Archive for the ‘film’ Category
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
You have to love Alejandro ‘Chuckles’ Jodorowsky… he’s such a great conman that he’s able to fool most of his fans most of the time (fooling all the people at any one time is rather more difficult). His first feature film Fando y Lis (1968) was fabulous, but his output went gradually downhill from there…. as I’ve already said in different words elsewhere on this site. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed watching Chuckles’ almost overnight transformation from an obscure cult figure whose films were very difficult to see, to his re-emergence as a maverick who merits regular name-checking by the ‘mainstream’. The tipping point for Chuckles was 2007, when Tartan in the UK and Blue Anchor in the US issued a box set of his three key movies (Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain), and since then I haven’t been able to move without stumbling over press coverage for Jodorowsky; a couple of weeks ago he was even featured on the front cover of the print version of The Guardian’s weekly Guide. The Guardian piece was hung on a Season of Jodorowsky in London organised by Guerrilla Zoo, comprising an ‘art’ exhibition, three performances of a play and some film screenings.
A few months ago I saw the Drawing Room’s Jodorowsky show, based on this director’s preparations for his aborted Dune film project. I went on a Saturday and the ‘wow factor’ was the dense and completely mixed art and cult film/sci-fi crowd, the place was heaving. The work displayed at The Drawing Room – production sketches by Moebius, H.R Giger and Chris Foss, plus recent art pieces inspired by the unrealised movie – did nothing for me. As a result of that Drawing Room experience, I decided to catch Jodorowsky’s current London exhibition at The Horse Hospital on a Friday afternoon right at the end of its run (today is the last day), hoping it would be a little emptier than the Dune show. I was surprised that no one else was there when I was looking at the work, but my expectation that I would find it dull proved well founded. The ‘wow factor’ this time turned out to be the price tags (in the £12,000 to £15,00 bracket) for work that looked like it had been made by a teenage outsider artist born in the early part of the 20th-century and just after he or she had discovered surrealism and the occult (Jodorowsky turned 80 this year, so perhaps this can be attributed to him starting off a little old-fashioned and then never growing up). I can’t imagine the trade in these items, or even those pictures that are available in limited edition prints at £80, being particularly brisk. Still, the sheer front Chuckles possesses continues to impress me; and as I hope is clear, I value his happenings and film work of the 1960s. The current show features 32 mediocre (they aren’t even bad) watercolours, all of them collaborations between Chuckles and Pascale Montandon.
After a Friday afternoon looking at Alejandro Jodorowsky and Pascale Montandon’s incredibly dull watercolours, there was only one thing I wanted to do that evening, and that was see a movie with no pretensions to being anything very special at all. I hadn’t watched Joel Silberg’s Breakin’ (1984) for at least two years, so it seemed like a good candidate as a piece of mindless entertainment. Two street dancers Ozone (Adolfo Quinones) and Turbo (Michael Chambers) meet up with a middle-class white girl called Kelly AKA Special K (Lucinda Dickey) and like each other’s style. Kelly is a trained dancer but she realises the street kids have talent, and after a few set backs they all gain the recognition they deserve. The film is set in LA, so there is plenty of sunshine alongside the endless breakin’!
The street lingo and threads of the ‘real’ kids are a groove sensation, but even better are the eighties outfits worn by the trained dancers! Looking at the Dickey’s crazy leotard outfit with purple pants worn over it, made me want to dig out my copy of Lucio Fulci’s Murder Rock – The Dancing Death (1984), which like Breakin’ is a Flashdance (1983, Adrian Lyne) rip-off that is not only much better than its ‘inspiration’ but also has plenty of gore and nudity! My main problem with Breakin’ is that while there is some semi-romantic interest between Ozone and Kelly, they fail to get off, let alone get it on in a steamy tripple X-rated all nude sex scene.
The rapper at the street events in Breakin’ is Ice-T and he’s described the film as ‘whack’; but actually it’s Ice-T who is whack, the film itself is so stupid it is really far out! The formulaic nature of Breakin’ represents a complete break with realism, and it is this that makes it a prime example of post-modern kitsch, in other words it is so bad it is good! In dissin’ the film to cover up his own poor performance, Ice-T merely demonstrates that he don’t know jack shit about the way in which ‘the masses’ absorb all meaning; I’d expect a bit more savvy from a motormouthed entertainer like Ice-T, who claims to have been a pimp before he started rapping and acting – but maybe he’s just the ‘original’ Sunset Boulevard ‘flake’! I watch a film like this mainly to check the dance moves, and there are plenty of those, I don’t really care about the ‘plot’, which is after all merely a vehicle to display plenty of lockin’, poppin’ and breakin’!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Adolfo Quinones, Adrian Lyne, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Blue Anchor, Breakin', Chris Foss, Drawing Room, Dune, El Topo, Fando y Lis, Flashdance, Guardian Guide, Guerrilla Zoo, H.R Giger, Horse Hospital, Ice-T, Joel Silberg, London, Los Angeles, Lucinda Dickey, Lucio Fulci, Michael Chambers, Moebius, Murder Rock, Murder Rock - The Dancing Death, occult, Pascale Montandon, post-modernism, Season of Jodorowsky, Sunset Boulevard, surrealism, Tartan, The Guardian, The Holy Mountain
Posted in counterculture, exhibitions, film, occulture | 18 Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Back in 1970 this allegedly ‘serious’ documentary about witchcraft sneaked a lot of full frontal nudity past the British censor and was then screened in sex cinemas for the enjoyment of the dirty raincoat brigade. It acts as a kind of companion piece to Derek Ford’s Secret Rites, since both feature Alex Sanders (as, indeed, does Angeli bianchi, angeli neri AKA Witchcraft 70, but that’s an Italian mondo movie not an English ‘documentary’). As the self-styled King of the Swingers (oops, sorry, I mean witches), Sanders camps it up as much here as he does elsewhere; unfortunately there’s a lot less of his rib-ticklingly softly spoken voice than in Ford’s short.
