Wednesday 26 December 2018

Robert Aldrich | Four Decades, Four Movies

Over the past six months or so, I've been watching Robert Aldrich films. Aldrich has been on my radar since I read that Kiyoshi Kurosawa was a big fan of Emperor of the North, and that fact alone spurred me on to see them all. I've now done that and, somewhat inevitably, I've ranked them all on my Letterboxd. As a form of closure on this project, I thought it'd be a good idea to write briefly on one film from each decade he was working: the 50s to the 80s. Four films for four decades. With thanks to Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, Ursula Andress and Anita Ekberg, it makes sense to call this whole endeavour 4 For Aldrich. It's nice how things work out.

Ten Seconds To Hell | 1959

Love in the ruins. Six men disarm bombs in the post-war rubble of Berlin, the scars of a city echoing the past in the present, to make an inhospitable place a city again. Blueprints line the walls of their office and they can precisely identify bombs from a distance, but these men can never be truly prepared. There are too many variables. Every day is a "gamble with death” — but men with something to rebuild have the most to live for. Architects and murderers. Morality and greed. “What will rise from these ashes?”

The Last Sunset | 1961

A Texan sheriff hunts a man accused of murder across the border into Mexico. He has no jurisdiction here, so the two men team up for a lucrative, mutually beneficial cattle drive back across the border, along with a disgraced Civil War deserter and his wife and daughter: a chance to escape, a chance for justice. Romances blossom and relationships fray as these men cagily push on to their inevitable endgame, prowling around each other in the post-war ruins of country fraught with danger. A yellow dress to reawaken ghosts, unverifiable revelations weaponised as punishment. "I've loved you all my life."

Hustle | 1975

"What the hell happened to justice?" The death of a young woman, ruled as a suicide but treated as a murder by her angry father, a veteran struggling to readjust to civilian life. There's too many murders in Los Angeles to reopen the case, so the girl's father, firm in his belief that the police are covering something up, investigates alone, while an embattled, whiskey-swigging homicide detective, planning a new life in Europe with his French lover, tries to help as much as he can out of a sense of moral obligation. A furious film about the ugliness of post-Korea, post-Vietnam America, how there's no escape from it, and how it may be too far gone to fix it. "We lost her a long time ago."

... All The Marbles | 1981

From darkness into light. A life on the road in a struggling industry, driving from town to town, motel to motel, to wrestle in dingy venues to small audiences for low pay. Smoke billows into the atmosphere from factory chimneys everywhere they go. "You think we've got it tough? How'd you like to work in there?" Pills and cigarettes to cope with the cold, the pain, the loneliness, but the struggle pays off in the ring. Out of it, a new set of problems: the higher the stakes, the higher the costs. Loaded dice and bribery, violence and sleaze, power games with powerful people. In Aldrich's America, wherever there's money there are people trying to steal it. But the determination to win, to right a wrong, to reclaim one's dignity, always shines through in the end. "Win or lose, I love you both. But we've come too far to lose". Work hard, win big. Maybe the future is yours, after all.

Monday 24 December 2018

2018 in Cinema

I seem to have gotten into the habit of writing an end of year round up (see 2016 and 2017), and I don't really know why I keep writing them. I’m a lot less engaged in film culture than I used to be. The effort I once went to to keep track of which directors had films on the way in the next year or so and which festivals they might premiere at and all that kind of thing is now channeled into more rewarding areas of my life. I still keep an ear to the ground, but long gone are the Google Sheets filled with films, premiere dates, self-imposed hierarchies of interest. I tweet less and less. I only use Letterboxd for tracking what I watch and leaving the odd review or list. I write occasionally on here. I still watch movies, and I still care about what's happening. I'm just checking out of the online aspect of it. I don't enjoy it. More and more, the art feels secondary to the idea of being publicly seen to have the correct opinion on it, and the idea of having the correct, and therefore only, perspective on any kind of cultural object cannot be healthy, particularly when that opinion is policed. If you don't like Twin Peaks you're an idiot. If you like Suspiria you're a potato. It's all a bit too dystopian for my tastes.

