Beck X: Curtain Call

STOCKHOLM MARATHON begins with a tense scene of a clearly traumatised girl escaping from a window and walking across the roof of a glasshouse… the glass starts to crack…

It’s effective, though it doesn’t extend itself to breaking point and the music is unhelpful, and then the inevitable slomo… it also has nothing to do with the supposed source novel, The Terrorists, the final installment of The Story of a Crime, the ten-volume adventures of Martin Beck by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö. Start as you mean to go on. The entire movie has nothing to do with the book, despite a Stan Lee type cameo by Sjöwall.

Somebody in charge of this series of (straight-to-video?) Martin Beck films, starring Gosta Ekman, made the decision to strip out the CONTENT, the political attitude underpinning the detective story. No doubt the filmmakers weren’t Marxists. But you don’t have to be a communist to agree with a lot of the authors’ critique of Swedish society and western civilisation in general. In fact, rather than pushing their own worldview (Wahlöö “a little bit Stalinist” according to his partner), the authors mostly confine themselves to taking satiric/despairing potshots at the status quo, only offering a solution in the last word of the last book, in the form of a crossword puzzle solution, the single word “Marxism.”

Like most of the books after the first three, The Terrorists hares off in various narrative directions, splitting up the protagonists and assigning many of the key scenes to characters other than Beck. This apparently seems like a problem to those adapting them, but needn’t be: the most faithful films seem to be the most successful.

One strand omitted by screenwriters Rainer Berg & Beate Langmaack is the story of the naive girl done in by society. It’s central to the novel, showing how social services, the police, the justice system, can conspire to destroy one powerless individual. The heart of the book. Parallel to that is the story of the terrorist gang, the only thing retained by the moviemakers, though in fact their story about a threat to the Stockholm Marathon (shades of FOUR LIONS) is nothing to do with the novel’s scheme about assassinating a controversial American politician.

The big ironic twist in the book — spoiler alert — is that after Beck and his team manage to thwart the highly-trained assassins, a lone nut — the girl whose life has been ruined — slips past them and murders, not their right-wing yank, but the Swedish prime minister.

I can see how, just eight years after the real assassination of Olof Palme, the real Swedish prime minister, as he exited a middlebrow Swedish comic film, THE MOZART SISTERS, Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s childish glee at offing the country’s leader might have seemed in poor taste. All the more reason to do it!

The filmmakers double down on the “lone nut” approach in order to deliberately rob their story of any political significance. They really have a genius for finding the least interesting direction at any turn. Since there’s not much of value that can be said about an artefact like SWEDISH MARATHON, there now follows a short disquisition on the dramatic vs. the interesting.

“Many things in life are interesting; not many things are dramatic,” said Dan O’Bannon in an interview for, I think, Screenwriter or Screenplay magazine which condensed all the insights from all the screenwriting books on the market into a few short paragraphs. O’Bannon promised that by following the principles of dramatic structure, pretty much any chump could write an entirely worthless script which the reader would nevertheless feel compelled to finish, or at any rate were the atrocity to be committed to celluloid, the viewer would find themself watching to the end (and probably cursing themself for it).

Raul Ruiz, meanwhile, asked why only a three-act structure based around a central conflict could be interesting? Why couldn’t a film detailing all the activity in a Brueghel painting be interesting, for instance? O’Bannon has the answer: interesting, yes, but not necessarily dramatic.

Ruiz is not primarily a dramatic filmmaker, I’d say: he does something harder, I think, because he has to sustain the audience’s interest with less obvious hooks. Where he does detail dramatic problems, there are likely to be lots of small ones rather than one big dumb one. There are plots, often quite complex — related events unfolding sequentially, but a synopsis of a Ruiz film might indeed end up sounding more like a description of a huge, detailed painting.

We’ve all seen too many films where the filmmaker hooked us and reeled us in, but offered no reward for the journey. Since the three-act structure is a boringly familiar trope (one reason it works so well may just be that we’re subconsciously familiar with it, so that it’s comforting to know where we are in the story), it’s incumbent upon anyone using it to offer some Ruizian INTEREST — in the form of psychological or social insight, ideas of any kind, aesthetic surprise, behavioural authenticity, something thematic or stylistic out of the ordinary run, possibly connected to but extending beyond mere PLOT, which E.M. Forster, citing the example of Scheherezade, justly defined as a trap for brutes.

