These posts were part of a semi-regular blog I kept at MySpace (remember that?) way back in the early 2000s. They represent a time when it was more accepted to "think aloud" in public. Now some of the opinions here might be deemed controversial. But...publish and be damned, I say. I don't agree with this retrospective tidying up and spring cleaning of past culture; it's a form of censorship, both personal and social. While I now disagree with some of the ideas expressed below - indeed find a few very embarrassing - they survive unedited.
Two things have been bothering me lately. Firstly, I’ve noticed a growing aversion in me towards classic Hollywood cinema. How can this be? Surely this period is the bedrock of all nascent cinephilia? Let me put it this way – to me, Hollywood cinema is like a family photo, a group portrait in a fetching frame. It’s taken professionally, nicely presented and it’s something you want in your living room even if you don’t look at it very much. Whereas European/Asian/World art cinema is like a photograph developing in the dark room. You’re allowed to see the process of creation in action, the photograph thrillingly forming in front of your eyes. And then it’s plucked from the chemicals, still dripping and as new, a raw image unbounded by a frame (a happy ending, a sense of resolution) and one seemingly plucked from time rather than carefully set up for the viewer’s eye. And so it is that in a weekend of watching The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra), Waiting For Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako) and Five (Abbas Kiarostami), it was the latter two that really impressed me, despite the fact that the first was the most complex and subtle in both its mise-en-scene and narrative structure.
The second thing that’s been nagging me is a fellow aversion to that other untouchable of world cinephilia, the Nouvelle Vague. So, in an attempt to explain it, here’s another daft metaphor for you. Imagine a Thomas Mann-like gathering of philosophers and scholars in a beautiful, secluded Swiss chateau. Their day is spent in discussion of the human condition and the future for mankind, and everything falls under their scrutiny – God, love, politics, art, the family, the fall-out from the Second World War and the shitstorm of early 20th century politics (Marxism’s perversion into Stalinist Communism, nationalism’s perversion into Fascism, etc.) Think of it as a project undertaken by equals – somewhat elitist, perhaps, but a benevolent elite. And then, one evening, some young gatecrashers burst in and stage a party. Old etiquette is brushed away and youth holds sway, with its burning desire for sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, radical posturing, revolution, the whole damn thing.
A breath of fresh air, no doubt, but something precious has been lost…
You see, the ‘60s is characterised as an explosion of creativity, but might it not also be seen as a rupture? Ask anyone to draw up a list of the best films of the ‘60s and it’s likely they’ll immediately look to the work of Godard, Truffaut et al as their starting point. But this is because they are definitive of the era – they sum up the zeitgeist. But if we were to take quality of vision as our only criteria, then a different canon emerges. For, ironically, it was those grand auteurs who had inspired the Nouvelle Vague, and who were still rumbling on like dinosaurs into this brave new world, who gave it its most formidable works of art. I’m thinking of Hitchcock with The Birds, Ozu with An Autumn Afternoon, Dreyer with Gertrud, Bunuel with Viridiana, the two Italian creators of modern cinema, Rossellini and Antonioni, with films like The Rise To Power of Louis XIV and L’Eclisse, and Bergman who, in Persona, engaged with the freedoms of the New Wave only to use them all up in just one movie before moving on to something else.
It was Bergman himself who dismissed Godard as “trivial”. A tough judgment perhaps, but not without merit. For, compared to the sobriety and profound emotional range of the movies mentioned above, doesn’t A Bout de Souffle strike one as the work of a restless flibbertigibbet, a youngster chronically unable to settle on one area of human experience and fully engage with it before jumping over to the next? As Raymond Durgnat put it, Godard was “unable to sustain an intellectual hard-on long enough to probe for any lasting emotional warmth.” (God love Raymond Durgnat!)
For me, the filmmakers of the ‘50s were active in the last great humanist period of art – negotiating with the literal and metaphorical destructiveness of the century – while, at the same time, acting as a continuity for European and Asian art, developing and redeveloping Modernist and Neo-Realist aesthetics. The Nouvelle Vague shattered that train of thought. They ushered in the new gene of “cinephilia”, in which filmmakers were more commonly reacting to other films than to life experience (Godard’s films are works of criticism, for example). Critics who despise Spielberg and Lucas and blame them for the collapse of cinema should accept that they were only carrying forward a seed laid by their French counterparts. And with youthful enthusiasm comes youthful ideology – politics becomes cruder and more radicalised, love more fleeting and sexually oriented, soundbites, gestures and “pop” philosophy replacing reason and reflection.
