Vampyr (1932)

Carl Dreyer's Vampyr is unquestionably an astonishing feat of film-making, due in no small part to the innovative craftsmanship which must have seemed so radicaly new in 1932. That is, admittedly, what impressed me most on my first viewing. 'What? This is 1932?...Wow'. The movement of the camera in particular seems very sophisticated, even by contemporary standards. Many of the film's effects are hokey by comparison with modern cinema, but to zoom-in on these effects strikes me as uncharitable and misguided...better to appreciate the strange and mysterious imagery of the film...

On the DVD commentary Guillermo del Toro quotes Magritte stating that the duty of the artist is to connect us with mystery. While I can't find that exact quote, I have found these others from Magritte: "Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see" & “My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.”

Want more time for reflection on this one, particularly because Guillermo del Toro's such a big fan. So, more to come...in the meantime, here are some images from the film , and some scans of the beautiful programme which was printed for the Danish release...

Climates (Iklimler) - 2006

The problem with an education is that you have to work so much harder for enjoyment. Or search harder and longer anyway. After watching L'eclisse earlier this year I can't help but think of Climates as Antonioni-lite. Virtually the same preoccupation with alienation, isolation and the impossibility of meaningful emotional connections between people (especially lovers) but without the technical skill or vision or artistry required to lift the plot from being merely anecdotal to something more profound and provocative.

I'm mystified as to why the film has been so critically acclaimed. Have any of these people even watched Antonioni? Surely, it's not a radical gesture to make a movie about relationships that isn't a RomCom? huh?

Plot outline: Ageing architecture professor and younger TV art director girlfriend split up after summer holiday. Man stumbles through halting relationships with family, colleagues and lovers before travelling to snowy, (eastern?) wastes of Turkey to win back the girl. Having successfully done so, he reverts to being an asshole eventually leaving the girl devastated and alone. Move closes with her crying in the snow.

Maybe I'm just being mean, but the knowledge that it's a Turkish film made on a no-doubt miniscule budget helps to undermine the director's artistic aspirations - of course it's a small, claustrophobic, 'domestic' drama with a tiny cast! What other kind of movie are you going to make in Turkey? A blockbuster sci-fi epic? You could of course argue that the director makes a virtue of necessity, but the film is just not that virtuous, sorry.

Watching the commentary for Vampyr, Guillermo del Toro quotes Magritte as saying that the purpose of art is to put us in touch with the mysterious. Perhaps Climates's problem is that it settles for just plain inscrutable.

Note: There is a rather dramatic, violent and uncomfortable love-scene, if one can call it that, that is very well realised. So it's a good reference for that kind of thing if you're looking for it.

Extra Note: This is my second big Turkish disappointment, the first being Orhan Pamuk's zzz-fest Snow.

Dreams from My Father

It was with a sense of duty that I picked up Obama's Dreams From My Father. One should at least attempt to acquaint oneself with the life and thoughts of the, how-many-times-can-we-hear-it, 'most powerful man on earth', shouldn't one? The sense of responsibility, of social and political obligation, quickly dissipates, however. Or at least for me it did. By the start of the second chapter all thoughts of what 'one' should or shouldn't do are pushed aside by the direct, earnest and slightly clumsy life-story that tumbles out of the book. Nothing feels certain about the narrative Obama constructs from his life so far. This uncertaintly is emphasized by the series of questions that seem to underpin the autobiography...'who am I?'...'where do I belong?'...'what should I do?'...'what are my responsibilities?' - Questions which I peronally find quite demanding and unsettling, and that's perhaps why I found the book so riveting.

It's amazing that given all the benefits of his birth into a white, middle-class, generally happy family, Obama felt so haunted by questions of identity and heritage. The extent to which this intelligent and obviuously remarkable man is tortured by these questions is eye-opening and I have a newfound appreciation of the complexities and difficulties of race relations, both in the US and elsewhere. I know this is odd, and perhaps even insulting, coming from a South African, but at home in South Africa you can sometimes buy into the idea that the rest of the world has the whole race-thing completely under control. This is why Americans attempting to reconnect with their African roots has always seemed so ludicrous to me, the gulf between a relatively wealthy African American and an 'actual' African seeming ridiculously wide. I have a new sympathy for these attempts after reading Obama's book, a new understanding of what the idea of Africa might stand for, what function it might serve in the political and cultural imagination of black people the world over. Despite these realizations, or because of them, I find myself skeptical of the ease with which Obama integrates himself into his African family, but perhaps I am simply jealous of the fact that I have no corresponding community to which I feel I am a part.

