The Cameraman's Revenge

After Harakiri I was in the mood for something a bit less heavy. Solution: dive back into the DVD library for some Hong Kong action, and a particularly wild example of same (also one not to be confused with Tsui Hark’s own remake from 2001). Ropey though some of the effects might… well, do look in this day and age, they were state of the art in 1983 and groundbreaking for a film industry not used to them. Tsui imported American technicians to show the Hong Kong crowd what to do, and the result was an extravaganza that’s still kind of staggering, especially in its self-evident and unswerving commitment to Doing All The Things. So determined is it to be a mind-melting explosion of sheer Stuff Happening that it almost succeeds in making you realise the actual plot doesn’t really kick in until over half an hour in; up to that point it’s a long introduction to our main characters, a pair of somewhat odd couples (a Buddhist monk and his disciple; a travelling scholar and a soldier escaping a battle who becomes his disciple). That plot is kind of a thin one; they have to destroy the Blood Demon before it reincarnates, said mission involving a quest to recover two magic swords. Complications ensue when the scholar becomes the embodiment of evil along the way. The simplicity of the good-vs-evil conflict is nice, and the “Chineseness” of some of the details (cf. Sammo Hung’s monstrous holy eyebrows) gives it an obvious flavour, but really it’s about pure spectacle; it’s a film that shouts at you to look at it, see the tricks it can do, marvel at the amount of business it crams into just over 90 minutes, and try not to worry too much about the abruptness of some of the storytelling. At times like this, that sort of thing is just about perfect.

What an odd film. Odd that a Hollywood studio would adapt this play in the mid-30s, a time when Hollywood served up fantasies by the dozen but not of this kind; even though the success of Max Reinhardt’s theatrical production of 1934 was what moved Warner’s to make it, it still seems like a curious choice. And odder still that Warner’s made it, too; I could imagine MGM doing it more easily than them. I have to admit this was one of big Bill’s plays I’ve not only never read but I knew almost nothing about it—though obviously I recognised some of the lines just because Shakespeare’s so ubiquitous in the language—so I had only a dim idea what I was in for. And to some extent I suppose I got what I was expecting, which was, you know, a 1930s high Hollywood spectacle. On which level, of course, it really is something special; on reflection I suppose this actually is the Shakespeare play best suited to the big spectacle tendencies of that period. It’s a veritable extravaganza of cinematography and production design, winning the Oscar for the former, and it let Reinhardt indulge in some tricks I don’t suppose even he could’ve pulled off on stage. There is something inexplicably yet hugely moving, too, about that ballet where the fairies depart. I’m less convinced by the people who actually perform in this astounding set. Dick Powell apparently later admitted he didn’t fully understand his dialogue, and a little of Mickey Rooney’s screeching Puck goes a long way indeed; conversely, the incongruous casting of James Cagney actually works rather well, he’s very obviously enjoying himself as Bottom. On the whole I suspect it’s a film with more things in its favour than against it, once you look past the oddity of its very existence; alas, for whatever reason, it flopped at the box office and ended Reinhardt’s limited career. Obviously stage success was no guarantee of screen success even for him…

There’s not many films I can say I’ve seen twice on the big screen, but this is one of them, which is kind of remarkable given its age… once at that shithole called the Encore that used to be on Devonshire St, the second as part of the Chauvel’s Murnau retrospective accompanying Shadow of the Vampire in 2001. Both times it was a mediocre 16mm print of the “bilingual” version, so this was the first time I’ve seen it in an actually good version, i.e. the restored German original… I recall talking to someone after the first viewing (or was it the second?), and he said something about the second half of the film not being as good as the first. Which at the time I don’t think I agreed with, but on this revisit it was hard not to; Gosta Ekman now strikes me as a comparatively colourless lead, better as the older Faust than the younger one, and the whole business with Gretchen is a bit meh. But holy hell, what goodness there is in the first half. Like Metropolis, Faust was something of a financial sinkhole, but one where all the money spent showed on the screen; as FX extravaganzas go, this is some hard-to-beat stuff, even now the “magic carpet” flight is kind of astounding, as is the giant Mephisto looming over the town early in the film (all actual model work, too, obviously no computers involved). Emil Jannings, of course, is the real star of the show as Mephisto, flamboyant and hammy but so would you be if you were the devil. And yet it’s a bit of non-casting that perhaps helped the film best; the studio wanted Lilian Gish, who refused to be filmed by Murnau’s cameraman, but Murnau insisted on retaining the latter. Whatever Faust lost in internationally appealing star casting, it surely gained in visual strength. Maybe in the end it’s only half a great film, but that half is damned impressive.

