Shadows 2009-2011: R.I.P.?

Actually the last day of MIFF 2009, but I thought the pout matched my mood.

 From autumn 2009 to summer 2011 I projected movies on to a wall and then a screen at a gallery in Collingwood. I had a conviction about the need for an alternative cinema experience somewhere between a dvd night and the long gone arthouses of this town. It was meant to be both relaxed and challenging. Going by the people I met while doing this, talking and drinking with them, I got the message that I was doing a pretty good job.

I screened my last at ABC Gallery in December 2011 with the understanding that if continued in the same venue in 2012 it would have to be on a night other than the usual Friday as mine host Milos needed the night to spend more time with his son. That outranked my film night so I began thinking of putting feelers out for a similar venue. If I'd been planning to try to talk Milos around to resuming on Fridays with a different frequency those plans were dashed with his plummeting fortunes in January 2012 when he suffered a stroke and was given two weeks notice to quit the gallery. (If you think I'm being frivolous about this issue, read the previous two posts.)

I made a tentative query to the folk at Long Play in North Fitzroy who were generous with their information and open to discussion. Their discouragement of Friday as a regular night was given with pragmatic reasons but were happy to discuss other nights of the week. They are kept in mind. There are other avenues and existing options that I will be investigating over the next few months. But things have changed for me, as well.

First, I have been working on my graphic novel The Monsoons for years now and I am using this hiatus from Shadows as an opportunity to finish it. My blog Monsoon Days, detailing the process and background, is also taking up both time and enthusiasm.

Second, I'll have to confess to some exhaustion where Shadows is concerned. This has nothing to do with my love of sharing these films. And I haven't run out of them. It does have to do with the fact that even in 2011, when my lowest numbers were higher than the average attendances of the previous years, I perceived a drop in the audience which was only indirectly related to its size. The drop I've been noticing is in the acceptance of the very material the night was established to offer.

I had one curatorial goal in mind with Shadows and that was the message that cinema is a blank canvas. It's just a medium. A painting doesn't have to resemble its subject literally. A poem doesn't have to rhyme. Music does not need melody. Cinema does not need narrative, even if it's fiction. So, if a movie plays fair by declaring itself in the first ten or so minutes to be outside of convention, don't judge it through convention. I'm sorry if that offends anyone but it's just common sense.

No one needs a degree to understand that something's out of the ordinary. And if you do understand that, isn't it better to ask why it took that different path rather than complain about it as though all films are an extension of the general service industry and should be made to a tiny set of standards? I began to receive so much intolerance of the diversity I was trying to celebrate that I had to concede that I'd failed. At best, I was providing entertainment in a homey environment. Nothing wrong with that, it's fun, it's just that my purpose had been knocked out of the ring. So while I still relish the idea of putting on adventures in movies, for the moment, in this breath, I also dread it.

I know, I know. It wasn't you. And it wasn't every night. I was frequently gratified to find some difficult pieces met with open arms. I also learned to include titles that would please rather than stimulate and there was more than a little resignation involved in this. See, I didn't want to establish some rarefied circle of connoisseurs, I wanted to take the kind of thing typically considered exclusive, and reach out with it, demonstrate that, for all its obscurity or idiosyncrasy, this or that film had real things to offer, "quality" and high culture be buggered.

This means that, however temporarily, I am back to doing the thing I wanted to extend rather than rely on, dvd nights in with friends. I love doing that but loved more the opportunity of using the current accessible technology to go beyond my circle of friends to any who could make it to the dark of the screenings to taste something new.

So, I might be back but if I am it won't be for months yet and I have no idea where. Meantime you could do worse than check out Screen Sect at Bar Open, Fitzroy, Cine Cult at 303 High St, Northcote and the ones who almost stole my title, Shadow Electric at the Abbotsford Convent. I know I will be.

