films are still slight but enjoyable genre exercises in their own right. The first instalment Sweeney! is heavily influenced by the Profumo affair scandal which rocked the UK in the early sixties, whereas the clunkier and more violent sequel sees a more traditional pursuit of a robbery gang in Malta.

What makes the films so watchable and notable is John Shaw’s oft-imitated, never bettered portrayal of the hilariously dyspeptic Regan, which lends a slightly camp quality to his relentless abuse of booze, birds and bastards and can’t help but make him weirdly endearing; certainly more so than Ray Winstone’s eye-rolling self-parody in Nick Love’s markedly inessential 2012 remake. Paul Martinovic

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3.

The Super Cops (1974) It’s ironic that the one film here based on a true story perhaps be the most unashamedly cartoonish – and no mean feat, considering the other films in this list – but then again hardly surprising, seeing as the two real-life cops the film was based on anointed themselves as the real-life Batman and Robin.

The Super Cops focuses (although given the careering, ramshackle structure of the film, perhaps this isn’t quite the word) on the exploits of real-life detectives David Greenberg and Robert Hantz, whose unorthodox methods and unparalleled success at booking drug pushers made them both local heroes and wildly unpopular with the less successful and decidedly more crooked other members of the NYPD. This is no Serpico, though – the corruption storyline is repeatedly picked up and dropped whenever the film sees fit, but then again what do you expect from a film that was actually co- written by the creator of the 60s Batman series? The Wire?

There’s a scene where our heroes depart a shootout in a collapsing building by catching a lift on a nearby wrecking ball. It’s that kind of film. Paul Martinovic

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2.

The Driver (1978) Thanks to the crossover appeal of the likes of Harry Callahan and Popeye Doyle the maverick policeman in 70s movies was invariably presented as an anti-hero almost by default. Leave it to Hollywood’s Weirdo Laureate Bruce Dern, then, to reinvent the cop who plays by his own rules as an obsessive creep, in Walter Hill’s classic neo-noir The Driver.

In the macho world of 70s cop movies (and indeed all of Hill’s oeuvre) any hit of queerness is always analogous to untrustworthiness, and indeed there’s an unmistakably lascivious, homoerotic quality to the way Dern pursues the dashingly vacant Ryan O’Neal over the course of film’s taut ninety minutes, vowing to catch ‘the cowboy that’s never been caught’ before coyly just flat out admitting “I really like chasing you”.

But Dern’s Detective (like the Driver he is never named) is still a formidable sonof-a-bitch; bullying, blackmailing and brutalising anyone who gets in the way of his relentless pursuit of the Driver, and Hill’s typically terse, economical film-making allows Dern the perfect arena to flex those weird acting muscles and walk away with the picture, which by no coincidence is easily one of the best and most underrated crime pictures of the 70s. Paul Martinovic

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1.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) The final movie in a spectacular run of late-period crime films from Walter Matthau, preceded by the excellent Charley Varrick and the grimly engaging The Laughing Policeman (playing off Bruce Dern playing yet another creepy weirdo cop), The Taking of Pelham 123 is an all-time classic and the best of the bunch, with Matthau’s world-weary central performance as Lieutenant Garber a career highlight.

As a transport cop he’s far less glamorous than many of the other all-action policemen on this list, but in terms of investigative nous and sheer improvisational he’s right at the top, keeping pace and improvising superbly against Mr Blue (Robert Shaw) in a tense verbal battle that takes place almost entirely over a radio, before the film culminates with Garber’s triumph in one of the all-time great ‘gotcha’ endings.

The film even slyly subverts the un-PC personas of 70s cops, as Garber’s misanthropy and casual racism is presented as a flaw, best illustrated in the famous moment when a group of Japanese tourists he has gleefully been labelling ‘monkeys’ and ‘dummies’ turn round and politely reveal they speak English and understand him perfectly. It’s nice to see those attitudes made the butt of the joke in a 70s crime flick for a change. That said, you can’t help but fall in love with a character who utters the line: “The guy who’s talking’s got a heavy English accent…he could be a fruitcake.” Paul Martinovic

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

he largest event in Europe showcasing Chinese cinema, the China Image Film Festival, creates platforms for co-production and investment as well as representing the important connection between East & West film-markets.

These sentiments were stressed by Chinese officials and their British counterparts; including Ivor Benjamin, the chair of the Directors Guild of Great Britain & Directors Guild Trust, who talked of the importance of strengthening the relationship between the two countries, with films acting as a common language to overcome any barriers.

This year the festival was the biggest to-date, hosting over 20 screenings as well as a number of talks, discussions and panels.

The festival was attended by dignitaries from China and England, as well as numerous Chinese talents, including director Xue Xiaolu, director Cong Xiao, actress Yang Zishan and actor Aaron Kwok in addition to British filmmaking luminaries like Nic Roeg.

Here’s a couple of highlights from the festival:

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Opening Film AN END TO KILLING director Wang Ping Focusing on the meeting between Chinese Taoist priest Qui Chuji and Genghis Khan and the efforts of Chuji to stop Khan from using violence, this big-budget epic was one of China’s success stories this year with the international rights being snapped up almost immediately.

The film opens with a voiceover explaining Genghis Khan’s campaign across Mongolia and arrival in Afghanistan. Khan’s army is plagued by illness, which is fast claiming his soldiers and he begins to fear for his own life. Khan sends for Qui Chuji, a Taoist priest believed to hold the secret to eternal life. Chuji is at first reluctant, convinced that this will be the last trip he ever makes, but soon enough he is on the road, joined by one of his disciples and the Khan’s general sent as an envoy.

The rest of the film details the journey, the subsequent encounter between the two figures and the way Taoist teachings slowly change the Khan’s attitude towards violence.

There’s no denying the gorgeous vista of An End To Killing – shot across a number of provinces and costing a whopping 100,000,000 Yuan - and director Wang Ping mines every opportunity to create a cinematic spectacle. However, even such beautiful scenery cannot save what is essentially a wooden and leaden drama.

The script for An End To Killing is a patchy collection of scenes that fail to create a coherent sense of story of characters. Instead we follow ciphers who clearly represent values and arguments – Youilang Zhao as Qui Chuji is a man who has found a sense of peace and purpose within the universe, whilst Tumen’s Genghis Khan is caught within a tumultuous storm of his own making.

The film plays the clash of these ideologies as heavy-handedly as possible; throwing in sub-plots involving Khan’s wife Hoelun, the innkeeper and her captive husband. Instead of strengthening the characters we encounter, the script keeps throwing dramatic moment upon dramatic moment, weakening the overall impact. Add to this some unnecessary action set-pieces within the first half of the film, seemingly there only to engage an audience who might otherwise find the plot a drag, and the result is a hotchpotch of various elements that never come together.

At nearly two hours, the film more than overstays its welcome and by the time the obvious message is hammered home for the final time, there’s nothing for the audience to do but shake their head tiredly.

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Closing Film SILENT WITNESS director Fei Xing Director Fei Xing’s previous film, Man Behind The Courtyard House, was one of the most fascinating debuts to come out of China. Focusing on a killer played by Simon Yam, the film constantly rewound its timeline to bring a new perspective to the events on screen. What started off as a cheap horror film slowly evolved into a poignant character study and despite its flaws, remains a thrilling and worthwhile discovery.

The director uses the same structure in his new feature, Silent Witness, where the traditional courtroom thriller is deconstructed by playing fast and loose with the structure. Seeing the same timeline through the viewpoints of multiple characters, the film constantly rewinds to let its story play out with new information the audience has recently discovered.

Alas, this time Xing is unable to pull a second coup and Silent Witness ends up as nothing more than a dull movie with indulgent over-acting pulling at its seams.

Tycoon Lin Tai’s daughter is the prime murder suspect in the death of her father’s fiancée, Yang Dan. While her defence lawyer Zhou Li and prosecutor Tong Tao clash over her culpability, nothing in the case is what it first seemed.

