Vision On!

Check out the first video on my new YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbUg7uIPvl0&t=78s

Originality, Where Art Thou?

Imagine you owned a time machine and were able to whisk someone from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. How would they cope with the quantum leap forward taken by popular music during that 20-year period? Having just got to grips with rock'n'roll, what would they make of The Beatles and The Stones, the advances in production and layered sound, the experimentalism of the Beach Boys and Pink Floyd, the idiosyncratic styling of Bowie and Kate Bush, the emerging electronica of Kraftwerk, the social and formal chaos of punk? It would be like entering a different century, where the roots of this new music would seem barely discernible, even though they were part of the time traveller's own recent past.

Now imagine you tried a similar experiment with someone from the late 80s and brought them forward to the present day. They would endure nowhere near the same culture shock. True, the cultural references and fashions would be different, but the underlying forms would be roughly the same. After all, rap and R&B would still be dominant influences, perhaps more evolved for musicologists, but for the average layman, ostensibly unchanged. The pre-packaged commercial pop of Stock, Aitken and Waterman would have easily perceived equivalents. And this over a 30-year period...

Is culture slowing down? Is it stagnating? I'd been having such thoughts for some time, but they only cohered when I read the work of Leftist blogger and philosopher, Mark Fisher, also known as K-Punk. He also identified this apparent malaise, not just in music, but across all art forms, in his book Capitalist Realism, and came up with an intriguing diagnosis. His contention was that, with the falling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, capitalism had no direct antagonist; it had in effect "won", as per Fukuyama's End of History. But that also meant it had nothing to define itself against, nothing to fight for. So it settled into an easy era of materialist consumerism, where art and entertainment became mere commodities, objects of commercial interest as opposed to urgent commentaries on, or investigations of, the status quo. The problem with this is, commercialism will always base itself on precedent; give the customer more of what they want, ie. what they have purchased before. Originality and experimentalism becomes discouraged; a previously subversive art form such as rap is adopted by the mainstream establishment, rebranded as popular entertainment, and then regurgitated for financial gain, its corrosive edge blunted, its evolution stymied.

At the same time, genuinely idiosyncratic or ground-breaking works become absorbed and effectively marginalised by being labelled as of niche or cult interest, oddball islands in the great ocean of content, removed from their previous ability to challenge or even transform culture. If Kate Bush appeared now, she would certainly win an audience, but it would be limited, and defined by its relation to other "content" (as we've seen with the success of Running Up That Hill, but only after its inclusion in Stranger Things). Whereas in 1978, Wuthering Heights exploded into the charts and reached number one, influencing a whole generation of young music-lovers, but also engraving itself into the psyche of the nation as a major cultural event. Capitalism's personalisation of cultural intake – offering us channels, websites, and social media tailored to our tastes and views – precludes any such phenomenon now taking place.

The same problems are visible in the world of film, and cinephiles have also identified money and greed as the source of all evil. But this started long before 1989. When Steven Spielberg hit pay dirt with Jaws and then his chum George Lucas won the box office lottery with Star Wars a couple of years later, intellectuals bewailed the new era of the blockbuster pushing aside the halcyon days of counter-culture art house in the 60s and 70s. I have always detected a tinge of snobbery and exaggerated outrage in this attitude; after all, it was only the re-assertion of a popular cinema that had gone through a fallow period but had now discovered how to connect with audiences again.

But the "eggheads" were right about one thing: Hollywood had changed, and not for the better. You see, back in the golden age, Tinseltown was effectively run by a small handful of moguls. They didn't just run the studios, but dictated their whole style and personality. Films, directors and stars were picked according to their boss's tastes and principles; hence, MGM's output was more wholesome and family-oriented, Paramount was more chic and sophisticated, Warner Brothers more hard-bitten and realistic. In this sense, there wasn't that much difference between the studio heads and their European counterparts, financing independent films by auteur directors; the sensibilities may have been worlds apart, but both groups consisted of individuals making choices based on their own aesthetic ideals. From the 80s onward, studios were run as part of huge multi-national conglomerates; the personal touch dwindled and box office receipts were king. More emphasis was placed on market research, feedback from previews, and demographics – the desperate attempts to capture that all-important 16-25 age group, for example.

This feeds into the cultural stagnation observed by Mark Fisher. But there's something else. Much is made in today's media of the idea of "culture wars" and the need for "diversity", shorthand for less white male heroes and more female or ethnic minority characters. But this is difficult to achieve when so many of the popular narratives that clog up our cinema screens are from material that is at least 40 years old, and therefore from an era when whiteness was the norm. Try if you can to think of any iconic characters, franchises or fantasies, that have captured the public's imagination, which have their roots after 1990. You can't count Lord of the Rings – published in the 1950s. Nor the Marvel and DC universes, almost all of whose characters were present and correct before the mid-70s. Harry Potter, Toy Story, maybe The Hunger Games, maybe... It's hard, isn't it? How can you effectively create the environment for diverse protagonists if you're following templates that are decades-old? The 60s and 70s saw an incredible amount of iconic heroes created from Spiderman to Judge Dredd. That torrent of originality has dwindled to a trickle. One friend of mine alleges that there are only so many stories to be told, so it was inevitable we would reach this brick wall eventually. But at the same time, we are told that seismic change is happening within our society and old complacencies are being shed. Surely this should be a spur for creativity, for new concepts and paradigms? And yet the opposite appears to be the case.

I don't pretend to have any answers to this conundrum, but just identifying its existence is at least a start. Are we doomed to just rinse-and-repeat the same old stories, over and over, running along in our cultural hamster wheel, in a perverse simulacrum of Nietzsche's eternal return? Will we ever see new forms? Will there ever be another great school of art that totally upends tradition? Perhaps it's not so much impossible, more that we're afraid of it. Change is unsettling, after all...

On Snobbery And Sniffiness

I don't like sport. I'm male, 50 years old, and English, and yet somehow I don't like sport. Now imagine if one day I walked up to Liverpool Football Club and shouted up to the fans in the Kop: "Hey, guys, could you please stop talking at such length about transfer markets and league statistics and players I've never heard of? It's making me feel a bit inferior and left out, almost as if you're deliberately doing it to establish an elitist sense of exclusivity. Also, I don't really believe you're enjoying what you're watching. I mean, 22 grown people kicking a ball about like little kids for NINETY long, fucking minutes! What could be more brain-rottingly mind-numbing than that? You're only being pretentious, saying you like it to be part of the in-crowd, and looking down your noses at us, who enjoy more obviously entertaining activities like reading and crosswords. Maybe you could change football to be more appealing to everyone else, you know, dilute it a little, make it more accessible and inclusive."

I think they'd be within their rights to say: fuck off.

But if I was sitting in a cinematheque, watching a film by Pedro Costa or Jean-Marie Straub or Bela Tarr, and someone came to the door and shouted the equivalent nonsense at me, the society in which we live would broadly agree with, if not encourage, their point of view. I would be a culture snob and the cinematheque a stuffy den of elitists that should dumb down and broaden out to accommodate others, you know, those who had previously never dreamed of setting foot inside a gallery, theatre or library. In fact, something like this scenario has actually happened to me. I was working in an office which was liberally populated with football fans, who chatted regularly about players moving from Sevilla or Fenerbahce to Crystal Palace, or other such fascinating phenomena. But then, when I was having a conversation with a cinephile chum about the latest BFI season or whatever, a man piped up from the end of the room: "Why can't you talk about films we've all heard of?"

Of course, in the UK, we know the reason for this bizarre imbalance: class. Up until the early 20^th century, art was the preserve of the educated and the wealthy, which roughly amounted to the same thing. The masses had their own entertainments – music-hall, magic lantern shows, folk songs – but society drew a line between this popular culture and more highbrow pursuits. Then the Great Levelling began, and ironically, it was cinema that was in the front line of the attack, the battering ram into the ivory towers. In the modern, post-Industrial Revolution world, a medium emerged which was cheap, accessible, and therefore mostly geared to working people and the lower middle-classes. Its heros were bums and strays like Chaplin's tramp, Laurel and Hardy, or working girls like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, ordinary Joes like Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. And importantly, it was dominated by America, the land of the free and the Common Man. So, a blue collar style and machismo started to invade the world of fashion and shake up traditional ideas of beauty and sexuality, just as jazz and the terse prose of Hemingway and Steinbeck became seized upon by rebellious intellectuals to upend the old canons.

But the race memory of toffee-nosed superiority and its link to opera houses and concert halls has persisted. A strange inverted snobbery has become the norm in UK attitudes to culture; that they're looking down on us, that lot, pretending to prefer some arduous black and white drama by Ingmar Bergman to that whizzbang superhero flick WE all enjoyed at the multiplex last week. But we know who's telling the truth, don't we? Since time immemorial, it seems, television arts programmes have insisted on "blurring the lines" between high and low culture, that sci-fi TV and pop songs MUST be put on the same level as epic poetry and Wagner, not so much out of philosopical or aesthetic principle, you feel, but because they fear the accusing finger of elitism being pointed in their direction, and that they can only administer the "bitter pill" of art if it's mixed with the sweet syrup of popular culture.

It's hard to distance oneself from this cultural prejudice. Way back in 1995, it was the centenary of cinema, and I was in the first hot flush of cinephile fever. I had just moved to London, discovered the National Film Theatre, and was practically bankrupting myself buying film books, the same way others fall into destitution through booze or drugs. One of my purchases was a coffee-table book called Flickers by Gilbert Adair, published by the BFI. Its simple premise was to reproduce a succession of stills from throughout film history, one for every year of cinema's existence, each accompanied by a short essay, either on the film's significance, its director, its genre, or whatever took the author's fancy.

Ah, but what an author. Do you remember how critics used to be caricatured in '70s TV and films? They'd invariably be posh, slightly camp, wear a cravat or monocle, be bitchy, contemptuous and snide – in other words, that very elitist that the inverted snobbery of the UK so fears. Well, Gilbert Adair was almost comically such a figure. An effete dandy, who had lived for years in Paris, and affected a much higher consideration for French culture than he ever did for its English equivalent, he wrote purple prose, long curlicues of sentences richly spiced with bon mots and apercus, and would not lower himself one scintilla from the very highest denominator. So much so, that when I got home and started eagerly leafing through Flickers, I got a bit of a shock. I hardly recognised a single film or a single director he was discussing. No Jaws, no Godfather... Where were the Carpenteresque cult movies? I tutted with disgust. This was a pretentious wankfest, a pseud's corner of obscure avant gardism. But I thought "OK, you say these are the important films, the great artists. I'll take you on. Let's watch them and see." And so I hunted out Antionioni, Pasolini, Rivette, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Tarkovsky, Ruiz... I discovered more from that book than any other text I've ever read on film. It enriched my life. And why? Because the author had not patronised me, not condescended to my level of knowledge, but expected me to come up to his own. He had treated me as an equal. He didn't broaden out the canon, dilute or dumb it down, to bring me in, like our arts institutions are constantly urged, or even threatened, to do. Instead, he gave me the information I needed. You like film? Well, here's the critical insight to help you appreciate it more.

You see, people come to art as a need, it draws them. Just as some people are drawn by sport, others by political action. And when you get there, you don't want a scaled-down version, tailored to the inexperienced individual you are when you first arrive; you want the full-bodied experience at its most intense, to lift and inspire you. Which is why I can't understand why arts bodies are not more fulsome in their defence of that which they are set up to protect. Football clubs and fans fight with great passion to preserve the integrity of their game; witness the protests over the Super League. So, why is it deemed so strange that art lovers should complain bitterly about the marginalisation and commodification of their own pursuits? Is it snobbery, or is it passion?

Ritrovato Rediscovered

What is Il Cinema Ritrovato? It's a week-long film festival held every year around the end of June in the lovely Italian city of Bologna. It's dedicated to old, forgotten classics or recently restored, or rediscovered, gems from the film archives. I've tried to go every year as an annual treat, but the pandemic put paid to that, so 2022 marked my first visit in three years. Little had changed. A booking system was in place – a relic of the social distancing enforced last year. But otherwise, the atmosphere and diet of movies on offer was in keeping with other editions.

Because a certain classic cinephilia still reigns in Bologna. The best attended screenings are those for American B-pictures – which might bear traces of the overlooked genius of a neglected bargain-basement auteur – and Italian classics by major homegrown figures. There's a smattering of films from Asia, Africa and South America, with a perennial Japanese presence, and a good strain of Euro arthouse, but the emphasis is on the Franco-American cinephilia first hothoused in Nouvelle Vague Paris in the 60s. I like that – though I'm not really of that camp, I like the traditional flavour of Ritrovato, and how it doesn't bend to the winds of change blowing over from the US and UK.

There's a clubby friendliness about the whole affair, which stretches out from the cinematheque and its open courtyard – where silent films are shown on old carbon arc projectors – across the whole city, taking in cinemas, old screening spaces, under-road galleries, and of course the Piazza Maggiore, or main square, where there are open-air screenings every night (and indeed throughout the summer). To visit is to indulge in all the great things in life in one go; a typical day consists of wandering round a beautiful medieval city in blistering hot sunshine, darting in and out of cinemas showing great rare movies, sampling the extraordinary food found at every corner, before finishing off with a cheeky gelato. Festivalgoers are everywhere, easily identifiable through the black lanyards they wear at all times and their cute totebags decorated with movie posters that are given away free at the start of the event.

This year saw sidebars dedicated to Sophia Loren and Peter Lorre, directors Hugo Fregonese and Kenji Misumi, German musicals, Iranian cinema of the 70s, Czech cinema of the 60s, and silent cinema of exactly 100 years ago. Among my favourite discoveries were Man In The Attic, a terrific addition to the Jack The Ripper mythos, in which an outstanding Jack Palance plays a suspicious lodger in a middle-class household as the bodies start to pile up in the streets outside. Genuinely atmospheric, with intelligent dialogue and characterisation, it was the highlight of the Fregonese season, which also threw up two excellent westerns, Apache Drums and Saddle Tramp, and a great James Mason movie (are there any other type?), One-Way Street. Mason was the star, alongside Robert Ryan and Barbara Bel Geddes (of Miss Ellie in Dallas fame) of the best film I saw all week, Max Ophul's Caught, the kind of superior melodrama that acts as a proof of the auteur theory, ie. that humdrum material can be galvanised into popular art by the approach and style of a master filmmaker. The film is so beautifully choreographed and acted that its cliched set-up of girl caught between two men, one bad, one good, reaches a genuinely adult complexity, both in its emotional punch and in its discussion of work, class, and the modern woman.

