Winter Part 2: Singular

The silver drizzle falls and whispers.  The houselights glow dimly. The sky is low and solid with damp cover. It's the dead of winter.  Time for fires and tales beside them, fuelled by good wine and ale. Welcome to  SHADOWS, an evening of rare or locally unavailable film every Friday night.  Doors open at 7pm.  Screening starts at 8pm.  Wood fire heating, large canvas screen, licenced bar and other people there for the films they love or new experiences. This is what art house cinema used to be (when it existed) except it's warmer and easier to get a drink while you watch.  Stay afterward for wine and music and opinion, lots of opinion. Your chair, mesdames et messieurs!

Winter Part 2 is called Singular and features six tales of extraordinary individuals told with an eye to fiercely independent vision. As the title of the season finale has it Come and See!

Venue:

ABC Gallery is a spacious venue with a good sized screen for projection.  It is run by Milos Manojlovic whose intriguing and dramatic work adorns the walls and will give you a tour of them upon request. He will also sell you a local or imported beer or glass wine for $5. All that and some rare gems from the world of great cinema. What on earth are you doing moping around your bar heater feeling guilty about not putting your tax return in? Come and get some warmth and great movie goodness!


127 Campbell Street Collingwood.  Google it!

THE SCREENINGS

Friday July 23rd 7pm
HENRY FOOL (Hal Hartley USA 1998)

Young trashman Simon Grim hates his life.  He's bullied outdoors and in and barely gets through each day with a kind of controlled seethe. Grumbling into town comes Henry Fool, poet and troublemaker.  He insinuates himself into Henry's household and colonises what passes for family life, sexually conquering both mother and daughter.  He also buys Simon a notebook for him to express the fury there that no one else acknowledges.  When he reads what Simon writes, he is stopped in his tracks.  Simon's rambling literary anger verges on the pornographic but it has fallen, untrained, into iambic pentameter. Henry has discovered that rarest of things, a genius who doesn't know it.


Hal Hartley began the 90s with a handful of other inspired younger film makers whose work promised a resurgence of new, stylish  and original cinema. His approach was unconventional but mainstream friendly, ensuring he started off with a decent across the board support.  Then in the mid 90s he committed a kind of indie suicide with a pair of failed experiments that alienated even his staunchest fans. Henry Fool, at the end of the 90s was less a return to form than a consolidation of previous strengths with a renewed vigour. It was as though he had nothing more to prove but much more to say.  This is one of his strongest statements. 

Friday July 30th7pm

NORIKO'S DINNER TABLE (Sion Sonno Japan 2005)

Noriko, like a lot of teenagers feels alienated by everything around her. Taking solace in social networking, she finds a soul mate and resolves to find her.  One night, during a power failure, she decamps her comfortable small town home and boards a train to Tokyo. After some hours wandering she deduces the contact and finds her new friend. But all is not as expected. The big city girl peels off her online identity and introduces herself as Kumiko. Now meet the rest of her family. Before Noriko knows it, she and the group are off to see granny who welcomes them in a kimono and feasts them with love and food. The happiness of the family is so infectious that Noriko is quickly caught up and blushes with joy at being called Mitsuko by the grandmother. She belongs somewhere, at last. Then everyone packs up they do it all again with another grandmother.

Welcome to the strangest cult of all as they professionally stand in for lost family members in the laity. Only in Japan! They are looking for points of identity and people who are connected to themselves rather than part of the great servant culture that modern Japan appears to have become. Sion Sonno's second part in a mooted trilogy that began with Suicide Circle (Winter Part 1 last year)is less a sequel than an examination of the mindset that got the lethal juggernaut rolling. The events of the first film are referred to directly and are contained within the new film's timeline. Though there is really none of the wrenching gore of Suicide Circle here, Noriko's Dinner Table does disturb. If you thought the cult was creepy in the first one, get a load of how it works behind the scenes.

Sonno uses an energetic mix of stocks from 35 mm film to what looks like VHS to enhance the restlessly shifting points of view. Different characters deliver voice over narration in the past tense as though giving testimony, sometimes even speaking it to camera while strolling through the streets. The long standing theme of identity in Japanese cinema raises its head again and doesn't duck back down to cover.


 
Friday August 6th 7pm

HEARTLESS (Phillip Ridley UK 2010)

Jamie, young and good looking but rendered cripplingly shy by the great red birthmark that spreads across half his face, works as a professional photographer. He keeps the shutter going after hours, finding visual treasure in his crumbling area of town. One day, shooting a derelict house that has caught his eye, he sees something he can't quite make out in the window.  Developing it later (he's romantically committed to film photography rather than digital) he finds something that looks like it escaped from a Hieronymous Bosch painting of Hell. He goes back later to check and finds more than he bargained for, quite literally. 


Phillip Ridley makes few films and they are far apart in time.  That's probably because their characteristic strangeness scares off financial backers. Ridley is also a visual artist and author and illustrator of children's books and it's worth keeping that in mind when watching his movies as they delve deeply into the world of fable and grotesquery. Of his three feature films, Heartless is the closest he has come to mainstream filmmaking but that's not saying that much when the initial conventional premise starts warping until it is only barely in the viewer's control. There's a nice mix of the imagined and the real on a quite superficial level, as a bonus: I have never seen the dowdier parts of old London rendered quite as beautifully as here.  Ridely took great pains to celebrate the beauty in the North American rustic settings of The Reflecting Skin and The Passion of Darkly Noon but here seems to have relished the chance to do the same to his native city.

Friday August 13th 7pm

KURONEKO (Kaneto Shindo Japan 1968)

A rural cottage by a wood. One by one a band of samurai emerge from the trees and converge on the house. The two women inside are settling down to a meal.  The samurai enter.  Five minutes later in screen time the house is burnt to the ground and the strangely intact women's bodies lie lifeless in the ashes. Some cats, strays and considered vermin in the medieval Japanese setting, slink by and lick the blood off the necks of the victims. Fade. 