Aaron Kwok plays Tong Tao, the prosecutor who has been unsuccessfully trying to convict Lin Tai for a long time – delivering a wooden, unengaging performance. Then again, it’s hard to see exactly what any of these actors can do, as they are weighed down with verbose, expository dialogue and sub-par emotional twaddle.

Clocking in at 119 minutes, the film feels like thin material stretched way beyond its limits, and while the cinematography is solid in places, there are times when the whole thing looks like it was shot on the cheap on a low-grade digital camera.

All in all Fei Xing is a director with interesting ideas, but it’s going to take a film with a lot more substance than Silent Witness for him to create the intense emotional punch he is aiming for.

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Here Be Dragons

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Lost Souls

and Ghost Temples Sam Moore is charmed by Mark Cousins’ impassioned and intelligent Albanian travelogue Here Be Dragons

words by Sam Moore

B

efore watching Here Be Dragons, I was almost completely ignorant of Albania.

What I did know about the country mostly revolved around its hapless football team, so I was prepared for a learning experience unlike any other. Shot on a camera you can get for around £100 from Amazon, acclaimed film maker Mark Cousins ventures to Albania on film festival duties, but that soon takes a backseat as he attempts to look into the soul of the forgotten country.

A self-described essay film, Here Be Dragons is a chronicle of Cousins’ experiences within the country, very much in the style of a travelogue, but with philosophical musings in the style of Chris Marker. Here Be Dragons has a stream of consciousness, almost diary-like narrative and as a result, Cousins and his personality become directly intertwined with the film. It’s lucky then that

Cousins is a warm human being with a sensitive eye for detail and a passionate, thought-provoking view of the world.

Cousins acts as our guide and seems to be learning as we do, making the emotional experience a shared one.

The director’s smooth Irish brogue is warm and friendly, but capable of emitting fierce emotion when the time comes for it.

At first, Here Be Dragons appears to be Cousins’ first film interested in something other than cinema, but his thoughts on the world are so inherently defined by the medium that he has spent his life being so extraordinarily passionate about. Whilst not directly about film, Cousins sees the world through a camera lens and he gives us Albania through that prism – showing us the most ordinary images of a street or train station and illuminating them through his incredibly vast knowledge of film. Cousins

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“The problem surrounding the Albanian film archive goes deeper than funding and resources; there are a large number of people that would be happy if the films quietly disintegrate and never see the light of day.”

has no predetermined prejudices and his camera allows us to examine Albania freely and find its history hidden in plain sight.

Cousins spends a lot of time musing over a gaudy pyramid built to treasure controversial former leader Enver Hoxha’s possessions. Hoxha, a once promising revolutionary, oversaw an economic boom and societal improvements in the post-war years – but years of violent oppression have since overwhelmed his legacy. What remains is a pyramid that was supposed to be an almighty tribute but, in the decades since Hoxha’s death, has been vandalised and desecrated, with people even picking it as a location to have sex. It was supposed to act as a temple where people could worship, but is now a place where people fuck; a poetic act of punk defiance. The contempt shown towards the pyramid actually poses an interesting question: should the pyramid be torn down as act of solidarity to symbolise a new age or should it stay there rotting to signify when humanity got lost? I’m inclined towards the former.

That pyramid is a centrepiece in the capital of Tirana and the eyesore actually seems to embody the strange

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little city. Part dystopia, part relic, Tirana appears to be a place with a lost identity with nobody prepared to step up and reclaim it, which is a shame, because there is a beautiful place fighting to be let out. There are parts of Albania that wouldn’t look out of place in an Andrei Tarkovsky picture; all gloomy fog and odd, mystical beauty.

Perhaps the saddest thing shown in the film is the state of the Albanian film archive. The archive is near ruin, having being savaged by decay and neglect. The film is starting to stink of vinegar, which if you know anything about film stock, is very, very bad. These little-seen films sit in damp squalor and there are menial efforts to rescue them, though a small team of filmmakers, academics and cineastes remain determined to preserve these forgotten works. The problem surrounding the Albanian film archive goes deeper than funding and resources; there are a large number of people that would be happy if the films quietly disintegrate and never see the light of day. They want them, and all they contain, to be a victim of time, so memories of a painful past can’t haunt anymore. For many, it is a case of moving on but what is on those films is part of history, one little known about or discussed. For

“Cousins is a rare auteur who makes films in a singular fashion that are optimistic and intelligent. He is a necessary filmmaker for our time and his ability to go right to the heart of any issue in such articulate fashion is one of his greatest strengths. ” those reasons they need to be treasured and exhibited so that Albania’s history can be shown to a wider circle.

My solitary criticism is actually about the portrayal of Albanian cinema within the film, in that there really isn’t one. Here Be Dragons is a short film, always engaging and inquisitive, but it feels like there’s a black hole where several Albanian films should have been mentioned or examined. A little time spent talking about some Albanian classics would have been greatly appreciated and also helped emphasise why film should be so carefully treasured.

The most impassioned moment comes with Cousins’ open letter to Hoxha. As anyone who has read Sight and Sound will know, he has quite the way with words and the open letter is a simple, powerful piece of writing. Elegant, yet fierce, Cousins confronts the late tyrant and brings him to task for his treatment of the people of Albania. An open letter in voiceover is far from the most cinematic thing in the world, but Cousins makes it rousing and we absorb every one of his words.

Cousins knows better than anybody about the power of images, and there are times where he lets the visuals

speak for themselves, knowing no voiceover could do them justice. Cousins values both the images he is filming and the audience he is filming for, knowing how long to hold a single shot so that it can be correctly absorbed and deconstructed.

It’s no secret Cousins has a particular affinity with children – he has made two films related to children and also set up a charity with Tilda Swinton – and here he dedicates a segment to letting these young voices speak for themselves, something I’ve found to be a bit of a rarity in 21st Century cinema. His encounter with the children on the street is one of the most purely charming moments I’ve seen in a film this year.

Cousins is a rare auteur who makes films in a singular fashion that are optimistic and intelligent. He is a necessary filmmaker for our time and his ability to go right to the heart of any issue in such articulate fashion is one of his greatest strengths. I don’t know what his aims were when making this film, but he has inspired me to learn more about Albania and hunt down as many of this countries film as possible, and for that I’m truly grateful.

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The Obscure

Poetry of

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The Forgetten Legend Andrew Kam This month’s discovery sees Evrim Ersoy assessing the frustratingly short and overlooked career of a forgotten HK master

words by Evrim Ersoy

I

n the history of Hong Kong Cinema, certain names have travelled far and wide. Tsui Hark, who followed his early, angry, skilful work blending social statement and gritty action drama by reinterpreting the classic supernatural tropes of Chinese myths; John Woo expertly blended violent action scenes with explorations of the male psyche; Johnnie To, whose penchant for the unusual sees him focus on the natural rhythm of underworld life - the list can be expanded.

However, there is one name that seems to have been consigned to the dusty books of history with unfair finality, a man whose talent marked him to be even more skilled than some of his equals, but who slowly faded out of the movie world.

Andrew Kam is a contemporary of Johnny to, Ann Hui

and Tsui Hark, and a lot of his early work appears as a mish-mash of these directors’ various talents.

There’s no definite way, for example, of knowing who shot Swordsman. When King Hu left the project midway, Tsui Hark stepped in with a team of his own to finish the film. Although none of them are credited, it’s not hard to identify the work of these future masters: Ann Hui’s static and yet masterly style, so beautifully demonstrated in later work like The Postmodern Life of My Aunt, shines through in some of the character work. Meanwhile, the kinetic madness of Kam is clearly evident in the action set-pieces, though at this point it can be difficult to differentiate between Hark and Kam’s handwork, which both share a sense of purpose and elegance that separates them from the others involved.

Kam’s filmography consists of nine features – his final

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movie having been completed in 2004 – and he has since worked in television, albeit infrequently. However, getting any information about him and his body of work can be almost as difficult as tracking his pictures.

Kam is best experienced and understood through the four films he contributed to the action genre: The Big Heat, Fatal Termination, The Heart Of Killer and Asian Cop – High Voltage as well as Before Sunrise – a by-thenumbers thriller that only comes into its own in the final act.

