The Gore-Gore Girls (1972)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Alan J. Dachman

Cast: Frank Kress as Abraham Gentry; Amy Farrell as Nancy Weston; Hedda Lubin as Marlene; Henny Youngman as Marzdone Mobilie; Russ Badger as Lt. Anderson; Ray Sager as Grout; Nora Alexis as Lola Prize

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Lt. Anderson, one of my friends seems to have run into a bit of trouble... and lost her face.

Thinking he was ending on this film in terms of his film directing career, Herschell Gordon Lewis felt he wanted to go out with a bang, with more production value and shock as he was closing the door on his exploitation film career. Starting with the image of a woman, Suzie Cream Puff, "being creamed" by having her face hit through a mirror, he wanted to deliver on that premise. Here I will say, as one of the first Lewis films I had seen, I hated this film once. Hated it to the point it was actually held as one of the worst films I had ever seen. What changed in all the time that passed?

The immediate thing is this film embraces its sense of humour. Introducing our detective lead, Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress), stroking a pet cat in his lounge only to insert it into a cupboard when someone knocks outside, he is lured by a female reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) to investigate a series of gristly go-go dancer murders. The Gore-Gore Girls is a scuzzy and nasty little production, clearly influenced by the Italian giallo from the period as the unseen killer is even wearing black gloves for the job, but it is also a film so proudly with its tongue in its cheek it has pierced through the flesh. Gentry, as played by Kress, is immediately a stand-out even in terms of characters and acting performances in a Lewis film, playing a sarcastic dick but delightfully so, apt for the tone of the production with his many quips to people who irritate him during his work. He eventually even comes to like Nancy, despite their stand-off nature at first and questionable decisions nowadays; though he does nothing and makes sure she gets safely home, getting her drunk off her face on zombie cocktails repeatedly is not something we would consider heroic nowadays even if the joke back in the early seventies.

The film is a procedural where he investigates who the killer could be. Is it Grout (Ray Sager), the man at the Go-Go club bar who draws faces on vegetables and fruits, crushing them in a mania started on corpses in his Vietnam war service, or the leader of a feminist group, whose group storms a Go-Go club halfway through? Lewis even touching upon the Italian giallo genre by accident is a curious nod to this era Lewis would bow out OF, as horror cinema changed in the seventies and diversified further. This is including the fact he might have not been able to match the gore and splatter becoming more acceptable even in mainstream cinema from the period, such as The Omen (1976) having a full decapitation by way of pane of glass shown at multiple angles. Some of this film has aged and is of the era, as Gentry has no time for any woman, even when he is condescending to everyone, and eventually going to bond and have a romance with Nancy. Coming off as a chauvinist, there are many moments, before that romance too, Gentry feels like he is clearly not interested in women at all and could be read as gay.

Thankfully, a bit has aged well. Even with the feminists involved, the film never takes pot-shots with them even when their leader is a possible suspect, their huge storming scene more of a scuffle between actors then anything that comes off as offensive. It feels like Lewis, and his screenwriter Alan J. Dachman, who has a brief scene as a young male bystander asked where a suspect is, just took notice of the world around them and put in a touch for more interest. Gentry is also inclined to screwing with the male police lieutenant, hiding info and telling him the killer is a religious fanatic stealing the victims' Bibles, which is a legitimately funny running joke especially when the cast playing the fellow officers, who Gentry likes more, play it with their senior looking like an idiot.

One of the other aspects of the film was also one of the huge reasons I hated it originally, because I was offended by it, were the gore scenes, not used to the type of films Lewis made and the splatter genre. That they all involve female victims is going to be an issue for many, though Lewis was happy to have violence against men and women; the issue is entirely that, with the plot choice, some will find this uncomfortable whilst for Lewis, wishing to leave his career at this point as the inventor of the splatter genre, he decided to leave as gruesomely as possible. This is as extreme as Lewis could get, even next to Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat (2002), with openly absurd shock value and violent about it, where one person dies to a wooden meat tenderizer to the buttocks followed by salt and pepper being added the wounds. A lot of handling organ meat is involved, and the one scene that is the most infamous was also the one which really shocked me back in the day, still out-there in Lewis' filmography when a female victim has her nipples cut off, one producing milk and the other producing chocolate milk, among the other things that already happened. These scenes, even if played for the bleakest of humour, are going to shock and make people uncomfortable, especially because the targets are all women, which was the aspect which caught me off-guard when I first saw the film back in the day and also could not see the intentional absurdity in its grossness. Details of the film do feel of their time, like this or Gentry getting Nancy drunk continually, but what is also felt is that Lewis is not taking anything serious and being mischievous at the same time. Particularly with the look of the film, shot in Chicago, The Gore-Gore Girls was a shock for me back in the day for feeling rancid let alone looking it, and that I did not appreciate this type of cinema at all, especially when it came to its very twisted sense of humour.

It has a clear witty, very dark humoured tone, which helps the film so much in the modern day, but in hindsight this film should probably be a later work for a newcomer to watch from Lewis, just in case the content leaves a bad taste in the mouth without seeing Lewis' sense of humour in context. Nonetheless I have changed my tune considerably to the film, and if this had been his last film, it would have been a good one to have closed the curtains of his career on, with all his quirks, all his divisive content, and a fitting final image. One breaking the forth wall, the screen being closed by a character as a literal curtain closer, feeling closer to a touch from a forties screwball comedy than a splatter film conclusion. That was not the end, as he would return to cinema in the 2000s after a very successful career in advertising, but for the original era, this was an apt closure.

When it comes into asking why he even decided to end his career at this point as he did, some of it is the fact he was struggling to make these films and felt he could have less stress in his life, especially as his advertising career for decades after made him a very well off man. Interviewed on The Incredibly Strange Film Show, a 1988-9 Channel 4 series by Jonathan Ross where he tackled "psychotronic" or B movie figures, the episode entirely devoted to Lewis had him absolute at bliss, happy to look back on his career with mirth but also, playing tennis and well off, a man who did well as a lucrative writer and speaker on the subject of advertising, his film career a well kept secret. He came back to cinema, which was a happy thing, but there was in itself a happy end there just as well. Lewis, in spite of his notorious gore films, has something sweet to his life in that he managed to have happy conclusions to his life and career in cinema twice. It is an odd thing to consider, as his career was devoted to make the audience throw up and throwing entrails around, but he would have found that hilarious.

