OPULENCE (Josef von Sternberg, 1937)

'I can see heaven; as no man or woman has ever seen... I have burned in the sun's outer rings... charred my wings on re-entry, fallen to Earth with a crash... but I can see heaven...'

von Sternberg's final creation around Marlene Dietrich's hollow stare was his most decadent. A story of a Princess in a mythical Eastern kingdom who seeks the love of her people with ever-grander cityscapes, a multitude of gifts, and lavish balls. Her delirium means that she aims to build the grandest kingdom in the history of time. At first, this ambition causes the people to love her, as streets are paved, glorious food gifted to the poor, jobs secured and every individual paid handsomely. But soon the mania causes people to talk- should streets be covered in gold in a civilised society? Should each resident have every desire fulfilled? - and the more she feels she does for the nation, the more they resent her for what she cannot do- guarantee them against death. When a plague that was thought to have been eradicated by the queen's sanitation plans returns, the people riot. The queen then becomes a recluse, and turns her attentions to the palace. She builds within it a holiday planet of gargantuan excess: over thirty years her army of designers, artists and labourers construct one thousand floors of golden heaven.

The delight of Sternberg's vision is that he sympathises with the queen. She seems to be the most obvious cypher yet for the director on screen- a grand artist whose delirious vision grew unfashionable. Indeed, it is unfathomable that any Post-war director in Hollywood could re-create Opulence's damaged innocence without turning it into a tediously judgmental morality play concerning wealth. Dietrich herself describes Opulence as her favourite film, and suggested in 1984 that:

'... modern Hollywood talks socialism; nary a big movie can be made that doesn't root for the little guy, and bash the powerful. And yet they are made by the biggest and richest. Hollywood is a rich man dressing as a poor man... and Josef was a poor man dressing as a rich man. They hated this... and they hate it even more now...Josef is seen as morally conservative because he wanted to make grand pictures... but he was a rebel, a dreamer, always foreign' 1

Indeed, a strength of Opulence is also a point for which it receieved criticism: There is no explanation of where the money comes from, where the country gets its riches. And the film evades easy feminist readings too- for although the Queen is powerful, she is also beautiful, and she loves her people; she leads without sentimentality, but cares, and ultimately is prone to lengthy bouts of internal wrangling.

In some grand crescendo (gifted to us by a dream from the night before), the queen draws plans for an entire planet that can motor under its own influence, but when her head architect (Lionel Atwill) jumps from the tallest tower of the palace in horror at the never-ending vastness of these ideas, she is distraught: her ambition cannot be sated, she cannot have victory over herself, she can only lose. The final sequence of the movie follows Dietrich from her 40-poster, forty metre bed, up a spiralling staircase moulded entirely from diamonds that cut her feet, through a cavernous parlour the size of The Vatican, into a great hall the size of Switzerland filled with an army of one million blonde children, through a 100 acre interior orchard filled with hand carved wooden trees, golden apples and felt grass studded with sequins, through a flea zoo, an elephant zoo, a Victorian toy room, a midget funfair, a hall of mirrors, entire floors filled with water, or food, or bean bags or nudists, up through levels of complete darkness (for quiet contemplation) and levels of brilliant, shadowless light (for honest self-evaluation), up a slide which inverts gravity, through ever grander and more plush dining rooms and lounges, bedrooms and halls, until finally coming to an elevator-for-one filled with silk cushions that goes to floor 99999, which is still incomplete.

From this point, we can see how close the construction is to the surface of the moon- Dietrich reaches out above her head and lays her hand on the surface, pulling back a handful of dusty cheddar. With tears in her eyes, she tastes the moon, and utters the final, famously stuttered, words:

'It. Needs. Salt. The Moon. Needs. Salt.'