So call me square, man, an old fuddy-duddy, but am I wrong? Don’t misunderstand me – I’m delighted this era brought in the sexual revolution, the fight for civil rights, the emancipation of women and the legalisation of homosexuality. But ’68 and other egregious myths have had devastating long-term effects, not least in the sphere of art – the reduction of art to social barometer in academia, political correctness, knee-jerk responses to ideas of patriotism and tradition and, worst of all, the increasing implosion of art, a turning-inward to more individualist, fragmented forms that only have meaning to the artists themselves and their sycophantic clique of admirers.
But hope is at hand. A new generation of world auteurs is finally picking up the baton of ‘50s humanism and demonstrating that it was Antonioni, Rossellini and Ozu who laid the groundwork for future cinema and that the Nouvelle Vague was, if anything, a blip, a curiosity, a sideshow. Critics of the older generation who were young at the time will tell you that’s heresy but, if I may paraphrase one of their idols, that’s increasingly coming to sound like a “criticism du Papa”. So let’s hear it for Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Dardenne brothers, and all those others who are reanimating the art of cinema and building a bridge for us back to the lost joys of the 1950s. The ‘60s are so yesterday, man.
Well, I’ve left the blog gathering dust for some time now but regular readers – that’s you, Auntie Hilda! – shouldn’t worry. Well, not too much. The truth is, I lost heart a couple of months back when I slaved over a long and quite brilliant entry on why Woody Allen could be seen as a more interesting filmmaker than John Cassavetes (oh, it was my iconoclastic magnum opus) only to hit the Post key and see the computer crash! Attempts to alert the mostly non-existent help team on MySpace came to no avail. My work was gone, never to be recovered. I couldn’t face writing it all again and the blog lost its allure. Then it was off on my big Trans-Siberian Express adventure – schlepping through Westernised, smog-ridden Beijing (God, how that place has changed since ’92), revelling in the barren wastes of Mongolia and our lovely, snug Ger tent, and then shivering through the snowbound streets of Moscow. And no movies, not one (well, OK, I did watch Ronin on the plane going over, and a very silly film it was, too. Qatar Airways are great, though – there was a choice of nearly 30 movies! Sadly, no Hou H’siao-H’sien.)
Oh, and that reminds me, there was the London Film Festival. Where Hou’s film, Flight of the Red Balloon – totally ignored by the London critics - was the best thing on offer. Simple, direct, tender and beautiful. They were probably too busy watching that bloody Brad Pitt western with him mooning about in corn fields. Shite. There was also Wu Yong, Jia Zhangke’s beautiful documentary about a Chinese fashion designer, also ignored by practically everybody. And the reissue of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep which – deep breath – is the first African-American film I can honestly say I’ve really warmed to. Spike Lee and John Singleton et al always felt too bombastic to me. Burnett’s film is just as culturally specific while, at the same time, being a film that could relate to anyone (black, white, Asian) who’s suffered in similar social/domestic circumstances. To celebrate it as a great “black” film is actually to limit it – it’s a great film full stop. Disappointments included Beat Takeshi’s new film – a hideous display of self-loathing crossed with Felliniesque self-indulgence – and the new print of Joseph Losey’s Eve, a film which I’ve been chasing for years, but which turned out to be brittle and awkward, without any of the director’s saving graces. For me, his trilogy with Harold Pinter – full of subtle revelations about class and sex with cut-glass editing and jagged set pieces – remains his best work.
Then there was the Final Cut of Blade Runner. I’m glad I went to see it on the big screen and didn’t wait for the DVD. There were so many things I could see that, even on a proper aspect-ratioed disc, just don’t make their presence felt. It was a strange experience, actually. I’ve seen the film so many times, but not in recent years, that I didn’t feel the need to get absorbed in it – I was just watching it from a distance, making note of the changes and the way the film has affected me differently through the years.
When I first saw it, I was just bowled over by its physical brilliance – the beautiful realisation of a future world, its sights and sounds, the gorgeous soundtrack complemented by Vangelis’s superb score. It was the first movie that made me realise that a film is not contained in just the story or the characters, but in the way they’re brought to the screen, that the totality of the film is the thing. I suppose, then, you could say it was the movie that made me definitively fall in love with cinema. And I watched it so many times, I could not only recite all the dialogue, but actually remember the whole soundscape of the film – where music cues came in, the timbre of each actor’s voice when they said particular lines, how sound effects interacted with the score. I became absorbed in its world. (And what a world! Looked at this time round, it’s striking how much Ridley Scott’s version of a future LA – based on his fascination with Japanese and Asian cities – looks like a nightmare vision of multiculturalism gone mad – the kind the Daily Mail frets over. Different faiths and different races bump up against each other in the overcrowded streets, a Babel of languages clashing with electronic sirens and police warnings, different styles of clothes and architecture clashing with no sense of cohesion, no sense of a centre. While most future dystopias in art look quaintly old-fashioned - more a record of the times in which they were made than a future projection - Blade Runner has not only aged well, it may have become even more prescient. Though I will admit that the metro in Moscow does resemble Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to an alarming degree at rush hour.)