That vented, I thank you, I thank you all: ye comers and bummers, cinematic gourmands and holiday makers in unfamiliar climes, ye textbook bashing guardians of form and cine-Pollyannas, ye scriveners and disciples of the sprocket and the perforation, ye slaves unto the image, ye spielers of the spool, ye custodians of cool, ye talkers, ye baulkers, ye seven-rule chalkers, ye teachers, preachers, screechers and beseechers of the flickered visage, ye tickled and ye soured, ye bored and snoring sailors of the rapid eye movement, ye bold invigorated, ye toe-testing newbies, ye architects of new sensation whose thrill-quest beats the scoobies, ye dogmagogues and spirit-chasers, ye dipsos of the framerate, ye critics and ye cynics and ye early-cab-sav mimics, ye mudrakers and champions, ye hedonites and scions, and all ye blazing grenadiers of the shadows who came to see and hear and yell and drink and laugh and silently consume the light before you and all the sounds around you in the spirit of the adventure of the Notion: thanks for coming.

PJ

This one IS from a Shadows night. Meg, Dean and Kate.

Milos on the mend: slow but sure

Chris, Sonia and I went to visit Milos on Saturday afternoon. He's currently in the St George branch of St Vincents out in Kew. Having heard little of his developing condition I had only the vaguest notion of what to expect but when we got to his room we found him awake and pleased to have company, sitting in a motorised wheelchair. It had been reclined for his comfort. He looked like a suburban dad in it.

He launched straight into the story of how he came to be there, the morning when he woke dizzy and wobbly which degenerated into the stroke that got him. Very luckily, his co-tenant Alexander realised something was wrong and he was hospitalised within an hour of the attack. With strokes the sooner they are treated the better chances of recovery.

He came to in hospital, disorientated and unfocused, confusingly not in control of his movements or will. The days that followed brought details back to him in the form of memories returning as well as visitors. He says he remembers the visit that Miriam and I made but my own memory includes experience of his tact.

If I had worried that we would be staring around the room in silence for an hour I needn't have. Milos told us of the attack, the days in hospital and being brought here to Kew where he will be for perhaps another two months in recovery. What this means is that you have that time to pay him your own visit, if you can. He will greatly appreciate it.

He jokingly asked me when my next screening was on and while I left that at a smile, one thought led to another  and Sonia suggested getting a portable dvd player. We went thirds in one just after the visit. I'd told him I had relabelled some of the old Shadows discs to make them more recognisable and put them in a satchel. I'll add a few more to the collection and we'll deliver the player and discs within the next week. (Could you part temporarily with a dvd or two while he's there?)

One thing that hasn't been affected by the stroke is the Milosian sense of daily comedy. He told us he'd been banned from operating the wheel chair as he kept hitting other patients while he was distracted by the pictures on the wall and the better looking nurses. So he's back to L plates.

Just after he had been relocated from St Vincents in Fitzroy to the Kew facility he waited in his room, examining the walls. A doctor came in to check his chart. She was Indian, and beautiful. An hour later a cleaner came in to set up the adjoining bathroom. She was Indian. Shortly after that a pair of nurses came to help him into bed. Both Indian and pleasing to the eye. Later in the afternoon a decidedly Anglo doctor came in and asked a question to test his sense of orientation: "Do you know where you are?" asked the doctor.

"India," said Milos flatly.

It was probably the first occasion when his temporary incapacity to smile fully served his humour faithfully.

A visit or series of them would help to exercise those facial muscles, methinks.

PJ

Room 2, Level 1

St Georges Rehabilitation Centre

283 Cotham Rd. Kew 

98160444

Goodbye, ABC: Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Milos

Those of you who came to have such fun at the last Shadows Screening of 2011 and were there for my introduction will recall that I suggested that it would be the last screening for the year but perhaps also forever. Well, I'm glad you remember that as it will serve to cushion the blow I'm about to deliver. Actually, two blows and, considering the focus of this blog it's hard to know which to start with.

Actually, it isn't. The most important news is that Milos Manoljovic suffered a stroke last week. He's ok. He's as ok as people who have strokes can be. He can speak and move but will require continued treatment to get him back on his feet and walking amongst us. This might take months. He has been given two week's notice by the owner of the ABC Gallery who, again, has failed to put an application into this year's Nobel Peace Prize. No more Milos at the ABC.

As there is nothing I can do about that I'm going to spend a few paragraphs  thinking about this.

