Particular, Peculiar: Derek Jarman on Blu-Ray

Derek Jarman’s oeuvre can be a hard sell, but it shouldn't be. It’s slippery, inconsistent, frustrating, sometimes hopelessly dated, opaque, silly and occasionally outright tedious. It is also beautiful, funny, tender, intelligent, ahead of its time and absolutely fascinating. Sometime it’s all of these things at once, taken both microcosmically and as a whole. Lavishly presented by the BFI, Jarman Volume 1: 1976-1986 covers his earliest filmed work through to Caravaggio, along with a plethora of supplementary material including short films and exclusive interviews with many of his collaborators, all presented on Blu-ray for the first time.

The famously queer filmmaker’s early life was marked by an absolute denial of his sexual self - following a humiliating and brutal Catholic education, he buried it under art and education until the age of twenty-two. Rupture eventually came, and proudly so – what would follow was redolent of Cocteau: “In France this vice does not lead me to prison because of the way Cambacérès lived and the longevity of the Code Napoléon. But I will not agree to be tolerated. This damages my love of love and of liberty.” Loudly realised with his first feature film, 1976’s Sebastiane (co-credited, much to Jarman’s chagrin, with Paul Humfress) was the first explicitly homoerotic film to be screened in the UK. This affords it a certain importance, undeniably, but it is often quite a boring watch (on the surface, at least, to a heterosexual male viewer like this writer, who can’t get too much out of the frequent and extremely long shots of toned, tanned men bathing in the nude – this is not a criticism per se, the film was made with a homoerotic intention and, so, a heterosexual male is not the primary audience).

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Sebastiane. Image courtesy of the BFI.

The film becomes more interesting when one considers Jarman’s hostility to the film’s subject, the Third Century martyr, Saint Sebastian, who he once described as “the doolaly Christian who refused a good fuck, gets the arrow he deserved”, asking “Can one feel sorry for this Latin closet case?” It marks the film as a tentative setting out of his stall – unashamedly gay and furious at the abuse, violence and repression he had been subject to as a result of his sexuality. St Sebastian is his former self, a person he could never be again.

Rage courses through these films, a rage that Jarman would say was unleashed by the punk movement – this is most obviously realized by 1978’s Jubilee, as fervently anti-establishment as it is critical of the punk movement itself. Taking place in a dystopian near-future, the punk’s have won but not much seems to have changed but for a further degeneration of societal integration. Oh, and Queen Elizabeth I has travelled through time with the alchemist John Dee and the angel Ariel, to see what it’s all about. Jenny Runacre plays both QEI and one of the punks, Bod, and this dual role, along with QEI’s placid, thoroughly regal, benignly anachronistic presence is as good an emblem as any to the conflict(s) within the film: a love of an old, genteel idea of England set against an admiration for the would-be anarchy of punk and anger at an oppressive/regressive establishment. The punks in the film, led by punk icon Jordan’s superlative turn as Amyl Nitrate and including Adam Ant as Kid and Toyah Wilcox as Mad, generally doss about causing trouble – they test the audience’s patience but we’re on their side, at least eventually, especially following particularly brutal behaviour on the part of the police (you could easily cheer when two policemen are killed, such is their characterisation, presaging the wholly deserved portrayal of the police as Thatcher’s personal army before she’d even made it to No 10).

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Jubilee. Image courtesy of the BFI.

This sympathy withers at the film's close. Head of the world’s media, Cardinal Borgia Ginz (played with outrageously camp relish by Jack Birkett AKA Orlando), courts the punks throughout the film and eventually wins them over into the ultimate sin – selling out. Ginz is an emblem of the pernicious rise of commercialisation that Jarman hated, and the punks are victims just like anyone else, albeit ones we are very disappointed with (would you like some butter with your car insurance?); that he is a cardinal (‘cardinal’) surely no coincidence either. But as Ariel says, “Consider the world’s diversity and worship it. By denying its multiplicity you deny your own true nature. Equality prevails not for the gods’ sake, but for man’s. Men are weak and cannot endure their manifold nature.”

Ariel appears, of course, in Jarman’s next film, The Tempest, an oneiric cut up of Shakespeare’s text that convincingly conveys the sensation of being locked away while a storm or blizzard rages outside. Heathcote Williams’ Prospero quietly menaces, Toyah Wilcox’s Miranda drifts dreamily and Jack Birkett just about steals the show as the frequently fulminating Caliban, eating raw eggs and spitting out lines in his typically campy manner (Christopher Biggins turns up at one point too…). While the original play is arguably dismembered somewhat in its service, the film is among the more successful Shakespeare adaptations you could hope to see, heavy on (Cocteau-esque) atmosphere and fore-fronting the poetry of the text.

Indeed, perhaps Shakespeare needed Jarman as an editor – Prospero’s famous speech from Act 4, Scene 1 of the original now appears as a wholly fitting, climactic knockout:

“…We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

The whole film builds toward this moment, a successful reclaiming of Shakespeare from a British establishment that Jarman would come to vociferously despise over the following decade or so, an antipathy that progressed in parallel with Thatcher’s efforts to hollow out the country.

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The Angelic Conversation. Image courtesy of the BFI.

Shakespeare is central too to Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation (1985) but it is in some ways as unsuccessful as The Tempest is successful, though this impression may simply be a matter of format - it is simply too ponderous to be properly enjoyed in a home cinema context, and is ill-served by some particularly period video techniques. Two men move through gloomy landscapes in a serious of slow-motion Christian/AIDS allegories while Judi Dench periodically intones Shakespeare’s sonnets. There is no doubt that the film was very personal for Jarman and some of the imagery is very striking, but the testudineous pacing makes its seventy-seven minutes an endurance test, at least in your sitting room - a gallery installation feels like a more appropriate setting (the same could be said of Disc One’s In the Shadow of the Sun), or indeed the cinema.