Opulence Directed by Josef von Sternberg Produced by Josef von Sternberg Written by Josef Louys Starring Marlene Dietrich Lionel Atwill Paramount Pictures Release Date US: March 1937 UK: June 1937 Tagline: 'I Can See Heaven'

1. New Yorker interview, April 15, 1984.

DITKO/DIDCOT (Sandra Truart, 1999)

Swedish documentary maker Sandra Truart (real name Sandra Johansson) offers us this diptych that simultaneously tells the story of American comic book artist Steve Ditko and the Didcot railway in Oxfordshire, England. The two subjects have no obvious similarities beyond their names, and so the double narrative is at first disconcerting, flipping from colourful graphics of Spiderman to the sober chugging of a steam railway; from calm long takes of careful pencil strokes to blackened faces shovelling coal; from hot reds, yellows and blues to plumes of grey distilling into the quiet white of English skies.

But similarities prevail: Ditko trained as a carpenter at a steel mill in his home of Pennsylvania, and the footage from this part of his story is overlaid with the a sequence of men laying railway sleepers. Parallels, unlinear as they may be, are inevitably sought for, and drawn.

With Ditko's refusal to give interviews and the relentless chug of the steam engines, the film reaches a strange state of drone-fuelled nirvana: somehow, despite the disparate nature of the subjects, and the slackening of tension caused by the narratives refusal to intertwine the film becomes ever more hympnotic. It could be that this marriage of random subjects creates what philosopher Bert Embert described as 'The Chime' (We do actually see a copy of Bert Embert's Philosopher's Gilded Edge left on a carriage at one point in the film. The sad paperback, a clue, an accident, an idea, is found by a guard who has never heard of one of France's most famous thinkers) . This theory feels entirely apt with Truart's marriage of subjects in mind. I quote at length:

'... we can never exhaust possibilities as human beings... every hybrid we build, every new melding of old ideas... be it an old song in a new town, a composite of fabrics or the melding of two colours in an ever so slightly new way...we can never give up mixing all of the elements of our lives together in the same ways, hoping for new results, as it is possible that if God exists, then it is within some chemical combination of sciences we do not understand... perhaps the 1000th bar of a consistent G chord will expand into a cosmic opening one night, when the stars dictate it, when the atmospherics are slightly different to every other thousandth striking of that thousandth bar of G... Clang-duuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrr- when suddenly a wall falls, or a crowd member cries, or a lover enters and smiles, or a seagull swoops, or the power goes and yet the chord cries on- and for whatever combination of reasons, the party takes off in a way it never has before (despite every effort, contagious invites, excellent venue, gorgeous guests, food, drink and musics), and The Chime is heard and felt and smelt and seen and touched and known, and seas of ecstatic weeping will surprise us, and humanity will cease its own advancement to Heaven on Earth, its own Godlike status as a three-dimensional aspect, a prism of experience and feeling... and we will never know the precise combination of stimulae that got us there, the vibrations from what accidental running together of art...

... this is the role of the poet in society. Not to invent new elements, and discover a lost chord- for our discovery of 'The New' in conventional terms is pointless- but to draw elements together, randomly, beautifully, into a psychic collage, creating subliminal texts for others to be absorb and multiply, rip apart and fashion into ever clothing that references ever more of life, sucking into a whole grubby but precious damaged arts...1

We await that which never comes: The punchline, Ditko at Didcot, waving from aboard The Flying Scotsman. And always the question... what, what what could bring a young Swedish filmmaker to such subjects? The answer drifts, unanswered.

Ditko/Didcot Directed by Sandra Truart Produced by Sandra Truart, Iggy Johansson Random Pictures/National Film Archive of Sweden Release Date US: N/A UK N/A (Later available on DVD in Europe March 2005) Tagline: 'Dikto Did Not Drive Down to Didcot; But What if Ditko Did?'

1. Bert Embert's Greatest Hits, Penguin, 1999

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.!.'

OL' JAZZFACE (David Lynch, 1981)

Q:What do you get if you cross a gorilla with a human?