Second time round, I became fascinated by Blade Runner’s sci-fi conceits – What is it to be human? Is Deckard a replicant? – you know, the kind of questions that are blathered on about at length in many an undergraduate’s Film Studies thesis. Then, on further viewings, I fell in love with it as a noir romance, a dark melodrama about lonely people in a lonely city just trying to make a connection. (I think I’d just moved to London at the time and felt like JF Sebastian.) Blade Runner does have noir traits, but they run deeper than the much-remarked-upon visual style and the cod voiceover in the studio cut. The movie harks back to the more emotionally fraught films of the noir cycle – Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment or Ray’s In A Lonely Place – where the possibility of love dangles tenuously while murder and the forces of authority close in all around. When Deckard goes back for Rachel, gun held ready, the fine line between rescuing her and retiring her makes the new abrupt ending – his snap decision to live and let live - even more poignant than the relaxed journey into sunshine in the studio cut.
But further viewings reveal yet more depths to the picture – always the best sign of a masterpiece. There’s the obsession with “seeing”, the main theme that runs through the film. Consider…
The film opens with an eye looking over the city – the film as a “vision”
The eye belongs to a blade runner who will now perform a test on a replicant which involves studying their eye – the window to the soul is the thing that gives them away. All the replicant actors are lit throughout so their eyes glow eerily.
The replicants are “perfect” simulacra of human beings, they look the “image” of man as God made man in his own image.
To find his quarry, Deckard examines a photograph, and in that classic sequence, goes “into” that photograph, going into that image, enlarging it, walking around inside it as we can do in the world of a film. (Is it me, or in the new cut, does the photo of Rachel’s mother start to move – another image that can become three-dimensional? And look how memories are merely images, photos, visions.)
The replicants find their way to Tyrell through the man who makes eyes – “Chu, if you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.” A brilliant line.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…” Images we haven’t seen or shared. “Like tears in rain…” An image that fools or can’t easily be read.
What is seeing anyway? Are dreams and memories seeing? How does Deckard – and the audience – “see” the unicorn? Are we privileged and allowed to see into his own head? Or is it a vision that we and him share – like cinema, a shared dream? How does Gaff see it so he can craft the origami unicorn?
In the new cut, Scott puts in a bit more gore when Batty crushes Tyrell’s head to make the point that he’s really trying to push Tyrell’s eyes out, as Leon tried to do to Deckard… That, therefore, is signified as death – not seeing. And Tyrell wears glasses.
Both Leon and Batty play with eyes – Leon with Chu’s artificial creations, Batty with some glass eyes in Sebastian’s house – they need new life, they need to see through new eyes…
Right, enough of that. But then, this time around, I enjoyed it on still more levels. Blade Runner is also an extraordinary erotic fantasy. Bear with me here. All three women are artificial, perfect representations of femininity made for pleasure. Look at the way Scott photographs these actresses – how the camera enjoys watching Sean Young and Darryl Hannah walk. And aren’t they three perfect male fantasies? Zhora – the savage, the snake lady, dancing naked with a serpent – primal, unashamed, exciting. Pris – the punk chick with laddered stockings and peroxide hair but with a little-girl-lost voice. And Rachel – the prim, proper, perfectly-lipsticked 1930s secretary with her clipped walk and fine line in fur coats, just ready to turn into a sex bomb when the glasses come off and the hair tumbles down. And notice how, in each of their first scenes, they’re met by men in “useless, unworthy git” mode. Deckard is rude and charmless in his interview with Rachel, then oily and seedy, pretending to be an actor’s agent with Zhora, trying to “get a glimpse of a beautiful body”, and then JF Sebastian is the ultimate lonely geek, body conscious and shy before Pris’s beauty. At first, Deckard can’t relate to anyone and even guns down Zhora in the street. Then Pris gets the ultimate feminist revenge and smashes him between her thighs before he finally sees sense and realises loving Rachel might be the best idea for his future. Hey, it works for me.