This is just one part of film culture, of course, and it shouldn't be enough on its own to dissuade me from caring about the rest of it. I don't get to travel to see films very often as I don't work in the industry, but when I do, I'm able to treat film festivals as holidays. I like to enjoy films as an interest rather than as a profession. I have no obligations to write coverage of festivals so it's easy to relax and enjoy myself. The drawback, though, is that I don't get to see as much as I'd like to. I've not, for example, been able to see films like Christian Petzold's Transit or Stéphane Brizé's At War or Carlos Reygadas's Our Time, all films that I'm very keen to see but none of which have screened at the festivals I've been to or been released in UK cinemas. However, I do think that I see enough to get an idea, at least, of the themes dominating the year's cinematic output. Either that, or I project myself onto the films that I do see and only start to notice when an overarching theme begins to emerge. However it happens, it amounts to the same thing, and what I've encountered most often in the films I've seen in 2018 is an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction with the world. Lost pasts, doomed futures, a fog-shrouded present. A feeling that the infrastructure will crumble while the political hierarchies endure. Films about lies, cover-ups, paranoia, injustices. Films about how technology smothers humanity, about how nostalgia poisons culture. Films about the glass that separates us from each other. Films about death. However I've got here, the following twelve films, twelve because I always do twelve, are the films that have stayed firmest in my thoughts. For better or for worse, this is what I've got.

In alphabetical order:

An Elephant Sitting Still | Hu Bo
Ash is Purest White | Jia Zhang-ke
Burning | Lee Chang-dong
First Man | Damien Chazelle
Happy as Lazzaro | Alice Rohrwacher
I Don’t Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians | Radu Jude
If Beale Street Could Talk | Barry Jenkins
La Flor | Mariano Llinas
Monrovia, Indiana | Frederick Wiseman
Ready Player One | Steven Spielberg
Support The Girls | Andrew Bujalski
Suspiria | Luca Guadagnino
__________

I started the year with the intention of writing more than I did last year. It certainly doesn't feel as if I have, but, nevertheless, I've written some things that I'm proud of.

Here are my five favourites, in chronological order.

1) On doors and paint in Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance Nue
2) On Brian De Palma's homage to John Everett Millais in Femme Fatale
3) On my solitary day at the Edinburgh Film Festival
4) On Lee Chang-dong's Burning
5) On the films of David Cronenberg
__________

10 albums.

Ye | Kanye West
Iridescence | Brockhampton
Be The Cowboy | Mitski
Ruiner | nothing, nowhere
Kids See Ghosts | Kids See Ghosts
Some Rap Songs | Earl Sweatshirt
Nearer My God | Foxing
Lost & Found | Jorja Smith
Charmer | Charmer
| Beach House
__________

going through catastrophe, while all these humans laugh at me // 
it seems as they were born a different breed.
we must lend a hand to those who feel they're at the end // 
an act of love can really go the distance.

Catastrophe | Brennan Savage

I've listened to this track a lot this year, an incredibly direct song simultaneously appalled by human behaviour and hopeful that human goodness will shine through in the end. Everything's so toxic, but we can still get through it.
__________

M. Butterfly | David Cronenberg, 1993
Twilight's Last Gleaming | Robert Aldrich, 1977
Always | Steven Spielberg, 1989
Streets of Fire | Walter Hill, 1984
Van Gogh | Maurice Pialat, 1991
Poetry | Lee Chang-dong, 2010
Home From The Hill | Vincente Minnelli, 1960
Djinn | Tobe Hooper, 2013
Pola X | Leos Carax, 1999
Loving You | Johnnie To, 1995

Ten discoveries. I should probably dig deeper next year.
__________

Four memories from the year. Please allow me this indulgence.

In early June, listening to Ye over and over again on a delayed flight from New York City to London, somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean at 3am, or 7am, lost in jetlagged delirium and near-darkness, the hazy light of seat-back screens illuminating the aisles as people sleep face down on tray-tables. Virtual planes track our course across 3D globes on a dozen screens in my eyeline. The Titanic sank somewhere out the window more than a hundred years ago.

In July, getting entirely too emotional watching Eric Dier bury a dreadful penalty as England finally win a World Cup shoot out. It’s hard to explain the emotion of watching the national football team, an entity that I’ve been raised to love wholeheartedly, surpass all bottomed out expectations and succeed, particularly in a year in which the leaders of this country seem intent on debasing themselves at any opportunity. For a few brief moments in the summer things felt good in England. That’s something to be happy about, I think.

In October, watching La Flor, 808 minutes joyous of cinema, with Matt and some similarly embattled film folk across three weekday mornings and afternoons at the London Film Festival. Daily rituals: walking as slowly as possible from Piccadilly Circus to the ICA to breathe as much relatively fresh, unseasonably warm air as possible; tucking into a delicious Boost bar, a staple of my durational cinema endeavours, during the first intermission of each day; the frequent glimpses at Matt’s increasingly diagrammatic notes and meal deal choices, both equally impressive; actress Elisa Carricajo's cryptic daily introductions, telling us roughly when to expect each intermission based on the topic of conversation in a specific scene. All in all, a lot of time that I'm glad I spent where I spent it.