Also impressive was Sohrab Shahid Saless's Far From Home, a bleak portrait of Turkish immigrant workers eking out their existence in the hinterland of a German city, a film which was all the more powerful for being so stripped-back and restrained. Something which could hardly be said of Invaders From Mars, William Cameron Menzies' perennial favourite, now restored to its original eye-popping candy colours. Is it a) really a very terrible film indeed? b) a terrible film but one that looks exceptionally beautiful? c) a terrible film that, by accident rather than design, achieves something remarkable? Or d) actually a very clever film masquerading as a straightforward pop culture artefact? The screenplay is so simple that it feels more like a fable than a fully worked-out narrative. Characters are one-note cliches straight from a 50s advertising executive's junk drawer. The leading kid is so obnoxious, you expect him to turn to camera and sell you some milk. Plot exposition is fed up to the audience without any conspicuous evidence or deduction for the statements being made. When the aliens do turn up, they shamble around like misfits from a 70s Dr Who episode, in the same shot, repeated over and over again...

That repetition, though – is that the key? Because at the end, the whole sorry saga is revealed as a childhood dream. What should condemn the film once and for all to the back of the video store actually contrives to underline its mystery. Suddenly, its fabular style makes sense: the aliens at the bottom of the garden, by that rickety old fence, grown-ups turning nasty, the sets all built oversized to emphasise a child's-eye view of the world. And afterwards, one recalls peculiarly dark incidents – the boy's possessed father striking him, the little girl setting fire to her house and smiling, a drill moving inexorably towards a woman's neck... Has Menzies, by accident or design, created an incredibly subversive portrait of the troubled young American mind?

Films don't necessarily have to be masterpieces to excite or disturb. And though the Ritrovato programme was perhaps not as rich this year as in previous editions, each film seen contributes to one's understanding of cinema. So a hoary old sci-fi takes its place alongside political documentaries and the works of Stroheim and reveals their common DNA. I love Bologna.

Would The Real Robin Hood Please Come Forward?

The other day, having too much time and daydreaming on my hands, I put together a list of my favourite fantasy heroes: Dr Who, The Prisoner (of "I am not a number" fame), Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Judge Dredd, Halo Jones, Ripley from the Alien series, Columbo, and – a more personal choice, perhaps – Titus Groan from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels. It struck me that the first five were all quintessentially English, avatars of a certain attitude towards freedom and liberty and a way of being that gesture towards an idealised national character. One could add to THAT list such names as Falstaff, Inspector Morse, Fletcher from Porridge, George Smiley and Richard Hannay. Figures that would be inconceivable or just wouldn't function in the literatures or fables of other cultures.

Of all of them, Robin Hood is the most problematic. Because, for me, so many films and TV series have got him wrong. They mess around so much with the key elements that, unlike Robin's trusty arrows, they always end up missing the mark. To be fair, the problems start at source; unlike with the other characters listed above, there is no original text or definitive source novel to work from. Robin Hood emerged in songs and ballads that grew in number long after he was supposed to have died. These were added to over the centuries, and each era twisted or shaped the tale to suit its own social mores and concerns. So I'm in no position to argue for an "authentic" Robin Hood – no such thing exists. And yet, it seems to me, that certain key ingredients which have been crucial to the story's popularity are now frequently overlooked, and it's time to put them back front and centre.

a) Robin Hood is from Nottingham

Now before we go any further, I should admit to a vested interest here – I too am from Nottinghamshire. So Robin is a local hero. And that's important to me; as a child, my large-format, gorgeously illustrated book of his stories was a companion in my childish imagination to the exploits of Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest and Albert Finney in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, one of my father's favourite films. And damn it, I want Robin to have a Notts accent. A rare accent on British film and TV, said to be the most difficult to imitate, it sits between the South Yorkshire and West Midlands accents, and is hard for folk from the rest of the UK to distinguish. But it is distinctive. You hear it in the films of Shane Meadows – the young white boy in A Room For Romeo Brass, Paddy Considine in Dead Man's Shoes. And then there's the Midlands countryside. Hardly any adaptations have been filmed there. Admittedly, Sherwood Forest has shrunk to the size of a postage stamp, but there remain some areas of the Midlands that are usable. Most adaptations are too lush, too green, too immaculate; they don't capture the muddy, messy, tangled, chaotic, rain-sodden, raggedy beauty of a genuine English forest.

b) Robin Hood is a woodsman

And the authenticity of the forest and the accuracy of its local detail is important because, not only is it Robin's home, it is a crucial part of his mythical persona. For a modern audience, Sherwood Forest is just a refuge and a place to hide from the Sheriff's men. But we need to remember that Robin is a medieval hero, and in the medieval mind, the forest was so much more than trees. It was a non-human place, a world governed by nature, a world of fear and danger, a world of spirits and nymphs, of travellers and bandits. And therefore it is also a place of liberty; it is free of the bonds of human society, it is lawless. Robin emerges from the forest to wage war on the men from the city, then he draws back into its shadows. He is a medieval variation on the myth of the Green Man. He doesn't just live in nature; he is a force of nature himself.

c) Robin Hood is working-class

In the original ballads, Robin was referred to as a yeoman. These were commoners who usually cultivated their own smallholding, above peasants but below the landed gentry. So Robin was a farmer, a man of the land. But recently, it has become fashionable to portray Robin as a nobleman – the Earl of Loxley, for example – who has been deposed and is only arsing around in the forest until he can regain his rightful place, swigging flagons of wine in a cosy castle. For me, this completely undermines what made the tale such a staple of English folklore: that Robin was a hero of the Common Man who stuck it to the rich. Surely that was why he became a fixture of popular culture, the subject of tavern songs and proletarian aspiration? After all...

d) Robin Hood steals from the rich and he gives to the poor

Have we forgotten this? You'd be forgiven for thinking it was completely incidental, if modern adaptations are anything to go by. They seldom feature it. Robin is either fighting to regain his title, to save Maid Marian, or to depose the King. Yet isn't this the whole point of Robin? Dr Who saves Earth from alien invasion, Sherlock Holmes solves murder cases, Robin helps the poor. It's his mission statement. And the fact he does so by stealing from the rich and powerful makes him a folk hero, like Dick Turpin and the bank robbers, Bonnie and Clyde. This is the problem with expanding Robin and his universe and taking away his status of local, Nottinghamshire lad-made-good. We miss the true charm and fascination of the story for the generations before us; he wasn't trying to fight the King and play a role in the national story, he wasn't an aristocrat, he was one of us, just trying to survive and doing good into the bargain. That the 20^th century, the era of the Common Man, that saw the rise of Socialism and the levelling of elitism, should be the era that has done most to promote the idea of Robin as a toff is bafflingly ironic.

e) Robin Hood is part of a community

It's no accident that the tales of Robin Hood are often referred to as those of he "..and his merry men". These friends of Robin are as crucial to the myth as he is, and I would argue that the way he meets them – Little John, Will Scarlet, Alan-a-Dale – are stories that don't just add colour to his adventures, but are beautiful vignettes of friendship and working-class fellowship. "Merry" is often interpreted in modern versions as being "drunk" or interminably jolly with much slapping of one's thighs – or each other's thighs. This misses the more medieval interpretation, of an innocent enjoyment of life, of nature, humour, and each other's company. We see this also in Shakespeare's Falstaff. An essential component of this shared camaraderie is the fact that these men meet as equals; there are no barriers of money or class between them. In the forest, all hierarchies collapse. Which is why Robin's status as the Earl of Loxley is so wrong; he's not at the same level as his fellows. He becomes a leader, not just in terms of natural charisma, but socially and politically.

So, please, to any scriptwriters out there itching to take on the adventures of the Hooded Man, keep it local, keep it Notts. Fight the Sheriff of Nottingham, not King John. Have Robin hang out with friends, not Crusaders or deposed lords. And above all, make him poor, and make him give to the poor.

Birthday Bash

This month marks my 50^th birthday. 50 years! Half a century...

50 years on this planet, and I still...

• haven't watched a single episode of Game Of Thrones
  

• have only watched one Cassavetes film
  

• find the Carry On Team funny
  

• wish Kubrick had made Eyes Wide Shut with them
  

• find Eddie Izzard terminally unfunny
  

• can't see the point of wrestling
  

• find Brad Pitt a total bore
  

• hero-worship Tom Baker and Peter Falk
  

• think Sylvester McCoy was a terrible Doctor Who
  

• don't see Die Hard as a Christmas movie
  

• would rather stick my head in a bucket of cold dog vomit than watch The Shawshank Redemption again
  

• love the Amicus portmanteau horror movies
  

• reckon Clive Owen would have been a great James Bond
  

• fancy Caroline Munro
  

• think Antonioni was a genius
  

• think the Nouvelle Vague is overrated
  

• giggle at Laurel and Hardy
  

• don't understand the cult of Cage
  

• hate David Lean for profiting from a condescending portrayal of British POWs in Bridge Over The River Kwai
  

• admire Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, even though I can't stand musicals
  

• wish they'd swapped the casting of Ice Cube and Jason Statham in Ghosts of Mars
  

• I hadn't run out of the cinema during the injection scene in The Exorcist, not because I was scared but because I'm a big wuss with medical stuff on screen
  

• hadn't decided to give Nightmare on Elm Street a second chance
  

• think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the purist horror film ever made
  

• wish Cronenberg had never stopped filming his own scripts
  

• prefer Peckinpah and Leone to John Ford
  

• am utterly baffled by the popularity of Back To The Future
  

• become grumpy when some youngster tells me some crappy blockbuster that appeared in my lifetime, ie. Jumanji, is a classic
  

• have never fallen in love with a single Disney movie
  

• adore British wartime propaganda
  

• and footage of old London town
  

• marvel at Jane Asher in Deep End
  

• have a frustrating crush on both Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet in Sense and Sensibility
  

• think Roger Moore is great in The Man Who Haunted Himself
  

• look to The Prisoner as an avatar of liberalism
  

• cannot sit through Birth Of A Nation
  

• think Ingmar Bergman is one of the great artists of the 20^th century, despite everyone saying he's overrated
  

• believe Woody Allen didn't do it
  

• prefer Adam West as Batman
  

• prefer Peter Ustinov as Poirot
  

• remember laughing at Gregory's Girl
  

• remember the family laughing at Benny Hill...
  

• cannot get over watching Tarkovsky's Stalker for the first time
  

• think The Innocents is the scariest film ever
  

• am haunted by the end credits of the BBC series, Secret Army
  

• think Ennio Morricone is the greatest film composer of all time
  

• think Star Wars is for kids (not necessarily a bad thing)
  

• long for a decent Judge Dredd movie
  

• refuse to eat when watching a film
  

• get excited when a movie starts...
  

India, My India

For some years now, I've been fascinated by a peculiar sub-genre of films, that might be deemed culturally undesirable these days – portraits of India through western eyes. The crucial examples, the canon if you like, comprise Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus and Jean Renoir's The River (both adapted from novels by Rumer Godden), Roberto Rossellini's documentary India Matri Bhumi, and Marguerite Duras' India Song. I've discussed the first two films here - https://sites.google.com/view/mikes-movie-house/articles/rumer-godden -

but watching them all back-to-back recently, I was struck by the similarities between them, despite the fact they couldn't have been made by four more different auteurs.

When Renoir started approaching Hollywood producers in the late 40s with a view to getting funding for The River, most reacted to the script with disdain. Where were the elephants?! That's what Johnny Public associates with India, they said. In fact, only one of these films, Rossellini's, features elephants, in a beautiful ten-minute segment, which shows them as working animals, moving timber in the forest, before enjoying a wash and scrubdown in the local river. But this is not just exoticism; Rossellini extends this fixation on the pastoral into the following three stories of the film, creating a portrait of India as a country on the brink of industrialisation and urbanisation, in which the natural order, as enjoyed by both men and animals, is under threat. In the second episode, a whole valley is flooded after the construction of a dam, abandoned temples rising forlornly from the waters. In the third, a tiger's habitat is disturbed as miners move into the forest, and in the final segment, a tame monkey tries desperately to survive in the human world when its master unexpectedly dies. The result is a film that is simultaneously in love with India but also afraid of it.

"There's something in the atmosphere here that makes everything seem exaggerated." So says Mr Dean, the world-weary English agent who is the local contact for the nuns in Black Narcissus. When we first come across him, he has been in India for some time and he seems dispirited and cynical, but more appreciative of local custom and cynical of British repression. India has changed him, yet he seems neither of it nor of his home culture. Later, the nuns will find that they are transforming as well; something in the rarefied air of the mountains, the perfumes of nature, the more pagan atmosphere of Hinduism starts to seep into their souls. They remember old love affairs, sow flowers instead of vegetables in the gardens, start forgetting their vows. This problem, this spiritual effect that India seems to have on the westerner, lurks in all four films here. With India, you either have to "ignore it or give oneself up to it". Throughout India Song, characters constantly ask each other if they have become "acclimatised": "How can you stand it?" "Have you got used to it yet? "Does one ever get used to it?"

