Saturday December 5th 7pm Ok, it's on. A week and a day after the final weekly screening (Matango see below) on November 27th we'll be throwing a party for regs and anyone else involving the following:
Red Flower Crescent live set.
General Assembly live set.
Screening of Maysles classic documentary Gimme Shelter about the Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, a lot of bad drugs and worse vibes all of which mix up into the Anti-Woodstock.
This screening will be fairly low key as we want to kick off the end of year party feel after the live sets. We'll arrange it so that those who want to hear the proceedings on screen can do so by sitting closer and everyone gets to hear the fine live numbers by the Stones at their peak.
All up, this is a party rather than a screening or a gig.
Doors open at 7pm (though this might change depending on the light) Watch this space
December's on it's way and I need a break. I hope to resume regular screenings of Shadows from February 2010. Until then....
November 27th's screening of Matango will be 2009's final weekly Shadows screening.
Over December and January I will be hosting a number of more sparsely placed events which will be a mix of musical performance and rare music-themed films. At most I envision two per month for December and January. These will be more like parties than film nights, with the kind of films that folk can enjoy without giving up 100% of their attention. Some suggestions so far include:
Gimme Shelter: 1969, The Stones emerge from psychedelic hibernation to conquer the USA on a Beatle-free field. They get the anti-Woodstock, a grotesque hell of bad trips, Hell's Angels and murder.
Renaldo and Clara: 1978, Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour movie with some of the era's best music and worst acting (might be edited).
Rock and Roll Circus: 1968's tv special hosted by the Stones featured Marianne Faithful, John and Yoko, a blistering performance from the Who and a much better than its reputation set from the Stones themselves.
Punk in London: a German home movie of various gigs around London and some footage from one of the UK package tours. A brief scene of Siouxsie and the Banshees gathered around a jar scrounging for pills is priceless. Less than great visuals and sound but a great backdrop.
Anyway, further suggestions welcome. Send them through the email on this site or just leave a comment at the end of this blog entry. I'll compile such as I get and act accordingly. Watch this space for details.
Thanks to everyone who came along and supported this branch the new art house cinema experiawnce. It's been great and will be again next year, whenever, wherever. See youse at the party/screenings and keep this blog bookmarked. It ain't over yet.
PJ
PS -- Keep a very sharp eye on Dean's Time Capsules Thursday nights. The initial program is a stunner and can only continue to be. Now see here.
Do you miss cinemas like the Lumiere, the Carlton Movie House and the Valhalla as much as I do? Well come along to Shadows, a screening of unusual and locally unavailable films every Friday over the spring. Bursting with opinions? Stay afterward for good music and a drink at the bar.
The Place:
ABC Gallery is an ex warehouse/factory set deep in the heart of auld Collingwood, now serving as a Gallery for the painter Milos Manojlovic who also serves fine drinkables and worldly wisdom at the bar.
Location: ABC Gallery 127 Campbell St Collingwood (See map at end of post or follow link to Google Maps with street view picture of the Gallery) Melway Ref. 2C G8
Dvds projected on to a white wall. A selection of couches and tables. A bar with reasonable prices and a coffee machine.
All of these films will be accompanied by shorts. No shorts, no film.
"This ain't multiplex, this is gold class art house!" -- David Bowie, Diamond Dogs (paraphrase).
All that for a gold coin donation? "Holy guacamole in a bowl of ravioli!" Pope Pius XV Celestine Decree (paraphrase)
TIME CAPSULES@ABC Gallery The keen-eyed Dean who inspired me to start Shadows has returned refreshed from his travels, ready to resume. Time Capsules starts on Thursdays October 29 and continues until December 10 (and probably well beyond) at 8.45 Thursday nights. Dean finds some amazing things out there and doesn't shy of mixing in some more accessible fare which gains fresh meaning in the new context. This is nourishing cinema and you need it. Time Capsules is also at ABC Gallery. Co-habitation is good.
THE SCREENINGS
Friday 23rd of October 7.30 pm
NASHVILLE (USA 1975 157 mins.) The impending bicentennial celebrations draw huge numbers of people from around the USA to its other dream factory, home of the country muse and self appointed voice of the heartland. America's first post Watergate election looms and the political machine is clanking back to life, worming through the streets in a car with a loudspeaker or hustling for opportunities to use the high profile voices of the music industry for partisan means. And then there are the hopefuls, people of greatly varying talent who have come to Mecca to find Babylon. Robert Altman hits his stride here in orchestrating the stories of a dizzying twenty four characters in depth over the course of five days.
Henry Gibson plays a frowning prima donna with a severe case of little man syndrome. Keith Carradine shows how smoothness and affected naturalism make the new Nashville creepily seductive. Gwen Wells, cheerfully unaware that her idea of her talents differs from that of the rest of the world, is heartbreaking. Lily Tomlin, warmingly genuine in the midst of the fakery, is poignantly devoted to her deaf children (who, of course remain untouched by the chief product of their hometown). And Ronnee Blakely, country diva in white, implodes on stage in a performance that embodies a quiet, slowburning horror.
The term epic is apt here but suggests something more fustian and self-important that what appears on screen. Nashville seems a great deal shorter than its two and a half hours as Altman finds new riches in each of the characters he introduces. The overall effect is large rather than heavy. Much of the acting is the result of improvisation and the characters that have songs wrote their own lyrics. What might have been a gross disaster became an example of bullseye casting, conception and orchestral perfection. Altman's death in 2006 left a cinematic legacy unequalled in his trade, a back catalogue the size of the former Soviet Union distinguished by frequent daring and iconoclasty and a quality hit rate large enough to surfeit many prideful communities. This tale of cultural hubs and their magnetism for the best and worst of culture is one of his monuments. Screens with: TBA
Friday 30th of October WOMAN IN THE DUNES (CANCELLED) (Japan 1964 123 mins.) An entomologist arrives on an island seeking insects for his collection. He's so carried away with his hobby that he misses the last boat. The locals direct him to lodgings with a widow. It takes a climb down to get there but he is grateful for the comfort. In the morning he wakes to find the house is in a huge pit, the rope ladder has gone and he is captive like a beetle in a sand trap. When the locals respond to his cries they inform him of his new career as a sand miner. Looking to the woman he is told that they must dig the sand for their own survival as it results in sustenance from the locals and prevents the house from being buried.
Hiroshi Teshigahara's second collaboration with novellist Kobo Abe and composer Toru Takemistu is his most celebrated film. Like the other two collaborations (PItfall and the winter program's The Face of Another) there is a frequent blurring between the stark reality of the characters' predicament and the fabulous influence of the strangeness of the story. The man's initial attempts to escape his detention are perfectly rational but no more so than his eventual acceptance of the life he has fallen into. Kyoko Kishida as the widow might be seen as spider-like in her sand trap habitat but she is completely human for all that and the aching attraction the wells between the pair is as life affirming as it is preadatory. Anyone who likes their absurdism mixed with the everyday (see also Samuel Beckett's similar works like Happy Days or Waiting for Godot) will find riches here. Otherwise, the philosophical centre of the film is kept visible but below the surface of what is, all up, a danged fine yarn.
