FICTIONAL FILM CLUB

ANDY WARHOL'S RYAZANTSEV (David Salle, 1970)

2011-11-04T01:22:00.000-07:00

If one were to compile a book of pictures of the Soviet star Tanya Ryazantsev (and indeed someone has, but it might not count: as the evidence is absent from the web in body of image and of thought. He was a Ukranian photographer (with the distinctly un-Ukranian name of Sauvage), whose collection did not survive Glasnost to arrive safely in the ultimate age of carbon-dated ephemera retrieval, the digital one), one might see a study in the the effort that it takes to construct a frown: for rarely has an icon made looking iconic seem so hard-earned. If she has pedagogical eyes and learned limbs, then she is straining every last branch of her family tree to appear this way.

The photos would show all of her body parts, in varying sequences: the tight calves, stretched as if about to snap; the protruding collarbone, as distinct from her upper torso as a garland of ceremonial tibias; eyelashes, thin and fair, invisible in the sun.

Warhol's treatment of the star in many ways fits his treatment of everything: Ryazantsev's cheekbones are flattened, her expression deadened, her complexion rendered as pale as one of his own palid hairpieces. Warhol, the story goes, lost interest in the star long before he'd finished shooting her, passing her onto David Salle. Characteristically, the Factory host found the scenes that were shot and edited by Salle to be among the finest work that he himself ever produced. If Warhol traced the dichotomies between commerce and art, his most profound statements were the ones that crossed the production line: the silk screens made by others, for example. The films at which he cast but the most cursory glance are the ones that bear his stamp most surely. Such is the paradoxical grip of a certain brand of nihilism.

Ryazantsev then, an enigma of passions, her face a colony of efforts. But to what end? She certainly had none of the ambitions that seem to drive most actresses, and starred in only a handful of films in America, and then erratically. She supposedly turned down many big names over the years, only to say yes to the made-for-TV John Milius actioner Death Or Death? Ryazantsev returned to Russia in 1990 to 'walk the countryside and breathe the air. That is all.' Ryazantev, one suspects, is far too stupid or clever to care about her legacy. If her departure from cinema threatens to lend a Garbo tint to her narrative, the robust quietness of her post-fame life quickly distills such fancy. Garbo quit the screen because she cared, Ryazantsev because she couldn't care less.

In the final shot of the film that sealed her fame across Communist Eastern Europe, дневник моего заключительного года (Diary Of My Final Year, Lev Mikhailov, 1955) the girlish Tanya conjures a frown so delicately indecisive that the viewer feels tricked; its ambivalence strikes a contrast with the repeated mantra of her inner monologue ('You have to love yourself before you can hate anybody else, you have to love yourself before you can hate anybody else...') which spins ever onwards, until the words collide on the soundtrack, overlapping, and splitting, much like Alvin Lucier's sound piece I Am Sitting In A Room. The words become hollow and meaningless in repetition, an idea that Warhol, in particular, understood.

Ryazantsev Directed by David Salle Produced by Andy Warhol, David Salle Written by David Salle, Tanya Ryazantsev Starring Tanya Ryazantsev, Geri Miller Release Date US: Oct 1970 Tagline: 'Yes. No. Maybe. Maybe Not.'

FUTUR (Piotr Janas, 1958)

2011-09-27T13:51:00.000-07:00

'Forty years and I have learned nothing, nothing useful, about the people, factories, politics and personalities of Hackney. The name has declined to a brand identity. A chart-topper: worst services, best crime, dump of dumps. A map that is a boast on a public signboard, a borough outline like a parody of England. My ignorance of the area in which I have made my life, watched my children grow up, is shameful. I've walked over much of it, on a daily basis, taken thousands of photographs, kept a, 8mm film diary for seven years: what does it amount to? Strategies for avoiding engagement, elective amnesia, dream-paths that keep me submerged in the dream.' Iain Sinclair

In 1947, Piotr Janas moved from Gdansk in Poland to London in England and immediately started work on his only film. His script revolved around a young man in wartime Poland who slipped forwards and backwards in time, and when he began shooting in the bereft streets of postwar London, the problem of the setting was evident. 'I didn't know if London was big enough to stage my memories of my bombed and occupied hometown. Even though it dwarfs Gdansk, the intensity of my destroyed home looms large.'

Janas never planned to leave anything more than just this one artifact, a nine-hour compendium of 'every thought, waking, sleeping, and the delicious etherworld in between.' He shot hundreds of hours of footage in London between 1947 and 1953, and became intrigued by the way that the narratives of different places can echo. 'I filmed so much, imprinting my memories of a now dead past onto my new home, that the effect was dizzying. I began to see doppelgangers of childhood girlfriends in the windows of London buses, and a turn down a calm street in Notting Hill one day drew me to my childhood road completely, even though they bear few similarities, except my own presence at one time, and then another.'

Compelled, Janas shot more footage throughout 1955 and 1956, bleeding his new autobiography into his script. 'All films are really, of course, about making films. The viewer cannot help but be aware, somehow, of the fact that their view is one given to them by an invisible hand. This was even more true for mine, it being my one and only attempt.' Janas' biography of his own time in London was being folded in on itself, ingredients inseparable from his time-travel plot: The process as the art.

In 1958 the film was released under the name Futur (the final 'e' being dropped because Janas wanted to acknowledge the unfinished quality of even an exhaustive work like this.) It is largely a science fiction narrative following a man as he jumps between occupied Poland and a dreamy future. But for long periods our hero is gone, vanished from the text, lost amid documentary footage of Picadilly Circus, Hyde Park, or Hackney's Mare Street. During many sequences, Janas' voice walks with us. His words are a jumble of his story and that of his character:

The future is made up of versions of the past, of course. Sometimes, our brain traces links, apparently to make the distortions more palatable. When I am in the future, I have memories of the present, and feel uncanny nostalgia for a variety of pasts. Walking down a London street, I know this is the near-future, so I scan the surroundings for clues, and tread carefully. It is busy, there are lots of people and cars. A girl loading furniture into a van wears a face mask to protect her breathing; a passing cyclist does the same. Other faces in the crowd wear them too, but not everyone. I pass a row of shops. Outside the pavement is filled with flatbed trolleys, the kind used to bring large amounts of milk or bottles of water back and forth. This makes the pathway hard to get through, so I step up onto one of the trolleys to let walkers pass in the other direction. Amongst the austere bustle, a dark-eyed woman smiles from under a furry Russian-style hat and fur coat. She looks like a school friend, fully grown, and is the only person making eye contact. Others move in and out of the supermarket with what I read as a life-during-wartime hollow calm, the kind that sets in after the realisation hits that panic stations cannot be manned permanently. Perhaps I am wrong.

I pass the supermarket. Behind me, a notably cheerful man camply declares that he will eat it (what? leftovers? something) with a few slices of FG. His female companion laughs. I walk on, debating in my head what FG might be. Conclusion: Fresh Golden, bread, and this sets a hunger off in me. I cross the street to a bakery selling the warmest, freshest loaves.

Home, at mother's. Except it is different. I reason that she has moved. It can't be too far into the future, but something has happened. This is a big, gorgeous house. I eat the bread with cheese, tomato and cucumber. My mother-in-law comes downstairs, and I remember that her and my father-in-law are staying here. My mother is out. My mother-in-law is carrying a cleaning device that is uses a vacuum- she has just done the upstairs bedroom, I guess, typically keeping busy. I show her the bread, and she is suddenly very hungry too. I cut more for her. I scan her face and the room for clues, something to bring back to my present, but I see none.

The unnamed central character never quite finds what he needs in either time. His frustration grows; this gift of foresight frequently proves useless to him, and the slivers of future he encounters contain little to carry back to the past for profit or nourishment. Before long, all he can see in the future is a looming absence: a world that rolls on, even after his death.

Futur Directed by Piotr Janas Produced by Thomas Standish Written by Piotr Janas, Tomas Lewandolski, Richard Smith Starring Robert Colt, Louise Mather Rabbit Films/CKF 552 mins Release Date UK: March 1958 US: 1982 Tagline: 'The Futur Is Murdr'

CHOCOLATE CASSETTE (19--)

2011-07-02T18:00:00.000-07:00

My dreams are gone. I awoke with a phrase in my head that I knew was the key to unlocking a whole narrative, and repeated it to myself many times. I came up with an abbreviated set of codewords to help me recall the phrase, and an acronym of those words.

But it has all gone.

I first heard about Chocolate Cassette from David H, who (among many things) was the cultivator of a collection of anecdotal evidence of the wonder of pop culture's hidden corners. He had tracked down rumours of the film's existence across playgrounds and video shops of the West Midlands. His vivid descriptions, over several weeks, of the film's plot, dialogue, decor, acting nuances, and grand themes were, I knew, too complex to be completely true. His enjoyment of the telling was too obvious, and he would string us along at the end of a lunch break, withholding details until next time.

I stuck to him closely, convinced that he had seen the greatest film ever made, and that we, by being proxy witnesses, were glimpsing gold. And the more he told us, the more I knew it. I was sure it was a film pulled from my consciousness, and when the others lost interest (long after the most salacious details had been spent, their power rubbed out through repeated retellings), I hounded David H into further examinations, even prompting him when he forgot his own lines. Disappointed at his own waning absorption, I began writing down everything I could about the film. Before long I stopped bothering David H to check my work, and spun out alone.

By now, no-one else cared about the film, and only the curious insult taken from it lingered: Me? well you're as out-of-date as a chocolate cassette! My immersion into the world of the film I hadn't seen continued, to the point that I was certain that I had, after all, seen it. Hadn't I? In the time since I'd got a television for my eleventh birthday a couple of years earlier, I'd seen countless films. (In a way all of the entries in Fictional Film Club evoke a feeling in me, a feeling of falling asleep late at night close to my 14 inch portable television (in one of many possible bedrooms it lived), and waking up a little later to find a film underway. The sound levels of a film are vastly different to other television shows, and sometimes the drop to a quieter level wakes a dozer. In this particular scene and hundreds like it, I awake near the beginning; the protagonists are already involved in their story, but not so much that I can't keep track. In the days when more movies were on tv and less was written about them, you could stumble over them. B movies, classics, all treated equally, shown after hours. I saw many this way, not knowing until several days or years later what they were. Some are still lost, just vague structures of image and plot, evoking that Edward De Bono line about memory being that which is left when something happens and doesn't completely unhappen. There's the one where the kids break into what turns out to be a horror house, with the emaciated fella living in the walls (The People Under The Stairs, Wes Craven, 1992), or the man with nine lives performing dangerous jury duties in mob-ridden Chicago (Disclaimer, Tommy James, 1954), or further examples, on the tip of my-)

Chocolate Cassette lingered on the periphery for years until a recent visit home turned up some old diaries. A phone rings. Out of shot, a memory gathers. I knew nothing of this film until it popped into my head one day, sent there by a thousand ghosts. My writing from then is its own world, quite separate from the film. I quote:

'Sept 16, 1990.

I was about to go to bed last night when a film began on Channel Four. I idly watched the opening scenes, recognising both the father in the family who had played not only the leader of an unruly band of warriors (who also included an actor from an Australian television soap) in a lesser piece of sci-fi, but had been the host of a daytime gameshow in more recent years. The actress playing the mother I also recognised, but I couldn't place her. Their son found a diary, anyway, a plot point that seemed somewhat buried, and so I was subsequently baffled when the film swung on it. Anyway, grandparents loft, dusty light, treasure chest. Kid smashes the lock, finds nothing inside but shreds of newspaper. He thinks. But at the bottom is a diary. He takes it out. Leaves it in his room. Mum finds it one day. She opens it. Reads a random page:

'Dear Diary,

I cannot gather enough prose to talk about this. But I can put a clipping from the local rag below:

'Local Man Invents Chocolate Cassette'

[The following passage is highlighted.]

'....the ephemeral nature of song. You can record a tune which only plays once. A song that melts upon completion. No one can really remember it. It is a romantic one-off that you give to a loved one. They can eat the delicious mess. Ingest your melody.'

The distortions, from the real film, through David H's exaggerations and my own appropriations, only expand in time. Lies grow and grow, echo and echo. If I saw the film now, I'd probably overlook it, another face in the crowded station, so different it would be from my idea. Chocolate Cassette is my favourite film, at least until I see it.

BABY SHOWER (Leo Katzenberg, 1977)

2011-06-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

Todd Rundgren stars in this oddity (produced by Blake Edwards) about a man who, taking the advice of a successful gigolo (Cliff Robertson), begins gatecrashing baby showers in the Cincinnati area, arriving with presents in the hope of meeting women. Before long, he cannot successfully navigate any romantic encounter unless it takes place at one of these gatherings.

Time spent watching Baby Shower and trying to tell apart genuine gags and missteps of taste is time wasted. Take, for example, the Todd-sung refrain, added below. It reprises itself at least thirty times on the soundtrack, reflecting (rather too directly) our hero's sickening addiction. (1)

Baby Shower by Rodd Tungsten

Baby Shower Directed by Leo Katzenberg Produced by Blake Edwards Written by Dom Perdue Starring Todd Rundgren, Maud Adams, Cliff Robertson Songs by Rodd Tungsten 88 mins Pink Productions Release Date US/UK: May 1977 Tagline:'Get out your one-sies and have some fun-sies!'

1. The songs, it should be noted, are credited to 'Rodd Tungsten'.

JACKY (Jean Antoine, 1993)

2011-06-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

'Obviously narration is only an act of memory; on the other hand, it holds nothing in reserve for future use; it merely derives a little pleasure from the states of dread by trying to formulate them as aptly as possible;from enjoyment of horror it produces enjoyment of memory.' Peter Handke (1)

'In the 1930s Warner Brothers developed a serious line in earnest, inspirational films celebrating great scientists, liberators and social benefactors, usually played by Edward G Robinson or Paul Muni, dedicated to Longfellow's lines in his "A Psalm of Life": "Lives of great men all remind us/ We can make our lives sublime/ And, departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time." But Variety's contemptuous neologism "biopic" stuck, and biography has never had much standing in the cinema – unlike the literary world where, under the larger rubric of "life writing", it's a serious matter both to practise and study.' Philip French (2)

Joann Star's 2010 biopic Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) followed recent rock star narratives (Ian Curtis, Edith Piaf, Brian Jones, Peter Sellars, Bob Dylan) that eschew the Oscar-sweeping epic treatment of Gandhi or Lawrence of Arabia and settle for something more impressionistic or cheeky. Gainsbourg captures the nonchalant arc of its subject's life, is enjoyably raucous and thoroughly entertaining, but somehow it still leaves the viewer knowing less about the man that President Mitterand described, upon Gainsbourg's death in 1991, as somoeone who 'through his love for the language and his musical genius, lifted the song to the level of an art.'

The real truth is in fiction, of course. At the time of his death, Gainsbourg was filming a rollicking tale of a lady-killing singer. Jean Antoine's Jacky was fashioned from tall stories, and yet it can inevitably be read as a biopic of the star, whose own episodic life (with great highlights and a fair amount of mediocrity) serves as a bold confirmation of the print-the-myth ethos. After his death, the production continued without Gainsbourg, leaving a jumpy narrative that makes perfect nonsense, and thus his turn as the titular ungallant gallavanter is a bold sign-off, a self-penned eulogy, and somewhere between brilliant and disappointment.

Gainsbourg's existence is one that comes to us framed as a series of anecdotes (smoking in hospital post-heart attack, insulting American singer on television, being banned by the BBC for being too sexy, et cetera, et cetera), all fully-formed squares in a mythological tapestry, their veracity unimportant, their greater truth illustrative of something we admire: a man living to the edge of his capacities, world be damned. So too, Jacky's life is potted and episodic, every step a deviation from the road. The character is lifted from the Jacques Brel song of the same name (the galloping chanson that begins with the careering lines: 'And if one day I should become/A singer with a Spanish bum/Who sings for women of great virtue/I'd sing to them with a guitar/I borrowed from a coffee bar/ Well, what you don't know doesn't hurt you'), the one that treats its subject like a dreamy mystic, a pickpocket pragmatist, an ambitious romantic; the man who outdrank the Roman army, outsang Frank Sinatra and outfenced (Biblically speaking) Casanova, or so he says.

There is Gainsbourg, his face like a literary allusion, weighty and important as he can muster, knowing it is all a joke. His frequent accomplices (for he needs an audience, a victim, a stooge, someone to verify and spin) are excited by him. He is calmly crumpled in the residue of party after party, the veneer of noise on everything about him, but never on him; his eyes are hollows never to be full. In exchanges with another musician in a bar, we see a riff on Mae West cheek, making rich women buy them drinks so they can spill them on the suits of husbands. They step outside into the cool Marseille night, drunker than all hell, fighting their memories to put a face to a name: Steven Angiers, wasn't he at your college? A man you knocked out in a streetfight or prizefight? The man your mother left your father for? Or someone else?

But later, after many deviations, there is a Steven Angiers, and it is Jacky himself, overseas and in pseudonym, a man with no reason to live other than to prove that he can. Exposed to the winds, Jacky takes in Paris, Tangiers (because it rhymes with 'Angiers'), Bogota and Prague, actively looking for his lottery to throw a ticket towards. This snakes and ladders progress flicks the edges of destitute, and contains champion moments of alcoholic logic bereft of boozy remorse. 'I am Jacky, and I have a full compliment of fingers and toes,' is the repeated line to the changing faces in changing fauna, as if in a life of no clear path, such simple facts can stand as a humble gospel.

In the final scene, when Jacky takes the microphone in an empty bar, he doesn't know what his next song will be, and doesn't seem to care. (3) Absolute confusion looking very much like absolute bliss, and that is as it should be.

Jacky Directed by Jean Antoine Produced by Alain Terzian Written by Jean Antoine, Serge Gainsbourg Starring Serge Gainsbourg, Christian Clavier, Sabine Azema Strand Releasing Release Date UK/US: Jan 1993 126 mins Tagline: 'Too Many Pretty Singers, Not Enough Pretty Songs'

1. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

2. The Observer, August 2010.

3. The Gainsbourg-penned and performed songs 'Le Botox', 'Amour Cruise' and 'Mon Amant Avant-Dernier' appear in the film. The latter includes a verse sung in French, and then repeated in English:

You're my penultimate lover

The one before the one before the end
After you my energies will be sucked through the vacuum
By some peachy nymphet in a gloomy backroom
And I'll expire there sweating on the Indian rug
While she calls in the others to watch me slip down
To the spiteful netherworlds, where feeling so smug
I'll buy a drink for the jailer in exchange for a favour
A call to my love whose love never wavered
I'll tell her that down here it really is hell
O hello I'll be here a while , alas, oh well
Sort out her Lucifiction from her Lucifacts
Some of the boys have got on the escape committee
We know it's impossible, no room for self pity.

M.JAINET'S ETERNAL ZIGZAG (Francois Lepin Eziot, 1949)

2011-05-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

Plotwise, this is as simple as those early cinematic experiments entitled Tennis Match or The Motorcar Departs: A man is pursued, endlessly, across borders. We pick up our sympathies from the details: small habits and clothing tell us that he is a member of the resistance and his assailant is a Nazi spyhunter. His name is M. Jainet, and he will run and run and run. The Nazi, trapped in hopeless caricature, has no name. Even as the film begins, we are clued in to what they both know: that this chase does not end when the war does. This is their own private battlefield, a psychic chess, and it knows no international law or politick. Their situations could be reversed, and they would behave in the same manner. Like Japanese soldiers lost in the jungle, a mutual suicide, keeping alive only to spite the other, clueless as to what death to either would mean.

Eziot takes a simple stylistic concept and holds it for 85 minutes, a captain clinging to his mast through a storm. An exercise in repetition, each scene is made up of a single shot, usually with an unmoving camera. Sometimes, a scene can sit empty for minutes: an abandoned market at night, a doorway outside a glowing bar, a towpath along a canal at dusk. But always, it seems, stairs are present, lifting through the darkness hopefully, to who knows where. Frequently, we have a three-quarter view, slightly elevated, a privileged angle on these cityspaces as smoky, desperate Eschers, cold geometries which our pair pass through. Diagrams freshly-built but anciently anatomical. Tension is never relieved, as every revelation is followed by a mind-wiped new scene. As soon as one man spots another (his body stiffening ecstatically out of the jetlag for a moment), his actions are quick and decisive, but ultimately mean nothing. Not unless we see capture and an end to the cycle, and we do not. For a new scene, in a new part of town, will surely follow. Sometimes Jainet finds the stairs, and our hopes are lifted. But he has only escaped to the next screen, to begin again.

In some scenes, nothing happens; there is no-one. In others, we might only see the pursuer or the pursued (perhaps searching eagerly, or hiding, or even, on occasion, relaxing, putting the danger aside for a moment (the latter of which is frequently the most affecting)); in at least one, both pass each other without noticing. Every time, we look for those faces: the twitchy, hopeful Jainet (played by Serge Reggiani, the popular French-Italian singer) and the lumbering never-tiring Nazi (Gaston Modot, who played another angry German in Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu (1939)).

At first, Eziot's espionaged theatricals seem like a game for the viewer, and each scene a mystery puzzle, a Where's Waldo? in frosty greys and blacks. But soon, the beautiful complexity of an eternally repeating screen (with the water-torture tension of infernal Pong) affects us, as does the knowledge that when Jainet ricochets himself into the edge of the screen, that is the end of it, but only for now.

Eziot tinkered repeatedly with his film, and the most widely seen cut from 1949 is by no means the most definitive. In 1972, He toured a 72-hour version entitled M.Jainet's Eternal Zigzag '72, with reels replayed in random orders; a stiffening, endless, Spy vs Spy, zen warfare, perpetual fear.

Francois Truffaut wrote about the experience of watching this version for Cahiers du Cinema: (1)

'In the theatre, the fans celebrated this event in various ways: there were poetry recitals at the back, and a drinking game near the front that fell away by the halfway point of the film. One group began to cheer the Nazi, perhaps finding in him the perennial despair of Wile E. Coyote, perhaps just yearning for a conclusion. Near me, a couple slept in each other's arms for the entire weekend, not looking up once. At one point, I became convinced that the roles had been reversed, and that Jainet was tracking his pursuer; Eziot had hypnotised me, or perhaps Jainet had realised that the best way to avoid capture was to follow... Despite the singular pacing of the film, the overall mood ebbed and flowed throughout: at one point, almost everybody cheered each carefully created scene, at another they were slow-clapping, and at others it seemed like it didn't matter what we were watching... after about eighteen hours, the backgrounds through which the two men move become less like Vichy France and more like other wartime outposts- Morocco, Stalingrad, Cyprus. By the fiftieth hour, I recognised nowhere. The longer one watches, the further away from the original place we are. One comes to feel that if one were to watch Jainet running for several weeks, he might end up leading his pursuer into the sun, or the outer rings of heaven; similarly, the viewer would leave the cinema to find themselves in a completely different city, on another planet, or in another body entirely.'

The film was homaged in Rick Marving's home computer games for the ZX Spectrum in those glorious early-1980s years of quick inspiration, bedroom programming and whimsical in-jokes. Monsieur Janney's Eternal Zig-Zag '82 and Monsieur Janney's Still Running, were both famous for being never-ending, self-generating puzzles, with no game over or prize screen.

M.Jainet's Eternal Zigzag Directed by Francois Lepin Eziot Produced by Jean Eziot Written by Francois Lepin Eziot Starring Serge Reggiani, Gaston Modot DisCina Films 99 mins Release Date UK/US: March 1949 'How long can you avoid yourself?'

1. July, 1972

GOONER (Peter Harris, 1996)

2011-05-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

'Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.' Joyce Carol Oates

'The recurring image, the one that says more than any of his videos or statements, is the Warholian one we now have: bin Laden watching a video of himself, caught in a jihad for fame.' Christopher Hitchens

Some real-life fictions have an immediate impact on Hollywood ones. Nothing stops production, of course, but this month, the death of the world's most wanted man has created a conundrum. Two weeks ago there were two Osama bin Laden films being shot, and both must be hurriedly rewritten. Now, the general public will not abide by Kathryn Bigelow's as-yet untitled film about the fruitless search for the al-Qaeda leader. The ending must now be bloody and final. Word is that Bigelow's liked tale only because it had no 'closure' (a hopelessly modern term that, when used, sounds like it means something, but rarely does); now there must be, imperfect and prosaic. Similarly, Oliver Stone's fever dream With Us Or Against Us, (imagining a predictably bombastic afterlife in which a certain former US President and his nemesis collide with sticks, resulting in mutual destruction) was due in 2012, but now seems an exercise in angry cartoonish bloodlust too far: why put up with such overcooked satire when the wreckage of a real-life lynch-job is ripe for the picking?

Through flickering videotape, one man slipped into an iconography that it seems it didn't need his death to seal. He was already a ghost, turning up in Western dreams since before he was born.

He is there in Vick Kissing's The Phantom (1942), which follows a manhunt through Montana that ends in starvation and freezing to death. The group discuss the whys and wherefores of their eye-for-an-eye existence, but the audience never discovers the extent of the actual murderer's guilt. His size, ethnicity and gun hand are all argued over, and their harried accounts seem to describe a several different men. The fracturing and failure of the group seems inevitable from the outset, leaving the question of whether the killer exists at all (and by existential extention, whether a group hunting a non-existent man can 'exist', not to mention an audience of a film about them). Clint Eastwood,(1) himself existing somewhere between icon and human, remade it as A Horse With No Rider (2004). His last Western, it fit into a Bush narrative all too easily, with a posturing son leaning ever more on the Descartian double-bind: 'We're chasin' him. He must exist!'

1996: The year the Taliban took control in Afghanistan, and Arsene Wenger began introducing a new purist mindset to Arsenal Football Club. Twin narratives, two sets of idealism. Arsenal were hitherto the epitome of English gung-ho: Tony Adams drink-driving, Ray Parlour letting off fire extinguishers in Pizza Hut (and is there a more tawdry metaphor than that?), on a heroic death-charge for the old guard of banal boozers, facing up to their own terms of endangerment in a new world. Footballers in England would now eat pasta and drink soft drinks. They would no longer be seen gurning down the lens on Top of the Pops, arms around each other in a parade of uncool fun, like rictus Astleys.

1996 also saw the filming of Nick Hornby's loveletter to boyish men and Arsenal, Fever Pitch (David Evans, 1997). It also saw the release of a lesser known North London narrative: Gooner (1996) is Peter Harris' account of Osama bin Laden in London in the 1980s, going to see Arsenal play at Highbury. Or is it? Harris took the loose facts, that bin Laden had been known to frequent Gunners matches in the Thatcher years, and spun a tale about how a rich and bored man might be swayed by religious dogma or weekly worship of a sporting kind. This came out before the World Trade Center fell, of course, but after the earlier failed attempt in 1993. Harris' film does not predict the significance of his subject to a worldwide narrative (and it must be said, he has always claimed his character is a fiction, known only by the name 'Al'; Harris he also denied all knowledge of bin Laden until after his film was finished, but this matters little). Alfred Molina (2), that man of a thousand ethnicities, plays Al with no little sympathy. He seems lost and unsure as he buys up Arsenal memorabilia.

This could be the lost British terrorist film, Molina flickering across London like M.Vurloc in Conrad's The Secret Agent, unsure of his sympathies, building his resentments. Harris' denials fit the Osama myth perfectly, erasing a man from his own biography, until he is only a figment of the world's imagination, hiding in a dark cave of the collective mind. There are parallels with Chris Morris' Four Lions (2010), but the action is looser, less dramatic; like Gus van Sant (in Elephant or Last Days mode) if he had been asked to interpret a Hornby novel shorn of women and music, leaving only the football.

Gooner Directed by Peter Harris Written by Peter Harris, Rob Watts Produced by Rich Robbin Starring Alfred Molina, Dexter Fletcher Flickknife/BBC Films 99 mins Release Date UK: Sept 1996/US: N/A Tagline: 'Who Are Ya? Who Are Ya?'

1. Eastwood's films frequently deal with the potency of symbolic masculines. Could any other action hero dissect his own mythology so frequently and cuttingly? Compare and contrast with other tough guys as the butt of their own jokes: Vin Diesel, Hulk Hogan, the second half of Sylvester Stallone's career. And don't think that Arnold Schwarzenegger's barrage of limping comedies of the early 90s (think Twins, Cinderfella, Kindergarten Cop, Austrian Thunder and Last Action Hero) display any kind of self-examination, as they are all one-note riffs on the same big-guy slapstick he'd always wrought.

2. There is a rumour that Alfred Molina has appeared in every film made during his lifetime, and even some that preceded it, such is his multi-faceted glory. He is one of those faces that link texts, jumping between them at rapid speed, cementing them as real live artifacts. His startling turn as John O'Neill in He Knows Everything And It Doesn't Even Matter (2006) was as hidden from view as Osama Bin Laden at the time: sporadic video showings, unverified. Peter Bradshaw praised the film, but said that 'it suffers from a huge problem. That John O'Neill's story spins on a real-life irony too implausible for fiction: the FBI's best man on al-Qaeda who, having been forced out of the Bureau for maverick genius, takes up his new job as the head of security at the World Trade Center. He died on his first day at work, on September 11th, 2001, and this is too perfect to ring true, even though ity is true. Truth can be stranger than fiction, but it can also be more truly fictional. Sven Hassel's gutbusting By Their Necks (1965) does not suffer from the same problem, as the musclebound romps through Torah Borah lay no claim to credibility.'

MENSCH VERSUS MITTWOCH (MAN AGAINST WEDNESDAY, F.G. Hoch, 1930)

2011-05-07T14:00:00.000-07:00

There is a sequence in F.G. Hoch's Mensch Versus Mittwoch in which protagonist Eli, played with brilliant care by Emil Jannings, leaves a bar drunk and walks down a Berlin alleyway. He is set upon by an unseen assailant, who beats him to a bloody pulp. The whole thing is filmed in the reflected retina of a feral cat, watching the action before passively turning away to toy with a dying mouse. It is such an extravagant piece of camerawork, stepping beyond the stark theatricals of the Weimer Expressionists (and through a portal of territory unmarked at that time, except perhaps by Man Ray's Alice dans le Pays des merveilles, the lost bravura short from 1932) that it jars the viewer from the narrative: Hoch acknowledges this by showing the next scene, in which Eli recovers in his room, twice. Many first-time viewers do not notice this playful repetition, this record-skipping break of the verisimilitude.

