The Cameraman's Revenge

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…

My local library continues to surprise me with its DVD holdings, as witness this, which I chanced upon the other day while casually looking through the DVD racks. I think this makes the third time I’ve seen this, the first having been at Cinematheque and the second having been at the Art Gallery of NSW… and possibly because this is the first time I’ve seen it “up close” at home, a couple of things really struck me: 1) the fact that most of the film was obviously shot silent and dubbed later (which seems like such an obvious technical necessity for a film like this right at the dawn of sound; although the Vicomte de Noailles did commission it as a sound film, I don’t suppose he would go as far as stumping up for full sync-sound), and 2) the music. It really is… inappropriate, isn’t it (the Tristan prelude seems especially so somehow)? Which I”m sure was part of the strategy, though; if Bunuel was going to have a go at the bourgeoisie, why not bring the music they love into it as well? It was particularly instructive to watch this again after that third Forbidden Hollywood box; for all that people tout the virtues of pre-Code American cinema, how many of those films would’ve countenanced child killing, statue toe sucking, clerical defenestration and, of course, the 120 Days of Sodom ending even before the Code was enforced? Eight decades after the fact, the reasons for the riot it provoked aren’t hard to discern. And yet the most perverse thing about the film—which, again, I somehow never really noticed those two times on the big screen—is the warmth of the story of our two lovers around whom most of the film revolves; after their forcible separation early on, there’s something kind of sweet about the way they come back together again. Maybe that was in spite of Bunuel’s intentions (cos the love doesn’t exactly last), but I thought it was there even so.

Hockey politics, a Nazi invasion of Canada, sleepwalking, strange municipal laws, seances, B-grade melodrama reenactments of childhood events that may not have happened performed by actors including one who the narrator claims is really his mother, frozen horses, a daily soap opera whose action over the 50 years  it’s been on has consisted entirely of a man threatening to jump off a building ledge… it’s Guy Maddin’s “docufantasia” My Winnipeg, and it could be described as strange to say the least. My experience of Maddin has hitherto been limited to seeing The Saddest Music in the World (which I recall being kind of befuddled by) and reading more about his fascination with silent cinema and his attempts to try and recreate that style in his own films, fondness for what his IMDB bio calls “lo-fi” techniques like Super 8, that sort of thing, and I knew he had some sort of reputation as an interesting artist among your hardcore cinephile crowd. As such, though I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by the other film, when I found My Winnipeg at the library I thought I should check it out, maybe see if I liked it better, which I probably didn’t. The narrative thread, if you can call it that, concerns “Maddin” trying to escape Winnipeg, the town he’s spent his whole life in, while trying to erect a somewhat absurdist myth about the place. This is done in somewhat fussy style, involving an assortment of period newsreel footage, reenactments, backprojected slides, and Maddin’s own narration (which he sometimes performs live at showings of the film), itself a curious mix of portentous semi-poetry, seemingly genuine anger, and so forth. It’s not uninteresting but something about it never entirely clicked with me so that it never seemed more than mildly amusing, the surrealism felt forced, and even at just 80 minutes it seemed to wear out its welcome well before the end.

Apparently Godard began this immediately after Weekend, the conclusion of which proclaimed the end of cinema. This was the point where he suddenly decided to break with his past as an artist and a person, started engaging with far left politics in a way he hadn’t before, and, to quote one of my old film history books, “deliberately set out to make unpopular films, and succeeded”; indeed, beyond just being unpopular, Le gai savoir was designed to especially piss off the French public broadcaster that commissioned it and then refused to run it. Basically, it’s an essay film in the form of a  more than slightly dense collage of sound and vision, and if like me you have to watch it with subtitles that adds a further layer of complication cos they’re not always fast enough to translate everything being said both on the screen and on the soundtrack (my French is just good enough to pick up a few things the subtitles missed—and sometimes frankly got wrong—but not good enough that I can entirely do without them)… and the film is just so tied to the concerns of its time (1967/68) and place (France), or at least the concerns of the political far left of that time and place, that if you don’t at least share that ideology then the film doesn’t exactly leave you with much. Or it didn’t leave me with much, at any rate. I found it more or less impenetrable, and even watching it again straight away with Adrian Martin’s DVD commentary didn’t do much to clarify it (I certainly never got the humour he finds in it); and it seemed that if you didn’t already agree with whatever Godard was trying to say, he wasn’t interested in arguing in his own favour. As such I’m struggling to imagine what it had to offer back in its own time and place, cos I’m damned if I can see what it has to offer now.

This is one of those films you don’t seem to hear much about any more but which I imagine must’ve been a staple of arthouse repertory years ago… you know, if you were trying to study cinema as “serious” art, this is the sort of thing you’d go and see.  Nowadays there are so many more films around for people to see and study, that it’s perhaps inevitable that certain once-venerated classics fall to one side to make room, and for some reason this strikes me as having been one of those cases…  Anyway, I’ve finally seen it after years of it being one of those films I always felt I should see, and I’m pleased to say it was worth the wait. One of a number of “city symphony” films from that decade, hardly the first of its kind but probably the biggest example, along, of course, with Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera; critics then complained about the lack of “human interest” in the film (for similar reasons one more recent critic I’ve seen has carped that it looks forward to the Nazi cinema), but it was hardly meant to be a film about people (except as elements in a pictorial setting) so I don’t know how well such a criticism really holds. How many of the Lumieres’ films have “human interest”? I got the Edition Filmmuseum disc which carries the 80th anniversary restoration of the film plus the original 1927 score by Erwin Meisel; the score is optional but I can’t see why you’d watch the film without it, it’s terrific… chugs along in perfect accompaniment. I look forward to the rest of the DVD set, which contains all of Ruttmann’s extant pre-Nazi work…

What was I saying the other day about self-conscious Euro-art-filmness? Here, by God, is the very definition of same. Apparently Tarkovsky considered his previous film Solaris to have been a failure because it was too much of a science-fiction film, too tied to a commercial genre; this retreat into art could never be accused of the same thing. Not easy going by any means, although it was less fearsome and obtuse as I was kind of expecting it to be; took a while to get into but I didn’t share the apparent incomprehension of the Soviet authorities. That said, I could easily imagine myself hating it had I been in the wrong mood, and there’s really no way you could recommend it to anyone unwilling to venture beyond conventional narrative cinema. Your average multiplex inhabitant would likely consider it not so much foreign as alien…

An extraordinary nuclear apocalypse film. The last man on earth freaks out at that fact and basically hallucinates an entire new civilisation, represented only by a welter of off-screen voices (Robert Strauss is the only actor we actually see on screen). But being God proves difficult and burdensome. Kind of difficult viewing in the first half as we try and adjust to what’s going on, but in the second half as Noah goes even more mad and the film is pretty much taken over by the soundtrack and the collage of voices, effects and historical recordings therein it becomes remarkably powerful. Here’s an interview with Daniel Bourla conducted by Phil Hall, whose article on the then almost totally unseen fillm (along with this interview) led to the film’s rediscovery and belated release. If you haven’t heard much about this film (as I hadn’t before I got a loan of it), the back story is as good as the film itself. Although contrary to Bourla’s claim, The Noah is far from the only, or even the first, one-man feature film.