Personal reflections aside, I am rooting for Obama from now on, joining the ranks of his cheerleaders, and I'm vaguely embarrassed I ever supported Hillary over him. Mea culpa, mea culpa...

I picked up Dreams from My Father hoping for some sort of programmitic or didactc introduction to the policies and moral philosophy of the president of the United States of America and ended up putting down a highly personal attempt to explain a life in progress, a life that asks demanding questions of my own. As such, the book is inspiring and profoundly unsettling.

Extra Note: On purely literary terms the writing is a little hokey. The endings of many of the chapters feel slightly contrived. Over-dramatized in an attempt, perhaps, to justify the events described, to try and extract some meaning from them. There are few original images or turns of phrase. Fortunately these technical faults do little to dampen the emotional power of the book.

Waiting for the Barbarians

It's difficult to know what Coetzee thinks of his narrators. I find them all so terribly sympathetic that it's difficult to know how one should judge their characters and actions. Waiting for the Barbarians was my introduction to yet another ageing male protagonist whose relationships with women are decidedly problematic and certainly abusive under modern codes of behaviour.

The nameless magistrate whose tale unfolds through the course of the novel is stationed on the outskirts of the Empire. Comfortable marooned on the periphery of civilization, the magistrate spends him time collecting buried artifacts from long-forgotten peoples which are scattered through the desert sands which surround the outpose and occasionally and indiscretely taking advantage of the young maids who are under his command. The arrival of the sinister Colonel Joll - a respresentative of the Empires secret police, the deliciously-named "Third Bureau" - with his queer manners and affectations (see the sunglasses excerpt I have included below) destroys the little idyll the magistrate has established. Rumours are growing that the Barbarians that surround the Empire are banding together, conspiring to attack the Empire. Oblivious to the social and cultural particulars of the peoples who surround the outpost Joll captures and tortures a boy and his father (who are quite obviously innocent) and forces the boy to lead them into the desert to reveal the hiding places of his 'co-conspirators'. Joll leads a party of men out into the desert and returns with a string of bound barbarians who who viciously and cruelly restrained by thin wires which have been woven through their hands and cheeks. Joll proceeds to torture the barbarians while the magistrate seeks to distance himself as much as possible from the abuses which take place. Having extracted the information he desires, despite its highly questionable veracity, the Colonel returns to the capital to make his report. Horrified by the torture, by the blind and needless pain inflicted on Joll's victims, the magistrate releases the Barbarians who return to the desert. Only later does the magistrate discover that they have left on of their own behind - an impassive barbarian girl who has been partially crippled and blinded, forced to beg and prostitute herself to survive. The magistrate is moved by vague and yet powerful desires, taking in the girl and subjecting(?) her to ritualistic washings of her broken body. Confused by his own motives, and potentially seeking to atone for his complicity in the torture, the magistrate decides to return the girl to her people. The gruelling journey through icy wastes which follows nearly kills the magistrate and the men who have escourted them, and is the novels most sustained piece of brilliant writing. Releasing the girl to her people and surviving the return journey, the magistrate is soon subjected to much much worse than the pain and anguish of ice, wind, snow and hunger.

Arriving back at the outpost the magistrate discovers the Empire have send troops to deal with the impending Barbarian invasion. Under suspicion of colluding with the Barbarians, and accused of various failings and abuses of power, the magistrate is jailed and tortured, subjected to countless humiliations, "I wondered how much pain a plump comfortable old man would be able to endure in the name of his eccentric notions of how the Empire should conduct itself. But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it. ... They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.'' . Finally, the Empire's forces are expended, defeated by the unforgiving wastes which surround the outpost and the magistrate finds himself free once more, virtually taking up the position of magistrate as the Empire abandons the outpost to the wilderness and the barbarians. The End.

