It will be mine...
Sunday, 14 September 2008
Saturday, 13 September 2008
Midnight Blue
Three female athletes, Rita, Elena and Francesca, decide to spend the weekend at the luxurious beach-front house belonging to Francesca's mother. Their break from training is soon interrupted by three men, Bruno, Mario and Pierluigi. While certainly prone to the usual macho antics the men seem normal enough – sufficiently such, at least, for the men to be invited to stay at the beach house overnight, with all the attendant fumblings, and for the women to think nothing of Pierluigi's making a telephone to an unspecified associate.
Forgotten auteur #507?
The next morning things take a dramatic turn as, visiting town for provisions with Pierluigi in tow, Francesca notices the newspaper headline: three dangerous convicts, including a rapist and a murderer, have escaped from jail.
Gratuitous nudity
Natural lighting
All too obvious attempts at style
No prizes for guessing whom...
And no prizes, despite the misleading porno-sounding title, for identifying the chief inspiration behind this obscure 1979 thriller from the equally obscure Raimondo Del Balzo.
Yes, it is indeed yet another film sullo stesso filone Last House on the Left, following the well-trodden path of Late Night Trains, Terror Express, La Settima Donna and company; although the men's wait for their underworld contact also raises the intriguing possibility of a Cul de Sac / Waiting for Godot absurdist scenario, this predictably doesn't really materialise.
The most obvious departure from the usual formula is thus that the three women have the potential to offer more formidable opponents on account of their athletic training. Unfortunately the three actresses – none particularly famous or notable, with the most recognisable face being that of Dirce Funari in a supporting role as their coach, Silvia – fail to convince as athletes. As cheerleaders giving a us a “T” and an “A” yes, but as Olympic hopefuls no.
Then again, the three men are not the most convincingly desperate degenerates you'll have seen. Though at a pinch this could be part of Del Balzo's strategy, represent typical / respectable seeming bourgeois types as rapists and killers by way of making a feminist political point, I think it's probably more likely to be a reflection of the limited pool of talent he was working with and unsatisfactory writing.
In the latter regard one thing that stands out is why three escaped convicts would take time out to go for a swim and have one of their number go into town without bothering to disguise himself when he knows his face is likely to be plastered all across the front of the papers. Another, though this could be a reflection of the English dubbing voices, is that the film feels curiously devoid of place, being neither obviously an Italian product nor one that goes to any particular lengths to pass itself off as American and, as such, less able to make any kind of statement on “leaden years” Italy or post-Watergate / Vietnam War America.
While the exploitable content is enhanced by deeply cynical ending somewhat reminiscent of Di Leo's borderline filone entry To Be Twenty – an impressive film which does successfully relate to its specific time and place – in approach if not wider dramatic impact and significance, Del Balzo is less successful when he tries to inject a degree of style into the proceedings.
Frustrating the implied viewer's desires or just bad filmmaking?
Too often his use of handheld equates to shots that are inadequately lit or which don't quite manage to follow the action. Though these could again be taken as anti-exploitation elements in the manner of some of Jess Franco's works, in that you want a sex scene, I'll give you one but deliberately frustrate your expectations / desires way, it seems more likely to be a case of trying to cover up shortcomings elsewhere with a surfeit of style that only serves to make the film's deficiencies all the more evident.
An early shot of a building is also characteristic here, as in addition to using a crane shot in that 'because I could' manner Del Balzo also breaks out the distorting lens for no obvious reason.
In sum, a curio that can best be recommended to those who have seen its predecessors and feel the need to complete their viewing set.
[The film is available in English dubbed Greek subtitled VHS rip from Cinemageddon]
Forgotten auteur #507?
The next morning things take a dramatic turn as, visiting town for provisions with Pierluigi in tow, Francesca notices the newspaper headline: three dangerous convicts, including a rapist and a murderer, have escaped from jail.
Gratuitous nudity
Natural lighting
All too obvious attempts at style
No prizes for guessing whom...
And no prizes, despite the misleading porno-sounding title, for identifying the chief inspiration behind this obscure 1979 thriller from the equally obscure Raimondo Del Balzo.
Yes, it is indeed yet another film sullo stesso filone Last House on the Left, following the well-trodden path of Late Night Trains, Terror Express, La Settima Donna and company; although the men's wait for their underworld contact also raises the intriguing possibility of a Cul de Sac / Waiting for Godot absurdist scenario, this predictably doesn't really materialise.
The most obvious departure from the usual formula is thus that the three women have the potential to offer more formidable opponents on account of their athletic training. Unfortunately the three actresses – none particularly famous or notable, with the most recognisable face being that of Dirce Funari in a supporting role as their coach, Silvia – fail to convince as athletes. As cheerleaders giving a us a “T” and an “A” yes, but as Olympic hopefuls no.
Then again, the three men are not the most convincingly desperate degenerates you'll have seen. Though at a pinch this could be part of Del Balzo's strategy, represent typical / respectable seeming bourgeois types as rapists and killers by way of making a feminist political point, I think it's probably more likely to be a reflection of the limited pool of talent he was working with and unsatisfactory writing.
In the latter regard one thing that stands out is why three escaped convicts would take time out to go for a swim and have one of their number go into town without bothering to disguise himself when he knows his face is likely to be plastered all across the front of the papers. Another, though this could be a reflection of the English dubbing voices, is that the film feels curiously devoid of place, being neither obviously an Italian product nor one that goes to any particular lengths to pass itself off as American and, as such, less able to make any kind of statement on “leaden years” Italy or post-Watergate / Vietnam War America.
While the exploitable content is enhanced by deeply cynical ending somewhat reminiscent of Di Leo's borderline filone entry To Be Twenty – an impressive film which does successfully relate to its specific time and place – in approach if not wider dramatic impact and significance, Del Balzo is less successful when he tries to inject a degree of style into the proceedings.
Frustrating the implied viewer's desires or just bad filmmaking?
Too often his use of handheld equates to shots that are inadequately lit or which don't quite manage to follow the action. Though these could again be taken as anti-exploitation elements in the manner of some of Jess Franco's works, in that you want a sex scene, I'll give you one but deliberately frustrate your expectations / desires way, it seems more likely to be a case of trying to cover up shortcomings elsewhere with a surfeit of style that only serves to make the film's deficiencies all the more evident.
An early shot of a building is also characteristic here, as in addition to using a crane shot in that 'because I could' manner Del Balzo also breaks out the distorting lens for no obvious reason.
In sum, a curio that can best be recommended to those who have seen its predecessors and feel the need to complete their viewing set.
[The film is available in English dubbed Greek subtitled VHS rip from Cinemageddon]
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
I Gabbiani volano basso / Seagulls Fly Low
In this obscure 1978 thriller Maurizio Merli is cast somewhat against type as a professional killer. I say somewhat because, as we soon learn, he's not really a bad guy and more a victim of circumstance: a Vietnam veteran who grew tired of the war and deserted, he found himself in Italy where he was forced into working for businessman-cum-criminal Micheli, played by Mel Ferrer.
