The Cameraman's Revenge

I’d like to just write “what the fuck?” here in regards to this film, but I feel I should make more of an effort than that… I tried looking up the Czech translation of the words “what the fuck”, which would’ve been appropriate here, but couldn’t find one, so too bad. At least I read a bit of the DVD booklet essay before watching and noted the reference to Valerie having her first period at the start of the film, which I was glad I did read or else the film might’ve made even less sense than it did otherwise. It put me in mind of Marienbad, if only in terms of how good it looks while being so hard to actually understand, though to be sure it does so in an opposite way: 1.33 aspect ratio rather than anamorphic, colour rather than monochrome, and full of pastoral warmth rather than the enclosed coldness of Resnais’ hotel… Also I don’t think Resnais evokes surrealism in the way Jaromil Jires does here; though Jires himself apparently wasn’t part of the Czech surrealist movement, the author of his source novel was. But I really don’t know what to say about this. Eastern European cinema is something that has, by and large, passed me by (Russian/Soviet cinema being a relative exception), so I’m not au fait with the Czech New Wave except by repute; I know this was a very late example (actually went into production a year after the Soviet tanks rolled in) but not much more than that. To be honest, I’m not even sure of the extent to which I did or didn’t like it (apart from the purely visual aspect), it’s that sort of film… “what the fuck” indeed. I can see this needing repeat viewings.

Alas poor Oscar, you’d be struggling to recognise more than the shadow of your story in this rendition of it. Wilde’s Dorian is updated to the late 60s/early 70s, and is done so in reasonably handsome fashion; director Massimo Dallamano had been a cinematographer since the mid-40s before taking up direction late in life (he died in 1976 aged 49), and so for lovers of that “retro” look of films (particularly European) of this period, this film is at least a delight to look at. But exactly what period is it? I mean, it clearly starts around 1970, and the story seems to span about 20 years  or so (going by the vague hints the film itself gives)… but it still looks like it ends around 1970 as well. That’s the aspect of the modernisation of the story which bothers me, at least; other reviewers I’ve read are more bothered by the very idea of the modernisation, or maybe it’s more the actual time it was made… cos by 1970 Dallamano could get away with more than MGM had been able to in 1945 with their version, it could be more overt with the decadence and filth, and that’s what seems to put some off… but, being me, I think it doesn’t go anywhere near as far as it might, it doesn’t wallow in the muck to the extent I kind of hoped it would; for all that its admirers and detractors seem to agree that it takes advantage of the period’s permissiveness, it’s awfully shy about actually showing penis (apart from a split-second flash), forcing Helmut Berger to stand covering himself awkwardly with his hands or a sheet. Some fearless bloody libertine… Not that it’s not trashy, cos it is, just not as much as I’d expected. Disappointing. Also, while it looks nice, I wish I could say the same for the sound on the Australian DVD; the English track was unexpectedly hissy though otherwise clear enough, but the Italian track (which I also sampled) sounds like it had been taped off a TV broadcast being received inside a cave while a thunderstorm was raging outside by one crappy microphone hooked up to a barely functional reel-to-reel recorder utilising a particularly shitty brand of tape. Whoever Big Sky sourced it from should surely be taking a bit more care when it comes to supposedly legitimate and professional presentation…

The handy thing about these early Fassbinders is they’re all relatively short (this one clocks in at just 80 minutes, the others 88 and 91) compared with some of his later ones, so it was quite easy to watch the whole set in one day, plus take time to write the reviews, go out for a short walk, have dinner, watch the latest repeat of The Goodies on ABC2, etc. You can see how full my days have been lately with other stuff to do than burn through my DVD backlog. But never mind that. Of all the films in the set I’ve been going through, this is the one that looks like it would translate the easiest into an actual 1950s American film noir; the details would need some retooling, but the basic story (three cops secretly hire their own assassin to wipe out some problem crooks for them; a bit like Magnum Force avant la lettre but the cops aren’t doing their own dirty work) could be well Americanised. And to be sure, Fassbinder pins some of the noir style characteristics, but his method of telling the story ultimately defeats the film for me… maybe because it feels so much like a “real” noir; it’s like Fassbinder was aiming for the real thing while still taking an “arthouse” approach to the genre, and not hitting the mark (I didn’t get that sense from the other two films, which seemed more like they were consciously avoiding it). Where the long takes and pauses and all that of the first two films were certainly testing at times, here it just seemed to add up to dullness. I have to say I’m kind of ambivalent towards all of these films, especially when viewed as a set, but this one gives me a lot more problems than either of the other two.

