OTPOKN BO BCEJEHHON

No, I didn’t just collapse on the keyboard, the title of this post is (sort of) the name of a ’70s film (or maybe it’s a TV show, or a dream?). More Russian sci-fi madness. It’s the source of the images here and here.

This film really invites you to take multiple mind-altering substances and trip out.  ”Come on,” it whispers in your ear, “everybody’s doing it? Whassamatter, you scared or something?” which is irresponsible really as it’s a kids’ movie. Maybe if you speak Russian it all makes sense, but watching it without translation induces a strange feeling. It becomes necessary to provide your own simultaneous faux-translation, making up a plot in a desperate attempt to make the freaky imagery less mind-altering.

“Want some space-cake? You know it’s space-cake because we’re shooting it with a starburst filter. Oh, by the way, how do you fancy spending your next birthday on an ALIEN WORLD?”

You get a slightly zonked feeling just from watching the fairly long dialogue scenes and not understanding a word, and the faces of those Soviet children are kind of… odd. Nice, but odd. When we get to the space age sets and costumes, about ten minutes in, things pick up. I like the leather interior of the kids’ space-ship. The special effects start up soon after and things get seriously peculiar.

“Boy, I bet those space aliens will be so grateful for us bringing them the gift of Marxist-Leninism.”

There’s some inexplicable close encounters with unidentifiable flying bric-a-brac, and then part of our team bundles into a nifty space shuttle to have a looksee at a forbidding planet.

“Cody Kropotkin and his Teen Space Rangers head off into uncharted void-stuff.”

“Watch out for that chrono-synclastic infundibulum, Kapitan!”

“Keep your eyes on the road, Cody!”

“This is the best fun we’ve had since Chekov defected!”

Soon our team make planetfall on Metaluna, or Altair IV, or Planet Foozbane, or wherever it is – 

Right around here we get a sudden blast of sorta-solarized footage lifted straight out of 2001, and I bet Mosfilm didn’t pay MGM for the use of it. All’s fair in love and cold war. Plus it’s a fitting retaliation for what Roger Corman and Curtis Harrington did to NEBO ZOVYOT, turning it into the enjoyable but less-respectable QUEEN OF BLOOD. Cultural piracy went both ways.

“Everybody remember where we parked.”

And now we go on location (GREAT location — if this was the BBC it would just be a Devon chalk quarry) there’s quite an epic feel, and the odd characters turning up give it a sense of David Bowie music promo.

“We are the chin-strokers and we bring you — hedge-hog hats!”

Then we head indoors for what seems like AGES, but they keep bringing in new robots and aliens and sets and weird effects, so it never gets dull. A very small amount of alcohol is enough to make you feel completely psycho at this point.

“…two…one…zero…we have Smirnoff!”

LOFRAO (Laughing Our Fat Russian Asses Off).

There’s something very weird going on with a big scary machine that some robotic types want to stick the kids into. They probably want to turn them into free market counter-revolutionaries. Or else it’s some kind of weird sex thing.

Escape! Pursuit! Domestic robots standing around on a hill!

“Click-Whirrrr… can I buff your spacesuit, master? Whirrr-click!”

“My work is done here.”

A happy ending! Except I have no idea what has been achieved or who the guy in the suit works for. It’s weird seeing him there, he kind of ruins the feeling that we’re on another planet. Just as people in space suits make any location feel like another world, so a guy in a suit with bad hair makes any location, however amazing, seem like a 1970s BBC Scotland outside broadcast.

The space-suit thing reminds me of something I saw as a kid on TV. I think it was on Nationwide, a rather shonky regional news show, and they did a report on UFOS and weirdness. The presenter said that the S family had been on holiday and they’d taken a photo of their son. Everything seemed normal at the time, but when they got the pictures back from the chemist –

And here they show a picture of a kid on a hillside, only behind him is a man in a spacesuit — a suspiciously terrestrial one — with mirrored visor, lurching towards the smiling, unsuspecting lad with arms outstretched menacingly!!!

It sounds very silly but it freaked the hell out of ten-year-old me, and I believe I physically recoiled from the TV which, kid-fashion, I had been squatting right in front of.

A powerful memory… except I couldn’t swear that it actually happened.

“See you next time, space-comrades!”

The Walls Have Ears

I love this! Chris B. demonstrates how Shadowplay has brainwashed him, forcing him into buying DVDs and books. My real intent of course is to short-circuit the capitalist system and have everybody trading bootlegs. “You wouldn’t steal a car!” scream the ads. But, as one unknown comedian put it, if a friend came round and said, “I just bought a Mercedes, can I burn you a copy?” most of us would probably be amenable.