This biopic of the gorilla that caused a sensation in twenties New York has been maligned as David Lynch's worst movie, perhaps unfairly. Made just after The Elephant Man and covering a similar narrative arc (outsider is outside; outsider comes inside; outsider prefers, and preferred, to be outside), Ol' Jazzface is a true-to-life story of Bess Lucas, a half-girl, half-gorilla who was born to immigrant parents on a boat to the US from Europe and abandoned on Liberty Island. She went through a horrific youth in the tenements of Brooklyn, being bullied and beaten by all, until kindly nun Sister Peters (played here by Ellen Burstyn, who was nominated for as Oscar for the role) took her in and introduced Bess to music. Authorities forced Bess into an institution after she ripped the arm off of a bully, but she subsequently escaped (after years of hair-pulling) and found fame in vaudeville as 'Ol' Jazzface', a singing, dancing comic whose deranged stage persona and aggression to the drunken crowds caused a stir and pioneered the Gorillage School of stagecraft, an approach used by such disparates as Mae West, Lenny Bruce and Melt Banana.

Bess Lucas' Great-Granddaughter, Martha McTally is the star, and this in itself caused controversy. Lynch insisted on McTally for the role, despite the studio pushing many young actresses forward (Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon both auditioned for the role), even going as far as suggesting that using a non-gorilla actress in the role would be grossly offensive.

The movie served helped pave the way for the Animal Rights Act that gave four-limbed mammals the right to vote in certain districts, one of the first bold moves of the Clinton administration. Indeed, in light of subsequent Hollywood reckonings, Francis Ford Coppola's Darn Yankee Cat (1988) and Oliver Stone's Nine Lives (1989) (both themselves examples of fairly large budget kit-lit adaptations that littered screens in the late eighties, made at a point long enough after the unsuccessful Scratch Offensives of the late sixties to be at last palatable to lily-livered Hollywood execs), Ol Jazzface can be seen as an important movie beyond its cluttered aesthetic parameters. Roger Ebert praised Lynch for avoiding sentimental cliche, but wondered when Hollywood would get away from making movies that 'invent a problem that we solved decades ago; then solve the problem onscreen, then congratulate themselves for progressive thinking.1'

Lucas herself died a sad death, her hero status undermined by drug overdoses, cannibal controversies (themselves captured lovingly in Crispin Glover's petrified short Give The Girl A Hand(1994)) fruit busts, drowned dancers in pools. Lynch, sad at having not captured her legacy well enough, has since only used animals in small roles in his movies.

A: A human/gorilla hybrid destined to be shunned by both humans and gorillas, undoubtedly due to suffer numerable sicknesses, probably sterile, certainly lonely.

Ol' Jazzface Directed by David Lynch Produced by Johnson Johnson, Mel Brooks Written by David Lynch, adapted from the memoir ''Nanas' by Bess Lucas Starring Martha McTally, John Geilgud, Danny Devito, Ellen Burstyn Paramount Pictures Release Date UK: Jan 1981 US: Feb 1981 Running Time: 142 mins Tagline: 'Ape Ape Ape'

1. New York Times interview, February 6,1982

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 SECOND DRAFT (John Loose, 1999)

I wanted to introduce this entry with a spine-tingling suggestion... but its gone.

So: Based on the elemental short story written by Puppy Smith1 (the authoress whose fledgling career was cut short by death at the age of nine), The Second Draft is a shifting thought-dribble regarding creativity, celebrity, and identity. John Loose vowed to never make a movie again after the post-modern afterburn of the project left him in hospital for weeks. His idea, of taking the frustration of the protagonist in the short story (who is bemoaning his lost first draft, which contains, he tells us, an incredible tale, beautifully told) and turning it back on the viewer by causing a similar second-hand psychosis, was always a tricky sell. He erased from view all plausible drama, making all situations roll with suggestion and suggestion only. The movie thus appears as a series of unfinished vignettes, with all of the major action happening off-screen, and this non-storytelling twisted the director in complicated knots. His execution took it far beyond what even he expected, leaving whole conversations muffled behind doors, and lengthy post-flashpoint silences. It was, Barry Norman told us, 'a cryptogram dressed up in a jigsaw hidden in a coming-of-age drama'2

Kieran Culkin plays the young American who moves to the sleepy seaside coast of Sussex, England with his grandparents. They spend their time watching classic Hollywood movies, and are excited when a woman who moves into a vacant flat in their streeet bears a startling resemblance to Marlene Dietrich. So far, so regulation. We wait for the unlikely friendship between the old dame and the mute boy; but this promise is withheld. No climax that is suggested is given. We are left to wonder, with the boy, along sunny, silent, coasts.

