Category / Horror

by Jonathan M

10 Works of German Expressionism

Videovista have my (rather long) piece on German Expressionist film entitled Apocalyptic Adolescence.

The piece gives a list of eight particularly noteworthy works of Expressionist cinema and ends with two works which, though not Expressionistic, seem like logical reactions against the trend.  One of the challenges of writing this piece was the slow realisation that the term “German Expressionism” is now effectively meaningless.  So I attempted to keep track not only of how the term changed, but also to look at all of these films through a rather definite understanding of what it meant to be a part of the Expressionist movement.

The list includes : The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Student of Prague, The Golem, From Morn to Midnight, Genuine : A Tale of a Vampire, Waxworks, Nosferatu, Metropolis, The Last Laugh and Pandora’s Box.

by Jonathan M

The White Ribbon (2009) – The Challenge of Empathy

To understand the films of Michael Haneke, one must first understand his deep ambivalence towards the themes and techniques of genre film-making.  In The Time of The Wolf (2003) it was the post-apocalyptic.  In Hidden (2005) it was the mystery.  In Funny Games (1997) it was the slasher.  All of these films would happily fit within the genre canons that inspired them were it not for Haneke’s almost visceral reaction against the cosily self-indulgent safety of genre.

To go and see a genre film is to arrive at the cinema with a certain set of expectations.  The purchase of the ticket is a contract : Scare me.  Thrill me.  Entertain me.  Move me.  We know what we want and we happily pay to receive it.

Haneke is a filmmaker who refuses all such contractual relationships.  He uses the methods of genre to engineer not the effects that audiences have been conditioned to expect, but rather something different.  Something far more subversive.  For example, in both versions of Funny Games, the story of a family’s torture and murder allows the filmmaker to challenge his audience’s desire to watch such atrocities.  At one point, Haneke allows one of his characters to escape their fate only for the murderer to pick up a remote control and rewind the film in order to foil the escape.  Audiences are to be denied the consolations of genre even if it means that the fourth wall must be shattered in the process.  The same is true of Hidden.  Haneke apes the mystery so effectively that the audience begins to tie itself in knots, picking over clues scattered throughout the narrative as to the identity of the stalker.  However, Haneke refuses to resolve this question, leaving instead the methods, motivations and identity of the stalker unanswered.  Soon the question changes from “who is doing this to the character?” to “what has the character done to deserve this?”.  The main character begins to pick over his past until he eventually uncovers some terrible secret.  A secret that might not have caused the film’s goings on but which could plausibly inspire them.  This is the whodunit not as a form of palliative reassurance that no crime will go unpunished.  Instead Hidden uses the themes and movements of the mystery genre to imply universal guilt, not only in its characters but in its audience.  Are you, the film seems to ask, really innocent?

Das Weisse Band – Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte sees Haneke return to the same hostile and yet pragmatic relationship with genre themes and images to request of us a leap of empathy and understanding.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – King of the Hill (2007)

VideoVista has my review of King of The Hill (El Rey De La Montana).  Not the long-running animated comedy but rather a taught and atmospheric Spanish thriller directed by Gonzalo-Lopez Gallago.

King of the Hill, along with a number of other films I have reviewed in the last year, suggest that Europe is going through something of a genre boom at the moment.  Britain and France are churning out genre films like nobody’s business and places like Spain and Norway are following suit.  Sadly, while a lot of these films are very well directed indeed, not that many of them are well written and King of the Hill is further evidence of that observation’s validity.

by Jonathan M

Johnny Mad Dog (2008) – Random Acts of Narrative

Two books have recently been weighing quite heavily on my mind.

 

The first is J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a novel that is as striking in its imagery and ideas as it is in its formal innovation.  Rather than providing a coherent narrative, Ballard chops the book up into short paragraphs that are more or less conceptually and thematically related.  Themes, motifs and characters re-appear (sometimes with different names, sometimes filling spaces previously occupied by other characters) but between the disjointed writing style and the abstraction of Ballard’s ideas, it is clear to me that any story one projects upon the book is exactly that – a projection.  The haecceity of the book is not a matter of plots and characters and events.

 

The second is Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound – Enlightenment and Extinction (2007).  A work of surprisingly accessible wide-spectrum philosophy, Nihil Unbound opens with an important distinction between what he calls the scientific image of man – the best scientific model for human cognitive functioning – and the manifest image – the model we use when thinking about and describing others.  The manifest image is grounded in what is known as ‘folk psychology’ and it represents centuries-worth of little theories and assumptions about how humans think.  This image is made up of relatively complex ideas such as Freudian projection as well as more fundamental ideas such as the idea that there is such a thing as the self and it is that which works the controls of the body.  The problem is that the clearer the scientific image becomes, the more the manifest image comes to resemble a collection of empty and surprisingly brittle superstitions.

 

One of the things that I have taken away from these books is the artifice and ubiquity of the story and of the narrative form.

 

As humans, we are constantly trying to make sense of the world around us.  Our brains are optimised for pattern-recognition and, when confronted by a stream of random and unstructured data from our sense organs, our brain starts trying to make sense of it.  We see stories everywhere.  We even tell stories about ourselves, stitching causal histories composed of random fluctuations in hormone levels and neural pathway activation into neat little just-so tales about why we do the things we do.  We are addicted to the story…

 

We build religions around this need to tell stories, we construct therapeutic models encouraging us to piece together the stories of our selves and, when it comes time for us to depict the world around us through art, we happily continue the pursuit – Building characters out of our woefully inaccurate folk psychological notions and marching them through worlds far more ordered and simple than our own.  Sometimes we even confuse our understanding of the world with the world itself and write stories we claim to be ‘realistic’, ‘accurate’ or ‘authentic’.  But all too often, what we take to be the world is just another story… a simplified and conveniently understandable abstraction.  This poses a theoretical challenge to art : Can it ever capture the truth about the world, or is it necessarily a simplification of it?  If it is possible then the chances are that the results will resemble something like  Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog, a film about boy soldiers based upon the novel Johnny Chien Mechant by Emmanuel Dongala.