If the late Alex Sanders actually had any ‘occult powers’ then I’m The Queen of Sheba (and no doubt there are plenty of Alexandrian Wiccans out there prepared to assert that I was indeed Sheba in a previous incarnation). Nonetheless, Alex and his coven of nubile young wenches (there are an equal number of considerably less attractive men) dancing naked around fires and performing (simulated) sex magick, are a psychedelic groove sensation. The bad news is that this movie is 72 minutes long and way too much of its running time is devoted to other shit.
Before we get to the self-evidently fake stuff with Alex, there is a load of Margaret Murrayesque bollocks about the supposed survival of the ancient pagan religions of Europe right through the Christian era to the modern day, which is delivered as a voice-over to a few interesting and innumerable dull visual illustrations. Anyone who knows anything about the actual history of European witch trials, will appreciate that the claims of Murray and her followers are complete cobblers. Less informed viewers may take these claims at face value, since the voice-over sounds authoritative, but believe me (actually don’t, go and read up on it), it isn’t!
Anyway, back to Alex, he was obviously an obliging bloke who’d do whatever it took to get into a film. So here you have a witch initiation ceremony that mirrors aspects of Christian baptism (because the alleged survival of the ‘old religion’ is Malcolm Leigh’s obsession) and it looks rather different to the way the Sanders’ coven does supposedly the same thing for Derek Ford. That said, there is still plenty of nudity, bondage, whipping, and other borderline sexual thrills – so if you belong to the real army of the night (the dirty raincoat brigade) fear not, you’ll get your jollies! However, things get even groovier when we move onto scrying, where we have psychedelic hypnotic-patterns flashed across the screen – it’s a total trip, and wouldn’t have looked out of place in a hip 1960s horror flick like The Sorcerers.
Since director Malcolm Leigh is obsessed with the parallels between Christian and pagan rituals, Sanders also obliges him with a black mass; except, of course, this looks nothing like any black mass you’ve ever seen (such as the one in Ray Laurent’s Satanis, a 1970 documentary about Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan). Alex Sanders may be a showbiz sell-out but he’s both sweeter and considerably less of a flake than LaVey. While LaVey appears to have been no more than a huckster, these days so-called Satanism (in reality it is just Christianity in a mildly inverted form) seems to act as a magnet for kiddie-fiddlers and related low-life scum. Sanders, by way of contrast, is great entertainment. It’ s well worth grabbing a copy of Legend of the Witches just for the footage of Alex and his coven acting out their fantasies for the entertainment of dirty old men!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alex Sanders, Alexandrian Wicca, Angeli bianchi angeli neri, Anton LaVey, Christianity, Church of Satan, Derek Ford, dirty raincoat brigade, Europe, Legend of the Witches, Malcolm Leigh, Margaret Murray, occult power, Queen of Sheba, Ray Laurent, Satanis, Satanism, Secret Rites, sex magick, The Sorcerers, witch trials, Witchcraft 70
Posted in film, occulture | 19 Comments »
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
Omer Fast’s film installation Nostalgia is a good example of how material is formatted to fit the institution of art. This is not a criticism of Fast or his work; everyone has to survive in a capitalist society, and in doing so we all reproduce our own alienation. It should go without saying that the creation of a society where all distinctions between high and low culture are abolished in favour of a truly human world is a pressing task – but in the meantime, where I’m forced to choose between art and popular culture, I’d opt for the latter most of the time. That said, it is hard to see how Fast and his fabulous films could operate outside the art arena in this society. To make my own experience of Fast’s current London show a little more like mass culture and less like elite art, I walked through the gallery to watch the main feature Nostalgia III before taking in parts I and II. If Nostalgia were a DVD, part III would be the feature and I and II the extras.
Nostalgia III is a 30 minute sci-fi short. The set dressing indicates it takes place in an alternate version of the 1970s or possibly 1980s. Europe is impoverished and many of its inhabitants are fleeing to north Africa, where as illegal migrants they face a militarised border, brutality and the ongoing threat of deportation. As ever, Fast is poetic in his approach, deploying a collection of interlinked stories that undermine each other and thus raise questions about the ways in which truth is constructed. Nonetheless, given that Fast has made this piece for a gallery audience, his deliberately crude reversal of European bigotries is an astute move: white middle-class institutional racism is so deeply embedded in high culture that the kind of subtleties which would be understood by a broader audience will inevitably be lost on most of those who will see this piece in its current setting.