I loved films at ABC. From the moment I walked into the Gallery in the winter of 2007 I was hooked. A friend of mine Dean, was showing one Japanese horror film I loved and another that I hadn't seen. I'd been to small time enthusiast's film nights over many years and knew what to expect: a ratting super-8 projector near the door of a small white room peopled by a lot of bereted students on cushions on the floor, their legs going numb from the cramped elegance enforced upon them, a pair of casks of red and white goon warming  in the corner, some naff  but fun old public service announcement shorts form the cold war about self-preservation in the event of a commie H-bomb going off in your neighbourhood, and maybe a Russ Meyer flick or two. Ok, I'll go along to one and say I've been. Well...

There was a bar, a real bar, and it had a real licence. And there was a digital projector which was busy casting a BIG picture on to the white wall at the other end of the large space. The walls between were crowded with canvases which had an intriguing ... lurk to them. The sound was crystal clear. All I had to do was choose a chair at one of the unmatched cafe style tables and watch the film.

The wall where the movie was moving was whitewashed brick. It had a texture. Here and there a nail or rivet or something stuck out form the surface creating its own miniature De Chirico shadow on the image. I couldn't have cared less. I was being treated to a Japanese horror film which I had no idea existed. Its title was Matango and I couldn't place its vintage. It was so thickly atmospheric and intriguing that I forgot all about the wall's bumps and spikes, sipped wine and relaxed into complete absorption.

Dean carries his own personal sharpness effortlessly, he has some good ideas. One of them was that a good cinema only needs a projected image and sound and a place to comfortably watch and listen. That achieved it could happen in an igloo. We had just lost our last major art house in Melbourne. Well, here it was, as fresh as a whim, right in front of me. Dean had thought it up and done it. What else could I want? More, that's all. More.

I got it. We all did. Time Capsules gave us unjustly forgotten whackfests like Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life, more Japanese genre that I hadn't even scratched the surface of in my own wanderings, whole nights of blasting obscure and trippy animations from the world of history and the history of the world, Busby Berkley's cosmic Broadway rubbing shoulders with flavoursome delicacies and rare finds. Time Capsules was a tribute to free thought in the projected image and hooked my Thursday nights. After the film there were people to meet and argue with (in a good serious fun way) and there was whiskey, beer and wine. Somewhere between an arthouse cinema, cool bar and a dvd night with friends it often felt like a shared discovery and a celebration of it to follow.

This was the answer. It called out from the void left by the closure of the arthouses mid 2000s. People not only doing it for themselves but defying the unspoken directive to huddle indoors for dvd nights. It brought the crowd back, the strangers in the dark who are the best people to share an unseen film with. A bar and an attitude of the purest fuck-you to the assembly line of the mainstream. It was gold class arthouse.

I ran a few screenings with three others in 2008 when Dean scheduled some travel. I chose four titles, wrote them up on his blog, read about them and presented them. Dean had curated his screenings, taking care to read an introduction to each, priming his audience for the night's discovery. So did I. And if going to the screenings had been zappy putting them on was pure thrill. When the opportunity came for me to do my own I seized it.

This is where the mighty Milos really comes in. It was his place all along and he ran the bar with a saturnine humour, keeping the punters going with his tongue-in-cheek observations, opining from deep thought on the films just seen, lodging a log splitter into a tree stump, lifting it over his head and bringing it crashing down on to the concrete floor in a single motion and feeding the wood heater with the shattered remains. We needed heat. That's where we got it from.

It was Milos who encouraged the nights. He kept them going. With my varying fortunes in the first year of Shadows I decided to begin the new year with an unintentionally disastrous dual program which served by a schedule that no one could decipher. After the inevitable first few fizzers it was Milos who said: just go weekly again, we'll work it out. I did and slowly rebuilt. And patiently, Friday after Friday, he prepared the room, swung the tables and chairs into place, chopped the wood and stoked the fires, made sure there was ice and enough beer and wine. And even at my abject screenings, the ones that drew in a mighty four or five, he silenced my protests that I would really get people coming in for the next one, by saying: I like the night, anyway, people will come if they want to. He'd then pour me a wine and refuse my money.

The first year was not all gas and gaiters (what is, though, seriously? Sounds horrible, doesn't it, GAS and GAITERS) and my struggling effort was frequently interrupted by either a double booking or an invasive one. My earnest complaints about this had to be swept under the rug when I realised that I was still very lucky to be continuing with the thing when it was bringing in so few people and not fulfilling its promise or my amibitions for it. It would have been both justifiable and merciful for him to terminate Shadows and just host parties instead which would at least have paid his rent. But, no, after the interruption I just came back and he let me.