Here's a helpful excerpts from the New York Times review of the book: "And at the outset we also realize that this is to be a novel not about nuances of character but about a clash of moral styles, a drama of representative ways of governing." There are many instances in which the novel sketches out the dangers of a centralized and isolated government: the way people can be brutalised and abused, the way the peripheries in particular are vulnerable to exploitation and violence, the way a lack of local knowledge and sympathy leads to cruelty and, ultimately, defeat. It's a political parable, but also a story about desire really. What it's trying to say about desire, however, is much more difficult to decipher than the obvious politcal insights into certain modes of government. Also, I'm not sure I agree with the quote associated with the book that describes it as "an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency" mmmm. Finally, here's the bit about sunglasses that I like, it's actually the opening of the novel and very effective one at that, "I have not seen anythign like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind?...The discs are dark, they look opaque from the outside, but he can see through them. He tells me they are a new invention..." Hmm, it isn't as impressive on a second reading, but the way the sunglasses are described in later passages, the way they figure in the narrative as the "affectation" spreads, is very well done, even if sunglasses = bad guy, is a bit of cliché.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Sigh. Barry Lyndon, Barry Lyndon...where to begin. I must confess that I remain mystified as to why Kubrick's epic marathon of a period drama is suddenly being touted as his masterpiece (at least by the BFI).

Loosely based on a novel by Thackeray the film is divided into two parts. The first tells the story of how one Redmond Barry secures the title of Barry Lyndon, along with all the wealth and privilege that come with it. A litany of disasters characterizes the second part, with Redmond eventually losing virtually everything he has managed to steal, pilfer, charm, usurp and swindle. Kubrick treats the film, particularly the second half, as a series of tableaux vivant, an obsessive sequence of painterly images created to mimic 18th century art (The BFI notes that accompanied the screening had quotations from some sort of film academic waxing lyrical about 18th century modes of looking and whatnot). The film is also remarkable for being filmed almost entirely with natural lighting - if hundreds of candles can be said to constitute natural lighting.

Despite all this fanfare, the cinematography fails to impress. The film is admittedly a triumph when it comes to the casting of the supporting characters, however, almost all of whom have the most unusual and arresting faces. Or perhaps it's the costume designer and makeup artists who are the real stars with their ability to sieze on an actor's face and to meld it into a a strange vision of an 18th-century mask or something. Mask is a rather apt word seeing as there's not a lot of emotion on display generally speaking.

The most memorable scene occurs in a carriage as the newly entitled Barry Lyndon and his new wife travel to their palatial country home. Secure in his new position as the lady's husband, Barry subjects her to an intolderable level of cruel indifference. After a repeated request to stop smoking Barry slowly turns to his wife and coldly and very slowly blows smoke straight into her face. I also love the quote from Thackeray at the end, especially as I used it in my Zombie essay, "good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now"

[I've included a lot of images from the film because I think that a large selection is necessary to get a feel for it. And because the images actually seem much more interesting outside of the film than in it]

Galapagos (1985) by Kurt Vonnegut

Not my favourite Vonnegut, but it's still clever, funny, humane and touching.

Memorable moments, plot developments and narrative devices: The entire tale is narrated by the ghost of Leon Trout; said ghost declines to enter the blue tunnel to the afterlife after being decapitated during the construction of the cruise ship which delivers the human survivors to their sanctuary in the Galapagos island; ghost waits for a million years for another opportunity to enter blue tunnel to the afterlife, witnessing the shipwrecked survivors of humanity evolve into seal-like creatures with fins and beaks (and highly attractive nubbins on their fins, vestigal traces of fingers); Biology teacher Mary engages in a little artificial insemination by reaching inside of herself to retrieve the sperm from the island's only male - she dips her index finger into herself and then into the six kanka-bono women who have been shipwrecked with the rest of the crew; Vonnegut places stars (*) in front of the names of characters who are about to die; The *'s start out as a purely amusing device but prove very affective when a character we have grown to have some sympathy with suddenly has a * placed before their name; Gary loves the fact that even after a million years have passed, even after mankind's brains have shrunk and their arms have evolved into fins, people still laugh when someone farts; there's a great description of the mating dance of the blue-footed boobie.

Here's something like a synopsis from the New York Times's original review: ''Galapagos,'' however, seems to scrabble back toward the energies of earlier works. It is the story, sort of, of a second Noah's ark, a 1986 nature cruise booked with celebrities (Mick Jagger, Paloma Picasso, Jacqueline Onassis and others) that in the wake of planetary catastrophe - famine, financial crises, World War III and a virus that eats the eggs in human ovaries - is fated to land on the Galapagos Islands and perpetuate the human race. Humanity ''was about to be diminished to a tiny point, by luck, and then, again by luck, to be permitted to expand again.''