They mean the heat, the dust, the crowds, the sun, the heavy air with its rich scents... Notice how sleep and torpor are omnipresent in these films (as they are in the cinema of Satyajit Ray). People seem stifled into inaction. In The River, the death of a major character is preceded not by tension or suspense, but a montage of characters sleeping in the afternoon heat, disparate people now unified in slumber, the prone body of a dead boy merely another figure at peace. And this sense of inertia in people is complemented by the decay in the landscape around them. India Song is filmed in and around an abandoned mansion (actually, in a bit of cinematic sleight of hand, found on the outskirts of Paris) in which various characters appear like ghosts, re-enacting soirees and colonial gatherings of the past. The nuns of Black Narcissus instal themselves in on an old palace in the mountains which teeters on the abyss, while the English children in The River escape the family home across crumbling walls that give onto shrines or the forest. Traditional social roles and cultural barriers also break down. The British and the Indian begin to interract more freely, the cloistered nuns find it impossible to keep the outside world from flooding through their walls, whether it be children in search of education, women in search of medicine, or young princes in search of western tutelage. People are not what they appear to be: the gatekeeper of the colonial home in The River, who sleeps on a bench in the garden, is an ex-army officer, as is the holy man who sits motionless and eerily silent on the cliff above the nunnery in Black Narcissus.

Is it any wonder, then, that the British and colonial characters of these films seem beset by dreams, fantasies, hysteria? Just as the nuns' spiritual resolve seems to falter in the high, thin air of the Himalayas, so social etiquette breaks down among the French ex-pats of Marguerite Duras' film, with casual affairs and polygamous relationships becoming the norm. One ambassador collapses into extremes of behaviour, shooting at lepers in his grounds, then screaming out his love for someone else's wife through the streets of Calcutta at night.

Memories, myths and dreams start to merge. Are the little girls telling stories at the start of India Song really talking about a mythical beggar girl or indirectly describing the wayward society hostess played by lead actress, Delphine Seyrig? Their tales give way on the soundtrack to the chatter of "polite society" in the embassy salons, as disparate unidentified voices gossip and expound on the exploits of their peers, phantom narrators from the past. These films are crammed with stories and fables, often told by children. In The River, the young protagonist, Harriet, tells the story of a traditional wedding in the local village; but fantasy becomes blended with reality when the roles in the story, re-enacted on screen, are taken by Harriet's own neighbour and her suitor, and seems to be foretelling their own union.

Indeed, children, and a child's eye view of the world, are key elements in these films. Rumer Godden's The River is about a family of girls and their different paths to womanhood. But is it a coincidence that her other novel, Black Narcissus, is also about "a family of girls", sisters who also find themselves distracted by men and in competition for their affections? The anarchy and bedlam of childhood play is everywhere apparent and threatens to overrun adult order. One of Renoir's characters actually delivers a monologue to camera on the sacredness of children, and how adulthood may be a corruption of their purer point of view. Does the special essence of India make children of us all, liberate us into a more innocent and playful frame of mind?

Little in these films is direct; everything is told through other media, the fable, the poem, the dance... It is remarkable how a dance sequence figures so prominently in each of the three narrative features here. Renoir was introduced to Radha, a specialist in traditional Indian dance, while he was researching his film, and changed the script to accommodate a performance by her; the result is the centrepiece of the movie and one of the most beautiful moments in cinema. It symbolises the Indian girl coming to terms with her sexuality, roots and identity. Similarly, in Black Narcissus, Kanchi's dance gives us an insight into her impulsive passion for life. While the film India Song is a dance unto itself, with figures caught in a permanent roundelay of coupling, parting, pacing and recoupling, as they move from one soiree to another.

Rumer Godden ended up hating Michael Powell's adaptation of her novel, thinking it gaudy and camp and fake, largely because not a single frame of it was shot in India itself; Powell elected instead to film it entirely in an English studio. But I think this unusual decision actually adds to the film; Powell creates a dreamscape, a lurid Technicolor fantasy of India which corresponds exactly to the hysterical mindset of the nuns, caught between passion and faith. I too have never been to India; for me, it is also a land of fantasy and illusion, an imaginary place to get lost in. A movie world.

How do you solve a problem like diversity?

Anyone who follows a film franchise or cult sci-fi series can't fail to have noticed the rise of a new phenomenon in the past few years: fans v MSM! Where MSM is "mainstream media", the content providers for TV, film, music and general broadcast. An ongoing battle has been waged on Twitter and YouTube between bigwig producers like Disney and fans frothing at the mouth at what they see as the creeping politicisation of their favourite shows. Dr Who and Captain Marvel have been transformed into women, white characters swapped for black, storylines become preachy and saturated in modish "wokeness". In the papers, this has been characterised as the whining of right-leaning bedwetters, frustrated that the world is changing around them and raging against the dying of their patriarchal light. Instead, they should embrace a new perspective, which lets in previously under-represented groups, like women and ethnic minorities, in pursuit of new stories to tell, many of which have formerly been repressed.

But is this really what's going on? And is there a neutral solution to this "culture war"? Much of what has changed in popular culture in the last decade is put down to the quest for "diversity". This term bothers me. We know that it purports to mean an opening out of culture to groups that were previously sidelined. But in practice, it simply means changing the cast: white to black, male to female, straight to gay. The material, the narrative structure and theme, the generic templates, all remain unchanged. What we're talking about is really a diversification of the mainstream, not a diversity of ideas, philosophy, perspective, or aesthetics. I've been struck, for example, by how younger, furiously anti-Tory work colleagues of mine would bitterly criticise racism in the arts yet scoff at my desire to go and see a Hungarian or African or Thai film. I mean, a 1960s Czech documentary - why would anyone want to go and see something like that?! Their interest, it seems to me, is squarely behind what the market serves up. Diversity is a con; it is a game where a white playing piece is replaced with one of a different colour, but the rules remain unchanged. Which, when you think about it politically and philosophically, is deeply troubling; a movement in society that pretends to be widening our perspective is actually hemming it in, bringing differences into the centre and eliminating their potential subversiveness beyond.

But to understand this further, we need to look at the four different groups involved here.

Producers: Those who actually make the films and shows in question. For years, Hollywood avoided politics like the plague; it was felt to be a turn-off for audiences in an industry which was committed to getting as many bums on seats as possible for each of their productions. Put in a political message and the odds are half your audience is going to turn up their noses in disgust and walk off. So leave it for the papers! Over the last decade, something has changed, and now Hollywood and TV broadcasters can't get enough of politics, of showing off how much they want to "change the narrative". Why?

Money. Don't kid yourself it's because they actually care; the bottom line in entertainment is what it has always been – cold hard cash. They now think politics sells. Particularly with that most lucrative market, the young. I remember Orson Welles once talking in a Parkinson interview about the fading glamour of film stars. In his youth, he said, opera stars were the thing; women would swoon in the street if Caruso passed by. Then cinema took over the popular imagination; Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper became the object of fantasy, their images plastered over teenage walls. In the 60s, they began to be supplanted by rock'n'roll, musicians like the Beatles and the Stones, Bowie and Hendrix.

I would argue that now politics has become the new cool. If you'd told me when I was a teenager that a 16-year-old Swedish girl banging on about environmentalism would be a youth icon or that students would be chanting Jeremy Corbyn's name as if they were at a rock concert, I'd have thought you were stark, staring mad. But there is no doubt politics has a hold on modern youth culture. And producers want a piece of that. But if tomorrow the wind blows in another direction – as it inevitably will – and something else becomes flavour of the month, they'll drop it all like a stone, without one whit of guilt about the cultural divide they've helped create.

The audience: Now the audience is a fickle beast. It's large, for one thing. And it's that size, and the multiple variations of culture and community within it, that's causing the headaches. Producers are asking themselves: how do we cater for that? What we should remember above all else is that 90% of the audience don't care a toss about the subject under discussion here. Whether they're conservative or left, working-class or bourgeois, the vast majority of people don't care about the political leanings of the content they watch. They just want to be entertained. If it's good, they'll switch on. The Guardian and other papers are fond of talking about reactionary folk switching off Dr Who because the part is now being played by a woman. But what was noticeable when Jodie Whittaker's casting was announced was how few people seemed to really care. And I remain convinced that even stick-in-the-mud grumps – of which I am one – who thought it a terrible decision and a weak concession to disinterested, self-aggrandising media campaigns, would happily have put my objections to one side if a great actress had taken on the role and the stories had been well-written and compelling. What the BBC doesn't want to concede is the reason people have stopped watching is very simple: it's just not very good!

The fans: Which brings us to the fans, who are part of the audience, but operate completely differently from it. As was once pointed out, fans like something too much. They are an active audience who invest in the material on screen beyond the basic narrative that is unfolding. What may be a straightforwardly entertaining story to some may be irksome to a fan because it contradicts previous continuity, or radically changes a beloved character or set of principles the show is perceived to have had. Fans are often conservative in nature, at least aesthetically, preferring the franchise to deliver more of the same which they have come to love. They are self-appointed arbiters of what the show should or shouldn't do; in other words, they make themselves unofficial critics...

The critics: But there is another body of the audience who are officially critics: newspaper and internet journalists who produce reviews for a mass readership. Like fans, they are active, participating in the ongoing discussion about any content. But unlike fans, their investment is not personal, but institutional; they represent a magazine or a broadcaster. And it's noticeable how they have come out en masse in support of this new politics of the arts, deriding fans who dare criticise it. Perhaps because the institutions they write for want themselves to ride this wave of political cool and not be seen as behind-the-times, particularly when it comes to hot topics like modern feminism or anti-racism.

But is there a way to accommodate these contradictory interests? If we accept that the audience is fragmenting and different cultural, political and ethnic groups have developed tastes that are not reconcilable, is this really the end of the world? Two franchises, it seems to me, have tried to take on this problem in intelligent ways. After Disney took over Star Wars, it set about producing a new trilogy to take the story forward, as George Lucas had envisaged over 20 years before. But it also announced a series of spin-off films, that would pick up on ancillary characters and storylines and widen the Star Wars universe. These instalments – Rogue One, Solo – have a more adult tone and different atmosphere to the mainstream, family-oriented trilogy. Like a food company offering a brand of pot noodle, but with different flavours, so as to appeal to a broader range of consumers.

Earlier, Russell T Davies had tried something even more radical with the Dr Who franchise. After the reintroduction of the main show was a success in 2005, the BBC were keen to produce some spin-offs and cash in on a popular quantity. Davies produced two programmes, aimed at entirely different demographics. Torchwood featured a gang of characters, thoroughly diverse in ethnicity and sexuality, engaged in sexier, darker adventures that were shown after the watershed. The Sarah Jane Adventures was made by CBBC and was aimed at the post-school, afternoon-tea age group. Ironically, its innocent storytelling approach was more attractive to some old school fans than that of the main show, because it was closer to the Dr Who they had grown up with. In this way, the new Dr Who franchise could appeal to a broad scope of the audience, giving them sci-fi adventures appropriate to their own taste and age ranges.

The problem with this approach is that fans are so invested in their object of cult adoration that they want to watch – and like – everything with its logo on it. If it's got Star Wars in the title, it's a must-see. And if it doesn't live up to expectations, or has a different "taste" to what fans are used to, the dismissals can be furious.

On their part, producers seem stuck in a rut. They talk a good deal about diversity, but seem unable to move beyond narratives and characters – Batman, Spiderman, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, James Bond – created many years ago in a completely different social and cultural paradigm, which makes them awkward to adapt into modern, multicultural franchises. They seem incapable of the originality and creative genius of the 20^th century or unwilling to invest in its 21^st century counterparts. Or is it that, unwilling to take a gamble on a female or ethnic minority hero who they secretly believe won't attract large audiences, they cynically maintain the already popular heroes in our culture and try to zhuzh them up with a bit of diversity casting?

Either way, both fans and producers are missing a trick here. If the fans could learn to pick and choose their flavour of fantasy and realise not everything will suit their taste, and if producers could acknowledge that different audiences need and want different things, the "culture war" could be stifled at birth. Hollywood giants, like Disney, have more than enough money and resources to make different versions simultaneously of the same thing. Why not make an old-style James Bond, closer to the Ian Fleming novels, at the same time as having a series with a female Bond, and the continuation of the main series post-Daniel Craig? Why not make a more classic, '60s style of superhero picture alongside graphic-novel-inflected films, targeted at a more adult or counterculture audience? Or continue the female Who, and offer a low-budget, more traditional style of story over on BBC4, probably written by Mark Gatiss? That way, the audience gains what they've always been promised...

A true diversity of choice.

The Future In Retrospect

They say time heals everything. Well, cinema history is littered with critical debates, some heated, some trivial. There was a time when you were either for Chaplin or Keaton, Kurosawa or Mizoguchi, Hawks or Huston, for montage or deep focus – the frenzied cutting of Eisenstein or the long sequence shots of Welles. Of course, the most influential of these debates centred around the status of Hollywood filmmaking. We forget now, but for years, Hitchcock was considered a mere entertainer (even by himself) until the young Turks of the Nouvelle Vague anointed him as the medium's patron saint. The cultural establishment tutted and guffawed at the very idea, but in a mere handful of years, the evangelists won the battle and their sermon became gospel truth.

Of course, the main problem for Hollywood was that it was popular culture, which is bound to the present in a way independent artistic statement doesn't have to be. Pop culture is really an ongoing conversation, picking up on current trends and fashions and ways of thinking, and feeding it back to the audience in the form of new content. So, comedy will make play with names in the news, changing styles, buzz terms, generational conflict and so on; while horror, for example, will tap into tensions in the current zeitgeist, whether they be related to terrorism, viruses, body mutilation, or questions of identity. An arthouse director, by contrast, can follow a purely personal agenda, both aesthetic and philosophical, which more easily transcends the era they're in. Thus, film history more easily privileges the Bergmans and Dreyers and Fellinis of this world, because their work is essentially timeless.

However, the Nouvelle Vague's success in raising Hollywood's profile meant a wholesale re-evaluation occurred, and hundreds of formerly ignored directors suddenly found themselves rebranded as cult heroes. What helped matters was that most of them had retired or were nearing the end of their careers. So a body of work could be presented, where the thematic and stylistic connections between their films overshadowed the more contemporary concerns they exhibited at time of release.

Could this work for a modern mainstream director? Take someone like Clint Eastwood, for example. Each year, this wizened old veteran churns out yet another true-life story of bravery overcoming adversity, or yet another wry drama about machismo in the age of snowflake. And each example will get lightly patronised by The Guardian for its classical style, its conservative ethics, the feeling that it's out-of-date. You see how its presentness is a crucial criterion in any judgment? But what happens when Eastwood dies, and suddenly each film becomes part of an overall filmography, free from the concerns of an ever-changing media landscape? It's often observed that artists are only appreciated after they're gone. Maybe this is why; distance lends their work wholeness and perspective.