He was rarely so bold again. As film scholar Joseph Pranden said in 1962 when reviewing F-G's career downward spiral, 'the early prognosis of 'terminal genius' was hasty, and with time the outlook receded to the less spectacular: extreme spells of inspired sickness (Gestalt Honey in 1932, Zwölf Jünger (Twelve Disciples) in 1935) punctuating long spells of banal and lazy health, in which the ability to function is taken for granted (and too many titles to mention fall into this category).'(1)

His departure to America in 1937 was an ending. Far from flourishing in Hollywood like counterpart Fritz Lang, he froze. But here he fires beautifully, his promise coinciding with Weimar studio Ufa, just as the Expressionist movement was both flourishing and about to be stifled by the rise of the Nazis.

Man Against Wednesday applies overt noir sensibilities to a plot that stretches whimsy until it is a desperate and sad dirge. Eli experiences the week as seven individuals with an agenda: to him, each day is a person, lurking in the shadows, bumping into him in the same sequence, over and over. They all wear different colours, he is certain, and although their appearance is otherwise identical, he becomes convinced that they all have defining features. Monday, always one step ahead of the dullard Tuesday, is a red-pen wielding thought-editor whose vision has receded so much that he can only swivel his eyes in two dimensions, across the ledger and down the page, to the bottom line. Sunday is calm and apologetic, meeting Eli in parks and cafes, but the others all mix brawn with punctuality, a frightful combination.

Eli tries to reason with Sunday, asking her to visit more frequently, maybe twice a week; but she clams up, refusing to talk. This is how it must be, Eli.

Eli formulates a plan. If he can avoid Wednesday, the most timid of the rest of the days, he might disrupt the chain, and escape the clutches of their routine. But where can he go where Wednesday cannot? Week after week goes by, no refuge can be found. Eli changes his regular paths, throws everything out of sync, and loses his job and friendships because of it. But still, the days always catch up with him, and their aggression only grows. Eli drinks, and tries to sleep through entire days, but wakes to find that his assailants have visited, destroying his room.

He resorts to a final plan: barricading his room and waiting. If Wednesday can't find him, Eli wins. In a sickeningly slow final scene, Hoch allows us to live with what we know, and what Eli should know: that someone else is there in his small apartment. It takes an age, but when Eli finally turns his back, Tuesday steps out from behind the long curtains and unlocks the door, letting in his eternal successor. They nod grimly, their celestial relay handover as smooth as ever, and Wednesday enters, knife drawn.

Mensch Versus Mittwoch Directed by F.G.Hoch Produced by Franz Lammer Written by Lisbeth Heinz, F.G.Hoch Starring Eli Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Max Hiller, Werner Krauss UFA/ Goldwyn Distributing Company (USA) 87 mins Tagline: none.

1. Film As A Popular Art Form, Scholar Books

I DREAM OF 'TO THE BRINK' (Peter Davies, 1988)

2011-04-26T10:06:00.000-07:00

A boy (Matthew Rhys) dreams about a television show that he is convinced must be real, so rich is the detail in his head. He spends a day walking around his small Welsh town, asking people if they have heard of it. They have not. Every time he sleeps, he is taken to this world, a forgotten comedy-drama from the 1970s, an alternative past that only he can access.

Upon waking, he carried back with him the fully-formed history (life, loves, unloves) of a character he knew to be fictional, and yet: it was perfect in all the ways that a plausible outline should be, but vague and imprecise at the exact points that made it seem flesh rather than a carefully sculpted invention (taking into account the obvious, which is that art must consider logic in a way that real life does not, swathes of this dreamt figure's history were in the shadow, as blurry as a stranger at a station about which nothing is known except their keenness for the arrival of a train).

In the dream, the man was an English actor, a descendent of the Barrymore clan, whose name was Richard, or Rich, or maybe he was just rich. He was handsome in a slightly exotic way, dark like Tom Conti, but taller. Richard Barrymore then, estranged nephew of Sir John, who played posh con artist Hugh Brinkman in 70s sitcom To The Brink. He knew that this didn't exist, this show, but it sat in place in his mind as comfortably as those that did. To The Brink, numbers could be fabricated that seemed correct: 140 episodes, between 1974 and 1981, with a Christmas special in 1983 completing the cycle. By that point, Barrymore was starring in minor British films, small cameos in Hollywood productions, a grey beard for the stage, the usual. He died on-set in 1989, liver failure, the drink. 53. Loved, missed. They said nice things about him as a man, more than his acting. His technique was neither here nor there, his charms were his chops.

In the dream, the boy is looking at black and white photos from this show under a Christmas tree at his grandmother's old house, the one that stayed as a constant in his childhood. He can see the faces of the cast, including the grumpy pub landlord with the catchphrase ('Last orders, gentlemen. You too Mr Brinkman.'), the very common and very pretty Susie Soap, who works for Hugh in some capacity or other, and Mr Constable (played by an actor who was clearly well-respected and famous, because despite appearing for only one scene every week he was billed in the credits in large lingering letters as 'featuring Leo Carmichael as Mr Constable', to canned applause), a pensioner who Brink stops in to check up on, as some kind of penance or display of his virtuousness, lest the rest of the show leave us in doubt as to the golden heart below the caddish exterior. To The Brink survived the axe with the introduction of thick but loveable Jamaican sidekick Malcolm in the second series, a step that caused the show to be both praised for racial diversity and attacked for an apparent lampooning of immigrants. The boy loved Malcolm, and laughed just thinking of him.

Escapades: Brink always needed money, despite being to the manor born. Each week he would trip into some scam designed to return his crumbling estate to fortune. But everybody around him, except a select few, thought that his bank account was overflowing, and were trying to rip him off at every turn. Thus the frequent situation where Brink would be lavishing presents on a disinterested socialite while trying to convince would-be gangsters of his poverty.

There always seemed to be a scene where, Brink, cornered by some heavies/ an annoyed husband/ the police would feign a cockney accent and talk his way out of trouble; an inverse Eliza Doolittle, dropping 'is H's like smart bombs, for deliberate effect, and burying schooled vowels in South London lock-ups with the documented evidence of his five-hundred year-old family tree.

The boy even recounted some of the lines, pulling off approximations of the normal cut-glass Brink voice and his rougher alter-ego, but the town just laughed indulgently, and spoke of other television shows that they remembered, and were actually real. But none of them were vehicles, souped-up or otherwise, for the elusive and charming Hugh Brinkman.

I Dream Of 'To The Brink' Directed by Peter Davies Produced by Vic Marshall Written by Rick Green Starring Matthew Rhys, Thomas Bowen, Laura Ashe, Willie Ross Channel 4 Films 107mins Release Date UK: Nov 1988 US:N/A Tagline: 'Come Back, Hughie Brink, Your Drink Needs Drinking!'

MATHEMATISCHE (GEOMETRIES, Cecil Franck, 1960)

2011-04-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

This hypnotic film from the solipsistic eye of Cecil Franck is part of a larger exercise in narrative and mind-mapping that the filmmaker returned to throughout his career. Essentially an internal monologue over the top of images of a boy walking the streets of suburban Stuttgart, it hints at the melancholy of Albert Lamorisse's Le Ballon Rouge (1956). The footage, featuring Franck's nephew Jens, was shot in 1955, and subsequently reused by Cecil in over 100 films, recut and combined with different voiceovers and swathes of musics, an ever-evolving exercise in film. From 1955's Light Line to 1984's Lazer, Franck's manipulation of just an hour of the same visuals, over and over, is an endless working towards the central questions of art and meaning(lessness).

Mathematische uses an English language voiceover. A boy speaks:

'When I was a child I would love to make games out of everyday activities. any walk was a race with imaginary opponents. Or I might consider cars to be my enemy, and attempt to pass a lamppost before they did. This worked fine on quieter streets, where the noise of the car in the distance would serve as a challenge; I'd pick a marker ahead of me, one which seemed to be far enough away to not be so easy for me to reach before the car. A truly satisfying judgement would result in me dipping slightly to take the tape mere feet before the car passed unknowingly. On busier streets it would be harder to pick out individual cars in the hubbub, so I would change the game. One might be to see the sections of grass between the pavement and the street as safe zones behind which passing cars were no threat. In this case, I could not pass between them across a driveway entrance at the the same time as a car went by. Again, I could not run or stop, but by adjusting the pace of my stride, I'd hope to navigate an entire street without being 'hit' by a passing car. I would spend a lot of time imagining lines, running from the edges of the grass through perpendicular angles across the road and across the pavement. I'd also imagine similar lines across the front and rear bumpers of cars fizzing at 90 degree angles across the pavement, shots of invisible laser or light that would be repelled by the grass but would otherwise continue across the unguarded pavements, burning all in their path. Imagining these lines became second nature; They'd spin out from parked cars (also designated as cover sometimes) and benches, walls and any vehicle. Geometric prettiness from unseen shapes, dealt with by checked strides and sudden spurts.'

As late as 2005, with the release of Luxuriant Jay, Franck was still making films with the same piece of footage he had shot of Jens in 1955. 'I have not lifted a camera or been on a set in fifty years,' he said, 'for the images I collected then contain endless possibility. There are a million films to be made from those sequences of Jens, and I will never be finished. I am like a musician composing using only one chord, on one instrument, and through this repetition I discover anew things that I could not with a wider palette.'(1)

Jens Franck died in the year 2000, aged fifty-one. His uncle continues to remake his image, combining it, in various constellations, with various music (self-composed minimalist electronics, or commissioned/borrowed works from (among many others) Klaus Schulze, Holger Czukay, Robert Wyatt, Francoise Hardy and Die Krupps) and snippets of broken words. 'Now Jens is gone, I feel like my mission has sharpened, my idea more correct. In these fifty-five minutes, over and over, I can reflect his life, his family, his loves, his passions, through the way in which I edit a small section of his life as a boy. It is all in there, his entire existence, if only I can reframe it, highlight it, show it. For him.'

Mathematische Directed by Cecil Franck Produced by Cecil Franck, Tomas Duhbyoose Written by Cecil Franck Starring Jens Franck Franck Filmproduktion 55 mins Release Date: UK/US: None (shown on German television in 1973, and at Stuttgart's ContemptArt since 1995) Tagline: 'Still Here.'

1. KINO magazine, April 2005

LANDFILL (George Eliott, 1974)

2011-04-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

Locals debate the meaning of a quarry in a poor small town in the Midlands. It is 1969, and the swinging sixties, a media hologram only filled in with hindsight, hasn't been seen here. A gargoyled sexless rock'n'roll bled through years too late, however, leaving a residue of shabby Teddy Boys with fists. A town of scared people looking anything but, hard-minded and shut down. This is not the quiet inarticulation of Leigh or Loach; the abstract murders herein hover like reanimated carrion, where bacon-faced sons seek only a swifter nip of spite in a nonsense world of hypercolours. Flick-knives hide behind lead-in lines and 'penny-for-the-guy' smiles, and devils hang signs in the centre of town, unseen in plain view. Landfill takes a paving slab to notions of British Realism, creating a slim but swampy Anglo gothic shorn of manors and barons. No Billy Liar fantasies of escape here; they know there's nowhere to run. The youths are distressed geographers, circling their homes. Our notional hero, a tough bundle of sticks named Smithy, chases down frustrated a philosophy, but it only appears to us in fragmented voiceover, dribbles of poetry:

'England. You're free to destroy the borders, but you can't see 'em. They're not big red lines. Counties don't interlock together in some miraculous patchwork, fitting exactly, as I thought when I was younger, meeting exactly at the edges. Rather, there are spurs and burrs, overlapping edges that rut like horny stags, and dead ends that don't match up, tunnels to nowhere. You ever notice how many walls in this town don't hold anything in or out? You can walk along them but they don't go anywhere. They're just endings. The grassy mounds, piles of rubble, even shops that no-one goes in. If you can even imagine a hero being here, you can just see him walking in and knowing that this is the kind of place that sporting hope ignores, and that this is where he gets cornered without his sixgun.'

Gangs fight over ownership of the night in various places, Smithy is enlisted. The prize location: the quarry, where bad things happen to children, and it is always their own fault for being there. Over the landfill site the dug-out soil stands as a semi-permanent hill, Mount Crud. The locals christen it, laugh at it, climb it, tut at it's grim appearance on their horizon, but it becomes evident that it represents far more than municipal decision-making and ugly waste-management. It is totemic, a vibrating hulk; at night the distant motorway hums, but so too does Mount Crud, as if when it was lifted from below the topline it brought with it deep messages that it articulates solemnly. A local copper breaks a leg chasing some kids up it, and some locals say the eyesore is a nosesore and earsore too, breaking out in itchy spots. Everyone wants to move it, everyone is desperate to fill the quarry in, but it doesn't happen. Superstition, once attached, is difficult to shake from even the flintiest of shins, and after a while most repeat, as if in the same voice: I don't know much, lad, but I know we aren't going to see the end of Mount Crud.

From the pile of filth some evidence is plucked: veteran lensman Herb Alcott began his career here, and stays his post with vigour, even if the camera flinches at the noxious fumes and racist countenances of certain characters. Child actor Bon Johnstone grew up to be the guitarist in post-punk brutalists The Pressure Group, whose seminal album 'We Are Not Against The Anti-Counter-Revolutionary Resistance' stayed perfectly unbought for years. Other faces are recognisable, turning up in all manner of British films and television, but no-one remembers their names. Their faces glisten briefly in the murk, a deja-vu. Director George Eliott stole her name from a local writer (but with a final, sarcastic extra 't', hovering like a provocation to pedants) who changed her name to be taken seriously by appearing to be a man; this gesture, in 1974, had the opposite effect, looming like a parochial blasphemy, something that Eliott the second clearly invited.

Landfill sank inevitably into the gloom upon entry, thrown into cupboards during the week of its release and into skips six months later. All is refuse, now and forever.

Landfill Directed by George Eliott Produced by Lew Grade, George Elliott Written by Simon Prince, George Elliott Starring Bon Johnstone, Eric Rudge, John Jules, Lucy Pine, Amanda Richards Red Films/Central Productions Release Date UK: Oct 1974 US: N/A Tagline: none.

SCALA QUARANTA (Beppe Nona, 1963)

2011-03-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

This cannot be approached like other Nona films: Scala Quaranta, sensing our critical apparatus even when our advance is silent, hastily retreats into the undergrowth. Its enigmatic figure belies a hardy creature, one that can survive in a range of unpigeonholed habitats. It has rarely been seen in captivity (underwhelmed by early screenings, it shrank from view), and a firm category for its confusing silhouette proves elusive. Strong-arm critics throw it in with Nona's 'Casa' stage, the period of films made before his entry into the global bloodstream with the Bond/Barthes/bebop melange of Sigh Your Name (1966) and the subsequent theft of international hearts with Wine For Song (1967).

Scala Quaranta at first seems set for the kind of Old Country whimsy that delights outsiders: we follow a small god-fearing family as they work, eat and play in a small town in central Italy, with a beguiling lack of glamour. Violent routine prevails. The details of their lives are worked out exactly, and yet petty squabbles and jolly argument are forces that push and pull the day. Mamma (Alberta D'Agostini) is the sun of the house, never resting, except to play cards. The family sit at hands nightly, gambling for small amounts. A slow pace is thus established, seeming unbreakable. But then, in a delightful scene of creeping significance, drama intervenes.

One night, when asked to cut the deck, youngest son Beppe (the delightfully podgy Paolo Rossi) turns over a joker. This is seen as good luck. The family laugh, calling the boy fortunate. He denies this, suggesting that he has a special skill. When given a second opportunity, he does so again, against the odds. The family tease and hug him all the more. Pappa (Giancarlo Bianchi) bets him a week of chores that he can't do it again; but once more, Beppe cuts the deck and finds a joker. The family erupt. Amid the laughter, Mamma stops, and tells Pappa to shuffle the deck properly. He does so, at length, as the other brothers and sisters lean in. When Beppe cuts the deck and finds a joker once more, Mamma screams and crosses herself. She shakes Beppe, asking him how he is performing this trick, and accuses Pappa of fashioning a cheat. But they deny it vehemently, and Beppe, now upset, sits silently. When Mamma thrusts the deck in front of him once more, he at first refuses to cut; but under a barrage of shouts, he sullenly does so, drawing a joker again.

This just does not happen. The family argue the significance through the night, periodically finding new decks to offer Beppe. When he cuts, he finds a joker every time. After twenty-five consecutive jokers, they stop. This is no quirk. Meaning must be found. A priest, a doctor, a man of high learning, all react differently, all equally unhelpful. Mamma cleans ecstatically, she throws out belongings, domestic sacrifice, offerings; she spends money in tears, buying new decorations and trinkets to hang around Beppe's bed, his door, his neck. Are we saving the child from Fate or is Fate the child? Neighbours close their doors, but is it to the family's intertwining with Kismet or Mamma's apocalyptic euphoria? Some weeks the family give generously on a Sunday, some weeks they stay at home, the correct course yet to be found.

Throughout, Nona skirts with delicious indecision, never allowing the viewer to completely sympathise with or against anyone. The whole affair seems simultaneously ridiculous and staggeringly significant. Beppe is a proto-Damien and/or fearfully abused, Mamma a superstitious sadist and/or a brave matriarch. Only Pappa is the same in every reading, emasculated and pale, haunted by his own inability to act. The central mystery about whether the jokers are a clever trick or a supernatural sign is never explained, and the family drifts into the shell-shock of a self-imposed exile, not remembering what the question ever was, but searching the walls for an answer.

Scala Quaranta Directed by Beppe Nonna Produced by Gilberto Moretti Written by Beppe Nonna, Astrid Luna Starring Alberta D'Agostini, Paolo Rossi, Giancarlo Bianchi, Rosa Bianchi

Cino Del Duca/Janus Films 144 mins Release Date UK: Oct 1963/ US: Jan 1964 Tagline: None

THE LIBRARY AT QUEEN OF ALL SOULS (Leo McCarey, 1955)

2011-01-31T11:40:00.000-08:00

'Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.' Archibald Macleish

'To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.' Virginia Woolf

'I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.' Jorge Luis Borges

A librarian, Josie Werner (Barbara Stanwyck) dedicates her life to the flourishing and development of a library in a small town called Queen of All Souls, Texas. It is 1954. Despite efforts to censor and diminish the library by several successive mayors and various townsfolk, the shack-like construct survives all winds. The collection, due to the work of Werner, swells, and begins to receive national attention as a bastion of liberal learning.

The attacks on Werner grow however; her relationship with a black man (Titus Chambers) is examined, and her past as a young unmarried woman with a series of romances is repeatedly held up as evidence of the impropriety of her books. The fact that she is played by Stanwyck means that we both believe that any story about her may be true, and love her for it.

And just when we seem set on a path of anguishing town politics and individual bravery (shown, perhaps in the form of impassioned speeches in a courtroom setting, or a defiant entrance into (or exit from) a town meeting), an apocalyptic plot twist sets us on our bums, the deus ex machina being an actual nuclear apocalypse. The Russians and Americans set on a path of mutual destruction, and those above ground have only hours of unburnt air left. All recriminations are deemed petty, and the town pulls together to begin the evacuation.

The film thus folds back on itself, and breaks at the middle. The second half of the film bears little relation to the first. The constant is Josie and her bloodymindedness. As convoys leave the town, heading for potentially safer mountains and bunkers, she refuses to go. She shows no panic, but slips into a quiet silence as she organizes her books. When asked why, she doesn't explain. Weeping relatives come to try and persuade her to join them in one of the protective areas. Mankind needs people like you. We need you. She refuses, saying that someone must tidy the books. Stanwyck's natural defiance here rings like huge deep bell, no trace of trebly spite, just true and low.

If Josie's reasons are unclear to us, they are to her too; indeed, McCarey seems to be attempting to figure out the meaning of a life's work during these slow minutes, in the increasingly empty town and near-silent library. The examination is a clear-minded one that still comes up with no answers, as if McCarey knows that his own position as a credible and brilliant artist might be secure (a director of Duck Soup and The Awful Truth bends and scrapes to no-one in any just celestial Hollywood cafeteria; if such artful shepherding of Marxes and Cary Grants and Irene Dunnes is not a karmic get-out-of-jail-free card, one wonders what might be), but also that this means absolutely nothing.

Nearing the end, Josie writes a letter:

'I don't believe that good people make the world better. And often times they make the world worse, despite themselves. Isn't that why the planet is dying? Good people making mistakes? But you should still try. One bad person can do so much damage that it takes generations to repair. But all the good people in the world I think keep the world afloat. And they shouldn't have ever worried about betterment or evolution because- what's changed? In 10000 years? Textural things. That's all. But human nature seems to be the same. Self-destructive.'

She then rips it up with a laugh so dismissive that we, the audience, feel ridiculousness at the weight with which we might have received her words. They are meant for us, there is no-one else left for Josie to talk to. But they are hollow, mere platitudes (perhaps even stolen, half-remembered from another production); an attempt at making retrospective sense of a decision (and many other decisions, millions of them across a life) that needs no explanation. Because there is none. McCarey spares us the fiery end we know is due, cutting away from Stanwyck as she smiles into the distance, dreaming of the twenty-four (and more) variations of the note that she could have written, all plausible but too pat, somehow; no line is big enough to suffice, to be more than a scratch in the dirt.

The Library At The Queen Of All Souls Directed by Leo McCarey Produced by Leo McCarey, Jerry Wald Written by Mildred Cram, Leo McCarey Starring Barbary Stanwyck, James Earl-Jones, Ray Milland 20th-Century Fox Release Date US: March 1955/ UK: Aug 1955 102 mins Tagline: 'Just Because You Didn't See It Coming Doesn't Mean You Don't Have To See'

ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BILL (Bobby Hope,1982)

2011-01-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

Bobby Hope (pronounced /huːp/, like hoop, but with a slightly Dutch 'y' sound in between the two o's, like a crooked nose being framed by two ever-open eyes) has made over a thousand films. He does so despite most having never been seen by anyone outside of his family. He also writes novels, cinema criticism and plays, shoots videos and documentaries, and hosts a cable access television show. He busks at at street fairs, dances at festivals, and takes photographs for exhibitions that take place on the side of the street. He does all of this despite being ignored. Talent be damned: Bobby Hope is a hero.

In Elvis Has Left The Bill (1982) he looped echoing fragments of Presley songs over images of an Elvis Impersonator in a diamond-encrusted coffin; this was punctuated by shots of a young lady at a table, her date keeled over on his plate, the raven-haired fatty possibly dead. Waiters pick their way through a mountain of peanut-butter-filled baguettes to give the girl a distressingly huge check. It seems li- [... And there I must interrupt myself.

I'm stepping from behind the curtain, breaking the performance to attempt a performance of a different kind: plain-speaking. Like any attempt to breach the fourth wall it will no doubt run the risk of seeming 'artificial' rather than 'honest' (the latter being perhaps the most misunderstood and incorrectly used word, with the most misunderstood and overpraised meaning), and that is fine too, because it has to be.

I'm momentarily compelled to explain myself (a rarity; I'm attempting to cherish it and embrace what comes naturally to others). Perhaps it was due to a concern that the Fictional Film Club, which may seem like a whimsical diversion, might need a defence, a manifesto, a stance to explain its significance to me. But here I am, on the stage, alone, facing the baited breath of both of the audience members, and I'm unsure. I clear my throat. 'So I'm speaking with some reluctance, knowing that there are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement, depending on where you're standing at the time or on what the weather's like'. That's Harold Pinter. So is this:

'If I were to state any moral precept it might be: Beware of the writer who puts forward his concern for you to embrace, who leaves you in no doubt about his worthiness, his usefulness, his altruism, who declares that his heart is in the right place, and ensures that it can be seen in full view, a pulsating mass where his characters ought to be. What is presented, so much of the time, as a body of active and positive thought is in fact a body lost in a prison of empty definition and cliche.

This kind of writer clearly trusts words absolutely. I have mixed feelings about words myself. Moving among them, sorting them out, watching them appear on the page, from this I derive a considerable pleasure. But at the same time I have another strong feeling about wrds which amounts to nothing less tan nausea. Such a weight of words confronts us day in, day out, words are spoken in a context such as this, words written by me and by others,the bulk of it a stale dead terminology; ideas endlessly repeated and permutated become platitudes, trite, meaningless'.

Words lie. Especially those of other people. FFC fan William Self:

'I like the Fictional Film Club because I like the idea of a complete dictionary (with footnotes, and appendix) of something that cannot be complete; a dense map, thousands and thousands of hours of work, that is striking in its nonsense. But one that at any point may yield a dangerous clue or a few seconds of the most gorgeous melody you've never heard, before sending you stumbling down a dark passage again, lost.'

The FFC may be nonsense containing my deepest thoughts. It may serve as a diary written in a code that I do not understand, it may be a series of dreams that reveal significance seldomly. It may be a huge joke at my own expense, or an epic folly. Or a smaller, less glamorous one. (At this point, one of you might cough in the darkness, a cough that suggests that you don't come here for this kind of thing. In response, I might throw out a pun or fashion a balloon animal, but as you both are sitting in different parts of the theatre, your responses might be totally different. One of you might (might) laugh at the line, while the other mishears (mish-ears); the balloon animal from one angle might be a delightful puppy that enamours one of you, but it causes the other to leave, convinced I'd made a blasphemous shape. Which one did I make? I'll ask myself later and find out.)

Years end, and it seems right to mark them: I'm not superstitious, but I'm working on it. 2010 saw flickers of FFC in the real world: the unrighteously righteous Teeth of the Sea (and you should bookmark these boys and not only listen to their records but listen to the records that they listen to, read the books that they read, watch the films that they watch... http://teethofthesea.blogspot.com/) recorded this piece of sublime madness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBjs-9u158k&NR=1

After reading this:

http://fictionalfilmclub.blogspot.com/2009/02/acronym-tim-thurber-1979.html

An interjection into the real world, perhaps, or another layer of fabrication. Who can say? My intent is vague. I'll continue faking an inner vision until I convince myself that I have one. Explanation, or lack thereof, is over. Now back to the picture. I'm sorry it's nearly over.]-eed, one would not quibble with the judgement. A. House Is Not A Homo (1984), his documentary investigation of self-described 'church leader and ambassador for heterosexuals' Andrew House (who was predictably arrested with five rent boys in Las Vegas in 1979) certainly brought him more attention. Since then he has fluctuated between iconoclastic surrealism (A Cake of Sleep (1987) and Jesus and His Apostrophes (1990)) and sober documentary (Dumb, Dumb and Full of Dumb (1988) and Charlie Sheen: Piss Factor (2007). What comes next for Hope? Who knows.

Elvis Has Left The Bill Directed, Written and Produced by Bobby Hope Starring Bobby Hope, Louise Hope, Johnny Hope Snood Films Release Date US: Oct 1982 26 mins Tagline: None.

THE SEARCHERS (Lars von Trier, 2009)

2011-01-07T03:18:00.000-08:00

[This review is a near word-for word rewrite of Gavin Smith's review of Gus van Sant's Psycho in the February 1999 edition of Sight & Sound, with all references to those films replaced by ones to John Ford's (or Lars von Trier's) The Searchers. A cover of a piece about a cover of a film.]

Lars Von Trier's remake of John Ford's canonical 1956 film The Searchers - in which Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards (John Wayne in the original, Vincent Cassel here) pursues kidnapped-by-the-Comanche niece Debbie (Natalie Wood then, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey now)- isn't the self-defeating, perverse exercise it might seem at first glance. It's more a work of 'metacinematic' research. By remaking The Searchers, the film-makers have managed to replay formally notions of transgression and difference that manifested themselves in Ford's original as themes and subtexts. So Von Trier's The Searchers is both more and less than a remake. More in the sense that it literalises the notion of remaking by copying or transcribing Ford's 1956 film, less in that it denies the standard remake strategy which demands that the remake transcend its origins by revision (Cape Fear, Scarface, True Grit).

On the contrary, Von Trier's The Searchers, with its ritualistic attention to detail, could be described as a re-enactment or, as he has suggested, as the equivalent of a cover version of a classic song. But critically, given that contemporary cinema has been permeated by the strategies and tactics of the original film, von Trier can neither reproduce the effect Ford's film had on its contemporary audience - its impact - nor escape the burden of its place in film history. If a theme of Ford's The Searchers is the terrible power of the past and how it blights the present, then it is doubly so for von Trier- indeed this becomes the new film's organising principle. The weight of the past on the present and the loss of autonomy afflicting Ethan Edwards becoming Von Trier's point of departure for this radical project.

Director and cinematographer (Chris Doyle of Chungking Express fame) have imposed on themselves a set of extremely tight expressive constraints to minimise deviation from the original movie. Their film uses the same score, is more or less the same running time and, most crucially, employs the same screenplay. If anything, von Trier's strategy is subtractive rather than additive. Although several anachronisms are wilfully permitted to survive, Frank S. Nugent's original script has been subtly abridged and pared so that, despite several enigmatically superfluous added lines, there is even less dialogue here than in the already sparse original.

On the other hand, given that the original derived much of its power from exuberant and colourful landscapes, von Trier's film employs a no-frills black-and-white shooting style and therefore has a completely different effect. And although many scenes are reproduced exactly, this is by no means a shot-for-shot remake. Many shots only approximate those in the original, and in general the pacing seems faster - dialogue is more clipped, shot duration more varied. In many instances, though, there are significant embellishments: Ethan's arrival scene (the opening sequence), is now a full minute longer and although many shots are identical, it includes a number of new images (a close-up of Martha's dilating pupil as she sees her brother-in-law and former lover; a blurred Martha's-eye-view of Ethan entering the house; a fleeting, enigmatic image of billowing storm clouds). Von Trier and Doyle's shots, even those reproduced exactly from the original, seem comparatively casual and indefinite, lacking the vibrancy, deliberation and measurement of Ford's. And the two films have completely different senses of space, particularly interior space. It is in such distinct yet unquantifiable differences that von Trier's inquiry or research finds its form. The same is true of the film's determinedly muted, enervated tone and air of inconsequentiality.

von Trier's The Searchers is fundamentally an investigation of the expressive and thematic possibilities of nuance. Given the same script and more or less the same visual architecture, casting and direction of actors become key. Sure enough, von Trier gets considerable mileage from the redeployment and reassignment of character values, enough to achieve a small but significant shift of meaning. Rather than using the modern equivalents, he selects actors who largely counter or contradict the original cast's qualities and associations. An example: the substitution of Gael Garcia Bernal for Jeffrey Hunter as part-Cherokee Martin Pawley, Bernal's boyish cheek making Pawley seem less naively earnest, and although he always seems foolishly brave rather than tough, one suspects he might match up physically rather better to Cassel than Hunter did to Wayne.