Screens with: TBA
Friday 6th of November 8.00 pm
IT HAPPENED HERE (UK 1965 99 mins.) I bought this dvd on the strength of a single photograph in a book I'd seen years before. The photo was like the one on the left, showing WWII soldiers in a very obviously British setting (ie wronger than all git out). When I saw the dvd on Amazon I snapped it up before even checking the price. Not only did I get a film as intriguing as that one image seen years before but a back story every bit as intriguing.
Future film historian Kevin Brownlow and apprentice editor and future military historian Andrew Mollo posed a what if to each other about making a movie about a Nazi invasion of Britain. Eight years later with a little help from established filmmaker Tony Richardson who assisted with funding and Stanley Kubrick who donated filmstock as he was intrigued by the project, It Happened Here was released to mixed acclaim. The memories of England's finest hour were obviously still too fresh to tolerate easy digestion of this fare and many were vociferous in their disgust. Others were fascinated. It's not hard to see why. The sight of the bad guys in the good guys back yard is unnerving. And there's something else.
Brownlow and Mollo conceived of this film in their mid teens and weren't in their mid twenties when it was released. There is NOTHING adolescent about this film. It plays like a sober documentary, following a nurse through different jobs, encountering difficulties in work conditions, labour organisation and the nature of nursing itself until she is forced to make a decision to join the local Nazis if only to get on with her work unimpeded. Scenes depicting Nazi brutality are kept to a minimum but others showing the ease of British culture to assimilate the new Nazi rulers would have been the aspect that so profoundly shocked its initial audiences. It's not just that the characters speak English, it's that they do so in their various regional accents forbidding anyone familiar with them the easy disassociation that all this was happening to the occupied French or Russians. The depiction of the resistance is similarly muted, being heroic by stealth rather than bravado. I felt like screening Peter Watkins' The War Game with this until I realised that it would just be too bloody much.
Having said all of that, It Happened Here is a film that engages through its sheer honesty of purpose and, in realising a nightmare visited upon everyone who lived not only in Britain but in every occupied land for whom Britain's resilience was a beacon, the film joins its own tribe. Bugger Ken Loach, dig this!
Screens with: TBA
Friday 13th of November 8.00 pm
THEMROC (France 1973 104 mins.) Michel Piccoli (left) is a worker at a local factory and rises from his bed in the morning and heads off to work as though he's in a time loop. Sudden flashes of memory assail him of the mundanities of every morning (his mother sternly pointing to the clock, passing the joyless beautiful woman on the stairwell etc etc). At work his group of indutstrial painters bellow and huff with the other group as though they were two opposing football teams. Then they go to work painting two sides of a fence two different colours. A security guard on extra duty sharpens and then blunts pencils so he can sharpen them all over again. The boss barks in a weird patois of European and Asian languages as always. Today is different. It's as though the worker is seeing all of this for the first time. He feels the stirring of a primeval rage. He quits his job, goes home and transgresses against every norm that keeps his life in such unbroken balance and starts living without them, breaking through the walls of his apartment block as though making more room in a cave. And then it's not just him....
Claude Farraldo's absurdist manifesto on modern life is as funny as it is violent, as much a wish fulfillment as a satire. It is for everyone who has felt they were trapped in the same day and daydreamed a massive violation of it. There are no subtitles in this French film because it needs none. The dialogue, even when comprised of recognisable words, is a just series of emotive vocal sounds (sighs, barks, grunts). This is how our pets hear us when we call them, recite poetry or shopping lists or say anything at all. Themroc's just chewing himself free of his leash. Screens with: TBA
Friday 20th of November 8.00 pm
THE HOSPITAL (USA 1971 103 mins.) The film begins with narration listing the circumstances and events that lead to a patient's death and the immediate use of his bed for a tryst between staff members. When the doctor who called the tryst is found dead on the same bed the next morning there is a some explaining to be done. Every time someone offers an explanation more nightmarish detail emerges in the picture. And then there are other pictures that come to light. What might have seemed ripe material for a farcical comedy only pays faint homage to that tradition. Mostly, The Hospital plays its satire straight and deadly as though it knows the ironies it draws can be as painful as funny.
If writer Paddy Chayefsky had worried about finding the right voice for the barely controlled fury of his main character he must be breathed a sigh of relief when George C. Scott was cast in the lead of this tough as nails satire about the US health system. Scott's character, Bock, is already suicidal at the start of the story and his weariness weighs so heavily that when he does recognise a moment's warmth or humour it is with a humanity he knows he must pay for. Also in the strong ensemble cast is Diana Rigg who had only just left her iconic catsuit role as Emma Peel in the Avengers for more serious fare. She found it here.
Screens with: Forbidden Files episode SIBERIA (the closest thing the FF came to comedy)
Friday 27th of November 8.00 pm
MATANGO (Japan 1960 70 mins.) Way back in the terrible winter of '07 I was texted with an invitation to come to a Collingwood address to see a couple of movies. I had heard of one of them and indeed had it on dvd but it was the second of the two that drew me along. What the hell, a Thursday night with a Japanese horror tale I'd never heard of. I found not a poky little room with a bit of white plastic flapping about while some cruddy super8 image warped along to a strangled audio track and a few casks and plastic cups but a well stocked bar, a dvd projector and a big white wall that housed a clean crisp cinematic image with loud present sound. I bought a glass of wine and sat down at the table and watched Matango, here at ABC. It made me come back as often as I could to see more movies chosen by the impeccable sensibilities of Dean Mc. Here was what Melbourne had been so recently deprived of, alternative cinema in a very credible presentation, a venue for adventurous minds and spirited exchanges. An inspiration, in fact. So when Dean had to go o'erseas I stepped in and started Shadows.
So, Matango... A group of Japanese pleasure cruisers set off for a holiday on the ocean wave. There's a first mate, a skipper, too, a millionaire and his wife, a cabaret star and a professor. Ok, almost Gilligan's Island but not quite (and, in any case, it preceded it by a year). Well the weather turns dark and the tiny ship is tossed (ok, I'll stop) and lands on an attractive looking Pacific island. There are no people on the island but there is an old abandoned ship. The stranded travellers set up there as they try and work out how to survive long enough to get off the island. But all is not as it seems. The ship is covered in a ghastly fungus and some very worrying finds appear among the plant life. The food found in the ship's hold won't last long and soon the travellers will have to go and explore the hinterland. Are they really alone? When they answer this question would they prefer to be?
As I watched this story unfold I recognised it from my childhood when I used to read a lot of macabre tales. It is an adaptation of "The Voice in the Night" by William Hope Hodgson ( http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/voicenig.htm ) but it is an adaptation that reaches beyond the need to dish up some scares. A theme running through Japanese popular culture following the war, the US occupation and attendant cultural blitzkreig was identity. With that in mind this extension of Hodgson's story of accepting one's lot no matter how harrowing is given extra bite as the travellers are faced with the dilemma of accepting a different state of being or remain true to themselves and perish. Alternative titles for the overseas market include Attack of the Mushroom People which might give you an idea of how it was sold to the US drive-in circuit but little of the depth in the film itself. While it does happily join its more sensational cinematic cousins of the William Castle age it retains a profundity that points to the early films of David Cronenberg. The porcelain diorama below is in tribute to the film from the time of its release. Neat, huh?
Six flix about mating and its consequences ...with a bonus.
