Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d7/
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Director: David Blair

Screenplay: David Blair

Cast: Father Bessarion; David Blair as Jacob Maker; William S. Burroughs as James 'Hive' Maker; Florence Ormezzano as Allellee Zillah; Meg Savlov as Melissa Maker; Clyde Tombaugh

In the annuals of American avant-garde cinema, David Blair's film has many distinctions. One of the first edited with digital equipment; when converted to a hypertext known as Waxweb, it was one of the first ever world wide web sites in existence; and it was the first film streamed online in the early days of the internet. Blair, still working into the modern day, took six years on the kind of delirious work here Thomas Pynchon would look at with bafflement. As if symbolic to this kind of post-modern reference, as you follow protagonist Jqacob Maker (the director himself) through hyper intelligent Mesopotamian bees, the dead living on the moon, and turning into a living missile to kill a previous incarnation, William S. Burroughs has a small none speaking role as the protagonist's ancestor, as if to mark this film with greater credibility.

Wax... whilst made with the technology of the time, with crude CGI denizens of the world of the dead and an emphasis on an essay film structure for its fictional and surreal plot, feels ahead of its time in these presidents and also its subject matter. David Blair, whilst this is his most well known film, is a figure who still works within this spectrum outside of conventional cinema, making a sequel of sorts in 2017 with a fifteen episode web series streamed online called The Lost Tribe, and is clearly someone who is always on in terms of ideas to his work. Wax... in content is just as unique, not just enough to have this premise of the dead rebelling and bee television, but in its language and style too, a beauty to its weirdness.

As mentioned, the film is structured closer to an audio-video essay, most of the actual footage that isn't pre-existing material, polygon shapes or photos silent with narration, tracking of course how James 'Hive' Maker (Burroughs), a spiritualist who used camera technology to capture the images of ghosts and a beekeeper, will link to his ancestor Jacob Maker, who helps design intelligent missile guidance systems, Jacob's own life literally absorbing back into his forefather's through what is mainly footage of him wandering locations in a bee keepers suit. From there, as Jacob develops the ability to communicate with bees and begins slowly to transform, this is depicted in a barrage of stock footage, overlaid images and basic computer animation, all of which adds an appropriate dissolution of the barrier between you the viewer and the material as, trying to absorb it all, the strange narration makes "sense" in terms of mood, rather than logic, and you find yourself investing in the material emotionally as a result of the grasping for space within all this information.

From https://66.media.tumblr.com/fee6cb10dc5e2619bb2efb9547a
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And it becomes more frenzied and surreal as it goes on. Spoiling plot points is actually difficult because the experience is not the same as describing it second hand, as Jacob has the aforementioned "bee television" implanted in his brain by his own hive of bees, culminating between the story of Cain & Abel being retold in his family, learnt to be his descendents and Jacob's work on intelligent missile guidance software being symbolic, as he himself becomes a living missile in the end who, rather than fleeing to the moon like others, must literally kill himself in one of his multiple co-existing reincarnations in the middle of the first Gulf War. Reality is broken early on, and its actually pathetic for me personally, as a surrealist in mind, for this film to purposely decimate the foundations of it, allowing for Jacob to hop between times, including his grandfather's home of the Garden of Eden, to the idea that souls actually split into multiple living pieces after death like the bees in a hive, all with a soberly spoken narration that is almost deadpan at times with lines that cannot be viewed as anything but intentionally ridiculous from Flair's part.

Frankly, why not love a film where mad, weird ideas come off this freely, as abstract poetry that just makes sense, especially as it's still intelligently put together with sub textual links rather than a word salad of a z-movie. Blair riffs on real concepts, from the religious to links like Mesopotamia, where the bees are linked to, being argued to be where Iraq now exists, not lost that this film was being made in the time of the first Gulf War with a damning view of military weaponry, more so as the ending has all of our protagonist's forms and their enemies becoming one and forgoing hatred in a unity. Adding a new ominous side that, David Flair not knowing this would happen, intelligent missile guidance systems predate drone technology, now used in military service and emphasising this sense of violence committed from a distance the director-writer plays with here.

Blair himself, by accounts, isn't religious but his mix of Christian and New Age ideas is also compelling, not coming off as a mess but delirious in a haunting ode of the dead being restless, the weight of the past burdening the living and crimes having to be dealt with in the afterlife even if it means breaking reality. Again, the surrealistic side of my heart cheers the later, transcending physical logic for a profound point, a man able to be both his victim, the killer, the revenger, two twin women and their siblings, and all within a film that talks of it with a wise, clever attitude. The density of the material is like another creator, Jean-Luc Godard, in how it plays with the form of materials like video and stock footage, but is its own rich and amazing creation. It is the kind where the technical obsoletion of some of the materials has actually made its virtues even stronger in fact.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Mindbender/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Personal Opinion:

Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, available to watch legally on (what else?) the internet without any cost from the director himself, is a very strange film to say the least. Absolutely unique but also a fascinating document in how, made in tandem with the new creation called the World Wide Web, it is arguably one of the first abstract films ever made to reflect this new medium which would have a profound impact over the next few decades. Whilst alien to many internet videos in tone and ideas, its effectively the grandfather to many odd experimental works like it, somewhat befitting considering it itself is a film where a man can be his own grandfather and himself as these films online form a curious heritage to each other.  

