The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

Classic Scene #34

2012-01-31T12:53:00.002Z

Marilyn Monroe performs One Silver Dollar from River of No Return. What a fantastic singer she was. I don't mean her voice as such, although it was fine, but her immersion in a song's meaning and emotion. It's where her acting is at its finest. While she was a peerless light comedian, her serious acting could be clunky at times (although by no means always) but just watch her sing. 'Love is a shining dollar/Bright as a church bell's chime/Gambled and spent and wasted/And lost in a dawn of time'. You feel she understands this song completely. Even the camera cutting away to follow Mitchum through the crowd can't break the spell.

Alternative Universe Films

2012-01-16T00:51:00.006Z

Just came across this. Someone wondered what stars of yesteryear would be cast in todays films (and who would direct them) and decided to create posters for these films. It's very good. The casting is spot on. Warren Oates as Jesus in Lebowski made me shout yes! at the computer. How about Trainspotting by Godard? Or Rushmore as a Nicholas Ray film with James Dean, James Stewart and Audrey Hepburn. Fritz Lang's 2001 anyone? It's inspired. Honestly, I would kill to see some of these Movies from An Alternative Universe.

Classic Scene #33

2011-12-25T12:03:00.003Z

My Christmas morning consisted of taking toys out of elaborate packaging and assembling them for impatient, over-excited children, all the while wondering if it's too early to have my first drink of the day (it was, sadly). So I can only look on with frazzled envy at the Christmas morning of Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man. No one was unwise enough to get me a pellet gun and my wife isn't independently rich enough to buy herself expensive presents because I can't be bothered, but that's not really what appeals about this scene. It's the wryly bemused expression on Nora's face as Nick takes aim at the Christmas tree, and the studiously ridiculous poses he takes up. He's being childish but also entertaining her. That's his whole schtick, keeping this wonderful woman amused. Their life is a neverending playtime with responsibility for nothing more taxing than a cute dog and maybe the occassional murder to solve in between martinis and wisecracks. The perfect marriage then, but also the carefree boredom of the idle rich, never so charmingly portrayed. May we all maintain a small amount of their blithe spirit over the Christmas holidays. (Now, where's that Nerf gun...)

Amelia and the Angel

2011-11-29T20:13:00.007Z

Amelia and the Angel is a charming short film made in two weeks for less than a hundred pounds by Ken Russell. It was the second of three shorts he made in the late '50s that landed him a job on Monitor, the BBC arts programme where he would make his reputation. It tells the story of a young girl about to play an angel in her school nativity play who brings her angel wings home to show her mother. This turns out to be a mistake as almost immediately her brother runs off with them and soon they're damaged beyond repair. We then follow her journey through ramshackle post-war streets and buildings as she searches for a new pair in time for the play. Amelia was played by Mercedes Quadros, the daughter of an Argentinian diplomat. 'She was delightful, no trouble at all,' Russell recalled years later, 'as long as I gave her scary whirlwind rides in an old, broken-down Morris 8 I had she was as good as gold.' While it bears many of the hallmarks and themes of Russell's later work, his interest in Catholic imagery, his background in dance, it's not just a curio for film buffs, a rough draft of future talent that needs excuses made for it. It's genuinely delightful, with all the whimsical charm of a Victorian children's story, fresh with Russell's love of the outlandish, his eye for composition, every frame saturated with natural light and verite movement.

Amelia and the Angel 1

Amelia 2

Amelia 3

Amelia 4

Amelia 5

Cinematic Enlightenment

2011-11-22T16:28:00.006Z

'I want formal enlightenment. I need the secret consequences of a jump-cut to be revealed to me. I want to know how the rawness of the camera angles or the grain of the film material figures into the emotional equation. I want to learn about acting from the performances, about atmosphere from the light and the locations. I'm ready, fully prepared to absorb truth at twenty-four frames per second.' - Jim Jarmusch, quoted in John Cassavetes: Lifeworks

Happy Halloween Little Pigs!

2011-10-31T10:30:00.009Z

What makes The Shining stand out is its all-pervading atmosphere. It has its shocks and creepy moments but what really gets you is that slow, pulsing dread. Very few horror movies are genuinely scary, especially as you get older, but The Shining does it still. It's also got Jack Nicholson letting loose the Big Bad Wolf inside, the giddy release of it, especially in the famous 'Here's Johnny!' scene below.
'Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in', he calls, returning the nursery rhyme to its original fear setting, unleashing its allegorical power. It's not just scary though, it's funny, hysterical, in both meanings of the word, pure grand guignol ham. Maybe it's this tension, this close-to-the-edge quality, that inspires butterflies in the stomach every time I watch it. Every time.

And then there's the original trailer, a masterclass in less is more. Of course, when you've got an image as good as this, with all the deadpan clarity of a nightmare, what more do you need? Imagine seeing this in the cinema at the time, having no idea what's coming. Can you imagine the impact it must've had?

And finally, the mournful, unsettling theme by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, based on Hector Berlioz' interpretation of the Dies Irae, a medieval poem about the day of judgment, the last trumpet summoning souls before the throne of God, where some are saved and some are cast into eternal flames. It's grave music, complete with eerie electronic wailing, the souls of those unsaved no doubt, and it sets a suitably desolate mood for this Halloween night. Enjoy!

Last Five Films...

2011-10-25T17:54:00.007+01:00

1. Detour (1945)

Edgar G. Ulmer is a fascinating character in film history, a talented man on the verge of a successful career exiled to the world of poverty-row b-pictures because he fell in love with the wrong woman. Could be a noir plot in itself, of course, which might explain why Detour stands up as one of the great noirs despite its manifest cheapness. 'No matter what you do, no matter where you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you up,' Tom Neal's hapless narrator tells us, and you can imagine Ulmer identifying with that. The film has the fevered compression and illogic of a nightmare married to location realism (cheap road-side diners, motels etc). Nobody in this film has star charisma. Ann Savage is an amazing presence but her Vera is every inch an ordinary woman driven to the edge by disappointment. Lord knows what she's had to endure but Savage manages to imply a world of desperation and pain. Like an animal mistreated once to often she'll bite the next hand that comes near. She's not going to let anyone get the better of her again, gonna take whatever chance comes her way. She's a monster, a rabid Bette Davis, the American Dream going crazy before our eyes, and the main reason (though far from the only one) to see this lo-fi cult classic.

2. Gun Crazy (1950)

Another unheralded actress delivers an even better performance in Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy. Peggy Cummins isn't exactly a house-hold name, even for fans of classic movies, but she's sensational as carnival sharpshooter Annie Starr. We first see her haloed with fire, a warning if ever there was one. But gun-obsessed Bart Tarr (John Dall) fails to heed it. Instead he's like a horny moth to her flame. 'We go together, Annie,' he tells her later, 'I don't know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together'. It's noir fate then, but Gun Crazy is more than a standard noir and Cummins more than a femme fatale. She takes over the film, hijacks it. She's on fire, alive with heat and scheming energy, with outlaw lust, a hipster revolutionary out to play the system by its own game. She may say 'I've been kicked around all my life, and from now on, I'm gonna start kicking back', but you get the feeling grievance is only a small part of it. This is one dame who's been ready to go off for a long time, maybe forever. Sure she wants money, but more than that, she wants action. The sexual thrill of guns, of danger, of death. That's what's really turning them on, a death-wish so strong they can hardly resist it. It's the essense of American cinema; guns and cars, sex and death - living for the moment. And Lewis shoots it like that, with great verve and vérité energy. It's New Wave ten years before Godard, the camera hurrying through real locations, watching from the back seat of moving cars. It puts us right in the moment, especially during a one-take bank robbery that's arguably the greatest single-take scene in all of cinema, small-town streets a panicky blur as they screech around corners, the moment alive with giddy tension. By the end it's transcended its genre, no longer noir, but something more vital and tragic, a Freudian parable, an essential cinematic credo: Thrill crazy. Kill crazy. Gun Crazy.

3. The Big Combo (1955)

Five years later, Lewis delivered another cult gem, but this time the noir conventions are adhered to throughout. All the earlier film's energy and movement are gone, replaced by a stylized, shadowy mise-en-scene that comes close to abstraction. The cinematographer is John Alton, the Rembrandt of noir cinema, the man who literally wrote the book on lighting. It's hard to imagine Lewis daring to shoot on the hoof when Alton was painstakingly setting up the visual geometry of a shot. The result is weapons-grade noir, a world where it's always nighttime, where talk is hardboiled poetry and cops are dogged loners on a mission. It's lifted above the routine, though, not only by Alton's lighting but by the performance of noir-stalwart Richard Conte, fantastic as mouthy gang boss Mr. Brown. He's having a ball rattling out killer dialogue ('Joe, tell the man I'm gonna break him so fast he won't have time to change his pants,') high on his own sense of invincibility, smarter and more ruthless than the mugs around him. Cornel Wilde is suitably weary and dour as Brown's nemesis, Detective Leonard Diamond, but it's hard to warm to him. This is probably what denies the film classic status, the elevating persona of a star performance. (Compare Wilde, say, to Glenn Ford in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, made two years earlier and very similar in plot and characterisation, where Ford brings a charismatic righteousness to his role that Wilde can't match, a sense of the film's moral universe flowing through him.) Unlike Lang, though, Lewis didn't seem interested in a moral universe. As in Gun Crazy, characters are motivated by instinct and desire. It's an amoral tone that sets the film apart even as it's undermining the plot. We don't really care about Diamond's crusade because Lewis doesn't either, he's having too much fun with the baddies, more alive and vital because they've embraced instinct instead of fighting it. There's an almost gleeful air of perversity, a nasty, unsettling edge that sets the film apart. Brown's henchmen, Fante (a super-cool Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman) are clearly meant to be homosexual and the crimelord's classy moll, Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace) stays with him mainly because she gets off on being treated rough. For Lewis, sex is at the heart of the action once again, characters are defined by it, their sexuality as inescapable as any noir fate.

4. Black Legion (1937)

Interesting early Bogart. He plays a factory worker called Frank Taylor who joins a 'pro-American' secret society called the Black Legion when he loses out on becoming foreman to a Polish-born immigrant. The organization is a version of the Ku Klux Klan complete with mumbo-jumbo initiation rites and black robes who intimidate, torture and kill those they believe are taking their jobs. Behind them are shadowy right-wing industrialists hoping to use them for their own ends. As his involvement deepens Frank's marriage crumbles and he turns on his best friend. It's a cautionary tale fresh from the headlines that still retains its power today. There really was a Black Legion and the film is based on an actual killing that took place a few years earlier. Shot in real working class locations it's an unflinching look at the dark side of 30s America, the heart of fascism lurking, anti-foreigner agitation. (It would make a great double-bill with Lang's Fury.) While not a great film it is a fascinating one, a real eye-opener. You just don't expect 30s films to be this realistic, to face up to this kind of ugly truth. Archie Mayo is no-one's idea of a great director but he was a veteran of the cheap potent style of Warners pre-code films and brings an unfussy realism to proceedings, happy to follow the script and get as much in as the Hayes Code would allow, which turns out to be quite a lot. He also directed The Petrified Forest (1936) which saw Bogart make his debut as gangster Duke Mantee, so was possibly responsible for getting him the part (the producers originally wanted Edward G. Robinson). Whatever way he became involved it's a key film for Bogart. You can see him discover the satisfaction of exploring flawed characters, their meanness, paranoia and self-delusion, a seam he would continue in later films like The Treasure of Sierra Madre and The Caine Mutiny. And the film doesn't sugar-coat Frank's involement in this fascist group. For a while he relishes it, high on the power, the late-night adrenaline, admiring himself in the mirror as he holds a gun for the first time, imagining himself in a film (the pre-echoes of Travis Bickle are there). It's a tribute to Bogart's skill as an actor that we retain some semblance of sympathy for Frank by the end. The story received an Oscar nomination and the National Board of Review named it best film of 1937 and Bogart best actor. It should have been his breakthrough but he had to endure four more years of playing second fiddle to Cagney and Robinson before High Sierra finally made him a star. Black Legion should've been it. A must-see for all Bogie fans.

5. You Can't Take It With You (1938)

The Capra Problem was in full effect by 1938, a soft-headed belief in the folksy goodwill of 'ordinary' people. Capra the artist was always at war with Capra the idealist, so the bad things in the world were given their due, Capra understood full well the malign forces in the world, the small-mindedness and greed, (his films keep coming back to them) but he choose to believe that community could overcome it, that simple human empathy would set an example that would save the Republic from ruin. (By 1946, the nightmare seemed so much closer, it was called Pottersville, and the dream of community was so much more feverish and desperate). But this sentimentality always seemed at odds with the darker forces of his films, contrived, something willed and false, as if Capra himself didn't really believe it, or feared he didn't. Here powerful businessman Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold) needs to buy one more house in a twelve block area to build a munitions factory in advance of the war that's coming. How's that for cynical. Only problem is the house belongs to Martin 'Grandpa' Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) and he isn't selling. This loveable eccentric has renounced the world of work and money and turned his home into a menagerie of impractical kooks and dreamers. The only 'normal' member of the family is his grand-daughter Alice (Jean Arthur) who works as secretary for Kirby's son Tony (James Stewart). Unaware of the conflict developing between their families Tony and Alice proceed to flirt and fall in love. And so the coming together of the Vanderhofs and the Kirbys is set in motion. It's the stuff of stage farce and romantic complication, sure, but it's also an essential American conflict, money versus freedom, conformity versus rebellion, those who believe in and profit from the system verses those who turn their backs on it, not so much the haves and the have-nots as the haves and the want-nots. Despite this ideological battle the film teeters on the edge of being 'quirky' or 'kooky' or any of those dread words. Only towards the end does it fall over that edge completely. And yet, there's a delicately played romance between Stewart and Arthur that's so good you'll wish there was more of it, some precient speeches about fear and a couple of genuinely funny scenes. As so often with Capra, there's much to like, much to chew over in his contradictions and failings. Live your life for yourself, be true to yourself, there's more to life than money. All these platitudes are true but they don't make great art. Telling a banker he's a bad father and getting him to play the harmonica will not change American capitalism no matter how much Capra wants it to. If only it was that easy.

Building A Statue Of Snow

2011-09-30T12:49:00.005+01:00

"LAWRENCE!" O'Toole spat out, swallowing his Scotch. "I became obsessed by that man, and it was bad. A true artist should be able to jump into a bucket of shit and come out smelling of violets, but I spent two years and three months making that picture, and it was two years, three months of thinking about nothing but Lawrence, and you were him, and that's how it was day after day, and it became bad for me, personally, and it killed my acting later. After Lawrence...I did BAAL and a close friend of mine, after my dress rehearsal, came back and said, `What's the matter, Peter, what is it?' I asked what the hell he meant, and he said, `There's no give!'...Christ, his words struck terror in me. Oh, it was bad acting! I was flabby, diffuse...Later I said, 'You're in trouble daddy,' and I felt it in my fucking toes. I was emotionally bankrupt after that picture.

"Oh a BBC show...I said that after LAWRENCE I was afraid of being mutilated. That filming for that length of time, two years, three months, and having all the responsibility for the performance but none of the control...Christ, in one scene of the film I saw a close-up of me when I was 27 years old, and then 8 seconds later, there was another close-up of me when I was 29 years old! 8 goddamn seconds! and two years of my life had gone from me!

Oh, it's painful seeing it all there on the screen, solidified, embalmed," he said, staring straight ahead toward the rows of bottles. "Once a thing is solidified it stops being a living thing. That's why I love the theatre. It's the Art of the Moment. I'm in love with ephemera and I hate permanence. Acting is making words into flesh, and I love classical acting because...because you need the vocal range of an opera singer...the movement of a ballet dancer..you have to be able to act...it's turning your whole body into a muscial instrument on which you yourself play...It's more than behaviorism, which is what you get in the movies...Chrissake, what are movies anyway? Just fucking moving photographs, that's all. But the theatre! Ah, there you have the impermanence that I love. It's a reflection of life somehow. It's...it's...like building a statue of snow...."

Peter O'Toole looked at his watch. Then he paid the barman and waved good-bye to the drunks in the corner. It was 1:15 P.M.--time to be getting to the track.

- from FAME AND OBSCURITY by Gay Talese

Classic Scene #32

2011-09-08T00:30:00.000+01:00

Hello! Haven't had time for blogging recently as our third child arrived in the world last Friday, nearly five weeks early. His sudden appearance has left me feeling much like Martin Blank in this scene from Grosse Point Blank; ambushed, perplexed, awestruck. 'Love dares you to care...' Bowie sings as Martin begins to feel the earth move beneath his feet. To hold that little life in your hands is to feel self-interest dissolve, to find yourself, yes, under pressure, but in a good way, undone by relief and stupid happiness, by responsibility for something fragile and mysterious and greater than you. How has this creature ended up in my arms, Martin's expression tells us, and why can't I stop looking at him? That's been me for the last six days.

I'm Ready For My Close-Up Mr Steichen!

2011-08-24T17:37:00.004+01:00

An amazing portrait of Gloria Swanson by Edward Steichen from 1924. The eyes behind the veil are amazing, those of a seer, a prophetess, a hypnotiser of silent movie audiences.

Clip Joint Round-Up: Voice-Over

2011-08-18T23:40:00.007+01:00

I love a good voiceover. It's always annoyed me when people (like Robert McKee) dismiss them as a failure of cinematic storytelling, as if cinema was a pure art form and not a mongrel one made up of all the others, plus that little bit extra, that cinema magic, that alchemy. There are plenty of sloppy voice-overs, of course, but the best add mood, poetry, depth and complication to the cinema experience. I liked this Clip Joint because it laid out, in clip after clip, how essential the voice-over/narration has been to so many great films and filmmakers, how the history and development of the medium would be immeasurably poorer without it. Once again, picking favourites was tough, but I ultimately choose the five below. Steenbeck's well thought-out choices are here below the main article.

It's clear now the theatrical soliloquy was always a frustrated voice-over, the only way dramatists had to let audiences know what characters were thinking. But cinema solved this problem. Now we were inside their minds, their inner voice somehow speaking in our minds, a new form of telepathy. It's one of cinema's great weapons of seduction, the intimacy of that disembodied voice, especially if delivered in the velvet purr of a great actor. Laurence Olivier used it in his Hamlet (1948) to emphasise certain lines in the 'to be or not to be' speech, but couldn't resist the actorly chance to declaim much of it as he would have on stage. It was left to Orson Welles (as it so often was) to fully merge the theatrical with the cinematic in his Shakespeare films, especially Othello (1952) where he seems to have realised the soliloquy was a natural voice-over, that it added that air of brooding self-absorption required for acts of tragic folly.

Noir captured that late '40s mood of existential dread, a generation's collective hangover from the traumas of war, its uneasy awareness of how the forces of history and politics could sweep people away. So if you could die at any minute, if you were merely an expendable pawn in someone else's game, what did anything matter? (This was the seed from which cool was born, of course. Not caring being the essence of it). This fatalism was inextricably linked to the laconic tone of the voice-over. Think of Robert Mitchum in Out Of the Past (1947) watching Jane Greer enter La Mar Azul. 'And then I saw her', he tells us, 'coming out of the sun.' That line's no accident I think. We're in Mexico, Acapulco, home of the Aztecs, whose sun gods demanded human sacrifice as tribute or they'd refuse to move across the sky. So here comes Kathie Moffat, out of the sun, demanding a human sacrifice of her own. And Jeff Bailey is it. He doesn't know it yet but his voice-over does. That's no woman coming towards him in a cool white dress, face hidden in the shadows, it's fate.

As noir prospered and matured it was inevitable that someone would take the genre's fatalism to its logical conclusion. And that someone was Billy Wilder. In Sunset Blvd (1950) his narrator, Joe Gillis, isn't on a trolley-car to the end of the line, he's already there, face down in a Hollywood swimming pool. Listen to the bright, cynical tone of the voice-over, the disembodied voice of Gillis' soul mockingly declaring 'poor dope' to his corporeal self, floating in the water with three bullets in him, press cameras flashing in a grotesque parody of the Hollywood dream of fame. Wilder brilliantly realised the analogous link between noir and fame, both were ritualised traps, and when fame was gone, the living might as well be dead. Norma Desmond's mansion is, after all, little more than a fancy mausoleum, a ghost house where silent movie stars like Mabel Norman and John Gilbert once swam in the pool 'ten thousand midnights ago...' Time is different in Hollywood, stars disappear in the dark, ghosts flicker in projector light and the dead speak to us in voice-over.