These days, of course, we’d probably have to frown upon the orientalism of the whole thing if we considered ourselves politically correct, but since I don’t I’ll just have to settle for enjoying the film. I was delighted to find the BFI edition of the film recently, and delighted to watch it again tonight; first saw it eight or nine years ago courtesy of the estimable Jan Willis, who used to supply me with masses of stuff taped off Turner Classic Movies, including this… The prize for creator of the animated feature film seems to be that Cristiani fellow from Argentina (the DVD’s liner notes ludicrously assign credit to Winsor McCay’s Lusitania film, which is not a feature), but since his films vanished decades ago Lotte Reiniger certainly has the earliest surviving example, and a singular one at that thanks to the silhouette technique involved. Achmed is an extraordinary achievement in many ways, not least because Reiniger made it with such a small crew (husband Carl Koch and a handful of assistants like Walter Ruttmann—interesting to see this again having seen Ruttmann’s own animations, now I can spot the things he must’ve done in this), and constructed all the silhouette models herself. Little wonder it took three years to make. It was sufficiently out there stylistically that its first German audiences didn’t get it, but it was well received by the French; Jean Renoir was such a fan he became friends with Reiniger and Koch, working with the latter on various films during the 30s (Reiniger also did a shadow theatre scene for La marseillaise), while they took over his unfinished Tosca when he fled to the US. It’s literal Arabian nights stuff that packs a remarkable amount of narrative into a running time of just over an hour, but the animation itself, the artwork, is what really matters. Pioneering but not primitive at all, and still quite splendid 85 years later; now I want the other BFI disc of her short films…

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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From memory my first encounter with Mizoguchi was The Loyal 47 Ronin on SBS, then some years later I saw this at the Chauvel (part of the same retrospective where I also first saw Osaka Elegy). On re-viewing, Ugetsu strikes me again as a pretty fair introduction to Mizoguchi’s work, which it pretty much was for Western audiences… Amusing to realise this last bit of his career came out at least to some extent because the success of Rashomon at Venice in 1951 miffed Mizoguchi into seeking some of that acclaim himself. During the civil wars of the 15th century, two peasant brothers (apparently, though at least one review I’ve read is doubtful for some reason) have plans to make it big; Genjuro has visions of making lots of money selling his pottery, while Tobei’s ambitions extend more to military glory as a samurai. In the meantime their long-suffering wives (this is Mizoguchi, of COURSE they’re long-suffering) have to not only tolerate their husbands’ dreams of bettering themselves but to fight the even harder battle of surviving from one day to the next; this is still wartime after all. Tobei’s foolishness is much more obvious than Genjuro’s, clearly, but the latter will still find he’s not above making grand mistakes when he lets himself be seduced by a young lady who, well, isn’t exactly alive any more.; both of them will be sadder and wiser men by the film’s end (which isn’t exactly happy per se but it’s still gentler than Mizoguchi seems to have usually permitted). Like I said, it probably is the easiest way into Mizoguchi’s oeuvre (or at any rate it’s a lot less brutal than the Eclipse box), although I suspect that I still prefer Sansho the Bailiff (which I also saw years ago at that Chauvel retrospective). We’ll find out soon enough if I still do…

I first (and last) saw this at a short film night which, from memory, Brett Garten was running back in 2003 at Candy’s Apartments in King’s Cross… this was the second installment when he showed an assortment of French shorts (also including Lamorisse, Séchan and Resnais); I don’t recall there being a third, probably because the venue wasn’t great (the heinously expensive drinks didn’t help). Conditions were somewhat happier at home this afternoon, although Lionsgate’s print (which I assume is the best available) looks about as rough as the one I saw back then, and sounds nearly as rough as it looks; the DVD oddly credits Marc Perrone with the music but the soundtrack is clearly the one credited on the print itself which seems to have been recorded the year after the film’s French premiere… Anyway, the film adapts the Hans Christian Anderson story, with Mrs Renoir once again in apparently her last lead role for hubby, in which capacity she probably is way too old to be playing the girl selling matches (Mary Pickford might’ve got away with it better); Renoir himself somewhat jettisons the last bit of Anderson’s original story in favour of an extended fantasia of his own. Jean Tedesco is usually called the film’s co-director, though the print actually lists him and Renoir as “producteurs” and credits Renoir alone with “mise-en-scène”; Tedesco’s Theatre du Vieux-Colombier was one of the first repertory cinemas in the world, and also hosted avant-garde film screenings, and Renoir’s Little Match Girl appears to have been made to be shown at Tedesco’s cinema (as well as having been shot in his studio). It’s OK, but I still didn’t find myself blown away by it; there are those who think this is his best silent film but somehow I never found it as emotionally involving as Renoir presumably meant it to be. Interesting as an experiment without perhaps being an actual success.

I was in another of those moods where I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to watch (I’ve been trying to keep to some sort of viewing schedule, but I think that’s broken down a bit), and then I recalled I still had this lying around… picked it up cheap a while ago as a library title (cos I wanted at least a bit of Starewicz on DVD) but hadn’t got around to actually watching it yet cos I kind of kept forgetting it was there. So I decided it was time to check in once again with the man who gave this blog its name…

As pioneers of cinema go, few are as arguably obscure, not to mention inadvertent, as Wladyslaw Starewicz. Born in Lithuania to Polish parents, the young fellow’s passion for entomology led him to become director of a natural history museum, and his other abiding interest in photography led him to try his hand at film making around 1909. However, trying to get his insect subjects to co-operate (the either fell asleep or died under the lights, depending on which story you read) was a vexing problem for him. Then he apparently saw one of the early animated films of Emile Cohl, the French cartoonist, involving stop-motion matchsticks, and decided he could pull a similar trick with his insects. After the 1917 revolution, Starewicz settled in France and continued his work there until his death in 1965. For the life of me I can’t recall how or when I first heard of him, but I do recall that back in 1995 I first read Sight & Sound magazine and I think I must’ve seen a review in that of the Connoisseur Video release of some of his films and that led me to actually order the damn thing (via the Dendy shop, back in the days when the Martin Place cinema had a shop out back), probably the first time I actually did that.

