Coven (1997)

 

Director: Mark Borchardt

Screenplay: Mark Borchardt

Cast: Mark Borchardt as Mike, Tom Schimmels as Steve, Miriam Frost as Sharon, Robert Richard Jorge as Goodman, Sherrie Beaupre as Daesa, Jack Bennett, Mark Nadolski, Scott Berendt, Barbara Zanger, Donna McMaster, Mike Schank, Cindy Snyder, Nancy Williams, and Wayne Bubois as support group members.

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

For all the infamy of the film pronounced “oven”, from the acclaimed documentary American Movie (1999) about this film and its director-writer-lead Mark Borchardt, what about the film at the centre of that story? What about the short film Coven itself?

Coven is actually great and, even as someone who has defended shot-on-video and no budget films which have wavering acting and questionable plot tangents, it is actually one of the best I have seen. It is not perfect, but is a moody tale where our lead Mike, played by Borchardt, ends up in a hospital after using prescription drugs to help him reach a writing deadline, only to have overdone it to severe bodily harm. Shot in stark monochromatic 16mm film, he ends up pressured by a friend to join a small addicts anonymous group he is part of. It ends up with a more pulp turn – they are set up as a literal coven whose methods of helping their members stay sober involve questionable spiritual transcendence – and whilst it might be criticized for contradicting the sympathetic nature of the members, as I’ll get into, I have softened to this especially as Borchardt for a film that goes for a more complicated psychodrama in its tiny length and tiny budget.

A part of this is also the possibility, whilst leaning to there being a real cult holding sway in an addict’s consolation group, that as much of the paranoia is caused by the lead Mike’s own fed by his drug use, even using stimulants like speed when already part of the group and meant to be overcoming this substance abuse. This sense of all that what is not it seems, whilst not perfect, is set up to the director’s credit when he leaves the hospital from his initial incident, as he witnesses a woman on a gurney suddenly goes into a fit in the elevator, all before he even meets the coven. Even going to a dealer for said speed when he is meant to be on the recovery wagon, it becomes explicit that, even if the cult is real, our lead is already on the edge and there is still a sense of him adding to his own terrors. With a celebratory sole drink with the group where they’ve likely spiked his, his hallucinations like seeing the members confess to murder or starting speaking gibberish, or seeing a male priest on the floor of the public building bathroom they are in starting to mutter apocalyptic babble, there is as much felt this time seeing the sequence with the sense his own demons are feeding them as much as the cult feeding on them.

The mood helps with Coven even when it is literal and those are real hooded cultists the lead is seeing in the Wisconsin woods even high on speed. The opening surreal scene for a film less than forty minutes establishes Borchardt had more on his mind even if American Movie depicted the production’s difficulties, Borchardt running on a rural road with an old guy ranting in a passing car about religion and dead bodies on a road depicting a subjective nightmare. Helping considerably is the shooting within Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin where the rural small town as seen here in stark black and white adds the best production values for a tiny budget film. Not just for the advantages of woodland for any micro budget film where you don’t mind permits, but that, shot at a time when the trees were bare of leaves in winter and look skeletal, with the sky at times washed out white, it looks appropriately ominous for a film which struggled with taking a long time to be completely finished. It has a naturalism with the locations Borchardt shot, likely with local non-actors or local actors in dialogue roles, in real bars and public buildings, but with the choice of monochrome and the production choices, like using post-synched dialogue and sound for moments where the lead’s sanity is slipping, allowing its more fantastical moments to not feel out of place. Without hyperbole, but utmost sympathy, it evokes the front LP cover, let alone with the music itself, of one of my favorite albums Spiderland by Slint, a post rock band from Louisville, Kentucky, and not that far geographically from Wisconsin, nor where its famous cover was photographed at in stark black and white at a quarry lake in Utica Township, Indiana. Spiderland is held as a great album for indie music, but in one of my favorite songs ever Nosferatu Man, you have a potentially cheesy lyrical choice of having a song about a Dracula like vampire living in a rural American community, where he lives with his brides in a place where he constantly has to suffer from the trains running nearby from his castle. That sense of working class, non-metropolis Americana especially when it comes to regional American horror cinema is close to this ideal even with cheesy lines of dialogue and fake red blood, but Coven to its credit manages to allow the unnatural to bleed into blue collar Americana without it feeling tonally wrong. When you have hooded cultists destroying a car with random clubs in weed filled wasteland, possible because the production got hold of an actual car to destroy, it feels not as cheesy as other regional horror films, but like a gang attack where the inappropriate uniform choices without being able to see the faces feels more disturbing.

