by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Blancanieves (2012)

BlancanievesVideoVista has my review of Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves, a silent black and white re-invention of Snow White.

Set in 1920s Spain, the film opens on a young couple who are about to have their first child. He is a successful bullfighter, She is a famed flamenco dancer. Unfortunately, tragedy strikes when He is injured in the ring and She goes into premature labour and dies in the process of giving birth to her daughter. For reasons that are not even remotely addressed, the bullfighter’s daughter grows up in the care of her grandmother and is never allowed to meet her father who immediately marries his demonic and controlling nurse. When the young girl’s grandmother dies, for reasons that are not even remotely addressed, the bullfighter agrees to assume his responsibilities as a father but he refuses to meet with his daughter and so the young girl is forced to work as a scullery maid. Eventually the father and daughter meet and so the evil step-mother throws the young woman out onto the street forcing her to befriend a band of dwarven bullfighters who help her achieve fame as a successful bullfighter in her own right.

The fascinating thing about this film is that while Berger sets out to make a proper silent film, it is clear that Berger struggles to tell a story using only images and musical cues. Thus, rather than images that tell a story and musical cues that provide an emotional context for these images, Berger presents us with a series of incredibly well-composed but dramatically empty images backed up with an entirely inappropriate musical score. Indeed, Blancanieves is less a work of cinematic art than it is a fashion shoot inspired by a combination of 1920s Spain and film noir. As I say in the review:

Having failed to marshal both his visual and his musical resources in an effective manner, Berger is forced onto the decidedly contemporary footing of relying upon scripting and actors to tell the story, and this is where silent film’s lack of bandwidth really bites as the actors seem to take their cues from the inter-titles and the inter-titles are all featureless snippets of dialogue meaning that none of the actors ever transcends the childish and stereotypical origins of their characters: evil stepmother is evil, warm-hearted child is warm-hearted, broken patriarch is broken, and dwarves provide a deeply questionable combination of comedy and pathos.

Ideally, the history of film should tell a story of growing complexity and accomplishment; Each new technical innovation unlocking entire arenas of artistic potential that is broken, harnessed and added to the ever-growing toolbox of a mature art form. However, as Berger’s failure to tell a convincing story suggests, many of the techniques pioneered by silent filmmakers have dropped out of mainstream use meaning that many contemporary directors trained to make ‘talkies’ are effectively incapable of making a silent film as they lack the technical skills required to convey narrative without the use of expositionary dialogue. However, as I explain in my review, many of the skills pioneered by silent filmmakers live on in the work of art house directors:

In 1963, the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman produced a film with no dialogue at all. The Silence is a genuinely extraordinary exercise in technical self-control as while Bergman does make use of sound effects and incomprehensible mumbling, he effectively manages to tell a complex psychological story without a single line of dialogue or even an inter-title. This desire to demand more from your audience and keep them making imaginative leaps is now firmly embedded in the DNA of the art house tradition but it is particularly noticeable in such recent dialogue-free triumphs as Jose Luis Guerin’s In The City Of Sylvia, Mao Mao’s Here, Then, and Amer by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Watching these films reminds us of how crude, lazy and wasteful Hollywood filmmaking has become. It also shows us quite how much the likes of Pablo Berger need to learn before they can tell a compelling story without the use of dialogue.

For those interested, I include links to reviews of the films I mention:

Re-reading my review of Bergman’s The Silence, I am struck by how little I actually engaged with the film as a piece of silent cinema: I talk about character, I talk about mythology and I talk about the purpose of criticism precisely because at the time of writing that review (2008) I lacked the critical tools required to make sense of what it was that I was seeing on screen. In order for audiences to be able to make sense of a work of art, they must first possess the tools that will allow them to decode them. Much of what we mean when we talk about ‘education’, ‘learning’ and ‘being cultured’ is acquiring skills that allow us to make sense of particular works of art and it is in this process of acquisition that we see the true biases of our own society: Because I grew up in an era when films had dialogue, I never needed to acquire the skills required to make sense of a dialogue-free film. Because I am a straight, white man and I grew up in a culture that uses that perspective as a universal cultural default, I find films that embody different perspectives to be both a challenge and a release but I think many people view films made from non-white, non-straight and non-male perspectives in a manner comparable to the way I used to see silent film: Sure… a lot of effort went into this, but I can’t make any fucking sense of it!