And maybe it’s because I’ve turned 35 and am getting middle-aged, but I never appreciated before how much the shadow of death falls across the whole film. I’ve always loved the intimations of mortality in this picture – the streak of blood in the glass of water, Deckard’s teeth cracking after he’s been hit, his belly hanging over the sink – those little suggestions of the frailties of the human body. And I’m a little sad that Scott has redubbed Batty’s line “I want more life, fucker!” to the more thematically correct “Father” because I felt that ferocity, that desperate, angry need for more life was so beautifully expressed in that one, lone swear word in the entire film. (We know he’s the Father, anyway – you don’t have to hammer home the point.) But this time round, I saw the sadness in the final duel between Batty and Deckard, which I’d always enjoyed as the “fun”, action part of the film, but which I now realise is Batty’s last chance to enjoy life. And he does so by pushing this “man”, this human, to save his own. He’s watching and loving every little thing that human will do to stay alive – climbing the outside of buildings, jumping chasms, clinging onto a girder with no hope of ascent – all the basic elements of survival. “Quite a thing to live in fear, isn’t it?” Finally, a human has understood his own replicant life – he’s had his revenge. Now he can do the ultimate – save a life, the thing he’s been trying to do all along. That’s why the dratted voiceover in the first cut was so, so wrong – it drowned out a whole complex of feelings at this point with just one reading. But now it’s free.
Right, it’s 1:30 in the morning and it’s time for bed. Who knows? Perhaps you’ll share my dreams…
Here's the orthodox version - that in 1972, a street-smart, bums-on-seats Hollywood director made one of the best horror films of all time, The Exorcist. It scared audiences witless and went on to be nominated for an Oscar. A few years later, a poncey, pretentious British director called John Boorman got his hands on the franchise and produced a stinker - a genuine commercial flop plagued by a confusing plot, intransigent performances from its players, particularly a very wooden Richard Burton, and a complete absence of terror.
Here's the heretical version - that in 1977, the year Star Wars came into the world, a struggling director somehow contrived to make one of the most ambitious religious films ever to appear under a mainstream banner. Sure, it's riddled with flaws - the cast, for one thing. All the main actors, not just Burton, feel like they've been bussed in from another movie, a kind of 1970s version of Bigger Than Life. And it does take a massive suspension of disbelief to stomach the central plot device - a mechanism called the Synchroniser which manages to simultaneously hypnotise two subjects and therefore allow them to share each other's memories and thoughts. Complete scientific twaddle...
..but, oh, such a marvellous metaphor. Firstly, for the shared telepathic gestalt that the movie speculates humanity is moving towards, and secondly, for cinema itself. The device flashes light into the subject's eyes, just as the filmgoer is spellbound by a projection. The subject stares at the "screen", his partner, and the screen stares back, and slowly an image starts to form, and he finds himself sharing in a dream. Through this mechanism, Boorman can not only translate us back into the original film - we see the scene where the possessed girl kills Father Merrin - but also teach us how to "see" within the film. So that a shot to a locust in the air suddenly becomes the locust's point of view and we're flying through the air over wild landscapes and ancient cities.
Throughout the movie, the action shifts between Africa and America, and Boorman made the ingenious decision of filming all the African scenes in studio. This way, they take on a hallucinatory quality perfectly in keeping with the idea of a shared dream. The scenes with Burton scaling a cliff to the ancient Coptic churches of Ethiopia is particularly striking.
And Boorman pursues his metaphors right through to the end. As Burton and the girl wander off into the sunrise (as a couple? the perfect, if blasphemous, representation of the union between priest and God represented as that between a father and daughter?) Boorman tips an unnerving, but rather clever, wink at his audience, as Louise Fletcher's character, watching them go, starts to pulsate with the light of the Synchroniser. And so we, and her, feel "in on the joke" - the new enlightenment felt by Burton and the girl, the dawn of a new spiritualism.
Enlightenment? Spiritualism? Yes, that's right, this is a genuinely religious film. Or at least, it's a film that believes in the fight between Good and Evil. The irony here is that the first Exorcist film is made by a director that I think didn't believe in anything - merely the cynical pursuit of scaring his audience witless. That he does consummately is true, but there's very little else. It's a terribly crude film. And it could have been so much more - an exploration of the loss of faith in a time of spiritual stagnancy and apathy coming face to face with what seems to be the evidence of great Evil. That "seems" is important - if the audience had been left in the dark as to whether Regan was possessed or not, the film could have spun out an intriguing and very disturbing question - how much horror and psychological malaise has to be seen before you will believe in Evil? In other words, the audience would be forced to take a stand. But, as it is, Friedkin makes no bones about it - she levitates, twists her head round, walks down the stairs in a funny way - yep, she's possessed. Cue lots of shocks - and no brains.
It's worth remembering that many of the original cast of The Exorcist did not want to take part in the sequel because of their grievous reservations about this first film. Max Von Sydow felt it was really about the torture of a young child to be enjoyed by audiences disturbed by the energy of youth. Boorman, in his turn, reacted by making the very best kind of sequel - one that shifts the franchise into a whole new type of movie. Just as James Cameron realised he couldn't top Alien so instead decided to make an action movie, so Boorman takes one look at The Exorcist, decides it's pointless trying to make another scary movie which he doesn't much like anyway, and pours his energies into making an epic about the battle of Good and Evil.
