Themroc (1973)

 

Director: Claude Faraldo

Screenplay: Claude Faraldo

Cast: Michel Piccoli as Themroc, Béatrice Romand as the Sister of Themroc, Marilù Tolo as the Secretary, Francesca Romana Coluzzi as the Female Neighbour, Jeanne Herviale as the Mother, Patrick Dewaere as the Police Officer, Coluche as Male Neighbour, Miou-Miou as the Young Neighbour

An Abstract Candidate

 

Themroc has an interesting legacy in Britain, though one interlaced with a time of moral panics. Channel 4 in Britain, when it was first launched in 1982, was literally the fourth terrestrial television station in Britain. Television was dominated in my country by the BBC, who had two stations, and ITV, who was originally a series of regional stations that shared programming and had advertising unlike the BBC. Channel 4 would eventually over the decades become more conventional, but at first they were very controversial, an alternative choice even into the nineties and into the Millennium as, even when they were drawing bigger numbers creating shows which could get complaints. They had a few notorious moments over the decades, be it satirist Chris Morris' incredibly controversial Brass Eye (1997), which tackled biting topics like the fear of paedophilia in the media with a scathing surrealism, to even TFI Friday, a live music comedy show hosted by Chris Evans originally between 1996 and 2000, which had its own controversies to the point Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder was not allowed on the show in live form to get around his passive habit for cursing. Even now, toning down, you still get something like Naked Attraction, started in 2016, which is a dating show where you literally first get to know someone from their naked body first before their face or personality, which got the danders up for some¹ and thankfully shows that old school side to them.

Themroc is important for them as, whilst only a series with ten films², Channel 4 showed Claude Faraldo's experimental satire as the first film for the Red Triangle series between 1986-7, a curated series of international and experimental films which were marked as after midnight broadcasts, warned in their promotion as having adult content. This was a literal red triangle promising adult material, with many of the choices having sexually explicit content even if they were cerebral works, like Michelangelo Antonioni's sexually explicit but ennui drenched Identification of a Woman (1982). Some films were not this, like the devastating Brazilian film Pixote (1981), films which have slowly been rediscovered and some, like the two from Japanese filmmaker Shūji Terayama in the line-up, in dire need of actual releases in the West still. Themroc among them is the entry from the French industry after the French New Wave, least the time after Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed the medium dead and made experimental projects in a variety of forms over the seventies, a time which could give you Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (1971), but also Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973), a project by the Situationist movement which took a martial arts film, and added a new dub which was a left wing political satire intermingled with the fight scenes. 

Themroc immediately stands out as entirely wordless or depicted with the cast speaking complete gibberish, a tale of art house film legend Michel Piccoli as an ordinary working Joe who ends up descending into an urban caveman after one bad day at work after being disciplined for eyeing in on his boss and his sexy secretary. The film depicts this all in his performance, the cast and the world without needing dialogue, and one of its first idiosyncratic touches tells his back story by repeating each day of this dead end job through tiny moments from days pass, the same moments but with the cast in different clothes per day of Piccoli's life. Among the things which influences this character's descent is also with the opposite gender and sex. Thankfully, this does not factor in with a way which could horribly date as this progression goes on; even if he commits to an incestuous relationship with his sister (Béatrice Romand), this feels like a perverse touch even if a discomforting one, one of the first stabs at the taboos this film is playing with than a male fantasy. It is certainly an eccentric production, where a very sick sense of humour goes a long way into appreciating this, and a sense of the weird too, witnessing the likes of the guard obsessed with sharpening pencils only to break the tips so he can sharpen them again, not that dissimilar to the man polishing his posh car over and over living in the same apartment complex as our lead when the events transpire, strange irrational behaviour between with hindsight that make Piccoli's turn, even if transgressive, more sane in comparison. Cemented together by Piccoli himself, in primal scream form in a damn good performance, he is not playing a troglodyte stereotype but this force of confidence in urban form. This is one or two aspects which may have aged, but not in the ways expected, in that he does begin to entice the women around him, including the secretary, with his charms, but it becomes more complicated. Far more likely to have aged, just in the incestuous relationship, is how Béatrice Romand is a much younger woman in various states of undress throughout the film rather than them being siblings, all because the transgression is more clearly the point but the presentation is what is closer to the reductive alternative version what could have gotten in Themroc as a bad film. A lot has surprisingly gained more as time passed for the production. The first person to follow his charge is the best example of this, as it is a  housewife played by Francesca Romana Coluzzi, a statuesque figure who escapes her doldrums and whose less dominant, small nerdy husband joins her more cautiously, with a regular hammer to break their possessions and walls down next to her with a sledgehammer.