Not so Caravaggio. Opening with the titular figure dying of a fever, the film skips back and forward through the artist’s life, reality twisted by the way that memory afflicts itself. Anachronisms abound (a gold calculator, a linen suit, dinner jackets) in a particularly dank and grimy Rome. There are visual nods to many paintings, not just Caravaggio’s, Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, for one – Jarman the art historian, perhaps. The attention to Caravaggio’s work is not slavish in its reproduction of his paintings (impressive though many of them are), nor are the settings from which he paints quite what we’d expect – Jarman the artist shows us the alchemical leaps that are made from reality to the canvas, the artist as conduit. Nigel Terry’s turn as the brooding artist is impressive and subtler than it might’ve been, given the biography involved and Jarman certainly affords Caravaggio a narrative that both acknowledges and transcends the mad-artist-turned-madder-murderer story to which we are accustomed. It may be Jarman’s most accessible film, but it also seems a perfect fit for Jarman as we know him: an outsider and an insider, a transgressive and a conservative (self-described, presumably with a minuscule ‘c’).

This box set provides an intricate and intriguing detailing of an artist’s development from punky independent to established transgressor. It is not always easy to watch these films, but they are always, intelligent, and more complex than facile viewing sometimes indicates.

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Caravaggio. Image courtesy of the BFI.

Gina Birch of The Raincoats wrote the following of Jarman’s work:

“We now think of film and TV as the way of capturing reality. We are programmed to think of it as ‘real’. But is it more real than the time before we discovered perspective, when there was an honest selectivity about what was considered most important/ Derek’s films introduce us to a different kind of reality, a world of the interior mind – feelings, thoughts and dreams – that impinges on our view of the exterior world.”

One could go further – perhaps his work suggests also that the exterior world impinges on the interior; the subjectivity of our existences blurs the boundary between both states - the interior world may be more important than the exterior, but not solipsistically so. Our own feeling, thoughts and dreams can only ever really be our own, but they blur the boundaries between reality and each one of our inner selves. Derek Jarman’s very particular, peculiar cinema bears that out in a very particular, peculiar and captivating way.

Jarman Volume 1: 1976-1986 is out now on limited edition Blu-ray on BFI. A second volume will be released later in 2018.

Andrew R. Hill

Magician & Surgeon: The Mystery of Picasso

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (Le mystère Picasso, 1956) is, at least in part, a failure but it is an interesting one. Presented here in a lovingly restored form by the ever-admirable Arrow Academy, it is essential viewing for anyone with an interest in 20th Century art, never mind the singular force of nature it seeks to document.

Clouzot’s stall is set out early in the film, a voice intones:

One would die to know what was on Rimbaud’s mind when he wrote ’The Drunken Boat’, or on Mozart’s when he composed his symphony ‘Jupiter’. We’d love to know what secret process guiding the creator through his perilous adventures.

Clouzot doesn’t even get close. Or maybe it’s a red herring? The ‘French Hitchcock’ (a needless Anglophone-centric reduction if ever there was one) has some success in approaching Picasso’s work as an opportunity to build suspense, as was his stock-and-trade. Much of the film consists of specially-prepare canvases reverse-shot, filling the screen while Picasso ‘paints’ using marker pens and special inks on the other side. The ink bleeds through, giving us an unusual sort of animation. This was the first film of Clouzot’s to feature colour, an approach that certainly underlines the jouissance present on/in each canvas. The suspense emerges from the line of questioning most viewers cannot help but ask: where will that line go? What will this form become? What will the background be? When will the next nude or bull or matador or Pierrot turn up?

Shot in nice over three months in 1953, many of the pictures created in the course of the film are recognizable variations of works form the previous few years, typical of Picasso’s ‘late style’ (the body of work created between 1953 and his death in 1973). Of course, there was no one style per se over these twenty years, but it is not too harsh to state that his hitherto constant thrust toward innovation had ebbed by this time. As Cy Twombly once asked in defense of his friend Robert Rauschenberg, “ Do you have any idea how difficult it is to hold the tension over several decades?”

Perhaps the frustrations of this approach could be said to be with Picasso rather than Clouzot. While there is no doubt an appeal to the resultant works Picasso creates, the imposed suspense is rarely satisfied. That said, the suspense is imposed; and maybe that misses the point anyway – in a thriller, the suspense (not the resolution) is the point. Interestingly, this dovetails neatly with Picasso’s own attitude to his art:

For me each painting is a study. I say to myself, I am going one day to finish it, make a finished thing out of it. But as soon as I start to finish it, it becomes another painting and I think again I am going to redo it. Well, it is always something else in the end. If I retouch it, I make a new painting.

The trouble is that often this suspense feels not just imposed but really quite forced, and one cannot help but feel that Clouzot could do with letting the works ‘breathe’ more. The worst element in all this (and in fact the worst thing about the whole film) is Georges Auric’s overwrought, grating score – rather than leading one to be tense through a sense of suspense, one ends up tense through aural aggravation.

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Image courtesy of Arrow Films.

To see a Picasso emerge before you is a privilege, no doubt, but the most interesting parts of the film may be where we see the Picasso interacting with Clouzot If it weren’t apparent enough already from the canvases he has created before, Picasso’s enormous sense of playfulness then comes out in contrast to the mostly austere Clouzot  - though they do share the odd chuckle. It’s fascinating to see Clouzot excel in his usual stark monochrome yet with a more Brechtian, and less straightforwardly documentary approach. One of these all-too-short sequences leads to more suspenseful drama, Clouzot telling Picasso how long he has left to paint before the film runs out. Interestingly, these segments are score-less and manage to be more suspenseful than those where we directly watch and await the emergence of a ‘complete’ canvas.