In other words, he moves from a cynical late 20th century exercise in mass entertainment to what can only be described as a late 19th century Christian allegory. You see, Boorman is a man out of his time. Friedkin's film was successful because it corresponded to the norms of modern entertainment; although it deals with Satan and the Church, it is no way a religious film, merely using those concepts as pegs on which to hang a story. Boorman's mistake was thinking that the people who were touched by it would respond to a film genuinely interested in faith. He reminds me of the 19th century Spiritualists - naive and strangely innocent intellectuals turning to table-tapping and seances for a new kind of enlightenment. "Innocent" is the key word here - their pursuit was totally without cynicism or self-conscious posturing. And Boorman is their modern equivalent, that most sneered-at of social caricatures, the New Ager, the hippy who believes in light and energy. But why not? Isn't it sad that an audience who had thrilled to the horrors apparent within their orthodox faith - possession, Satanism - so utterly rejected a more positive allegory of its message? They thrilled at darkness and despair, but rejected innocence - and as Rossellini's brilliant film Francis God's Jester shows us, it is in innocence that lies the seeds of true faith.
Perhaps therin lies the secret of the rise of religious fundamentalism. We live in an age where beliefs are represented as crude antagonisms, rather than optimistic cosmologies. Compare two American artists - Edgar Allan Poe and William Friedkin. The former scared the pants off his readers, too, with weirdly disturbing short stories, but delve further into his bibliography and you'll find strange essays on the makeup of the universe (Eureka) and rather arcane dialogues, or colloquys, between spiritual beings about the nature of the cosmos. His horrors had a basis in a genuine faith that was trying to understand the universe around it, and through contemplation and discussion. Such argument has been cut off in the post-War period due to a collapse in faith and a retreat into simpler doctrines.
And it's not just spiritual groups whose ideas are found wanting, it's film critics, too. Because the response to Boorman's film exposes a crucial failure in their imagination. Like their religious counterparts, they have retreated into a simplistic orthodoxy, one called realism. More than ever, I feel critics are rejecting the allegorical or the analogy in favour of the "here and now", the immediately observable world around us - they've become incredibly literal-minded. Filmmakers wanting to work in a different register are regarded with suspicion. Only now is Cronenberg, for example, being welcomed as a "mature" artist, because he's dropped all the gore and gruesome body parts for more psychological thrillers. But what these critics don't seem to appreciate is that all that body horror was an ingenious metaphor and tool of analogy to consider ideas beyond social realism or political polemic. Zack Snyder's 300 is an interesting test case here - utterly dismissed, of course, for its admittedly juvenile comment on modern political reality, it was also laughed at for its artificiality and CGI dioramas. (As if realism was suddenly a pre-requisite of the sword and sandals epic!) The filmmakers were implicitly being criticised for not realising a genre on accepted terms. But what if they were trying to realise it in another register? To move into the realms of the Grand Pantomime, using CGI backgrounds for consciously theatrical effect, in order to more successfully convey the style of an epic poem? Indeed, to move the work into the more overaching paradigm of myth (and therefore negating pedestrian connections between the ancient world and the new)? The allegorical is rejected because films - especially mainstream films - are expected to function on a literal level.
Which brings us back to Boorman. What was he thinking? If you stick a 2 on the end of a film's title, it means something - "more of the same". Certainly not innovation. It means staying in a rut, a pre-established set of conventions, an already observable truth. Like the "real" world around us. Not...in any way, shape or form...does it mean transcendence.
Only a few days after completing the 100 best list found in my last post, I finally got around to seeing Bela Tarr’s mammoth 7-hour opus, Satantango. I now feel its absence from that list very keenly. I’d not much liked what I’d seen of his work up to that point, but Satantango was a revelation. And I think my appreciation of it has gone some way to confirming what I’ve always secretly felt – that film does need narrative and that non-narrative cinema is a dead end or, at worst, an affectation.
Not that Satantango could ever be called a “plot-based” film or that its pleasure derives from twists and turns. Far from it – the majority of its running time is taken up with exhaustingly long sustained takes of people tramping through the rain or negotiating the grubby interiors of a delapidated village. To simply look and listen is the essence of the experience, as it was with Tarkovsky. But Tarkovsky anchored his mystical contemplations in simple but very strong narrative ideas – ie. a planet that can reproduce our dreams, a zone where our wishes can come true, a deal with God to prevent war. With these concepts as a basis, the filmmaker is free to explore their ramifications to the point of audiovisual euphoria while, at the same time, having a framework by which the viewer can guide themselves and the filmmaker can discipline their experimentation.