A strapping young samurai riding alone at night is stopped by the sight of a lone gentlewoman on her way home.  He offers to escort her to safety and for this is treated to the exact opposite of the opening scene including his violent demise at the hands of the women. This becomes a regular supply of warrior loss. An ambitious young samurai is called from his duties in an unending war to deal with the problem with the warning that it might have a supernatural cause.  Ambitious, he accepts the mission and finds far more than he'd expected. 


Kaneto Shindo had already stunned the world's cinephile's with his extraordinary film Onibaba (which stuns to this day) but this time he took a path away from the spooky sensuality of the marshland and into the more traditional Japanese ghost tale with this stylish, beautiful and eerie story.  Like the earlier film, a mix of choreography and location work add up to something of its own tribe.  Add some pretty dazzling wirework and you have a piece as strong as Onibaba at the same time as being completely distinct from it.

Friday August 20 8pm

COME AND SEE (Ellem Klimov USSR 1985)

Farm boy Florya tries to make it through each day intact as the blitzkrieg eviscerates the land and people around him. There are moments of fascination in the great Russian forests, even some eroticism, but these are fleeting as the nazi machine finds its way into every last quiet place. Still a teenager at the end of the flim, Florya seems to have aged a hundred years as he confronts an image of the cause of this hell on earth. A film that holds its anger like a newborn child.

Writer/Director Ellem Klimov declared this his final  film.  Sure, you've heard that before. Well, he's still alive and he  hasn't directed another film since. Now, if (insert name of cinematic  disappointment here) had done that, s/he would have a rich legacy to  offer the screen and its disciples. I have one irk about Klimov being a  man of his word, though.  He was slated to helm a film version of The  Master and Margarita with Speilberg backing. On the strength of Come and  See I think the world has missed out on that one.

So, come and see...

Winter Part 1

The auld cauld sea mist sighs in from the strait and the brown leaves i' the gutter soak to compost in the rain: the towers o' the Housing Commission flats glow through the fog, floor by floor until they are consumed by the solid night air ; winter again and my default mood is contentment. Time to get some stories on the screen that give pause for the great indoors and its thoughts of embers and mortality. Milos will fire up the wood heater, the lights will go down. Arm yourself with a glass of something good and take your chair, your table or your couch (if you're early). We'll do the rest.

Then stay afterward for opinions, drink and good music.

2C G8, as the Melway would say.
Enter
through the heavy door by the corner.

THE SCREENINGS

Friday June 4th 7 pm
NO SCREENING on this day. None at all. Next week there will be and the one that was meant to happen on Friday June 4th 2010 wil be presented on June 18. but none tonight.

Friday June 11th 7 pm
THE GREAT ROCK AND ROLL SWINDLE
(Julien Temple U.K. 1980)
Ok, The Filth and the Fury and the Classic Albums episode on Never Mind the Bollocks have been out for ten years and we all know the real story. This is the fun version.

As a contemporary fan of the Pistols I learned to revile Swindle as McClaren's rocket polishing account of how he started punk rock. So, now you know better, don't you think your true faith can withstand the effects of the devil's tale? Oh go on, I'm pressing the play button, get into some insanely incorrect chaos cash-cowing and revel. Besides all of which, someone (I wish it had been me) pointed out that between this version and the later revisions, Swindle is far closer to the spirit of the times it depicts. So there are no ponderous retrospective damnations or balance redressings. This is the crook's tale so there's plenty of unfair and unrepresentative abandon. There's a really good message in all of this, as well and it's one not intended by its supervisor: don't revere the Sex Pistols, dig 'em!

This film will be supported (and followed) by my birthday drinks so there's no short feature this night.


Friday June 18 7pm
HAROLD AND MAUDE
(Hal Ashby, USA 1971)
Harold is a teenager who's trying to get and keep his mother's attention. His mother is actually doing a lot to get her son out into the world but her methods seem designed to play out without his involvement. Harold's idea of bridging this communication gap is to stage highly authentic looking suicide attempts. His psychiatrist asks what he does to reach out to the world at large and join society. "I go to funerals," says Harold.

At one of those his attention is agressively pursued by an old lady who is curious at seeing him at all the funerals she goes to. This starts an end of winter start of spring romance like no other. Harold's death wish steadily erodes under Maude's raging life force, and he embraces the beauty of the world, knowing that it doesn't have to be as stifling as the one his mother uses all that valium to navigate. But the bony guy with the scythe isn't going anywhere.

That's why this film works. As quirky as it gets, as airily whimsical Ruth Gordon's rhapsodies become, this film never descends to a series of goofy scenes gaffer taped together in the hope that the sum of them works. There is a committed narrative here borne by strong performances and textured characterisation.

If there was any justice in this world people like Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson would be forced to watch this film and learn how it's done. Here is the range of themes celebrated by those two and almost every other indy film maker from the 1970s onward. Anti-conformity and the strength of the outcast form the centre of this film and they have seldom been examined as well (and never bettered). But this was made in 1971 why haven't those other directors learned anything is this old thing is so good, haven't they seen it? Oh they've seen it, they just can't reproduce it.

Oh, and using pre-existing songs by one artist to add to the experience isn't cloying here. Like the earlier The Graduate with Simon and Garfunkel tracks, Harold and Maude's use of Cat Stevens works more effectively than an orchestral score ever could. They just sit right. Hey Wes, don't just throw your record collection at the screen, think about it.

Best. Rom com. Ever.




Friday June 25th 7 pm
RAISE RAVENS (aka CRIA CUERVOS)
(Carlos Saura Spain 1976)

Young Ana lives in a troubled house. She and her sisters are being tended by their highly starched aunt while their father, a ranking army officer is having loud affairs when he deigns to come home. Ana's mother walks the house as a ghost, offering consolation to her daughter from beyond the grave. Ana believes he killed her mother through neglect and also considers herself the agent of her mother's vengeance when her father, too, dies at the start of the story.

