Not sure of the origin of this poster but it is lovely…

Two men, known only as ‘Writer’ and ‘Professor’, hire a Stalker to guide them through the ‘Zone’, an off limit area where danger is supposedly ever-present. Their aim: to get to the room at the heart of the zone where their innermost desires will be realised.

It’s been a few weeks since I watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and I’ve wanted to write about it since then but, well, I’ve had to give it some time to settle in my mind. It is, first and foremost, a beautiful film. Cate Blanchett has talked about how each frame is ‘burned’ into her retina; on watching, it quickly becomes apparent why. Each frame is an exquisitely composed piece of art. Colours drip and drain whilst the textures of the world are the crumbling evidence of a creative space in a state of decay and disrepair. Because it is Tarkovsky you get plenty of time to appreciate these compositions too (141 shots in 160+ minutes, several over four minutes and one clocking in at 6 minutes and 50 seconds – Johnson/Petrie). There’s a few other familiar things in here too, his focus on the backs of people’s heads is evident and recurrent religious iconography as well as his father’s poetry being read out.

But this isn’t why Stalker is so special, it’s special because of something much more difficult to explain (but I’m going to have a go).

The three men ruminate on their journey. The inclusion of Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg was out of the question.

There is no consensus on the meaning of the film. It is loaded with images and the suggestion of some kind of message but even the most straightforward of these is open to debate. It appears perhaps that Stalker is a film about the process, about the journey to realisation and about how that journey is of a greater importance and significance than its end. Although, given its nature this interpretation is likely as accurate as the numerous other theories about the film; that it functions as an allegory of the perils of intellectualism in communist Russia, life in a Gulag or indeed as a representation of the hidden Kyshtym nuclear disaster. You see, it doesn’t respond particularly well to being nailed down because it has no concrete answers. And why should it?

Perhaps Tarkovsky has created a film with the kind of interpretable imagist framework and structure that it merely reflects back at us what we want to see. Perhaps, or maybe it is just a very slow, lovingly photographed film with some lofty sci-fi ideas that are never fully realised.

Here’s a lofty idea of my own: I’ve been toying with the notion of a kind of film criticism that would take a kind of New Historicist approach, loading the meaning of the film text itself with an understanding of its method of production and subsequent reception. You can’t ignore the circumstances around a film’s creation and the way this impacts on the text itself. I’m reticent to use the word ‘holistic’ because it always sounds quite twatty but in this case it might just be right. Understanding anything to do with Stalker is to understand the circumstances under which it was created, the minds that shaped it and the way it came to define the careers of those involved, before being potentially culpable for ending their lives.

The Stalker (right) slowly wears down under the sheer weight of the mission.

So what is the story of Stalker’s creation? Adapted from sci-fi novel ‘Roadside Picnic’, the external shots to be filmed twice because the Kodak film being used was unfamiliar to the Russian processing lab (or potentially even defective) and ruined during the development process, losing the shots for good. It’s difficult to understand quite how much of a setback that would be today but in a system where money had to be lobbied from the central agency of Mosfilm, convincing them to stump up again after so much has been pissed up the wall couldn’t have been easy. There’s more on the story from editor Lyudmila Feiginova here or from sound designer Vladimir Sharun here.

I joked to the person I was watching the film with that the bleak settings, burnt out cars and abandoned industrial buildings were how I imagined sections of Russia to look anyway, it turned out that Tarkovsky shot many of the interiors in an abandoned chemical plant in Tallinn. That rank water they wade through, that wasn’t set dressing.

Monkey, the Stalker’s crippled daughter. Is she the key to understanding the greater meaning?

With all that in mind the film takes on some of the arduous nature of its creation. It is hard work to watch it. It requires patience and persistence. It forces you to think, you have to think because it doesn’t bother to fill in any gaps for you. Despite the repeated suggestion that the zone is riddled with danger there is very little in the way of visible threat, Tarkovsky uses stillness and implication throughout. These men, possibly representing aspects of human character (Writer is the creative/poetic, Professor is rational whilst the Stalker seems almost religious), undergo profound revelations on their journey but it is the Stalker himself who seems most troubled. His looks of anguish and strain seem to show the experience bearing down on him. His pained expressions belie some kind of spiritual torture, his very existence, his calling, his confliction writ large across his face.

