by Jonathan M

Cinematic Vocabulary – The Opening to This Man Must Die (1969)

As with most of the big names of the New Wave, Claude Chabrol began his cinematic career as a critic for the Cahiers du Cinema.  This critical career culminated with the release in 1957 of a book about the films of Alfred Hitchcock.  This attraction to Hitchcock’s style and subject matter followed Chabrol when he ‘crossed the aisle’ from criticism to film-making and his early output quickly earned him a reputation as the ‘French Hitchcock’ and the influences can also be seen in the film I am going to be writing about today.

Que La Bete Meure (1969) was adapted by a novel by the British poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis.  It is the story of a man who tries to avenge the death of his son by tracking down the man who ran him over.  After seducing the man’s sister-in-law and infiltrating himself into the killer’s family, the grieving father discovers that the family have no more love for the thuggish monster than he does.  The scene I want to talk about is the extraordinary opening sequence leading up to the death of the child and the father’s discovery of the body.

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by Jonathan M

BG 16 – Mirror’s Edge : The Emptiness of the Short-distance Runner

Futurismic have my 16th Blasphemous Geometries column.

As a piece, it is a lot closer in style to the kind of criticism I have been producing for this blog.  Hence the use of YouTube videos and a viewpoint that is a lot closer to the text of the game, rather than standing outside that text and using it to illustrate more abstract ideas.  I’m not sure if I’ll be sticking to this style for Blasphemous Geometries in future.  I’ve decided to focus on a game per column but quite how each game will take me is difficult to predict.

by Jonathan M

My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) – The Revenger’s Futility

My Work is Not Yet Done is a novella published alongside two other stories.  It is, to this date, the longest work of fiction produced by Thomas Ligotti.  It is also a deeply vexing work.  While the book is occasionally brilliant and incredibly twisted, it is also a deeply taciturn book that is forever seeking to wrong-foot its readers with a series of shifts in tone, style and even genre.  The book’s ultimate target is work (that most inhuman and universal form of slavery) but I would argue that the book’s shifts in tone and sympathies also suggest a desire to deny its audience the vicarious catharsis that generally comes with a good story of revenge.  It is this aspect of the story I want to discuss here.

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by Jonathan M

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – The Unwanted Guest

There is no greater testament to the evolving nature of genre than the Vampire.  Once upon a time, the vampire was the poster boy of the gothic romance.  He stood for the dark side of the Victorian heart; The swarthy foreigner whose powers of evil and sensuality lured upstanding Victorian women to their fall not through force but through mesmerising gazes and hushed words.  The horrifying nature of the Vampire lay in his mastery over the very elements of human nature that Victorian society sought to deny.  His was the worst kind of evil.  The evil that one wanted to give in to.  As society changed and cultural attitudes shifted, the Vampire’s evil seemed to dim.  As Horror peeled away from the gothic and what remained sank back down into Romance, the Vampire changed from a dangerous sensual evil into the kind of sensual creature that you would love to date, even if your parents wouldn’t approve :  Male Vampires became leather-trouser clad pretty boys with fashionable hair styles and either a fondness for violence or a deep and brooding sense of artistic self-loathing.  Female Vampires became invariably bisexual and more or less freaky.  The kind of freaky that would scare you but which would also allow you to indulge all of the stuff you see in porn films but would never dare to ask of a real sexual partner.  In other words, good freaky.

In the space of a hundred years Vampires have moved from creatures of pure evil to pathetic sexual Mary Sues for frustrated and repressed Westerners.  The Vampires themselves haven’t changed.  What has changed is our attitude to what the Vampire represents.  That which the Victorians feared and denied in themselves, the people of the 21st Century indulge to the point of solipsism.

However, some attempts have been made to keep Vampires true to their role as creatures of Horror.  Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995) saw in Vampires creatures more in tune with the violent and self-destructive urges that animate humanity as a whole.  Creatures for whom the rational mind serves as an organ or self-justification rather than control or repression.  Alfredson’s Let The Right One In (2008) presented Vampires as users, creatures who adapt themselves to the demands of the marginalised in order to slowly suck the life out of them.  This essay is about a film that returned to one of the first non-romantic presentations of Vampirism.

Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) is a remake of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu : A Symphony of Terror (1922).  But while the remake is, at times, almost shot-for-shot, Herzog’s version presents Vampires as creatures that are not only deeply lonely but whose power is entirely dependent upon the Humans whose blood it drinks.

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by Jonathan M

‘From’ in which sense exactly?

One of the running themes of this blog since its inception has been my on-again, off-again relationship with the approach to film criticism.  In some cases I have argued that works should be seen as windows into the writer’s mind, in other places I’ve been happy to cast it into the dustbin of history on the grounds that a) if you buy into auteur theory then you really need to know quite a bit about the auteur before writing about their works and b) a lot of films become more interesting if you completely ignore what it was the director was trying to achieve.

