This weekend, I saw what I think is possibly the film of the year. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) is a triumph of style, content, and artistic politics. It is such a complex and subtle film that I feel that I need more than one post to do it justice and so, this is the first in a series of posts about Antichrist. The first intalment is about the correct way to approach the film as a work of art.
Month / July 2009
REVIEW – Moon (2009)
Sometimes it isn’t easy to love the cinema. Increasingly, the greatest popular art form of the 20th Century has become a means of oppression : Every year, the summer blockbuster season lasts that little bit longer. The season of empty months. Months during which the few decent films that do make it into cinemas are instantly forced out by over-hyped sequels and works of distorted genre. Works so disjointed and violent in their imagery that they have come to resemble twisted parodies of the world we know. Works that do not seek to elevate our collective humanity but to pervert it by filling our poor throbbing skulls with whole new vistas of psychosis and paranoia. Vistas we can only escape from with the help of consumer products, the antics of boy wizards and bellicose robots. Vistas produced by a media-industrial complex that keeps us supine and malleable lest we realise the living hell that we have made of our collective existence. A collective existence so cruel and unhinged that were we to grasp its true nature for even a second we would all run screaming into the streets, tearing at our clothes and flesh in a hideous and brutal attempt to somehow get clean and free of a system that has crushed us beneath its heel for far too long.
But then a film comes along that seems to recognise all of this.
BG 17 – Red Faction : Guerilla
Futurismic have my Blasphemous Geometries column about Red Faction : Guerilla.
This piece was slightly wild. I initially took as my inspiration Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces : A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), one of my favourite pieces of writing about music. the first chapter of the book begins with a song-by-song and almost line-by-line examination of the music of the Sex Pistols and I was struck, as Marcus was, by the enduring power of the opening line of Anarchy in The UK : I am an Antichrist, I am an Anarchist. That desire to destroy and reject everything struck me as central to a proper understanding of Red Faction : Guerilla. But then I came up with the idea of the idea of a suicide bombing simulator and was amused by the similarities and I let that Idea simply carry me home.
Public Enemies (2009) and Digital Projection
I will begin with a brief review : Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009) is a completely unexceptional crime thriller. Its characters are extremely simplistic, its engagement with historical or social context is minimal, its writing is functional, its performances are adequate (with the exception of Stephen Graham as Baby-Face Nelson) and its pacing slightly saggy but ultimately reasonable. Much like Mann’s Heat (1995), it is a film best remembered for one beautifully staged shoot-out. However, despite having nothing to say and failing for all of the thematic reasons that Richard Kovitch mentions in his review, the film does do one thing well : It provides a fantastic justification for the roll-out of digital projection.
Cinematic Vocabulary – Three Moments from Irma Vep (1996)
So far, Cinematic Vocabulary has focused upon isolated cinematic scenes. The reason for this is that, while matters of style and technique impact upon entire films, it is frequently easier to isolate these aspects of a film by filtering out issues of narrative and characterisation that tend to function more on the level of entire films than on that of individual scenes. However, as with atoms and tables, there is a point where the small things come together to form something recognisably large. This column is about how a series of scenes can link up in order to form a part of a wider thematic arc.
A few months back, I wrote about Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002). Intrigued by the cerebral and somewhat extreme piece of French film-making, I tracked down the best known of Assayas’ works, Irma Vep (1996). Set behind the scenes of a fictional remake of Louis Feuillade’s silent era crime pulp Les Vampires (1915), Irma Vep casts Hong Kong martial arts veteran Maggie Cheung as herself playing the titular Irma Vep character. Much like Truffaut’s Day for Night (1974), Irma Vep uses its film-within-a-film structure to comment upon the nature of film production in general and the health of the French film industry in particular. The result is a hugely rewarding film filled both with touchingly funny moments of human frailty and insightful critiques of what French film has lost and where it should be heading.
REVIEW – 35 Shots of Rum (2008)
Recently, Ruthless Culture has become somewhat fixated with films that deal with alienation, death, misery, insanity and violence. Fixated enough that I think a bit of a change might be welcome and I can think of no better a vehicle for change than Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums (2008).