'Who the hell is the old lady?'3 cried critic Paul Hallus, and spent paragraphs describing himself throwing his hands in the air in frustration (itself a daring homage to the sensibilities of the film) But the old lady is not really the point. The story is subsumed below worries of how to tell it, just as young Joe (Culkin) is concerned that his small detective tale is a narrative with its bottom falling through. His life seems supernaturally tinged, but even he is aware that his grandparents (played zestfully by Albert Finney and Maggie Smith) play a huge part in the contrivance: Is the family's fantastic capability for suggestibility (as displayed in various scenes where they mistake incidents in classic Hollywood for intrigue in their personal lives) as cute as it first appears? Or are we party to a collective mental illness? Many events outside the house happen without the camera as witness, and we are only told about them by a grandparent. In turn, when young Joe begins to write a diary, we begin to see gaps between his words and the truth.

Loose slackens his grip; Smith disappears from view. Invisible lies smoke out the Dietrich lady, who is the cast-iron MacGuffin. Young Joe, innocently, is a flawed narrator. The English Channel is filled with sharks pushing teeth-holes through scrunched white pages.

An interesting phenomenon has plagued critics of both the short story and the film, Second Draft Syndrome, which is now worthy of its own Wikipedia entry. Many writers have seen their own first drafts of criticism of The Second Draft disappear: be it house-fires, computer problems, or authorial tantrum, many perfect pieces have been lost to fate. Both the LA Weekly and New York Times film critics failed to file a review on time, citing writer's block, and both produced apologetic synopses a week late; Paul Hallus himself lost a hard-drive when writing his, Roger Ebert lost a kidney, and a class in Iowa studying differences between the story and the film forged a suicide pact before turning in their papers, and although none of them went through with it, one of them, Marie Staedler, nearly did herself in with a stapler the following Spring (her own, if you will, second-time-around failure. This is the root of the phrase 'Doing a Staedler' which means to perform a task badly, especially one that involves harming oneself.4).

The Second Draft Directed by John Loose Prduced by Smith Brown Written by John Loose and Curt Dugless, based on a story by Puppy Smith Starring Kieran Culkin, Albert Finney, Maggie Smith Film Four Pictures Release Date UK: Jan 1999 US: May 1999 Running Time: 122 mins Tagline: 'I'm Sure I Said It All So Much Better Before'

1. The Second Draft won the Chehkov Prize for Short Fiction in 1999, ten years after Smith's death. Her collected stories, Unstories won the National Book Award in 2000. John Barth declared the end of the short, short story in an essay entitled 'Who, Where, Shorts, Shorts?' following the announcement of the prize. He later softened his claim in a follow-up argument in 2004, 'Aye, Where Short Shorts.'

The critical division over the short story prompts me to print it entirely here:

The Second Draft by Puppy Smith

'The elements stole my first draft. And you should know that that is something of a crying shame, for it was a kingly piece of work. Every word slid and locked into place, held by some magic. The tools of fiction were at their quickest in there. It not only told my story in an entertaining and enlightening fashion, it might have had something for someone other than myself too.
It not only told the story, but in interlocking haikus it managed to convey some power of everything I’d ever known. But a wind blew up and carried it off.
But what a draft; within it were codes and schemes. Surveillance systems were debunked, governments toppled; assassins evaded, crucial answers found.
But now they’re just mapcap theories, scribbled in invisible ink and lost; the pages are still disappearing across the beach in the wind. A whole bible of noise lost, chased across the stones, rediscovered page by page; a Hansel and Gretel trail to a big haunted house of an idea.
It started with the following; this much I remember.