A plot summary does little to communicate the power of this film as it has so much to do with the observations of a child struggling to balance what her imagination can do to terrify her and what her sense can do to control the world that seems to bring nothing but grief with every change.

Ana Torrent carries with her the strange and spooky intensity that made The Spirit of the Beehive so magnetic. If it was strong then it's a little older and wiser here, knowing more anger and resolve. Carlos Saura uses the pause following the death of Spain's dictator Franco as a breathing space to take stock of what it felt like to be free of oppression for the first time in decades. Perhaps the times were less than clear about that forcing his storytelling to keep allusive rather than explicit. Perhaps he was artist enough to know better than cry freedom when so many were still suffering.



Friday July 2nd 7pm
PONTYPOOL
(Bruce McDonald Canada 2009)
DJ Grant Mazzy, exiled by his own big mouth from the major radio stations now announces school fetes and the unchanging weather of the sub arctic Canadian backwater he's landed in. The morning shift on this day begins like any other, too early and frozen. A shot of the old stuff and the Grantster feels ready to "take no prisoners". His producer cautions him against it but only because he would be impossible to replace at this notice. Now here's Frank with the weather. Well, yeah, he's got the way the wind's blowing, aright. He goes on air with a report of a mountain of slow moving people consuming a small family in their car. Details are hard to come by. Trying to contact the outside world Grant finds himself suddenly being interviewed by the BBC who are trying to work out if his hometown is really being destroyed by zombies.

This inversion of the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio scare starts from a position of difference and cheekiness from the word go. Without resorting to mockery of the Romero canon, Bruce Robinson gets to work on a zombie movie with something new to say, quite literally. The mind that created the wonderful Roadkill and adventurous Tracey Fragments here rides on the riches of the possibilities. This script began as a radio play and the film only intensifies the isolation of the medium. Not without its false steps but like the equally daring (and equally Canadian Ginger Snaps), Pontypool's moves toward putting some innovation in the revived zombie genre are confident and sassy.




July 9th th 7.30 pm
WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES
(Bela Tarr, Hungary 2000)

Leonard Maltin once ingeniously described Night of the Living Dead as a cinema verite record of a nightmare. I'll steal the thought and describe Bela Tarr's epic as the cinema verite record of a middle European folk tale.

Valushka, innocent lad about the village who can get a barroom full of belicose drunks to perform a ballet that explains what happens during a solar eclipse is still unschooled in the ways of men. He is a kind of gopher to his uncle, aunt and various authority figures of the village (even the local postman gets him to deliver mail) and while he likes his life well enough is pursued by a restless curiosity about the universe he inhabits.

The sun and the moon and the stars generally have to do to provide him with questions to answer, the village life itself offers little more than drunkenness and shiftless boredom. Then one night his path is literally crossed by the longest lorry he has ever seen. It parks in the village square and contains a wonder, a taxidermised blue whale.

Valushka is speechless at the sight of it (his eye off with the great mammals big dead peeper is a modern classic scene) but then, lingering in the darkness of the truck he overhears the lesser trumpeted attraction, a circus freak known as the Prince whose tirade against reason and order is strident and terrifying. Emerging from the darkness of the exhibit, Valushka learns that this ranter is the real attraction, a messianic figure whose rumoured advent has drawn the men of the village to surround the lorry in the square in a single angering mass.

Is this a fable about the end of religion, the decline of Soviet domination of the Hungarian homeland and its subsequent fatherless status? Maybe, but it doesn't have to be. Tarr's mesmerising style (using long takes to involve rather than alienate the viewer) takes us into Valushka's world, we easily share his worries and sorrow at the world he finds he lives in. This is great storytelling that doesn't have to go a mile a minute nor have an edit every thirty milliseconds to draw you in. One of my favourite films of the noughties, if not THE favourite.

Trailer (French subtitles but that's the only one on Youtube)


July 16th 7 pm
RETRIBUTION
(Kyohsi Kurosawa Japan 2006)
A woman is found dead in a disused industrial lot, drowned by seawater. The detective on the case, a world-bearing pair of shoulders supplied by the ever dependable Koji Yakusho, finds something worrying about the case as the evidence comes in: he might have done it.

Contemporary Japanese cinemaster Kyoshi Kurosawa likes a challenge. Sometimes, as in the case of Cure, his success at surmounting the problem soars beyond it. More recently, his attempts at genre bending or remixing have resulted in some cringeworthy moments such as Loft or Doppleganger. Here, his intention to make a non scary ghost story is not only delivered but surpassed. Whereas Loft quickly descended into a smug attack on the popular J-horror genre, Retribution (aka Sakebi or The Scream) uses highly generic traits like the female ghost with the long black silk curtain hair but here they exist in a world more troubled by stress and guilt than sudden shocks.






















Enjoy a drink the relaxed lounge and listen for your flight details to the tune of Nena or Throbbing Gristle

Here's a map.

Autumn 2010 Program

SHADOWS BACK ON A WEEKLY BASIS!
THAT'S RIGHT!
You can rock up around 7pm from April 23rd till the end of time (well the end of 2010) and know you'll be able to see some tasty cinematic fare. So rock up and rock on!

Oh my God! The Lumiere and other cinemas have closed, leaving only the megaplexes that screen nothing but the same few films under ever changing titles. Our only hope is to plant the surviving seeds and see if they take.

Dvds projected on to a white wall in a gallery rich with the paintings of Milos Manojlovic who will serve anything from a cappucino to a shiraz or scotch at decent prices and a word or two of worldliness. Stay for opinions, music and imbibing after the film. Go on, dare ya!

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

APRIL

Friday April 23rd 7.30 pm

HEATHERS
(Michael Lehmann USA 1989)

After the dust had settled in the late 80s the spirit of punk had well and truly shuffled off. What Gen X replaced it with was cynicism, a kind of knee-jerk distrust. Leads you to the same bullshit that credulity does but it does end up feeling better. The abovementioned punkdust had been gathered up by major record labels and now filled the pixels of MTV in the form of the kind of automata that the folks at Sony and Geffen thought would thrill the kids of the day. Who can fault the cynicism?