The Driver's Seat (1974)

 

a.k.a. Identikit

Director: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi

Screenplay: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Raffaele La Capria

Based on the novella by Muriel Spark

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor as Lise; Ian Bannen as Bill; Guido Mannari as Carlo; Mona Washbourne as Mrs. Helen Fiedke; Luigi Squarzina as Lead Detective; Maxence Mailfort as Pierre; Andy Warhol as the English Lord

An Abstract Candidate

 

But orgasms are yang!

The Driver’s Seat, when I first heard of this film adaptation, was presented as a bizarre folly¹, something camp which is arguably deliberate when you get to Bill (Ian Bannen) and his macrobiotic diet. However there is so much more here, now you are in an era where the film can be seen in pristine form as intended than a bootleg¹, that is disarming on purpose, comedy there but morbid and, against the eerie nature inherent to many Italian productions in how they were made, a dread clinging to this. There is a perverse humour to our lead Lise (Elizabeth Taylor), on her way to Italy, meeting an older woman who asks which pulp novel is the more “sadomasochistic” for preference, one of the few moments, including her recounting in delight reading her lawyer son’s records on crimes, which is not from the source text but not out of place from the novella’s tone. The corpse humour however leads into the tale of Lise herself, a woman on a knife edge who is after the perfect man on her trip, but not for a clear reason until it is too late, especially as it has flash forwards when it is seen that Lise will be dead and the police will be trying to figure out what happened.

It is a befitting film from an author, Muriel Spark, who literature could be uncomfortable. She wrote stories which could be also whimsical in their tone whilst nonetheless posing moments which undercut it – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) flashes past the lives (and abrupt deaths) of a troupe of teenage girls forming a cult around a female teacher whose liberal attitude is however cut by her ego and passion for Mussolini – and for the bleakness of the story’s final reveal, The Driver’s Seat has its own idiosyncrasies which blur the lines between funny and dark too.. All set in the (real life) tense situation of kidnappings, crime and terrorism in Italy, a vague location in the novella given flesh by the production at an incredibly turbulent period in modern Italy, where random outbreaks of crime even happen here in the airport, Lise is on a mysterious goal to find the right man. There is a wit, but with an aura where everyone is apparently afraid of Taylor’s Lise, you have a lead who is not likable on the surface, with a hair trigger temper over anything from a glass left in a hotel room which a dissolvable aspirin to stainless dresses, but is also someone who is visibly on a trajectory in a fragile state. It is great performance you could dismiss as camp except it has the layers of the film helping enrich Taylor’s acting. Take the first scene, more disarming in a location where feminine mannequins in the shop have a foil-like material wrapped around their heads like a crime scene; her temper at a stainless dress which causes upset is absurd until you see how Lise continues, and how her fear of “stainless” fabric is meaningful as the secrets are unlocked. Considering, as in the novella, her behavior is as much to get attention, from her over-the-top and multicolored clothes to her responses to people, like kicking a fuss at the airport security, then Taylor’s performance is appropriately heightened.

Some of this is gleefully absurd, taken from the novel for the most part. The touches the film add work, such as the novel Lise carries being something specific here - Richard Neely's The Walter Syndrome (1970), one of many pulp crime books from this period that causes one to think director/co-writer Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, or the co-screenwriter/novelist Raffaele La Capria, wanted to parody the giallo boom in Italian culture and cinema, as well as feel absolutely right for the twist that centers Lise's plans, as a murder mystery about a killer. The decision to emphasis the political turmoil the novella is set, by placing it in Italy, where we see an attempted kidnapping at the airport, and an ambassador for an Arabian King having their car blown up in the street, fits contextually for the time period and fits how the novel, while vaguer, nods to this period in general for the political strife too. Other passages are entirely from the book if enriched in the film, especially in the case of Bill.

The “macrobiotic diet” was a concept developed by Sagen Ishizuka, and codified by George Ohsawa, the later a Japanese educator who also drew from Zen Buddhism with its ideas of ying and yang being balanced by what you ate, which means it does have a streak of non-scientific New Age to it in concept. Even the most ultra cynical disapprover of alternative medical diets, like Penn Jillette, would be in Ohsawa’s corner, mortified, if they saw a real life representative of the macrobiotic diet like Bill, one of the many sexually predatory men from the novella who try to force themselves onto Lise aggressively, which requires a trigger warning but is in mind, in the end, she is the one in control making them look fools. The difference between the version of Bill in the book and this version is that Scottish actor Ian Bannen really adds so much to make him stand out, the first shot perfect as Bannen’s entrance fully gets the character over, looking lustfully at Lise on an airplane with a literal comparison to Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother wanting to eat her thrown back at him. Believing in a mandatory orgasm a day, ignoring the existence of masturbation, and that two in one day would cause him indigestion, alongside his habit of carrying tiny plastic bags of unpolished rice on his persons in a way suspiciously like he was smuggling cocaine into Italian soil, he is a cruel parody of New Age figures from this era. He is however also a perfect centre to the reoccurring aspect of Taylor’s Lise, as an older woman, among libidinous men trying to get a woman (even by force) despite Lise with no desire for sex, barring one scene by herself, but for a different goal.

The film leans on the police investigating the case more than the book, a crime thriller touch that does not neuter Spark’s novel but feels the same way legitimately, like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) by Elio Petri, as a way to emphasis the complex psychology at hand when other characters can present fragments of images of Lise. Yes there is plenty here which does scream “cult” – Andy Warhol cameos as a vague character from the book, a lord who Lise briefly fixates on, Warhol there at the right time, aptly around the time when his name presented the Italian shot Flesh for Frankenstein/Blood for Dracula (1973) films by Paul Morrissey, and also a perfect choice in hindsight for the tone, even in terms of an English lord clearly played by an artist from Pittsburgh in his pure white hair and suit. There is however so much here which a level above, even for a film streaked in camp, that is incredibly well made, a huge factor to the proceedings being Vittorio Storaro as the cinematographer. Set in modern environments, with a large portion of the film in septic white and alien-looking shopping malls, Storaro adds so much by himself in showing this fascinating but sterile world where Lise literally is the most colorful detail within them. It is a film which, like so many idiosyncratic productions particularly with the sixties and seventies, came but seemingly became lost to time, with no actual British release for the film until a 2023 British Film Institute Blu-Ray for a debut. It will confound a few viewers but feels too precise to dismiss. Certainly it makes a legitimate argument, from a figure of the golden age of Hollywood starlets both in terms of her own screen roles but the gossip around her life, that Elizabeth Taylor was both a great actress but one with this entire deeply unconventional period in her filmography – next to Boom (1968) and Secret Ceremony (1968 too) in terms of deeply unconventional films she controls – that is ripe for dissection.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric / Psychodrama

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

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1) Elizabeth Taylor's Craziest Role: 'The Driver's Seat' aka. 'Identikit', by Richard Metzger for Dangerous Minds, published 24th March 2011.