As things slowly improved at the screenings, attendances first stabilising and then, last year, swelling, I understood that I was only there because Milos enjoyed the idea of it. Not just because he got a crowd of people to meet on a Friday night or saw the occasional film that surprised or delighted him from the menu of great dirges I prefer to show the world. He let me because he liked what I was trying to do. It was important to him.

When I heard the news of his attack last week I went to visit him with friend and Shadows regular, Miriam, who'd told me the news. Hospitals make me feel frail but this was necessary. We got in early evening and found the ward. He was asleep, fathoms down into a profound slumber. We went for a stroll to chat and bide some time before trying again. This time he stirred. Miriam spoke to him but he was so woozed out by his condition and whatever they had given him to allow his landing some ease. He looked at Miriam and then at me, he didn't seem to hear us speak his name, he saw two strangers at his bedside. There was nothing we could do so we left quietly.

The heatwave had broken and the evening was bright and cool. I shuffled back home and then on to the thing I was going to, seeing nothing but those strange, uncomprehending blue eyes. It was haunting me. And then I remembered he didn't have his glasses on. He's virtually blind without them. We might as well have been Bert and Pattie Newton for all he knew.

Reports kept coming in. He was affected by the event but recovering. Miriam called after a later visit with a happier impression and suggested I hot foot it to St Vinnies before Milos got shipped out to Kew for months of physio. No definite date on it but I figured I could leave it till the next day. So I fronted up and found out from the pleasantest receptionist I've encountered in a long while that I'd missed him by about four hours. She offered to put me through to the Kew facility but I declined with thanks and left working out how I was going to get there in the coming weeks. It'll happen. It'll have to. It's too important not to.

So, and by now this other bit really does feel like the soft news story it is, no more Shadows at ABC. I'll look and ask around but I've had a pretty good run, had some fun and maybe even reached out and touched a few. For that, I have to thank Milos Manojlovic.

St Georges Health Service, Kew

Review: Melancholia

Fade in. The gold and ice beauty of Kirsten Dunst. Her gaze is resigned. Objects fall through the unfocussed light behind her. They are birds plummeting to earth. Charlotte Gainsbourg carries a child and runs across a golf course, her feet sinking into the damp turf and leaving dark holes behind her. A black horse struggles to stand but collapses. A huge blue planet moves into earth like two movie stars' heads coming together for a screen kiss. The world is ending. This is how Melancholia begins.

The opening sequence seemed absurdly long until it dawned that I was watching an overture. I was listening to one, as well. The gigantic plaintive musical theme that I couldn't quite place was revealed with a little googling to be the overture from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Then, after we see the fate of everyone we are about to see in the film we get a chapter title with the name Justine.

And then we have comedy. An extreme high shot of a narrow winding country lane. Into this small scaled nature moves a huge white stretch limo that is not going to make it from the bottom of the frame to the top without a lot of trouble. Inside the car are newlyweds Justine and Mike (Kirsten Dunst and Aleksander Skarsgard, the Viggo Mortensen you have when you can't have Viggo, also known as Eric the Viking Vampire from True Blood). Both of them have fun trying to get the monster car through the tiny lane. When they finally get to the reception at the mansion owned by Justine's bro-in-law they are met by a frowning sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who reminds them that they are two hours late and the reception is now all but ruined.

The reception has cost Claire's husband John (Keifer Sutherland) so much money he never names the sum but continually introduces the topic into conversation. Justine's father (John Hurt) is a happy drunk whose sad resignation to his life's failure gives him a shambling dignity. His ex and Justine's mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) is an arid and bitter woman who is bursting to let everyone know what she thinks of marriage. Justine's boss (Stellan Skarsgard, Aleksander's father: not relevant but we're going through family relations so what the hell?) is still at work in his wedding tuxedo sending his bug eyed nephew after Justine to get a tag line for an ad.

Etc etc ... A complex sprawling told in more or less real time with use of shaky cam digital video. Sounds like blergh? Maybe but it proves compelling. The mass of inter-relations and microplotting that give this chapter its Pieter Breughel the Elder earthy grandeur is all backdrop, though. This isn't Festen nor is it attempting to be. At the centre of this happily chaotic celebration there lurks a dark spirit. Justine proceeds to alienate everyone present (everyone!). It takes her a while but she goes about it patiently and certainly. By the end she is alone.