Steven liked to break into houses on the Sussex Coast. His mother had died when he was small, hit by a bus, and his father had died some two years later, drunk with a broken heart. He’d walked into the sea, and washed up three miles along the coast. Steven was five. He went to live with his grandparents, who watched old movies all the time. These films filled Steven’s brain, haunted his sleep, and this fact may or may not have contributed to the present tale.

A wonderful part of my first draft dealt with the anecdote whereby a younger version of myself attempting to write an early version of my memoirs, aged seven or so, described the feeling of being an orphan as akin to ‘waiting for a wonderer to return.’
Grandad corrected me on my mistake. ‘It’s wanderer, Steven. Wanderer. Someone who wanders off.’
But Grandma saw the dramatic possibility of my word, and cut Grandad short. ‘Or did you mean wonderer, Steven, like someone who wonders why?’
They looked at me expectantly. ‘I think I mean both,’ I said.

Aah. That’s how it went. Or something. Ask the sea next time you’re on the Sussex coast. The sea ate the first version, the truest version of the story. This draft is inferior, it’s akin to development sketches of female parts I’d never seen. But it must suffice.
So the films; this is the important thing with my Grandparents. Let’s try:

Granddad had a penchant for gentlemen. Humphrey Bogart was enjoyable, but greasy. Cary Grant had it. Grandmother had a taste for the nice faces- James Stewart, Fred MacMurray; but father though them a touch soft.
There was Dietrich, who possessed some of the beauty of his mother. In Blonde Venus, she was barely plausible as a mother, and Steven supposed his own mother was like this; too beautiful, too stellar, to be plausible as a mother. That was why she’d died, he supposed. God’s will.
Oh, and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca, with Grandad’s Larry.

And then there was the woman who lived on our street, that aged, frail German, who Grandad thought was Marlene Dietrich.

'She doesn't live in Sussex' Gran said.

'I'm sure it is her,' Grandad said.

He was the straightest of die; Religion? A fearful hotch potch. Enigmas were never cultivated. But Marlene on the coast? True as true.

A convoluted interlude saw my boredom turning to crime, breaking into large flats on the seafront, watching their videos, drinking their tea. And then, inevitably, I was caught by the old lady, the cranky, would be Marlene; and the ensuing unlikely friendship was dreamt in a plausible and pretty way. I didn't evade the cliche, I embraced it, and these passages were some of the most rewarding on those papers.
And then, of course, we hear that Dietrich is dead in Paris; and of course, the flat is on the market; and we never see our Marlene again, except in our sleepy fantasies.

'Good, proud lady, that Marlene' Grandad said.

'You never met her, silly,' Gran said.

'Perhaps not. But she kept her garden tidy and was kind to the boy,' Grandad said.

I've been through my notes to find a scent of the magic; this outline does not suffice. All I find in my extensive perusals are plundered wordlists and defected lexicons. Now I’m gutting books, ripping their spines, to find suggestions of all that I had. I need a skin draft.'

2. BBC Film 99, Jan 26th, 1999.

3. Sunday Times magazine, Jan 30th, 1999

4. Eg:'I wanted to wax my legs this morning, but I completely did a Staedler and missed with the waxing strips and gave myself an inside-out mohawk.'

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

DIJONNAISE (Walter Friend, 1941)

Underground legend Friend's influential concern with the minutae of existence began with this experimental masterpiece, shot in an afternoon in 1941. Dijonnaise simply shows an unnamed man eating a meal. Shot in the grainiest of black-and-white-and-grey, this absolutely quiet movie is strangely compelling and tense: When, the viewer wonders, will the man sit down to eat? What is he eating? Who is he? Why? What is this all about? What time is it? When? Now? Who are you? What are you doing with that bread-knife? Why do I feel hungry? What? Et cetera, Et cetera.

