It is a pleasure to return to Cinematic Vocabulary and kick off Polanski Week by looking at what I consider to be one of Polanski’s less appreciated films. While The Tenant (1976) is the darling of cinephiles and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is second only to Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) in terms of mainstream appeal, Repulsion is sometimes overlooked as an early work, sandwiched as it is between Polanski’s break through film Knife in the Water (1962) and his more famous Hollywood projects.
However, it is my contention that Repulsion is a substantial landmark on the the road of Polanski’s artistic development. The low-budget British Horror film allowed him not only to perfect some of the cinematic techniques that would feature prominently in his later works but also to tackle some of the themes dear to the generation of 1930s surrealist film-makers who clearly had quite an influence on Polanski’s thinking.
While I try to move outside of my comfort zone in the films I choose to watch, sometimes I find myself in a place where only a certain kind of film will satisfy me. At the moment, that type of film is the psychological thriller. One of the masters of this particular genre is the Polish-French director Roman Polanski. Holocaust survivor, husband to Sharon Tate (who was murdered by Charles Manson and his ‘Family’) and fugitive from justice, Polanski has made many powerful and disturbing films though perhaps none as disturbing as his Apartment Trilogy.
Repulsion (1965)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
The Tenant (1976)
In order to pay appropriate hommage to my current obsession, I have decided to turn Ruthless Culture over to the study of Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy for a period not exceeding one week.
Videovista also have my review of Yim Pil-sung’s Hansel & Gretel.
Over the past month I have been reading and watching a lot of stuff that consciously plays around with pre-existing forms of imagery. For example, Blindness (2008) seemed to address not just metaphorical blindness but also the idea of blindness as a metaphor. I also sat through not only Stephen Moffat’s direction-less Jekyll (2007) but an equally uninspiring theatrical reworking of the original novella by James MacLaren entitled (somewhat unoriginally) Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
One of the main problems with Hansel & Gretel is that while it plays around with the idea of Hansel and Gretel, it really does not have anything to say. It is a film that draws heavily from the del Toro tradition of stories about abandoned children and in bringing together those two traditions, all it really manages to do is make us realise that del Toro’s stories are hardly revolutionary.
However, in thinking about this film and Blindness I could not help but wonder whether there isn’t some kind of bell curve for reinventions. Fail to do enough and your story comes across as hackneyed but do too much and the story gets lost or, as in the case of Blindness, the metaphor effectively becomes so flexible that it becomes effectively meaningless, thereby leaving the writer looking like a pretentious pseud.
On a completely unrelated subject, this month’s Videovista also featured my review of the old TV mini-series Escape from Sobibor (1987), which, if nothing else, shows how films such as Schindler’s List have helped make mainstream media a good deal less squeamish about the Holocaust than it used to be.
This month’s issue of Videovista has recently gone up and it contains my review of Peter Chan’s The Warlords (2007). It is not a bad film at all and it draws attention to two interesting characteristics about contemporary Chinese cinema.
Firstly, that while Chinese films are lagging behind the West in matters of digital jiggery-pokery, they have acess to material resources such as sets and extras that render a lot of these techniques largely moot. For example, I suspect that had The Warlords‘ battle scenes been shot for an American film, the armies would have been mostly digital and, as a result, much much larger. After all, why have a few dozen ships when you can have thousands? I call this the Troy Effect.
You can also see the impressive material infrastructure of Chinese cinema on display in Alexi Tan’s Blood Brothers (2007) ,which I also reviewed for Videovista. The film’s opening scenes are set in the Chinese country-side and instead of a few internal shots and maybe some location work, the film benefits from having been shot on what apears to be the kind of vast back-lot that Hollywood has long since transformed into theme parks.
Secondly, both films are set at times in Chinese history when there was a good deal of foreign involvement in China’s internal affairs. Indeed, Blood Brothers is set in 1930s Shanghai, which hosted a large British ex-pat community including J. G. Ballard. Similarly, The Warlords is set in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, the wars between China in Britain that not only netted Britain Hong Kong but which opened China up to foreign trade and cultural influence. However, despite this both films are completely free of British characters and Western faces.
Since the apologetics of Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), it has become tempting to see all Chinese cultural exports as exercises in nationalist propaganda and the degree of cultural re-appropriation going on in both films invite us to consider them in this very light. However, this strikes me as a rather egocentric vision of Chinese cinema. Not every film (or song) is about the West or even for Western consumption. As a result, it seems more reasonable to see this kind of historical airbrushing as being an expression not of ideological projection but of yielding to popular tastes. So just as American audiences prefer to think that their country won the Second World War single-handed, I suspect that most the Chinese audience would react badly to films that remind them of their country’s quasi-colonial status.
Futurismic have just put up my thirteenth Blasphemous Geometriescolumn entitled “The Alternative Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form”.
Unsurprisingly, given that title, it is an alternative shortlist of five works of genre cinema that push the envelope a little furthers than the very mainstream indeed hugo shortlist. I’ll also take the opportunity to link to Mark Kermode’s discussion of Martyrs, which he agrees is an almost unwatchable film redeemed by its transcendental themes.