In November, losing myself for an afternoon at the V&A’s impressively vast Videogames: Design / Play / Disrupt, an exhibition focused on artistry in gaming. I’m both fascinated by gaming as a medium and dismissively terrible at video games, so this was always going to be an interesting experience. I’d never really considered how a game’s form could be used to enrich the ideas and themes of a game before, but now, having seen striking examples of this from Bloodborne and The Last of Us, in particular, my eyes have been opened to how much of this fledgeling artform I’ve either taken for granted or missed entirely. I’ve got some catching up to do.
__________

I should be more active.
I should put more work in.
Let's see where my time goes.
__________

Sunday 2 December 2018

David Cronenberg, Ranked




The Fly | David Cronenberg, 1986
M. Butterfly | David Cronenberg, 1993
Crash | David Cronenberg, 1996

I've been watching David Cronenberg's filmography from (pretty much) start to finish over the past month or so as a post Halloween project of sorts. No real reason beyond curiosity, really, or more specifically an interest in seeing everything in the context of a progression of ideas. Cronenberg is a guy whose work has peppered my film education for years, from a secondhand VHS copy of The Fly that I bought for 50p at a boot fair in the mid-2000s at far too young of an age to really be watching something so traumatic, to laughing my way through A History of Violence in a GCSE Media Studies class with my friend Robin because we found the "my name's Tom" scene so patently absurd, to becoming obsessed with the frankly incredible French teaser trailer for Cosmopolis just before its Cannes premiere during my final year of university, and so on and so forth. I'd been wanting to revisit a lot of this stuff, and to finally catch up with the few that I'd somehow not gotten around to yet, for a long time, and I'd especially wanted to get a better idea of what Cronenberg is about. The chill of late autumn seems to fit his vibe pretty well, too.

Now, having revisited every feature but the first two, the near-silent 60 minute oddities Stereo and Crimes of the Future, both of which I struggled with before abandoning my efforts entirely after ten minutes apiece, I feel I can say with certainty that, without really being able to articulate exactly why or how, the lingering presence of Cronenberg's work in my blossoming cinephilia has had a significant impact on how I think and feel about movies. As an attempt to get closer to this, I've put 19 of Cronenberg's films into an order of preference, or of reverence; some kind of hierarchy based on my experiences with each of them. I've also written something about them all. Impressions, mostly, or observations, summaries, the odd comparison or two. Something, at least. Ideally the process of doing this will help me to understand what it is that makes these movies speak so clearly to me. Maybe it won't, but, at the very least, it'll be an interesting time capsule for me when I inevitably disagree with everything I've said here in a few weeks, months or years from now.

-----

1. M. Butterfly (1993)

So much all at once, and, appropriately, so well disguised. The weaponisation of cultural stereotypes becomes weaponised love when the stereotype proves impenetrable, but, ultimately, the downfall of Jeremy Irons' French diplomat is not his blindness, but rather the misplaced confidence his blindness facilitates once everything seems to be going his way. An initially meek, easily intimidated man is lent an air of brash hubris by this blossoming romance, as if, for the first time in his life, he feels valued, valuable, a focal point for other people. He's more sociable, he drinks more, he makes rash decisions, he fucks around, he speaks louder and with more authority. His newly-inflated ego clouds his judgment in a way that he can't handle, ultimately destroying him far before the reality of his relationship with "my butterfly" finally and brutally dawns on him.

2. Crash (1996)

Total blankness. I've never read Ballard but I think he's someone whose mindset I can get on board with, and, based on this, Cronenberg is certainly on his wavelength. Sex and destruction, technology and flesh. A soundscape drawn from individual cars, totally at odds with the perceived increase in vehicles on the roads, and whispered, breathy voices, barely audible at all and separate, isolated, alone. A coldness created by metal and glass. Scars and limps point to a violent history, and the intersecting infrastructure of city roads suggests a preparation for an inevitable future. Dense, painful, bleak. The end of the world.

3. The Fly (1986)

The ultimate romantic tragedy, and an idea that Cronenberg would refine further in M. Butterfly. Again, a quiet, meek man is transformed by love, only here it's his lack of rationality that catalyses it when his new girlfriend leaves in the middle of the night to confront an ex-boyfriend who is harassing her. Brundle, believing her to be sleeping with him and fuelled by this imaginary challenge to his masculinity, makes a choice that ultimately destroys him. A surprisingly long-winded set-up introduces Brundle's nervous, charming, neglected personality, making the initially acute post-teleportation changes in his behaviour more pronounced, and making it clear that something is wrong far before this transformation is literalised as something physical.