Contrary to popular opinion, cinema isn't a visual medium. It's a hybrid one that synthesises all the other art forms into itself. Take this scene from Badlands (1973) where music, words and images work together in perfect harmony. There's even the musical quality in Holly's accent. Her voice-over is like the narration of a girl's book, a story she's telling herself. They're like the Swiss Family Robinson, building underground tunnels and tree houses on a desert island. But the images play off this, like the gun beside Kit as he sleeps. The mood this sequence captures is almost exactly what Holly imagines is happening, an idyll, timeless revery. They've taken two steps to the left and are in an adventure, inventing passwords and watching the clouds go by. Even the casual way she says 'they hadn't found but one set of bones in the ashes of the house' betrays nothing of the fact that those bones belong to her father, murdered by Kit. It's like none of it is real to her, or rather, that reality can't compete with the yearning fantasy set free by the arrival of Kit, that adolescent desire to feel like you're in a book or film. Imagine the feeling if your life started to resemble one? Wouldn't that seem real to you, inevitable, a fulfilment of some kind? Don't we all want to escape the random drift of our lives and enter a world shaped by plot, by the rhythmic certainty of sentences? Aren't we all telling the story of our lives to ourselves in our minds, increasingly disappointed by its refusal to take shape into any recognisable narrative? Holly's voice-over tells us how a girl could end up on a killing spree with a boy she hardly knows. Kit is like a character from a movie who's materialised out of nowhere to take her through the looking glass. Twirling her baton in the Texas dust his appearance has the inevitability of a dream, of a promise foretold.

With Taxi Driver (1976) we're back to noir, to the insularity cities can provoke, the loneliness, to what it sounds like when that loneliness edges towards madness. In other words, welcome to the mind of Travis Bickle. While the loner is a hero of fiction, in the real world, as Philip Larkin once observed, 'virtue is social', and the loner/misfit is generally not liked or trusted. But inside most people there's a yearning for self-reliance, a sneaky admiration for those who refuse to take the daily compromises required to exist in society. 'Hell is other people,' as Sartre said, and we seek the escape of fantasy worlds to release this tension inside us, worlds where men stand alone against a corrupt world. 'Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,' Raymond Chandler famously wrote, 'who is neither tarnished nor afraid..a man of honor...with...a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.' That's Travis Bickle, a hero out of time, a social misfit who takes girls to porno movies and talks to himself in mirrors, but who, in a different context, could easily be a hero, a man of honour. It's just his fate to exist in a world where heroism is a myth and honour an anachronism, where loneliness isn't a manly virtue but a slow disease, an inner voice telling you crazy things. Betsy, his would-be heroine, calls him '...partly truth, partly fiction. A walking contradiction,' quoting Kris Kristofferson's song The Pilgrim. (A pilgrim, of course, is someone on a quest for the sacred, like the Pilgrim Fathers, those English Separatists who founded the first American colony. Travis is like one of these puritans, these outsider/outcasts in search of a shining city, finding himself instead in '70s New York, fascinated, disgusted and confused). He writes in his notebook and we hear these thoughts. We could see the words on the page instead, of course, which would make Robert McKee happy, but would, obviously, be stupid. These thoughts are, after all, in his head before they end up on the page. We hear them forming as he rides the night streets, watching New York in its vibrancy and breakdown (possibly the same thing). It's seductive, the poetry of it, 'whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies', how easily it makes us identify with the confused voice, how righteous it makes his thoughts sound, all that externalised self-hatred passing for moral purity. Good and evil. Salvation and damnation. God's lonely man and the scum of the streets. (How close, by the way, is this scene to the Pottersville sequence in Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. Travis is the right-wing George Bailey, a man who would not take it anymore, who decides to stand up rather than throw himself off a bridge in despair.)

Burnin' And Lootin'

2011-08-09T11:15:00.006+01:00

Topical as ever, the opening of La Haine (1995).

Caligari At The Cathedral

2011-08-06T22:03:00.004+01:00

Went to see The Cabinet of Dr Caligari last night in St Canice's Cathedral as part of this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival. The music was provided by my old favourites 3epkano along with organist Eric Sweeney. The 19th century organ is one of the biggest in Europe and looks like it came from The Phantom of the Opera. Most people I spoke to afterwards seemed to think it didn't contribute as much as they were expecting but this is a minor quibble in what was a wonderful experience. The Cathedral was a suitably gothic venue for the screening, the mediaval arches of the alter bathed in flourescent blue, the musicians hidden in the dark behind the screen, everyone sat happily in their pews, worshipping at the high altar of cinema.

The film cast its spell too. Despite some ripe acting it's still remarkably effective, sophisticated story-telling mining psychology, dreams, prophecy and fear. Werner Krauss is indelible as Dr. Caligari, a malevolent imp, a nightmare figure, irrational and devious, while Conrad Veidt is unforgettable as somnambulist killer Cesare, bringing subtlety and otherworldly grace to cinema's first great monster. The moment he opened his eyes at the fair was truly electrifying (due, in no small part, to 3epkano's rising, intense accompaniment). The famous expressionist sets, with their painted shadows, distorted perspectives, warped windows and angular, narrow streets, still work even now as a disorienating mechanism for audiences, the action imbued with unsettling dream-logic, a fable-like quality that remains strangely disturbing.

Other highlights were Cesare's kidnapping of the heroine and the asylum director's obsession toppling over into insanity represented by the name Caligari appearing everywhere around him. Moments of irrational intensity then, expressive fantasy, a knife in the dark to realism's throat that just won't go away. It's influence has been huge, from James Whale's Frankenstein to Scorsese's Shutter Island. As usual, 3epkano did a wonderful job of responding to the film's rhythms and moods, partly rehearsed, partly improvised, they made it another unforgettable experience in suitably exalted surroundings.

Classic Scene #31

2011-08-01T09:54:00.007+01:00

The opening sequence of Fritz Lang's Spies (1928) is just plain brilliant, so much information compressed into such a short space of time, the economy and sophistication of it is still startling, the excitement of those rapid scenes, their comic book vitality, all leading up to the appearance of criminal mastermind Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) and that wonderfully ominous 'Ich'. It's Lang inventing the visual grammer of the spy movie thirty years ahead of the game, just as he did for sci-fi epics with Metropolis and serial killers with M. You want to watch the rest of it now, right?

Mark M For Murder

2011-07-28T23:55:00.010+01:00

Fritz Lang's first talkie, M is a masterclass in mise-en-scène, creating pace and tension in quick scenes that click together like a mathematical equation, dialogue from one scene spilling into the next, inducing a sense of urgency, the city overrun with suspicion and fear. It begins as a police procedural, a kind of 1930s CSI Berlin, with both the criminal underworld and the police trying to find child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre). Beckert is nothing more at this stage than a lurking shadow and an eerie whistle, a bogie man luring children away with presents, like the balloon he buys for Elsie, whose death is conveyed by two unforgettable images; her ball rolling out from behind a bush (we're left to imagine what has happened behind that bush) and the balloon snagged in telephone lines, fluttering in the cold breeze like a distressed soul, or a struggling body.

But then we enter Beckert's world, are with him as he suffers the agony of temptation. Suddenly the film inspires both empathy and horror. The criminal world's attempts to catch him are heroic at first, we're on their side. But as the trap closes in and the hunter becomes the hunted our allegience wavers. Surely this is the film Hitchcock learned how an audience will side with anyone if we're put in their shoes, shown their point of view. In many ways it's a modern film, a classy chase thriller. But it's much more too. It's impossible not to see it as prophetic, an x-ray of the society that so easily let the Nazis into power only two years later. It understands how easily public mood could be manipulated by fear, by tales of monsters, how the rule of law, with all its sophisticated techniques, was no match for the outrage of the mob. Beckert is a sick and dangerous man, but a man he is, not a monster. And yet the children are dead. If the police can't protect them, who will? There are no easy answers here which is what makes it resonate still. Lorre is extraordinary as Beckert, a man of cunning and weakness, tormented by demons, by his own desires, a pathetic wretch and a vision from our worst nightmares. Cinema's first great serial killer. Essential.

Classic Scene #30

2011-07-16T00:52:00.000+01:00

The ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point comes in three stages; first the multi-angled explosion, a thrilling succession of detonations, each one closer, each one beautiful in its annihilating force, like a Michael Bay wet dream. But then it goes somewhere Bay would never dream of going, wet or otherwise. The sound of Pink Floyd's Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up drifts over a scattershot ballet of graceful, slow-motion debris, an atomised universe of shattered glass, torn clothes and flying food swimming in the blue ether, surreal and haunting. Then the music changes to a screaming intensity as explosions bloom out at us, books bursting like ripe flesh, pain and anguish erupting from beneath the visual. It's extraordinary, like nothing in cinema before or since. And then it just ends, abruptly, and we're back with the girl. Remember the girl? She's just imagined all that it seems. What could it mean?

Two Steps To The Left

2011-07-05T13:56:00.004+01:00

''I remember people coming through La Junta while we were filming, crew members who were working on another film somewhere that had just wrapped. While they stopped off to see some of their friends who were working on Badlands, I remember thinking, "They're making a film somewhere else?" It seemed like the center of the universe. Like nothing else really existed.''

Sissy Spacek quoted in GQ's excellent Badlands: An Oral History.

''The film has this very American notion, I think, that two totally humdrum kids with hardly an ounce of education between them—if they just take two steps to the left, they're into fame and legend. After all, what the fuck else are they gonna do with their lives?''

Film critic David Thomson from the same article

Scenes From The Suburbs

2011-06-28T23:46:00.005+01:00

Just watched Scenes From The Suburbs over at MUBU, Spike Jonze's short film based on Arcade Fire's recent album. Obviously meant to be the fragmentary recollection of one of those teenage summers that change everything, it portrays the relationship between two suburban boys as a dystopian military state tightens its grip around them, the violent, repressive atmosphere beginning to erode their sense of humanity. Beautifully shot, with fine performances from the young cast, Scenes From The Suburbs still left me a little frustrated, maybe because it was rich enough to have been a full length film. Although then we'd loose the eliptical nature of the narrative, supposed to replicate how we only remember the past in confusing fragments, some intensely present to us after years, some vague, others absent altogether. Why do we remember some things vividly, and other things, often as important or even more so, not at all? It's a fascinating question and Jonze uses it to create tension and unease very well, the real touched by the nightmarish. I'd like to see it again to get a clearer idea of whether it stands up as a short or whether the richness discovered deserves to be explored in full. Still, even now it's an engrossing half hour that captures perfectly the intensity of teenage friendships and the world-threatening pain of change.

Footnote: actually, watching the video below, there are several scenes and moments not in the film, which leads me to believe there may well be a full length film and that Scenes From The Suburbs is a kind of extended trailer, a teaser for the fuller experience to come.

Clip Joint Round-Up: Pianos

2011-06-20T16:06:00.033+01:00

Hello. It's been a while. Been busy with proper life stuff and general brain freeze. To get back in the groove I thought I might do a round-up of last weeks's Clip Joint over at The Guardian, one of the few things I've had the attention span to contribute to recently. So, the task, choose five from all the suggested clips. This week's theme was pianos, which turned out to be an inspired one. As the great clips kept coming I thought to myself, god, I wouldn't want to have to pick five from this lot. And then I thought, but if I had to, what would they be? So here I am, doing that. The five chosen by Tess can be found here, just scroll down a bit to see them.

First up for me has to be Jean Arthur and Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings. It was hard picking just one Howard Hawks scene as I've had to leave out Hoagy Carmichael and Lauren Bacall's iconic double-act from To Have And Have Not but in the end that undulating thing Arthur does with her arm and Grant yelling PEA-NUT! swung the deal. In two minutes the piano tells us plenty about her; that she's a tougher cookie than she first appears, a practised performer who's been around plenty of those disreputable rogues, musicians. And the brief bit of introspective noodling tells us she's been hurt in love too, almost certainly by one of those musicians. Here then, we not only have the Hawksian world-view encapsulated in one scene but also an example of the way pianos act as social hubs, focal points for gathering around, starting parties, lining up shots glasses. A piano, this scene tells us, is more than an instrument, it's a test of character, a hurt unlocker, a standing invitation.

Or, in the case of The Seven Year Itch, a libido unlocker. That's certainly how Tom Ewell sees it, or imagines it. This was the scene posted, but we forgot about an earlier one, where Ewell fantasises about the effect Rachmaninoff will have on Monroe, how its deep romantic seriousness will induce shakes and quakes and goosebumps, leaving her helpless putty in his arms. Here we have the less exalted reality. Instead of Rachmaninoff we get chopsticks, instead of a fantasy sex goddess there's a girl having thoughtless fun. Marilyn still gets goosebumps, though. And how! But Ewell ends up flat on his face. Monroe's girlish enjoyment is infectious. She's not some pretentious siren of desire, classical dream-cords reverberating through her body. She's the simple, surface fun of chopsticks. The piano, in this case, is a personality decoder, an arena of (would-be) seduction, a reservoir of lost childhood pleasure.

As I said above, the piano is a standing invitation. Especially in an empty room. And double-especially in an empty bar. It seems to call to certain people, to tempt them away from reality, like Alain Delon in this scene from Jean Pierre Melville's Un Flic. It's a homage I'm sure to Sinatra, who invented (or crystalised) this tough-guy-reveals-sensitive-side-playing-piano-in-an-empty-bar schtick. It's a moment of private reverie, time holding its breath, Delon playing an introspective, jazzy piece, cigarette in his mouth, Catherine Deneuve listening unseen in the shadows, falling for him with every note. The piano, this tells us, is an interzone, a world unto itself, touchstone of timeless cool, summoner of goddesses from the dark.

'It hurts', Ingrid Bergman explains to Liv Ulmann, 'but he doesn't show it.' The film is Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata, the he is Chopin, the piece is his Prelude No. 2. which Ulmann has been playing just before this, every halting note clearly torture to her concert pianist mother, who is now going to show how it should be played. What follows is a lesson and a humiliation. As she plays, Ulmann gazes at her. The look is mesmerising, total; need, resentment, love, hurt, all held in sway by those hypnotic, mysterious notes. Just look at me, notice me. It's almost unbearable, the longing for her mother to pay her the same attention she does the piano, to touch her with the same tenderness, the same care. 'Total restraint the whole time,' Bergman emphasises, surely aware of the naked gaze, but refusing to acknowledge it. 'Feeling is very far from sentimentality,' she lectures, as her daughter sits meekly, saying nothing, craving sentimental connection, reduced to a mousy nothing by her elegant, brilliant mother. This piano is a cuckoo in the nest, an all-consuming lover, an instrument of pain, both exalted and plain.

And finally, I've gone for this old gag from Ballot Box Bunny, so good Looney Tunes used it more than once. I like this one best mainly because Yosemite Sam says pie-anna but also because his volcanic temper makes what he does in the end wonderfully inevitable. It's all in the timing. Get that right and it'll be funny forever. I've watched this ten times in the last week and laughed every time. Why when I know what's coming? Well, partly because I do know it's coming and partly it's the rhythm of it. Bugs plays the tune slow, Sam plays it fast. That's part of it too. So, what does this scene tell us about the pie-anna? That it's a potential booby-trap, a punisher of impatience, and comedy's favourite slapstick musical instrument.

The Big Clock

2011-05-06T16:18:00.006+01:00

In J.G. Ballard's short story Chronopolis,the inhabitants of a run-down city live without clocks. Time-keeping has been outlawed. But a young man's curiousity (his name is Newman) leads him to a deserted part of the city where time once ruled peoples' lives absolutely. Clocks are everywhere here, on the side's of skyscrapers and in the central plaza that was ground zero for a civilisation controlled by time. All the clocks have long since stopped at the exact time of the revolution that overthrew them. Newman sets his sights on restoring the enormous central clock through which all the others were once run. The idea of the story is that free of the tyranny of time, people gradually stagnate, society runs down, that while a society controlled by time may be highly efficent it is nevertheless soulless, a fascist state where human autonomy is virtually outlawed. Let time take over and it will rule you like a dictator, ignore it and you'll sink into boundless lethargy. It captures our natural fascination with clocks, with questing minds setting out in search of answers, but it also articulates our unease with time as a personal and political tool of oppression. I thought of it the other day while reading about Christian Marclay's amazing art piece The Clock, a video installation sampling thousands of time-related film clips to create a metaphysical meditation on time. It also happens to be a twenty-four-hour clock merging real time with its more elastic cousin, cinema time, creating in the process a kind of Venn diagram, an interzone where life and art meet, a world where clocks are everywhere and every minute is not only catalogued and synchronised but significant. It sounds amazing and I'd love to see it but unfortunately being an art piece it's only on exhibition in certain galleries in big cities, so I don't have much hope. Some considerate person has, however, uploaded about six minutes of it onto Youtube.

Even this short excerpt is hypnotic, time hovering behind everything surreptitiously. (We're not watching time; time's watching us). The ingenuity is compelling enough but what I really like is the way time links each clip to the next, creating a sense of inevitability, like these random clips from past and present are meant to go together, like there's meaning here, a narrative just out of reach. There's no past, present or future, it seems to suggest, only time, continuous, backwards and forwards, where Laurel & Hardy and Roger Moore are in the same film and cinema has been engaged in a secret process of accumulating clips for this very project all along, a High Noon-style countdown across cinematic history. 'Time is the substance from which I am made,' Jorge Luis Borges once wrote. 'Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.' Substitute cinema for time in that and you might have an answer. Cinema carries us along too, devours us. Maybe it's our collective dream of escaping the heartbeat ticking of clocks, of re-entering the timeless flow of eternity, floating away on it like Michel Simon's anarchic tramp at the end of Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning. On the other hand, we like the sense of control clocks give us too, the sense of purpose, which is probably what makes a cinematic clock such a potent idea, the best of both worlds, mysterious and accurate, a Chronopolis we can escape from.

Classic Scene #29

2011-04-09T21:28:00.004+01:00

In honour of Sidney Lumet, who died today, here's my favourite scene from Dog Day Afternoon, not only one of the great 1970s movies but one of the great 1970s New York movies, that sub-genre that captured the great metropolis in kinetic meltdown. Pacino is marvellous here, feeding off the tension, giddy with fear, an actor revelling in the stage. It's still electric to this day, as quintessentially New York as Lumet himself. Everybody now: 'Attica! Attica!'

Classic Scene #28

2011-03-30T10:39:00.004+01:00

Clark Gable attempts to teach Claudette Colbert the subtleties of hitchhiking in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), the unbeatable template for romantic comedy ever since, an evergreen road trip through 30s America which tells us plenty about the rich and the working class, men and women too, with Gable in his prime and Colbert in his pyjamas. As the critic Pauline Kael observed:

'It made audiences happy in a way that only a few films in each era do. In the mid-30s, the Colbert and Gable of this film became American's idealised view of themselves - breezy, likeable, sexy, gallant, and maybe just a little harebrained. It was the Annie Hall of its day - before the invention of anxiety.'

Classic Scene #27

2011-03-27T02:19:00.005+01:00

The great Lotte Lenya singing Seeräuber Jenny from G.W. Pabst's 1931 version of Brecht and Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). It's her stillness, I think, that's so spellbinding, and the veiled look in her eyes, like she's seeing that ship in her mind as clear as a vision, like it's not a dream but a promise.
You can imagine this woman at the French Revolution, at every bloody uprising of the poor and exploited before and since, her vengeance pure and justified, watching tyrants' heads roll one by one, crying out as each one falls - hoppla!

Last Five Films #5

2011-03-18T11:21:00.002Z

1. No Man Of Her Own (1932)

Likeable pre-code fare with Clark Gable in full virile mode as big city card sharp, Babe Stewart, wooing small-town librarian Connie Randall (Carole Lombard) with some full-on flirtation. ('Do your eyes bother you?' he says, leaning close to her in the library. 'No, why?' 'Because they bother me.') She resists him, but in truth it's all she can do to not buckle at the knees every time he comes near. 'The girl who lands him will say no and put an anchor on it,' she tells a friend, 'but isn't it tough when all you can think of is yes?' Which is exactly what makes the first half of this film so enjoyable. The aching knowledge that she wants to say yes, even though (or precisely because) he's a predatory heel who'll high-tail it back to New York as soon as he gets his way. There's an animal intensity between them in these scenes that's a pleasure to behold, a blatent sexiness that holds the film spellbound. Unfortunately, on the toss of a coin, ('I never go back on a coin') they get married instead, and he brings her to the big city. Despite some funny scenes the film peters out somewhat after this trying to redeem Gable, who goes from criminal badass to charming rogue to love-sick good guy willing to endure prison and even work for a living! In the process the film looses much of the heat that made it such good sexy fun. Still, well worth a look, if only to see Lombard in her undies!