On Chris’s monitor we see some strange walls of facial features, which reminds Brandon of THIS:

From Hiroshi Teshigahara’s THE FACE OF ANOTHER, starring the great Tetsuya Nakadai. If you haven’t had the pleasure yet, Teshigahara’s films are well worth getting into. In terms of pace, composition, movement, vibe flavour and whatnot, he quite simply has HIS OWN THING GOING ON. There are only a few H.T. flicks available out there in the west, but it’s a start.

We all do the wibbly-wobbly walk

Yes — I call him THE FLOOBY MAN, and he is my most Special Secret Friend. He lives in the cupboard under the stairs with the vaccuum cleaner (because we must have nice clean vaccuum at all times) and he only comes out on Special Secret Days. And then he makes Julian Sands faces while wibbling and wobbling on his way.

Yes, this is Russian science fiction insanity. My blog will have more to say about this later.

Press Your Space Face Close to Mine

Well? What is this film???

I don’t actually know myself. Maybe somebody can elighten me. More on it later.

I will say this, it’s a good film to dream on.

Quote of the Day: Thou Shalt Not

‘When I shot LES YEUX SANS VISAGE I was told: “No sacrilege because of the Spanish market, no nudes because of the Italian market, no blood because of the French market and no martyrised animals because of the English market.” And I was supposed to be making a horror film!’

Georges Franju, quoted in Franju by Raymond Durgnat.

I found a copy! It looks excellent. Now if only I could find copies of all the films listed. I already have EYES WITHOUT A FACE and BLOOD OF THE BEASTS, of course, and some rarities — JUDEX, for instance, and an unsubtitled VHS of LA TÊTE CONTRE LES MURS. Ever since I’ve known David Wingrove there’s been a plan afoot for him to translate it for me sometime, but he watched it in preparation and I don’t think he was that keen. I also have SHADOWMAN, which is sort of fun but not really a worthy companion to JUDEX.

But what I’d really like to get is the short films. As good as some of the features are (and EYES is some kind of masterpiece), the best Franju I’ve seen is BLOOD OF THE ANIMALS, and I’m tantalised by the possibility that some of the other shorts — LE GRAND MÉLIÈS, HÔTEL DES INVALIDES, MONSIEUR ET MADAME CURIE — might be equal to it, or even close. I have a vague idea that I’ve seen one of them, LE MÉTRO, long ago, without knowing what it was — perhaps only in a dream.

It’s interesting that Durgnat points out Franju’s relation to the Nouvelle Vague: a colleague of Henri Langlois, “he made what is in effect a first short film a year after Resnais’ VAN GOGH, and his first feature at the same time as HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR,” before asserting Franju’s closer ties with the older generation. And indeed, asides from the lively interview clips of old Georges looking satanic, included on the Criterion DVD of EYES, the only footage I’ve seen of him is in an old BBC documentary on Marcel Carné. Asked if he agreed with the Cahiers filmmakers assessment of Carné’s works, he characterises them as a bunch of “côns” and argues in no uncertain terms that nothing they have made themselves could hold a candle to LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS.

So, despite the iconoclastic and surreal qualities of his work, Franju was more of the old school. This makes it ironic that he’s been played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in the recent fact-based drama I SAW BEN BARKA GET KILLED, but the casting seems auspicious: there’s definitely a physical resemblance, and Léaud has the same kind of furious intensity, a suppressed mania, that you see in Franju’s staring eyes.

Dead Set.

The detective sergeant has no name. He works for a superior known only as The Voice. He works out of a place called The Factory, a department called Unexplained Deaths.

This nameless investigator is protagonist of Derek Raymond’s Factory series of crime novels, which I’ve just started reading – predictably enough, in the middle of the sequence. How The Dead Live is sensational and I immediately wanted to film it. One problem — I wanted to film it with Stanley (PERFORMANCE) Meadows in 1965, twenty years before it was written, two years before I was born.

But never mind, I’ll happily film it now if anybody will let me. The French have filmed two Raymonds, but the language of the books is so integral they must be losing masses of good stuff. How the Dead Lives alternates between madly uneven existential philosophy and pulp posturing in its narration, and shamelessly dated (even for the mid-eighties) cockney patter and noir bullshit in its dialogue. I found it utterly irresistible. You have to imagine dialogue as excessive as Clifford Odets’ in THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS of Abraham Polonsky’s in FORCE OF EVIL, only wrapped round a clenched London fist of slangy argot.

