Vérité August 2014

ISSUE #17

V é r i t é AUGUST 2014 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT Social Realism meets Star Power

also...

Abel Ferrara / The Rover / FrightFest 2014 / Miami Vice Faust / reviews / and more...

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Editor’s Letter

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ecently I’m finding the most stimulating and outright entertaining film comment to be found outside of ‘film’ publications. On podcasts not specifically devoted to cinema (the Bret Easton Ellis podcast for one, which has recently featured James Gray, Alexander Aja and Michael Tolkin) or in the pages of the great New Yorker magazine, which carried an excellent Richard Linklater profile piece.

Online, the prevailing film conversation has started to feel frustratingly miniaturist. So much twitter film noise seems to be about an incredibly narrow definition of cinema and a handful of films as well as exhibiting an increasingly intolerance of opposing viewpoints and perspectives. The recent Guardians of the Galaxy review by Stephanie Zacharek for the Village Voice managed to outrage a sizeable chunk of the geek blog populous with the contention that this featherweight but fun space romp was anything other than an unqualified masterpiece.

At Vérité we are broadly optimists about the state of cinema but we also love a good tussle, and some impassioned, engaged contrary debate. A lot of the online flame wars though feel like passive-aggressive, infantile name-calling. So where should we be looking to get some grown-up rabble rousing ?

Aside from the Ellis podcast I must confess to a genuine love of Armond White, the infuriating but frequently brilliant US scribe who is back penning some tremendous stuff (on Dwayne Johnson and the new James Brown biopic) for OUT. I was recently told by someone on twitter that I “cannot be fucking serious” for liking and defending White. I assured him (and anyone else listening) that I am and that even when he’s on bewilderingly contrary form I’ll turn to him for a view on current cinema over many respected, popular but frequently predictable film sites. Let us know where you’re going for thought-provoking debate at @veritefilmmag.

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Thanks for reading, Jordan McGrath & David Hall

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“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.�

Robert Bresson

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Contents Features

Columns

Sandra’s Choice - p8

In the Air Tonight - p44

Joseph Fahim takes us through the impressive career of the Dardenne bros whilst focusing on their highly anticipated Two Days, One Night.

Sam Moore explains why Michael Mann’s mostly forgotten, critically unfavoured Miami Vice was the best blockbuster of the 00s.

Reviews

Blood Ties - p58 The Congress - p59 God Help the Girl - p60

A Night to Remember - p16

Sabina Stent allows us to time-travel back and see what a ‘Night at the Cinema’ might have looked like in 1914.

Masters of Cinema - p56

Cleaver Patterson discusses yet another masterpiece from the MoC collection. This month it’s F.W. Murnau’s fantasy horror, Faust.

The Rover - p61 Two Days, One Night - p62 We Gotta Get Outta This Place - p63

The Frighteners - p22

In Defence... - p60

David Hall speaks to Paul McEvoy and Greg Day, two of FrightFest’s directors, and discusses the state of horror and the upcoming festivities.

Dr. Karen Oughton defends the early Jeremy Renner vehicle Dahmer, as David Jacobson’s serial killer biopic delves deep into the darkness.

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Wakolda - p64 Mr Morgan’s Last Love - p65

Join the Conversation

@veritefilmmag

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SANDRA’S CHOICE The Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night further cements their reputation as the world’s leading exponents of social realism, this time with a high-profile actress at the centre of the action

words and interview by Joseph Fahim

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ew other filmmakers in the long history of cinema have enjoyed the sweeping success Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have managed to achieve in Cannes. After bowing at the Director’s Fortnight with their breakthrough hit La promesse (The Promise) in 1997, each of the Dardennes’ subsequent five films went to earn major accolades at the world’s biggest film festival, including two Palm d’Ors for Rosetta (1999) and L’enfant (The Child, 2005); the Grand Prix for Le gamin au vélo (The Kid with a Bike, 2011); best screenplay for Le silence de Lorna (The Silence of Lorna, 2008) and best actor for Le fils (The Son, 2002).

This rare victorious run was finally broken this year with Deux jours, une nuit (Two Days, One Night), the duo’s most accessible film to date and the first to pair them with a bona-fide international box-office draw (Oscar winner Marion Cotillard). Unlike the 2014 Palm d’Or Turkish winner Nuri Ceylan, Russian maverick Andrey Zehbvery or the eternal rabble-rous-

er Jean-Luc Godard, there was little excitement for the Brothers’ new picture. The duo’s undimmed consistency for creating expertly made, socially-conscious slices of hard-bitten realism was never questioned; their filmmaking — aesthetically, narratively and thematically — has grown into a distinctive brand mimicked by everyone, from Hollywood troubadour Darren Aronofsky to Moroccan novice Leila Kilani. But few expected (or hoped) that the pair would pull any surprises with their new film, unlike Ceylan for instance whose evolving visual style has been put in service of diverse genres and subjects.

The reaction to Deux jours in Cannes was somewhat confusing. A lengthy standing ovation and loud cheering greeted the film in the press screening, yet not everyone was entirely sold. On my way out of the Lumiere Theater, a reporter summed the film up as “Marion walking, talks to a bunch of people, continue walking and that’s it.” Sight & Sound editor Nick James called it “schematic,” while New York Times

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chief critic Manohla Dargis criticized the casting of Cotillard, asserting that her presence is a “distraction.”

In the same paper, veteran movie-screenings organizer Peggy Siegal was also dismayed by the choice of La vie en rose star. “She plays a factory worker, and she comes to the news conference dressed in a jewel-encrusted minidress,” Siegal said. “She looked gorgeous, but she seemed like a disco queen selling a socialist movie.”

On the other hand, Xan Brooks from The Guardian called it “a socialist epic in miniature,” while Variety’s Scott Foundas attested that “within their circumscribed world, the Dardennes once again find a richness of human experience that dwarfs most movies made on an epic canvas.”

My personal gut reaction was drastically different. For a film critic, there are two impulses that always tussle against each other during watching: that of the keeneyed analyst and the forgiving film lover. Whichever of the two impulses eventually prevail depends on a multitude of factors; chief among them is the relationship of the critic to the director and his world. On occasion, your ardent defense of a certain work doesn’t necessarily stem from what’s playing on screen as much as it from your personal beliefs that are echoed and realized in a filmmaker’s given oeuvre.

Watching Deux jours, I found myself torn between

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those habitual sensations. On one hand, I was initially wary of the monotonous structure of the film, of the Dardenne’s derivative strategy in allowing more than a handful of characters into their usually confined universes, and of the seemingly slight relationship of Cotillard’s character Sandra with her coworkers. On the other, and as in every Dardennes pic since La promesse, I was deeply engaged in the story; moved by Sandra’s plight and longing for those incredibly powerful moments of emotional release that made Rosetta, L’enfant and Le gamin au vélo such transcending experiences for me.

At the end, the latter impulse won as I left the Lumiere with my heart pounding, lips smiling and eyes welling up with few tears. Deux jours, une nuit is, first and foremost, a heartfelt work of profound humanity; an unabashedly sentimental celebration of solidarity, human strength and the possibility of goodness in this day and age.

Like all of Dardennes’ pictures, the film thrusts us immediately into action. Sandra, a struggling working class wife and mother of two working in a solar plant, wakes up to an alarming phone call from her friend and coworker Juliette. In a leave of absence she took to deal with depression, her company realized that she should be made redundant. Giving the workers the choice between a 1,000 euros bonus or keeping Sandra on board, 14 of

“Deux jours, une nuit is, first and foremost, a heartfelt work of profound humanity; an unabashedly sentimental celebration of solidarity, human strength and the possibility of goodness in this day and age. ” the 16 employees that comprise the factory’s union opt for the former to leave Sandra jobless. Backed by Juliette, she convinces the reluctant foreman (Dardenne regular Olivier Gourmet) to have a revote, leaving her with a span of one weekend to convince her coworkers to give up their bonuses and keep her.

More than any previous film in their cannon, Deux jours is the Dardenne’s most plot-driven film to date. In each of their previous films, a premise or an inciting incident, introduced mostly at the beginning of the film, is used as a starting point to explore the life of one specific protagonist and the ensuing relationships she/he forges with a small number of characters. It’s Igor promise to illegal immigrant worker Amidou to take care of his wife following his accidental death in La Promesse; Rosetta’s eponymous heroine’s obsession with finding a job; Olivier’s discovery that his new apprentice is the killer of his child in Le fils; Bruno selling his newborn to pay his debts in L’enfant; Albanian immigrant Lorna marrying junkie Claudy to get the Belgian citizenship in Le silence de Lorna; young boy Cyril searching for the father who left him behind in Le gamin au vélo.

In Deux jours, the premise is more specified, more streamlined. The Dardennes constructs their script on particular points it cannot deviate away from: a vote is held, Sandra must persuade her coworkers to give up

their bonuses, a revote shall be held again that will determine the success of Sandra’s endeavor. The attention to plot gives an uncommonly little space by the Dardenne’s standards to explore the milieu of their characters in detail. Plot is used instead to expand on the tiny worlds the brothers have built their stories on for the larger part of their career. For the devoted Dardenne fan, the result could be jarring at first, but gradually, what emerges is a startling view of a place and people no less intimate than their previous films.

In that sense, Deux jours could be seen as a refined companion piece to the Dardennes’ largely unseen sophomore flop, Je pense à vous (You’re on My Mind) (1992).

A blandly acted, ultra polished melodrama about a steel mill worker who abandons his family after his factory closes down. The man would regain his soul when he stands by a fellow worker in the face of an abusive factory manager. Finding redemption in solidarity is the precise notion upon which Deux nuits is outwardly constructed.

Je pense à vous is set in Seraing, the destitute Belgian steel town examined in most of the Dardennes’ earlier documentaries and where every subsequent film of theirs, including Deux jours, would take place. From the get-go, Seraing emerged as an ideal backdrop for the Dardennes’ themes and philosophy. The neighboring city of the Dardenne’s affluent Eastern town Liège stands as

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anomaly in a highly modernized society governed by ostensibly well-constructed social welfare system that leaves no citizen behind. This is a city populated by vagabonds, illegal immigrants, blue-collar workers, unemployed youth, fatherless children — the 15 percent that’s been forgotten and marginalized by the indifferent society.

Against this backdrop, the stakes for charged dramas are automatically high; any risks taken have bigger consequences; any simple act of kindness has an overwhelming impact. Redemption is never a given; it’s a fiercely fought-for end.

It wasn’t Seraing that would define the Dardennes’ aesthetics though, but rather the failure of Je pense à vous. Initially working within the studio system, the pair was given little freedom to realize their visions. Je pense à vous and its predecessor, Falsch (1986), were essentially trial vehicles for them to find their artistic identity.

They’ve repeatedly stated it wasn’t until La promesse that they figured out where to place their camera; what to show and what to hide. The strong melodramatic sentiment of their first two films would be submerged in their subsequent works, camouflaged by remarkable attention to the physicality of both their characters and their surrounding; but it never evaporated, always surfacing in a astonishingly subtle fashion through the relationships of their protagonists with one another.

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The strong feel for the physical remains present in Deux jours. The modest suburbs in which Sandra and her workers inhabit are characterless and functional. The calm facades of their houses cannot conceal a shaky existence hanging by a thread.

Various objects — most notably bikes in La promesse, L’enfant and Le gamin au vélo — figure in heavily in the Dardennes’ films. Doors are another, most potently used in Rosetta where they stood as barriers for the social integration she achingly longs for. Similarly, the doors in Deux jours stand as gates obstructing Sandra from reclaiming her life back. Behind every door she knocks lies hope or despair; deliverance or misery.

For the entire duration of the film, Cotillard is unglamorously dressed down in a tank top and jeans. She looks exhausted, weary, and constantly apprehensive.

Despite her desperation and the humiliation she goes through in being turned down by some of her colleagues, she nevertheless manages to carry herself well, always imbuing a sense of grace and dignity. Cotillard, in the greatest performance of her stellar career, finely captures the slightest particulars of a woman thrown in a fight she cannot carry. The acute fluctuations in Cotillard’s clear, highly expressive face reflects a psychological imbalance (possibly manic depression) of a fragile soul charged with a grave responsibility she cannot quite handle.

Various critics and scholars have frequently compared the Dardennes’ to Bresson, and for a valid reason. No other filmmakers have drawn the strong connotation between human suffering and grace that informed Bresson’s work like the Dardennes. Like Bresson, there’s plenty of anguish in the Dardenne’s world, ignited by social forces their characters cannot control or face; forces that victimizes them in spite of themselves. In various works such as Au Hasard Balthazar, Mouchette and Diary of a Country Priest, the ensuing grace, in its myriad forms, of Bresson’s stories in stemmed in the divine; in a Catholic article of faith.