From https://66.media.tumblr.com/1fc1a3951c166b7d3769fa69f1
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In the Aftermath (1988)

From https://cdn.flickeringmyth.com/wp-content/
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Directors: Carl Colpaert (Based on a film by Mamoru Oshii)

Screenplay: Carl Colpaert (Based on a film by Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano)

Cast: Katie Leigh as Angel (voice); Tony Markes as Frank; Rainbow Dolan as Angel; Kenneth McCabe as Goose; Kurtiss J. Tews as the Psycho Soldier; Bryan Ellenburg as the Soldier; Ian Ruskin as Jonathan (voice); Lisa Maxwell as the Older Angel (voice); Filiz Tully as Dr. Sarah; Mike Hickam as the Officer

A 1000 Anime Crossover

This is from my other blog 1000 Anime, the same review but with additional material added to the end. As not all my reviews for that blog, covering anime, would be appropriate for this blog's subject, follow the link to the original review HERE and take a gander at the various other reviews you have been missing out on from there.

Let's begin with the obvious - how Mamoru Oshii's original version of Angel's Egg (1985) isn't available in the West but this notorious American reinterpretation from Roger Corman's New World Pictures is baffled me as it has for many. I don't blame those who licensed this version mind, neither Code Red in the United States or Arrow Video in the United Kingdom, as its likely the sad case the license for Angel's Egg is difficult to acquire or priced too high. (If by any chance it's due to New World Pictures or Lakeshore Pictures, the later owning this license, then someone would've grumbled about it by now, but bear in mind anime has been notoriously pricy at times to license from Japanese companies). In contrast, In the Aftermath was, from the looks of things, an entirely different license as a New World Pictures creation, Lakeshore Picture owning the rights since 2002. And honestly, whilst it's a ridiculous train wreck at many points and inferior to the original Angel's Egg, I'm glad we still have a 2k restoration of In the Aftermath, even if my own idealised version would'e been as an extra to the superior Japanese production.

As it goes New World Pictures ended up with the license for Angel's Egg, to which the likes of producer Tom Dugan thought it was an incomprehensible work. Angel's Egg, for those who don't know what it is, is an experimental theatrical animation by Mamoru Oshii, cult anime/live action director of the likes of Ghost in the Shell (1995), in collaboration with the legendary illustrator Yoshitaka Amano, who'd become acclaimed enough to have his work in art galleries after a career starting in anime production in the late sixties. Oshii, originally desiring to become a Catholic priest, clearly made Angel's Egg as a parable about religious doubt, with what you do see in In the Aftermath in terms of original footage enough to show it was very open in the conclusion without ever drawing a line onto either side, the title referencing an egg the iconic animated girl character had which either was an angel's or had nothing inside it. The New World Pictures version still also includes the sequence of fishermen trying to catch shadows of giant fish which cling to their city walls, only destroying what they try to hit with harpoons, a metaphorical sequence that, even if Oshii views the film more of a mood piece nowadays, still has this visible message within itself.

A lot of Angel's Egg is understandably abstract, intentionally so and soaked in a post-apocalypse built around the best representation of Amano own work and some of the best animators on staff from the eighties anime boom. It could've, however, been sold to an American audience by New World Pictures, rather than making an even less comprehensible version in In The Aftermath, if you'd just sold it to the art house crowd Roger Corman once did with Federico Fellini and other European films. Hell, for the visuals alone, this could've appealed to the cult film crowd even if the original film has very little dialogue and a lot of slow, languid scenes as it's a trippy, strange film even without the visible existential message.

Somehow, trying to make the film more sellable, another issue being that at seventy or so minutes Angel's Egg was seen as too short, the people behind In the Aftermath making something even less coherent at times just to fit their perceived parameters. To see it to the VHS market (though it did have an Australian theatrical release), the animation is used as an alternative world overlooking ours, actually like the angels of It's A Wonderful Life (1946) where the original protagonists, the white haired girl and a young male soldier, are now siblings and with the young girl to be sent to Earth, in live action, which is a wasteland where the ozone is poisoned and clean air is a precious resource.

It's actually not as disastrous as the reputation is. The infamy is how not only someone thinking this was a good idea, not helped by the original film not being available in the West still, but that to "make sense" Colpaert, an apprentice to Peter Bogdanovich, wrote a new script of utterly ridiculous (and quotable) dialogue about men crying about a world without fish and the girl being spanked by her older brother with asteroids as punishment for falling asleep. The project, even if I wished an English dubbed version of Angel's Egg was the version released rather than this misbegotten belief of trying to make a more "sellable" version to the West, is still compelling now we know it's an utterly perplexing creative decision, a time capsule to this bizarre cultural reinterpretation to sell films that still happened into the 2000s, whenever Miramax got hold of work like martial arts films for example, but is also alien to many world cinema fans as a practice. In 2K resolution on a Blu Ray, Angel's Egg as an animated production is incredible, causing one to weep that it is available outside Japan barring bootlegs; it is a project of the era, a box office failure whose production was only possible due to how the bubble economy grew in Japan during the eighties and, before the bubble burst at the end, there was enough money going around including in the animation industry to fund these bold projects.

From http://entervideo.net/thumbs/
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Oshii himself, whilst he can be difficult for many, is an intellectual auteur, who even when he now claims the film is vague in meaning laced the film with too much clear symbology of his own spiritual crisis. This, as mentioned, is the only project to fully capture Yoshitaka Amano's art style too, so it is painstaking in capturing his gorgeous yet highly detailed illustration right down to the difficulty the animators would've had in just animating the movement of the clothes and hair of characters. The production team, with individuals who'd go on to the like of Akira (1988) to My Neighbour Totoro (1988), were not slouches either.