It meant that genres like the teen com had to grow up and get wise. Didn't really happen, though ... apart from this one.

Wynona Ryder plays Veronica, smart and malcontent about her own luck in being part of the uber clique of bitches in excelsis, the Heathers of the title. The school where the Heathers hold court is a Darwinian hell of survivalism and social entropy. Then JD appears.

Christian Slater, a kind of baby Jack Nicholson, is chaotic and cool all at once. Actually, really cool, cool enough to render the Heathers into magic-free bitchfaces who deserve some recompense. It's sagely said that a compulsive gambler is created by an early win. That's kind of what happens here.

Michael Lehmann's black comedy of manners plays out freshly still, despite the dilutions of later imitators Clueless or Mean Girls. It's fresh in a creepy way, actually, reminding us of the Columbine massacre, having been made a full decade before it. This might be the most mainstream movie I'll show this year but it's one case where origin is overridden by sheer bloody wit and energy.

Christian Slater faded under the ressurected carreers of people like John Travolta, Wynona learned how to shoplift (but not very well) and Shannen Doherty found a couple of years glory in 90210. I guess all of them peaked early because here they each touch something very like genuine cynicism-free glory.

Screens with TBA





Friday April 30th 7.30 pm


BRIGHT FUTURE
(Kyoshi Kurosawa Japan 2002)

Maturity, youth and jellyfish are on the table in this story about the generations to come in contemporary Japan. Two friends serve time in a clock watching job at a laundry that washes towels for restaurants. One of them, Mamoru has a pet jellyfish that at first just looks beautiful and scary in its tank. He has big plans for it, as it happens. But then something goes wrong. His friend, Nimura, already holding in a tide of undirected rage commits an atrocity. Mamoru who has unsuccessfully attempted to guide Nimura in the harnessing and uses of rage steps in to save his friend. It is a very dire salvation but as events develop, Mamoru's legacy is fulfilled and the bigger picture of his plan is revealed. An extraordinary modern fable from the always (or mostly) extraordinary K. Kurosawa (Cure and Seance both shown at Shadows previously) and one rendered far more accessible than any of his other non-horror outings (eg Charisma). Kurosawa has said that this story contains no irony and is a straight-up vision of the state of things in Japan but I'd trust that assertion as far as I could throw a sumo wrestler. Screens with TBA.

MAY

Friday May 7th 7.00 pm

IF...
(Lindsay Anderson UK 1968)

Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell's screen debut) comes back to school from holidays, wincing from the constraining effect of the change. So what? Well, it's a British public school, ancient and near-fatally proud of itself. It's not hard to feel for Mick when you watch the daily grind of icily observed meaningless rituals and routine cruelty that form his school days. Like everyone outside the centres of power (ie teachers and prefects) he hates where he is and is learning nothing from the experience. The weave twirling between the suffocating conformity expected of him and his growing sense of freedom tighten to a knot that can only be solved by scission which happens violently with the training and weapons unwittingly given him by the Establishment.

Lindsay Anderson's tale of personal anarchy came at a time when public youth led protest was spreading throughout the world. The UK might not have had a May '68 like them folks over the channel (which was a failure, anyway) and maybe that was because a lot of the potential was anesthetised with the soma of acid and the Summer of Love. This film was a warning and a call to arms. The frown that drives the story, though, is tempered (in a very Brit way) by a healthy injection of anti-authoritarian absurdism.

Did the warning or call work? Does it ever? See also, Heathers, made twenty-one years later.





Friday May 14th 7.00 pm

IN THE COMPANY OF MEN
(Neil La Bute USA 1997)

Two white collars travel to a marginal centre to set up a local branch of their unidentified business. They get to talking about career and women and one step at a time arrive at a vague plan to find a woman and destroy her. The woman they find is beautiful, accomplished and to round off the checklist for a perfect victim, disabled. She is deaf, assuring one of them at one point: I can't hear you when you lie. This is interpersonal politics at its most frightening and sophisticated. Like the Restoration comedies it was inspired by, it examines what it would condemn to the extent of sometimes appearing to be indistinguishable from it. There is a one liner that shocks through its severe misogyny and sheer wit. This is a writer who understands that names can break bones far more efficiently than sticks and stones. Based on director Neil La Bute's own stage play, this film made for about $10.50 in the late '90s, never feels stagey. Aaron Eckhart reported that a woman approached him after an early screening and told him that she hated him. He corrected her, saying, "No, you hate my character, Chad." "No," replied the woman, "I hate you." La Bute was softened by success in Hollywood, however modest it was, and reached a career nadir with a pointless remake of The Wicker Man. He's since returned to writing for the stage. Perhaps he'll find his way back with something like this. We can only hope.



Friday May 21st 7.00 pm

WOMAN IN THE DUNES
(Hioshi Teshigahara Japan 1960)

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 last year' 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.





Friday May 28th 7.00 pm

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE
(Michael Sarne USA 1970)