I presume this film is why the whole “gangster films” set got an R rating in Australia, i.e. for the brief but rather startling look at the contents of a hardcore porn magazine… the local DVD includes a long interview with the film’s star Harry Baer, who says something about the stasis of Fassbinder’s first couple of films being due to the sheer weight of the soundproofing blimp on the camera, meaning it was just easier to put the thing down in one place and film from a fixed position. By the time of his third film, though, young Rainer apparently more money to work with (though the film still cost less than US$50,000) and so Gods increases its visual range vastly by comparison with the last film, even extending to a couple of aerial shots. Even the interiors and so forth are a lot livelier somehow; there’s not so much of the void-like starkness, and the whole thing fee;s less cramped. And generally it’s more recognisable as a “crime film”, with lighting influences and the like clearly coming from American film noir, though it shouldn’t be mistaken for a regular one; Fassbinder keeps the slow pace from the first film, so the conventional thrills are not exactly to be had. And what of Baer? He plays the same character as Fassbinder himself in the last film, just like Hanna Schygulla reprises hers… or do they? The precise nature of the “trilogy” starts getting complicated here, cos Baer’s performance and physicality as Franz  are so different from that of Fassbinder, it doesn’t have the same repressed thug swagger, it’s more, I don’t know, beat or something. Are these the same people as in the previous film, or different ones? I’m not sure there is a definitive answer to that (I gather the third film will complicate the issue further). At least, taken by itself, Gods seemed a bit more easily accessible than the first one. Time to go and see how I fare with number three…

And finally we return to Fassbinder… only, what, a year after I last said more reviews of his work would follow? Note to self: stop making promises like that, reality will only get in the way… As I said way back when, a lot of his films have started appearing here in multi-disc sets, and so we’ll be looking at the “Gangster Films” set first, three of his earliest films that form a trilogy of sorts, starting with this, his first feature. Adrian Martin’s commentary on The Immortal Story kept talking about that film’s minimal style, but this one makes the other look like it’s overflowing with lushness; THIS is minimalism, full of silences and pauses between characters and dialogue, spartan interiors (which tend, at times, to make the characters look like they’re in some sort of void because there are no  other visual cues), limited camera movement and mostly static frontal compositions (the scene in which Bruno and Johanna go shoplifting in an enormous supermarket—in one amazingly executed single shot—takes on a positively epic quality relative to the rest of the film). This isn’t your traditional gangster film, this is the genre filtered through Godard and given an additional coat of Brecht acquired from Fassbinder’s theatre work; the film is, indeed, credited as a production by his theatre troupe, Antiteater, and to some extent it seemed to carry some sort of trace of that background (though I don’t know if it actually started life as a play or not)… Interestingly, it’s one of Fassbinder’s relatively few widescreen (1.85) films, and somehow the wider image serves to enhance the feeling of claustrophobia the film exuded for me; it’s a small hemmed-in world of small hemmed-in people. It’s interesting but not exactly easy to like as such; but Fassbinder himself admitted the film was designed to be kind of difficult, on which level if no other you must admit to his success.

A few weeks ago I got two awesome multi-disc DVD collections of vintage exploitation trailers (Umbrella’s Drive-In Delirium sets, kind of the local versions of Synapse’s 42nd Street Forever series but even better), and watching them I found myself particularly struck by a trailer for a film called One on Top of the Other. Curious, I googled it and found it was, in fact, a film I already had under the name Perversion Story. Them’s the vagaries of retitling films for international release, I suppose. We’re in L. Fulci’s hands again for what was evidently his first essay in giallo, a film that could be easily summed up/dismissed as “Vertigo with more tits and quintuple split screens”; but though Hitchcock and his film loom over this, there’s more to it than just that… It’s a stylish exercise in late 60s Euro-groovy, full of strident colour (particularly a red I can only describe as huge) with a slightly sitar-happy Italo-jazz score, and running on a fairly lurid thriller narrative set around San Francisco; this latter detail contributes to the oddness of the experience of actually watching the film, at least if you do so (as I did) with the Italian soundtrack. I don’t know why it felt so odd, cos I’ve seen so many films where the characters all speak English despite the film being set in a non-Anglophone country, so why not have an Italian film set in the USA where the characters speak Italian? It makes about as much sense, but in fact it was kind of disconcerting (even more than the UK-set Lizard in a Woman’s Skin), possibly because not all the soundtrack was actually all’Italiana; there’s a lot of background voices in the prison, the strip club, etc that are all’Americana. Maybe dubbing all those voices into Italian was an ADR job too far? Whatever, it was distracting, but probably still a better bet than the English dub. That aside, no masterpiece, but consistently fine to look at, and directed by Fulci with enough style that the ultimate preposterousness of the story isn’t too hard to ignore.

The other side of life under Nazi occupation to that shown in The Cremator, and indeed of filmmaking approach in general. This film seems to have been alternately cursed and blessed by Cahiers du Cinema; the Criterion essay basically blames them for damning the film’s chances overseas by giving it a scathing review in 1969 (which in turn allegedly put American distributors off so that it was never released there at the time), until a reappraisal in the mid-90s finally led to the thing being dusted off and given the restoration it apparently needed very badly by then and finally released in America, whereby it beat out actually new films became the favourite foreign-language film of many critics for that year. As for me, I have to admit to being a bit… I don’t know what when it comes to J.P. Melville, who is someone I feel like I should like their work more than I perhaps really do; something seems to hold me back a bit. But I don’t think I’d even heard of this back in the 90s when I first discovered his work, it isn’t mentioned in the old Robinson/Lloyd Illustrated History that was my beginner’s text (to which I still return every now and then). On viewing it now, it seems of a piece with the crime films he was making at the same time, only it’s even darker by virtue of the subject matter (the activities of a small Resistance cell in 1942/43). If The Cremator gave us a man entering murky at best moral waters when the Nazis come, this film shows us people doing the same thing in opposition to the Germans, and like that film this one hinges to some extent upon the physicality of the lead actor (Lino Ventura), the character having to look like the civil servant he was while possessing an astonishing hidden ruthlessness; in short, it also works as another study of what extreme situations can drive us to do, and does so in the most cheerless manner possible, offering remarkably little sense of hope that anything these people can do will actually have any effect. If you like your war films bleak and lacking in heroics, Army of Shadows is a sterling example…

I have an account at ICheckMovies, for the one or two people who are likely to find it of interest, although I only mention it now because that’s the site where I first heard of this film. Looking at the comings and goings of the various IMDB genre lists, I was intrigued to see something from 1969 called Spalovac mrtvol appearing in the horror chart (where it currently sits at 28). Looked it up on IMDB, found it was this, went out and bought it at the first opportunity, finally got around to it tonight. Its status as “horror” might be questionable (there’s an oldish but interesting interview with director Juraj Herz here in which he addresses the genre question), and someone on the film’s IMDB page is whining in the message board section about it not being comedy either, but there’s still a bit of both at work in this film. It’s set around the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1930s, where our “hero”, Karl Kopfrkingl (no, the “r” isn’t misplaced like it seems to be) works at a crematorium. He’s an odd little man, fond of a book about Tibet and Buddhism, feeling that his work helps liberate the soul from its earthly bonds to move on to wherever it goes next; from early one we may suspect there’s something not entirely right with him, and when he starts proving amenable to the requirements of his new German overseers we realise that “not entirely right” barely begins to describe him. I’ve said before that some films rely upon the strength of a single lead performance to work; this one goes a bit further by relying on the appearance of that lead actor. Somehow I think Karl could only be embodied by someone who could actually look like Rudolf Hrusinsky does here, that sort of mild, almost bland, vaguely aspirational middle class thing. It’s a terrific piece of casting, supported by Herz’s own black comic tendencies, and he’s the real horror of a reasonably normal person turning reasonably abnormal under the influence of an extreme idea, and the horror of what real people will do to each other under certain conditions makes this a lot more disturbing in the end than your conventional monster movie. And the fact that it is quite funny only makes it even more so.