Non-narrative, avant garde, experimental cinema, whatever the bloody hell you want to call it, shuns discipline or does the exact opposite – imposes a discipline or plan arbitrarily onto the material, as in having ten shots of a landscape on screen for exactly ten minutes each, etc etc. But why? It’s a reasonable question. It’s human to need reasons, to look for a system of cause and effect. By denying such a system, or consciously declaring that one should not exist, the filmmaker is consciously pushing their film into abstraction and deliberately away from a direct representation of reality. As such, what does it mean? What’s its significance to anybody? It becomes a game of forms and technique, perhaps only wholly meaningful to its creator and to their sense of themselves as an “artist”.
Take that label “experimental cinema”. God, that annoys me. As if Dreyer, Rossellini, Ozu, Hou H’siao-Hsien, and Kiarostami aren’t experimental! What about Hitchcock and Kubrick, bending the conventions of the mainstream to breaking point – are they not “experimental filmmakers” simply because they operate within commercial cinema? Face it – all filmmakers are “experimental”, from Spielberg to Tim Burton, from Ken Loach to Pedro Almodovar. Each time, any director tries to work out how to get what’s in their head onto celluloid (or digital), they’re experimenting. Take CGI – that is experimenting with a whole new way of seeing, a whole new way of negotiating the film image. But because it takes place in Hollywood blockbusters, it’s dismissed as superficial twaddle. You can’t help wondering what would have happened in the critical community if someone like Stan Brakhage had been the first to explore its possibilities…
I just can’t help feeling that “experimental cinema” is an mantle assumed by the filmmakers themselves. And why? Not just to differentiate themselves from narrative cinema but actually to surreptitiously suggest a position of superiority, a place of ambitious investigation that is not reliant on box office receipts. But who deserves our respect here? A hard-working artist/manager who knows that he has to create some kind of audience for his work in a theatre (the same is as true for art-house auteurs as it is for Hollywood hacks), and so works through craft, technique and vision to marry his ideas with a sustaining narrative? Or a gallery “artist” who doesn’t have to sustain his audience’s interest and keep them captive in a movie theatre, who can reject any governing disciplines, who enjoys the freedom to simply do anything and still call it a “work of art”? Who deserves awed whispers – Hitchcock, the consummate professional churning out thrillers, who smuggled his own obsessions into classic suspense material? Or the “artist” who thinks what a jolly idea it would be to slow it down to 24 hours and project onto a huge screen in a gallery? I’m painfully aware that such discussion marks me out as a philistine in the eyes of many modern art critics, but given the mealy-mouthed inanity of most art (and film) criticism these days, it may be time for the definitions of art and philistinism to be transposed.
Anyway, getting back to Satantango, what worked for me in this film, as opposed to his other efforts, was precisely the relationship the form of the film had to its story. In Damnation, Tarr had taken a basic film noir plot and stretched it out to the point of absurdity, so the complexity of emotions you’d normally expect actually became somewhat simplified by the “art-house” treatment (a case where a thorough, even over-determined, narrative works better?) Whereas in Werckmeister Harmonies, the reverse happened, and the narrative was so abstract that its succession of set-piece scenes were too obviously metaphorical in intent and the whole was wearisomely pretentious. But in Satantango, the story is an interesting one, populated by grotesque but fascinating, well-drawn characters. And the full picture of what is going on is only released gradually to the audience. Indeed, each of the 12 chapters of the film is moulded around a new perspective on the characters and their actions (the film flits backwards and forwards in time, mirroring the titular dance). Therefore, the film sustains an enigma which draws the viewer forward through its occasionally oblique passages (you could even call it suspense) and the shape of the narrative justifies the extreme formal experimentation as it is tied to the viewer’s growing sense of the story. The only other film it’s comparable to, in this sense, is Jacques Rivette’s Out 1.
OK, it's a day late, but after watching More4's excellent documentary Looking For England last night, I was inspired to write a comment on the movies and moviemakers that have come out of dear old England.
This doc took a series of talking heads - ordinary people across the country - and asked them what Englishness meant to them without the intrusion of a partisan voiceover or patronising bias in the editing. The result was a considered analysis of a country caught between holding onto a sense of its traditional past and evolving a multicultural present. No one view was privileged but a clear pattern emerged of a schism between rural, monocultural life and an urban life of diversity. Clearly, these two cultures are not speaking to each other, but what was even more saddening was the apparent lack of communication between groups within the city themselves. As one London woman of Jamaican ancestry put it, these groups used to integrate and rub along together, despite the occasional friction, whereas now they seem to crave isolation from each other. It was a grim portrait of an increasingly less green and pleasant land.