If one feels a slight dissatisfaction at the end of the film, it is perhaps the blame of those expectations set up by the opening narration, that somehow we will have a greater insight into Picasso’s work, practice, thoughts, ethos; ultimately, we do not. In some ways this underlines a point made in Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’:

Magician and surgeon behave like painter and cameraman. The painter, while working, observes a natural distance from the subject; the cameraman, on the other hand, penetrates deep into the subject’s tissue. The images they both come up with are enormously different.

This disconnect may be the source of the sense that something has not quite come off with The Mystery of Picasso. But this is an experiment, and watching both artists working really is a privilege in itself. At the end of The Mystery of Picasso, Picasso and his work remain just that, a mystery – would you really want it any other way?

The Mystery of Picasso is out now on Arrow Academy on blu ray and DVD formats; each features Paul Haesaerts’ 1949 documentary ‘A Visit to Picasso’, ‘La Garoupe’, a 1937 ‘home movie’ by Man Ray, and a short ‘before and after’ feature on the restoration of the film.

Andrew R. Hill

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directed by Georges Clouzot

Bibliography

Bazin, André. Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties & Fifties. Edited by Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, Routledge, 1997.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by James Amery. Underwood, Penguin Books, 2008.

Berger, John. The Success and Failure of Picasso. Penguin Books, 1966.

Lewison, Jeremy. “In the Antechamber of Death: Picasso's Later Paintings.” Late Style and Its Discontents Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, Oxford University Press, 2016.

Lloyd, Christopher. Henri-Georges Clouzot. Manchester University Press, 2007.

Under your skin: Hesteofringen - Henning Christiansen

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Image courtesy of Holidays Records.

This oddity from boutique Milanese label Holidays Records makes for a disquieting and arresting listen across its 8 minutes and 55 seconds. A single-sided 10” in beautifully minimal respectively white/green and red/white outer and inner sleeves, it transcends its origins as the soundtrack to a singularly bizarre and brutal piece of Danish conceptual/performance art.

Broadcast to a large portion of the Danish population in January 1970, Hesteofringen (‘Horse Sacrifice’) was the ostensible ritual slaughtering and dismemberment of a horse in protest of the ongoing war in Vietnam (the horse was actually very old and put down humanely by a vet). Initiated by Bjørn Nørgaard, this ‘happening’ is captured on silent super 8 footage - a medium that is lent an additional strange horror by the fact that it was so often used to record home videos in the past. The record sleeve’s colour scheme is no coincidence – on a snowy plain in northern Denmark, we see (multimedia and performance artist) Lene Adler Pedersen incanting as a ‘priestess’ while wearing a red, black and white robe, a reflection of sorts of the horse’s dark body bleeding out onto white ground as it is hacked up - while Fluxus-associated Beuys collaborator Henning Christiansen accompanies the act on a green violin (this scene is documented in a vibrant colour photograph on the inner sleeve). The only sound in the film is the music documented on the record, which is partly repeated later in the film (17 and a half minutes long).

The music (a piece that is actually entitled ‘Min døde hest’ – ‘My dead horse’) consists of Pedersen, childlike, singing a poem by Nørgaard; Nørgaard plays plangent, cyclical piano chords while Christiansen draws out atonal, creaky, moans from his violin. The voice is the part that dominates, the part that captivates most – nothing so unusual about that – mourning, distracted, absent. But the (Danish) lyrics repeat the piece’s title again and again, with interjections about crawling inside the dead horse, “Oh, your soft intestines”, and “dead horse on bread”. We do not need to comprehend the lyrics literally (a kind Discogs user, Google translate and the sleevenotes are to thank for these transcriptions/translations) to understand that this voice speaks of a profound loneliness.

The music is perhaps very slightly reminiscent of John Cage’s songs for piano and voice (as found on ECM’s 2012 release As It Is), or Erik Satie, or Patty Waters, but one tends to think more of Jandek, or Grouper (particularly Ruins) in the sense that - irrespective of the actual circumstances of the playing of the music - this sounds like a room containing one person, singing inwardly, lamenting, not taking much care to the execution of the playing, more trying to work through something harrowing, and perhaps finding they are inadequately emotionally or linguistically facilitated to do so. Holidays Records describe the piece as a ‘sad lullaby’ and it’s hard to argue with this description. Lullabies are often used to sing children to sleep, especially if they are unsettled or temporarily troubled; this sounds like someone singing herself to sleep, slipping back into something infant, seeking comfort, warmth, protection.

Lene Adler Pedersen and Henning Christiansen perform Hesteofringen (film still found on inner sleeve).

In Christiansen’s ‘THOUGHTS ABOUT A DEAD HORSE (and an attempt to move on)’ (February 1970), presented as sleevenotes to Hesteofringen, he underlines the existential isolation that echoes through the record: “Our most immediate problem is contact among people. For the last five years, the code word has been communication, but this was on an external level. At stake now is the internal level.” The hippy-ish context of that most late-60s/early-70s artwork, ‘the happening’, and the references to mysticism throughout Christiansen’s statement tend to make one suspicious of this assertion, but it is not so distant from Lacanian thought around language’s alienating effects – most basically (so one is given to understand), that there is a fundamental, irresolvable disconnect within each one of us that leads to an innate dissatisfaction, and language (as an external system) bears much of the responsibility. While the then-fashionable quasi-spiritual mumbo jumbo contained in Christiansen’s 48-year old statement is to some degree validated by tracts of poststructuralist theory, it is really a tautology, irrelevant. As interesting as the sleevenotes are, and as fascinating as the original artwork/performance is, the song resonates all the louder by itself.

Hesteofringen lends some voice to that alienation, without resolving it. That language here has to some degree broken down - become repetitive, twisted, obsessive - is surely no coincidence; not understanding the literal meaning of the words (though the repetition is obvious) actually enhances this sensation of alienation. That the voice, piano and violin all sound slightly misaligned, disjointed, heightens the sensation further still; but the voice alone transmits this alienation well enough, and the loneliness conveyed makes one a voyeur. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, spying on private trauma.