Dark Echoes (1977)

 

Director: George Robotham

Screenplay: George Robotham

Cast: Karin Dor as Lisa Bruekner; Joel Fabiani as Bill Cross; Wolfgang Brook as Inspector Woelke; Hanna Landy as Frau Ziemler; John Robotham as Dieter Beckmann; Norman Marshall as Captain Gohr; Frederick Tully as Officer Braun; James Dobson as Officer Garth; Alexander Davion as Dereck Stanhope

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A lake with a curse is established in the beginning of Dark Echoes, leading to two older male fishermen dying in a strange drowning accident and the film, shot between Slovenia and Austria, setting out an eerie tone of a piece out-of-time. Cold chills warn those too late of what attacks, apt for a film steeped in its eerie synthesiser score by Sanja Ilic and Slobodan Markovic. A film between European aesthetic locations, Germanic uniforms on the officials to its locations used for the production, the scenario is set up as so severe an American clairvoyant has to be brought in by the local law enforcement. This figure is introduced in an abrupt turn into a commercial for skiing, also evident the composters' score can be proto-vaporwave as, with compliment, their music can turn on a dime into a score for travel advertisements. This is not that strange when one learns to co-composter Slobodan Markovic, born in Belgrade, worked on an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, 1991 Yugoslavian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, Brazil, performed by Bebi Dol. Tragically it only got 1 point, coming 21st in the field of 22 competing countries, beating only Austria^1&1b.

An older male psychic from the USA, Bill Cross (Joel Fabiani) is sadly underutilised in terms of his psychic abilities, which seems a plot thread, barring one foreboding image he and we see, that seems actually pointless to have included, among the issues to a film despite its virtues. More so as the character, the real deal, would have been one you could flesh out further than here, deliberately an outsider who instructs a confused European bartender who to mix a martini, eventually the American and the European bonding by way of a good cocktail served in a beer stein. With a potential love-hate relationship with a female journalist Lisa (Karin Dor), and the set up is there. Like many films, dialogue scenes are needed to explain the plot, here about a sea captain blamed for eighty deaths in a sea wreckage accident. This tonal choice is the aspect people dismiss as detraction in many horror films, yet films find themselves feeling they need these scenes as Dark Forces does, to be exposition trying to weave character personality within them, all for our alcohol loving lead able to try to investigate this strange series of deaths among wood panelled walled rooms. The result will put some off because of this, as the film takes its time even at ninety minutes to establish this story this way.

It was a fascinating one-off for director-writer George Robotham, whose career was almost entirely as a stunt man since the 1940s to Mars Attacks! (1996). This means film serials like Batman (1943), the Technicolor fifties era movies like Guys and Dolls (1955), westerns like The Undefeated (1969) as Rock Hudson's double, disaster films of the seventies like The Towering Inferno (1974), to films you would not normally presume would have stunts like Flashdance (1983). As his sole film, one which has been seemingly lost to time barring Japanese VHS tape rips, it is a production caught between its moodier presentation and what is more explicitly more cartoonish in its horror. Mood as nature circles the central place the story takes place in, an isolated town whose cemetery is from the medieval times with its own bone house to store the ancient dead, with an artist who paints the skulls in respect to them, and what is effectively in the subgenre of underwater zombies that films like Zombie Lake (1981) are part of. The amount of dialogue feels like someone making their first (maybe their only) attempt to bring something they wanted to see onto screen, and there is a sense of feeling the story, whilst insanely simple, needed this to flesh the material out. In real life, there would be a lot of discussions for hours in bars by stressed officials, as even Jaws (1975), whilst a blockbuster, was as good as it was as a less supernatural film about dangerous bodies of water, all due to its characters, building them up as neurotic figures, trying to figure out something as less mysterious as a shark and how to stop it.

Here, moments show the paranoia well, of the thing off-screen that growls like a man-wolf, when a German Sheppard barks into the darkness, and the tone of Dark Echoes whilst languid works. It works when it is bordering this tone, aptly requiring one to consult an older wise woman to get more knowledge of this threat, one so at peace with her place crows happily perch on her shoulder. Alongside the few moments of gore too, this is where the one lurid aspect of Dark Echoes ever appears too, as she presides over rituals with robed youths performing ritualistic nude dance orgies, something never returned to, never condemned but the abrupt punch of something more adult to the proceedings until more violence appears.

When the violence does appear, the film finds itself becoming closer to a film like Zombie Lake as a monster film. That was infamously not a good film technically for many about aquatic Nazi zombies, and whilst you do not see the edge of a swimming pool in the underwater footage, which infamously happened in that film, it does feel an apt comparison for better or for worse as this becomes more overtly a b-movie which its set up and languid tone clashes against, entirely about a zombie figure who claws people and is intimidated by his vanity when forced to look in a mirror. Tonally it is a slow work which contrasts this change into this plot tone more, more so as for whatever reason, whilst underwater is a world a world of unnatural and compelling sights in real life, it has a dreary nature when you usually shot it onscreen. Even when a James Bond film like Thunderball (1965) has frogmen armies fighting under the sea, you can find yourself in prolonged scenes which are woozy if you are in the right mood, but are not for everyone, which is also an issue for a film like this when such scenes appear.

Here, finding ourselves with a melted face skull man in a captain's hat, Dark Forces is likable as a film but you also see a film which shows the first cautious (and flawed) attempts of a first time creator. It is still fun, lovable morbid and absurd when an ancestor chews him out for being a murderous coward, or suddenly bringing in a gory decapitation out of nowhere, but this is far from a perfect film at all. It is fascinating to watch, like so many of these obscure horror films are, but this is a case of lowering expectations to be able to appreciate it and get the most from it.

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1) Result of Rome 1991 Eurovision Song Contest, from the official Eurovision website.

1b) Reference to Slobodan Markovic composing the entry for Yugoslavia.

Children of the Stones (1977)

 

Created by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray

Director: Peter Graham Scott

Screenplay: Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray

Cast: Gareth Thomas as Adam; Veronica Strong as Margaret; Peter Demin as Matthew; Ruth Dunning as Mrs. Crabtree; Iain Cuthbertson as Hendrick; Katharine Levy as Sandra; Freddie Jones as Dai

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Make it a sherbet butty.

