Friday 30 January 2009

Werner Herzog at the BFI

It was not a significant bullet.



The Werner Herzog Q&A at the British Film Institute last  Monday was both exhilarating and revelatory. Herzog first introduced a preview screening of his new documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, and was later interviewed onstage by Mark Kermode.

The interview was one of the best I've seen at the BFI. Herzog is a skilled raconteur whose stoicism and grim realism ("I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder," as he growled famously in Grizzly Man) is tempered by generosity and mischievous humour.  Kermode—the UK's favourite bequiffed, skiffle-playing, horror aficionado—is an experienced interviewer with deep film knowledge and approachable humanity. There was evident warmth between them (Herzog was shot during an interview with Kermode a couple of years ago, so they're practically war buddies) that was enjoyable to witness.

I tried to memorise my favourite of Herzog's comments, but thankfully The Guardian has now published a transcript of the evening. Here are a couple of my favourite moments, beginning with Kermode's question about the acrimonious relationship between Herzog and his muse Klaus Kinski, and their mutual death threats during the filming of his masterwork Fitzcarraldo:

MK: What did you actually say?
WH: Very quietly, as he was packing his things, I said that he would have eight bullets through his head before he reached the next bend of the river. Which was probably an exaggeration. I would have missed at least three or four.
Later, Herzog explained that he rarely has a chance to watch films as he's so busy making them:


WH: Two years ago, I think I saw a grand total of two films, both of them very bad, but very healthy because only from bad films I could learn.
MK: What were they?
WH: One I've forgotten and ...
MK: You only saw two films and you forgot one of them?

WH: Yes, one was a big Hollywood production, but I don't remember which one it was. The other one was a small Hollywood film, I think it was called The Real Cancun, about young people on spring break. There were eight young hunks and eight young girls, and the only point of the film was who got laid first. It was kind of delightful but it wasn't such a good film either.
Och, I laughed so hard I hurt myself.

Sunday 25 January 2009

Dante 01


Film: Dante 01, 2008
Director: Marc Caro
In a nutshell: A strange new prisoner arrives at a remote space station populated by the criminally insane.

Some films are less than the sum of their parts. Here are the parts of Marc Caro's mystical sci-fi turkey Danto 01:

For hubristic scientists and space madness, see Soderbergh's Solaris remake and Danny Boyle's Sunshine. For amnesiac messiah and heavy handed religious iconography, see the unwatchable French sci-fi turd Eden Log. For claustrophobia and interminably slow pacing see, well, all of the above. For bald murderers incarcerated in a space penitentiary, see Alien III. For Christ-like prisoner who can heal the dying by magically eating their disease, see The Green Mile. For awful greenish colour filter that looks like the camera lens has been fished out of a stagnant pond, see every shitty torture porn film from Hostel onwards. These are not exactly high quality components (actually, The Green Mile ain't so bad) and you can't build a Porche from a bucket of rusty spoons.

Ugh, I lack the energy to attempt a synopsis.

Dante 01's half-baked script and simplistic production design reek of "low-budget debut feature", yet this is hardly Marc Caro's first venture - he made the wonderful Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children in the 90s with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. How, then, has he managed to make a film as terrible as Dante 01? It is a mystery as incomprehensible as the plot of this film, and as uninteresting to solve.

A shining screen.

I love this:
Since the 1970s, Sugimoto has worked on his photo-series entitled Theaters, in which he photographs auditoriums of American movie theaters, and drive-in movies, during showings. The exposure time used for the photograph corresponds with the projection time of the film. This allows him to save the duration of the entire film in a single shot. What remains visible of the film’s time-compressed, individual images is the bright screen of the movie theater, which illuminates the architecture of the space. That its content retreats into the background makes the actual film a piece of information, manifesting itself in the (movie theater) space. As a result, instead of as a content-related event, film presents itself here as the relationship between time and spatial perception.

"One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious." Hiroshi Sugimoto.
According to Sugimoto,"Different movies give different brightnesses. If it's an optimistic story, I usually end up with a bright screen; if it's a sad story, it's a dark screen. Occult movie? Very dark."

Monday 5 January 2009

Day of the Dead


Film: Day of the Dead, 1985
Director: George Romero
In a nutshell: Romero's third Living Dead movie, set a few years after the zombie apocalypse.

Man alive, this is one terrific zombie film. There's great stuff here, and although the plot itself is quite straightforward, the social problems that evolve are satisfyingly complex. As is often the case in Romero's stories, the characters are undone as much by their inability to communicate and work together as by the actual gut-gobbling living dead. The film also possesses a dignity that belies its genre: for example, the script's respectful treatment of the film's only woman, Sarah Bowman (the no-nonsense scientist), is a blessed antidote to the usual bouncy, ankle-twisting, pneumatic victims-in-waiting. And Bub - the ex-military zombie who's as much a fan of classical music as giblets - remains the only really likable zombie, well, ever. (In fact Bub elicits more sympathy from the viewer than most of the film's living characters.)

Like I said: great stuff. Personally, I have a special fondness for zombie films set some time after the apocalypse, as they explore the prospect of a survivalist utopia (even if the utopias inevitably crumble by the end of the second act). In Day of the Dead, the survivors - a volatile combo of scientists and soldiers - are holed up in an almost perfectly secure underground compound, with plentiful food, guns, and even a freaking helicopter. What more could you want? Well, as it turns out: how about a little social cohesion?