Grace in the Dardennes’ universe, on the other hand, is more tangible, more earthly, and usually found in the love of another person: Rosetta’s co-worker Riquet; Bruno’s forgiving girlfriend Sonia in L’enfant; Cyril’s surrogate mother Samantha in Le gamin au vélo. Each film represents a journey of growth for their protagonists; a journey where the characters must learn to forgive themselves (Lorna for her complicity in Claudy’s death, Igor for his failure to save Amidou’s life, Bruno for selling his child) and others (Olivier absolving the young killer of his boy, Cyril accepting his father’s apathy and selfishness).

Deux jours is also a journey of growth that takes a dissimilar route from the Dardenne’s previous stories.

Sandra does find support and love from her kindheart-

ed, selfless husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione, another Dardenne regular), but what truly injects a new life in her is the comradeship of her peers, in their capacity to sacrifice their happiness for hers.

The most affecting element of the Dardenne’s palette is the little acts of kinds their protagonists are bestowed with; moments of disarming gentleness and benevolence penetrating the gloom and wretchedness. Moralists at heart, the Dardennes always found it unethical and distrustful to water down a reality shared by millions in similar situations around the world; but they never lost faith in humanity, in our capability of charity and empathy, in the healing power of love and friendship. Apart from Lorna, there are no real villains in the Dardennes’ movies; each character is a product of harsh environment where the necessity of survival trumps everything. Their heroes and heroines are ultimately saved not only by the love of others, but by a conscious choice to be good.

Although always adhering closely to the same aesthetics and themes, the Dardennes had a slight change of direction with Le gamin au vélo. Having delivered their bleakest, most austere work in Lorna, the duo broke away with their vow not to work with an established star and teamed up with two-time César winner Cécile De France (Hereafter, High Tension) in their next picture.

Their first film to use non-diagetic music and be shot in

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the summer, Le gamin au vélo marked a sense of regeneration; a textural and temporal softness only glimpsed in their past work. The grays and washed-out blues of Rosetta, L’enfant and Lorna were replaced by reds, greens and purple in Le gamin; the nail-biting tension that lent their socially-conscious production the tint of thrillers were tempered down, replaced by generous bouts of catharsis.

Deux jours follows the same path. Also shot in the summer and exuding the warm hues of its predecessor, the Dardennes’ ninth feature ups the tempo a little bit, hurling their heroine in a race against time to win the vote. But the overall ambiance is more relaxed; the unflinching cruelty and indigence that was front and center in their previous work is relegated to the background in here; the dose of sentimentality is amplified. Deux jours is, by long stretch, the brothers’ most optimistic, most colorful, most life-affirming film to date.

A major element the Dardennes have not lost is their narrative and visual economy. Clocking a little over 90 minutes and encompassing at least half-a-dozen encounters, the brothers only give five to six minutes of screen time for each of the co-workers to justify their decisions.

As risky as this strategy may be, it takes nothing away from the story. We’re well aware that each character shares the same motivation; each is struggling to make ends meet and don’t have the luxury to dispense with a

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single euro; each are blameless casualties of an inhumane global economic model that treats works as mere cogs of a machine that shall always move forward in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. What separate each character from one another are their moral choices. It’s not just a sheer solidarity that propels each of Sandra’s backers to sacrifice their well-being for her; its friendship, love and altruism.

The Dardennes are not naïve to convert all of Sandra’s colleagues to her cause, but they do take a leap of faith in convincing the audience that these lofty ideals can exist.

Every character in the film, including Sandra herself, is put through a moral test, propelling the audience to put themselves in the same shoes. At the end, we do not only root for the honest, thoughtful Sandra to win the day, but for her workers to stand by her; we do not necessarily root for particular persons; we root for the prospect of a better world.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have described Le gamin au vélo as a “fairytale.” In essence, all Dardenne movies are fables of goodness; soul-lifting stories built on the belief that no life is wasted, that no life is beyond hope. In a year of countless horrors; of maddening bloodshed, unfathomable heartlessness, disgraceful cowardice; causal callousness; a film like Deux jours, une nuit feels like a minor miracle.

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A NIGHT T O REMEMBER A document of comedies, dramas and newsreels from the BFI National Archive provides an insight into what a ‘Night at the Cinema’ may have been like for a viewer in the last century words by Sabina Stent

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914 was a significant year for film. The decade was standout period cinematically, one of the brightest and most revolut ionary times of film history. The year saw everything from the birth of future stars to the emergence of Hollywood as the mecca of the film industry, unforgettable screen debuts were made and final performances were captured on screen. Although we can only go so far into the events of the year we need to consider why the biggest changes occurred; how Hollywood studios obtained their power on the industry, the changes they made and the consequences of their actions. The reasons all come down to one monumental event: the First World War. The war was responsible for the greatest changes in film production. As European studios saw their supplies rationed their American equivalents began to dominate the industry. One studio, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play

Company, was especially productive during this time and 1914 saw the start of their unyielding reign of power.

Jesse J. Lasky began his career as a vaudeville performer and in 1911 produced two Broadway musicals - Hello, Paris and A La Broadway. After Lasky’s sister Blanche married Samuel Goldwyn the powerhouse studio Lasky Players began to take shape. In 1913 the two men partnered with fellow stage actors Cecil B. DeMille (whose fame directing both silent films and ‘talkies’ was imminent), and Oscar Apfel. Like the others Apfel had spent time on stage - eleven years on Broadway – before he joined the Edison Company and made the short film The Passer By in 1912.

In the beginning the company’s rented studios were extremely basic: an open stage, film laboratory and the Lasky-DeMille barn (today you will find the Hollywood Heritage Museum on the site of the latter). Despite their

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DeMille on the set of The Squaw Man

limited facilities and modest beginnings their productions did not go unnoticed, and the Lasky Company’s first film The Squaw Man – directed by DeMille and produced by Apfel (as were all of Lasky’s first films) – was released in February 1914. Titled The White Man in the UK the film starred Dustin Farnum in a dramatic silent Western that had been adapted from Edwin Milton Royle’s stage play.

Although other films had been filmed in Hollywood The Squaw Man was the first to be completely made, from pre-production to completion, in the area. The company’s ascension continued and eventually, in 1916, the Lasky Company merged with both Paramount Pictures and Adolph Zukor’s Famous Player’s Company. This accolade and privilege awarded Lasky Studios the title of Hollywood’s first major motion picture studio and today we refer to it as Paramount Pictures.

What about those appearing in the films? During 1914 many fresh faced actors made their on-screen debuts to become the familiar faces that are still widely loved and respected today. In February 1914 Charlie Chaplin made his first appearance in writer/director Henry Lehrman’s Making a Living. In the film – which also went under

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such titles as Doing His Best, A Busted Johnny, Troubles and Take My Picture – Chaplin played a womanising thief called Edgar English who spends much of the feature on the run from the Keystone Kops. Named after the studio Mack Sennett established in 1912, the Kops were a group of Policemen usually seen in fumbled chases, waving their batons as a ragtime piano accompaniment played as the musical score. Often called “the King of comedy” Sennett was a producer and director whose talent book boasted unknown actors (of the time) Chaplin, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and the Keystone Kops. Soon the popularity of the individual actors overtook the group of policemen and as Chaplin, Arbuckle and Normand’s fame soared the role of the Kops became supporting the more popular names.

Although famous for short films – or ‘reels’ as they were referred to – Sennett made his first feature film starring Normand and Chaplin in 1914. A change of pace from the usually frenetic paced, high-energy films, Tillie’s Punctured Romance was a success; increasing Chaplin’s popularity and heralding the start of a lengthy and tumultuous romantic relationship between Sennett and Normand. Normand too was astonishingly active in

Mabel’s Strange Predicament

1914 – she made over twenty films during the year and is credited as an actor, co-writer and co-director. The majority of these titles were co-written with Chaplin and directed by either Chaplin or Arbuckle.

Although Chaplin’s first on-screen appearance as ‘The Little Tramp’ may have been in 1914’s Mabel’s Strange Predicament it was not the first time the character had been filmed: Chaplin had already played the role in Kid Auto Races at Venice yet this was released five days after Mabel. Unfortunately working relationships soon turned volatile and after Chaplin and Normand clashed the former was almost released from his contract. Yet Chaplin’s films were too lucrative to merit his dismissal and Sennett had already received orders to make more films with the popular actor. When Chaplin wanted to make his directorial debut with Caught in the Rain (1914) Sennett was hardly in favour and only complied when Chaplin agreed to pay Sennett $1,500 if the film failed. Sennett was proved wrong and Chaplin continued to direct himself in almost every short that he made at Keystone at a rate of one film per week.

These may be familiar names and familiar stories but 1914 also broke new territory, especially when it came

Carl Laemmle

to women in film who, like Normand, were as active both behind the camera as they were taking centre stage.

Although women had contributed to most of the production schedules their activity as directors, especially at Universal, was very noticeable and between 1911-1918 there were at least ten female directors on the company’s books.

Strikingly, there did not appear to be the gender divide that intercepts so much of the film industry today. These women were already well established in the business as actors or writers and so began directing careers with the respect of their peers. It also helped that studio heads, for example Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, chose the best people for the job, favouring reliability and employing staff based on their professionalism and ability to meet deadlines. Refreshingly gender was not an issue; respect drew him to director Lois Weber who, after gaining status at other studios, elevated Universal’s reputation with her prestigious films. By 1916 Laemmle was the highest paid of all Universal’s non-acting staff (of either gender) and toasted by ballerina Anna Pavlova – who Weber had directed in The Dumb Girl of Portici that year – as “the greatest woman producer in the world”.

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director Lois Weber

Weber was something of a force in 1914 directing a total of twenty-seven pictures in that year alone. Additionally she was one of the first directors to come to the attention of the censors and one of the first to have experimented with sound and credited with pioneering the split-screen effect (as used in her 1913 film Suspense).

Originally making films for the Reliance Company with her first husband Philips Smalley they left in 1910 to join their subsidiary Rex. When Rex became merged with five other studios the unit re-launched as the Universal Film Manufacturing Company - by April 1912 Weber and Smalley were the ‘faces’ of the business. After Weber co-directed a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (February 1914), she became both the first American woman to direct a feature-length film in the United States and the first person to direct “the first feature-length Shakespearean comedy”. As well as adapting The Merchant of Venice the couple also appeared in it Weber played Portia and Smalley was Shylock – and the production also involved Jeanie MacPherson who would soon be awarded the accolade as Cecil B. DeMille’s favorite screenwriter.

Despite being contested on religious grounds, the

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film received praise as a quality Shakespearean adaption.

Robert Hamilton Ball declared the film “careful, respectful, dignified, but lacking in passion and poetry” for two specific reasons: the first was to satisfy censorship and the second was that, as a special release, exhibitors had to pay extra to run films not part of their regular programme.

These limitations contributed to the film’s suppression and, unfortunately, it is now categorised as a lost film.

In June 1914 Weber and Smalley left Universal to join new company Bosworth Incorporated, which had been set up the previous year by stage and screen actor Hobart Bosworth. Having parted ways with Universal on the advice of Julia Crawford Ivers (the first general manager of a film studio) as the company did not want to produce more feature films, taking over duties from Bosworth ensured that Weber became “the best known, most respected and highest paid” female director of the time in Hollywood, with a $50,000 annual contract and a weekly film audience of five-to-six million viewers. It is ironic that, after leaving Universal to make more feature films, Weber’s first film for Bosworth was the one-reel short film The Traitors (1914). However, this proved lucrative as Motion Picture News declared the short to be “the

Gertle with cartoon McCay

most talented single reel that has ever been filmed”.

In late 1914 Weber made one of her most controversial films, Hypocrites (released in 1915), a forty-nine minute silent film detailing hypocrisy in religion, American business and politics. Weber broke new territory by representing ‘The Naked Truth’ as a completely nude woman (actress Margaret Edwards) and the first example of on-screen, full-frontal, female nudity. Surprisingly the film did pass the censors but was banned in Ohio, caused riots in New York and the mayor of Ohio demanded that each naked frame be hand painted to clothe the exposed flesh. When the film was finally released it was “celebrated as a cultural, artistic, and moral landmark for the film industry” and “praised for its use of multiple exposures and complex film editing”. After making $119,000 in the United States alone (it cost $18,000 to make) Weber became a household name.

These are only a glimpse of what 1914 heralded for film. Further groundbreaking and exciting changes included the opening of more elaborate movie palaces to replace the cheaper nickelodeons. The first of these was the Mark Strand Theater [sic], which opened in New York’s Times Square and had a seating capacity of 2,800.

Technology advanced and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1914), known to be the first feature length film in Kinemacolor, premiered in London. Racial and social issues came to the fore when D. W Griffith began work on Birth of a Nation, while Darktown Jubilee (1914) – one of the first films to use an African-American actor in blackface make-up – was released.

