EN VANAVOND NEMEN WE BABEL (AND TONIGHT WE TAKE BABEL) (Hans Van Den Boom, 1977)

'Comparisons are reductive.  And the critical game of trying to describe a piece of art by naming two others is not only lazy, but cheating.  If I were to say that this film is a blending of Jodorowosky's Holy Mountain and Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line (with the mystical terrorism of Michael Mann's The Keep), I would feel a sense of embarrassment about my ability to describe what I see to you.  But I did mention them, and even in withdrawing them I leave something for you to go on (like a prosecuting lawyer who draws groundless pictures which will inevitably be struck out by the judge, knowing that the pictures are in the minds of the jury and cannot be unseen).  A fake, maybe, but now you have a turnstile into the correct ballpark that holds And Tonight We Take Babel, and you can feel the ebb and flow of its game, restricted seating or otherwise.' Mitch Michener (1)

A spy has already given her life in exchange for smuggled footage, taken by microcameras hidden in her hair.  Based on this information, the psych-drum was struck, calling the men.  Soon, the corridors echo with humming nuns, one sitting in every home that has sent a soldier.  Families launch night-time candlelit vigils through the centres of towns.  Silently.  They walk a strict route as an omen of disaster, the song of curlews at night, has been heard.

We will witness, from beginning to end, a military attack on an enchanted meadow of noise.  The need for this land is never entirely clear, but we can gather from the bubbling voicebox thrum coming from it that it is more than a symbolic or strategic significance, and that the holy din therein can cause men to believe that they can swim new rivers and end all wars. 

The weather spoils one advance, leaving platoons marooned at the foot of the hill.  As they await instructions, their supplies, which consist mainly of powdered drinks, run low, and they are forced to brew soups from the spillages of wildlife.  They haven't seen the enemy yet, but know that too long spent in the valley could see them fatally outflanked.  The mood is itchy.  The prophylactic errors in boudoirs of towns on the trail must be left behind, a new spiritual strength must be found for the assault.  But where?  The valley is filled with exotic foliage.  Broccoli trees loom up to fifty feet, but are yellow and inedible at this time of year.  Endless shining truths loom on the horizon, ready to poison a corporal.  The men know that waiting until the solstice will make the attack harder.  But striking on the night itself, the longest there is, might swiften the end.

In the meantime, the regiment's icon is placed on a tablecloth at the head of the advance.  It sits, hot as an electric fence, crackling with premonitions of action.  Soldiers take turns making offerings, hoping to wash their arms with oranged energy before battle.  Their prayers seem to be grammatically unconnected lists, as if proving to their god that Babel Hill, with it's surfeit of language, must be delivered; without it their words have no meaning.  Despite their claims to blankness, corrupt imagery seeps through their syllables.

Generals in their tent discuss ball games from home to avoid talking about the paradoxes of battle:  We do not need to fight.  But we need to win.  We do not have a reason to fight unless we win.  Then meaning follows. 

One general, more thoughtful than the others, has been observing the men:

'Although the battle plan imposes few constraints on the movements of its soldiers, I learn with interest that individual performances do not diverge significantly from one another, nor does the regiment degenerate into chaos.  The fact that this does not happen is of considerable interest, because it suggests that somehow a set of controls which are not stipulated in the plan arise in battle, and that these "automatic" controls are the real determinants of the war.  Optimistically speaking, we are perhaps far more telepathic than we suspected.  On the other hand, perhaps we lack any imagination. This is fascinating, and could prove decisive in either direction.'

Psychic soldiers behind our lines sit and project an invisible netting over the battlefield.  Their concentrated efforts not only slow the movements of the enemy, but give our men the opportunity to advance through the air.  Teams of six can, with a combination of molasses, Diet Coke and prayer, lift off the ground and spin over the battlefield. Many of these early scouts will be shot out of the sky and move on to Valhalla introductory ceremonies, but the drama of their percussive deaths allows our army to find new positions.  The rest of us salute them, and run into our new positions.  The objective is now in view.