The Big Heat seems like a typical Hong Kong actioner from the late 80s – produced by Tsui Hark, the film was directed by Kam, with Johnnie To handling some later scenes and reportedly even Hark shooting some of the set-pieces. However it’s almost impossible not to identify Kam’s handiwork, which has a brutal, gritty quality to it – marrying Hong Kong bullet ballet with neo-noir reality.

Wong Pai Pong (Waise Lee) has nerve spasm in his right hand freezing him during gunfights. Choosing to retire from the police force before he causes any real harm, he is drawn back in when his partner Tse gets killed in Malaysia. Information reveals that Tse (Wong Lik) was investigating the details of a large shipment of

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goods to be smuggled out of Hong Kong and that Han Ching (Paul Chu), a local businessman, is somehow involved. Wong decides to take on the case as one final job…

Far from the heroic bloodshed of John Woo lies the twisted world of Kam – the city presented in The Big Heat is an asphalt jungle - an unforgiving warzone where no good deed can go unpunished. The violence is bloody, fast, almost sickening – Kam pull no punches. By the final act, Wong Pai Pong is so brutalized that he can’t even cock his shotgun without the help of another detective – the simple story of good vs. bad becomes a trawl through a city populated entirely by emotionally savage animals that inhabit the skins of men. It’s a brutal nightmare.

Follow it with Fatal Termination and a pattern emerges – clear as day.

Two groups of warring terrorists attempt to get hold of an arsenal of weapons being smuggled through Hong Kong, while violent cop Jimmy (Simon Yam) is on the trail of arms dealer Ko (Kao Fei,), who has joined forces with corrupt customs agent Wai (Robin Shou) to enable safe passage. What follows is a bloody battle through Hong Kong with Moon Lee also getting involved once

“There’s no denying Kam’s brilliance. Even with his limited filmography, there’s enough evidence to see incredible poetry in his stunts, his intelligence handling action scenes and his ability to craft genuine moments from conflict.”

the bad guys kidnap her daughter.

Visually stunning with incredible set-pieces, the real coup de grace for Kam is his stunt scenes – however many times you watch Fatal Termination, the scene where Moon Lee’s daughter is dangled out of a speeding car for real will always draw a cautionary gasp. People don’t as much jump, dive or fall in Kam’s films as be propelled by explosive forces beyond their control. His action scenes are filled with increasingly extreme stunt work, not for the sake of visual one-upmanship, but reflecting the ever-spiralling nature of the violence spilling out of the war between these unpleasant characters. Kam uses ultra violence to reflect upon the people who are inflicting it, like James Cagney in The Public Enemy or Lee Marvin in The Big Heat.

Heart Of Killer is perhaps closer to John Woo’s work than any other. The themes of loyalty, honour and even some of the more fetishistic rituals of these vicious killers are explored in the story of a hitman who finds himself embroiled in a war when a job goes wrong. There’s something brilliant about the quiet scenes this time that makes the film stand out. Kam creates a real world for the hitman, who lives by the seaside in a small hut and engages in rituals including listening to music and drinking. But it’d be a disservice to deny that the final act, where he defends his hut against approaching murderers, is not also a highlight – the traps he has laid are both brilliant and effective demonstrations of Kam’s love for excessive pyrotechnics.

Asian Cop – High Voltage plays for most of its running time like a typical Donnie Yen vehicle. In it, Yen plays Chiang Ho-Wa, a ruthless cop determined to bring down a ruthless crime lord (Roy Cheung) after the death of his wife. To complicate matters, he is paired with a by-the-book detective named Edu (Edu Manzano), who seems determined to stop Chiang’s unorthodox operations.

The film marks one of Donnie Yen’s first outings as action director and for most of the time, the set pieces are steady and unremarkable. However, there are one or two sequences (including an explosive scene on a basketball court) where Kam is able to demonstrate what he does best: create over-the-top action beats that outshine everything else.

By this point in Kam’s career his films became more and more subdued – the lack of information makes it very hard to pinpoint whether this is because he was forced to work for hire (whilst The Big Heat’s budget was unremarkable, ‘Fatal Termination’ had to be made for even less) or because he was unable to get projects off the ground. Whatever the reason, the end result meant that instead of Andrew Kam films, what we find are films with Kam sequences hidden inside them.

Beyond Sunrise is one such film – on the surface a romantic tale crossed with a hostage drama, that shifts up a gear when the tables are turned on the violent hostage-takers. It’s a breath-taking scene of such audacious staging that it’s impossible not to be taken aback, as if the producers left Kam alone on set one day and he immediately created stunts unlike anything else we have seen. For anyone who watches the film, the fate of one poor goldfish will remain proof enough that no one and nothing is safe within Andrew Kam’s universe.

There’s no denying Kam’s brilliance. Even with his limited filmography, there’s enough evidence to see incredible poetry in his stunts, his intelligence handling action scenes and his ability to craft genuine moments from conflict. While John Woo and Johnnie To are now considered legends, Andrew Kam has been unfairly relegated to obscurity. The strength of his work demands that this auteur be re-discovered by those keen fans of Hong Kong genre Cinema.

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Masters of Cinema

Martin Scorsese Presents Revenge

This month, Robert Makin discovers a trio of obscure and startling works of world cinema – available for the first time in a new collection from MoC words by Robert Makin

A

screeching, flaming rat, tortured by a group of bored, sadistic school children, races across a barren landscape to become directly instrumental in the hideous death of an aging drunk; a former teacher responsible for the murder of a young girl. Brutishly ignorant throughout his entire life, he will never be afforded the luxury of understanding the dark irony that echoes through his painful demise, as his body is burnt alive.

The distressed yelps of a farmyard dog impale the silence of a night dense with malicious intent. The dog limps ungraciously into the shadows of a nearby bush during his final moments. A desperate and disgruntled villager, determined to defend his rights and drive fear into the heart of his greedy adversary, has shot him at point blank range.

Like all political conflicts, no matter the scale, it is the innocent who suffer.

The relentless North African rhythms of a local band

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cement an impromptu and relaxed performance. Even on their day off from an epic tour they can’t help but let the music flow from their being. Passers-by are drawn in by the exuberant sounds emanating from the entranced musicians.

They form a small crowd, becoming a vital component in the music’s transition, as they clang away with their castanet-like Krakebs or Garagabs. An elderly man in the throes of euphoria stares at the tiled floor. A goat lies at his feet, twitching sporadically in pool of blood gushing from its sliced throat.

Bonded by their cruelty, these striking and unforgettable images form an unintentional link between the three films that comprise The World Cinema Project Volume 1 box set. An absorbing collection of work from opposing corners of the globe rescued from obscurity and restored to their former glory by the World Cinema Foundation, overseen by Martin Scorsese.

Neglected and in some cases suppressed due to their

content, this vital assortment of lovingly salvaged movies is capable of satisfying the most discerning and adventurous cinephiles. The set has certainly raised my own interest in the cinema of Turkey and Kazakhstan and caused me to re-evaluate my thoughts on film history as it currently stands.

The hardest watch for me was Moroccan music documentary Trances (Transes, 1981), which captures Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane at home and performing on tour. Not that it’s a particularly bad film, but I think the majority of docs based around musicians struggle to find an audience outside of their initial fan base.

It’s the only film in the set that feels like a sentimental vanity project for Scorsese. There is some great footage of audiences losing their shit during the shows, but I couldn’t help feel the film lacked insight into the musicians themselves. Being new to their music, I found over an hour’s worth of clanging Krakebs proved a little bit too testing.

Ermek Shinarbaev’s Revenge (Mest, 1989) is representative of one of the least reported film movements in modern cinema; the Kazakh New Wave that took place between the late eighties and mid-nineties. Revenge is a mysterious and hypnotic Zen thriller on a profoundly epic scale.

Dreamlike and contemplative – but never slow – the film is an exploration of cultural displacement, how the dark weight of brutality can destroy the glimmering light of creativity, and how suffering and obsession can reverberate across generations.