Vincent Cassel's non-American status is a matter of record (lending all manner of ironies to his character's discussions of the Texas Rangers, the South, and America), and he emphatically does not project the same blunt power that John Wayne brought to the role of Ethan Edwards; how could he? His Ethan lacks Wayne's weary (but buried) guilt, his own melancholy apparently due to a seemingly mounting sense of entrapment by his mission. Where Wayne's Ethan maintained a careful distance from Pawley, treating him with bullying machismo, Cassel's sadism is slyer and somehow more sexually complex.

However low-yield the shift in meaning von Trier accomplishes proves to be, it's enough to justify the experiment: same film, different meaning. Where Ford's search is conclusively resolved, at a price, von Trier's is ongoing, chasing its tail, losing its tracks in the sand. Which is a far more honest, if depressing, forecast.

The Searchers Directed by Lars von Trier Produced by Meta Louise Foldager Written by Frank S. Nugent Starring Vincent Cassel, Gael Garcia Bernal, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgård IFC Films 119 mins Release date UK/US: Nov 2009 Tagline:'The Search Will Never End'

OLDER HOUSES (John Hinckley, 1987)

2010-12-19T18:22:00.000-08:00

A young man visits a childhood home.

'Crossing the road with several other people. The house where we lived between 8 and 14 is here, on a busy main road. In my dream, I know that we have sold part of the house to a young family, and that they will eventually have it all. This is simultaneously a recent event and from twenty years ago.

I retain hope that we can have the house back at some point. I walk up the driveway and meet the grandfather, a rugged Hemingway-a-like with soft eyes and a slight shyness. He is surrounded by playing children. He knows who I am, and upon seeing my excitement at seeing my old house becomes momentarily defensive. It is as if just a moment before he had been relaxed and playing, but now his friendliness is slightly forced. He invites me in, and in the hallway I see the father, who says hello shyly, but certainly with more warmth. He is red-headed and slim. He shows me around, tells me how much they love the place. Every improvement I notice that they have made causes him to point out great things we left behind, as if he doesn't want to upset my memory. I can already see that my idea that part of the house is still ours is misguided, as they have filled or redecorated every room I see. The father makes noises about how I can stay whenever I like for as long as I like, as it is still my house, but through his sweetness I can see that this makes him uncomfortable, and although I'm convinced of the genuineness of the offer, I know that he'd rather I go. We walk through the long kitchen, and I can see the changes we made, like putting the sink by the back window, have already gone.

We walk into the back garden, where I notice the neighbour's house has been changed, from a neat large semi-detached brick house into something huge and somehow scary; much has been cutaway, leaving a large carport area, and the back lawn has been carved into rutted roads. They have some kind of business there. I reminisce aloud about kicking footballs over the fence and sneaking into the allotments to retrieve them, and the man laughs politely.

Then the mother emerges from the house. She is red-headed too, curvy, and wearing a purple velvet dressing gown. She doesn't appear to recognise me, and her demeanour is dreamy and confused, as if she is sick or drunk. The grandfather shepherds the children inside sadly, and this alerts me to a family politic I cannot identify. I tell the woman who I am, and she smiles as if to say 'of course I knew'. She starts talking about how much she loves the house and how beautiful she remembers my mother and family being, before drifting off into elliptical reveries that make little sense. I sense that while the men in the family love her dearly, they are somewhat embarrassed of her, as her conduct is not quiet, but I sense her frustrations with this and sympathise silently. She excitedly tells me about a game she plays on her computer, and that I should play it on mine. She gives a full account of her scores and statistics, assuring me that it is impressive. She looks at me, lingeringly, and I look away, but then look back again an hold the stare. Words are jumbled, but a message skims through, as if telepathically: She likes me. She is sorry they took our house. It is OK, I attempt to communicate. It is silly of me to want something back that is really theirs now. It dawns on me that the house is gone, and that I am happy that nice people have it. Through her distant daze, the woman somehow understands this far more intuitively than anyone else.

I follow her to an unrecognized part of the house, a darkened ground floor bedroom that I'm convinced doesn't exist; this also helps me to feel that it is hidden somehow, and safe. She pulls me onto the bed into a long embrace.'

Older Houses Directed by John Hinckley Produced by John Hinckley Written by John Hinckley Starring James Horston, Sam Nicholas, Lou Longshoot, Bob Fields St Nic Films 65 mins Release date UK: Sept 1987. Tagline: None.

DYSLEXIC FRENCH RED; NE'ER DO WELL (5) (Simone Tzerkovska, 1954)

2010-12-03T09:44:00.000-08:00

...the awkward title being a cryptic crossword clue that the heroine is stumped by momentarily at the action's crucial point; an oversight, a slip, as she is something of a black belt in games of linguistics. She can read the black and white shapes in the puzzle corner of the well-thumbed daily rag left on a train carriage seat and know if she's seen it before. She can pass her hand over the clues like braille (an affectation; but it does seem to help her concentrate) and collect half of the answers in one sweep, returning to fill in enjoyable details subsequently. She likes to picture the word grid as a house that she has to clean or illuminate, and each answer, despite being in black or blue ink, is actually removing dark dust from the far flung corners. Large words please her; but more rewarding are the three-letter nuggets to be dug out of the corners, the tricky acronyms and abbreviations, little globs of adhesive.

Off the page her movements are dreamy and vague. Her observations of what is happening slow, and cars will honk at her daily as she wanders across busy streets, chasing code in her head and rearranging alphabets. Her husband calls it 'taking inventory', as it looks like she is internally tallying wherever she goes. He laughs about it by day, and visits other women at night.

This night they make a date: A movie. A throwback to their younger romance, and the effort they make to dress and have fun saddens them both, but they try not to show it. They take a cab, line up for tickets, smile sweetly at one another; he holds the door for her, and she almost laughs. They imitate themselves so well that she is disoriented.

The film begins, and they hold hands, even when it becomes uncomfortable. They check each other's reaction regularly at first, and then settle in. She is pleased at the neatness with which Ernest Borgnine's (or Humphrey Bogart's, or Robert Ryan's; she isn't sure which) dilemma is set-up on screen, the clean moves of the plot containing an elegance. But soon this pleasure recedes, and an uneasy quiet grows in her. Her husband is engrossed, so kissing his arm, she gently unhooks herself and heads to the bathroom to calm herself with a crossword.

She knows, at the moment that the word ROGUE evades her (an easy one, an open goal), that something is wrong. She looks up at the cubicle door and listens. Nothing. She slowly leaves, washes her hands, and looks in the mirror. Her face is hers alright, but a look in the eyes seems to serve as a warning that she cannot quite read. She recites clues in her head (4D: Sunken female?: THE LADY IN THE LAKE, 13A:(intersecting; third letter must be D) Repetitive ritualistic behaviours: OCD), and the look fades. She still suspects her reflection is tricking her, however.

She wants to head back to the movie, but can't. Her husband, handsome and sensitive tonight, now horrifies her.

Minutes pass, hinging on her lack of cutting edge in discovering another answer, one that pivots from THE LADY IN THE LAKE (from the tip of LADY, ending at the the L, which itself is a scissor shape): 'Very sad unfinished story about rising smoke'. She knows, instantly, that 'very sad' yields the definition, that the word will be sombre. 'Unfinished story' suggests, obviously, an incomplete word which houses the 'rising smoke' part. But here her brain apes the clue and itself seems to move upwards, rising from the clean bottom corners of her puzzle to the top, and then further, off the page and into the middle distance. It hovers in mid-air, vaguely aware of an alarm bell somewhere, in another room.

Her face looks reversed in the mirror; she thinks of the lopsided weather vane on the roof of her house whose arrow always points down towards their bedroom, accusingly. A knowledge evades her slightly, but she searches for it. But there it is: she realises she is going to leave the theater and go home. And then she already is, walking across the lobby with purpose. But something stops her at the door: an answer.

TRAGICAL. Of course. The obvious solution makes her laugh: The rising smoke is a cigar, and it runs backwards up the page, clothed in TAL; which is almost TALE, and thus an unfinished story. It takes minutes, but order is restored. She decides to return to her seat, hold his hand and pay attention to the film. She does not know that her husband is gone, vanished in the interim, already in a cab across town, dreaming of flights to carefree territories. Or that the night was an opportunist performance, and that when she finally goes home, with some kind of awareness dawning, she will find a house shorn of every sign that he was ever there.

Dyslexic French Red; Ne'er Do Well (5) Directed by Simone Tzerkovska Produced by Dexter Hunstler Written by Victor Joi Starring Elizabeth Tizla, Hanz Janck Czech Film/CBK 104 Mins Release Date UK: Oct 1956/US: Oct 1956 Tagline: none.

PLAYED YOUR EYES (Jim Hertz-Tanning, 2006)

2010-11-23T10:03:00.000-08:00

The following is an extract from an article written by the director Jim Hertz-Tanning in The Guardian, on Saturday 28 October 2006:

'I am overjoyed to discover that my latest film, Played Your Eyes (a catchy and fashionable title) was released at the end of September in a deluxe 2-disc DVD package by Warner Brothers. It is a bargain at £25.99, for over four hours of movie plus out-takes and trailers. How do I know? Amazon have emailed any of its customers who previously bought my films on DVD. The world's largest online retailer is offering a persuasive 'Unique Price' discount. The truly impecunious, it suggests, can wait until September 2007 when, evidently, Played Your Eyes comes out in a humbler package, stripped of extras, at £15.99.

During that time, no doubt, the film will have been entered for prizes, presented at festivals and will have attracted the usual batch of mixed reviews, including the customary splenetic rebuff from the Daily Mail's Chris Tookey.

During the few minutes it took me to access Played Your Eyes' details on Amazon's web pages, the movie's sales rank jumped from 70,301 to 69,844. It jumped another 60,000 places when I submitted my own order. Sadly, sales have tailed off a bit in the last few days - down to 219,986 at the last check. Maybe Amazon have sold out and Warner Brothers are reprinting. But my DVD must be on its way by now. As the named writer, director and producer of Played Your Eyes, I'm looking forward to my first sight of it.

The only hitch is that Played Your Eyes is a phantom film - and its not even a phantom of my own creation. I have in the past acquired a reputation for crediting non-existent actors, writers and sources, and for placing fictional figures in biopics: My first three films (Seven Bridges of Königsberg (1997), The Suslin Operation (1999), and Sham Epigraphs (2002) were all 'remakes' of works by non-existent foreign filmmakers, Georgis Fickl-Adonis, Gustav Stuck and Sir Maxi Beardsley.

It always cheered me up when my films were badly received to learn that the scholarly critic was nevertheless more than familiar with the works on which they were based, and even favoured the originals. The Los Angeles Times informed me that Fickl-Adonis was "the premier German-Greek film-stylist", while Total Film, as you'd expect, considered his work to be "arcane and irksomely septimal". The Washington Post judged Stuck to be "a sadly neglected amorist, film-maker and photographer" and the New York Times swallowed "the real archaeologist, movie-mogul and bon-vivant Sir Maxi Beardsley" hook, line and sinker. Even Frank Kermode (in this paper) fell for "Max" (evidently believing that as a fellow knight he could abandon formality and drop the "Sir"). It was only after I succeeded in seeing reviews of the non-existent Beardsley's non-existent canon in Movie Hound 2006, The Guinness Film Bible 2006 and Time Out's History of Film 2007 (the latter giving Utter Hinten a three-star review, and decrying its 'gorgeous but dreary sunsets' as 'uglier than Beardsley's more substantial films') that I decided critics were too easy game and that I should direct my mischief elsewhere. But Played Your Eyes is not another of my spoofs. It's little more than a slip of the tongue.

I do have a new film in the wings. It is called Plagiarize but it won't be released until next March and by EM Media and Film Four rather than Warner Brothers, who held the rights to the original script. It's set in an ancient future and is an inquiry into our relationship with originality and art. When Warner Brothers contracted about the script a few years ago, I had not yet decided on a title. But the first line of dialogue was going to be "I Plagiarize." It was convenient to use that as a working designation. Nobody would know or care except me and my co-writers.

Now we are in the world of guesswork. When the film was "announced" all those years ago, someone at Warner couldn't type, possibly, or someone at Amazon was hard of hearing. "Plagiarize" became "Played Your Eyes", an amusing error. But an error with a life of its own. The Amazon computer sucked the information in, fleshed it out, nurtured it, gave it provenance. It was for me a disconcerting error too, because while we were writing Plagiarize I became overly self-conscious about upsetting the art world in this timid, post-art climate. I pulled my punches a bit. There was the script we wrote, and there was the more discourteous script we might have written had I been more thick-skinned. Played Your Eyes would have been its perfect, hazy title, with its visual and game-playing suggestiveness (like a near-invisible sight-gag, the poster haunts the back of my eyelids to this day). The Amazon computer knew that, of course, and must have simply completed the film that I was too pusillanimous to attempt.

Is this the future? It certainly might indicate a grim future for cinema, one in which the pigmies - independent theatres and discerning video-rental spots- are finally edged out of business by the computer-driven amazonians that cannot discriminate between hard copy and a slip of the tongue. Anyway, Played Your Eyes, complete with its own barcode number, is now available for purchase. I am almost certain that not a frame of it exists. Order your copy, while stocks last.'

Played Your Eyes does not exist. Plagiarize was releasd in the UK in August 2007.

THE SQUEEZING OF A BENEVOLENT VENTRICLE SHOULD SUFFICE (Sty Statula, 1932)

2010-11-18T12:12:00.000-08:00

Hero: A matinee idol, a super man. Jet-black hair glows blue. Eye-mask doesn't protect his identity, it is his identity, and without it, he is an anonymous citizen. Portrayed by loved strongman Rockmond Beach, his adventures are recounted to us in an episodic format, similar to many from the time; his invulnerability is evident, always. He reminisces, from the comfort of comfort, about the victories that keep the city safe. His protection of the populace is so complete that he enjoys finding ways to bring that very public into the action as unwitting accomplices; stunning a thug so that he falls into the path of a bystander, who bemused, collars the cad, and so forth.

Fashion shoots for local department stores, modelling swimwear. Radio spots, multiple public appearances, weight gain. Complacency sets in. His senses are dulled to such an extent that the doubts collecting in the distance, the ones that would be spotted by a normal person, are almost invisible, a distant mist.

Scene: Hero, in everyday disguise (sports coat, fedora), enters large and busy supermarket, unaware of a crucial detail: He has been shot with a tranquilizer dart that will very soon begin to cause him to panic and lose control. Villain knows he only has to wait; fire alarm or similar will cause an anxious riot in the building. Doors will lock, crowds will push, and the hero will be trapped. We follow the hero, unable to tell him that firstly his secret identity will be exposed when he loses consciousness, and secondly that the villain already must know his secret identity, or suspect it enough to shoot him with a dart.

('The hero is preoccupied with a dream he keeps having: 'Killer plants. A fairly generic villainous plot: vines, warehouses, the discovery of an antidote that is far too minor to be effective. The plants evolve to fire razor sharp leaves at scientists. I leave, and take a tram, sometimes a bus, into town. (Which town? I don't know... an ersatz London, but it feels American; the layout of the train stations feels like Berlin, but no. Must locate.) I have to change at the next stop to get the returning vehicle, as I'm going the wrong way. I pretend I meant to do this, because after all, this is a town I know; others do the same. They follow me out of duty and expectation. Why?')

It plays out according to certain conventions: Panic grows, artfully; hero fights crowds, clothes, looking for a breath; riot escalates... and just at the point at which the hero seems to have regained some semblance of control over his powers, right when that the smoke or water has cleared (or at least seems behind him, or assailable) and he is close to a rear door, and to air and escape... just then the villain breaks a window, leans in, and pulls our hero out, like low hanging fruit; as he could have, the feeling goes, at any point in the last ten minutes. Hope turns into helplessness, and ultimately the former seems pathetic; hindsight casts an embarrassing pall on the way our brain tried to push the hero to awareness, and to strength, and to safety.

(He hears a tannoy announcement, among the panic, for a man by the name of Steve Wilson. As he is dragged into sleep, he tries to place that name; it is one he is sure has, at some time, been correctly attached, in his head, to a face. Steve Wilson, Steve Wilson... he holds the label aloft, turns it around.... No sli we vets, we've still son... and then someone presents the face to him, from nowhere: Steve Wilson is his name, his alter-ego, his cover. As he falls asleep, he tries to forget the name, like a child closing his eyes to hide from the world.)

And then, later, a different helpless: In an upper room of a house, a machine gun in hand. We are with him, and he has somehow begun an escape. He hides in a corner as a group of goons lean in and shoot and smirk. The feeling is that these are the first of many, and like baddies on an early level of an endlessly regenerating computer game, by no means the toughest. We should get past these guys, and onto bigger challenges, but somehow we cannot get into a position to shoot them. The fear grows that our journey out may never even begin, and that we may even have to contemplate the absurdity of dying in this small room.

The Squeezing Of A Benevolent Ventricle Should Suffice Directed by Sty Statula Produced by Lex Loveless, Pal True Starring Rockmond Beach, Tweet Van Smith, Lola Finn Written by Tex Lewis RKO/ARCO Pictures Release Date US: May 1932/ UK: Oct 1933 Tagline 'Oh No!'

TOO BEAUTIFUL TO BE PLAUSIBLE: THE TALE OF POLLY 21 (Lucy Fedoro, 2006)

2010-11-08T08:51:00.000-08:00

'If her body of work offers service as a miscellany of possibility, then her body works as a miscellany of possible services' Norman Mailer

'The theory of Six Degrees of Separation slims down to three or four degrees with Polly Ventuno. If you don't know her, you know no-one. If you know her, you know everybody.' Gore Vidal

'How do I describe her? Two parts Sophia Loren. One part Gilles Deleuze. One part Russ Meyer Supervixen. One part Steve Reeves. One part Lucille Ball. One part Arthur Scargill. And perhaps another part Sophia Loren, just so her gorgeousness doesn't get diluted.' Germaine Greer

Polly Ventuno, better known as Polly Twenty-One, has amassed a startling array of film credits over the course of a long and langorous career. She has been an exotic starlet, a camp fetish object, an intellectual, an avant-guardian, an activist, and famously, 'too beautiful to be a plausible'. That is the name of the documentary which attempts to cram into ninety-four minutes many lifetimes. It lingers on the scuffles (when she slapped Lee Majors on live television; when she called Ali McGraw a 'fembot of self-loathing'), but fails to do justice to the mind-boggling list of credits on her film CV. Impossible as it is to cover it all, I feel this should be rectified somewhat, and have chosen to pick out some of the highlights from a career that spans nearly seventy years. The total number of pictures are innumerable: 'one stops counting at five-hundred, my dear. And you should too. It's only polite,' says Polly herself in the documentary.

In many ways, Polly has had the perfect career; for her happiness, anyway. 'I have been in so many terrible movies that I am unsinkable' she claims, and while this is a touch severe, there are enough blemishes, such as Josh Kosloff's risible Tip-Toe (1983, in which Rutger Hauer enters the Stealth World Championships), and Don Invigilator's dreary Space Hub (1954, space opera, plot long forgotten) to offer question marks. That she has endured unscathed may suggest something quite simple: that she has been castable, versatile and well just plain good enough times to stay lovable. Considering her genesis as 'ze most bootiful womans in ze hull whirld' (as Orson Welles famously jibed, gently mocking Polly's swirling vowels), and the precariousness of such a position, this is worth celebrating.

It was Welles who gave her a start, in his myth-assaulting Bellerophon (1943), and if her role in this, Sam Fuller's bone-hard war flick The Bejesus! (1951) and Welles' own Non Quixote (1952) revolved around little more than her ample charms, she was wonderful in all. A lead role in Roger Corman's Oskar Minimal (1957), as the lonely wife of a shrinking scientist showed that she really had the chops, and a part in Douglas Sirk's Cashmere Perfection was to follow, Polly's shadowboxing scene with Tab Hunter the most memorable moment in the box office smash of summer 1960.

She brilliantly avoided megastardom at this point, taking roles in campy dreck and small independent projects, apparently at whim. Straddling both was Return To Zembla from 1968. Boob-house legend Russ Meyer made this as a sequel to Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. In the novel, our narrator, Charles Kinbote, who claims to be an exiled king from the country of Zembla, provides radically mistaken commentary on a poem by poet John Shade, claiming the poem to be about himself, and his journey from Zembla. We slowly become aware not only of Kinbote's delusions, but of his contribution to Shade's death. Return To Zembla sees Kinbote (Kurt Just) struggling back through the wilderness of a post-hippy America, running into busty flower children everywhere. Polly plays a visionary femme whose dreams of Zembla fit Kinbote's descriptions, and who helps the hero on his journey home. He doesn't get there; they rut endlessly.

The iconic roles continued: In Bob Fosse's electric Manhattan-set Alice in Wunderland (1977), Polly played the Queen of Hearts in a disco-fuelled re-imagining of Lewis Carroll's yarn. Memorable choreography and turns from an eccentric cast, including Fosse himself (The Mad Hatter), James Caan (the Cheshire Cat), Richard Pryor (the Black Rabbit, running to a meeting with his dealer), Donna Summer (The Duchess) and Pat Benatar (the Dormouse) mean this is an endlessly watchable slice of nonsense.

And on and on; whenever she seemed certain to fade into poor television and straight-to-video purgatory, up she would pop in something bold and deviant, like Abel Ferrera's kinetic Segue (1990, alongside William Burroughs as a shotgun-toting bus driver) or Claude Chabrol's deft suppression-of-story undrama Subtext (1995). These proved she still had legs and wit. The argument that she might have been a 'great' actress with different choices is moot, especially when you consider how good she is in so many things. Even when she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1982 for her role in Harold Ramis' A Confederacy of Dunces, she refused to take herself seriously. 'One felt all along, that we were playing a game that Polly wanted no part in. That was charming and quite something.' said Leslie Ann Warren, a fellow nominee that year. Or as critic Giles Hunter puts it: 'Polly is among the most gifted and prolific actresses of any generation, but her name is nowhere to be found on any awards list; not, I would venture, because she fails to live up to the ceremonies' implicit criterion of importance, but because she steadfastly refuses to try.'

Too Beautiful To Be Plausible: The Tale of Polly 21 Directed by Lucy Fedoro, Produced by Lucy Fedoro, Jeff Lynch Starring Polly Ventuno, Norman Mailer, Lee Majors, Germaine Greer, Joan Rivers, Gore Vidal Ultimo/Gossard Productions 94 mins Release Date UK/US: Nov 2006 Tagline: 'You Know Her. You Don't. You Love Her. You Should.'

NIE FUR DEN BUS LAUFEN (NEVER RUN FOR THE BUS, Serge Grebiot, 1969)

2010-10-31T22:24:00.000-07:00

Serge Grebiot died this week, to little fanfare. The deaths of fellow French filmmakers Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol this year were rightly mourned and their lives celebrated, as two quite different men who produced worthy art up to their deaths. Grebiot lacked their consistency, for sure, and perhaps more precisely, their desire to make films (his last completed effort was 1997's How To Make An American Quit, a lazy and outdated jingoistic diatribe, displaying, finally, his complete loss of ju-ju), but when his powers were firing, most notably between 1968 and 1973, the art he offered could stand toe-to-toe with almost anyone.

One reason for his annexing from the canon could be that he was a Frenchman who made films in Germany, thus falling between the cracks of two national cinemas in various stages of revolt and reform. Young France had enough angry philosophers in-situ. Young Germans on the other hand, wanted to wipe out the old guard, in their desire to make a hopeful new statement about their forlorn nation. But this also meant a rejection of outside influences too; they could not mimic the stylings of American or British idioms such as rock'n'roll, pop, nor the strong-armed glamour of dizzy Hollywood. Same went for anybody else. Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Kraftwerk, Can and Neu, all flying on the fumes of '68, painted new future possibilities, built new roads, distinctly German but not stiflingly so.

Serge Grebiot; Die Französisch Deutsch ('The French German') was born in Montpellier, joined the resistance as a teen to subvert the Nazis, and was subsequently stationed in Frankfurt as the Allies carved up the corpse of a land. Grebiot stayed, fell in love with a German girl, and made movies. It was a deeply unfashionable place to be making art in the late fifties; whereas Grebiot's countrymen were harvesting international acclaim with chic new-wave manouvres, Germany had yet to find her post-war feet, and as such much of the art produced was samey and fearful. 'Remember; we could not sweep away all of the Nazis; we still needed school teachers and policemen and judges. Many witnesses to atrocities were still in power. As such, most art tried to ignore the past quietly, and was thus beleagured and anodyne.' said Uschi Obermaier, model, activist and member of freeform radicals Amon Duul.

Grebiot, as an outsider, was freed from this compulsion toward self-invention, but also humbled and challenged by it. As such, his films can be seen as definitively German at times, in much the same way that it took immigrant talent (von Sternberg, Chaplin, Garbo, Dietrich, Wilder, Lang, Ophuls, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera) to define Hollywood in the first half of the 20th Century.

Nie Für Den Bus Laufen (1) was dubbed 'Hausfrau Noir' (the delicious mangling of two languages in the phrase a doff of the chapeau/kappe to Grebiot), and it rings true; the noir is there in the sharp silhouettes on-screen, which carry echoes of the Weimar gargoyles that went by boat to Hollywood and paired with a hard-boiled and pulpy American sensibility. Here, Grebiot reinherits the stylings, refurnished as they are with various detective-in-morally-complicated-waters motifs, and ties them, incredibly, to a one-room drama about a working class household in Frankfurt. Instead of a weary but smart Sam Spade, we have mother of four Irma (Betty Schneider), whose tired demeanour betrays a domicile at the end of its tether (a 'digs' in a hole, if you will, or an abode of corrode, or a crashed pad, even a dwelling of dwelling (2)). Her husband is absent, presumed dead, and the action (or lack thereof) centres on Irma's quiet inquisition of her children, who, it seems, are purpetrators of various minor misdeeds such as being messy and drinking all of the milk.

Grebiot centres on such mundane details that the viewer is thrown; Irma seems like normal mother and simultaneously insane, and the way in which the regular seems irregular (the checkerboard territories of the tablecloth, the luminous whiteness of the plates, the endlessly held stares of the children) offers a Realism/Realisn't duality of a Beckettian lean. The narrative, in which she slowly pulls out clues and jumps on hunches, spins like Chandler in a kitchen-out-of-sync. And the conclusions Irma draws about the slack moralities of her own generation and the potential of her children is equally hopeless and angry. This was taken as a harsh indictment of his adopted country, but Grebiot refuted this at the time. 'I do not speak of Germany. I speak of the world.' (3)

Immer für den Bus überfahren, Nein, Nie für den Bus laufen Directed by Serge Grebiot Produced by Karl Stuch Written by Max Friedl, Serge Grebiot Starring Betty Schneider, Patty Ernst, Lukas Fricker, Tomas Fricker, Roland Schneider Futurefilm/Octocinema Productions Release date UK: Oct 1970/ US: Nov 1971 88 mins Tagline:'Mutter Weiß Gut' ('Mother Knows Best')

1. The full title of the film was Immer für den Bus überfahren, Nein, Nie für den Bus laufen, translated as 'Always Run For The Bus, No, Never Run For The Bus', apparently to reflect Irma's indecisive nature, for their are no buses mentioned in the film. She betrays a confusion over the correct punishment for her children, or even whether they merit punishment, and speaks frequently with a muddled folksy wisdom. Even if we do not hear her say these words, we imagine them in her voice.

2. Such inane punning and repetition to diminishing effect (the lines above were especially selected to illicit annoyance and groans; that is why such crackers as 'crib of glib fibs' and 'grovel hovel' were deliberately hidden out of plain view in a footnote.) is relevant. As Irma grills the kids, she constantly clicks from accusation to apology and back, each time trying to cover her anger with humour and her sadness with a joke. Her lines are filled with many desperate jokes that are meaningless to an English speaking audience, including refences to German Shibboleths used during wartime to oust non-native spies.

3. Cahiers Du Cinema, March 1971.

" " (Alex Goochy, 2004)

2010-10-10T18:45:00.000-07:00

The name of this film is- . Or " ". Or " "(italics mine) That is, it is nothing, or it is a space. The studio backers (Warner Brothers, in the first hand, Dreamworks, the second; finally Columbia in a split the difference we-may-aswell-all-be-in-on-the-gag gesture) might call it The Film With No Name, The Film Without A Name, or Untitled, but all are problematic (not in the least because they have all been used before, attached to poor films and thus stained with failure), and were all heavily opposed by the director Alex Goochy.1

'These are all titles,' said Goochy in 2004. 'I wanted no title at all. It is complicated, but it is related to the idea that in naming something, and this is Eastern Philosophy now... in naming it, you're maiming it; you know it, and contain it. Titling a film, while making sense in many ways, completely finishes it in another. I wanted space for the film to fluctuate and shimmer under the glance of the world like a new species of plant we have just discovered but did not have a word for... or a constellation that may not be the brightest, or the most delirious formation, but holds the interest all the same.... because there is no name to rope the distant stars together' 2

The compromise involved using punctuation: floating quotation marks like this: " ", with, a space in-between, described by Harold Bloom as 'a symbolically hollow center'. He went on, and we should not stop him before he gets into his stride: 'The fact that the quotation marks hover on the billboards and marquees like air quotes made with fingers at dinner parties just makes the whole exercise seem even more damnable; these four separate swords of damocles hanging in two menacing pairs (like smug buddy cops on patrol a block apart), ready to catch us all. And we deserve it.'

Some at Warner/Dreamworks/Columbia, in honour of the unutterable title (or lack thereof) took to calling the film 'Ingooglable Basterd', and even leaked mocked-up posters with this title. The working title was 'Working Title', and this was replaced by 'Untitled Project', and some suggested a return to those prototypes. They called on Vikram Slinki, a friend of Goochy's, to mediate. Slinki, of course, is a a director who switches the titles of his films so as to change expectations; but at least he uses titles. A horror film that purports to be a romance is more shocking,' he said of his Lovely Tuscan Dreams (1999). Slinki suggested that Goochy go the route of their mutual acquaintance Phil 'Bill' Smith, who labels his films precisely. The problem being that Smith's films, including Morose Family Drama With Motown Scene (and Cancer) (1995), Verbose Smug New York Comedy with Unlikeable Protagonist (1996) and What Do you Mean The Girlfriend Did It? (Fake Dream Ending) (1997) all failed to find any kind of distribution at all.3

Goochy, provocateur, art-terrorist, anti-activist, settled for nothing less than nothing. She even suggested empty quotes next to the names of newspapers, her examples being: '" " says The LA Times. The New York Post raves, saying " " about " ", whereas the New Yorker was speechless.' The unofficial poster containing these words and un-words even hung in New York briefly, until the various publications named threatened litigation on the basis that they hadn't said anything or not said anything or even said nothing about " ", on account of the fact that they had not seen " ", and if a party can be unquoted (and have those lack of words presented as if ithey had been uttered or unuttered) about something about which one knows nothing of, well...where does it end?

