Reality (2014)

 

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Screenplay: Quentin Dupieux

Cast: Alain Chabat as Jason Tantra, Jonathan Lambert as Bob Marshall, Élodie Bouchez as Alice Tantra, Kyla Kenedy as Reality, Eric Wareheim as Henri, John Glover as Zog, Jon Heder as Dennis, Matt Battaglia as Mike, Susan Diol as Gaby, Bambadjan Bamba as Tony, Patrick Bristow as Klaus, Sandra Nelson as Isabella, Carol Locatell as Lucienne

An Abstract Candidate

 

What are the sticky things in the tummy Daddy?

After films like Rubber (2010) and Wrong (2012), Quentin Dupieux made a more sedately strange film with Reality. This follows a series of figures wandering through scenarios set up by the film, dream logic integral to the premise that everything is interlinking between worlds, between the waking one to films and dreams. Time is non-existent, and logic is less concerning as the rationalisation all weaves into each other, a collective unconsciousness in dreams. When taken with her father to the woods, as he hunts boar, a young girl name Reality (Kyla Kenedy) sees as he guts the animal back home a blue videotape fell out of the corpse’s stomach, wanting to see what is on the tape. The host of a cooking show, where he wears an animal costume and asks guests if they believe in God as much as their chosen desert to make, is having an eczema attack which is not helping the production of the show and no one else can see. One of the cameramen, an older man named Jason (Alain Chabat), has a once in a lifetime deal to make a film with a producer, about televisions trying to conquer the Earth, and only needs to get the perfect groan of agony, good enough to win an Oscar, for the producer to bankroll the project.

Layers of reality are broken, without it leading to a conventional climax to rationalise it all, where an audience is watching the girl’s tale. They are dealing with producing her tale as a film, following an ex-documentary filmmaker named Zog (John Glover) who may be able to record dreams. There is a superintendent at her school, who goes to his psychiatrist, Jason’s wife, about a dream of driving a military car in a woman’s dress, only for Reality herself to be in the dream and later blackmail him over this. Reality herself will watch the cooking show and the videotape bends reality itself further as the film becomes more threaded between each other. There is no explanation of this, and it would be patronising to try to rationalise this either. What you get instead is dream logic of various states of mind and anxieties, a classical surrealistic style, but one you can see influenced by relevant ideas to the director-writer Dupieux. The inherent curiosity of an unmarked videotape, whether a boar can swallow one whole unscathed or not, is a surreal but would fascinate any of us if we encountered it, a little strange moment with curiosity in this phantom object as for the young girl. I can also see Dupieux himself as a filmmaker having had the anxiety Jason has, where he finds himself in a cinema where his premise for a film he worked so hard on is already a produced theatrical release. There are more overtly wacky moments – the producer is a figure who wants non-smokers who visit to try his cigar collection despite hating the smell, and picks off surfers from the nearby beach from his mansion with a sniper rifle – but this is not different from the gags surrealist artists used to pepper into their work on purpose with the subversion to catch viewers off guard, the predecessors to surreal comedy.

Reality is the logical conclusion to Rubber’s thesis of content in films happening for “no reason”, not with a nihilistic suggestion of meaninglessness, but with logic here beyond trivial structure of time, and characters like Jason and the host finding themselves lost in a world spiralling out of their grasp. Reality does not have as much of the wackier touches of the Dupieux beforehand, and feels a more sober production even if entirely a comedy at heart. The one moment which feels less indebted to figures like Luis Buñuel in tone is when we thankfully see Jason’s premise for his film Waves, which could have been a “Rubber 2” (as seen on a cinema marquee as a joke) with TV sets microwaving people until they start bleeding from every orifice to death. In fact scenes like this emphasises that Dupieux, part of this wave of “cult” filmmakers who came into cinema in the late 2000s onwards through film festivals and greater emphasis on the DVD releases being more readily available than theatrical screenings, had an advantage that surrealism found its footing in genre films and independent productions to bend such tropes. He was able to get to the point with Reality where it could touch on premises on psychotronic horror movies about homicidal electronic appliances, and yet also being deliberately more unconventional, basking in mood within it’s playful tone.

Dupieux’s style is clear, another US co-production whose style rejects elaborate camera set ups but allows him to use his locations and style for the intended goal, especially for this premise where realities will bleed into each other to the point bedrooms are to be found in woodlands. A prominent audible choice comes from using the same fragment of Philip Glass’ 1971 minimalist piece Music with Changing Parts, released as a full length album piece which Dupieux deliberately only used a fragment of to cause a sense of being in a loop¹. It is also befitting, knowing Glass’ precise style, or how his opera Einstein on the Beach (1979) consisted of repetitions of stream of consciousness for its lead, Dupieux choose a composer whose trademarks included layering multiple parts and repetition, something befitting for Reality’s examples of repetition and layering of sequences from earlier in the film onto others, before you even get to Jason finding there are multiple Jasons in existence.

There is some post irony here, where characters blatantly state that none of this is making sense, a sign less of compromise but a tongue in cheek humour. That in itself is arguably a mark of how culture has changed, how we have likely had to include this for modern films, but also with an awareness that this type of humour reflects a sense of malaise with life in general as reflected in sarcasm and ironic nods to this makes sense in context to this ennui. The idea of a collective unconsciousness this gets into is admittedly a positive concept, and the character of Zog comes off as an enlightened genius, dismissed for wasting film footage only for his skills and patience as a “fucking genius” to be revealed as he has figured out a way to record dreams and these through lines. The only character left who may still suffer is the host with his eczema, also finding out the eczema doctor he went to, covered entirely on the face with eczema, may be a gatekeeper aware of these realities too, and that this is never resolved may put some viewers off. The lack of conclusion or explanation in itself feels refreshing, ultimately a film deliberately designed as like a dream. All makes sense in the dream, and it is only after waking up, or leaving the film in this case, that one feels pause for thought trying to rationalise the material. For me, that was not a bad thing to experience at all.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric

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

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1) Quentin Dupieux Explains Why He Doesn’t Like Being Compared to David Lynch, written by Greg Cwik and published for Indiewire on May 4th 2015.