And, well, I’ll stop there. You have to watch Stalker. Not as some kind of elitist directive, not as an exercise in ticking boxes but if you want to talk about it you have to watch it. Because that’s when the fun begins, you can tease out meanings and thoughts on the text, you can start to engage with it. But it won’t be solved. It’s not that kind of puzzle.

Circles. Lots of circles.

Solaris. It is often referred to as Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece. A sci-fi response from the communist world to the Western 2001: A Space Odyssey. In reality it functions in an altogether more subtle way. Solaris is a 160 minute film about grief and loss. The subtlety with which it plays out is such that you can easily get a little confused as to what is supposed to be happening. What the film has in abundance is ideas. Taken from Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction book of the same name the plot is about a psychiatrist, Kris, sent to a near abandoned space station where there are three scientists left analysing the planetoid called Solaris. Their studies have apparently waned in use to the point that our Kris is going to advise the government on whether or not to carry on ploughing money and time into the endeavour.

Lem’s overriding theme in sci-fi is apparently the futility that humans would face when trying to communicate with an alien intelligence. Solaris itself is a planet covered with a kind of living ocean and attempts to study this biomass and communicate with it (via the seemingly un-scientific method of smashing it with radiation) have borne unexpected results. Solaris creates facsimiles of people, ‘guests’, drawing information from the minds of the people in the space station. Your memories, powerful ones at that, come back to haunt you. Whilst on the space station Kris is treated to a facsimile of his dead wife, Hari, who had committed suicide years earlier. The facsimile can’t remember details, she craves Kris’ attention and slowly becomes aware of her own limited existence. It’s a fascinating idea, one that Philip K. Dick would parley with through his own work, how much do memories and the capacity to feel, to emote, make us people? New Hari, as it happens, isn’t much of a fan of the idea that she isn’t human.

Less human than human.

I love the ideas in this. I love the planet-wide intelligence and the notion that we’re too fixed to human ideals and procedure to communicate with it. I love anything to do with memory and the potential for proto-humans to exist with memories and feelings and I even like some of the outright weirdness of the film. The scenes when Kris first arrives on the space station are pure unexplained delirium, bordering on the creepy. Of the three scientists supposed to be on board one has committed suicide; though no-one really ever mentions how or indeed exactly why (a semi-explanation is given later in the film). The other two have ‘guests’ with them. Neither is explained and we only catch glimpses of a potentially restrained body in a hammock and what appeared to be, based on a split second of film, a very worried dwarf. Kris, politeness personified that he is, doesn’t think it seemly to ask who they are or what is going on. Nor does he bat an eyelid when the doc with a dwarf locked in his lab refers to ‘autopsies’ he has been carrying out. Nice.

Here’s the thing though. Solaris has ideas. It has weird unexplained stuff, which is good because you have to pay attention. It is beautifully shot and packed with visual cues throughout like the early hot air balloon pictures in the house – a ref to the prologue of Andrei Rublev and a nod to the idea of flying away from censorship. The production design is also never anything other than fascinating – the repetition of circles in the space station where everything is looping back on itself and inescapable reflecting the process of repetition that engulfs the scientists. But despite all this I found it pretty ponderous. A bit on the slow side. Which sounds like a philistine’s attitude to art cinema but, dammit, Rublev was longer, more medieval and lacked the giant alien planet and, crucially, it never dragged. It seems like sacrilege to criticise a film held in such high regard but, frankly, for my money it could stand to lose 20/30 minutes. Probably trimmed off the space station stuff. Still, looking through the various reviews I’ve got of Solaris in the list booksI have dotted around I found one that concurs, ‘The cinematic equivalent of queuing for bread.’ Reads the ever-cheerful Phelim O’Neill.  The best bit, he suggests is when ‘you eject the tape, rub the sleep from your eyes and go get on with your life.’ Solaris tops his selection of ten ‘Films you should own but not watch.’