 

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by Jonathan M

The Offence (1972) – I am not your Godhead, I am just a Paedophile

I get the impression that for many, a trip to the cinema is a religious experience.  Note that I say ‘religious’ and not ‘mystical’. People commonly reach for transcendental terminology when groping for fresh panegyrics with which to adorn some film or another;  said film is not merely good, watching it is comparable to what a medieval peasant might have experienced upon visiting a cathedral or what a fakir might experience after twenty years crouching upon nails in the sub-continental wilderness.  This is not what I mean by religious experience.  What I mean instead is that people go to the cinema (or read a book) in order to have their moral compasses reset.  They go to see a romantic comedy in order to re-connect with what it is to be really in love.  They go to see Pixar’s Up (2009) in order to know what it means to grow old with someone.  They go to see a navel-gazing drama that deals in matters of identity and alienation in order to get some insight into who and what they are.  People use films in the same way as they once used the Sunday sermon : As a form of guidance.  Simple moral and psychological truths made accessible and easily digested along with pop-corn and diet Coke.  Is it then any wonder that we treat successful actors as living gods?  These people are not merely entertainers, they are the prophets of a secular age.  Our need to constantly tell stories about ourselves drives our desire to consume the stories of others.

Most films are happy to play their role in this relationship.  Modern romantic comedies have their relationship advice, Godard had his attempts at spreading Maoism and even nihilistic film-makers such as Noe are happy to sell their audiences on the horrors of existence, a belief which, in its own way, is no less consolatory than the more up-beat alternatives such as Sam Mendes’ bile-raising “sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it”.  However, some film-makers seem instinctively aware of their positions as moral teachers and reject the role.  Directors such as Hanneke and Von Trier assume accusatory and playfully obtuse attitudes towards their audience in order to avoid it.  Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, based upon the play This Story of Yours by John Hopkins is a film that seems to deconstruct this relationship, turning it into something unhealthy and disturbing.

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by Jonathan M

Celia (1989) – Against the World of Men

Frequent visitors to this site will have noticed that, following my viewing of Pialat’s Passe Ton Bac D’Abord (1979) and L’Enfance Nue (1968), I have written quite a bit about cinematic depictions of childhood.  Pialat’s take on the matter was almost wilfully perverse.  He cast a load of kids, gave them parts to play and then stuck a camera on them as they improvised.  The resulting performances being supposedly ‘more real’ than films such as  Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) or Shane Meadows’ This is England (2007), which deal with childhood by projecting onto their child protagonists the fears, hopes and values of the film directors.  Ann Turner’s Celia embodies a third approach to the problem of depicting childhood in that it examines the ways in which children process and try to make sense of the values and actions of the adults that surround them.

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by Jonathan M

BG19 – Fear of a Transhuman Future : Zombies and Resident Evil

Futurismic have my nineteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.

It deals partly with the Resident Evil games but mostly with the evolution of the zombie genre.  Originally, I was planning a much more expansive piece that also took in the games Dead Space and Prototype – as they also have a rather reactionary attitude towards the shifting conceptions of identity found in transhumanism  – but I decided instead to focus my analysis a bit more.

by Jonathan M

Kairo (2001) – Hedgehogs meet the Internet

There is something faintly Proustian about sitting down at a keyboard in order to write about Japanese Horror.  As though biting into a madeleine, I am suddenly transported back to the horrible ICA seating I put up with in order to see Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998).  I am swamped by memories of girlfriends past, trips to out of the way cinemas, sequels rented on VHS tape and vindictive reviews of terrible American remakes.  It all seems like so long ago and yet it was only the early 00s.  Tempus Fugit.  Sic Transit Gloria Mundi…

Though historically accurate, mentioning Ringu seems somehow inappropriate as,  despite having been a product of the J-Horror bubble (it even earned itself a terrible 2005 American remake), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo is no mere genre copy-cat.  Clearly influenced by Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), the film uses genre formulae as a spring-board for exploring philosophical ideas with an almost poetical elegance and softness of touch.  Kairo is, in every way, a remarkable film.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Videovista has my review of Lucio Fulci’s Quella Villa accanto al Cimitero.

What surprised me most about this film was how genuinely weird it was.  By the early 1980s, the Italian film industry was doing a pretty god job of milking the ideas from successful genre films.  In some cases, they even released unofficial sequels to American films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and even Terminator (1984) – more about which can be found in the interesting if rather bizarre videologs put out by The Cinema Snob – Fulci was very much a part of this tradition and The House by the Cemetery was a part of a series of zombie films he made.  However, with little money and much repetition of subject matter, these Italian exploitation films had to find someway of getting themselves noticed and this seems to have spawned a culture of genre-bending where ideas were crammed together in interesting ways regardless of whether or not they made sense.

This hot house of creativity stands in stark contrast with the stagnant and moribund culture of gay indie cinema.  As proof, Videovista has my review of Chip Hale’s Mulligans (2008).  A review which marks round 273 in my on-going battle with TLA Releasing.