The enemy sends shunts into our psychic field.  These low-resistance connections in the circuit form an alternative path for a portion of the current. This bypass allows their guerrillas passage into our body channels, and if not stopped quickly, they can surgically divert blood from out vessels.    Instructions to the front line become ever more damaged and confused, arriving as whispered rumours.  The battle rages for days.

The general:
'Perhaps the only way to truly outflank this enemy is if we find a brand new pattern of assault.  I propose that we send a platoon through the unguarded pass we call The Afterlife.  Once there, these men can cause havoc with the minds of the enemy, who do not believe in what they cannot see.  Once these men have plotted coordinates, a massive rush of men behind them will swing the battle decisively.'

An explosion, and suddenly we are in a quiet room.

Young, young men smile and escort us through the white.  They are sort of astronauts, but with all the psychological aspects of sailors.  Their calm smiles lead us to a banquet.  We tell them of our orders, to take the pass, but they insist that we sit.  Slowly, the guilt we feel about abandoning our colleagues fades, and as course after course of delicious food is brought to us, we begin to believe that perhaps we have won.  For surely, only the owners of the melodious field of Babel could provide such a meal.

And Tonight We Take Babel Directed by Hans Van Den Boom Produced by Ronny van der Linden Written by Hans van den Boom Starring Willem Joos, Rutger Hauer, Herman Brood, Jeroen Krabbe, Hans van den Boom  102 mins OranjeFilm/ Rank Organisation Release Date UK: Sept 1977 US: N/A Tagline:'War Is Hill.'

1. First Lines From The Front Lines  (MacMillan, 1985)

FUTUR (Piotr Janas, 1958)

'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'

TEN FICTIONAL FILMS OF THE DECADE (Part Two)

=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)

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 JOUR NOUS AVONS PERDU UN MOIS (THE DAY WE LOST A MONTH) (Chris Marker, 1966)

The Day We Lost A Month, the reaction was slow. No-one noticed at first: It was May, and November was the month that had been taken. As leaders took to our screens to tell us, most didn't understand. How could this happen?

Chris Marker (real name Christian Francois Bouche-Villeneuve) emerged internationally with La Jetee (1962), a seismic short composed of still photography that tells the tale of a post-nuclear time-travel experiment.1 It set the tone for his further work, especially La Jour Nous Perdu Un Mois. Both films share a documentary style, a time-travel motif and a bleak outlook. La Jour... takes an absurdist concept and grounds it in grim detail: The governments of the world discover that the month of November has 'vanished'. An explanation for this is not forthcoming. The film centres on events between this discovery becoming public and its consequences: it is, essentially, a pre-apocalyptic panic film, with a vague and not yet understood apocalypse.

Snatches of anonymous monologue surround the film:

One twelfth of our lives will be stolen away. That is at least six years to a healthy Westerner. Where did they go? Who took them? Early government reports were perceived as whitewashes designed to placate and confuse. This only caused people to suspect a conspiracy even more. Angry speeches turned into riots. But truthfully, the governments of the world were as unsure about the situation as the rest of us.

We are healthy. We are well. This will not happen.

But what if November literally caved in, leaving millions fleeing for a safer time of year, and destroying Thanksgiving? The rich might manage to buy themselves a perpetual August, guarded by hired armies, but others would be left scrambling from the void.

A group of revolutionaries in France attacked several May days and successfully captured them, with the aim of turning them into cool November ones; in effect beginning a rationing process of the rest of the days, spreading them along the calendar, pushing the edges of October and December into the void, like stepping stones over rushing black waters. But the French government, backed by the UN, freed the days in a daring televised raid.

The May days wilted, cried, disappeared. Years were shrivelling before our eyes.

A plan was formed that involved a small group of elite marines dropping by helicopter into the day after October 31st to see what was there. This mission was named 'The October 32nd Drop' and was deemed by many experts to be a suicide mission.