Sjöwall & Wahlöö obviously used their narratives for a sociopolitical purpose, which seems one of the most suitable uses for a detective story. Psychology is certainly possible, but the Mechano-set construction of a cop story can get in the way of that. Which makes it an even better trick if you can do it. These Martin Beck movies offer plots which, fascinating on the page, become sterile when rendered on the screen with the INTEREST strip-mined away, cardboard characters moving along the string of a murderboard without a centre.

The Ruiz Diaries

Jaime Grijalba Gomez is translating the late filmmaker Raúl Ruiz’s diaries. You can subscribe and get them in your inbox! It’s like becoming a correspondent of the Great Man Himself. Or his medium.

You can also pay Jaime to help him keep at it.

I had to share this one because the story Ruiz tells is so very, very Ruizian. Obviously, if you’re Raúl Ruiz, people are going to tell you stories like this. Another reason to subscribe to the diaries: they help you to be Raúl Ruiz. Oh, I don’t say you’ll ever make it, not all the way. But anything that gets you close…

Over to Jaime:

Short Note: Ruiz tells a fascinating tale here, which is apparently true. If you’d like to donate, do it here, it gives you more translations. Thanks and enjoy! Yesterday I spent the day wandering around without much point. I didn’t go to the bank. I had lunch with Jacques Bouquin at the Sukiyaki. In the middle of lunch Martine arrived. He had to treat about work with both of us. Then I passed to L’Arbre à Lettres, where I bought a book by Ali al-Baghdadi, writer of the 14th century of the court of the Mameluke in Egypt. I read some of it. Exulting and joyful obscenity. I took a nap and at 18.00 hrs. I went to meet with Bruno Beaugé, who has done some sets for me. He’d like to work again for me. In the night we dined with Guy and Rachel at Michel Ciment’s house. They had invited a female writer specialized in Nietzsche. Gossip and good mood. At the end of dinner I told a story that Bruno had told me that same afternoon. I left them perplexed. Nevertheless, it seems luminous to me. Bruno says that in 1971, being in the northeast of Cameroon, in a little transited region, they found a tribe whose members spoke an unknown language even for the local interpreters. The members of the tribe were completely naked and each one had in his hands a flute that played only one note. They surrounded them, made a circle around the Europeans and they composed, making one sound after the other, a melody of four notes that they repeated as they narrowed the circle. After three hours, Bruno and his companions understood clearly and distinctly that the members of the tribe were asking for a shovel and a lavatory. They gave it to them and the mysterious flutists rushed away and the jungle swallowed them. 18.45 hrs. At the Mecano, to have a beer with Valeria, a nephew and René Naranjo in this Anguish Sunday. The place is almost full. Before coming I went to a Muslim bookshop and bought The Ringstones of Wisdom by Ibn Arabi. God, exterior and interior, thus we understand the manifest for what’s hidden and the hidden for what’s manifested. “The perishable and contingent beings don’t have another actual reality than the one of God”. Every determined manifestation, every particular being are necessarily divine (commentary to Chapter I, p. 63). Day 361The Ruiz Diaries by ruizdiariesSome Street Santiago de Chile, Chile

Secret Cinema

As you might have noticed, we don’t tend to do lists here at Shadowplay. I have, at various times in my life, enjoyed making lists, but now the internet is flooded with them, so I will only do lists if they can be complete rubbish, like this one.

So, what follows is a list of the most secret films ever made, films that have never made it onto their respective auteurs’ filmographies.

1) Alfred Hitchcock’s STOLEN. Alfred Hitchcock’s career officially contains two missing films, the unfinished NUMBER 13 and THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE, completed but lost. But some time in the sixties, Hitchcock conceived a complex, self-referential movie called STOLEN, which was designed to be stolen and never recovered. Hitchcock scripted and shot a complete feature film which then went missing without a trace. The empty film cans were later retrieved, but with no trace of the footage. It has been suggested that, as a kind of perfect crime, Hitch actually shot the movie without film in the camera, and thus STOLEN never actually existed. At any rate, he planned a major publicity drive, inviting audiences to buy tickets and see a blank screen glowing white where the movie would have been had it not been nicked (using a slogan adapted from THE BIRDS: “Stolen Isn’t Coming”), but Universal bosses nixed the scheme and the whole thing was hushed up.