Stephen King's Rose Red (2002)

 

Director: Craig R. Baxley

Screenplay: Stephen King

Cast: Nancy Travis as Dr. Joyce Reardon, Matt Keeslar as Steve Rimbauer, Melanie Lynskey as Rachel "Sissy" Wheaton, Kimberly J. Brown as Annie Wheaton, Judith Ivey as Cathy Kramer, Matt Ross as Emery Waterman, Julian Sands as Nick Hardaway, Emily Deschanel as Pam Asbury, Kevin Tighe as Victor "Vic" Kandinsky, David Dukes as Dr. Carl Miller

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Well, I’ve never heard Glen Miller out of a flower before.

Unlike other Stephen King adaptations, this is not actually adapting one of the legendary author’s stories to the screen, but is an entirely original tale King himself wrote the screenplay of. This one has some history, in which in the nineties he had pitched a haunted house story to Steven Spielberg, remaking The Haunting (1963), the legendary horror film adapted from Shirley Jackson’s seminal novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959)¹. Spielberg would produce the 1999 remake of The Haunting, whilst here King’s original idea would finally find its form in an entirely original story, a four plus hour mini-series, directed by former stunt man, former stunt coordinator, and the director of Stone Cold (1991), an action movie attempting to launch the film career of American football player Brian Bosworth. Craig R. Baxley would become a regular director of Stephen King mini-series during the 2000s, there is nothing but playful humour in the later reference.

Effectively this does reimaging Jackson’s seminal supernatural novel and original version of The Haunting, if by way of influences in real life. One clear influence is the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, home of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester. Alongside stories of the mansion being haunted, it was also a building Sarah Winchester had constantly under construction, building mazes and weird unconventional additions to the building which it can be legitimately possible to get lost within.

A college professor Dr. Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis), with a very liberal attitude to the paranormal, is self funding an expedition to Rose Red, the equivalent to the Winchester House but with a significantly larger body count in its tragic history, and absolutely the example of something so evil you should just torch the place rather than enter it. Deciding regardless of the risk to collect together a group of psychics, she wishes to prove ghosts exists with what eventually develops into the maddened zeal of Captain Ahab and a white whale. Among the psychics brought into the manor is Annie (Kimberly J. Brown), who gets a prologue introducing her, who is a trope in King’s work, that of figures with disabilities or significant ostracization in society possessing unnatural abilities. As someone born with autism myself, I was concerned – with childhood memories of Dreamcatcher (2003), a notorious King adaptation for the silver screen where, alongside “shit weasels”, there was Duddits, a disabled character with unnatural abilities which was broadly dealt even from the perspective as a younger viewer. This was more so the case here as Annie is explicitly depicted as autistic here and could be a misfire. Thankfully it is not the case – she would be on the more severe spectrum in difficulty in communication, not directly communicating with people, acts of repetition which even I do which offer comfort or pure enjoyment (her obsession with Glen Miller, to rearranging dominos, which do not come off as broad. As a character among some broad (and questionable) stereotypes, she comes off well. Even when characters start making more crueler comments on her, as a person who would need to be in care even if her paranormal abilities are more advanced, it comes from when feces hits the fan and it comes clear. As someone ultra-gifted to the point she can rain stones from the sky, placing her into Rose Red, which can use her, was like bringing a nuclear missile to Godzilla, so the tone does not feel insulting but contextually when other characters start to lose it and others have already died.

The broadness of some of the characters here is an issue in other cases. Among the psychics is Emery (Matt Ross), whose pre-cognitive warnings from ghosts about Rose Red are useless when he has all the bills to pay from his mother’s overspending, even if you leave the fridge a bloodbath. His mother herself is a broad take on the domineering mother which you can accuse as being a tasteless stereotype, the large figured and overprotective stereotype with no real point to her but to be a grotesque domineering stereotype. Rather than say, for a good example, what “mother” is to Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), this plays to stereotypes of ugliness which have not aged well. You will also have the surprise that, with an arsehole stereotype of a rational skeptic in Dr. Carl Miller (David Dukes), a fellow professor who wishes to bump Dr. Reardon off her tenure for her “irrational” believe in ghosts, King punts a figure totally opposite for what he has done with Christian zealots. Some may be angry about him, but let us be blunt, Marcia Gay Harden’s Christian fundamentalist in The Mist (2007), one of the more acclaimed King adaptations from the 2000s, was also a broad one-dimensional stereotype, but with the unfortunate reality that too many Christians are terrible examples of their faith, making it more digestible to kick them in the gonads in horror films for many as they are more frequently a problem in modern politics and culture. It posits, the more of King’s work I have grow up with, a family collecting the films and mini-series, and reading his work, that the author just despises holier than thou figures of all types, authority for him delusional, especially as, initially sympathetic, the Captain Ahab comparison is perfect for Dr. Joyce Reardon. He is entirely sympathetic to the psychics themselves, all likable and with real powers among those here, but Reardon’s hair trigger temper on the subject of the supernatural warns that, wanting to prove it, she will sacrifice people and eventually be burnt by the supernatural fire she wishes to claim. King follows a well worn trope in horror, a good one, of the dangers of acquiring unnatural knowledge without realizing the respect and risk than entails with the occult.