Additionally, and considerably more child-friendly, 1914 heralded a new dawn in animation with Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). McCay’s third animated production introduced the first ‘interactive cartoon character’ and the earliest example of a film where both live action and animation were combined. As a result of the film’s popularity Gertie became the first animated cartoon celebrity.

The BFI’s A Night at the Cinema only touches the tip of what 1914 meant for both the film industry and cinemagoers. A huge amount can change in the space of a year and it is pleasing to know that, in one-hundred years’ time, future generations may look to our advances in cinema with the same amount of affection and nostalgia as we now look to the past.

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The

Frighteners As FrightFest – the UKs premier horror festival – moves into a new home, with an expanded format, David Hall speaks to the team behind the annual Bank Holiday gore extravaganza about their ambitious plans and the current state of the genre

words and interview by David Hall

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rightFest is a venerable British genre institution. Now in its 14th year, the festival has reached a new chapter in its history; moving to the Vue West End and splitting its 60 plus features and shorts over three screens for five days at the end of August. It’s a veritable gorestock for genre fanatics.

An ambitious and creative venture which has built a powerful following over the last 13 years, FrightFest is globally recognised for its bold programming and unique community spirit. The festival, which began at the famed Prince Charles Cinema in London, soon expanded to the point where the last five have seen it take up residency at the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square. This year’s move to Vue, which has hosted the festivals perennial Halloween all-nighter since 2011, is complimented by its biggest line-up to date; a tremendously eclectic mix of films and a guest roster that includes Freddy Krueger himself.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve known the FrightFest organisers in varying capacities over the years,

first as a fan and attendee, as a guest with my own short film The Initiation in 2008, and more recently as a friend of the festival. I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years, along with a big increase in the festival’s popularity and a more balanced gender mix. As co-founder Alan Jones says: “Long gone is the perception that horror geeks are all nerds in Lucio Fulci T-shirts, they are now just as likely to be gorgeous twentysomethings in Manolo Blahniks.”

I’ve also noticed that articles about the festival in recent years have started to feel like semi-retrospectives, focusing on the triumphs of the past rather than looking to the future. So, with this year’s festivities less than a month away I talked to Greg Day and Paul McEvoy 9who co-run the festival along with Alan Jones and Ian Rattray) about where the focus of the festival is right now, whether television is beating film in the genre stakes and whether it’s still possible after all these years to be scared – and scarred – by horror movies.

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The Babadook

Vérité: This year’s festival sees a change of venue and format. Tell us what we should expect that’s different this time around?

titles on offer this year with a dramatic and diverse range of cutting edge must-see films, the festival will provide something for every genre fan.

Greg: I think it will be bigger, busier and more vibrant – but have a different energy to the years at the Empire, where everyone more or less shared the ‘same’ experience. Now, with the five screens, we offer more choice and allow people to be more adventurous. The Discovery Screens, I think, will be very popular and fans will be pleasantly surprised how much staff and management will embrace them and make it an experience they’ll want to repeat. Well, that’s the ambition anyway! We are prepared for mixed reactions and opinions, which we’ll listen to in order to make it even better in 2015.

Fans old and new hark back to various ‘golden ages’ of horror. Taking the temperature right now, how healthy is the genre in 2014?

Paul: This year will be markedly different to previous years in a number of exciting ways: more choice, more films, more screens, more screenings, more guests and more excitement. We are excited to be at new venue which offers a wonderful, comfortable, state of the art venue. Big changes are afoot but we will ensure that the same level of audience community and friendliness is maintained throughout. Perhaps the single biggest change is that more than ever before we are offering the fans the unique chance to curate their own festival experience, and with the extraordinary breath of fantastic

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Greg: It’s certainly more diverse than it’s ever been and definitely more global. We’re showing our first horror film from Venezuela. Twenty years ago, would you have thought we’d have Hebrew horror? I think it’s very healthy, the monsters are bigger and badder than ever and more and more filmmakers are trying their hand at the genre, thus keeping that independent spirit alive but also confident that their careers can progress; that the studios no longer view horror films with quite the distain they used to.

Paul: I would say that the genre is in great health at the moment. We have exceptional new works screening from a whole bunch of genre stalwarts, along with lots of exciting ‘new blood’ filmmakers, many of which I know will go on to make future favourites.

Who is doing the most exciting work in the genre right now? And who should we be keeping an eye

I Survived a Zombie Holocaust

on as a future ‘master of horror’ from this year’s crop?

The opening film is always much anticipated.

What makes ‘The Guest’ the ideal opener?

Greg: Keep an eye out for Jennifer Kent, debut director of The Babadook – and not just because she’s a woman.

She really has delivered a first-round punch that knocks you over. I’m a great admirer of Travis Stevens (Cheap Thrills, You’re Next, Starry Eyes) an extremely prolific producer who really delivers every time. There’s a connection here with E L Katz, who I rate very highly also, but will he stay in horror?

Paul: Adam Wingard’s film is a perfect festival opener in every conceivable way – two star-making central turns from Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens and future superstar Maika Monroe – soon to be seen in It Follows – who we are delighted will be in attendance over the FrightFest weekend. Adam is a brilliant talent and this will be the third film of his we have screened at the festival. The film wears its 80s and 90s heart firmly on its sleeve and audiences will soon see exactly why we selected this as our gala opening presentation.

Paul: One of my favourites from the line-up is the New Zealand splatter comedy I Survived a Zombie Holocaust which deftly mixes comedy, pathos and gore and a great central performance. It has a lot of heart and feels like early Peter Jackson but with enough significant differences to mark out director Mark Pigden as a talent to watch.

Alleluia, the new film from Fabrice du Welz, is another outstanding work from the genius who gave us Calvaire a few years ago. This one is a Honeymoon Killers riff and is pure unadulterated adult cinema in its most fabulous form. One of this year’s significant trends is the advent of the female genre director; a situation we are all particularly thrilled about) and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is an edge-of-your-seat scare-fest that will go down a storm.

Greg: It’s taut, tense and packs a real punch. It’ll get the adrenalin flowing.

The new television renaissance seems to have revitalized mainstream interest in horror. Is TV the place now for ground-breaking taboo busting stuff? Hannibal and American Horror Story seem to push the envelope a fair bit. Is TV horror besting film for horror?

Greg: At the moment it would appear that way, but you’re not getting the range and global tastes the genre

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The Guest

can offer cinematically. I reckon it will all start feeling ‘samey’ and the fashion for good-looking vampires and Armani-suited serial killers will fade and once the top directors get bored, that will be it. Hannibal nudges the taboo-busting envelope but nothing else gets close, in my opinion. I can’t ever imagine a Martyrs: Season 1!

Paul: TV horror in recent years has really come into its own - perhaps with the advent of The Walking Dead and its subsequent offspring. The format is obviously a markedly different one from film, allowing characters and situations to develop at a more even pace, so I feel that there is more than enough space for both formats to thrive and survive.

Is it harder to scare audiences now? It sometimes feels as though audiences, particularly those with an obsessive interest in the genre, have ‘seen it all before’.

Paul: Yes to a degree, but part of the thrill of watching the hundreds of submissions to the festival is when you find a film or moments within a film that send shivers down your spine - one film this year in particular did that to me and it was the brilliant Creep from Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass. This frisson of fear is something that I am always on the look for and I am always thrilled when it comes.

Greg: We can never stop being scared. If a director gets

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it right it feels like you’re trying to ‘survive the film. And, don’t forget, we enjoy being scared so we’ll always be suckers for a good scary movie. Yes, it is more of a challenge for film-makers as real-life footage adds to our immunity, but I don’t think our instincts have changed that much. That ‘seen it all before’ maxim is more levelled at film-makers who are too lazy or unimaginative to try something new.

Putting on a festival of this scale, as well as your mini-festivals throughout the year, is a huge undertaking. How has your approach to developing and programming FrightFest evolved over the years?

Greg: Working as a team is crucial and not always easy as the four of us have plenty of other work to do. I don’t think we’ve discovered an ‘easy’ way of running the festival but somehow our contrasting strengths pull as through, although it does seem to get tougher the older we get. I still feel a real surge of excitement though when I’m involved with FrightFest. I love it and perhaps that’s what pulls us through. We’re passionate about it.

Paul: The festival and its UK-wide Halloween events and the wonderful weekend within the Glasgow Film Festival has seen us working 52 weeks a year on those and various other events. In fact we start work on next year’s August extravaganza the moment that the festival ends.

So it is a huge undertaking for us all.

Zombeavers

What’s the single biggest change you’ve seen in the Paul: I would disagree as I think we have always had a diverse mix right from the very first year. Although we horror genre/industry since you started Frightare ‘FrightFest’ we have always stated that we aimed to Fest?

show a snapshot of the genre at any given moment - for Greg: I’ve seen two major changes: the global expansion better or for worse - and to include Horror, Thriller, of the genre and the wider definition of films that fit into Science Fiction and Fantasy features - and everything in between. Hence us showcasing previously Donnie Darko, the genre. I don’t think genre films have got better or Insomnia, Old Boy, Hellboy, The Girl With The Dragon worse, there are just MORE of them and a more varied mix. How many times have you seen a film described as a Tattoo) (or Millennium as it was then called) and The Raid. dark psychological horror mystery thriller?

Paul: I would say the advent of VOD / PPV / downloads, the changing digital landscape for the delivery, release and supply of films of all kinds. The death of retail as a significant film outlet in the UK. On a positive front I think that the genre as a whole has increased its output enormously, perhaps because with the advent of new technology it is now simpler to go out and make a film.

If someone were coming to FrightFest this year absolutely cold, what’s the one film they absolute should not miss?

Greg: The opening film, because that will plug them into the fantastic current the audience creates and the buzz they’ll get will make them want to stay for the whole fest.

And they’ll definitely want to see Zombeavers.

Looking back for a moment, it feels in some ways Paul: Impossible question to answer - but here it goes. the festival has moved a little from a very broad genre mix to concentrating on pure ‘horror’. Would Come along and sample any film from the 60 plus lineup. Although it is the film that is of paramount imporyou agree and if so, was this a conscious decision?

Greg: No, actually the opposite in my opinion. I’m not sure I know what ‘pure’ horror is – except in real-life.

Anyway, we always consciously try to cater for all tastes and represent that year’s global trends. Don’t forget, we are at the mercy of what film-makers decide to do and the politics of distribution.

tance, it is the atmosphere at FrightFest that is the most potent thing - you will feel a part of something special and encompassing that is utterly unique and once sampled hopefully you will come back for more.

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Rape

&

Redemption

Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York sees the director return to his roots and explore the preoccupations with sexual violence that have marked his very best works

words by Christina Newland

I

n Ms. 45, a mute rape victim dressed as a nun wreaks bloody vengeance on the men of New York. The eponymous Bad Lieutenant has Harvey Keitel ogling shapely dead bodies, compulsively gambling himself into a hole, and calling Jesus Christ a “rat fuck”. Abel Ferrara’s latest, Welcome to New York — a loose, fictionalized portrait of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case that upturned the French political elite — is no less lurid, and no less concerned with sexual violence, moral squalor, and the shrinking possibility of redemption.

Ferrara’s work has often revolved around similar thematic and aesthetic tropes, making him an auteur in a rather traditional sense; his personal obsessions and thematic interests have led him through every variation of genre imaginable. Ferrara’s career began with hardcore pornography – 1976’s Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy – before careening into violent exploitation (Driller Killer, 1979) and into the poor box office receipts of the main-

stream in 1990 with his violent gangster film, King of New York. However disparate his work has sometimes appeared, his milieu is surprisingly uniform. Each set in their contemporary time, Ms. 45 takes place in early 80’s, pre-gentrification Manhattan, Bad Lieutenant in the Bronx of the 1990’s, and Welcome to New York is set predominately in a purgatorial luxury space, made up of Madison Avenue penthouse suites and $60,000 per month apartments.

Many of Ferrara’s visual motifs are also shared in each film; otherworldly red light glows and reflects on the many surfaces of the nocturnal city; rain beats down luminous car windows; scum and derelicts haunt the backstreets. His universe – and his New York – is essentially a predatory place, made up of corrupt cops, rapists, druggies, and vampires of both the literal and metaphorical persuasion. His dynamic, continually mobile camera has an often circular spatial awareness, working from overhead or handheld shots. And his thematic landscape

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is equally savage, featuring men ridden with spiritual sickness. The central protagonists of his films are wracked with tortured psyches, weighed down by sin and venality, and long for Catholic redemption which more often than not eludes them. Pointedly, many of his films connect their central protagonists to rape or sexual assault.

Ms. 45 features a woman as its central protagonist, allowing us to see through the looking glass at the victim rather than the perpetrator; though potentially, the victim becomes the perpetrator in Ferrara’s imagining, after a series of revenge killings on the men of the city. Ms. 45 features Zoe Tameris-Lund as Thana, a prettily moonfaced seamstress who happens to be completely mute.