The most fascinating trainwreck outside of Ishtar, Myra Breckinridge is the film adaptation of Gore Vidal's smirking look at Hollywood in Decay at the end of the 60s. Man about Swinging London, Michael Sarne was imported by Twentieth Century Fox to inject the kind of psychedelic pizazz into the story whose title character held all hippy culture in icy contempt. A kind of mashup effect is achieved through the rhythmic use of clips from vintage Hollywood cut into the main narrative, even taking part in the dialogue here and there. There really are some good, sharp ideas here but at the time they were heavily overshadowed by the casting choices. John Huston, rugged and craggy veteran director and action man, was chosen to play Buck Loner, rugged and craggy veteran western star and head of a film school. A reanimated Mae West as a sassy and monstrously libidinous talent agent. Queen Bimbo Supreme Raquel Welch in the title role and Queen Bitch of the New York Observer movie review Rex Reed as her alter ego, Myron. It was commonly joked that Reed's inclusion in the cast was insurance against bad reviews. But then his performance is fine, having real screen presence and natural youthful beauty. Mae West refused to appear on screen with Raquel Welch or even work in the set on the same day. She wasn't threatened. Welch, better known in the loincloth of A Million Years B.C. or in the cat suit of Fantastic Voyage, here delivers both intelligence and bitchiness in a role that offers opportunity for some payback for an industry that trivialised her (to say nothing of a million dollar costume change for every scene). Huston fits his character but he pushes himself to a respectable self-parody. Mae West ... Mae West was not informed by anyone that she hadn't been a sultry siren for some decades. To her credit, though, her big number at the film's heart includes what might be the first rap song (but maybe she was just rekindling memories of seeing Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club for real). Aficionados of 70s and 80s prime time tv might be tickled pink to see young and natural incarnations of Farrah Fawcett and Tom Selleck. As to the plot? After all that you still care about the plot? Ok, Myra B. goes to Hollywood to take up a position teaching at her deceased husband's uncle's acting school with the intention of destroying the new Hollywood from within, having first failed to secure her inferitance. She is taken with a shiny young couple among her students and picks them for grooming as her chief weapons in a dream factory that has become more Hugh Hefner than Howard Hawks. Weird hilarity ensues. So why does this film work? Who said it did? This is a film that is best viewed as a record of a dream recounted by someone sky high on acid when he was told it. That said, the ending does provide a kind of logic to the proceedings. But the thrill is in the ride. Roll up! Roll on up! Screens with TBA. Raquel Welch talks to Dick Cavett at the time of the movie's release while janis Joplin looks on.

Liquid Sky@SHADOWS

Friday March 19 8pm
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

LIQUID SKY
(Slava Tsukerman, USA, 1982)
Aliens vs designer punks! 1982, Manhattan. The earth sustains an alien invasion. But this is not the day the earth stands still. The invaders are so ethereal that they are invisible to the human eye, being less bodies than impulses. Previous and future cinematic visitors have variously wanted conquest or resources and these ones do too. But it's neither gold nor water they're after, it's good old fashioned smack. Yup, ethereal they might be but their spirit-hands are out and they're chasin'!

But this is sci-fi and needs some science. It comes (future pun warning) in their discovery that the endorphins released in the brain during human orgasm the high to end all highs. Where better to make such a discovery than through the life of Margaret, a country girl awash in a tide of drugs, affected nihilism, real nihilism, rotten synth pop, execrable dancing, high fashion, plain human vileness and easy easy sex. She ain't in Kansas anymore but, as she observes with a quiet strength in a striking monologue: "I can kill with my c**t."

The time capsule element in this film is not the look and copped feel of the new romantic scene in New York in the early 80s as much as the mood of independent film making at the time. Following the decade of the midnight movie (El Topo, Eraserhead, Pink Flamingoes) independent filmakers had a newly established public tradition to mine but this time also had a newly powerful indy music force that had made a virtue of intensity over formal skill. Liquid Sky is made very much from the latter spirit. Glimpses of conventionally assured cinematic skill surface throughout from the openly cheap execution of most of what's on the screen. This is self aware trash but it bears a real gravity and delivers a real saddening blow in its extraordinary closing sequence.

SCREENS WITH HANGING AT PICNIC ROCK introduced by its writer/director Clint Cure

LOST VALHALLAS

As threatened, I will be presenting a series of films between the monthly Core Program nights, as the Gallery's calendar permits. Celebrating those who fought the big one against the mainstream as it evolved, anime-like from a number of privately owned businesses into Megaplexor and swallowed the little uns. These pre-SBS2 portals to other worlds served the imaginations of the adventurous moviegoer for decades, providing canvas chairs, mono soundtracks, a selection of foyer-made choctops, and a sense of community for the curious.

In memoriam:

The Valhalla
The Carlton Movie House
The Trak
The Brighton Bay
The Lumiere
&c


Here are the first few:

SMILE
(Michael Ritchie, USA, 1976)
The first film shown at Melbourne's Valhalla when the film was a new release back in 1976. The rest was the history of marginal cinema exhibition in Melbourne. Happily, it's also a knockout film.

Bruce Dern and Barbara Feldon (in a rare post-Get Smart appearence) head the cast (including a teenage Melanie Griffith) in this tale of morality going elastic during a teenage beauty quest. Perhaps a subtler, closer to sober cousin to Robert Altman's epic national biopsy Nashville, Smile plays less for quick laughs than a thoughtful gaze at this most American of rituals.

The more recently made Drop Dead Gorgeous does have its moments but it looks flat and try hard beside this entry from Hollywood's golden age of social satire.





LIQUID SKY
(Slava Tsukerman, USA, 1982)
Aliens vs designer punks! 1982, Manhattan. The earth sustains an alien invasion. But this is not the day the earth stands still. The invaders are so ethereal that they are invisible to the human eye, being less bodies than impulses. Previous and future cinematic visitors have variously wanted conquest or resources and these ones do too. But it's neither gold nor water they're after, it's good old fashioned smack. Yup, ethereal they might be but their spirit-hands are out and they're chasin'!

But this is sci-fi and needs some science. It comes (future pun warning) in their discovery that the endorphins released in the brain during human orgasm the high to end all highs. Where better to make such a discovery than through the life of Margaret, a country girl awash in a tide of drugs, affected nihilism, real nihilism, rotten synth pop, execrable dancing, high fashion, plain human vileness and easy easy sex. She ain't in Kansas anymore but, as she observes with a quiet strength in a striking monologue: "I can kill with my c**t."

The time capsule element in this film is not the look and copped feel of the new romantic scene in New York in the early 80s as much as the mood of independent film making at the time. Following the decade of the midnight movie (El Topo, Eraserhead, Pink Flamingoes) independent filmakers had a newly established public tradition to mine but this time also had a newly powerful indy music force that had made a virtue of intensity over formal skill. Liquid Sky is made very much from the latter spirit. Glimpses of conventionally assured cinematic skill surface throughout from the openly cheap execution of most of what's on the screen. This is self aware trash but it bears a real gravity and delivers a real saddening blow in its extraordinary closing sequence.