The mini-series is a broad, brash haunted house metaphorically, not subtle in the slightest and spooky like a jaunted spooky train ride in four plus hours, split over three parts originally. Aptly the setting is cool, like a great haunted house, including its influence from the Winchester Mystery House in some of the more unconventional sets built, such as an upside down room or the tiny model version of Rose Red in the lounge. A shame is felt that they could have lent on the optical illusions of the location, even on a TV mini-series budget, especially as one of the aspects that Rose Red has is its ability to expand and change rooms to trap victims. A lot of the first half, taking a part before even getting to Rose Red, is bringing up the back-story of the home, which becomes more a nicely ghoulish series of disappearances, deaths and a man choking to death on an apple. Even if there is some violence, and severed fingers, the lack of gore, and only a subtle nod to the morbid and decayed, feels like an actual haunted amusement attraction, especially as the mini-series is ambitious (despite the seams being visible) in using unsubtle CGI for evil statures or bees. The difference is that, as a story, it is a spooky movie allowed to be more fleshed out in its longer length, and that this is a haunted house ride where you get to go with Julian Sands, the British actor arguably the highlight as a likable English psychic who takes to the environment with common sense and white.

In terms of King works, adaptations or original ones, the broad strokes in characterization and wishing to have a complete lack of subtlety in the premise, neither next to The Haunting or the Shirley Jackson source material, are not going to leave it as appealing to the more acclaimed adaptations. The Shining (1980) this is not, and infamous King hated that adaptation and a 1997 TV mini-series properly told the source novel, so what he considers the appropriate tone for a story of a haunted house may not appeal to everyone. Personally there was a lot of fun for me here, in mind to that comparison to a literal haunted house ride than a profound psychodrama.

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1) Stephen King's Rose Red Was Originally A Remake Of The Haunting, written by Michael Kennedy and published for Screen Rant on March 5th 2021.

Robinson in Ruins (2010)

 

Director: Patrick Keiller

Screenplay: Patrick Keiller

Cast: Vanessa Redgrave

An Abstract Candidate

 

As films go, Robinson in Ruins will be very unconventional for many even with a taste for "abstract" films. An essay film, Ruins was my first film from Patrick Keiller, closing out a trilogy he began in the nineties. At the start of the 1990s Patrick Keiller, who is also a lecturer and writer, created a character named "Robinson" for a pair of essay films documenting the sociological state of Britain, first with London (1994), focused on the capital, and Robinson in Space (1997), expanding out into the rest of England. Robinson himself was never heard from, and the unnamed narrator, played by the late Paul Scofield, was our guide into Robinson's excursions. Keiller belongs with a film like Robinson in Ruins in the territory called "psycho-geography", a concept of interpreting a concept of interpreting geography in their history and sociological terms, alongside what has transpired in both in their creation and shaping. I became fascinated by this concept, at the right age in my early twenties, from Ian Sinclair, a filmmaker and author whose London Orbital (2002), chronicling a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot left a rewarding mark. Despite the inherent weight to that text, dealing with the ramifications of Britain's political elite on the landscape, which Robinson in Ruins also does, there is also something very British in a profound, profane and quaint way in both examples, where there even the most seemingly banal of motorways, as London Orbital was about, allowed one to peel back the historical and sociological influences that marked the landscape, all the tensions also found here, able to be peeled back even in the pipeline markers spotted in land overgrown by nature itself.

Robinson in Ruins, which is made in knowledge Paul Scofield passed away in 2008, was left without the voice from the films before, and in context of Robinson being depicted here now as a literal ghost having left his mark, we are also in the midst of the 2008 economic crisis that happened in real life. A huge event globally that left a lasting effect, this is also when Robinson, before he vanished was assigned to a project on environmental collapse, industrial capitalism becoming his obsession, only to disappear. Film canisters and his diaries are found in his last know living place, a caravan, and those who found it have put the material together, the narrator (as voiced by Vanessa Redgrave) connected to this project as the original narrator's lover. Contextually this is, as with London Orbital, seemingly banal to the extreme, as the brown and green land collides and one of the first locations seen a Lidl, a supermarket chain found where I was growing up and is something you would living in ordinary working class England without batting an eye at its symbol. Then the narration brings up their problematic work practices, and you see the layers being peeled back of how even the banal is marked in tensions.

The metaphor which ties together the film, which could win a person over even if they find Robinson in Ruins too dry in its construction, is the repeated image of lichen, a fungal species here, repeated with the same one, that has survived and adapted to human progress with ease as the rest of nature has; the image in question has lichen growing on the letters of a motorway sign, curling around the letters itself, as we see the struggle between the natural landscape and human development in a severe economic downturn. Having grown up with autism, my own spatial awareness of environments as a result has made a concept like psycho-geography compelling for me, where so my awareness of environments is always with intrigue having to adapt to new stimulus, even old sights gaining new layers and emotions depending on that particular day. This film itself finds layers where political and social tensions have broken out, and been left, in the tranquil shots of natural landscape in agricultural and motorway territories, evoking old Peter Greenaway experimental shorts from early in his career without the critique of the filming structure.

This film, in truth, does feel dry, entirely because whilst London Orbital, as a novel or the Chris Petit adaptation co-directed with Ian Sinclair as a 2002, was a freewheeling and expansive work which could include pithy put-downs and humorous comparisons as it dealt with the seriousness of some of its subject matter. In contrast, Robinson in Ruins, shot in celluloid film, is structured around spatial shots of isolated locations, with only the natural landscape and Redgrave's narration the closest to a soundtrack. This in itself is enough to easily put some off who may find the subject - the death knell of post-liberalism in this economic downturn - still fascinating, because there are lengthy pauses literally examining a field, buildings and plant life among other details, contemplative in a minimalistic form with no human beings ever depicted onscreen baring vehicles. If you can find your way past this, as I did, there is to these images a contemplative and peaceful form matched by a rich narrative text which would have to be picked through over multiple viewings of. It is a project, baring the use of celluloid film, that could have been an ambitious YouTube video, but the moments which strike out in look - the close up of a spider weaving its web over a monologue about the economic collapse itself, to watching farming machinery working in the field - are also contrasted by what the narration reveals about seemingly banal images. The wasteland of derelicts, power stations and even poster covered boards with penises crudely sprayed on them in graffiti would be ignored by most people, but here gain more weight as this fictional narrative with real world essay material adds context to the images. We pass rape seed oil crop fields, and their connection to importation, to nuclear missile silos from the nineties, to 18th century traveller inns turned into banks. The irony of British opium fields we see onscreen, for medicinal purposes, is contrasted by the narration bringing use the opium fields found in Afghanistan, which is later developed as heroine imported into Britain itself.