It’s a startling piece of work with an incredibly distinct look and feel; from the prologue in a royal courtyard in 17th Century Korea to the final scene set in the 1940s, that sees two aging sisters discuss the tangled net of destiny as they pick cockles on a desolate beach. One haunting image flows effortlessly into the next as the disquieting atmosphere of dread creeps and builds across a seemingly inescapable odyssey, until nothing is left but an eternally blazing sun burning on the horizon.

Turkish director Metin Erksan was already a controversial figure by the time he directed Dry Summer (Susuz Yaz) in 1964. A former art history student and film journalist whose politics leaned towards the left, Erksan’s directorial debut, The Dark World (1953), was based on the writings of blind poet Asik Veysel and was immediately suppressed by the authorities for showing Turkey in a negative light. Erksan soon established himself as an aesthetically aware social realist filmmaker, a politically conscious director with a strong, dramatic and stylish visual sense.

In 1962 he stirred up trouble again with The Revenge of the Snakes, the story of a minor dispute that leads to the social fabric of a small fishing village completely falling apart. Because it dealt with the taboo subject of unwanted preg-

Trances

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Dry Summer

nancy, the film was immediately dismissed as communist propaganda, and was temporarily banned.

Two years later the extremely assured, overtly political, earthy, sizzling melodrama that is Dry Summer would suffer an even more bizarre fate. Despite winning the Golden Bear at the 1964 Berlin International Film Festival, the Biennale Award at the Venice Film Festival, and being Turkey’s official submission at the Academy Awards, it was then withheld from screenings by the irate Turkish authorities.

Time for Love, the tragic tale of a painter and decorator who becomes obsessed with the framed photo of the woman whose house he’s decorating, was a substantial domestic success in 1965, as was Kuyu in 1968, which follows the developing relationship between a young village girl and her callous kidnapper.

Erksan was capable of making as many as four films a year. For the majority of the seventies he concentrated on directing commercially viable films. Much like the Italian film industry during the same decade, Turkey was infamous for creating its own sequels and specialised versions of American box office hits with a total disregard for anything

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in the way of copyright laws.

A strange and confusing cult movie sub-genre sometimes referred to as Remakesploitation, this phenomenon was responsible for spawning such dubious gems as Turkish Laurel & Hardy (Tosun Ile Yosun, 1963), Turkish Batman (Yarasa Adam, 1973), and Turkish Superman (Superman Donuyor, 1979). Erksan’s entry into this murky world was the unbelievably unhinged Turkish Exorcist (Seytan, 1974).

But he would later take the concept of remakes to another level with his impressionistic, lively and bizarre interpretation of Hamlet, Kadin Hamlet, The Angle of Vengeance – The Female Hamlet (1977).

Erksan died last year at the age of 83 with 42 director credits to his name. Thanks to this crisp, newly restored version, Dry Summer will hopefully find itself a new and appreciative audience. It deserves to, as it is a superb film that, unlike many other movies of the era, never flags in terms of pace and style.

Dry Summer is a sturdy, gritty and tense tale of a tobacco farmer who decides to monopolise the local water supply by building a dam, prioritising his own land whilst the other surrounding farms perish in the heat. A conflict

Revenge

“It’s unsurprising the film caused such uproar on its original release, and not just because of its political subtext. Dry Summer feels very risqué for its v time with an incredibly lascivious villain at its centre.”

immediately ensues with the other local farmers, who are determined to bring an end to his ruthless and infallible greed, which inevitably leads to murder and betrayal.

It’s unsurprising the film caused such uproar on its original release, and not just because of its political subtext. Dry Summer feels very risqué for its time with an incredibly lascivious villain at its centre, prone to peeping up skirts, spying on his naked sister-in-law, and in one very odd moment, suggestively fondling a cow out of pent-up frustration.

Throughout Dry Summer the bold cinematography perfectly captures the arid, unforgiving landscape without becoming completely lost in it. Erksan also pays close attention to the individual characteristics of people’s faces, occasionally framing them like deeply shaded pencil drawn portraits. So no matter how politicised, subversive and technically erudite it aims to be, it never forgets to be human.

Martin Scorsese Presents is available on December 10th courtesy of Eureka Entertainment. www.eurekavideo.co.uk

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In Defence...

Nostalgic Trash: KISS meets the Phantom of the Park

words by C.J. Lines

K

ISS were the first band I ever saw in concert.

The Crazy Nights tour. Well, okay, my first ever concert was Black Lace in Blackpool if we’re getting technical but the first one I actually chose to go to – no, begged to go to – was KISS. I was too young to go alone so had to drag my long-suffering dad with me. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to say “no”.

I was obsessed with KISS but obsessed in that weird, uninformed single-minded way you can only really be when you’re a little kid. I had just four albums (KISS, Love Gun, Destroyer and Dynasty – the ones with the coolest covers) and one video (Phantom of the Park). This was in the days before the Internet so I didn’t know much about the band and I didn’t have enough pocket money to buy albums without cool covers and the ones where they weren’t wearing make-up just looked kind

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of boring (I mean, why would they even take those photos?).

My idea of KISS was slightly distorted.

When we went to the concert, I was heartbroken. They were just regular dudes - I didn’t even know who two of them were - and they didn’t have a big light show, let alone all the makeup and costumes that I loved so much. Even the support band (hair rock also-rans Kings of the Sun) upstaged them in my eyes, purely because their singer mooned the crowd. I was a kid. Like RKO’s old letterhead, I was all about “showmanship not genius”.

As an adult, I can appreciate that KISS were incredible songwriters; that their unique blend of sugary fifties pop and contemporary rock trends was an addictive brew and that I was clearly hooked on it. But back then, I thought I just wanted fire, blood, stunts. I wanted dudes with badass make-up who

“It’s not just dewey-eyed nostalgia that makes me want to defend Phantom though. The reasons why the film works so well for kids can still be appreciated by adults in the right mind-set.” could fly. And most of this irrational expectation I can pin on their movie KISS Meets The Phantom of the Park.

I think I must’ve been eight when I first watched Phantom so I was exactly the right age. Produced by Hanna Barbera, it’s sort of like a Scooby-Doo re-imagining of Phantom of the Opera. The story revolves around Abner Devereaux, an engineering genius who has designed a theme park called Magic Mountain. His crowning achievements are the lifelike robots throughout the park, dressed as everything from gorillas to astronauts to samurai. Sadly, despite this abundance of radness, the park has fallen on hard times. The owner believes the robots are becoming old hat so he fires Abner and arranges for KISS to play three nights of concerts in the park; a last ditch attempt to boost revenue. Abner freaks out, retreats to his underground lair and decides that everyone must pay for misunderstanding his genius.

He starts turning various members of the public and park staff into robots by placing a cybernetic implant in their necks.

You’d think this might be just simple mind control but it also enables him to chop them up, leave them in various states of dismemberment around his lab and still have them function.

The marvels of science! One disturbing scene shows Abner making a barbershop quartet of human robots that sing in

harmony even though they’re missing arms and legs. The high baritone is just a head! This is nothing though. On the eve of the third KISS concert, Abner intends to replace the real KISS with EVIL KISS ROBOTS, programmed to sing songs that induce rioting through musical hypnosis and will bring the park to its knees.

You with me so far? It only gets more complicated I’m afraid, because Abner hasn’t banked on KISS having cosmic superpowers (nor, I would imagine, had most rational viewers). The band has a box of mystical amulets from an unknown source that wield unique magical abilities. Paul is the Starchild and has a beam of light that comes from his eye and can be used to illuminate hot girls in the crowd or listen in on private conversations from a distance, depending on what’s convenient. Gene is the Demon. He is super-strong, barks like a dog, has a ton of reverb on his voice and can breathe fire. Ace is Space Ace, who can fly and teleport and shoot lasers from his wrists. Peter is Catman. He can, uh, jump higher than is average...

What could go wrong with a plot like this?