Helped by the music by Patrick Nettesheim, ultra low budget synth, adds to the atmosphere of an earnest, imperfect but heartfelt attempt at a film, as helped by the naturalism forced onto a film without the budget to have staged locations but shooting in friends’ rooms instead. Coven ends up less subjective at its end in story with the ending becoming a bloody affair in a kitchen, but even that befits the tone of a film that is largely a stripped back homemade drama, especially as one of the more compelling aspects of the entire production are the addicts’ anonymous meetings. Even if they were an actual coven, Mark Borchardt still sets up that its members are there for legitimate reasons, which also feel like real anecdotes that deal with addiction honestly. There are extensive monologues of people talking of their reasons for their addiction, and they all sound painfully real, even the guy who says he started cocaine at twelve or the more explicitly humorous one of another man who tells with deadpan, to prove a point to an official about being stoned, coming to a meeting on the subject whilst high on acid. There are wives whose husbands who stuck out miserable jobs for benefits, people with depression, and men and women of all ages and concerns in their addictions. It all violently contrast the reputation I first learnt of Coven as being a butt of jokes as a disastrous low budget production in their severity, and they add a moral side to the short I have to praise fully. Even our lead Mike, having to make the rent by writing, which caused the damage to himself, is salient in the idea that, in the coven recruiting members, they literally brought in the desperate and the miserable with real problems they could easily bend to their will.

Even with its finale, of the cult wanting to create new members but never explicitly saying anything sinister about their souls and still concerns of enlightening, adds to a different sort of sinister to the story in terms of interpretation. With one cultist having their head caved into a kitchen drawer, it is a sinister that suggests that our lead may have presumed to have fended for his life, but just killed some innocent people in his own kitchen in a cultist fed mental breakdown. That is the things that I can legitimately say Mark Borchardt was able to pull off with Coven, and credit to American Movie, whilst that film became the iconic part of Borchardt’s own career, it thankfully led to people like me wanting to track the original short down. American Movie is a film I want to return to as its own work, even if tied to this fully with a symbolic umbilical cord, but Coven itself is something I wish with hindsight gets more attention. More so especially from the communities which grew, decades after especially in the United States, for shot-on-video and ultra low budget genre films, where they get Blu Ray releases even if preserved on VHS transfers with visible distortion from age and the materials used. It feels like one of the grand tent poles for this fan base that needs more recognition for its virtues with hindsight.

Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge (1999)

 

Director: Gary Whitson

Cast: Debbie D as Stacey; Barbara Joyce as Trish; Tina Krause as Lisa; Dean Paul as Dr. Baines; Sunny as the Dirty Blonde

Ephemeral Waves

 

I wanted to verify you were prettier than me.

Slighted because her boss Trish (Barbara Joyce) felt the most attractive female staff member was needed to talk to their male clientele, Stacy (Debbie D) is not impressed, armed with a shrink and growth ray, thus bringing us vore fetish before this was a known thing. Anyone who has no idea what “vore” means, well, Stacy realises that one has to eat her way up the corporate ladder to get anywhere...

This is a W.A.V.E. Production, which begins with two women getting wet t-shirts for their promo image, openly showing that this company was making softcore. This was an idiosyncratic one thought as, from New Jersey, W.A.V.E from their 1987 had their scripts written by fans, and were fan funded, producing mail ordered ultra-low budget films which catered to their idiosyncratic obsessions. As a result, Eaten Alive is going to be a bizarre experience for so many, in which a male scientist, with a British accent, creates a ray gun able to grow or shrink objects which Stacy uses to her advantage. Among its stilted amounts of dialogue, you get the first moments of this begin something exceptionally strange when the first victim, a W.A.V.E regular and a director in her own right, Tina Kraus, is shrunk and you witness, through video toaster effects and weird positioning of Debbie D's head, a nude woman the size of Tom Thumb being eaten by another. Clearly, this was someone who had a fetish who wrote this, a trendsetter in fact, but the result including the stock screams in the soundtrack and how low budget the sequence is makes it even stranger.

Whilst at least one (clothed) English man is eaten, the fetishishtic nature of this short clear in how all the victims are depicted naked, as Stacy develops a perverse ritual for this. There is even an extended scene of trying on bikinis with an extensive lack of music; this becomes more curious in how modest this production still is in terms of explicit context as, baring Krause being more comfortable with her scene, all the nudity here is the equivalent of a sixties softcore film, topless only, shot as an ultra-low budget film decades after. It is both, as a result, very tame but because of the context kinkier in paradox. It is, absolutely, strange to witness, one of those productions whose history, for those who knew of it, is matched by the fact that all its effects have to be completed with very cheap green screen and digital editing to pull this off, literally splicing the actresses awkwardly in place when they are shrunk. That is not an insult either, as W.A.V.E Productions were clearly a group whose work were made proudly aware they literally had shoestring budgets to these titles, working off their fan base’ interest in them.