Chapter 2 is Claire. Charlotte Gainsbourg talks to her husband Kiefer Sutherland about her fear that the big blue planet Melancholia is about to fly by the earth will really collide with it, rendering everything they are and know to space dust. He tries to reassure her that that won't happen and as an amateur astonomer is keenly looking forward to the event. In these doubting days the family takes delivery of Claire's half sister Justine who is so deeply into her affliction that she has to be coaxed to lift her foot to step into the bathtub. As Claire forages in every human corner for hope, Justine, in chilling resignation, tells her that there is no justifiable hope and that they must give up to the inevitable end of days.

There are directors who never seem to go out of fashion and whose whole body of work is labelled good in polite society. The Coens are in this group. There are others whose work features an exception either way. People who loathe David Lynch will usually give him Blue Velvet or Muholland Drive. And there are director's whose place at the top of conversants' admiration has long been cold and vacant, regardless of their output since. Lars von Trier lives here.

He has been generally out of favour since Breaking the Waves back in the mid 90s. And then there was Dogme 95 which kept him there. And then there was a series of foot in mouth gaffes at press conferences that had him virtually put a "kick me" sign on his own back. The most recent one of these was his rambling admiration for Hitler's architect Albert Speer which turned both weird and sour as Kirsten Dunst beside him quite visibly wished she was somewhere else (Youtube it!).

For me, I take von Triers' films one at a time. I don't hate any outright but some I don't care much about. What I do like is his steady hand at melodrama (see also Almodovar for this as a redeeming feature) his ease with experimentation and the warm and deep results of his direction of actors. I took some pains above to list some of the cast because it's a splendid one and unusual for such roll calls, not one is wasted nor allowed to phone it in.

I've enjoyed Kirsten Dunst as a screen presence since the Interview with the Vampire way back when and have found that she drives even indifferent vehicles well (Mona Lisa Smile). Along with the Gyllenhall siblings she is among the most compelling of her screen generation, lifting whole films with little effort. Even though she is in such fine company here and the playing is more ensemble than individual, her performance centres the whole two hours twenty minutes.

That is important to this film because, although it has been dismissively called Festen meets Armageddon, Melancholia is neither social realism nor sci fi. All told this film is not about a wedding gone wrong nor an interplanetary disaster it is about depression. The grinding black defeat of depression is present in every frame and its host is Kirsten Dunst's performance. Whether facing off the lens in the first shot with an unblinking gaze of certainty, swaying drunkenly by herself in the golden-hued crowd at the reception, chugging a great quantity of cognac straight from a bottle of Hennessy XO, suddenly crying into her favourite food at the dinner table or quietly preparing her sister and nephew for the end of the world, Dunst holds us with her glacial precision. There is no warmth in this embrace but we don't want to disengage, so powerful, so pitiable, so pure. This is a fable of depression and has at its heart the kind of simple message that all fables must carry. In this case a single word will do: Cope!

My 2011

What kind of year was 2011 at the cinema for me? A slightly more active one than the previous five. Some Picks:

Disappointed that:

We Need to Talk About Kevin ventured no further than its virtuoso character and issue construction.

Sion Sonno moved back into conventional three-act territory after offering such bold and thrilling rides in pieces like Suicide Circle and Strange Circus. Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance played far more conventionally than they needed to and rest on lower rungs in the Sonno's ladder o' greatness as a result.

I Love You Phillip Morris could not survive the best attempts by its star to provide as true a portrayal of a rotter/cad/etc as he could muster. Love did not mitigate interpersonal atrocity for this bum on a seat.

Jane Eyre wasn't very interesting even though it succeeded in importing some freshness into the much filmed story.

Burning Man, having introduced a finely crafted time-shattering method of examining a serious situation too soon lost control of it.

Gratified that:

The Woman not only excelled at everything it attempted, provided real horror and provoked thought but broke its director out from a string of self-defeating "good ideas".