“Oh, just the whole world was a dead horse.”

Crawling inside your “dear, dead horse” won’t bring it back to life; it may protect you from the elements for a while, but the world remains outside.

This may make the record sound horrific, unbearable, unlistenable, but it is far too beautiful to honestly deem it so. Hesteofringen is undeniably stark, strange, discomfiting; but its hypnotic melancholy cannot help but get under your skin.

Hesteofringen is out now on Holidays Records, in a limited edition of 350 copies. Thanks to Low Company Records for bringing it to our attention.

Andrew R. Hill

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Bibliography

Ghosh, Mallika. “Lacan and Post-Structuralism.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology (IJSSA), Dec. 2016, pp. 85–89., http://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0e8b/d896781fe72f4533098794afbc64b4586949.pdf.

Harwood, Mark. “Nature and Culture.” Surround, Apr. 2014, surround.noquam.com/nature-and-culture/.

Hvidt, Annette Rosenvold. “About the Work: The Horse Sacrifice.” Statens Museum for Kunst, 22 Mar. 2017, www.smk.dk/en/visit-the-museum/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/2010/bjoern-noergaard/about-the-work-the-horse-sacrifice/.

Lechte, John. “Jacques Lacan.” Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: from Structuralism to Postmodernity, Routledge, 1994, pp. 77–81.

Glasgow Film Festival 2016: Miguel Gomes’ ‘Arabian Nights’ Trilogy

Adapting One Thousand and One Nights for the cinema is no small undertaking, especially when to do so automatically places you in the estimable company of the likes of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Georges Méliès. While the framework of Scheherazade’s need to tell her fantastical tales in order to save her life (and those of others) is still present, it is just that – little else of the source text remains, at least in terms of plot. Over these three films, a disparate and heady miasma of strange trials, talking animals, recondite hobbies, suicide, priapism and economic hardship unfold, primarily in Portugal of 2013 and 2014.

The trilogy begins with a prologue of sorts that establishes quite avowedly that this is not to be a literal adaptation of the famous book(s). Via documentary footage and interviews, we learn that a shipyard in a town in contemporary Portugal is to be closed; the town is also beset by a swarm of Asian Hornets threatening the indigenous bee population and, as such, the local honey production. The film’s director, Miguel Gomes, narrates (temporarily) and appears on screen, utterly despondent. He is trying to link the two problems afflicting the town, but isn’t sure what he means by it; then things take an unexpected and comic turn. It is the first of many, many formally playful moments over the trilogy’s intimidating six hours and twenty-one minutes duration. We do see Scheherazade (and she does turn up as other characters through her stories) in her Baghdad ‘in the Antiquity of Time’, especially in the third part, an undisguised modern-day Marseilles (Scheherazade uses a speed boat and at one point she and her father converse on a Ferris wheel). This is no sword-and-sandal epic and puts the (almost) here-and-now, post-economic crisis Portugal through a frequently entrancing magical realist filter.

Crista Alfaiate and Américo Silva ride a Ferris wheel in Arabian Nights Volume 3: The Enchanted One. Image courtesy of the Glasgow Film Festival.

Those only familiar with Gomes’ 2012 feature Tabu may be initially surprised by the tone and form of Volume 1: The Restless One but gradually a more meditative feeling takes over – the first film flits between several stories and settings; the second slows into more detailed, longer tales; and the third slows further still, to such an extreme that the trilogy ends with a grinding inertia (which stands in stark contrast to the first film in particular). The testudineous pace of Volume 3: The Enchanted One does bear facile resemblance to Tabu’s meditative oneirism, but lacks its compelling emotional weight. Unfortunately, the over-extended primary story of Volume 3 slips readily into self-indulgence and stretches initially interesting subject matter to a frustratingly ponderous length (there was an unusually high amount of groaning and sighing around the audience); arguably the saviour of this part and thus the trilogy is the particularly effective climactic use of The Langley School Music Project’s take on ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’, but the problems with this volume do threat to bend the viewer’s impression of the whole trilogy significantly out of shape.

Its running length and its experimental form makes Arabian Nights no small undertaking for a viewer either, but for all its manifest flaws, it is a worthwhile one; charming, beautiful, bawdy, hilarious, tragic and furious, it makes for a long, strange trip and one all curious or serious filmgoers should consider taking.

Andrew R. Hill

EIFF 2014 - A letter to Mania Akbari and Mark Cousins, after their new film, 'Life May Be'

Dear Mania, Dear Mark,

 Please pardon the familiarity. I am writing this letter as I have just seen your new film, Life May Be, in which you film letters to each other. Of course I write this (similar to Mark in the letter-within-a-letter of the first section) without any expectation of a response, nor the expectation of being able to match your respective poetic, explosive, eloquences. As the closing credits roll, I am taken to write this letter and I wonder what I’d say. Here goes nothin’, as they say in The Movies.

 Firstly, I must apologies to Mania as this is the first of your films that I’ve seen, while this is the fourth of yours, Mark – I will endeavour to rectify this imbalance as soon as I can. I like how personal Life May Be is, how it starts with a long take from Mark, reflecting what he tells us is a trademark of yours, Mania, yet journeys around the world in his narration – you then reflect and expand Mark’s letter with numerous photographs, in relatively short bursts both confounding and agreeing with Mark’s commentary on your trademark style (a photograph is a permanent take, no?). I like how the film unfolds, ideas ricocheting of each other in unexpected ways, platonic love letters to each other, each other’s films, to cinema, to the audience and to the audience members’ own lives.