Could time be tricked if we supposed a new calendar? Could we trick ourselves into not noticing our cosmic short-changing?

The articulation of a fear of loss is potent here: What is being taken is not material, and thus cannot be saved. The diminishing of November is as strange and inevitable as the slipping of teenage love from its glorious mountaintop, or of one's own life ending. There is no villain to defend against, no cure; just apprehensive misunderstandings, loss, and possible death.

Come October, panics begin. With no November, what will happen? Will we simply jump to December? If so, can we just call that November? Some tried to compare it to the panic over the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, but that was technically a renaming. With this, we were actually losing time.

What if when the clock turns to midnight on Halloween, the world ceases?

The hopeless, black void at the end of this film is one of the most despairing negatives in movie lore. Sad as a D chord held indefinitely, the confusion and fear of the previous seventy minutes is funnelled chillingly into an ever darkening image.

And then, nothing.

Le Jour Nous Avons Perdu Un Mois Directed by Chris Marker Produced by Anatole Dauman Written by Chris Marker, Jacques Sternberg Music by Paul Misraki Starring Helena Chamelaine, David Richard, Serene Vespa Athos Films/Criterion Release Date UK/Fra: June 1966

1. La Jetee was later remade, most famously by Terry Gilliam as Twelve Monkeys (1995), but also by Mamoru Oshii as The Red Spectacles (1987) and by Jeff Poncaby-Ryde as Time Bitch (2001). Le Jour Avons... was remade by Jan Le Bont as No Thanksgiving This Year (2002), starring Nicolas Cage and Madeline Stowe.

SEPTEMDECILLION a.k.a. A ZILLION TROUBLES (Hypperson 2007)

'Cinema became so high-concept it consumed itself by 2001. What we see on our screens now are echoes and ghosts' Jean Baudrillard,1

The enigmatically named Hypperson has set about turning children's quasi-facts into fictions, and his huge-budgeted creations have almost created a new genre. What if? cinema if you will, although that doesn't satisfy, because all speculative fiction is such a query; Logistics Cinema, perhaps, as suggested, not without spite, by cultural expert and thinker Graheme G.

Before this behemoth, Hypperson had already garnered attention for his expensive debut China World Suicide (2005) which was about a bankrupt Chinese government in the near future trying to organise an attack on the United States. The film is largely made up of discussions between Chinese scientists as they argue about the veracity or otherwise of the statement which every schoolchild knows: 'If everyone in China jumped on the spot at the same time, it would cause a tidal wave big enough to flood America'. Is the hypothesis plausible? The top brass, ludicrously, seem to think so, and enforce training drills to create synchronicity. After a practice strike on Hawaii, China faces diplomatic meltdown and mutual destruction with it's main plan.

Septemdecillion is itself more than an investigation of an unprovable query: Of course, every British child knows the probability (or otherwise) of every person on the planet fitting onto the Isle of Wight (the island off the South Coast of England only 147 square miles of land in size), and Hypperson does not concern himself very much with the theory: He simply begins the film with everybody in the world waking up on the island. No one knows how they got there, and indeed, we never really find out. Instead, the film concentrates on the havoc that would be wreaked in the wake of such an event: The unattended nuclear weapons, the unmanned power stations, the empty parliaments; food and sanitation issues, impossible crushes, splintered communities. The two hours of the film are a hectic scramble, as we watch confused familes looking for one another, concussed rioters fighting, aggressive swimmers diving for the mainland, petulance and preaching, pushing and posturing. In long early scenes, we hear a babble of noise from which only minor details emerge. Amidst the panic and fear, we occasionally see a good samaritan attempt find order, or a veiled prognosis from a professor, or a Doctor administering bandages to crushed children, but the camera leaves, the outcome of these minor incidents lost in the dizzying spectacle of seven billion stories. The camera, whirring around, simply cannot choose a starting point, and is strangled by gasping narratives.