I’ve spent years complaining about how the sheer range of stuff you can get on DVD in the US pisses on what’s available here, but on very rare occasions Australia beats the US to something. Thus it is with Orson Welles’ Immortal Story, on DVD here in both French and English versions care of Madman… which means I’ve now seen all of Welles’ released work except Chimes at Midnight and Filming Othello, and I daresay I’ll see the former long before I ever see the latter if Beatrice Welles has any say in it. Like Confidential Report the other day, I’m kind of glad I’d seen his other, better films before this one. I actually started watching it on Friday night before realising it wasn’t working for my mood, and so held off until this evening… whereupon I watched both versions, the English one with Adrian Martin’s commentary on and then the shorter French version to actually watch the film itself; I had a feeling it’d be one of those films I’ve spoken of before that are better in a language other than English. Martin said something about Karen Blixen’s stories being like parables, and that kind of instantly unlocked what had been my major problem with what I’d seen of the film to that point, i.e. the story itself… it’s such a literary conceit, isn’t it, this man so appalled by the idea of fiction, so unable to conceptually stomach anything but facts, he determines to take an urban (maritime?) legend and make it actually happen. Maybe that’s why it seemed at least vaguely palatable spoken in French with English subtitles on screen; it seems like the thing you should read more than watch or hear, because these are literary characters in a literary situation… As you may see, the Spanish theatrical poster I found on Wikipedia highlights the fact that The Immortal Story was Welles’ first colour film; he hated having to shoot in colour, though, and to be honest I’m not sure he does anything that interesting with it. Adrian Danks’ booklet essay describes the film as “self-conscious and mannered”, and he likes the film; I go along with that description and I don’t think I do like the film very much.

And so this is Christmas (Eve), and what can I watch? Well, I could watch It’s a Wonderful Life on ABC1—hadn’t looked at the TV guide so was momentarily disconcerted when it came on after the midday news—cos it’s the festive season and I’ve never seen it; it’s one of the big gaps in my classic Hollywood knowledge. However, it’ll have to remain that way for a while longer, cos I decided after a few minutes that Frank Capra’s beloved chunk of Christmas cheer wasn’t something I was in the mood for, and so went back to the unwatched DVD pile. I got this in a triple-pack with Winchester 73 and High Plains Drifter, likely wouldn’t have bothered with this on its own, but while it was hardly life-changing it was still pleasant Friday afternoon viewing. John Wayne is, shall we say, a wronged man, well-to-do until a corrupt businessman stole everything from him, had him shot and sent to jail; out on parole, he’s out for revenge, returning to take back half a million dollars in gold. In short, it’s a caper movie set in the Old West involving a gang of assorted misfits, with the added potential twist that the other chief partner (Douglas) has been offered $12,000 to kill Wayne by the man Wayne’s out to rob. Will he take the gamble on the bigger amount or settle for the smaller but definite sum? No real prizes for guessing, of course, but the sparks between Douglas and Wayne (suddenly sounds like a gay romantic comedy, doesn’t it?) give this film a good lift; the set-up is probably a lot longer than it really needs to be, but the heist is good and the widescreen visuals are put to good use. Undemanding and old-fashioned in many ways, but pleasing stuff.