Lots, apparently. The shoot was plagued with problems. The fact that none of the members of KISS had ever acted before was bad enough in itself but the fact that two of them were battling alcoholism at the time must’ve been tough for director

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Gordon Hessler to get past. In the end, Peter Criss’ dialogue had to be dubbed because he was slurring so much it was incoherent. The script was rewritten numerous times to meet the demands of the band and then again to meet the demands of the producers who worried it would run over budget. The end result didn’t seem to please anyone. The production team thought they’d made a howler because they’d had to tamper with it so much. KISS fans hated it because it was ridiculous and made their favourite band look clownish. The band themselves were so angry and embarrassed that no one working with them could even so much as mention it for years afterwards without being fired. It triggered so much animosity that the only way the band’s manager could placate KISS into not breaking up was by allowing each member to release a solo album in 1978, thus soothing their shattered egos.

So who watched it? Who liked it? Why am I defending it (besides, obviously, the fact that it led to four awesome solo albums)? It’s one of those mysterious accidents, really. Phantom of the Park was made for NBC and aired on television at a time when impressionable minds could watch it. Teenage KISS fans wanting to be cool may have found its B-grade psychedelic tomfoolery too ridiculous, but their younger brothers and sisters took it in with love. It’s been said since that, with-

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out these fresh new converts brought in through Phantom, KISS’ fan base would’ve dropped off altogether throughout the eighties and the band would’ve quit. I mean what kid wouldn’t fall in love with a band that dressed like aliens and could be seen in a movie fighting a pack of silver-suited albino robot werewolves on a rollercoaster? That kind of love doesn’t die.

It’s not just dewey-eyed nostalgia that makes me want to defend Phantom though. The reasons why the film works so well for kids can still be appreciated by adults in the right mind-set. If you like monsters, fun fairs, robots and superpowers, Phantom of the Park delivers them in bucketloads. Throw in some of the greatest rock tunes of the seventies and it’s just an audio-visual trip of joy after joy. Huge, preposterous, unselfconscious joy.

For me, there’s so much pleasure to be found in just watching a film and thinking “well, THAT’s something I haven’t seen before”. In most situations, someone, somewhere would probably have yelled “stop!” if a millionaire rock band were asked to film a scene where they fly into their own concert (apparently from the stars) and do battle with robotic doppelgangers, but here no one did. The fact that this film even exists - never mind that it’s as strange as it is - is something to be celebrated. If Radiohead made a movie in which they

descend into a flame-lit torture chamber and fight a series of wolfmen, mummies, Frankenstein-monsters and whip-wielding inquisitors, maybe I’d have a bit more respect for them. But they never would. KISS might have done this under duress and subsequently disowned it (although Gene later mellowed and said “it’s a classic movie – a classic movie if you’re on drugs!”) but at least they did it... and set a whole generation of kids’ minds on fire.

Many people who dislike Phantom seem to work on the assumption that being kitsch is a bad or a stupid thing. I suppose for me, I always loved the campier side of KISS (the disco tunes on Dynasty and the Phil Spector covers) the most anyway and Phantom plays to that. When bare-chested, lycra-clad Paul Stanley shrieks, “I don’t believe it!” as he battles off a chubby Frankenstein robot, this delights me. As does the snappy dialogue between band members, designed to imitate the quick-witted interplay of A Hard Day’s Night but sounding so stylized and bizarre, it’s more like acid-addled Dr Seuss (“What’s his trip? His trip’s a trap!”).

There are few moments of grace in Phantom of the Park.

Even its mellowest scene, Peter Criss serenading Deborah Ryan with a gorgeous acoustic version of Beth beneath a water fountain, is wrecked by being intercut with a robot henchman

smashing shit up in search of magical amulets. It’s this ferocity of intent, this relentless craziness, the constant clanging and banging of it all that makes it so effective. It’s a rock’n’roll movie that will bug your parents; indeed bug almost anyone who has a sense of good taste. Yet it never actually does anything offensive. It’s not tasteless by being gross or shocking, just by being gauche, misguided and very silly indeed. The unabashed puerility is what draws kids to Phantom but it has a ramshackle charm, an unpretentious sense of “anything goes” and it’s never, ever boring. As long as you’re not boring either, there’s something here for you to delight in.

Sometimes one looks at films from another era and thinks, “How did THAT get made?” but times do change. Great ideas thirty or forty years ago can frequently seem bizarre by modern standards and that’s just the evolution of taste. With this one though, no matter when or where or how you’re watching, it’ll always be weird. It always has been. There is no point in history (and probably never will be) where Phantom of the Park fits into any kind of popular sensibility. No point when it would have ever made sense to produce it. As a result, regardless of intent, it’s outsider art for the inner child. I was made for loving it.

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Big Bad Wolves release date 6th December

cert (18)

writers Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado starring Guy Adler, Lior Ashkenazi, Dvir Benedek

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Review by James Marsh

directors Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado

When the decapitated body of a missing schoolgirl is discovered, she becomes just the latest victim in a string of vicious child murders that has rocked an otherwise sleepy Israeli suburb. All fingers point to an unassuming schoolteacher (Rotem Keinan), but when Miki (Lior Ashkenazi), an overzealous cop, attempts to beat a confession out of him, a video of the incident goes viral and he loses his badge. Determined to get his man, Miki turns vigilante, but soon discovers the young girl’s father, Gidi (Tzahi Grad), is also looking to inflict his own personal brand of justice.

After giving Israel its first ever horror film with 2010’s enthusiastically received Rabies, writer-directors Aharon Keshales and his former student-turned-collaborator Navot Papushado dissect the violent nature of their fellow countrymen once again in this brutal, yet darkly comic thriller. While Rabies presented violence as a contagious germ, capable of infecting men and women at a moment’s notice, Big Bad Wolves hones in specifically on men’s potential and predilection for brutality and sadism.

Some critics have been quick to object to the film’s only female characters being either overbearing Jewish matriarchs or victimised fairy-tale heroines, but the film seems utterly disinterested in such observations.

Keshales and Papushado have been raised in a country in a perpetual state of seemingly fruitless conflict, so it comes as little surprise that the concept of violence begetting violence is handled with pitchblack gallows humour. Their characters understand the futility of their actions, but nevertheless proceed forward regardless, as if resigned to their own absurd, blood-stained fate as some rite-of-passage to underscore their masculinity. In fact much of the film’s humour comes from witnessing how the protagonists repeatedly undermine their own vengeful plans through sheer single-minded stupidity.

One obvious but effective contradiction in Keshales and Paushado’s film is the comparison between how each interrogator, or abductor, treats their victim. Miki and Gidi both inflict violence in order to punish or extract information, while the film’s killer, conversely, pampers their victims as honoured houseguests – showering the young girls with food and gifts – and rendering them unconscious before commencing with their defilement.

While the message at the heart of Big Bad Wolves is straightforward, and resignedly bleak in its outlook on masculinity, the film remains incredibly engaging and, dare I say, enjoyable thanks to stylish, assured direction and a collection of impressively diverse yet committed performances. Keinan is wretched and snivelling throughout, while Ashkenazi’s brutish cop retains an air of the likeable everyman hero. It is Tzahi Grad and his world-weary father (Doval’e Glickman), however, who garner the most laughs even as they present the film’s most chilling threat of all.

In addition, Giora Bejach’s lush cinematography creates a graceful, elegant ambience, which is complemented wonderfully by Haim Frank Ilfman’s balletic score. The almost dreamlike tone of the film, especially in its opening moments, accentuates the filmmakers’ efforts to align themselves with the Brothers Grimm, only in this case they look to terrify the wolf rather than the children.

Fill the Void release date 15th December

Review by Luke Richarson

When dealing with social realism at the movies, the pursuit for authenticity is often a fruitless one.

Rather than forging some kind of heightened reality, Israeli filmmaker Rasha Burshstein uses her insider knowledge as an orthodox Jew to frame a perennially prevalent tale of wedlock, death and duty set within her distinct community. Manifesting like a particularly cloistered soap opera, Fill the Void might be the illegitimate bedfellow to The Godfather, Days of Our Lives and the work of Jane Austen, it is a truly unique, curious and formidable debutant effort that will reignite your faith in tragic cinema.