The film begins with what is supposed to be Merli's last job, the assassination of Martini, a former business partner of Micheli and his colleague Calvi; though some of the organisation's own men, like the one played by Franco Garofalo, could easily have performed the hit just as well, Micheli correctly felt it safer to employ an outsider.
Merli's problems only really start as he boards the plane for New York, equipped with a one-way ticket and a forget passport. One of the other passengers suffers a heart attack and everyone has to disembark and wait in the departure lounge. In an uncharacteristic loss of composure, Merli comes to believe that his fake passport has been detected by the airport security, and thus flees from the airport and back to Micheli.
Maurizio Merli as Jeff Blynn?
Maurizio Merli sans moustache
We might however wonder if he doesn't make too much a show of his panic, running through the airport, stealing a car and then driving off at high speed; perhaps airport security was just that bit more relaxed 30 years ago.
While Micheli deals with the situation with customary calmness, helping Merli to change his appearance and arranging for another passport to be made – I keep using the actor's name because his character tellingly doesn't really have one, being referred to as “the mechanic” and “the freak” initially and then using the alias “Albert Morgan” – Calvi starts to worry about his own exposure and thus orders Garofalo to take care of Micheli, setting up Merli to take the fall...
Some dubious red tinted Vietnam flashbacks
Competently if unexceptionally directed, as the kind of film where the stylish moments tend to come across as such, rather than being seamlessly integrated into the whole, and featuring a good cast, also including Dagmar Lassander as a nightclub proprietor and Nathalie Delon as the lost soul who takes sympathy on Merli (“you mustn't give up now; it's not as if you've killed somebody” ironically foregrounding exactly what he cannot tell her) to add glamour and romance, it's something of a mystery why Seagulls Fly Low isn't better known.
Featuring a passable quotient of action, plenty of suspense and a suitably dark and cynical 70s worldview – though film noir and French poetic realism certainly establish a longer heritage here – the film gives Merli far more to do as an actor than was usually the case, his role being marked by a world-weary reluctance to use a gun or his fists alien to his Iron Inspector characters and, after he meets Delon, the tentative possibility of his life taking another course.
Perhaps part of the problem was that Merli's fans were happy to see him play an essentially tragic, doomed character, but wanted to see him go down fighting rather more if he was not to ultimately be triumphant. To make a neo-noir comparison, trying imagining a Point Blank where Lee Marvin's character didn't go on a quixotic quest for his money.
Another possibility is that in initially looking a bit like Jeff Blynn, with longer and bushier hair than usual, and then losing the iconic moustache, he simply wasn't immediately recognisable as Merli. To make a noir comparison, we might think of Orson Welles's deconstruction of Rita Hayworth's image in The Lady from Shanghai.
The familiar image of a plane departing
Or maybe it's just the title: while its meaning is explained in the course of the film, it doesn't exactly tell you what to expect. In the world of the filone cinema this mattered, as director Giorgio Cristalli clearly knew from previous credits such as You're Jinxed, Friend, You've Met Sacramento and Four Gunmen of the Holy Trinity.
To summarise, a film that's worth the Merli fan's attention but which probably won't appeal to the more casual poliziotto viewer who only wants to see car chases, shootouts and fist-fights.
[The film is available on VHS rip from Cinemageddon]
The film begins with what is supposed to be Merli's last job, the assassination of Martini, a former business partner of Micheli and his colleague Calvi; though some of the organisation's own men, like the one played by Franco Garofalo, could easily have performed the hit just as well, Micheli correctly felt it safer to employ an outsider.
Merli's problems only really start as he boards the plane for New York, equipped with a one-way ticket and a forget passport. One of the other passengers suffers a heart attack and everyone has to disembark and wait in the departure lounge. In an uncharacteristic loss of composure, Merli comes to believe that his fake passport has been detected by the airport security, and thus flees from the airport and back to Micheli.
Maurizio Merli as Jeff Blynn?
Maurizio Merli sans moustache
We might however wonder if he doesn't make too much a show of his panic, running through the airport, stealing a car and then driving off at high speed; perhaps airport security was just that bit more relaxed 30 years ago.
While Micheli deals with the situation with customary calmness, helping Merli to change his appearance and arranging for another passport to be made – I keep using the actor's name because his character tellingly doesn't really have one, being referred to as “the mechanic” and “the freak” initially and then using the alias “Albert Morgan” – Calvi starts to worry about his own exposure and thus orders Garofalo to take care of Micheli, setting up Merli to take the fall...
Some dubious red tinted Vietnam flashbacks
Competently if unexceptionally directed, as the kind of film where the stylish moments tend to come across as such, rather than being seamlessly integrated into the whole, and featuring a good cast, also including Dagmar Lassander as a nightclub proprietor and Nathalie Delon as the lost soul who takes sympathy on Merli (“you mustn't give up now; it's not as if you've killed somebody” ironically foregrounding exactly what he cannot tell her) to add glamour and romance, it's something of a mystery why Seagulls Fly Low isn't better known.
Featuring a passable quotient of action, plenty of suspense and a suitably dark and cynical 70s worldview – though film noir and French poetic realism certainly establish a longer heritage here – the film gives Merli far more to do as an actor than was usually the case, his role being marked by a world-weary reluctance to use a gun or his fists alien to his Iron Inspector characters and, after he meets Delon, the tentative possibility of his life taking another course.
Perhaps part of the problem was that Merli's fans were happy to see him play an essentially tragic, doomed character, but wanted to see him go down fighting rather more if he was not to ultimately be triumphant. To make a neo-noir comparison, trying imagining a Point Blank where Lee Marvin's character didn't go on a quixotic quest for his money.
Another possibility is that in initially looking a bit like Jeff Blynn, with longer and bushier hair than usual, and then losing the iconic moustache, he simply wasn't immediately recognisable as Merli. To make a noir comparison, we might think of Orson Welles's deconstruction of Rita Hayworth's image in The Lady from Shanghai.
The familiar image of a plane departing
Or maybe it's just the title: while its meaning is explained in the course of the film, it doesn't exactly tell you what to expect. In the world of the filone cinema this mattered, as director Giorgio Cristalli clearly knew from previous credits such as You're Jinxed, Friend, You've Met Sacramento and Four Gunmen of the Holy Trinity.
To summarise, a film that's worth the Merli fan's attention but which probably won't appeal to the more casual poliziotto viewer who only wants to see car chases, shootouts and fist-fights.
[The film is available on VHS rip from Cinemageddon]
Saturday, 6 September 2008
Extrasensorial / Blood Link / The Link / Blutspur
You never know quite what you're going to get with an Alberto De Martino film. Responsible for some of the worst examples of filone cinema, such as Puma Man and Miami Golem, he's also made directed some seriously underrated films like 7 Hyden Park, A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta and this 1982 horror-thriller.