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013)

Alan Partridge Alpha Papa posterFilmJuice have my review of Declan Lowney’s Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, easily one of the most disappointing films I have seen this year.

Despite his familiarity to and broad popularity with British audiences, the character of Alan Partridge is something of a cult figure; A comedy grotesque born not only from the self-conscious egotism of Steve Coogan but also the subtle brilliance of Armando Ianucci and Chris Morris, two of the most respected and influential writers in contemporary British comedy. Over the years, Partridge has undergone a slow process of evolution from little more than a means of mocking sports journalism to a a more rounded critique of low-end British celebrity and eventually middle-aged masculinity in general. That which began as Motson continued as Wogan and Titchmarsh before concluding as your dad. Given that each turn of the creative handle has injected more history and depth into the character, it is strange to find the beautifully nuanced Partridge of Welcome to the Places of My Life turn up in a knockabout cinematic comedy. Indeed, many of the problems with Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa stem from the fact that the film’s writers keep wanting to produce character comedy in a film set up to deliver broad and accessible jokes. Little surprise that this film seems to have encountered significant problems during the production process:

Most DVD releases contain making-of documentaries that are really little more than advertising designed to convince everyone that actors and crew all had an amazing time making the film. Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa breaks violently with that tradition by inadvertently laying bare the film’s tortured production history. The first warning sign appears when Steve Coogan apologises to his fellow actors for the lack of a finished script. From there we move on to talk about on-camera improvisation and some absolutely extraordinary footage in which Colm Meaney appears to be working out his character’s motivations on set while other actors mention the fact that they were frequently given their lines on the morning on which they were due to film the scene. This lack of a clear vision going into the project is evident not only in the sloppy narrative but also the comparative weakness of many of the jokes. Compared to your average cinematic comedy or TV sitcom, this film’s gag-rate is surprisingly low and when the jokes do come they invariably feel as though they could have been improved by a couple of re-writes. In fact, aside from a few good lines and a genuinely funny dream sequence, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa is not a particularly funny film. It is not only less funny and less well made than such recent comedies as Bridesmaids, it is significantly less funny than Michael Lehmann’s 1994 comedy Airheads, whose plot is almost identical to that of Alpha Papa.

This is one of those films where you wish you could be a fly on the wall during production meetings as almost every aspect of the film seems to have gone wrong from the choice of locations to the choice of plot right through to the way in which the actors worked on set.

How actors work on set is actually a fascinating question as the rise of Judd Apatow seems to have ushered in an entirely new approach to the production of cinematic comedy. The reason why the trailers for films like Bridesmaids and Get Him to The Greek (both produced by Apatow) feature different iterations of the jokes that appear in the final films is that many contemporary comedies work by shooting numerous variations on the same basic gags. Sometimes these differences will be comedic in nature (different pace, different props, different lines), sometimes they will be technical (different angles, different lightings) and sometimes they will bring out different aspects of the plot or characters, but what all of these differences do is shift the act of creating the film from something that happens in the writers’ heads before production starts to something that happens in the heads of the editors and directors after production has completed.

Given the information contained in the astonishingly candid making-of featurette included on the DVD, it is tempting to conclude that Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa tried to use both approaches at the same time and wound up locating the creative act in the minds of writers and actors as they were sitting on set. Indeed, we see that Coogan and Meaney had a good deal of freedom in creating their parts on set and yet supporting actors were given their parts on the morning in which they were expected to shoot. This suggests that the film went through a continuous process of re-writing in which spontaneous acts of creativity would shape and reshape the characters who were supposed to serve as basis for much of the comedy. This also explains why so many of the gags felt under-written: The writers simply did not have time to finesse them. An experienced director could have imposed order on this process but the producers of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa went with Declan Lowney, whose directorial experience lies mostly in TV comedies like Father Ted. Again, the making-of featurette reveals quite a lot about Lowney’s role as it is full of images of Coogan either directly undermining Lowney or assuming the type of leadership position that you would normally associate with a director.