Recently, I came across Absolute Power (1997) while I was channel surfing at my mum's house. It was a film I totally ignored on release, but its lazy charm fitted with my lazy mood at the time, so I settled down to watch it. And I found it thoroughly enjoyable. And yet, I couldn't help reflecting that, if I had gone to see it in the nineties, I would have regarded the plot as the cheesiest, most ridiculous piece of objectionable hokum I'd ever come across. Basically, Eastwood plays a burglar who breaks into a mansion, only to witness the President accidentally kill a woman in a bout of rough sex. And bear in mind, this was released during the Clinton era. It sounds like the pitch meeting from hell; some conservative hacks batting around terrible thriller plots and wanting to stick it to the Democrats at the same time. Camp and crude and silly.

But the nineties is a foreign country; they do things differently there. And that decade's thrillers now seem all of a piece. High-blown, overwrought, melodramatic and not at all realistic. Distance has made them...cosy. And it's removed their cutting-edge relevance. So that now we watch them as genre films and enjoy them for their style and their themes, which have become universal as opposed to immediate.

Of course, it doesn't always work out this way. Let's look at another ol' man of the west, Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah's films were always controversial; they were condemned for their overt violence and perceived misogyny. They were feted and reviled in equal measure. Then Peckinpah died relatively young, and he made the transition into being a "great director", now safely inactive and no longer capable of aggravating the status quo, so his work could be quietly reappraised and appreciated. But in recent years, his reputation has suffered a setback; the #MeToo movement has thrown a retrospectively harsh light on the macho figures of the past, and a director who filmed not one, but TWO rape scenes where the victim appears to take pleasure in it, was bound to fall foul of feminist bile. Couple that with his attachment to the western, a genre inextricably linked with white colonial aggression and strong masculine values, and it's no surprise that his masterpiece, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, is still awaiting a Blu-Ray release in the UK.

Eastwood, however, is not as difficult and uneven as Peckinpah, either as an artist or a person. Yes, he's also associated with the western, but he's diversified into other genres, like the thriller, the cop movie, and even romance, in The Bridges of Madison County. I think his reputation will navigate the choppy waters of popular morality more smoothly than Peckinpah's in the future. And his simple, lean style will be identified as a distillation of technique by a wise, mature artist. Distance will make the journeyman into a master.

A Christmas Carol

Let me tell you of Christmas Past...

The time: December 1968. The place: the chaotic production office of Dr Who. The second actor to play the part, Patrick Troughton, is coming to the end of his run. Suddenly, a script has to be abandoned, and the final ten episodes of the season have to be hurriedly re-written as one epic story. In desperation, the script editor turns to his long-time friend, someone he's worked with on soap operas in the past, and together, over much coffee and cigarettes, they hash out a plotline. Then they lock themselves in their rooms and bash out this ramshackle masterpiece before the deadline hits.

Years later, it's considered one of the finest stories in the series' history.

But before we discuss its narrative, let's look more closely at the two gentlemen concerned. The script editor was one Terrance Dicks, a rotund, jolly chap with a Popeye laugh. In interviews, he has said that everyone was left-wing in those days and he supposed he was as well. But elsewhere, he has admitted that he never understood what was so wrong with the British Empire and didn't share his producer Barry Letts' concerns about politics and environmentalism at all. In fact, reading between the lines of his many comments over the years, it seems more likely that Uncle Terry was what you might call a 'cuddly Tory'.

His friend, however, was quite a different kettle of fish. Malcolm "Mac" Hulke was an enthusiastic member of Britain's tiny Communist Party from 1945 onwards. MI5 thought him a person of interest, and kept him under surveillance, tracking his movements and even tapping his phone. He retained his strong Leftist views throughout his whole life and they are clearly visible in his writing.

So, basically, a Commie and a middle-class Tory sat down and wrote together. They traded ideas, jokes, scenarios. And they came up with a hell of a plotline. The Doctor and his companions land in World War One and are put on court martial for being between the lines. But as soon as the trial begins, it becomes apparent that all is not as it seems... The officers seem determined to antagonise, even hypnotise, their underlings into submission, and there are mysterious anachronisms, like TV sets sunk into the wall. Eventually, the Doctor discovers that they are not on Earth, but an alien world, where the inhabitants have kidnapped soldiers from different wars in Earth history, and created environments for them to continue their conflicts, with the humans blissfully unaware of what has happened to them. The ultimate aim of the aliens is to gather the survivors – the humans who have proved toughest – into one big army to take over the galaxy.

Terrance Dicks asked his kids which were their favourite wars in history, and so the episodes play out over the 1914-1918 conflict, the Roman invasion of Britain, and the American Civil War, with characters from other periods popping up willy-nilly. It's all enormous fun.

But take away the Saturday teatime adventureness of it, and look again. It's a story about ordinary young men being pressed into battle by a shadowy elite, of whom they are not even conscious. Where the masses are the playthings of a hierarchical structure whose aims are nothing to do with the causes the people think they're fighting for. A Commie and a Tory...

As the tale progresses, some of the human soldiers manage to see through the alien brain-washing and realise the truth of their situation. (The wet dream of any conspiracy theorist...) They form a Resistance army. And who make up the bulk of this army? Which humans prove least susceptible to illusion? Pancho Villa's Mexican revolutionaries. Of course – the poor peasants, the uneducated, proletariat army. A genius touch from Malcolm Hulke. But Terrance Dicks leaves his own signature on the material; the leader of the Resistance is a British Empire officer, complete with pith helmet and chunky revolver. A gorgeous bit of cheek. Soon, Japanese soldiers are fighting alongside Russian Cossacks, Prussian generals alongside Jacobite Highlanders. Random punch-the-air moments tumble into the narrative one after the other. A black Union soldier turns to white Confederates and pleads with them to see that they're fighting the same cause. An alien impersonating a German officer is speaking with a Southern drawl the next scene; when he's caught by the Resistance and held captive by an English infantryman, he swiftly adopts the pompous tones of an upper-class general of 1745. The implication being they're all the same...

Now let's come forward to Christmas 2021. Such moments as those outlined above would be deemed "woke" or subversive or politically exciting if they were to appear in a popular drama now. Whereas, at the time, they were throwaway moments of breezy amusement for two artists putting their political differences behind them to fashion half of hour of family fun after the football results.

And then there's Terry Gilliam. He was preparing to direct the musical, Into The Woods, at the Old Vic. But weeks before its premiere, staff members got together and decided they didn't want to work for him, after comments he had made in interviews and on social media. So, in 50 years, we've gone from a Communist and a cuddly Tory being close enough friends that they could write together in an emergency – seeding the same material with their own politics and ideologies, and enjoying themselves to boot – to a theatre director being booted out of his job by his own colleagues because they happen to disagree with him! Not because he had committed a crime or advocated violence or used hate speech, but because they thought his opinions were a bit, you know, rum.

If that's Christmas Present, heaven knows what Christmas Future will bring...

It's Good To Talk...And Talk

The recent London Film Festival finally saw due recognition being paid to one of the most interesting filmmakers to have appeared in the last decade. Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a Japanese director whose breakout film on the festival circuit was Happy Hour (2015), a five-hour examination of the lives of four thirtysomething women in modern Japan, heavily improvised by a team of amateur actors who Hamaguchi had workshopped over several months. His follow-up, Asako I+II (2018), was a brilliantly original twist on the romantic movie, as it charted the burgeoning relationship between a young city worker and the doppelganger of her high school sweetheart, who had disappeared years before. Now, at the festival, he has debuted not just one, but two new releases: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a portmanteau of three stories about love and chance, and Drive My Car, an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story, about an actor coping after his wife's premature death.

Because he's Japanese, he's automatically treated in this country as an arthouse filmmaker, just like all non-English language directors. But I would argue that his work belongs to a peculiar genre, that has had fewer practitioners than, say, the western or the horror film, but still has a marked and identifiable place in cinema history – the talking film.

So much of the running time in Hamaguchi's films is taken up with people just conversing with each other. Little happens, indeed time seems to stand still, while two people begin chatting, passing the time of day, finding out information, then digging deeper, pushing towards emotional truths, circling each other, almost in a dance. The camera is often static, holding the interlocutors in stasis together; the audience is focused intently on gesture, eye movement, the subtlest change of expression. The end goal is to really excavate the soul of a human being, and to discover the true nature of the emotional bond between these people. It's a cinema divorced from action and dynamism, and withdrawn from (though not totally uninterested in) social and ideological themes. If there's politics here, it's the politics of human interaction and the creation of the couple.

Of course, the above paragraph will remind most people of Richard Linklater's Before... Trilogy, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. These three films represent the ne plus ultra of the talking film, in that each one is essentially a long conversation between the same couple, traipsing around various picturesque locations – Vienna, Paris, Greece – trying to work out what the other is feeling. Linklater's approach may be the most extreme of the directors under discussion here, but his films also feel the most casual; his lightness of touch and the genuine chemistry between his stars ensure the constant banter and occasional rows retain a comic glow.

That could not be said for Ingmar Bergman, whose work is far from limited to the talking film genre, but whose intense interest in the modern couple, and how men and women speak to each other, was the catalyst that brought it into being. There were directors who'd explored courtship and matrimony before Bergman, but never with such psychological depth and acuity. And never had the opposite sexes clashed so violently and cruelly, never had the conversation been so open about the most hidden and taboo aspects of desire and rejection. I remember being struck as a young twentysomething by the savage exchanges between Gunnar Bjornstrand's priest and his long-suffering admirer, played by Ingrid Thulin, in Winter Light (1963). She details her complaints about his behaviour in a letter delivered in a monologue to camera, giving a lacerating portrait of male arrogance and coldness, but not half as lacerating as his attacks on her, on the way her body and her neediness repels him. This brutal honesty between partners reaches its apex in Scenes From A Marriage (1973), in which Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman, playing a middle-class couple undergoing divorce, tear each other apart in on an ongoing series of battles and rapprochements. Bergman clearly pared down and distilled his formal approach here, concentrating the camera on the two actors, with few cinematic flourishes, setting the foundations for the Linklater and Hamaguchi films mentioned above.

But Bergman's greatest influence was on Woody Allen, who translated the Swede's studies of psychological malaise into a lighter, more comedy-drama mode, while retaining the fascination with the ins and outs of male-female relationships. Allen's films dwell in the realm of farce, often featuring a clutch of upper-middle-class Manhattanites caught in a roundelay of love, lust, adultery and forgiveness. But in his best work – Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah And Her Sisters, Crimes And Misdemeanours and Husbands And Wives – Allen's trademark witty dialogue is still laced with psychological and emotional truths, and there is a thin but palpable vein of despair in many exchanges. And like Bergman, he has a knack for creating believable and rounded female characters, which is somewhat ironic considering his current reputation. Indeed, all the filmmakers working in this genre have that facility; it seems to come with the territory.

Working in a slightly different register is Eric Rohmer, and the Korean director he is often likened to, Hong Sang-Soo. Though their films are actually very different, both in tone and register, each structure their narratives around the interactions between men and women, often talking at cross purposes, attempting to build relationships, succeeding but most often failing, existing but not connecting. This is the core of Hong's interest, and he keeps his work deliberately small-scale, filming with a tiny cast and crew in hotel rooms and city streets, the better to endlessly experiment with the representation of people communicating. He's most famous for improvising scenes where his characters – and the actors that play them – get drunk and start spilling truths in their cups.

Rohmer, on the other hand, is not primarily interested in male-female relationships. Rather, he uses them as a basis to explore another theme: what it is to be civilised. His films are drowned in chat, frequently between young friends or wannabe lovers, paddling out into the complex waters of trust and commitment, but these conversations are really moral workouts, where more abstract philosophies are marked out and tested. So, while A Summer's Tale (1996) is nominally about an indecisive youth trying to choose between three beautiful girls, it's really a sly examination of self-knowledge and self-delusion, and how we build intellectual justifications for our own weaknesses. There's something Diderot-like about Rohmer, even down to the structure of his dramas, which frequently resemble 18^th century plays transposed to a modern setting. Their framework may be arcane, but the mindset is anything but, playing out 20^th century concerns against a studiously realist portrait of the contemporary world.

Fact or Fiction: or, What You Will

A few weeks ago, the BBC aired a three-part documentary called Uprising by the film director, Steve McQueen. Its starting point was the New Cross fire in 1981, where 13 black teenagers lost their lives in a blaze that ripped through a house party. There was widespread belief among the community that the incident was caused by racists, and a protest march was staged on the streets of London which turned ugly when there were clashes with police. McQueen builds this story into a potent example of black experience that has been suppressed and forgotten by official history, an outburst of anger arising from a racial attack.

Except it wasn't. We know it wasn't. The incident was the subject of not one, but two forensic investigations – one at the time and the other after a public enquiry was initiated when new evidence came to light. This evidence suggested the fire started after nail varnish was spilt on a carpet and somehow caught alight (there was a bizarre witness statement to the effect someone tried to dowse the flames with paint thinner!) Both investigative teams found no evidence of outside attack or invasion into the property, and no evidence of racial aggravation.

What I find curious is that not a single review of McQueen's film mentions this point, in fact, quite the opposite – they seem to subtly enforce the myth that it was a case of arson. I wonder how many of the film's audience came away with the same impression, one that I believe McQueen wanted them to retain. Does it matter? Isn't it enough that the victims and their community believed it was a racist attack and that was the reason behind their subsequent actions? Maybe, but in a documentary – a film which we understand to be concerned with telling us the truth, as opposed to fiction – shouldn't the facts of the situation be made crystal clear instead of being obfuscated behind personal or communal paranoia?