Where indeed.

A question: Is " " any good? Nah. What happens in the film? Oh, nothing of consequence. Girl meets gun. Girl falls for gun. Girl kills gun. Mildy erotic thriller with epilectic subplot and brain-freeze editing. De Palma on ice, or Eszterhas on mildly tasteful sedatives.

" " Directed by Alex Goochy Produced by Alex Goochy Alex Cox Leroy Smith Written by Joseph Hand Starring SaraJo Belling, Thomas Gunter Warner/Dreamworks/Columbia Release Date US: Oct 2004 UK: Jan 2005 121 mins Tagline: None.

1. Alex Goochy, is in fact not the real name of the director. Born in the Ukraine, she moved to LA aged 23 in 1985, where she has directed many independent features under various awful pseudonyms, including Sue Denim, Biff Bangpow, and Martin Scoreswayze (although not, as suspected 'Bryan Diploma'. When the film Carry (Bryan Diploma, 1999) was released, Goochy was a suspect, but it emerged that Brian De Palma was responsible for this low-budget tribute to his own Carrie, in spoof tribute to Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot Psycho remake (1997) and Claude Chabrol's shot-for-shot The Man Who Knew Too Much (1997) (Hitchcock's 1956 version being the one copied, which itself was a remake of Hitch's own 1934 original of course).
2. Cineaste interview, Summer 2004.

3. A Film, Literally (2007) was on display at MoMA for some time in 2008.

FRIGGIN' IN THE RIGGIN': THE JOHN LANCASTER STORIES (Victor Ford, 1974)

2010-10-02T01:45:00.000-07:00

'And so dreams tell stories, many stories. I am writing a story, if it could so be called, about the Mary Celeste. I am painting scenes from the story I'm writing. And I am dreaming about the Mary Celeste, the dreams feeding back into my writing and painting. A burst of fresh narrative: the Celestial Babies and the Azore Islands... digression and parentheses, other data seemingly unrelated to the saga of the Mary Celeste, now another flash of story... a long parenthesis. Stop. Change. Start. Should I tidy up, put things in rational sequential order? Mary Celeste data together? Flying dreams together? Land of the Dead dreams together? Packing dreams together? To do so would involve a return to the untenable position of an omniscient observer in a timeless vacuum. But the observer is observing other data, associations flashing backward and forward.' William Burroughs

'Lancaster's writing is shorn of all allusion; it lacks the melange of tastes present in even the most mediocre of fiction; when speaking of faraway places he conjures them as if by magic, with a complete lack of vision; and somehow (much like a politician whose inarticulacy speaks to some people of an honesty (as if only the literate can lie or steal)) this only seems to say to a large strand of the public that this mean speaks the truth. This paradox has contributed to him being one of the richest floggers of text in the tongue.' William Deresiewicz

'Give me credit for my dreams.' John Lancaster

'He was a man who wrote about how he had done what he had not done as if he had done. Then we found out that what he had done was not what he had said he had done and that what he had said he had done he had not done. Embarrassed, he set out to do exactly what he had said he had done exactly as he had said he had done it.' Tagline from 'Friggin' In The Riggin'' poster.

.... except now he was old, and ashamed, and the world had turned against him. John Lancaster had had it all except literary kudos. But so what? He was a successful author, a diarist of his own real-life seafaring adventures, who despite completely lacking critical adoration had something else, a kind of macho integrity; a streetwise candour carrying with it the weight of a stout-bellied but strong-armed silhouette of, if you squinted, a low-rent Hemingway. Even his lack of style was seen as evidence of his honesty; a fancier hand and a more delicate turn of phrase might suggest a piano-fingered intellectual, rather than the stubbier and tougher digits of this oaken presence (Oaken Presence incidentally being the name of his fifteenth book of autobiographical adventure, and also the name of one of the yachts at his home in Barbados, earned from shilling best-selling potboilers).

And then it emerged: the round-the-world trips, the Pole-to-Pole journeys, everything Lancaster had claimed to have done was false. He had been on some minor cruises, but he could barely steer a speedboat. His exposure caused a fracture, for even when his mass popularity waned, certain serious critics suddenly took an interest. 'Imagine finding out that James Patterson was a supercomputer, or that Martha Stewart's food was not real but made from hybrid plastics: it would be weird not to be a little curious about the hows and whys,' said Harold Bloom. Lancaster's response was a vow to learn how to navigate, and then perform every single feat he had laid claim to. He tried, failed, went mad.

Walker Percy's script shows a life dashed on the rocks, and with Ford's unsteady hand on the tiller, the film is everything and nothing. We see events as Lancaster told them; we see events as they were; we see events as he then set out to make them, after his exposure. This is not shown in a linear fashion, however, and the mixture of fact and fantasy, performed by four actors, muddies the metaphors enough for us to lose our way. In a film about (dis)honesty, we are never sure about which parts we can trust. As such, it serves as a corrosive antidote to the limpid idolatry of a regular biopic, most of which rest in a deep gutter of cause-and-effect (x was an addict/wifebeater because he was a genius/x was a genius because he was an addict/wifebeater; montages detailing the exact moment of incredible genius because all genius has to have an exact moment (which presents the paradox of biopics: this 'showing' drags the art and artist to mundane cliche, and yet we are expected to believe that what we see is unique).

As played in vastly differing styles in this one film by Rod Steiger, Alain Delon, John Cassavetes and Charles Aznavour, Lancaster is presented as a cubist portrait; a muscular bald neck here (Steiger), a cowardly twitch there (Cassavetes); a brave smooth nose in one place (Delon) obscuring a more honest and self-regarding schnoz elsewhere (Aznavour); all are possible facades, all are as hopelessly true as they are hopelessly false. His teary wife (Gena Rowlands) buys all of them, as long as it suits her.

At one point, Cassavetes as Lancaster asks 'Is lying so wrong? Why? Who says?' At another, Steiger as Lancaster asks: 'Is a man without a dream any kind of man?' We see Aznavour as Lancaster ask 'surely it is more cowardly to tell the truth, with no risk of exposure? Doesn't a braver man build a bigger house of cards?' It is left to Delon, on the faux-deathbed, to say 'fiction is truth. Only liars think otherwise, and they're not worth my time.'

Friggin' In The Riggin': The John Lancaster Stories Directed by Vic Ford Produced by Bert Schneider Written by Vic Ford, Walker Percy Starring Rod Steiger, John Cassavetes, Charles Aznavour, Alain Delon, Gena Rowlands Warner Brothers 123 mins Release Date US: September 1974/ UK: March 1975 Tagline:'He was lying on seabeds; now he's lying on deathbeds.'

PE AVIOANELE INVIZIBILE (THE HUMMINGBIRD, Dmitri Loao, 1913)

2010-09-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

On page 367 of his labyrinthine history of film 'VIZ-A-VIZUAL', scholarly Teuton L. Bosch cites a Romanian text written by the shamanic historian Nicolae Nicolescu, who articulated the fate and epitaph of Vincenzo Loao, a local baron of mixed parentage who fell from his horse and died in 1913. Nicolescu centres on Loao as the primary symbol of what he calls 'Tigan tau' (loosely translated as 'gypsy tao'), a minor fad in parts of Eastern Europe during the early decades of the 20th Century.

Loao sustained a head injury in his fall, but lived long enough to insist on a message for his own headstone. It was a mixture of Romanian, Portuguese and indecipherable words. His younger brother, the stout Dmitri, dutifully saw to it that his wishes were adhered to, without understanding the message. Fragments could be made to make sense, if forced- one line that most agreed on was 'the hummingbird cannot be seen to move' although some argued that it was more like 'the hummingbird moves so quickly no-one can see', a subtle difference, but a difference all the same.

Nicolescu, dipping beyond local folklore located a theory, and it centred on what L Bosch described as 'a Twilight Zone dreamache, a Borgesian hello, a whole philosophy rendered so cryptic as to be unseen'. Study of Loao thus far had dismissed his interest in religion, in particular that 'derivation of Eastern transcendentalism fed through a Dead Sea gauze and winged with Romany blood rituals and flower-theory' that Nicolescu calls key to 'his attempts at understanding mortality.' Nicolescu was knee-deep in this when a development came and changed his book.

March 1966: a publican in Bucharest found two reels of film in his basement that could not be identified. Rather than handing them to the authorities, he was persuaded by a patron of his bar to let them be taken to a local intellectual known only as 'Gheorghe'. An acquaintance of Gheorghe's identified the main actor appearing in both films as Vincenzo Loao, the exotic part-foreigner who had died fifty years earlier. His striking black features and his long frame (Loao being, by various accounts, anywhere between six and seven feet tall) was verified by many in Loao's hometown, just twenty miles from the capital. Gheorghe noticed that some locals refused to look at the films, despite them both being only seven minutes in length, and containing only innocuous footage of Loao walking, dancing and performing a quiet array of poses for the camera.

Frustrated by the apparent superstitiousness of the locals, Gheorghe was about to leave when a mute and almost blind man gestured to him from the trees. He led Gheorghe through the woods in near dark until he came to an apparently abandoned barn. He gestured for Gheorghe to go inside, where there was nothing except a pile of wood in the centre of the building, prepared as if for a fire. The old mute walked to the pile, lifted the wood and pulled out a can of film. On it was drawn a small white symbol. He pointed to this carefully, and then placed the film in Gheorghe's hands, gesturing for him to leave quickly.

It was another film of Loao. This time twelve minutes in length. Although slightly deteriorated, the long dark gentleman can be seen throughout, performing several poses that appear to be akin to a slow martial art. It still made little sense.

But then: in 1967, Gheorghe received an anonymous package. It was another film, much like the previous ones. Another arrived a month later, and yet another within two weeks. He received a tip-off of a Loao film turning up in Sarajevo, and retrieved it by train. Another was sent to him by an acquaintance in West Berlin, who had no knowledge of his search. When Gheorghe was interviewed by Filmdat, a Greek periodical later that year, he drew attention to the films, and received an influx of new material. A stockbroker in London sent him a piece from his collection, that showed Loao on a horse approaching a castle; a projectionist at a picture house in Queens, New York sent a film to Gheorghe that had been found amid reels of fading previews and curled B-movies.

In all, there were twenty pieces of film, all starring Loao. Gheorghe pieced them together as best he could, but could make no sense of them. He was convinced of a narrative, but could not recreate it.

Nicolecu writes: 'Gheorghe tried it all; tried plying them in every possible order. Still, they only glowed with suggestion. But then, something strange happened. When trying to change from one reel to another, Gheorghe's projector chewed two reels into its mouth and threw them onto the screen simultaneously; the two images (one of Loao performing an odd karate; one of Loao miming fishing) were combined, and created an entirely new shape: and behold! when Loao moved into a lotus position, and this was now juxtaposed with him riding a horse near a castle, one could see something forming: new shapes, appearing like hieroglyphics, his body shapes forming letters, sentences: there is an A, hard and angular, there is a C, soft but clear. And the Gheorghe remembered Loao's epitaph, regarding the hummingbird, and pondered that the film stock may be wings, which, when beaten together at ferocious pace would cause order to come... and after many weeks of re-watching and watching, Gheorghe discovered the statement that Loao had left and hidden. The sped-up images of contorted body parts combined to spell out the following:

'I have nothing to say... There is no more... my body is dead... I cannot believe in a world that exists without me... therefore I must be alive... forever more.'

Post-script: the identity of 'Gheorghe' has never been fully known. Some postulate that he was in on a hoax, that he was a Loao, or similiar; some suggest he is non-existent, a surrogate created by Nicolescu. Details do not suffice.

Pe Avioanele Invizibile Directed by Dmitri Loao Starring Vincenzo Loao Release Date US/UK: N/A. Shown in its edited Gheorghe inspired form at MOMA in 2001.

GLITTERED SHOULDERS (Douglas Sirk, 1961)

2010-09-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

'To know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic' Paul de Man

'To appreciate a film like Glittered Shoulders probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman's masterpieces, because Bergman's themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.' Roger Ebert

Pierre Imperius, firebrand beat critic for the short-lived Insouciance '55 said of Douglas Sirk's Glittered Shoulders that 'if insoluble dubious intent is the barometer of febrile justice (and judging by the nixed reactions to the Testament of Offshore Leaking, and Korea, and The State of the United States, actually, it may well not be) then tensions must surely mount upon the fluid release from this hellish discharger; for Sirk may purport to mock vanities, but he is decadence disempowered, stripped to fervent longing and lack of belonging and unfurling and and and and... the self-indulgence on display is surely worthy of crucifixion, with no chance of resurrection.'1

A counter-argument comes from an unlikely source. In his erudite examination of road movies Gas, Food and Longing (1986) shabby philosopher Milo Holodex takes in a pitstop (sunny vista, near a large villa, walled gardens) and lingers on Sirk briefly, suggesting that, in his repeated examination of lovers and haters in situ (A house, a stage, a house as a stage) Sirk 'tackles American displacement from within; his characters are eating the heart out, whereas the Easy Riders and Kowalskis are just eating out, heartlessly'.2

But time and time again, purported avant-garde or experimental film-makers are cut a huge amount of slack, whereas huge studio names like Sirk are drafted into the drippy camp, tarred as counter-revolutionary or dimly praised as 'stylists.' But surely with Glittered Shoulders Sirk nails what any number of angry Shampoos or Blow-Ups or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls stuck it to (in their varied ways) later and with less complexity. It drapes a plot over the arm of a Hollywood setting, and implodes a cold and hucksterish scene from inside-out (which perhaps is scientifically an impossible metaphor, but such is the sleight of hand that Sirk pulls: The satire is so vast as to be invisible. This Hollywood stage is bedevilled with such ornate decadence that it would a miracle for the keen starlets, oaken actors and trophy-laden old money to notice the elephant in the room (with its irony tusks). Elephantitis, or similar visible and/or tropical disease, would be sniffed like freshly-cut gossip from next week and banished or paraded accordingly.)

Anita Ekberg is the bombshell with an LSD addiction, paying regular visits to a German doctor; Richard Widmark the producer from the storied family who seeks to live up to his name with on-screen success and off-screen destruction; Groucho Marx has a flinty cameo as a cynical party host with an impenetrable hold on the tastemakers; Lana Turner, in curious series of wigs and eyelashes is Baroness Barba Gabrielle Gastoni (or 'Lady Baba Gaga for short, and boy is she short with everyone,' as Marx tells all), the lost lead around who the film spins. She enters, she leaves, she sighs, and endless orchestral variations of Henry Mancini's 'Theme From Glittered Shoulders'3 follow and follow and follow, until it feels like this elegiac drift is not so much an announcement of her beauty and presence as a haunting reminder of her spindly existence.

All of the characters speak knowingly and with apparent wisdom (of goings on, of what to do, of who does who, and how they do), and yet each screams sadness with every smirk. Marx is particularly effective in this regard; his familiar smart-aleck persona rendered, with a slight shifting of mirrors, unlikeable and desperate. The difference is minor (Groucho Marx is, after-all, always Groucho Marx), and many critics see here only a paler imitation of his best performances. But this is Sirk's masterstroke, withholding the genius when necessary, frustrating the audience and the performer. He performs a dramatic castration, an orchestrated self-savagery epic and lushly toned, in which satire is buried so deep as to be be as cool and cruel as the ice princess at its centre, Turner.

I return to Paul de Man: 'Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level.' Sirk's genius is that he manages to unite these two separate time zones in a place so rarely visited that it took viewers and critics years to discover the breadcrumb trail led somewhere.

Glittered Shoulders Directed by Douglas Sirk Produced by Ross Hunter Written by Allan Scott Starring Lana Turner, Richard Widmark, Anita Ekberg, Groucho Marx, Music by Henry Mancini, Universal Pictures 123 min Release Date US: June 1961 UK: November 1961 Tagline:'Come rub shoulders with the stars.'

1. Insouciance'55, vol3 No12, Summer 1961. Imperius said lots of things for their coin, and took a long time saying them: He wrote 100,000 words over a two year period.
2. Holodex makes another claim worth repeating:'
'the sixties represent the beginning of the end not because of drugs or sexual deviancy or civil rights or Vietnam, but because it was the first time that a huge minority of Americans became aware of the mass illusion that there is a joke that they have to be in on; this is what is loosely known as cool; it poisons the waters of the most benign offerings, and does so endlessly, so much so that instead of admiring great achievements, we spend longer avoiding great embarrassments'.
I think it is worth thinking about Sirk with these words in our ears, because not only did his career end as 'the sixties' formed, but because no modern concept of cool includes elements that are especially Sirkian; The man himself had no concern for it. He said: 'the great artists... have always thought with the heart'. He also said, (regarding the film's relative box-office failure) 'I could suggest a thousand reasons why nobody wanted this. But they would all be incorrect. Motives are always confused, always, if they are honest. And by honest I do not know what I mean.' These two statements need not be seen as contradictory.
3. The main theme song was composed by Henry Mancini, crooned by Ricky Nelson, and had notable lyrics by Mack Discant:
'When you rub shoulders with the stars, you get glittered limbs
you compose wild hymns
In your pseudonym, she swims
And other synonyms'

BEHOLD THE AWESOME MOUNTAIN (Dexter Himmler, 1936)

2010-08-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

'Inadvertent magic, is, we think, the best kind; the secret message, the hazy coincidence, the series of signs not quite decoded. It can be the first recording of a song, before the words have clicked into place, when the flawed syntax catches the edge of a chord, and the hum of a misplaced microphone spills into the mixture. But there comes a point, and this can be dangerous, when the artist can fall prey to a confidence borne of this early fizzing success; she wants to harness the power without understanding it, and seeks a do-over, never understanding that the misplaced passes and fudged lines of the imperfect first incantation were vital to its construct.' Greil Marcus, Lost Locales

"..an hour later they of course loop back and, finding the intersection they made earlier, exclaim 'More tracks!... A second car joined the first one.' As the hours go by they rejoin their own tracks again and again, believing each time that the highway they are following has grown busier and busier. This brilliantly allegorical scene is endlessly regressive: what Thompson and Thomson are doing is failing to recognise that they are not only reading their own mark but also reading their own reading of their mark, their interpretation of their own interpretation. Tintin, crouching over the tracks, realises what is going on but has no means of communicating. Then the Khamsin whips itself into action: a ferocious sandstorm that soon wipes all tracks away. An orgy of marking, reading and misreading, followed by total erasure, total inscrutability. As Tintin huddles, despondent, endless grains of sand hit his eyes and mouth, like so many illegible tracts.' Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature

'The past it is a magic word/Too beautiful to last' John Clare, Childhood

Like a prehistoric (in cinema terms, at least) version of Antonioni's Blow-Up, Dexter Himmler's Behold The Awesome Mountain is about the reconstruction of a scene; an attempt at discovery through rediscovery (and vice-versa), insight through repetition. With its classically cinematic themes of doubles, lost images, exotic locales and erasure, layers of suggestion are peeled and unpeeled in ultra-white. Framing tales window onto previous and later ones, events unfold like the pages of a lost diary; we gather that we are following a photographer (Peiter Wiki) who accompanied an expedition up an unnamed peak in the Himalayas. We find that his tale is dipped in tragedy- the party is severed in an avalanche, and the photographer apparently expires, sending his photographs back down the mountain on a horse somehow.

So it seems.

A series of narrative focus-pulls changes our perspective, firstly from the expedition's leader Nicolas (Lukas Bronowsky), then to the photographer following the group (whose feat seems more astounding- for not only does he follow, but at points he leads, lugging his tripod and camera over ledges to record the party's arrival; he does everything they do, but with more baggage), then to the horse, and finally to the recipient of the photos, the brother of the expedition leader, Jan (whose near-identical likeness to his sibling causes us to turn full circle, back to the original hero; especially as he is also played by Bronowsky). Jan recreates the footsteps of his brother in a bid to find the locations of the photographs. Initially this is an attempt to discover the fate of Nicolas, but soon Jan finds a strange power in the snaps, and begins mimicking them as precisely as possible, at the correct locations on the journey up the mount, in a faintly ridiculous ritual that makes sense to only Jan.

He seems convinced that if he can recreate the photos, he will end up finding his brother; all the time, he seems half in-love with the potential for his own decimation by following this path. A belief that the party may have found some snow-capped Eldorado takes hold as well, and Jan follows, re-enacting the scenes, pulling texts from his boots, stories from the snow. He curses his own mistakes. Sometimes he takes the wrong route or gets the angle of a photograph skew-whiff. Always, he regrets not being on the original expedition, and mourns lost games of ping-pong and shuffleboard with his brother. Oh, and the woodland rambles they would drift on! His final words to the reluctant photographer as he struts off alone up the impenetrable mountain hang over the snow:

'I just know that there is a warm safe place here... where nobody but me can find him, napping and content... and I also know that I may never find it...'

Himmler shot the film in English, despite a German cast, contrived a fictional crew member that he claimed was lost on location to drum up publicity, and never made another film. He attempted to remake Behold The Awesome Mountain in America in the early seventies, but failed to find the funding; this time, his previous tracks really were covered over, never to be followed. And so endless versions can be imagined, but not realised.

Behold The Awesome Mountain Directed by Dexter Himmler Produced by Fritz Loger, Dexter Himmler Starring Peiter Wiki, Lukas Bronowsky, Fabrice Domoccoli FDF Pictures Release Date UK: Feb 1948 US: Jan 1951 103 mins Tagline: 'So Snowy, so white, so gone...'

BOXES (Vincent Leighton,1996)

2010-08-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

When a thirteen year-old boy is killed by a train, his friend explores his belongings for clues about his death. Based on his findings, he accumulates evidence all around his small hometown, becoming ever more convinced of a cosmic conspiracy that his friend may well have been in on.

Pages and pages of detailed sport scores, both fictional and real; detailed accounts of both the England football team's defeat on penalties to Germany in the semi-finals of Italia '90 and their hypothetical counterparts' fictional fate, winning the trophy outright with a 2-1 victory over Yugoslavia in the final (Platt 68, Lineker 83), all played-out in vivid detail in the Little Park, and recorded herein for prosperity. Other scrap and crap: dirty books covered in wallpaper, the Penthouse he got one Christmas, when after opening all his presents his Mum leaned in and whispered 'don't go and look now, but there's something extra under your pillow for bedtime', and which we, incredulous, took turns in taking to the bathroom, to do what with we knew not what; fabulous contracts, IOUs, wrappers of chocolate bars with details of expired competitions, badges with his own face on, drawings, hundreds of them, poor in execution but with an unquenchable zest. Each one looke as if it had been drawn at great speed, and that wasn't some style he had cultivated, but was emblematic of the fact that always the idea was more imoprtant than the presentation, often to its detriment, as many of the pictures are indecipherable. Often, the artist clearly loses interest as he composes, the initial excitement failing to sustain the technique long enough to see the picture through, another idea exploding already on another piece of paper.

Ideas as far-reaching as designs for weapons, sports equipment, confections, video games, board games, houses, secret houses, secret girlfriends, shadowy backstories, egos and alter-egos, cartoon characters, carton charters, novels, novellas, ghost stories, menus, record sleeves, sleeveless outfits, bands, graphs of pocket-money spending and savings, dozens of illustrated pool trick shots, entire league seasons of invented sports with invented teams, a fake police report for a child Tony had known before he moved to our school who he claimed had been hit by a bus and killed, to whom he dedicated some of his better battle-scene sketches of Americans in the Burmese jungle or Lancaster bombers over Dresden or Space-Orks on a sinking Bismarck. Most are barely fascinating in themselves, containing the thinly-veiled plagiarism of a normal thirteen-year old. But as a demonstration of a fickle and searching spirit they are illuminating, if only in sheer volume. Most are dated and accompanied with a small 'TC' in the corner. There are some pages which are only this small 'TC' repeated over and over, like practice or lines.

The amount of pages produced in any one day could be thirty or forty. On the 18th July 1991, when Carter was 12, he not only designed an electronic umbrella ('The Cartella'), an over-packed chocolate bar that would be all but inedible ('The Tony Bar') and seven cars, but also all manner of gun and knife hybrids (none small), wonkily rendered warrior types and all manner of boat/shuttle combinations, each bigger and angrier than the last. (Assuming I'm looking at them in order- they may of course have gotten smaller and neater, as he dragged his fantasies down to the Earth; but no.) Rather than perfecting and honing designs, it seems that he was moving away from the original inspiration each time, as a character drawn on the 13th was less nuanced by the 15th, growing and spitting, deeper indentations into the paper, as if his flighty fighting spirit was unable to or could not cope with cohesive and finite versions of anything. Suggestion was key, scale implied, rarely measured.

Always, always huge.

And then: Thirty-line limericks or one-hundred-line haikus, enough spent ink to give a bionic giant a transfusion, enough paper to house the cuckoos of the planet. The lids and labels from prescription pharmaceuticals, his mother's, cut and pasted into a dictionary. Prototype dialects abandoned, reams of babble, nothing ponderous or overworked. careless cacophony actually displayed great interest in its desire for the new. His fertility, its teeming, spouting at the mouth. But poor Tony, can't find the spunk to strike the egg, or the notch to set it all off, just morass of hot potential. His starts now seem like sullied canvasses, rotten fibres.

I flicked through the pages quicker and quicker, losing interest in the designs, when I came across one that made me stop. At first I didn't think it was a Carter drawing, as its subject matter wasn't one that might concern him, and its execution too careful and, well, skilled. But the fizzing felt-tipped colours were his alright, leaving their margins like immigrants in search of a new life, unmoored from the page. A train, a man surrouded in bright colour. The usual signature and date confirmed: July 15th, the day after he died.

A message.

This metaphysical detective story was the only feature directed by Vincent Leighton, a veteran of the small-screen. He died in 2001, before his pet project The Infested Mind of Pat Phoenix: A Psychedelic Biopic could be completed.

The Box Directed by Vincent Leighton Produced by Coxy Written by Simon Home Starring Graham Mikl, Fred Savicevic, Pat Dancer, Tom Tarter Film Four Pictures Release Date UK: March 1996 99 mins.

ROGER IN AMERRYKA! (Leonard Fitzroy, 1959)

2010-08-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

I announce: I have discovered a country: Amerryka!

And with it, life as anecdotal drift. For example: It was 1940; It was 1950; It was 1960. I formed a rock'n'roll trio with two regulation gas attendants, and mewed kicking non-hits like 'Destination Cerebrum', 'Damn Cat' and Pigeon Porch Blues' all over Kentucky and Tenessee, my extracted claws making a screeing guitar holler but lacking subtlety to make pretty chords. Our sets lasted for minutes, but I always charmed a female into taking me home. I always wore a bowtie onstage, and I discovered that cats dressed as humans gets girls all giddy and a flutter. During those years I made love to thousands of cats. I made love with hundreds of human women. I tried it with males, I tried it with dogs. It was an itch I couldn't scratch; I remained candlewick dependent. I swam through ages, never getting older; I drank up the new years while still being able to see, smell and taste the old ones. My double vision became trebled, quadrupled; Olefactory calamity captivated my bronchioles, until I convulsed thrice-nightly. My dreams, seperated from waking by no film of unreality, began to multiply together, spawning horrific orgies between a pantheon of inter-human species, cat people with wings instead of heads, dancing notions pressing gruesome members into each other in an endless diorama of fur and flesh intercourse, sweating, endless and sickening. And in all of it, in my sleep and in my day, I knew I was being watched. The fairground, under the lights, I began to realise I was either being followed or was tailing an unknown suspect for an unknown crime. I was a Trojan Hoss of heightened language, embedded with chiselled horrors and cocaine brained fancy.' Roger the Cat, 'Roger in Amerryka!'

Leonard Fitzroy's Roger the Cat is but one in a long line of feline protagonists with an urbane demeanour. But no cat has surely gone as far as Roger, whose beat prose and sexual neediness marks him apart. The Roger the Cat stories, part science-fiction, part experimental fuzz, part 'awwdon'thelooklikealilman' cuteness always confound and delight equally. Too risque, perhaps, for many sensibilities; for after having the stories rejected by every magazine, periodical and newspaper going, Fitzroy finally self-published the Collected Roger the Cat stories in 1953, and managed to get some attention reading them aloud in Greenwich Village cafes.

The origins tale, Roger and the Author, caused a riot at the Semblance Cafe in Prospect when several of Fitzroy's inebriated writer friends grew annoyed at the implicit criticism of the self-deluding romantic ideals of the titular scribe. They took it to be a mocking of their scene, and flounced accordingly. This led to Fitzroy recording the jazzy single 'Too Beat for Two Beats' under the name 'Roger the Cat', with Landon Horny providing the voice of Roger for the unforgettable chorus:

Too hep for those cats

I'm feline groovy

Blue eyes, no cataracts

My relationship with myself

Is merely platonic

But I'd be lying if I said

I didn't want to take it further'

The success of the song drew attention from Hollywood. Mogul David O Selznick wanted to make an animated picture, telling Fitzroy that his 'cussin' cat causes kids to cry and I want a piece'. Arguments abounded as to the format, before settling on a quite spectacular mixture of tinted live action footage an animation, a psychedelic inversion of the yet to come real-people-in-toontown Roger Rabbit principle.