The ‘naked’ thread might be the most important running through your film. I wonder why I, like so many people like clothes so much, why I dislike my own skin, why I prefer to cover it. Convention, yes, although I’ve never cared much for it, but what beyond that? Control, yes, more likely. In my own way, I am as much a prisoner to clothes as those bound to wear the veil (although I could and would never dare suggest that I am oppressed in the same way). It’s interesting that you feel that your mind is freer when naked, Mark; I have a tendency to believe that I need to be fully dressed to work, to think, even though my mind seems to get carried away in the shower every morning, thus leading to inevitable lateness, and an internal scrabble to find the ideas again later. I guess what I’m getting at is that the less I think about my skin, my face, my hair, the less embarrassed I am by it, then the freer my mind becomes. Maybe that explains a particular patriarchal rationale for making women think about the way they look to such a toxic level (whether veiled or to be expected to “attain beauty at any cost”), as you illuminatingly mull upon in your first letter, Mania; this afflicts women everywhere, whether that be in the Scottish Highlands, or Tehran, or Dubai or Stockholm, or London or Kaunas or Edinburgh.

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Image courtesy of EIFF

Then I think about ‘the Naked Rambler’, Stephen Gough, as you mention in your next letter, Mark, and how he has been mocked and pilloried, deemed a pervert and exhibitionist. The reaction is in some ways even more understandable when one realises, as I do just now, that people are afraid of him. And why? Not because of please-won’t-you-think-of-the-children-Daily-Mail-style hysteria, or not because he is naked and refuses to clothe the body that does not meet their conventional standards of ‘beauty’, but because they are afraid of how unafraid he is to bare all, to unveil; this body that they believe he should be - like they are - ashamed of. Stephen Gough is imprisoned because of his body, and because of his ideology; people everywhere feel their bodies to be prisons because of ideology. And if you are imprisoned just by the very nature of your being, then it makes it all the easier to control you. You both appear naked on screen in Life May Be, and your letters make it seem very natural indeed. More powerfully, perhaps, are how naked you are in your words Thinking of ekstasis, as referred to in this film by way of Mark’s What is this film called Love?, you make it very obvious that we need to get outside ourselves a lot more, clothed or not.

As I walk out of the press screening and down Fountainbridge, again it occurs to me to write this letter, and as I look at others who have attended, I wonder what would happen if everyone who saw Life May Be wrote - or went one step further and filmed - a letter in response; not just the delegates, but everyone who saw it? A lot of your time would be consumed of course, if you felt compelled to read/watch them all, but what would they say? A simple ‘thanks’? A review? A rant? Would they find their own personal experiences and feelings jolting through, as I have found?

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Image courtesy of EIFF 

Creating and engaging with art is to make connections - between subjects, objects, concepts, landscapes, feelings, structures, arguments, ideologies, colours, shapes, people - that one might not expect, or, at least, one may have not seen or understood fully before, and (as an appreciator of or art, or as an artist) make you see the connected things in a different way form thereon. Mania, Mark, you have done so with your film – in Life May Be you connect with each other across time and space, throw ideas and experiences into the air and see where they land, and in doing so you invite the audience to do the same.

You highlight something that we risk forgetting all too readily, as apathy quickly becomes the opiate of the people – the personal is universal, yes, but the personal is most definitely political.

Yours in ekstasis,

Andrew R. Hill

‘Life May Be’ received its world premiere on Saturday as part of this year’s Edinburgh international Film Festival. There is a further screening at Cineworld on 23 June.

Edinburgh International Film Festival '14: Five Reviews

Koo! Kin-dza-dza (dir. Georgiy Daneliya & Tatiana Ilyna)

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Image courtesy of EIFF

Present day Moscow. World famous cellist and cultural snob Vladimir Chizov and wannabe hipster DJ Tolik are accidentally catapulted onto a strange and desolate planet known as Puke. How will they make it back to Earth? This is the premise of Koo! Kin-dza-dza, an animated remake of the homonymous 1986 Soviet sci-fi satire. 

It's refreshing too see an animation that doesn't have to rely on CGI or 3D, especially when it skillfully infuses a picaresque story line with the absurdist touches of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. In the dune world of Pluke, inhabitants fall into two main categories - Patsaks and Chatlanians (the latter being the dominant people), a humble match (known as a ketse) is the most valuable item, and common sense doesn't seem to apply as strict hierarchies extend to the colour of pants one wears. The two main characters must fight their way through unreliable journey companions, perennial bribes and cacophony-loving  grandmothers. The comic darkness of this dystopian universe is  occasionally provided with light relief: it's hard not too smile when Vladimir plays his cello for an unusually appreciative and rather timid Plukian creature, or when Vladimir and Tolik seem to finally make an emotional connection.

For all its analogue ambition, Koo! Kin-dza-dza is far from perfect -  clocking in at 96 minutes, it feels overlong, leaving us with the impression that the script could have been much tighter in parts. 

Seeing this film presented again in the 21st century, when the USSR has become a distant memory makes for thought-provoking viewing, as its powerful depiction of laughable hierarchical structures, corruption and racism still resonates in contemporary Europe.

Koo! Kin-dza-dza , 27 June, 18:15 at Odeon 2

[Erika Sella]

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Anatomy of a Paperclip (dir. Akira Ikeda)

Director Ikeda Akira has stated that his starting point  for Anatomy of a Paperclip was his wish to create the modern equivalent of a Japanese folk tale.

The quiet, submissive Kogure is certainly the kind of character that can be found time and time again in both literature and film (his body language and tubby, inexpressive appearance reminded me Italian popular cinema staple Fantozzi); the linear simplicity and even pacing of the storyline (matched by the minimalist, deliberately two-dimensional and immaculately balanced, often symmetrical shots) are also somewhat reminiscent of a parable. 