That side does make this weirder too, knowing the script’s dialogue is made from a normal person unleashing his idiosyncratic obsessions, like entering the id of a person’s brain tapped into like a beer keg, and I include here for all the jokes I have made within this review no kink shaming, or shaming at all if it was not a kink at all but something that they wanted to see onscreen. It does admittedly produce one of the strangest moments I have probably witnessed in a film – a scene inside Stacy’s gullet, with a naked actress sprayed with water, with slowed down moans and a heart beat on the soundtrack - which is filthier than porn, but it was and so weird it was inspire. Including seven minutes of outtakes as an extra, this comes from this side of independent cinema which is entirely alien for many, as alien to the mainstream view of cinema as you could get, and it is admirable in this, how strange and out-there it is. Certainly, this feels like outsiders to cinema, people you normally do not find even in some softcore cinema despite the casts' careers. It is meaningful in seeing something closer to the world of the film viewer himself or herself rather than something fabricated, more so when time has passed and we can look back on this for that reason and a gleefully (and purposely) bizarre production.

The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo (1987)

 

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Screenplay: Shinya Tsukamoto

Cast: Nariaki Senba as Denchu Kozo; Nobu Kanaoka as Sariba Sensei; Kei Fujiwara as Future Eve; Shinya Tsukamoto as Kondo; Tomorô Taguchi as Hijikata; Mitsuru Saga as Okita; Kenji Nasa as Ryoma Sakamoto

Canon Fodder

 

Before Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), Shinji Tsukamoto was part of Kaijyu Theatre, the future film production company of his originally a tent where Tsukamoto, wanting to act more, performed plays of his and collaborators in what looked like a sex monster as a tent, hence “kaijyu” after the Japanese for “sea monster”. The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo, or The Adventures of Electric Rod Boy, was one of the first micro-features as a director Tsukamoto helmed based on plays of theirs, following the aforementioned teen boy born with a giant electrical pylon growing out of his back. Bullied, he is however protected by Momoko, a female friend who out of gratitude he offers a homemade time machine to her only to be sucked into a time wormhole himself.

This takes him into a future where vampires have turned civilization into a post-apocalypse where they rule the world, showing the ingenuity which would be found throughout Tetsuo here already. It is, for a forty minute plot, a delirious production in itself, where the vampires created “Adam Junior”, which allowed them to envelop the sky in darkness twenty five years from where our lead was taken from. Now they need to develop Adam Special for more power, before the sunlight returns, and it allows collaborator Kei Fujiwara to act as the virginal "Future Eve", reaching puberty, part of Adam Special who they are waiting to mature and allow her to become an encompassing and powerful force on their side. A female teacher there will help Denchu-Kozo, as well as another time travelling rod boy, in what is a delirious work which is proudly over-the-top in tone. I think how there is a child choir at one point, like a Japanese animated series from the seventies, emphasizes the more playful tone to this to later Tsukamoto films which is its own virtue, still with its foot in a type of storytelling that would not really be found in his later work. Humour can still be found, but he became serious in a great way, leaving this a rare work with a more absurd tone.

Even more a low budget indie production next to Tetstuo, with a young Tsukamoto looking like a Visual Kei band member alongside regular lead actor Tomorô Taguchi, this however presents already the fascinating creativity in terms of visuals and sounds he explored. The use of manipulating the screen, where actors are “moved” in stop motion outside to show rapid speed, is used here for the chase sequences, whilst the home made quality of the props is found, especially with Adam Special as a strange melding of sexuality and body horror which feels like a prototype to later Tsukamoto. This, absolutely, has tonal choices which left his filmography, but are admirable in the vast contrast to before, such as the abrupt use of Japanese punk music, or how the end credits is animated illustration of electric rod people which feels like a weird experimental anime made by one person in its presence.

It also still tells a story, which a dramatic conclusion with pathos, which does feel closer to his later work, including the surprising changes that came where drama became more important to Tsukamoto as well as the prominence of female characters as important (and even central) figures in his work, already present here. It is an early work,  in the sense that his style would become more refined even in the later film, less likely to have the eccentricities here such as having the vampires living in an apartment (for budgetary reasons) covered on the walls in softcore erotic photos. It does however like the best early work, even the best ultra low budget work, have the creativity and unpredictability I have to admire immensely even if I did not appreciate the director already.