Before heartbreak comes love. The fable starts with the 18-year-old Shira (Hados Yaron) and her weary mother Rivka (Irit Sheleg) scouring a Tel Aviv supermarket for the young, reddish-faced Hasidic bachelor who could soon become Shira’s husband-to-be. This is not an ‘organised’ betrothal, per se, but instead the highly belaboured sort familiar to their devout community. Seemingly, for Hasidic women, holy matrimony is considered as life’s main goal, and Shira is no exception to this blessing.

After a quick glimpse in the dairy aisle, the virginal Shira is head-over-heels and ready to wed.

Before the arrangements can be set in stone, devastation hits their family when her beloved older sister Esther dies during childbirth, leaving behind a motherless son and her oddly phlegmatic widowed husband Yochay (Yitfach Klein). During this time of grief, Yochay considers leaving Israel to start life anew with his son and a new eligible wife in Belgium. Releasing she could lose her only grandchild, Rivka goes in to irrational matriarchal mode, practically begging her last remaining daughter to marry her former brother-in-law. An adolescent rapidly given some significant life choices amidst such tragedy, Shira grapples with the idea of appeasing her familial loyalty or shunning them out of free will.

The parental absolutism may be unsavoury to progressive audiences, yet Burshstein’s tautly crafted melodrama is palpably sincere and riveting.

Almost all of the drama takes place behind closed doors, with cursory glances, subtly poetic speech, wry humour and a delicately nuanced visual allure.

The severity of the portrait could not be confused with ethnography, however. Despite Burshstein’s proximity and familiarity with Shira’s situation, her magnificent central cast are secularists. The effect is not so much a collision between piety and heresy, as seen in the more polemical, platitudinous work of prize-winning director Haim Tabakman but a compassionate, dialectical collaboration of two sects.

Despite the drama moving like an incessant maudlin cortège, Yaron’s zealous leading performance adds some real bite and sinew to the proceedings. Shira is not the typically subjugated damsel in distress. With her modicum of liberty at odds with the autonomous Hasidic community, her every move, thought and her ultimate decision are delivered with an emphatic intensity. The situation may be niche, but Shira’s transition from guileless adolescence to interdependent adulthood is one of the most achingly universal coming-of-age stories you’re likely to find in cinemas this year.

cert (U)

director Rama Burshtein writer Rama Burshtein starring Hadas Yaron, Yiftach Klein, Irit Sheleg

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Review by Kelsey Eichhorn

Floating Skyscrapers release date 6th December

cert (18)

director Tomasz Wasilewski writer Tomasz Wasilewski starring Mateusz Banasiuk, Marta Nieradkiewicz, Bartosz Gelner

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Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another LGBT Polish film. The impression of many Eastern European cultures is stereotypical conservatism, fuelled by a history of overt homophobia. So the mere existence of such a film heralds a refreshing change and a distinct air of possibility in Polish cinema, for not only LGBT films but also for other similarly marginalized and controversial subjects. Yet a bold and progressive subject matter is not in and of itself enough to proclaim a film a success. Disappointingly, Floating Skyscrapers is a film that falls flat.

The basic plot is stale and weary, lacking inspiration beyond the already noted cultural context.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with a been-there-done-that storyline, failing to enhance the subject with an independent treatment is a sure way to sink the ship. Swimming hopeful Kuba trains daily at the gym, where he engages in clandestine and emotionless trysts in bathroom cubicles with fellow athletes. His gay encounters seem to play no part in his “real” life; he shares a room in his mother’s flat with his girlfriend Silwya, whom he sleeps with on a regular basis – that is when he isn’t maintaining his rather odd relationship with his mother, who insists that he bathe her and massage her back. Then one day he meets the sexually assured Michal and his carefully controlled double life slowly unravels. As Kuba falls more and more in love and lust with Michal, the question of his homosexuality wreaks havoc on the rest of his life.

It is overtly clear that there are numerous areas of sexual tension and confusion in young Kuba’s life, and his struggle seems in some way synonymous with that of Poland itself, in this new and controversial cultural landscape, as both suffer through the tormenting process of “finding” oneself. Yet the film is devoid of any compelling emotion and the frustratingly flat characters do nothing to enliven the blandness of the plot or the intricacies of the possible comparison. Instead of endearing the audience to the struggles of a tortured soul, Kuba’s non-existent personality makes it impossible to connect with his character at all.

In stark contrast, Michal wears his heart on his sleeve, a character lacking any mystery or depth.

So while the sexual tension between the two is almost palpable, the subtlety of the emotion in their doomed affair is neglected. The most interesting point of the love triangle is Slwyia, who comes across at times as calculating but desperate, manipulative yet fragile. Yet, without the passionate interlude of the other two characters her potential dynamism is lamentably underdeveloped.

The film attempts to breathe life into a tired narrative with a carefully controlled aesthetic of light and dark, playing off the strong geometric architecture of the city. And while there are moments of beauty in the stark cinematography that fleetingly illuminate the opposing emotions of this tragedy, ultimately the connections are unconvincing and the overall aesthetic weak.

Review by Clarisse Loughrey

Is this Denmark’s own version of Louis CK? While it always feels a little tacky to rob art’s originality through comparison (It’s Star Wars meets Antichrist but with dolphins!), there was an inescapable sense of familiarity watching Mikkel Nørgaard’s feature-length outing of the country’s kings of uncomfortable comedy Frank and Casper, whose series (also named Klown) ran for an incredible 6 seasons. Here we see the duo embark on their long-planned sex tour of the Danish countryside by that most classic mode of transportation, the canoe. A plan that is potentially jeopardised when Frank suddenly kidnaps his girlfriend’s nephew in an effort to prove to her his capabilities as a father.

While Klown has received constant comparison to Curb Your Enthusiasm, there’s a distinct division here between stand-up Frank Hvam’s fictionalised vision of himself and the cynicism of Larry David. Instead, Frank, much like TV’s Louie, possesses an honest kind of stupidity that seems driven only by some inescapable, primitive manliness that he’s in absolutely no control of.

He’s repulsive, unbearably so, but it’s an earnest kind of repulsiveness that replaces the triumphant self-awareness of “bros” with a continuing exasperation at his own crudeness. Maybe it’s just an innate talent of Hvam in his ability look so deeply confused by the fact he’s just kidnapped a child, a confusion that lasts from the first to very last frame of this movie. In the end, Hvam’s actually a lot more likable as a protagonist than Larry David, even though he’s a whole R-rated level up in despicableness, leading to some genuinely heart-warming moments between all the dick jokes. At the centre of it all, there’s a man slowly discovering himself as a father and forming a sincere bond with a kid lost within the cruelties of modern childhood i.e. having older kids laugh at you because you have a tiny dick.

However, be warned, this film is explicit in such a way that watching this movie with any of your relatives would be some kind of living nightmare.

The phrase “Tour de Pussy” is repeated so often that it’s the only Danish word I learnt from this whole experience. Klown possesses that special kind of Danish bravado, pushing boundaries that would make Hollywood directors blush and knock their coffee all over their spec copy of “Bros Buy Weed Off an Undercover Policeman, Things Get Crazy”. However, Klown never quite reached the realm of offputtingly tasteless; maybe it’s just something about the effortlessness of Scandinavian humour, that dry, po-faced attitude that underplays so well the outrageousness of the situation. It’s an attitude wonderfully summed up in the sour faces of Frank and Casper’s girlfriends, eyes boring holes into their partners’ skulls.

On a surface level, Klown falls in line with the uncomfortable crudeness of the “stupid white male” genre, but there’s an extra spark within the brash yet tender characterisation of its lead that make it a worthwhile trip (by canoe). .