But then documentary is a dirty word these days. The ability of a filmmaker to objectively convey the truth has been so called into question, that in Sight and Sound's most recent poll of the best documentaries of all time, most of the critics who contributed were at pains to distance themselves from the very idea, favouring the more personal and subjective essay film over the third person authority popularly attributed to factual filmmaking. The problem for these critics is the filmmaker themselves, who, in their eyes, acts like the scientist who alters what he is measuring in the act of measuring it, and brings too much bias and personal perspective to bear on their subject matter.

But what I want to argue here is that there is another, perhaps more problematic figure in the documentary debate – us, the viewers. Let's go back to those critics who raved about Uprising. How many of them knew the details of the New Cross fire? How many of them bothered to research it after watching the film? In the space of ten minutes, after reading The Independent's positive review of the film online, I was able to find through Google the same paper's article about the forensic evidence on the fire from only seven years previously. Here it is: https://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/judge-calls-new-inquiry-new-cross-fire-9273919.html And if this is the case with UK critics, imagine the reaction from US or European critics, whose knowledge of the incident and of British race relations in general is necessarily more limited. It makes you wonder: when we watch a documentary, how much are we taking on trust? Have you watched a film about events in a foreign country and ever asked yourself: what if this is wrong, or ridiculously biased, or a distortion of the facts? Do we, the audience, put too much trust in filmmakers? And if so, do we further distort the truth the film purports to be showing by bringing to it our own ignorance?

Recently, I finally got round to watching Caniba (2017), Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel's study of a cannibal killer. Now these two filmmakers do almost everything possible to distance their "sensory ethnography" from traditional documentary methods. No voiceover, no commentary, no establishing shots or framework, no narrative. Rather, the viewer is plunged into an intimate "experience" of the subject, a discovery of its essence through the manipulation of photography, sound and editing. So, for the first half hour of this film, the camera is in tight close-up on the protagonist's face, squeezing in and out of focus, as he haltingly reveals the reasons behind killing – and eating – a fellow student. His comments are so oblique that the audience finds itself having to piece together the story of the murder he committed and the nature of his personality, as if completing a gruesome jigsaw puzzle.

Mind you, I say the audience, but what I really mean is me. I knew nothing about this killer going into the film; I was discovering an unknown country. But afterwards, I realised through reading articles online that his case was infamous in both France and Japan. His name is Issei Sagawa, and in 1981 (the same year as the New Cross fire) while he was a student in Paris, he killed and ate a Dutch student from his class. The incident generated enormous interest, especially when the French courts declared him legally insane and, on a technicality which puts even the Polanski case in the shade, allowed him to return home to Japan scot-free. The Stranglers even wrote a song about it, La Folie (which the filmmakers play over Caniba's end credits). Once back in his home country, Sagawa actually exploited his newfound fame, writing several novels and a manga, which graphically depicted his crime (and which is also shown in the film). He became a cult hero and even appeared as an actor in soft porn flicks.

So, for a French or Japanese viewer, they are not watching a killer, but THE killer: Issei Sagawa. Their relationship to the unfolding images is completely different; my ignorance of the case biases my reading of the film. For a Japanese viewer especially, the fact that they are aware of Sagawa as a cult pop culture icon means this must come across as yet another portrait of a man already well used to representing himself to the public. They might approach it with a degree of cynicism, knowing how cannily he's traded on his infamy for so long. But I approached the film in innocence, believing I was watching the exploration by two investigative filmmakers of a curious and unique subject. In the process, one could argue that two quite different films are produced, not by the filmmaker, but in the mind of the audience member.

This has ramifications for every theme explored during the course of the film. For example, halfway through, we suddenly cut to a punishing montage of Sagawa's brother subjecting himself to various forms of S&M, including thrashing around in barbed wire, stabbing himself with kitchen knives, and setting off fireworks close to his skin. Then we listen in as the brother tells Sagawa of his fetish for pain for the first time. For me, this was like a moment of revelation, an intimate moment where both the brothers and ourselves can reflect on their mutual history of perversion and its possible causes. But for Japanese viewers, was it more like reality TV sensationalism, where one protagonist and the camera crew conspire to "set up" a confrontation? The famous decadent now faced by the irony that his brother is also into "that stuff"?

It is not enough to say the viewer can learn through watching the film; the perspective from which they first start viewing colours the whole experience. Or to put it another way: each viewer learns, but learns something different, according to their own ignorance from the outset. An American watching Uprising might take it as read that this is an accurate portrait of racial tension in the UK; that's their starting point from which they "learn" the resultant details. But if the starting point is dubious, where does that leave the "learning" that the viewer has achieved? Perhaps those critics who doubted the documentary were right, and one should rather lean towards essay films or open polemic. But even polemic is a personal argument based on facts. McQueen's film is based on myths. Perhaps we should coin a new term for such a film; an atac-umentary, perhaps? Where only one's feeling and anger constitutes truth? Maybe we should take Donald Trump's approach and be wary of "fake news" and read around the story next time we watch a film? Or maybe we should take Godard's maxim, "A film is a documentary of its actors" and turn it on its head: "A documentary is a fiction of real people."

Where Have I Seen That Before?

Whatever you do in life, it's a sure bet someone has done it before you. This is even more true in cinema. Film history is full of celebrated scenes or bits of virtuoso genius, and yet you can almost always find a precedent, a similar moment in a long-forgotten movie that tried the same trick but somehow the idea didn't lodge in the audience's brain.

Take the famous cut in Kubrick's 2001 (1968) from a jawbone spinning in the air to a spaceship orbiting around the earth. The bone represented the first time Man had taken up a weapon to kill and therefore assert his dominance over other animals; the satellite – actually a floating nuclear bomb – represents the end result of that weapons technology, Man's now ultimate power over the whole of Creation. One cut compacts and reflects on the whole of human history. But let's look back at Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944), and right there in the opening prologue, as Esmond Knight's dulcet tones take us through a potted history of England, a falcon rises from a knight's arm only, by virtue of editing, to descend as a Spitfire, engaged in battle. Again, the idea is to compress a whole epoch of history, forcing the audience to reflect on how those distant medieval times are still close to our cultural present and part of the heritage we were fighting for in that conflict.

I keep stumbling over such examples from throughout movie history. For years, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) struck me as a crucial touchstone in the development of film form. In every scene, every shot even, there is another brilliant innovation in how to make the audience feel the sense of the uncanny: shadows moving independently of those that cast them (reused in Coppola's adaptation of Dracula), sprites reflected in water below a bare riverbank, the swinging of a gravedigger's arms in reverse, characters walking back and around the camera, disorienting the viewer's sense of space. The most notorious of these effects comes when the protagonist appears to be buried alive, his trance-like face staring out of a tiny glass aperture in the coffin lid. We see from his point of view – the perspective of a corpse – faces peering down at him, tree tops passing as he's carried to the cemetery... Surely one of the most inspired sequences in history? But in the very same year, a Hollywood romance was pulling off the same trick, with similar spiritual overtones. In his romantic adaptation of A Farewell To Arms, Frank Borzage elects to show wounded soldier, Gary Cooper, being taken into a Milan hospital from his point of view, looking upwards from the stretcher. The religious frescoes and soaring domes above him give the hospital a cathedral-like air, which in turn seems to symbolise the soul's approach towards death and onwards to heaven...

The most celebrated set piece in Hitchcock's otherwise disappointing Torn Curtain (1966) involves the brutal execution of an East German spy. But yet again, Gary Cooper got there first! In the Hitchcock film, Paul Newman's clumsy US agent and a female accomplice take several minutes over trying to disable their pesky opponent; they variously try to stab him, strangle him, beat him, kneecap him, and than haul him over to an oven to gas him. Hitchcock wanted to show that killing a man is no easy task, and that perhaps movie violence up that point was too clean. But arch rival, Fritz Lang, had got there before him, in one of his lesser known thrillers, Cloak and Dagger (1946). Here, another US agent is forced into murder at close quarters; the fight scene lasts almost two minutes, and during that time, Gary Cooper's face is clawed, with great gashes appearing down his cheeks, there's karate chops to the Adam's apple, and Cooper finishes the job by stamping hard on his opponent's ribs. There's a realism to this violence which, even for a modern audience, is genuinely unsettling, and this may have something to do with the fact that many of the moves on display were based on combat techniques American agents were trained in at the time.

Sometimes a visual idea can carry across several movies and directors. In 1968, Fellini made Toby Dammit, a much admired Edgar Allan Poe adaptation as part of portmanteau horror film, Spirits of the Dead. Its most memorable image – among many – was that of the Devil as a grinning young girl playing with a ball. A highly original and chilling concept...except that, two years previously, his fellow Italian, Mario Bava, had also made the central figure of evil a young girl with a ball, in his film, Kill, Baby...Kill! In both cases, the ball bouncing towards the hapless protagonist is an eerie harbinger of the girl's presence or a signifier of their doom. What's intriguing about this particular example is that both directors could have been influenced by a third filmmaker, our old friend, Fritz Lang. In his German classic, M (1931), the death of a little girl at the hands of a child murderer is signified by her little ball bouncing away and landing forlornly in the dirt...

So, next time you're in raptures over a stunning piece of film art or a virtuoso display of a particular director's genius, take care. In five years' time, while you're channel surfing or idly watching an old movie you've barely heard of, you'll see it again. And maybe again...

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Which is Hitchcock's best film? Today, many critics would argue that Vertigo is his greatest achievement, and I wouldn't disagree. But the canon of great films often focuses on the serious and portentous, on humanist masterpieces or virtuosic display. And it's easy to forget that, at the height of his fame, Hitch was invariably seen not as an auteur director, but as a master entertainer. His movies were fun. And if we were to adopt "fun" as our criteria of excellence, then the most admired Hitchcock would surely be North By Northwest.

By the time he made it, Hitchcock was in complete control of his craft and had been dubbed "the master of suspense". For him, film was no longer an art form to be worked at, it was a playground in which to show off. Indeed, the whole movie is really a string of set pieces slung together for the sheer joy of realising them: a scramble over the faces of Mount Rushmore, a chase by crop duster plane, a brutal murder in a crowded cafe. And Hitch was also enjoying crashing together his two cultural identities, playing out the English hijinks of The 39 Steps over the exciting new canvas of modern America, with its Frank Lloyd Wright-style houses, vast open plains, chic hotels and bustling cities. Just as he would meld the traditional narrative of classic Hollywood cinema with the avant garde, in his play with geometric planes and angles, as in the fantastic overhead shot of Cary Grant fleeing the UN building.

There's a wonderful sense throughout of a craftsman letting go and seeing where his fancy takes him. That other great thriller director, Fritz Lang, did much the same thing with Ministry of Fear (1944). Apparently, Lang didn't much care for the material, and that may have been a blessing in disguise, because instead of presenting a realistic tale of espionage, he launches into a series of dark, macabre vignettes – a village fete eerily held at night, a cryptic fortune teller, a blind man jumping from a train during an air raid, a creepy séance where a shot rings out – all tinged with a blackly comic sense of humour.

There's a similar joi d'esprit in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. By this point in his career, Cronenberg had proved his chops as an original auteur, and was essaying tricky adaptations of frankly unadaptable works – Naked Lunch, Crash. Formally impressive though these films were, they were rather sombre and cold. ExistenZ, by contrast, feels like the work of a first-time director; it's breezy, youthful and narratively carefree. It revels in the opportunities opened up by its videogame scenario, allowing it to jettison physical and psychological cause-and-effect; one minute its protagonists feel the need to have sex, simply because that's where the game is taking them, the next they're working in a factory filleting fish/game control hybrids, the next shooting waiters in a Chinese restaurant with a teeth gun! It's all gloriously loopy.

These films all convey the sheer joy of filmmaking. And no movie does that better than Mad Max II: The Road Warrior (1981). George Miller's crash 'n' burn classic is shot through with home-made, make-it-up-as-we-go-along indie energy; as the myriad of vehicles speed after that tanker at the end, you can almost hear the assistant director shouting "Faster! Faster!" through a loudspeaker and sense the sheer fun the cast of extras are having, blasting across the desert. Miller and his cinematographer have a ball, coming up with every camera angle they can think of, to show off their vehicular ballet. And what vehicles! A punk artist's phantasmagoria, a petrol head's wet dream, of power, speed and aggression. I once visited Silverton, the bush town in Australia where it was filmed, and one of these cars still stands parked outside the local pub, others are piled up in a warehouse on the other side of the red sand square. You can feel the love put into each and every one of them.

It's these films, and not the great classics that appear on top ten lists, that make you wanna pick up a camera, go out and make a movie. But North By Northwest marked the end of an era. Soon afterwards, Hitch learned he was the subject of much admiration in France, that he was considered a major artist. His films subtly changed tone; they reached for darker, more adult themes.

But it never looked like he was having so much fun.

Four sentimental Landmarks; or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Abandon Film Culture

"Cinema is dead; long live cinema." Don't you just hate it when people say crap like that? But there was a lot of it about in the mid-90s, when I was coming of age as a cinephile and film was celebrating its 100^th anniversary. Just as I was gorging on all the delights the repertory houses and art cinemas of London had to offer, renowned critics and film writers, like David Thomson, Gilbert Adair and Susan Sontag, were calling time on the silver screen, saying its best days were way behind it, in the 60s and 70s, and that the party was over. Thomson even described it as a "funerary art". But stimulated by the works of Kiarostami, Kitano, Hou H'siao-Hsien, and the comeback of such veterans as Altman and Rivette, I refused to accept this pessimistic outlook and was encouraged by the bombastic arguments made against it by Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his books Movie Wars and Movie Mutations, both of which acted like a clarion call to a new generation of writers to speak up for a new generation of films and filmmakers. For us, the old cinephilia of the Nouvelle Vague and Movie magazine may well be dead, but cinema was still going, and had merely transferred its centre of gravity, from the West – America and Europe – to Asia – to China, Japan, Taiwan and Iran.