The main theme by music composer Sidney Sager - a breathless chorus of voices - is enough in its distinctness and unnerving form to signpost Children of the Stones, this unsettling ethereal theme to be heard as the main motif and the opening credits piece for all seven episodes of this West HTV Production. Sidney Sager - whose filmography is smaller than I would have presumed but does include episodes of The World About Us (1967-1987), a documentary series about geography, anthropology, and natural history subjects, befitting the tone of this series - did have an extensive career as a composer and conductor, so thankfully his work would have been appreciated in other mediums, here making his mark among many people here in Children of the Stones being a very rewarding dip into British supernatural television from the past.

For clarification, HTV Production is tied to ITV which, launched in 1955 as Independent Television, is a cultural landmark for television anyone from the United Kingdom. Everyone has grown up with unless born before 1955. ITV is the oldest commercial network in the UK, and wishing to let any non-British readers of this review have some context, they became for the early years of television the first big rival for the BBC. They were also a network of separate companies which provided regional television services and also shared programmes between each other to be shown on the entire network, which is where West HTV Production comes in. Eventually they became ITV Wales & West, until December 31st 2013, and thus afterwards being separated into ITV Cymru Wales for Wales and ITV West Country covering the both the West of England sub-region and South West England¹.

The broadcasting area was divided into two sub-regions, Wales and the West of England, which is apt as Children of the Stones, whilst set in the made up community of Milbury, is shot in Avebury, Wiltshire, one of the locations covered in their broadcasting at the time. This series would have been broadcast across the country beyond HTV Production, unleashing this unconventional mini-series that, whilst a fantasy story with sci-fi edges, is befittingly dread inducing like a horror story. The "stones" is a stone circle, fifty three, part of the small village of Milbury, where astrophysics professor Adam (Gareth Thomas) and his son Matthew (Peter Demin) are to stay there for three months, part of the father's research on this pagan formation. The stones are the Avebury stone circle, viewed to have been built between 2850 BC and 2200 BC, and seen in this mini-series in aerial shots as a huge circular stone circle which in turn encloses two smaller stone circles². Originally 100 stones², there is an argument it is a worship place, but exists in the same way as Stonehenge, a legendary location further in Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, as an ancient heritage site whose origins and reasons behind it are mysterious, befitting Children of the Stones' esoteric narrative flourishes. Since these incredible ancient monuments exist, why not use them onscreen too?

The entire plot stems from Matthew finding a painting of a stone circle involving a Pagan ritual and a light in the centre from the sky. The painting is enough to cause the elder female maid at the home they are living in to faint, but considering the landlord, and head of the village Hendrick (Iain Cuthbertson), is encouraging both to stay longer, Milbury is an immediately suspicious place. When the term "happy one" and "unhappy one" are used by even by the kids, it is a sign this community is strange, clearly a village of aliens or brain washing with regular people the dwindling minority, where even the classrooms are divided into high level mathematics and forcing the "normals" and the farm boys with simpler sums. What it is, where the locals can just disappear on nights leaving the newcomers alone, is knee deep into the esoteric fortean culture popular at the time, alongside what would become "hauntology" decades after in British pop culture from this time having an uneasiness stemming from the combination of the urban and the rural in our island country. The centre of fifty three ley lines, it is a place of astrological connections, a supernova in the time before Christ documented in Milbury, with a black hole where it is and where the rocks are pointed. Here we are in Pagan versus modern cultural territory, a bear cult in the past around this place and psionic powers involved, which Matthew develops after a glancing touch of one of the stones.

Children of the Stones does evoke fear of conformity; specifically the notion of village life, where everyone knows everyone, as a virtue is undercut, instead posing the chilling idea of everyone being without their real selves, with the juxtaposition of the metropolises in the leads being outsiders against this rural place. The thing I have not mentioned until now is that this is a show made for children, whilst makes Children of the Stones even more interesting as, barring some dialogue and exposition which is heavy handed, this never talks down to its target audience and has all this eerie content which is just as distinct for a viewer of any age group. The creators and writers Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray deserve their credit as everyone on and off-screen do. Jeremy Burnham was as much a prolific actor in television and film as a writer, whilst Trevor Ray was more of an actor, with only three credits to his writing career - this, another ITV mini-series Raven (1977), another children's show dealing with Arthurian legends which he worked with Jeremy Burnham for, and an unaccredited hand in The Ambassadors of Death: Episode 1, a Doctor Who episode. It is hilarious that Morris dancing, the most innocuous of folk traditions, is held as a sign of being brainwashed, but for a children's show to scrutinise the notion of an idealised rural community life, the "good old days" concept, as being a sign of being docile and without emotion, is a sticking point for the better, knowing this is family entertainment offering the notion, when we learn the secret of the village, that removing all sadness and permanent happiness is itself controlling.

The smartness of the show, working around its style, is really rewarding. Like a lot of British television dramas from this time, there are stage set interior scenes but a lot of on-location exterior ones, having to work around some aged effects but mostly a dialogue driven show with a creepy edge. The cast is full of people who would have been prolific at the time in various mediums, which includes the delightful appearance of Freddie Jones as Dai, a poacher and one of the few "normals" who has stuck around for a long time in the village, Jones' legacy as much for the likes of David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) and it is the ITV soap opera Emmerdale.

The music from Sidney Sager, the one main theme, really does enough in itself to being discomforting, and there are plenty of macabre and openly odd touches to the story. People turn into stone and/or die, and you cannot leave Milbury because, not only does it exist within a protective barrier, but is revealed to exist in its own time zone. Some of the content which is of its era, proudly sticking itself into the fascination with esotericism from the time, may be eyebrow raising for some viewers, but alongside the matter-of-factness the show has for it, taking it serious, but this is in mind to the period it was made. That, being between the British and the North Americans, if not anywhere else, the seventies if rife with the occult and the unexplained as pop cultural fascinating, this screening on television at a time Uri Geller would have already been famous for the likes of bending spoons with his mind and already being challenge by the likes of James Randi, alongside a lot of strange films from the era in the occult and horror which helped created the future Hauntology interest. This fully embraces psychometric themes including psychic powers, which as it is told sincerely is more rewarding than cheesy.

It also has a rare example of a father and son relationship with the leads, and with actors Gareth Thomas and Peter Demin, it is a good one. Matthew, barring his eccentric humour in eating bizarre combinations of fillings for sandwiches, transgressing the savoury and sweet food lines, is a teenager who is as smart as his father, who is neither played as a dolt. This is a horror story where they manage to outsmart the villain with something actually clever - using science to manipulate the clocks in their favour - and this intelligence, or least the sense of letting the characters being alert and act sensibly in this increasingly perverse village, is a huge virtue to Children of the Stones. It is a good show, a sci-fi thriller which does touch horror in its own way, telling even its more unconventional aspects straight faced, as serious drama which never drags over its seven episodes less than thirty minutes each, succeeding as a result .