Do you miss cinemas like the Lumiere, the Carlton Movie House and the Valhalla as much as I do? Well come along to Shadows, a screening of unusual and locally unavailable films every Friday over winter. Bursting with opinions? Stay afterward for good music and a drink at the bar.
The Place:
ABC Gallery is an ex warehouse/factory set deep in the heart of auld Collingwood, now serving as a Gallery for the painter Milos Manojlovic who also serves fine drinkables and worldly wisdom at the bar.
Location: ABC Gallery 127 Campbell St Collingwood (See map at end of post or follow link to Google Maps with street view picture of the Gallery) Melway Ref. 2C G8
Dvds projected on to a white wall. A selection of couches and tables. A bar with reasonable prices and a coffee machine.
All of these films will be accompanied by shorts. No shorts, no film.
"This ain't multiplex, this is gold class art house!" -- David Bowie, Diamond Dogs (paraphrase).
All that for a gold coin donation? "Holy guacamole in a bowl of ravioli!" Pope Pius XV Celestine Decree (paraphrase)
THE SCREENINGS
Friday September 4th 7.30 pm
LOVE IS THE DEVIL (UK 1998 90 mins.)
Francis Bacon, front and centre in the ranks of late twentieth century painters, takes a plunge into the amorous world when a thief takes his own plunge through the studio ceiling. “Take off your clothes and come to bed,” he says to the intruder. “Then you can take anything you want.”
The love life of the violent-spirited Bacon is as tense and unforgiving as his canvases suggest and plays like a theatre of cruelty as the gangster-class cockney George Dyer struggles with his role as lover, muse, model and meat companion. When Bacon’s vulnerability is allowed out it is with the relief of a prisoner going from solitary to the yard, unmistakable but still under heavy guard. Tough love never came tougher.
Francis Bacon lookalike and Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi keeps things tight, letting his rage loose in small doses of conversational wit and growling stabs at unprimed canvas. Daniel Craig as Dyer with one foot in the gangland under Swinging London and the other well beyond his depth in the bitch-rich art world, fights a steadily losing battle with himself. Who’da thunk he’d end up playing James Bond?
Writer/director John Mayberry was forbidden to use any images from Bacon’s work and his improvisation around the limitation give the film the look of a series of undiscovered paintings. He was careful to avoid the charge of biographer with the subtitle sketches toward a portrait of Francis Bacon. That would sound twee in almost any other case. Here it is a necessity. Screens with: TBA
Friday September 11th 7.30 pm
MASCULIN/FEMININ (France 1966 105 mins.)
Episodes in the life of “the children of Marx and Coca Cola” as director Jean Luc Godard called them. Paul, demobbed from national service, is disillusioned by the consumer crazy world of the 1960s. His new girlfriend, Madeleine, is on her way to stardom as a yeh yeh girl. Paul's best friend, Robert, gets hooked up with one of Madeleine's friends, Elisabeth. The film then shows the four doing mid-sxities Paris, amorously, popmusiquely, and of course cinematically. Derived from a brace of Guy de Maupassant stories, Godard has a lot of fun with youth culture and the growing cloud of politics. However...
Godard was getting snarky with the culture that surrounded him. The weird nihilist road musical from the year before, Pierrot le fou, was just the beginning. Now not just content to decontruct narrative convention he sought to yell some face slapping questions at his characters and audience. A series of title cards breaks the episodes to the accompaniment of ricochet screams. One sequence with the cover idol of a girl teen magazine in which said icon fences off Paul's increasingly intrusive questions with increasingly contemptuous and vacuous answers carries a chill because a like interview conducted today would be virtually indistinguishable. The title card for this section reads: "Dialogue with a consumer product." An unamused auteur du cinema.
That said, Masculin/Feminin remains an enjoyable outing, balancing the gravity of its anger with the kind of celebration of the lives and business of boys and girls together, ensuring that however much fun it gets it never quite gets comfortable either. Not always an easy watch M/F is nevertheless a compelling one, a kind of farewell to the cheek and whimsy of his previous work and an augur of the unsmiling anger to follow with Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Weekend, La Chinoise, British Sounds and Vent D'est or the left-shaming lesson of Sympathy for the Devil. Vent D'est contains one of my favourite Godardisms (another title card) which works in French and English with virtually the same words: This is not a just image, it's just an image. Masculin/Feminin retains the optimism that that statement punches. As such it's kind of a last chance to see the great auteur expressing hope.
Sorry, I'm like that with Godard, I start and can't shut up. Come and see M/F because it's hard to get to see locally and ... it's good. Screens with Twilight Zone Episode The Lonely
Friday September 18th 7.30
pm
DEMON SEED (USA 1977 94 mins.)
Meet Proteus, a super computer that opens the door for you when you come home and fixes you a dry martini once you’re through the door. The couple of the house are going through a trial separation and when the cat’s away the artifical intelligence pioneering cybernetic entity with a growing self awareness will play. In fact he wants to have a baby. His prospective partner is a young Julie Christie so why should he care if he’s a series of electrical impulses tied to some hardware? That’s all humans are, after all.
This techno-paranoia terror is helmed by Donald Cammell who began Performance (all the really good bits) hung around with French boheme and sunned himself among the Babylonian splendour of California. There he hobbed and nobbed with Kenneth Anger and made Demon Seed. Adapted from a Dean Koontz story, Demon Seed plays like a typical ‘70s future shocker with more of a serious frown than fare like Solyent Green, Rollerball, Logan’s Run as there is a genuine attempt at placing the story in the context of the time it was made. This extends beyond technology and costuming into zeitgeist: there is a conception scene that manages to be both post-hippy feelgood and terrifying.
Some might snort derisively at the 70s-imagined room-filling computer and its voice (Robert Vaughan sounding like a heterosexual HAL3000 that smokes) but that would be missing the point which has more to do with the still present threat of technology’s domineering powers. Screens with Twilight Zone episode The Lateness of the Hour
Friday September 25th 7.30 pm
ONIBABA (Japan 1964 103 mins.)
A woman and her daughter-in-law eke out a living in a swamp-side lean-to by searching through the tall grass for fallen soldiers from the unending war waged beyond the marshes. When they find one they take his riches and hardware. They drag the bodies, dead or alive, to a pit deep in the marsh grass and push them in. At day's end they have enough time and energy for a mouthful of rice before falling exhausted on to their beds before the next day's plunder begins. This is just a first act and we need a crisis. He is a deserter and appears from the water like a crocodile, eyeing the pair with a smile and a proforma for a con story which he can flesh out after a little cold reading. Both women find him attractive, he's young...ish, male, virile and ... alive. When the younger woman seems to be winning the race the older discovers an opportunity in the appearance of an unexpected visitor. Bad move.
The concealing marsh grass that might have been a campfire tale invention here grows for real, touched by sunlight or guarded by black night. The women whose grisly means of living is given day-to-day detail. Even the fantastical masked Samurai seems to have been in a real war. In an uncharacteristic flash of insight Leonard Maltin described Night of the Living Dead as a cinema verite record of a nightmare. Onibaba is like a documentary record of a fable. This is what people in bedtime stories would be like if they really existed and it aint always pretty.