 

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Silence (2012)

SilenceFilmJuice have my review of Pat Collins’ art house travelogue Silence. The plot (such as it is) revolves around a sound-recordist who is dumped by his German partner. Depressed and more than a little lost, the sound-recordist reacts to his personal tragedy by returning to the Donegal coast in Ireland in order to make recordings of places completely devoid of human presence. However, whilst engaging in this anti-social dalliance, the sound-recordist realises that the sound of silence might yield something more than an absence of arsehole humans… something deeper and more spiritual. As I explain in my review, Silence is essentially a cinematic reconstruction of the experience of watching an art house film. In an art house film, the director presents you with a collection of beautiful images and invites you to reflect upon the thoughts, feelings and memories these images bring forth. In the case of the sound-recordist, the sound of silence summons memories of a childhood spent in an isolated fishing village on a tiny island off the Irish coast. A little while ago, I wrote something about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (apologies for the fucked-up formatting) in which I argued that the film was an attempt to use cinematic techniques to induce a sort of spiritual experience in the audience:

While there are many films that use evocative imagery to explore the belief that there is something out there that is bigger than ourselves, Stalker moves beyond the purely representative in order to fundamentally alter the relationship between film and audience. Yes… the hidden systems of the Zone neatly mirror the type of magical thinking that underpins most religions, and yes… the perversely benign Room serves as an elegant symbol for any spiritual end-point you care to name, but the film does not simply represent a spiritual experience, it actually compels the audience to have one by encouraging them to seek meaning in the film in much the same way as the Stalker seeks meaning in the Zone and the spiritual seek meaning in the world. This state of forced sympathy with a man who is either deeply disturbed or deeply religious pays off in an absolutely mesmerising final scene in which the Stalker’s daughter appears to move a glass with her mind as a train roars past in the background: Did the Zone actually exist or was it all a fantasy? Did the daughter move the glass or was it the train? Was the daughter gaining magical powers the Stalker’s reward for reaching the Room in the correct state of mind? Did the Stalker’s visits to the Zone alter the DNA he passed on to his daughter? Tarkovsky’s film is so rich and complex that these questions can be answered in any number of ways but which interpretation you happen to choose invariably comes down to a leap of faith no different to that of the Stalker or that of the spiritually minded.

Silence is clearly an attempt to reproduce this same trick by inviting the audience to identify with the sound-recordist and open themselves up to the possibility of a deeper silence. Unfortunately, Silence is let down by Collins’ failure to follow through and show us what this process of reflection and silent-listening might produce. In Stalker, we have the appearance of a dog and the possibility of the stalker’s daughter Monkey acquiring supernatural powers. In Silence we simply have the possibility that the entire thing might well have been a waste of time:

While Tarkovsky perfectly captures the combination of profound understanding and acute alienation that accompanies life-changing experiences, Collins is rather unclear on what it is that his protagonist actually finds at the end of his journey: Is it a sense of community? Is it the understanding that he should never have left his home? All we see is a wind-swept derelict.

It may seem a little unfair to unfavorably compare Silence to one of the greatest films of all time but I see the comparison as a compliment. Many directors reach for the art house tool kit and produce nothing more than a series of pretty images that signify nothing more than the compositional skill of the cinematographer. Silence is not an entirely successful film but it is an attempt to reconnect with an approach to filmmaking that has lain dormant for far too long. Great cinema should not merely entertain or move, it should transform and films like Stalker and Silence should be celebrated for pursuing that transformative potential, even if it is ultimately unsuccessful.