HAROLD AND MAUDE
(Hal Ashby, USA 1971)
Harold is a teenager who's trying to get and keep his mother's attention. His mother is actually doing a lot to get her son out into the world but her methods seem designed to play out without his involvement. Harold's idea of bridging this communication gap is to stage highly authentic looking suicide attempts. His psychiatrist asks what he does to reach out to the world at large and join society. "I go to funerals," says Harold.

At one of those his attention is agressively pursued by an old lady who is curious at seeing him at all the funerals she goes to. This starts an end of winter start of spring romance like no other. Harold's death wish steadily erodes under Maude's raging life force, and he embraces the beauty of the world, knowing that it doesn't have to be as stifling as the one his mother uses all that valium to navigate. But the bony guy with the scythe isn't going anywhere.

That's why this film works. As quirky as it gets, as airily whimsical Ruth Gordon's rhapsodies become, this film never descends to a series of goofy scenes gaffer taped together in the hope that the sum of them works. There is a committed narrative here borne by strong performances and textured characterisation.

If there was any justice in this world people like Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson would be forced to watch this film and learn how it's done. Here is the range of themes celebrated by those two and almost every other indy film maker from the 1970s onward. Anti-conformity and the strength of the outcast form the centre of this film and they have seldom been examined as well (and never bettered). But this was made in 1971 why haven't those other directors learned anything is this old thing is so good, haven't they seen it? Oh they've seen it, they just can't reproduce it.

Oh, and using pre-existing songs by one artist to add to the experience isn't cloying here. Like the earlier The Graduate with Simon and Garfunkel tracks, Harold and Maude's use of Cat Stevens works more effectively than an orchestral score ever could. They just sit right. Hey Wes, don't just throw your record collection at the screen, think about it.

Best. Rom com. Ever.






LITTLE MURDERS
(Alan Arkin, USA, 1971)
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.






ZABRISKIE POINT
(Michelangelo Antonioni, USA, 1970)Having reduced Swinging London to an essential oil in Blow Up Michelangelo Antonioni turned his deep gaze to the student protest raging in the USA. Mark, a student who restlessly exits a student sit-in soon becomes politicised when he is arrested at a demonstration. In a series of scenes that Michael Moore would green up from Mark and a friend assemble a small arsenal of weapons without licences but a truckload of smooth talk from legitimate gunshops. Then something really really bad happens and Mark is on the run. Well "takes flight" might be more apt.

As this is happening, Daria, a young woman, decides to drive across the desert to get to her boss' grand late 60s sci fi house on top of a mesa. Her path is crossed by Mark's and one of the oddest and most exciting mating rituals ensues (and that's before you get to the desert love-in).

The sparseness of the dialogue, plot and landscape are intentional and effective. This is not an examination of youth culture or the protest movement (like the contemporary Punishment Park or Medium Cool) it's mythmaking. Antonioni is interested in legend rather than politics and seeking a new American one to extend those of the old west. Just as steadily as he built up the Cockney star in Blow Up ony to deflate him fully Antonioni wants to suggest a path to hope in the turmoil. The sequence that expresses this, a series of spectacular cinemascope explosions is justly celebrated.

Warning: with contemporary Pink Floyd, Stones and the Youngbloods on the soundtrack this film can get seriously groovy.




REPO MAN
(Alex Cox USA 1984)A highway cop stops a car driven by a nervous nerdy type. He checks the boot and instantly distintegrates in a flash of intense light, leaving only a pair of smoking knee high boots. Back in desert bound nowheresville, L.A, Otto is drawn into the repossession business and is soon caught up in an intrigue involving aliens, religious loopiness, the local punk scene and a battered old Chevy that everyone seems to want. This film would have been pitched with one word: cult!

Brit Alex Cox took his love of American movies and spaghetti westerns to the United States of A. to fashion a film "for today". Perhaps I'm sounding harsh but I'm only trying to do it justice. See, this movie isn't so much dated as traited. If you surveyed the themes of mid 1980s independent cinema and dropped anything uncommon to all of them what you'd have left is this one. This is from the era when new films were described as cult before their release (bugger having to slave away being projected in fleapits at midnight for eight years before that honour could be bestowed). Much in the same way you could follow a recipe for a rock song from a previous era and create a perfect Syd Barret or Monks track (oh wait, people do do that) Alex the C. looked around him and dressed his satirical agenda with the trappings of the today of 1984. Absurdly first marketed as an actioner this returned from its flop to ride the arthouses o' the world. Everyone saw it and you were no one if you didn't love it.

So is it any good? Yeah, pretty much. Take the context away and it roars along. Emilio Estavez (then Martin Sheen's more famous son) sneers and winces through a nice turn in nihilism. Harry Dean Stanton, fresh from "cult" superstardom in (the execrable) Paris Texas is a must. The sci fi story is fun (if less profound than Liquid Sky's) and well sustained. Depsite what I've written here, I'm showing this one because I do think it's worth seeing.

Cox went on to the embarrassing but successful Sid and Nancy (which at least brought Gary Oldman to the world's attention) and a fraying string of further efforts. He's slated to helm a film for release this year entitled Repo Chick. Don't do it, Alex!

But come and see this one as it's a hoot.




IN THE COMPANY OF MEN
(Neil La Bute USA 1997)Two white collars travel to a marginal centre to set up a local branch of their unidentified business. They get to talking about career and women and one step at a time arrive at a vague plan to find a woman and destroy her. The woman they find is beautiful, accomplished and to round off the checklist for a perfect victim, disabled. She is deaf, assuring one of them at one point: I can't hear you when you lie.