 

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1) ITV Cymru Wales news shake-up under new Ofcom licence, written by Huw Thomas for BBC.co.uk and published on July 23rd 2013

2) A small biography of Avebury for the English Heritage website.

Mononoke (2007)

 

Director: Kenji Nakamura

Screenplay: Chiaki J. Konaka, Ikuko Takahashi, Manabu Ishikawa and Michiko Yokote

"Voice" Cast: Takahiro Sakurai as the Medicine Seller

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) / An Abstract Candidate

 

Mononoke originates as a spin-off, from a 2006 animated horror anthology named Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales. Both came from the Noitamina bloc, a syndicated time space on Fuji Television in Japan which, whilst have had more action and genre orientated anime shows over the decades, has however stayed with its origins, designed explicitly to cater to anime for multiple audiences and encouraging experimentation even with the more overtly genre productions. It is where Eden of the East (2009) came from, a conspiracy thriller about a young man possessing the ability to unlimited resources to grant wishes, or, for the perfect example, Masaaki Yuasa's The Tatami Galaxy (2010), an eccentric adaptation of a Tomihiko Morimi novel in which a university student, in a Groundhog Day scenario, finds himself repeating his school life in various clubs in an existential crisis, Masaaki Yuasa before he finally gained his fame in the Western helming series for this block beforehand. Ayakashi, for two of its three tales, adapted ghost tales from classic authors, whilst Mononoke comes from the one tale which was entirely original, contrasted by its absolutely idiosyncratic art style. This third tale was an original story also directed by Mononoke's Kenji Nakamura, which first introduced the world to the Medicine Seller, a figure in his own series here who follows the trope within a lot of anime of occult and supernatural figures, in episodic stories, who investigate and resolve paranormal scenarios, only in this case set in Japan's ancient past.

Mononoke itself is a series of five stories, all taking two or more episodes to tell, set between the Edo and Meiji periods of Japan, the nameless Medicine Seller found wherever there is a mononoke - when a supernatural spirit (an Ayakashi) is corrupted by the worst of humanity and starts to interact with the human world in violent ways. He can only exorcise them with his magical sword when he finds out their shape (form), the cause of their creation (truth) and why this was (reason in the English subtitles). The series, from the first (two episode) tale Zashiki-warashi, immediately stands out as a beautiful production. The tale is very obvious in plot, in which a pregnant woman on the run stays in a hotel with a sinister past, but the way Mononoke presents this is entirely unique in terms of its art style, and in terms of plotting, emphasising the sins of human beings as the cause of the mononoke. Whilst a beautiful story to look at, it is soon revealed this inn was once a brothel whose owner was the woman who did the abortions for the sex workers, hiding the foetuses in the wall of the room the pregnant woman is occupying, and not pulling its punches in this theme.

Mononoke is an exceptional looking show which appears to have been made with cut outs or even with paper used as animation cels, making the fact (as behind the scenes footage on its US DVD shows from Flatiron Film Company) that it is a computer animated production which layered this two dimensional look on top of computer drawn sketch lines a perfect marriage between the two styles. It argues the balance between the old hand drawn era and the digitised era perfectly, having aged without fault from 2007, and that some of the best anime of the 2000s onward made a conscious decision to marry the two sides or embrace the expressionistic. It looks like, as with the original Ayakashi story, that it was drawn using glossy paper, a tactile appearance which is contrasted by the use of colour, significant in how bright and vivid a show with such morbid subject matter becomes, drastically contrasting what is expected from the tropes of horror in what aesthetic palettes are usually used. Even with stories which had intentionally dank, dark looks, the visual and colour palette is significant with many of these stories in terms of aesthetic detail, even when with the absence of colour, used to signify details carefully.

The stories tread on well worn tropes but the unconventional look through the stories, alongside the time given to them over two to three episodes, gives them new personality here. The tone for Mononoke as a result is openly symbolic and surreal both for style and to tackle exceptionally grim subject matter, where the titular beings known as Zashiki-warashi in the first story are connected to the aforementioned unborn children, symbolic imagery blatant in meaning like red cloth being ripped, but allowing material that would be gristly to actually depict to be shown in a heightened, meaningful manner. Sometimes it is useful for the limitations of a TV anime production whilst presenting an utterly artistic flair, such as the final arc of the series replacing moving crowds of bystanders with mannequins in costume, all felt having be practiced with the Ayakashi episodes and perfected here.

A story like Umibōzu, in which there are a group of people on a boat in the midst of a haunted area of the sea, shows how all the stories are effectively chamber pieces, supernatural detective stories where the Medicine Seller is the judge of mortal sins. As he has to figure out the cause of the mononoke to cleanse them away, he becomes the auditor who usually extracts the truth from all the characters with him in each particular story, especially as many have a tendency to lie. Rather than laborious plot twists, its closure is equivalent of peeling away the layers of an onion and using the stories to depict human fallacies, Umibōzu particularly poignant for this as its about guilt, the masks people in any stature wear and how cleansing it actually transforms a person for the better. That story also shows how proudly strange these tales are, openly riffing on folklore from Japanese history whilst improvising around the lines, such as a surreal sight of a ghost biwa player, a fish creature with one leg, who forces mortals to experience their worst fears as if real, even if it makes you puke up your prized giant goldfish.

This could also alienate the viewers in place expecting actual monsters, the next story Noppera-bō about a woman who might have murdered her husband and his family which is instead an existential drama all within her own head. Constantly, however, in these tales they are using conventional plot structure to tackle human drama through these folk creatures. Noppera-bō for me is a great story, within a series of consistently perfect narratives in themselves, as this is an existential drama in which, whilst with an obvious twist, uses its artistry and symbolism perfectly to tell the story of a woman without a real self, helped to free herself, based around very surreal imagery of Noh masks and faceless beings. As with all three stories of Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, these are tales based on human behaviour and the acts we commit, and it feels more sincere to depict them as such than the (usual) Western model of such creatures being mere monsters outside our species.