2. Bombshell (1933)

Cheerfully cynical early screwball with everyone involved rattling off the zippy dialogue at breakneck speed. The plot is meta before its time with Jean Harlow playing Hollywood star Lola Burns, dragged down by mooching family and thieving employees, torn between tough-guy director Jim Brogan (Pat O'Brien), continental lothario Hugo (Ivan Lebedeff) and studio press agent E.J. Hanlon (Lee Tracy). Tracy is the engine of the film, an endlessly scheming Iago with an angle for everything, manipulating Lola at every turn while professing to love her. We're on the edge of a corrosive truth about the Hollywood machine here but the film never stops moving or talking long enough to admit it. You can see fact and fiction already beginning to blur in the Hollywood sun. Lola profits from the scandal Hanlon creates around her but she craves respectibility, the realness of domesticity (posing for kitchen photo-shoots), the ideal of motherhood (trying to adopt a baby), the sanity of being unknown (she runs away to a spa resort). All these fantasies end in failure. The idea is Hanlon is saving Lola from herself by sabotaging her desires for class and stability, helping her realise that where she really belongs, where she's really happy, is in the mad-house of vulgar chaos that is Hollywood. Fast and funny, Bombshell is a love letter to that vulgar chaos, a brazen celebration of deception and bullshit that can't entirely hide the truth in its meta twists and turns, the shadow of fame's devouring neon hovering over it all.

3. My Man Godfrey (1936)

'Life is but an empty bubble,' sighs Carole Lombard's spoilt socialite in Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey, casually summing up the philosophy at the heart of the screwball comedies of the '30s. In fact, this is probably the prototype '30s film, a Depression-fuelled screwball romance with all the blithe wit of a Broadway play leavened with scabrous contempt for the rich and blessed with that mysterious light touch that the best directors of the era seemed to have in abundance. It's a classic. William Powell plays homeless bum Godfrey Smith living at the city dump and minding his own business when snobby rich girl Cornelia Bullock turns up and offers him five dollars to be her 'forgotten man' for a scavenger hunt. He refuses and she storms off. But her younger sister Irene (Lombard) stays behind, intrigued by this strange man. Touched by something sweet-natured in her (and by a curiosity to see such an event at first hand) Godfrey offers to help her beat Cornelia. In the ballroom of the Waldorf-Ritz Hotel we're treated to a scene of undignified chaos as hundreds of socialites push and shove and argue over who gets to register their scavenger hunt items first. Irene's father Alexander (Eugene Pallette) observes, 'all you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people'. And that's the film right there, the rich are crazy (with greed and boredom), American capitalism is teetering on the brink of savagery, but the poor, the forgotten men, have had all the crazy knocked out of them. It's touch and go as to who should be pitied more. Only Irene is absolved, she's a kind of holy innocent who offers Godfrey a job as their butler so she can have a protege like her empty-headed mother (Alice Brady), who has free-loading poet Carlo (Mischa Auer) as hers. As the new butler in the Bullock madhouse Godfrey is the most refined character in sight. No one had the elegant poise and knowing intelligence of William Powell. He moves through the film with the careful reserve of an adult trapped at a children's party. And Lombard is sensational, a ditzy dope with a big heart, a loveable child prone to funny moods and irrational fits of mania. There are twists and turns that ultimately let the rich off the hook somewhat, lessons learned, the social satire softened, but somehow it doesn't matter as the faultless direction pulls us through to the kind of perfectly delivered last-line closer most films would kill for.

4. Easy Living (1937)

Poor Mitchell Leisen. So many good films, so little credit for any of them. With Easy Living the reason is screenwriter Preston Sturges. The film feels so much like a forerunner of the Sturges style he has to get much of the kudos. Smart lines, farcical plot, slapstick shenanigans? It's all here along with several of the Sturges stock company. But then, Leisen trained as an architect before going into movies and surely he's responsible for the amazing rooms Jean Arthur is shown around by hotel owner Louis Louis. They're a dream of opulent elegance, the kind of insane luxury that makes it obvious why Louis is going bankrupt. The only possible response is Arthur's when left alone in this impossibly swish suite; a half-awed, half-appalled 'Golly!' Wealth here is like a fairy-tale. You are always only a lucky break away from riches. It's a lottery that can fall on anyone. There's little of the moral distain that fuels My Man Godfrey, no forgotten men, just a good girl struggling to get by whose life is changed forever when fate lands a fur coat on her head. The coat in question belongs to the third richest banker in New York, J.B. Ball (Edward Arnold), who throws it off the roof of his penthouse apartment in a row with his wife. It lands on Arthur as she passes by in an open-topped bus, breaking her hat. When J.B. tells her to keep the coat and takes her to buy a new expensive hat rumours spread that she's his mistress. As newspaperman Van Buren brilliantly puts it, 'the bull of broad street, with a girl, in the sable-est sable coat they ever sabled!' As a result she loses her job but gets offered the hotel suite by Louis as a way of insuring J.B. doesn't foreclose on the hotel. Suddenly everyone wants to cash in on her notoriety while she remains oblivious as to why. Add in a romance with J.B.'s cheerfully useless son (Ray Milland), a near riot in an automat, a run on the stock exchange and plenty of shouting, outrage and confusion and you have a cock-eyed cocktail to savour. The end is too neat (a Leisen failing) but Arnold's manic bluster, Milland's boyish charm and Arthur's sweet smile are what will stay with you afterwards.

5. Nothing Sacred (1937)

'For good clean fun, there's nothing like a wake,' declares newspaperman Wally Cook in William A. Wellman's Nothing Sacred, supplying this acid satire with the perfect tagline. In this case the wake is Hazel Flagg's (Carol Lombard) except she isn't dead yet, just dying (of radium poisoning). And, frankly, everyone couldn't be more pleased about it. There's just one thing; she isn't dying, she was misdiagnosed. But the chance to escape her small town, to enjoy the big city delights of New York, prove too tempting, so she lies to Cook (Fredric March), a once great reporter in need of a big story. She's exploiting everyone's sympathy while the newspaper exploits her, and the public get to bask in the glow of her 'bravery' and cry crocodile tears at her impending death. No one escapes in this savage film. You only have to think of the recent Jade Goody story (hated loud-mouth celebrity transformed by cancer into brave mother and national heroine) to see how on the money this was and is still. The only other film I can think of that displays the same contempt for the malign influence of the media and the baser instincts of its audience is Network (1976) but unlike that film's atmosphere of intense, shrill seriousness Nothing Sacred maintains its era's fast-paced, crazy spirit throughout. Ben Hecht's script zings with great lines while tough-guy director Wellman keeps all sentiment at bay. It doesn't waver for a second. As the man says to the Dutch girl; 'Show them the finger babe'. And it sure does.

The '30s Project

2011-03-09T12:07:00.005Z

Currently watching, and writing various pieces on, 1930s films with a view to a mini-weekend festival we're planning for the summer based around films from the era. Still in the planning stages at the moment, we may even dress up, but for now all I've finished is a playlist of '30s music to listen to while I write (because this is, of course, a vital component of the whole enterprise).

The Strange World Of Charley Bowers

2011-03-03T11:26:00.007Z

In his 2002 novel, The Book of Ilusions, Paul Auster invented his own silent movie comedian, a once celebrated figure forgotten by all but a few archival specialists. Hector Mann had disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1929 and over the years his star had faded to obscurity. Then, in the early 1980s, canisters of his lost films began turning up in archives around the world.
It's hard not to think of Mann when confronted by the real-life story of Charley Bowers, a silent movie comedian/cartoonist who made his last proper film in 1930 and essentially disappeared too, although his vanishing act wasn't total or mysterious. He just went to live in New Jersey where he drew cartoons for the local paper until his death in 1946. But if it wasn't for a chance find of French copies of some of his films in the 1970s he would still be entirely unknown.
Although his screen persona was reminiscent of Buster Keaton, Bowers was only an average performer. What makes his films interesting today are their stop-motion flights of fancy. He's closer in temperament to someone like Georges Melies than to any of his contemporary comedians. His strange imagination was so pronounced that even Andre Breton, the principal founder of Surrealism, championed his first sound film It's A Bird (1930). In it, a comical, metal-eating bird consumes some car parts before laying an egg which proceeds to hatch a small, dark object that transforms into a full-sized car before our eyes. It's a little marvel of technical skill and private imagination following its own oddball reveries.

And then there's this madness. One of his twelve silent films, There It Is is a bizarre tale in which a house is terrorised by a little bald man called the Fuzz-Faced Phantom and a Scotland Yard detective is sent to investigate along with his assistant, an animated insect. If that sounds weird it's nothing to the actual film. It may not be very funny but that hardly matters when the actions of the Fuzz-Faced Phantom amount to nothing less than an attack on rationality itself, an exercise in epic randomness that has the illogic of a nightmare.

But my favourite Bowers moment happens near the end of probably his most successful film, Now You Tell One from 1926. In it, members of a Liars Club are competing to see who can tell the tallest tale. This section has some nice moments, especially the forty-seven elephants streaming into Capitol Hill, but then Charley tells them about a potion he's invented that allows him to graft anything onto anything else. Setting out to sell this potion he arrives at a farm overrun by mice where he grafts a much-needed cat from a plant. The result is a protoplasmic effusion of cats growing from this plant like balloons, bodies forming in seconds. It's a surrealistic image worthy of Rene Magritte or Max Ernst.

Hollywood Surreal

2011-02-24T17:27:00.012Z

Mentioning Dali and Disney yesterday reminded me that they did actually collaborate once. The two met at a Hollywood party while Dali was working with Hitchcock on the dream sequences for Spellbound (1945). Dali was a huge Disney fan, considering him one of America's great surrealists along with Cecil B. De Mille and Harpo Marx. (He'd clearly never seen a Fleischer cartoon). In fact Dali's first links with Hollywood went back to 1936 when he'd met Harpo at a party in Paris. (Someone really should do a thesis on the importance of parties to the development of 20th century art).

After sending him a present of a barbed-wire harp Dali came to Hollywood the following year to paint Harpo and wrote a typically bonkers screenplay while he was there for a proposed Marx Brothers film to be called Giraffes on Horseback Salad. Not surprisingly it was never made. There was also a sadly-aborted project with Fritz Lang around 1940 before he teamed up with Hitchcock four years later and finally got something on screen.

And then he met Disney. By January 1946 he was working under contract with studio artist John Hench on storyboarding a six-minute sequence for the film Destino. Every morning he'd go to work at Disney's studio (on Dopey Avenue!) just like a regular employee. Can you imagine Dali turning up at your work place every day? Eating his melty cheese in the canteen, waxing his moustache in the tiolets? This unlikely scenario must have seemed pretty surreal in itself. But Dali really was there to work. He produced paintings, sketches and guide images on lined paper. Unfortunately, like many of his Hollywood ventures, it never came to fruition. Disney's financial problems at the time meant the film was mothballed indefinately.

But in 1999, during work on Fantasia 2000, Disney rediscovered the lost project and decided to bring it back to life using the original storyboards. Finished in 2003 (and given a limited theatrical release with, of all things, Calendar Girls - now that's surreal) it tells the story of the Greek god of time, Chronos, and his love for a mortal woman who dances through a virtual compendium of classic Dalí images. The song, by composer Armando Dominguez, sung by his Mexican compatriot Dora Luz, casts a moodily romantic spell. 'This heart of mine is thrilled now, my empty arms are filled now, as they were meant to be' she sings as if in a reverie. 'For you came along, out of a dream I recall...to answer my call, I know now that you are my destino.' The dream of love triumphs then, in classic Hollywood style, over surrealism's Freudian nightmares, over time itself. Destiny, it seems to say, is time's DNA, forever with us, ready to spring from our dreams and save us, if only we can decipher it.

Dali's stock may have fallen greatly in his latter years, and his Hollywood ventures may well have been the start of his decline, but they were also a genuine, if star-struck, engagement with the dream factory, an attempt to bring his surreal ethos to a mass audience. In Destino, though, it feels like the opposite happened, that nearly a decade after he first followed Harpo to Hollywood, it was Dali who was being taken over by its ethos, undone by the high romance of popular song, the heady power of princess dresses and wild hair.

Swing You Sinners!

2011-02-23T17:19:00.000Z

More wonderful Fleischer madness, this time from 1930. Swing You Sinners is based around a reworking of a popular gospel song of the time called Sing You Sinners, which it jazzifies and scats to great effect. Once again an ordinary situation, dog tries to steal chicken, quickly evolves into a surreal, nightmarish tour de force like nothing you've ever seen before. The Fleischer world is alive with the mutability of forms, booby-trapped with malevolent or mischievous intent, everything in danger of changing at a moment's notice. It's like what would've happened if Salvador Dali had secretly replaced Walt Disney, except it has a primitive power closer to the superstitions of folk art or the medieval biomorphic weirdness of Hieronymus Bosch than to Dali's arid dreamscapes. In fact the latter stages of Swing You Sinners are Bosch-like in spirit, with all the demented Dutch master's hellish glee in the damnation of sinners. Unlike Bosch though, it also has gallows humour, slapstick charm and the swinging rhythm of the music. A strange little masterpiece.

Minnie The Moocher

2011-02-19T02:03:00.003Z

Before Disney annexed it to colonise the imagination of children forever more animation was a place of anarchic possibility. Take that troubling minx Betty Boop. Always cavorting half-dressed through life, Betty was the 1930s most unlikely sex symbol. Originally Bimbo the dog was the star with Betty only making cameo appearances, unnamed and not even really human. Before she was a woman, Betty was a dog, a cat and even a fish. It was evolution cartoon-style and the man responsible was Max Fleischer, the greatest rival to the early Disney empire, an audacious pioneer also responsible for the first Popeye and Superman cartoons.
As film archivist Dennis Nyback explains, Max and his brothers, Dave and Leonard, had a unique way of making their films, working backwards from music to drawings in exactly the opposite way most other animation outfits work. Jazz fan Leonard would bring in the latest hot records from black artists and the animators essentially improvised to the music. The results were often surreal and revelatory. Take Minnie The Moocher from 1932. It starts off with real footage of Cab Calloway and his orchestra performing the song, Calloway doing his super-cool (and much-imitated) dance moves. Dennis Nyback explains the reason for this live-action footage:

...the head of the New York musician’s union...didn’t like the use of records without paying royalties. Max invited him to the studio and made him a deal. He offered to have the musicians come to the studio and be paid for performing. He would then film and record them. The filmed images of the jazz performers would appear in a Fleischer cartoon based on their record, exposing them to wider audiences...As a result we can see Cab Calloway...and other jazz greats of the early thirties in Fleischer cartoons. (This did not sit well with bigots. The appearance of black performers with white Betty Boop elicited threats from the Ku Klux Klan.)

The film starts with Betty getting into a fight with her parents. Upset, she decides to run away. She calls Bimbo, they meet up and begin their escape. Soon though it gets dark and the strains of Minnie The Moocher begin. Frightened, they duck into a cave where a strange walrus creature appears and sings the song to them. This is clearly Calloway. The Fleischers used their own invention, rotoscope, to animate his movements by tracing frames of the live action film. (It was one of the many innovations they were responsible for. They also pioneered the use of synchronised sound three years before The Jazz Singer). What follows is a nightmare vision of skeletons, ghosts, dead-eyed cats and the scariest witch to ever fly towards a camera from out of nowhere. Even the Calloway-infused walrus is disturbing, with its weirdly distended and fleshy body. Soon a terrified Betty is running home to hide under her bed covers. As would any of us if confronted by this night of the dead. It's creepy enough as a cartoon. Hi-dee-hi-dee-ho indeed.

Please Look Now!

2011-01-31T17:00:00.001Z

I've been toying for some time now with the notion of doing one of those Youtube videos that are all the rage with the kids these days. Decided for my first effort on a tribute to Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now, which I wrote about here a few months back as part of my classic scenes series. Its inspired imagery was half the battle won, of course, even before I started, so picking the right soundtrack was the real task. I finally went with the My Bloody Valentine-inspired Babelonia by School Of Seven Bells, a suitably mysterious, gothic sound with appropriate lyrics about fractured time. I'm reasonably pleased with the end result, for a first effort anyway, especially as it took me six hours to figure out how to upload it! Hope you like it.

John Barry (1933-2011)

2011-01-31T09:26:00.010Z

With the death of John Barry yesterday the film world has lost one of its true greats. In an era of fine composers Barry's unique versitility and class stood out, from low-budget cool to Hollywood pizazz, he could do it all, usually better than anyone else. So here, in tribute, are five of my favourite pieces of Barry magic.

His first soundtrack and what a way to start, the opening of Beat Girl (1956) sees him capture the heady excitment of teen rebellion way better than the film does. Music so cool it makes you wish you were in that packed cellar club for real, dancing like a hipster loon.

His most famous work will always be the main James Bond theme, but he composed many fabulous pieces for all the Bond films. The one I keep returning to is Piz Gloria Escape/Ski Chase from possibly my favourite Bond film On Her Majesty's Secet Service. It's sinuous, atmospheric and thrilling all at once. Try listening to it while doing the washing up and even that mundane task will suddenly be infused with all the glamour of international espionage. Honest.

His main theme for the British epic Zulu (1964) showed he could do blockbuster bombast with the best of them, producing a rousing piece suitable for tales of heroic sacrifice, bloody battles and the wide open spaces of the African veldt.

And then he could do this, practically the polar opposite, the main theme for Midnight Cowboy (1969), music so wistful and feather-light it sends the listener into a reverie, evokes complex feelings of melancholy and somehow expresses all the burning hope and disappointment of the American Dream while making you want to gaze out windows and contemplate the passing world.

And just for good measure, he proved he could master the TV theme tune and inspire a generation of electronica musicians in the process, with this classic for The Peruaders, music so unique and innovative, moog-moody and exotic it should really have been soundtracking something far greater than this larky, lightweight vehicle for Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. Honestly, it's like Beethoven doing the theme music for bloody Spooks. He was just so ahead of the field by then, could compress so much into a few minutes of music, few filmmakers could match him. Genius.

Classic Scene #26

2011-01-07T00:11:00.005Z

'Ring out the old year, ring in the new, ring-a-ding-ding.'
What better way to start another year than with that line sighed by Miss Kubelik near the end of Billy Wilder's The Apartment, the words hollow with derision for the lies of festive hope, the final flourish mocking the flip verbal smartness of the executives at Consolidated Life, the heartless ease with which they seem to pass through life, leaving girls like Fran Kubelik in their wake. Wearing that paper crown over her blankly disappointed face she seems, briefly, like the loneliest person in New York, her heart soured forever.
But then that wonderful smile slowly lights up her face, sweet with release, as the drunken crowd mindlessly sing 'we'll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.' And then she's running, in one of the most purely happy shots in all of cinema, her face blissful in the breeze, running towards C.C. Baxter, towards fruit cakes and card games and the kindness she deserves.

Yo ho ho!

2010-12-23T15:35:00.010Z

What better way to celebrate Christmas than with this heartwarming discussion about reindeers that I'm sure is being replicated in homes all over the world around now between curious children and their loving guardians, assuming, of course, that their loving guardians also happen to be drunken, amoral sons-of-bitches masquerading as shopping mall Santas, which I'm entirely confident most of them are.

Or we could just keep it old school. I am, sadly, old school enough to have seen Beat Street when it came out in 1984, along with that year's other rap-sploitation hit, Breakdance. For the first time we experienced what other generations before us had, that universal white boy infatuation with (American) black street culture. As with jazz and blues before it, rap and its cultural debris, graffiti and breakdancing, hit us hard. What a sight we must have been, gawky Irish boys trying to bust our moves on flattened out pieces of cardboard in our parents' driveways or spray-painting our names under bridges before heading home because it was getting dark. Watching it now though, it's easy to hear the political message we missed then, about what Christmas is really like for those unlucky enough to find themselves on the wrong side of the economic tracks. Happy Christmas y'all. Kiss my mistletoe!