Literally building a cave out of his apartment with a few adjustments, the production getting access to an old building complex they could literally destroy the outer walls of in real time, the police do come for Piccoli, only to become figures in a farce where tear gas is an aphrodisiac when you turn feral. Tellingly, post May 1968 and the riots which brought France to a close, it is the police who are the real monsters, a bumbling mass who for the sake of it assault a young boy out of frustration or even commit sexual assault, coming off as clueless and lost entities are mindlessness. That or as food, as authority figures become the antelopes for urban lions to barbecue for tribal bonding over a meal, with the act of cooking authority the most overtly surreal and transgressive moment, and not even hiding the meaning in subtext. There is even a hint of bisexual cavemen, or at least toying with male-male eroticism where, in an attempt to bring back human respectability by bricking the cave up with walls again, men can show sensual respect for their own beauty by stroking each other, especially to tempt them from being a mindless brick layer for authority and to join this cave person tribe.

The ending furthers this subversive streak of how Piccoli and the others are not regressing but stripping away the horrors of modernity, contrasting their few transgressions against greater horrors as the buildings allowed to be destroyed for this film's production are later contrasted by the new apartment complexes shown at the end, white fortresses which look depressing even shot from afar. Sexuality itself is part of this as is control; there is one police officer living in the apartment complexes as this all transpires who keeps his daughter under his thumb, even striking her out of discipline, regardless of her own freedoms and passions in vicinity to these events. That or the older woman, Piccoli's mother, almost having a constant panic attack between her horror at what has happened but also, even if a taboo is involved, the attack of her social morals clashing within something primordial. That there are taboos that, in any other circumstance, would rightly be considered unacceptable is understandable to consider, but Themroc clearly has these hypothetical scenarios not to suggest they are the right way forwards, like cannibalism, but as a deliberately shock.

Whilst that might be the aspect which has aged the most, the sight of values being raged and challenged in this has not, as Piccoli and his tribe manage to live in peace baring the killed and eaten police officers. His tribe's primal screams in the finale, starting to affect others across the city, cause these figures to question themselves, to break from a repetition, break from materialism by means of destroying one's car they were obsessed with, becoming part of this hymn to a singular human form of passion and life without the trappings of mindless social structure and repression. Again, all of this is conveyed without dialogue and explicit political grandstanding, and that becomes one of the best aspects of Themroc, how pure gibberish from the cast and using performance even from the non-feral figures conveys this all perfectly. Even that it manages to move away from potentially contentious aspects, the strong macho lead who woos women with his feral charms, to become much more interesting in the turns it takes with other characters means it never becomes trite and obvious.

Hilariously, it was the government of Margaret Thatcher who are to be thanked for Channel 4; a deeply controversial figure, a scourge to many and also connected to the attempts to ban "Video Nasties" in the video tape rental stores too through members of her government, they nonetheless wanted to force competition against the BBC, creating an entrepreneurial setup allowing smaller television production companies to create programming the channel could buy off them³. This ended up creating a channel that, in this original form, was everything her conservative ideals would have been aghast with, showing a film like Themroc which rebels at everything her government's ideals would have aspired to just in terms of materialism and family values. That in itself adds a delicious layer to the story, even if this screening happened before I was born, in terms of this film with a legend just in terms of British television.

Abstract Spectrum: Transgressive

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

 

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1) Naked Attraction won’t be laid bare by Ofcom as Channel 4 show escapes investigation, written by Kirsty Bosley and published for Metro.co.uk on August 7th 2017.

2) Too hot for TV? Inside Channel 4’s doomed Red Triangle experiment, written by Stephen Armstrong and published for The Telegraph July 14th 2021.

3) I owe Margaret Thatcher a debt of thanks for creating Channel 4. Now her heirs could destroy it, written by David Olusoga and published by The Guardian on July 25th 2021.

Dream City (1973)

 

Director: Johannes Schaaf

Screenplay: Rosemarie Fendel, Alfred Kubin and Russell Parker

Cast: Per Oscarsson as Florian Sand; Rosemarie Fendel as Anna Sand; Olimpia as The Girl; Eva Maria Meineke as Mrs. Lampenbogen; Heinrich Schweiger as Mr. Gautsch; Rony Williams as Hercules Bell; Alexander May as Dr. Lampenbogen; Louis Waldon as Louis

An Abstract Candidate

 

Delving into an obscure German film, Dream City begins with an artist named Florian (Per Oscarsson) who has been stalked by a man for three days waiting outside his apartment. He offers good tidings for Florian from his old college friend Klaus Patera, who in a Middle Eastern desert has raised an entire city, the titular one, free from need for commerce, a place where all you need to do is dream, offering an artist in an artistic crisis hope. Currently having to work in photography, the ability to live in Dream City and escape the sprawl of urban German life is too tempting for Florian to ignore. However, it becomes clear this, as a 1973 film, will reflect what Hunter S. Thompson dubbed "when the tide went down" in the late sixties ideal, that moment when all the optimism keeled over as this presents the concept of the utopia which was never going to sustain itself.