Black Swan declared its hand early but kept to its purpose so stubbornly that it transcended the tributary slide show it was initially and soared into high nutso greatness. Thank you Darren Arranofsky for not doing a Gus Van Sant on us and going all mainstream. Black Swan is a mainstream film by distribution and mood but retains the individuality of an auteur. Good job.

End of Animal kept to its odd brief, demonstrating again the need for a steady hand at the helm when daunting weather is ahead. Also, very good to see the continuation of South Korean cinema gem production.


A big thank you to:

Pedro Almodovar for surprising me with a film that chose against expected directions. The Skin I Live In is a treat. Don't be fooled by the spolier-avoiding trailer.

Nicholas Winding-Refn for giving us an action movie that was both old fashioned and new. The constantly effective Drive thrilled me despite a saggy final act.

Justin Kerzel for a crime thriller that examined the roots of atrocity, unflinchingly staring at the family values at the heart of this monstrosity. Snowtown was a triumph. Animal Kingdom team, this is how it's done.

Richard Lowenstein and Lynn-Maree Milburn for Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard which showed that a tribute to an artist can be sincere without being sucky. Martin Scorsese, you tried with the film about George but you couldn't get close (to either your subject or the Howard film).

Apichatpong Weerasethakul for showing us in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives that a theme like death can be celebratory and that a whimsical touch can also carry great weight.


Film o' the year?

The Woman

Review: The Skin I Live In: Almodovar lives well

There is something very strange going on at the Ledgard place. Roberto, a plastic surgeon is nurturing the care and recovery of a woman in a skin suit who possibly has crippling burns to most of her body. She lives from day to day being served food and reading material via a dumb waiter while she makes bizarre sculptures out of clay and torn clothes. The servants obey her but she is a prisoner.

Roberto comes home from a lecture in which he strongly hints that he has crossed the line in an experimental procedure involving synthesised skin. He turns on the giant screen in his den and luxuriates over the sight of his patient, an unwrinkled beauty turned away with all the glory of her posterior view on show. Noticing something, he rushes to her room and finds that she has slashed her wrists. Having an impeccably well equipped operating theatre at home he is able to stitch her up and lecture her, advising that the jugular is a better choice for those serious about their suicide.

Who is she? If not his dead wife is she someone he has saved from a similar fate (she burned to death in a car accident) and fashioned in the image of his beloved? Why? And why does all this just seem to coast?

Whoopsie! Six years earlier ...

No, this film is still in cinemas and it is so fragile against spoilers that I'm stopping here. I can say that the plot involves the most troubling act of revenge I have ever seen depicted on screen. Also, that if you go to this film expecting one of Almodovar's slightly off kilter melodramas keep thinking that and enjoy the ride. He has never gone so far into the realm of fable as he does here but this is no fairy tale. Also, if you feel that you've given it forty-five minutes of your time and it really isn't moving anywhere, sit tight, it moves.

If possible scenes of surgical violence turn you off be advised that you'll find NONE here. Aldmodovar has exercised great grace in removing any distracting gore from a tale that might be red with it in lesser hands. No, he is not concerned with violence. There's plenty of anger here, anger at the human race sinking into its own hell, anger at the anger and counter anger at that. And there is grief, grief that strains toward a naive kind of perfection which rewards its witnesses with a show of futility. (I'm reaaaaaally trying to avoid spoilers here.)

So what can I say about it? I can say that loss, a long standing theme for Almodovar, is here given the gravest treatment he's yet mustered. But, typically, it is given a setting both recognisable and fantastic. This helps any who approach to concentrate on the carefully constructed emotional maelstrom on screen.

Banderas, who came to the world through Almodovar's powerful but unglamorous roles, continues here with a performance that respects its author's care. He is pitiable and menacing by turns and, somehow, always caring. Beside him is the always wonderful Elena Anaya (see here for notes on the superb Hierro -- scroll down). There's one objection I have to her performance but it necessitates a spoiler but there is one scene, as old as folk tales, where she cannot reveal who she is to loved ones without a cataclysm: her decision grinds behind her  eyes as her love and her pain fight to the death.

I'm on and off with this director. Sometimes his comedies wear (I think I'm the only person who has seen it who finds Women on the Verge a drag). And sometimes his melodramas bore. Mostly I find his great Rabelasian humanity a joy. But now and then, he'll leap from the shadows with something tough and beautiful at once, a new thing. That's what he's got here.