by Jonathan M

TranSylvania (2006) – Post-Sedentary

Identity is an ambiguous thing: Some are born without an obvious place in the world and so wander the Earth in search of an identity they might call their own. Others are born with a very clear identity that is imposed upon them at birth and while these people may know precisely where they are, their location frequently turns out to be under someone else’s boot. The dull ache of ambiguity throbs not only in the identities we receive from society at large, but also from the identities we choose to impose upon ourselves. This is a film about identity and how assuming an identity may very well wind up harming those who have that identity forced upon them.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Creepshow (1982)

creepshowFilmJuice have my review of George A. Romero’s infamous horror/comedy Creepshow. Infamous… not because it’s particularly funny or scary, but rather because it features the film’s writer Stephen King playing a dungaree-clad redneck simpleton who slowly turns into a hedge. Creepshow is something of an odd cultural artifact as, despite having an incredibly famous writer and an incredibly famous director, the film is actually quite shit. Indeed, re-watching the film and scowling my way through its terrible gags and ineffectual scares, I was struck by the fact that this film’s fame owes less to the film itself than it does to its impeccable geek heritage. As I put it in my review:

Nostalgia only ever functions within the confines of a single generation and expecting contemporary audiences to feel nostalgic for comics produced in the 1950s is a fool’s errand.  Creepshow may well have struck a nerve with audiences when it first appeared but uneven writing and questionable direction mean that this film is now of little more than historical interest.

The nostalgia I speak of is nostalgia for a range of oddball horror comics published in the 1950s by a company called EC. As I explain in my review, before being wound down into a rump publishing little more than Mad Magazine, EC acquired a huge following by pioneering the combination of comedy and horror at a time when comics were being broken on the rack of public opinion for their supposed role in creating juvenile delinquents. Despite being something of a flash in the pan, the sensibility pioneered by EC was immensely influential on American babyboomers and traces of EC heritage can be found not only in the work of George A. Romero and Stephen King but also people like Stephen Spielberg, Sam Raimi and anyone from that generation who took it upon themselves to direct a horror/comedy. The problem is that, while the ‘boomers clearly loved their EC comics, they drank so deeply from the wellspring and returned to it so often that the idea explored by the EC comics themselves now seem incredibly dated and dull. We’ve seen it before and we’ve seen it better because everyone who ever read an EC comic decided to borrow the idea and make a film about it.

At the time, Creepshow must have seemed like a great idea and given how many 1980s film critics must have read EC comics as children, I’m sure the sense of shared love and nostalgia was universal. However, while nostalgia is an incredibly potent force that excuses many great cultural ills, it doesn’t transfer between generations meaning that while EC comics might have meant a lot to ‘boomers, they don’t mean anything to people like me. In fact, I’m more like to be nostalgic for the work of Romero and King than I am for the work that inspired them. Stripped of its shield of nostalgic good will, Creepshow reveals itself as poorly conceived, poorly written and poorly made.

I got into this question when I reviewed Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell back in 2009:

What most struck me as I sat watching Drag Me To Hell is its quite overt racism.  The film’s depiction of the Roma people is straight out of the darkest dreams of the Daily Mail and a tradition of racial prejudice, fear and scape-goating that stretches back at least as far as the Dark Ages.  Mrs. Ganush is physically disgusting, replete with disease and foul habits.  A vindictive and dishonest creature who needs little provocation before lashing out at honest white middle class people using her sinister gypsy powers.  Her family are presented in a similar tone as a pack of ugly, sinister and unsympathetic people playing weird violin music in the basement of a tumbledown old house.  I would have some sympathy for the idea that the Raimi brothers – as Americans – have little awareness of the spectre of genocide that still hangs over the European treatment and depiction of gypsies except that, even accepting that this kind of gross ignorance is acceptable, it does not explain why the same kind of racially-inspired, type-based characterisation also applies to other non-White characters.

At which point, Patrick Hudson appeared in the comments and mentioned not only Creepshow, but also nostalgia for EC comics. At the time, I was unimpressed by the suggestion that nostalgia somehow made Sam Raimi’s antitziganism acceptable but since then, my position has hardened even further: Nostalgia does not travel between generations and any attempt to force the issue (as in the case of Olivier Assayas’ recent love letter to the 1960s) is likely to result in a film that makes its creator look either sentimental, simple-minded or politically reactionary.