A sequel: Septemdecillion Squared (2009) was ill received by a sceptical public, whose boredom at Hypperson's philosophical musings was evident. The plot this time, was a slight variation: Everyone who has ever lived on Planet Earth wakes up in 2020 on the Isle of Wight. Piles and piles of people, from different eras are there, on that 12.5 by 25 miles of land. The supernatural shock of humanity being confronted with her own refried pasts sends such a jolt through her body that the island becomes an angry bloodbath, with piles and piles of writhing fights. 'I essentially want to keep making the same film, but with slight environmental changes. My films are experiments, and I am a scientist.'2 Universal declared no interest in financing further Hypperson productions after the failure of Septemdecillion Squared, but he has vowed to continue, and is plotting back-to-back sequels in 2011: Septemdecillion: Manhattan and Septemdecillion: Moon recreate the scenario but in the respective locations. 'Moon' will essentially concentrate on the Earth. Says Hypperson: 'If everyone wakes up on the moon, and then dies, what happens on Earth. The image of overgrown shopping malls is an appealing one to me.... I am also a film-maker concerned by the grammar of the medium. When, in a horror film, a girl leaves her shower to investigate a noise, I find myself horribly distracted by the fact that she hasn't turned the water off, which bothers me far more than the inevitable intruder. The Septemdecillion is an attempt to create a horrific situation, and then tidy it up'3

Indeed, the film climaxes with a series of everyday banalities: a shopkeeper finds looters have done just a little damage to his shop. The President finds his red button untouched. Refugees board buses. Ferries run at all hours. A baby is delivered safely. Pockets of reunions take place. Food is passed around. The gradual, fearsome crawl of the everyday dulls even this most supernatural of experiences.

Septemdecillion Directed by Hypperson Produced by Ron Elegant, Hypperson Written by Hypperson, Dane Bowers Universal Pictures Release Date US: June 2007 UK: July 2007 Tagline: What if?

1. Cine Dreams, Fourth Estate, 2007

2. Film Bizz interview, October 2009

3. Film Bizz interview, October 2009

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. (Tim Thurber, 1979)

This sci-fi dalliance started out as a straight adaptation of Alfred Bester's novel The Demolished Man, which pitted the resources of a vast interplanetary empire against a corps of mind-readers. By the time Tim Thurber had got his opposable thumbs on it, the script (which at one point was rewritten by a beardless James Cameron) was folded in on itself, like a classroom demonstration of a theory of time-travel.

A 95 year-old Douglas Fairbanks stars as reclusive rebel leader H.E.R.O. (Hope Enabling Religious Omen) who, with the help of Rich of Yolenge (John Travolta) gives battle in vigour to, as he announces from a mountain at a critical point, 'prove that men can very easily, with justice on their side, have useful, and free, purposes'. Both men share the belief that they must rise violently against oppression, and form the secret group A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.-Ace Corps of Rebellious Ousider New Young Men- to do this.

After the cruel government led by B.O.S.S. (Big Overlord of pSychic Subjects, herein represented by a holographic image with the voice of Sir Laurence Olivier) labels all disloyal citizens as L.O.S.E.R.S (Lethargic or Subversive Energy Redundant Subjects), a cult group of peaceful protesters (led by Dennis Hopper as R.E.B.E.L. (Reaching Everyone By Exposing Lies) name themselves L.O.V.E. (Let Our Violence End) and spray their symbols and slogans across the futuristic Maglev trains, but a counter-revolutionary band also calling themselves L.O.V.E. (League of Villainous Entities) steal the original groups signage and calling cards, and in an echo of the Nazis use of the swastika (an analogy heavily alluded to with some weighty pans and grating synth-strings), pervert L.O.V.E. to nefarious ends, forcing the authorities to ban all public displays of L.O.V.E.