Hell Teacher Nube: Summer Holiday of Fear! Legend of the Sea of Suspicion (1997)

 

Director: Junji Shimizu

Screenplay: Yoshiyuki Suga

Based on the manga by Shō Makura and illustrated by Takeshi Okano

(Voice) Cast: Emi Uwagawa as Shizuka; Kazunari Tanaka as Katsuya; Machiko Toyoshima as Noriko; Masaya Takahashi as Kisaki; Maya Okamoto as Nagisa; Megumi Urawa as Makoto; Michiko Neya as Ritsuko-sensei; Miina Tominaga as Miki Hosokawa; Rumi Kasahara as Kyoko Inaba; Ryotaro Okiayu as Nube; Takayuki Inoue as Kiyoshi Horie; Toshiko Fujita as Hiroshi Tachino; Yoshiyuki Kouno as Kainanhoushi; Yuri Shiratori as Yukime

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An 1000 Anime Crossover

 

From a series I had never heard of, this theatrical special comes from a franchise which, if this had been released into the 2000s as more "Shonen" titles were available in the West, could have been jostling with Naruto and the like as this is a Shonen Jump publication work from an earlier period in the nineties. To think this series is from the same publication My Hero Academia is published in, a huge work you may know of even if you do not dabble in anime, is good evidence that anime has had a long time to get more and more pop culture cache in the West, as nowadays Shonen Jump titles get traction in the West as much as in their home land of Japan. From just this special, an occult horror tale of a male school teacher who just happens to have a demon hand and protects his class from spider demons here, it appeals to me to want to track down this franchise however possible. Something about a comedic toned yet also macabre franchise with this premise already won me over just from this later production.

For the full review getting into this in more detail, follow the blog link HERE.

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.

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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.

Cuatro Paredes (2021)

 

Director: Matthew Porterfield

Cast: Bárbara López as Karla

Ephemeral Waves

 

Even with a small steak, you're still eaten the whole cow.

Sometimes it is better not to have a review, but instead create merely a diary entry for some films. Less a critique, amateur or otherwise, but a document that a film exists, a short film in this case from Matthew Porterfield, an independent director from Baltimore, Maryland who directed feature length films like Putty Hill (2011). This short film, shot in Mexico, begins hinting at a lighter tone than it may suggest, that as a young woman named Karla (Bárbara López) is driving, only to bring up a blue balloon and begin blowing it. Sounding less pleasant as it goes, the non-diegetic soundtrack continuing to suggest she is doing so one does with a paper bag, as we see the car driving through the countryside, Cuatro Paredes is marked by more.

It is a short film made in mind to the passing of Porterfield's father. Set within the first anniversary of her father's death, the film's scenario was composed in two days, shot in two days, set in the area Porterfield had moved to and improvised from this scenario of a small timescale to work with¹. The film exists in a world where Karla is the only figure onscreen, baring the cats who were in the area Matthew Porterfield with his girlfriend¹, but she is still connected to the world. The film, more abstract in tone, is a literal short story based on mood.

This is where, rather than review Cuatro Paredes, this is more of a diary entry for me, to mark the film's existence, that within twenty minutes I experienced a fascinating work for that small time. The film's mark in reality is there - the mark of a character morning their father, that the film is in tribute to one of the cats onscreen¹, the one actress Bárbara López sings to on the bed with a cough, which I had wondered about watching the film only to realise that was real. It is also a fascinating film to watch to see how one, in a small timeframe, tells a story but without need nessecarily from a plot structure. That mood is the dictator for what progresses: this is something found in avant-garde cinema in what one experiences when a film, of any length, creates a fulfilling experience, but also a character piece like this reaches its meaning in a perspective found than event.

The film is also more about presence. That even separate from everyone, there are people there for her, phoning her, leaving Karla messages, ones which are more abstract in how they match her own contemplation of herself, her thoughts, in mind to her father now becoming absent. Karla's thoughts on the drive in the morning, debating what exists and passes through a person's mind in a random memory, expresses the sense of consciousness. Her ending monologue, which Bárbara López memorised in a slight time¹, becomes more interesting in imagining the connections of her real life as much as cinema and storytelling itself, the interconnecting pieces. Trying to build a memory palace whilst on acid, Karla recounts her palace and an elaborate story of a soldier who married the mother of the child he killed, the daughter their sire who grows up into a sex worker, a vast complex that reminds me of a Italo Calvino passage from Invisible Cities (1974) in its tone or, with a further push, fully into Jorge Luis Borges' territory.