Bugger the new Mission Impossible in IMAX. Go for a thrill for your inner core. Go see this one.

Why Spider Baby is a better film than Schindler's List: a Xmas reflection

Before going any further, please read this: I am not writing about the Holocaust. This blog post is concerned with a film that includes a representation of it. The event is rightly recalled with strong emotion ... but it's not what I'm talking about.

Anyway ...

Think about it:

A man responsible for a group of outsiders tries to keep the threat of the world away from them until he is forced to grave action.

A con artist exploits a group of outsiders until he is forced to feel for them and delivers a sickeningly self-serving speech about not doing enough.

Which one would you rather watch?

Spider Baby (the first description above) presents itself as an exploitation film. Family servant, Max is caretaker to a doomed family. The Merryes have a disease named after them. It's a form of galloping dementia which begins eroding their intellect in childhood. Enter city slicker cousins, unaffected by the condition who, with their shyster lawyer want to sell the property and live off the proceeds. The kids, with their ethical capacity disappearing but with young physiques, are dangerous (from the first scene on). Max tries to please everybody but understands that this is impossible. What he does is brutal but guided by nothing but despair at morality offering a better way.

Oskar Schindler is a spieler, going from table to table at nighclubs, making a big splash, putting himself about until he's noticed by the local movers and shakers and talks his way into manufacturing contracts. It's 1940s Europe and the movers and shakers wear swastikas and can offer free labour. Oskar has no problem with this and happily sets up his factory. Also setting up shop is Amon Goeth, another one of those darned Nazis who rolls into town and sets up the labour supply for Oskar's franchise. Amon has further orders than just keeping order and when Oskar witnesses one of Amon's massacres he begins to grow a conscience. After that he protects his workforce with ever cleverer schemes until they are effectively retarding the German war effort. So far this could be Hogan's Heroes.

But it isn't and for the very good reason that helming this venture is a director whose taste for bad guys is like a junkie's for junk. Scenes of Ralph Fiennes doing the kind of things that every bullied boy in the world daydreams about are the most magnetic in this film. At one point Goeth rises from his sexual bed to enjoyh a cigarette on the balcony and some idle target practice with a hunting rifle. He bends to the ledge and leaves his cigarette there, aims, fires, kills, swings around for another target and as he does, picks up the cigarette with his lower lip and aims again. The woman he's spent the night with complains about the noise of the rifle. He tells her to shut up.

When I saw this scene in the cinema when the film was new it trumped everything that had preceeded it and all that was to follow. It was a perfectly realised expression of male id, a man was doing what he felt like with no one to stop him. This is after the lower key but still remarkable entrance of the character whose first line is one of selfish profanity. However laddish and arch Schindler has been painted he has just been trumped. Thereafter something curious happens...

To give this weight I'll need to inform or remind my reader that Stephen Speilberg declared that he got in touch with his ancestral tradition in the making of this film. Where he had been raised outside of Judaism he now craved to identify with the victims of this atrocity. He declared that after this film he could no longer depict Nazis getting comically dispatched as they were in the Indiana Jones films. I'm not going to doubt his sincerity here.

But why, then, in a film that attempts to be the definitive mass for the victims of genocide, does the audience crave the screen presence of the perpetrators? Goeth is all charisma and depth. Schindler is a cardboard cutout who goes from cynical lines to idealistic ones and still seems like an unfolded mailing box. Liam Neeson does what he can with the role but ends up being playdough for Ben Kingsley's moral centre (admittedly given some interesting twists). But Fiennes' powerhouse performance as Goeth is something Stephen Spielberg cannot prevent himself from presenting: a really tasty villain.

In Jaws we watch a distant beach crawling with insect like humans as the awesome elegance of the shark glides through the water of the foreground. The good guys in that film have to be put through really really gruelling peril for us to identify with them when the great white terror is close by. Same with Amon Goeth.

So what? Doesn't that make him a talented filmmaker with the same quirk as Hitchcock? Yeah, it does. While I don't like his films very much I have to dips my lid to his sheer skill with light and sound. He is a cinemaster. The problem is not that he does it well but that he does it at the expense of his purpose.