Nostalgia I and II feature individual soundtrack interviews with an Africa migrant now living in Europe. I shows a European male in combat gear making a snare as described on the soundtrack. II shows an interview taking place on split-screens. Both reveal a part of the research process from which Fast created Nostalgia III, and are very much supplementary to the longer piece. It takes 45 minutes to view all three works, and I spent just over a hour in the gallery; during this time I was one of six people actually looking at the work. However, while I was watching Nostalgia III there was a constant stream of people walking through the gallery from the offices and outside area that are accessed from back of the building – far more than were actually looking at the work. This may have been exacerbated by the fact that the gallery is currently being extended (the work of specialist art builders John Perkins Projects), but it nonetheless illustrates why art venue are often not the best places in which to display film. There was also a problem with sound bleed between the galleries (despite a lot of very visible and thus presumably cheaply installed soundproofing); and a further irritation with the screen of Nostalgia I being insufficiently blacked out. Despite these problems, do try to catch Fast’s Nostalgia if you can, it is on until 6 December 2009.
For stuff about Fast’s contribution to the 2008 Barbican exhibition On War, click here.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Africa, Barbican, Europe, John Perkins, John Perkins Projects, London, migration, Nostalgia, Omer Fast, On War, south London, South London Gallery
Posted in exhibitions, film | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
I reported on an earlier YouTube banning of my work in a blog I posted in September, and shortly after I’d written that YouTube pulled another video of mine, Nude In Melbourne. The point of the second piece, which was clearly lost on YouTube’s half-wit censors, is that I may or may not be nude in this short: you can’t tell because anything that might break the YouTube rules is hidden by a camera… but that didn’t stop the platform from banning it. However, the video is now available again via Vimeo:
<http://www.vimeo.com/7103351>
Due to the hassles I’ve been getting from YouTube, I decided to post my recent video Two Strippers straight to Vimeo:
<http://www.vimeo.com/7217171>
Nonetheless I’m continuing to amuse myself by posting selected pieces to YouTube. Recent additions to my profile there include I Wanna Die In The TV (which realises my desire to bring back the test card back), William Burroughs In Hell (two jokes with some groovy visuals) and In The Street Today – Paris (a psychogeographical exercise inspired in part by the camerawork of Stephen Dwoskin).
Raymond Anderson recently pointed out that ‘you tube’ is a common insult in Scottish playgrounds, and thus a very appropriate name for a platform that has its brains in its arse as far as understanding its own rules on forbidden material goes. While all corporate web 2.0 operations are selectively blind, deaf and dumb, when it comes to appraising content it seems that YouTube is consistently dumb, thick and stupid….
I’ve also found it curious in recent weeks how frequently both YouTube and Facebook have been either down or failing to function properly. While I don’t want to completely ignore those whose web use is largely restricted to corporate social networking platforms, we still need to get it on with web 2.0 software on our own sites: which is, of course, one of the reasons this blog is to be found here.
And talking of corporate platforms that don’t work, the Technorati overhaul last month resulted in some major glitches. My own entry has lost all my fans, comments, and it now links to the homepage of my website instead of this blog (with the result that the feed has lost all my blog entries and all my ‘authority’). I’ve emailed Technorati to tell them this, since I’m unable to do anything about it by logging-in, but of course they’ve done sweet FA about it. I always thought Technorati was a waste of time anyway, and this just serves to underline that!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: I Wanna Die In The TV, In The Street Today - Paris, Nude In Melbourne, Raymond Anderson, Stephen Dwoskin, Stewart Home, Technorati, Two Strippers, Vimeo, Web 2.0, William Burroughs In Hell, YouTube
Posted in film, Web 2.0 | 25 Comments »
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
Shortly after I’d settled into my seat at BFI Screen 1 for the Flipside Halloween shindig, a ‘real-life witch’ came and sat next to me. I figured this woman was a Wiccan because she looked completely out of place among hordes of trash film fans. A few minutes later Geraldine Beskin from the Atlantis Bookshop joined her. Among many other things, I overheard the pagan immediately to my left make the following observation to her occult book dealing friend:
“A lot of people said they would have come any other night of the year but not tonight because they need to be alone to communicate with the spirits. It’s a shame. I’ll get my brazier out when I get home and I’ll still have plenty of time to see who’s running about…”
Eventually, Flipside’s mainstays Vic Pratt and Will Fowler did their comedy act. After this short introduction, it was straight into the films, starting with a ten minutes segment about witches from a BBC programme called Twenty-Four Hours. In this, Bernard Falk introduced Alex and Maxine Sanders in sky-clad action (i.e. ritual nudity) with their coven. Sanders was treated as a comedy item in this 1970 production and deadpan observations along the lines of him being ‘a former chemical worker from Chorlton in Manchester’ got plenty of laughs. At the time this was made, Sanders had perfected a piercing stare but otherwise appears somewhat lacking in the necessary charisma to be a really successful cult leader.