This was my first Matthew Porterfield work at all, requiring more than one viewing to fully gauge with; as a text, it offers the idea of cinema being more elusive and drawn to forms that are more curious than to merely tell a narrative. That may seem vague but, whilst a film from a North American director that just happens to be made in Mexico, with non-English dialogue, this evokes how I got into world cinema because of its complete unpredictability, that even when with more fully formed narratives they were more character pieces when they interested the most as dramas. Obviously, if this has to be a review, I recommend seeing the film if you can; for interesting for me however, to mark its existence if it lasts for decades or is forgotten, is more how this, as a literal fragment on purpose, has a lot to ponder in just twenty minutes and that writing the review is in respect for its creators' hard work.

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1) A great contextual piece comes from Matthew Porterfield himself, from his MUBI premier piece Matthew Porterfield Introduces His Film "Cuatro paredes" from April 13th 2021.

Stump the Guesser (2020)

Director: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson

Screenplay: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson

Cast: Adam Brooks as The Guesser; Brent Neale as Trofim; Stephanie Berrington as Y / Other Sister; Thaller as Z

An Abstract Candidate

 

A short from Guy Maddin, these films from his career despite their length, this one created with Evan and Galen Johnson, are always as distinct as his longer work even in just twenty minutes here. Certainly you cannot escape the premise's allure, where in this nocturnal world there are carnival guessers, figures played by Adam Brooks, who can almost psychically guess how many fish a man has hidden on his persons or which chambers of a pistol have bullets in them for improvised Russian Roulette, all for prizes of various kinds given out if anyone was to manage to stump the guesser. A registered job requiring a license, with the actual skill tested to be 99% accurate or have the license revoked, even if you use "guessing milk" to assist the power you can loss this work, which is what happens when the Guesser of this ends up losing his. Happening as with so many Guy Maddin male protagonists, it all begins when he lusts over a woman and his libido controls him, a constant narrative touch which is never condemning the women in his work in a misogynistic slant at all, but always condemning men to be driven by his lusts. The woman he loves (Stephanie Berrington) also happens to be his long lost sister, which causes issues as incest is a no-no and gets you red marks of shame on your record.

Befitting a Maddin film, even the sexual desire has a transgressive aspect as, when he loses his job, the carnival guesser is fixated on overcoming this legal law against incest, even if it means taking a role helping a scientist in disproving genetic family trees. By this point, Maddin's ability to create compelling, even perversely witty realities of any length is unparallel. Little things grow beyond this too enriching the work for me as a long time fan, such as the encroaching clarity of how much Socialism and its iconography has influenced his films as an obsession, when one of the prizes in this guessing game for a one shot joke is a Trotsky-bear, which is literally what it sounds like with a plush toy with the face of the noted Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky that includes his trademark beard.

The one trait which became a permanent fixture over time is how Evan and Galen Johnson have been permanent co-directors since The Forbidden Room (2015), and it is clear their involvement come with Maddin's greater use of computer effects. Whilst it may disappoint how a director like Maddin, who once shot a lost film in a garage with sets (Love-Chaunt in the Chimney), has decided to build his worlds now digitally, but it is also clear that, never the purist of cinema in the slightest from the beginning, his tributes to silent cinema also toyed with and re-used in different new aesthetic ways, with this new stage in his career that one where he revels in the artificiality of the digital look. This could be a perverse comparison, as the later is a director who is not screened on streaming sites like MUBI or at art festivals, but I cannot help but think of practical effects creator and low budget horror film director Joe Castro, who suddenly in the 2010s changed to a similar type of filmmaking based around heavy green screen use and deliberately artificial aesthetics. His work, with all its CGI gore, I compliment with this comparison as imagining Hieronymus Bosch if he binged on internet meme aesthetic, original goregrind era Carcass album covers and splatter films with a sense of horror vacui to Castro's work after the 2010s of not wanting to leave the amount of empty space he had in his earlier 2000s films. Maddin is the same in his own way, even close to horror vacui too at times with the look of his newer films, always having the grain and damaged film look even when the films are clearly digitally made, or how from The Forbidden Room on, he eventually depicts mental collapse or tension with a little blitz of the visuals. When the Guesser is forced to make a final guess for happiness, a level of visual barrage greets the viewer which is pushing what he accomplished with acclaim for the short The Heart of the World (2000).