Klown

release date 6th December

cert (18)

director Mikkel Nørgaard writers Casper Christensen, Frank Hvam starring Frank Hvam, Casper Christensen, Marcuz Jess Petersen

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Inside Llewyn Davis release date 24th January

cert (15)

writers Ethan Coen, Joel Coen starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake

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Review by David Hall

directors Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

The latest from Joel and Ethan Coen is a surprisingly soulful mediation on creativity and failure; a lightly comic, near-mystical odyssey told with warmth and deliciously sly wit. It also smashes the myth that the brothers are a cold, calculating and removed duo and may be their most satisfying film since Fargo (1996). That folk singer Llewyn (Oscar Isaac, from Drive and Sucker Punch) is a carelessly selfish individual who blusters his way through life insulting everyone (including those who help him out and put a roof over his head) may put some casual viewers off, but this isn’t a film for casual viewers.

Llewyn Davis is a folk singer in New York, 1961.

Handsome and talented but homeless and unsuccessful; schlepping from couch to couch, coast to coast, fiercely protective of his integrity, savagely mocking of any artist he believes is beneath him.

He’s formerly part of a minor cult duo and floundering in the wake of that tragic break up. Radio stations aren’t picking up on his music, people aren’t digging his scene and he’s forced to watch from the side-lines as lesser, more polished and unthreatening talents garner all the attention and love. To make matters worse, he may have impregnated his fellow artist and friend Jean (Carey Mulligan) – who loves and hates him in equal measure and is already married to mutual buddy Jim ( Justin Timberlake, brilliantly earnest and funny).

It’s particularly amusing to see this musical scene, for so long treated with kid gloves by years of Mojo sponsored hagiography, punctured in such affectionate style by the Coens, who offer a corrective to the perceived wisdom of the artist as empathetic amplifier of people’s struggles. This is an even richer film about American music than its spiritual cousin, O’ Brother Where Art Thou, also musically authored

by T Bone Burnett, full of juicy ironies and insights about the link between commerce and creativity.

One of these ironies may be unintentional but I am particularly tickled that Marcus Mumford had a hand in the film’s beautiful music; Mumford and Sons being precisely the kind of band that a modern-day hipster version of Llewyn (who lets face it is an old-school hipster) would likely hate on for inauthenticity.

Isaacs’ nuanced performance is one of the best of the year, keeping us ensconced in the fortunes of Davis, who seems initially dislikeable, is revealed to be in a great deal of pain, garners some sympathy but remains – on the surface and to many of those around him – a self-involved pain in the ass. I’ve heard some people bemoaning the film’s slacker mid-section – a car trip involving a Dr John/Beefheart style musician played by John Goodman – for grinding things to a halt but trust me that’s not the case. Besides, it’s entirely in keeping with its hero’s odyssey. And the finale, as is often the way with the Coens, is both abrupt and inspired. A rich, insightful treat from an extraordinary partnership at the top of their game.

The Patience Stone

release date 6th December

Review by Joseph Fahim

Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone is the latest entry in the rather modest fictional Afghani oeuvre set in post-9/11— the small group includes Siddiq Barmak’s Osama, Samira Makhmalbaf ’s At Five in the Afternoon (both in 2003) and Rahimi’s debut feature, Earth and Ashes. All three films deal with different facets of war-torn Afghanistan: subjugation of women, the distant dream of democracy and the irreparable damage left behind by an armed conflict that is yet to wane.

Rahimi’s sophomore effort delves into altogether different, and thorny, territory: the sexuality of Afghani women. Based on his 2008 award-winning novel, Syngue Sabour, the film revolves around an unnamed young wife of an older mujahid husband, reduced to a silent, motionless, bed-stricken carcass after receiving a bullet in the neck during combat.

Desperate and overpowered for years into complete submission, the wife (Iranian star Golshifteh Farahani of About Elly and Body of Lies fame) begins to open up to her impotent husband, revealing her secrets as the violence outside their rundown shack continues to rage on. Meanwhile, a young virgin fighter with a speech impediment enters her life to provide her with the love and comfort she has never experienced before.

Despite his best efforts, Rahimi fails to escape the shadow of the literary source material. All backstories are recited by the wife to the husband via straightforward monologues, occasionally interjected by clumsy flashbacks catered to soften the growing claustrophobia. This device enlivens the unfolding action with a sense of artificiality that stands as a barrier between the characters and the viewers, always acting as a reminder of the fictional nature of the story.

The film leaves no emotion unarticulated verbally.

Nothing is implicit; Rahimi constantly bombards us with a torrent of information that leaves little room for contemplation and, subsequently, empathy or full immersion. Rahimi’s visuals fall flat as well, constantly swinging between raw wartime docudramas and poised chamber pieces. The end result is something altogether staid: a blandly lit, middle-ofthe-road picture that makes little use of the rather intriguing space at hand.

There’s a whiff of exoticism to the whole affair.

Tackling sex, an unprecedented feat in Afghanistan-set stories, is a brave - if somewhat calculated - move by Rahimi that eventually loses significance with a highly contrived conclusion. Beneath the sexual politics of the film lies an all-too-familiar story of a Muslim heroine who has fallen victim to the folly of emasculated, oppressive man (there isn’t a single positive male character in the film).

The main conflict of the drama is equally familiar: pure thwarted desires clashing with a repressive patriarchal society rife with hypocrisy and contradictions. It’s always refreshing, and important, to see stories from this neglected part of the world; alas, Rahimi offers nothing we haven’t seen before.

Farahani gives a powerhouse performance of great control and intensity. She allows the bitterness and hatred of her character to gradually simmer, and the film finds its footing when it lets the wife’s obsessive resentment overcome her victimhood.

cert (12a)

director Atiq Rahimi writer Jean-Claude Carrière starring Golshifteh Farahani, Hamid Djavadan, Hassina Burgan

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Review by Craig Williams

Nebraska

release date 6th December

cert (15)

director Alexander Payne writer Bob Nelson starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb

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After his disappointing sojourn to Hawaii with The Descendants, Alexander Payne returns to the Midwest with the excellent Nebraska. Diving headlong into the heartland, the director excavates the mythic significance of “flyover country”, spinning a warm but prickly tale of family and money.

The American Dream is a pervasive compulsion in Nebraska; a fluffy ideal and an unhelpful distraction from the important things in life. It’s a picture about where we’re from and where we’re going; the emotional flotsam and jetsam in the pursuit of happiness. It skilfully appropriates the road trip – the most American of genres – to cast a weary eye over blue-collar hopes and aspirations in a way that feels both breezy and weighty.

“I never knew the son-of-a-bitch even wanted to be a millionaire,” remarks Kate ( June Squibb) to her son David (Will Forte) when her elderly husband Woody (Bruce Dern) announces he’s won a million dollars and must travel from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim it. Everybody tells Woody he’s been scammed by some enticingly worded junk mail, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He’s surly, grumpy and only speaks up to talk about his purported winnings. There are implications of booze and misery; a life wasted through idle selfishness. But, in a flash of goodwill, David agrees to drive his father to Nebraska, stopping off for an extended homecoming along the way in Hawthorne.

Nebraska’s clear-eyed nostalgia cuts through the heart of the Midwest. Payne sees small towns as peculiar microcosms that engender their own sense of self. Miles from the cosmopolitan clamour, they are communities that define their present by always looking to the past. There’s bite behind this gentle, bittersweet melancholia. Like a city-dwelling adult returning to his humble origins, there’s a sense that Payne is partly in love with the touching simplicity of life in Hawthorne, while simultaneously feeling irritated by the teeming pettiness of its residents. Nebraska is arguably the first time Payne has perfectly reconciled the spiky, acidic humour of his earlier work with the slower, more reflective ambiance of his post-About Schmidt films.

It is also notable for being another Alexander Payne picture about a journey, but key to Nebraska is that it takes place largely in a curious limbo; a fictional town between two real life places. Hawthorne is lost in time; it’s a meaningful diversion on the road to an inevitable disappointment for Woody. It’s Payne asking us to look around, and realise that, in the futile chase for wealth and status, we may have already reached our true destination. The rolling vistas and open country around Hawthorne are reminders of an untouched America, a panorama of beauty and possibility. Woody may be insignificant against it, but it puts his aims into perspective. He could be the idiot savant; a cipher for the hopes and dreams of those around him. He may already have it all figured out. On the evidence in Nebraska, Payne certainly does.