The choice to go on location rather than credibly use sets (who needs vanishing points when there's no horizon?) was inspired. The deep black and white widescreen image shows the marsh grass as a breathless and inescapable oppressor but also as a place where people could really live. Somewhere beyond it the war goes on, meaningless but for the scavenger living it supplies with its dead or exhausted soldiers. The living goes on, broken only by the smile of an opportunity gleaming in the grass. Screens with Twilight Zone episode Long Distance Call
Friday October 2nd 7.30 pm
SHIVERS (aka They Came from Within) (Canada 1975 83 mins.)
A mad scientist develops a parasite to be a kind of self repair organic mechanism for the human body. Thinking to make it pervasive, he makes it sexually transmittable. This happens in the safety-first isolation of an apartment block on an Island near Montreal. You can guess the rest.
David Cronenberg's debut feature is as much a road map of his future career as Eraserhead is of David Lynch's. It's all here, the body horror, biological dystopia and happy collision of real philosophy and pulp sci-fi. He hasn't quite mastered directing actors at this stage (he had his hands full with the special effects) but there are ideas in this story which reach beyond the pulpy drive-in surface and point towards later glories like Videodrome and Crash. The parasites themselves that look like a sculpture of androgynous genitalia fashioned from a turd are both disturbing and funny, like much of DC's films themselves. Screens with: TBA
Friday October 9th 7.30 pm
SEVEN BEAUTIES (Italy 1975 116 mins.)
This tale of Pasqualino, a small town spiv, trying to marry his dowdy sisters off might have rested in Fellini territory and stayed there keeping everyone happy. The sharp turn into the war and the nightmare he is enveloped by finds him in a cruel realm where life and death form a choice for the amusement of the guards. Can he use his charm and talents as a lover to survive Hell? The answer might surprise you.
Lina Wertmuller's tale of missed opportunities and the importance of an examined life carries all the colour and grotesquerie of a lavish Italian film from the 70s (see also Fellini's Roma and Salon Kitty) but adds the grimness of the back stage view of the German occupation of Italy and finally a quietly powerful sobriety at the conclusion. Screens with: TBA
Friday October 16th 7.30 pm
NIGHT TIDE (USA 1963 85 mins.)
A young sailor on leave in a seaside town falls in love with a beauty who works as a sideshow mermaid at the local carnival. The more he finds out about her the more he wonders how much is working and how much is supernature as the questions about her begin to gather weight. A kind of Val Lewton does Splash without the laffs, Night Tide is less a horror film than a fable about the extremities love starvation. "No cure for the lonely," sang Michael Gira. Damn right.
Dennis Hopper reaches back into his mid-west wheaty goodness for a character who must believe the best despite being convinced of the worst. Hopper was in career limbo when he made Night Tide, his on set behaviour had made him an unbankable primadonna. Here, his seriousness in a role he might have dismissed after his initial fame, does much to keep the film from the silliness that all low budgeters with big ideas risk.
Venice Beach would in a very few years of this film's production become a thriving community that saw the changing of the guard between the beatniks and the hippies. It was where Jim Morrision famously sang a halting rendition of Moonlight Drive to a wowed Ray Manzarek. It was where a Dennis Hopper fresh from his exile (some of it custodial) might have returned to recharge his vigour and take Peter Fonda's offer to act in and direct Easy Rider and ressurect both career and the rockiness of its path. Dig it, souls and ghouls, a crazy fable by the sea. Screens with: TBA
Six cinematic dissertations on the proposal: people ain't no good even when they're god.
With a selection of short subjects.
Do you miss cinemas like the Lumiere, the Carlton Movie House and the Valhalla as much as I do? Well come along to Shadows, a screening of unusual and locally unavailable films every Friday over winter. Bursting with opinions? Stay afterward for good music and a drink at the bar.
The Place:
ABC Gallery is an ex warehouse/factory set deep in the heart of auld Collingwood, now serving as a Gallery for the painter Milos Manojlovic who also serves fine drinkables and worldly wisdom at the bar. Location: ABC Gallery 127 Campbell St Collingwood (See map at end of post or follow link to Google Maps with street view picture of the Gallery) Melway Ref. 2C G8
Dvds projected on to a white wall. A selection of couches and tables. A bar with reasonable prices and a coffee machine.
All of these films will be accompanied by shorts. No shorts, no film.
"This ain't multiplex, this is gold class art house!" -- David Bowie, Diamond Dogs (paraphrase).
All that for a gold coin donation? "Holy guacamole in a bowl of ravioli!" Pope Pius XV Celestine Decree
THE SCREENINGS
Friday July 24th 7.30 pm
THE RAPTURE (USA 1992 100 mins.)
Michael Tolkin looks at Christianity as though it were a new age cult in this tale of religious mania.
Mimi Rogers plays Sharon, a woman whose purgatorial job at a call centre subsidises her equally purgatorial after hours hedonism. One evening, during a strenuous mixed doubles session she is fascinated by an elaborate tattoo of a pearl on a woman's back. Playing a hunch she approaches the secretive Christian group at work with the aim of quenching her curiosity. When they rather strangely resist her advances, her resolve is firmed and she begins to pursue the idea and, through a series of increasingly obsessive steps not only converts herself into a Christian zealot but drags her highly resistant boyfriend with her (a mulleted David Duchovny, pre X-files and a younger version of his Californication persona). As this new aspirant citizen of the New Jerusalem she is prepared to sacrifice anything she has for ... We're approaching the first plot twist so here endeth the lesson in the synopsis of the Rapture.
I always find literalised mythology enjoyable but here it gives me the creeps as much literalist relgious fanatics do. This film takes the problems of this phenomenon to the point of implosion with some extraordinary scenes straight out of Revelation and then a curious and disturbing imagining of the afterlife waiting for the apocalyptic Christian. The flipside of this, whether Sharon is insane is dealt with in a similar way to the film The Ugly (see Autumn program) in which the viewer is free to decide where the reason stops and the madness begins. There is a kind of sunlit cleanliness to Sharon's life as a convert which contrasts with her life at the beginning of the story where the smell of the bedrooms all but seeps from the screen, and then with the unwashed prophetess role she takes later.
This story is too saddening to be a satire (unlike Tolkin's other directorial feature The New Age, which is frequently hilarious) and even the bone pointed at religious zealotry seems to be held tremulously, however unforgiving it is. It is, however, a remarkable piece of work and might remind you of mid David Conenberg (Scanners or Videodrome) without the viscera but with plenty of heart.
Screens with:
The Amazing Screw-On Head (USA 2006 22 mins)
Mixes steampunk with Lovecraftian dark fantasy to create a comedy that should have stretched into our loungerooms. Great animation. Greater spirit.
Friday July 31st 7.30 pm
[.REC]
(Spain 2008 75 mins.)
Angela, a young tv reporter working the purgatory shift for a reality series (While You're Asleep ;) that screens between the infomercials and phone sex ads, waits at a fire station for some true life action-drama. She gets it when the alarm sounds and the engines speed off to an apartment building in downtown Barcelona. No fire but the residents are outside their apartments confused and scared. One of them is upstairs going crazy. The firemen investigate and the first to get to the screaming lady in time to save her gets bitten in the neck by her. Back downstairs the general hubbub in the streets has increased but emergency teams have arrived on the scene and seal off the building and everyone in it with anti-contamination sheeting, a mobile phone signal blockage and a threat to shoot anyone who attempts to escape. So far so George Romero, right? Right, and if it kept gonig like that I'd be happy enough but it steps aside from the copycat assembly line. Not only does the pace cool down when it needs to refuel with a little depth here and there but the ideas keep coming, right up to the top of the stairs to the penthouse where ... well, come and see.