The ban is quickly extended by B.O.S.S. to include all Acronym-using groups. This puts a price on the heads of A.C.R.O.N.Y.M., and they go underground, taking the alternative name of S.Y.N.O.N.Y.M. (Secret Young New Outsiders of Newer Younger Men) to buy themselves some T.I.M.E. (Tested Increments of Measured Essence). After L.O.V.E. members are murdered on live T.V. as an example to the L.O.S.E.R.S. and dissenters, H.E.R.O. and Yolenge's small band become Robin Hood figures to the oppressed populace. In hiding, they witness their original good name soiled by B.O.S.S., who stages fake A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. assaults on the poor, before cleaning the mess up with what he suggests is a 'heroic brand of Robotic Police; a life-saver in this darkened attic. This new band of Super Cops are playfully named A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. (Arch Cryptic Reminder Of the Nomenclature of Young Men) in an attempt to replace the populace's memory of the rebels with new safer ones. He speaks of a new kind of citizen, M.A.N. (Mechanized Aryan uNit) who will efficiently take the city into the future. Again, the Nazi references are somewhat overbearing.

S.Y.N.O.N.Y.M. stage an exciting climactic assault on the City of Glass Towers, the H.Q. (Headquarters) of B.O.S.S. H.E.R.O. inevitably dies in the skirmish, but not before he buys Yolenge enough T.I.M.E. to pixelate himself and slip unnoticed through the villains' cyber complex in bit-form, subsequently slaying B.O.S.S. in a P.O.N.G-like (Paddle Oriented Never-ending Game) death-match inside the computer. Travolta utters the now famous line, 'Game over buddy, press start!' and these celebratory words are recorded, played back, and strung out over the city tannoy, before breaking apart into single letters and floating down on the city like misty rain, causing alphabet trees to grow and liberate the citizens from the concrete of beurocratic word-hostaging. In the final optimistic scenes, we see the subjects farming the alphabet trees to grow new letters, which they arrange in beautiful lines. They now speak in iambic pentameter and frolic freely in green orchards. We hear the voice of a now much older Yolenge as the synthesized soundtrack (provided by Tangerine Dream in imperious sci-fi form) swells:

'... with time and manure, the citizens grew a new letter to add to the twenty-five we had. We called it 'Z'. 'Z' allowed us to make more words, but more importantly, it finally allowed us to sleep... and to dream... and to sleeeeep... and to d r e a m... y a w n . . . t o s l e e p . . . t o d r e a m . . . . t o . . . z z z z zzz....'

The film has been scavenged by the pop-culture savvy: The Ace Corps of Rebellious Outsider New Young Men were the inspiration for both the New York-based no-wave band Ace Corps and the British New Wave of New Wave band New Outsider Young Men (winners of the NME best live band in 1993). There are many examples of songs entitled 'Game Over, Press Start', including creations by the Talking Heads, Weezer, Wheatus and Ween. Greggs, the British chain of bakers, took their name from the pasty-like food units consumed in the movie: G.R.E.G.G.'s are Generous Reheated Energy Giving Globes, and at one point a member of S.Y.N.O.N.Y.M. says 'I'm so hungry, I could eat a thousand G.R.E.G.G's!'. This later became the centrepiece of a long T.V. advertising campaign for the company.

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Directed by Tim Thurber Produced by Kip Warner Written by Tim Thurber, James Cameron, based on the novel 'The Demolished Man' by Albert Bester Starring John Travolta, Douglas Fairbanks, Sir Laurence Olivier, Dennis Hopper Music by Tangerine Dream 20th Century Fox Pictures Release date US: April 1979 UK: August 1979 Tagline: 'C.A.P.I.T.A.L.I.Z.E.!.'