“‘I don’t think you quite understand,” I said. ‘I’ll put it this way. The more you don’t tell me right answers to what I want to know, the more I start to suspect — and as another police officer I’d better remind you straight off, you be careful you don’t pot the wrong colour on this one, darling. Because if you do you could lose the whole of this frame fast and find yourself on your ear with a pension worth five times fuck all. Now your best course is to start telling me what I want to know immediately, otherwise I’ll dig it up by myself and God help you, are you reading me? It’s London that wants the answer to this Mrs Mardy business fast, and I mean very fast. I’ve got a firework up my arsehole from my folk, and that means I’m going to have to put one up yours, it’s called self-help, alright?’”

Storywise, How the Dead Live starts like Red Harvest and ends like Poe — maybe The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, for instance. It’s smeared over with death throughout, although there’s only really one fatality within the novel’s time-frame. Raymond is obsessed with the Big Sleep. His prose reeks of decay. His hero is a ragged scarecrow of a man, the world he moves through is slipping into putrescence. At the centre of the book is a vast manor house collapsing with damp, its contents rotting away.

“Now I saw by the final light what I had only sensed in the dark the time before. Now appeared the murderous abandon of the park — shrubs that had once been planted in orderly groups shrank like wet beggars; the flailed and thrashed, unpruned, under diseased elms staggering in the gale. I stopped the car, got out and looked up at the ruin of the house, high, wet and hideous.

“As I stood there I suddenly felt afraid — not of what confronted me but in a general way. I thought and felt that the secret of existence was perhaps to get old with beauty, ironically, coming closer and closer to you as you aged; innocence, everything that you had rejected or ignored as a young man, entering you like music all the time until in the end there was no more time. Then much of what had seemed so hard would be over, after too much work in cities, after patrolling too many streets for too long, after studying too many faces with the sly, fixed look of the dead.”

It’s purple and overripe and totally sincere, like Poe or Cornell Woolrich. The best bits are incredibly sharp, the worst bits are still kind of brilliant. By the end I had settled on Bill Nighy to play the detective sergeant in my dream movie, although there’s a brilliant actor called Danny Webb who’s more the right age and could also be great. He has the same mad, icy eyes as the late great Nigel Green.

“‘Considering who you are and what you do,’ he said, ‘I think you’re all right.’

‘None of us are ever all right,’ I said. ‘We’re all just waiting for the death express.’”

Michael Burnside: Sexual Sniper

THE SNIPER (1952) deals with a psychotic misogynist who takes to shooting women. It comes to us from Stanley Kramer’s production company.

Here’s Paul Mayersberg on Stanley Kramer in Hollywood The Haunted House ~

“In Kramer you can see the real dilemma of the Hollywood director. He wants to be an artist and he wants to be popular. He doesn’t want to be the compleat middlebrow which is what he is, what he is forced to be. Kramer has not come to terms with popular culture in the United States. So where does he stand? Bang in the middle of Reader’s Digest country, but he is no philistine. To be cruel about it, Kramer is Hollywood’s answer to Arthur Miller.”

Far from being cruel, that’s probably the most sympathetic critique of Kramer I’ve read. Though middlebrow reviewers may like some of his films, those who see them as preachy and dull tend to be savage in their dismissal. Mayersberg gets at the root of the problem and shows simply and directly how Kramer’s good intentions make for bad cinema. (Yet when Kramer tried his hand at pure entertainment in IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD, the results were even worse. It’s Steven Spielberg’s favourite comedy, and thus we get Spielberg’s own bloated comedy corpse, 1941.)

THE SNIPER is a Kramer production, but it’s directed by Edward Dmytrk and it’s a thriller, so that gives it a slightly schizoid character. Kramer usually saw himself as above genre, which is part of where he goes wrong. As Mayersberg says ~

“Oddly enough, the subtleties of form occur in the genre movies rather than the theme movies, because in genres you are playing variations within certain conventions and you can be more experimental. We may be close to André Gide’s idea that ‘art is born of constraint and dies of freedom.’”

The schizoid nature of THE SNIPER comes from its script, direction and production. The script is at pains to lay everything out, to explain everything over and over, and to make us understand it’s central theme. A title crawl at the beginning tells us what this theme is. Then we see it nakedly expressed in the action of the plot. The characters discuss it and the psychiatrist character explains it so we can all understand. And the bit-part players keep up a running commentary on events also, so we get to hear what the man in the street thinks. The schism lies between this idiot’s approach to storytelling, and the intelligent and dynamic use of visual storytelling by director Edward Dmytryk.