This belief in a new cinema sustained me for about 20 years. But recently, I have lost the faith. And I've found myself indulging in the same weary, mournful lament for film that infuriated me all those years ago. I find myself watching less and less new films each year, and of those that I do watch, few fill me with the fascination and excitement I used to feel. What happened? Where did my enthusiasm burn out? Pondering this, I came up with four sentimental landmarks, all of them from the early 2010s, that have come to symbolise for me the end of an era and the beginning of a decline. They are entirely personal and probably very silly, but I present them as a way for the reader to reflect on their own relationship with contemporary film.

a) The death of Abbas Kiarostami. For nearly three decades, the Iranian director had felt like the crown prince of world cinema. A smooth, gentlemanly elder statesman, whose reinvention of neo-realist and arthouse conventions emanated from an excitingly exotic new culture (at least for western filmgoers), Islamic Iran. He, together with Hou Hsiao-Hsien, became the filmmaker of our generation, in the same way the young Turks of the 60s had Godard, those of the 70s had Fassbinder. He became the aesthetic benchmark, the "shock of the new" for contemporary formalists to gather inspiration from, the forebear of a regeneration in Asian cinema. When he died in 2016, it felt like the loss not just of a great artist, but of a whole momentum in filmmaking.

b) The Turin Horse (2011). The European cinema, whose end Thomson and Sontag had so lamented back in the 90s, rumbled onto into the new century, mostly kept alive by the French old guard – Rivette, Rohmer – and a handful of other veterans. Among them was the Hungarian Bela Tarr, and it is his final film which feels like a full stop to the whole shebang. Quite literally. It has that haughty grandeur of an artistic statement – an attitude now somewhat frowned upon as evidence of masculine auteur arrogance – but its focus is narrow – the dreary life of an old man and a younger woman in a bare shack on a wind-blasted heath. As the film progresses, everything reduces: the amount of food on the table, the interaction, the conversation, the light... Till there is no sound, no dialogue, no image. Just blackness. The end. Full stop. Like the last inky blot on a white page. It's as if European cinema has shut up shop – there's nothing more to say, nowhere else to go. And certainly, no film since has produced anything like such a confident statement on the human condition. Film culture now prizes the modest, the experimental, the tentative, the respecting of other values and perspectives, over the grand declarations of the Great Author. But at what cost?

c) The Tree of Life (2011). In the same year, Terrence Malick went mad. Another mighty auteur, his irregular contributions to cinema were so sparse that they used to generate a mania amongst cinephiles when they appeared. But The Tree of Life divided opinion; many of his disciples were shocked by the looseness of the narrative, the seemingly gauche and awkward use of whispered voiceovers – "Who are we? What is love?" – the relentless barrage of pretty pictures that resembled a montage from a luxury car advert. Others argued that Malick had discovered a new form for his ideas, was breaking free from genre, and finding the aesthetic he had always been reaching towards. The reason I include it here is because its premiere marked the last time I can remember people getting excited over a film because of its nature as a film. How it operated as a work of art. As opposed to discussing its political inclinations or the race and gender of those who made it. As such, it represents the end of aesthetic delight in cinema, and of criteria of judgement based on artistic quality, and the encroachment of a narrow appraisal of films according to their ideological worth.

d) Locke (2013). And this new ideology – crudely summed up in the word "woke" – has begun to distort not only our judgment but also our emotional response to film. Steven Knight's Locke is as virtuosic and ambitious as the Malick and Bela Tarr films, only in a much quieter register. The action is entirely centred around one man driving down the motorway to London through the night. Actor Tom Hardy has to carry the whole narrative, with the rest of the cast only present as voices on the other end of his mobile phone. The storyline is deliberately low key – he is a building contractor, forced to leave the construction site at a critical moment to attend the birth of his illegitimate child, all the while managing the operation remotely while dealing with the domestic fallout of his infidelity. Over the course of 80 minutes, we watch an ordinary everyman trying to retain his integrity as a professional and as a husband.

However, this was the response from Guardian critic, Simran Hans, who ironically was generally positive towards the film: "I like to think of Ivan Locke as more of an antihero...an unlikeable, emotionally repressed modern man." She then quotes another critic, Ashley Clarke, who sees it as a study in "absurdly intransigent, peculiarly maudlin British masculinity". One wonders if Locke would be met with such hostility if he were female or from a different racial background. A portrait of modern, everyday heroism gets turned on its head; sure, Locke is far from perfect, but since when was any hero or protagonist perfect except in fairy tales? But now the web of ideological and political dogma is laid over the work, and our interaction with the full and rounded human being that Knight and Hardy create transforms into a crude and derisive summation of how any white male might act in that situation. The individual who represents the whole audience is lost, only the caricature of social groups remains. I can't help feeling that Locke could never get made now; he was cinema's last hero, its last frontiersman.

Remembrance Of Cinema Past

I remember...

..first going to the cinema when I was five years old, to see Star Wars at the Nottingham Odeon, and feeling a kind of vertigo, as if I was staring through a window into another universe.

..going to see Close Encounters Of The Third Kind a few months later, and my dad afterwards remarking how much he'd liked it "because the aliens were friendly for once" – a remark I now recognise as my first exposure to film criticism.

..begging my parents to take me to see a documentary on the Bermuda Triangle at the crappy bomb shelter that passed for the Mansfield ABC, and watching it with earnest seriousness, while they and the other ten people in the auditorium sighed with boredom.

..enjoying a rare school visit to the pictures after our group won an award, and laughing and cheering along to the now despised Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and experiencing that "rollercoaster ride" that Hollywood always promises with blockbusters, both literally and metaphorically, in the climactic scene.

..walking out of a screening of Scorsese's Mean Streets at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds – an old terrace house wonderfully converted into a bargain basement flea pit – because it wasn't gangstery enough.

..having to run out of the same cinema months later while watching The Exorcist – not because I was too scared, but because the injection scene made me feel physically ill – and being comforted by the elderly usherette.

..a man turning to me at the end of Michael Mann's Heat and asking me what I thought, babbling about how, the first time he'd seen it, complete strangers had been excitedly chattering to each other about it in the lobby for ages afterwards.

..how, by contrast, the audience at The Other Cinema, having all stayed till the end of the credits, rose unsteadily to their feet and gazed at each other in stunned silence after David Lynch's Lost Highway.

..being blown away by a 70mm print of Hitchcock's Vertigo, only for the man in front of me to mumble to his partner, "Well, that was a bit boring."

..the projectionist and the usher staring at me in fascination when I was the only person to turn up to a screening at the BFI.

..a woman two rows in front of me screaming and jumping out of her seat at the last act of Delphine Seyrig's downtrodden housewife in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels.

..almost spilling Coke over myself when, after being lulled into a half-nap by the slow pace of Albert Serra's Story Of My Death, I jumped when Casanova suddenly smashed his head through a window pane while vigorously having sex with a school girl.

..watching Les Enfants Du Paradis on an outdoor screen in the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, only for it to start raining at the exact same time as it does in the movie, and everyone bolting for the arcades while a hardy few of us remained, enjoying life imitating art.

..sitting in the courtyard of the Bologna cinematheque watching the original Stella Dallas in the flickering light of an original carbon arc lamp projector.

..going to watch Rush Hour at a multiplex in Zimbabwe and hearing the audience cheer Chris Tucker and not Jackie Chan.

..settling down in my brother's car to watch a drive-in movie in the Australian Outback.

..the audience quietly giggling then breaking out into belly laughs at the awkward portrayal of English life in Woody Allen's Match Point.

..the spontaneous groans and gasps of delight when a very naked Viggo Mortensen fought for his life in that bath house in Eastern Promises.

Next month, the cinemas are reopening. I hope these memories whet your appetite and remind you of the unique experience of watching films in a movie theatre, and that we will all have many more such experiences to come.

Critics Be Damned

Can a film be critic-proof?

By which I mean, can a film be found wanting when judged by the usual criteria – quality of script, direction, acting, production design, concept – and yet still exert a powerful charm over its audience, one that eventually leads to it being dubbed a classic? Consider King Kong and The Wizard of Oz. Neither could be said to be terribly original in form or groundbreaking in terms of cinematic art. Kong's narrative creaks along for half an hour before sputtering into life, and even then the dialogue is uninspired and the acting less so. While Oz was a resounding flop on its release and follows much the same format as any other musical of its era. And yet, by some weird alchemy, both films have become touchstones of cinema fantasy, the childhood dreams of western culture ever since.

Cinema history is littered with "popular classics" which, on closer inspection, offer up little that is radically different from other mainstream films of the time, but which somehow captured the zeitgeist and became iconic. Think of Casablanca, The Graduate, Blade Runner, Dirty Dancing... There was nothing new under the sun here, but audiences seemed to feel these films summed up or expressed their concerns in a way that has often baffled viewers from older or younger generations.

Then there's comedy and horror, which present critics with a whole other set of problems. Both involve the irruption into the real, rational, serious world of something chaotic that completely undermines it. Comedy and horror rewrite the rules; they are anarchic by definition. So, how to critique them by the normal conventions of criticism? For surely, to be successfully anarchic, they cannot operate by the same criteria by which we would judge drama; indeed, one assumes they would have to behave not only differently, but in entirely the opposite manner.

Ultimately, the home videos that play out on You've Been Framed – man falls over his dog, someone slips on the ice, cat pulls a daft face – can be as hilarious as the most sophisticated farce. No artistry or skill is required whatsoever, and we laugh just as heartily. So, when it comes to comedy, film criticism has kept to the director-stars, particularly of the silent era like Chaplin and Keaton, because the examination of their work cleaves more closely to that of other directors. Whereas the belly laughs of grossout or zany fratboy comedies, or the madcap characters played by Jim Carrey, completely short-circuit any attempt at analysis. You either find them funny or you don't, and if you do, you'd be hard put to explain why.

Now let's turn to horror. Last week, by chance, I happened to watch two notorious Italian gore-fests in close succession: Lucio Fulci's The Beyond and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. Neither film could be said to be an acting masterclass, the characterisation in both is paper thin, and the dialogue simplistic and bombastic. Neither exhibit the traits we look for in a well-formed narrative, Fulci's movie in particular seeming like a plotless excuse to string together a series of gruesome deaths, especially if they involve eyes being gouged out and heads dissolved in acid. And yet both have stayed with me, in a way more "respectable" films I've seen recently just haven't. Scenes recur before my eyes, images are imprinted on my mind. Is that just because they are relentlessly horrible, and any repellent nastiness is bound to be memorable, in the same way pornographic sex will have a more visceral impact than a more discreet love scene?

Maybe. And yet, if the aim of both films was to fill me with a sense of horror, then they admirably succeeded. The Beyond is nominally about a bayou hotel in the Deep South that has been built – rather carelessly – on one of the seven doorways into Hell. An artist has found the key to opening that doorway, and now that the hotel is reopening after years of lying derelict, he is preparing to help the dead invade the earth and trap the living in the underworld. I say "nominally about" because you get barely any sense of this plotline from the script. Instead, gory violence and unearthly visitations are thrown at the audience willy-nilly, with barely any logic or rationale, with characters behaving nastily, sympathetically or stupidly as the scene demands. There seems to be no reason – logically or in the interests of plot development – why someone gets killed, and even less why they should come back as a vengeful demon.

But it's this very randomness, this complete lack of cause and effect, and the refusal to ground the audience in any rational framework, that lends the film its eerie power. One feels that the "real" world and Hell are merging and becoming one because there seems to be no natural order. At one point, a lost soul from the nether dimensions tries to warn our heroine of her fate should she continue to stay at the hotel; then she screams and runs out of the front door, and the action is replayed twice, the second time in slow motion. No reason is ever given for this. It has the curious effect of wrongfooting the audience; there's the vertiginous feeling that nothing can be taken for granted in this film, that perhaps we, like the protagonists, are already lost in a dimension we don't understand...

"Good" horror films provide reasons, contexts, back stories for the malevolent forces threatening their heroes. They are careful to explain the nature of the threat – often through the good old-fashioned "info dump" where a professor or priest will expound on the nature of vampires or werewolves, for example, and how to kill them. More importantly, they take care to present that threat stylishly or with a consideration of its impact on the audience – hence that old chestnut about only showing the monster fitfully or in the shadows, the better to preserve the mystery. In The Beyond, Fulci throws all that out of the window. The demons of hell appear in strongly lit rooms in comically grotesque make-up; the deaths they inflict are presented with slow-motion delight and buckets of fake blood. Subtlety is not on the menu.

And maybe that's why it works. It's the film's very "cheapness", in the aesthetic sense of the word, that makes it genuinely horrible. At the end, the heroine and her partner blunder out onto the barren plain of Hell, trapped for eternity on what looks like a bumpy grey stage floor with black curtain backdrop, the mounds in the ground representing the half-buried bodies of the deceased, moaning in their despair. A "better" production would have offered a juicier vision of the inferno; this simplistic one haunts the mind.

Cannibal Holocaust is a very different kettle of fish (and monkeys and turtles and snakes...). Infamous for its scenes of animal cruelty and relentless sexual violence, the film is both less gruelling and more disturbing than its reputation. The first surprise is that it's actually rather well made, with excellent cinematography, sharp editing, a beautiful, rich score by Riz Ortolani, and a sense of pace and atmosphere. The second is that it's not the harrowing sexploitation nightmare of repute. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say it's not even a horror film. Instead, it's a work 20 years ahead of its time.

Many people have noted the debt The Blair Witch Project owes to Cannibal Holocaust. Years before Blair Witch made found footage horror a thing, Deodato structures his story around the efforts of a young documentary team who go missing in a forest while trying to capture something terrifying on film. A professor and two guides penetrate the Amazon rainforest in search of them, encounter the cannibal tribes and the bodies of the young reporters, and bargain for the film cans they left behind. Once back in New York, the professor starts watching the unedited footage and discovers what really happened...

And this is where the film delivers its third gut-punch surprise – that the film crew were actually mercenary sensationalists, who deliberately wounded and terrorised the cannibal tribes in order to get more exciting footage and craft a more lurid vision of life in the jungle, and that their murder was a matter of revenge rather than native savagery. As in Heart of Darkness, which Cannibal Holocaust curiously resembles, it is the white man that is the true villain.