GESTERN IST NICHT DORT (YESTERDAY ISN'T THERE) (Dieter Buchmann, 2001)

That such a thoroughly modern piece of art could cause slow-burning collective shock... should please anyone with concerns of the future of humanity. That it should be a B-movie set in near future Germany made with only ten thousand Euros should warm the cockles of the romantic hearth. So: this near-future Germany then, where people are getting nostalgic for old things and playing with modern technology, much like us, here, now; but they do this so much that a collective short-term memory loss takes hold. Heads filled with dreams of future technologies (we see social networking ear-pieces and fleshy interfaces instead of keyboards) and sharpened memories of ephemeral history (a gameshow called Pop AD! in which contestants reel off huge lists of the pop charts in 1983, or dialogue from popular sitcoms) mean that slowly the country becomes aware that practical details of recent days slip from view. It starts with small things, like keys being lost, doors left open, and proceeds to a state where people cannot remember the way to the school their child goes to, or even cannot remember their child. Banks begin to fall apart because administrative skills are all but forgotten; panicked individuals wander the streets, not knowing who they are, reciting a list of Best Actress Oscar winners (and nominees) from 1926 onwards, for comfort.

The hero, played by Kurt Hauser, (who famously starred alongside David Bowie in Lindsay Anderson's Mime in 1973, and so by appearing here brings flashing memories to the surface of the audience) devises strategies to help him try to remember his wife, whose whereabouts he cannot decipher. A computer expert, he builds a keyboard with actors and pop stars faces instead of letters on the keys, which brings him to the attention of a secret underground group collating a Memory Advancement Database (M.A.D.) which aims to collect real-life memories. 'Without MAD, there is nothing' the boss of the organisation tells Hauser.

Gestern... was a remake of Sehnsucht (Nostalgia), which was made by Fritz Lang in 1930, and remade in 1935 in Hollywood by Lang himself. This first remake, titled Nostalgia and starring Henry Fonda, was a minor success. Since the success of Gestern... a band of fans of the Lang versions have gathered on the internet claiming that they can find remakes of the movie every year since its release; some even claim to find the original story in both The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Bible. Thinker Roland Barthes described the story as 'the only one ever told; but we have always forgotten it as soon as it passes through our ear canals, which profess to listen but are instead waterways filled with refuse and abandoned shopping carts'1

Dieter Buchmann himself has a mysterious past, with lists of film credits speculative at best. It is believed that he was the writer/director (listed as Dietmar Baumann) of Time-Traveller (1994), in which Ralph Macchio, after being told by a clairvoyant that he will become a war criminal and perpetrate mass genocides (and that, if he kills himself to stop this he will become a martyr and even more will die to honour his name), travels back in time to kill his own father, prevent his own birth, and thus prevent multiple organism deaths. He discovers that the much-used narrative device of changing the past to alter the future isn't true- he kills his father, but is still born in the future, but with a taste for blood from birth. (The tagline for the film was 'Man Builds Time Machine. Man Goes Back In Time To Kill His Father. Nothing Happens').

Naturally, Gestern Ist Nicht Dort was forgotten by everyone immediately, except by those few who could recite every line perfectly. Its warnings, whatever they were, remain more relevant than ever, I'm sure.

Gestern Ist Nicht Dort Directed by Dieter Buchmann Produced by Stefan Ardnt Written by Dietmar Baumann Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Release Date: UK/Germany April 2001, US Feb 2002 Tagline: 'Where Ist My Mind?'

1. The Way It Wasn't by Roland Barthes, published by Hill & Wang, 2004

THE IRON TOWER (Victor Lazarus,1926)

Strident Informations Abound! Default On Life!... and so on; Victor Lazarus' beautifully tinted silent vistas are punctuated by various sloganeering texts that never quite explain themselves; Silent movie great Donald Dunston Dunderville gives an iconic performance as a Roman Centurion who is determined to prove himself; and then there is the great Iron Tower itself, the biggest construction ever on a Hollywood lot, a towering monolith that in the movie appears one morning in the centre of Rome, tall and vulgar, begging to be challenged, and in real life unleashed a thousand poisons upon the Warner Brothers lot during its six-month stay. Avoid Diffusion! Disrupt Arts! the intercutting lines suggest and demand, prompting confusion from the pictures before us. An extistential journey? A surrealist wonder? A visual beanfeast? A symbolic afterlife query? A homosexual inquest? Pseudo-nonsense? The last pure leap of the silent age? The Iron Tower may well be all of these things, and more. Steadfast! Steadfast! Steadfast!

A ripe concoction indeed.

The crackling hollow images of early in the film set up what looks like being a standard romantic plot- Tyrus (Dunderville) is a Centurion of no great reputation, and his dreams of ways to prove himself to his mentor, Lexus (Roberto Strong) include bog-standard run-and-rescue scenarios and heroic pronouncements from the blond wonder (Breathe Maestro! Your Savior Explicits! Defence Is Dust!). Dunderville's broody insecurity invests these sequences with much pathos; but it is when the iron tower appears that he sees his true chance. No explanation is given for the appearance of the tower, which reaches beyond the clouds. The Romans see it at first as military assault, then as a blessing from the Gods; but as brave warrior after brave warrior attempts to ride his horse up the side of the construction, only to fall, the city's fathers begin to feel that the Gods are shunning them. They see this as a message that Rome is doomed. Alas! The Wolf-Brothers Forgotten, Accursed!

Tyrus, to the merriment of all, decides to attempt to climb the tower with the aid of only four arrows, which he drives into holes in the side of the tower and uses as steps, moving one at a time to make progress. The city gathers to laugh at the folly of the cherubic innocent whose climb is painfully slow. In some of the most dramatic sections of the film, Dunderville's hopeful and scared face is besieged by rotten fruit, thrown from below, and occasionally a failed hero, falling from above, hatred in his throat. Ponderus! I Will Resurrect! cries one burning victim. It increasingly seems like failure is the glorious option, that when he falls, Rome will nurse him to her rose breast and love him; but Tyrus continues, and makes it to the Supposed Volcano In The Clouds. The climax, set in lava skies, offers one thundering metaphor after another, as Tyrus, nonreligious and curious, argues with the heavenly voices and their brazen systems.

Freud, Sigmund called it 'the greatest sexual metaphor in the canon'1. Freud, Jimmy of the LA Chronicle called it 'barbaric witchery, fraudulent film-making, juvenile symbolism.'2 In light of the problems Warner had during shooting (one carpenter died falling from the construction, and two horses were injured in seperate incidents; costs escalated three-hundred-fold), Froyd, Beau of Snapshot christened the Iron Tower 'Mr Warner's Limping Member' before adding, after a disastrous opening few weeks, that 'America's chastity is clearly immune to such grand drizzle. Our belts are tight against such pornographic abundance' 3

Even so, the movie in time found a following, not least for its absurdist reckoning of heroism, the desperate performance of Dunderville, and the timeless images that pervade, ripping through the nightmares of a bustling century: The tower, the climb, the success of death.

The movie's title was changed to The Black Tower in Canada, where the terrorist group tour en fer (Iron Tower) had been causing political problems. The group changed their name to la tour noire as a riposte. Authorities thus banned the movie for years there, and it wasn't until a popular new version of the movie (with a soundtrack by German band Harmonia, added neon colouring and rediscovered lost sequences) was released in 1975 that Canadians could see The Iron Tower in full proud glory.

Dunderville? Alas his career struggled, like many of his peers, with the advent of sound. His shyly dashing appearance was undone by an ungodly flat vocal, but even so his fame (and that of co-star Tyrone Symple) was enough to bring success to Little People Are People A Little (Alan Smithee, 1933), RKO's response to MGM's Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932), the movie that started a domino effect of increasingly exploitative outsider flicks about those members of society with physical abnormalities. The success of Dunderville's sound endeavour warranted a quick sequel, but Little People Are People A Little Too (Reckless Adams, 1933) was boycotted by the midget union of Hollywood (Small Person's Association of Movie-Actors, or SPAM) who decided to offer none of their actors to the studio, on account of the first movie's 'unaccountable patronising of fellas under five feet'4. The Folly of Dunston Dunderville (John Turturro, 1998) a movie about the period, was a sympathetic look at Dunderville's naivety, but still drew lawsuits from his estate, such is the sensitivity about the politics of those movies that reside in RKO's vaults, unseen for years.