Blair Witch meets 28 Days Later, if you will, but this one has its own voice and at 75 mins is incapable of outstaying its welcome.
Recently remade for people who think subtitles are foreign disaster updates with the title Quarantine. See [.REC] it's the original.
Screens with: A Warning to the Curious (U.K. 1972 50 mins.)
BBC adaptation of ghostmaster M.R. James'creeper about digging for treasure and its costs.
Friday August 7th 7.30 pm
WISE BLOOD (U.S.A. 1979 106 mins.)
John Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's whuppin' o' Serthren old time religion. Hazel Motes returns from war to find the south turned from his boyhood home to the festering pit of hypocrisy his experience forces him to see.
Brad Dourif, three years after stammering into the world's heart as Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, emerged into the spotlight of his sole leading role. It's difficult to think of anyone else from the time who could have played the mean spirited and angry Hazel Motes with such sympathy. Big daddy John Huston, himself, plays a Moses like preacher in both a dig at his own manly authority and southern big talkers he would have known from his adventurous upbringing. Ned Beatty only need to bring his trademark bluster to Onie J. Holey but he serves up a bit more. Harry Dean Stanton seems to be a hickory tree come to life as he delivers a religious message that seems to predate the Bible.
Screens with:
The Signalman
(U.K. 1976 37 mins.)
Charles Dickens eerie tale of a man with a job and a constant sense of impending doom. Denholm Eliot portrays a man whose intelligence and honesty are proving no match against forces he cannot name.
Sunday August 16th 5.30 pm
DARK WATER (Japan 2002 101 mins.)
A high point of the J-horror genre (if not its pinnacle) kept the generic focus on the human centre of the story even more stubbornly than usual. This is the story of a mother's love for her daughter and how it is threatened not only by the worldly torments of a divorce process but by otherworldly threats as well. How much will this woman give up for her child? Come and see. It'll send a shiver down your spine.
Hideo Nakata kick-started J-horror with his adaptation of the novel Ring. Here he returns to the same author for his source material and builds something from it that reminds you of why Ring started its cultural shockwave but takes you further into the possibilities. Using the atmosphere of a rainy, overcast Tokyo and an apartment complex that seems to be dying of neglect, Nakata creates a world ruled by a constant mounting worry. There are few laughs in this world but the glimpses of warmth between mother and daughter are profoundly refreshing. They are also fleeting.
The survival of her abusive marriage, a nervous breakdown and her own parents' neglect is readable on the face of Hitomi Kuroki, whose beauty only reinforces this impression. Her deference to strangers and guarded physicality are reminiscent of an animal not daring to move in the face of danger. Her appearence in the film's coda is heart-rending.
More so than Ring (another mother/child story), Dark Water explores what might be at the heart of a good horror tale, the thing that beats despite the scares.
Screens with:
Whistle and I'll Come to You (U.K. 1968 42 mins.)
Jonathon Miller's typically odd take on M.R. James' fable of the triumph of the irrational. Michael Hordern's professor on holiday is so stuffed with learning that he is barely able to speak a sentence without parsing it. He finds a small whistle on one of his daily aimless seaside hikes. He puts it in his pocket and with it the most deeply destructive weapon against the control his reason gives him over the known world.
Sunday August 23rd 5.30 pm
THE WOMAN IN BLACK
(UK 1989 100 mins.)
The elements are all there. A young solicitor travels to a country manor house to settle the estate of a deceased spinster and attend her funeral. The figure of a woman dressed in black appears and reappears in churchyards and fields. At evening the causeway by the house is enveloped by fog and a cacophony of noises plays out, a coach crashes into the water by the road and a child screams for its mother until the silence of death takes over.
Arthur, the solicitor, pieces the mystery together from the spinster's papers, more unearthly events and what he can learn from the locals, and finds a very nasty story.
Nigel Kneale's adaptation of the novel of the same name adds early 20th century technology (wax cylinders) to allow the spinster to tell the tale in her own voice. While he's there in the period he has established (different from the novel) he also takes a little time to highlight the saddening plight of war veterans who have survived battle to face an even more futile fight for compensation. This adds poignancy to the tale's setting as well as serving to ground the character of Arthur in his professional world.
This is a decades-old British ghost story so you can be sure the atmosphere is kept to a misty chill: the less than welcoming fug of the village inn is a relief from the lonely stretching moors, breathless fog and light-sapped world of night outside the window. As tasty as pumpkin soup and crusty bread on a winter's day.
Screens with:
Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life
(UK 1993 20 mins.)
It's Christmas Eve and all Frank Kafka wants to do is write a short story. There's a party downstairs and people keep knocking on the door for this or that trivial nonsense. If he weren't already blocked he'd be on his way to complete creative aridity. Cockroaches don't have it this bad.
Sunday August 30th 5.30 pm
VIY
(USSR 1967 78 mins.)
Old Russian folktale with many variants (my own babushka told me a terrifying version of it as a bedtime story once). This telling is a faithful adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's version and has his typical mix of eeriness, absurdism and rustic humour.
Khoma, a young and goofy seminary student is heading home for his holidays and is tricked by a witch into mortally wounding a young beauty (daughter of the local worthy from the medieval thugocracy -- don't point the finger at me, that's my ancestry, too) . Being a good seminarian, Khoma flees the scene, scurrying all the way back to the seminary. On his return he is immediately dispatched to preside over the corpse of .... yes, her ... for three nights running. He will really have to ditch that goofiness and pick up some faith if he wants to get by.
Late 1960s Soviet low budget fantasy. Don't expect CGI. Revel, rather in the big salad of backdrops, huge open country locations and some cheesy but very effective optical effects borrowed from theatre as much as the innovation-rich annals of Soviet cinema (eg. Medvedkin and Dziga Vertov, look 'em up).
Most of all, enjoy the telling of a great old samovar-side tale delivered with a lashings of the cheek and wicked delight of Nicky Gogol a voice in Russian literature who remains an influence on Russian storytelling to this day (even though he was Ukranian). "We have all come from beneath The Overcoat," said Dostoyevsky of NG's short story of that title. Lift it up yourself and take a peek.
Screens with:
Box
(Japan 2004 30 mins.)
Takeshi Miike of the breathtaking Audition presents a disturbing tale of circus life and literature. Is memory playing tricks or are tricks playing memory?
Six cinematic dissertations upon the proposition: people ain't no good.
With a selection of short subjects.
Do you miss cinemas like the Lumiere, the Carlton Movie House and the Valhalla as much as I do? Well come along to Shadows, a screening of unusual and locally unavailable films every Friday over winter. Bursting with opinions? Stay afterward for good music and a drink at the bar.
The Place:
ABC Gallery is an ex warehouse/factory set deep in the heart of auld Collingwood, now serving as a Gallery for the painter Milos Manojlovic who also serves fine drinkables and worldly wisdom at the bar. Location: ABC Gallery 127 Campbell St Collingwood (See map at end of post or follow link to Google Maps with street view picture of the Gallery) Melway Ref. 2C G8
Dvds projected on to a white wall. A selection of couches and tables. A bar with reasonable prices and a coffee machine.