The film flopped. 'It wasn't Roger's horniness, his affair with Joan Fontaine, his taste for the swears or even smoking that Americans didn't like,' claimed Fitzroy. 'It was the fact that he was an intellectual, and talked alot.'1 Roger's poetic thrust, sexual clamour and propensity for cod-philosophy (and cod philosophy) found him an audience among students throughout the sixties, enough for a sequel Roger Gets Hep (1967) to be made, this time with no attempt to charm the kiddies. His iconic presence was seen on pin badges and banners at Vietnam protests across campuses in America, and in Paris in May 1968. It seems his constantly open spirit and questioning attitude will always find fans, albeit sporadically: A character named Roger the Catt appeared in Cheech and Chong's I Started A Toke (1981), and Roger appeared heavily in Jean-Luc Godard's Mickey Mouse biopic La Souris d'Hollywood (1987). The original film has been remastered and re-released several times, earning praise from Peter Cook who called it 'the result of a boozy seance between Doctors Seuss, Freud and John'. 2

'The truth is, Roger will always be quicker than me,' Fitzroy said in 1994. 'I never managed to pin him down in any story, strip or film. He was always too clever.' 3

'Bewitched by the Americas. Inca cats. The earth is soiled by tattooed spells. There, I was plugged into full cat voodoo, inserted into the mainframe, dispelled to a swirling hexed vortex. The Native Americans claimed that ancient cats, Gugols, were there, in North America, before humanity. They receded when Humans came. If your hive was Africa, ours was America. Inspired, giddy, lovestruck, I saw a ghostly cat that I followed. It looked pretty, pretty as me, and had a familiar gait that I attributed to a wombic memory of motherhood. When I saw her in an alley, I scared away another cat, shadowy and evasive, that slipped into the swampy indeces of the drugged city. The object of my affection did not acknowledge me once; just sidled away, with a follow me turn of the tail. Motherlode, They became expert at disappearing; they became attuned to the wind,. and took off in invisible flights. untailored modes. In the hollows of the man-made fortifications, in the call of the trees, they sing quietly. Dire tunes, terse and bitter some of them, but to a cat those hallowed meccas retune the brain like a lightning rod to the tail. exonerated spirits, The city was a used book, even when fresh metal. It's fifty-storey mountains came retro-fitted with hexes and chants, and weaved in the wind accordingly. Nectared breezes send bitter ghostly spells up Manhattan streets, before expiring in the salt of the Harbour. I was, reader, in a lather. Clutching at the West Virginian meterologies like they were tangible personages, Tom Rain, the firebrand, honest, brave, Lucy Sun, shy, alert, mating in their woozy troposphere boudoir, where further weathers are made, eternal variables of their uncles and aunts who spawn rainbow offspring with mixed metaphor jism. Awakened in a Louisiana hotel to perverse ecosystems, twitching my synapses like arcane texts, to be read aloud, to a matful of bovine schoolherd who would sink into a magical slumber and arise sainted and holy, handsome and wise.'

Roger the Cat, 'Roger in Amerryka!'Roger in Amerryka! Directed by Leonard Fitzroy Produced by David O Selznick, Tom Lord Written by Leonard Fitzroy Starring Landon Horny (voice), Joan Fontaine, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle Selznick International Pictures 92 mins Release Date US: May 1959/ UK Aug 1966 Tagline: 'The Cool Cat's Cool Cat Strikes Back (Hatless)'

1. Paris Match interview, 1986
2. Times interview, May 21 1992
3. The Guardian interview March 1994

KUBRICK'S NAPOLEON (Charlie Kaufman, 2010)

2010-07-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

R FOR REMAKE

When I talk about greatest films you've never seen, I of course attempt to encourage a visionary moment on the part of the reader- these films do not exist, and can be seen in no cinema near you except the Ritz in your skull: the one with the ultimate screen, the eyelid, on which that brilliant-but-flickering projector, the inner eye, sends down images in dream-light. All are the ultimate possibles, because they never were. But there is another kind of never-weres, a branch that exists in the common imagination because they were almost made; their relationship to anecdotal reality is more suspicious, because it includes a failure, because they were begun but never finished, miscarried or aborted long before a metaphorical forty weeks were up. These unfinished films live in a never-ending circle of longing: Just intoning the following creates an inescapable spiral loop: Welles' Quixote; Gilliam's Quixote; Lean's Nostromo (Conrad); Welles' Heart of Darkness (Conrad); Welles' Quixote. Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon stands as possibly the greatest of these unfinished pieces, taking up two years of Kubrick's life in deep research, before studio cold feet brought it to a halt, leaving it as an endless what-if. Kubrick had everything: scripts, set designs, incredibly detailed notes on what he was to do- all of which he kept with him until death, never quite letting go the hope of realising his dream film.

N IS FOR NAPOLEON

Charlie Kaufman, naturally did not want to just make Kubrick's Napoleon. He didn't want to make a film about making Kubrick's Napoleon either. He wanted to make a film of Stanley Kubrick making Kubrick's Napoleon. He is a man with impossible dreams with a penchant for men with impossible dreams, and so his account is of a young man, director John Fink, who realises that he is about to be the same age that his hero Stanley Kubrick was when he attempted to begin his film Napoleon. Fink decides that he has no chance to be as great as his idol in original deed, so he sets out to recreate a facsimile of the man's dream, and make the Napoleon film that Kubrick did not. He gets access to a storage space filled with Kubrick's huge amount of research, and studiously tries to recreate the plan. Exactly. 1970 vintage equipment is used, and everybody on set must dress in era clothing. No cell phones on set. Strict discipline will surely cause some magic to be absorbed. These rules soon multiply and expand: No-one can travel to the set in a car younger than 1971, no internet, or discussions thereof; No cell phones ever, anywhere. Slang and pop cultural references must be temporaneous. The Shining hasn't happened yet, but A Clockwork Orange has.

K IS FOR KUBRICK

Fink goes from dressing like Kubrick in an attempt to invoke his spirit, to impression, to believing that he is Kubrick, all on a long tumultuous shoot that causes psyches to fray and unravel. Rapper R.A. the Rugged Man, noted for his uncanny likeness to a younger Kubrick, stars as Fink in his first dramatic role. He pulls off an astonishingly subtle dive; Fink's absorption into Kubrick's colours and mythos is lengthy and delirious, spinning from the sporting of a lucky black polo neck to full-blown hectic impersonation, even dropping anecdotes from the sets of Kubrick's films as if they had happened to him, like how James Mason's quirks and desire for certain pre and post-luncheon activities reset the clocks on the set of Lolita(1962), and how Malcolm McDowell only eats from one side of his plate (the left). For a while, it works. Cast and crew begin to wonder if this man is a reincarnation, or if they have somehow slipped into the past. Shooting begins well. But it cannot hold.

L IS FOR LIES

The original title was K for Kubrick, N for Napoleon which, carrying with it an inescapable nod to Welles' own F for Fake (1974) (and in so doing, reveals itself to be slippery, for if a title like 'F for Fake' transparently suggests its own lie, a title that refers to that lie indirectly silently reveals its hidden lie only somewhat, that is to say, it reveals that its lie is hidden somewhere, or perhaps that it is hiding the fact that it contains an honesty about a lie that too that is not to be trusted. Or not.) perhaps too swiftly put the film in a place of self-described charlatanry that Kaufman had mined before, in particularly in the script for Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999). This place is woozily compelling of course. But Kaufman stepped away from this comfortable clearing, and marched on through the unfloodlit trees with his directorial debut Synechdoche NY (2008)(a film about 'things' and 'people' in every possible permutation unimaginable). He goes further into the darkness here, only now he is running euphorically, somehow avoiding low-hanging branches, fallen logs, and all manner of blackly unseen hazards.

Kuafman as R.A. as Fink as Kubrick fails, burns the set, throws himself on the fire; the only ending possible. $100 million dollars expires.

Kubrick's Napoleon Directed by Charlie Kaufman Produced by Anthony Bregman, Spike Jonze Written by Charlie Kaufman (using sequences written by Stanley Kubrick) Starring R.A. the Rugged Man, Cary Elwes, Tom Wilkinson Produced by Sony Pictures Classics 135 mins Release Date US: March 2010 UK: July 2010 Tagline: 'Can You Solve The Kubrick Rube?'

PARAPRODOKIAN: MAYBE YOU JUST HAD TO BE THERE (John and Lucy Mills, 2007)

2010-07-08T17:26:00.000-07:00

...like a meandering monolgue without a punchline, only moreso, herein we see a playing out of the Monty Python's Funniest Joke in the World sketch, that frustratingly perfect device in which the promised gag is withheld; For this documentary, about the comedian Alex Paraprodokian, labelled by Time magazine as 'The Funniest Man In The World, Sketching' contains no sign of Paraprosdokian himself, as the filmmakers could not track him down. We have no primary evidence of his hilarity either, as none of his jokes have been recorded, on audio or visual media. What we do have is a series of talking heads giving vaguely remembered descriptions of how funny he was, leading to the suspicion that the whole exercise is a spurious gag at our expense. One after another, screen comedians appear to sing the praises of a man who may only be a rumour. These famous, successful comedians all bow down to the almighty Paraprodokian; Stephen Wright, Rodney Dangerfield, Sandra Bernhard, and more, but none can remember an exact joke, none can bring us proof. Time and time again, we're told: I guess you had to be there.

One woman's funny mount is another's vast edifice of nonsense; for one individual, 'because it's there' is reason enough to go to the top, for another, it is an exercise in pointlessness. No one comedian can ever stand above every other, an Everest in fact and feet. I could go on about the highest mountains being below sea, but the metaphor splits in my hands, overstretched with weight. The point being: successful comedians need not be funny, but can merely offer enough of an impression of a funny person to suffice. Silly voices and faces are a start. A speculative experiment finds that, contrary to popular expectation and hope, those that might attempt to sue (to pick someone entirely at random) Adam Sandler, say, for, 'distress caused by gross unfunniness' perhaps,would only ever lose. If his face is on the poster (and it always is) then the viewer only has himself to blame, a hypothetical judge might conclude.

A Hypothetical Judge Might Conclude (1999) is a comedy that revolves around several high-profile comedians reading pre-written jokes in front of a camera (some of which are attributed to the hidden Paraprodokian), which records them. If the delivery is poor, they have the opportunity to record the joke again. When the entire sequence is complete, it is edited together into an apparently seamless and spontaneous piece, known as a 'film'. This approach is, by this point, a tried and tested formula, supported by a multi-million dollar machine that creates the best possible conditions for a successful recording. All possible problems have many opportunities to be eliminated by many of the hundred people involved in the project. And yet. And yet. 'Perhaps we are in a truly 'If you don't buy a ticket you can't win the lottery' industry, and Universal Pictures reason that the more American Pie films are made, the greater their chances of finding a joke,' says Mark Kermode. He too had no idea of Paraprodokian's existence until Paraprodokian came out, and was among the prominent critics suggesting it to be a hoax: That Alex Paraprodokian does not exist. Several comedians in New Jersey have claimed to either be Paraprodokian or to have played a character onstage called Paraprodokian, but none have proved to be very funny. Not proof of their lie in itself; but it does bring with it the ghost of a suggestion that no-one can be that funny, ever.

'Comedy is essentially anarchy, and cannot be bottled' said Bob Hope, of all people. 'The comic, like the Indian, has a piece of his soul stolen by the camera.' Which apart from bringing the story of Alex Paraprodokian to mind, is clearly the kind of mythologising bullshit we support every day; the kind of artist-as-indefinite-divinity system that invented him.

The film concludes in the woods of Conneticut, where the makers have come to find the supposed place of Paraprodokian's birth. The Mills' crew finds nothing, other than a clearing where a house used to be.

Alex Paraprodokian has his place in the OED:

Paraprodokian (n): 1. Name given to an item of brilliance that there is no accountable evidence of. 2. An unseen presence in a room of people.

Paraprodokian: Maybe You Just Had To Be There Directed, Written and Produced by John and Lucy Mills Starring Stephen Wright, George Carlin, Sandra Bernhard, Rodney Dangerfield, Don Rickles, Janeane Garofalo, Damon Wayans

ADOLF HITLER '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL (Tom Lancaster, 1973)

2010-07-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

'Without 'two world wars and one world cup', as the song goes, the English would have disappeared from even their own imaginations by the year 2000.' Peter Handke

'Without the Beatles, England are Portugal; Empireless and small.' Ian Svenonius, The Psychic Soviet

' [These comedies] come with the idea: we the British, and more specifically, we the English, can laugh at ourselves, and that is what makes us better than you. But it also contains the more troubling thought: we can laugh at ourselves, because whatever we are, we know we're better than you.' Stephen Fry

When England were paired with Germany in the World Cup last week, it resurrected age-old cliches that even the brazen seemed to use half-heartedly, aware that the ground had shifted. But use them they did, and when Our Boys were ambushed by a swashbuckling young German side filled with various ethnicities, the great unspoken English response was: that should be us. But naturally, it couldn't be, not right now, because deep introspection and radical projection isn't natural for the English (we use a French term, avant-garde, remember, because we have no equivalent of our own).

The goal that wasn't was one of those poetic echoes that sport, unscripted, throws up, a beautifully crafted red herring, in this case.

The Second World War gave Britain several things: A renewed feeling that her innate sense of moral superiority was correct (the geographical spread of the Nazi forces everywhere but the islands is both a fact and a metaphor), a celebratory complacency (for while America thrived in a consumerist glee adrenilized by rock'n'roll/Vietnam/Space Race euphoria, and the rest of Western Europe rebuilt and modernized itself, Britain clung to a sepia infrastructure) and a ribald miscellany of comic types to sustain itself for twenty years, thirty years, forever.1 From the kinky Gestapo officer to the tediously punctual guard, to name but two, the Nazis as joyless sadists turn up again and again, especially in the Nineteen Seventies,when every sitcom/stand-up routine/sexploitation comedy of English origin had one.

Always, it is the notion of spirited, fair-playing Englishmen which prevails, the plucky geezer fighting the robotic enemy. Of course, a berserk romanticism on the part of the Nazi's is key to what undid them. but its kinder (and lazier) to think about them as automatons consistently outgagged and outsmarted by an Englishman, with common sense,wit and attitude.

Adolf Hitler '68 Comeback Special seizes the same turf, initially, as Heil Honey I'm Home, or 'Allo 'Allo: it's mean panto season, then, and our ugly sisters wear swastikas. Shot with the same tone as the Robin Asquith 'Confessions...' flicks, and often with a similar cast and locales (Southend stands in for Paraguay, Brixton is Manhattan), John Le Mesurier plays an eerily un-uncanny Erwin Rommel in the style of Roger Moore, trying to guide the second coming of Hitler (Tony Booth) back from the jungle hideaway in Paraguay he has inhabited since 1945. His plan: Career resurrection, Broadway style. He books a televised show (under the pseudonym Johnny Fuhrer, a name later adopted by the singer of shock punks The Swasticklers) at Carnegie Hall where he will unveil the fourth reich, supported by hypnotism, which he hopes to conquer the new empire of America with. Only his timing is awful, as he discovers that the night he has booked is the same night that Elvis Presley's Comeback is being televised from Las Vegas. The entire world will be looking elsewhere.

Against advice, Hitler plays the show anyway, and to an audience of three, he performs a play, 'Spy Finkel and the Gormless Rotunda', in which a member of the Reich infiltrates America and discovers its pitiful and horrific daily existence.1 The joke is that Hitler's grandly pompous narrative arc, approaching fifteen hours with the menace of a panzer division's progress through Ukranian frost, is so devoid of entertainment (especially in comparison with Elvis' charm) that no-one could ever sit through it comfortably. But this is dealt with so smugly, that one comes away feeling immense sympathy for the misunderstood auteur of epic plays/mass genocide/ethnic cleansing. The underlying feeling is that this Hitler, failing Austrian painter, is an outsider talent being crushed under the wheels of an ignorant entertainment industry. Fuelled by Nazi bullion and a dream he books a rundown theatre for a year, and continues to play the show to nobody, heroically.

Tony Booth is grandly sypathetic, coaching from the front row every night, convinced that with slight script tweaks and absolute commitment he'll have his hit. John Le Mesurier plays Rommel as a resigned but dutiful right-hand, coping with the Fuhrer's eccentricities and his own alcoholism with suave and offbeat style. His white-suited Rommel is immaculate even when waking from the gutter. They're both too likable and foolish to hate, which somehow seems like the grandest faux pas of all.

And then Nazis fell out of fashion, at least in comedy. Stephen Frears' Somme Girls Are Bigger Than Others (1986) was a late, independent dig, mixing First and Second World War metaphors with death-by-Thatcher northern yearning. But the archetypes live on, and on, perpetrated mostly by English minds 'who have already decided on their place in the world, and it is at the top table.'4

Adolf Hitler '68 Comeback Special Directed by Tom Lancaster Produced by Bert Harris Written by Tom Lancaster, Simon Humphries Starring Tony Booth, John Le Mesurier Rank Organisation Release Date UK: Aug 1974, US:N/A, 104 mins Tagline 'The Most Notorious Act of the Century is Back!'

1. And by Britain, in this case, I mainly mean England. Wales and Scotland have other nationalistic crutches to cling to. The Northern Irish.... well, I'll leave the Northern Irish alone for now.
2. Sam Mendes directed a version of this play on the London stage in 2000. It was restricted eight hours, but received some minor praise.

3 .I quote German thinker Pierre Littbarski: 'The English are forced to use a French term, 'avant-garde', becauser they have no equivalent. Their children are stripped of dangerous thoughts, punished under a grammar hammer. The cleverest English are comedians and popular musicians. Ask an Englishman to name a clever fellow countryman,and they will say Stephen Fry. Or Morissey. 'Yes, that bugger's a smartarse.' Philosophical questions must be framed in these highly accessible forms. This is not necessarily a bad thing. So: navel gazing about the war is restricted to casual romanticism.'

4. George Bernard Shaw.

PROCEDURAL (Joel Schumacher, 2004)

2010-06-25T13:19:00.000-07:00

It came, as always, way too late. The creaking mechanisms of the filmic industry wither ideas by the time they churn them, causing that aching taste for popcorn on your tongue. When the idea is second-hand, this fresh window is even smaller. So we have our familiar, our Type: A character named Hunch (because, hey, he has lots of them, and also because, naturally, he has a stoop caused by some dramatic injury in the past), whose presence in three different long running television shows has shorn him of what small novelty he contained. Perfect for the big screen, then. Not a mistake in itself, but waiting until that point at which people are forgetting him, but before they're ready to remember him, to make the film: disaster. Pity actor Vince Cannon, whose face is fused to the face of Hunch, because they are one and the same, and will always be.

Cannon briefly threatened to be a going concern, before settling for a life mugging for the gallery. His appearance in Walter Hill's Startled Leprosy (1982) as a complex hood promised a dangerous arc through the netherworlds of character dramas. But he ended up where he ended up so very quickly that his ealy excellence can be seen as an aberration, rather than an example of snuffed promise. Soon he was the star of a plethora of prime-time television dramas, his deadpan delivery of gauche cliche witnessed in the cop shows MALAPROP COP (1993-1995), PROCEDURAL (1998-2007), EXPOSITION (2008-2009) and HUNCH (1985-present). The latter three, in which he plays the ever-so-slightly offbeat detective Christopher 'Hunch' Hunchowski, (who greets each case with the too-wry (too-wry, too-wry-ay) line 'Stevie, Didn't we solve this one last week?' Reply: 'Hunch, don't you say that every week?'), is a precise mixture of perfect formulas. Hunch himself is a hash of implied backstories that include flickers of post-'Nam mysticism, suggestions of cataclismic addictions and hollow flashbacks to A Very Disasterous Personal Event that are never outlined or examined, but serve as a huge dollop of explanation (or lack thereof) for what we see before us, the deep and erratic zen-like logician.

The other characters serve as a Greek chorus of 'This-guy' raised eyebrows,
and the plots that pollute Hunch are never allowed to get in the way, being so familiar as to drift into a babble of Beckettian absurdity. Each episode requires a scene after 35 minutes where Hunch narrates his own brain movements for the benefit of the audience, preferably over ponderous light classical chords; Frequently, he is sitting at his art deco desk (which is carved from, in his words, 'maple and pain'1, and serves as an symbol of the titular detective's affectations), which he strokes like a pony. 'But what if the victim was ambidextrous?' says the voiceover, mysteriously, several minutes after your Dad had, contemptuously.

Humour? It is there, often in elaborately set up lines that Hunch gets to deliver. The best pun of the show's history has been re-used many times, and it goes something like this:

COP: She was a junkie, is all.
HUNCH: She was a victim of society's ignorance and apathy.
COP: What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?
HUNCH: Nobody knows, and nobody cares.

(Insert meaningful silence, as COP stares into distance, looking confused. Hunch walks away. COP finally gets it, smiles, turns to HUNCH; HUNCH is gone.)

The film version, pieced together by Joel Schumacher in one of his lean moods, isn't horrible. Vince Cannon, wisely, is allowed a reprise, and his new cragginess gives a certain poignancy. But as if knowing his face can't carry a film, the script leans heavily on a rookie-cop following Hunch, and an intredid (and beautiful, of course) reporter trying to get under Hunch's aviators. Both can't keep up.

Procedural Directed by Joel Scumacher Produced by Vic Ledgor Starring Vince Cannon, James Gandolfini, Claire Forlani, Tom Skerritt, Andrew McCarthy Written by Andrew Kevin Walker Columbia Pictures 105 mins release date UK/US: March 2004 Tagline: 'Hunch has got a hunch. And a feeling in his gut.'

1. Country singer Earl Lance 'Unlucky' Duckett recorded a eulogy to cops with the title 'Maple & Pain' ('Maple and Pain/ Is all I need to bring it all back again/ Boys in blue/ Carrying memories and Badges too')

HICK (Smith Hyphen-Jones, 2000)

2010-06-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

Hick by Ted Hughes

'They waited and waited for him to begin
But when he did he was already gone
The bear with the uneasy grin
Is walking back once again from the sun
His legs
too slow to guard the door
Interloper's grenades split his
bat
Limpid agitated swafts in place
Of cultured
darting strokes
Our hopes
Cling
On
On Colonial burial grounds
A hired soldier fights a rearguard action
One hundred and Seventy Eight
In the heat and haze
But it's too late now
31.32
The answer to a question
We know not what'

'A maths problem even more complicated than the one at the start of the film Rushmore. We know that the answer is 31.32, Hick's bewilderingly modest Test average, but we all arrive at that figure in a different way. Was it an 'aversion to the short ball + Curtly Ambrose x selectorial inconsistency = 31.32'. Or 'mental fragility – flat tracks x too long a qualification period x simple misfortune = 31.32'. Or simply 'Graeme Hick ÷ Ray Illingworth = 31.32'. Nobody will ever truly know, but everybody has their own take on it.' 1

When Ted Hughes, poet laureate, composed his poem about the enigmatic Zimbabwe-born England batsman Graeme Hick in 1998, it fired few imaginations, buried as it was in a collection of detritus verse named Detritus Verse. Hick, remembered mostly as a failure for his country, despite being a perennial bully on the County circuit, was described by Ted Hughes as having 'the care of all sport etched on his smile'. Another poet named Hughes, the legendary Australian Merv, had an instructive verse of his own for Hick: 'Mate, if you just turn the bat over, you’ll find the instructions on the other side.' The collected works of Mervyn Hughes remains a wondrous untapped source for cinema (if you exclude the excretable Aussie comedy Slugger McGabe (Jeff Thomas, 1995), clearly based on the life and times of the mustachioed one), and indeed the world of cricket is somewhat under-represented. The rumours that Paddy Considine has signed on the play Ian Botham in the biopic Beefy to shoot next year may end the drought.

Until then we cling to this: Hick. Which makes every attempt to secure Hick's place in the misunderstood genius camp by serving up 90 minutes of footage of him in languid slo-mo foisting Indian spinners to the rope and silkily pocketing slip chances with ease. Over the top is laid the poetry of Ted Hughes read by Brian Blessed, whose bullfighter-in-China delivery renders the exercise hilarious, especially when he uses his rumbling whisper at moments of high tension (a whisper that is more volumnious and heavy than his booming conversational tone). This is matched by strident Elgar pieces, bulging and billowing, which is hardly very Hickian; This Blessed and Elgar one-two might suit the hairy-lipped violent battery of a Gooch or a Robin Smith, but surely the shy Zimbabwean hulk is better suited to another combination, and all kinds of pairs can be imagined. No-one is suggesting Geilgud and Mozart, but perhaps Nighy and Chopin? No, too slippery perhaps. Broadbent and Walton? Too English. Fry and Debussy? Not quite. Any one of these combinations would create a completely different personality for Hick and for Hick, and all are possible. For Hick stands as a modern enigma, a would-be legend who failed, a loved letdown who also won. An experiment might involve the same footage being played over and over, with the same words read over the top, but each time by a different actor and with different orchestral accompaniment. One might then turn on the lights each time and ask the gathered schoolchildren 'What kind of man was Graeme Hick?' and then tabulate the results. Because, it may well run the gamut. Might Laurie reading over Scarlatti conjure a murderous Hick in the minds of the babes? Might Forsyth (Bruce, naturally; although repeating the dose with Frederick might be worth attempting, in carefully controlled conditions) reading over Reich cause them to dance giddily for the ice cream man? Or weep for some punishment not yet offered?

Myself? I'd plump for a wearily shrill Kenneth Williams reading over some Satie. That's my Graeme Hick, at least today.

Hick Directed by Smith Hyphen-Jones Produced by Smith Hyphen-Jones Narrated by Brian Blessed Boundary/Film Four Pictures Release Date UK: June 2000 US: N/A. 92 mins Tagline: None.

1. Rob Smyth, The Guardian, May 2008

THE ALBATROSS (Remi Ataka, 1982)

2010-05-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

'Often, when bored, the sailors of the crew
Trap albatross, the great birds of the seas
Mild travellers escorting the blue
Ships gliding on the ocean's mysteries.'

Charles Baudelaire, The Albatross.

There comes a moment of false in so many Remi Ataka movies- the good (Fraudulent Doctrines, Tapas Dancing, Um Bungo), the great (Singed Songs Saved From The Fire), and the decidedly mediocre (The Singing Menstrual, Trojan Whores II: Roost, Roast, Rest, Repeat) when he reveals The Vortex, the name we have collected and attached to that whirling, writhing face he finds at moments of high conflict.1 Suddenly, he starts the audience with such a display of unhinged anger (be it at the English filmmakers attempting to replace his village with a more 'accurate' fake one in Um Bungo, or when fighting the ghost of his suicide bride at the end of The Singing Menstrual)- a blast of tool-sharp intensity that punctures the screen with it's power. Ataka is more than one of African film's great icons- he is an ambassador of entire human conditions, bringing messages from such foggy bays as Resentment Squared and Revenge Infinity, areas of such extremely disfigured emotions as to be almost comical. Especially to a modern Western audience.

Essentially, Ataka is an actor with one tic up his sleeve, but what a tic. Raised in the Congolese jungle by a traditional family, he was educated in the art of dance and performance in ritualistic situations. 'Everyone of my cousins laughs at my acting. They are all able to perform this war-cry that the newspapers have called 'The Vortex.' Many of them perform it better than me, and find my films to be funny and lacking in depth because of this.'2

The Albatross, which Ataka directed and starred in himself, is not good, great or decidedly mediocre. Its seriousness and fire drags it into another entire realm, where judgements so superficial are disgustingly arbitrary, like price tags on sheep's heads or women's thighs. It came at a point in Ataka's career when, aged 29, he was the most famous man in his home country. The films he had starred in previously were made in Zimbabwe, under the last vestiges of British rule. The Hammer studios had paid for several of them, and Tapas Dancing (1978) and Bushman II: The Whites of Their Thighs (1978) had gained much success in parts of Africa, despite being unreleased in Europe and America. Ataka set out his stall as a serious actor in both films, utilizing method techniques for his roles in all his films, whatever their budget. And the budgets ranged between modest and non-existent.

He headed back to the Congo prodigally, with a slick crew and the biggest budget his home counntry had ever seen. Employing many local non-actors, his film set out to discover the astonished heart of Africa. As such, The Albatross is an inverse-Heart of Darkness, an alterna-Aguirre, with Ataka playing a leader of a a group of tribesmen protecting a religious artefact as colonial soldiers approach. They wait, and as they do so, they think. And think. Heightened anticipation over days and weeks takes a toll: the threat of the advancing men distorts, until they become convinced that the devil's own foot-soldiers are on their way. Visions jump from the trees, the air is a vast echo chamber rebounding whispers into fear. An unbreakable vanguard is destroyed from the inside, by fear bombs. When the white man does arrive, he is not fearless and strong, he is vain and completely ignorant of the artifacts. Sad ironies litter the compound amongst the mad bodies.

'Imitation is the sincerest form of flattening,' said Kip Lowry of Fox when his company embarked on a series of remakes of foreign films in the early 1980s. 'The only way we can destroy competition in the territories is to give them shinier versions of their own stories.' Ataka, offered a join-us-or-be-forgotten ultimatum, chose not to be a part of Fox's damply polite remake of The Albatross, which forgetably starred Michael Douglas and Laurence Fishburne in 1984. He did however reprise his role of Femi in the fish-out-of-fish-sauce drama Lucid Intern. The original, made on a budget in 1980 by Ataka's uncle Jean-Luc, followed Femi as he moved from the country to a job at a law firm in Cape Town. The remake throws him to the liars by inevitably sending him to New Yotk City, Hollywood's ultimate city as a character.

'Hollywood swallowed me', said Ataka in 2000.3 Roles in such mediocre fare as Crocodile Dundee III: Crocodile Rock Star (1995) and the later Trojan Whores films left him examining the wreckage of his career on the world stage. He did star in Timid with Jennifer Jason-Leigh as late as 1998, but nobody saw that, and he had a subsequent recurring role in CSI:Voyager to a little acclaim. All of these roles have required him to pull out his old moves, weak parodies of The Vortex, but with less and less success: Hollywood, more than any other place, is subject to the law of diminishing re-runs. Ataka finally realised this, leaving America in 2003. Since then he has kept radio silence, emerging only in 2007 to announce he would be commencing work on a Congolese film version of Wagner's opera Parsifal.

But then nothing. Ataka has always had a cult following of fans in Europe, but he may well already be spinning in his grave disposition at his champions. 'He wanted to be Brando, or Eastwood. But now the only people in the West who know him are the the kind of world music clapping, tofu-munching, miso-horny types he always felt patronised by.'4

The Albatross Directed by Remi Ataka, Produced by Remi Ataka, Jean-Luc Ataka, Lomana Lomana, Written by Joseph Smith, Remi Ataka Starring Remi Ataka, Jean-Luc Ataka, Lorolei Samuel, Tresor Pasquale Vision Pictures/Afrika Films 203 mins Release Date: UK/US: N/A, Africa: April-December 1982, Tagline: 'The Ghost Stalks'

1. Perhaps author Will Self has given the best description of 'The Vortex': 'It is as if his face collapses, becoming a cavemouth that surely leads to Hell, or some kind of purgatorial punishment at least'.