Hollow faced Anatoly Solonitsyn is Andrei Rublev

In light of enjoying I’ve bought a box with all of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films in it and I’m working my way through the lot of them. I’ve never seen any of them before, which is a bit slack, but I’ve got the bit between my teeth now and I’m enjoying them

I was going to write something on each film but Tarkovsky’s first film, Ivan’s Childhood is functionally a similar story to Come and See and suffers a little in watching it so shortly after Klimev’s powerhouse. Though it is still a superb film, stark and beautifully photographed, with a dark denouement where a wire hoop holds the answer you didn’t want.

Andrei Rublev is a different beast entirely. Having wrestled with Mosfilm, the Russian film authority, on getting the film released it’s initially difficult to understand why. In fact, at first, to Western eyes dimmed by the constant parade of over edited, over stylised, gaudy and exposition heavy produce from America, it’s easy to be completely nonplussed at a film like Rublev. It’s black and white, set in the medieval 1400s and the main character is a bit of a non-entity. At three hours in length with an episodic story that has no apparent continuity it is, in the tradition of Russian literature, a forbidding experience.

It is amazing though. Despite an ominous reputation, the complexities of the presentation (what is the prologue about?) and its steadfast refusal to adhere to either Western expectations or the angry authorities of Russia itself, a quick look around the internet shows you a variety of fans who would agree. From film critics to arch-bishops. I flicked through my copy of Time Out’s 1000 Movies to see before you die. Rublev has five separate page entries from their box-outs by film luminaries. Each of them mentions their experience of watching the film. Some even despising it first time around. But something about this monolith draws your thoughts. Even now, days after I’ve finished watching it, I’m still thinking about it. Pondering on its meaning. Striving to understand. What is it about, what is it saying, what is its purpose?

I’m not sure I’ve readily got the answer to any of those questions.  Rublev is wrapped in metaphor, it requires some knowledge of the context of the production, a little knowledge of the Tatars (and even the Golden Horde) doesn’t hurt and perhaps even a brief understanding of the work of Rublev himself. I’ve had to read up on this since watching the film and it uncovers and explains the basis of the story but that’s only really on a surface level. The essence of it is that this is a film that demands ‘reading’. This is not junk food, this is a complex and layered banquet with depths of flavour that would have Heston Blumenthal salivating.

Two sequences stand out. The Tatar sacking of a city in which Rublev is working is a brutal and unforgiving siege with torture, rape and pretty shocking scenes of a horse falling down a set of stairs and a cow on fire (yes, a cow, on fire) all on the menu. This precipitates Rublev’s vow of silence and refusal to paint for several years. Until his meeting with the young Boriska (played by the ridiculously talented boy from Ivan’s Childhood), where he witnesses the boy plough every ounce of his energy into casting a massive bronze bell for a local dignitary. What is Tarkovsky saying? I think it is something to do with finding the value in work, in creation. In seeing the benefit of bringing a message to people. Some might suggest that Tarkovsky’s struggle in creating the film is a reasonable mirror of Rublev’s contemplation. Is it worth the trouble of creating? Of finding the precision and talent to craft something which can be destroyed so easily? Such is the richness of the film I’m not sure I can answer that satisfactorily.

Solaris is next. Described in the Neon book of 1000 Essential Movies on Video as ‘The cinematic equivalent of queuing for bread.’ So that’ll be a rollercoaster ride too.

Eyes that have seen far too much…

Surprises are rare these days which is why I’m moved to write about something that has taken me aback. A couple of days ago I watched Elem Klimov’s film Come and See, a story of how the Nazi incursion into the Belarus (part of the former USSR) affects the life of one young partisan. I’d contend that it’s possibly one of the greatest and most human films about war. This is cinema at its most deadly serious about slapping you in the face and forcing you to confront something you don’t want to. This is fury made celluloid and it stares you right in the face without flinching and shows you the horror of war in a very special way.

I’ve seen about four Russian films before, ever (no, The Hunt for Red October does not count). Three were classics of the montage era Battleship Potemkin (I’ve watched that bad boy three times through), Mother and Man with a Movie Camera; the other was the much more recent and high concept NightWatch. So for one of the most productive and important countries in cinema history I pretty much blanked the lot of it, watched a couple of key texts and went on my merry way. But there is something confrontational about their cinema, it will not wash over you, it demands to be read, to be engaged with.