Also as a result of this, openly existential and psychological tales using the wild and wonderful yōkai of Japanese folklore, the series openly embraces the strange even if it is by means of rewriting said creatures of Japanese culture for new meanings for the stories too. Nue, the fourth tale, is openly weirder than the others, a literal chamber piece involving two dead bodies, four people including the Medicine Seller and a mystery to solve...only that its surrounded by an incense smelling competition between the individuals where, for one game, the answers have to be named after chapters of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji (1021), the first ever Japanese novel ever written. The oddest arc of the series, which includes visual clues that on future watches will immediately show the story showing its hand early, naturally it comes from one of the most interesting anime screenwriters I have encountered over the years by the name of Chiaki J. Konaka, who has made a career of this type of distinct writing. Both loved and notorious for his existential and abstract plotting, his work goes from fan favourite Serial Experiments Lain (1998) to frustrating viewers of the second season of The Big 0 (1999-2003), a legitimate candidate for an auteur screenwriter in anime who just happens to be in a production like Mononoke, one where the scripts by all the screenwriters involved are all strong too.

The only issue with Mononoke is that it could have been longer, but in 2022, a feature film was announced in production¹, making this a production which has all the ease in being able to be returned too over and over again. Mononoke for its finale offers a tantalising conclusion by jumping forward abruptly in time to the 1920s and the Taisho period, the story Bakeneko about a group of people trapped on an underground train that may have all been responsible for a death of a young female journalist. This jump offers an obvious realisation - our sardonic Medicine Seller is not human, clear as his real form when he can use the mononoke killing sword transforms into a golden gold-like figure - but it also offers the tantalising fact that, if this had continued, Mononoke whilst getting its personality from its Edo period narratives could have continued in various periods of modern Japanese history too. This three-part narrative does stand out for its bold style in this historical time period as well, with moments of legitimately gruesome horror by way of expressionistic imagery and the nihilistic tone it has for three quarters of its length. Even if it offers a happy ending, as argubly most do, that people can redeem themselves, it still has imagery of people scratching out the limb or organ which sinned, being mauled by cats, or that unlike others, where the mononoke punishes the transgressor, there is in this a macabre conclusion where the one truly guilty person (or two) who compromised does not get to escape their sins.  

It is a great way to have ended the series, with the obvious connotations, with the Medicine Seller ageless on the train, that it does leave one gasping for more episodes about the character existing in modern day Japan, standing out in his appearance but still have a cool, humorous air to him dealing with mononoke still. With Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales the bleakest tale, as a prototype, which is worthy of seeing too, they all together are among one of the best anime horror series in existence. The art style alone, alongside its use of symbolism, is truly a one-off, but the stories themselves are just as exceptional as ghost tales, the aesthetic and storytelling sides fully succeeding..

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Avant-Garde/Grotesque/Surreal

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

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1) Mononoke Anime Gets New Film in 2023, Stage Play, written by Crystalyn Hodgkins and published by Anime News Network on June 18th 2022.

Dogra Magra (1988)

 

Director: Toshio Matsumoto

Screenplay: Atsushi Yamatoya and Toshio Matsumoto

Adapted from a novel by Yumeno Kyūsaku

Cast: Yôji Matsuda as Kure Ichiro; Shijaku Katsura II as Prof. Masaki; Hideo Murota as Prof. Wakabayashi; Eri Misawa as Moyoko; Kyôko Enami as Yayako

An Abstract Candidate / A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Opening with a poem asking a foetus if it undulates with dread, we are in odd waters here from the get-go. Dogra Magra is a curious film in general, which is not a surprise when its director is Toshio Matsumoto, an experimental filmmaker who started with shorts and documentary productions before his debut, his most well known film Funeral Parade of Roses (1969). One of his only films widely available, it is however also a masterpiece, a significant one in LGBTQ cinema as it proudly is avant-garde. Sadly Matsumoto's cinema afterwards is not readily available, a shame as alongside another horror film, the period samurai drama Demons (1971), Dogra Magra is another film missing out of circulation, a shame as this, his last film, is Matsumoto not compromising himself if in the veneer of horror murder mysteries.

It also presents the lack of representation of Japan's history of pulp, horror and unconventional literature, as more readily available in French and Chinese publications, Dogra Magra is also an adaptation of a novel by Yumeno Kyūsaku. First published in 1935, Kyūsaku with just the adaptation of this story feels like a sibling to Edogawa Ranpo in terms of not only writing detective novels, but also known for having both horror and idiosyncratically weird flourishes to his storytelling, with Dogra Magra also tapping in psychoanalysis and a critique of psychology at the same time. Sogo "Gakuryû" Ishii's Labyrinth of Dreams (1997), another film in dire need of more notice, is based on a Yumeno Kyūsaku novel, about a young woman in the thirties to forties, working as a "bus girl", who thinks the young bus driver she works with is seducing and killing women in her job role.

This film does use the detective mystery trappings fully, set within the period it was originally written and with the first shot being a young man (Yôji Matsuda) waking up in a psychiatric hospital. He is an amnesiac, and neither helping is that the hospital is in turmoil as its head, Prof. Masaki (Shijaku Katsura II) has just passed. Openly, and this has to be adapted to, this narrative embraces the tone of a mystery where most of the dialogue is exposition, as Kure Ichiro as he comes to be is the confused figure in the labyrinth of shifting perspectives, even of who he is and whether he was the suggested person in the first place. That there is a young woman in the room next to his claiming he to be connected to him, and reacts when he enters the room, complicates this.

His tale circles around Ching-hsui, a macabre tale of an ancient Chinese painter who strangled his wife, the daughter of the Emperor, and painted her decaying body, turning to another source for a corpse to finish the painted scroll. Having to escape to Japan, with a woman who survives him, his lineage biologically through her is linked to Kure Ichiro, including the original scroll having been preserved as a gristly heirloom. Masaki, a very flamboyant man, may still be alive too, a psychologist who believed that memories and ideas infect the offspring on a genetic level, Kure Ichiro for him possibly an heir to Ching-hsui's lineage. Kure Ichiro is possibly the young medical student who has strangled his fiancée and tried to draw her corpse, repeating history of the far past. Dogra Magra has no clear ending to this, and some will hate this film because it fully invests in a similar trope of everything being a dream and being suspicious.  If you can accept this, then the film becomes a case, particularly with these tropes of morbid horror/thriller stories, where exposition becomes the flavour text.

The title is taken from a chant from a secret Christian sect in Nagasaki, within a novel written by a student and kept in Masaki's office, the parchment if read is meant to drive one mad. This one of the many aspects circling within Dogra Magra's curious brew of ideas, Kure Ichiro possibly the medical student, Prof. Masaki possibly still alive, and the new head of the psychiatric hospital Prof. Wakabayashi (Hideo Murota) possibly is having a power play over the former head. Wakabayashi may be a possible killer in his own right. Masaki's office alone sets this in the horror genre and the strangeness it imbibes from, when it has babies in jars and the head of a cat preserved among the decoration, from a man who attempted to poison his whole family's meal with said animal, embracing the macabre fully. This skirts horror and exploitation, with its gristly premise touching on sensuality against murder and decay. A really gruesome scene, possibly a lie, suggests Prof. Wakabayashi is also a psychopath who, alongside having Ichiro's presumed dead fiancée in the nearby room to him, cuts up women's corpses to mutilate them and fondle their inner organs.