Oh Dunderville. As one of the captions from The Iron Tower put it: He Burns The Stars With His Poise! Can They Love Him? The answer was that they could, but all too briefly.

The Iron Tower Directed by Victor Lazarus Produced by David Warner, Adam Warner Written by Rick Flynn Starring Donald Dunston Dunderville, Roberto Strong Warner Brothers Release Date US: September 1926 Running Time: 74 mins Tagline: 'Where Did It Come From? Where Does It Go? Beware, The Iron Tower!'

1.Juvenalia, 1933

2. Oct 17th, 1926

3. Jan 3rd, 1927

4. SPAM press release, printed in Variety, Jan 14th, 1933

DISCO CAR (John Carpenter, 1979)

This oddity set in a future San Francisco stars Peter Falk as a weary delivery driver who turns gumshoe when a beautiful woman (Jessica Lange) hires him to deliver a succession of what appear to be empty boxes to the same location everyday. The joy comes in seeing the expected thriller plot never arrive- after the set-up, the action centres on the internal workings of Falk's brain as he attempts to discover the meaning of his mission.
The futurescape looks wonderful: trams are illuminated Dickensian structures, Christmas box toboggans dressed up to the nines with fairy lights, as this future is one in which electricity must be used as much as possible. That's right- in a witty twist of typical of Carpenter, electricity is discovered to be a living entity with feelings, and the more it is used, the more useful it feels in return, and swells itself to a more abundant size. And so tenement blocks are covered in permanent luminous skins, causing the film to have an over-saturated white sheen.
Falk is a vision, the angelic eternal Christmas reflected in his rarely removed sunglasses.

Carpenter abandons his usual superior pulp tightness for a more lyrical feel, as Falk repeats his task and cashes his cheques without finding many answers. His quiet paranoia about what is in the boxes, and his speculations (in increasingly fevered overdubbed narration, which contrasts with the quietness Falk exudes on screen) about what exactly is taking place is a brave study of how having time to think can drive a man of action mad; The long, gorgeous shots of Falk at the wheel of his vehicle (the Disco Car of the title- a beaten up silver Corvette, basically, with extra lights) steer the film towards existential road movie territory, but the repetition of the same short route means the journey here is frustrating for the participant. A tension is created by the same process being shown over and over, but it's a quiet, plotless tension, rooted and subverted by Carpenter's own score. A development of his stark work for his own Assault on Precinct 13, suggestions of psyched, haunted Americana fleck the drum machines with warm hues, before disappearing again. The scene where a desperate Falk drives to a glowing Golden Gate Bridge to ponder his life, only to have some kind of communion with an electrical storm, is accompanied by a symphony of dying keyboards and drenched acoustic guitars that is both beautiful and frightening. By the end of the film, as Falk reaches a barely constrained horror, too frazzled to confront Lange about the boxes, too spooked to quit, the soundtrack strips itself to a barely audible pulse and hum as our non-hero drives round and round his city of electric churches, ad nauseum.



Money problems and disagreement over the film's final cut (and misleading name and artwork) caused the film to stagger into consciousness too tentatively, and since it's limited cinema run came to an end, no VHS or DVD release has been forthcoming.

Disco Car Directed by: John Carpenter Produced by: Debra Hill Written by: John Carpenter AVCO Embassy Pictures Starring: Peter Falk, Jessica Lange, Adrienne Barbeau Music by: John Carpenter Release Date US: February 1979 Release Date UK: N/A RunningTime: 89mins Tagline: 'What's In The Box?'