Indeed, had Blood Link / Extrasensorial been directed by someone better known like Brian De Palma or David Cronenberg – as two contemporary reference points, for reasons that will become clear – I have little doubt that the film would be acknowledged as a classic of its type.
Dealing with the romantic theme of the doppelganger in a contemporary guise that incorporates extra sensory powers – hence the alternative title – the film opens with a waltz scene that turns into a murder scene to recall the opening moments of Shadow of a Doubt.
Given that Hitchcock's film was also intimately concerned with doubles we may assume this to be a deliberate quotation on De Martino's part, especially given that the killer, like his counterpart in Hitchcock film targets lost soul type older women.
Beyond this the film riffs on a number of more general Hitchcockian themes, such as the transference of guilt and the double pursuit narrative whereby the “wrong man” must catch the guilty one to prove his own innocence to the typically unimaginative and ineffectual authorities.
Just a dream?
Martino also subtly misdirects us in this opening sequence as, breaking it down logically, the killer would have to have murdered his victim in plain sight of all least some of the others in the ballroom.
As the narrative continues, Dr Craig Mannings wakes up from his seeming nightmare – “I guess it was just a nightmare” – to the sound of the telephone ringing. It is his colleague and girlfriend Dr Julie Warren, reminding him that they have an important meeting at the university where they have to demonstrate that their research warrants further funding.
The meeting does not go well. Mannings insults the board and refusing to tell them what they want to know, with its head in any case being somewhat biased against their research, which involves the use of acupuncture and electric shocks with Mannings himself as the chief test subject, as unscientific.
Waking dreams?
Worse for Mannings, however, are the visions that trouble him on his way to campus, in which he sees himself picking up and murdering another woman, along with various curious details like writing on a boat in German – a language he has little or no knowledge of.
Mannings starts to believe that his experiments have unleashed something within him connected to his past – a past which, even by the standards of the Italian giallo is unusually traumatic.
For starters he and his brother Keith were born conjoined. Then their parents died in an accident when they were seven years old, leaving them to be brought up by different foster parents. Then Keith himself apparently died in another accident when he was 17. “I've been searching for the answers since I was seven years old,” as Craig remarks.
Stalk and slasher imagery with a twist
Or, rather, didn't: Keith is alive and killing in Hamburg, Germany – thus explaining the boat – and, sharing a psychic connection with his brother, also knows that Craig is well on his way to realising this and endevouring to stop him...
With its wintry locations, psychosomatic weird science and conjoined twin motif Extrasensorial recalls elements of De Palma's Sisters and Cronenberg's The Brood and Scanners. Crucially, however, De Martino uses these building blocks to create something that is recognisably his own, as further testified to by the way in which Dead Ringers and Raising Cain seem to almost return the compliment at times by then further developing some of Extrasensorial's themes and ideas.
The old through a fish tank shot
And there are certainly a lot going on around such seemingly uncharacteristic Italian horror topics as memory and identity and – perhaps more familiar, if because commonly used as an analytic tool here – the workings of the unconscious. It's not difficult to interpret Craig and Keith as representing ego and id respectively or Keith as the repressed side of Craig who gives free rein to anti-social and murderous impulses his brother denies, or to see them as introvert and extravert incarnations of the same person.
Here we might also note Craig's more assertive / aggressive response to the review board and his remark to its head: “I trust you have no difficulty finding the right patients?” “No, actually I have a great deal of difficulty. In fact we're looking right now for a really tight-assed subject to see how we can loosen him up. Would you volunteer Dr Adams?”
The thing is that it's almost too easy to invoke the ideas of Freud, Jung and company here. A more cinema-specific alternative is to read the opening scene as establishing a kind of Deluzean “crystalline image” with a temporary circuit of the real and the virtual chasing one another; significantly Deleuze entitles a key chapter of his Cinema 2: The Time-Image “From recollection to dreams”. With that “irrational cut” from the ballroom to the antechamber we can't definitively say whether we're seeing a representation of Keith's actions, Craig's visions of them, or something in-between. (“I meet my siamese twin after all these years and he calls me a murderer!” “I saw you!”)
If generic requirements mean that De Martino ultimately has to provide a clearer resolution than the more thoroughgoing Deleuzean critic might like, as epitomised by the way in which the final shock is more a detachable fragment in the manner of Carrie than a challenge to narrative closure, the director nevertheless does repeatedly confuse things and states by continually using mirrors within his compositions along with some adroitly executed match cuts that take us from one brother and location to the other. (Unfortunately, as is so often the case with this kind of film, the unsatisfactory pan and scan presentation has a tendency to make a something of a mockery of the filmmakers work, undoubtedly further contributing to their ghettoisation.)
The curse of panning and scanning strikes again
The other cornerstones of the film are Michael Moriarty's performances as the brothers, who start out with their own particular mannerisms – Craig plays with his hair when he is nervous, for instance – but quickly pick up on each others quirks, albeit with an apparent difference insofar as Keith consciously imitates Craig whereas Craig seems unawares that he is picking things up from Keith.
Keith
Craig
Keith and Craig
Cameron Mitchell plays an over the hill ex-boxer turned wrestler who has relocated from the US to Germany with his daughter, an old acquaintance of Craig's who has the misfortune to come across Keith first. His performance is also endearingly (sym)pathetic, making for a satisfying contrast with the smug, self-satisfied Max Morlacchi of Blood and Black Lace nearly 20 years earlier. (The use of German locations is explained by the co-production partners on the film being Italian, American and German.)
Who am I? Where amI?
The two female leads, Sarah Langenfeld as Mitchell's rightfully concerned daughter, and Penelope Milford, as Dr Warren, likewise deliver more than satisfactory performances, helped by the fact that their roles having more depth to them than many comparable films. Both are active rather than passive characters, going some way towards offsetting the more straightforwardly exploitative 'tits and a scream' aspects of the roles, although their divergent fortunes could be read as telling.
No less than Ennio Morricone delivers a simple but effective score that is by turns romantic and suspenseful while Inferno and Phenomena cinematographer Romano Albani meets all the demands of De Martino's sophisticated mise en scene, producing several layered foreground / background compositions and distorting effects.
Indeed, had Blood Link / Extrasensorial been directed by someone better known like Brian De Palma or David Cronenberg – as two contemporary reference points, for reasons that will become clear – I have little doubt that the film would be acknowledged as a classic of its type.
Dealing with the romantic theme of the doppelganger in a contemporary guise that incorporates extra sensory powers – hence the alternative title – the film opens with a waltz scene that turns into a murder scene to recall the opening moments of Shadow of a Doubt.