Dmytryk had a weakness for the big theme too, but at least he liked to express it in visual terms. Maybe making socially conscious films like THE SNIPER was a way to reassure himself that he hadn’t sold out after he became a friendly witness and ratted on his former pals in the Communist Party.

Whatever his politics, Dmytryk didn’t automatically become a bad director when he turned stoolie (that came later). He directs THE SNIPER with flair, using striking deep-focus compositions (although he claimed to hate the use of wide-angle lenses for oncreasing depth of field, preferring to use them for psychological distortion). The great Burnett Guffey is D.O.P. here, making atmospheric use of San Francisco locations, transforming them at night with near-expressionistic lighting.

In an effort to stop his homicidal impulses, our sniper burns his hand on the oven ring, and Dmytryk and Guffey contrive a bizarre low-angle shot with the hot hob casting an implausible glow on the ceiling:

Each bullet from the sniper’s gun is effectively shocking and abrupt. Several of the murders aren’t even shown — Kramer and co are anxious not to make this an exploitation film. Hence all those screeds of verbiage. The insane killer is shown as a victim of his psychological disorder and of an uncaring society. It’s all very liberal and decent, and when Dmytryk is allowed to do his job and tell the story with sound and image it can be effective too.

Adolph Menjou is Detective Frank Kafka (yeah, I laughed too), which is a literary reference with no apparent point. Arthur Franz is attractive and charismatic as the killer. The terrific Marie Windsor appears only briefly, but is as warm and lovely here as she is harsh and brazen in THE NARROW MARGIN. And she has a mouth the size of Charles Durning, which is no bad thing:

Weirdly, the film classes the sniper as a sexual criminal, but the behaviour of the character doesn’t really suggest he gets a sexual charge out of his crimes, although he does kill attractive brunettes, often ones he’s failed to get off with. The police haul in assorted “peepers, rapists and defilers” and have them publicly humiliated in a lineup by a chubby interlocutor with the air of a stand-up comedian.

Then a psychiatrist explains that there’s no crossover in criminal insanity — none of these criminals could turn sniper. Incidentally he’s wrong — the absurdly-named Colin Pitchfork, the first murderer arrested on DNA evidence (read Joseph Wambaugh’s excellent The Blooding for the fascinating story) was a flasher who moved on to rape and murder as an extension of his initial perversion.

In it’s killer’s M.O. and San Francisco setting, THE SNIPER oddly looks forward to the Scorpio killer and his movie incarnations in DIRTY HARRY and SCORPIO. Where Don Siegel’s DIRTY HARRY portrayed its killer as a motiveless force of pure malevolence, and David Fincher’s SCORPIO uses him as a kind of defining absence at the story’s heart, the Dmytryk urges compassion and clinical care for the disturbed. It’s a very honourable film. But perhaps best watched with the sound off.

Give us a clue…

Somebody might actually guess this one! The movie is a bit less obscure, and the images actually relate to major plot features. It’s from 1952, so if you have a thought you can check it off using that info.

And they’re from the same movie as the previous post, SUSPECTS.

If you don’t have a serious suggestion, INSANE NONSENSE is always gratefully received.

Maybe we’ll have a prize if somebody gets it! Would you LIKE a prize?

Suspects

Here are some SEXUAL DEVIANTS:

THE PEEPER! He can look over walls, using his special height!

THE POISON PEN! His penetrating eyes grown beady, this ink-stained wretch should seek decent employment as a critic, where his perversion can be put to socially responsible use.

THE RAPIST! If you see this man, do not approach him. He will approach you, if he’s interested.

More on this film shortly. I might even tell you what it is. But I’m reminded of a bit of nonsense. My friend, BAFTA-winning director Morag McKinnon, once told me that she didn’t like the Cowardly Lion in THE WIZARD OF OZ because “he looks like a rapist.” She will deny this if you ask her but, like everything else I tell you here, it’s TRUE.

I protested that Bert Lahr looks like a vaudevillian, not a sexual predator, and that if actual rapists went around dressed like that they’d be easier to identify, apprehend and convict. It would make for interesting police line-ups, anyway.

Geology, litigation, gender, cinema: my Saturday night.

The glamour of film-making — the unit assembles for ROUNDING UP DONKEYS.