Even if re-creatable with the modern technology of digital phones, even at this time in 2010, there is a beauty in Keiller's film to contrast its vast text of intersecting worlds, one that would fill a cinema screen with its minimalism. Thematically it is of its era, the economic crisis at the time still having a lasting impact but something that was once such an impactful concept in the news, and this film also name checks Britain Conservative politician Boris Johnson, who here is just the newly elected mayor of London, not the future Prime Minister into the decade after. The environmental concerns have sadly not aged, still severe in the text here as its talk of the dying throes of neo liberalism, contrasted by fears of environmental destruction which are now creeping up to us in mainstream conversation. In contrast, however, it was always surprising how relaxing watching this film actually was, a perverse serenity to an extreme close up of lichen, turned into these bio-alien life forms that Robinson possibly can hear here as is talked of. As much as this rings the dreaded bell of our fault in damaging the Earth itself, it is mirrored against scenes of woodland; whilst there is a legitimate fear still with us of environmental collapse, you however see nature still finds a way to continue. Orchids still grow near motorways, and even in the fingerprints of human interference, creeping in-between the areas once newly built but merely in the background or even abandoned.

The contrast in its peaceful veneer against the chaotic history the film talks of - nuclear protests by wives in the nineteen eighties, protests in the 19th century about claim to land - is something which requires patience with, but if you can find it is compelling. It could be ignored if you struggle with the seemingly ultra minimalistic aesthetic the film has. With the visuals and the narration together however, the film does gain a great deal to it. For a film that was clearly a holdover of the 2000s in culture, it is surprisingly relevant still. The landscape baring a few differences is the same still in Britain, and the environmental concerns are growing every day. Certainly as well, though Patrick Keiller might raise an eyebrow to this, the film even as the most stoic in presentation does have an innate eccentricity to its advantage. There is some deadpan humour still here, and again, the choices of locations, seemingly the less profound choices to talk about the history of, has something innately eccentric to them as choices if with a real significance found. It is not Swandown (2012), director Andrew Kötting's own travel essay film in which he, with guest stars like famous comic book/graphic novel/novel writer Alan Moore and Ian Sinclair himself, pedalled a swan-shaped pedalo from the seaside in Hastings to Hackney in London, via the English inland waterways. There is, however, something still very English let alone British in a film like Robinson in Ruins, where someone made an essay film like this in which lichen on a road sign is the main selling point in the trailer, and actually proves the most symbolically synchronizing point to tie its themes together.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde

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

Run Coyote Run (1987)

 

Director: James Bryan

Screenplay: Renee Harmon

Cast: Renee Harmon, Frank Neuhaus

An Abstract Candidate

 

The gods have indeed blessed her body bountifully.

Within the space of two months, I once unintentionally saw Lady Street Fighter (1981) three times, even if just in clip form in other films, as director James Bryan and star/writer/producer Renee Harmon milked that earlier film twice, unintentionally creating two sequels to the previous film with chronological time line differences and reused footage. Revenge of the Lady Street Fighter (1990) is just the entirely the first film again, all the footage with a tiny bit more new context, playing with Harmon's original lead character being followed by a new female character. Run Coyote Run is an unofficial sequel because it follows the premise of the prequel, even if shown onscreen reused footage, and turns it into a new story with the surrealism of pre-existing footage from earlier Harmon productions being incorporated into new scenes. With one little plot difference – the original film being about a tape containing the names of assassins, this about tape with drug smuggler leaders on a similar list – these technically do not co-exist as films in the same world, but it feels truthfully they should. With this film particularly, even if you include the three as a perverse little trilogy in the same world, this makes at times even Godfey Ho, the infamous Hong Kong director who created films from pre-existing and unfinished movies with new footage, look conventional at times.

Harmon is Anna, a female police officer with psychic abilities. Again, as mentioned, this is not intentionally a sequel to Lady Street Fighter, but it is tied to that film's plot, the McGuffin of a master tape of concern here again and Harmon’s original character Linda now re-contextualised with having a sister (who is unintentionally identical) searching for clues to what has happened to her deceased reporter twin. The film, unlike Revenge of Lady Street Fighter, has much more plot and new footage, and in Anna 's search for the truth, people are being silencing by those connected to a criminal cartel, including an evil biker priest who comes off as a joker among the bunch. This in itself, as shot-on-video genre cinema from the late eighties, is goofy, with stock footage of a hospital having to be used to introduce our heroine in her first scene, and a lot of silly dialogue such as the suggesting, despite being a reporter, Linda could not even spell “cat”. A torture scene from the original film is now casually turned into a new one with spliced in footage and voice, but this also leads to the most curious aspect of the film.

It is not just the original Lady Street Fighter which is re-used for footage but also, to compensate for a lack of budget, footage from previous films by Harmon and Bryan is used, specifically Frozen Scream (1975), The Executioner, Part II (1984), and Hell Riders (1984). This is where the Godfrey Ho comparison comes in, with his infamous cycle of ninja movies from the eighties like Ninja Terminator (1985) where new footage with the likes of actor Richard Harris in camouflage ninja outfits was spliced in with existing films he had acquired. In all my Godfrey Ho viewing though, unless deepest cuts may lead to some stranger surprises, he never reused footage from a prequel he made and replayed it with new inserts like what happens with these Harmon films, déjà-vu and the cyclical nature of violence taken here to an absurd depth. The most delirious thing, where Run Coyote Run gets weirder, is realising new actors are being dressed as actors from the old footage so they can connect, like a trick Chilean director Raul Ruiz might have deliberately done in his films with an intentionally alienating effect. Realising very obvious old man makeup on an actor was for a murder scene from Harmon’s Frozen Scream to be spliced in, a seventies film from a different era of cinema with its contrast in celluloid film to a video production, added a new level of weirdness here.  Adding to this is that you can tell the seams, such as with a fight scene on steel steps latter on, or how there is a strange woozy tone to the production even if replaying Lady Street Fighter again.