4. The Dead Zone (1983)

A man awakens from a five-year coma with an unexplained ability to see into people's pasts and futures by touching them, and begrudgingly becomes first a detective, then a political assassin. A fascinating film about power, and one reminiscent of De Palma's Blow Out, in that both are about people who know something that they don't want to know and are forced to act on it out of necessity. Christopher Walken's ex-schoolteacher has to act as he knows that his inaction will have profound consequences: stopping an ice hockey game so the ice doesn't break, catching a mass-murderer to save lives, assassinating a politician to avert a nuclear war, all because he has seen the danger, even if his behaviour makes no sense to anyone else. As well as these averted disasters, Cronenberg shows some of Walken's predictions coming true, too, making it clear that his prophetic visions are indeed prophetic rather than simple hallucinations, removing all doubt and lending his later dilemmas a more troubling sense of moral cost. "If you could go back in time to Nazi Germany, before Hitler came to power, knowing what you know now, would you kill him?"

5. Cosmopolis (2012)

"Look how good they feel". As dense and surreal as Naked Lunch but, I think, significantly more palatable, perhaps simply because DeLillo's control is, to me at least, far more interesting than Burroughs's lack of it. The wilful self-destruction of an immensely powerful man blind to the ramifications such a collapse will create, locked away in a soundproofed car in the middle of gridlocked traffic, talking about buying the Rothko Chapel to put in his apartment and watching increasingly violent protests on the streets of Manhattan from behind tinted glass. Information wielded as a weapon, as a form of control, a form of security, and having it all stripped away in the blink of an eye to leave nothing but chaos and vulnerability — which is precisely what he wants.

6. Dead Ringers (1989)

"You haven't had any experience unless I've had it too." Inseparable twin brothers who live together and work together, both drawn to a patient with a trifurcated cervix and dragged apart by her presence in their lives: Beverly, the meeker of the two, falls in love with her, and Elliot, the extrovert, doesn't want the dynamic to change. But it's so much more than that, of course. Such a complex film, and so well crafted. "We are perceived as one person," but Jeremy Irons imbues them both with so much individual depth, not just in affection or character but in their respective collapses. These are two totally separate, totally different minds. Glass and metal. "Are you afraid that when it came down to it I wouldn't be able to tell the difference?"

7. eXistenZ (1999)

The mind creates the universe and its rules, and conflicting layers of reality and virtual reality blur together in a game world. Gaming is mass-entertainment. Game designers are superstars. "Game Pods" are made from frog organs, free-will is occasionally removed to further the narrative, dream logic and nightmare imagery. Significantly more interesting to me than Videodrome, which is, I think, the closest point of comparison, but perhaps only because we're currently in the process of seeing its prescience come to fruition — or maybe because its mind-altering qualities are both a natural extension of its existence and drawn from the mind of the player rather than an external source. "I actually think there's an element of psychosis involved here." "That's a great sign."

8. A Dangerous Method (2011)

"Never repress anything" seems to be key here, as repression is exactly what poisons Freud and Jung's relationship. The initial frankness and enthusiasm of their discussions paves the way to fierce debate and, ultimately, an intellectual impasse. Neither man wants to cede ground to the other, so they lie, they hold things back, they resist each other's ideas, until they've driven themselves so far from each other that there's no reason to keep speaking at all. Cronenberg has the time of his life illustrating these shifting power dynamics through high and low angles, minute behavioural details, little glances, vocal inflections and, in particular, the oft-noted split-diopter shots, suggesting a constant analysis in progress by a dominant force on the periphery. He's never been one to hold back.

9. Shivers (1975)

The death of civilisation. A Ballardian, self-sustaining apartment block on an island in the shadow of a city, with a supermarket and a doctor's surgery on-site and a bridge serving as the only link to the mainland, falls into chaos when people come out of their homes seeking contact with one another. A warning of the dangers of an isolated high-rise lifestyle, all concrete and fake wood, sold as a commodity on the verge becoming the norm. "I'm hungry for love" as the cry of a monster. Blood trails on blank white walls.

10. Videodrome (1983)

A chance encounter with a hyper-violent TV transmission sets in motion a hallucinatory misadventure for a TV executive. He needs to find transgressive new shows for his network in order to remain in business. "I'm looking for something that will break through." A signal with the potential to change reality, and a conspiracy to open it up to the masses. A chaotic, maddening, visceral film about our obsession with images on screens and their power to manipulate and control individual thought, and one that I could happily never see again. "The monologue is his preferred form of discourse."