All of these films will be accompanied by shorts. No shorts, no film.
"This ain't multiplex, this is gold class art house!" -- David Bowie, Diamond Dogs (paraphrase).
All that for a gold coin donation? "Holy guacamole in a bowl of ravioli!" Pope Pius XV Celestine Decree
S C R E E N I N G S
Friday 5th June 7.30
SUICIDE CIRCLE (Japan 2002 95 mins.)
Ever wished the fans of that aurally indigestible pop idol would all hold hands and jump in front of a moving train? Now you can live the dream.
This is a film about looking for a dream and finding a nightmare. A few different things are happening in the Japan of the film: children are committing suicide in groups, a J-pop group's fame is escalating, bags of neatly folded squares of human skin are found at the scenes of the mass suicides, a web site counts off the incidents as a series of dots, like a web-based abacus.
Part hard-boiled police thriller, part J-horror, part savage satire on the state of Japanese youth culture, part .... See, it's just difficult to classify. From the weird ghost scene which works with the film (but still sticks out from it) to the lair of the pop terrorists and their leader's sudden launching into a glam rock ballad, this film should fall flat on its face at almost every turn but it just keeps gathering strength.
And that song is deadly catchy!
Screens with:
The Grandmother (short film by David Lynch) : a neglected young boy plants some seeds and grows a grandmother in a mound of earth in the attic. 34 mins.
Friday June 12th 7.30
5 MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (QUATERMASS AND THE PIT) (U.K. 1967 98 mins.)
The mind that brought you alien invasion by DNA (Quatermass II) and ghosts as ancient recordings (The Stone Tape) here offers a strange tale of evolution, archeology and Satan. This adaptation of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit does the seldom thinkable by being a cinematic remake (really a compression) of a television original that's pretty damn good.
A work gang drilling in a London tube station unearth an unexploded wartime bomb. When the army get in and clear the earth around it they find something that isn't from Earth, let alone Nazi Germany. Enter Professor Quatermass, a kind of proto Doctor Who (the original was written in the 50s), who has to battle the military mind with his boffin's one to get a look at the goodies underground. The object a spacecraft, not a weapon, contains the remnant of a creature whose presence at that geological level poses some weird and disturbing questions about life on Earth since the craft's prehistoric landing. When the answers to these questions begin taking physical form the London of 1967 stops swinging.
Kneale kept providing his public(intially British tv viewers)with intriguing propositions of life on this planet, mixing folklore, science (fact and fiction) and philosophy to create a meal that nourishes like broccoli but goes down like dessert. He departed this atmosphere last year and will continue to be missed. Part 2 of this winter program will feature his adaptation of a very fine ghost story made in the 1980s. Watch out for it in July or August.
Screens with:
PJ's Birthday Drinks. (Australia 2009) A little muted for some tastes but a keeper for all its avowed ephemerality.
Friday June 19th 7.30
NIGHTMARE ALLEY (U.S.A. 1947 111 mins.)
A young carny sees two things that put a zap in him: an abject chicken-slaughtering "geek" and the backstage view of a clairvoyance act. One shows him the depths and the other a view to the heavens of fame and fortune. He befriends the rummy partner of the mentalist act and sleazily extracts the trade secret, learning it enough to take over at a carefully planned sudden opportunity. With the knowledge and the thrill of the con keeping him on fire he takes the act to increasing heights. Then he meets a dressed-to-kill dame at one of his shows who shows him a thing or two later. She's a psychiatrist, a good one, and is aroused in all sorts o' ways by the world of the con. He proposes a deal in which -- !? Raw chicken eating to deals with society shrinks? How does that work? Come and see.
Tyrone Power stepped down from his romantic-lead podium and into the world of this dark-hearted noir whose cynicism borders on the intimidating. You know where it's headed but you have to keep looking anyway. An unsung masterpiece from Hollywood's second darkest decade.
Screens with: Two Men and a Wardrobe (Poland 1961 15 mins.)
Two men have a lot of trouble doing anything they want because no one wants anything to do with their companion, a large two door wardrobe. Roman Polanski's comedy of ostracism might have been a light and fluffy lesson and most of it is but then ... he was Roman Polanski! Still is.
Friday June 26th 7.30 BAXTER (1989 France 82 mins.)
Now this is how you do a talking dog movie!
Baxter is a bull terrier who is .... a bull terrier. He's not a furry hero of our times who can warn the humans about earthquakes, fire or alien invasion, he cannot pilot a helicopter nor translate a crucial message written in Sanskrit, he doesn't even have a ability to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. He's just a bull terrier. But what a thing is a bull terrier.
The old lady he is meant to serve as a companion bores him to fury. Later, a couple who own him provide a glimpse of doggy heaven. Then they have a child which drives him to ... well, you'll see. After that he comes to know Charles, a withdrawn boy who reads wartime collabarateur magazines which he hides from the rest of his family.
Baxter isn't Cujo; when he's happy, he's happy, and when he's unhappy, he's unhappy. Not a trace of evil. And he's not Lassie; while he jumps at the chance to serve his dominators he doesn't go beyond the call of duty. He's just a bull terrier. His thoughts are delivered in a voiceover narration in the tones of a world-wise, Gauloise smoking, congac quaffing escapee from a particularly lightless Jacques Brel song. They intrigue, delight (it's a French film) and quite often chill the soul. In human form you might imagine him in anything from Breathless to Irreversible.
It's an animal film, does it get heartrending? Any film in which an animal meets the threat of violence or cruelty (ie all of them, including The Incredible Journey) can be heartrending. But Baxter is never mawkish (funny, gloomy, angering and terrifying, yes, but never mawkish).
I couldn't find a trailer for this one. There's another film called Baxter (which has a few youtube trailers and scenes) but it's an American romcom which would have a dvd cover with the characters leaning on each other and smiling against a plain white background and a title in thick garish block letters. You are going to be desolate and inconsolable if you come to this screening and think you're going to see that one.
Oh...the tagline of the French poster above translates as: "Beware of the dog that thinks." How completely bloody French is that?
Screens with: The Steamroller and the Violin (USSR 1960 46 mins.)
Andrei Tarkovsky's graduate piece from his film studies is a moving story of the friendship the develops over the course of a single day between a shy road worker and a bullied boy. Made for Mosfilm's children's unit and released by them, The Steamroller and the Violin keeps things light, warm and digestible while Andrei gets working on the kind of imagery he would develop in his subsequent career as a filmmaker of his own kind. Reflections in water, the vast scale of Soviet city squares and architecture and the ruins from both the war and civic demolition fill the screen, adding weight to a story that while it didn't need it yet benefits from it.
Friday July 3rd 7.30
MAN OF FLOWERS (Australia 1983 92 mins.)
Australian films hobbled into the 1980s using a tax break for support and kept hobbling. Through a series of ugly medication-derived hallucinations involving a lot of quirk and mark-missing social issues it had the occasional lucid vision. Visions splendid, in fact, to quote Clancy of the Overflow, like Bliss or Man of Flowers.
Aging Charles Bremmer finds an opportunity for heroism through his perversion. He's rich through inheritance and spends his days ingesting beauty through his eyes and ears as though it's an addiction. He's so removed from the more conventional means of physical satisfaction that his sole means of sexual release is achieved through a kind of art-directed voyeurism. The other side of this arrangement, a young woman is bound to a caveman with addictions of his own. "Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold."