This is interpersonal politics at its most frightening and sophisticated. Like the Restoration comedies it was inspired by, it examines what it would condemn to the extent of sometimes appearing to be indistinguishable from it. There is a one liner that shocks through its severe misogyny and sheer wit. This is a writer who understands that names can break bones far more efficiently than sticks and stones. Based on director Neil La Bute's own stage play, this film made for about $10.50 in the late '90s, never feels stagey. Aaron Eckhart reported that a woman approached him after an early screening and told him that she hated him. He corrected her, saying, "No, you hate my character, Chad." "No," replied the woman, "I hate you."

La Bute was softened by success in Hollywood, however modest it was, and reached a career nadir with a pointless remake of The Wicker Man. He's since returned to writing for the stage. Perhaps he'll find his way back with something like this. We can only hope.



VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS(Jaromil Jires, Czechoslovakia, 1971)
Stills or extracts from this film make it look like an extra stylish euro-pudding gothfest but it isn't. Valerie is entering puberty and it's scary: there's blood, confusion, pain and the attention of males, particularly the members of the very creepy clergy, all mix in to make the time pass strangely and dangerously.

Instead of using the by then worn devices of cinema verite to illustrate such a kitchen sink subject, Jires instead started with Valerie's emotional state, took it literally and provided cinema with one of the most surreal representations of the rites of passage. Daywalking vampires are variously extended family members or preach from the pulpit and other monstrosities mix with achingly beautiful imagery. This film is told in emotional rather than narrative sense despite some recognisable conventions of narrative cinema perceptible throughout. This is a celebration conducted by its own rules as much as were Alice in Wonderland or Maldoror.


Screening dates as they become known to me. More to follow, over....

2010 Core Program

Oh my God! The Lumiere and other cinemas have closed, leaving only the megaplexes that screen nothing but the same few films under ever changing titles. Our only hope is to plant the surviving seeds and see if they take.

Dvds projected on to a white wall in a gallery rich with the paintings of Milos Manojlovic who will serve anything from a cappucino to a shiraz or scotch at decent prices and a word or two of worldliness. Stay for opinions, music and imbibing after the film. Go on, dare ya!

Oh my God 2! For anyone who revealed their poor maths in previous programs and thought they were dominated by horror, this and the next half of the core program contains none, not one horror movie. Now, satisfied?

NO? You still want a weekly screening of strange and unavailable film? Click here and see.

Still NO? Alright how about an occasional series of films from the lightless margins o' the mainstream called Lost Valhallas! This won't start until it's ready to but confirmed titles include Smile (first film shown by the Melbourne Valhalla), Liquid Sky (punk sci-fi and addiciton morality), Repo Man (the first slacker comedy? add sci-fi), In the Company of Men (Neil LaBute's first and still strongest feature film might have been his last good one), Harold and Maude (available locally but still unseen by people who should see it) and so on...

Not satisfied YET? I am open to suggestion for titles to screen including those missed last year (The Beguiled and Little Murders sparked a lot of interest by those who missed out on it) or encore performances of others (Spirit of the Beehive had a lot o' post screening buzz). These will be a lot fewer in number as time will be more limited this year. But lemme know...

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

THE SCREENINGS
Last Friday of every month.


January 29th 8.00 pm
MY WINNIPEG(Guy Maddin, Canada 2008)

Guy Maddin takes his perception-warping mix of silent cinema look and contemporary mores from fable to memoir as he recounts the story of the region of his birth and upbringing.

Maddin finds the look and feel of silent cinema not just irresistible but a personal compulsion. Whereas any other filmmaker using this look might be considered gimmicky, Maddin lives in the world of Murnau, Lang and Buster Keaton and doesn't care who has a problem with it. That said, his films are resolutely contemporary, containing no nostalgia beyond the very surface.

So, when we come to My Winnipeg a history and intensely personal memoir of Maddin's birthplace, are we really still free of dreamy recollection? You betcha. The longing for some of the subjects in this film and the yearning for the departed world are but brief inaudible sighs compared to the omnipresent spectre of his mother and her thorny domination of the family. Maddin even sees the mother in an aerial view of the landscape of the province. She is inescapable. Even as the weary traveller endlessly trying to leave town on a train heads out towards the real world, he fears he can never really leave.

From the cheeky mismemories of local tv shows to stunning set pieces like the field of frozen horses, Maddin serves up a real feast that reminds his viewers of the hazards of nostalgia but also invites us all to remember our lives with a sense of justice as well as whimsy.

Screens with TBA.



February 26th 8.00 pm
SEVEN BEAUTIES
(Lina Wertmuller, Italy 1976)

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.

This screening was scheduled last year but the screening was bumped. There was a swell of interest from the regulars about seeing this one and disappointed at missing it. So here it is.

Screens with TBA



March 26th 8.00pm
WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR?
(Martin Scorsese, USA 1969)
Scorsese's first feature offers a blueprint for the best of his later work from Mean Streets to Goodfellas. Harvey Keitel is J.R. a young gun in New York's Little Italy who is drawn out of his cultural cul de sac when he meets a WASP girl while waiting for the Staten Island ferry. J.R. is transcendent! Things go pretty well and it looks like he's headed out of the dead end. Then, when The Girl (that's what she's called in the credits) shares a difficult truth about a date rape in her past, J.R.'s Catholic macho mores freeze him into an uncontrollable disgust. Scorsese's courage here has to do with telling this story during the rise of the Love Generation where such morality was considered passe. The assertion that the statements of a few high profile hippies were no match for the reality on the streets was an unusual step (especially for someone who helped bring Woodstock to the big screens of the world!).

People only familiar with Harvey Keitel as the urbane leonine cool father figure that his 90s career ressurection depicted him (Bad Lieutenant aside) might even be shocked to see how beautiful he was in his twenties. Those good looks come with a ton of gravitas beyond his years.

And all the Marty goodness is here, film quotes, contemporary pop music, fetishistic Catholic imagery, Little Italy writ LARGE, realistic overlapping dialogue, machismo shown critically. The influence of the Nouvelle Vague looms large here but crosses over to later Scorsese pretty clearly (J.R.'s heart visibly races when The Girl reveals her mutual love of John Ford Movies!)