Next was a 25 minute TV programme from 1957 directed by Geoffrey Hughes entitled Out of Step: Witchcraft. This was presented by Daniel Farson, a Soho drinking legend in his own ‘rite’ (oops, I mean ‘right’)… as well as a TV personality of yesteryear, and an almost iconic gay figure to boot. First up, he interviewed an elderly Margaret Murray, whose unreliable and extremely far-fetched book The Witch Cult In Western Europe (1921) is the source of much modern paganism. She was followed by the hugely entertaining Gerald Gardner, whose bulging eyes and maniacal laugh when asked in a slightly veiled manner about nudity at his Wiccan ceremonies, were particularly pleasing. It was, of course, Gardner and his circle who synthesised Murray’s highly speculative claims with rituals cribbed from Aleister Crowley and freemasonry (and a few other things, including Gardner’s business and leisure interests in nudism) to create witchcraft as we know it today. Thus there is no reason to give any credence to the spurious assertions of modern witches – including Gardner and Alex Sanders – that their practices are the continuation of a pre-Christian tradition. The last of Farson’s interviewees was the writer Louis Wilkinson (AKA Louis Marlow), who was presented as a relatively sensible secular friend of Aleister Crowley with little sympathy for occult ritual or belief, but a deep personal knowledge of its most famous practitioner.
However, the highlight of the night was undoubtedly the screening of Derek Ford’s mockumentary Secret Rites (1971). The print from the BFI archives runs to 47 minutes, and while there are rumours of a longer cut, I have no idea whether a feature length version of the film actually exists. Ford is probably best known as the director of ultra-low budget British sexploitation flicks such as Groupie Girl (1970) and The Wife Swappers (1970): and while I love scenes in both these movies, they would definitely have benefited from being trimmed in terms of running time. In Secret Rites, Ford appears to have teamed Sanders up with some professional actresses, put them on a movie set (in Film House Studios) and run them through cinematic variations on some spurious Wiccan rites. As long as you are happy to accept everything is utterly fake, and Alex Sanders is the biggest flake of them all, then Secret Rites is a groove sensation (including the assertion at the end of the film that what you have just seen is completely ‘authentic’). As the rites get going and the robes come off, we are treated to some particularly trippy mirror distortions and a glorious soundtrack of psychedelic funk from the Spindle (as well as possibly the worst faked orgasm ever committed to celluloid). If you liked Luigi Batzella’s Nude For Satan, and I know I did, then you’ll love Secret Rites!
For the record, the credited ‘coven’ consists of Jane Spearing, Penny Beeching, Shirley Harmer, Tony Barton and Wendy Tomlinson. The narration is handled by Lee Peters – whose other credits include appearances in Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) and the English TV series Dixon of Dock Green. I suspect that Penny Beeching is the early-seventies starlet of that name who can be seen in various episodes of Up Pompeii and The Morecambe and Wise Show. If anyone can pin this down for me, I’d appreciate it if they can add their information to the comments section below. The intonation of some of the ‘coven’, not to mention their suntanned breasts, certainly suggest to me that they are more likely to be actresses or models than ‘real-life witches’.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Aleister Crowley, Alex Sanders, Atlantis Bookshop, Bernard Falk, BFI, Chorlton, Daniel Farson, Derek Ford, Dixon of Dock Green, Film House Studios, Flipside, freemasonry, Geoffrey Hughes, Gerald Gardner, Geraldine Beskin, Groupie Girl, Halloween, Jane Spearing, Lee Peters, London, Louis Marlow, Louis Wilkinson, Luigi Batzella, Manchester, Margaret Murray, Maxine Sanders, Nude For Satan, Out Of Step: Witchcraft, Penny Beeching, Secret Rites, Shirley Harmer, Soho, Spindle, The Morecambe and Wise Show, The Wife Swappers, The Witch Cult In Western Europe, Tony Barton, Twenty-Four Hours, Up Pompeii, Vic Pratt, Wendy Tomlinson, Wicca, Will Fowler, witchcraft, witches, Witchfinder General
Posted in film | 17 Comments »
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Last night I went to the celebration of the life and work of Tamara Krikorian and Tony Sinden at Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium. The event was a tribute to two pioneering UK based video artists who died earlier this year; among other things, Krikorian also played a major role in setting up London Video Arts. Unfortunately, I find Krikorian’s work boring, and neither the talks about her nor the screening of her 1977 video Vanitas did much for me. In Vanitas, Krikorian stands in front of a mirror with a TV and many other objects reflected in it, the audio cuts between the artist talking about art and TV news reports. It is an understatement to say this failed to rivet me.
Tony Sinden wasn’t afraid to experiment, and I find his work hit and miss, but went it hits it nails me to the floor. The first screening last night was This Surface (1973) by David Hall and Tony Sinden. The 12 minute short kicks off with a pub scene: a right tasty geezer with a not quite full pint of beer balanced on his head dances, while guys and gals in groovy flares and sporting fabulous seventies hairdos look on in disbelief. As the dance goes on the reveller tilts his head further and further to one side in order to keep the beer balanced on top. The soundtrack is Mouldy Old Dough by Lieutenant Pigeon. After this, the film cuts to a tracking shot looking out to sea and moving from the east towards the Palace Pier on Brighton Beach. The words ‘this surface’ is written in marker pen on either the camera lens or some plate glass in front of it. The camera movement creates the impression the viewer is on one of the mini-railways that were a common feature of British seaside resorts in the 1960s and 1970s.
This Surface runs through various fragments of text relating to filming, cameras and cine-projection; both ‘interrupting’ the filmed ‘scenery’, and as ‘subtitles’. Having not quite reached the Palace Pier, the camera jump cuts to a reverse shot, and facing inland we trundle past the various boat houses and sheds located immediately beneath Marine Parade as we head back east. Next comes another jump cut to what looks like Western Road, and the camera tracks west to east along the shops immediately north of what is now Churchill Square. The next cut apparently takes us back to the seafront, and a static shot shows a Pit and The Pendulum type scenario, with a blade swinging over the body of a human dummy (displayed in the window of one of the many seaside attractions). Finally the action cuts back to the man dancing with a glass of beer on his head (still to Lieutenant Pigeon), but shot from a different angle to the scene that kicks off This Surface.