by Jonathan M

Keeper of the Clockwork Heart: The Late Films of Kenji Mizoguchi

Late-MizoguchiIn a career spanning thirty three years, the Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi produced a total of eighty three feature films. While many of those films have now been lost and only a few have ever been made available to Western audiences, recent years have seen an attempt to reclaim the legacy of Mizoguchi and introduce his work to a new generation of film-lovers. So far, the most visible element of this campaign has been the very visible release of Mizoguchi’s later films by Criterion in America and Masters of Cinema in the UK. Next week, Masters of Cinema are releasing a blu-ray box set entitled Late Mizoguchi: Eight Films 1951-1956. The set includes:

  • Ugetsu Monogatari (1951)
  • Oyu Sama (1951)
  • Gion Bayashi (1953)
  • Sansho Dayu (1954)
  • Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954)
  • Uwasa No Onna (1954)
  • Yokihi (1955)
  • Akasen Chitai (1956)

My review of the complete box set is now available on FilmJuice. As you might expect for a review of an eight-film box set, the review is kind of long but I think the length was necessary in order to explore not only Mizoguchi’s approach to narrative but also his attitudes to women and how these attitudes to women transitioned over time from bewailing their fate to celebrating their courage and finally to railing at the capitalist system that dehumanises and immiserates them. I personally consider Akasen Chitai to be one of the greatest films of all time as no other film so perfectly captures the ways in which the system bullies and coerces us into betraying each other for personal advancement.

I was actually lucky enough to review some of these films when they were first released on DVD back in 2007:

Re-reading these reviews just now, it’s interesting to see that while my dim opinions of Yokihi and Chikamatsu Monogatari have not massively changed, my feelings on both Uwasa No Onna and Akasen Chitai have improved immeasurably with time. Akasen Chitai may have impressed me at the time but it also stayed with me and had a real impact on how I thought about both the world and film. Since then, I’ve seen quite a few works that have been celebrated for their politics and their devotion to social realism but nothing in either British or Italian Social Realism come even close to the focus and power of Akasen Chitai.

by Jonathan M

Here, Then (2012) – So Much Less To Me Than Meets the Eye

here_thenIt is impossible to overstate the enduring influence of existentialism on art house film. Since disentangling themselves from the mainstream of popular cinema back in the 1960s, art house filmmakers have worked hard to create a set of narrative techniques that perfectly capture what it’s like to feel lost and a little bit sad in a world rippling with beauty and potential. This tension between the world’s extraordinary potential and our own failure to make the most of it is what lies at the heart of all existential thought and most art house film. Indeed, these techniques and the moods associated with them are now so common in European and World cinema that their deployment has started to feel more like a professional rite-of-passage than an expression of manifest truth.

Winner of the Best International Film award at the 2012 Edinburgh International Film Festival, Chinese director Mao Mao’s first film Here, Then (Ci Chu Yu Bi Chu) is an excellent example of how to launch a directorial career: As technically brilliant and thematically rich as any conventional art house film produced in the last five years, Mao Mao’s debut proves that he can use conventional art house techniques to tell a conventional art house story about alienation, isolation and the yawning chasm at the heart of middle-class life.

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by Jonathan M

A Hijacking (2011) – Don’t Look, Don’t Cry

AHijackingAs DVD box sets and online streaming slowly replace broadcast TV as primary delivery systems for televised drama, industry people have begun to cast about for the next great thing to fill middle-class evenings. After the Golden Age of American TV came the discovery of gritty French crime dramas such as the magnificent Spiral, the abortive popularisation of Italian dramas such as Inspector Montalban and the increasingly potent and influential Nordic gold rush including The Killing, The Bridge and Those Who Kill. Less showy but more substantial than many of these post-Wire police procedurals is Adam Price’s Borgen, a political drama about the first female Danish Prime Minister that eschews the infantile patriotic sentimentality of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing in favour of real political engagement with Denmark’s many social and political problems. Given the success of Borgen and ‘Nordic Noir’, it is hardly surprising that the Danish film industry should attempt to use the visibility of Danish TV to help promote their national cinema. Aside from being written and directed by one of Borgen’s writers, Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking (Kapringen) is so filled with Borgen cast members that I suspect Lindholm may have driven up to the set in a large van and kidnapped them using promises of gravlax and crispbread.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2013)

PGTI_home2FilmJuice have my review of Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Žižek’s lecture/documentary film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.