This revelation allows us to retrospectively assess what we've just watched and appreciate the clever structure Deodato has given his film. 20 years before highbrow arthouse directors started to play formal games – bifurcating their films into two different but complementary halves, as in Apichatpong's Tropical Malady or Hong's Right Now Wrong Then – Deodato got there first, using the two separate journeys into the rainforest – one by the professor, the other by the film crew – to explore alternative approaches to understanding other cultures. Because the professor and his team approach the tribe with respect, even to the point of taking on their custom of eating meat, they walk away in safety and friendship. We then watch the same geographical odyssey undertaken by the film crew, but this time they refuse to engage with the local people, instead asserting an aggressive and hostile control over them, one that leads to reprisals.

All this makes Cannibal Holocaust sound like something that wouldn't be out of place at a middle-class arthouse venue during a film festival. But rest assured, gore-hounds, it has the same nasty appetite for icky entrails as Fulci's film: a live turtle is beheaded and disembowelled, a monkey has its face chopped off, a foetus is ripped from a woman's belly and buried in mud. And the sexual violence is truly shocking: a naked woman is ritually beaten and violated by a stone weapon for committing adultery, and the young film crew gang-rape one of the local tribeswomen. All of which feels gratuitous and ugly.

But if Deodato didn't include these scenes, would the film still retain its peculiarly fascinating power? Would we still think of it as truly horrible, or would the audience be let off the hook, able to amble home musing on the themes explored, but without being scarred by them viscerally or psychologically? Respectability brings safety. It cushions the viewer in a web of tidy connections, complete with nuances and distinguishable elements of quality, that flatter their intelligence. Crassness, shittiness, ugliness – they assault the sensibility, frustrate, anger and upset us.

Isn't that what horror is supposed to do?

And so I return to my original question – are some films critic-proof? Because, by any stretch of the imagination, and by any stretch of the qualitative spectrum, these two films are not "good". But if they were, would they ever give us such a powerful sense of being lost and abandoned in hell? The individual elements are weak, but the overall impact is immense. And isn't that why we entered the cinema to see them in the first place?

Tales of the Unexpected

What is the peculiar appeal of the Amicus portmanteau horror anthologies?

Made in the 60s and 70s by Hammer's most serious rival studio, these homegrown horror flicks were graced with lurid titles like Dr Terror's House of Horrors and The House That Dripped Blood, and were made up of four or five gruesome little tales, playing with the classic standards of the genre – vampires, werewolves, witches and, er, killer plants. Each tale was presented within an overarching narrative in which a sinister figure – a crypt keeper, a fairground hustler – would assemble some unwitting victims who would become the protagonists of each story, before their ultimate fate – death and/or hell – was revealed.

The films were made cheaply, and subtlety – unlike blood – was not on the menu. Each opens with one of the time-honoured spine chillers from the classical music archive – Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor – or a magisterial score designed to ape them. And these play out over opening shots of Victorian graveyards or derelict tombs with an appropriately Gothic font for the credits. Sometimes the effect can be wonderfully comic, as in The Vault Of Horror, when the entire credit sequence is made up of men calmly entering a lift, one floor at a time, as it descends through a towerblock, counterpointed by a ludicrously bombastic score from Douglas Gamley that suggests this is the most terrifying ordeal they could possibly endure!

All the stalwarts of British horror are present and correct: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, and the ubiquitous Ian Hendry. Indeed, the producers often sacrificed expense elsewhere to lure major stars and character actors into the fray; so Ralph Richardson turns up in the same movie as Joan Collins, while Burgess Meredith, Jack Palance and Henry Magee all make appearances.

The effects are as pitiful as you would expect, the stories barely long enough to contain any strong characterisation or thematic depth. So far, so predictable. And yet these films endure; in the UK, Second Sight have just released swanky new Blu-Ray editions of two of the series. Why do they remain so popular?

The first clue lies in their source material. Many of the individual tales were lifted or adapted from EC Comics, an American label that specialised in cynical and waspish horror stories, that often came with a nasty twist. Making this an extremely rare instance of a British film studio recognising the value of contemporary pop culture and plundering it for inspiration; though this may be accounted for by the fact that the producers of the series, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, both originally hailed from New York. As such, Amicus imported a new flavour into British horror that ran counter to the florid Gothic romanticism of Hammer.

But there was something else about the EC franchise which was different; its stories were set in the present day. There was no room here for hansom carriages and Victorian parlour maids; these narratives took place in modern homes, towerblocks, suburbs, with all the bric-a-brac of 20^th century living, like elevators, motor cars, handguns, bistros, package holidays to Europe. And it's this shift wherein lies what I think is the peculiar appeal of these movies.

They update the British horror film to an entirely new milieu, closer to that of the spectator, but crucially, they in no way modernise the genre. Because, despite all the artefacts of contemporary life being present and correct, the stories still don't feel modern. Instead, they retain the melodramatic flourish of much Gothic fiction. They remain estranged from ordinary life. The same approaches to visual style, colour, framing, are used as in the Gothic film, and applied to a merely cosmetic surface of the everyday world. The result is a never-never land of present-day England, full of stereotypically rolling countryside, stereotypically sniffy posh restaurants, stereotypically dreary satellite towns... Where each character is drawn with broad brush strokes and is immediately recognisable. And where there's an economy in the storytelling so that one can grasp the situation in hand within minutes. It's all immensely appealing, and leaves the viewer with the curious impression that these stories are part of a long-standing tradition of tales of the macabre whose conventions they follow admirably; when, in fact, Amicus was creating something brand new.

Experience Is Everything

Theo Angelopoulos' The Hunters (1977) is about a group of middle-class men on a hunting trip who find the body of a Communist rebel in the mountains – only, the civil war that engulfed Greece in the 1940s has been over for nearly three decades. In the ensuing investigation, each of the men and their wives open up about their pasts and their possible relationship to the mysterious corpse. The whole thing is a straightforward and none-too-subtle allegory of recent Greek history, in which the hunting party represents the Generals, Papadopolous, and their assorted cronies, and the corpse represents the Leftism that was annihilated and then swept under the carpet by successive regimes, only for its influence to remain...

What interests me is Angelopoulos' treatment of this material.

I've been reading Adrian Martin's book Mise-en-scene and Film Style recently, which begins as a history of the way mise-en-scene has been defined by critics. At first, it was a term lifted from theatre, meaning literally "what is on stage", and was applied to cinematic elements like sets, lighting, actors' movements in relation to each other, the things a director could control over and above the script and therefore, so the writers argued, the means by which directors could add their own meaning. But as time went on, the term seemed more and more inadequate. What about the relationship between the elements in a single shot and the editing across a scene – what the French call decoupage? And what about the importance of sound – surely that has a bearing on one's reaction to what is on screen?

Martin agrees with those critics that call for a wider and deeper understanding of what mise-en-scene is, arguing that even digital trickery and TV graphics could be considered as possible elements. He also puts the case for distinguishing different types of mise-en-scene; for example, "social mise-en-scene" is when those rituals of polite society or state business – like the family evening meal or a court case – are used by a director as architecture to build suspense or embarrassment or whatever the scene requires, the audience's familiarity with the codes of conduct on display supplying the filmmaker with a useful aesthetic shorthand.

But I think Martin misses a trick here. He fails to define what I would call experiential mise-en-scene. Where the director's strategy is not to provide a more complex meaning in terms of theme or narrative, but to make that meaning felt through how the audience experiences the scene. Angelopoulos, for example, does not construct a continuous cause-and-effect narrative with psychologically defined characters. Instead, he converts his subject matter into a kind of Brechtian pageant, a modern dance, in which each element is heavily symbolic and the characters move as if to an inner music, rather than for any discernible motive. At one point in The Hunters, his protagonists break out into a patriotic, rabble-rousing song celebrating the pillars of the establishment: religion, family, salary and state. Suddenly, they break off and look outwards to a lake and see, strewn across the water, hundreds of tiny rowboats each carrying a bright red flag. And carried to them on the wind is the mournful song of the sailors – a love song for one who is lost. The point is almost embarrassingly simple: the self-satisfaction and narrow-mindedness of the Right faced with the ongoing movement of the Left, mourning their dead but still bonded together in unity.

As a complex portrait of political reality, it would be risible; but as an expression of ideological sentiment, it's extraordinarily beautiful and moving. And whereas it lacks intellectual heft, it is aesthetically daring, transporting the audience between different modes of representation – the literal to the symbolic – within the same frame. In Ulysses Gaze (1995), the protagonist, played by Harvey Keitel, finds himself at a New Year's Eve dance in the 1940s. Suddenly, the dancers part to reveal two heavies who have come to escort one of the partygoers to prison – a Leftist insurgent. But they don't march him outside; instead, the three men engage in a slow dance to the door, shuffling left to right in a swaying, awkward rhythm. After they've gone, the dancers regroup, and the party continues. But something has changed – not just the atmosphere, but the time; miraculously, we have moved forward in years. In fact, the whole scene is meant to represent a five-year period between 1945 and 1950, but all orchestrated into one shot. Again, the meaning is straightforward, but the sensation of watching it is anything but, with different times, spaces, choreographies, and political fears merging into and commentating on each other.

There are many different types of experiential mise-en-scene, and I would argue one of its foremost practitioners is Jerzy Skolimowski. Take The Shout (1978), based on a short story by Robert Graves, a kind of weird chiller in which a stranger who claims to have magic Aboriginal powers imposes himself on a couple and tears their domesticity apart. The narrative is relatively straightforward and sets up the foundations for many themes to be explored: masculine rivalry, reason versus superstition, madness versus sanity, etc. But whereas in most horror tales of this kind, the themes get hashed out in the dialogue at some point, Skolimowski dials down on the chat and instead indulges in a whole series of audiovisual tactics, designed not so much to enlighten the audience, as to unsettle them. His mise-en-scene is "spiky". The arms of total strangers suddenly poke into shot from around a wall, aiming guns or letting the air out of bicycle tyres. There are splashes of primary colours which clash across edits into different scenes; plays with sound, where the thud of a cobbler's hammer morphs into the thump of a stone on a man's head; the unexplained antics of a crowd watching cricket, with one man upending his wheelchair by a tree. Skolimowski even plays with social mise-en-scene too, but in the most unexpected ways; at one point, a man enters a kitchen to find his wife licking her lover's hand like a supine dog, only for the husband to carry on a conversation with very English politeness. All this adds nothing to the ostensible meaning of the film, but its cumulative impact on the audience is huge, leaving an after-effect when the film is over that is arguably as powerful an influence on people's thoughts as a more articulate narrative.

The only problem with experiential mise-en-scene is that it leaves the director open to ill-considered charges of simplicity, both in the narrative treatment and the intellectual weight of the film. It's noticeable, for example, that The Shout is relatively ignored in Skolimowski's output and denigrated in comparison to his 60s work in Poland, which was more overtly experimental both in form and content. Similarly, Angelopoulos' gambit of transforming socio-political currents into symbolic pageant comes with its pitfalls; imagine if in the future a filmmaker who was sympathetic to the Right were to present a scene like the one on the lake described earlier, but the boats were no longer sporting the flag of Communism, but that of another downtrodden and repressed movement, Trump's supporters, and the Texan banner was multiplied a hundred times across the water to the horizon... Would the scene still be beautiful and moving, or would it suddenly strike one as quasi-fascistic, a Riefenstahlesque wet dream of defiant unity?

Perhaps context is everything. But I can't help feeling we live in an era where context has become all; who is in front of and behind the camera, the film's politics, and whether it ticks all the right boxes regarding diversity and modern correctness, seem to make up the entire range of the conversation. In such an atmosphere, judgement of mise-en-scene, whether classical, social or experiential, seems to have shrivelled in importance. Maybe Angelopoulos' and Skolimowski's work will be even further misunderstood and marginalised. But for those who care to go looking for it, it will still deliver and be found troubling, challenging and exhilarating – in short, an experience.

Actor As Special Effect

The film opens on a long shot of a plain. The American midwest. A solitary man walks down a deserted road in complete silence. His erect gait matches the slim telegraph poles lining the highway. His arms swing loosely as he approaches the camera. He comes upon a wayside cafe and looks over it like an astronaut inspecting a new alien world...

The actor is Henry Fonda and the film is John Ford's adaptation of The Grapes Of Wrath. And what strikes me most about the scene, more than its painterly beauty and its eerie hush, is Fonda's body language. Nobody walks in movies like Henry Fonda, nobody watches like Fonda. He has the aura of a man who is constantly regarding the world anew, reassessing it, letting it come to him in the moment. We discover that he is an ex-con just out of prison and that he's making his way by foot back home to the family farmstead. This, then, is a world he knows; but he still approaches it as if for the first time, not by any means with the innocence of a child, but with the wary confidence of a man who, despite his mature years, understands that society is something that needs to be endlessly re-negotiated.

It's this quality in Fonda that has perhaps led to him being cast again and again in the roles of leader or diplomat or honest-minded Joe. It's in the way he looks at people: gauging them, judging them, seeing them – like that wayside cafe – as if for the first time, and so without prejudice.

This also gives him the capacity to express one of the hardest things for any actor to convey: surprise. We never feel with Fonda that he knows the script or characters beforehand; they seem to come to him rather than him forming part of their pattern. Michelangelo Antonioni found a similar quality in Monica Vitti in the four films they made together in the early '60s. Throughout these works, Vitti is like a child, open to the sun, waves, warmth, affection, and the purely sensual, but who can be suddenly crushed by a hostile glance or unexpected coldness, and crumple up like a shrivelled flower. It was said by some that she was not a great actress, but a beautiful one, who served Antonioni's themes and visual palette. But I think this is a terrible injustice which arises from a misunderstanding of the relationship between director and performer, and that between the performer and the film they're in.

Among the many cliches spewed out by people who know nothing about film acting is that "so-and-so always plays themselves" or that the measure of a great actor is that they can inhabit many different roles and never seem the same twice. This, of course, completely elides the power of the star system, on which much of cinema's early success was based – audiences turning up to watch performers precisely because of the qualities they always brought to the screen – while positing the fatuous idea that any actor could ever get away with playing their day-to-day self and bore the punters to death. But more importantly, it suggests a simple equation of script-casting-performance that deprives us of a more conceptual understanding of how film works.