2) Alejandro Jodorowsky’s NUDE. After he lost the rights to Frank Herbert’s DUNE and saw Dino de Laurentiis make a dog’s dinner out of it, the famously eccentric Jodorowsky attempted to make his own version without copyright by rearranging all the letters. DUNE became NUDE and the rest of the story was similarly rearranged, making NUDE officially the first filmed anagram. The adventures of Sir Lead Taupe on the planet Ark-Sari, where he battles the evil Bonar Nan-Honker and rides on a colossal Norm’s-wad, NUDE also lived up to its title by being made without a costume designer, or even costumes. To further save money, Jodorowsky adapted an idea from his earlier plans, in which Salvador Dali as the emperor was to have been played party by a life-sized statue (because Dali would only agree to a few days’ filming). Going one better, Jodorowsky cast his film entirely with statues. In reality, the extremely limited budget only ran to one naked statue, which the director modified from shot to shot with a series of wigs, false beards and false breasts. The film, basically a series of shots of statues with anagramized dialogue dubbed on, was immediately slapped with an injunction by Dino De Laurentiis and was never screened. Jodorowsky subsequently denied ever making it. But he totally did.

3) THE BAWDY ADVENTURES OF TINTIN. Remember when Peter Jackson was going to make the second part of the TINTIN saga begun by Spielberg? But then nobody went to see the Spielberg film because the mo-cap characters looked like corpse-puppets? Well, in fact, Jackson shot his film back-to-back with Spielberg and it has been awaiting release ever since. Owing to the disappointing response to the corpse-puppet version, however, Jackson has been working furiously to make the footage acceptable to the public. First, he toyed with releasing the film straight, without animation, just as a series of scenes of Jamie Bell and Andy Serkis in gimp-suits, studded with measles, cavorting in front of greenscreens. TINTIN DOES DOGVILLE was the working title of this version. Then Jackson considered a return to his low-comedy roots, adding a lot of sex and violence. In this cut, the Thompson Twins would form an incestuous relationship, Captain Haddock would turn out to be a female transvestite, and Snowy… but it is better not to know. Fans will learn the truth when the film finally sees the light of day as the fourth part of THE HOBBIT trilogy.

4) Andy Warhol’s UNTITLED. Not its real title. The true title is . Not a full stop, just a space. Like this one: . Not the colon, not the full stop, the bit in between. This has ensured that even when film historians remember to include   on Warhol’s filmography, nobody notices it. The film itself is just sixty minutes of Candy Darling’s left nipple.

5) FILM MAUDIT. Jean Cocteau, having invented this useful term, then had to use it as a title for a film he made about swanning around Picasso’s villa, taking lots of opium, and annoying Picasso in his trunks. The film lived up to its name when it vanished in a puff of smoke after coming into contact with a drunken Robert Shaw.

6) UNSEEN FILM. This 1997 curiosity was cobbled together by director Raul Ruiz from out-takes of several of his earlier films and part of an incomplete Jesus Franco women-in-prison romp. Threatened lawsuits by several cast members (or their executors) were only forestalled when Ruiz screened the film for a drunken Robert Shaw.

7) NIDAKRA .RM This unofficial version of Welles’ MR. ARKADIN was never released, but some claim it to be the director’s preferred cut. Unhappy with his makeup, which mainly consisted of two false beards, one stuck to the top of his head, Welles toyed with the idea of threading the film backwards so it projected in reverse and upside down. He had always favoured achronological narrative structures, and viewed in this inverted manner the beard sprouting from his scalp didn’t look so bad. The film itself was just a perfectly ordinary print of one or other cut of the film, so that even letting Robert Shaw near it didn’t ultimately do it any harm.

8 1/2) Fellini’s NINE AND A HALF. We all know that EIGHT AND A HALF was Fellini’s eight-and-a-halfth film, but what of his nine-and-a-halfth? This was a misguided experiment inspired by the maestro’s exploration of LSD. JULIETTE OF THE SPIRITS may have been influenced by Fellini’s hallucinogenic experiment, but the untitled follow-up was actually made DURING an LSD trip. Reversing his usual practice, Fellini did not have his actors speak numbers and then dub on dialogue: ha had them speak a carefully prepared script and then dubbed on numbers. Producer Dino de Laurentiis had previously had a scene from NIGHTS OF CABIRIA stolen from the lab to prevent Fellini from using it, but on this occasion he had the entire film stolen and claimed it on the insurance. Rumours abound that Adrian Lyne later claimed the film simply by adding the word “WEEKS” on the end and redubbing it. And adding tits. Others claim that a remorseful Fellini begged Robert Shaw to borrow the negative, usually a safe way of destroying something, but that several reels may have survived despite Shaw setting fire to the cans, his house, and his legs.

The Forgotten has been on hiatus for Cannes, but will return to The Notebook next week.