All this may sound like a glittery and Darwinian ''Gilligan's Island'' - not really what ''Galapagos'' is at all. Although certainly the novel has something to do with the giant crush America has on celebrity, the famous people never really do make it into the story, and what we end up with is a madcap genealogical adventure - a blend of the Old Testament, the Latin American novel and a lot of cut-up comic books - employing a cast of lesser-knowns that includes a schoolteacher named Mary Hepburn, an Ecuadorean sea captain named von Kleist, a former male prostitute named James Wait (whose skin color is ''like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria''), a dog named Kazakh (who, ''thanks to surgery and training, had virtually no personality''), plus a narrator who turns out to be none other than the son of Kilgore Trout, that science fiction hack from Mr. Vonnegut's earlier books.

Leon Trout, Mr. Vonnegut's doppelganger, speaks to us, moreover, from a million years hence, from the afterlife, whence he can best pronounce on what was wrong with us 20th-century folk - our brains were too big - and reveal what, through evolution and for purposes of survival, we became: creatures with smaller brains and flippers and beaks. Even if people of the future ''found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths?'' Leon Trout asks. And: ''It is hard to imagine anybody's torturing anybody nowadays. How could you even capture somebody you wanted to torture with just your flippers and your mouth?''

Postscript: Here's the bit I like about the stars, "The two with stars by their names [this follows a list of names] would be dead before the sun went down. This convention of starring certain names will continue throughout my story, incidentally, alerting readers to the fact that some characters will shortly face the ultimate Darwinian test of strength and wiliness".

Frost/Nixon

Well, it's certainly an educational experience, speaking from the point-of-view of someone almost wholly ignorant of the political circumstances of 1970s America. And the performances are unquestionably good. And Ron Howard brings his dispiritingly professional touch to the film, executing everything neatly with a few neat flourishes. [Speaking of the direction: enough with the voyeuristic 'out-of-focus-edge-of-door/window-in-frame' stuff already. Sheesh. Alison Jackson has a lot to answer for in terms of cinematographic trends.] The film is primarily interesting though, as a character study. And I suspect the reason Frank Langella has received critical recognition, while Michael Sheen remains relatively unnoticed, is mostly due to the fact that Nixon comes across as a much more interesting character than Frost. J. Hoberman sums it up perfectly in his review for the Village Voice, "Frost/Nixon's main attraction is neither its topicality nor its historical value, but Langella's re-creation of his Tony-winning performance." Jonathan Gross finds Milk, in an interesting comparison, a far more successful political fillm - and I have to agree with him really. The one way the film is trukly interesting, politically speaking, is the way it engages with the idea that politics has become so entangled with ideas about performance - ideas that are probably more successfully addressed in a stage-play. All in all, I'm pretty sure the play is a more powerful piece of drama. And it looks great too (check the pics above. Liking the blue carpet mucho). Here's another excerpt from the Voice review (love those guys), "In opening up the play, however, the movie unavoidably dissipates its power. Having Nixon's actual lair, the so-called Casa Pacifica, as a location is considerably less compelling than the stripped-down onstage set, in which Langella and Sheen competed not just with each other, but with their giant, multiplied video images. (There's a profound poetic justice in that, as historian David Greenberg has argued; Nixon was the first American president preeminently concerned with the construction of his image.)"

Milk (2008/9)

Snore. Yawn. Meh. It's ok. Only a scene-by-scene dramatization of 'The Times of Harvey Milk', however. The movie is so well-intentioned, methodical and politically ambitious that it's dramatically inert. Some pretty camera-work in the love-scenes. That's it I'm afraid. [Difficult to find images from the movie. Too recent I guess. And 'milk' yields a whole lotta images that have nothing to do with the movie if you're thinking Google's going to be any help.]

Mother of Tears: The Third Mother (2007)

Hee hee hee. Here's Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "We've lost something in the culture of horror movies when a good, solid evisceration at the hands of slobbery, bloodthirsty demons has come to seem old-timey and quaint, a comforting relic of drive-in gorefests and '70s-era Times Square double features. Dario Argento's "Mother of Tears" features one such evisceration, in the movie's first 10 minutes no less. (The unfortunate victim is strangled with her own entrails, a nutso stylistic touch that's the horror-movie equivalent of tying a bright scarf around your neck to liven up a dull outfit.) "Mother of Tears" features other assorted dashes of sick, twisted ingenuity -- a semi-medieval eyeball-stabbing device; a deep slash of a neck wound that causes the victim's head to flap around as if on a hinge -- that may make you wish you'd hung onto that "Mark of the Devil" barf bag. "Mother of Tears" is depraved, bloody and unrepentantly exploitive, and the plot makes virtually no sense.

