The Cameraman's Revenge

So here I am, reviewing the unreviewable. Indeed, when I started watching the film I wasn’t sure I’d write about it at all, cos what exactly can you say about it… it’s a nine-hour-plus documentary about the Holocaust, and I don’t expect to ever watch another film quite so heavy in my life (I mean, god/dess, I hope not). What do I say about Claude Lanzmann’s film, beyond noting that it exists and what it does? As this review notes, actually reviewing it is near impossible; I’ve never believed in the idea that worthiness of subject matter necessarily renders something immune to criticism (I don’t believe Schindler’s List, for example, should be treated as some sort of sacred object and shown without adverts on TV or anything like that, as it often is, just because it’s about the Holocaust), but I find myself floundering somewhat when it comes to approaching this as a film rather than a collection of testimony.

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A documentary on a subject I’m not interested in that nonetheless manages to grab me must be doing something right, whatever it is. And I was intrigued by Senna cos it was the subject of a number of raves, particularly from people who were avowedly not fans of Formula One racing. And I am in their position: I’ve no especial interest in cars, not much more interest in sports, so sports involving cars don’t really stand a chance with me. Why yes, I am a failure as a man, why do you ask? Having said that, though, I’m not completely ignorant of at least some of the bigger names involved in the sport, so even I was at least dimly aware that Ayrton Senna’s death was a big deal when it happened… “dimly” being the admittedly operative word. Anyway, like I said, I was intrigued by the big ups the film was getting from non-F1 fans, so that drove me to finally check the thing out, and though I don’t know that I’d quite go along with some of the grander statements about its greatness, it is indeed pretty good viewing. The approach the film takes of sticking only to original visual material, rather than a mix of old footage and new talking head interviews (restricting the latter to additional voiceovers), and presenting events in historical order rather than jumping around in time is an interesting one, and the sheer range of visual material is fascinating too; in the DVD commentary, the director and producer may often be heard marvelling at some of the stuff they were able to turn up. Even if I don’t think it was quite as amazing as some, it’s still pretty impressive, and I can understand why people were angry that it was ineligible (some rule, apparently, disqualifying documentaries made completely from archive footage) for the best documentary category at the last Oscars…

I was (and am) a huge admirer of Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood, so the prospect of him taking on Filipino exploitation cinema struck me as a good thing; my own experience of the stuff is limited to a couple of Eddie Romero movies, Weng Weng (obviously) and Willie Milan’s remarkable W is War, so a primer on this sort of thing seemed like an excellent idea. There is a rather crucial distinction between the two films, though, in that NQH is about the Australian film industry but MMU is actually really about American exploitation cinema of the period that happened to use the Philippines as a filming location (especially those released by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures) and not about the actual Filipino industry itself. Apparently there was a pragmatic reason for this, namely that, frankly, those films produced for US release still exist, whereas a lot of the films produced for the home market just don’t (the Philippines was the last country in the world to establish a film archive, as recently as last October). That said, there’s plenty of insight to be gained, and if the portrait of the local filmmaking style in the film and the DVD extras is accurate, then “cavalier” doesn’t begin to describe it. Indeed, in some respects the additional interview footage is where the really jaw-dropping stuff lies; there are astounding tales of insanely unsafe stuntwork, and a genuinely horrifying near-rape story involving performers who apparently thought they were being paid to really rape the actress. As if the country’s dodgy political situation wasn’t sufficiently troubling, you had situations like this that went beyond mere incompetence to something quite disturbing. Accordingly Machete Maidens Unleashed ends up (perhaps inadvertently) as a fairly unflattering portrait of the American producers like Corman who went to the Philippines to shoot films cos it was cheap, leaving a slightly bitter sense that these were indeed “exploitation films” in a darker way than usual…

Thought it was time I contemporised a bit; it’s been months since I last watched anything from this century, and this at least has the decency to have only been released about six months ago, making it the nearest thing to an actually new film I’ve reviewed since I started this blog… Anyway, isn’t it remarkable how a person can make a film that spends nearly three and a half hours on its subject and yet the end result still feels incomplete? I got that feeling from Scorsese’s bio of “the quiet Beatle”, who I think spent much of his life being overshadowed by his bandmates in the Beatles, both during the lifetime of that band and after it… just look at their discography, he starts out being given one of John or Paul’s songs to sing, finally given one or two spaces on each album for his own songs, gradually allowed to contribute a single B-side, then eventually an A-side (“Somewhere”, which Frank Sinatra said was the greatest love song ever written but ascribed to Lennon/McCartney), until finally he blossomed with his very own triple album and the Bangladesh thing… but then John and Paul carried on through the 70s while George seemed to fade somewhat. There was some recognition again by the late 80s, but then relative silence until his death… and he didn’t die as publicly as John, he never really had the success of another major band like Paul, he didn’t tour for nearly 20 years.  He seemed content to remain kind of obscure, and the film kind of leaves him that way, too. The overall impression I got was of an extended appendix to the Anthology, a useful look at the Fabs from George’s less-explored perspective, but only useful if you already had some familiarity with them and him, and on the whole it was hard not to feel it never really got that close to its subject. I suspect Harrison wouldn’t have been too unhappy with that, though it was frustrating for me the viewer…