As Toshio Matsumoto made a horror film beforehand, Demons, he would be aware of how to make the film as it became. The co-screenwriter Atsushi Yamatoya clearly has his influence here too. Together with Takeo Kimura, Yōzō Tanaka, Chūsei Sone, Yutaka Okada, Seiichirō Yamaguchi, and Yasuaki Hangai, as part of the group "Guru Hachirō", he helped write Branded to Kill (1967), Seijun Suzuki's legendary and eccentric crime masterpiece. In mind to his work, including directing and writing the bizarre avant-garde pinku film Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967), Yamatoya adapting Yumeno Kyūsaku fully embraces the dreamlike and a complete lack of a cohesive reality. In terms of this period too, the eighties, you did also find directors from the art house and experimental corners of Japanese cinema enter more openly genre films, not losing their flourishes and unconventionality at all. Funeral Parade of Roses was an Art Theatre Guild release, the ATG a legendary film production company that, originally distributing films, began producing movies for the likes of Nagisa Oshima to Akio Jissoji until the mid-80s. The directors who work were released through ATG did move into genre cinema, even Shūji Terayama with a French-Japanese erotic film Fruits of Passion (1981), and Jissoji, who had worked in pulp beforehand in the sixties, continuing with even a blockbuster in production and spectacle, Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1987).

With a film like Dogra Magra, it does not feel a compromise but the creators behind this bringing their styles to the material, especially in mind to screenwriter Atsushi Yamatoya and his history in erotic genre films during the sixties and seventies, stretching themselves to themes of mortality, eroticism, and here the slipping layers of sanity through the style of genre. Dogra Magra, like Akio Jossoji's own Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988), even Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, is also a film which feels and is made as a production that came from the eighties, particularly its use of coloured lighting, but is dealing with the past in Japanese history. Particularly there are films which skirt into genre and surrealism that circle around or are within the time of the Taisho era of 1912 to 1926, Dogra Magra finding itself bedfellows with Seijun Suzuki tackling his "Taisho" Trilogy in films like Heat-Haze Theatre (1981). This helps Dogra Magra greatly as, once you accept the exposition as part of the purple prose, it guards the film in its period setting, and its sombre elegance, only to have its Grand Guignol touches (the jars of body parts in Masaki's office, the slithers of blood, even a surreal moment of a portrait of Masaki having lips superimposed to allow him to talk) stand out greater in its ornate appearance.

Cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki is a huge factor in mind of this aesthetic too, coming from the Art Theatre Guild era. Having filmed Funeral Parade of Roses for Toshio Matsumoto, a very different film in aesthetic style, he also worked on productions for Shûji Terayama, which this shares touches to with even the use of colour. The film also has flourishes which are unconventional. The tale of Ching-hsui itself, as told to us as it is to Kure Ichiro, is depicted with puppets, which is as extravagant as it is telling a truly gristly ancient tale with a beauty in the aesthetic tone. Masaki himself, an amateur filmmaker, has recordings which bring in black 'n' white silent film storytelling, disregarding logic in that you have intertitles spliced in-between for when patients he was filming talk directly to the camera.

Also a factor to the film's tone, helping it considerably, is that one of the most compelling figures in the film, Masaki himself, is the standout performance but not from a cinematic actor. Shijaku Katsura II was better known as a Japanese rakugo performer of the late 20th century, who often performed in English and wished to bring the art to the West. Rakugo is an art form involving one lone storyteller performing a narrative, with multiple characters and long form tales, and even a semblance of knowledge of this, even if barely scratched on, shows Katsura was the right man for Masaki. Born Tōru Maeda, not only does he perform the lion's share of exposition with Hideo Murota as Prof. Wakabayashi, a prolific actor at this point, but also particularly with Masaki as a character, Shijaku Katsura II was the right choice of someone who could figure out how to present the character. Bald with a pencil thin moustache, Masaki is an eccentric, who believes the mind is an illusion and human beings closer to animals, all the psychological details of the text a critique of such a character, as his therapy practices leads to one of the patients killing another. Katsura can make him both compelling and prevent so much exposition from being flat in tone. Particularly as Yôji Matsuda as the lead has to play a cipher for the most part, until he may start recovering memories and find horror in what he has done, Katsura with Murota have to keep the film suspended throughout, Masaki thanks to Katsura becoming a carnival ring leader of a cult of personality in how he is played.

This is a film of an avant-garde artist, as a semblance of an ending is knowledge, whilst a dream-within-a-dream, our lead is hiding secrets which his mind will never accept and will literally reset once discovered, as obvious as you can depict it without being heavy handed. A shot in a country field full of corpses will mark this, closer to something from Shûji Terayama's Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) in tone and its complete surreal mood, another film cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki worked on. Dogra Magra is, honestly, a film I could imagine the Art Theatre Guild would have released if sadly they did not close earlier in the decade. It however says a lot about the eighties in Japanese cinema in general, when there were still other producers and companies who brought films like this to existence, that you could stumble over fascinating works like this to the screen, all in dire need of more awareness of them.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Grotesque/Surreal

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

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978)

 

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz

Cast: Jean Rougeul as the Collector

An Abstract Candidate

 

Established in the beginning, with the unseen narrator and an art collector (Jean Rougeul) onscreen establishing the set-up and the later correcting the later onwards, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting was originally meant to be an actual documentary on author, theorist, and artist Pierre Klossowski. Instead becoming a pastiche of a documentary, and paying tribute to Klossowski still with explicit references to his provocative last novel The Baphomet (1965), The Hypothesis... as with many other Ruiz films becomes of work of layers upon layers even in a work just over sixty minutes.

The set-up in itself is something you could expect in a more conventionally told mystery tale. A fictitious artist is created here, Fredéric Tonnerre, whose exhibition of a series of seven paintings caused a major yet mysterious scandal in the Parisian court in nineteenth century France. The art collector we follow believes the seven paintings were coded for a true meaning, the documentary we now see intending to demonstrate this to the viewer as, recreating the paintings onscreen with actors, the codes are found in replication and decoded. That one painting is lost causes an elusiveness to this, and as with other Ruiz tales, the point is never the conclusion but the hidden fragments and the journey we experience.

