Euphoria #45: Call me

 

We are assembling a shimmering pyramid composed of delightful movie scenes that shine out from your memories and illuminate my foggy Edinburgh nights.  

A couple people* have been requesting a scene from Bill Forsyth’s LOCAL HERO. Since I, like Forsyth himself (!) don’t own a copy of it, I’m a slave to what’s already on YeTube. Fortunately, though NONE of the requested scenes are available, this one is.

Spoiler alert: it’s the end of the damn movie.

My old mate Lawrie remembered Forsyth in his very early days, making no particular impression on him, which was unfortunate since Lawrie was more or less running the Scottish film industry at the time.

The Times Online has an intriguing piece that does much to illuminate Foryth’s more curmudgeonly aspect. He’s known to be somewhat difficult — volunteering to teach at Edinburgh College of Art, then gruffly denying all knowledge of this — and had a bruising run-in with Scottish Screen, over issues of transparency. I think Forsyth was basically in the right on that one: there was probably no corruption, but it mattered very much that Scottish Screen didn’t seem to care whether people thought there was. The head of that organisation, Eddie Dick, complained to me, rather hurt by the whole thing: ”people think Bill is like his films, but there’s a very dark side to Bill.”

Forsyth always found directing agony, and his love of both Bresson and “experimental film” may have pulled him away from his natural talent for comedy. I have a recording of a moving TV masterclass Forsyth gave on Bresson’s AU HASARD, BALTHASAR where he talks with great emotion about the power of the film’s first few minutes, and you get a sense of B.F.’s frustration at not being able to reach the same exalted level: “You know these dreams you sometimes have when you can fly or you can flat down the street three feet off the ground? I remember having a dream about making a film. And it was the perfect film. It’s the kind of dream, when you wake up, you want to remember it, and remember how to do it… and you can’t. In this dream, I had made this film which was perfect, and fluid, and wonderful. I was reminded of it when I watched this film recently because that four minutes is kind of the way I saw the movie in my dream.”

The Timespiece ends with a postcard Forsyth sent the interviewer, where he discusses the crossroads he faced back in the Lawrie Knight days:

“Either I would…spend the following decades tenaciously developing what was finally manifest as the gallery video-installation genre, or I’d make that slow backwards retreat into conventional cinema. We know what happened. To think that I might now have been the grand old man of international video art (probably with a pad in Berlin). Seriously, I don’t think I’d have relished that any more than my present perch as the retiring ploughman poet of Scottish cinema (living up a hill with some trout as neighbours), and with the one residing ambition of wanting to make people laugh.

“So, no regrets. At least I didn’t ever jump headlong into the commercial pool but studiously and cussedly patrolled just the margins. And thankfully I never did stop feeling like an outsider…

“You’ll appreciate that you have only yourself to blame for this letter. You prodded me awake in my cage, and being simply human, my first and only demand is to be understood.

Best wishes, Bill Forsyth.”

Like the scene above, and like much of Forsyth’s work, there’s a happy-sad feeling to this communique: melancholia euphoria?

*Vince Randaldi and Mike Reed.

Myth Takes

 

A mystery Shadowplayer, who wishes to remain anomalous, dropped in to add some thoughts to the mythic storytelling discussion. We’d been discussing stuff like Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces and Propp’s Morphology of the Folk tale.

‘Part of the problem is that both Campbell and Propp have what seem to me v. mechanical understandings of myth (tho the latter is sort of interesting til one gets his point, which happens pretty quick). Compare that to the understandings of roberto calasso (who you shd read), Joyce, Rilke… Jung is more interesting than Campbell and Eliade maybe more interesting still.

‘Victoria Nelson’s SECRET LIFE OF PUPPETS is a plenty intriguing modern study.’

I was promoted to reply, thinking of Campbell:

‘Listing the most common features of world mythology is sort of interesting but does that mean we SHOULDN’T take inspiration from less popular myths? George Lucas would presumably say YES.’

The Mystery Man shot back:

‘Not only that, but the Propp/Campbell (and to a lesser extent Jungian) models all focus on similarities and neglect or shave off difference. Whereas someone like Calasso, in his retellings, makes the crucial point that myths EXIST in their variants, their sum-total of tellings, and resist any “definitive” form. So laying them down on a structural grid, and cutting to fit the pattern, may have some interest, but it’s also a considerable violence.’