Given that Hitchcock's film was also intimately concerned with doubles we may assume this to be a deliberate quotation on De Martino's part, especially given that the killer, like his counterpart in Hitchcock film targets lost soul type older women.
Beyond this the film riffs on a number of more general Hitchcockian themes, such as the transference of guilt and the double pursuit narrative whereby the “wrong man” must catch the guilty one to prove his own innocence to the typically unimaginative and ineffectual authorities.
Just a dream?
Martino also subtly misdirects us in this opening sequence as, breaking it down logically, the killer would have to have murdered his victim in plain sight of all least some of the others in the ballroom.
As the narrative continues, Dr Craig Mannings wakes up from his seeming nightmare – “I guess it was just a nightmare” – to the sound of the telephone ringing. It is his colleague and girlfriend Dr Julie Warren, reminding him that they have an important meeting at the university where they have to demonstrate that their research warrants further funding.
The meeting does not go well. Mannings insults the board and refusing to tell them what they want to know, with its head in any case being somewhat biased against their research, which involves the use of acupuncture and electric shocks with Mannings himself as the chief test subject, as unscientific.
Waking dreams?
Worse for Mannings, however, are the visions that trouble him on his way to campus, in which he sees himself picking up and murdering another woman, along with various curious details like writing on a boat in German – a language he has little or no knowledge of.
Mannings starts to believe that his experiments have unleashed something within him connected to his past – a past which, even by the standards of the Italian giallo is unusually traumatic.
For starters he and his brother Keith were born conjoined. Then their parents died in an accident when they were seven years old, leaving them to be brought up by different foster parents. Then Keith himself apparently died in another accident when he was 17. “I've been searching for the answers since I was seven years old,” as Craig remarks.
Stalk and slasher imagery with a twist
Or, rather, didn't: Keith is alive and killing in Hamburg, Germany – thus explaining the boat – and, sharing a psychic connection with his brother, also knows that Craig is well on his way to realising this and endevouring to stop him...
With its wintry locations, psychosomatic weird science and conjoined twin motif Extrasensorial recalls elements of De Palma's Sisters and Cronenberg's The Brood and Scanners. Crucially, however, De Martino uses these building blocks to create something that is recognisably his own, as further testified to by the way in which Dead Ringers and Raising Cain seem to almost return the compliment at times by then further developing some of Extrasensorial's themes and ideas.
The old through a fish tank shot
And there are certainly a lot going on around such seemingly uncharacteristic Italian horror topics as memory and identity and – perhaps more familiar, if because commonly used as an analytic tool here – the workings of the unconscious. It's not difficult to interpret Craig and Keith as representing ego and id respectively or Keith as the repressed side of Craig who gives free rein to anti-social and murderous impulses his brother denies, or to see them as introvert and extravert incarnations of the same person.
Here we might also note Craig's more assertive / aggressive response to the review board and his remark to its head: “I trust you have no difficulty finding the right patients?” “No, actually I have a great deal of difficulty. In fact we're looking right now for a really tight-assed subject to see how we can loosen him up. Would you volunteer Dr Adams?”
The thing is that it's almost too easy to invoke the ideas of Freud, Jung and company here. A more cinema-specific alternative is to read the opening scene as establishing a kind of Deluzean “crystalline image” with a temporary circuit of the real and the virtual chasing one another; significantly Deleuze entitles a key chapter of his Cinema 2: The Time-Image “From recollection to dreams”. With that “irrational cut” from the ballroom to the antechamber we can't definitively say whether we're seeing a representation of Keith's actions, Craig's visions of them, or something in-between. (“I meet my siamese twin after all these years and he calls me a murderer!” “I saw you!”)
If generic requirements mean that De Martino ultimately has to provide a clearer resolution than the more thoroughgoing Deleuzean critic might like, as epitomised by the way in which the final shock is more a detachable fragment in the manner of Carrie than a challenge to narrative closure, the director nevertheless does repeatedly confuse things and states by continually using mirrors within his compositions along with some adroitly executed match cuts that take us from one brother and location to the other. (Unfortunately, as is so often the case with this kind of film, the unsatisfactory pan and scan presentation has a tendency to make a something of a mockery of the filmmakers work, undoubtedly further contributing to their ghettoisation.)
The curse of panning and scanning strikes again
The other cornerstones of the film are Michael Moriarty's performances as the brothers, who start out with their own particular mannerisms – Craig plays with his hair when he is nervous, for instance – but quickly pick up on each others quirks, albeit with an apparent difference insofar as Keith consciously imitates Craig whereas Craig seems unawares that he is picking things up from Keith.
Keith
Craig
Keith and Craig
Cameron Mitchell plays an over the hill ex-boxer turned wrestler who has relocated from the US to Germany with his daughter, an old acquaintance of Craig's who has the misfortune to come across Keith first. His performance is also endearingly (sym)pathetic, making for a satisfying contrast with the smug, self-satisfied Max Morlacchi of Blood and Black Lace nearly 20 years earlier. (The use of German locations is explained by the co-production partners on the film being Italian, American and German.)
Who am I? Where amI?
The two female leads, Sarah Langenfeld as Mitchell's rightfully concerned daughter, and Penelope Milford, as Dr Warren, likewise deliver more than satisfactory performances, helped by the fact that their roles having more depth to them than many comparable films. Both are active rather than passive characters, going some way towards offsetting the more straightforwardly exploitative 'tits and a scream' aspects of the roles, although their divergent fortunes could be read as telling.
No less than Ennio Morricone delivers a simple but effective score that is by turns romantic and suspenseful while Inferno and Phenomena cinematographer Romano Albani meets all the demands of De Martino's sophisticated mise en scene, producing several layered foreground / background compositions and distorting effects.
Thursday, 4 September 2008
Judex
Given that his widowed daughter Jacqueline Aubry is about to be engaged to remarry and obtain the family a noble title in the process, banker Favraux should be happy. All his schemes, 20 years in the making, seem about to finally come to fruition. Unfortunately for him there are two flies in the ointment.
The first, whom he initially dismisses, is Judex, the self-appointed scourge of the underworld – his name, as Favraux's assistant Valliers explains, means 'judge' or 'upholder of he law' – who knows his wealth and power is built on blackmail and treachery and has sent a letter telling the banker to own up to his crimes and give up his half his ill-gotten gains, or else.
The second is Pierre Kerjean, an old co-conspirator who went to prison for Favraux on the promise that his family would be supported, duly had his naïve trust betrayed, and has now showed up seeking help in finding his long-lost son.
The old man is easy enough to deal with, being taken care of in a hit and run 'accident' but Judex proves another matter entirely.
Making his first appearance at Jacqueline's engagement party disguised as a bird-masked conjurer, he spikes Verneau's drink, causing the banker to drop down dead at the very moment indicated in his letter of the previous day.