Personally, I don't think that this has anything to do with his fealty to his ancestry. I think he just digs bad guys, understands them (deeply) and has a near compulsive need to fill his screens with them. In this case, as in Jaws, he finds a big threatening presence to scare his audience with and runs with it until he has to appease  them with a happy ending. Meantime, we get to walk around the skull of a real live Nazi. Now, if you accept this, doesn't it smack of the kind of movie this was meant not to be? Doesn't this remind you of a cinema aestheic that never gets close to Oscar ceremonies? Isn't this an exploitation film?

Try it. Get your mental machete and bash your way through the big names on the marquee and the state-of-art production values and look at what you are left with: a spayed chiper and a centre of moral gravity (Itzhak Stern) whose film this really deserves to be and above them both a fetishised tyrant whose personal power is as thrilling as it is terrifying. This film should be beside Russ Meyer.

But Russ Meyer might not feel so honoured. What, by the way has happened to Spider Baby in all this? Well, nothing much needs to happen. It is a film whose fantastical introduction (delivered with all the solemnity of an Ed Wood epic) comes right out and tells you it's an exploitation film. It's happy at the drive in or the grindhouse. But there's more: it's also good.

Lon Chaney Jr, having begun his career freed from the shadow of his tyrannical father, coasted through roles in Hollywood until chosen to play the Wolfman in Universal's famous monster movie. He brought a sadness to the role of the man trapped by his destiny which still gives the factory genre film its distinction. Much of his subsequent career until the 60s when Spider Baby was made did little more than reprise this performance. But when Chaney plays Bruno it's as though he has seized the essence of the character and only adds weight throughout the film. That essence is a similar sadness that his job has brought him, to care for and love those who are unable to return either and the sadness in knowing that his charges are doomed. Doomed if left alone and doomed if brought into the light of the world.

Bruno needs neither cruelty nor force to assert his authority but is left bewildered when faced with the venal cynicism of the worldly cousins. As primitive and wanton as his wards are, their violence seems like play to them. The cousins' lack of concern for the pathos of this situation renders them monstrous by comparison. Yes, it's a campy overstated monstrosity but everything finds its balance in this film. If there were Nazis in this movie we probably wouldn't need reminding that they were bad guys.

Those who dislike Spider Baby in my experience dislike the difficulty they have in classifying it. Is it a campy romp, a straight exploitation shocker, a Meyer-like outrage, a satirical comedy, a deceptive horror film, a horror parody...? What? All and none. Whether intentional or not Spider Baby is a remarkable piece that can welcome derisive laughter and provoke thought alike. It should be next to Val Lewton.

So, why even write this post? Well, I can't think of anything more pointless than to provoke Spielberg fans. They walk the earth in armour. And it's not just to be contrary (pointless, again). It's that in three years of sharing treasures from the shadows of the great unbeatable mainstream with whomever would see them, championing the subtle and the small in preference to celebrating the box office triumph, of experiencing the idea beneath the signs of a low budget, of becoming familiar with alternatives to classical narrative (or even just narrative), I still get people who cannot accept alternatives.

There can be no perceptible fault to not knowing the marginal pieces when they are so effectively smothered by the mainstream. Previous posts here have lamented the loss of an active and self-promoting arthouse scene, one that is a visible part of the cultural and social scene. What I and a few others have tried to do recently in this burg is get people back in touch with why cinema is such a valuable art and how variable the approach to completing a film can be. Because the narrative element in mainstream cinema makes it feel native to the form alternatives or even acts of defiance against it are often met with outrage. No, I mean it. Outrage. I've seen regulars to Shadows fit to be tied over this film's anti-narrative or that one's innovative use  of narrative. I've witnessed genuine offence.

I ask such folk if they are equally offended by Jackson Pollock paintings to be met with incredulity yet it's the same proposition that alternative cinema brings. If the Blue Poles is not trying to be Christina's World, aren't you left with dealing with the Blue Poles on its own terms? Put it in context, certainly, but in the end it's the picture before you that you should be responding to. And if you're going to rail against the symptoms of low budgets, or even just snicker at them, be fair and see what's left when you remove the big budgets from the blockbusters. Throw a few million at Spider Baby and you'd have Blue Velvet. Take the fortune away from the budget of Schindler's List and you have Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.


'Cept I'd probably rather watch Ilsa.