35 Shots of Rum is a warm-hearted but utterly uncompromising drama revolving around a somewhat extended family grouping. Lionel (Alex Descas) lives with his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop) in a block of flats that also serves as home to Lionel’s old partner Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) and old friend of the family Noe (Gregoire Colin). If I use vague terminology such as ‘partner’ and ‘friend of the family’ it is because, initially at least, many of the relationships in 35 Shots of Rum are unclear. This lack of clarity is not only intensional, it is one that continues throughout the film as Denis tries to place us in the same position as her characters… we know how we feel but we do not know where everyone stands.
Ballard before Cokliss, Cokliss before Ballard, Ballard before Cronenberg
I am currently researching a piece on the films of J. G. Ballard and I came across what appears to be a rather interesting cinematic feedback loop. In 1996, David Cronenberg adapted Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash. Crash was an expansion of the ideas contained in “Crash!”, one of the sections of Ballard’s splendidly disjointed modernist collection of condensed novels The Atrocity Exhibition (1969).
However, the line between “Crash!” (1969) and Crash (1996) is not that typical of most literary adaptations. Traditionally, the progress of forms is from short story to novel and from novel to film. However, in this case, the line is broken by a cinematic interloper. In between the publication of The Atrocity Exhibition and the publication of Crash (1973), Ballard’s ideas found their way into a short film by Harley Cokliss. Not only starring but also written and narrated by Ballard himself, Crash! (1971) is somewhere between a televised essay, a work of audiovisual art and a traditional short film. It is also quite a distinctive work when compared to its literary precursor and successor. Indeed, by looking at the changes between the different Crash pieces, it is possible to gain an insight into Ballard’s methodologies.
A Week In Film Purchasing
One of the reasons for this blog’s existence is to provide a place for me to work through the ideas that are cluttering up my head. I do not write for any particular audience, I write for my own sake because otherwise I would not be able to get anything done. One of the topics I frequently wrestle with is the ‘job’ of the critic. Its ethics, its philosophical posture and its practicalities. However, a good film critic is not only an analyst, he is also someone who has to have a feel for the film business. An understanding of the realities of film-making. Last week, I experienced something that addressed this much neglected practical side of ‘knowing about film’.
My brother runs a film distribution business in France and he was over in the UK in order to attend the London UK Film Focus event at the NFT on the Southbank. London UK Film Focus is essentially a series of screenings over a few days with some hospitality and drinks receptions thrown in. The idea being that while a buyer might not travel to London to see any of the particular films of offer, they might well travel to see a dozen or so films screened back to back. LUFF, as some call it (presumably those who don’t know about the always amusing Lausanne Underground Film Festival) has a rather Spartan website that gives few clues about what is being shown because the event is aimed not at journalists, cinephiles and critics but at buyers. A lot of the films at LUFF were receiving their first proper screenings anywhere, before they even appear on the festival circuit.
I was there in order to give my brother my ‘expert opinion’ on which films were worth checking out. However, I think it’s fair to say that I got more out of it from my presence there than he did.
Blood Of The Beasts (1949) – Humanity’s Capacity to Dream
Georges Franju’s background was in theatrical set design. As a set designer, he would have learned to create atmosphere through the use of subtle visual queues but he would also have learned that every scene and every shot are a world of their own. Properly conceived, a single shot can convey as much information as an entire page of dialogue. Where the camera focuses, when people enter, where objects stand and how they are lit are not merely aesthetic variables, they are to cinema what words are to poetry and literature. As such, it is perhaps fitting that Ruthless Culture’s first look at a work of Franju should be a short film that is practically silent; His 1949 short film about Parisian slaughterhouses Blood of the Beasts.
REVIEW – 20th Century Boys (2008)
VideoVista have my review of Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s 20th Century Boys.
Watching this film put me in mind of archeology or anthropology. It is based upon a series of manga which, while hugely successful in Japan, have yet to acquire much of a cult status in the West. Because of the popularity of the source material, the film and everyone involved in t seem to be making a real effort to produce a film as close to the source material as possible. So in effect, the film is this huge homage to this pop cultural deity that I have never heard of. It’s like some weird and incomprehensible religion; to those within the sphere of influence of the manga, clearly the film is a big deal. To the rest of us all of the slavish respect seems irrational and incomprehensible. Which is probably a good state to be in when it comes to popular culture.
Ruthless Culture 