Judex's formal introduction, as classic surrealist shock moment
The masked ball
Following Favraux's burial, Judex and his men dig up the banker's coffin and take it to their secret hideout in a windmill. Favraux, who was not dead but merely in a catatonic state comes to in a cell for the continuation of Judex's punishment.
Marie listens in
And Diana, the huntress, makes her move
Meanwhile the governess, Marie Verdier, whom Favraux had been planning to marry and is secretly the head of a criminal gang of her own under her real name Diana Monti, stakes her claim to his ill-gotten gains and thus sets herself on a collision course with Judex...
Another quasi-surreal moment
Charming and entertaining as it is, Judex is never quite as good a film as it could have been for one very simple reason: the subject was not director Georges Franju's first choice. Knowing that a femme fatale and a diabolical master of disguise provided rather more interesting anti-heroic possibilities in tune with his own sensibilities, his preference was for two of silent serial director Louis Feuillade's other characters, Irma Vep of The Vampires – work out the anagram of her name, as a predecessor of “Johnny Alucard” – and the eponymous Fantômas. (Bringing it back for today's audiences we might consider here why the Joker gets the best lines and notices in the Batman films; if this seems arbitrary consider that both films feature caped crusaders and that the look of Batman's nemesis can be traced to another half-forgotten tale of crime and punishment, The Man Who Laughs.)
While Franju does make Diana / Marie into something of an Irma Vep character as she slinks around with feline grace in a black body stocking before disguising herself as a deliciously devilish nun, this serves to also emphasise the comparative blandness of Judex himself, with only his initial appearance in the bird mask really having the same imagistic power.
Suor omicidi; note also the reversal of the usual black and white symbolism in the first image
Indeed Feuillade, a conservative rather than an instinctual anarchist like Franju, had actually created Judex as something of a watered down version of his earlier more anarchistic villains-as-heroes that he hoped would quell the establishment criticism they had provoked.
Light and dark – Diana shows her true colours
The most telling scene with regard to the difference between the two men's sensibilities is one late here that sees Judex encounter Favraux after the banker has been rescued by Diana. As Judex lurks outside Favraux expresses contrition for his old actions and indicates that he is does not want his old life back any longer. In part this is because he knows it suits several influential people for him to be dead to the world, with the implication that if he did dramatically reappear – a reappearance not outwith the realms of probability in the universe of these films – he would then soon wind up dead for real. Judex then bursts in regardless, still determined to act as judge, jury and executioner without evident regard for the clear selectiveness of his approach – a selectivity which becomes still more evident and compromised by the end of the film – but also his impotence in the face of what is clearly an endemic criminality amongst the respectable classes. As such, if Feuillade's Judex was a figure and a film acceptable to the establishment, here Franju pushes both that little bit further to bring the inherent contradictions of his prececessor's work to the forefront.
Franju further makes the film distinctively his own through a number of intertextual references to his previous films, with the doves that Judex produces and the guard dogs that protect Jacqueline and her daughter both referencing Eyes Without A Face. Certain of his composer of choice Maurice Jarre's musical motifs also sound very similar to those in the earlier film.
Balanced against this, however, Franju also beautifully captures the style of his silent serial models with intertitles, irising and other archaic effects like keyhole shaped masks, while also using his camera in a thoroughly modern and personal manner that recalls the contemporaneous nouvelle vague and Alexandre Astruc's theoretical notion of the “camera pen” with which the auteur director inscribed their signature onto their work.
Indeed, if anything, I would actually say that Franju's combination of new and old works better than that of Truffaut in Shoot the Pianist, as a film set in the present but making use of anachronistic techniques, and perhaps even Jules et Jim, as a film set partly in the same period.
Whereas to me Truffaut's use of irising and suchlike can come across as somewhat mannered, Franju's assemblages always have that sense of authenticity. There's the sense that unlike his younger counterpart he was never trying to impress anybody with his knowledge of cinema history and technique but was simply expressing himself and the delight he found in the early cinema. (Whereas Truffaut 'studied' at the Paris Cinematheque, Franju, along with Henri Langlois, founded it.)
Though not an actor, American magician Channing Pollock has a 'fit' with the Judex character and the film's universe, in that you believe he could pull of these tricks and invent this technology after seeing his bird-masked conjuring routine – which must have challenged his ability to misdirect somewhat, one supposes – and thereby makes the role his own.
Edith Scob brings that distinctive combination of fragile beauty and steely resolve to Jacqueline Favraux as she had earlier exhibited in the role of the titular Eyes without a Face, making it clear why Franju was drawn to work with her time and again.
The real star of the show as far as I was concerned, however, is Francine Bergé who, as Franju's Musidora / muse, has a much more active, challenging and trangressive role – see here Vicki Callahan's Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade for an extensive analysis of the actress and her characters and what they meant to 1910s audiences, particularly in relation to gender norms – as Diana / Marie.
Eurobabe fans will want to note that Sylva Koscina has a smaller, but nevertheless pivotal role, as a passing circus acrobat, while Eurotrash fans may be intrigued to know that the film was produced by Robert De Nesle, later known for his work with Spanish maverick Jesus Franco.
The first, whom he initially dismisses, is Judex, the self-appointed scourge of the underworld – his name, as Favraux's assistant Valliers explains, means 'judge' or 'upholder of he law' – who knows his wealth and power is built on blackmail and treachery and has sent a letter telling the banker to own up to his crimes and give up his half his ill-gotten gains, or else.
The second is Pierre Kerjean, an old co-conspirator who went to prison for Favraux on the promise that his family would be supported, duly had his naïve trust betrayed, and has now showed up seeking help in finding his long-lost son.
The old man is easy enough to deal with, being taken care of in a hit and run 'accident' but Judex proves another matter entirely.
Making his first appearance at Jacqueline's engagement party disguised as a bird-masked conjurer, he spikes Verneau's drink, causing the banker to drop down dead at the very moment indicated in his letter of the previous day.
Judex's formal introduction, as classic surrealist shock moment
The masked ball
Following Favraux's burial, Judex and his men dig up the banker's coffin and take it to their secret hideout in a windmill. Favraux, who was not dead but merely in a catatonic state comes to in a cell for the continuation of Judex's punishment.
Marie listens in
And Diana, the huntress, makes her move
Meanwhile the governess, Marie Verdier, whom Favraux had been planning to marry and is secretly the head of a criminal gang of her own under her real name Diana Monti, stakes her claim to his ill-gotten gains and thus sets herself on a collision course with Judex...
Another quasi-surreal moment
Charming and entertaining as it is, Judex is never quite as good a film as it could have been for one very simple reason: the subject was not director Georges Franju's first choice. Knowing that a femme fatale and a diabolical master of disguise provided rather more interesting anti-heroic possibilities in tune with his own sensibilities, his preference was for two of silent serial director Louis Feuillade's other characters, Irma Vep of The Vampires – work out the anagram of her name, as a predecessor of “Johnny Alucard” – and the eponymous Fantômas. (Bringing it back for today's audiences we might consider here why the Joker gets the best lines and notices in the Batman films; if this seems arbitrary consider that both films feature caped crusaders and that the look of Batman's nemesis can be traced to another half-forgotten tale of crime and punishment, The Man Who Laughs.)