Florian and his wife Anna (Rosemarie Fendel) go to Dream City, and for what is meant to be a place of no money and seemingly no rules, the issue is entirely that the place is a mess, a throwback to the 17th/18th centuries in costumes, in dress and attitude down to even horse drawn carriages, where people are aimless and where the removal of commerce leave public clerks bored, demanding complicated forms to the complete to make their lives worthwhile. Everything is unfocused, and this is not that this comes off as a damnation of the utopia, dismissing it as a fairytale concept, but that they never got to the basics written down by Thomas More in his 1516 satire on how to create one. It is instead a place where very little makes sense, Franz Kafka's The Castle (1926) and his spectre even evoked as Florian at one point, even to try to meet Klaus, has to go through former clerks requiring immense amount of identification to get an "audience card" with him, Klaus Patera a vague phantom hidden in a world where people have drifted aimlessly. There is a sense of degradation felt, and whilst using a brothel as a metaphor for this at one point has aged the film, as we thankfully have taken pro-sex worker views over the decades after this film, the time it is brought it is with a group of men trying to drag Florian to one where it is clear the ideals have gone to the dogs. It is replaced in favour of base level pleasures without the ability of even them, to booze and fornicate, to have a greater sense of worth than to pass the time but just to kill time. The intellectuals just hang out in a pub to just pontificate with no sense of real life influence, just procrastination. 

Dream City from Johannes Schaaf, who would go on to direct for theatre and opera in his home land in Germany, is part of the "surreal" side of cinema but a large portion of its tone, as a few from the sixties and seventies, is very grounded drama with realistic production values. The plot is still a focus, depicting the city as a realistic town where, despite the artificiality of the costumes, feels like a commune of a different world people can hide in. Most of this is about Florian's greater frustrations and Anna's growing anxieties, whilst the eccentricities are from the side characters for half the film, who indulge in their many curiosities in behaviour, like the female singer with many cats who wants to seduce Florian. Many of these are one-scene characters too but they all stand out, such as the man who likes randomly bricking up other peoples' windows, to the other man pontificating to an almost entirely empty library but speaking in a public orator voice to an imaginary audience.

To those expecting a "surreal" film of decades later, where every scene is a bizarre image or deliberately arch, Dream City surprises for how subdued it is for all its eccentric scenes. The more overtly strange side finally comes to the surface but after the build up, as the layers of the titular city are exposed to Florian and tragedy eventually comes to his life, [Spoiler] the ritualised death of Anna whilst she is still alive [Spoilers End], involving people being wrapped up in cloth cocoons and hung in a tree in the outskirts to perish when no longer needed. Outright weirdness comes from the theatre ship when we are introduced to it, a place of public expression which has images which may shock - random minstrel black face and a man in Nazi regalia being mocked crucified - as well as being a cacophony performance of primal indulgences, singing American football and baseball players, random nudity and skeletons, chefs and a singing knight with a stuffed goose under his arm. This is the kind of scene even I, a fan of this era of experimental cinema, will point to as the stereotype of surrealism in seventies cinema even if the resulting scene is memorable, as well as appropriate for the film's ideas. It can be argued to be a very conservative message in moments like this by accident, how the ideals of artistic and personal freedom have collapsed here into random nonsense, but it also comes with a sense of ennui in context of the time period this film was made within, where the ideals to escape the encroaching modernity of 24-7 working life in the West did not help despite the political strife that took place, not long before this film was made, that were to help them forwards.

Ultimately, it becomes the blatant tale of how this utopia is founded on unstable forms, under a figurehead who is elusive, may merely wander the streets up to no good feeling women up, and/or is literally hollow, with the world built around him inevitably going to collapse. The biggest opponent to Klaus Patera, who will help undermine the system, is a black man who expected revolutionary help to change the world only to be ignored by the indulgences practiced instead, the one who calls out the Emperor for being naked. Everyone is mindless without a figure to follow, and eventually a military force comes in to destroy the city, and their abrupt inclusion may be seen as a fault but befits the metaphor of the outside world kicking the doors down. Even Florian is not a guiltless bystander eventually, obsessed the moment he entered the city by the perfect female subject for a painting, one who he eventually is able to meet but whose actions to her in the final scene are distressing. The horror she will fall into as a victim by the end credits roll, a victim to his lusts without seeing the outcome, ends Dream City on a disturbing note, and it feels appropriate as an ending.

The pace and tone will catch people, as it fully belongs to an era of surrealist/experimental world cinema of still following dramatic character pieces where the drama is drawn out. This has a virtue, in being this slow burn, as when the layers are peeled away from the titular setting, all that was left of these utopian ideals is followed into inane artistic pretensions and expression, without any goal to actually create art that will last, no ideals to stand. In any other context this would seem a dismissive view of art in general, of hippie communes and lofty ideals, but one cannot help but feel reflection of the time period it was made in greatly in a cynical distress.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Surreal

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