The Film Club Reviews #8

2010-12-21T15:34:00.005Z

I'd like to think that the stunned silence that greeted the ending of Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth wasn't just shock at its unpredictable violence and sex scenes but also that people were struggling to respond to a troublingly original film, one determined to confound expectations. This seemingly surreal story about a couple who keep their grown-up children isolated from the world in a walled compound on the outskirts of a city, has the unarguable clarity of a parable and the matter-of-fact courage of its low-budget convictions. It's about repression, social and family conditioning, language, trust, corruption, sex, violence and ultimately rebellion. It's a tribute to its marvellous deadpan that it could easily be used to argue opposing positions; that the parents are repressive monsters or that the introduction of outsiders into the controlled environment disrupts the previously blissful existence of the 'children'. Or possibly both. The one thing that's unarguable is the film's belief in the maleability of human mind, that without any frame of reference we are capable of believing anything, as easily conditioned and trained as dogs. However, throughout the film there are moments when emotional outbursts, sexual desires and natural curiosity find ways to express themselves. Not let out in normal ways, they find different, less socially acceptable ways to escape. It's nature vrs nurture as some kind of social experiment then, hinting at the contradictions and failures of Communist regimes or the repressiveness of closed religious communities. In this sense it has a lot in common with Haneke's The White Ribbon. But it's a very different film, funnier, stranger, a twenty-first century Bunuelian fable, as sharp and enigmatic as a razor blade, as hard to get rid of as a stubborn tooth.

Silent Music

2010-12-13T16:39:00.016Z

In the last few years I've had the pleasure of watching classic silent movies on the big screen, usually with live musical accompaniment by post-rock Irish group 3epkano. I've seen The Passion of Joan of Arc, Pandora's Box, The Blood of a Poet, Sunrise, Battleship Potemkin and The Man With the Movie Camera. I always find the combination enthralling. It's easy to sense the hold the medium had on pre-sound audiences, somehow you're more attentive to the images, faces especially, radiant in the celluloid light in ways so far removed from modern cinema it feels like a different art form, closer to alchemy than the seamless science of digital technology. I've usually come away from these screenings elated, with the faces of Maria Falconetti, Louise Brooks or Janet Gaynor seared into my mind, indelible images, religious in their iconic power.

And the music is a vital componant to this. 3epkano's great strength is there understanding of film. A friend of mine saw Lambchop doing a live score to Sunrise and said it was a disaster because they essentially played their songs over the film with little reference to it. 3epkano never do this. At times they're completely silent, letting the significance of a scene work on the images alone, sometimes they fill the silence with just the barest brush of a cymbal, moody scrape of violin, waiting for the right moment, following the narrative rhythm of the film, before building to emotional crescendos. At its best, the combination is near overwhelming, the drum beats reverberating in your chest, the violins and guitars displacing the air, sonically entering your pores. It's something else, exciting. You feel like you understand what it was like when cinema was still new, still numinous with mystery, still giddy and awe-struck by its own power. Unfortunately, no-one has yet combined 3epkano's music with images of these films on Youtube but below is one of their pieces, Everybody Is Already Down Below from their album At Land.

Classic Scene #25

2010-12-07T15:45:00.012Z

'Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'

- from The Dead by James Joyce

Classic Scene #24

2010-12-07T13:20:00.006Z

Sometimes, though, innocence is just that, not lost just pristine like the first fall of snow, the very first time children see it, when it's not a metaphor for anything, just pure wonder and fun, like Bambi's surprise at his own footprints in the snow or Thumper's infectious excitement at discovering the water is stiff and wonderfully slippy.

Classic Scene #23

2010-12-06T14:35:00.011Z

As it's started snowing heavily again outside I suppose it's time for some more snow-related movie scenes. The most famous, of course, is little Charlie Kane and that sleigh in Citizen Kane, not to mention the snowflakes skittering through time in the smashed snow globe as old Charles breathes his last. Welles returned to snow as an emblem of lost innocence again the following year in this lovely scene from The Magnificent Ambersons. But in Jim Jarmusch's blank-generation hipster classic Stranger Than Paradise , snow becomes a white-out metaphor for the empty nothing of the characters' lives as they stare out at what's supposed to be Lake Erie, but is really the bleak reality of their future lives. Surely one of the worst tourist visits ever.

You Call This Snow? Why, Back In My Day...

2010-12-06T12:11:00.005Z

As a little follow-up to the Phantom Ride piece below, I thought it would be nice what with all the snow round these parts at the moment to post this, another one of those excellent BTF shorts, this time from the big freeze of 1963, its editing reminiscent at times of the giddy ecstasies of Dziga Vertov's 1929 classic The Man With The Movie Camera.

The Phantom Ride

2010-12-03T16:54:00.005Z

Before there was cinema, there was the train. It might seem fanciful but I'd like to make the claim that train travel not only prepared people for the idea of cinema but may even have been a catalyst for its eventual creation.
Invention is such a mystery, after all, something in the air of the times, a whisper of influences waiting to coalesce. Surely the idea that still images could move was born in the mind of someone sitting by a train window watching the world go by, or millions of people sitting by thousands of train windows watching endless fields and suburbs go by. It was in the air. Cinema the idea was already an invention of the imagination long before science and technology caught up. This was the era of camera obscura towers, magic lantern shows and experiments in capturing the secrets of motion by men like Eadweard Muybridge and Jules Maray. Cinema was the culmination of all these processes, all these primitive yearning mechanisms for capturing life.

The wonder of early cinema wasn't in stories or acting or montage it was just this; the mystery of suspended time, of captured motion. Just like train travel. Who, after all, hasn't been lulled into a time-forgetting dream-state by the clickity-clack rhythms of a train, the rolling cinema of carriage windows? The analogy was there from the start. They were kindred spirits, both symbols of progress, both promising journeys to other places, both foreshortening distance and time in ways society had never imagined before.

And so, naturally, it was to the train that the earliest filmmakers were drawn again and again, in homage and unconscious recognition. Between those famous train-centred milestones of early cinema, the Lumiere Bros panic-inducing L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1896) and Edwin S. Porter's narrative breakthrough The Great Train Robbery (1903) lies a generally less well-known period of sensation, novelty and gradual evolution, when techniques were discovered that are still with us today. And one of the most popular and profound of these was the phantom ride, an evolutionary step forward for the fledgling medium, one in which it stopped simply recording motion and instead became motion itself.

In the typically cavalier fashion of the times the effect was achieved by tying a cameraman to the buffer of a moving train and having him crank away as it sped along the track. The means may have been primitive, not to mention dangerous, but the result was a sensation, a ghostly ride through the air, as if the viewer were floating above the track, a disembodied dream eye travelling into the darkness of tunnels and towards the light on the other side. Audiences couldn't get enough of these virtual thrill rides which were often, appropriately enough, shown at travelling fairgrounds as part of a programme of similarly short actualities, comedies and trick-films. The earliest known example, Biograph's The Haverstraw Tunnel (1897), was an instant hit, spawning dozens of imitators including Railway Trip Over The Tay Bridge (1897), View From An Engine Front - Ilfracombe (1898) and View From an Engine Front - Train Leaving Tunnel (1899). The latter was used by one of the most innovative filmmakers of the time, G.A. Smith, to create his influential A Kiss In The Tunnel (1899). It consists of only three shots; train enters tunnel, man kisses woman in the dark compartment, train exits tunnel. It might not sound like much now but this was a major advance in editing and continuity leading the medium towards more sophisticated story-telling.

Although single-shot phantom rides continued after this, well into the new century, taking in ever more exotic and far-flung places from the front of ships and trams as well as subway trains, it was soon just another technique in an ever-expanding arsenal of possibilities. The success of The Great Train Robbery had marked the end of simple awe and curiosity and the start of cinema as a serious art form with all the potential range of novels and theatre.

But there was to be one final hurrah for the pure phantom ride form, one which brought the relationship between trains and films to its logical conclusion. In 1905 a Kansas City Fire Chief named George C. Hale created a nickelodeon amusement called Hale's Tours and Scenes of the World. This 'illusion ride' consisted of mock train carriages showing ten-minute films of scenes from around the world. But they weren't just novelty cinemas. While the passengers watched these phantom ride films, projected onto the end of the carriage to create the illusion of actually travelling through these scenes, like they were looking through a window, the carriage would simulate the motion of a real train, rocking and swaying from side to side while steam and train whistle sound effects played and painted scenery rolled past the windows.

The Hale's Tour had finally made real what had always been implied; that being in a train and watching a film were essentially the same thing, that illusion and travel worked on the imagination in much the same way, creating intermediary zones away from the real world where people could dream and forget. Not surprisingly, they proved insanely popular. By 1907 there were five hundred all over the United States, and many more around the world in places like Melbourne, Paris, Hong Kong and London, which had no less than four, with others in Manchester, Blackpool, Leeds and Bristol.

Despite this success, the truth was the phantom ride had effectively been shunted onto a siding of cinema history, merely a passing fad, a necessary but primitive first step in the maturity of a great new art form. And watching the surviving examples today it's easy to dismiss these grainy, ponderously slow artifacts, to wonder how they could ever have had such an electrifying effect on audiences. But speed is relative and what would have given a Victorian a nosebleed barely feels like moving now. In 1962 a British Transport documentary called Let's Go To Birmingham revived the form to record the journey from London's Paddington Station to Birmingham's Snow Hill but with one crucial difference, they speeded it up so the entire journey takes only five minutes. It's still a blast and is probably a modern viewer's best chance at understanding what it was like to see the first phantom rides.

Today the phantom ride has become a standard cinematic device for putting audiences into the heart of the action, little different at times to its thrill ride origins (note its use in the current 3D craze, like the rollercoaster scene in Despicable Me for example). But it's also been used for the opening title sequences of films like Get Carter (1971), The Warriors (1979) and David Lynch's Lost Highway (1996), not just as a way to create an immediate sense of momentum and excitement but also to put us in the right frame of mind for the film to come, to lure us into the disembodied dream-state of film itself. One phantom ride, you could say, preparing us for another.

The Phantom Ride originally appeared in online arts magazine Oomska

Crime City USA

2010-12-01T14:32:00.012Z

I first came across RubyTuesday717 when I chanced upon her The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir, a fan video so good it made me want to hijack an old cinema and watch nothing but film noirs day and night until that double-crossing blonde betrayed me to the cops and I died in a hail of bullets trying to shoot my way out. I didn't, of course, but I did watch The Endless Night over and over again. It was that good. Later I used her tribute to Notorious as the perfect ending to a piece I wrote about that fantastic film.
And now she's done it again, produced another absorbing tribute, this time to all the 'delicious, sinful crime films' set in San Francisco, piecing together images and moments from Dark Passage, The Maltese Falcon, Zodiac, Dirty Harry, Vertigo and Bullitt to name just a few, and adding inspired music, mainly Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man, with other snippets from Henry Mancini, Smashing Pumpkins and John Murphy. The result is not only exciting and ingenious, an admirable work in of itself, but it also invokes a love for its subject matter so intense it makes you want to watch all of these films, all at once, in a hijacked old cinema, of course, with a duplicitous blonde by your side, whispering sweet oblivion in the dark.

Classic Scene #22

2010-11-22T11:09:00.004Z

Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now is a ghost story with a difference, built on the usual Gothic principles of premonition and dread but complicated by more emotionally profound kinds, the unspoken fears lurking in every parental mind, the potential for loss, the devastation of grief and guilt. The result is like nothing you've ever seen. Roeg's unique style, a quantum splintering of time, poetic connections between images, motifs chiming and cameras zooming with woozy significance, all come together in this opening scene to create a technically sublime waking nightmare, horror movie rhyming with muddy reality, every superstitious fear rooted in real fear, verified by it, the unthinkable making everything possible, necessary even.

Classic Scene #21

2010-10-29T16:34:00.003+01:00

On a more genuinely scary note, here's another medium getting in contact with the dead, but we're a long way from dotty old Madame Acarti here. In this scene from superb Spanish chiller The Orphanage a paranormal investigation team led by the psychic Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin) attempt to make contact with the spirits of the old orphanage. There are no laughs in this one.

Classic Scene #20

2010-10-29T15:45:00.003+01:00

To get everyone into the Halloween mood, a little seance with Madame Acarti. Mind you, Blithe Spirit being a Noel Coward play it's a very British kind of seance, played mainly for laughs. But atmospheric direction courtesy of David Lean and the wonderfully bonkers Margaret Rutherford as Madame Acarti eerily channeling a little girl's voice make it more than just a comic scene.

Last Five Films...#4

2010-10-26T16:51:00.010+01:00

1. Dawn of the Dead (1979)

Shown in conjunction with A History of Horror, Mark Gatiss' excellent three-part series for BBC4, Dawn of the Dead is a classic despite its manifest flaws. The analogy I've come up with to explain this is the difference between Frank Sinatra's Songs For Swinging Lovers and Ramones by The Ramones. The first is the result of supremely talented people on the top of their game, Sinatra's voice and phrasing, Nelson Riddle's arrangements, the finest session musicians money could buy, not to mention The Great American Songbook of Cole Porter and George Gershwin. It's so evidently a high watermark of moden culture it doesn't need any special pleading.
The Ramones, on the other hand, the original three-cord punks, weren't even the best musicians in scummy New York dive CBGBs in 1975 (Television or Talking Heads if you're asking) and had only one basic idea, gonzo, speed-freak versions of 50s pop. But what an idea it was, especially when attacked with dumb-ass gusto on classics like Blitzkrieg Pop and Beat On The Brat.
The point is, taste and talent would never have given us this. Likewise, they would never have given us Dawn of the Dead. It took an instinctive amateur to go there. Romero's direction is borderline incompetent at times, especially with action sequences, and the actors are often all at sea, but there's no denying the moral intelligence behind it or the now-iconic images of zombies wandering through the shopping mall as cheery Muzak plays, filmmaking so savagely satirical and sweetly funny that no-one except maybe the Kubrick of Dr Strangelove would have dared go there.

2. The Quatermass Experiment (1955)

The Quatermass Experiment is a very effective early Hammer sci-fi/horror about a rocket ship returning to earth infected by a mysterious alien organism. Excellent location shooting and a haunting performance by Richard Wordsworth (as the only surviving astronaut slowly being taken over by this thing inside him), give this spin-off from a landmark TV series real bite. As maverick scientist Dr Quatermass, veteran American actor Brian Donlevy waltzes around 50s Britain like he owns it, ignoring or browbeating everyone from the military and the police to medical experts as if none of the rules apply to him (which may have been some kind of sly political statement of course).

3. Despicable Me (2010)

Another week another entertaining animated film. If only my kids realised what a golden age of childrens' cinema they're living through. Even sequel-fodder like Ice Age 3 offers more invention and wit than most adult films. In fact it's easy to take the visual flair and comic timing of a film like Despicable Me for granted. It may not be the latest ground-breaking animation from Pixar, criminal mastermind Gru may be a cross between Uncle Fester and Dr Evil, the plot a variation on The Grinch and the visual style half-inched from Henry Selick, but it doesn't matter. My kids loved it, the minions are funny and it manages the inevitable heartwarming ending with enough delicate skill to avoid mawkishness.

4. Army of Shadows (1969)

Superbly laconic account of the French Resistance showing how ordinary people became as ruthless as the enemy and as devious as criminals to survive the Occupation. There's an air of existential gloom over it all, from the closed, watchful faces, the dour overcast skies, the lonely sound of hard shoes on cobbled streets, the cowed eyes of men who know they're going to be killed. It's difficult to sympathise with anyone though, because the sense of honour and sacrifice is alien to us now, the idea of killing your own because they've betrayed you. It's hard to justify when they're just kids who made mistakes or women trying to protect their children. The film is unflinching in this and while the middle section in wartime London is a little unconvincing overall it's a compelling work.

5. Fool's Gold (2008)

I have a soft-spot for Matthew McConaughey (no not quicksand). I honestly think he could've been this generation's Errol Flynn if the roles had come his way. Only the enjoyable Sahara gave him a proper opportunity to show what a likeable wise-cracking hero he could be. Too often he's been tied down to lame rom-com plots opposite B-list actresses and Fool's Gold is no help; a half-baked treasure hunt plot shackled to contrived romantic fireworks opposite charisma-free Kate Hudson. Despite a few bright moments it doesn't work. And I really wanted to like it, I really did. But it just gets progressively worse as first Donald Sutherland and then Ray Winstone compete to see who can produce the worst accent in cinema history. Winstone wins by a nautical mile, his Southern-drawl-meets-East-London-snarl so toe-curlingly bad McConaughey should have taken it as a personal insult and challenged him to pistols at dawn and saved us all this witless waste of time.

Great Title Sequences #3

2010-10-10T13:51:00.003+01:00

After the disastrous School Daze (1988) Spike Lee was under pressure to prove his break-out film She's Gotta Have It (1986) wasn't just a fluke. Many promising directors haven't recovered from similar missteps, self-doubt sending them in search of the temporary safety of formulaic studio work, from where they either disappear or become careerist hacks for hire.
So the title sequence to Do The Right Thing (1989), amongst other things, can be seen as a statement of intent, Lee coming out fighting, refusing to compromise, reasserting his right to be considered a true autuer and not just someone who got lucky once.
And what a statement it is, an incendiary way to start an incendiary film, a bombardment of expressionist colour, lighting and sound from the audacious camera dolley that starts it, to the in-your-face intensity of Rosie Perez's dancing, to the thrilling rap soundtrack of Public Enemy's epic Fight The Power.
Before you have any idea what this film is about you know it's about anger and heat and sex and the sensery overload of city life and a director saying, in no uncertain terms, bring it on.

Classic Scene #19

2010-10-03T13:21:00.004+01:00

Tony Curtis was one of the most recognisable movie stars in the world, but his fame was built on only a few good movies. Naming six would be a challenge. Not surprisingly then, most of the focus after his death has been on Some Like It Hot and to a lesser extent Sweet Smell Of Success (both amazing films, unquestionably his best performances, so no complaints there). Still, I'd like to pay tribute to his passing with a scene from one of the others worth mentioning, Blake Edward's The Great Race (1965), a period farce in the style of It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) or Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965), reuniting Curtis with his Some Like It Hot co-star Jack Lemmon. The scene I've picked is the fantastic custard pie fight, arguably the finest in movie history. I like to imagine it's where Curtis is now, in that eternal custard pie fight in the sky with Lemmon at his daffy best and the divine Natalie Wood.

Great Title Sequences #2

2010-09-27T00:15:00.003+01:00

I love Walter Hill's The Warriors , in no small part due to the opening credit sequence. It's a little masterclass in how you can establish location, character, plot and mood all before the film's even started. Everything about it is great: the opening shot of the Coney Island Ferris Wheel, spokes lighting up against the night sky, (all paths metaphorically leading to the centre), the fantastic theme music driving everything forward, graffiti-credits looming out of the darkness, spray-paint red coolly blending with station-light blue against the tunnel blackness, the intercutting of the dialogue scenes with the train speeding towards the city. Honestly, it's almost a pity it has to end, I could quite happily watch a whole film of this, narrative evolving in clipped statements intercut with shots of the train moodily hurtling through the night. By the time it does end, the audience, if they're anything like me, is giddy with anticipation for what's to come. As the man says, 'whole lotta magic.'

The Film Club Reviews #7

2010-09-25T18:47:00.010+01:00

The White Ribbon (2009)

The second film of our winter season was in stark contrast to the first, (feelgood Irish documentary His & Hers). As always with Haneke much is left unsaid or hinted at with mysterious events threatening the status quo of seemingly normal society, in this case, a small village in Northern Germany on the eve of the First World War. Visually and thematically recalling the Scandinavian austerity of Dreyer and Bergman (but with a devastating frankness all its own), it also exudes a mise-en-scène mastery worthy of Hitchcock. And as with Hitchcock, at heart the mystery is a McGuffin, a means to darker moral ends. Haneke isn't interested in who kidnapped the children or burned down the barn, his real concern is in what these events reveal about family life and society at large. We watch religious repression and social conformity incubate violence and intolerance, ordinary youthful vitality and exuberance denounced in the name of idealised goodness. It's not too difficult to imagine these children twenty years later, conditioned by stern authority and desire for purity, voting for a regime promising them both. With stunning black and white photography capturing every child's face in vibrant close-up, faces brimming with confusion, hurt, trust and defiance, The White Ribbon will linger long in the mind.

Great Title Sequences #1

2010-09-16T22:58:00.002+01:00

We have to start with the grandaddy of all title sequences, the Saul Bass-designed credits for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. They're so good, in fact, they have us hooked even before they begin. In the darkness we hear the first strains of Bernard Herrmann's music, instantly invoking that state of heightened dreaming that is cinema. Then the Paramount logo appears, in black and white, from which a huge V looms towards us, for all the world like a plunging scissors, becoming the centre of the word VistaVision (rarely can a brand name have seemed so ominous). Already, even before the titles have started, we're enveloped in the uneasy dream-mood of the film to come. This is no accident. As Bass explained, 'my initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.' So the titles proper begin. The camera roams across a woman's face, from the pallor of her cheek to her pursed lips, from both eyes nervously looking askance to a close-up of one, liquid-dark eye. Feminine allure and mystery established we enter the spiraling world of that eye. 'Design is thinking made visual,' Bass declared, and somehow this sequence seems more than just visually striking. It's metaphor and hypnosis, endlessly mysterious and suggestive. When it ends our emotional resonance is well and truly primed for what's to come.