While Franju does make Diana / Marie into something of an Irma Vep character as she slinks around with feline grace in a black body stocking before disguising herself as a deliciously devilish nun, this serves to also emphasise the comparative blandness of Judex himself, with only his initial appearance in the bird mask really having the same imagistic power.
Suor omicidi; note also the reversal of the usual black and white symbolism in the first image
Indeed Feuillade, a conservative rather than an instinctual anarchist like Franju, had actually created Judex as something of a watered down version of his earlier more anarchistic villains-as-heroes that he hoped would quell the establishment criticism they had provoked.
Light and dark – Diana shows her true colours
The most telling scene with regard to the difference between the two men's sensibilities is one late here that sees Judex encounter Favraux after the banker has been rescued by Diana. As Judex lurks outside Favraux expresses contrition for his old actions and indicates that he is does not want his old life back any longer. In part this is because he knows it suits several influential people for him to be dead to the world, with the implication that if he did dramatically reappear – a reappearance not outwith the realms of probability in the universe of these films – he would then soon wind up dead for real. Judex then bursts in regardless, still determined to act as judge, jury and executioner without evident regard for the clear selectiveness of his approach – a selectivity which becomes still more evident and compromised by the end of the film – but also his impotence in the face of what is clearly an endemic criminality amongst the respectable classes. As such, if Feuillade's Judex was a figure and a film acceptable to the establishment, here Franju pushes both that little bit further to bring the inherent contradictions of his prececessor's work to the forefront.
Franju further makes the film distinctively his own through a number of intertextual references to his previous films, with the doves that Judex produces and the guard dogs that protect Jacqueline and her daughter both referencing Eyes Without A Face. Certain of his composer of choice Maurice Jarre's musical motifs also sound very similar to those in the earlier film.
Balanced against this, however, Franju also beautifully captures the style of his silent serial models with intertitles, irising and other archaic effects like keyhole shaped masks, while also using his camera in a thoroughly modern and personal manner that recalls the contemporaneous nouvelle vague and Alexandre Astruc's theoretical notion of the “camera pen” with which the auteur director inscribed their signature onto their work.
Indeed, if anything, I would actually say that Franju's combination of new and old works better than that of Truffaut in Shoot the Pianist, as a film set in the present but making use of anachronistic techniques, and perhaps even Jules et Jim, as a film set partly in the same period.
Whereas to me Truffaut's use of irising and suchlike can come across as somewhat mannered, Franju's assemblages always have that sense of authenticity. There's the sense that unlike his younger counterpart he was never trying to impress anybody with his knowledge of cinema history and technique but was simply expressing himself and the delight he found in the early cinema. (Whereas Truffaut 'studied' at the Paris Cinematheque, Franju, along with Henri Langlois, founded it.)
Though not an actor, American magician Channing Pollock has a 'fit' with the Judex character and the film's universe, in that you believe he could pull of these tricks and invent this technology after seeing his bird-masked conjuring routine – which must have challenged his ability to misdirect somewhat, one supposes – and thereby makes the role his own.
Edith Scob brings that distinctive combination of fragile beauty and steely resolve to Jacqueline Favraux as she had earlier exhibited in the role of the titular Eyes without a Face, making it clear why Franju was drawn to work with her time and again.
The real star of the show as far as I was concerned, however, is Francine Bergé who, as Franju's Musidora / muse, has a much more active, challenging and trangressive role – see here Vicki Callahan's Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade for an extensive analysis of the actress and her characters and what they meant to 1910s audiences, particularly in relation to gender norms – as Diana / Marie.
Eurobabe fans will want to note that Sylva Koscina has a smaller, but nevertheless pivotal role, as a passing circus acrobat, while Eurotrash fans may be intrigued to know that the film was produced by Robert De Nesle, later known for his work with Spanish maverick Jesus Franco.
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Nuits rouges / Shadowman
Georges Franju's last film needs to be understood in relation to the trying circumstances in which it was made, as outlined by writer and actor Jacques Champreux in the interview included as an extra on the Eureka 'Masters of Cinema' series DVD, where the film is double billed with Judex.
The original plan was for a contemporary remake of Louis Feuillade's Fantômas, one which would be as shocking to 1970s audiences as the original had been to their counterparts in the 1910s and which would thereby serve as antidote / antithesis to the more familiar and comfortable 1960s series starring Jean Marias as the eponymous anti-hero.
A French television station liked the idea and gave Franju a relatively big budget to work with. He then found that securing the rights to the Fantômas character would cost around half this budget. Parallel to this Champreux had been working on a script for a pulp villain inspired by silent era star Lon Chaney Sr, “the man of a thousand faces.” He suggested to Franju that they might use this, with the director agreeing.
The production was then shot in both 16mm and 35mm versions, for television and cinema respectively, in Belgrade. When the footage was sent back to the laboratory in Paris for processing – suggesting that Franju was working without rushes, giving an indicator of his talent but perhaps also why his approach might lead him to encounter problems a routine journeyman would not have – it was discovered that someone had stolen the 35mm material en route.
The Shadowman
If the salvage job nature of Shadowman / Nuits Rouges has the serendipitous effect of bringing it that bit closer to the surreal strangeness of its model in certain ways – Feuillade famously writing characters into or out of his stories from episode to episode depending on the actors' availability and other chance factors – the downside is that it weakens the extent to which it presents an actual serial-like narrative with a regular roller-coaster ride rhythm.
The 1000 Eyes of the Shadowman?
It starts off well, with the introduction of Baron de Borrego and his secret treasure, the wobbliness of the secret panel hiding a wall safe and the rather prop-like nature of the mask endearingly low-tech and providing further hints as to the pastiche / parody nature of the piece.
The Templars
Unfortunately for the Baron his servant is completely untrustworthy and in desperate need of money to pay off his gambling debts and thus sells this information on to the initially sceptical Shadowman.
The mad scientist and his auto(n)matons
His secret base and army of minions, including zombie like slaves produced by a mad scientist, are also a delight. Indeed, the latter subplot was my favourite, both for its imagery of the hitherto mannequin-like zombies advancing implacably and inexorably on their targets and the typically Franju-ian politics. After all, the mad scientist only follows capitalist logic to its (il)logical conclusion when he suggests that replacing of the workers with his automata would allow for great cost savings since they don't need paid and can be kept in storage when not needed.
A mechanical auto-pilot
Nor is there any problem with the masked villain's visit to and murder of the Baron, against warnings of dire consequences that he cannot begin to understand.