The live action isn't, even if low budget, letting the side down however in ingenuity. I will mock the point of even creating the film as it was, and mock the script, a really bad case of presuming an audience couldn't catch the vibe of the original or even just admiring the pretty pictures in spite of finding it slow, but I won't deny it's a great example in terms of clearly having so little to work with, two locations for sets and a few actors, and trying with some damn good ideas to make something interesting even if the script is gleefully gibberish at point. The two locations were chosen well, the factory in particular also used for Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), the kind of evocative set you could find in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) to a b-movie; by all accounts, an actual closed factory, it might've been dangerous to film there with those dust clouds onscreen looking too irradiated in chemicals abandoned there for comfort. Cinematographer Geza Sinkovics does his hardest to help the live action sequences, but its score composer Anthony Moore who deserves a moment of praise. An experimental composer who has worked with the likes of Henry Cow and Pink Floyd, he's a vital element in improving this film, in tandem to some of the other visual tricks at hand the person who comes close to matching the original source material in evocative mood.

Even when the animation is spliced into the live action, to try to make it work, there's also an eeriness that works. The premise, an "angel" sent to save Earth from environmental devastation is depicted by only six cast members (including lead Tony Markes), groans under trying to rationalise an art film into a pulp b-flick, but there's a sense of the unnatural to still appreciate because of this. The anime still has power even in this bastardised form, and the live action is appropriately eerie when you ignore the story.

Instead, the script, by the director, should be appreciated for going into non-sequiturs even weirder than the source, which was strange for its open ended ideas and the psychedelic dialogue but, when characters actually spoke, was very precise and sombre, building to the themes of spiritual ambiguity. Some of what is found here is potent whilst still strange, Markes in a gas mask playing a piano to a female doctor (Filiz Tully) he encounters, but spanking people with asteroids is just the kind of line screaming for baffled reactions. Angel's Egg had limited dialogue, a lot of silence that was clearly seen as unsellable considering the decision to cram voiceover to sell it, all of which adds an unintentional absurdity. Thankfully, it wasn't dull, pedestrian sci-fi exposition; instead, its lore that makes no sense but is fascinating in how this is an attempt to make the original work "makes sense" but becoming something gloriously off. The largest monologue in Angel's Egg, the young soldier retelling the tale of Noah's Ark with the boat drifting on an ocean never finding land, is turned into a nonsensical tale of deception where fish floating in the air on a planet are stolen that has to be heard to be believed.

It makes no sense why this executed plan was meant to be more marketable, but whilst I imagine an alternative world where Angel's Egg was sold as a more avant-garde Ingmar Bergman movie to art film audiences, In the Aftermath was what we got and is still rewarding for how odd it is. The real tragedy is that, whilst it helped introduce Westerners to Angel's Egg, it never lead to Angel's Egg actually being released; New World Pictures, among their work, also released an "Americanized" version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) as Warriors of the Wind, the original pre-Studio Ghibli film now available whilst that version has vanished, yet nonetheless for a certain generation probably thanked for letting them still see anime for the first time. We thankfully left this need for alternative versions of foreign titles, but considering how extreme and peculiar In the Aftermath is, I am glad it's still available. That it's not an extra to the source and the only restored version in the West of the two films is tragic, but the oddity shouldn't be blamed for that.

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Nonsensical/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

If we were talking about the original Angel's Egg, it would deserve a significantly higher position in terms of the Abstract Rating, alongside utter admiration of its existence as an incredible and unique animated production. As it stands though, not only is In the Aftermath still weird as a creation but, even if its production undercuts the original uniqueness of the source material, its an odd film which doesn't feel even like many re-interpretations of other's work, something to be admired even if an acquired taste.

From https://admitonefilmaddict.files.wordpress.com/
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TerrorVision (198X)

From http://www.p-synd.com/tv03.jpg

Directors: John Auerbach, Terry Hamad, Jonathan Heap, Alvin Merrill, Michael Murray, Mark S. Esposito, Millard Segal

Screenplay: Jonathan Heap, Jordan Horowitz, Nathan Klein, Philip Morton, James Percelay, Ann-Marie Pieters, Paul Segal, Leo Stuchkus, Virginia Watson-Rouslin

[USA]

In terms of the Abstract, special exceptions can be made for materials that in their original context and how one approaches them are innately weirder than just the premises. They develop a magnetism wondering why they existed, who decided to make them, how it was made and originally broadcasted, and how they can just disappear until this era of the internet and amateur cultural archiving where they reappear like ghosts.

The existence of TerrorVision, which I openly admit only knowing about in 2017 when a podcast Cancelled Too Soon, about one season wonders and failed pilots, disturbed its VHS necropolis, is absolutely weird. Horror anthologies are a dime a dozen in many mediums, and I love them like many, but one for the Lifetime Channel visibly shot on VHS and on a zero-budget, where we cannot fully confirm what year it actually came out and was once gone from existence, is perplexing. Ten minutes long per episode, when TerrorVision was screened between 1985 to 1987 (in theory) is as much spectre-like as it cannot be pinned down, the kind of work that just feeds a CreepyPasta story in itself.

You get a great primer for what to expect in the first episode, The Closet Monster, by co-director of Cafe Flesh Mark S. Esposito. Unknown actors, woodenly performing in ordinary middle class suburbia, shot on video now battered and distorted by time memoriam, in which the only son claims there's a monster in his closet. I forgot, returning to this series, that even for these ten minute long episodes that they still feel long to experience, a lot of TerrorVision drama with casual (even banal) dialogue scenes until you get to the horror twist, here the father talking about using video toaster technology at work and ignoring his son's claims of a monster in his bedroom. Stylistically as crude as you can get, the title sequence for this series is a skull with hastily added eyes, the type of no budget production that, whilst ridiculous, has a strange aura to it of low res video and with unknowns having to deal with scenarios which are both lame but eerily perplexing. In this case, a domestic drama where the parents think their son is disturbed, itself a dark psychological subtext to scratch the surface of, until the twist involves a costume that you'd laugh at in a costume store but here, in your closet and bug eyed, is still weird when worn by someone.

Final Edition, of a woman being stalked in her home at night, furthers this whilst also showing how the series could've also been legitimately good, the banality of the aesthetic actually able to be creepy as the style looks like a viewer's own home rather than a set, as something's out of the corner of one's eye catches your attention behind the protagonist's back or when a voice asks her over the phone menacingly whether she got the newspaper. MAJOR SPOILER, this culminates with the episode being in an ouroboros, where she is stuck repeating the same story over and over with it leading to her death each time, something which as the story has her as a hard working employee with a history of psychological problems including hearing voices actually has more nuisance than most of TerrorVision.

The Craving has as much nuisance, i.e. the completely opposite and what you'd expect from TerrorVision. A man gets a toothache and makes the ill advised idea to go to a dentist only open after night, a fat shaming caricature that eats insane proportions of food and the crass tuba score usually used for such character is recreated with a synth. The punch line is from a children's joke book I probably had in my youth, but its part of TerrorVision's charm (in spite of the cruelness of mocking the episode's protagonist) how earnest this all is. And clearly, someone was in on the joke as, among the bleeding colours and foggy atmosphere of the dentist's corridors, a side character has a newspaper with a mocked up headline of a couple fleeing a talking bear.

The short length means that these stories never get tiresome. There's Reflections of a Murder, about a corrupt lawyer who kills his business partner only to be haunted by his ghost, or One of a Kind, where elderly owners of a sinister fashion store steal wannabe models' "souls" with a special camera to sell them themselves as merchandise, both of which emphasis the presumed origins of the show in their emphasis on drama merely filtered through horror tropes, the lo-fi aesthetics (such as the transformation of models by the camera) having their own charm.

A Cold Day in July does emphasis how, throughout, these are moments of pure lopsidedness in the production, a drama of a sleazy weasel, his angry former model wife, ill advised horse racing gambling and ridiculous amounts of beef being bought, all of which is only supernatural, let alone horror, when someone abruptly freezes to death in a shower at the end. Rosemary's Lot, about the preserved hand of a crazed killer and the tribulations of a female pathologist having to put up with a chauvinistic colleague trying to woo her, does leave the series on a high. Same stupefied tone, a hand rising out a bowl of soup, and actual gristly material including an undead monster and bloodshed onscreen, but certainly memory to the show's credit.

It is all peculiar. In another context it wouldn't be abstract, just inept but compelling. In this one though it is stranger, both in execution and how the hell the series even came to be in the first place, more so as these seven episodes are all that (presumably) exist. The fact the series just disappeared into obscurity, only for a couple of decades later to spring out again to rediscover it in the 2010s, adds to this oddness.

Abstract Spectrum: Lo-Fi/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

As curious a television programme as you could get when witnessed. All depicted with a sense of an extremely low production that at time barely acts like a horror anthology, at times shot with a haze of a homemade production, always interesting in its oddness and how it's too short per episode to ever get tiresome. TerrorVision is an acquired taste, another example, but a really great example of how much is made for television and how much of it, if dug up again, could be this idiosyncratic.

From http://www.p-synd.com/tv53.jpg

Let the Corpses Tan (2017)

Directors: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani

Screenplay: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani

Cast: Elina Löwensohn as Luce;  Stéphane Ferrara as Rhino;  Bernie Bonvoisin as La brute; Michelangelo Marchese as L'avocat; Marc Barbé as Max Bernier; Marine Sainsily as La nounou; Hervé Sogne as Le policier; Pierre Nisse as Le jeune; Aline Stevens as La femme dorée; Dorylia Calmel as La femme de Bernier; Marilyn Jess as La policière

Long awaited, tragically not properly given their due¹, the return of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani pleases me immensely. Wanting to raise eyebrows even further than before with the surreal sexual imagery, the duo have transitioned away from giallo to the crime and Poliziotteschi genres of Italian pulp cinema alongside visibly references to westerns, set at the isolated home of an eccentric artist Luce (Elina Löwensohn) whose decision to welcome in criminals backfires when they, after a gold heist, end up in conflict with two police on the premises alongside a drunk author's wife being catch in the crossfire with her maid and son. Luce just sits back and watches on at the carnage at hand.

The irony in this change of genre is that, for any accusations of style over substance, Let the Corpses Tan tells a story just as complex as you might get in a crime film, i.e. basic, but cuts out the chaff and tells a lot which is usually told in exposition through the visuals instead. Knowing as well this is actually based on a novel, Laissez bronzer les cadavres by Jean-Patrick Manchette (an important French novelist) and Jean-Pierre Bastid, really adds to the interest of how what is usually told through a standard unpacking of narrated plot points it being told here instead in full detail, by through a visual medium that you need to keep on your toes with and focus upon. That's not to deny how surreal some of the scenes are, the dreams and fantasy sequences bizarre, but they all actual meld together with some point if you register what's going on.

To the creators' credit, the miniscule plot is told in detail, right down to one of the most prominent and compelling details in that not only will they constantly flash the time when events that transpire take place, even after a minute from the last with onscreen text cutaways, but they also show events which transpire with the same minute from different characters. Baring some different locations, most of the film is entirely set in an isolated area of land which becomes a terrain for bloodshed and backstabbing, never a sense of complete confusion of geography even if it's dense and frantic at points. Certainly at this point in their career, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have defined their style entirely as their own, for all their borrowing (still in this film too) of aesthetic and actual music from classic Italian genre cinema not a tribute act in the slightest. They are the right direction in terms of tackling past influences, paying homage but distorting it into new and refreshing directions.

From https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape
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Prominently is their obsession with textuality in audio, visuals and content. They are practically fetishists in many ways, never a creator fixated on leather gloves to the point even old giallo look normal in comparison, the leather of the two cops' costumes heard in painstaking sound detail. Actors' appearances are fixated and obsessed over, and how befitting in this case this marks my rediscovery of Elina Löwensohn, who I saw once ago in her youth in a TV recording of Michael Almereyda's Nadja (1994), than a regular of a few Hal Hartley films, now a much older but striking actress onscreen, now the muse for Bertrand Mandico and appearing in this. As the central (frankly phantom) id who watches over the carnage like a one woman Greek chorus, also likely the female figure of shadow who urinates gold and is the clear personification of death in the phantasm sequences, she is such a huge virtue of Let the Corpses Tan.

The human body in general, what it is wearing and when bare, is lavished over too, contrasted with death, blood, gold and dust adding to a hyper sensitive tone. In mind to this, it has to be raised that one of these director-writers, Hélène Cattet, is a female creator and as prominent a creative force as Bruno Forzani is. This is poignant to point out because, as with their previous work, they rely heavily on the sexualisation and nudity of the female form. This is prominent in Let the Corpses Tan when you have someone fantasise about machine gunning of a woman's clothes off, all which could be seen as highly objectifying. Having a strong female creative force involved really complicates the viewer's reaction to these images, as with their other work the highly sexualised depictions laced with violence and S&M could be read with problematic detail, but in lieu to this have a bit more to keep in mind. Its notable in this particular film that, not only are all these sexual sequences always the fantasies and delusions of the male cast, even the most bizarre like a woman on a wooden X being tied with ropes so hard she lactates spring water, but the female characters are very dominant. The male characters are doomed to their lusts for gold, and even after they have scenes when held hostage by the male criminals, the women start to show tactics both in lieu of protecting themselves and especially the young boy. Löwensohn's part as well, this figure who doesn't bat an eyelid to being threatened by cop or criminal, is too strong to dismiss. The gaze a viewer is inherently complicated as the viewer can not only be male or female but also heterosexual, bisexual or gay, which adds more questions to raise when dealing with these images, and when a creator is a woman, that furthers this complexity alongside how the images are used and told.

Despite gut reactions at point to some of the material, and the sense this is still a crime thriller in the clothes of an avant-garde film, it's a true cinematic UFO which even challenges both the idea of the viewer's gaze, knowing our creators are male and female, and that it completely reinterprets these genre tropes into something profound. Stylistically the directors are completely confident by now, the change needed to not become predictable the genre chosen rather than changing their directing style. They are interesting in how, with its heavy emphasis on editing and saturation of images and sound, they take the avant-garde and infuse it with their own utter surrealism like ants running on a map of the central location. They are, frankly, one of my favourite working directors, as a duo, entirely for bringing something truly unique to the cinematic form and especially for cult cinema.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Psychotronic/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Personal Opinion:

The return of Cattet and Forzani is something I always anticipate, and Let the Corpses Tan didn't disappoint. That they look like they could transition to various different genres and change their styles, though, is a new and exciting point to their careers.

From https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/08/31/arts/31letthecorpsestan/merlin_142704852_55b
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1) That the film has merely booted to Amazon Prime, where people may not know about I did, and hasn't had even a DVD release just goes to show the state of British film distribution.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

From https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1057/4964/products/the-discreet-charm-of-the
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Director: Luis Buñuel

Screenplay: Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière

Cast: Fernando Rey as Rafael Acosta, Paul Frankeur as Francois Thévenot, Delphine Seyrig as Simone Thévenot, Bulle Ogier as Florence, Stéphane Audran as Alice Sénéchal, Jean-Pierre Cassel as Henri Sénéchal, Michel Piccoli as the Minister

In university, when I was tentatively discovering world and art cinema through the DVD shelves of their library, large enough to be its own building in a multi floor (?) book depository, it was Luis Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard I once felt were completely overrated yet kept binging their films from the collection trying to rationalise why they were even popular. Over ten years later, I hold them in high regard.

It was a transitional period over these ten years where, without wanting to dismiss anyone's taste in film in these comments, I changed from the reader of Total Film magazine who once viewed The Usual Suspects (1995) and Memento (2000) as the best of cinema to becoming the person who read Sight & Sound who viewed the likes of Satantango (1994) to cult anime as some of my favourites. (Nowadays I read neither and am a fan of many films).  This is surprisingly a transition many cineastes have been said to go through, as much due to growing in age; I openly admit a form of Stockholm syndrome kicked in particularly with Godard too. One wishes I had this open-mindedness, slowly cultivated from getting used to unconventional and experience film styles, back in university when I had access to that library but hey hum.

Buñuel, particularly his final famous French period where his films were co-scripted with Jean-Claude Carrière, are also a lot more difficult for their apparent accessibility then you'd think; Jean-Luc Godard's work was always difficult on the surface before he even discarded narrative filmmaking by the 2000s, but Buñuel's more elusive. His films, despite being satires in the period from The Milky Way (1969), aren't exactly funny ha ha but an aloof lifts of the eyebrows which doesn't exactly come off as tight slappers. His films are paced slowly with minimal camera movement and editing. He also doesn't have a lot of non-diegetic music if none at all in The Discreet Charm...; in any film, if there's no score to subliminally affect a viewer, it drastically changes the pace considerably.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is nonetheless one of his most accessible films. It can be summed up in one sentence, a group of middle class bourgeoisie in vignettes who are constantly prevented from having a dinner party, arguably alongside its quality how it's become one of his most well known films, with a reputation even outside his filmography just from winning the 1973 Best Foreign Picture Oscar, but it's still a bizarre and subversive film, full of subplots to tangents and dreams within dreams which get increasingly perplexing.

Our bourgeoisie are as appalling group over-privileged figures as you could get; complimenting ex-Nazis as gentlemen, adultery with each other's wives, and in the case of Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey), an ambassador to a South American country as corrupt as you could get despite his constant offense to this being pointed out to him. Yet they are strangely sympathetic, mainly because a) a cast including as legendary a cast of European actors like Rey to Delphine Seyrig is inherently full of the most charismatic of Euro-cinema, and b) because they are utterly banal people, the real satire in the current day, and more profound critique to have with the middle and high classes, is that no matter how corrupt they could be, this particular lot are as average and easily ruffled over a lack of tea in a cafe as you could get. From there, they are figures who look like deer caught in the headlights a great deal of the time, more concerned with sex and food whilst continually putting up with increasingly pronounced interruptions, beginning with visiting each other on the wrong day for a dinner part to a military troop in manoeuvres paying a visit. Their worst attitudes are witnessed, but so is how baring their privilege how mediocre they are too, profusely clueless as scenes have them wandering countryside road as a curious form of purgatory.

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For a while the only truly sympathetic character, until a late period subplot twist, is Julien Bertheau's Monsignor Dufour, a priest who wishes at first to also garden. Much has been made of Buñuel's history of atheism, but alongside casting Édith Scob as the Virgin Mary in The Milky Way, there's a sweetness in a priest who wants to be someone else's paid gardener on the side even if their new employees are arseholes. It's only when that plot twist appears things are complicated; a loaded situation, literally, and a reminder Buñuel's jabs have a lot to do when religion had "organised" in front of the word. Noticeably how characters refuse to pay the priest any attention until he's actually in official uniform, rather than gardening dungarees, says a lot.

The moment The Discreet Charm... gets abstract is when scenarios not only get odder, but when the dreams appear. Scenes literally stop to let one character talk about their dreams, or in one case a solder at a cafe walks up to the female protagonists and sits at their table, talking about his childhood and how the ghost of his dead mother told him to kill his step father, all before saying goodbye and never being seen again.

Then entire scenes are dreams dreamt by the characters which are then dreams dreamt by their friends, and The Discreet Charm... truly gets weird. And these become overtly surreal. Some are worse case scenarios, such as Rafael Acosta shooting a dinner party host over saying his country is corrupt, but others follow the tropes of barriers in their desires, fake plastic chickens, and literal phantoms who roam the corridors. Their existence, baring farces with bitter humour, still expose the worst in these people, from the corruption of the police using electrified pianos to a general buffoonery of these strict middle class ideals. Buñuel even has a bit of Godard's tricks at hand as, in a comically brief cameo by Michael Piccoli, his phone call to a character (shot entirely separate from everyone else) is drowned out by the sound of a plane twice, both to use the viewer but even the character trying to communicate to him.

Any further attempt to analysis Buñuel and Carrière's work would spoil it. The Discreet Charm... may be cool and aloof at times in its presentation, but it's still funny, arguably the most overtly humorous of his work despite his tendency to be more funny peculiar in his career. The natural but brightly coloured world of French cinema is a good place for this perverse comedy of manners and a cast this strong to work within; obvious Rey stands out as the ambassador who'll sacrifice himself for a cold cut, and has to deal with a rebel group in his country constantly trying to send a female agent to him, but everyone succeeds in making these stereotypes have some personality. They all (even unintentionally) bring some sympathy to this miserable lot as, despicable as they are, they are shown as guided by ordinary obsessions like you and I, the awkward moment a husband and wife want to have sex but the guests have already arrived, or the moment you realise the proprietor's corpse for a restaurant is in another room as you are about to dine.

Even the most absurd moments are brilliantly staged by how calm or matter-of-fact they are, the military group coming for a large banquet, or the harsh efficiency of a group of machine gun welding intruders. If anything, it proved that Luis Buñuel, who has multiple phases of his career, had a virtue of always being this sedate and calm in tone whether here or in his earlier Mexican productions, his slow manner particularly for these final French films adding to the dark humour and allowing it to stand out proudly.

Abstract Spectrum: Humorous/Surreal/Whimsical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Personal Opinion:

Returning to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, it's a gem, an absolutely incredible work. A lot can be delved in further if you wish to dissect each segment, but it cannot be argued that the film's singular acclaim comes as much from how more accessible in structure yet so open to interpretation as it is.

From https://celluloidwickerman.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/
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3 Women (1977)

From https://art-s.nflximg.net/5a5c7/52bd45a08943a
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Director: Robert Altman

Screenplay: Robert Altman

Cast: Shelley Duvall as Mildred "Millie" Lammoreaux, Sissy Spacek as Mildred "Pinky" Rose, Janice Rule as Willie Hart, Robert Fortier as Edgar Hart, Ruth Nelson as Mrs. Rose, John Cromwell as Mr. Rose, Sierra Pecheur as Ms. Bunweil

In a period of great stress, his wife going through a major illness and in a hard period of his own career, Robert Altman had a dream. His dream, produced by 20th Century Fox, would be set in the desert community of Palm Springs, California, all within a world isolated by vast dusty desert road coloured pronominally yellow with the additional boldness of mid seventies decor, where an apartment block can have purple sage railings and a character befittingly nicknamed Pinky (Sissy Spacek) weats bold pink.

Pinky is a new employee at a health spa for the elderly, who is at times incredibly childish or frankly alien, attaching herself to Millie (Shelley Duvall), a waif-like figure who at first seems to be a popular sociable figure until you realise she is a figure who talks constantly in a world of her own with no one else listening, an incredibly isolated figure not particularly liked who gains most of her knowledge of the world from magazines. Theirs is a curious relationship, but as is their world. A place of a languid melancholy, Altman shoots the film in a hazy state as Millie becomes aware of her disconnect whilst Pinky is visibly stealing pieces of her personality, even if it is by accident due to an incident at the apartment complex pool.