Classic Scenes #18

2010-09-14T14:22:00.004+01:00

The pleasure of this scene from Harvey (1950) isn't just the quoteable wisdom of the words but also the music of their delivery. While all the focus is rightly on Stewart's iconic Elwood P. Dowd, don't miss the plummy rhythms of Cecil Kellaway as psychiatrist Dr. Chumley, the way he uses those crisp consonants and rolling rs to run his words into each other, riding the internal rhymes of lines like 'this sister of yours is at the bottom of a conspiracy against you.'
But then there's that lovely, rueful 'Ohhh doctor' from Stewart and like one musician handing over to another, he begins his solo. Notice the run-over into the next sentence before 'she always called me Elwood', those softly echoing 'oh sos' and the warm emphasise of 'I recommend pleasant'. It's a masterclass of tone and rhythm and I never grow tired of hearing or seeing it.

The Archetype Abides

2010-08-29T15:54:00.007+01:00

For psychologist Carl Jung his patients' dreams were to be taken as seriously as any waking experience they may have had. If one described a dream about traveling to India, Jung would get a map and ask him to point out exactly where in India he had been.

Taking the dream experience seriously, as an arena of symbolic clues, led him to believe that the psyche contained common archetypes, recurrent images that could be found in cultures all over the world, past or present, primitive or modern.

Studying ancient texts and traveling the world, spending time in African villages and American-Indian reservations, he came to believe people saw these images in dreams or visions, that these states were a way for our minds to access a reservoir of shared knowledge, what he variously called universal consciousness or the collective unconscious.

BRYSON: I understand that the geology confirms the images. The images are your private images in Dali's head but painted out they correspond to a reality.

DALI: Exactly...my delirium is injected and sublimate in these rocks and in this geology. There's many kinds of imagination, [such as] the Romantic imagination, almost never exist in rock. It's only fog, music, evanescent visions of Nordic countries [where] everything is completely musical. This also is very clear in my moustache because my moustache is the contrary of the moustache of Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche is the depressive moustache, plenty of music and fog and romanticism and the Dalí moustache is exactly the same que two erected scissors completely metallic.

Salvador Dalí, interview with David Bryson, BBC Third Programme, 1962

In his autobiography Dali told a story about how he used to go walking with a girl to whom he showed off with copies of L'Esprit Nouveau, a magazine edited by Le Corbusier and Fernand Leger: 'she would humbly bow her forehead in an attentive attitude over the Cubist paintings. At this period I had a passion for what I called Juan Gris' 'Categorical imperative of mysticism'. I remember often speaking to my mistress in enigmatic pronouncements, such as, 'Glory is a shiny, pointed, cutting thing, like an open pair of scissors'...'

Before the age of digital editing suites, the link between film and scissors was always strong. It was the chief implement in the editing process, that destructive act of cutting that gave birth to the language of cinema, montage. Alfred Hitchcock was a passionate believer in the manipulative power of montage, so it's no surprise he held the humble scissors in such high regard.
In his book The Hitchcock Murders, Peter Conrad tells of a Lincoln Centre tribute to Hitchcock in 1974, during which the great man watched a compilation of clips from his films. The anthology of abreviated killings concluded with Grace Kelly stabbing her attacker in Dial M for Murder. 'The best way to do it,' Hitchcock commented, 'is with scissors.'

The idea of the scissors predictably stimulated Hitchcock's taste buds. For him, murder was aesthetic, erotic, but also appetitive. He rejected a shot from Dial M for Murder because the blades of the scissors did not flash as they arched through the air. 'A murder without gleaming scissors,' he reasoned, 'is like asparagus without the Hollandaise sauce - tasteless.'

Peter Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders

When Hitchcock and Dali came together to collaborate on the dream sequence for Spellbound (1945), it's no surprise to see scissors playing such a prominent role, a giant pair slicing through eyeballs, not only in homage to Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (1928) but also in symbolic allusion to the editing process itself, its power to do violence to our minds via our eyes. Cinema, this moment implies, is the unconscious incarnate, a shining implement to access those archetypal images buried deep in our dreams.

Fifty years later and those same giant scissors made another appearance in a dream sequence. Everyone remembers the feelgood gutterball sequence in The Big Lebowski, but possibly tend to forget how it ends, the Dude being chased by three nihilists in orange body-suits brandishing enormous, threatening scissors.
Is this an example of Jung's archetypal unconscious at work? Did one or both of the Coen's dream those scissors, or see them in a vision? Or were they found in a studio cupboard, left there ever since filming on Spellbound finished? Or is it simply that the Coens know their film history so well that they wanted to pay homage to Hitchcock's dream-image in much the same way he did to Bunuel's all those years before? You decide.

Here Be Monsters

2010-08-21T12:18:00.005+01:00

Spanish painter Goya's famous dictum that 'the sleep of reason breeds monsters' has special significance for cinema, which has always been happy to show us those monsters, to use our superstitions and fears against us. What Goya was getting at was the way sleep leaves us vulnerable to the thoughts and desires we'd rather not acknowledge. So those conditions that impose sleep on us without our control are particularly frightening.

We all know stories of people who sleep-walk, of children sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, seemingly in a trance, holding conversations with siblings they have no memory of the next morning. These incidents are usually recounted as funny stories but the reality of the moment is certain to have been unsettling. We don't like not being in control in this way or even seeing it in others. It provokes too many questions we don't have answers for. What monsters are we prey to in our sleep? In what ways are they controlling us? What would we see if we remembered these states? Are dreams just surreal mental debris or coded visions of the future? Many societies have certainly associated trances with precognition.
Part of the appeal of cinema is its mimicking of this state but with the comforting knowledge that we are, more or less, in control, the monsters can't really get us. But not everyone believes this. The public outcry against video nasties in the 80s, or the knee-jerk attempt to blame certain movies for the acts of those who go on killing sprees suggests that there is an instinctive fear that invoking our hidden demons on the screen can somehow activate them in our minds, bring them into this world, as if the cinema acted as some kind of portal between our dreams and reality. At the very least it suggests that our unease with sleep has passed over to the daydream of cinema. The two are inextricably linked, versions of each other. We don't need intellectuals or critics to make the connection, we feel it instinctively.
Which is all another way of saying that the somnambulist may be the perfect cinematic subject, the sleepwalker who can see visions, who can be manipulated into participating in terrible acts under the spell of sleep. Just like us, of course, accessories in the dark.

The most famous movie somnambulist appeared as far back as 1920 in the expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. He was Cesare, plaything of the sinister Caligari, owner of a stand in a traveling fair that visits a small German town. The townsfolk are encouraged to ask Cesare questions. One asks how long he will live and gets the reply, 'you will die tomorrow.' Which he promptly does.
The film is most famous today for its groundbreaking art direction, using theatrical set design to create a distorted world of narrow streets and angular buildings, deliberately artificial and exaggerated to represent the nightmarish world of the cursed Cesare.
Fittingly, it also predicted the future, with Caligari a premonition of another charismatic madman on the horizon and Cesare the German people, all too easily sleepwalked into atrocity.
That's the trouble with letting dreams into the world, y'see. Pretty soon you don't know what's real anymore, what's true. And as Dostoevsky made clear in The Brothers Karamazov: if nothing is true, then everything is permitted.

Eighty years later and another somnambulist is manipulated by a sinister figure to commit a series of crimes. In Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, troubled teen Donnie's sleep-visions of a giant rabbit also give him access to the future, not the death of individuals this time but the death of everyone, the end of the world. Of course, in the film's quantum time, the possibility exists that Donnie is both dead and alive at the same time, like Schrodinger's Cat, suspended in a dream state between knowing and imagining. Either way, sleep remains a dangerous mystery, that place on old maps yet to be fully explored, where superstitious cartographers usually wrote:
here be monsters.

The Mirror of Dream

2010-08-09T22:46:00.009+01:00

I honestly can't remember the last time I went to my local Omniplex (for a grown-up film I mean, I take my kids all the time.) Tragically that omni- is more spin than fact when it comes to the variety of films on offer. So it was a double pleasure to see Inception last week, partly because it was a blockbuster that demanded you paid attention, but also I'd almost forgotton the mind-altering magic of losing yourself in the dark, succumbing to the dream-world of the screen so completely that it clings to you afterwards, the mind still in suspension, half-believing the streets would rise up like a child's pop-up book and fold over our heads at any minute.

The film is a sci-fi thriller about our unconscious dream-worlds and how technology has figured out how to access them. But at the same time it's a meta-experience for the audience because the film itself is a dream we're all experiencing. In it, Leonardo DiCaprio's character keeps a spinning top as a 'totem'. If it keeps turning, he's still in the dream, if it loses momentum and falls over, he's back in reality. Maybe the audience should be encouraged to bring their own totems so afterwards they could double check they're actually back in the real world, despite what their minds might be telling them.

Ever since I've been thinking about cinema and dreams. The similarity between the two has been obvious since the very earliest days of the medium. Writing of Jean Cocteau in his Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson noted that 'Cocteau's overriding image of the poet's passing through the mirror of dream...is a very suggestive metaphor for the way a movie audience can pass into the celluloid domain.' In fact, it's almost as if cinema had to come into existence to satify the growing desire for that domain.
The nineteenth century was full of prefiguring images, of doors into secret gardens and mirrors into alternative realities. When Proust wrote that 'if a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time,' he might well have been talking about the movies. They released that insatiable craving for escape, for the refuge of dream states, that had been the subconscious hallmark of the century preceeding it, the century that seemed to will psychoanalysis and cinema into being at more or less the same time and for more or less the same reason, to give us access to our dreams.

'Alice falls asleep in a wood and dreams she sees a white rabbit, which she follows down a rabbit hole...' The mirror of dream could, of course, be an alternative title for Lewis Carroll's sequel to his quintessential Victorian fantasy Alice in Wonderland. It's appropriate then (or inevitable) that one of the earliest British fantasy films was this version of Alice In Wonderland, made in 1903, just two years after Victoria's death. The last surviving copy has been preserved and restored by the BFI. It's a fascinating document, still strangely enchanting, mainly due to, rather than inspite of, the severely damaged nature of the print. The wavering blotchiness, the kinetic erosion, the sudden jumps in time, all give it the feeling of a dream or a ghostly window into another time. It's a feeling helped in no small measure by the modern soundtrack, Samuele De Marchi's Persistence of Vision which is suitably ethereal and otherworldy.

'Do you mean you've never ever spoken to time?' 'No.' 'But ah, she knows how to beat time.' 'When I play music.' 'That accounts for it Alice. He won't stand beating y'know.'
Sixty years later, playwright Dennis Potter had an inspired notion; what if Alice Liddell, the real girl behind Alice in Wonderland, had, as an old woman, been invited to New York on the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth to receive an honourary degree? The result was his play Alice, which twenty years later became the 1985 film Dreamchild. Potter understood the allure of fantasy and our shaky hold on reality better than most and aided by the wonderful puppetry of Jim Henson created a brilliant and disturbing meditation on memory, fantasy and the dream-states of story-telling and old age.

Big Bang Boom

2010-08-01T15:54:00.005+01:00

My sister sent me this a few weeks ago but I only got round to watching it today. It's wall-painted animation using time-lapse photography on real locations telling the 'unscientific' story of evolution from the Big Bang to 'how it could probably end'. Very impressive. Animation continues its own evolution.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM from blu on Vimeo.

Last Five Films You've Seen #3

2010-07-22T14:23:00.005+01:00

1. Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Wasn't impressed with Kingdom Of Heaven on its initial release. It seemed overlong, confused and fatally undermined by the miscasting of Orlando Bloom. All of which is still true and yet, watching it now, I wasn't inclined to be as hard on it. Not that it's suddenly revealed as an unfairly maligned masterpiece or anything, far from it, but I think films, like people, can often grow into their flaws, or rather, the flaws can grow into them, becoming part of what they are. We end up accepting them like we'd accept the character failings of a relative or friend, eventually barely noticing them.
For example, as the political era it was made in recedes from us like a fevered dream, the film's many references to post 9/11 wars and attitudes now seem less thumpingly obvious and more part of an overall humanist thrust. Bloom remains anaemic at best, of course, but I did appreciate the film's visual style better this time around. It's ravishing at times, but all those burnished shots of desert armies, bustling sea ports and medieval villages do start to blend into each other after a while, like glossy illustrations in an expensive picture book, the images left increasingly empty as the human story suffers from simplistic gestures and choppy narrative. And yet, despite that, there's a rich sense of time and place, of religious and political tumult, of having been on an epic journey by the end.

2. In The Heat of the Night (1967)

The social and political times in which In The Heat Of The Night was made have receded too, of course. You've got to remind yourself while watching it now of what was happening in America at the time, that the notion of a black cop from the north joining forces with a Southern sheriff was more than just a good oppositional set-up, a buddy movie contrivance, like Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in 48 Hours. (Whatever the merits of that film, no-one's claiming it as a milestone in race relations). No, when this film came out there was real heat in the American night, the heat of Klan torches and race riot burnings. Which probably accounts for why it remains an absorbing thriller to this day. Beneath the routine murder mystery plot and the enjoyable sparring of Tibbs (Poitier) and Gillespie (Steiger) the dangerous energy of the times can still be felt. Norman Jewison's taut, unhurried direction helps, as does the acting, especially Steiger, in an Oscar-winning performance, making a belligerent sheriff sympathetic even as he's being racist and jumping to one wrong conclusion after another. That's star power for you. He's also having fun with the music of the southern accent. Just listen to the way he makes the line 'I've got the motive which is money and the body which is dead!' sing like found poetry. Liberal fantasy entertainment then, contrived to make the black cop win maybe but the set-up's so satisfying you'll happily watch it every time.

3. An Education(2009)

Although set in the drab, conformist world of post-war England, (just before the Swinging Sixties revolution swept it away), the question at the heart of An Education still resonates. University life or the university of life? That's the choice facing sixteen-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan), being fast-tracked to Oxford by her aspirational parents. In her bedroom though she listens to French pop songs and dreams of romance and adventure.
Then one day she accepts a lift from charming older man David (Peter Sarsgaard) and a different kind of education enters her life, one that involves fancy restaurants, glamorous clubs and goodnight kisses in expensive cars. Suddenly her life before David seems unbearably static and she's soon in open revolt against what's expected of her, that life of improving education mapped out by well-meaning parents. After all, if action is character, as her English teacher has told her, then what kind of character can come from a life of study? 'If we never did anything we wouldn't be anybody', she argues with some justification. That's the fascinating crux of this film. How to balance the benefits of education against what it asks of you. Is it worth it if, in order to have 'a future', you have to mortgage your youth away studying Latin?
And while the film follows this idea it's genuinely engaging. Unfortunately the filmmakers don't believe it. Like sensible adults they understand that if it's a choice between female empowerment or silly schoolgirl crushes then in the long run its better for the girl to fulfill her potential than throw her life away.
Obviously this is true, but that's not how the film plays for long stretches. In Jenny's empassioned speeches against her education you can feel her realising that living for the moment, feeling alive now is what matters, not the social status of an Oxford education. 'It's not enough to educate us anymore Ms. Walters,' she demands of her headmistress at one stage. 'You've got to tell us why you're doing it'. This is the question the film ultimately fudges.
You can't help feeling if it had been a French film they'd have had the courage of their convictions, allowing Jenny the full consequences of her actions rather than saving her (from herself) at the last minute, cowed back into line by betrayal (David's and the film's).
It's still a good film though, despite this. Carey Mulligan is clearly a star. Peter Sarsgard is all soft-spoken charm. Alfred Molina does a fine job as Jenny's Dad and Rosamund Pike steals every scene she's in as ditzy, good-time girl Helen. Ultimately though it's all let down somewhat by that compromised ending.

4. La Grande Illusion (1937)

Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion is one of those imperishable classics everyone should see at least once. It's a POW movie, possibly the first, with all the ingredients we've come to expect from them; tunnel escapes, camp shows, etc. But it's also far more than that, a masterful study of human relations during wartime, of the way class and religious divisions may be put aside in times of mutual danger, but never really go away, always endure. So Captain De Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) is an aristocrat while Lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin) is a mechanic in civilian life. They're both officers, friends even, full of respect for each other but the wariness never goes away, the ghost of their respective social positions always between them. Compare this to De Boeldieu's relationship with Prison Commandant von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim). Both aristocrats, both familiar with the same pre-war high society, both in truth a little distainful all this bourgouise warmongering. Here class trumps nationalism every time. Renoir weaves many more characters into this network of complex relationships: a wealthy Jew, a music hall actor, an intellectual, a black Senegalese prisoner and finally a widowed farmer's wife (played by the wonderful Dita Parlo, star of L'Atalante). Throughout he never puts a foot wrong, creating a compelling war movie and a humanist masterpiece grounded in realism. It leaves you feeling priviledged to have seen it.

5. Star Wars (1977)

The original. I refuse to call it Episode IV: A New Dawn because that's what Lucas wants me to do. This isn't the fourth film it's the first. My kids had been pestering me for ages to see it after they got The Clone Wars on DVD for Christmas. I didn't intend watching it myself but got sucked in. It's the physicality I like still, the sense of actual space and noise, much of it filmed in Tunisia, not created by computers. I've written here before about the camera moving through real space. I think we respond to that in a subconscious way. The sounds, the sense of space, the inescapable feeling of people playing dress-up about it all. Overrated yes, malign influence, undoubtedly, but still retains enough of the fun to be diverting.

Classic Scene #17

2010-07-09T18:19:00.010+01:00

In Cool Hand Luke (1967), Luke is visited in prison by his dying mother. It's a scene bookended by Harry Dean Stanton in the background singing gospel standard Just A Closer Walk With Thee. 'Through this world of toil and snares,' he sings, 'if I falter, Lord, who cares?' The answer to that question is in the same scene when Luke's mother tells him, 'You ain't alone Luke. Everywhere you go I'm with you.' Already then we have the conflation of motherhood and religion, both forms of unconditional love, of shelter and consolation in a crual world. The film's a Christ-allegory, so if Luke is Christ then it makes sense that his chain-smoking old Ma is the Virgin Mary.
Later, informed of her death, he walks to his bunk, picks up his banjo (given to him during that earlier visit) and sings a little boy's idealised vision of his mother, 'a sweet madonna, dressed in rhinestones, sittin' on a pedestal of abalone shell'. Now she's gone though, and he's truly alone in this world.
It's hard to imagine how the film could've accessed the complicated layers of emotion and meaning in this scene in any other way. The bright hope of the words in the song contrasting with the bereft performance, the halting way Newman sings it, conveying emotion in a way a more polished performance couldn't have. This is real, private sorrow. 'Goin' ninety I ain't scary, coz I got the Virgin Mary ,' he finishes, tears running down his face, 'assurin' me that I won't go to hell'. He knows now, that's exactly where he is.

Classic Scene #16

2010-07-03T10:25:00.005+01:00

This week I've been searching for another one of those interzones between fantasy and reality, those moments in relatively realistic films where someone begins to sing. In Annie Hall (1977) Diane Keaton performs a sublime version of Seems Like Old Times, bringing that great film's neurotic chatter to a standstill for a spellbound two-and-half minutes during which you can actually hear an entire generation falling in love with her.

The Music of Howard Hawks

2010-07-02T13:08:00.007+01:00

When you watch Howard Hawks movies you begin to notice patterns repeating, variations on themes, cover versions of previous scenes. One of these repeated patterns is the musical number. Time and again a Hawks movie will just stop in its tracks for a song. And each time there's the lovely feeling of careless enjoyment, an immersion in rapt mood and private glances that could happily go on forever.
As his career matured there evolved a belief that all scenes were independent moments, were discrete performances (like songs), that a film could be made up of a string of these moments with only the merest fig-leaf of plot or narrative drive as an excuse for it all.
In fact by the end of his career he wasn't even bothering to come up with new plots, simply recycling old ones, riffing on the same scenes, remaking Rio Bravo not once but twice, firstly as El Dorado and again as Rio Lobo. Plot didn't matter, narrative was a lie, the moment was everything.

Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Jean Arthur defines the archtypal Hawksian heroine. 'Grown up yet?' Grant asks her. 'Hope so,' she replies, drinking whiskey and playing piano like a pro. Don't you love that thing she does with her arms before she starts to play? And Grant yelling PEA-NUT! I mean seriously, isn't it agony when they cut away from this mid-song? It looks like some party starting and you want to stay, want it to go on all night.

In Ball of Fire (1941) nightclub singer Sugarpuss O'Shea performs Drum Boogie while shy professor Gary Cooper watches on. In a way, it's pretty standard. Many films of the period had nightclub scenes as an excuse for the heroine to sing, but notice how the song is more a showcase for drummer Gene Krupa than it is for Stanwyck. Is Krupa part of the narrative in any way? No, not at all. And then we get the coda, the matchbox riff on the same song, everyone singing along in a tight circle, a hushed, spotlit moment with no purpose in the film except the sweet pleasure of its own existence.

By To Have And Have Not (1944) Hawks was in open revolt against narrative, ignoring the original Hemingway story and finding any excuse to get Hoagy Carmichael and his piano into the film. Notice the casual way this song seems to evolve out of nothing, as if Bacall has conjured it up as an excuse to escape the creep she's with as well as a way of flirting with the mysterious stranger across the bar. Notice that knowing glance his way as she sings 'the sad and lonely one'. This is a girl who's had her heart broken, who knows all about the blues. Come and get me if you like, she's saying, just don't expect it to be easy.

Later in the same film, and Bacall is at it again, communcating things in song she's to wary to say in reality. 'Love comes along, casting a spell' she croons seductively. 'Will it sing you a song, will it say a farewell? Who can tell?' It's a tease and a plea; I want you/I don't care, I love you/I don't care, you can have me/I don't care. Flirtation is at the heart of it, that lovely balance between yes and no, that place where everything is possible and only the moment matters. In other words, to have and have not. You get the feeling Hawks only decided to make the film so he could use that title.

And then there's this scene from The Big Sleep (1946) which does pretty much the same thing, Bacall at the piano once more, surrounded by adoring young men, while Bogie leans at the door, sexy waitress by his side. They flirt wordlessly through good-natured, see-if-I-care glances while she sings a deceptively upbeat song about 'a real sad tomato, a busted valentine.' Suddenly the stuck-up rich girl is revealed as a hep cat with a broken heart.

And finally Rio Bravo (1959) and Dean Martin's time-struck ode to the cowboy life. It's a moment that takes you away from everything else in the film. Do they look like they're trapped in a jailhouse with people outside intent on killing them? Not for a second. What baddies exactly? Or for that matter, what film? 'It's time for a cowboy to dream,' Dino sings, and so they do. 'Real pretty,' old Stumpy says, echoing Hawks's favourite credo, 'go on, sing some more'.

Lost in Sofia

2010-06-21T16:25:00.005+01:00

Just came across this early-sighting trailer for Sofia Coppola's latest Somewhere. As a big fan of Lost in Translation I like the way it seems to be mining a similar vein of jet-lag sweetness, lost souls making connections in intermediary places, escaping the unbearable lightness of existence in a somewhere that could be anywhere.

Classic Scenes #15

2010-06-12T14:33:00.006+01:00

More provincial football action, this time from unglamourous Scotland, circa 1980. Dee Hepburn shows the boys how to play in Bill Forsyth's timeless classic. Modern girls, modern boys. It's tremendous.

Classic Scene #14

2010-06-11T10:03:00.004+01:00

The World Cup starts today. So the classic scene has to be this, the greatest of all movie football matches.

Classic Scenes #13

2010-06-08T17:24:00.011+01:00

Look, I'm the classic male standing at the bar watching everyone else on the dancefloor. I've never been to a musical theatre show in my life. In fact, recently I seem to have developed a prejudice against musicals. Every time I turn on the TV there's another production number advertising a building society, another street dance troupe on a talent show, yet more D-list celebrities dancing on ice, yet more films trying to emmulate the Chicago model, or the High School Musical franchise or the insane success of Mama Mia.
In fact, there are times when it feels like the entire world has formed into one enormous, cheery, fame-hungry musical society and nobody bothered to inform me. (Probably because they knew I wouldn't join in). It's all annoyed me in that unfocused way things at the edge of your peripheral consciousness do, a thoughtless, indiscriminate grumpiness gradually burying any genuine feelings or thoughts.
Then a few weeks ago this amazing Astaire clip cut through the crap. Since then I've gradually stumbled into thinking more about it, into rediscovering great dance scenes and generally recognising that because I love classic cinema in all its forms I also naturally love Gold Diggers of 1933 and Top Hat, Meet Me In St Louis and Singing in the Rain. It's just that for me they've always been great films first, musicals second. Basically, the musical form I can take or leave. Greatness on the other hand, in whatever form it manifests itself, is something to be cherished and championed.
So, in the last week I've looked at dance not only as an ideal of human expression but also as a way of feeling like you're in a movie, as something that can take you somewhere private or as a means of psychic escape, a consolation for broken dreams.
But what if the same abandon that allows us to reach trancendental states of consciousness also let loose darker forces hidden inside us? In other words, what if we watch the ballet scene from Powell & Pressburger's The Red Shoes?

People have always feared the power of dance. The ancient Greeks reportedly created one for the Furies that caused terror in audiences. In Celtic folklore it was believed fairies lured mortals into their circles before forcing them to dance to the point of exhaustion, death, or madness. So the idea of dance as something otherwordly, as a means for unleashing uncontrollable passions was well established by the time Hans Christian Andersen wrote his fairy tale, The Red Shoes, in 1845. And even though he co-opted the idea in the service of mean-spirited Christian morality (the vain, shoe-loving orphan girl is taught a lesson by having her feet chopped off no less) the notion of shoes that won't let the wearer stop dancing was just too full of metaphorical riches to stay inside Andersen's tale forever.

Powell & Pressburger's film is about the behind-the-scenes life of a ballet company, about one ballerina's love for two men. But it's the fifteen-minute ballet sequence that everyone remembers, a remarkable coming together of fairy tale, psychology, symbolism, expressionist lighting and pure cinema. By the end the red shoes have become much more than a cruel punishment. They've become emblems of sexual freedom, of romantic obsession, symbolic of the mania inside all passions, and the death-wish too. Red, after all, stands for danger and sex and blood and everything that makes us feel alive. 'Of all the films they made,' Martin Scorsese once said, 'this is the one that seems to cast a spell on many people, because it weaves a mystery of creativity and obession—it becomes a film about the creative drive.'

Classic Scenes #12

2010-06-03T21:27:00.009+01:00

Don't mistake this as a typical musical number from a typical musical film. Pennies from Heaven began as a BBC TV series in the 1970s, written by Dennis Potter. It's about a man in 1920s England who imagines the romantic glamour of popular music entering his life, imagines ordinary people breaking into song, mouthing the words of actual songs from the era. The idea is a dream so impossible, so hopelessly desired that it spontaneously erupts into the real world.
What made it work was the other-planet distance between drab England and the dream-factory world of the songs. For most people around the world at the time America barely existed as a real place. It was Shangri-La. The film version made the mistake of transferring all this to America, negating much of the impossible yearning. It's just vaguely conceivable that Bernadette Peters could meet a smooth dancing gigolo in a bar somewhere in the States, but utterly impossible in the England of the 1920s. Still, this scene works, not merely as an expression of optimistic showbiz pizazz, not just as a showcase for the dancing skills of Christopher Walkin, but as an inner erruption of defeated desire. It's only happening in her mind.

Classic Scene #11

2010-06-03T20:58:00.004+01:00

I've been thinking about dance scenes again. Unusual ones, ones that seemingly come out of nowhere in realistic, non-musical films and I remembered this lovely moment from Vincent Gallo's Bufallo 66. Christina Ricca goes off into a private reverie, a sleepy tap dance from another dimension.

Classic Scene #10 (Two for One Special)

2010-05-28T11:25:00.010+01:00

The famous dance scene from Godard's Bande a Part (1964), has a lovely spontaneous feel to it, a found moment, choreographed magic entering ordinary life, like none of them had any idea they were going to do it until suddenly they were, transported by the music into synchronised grace. 'Franz thinks of everything and nothing,' the narrator tells us, 'uncertain if reality is becoming dream, or dream reality.'

Twenty-eight years later Hal Hartley re-enacted the scene in Simple Men (1992). In the original the music was an R&B number composed for the film by Michel Legrand and christened the Madison dance by the actors. Here the jukebox is playing Kool Thing by Sonic Youth.
This dance is less ineffably cool than the Godard, perhaps, more shambolically awkward, more contrived in the way anything that's a copy rather than the original will inevitably be, but this makes it its own thing, I think, an outburst of defiant energy and noise in a dead-ass country town. One's magic, the other's release. What both scenes have in common, though, is the way the men seem to take their cue from the women. Their un-selfconscious spontaneity seems to create a space, a moment, where dream and reality can meet.
There's something almost religious about this, an age-old connection between dance and altered states. Consider the word dervish. It means doorway to god or enlightenment. The dervish dancers of the Sufi religion whirl incessantly while repeating the name of god until they fall into a trance, a state of deep worship. Surely there's a fragment of this idea in these scenes, the trance state of music and dance taking them towards a more modern state of enlightenment, a place where they feel intensely alive but also blessed by something greater than themselves, something not of this world.

The Kino Eye

2010-05-26T10:02:00.008+01:00

A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet

Pupil, from the Latin pupilla, 'a little doll'. When the Romans looked into one another's eyes they saw a doll-like reflection of themselves. The old Hebrew expression for pupil is similar: eshon ayin, which means 'little man of the eye'

To me, one of the cardinal sins for a scriptwriter, when he runs into some difficulty, is to say ‘We can cover that by a line of dialogue.’ Dialogue should simply be a sound among sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

There are many explanations for what inspired the legend of the Cyclopes - the one-eyed monsters of classical mythology - invoking everything from an ancient find of mysterious dwarf elephant skulls, to the blacksmith's habit, in the days before protective goggles, of protecting one eye with a patch. But the most likely inspiration is also the saddest; occasionally a human cyclops survives in the womb long enough to emerge visibly disfigured. Once upon a time, someone got a good look at what they had aborted - and for ever after wished they hadn't

In the early 50s two research teams stumbled independently on a way to stabilise images on the retina. They fastened tiny spotlights to the contact lenses their volunteers wore. It didn't matter how much the volunteers moved their eyes: the little spots of light would always be stabilised at exactly the same places on the retinas. The results could not have been more spectacular: after about a second of this curious, frozen vision, the volunteers lost sight of the lights. The eye exists to detect movement. Any image, perfectly stabilised on the retina, vanishes. Our eyes cannot see stationary objects, and must tremble constantly to bring them into view.

Dr. Mabuse is a master of disguise like Fantômas and a master of telepathic hypnosis, not unlike the hypnotist Dr. Caligari. Like Fu Manchu, Mabuse commits very few of his crimes in person, instead operating primarily through a network of agents acting out schemes he has laid down for them. Mabuse's agents range from career criminals following him for money, to innocents blackmailed or hypnotized into cooperation, to dupes so successfully manipulated they do not realize that they are doing exactly what Mabuse planned for them to do

Both Peeping Tom and Vertigo preface their narratives with the extreme close-up of an eye, as if to announce at once the themes of vision and subjectivity. In Peeping Tom we can detect, below the closed lid, the rapid eye movement that denotes dreaming; the eye thereupon opens wide, introducing a story that has the intensity and condensed logic of dream, or nightmare

As Vertigo's credits begin, the camera moves across the face of an unidentified woman. After first framing the mouth, it moves up to a close-up of the right eye, which opens wide, as if in shock; then moves further in, as if into its interior depths, from which galaxy-like spirals emerge.

Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope…now they have perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into he visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten.

No one knows how we focus our attention. No one even knows how to ask the right questions. If the eye is an outpost of the brain, it is - by the same logic - an incursion of the light. When our eyes are drawn to a change in the scene, what draws them: our desire to see, or the change in the scene? Is one a cause, the other an effect? Or - in Goethe's memorable phrase - do 'the two together constitute the indissoluble phenomenon'?

Stand about eight to ten inches from a mirror and look at your left eye. Now look at your right eye, and then back at your left eye. Do this five or six times in quick succession. You will not notice any movement - your eyes will seem to be completely still. But this is in fact not the case, as an observant friend will immediately tell you: your eyes move quite a lot with each shift of focus. The blurred swish during the movement of the eye is somehow snipped from our conscious awareness, and we are left with just the significant images before and after the movement. Not only do we not see the blurred movement, we are unaware that anything has been removed. And this is happening all the time: with every movement of our eyes, an invisible editor is at work, cutting out the bad bits before we can even see them

I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.

In 1875 the Viennese physiologist Sigmund Exner showed that two brief, stationary flashes, provided they are not too far away from each other, are seen as a single object in motion. This habit of fusing stationary dots into moving objects makes a great deal of sense in nature, where prey and predators disappear and reappear constantly as they move through grass, run behind trees, and peer around rocks. But the power of the phenomenon (called the phi phenomenon) will perhaps best be demonstrated the moment you turn on the television. Every film and TV programme ever made depends on phi. Both display still images quickly enough for our eyes to read them as a single moving image.

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema

Images: Orson Welles, Pan's Labyrinth, Psycho, Clash Of The Titans, Repulsion, Dr Mabuse The Gambler, Peeping Tom, Vertigo, The Crawling Eye, Grandma's Reading Glasses, Un Chien Andalou, The Man With The Movie Camera, The Battleship Potemkin, A Clockwork Orange

Quotes: Orson Welles, A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, Alfred Hitchcock, The Eye: A Natural History by Simon Ings, The Eye: A Natural History, Dr Mabuse Wikipedia page, Vertigo (BFI Film Classics) by Charles Barr, Dziga Vertov, The Eye: A Natural History, The Conversations: Walter Murch And The Art Of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje, Dziga Vertov, The Eye: A Natural History, Jean Baudrillard

Classic Scenes #9

2010-05-24T20:46:00.003+01:00

'And two hard boiled eggs...'

The Killer Elite

2010-05-22T13:47:00.005+01:00

Cinema is, as we all know, the stuff that dreams are made of, all our romantic reveries and adventurous daydreams come to life, a projection of the perfect world we'd ideally love to be living in, full of excitement and happy endings. Or it would be if it wasn't for one little problem: not all our dreams are so wholesome. In fact some are downright dark and scary. And nothing can get at the malign impulses that lurk in our subconscious quite like cinema. It's something filmmakers have known since the earliest days, audiences love the vicarious thrill of illicit acts just as much as wholesome ones.

Which brings us to the horror and fascination we have with those who disobey the most serious of all the Ten Commandments. As Ernest Hemingway once observed, ''when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing.'' What he neglected to mention was the pleasure an audience often experiences, whether it's in the bullring or the omniplex, while watching this rebellion against death. It's a primeval experience, a ritualistic act, one that connects cinema to ancient rites and religious transfiguration. The cinematic killer enacts our hidden desire to kill and our hidden relief that the victim is someone else. They die for us, so we don't have to. They kill for us, so we don't have to.

So whether it's the serial killer, the vigilante or the hitman, the killer is always with us, haunting our dreams, charming our worst instincts, hunting us down with remorseless determination. With Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me set to be the latest profile of one of cinema's most troubling and enduring residents, it's time to look back on five of the more memorable ones.

1. Speaking of Hemingway, his famous short-story The Killers was the basis for one of the great film noirs of the 1940s. Two hitmen arrive in a small town to kill someone called 'the Swede'. They wait in a diner for him to arrive. The film goes on to expand on this simple set-up, giving us the back story as to why the Swede has ended up here, (it's all a girl's fault wouldn'tcha know) but it starts with a faithful recreation of the original story in all its noirish menace.

2. We can't talk killers, of course, without talking Hitchcock. Killers were one of specialities and I could easily pick five clips from his films alone. In the end I choose Bruno Anthony from Strangers On A Train. It's in incomparable performance from Robert Walker, the killer as psychopath, victim and charmer all in one. Hitchcock was always trying to implicate us in his murderous schemes, manipulating us to identify with killers, and here as Bruno murders the woman at the carnival, Hitch literally lowers her body into our laps, presents her to us as a sacrifical offering.

3. It's hard to imagine the western without killers. The gunslinger, the outlaw and the gun-for-hire were staples of pretty much every western ever made. So an enormous wealth of ornery so-and-sos in black hats to choose from then. I've gone for an Italian take on this most American of genres. Surely few killers have ever had a cooler (or better soundtracked) entrance than blue-eyed Frank in Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West. The fact that Frank is played by Henry Fonda, that paragon of liberal justice in films like The Grapes of Wrath and Twelve Angry Men only makes it all the better.

4. Not all movie killers are human, of course. Monsters, alien creatures and pissed-off animals have all menaced mankind over the years. Most of these can be explained by the unpredictability of nature or our instinctual fear of the unknown. Movies where we imagine being preyed upon by our own technology, on the other hand, are harder to explain. John Carpenter's Christine (1983) is a good example of this. In Stephen King's original book the car was haunted. In the film, however, it has no discernable reason for turning on humanity. It's just bad and it wants to kill us. Technophobia was clearly in the air. Maybe Christine travelled back from the same future depicted the following year in The Terminator, where all our machines have finally risen up against us?

5. And finally, a more recent phenomenon is the arrival of the female killer. It's been a staple of exploitation movies and comic books for some time of course, but it's been gradually making its way into the mainstream as trash aesthetics and comic book sensibilities have taken over popular culture. It's female empowerment meets geek boy fantasy in an unholy alliance and it surely reached a new zenith this year with Hit Girl's gleeful carnage in the wonderful Kick Ass.

Classic Scenes #8

2010-04-24T10:01:00.007+01:00

A friend of mine has this blanket hatred of musicals, across the board, no exceptions. I used to try reasoning with him, but recently I've started coming around to his way of thinking. Our culture is under attack from the song-and-dance stormtroopers. It's a bandwagon (rather than The Band Wagon) and it's all getting out of hand. Everyone wants to wallow in second-hand showbiz glamour, hide their heads from the economic crisis, happily watch an entire X-Factor generation sing and dance their little hearts out for a chance in the fame spotlight. And sometimes I just get fed up with it, never want to hear a character break into song ever again, never want to see some second-rate celebrity hoofing for all their worth ever again. But then I come across this and I remember why I always argued against that friend of mine. Because this is the antidote to all of the above. It's mesmerising, Fred so graceful, so God-like, I genuinely believe he makes the cane rise into his hand on his own. What we see today isn't even related to this. There should be a different name for it. Art or something.

Classic Scene #7

2010-04-23T15:19:00.011+01:00

Recently I've been taking part in the Guardian's Clip Joint. Every week someone picks a theme, giving five example clips, and then it's open to the rest of us to come up with the best clips we can find. The following week the best clip is chosen and the triumphant winner is showered in prizes and fame and...well, okay, the winner gets nothing but the sweet nerd satisfaction of victory itself. I mention this because, a few weeks back, I was that nerd, the subject was twins, and this was my winning clip, the coolest cinematic twins if you please, the coolest cinematic twins if you don't please.

The Film Club Reviews #6: Ten Thoughts Inspired By: A Bout de Souffle

2010-04-18T23:36:00.004+01:00

1. Before I ever saw the film I saw this poster. A classic of graphic design. As soon as I laid eyes on it I knew I had to see the film. It radiated cool energy. And that title. At once a declaration of the film's style and the viewer's response to it. A promise and a boast. Stylish. Sexy. Breathless.

But its original title, A Bout de Souffle, translates as Out Of Breath. That's a B-movie title, slang for death, like Chandler's The Big Sleep. Consider if they'd used that as the English title instead. Would the film have attained such a cool reputation? Just imagine it on the poster. Stylish. Sexy. Out Of Breath.
Suddenly it's not so much an intimation of awed wonder as middle-aged decline. My younger self probably wouldn't have been so impressed, but so what? Does it matter? A title's just a title, after all, a way of identifying one film from another. Sure, mostly, but it's not always that simple. Consider these titles for example: Stranger Than Paradise. Some Like It Hot. White Heat. Touch of Evil. Now each of these could, at a push, describe what happens in their respective films, but I don't think that's what's going on when we read them. They're not merely labels, they're suggestive, free-floating, haikus of compressed mood. Yes, a good title can define a film, capture its essence, but it can also add to it, deepen it, complicate it. It's a chemical reaction. Just think of the mysterious, symbiotic relationship we have with names and they have with us. Do they shape us, do we grow into them? If you don't believe this then consider these possible alternative titles for the films above; Losers. TransAmerica. Mother Love. The Mexican. Does it make a difference? It's hard to say, but this much is clear, the anonymous translator tasked with finding an English version for A Bout de Souffle clearly thought so.