It's when the Baron's nephew and heir Paul arrives in Paris that things start to go awry. Because we don't know what the master of disguise Shadowman – AKA “the man without a face” – actually looks like we are in no position to know that this Paul is an impostor and while certainly experiencing a shock when this deception is revealed are not placed in a state of suspense beforehand.
Things get worse as we're then subjected to a long and rather tedious expository sequence outlining the backstory of the Templars and their treasures, in which we're also introduced to another unidentified character in the form of the hooded Templar who swears to avenge the Baron. But precisely because he isn't identified, it's hard for us to identify with him.
The rooftops of Paris, or a Belgrade studio at least.
Though Nuits Rouges picks up hereafter as it settles into a regular pattern of moves and countermoves by the good guys and the bad guys – again limited by the extent that we know which of these labels to apply any given individual, though the inherently perfunctory nature of the characterisation qua bumbling police inspector, femme fatale etc etc. certainly helps – and a more regular alternation of scenes of suspense and shock, story and spectacle, the momentum is never quite regained.
If it's difficult to recommend Nuits Rouges to the casual viewer who perhaps only knows Franju as the director of Eyes Without a Face, those already committed to his unique cinema will nevertheless find a lot of pleasure in the film.
For us it's very much a case of the more you bring to the film the more you will get out of it: it's about being on same fantastique / surrealist / art-trash wavelength, where one is not only able to identify Gerd Frobe as the titular villain of Goldfinger but also as the nemesis of Dr Mabuse in the 1960s series inaugurated by Franco Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, before then going on to that repressed history of pop-modernist European cinema outwith the official canon; while I'll refrain from doing so, true obsessives will also want to seek out the 1919 Feuillade L'Homme sans visage and the 1974 French TV series of the same name, which features all Nuits rouges' leadings players, for comparison purposes.
Equally, however, Nuits Rouges is no lost masterpiece. The televisual origins of the material are apparent in its flat lighting, a far cry from the Eugen Schuftan's sublime cinematography on Eyes Without a Face, whilst the use of irising rather than straight cuts seems as much influenced by the presence of commercial breaks as Feuillade.
[DVD Times review of Judex and Nuits rouges]
The original plan was for a contemporary remake of Louis Feuillade's Fantômas, one which would be as shocking to 1970s audiences as the original had been to their counterparts in the 1910s and which would thereby serve as antidote / antithesis to the more familiar and comfortable 1960s series starring Jean Marias as the eponymous anti-hero.
A French television station liked the idea and gave Franju a relatively big budget to work with. He then found that securing the rights to the Fantômas character would cost around half this budget. Parallel to this Champreux had been working on a script for a pulp villain inspired by silent era star Lon Chaney Sr, “the man of a thousand faces.” He suggested to Franju that they might use this, with the director agreeing.
The production was then shot in both 16mm and 35mm versions, for television and cinema respectively, in Belgrade. When the footage was sent back to the laboratory in Paris for processing – suggesting that Franju was working without rushes, giving an indicator of his talent but perhaps also why his approach might lead him to encounter problems a routine journeyman would not have – it was discovered that someone had stolen the 35mm material en route.
The Shadowman
If the salvage job nature of Shadowman / Nuits Rouges has the serendipitous effect of bringing it that bit closer to the surreal strangeness of its model in certain ways – Feuillade famously writing characters into or out of his stories from episode to episode depending on the actors' availability and other chance factors – the downside is that it weakens the extent to which it presents an actual serial-like narrative with a regular roller-coaster ride rhythm.
The 1000 Eyes of the Shadowman?
It starts off well, with the introduction of Baron de Borrego and his secret treasure, the wobbliness of the secret panel hiding a wall safe and the rather prop-like nature of the mask endearingly low-tech and providing further hints as to the pastiche / parody nature of the piece.
The Templars
Unfortunately for the Baron his servant is completely untrustworthy and in desperate need of money to pay off his gambling debts and thus sells this information on to the initially sceptical Shadowman.
The mad scientist and his auto(n)matons
His secret base and army of minions, including zombie like slaves produced by a mad scientist, are also a delight. Indeed, the latter subplot was my favourite, both for its imagery of the hitherto mannequin-like zombies advancing implacably and inexorably on their targets and the typically Franju-ian politics. After all, the mad scientist only follows capitalist logic to its (il)logical conclusion when he suggests that replacing of the workers with his automata would allow for great cost savings since they don't need paid and can be kept in storage when not needed.
A mechanical auto-pilot
Nor is there any problem with the masked villain's visit to and murder of the Baron, against warnings of dire consequences that he cannot begin to understand.
It's when the Baron's nephew and heir Paul arrives in Paris that things start to go awry. Because we don't know what the master of disguise Shadowman – AKA “the man without a face” – actually looks like we are in no position to know that this Paul is an impostor and while certainly experiencing a shock when this deception is revealed are not placed in a state of suspense beforehand.
Things get worse as we're then subjected to a long and rather tedious expository sequence outlining the backstory of the Templars and their treasures, in which we're also introduced to another unidentified character in the form of the hooded Templar who swears to avenge the Baron. But precisely because he isn't identified, it's hard for us to identify with him.
The rooftops of Paris, or a Belgrade studio at least.
Though Nuits Rouges picks up hereafter as it settles into a regular pattern of moves and countermoves by the good guys and the bad guys – again limited by the extent that we know which of these labels to apply any given individual, though the inherently perfunctory nature of the characterisation qua bumbling police inspector, femme fatale etc etc. certainly helps – and a more regular alternation of scenes of suspense and shock, story and spectacle, the momentum is never quite regained.
If it's difficult to recommend Nuits Rouges to the casual viewer who perhaps only knows Franju as the director of Eyes Without a Face, those already committed to his unique cinema will nevertheless find a lot of pleasure in the film.
For us it's very much a case of the more you bring to the film the more you will get out of it: it's about being on same fantastique / surrealist / art-trash wavelength, where one is not only able to identify Gerd Frobe as the titular villain of Goldfinger but also as the nemesis of Dr Mabuse in the 1960s series inaugurated by Franco Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, before then going on to that repressed history of pop-modernist European cinema outwith the official canon; while I'll refrain from doing so, true obsessives will also want to seek out the 1919 Feuillade L'Homme sans visage and the 1974 French TV series of the same name, which features all Nuits rouges' leadings players, for comparison purposes.
Equally, however, Nuits Rouges is no lost masterpiece. The televisual origins of the material are apparent in its flat lighting, a far cry from the Eugen Schuftan's sublime cinematography on Eyes Without a Face, whilst the use of irising rather than straight cuts seems as much influenced by the presence of commercial breaks as Feuillade.
[DVD Times review of Judex and Nuits rouges]
Monday, 1 September 2008
Svezia, inferno e paradiso / Sweden Heaven and Hell
This 1969 mondo is mainly known for one thing: it is the film which gave the world The Muppet Show theme, manha manha. It was written by Piero Umiliani, writer-director Luigi Scattini's composer of choice.