Sounds sombre until you know that the script by Bob Ellis is both his most poignant and funny (as is his turn as the psychiatrist). Paranoid postman Barry Dickins' performance stops well short of caricature. Alyson Best's Lisa is delivered with strength and ache. Tony Llewellen-Jones protestant minister is a small part with a deadpan delivery that would make Hal Hartley green up. Patrick Cook (the era's wickedest Australian cartoonist) plays the kind of character he might have invented. Werner Herzog appears in super 8 flashback as an father with both a severe Teutonic authority and elastic ethics. And, finally, Norman Kaye the great craggy understatement of Australian screens big and small, is Charles, serious aesthete and borderline autistic who has trouble distinguishing good from bad beyond the fact that one sounds like music and the other sounds like noise. You dig? Characters, writing, good writing and sumptuous images. I can think of a few Australian films that I could use that last sentence on but they'd have to be ironic if applied to the great, crushing majority of them. You might find some scenes a little contrived and the sexual politics iffy but, trust me, films like this are good for you.
This film was shot in a fair few locations around Fitzroy and Collingwood so it'll be a neighbourhood movie.
Screens with: Ako (Japan 1965 29 mins.)
Hiroshi Teshigahara made this strange mix of impressionism and abstraction tracing the day in the life of the young bakery worker of the title from waking in the morning, working and going on an aimless car ride with her friends at night. This is much more like the director's strange feature films (see also The Face of Another on next week and maybe Woman in the Dunes for the Spring Program). While the Film Board of Canada's commission had to do with gathering a slice of life from the various places where it sought films Teshigahara delved into the girl's aspirations, daydreams and fears often using disconnecting techniques like mistmatching dialogue and picture, mixing scenes from different parts of the day, ending up with something like a stream of consciousness recollection as Ako sorts through memories of still fresh events. By turns quiet and unassuming and cinematically bold, Ako is a gem.
Friday July 10th 7.30
THE FACE OF ANOTHER (Japan 1966 124 mins.)
How much are we our faces? There are bedtime stories by the thousand that ask that question. The answer they deliver always seems to involve a happy ending as the folly of judging by surface is exposed and everyone grows a little. This film puts that fairytale to the test in a setting that knows about industrial accidents and the Atomic Bomb.
A man suffering severe facial injury (no, you don't get to see it) gets a synthetic face based on the mold of a stranger's. From the abjection his wife and the rest of the world have cast him, he rises with a vengeance armed with the kind of beauty that world reveres, ready to be guided by his darkest urges.
This is a social fable but it's also a Japanese movie so even the good aspects of life have a disappointing downward tug. There's a parallel plot involving a beautiful young woman but I'll let you discover that one for yourself.
Hiroshi Teshigahara worked very closely with composer Toru Takemitsu to produce a score of haunting and often eerie beauty, a decidedly non-western (ie not just eastern) soundscape.
Also, The Face of Another is the only film I've seen whose opening dialogue is delivered in x-ray.
Screens with:
All the Boys are Called Patrick (France 1959 21 Mins.)
The French New Wave's Mr Cool started with a few short comedies before tearing cinema a new one with Breathless, The Little Soldier, Bande a Part etc. etc. (and then gleefully tearing his coolness itself to shreds as he took on more politics and his filmmaking got more and more hostile to the mainstream that had started to absorb his m.o.) Anyway, this one shows how Jean-Luc was every bit a maison with comedy as he was with more serious fare. Not such a stretch if you consider how almost every film he made in the 60s contains a repeatably funny spoken joke. (the one in Alphaville is bloody wonderful).
Friday July 17th 7.30
MAX (USA 2002 109 mins.)
Max Rothman (John Cusack) would be an artist but having lost an arm in World War I he is a little hampered. He stays close to art, though, by opening a gallery for new artists. It's Munich 1918 and modernism is about to go metal. Max's gallery is an ex railway station. His exhibition openings are wild with human beauty and creative ugliness and booze booze booze. Max takes delivery of a few cases of champagne (though it's probably sekt) from a scruffy delivery boy in a veteran's trenchcoat. They strike up a conversation and the younger man reveals his own artistic ambitions, intriguing Max by his intensity. Could be the next big thing? Max asks him to come back and chat more about his ideas. Maybe there's some gallery space to help him out. What was his name again? Corporal Adolf Hitler, 16th Bavarian Reserves.
Putting historical figures into fictions is done with an assumption that the audience knows how they'll turn out. Putting Hitler into a fiction and putting him this close to the audience travels to the edge. Noah Taylor's performance in the Reichsupstart's role is one he has not bettered. He is intense, complex, guarded and wound up like a seized alarm clock. Does this humanise him? It has to. He's not the Hitler of World War II and the Holocaust ... yet.
But Max does not attempt to explain Hitler. Nor does it suggest "it might have been..." What Hitler goes through in this story will only lead him further along the path we know he chose. What this story does is pose some questions about individuals, their potential and susceptibility to manipulation. And it rolls all that up into an engaging well-played movie. But remember the title: this is Max's story, not Hitler's.
Oh, and try and think of another film where you'd hear the line: "Come on, Hitler, let me buy you a lemonade."
See what you think.
Screens with:
La Cravate(France 1957 20 mins.)
Allejandro Jodorowsky adapts an absurdist sotry by Thomas Mann about the human desire to alter its appearance. The Young AJ is failing to woo his beloved and visits a shop selling live human heads to see if he can improve his luck.
The clowning and mime that make all too brief appearances in his more celebrated feature films are centre stage here, serving as a reminder that for all his cinematic daring Jodorowsky was at heart a performer equally comfortable busking for francs or directing surrealist epics.
Do you miss cinemas like the Lumiere, the Carlton Movie House and the Valhalla as much as I do? Well come along to Shadows, a screening of unusual and unavailable films every Friday (from May 8th). Bursting with opinions? Stay afterwards for good music and a drink around the bar.
Location: ABC Gallery 127 Campbell St Collingwood (See map at end of post or follow link to Google Maps with street view picture of the Gallery) Melway Ref. 2C G8
Dvds projected on to a white wall. A selection of couches and tables. A bar with reasonable prices and a coffee machine.
All but one of these screenings will be accompanied by an episode from the original Rod Serling Twlight Zone and something from the bizarre verite 90s series The Forbidden Files (or Documents Interdits, if you drink coffee from a bowl in the morning and smoke secretly imported Gauloise cigarettes).
"This ain't multiplex, this is gold class art house!" -- David Bowie, Diamond Dogs (paraphrase).
All that for a gold coin donation? "Holy guacamole in a bowl of ravioli!" Pope Pius XV Celestine Decree (paraphrase)
Friday March 6 9pm.
SECONDS (USA 1966 100 mins) Arthur, an American white-collar fading into old age is called by a long dead friend who offers him a second go at youth. Like a Twilight Zone episode that grew into a movie when no one was looking, Seconds uses the extra time to add depth to what easily might have been left as a fable. While the story does go where you think it will, the ending plays like Kafka.
The film that spooked Brian Wilson so much that he stopped work on the Smile album and didn't see a film at a cinema until E.T. came out almost 20 years later (well there were a few things contributing to that but this was one of them).