Ah, the wonders of Youtube, even if, alas, one of the 12 parts of this film got nobbled for copyright infringement… Amazing that they blocked just that one bit of the video, though, when the whole thing—an examination of the history of the cinematic representation of Los Angeles—is a morass of uncleared clips (and the occasional bit of director Thom Andersen’s own footage). On reflection, I wonder if the Internet isn’t the natural home for something like this; in more recent times there’s also been net-released videos like this and this, so with LAPI stuck in bootleg limbo anyway, Youtube might’ve been the best place for it. Anyway, interesting to watch this after Histoire(s) du cinéma, and—as I kind of expected—I liked it rather more than the Godard film, perhaps because Andersen’s film is over an hour and a half shorter than Godard’s, and also because the points it tries to raise are actually clear and Andersen seems more interested in actually communicating than Godard. Thought it was interesting that Andersen’s narration, though first-person, is actually done by someone else, but otherwise it’s an obviously personal project, with some perhaps personal prejudices on show; I don’t fully understand his loathing of the abbreviation “LA” when talking of his city. But Andersen still brings to this fascinatingly varied assortment of film and TV clips (including bits of the legendary gay porn film LA Plays Itself, from which this film takes its own name) an interesting insider’s perspective that highlights things an obvious non-Angeleno like me wouldn’t even think about; I particularly liked the way he showed how films keep dumping on LA’s celebrated modernist architecture by making them the residences of criminals and psychos, his comparison of the cops in LA Confidential with the even worse real LAPD of the 1950s, and his distinction between “high tourist” and “low tourist” filmmakers. At 169 it’s still pretty long, and not a terribly easy haul, but definitely one of the best documentaries on film out there. Start watching it HERE.

I don’t know where to begin with this, and I suspect neither will most people who watch it. My latest adventure in trying to “get” J.-L. Godard has ended in… something, I’m just not sure what. Maybe I should start by complaining about the DVD itself. Dear Madman people, why three discs for something that could’ve fit on two quite comfortably, even with Adrian Martin’s introduction? (For that matter, why so much more expensive even than your other three-disc sets?) Also, the subtitles identifying all the film excerpts and so forth? Terrific idea. I just wish you’d authored the discs so that you could actually switch to them while watching the film… as it is, the non-Francophone viewer has the choice of watching the film with subtitles to understand what’s being said and having to fend for themselves when it comes to identifying the visuals, or knowing what all the clips are but not knowing what’s being said about them. You can’t watch a bit, then flip to the other subtitle track to see what that clip was from. Irritating. Mind you, I’m not sure that I even did understand what was being said most of the time, and over a total running time of 266 minutes, that’s a lot of befuddlement. And the more of it I watched, the more I wondered if anything was, in fact, being said at all.

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I’ve finished with the ICM Top 500 Horror list for now, and am going to spend the next few days ticking off some titles from the Jonathan Rosenbaum list. To ease us from one to the other, let’s begin with this fascinating bit of work… The Museum of Modern Art calls it “a delirious reflection on the codes and conventions of the horror film through the language of structural materialist cinema”, but I daresay they would call it that. In plainer terms, it’s a film shot during the making of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula, which the opening credits oddly ascribe to Hammer, who would surely never have let Franco near them; and yet it’s not really a “making of”, or if it is, it’s one of the strangest examples of the form ever made. Directed by Pere Portabella, we do get some views of the behind-the-scenes stuff (I particularly liked the fan device that blows cobwebs onto things), but other scenes are of a less obvious nature. What’s actually going on in some of them? We see Franco’s camera crew filming certain scenes, but if that’s what they’re really doing then wouldn’t they have also got Portabella and his crew in the picture they were shooting? Are we looking at re-enactments of the scenes acted for Franco, rehearsal footage, even bits of Franco’s own film? The absence of speech (except at the very end) only makes things more ambiguous… But if you’re broadly familiar with the story of Dracula, it’s not hard to follow, and it never looks anything less than astounding thanks to Portabella’s decision to shoot in very high-contrast monochrome. It’s a decidedly abstract retelling of Dracula, and of Franco’s film, but a fascinating one. Alas, Portabella’s never let it be released on video or DVD (I scammed my copy from Youtube, no idea of its provenance but it’s remarkably good quality), but a restored print’s been doing the repertory rounds for a while, so maybe one day…

The early days of cinema is a subject that fascinates me, always has, so in spite of my usual wariness towards Wim Wenders, his film about the Skladanowsky brothers was one I wanted to see. The Skladanowskys were Germany’s contribution to the birth of cinema but, alas, not to its future; notwithstanding a few films apparently made just before WW1, they were out of the fledgling film business just as it was barely beginning to take off. Although they beat the Lumiere brothers in the race to publicly exhibit moving pictures, the Lumieres’ machine won the overall battle by simply being a lot better than Max and Emil’s Bioskop, which looks bizarrely complicated in hindsight (using two alternating strips of images that were glued together frame by frame). Wenders clearly has much affection for his subject, particularly what he calls in the DVD commentary the “un-Germanness” of the creation of the Bioskop by these isolated inventors who were kind of amateurs without the sort of industrial backing the Lumieres or Thomas Edison had. The film was produced as an exercise with students he was teaching at his old film school, and switches between interview footage of Max’s nonagenarian daughter Lucie with re-enactments of the invention of the Bioskop and the grand premiere of their little film loops at the Wintergarten; these latter scenes were shot using a hand-cranked camera from the 1920s, filmed at “silent speed” and then step-printed to 24fps. It’s a technique which, combined with the somewhat exaggerated, occasionally bordering upon slapstick performances, adds to the overall whimsical feel of the film. I was only disappointed that, although Wenders does get to show us the actual Bioskop machine, we don’t see any of the original films. On the whole, though, I enjoyed this, and I kind of admire Wenders’ honesty in the commentary about the end credits being stretched to absurd length purely so the film would be long enough to qualify for distribution in Germany.

So a couple of nights ago I spent an evening with Jan Svankmajer’s oeuvre… which I first discovered probably around 1995 or so (did I first read of him in Sight & Sound? Can’t remember) when SBS showed the Channel 4 documentary on him, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (helpfully included on the BFI collection as an extra), and then I think they showed Alice afterwards or something. I’ve since seen Faust as well, but the short films have been unfamiliar territory, apart from Meat Love (saw at Mu-Meson Archives one night) and such excerpts of the shorts as appeared in the documentary (i.e. more or less all of Dimensions of Dialogue and bits of others; I always wanted to see his House of Usher after seeing the fragment of it in the doco). Beyond that I haven’t really made any actual effort to explore Svankmajer’s work; I only thought of him dimly as a sort of Czech surrealist and never exactly tried to hunt him down (I only even saw Faust cos I got sent a DVD of it by the local distributor). But I knew my library had the BFI collection of his short films, so when I found it in stock a couple of weeks ago I took it, and after watching the Paradjanov film the other night I decided that was the right time to finally watch the thing.

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Can’t find a cover for this, even at the Madman website (cos it’s their edition I’ve got), so you’ll have to put up with just my words rather than a pretty picture to distract you from them… Anyway, I find myself wondering exactly what it was that drew me to this one; Alexander Kluge isn’t a director I’ve felt any great need to explore in the past, and I can’t remember having heard of this specific title or seeing it noted in any guide that it was a film I Needed To See. I do recall seeing it in the DVD section at Abbey’s, thought “hmm that might be interesting”, and obviously I eventually took it home with me, but how did it get my attention to begin with? I’ve been wondering that while waiting for the film to come up in my viewing schedule, and now I’m wondering again after having watched it. It’s described as a collage film, including bits of stock footage, staged fiction scenes, and other scenes of opera rehearsals that I don’t know if they were staged or not. All of this is in some way tied in to the theme of emotion, which quality is not exactly present in the film in high quantities… The DVD liner note amusingly observes that, for one of his earlier films, Kluge himself offered free tickets to anyone so bewildered by it they needed a second viewing; in this day and age, though, we can instead turn to Michelle Langford’s audio commentary, as I did, and, well, I left not much more enlightened despite her enthusiasm… as she reiterated in the commentary, Kluge wants You The Viewer to be part of the fun, be an active viewer rather than a passive one, draw your own conclusions about what he’s showing, how you think it connects. And maybe if I’d felt Kluge was giving me anything worth thinking about, I might’ve done so.