It did feel like a dream as a result. As a film, Run Coyote Run is a curio only for those who can appreciate these films, which can be said of all the Renee Harmon /James Bryan collaborations I have seen. Coyote though has the advantage that it is a curious attempt at a lower budget genre film which is at the price of a VHS instructional film budget, using a remix technique you use for an artistic plunder phonics-like project but never expect for a production like this. That is not an insult either as, regardless of this being visible, the reused footage done to work around this creating a compelling strangeness within itself. As a result too, the genre burps between occultism, as yes, Harmon is psychic and has flashbacks to Linda’s experience, with horror incorporated by use of the Frozen Screams scenes, with their black hooded murderers evoking a slasher instead and with unexpected gore scenes within what is meant to be an action film.

It emphasises the fascinating with this ultra low budget cinema alongside something I admire, that of trying in spite of obvious handicaps to make a film. Common taste would dictate a lot of this film is (bluntly) "amateurish", from its acting to the contrast in footage types, but for a person like me or Bleeding Skull, a website devoted to this cinema, that is meaningless to the pleasure in them. Bleeding Skull have to be thanked for this film even being known, as they found the film in the trunk of a used car, first releasing the film themselves in a short lived VHS series in 2014¹, before the American Genre Film Archive included it as an extra to Jungle Trap (2016), a larger scale salvage by the website of a lost Harmon/Bryan film they worked with the director on to finally finish.  Standard technical bars presumed to be what makes a good film are alien to a film like Run Coyote Run, where even its rediscovery raises tantalising questions of how it ended up in that trunk in the first place. Instead, the joy of what, without safety barriers, a film can end up as are to be found here for the adventurous.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Minimalistic/Weird

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

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1) Bleeding Skull! Video VHS page for Run Coyote Run (BSV-003), written by Joseph A. Ziemba and published for Bleeding Skull on November 28th 2014.

Two Short Works from Aleksey Balabanov: Trofilm (1995) and The River (2002)

 

Trofilm (1995)

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Alexey Balabanov

Cast: Sergey Makovetskiy, Zoya Buryak, Semyon Strugachyov, Aleksey Balabanov, Aleksey German

Canon Fodder

 

Trofilm was made for Pribytie poezda (1995), a Russian anthology film which had entries from Vladimir Khotinenko, Aleksandr Khvan, Dmitriy Meskhiev, and Balabanov himself. The anthology is one I have never heard of, and it is an obscure production despite the fact all four directors, not just Balabanov, were prolific in their filmmaker, and Meskhiev is as prolific as a film producer in Russia. At this point, Balabanov had not made Brother (1997), the film which made his name, Trofilm instead connecting closer to the film made before, his Kafka adaptation The Castle (1994), and also nods to Of Freaks and Men (1998), his transgressive bleak comedy set at the turn of the century and about the beginning of cinema. The year 1995 would have also been the 100th anniversary of when cinema was technically "created", when the first moving pictures presented to a paying audience were the Lumière brothers in December 1895 in Paris, France. In 1995 there was a lot of celebratory works commissioned, Lumière and Company, a insanely huge anthology, in terms of the famous directors involved and using an original Lumière Cinématographe camera, which most only know of now for David Lynch's Premonition Following an Evil Deed short. There were documentaries commissioned too, with two by Nagisa Ôshima (100 Years of Japanese Cinema) to Jean-Luc Godard (2 x 50 Years of French Cinema). Trofilm is a sibling, as Pribytie poezda, also known as The Arrival of a Train, was a hundred year celebration for cinema in itself. Co-produced by Roskomkino, a state body representing Russian industry of audiovisual content, Balabanov could be argued to have thumbed them and the other producers in the eye with how this short ends, a film reflecting on the hundred years of cinema if more pessimistic or critical of how cinema was preserved in Balabanov's time then.

Shot in sepia, a man played by Sergey Makovetskiy, a regular cast member for Balabanov, murders his brother because he was romantically connected with his wife. One botched attempt at a hanging later, where the noose just breaks whilst trying to do so in the barn house, and our protagonist wanders forth out onto a train. The short is set between the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, when Russia fought Japan, and alongside being a faithful depiction of this world, Trofilm has a deadpan bleakness to it. Our protagonist will openly admit he hacked his brother to death to almost anyone he passes, be it the train conductor, even a female sex worker later on when she temps him into her bedroom in the pub she is within.

The film is slight in what happens, as inevitably despite this casualness of him admitting his crime of passion, he will be turned in to the authorities. Where the film touches on Of Freaks and Men is that, unlike that film showing how pornography soon into the creation of the medium came about, this plays as both a bleak humoured take on the early actuality films, but almost becomes a nod to how cinema preserves time. Our lead interferes with early cinema history when a French filmmaker is trying to shot a train coming into the station, evoking both L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), the legendary Lumière film, and their own remakes and the likely replications of this film from the era.

It is, for a film which is ultimately pessimistic, funny to see the logic conclusion that likely happened to the earlier cinema pioneers, of a bystander look aimlessly into the camera, even block the shot, out of curiosity.

Trofilm ends in the then-modern day, nodding to how film shot in the past even preserves the figure on a roll of 1904 Pathé cinematograph footage, showing a train arriving at St Petersburg. A random person, who committed a crime which will be forgotten, unless recorded in the law books, manages to survive in this moment he bumbled into a shot and ruined it. That would be if the most pessimistic joke was not the punch line, completely undermining the point of film archivalism, the people working on the filmmaker's creation calling our lead an idiot, and then proceeding to cut his shots out of the film they would rather have. Trofilm, which looks distinct with its sepia brown look and recreating this time period, fits Balabanov's worldview even in that joke. It neither feels cruel for the sake of it, but a cruel irony on point.