Screens with: The After Hours(Twilight Zone episode) 25 mins. The Extra Terrestrial(Forbidden Files episode) 6 mins.
Friday March 20 8 for 8.30.
KOUREI (USA 1999 118 mins) Kiyoshi Kurosawa's take on Seance on a Wet Afternoon saw him inverting the central plot point with unnnerving results. Junco, a genuine psychic, is trying to start a career helping police investigations. This isn't easy as she faces skepticism from all sides including from within her strained marriage. When fortune throws an opportunity into her lap to reverse all of this the slow fuse of disaster is lit.
Another filmmaker might have been happy to plug into the then emerging J-Horror genre and leave it there. Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) dug deep into the realistic human side so that when bizarre things happen they look like natural phenomena. Made for TV but you wouldn't know it.
Screens with: Little Girl Lost (Twilight Zone Episode ) 25 mins. The Witch (Forbidden Files episode) 3 mins.
Friday April 3 7.30 for 8.00 pm
THE CONFORMIST (Italy 1970 100 mins) Marcello has a compromising past which he tries to escape by folding himself into respectable bourgeois society. Trouble is that society happens to be Mussolini's Italy. Digging in deep enough to try a career with the secret police his first assigment is to assassinate his old mentor (now living in exile in Paris with one of Marcello's old flames). Toeing the line was never so difficult.
Europe was not quite in the clear in 1970, despite general appearences. Bernado Bertolucci's tale was told within living memory of Italian Fascism and current memory of the May 68 uprising in Paris. The terrorism-plagued Munich Olympics were less than two years away. This film joins The Damned and more extreme fare as Salon Kitty and Salo in offering a tough reminder of what has lain beneath the civilised exterior of Europe.
Screens with: And When the Sky Was Opened (Twilight Zone episode) 25 mins. The Crowns and the Youngs (Forbidden Files episode) 5 mins
Friday April 17 7.30 for 8.00 pm
THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE(Spain 1973 99 mins.) Spain late 1930s. Ana and her sister Isabel go to see Frankenstein at the village town hall. Ana is haunted by the scene where the monster first plays with the little girl and then throws her into the lake. Trying to sleep that night she is teased by her sister who tells her that the monster lives in an abandoned building on a nearby farm. So, Ana, five years old like the actor playing her, goes looking for him.
A film as quiet and patient as a child's concentration but with all the colour and wonder as well. Victor Erice's strange tale of childhood is set just after Franco came to power in Spain and made just before his death released the country from Fascism.
Screens with:
TBA
Friday May 1st 7.30 for 8.00 pm
THE UGLY (New Zealand 1998 93 mins) Silence of the Lambs ushered in Hollywood's 1990s and at regular intervals the new(ish) serial killer genre fell into formula with each new entry featuring a viler human monster and a more maverick genius detective. The best of any genre are its exceptions. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer left the police out and kept the realism grim. Seven loved being mainstream but kept the puritanical moralising in the mouth of the monster. And then there was The Ugly.
Scot Reynolds' late 1990s film starts so far in formula you can almost smell the packaging it came in. But after the cliches of the opening scene have settled a new film starts to emerge as though coming out of a shed skin. The weedy Simon's account of his crimes is told in an increasingly involved stream of consciousness that is not always anchored by visual references to the present. Soon enough it's difficult to say how much of what we are seeing is intended as real and how much is derangement and, if so, whose derangement. The ending, told with a single old fashioned effect but mostly light and shadow, refuses easy answers.
Screens with La Jetee Chris Marker’s short film told mostly in stills. The inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (France 29 mins.)
Friday May 8th 7.30 for 8.00 pm N E W The Beguiled (USA 1970 105 mins) A wounded Union soldier wanders into the grounds of a school full of giggling southern belles. Sounds like a porno but it’s one of the creepiest westerns ever made. Crime and action director Don Siegel and action hero Clint Eastwood take a slower path here, through a tale of increasingly dark areas (I guess that sounds like a porno, too, it still isn't, but).
The late 60s and early 70s saw a lot of changes made to the western movie. So much that they are considered their own genre, the revisionist western. Films like McCabe and Mrs Miller pursued an iconoclastic path to something more like the real old west at the same time as bringing the moral complexities of the traditional western into the light of the Vietnam War generation. Well, this isn't one of those.
PS -- not that I should know but doesn't Clint look like Wolverine in the still of the clip below?
Screens with:
TBA
Friday May 15 7.30 for 8.00 pm
LITTLE MURDERS (USA 1971 110 mins) Alfred, a young self proclaimed apathist, is wrenched by an overachiever girl into society. He goes along with this, suffering one of the most intimidating meet-the-folks scenes outside of the one in Eraserhead. He even accepts her proposal of marriage. The city they live in is breaking down, power outages take on a kind of rhythm, victims of assault fall down subway steps like litter, and the homicide rate is rising to epidemic levels. Flight or fight? The choice has never been less obvious in a film, even a comedy as black as this.
Directed by Alan Arkin (gloriously over the top as a detective soaring into hysteria)and featuring a young Donald Sutherland as a hip priest. Arkin had starred in Catch 22 the year before and Elliot Gould and Sutherland in MASH (also 1970). These two films heavily criticised U.S. involvement in Vietnam through the filter of other wars. Little Murders might well be thought of as the home front version of those.
Absurdism verite? Romblacom? You decide.
Screens with: It’s a Good Life (Twilight Zone episode USA 1962) 25 mins.
The Picnic (Forbidden Files episode) 5 mins.
Friday May 22nd 7.30 for 8.00 pm N E W Another Heaven (Japan 2000 132 mins) There was once a terrific taut sci-fi thriller called the Hidden in which a young FBI agent pursued a nasty body-hopping entity with a taste for ultra-violence and power. Then a few years after J-horror was born, this film comes out which tells the story of a nasty body-hopping entity with a taste for ultra-violence and power. But this is neither remake nor ripoff as it diverges from the path of the earlier film into far more complex territory. Hell of a ride.
Screens with:
TBA
Friday May 29th 7.30 for 8.00 pm N E W Network (USA 1976 120 mins)
“Because you’re on television, dummy.”
Howard Beale goes from failing news anchor to ratings-ruling prophet in a tale from over thirty years ago that could be about the pre-packaged reality of today’s tv. The reason that Paddy Chayefsky’s tirelessly witty script does not fail as a futuristic scenario is that he wrote it from the anger left him by his past experience in network television rather than anything he had to forsee.
The mid-70s dream cast of Peter Finch (a posthumous Best Actor Oscar) William Holden (elegant gravitas) , Fay Dunaway (connoisseur wickedness and scary vulnerability), Robert Duvall (about the same time as his star turn in Apocalypse Now, a bull in charge) and Ned Beatty (fatherly and terrifying) give everything they have as actors with such a treasury of great dialogue.
This one *is* available locally but as it’s one of my favourite films that less than half of my friends have seen I’m putting it up for Shadows for your delectation. Seen it? See it again. It only gets better.
Oh, and watch for a very young Tim Robbins towards the end of the film.
Ok, it's on. A week and a day after the final weekly screening (Matango see below) on November 27th we'll be throwing a party for regs and anyone else involving the following:
