Tuesday 18 June 2019

The Cinema of the Abstract Class 2018-19 [Part 2]

 For the beginning of this end of blog year retrospective, follow the link HERE.



Best Acting Performance(s) for Women:
Honourable Mentions:

d. Occidental (2017): You cannot talk about Neil Beloufa's film without mentioning Françoise Cousin in her canary yellow jumper and Anna Ivacheff as the paranoia (but strong minded) hotel manager. They work with the male cast as a perfect team of performers together.

c. Flexing With Monty (1994/2010): Actress and stage performer Sally Kirkland exposed herself literally and figuratively, as a nun who enters halfway through this film to divide the central brothers, and she jumps to the occasion appropriate for such a bizarre film.

b. Gdgd Fairies (2011-13): Voice acting is an underappreciated art, seen sometimes at its best in Japanese anime in comedy. For actresses Kaoru Mizuhara, Satomi Akesaka and Suzuko Mimori however, what in the first half of an episode is absurd sketch comedy about three fairies always turns into actual improvised skits for the second, where they had to literally have to improvise over what bizarre, cheap CGI artefacts they were seeing even if they flub over their words, start giggling or abruptly start singing. At one point Satomi Akesaka, who steals the improvisation scenes, actually says she's a disgrace to anime performing for screwing up her joke; she isn't, and the willingness to go into this silly comedy show, with Mizuhara and Mimori, should be something they should be proud of and the trio knock such absurd roles out the part.

a. John from Cincinnati (2007): Again, John from Cincinnati isn't for many, but the cast does their best and are memorable: Rebecca De Mornay chews scenery like a John Waters character, and in the one figure out of all the actresses who deserves to get on the list, the best character of the show and most inspired piece of non-professional actor casting comes from real life surfer Keala Kennelly who comes off as absolutely charming as the most sympathetic character.

5. The Wild Boys (2017): A lot of this list is a celebration of ensembles of actresses who all bring great performances by themselves but are even better together. Bertrand Mandico's The Wild Boys is a great example, as part of the film's gender fluid transgressions, because the main cast (Vimala Pons, Mathilde Warnier, Diane Rouxel, Pauline Lorillard and Anael Snoek) are all playing characters original young Sadean male youths who only turn into women when we get introduced to the island of phallic plants and hairy sexually suggestive fruit. They themselves are excellent, but I haven't even mentioned Elina Lowensohn striding the flora in full white suit and hat like the Dr. Livingstone figure of most viewers' fantasies.

4. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972): Again, Bunuel's most surreal films tend to be more about their style which just happened, in his final French work, had the best casts he could get.  But let's not kid ourselves, when you cast Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier and Stéphane Audran you can even make vain and awful Bourgeoisie characters strangely sympathetic for all their flaws, thus showing why you cast such great actresses back in the sixties and seventies.

3. 3 Women (1977): Three women...Janice Rule in a virtually dialogue-less role still great, but this is definitely a film where you introduce Shelley Duvall to Sissy Spacek and everything in Robert Altman's film, literally created from a dream, turns into platinum.

2. Happy Hour (2015): Built from a workshop with director-writer Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Happy Hour stands and falls because of its four actresses - Sachie Tanaka, Hazuki Kikuchi, Maiko Mihara and Rira Kawamura - who are central, even when one character disappears, to engaging you with the entire work. They exceed exponentially.

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975): One actress, the legendary Delphine Seyrig, commands the entire three plus hours with even a single mistake in stitching causing one to feel fear.


Best Director:

Honourable Mentions:

d. Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991): Alongside being an absolute innovator who is underappreciated - creating both one of the first actual websites on the internet with this film's hypertext version AND streaming the feature online decades before Netflix was even a thing - David Blair's barrage of psycho-surreal digital images is something to behold and admire.
Happy Hour (2015): On a list that wasn't this crammed with directors who deserved to be in similar positions, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's magnum opus in which he takes five and a half hours to create an intimate and quiet drama, and succeeds, would've shot him to Number 1. But, whilst he's mentioned, Hamaguchi deserves applause for this achievement.

c. The Territory (1981)/Régime sans pain (1985): Raul Ruiz is going to become a regular on the blog, (if his work ever got easier to find), but even for a man known for his truly unique filmography the eighties was the decade of his most insanely prolific and oddest work, especially as Ruiz had no qualms with working in cinema, television, dance films, shorts and whatever ephemera he could burn his imagination on and never drain his creativity through. No one else can claim, within just four years alongside other films, to switch from a horror farce where American tourists get stuck in the woods and have to resort to cannibalism, that had Wim Wenders film his own movie in the midst of its protracted shoot, to what was originally a music video for cult French musicians Angèle/Maimone that turned into a bizarre and brilliant musical dystopian sci-fi about a brain wiped king having to go back into competition to become king again. Ruiz's filmography before his death in 2011 was over a hundred films, so two curiosities that would be the strangest and best in another director's work were probably another day at work for him.

b. Let the Corpses Tan (2017): Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are still going strong with this genre jump to crime cinema, turning it inside out as they did with giallo.

a. Boro in the Box/Living Still Life/The Wild Boys (2011/2012/2017): Since being introduced to Bertrand Mandico through MUBI, he's immediately become a director to watch for these phantasmagoric and incredible films. Shame his work is not easy to see in Britain beyond that small window, but what I got through MUBI were glorious.  

5. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972): Luis Bunuel's most well known film is great; what you don't realise, however, until revisiting it again is how quickly the film was put together, how effortlessly he made it, and how he and Jean-Claude Carrière made something legitimately subversive and funny from what was improvised material between them.

4. The Wolf House (2018): It feels like Cristóbal León and Joaquin Cociña put their blood, sweat and tears into making this fake propaganda animation, inspired by the real life horrors of Paul Schäfer's Chilean sectarian community that was able to get away with horrifying acts under a dictatorship, and their hard work is absolutely successful as a metaphor without ever explicitly detailing this. Even if you didn't have this historical context, it's not a film you forget easily.

3. 3 Women (1977): Only in the seventies would 20th Century Fox fund a film entirely based on a dream the director had. Thankfully, said director was Robert Altman, a man who could turn in a subdued and truly weird psychodrama from this origin.

2. Night is Short, Walk on Girl (2017): Because Masaaki Yuasa is Godlike and now has thankfully gotten so much attention he's never going to be out of work for a while now.

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975): Chantal Akerman's cinema here is daunting but felt fully, something impossible not to take as merely a subdued, primal scream in slow burn form. Anyone else at this position would've been an insult.


Best TV Project (Abstract or Not):
Honourable Mentions:

b. The TV Wheel (1995): Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson never got this curious sketch comedy premise beyond a pilot, a live show where a who's who of future comedy stars and writers have to perform live on a giant rotating stage, but the experiment (puppet uprising and all) is worth witnessing as a valiant failure.

a. Darknet (2013-4): Vincenzo Natali tried to refresh the horror anthology series by remaking a Japanese one; sadly, he only got six episodes, and stumbled badly for the whole of the fifth, but playing on the CreepyPasta and urban myth crazes did produce some inspired results.

5. TerrorVision (198X): Not "great", frankly how this micro-series shot on VHS and with the most limited of resources ever got made is a question worth raising, but that's just as much part of the fun as its absurdly cheap horror storytelling.

4. Tokyo Vampire Hotel (2017): Sion Sono wins me back, especially after the experiment pinku failure Antiporno (2016), by using Amazon Prime money to go to Transylvania and spill comical amounts of fake blood everywhere.

3. Gdgd Fairies (2011-13): On the surface, this just looks like a series of ironic and cheap gags just about its cheap CGI animation. After two seasons, you realise the usually confused three voice actresses and the production loved creating the strangest and funniest jokes about three fairies bumming around their magic kingdom as much as you do watching it. Even when a major collaborator left after the first season, the second got so much more ambitious and ridiculous it was practically bulletproof.

2. John from Cincinnati (2007): The ill advised attempt at Deadwood creator David Milch to create a spiritual and weird cult surfing series is an acquired taste but, hell, I enjoyed it. I realise why many could see it as one of the worst series of that decade (the 2000s) but we still talk about this series to this day because it was truly unique for better and worse.

1. Boogiepop Phantom (2000): Much more difficult to understand as the sequel to a live action adaptation, but still a true one-off, a strange and mesmerising horror sci-fi story which (barring one detail or so) makes you earn the ability to understand what the hell's going on with great aesthetic style and script writing. Everything from a lounge ballad of all (inspired) choices over the opening credits to its nerve wracking noise electronic score is perfect.


Best Non-Abstract (The Oddities, Obscurities and One-Offs Award):

As of now, these reviews will be called the Oddities, Obscurities and One-Offs, so let us transition from "Non-Abstract" to this new title in a respect passing of the torch...

Honourable Mentions:

c. Darknet (2013-4): An imperfect but bold Canadian horror anthology from Vincenzo Natali, playing with myths about technology and insanely non-chronological narrative structures; I wished it'd least have more than six episodes and not ended on that dumb final scene twist, but it was innovative in turning clichés into some unique shocks.

b. Intruders (1992): An alien abduction mini-series for CBS which is cheesy at points, marred by an attempt to soften itself that leaves a bad taste, an ending inappropriate for a dark story of women being abducted by aliens, but the final work is still a compelling. At three hour, the greatest virtue of this work is how it tries to add psychological complexity to this well worn paranormal topic, bringing actual fear to the material whilst adding greater emotional resonance.

a. Welcome to Marwen (2018): A somewhat troubling, sometimes unintentionally dark take on artist Mark Hogancamp, sometimes deliberately weird and ridiculous too, but considering the director of the Back to the Future films could've just spent the rest of his career making dull motion capture films, better this flawed oddity came to be instead where he took on this challenging material.

5. Year of the Nail (2007): Not a fan of Alfonso Cuarón, but his son Jonas' debut composed of photographs put together into a narrative a la La Jetee (1962) is worthy of rediscovery.

4. Occidental (2017): Sadly a film that's going to be difficult to see again, but Neil Beloufa's neon and synth soaked black comedy of mistaking identity of paranoia in a hotel in the midst of a street protest hit all the right notes.

3. Tokyo Vampire Hotel (2017): My love/hate relationship with post-2010s Sion Sono was softened by this ultra-gory but playful Amazon Prime mini-series. The clichéd shocks of his other recent work is here, but something about a longer length to play with brought back his much missed eccentricity too.

2. Cry Baby Lane (2000): Wasn't this TV movie pulled off Nickelodeon because it was too frightening for children? Probably not, but the CreepyPasta and urban myth helped the likes of me see this strange Goosebumps-like horror story worthy of a proper rediscovery, which is far more interesting in terms of its actual weird subtexts on adolescent sexuality and growing pains, the theme score turning into a Cramps riff and Frank Langella making the best Tom Waits replacement for a useless but lovable undertaker.

1. Happy Hour (2015): Over five and a half hours, a drama which justifies this length because like the best of novels, its tale of four Japanese women over thirty and their various stories are expanded and layered to the point that you are fully immersed into their work.


Best Abstract Film:
Honourable Mentions:

e. Régime sans pain (1985): Beats out The Territory from Raul Ruiz because I wasn't expecting a sci-fi film which states stealing a jacket from a dying man in a burning car is required to qualify into the semi-finals of becoming king of an entire nation.

d. Let the Corpses Tan (2017): Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani return with a much needed transition into new material without needing to leave their original and still innovative mix of genre and avant-garde.

c. Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991): Bees, living missiles escaping off to the moon, being your own grandfather, and I can list more from there to adore.

b. 3 Women (1977): Robert Altman makes a film of changing identities without anything stranger than just one dream sequence and the entire tone of everything else just being off.

a. Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember (2016): Khavn's profane, tragic, sickly funny and at times just sick explosion of rage about child criminals eventually forced as adults back into more violence.

5. Boro in the Box/Living Still Life/ The Wild Boys (2011/2012/2017): Bertrand Mandico enters my life, making a completely unsanctioned biography of Walerian Borowczyk he'd be proud of, a morbid yet perversely beautiful short about film literally animating the dead, and a gender-fluid boy's (girl's) own adventure and thus wins my heart.

4. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972): Bunuel's Oscar winning farce about the middle class being unable to have a dinner party has finally won me over after not seeing each other for a long, long time. Befitting that sentence sounds like one of the many dreams recounted by characters within this same film about encountering dead friends.

3. The Wolf House (2018): A legitimately uncomfortable, but artistically masterful, subversion of Chile's dark history by way of a propaganda animation made from one's own nightmares.

2. Night is Short, Walk On Girl (2017): Masaaki Yuasa returns to the world of The Tatami Galaxy (2010), a wonderful animated series back when he was merely a cult figure barely accessible in the West, to follow another character in the world with the energy and creativity of a man whose touch for many (even Adventure Time fans) turns any animated production to gold.

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975): At first possibly a bizarre choice for a blog about "abstract" films until you actually watch this seminal seventies work, in which three plus hours of domestic stagnation play in slow time over a period of three days forces the viewer into a stupor before everything breaks in a sudden violence at the end. That if anything is truly, absolute, what abstract cinema is defined as for me, rejecting representation of external "cinematic" reality in mainstream cinema and forcing one to experience it in an entirely different way. I usually define this attitude from the most unrealistic or surreal of techniques, but this film, a monolith in feminist cinema, proved you can reach this same goal through unbearable realism.


The Abstract Hall of Fame (Class of 2018-19)

I felt that, in lieu to Cinema of the Abstract as a blog being a passion project entirely for myself I want to treat as seriously as possible, recognising the figures responsible for this type of cinema felt necessary. So, hopefully for the first of these, may I present the first nominees for recognition for these great creations I have watched over the years, be they director, actor, writer, even (hopefully in the future) other individuals in underappreciated roles in creating this work. This is a toast for them with sadly no promise of an actual award unless I somehow become successful for this blog...


I haven't covered a film from Fulci this year, (though in June 2018 I did cover the truly weird later film Touch of Death (1988) which was just out over the cut-off point), but the legendary Italian director is a name to remember in terms of his deliberately surreal and unconventional genre films which I have covered a lot of, with many left to tackle. Not just a horror director, who was actually incredibly diverse in his genres of choice up to the mid-eighties, but even his iconic and notorious splatter horror films are unlike anyone else's, strange and deliberately obfuscating logic deliberately.


Over ten years ago in university, who were legally allowed to keep TV recordings of television and films for educational purposes, I saw Löwensohn for the first time in Nadja (1994), Michael Almereyda's idiosyncratic take on the vampire film which is worthy of coverage here. I didn't expect over a decade later for Elina Löwensohn to reappear and with as much reoccurrence as it did, now a muse for unconventional and unique European filmmakers who skirt genre and transgression like Bertrand Mandico to Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Whether striding the jungle in white suit and pure swagger, or playing the one person Greek chorus of an artist shooting holes in her paintings, Löwensohn from her striking appearance to her clear ease in even very explicit scenes in films like Boro in a Box (2011) to The Wild Boys (2017) is absolutely magnetic onscreen, an incredible figure who lives up to the notion that you can have a healthy career in this territory of cinema as she seems to be having now. Considering how she started back with films like Nadja, this slowly growing career reassurance, at least in public consciousness for cult and art film fans, should hopefully reward her in the end.


A life couple and a strong duo, the release of Let the Corpses Tan proved that, thankfully, Cattet and Forzani weren't a one trick pony. They are the best working directing duo barring the Coens (no joke) as they at least provide something truly unique, a sense driven experience each time you watch one of their films. Leather gloves and fetishism were never the same when they came into cinema.


Somewhat of a risk as I have only known of the French director's existence since 2018, and he could drop the ball if a worst case scenario happens, but its notable that his debut, mini-feature Boro in a Box, was not only incredible but only from 2011, meaning that he is a new figure and one that, if he keeps progressing through shorts and a successful debut theatrical length film (The Wild Boys), is going to make great waves for the better.



Now roll on the 2019-2020 year...

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