If you haven't seen it you need to. If you have you need to see it again, if only to recall Gangs of New York with shaking head and ask: Marty, what the hell went wrong?

Screens with TBA



April 30th 7.30 pmBRIGHT FUTURE
(Kyoshi Kurosawa, Japan 2003)

Maturity, youth and jellyfish are on the table in this story about the generations to come in contemporary Japan.

Two friends serve time in a clock watching job at a laundry that washes towels for restaurants. One of them, Mamoru has a pet jellyfish that at first just looks beautiful and scary in its tank. He has big plans for it, as it happens. But then something goes wrong. His friend, Nimura, already holding in a tide of undirected rage commits an atrocity. Mamoru who has unsuccessfully attempted to guide Nimura in the harnessing and uses of rage steps in to save his friend. It is a very dire salvation but as events develop, Mamoru's legacy is fulfilled and the bigger picture of his plan is revealed.

An extraordinary modern fable from the always (or mostly) extraordinary K. Kurosawa (Cure and Seance both shown at Shadows previously) and one rendered far more accessible than any of his other non-horror outings (eg Charisma). Kurosawa has said that this story contains no irony and is a straight-up vision of the state of things in Japan but I'd trust that assertion as far as I could throw a sumo wrestler.

Screens with TBA.



May 28th 7.30 pm
MYRA BRECKINRIDGE
(Michael Sarne, USA 1970)

The most fascinating trainwreck outside of Ishtar, Myra Breckinridge is the film adaptation of Gore Vidal's smirking look at Hollywood in Decay at the end of the 60s. Man about Swinging London, Michael Sarne was imported by Twentieth Century Fox to inject the kind of psychedelic pizazz into the story whose title character held all hippy culture in icy contempt. A kind of mashup effect is achieved through the rhythmic use of clips from vintage Hollywood cut into the main narrative, even taking part in the dialogue here and there. There really are some good, sharp ideas here but at the time they were heavily overshadowed by the casting choices.

John Huston, rugged and craggy veteran director and action man, was chosen to play Buck Loner, rugged and craggy veteran western star and head of a film school. A reanimated Mae West as a sassy and monstrously libidinous talent agent. Queen Bimbo Supreme Raquel Welch in the title role and Queen Bitch of the New York Observer movie review Rex Reed as her alter ego, Myron.

It was commonly joked that Reed's inclusion in the cast was insurance against bad reviews. But then his performance is fine, having real screen presence and natural youthful beauty. Mae West refused to appear on screen with Raquel Welch or even work in the set on the same day. She wasn't threatened. Welch, better known in the loincloth of A Million Years B.C. or in the cat suit of Fantastic Voyage, here delivers both intelligence and bitchiness in a role that offers opportunity for some payback for an industry that trivialised her (to say nothing of a million dollar costume change for every scene). Huston fits his character but he pushes himself to a respectable self-parody. Mae West ... Mae West was not informed by anyone that she hadn't been a sultry siren for some decades. To her credit, though, her big number at the film's heart includes what might be the first rap song (but maybe she was just rekindling memories of seeing Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club for real). Aficionados of 70s and 80s prime time tv might be tickled pink to see young and natural incarnations of Farrah Fawcett and Tom Selleck.

As to the plot? After all that you still care about the plot? Ok, Myra B. goes to Hollywood to take up a position teaching at her deceased husband's uncle's acting school with the intention of destroying the new Hollywood from within, having first failed to secure her inferitance. She is taken with a shiny young couple among her students and picks them for grooming as her chief weapons in a dream factory that has become more Hugh Hefner than Howard Hawks. Weird hilarity ensues.

So why does this film work? Who said it did? This is a film that is best viewed as a record of a dream recounted by someone sky high on acid when he was told it. That said, the ending does provide a kind of logic to the proceedings. But the thrill is in the ride. Roll up! Roll on up!

Screens with TBA.
Raquel Welch talks to Dick Cavett at the time of the movie's release while janis Joplin looks on.




June 25th 7.30 pm
WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES
(Bela Tarr, Hungary 2000)

Leonard Maltin once ingeniously described Night of the Living Dead as a cinema verite record of a nightmare. I'll steal the thought and describe Bela Tarr's epic as the cinema verite record of a middle European folk tale.

Valushka, innocent lad about the village who can get a barroom full of belicose drunks to perform a ballet that explains what happens during a solar eclipse is still unschooled in the ways of men. He is a kind of gopher to his uncle, aunt and various authority figures of the village (even the local postman get him to deliver some mail) and while he likes his life well enough is pursued by a restless curiosity about the universe he inhabits.

The sun and the moon and the stars generally have to do to provide him with questions to answer, the village life itself offers little more than drunkenness and shiftless boredom. Then one night his path is literally crossed by the longest lorry he has ever seen. It parks in the village square and contains a wonder, a taxidermised blue whale.

Valushka is speechless at the sight of it (his eye off with the great mammals big dead peeper is a modern classic scene) but then, lingering in the darkness of the truck he overhears the lesser trumpeted attraction, a circus freak known as the Prince whose tirade against reason and order is strident and terrifying. Emerging from the darkness of the exhibit, Valushka learns that this ranter is the real attraction, a messianic figure whose rumoured advent has drawn the men of the village to surround the lorry in the square in a single angering mass.

Is this a fable about the end of religion, the decline of Soviet domination of the Hungarian homeland and its subsequent fatherless status? Maybe, but it doesn't have to be. Tarr's mesmerising style (using long takes to involve rather than alienate the viewer) takes us into Valushka's world, we easily share his worries and sorrow at the world he finds he lives in. This is great storytelling that doesn't have to go a mile a minute nor have an edit every thirty milliseconds to draw you in. One of my favourite films of the noughties, if not THE favourite.

Screens with TBA.

Trailer (French subtitles but that's the only one on Youtube)


Gallery Location