====

The River (2002)

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov, Evert Paiazatian and Vatsslav Serashevskii

Cast: Tuyaara Svinoboyeva as Mergen; Vasilii Borisov as Kirgilei; Spartak Fedotov as Salban; Anna Flegontova as Anchik; Mariya Kanaeva as Kutuyahsyt; Mariya Kychkina as Bitterhai; Mikhail Semakov as Knyaz; Mikhail Skryabin as Janga

Canon Fodder

 

The River in contrast sadly has a tragic back-story to its creation, real history altering and affecting what was meant to be a feature length production, but became both a micro-feature and an unfinished production. The tragedy is that, for a narrative set in the end of the 19th century within a leper colony in the desolate Arctic region of Yakutia, Tuyara Svinoboeva, the leading actress of his film The River, was killed in a car crash during the shoot. The film was released in 2002 with what footage exists, exposition to clarify the context of scenes not filmed, and made into a chamber piece for what was shot.

The River is fascinating in that, alongside The Stoker (2010), Aleksey Balabanov has devoted himself to two films about the Yakut, a Turkic ethnic group who mainly live in the Republic of Sakha in the Russian Federation.

Considering Balabanov has skirted dangerously thin ice with characters who are racists in his films and nationalism, it fascinates that, whilst very bleak films, his work with Yakut actors and stories around them in these two films are absolutely admiring and respectful for them. Again, these are bleak films, The Stoker melancholic and violent, and The River ultimately his most straightforward drama, of jealously and human petty attitudes causing tragedy within one family. The sense of respect is entirely in how, in the initial narrative, we follow the central family, within a leper group, living their lives in a yurt tent, a large family of people who have to make do with what they have in isolated snow covered environments. Even for those whose leprosy has altered their faces and bodies completely, they live and exist, with the period dress and normal activities depicted. The film, as well as having exposition narrative for plot missing, is acted in the Yakut language too, with a Russian narrator who translates into that language at the same time, showing an admirable attitude in Balabanov in trying to depict these characters.

The tragedy is that, in what he could film, how a younger female character lashes out in this yurt environment. Most of the film does not feel like it is missing significant parts, which helps it a lot, only missing a section where attempts to steal food from others has led to injury and antagonism a huge plot point to consider. The central female lead, the one healthy woman in this leper colony, reacts more and more antagonistic to the other members of this yurt, more so as with the man she has fallen in love with, another woman, his wife, has returned into his life, spiralling into a violent jealously.

The breaking point is ultimately when they acquire a cow, a thing of happiness, especially for the youngest daughter there, but becomes the straw which breaks the camel's back. Hating members of this yurt, the lead will willingly wish to maim the cow, likely others too, by setting a fire, an act ending the film with a tragedy even she regrets and what makes The River incredibly nihilistic. It is so least in terms that for Balabanov, as throughout many of his films, people will even kill others out of petty reasons, which comes back for The Stoker considerably.

The River, in mind to how it sadly was not finished as intended, is an admirable piece, where he showed the diversity of Balabanov's career. Alongside Trofilm, his cinema was wider than that which was released outside of Russia, and sadly, The River is the kind of production which would be ignored, something which would be a crime as by itself. Even in its historical context, it has a lot to admire.

Rise And Fall Of A Small Film Company (1986)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard

Meant to be based on the novel The Soft Centre by James Hadley Chase

Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud as Gaspard Bazin; Jean-Pierre Mocky as Jean Almereyda; Marie Valera as Eurydice

An Abstract Candidate Re-Review

 

ALBATROSS

FILMS

 

For Jean-Luc Godard, the state of cinema is assessed by way of an adaptation of a James Hadley Chase crime novel, or what should have been one, originally produced for the crime story series Série noire (1984–1991) in France. In this episode of the series, we are introduced to producer Jean Almereyda (Jean-Pierre Mocky), once a matinee idol and major producer explicitly referenced later on in this world to having funded Georges Franju's Head Against the Wall (1959), and lost his career from the failure of Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates (1969), now reduced to TV movies. He is also now dogged by a case of stolen money, all whilst his main director Gaspard Bazin (Jean-Pierre Léaud), once an acclaimed figure, spends his time in an obsessive ritual for casting extras that eats up the funds they do have. Almereyda's wife Eurydice (Marie Valera), feeling herself a caged bird, crosses paths with Bazin, becoming a potential creative source when she desires to be an actress.

This, in that premise, befits the time period of theatrical films Godard made, but as mentioned, this was for television, clearly shot with video. It is strange we can uncover lost films by Jean-Luc Godard, one of the biggest names in all cinema, but we can forget that even after ten years, obscurer films in a director's filmography can be neglected absentmindedly, especially when Godard's career for many was the sixties French New Wave era, or his Film Socialisme (2010) period onwards, not even considering his work in television or short film creations. That even a great American director can have material not available means that the Swiss director, even if he is a legend in cinema, can have probably more unavailable, as both being a director who worked in a foreign language to English, and has experiments in television and short work more rife than many in his career. Rise and Fall..., taking place when he returned with his second "debut" Every Man For Himself (1980) after his experimental and Dziga-Vertov Group era, comes a year before his infamous Cannon Films production King Lear (1987), but even here, as a big name to bring in to his assignment with Série noire, he did not do as likely intended.