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Image courtesy of EIFF

The flat cinematography also complements the deadpan humour that springs from a world that has become devoid of pleasure - this is Japan, but not as we know it. Kugore lives in a small, bare room, works in a factory (which actually looks like a converted garage) where he is repeatedly abused by his horrific boss, survives on horrible food and is regularly taunted by a couple of thugs who have a penchant for stealing his clothes. This routine is gradually eroded by the vision of a butterfly (a presence usually loaded with meaning in Japanese culture) and the consequent appearance of a woman who speaks gibberish (a 'language' that was invented by the filmmaker) and decides to move into Kogure's bedsit without an explanation.

At the press screening, a fellow viewer felt that Anatomy of a Paperclip was 'essentially a Japanese remake of Eraserhead'; while the bleak, quietly hysterical  atmosphere that pervades the film may certainly recall some aspects of David Lynch's output, I felt this statement detracts from the film's complexity. This is a mysterious and often profound film; a poignant (yet very funny) comment about human nature and the meaning of interpersonal connections. 

Anatomy of a Paperclip, 28 June, 13:15 at Cameo 3

[Erika Sella]

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Displaced Perssons (dir. Asa Blanck and Johan Palmgren) 

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Image courtesy of EIFF

Pelle Persson is one of the most intriguing characters I have ever had the privilege to encounter on the big screen; perhaps inspired by a childhood adventure book (having recently watched Mark Cousin's A Story of Children and Film, I was reminded of Palle Alone in the World, and not simply because of the similarity of the main character's name), he sets off to adventure as soon as he is old enough to drive, living and working in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He eventually settles in Lahore, Pakistan, where he marries Shamin, and has two daughters. As his children reach adulthood, he finds that his liberal parenting idea clash with the local customs (the girls find they can't leave the house by themselves), and decides to return to his native Sweden. But can you ever go home again? 

This is a documentary that tackles complex issues such as identity, the meaning of national cultures and of family ties. It's hard not to like the Perssons as they face their Swedish adventure with defiance and a great deal of humour, but also with fear and maybe some regret; the camera only needs to sit back and watch them, letting the occasional title card guide us through the passing of time. We see the deadpan Shamin braving the freezing winter and unenthusiastically learning Swedish, Pelle having to prove to the local bureaucrats that he still exists in order to receive his pension, their daughter Zahra struggling with life-changing decisions. There is no place for stereotype here - both Sweden and Pakistan are represented in ways that we not normally accustomed to. We are faced with a family that don't conform to the narratives we are fed by the popular press: Pelle, Sharmin, Zahra and Mia all prove that identity is something complex, fluid and not necessarily defined by a country of birth, and that love and family really can overcome the biggest difficulties. As soppy as that might sound, there was not a dry eye at the screening - Displaced Perssons delivers the kind emotional punch that is becoming increasingly rare. Do not miss.

Displaced Perssons, 27 June, 18:10 at Cameo 3

[Erika Sella]

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Snowpiercer (dir. Joon-ho Bong)

It’s quite startling that an actor better known as Captain America (AKA Chris Evans…no, not that one) to many should be the protagonist of a film that critiques Capitalism quite so overtly (if in an occasionally naïve, often daft way). The premise is a bit silly but clearly analogous: in a post-apocalyptic world, a train rattles around the world carrying three groups of people, the last humans left on Earth – an elite that lives at the luxurious front, a servile group that do their bidding, and lumpenproletariat that dwell in slum-like carriages at the rear. Evans’ Curtis leads a revolt, blood is shed and a fable of the perils of Capital emerges through action setpieces and a great deal of humour. It does feel a little lacking in nuance in its politics and is silly in that comic-book-film way at times, but is enjoyable all the same. John Hurt expertly plays the wise old man, Tilda Swinton is a hilariously grotesque Lancastrian spokesperson, Kang-ho Song amuses as the drug-addled security expert and Jamie Bell is an entertaining sidekick (if a little heavy on the Oirish Eejit schtick) to Evans’ hirsute and oh-so-tortured American hero. 

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Image courtesy of EIFF

Snowpiercer may struggle to escape the inherent limitations of its form but is entertaining with both heart and head in the right place. One can’t help but feel that Harvey Weinstein has probably bludgeoned Joon-ho Bong’s film into something more straightforward for Anglophone audiences than it may have been in the form shown to audiences in South Korea and elsewhere, but entertains and manages to be not entirely brainless with it, which is more than can be said yer average comic book (sorry, graphic novel) adaptation.

Snowpiercer, 28 June, 20:15 at Cineworld 3

[Andrew R. Hill]

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The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black Black Oil (dir. John McGrath)

Buried treasure screened on Saturday afternoon as a part of Dick Fiddy of the BFI’s lovingly programmed Border Warfare: John McGrath’s Work in TV, Theatre, & Film thread at the EIFF 2014. John McGrath’s The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black Black Oil shouldn’t work; a Brechtian play filmed live (audience and all) with inserted dramatised exterior scenes (with different actors from those in the play), contemporary interviews with real people, Gaelic folk songs, Scottish country dancing and old-fashioned one-liner comedy collide in an hour and a half that is by turns tragic, didactic, polemical and hilarious.

The play takes three instances of the Scottish Highlands being carved up by outside forces, from the Clearances through to the Victorian stag hunting playground to North Sea oil. An unashamed attack on Capitalism, The Cheviot… is a breath-taking work of deceptive complexity – detailed, rich, informative, entertaining and moving. That it was screened on BBC One is astonishing now, especially on a weekend where the BBC News has proven itself to be little more than the propaganda wing of the Tory government, failing to report 50,000 people marching from its own headquarters to protest anti-austerity measures. That the film has yet to be released on DVD is, sadly, not much of a surprise – and, no, a screening on BBC Alba in 2012 isn’t enough (and Auntie’s tack has shifted all too far in the wrong direction in the interim). Luckily, YouTube saves the day – it  really is essential viewing. 