2. New York Times interview, March 2002.

3. Rolling Stone interview, March 2000.

4. Will Self, The Independent, April 2008

BLAST! (Alfred Hitchcock, 1978)

2010-04-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

If indelible sources are to be believed, the eastward tilt of 's Alfred Hitchcock's candlestick after 1970 was not as a result of the miraculous cleansing of his muddied windshield (the Damascan turnpike event that legend dictates changed his pictures forever, 'The Accident'1 is merely a red herring here), nor because of a return home to a land of chocolate biscuits and hung parliaments; no, his Frenchified fervour for seditionary sang-froid was caused by, no drumroll necessary, a blonde. So bewitched was the octogenerian psycho-sex-genius by model Hansa that he stowed his boat down a river of blood and pledged solidarity with the blue collar rioters, made a racket akin to a thousand bombings of Coventry and turned up on late night television, stepping up through the gears of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents strand and shooting into the Third Eye directly with opiated visual nightmares that singed viewer and unviewer alike. 'Quick, Hitch is on the telly,' became a fearful warning as much as an invitation.

Hansadid her work, changed the man, and vanished, as if imaginary. She and her like flit through 20th Century history, changing important people but never threatening to be important; Eva Brauns, one and all, obscured by events and ideas, muses for geniuses and tyrants.

Those last five years, until his death in 1980, the clearly fretful Alfred clocked several hours of scorched earth television and an ignored final film, Blast! (1978), in which a ragged Mae West drove all over England in a Ford Cortina searching for nuclear oblivion. The film kicks and wails. Full of classic West lines ('I don't know if saying I love you means I love you or if it's just a phrase I'm going through'), it follows a rejected singer who, trading on her lost-foreigner schtick, picks up young hitchhikers, only to kill them. And kill them she does, splendidly, with the pay-off 'but I never said I was going to Plymouth.'

It's Hitchcock's Peeping Tom, of course; but instead of killing his career as that earlier film had done for Michael Powell, this was left to slide, because, well, by this point nobody much minded what Hitchcock did one way or the other. Legends reach such a status, and some reach it early, so that even pouring luminous vomit over their legacies fails to stain them, such is their power. Hitchcock was so far in credit by this point that nothing was at stake. Ditto David Bowie, whose Herculean efforts through the seventies has bought him many years of larking about as Laughing Dave. Imagine, if you will then, the dreck we might have had from Paul McCartney if he hadn't died at the height of his fame: cashing in his Fab Four chips (which happen to be some of the worthiest currencies in the house) with children's songs and nagging charity efforts, no doubt, and endless permutations of that Beatles sound, forever square-rooted until insignificance. Or Bob Dylan: what if his motorcycle hadn't slipped on wet roads, killing him in 1967, just a year after McCartney had gone? It is a pop parlour game, a nonsense to imagine his next moves, but such is the power of rock'n'roll that it is never more potent when it is gossipy, never more dangerous than when apparently ephemeral (think of the sweet sting of the sudden dynamic chorus intruding on a previously inane ballad, the cruel drama of a hated has-been hitting gorgeous payola for two and a half-minutes), and so these games stretch beyond philosophy. For my diceroll, I'm going to say that had Dylan lived he would have become a television actor, star of a detective show. In the mid 1980s he would have made a musical comeback, dovetailed with a run for Senator of Minnesota, then insane riches, a Rickenbacker Rockerfeller. Snake eyes for me, perhaps. But every dream in a pop world (which is based on fabrications of mythologies anyway) adds a slither of substance to its history. Just look at how many people believe that Elvis lives. Smoke and mirrors only add to the illusion of depth, and Mr Presley is alive because people all over the world see him going about his business frequently.

I digress. As West does throughout Blast!, going to the places her passengers request, only without them. She expends her wit at service stations ('Whadda ya gawkin' at, lady? I gotta penchant for ponchos') and in grim post-coital scenarios (West: 'Best three minutes of my life.' Man: 'Hey, if three minutes is all Motown needs, it's good enough for me.' West: 'More of an opera buff myself.'), but it is all wasted on West's greyscale fellow travellers. It is as if Hitchcock, after thirty years in exotic locales with Ingrid Bergmans and Princess Graces, was horrified to find his homeland still drifting in postwar ruin, and unleashed a Hollywood ghost: West as Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates as Mother, an aged blonde in a frightwig with a knife. And in doing so, the Leytonstone Lugger locks into a nebulous mind-meld with British culture, somehow finding himself in the same waiting room as Peter Sutcliffe (as played by Ian McKellen in Derek Jarman's Ripper Yarn (1983), John Lydon and Billy Bremner.

Reporter: Why did you kill 'em, love?

West: I was hungry.

Reporter: Any final words for our readers?

West: When referring to God, use an upper case H for all personal pronouns,
just in case.

Reporter: That's it?

West: That's it.

Blast! Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Produced by Alma Reville Written by James Costigan, Alfred Hitchcock Starring Mae West, Barry Foster Universal Pictures Release Date UK: Oct 1978 US: Nov 1978 Tagline: '...move. Stick and move. Stick and move. Stick and...'

1. Hitchcock's boating accident in 1970 in Cuba has been widely discussed to the point of invisibility, so I won't add any more reportage here; I'll simply pause to nod to its iconic power on his myth, before dismissing its significance completely. One, he fully reccovered, two, no charges were brought, three, Hitchcock was shooting again inside a week. Hansa, the
Austrian pummel horse, comes six months later, like a premonition. Hitchcock didn't shoot for three years after her arrival. She's the BC/AD coin-flipper here, if there is one.

QUOTES (Woody Allen, 1989)

2010-04-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

Allen: 'Intrinsic to my understanding of history is this: The Witch never said 'You're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy Gale.'
Minnelli: 'But she did.'
Allen: 'Exactly.'
Minnelli: 'Contrarily, Dorothy did say 'There's no place like home,' several times, but she was lying.'
Allen: 'Of course. Will you marry me?'
Minnelli: 'No-one said anything to make you say that.'
Allen: 'Jimmy Stewart. Philadelphia Story.'
Minnelli: 'Hepburn said no to Jimmy Stewart. She remarried Cary Grant.'
Allen: 'Well we can't all be Cary Grant.'
Minnelli: 'No. Some of us even less so than others.'

Woody Allen and Liza Minnelli in a scene from Quotes.

'The truth is that as a filmmaker (if not as a performer), Woody Allen has almost no personality of his own. Respect him as we may for preferring pastiche (or imitation as the sincerest form of flattery) in a period when the American cinema has capitulated to the whorish charms of parody (or imitation as the sincerest form of derision) , we ought not to elevate a pasticheur's talent into the temperament of an authentic artist. Allen is Zelig, Zelig is Allen. Brought into contact with Bergman, he turns into Bergman (Interiors, Another Woman); with Fellini, he turns into Fellini (Stardust Memories, Radio Days); with Pabst, he turns into Pabst (Shadows and Fog)... and so it has always gone. Zelig however, is the exception that once truly does prove the rule, and so Quotes is a rare stride towards something else, as if there exists in Allen a true original he is straining to supress. Quotes is Allen's career writ large and exploded, a cavalcade of every filmmaker he loves at once, a collection of brilliant techniques that serves to provide a mixed salad, avec dressing, with a small man in glasses sitting in sorrow in the middle.' Gilbert Adair, Flickers

'QUOTES is a blast. Take an inspired idea- the referencing of everybody else, and I mean everybody else- pepper with a gag or two, then stew in wit for aeons, and voila! a Cannes hit that will make minor rewards in Western territories. But Allen, for once, goes further, and his intricate web of references and borrowed dialogue becomes something beyond postmodern or meta.' Geoffrey Standage, The Sunday Times

'Allen alienates adroitly and aims angry arcs at any anti-Allenists (and Allenist alike) attending, acutely aware at all affects an arrogant audience anticipates. A+' Arsula Andress, San Francisco Chronicle

'Allen of course, must know that his presence in his own movie can cheapen his directorial nous somewhat, in that his verbal prodding can sometimes replace what greater directors do from behind the camera. But he is also smart enough to know that this gives him something to, and Quotes allows him to provide a director's cut from within. His character can talk about film style as he himself gives us film that contradicts that style.' Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

''If bad puns a comedian doth make, then Allen is very funny indeed.' Here's one for you: Waiting for Godard.' Blixten Tongstress, Twice Weekly

'Allen never gives us three chords and the truth; three chords and the Truffaut, maybe. Even his tenderest moments are not wrought with any feeling other than nervous self-examination, leaving his voice to be that of a whinnying karaoke singer. Which as we all know, can be perversely poignant.' Mark Kermode, Videodrome

'If we see Allen's work as a schizophrenic dance between Bergman and something sillier, then this boils it down to the barest credentials. Insipid and inspired. A petulant stamp from an undergrown intellectual. Four stars.' Tom Bonnet, Sight & Sound

'Only eternal love between Farrow and Allen would provide the trust necessary for her to don that particular outfit and say those particular lines.' Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun

'Allen used to have a stand-up line that he re-used over and over, he liked it so much: 'I'm not scared of death... I just don't want to be there when it happens'. Well, he has been there when it happened many times: Hollywood Ending, Match Point and Whatever Works, to name but three deaths. But every time I reach back for Annie Hall or Manhattan I only feel sad for an auteur now lost. Only Quotes keeps me excited. It is an enigma, a flashing message not quite understood.' Paul Auster, Notes on Film Signs

'You know, people ask me who I am, and I presume it is a trick question. So then they ask what kind of man I am, and I realize that if they think I'm a man then I've actually tricked them.' Woody Allen

Quotes Directed by Woody Allen Produced by Robert Grenhut Written by Woody Allen, Mia Farrow Starring Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Liza Minnelli Orion Pictures/Warner Brothers Release Date UK/US: Mar 1989 99 mins Tagline: 'Umm.. I Really Don't... I Gues Yuo Need Something For The Poster... Use Something From Ben Hur.'

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST (Charles Laughton, 1951)

2010-03-22T19:50:00.000-07:00

The Transcendentalist finally makes peace with itself about an hour in, settling into a nonsense rhythm reminiscent of another sub-prime classic you'll have on the tip of your tongue, like the name of a minor lover you spent a long week promising to never forget on one of the more tousist-ridden Greek islands when you were eighteen and promptly didn't write to, ever, despite wanting to. (Why didn't you?) Gary Cooper, heretoforth vibrating with alacrity between folksy hero and weary cynic (a pendulum on which almost every Hollywood lead swings, at least if they're not on the one that ticks on homespun innocence and tocks, unbelievably but inevitably, on genius and glory. Neither are exclusive; many character arcs greedily take in both donging devices, or an unholy mixture of both), takes sixty minutes of chewing gum (beautifully, slowly, sexily, evoking the old Wrigley's slogan 'Too much mastication will make you go blind', a minor classic of inverse-advertising that made the kids chew their way through the fifties) before he ups the gears into something more, something om; He discovers a fifty-foot meta-Cooper at exactly the same time as James Agee and Dirk Langston's script begins to sing a second simultaneous song, spreading melodic shards in many new curves; this is also the exact moment that Charles Laughton's direction seems to twist into a new heaven, somehow capturing the exact moment that Western Philosophy meets east, causing a blissful Oz to permeate the director's canvas/Kansas.

Hyperbole? Watch it, and you too will think that the film suddenly shifts from black and white to colour. But it doesn't; it just seems that way, an illusion created by a coincidence of genius. ' Every one of my mother, Colin Cowdrey, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rin Tin Tin see the ending in colour,' said Graham Greene in a Times piece in 1956, going on to refute the myth that dogs are colourblind, instead suggesting that they see in fact a dim rainbow, in which blue is especially noticeable to their eye... 'so perhaps Rin Tin Tin appreciates the waterfall sequence here in a somewhat nuanced way'.

A metaphysical detective story becomes decadent, endless inqury; Cooper wanders into the golden countryside, not leaving a linear plot behind but somehow multiplying it tenfold and making even more sense. The gates of noir are flung apart.1 Somehow, you wonder, if in fact mankind would have been condemned long ago but for these curious puzzles we create to confuse the gods. Art doesn't just amuse us, it buys us time, until we can figure out a suitable escape plan. And so flippant jokes can actually be mordant philosophies, and Gary Coopers can actually be religious vessels, carrying our fevered hopes as far as they can before their knees buckle and they grow tired and tiresome.

'Our noons were in the same sky,' said Cooper of his time working with Laughton, Agee and Langston. The public wavered, however, finding the hard stare of genius too much to bear, and went to see other entertainments instead. 'Such is life,' remarked Laughton, I shouldn't wonder that if Christ was resurrected in our lifetimes, we would surely fail to notice.'

The Transcendentalist is the first of two one-hit wonders of Laughton's directorial career in Hollywood, the other being Night of the Hunter (1955), another slice of sublime dissonance.

(Nance... Nancy- that was it her name, knew her for a week in 1993. Or Susan. From Stepney, or Colchester. A six-foot tall tomboy in a West Ham shirt on the verge of blooming into a stunner, a fact of which she was all too oblivious. She was relatively spiteful in play on holiday, but wrote two letters full of longing back home. There was no response. She is thought of seldomly, but once every six months a girl with her likeness walks past and causes a wave of wistfulness.)

The Transcendentalist Directed by Charles Laughton Produced by Paul Gregory Written by James Agee, Dirk Langston, United Artists 92 mins Release Date US: Jan 1951/UK: Aug 1951

Tagline: 'He's gone.'

1. David Lynch was heavily influenced by The Transcendentalist, and the central motif of a detective encircled by mysterious evils was evident in Twin Peaks, with Lynch even naming his Special Agent hero after Gary Cooper.

HOW AUSTRALIA TOOK US (Franck Boston-Tobias, 2010)

2010-03-08T11:48:00.000-08:00

Scene: In the midst of some kind of national crisis, a young man (Noah Taylor) sits in a police interview room, accused by a detective (Nick Cave) of murdering his lover (Isabelle Huppert). The young man proceeds to attempt to justify his actions by explaining that the cause of the American apocalypse is a disease which causes lovers to see, at the point of orgasm, every one of their partner's previous conquests. He suggests that this disease is an act of sabotage from outside. Monologue:

Australia's army was small, but their nous was acute. They picked off the sex-psychics first, exploded their skulls with cuckold imagery. Invasion unnecessary. No Billabong kids with crackling jaws were required to cross our borders, those smirking goblins just spent down their dreams to a fast edge to catch us cold. Smiling, the cool bullies infected us from afar, destroying our orgasms, rendering our small deaths into enflamed confusions. A series of internal bombs, hoaxes and smokescreens confuse us; secret war twitches our pens. When the key is the anagram of sex, the vanquished can't write.

The near-flaw in their plan of aiming for the libido of the nation was that they overestimated the value of sex to America. Our frigidity almost saved us. While they considered our fleshy levees to be lugubriously swelling, they were in fact obscured from our view, our decadence uncalculated. We appeared, at a deep glance, to be obsessed with rutting, but this disguised the facts. Unvisited orchards produced only apples.

But the plan worked, nonetheless. There's always enough sex to bring any civilisation down.

They scrambled our endings, Victoria's secretions. Before we knew what they had done, it was too late. No parachutes from the edge of the sky, no bloody hacking into our procrastination. After all, there was a labyrinth no interloper could ever pass through at the heart of our pentagon. Walls of fire, an infinity of code. Which we knew, because each previous failure to overthrow us had been paraded headless and hollow on television. Our digital safety was thus pledged. And as we were convinced that the only way they could come was through our plastic keyboards, we were comforted. But they found a backdoor we didn't know we had. Fantasies were sabota-
'-Mr Smith, you mean to say you didn't kill your girlfriend? That a foreigner did?'

Leading question. Tone of slight derision. It isn't Australia the country, but something more
elusive. Australia is the name we have for them, and it doesn't suffice. I'll tell him again.
He has the numbers: Domestic violence rose, but he'll say it always had. The divorce rate soared, but then it always had. The curse that had been put on us, the trick they were fooling us with, might have been a gift to a more enlightened people. Instead, we found that seeing images as we climaxed that revealed who our partner had slept with previously only hurt.
Previous lovers in this context were vampires reflected in surfaces.

For that was what they did.

Somehow, they managed to poison us. During sex with another person, we would see, every
time we closed our eyes, all of their previous sexual partners, stacked up, or in a line. There were those that may have been spies, sleeping with groups of friends, entire families. The greys and cool oranges of my city appeared to change. Although the invasion was not to be seen around us- there were no gunposts above bars, checkpoints as the occupying force marshalled space- our vision was suspect. Our eyes were all vichy eyes, lying to themselves. Some ran anywhere, just to get a jump on death, a couple of days.

'Mr Smith, you're ignoring the subject.'

'Sir, this is the subject. Our country has fallen into disrepair. They caused it. A skreeing satellite pixelated our thoughts. One moment we were scraping moondust from our boots, shedding ideas, almost controlling Time, period. But we didn't see that dark was the night, and it was falling. Now, before we know it, we are segregating ourselves. Fence wires are cut and snap back like guitar strings. A black humming in the distance might have given the game away. Church gatherings, street corners. We're burden bearers, licking friends, naming our afflictions to weaken their power. Uncrushed, dreams of blacked victory. Revenge flickers in cities, not coherent enough to rise like a threat. Names of towns haven't changed, but they now seem sad, echoing dully, devoid of Revelators to convey. Talent contests unfinished. TV towers hum, our bluesmen. Trains run as usual, but listlessly. We hold pretty things in our hands, and don't know where to look.'

'Not everyone is killing their girlfriend, Mr Smith.'

'The stories, complexities, were dotted among the news, but no pattern was traced to link them. Hetero concerns remain hidden, colourful ones pastiched into ridicule. It happened to me, one, twice, a hundred times before I linked it to the outside world, the passages in misspelt news
that leapt, the seasoned broadcasters' disdain for nothing much at all. We are a matrix, a clogged artery, a segue upon a segue. The East Coast hummed with this and everything else, a cold electrocuted corpse, over there and out of reach. In camps, some of the homeless rutted endlessly, and every time it hurt, they did it more. And once sex is gone, pleasurelessness will kill us before lack of reproduction does. We don't need children to refresh our cities, but we need stimulae.'

'You murdered her.'

I remember V, late, that middle of the night away from all. Her room was above the street, and even after she no longer worked in the bar below, she stayed. Fried smoke always found its way in. She'd change into a T-shirt, smile from the hall, slow right down to the speed of a record. Do you think I should cut my hair? She lifted it up into a bundle on top of her head, and pouted sideways at me. No. Never.

V, inverse opening, long-legged receptacle, on her back. She'd be below me, but would govern my action. V, a crooked seagull coasting on her own air. Sweat, fogged lenses, happy cheeks. The picture appeared in a cloud of activity, and I lost it in her ear canal: Her other lovers, on the wind, gone. Hundreds, thousands, all caring less than me. We ate cold lasagne while sitting on top of the sheets. She talked about her day, I forgot B momentarily. Christmas lights jumped, it was midnight in March. I knew I couldn't live with her anymore.

She died while wet, cut off from the shore. My withheld knowledge of the tidal situation incriminates me. The day was hot, so we went to the coast. Drove quickly, leaving behind a run of bad luck, frustrated bank accounts, percussive arguments. She proposed the escape, twenty-four hours away, and I agreed quickly. She was a brave swimmer, not a strong one. I wasn't even aware of my plan until it was all over, but by the time her cold lungs had stopped, I realised that my intention all along had been to end it here.

'That's a confession, Mr Smith?'

'I suppose. But I must add something. Her love was palindromic, you could approach her from both sides. Before and after the heat were identical, her smile distant, glances over your shoulder to future interests. Even in our special case, as victims of sabotage, she bore no ill will: She was just as warm as before our romance, and just as cool. But we were a special case. Our love ended at the phantom invasion, when one million homes sank like red herrings, tetchy and confused. I was a victim as much as she. We all were. Are.'

'Anything else?'

'Yes. Some of her hair was left in the bathtub. It suggests a message. But I could not decipher it. Could some of your experts have a look?'

'We'll have a look at the whole house, sir. Don't worry.'

How Australia Took Us Directed by Franck Boston-Tobias Produced by Hobson Tragic, John Boston-Tobias Written by Franck & John Boston-Tobias Starring Isabelle Huppert, Noah Taylor, Melissa George, Nick Cave, Music by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis HBO/Film Four Release Date US/UK: November 2010 Tagline: 'They took nothing but our sex'

LA MORT DE ROBERT REDFORD (THE DEATH OF ROBERT REDFORD) (Jean Rouch, 1974)

2010-02-25T14:35:00.000-08:00

Introduction: 'La mort d'une étoile.'
When he went, his edifices were scrawled on by well-wishers. His cheeks were garlanded with red-penned declarations that we would never see his life again. Panic had elapsed, following the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and we had fallen into a frayed acceptance, beyond hysteria. The end seemed but weeks away, and the murder of the totemic Bob seemed to reflect this.

Scene One: 'Pourquoi tournez-vous, monsieur? C'est la fin, il n'y aura personne quitte pour regarder le film'
As the news broke that Redford was murdered attempting to board a train at the Gard du Nord, Parisians took to the streets. January, 1973. Documentary-maker Jean Rouch took his camera. 'Individuals who were not old enough or brave enough to commit to the riots in 1968 were here. They were attempting to make up for something. They were responsible for most of the damage. Efforts at a greater symbolism rarely can be good if they are so preconceived.'

Scene Two: 'En Amerique la police a des fusils. Mais pas ici.'
Suicide by cop is an early verdict, which brings more riots. A man appears on camera. He is old, ninety perhaps, and has wild grey hair. His eyes are an agitated blue. 'ils l'ont tué! Les bâtards du droit religieux lui ont offert comme un sacrifice! Imbéciles!' Rouch translates: 'He says they killed him... the religious right offered him as a sacrifice.' The old man looks at the camera. In English he shouts: 'bastards! I call them religious bastards! Say what I say!'

Scene Three: 'La discussion du symbolisme de blonds, avec les cigarettes.'
The discussion of the symbolism of blonds, with cigarettes. At one point, a student breaks into English to interrupt. 'This is exactly what the world thinks we do in France! We riot, and then we sit in cafes discussing philosophical concerns.' Rouch spends the rest of the scene prompting the assembled to discover if they agree.

Scene Four: 'Déformation de personnalité.'
He had ideas above his station, perhaps. The fact that this icon had the temerity to be beautiful and a scientist upset the extremes of left and right, as well as capillary demons of the nth eye. His suggestion: That a calendar year of 400 days would suffice our needs. Stretch the year to capacity, leaving 25 year-old wrinkled people wandering the planet. This idea threatened many interested parties. Assassinations can fall into several categories. All contain traces of hero-worship. Gilles Deleuze appears on camera. 'In the death of a famous figure like this, one wonders if the abrubt event in everyone's lives is not some form of personality warp, in which we all are meshed in a non-linear paradigm; a world seen only by a third eye, not our own'.

Scene Five: 'Apocalypse Maintenant'
Psychic mistakes do not appear immediately. They fester and burn, showing up as symptoms on maps of the poorer districts. It is easy for the deniers to derail theories, pass such events off as the quirk and spite of the under-appreciative ethnic castes. Even when a rich blonde or two is afflicted with the tawdry, kipnapped and drugged and thrown insanely from a cliff, say, or being brainwashed into being unwashed and homeless, even then still their probes do not quiver unduly. How many apocalypses must we enjoy? JG Ballard suggests that 'thousands of celebrities could die in the Paris night, and our civilisation would be stronger, not weaker.'

Scene Six: 'Le ligers de Paris'
President Georges Pompidou wonders, on camera, if Redford's last will and testament implies that his safari park will be left to the French people. 'Currently, Paris' rainbow ligers are an illusion, created by a series of holograms placed in front of regular ligers. But a real one would be a great posthumous gift to the city.' Some feel that this is inappropriate. But it does suggest that our leaders have confidence that the world has some future.1

Scene Seven: 'Le hot-dog, en sautant la grenouille, Albuquerque.'

We calm down. The world does not end. Generations later can see Rouch's account of the death of the most famous man in the world, and his account of that account (recorded simultaneously). Humanity continues. In his honour, the Utah Film Festival is renamed 'Sundance'. Redford's last words are recorded as the cryptic 'Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque'.2 Who knows?

La Mort de Robert Redford Directed by Jean Rouch Produced by Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin Fisk Productions/BBC Films Release Date Fra: Oct 1974 US/UK: Jan 1979 Tagline 'J'étais là Quand une Etoile est Morte.'

1. Georges Pompidou died three months after appearing in this documentary. He was 62.

2. These words were the inspiration for the chorus of Prefab Sprout's 1987 hit 'The King of Rock'n'Roll', and also for the title of Stan Brakhage's 1979 short Albuquerque Frog.

TOM THE SCORER (Barry Bishopsfield, 1963)

2010-02-19T11:45:00.000-08:00

'...Of course, I wanted to call it Statistical Breakdown, but that seems too punning, too dismissive... but sometimes I do still like it, and go to screenings of Tom... and shout out 'I should have called it Statistical Breakdown!' over the credits.' Barry Bishopsfield

Along with Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson Karel Reisz et al, Barry Bishopsfield was part of the Free Cinema movement of the early sixties. By the time of Tom The Scorer, however, he had moved away from a quasi-realist style and towards something completely his own. For while his visual grammar and subject matter may have had much in common with his peers, Bishopsfield consistently began to breach the Fourth Wall by including himself in his work. Often, his directions to actors can be heard on the finished film, and sometimes scenes are broken by actors forgetting a line, stopping and then beginning the scene from the beginning. So far, so Godard. But Bishopsfield developed idiosyncrasies all of his own: Tom The Scorer is overlaid with an audio track of his own thoughts, weary judgments made in post-production about the shortcomings of his fare. This approach is remarkably similar to the commentaries offered on modern DVDs, in which the director and/or stars of the films will talk over the film. Of course, on the DVD, this is a largely ignored optional extra, and not an integral part of the art; but it came to be central to Bishopsfield's films. And of course, on the DVD, we have a relaxed, wry director making gags and giving us unnecessary technical details; In Tom The Scorer, we hear a panicky Bishopsfield despairing about his vision falling apart before his eyes, and his anger at the confusion in his head being all but impossible to recreate on film ties in with the subject of the film: The titular Tom is a boy who is so obsessed with noting down the goings-on around him that he retreats into a near-autistic inner world of ever-growing data.

Tom begins by copying maps. He doesn't trace them, but sketches careful and accurate versions. He notes down pertinent facts: Population, size, relevant dates, languages spoken, currency. Here Bishopsfield interrupts to reflect on how when he was a child he collected coins and had some from India, Canada and Poland that could not be found for this shoot. He feels this is important to state. Tom likes cricket, Bishopsfield does not like cricket, but finds its slowness and statistical possibilities to be perfect for his metaphor, and as Mark Twain said (or perhaps did not, again my sources may not be correct) 'allow the poet his metaphor', but sadly Tom isn't a skilled enough batsman or bowler to turn out for the school side. Instead, Mr Smithson (Roger Livesey, who it must be noted, bears an uncanny resemblance to the games master who beat me thrice weekly at school, and as such bears an uncanny resemblance to the SOUND, SMELL AND VISION OF HADES IN MY HEAD and is thus more perfectly cast than anyone could ever suspect) notes Tom's eye for detail, and taking pity on him, and gives him the important job of being the official scorer for all of the school's matches.

Bishopsfield interrupts again with some statistics:

The film is 73 mins and 32.21 seconds. This is 4412.21 seconds. The film has 490 shots. The longest shot lasts for 12.43 seconds (The whirling pan when Tom is confronted by the big city).

Of the 490 shots, 201 are stationary. The other 289 involve camera movements. Number of people that appear on screen: 164. Number of people that speak: 17. Number of people that tell Tom that he needs to 'stop writing in that bloody book': 7. Number of words Tom speaks: 121. Number of words Tom speaks inside his head: 1207. Most common word: 'I' (heard 97 times). Number of times Tom writes something down in his notebook: 54. Number of minutes Tom is on-screen: 42 mins and 56.21 seconds. Amount of perspiration: immeasurable. Gallons. He found himself wondering. He liked the cinema, but he wondered how many times he had been.

Problems come when Tom's obsessive scoring holds up the game, and the crowd boo him. Bishopsfield's insertions mirror Tom's: Both want the perfect sequence of events recorded perfectly, but both find that their study overwhelms their respective subjects. When the ball is hit in Tom's direction, he hides it, all the better to give himself precious seconds to catch up. Similarly, Bishopsfield begins stopping the film at many points to explain. But this didn't prove to be enough for the director. After the film was released, to mixed reviews and general confusion, Bishopsfield took to turning up at showings of his film, carrying with him a large piece of cardboard with which to cover portions of the screen at particular points. He would also comment on his own commentaries, creating a loop of directorial uncertainty that echoed long after the final credits. Cinema-goers in Morden, Brixton and Wimbledon were especially likely to have their already over-directed fare interrupted by the director himself. In 2001, The Curzon in Soho had a special showing of the film, to which they invited Bishopsfield to recreate some of his interruptions. He sat quietly through the whole film.

It wasn't Mark Twain that said that, as I incorrectly guessed on the soundtrack. Oh no, I cannot attribute it. There is another quote that I can correctly assign to GK Chesterton, however, that goes like this: 'The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.' I disagree of course, and hope to leave nothing inside me by completely expelling all energies, true or false, into the public air.

Tom The Scorer Directed by Barry Bishopsfield Produced by Barry Bishopsfield, Karel Reisz Written by Tom Warne, Barry Bishopsfield Starring Benjamin Tot, Roger Livesey Bryanston Films/ Continental Films 87 mins Release Date UK: June 1963 US: Aug 1964 Tagline:What Is The Score?

ваш фильм (YOURFILM), (Alex Mikhailichenko, 1922)

2010-02-14T18:30:00.000-08:00

'Bearing witness to the proud travelogues of others is one thing, but when one can self-document a unique passage in light and colour, does one not hum contentedly? A billion subjective versions, a billion truths, surely ring louder than one.' Gilles Deleuze

What are we viewers if we are not frustrated artists who would love nothing more than to bend the onscreen action to our will? To save a hero from a low-flying blade of a masked villain (or condemn her, should her passions/face/haircut demand it), or step up and throw a piece of small jewellery into a pit so as to better help our half-pint fictional brethren (and so end a painful, long, painfully long journey)?

Such was the conviction of Alex Mikhailichenko, a Ukranian who invented the YOURFILM technology in 1922. His visionary future included the 'destruction of the passive feature film worldwide by 1930', which to his Soviet paymasters meant of course only one thing, the disrobing and slaying of Hollywood demigods. The staggering failure of the technology may disprove something, but certainly not the potency of the idea. If anything it was too good, like Houdini's disappearing elephant trick in 1918, which was received underwhelmingly by an audience who did not understand its potency of the conjurer's greatest illusion.