At one point, Godard does buries the book through Jean-Pierre Léaud's Bazin, and Rise and Fall..., rather than the adaptation of a crime novel as like intended, is a meeting place between his return to narrative cinema in the eighties, and the video experiments that would lead him to his career in the current day, the video and use of clips here a prototype for Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-1998). The noticeable limitations - the TV screen ration, the limited aesthetic, the video sheen and digital text captions - are things that would undermine another director, but are like providing Godard with new tools to work with here. He is someone, known to use VHS rips of old films on purpose still to this day, completely polymorphous when it comes to technology, already working on television productions in the seventies and, in the 2010s in his older statesman position, having his own 3D camera built by scratch and making a 3D feature in Goodbye to Language (2014). Still working with a plot, he uses this context around one which contrary to his famous quote does have a beginning, middle and end in that order, the struggles of a TV movie company mid adaptation of James Hadley Chase's The Soft Centre, the novel Godard is meant to adapt, in which he weaves his state of unrest, looking at cultural critiques in the midst of the tired producer Jean Almereyda, and the deranged genius Gaspard Bazin.

Léaud, meeting back with Godard and thus evoking his many moments in the latter's work, could if you cheated a little be the exact character he would later play in Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep (1996). The same director hired to remake Les Vampires (1915-16) in that film, he here as Bazin rather than that film's character is stuck in a wilderness era in the late eighties, his obsessive ritual with the extras of having them move through rooms in a conveyor belt his fixation. Having them quoting at one point the same passage contracted together between them, the ritual is much him attempting to find his creative sanity as madness. He is less irritated by being stuck making television work, but more that, (with the film biting the hand financing this feature), he wished he was adapting Dashiell Hammett instead, alongside the sense of the world being entirely alien to him, someone in his back story having been as broken mentally as his producer Almereyda in status by the industry.

In a world where he and his producer sit in front of a television showing a fire, rather than a real one, to stay warm, the world has become stranger than the sixties they made their fames in, that strange and very funny moment pretty much the best statement from Godard of what he is aiming at, in the all pervasive air of a television, all within telling a really good narrative in his unconventional way. The film making world is so different from France's before, where Bazin's arcane ritual with the casting chews up money for a company who cannot even get a TV movie off the ground and shown. That Jean Almereyda has stolen German marks, an act that will doom him, to run the company, is as much caused by the struggle of his own career as it is because Bazin is not helping.

Admittedly, Godard's criticisms of the state of cinema and life, as he has been doing them since the sixties, could dangerously fall into shouting into the wind, worse a man trying to joust windmills thinking they are dragons. I view the Film Socialisme Godard, onwards to this day, as cinema's Prospero now, in his magical tower in Switzerland creating his cinematic incantations, or like his character Professor Pluggy in King Lear with patch-cord dreadlocks in his hair, isolated from the world entirely but still incanting on the state of it with a world weariness to his voice. Bazin's test to people, which Eurydice actually succeeds in, of being able to see the true number of characters within classic art, not the exact number but those who are the most important, feels like Godard himself. We must realise in hindsight, for the innovations he brought to cinema with his peers with Breathless (1960) onwards, his career has morphed from the innovator to the figure looking even beyond art to culture in general. Going into literature, classical art, older films, and with this having a crow's murder of soundtrack choices - Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Janice Joplin's Mercedes Benz perfectly used for an intertitle - Godard became someone who is not just the cineaste but the curator of art, a man who can appreciate Jerry Lewis in his youth, but by this point in his career brought in classical music and even Scott Walker into his scores.

His philosophical concerns here are not only enlightening but constantly evolving over time, the ones of yore still relevant to the current day or time capsules to new problems per era, especially as like many of the films from this eighties period, he returned to narrative, and the narratives are interesting even if unconventional. Here, ironically when he was asked to make this TV film, he is practically spiting at the producers by having the pair of Bazin and Almereyda as doomed figures of the past, floundering even in commercial television, but that is still a compelling little noir tale in itself. Calling the female lead Eurydice is a loaded choice too, but like the women and femme fatales of noir, she is also the focal point here for the drama, as the female heroine also dragged down in tropes of those films of corrupt and the underbelly of life, here the figure kept in an unhappy marriage as a trophy wife to an older husband. She is ultimately not the person that leads someone to doom unlike other noirs, instead the one who, from an unhappy marriage, actually finds happiness in the end here.

Their lives are small scale, the television budget and style of Rise and Fall... helping this. It is too rye to be an out-and-out comedy, but humour is to be found especially in side characters like the accountant, who in deadpan handing out paltry earnings to the extras discounting their social security. Or Léaud playing up his character's out-of-control behaviour, be it interrupting a phone call between a potential actress with acute abruptness, brought to she suspiciously suspected to be erotic shot, when asked to bring a bikini alongside her, or breaking into a Woody Woodpecker impression. Godard's also one of the few directors able to get away with casting himself as the wise sage as well. Much of it, by this time, is because Godard was such an iconic name it was impossible to get around this, common in narrating his own films since the sixties and having a reputation as a figure outside of cinema, making his work (usually dialectic anyway) completely attached to him. Rise and Fall... offers him playing himself, amusingly (as I want to picture it) visiting Reykjavik in Iceland because he had to witness the greatest chess game being played there, but here appearing to find a deal back in France, his scene turns into something else with his talk about Romy Schneider.

Schneider's reference is also one of the most important, and bitterly sweetest, of this film, as thus his scene turns to an appropriate melancholic air about the period, of Schneider, in real life, passing in 1982 in only her early forties. An actress of considerable talent, starting in the fifties and connected to the multi-continental era of European cinema, from France to Italy, the scene in general as well as the clear empathy for her in the dialogue becomes one of the film's most meaningful scene, with Godard with his fictional creation Jean Almereyda, of two old professionals lamenting their careers in cinema being affected by the change in tide, left adrift within it, with Schneider's death for Godard marking a symbolic change in the industry. Even if Godard would become more and more a legendary filmmaker who made films to the current day, he eventually drifted far from narrative cinema again into the nineties, into experimental features entirely, all bolstered by the reputation he developed allowing him to leave mainstream cinema behind whilst French cinema would evolve again into the Millennium into its own form.