The EIFF should be commended for unshowily yet unashamedly political programming, in an era where artists (by which I include filmmakers, musicians and writers) seem content to shy away from politics altogether, for fear of alienating audiences – audiences that are often very receptive. John McGrath certainly was no such artist and the opportunity to discover (or, indeed, rediscover) his work is an unmissable opportunity.

[Andrew R. Hill]

Review: 'We Are the Best!'

 ‘Tell me something good about my life’    

 'You’re in the world's greatest band.’     

Lukas Moodysson is back with a film that, at least in spirit, resembles his debut feature Show Me Love (1998): here's the story of three teen outcasts who form a punk band. It’s 1982, and Bobo and Klara are having a tough time both at home and a school. Somewhat neglected by their horrifically liberal-bourgeois parents, and mocked by their peers for looking different, these girls know that something needs to be done: embracing what is best about DIY punk culture, they pick up bass and drums and write one (actually pretty good) song (‘Hate the Sport’). It doesn’t matter that they can’t play their instruments (although they get some musical coaching from the band’s third member, skilled guitarist Hedvig) – it’s their ideas and attitude that matter. 

Image courtesy of Metrodome

Perhaps I was a soft target: We Are the Best! Feels really close to my heart because I was once a naïve, difficult teen who picked up a guitar and tried to form a band with my then-best friend. It didn’t matter that we never got out of her family’s freezing basement – we felt we were doing the most wonderful thing in the world.  Lukas Moodysson seems to know what it feels like to think you are on top of the world, when in reality you have little going for you: it’s great to see how these three girls bond, how they fight and make up, how they defiantly make a stand against a grey world populated by inane adults (the Youth Centre leaders, their PE teacher) and insipid schoolmates with crimped hair. They’re sketchily portrayed through a narrative that is for the most part episodic; yet the performances and clever (and very funny indeed) script ensure that we are left with an impression of well-rounded, believable characters.

It’s good to see a coming-of-age tale about females; whilst we are used to see young boys bond on screen, cinema’s depiction of teenage girls interacting tends to be outrageously inaccurate, peppered with either over-the-top bitchiness or sickening idealisations of pre-pubescent femininity.  Klara, Bobo and Hedvig bicker a lot, they questions each other’s authority and behaviour, they argue over boys and then eventually put it all right again, their friendship cemented by the experiences they share.

The portrayal of 1982 Stockholm is also something of a delight – a lot of films set in the 1980s  end up being cartoonish, especially when they feature music so heavily. Moodysson and his production design team handle the period setting with care, with little details such as pop-up toasters and Guzzini-like floor lamps being pointers that never feel too forced. The colours are soft and have a vintage 35mm film feel to them, but nothing here screams ‘retro’.

 It’s telling that We Are the Best!  feels so incredibly fresh – Moodysson just seems to have a natural knack at telling us stories about the all-too transient and often awkward period that is adolescence.  This is a film that definitely deserves to be seen widely (here’s hoping it inspires a new generation of riot grrls) – even for the last sequence alone, where the protagonists play a gig so riotous that it puts The Jesus and Mary Chain to shame. 

Provocative Swedish auteur Lukas Moodysson (Show Me Love, Together) returns with this raucous and ebullient tale of three pre-teen outcasts who form an all-girl punk band. http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/wearethebest

Review: 'That Sinking Feeling'

That Sinking Feeling (1979) was a ground-breaking debut: shot on a minuscule budget (according to its director it was the "cheapest feature film ever made"), it signalled the birth of a truly indigenous Scottish film industry. Made by the Whiteinch born-and-bred Bill Forsyth with funds entirely raised in Scotland, it was shot in Glasgow with local talent - largely amateur actors from the art project Glasgow Youth Theatre.

Image courtesy of BFI

The film is ostensibly a comedy heist: a group of unemployed teenagers come up with a plan which involves stealing stainless steel sinks from a local warehouse. As in other Bill Forsyth films though, plot only matters to an extent, with the whimsical aspect is undercut by bitter detail (the boys' hopelessness), and its narrative refusing to stick to a conventional linear structure.

In the opening sequence, Glasgow looks for the most part desolate, a city whose skyline, dominated by high-rises, is repeatedly revealed in the long establishing shots. The desolation of the landscape is soon matched by a story of unemployment and deprivation: when trying to purchase a hamburger and a coffee, Vic (John Hughes) realises that he cannot pay the 45 pence the lady in the van is requesting. The scene in which we first meet the leader of the teenage gang, Ronnie (Robert Buchanan), is of a similarly bleak tone: his speech to the equestrian statue of Lord Roberts situated in Kelvingrove Park starts off in a semi-jovial tone as the teenager ponders "You’ve got to make the most of what life offers you" and tries to reflect on what assets he and the Field Marshall may have in common; the pitch soon shifts when he looks at the statue’s plaque and exclaims, "Oh wait a minute, I don’t see that many O-levels there (…) How did you do it? And why don’t I have a job?" To emphasise his point, he violently kicks the (physical and metaphorical) barrier that separates him from his 'interlocutor'.

This is not to say that That Sinking Feeling is about mere social realism – the continuous interplay between comedy and seriousness constantly downplays any sense of hefty political commentary. Contrasting elements come together in unexpected way – as in the scene when Wal (Billy Greenlees) ends up selling his sinks to the art collector (and Blasted local hero - Ed.) Richard Demarco (played by himself), his goods mistaken for the "Latest development of the New York School".

BFI FLIPSIDE proudly presents THAT SINKING FEELING The original version remastered, for the first time on DVD/Blu-ray http://amzn.to/ME9aQw Hilarious and inventive, the zero budget debut from much loved director Bill Forsyth (Gregory's Girl, Local Hero, Comfort and Joy) is an authentic depiction of 1970s Glasgow youth culture, and is presented here for the first time in a new HD transfer with the original Glaswegian dialogue track.