One of the things I find curious about Sinden’s work is the chance serendipities that can sometimes really enhance its effects. In the case of this particular collaboration with Hall, the setting is for me an example of this. Although I’ve never lived in Brighton, I know the town well, and as a child in the sixties and early seventies I’d be taken on day trips to Brighton Beach in the summer. Thus This Surface is jolting for me, because once the text is stripped away from it, it could almost be my own memories. Likewise, Mouldy Old Dough was a huge hit when I was a nipper, and takes me right back 1972. Sitting immediately behind me was currently London based but north American raised artist S. E Barnet. She told me afterwards she’d never heard the tune before, so although she found it striking, it had no associations for her; and I assume she doesn’t have childhood memories of Brighton in the early seventies which render This Surface even more strangely familiar to me. S. E. was obviously as grooved by the short as I was, but given it carried for her few of the associations it held for me, was she watching the same movie?
The other highlight of the night was David Cunningham (a former member of seventies one-hit wonder band/collective Flying Lizards), Rob Gawthop, and Alan Baker, performing a 1977 sound piece from Sinden’s Functional Action series. They each rubbed a couple of pots together and the resulting music was a groove sensation! The Functional Action series is where my fascination with Sinden began. I was vaguely aware of his video installations when in mid-eighties London I was doing something or other with a gallery (possibly Chisenhale in Bow) and I came across a pile of his album Functional Action Parts 2 & 3: Swing Guitars/Drift Guitars (Piano, 1980). Asking why the albums were leaning against a wall with rubbish piled up beside them, I was told the gallery were throwing them out and if I wanted the record I was welcome to take one. When I got the vinyl home and played it, I thought one side was fabulous and the other dreadful. After that I paid attention whenever I came across Sinden’s name.
Last night the Tate Modern was filled with Sinden and Krikorian’s friends and colleagues, who were paying tribute to them. It would be nice to see parts of Sinden’s Functional Action series and 16mm collaborations with David Hall reaching a new and younger audience. I trust that will happened in due course, with the best of his film and music reissued in appropriate formats. Despite an at times understandably sombre tone, the Tate tribute nonetheless provided a very useful overview of Sinden’s creative endeavours. Minimalism and conceptualism can rock, you just have to do it right!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, Alan Baker, Brighton, Brighton Beach, Churchill Square, conceptual art, David Cunningham, David Hall, Drift Guitars, Flying Lizards, Functional Action, Functional Action Parts 2 & 3, Lieutenant Pigeon, London, London Video Arts, Marine Parade, minimalism, Mouldy Old Dough, Palace Pier, Piano Records, Pit and The Pendulum, Rob Gawthop, S. E. Barnet, Starr Auditorium, Swing Guitars, Tamara Krikorian, Tate Modern, This Surface, Tony Sinden, Vanitas, Western Road
Posted in film, music, talks | 18 Comments »
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Hadewijch is the latest film from Bruno Dumont, a former philosophy lecturer whose movies are often compared to the work of Robert Bresson. Dumont doesn’t so much take inspiration from Bresson, as allow the older man’s films to possess his own, so that he might correct their faults. If someone had told me before I went to see Hadewijch that it was ‘The Trial of Joan of Arc meets Mouchette in the age of post-modern simulation’, then I could have imagined the flick in its entirety before I viewed it. That said, the process of attending the screening was nonetheless worthwhile, albeit rather irritating.
It was difficult to get into the Vue in Leicester Square due to a simultaneous premier for a very boring British film set in Twickenham in the early sixties. The crowds and the cops were out in force, and I had to get past some ridiculously heavy security before being allowed anywhere near the multi-screen Vue. Thus after much hassle and finally seated, I realised I hadn’t seen a Dumont flick since his big screen debut, The Life Of Jesus, came out a decade or more before.
Hadewijch is inspired by the writings of a 13 century Flemish mystic of this name, a rich but nonetheless hip chick who liked to eroticise her relationship with ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ by foaming at the mouth until the resulting insanity poured forth from her pen. Hadewijch’s religious pornography took the forms of poetry, letters and written records of visions; and these mystical freak-outs might be likened to free spirit heresies. But while this provided Dumont with his initial inspiration, he sets his film in contemporary France.
The plot of Hadewijch isn’t of much consequence. Celine (Julie Sokolowski) is booted out of a nunnery for being too zealous. She returns to her parent’s opulent apartment. The 20 year-old Jesus freak then hangs out in and around her Parisian home; she meets Yassine (Yassine Salihine), an unemployed teenager from the suburbs who wants to get it one with her, but they never do anything more intimate than embrace. However, in Yassine’s brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis) she recognises a kindred spirit, a fellow religious nut. Nassir tells Celine about Islam and then takes her to Lebanon; when they return to Paris they ‘matyr’ themselves by performing a two person suicide bombing on a metro train. If this were a realist film, then the explosion would be the end of the movie, but Dumont’s speciality is a Baudrillardian simulation of realism, and there is a lose thread to tie-up in the form of a character called David (David Dewaele).