Because a director is not just looking for a good actor, but the right actor for the role. We can all understand that – despite the fact they're both fantastic performers, most people would pick Ralph Richardson as an eccentric crypt keeper over Michael Caine any day of the week. But what if we extend that idea of "rightness for the role" to the entire conceptual framework of the film? Antonioni didn't just choose Vitti because of her looks or her particular thespian skills, but because of her very nature, the way she inhabited the screen. His films dealt with the increasing alienation of modern life, but they needed a central protagonist whose simultaneous spontaneity and fragility conflicted with it and threw it into relief. As such, Vitti was the perfect actress for him, and therefore her performances in those films are essential. The question of whether she was good in anything else, or was adaptable, is completely immaterial; in those films, she was astonishing, and the right choice, because she was the only choice, the only actor who could work with Antonioni's material to produce that effect.

What if this impression, this attitude, of an actor carries over work by different directors? I've argued this with Henry Fonda; it's also true of Julie Christie. In the post-war period, a new subject seemed to preoccupy European arthouse directors: the modern woman. Or, more accurately, the psychology of the modern woman, and by proxy, that of the society she lives in. Rossellini started the trend, watching Ingrid Bergman struggling in an inert marriage on a remote island in Stromboli. Then Harriet Andersson stared into the camera, challenging the audience, in Bergman's Summer With Monika. Vitti and Antonioni took up the baton, and then it was passed to Christie, who, in a series of performances across UK and US films in the '60s and '70s, seemed to represent the new zeitgeist. Again, this was not just because she was a star and a capable actress; there was more to it than that.

Like Vitti, she was beautiful, but it's the nature of her beauty that is important. (One problem in a post-feminist, politically correct society is positing the notion that beauty, let alone a type of beauty, can be an important factor in assessing art.) Christie has a girl-next-door prettiness that has just spilled over into beauty; and yet her astonishing blue eyes reveal depths of pain and insecurity. This superficial aspect interlinks with her gifts as an actor; Christie is very natural and unaffected, we feel like we could meet her in the street, but she is not afraid to show great vulnerability. The other characters mark her; she never dominates. There are few great actors in the history of cinema who are so strong in their weakness.

Several directors fed off this astonishing range of attributes – Roeg in Don't Look Now, Altman in McCabe and Mrs Miller, Hal Ashby in Shampoo – to build up an inadvertent mosaic of the modern woman. But perhaps no director captured Christie quite so well as Richard Lester in Petulia, where she plays a young wife escaping the abuse of her wealthy husband by starting an affair with a middle-aged doctor. But she's a "kook", desperately trying to kickstart the affair with mad stunts, like gifting the doctor a stolen tuba in the middle of the night. Psychologically, she's messed up and strung out, wanting to love, but stunted and hemmed in at every turn. In short, she's almost a living avatar for the times she's in, hungry for change, but limited by her imagination and grasping at dreams. In the last shot, as the anaesthetist's mask is lowered onto her face and she reaches out for a comforting hand, the haunted look in her eyes feels like a cry of despair for an entire generation.

What I'm trying to get at here is not that these actors are stars, who bring a certain attractive quality or essence to the screen, or who become synonymous with an era because they are so popular, but that their nature as a performer is a working component of the film. That none of the works discussed so far would have been the same with an equally capable actor in the role; the actor's essence is the film, or at least an integral part of its effect.

There is one actor who came to understand this: Marlon Brando. Which is ironic, given that he is often held up as the crown prince of a whole different approach to movie acting – the Method – where a performer searches inside themselves and their inner emotions to find the psychological truth of a character. Conventional wisdom has it that his finest performances on screen came in that early part of his career which coincided with the Method – A Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront – and that he declined in the 70s.

I couldn't disagree more. Rather, I feel that he came to reject an approach to acting that was thoroughly introverted, in favour of one that opened up the actor to the whole aesthetic trajectory and pattern of the film. Let me give a simple example. The scene in Apocalypse Now when Willard finally secures an interview with Kurtz. Brando had a great deal to do with how the scene was constructed; he sits in semi-darkness, the great dome of his shaven head appearing like the crescent of a waxing-and-waning planet as he squeezes droplets of water onto it from a sponge. He speaks in a mumbling sotto voce. In an earlier scene, he had babbled about gardenias, and it's said much of his dialogue was cut because it was incoherent. Many critics thought his performance indulgent; even Francis Ford Coppola himself thought Brando was taking the piss. But they were wrong. In fact, it seems to me, Brando had thought very carefully about the role. Kurtz, in the novel Heart of Darkness, is not really a three-dimensional character; he's a voice, an articulation of madness and imperial arrogance, a suggestion of horror every bit as opaque and unformed as anything in Lovecraft. So Brando approached him as an effect, choosing to focus on his impact on those around him, rather than trying to construct a psychology that was unknowable anyway.

He'd done something similar a couple of years before in Arthur Penn's western, The Missouri Breaks. Here, he played a hired assassin who, in order to do his job, needed to keep his identity secret. So he played with assuming different identities. Brando revelled in the opportunities this gave him, donning all kinds of outrageous accents and even dressing up as a woman in the final showdown. Again, critics felt this was showing off, but in fact, it was a brilliant analysis by one actor of another; the thespian, used to picking up and discarding personas, revealing the mindset of a killer, whose delight in his own playfulness only exposes the lack of an integral, binding personality within. Like Kurtz, he is a nullity, a void. But Brando could not have achieved this without breaking through conventional performance codes, by conceiving of his character in abstract, rather than psychological, terms.

Perhaps it's time criticism looked at film acting anew. The star system, the Method, and classical stage training are all well recognised and have been thoroughly dissected. But I would argue this new approach to assessing the actor's contribution gives a greater idea of how their performance works in tandem with the director's concept and the other components of the film.

I can picture Henry Fonda musing on it now...

Ten Little Known Debut Movies

Hi and welcome to my new blog, which I'm starting in the midst of England's second COVID lockdown, in November 2020. It'll be a rambling assortment of reviews, views, lists and general reflections on cinema old and new - though generally old because I've gone off new movies lately. There's so little worth watching, isn't there? I hope you find something here that will stimulate your own viewing and open up new pathways into cinema. In that spirit, I'm kicking things off by presenting an unpublished article I wrote for the website, A Taste Of Cinema, that talks about debut films and first-time directors. A suitable place to start, no?

"Firsts" are hardly ever firsts, really. When people talk of something happening for the first time in film, there's usually always an antecedent, a previous example that's been lost in the mists of time. Take Kubrick's famous cut from a bone spinning in the air to a spaceship drifting through space; Michael Powell had been there and done that, in the prologue to A Canterbury Tale, where a hawk wheeling in the sky is transformed by edit into a diving Spitfire. Similarly, debut films are often no such thing; before a director turns out their first fiction feature, they've often served an apprenticeship of shorts, TV work, avant garde experimentalism, you name it. And yet, there remains something special about the debut, because it's the first long-form statement of a director's personality and intent, and it marks the advent of a new voice in the world of cinema releases. The following films are relatively little known, but are all stunning examples of major directors finding that voice straight away.

Maborosi

Koreeda Hirokazu was a successful TV documentarist in the lead-up to making Maborosi, and it shows in his portrait of a remote seaside village, where narrative compulsion is abandoned in favour of a stream of languidly-paced vignettes that convey the reality of small-town life. A young widow has ended up in this village, looking to build a new life with a second husband, but she is haunted by the question of why her first partner took his own life. Koreeda avoids the usual dramatic cliches associated with such material – the potential jealousy of her new husband, their respective children not accepting their new step-parents – and instead builds a portrait of understanding and compassion sadly rare in Western cinema. Instead, he illuminates the widow's anguish through purely cinematic means, most particularly the use of light; this is a dark film where the main character, often dressed in black, appears like an angel of death, engulfed in shadow or bathed in twilight, only for the screen to be suddenly shot through with the warming rays of the sun.

Goto, Isle of Love

Walerian Borowczyk had also enjoyed a successful career before turning out his first feature – as an animator and one-time collaborator with Chris Marker. And he too turned to lovers in a remote outpost for his debut source material. But there the similarities end. Because there is little realistic in Borowczyk's treatment of anything, unless one counts his fastidious and obsessive interest in the tactility and presence of physical objects. The film takes place on an island in the grip of a mad dictator and focuses on a couple desperate to escape. But the plot seems superfluous; it's the striking imagery that burns itself into one's memory. That, and the strange sense of timelessness that permeates all Borowczyk's work, where the events on screen feel simultaneously immediate and relevant and yet as time-honoured and iconic as the most ancient folk tale.

Les Anges du Peche

Bresson had already made a short in the 1930s before he made Les Anges du Peche in 1943, but he later disowned that slapstick comedy and it remains little seen. Hard to believe anyone could go from that to this serene and beautiful portrait of two women whose lives are brought together in a convent – one a devout young nun, the other accused of murder. Many of Bresson's themes are already present and correct, but they have not yet been yoked to his later austere style; we still have great actors, moving through beautifully lit interiors, performing in consummate style. And yet his delineation of human frailty and self-delusion is as rigorous as we would come to expect, as he carefully contrasts the nun's zeal to save someone she sees as a victim with the earthy pragmatism that "poor unfortunate" truly displays.

Violent Cop

Takeshi Kitano was hugely famous in Japan well before his film career began, and he's arguably still better known there as a comedian and game-show presenter; his move into acting and directing would be rather like Chris Tarrant or Ryan Seacrest suddenly making art movies in the US. And it almost didn't happen – it was only because Kinji Fukasaku couldn't tolerate fitting in shooting around his new star's TV schedule that Kitano took over directing this film. But immediately, Kitano brought a brand new style to the cop thriller. Long takes, deadpan humour, minimal dialogue, brutal violence, all cleanly and coldly edited. For his own performance, he suppressed the zaniness for which he was known and instead cultivated an icy coolness, which would later become his hallmark and lead to him being one of the most recognisable cult figures of the '90s.

Intimate Lighting

Like Violent Cop, Intimate Lighting was something of an accidental debut; Czech director, Ivan Passer, formerly an assistant to Milos Forman, only ended up directing when his friend, screenwriter Jaroslav Papousek, had exhausted all other options and asked him to step in as a favour. Given that unpromising start, it is remarkable how beautiful the film turned out. It's a simple slice-of-life tale of a musician visiting his friend in the sticks in order to appear in a local concert. But this slender narrative is merely a pretext for exploring the world and characters of this rural backwater, which Passer does with elegant wit, whimsy, and wry amusement. Audiences loved it, but the Communist authorities weren't so keen, banning it for almost 20 years. When asked why, Passer explained that what the authorities hated was not that they felt criticised by it, but totally ignored.

The Apple

Samira Makhmalbaf was only 17 when she started shooting The Apple. True, she had the benefit of her acclaimed father Mohsen Makhmalbaf's experience, after he had virtually turned his family into a mini film academy, from which both his wife and Samira's younger sister also "graduated". But even so, her first film is all her own; the approach bears resemblance to Mohsen's work in the way it casts the real-life protagonists of the story in their respective roles on screen, but the sensibility is, if anything, even more compassionate to all the psychologies and points of view involved. Inspired by the true-life case of a couple who locked up their daughters and forbade them to leave the house for 11 years, it ends with the girls emerging into modern-day Tehran and a freeze-frame final shot that is genuinely heart-stopping.

Xiao Wu

Another great portrait of youth by youth came from Chinese director Jia Zhangke, only this time, youth is on the wane and the pickpocket protagonist finds himself taking stock of an adulthood where he already seems to have been left behind by his schoolboy peers. The film follows his developing relationship with a local prostitute, but its greatness lies in the central performance of Hongwei Wang, whose naturalistic style is both eccentric and amusing, and Zhangke's bold and original exploration of the China emerging from Communism and taking its first baby steps into capitalist reform. Indeed, his approach was so influential that it steered independent Chinese film in a completely new direction – revolutionised it, if you will.

The Day A Pig Fell Into The Well

Another great Asian debut from the 90s, this wonderfully named masterpiece crashed out of nowhere into the burgeoning Korean cinema and announced the arrival of the director who would become its most prolific figure. But Hong Sang Soo has always kept himself apart, preferring to work with small crews and miniscule budgets, the better to preserve his independence. And this film couldn't be more different than the blood-and thunder revenge dramas or gangster flicks made by Park Chan-wook and Hong's other Korean counterparts. Instead, it's a naturalistic, moody portrait of four urban professionals caught in the no-man's-land of their early thirties, whose mutual conflicts eventually lead to tragedy. It's more serious than Hong's later work, but his insight into male-female relationships is already acute and it features a classic example of what would become Hong's trademark: scenes of people drinking and arguing!

La Cienaga

There's drinking, arguing, and all sorts of simmering hostilities between the denizens of Lucrecia Martel's debut feature. It focuses on two middle-class families coming to the end of their summer retreat in rural Argentina, but there's precious little gentility on show. Instead, the film reeks of sweat, cheap booze, and sex; there's blaring pop music and ominous, distant gunfire. The adults and children seem to fall over each other, getting in each other's way, when they're not slumped in sun loungers. Passive aggression and casual racism abounds. It all adds up to a remarkably scathing portrait of a whole class, one that has become both pushy and decadent, and remains Martel's most vibrant and attacking film to date.

Honour of the Knights

And finally, as Robert Hughes would put it...the shock of the new. Because for all that most art seems to draw on elements from the past or the artist's previous experience, sometimes a work comes along that just upends all expectations and is so totally original that it forces the viewer to recalibrate their whole response to the medium. Such a film is Honour of the Knights. Its source material couldn't be more familiar: Cervantes' Don Quixote. But Albert Serra removes all the key set pieces and narrative action from the novel and instead concentrates on the in-between bits with Quixote and Sancho out in the wilderness. Little happens – the two dolts variously quarrel, bathe, and experience visions. And yet the essence of the novel is maintained while the film spins a curiously beautiful web of its own, one that is totally unrelatable to any cinematic experience before it. Truly, in every sense, a first film.