About 6/7 years ago a friend asked if I’d heard of Come and See. “It’s Russian, ‘bout the war and brutal as fuck.” I nodded sagely and probably made a pithy comment about the nature of life in the Urals.

Then nothing, never got hold of a copy and never really tried to. Until Mark Cousin’s beautiful and brilliant TV series The Story of Film: An Odyssey debuted and during the course of it he shows a couple of clips from the film, mentioning its strength and power. The clips look terrifying and amazing. I think I might have to seek out this film. But I wait until the New Year, until I’m inspired by talk of ‘filling in’ the blanks of movie history (primarily from Nathan Ditum). We tentatively talk about Bergman, Tarkovsky and Herzog and I decide it’s time to take on Come and See. Will it dethrone Threads as the most emotionally draining thing I’ve ever seen? Well, yes.

Come and See is cinema balled up into a fist and punching you square in the gut, why? Because it doesn’t bother with conventions of framing, sound and plot. How can you reflect such pain and misery whilst staying in the parameters of comfort? Characters address the camera, and whilst they do they address you. They stare at you, in your life of comfort, and they question you. The sound is a cacophony of pain, from the point that our main character, Florya, is semi-deafened by a bombing raid Mozart weaves in and out of a threatening hum of white noise disturbed by distant cries of pain or rasped and desperate breathing. And then there is a scene where you can hear the flies. You won’t forget that in a hurry. Finally the plot – it isn’t a plot. It’s a descent. There are no ups and downs. There’s just downs. This isn’t so much ‘war is hell’ as ‘war is the beast which fucks everything in its path, you, your family, your life, your land and your mind.’

If tabloid hyperbole refers to a film being a ‘treat for all the senses’, or somesuch guff, they probably just mean that it has one or two explosions and probably a fight on a tall/fast moving thing. Come and See is a film which batters the senses. You may well not smell anything but you can feel the textures of this world as they are filmed. It is earth, cloying damp and pale flesh ground together without concern or compassion. It is a human experience of inhumanity.

Klimov claims that his film is tame, timid by the measure of what really happened in the purported 628 villages that were genocidally razed by the Wehrmacht. There are stories of German soldiers from the Belarus campaign testifying to the film’s authenticity. It is amazing and it is vital stuff. It’d be trite to make a hack journalistic comparison along the lines of ‘it makes Schindler’s List look like Carry on Camping,’ but there is a sense in which a film like this highlights the conformity of other war films. The ‘safeness’ of other epics that show misery in a somehow more detached manner.

This is a brilliant expressionist nightmare, its images are as beautifully composed as they are disturbing (the Nazi troops emerging from the fog is an especially striking moment). Watch it, drink it in and understand that we are lucky no war is ever likely to be fought on our land.

Noisy colours

In December 1957 Charles Starkweather killed a man, Robert Colvert. By the end of January 1958 he, and his girlfriend Caril Fugate had killed 11 people (and a couple of dogs). Their violent spree-killing road trip has left a quite unexpected legacy, one that sprung to mind whilst I sat watching Bobcat Goldthwaite’s latest film ‘god bless america’ (all in lower case because that’s how it is in the film and, well, I’m pretty sure it’s like that on purpose).

Goldthwaite (probably best known in this country for his turn as ‘Z’ in the Police Academy films) doesn’t pull any punches in his film. From the moment a baby is blown away with a shotgun inside the first two minutes the nihilism on display is unremitting. This isn’t a film where there is a light at the end of the tunnel, redemption or a new found appreciation for life – it’s cynical and pissed off and it doesn’t want to vote on another vacant TV ‘talent’ show parade of underachievers. In short, I recommend it. This is a work that has the courage of its convictions and they are rare beasts indeed. Check out the excellent trailer below…

Three films immediately leapt to mind as forbears of the Goldthwaite’s dark satire, Badlands, Natural Born Killers and True Romance. All of them are influenced by the Starkweather case where a sometimes violent and dangerous man takes a girl on a road trip where death is always nearby (True Romance doesn’t fit the bill quite as neatly, Clarence isn’t a cold blooded killer but he’ll take someone out if they cross him).