There are ideas that seem to be of a certain place and time. Call them icons, if you will. One of the most powerful icons of the early to mid twentieth century is the femme fatale. Born of a cultural climate where gender was not divorced from sex and where women were expected to be virginal and submissive, femme fatales rejected this essentialist vision of gender by being sexually aggressive, socially independent and more than willing to use their sexual wiles to render men subservient to their own desires and goals. Decades after the arrival of the contraceptive pill and miles down the road towards sexual equality, you could be forgiven for thinking that a society such as ours has outgrown the need for bold cinematic challenges to our understandings of gender. Indeed, nowadays the femme fatale seems like little more than an anachronism; as out of place in the modern world as a cockney spiv might be in pre-Credit Crunch London. However, even the most liberal of societies falls into lazy thought patterns, habits of conception that need to be re-examined lest they go stale, rot and become oppressive dogma. Swedish Vampire film Let The Right One In (2008) is a film that rides out not only against popular theories of gender, but also against the commonly held belief that children are innocent, pliable creatures who need to be protected from adults. It does so by rejuvenating and reinventing that most iconoclastic of icons, the femme fatale.
I have always found my view of the genius perceived by others in Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1987) to be obscured by the looming presence of the bleeding obvious. I respect the form, less so the matter. Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009) failed to turn this respect into love. For most of the film I felt the adaptation so submissive and passive that I might as well have stayed at home and read the comic. However, there are moments of greatness in Watchmen. Moments that have very little to do with Alan Moore and a lot to do with Zack Snyder. Moments when Snyder allows himself off the leash, and no… I am not talking about the stupid fight scenes.
In an essay entitled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud argues that pleasure stems not from stimulation but rather a lack of stimulation. The lack of stimulation that comes, for example, from taking off shoes that pinch your feet and the moment not of orgasm but the instant of satiation immediately after the orgasm but before post-orgasmic tristesse sets in. If pleasure is the complete lack of stimulation then it follows logically that death is the ultimate pleasure and that the pursuit of pleasure is somehow also the pursuit of death. Freud called this drive towards death Thanatos. No film maker argues the case for the connection between pleasure and death more aggressively than Zack Snyder.
Write enough reviews and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of films as discrete cultural units. Artefacts cut asunder from the rest of the world and presented to the audience in a neat little package. Thinking of films in these terms tends to lead one to focus upon macroscopic issues such as plot, performance and theme whilst ignoring the fine-grained details of the film such as the cinematography, the sound editing and the techniques used to convey those plots and themes. In an attempt to wean myself away from thinking of films as discrete cultural artefacts, I have decided to write a series of pieces that focus on individual scenes from a critical perspective. My own take on the Anatomy of a Scene series if you will.
The first scene to go under the microscope is the opening sequence of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958).
My latest Blasphemous Geometriescolumn has gone up over at Futurismic.
It’s an attempt to lay down some thoughts on a different way of looking at story-telling in video games, but it’s also an excuse for me to make wise-arse comments about a number of different games I’ve played over the years. Speaking of being a wise-arse I was intriged to discover a YouTube pilot for an Australian TV programme called Game Damage. Starring The Escapist‘s answer to Charlie Brooker, Yahtzee Croshaw. It will be interesting to see whether the show will be picked up because I think it highlights the problem with game commentary in a nut shell. If you watch the pilot you’ll see Yahtzee pouring scorn on what is evidently the contents of a press release while the other two scramble to say something positive. One the one hand, everyone who plays games knows by now that games companies are entirely self-serving massively dishonest and mostly incompetent. On the other hand, ‘Yay! New games!’.
VideoGaiden came close to solving this problems by being mostly weird and curmudgeonly with interludes of interest and enthusiasm but I think the problem is that gamers and TV people have tended to be on different pages. Gamers want to express their culture and that culture involves a good deal of snark and cynicism to counter-act the heavy handed and manipulative marketing techniques used to ensnare them. TV people, want something that taps into the popularity of games and you generally do this by being up-beat about the thing you’re covering. Result = generation upon generation of games-related TV that genuinely struggles to move past reading out press releases and playing game trailers.
In order to grasp the devastating beauty of Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open (1984), it is first necessary to grasp the devastating beauty of another text; Conrad’s altogether more famous Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad’s book ends with one of the most memorable soliloquies in British literature :
“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
‘The horror! The horror!’”
As one of the most commented upon texts in academic literary criticism, this passage has been found to contain endless meanings but one particular meaning has clawed its way up out of the Darwinian jungle of ideas with greater panache and ferocity than the others. The most common interpretation of that final line is that Kurtz has somehow seen the savage, devouring emptiness that lurks at the heart of existence. A heart of darkness that can only truly be grasped by the mad or the inspired who can free themselves of the comforting fictions that animate our day-to-day lives. For Queen. For Country. For Myself. For Love. All fictions. One reason for the popularity of this interpretation is that it echoes the themes of meaninglessness that pervade existentialism, that most popular of Post-War philosophical postures.
Noir crime fiction is seen by some as a form of populist agitprop for existentialism. While Camus and Sartre took over the left bank, it was the Noir writers who were on sale in every news-agent. It is only natural to read Raymond’s book as a continuation of this de facto intellectual alliance, but I would argue that Raymond’s take on existentialism is almost diametrically opposed to that of Sartre, Camus, Kafka or Marcel.
Ruthless Culture 