The city around her is a cesspit, seething with danger for a woman alone. Along with the women she works with, she is routinely sexually harassed and accosted by men; eyes follow her, along with obscene gestures and rude remarks. It’s not difficult for this to spill over into the first of two broad-daylight rapes, setting Thana’s reprisal into motion.

Essentially a standard rape-revenge exploitation film, Ferrara nonetheless infuses Ms. 45 with expressionistic, startling imagery, and a genuine sense of catharsis. Unlike many other such movies, the rape is not eroticised, and there is hardly any nudity involved. In response to her attack, Thana vamps up, donning all black and red lipstick while she quite literally “takes back the night”.

Floods of city smog fill the streets as the avenging angel blows away creeps and pimps; her shadow is cast across dark alleyways at a Dutch tilt. There are tight close ups of Thana’s alien beauty, her eyes gleaming with alarm like a silent film star. This is not to downplay the film’s brutality; Thana murders her rapist and finds a grisly way to dispose of his body, dumping him in the bathtub. The drain becomes blocked with skin and gristle; the leftovers are dropped in bins and open car boots around the city.

Because Thana is a mute, she is unable to scream or to verbally defend herself against sexual assault. Her silence is an obvious metaphor, particularly when faced with a narcissistic fashion photographer, who continually makes advances without a second thought for her response.

Repeatedly, Ferrara shows that women’s voices, and therefore their agency and personhood, are silenced and ignored; considered secondary to the voices and desires of men. It’s this very attitude which underpins rape culture, and which Thana grows so disgusted by that she

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strikes out almost indiscriminately. Her interactions with the opposite sex are so uniformly unpleasant that there is no room for any alternative, positive portrayal of men.

This suggests Ferrara’s later, uncompromisingly nasty central protagonists in Bad Lieutenant and Welcome to New York.

The twin sexual transgressions of Bad Lieutenant hinge, firstly, on the violent rape of a nun and the lieutenant’s search for the rapists; and secondly, the lieutenant’s own masturbatory blackmail of two young women in a car. Taking his cue from the merciful nun who refuses to name the men who have raped her, the lieutenant simply makes the perpetrators leave town. He responds to the nun’s wishes rather than his own desire for vengeance. Interestingly, the two acts of sexual subjugation mirror each other; because Keitel must choose to forgive the two young men who commit the crime, he finds a tiny scrap of salvation for his own soul.

Absolution is more difficult to gain in Welcome to New York. Devereaux is a serial rapist, shown to be guilty of any number of offenses or attempted ones; his obesity hints at his insatiable gluttony. Devereaux is played

by Gerard Depardieu with an ugly, loping grace, and, with his super stardom, an entirely believable sense of the power he wields. Depardieu is unafraid to bare his slovenly belly, amongst other things, during his many sex scenes. His grunting, thrusting presence curdles any notion of sensuality.

Ferrara films these early sex scenes with antiseptic clarity, almost impassively — filtering pristine hotel suites with cool bluish-grey light, ever distant and impersonal.

This Bacchanalian horrorshow soon gives way to the almost too-quick-to-register assault of the hotel maid, which is committed so casually that it seems hardly a blip on Devereaux’s radar.

Financial gain and masculine power are explored in many of Ferrara’s films. In Welcome to New York, this is omnipresent and expanded upon, where the kingly wealth of (IMF head?) Devereaux is an all-consuming vortex. He spends the night with a selection of prostitutes and still greedily attacks a working-class African-American hotel maid. He has everything he could ever want, and wants more; it’s rape almost as a natural extension of class entitlement. The implication is that the hotel maid is more than a rape victim, but the victim of the advanced capitalist mind-set at its most voracious.

“His universe – and his New York – is essentially a predatory place, made up of corrupt cops, rapists, druggies, and vampires of both the literal and metaphorical persuasion. ” Ferrara seems to engage with the idea of rape as the ultimate sin, almost as a measuring stick for his character’s ability for sin and repentance. This, in itself, is potentially problematic; when rape becomes metaphorical, it risks losing its emphasis as an act of sexual domination and violence.

Devereaux is utterly unrepentant, and what’s more, his daughter and his wife Simone ( Jacqueline Bisset) only see his alleged crime as a public relations disaster; both lack any empathy for his victims, relating to the event only inasmuch as it affects them. These women are in thrall to the masculine power and wealth that Devereaux wields, and along with it, how he masterfully disguises his monstrous impulses behind the mask of a charming rogue.

Welcome to New York makes literal Ferrara’s previous obsessions, with Devereaux admitting outright that there can be no redemption for him. He doesn’t beg forgiveness or offer a gesture of magnanimity, as the bad lieutenant does, when Keitel prostrates himself at the church altar. He isn’t blasted off the face of the earth, as the sexual offenders of Ms. 45 are.

Scholar Rebecca West says that the men in Ferrara’ s films ‘interject physically and socially damaging views on sexual, familial, and professional roles to the point that capitulation or self-immolation is the only option left […]’. But Devereaux might be an exception to the rule – he never truly capitulates. He merely sits back and lets the drama unfold, gruff and mostly untroubled. “I’m not accountable to anyone,” he tells his wife, and in due time, we see that this proves horribly true. This is Ferrara’s ethos in an advanced state of decay; a sense of godless solipsism, of the irredeemably damned. Ferrara seems interested in the wounds that men inflict, and in the evil that they do in the name of sex, money, and power.

When Devereaux tells his psychiatrist, ‘No one wants to be saved. No one.’, he makes literal the overarching concern in all three films – Ferrara has always been more concerned with perpetrators than victims. He is a chronicler of white masculinity at its most dominant, predatory evil — and considering the mounting hopelessness of his latest work, his view on the current state of affairs is damning indeed.

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Australia’s Empty Heart Ben Nicholson heads down under as he discovers a grim future in David Michôd’s highly anticipated follow-up up to Animal Kingdom, The Rover

words by Ben Nicholson

D

o you know what The Bush is about?” asked Guy Pearce’s Detective Leckie in David Michôd’s first film, Animal Kingdom. The explanation that he proceeded to give described an ecosystem in which survival and knowledge of one’s place in the grander scheme are paramount. What this doesn’t capture, is the captivating sense of the untamed that comes hand-in-hand with the Australian outback - particularly when it is projected onto the big screen. Where early cinema often sought to chronicle the conquest of this alien and inhospitable desert, more recently those elements have been embraced - as awe-inspiring, nightmarish, or mixture of both. It’s the primordial terrain that has sculpted the perceived national character; hardened, matter-of-fact, eternally chipper. It’s the landscape from

which the toughened family of Michôd’s debut arguably emerged, and it is the wilderness both literal and allegorical that plays setting to his powerful and merciless second feature, The Rover.

In 1971, two films were released that between them explored the dual fascinations of his vast expanse. On the one hand was Nicholas Roeg’s typically beautiful and elusive Walkabout, in which a young aborigine employs the exact skills that Leckie refers to in order to aid two children lost in the outback. Despite its pessimistic tone, and the plot being set in motion by burnt out car and a suicide, there is mystery threaded throughout it.

On the other hand is Ted Kotcheff ’s shocking Ozploitation, Wake in Fright, in which a young teacher becomes trapped in a hellish outpost. In Animal Kingdom, Michôd used a literal depiction of this inner frontier as

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a metaphorical structure for the cutthroat nature of the criminal underworld. With his new film, he encompasses the lineage of its more metaphysical aspects in a tale of the fall of human society and morality. In all instances, the anxieties and emptiness of the Australia’s heart colour the films with recognisable red dust.

Animal Kingdom followed a teenager taken under the wing of his less-than-reputable family after the death of his mother. Through his eyes and his experiences, the cogs of such an operation were exposed, as were the callous actions of cold-hearted killers. For his follow-up, Michôd has simultaneously broadened his scope and stripped things back to their essence. Where once a single brood acted with impunity, in The Rover the entirety of Australia - and for all the audience really knows, the whole world - have forsaken order and responsibility. At the same time, the multiple characters and plot strands that were woven together in his last film have made way here for sparer, more muscular and elemental cinema.

By all accounts, the screenplay for The Rover was

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originally conceived of back in 2007 before the director shot to international fame at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Michôd and his friend Joel Edgerton came up with a Mad Max style concept of cars in the desert, intending that Edgerton’s brother, Nash, would direct. What eventually formed the first draft, though, was something far more slow-burning and which provided the genesis of the film that was eventually made. Into that premise was poured all of the concern, uncertainty, and scorn that Michôd was feeling in 2012 when he returned to redraft. In the wake of the financial crisis, he observed a world with a painfully apparent widening of the wealth divide and a vital need to curb terminal global warming. It’s clear to see the influences of both hangups on the dilapidated communities that Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson encounter during their trek through the outback. Pearce’s character, Eric, is a vessel for Michôd’s disillusionment and the surroundings represent his fear for the future.

Eric is not quite the antihero one might expect

given the scenario, though. Australian cinema is known for imbuing its bearded emblems of masculinity with a palpable edge of danger. This is supposed to be a man with nothing to lose, who appears to kill without remorse and who will relentlessly pursue a band of thieves across the outback to retrieve his car. Indeed it might be thought that someone more rugged with a really nasty streak would be more suited to this solitary bushwhacker.

In actual fact, Pearce is perfectly cast in the role, being asked not just to serve as the angel of death, but also as the seraphim fallen from God’s grace. He has not always been such a man, but his broken world has broken him.

The desolate view from his window has enforced a worldview equally devoid of optimism. Again, this expands on the conclusion to Animal Kingdom which leaves little room for hope, and proffers a world - and not even one of near future Science Fiction - in which justice can only be found through the barrel of a gun.

There is one bright spot in amongst all of the gloom, however, both narratively and otherwise. Michôd has

stated in interviews for the film that he didn’t know what Robert Pattinson was capable of until The Rover, and it is hard to disagree. Since the end of the Twilight franchise, the English actor has worked hard to show that there is more to him and while he has impressed in performances for David Cronenberg (in Cosmopolis and, shortly, Maps to the Stars) it is nothing quite like this. He dominates every scene that he is in - despite his character Rey never doing so - and provides the slowly corroding heart of the film. His accent is impeccable and his mannerisms, suggesting slow wits, are perfectly judged. Rey is an archetype that all with be familiar with, but seeing it performed with such intelligence bodes well for the actor’s future. He has a string of films lined up with the likes of Werner Herzog, Anton Corbijn, and Olivier Assayas, and on this evidence, they will be fascinating to see. Sadly, even his humanity cannot escape The Rover’s downward spiral, as the outback and David Michôd claim their latest victim.

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Vérité’s Top 5 Slow Cinema

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5.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1998) Grounded in an aesthetic awareness of time that predates the medium itself, Slow Cinema as a formal genre is relatively young - its boundaries still being debated and defined by critics and scholars around the world. Certainly the presence of long takes and slow narrative rhythm are not enough to mark a film as a member of the Slow Cinema movement. Yet with the intensified narrative treatment of time and adherence to a liberated rhythm that dissolves traditional components of storytelling into series of de-centred, digressive conflicts, this debut feature from British director Terence Davies follows Ozu to join Tarr and Theo Angelopoulos as an important architect of this nascent genre. Set in 1940s and 50s Liverpool, the film chronicles the daily lives of a working class Catholic family and is plot into halves.

The first, Distant Voices is dominated by the presence of the dominant and violent patriarch played by Pete Postlethwaithe while the second sees the children fully grown and emerging into the slightly brighter future of the 1950s following their father’s death. At once both bleak and evocative, Distant Voices, Still Lives offer a poetic and masterful portrayal of family life in the way only a Slow Cinema film can. Kelsey Eichhorn

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4.

Late Spring (1949) Often called “the master of time” Yasujirō Ozu understood the peculiar capability of cinema to both manipulate and illuminate the nature of time long before the phrase Slow Cinema was coined. Part of his Noriko Triology, (the others are Early Summer (Bakushu, 1951) and Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953), Ozu’s Late Spring is often identified as the beginning of the director’s final phase of creativity in his career - a phase highly influenced by the Japanese genre of Shomingeki.

A genre that is concerned primarily with the daily lives of everyday middle-class Japanese families, Shomingeki seems an obvious predecessor to the later defined Slow Cinema movement, embracing as it does not only issues of narrative time that is true-to-life, but also aesthetic trends such as long takes, static camera scenes and a conscious employment of off-screen space to heighten narrative continuity. Ozu’s commitment to using time as a guiding factor of his narratives was so intense that he often specified set construction for his films based on the exact amount of time it would take an actor to walk up a set of stairs, or down a hallway into a different room. Late Spring exists as a stirring reminder that the often marginalised narrative features of atmosphere, poetics, rhythm need not necessarily submit to the superiority of the story. Kelsey Eichhorn

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3.