Me:

And again, it CAN have a rather deleterious effect on the imaginations of those seeking a “mythic model.”

Him:

‘It has a “deleterious effect” on EVERYONE.’

This is our fear: that people have a one-dimensional idea of mythic storytelling, in which all the individual quirks and strangenesses are chiselled away, and what’s left is a styrofoam Arnold Schwartzenegger or something.

Or a CGI Ray Winstone.

Off the Map

These imaginary landscapes from Mario Bava’s HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD, composited in-camera from miniatures, magazine cut-outs, and occasionally some actual life-sized live-action (tiny figures on the cliff on the right of [3]) may not be REAL, per se, but they have a physical existence beyond that of the digital landscapes of Zemeckis’ BEOWULF, and that seems to matter to me.

I hope I’m not a Luddite — I’ve used C.G.I. with pleasure in my short INSIDE AN UNCLE and the TV show INTERGALACTIC KITCHEN. But there’s a tendency to use it to tackle every problem nowadays, when maybe it’s only the right solution SOME of the time. For instance, did anybody find the computer generated bugs-crawling-under-the-skin in Stephen Sommers’ THE MUMMY half as disturbing as the bulges that traverse the body of the hapless inhabitee in Cronenberg’s SHIVERS? The difference is, one thing is incontestably THERE, in front of the camera, and the other, we know, isn’t.

*

I don’t think I need SAY anything to connect this post to our Nibelungen Week here at Shadowplay. A picture (or two) tells it better:

Lang’s DIE NIBELUNGEN is a magnesium-tipped arrow fired at the rooftops of epic entertainment, which overshoots and ignites a mausoleum of APOCALYPTIC GRANDEUR.

Bava’s HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD is a piece of cheeky matinee fun, with a slightly off-colour malaise lurking somewhere behind its Technicolor dioramas. Bava’s dark side always provides a subtly bitter aftertaste, while Lang’s is like swallowing one of those booby-trapped Monty Python chocolates where steel bolts shoot out through your cheeks.

Extreme Prejudice

 

There’s a famous and well-respected article by Serge Daney called The Tracking Shot in Kapo, in which he discusses a movie about concentration camps by the great Gillo Pontecorvo. The article centres on a tracking shot where Pontecorvo’s camera moves in on a slain woman. Daney quotes a review by nouvelle vague filmmaker and critic Jacques Rivette: “the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt.”

Daney then defines his conception of cinema by agreeing with the above sentiment — even though he hasn’t seen the film.

This might seem like an odd kind of criticism, but it has a certain kind of legitimacy. I’ve been known to moan about a 9:11 documentary called THE FALLING MAN, in which the filmmakers have put sad music in the background over interviews with grieving relatives of terror attack victims, to make it emotional. The people I tell nod: they agree with me in principle, though of course they’d be entitled to feel differently if they saw the film and found it worked/was not offensive in actuality.

Of course, actually writing a review of a film one hasn’t seen is another matter. In The Guardian newspaper, Andrew Pulver reviewed Rivette’s own CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, with the capsule summary, “…documents in exhaustive detail the relationship between the eponymous women. Dialogue is minimal and events, such as they are, are propelled by a whimsicality characteristic of its era.” It’s pretty obvious from this that he simply missed all the dialogue by SKIPPING OUT some time during the first half hour. The cheeky blighter! (Thanks to Comrade K. for spotting this.)

In the spirit partly of Daney and partly of Pulver, I thought it might be interesting to write about a few of the many films I haven’t seen and don’t like. I’m not condoning this practice at all, I just want to see what will happen and who I offend.

(Note: I found it so depressing trying to find images from these films to illustrate them that I just gave up and went for some attractive images of general angst, which kind of show how I feel when I think about these movies.)

 

1) 9 SONGS. It’s hard to pick a Michael Winterbottom film that sums up the spectacular lack of appeal his work has for me, there are so many contenders. A COCK AND BULL STORY passed the time, but in retrospect I rather felt it had STOLEN the time. I quite enjoyed 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE for the smart script and playing, but for a film about the record industry it had no clue how to put across a song.

So I think it’s a safe bet I wouldn’t like this 2004 tale of shagging and concert-going, especially as I hate hate hate everything else I’ve seen by the man I call Michael Autumnbottom (I call him that because it’s the only way I can discuss him without feeling a bit depressed). In particular JUDE where they slaughter a pig for Dramatic Effect and attempt to capture a JULES ET JIM feeling elsewhere by the simple procedure of ripping off whole sequences from JULES ET JIM.