11. Scanners (1981)

"You murdered the future." A medication prescribed to pregnant women gives their unborn children psychic powers, and the children are later rounded up to be used as weapons. A short cut to human evolution. Unethical science and corporate espionage conducted in blank-walled, sterile office buildings and remote factories. Mental abilities have physical ramifications: sparks fly as a computer is hacked through a phone line, a man's head explodes; a war is fought and lost and, finally, something entirely new is born from the ashes.

12. Maps To The Stars (2014)

As cold and sterile as Crash, but more openly critical (funny, too) — a mode of Cronenberg that I don't really know what to do with. Contrasting downfalls: a washed up and washed out actress and a bankable child star of a highly successful franchise, linked by the presence of a mysterious woman with burn scars and both haunted by ghosts. Hierarchies of indirect conversation, verdant gardens viewed through glass, a fridge stacked with energy drinks, weird robotic ringtones, mirrors showing reflections that nobody can bear to look at, sterile modern architecture, natural light and decorative dead trees. An obsession with the physical at the expense of the psychological. "Secrets kill." Who'd have thought Hollywood was such a poisonous place?

13. Eastern Promises (2007)

"I need to know who you are." What a strange film. The machinations of a Russian mafia family in London and a midwife's quest to expose the truth about the death of a pregnant young girl. A translated diary reveals buried monstrosities. Rumours of homosexuality as a motive for murder. People play both sides to stay alive. Tattoos as maps of a history and, more importantly, proof of authenticity. There's no reason not to trust these images. An outwardly unusual project for Cronenberg, but one that fits into his interest in identity that echoed throughout all three films he made in the 2000s, and one that works as a reversal of sorts of A History of Violence — how deep can you go before it's too far to escape?

14. A History of Violence (2005)

After interrupting an armed robbery and brutally killing the two perpetrators, a family man and pillar of his community is forced to confront his violent past against his will. An extension and expansion of the themes of Spider, in that the buried past is here forcibly shared by two families (the one he has created and the one he has escaped) rather than experienced solely by one man — and so the collapse of the charade is shared too. How do you protect the unit when you're the reason it's under threat? How do you escape it?

15. Spider (2002)

An objective film about subjectivity. A man is transferred from a prison hospital to a halfway house as a means to escalate his recovery and, once there, he replays events from his childhood that led him to this place. Cronenberg provides no history up front, only a succession of memories as they're lived and re-played by Spider as a way for him to confirm them as a truth, his truth, only for cracks to appear and for the whole thing to collapse under the weight of its artifice. A fascinating, if totally self-contained, film about breaking to rebuild, about healing, about the fragility of the human mind, and one that could only become richer with repeat viewings.

16. Rabid (1977)

A disease comes full circle. A revolutionary surgery leaves the victim of a motorcycle crash with a parasitic new organ and an insatiable bloodlust. A new nature, new instincts, new cravings. She does what her body tells her to and inadvertently unleashes a vampiric plague on society. The most impressive thing here is how quickly the disease spreads without her, from a secluded medical retreat in the mountains to the metropolis of Montreal. Sitting in a shopping mall, she sees a disease-stricken man she's never met violently attack another man, causing chaos, and she never for a second thinks that she's responsible for any of this. Why would she? And so this modern day Typhoid Mary, the only chance at a cure, escapes with the crowd. A city burns to the ground.

17. The Brood (1979)

Maybe the most frightening film Cronenberg has made, and a genuinely traumatic one, too. The collateral damage of a ruined family that unexplainably gets worse and worse. Also, I think, the Cronenberg film with the most single-scene set pieces, singular moments that illustrate precisely what is going on and give the whole thing a chopped-up, almost apocalyptic momentum, careening inevitably towards a conclusion that finally offers some kind of future for this family — but only by severing its past.

18. Naked Lunch (1991)

A real curio, one that I've seen twice now and I can't get my head around any of it. The dreamlike qualities of Burroughs's novel are all present, and it's hard to fault this as an adaptation of such a dense work, but beyond following Cronenberg down an increasingly (and impressively) bizarre rabbit hole, there doesn't seem to be all that much to think about — or maybe I'm thinking too much.

19. Fast Company (1979)

On some level, Fast Company is a loose exploration of the physical dangers that emerge within a battle of egos, but Cronenberg spends far more time on the day-to-day logistics and shady corporate interests that make a race-day happen, rather than how they facilitate this increasingly dangerous rivalry. As such, nothing is ever really explored much beyond the surface, and this fertile idea ends up closer to a goofy b-side to Bronco Billy than to anything else Cronenberg would go on to make.