As with anything the Chilean director touches, more is to be revealed onscreen and early into his exile from his homeland in France, an added factor here is cinematographer Sacha Vierny. A true legend behind countless films, the film to touch on, and would be referred to in Vierny's work with Welsh director Peter Greenaway, is Last Year at Marienbad (1961), itself a curiosity as whilst a legendary title of its director Alain Resnais, more and more I myself look to its story writer, legendary author and later filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, as much the author with Sacha Vierny. Whilst eventually unfolding with an unnerving beauty in the end, The Hypothesis... gets the initial parody successful, as this journey with the unnamed art collector raises a scandal of secret codes, connected directly to a novel written at the time, related to a secret cult. One which evokes The Baphomet novel, the piece of the puzzle for an actual viewer, like me, which would answer a lot of questions but many may not be even aware of or have read. By itself, it is a fascinating enough take on the notion of interpretation, especially as the mock up enactments of the paintings, heavy handed works of kitsch in some cases, force one to rethink the difference between how a film to a painting stages scenes, Ruiz not hiding when the actors, whilst standing still, sway a little and have to keep themselves steady.

The original figure of the project, before he transformed this documentary to one of his most well known films, is Pierre Klossowski, a polymath especially in where and how he crossed multiple mediums in his homeland of France. Translating Franz Kafka and Ludwig Wittgenstein at one point, acting in Robert Bresson's Au hasard, Balthazar (1966) at another, an author in his own right as much as writing on the likes of the Marquis de Sade, with his last novel The Baphomet, when a synopsis is glanced at, being of the Knights Templar, after their dissolution of heretical rights, reassemble as ghosts and leads to Klossowski himself, a Templar grand master and Frederick Nietzsche being introduced debating notions of morality between themselves. To some that would sound impossible for some to ever be able to engage with, whilst just that synopsis by itself, even with the director is not known for lengthy philosophical discussions in his works, sounds like something Ruiz dreamt up for his later films.

There is an irony knowing this is probably one of his most accessible films, as in one hour it encapsulates a very easy to grasp premise, but is one with enough in itself innately to fully serve his style. It is more restrained as, before his full blown eighties period of delirium, this is kept in a sedate elegance with its monochrome appearance, absolutely stunning to witness thanks to Sacha Vierny. Even Klossowski himself is much part of a greater mystery this hints at, more so as beforehand Ruiz had adapted one of his novels The Suspended Vocation, a 1950 publication, into a 1978 film from the same year. Alongside the narrative being about a seminarian in a Catholic Church organisation caught between jostling sides, one which might not even exist, Ruiz himself added a layer in how the film is structured as if one half was made at a significantly different time, alongside presentation, to evoke a production with its own mysteries in its incomplete form. (Apt as the novel is structured as a critique of a fictitious book of the same name). The Hypothesis... does not play these games, instead its own simple game. Even a painting of the hunter goddess Diana can be linked to a nineteenth century scandal, especially when the mirror is pointed out and the clues start to appear for the art collector.

Its elegance as a film makes sure as much that its mystery does not come off potentially ridiculous and overcooked, something it is in danger of when the art collector reads the entire narrative summary of a nineteenth century novel, a drama of deceit and hidden homosexuality, which may have easily turned the mystery in a cliché by trying to link everything together. It is helped considerably that the film is one of the best to start a novice to Ruiz's world with, but with fans seeing other films, it grows even beyond the obviousness of its material. It is, without trouble, a beautiful and eerie production, stunning especially when it begins with the staged recreations bleed into each other. With knowledge to Ruiz's career, the more mysteries at hand, the more questions are raised. Beyond the obvious, that the mystery's answer suggested here could merely be a theory, there is fixed a missing piece of the puzzle too, and also the fact that even in theory, one can find oneself caught in debate on interpretation, the art collector correcting the narrator, undercutting their place in a documentary as the authoritative voice that knows everything, and even questioning himself in the end.

Strange details alone raise questions, like the collector taking male plastic dolls, like Barbie ken dolls, out of a drawer as if to use them for a demonstration, only to put them away in another drawer in the same scene, and that he has used them in stages photos we see, add strange jokes and questions the more you see the film. Raúl Ruiz is a director perversely apt for the modern age, where you can return to films over and over, even if his work is ingrained into the past and history with great intelligence. (He is annoyingly never however one director among many others who have been betrayed by the lack of availability of his work by ignorance.) Ruiz here is as much compelling for the pleasure of his work, the imagination, as that in it is intellectual dissection. One of his fascinations was the concepts of doubles, drawing from theories of a 19th century Algerian activist and scholar Abd al-Qādir whose notion of the "veiled vision of divinities" was transposed to cinema by Ruiz. Ruiz, taking Qādir's concept of the divine being concealed within images of this world, which in turn reflect invisible realities with divine sparks, theorised that films themselves contained a hidden film, and every frame thus a secret frame¹. As an amateur fan, this stems more in his other work, especially the eighties work which, embracing almost pulp and cult-like film tropes as much as being serious works, the tales behind them as much as the images and how they connect together on-screen in one film having worlds-within-worlds for the filmmaker. Yet The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting radiates such virtue in itself, its simplicity growing to a beauty in its questions. Even with the morbidness of its final reveal, demon worship by holy orders, sacrificial child-boy priests and the material of gothic novels, the film eventually grows into something dreamlike when the art collector wanders a manor, once a stage for elaborate recreations, bled into by figures from paintings in living compositions more beautiful than the ones they originated from.

Reality, as mist enters rooms in the end, and Sacha Vierny guides such beautiful images with his director, dissipates as happens in a Raúl Ruiz film but it in itself feels more real and tangible, apt for a director where the dead do not disappear and immediately get back up in many cases, and the unnatural is as real and imposing in a film like City of Pirates (1984) after the initial set-up. It itself, with The Suspended Vocation, this film marked the early stages of a director who fled his home, due to a Chilean dictatorship, and yet found himself lost at sea in Europe managing a run, into 1990, that is as spectacular as cinema can be.

Abstract Spectrum: Eerie/Playful

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

 

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1) I myself will openly admit to taking this from The Brooklyn Rail website, from their Critics Page on the film by Dalia Neis from their May 2019 issue. It refers to material from the Poetics of Cinema, a book of Ruiz's transcribed lectures from 1992, which is both befitting a review of a work with many layers upon layers, and felt necessary to reference. It encapsulates a huge part of Raúl Ruiz the filmmaker in ideology for me now as a huge fan of his work.