Birdsong (1998) There are any number of cinematic techniques that can influence a film’s narrative treatment of time, not the least of which is camerawork, specifically, shot length.

Director Albert Serra is well know for employing extended, almost excessively long takes as a way of elongating the audience’s perception of duration and freeing the cinematic narrative from the demands of continuity or progress by eliminating the effect of montage. In his 2008 film Birdsong (El Cant dels ocells) there is a nine-minute take that starts with a slow pan before coming to a halt to observe the Three Kings’ measured retreat into the distance of the frame. After about five minutes the men disappear over the crest of a hill, then re-emerge atop the next hill as tiny dots, and still the shots rolls on. Eventually it becomes apparent that the Three Kings are now moving back in the direction from which they came, and the film cuts after they are half returned in their journey toward the camera. Initially the simple existence of the three bodies in the frame is the dominant point of attention, but as the shot steadily stretches uncompromisingly on, the audience begins to become acutely and unavoidably aware of the heavy presence of time as a factor in the story. Serra often subverts the proscribed standards of progressive narrative, utilising the fundamental experience of the medium to tease out his stories.

Kelsey Eichhorn

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2.

The Turin Horse (2011) It’s impossible to have a cohesive discussion of Slow Cinema and not speak of Béla Tarr. An aesthetic of slowness in both style and narrative are hallmarks of the director’s career, and while any number of his much-lauded films could easily find a spot on this list, the cream of the crop is arguably his final feature: The Turin Horse (A torinói ló, 2011). A starkly simple plot, presented in a scant 30 shots by Tarr’s longtime cameraman Fred Kelemen, proves the perfect conduit for a strikingly serious and poignant meditation on human existence. Opening with a narrative voiceover introduction delivered to a black screen, Tarr describes how in January of 1889 the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnesses a farmer brutally beating a stubborn cab horse in the city of Turin. The encounter causes the philosopher’s mental breakdown and he lives in silence for the next decade, cared for by relatives until his death in 1900. The film that follows is the tale not of the famous Nietzsche, but of the horse, his owner and the bleak, monotonous world in which they live. Embracing one of the major trends in Slow Cinema, repetition, The Turin Horse focuses not on issues of mortality, but on the often much darker and heavier questions of daily life, producing a cinematic tale that is effortless and, quite simply, irreproachable.

Kelsey Eichhorn

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1.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) If Tarr’s The Turin Horse was the most anticipated film of 2011 for the slowness aesthetic cinephile, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia was that year’s biggest surprise. While Ceylan’s 2008 Three Monkeys firmly cemented his directorial talent, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia introduced an element of narrative experimentalism and a far more complex appreciation of cinematic time. Structured around a police investigation in search of a buried body, a troupe of men comprised of police officers, prisoners, gravediggers, and a doctor, wends its way by car into the remote hills of Anatolia. Both the story and setting of the film lend themselves to contemplation; the film is a metaphysical road movie, highlighting the monotony of small town life and the inherently repetitive nature of human existence. As the character’s physical journey progresses further and further from civilisation, the somewhat simple plot slowly dissolves into the background.

The intensified mood, style and evocative, ephemeral aesthetic coalesce to reveal the true meaning behind Ceylan’s masterpiece. Kelsey Eichhorn

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In

The

Air

Tonight Why Miami Vice was the Best Blockbuster of the Oughties

words by Sam Moore

Y

ou’ve barely sat down at your seat in the multiplex and BANG, you’re in a sweaty, intoxicating Miami nightclub accompanied by the thudding beat of Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s ‘Encore’. The frame is tinged with Michael Mann’s trademark blue as swathes of glamorous people in Armani bump, grind and down mojito’s.

Your senses are heightened, you don’t know what is going on, perhaps something involving prostitution or sex trafficking, but you can’t be certain because Mann has disorientated you into a state of paralysis, warping your mind with the sudden avalanche of sight and sound.

You’ll recognise the famous faces of Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell, but Mann doesn’t immediately let you identify with them, they’re just two of many shady looking suits. We finally slip into some sort of narrative through a phone call to Detective Crockett (Farrell) from one of his informants in the Miami underworld.

Something’s gone bad, very bad and a gang of automatic-weapon wielding neo-Nazis, a dead wife and suicide

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later, we realise just how disastrous the situation is.

It’s one of the most breath-taking openings to a film I’ve ever seen, you’re hurtled into this strange, tempestuous environment without so much as a credit sequence.

It’s the most daring move imaginable for a $135 million movie. Those expecting a comedic pastiche of the classic 80s series in a similar manner to the Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson starring Starsky and Hutch or Scarface style caricatures were perhaps surprised by the subtle, rambling beast that is Mann’s movie. It is the most avant-garde blockbuster in Hollywood history. There are only slight hints at plot, zero exposition and the minimal dialogue is often of a technical nature and drowned out by the blast of a speedboat, roar of a Ferrari or whir of a helicopter. The audience is never certain about what is going on, often all that is decipherable is that two impossibly handsome and stylish men are verging on the edge of catastrophe and violence always seems imminent. The result is relentlessly exciting.

Mann’s Crockett and Tubbs, the characters made famous by Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas, are defined solely by their profession; there is no back-story and little character development. Their fraudulent undercover identities are more fleshed-out than their real ones and interestingly, neither character is seen in a situation

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that isn’t somehow related to work. The characters are really non-characters, we know little of them except their names and rarely are we allowed to see a facial expression from the pair that isn’t distinctly neutral, they possess no attributes in common with other protagonists in Hollywood blockbusters other than they’re handy with a machine gun and could front a Tom Ford advertising campaign.

The film’s defining moment comes when Sonny, after falling intensely in love with the drug cartel head, Isabella (played by Gong Li in her English language debut) whisks her away on a speedboat to Havana with the lovely voice of Patti LaBelle whispering behind them. For those three minutes or so, I was on that boat with them, the spray from the ocean hurtling over my head, the wind rippling my shirt, the sun blinding my eyes. It was pure bliss and the sensuality of the scene was scintillating, Farrell and Li only need to glance at each other to create a rapture of sexuality. And if you throw a speedboat, Havana and dancing into the mix, then you have something very special.

Miami Vice is unmistakably a Michael Mann film; recurring themes such as the isolated men defined by their work, growling machismo, the duality of the cop and the criminal, the sudden eruptions of heart-stopping

violence and a super-cool contemporary soundtrack that features Audioslave, Mogwai and Moby are all apparent. Mann’s use of digital photography also reached a pinnacle with Miami Vice, each frame has a texture you just want to touch and the vibrancy of Miami is ignited through Mann’s lens as he paints the city with an uneasy mix of shadows and contemporary cool. Mann became the first person to prove that digital is just as responsive as film; it’s about how you use and apply the technology, not the technology itself. If nothing else, the way Mann composes his film just emphasises how much every other Hollywood blockbuster lacks innovation and sticks to a formula.

Of course, despite its two mega-stars as leads, the film practically bombed at the box-office, with it particularly failing in the US, but found more love on DVD. It’s a bold movie on every conceivable front, a risk rarely seen in a Hollywood that’s ruled by accountants and the perfect antidote to the gleaming superheroes, CGI robots and child-friendly adventure movies. Since the middling financial returns of the movie, Universal has stayed mostly away from these types of risks. Oliver Stone’s Savages is possibly comparable but that was budgeted at $45 million, almost a hundred million less than what Miami Vice cost to finance.

For all the clinical approaches to character and feeling, Miami Vice is a rush of emotion. The romance of Sonny and Isabella is frantic and passionate. When the team botch the rescue of a black colleague from the neo-Nazis, it is simultaneously panicking and thrilling. And during the climactic shoot-out as bullets fly, bodies drop and secrets are revealed, you are torn from feeling fear to sadness as Sonny reveals himself as a cop to Isabella. You are absorbed into the film through the atmosphere and feel everything the characters feel.

Mann is one of the best, and nobody does crime movies quite like him. Heat, Thief and Collateral are all master portraits of the criminal, but Miami Vice is something different. It doesn’t go into the psychology of these people, presenting more an abstract observation of the blurred lines of the cop and the criminal. In less capable hands, this would have been ungodly awful, full of shallow clichés, cheesy one-liners and the type of empty bravado that has come to plague the crime genre. But Mann is a master of this genre, and he somehow managed to coax over a hundred million out of Universal to let him go and make an art-house blockbuster with two of the biggest stars in the business, one of the very best of the decade.

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T H FESTIVAL G E N N D A

words by Evrim Ersoy

ow in its 15th year, Film4 Frightfest is the leading genre festival within the UK. Offering a snapshot of horror and fantasy genre over five days, the festival has grown from modest beginnings to become one of the key players within the London film scene: with countless premieres, a plethora of guests and unexpected but delightful surprises.

Although the bigger titles of the festival are always the main draw, the Discovery Screens offer unexpected gems in the shape of smaller but perfectly formed films. Here is our top three of the rest:

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THE DEN director Zachary Donohue

Working from a novel concept, the Den is a found-footage film told entirely through computer screens. Although the initial reaction might be that of distrust for such a gimmicky approach, those who stick with the film are more than amply rewarded with a tense and well-made film.

Only marred by a lackluster last twenty minutes and a groan-inducing climax, The Den somehow still manages to stage some effective scares. Overall the innovative method and the unique viewpoint elevate this title well above the usual genre material.

HONEYMOON director Leigh Janiak

Focusing on a young couple arriving at a disused family cabin for their honeymoon, this film creates a master class in tension and unease with an ultra-effective pay-off. An intimate, quiet picture with some brilliant Cronenberg influences, it divided critics upon initial screenings with its languid pace and purposefully obtuse storytelling. There’s no doubt the film might have a similar effect on audiences who will either buy into the central mystery or find themselves bored to tears by the endless shots of the forest. Overall a quiet but brave attempt to craft a different kind of horror, this is one trip well-worth taking.

COHERENCE director James Ward Byrkit

Lest there be any accusations of nepotism, let me state it outright: Coherence screens at Film 4 Frightfest as part of a takeover by The Duke Mitchell Club of which I am a member.

However with that disclaimer out the way, let me extol its virtues without any modesty: Coherence, without any doubt, is one of the smartest, articulate and effective mind-benders of the last ten years.

On the night that a comet passes Earth close-by; eight friends attend a dinner party where they suddenly find themselves without electricity. Further investigation reveals the entire block to be without power except for a single house down the road. Deciding to go there to find some help, the friends are unaware that the mysterious house holds many dark and weird secrets.

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Masters of Cinema

Faust Cleaver Patterson takes us through another great release from our freinds at Masters of Cinema, F.W. Murnau’s 1926 classic Faust

words by Cleaver Patterson

P

eter Cushing may well have had legendary German filmmaker F. W. Murnau’s 1926 version of Faust in mind, when he said that he found a creaking door and half open coffin as disturbing as any amount of visceral gore or special effects.

Murnau’s classic is the perfect example of why the medium of silent film could have been created for the horror genre: a subject which is often more effective when atmosphere and tension are built through subtle visuals, as opposed to the increasing dependence on gruesome set pieces as seen in much modern horror, and that speaks volumes when there is silence. As a result many horror films which emerged during the early decades of the twentieth century, when cinema was in its infancy, remain equally effective today.

The story of Faust - an aged scholar who enters into a pact with the devil in the mistaken belief that as a result

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he can save the lives of the inhabitants of his hometown which is being decimated by an outbreak of the plague - is one such example. A large part of its appeal, as with many which take their essence from folklore - is the universality of its message. Everyone, no matter where they come from or in what era they live, will understand the basic subject of the eternal fight between good and evil. The fact that the forces of good in these stories usually win in the end may not, on the face-of-it, always appear true to life. Nonetheless legends and folktales frequently offer a sense of cohesion and moralistic hope in our often turbulent and frightening world.

During horror’s long and storied history - both in written form and more recently on the cinema screen - the rich and varied subject of European legend has created some of the genre’s most memorable moments. Murnau’s Faust is

part of a tradition which flourished during the early years of German cinema. Whether due in part to their folkloric tradition, or from the fact the country, along with the rest of Europe, was still recovering from the traumatic aftermath and influences of the First World War, horror was a popular subject matter for German filmmakers at the time. Some of the greatest early works in the genre - outside of those produced by the big Hollywood studios - came from Germany, with such classics as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920) and Vampyr (1930) all originating from the country.

However two films more than any stood out, personifying a feeling of surreal and lonely otherworldliness, elements which are amongst the basic essences of true horror. Both Nosfertau (1922) - perhaps one of cinema’s most unsettling and haunting interpretations of the Dracula legend - and Faust which followed four years later and was to be the last film its director was to make in his homeland, shared many similar qualities, such as heavy, foreboding atmospheres, stark, minimalist settings and casts of bizarre and troubled characters. All of which isn’t surprising considering both films were the handiwork of Murnau.