The world here has a heightened mood entirely different to his earlier work but still refining what he did before with new collaborators, such as tiny touches as using colour against monochrome, like having to guess the eye colour of a woman who turns out to be your sister). Far from feeling like a compromise, all I would ever regret with Maddin teaming up with Evan and Galen Johnson is if he entirely jettisoned the stage bound sets of earlier films, and that side to his career as a result. Thankfully, even if it means melding the two more than he has done in the 2010s on for a wonderful hybrid, that is still being felt with films like this.  Stump the Guesser as it stands is another fascinating work and, as just twenty minutes long, is rich enough in what is told in its little narrative even in the little storytelling touches you can miss out on - that the Guesser, as a master when we meet him, even wanders his living quarters with others blindfolded, with a side of his sleeping blanket marked for heads and feet he cannot see and is meant to get the right way up, something which goes amiss when he starts to fail in this work and obsesses over his sister. This has enough richness in narrative, including its final punch line, left with a metal bird toy, to be a worthy part of Guy Maddin's work even among the feature length titles.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Eccentric

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

Workbooks Collection (2005)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Canon Fodder

 

Known also as Love-Chaunt in the Chimney, at least in the Zeitgeist DVD release of Cowards Bend the Knees (2003) which have these as an extra, this is among the many of Guy Maddin's career of feature length and short length films, but with the irony that, long before the Seance (2016) project, where he resurrected the lost movies of directors from Mikio Naruse to Ernst Lubitsch, Maddin himself has a lost film these are connected to. Seance, originally set up as a recorded live performance between Paris and Canada, became The Forbidden Room (2015), Maddin's delirious multi-narrative-within-narrative film, whilst the films also called the Workbooks Collection are just shorts from a project which was lost in a fire¹. This is a ghost, fused together and rebuilt from the remnants, including a tie-in to Cowards Bend the Knees.

The films are FuseBoy, Rooster Workbook, Zookeeper Workbook, Chimney Workbook, Audition 01 and Audition 02, blurring the lines between what survives of this project from the late nineties and Audition 02, which connects to Cowards Bend the Knees, a Guy Maddin film which does exist. This lost film started after Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a 1997 production that for me was a pleasant experience but is not historically the best period for Guy Maddin. A documentary from the time, Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), shows a miserable Guy Maddin, who eventually hated Twilight of the Ice Nymph, which was not seen as a popular work, and a terrible and frustrating experience to the point that the documentary almost has a near-memoriam tone of Maddin imagining his career ending. Made in his garage, some at the Winnipeg Film Group Studio¹, his solution to overcome that experience was a film entirely self produced with improvisation.

How it would have compiled together, an amalgamation of Herman Melville short stories stuck together with assistance from George Toles, is a question for me of interest as, including the two Audition films, the lost film's surviving forms are a curious set of experimental pieces entirely about mood. They precede the fetishishtic nature of Cowards Bend the Knees, the most overtly sexual film of his career, as well as touch a similar nature to old George Kuchar and Jack Smith films as improvised low budget productions literally filmed at points in the director's garage. Rooster Workbook is probably the most explicit, in which a nude woman crawls through homemade crawlspaces, whilst feathers and a rooster populate the visions in rapid fire, repeating scenes in the editing. Fuseboy, starring Guy Maddin regular Louis Negin, is the most implicitly erotic, at least in how Negin, in just tighty whities, plays a man possessed by an erotic memory of three younger men (or one his younger self with two) shirtless erotically mucking about fixing electric fuses.  

With Zookeepers Workbook, Maddin even explicitly references Les Chants de Maldoror, Comte de Lautréamont's transgressive novel which, cosnidering its high art status, is also a work where the God-hating transgressive lead has sex with a female shark, surprisingly more transgressive than even Maddin's own work at times but befitting someone, whilst more whimsically transgressive in his films, to reference. Most of the shorts also, shot in standard definition, feel even if from afterwards like prototypes from The Heart of the World (2000), a short film that, when it was commissioned and debuted at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, was a huge turning point positively for Maddin with its Soviet rapid fire editing and aesthetical tributes. These shorts are to be absorbed, his obsessions felt like mood tapes with their repeating images, the Audition shorts, the first for Fuseboy, the later with cast from Cowards Bend the Knees, a curious pair to include but yet befitting, suddenly Maddin turning the viewfinder on his productions themselves. They all, whatever they call them, are a fascinating collection.