I first heard of the Starkweather case when it was mentioned prominently in Peter Jackson’s oft-forgot Ghost hunting film The Frighteners. ‘Got me a score of 12, that’s one more than Starkweather!’ Spits Jake Busey’s deranged spree-killer Johnny Charles Bartlett. So why is the Starkweather case such a evocative one, why do the movies return to the case to plough out fresh pairs of psychopathic killers?

Elvis shades and horse cardigans

The obvious reasons are that you have a romantic couple, with the added advantage (in Hollywood terms) of the man being an older, more established leading role and the girl being all young and pretty. Taking that a step further though the man has to embody all of the things a romantic hero has in any film but he can meld that matinee idol, Clark Gable, protector of his woman performance with that of a scene chewing psycho killer and a rebel without a cause anti-hero cool. It’s no surprise Martin Sheen and Christian Slater had more than a hint of James Dean about them in their films too. In a case of the art/life lines blurring to an event horizon, Starkweather himself had cultivated a widely reported James Dean obsession, styling his appearance on the ill-fated movie star.

For your female lead you need the heady mix of naivety, innocence and sexuality that sets producer’s mouths to froth. But, tellingly, your woman (girl?) has to be convincingly unhinged when the moment demands it. Juliette Lewis’ Mallory Knox outdoes the rest in this respect, getting closer to the spirit of Caril Fugate (who allegedly mutilated the genitalia of least one of the bodies of their victims).

Then you take this potent brew of romance, sex and brutal, remorseless murder and pour it out over a long stretch of land. The spree killers are not static beings, they’re on a road trip through the vacant landscapes of America picking off travellers as they go. These are road movies with cool cars, a stretch of blacktop and a landscape of danger and possibility.

Where Badlands was Terrence Malick’s poem of doomed teenage love and achingly beautiful photography, Tony Scott’s Tarantino scripted True Romance was a post-modern rock’n’roll blast with an astonishing cast and a softer, more hopeful side to our lovestruck couple. Oliver Stone’s Tarantino scripted Natural Born Killers is the black sheep of the flock – purposefully cross cutting from one sickening hued shot to another. Goldthwaite’s film picks pieces out of the legend to create something else, something suited to us now as an audience.

Starkweather won’t have known it at the time but he crafted a perfect template for a dark mid-West fable where a love is so twisted it doesn’t carve its name into trees but into bodies and doesn’t write in ink but in in blood, right across the heart of America.

In the wake of our first glimpse of Zack Snyder’s Superman and following criticism of the big guy himself from certain quarters (yes, I’m looking at you) I thought I’d write a little paean to the fella with the bright red pants on the outside of his tights, starting with some musings on what a Superman film might need to take from the rich history of the big guy to succeed and why.

It’s easy to dismiss Superman, and there are plenty of Superman stories and some incarnations that deserve dismissing, being a mix of un-ambitious boy-scout adventures or even showcasing the ridiculous Superman who can blow out a star (a ‘pre-crisis’ Superman from #91). But there is something in the story of Superman, something in the concept of the alien who strives to be the best human he can, that appeals and continues to be relevant.

Most complaints about Superman are about the limitations of the stories displayed in his various film incarnations, the kryptonite factor. It’s difficult to be bothered about a character who is nominally invincible and the only plausible storyline demonstrated for him is that he is ‘de-powered’ by a glowing chunk of rock from space. It’s true, the films haven’t treated us to a range of brilliantly varied storylines and they’ve overplayed the kryptonite angle. It was only really the first motion picture that made Supes make some awkward decisions; certainly none of them have embraced the more cosmic spectrum of Supes’ stories with the exception of Zod and his crew turning up on earth in Superman II. So if Superman is cinematically limited in what we’ve seen so far, what sort of stories might work particularly well? There’s a few things that need doing.