Faust - the film which Japanese director Shinji Aoyama rates amongst the greatest ever made and whose devilish opening sequences are thought to have influenced the ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ segment from Disney’s Fantasia (1940) - and the way it comes alive on screen still makes chilling viewing even more than eighty years after its initial release. From the opening in Faust’s plague ridden hometown, to the scene’s in his study heavy with the air of an alchemist’s lair and where he, in despair denounces God - setting in motion the disastrous train of events which will eventually destroy the lives of himself and those he loves - everything is imbued with a sense of the death and decay which pervaded much of the Medieval period in which the story is set.

Later as the story progresses it focuses on Faust being given his youth back by Mephisto in exchange for his soul, and his love for a young girl called Gretchen (played by the German actress Camilla Horn in a role originally intended for Hollywood star Lilian Gish).

Much of the proceedings during this part of the film (lighter in tone and subject, though with a dark seam running at their core) play out against backdrops of a brighter palette, serving only to heighten the darker periods which bookend the film’s main body. Murnau, in conjunction with German cinematographer Carl Hoffmann - who had worked on Fritz Lang’s legendary Dr. Mabuse (1922) and Die Nibelungen (1924) - created a world on screen of fantastical proportions.

Fairytale cottages surrounded by beautiful gardens made the perfect setting for Faust and Gretchen’s doomed love story to play out in. These were later juxtaposed, during the film’s heady finale, against a medieval town of angular houses with gabled roofs and twisted cobbled streets along which rampant hoards of vengeance seeking yokels thronged, a staple element in

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European themed horror cinema for years to come.

The subject is also an excuse for the creation of countless bizarre animals, imaginary beings and inexplicable situations, which lend themselves perfectly to the horror genre. In Murnau’s retelling of the Faust legend these flights of fancy are taken to new levels. From the central character of the devil himself (in the form of the cunning and sly Mephisto), to Faust’s own magician-like aspirations as well as flying animals, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, damsels in distress and strange potions, the screen comes alive with an endless array of the strange and curious.

The byways of cinematic history are strewn with talented individuals (both from behind and in front of the camera) who died tragically young; what magic would they have gone on to produced had they lived? The German director F.W. Murnau was one such person. Born on the 28th December, 1888, in Germany’s Province of Westphalia, Murnau died tragically in a car crash in Santa Barbara, California, forty two years later. During a short career which spanned only twelve years, he masterminded some of early cinema’s most influential and renowned works including several - such Der Janus-Kopf

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(Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde / The Head of Janus) (1920) and ScholB Vogelöd (The Haunted Castle) (1921) - which could be said to fall within the wider horror remit. Many of the films he made have been lost in the interceding years. However watching those that have survived, it is not hard to see the talent and imagination of a man who, had he lived, one can only imagine would have gone on to produce more weird and wonderful cinematic visions.

Gösta Ekman, who played the title role of Faust, also had a relatively short life, dying at the age of forty seven. Unlike Murnau however, Ekman had a prolific career starring in almost forty films as well as countless stage productions which earned him the title of Swedish theatre’s most legendary performer. In Faust he is given ample opportunity to display his renowned ability for portraying a wide range of ages, playing Faust as both an aged man and much younger, virile character.

Though, by dint of its very title, the film revolves around the inner turmoil, angst and tribulations of Faust, the significant individual that stands out when reflecting upon the film isn’t him. From the moment Mephisto (a chief demon of traditional German folklore) appears on screen - making a bet with one of Heaven’s principle

angels that he can win the soul of a righteous man and in the process gain dominion over the earth in the name of the Devil - it is this sly, insidious and deceptively benevolent man who is the film’s most memorable character.

Following his initial appearance in the traditional demonic form of winged and horned beast - he takes on human appearance swathed in a suit and cloak of liquid black satin, as he spreads and seeps his evil treachery into every aspect of the lives of those he meets. The embodiment of Mephisto by Swiss actor Emil Jannings was praised as a standout portrayal at the time by The New York Times which, in their review of The 7th December, 1926, referred to Jannings’ performance as masterful, calling him a ‘sly, busy Satan, who, with a wink and a grim laugh, gloats over the misery he causes’. Jannings (who went on to become the first non-American actor to win an Oscar for his leading role in The Last Command (1928), plays the insidious character of Mephisto with a commanding presence which becomes the viewer’s sole focus of attention whenever he is on the screen.

The stories which surround Murnau’s film, particularly in the years following its release, are almost as legendary as that of Faust itself. The director, a perfectionist who

laboured over the minutest detail, made several different versions of the film, of which five are known to still exist, including two German editions, a French version, a bilingual European version and an edition prepared by Murnau for MGM in America. These versions differed in various ways with everything from missing scenes to the use of different costumes and even actors. It was those made for the home market however which were considered the archetypal editions, but which until recently were not seen outside of Germany, making the new release by the Masters of Cinema label, reconstructed from Murnau’s favoured domestic market edition, of particular significance.

Faust is the embodiment of Peter Cushing’s mantra, the perfect example of how style - in the field of horror - will long outlive the modern fixation with gratuitous, in-your-face frights.

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Faust is available on August 18th courtesy of Eureka Entertainment. www.eurekavideo.co.uk

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In Defence...

The Dark Art of Dahmer

words by Dr Karen Oughton

M

aking entertainment out of the crimes of serial killers does not sound like a suitable endeavour for art or appreciation. How can repetitive crimes by regrettably guessable social types seek to espouse something profound about our human condition? Such voyeurism should not, surely, be afforded the dressing of intellectual critique simply through discussions of playful panning or eloquent expression?

The latter are what we sample when the fare is carefully curated, such as selected cuts of the subtle and sometimes tender, Academy Award-winning supposed fiction of The Silence of the Lambs. In true crime, we trip over the bloated, runny bodies catalogued for real on gloating websites separating that cheap tart, loser or queer from us. We will remember true crime’s heroes when you

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are gone. We will envy them when we are supposed to despise them and yet we will also disgust in their stunted emotional growth and the puddles of putrid body juice they leave behind. Sometimes, the extraordinary in life is terrible: art has been made from Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer.

The Milwaukee Monster (as Dahmer was also known) was an alcoholic, periodic paedophile and flasher who pleaded guilty to killing 16 men, raping and eating parts of their bodies (with A1 sauce) and keeping other parts in the fridge while he worked in a chocolate factory.

He faked ‘spastic’ fits as a youth and his obsession with Star Wars led him to cruise for men wearing Sith-style contact lenses. At the same time, he was a handsome guy who did not want for lovers. He was a delicious contradiction. To date there have been five primary feature films made about his crimes: two lurid accounts

“The intensity is intoxicating, fascinating and sexy – that which comes from experiencing the unordinary, yet his jockish tee serves only to heighten the contrast: he still looks like a loser.”

– Dahmer vs. Gacy and The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer, one family-backed sop (Raising Jeffrey Dahmer), a mixed-method documentary (The Jeffrey Dahmer Files) and Dahmer (2002) the morally ambivalent subject of this piece.

Dahmer (2002) stands out owing to its conception and execution. It operates on two time frames, the present short-term stopping just prior to Jeff ’s arrest and the time prior to that reversing to before his first murder to his teenage years. These sections cross-connect to suggest how Dahmer’s psyche was influenced, damaged maybe, by his circumstances. They guide us inside Dahmer’s head and it becomes difficult to know what is memory, fantasy and reality even when you know the case’s chronology. It becomes easy to imagine how, after his second accidental homicide, he simply went with it.

Director David Jacobson’s depiction of Dahmer doesn’t waste time covering itself with politically correct brow beating. It is not about obvious moralising over the real killer but the efficacy of a filmic representation of him and as such it is a slow-paced feature presumably intended for an intelligent audience rather than fast-food exploitation fans. Thanks to the cinematography and direction and the acting capabilities, charisma and good

looks of a pre-fame Jeremy Renner, we see Dahmer blossom… and freeze. He switches back and forth between a runty little stump with bad hair, glasses and a slump to a comparative Casanova of a smart young man desperate to be as emotionally resolute as he pretends to be.

We are drawn into a world where Dahmer’s actions make sense because the film reimagines how he thought and felt and how his victims saw him. Jacobson has form here. As the director also behind Edward Norton vehicle, Down in the Valley, his Dahmer grows to be an antihero in his own head and something rather different outside of it. Indeed, we are encouraged to understand Dahmer’s unaltered mindset to the extent that the last section of the timeframe set in his present sees the final one that got away return to Jeff ’s flat the next day only to catcall him at his window. Shown from Dahmer’s perspective before he withdraws into his room, it suggests he saw himself and was akin to a lovelorn teen in a series of intense romantic tiffs rather than as the calculating sadist that it has been argued he was. The depiction therefore explores our popular understanding of the paradoxical appeal of the serial killer in stark contrast to the actuality that the victim returned, still handcuffed, with law enforcement.

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Nevertheless, the character arc also offers a Dahmer who is realistic as well as expressionistic and impressionistic. It is more concerned with creating an accurate kaleidoscope of Jeff ’s personae than a narrative with a firm answer and we lurch from an opening scene showing him in ugly overalls and an ear-emphasising chocolate factory cap to a sequence where he charms a victim home. The gloopy, mechanical glug of the machines reminds us of his dime-store cannibalism (no nice Chianti here) before we switch to the clothing shop where the subtle panning and shot angle convinces us that he is the epitome of smooth, that stripping nude for a stranger is normal and that propositioning for porn is positively humanitarian.

That said, the film also reflects Dahmer’s ability to commit his crimes owing to being “a honey” on the Milwaukee gay scene, as was stated by court reports. He had an appealing vulnerability. In the film this is made explicit in his interaction with Rodney (the alias of Tracy Edwards, played by Artel Kayaru) when they first meet in a shop. The camera cuts between the two as they begin to flirt, with Rodney masquerading as a shop assistant and Dahmer slightly bashfully bailing him out when he is chastised for handling the goods. The lighting is low as they realise their mutual desire and underlying distaste while the direction moves them closer together.

Through this relationship the audience is encouraged to understand Dahmer rather than simply condemn him. This is most apparent when the pair retires to

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Dahmer’s flat. We see Jeff ’s awkward attempt to dance to the chintzy Tallahassee Lassie with Rodney. His robotic shuffling indicates just how ill at ease he is with his homosexuality particularly against Rodney’s quirky shape-throwing. We then watch as Jeff just stands and stares at Rodney, who he could have and hold but won’t.

Indeed, the soundtrack and set design call the audience to their relationship with Dahmer himself. He cannot live apart from the world or what it has supposedly done to him. Lit by an in-scene lamp and visually encroaching red lights, extra-diegetic moans mingle with the police sirens that typically cruise unawares beneath Jeff ’s window while he lies with his conquests. As the film progresses, the soundscape moves from a literal lack of dialogue to couple flashbacks of his first murder with his abortive first dalliance with Rodney. With the temptation of happiness, vocalisation now increases dramatically as Dahmer discusses his homosexuality, anger and religion and they try to reach around his animosity. Up to this point, sounds transform and take on timbre of the angelic choirs calling in the minor keys that haunt adventure and love stories, but here they fall silent, signifying the story’s ultimately tragic outcome, for there is no redemption.

The film doesn’t shy away from disdainful aspects of Dahmer’s character either and we are left under no illusions as to how damaged and essentially weak he is.

This is highlighted through impressionist sequences. We

step through a wild party to look down on Dahmer silent in a chair, drink clenched in hand and hiding behind his oversized glasses and fringe mechanically smoking the cigarette clamped in the tips of his fingers. Another sequence sees the man-boy smashing trees with a stick in frustration. The latter is based on his response to his parents’ acrimony, but here it suggests an attempt to feel that doesn’t alleviate his frustration regardless of the force he uses. The sequential nature of these images reveals him trapped within his own patterns of thought and behaviour. The intensity is intoxicating, fascinating and sexy – that which comes from experiencing the unordinary, yet his jockish tee serves only to heighten the contrast: he still looks like a loser.

The film faces Dahmer as the criminal he was. These sequences vary from lurid but factual shots of Dahmer wielding the drill he uses on his victims’ heads to unnerving follow-up footage of one boy drugged and stumbling to get away. Dahmer’s own headspace is conversely shown in expressionist scenes with him sweating, naked and nearing orgasm while having sex with the drugged body of a bathhouse conquest while obscured by the jump cuts and flashing red light of his alcoholic haze. The colour literally fades to black as he temporarily gives in whilst attempting to dismember a victim. The magnitude of the action complete with pooling blood projects the childlike quality of someone disconnected from the reality of the world around him, if he does understand

the theoretical immorality of his actions. We move from eventual monologues illustrating cavalier self-disgust fostered by years of pretending not to care to images of him as a younger, freshly broken man. The too-stiff little fingers of the thirty-something year old give way to the shaking hands of a silhouetted boy who slurps from a booze bottle and chain smokes to steel himself to saw up his victim. He stops, nearly vomits and then later cries his heart out before crumpling into a puddle of drunkenness.