Friend was a student of the Diktat School, a collision of ex-pat Americans in Paris between the wars who idolised both Renoirs, Robert Bresson and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and saw in them a way to breathe humanity into American cinema. They returned home to stalk Hollywood en-masse, and using cameras borrowed from studio lots, set about making difficult shorts, albeit difficult shorts that contain a multitude of Hollywood paraphernalia- in Dijonnaise, the protagonist wears the same coat that Humphrey Bogart wore in The Maltese Falcon, Friend's cheeky admission to the fact that he 'borrowed' Warner Brothers equipment. Fellow Diktat members John Vigour and Herb Silence shot their respective shorts Arrows (about lost Native Americans) and Sebastien (about the legendary drag cabaret star) in the same week as Dijonnaise and with the same equipment, causing celebrated film historian Dizzy Bordell to call that manic period of filming as 'the shots heard around the world'.1

Dijonnaise is famously notable for having a place in culinary history too, as a movie that created a new condiment- remarkably, dijonnaise (a winning combination of dijon mustard and mayonnaise) wasn't seen on the kitchen table before Friend invented it for this short (Friend actually owned the copyright to the recipe, before selling it to Kellogg in 1951 for an undisclosed amount). He repeated this trick of collapsing words together to invent a new one with Brunch (1941), in which we see a woman eating a meal that is neither breakfast or dinner, but somewhere in-between, and with Ham-Fisted (1943), in which we see a man with a ham for a paw attempt, clumsily, to eat himself. Fans of alternative cinema would keenly await each Friend release, anticipating the far-sighted nomenclature on the posters as much as the cinematic brilliance within.

Friend's reputation as a prime contributer to the lexicon was not affected by the lesser known works that failed: Brynner (1944) was not a word that passed into common parlance (there was already a word for the meal between breakfast and dinner- it was known, to 1940's Americans at least, as lunch), but it did become the stage-name of upcoming young actor Yul Jones, later to star in The King And I (1956), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Stone-Cold Leprosy Soundworld (1971).2

By the fifties Friend influenced a new generation with the lyrical Intern-net (1957) and Motorheed (1959), speculative fictions about trainee psychic fishermen and electric skull replacement surgery respectively. But perhaps Friend's most lastingly memorable piece was At The Drive-In (1959), a documentary recording of a screening of Rebel Without A Cause at a drive-in theater in California. After some shots of cars arriving and young couples buying popcorn, the camera finds a spot and doesn't move; it simply watches the screen for the duration of the film. The technicolor melodrama attains a stark truth when reduced to greys, and Friend's detached viewing of the excitable youths on camera (and on the screen on camera) articulates the confusion of the generation gap as well as Ray's masterpiece itself, but from the other side: By this point Friend was well into his sixties.

He retired shortly afterwards, and wrote a memoir about alternative American Cinema entitled A Bit Of The Other, in which he expressed regret at having never topped his first film. 'It was never bettered. I have played with the ingredients, jumbled my technique, started the whole thing from scratch, not measured anything at all, measured everything; but nothing in my career is as sweet as that simple, wonderful, Dijonnaise'3

Dijonnaise Directed by Walter Friend Produced by Walter Friend, Herb Silence Starring Samuel Hartley Diktat Pictures Release Date US:Winter 1941 Running Time: 24 mins.

1. At Them There Movies: The Collected Dizzy, Roger House Publishing, 1966.

2. Interestingly for Fictional Film Club fans, Yul Brynner died on the same day as Orson Welles (October 10th, 1985), his co-star in The Battle of Neretva (1969). Brynner also appeared in the Welles-directed Perseid (1967), which was part of a never-ending sequence of inter-locking narratives that Welles planned would 'pull together every arc of myth, philosophy and truth into a rainbow of religious noise'. The series was called NOTES, and contains six finished movies, an unfinished seventh, a stage-play, and a cryptic novel. There is a link back to Walter Friend here: Friend was approached by Welles to assist with the cinematography of several of the movies, but Friend resisted. 'I took my Mount Olympian bulk to the Zeus of underground cinema; but Zeus was hiding in the sewers' Welles said about Friend's rejection.4

3. Macmillan Publishing, 1980.

4. Well, Well, Welles: Reasons to Disbelieve Or: A Life Against Hollywood Penguin Putnam, 1982

SUPER MAGIC BOSS (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1982)

Katsuhiro Otomo created a landmark for Japanese cinema with his anime jaw-breaker Akira in 1988, but he debuted to little acclaim with this existential dream of a film six years earlier.