The film itself is very much business as usual, presenting the usual mixture of the defamiliarised, like the state-run alcohol shop, and the downright strange, like the team of the blind divers who salvage things from Stockholm harbour, accompanied by an intermittently informative but mostly sceptical, supercilious and non-sequitur voice-off:
“Sweden covers little more than a quarter million sqaure miles of Europe. Its population is eight million, which means statistically around thirty four and one-quarter inhabitants to every square mile. The quarter inhabitant is an infant. At sixteen he or she acquires the status of a half and at twenty graduates to a whole.”
The titles and customary statement of fact with slow-motion spacehopper action
The specific theme or question tying all the vignettes, which also include the likes of sex education classes, sex shops, swingers' and lesbian clubs, together is that of the title: does the Swedish model society of the time represents more a heaven or a hell on earth?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is a balance of both. Thus, for example, the selling of alcohol through the Systembolaget apparently meant that the authorities avoid supplying registered alcoholics, who would then purchase their booze from other customers allowed to use the store. Others, presumably no longer able to afford the marked-up prices are seen inhaling from petrol soaked rags and eating shoe polish on bread to get a hit. Or, to recast things in sociological terms, it's about the unanticipated consequences of a essentially well-intentioned but at times paternalistic social-democratic welfare state.
Shoe-polish on bread. Mmm
The balance also presumably depends on where and when you were viewing the film, your own social values and – one suspects, having only seen the film in English – the particular slant given the material by the voice-off, Edmond Purdom supplying the English narration and Enrico Maria Salerno the Italian.
For the contemporary viewer at nearly 40 years distance of the material comes across as dated rather than shocking, providing a point of contrast with the harder edged strain of mondo typified by the slaughterfest likes of Africa Addio.
Indeed, the biggest shock may be in the attitudes espoused by the voice-over, with its indiscriminate 'drugs are bad' lumping together of hash and heroin and 'women become lesbians because they've been raped or otherwise actively turned off men, whom they should naturally desire' discourses.
The 'desperate', 'unhappy' 'lesbians'
Another criticism is one endemic to the mondo as a whole, that too often we're shown five minutes of things that that could in themselves have made 'proper' 50 minute documentaries, such as the aforementioned blind divers (what it is it like to experience the world as they do?) or the centre for troubled children (what does the existence of a 12-year-old prostitute say about the failings of the system?)
A cold war era nuclear bunker of a type that may unfortunately be coming back into fashion; note the vehicle at the bottom of the image providing for the rapid tracking style shot
Beyond this the apparent banning of the film in Sweden itself because some material was collected covertly without the informed consent of those caught on camera is also of interest when considering the mondo filone with their tendency to exploit the third world more than the first, whilst also providing another indicator of the strength of the Swedish social democractic idea(l) in its defence of the otherwise relatively powerless. It also provides an intriguing point of connection to Fredrick Wiseman's Titicut Follies, as a 'legitimate' documentary that suffered comparable legal challenges.
By turns intentionally and unintentionally funny, sad, touching and surreal – the opening credits sequence, of identically clad girls on grinning faced orange spacehoppers bouncing in slow motion – Sweden Heaven and Hell remains sufficiently entertaining, for the right and wrong reasons, to be worth a look, while again giving plenty to think about.
[Tim Lucas' s Video Watchblog post on the film: http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2008/06/cincinnati-heaven-and-hell.html]
The film itself is very much business as usual, presenting the usual mixture of the defamiliarised, like the state-run alcohol shop, and the downright strange, like the team of the blind divers who salvage things from Stockholm harbour, accompanied by an intermittently informative but mostly sceptical, supercilious and non-sequitur voice-off:
“Sweden covers little more than a quarter million sqaure miles of Europe. Its population is eight million, which means statistically around thirty four and one-quarter inhabitants to every square mile. The quarter inhabitant is an infant. At sixteen he or she acquires the status of a half and at twenty graduates to a whole.”
The titles and customary statement of fact with slow-motion spacehopper action
The specific theme or question tying all the vignettes, which also include the likes of sex education classes, sex shops, swingers' and lesbian clubs, together is that of the title: does the Swedish model society of the time represents more a heaven or a hell on earth?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is a balance of both. Thus, for example, the selling of alcohol through the Systembolaget apparently meant that the authorities avoid supplying registered alcoholics, who would then purchase their booze from other customers allowed to use the store. Others, presumably no longer able to afford the marked-up prices are seen inhaling from petrol soaked rags and eating shoe polish on bread to get a hit. Or, to recast things in sociological terms, it's about the unanticipated consequences of a essentially well-intentioned but at times paternalistic social-democratic welfare state.
Shoe-polish on bread. Mmm
The balance also presumably depends on where and when you were viewing the film, your own social values and – one suspects, having only seen the film in English – the particular slant given the material by the voice-off, Edmond Purdom supplying the English narration and Enrico Maria Salerno the Italian.
For the contemporary viewer at nearly 40 years distance of the material comes across as dated rather than shocking, providing a point of contrast with the harder edged strain of mondo typified by the slaughterfest likes of Africa Addio.
Indeed, the biggest shock may be in the attitudes espoused by the voice-over, with its indiscriminate 'drugs are bad' lumping together of hash and heroin and 'women become lesbians because they've been raped or otherwise actively turned off men, whom they should naturally desire' discourses.
The 'desperate', 'unhappy' 'lesbians'
Another criticism is one endemic to the mondo as a whole, that too often we're shown five minutes of things that that could in themselves have made 'proper' 50 minute documentaries, such as the aforementioned blind divers (what it is it like to experience the world as they do?) or the centre for troubled children (what does the existence of a 12-year-old prostitute say about the failings of the system?)
A cold war era nuclear bunker of a type that may unfortunately be coming back into fashion; note the vehicle at the bottom of the image providing for the rapid tracking style shot
Beyond this the apparent banning of the film in Sweden itself because some material was collected covertly without the informed consent of those caught on camera is also of interest when considering the mondo filone with their tendency to exploit the third world more than the first, whilst also providing another indicator of the strength of the Swedish social democractic idea(l) in its defence of the otherwise relatively powerless. It also provides an intriguing point of connection to Fredrick Wiseman's Titicut Follies, as a 'legitimate' documentary that suffered comparable legal challenges.
By turns intentionally and unintentionally funny, sad, touching and surreal – the opening credits sequence, of identically clad girls on grinning faced orange spacehoppers bouncing in slow motion – Sweden Heaven and Hell remains sufficiently entertaining, for the right and wrong reasons, to be worth a look, while again giving plenty to think about.
[Tim Lucas' s Video Watchblog post on the film: http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2008/06/cincinnati-heaven-and-hell.html]
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