At the beginning of the film, David is a prisoner doing restoration work on the nunnery from which Celine is expelled. He is also framed at various times to look rather like the image of Christ in various Dutch old masters. A succession of scenes indicate that he is a conflation of both Christ and the thieves on the crosses beside the Toad Of Nazareth at the time of ‘The Crucifiction’. I assume Dumont is inviting viewers to recall Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, and even if he isn’t, this is what the depiction of David brought to my mind; in other words, religion is an alienated projection of human attributes into a bogus realm of ‘the sacred’.
After the explosion (i.e. after Celine and Nassir’s implied but not explicitly depicted deaths), Celine and David appear back at the nunnery, but rather than it being winter – as was the case when we first saw them there – it is now spring. Celine attempts to drown herself in a pond but is saved by David. The series of events that take place after the explosion clearly confused much of the audience and became a focus for questions to the director during his Q & A session. I wasn’t feeling engaged enough to point out that the failed drowning rather too self-consciously invokes the climax of Bresson’s Mouchette. My unwillingness to join the discussion stemmed in part from Dumont’s answers exuding the rotten-egg smell of what is sometimes labelled ‘the anxiety of influence’, and this made what he did say so boring that I left before he finished.
Nonetheless, a director like Dumont becomes significant when you see how many of the people attending his screenings don’t understand that film as a medium need not be restricted to utterly flat realist narratives; and is, in any case, better understood as ‘poetic’ images. Quite a few people walked out during the festival screening of Hadewijch I attended. I like the effect Dumont has on audiences considerably more than his movies – which are still too tastefully made to shake up the film world as much as I’d like.
After seeing Hadewijch, I found myself imagining an alternative version in which Celine was a white rasta rather than a catholic, who is loosely modelled on Gale Benson (the daughter of a British Tory politician murdered at Michael X’s black power commune in Trinidad); this would also allow for a heavy dub soundtrack rather than the shit classical music Dumont favoured. Such a venture is not something I can imagine Dumont carrying off successfully – and so, instead, I look forward to him making a Deulezian cross between my two favourite Bresson movies A Man Escaped and Pickpocket. Dumont remains the Jean-Philippe Toussaint of contemporary French language film. Good as far as he goes, but cinema will leave him behind when we force it to go much further….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: A Man Escaped, Bruno Dumont, David Dewaele, Flanders, France, Gale Benson, Hadewijch, Jean-PhilippeToussaint, Julie Sokolowski, Karl Sarafidis, Leicester Square, London, London Film Festival, Ludwig Feuerbach, Michael X, Mouchette, Paris, Robert Bresson, The Essence of Christianity, The Life Of Jesus, The Trial of Joan of Arc, Trinidad, Twickenham, Vue, Yassine Salihine
Posted in film | 16 Comments »
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
24 Hour Party People (2002) kept coming up in conversations I was having as I wandered around the UK, and so I have finally checked it out, although I am no fan of director Michael Winterbottom. This particular film with its super self-conscious po-mo ersatz drug patter is more like his A Cock & Bull Story(2005) than Wonderland (1999) – and let’s not even get into the puke-inducing television journalist-centred Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), or the pathetic ‘pop cultural’ 9 Songs (2004). Winterbottom’s 2002 effort focuses on Tony Wilson – a Manchester based television journalist, unsuccessful businessman and would-be hipster. It goes without saying that no matter how Wilson’s PR minions attempted to gloss his life story, it always ended up looking really boring to me.
What 24 Hour Party People rams home is how Tony Wilson suffered from terrible musical taste; and it is unfortunate that via Factory Records he was mildly successful at hyping some piss-poor tunes into the British pop charts. Aside from a clip of The Stranglers early on and Blackfoot Sue’s Standing In The Road playing in the background during one scene (Wilson had nothing to do with either act), all the music on the soundtrack is truly awful. From Joy Division via A Certain Ratio and New Order to The Happy Mondays, the ‘sounds’ Wilson promoted were uniformly dire (and let’s not waste time looking at Factory’s much-vaunted ‘design’, which was in reality a shower of shite, although it worked as pseudo-corporate branding).
Manchester produced its fair share of decent bands in the late-seventies – Slaughter and the Dogs, The Drones, V2 – but there isn’t any mention of them here (despite the involvement of Wilson’s business partner Rob Gretton with Slaughter); instead, when it comes to non-Wilson controlled musicians, we get the likes of Mark E. Smith of The Fall and Howard Devoto of The Buzzcocks and later Magazine. So if we’re not being subjected to unbelievably dull super-commercial crud by The Mondays, we get the relatively well-known end of the crap that would appeal to a pretentious ex-Cambridge University student like Wilson, rather than Manicured Noise or The Passage (who were just as bad but not half as ‘famous’).
Factory Records had about as much to do with rock and roll as Stalin did with human liberation. The exception proving this rule was their release of a record by New York’s incredible ESG – but there is no sign of them on the 24 Hour Party People soundtrack. But then I’d imagine that ESG, like the more interesting elements of The Hacienda that had been copied from New York clubs, reflect Rob Gretton’s tastes rather than Wilson’s. Likewise, the fact that there is no sign of The Royal Family and the Poor (supposedly the ‘weirdest’ act’ on Factory Records) in 24 Hour Party People, is illustrative of the way the movie is pitched firmly at the mainstream and will only appeal to those who dig Hollywood crapola (and simultaneously accounts for the one-line put-down of John The Postman, who may not have been a great singer but was a curious phenomena).