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1) As talked of briefly in Offscreen for An Interview with Guy Maddin: Dissecting the Branded Brain by David Church for Volume 10, Issue 1 in January 2006

The Dead Father (1986)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Cast: D.P. Snidal as The Dead Father, Margaret Anne MacLeod as The Widow; John Harvie as The Son; Angela Heck as The Daughter; Rachel Toles as Little Girl I; Jilian Maddin as Little Girl II; Stephen Snyder as Cesar

Ephemeral Waves

 

A short review for a short film, this is the first work by Guy Maddin and, whilst the presentation would improve over the years and decades, the Canadian auteur began with dealing with neurosis and psychodrama from the start. Told in first person, this is one of the many unfinished books for the protagonist being written of his life, one of which is the compelling title "My Fear of Bushes", which immediately set up Maddin's interest in curious personal behaviours, ticks and obsessions.

What story is told however is The Dead Father, as much a reflection, if accurate to the bio of Maddin in his own My Winnipeg (2007), to the death of his own father, whilst not quite the conventional tale of grief and overcoming the loss of a young one you would normally get either. Most films on grief do not lead to the son eating his father's stomach and contents with a spoon, but despite the late patriarch of the family in this short being dead, he is like a Raúl Ruiz character. When his prone body is not on the family dining table, that late does wake and wander. More uncomfortable for the family than this, which is just accepted as a matter-of-fact occurrences, behaving as he normally did, is that he wanders to a different address, fully alert and awake but preferring someone else's home to his wife and children's.

Early, at the beginning of his career, the aesthetic of Guy Maddin's work is not here. It is crude, knowing that Maddin himself would continue making as many short films and return to the medium over the decades, an era as important to his career (like The Heart of the World (2000)) as it is an area worthy of introspection in itself, his craft being sharpened just by telling his own short stories as it has been with the feature length titles. Saying The Dead Father is crude is not an insult, as this still has the psychodramatic nature of his work that would last into the decades on, only in primordial form. Parents haunting their children, even when still alive, becomes a significant trope of his work which is here, as is the tinges of very twisted sense of humour which can be bleak yet is compelling to see. This does compel, and shooting in black and white, he begins with his desire to work in an unconventional aesthetic. Knowing this as well, Guy Maddin also came from the school of independent budget cinema from the eighties, and the arch of unconventional Canadian cinema from this era. Growing into his later films, The Dead Father is important as a step, one where Guy Maddin would become a truly unique filmmaker, the template found here in pieces.

Travel Songs (1981)

 

Director: Jonas Mekas

Canon Fodder

 

May there be happiness -

The name Jonas Mekas is legendary, a figure of great importance of American avant-garde cinemas a Lithuanian migrant who came to American and contributed to avant-garde filmmaking in his own work and he help in others work, co-founding the Film-Makers' Cooperative in 1962 and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives. The interesting thing seeing his work, and it is cinema not as readily available as one would hope unfortunately, is that nothing in his work is "experimental" in the sense of requiring a different attitude to approach the material. This twenty plus minute short is exemplary to this.

Travel Songs, in all honesty, is a compilation of home movie fragments. It is not difficult; it could be sold to any viewer with ease if they found a fascination in exploring any person's old films, vacations or chronicles of a place in an old time period, and appreciate the experience. Mekas' career, with his own filmmaking, is a man who picked up a film camera and recorded his life over the decades until his 2019 passing. In the span of twenty minutes here, from the late sixties to the eighties, we hop through the various countries he has travelled within, snapshots of times of the past. In fact, Travel Songs as I viewed it is actually a compilation of shorter work - The Song of Assisi (1967), The Song of Avila (1967), The Song of Italy (1967), The Song of Moscow (1971) and The Song of Stockholm (1981) at least.

Stan Brakhage, speaking of avant-garde filmmakers he would have crossed paths with, becomes a point of note here as, whilst this does follow common traits to other Mekas films I have seen, noticeable for me is how he intercuts the silent footage filmed in these environments, literal fragments in places, and rapidly cuts between them, a barrage of memories especially with Italy, which has the longest segment over fifteen minutes, very much like Brakhage. Yes, these are home movies of travels, but that is inherently rewarding as time capsules to the past, which Mekas recorded amongst large portions of his own life, especially between those we see rushed through in snapshots, as if recounting memories which suddenly flash up when least expected in barely glimpsed form, or when we are allowed to breathe and take them in.

His trademark is not to hide behind the camera as a silent figure, not necessarily in front of it presiding, but his voice is that of a commentator on his own work. Here, it is sparser than other work where his voice and ideas dominate as much as the visuals are allowed to breathe. He relies here on a few text intertitles, which in the rawer look of the footage, where shots were recorded on shaking moving transport or dependent on the environment, is themselves as handcrafted to be filmed as everything else.