Boss, a lumbering man mountain living in the woods, comes under repeated attack from a small man dressed in bright colours. His attacks always follow a set pattern. At first, it is a mere annoyance; but the attacks become more frequent, and the assailant becomes stronger and faster each time. The man cannot remember a time when these attacks did not come. At first, the assailant was small and slow, and could be repelled easily; but soon, the attacker's reflexes improve, and he can beat Boss easily. Boss slides into trapped anguish, unable to escape the woods, and when becomes aware of his own horrific appearance after catching sight of himself in a magic pool, and becomes self-conscious about his golden colouring and extra limbs.

His sadness at becoming weaker is doubled by his inability to defend his friends, small birds that live in his hunchback. They fly out to help him whenever the assailant appears, but they vanish when hit, leaving numbers floating slowly heavenward, and sometimes burger-shaped treats or stars. Long sequences in the mid-section, some of the most thoughtful in the film, show Boss, a man who is used to being strong, contemplating his weaknesses, and cowering in fear whenever he hears a noise.

Boss' tragedy is that he never discovers the nature of his true place in life. This is revealed to us with an alarming shot near the end of the movie: Boss is shown to be an end-of-level baddie in an arcade game. The camera withdraws from his face, accelerates backwards into the sky, giving us an overview of the multi-faceted colour world in which he lives, which then dissolves into pixels and then becomes an image on a screen of an arcade machine in the corner of a canteen at an ice-skating rink in a small town in a large state in the middle of America. This delirious, epic reveal takes a full minute, and the dazzling melange of live footage from completely different locations, computer graphics and overlaid dialogue from the boys playing the game ("Remember when this boss seemed hard?" "Yeah! But now you just kill him so easy!") is stunning.

This neon requiem for the unnamed henchmen of violent arts provoked small controversy in Japan when the self-proclaimed Sad Cult, a group of teenagers in Osaka, drove their car into a river, leaving behind a note reading 'We Are Sorry, Boss'. The soft underbelly of the electronic future was exposed, leaving millennium-dreamers and candied ravers alike cold: who wants apocalyptic sadness when glitter-guns and jet-packs are loaded and ready? Thus the film limped to little success; but the failings bode well for it's longevity to wire-cynics and flagrant End-fearers.

Arase Sakiwake, a former Sumo wrestler (known as The Pepper-Shaker), played Boss in his only film role. He insisted on preparing for the role each day by changing into a kesho-mawashi, an ornate, embroidered silk 'apron', which he wore at all times on set before changing into his golden costume. It is believed that his payment for the role, at his own insistence, was the same amount that he would have received had he wrestled in a championship bout, and no more. Sakiwake later had his own chatshow on Japanese TV, called Sexy Baby, and was famous in Japan for a series of humorous cat-food commercials that referenced Super Magic Boss. Davis Tanahashi is gratingly perky as the ridiculously uniformed assailant (named in the end credits as Player One), whose initial enthusiasm soon turns to cocky and cruel showboating as he masters Boss' loud but limited movements.

The movie was remade for the American market in 1985 as Colorworld, and starred Andre The Giant as Boss. M Night Shyamalan took the plot of Super Magic Boss as the basis for 2007's critically panned Supernatural Echo Complex, starring Nicole Kidman as an evil valkyrie who knows not what she does.