But by far the film's most remarkable moment is the revelation is that, after the apocalypse, the zombies will have alligators as pets! Like so:




Dude. This shot appears for no more than a second in the beginning of the film (the zombie and his alligator friend are lurching/slithering out of a bank in response to a loud noise), and the whole alligator-zombie-partnership is left tantalisingly unexplored for the rest of the film. But someone really ought to pick up this idea and make it the premise of a movie. Gold.

Sunday 4 January 2009

My Winnipeg


Film
: My Winnipeg, 2007
Director: Guy Madden
In a nutshell: Madden's surrealist B&W "docu-fantasia" pays tribute to his home town.


There are some terrific ideas in My Winnipeg, Madden's dreamlike exploration of memory and the notions of home. Here are some: in an attempt to unpack his confusing upbringing, he hires actors to play his siblings, and has them re-enact scenes of childhood trauma with his real mother. He also introduces us to Ledge Man, the long-running TV show in which Madden's mother persuades a suicidal man to climb safely back inside (this happens in every episode, and Ledge Man has been running for fifty years). He explains that Winnipeg has ten times more sleepwalkers than any other city - somnambulism is so prevalent that a bylaw allows its citizens to carry keys to their childhood homes, where the current owners are obliged to take them in during nocturnal visits. And he chronicles key events in Winnipeg's history, such as the winter the cold snap came so quickly a team of frightened horses was frozen in a lake and their dead headsemerging from the ice in a rictus of terrorbecame an attraction for local skaters.


When the film is occupied with tales like these, it is a Borgesian delight. When, however, it strays into the realm of art student pastiche, it almost undermines its own inventiveness. For example, when he intercuts dramatic text (the word "betrayal", for example, set in white against a black background like the intertitles of a silent film) with static images, this is supposed to create layers of meaning.  Instead, it feels laboured and artificial. In one especially dull sequence, the word "lap" is repeated, along with images of a woman's naked lap, a map of forked rivers, and animal fur, creating a litany: "the fork, the lap, the fur". The lap is his mother's. The fur coat is hers also. The rivers trap the city of Winnipeg and prevent escape. You can see what Madden is aiming for: totems of the comforts and perils of home. The poetry of apron strings. But it doesn't resonate. It's a tin note. Oh, and boring.


Can techniques like flashing arthouse text and heavy-handed Freudian self-analysis still be considered "experimental" once they've been aped by a hundred second-year film students? Admittedly I've seen only one other film by Madden - his collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, My Dad Is 100 Years Old - but it too is full of contrived psychosexual imagery (Rossellini spends a good chunk of that film wriggling about on a giant pillow meant as a stand in for her late father Roberto's imposing naked belly). It's clearly a favoured theme. My Winnipeg garnered rave reviews, so there are those who enjoy this sort of thingbut at times I felt the film verged on self-parody.


My Winnipeg is the dream of a man on a train, trying desperately to leave the town of his birth, or at least work out why he can't. "Maybe I can film my way out," he says. Ultimately, he doesn't. But he gets close.

Thursday 1 January 2009

The Host

Film: The Host, 2006
Director:
Bong Joon-ho
In a nutshell: Much hyped South Korean monster movie in which an eccentric family try to locate their child, who has been either munched or kidnapped by a mini-Godzilla.

Reviews of The Host invariably note that it flouts monster movie conventions. To begin with, the monster itself - a sort of multi-legged salamander, mutated by the hundred litres of formaldehyde poured down a laboratory drain and so into the Hann river - appears very early on in the film, in broad daylight. This of course contravenes the mandate that monsters ought to appear only in glimpses and shadows for at least the first act (if not until the final showdown). The monster is also modestly sized - comparable with a mini-van, rather than a competitor for Kaiji of the Year. But the real way in which The Host breaks with convention is in the care and delicacy with which it treats its central characters, the eccentric Park family who pit themselves against the monster.

There is a wonderfully supernatural scene in this film, and it has nothing at all to do with mutant amphibian monsters. Sharing a meal in their snack hut by the evacuated Han river, the exhausted Park family are joined by Hyun-seo, the lost child for whom they have all been searching. When last they saw her, she was in the jaws of a monster, but here she is, appearing all of a sudden as though having just crawled from beneath the table. Rather than shout in surprise, each family member – wordlessly, unquestioningly – feeds her a mouthful of food from their own bowl.

This is done in such a quiet and naturalistic fashion that for a moment we really believe that she is there. And we feel a tremendous sense of relief. But she is not there: they are feeding rice to an apparition. Not a ghost, exactly, but a phantom conjured by the power of their collective longing. In fact Hyun-seo is alone, trapped in a sewer beneath Wonhyo Bridge, surrounded by wet corpses – in a sort of monster lunchbox, where she has been stored for later consumption. We knew this, we did, but for a blissful moment we allowed ourselves to be fooled. In remembering the truth – that she is not yet saved - we taste the family’s grief. It is cleverly done.

At the end of the film, there is a reprise of this scene, when Park Gang-du feeds the street urchin he has now adopted; this wonderfully real and low-key finale reinforces the feeling that despite having created a bona fide Monster Movie, the film maker's attentions seem curiously directed elsewhere.