This particular DVD is, alas, not an upgrade of that (if only it were); instead it’s actually an earlyish (released in 2000) presentation of a mid-90s video release by Milestone of six Starewicz films, only two of which I’d seen before… starting, obviously, with the title film and ending with Winter Carousel from 1958, apparently his last actually finished film. In between there’s The Insect’s Christmas, a combination of insect-work and more traditional puppets from 1913, two 1920s silents (Frogland and Voice of the Nightingale, the latter presented in a hand-coloured print that is truly something to behold) and the 1934 sound film The Mascot. The latter was clearly shot silent and later subjected to some of the worst post-synchronisation on Earth (fortunately there’s only a handful of actual lines of dialogue, though each one makes me want to kill the person talking); it’s also home to a genuinely strange mix of sentimentality and the macabre. Given that Starewicz was essentially making children’s films, I can only assume with this one he was trying to traumatise some of his younger viewers for life. Revenge itself remains a thing of complete wonder, of course, a tale of infidelity and marital mistrust filmed by a vengeful camera operator as part of that evening’s entertainment and all enacted by a cast of dead insects. 100 years later it’s still stunning.

Glad I’ve got this DVD, but at the same time it makes me wish someone would do a much more definitive Starewicz DVD set; I know quite a lot of his films are lost but I also know much more than just this batch of films exists (I’ve got a few of them on tape after all), and it’d be nice not to have to jump through flaming hoops to get them in digital form.

Trivia: Mark Spain (the boy Alex in this film) once called me “hairy motherfucker” in the men’s bathroom at the Sly Fox Hotel in Enmore. He then apologised profusely when he realised he’d mistaken me for someone else. THAT’S BESIDE THE POINT, though, which is that this film confuses me. What fucking country is it supposed to be set in, I ask? The intention of Tony Ginnane and/or Simon Wincer seems to have been that the story took place somewhere in the US, but it’s some alternate dimension America where cars have right hand drive and televisions show the old Channel 2 test pattern; the bewildering array of accents (a number of which seem to have been post-synced) doesn’t help. That’s actually remarkably distracting, almost as much as the strangely ropey quality of the “magic” effects shots (just watch the visual quality of the image take a marked step down at those points), and rather gets in the way of involvement with the film, which I otherwise enjoyed. Everett de Roche updates the Rasputin story to… well, wherever the fucking thing is set, doing so in perhaps unnecessarily literal and schematic fashion (“Nicholas Rast”?); in other words, if you know your immediately pre-Revolutionary Russian history, there’s not a lot of real suspense involved, but it is kind of fun trying to work out the correspondences. Very good-looking production, too, apart from the shoddy effects shots, fairly well-played, and despite the relative lack of real narrative surprises I did like that it ultimately leaves Ras… sorry, Gregory Wolfe unexplained in rational terms—despite the almost convincing way Nick’s backers set up a dossier debunking him—he remains a properly supernatural figure when all is said and done, which makes the film a bit more than a standard political thriller. Problematic—I’m not sure I’ll ever lose my frustration over the indeterminate setting—but certainly enjoyable.

Why has it taken me until tonight to wonder if Wim Wenders took some cues for Wings of Desire—namely presenting the angelic domain in monochrome and the real world in colour—from this film? Likely answer: I am an idiot… But never mind. I have this now on DVD as part of those Rank Classics three-disc sets; no idea what the other two films are like (yet; I’ll be watching them next) but the set was only $20 and I was happy to pay that just for this one. I first saw this on the big screen, in fact, back in 2005 when a new print from the BFI played at the Chauvel as part of Cinematheque, and to this day I still say that print is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in a cinema; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a print of a 3-colour Technicolor film actually projected before, and it was quite astonishing to behold. That the film further proved to be one of the best I’ve ever seen was just the icing on the cake; the experience was really about seeing the film in this particular way. Of course, digital disc is quite adequate too; it’s still a singular film (and what else would a 1940s Powell & Pressburger film be if not singular?) in whatever form. I know it’s the usual practice for films to have happy endings because that’s how people like their stories to end, i.e. happily (however contrived or absurd the happy ending actually is in practice). This film, though, offers the best sort of happy ending, i.e. the one you actually want to happen as opposed to the one you’re more commonly given as a formality. If I were ever damn fool enough to make a list of what I thought were the hundred best films of all time, I’m fairly sure this would have to make an appearance on it somewhere.