Firstly, Supes needs someone to hit sooner or later. He didn’t back in his first film, just the sight of Christopher Reeve being cool and decent whilst impervious to bullets and rescuing people was enough to be going on but by Superman II he had Zod and co to smash up. Modern blockbuster audiences aren’t amazed by someone flying anymore – to be honest they’re probably a bit blasé about people flying and fighting and destroying cities because it happens with some regularity. But we’ll ignore that for now, he’s got to have somebody to hit because people whinged about it after Bryan Singer’s bloodless Superman Returns. So why doesn’t Superman hit people very often? Well, why I don’t I let him explain it…

Any film will have to manufacture a situation where he can lay down some pain on someone and there are a bunch of available options; Superman’s canon of enemies isn’t quite as well known as Batman’s but with a ridiculous volume of stories behind him from years of publishing there are a fair few blokes to be having at who can take a wallop from Supes.

But enough of the punching, that isn’t the reason to really enjoy Superman stories, they aren’t really about fights, even if your blockbuster movie demands that they should be. The core appeal of Superman is that his stories are about fitting in, about coping with power and the desire to be normal when you are different. ‘Pah,’ you say, ‘who is interested in this self-pity nonsense.’ Well, everyone really. Everyone has experienced the sensation that they are different or isolated – Superman is just an avatar of this feeling. This is perhaps why Reeve was so successful in the role, he pulled of the awkward comedy of the bumbling Clark Kent as well as the clear confidence of the big guy. How often can you feel like the true you is masked beneath a fumbling, nervous exterior? Nail that aspect of the character, get him someone to hit and you’re on to a winner.

I’m going to write something about the best Superman storylines and how they give him impossible and difficult choices on another day, but for now I just want to say why I love the stories about the big guy. Superman is everything you could want to be, he’s decent and hardworking. He’s smart and tough without any of the attendant arrogance. He lost his mother and father and will never really know anyone like himself (pipe down Supergirl) – he’s the last of his race. Superman, the alien from another planet, embodies everything that a human could want to be. That’s summed up in Marlon Brando’s speech as Jor-El (used in the brilliant Superman Returns teaser trailer) raising the hairs on my neck and reminding me of why I love the big guy. “They can be a great people Kal-El, they wish to be…”

It became swiftly obvious during the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games that the creative director of the showpiece, Danny Boyle understands the importance of cinema, the movies, to a nation hoping to finally craft a positive identity in the modern age.

In years gone by I was taught about Australian cinema by a remarkable lady, Cath Ellis, whose key text in beginning to understand Australia as a concept and as a nation was the opening ceremony from the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. I remember discussing the importance of self-image and identity as presented by one of these events, events that are seen and consumed by the world at large. The ceremony aims to present a potted history of the country via images, music and loads of people dancing.

The net was abuzz about the success of Friday’s ceremony but one thing that struck me was Boyle’s use of the moving image, the way he collated and coalesced the beauty of our national cinema into a series of triumphant moments giving a taste of our ability to capture our myriad society, to look inward and frown, laugh and cry at our own idiosyncrasies.

National pride isn’t something I feel on a regular basis, in recent times that has nearly dissipated further. I get behind the cricket team (perhaps a little too much) and I feel that as a nation of artists, writers and musicians we are leaders in many ways but otherwise a history of slave profiteering and undemocratic privilege is a tough sell to someone of my sensibilities. How amazing it is then, that I nearly punched the air when that parachute opened and the John Barry musical sting kicked in. Inspired, of course, by the incredible ski jump from The Spy Who Loved Me. That image, that music, the whole thing is scoured deep into my brain – James Bond is cool, he wins, he gets the girl and he kicks all kinds of arse (NOT ass) whilst he’s doing it and he’s ours. He’s the cipher of British cool and superiority and it’s very difficult for any Brit to not want to be him.

The family home section of the ceremony (one that raised the ire of several right wing morons) featured so many amazing selections of film that it was a dizzying homage to British life as represented on screen. Clips from Gregory’s Girl, Kes, Four Weddings and a snippet of that incomparable conversation at the start of A Matter of Life and Death. Each one showcasing some aspect of our nation’s life in a way that makes it seem hopeful and exciting. We might never achieve the beauty of Peter’s stiff upper lip attitude to death or Billy Casper’s temporary escape from his dark satanic mill – but we can aspire. We see reflections of ourselves and our best characteristics as a nation and as individuals. Watch Peter talking to June again and you realise how perfectly David Niven embodies everything good about the classical English gentleman. How could you not want to be that effortlessly cool?