And British movies don't help. They're hardly a great credit to our country, neither artistically ambitious nor financially successful at the moment. And what movies do try to interface with contemporary culture and analyse what's going on, do so with such loaded arguments that they're virtually worthless. See Ken Loach and Mike Leigh's "entertainments" for the Labour Working Men's Club on a Monday night. Preaching to the converted at its most wincingly obvious.
You could write a book on what's wrong with British film but here are a few points to start with:
Francois Truffaut famously said there was a certain "incompatibility" between Britain and cinema, something that has hung heavy over a film industry with an inferiority complex. (Anyway, Truffaut was just sore that he couldn't get Fahrenheit 451 to work.) More to the point, though, is Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal's idea that we have "fantastic resources but a total lack of spontaneity of form."
Problems:
UK film is script (theatre/narrative) led, not director or "total" vision led. The tradition of "well-made" film still holds, script and actors being the dominant factors.
There's a lack of faith in cinema as art, so dominance of models from other mediums.
The Hollywood-style emphasis on entertainment and popular art is much less suspicious to the Brits who favour the idea of a more practical, more social creation as opposed to an arty, individualist one. In Britain, the idea of a less personal, more collective emphasis on filmmaking is apparent - it suits our temperament and ideology.*
One of the great myths of cinema exploded - we are the studio filmmakers, not the Americans (who are more individual), with all the lack of original thinking and cynicism that implies. Producers are generally timid. On the other hand, the BBC is the one, true British studio – the true genius of British visual art lies in TV. But our insistence on studio-style cinema puts us in direct conflict with the US where the competition destroys or absorbs us.
Effort is put into script and project development, not directors and artists. Terence Davies flounders without work because his ideas aren't deemed filmable or profitable.
We're caught between two stools – do we emulate the Americans with their similar language market and make populist successes, or the Europeans with art-house fare? Perhaps our sensibility is like neither...
There's a traditional distaste amongst English intellectuals for home country and culture, so they lean towards modern, progressive America or the high-art spectrum of Europe. This "love affair" can often be superficial and not take the form of a profound attachment to foreign culture, simply an escape. There's a consequent lack of discovery of who we are, a furious scorn of patriotism, a promotion of self-hatred and denial of a continuous, common culture. So a bastardised PC cinema spreads. However, we crave and need outside admiration to make us acknowledge our successes (which goes hand in our hand with our resentment of outsiders covering our "territory" and producing studies of work we consider only intelligible to ourselves).
Brits look up to Social Realism and gritty, Left, working-class drama. Thanks to the massive influence of the documentary movement - our key tradition - it's seen as worthy. But our fortes, our personality as a nation, are fantasy and comedy (Hammer Horror and Carry On areour two popular successes because horror and comedy are mirror images of each other). We are the jesters and dreamers of Europe, the Fool to France's King Lear, the fat kid at the back of the class who baits the good-looking, clever France sitting at the front. We're not the civilised coves of Europe that we like to think we are - actually, we're the savages who cut to the quick. Terence Davies has interesting things to say on sentimentality, too – we are wary of it because we are a sentimental nation, unlike the Americans who are tough so welcome it. All in all, we don't seem to know ourselves. The image we want to project or deem worthy of attention is not the true one.
Are we also essentially conservative as opposed to radical/socialist (in our aesthetic as opposed to political tastes)? After all, we still sustain a powerful monarchy, there's a preponderance of "classy" drama and role models in TV and narrative fiction – this conflicts with the essentially Leftist tastes of critics. (Think of the enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes, Morse, Poirot - there's a taste for refinement and intellectual isolation that belies the inverted snobbery so coveted by most newspaper critics.)
Many Brits desire to get out of England as soon as possible. Our wanderlust – and need for financial support – sees art in other horizons. Hollywood acts as a 'brain drain'.
The English landscape – it's beautiful but cosy, undramatic, the cityscapes are all uniform and dull. Truffaut thought this. And aren't the English voice and our manner of speaking and expressing ourselves also anti-dramatic? What of changing faces? Are they losing their character? Can the faces in Peter Watkins' Culloden appear again in an age of plastic surgery and constant media awareness?
The idea of a sustained tradition or school of art is a concept alien to almost all mediums in England and to the links between them. There's little continuity of ideas or culture, so artists are left like fragments in a vacuum, with occasional sparks of brilliance but no sustaining ideologies. Perhaps the weakness of religion and overarching social philosophies is to blame – art needs the supporting pillars of a strong culture or intellectual ferment.