Review by Luke Richardson

Once in a while, a documentary comes along that is both a feast for cinematic appetites and of profound political potency. Following Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary excavation of the 1965 Indonesian genocide in The Act of Killing, critically revered Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh arrives with the capriciously beautiful yet terrifying mixed-media memoir The Missing Picture to prove that all good things come in pairs.

While Oppenheimer asks executioners with impunity to recapture the dormant memories of their savage past, Panh confronts a prolonged act of barbarism which history has tried to forget, the pathological impact Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge elite had on his homeland during his adolescent years in the seventies.

Forced to enrol in a Communist re-education camp, Panh witnessed civility crumble around him.

Speech was limited to party-approved slogans; clothes restricted to oppressive black workman’s rags; and the Khmer’s nihilistic ideals of self-sufficiency and an implausible agrarian utopia saw urbanised communities moved into the barren countryside. Slaving over crops that would never grow and leading to whole communities forced into impoverishment, famine, and hundreds of thousands dying from preventable diseases like malaria.

Except for the communist’s own scaremongering propaganda diatribes, all recorded evidence of this manmade atrocity has been destroyed. Transcending the typically grim survivor polemic, the paucity of evidence means the account manifests through astonishingly artful means. Utilising an omnipresent narration and fragments of the doctored Cambodian newsreels, Panh and the sculptor Sarith Mang create handmade clay figurines and intricate dioramas, all functioning as an artificial stand-in for ‘the missing picture’ that is Panh’s childhood.

Although the Khmer Rouge has been a recurring subject throughout Panh’s filmography - most notably with his documentary on the Tuol Sleng prison, S21: the Khmer Rouge Death – the regime has never been so bluntly and evocatively criticised as with The Missing Picture. Cannes prize-winning and Academy Awards shortlisted, the film’s power is in its intimacy, a creative catharsis that is made all the more enthralling by his choice of cast. These miniature effigies are ineffable. Scared, bruised and fatigued, their allure and meticulousness collides with the harrowing history they represent, with catastrophic results. Despite lacking physical animation, they are framed as if possessed by the spectres of Panh’s past, recounted in the narration with a remarkable clarity.

Unfortunately, The Missing Picture isn’t picture perfect. While the unique exposition framing certainly allows for a riveting sensorial experience, the loose ‘essay film’ approach means the historical accounts of genocide sit uncomfortably alongside Panh’s ruminations on the power of the cinema, retracing existentialism and the fallacy of reminiscence. A lot to chew over, the clay tableau vivants start to lose their poignancy as the film continues to delve deeper into its maker’s psyche and further from the domestic terrorism he intended to pictorialize.

The Missing Picture release date 3rd January

cert (12a)

director Rithy Panh writer Rithy Panh starring Randal Douc

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“A good-looking new digital film magazine” Mark Kermode

Vérité Vérité is a new digital monthly magazine dedicated to offbeat, independent and foreign-language cinema.

ISSUE #1

ISSUE #2

V é r i t é

V é r i t é

MARCH 2013 EDITION

APRIL 2013 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

STOKER

And Korea’s Hollywood Pressure

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

Our motivation is simple - to provide a platform for interesting, provocative film criticism and discussion of films and filmmakers that excite and inspire us.

SPR I N G BREAKE R S

And the Return of the American Indie Kings

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Hal Hartley / Richard Linklater / SXSW / Xavier Dolan / Bakumatsu taiyô-den / reviews / and more...

steven soderbergh / death waltz records’ top soundtracks / claude chabrol / reviews / and more...

Vérité digs a little deeper; covering world cinema in a passionate, critical and celebratory way. The magazine carries regular retrospective content as well as features on new talent and contemporary reviews.

So far we have introduced readers to the work of Indonesian director Joko Anwar and French-Canadian fan-favourite Xavier Dolan, profiled the enigmatic Harmony Korine and taken the temperature of the Korean film industry.

And we have carried exclusive interviews with filmmakers such as Hal Hartley, Cate Shortland and Jeff Nichols.

Vérité carries original writing from fresh and dynamic voices on cinema combined with stylish design and layout.

With an international focus – and writers based in Hong Kong, the United States, Europe and the UK – Vérité already has global reach and our audience is growing. With only two issues published our circulation sits at an average of 4000 per issue.

We want to spread the word further and build a loyal audience hungry for new and exciting film comment and content eager to read about filmmakers other publications don’t always shine a spotlight on.

And we have big plans for 2013, including an expanded website and extensive festival coverage.

Our current media partners include Eureka Entertainment, The Works, Metrodome and Artificial Eye. Vérité is seeking partnerships and new opportunities for collaboration from media partners. We also have competitive rates for advertising throughout the magazine (rate of £75 per full page ad).

For more info, interviews and media opportunities contact: jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

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In the The Warriors Frame: (1979)

words by Emily A. Kausalik

I

n Homer’s Iliad, the great warrior Ajax is depicted as one of the strongest of all the Achaeans, known for his colossal frame and value in Agamemnon’s army. He survives to the close of the Iliad, only to commit suicide afterwards from the dishonor of losing the magical armor forged by Hephaestus.

Homer and Sophocles tell the tale slightly differently, but in both instances the death of Ajax is surrounded by dishonor, shame, and self-inflected pain.

The Warrior’s soldier, Ajax, may not share the honour and fame of the famous Greek warrior, yet his downfall manages to be just as tragic. After his efforts to end the fighting with the vicious Baseball Furies, he is captured by an undercover police officer after he tries to sexually assault her.

For some moviegoers, the moments of violence, the Baseball Furies fight, the “Warriors, come out to plaaayyyayyy”, are the moments that stick in the mind – the ones

that cement this film as a cult classic. But for me, Ajax’s demise is the most powerful, because I can’t believe I actually feel sorry for this heathen trying to essentially rape someone in the park.

The set-up is so obvious you can see it coming from the very beginning of the film. And through all of his foul-mouthed, selfish, egotistical, alpha male one-liners you would think his capture would be more than just ill-fate, and rather straight up, self-fulfilled and much-deserved destiny.

And that someone like me, watching this dark, gritty film, would be able to say “good riddance” to such a clearly horrible person. But for some reason when this scene approaches, after such a triumph over a powerful rival gang, my heart sinks into my stomach.

How can I feel so sad for such a clearly flawed and mean-spirited character? What is it about Ajax and The Warriors that makes me want them to make it, to survive,

to come out on top? Sure, they were falsely accused. But they were also buying into Cyrus’s message of taking over the city, run the cops out of town, and rule the streets in fear. They also tagged tombstones, lit cars on fire, and took equal part in causing mayhem and panic in the streets.

But there’s something ingrained in this tragic story, loosely based on Xenophon’s Anabasis, that makes me cheer them on.

Perhaps I’m so conditioned by contemporary narrative cinema I have to look for a character to be a protagonist, to map heroism onto someone in a film, even if they don’t deserve it. Perhaps the power of The Warriors, and why it’s ranked so highly in cult film lists the internet over, is because of moments like Ajax’s capture, where we feel bad for a monster. And maybe it’s that strange sensation of lamenting a fallen gang member that makes The Warriors so odd and powerful, a chimera that critics still don’t quite know how to handle.

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Jordan McGrath

David Hall

Founder / Editor-in-Chief / Designer

Managing Editor

jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com

davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

thanks: Contributors Stuart Barr Neil McGlone James Marsh Evrim Ersoy Robert Makin Paul Martinovic Craig Williams Kelsey Eichhorn C.J. Lines James Rocarols Sam Moore James Marsh Luke Richardson Clarisse Loughrey Joseph Fahim Emily A. Kausalik

Proofing James Marsh, Daniel Auty & David Hall

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Image credits: Entertainment Film Distributors - 8,10,11,12,13,79 / Hibrow Productions - 52,54,55 / Eureka Entertainment - 60,61,62,63 / Metrodome - 68 / Artificial Eye - 69 / Verve Pictures - 70 / Arrow Films - 71 / StudioCanal - 72 / Axiom Films - 73 / Paramount Pictures - 74 / New Wave Films - 75

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