Dahmer doesn’t do what we’re told a good crime narrative should. It doesn’t focus on victim restitution and indeed excludes the justice Jeff eventually faced, being battered to death in prison. It doesn’t gloat or give us a boo-hiss villain. It instead offers a psychological exploration that dares to be seductive and sadistic but, at times, also sweet. It allows Jeff Dahmer to be twisted enough to impale dogs on fences, have a warmly crooked smile and refuse to let his longed-for would-be-boyfriend stage a baiter-fish fight for fun. Renner’s Dahmer is a complex romantic antihero precisely because he projects the squirming yet utterly still chameleon the man was. This is while director Jacobson ensures Dahmer’s mind is reflected in the sound and light that intrude on and ultimately box Jeff into the world he can’t cope with.

The art of Dahmer is realising that there is yet beauty in such horror.

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Blood Ties

release date 15th August

cert (15)

writers Guillaume Canet, James Gray starring Clive Owen, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup

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Review by David Hall

director Guillaume Canet

Blood Ties, Guillaume Canet’s english-language debut, is pure jukebox homage – from its explosive opening set to Ace Frehley’s “New York Groove” as a bunch of wiseguys are blown away by big-collared feds through to an overblown and emotionally charged NY subway face-off. We’ve walked these mean streets so many times yet - like putting on over-familiar greatest hits collection - there is woozily enjoyable retro charm to be found here ; almost as pantomime 70s as American Hustle and with a big name cast gamely chewing the scenery throughout 1970s Queens.

Billy Crudup’s Frank and older brother Chris (Clive Owen) are the chalk and cheese siblings; cop and crook, both in emotional flux and looking for fresh starts. (Lili Taylor) is the sister caught between brotherly tension and elderly patriarch ( James Caan) is ailing after recent surgery. Chris is fresh out of prison with a genuine desire to lead a straight life with a good girl (Mila Kunis). But his attempts are continually hampered by old connections and his ongoing relationship with ex-wife and mother of is children (Marion Cotillard) who is coping with issues of her own. Frank meanwhile is trying to reconnect with an old flame (Zoe Saldana). Their fated and difficult lives intertwine and overlap over the course of year with explosive results Wisely this cut has been trimmed from the bloated 142 minute Cannes edit that earned sniffy reviews from international critics feasting on gourmet art-house. Blood Ties, with its wonky accents, throwback duds and shouty cameos, was always going to look like the dirty, high cholesterol burger amidst the chateaubriand of the usual competition suspects.

Canet’s soundtrack choices are as on-the-nose obvious as those used in the recent Killing Them Softly - pure service station cassette 70s rock and disco abounds - and setting drug scenes to the Velvet Underground is a student-ish affectation that by rights should be outlawed by now. The performances are as broad as Owen’s lambchop sideburns. One thanksgiving dinner sequence lurches into giddy near-parody, with the quarrelling brothers going toe to toe Sopranos style. Owen, accent flailing all over the pace screaming; “take yo turkey and shove it up yo ASS”, before poppa Caan practically has a heart attack trying to calm things down.

Co-written by James Gray, Blood Ties is actually reminiscent of Gray’s We Own The Night, whose cop and criminal blend it superficially resembles.

It’s actually a remake of a 2008 French thriller Les liens du sang by Jacques Maillot, which having not seen I have no idea how much it departs from.

That said, there is a definite gallic hue to Canet’s approach to this very US material with long diffuse exchanges and contemplative notes struck in between the stepieces and musical montages. While it falls short of reaching the heights of the kind of widescreen gangster epics it is clearly indebted to it has fun trying, and if you have any kind of Jones for this sort of thing you will too.

The Congress release date 15th August

Review by Jordan McGrath

When year’s end inevitably comes around, one of my favourite scenes will undoubtedly be Robin Wright’s (playing a fictionalised version of herself ) performance capture in The Congress. In an attempt to render actors obsolete, with studios choosing to render digital versions of their onscreen talent to use them for what they will, we see – in paradoxical beauty, honest humility and soul that computers could never recreate – her agent (played beautifully by Harvey Keitel) takes her on a journey from his past that eloquently guides her through a kaleidoscope of emotions. It’s simple but engrossing, old-school filmmaking that’s intimately influenced by words and countenance, not by hollow spectacle and special effects. And that’s The Congress’ message at its core, keeping the things in our lives, which define our personality, rather than submerging ourselves in false identities and fictional ideas to satisfy an empty, faux happiness, dictated by restriction-less reality.

The catch-22 that plagues Wright’s character for the first 40 minutes of The Congress is whether to bow to the studio’s pressure for digital scanning. To sell her likeness – and in a way her brand – would mean she would not be able to act again, anywhere, but to not opt for the scanning would mean falling into obscurity and unable to care for her ill son. Promised that she would be ‘aged’ down to 33 for the rest of her digital career, there’s a seething commentary on Hollywood’s treatment of its aging female actors going on here. Danny Huston’s studio-exec explains that, at the age of 44, she is close to the end of her career.

But it’s when The Congress jumps forward 20 years and Wright is invited to the titular congress that things become truly strange, with her onscreen facsimile now an action sci-fi star, we begin to see the human one disappear from humanity.

When she travels through Folman’s psychedelic Oz – more Return than Wizard – fully animated in differing styles and techniques, we see the director’s true vision come to the fore.

Folman’s aesthetic is vibrant and striking, and his message potent – emotion, either sadness or happiness, should be welcomed as it’s what makes us living, functional beings. Its tone may be a tad uneven but there’s something that tells me this was the director’s intention. In the animation world – there is no restriction and people are able to live the lives they want, regardless of identity clashes and structure. A side-love story surrounding Jon Hamm’s Dylan, the digital artist who has been animating Wright’s avatar for the last 20 years and has become obsessed with getting to know the ‘real’ Robin Wright, becomes a little stale – but allows the film to tap into more of the abstract dystopian themes Folman is trying to discuss.

The Congress may lack some cohesion but has enough soul and heart that it becomes an unforgettable experience into a world that may look different but is not so far off our own.

cert (15)

director Ari Folman writer Ari Folman starring Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm, Danny Huston

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Review by Clarisse Loughrey

God Help the Girl release date 22nd August

cert (15)

director Stuart Murdoch writer Stuart Murdoch starring Olly Alexander, Hannah Murray, Pierre Boulanger, Emily Browning

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God Help the Girl, the cinematic musical directed

by Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch is, as the curmudgeonly cynical internet dwellers will tell you, as twee as a birdhouse decorating workshop. If this fact at all surprises you, I am forced to gently ask you to reconsider your general expectations of the world. Every man, woman, and magically-endowed talking goat could see this coming from a mile off. Yet, there’s always been some kind of natural assumption that the word “twee” only works inside the context of condescending insult. That sweetness, innocence, and hope are irrelevant in the adult world unless as a prelude to an inevitable corruption. Are we all just living inside an Aaron Sorkin adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons? As entertaining an hour of television as that would be, I hope to god that’s not the case.

There’s plenty to fall in love with here, as Murdoch captures with ease the aesthetics of his band’s vintage melancholy onto film. Sitting on crumpled duvets and staring out of the window, cup of tea in hand, as the rain drops slowly mist your vision and turn traffic lights into blurs of colour sparked amongst a palette of grey. Dawn strolls through the deserted alleyways of Glasgow, gratefully absent of the junkies and gangsters populating pretty much every other film about Scotland post-Trainspotting. In many ways, this picture stands as a love letter of redemption to a much maligned city.

Here, Glasgow is a haven of indie and every scene of God Help the Girl pulsates with the electric atmosphere, not only of teen dreamers forming bands pledged to change the world (a natural high I’m sure a lot of us can attest to once experiencing), but of the enduring contribution of the city to the legacy of indie music.

Murdoch’s tribute is certainly warm and affectionate in tone, as impeccably dressed teens vow together to sing, dance, and hang out with alternative comedy queen Josie Long (whose cameo is brief but scene-stealing). The tracks are faultless in their own way, but behind all this veneer? Here’s where my problem lies. As a celebratory cake of a movie, sweet and irresistible, it works; but pumping reality through 1,000 distortion pedals brings its own problems. Supposedly, at the heart of the picture is Eve (Emily Browning), an Australian expat with musical dreams destroyed by the crippling grip of anorexia. Except it’s a special cinematic kind of anorexia whose only side effect is a comfortable, poetic kind of sadness. It’s always a little troubling to see a movie tack on a mental illness as essentially an aesthetic accessory to plot.

In that way, nothing about Eve really feels tangible, she’s more like a muse simply breathed into life like an indie pop Pygmalion. The lack of Eve’s humanity is just a bit of a sad trivialising of the depth of spirit and resilience which lies at the heart of Glasgow’s music scene. If God Help the Girl is truly meant to stand as a representation of the soul of Belle & Sebastian, then I think Stuart Murdoch might actually be underselling himself here.

Review by Ben Nicholson

David Michôd burst onto the screen in 2010 with his fierce familial crime drama Animal Kingdom, suggesting the arrival of a real talent. Less full-blooded but more poetically inclined is his introspective sophomore feature, the bleak and brutal The Rover. Framing his cast against the desolate expanse of the Australian outback, it is a post-apocalyptic fable that contemplates the effects of societal meltdown on the psyche of the populace. Here, the ‘collapse’ occurred a decade past and the ramifications of this are what is seen through the dusty windows of a car traversing this postlapsarian wasteland.

Dropped into the action, the screenplay pays little heed to offering more than the briefest summary of the current status quo. Information is drip fed in sporadic slivers – the inflated value of the US dollar, Chinese text visible on a passing train – by which the audience can piece together an overarching context if they desire. The real crux of this imagined world is the Aussie backdrop.

Already recognised as a wilderness punctuated sparsely with civilisation, in this instance it is continent as an allegory for parched moral bankruptcy.

Humanity is rare - remorselessness and regression are etched more commonly upon the grimy faces of these future Bushmen. Guy Pearce plays the stony-eyed Eric, a bearded loner who is effectively the amoral world anthropomorphised. He is sitting in a sleazy bar when his car is stolen from the side of the road by a trio on the run, led by Scoot McNairy’s Henry.

Eric sets off after them with unnerving resolution and soon finds himself with an unlikely passenger, the slow-witted Rey (Robert Pattinson). He is, in fact, Henry’s younger brother, left for dead at the scene of some unnamed crime, and agrees to reveal his sibling’s destination in exchange for passage. As the two bisect the arid locale, Eric imparts his equally unyielding worldview on the impressionable Rey. Both Pearce and Pattinson are exceptional in their roles - the former exacting as the good man broken by a bad world, the former stealing every scene as the Lennie Small-esque dimwit - the last incarnation of quiet hope in these bad lands.

In his quest to reclaim his car - and in the backstory that is imparted during a stint in a jail cell - we come to learn that Eric’s disillusion with law and order is longstanding. The fact that he was never held accountable for a heinous pre-collapse crime broke him and his faith in his fellow man. Now, his soul is as barren as world he inhabits - perfectly captured by Natasha Baier’s striking cinematography and Antony Partos’ atonal score.

Eric’s quest is an attempt to retain the concept of obligation and consequence. The burgeoning relationship between Eric and Rey is one in which the former’s perception of an absolutely corrupted humanity slowly crushes the last vestiges of something better. Though the emotional significance of the car is only revealed in the final moment, it – and the bloody conclusion – reflects Michôd’s grim theme – the final burial of human innocence.

The Rover

release date 15th August

cert (15)

director David Michôd writer David Michôd, Joel Edgerton starring Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy

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release date 18th August

cert (15)

director Sandra Nettelbeck writer Sandra Nettelbeck starring Michael Caine, Clémence Poésy, Michelle Goddet, Jane Alexander

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Review by Cleaver Patterson

Mr Morgan’s Last Love

Following the death of his wife Joan ( Jane Alexander) Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine), a retired American philosophy teacher, leads a lonely existence in his beautiful, modernist, Paris apartment.

One day as the bus on which he is travelling breaks suddenly, Matthew quite literally falls for a young dance teacher called Pauline (a beautifully measured performance by Clémence Poésy) after she kindly helps him to his feet. During the proceeding weeks and months as Matthew and Pauline’s unorthodox friendship blossoms, they discover things about each-other which give them both a fresh outlook on life and renewed optimism for the future.