2. The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. - Francois Truffaut

The famous dedication is to Monogram Pictures. Monogram were a poverty row studio specialising in cheap genre flicks, serials and westerns. So what was the attraction for serious French cinephiles like Truffaut and Godard?

Well, for starters, because they were largely ignored or unknown they were an undiscovered continent, ripe for reappraisal. They often relied on genre conventions, offering rich ground for theorising, for detecting encoded meanings, hidden ideas, themes build up across a body of work. Also because they had less to lose they could show the seemier side of existence more freely than bigger studio productions, the kind of exploitation subjects considered beneath proper art. The French saw passed all that bourgouis respectability, understood that the life of a petty thief could be as worthy of great art as the noblest king, that an absence of craft or style might represent a film's phychological meaning, its hard indifference to the lies of romance. They were the first to realise that serious artists could exist outside the mainstream, might find the fertile confines of genre more to their liking, might prefer playful indifference to highbrow pretention.
But even the worst of these films taught them about innocent enjoyment, the pleasure of transformation, how much easier it was to bring the moves, clothes and dialogue into your life when they were ritualised, repeated, how cliches spoke to the yearnings inside ordinary people. By dedicating his film to Monogram Godard was sticking two fingers up at the industry, rejecting its middlebrow concerns with craft and rules, alligning himself with the outsiders, the dreamers, with those great American values of outrage, adventure and play. This is a game, he's telling us. We're playing here. So can you.

3. The famous opening line is: I'm an asshole, a provocation from the start, followed by a close up of a skantily clad girl on the front of a newspaper, lowered to reveal our hero, Michel, hat over his eyes, puffing on an enormous cigarette. He's cool, but posing too, a kid playing dress-up.

Then he runs the side of his thumb across his lips. It's a signal. To us. Thumb across lips. That's all it takes. Your Bogie. Your life is a movie. It's hard to appreciate now the impact of this message. A Bout de Souffle was the first film to acknowledge people's desire for movie grace in their lives, wanting their everyday existence transfigured by it, blessed with purpose and shape, ordinary personas imbued with unified glamour. You don't need to be famous, a star. The magic isn't out there somewhere, owned by producers, studios, agents, fans. It's in you now, once you've seen the film, it's yours, a gift, not a privilege. This is what cinema is, the democratisation of play. It's an evolutionary tool, teaching poor regional kids moves and gestures to help them escape impoverished lives, to face the twin terrors of adolescence and neighbourhood streets. After all, when you live in a non-verbal environment knowing how to stand on corners with cool indifference is a vital art. This is another thing the film is already telling us. The street is a movie set too.

4. We first see Patricia ambling down the Champ-Elysees in her flat shoes, sweetly calling 'New York Herald Tribune! New York Herald Tribune!' She's played by Jean Seberg, proof that nationality is a notional concept at best. She's supposed to be the American chick but comes across, in her clothes, her manner, her cropped hair, as ineffably French. It's hard to imagine any other contemporary American actress playing the part, actually American but spiritually in tune with the Frenchness of the whole enterprise. (The film too is at once American in its conventions and French in its style and ideas.)

It was that way from the start. Her screen debut was as Saint Joan (1957), hand-picked from 18,000 hopefuls by Otto Preminger. It was Preminger again who brought her to France the following year to play the spoiled Celine in Bonjour Tristesse. The same year she married film director Francois Moreuil. By the time of A Bout de Souffle they were divorced and she'd taken up with French author Romain Gary, marrying him in 1962. Was it fate or inclination that drew her to the French and them to her? Or was it the hair? The gamine prettiness? Whatever it was, it went on, until her tragic, mysterious death in 1979, found dead in her car on the same Parisienne streets she'd watched Belmondo play dead on all those years before, back when they were all young enough to think of death as a romantic game, something to be bargained with.

5. Leaving Patricia behind Michel passes a poster for a film called Ten Seconds To Hell (1959), its tagline proclaiming 'Live dangerously till the end!'

It's a lovely moment, not just for the renegade cheek of using the poster without permission, but for the serendipity of it being there in the first place, articulating the film's key theme - defying death. (You know you're in the zone when the world starts to speak to you like this, send you secret messages, when you see connections everywhere, when you start to believe there's no such thing as a coincidence, that luck, in fact, is just fate in disguise).

6. Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. - Ernest Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon'

'It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained,' Hegel wrote, somehow defining the essence of A Bout de Souffle over a century before it was made. The spirit of the film may be its exhilerating sense of freedom, it's jazzy liberation from social, artistic and cinematic conventions, but it's also obsessed with death, from its title to its conclusion. Or rather, with invoking it in order to feel more alive. If the taking of life could, as Hemingway suggests, ward off your own death, than so could acting it out. In this sense, the film is as ritualistic as a bullfight, a bloodless rebellion against death.
Just as ancient Greek rites evolved into formalised drama, the death of a tragic hero offered to the gods rather than the sacrifice of a goat, so too with cinema. It may be a game, Godard suggests, but it isn't frivilous. It's as serious as any religion, as vital to our happiness as freedom itself. It was a message that hit the new decade like a molotov cocktail, starting a creative blaze that lasted twenty years and engulfed the old Hollywood studio system in its wake.

7. 'What is your greatest ambition?' Patricia asks the novelist (played by director Jean-Pierre Melville) at the kind of pretentious press conference only the French would have. 'To become immortal', he replies, looking straight into the camera, 'and then to die'.

It's a joke, a contradiction. He might as well have said his ambition was 'to wake and then to dream'. It's an impossibility, mutually exclusive states, waking/dreaming, immortality/death. Except, of course, there is one place where the impossible can happen. When we watch a film, especially in the dark of a cinema, what else are we doing but dreaming while still awake? And when we watch the great stars of the silver screen like James Cagney, Bette Davis or Steve McQueen, what else are we doing but watching the dead walk again, forever alive in their films, made immortal by them?

8. Which is what Bogart represents in the film, not just a role model but an icon of immortality. Dead only three years when A Bout de Souffle was made, already he's becoming a cult, his moves, clothes and dialogue remembered, repeated and fetishised.

But why Bogie? What was it about him that so obsessed the French? Maybe he was, in some way, more French than other Hollywood stars, more ironic, fatalistic, ugly? Maybe the characters he played, men with secrets, with shadowy pasts, were more in keeping with a nation haunted by defeat, collaboration and existential dread? Whatever it was it went deep, just think of the hats and coats in Melville's own films like Le Samourai.

Of course, the Bogart of The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The Big Sleep was also the coolest man on the planet, a dream of tough grace under pressure. He crystallised the essence of cool long before Brando and Dean turned up, a man's cool, not a grumpy adolescent's, someone who's lived, seen things, been betrayed by events, by his own heart, hides his honour like a dirty secret. But we know it's there, we know he does care, does know which side is right, he just won't be played for a sap anymore. Being a man, he seems to say, is a moral act. If you don't know how to read people, if you don't know when to keep quiet, if you don't understand that sometimes cynicism is just the truth no one wants to hear, then you deserve what you get, you leave yourself wide open, cannon fodder for conmen, Nazis and certain kinds of women.

9. Then there's the lovely extended scene in Patricia's apartment. She arrives home to find Michel in her bed. What follows is spontaneity, calculation and natural light, cultural allusions everywhere. She poses before a poster of Renoir's Mlle Irene Cahen d'Anvers and asks who's the prettier. He caresses her bum and asks can he piss in her sink. She washes her feet and tell him she's pregant. He sits beneath a Picasso figure wearing a mask. She quotes from The Wild Palms by William Faulkner: 'Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.' Michel says he'd choose nothing. 'Grief', he adds, 'is a compromise'. They talk, flirt, test each other and eventually make love, fumbling under the covers like kids, not sure what their parents really do under there.

The claim that capturing Seberg's beauty on film matches Renoir's achievement on canvass is hardly worth noting now. But it's a reminder of a time before the triumph of popular culture when film was considered an upstart medium, devoid of true craft, a nickelodeon distraction for immigrant hordes and over-excited housewifes, not something to be taken seriously as high art. This was the fight Godard, Truffaut and the rest of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics were waging in the late 50s, rescuing great artists like Hitchcock and Hawks from the neglect this pompous snobbery had consigned them to.

And what about Michel's claim that grief is a compromise? Is it an existential statement, like Beckett's 'every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness', or is he just trying to sound cool. Is he suggesting that emotions are a refuge, a refusal to accept the truth? It's an interesting idea in an age when personal grief has become everyday currency. Would Bogie give in to grief, cry and wail, take to his bed, sell his story to the tabloids? No, he wouldn't. He'd take it inside him, order a drink, light a cigarette, another lesson learned, another test passed.
The cigarette is vital of course. Just consider how important they were in all this. Michel smokes non-stop throughout the film. Even his dying breath is a puff of smoke. Can you imagine a time when smoking was this cool? When things weren't ghosted by consequences, by health warnings, when people drank at work and smoked in cinemas, weren't constantly fretting about their health, short-changing their youth for a few extra years at the end? When looking cool now was more important than being alive then? It's all about how you look, y'see, masks, uniforms, encoded signs, the transformative power of objects and faces. 'The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible,' as Oscar Wilde rightly pointed out. Open your eyes (and dream). We're being movie stars here. They're immortal. They never die of cancer or liver failure.

10. 'The film of tomorrow will be an act of love - Truffaut

Above all it's a film about love, love of cinema, love of life through cinema. There really was no difference to these young men. Cinema was life. Watching a beautiful woman and capturing her on film was the same thing to them. It was very chauvinistic, of course, but very romantic too (essentially the same thing). Romance has no time for feminist aspirations. It wants to be taken out of this crappy world, wants to idealise, heighten, improve. It's foolish, a youthful folly, but where would we be without it?

For a few brief years, as the world woke up from it's post-war slumber, a handful of young men believed that cinema was the new language of happiness and truth. A Bout de Souffle bottled that moment. It's a time machine. The spirit and energy of that moment can be revisited every time you watch it. You could even say it's immortal. Or to put it another way: Devil in the Flesh. Rififi. And God Created Woman. Scarface. A Bout de Souffle. The best film around.

Yes Logo

2010-04-03T17:25:00.003+01:00

Just caught up with François Alaux and Herve de Crecy’s Logorama, which won the Oscar for best Short Animated Film this year. While the humour's a bit crude the animation is undeniably impressive. It's a world made up entirely of logos and brand names, where the cops are Michelin Men and Ronald McDonald is a gun-totin' psychopath. Just imagine what Pixar would be like if it was run by Jerry Bruckheimer and you'll get the picture.

Classic Scenes #6

2010-03-18T09:50:00.001Z

Classic Scenes #5

2010-03-16T23:06:00.003Z

'Toddle along now Mammy, okey-dokey?'

Classic Scenes #4

2010-03-16T09:30:00.006Z

Just to balance things out after all that embarrassing Oirish stuff, I'm going to post some classic Irish-related scenes for the rest of the week. So let's start proceedings with a lovely, traditional song.

'Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes, are calling.'

Patrick's Day Special: Worst Irish Accents

2010-03-15T22:26:00.005Z

With St Patrick's Day nearly upon us again let's look at possibly the most maligned accent in cinema history. Hollywood's take on it has hardly changed since Old Mother Riley was packing them in. They're still peddling the kind of whimsical Oirish brogue that sends shudders down the spine. But which actors have committed the greatest crimes against the poor Irish accent? We here at the Stuff Dreams Are Made Of blog have investigated on your behalf:

(1) Barry Fitzgerald in Going My Way (1944)

Half man, half leprechaun, Barry Fitzgerald was the original DNA of blarney Oirishness, popularising all its worst cliches in a host of films from Bringing Up Baby to The Quiet Man. Surely his greatest crime, however, was insufferable priest-fest Going My Way, the kind of pro-Catholic propaganda Joseph Goebbels would've been proud of, where even Bing Crosby singing Too Ra Loo Ra Loo is surpassed for sickly Irish fakery by Fitzgeralds's old ham.

(2) Kevin Spacey in Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000)

In truth I could've nominated the entire cast of this treasure trove of bad Irish accents. It's so bad even the real Irish actors sound fake. Spacey's smug, lazy attempt at it goes from awful to non-existent depending on the scene. But the worst thing about this half-arsed cousin to John Boorman's The General is that it was not only written by an Irishman, Gerard Stembridge, but directed by one too, Thaddeus O'Sullivan. They should be very ashamed.

(3) Pierce Brosnan in Evelyn (2002)

'Where's moi dawtur!' Oh lord. Speaking of Irish people knowing better, the generally underrated Pierce Brosnan does heinous damage to the accent in this sentimental drama. It's based on a true-life story but, believe me, no-one living or dead ever spoke with an accent as ripe as that. All together now: 'Oi am Desmond Doile! Faader of Evelyn Doile!' It's excruciating, it really is.

(4) Tom Cruise in Far And Away (1992)

Hang on, though, who's this? 'Oi am Joseph Donnelly! Of the family Donnelly!' Ah yes, no list of bad Irish accents would be complete without this special-needs attempt from plucky Tom Cruise in Ron Howard's epic saga following every Irish cliche as they journey from bailiff-burning cottages to Amerikay's bustling streets. 'All they have left is their dream,' voice-over man tells us. 'But America was built one dream at a time.' That's all right then. Hilarious.

(5) Colin Farrell in Alexander (2004)

Ironically in Oliver Stone's much derided epic the Irish accents are authentic for once (Jared Leto excepted) but the results are every bit as woebegotten. Of course the idea is sound in principle. Why not cast Alexander The Great and his closest warriors with Irish actors? The usual American or classicly-trained English accents are no more authentic after all. Well, so much for theory. In practice Farrell's career-sinking performance is undermined all the more by the accent, his would-be lofty eloquence neutered by its flat cadences.

Last Five Films You've Seen #2

2010-03-14T14:38:00.004Z

The last five films you saw, no matter what they were or where you saw them. Here are mine:

(1) We Live In Public (2009)

Excellent documentary from Ondi Timoner, director of classic rock doc Dig! (2004). Here she unearths another gem of a story about little-known internet pioneer and proto-Warholian figure Josh Harris, chronicling the late 90s love-in between dot-com nerds and New York's party/art scene. Through Harris it was suddenly difficult to tell where parties ended and art happenings began, what was a business venture and what an anthropoligical experiment. We Live In Public is a fascinatng look at the digital era in its infancy, ripe with optimism and unease, a lawless frontier where anything was possible and everything allowed. It couldn't last and now, a mere decade later, it all seems like something from another age.

(2) 500 Days Of Summer (2009)

I really liked this. Yeah, I know, it's too cutesy for its own good at times, tries too hard to sugar a bitter pill, but not many films challenge Hollywood's love is fate paradigm so I'm willing to cut it some slack. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is excellent as fool-for-love Tom, and Zooey Deschanel is perfect as the object of his infatuation, Summer. Yes, some killjoys find her too calculated and kooky for their tastes but then some people would be happier living in colour-free Stalinist misery, so what do they know. Besides, Summer might be cute but she's also self-centred, cold even. She can have sex and generally be intimate with someone while maintaining a distance from them, from the experience, like it’s a holiday, like she’s a tourist in other people’s feelings. Tom, on the other hand, is an open wound of romantic desire just waiting to be healed by the love of a perfect girl, saved by her. Salvation or damnation. At heart then, a very serious film. Pity about the ending though.

(3) Up In The Air (2009)

For two-thirds of the way a smart, sophisticated entertainment for grown-ups, made with breezy style. Then it betrays itself in the name of family and 'heart'. And then, even worse, it doesn't have the courage to follow through on this and tries to regain its integrity with a downbeat ending. This rings as false as any tacked on happy one. I mean does anyone know how to end a film anymore? Clooney is superb of course, making it look effortless as all the greats do. There's a lovely chemistry between him and Vera Farmiga while Anna Kendrick's young hot-shot novice is flat-out brilliant. Once the soppy indie songs appear on the soundtrack, though, you know the filmmakers have lost faith in their own ability to generate emotion. See it, it really is very good. Just a pity it couldn't keep it going all the way though.

(4) Sherlock Holmes (2009)

The art of the trailer is usually employed in making films look better than they really are, or funnier. The above trailer for Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes is actually a pretty accurate summation of the film itself. It really is that much fun. An exciting romp that has all the gravitas and depth of a pancake but is the kind of undemanding film I would gladly watch again tomorrow. Robert Downey Jnr is in his element here, creating a lovely double-act with Jude Law. Silly nonesense but pulled off with surprising style and good cheer.

(5) Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)

Like 3D and other Hollywood gimmicks, Cinemascope was often used inappropriately, destroying the natural ratio aspect and composition of films that had no need for it. Bad Day At The Black Rock was a noble exception. Arguably the greatest pleasure to be found in John Sturges classic thriller is its widescreen look, its intelligent use of real locations (vast Western skies and jagged mountain ranges) to enhance the film's sense of isolation and entrapment. From the opening credits, over the Southern Pacific Streamliner making its way through the Californian desert, the eye is hooked by the colour and visual elegance of the film. And that's before one-armed Spencer Tracy steps off the train at the archtypal town-with-a-secret to take on the finest rogues gallery in movie history; racist ringleader Robert Ryan, sneering bully Ernst Borgnine and slouchy snake Lee Marvin.

Classic Scenes #3

2010-03-03T16:59:00.005Z

'It being the flood season we built our house in the trees...'

Classic Scenes #2

2010-03-02T13:31:00.003Z

'Nat, weave me another...'

Classic Scenes #1

2010-03-01T16:36:00.012Z

''Just think of me as a moral traffic light...''

The Film Club Reviews #5: Ten Thoughts Inspired By: Happy-Go-Lucky

2010-02-27T12:00:00.007Z

happy-go-lucky: adj carefree, easy going, blithe, casual, devil-may-care, heedless, improvident, insouciant, irresponsible, lighthearted, nonchalant.

1. Just think of the ways it could've gone wrong, the cheery lie it could've been, ticking all those lovely Oprah buzzwords along the way; feelgood, life-affirming, heart-warming. This is the danger you invite when making a film 'about' happiness of course. Isn't happiness shallow and delusional? Isn't the greatest art edgy and dark, gazing unflinchingly into the existential doom of it all? Happy films, by contrast, are for undemanding children and maiden aunts, those for whom life is merely a series of illustrated Hallmark slogans.

2. Notice, however, the subtle but crucial difference between happy and happy-go-lucky. One's a fleeting emotion, the other's a state of mind. One's something you aspire to, the other's a question of character. Poppy is thirty, no boyfriend, no kids, no mortgage. She lives with her best friend Zoe in a rented house, works as a primary school teacher. She's managed to avoid most of life's responsibilities up to now while retaining her independence of spirit. How can she carry this on into her 30s and beyond? Isn't it inevitable life will wear her down, that her youthful exuberance will wane? The film seems to ponder her on the cusp of all this. It's both a love letter to and a kind of elegy for a way of life that soon may disappear forever.

3. ''I think the bravest thing you can do in the world today is be happy...The people I most admire are those who’ve got the guts to face life, and deal with it, and live it completely down to their toes, and not escape anything....''

Bjork could be defining Poppy's world-view there. It's brave to be happy in a world that's trying to break your spirit every day, as long as you face life honestly that is. Being mindlessly happy, ignorant of life's complexities, unfairness and drudgery is, on the other hand, the delusional refuge of a prize ninny. Poppy isn't like that, although a lesser actress might have failed to find the moments of soulful doubt needed to offset the irreverence, those brief glimpses of wistful acknowledgment that let us know how hard it really is to keep this blithe optimism going.

4. ‘‘Real happiness comes from things that deserve gravity. There’s no punchline to those things. Moments of happiness aren’t light-hearted. If you watch people fucking, it doesn’t look like they’re trying on a joke.’’

It's a commonplace default position for many would-be intelligent people to view optimism and happiness as a kind of dereliction of duty, a failure to take THE TRUTH seriously. And they have a point of course but maybe there's a counter-argument to be made, as in the quote above by Kristen Hersh, that only taking dark subjects seriously is a pose, a crutch for immature minds. Maybe it's only the truly serious who appreciate what a grave business happiness can be, the pursuit of it, the experience of it, the preservation of it.