The title references three women mind, the third Willie Hart (Janice Rule), the pregnant wife of aging former stunt man Edgar (Robert Fortier), a buffoonish cad who, operating at Dodge City, a bar that looks like an old b-movie western set with an abandoned mini-golf course and everyone firing guns at a range at the back, is secretly having an affair with Millie and is eyeing up Pinky as well. Willie's one form of communication, the character only speaking at the ending, is peculiar mythological and sexual murals of female and male humanoids that, like the swimming pools, are the most reoccurring motifs onscreen.

3 Women's world is a curious one, stately and utterly banal but weirder as a result. Here is ordinary life, where Millie is obsessed with all the cooking recipes she finds in magazines than anything profound, store bought consumer food like squirty cheese a third reoccurring symbol of the film, all whilst Pinky is a literal chameleon in how she can change, from blowing bubbles in her drink to becoming a tempestuous glamorous figure as she becomes. The central figures, Duvall and Spacek are (not surprisingly) incredible in the film. The exact nature of the film, knowing Altman originally dreamt it and the final work is a creation of multiple sources, author Patricia Resnick and a lot of improvisation from the central actresses themselves, is subjective to an extreme in the sense that the film really does not play out as anything but a very subdued character piece for its length, scrutinising these figures, alongside characters like Willie and Edgar, through the contemplative nature that was Altman's specialty.

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David Lynch has possibly seen the film, which is something I can make a promise on, noticeable when Pinky's parents are meet, two exceptionally old people whose flat pronunciations on bland things, like a sign for the kitchen they get her as a gift whilst she is in a coma, feels like a prototype for the state of perverse normalcy that Lynch tapped into. Noticeably it's to question whether they are even her parents; as with everything else in the film, entirely subjective, even if it feels part of the habit of Pinky's to try to reject her past life, a Mildred to match Duvall's Mildred who also prefers a nickname, there's a deliberate obfuscation of what it of truth without ever becoming un-natural in tone.

Ultimately a great deal of the film, barring one nightmare sequence, is entirely grounded in a reality that has been made abstract the moment one of Pinky's new co-workers is revealed to be one of two female twins, as much done to deliberately catch the viewer off guard at the beginning of the film as her. Unlike Images (1972), another of the Altman productions which was more overtly surreal in as a psychological horror, the mannered tone at hand in 3 Women is even stranger.

The sense of dream logic is from how the film, as well as with mind to Altman's trademarks in improvisation and grounded characterisation, never follows the plot outline I've suggested as to where you'd expect it. What happens to Pinky and Millie is not what you expect, instead the titular three women morphing completely. It's a curious experience, also a wonderful one, a distillation of American drama slowed down enough to be truly weird. Even the abstract score, by Bodhi Wind, has a calmed quality of disruption based on woodwind instruments, a quiet dissonant quality appropriate for the content.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Psychodrama

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Personal Opinion:

Something very different because of how, on the surface, 3 Women follows known of the conventional trademarks of an "abstract" film; instead it finds that, when the drama is hovering over a plot which is vague, where the characters seem to shift into one another, and even without its origins from an actual dream, a sense that the film is entirely inside its protagonists' head (or an outside figure's dreaming all this for us) without telegraphing it is just as strange to witness. Its argubly sad that, in his prolific career, Robert Altman didn't make many films like this in his career; thankfully, there are at least a few that, whilst not necessarily going to be like 3 Women, are all potentially weird in their own right.

From http://www.capricorntheater.com/wp-content/
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Holy Pafnucio (1977)

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Director: Rafael Corkidi

Screenplay: Rafael Corkidi and Carlos Illescas

Cast: Juan Barrón as Adán / Jesuscristo / revolucionario; Pablo Corkidi as Pafnucio; Susana Kamini as Patricia Hearst; Gina Morett as demonio / china poblana / Emiliano Zapata; Piya as Malinche; Jorge Humberto Robles as Hernán Cortés / mensajero / juez / Romeo / revolucionario; Sebastián as voceador; José Luis Urquieta as the Soldier; María de la Luz Zendejas as Frida Kahlo / Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz / Capitán

Synopsis: Leaving a congregation of holy American football players, a young boy of holy origins called Pafnucio wanders the world trying to find a woman who will give birth to the new child of God.

Made in Mexico, I wondered if director Rafael Corkidi had any connection to the Panic Movement, an avant-garde movement that included Alejando Jodorowsky, director of El Topo (1970) and lesser know directors like Fernando Arrabal. To my surprise, Corkidi was instead the cinematographer on Jodorowsky's El Topo and The Holy Mountain (1973) alongside working on the likes of Juan López Moctezuma's The Mansion of Madness (1973). It feels apt learning this as Holy Pafnucio starts with a prologue where a black clad, cowboy like figure in the style of El Topo wanders the desert, passing various surreal and uncomfortable juxtapositions in the desert such as a Christ figure left abandoned on a cross, an Auschwitz gate with Jews wandering through them, or a band of Ku Klux Klan marching on a railway line. What the prologue actually means is to debate, but the sense of a figure going through various landmarks of time, both those which are important but also tragically the worst in humankind, feels apt when the film's raison d'etre is to follow a figure known as Pafnucio who is trying to bring the son of God, or the son of the son of God, into the world for our betterment.