Asia Argento (Dario's daughter) plays Sarah Mandy, a young woman whose life becomes a nightmare when a sealed stone urn shows up at the Rome museum where she works. Even though the urn is addressed to the museum curator, Michael (Adam James), who is also Sarah's boyfriend, a curious colleague can't resist opening it right away, and that's when the trouble begins. Inside are three ugly stone statues and a pagan ceremonial garment, which looks suspiciously like a cutoff sweat shirt trimmed with glitter glue. But this is one powerful piece of workout wear: It will awaken a leggy supermodel named Mater Lacrimarum (Moran Atias), aka the Third Mother, the last of three powerful witches who, for centuries, spread fear, mayhem and destruction around the world." Read the full review here.

While Stephanie might be a fan, lauding the film's vitality over the grim sadism of Hostel et al, not everyone is as appreciative, not even all of Suspiria's fans. Here are a few excerpts from the less complimentary Village Voice review: "The Mother of Tears is a high-camp hoot—a nut-brain fiasco so awe-inspiringly awful that somewhere in the great beyond, Ed Wood raises his maggoty fist in solidarity...The man who made The Mother of Tears...can't even hurl a baby from a bridge without the Fisher-Price doll bonking to pieces on the way down...This sepulchral pole-dancer [Mom of Tears to you and me], who snacks on tears and presides over a subterranean Plato's Retreat of ornate depravities—anybody care to explain the woman eating a length of Laffy Taffy out of someone's ass?—flexes her demonic might in the first of the movie's splattery showpieces: an attack on a museum staffer who has her teeth bashed out with a pestle before she's eviscerated by homunculi and hanged with her own guts—while a screeching monkey shrieks its encouragement. The eyewitness, Sarah Mandy, played by an unfortunately restrained Asia Argento, will later discuss this event with notable understatement: "Something strange happened to me tonight."

Raw Shark Texts

Here's an excerpt from the Guardian's review, just coz I'm too lazy to do my own synopsis:

"Steven Hall's debut opens, as so many novels seem to do these days, with a young amnesiac losing his memory after an unspecified traumatic event. Eric Sanderson wakes up in a flat with no idea of who or where he is. He finds out only because the old Eric Sanderson, the one before the memory loss, has prepared a series of letters telling him his identity and what he should do next...Eric holes up in his flat with his cat Ian and tries to establish a new identity for himself. He eventually opens mysterious letters from the old Eric (arriving mysteriously at his door), which duly tell him to surround himself with four dictaphones at all times and to assume the blandest false identity possible. All of which will protect him from the Ludovician...a thought fish, a gigantic conceptual shark which "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self". Except it's also, in a way, a real shark which can really eat you. Sort of. Unless you're protecting yourself in a cage of four dictaphones, which create a "non-divergent conceptual loop" that repels it, just like a shark cage.

Still with us? After the first attack by the Ludovician, Eric finds himself, cat in tow, on the trail of the "Un-Space Exploration Committee" to seek out "crypto-conceptual oceanologist" Dr Trey Fidorous. Along the way, he escapes the nefarious Mr Nobody with the sudden help of the beautiful Scout, who bears an uncanny resemblance to [Eric's dead fiancé] Clio. Scout tells Eric about evil mastermind Mycroft Ward (say it slowly), less a villain than a malignant consciousness imprinting himself on innocent people. Perhaps there's a way to kill two birds with one stone. And that, of course, is going to require a conceptual boat.

Yes, this does sound like a novel only a certain type of undergraduate could love, and the list of ultra-cool pastiches is extensive: The Matrix, Memento, Paul Auster, Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves, Chuck Palahniuk, and especially Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. And The Raw Shark Texts only really takes off in its last part, when Hall goes for broke and recreates Jaws - not just referencing it, but actually recreating it, plot lines, order of death, climax and everything.

There is, however, an exuberance here that keeps the self-conscious cult aspects from getting irritating. Hall acknowledges his influences directly and with enthusiasm, and his whimsy with typeface and page layout is usually to a purpose. Even the 50-page flipbook of an approaching shark late in the novel is surprisingly effective and chilling in context. And though his romantic dialogue is hackneyed, he's an effective writer of both horror and adventure."

Ugh. The whole thing was so tiresome and unoriginal - but wilfilly 'experimental' enough to fool total fuddy-duddies into believing what they're reading is pushing any kind of boundary. Hackneyed and infuriating is more like it. I found myself skipping whole sections just to get to the next ludicrous plot development so that the book could just end. Too many tricks, barely any treat.

Oh, yeah, 'Raw Shark Texts' is a take on Rorschach Tests'...