Danny Boyle isn’t so singularly jingoistic to limit the scope of his use of cinema to that produced on our own isles of wonder. Britishness, like any set of national characteristics, bleeds across the increasingly globalised world. British talent is internationally known, talent like David Bowie, Mike Oldfield*and Charlie Chaplin. They might appear in American productions but their identity contains something fundamentally British and they deserved celebrating alongside our other treasures.

What a success like this proves to me, above anything else, is that cinema is a vibrant and essential part of our identity, as these images swirl and thrum around us they become part of our consciousness. It’s about this point that I could start talking about postmodernity and simulacra with some nods in the way of post-colonial identity. Whilst that might be helpful I’d rather keep this simple. Film is art, art that reflects us in all our good and all of our bad, art with power and art we can be proud of. In amongst the superb party Danny Boyle threw on Friday night he created a tapestry of texts that we can be proud of and, as odd a sensation as it is, I am.

*Playing Tubular Bells over images of kids on beds gave me a distinct Exorcist vibe.

I spotted references and clips from this lot, did I miss any really obvious ones? The Italian Job, the Exorcist, Harry Potter, Oliver, Chaplin, A Matter of Life and Death, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Wayne’s World, Billy Elliott, The Full Monty, Trainspotting, Rules of Attraction, Shrek, Lady and the Tramp, Planet of the Apes, Wall-E, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet and obviously Chariots of Fire.

It’s as brilliant as it was back when I was first falling in love with the movies. The script is razor sharp, the performances are elegant and genuine and the action/drama all hit the spot. It also features a fight that I would still rate as one of the best in any movie, the scruffy martial arts scramble between Cusack’s Martin Blank and the faintly satanic-eyed hitman, Felix La Poubelle (played by martial arts supremo ‘Benny the Jet‘). It’s not hard to explain the good things about Grosse Point Blank but it is, to me, far more than the sum of all these parts. It’s one of a clutch of films made in the indie movement of the 90s that really cemented my interest in the movies.

The film weaves a clichéd storyline, about a hitman on a job finding a new respect for life, into a meditation on a mid-life crisis all with a whirl of 80s nostalgia summed up by the excellent soundtrack. But more than that, it hit a fair few notes with me. I knew when I was watching it that it’d be time for me to leave the area I grew up in, I knew that I had a chance to reinvent myself and I knew that I’d like to be as cool as Martin Blank. Two of the three actually happened. It’s easy to associate a song with a specific time or mood, when something captures the sense of an important point in your life but people rarely seem to associate this to cinema. I do, and Grosse Point Blank is a film that merits this periodical revisiting because its meaning to me subtly shifts but remains relevant as I grow older.

Initially the character who can disappear and mysteriously return with a new, arse kicking sensibility appealed. Now I look at the idea of returning and I find myself associating with the returning and revising aspect of Martin Blank, his determination to repair and atone. The parallels aren’t as clear but I now sympathise with the idea of putting things right and achieving that horrible, terribly tactile, new age, wishy-washy bullshit word – closure.

The other thing that occurred to me whilst watching was the depth and detail of the characters back stories. Each one has allusions made in snatches of brilliantly fast snapped dialogue. Particularly Blank’s accidental killing of a dog and the strained relationship with his parents. The repetition of the phrase ‘It’s not me.’ serves to cleverly link Blank’s abrogation of his responsibilities and personality with his growing sense of moral turpitude at his job. Or, simply put, he isn’t a real person with a real life because he’s in denial and he needs to reconnect with the last time he had a life because taking life is no life at all. Quite neatly summed up in those three words.

Really, all this post is about is why I love the film. The warm feeling of nostalgia I get from watching it and the sense that smart indie movies with mainstream sensibilities and great casts aren’t being made anymore. It makes me yearn for a time that no longer exists in movies, a time when everything felt fresh and new and potentially brilliant and it would last just as long as we wanted it to because it was so good. And didn’t we have it so damn good? A time where the VHS rentals I made on a Friday after school/college would help determine the mood of the weekend. A time when Steve Buscemi was the fucking king of anything and everything, because he was in almost anything and nearly everything. A time when Quentin Tarantino was prolific.