This film was a real disappointment for me. I remember discovering The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema when it screened on BBC4 and buying the DVD directly from the production company as it hadn’t quite managed to land a mainstream distribution deal. I love the visual style, I loved the choice of films it discussed and I loved the way in which Žižek took incredibly complex readings and compressed them down into diamonds of insight. I didn’t necessarily buy all of Žižek’s interpretations but criticism is a creative endeavour in which being boring is a far greater crime than being wrong. In that series, Žižek was never boring and so the series remains a fantastic piece of TV. Unfortunately The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is a far less attractive prospect for a number of reasons.

The first major problem with this film is that Fiennes has failed to reign in Žižek. Pervert’s Guide to Cinema worked by providing its resident critic with a very clear framework: He could talk about whatever the fuck it was that sprang to mind but each of his flights of fancy had to begin and end with the text of a particular film. This not only forced Žižek to be concise in his opinions, it also meant that if the audience ever fell of the train of thought, they could re-orient themselves by using their knowledge of a particular cinematic text. Sadly, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology suffers from the same problem that many of Žižek’s lectures (and now books) suffer from: a complete lack of intellectual discipline and a woeful tendency towards self-indulgence. As I explain in my review:

it is never entirely clear how Žižek’s opinions about the 2011 London riots relate to his opinions about Stalin’s efforts to position himself at the centre of not just Russian politics but Russian private lives as well. The more Fiennes indulges Žižek’s wandering attention span, the more insubstantial and hollow his ideas come to seem, something that is particularly evident in the slightly embarrassing attempt to conclude the film with something resembling a plan of action or a unified worldview.

In other words, this film is full of entertaining ideas… but none of those ideas ever amount to anything like a sustained intellectual critique. By failing to impose any limits on what Žižek couldn’t say, Fiennes has insured that he says nothing at all. In addition to these structural problems, the film also suffers from the decision to chase a cinematic release rather than the much longer TV-friendly running time enjoyed by the original series. The result is a lecture that tackles a much larger topic in much less time and with much less intellectual coherence. To paraphase Woody Allen: So much intellectual incoherence… and in such a small portion too!

by Jonathan M

Spring Breakers (2012) by Harmony Korine

SB1People fond of European and World cinema often accuse Hollywood of churning out safe, derivative crap whilst turning a blind eye to the fact that the vocabulary of art house film has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. Indeed, if you have seen Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Alain Renais’s Last Year at Marienbad then you are unlikely to be surprised by anything that appears in your local art house cinema. The truth of the matter is that cinema is an expensive medium and the conservative forces that compel American filmmakers to produce violently misogynistic popcorn movies are the same as the ones compelling ambitious non-American directors to produce beautifully shot stories of middle-class alienation filled with extended silences and psychological ambiguities. Given how many promising talents are crushed by the gears of these mature economic systems, it is always something of a delight when a director manages to follow their own path and find their own means of expression. Harmony Korine is just that kind of director.

Korine’s latest and most widely marketed work opens with a montage that is both completely out of character and utterly in keeping with the director’s favoured themes. The scene is one of oppressive revelry as American students drink, dance and grind up against each other in the Florida sunshine. Shot through a slightly greenish filter, the scene is gorgeously bright and yet oddly murky, as though someone had decided to open the Arc of the Covenant at the bottom of a garden pond. Korine is best known for such quirky portraits of impoverished dysfunction as Gummo and Trash Humpers but he was also the writer behind Larry Clark’s Kids and Ken Park. The sensibility that unites all of these films is that contentment (and even transcendence) is most likely not going to be found in all the usual places; churches, stable relationships, middle-aged men walking through fields of grass whilst talking in voices filled with hushed awe. Happiness is where you find it and chances are that the place you eventually find it is going to seem incredibly ugly and bleak to anyone who isn’t you. We see this in the squalid threesome at the end of Ken Park, we see this in the psychotic performance art of the Trash Humpers and we see it in the dub-step, boobies and beer bongs of Spring Breakers’ opening montage, which is best described as Ibiza Uncovered with better dentistry.

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