Anyway, rather than wasting your time on 24 Hour Party People (assuming you’re lucky enough not to have seen it), you’d do better Watching Paint Dry. But moving on, seeing the film reminded me of one of Wilson’s little scams pulled against yours truly. Tony Wilson was an impresario, and I found myself doing a panel talk with him, Mark E. Smith, and John King from the Gang of 4, at The Hacienda in 1996. When I arrived in Manchester I was shown a local newspaper by some of Wilson’s PR people, who were very pleased to have found a tame journalist who’d been fed made-up quotes falsely attributed to me in which I was erroneously reported slagging off their boss (I really wouldn’t have bothered while he was still half-alive, he enjoyed this sort of thing too much). It seemed to give Wilson a real kick to be the subject of fake vitriol attributed to me by the Manchester press.
Needless to say the panel talk I did with Wilson was a real bore, and I’m not sure the transcriptions of it now circulating on the internet are entirely accurate. Never mind, as 24 Hour Party People makes blatantly clear, Wilson preferred legends to factually accurate history…. let the dead bury their dead (Wilson died in 2007), we will blaze a trail to new modes of being… And if Wilson thought that what went on around him was a party, he’d have no doubt considered his own funeral a real ball had he been ‘conscious’ enough to enjoy it…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 24 Hour Party People, 9 Songs, A Certain Ratio, A Cock & Bull Story, Blackfoot Sue, Cambridge University, ESG, Factory Records, Gang of 4, Happy Mondays, Howard Devoto, John King, Joseph Stalin, Joy Division, Magazine, Manicured Noise, Mark E. Smith, Michael Winterbottom, New Order, Slaughter and the Dogs, Standing In The Road, The Buzzcocks, The Drones, The Fall, The Hacienda, The Passage, The Stranglers, Tony Wilson, V2, Welcome to Sarajevo, Wonderland
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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Those of you with long memories may recall that I wasn’t too thrilled when I got around to watching Jenna Jameson in Zombie Strippers, but now I’ve found a horror film in which the hardcore porn legend doesn’t star but she does really steal the show. Evil Breed (2003) directed by Christian Viel is a train wreck of a movie. It starts with some hetro sex in a tent and a stupid murder, then cuts to the title credits, and during this there is really bad heavy metal playing on the soundtrack. I watched the opening a second time with Yellowman’s Walking Jewellery Store on repeat play on my hi fi, and this massively improved it.
After the credits there is less heavy metal (so I was able to take George Phang’s Yellowman production off my deck and put the sound back up), and we are introduced to five students and their teacher who are making a research trip to a remote part of Ireland. Unfortunately the countryside they’re in doesn’t look anything like any part of Europe I’ve ever been to, let alone Eire. Visually we’re in Canada, where the film was shot; the flora, fauna and the buildings all look North American. For forty or so minutes nothing much happens other than small talk about horror movies, and some encounters with a couple of American actors who have the worst Irish accents you’ve ever heard (okay, so one of them is Ginger Lynn Allen, famous as a porn star rather than an actress).
Jenna Jameson suddenly appears in the woods and has a really dumb conversation about searching for missing friends with a couple of the students. After this, the small cast starts getting knocked off by the local cannibal mutant(s) who are allegedly descended from the feral family of semi-mythical Scottish killer Sawney Beane (although we never see more than one at a time, there is supposedly an entire clan off these murderous freaks).
Most of the gore scenes are rather truncated, and there isn’t much nudity either despite the film boasting several adult film stars. Everything is really badly cut together too, with the transitions from one scene to another occurring completely at random. Towards the end, the final girl Shae (Brandi-Ann Milbradt) is shown struggling with a cannibal freak, then we cut to her waking up in the mutant HQ; she isn’t shown losing the fight or being carried away as might happen in your average horror flick, and this is typical of the surrealist approach adopted by the editor, the viewer is simply left to fill in lots of blanks because the ‘plot’ implications of the half-shown ‘action’ scenes are ambiguous.
Howard Rosenstein (playing Paul) is eventually punished for his poor Irish accent by having his guts pulled out of his asshole, and then strangled with them. Better yet, when Jenna Jameson is carried nude into the cannibal HQ, she is strapped to a bench so that her degenerate captor can feast on her guts; the mutant attacks her breasts and is puzzled when he pulls out what I assume is supposed to be a piece of silicon enhancement (but actually looks like the type of air-wrap I use when I’m mailing boxes of books).