5. Don't get me wrong here, though. I enjoy being as grumpy as the next man. I'm not suggesting all the shiny happy people march on the Heartbreak Hotel and burn it to the ground. Oh no, far from it. I worked in a shop once where we had to endure some management consultant from the States trying to instill into us this idea of PMT, positive mental attitude. I couldn't imagine anything worse, still can't. It a fatuous lie, a way for the bosses to keep us in our place, happy with our lot, dreaming the American dream as our souls calcify. Being cynical, angry or fed up are all vital human emotions, it's just they're not necessarily better than the happy ones, don't automatically occupy the moral high ground.

6. I read a few years ago about a survey of American poets which found that the vast majority of them had never learned to drive, completely at odds with the general population. Poets, of course, are renowned for retaining a more childlike view of the world, necessarily seeing it as if for the first time. These two things then, retained innocence and refusal to learn to drive, are surely connected.

Notice we first see Poppy merrily riding through the city on her bike. She's never learned to drive either. But then her bike is stolen and finally she gives in, decides it's time to learn. It says a lot about the position cars have in our society that they've become so linked with our ideas about growing up. Your first car is a milestone, an initiation rite of passage, one of the first wrungs on the ladder of adulthood. Anyone who reaches their 30s and still hasn't learned to drive is viewed with, at best, bemused incomprehension. But instinctively some people avoid them because they don't want to climb that ladder, are perfectly happy where they are thank you very much. They don't want to grow up, or at least not in the way every one else does.

7. So Poppy starts driving lessons with a ball of barely suppressed rage called Scott, whose flimsy grasp of sanity rests on his belief in his abilities as a driving instructor. But Poppy doesn't take him seriously from the start, openly incredulous of his rules and rants. Poor Scott gets more wound-up with every lesson, bellowing En-ra-ha! at every turn, infuriated by her refusal to take anything he says seriously. Here, in fact, her blithe indifference is close to mockery.

It's a mark of the film's emotional intelligence that when Scott inevitably loses it, pulls Poppy's hair, explodes in an irrational, hate-filled rant, we kind of feel sorry for him. It doesn't negate how thoroughly wrong he is, how paranoid, racist and damaged he is, to see the bullied boy he once was/still is, how once we let grievance and self-pity in, it can eat us alive.

8. All this is funny of course. In fact, it's easy to imagine the Poppy/Scott scenes as a 30s screwball comedy set-up. Uptight, life-shy instructor has his world turned upside down when carefree hieress Poppy jumps into his car (by accident of course). Happy-Go-Lucky could be an exercise in seeing how a screwball heroine would cope in the real world. Carole Lombard, say, or Katherine Hepburn, could have played Poppy with that blithe indifference to consequence that is the hallmark of the screwball actress. Which would make Scott the kind of shy doofus usually played by Cary Grant or Gary Cooper, except with bad teeth and panicked eyes. This is what it means for men like this to really have their lives invaded by feminine chaos. Rage and fear are the secret subtext of all screwball comedies.

9. Poppy is concerned about the happiness of others. She's compassionate, wants to help people like the young boy in her class being bullied at home. It's a desire that can make her stray into areas she shouldn't, though, like her encounter with the homeless man. Coming home on her own at night she hears his mutterings and goes to investigate into a dark, deserted clearing behind some buildings.

It's crazy, halfway unbelievable, and ultimately mysterious. It's the heart of the film really. One of those rare scenes that don't tell you what to think. What does it mean? Is this her possible fate? The fate of all good-hearted people, to be broken by life, hiding in the shadows from the rubber knocker man?

10. Mike Leigh's created some annoying women in his career, a gallery of wittering, over-mannered characters going all the way back to Alison Steadman's iconic turn in Abigail's Party (1977). And Poppy could have been another one, to rank with the nadir of this tendency, Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman's epic competition to see who could out-quirk the other with headflicks and facial tics in Career Girls (1997). Seriously, I still wake in a cold sweat some nights thinking about it. But thankfully, the brilliant Sally Hawkins managed to take in all the usual Leigh characteristics while still creating a living, breathing human being, an intelligent woman determined not to take life too seriously, to laugh at it, take the piss, despite being perfectly aware of how truly serious it really is.

Great Character Actors #1: Stephen Root

2010-02-07T13:01:00.015Z

In the fine tradition of character actors since time began, Stephen Root's name will mean less than nothing to most of you but his face should be instantly recognisable. One of the most prolific of actors, he's guest starred in pretty much every TV show of note in the last twenty years, as well as having an increasingly busy movie career. In fact he's become so ubiquitous that the IMDb site is encouraging people to play 'six degrees of Stephen Root'.
A regular favourite of the Coen Brothers, he first came to my attention as the blind radio station owner in the blissful Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? sporting a humdinger of a Southern accent, full of musical cadence and casual bigotry.
Everything else about his appearance is equally spot on; the way he uses the cane, the missed tuft of hair standing up at the back of his head, the way he raises an eyebrow to listen better, the perfectly captured facial expressions of someone who's never looked in a mirror, unselfconsciously rocking his head back and forth, moaning to the music like he's on his own in a dark room. It's a brilliantly observed cameo, every detail real but adding up to something more than just realism, something eccentric and comic, a performance, not to mention a lesson in the fine art of scene-stealing.

Then he was mild-mannered Gordon Pibb in greatest slapstick comedy of all-time Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Gordon's a sweet soul forever taken advantage of, one of life's true worms who finally finds his inner rage thanks to the mighty transformative powers of dodgeball.

He's not just a comic actor though. As Eddie, the reclusive gay vampire in True Blood he created, in just a few short scenes, one of the shows most memorable characters, embuing him with soft, Southern vulnerability and the watchful intelligence of the truly shy, emmitting levels of sensual loneliness that linger in the mind long after he's killed. This is a man not empowered by being a vampire but left helpless by it.

And finally, there's probably his most famous role, certainly the one that's created a genuine cult following, borderline autistic office drone Milton Waddams in Office Space. What to say about Milton? He's a perfectly observed comic creation; the voice, the glasses, the muttered, stuttering delivery, all inspired and all delivered with spot on comic timing. But he doesn't even have to speak. Every time he appears, just sitting there, doing nothing, he's funny. Which is, I suppose, at the heart of what makes Root such a fine actor, technical ability and attention to detail allied to an immersion in character so complete he can make you laugh doing nothing at all, just existing.

The Last Five Films You've Seen #1

2010-02-04T19:42:00.024Z

Ok, what were the last five films you saw? Not just the best ones, not just the latest cinema or DVD releases, but also the ones you casually watched on TV when your brain was on standby, the films you rarely admit to seeing or simply forget to mention because they're too obvious or old or badly made.
It's an interesting exercise. With our list-obsessed, best of, worst of, hyped-up anticipatory culture, many fine movies get left in the margins, many average to bad movies might as well never have been made, while the vast history of world cinema lies beneath the surface of our attention, getting vaster and more ignored by the day as we merrily jet-ski our way through end-of-year lists, award ceremonies and teaser trailers towards a brighter tomorrow.
So, an old movie you discovered on TV, a recently-maligned blockbuster you caught up with, a DVD someone lent you, something you downloaded or even one you saw in a film club. They're all part of the rich pageantry of cinema. Here are the last five I saw:

1. White Mischief (1988):

Frightf'ly British tale of posh types in 1940s Kenya having affairs, cross-dressing and being fantastically decadent, bitchy and stiff-upper-lip about it all until the shooting starts. As one society gossip says of dashing womaniser Charles Dance: 'They say he can't get on with women, so he gets off with them instead!' Also has Gretta Scaachi looking amazing in a succession of fantastic 40s outfits and even better out of them, John Hurt wearing a funny hat and Sylvia Miles masturbating in a morgue. What more could you want?

2. National Treasure (2004):

Surprisingly enjoyable nonesense in the Da Vinci Code vein, but better than that lazily inept bore-fest. Of course, low expectations can sometimes be a film's best friend, and it's true I assumed this was going to be awful. To my surprise I found myself enjoying it, for the first half at least, as it sped along, tongue firmly in cheek, Nicholas Cage underplaying his oddball character nicely and Diane Kruger very appealing as the love interest sucked into the adventure. It outstays its welcome, too many protracted stunt and chase sequences, but as a family film, you could do a lot worse.

3. Inglourious Basterds (2009):

The usual from Tarantino; killer scenes, choppy structure, vivid performances. While Christoph Waltz has (rightly) gained all the plaudits for his turn as Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, there are equally fine performances from Diane Kruger (again), as German actress Bridget Von Hammersmark, Michael Fassbender as British agent Archie Hicox, Daniel Bruhl as German war hero/movie star Fredrick Zoller and Mélanie Laurent as Jewish cinema owner Shosanna Dreyfus. All are superb. So what if the basterds side of the story is a bit half-backed? Wouldn't it be churlish to find fault in something so cine-literate and entertaining? Yes, it would.

4. Everlasting Moments (2009):

Perfect example of the vast unseen world of cinema. This fine Swedish film's director, Jan Troell, has been making films for more than forty years, garnering five Oscar nominations along the way, and yet I'm sure I'm not alone in having never heard of him before. Everlasting Moments is the kind of immersive, emotionally complex saga European cinema used to make as a matter of course, and is, in its own quiet way, a masterpiece.

5. Office Space (1999):

Great comedy from Mike Judge that didn't set the world on fire when it came out first but has since gained a well-deserved cult status. The special tedium of office jobs is mined for comedy gold. Great cast, lots of quoteable lines and a major plot idea stolen from Superman 3. Also Jennifer Anniston's only good film. For everyone whose dream in life is to do nothing.

Oscar Nomination for Secret of Kells!

2010-02-02T17:16:00.016Z

Just got the news that Kilkenny's own Cartoon Saloon have been Oscar nominated for The Secret Of Kells. I was only talking to its director Tomm Moore at the film club last week. I didn't realise at the time the film was on the long list. It's a phenomenal achievement for an independent, feature-length animated film. I remember doing an article at the time of a fund-raising launch they had in Dublin nearly ten years ago now. That's ten years ago, people. I mean, fuck James Cameron and however long it took him to do Avatar. What the guys at Cartoon Saloon did was real perseverance and determination. And they had the sense to understand that all the technical wizardry in the world isn't worth bupkiss if you haven't got an interesting story to tell as well.
And now those ten years have been worth it and they're getting the recognition they deserve. It would nearly make you believe there's some kind of justice in the world after all. All we need now is for them to win it. But to be honest that's unlikely. It's up against some stiff competition this year with Coraline, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Princess And The Frog and Up the other contenders. But you never know, stranger things have happened. Good luck to them anyway.

The Third Pill

2010-02-02T15:19:00.007Z

Someone sent me this scene from Slavoj Zizek's The Pervert's Guide To Cinema recently. The part I like most is the idea of 'the third pill', one that would enable someone to perceive 'not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself.' I like this idea. I've just finished writing a novel where the central character is always on the lookout for those moments in life when the cinematic enters the everyday, or when the cinematic is revealed already existing inside the everyday. I now realise he was looking for the third pill all along. Or he was looking for Slavoj Zizek all along.

French Classics For Free!

2009-12-15T12:20:00.007Z

Those of you who saw our screening of Godard's evergreen classic A Bout de Souffle last week, will be delighted to know that film site The Auteurs is running a week of classic 60s French films for free all this week. You may have to join the site first but nevertheless, it's serendipity people, and I for one will be watching as many as I can while smoking non-stop, pondering the impossibility of love, sloshing back wine and forgiving Thierry Henry (kind of).

Friday Shorts #2

2009-12-04T18:54:00.005Z

Ramona Falls "I Say Fever" from Barsuk Records on Vimeo.

This week we have a music video from the band Ramona Falls. Why's it on a film blog? Because it's directed by a guy called Stefan Nadelman, who has a Sundance prize for his 22 minute film Terminal Bar, so he's a proper filmmaker and secondly, it's an astonishingly brilliant music video. In fact, the term 'music video' seems entirely inadequate to describe it. A mind-bendingly dark and imaginative short film would be more accurate, which just happens to have a song attached to it (a very good song too). Enjoy!

Friday Shorts #1

2009-11-27T16:52:00.015Z

I don't know what you call them really, fan videos, I suppose, that youtube sub-genre of people editing clips from favourite films to music or giving favourite songs a new video. Most of them are uploaded just to show the person loves this film/song, which is fair enough, but some are genuine attempts to create something fresh, to capture the essence of the story or lyrics.

Here are two of my favourites; the first from RubyTuesday717 who has managed to find music capable of doing justice to what is, arguably, the most profoundly heartbreaking film ever made, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

And this from Captainmcglue, finding metaphorical riches in the lush romanticism of Richard Hawley's Open Up Your Door. Enjoy!

Ten thoughts inspired by: Notorious

2009-11-03T22:09:00.020Z

1. First of all, there's the symbiotic dance between directors and actors. Many of the best directors, those interested in psychological states, often struggle if they haven't got the right actors. Look at how often Hitchcock's lesser films are saddled with actors ill-suited to the roles, actors with no depth to begin with or whose guarded personas don't allow him anything to mine. (Think of Paul Newman in Torn Curtain). Look at how his well-known yen for beautiful actresses is matched in every respect by actors who brought the best out of him, Cary Grant and James Stewart mainly, but also Joseph Cotten,(Shadow of a Doubt) Robert Walker,(Strangers on a Train) and Barry Foster (Frenzy) to name just a few.

2. Look at how Hitchcock brings out things in these actors no-one else did, but equally, look at the riches flowing the other way too. He needed them, these conduits into transgressive areas. When he was lucky enough to get them he was brilliant at finding their hidden dark sides, all that alienation, misanthropy and self-hatred not far from the surface of charming exteriors (Cotten, Walker & Foster), how easily Stewart's pious do-goodery, his martyr's passion for justice could tip over into obsessiveness and destruction.

3. In Notorious he strips away Grant's easy charm, strips away 'Cary Grant' really, leaving this sauve husk, this dangerous void, (think of the first time we see Devlin in the film, just the back of his head, ominously watching the other party revellers). As an Englishman Hitchcock would have been more aware than most of the constructed nature of Grant's Hollywood persona, of the real Cockney hiding behind it, the slum-dog acrobat Archibald Leach. Surely the day he met Grant was the day he began to be fascinated by what's hidden behind charming exteriors?

4. Hitchcock's relationship with his screen women is no less fascinating and collaborative. Sure it graduated towards sadism in his later years but in the 40s it was romantic, an exploration of emotional complexity and a product of the natures of the actresses he worked with, mainly Ingrid Bergman.

5. No actress gave herself up to suffering like Bergman. Vulnerability, defiance, self-hatred, sadness, bravery, watch her take on all of these and more in Notorious, from drunken floozy to endangered heroine, beautiful all the way. You can sense Hitchcock's spellbound fascination with her, not just visually, but emotionally too, the way she's leading the film into places it might not have gone without her. Imagine what kind of film it would've been with a different actress, Rita Hayworth, say, or Jean Arthur?

6. Then there are those poor forgotten puppies of the movie business, the writers. Consider that Notorious was written by Ben Hecht, probably the geatest screenwriter of the golden age of Hollywood. He seems to have brought a new seriousness to Hitchcock, a grown-up respect for emotional terrain, for the classical marriage of form and content. You feel that everyone's on their game because Hecht has given them something better than usual. You also feel that part of what makes Notorious work so well are the details. Hitchcock was frequently sloppy when it came to details, openly deriding the plot devices (the famous McGuffins) at the centre of his movies. You sense that Hecht, that good newspaper man at heart, researched his locations and made sure the McGuffin here, uranium hidden in wine bottles, had a hint of truth to it (a year before the first atomic bomb was detonated.)

7. And don't forget the sly pleasures of Claude Rains. He's every bit as complex a character as the leads. With a little tweaking it could easily be his film, poor man, trapped by evil Nazi cronies who'll kill him at the slightest hint of betrayal, in love with a woman who turns out to be a spy and in thrall to a vicious, manipulative mother, forced to be a Nazi when all he really wants to be is a playboy, as charming and witty as Claude Rains.

8. And then there's patriotism, the last refuge of the scoundral. Devlin is seemingly willing to let the woman he loves whore herself for a greater cause, for the greater good. Is he right or wrong to do this? If this was post 9/11 rather than post WW11 would it look any better? And is it really patriotism or something else entirely, a desire to punish her for all those men she's slept with before him. Notice the cold way he looks at her sometimes. She's making him weak and he hates her for it, complicating everything, the simple certainties of good and evil, of allegience to job and country, of knowing who the enemies are. He looks at her and all certainty disappears. Only love can do this. It's superbly complicated, the kind of love rarely seen in Hollywood movies, then or now.

9. But it is love, and despite all its noir darkness this is a very romantic film. So let's not forget the famous, Hay's Code defying, extended kiss, a genius scene capturing the true carnal pleasure of lovers, all nuzzling little kisses and the addiction of closeness.

10. And finally, there's the truth of the camera, Hitchcock's eternal belief in movement for its own sake, for the pleasure of it, yes, but also for the way it could illustrate thoughts, feelings and situations better than anything Ben Hecht or anyone else could conjure up in words. So see it give you set-up and secret in one elegant swoop from staircase longshot to key-in-hand close-up or watch it thrillingly capture the heart-in-mouth shock of discovering your husband and his mother have been poisoning you by zooming into their smug, conniving faces.

The Film Club Reviews #4

2009-09-26T00:13:00.027+01:00

Anvil! The Story Of Anvil (2008)

Here at the film club we've endevoured to show good documentaries from the off. My club compadre, in particular, is an enthusiastic advocate for them. And while I nearly always enjoy them, I have to admit they don't float my boat as much as a truly great fictional movie does. I don't really know why. But as we're showing three documentaries this season, it's made me think about my response to them which is, not ambivalent exactly, but certainly not as openly moved and provoked by them as others seem to be. So why is this? Well, maybe it's this strange place they occupy between reality and artifice. The first film we showed this season was a case in point, Anvil: The Story of Anvil.

As enjoyable and amusing as it undoubtedly is I came away with these nagging questions. For starters, was it all an elaborate hoax? No, it's clear Anvil were an 80s metal band who fell by the wayside. Oh good, so it's all real then. Well, hmmm, is it though, or were the filmmakers, under the cover of this reality, playing fast and loose with events, manipulating them to make a better narrative arc? Were they exploiting these guys for comic effect, either by editing it that way or setting up semi-improvised scenes of deadpan farce?
And the question hovering over all others, if they were doing this, was that a bad thing? Didn't it result in a hugely enjoyable, uplifting film? Yes, it did. So what's the problem?
I don't know exactly, mysterious accusatory voice in my head. Maybe this vague sense of being manipulated stops me fully giving myself up to films like this. The documentary form asks you to take what you see at face value, that's the unspoken contract of the genre, telling it like it is. But the truth is subjective at the best of times and film is an artful construction, edited for effect.
But if it's not real then our emotions are being toyed with, right? In Anvil we're being asked to care about these people, their desperate last-chance attempts to make it big. Our response is naked, human, with no fictional safety net between us and it. Reacting like this is clearly more complicated than with the usual film experience.

Maybe that's a good thing, sure, but maybe in a culture hamstrung by human interest angles and you-too-can-achieve-your-dream cliches it invites us to indulge in the kind of easy emotional catharsis we haven't earned, disarmed under the guise of documentarian truth?
I mean, what is Anvil saying? That the human story behind any phenomena is more important than the quality of that phenomena? Persist long enough and almost anything becomes loveable? Do we admire Lips and Robb? Aren't they just heavy metal versions of the deluded losers on X Factor, hanging on like those Japanese soldiers on islands still convinced the war is going on? Is it admirable they continue to follow their dream? If you knew them would you be proud or embarassed?
We've clearly become a culture obsessed with 'reality', with true life stories, memoirs, reality TV. It's hardly a stretch to see the rise of the documentary as being part of this trend. It's like there's been some kind of collective failure of imagination in the world and a creative cowardice along with it.
Here's what I think: if you have a good story, fictionalise it. It's what truly creative people do, as opposed to what exibitionists do. Fiction allows the reader/viewer to identify, enter in to, become part of the experience. The memoir/documentary often encourages passive gawping. It's a one-way system with only room for the people involved. It's their story, not yours.
Maybe that's it. Either give me the banality of the truly real or the fully immersive artifice of fictional worlds where we can explore our fears, fantasies, ideas and so on rather than just being spectators at someone else's.
(The exception to all this was Man on Wire. A film where the thriller aspect was up front and part of the package. Real life had taken on the contours of a film and the documentary exploited that brilliantly. Plus, the tiny figure of a man on a wire thousands of feet in the air is an image so pregnant with awe and metaphor it's beyond manipulation, like something from a Greek myth).