An arcade unit based on the original movie was created by Namco in 1983, and spawned a series: Super Super Magic Boss 2:Extra Magic-Docious is considered one of the classics of the arcade era, and it's broody humour captivated young teens further when it made an appearance on the Nintendo Entertainment System in cartridge form in 1987 as Super Super Super Magic Boss X. To this day, many gamers in the West are in the dark as to the cinematic origins of this legendary title.

Super Magic Boss Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo Produced by Shunzo Kato Written by Katsuhiro Otomo Music by Shoji Yamashiro Starring Arase Sakiwake, Davis Tanahashi Toho Pictures (Japan) Orion Pictures/Bandai Entertainment (US) Manga Entertainment (UK) Release Date Japan: Oct 1982 UK/US: N/A Running Time: 98 mins Tagline: '1-Up Wins'

CARY GRANT GOES TO CAT HEAVEN (John Doanon,1990)

Cary Grant Goes To Cat Heaven holds a unique place in the faux-canon: It's legacy was a completely transformed industry, so much so that Gilbert Adair called it the 'Jean-Marc Bosman of film'.1

It was the movie that began the Great Footage Debate of the early nineties, which saw Humphrey Bogart posthumously advertising cleaning products('Here's Looking At You, Jif') and the work of Paul McCartney (who of course had died in a bicycle crash in 1967) being used without clearance to suggest that airlines were the safest way to travel (Wings' 'Jet' the so-literal-it-is-nonsensical choice). Paul's lover Linda, who survived Paul and spent years promoting vegetarianism and World Peace, sued Virgin Airlines (the offending company) saying that Paul 'would rather have died than have his music whored like this'. Virgin's lawyer, Rick McMinn, replied 'why not have both? Oh, and by the way, whores get paid.' Linda won the case, which caused devastation in the worlds of advertising and film (a period of disruption known to posterity as The Linda Effect or Linda-rance), as numerous productions were halted and companies sued. A series of sequels to Cary Grant Goes To Cat Heaven were canned (including Jimmy Cagney Contemplates the Elephant's Graveyard, Robert Ryan Witnesses The Neon Aviary Afterlife and Klaus Nomi on Pigeon Street), and the original was taken from the shelves of video stores for years.

The movie itself? Why, it is delightful. It is effectively a treatise on the virtues of wise sampling. Footage of Cary Grant from various Hollywood movies is cut together with footage of kittens and clouds to create a dreamy ambiance of loveliness. It is a miracle beyond the earlier Who Framed Roger Rabbit (, 1988), for no actors could be manouvred and no cartoons drawn; sure, the kitten stars are perfectly wonderful playing angels (in Cat Heaven all cats are kittens of course), and all deliver fine performances. But the real genius lies in the directorial discretion of which Grant clip to use at which point. This also results in a patchwork of famous and lesser Grant moments, and much fun is to be had from spotting the pilfered originals.

The delightful thing is that it is not just obvious candidate Bringing Up Baby that is pillaged:

Look! See the reaction shot of Grant as CK Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story looking at Hepburn, Katherine, contemplating a marriage proposal from Stewart, James. See it here used to suggest Grant's hopeful confusion as he enters the Gates of St Peter. We see, in effect, a Grant megamix, the mythical burden reconfigured in new contexts and found to be intact: Solid gold performance runs throughout, and the consistent selection means that say, a sentimental pairing of a beyond-cute kitten and maudlin strings is anchored by the tanned wonder himself goofing off delightfully.

Alex Cox called Cary Grant Goes To Cat Heaven it 'the hip-hop of film'2. 'Hollywood re-uses plots and cliches; why not footage? cried Salman Rushdie in a defence of 'sampling' in an essay entitled Everybody Calls Their Wife 'Baby', Why Can't I?3

Grant Goes To Cat Heaven Directed by John Doanon Prduced by Jeff Litbarsky Written by Doanon Starring Cary Grant Film Four Pictures Release Date UK: Jan 1990 US: N/A Running Time: 103 mins Tagline: 'In Our Dreams'

1. When The Downs Go Light Penguin Putnam, 1997

2. Sight and Sound interview, June 1991

3. Atlantic Monthly, August 1993