Based on what I have seen, Autumnbottom is one of the most visually insensitive directors working — constantly! — in the UK today. I just want him to stop.

2) The remake of FUNNY GAMES. I walked out of the original around half an hour in. Haneke seems to approve of this, he says, “Those who walk out don’t need the film.” I think he is confusing NEED and LIKE.

He thinks he’s proving that we shouldn’t enjoy violent films by making a violent film that is supposed to be impossible to enjoy. But I like many violent films, I just don’t like films that are supposed to be impossible to enjoy. “Enjoy” may be the wrong word: I watch THE BLOOD OF THE ANIMALS in awestruck horror, Alan Clarke’s ELEPHANT imparts a terrible dread, COME AND SEE is like being punched in the heart. But there is some form of pleasure and beauty there still. Haneke’s film could achieve this beauty through its ideas, but the ideas are too painfully thick-headed and lumpen.

Some will argue that the film isn’t violent at all because (most of) the violence is offscreen, but adding up drops of blood is a ridiculous way to measure violence. The film is an endless parade of convincingly fear, suffering and cruelty, intended to teach us that we shouldn’t enjoy such things. I know that already. I only enjoy them when they’re faked, and when they are part of a film that is enjoyable in other ways.

As Maurice Chevalier says in LE SILENCE EST D’OR, “Some people think it is the director’s job to give the audience a hard time.”

3) LOVE, ACTUALLY. Isn’t the title reason enough? It’s like being lectured by a smug public-schoolboy before it even starts. Yet here we have a film which I suspect wants me to have a good time. I can’t fault it for that, the instinct is a generous one. But any film which has Hugh Grant as a loveable Blair-like UK prime minister is going to fail with me unless it has an interactive element that allows me to climb up into the screen and bloodily hatchet him to bits (and it’s not due to a particular dislike of the actor). Maybe Richard Curtis should write a romcom about Adolf and Eva next. FUHRER WEDDING AND A FUNERAL? Sorry, sorry.

Apart from that, I adore romantic comedies, just not too many recent ones.

4) I’m not too keen on most contemporary cinema from my own country (Scotland) but unlike the admirable forthright Ms Smith I’m somewhat afraid of alienating all my peers and the funding bodies who support them. And as these films constitute the film culture I’m stuck in, they’re of more interest to me than any old depressing, flat, unimaginitive cinema I might find elsewhere in the world. So I don’t rule out the possibility that I’ll take a look at even the most miserable of miserabilist Scottish cinema… at some point. But it’s rather disheartening if the only thing that draws one to one’s own national cinema is purposes of RESEARCH.

So, anything by Lynn Ramsey.

5) And I’m tempted to add, anything by Ken Loach, although I actually enjoyed RIFF-RAFF up to a point (it had funny bits) and HIDDEN AGENDA up to a point (though falsely pitched as a thriller, it was certainly an intriguing conspiracy story). But I can’t see anything making me choose to see LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD or RAINING STONES or most of the others. I tried to watch NAVIGATORS because I do feel strongly about the damage done to Britain’s rail services by rampant capitalism. But I didn’t make it past the titles. Loach, like Mike Leigh, is really not too strong on using music. My mate Lawrie used to say that a score can’t really add anything to a realist film, all it can do is detract from the realism, and while I’d be willing to admit the possibility of exceptions to this dictum, I find nothing in Loach and Leigh’s work to disprove it.

And I remember Billy Wilder’s preference for making a film at the Ritz Hotel Paris rather than down a coal mine. “What am I gonna do down there? I don’t leave the cinema elated…”

Of course, I agree that films should reflect social realities and enlighten as well as elate. I just don’t think that’s enough, or even a very good starting point. An entertaining film has more chance of being subversive, and therefore effective, than a piece of straight propoganda. Reflecting a fresh bit of society will bolster a strong film, but it will drag a dull one down into the depths of worthiness.

“Lacking a particular inclination, we all decide whether a film is worth seeing based at least on some minimal hearsay, because nobody can see everything.” ~ Peter Henne.

Yes, but what we must NEVER do is mouth off about the films we haven’t seen.

oops