Utilising 'brain pads' which were attached to the heads of the audience, the action in YOURFILM was changed by the emotional reactions of the punters. What happened on screen, after the initial image of two lovers on a battlefield ('Love and War being a solid beginning for all stories', according to Mikhailichenko), depended entirely on how the assembled react. Mikhailichenko himself described the effects upon his arrival in France in 1962, in an interview with Francois Truffaut for Cahiers du Cinema:

'Always, the screen was bubbling, Dali-like in its concept but more like Monet in its colouring and blurring of fantasies. Like melting clouds... one minute our hero was running through a field, before the swaying wheat was sea. The amazing thing was that what I saw and what my neighbour saw was different... we agreed on the principles... or did we? One time a group of drunken sailors turned the story into a tawdry strip show through their bustling brainwaves, and another time, the same story reached a fetid nirvana of absurdities with one crowd of minor geniuses. I wish I could see that version again and again. But it is gone.'

While Mikhailichenko was more interested in the psychedelic uniqueness of each experience, the Soviets saw otherwise. The filmmaker suggested that the technology was the ultimate socialist art, involving as many authors as possible; but they disagreed. When Maxim Gorky returned from Italy to the USSR in the early 1930s, it was such a coup for the Soviets (a rejection of fascism and (re)embrace of communism being the ultimate propaganda boon) that the writer was given the Order of Lenin. When Gorky compared YOURFILM to the 'distracting trinkets of Coney Island', and called it 'another time destroyer, a waste,' YOURFILM's days were numbered. It was seen as an indulgence, with one prominent critic too many.

The sadness, of course, comes in the corruption. Mikhailichenko claims his technology was stolen. Eyewitnesses claim it was distorted by the Soviets and turned into a weapon, with huge disorientating projections thrown across the invading Nazis in Stalingrad. Others suggest it was stolen by the SS, co-opted after 1945 by American agencies, and subsequently seen in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Rumours among US squadrons in Vietnam were that the North Vietnamese were being tooled with brain-pads to convince themselves that they were seeing huge ten-headed hydras behind them, on the side of Communism.

Mikhailichenko despaired, and fled the USSR in 1961. 'The fact that it had no measurable purpose frightened everybody. They would rather it had a destructive existence than the vague pleasurable one I conceived.'

Subsequent nuanceless audience-decides interfaces have met with narrow success, but they are on-rails narratives that bear little relation to YOURFILM's freewheeling possibilities: The on-running Choose Your Own... series (in which each film stops at various points to allow audience members to vote for whichever pre-recorded scenario they desire) has been resurrected many times since its 1954 debut. It has survived repeated critical barragings to threaten to come back into fashion following kitschbait features by Robert Rodriguez. His Naked, Naked Sex (2004) and Six-Gun Pizza (2005) were internet-only experiments in the hilariously outdated mode, and only highlight how far ahead of his time Mikhailichenko actually was. We still haven't come near his vision, and next to YOURFILM, all simplistic technologies must cower.1

ваш фильм YOURFILM Directed by Alex Mikhailichenko Produced by Alex Mikhailichenko, Written by Alex Mikhailichenko/ The Assembled Debuted in Moscow in November 1922

1. The rather peurile Top Or Bottom? adult spin-offs quickly lost their novelty in the seventies, however, with audience members frequently taking the most savagely deviant option at every opportunity, causing the films to be little more than the same sequence of events each time (like any normal film), only with a dozen intervals of frustrated clicking on keypads. And worse, surely, is the Cliche Program, rumoured to have been used by major Hollywood studios in various films in the 21st Century. This leaves the suggestion, ever lingering, that certain Hollywood stars can no longer perform to the standard required, and that through variations of YOURFILM technologies, audiences are convinced that, say, Mr de Niro still has his chops; because, after all, we still want him to be good; that perhaps what we are seeing is an assisted performance, with our collective memories of his younger danger twisting his infertile present day efforts, changing them like an empathetic autotune. The possibility also hovers that some stars may not be real, but hazy dreams of suicides, eternally out of focus. For who can really say that they have seen Ms Sandra Bullock and truly understand her; and who can identify what genus one Mr Vincent Jones really is?

DREAM JOB (Peter Whitehead, 1986)

2010-02-02T21:05:00.000-08:00

'An everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drama, a nightwalk at noon through a parade of distressed Coventries, a suffocating headlock of unmedicated schlock.' Iain Sinclair

Peter Whitehead disowns all praise and all criticisms. He disqualifies even the most strenuously delicate synopsis as wide of the mark. So even the cursory one-line breakdown that follows may be incorrect, but damn it, the author is wrong: Terry Hall does star as a young Midlands teacher, and his dream life interferes with reality. And the film was titled Son of the Speedway in America, and it was titled Grue Trit in France, and Introspection in Canada, and The Substitute in Australia, and Keeping An Eye On Nothing when it appeared on video in the UK. These are facts, supported scrupulously by the many internets that care.

Quoting extensively from the script then:

Continuation of monologue, Scene 5: I walk into the classroom, second floor of a prefabricated hut. The class are in the middle of a test. I take off my hat, coat and cycling gear and when they're done I introduce myself as Mr S, which is the name of one of the teachers that taught me. I decide to start a six-a-side football tournament, so I get some chalk to keep score and a whistle to referee, and call for two teams. They pick their own names. Hillsy's New Sailors win the first game 6-1, the goals initially being sofas (which the goalkeeper for Hunter Toner, Mimi, is very confused by when lying on the sofa full-length doesn't prevent the first two goals), and I referee fairly and well, except for when I place the chalk in my mouth, thinking it is the whistle. I find I may also need an assistant, as each moment the cataloguing of details I need to mark on the board seems to grow- first just the goals, then the goalscorers, then the yelow cards, then the number of fouls, then the number of house points I'l give for good play, then the number I'll give for fair play. All are marked with what is now a small piece of wet, chalky rubble.

Mr S's first name is Terry, just like the actor that plays him. This always creates a frisson of danger, as if events on screen could be real. Other moments that break through the drama include Terry humming along to a song on his walkman that sounds very much like 'Man at C&A' by The Specials.

Continuation of monologue, Scene 9: Halfway through the game, the goals become car boots and the goalkeepers decide to sit inside them, like machine-gunners in bunkers. Every time someone scores, I ask them their name. A girl who slams home a consolation rebound for Hunter Toner looks remarkably like Leslie, a boy I went to school with. Other kids clearly are ones I went to school with, preserved at fourteen: Bunto, Hillsy, Crossy. Bunto wants to play in the second game, despite having an ankle in plaster. He is not changed into his kit, but believes he'll be able to play: He just needs to wear a big boot or motorbike crash helmet over his foot. Wanting to ingratiate myself with him, as I might have done at school, I concede to his request, but I suggest he play in goal. He tells me he'll be fine. Hillsy, now apparently my age, and wearing a great three-piece suit with overcoat, asks me why he still feels like a tramp next to me.

Terry's father was a speedway rider. We know this because of the way he fondles the photograph of a man on a bike. Terry's father is dead. We know this because of the way Terry fondles the photograph of a man on a bike. Speculation: Memories of watching his father become an obsession, initiated by a child who bears a startling resemblance to a young Terry. The more mundane his day, the narrative seems to suggest, the more his memory life interferes.

Meanwhile, the kids are forming into teams for the second game. To my left, there appears to be nine kids, and to my right, many many more. I tell them both that I want only six on each side. The group to my right- three older girls and a gaggle of smaller kids- don't budge, and the older girls cross their arms. I approach one, becoming strangely angry, and wave an imaginary yellow card over her head. Only six, I tell her. She protests, telling me that they all look after each other out of school, and do everything together. I feel lonely, lacking a group. Then Ms Golden turns up, a popular young teacher. I become aware that she is my wife.

Ms Golden (Jenny Seagrove) is not Terry's wife, but he believes so. She is kind and concerned, and takes the approach sympathetically. She tries to help Terry secretly, without bringing attention to his problems. On another occasion, over coffee, Terry tells her about how he has been buying extra lamps for his bedroom because the lighting in his dreams is too dim, too musty, he can't quite see everything and everyone that is there. She indulges him. We hope they will develop a relationship.

She sits down to watch us. I am aware of my lack of patience with this lot, but can't stop. I ask them if they really want to play this game, and if not, then what would they prefer to do? Mr S, I hear a voice behind me say. Ms Golden puts her hand on my shoulder. Why don't you take a break she says. I give her a look, before turning and walking into the gym's main room. I look up and see the bikes, sliding round the corners. There is no noise in the room, just the bikes silently running in an endless circle at full pelt.

Dream Job Directed by Peter Whitehead Written by Peter Whitehead, Sylvie Host Produced by Tom Witness Starring Terry Hall, Jenny Seagrove ITC Entertainment/Samuel Goldwyn Films Release Date UK: Nov 1986 US:N/A Tagline: 'Terry got a Dream Job, but now he's dreaming on the job!'

REMAIN CORDIAL TO THE STICK INCEST (Orson Welles, 1962)

2010-01-26T15:43:00.000-08:00

'I'm turning everything full cycle. I want to explode cinema to such an extent that future generations will believe the medium to be a myth; Billy Wilder will seem like Bigfoot, and the Gish sisters a pair of gorgeous Loch Ness monsters, imagined only.' Orson Welles, 1946.

.. and so, finally, we get to Welles, The Great Orsini, the man whose personality and presence almost rubs itself out. Citizen Kane sits near the summit of every list, but Welles' subsequent work hides in its shadow. Much of his real-life substance has the shimmer of the fake about it: When critics dubbed his adaptation of Don Quixote a failure that would never make it to the screen, he responded by borrowing their cheeky name for it: Non Quixote (1947) was a chewed-up, spat out version of the myth, with Welles as both the titular hero and a modern filmmaker making a film about him. And thus a bipolar career opened up. For every impeccable Shakespeare adaptation there was to be shadowed web of cheaply made chunterers: His problems with studios, critics and his own ego led him to conceive a series of films under the title The Foul Papers that would be a spewing of interlinked ideas, filmed quickly so as to not suffer the overburdening of money and expectation, and rarely widely released. They were begun, like so many great things (including the Fictional Film Club itself), with the playful liberation of a joke, but grew into something more steadfast. And funnier.

The rabble of flicks in this broad series seem to fight among themselves, elbowing their way to the door. Heir Removal (1952), a tough runt, holds attention through the sheer volume of its dizzy anti-Roylist satire. Cruel Aprils (1949) is a doomed drunk, an elliptical inversion of Eliot's The Waste Land. Bellerophon (1944) was, Welles suggested, created when he went back in time to plant seeds that would grow into his great epic. Indeed, unknown actor Pearl Stringer was cast in that movie as Bellerophon's unlover Anteia, and she went on to star in many Welles films. Weirdly, no-one remembered her being in the earlier movie until she starred in the latter, her history growing before the world's eyes. Arch-genius invents time-travel, no-one notices. Just as Welles 'started at the top and worked his way down' as he had it, he somehow managed to work backwards from the future. Bellerophon skulks in the corner of the house, undiscovered.

(The Foul Papers series is not to be confused with Welles' other eternally unfinished run of overlapping stories, titled NOTES, that he claimed 'pull together every arc of myth, philosophy and truth into a rainbow of religious noise'.1)

Remain Cordial To The Stick Incest (1962) is a crescendo, of sorts. It is as if the filmmaker took everything that was left and threw it in the pot. Welles took kernels from all of his previous efforts, and wrapped them up in a construct half-inched from Flann O'Brien's modernist nonsense novel At Swim Two Birds. Various characters from Welles' films litter the scenes, confused and desperate to escape; they plot to kill their creator, the author Shag Lipton (Welles himself). Lipton, for his part, discovers a way in which he can in literature and literally, give birth to fully-formed adults. He explains, '...the benefits are obvious. No turgid backstory is required, no slow-moving exposition of tedious childhoods. Instead, we have sons who can be breadwinners from the womb, or daughters who are sprung out as attractive marriage propositions, or further, we can lay pensioners onto the operating table who are old and crippled enough to claim compensations from the state: parenthood is both a joy and an immediate economic advantage'.

Lipton's wife Sara (Jean Simmons) gives birth to Flashey (William Holden), a forty year-old gambler, shagger and boozer who immediately causes problems in the household with his advances towards his own mother. Lipton insists on a bed in a separate room rather than a crib in the main room, causing distress in proud mother Sara. Society begins to shun the Liptons at parties. Their son, older than they, is a public disaster, smashing glass and hearts unevenly all over the community of ex-pat American and British wives in Madrid.

Lipton assaults them from his window, describing them as '... bona-fide Marthas, lipsticked frigidaires and dried-out harpies of spastic alacrity, tense victims of a benign sisterhood, owned by thick vikings of the market, who climb over one another's gowns, splitting seams to reach an imaginary head table.'

... and meanwhile, the walking carcasses of Lipton/Welles' past creations fill the house, vengeful and waiting for the moment the creator averts his eye. He does. They put an ice-pick through his skull and escape to another film entirely, Decadent Midwife (1965) where they spawn and split up, leaving the ludic environs of philosophical parlour amusements for a life, one assumes, off- celluloid.

Harry Lime, Charles Foster Kane, Hank Quinlan and Macbeth bubble in a pool of blood, pasts both celebrated and shed. Welles implodes. 'There are no more waters in these Welles' cries Hollywood Reporter, but the big man turns his back.

Remain Cordial To The Stick Incest Directed by Orson Welles Produced by Orson Welles Written by Orson Welles, the cast Starring Orson Welles, Jean Simmons, William Holden, Rosebud Productions/United Artists Release Date US: Oct 1962 Tagline 'Gotta Get Outta This Movie!'

1. I mentioned NOTES in a previous entry regarding Walter Friend's Dijonnaise in FFC, January 2009.

MAN, DEAD AT 42 (Alfred Sitzl, Hans Mottel, 1972)

2010-01-11T02:13:00.000-08:00

'It is impossible that I will die. Impossible. Without me, this world will cease to exist.' Alfred Sitzl

Set adrift in a technicolor effluenza, the extraordinary career of Alfred Sitzl might been worthy of many biopics even without this implausible final act. Concerned with the afterlife, he aborted his final film Legacy (later unreleased unfinished in 1975) in which he interviewed himself about how he felt he would be remembered, to arrange this. With Man, Dead At 42, he all but set-up his own obituary. In his will he left a script, including complex instructions for the staging, lighting and filming of his own funeral. His partner Hans Mottel executed his late lover's wishes, completing the final acts of Sitzl's 'final masterpiece'.

Sitzl's early works, the fierce, avant-jazz Seizmic Caricatures (1944) and the balmy horror The Eunuch With Electric Forearms (1947) were made in America, where he spent the last three-quarters of his life, thirty-one years and six months exactly. He is most famous, perhaps, for an interview on the late night cable show It's A Kerrazy Midnite Alright! during which he responded to a mock assault by ventriloquist John Jonjon and his puppet Cyrus by pulling a gun and threatening to 'shoot your pee-pee, Mr John'. This spawned a cult T-shirt with an image of Sitzl and these words sloganned beneath; in the late sixties, this became an iconic counter-cultural garment, despite most not being familiar with the work of Sitzl.

In 1970, Sitzl was diagnosed with terminal life and was given just months to live. He had just received rave reviews for his subversive cabaret tributes to certain golden dames of Hollywood ...And We Would Let Joan Bennett Excrete Freely (1968), Invictus Pickford (1969), Joan Crawfish (1969) and Joan Fontaine, Sexy Caller (1969) and was seemingly on a career high. Death could have been an interruption. But no matter: Sitzl sensed an opportunity. Hans Mottel was instructed to film Sitzl during his last few months of his life. 'He told me not to scrimp on the death' said Mottel, in his own documentary about the experience Late Lover (1981). 'I had misgivings of course. But Al was convinced that watching a man slowly die, and for that man to be the director of the film, was the most extreme aspect cinema could approach. None of the gigglers in Tinseltown could beat this... It was his final wish. To have the footage edited together in a precise way. And for the funeral to be a particular way. Lights here. Camera here. Flowers there. Close-up of his wife there. For five seconds. She'd better be sobbing.'

Sobbing she was. Indeed the whole exercise can be seen as a series of trapdoors and stunt mirrors to tease Sitzl's ex-wife Ronnie Barbeaux. In one scene we see Mottel watch with great difficulty as Barbeaux reads aloud from Sitzl's diary, as per his final instructions. The camera moves gently from face to face as Barbeaux discovers for the first time the extent of Sitzl's homosexual encounters before, during and after their marriage, culminating in the revelations that Mottel has been left the greater portion of Sitzl's modest estate. Barbeaux simmers, Mottel clings to the camera for dear life.

A grand feast was executed as per Sitzl's wishes, and the elaborate food display, including whisky fountains, a maple syrup luge and a forest of broccoli, are filmed lovingly. This scene in particular is famous for being the source for the nomenclature of a grubby sub-genre of cinema,

'torture porn' being a misheard translation and a comical echo of the French 'tours de pain' which Barbeaux can be heard to exclaim repeatedly at the funeral 'Tours de pain! Tours du pain! Qu'imbecile veut des tours de pain a leurs funerailles?'1. Mottel's camera lingers on the offending baguette skyscrapers, returning to Barbeaux as his directions from the grave insist he must. The sight of the dead man's ex-wife suffering inelegantly at the deceased's cosmic practical jokes and his tightly planned posthumous humour is certainly a pre-echo of the late-Capitalist bourgois-sadism of Saw (James Wan, 2004).

Sitzl died. But somehow, he lives on as a gremlin in the ink, a smudged graffito on our wall. This obnoxious double Vs at the shore of the Styx, this delicious gob in the direction of his future host (and no less, to those left behind), somehow stands as a gesture of great humanity at it's most defiant, petty and brave.

Man, Dead at 42 Directed by Alfred Sitzl, Hans Mottel, Produced by Hans Mottel, Victor Grue, Written by Alfred Sitzl Tarakan Pictures Release Date Fra: June 1972, UK/US: Jan 1973 Tagline: 'Sitzl Is Dead! Long Live Sitzl!'

1. 'Towers of bread! Towers of bread! What kind of fool wants towers of bread at their funeral?

ROCK'N'ROLL PARTS 1,2&3 (Eli Reiner, Dancla Flakier, Dominick Stenz, Gorse Badier, Calgary Kurt, Phil Spector, Todd Sameth, 1978, 1987, 2006)

2010-01-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

'Chekhov said you put a gun in act one, it goes off in the end. Well I am the gun, and I've been going off since I was born' Phil Spector

Myth explodes. Fact expires. Familiar stepping stones are used or ignored. Pacino as Spector delivers a eulogy at Lenny Bruce's funeral; Spector as Spector delivers the same speech, word for word, at Jack Nitzsche's funeral. Diabetic stammering is blended into a one-chord gauze. Spector as Spector hosts late night birthday parties every Sunday at Jack's Bowl in suburban Pasadena. Sonics bleed together. Laurence Fishburne as Ike Turner didn't get as far as he did without knowing his way around a gun. We succeed, we fail, we make sure we're paid.

Elliot Gould as Leonard Cohen is drunkenly amused, always.

The World slights him at every turn; he is wronged, he doesn't need to explain himself, he says, but he does. Spector as Spector imagines Cruise as Spector delivers a didactic sermon on a Christmas record; Spector as Spector repeats it, word for word, at the funeral of Rudolf Nureyev. Pacino as Spector riffs and cribs and paraphrases from it all, half-cut like Lenny Bruce, on a recording for the soundtrack for Rudolf Nuryev's futuristic folly Beautiful Disco (1980). Spector as Spector imagines Cruise as Spector pitching a film to Peter Coyote as Robert Evans: Louis Cypher: Guitar Legend. No dice.

Spector as Spector imagines Cruise as Spector arguing with a gang in a late night diner. Pacino as Spector bends and drills one hundred musicians and thirty thousand dollars into the million-weight edifice You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling. The scene starts with soggy bum notes and inane repetition, running the gamut of self-doubt as Wallace Shawn as Don Kirchner threatens to pull the plug on genius. Tepid applause; Spector as Spector lectures the screen, dismantles the camera, eats the crowd.

Julian Lennon invokes his Dad in name only. Spector as Spector imagines Cruise as Spector strangling Lennon in London, drunkenly. Still, Cruise doesn't answer the phone, has no interest in playing Phil. Spector as Spector waves a handgun at the screen, threateningly.

Spector as Spector appears to explain: His life, originally, was to be split in three, a triptych of success-against-the-odds, parts one, two and three; but life refused to bow to a triumphant narrative. Four directors helmed the first part, three worked on the second. The third was completed without Spector, as he awaited trial in prison.

But he can't stop interfering. Pacino left the set of Part One, nostrils flaring like the hungry barrels of the shotgun Spector had on set; no matter, Part Two repeats many of the scenes of Part One, mythologising the already mythologised, with Spector as Spector imagining Cruise as Spector impersonating Pacino as Spector delivering bad jokes in the studio, the magic that punctuates the magic. Until inevitably, Spector as Spector appears, explaining, untangling, deciphering; but really, he mystifies even more, sabotaging the story of his life as surely as he sabotaged his life.

And so it goes: Part Three is just a remake of parts one and two, but the gun goes off, fatally. The series of directors, anonymous, grows longer. Scorcese wouldn't do it, and appears as himself to say as much. And so three films, all released at separate times, all blur together, because each part of Spector's life is the same story, ad infinitum.

Cruise's phone keeps ringing, unanswered.

The strings swell; Spector's own score is an amalgam of his best bits, Tina Turner shakes in nude silhouette, Darlene Love shimmers, Ronnie Spector disappears from view. Spector as Spector spends weeks trying to get a jukebox into an Oakland McDonald's. Nobody recognises him at any turn. Time drifts; the story has an explosive beginning, hit after hit after hit, before drifting through the decades, fuelled by tragicomic interludes. Spector as Spector talks to the camera, sometime in the early 21st Century:

'Sometimes, I feel like a story with no end. There's got to be one last shot, one last explosion, before this little Jewish firework goes out.'

Bang.

Rock'n'Roll Parts 1,2 & 3 Directed by Eli Reiner, Dancla Flakier, Dominick Stenz, Gorse Badier, Calgary Kurt, Phil Spector, Todd Sameth Starring Al Pacino, Phil Spector, Elliot Gould, Larry Fishburne, Tina Turner, Wallace Shawn, Sheila Ferguson, Scott Glenn, Julian Lennon Produced by Phil Spector, Robert Evans, Todd Sameth, David Geffen Written by Phil Spector, Mick Brown UA/Warner Bros/Fox Release Date US: Nov 1978, Dec 1987, Feb 2006 Tagline: 'He's A Rebel'

ROOMS (Svenoslav Kartosky, 1967)

2010-01-01T11:29:00.000-08:00

'Kartosky is a cartographer of fear, but be finds the absurdity of existence both compelling and comforting' Christian Metz

The weather chased her here, the wind at the wings of the plane, the sea blocking easy paths, the lightning that took down trees in her way, forcing her to turn left then right.

There is a large out-of-town supermarket. The entrance, through double-doors, is at the right hand-side of the front edge of the building. Buffeted by the wind, she decides to take shelter inside. The first room is small and dark. The impression is felt that the building is not too deep, but instead spreads away to the left. The visitor expects, of course, a cavernous space filled with strip lighting, but this option is not offered. Instead, there seems to be a series of small rooms connected to one another. When making her way through the first few series of rooms, the visitor is reminded sometimes of a fallow old teacher from primary school, or fleetingly remembers a game of dominoes with a dead relative. This is not unusual of course, for any visitor to any place will find themselves bedevilled by a waking thought of someone or some song for no reason that offers itself, but somehow the heavy flavours of the half-memories here are strong.

She feels a sense of huge spaces beyond her view. She feels lost, completely displaced. This configuration is illogical. But somehow she is comforted, in a way that makes little sense. It is as if up until this point she had some kind of thesis to defend, but now she is liberated from the chore. She tilts drunkenly. A light seems to flicker somewhere, but she doesn't see it so much as feel it.

She can hear the wind, far away, but it cannot reach her now. When did she leave the plane?

The visitor ducks behind a heavy curtain, sidesteps a pile of chairs and clims a set of three stairs. Then a shred of daylight, a coldness, stone floors. To her right are two identical cubicles, that remind her of the bathroom at her parents' grocery shop from when she was a child. She hasn't seen it for years, but remembers sitting on the cold seat and reading every comic in the shop. And here it is, not only doubled from her memory, but twinned again in front of her eyes, gloomy and cool.

And from here it is not too much of a step for her to begin recognizing other rooms- one ordinary door opens into an exact replica of her grandfather's shed, and the smell of honeyed wood brings involuntary tears to her face. The next room is vaguer, dimmer, and it is a while before she places it as a college friend's bedroom, pink, white and empty. She begins to rush through the rooms, desperate for certain places from her past, certain places that lack importance to everybody else except herself, were only significant enough to serve as obscured backdrops in family photos at Christmases and birthdays, and never appearing as the focus themselves. These vessels, stuck together in arbitrary fashion, seemed to make up a labyrinth of her past, minus people and context.

...and then for a second, the voice of her father, clear as a strong bell, rises into her eardrum. Lena, The Awful Truth is on TV. Irene Dunne. Cary Grant. Leo McCarey. Nineteen-Thirty-Seven. Lena! It's a good one, Lena.

She pushes through a stickered door and into her own bedroom, the one she had between the ages of six and sixteen. A man is sitting on the bed. He is dressed in a brown robe and has a kind, pink face.

Why Are You in my room?

Why are you in your room? Perhaps this is the real question.

Where Are We?

Sit down. There's something I need to tell you.

Who are you?

Don't you recognise me? I'm your brother. I'm here to tell you something. All the rooms you see here are rooms you have visited before during your life. They are here to provide a familiarity to the background. This is so that when you faint from news of your death, you do so in the apparent comfort of memories.

What are you talking about?

The configuration of all of these rooms together is absurd I know. This makes everything seem more like a dream. We find that if you think death is something like a confusing nightmare, then this helps you accept the news.

I'm dead?

Just think of it as a new year. A new decade, even. Walk boldly.

Rooms Directed by Svenoslav Kartosky Written by Svenoslav Kartosky, Mikel Kartosky Produced by Victor Garda Starring Joelie Michoz, Guus Speck Release Date: UK/US: N/A Cze/Fra: July 1967 32mins Tagline:Which ten-thousand rooms are you?

TEN FICTIONAL FILMS OF THE DECADE (Part Three)

2009-12-24T14:13:00.000-08:00

1. SHAZAM! (Daniel Goldstein, 2006, Isr/US/UK)

'Houdini's greatest trick was to make an elephant disappear. It was also his greatest flop. The illusion was so grand that the audience did not believe it. Sometimes, revelations can be too profound' Jim Steinmeyer

'The world can be served up proof, and it can be strong and true, and we still do not believe. Our positions are already too set.' Oshi

A documentary,then, at number one. I know, I know. But Brown student Daniel Goldstein's shaky cameraphone epic railed and rattled with such journalistic urgency that to not acknowledge it would be to prove some kind of peverse point. The informations contained herein are too Earth-shattering to ignore.

To begin with: Goldstein reveals the Wizards of the West Supermairgh, a select collection of alchemists whose magical powers died on the day that their special word of invocation, 'Shazam!' was found drowned in an East London canal in 1954. Foul play was suspected. Various theories link many to the crime (the Hells Angels, PLO, CIA, Soviet Union and international crime syndicates are named in the film), but who on Earth stands to gain? For with the death of 'Shazam!', man can no longer harness the tumultuous natural powers of the planet. Since the word was murdered, no human being is able to pronounce the word correctly- it comes out as
'Shuh-zaim!' rather than the now throaty gargling-iron-filings effort of yore) which has had dire consequences- human kind now finds it impossible to harness the Earth's hormones, and subsequently, grave sicknesses, such as global warming and AIDS (both with germinations circa 1954) have grown exponentially. The film looks at the botched inquest and subsequent cover-up by the Western governments, their sham-shazam wizards (fogging the lens of scepticism on prime-time television), and how rock'n'roll was invented, a charade of rebellion, to turn our heads like Christmas bells of jaunty distraction. There were other glistening lies, making truths (warlocks mourn death of a word/ A word drowns/ NATO invented rock'n'roll etc) seem preposterous. The veracity of an audience's belief almost managed to put shazam through a hall of mirrors, conjuring an infected appearance of magic. 'The US government is a placebo now' says government stooge W.Axl Rose in the film. 'I'm not even sure of the people in charge know that they are in charge. Their belief is that if you seem like a saviour, then you probably are. The world believed I was the singer in a dangerous rock band, and so I probably was.... and so 'Use Your Illusion' becomes a guiding principle really... you know, if magic is dead.'

A symphony of conspiracies so great is revealed that the viewer cannot hear, so loud is the clamour of truth.We hear about how the lido, a children's runaway haven, is the only place in Mexico City free from wrath of a corporation named Zodiac; How those that have earlobes and those that can roll their R's are in league, whether they know it or not. The journey ends in Copenhagen, as gamblers cross their fingers. The only solution? Dreamfarms in Indonesia, in which pubescent children sleep in large factories ('sweetshops') and their dreams are taken and used as fuel to fog the lens of the Western world, their kneebones used to tighten the screws of our ignorance.

... and JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, but there was no conspiracy; Oswald acted alone, spurred on by the liquid Satanic undercurrents that swept the Earth in the wake of the death of Shazam!... and a real sadness is that Shazam! is not remembered, but that a tired parody of the word is served to the world as a comic book story, for children and deflated adults in capes.

Sigh.