We have a weakness for black-and-white interpretations of society, class and politics, for schematic structures. The humanist view of Renoir seldom manifests itself (could Britain produce a Renoir?). We have a tendency towards didacticism, possibly shaped by the documentary tradition with its political arguments. (Is British thought itself divisive – North and South, working-class, upper-class, etc?) The defining characteristic of UK film is its schizophrenia or schematism (grittily real/outrageously baroque fantasy, Left/Right, violent/civilised), so much so that no one director seems able to straddle all these schools of ideas. Ken Russell, for example, is not un-English, as admirers often claim; indeed, he could only have emerged in English cinema, his overly gaudy excess a traditional response to staid realism. The British "indie", meanwhile, either cleaves towards the baroque or its polar opposite - squalid realism - in retaliation against mainstream Hollywood, but both represent extreme strategies.
Finally, the content and "importance" of material (either social or political) is stressed before style and form - so Ken Loach can chide critics for disliking The Wind That Shakes The Barley because it must demonstrate their political bias, ignoring the fact that they may not like it because it's cinematically dull. Furthermore, we set tough social and political criteria for our own film (ie. reality can only mean working-class misery) but not for those of other cultures (when was the last time you heard an American or French film referred to as middle-class or working-class?)
But enough moaning - that's another problem with British film, too much carping. Like that hilarious article by Nick James in Sight and Sound where he set out to herald a new Renaissance in British film, then started dithering, and finally ended up admitting that, yes, most of it was pretty crap after all. It's St George's Day and we're here to celebrate. So here's a list of the British directors who ARE worth seeking out, led by the trio who genuinely belong in the very top class of international film-makers.
1. Alfred Hitchcock - Had a full 13 years in Blighty before leaving for the States, and his approach to narrative was fully honed by then. The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes are full of wit and invention and stand as blueprints for the increasingly complex tales Hitch will develop later.
2. Michael Powell (with and without Emeric Pressburger) - Only Raymond Durgnat and Ian Christie have properly recognised Powell as one of the very best. A far more interesting film-maker than, say, Howard Hawks, but lagging behind due to the poor visibility of UK film abroad and particularly amongst French critics whose tastes cleave more towards the US anyway and who largely rejected British film during the Gaullist period. However, as a fantasist and as a "complete" filmmaker, in the sense of yoking all the arts together in the service of one medium, he has few peers. And the string of consistent successes he and partner Pressburger enjoyed between 49th Parallel in 1941 and Gone To Earth in 1950 has seldom been equalled.
3. Humphrey Jennings - The greatest - and most humanist - propagandist to come out of cinema. It's somewhat alarming to think that, at the end of the 20th century, the propagandists of two of the most extreme and dangerous regimes in history - the Soviet Communists and the Nazis (Leni Riefenstahl) - were more celebrated than the gentler, more thoughtful, and more subtly ingenious Jennings. Is British patriotism so ugly?
These are the best, but here are some personal heroes:
John Boorman - Uneven, but when he's good, he creates worlds of wonder, replete with images that sear the brain. His best work was done in the States with Point Blank and Deliverance, but a happy few of us love Excalibur and Hope and Glory.
Peter Watkins - Savage, uncompromising documentarist who ripped through the medium in the '60s with Culloden and The War Game and then left in disgust. His biopic of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch is a marvel.
Alan Clarke - The "gritty realism" director who is the exception that proves the rule. Unlike Loach and Leigh, he doesn't preach to the converted but puts them as much on the back foot as his intended targets. No-one's safe as he hunkers down into the world of thugs and racists to understand their anger and the pathetic welfare state that can neither comprehend nor contain it. Elephant, his 40-minute stream of murders turned into abstract poetry, is the most formally radical film ever made for mass consumption in England.
Joseph Losey - An American who came to Britain on the run from HUAC and the Un-American Committee's Communist witchhunts in the '50s. But he counts as an honorary Brit because of his trilogy of films with Harold Pinter as scriptwriter (The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between). Together, they dissect the British class system with an almost forensic precision and disarming ease.
Michael Reeves - Died at the young age of 26 in unusual circumstances, but still managed to craft two of the most adventurous and keenly intelligent horror films to come out of this country - The Sorcerers (Peeping Tom's bastard cousin) and Witchfinder General.
Terence Davies - Currently enjoying a much-deserved retrospective at the NFT, this quiet, sometimes diffident film-maker has produced some of the most serene and beautifully composed odes to British life found in any medium in the last 30 years, but all are shot through with a powerful underscore of anger and regret. But no-one will give him any backing. Given that kind of industry, is it any wonder there are no more than this handful of heroes to celebrate?
* Think of sport as an analogy. Sport is indicative of our national consciousness – why it’s a much more successful export. It’s social, collaborative and it gets results – a cup, medal, top of the leaderboard. Hence British journalists’ idea of Cannes as the Olympics, etc. Also, think of the way the War became the ultimate sport or soccer game, hence our time of greatest creative achievement. It’s also why Cahiers’ insistence on ‘personal’ vision was a death knell to British cinema – they enjoyed the team spirit of the studio.