Caine’s performance in Mr Morgan’s Last Love displays perfectly why he is widely considered one of the most accomplished actors of his, or any other, generation. Here is a man comfortable in his own skin, not afraid to show his age magnified a hundred times on the silver screen, with each and every smile and frown line laid open to public scrutiny. His portrayal of the despondent widower whose life fails to have any purpose once his beloved wife dies, but who finds new hope and energy in the form of his young friend Pauline, could only come from someone who has experienced life and understands the fears which face us all as we grow older. The viewer feels for Caine’s Matthew as he faces each day of the rest of his life without the one person who understood everything, both good and bad, which combined to make him the man he is.

That the new love which he finds - and which helps him face his future with fresh acceptance comes from outside of his remaining family (consisting of his grown up son and daughter, played with marvellous acidity by Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson) is also a reflection of situations which many people experience in later years. Your family may think - as Matthew’s children do - that they are making decisions with your best interest at heart. In reality however they are just as afraid as you of what the future holds, and that their actions may be seen as a betrayal of the past.

It is appropriate that a film - as intrinsically involved with the subject of love in all its diverse forms as this one is - should play out against the backdrop of the ‘City of Love’. Paris, with its faded and romantic bohemianism is the city-like embodiment of Matthew himself. A retired philosophy teacher, his character appears perfectly at home in his expensively appointed yet comfortable apartment with windows which open onto stunning views of the Eiffel Tower across a sea of gabled rooftops which sadly one feels probably only exists in the movies.

Mr Morgan’s Last Love is one of those films like the recent hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) - which sees growing old as a positive part of life’s rich cycle. As such it should instil in the viewer a renewed confidence with which to face the uncertainties of the future.

release date 29th August

Review by Christopher O’Neill

Adapted from the 2009 short film of the same name, the independently-produced Obvious Child was picked up for American distribution and international representation after it received its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year. While the romantic comedy, particularly when laced with New York Jewish angst, is an over-subscribed genre, what makes this feature debut from director Gillian Robespierre exceptional is that it tackles credible modern female issues (one of them particularly contentious) while remaining warm and humorous in its outlook.

Jenny Slate plays Donna Stern, an aspiring comedian who uses her experiences as a female twenty-something New Yorker as material for her stand-up routine. It’s a raw and personal brand of humour in which she is more honest about her personal life then she is with those people closest to her. This puts a strain on her relationship with her boyfriend and when he leaves Donna, it is only the beginning of a number of unexpected life-changing events: She loses her comfortable job in a laid back bookstore and finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand with the sweet but seemingly naïve Max ( Jake Lacy). With an appointment made at an abortion clinic, on 14th February of all days, Donna is forced for the first time in her adult life to fully grasp responsibility.

Much has been made in the media of the abortion aspect of the storyline, with some describing the film as the shorthand title “the abortion comedy”, but to label Obvious Child in such a simplistic manner is a crude misrepresentation. It does not set out to be simply provocative, make a overt political statement, or be particularly transgressive, but rather the film uses this element as one of many to create an empathic lead character. She is a contemporary movie heroine, put through a variety of situations that make her ultimate decisions credibly relatable. The use of comedy is noteworthy because it is not only for the amusement of the audience but it also functions to illustrate a major aspect of Donna’s character since she exudes humour to deflect her vulnerability in uncomfortable situations.

In essence, cringe comedy serves Obvious Child to build the central characterisation.

Having appeared in various supporting television and film roles, Jenny Slate is given centre stage here and she is phenomenal. Slate has a flare for neurotic, self-depreciating comedy, and the character she portrays in Obvious Child was clearly tailored to take advantage of this. While in most of her other screen appearances the actor has played characters with a blunt and biting wit, in portraying Donna Stern she displays a sensitivity not seen before and it serves her well. One can only hope it will be the first of many lead roles in the future, and that she will be re-teaming with Robespierre in the near future.

Obvious Child cert (15)

director Gillian Robespierre writers Gillian Robespierre starring Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffmann

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Review by Timothy E. Raw

We Gotta Get Outta This Place release date 15th August

cert (15)

directors Simon Hawkins, Zeke Hawkins writer Dutch Southern starring Ashley Adams, Mackenzie Davis, William Devane 64

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Screenwriter Dutch Southern has the kinda shitkickin’ name that tells you his debut feature We Gotta Get Out of This Place, could only be set in the Lone Star State of Texas. Just outside Corpus Christi to be exact, a dead-end community based around the local cotton mill.

Clearly, the romantic dreams of crime fiction fans, Sue (Mackenzie Davis) and Bobby ( Jeremy Allen White) are not borne out by the place they live, which is why they’re both headed to college, leaving disaffected, marginal BJ (Logan Huffman) behind.

Soon to lose the two people he’s grown up with, it’s also not lost on BJ that his best friend has eyes for his girl, most likely to make a move once they’re on campus. With this in mind, the reckless robbery he commits to finance their decadent send-off is just as likely intended to keep them around as accessories to the crime.

Somehow managing to blow twenty grand, the eve of their debauched last hurrah in the city is one of those nights where everything imperceptibly shifts to a place it can’t come back from. One minute, Sue and Bobby are discussing Jim Thompson over biscuits and gravy, the next the their lives are spiraling out of control like characters in one of his novels, hounded

by BJ’s psychotic boss, Griff. Having previously menaced Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski by shoving his head down the toilet, screaming “Where’s the fucking money, shithead!”, Mark Pellegrino is perfectly cast and excitingly exaggerated in the role, reveling in the tarmac tough threats Griff makes to convince these in-over-their-heads youngsters to pull a heist at the cotton mill to pay him back.

Like a teenage Fargo, first-time-director brothers Zeke and Simon Hawkins’ superb evocation of criminal adolescence tautly tracks the teens’ every wrong move, with cinematographer Jeff Bierman’s sparse, sun-bleached images, and composer Jonathan Keevil’s gravelly score capturing the grimy stultification and premature defamation of youth. Steering well clear of redneck stereotypes, the success of this archetypal crime story is in the telling. Strippeddown, there’s a sureness to the tone, an urgency to the narrative and an insight into the under-pressure-thought-processes of these unfortunate victims of circumstance.

Three terrific, empathetic lead performances elevate the film beyond pulp fiction. Underneath the brawn and bluster of BJ, Logan Huffman finds a rakish high school charm that’s already grown weary.

Even more impressive, Jeremy Allen White (a dead ringer for Jeremy Renner’s younger brother), who previously appeared in Afterschool and Rob the Mob, cements his one-to-watch status in a leading role. An unassuming deer in the headlights, inexorably bound by loyalty to his best friend and fiercely protective of the girl he loves, White’s furtive glances are constantly considering Bobby’s options, always trying to make right from wrong. And as Sue, the grease monkey with fierce intelligence who brings out the best in both her boys, Mackenzie Davis is a dazzling discovery. Currently walking away with every episode of AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, this film should help catapult her on to casting lists as the next Jennifer Lawrence. Further proof of the Deep South revival in US indie cinema after Joe and Blue Ruin, you gotta see this film

Review by Cleaver Patterson

They say true life is frequently more disturbing than anything the human imagination can concoct.

Argentinean director Lucía Puenzo’s 2013 thriller Wakolda (released under the title The German Doctor) exemplifies this perfectly. Based on a true story, the central character of Josef Mengele around which it revolves, was one of history’s most notorious and twisted criminals, whose reputation and legacy still has the power to chill even thirty five years after his death.

Patagonia, 1960. Having successfully escaped Europe following the end of the World War II, and evaded capture by taking refuge in South America, Hitler’s notorious henchman Dr Josef Mengele (Àlex Brendemhüll) finds himself living with a young family in their lakeside hotel. Initially unaware of his true identity, it soon becomes clear to the family that their new guest is not all he seems, and that he has the germination of a plan which could have far-reaching and devastating results for them all.

Unlike other films which have featured the character of Mengele - most famously in director Franklin J. schaffner’s 1978 The Boys from Brazil which frequently went for more visceral chills, Puenzo’s take on the later years of the man known as the Nazi’s ‘Angel of Death’ for his experimentation work on prisoners during the Second World War, is more understated. Her subtle screenplay and atmospheric direction uses one of the oldest tricks in the book, to maximum effect. By allowing the audience to know more about the central character and his ulterior motives than the cast around him, she ratchets up the tension, creating by the final frames, a sense of palpable anxiety onscreen.

Spanish actor Àlex Brendemhüll gives a marvellously unnerving central performance as Mengele, capturing perfectly the essence of a man who cloaked his evil intents and calculating coldness beneath an exterior of benign approachability. At times one may feel that the remaining cast are there simply in support of Brendemhüll - a difficult obstacle to overcome when his character is one with such a domineering and commanding presence. However the initial susceptibility of his unwitting hosts, which slowly turns to horror as they realise who it is that they have welcomed into their home and of his plans for their family, is skilfully captured by Florencia Bado, Diego Peretti and Natalia Oreiro in the roles of Lilith and her parents Enzo and Eva. The innocence of their performances reflects perfectly the underlying menace of Brendemhülls, making for an experience which haunts the memory long after the film has finished.

Exquisitely filmed on location in Argentina, it is not hard to see - amidst mountain and lakeside settings reminiscent of middle Europe - why Mengele would have felt perfectly at home in South America. It is also easy to understand, after viewing Wakolda, why his name still evokes such feelings of horror and revulsion decades after he died.

Wakolda

release date 8th August

cert (15)

director Lucía Puenzo writer Lucía Puenzo starring Àlex Brendemühl, Diego Peretti, Guillermo Pfening

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In the 35 Shots of Frame: Rum (2008)

words by Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy

W

illiam Sydney Porter was a sentimentalist in a tough time and a tougher city. Under the pseudonym O. Henry, he wrote short stories about the inhabitants of New York City in the early 1900s, peppering them with playful twist endings. His most famous story is 1904’s The Gift of the Magi, where a poor couple strain to buy gifts for each other’s Christmas and to show their love for one another. The girl sells her hair to buy a strap for her other half ’s favourite watch; the boy sells his watch to buy her a set of combs.

Henry’s tale is one that has amalgamated into American pop culture, its teasing sentimentality and moral message (it’s the thought that counts) resurfacing elsewhere.

Claire Denis is not someone that you would immediately consider a sentimentalist, but her films distinctly keep a loving gaze on the messy humans inhabiting them. She places an emphasis on movement, or a lack of movement – in her films, shifts in body language tell us more than a monologue ever could.

In 2008’s 35 Shots of Rum, she builds a story around transit worker Lionel (Alex Descas) and his student daughter Josephine (Mati Diop). At first it’s difficult to understand exactly what type of relationship these two characters have with one another, their comfort with one another conveyed through body language rather than pointed dialogue. Early in the film, Lionel comes home to Josephine after a long working day. They kiss each others’ cheeks and share a warm hug, she gently drops a pair of slippers by his feet, he gives her a gift and offers a small smile upon her pleased reaction. The gift is a rice cooker.

It is a portrait of cosy domesticity, but until we’re shown a bedside photo of the father carrying an infant Josephine, their comfort seems unbearably intimate. They have a certain rhythm with one another, one that makes you feel odd for intruding on their day-to-day.

And as is life, those rhythms give way to new ones. By the end of the film, Josephine has flown the coop to be with Noé (Gregoire Colin), a family friend who has confessed his love to her. Lionel returns home alone, and we

cannot tell if he is happy or sad. In the film’s final shot, Denis and cinematographer Agnes Godard crop Descas’ expression out of the frame. At this moment, Lionel has realized that his daughter had bought another rice cooker; we know this because we saw Josephine purchase it the same day she received her father’s gift, but this is the first time he notices it.

He takes the cooker out of its packaging and sits it alongside the one they’ve used for so long. It’s an interesting twist on the O. Henry story about the watch and after a moment of keeping himself busy by unpackaging the smaller cooker, he stops and takes a pause.

His frame is upright, his focus sticking to the cookers in front. His hands settle at the worktop and they stay there. His posture shows us he’s keeping it together, but his hand clasping the tabletop suggests a man trying to catch his thoughts, holding on for sustenance. A lot happens in this moment, but we don’t need to see his face. If you pay attention, his body says all that’s necessary.

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Jordan McGrath

David Hall

Founder / Editor-in-Chief / Designer

Managing Editor

jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com

davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

thanks: Contributors Joseph Fahim Sabina Stent Ben Nicholson Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy Evrim Ersoy Cleaver Patterson Sam Moore Kelsey Eichhorn Christina Newland Dr. Karen Oughton Christopher O’Neill Clarisse Loughrey Timothy E. Raw

Proofing David Hall, Dan Auty & Jessica Chamberlain

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Image credits: Artificial Eye - 1,8,10,11,12,13,14 / FrightFest - 22,24,25,26,27 / Altitude Film Distribution - 28, 31 / eOne Entertainment - 32,34,35,61 / Universal - 44,46,47 / Eureka Entertainment - 50,51,52,53 / Lionsgate UK - 58 / StudioCanal UK - 59 / Metrodome - 60,64 / Koch Media - 63 / Peccadillo Pictures - 65

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