His critiques are matched by a willingness to play with the form of film a way few would. The limitations, the flaws, of this television work are devices for him to exploit, superimposition to the hair-raising use of slow motion on a female extra's emotions mid-performance all his hand with collaborators constructing the images and audio. He even deliberately has the sound abruptly halted as if the film has failed, followed by a technical difficulties screen, for a joke about how that would have likely happened in television in that era. The marriage between the two sides is like a much underrated theatrical feature Godard made within this era, Detective (1985) with Johnny Hallyday and Nathalie Baye, a small scale crime narrative confined to one hotel, perfect for Godard's experimentation as well as providing an actual story. Rise and Fall... still tells an interesting tale - for Jean-Pierre Léaud's Bazin, a spark of life is found in Eurydice, who he compares to actress Dita Parlo known for films like Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937); for Almereyda, an embarrassing conclusion to his life, made more embarrassing trying to flee in the silliest costume possible for an escape. Bazin's connection to Eurydice is also not a romantic or sexual relationship either, instead Bazin finding artistic clarity, Eurydice her independence and freedom, finding business in the end to work as head of. Even when the tables turn, and Bazin is now an extra by the ending, he finds happiness nonetheless.

Restored and premiering at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival, sadly the reappearance of Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company is not as readily available as one would hope. However if Godard's Dziga Vertov years can be accessed, insanely difficult to appreciate (and even defend) films, and high definition versions no less, than one day one hopes Rise and Fall... would join those available. It is a title absolutely worthy of availability, like many of Jean-Luc Godard's eighties and early nineties work a hidden part of his career which is compelling and virtuous.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Diegetic

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

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972)

 

Director: Jonas Mekas

Canon Fodder

 

Berries, always berries.

Reminiscences... was the first Jonas Mekas film I ever saw, and I did not appreciate it. His films today, having come to appreciate them, belay what cinema can be. I do not consider this an insult, but this huge figure in American avant-garde cinema in his own work compiled what would effectively be lifelong home movies to most viewers, becoming diaries that spanned decades which he would eventually compile into short and long form features based on the subjects per work. You see this in the first pieces of Reminiscences..., scored to solemn piano music, of the streets of Brooklyn from his perspective as a Lithuanian migrant. This is real homemade footage focused on fragments of the most innocuous of images, like kids playing on the street, turned into something profound by time and his focus on them. The time capsule nature is profound - Mekas' own narration is personal and introspective, contrasting that the footage is archival and meaningful even without his compelling words over them.

Mekas' own accounts build together a life for those around him, a world where even an anecdote never seen onscreen is meaningful, such as his brother when drafted into the army being shipped back because he started eating leaves and was presumed to be mentally unstable. Mekas' own life is complex as, documented in this film specifically, he was a migrant who had to flee his homeland from invading Nazi Germany, including being imprisoned by them before he got to the United States with his brother finally. Reminiscences... follows him finally returning to his homeland in 1971.

Intermingling colour and monochrome footage, Mekas' work immediately evokes a time in my life of volunteering in a film archive, devoted to sorting through home movies on a variety of formats to discern historical importance, working on the types of film materials Mekas may have considered or even use like 8mm film reels, discerning the images on hand cranked projectors you had to squint to scan the images of. Here there is a greater existential nature, of a man from World War II in exile finally returning home. An additional factor at the time is that his home of Lithuania then was also a Soviet nation which is touched upon.

It is difficult to describe this, as it has to be experienced viewing the footage, seeing through his camera eye and thoughts of the world within them, of music, of drinking and sleeping on hay in a profound moment in his life he calmly, gracefully, recounts as a storyteller. Baring some rapid editing, this is only "avant-garde" in how sadly people do not want to watch something this sincere on mass to fictional reality. This is sad as, finally understanding this after the first viewing, returning to these reminiscences is incredibly gentle. Entirely in the countryside in the Lithuania section, there is not even a spectre of communism really here, where it feels less different from the land of Mekas' relatives when they were younger, baring that now collective farming groups exist. A running gag is how the native Lithuanians joke they will probably look backwards to the United States, all in an amused attitude, such as having to use hand ploughs.

It is a beautiful piece, structured in chapters, part 1 almost a prologue, the Lithuanian section part 2 with 91 shots makings it up, whilst part 2 examines how, fleeing the country, he did end up in a Nazi prison camp, going to Germany, before finally escaping to the United States. Far from a bleak affair, it comes with curiosity as, able to go to the factory he as a prisoner had to work in, now a heritage site, he can reflect on this history and even meet one of the staff, now an older man, with no grievances and now empathy for each other. It is a soothing reminder of how, even with the horrors of World War II and Nazi Germany, human beings are still human beings capable of empathy.

More so as Mekas, the man he became, ends the film, where with the colour of the film stock used adding such a striking look, the colour red so unique to this footage, Mekas goes to Vienna. The man who returned home, to be able to see family he left in his country, was also able to become a hugely profound figure for growing avant-garde cinema. His films soften and remind us viewers in the modern day even these seminal avant-garde filmmakers are us, where Peter Kubelka, the legendary filmmaker who turned a commissioned beer commercial into an elliptical short Schwechater (1958), is seen as a jovial man feeing pigeons, or how Ken Jacobs, of Star Spangled to Death (2004), was dubbed "the Child" by Mekas. Even tragedy, when Vienna burning at night due to the final is the final images of the film, as Kubelka is recounted lamenting a market he was fond of burning down, is felt with a greater worth than just mere sadness. That at least the market existed and is remembered, and that, yes, even destruction can be beautiful as it is here, the sight of crimson reds, oranges and flickers of yellow on black stunning to behold. If this review feels whimsical, more than usual, it is because trying to speak of Mekas beyond this would be absurd. Sadly, his films are difficult to see, a tragedy as never was there a man in avant-garde filmmaking who championed humility.