Just back from the rat-infested city of Glasgow, which I plunged into in order to attend some birthday celebrations. I was also on the look-out for info that might help me land another film or TV job, though it was unlikely that anybody at this party would be able to grant me one directly, and I was also looking out for any little items of interest for the blog.

The 40th birthdays belonged to Travis and Helen Reeves, whom I know from way back. They are that rare phenomenon, non-identical twins who look alike, though not so much now. I shall explain — while not genetically identical, they have a strong facial resemblance and similar build. But not so much now, since Travis, who used to be Helen’s sister, is now her brother, which makes a fair difference.

It’s all prefigured weirdly in my film CLARIMONDE, I think, where Travis, then outwardly female, provided the voice for a male character (a ghost). The same scene featured another male ghost who was actually a woman in drag, looking like a cross between Ringo Starr and a Mexican bandit.

Along with his gender reassignment, Mr. T has also changed careers — apart from his writing and directing, he used to be a production designer, arranging objects within the three-dimensional space of a set, and is now a sound designer, arranging noises within the three-dimensional space of a cinema (or TV viewer’s lounge). This comparison between the two jobs originates with Walter Murch, and it’s the reason he invented the job title “sound montage designer”.

Helen Reeves is a “diminutive antipodean singer-songwriter” who used to duet with Travis under the unofficial heading “The Twindigo Girls”, though Travis’ deepened voice has made their harmonizing trickier, and rendered the nickname inaccurate.

I did find out a few things that might prove useful in my film-hustling, and caught up with several old friends, such as Bert Eeles, editor of CRY FOR BOBO, and John Cobban, sound designer of same. I also picked up fascinating insights into forensic archaeology from Travis’ friend Friga (sp?), with whom I also co-invented a futuristic dwelling space (the kind of thing I tend to do after a few pints). Friga was bemoaning the fact that geological drill cores, which are basically cylinders of rock, are often very beautiful, what with the interesting laminations in sedimentary stone, but if you’re a geologist you get too many of them to keep. I suggested building a house out of them. Friga initially thought this impractical, since the cores are cylindrical, not brick-shaped, until we jointly realised they could be assembled into a STONE LOG CABIN.

So when you find yourself spending your retirement years in an edifice constructed from little cylinders of laminated sedimentary rock, you’ll know it’s my fault.

The night was spent in Morag McKinnon’s spare room. Morag is fresh from directing her first feature, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS, but I can’t tell you much of anything about that because it’s all at a sensitive stage, rough cut and all. I’m still very much psyched to see it, but there’s a no-DVD policy in force at the moment to stop unfinished edits falling into THE WRONG HANDS, i.e. probably mine.

I can tell you about the LAWSUIT though, because that’s been in the papers. As I mentioned before, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS is the second film in a trilogy, following on from Andrea Arnold’s RED ROAD. While the films are supposed to deal with the lives of a common group of characters, the fact that each movie is the work of a different writer and director means that this was never likely to have the uniformity of Kieslowski’s DECALOGUE. In fact, screenwriter / mad god Colin McLaren refitted the characters to suit his dramatic purposes, giving Kate Dickie a new daughter, and having her meet Martin Compston for the first time, even though she meets him in RED ROAD. So it’s an alternate universe sequel to RED ROAD. (There should be more of those!)

Following in the same spirit, Morag recast a minor character in RED ROAD — Dickie’s dad — since he’s the major character in ROUNDING UP DONKEYS. James Cosmo, a distinguished player who also embodies a dad in TRAINSPOTTING, takes the role. This has upset the actor from RED ROAD, Andrew Armour, who apparently feels that by taking the part in film 1, he was effectively contracted to play him in all subsequent films, should the character appear. I don’t think he has a legal leg to stand on, but there’s a terrible pathos to his position: he’s said that this is his only chance at a leading role, which is tantamount to admitting nobody would ever cast him in a star part except by accident.

I like Armour in RED ROAD — he seems like a real old guy who’s kind of wandered in front of the camera, rather than like an actor, which is surely a good thing. But the character written by Colin is a new person in all but name, and requires a different sort of player to bring him to life. It’s just one of those things.

If you want a really sad casting story, consider the case of the actor originally cast as Sonny in THE GODFATHER. In order to get Paramount to agree to cast Al Pacino (an unknown who had underperformed in screen tests), Coppola had to agree to take James Caan as Sonny and let the original guy go. Not only had the guy already celebrated getting the part with his family… I can’t remember his name. Because he’s not famous. He never got another break — that was his shot.

(Maybe I’m inclined to depressing tales because I’m hungover. More cheerful stuff tomorrow!)