It is perhaps telling that the only two characters that make a tangible gain out of the plan are Wal and fellow gang member Alan (James Ramsey), who manages to buy an electric guitar with his share of the money. Whilst one can be accused of imposing a meaning that isn't there, it is very tempting to imagine that Bill Forsyth is trying to promote artistic creativity as a way out of post-industrial drabness. In a way, with Postcard Records currently being celebrated with a book, a film, and a reissue of Josef K's The Only Fun in Town (due in May), it is hard not to re-imagine the late 1970s and early 1980s as a time that kick-started the diverse and unprecedented cultural outpouring that has taken place in Scotland in the last 30 years. 

That Sinking Feeling also represents a clear break in the way Scottish men (and specifically Glaswegian men) are represented: instead of the romanticised brutality of the 'hard man', we are faced with a subtler depiction of a masculinity in crisis. Forsyth's teenagers are awkward and confused; when compared with their female counterparts, they clearly appear to lack their wisdom and self-assurance. It is a thematic preoccupation that the director will continue exploring throughout his career - perhaps it is no surprise that the coolest character ever to emerge from his ouvre is the audacious, bobbed-haired Susan (played by Claire Grogan) who, with a little help from her girlfriends, outfoxes John Gordon Sinclair's Gregory with a cunning, if slightly convoluted plan. 

Bill Forsyth went on to direct Gregory's Girl (1981), Local Hero (1983) and Comfort and Joy (1984), perhaps the films he is best known for. Many viewers familiar with these might be unaware of his raw, extremely inventive debut, so we should be very grateful to ever-great BFI Flipside for finally releasing That Sinking Feeling (with the original Glaswegian dialogue track that was bizarrely missing from the 2009 2Entertain DVD version) in a definitive format. This edition is packed with special features: four short films involving Bill Forsyth in either acting, editing, or directing capacity; an audio commentary by the director and Mark Kermode; an interview with lead actor Robert Buchanan; another very entertaining interview where Forsyth discusses the DIY ways in which he funded his film. The booklet comes with a short essay by David Archibald (lecturer at the University of Glasgow), a contribution by Douglas Weir (technical producer at the BFI), and a 1981 article that Bill Forsyth wrote for Sight & Sound. 

That Sinking Feeling  might be one of my favourite films ever; for all its imperfections (if you are after sleek story telling, look elsewhere) it captures a certain spark that comes with being young with vivid, piercing attention to detail. Some of this is certainly be tied to of its late 1970s Glasgow setting, but despite its specificity (or maybe because of it) it also takes on an universal appeal - a fairy tale for underdogs everywhere. 

'That Sinking Feeling' is released by BFI Flipside on 21st April. There will be a launch screening with special guests at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Tuesday 15th April at 6.30. Tickets can be purchased here.

Review: 'The Double'

Richard Ayoade’s 2010 film Submarine was a warm, charming, stylish and frequently hilarious story of adolescent awkwardness that this particular writer has been recommending, sharing and gifting since falling head over heels for it on release. It’s not an uncommon response to it, one understands. So, as one would gather expectations of his second feature, The Double, were understandably high – and justifiably so, it transpires. 

The Double is an altogether darker affair than its predecessor and it’s no wonder - the source novella was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, an author that (while no stranger to humour) isn’t renowned for his carefree jottings on the lightness of being. ‘Kafka-esque’ would have doubtlessly been splashed all over the reviews were it not published over forty years before the Czech existentialist’s birth. That should not suggest an absence of humour of course – quite the opposite. The film is intense, oppressive and intermittently grim, but it is also very funny.

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. Photo credit: Dean Rodgers

The set-up itself is a wry smile of a premise. The protagonist (Simon James) is a nobody - a hopelessly meek, wan, anonymous, unmemorable office worker with a perennially unrealised crush on a co-worker; one day, an employee from another office transfers to his and is an instant hit – not only is his name James Simon, but he is everything Simon James is not (brash, confident, well liked, manipulative, lazy, dishonest); he’s also Simon James’ exact double, and nobody notices except them. Needless to say, the chain of events that follows brings Simon James to the brink of his sanity. Jesse Eisenberg plays both Simon and James masterfully, to the extent that one even forgets that the two characters interacting are, well, the same person. Furthermore, Eisenberg makes Simon James very much the subject of our identification, our empathy – in lesser hands, we wouldn’t care, or not as much anyway.

The setting for the film is familiar yet enigmatic. The location is unknown (the prevailing language is English; American, Australian, English, Irish and Welsh accents are all presented without remark), it could be the future or the past; it’s certainly a dystopian urban permanocturnal hinterland of lunatic bureaucracy and emotional retardation. The lack of a specific setting links it to Submarine (‘80s-ish with modern details) but (alongside many other films and filmmakers that employ this trick so well – most particularly Wes Anderson) also to Terry Gilliam’s classic Brazil; in particular, they both present a world in which progress stopped in some ways during the ‘50s yet continued in others. It could be distracting but it moreover serves to aid a fuller sense of the absurdist reality that could accommodate this strange and entrancing tale.

For all that the palette may have shifted somewhat (‘realism’ versus ‘fantasy’, bluish tones with primary splashes versus washed out greens and greys), Ayoade has already established a filmmaking language of his own. This is not to say it lacks obvious links to other films or works, far from it, but he does already exhibit a distinctive voice, a rare achievement. The Double stands up to analysis by itself, for all its narrative has a certain cultural shorthand (Chuck Palahnuik certainly must have read this particular Dostoevsky) and, as such, an underlying familiarity. It inhabits a world of its own - partly ours, partly someone else’s – and as with the most effectively realised dystopian worlds, one is both overtly repelled yet covertly seduced. This duality applies to The Double (how bad can a place in which Shin Joong Hyun is the pop star du jour be?), but one is unlikely to be left in two minds by The Double itself.

Ayoade has got a hard job following himself (again).

Andrew R. Hill