'Makes Michael Moore look like a rabble-rouser reading from an old script' The Guardian

'Shazam! shows us... the insipid tendrils of hope only drain the kitchen of its mess for a second, until the oppressive mess returns. Pernicious mummies of the state seek to hide the fact that they are hiding the fact that they are hiding the fact that there is in fact a malady of the sages, and humankind's fate, until the mid 20th Century tethered to its own regenerative abilities, now swings on its last life, unknowingly. Various new man-made tragedies serve as smokescreens, now that audio-visual arts have themselves lost a pull: black presidents, failing economies.' Noam Chomsky

'I totally loved the bit about that kid in Gaza or wherever who totally unplugged the world's electricity by lifting that watch battery that was wedged between two paving stones. He was hella cute, for a kid.' TMZ.com

'And to think! Our musical heroes were nothing more than juvenile indulgers and serial pederasts! Supported, no less, by a State who recognises the need for acceptable rebellion. Sickened, I burned my records. Including the ones I made. Especially the ones I made' Little Steven

Shazam! Directed, Written and produced by Daniel Goldstein Starring Daniel Goldstein Yasser Arafat Axl Rose Petra Wingfysh Kofi Annan Homade Productions Release Date: Worldwide online, Oct 2006

TEN FICTIONAL FILMS OF THE DECADE (Part Two)

2009-12-21T12:01:00.000-08:00

=6. SEPTEMDECILLION (Hypperson, 2004, USA)

http://fictionalfilmclub.blogspot.com/2009/04/septemdecillion-aka-zillion-troubles.html

=6. BIERCE THE FIERCE (Guillermo del Toro, 2006, Esp/US/Mex)

http://fictionalfilmclub.blogspot.com/2008/11/bierce-fierce-guillermo-del-toro-2006.html

'If James Cameron is the King of the World, Hypperson is the Booze in the Cooking' Keith Floyd

'[Bierce the Fierce]... is a festival, a torrid dance, a gorgeous musical death...' LA Weekly

I've written about these two at length, and couldn't split them. Both equally as good as one another in almost every way. Both haunt the back of my eyelids perennially.

5. NUEVA GERMANIA (Soren Elkjaer, 2004, Den/Ger/UK)

'No-one will ever place my words inside quotation marks.' Soren Elkjaer

Dane Soren Elkjaer has to date served up a buffet (writers: the word 'smorgasbord' is not necessitated every time a Scandanavian offers a selection of anything) of filmic wonder. Any selection might have warranted a place here. Mehr Nicht, Mehr Licht (2000) focussed on the argument about Goethe's last words. Shortly after his death, a man in Augsburg in Germany was committed to an asylum for pronouncing loudly that he really said 'Mehr Nicht' (No More') rather than the attributed 'Mehr Licht' ('More Light'), a nihilistic wail rather than the more palatable invocation, instruction, last wish, or affirmation of something. The Doctor who committed the claimant him was honoured by the city.

Or we could have picked Elkjaer's Either, OR (2006) (synopisis: Soren Kierkegaard arrives by train in the small Oregon town of Either in 1854. At 41, his health is failing. He will die within the year. He has left a doppelganger in Europe who he instructs to live a hedonistic existence. His own plan is to write alone in the distant and lonely West, in a bid to carry out the ethical half of his own Either/Or theses. But when he gets drawn into a love triangle with a widow and her daughter, this may prove more difficult than he suspected...). Or Noah's Archimedes (2001) (The Biblical boatmaker meets the Greek philosopher. Both teach each other about bouyancy, etc.), or even his spellbindingly abstract biopic Agassi (2009), starring Isabelle Huppert as the leonine racket-swinger.
But Nueva Germania may be the best: Missionary of all things German Bernhard Forster (Bruno Ganz), along with his wife Elizabeth Bernhard-Nietzche (sister of Fred, here played by Tilda Swinton) set out for Paraguay in 1887 to start a new colony and prove the supremacy of the Aryan peoples far away from the Jews. The group struggles. A failure, Forster poisons himself in 1889. Elizabeth returns home in 1893 to look after her sick brother.

During the last portion of the film, after Forster has committed suicide and the dwindling band of ex-pats are drifting in a sick sea of madness, every line of dialogue is one that has been attributed as the last words of someone famous. The jungle rejects them, her harshness forces them out. 'Friends applaud, the comedy is finished' they say, 'drink to me! Moose, Indian, moose indian...'

4: SOME EMPTY CHAIRS IN NEED OF FILLING, OR: PURGATORY (Mickey Gilbert, 2009, Ire)

When Sean O'Flanahan's play about the celebrity afterlife won a TONY in 2005, and it was announced that a film version was to be made by Warner Brothers, no-one could have envisioned this. The original play imagined Aldous Huxley, CS Lewis and JFK (who died on the same day in 1963) awaiting judgment in a grey lounge in the afterlife. They talk about Jean Cocteau and Edith Piaf, who had died on the same day a month earlier. They talk about Gandhi and Orville Wright, who had died on the same day in 1948. The film was to be a sober reenactment of the play, with the same cast.

When Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni died on the same day in 2007, O'Flanahan updated the play at the last minute, the actors improvising a touching for-one-night-only acknowledgement of the directors by impersonating them in Heaven. 'I realised that this play could run forever on the fumes of such tributes,' O'Flanahan said later, and when his friend Anthony Minghella and hero Arthur C. Clarke died on the same day in 2008, his cast repeated the trick. The proposed director of the film, Mickey Gilbert, thought that the excitement caused by these spontaneous rewritings lent the project new drama: 'In Spring 2009, we had begun shooting the original Huxley/Lewis/Kennedy script. I loved it, but as a film, something wasn't there. Something topical.'

Something soon came along.

On June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Sky Saxon died. Gilbert quickly halted shooting, and reshot the film with his actors impersonating these three. No dialogue was changed: 'Instead of Kennedy worrying about his legacy, we had Fawcett. Instead of Lewis calming the others with warm Christian philosophies and fantasy stories, we had Jackson. We shot it in three weeks, and had it out by November.'

3. GESTERN IST NICHT DORT (Dieter Buchmann, 2001, Ger)

http://fictionalfilmclub.blogspot.com/2009/01/gestern-ist-nicht-dort-yesterday-isnt.html

I've written about this previously too, and it only continues to rise in my estimation. Buchmann's other great achievement was his thirty-two hour Unity (2006), A real-time imagining of Unity Mitford's first meetings with Hitler in Berlin in 1934, when she learned his routine so she could 'accidentally' meet him in his favourite cafe. 'Before Sunrise meets Birth of A Nation' quipped Tarantino, Quentin, CA. ''Tasteless as turkey,' said Tarantino, Betsy, FL.

2. FIN (Michael Haneke, 2009, Aut/Fra)

'Haneke's moral diction is the glue of contemporary European cinema. His existence means I can be consoled by the failure of everybody else to show us burning bodies of war victims in every film since the invention of a medium for which 'medium' is an apposite word; Medium in the sense of divining ontological informations, and medium in the sense of being very average and unspectacular. How it should be, if you will, and how it is.' Tobias Hirsch

The last film to be released on the list, ducking snugly under the tape to be the one of the best as well. A couple middle-class couple finally have a great weekend together away from lots of family business. They feel guilty at first, but then loosen up, as they deserve some fun. They then turn on the news after a great forty-eight hours in blissful solitude to discover the world is about to end. Fin. No explosive apocalypse, just the certainty that everyone will die. The couple, most of all, feel guilty for their lovely last weekend. A suggestion floats that their internal relaxation somehow is linked to this chain of events; as if, by taking their eye off the ball, it has slipped under a passing car. This idea is very much a product of a modern egocentric and workaholic mindset, and is ruthlessly skewered by Haneke.

'We mock their bourgeois ways, we laugh at their pretensions, and we warm to their companionship. Ultimately, the horror and comfort comes from exactly the same place: Haneke is telling us how small we are, and how insignificant our worries are.' Sight & Sound

'The apocalypse, when it comes, will be inconsiderate. It will wait until just before your annual two-week holiday before descending blackly, leaving you rueing that fortnight you might have used more thoughtfully had you known. People of course, won't believe it. Won't want to. Will find it inconvenient, something to be spent away, ignored, etc. It will not be concerned with our society.' Michael Haneke

TEN FICTIONAL FILMS OF THE DECADE (Part One)

2009-12-14T14:00:00.000-08:00

I should prelude my pick of my ten fictional films of the decade with a disclaimer, and it is not the usual one of the critic, the one in which he (for it is always a he in matters of listeria) leans away from his sums for a moment to lecture us on subjectivity, and how he has attempted to put personal taste aside and strive for some kind of fairness.

No, being a hardline subjectivist, I have no concerns about whether my choices are popular or right (these two things sadly too often being seen as the same thing in most parts of Western culture, and perhaps everywhere else too). My concerns are more practical. For while it is difficult for a critic or amateur film enthusiast to pick ten films from a decade at the best of times, picking ten fictional films is clearly a much harder task. Viewing enough cinematically released pieces to make a broad overview of the last ten years worth of available art possible involves a huge investment of time for even the professional film writer; to pick ten well, one must surely see many hundreds. I commend them their efforts. But my task is almost impossible. The number of imaginary films out there is so numerous as to make any cohesive overview as similar as nailing jelly to the wall- both are awkward, messy, and leave apparently random patterns. Each place on my list could have been filled with millions upon millions of alternatives, and any imaginary film enthusiast could make a list entirely different to this one.

So what follows, is by no means conclusively the 'best' or 'most important'. Just ten good ones that came to mind.

10: TRAVEL 'TIME TRAVEL!' (Jacob Michaels, 2006, USA)

If Computer Generated Images in modern cinema are indeed the jewels, crowns and swimming pools, all the cacophonies with which beggar boys drown out the silence of imaginative poverty, (and let it be known I'm no fundamentalist on these matters- give me a bejewell'd dragon in three dimensions over tawdry Oscar buzz on any and all of the seven days), then perhaps Jacob Michaels of California is a King of Ideas who needs no such lusty shenanigans. Perhaps.

Without him, sci-fi would be in exactly the same place it is now. No-one has followed his curve, bending schemes beyond the paradoxical until a sublime nonsense jazz permeates. 'History is worth more than the future. Darwinism and Jesus Christ would not be so contentious otherwise,' declares Dr Schwimmer (Jim Broadbent) the man behind the titular Time Travel time-travel company. His technology allows two rivals (Ben Kingsley and Udo Kier) to go back in time to kill one another as babes. The effects of their past-meddling are legion, a swarm of loose ends, a mind-meld of subplots. Michaels explores the chaos of time travel by splattering his screen with ridiculous real-time ephemera: three-legged mothers, unborn siblings, memories that are ruptured and false.

The simplistic cause-and-effect logic of Back to the Future is amplified horribly: deaths happen apparently randomly, the consequences of tiny seeds of actions completely unrelated. The world is explosive, as mistakes are being erased and paradoxes created constantly. If time is confusing, time travel is Confucius. Or concussion. Don't do it.

9: THE DRIVE (Lucy Simmons, 2002, Can)

'When I first read what I had written, I threw it in the fire. It was like Pithecanthropus Erectus giving birth to a fully-clothed smoking philosopher and murdering the child in mute shock, the writing was so far advanced from what I had done before. I rewrote it immediately, leaving out the best parts. Naturally, it was even better. With each rewrite, I removed more plot, like a chef boiling some fresh vegetables down to nothing. I came to realise that the repetitive action is the most powerful; this couple, driving in a car, leaving some kind of family dispute behind, not wanting to go home, but driving onwards, onwards: they were almost wishing the road into never ending, and of course it didn't.' Lucy Simmons.

'A couple drive in the country. They stop at a gas station. Repeat to fade.' Roger Ebert.

'The fact that they are so distracted by... life, by death, by something... that they fail to notice that they keep stopping at the same station- is perhaps the most poignant contemporary commentary on the modern human condition. The final shot- of the wife looking at the attendant, looking at her distant husband, looking back at the attendant, furrowing her brow, as if on the verge of realisation, recognition, of some kind of comprehension (about what? the fact that the road is repeating itself? That they're in some kind of dull hell? That they're simply lost?) before shaking her head distractedly- takes this quiet film beyond the perimeter of Hitchcockian suspense, to something less satisfying and more truthful: there may be bombs under our respective tables, but we rarely notice them, even when they do go boom.' Slavoj Zizek.

8: KAL-EL (Ang Lee, 2002, USA)

Another film, then, trading science-fiction cliches for hard currency. Ang Lee removes the rumbuncious idolatory from Superman by leaving him on Krypton; an alterna-hell of green normality. His semi-beurocratic life has echoes of Clark Kent, but shorn of the sudden gear-change at the drop of a baby into heroically sentimental icon, that refracted ideal of America's self-image. So, we have a man in a robe doing a job, with no smellovision sonatas, no Christmas tones. Kal-El is a regular alien with regular parents. But he has dreams, dreams in which he is strong enough to lift vehicles, repair dams, fly. 'To say I made Superman without Superman is absurd. He exists in Kal-El's dreams, just as he lives in ours,' Ang Lee said, in a defence of his apparent sabotage. The real heresy (if that is a strong enough word for pop culture fanatics in a post-Christianity world) was perhaps having a Kal-El whose escalating resentment about the disparity between his life and dreams ends with him making a bomb big enough to destroy his homeworld, before fleeing and crashlanding on a green and blue planet where he has ultrasonic ears. And where, naturally, he can fulfill his own invented destiny.

'That this Superman is like any reality show contestant- tall, handsome, convinced of his own uniqueness- makes him simultaneously loathsome and sympathetic. Lee's genius is in holding these two weights in complete harmony' LA Times.

7: LIPSTICK FIBROSIS (Bert Smith, 2007, UK)

'The blogging generation's Spiceworld' The Guardian.

'Hey Hey We're the Junkies' The Sun

'War of the Worlds meets Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park meets Mars Attacks meets Head meets The Day The Earth Stood Still meets Abba: The Movie meets Mamma Mia meets Signs meets Purple Rain meets The Faculty meets Help meets The Thing meets Eddie and the Cruisers meets ET meets That Thing You Do meets Mack and Me meets This Island Earth meets Oliver Stone's The Doors meets Plan 9 meets Dreamgirls meets The Faculty meets Paris Blues. In fact, I'll tell you exactly what this film is like- the scene in Masters of the Universe where Courtney Cox's boyfriend discovers that he can decipher the key to the cosmic flux capacitor portal device by plugging it into his Yamaha keyboard and playing strident yuppie rock chords, thus evading Frank Langella's Skeletor- that scene, over the course of ninety minutes, refracted through myspace. Fun.' Mark Kermode.

Real-life legends-in-their-own-bathtimes Lipstick Fibrosis play themselves as Earth's last hope against marauding martians. Druggy singer Oskar Minimal is the hero whose asexual pipes flood the air with so much tuneless drivel that the aliens cannot decipher it among the rubble of hipster carnage in 21st century London. The previously unheralded spazzcore refuseniks turn out to be lovable heroes, world is saved, triumphant sell-out concert ensues. The rushed sequel Lipstick Fibrosis At The Beach (2008) was a step too far, and the forthcoming Lipstick Fibrosis In Space (2011) seems doomed. After the dismal failure of Razorlight At The Edge of Time (2007), and Jet: The Movie(2008), the brief band movie resurrection seems over. He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kasabian (2008), it should be noted, received a verdict of 'surprisingly watchable' in my house.

LE PAROLE (THE WORDS, aka TALEBAIT) (Mario Monicelli, 1973)

2009-12-03T13:35:00.000-08:00

'MY SENTENCE IS STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND!'

Mario Monicelli and Italo Calvino appear on-screen. Calvino stands over a typewriter. Monicelli reads what he types: 'When you get your tenses wrong, tectonic plates swallow houses somewhere warm. When your sentence srtucture is unsound, skyscrapers topple in another city. Words are everything.' What follows is a succession of short films, all written by Calvino, and directed by Monicelli.

'THE WAY THE STORY IS FELLED: THE STORY-HUNTERS OF IMAGINERIA'

Stories, of course, are not invented. They have to be caught. Some move slowly, like trees, and can be cut and stripped easily. Others, by which we mean the better, rarer ones, have a quicksilver movement that means they must be tricked. The Story Hunters of Italo Calvino's fable are not wilderness wanderers with spears, but lateral-thinking architects. Distant diggers obey subsequent clauses, and despite trundling through the tenses, from future perfect back to shrunken present, and manage to lay solid enough foundations. The machines pivot, laying scaffold to support word brick lines. These sentences can act as mazes, forcing stories down dead end alleys and into convenient corners. This results, hopefully, in capture. The words are abstract traps. For the Story Hunter, they can be everything, the poison that drugs the tale, the wall that prevents convenient getaway, but also (and this is crucial), they can serve to delay the hunter, for it is possible that he too may be rendered woozy and confused by the structures, and drunk on their horny potentials, be rendered babbling into ever diminishing tunnels of chatter, where letters, symbols, and punctuation haunt his direction (parentheses, often a clarifying pair of friends, only adding to the disruption by building roadblocks where doors should be (and building doorways inside smaller doorways, ever onwards) and offering little defence when truly required (when the tale shakes its fur and sidesteps at top speed, once, twice, a pirouette, a hop, all punctuation trips; in panic, over itself, over each other), and so the tale, so ripe for grasping and pinning while still alive into the display case (for sombre repeats, ad infinitum) one moment, is gone from view the next, tracks disappearing in the high winds/ heavy snowfall/ persistent drizzle.

'THE LION AWAITS'

'I shall be attaching myself to you like starfish for the rest of the night'. A writer (Vittorio Gassman) attempts to write down every detail of a woman (Gigi Proietti). She moves, and his notes are blurred.

'THE PLOT MACHINE'

New York, 1899. When The Professor (Donald Sutherland) designs a machine that writes plots for stories, he is inundated with visits from budding novelists high in descriptive talent but lacking the requisite organizational story-telling abilities to wow. At first the existence of the machine suggests the unimaginative rut that Man has run into by offering wondrous and complex storylines that are used by the writers to garnish the theatre and novels of the time. The Professor tours America with the machine, accompanied by his money-seeking agent (Warren Oates) and his daughter (Lily Dragoon), sprinkling inventive narratives on writers everywhere at $10 a pop. But soon there are problems: A protest group, known as the Pro-Imaginatives, follow the tour and as attention for the Professor's invention grows, so does their opposition. They believe that 'man should stand or fall by his own ideas, and that using a machine to create thoughts is blasphemous and false'.

The Professor counters this by drugging his audience, but finds himself confused about the next course of action. Conveniently (plotwise), the machine explodes, sprinkling its magic all over the world. Inspiration now floats in pockets, invisible clouds, waiting to be walked through by unaware individuals. Our only awareness of our contact with these fields is when thoughts attach themselves in sudden fashion in unlinked contexts: When shopping in a supermarket or walking to work, for example, and we suddenly think of a long-dead grandparent, or a childhood song, or a jarring, phrase, name or joke which we find we must repeat over and over, prayerlike, investigating the mystery of words. The movie suggests that the machine is behind early cinema releases like the Melieres' Trip To The Moon; that without it, Edison would have lacked the imagination to conceive of cinema.

'THE QUATRAIN'

The quatrain is a poetry train. Tight rhymes and iambic pentameter keep the wheels on the tracks, on the tracks, on the tracks, on the tracks. When somebody aboard writes free-form, the train comes off the rails. But is this a problem? Perhaps with lines fizzing in new, broken directions, the train may spin into unchartered territories? Klaus Nomi stars as a flamboyantly hopeless poet whose dizzy lines might lead the train to other planets, and they might not.

'THE QUICK WINTER'

A poor farmer (Ugo Tognazzi) is confounded by a sudden frost which kills his crop of letters. Without letters, his village cannot talk. Twenty mute minutes ensue.

'TALEBAIT'

Back in the woods, the trap is set. The Story Hunters wait. But in the night, hope gives way to despair, as they remember how many beautiful sentences they need. As they wait, we hear a distant noise on the wind. As it grows louder, the Story Hunters look confused. But we recognise the voice: It is The Professor from 'The Plot Machine', repeating over and over, 'Even with my machine, I don't know how to end this story... even with my machine, I don't know how to end this story... even with my machine...'

Le Parole Directed by Mario Monicelli Produced by Mario Cecchi Gori Written by Italo Calvino Starring Vittorio Gassman Gigi Proietti Donald Sutherland Warren Oates Klaus Nomi Italo Calvino Mario Monicelli Adolfo Celi Ugo Tognazzi Claude Dauphin Titanus Film 99 mins Release Date Ita: June 1973, UK/US: Nov 1973 Tagline:'Grandpa, Where Do Stories Come From?'

DONNA, OR THE POWER OF CONSTANT THOUGHT (Hermoso Equipo, 1951)

2009-11-28T11:16:00.000-08:00

You've seen it. Or, you've seen something like it. The same anonymous actors, same colours, but a variation on a theme:

Nick and Debs stop at a donut bar in the middle of a huge goodbye party. Employees of a local office are saying goodbye to a colleague named Donna. She doesn't seem to be there yet, or perhaps she is already gone, but the place is covered in written and drawn testimonials to her. They gaze at her picture. Nick thinks she is pretty. Debs thinks she looks like trouble. Then a friendly guy asks them to sign her card. They protest, saying it isn't right, as they didn't know her. Eventually Debs takes the pen to be polite, but when she looks at the card she sees a message in Nick's handwriting. Did you sign the card before? Did you know her? she asks. Nick is apparently stunned.

Later, Nick finds a letter in the attic from Donna. Or, a postcard arrives from her, saying: Nick, I wish I could have got to know you before I left, D x.

The couple are haunted. The movie ends with first scene being repeated, but with Nick and Debs' discomfort amplified. They do not know why.

Jimmy Jensen was part of the Danewood scene (the brief postwar Copenhagen coterie of state-supported filmmakers), until he left to start a wired, off-the-radar operation in Mexico City. Beginning in 1949, Jensen and his Mexican cohorts churned out over five hundred Hollywood-aping noir thrillers, in English and often with a mixture of C-list Hollywood nobodies and young Hispanic talent. These pictures were largely shot with Mexico City standing in for LA, Chicago or New York and with their pulpy concentration of crime and lust became known as 'Mexican Sexiguns', or just 'Sexiguns'. The films were frequently made simultaneously, with often as many as thirty in production at once, leading to obvious pitfalls. Many films contain overlapping actors, directors and scenes. Sometimes the cast and crew did not know which film they were working on, and some films are clearly a collage of several, causing their plots to be a hash of tangled cliches. Due to this, all films are attributed to a fictional director, Hermoso Equipo (Spanish for 'beautiful team').1 The group found strength in this approach, with Jensen even believing that 'the more of different films we get in one film, more authors involved, the more plots we refer to... the closer to the centre of fiction and humanity we got'.2

American Chiffon Fahey and Englishman Martin Bastion, never stars anywhere else, made several Sexiguns together, notably Bone Ring (1952), Sterling Silver Hallmark (1953) and this. Donna, Or The Power Of Constant Thought also stars the Latina bombshell Luisa Teresa Caracas, better known as 'Pipi', a popular singer of overwrought ballads in her homeland, Peru. Here she stars as Donna, a gossamer image of charged sexuality who flickers on the edge of the grey screen, threatening to burst through Nick and Debs' idea of themselves with technicolor vigour, and further, on through the fourth wall completely, covering the audience with gorgeous neon plasma. Such is her beauty.

Fahey and Bastion, haunted by the suppressed memory/ exposed id/ vibrating chaotic alternative that is Donna perfectly portray a milk-white and gaunt marriage, affectionate but drifting to tepid. (Of course, this being Hermoso Equipo, footage from the same shoot is used to perfectly represent unsure newlyweds on the lam and kissing cousins in Young Marrieds (1951) and Against God's Will (1951) respectively.

Weird interludes abound. A sudden bank heist is prevented, a young homeless boy with a bag of gold wanders across the screen, and Pipi sings a stinging ballad, apropos of nothing. These diversions, clearly intended to be sections from other Sexiguns edited carelessly into the Donna mixture, actually serve to embody the protagonists' confusion about this strage girl very well; indeed, the constant dissonance of overlapping energies can at times be so potent that this hurried B-production transcends mere pastiche and becomes something more ephemeral and spectacular. 'It is as if the actors are trapped in the screen, awaiting the cruel mercies afforded by sudden editing'3

The Sexiguns drifted and died by the early sixties, as inner tensions and a loss of will meant that the focus of the group had been lost. But their achievements are still noteworthy: in fifteen years, an as many as five hundred films were released, but an estimated thousand more jumpy hybrids were made. Most are lost, but some still surface at film festivals or on obscure cable channels. Noteworthy Sexiguns This Seems Like It's Real (1952), Pretty Worn Down, Whatever We Do We Don't Tell William, 14 Carat Gold With A Very Sadly Shattered Amethyst (all 1954), Too Smoky To Be Emerald (1955), Turpentine Lipstick (1956) and The Dark Underbelly (1959) are widely available.

The American-Korean boybuilder, Wii Fit, was perhaps the most famous breakout star of the Sexiguns. His charismatic monosyllabic performances in This Woman Is Amazing (1953), Very Of Their Time, Very Unique (1953) and The Crazy Folk Who Think This Is All Junk (1954), led to a role in Vicente Minelli's Hollywood musical biopic of Mussolini, Il Duce (1959) and subsequently recurring roles in US television shows such as Mork and Spork, Mister Probs 'n' Sister Probs and The Love Fund. He may have become the most famous, but really picking stars from such a collective seems beside the point somehow.

Donna, Or The Power Of Constant Thought Directed by Hermoso Equipo Produced by Hermoso Equipo Written by Hermoso Equipo Starring Luisa Teresa Caracas Chiffon Fahey Martin Bastion Hermoso Equipo Films Release Date US: circa 1951 Tagline: 'Can You Forget Her If You Never Knew Her?'

1. This led to a curious and no doubt apochryphal incident when in 1963 Fidel Castro invited 'the genius who offers gorgeous satire of the evil empire, Hermoso Equipo' to visit Cuba. Castro of course, being a Spanish speaker, would not be confused by such an obvious ruse, but the story lives on.

2. LA Times interview, Sept 1977.

3. So says film critic Jean-Luc Sofie, whose book Sexie was a crucial factor in getting critical attention to Sexiguns many years after the fact.

THE PRISON RODEO (Shye Phillips, 1990)

2009-11-13T09:08:00.000-08:00

'An incredible thing about cinema is that if someone is hiding in a closet, for example, perhaps from a group of pursuers, then we almost automatically feel a sense of trepidation about their potential discovery. This happens whether the hidden protagonist is a cop, a thief, a child murderer... what is this moral blur, and how does it occur?'1

This thriller has a trim and simple plot over which it plays a desolate magic:

Lance Guest stars as Vince, a man who is rightfully imprisoned for his part in a jewel heist. Despite swearing to stand by her man, his wife Hope (Penelope Ann Miller) soon shacks up with an avant garde country star DK (Dwight Yoakam) who writes a song celebrating their love.2 When this proves to be a smash on the charts, Vince vows to find a way to escape prison and win his girl back. The only problem is securuty has been stepped up after several high profile escapes, and there is no way out. Enter the Doc (Roky Erickson), a lifer whose eccentric practices suggest he can help Vince.

This much is established in the first ten minutes, with little fuss or fanfare. The swift arrival at

this juncture leads us to suspect a regulation prison drama, as our hero avoids survives lunch room staredowns and shower assassins. But we get something else when the Doc shows up. This isn't the wise and weary mentor we expect, for the Doc is somewhere between a poet preacher and magus. Through a series of incoherent, electric Erickson rants, we discover the Doc's escape plan for Vince: He will teach him to teleport through the walls.

'Vince, according to the law you deserve to be here. You did it. But there are higher laws. The rites of love give you access to more transient powers. Belief and control of this will come if you listen. I know, I know, you hear vulnerable sounds. The room has a changed timbre, with ideas wedged in a funnel and allowed to run. An unusual combination of textures is before your eyes. It makes every sound visible. Every now and again, as you breathe, allow a memory of your girl to bleed. Like the time you met, the time you approached her in the interval at the movies and said Will you have a drink with me?

You'll be confused. You'll be real confused. But these ideas float in a Xenon mist, and are only visible if you look straight ahead. No-one else here has this perspective, so they can't steal them. Classic military strategy. Steady. Don't fight the chair. Gung-ho iguanas tell me to relax. A thousand distractions, but you'll walk through the stone. Meanwhile, a beta unit that looks like yourself will warm your bed at night. Olefactory senses will guide you. Soon you'll be making it up to one another over warm beer at Silver Lake. The defences are like turrets. You'll dodge past them, a ghost, keeping radio silence in the fourth dimension. I'll jam the frequencies of nether ghosts while you dance on through the caves of the mind... shooting your way out through the walls like light. A long and fruitful life awaits with your little sweetie. Possibly.'

'Why possibly, Doc?'

'There is another possibility of course: Vince passes through the wall. His ghost walks twenty miles to her house. He sees her crying and thinks it is for him. It is not. It is because she is being haunted by her con ex-husband. Because it hinges on this: If your love is as true as you say, and hers is too, then the auditorium will clap your miraculous escape. But if not, then you are the stalker in their bad dreams.'

With this exchange, the Doc sets up a thought in our minds that it takes Vince a whole film to consider: that his wife was never supposed to be with him. Their love is over. Vince's Hope on the outside is someone else's, and should be.

Time passes. Vince practices. His teleportation appears successful. But increasingly, our sympathies are drawn away from him; Erickson's witchy tones don't ever stop, they drip over the images like a devil's treacle, or haunted molasses, or a wired broth. The frantic actions conveyed by his voice suggest all too well that he, not Vince, is the only one of them to truly feel hot emotion; Vince seems to slip away, his moral compass gone, his face a bland shadow. Our protagonist is essentially rubbed out of his own narrative halfway through, leaving only the memory in his wife's head of a failed first husband. And he disappears as if teleported not only out of prison but out of the world, and we are left hoping, in a final scene of domestic bliss between Hope and her DK, that Vince cannot touch her ever again.3

The Prison Rodeo Directed by Shye Phillips Written by Tom Tipley Produced by Shye Phillips, Martin Scorcese Starring Lance Guest Penelope Ann Miller Roky Erickson Dwight Yoakam Warner Brother Pictures US/UK Release Date: March 1990 Tagline: 'When Inside is Outside, is Outside In?'

1. 'The Slack Chariot: Cinema As 1000 Messages' esseay by Painter Williams, Times Literary Supplement, Sept 17, 1995.

2. The song includes the fevered quatrain that gives the film its title: 'Don't worry about him right now/He'll be starring in the prison rodeo right now/ You can call his name if you please/ But it's not him in your bathtub sha-sha-shaking your knees'

3. A 1993 sequel (Prison Rodeo II, 1993, starring Guest and Phoebe Cates) explored events after the first film, with Vince haunting his ex-wife in her new home in New Mexico. It played like Jerry Zucker's Ghost (1990) if Moore had been horrified throughout and Swayze had no Goldberg to filter his confusions through, comically or otherwise.