For big business financial reasons, and host of smaller reasons, that time doesn’t exist anymore and it likely can’t. Fellow film blogger Nathan Ditum could probably point out a few more specific reasons as to why, but regardless the more I think about it the less interested I am in modern cinema – which is a crying shame, because I quite like films.

Anyway, as I was saying, things I love about Grosse Point Blank. I love the musical cues, Minnie Driver’s insanely smart and real portrayal of  Debbie, Dan Ackroyd, Jeremy Piven and Hank Azaria being sensational comedy character actors, the use of the frying pan with the ‘I love you’ line, the school bully, the brilliant opening assassination, Alan Arkin, Doom 2 Arcade, G’n'R Live & Let Die smoothly transitioning into muzak, the omelette argument, John Woo influenced gunfights, the cutest baby in the history of cinema…

So what about aims for the summer, I had a simple aim last time around – I wanted to get paid writing work and spend a week working on a magazine. This time I’ve got to diversify, I’ve got several aims in mind.

1. Get a book available on Kindle (well, write it first).
2. Get a long form journalistic article available on Kindle Single (got one in mind).
3. Watch and review every unwatched DVD in the house. This little lot should keep me occupied…

4. Sort this blog into a comprehensive resource for all my stuff as well as a much nicer looking thing.

Shouldn’t be too hard, right? Just a lot of writing to do. I’ve got school work on in amongst all that but there’s just enough to keep me busy. I’ll be updating this fairly regularly, with work and stuff.

T’was re-named The Conqueror Worm in America.

Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968)

Brutal, sadistic, bloody and very very cheap, Witchfinder General was the fourth and final film made by the young and exciting Michael Reeves. The film concerns a fictional account of the activities of Matthew Hopkins, authorised in the film by Cromwell to smoke out any witches that may be operating in the country. Along with his brutal aide, John Stearne, he travels from village to village accusing people of witchcraft before having his assistant ‘extract’ a confession. It’s an interestingly cruel presentation of violence and misogyny and Vincent Price as Hopkins is inspired casting. As his lip curls and that tell-tale voice slithers out proclaiming that he is ‘Here to do God’s work my child’ there’s nothing camp here. Instead we get only the sinister look into the sadistic and perverted eyes of man with a mandate for cruelty.

Jaunty angle – grim face.

What makes this film folk horror then? Well, unlike many of the other films I’ll be looking at, this one is a steadfastly anti-supernatural. Really it doesn’t actually present any of the pagan activity that other films tend to revolve around. Hopkins is persecuting supposed witches but the film merely presents the victims as falsely accused people at the hands of a maniacal killer. The setting and locations chime with the likes of Blood on Satan’s Claw and there’s some lovely puritan outfits on display but let’s get to the details.

Signifiers:

Here’s my scientifically lacking pursuit of cataloguing the things which make something folk horror.

• Witchfinder General is a grubby little film, full of grime and dirt and a particularly nasty bit of rape in a field. There’s also plenty of greenery and vegetation dotted around but it looks curiously pale, like Reeves drained the colour out of the film stock. Or, more likely, it was cheap film.
• Bizarrely the religious friction in Witchfinder is its weakest link to folk horror. It isn’t playing the church against the malign influences of an older and more pagan religion. Instead Cromwell’s puritan warrior is actively pursuing an anti-papist agenda, hence the reason the priest gets it pretty early on. The false pretence of paganism is invoked but that’s all.
• Burning isn’t going to be missed in a film about witches. There’s even a cracking scene where some peasants have cooked their potatoes in the embers of a burnt ‘witch’. Brutal stuff.
• The only procession in the film occurs when the suspected witches are being led to the bridge for the drowning test, you know the one – where it’s remarkably difficult to live given the criteria.
• Flowing white robes/dresses Well the priest wears them, obviously, but there’s also a disrobing scene where Hopkins has his way with the priest’s niece.
• The Catholic church is reduced to ruins in the wake of the priest’s death.
• There’s some form of torture cropping up in the film quite a lot. Extracting them ‘confessions’ you see.
• Whilst it isn’t quite as pronounced as it is in the other films there are plenty of isolated communities at play here. Especially the town where the priest is tortured and killed.