The film proper from then begins when he leaves and the aforementioned Pafnucio appears, presiding over American football players in a monastery playing and praying in lotus positions as, once he removes his sacred football gear costume, he goes on a journey to find the perfect mother for the new holy child. To my utmost surprise, once he (a small boy) goes on a journey through a series of vignettes meeting Patty Hearst, a feminised Emiliano Zapata and the likes of Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortez, Holy Pafnucio turns into a symbolic surrealistic opera where everything eventually is sung in terms of dialogue.

Immediately from that reference, you'll be aware the film is surreal. What Holy Pafnucio actually means is to debate - but I am going to suggest that the main progressive plot point, of the search for the mother, is worth viewing as the message and enough in itself. Context is lost if you have scant knowledge of figures Pafnucio encounters, Hernan Cortez in particular in his involvement with the downfall of the Aztec civilisation a major example as, when Pafunucio encounters him, his group in their decadence are to "civilise" where they occupy. Time is subjective for obvious reasons, Pafnucio encountering figures that have clearly out of the time space continuum to be here. Whether Rafael Corkidi and Carlos Illescas are religious in mind or subverting it in their script, the story of Pafnucio constantly searching is of interest as he is, literally, an innocent young boy just on a quest to find someone to conceive a holy form into the world. The rich and privileged want him to choose them, a Patty Hurst figure he considering, Patty Kane in the version I watched, dismisses him, and the one perfect figure is on the run from a fascist military, a doomed choice. That in itself, that the Son of God, or the Son of the Son of God, would be stopped by the politics and corruption of the world is an idea worthy for ninety plus minutes of singing and oddness.

In terms of the singing, casting individuals who can audibly sing opera does bring a level of quality alongside suggesting to me, as someone who has never really gotten into the medium, it would be worth exploring as an artistic form as its sense of spectacle, and lack of concern in entering vivid and explicit territory in plots, is the sort of thing I'd get into with delight. The film does give the pieces respect regardless whatever it also does, which includes improvised new lyrics which can be cruder and even funny whilst never removing the innate power to the style, God's plan getting a literal "fuck off" with a grandeur once or twice.

From http://rarefilm.net/wp-content/uploads/
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Again knowing that Corkidi worked Jodorowsky, there's a lot of the transgression, certainly a lot of nudity, but the film's emphasis in visuals really makes it apparent that he had an important part in cementing Jodorowsky's reputation. I do believing in the auteur theory for directors, but I also realise the importance of strong voices in the production team like cinematographers can both be neglected and that they can actually collaborate to help the director become more idiosyncratic through their own visions. Viewed even in a less than stellar version, the long expansive shots of locations from desert plain to urban environments have the same sense of scale and preciseness El Topo and The Holy Mountain had and are stunning to look at.

There is one scene that could have only been made back in the seventies - our child prophet encountering a nude woman dancing in the desert trying to woo him, clearly done with each in separate shots and hopefully with stand-ins when they're not. Aside from this, even if Holy Pafnucio is difficult as you could get for cinema, it was a delight in terms of a curious oddity but, even better, a beautifully made one. A lot of it as mentioned is in the humour, just with some of the song lyric revisions being hilarious, which helps a lot overcome any accusations pretentious empty surrealism, and where a lot can still be read into the film in its ideas. That, entirely through the images and plotting, that whether Pafnucio goes, it is a struggle to bring the child of God to Earth. Patty (Hurst) Kane couldn't give a damn in the midst of having been kidnapped, yet to join the group who have her as the real Hurst did. The rich and privileged are obviously not the right group to choose despite their elegant surroundings. The female freedom fighter, more poignant knowing she is an interpretation of Mexican Revolution figure Emiliano Zapata, has a rebel lover who was killed and now has to go into hiding dressed as a man with a pencil moustache, the perfect figure but fatalistic on her situation as the military arrives. Even if the creators was satirising religion and cultural influences at first, with our American footballers wandering the Mexican landscape, there's a tragically humorous but also just tragic sense that even if a new messiah, who'd do good for humankind, was possible to appear the right figures to be the new Virgin Mary would be killed off and everyone else would be distracted. It's a simple, pointed idea and Holy Pafnucio succeeds in it.

Couple this with the prologue, with is naturally controversial as it explicitly evokes the likes of Auschwitz, and there's a visible sense of darkness and sadness to the proceedings too that, in this metaphorical world onscreen, a hope against this horror is going to be prevented. Thus in its own way, the film gets to a meaningful message in the simplest and bluntest ways possible. More importantly to this, there are moments of lightness to contrast this sadness, even the opening a memorable sing-along over the credits about the titular figure. Solace is found, even if they themselves have had their hopes hammered down and ostracised, in a male and female dancer who perform in a "traditional" style that embraces their Mexican heritage that Pafnucio encounter. That in itself sees at least the director has a clear concern and love for his heritage regardless of the message of the film ultimately.

Abstract Spectrum: Beautiful/Surreal/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Personal Opinion:

The musical, and its own sense of logic, is itself something I will have to consider a lot more for this blog even if many don't fully fall into the type of cinema I cover. If there's any reason Holy Pafnucio doesn't reach the highest ranking in the abstract is that, whilst it's still a bizarre experience as a satirical surreal opera, it never has that growing sense of spectacle that an opera or musical theatre usually has. But it's still a peculiar and fascinating artefact from the seventies, one which might put people off for very good reason with the prologue, which has the most provocative moments and is seemingly disconnected from the actual film afterwards. Certainly, for me having started without any knowledge of Rafael Corkidi, it was an immensely important key to learn that he was an important figure for Alejandro Jodorowsky's career and someone who thankfully got chances to make his own cinema. Now whether the other films he made could be accessed will be to debate, but having one if pretty wonderful in itself as it skewers expectations the moment everyone starts to sing.

From https://www.cca.org/blog/images/pafnucio-santo/pafnucio-santo-09.jpg