The Distance of Time

Very much enjoyed Keisuke Kinoshita’s TWENTY-FOUR EYES, which resolves some unique dramatic issues inherited from a source novel in some very interesting ways.

It’s about a schoolteacher and her first class, twelve kids. That’s already too many characters to keep straight. Then there are the schoolteachers’ family, various parents, other school staff. And the story covers decades so all the initial kids get swapped out by new actors. The film is quite long, but that’s a crazy number of people to keep straight.

It’s also a film with a lot of tragedy in it. The story starts before the war and the boys are the right age to enlist when WWII starts. There’s also illness, financial problems, death in childbirth. So there is a lot of crying, no way to avoid it even if you invoked a bit of Hawksian staunchness. “Tragedy is when the audience cries, not when the actors cry,” but sometimes, quite a lot in this case, there is no way realistically to avoid tears.

Kinoshita likes distant framing, and this has a couple of very positive effects, quite apart from the scenic values it brings in. The kids are often seen as a group, and I never felt pressured to remember particularly who was who. I had more of a general sense, but they definitely all had personalities and developed in different ways through their distinctive subplots. As a teacher — an aging one — I often feel pressured to remember lots of names in reality, so I don’t want that in my movies. But here it was fine.

And the wide shots added a certain discretion to the treatment of emotion. No up-close blubbering, though I don’t mean to imply we’re in a Roy Andersson film without closeups. It’s just that Kinoshita often goes wide when you might expect the opposite. The considerable space around the actors enhances aspects of the emotion but stops it being overwhelming in a bad way. Space = Time in an odd way, so that there’s an “emotion recollected in tranquility” sense to it. Welles talked about how, though the old line about how “comedy is long shot, tragedy is closeup” is broadly accurate, the TRUE long shot, the small figure in the vast landscape, takes us right back to tragedy again.

Kinoshita uses a lot of Western tunes, often quite emotionally loaded ones like Ford’s favourite hymn “What a Friend we have in Jesus,” and one would bet that he’s a Ford fan (like Kurosawa) but his wide shots are subtly different in effect/affect, there’s a little more, hmm, neutrality?

But I watched it with friends and we all cried buckets.

Not yet, Balaoo!

THIS TRAGEDY OF THE FOOTPRINTS ON THE CEILING WILL JAM ANY THEATRE

A long time ago — a million years BC — I resolved to watch every film illustrated in Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History of the Horror Movie, a big green book (though some editions are purple) which loomed large in my childhood. I named this quixotic quest See Reptilicus and Die, and I blogged about my progress until there wasn’t any to blog about. The problem is that some of the films are lost — that’s OK, I discount those, though the idea of remaking them has some appeal — and some were unavailable. The project kind of fizzled after I finally saw REPTILICUS, and failed to die.

BALAOO, THE DEMON BABOON was one of these inaccessible items — and also one of the lost ones. Only fragments survive, and they’re in some cinematheque somewhere. I vaguely thought about travelling there. But YouTube has obviated that requirement!

Excitingly, BALAOO is directed by Victorin-Hyppolite Jasset, director of the evocative and delightful PROTEA, a kind of LES VAMPIRES knock-off which has been entrancing unsuspecting punters since its recentish rediscovery. An amazing work. I see that there’s quite a lot more Jasset out there, and I ought to consume all of it, he seems one of the figures to preserve the charm of the cinema of attractions into the age of sustained narrative. A poet, in other words. I’ve only seen some of his ZIGOMAR films but he also made something called THE MAGIC SACK. What’s not to like there?

Just as PROTEA seems like the start of a serial that never develops or ends, the surviving bits of BALAOO have an evocative quality potentially in excess of the original, complete version’s, though it would have been nice to see those footsteps on the ceiling. Here’s a still purporting to show how they got there.

Doesn’t really make sense, since primitive man is not known for his arachnoid adhesion ability, especially while wearing shoes. Never mind, we’re not here to relitigate Balaoo’s gravity-defying feats, but to praise them.

Although we must first admit that 1913 punters may have felt like they’d bought sea monkeys after seeing an ad, when they Lucien Bataille’s screen makeup, which owes more to minstrelsy or the circus than Jack Pierce or John Chambers. But his physical performance more than makes up for it, and is so athletic and expressively convincing that the makeup comes to seem an exciting alienation effect, there to stop us getting TOO INVOLVED and thereby winding up dead from exhaustion.

I also like that the actor is called Bataille — he’s not the syphilitic tax collector father of Georges Bataille, though it would be lovely if he were.

Based on a mad scientist novel by Gaston Leroux which later became the affecting and underrated DR. RENAULT’S SECRET, the movie-selection features predictive text intertitles, leaping, and some green tinting on both titles and imagery which relates it in a chance yet psychologically evocative way to the front cover of the Gifford. It’s all more than good enough to make you want more, although it’s hard to say how much the movie is enhanced by its frustrating lacunae. Even, say, ALIEN COVENANT might turn into an evocative work if you deleted, say, 90% of it. Although maybe that’s too much to hope for.

Now I plan to finally watch THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET, which will take me an appreciable distance closer to completion of the See Reptilicus and Die project.

Yes, but what is it?