I got Evil Breed in Poundland for a quid, and you’d have to be off your rocker to pay more than that to see this! It would have been expensive at a tenth of the price… So borrow the DVD from a friend, stick it in the player and get your finger on the fast forward button for that one sick visual joke about Janna Jameson’s knockers! The rest is fluff! If you’re really lucky then some naughty copyright infringer will stick Jameson’s second and final scene on YouTube and you won’t even have to bother with the rest of the movie!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: adult film stars, Brandi-Ann Milbradt, Canada, Christian Viel, Eire, Evil Breed, Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain, George Phang, Ginger Lynn, Ginger Lynn Allen, Howard Rosenstein, Ireland, Jenna Jameson, Poundland, pronography, Sawney Beane, Walking Jewellery Store, Yellowman, zombie strippers
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Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Just when you think the monthly Flipside untamed cinema screenings at the BFI (Belvedere Road, Southbank, London, SE1 8XT) can’t get any more entertaining and deranged, that’s just what happens. Wednesday’s session began as always with the hardcore comedy double-act of Will Fowler and Vic Pratt. Next, Julian Marsh III rolled out of the audience to explain that contrary to blog rumour, Miss Leslie’s Dolls was not a lost movie – because he had a 35mm copy at home (and while Marsh didn’t mention it, there are also two prints in the BFI archive). Marsh also played back a recording of a conversation with Charles W. Pitt (Roy Sanders), the male co-lead in Miss Leslie’s Dolls. Pitt provided a good humoured account of his very short career as a film actor, and expressed his regret that he couldn’t be in London for what was apparently the first public screening of Miss Leslie’s Dolls in 30 years. Thus when Pitt referred to one of his female co-stars as ‘a pro’, I assumed he was talking about her non-movie career, since this woman’s acting was as stiff as the clients would have been in that other profession.
The screening kicked off with a rather wistful animated short by Bob Godfrey and Zlatko Grgic called Dream Doll (1979). It told the story of a middle-aged London man who escapes the drudgery of his everyday life with a great deal of help from some sex dolls. After that we went straight into Joseph C. Prieto’s Miss Leslie’s Dolls (1972). The screening was from one of the two prints in the BFI archive, and the film showed distinct signs of deterioration especially at the beginning, but the quality improved and at times the colours were even bright!
The ‘narrative’ begins with Miss Leslie (Salvador Ugarte playing a woman trapped inside a man’s body) messing around in a ‘graveyard’ that somehow manages to be less convincing than the cardboard cut-out tombstones in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). When a car comes into view and splutters to a stop because it is out of gas, Miss Leslie scuttles off into some undergrowth carrying a nubile looking corpse. The occupants of the motor, three students and their teacher, decide to brave the storm raging around them and soon end up at Miss Leslie’s isolated house.
Miss Leslie offers to put up the stranded travellers. Ugarte is lip-synced with a female voice but you’d have to be blind not to realise he’s a geezer wearing make-up and a dress! The two female students Lily (Marcelle Bichette) and Martha (Kitty Lewis) are both trying to bed Roy, while their teacher Alma Frost (Terry Juston) is a lesbian fox with her eye on the first girl. Miss Leslie is, as most film-fans will clock very quickly, an axe-wielding and mother-fixated psychopathic transvestite. He’s killed at least half-a-dozen girls over a twenty-year period, in a series of vain attempts to banish their souls and then put his own ‘metaphysical’ being inside a female body. He also murdered his own mother soon after bumping off his first nubile victim, but he still has regular conversations with ma’s skull. Likewise, his collection of life-size dolls are not made of wax but are, in fact, preserved human corpses! Miss Leslie’s guests are far too interested in copping off with each other to notice any of this – until it is, of course, too late!
Lily and Martha are murdered by Miss Leslie, but only after Roy has succeeded in bedding both of them, and Alma Fox has had a lesbian romp with the first girl. Roy is locked in a cell by Miss Leslie, who obviously doesn’t want to kill the object of his gay transvestite lust. After one of the most ridiculous through-the-woods chases in cinematic history, Miss Leslie catches up with Alma Frost in the ‘graveyard’ and succeeds in forcing her soul out of her body and occupying the still living flesh (meanwhile his own hideously scarred body disintegrates). Now looking like Miss Frost, but still speaking like Miss Leslie, the psychopathic cross-dresser enters Roy’s prison cell where he gets it on with the hunky young man. Roy is a little puzzled by Miss Frost’s changed voice, but doesn’t think too much about it because he obviously can’t believe his luck in getting off with a teacher who’d previously rejected his amorous advances. As the Miss Leslie/Alma Frost amalgam and Roy Sanders make the-beast-with-two-backs, the cell door closes of its own accord, the key turns in the lock and flies away, and the film cuts to the credits.
If Edward D. Wood had made Thundercrack it would look like Miss Leslie’s Dolls. The anti-moral of Joesph Prieto’s movie seems to be that inside the body of every uptight man or woman who has boxed themselves into a single sexual identity (gay, straight, monogamous or otherwise), there is a polymorphous pervert struggling to get out! And if you think that sounds good, then make sure you don’t miss Flipside’s upcoming Halloween witchcraft special featuring Derek Ford’s ultra-rare 1971 documentary Secret Rites, which stars the notorious sado-masochist and self-styled ‘King of the Witches’ Alex Sanders. It’ll be an almost totally nude groove sensation!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alex Sanders, Belvedere Road, BFI, Bob Godfrey, Charles W. Pitt, Derek Ford, Dream Doll, Ed Wood, Edward D. Wood, Edward Wood, Flipside, Joseph C. Prieto, Julian Marsh III, Kitty Lewis, London, Marcelle Bichette, Miss Leslie's Dolls, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Salvador Ugarte, Secret Rites, Southbank, Terry Juston, Thundercrack, Vic Pratt, Will Fowler, Zlatko Grgic
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