Another reason for rejecting auteur theory is that it seems to be the case, in American cinema at least, that the clock has been turned back on the director/auteur in favour of a return to the days of the all-powerful producer.  The poster boy for this development is, of course, J. J. Abrams.

But I see it elsewhere too…

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by Jonathan M

Empty Criticism

This week has seen some quite bitter disagreement over the role of the critic in writing about genre.  As pieced together by Abigail Nussbaum and Niall Harrison, the debate started when a new group blog launched claiming not only the name ‘ethics’ but also the primacy of enthusiastically positive genre writing.  Before long, a test case presented itself in the shape of Martin Lewis’ review of a fantasy novel.

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by Jonathan M

The Virgin Spring (1960) – Trembling Before God

Horror giant Wes Craven reportedly claimed that the violence of his debut feature The Last House On The Left (1969) is a reaction by his generation to the horrors of the Vietnam war.  While this justification seems a trifle pretentious and self-serving, it does raise the issue of why it is that depictions of violence in film need to be justified at all.

Why is it that Richard Curtis never feels compelled to speak about how the goings on in Darfur dictate that he must produce sentimental comedies involving smug upper class people?  Is the production of a third Ice Age film a direct reaction to the death of Baby P?  Were it not for the death of Princess Margaret, would Woody Allen ever have made Vicky Christina Barcelona?

A lot of the time, the way in which we justify things is only as interesting as the fact that we feel obliged to justify them at all.  This is the issue that Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) seeks to address.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Anything for Her (2008)

Falsely accused of murdering her boss, Lisa (Diane Kruger) is sent off to prison.  As the appeals process dries up, Lisa drifts into a dark depression and attempts suicide.  Realising that he is losing a wife and his son a mother, Julien (Vincent Lindon) realises that his current existence is untenable and devotes everything he has to planning and executing an escape attempt that will allow the family to be re-united, albeit for a life on the lamb.  Framed initially as a family drama in which Julien has to deal with the repercussions of an imprisoned wife, Anything For Her then mutates into an introspective crime drama as a teacher decides to reinvent himself as a criminal mastermind.  The critical reaction to the film has tended to snag upon how unbelievable it is that a man in such a position would decide to break his wife out of prison, but this is to miss the point.  Anything For Her (Pour Elle) is an interstitial work that exists on the fringes of the traditional drama and the crime genre.  If it fails as a film (and I think ultimately that it does) it is not because of its crime elements or its interstitiality, it is because of the fundamental weakness of its dramatic elements.

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by Jonathan M

Demonlover (2002) – Back from the Primitive

I recently re-read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) for the first time since taking up criticism as an activity.  I originally read the novella as a very straight-forward conceptual breakthrough story in which a Victorian comes to realise the literally horrifying nature of existence.  However, upon further reflection it strikes me that, while sticking to this interpretation of the novella, there are three possible insights to take away from the book :

  • Firstly, that existence outside of the confines of civilisation is horrific.  Under this interpretation, the desiccated world of doilies, influential aunts and ancient men we see in the opening section of the novella are a price we have to pay in order to protect ourselves and escape from the Horror of the Hobbesian state of nature.
  • Secondly, that existence is whatever humanity makes of it.  Rather than building a new world or exporting the values of the European elites, colonialism has in fact opened the way for the rapaciously greedy to create a sort of hell on Earth.  A hell in which a man’s capacity to kill elephants and enslave the local population makes him a great man.  When Kurtz dies, he groans not for the horror in the world, but the horror he and his imitators have unleashed.
  • Thirdly, that Kurtz’s groans are a moment of conceptual break-through.  Under this view, humanity is trapped between the anguish and misery of being and the terrifying nothingness of non-being.  Whether a Dutch merchant or a Congolese fisherman, the dilemma is the same even if we do not necessarily realise it.  Kurtz, by venturing far outside the confines of his native culture, has realised the truth about existence.  A truth that horrifies him even as he dies.

These three different interpretations represent different solutions to the question of why existence is so horrifying :  Is existence tainted by our actions?  Is it something that is present in the world but escaped from thanks to civilisation?  Or is it something that permeates all of existence, but which we only catch a glimpse of from time to time when we are paying attention?

Critically panned at the time of its release, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002) is an attempt to provide an answer to this question by considering not only the ways in which humans treat each other but also the ways in which human civilisation deals with the savage nature of existence through its media and its institutions.

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by Jonathan M

Town and Country (and some links)

VideoVista have my review of Daihachi Yoshida’s Funuke : Show Some Love, You Losers!.

They also have my review of Compton Bennett’s The Seventh Veil.

Funuke is by no means a perfect film but it does shed quite an interesting cultural light on one of my favourite social dichotomies.  A dichotomy I have also been discussing over at THE DRIFT.

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