As someone who documented the United States from the perspective of a Lithuanian migrant extensively in the likes of Lost, Lost, Lost (1976), here this feels like a relaxed view of the world beyond. Snippets of Moscow, its famous onion domes on Saint Basil's Cathedral barely appearing onscreen but enough to register, whilst Stockholm in Sweden is a place of humility, with Mekas placing great emphasis throughout these films-within-a-film on ordinary life and the joys of it, from simple acts to dining to looking on the people that pass in front of the camera (adults and especially children) with an admiration for them. Italy as having the longest segment becomes an ode to ordinary, non-glamorised reality between cafes to barbers rather than an elaborate piece with a commentary on the culture.

In his segment in Ávila, Spain the longest of his monologues here, near the beginning, emphasises the point of the whole Travel Songs. He reflects, with his accented voice with calm happiness, a "little dog" suddenly coming up to him and licking the dust off his shoe that came from the paths he was walking. Said dust connected him to the place, the dog and everyone there, as these films connect us viewers even decades later this time. Only the fact recorded footage, especially on physical materials he had to use rather than digital, creates its own beautiful distortions in time changes anything from us being there with these people and places of time before.  

It is a compelling piece altogether, but for me, their real worth comes with the larger scope of Mekas' filmography. Again, these films are not as easily accessible, but when they include Lost, Lost, Lost (three hours long, spanning his migration to the United States in the late forties to the sixties), to As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) (nearly five hours long), this is a small piece of a filmmaker's work, a real case of one where the author's entire career is in goal to one large composition, his life depicted on camera. This little piece by itself though still reaps a reward, but its place in the larger framework is where the power grows further for its virtues.

Secret Rites (1971)

 

Director: Derek Ford

Screenplay: Derek Ford

Cast: Penny Beeching as Penny; Shirley Harmer as a Coven Member; Lee Peters as the Narrator; Alex Sanders as Himself; Jane Spearing as a Coven Member; Wendy Tomlinson as a Coven Member; Maxine Sanders as Herself

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #248

 

The initial thing to address, in this documentary about a Wiccan initiation ritual and other rites performed at the coven of Alex Sanders, an English occultist, is that this definitely a fictionalised interpretation. We will get to the film's value as an artefact as we go, but just going off the main selling point of this micro-feature, Secret Rites' director Derek Ford is famous for work selling salacious content like The Swappers (1970), an anthology of wife swapping and swinging narratives. Penny Beeching, the young hairdresser wishing to join Sanders' coven, has a role in the television series Up Pompeii! (1970) with Frankie Howerd, and there were people not part of the coven hired as additional extras during that ritual scenes¹.

However, the interesting thing, as with any film, is that it still has legitimacy as a cultural document. More so as this does have a really funny and ultimately profound prologue, where you are introduced to a typical Hammer horror film conclusion as a parody. A nude Satanist orgy is taking place, with the oncoming virginal sacrifice of a young woman being talked of by the narrator, only for her fiancé John Goodfellow (wink) to rescue her with just a crucifix and the power of Christ. The film immediately cuts to Alex Sanders, a real practitioner of the occult, proclaiming this image to be rubbish, and later on even Dennis Wheatley, the author of the likes of The Devil Rides Out (1934) and other Satanic horror novels, is buried by his coven in the discussions. This immediately proclaims Secret Rites' virtue even if it is a fictionalised mondo documentary, that this is replacing the image of evil witchcraft stereotypes with Wiccans who, whilst still doing sky clad nude rituals, are ordinary people who pass the viewers on the street.

Even if Penny is a glamorised figure to enter this coven, the banality of her going from work at a hairdresser to the coven for her ritual is an image with profoundness, the occult and esoteric alternative religions seeping into ordinary British life. Even when her voice over talks of her family being slightly wary for her, no one is trying to stop her casually going to her induction ceremony as if a club. It is still of the time, with a lot of psychedelic music and m-o-o-g synthesiser sounds on the soundtrack, but for a document presenting the secret rituals of a community few have seen. This still has relevance in seeing how Secret Rites is trying to present the unordinary being of regular people. It is still sold for titillation - that whilst there is body positivity in varying shapes and equal opportunity full frontal nudity, this is sold on many nubile nude women. For whatever reason, alongside the more sombre documentary Legend of the Witches (1970)², this is rated for still being only suitable for eighteen year olds to see in modern British between them for BDSM nods, which is the only truly absurd content of the micro-feature too.

Even then, though it follows the trope of this type of feature of having to dampen the titillation for its audience with moralising, it is more progressive in this case as Sanders talks of people wishing to join his coven for nude orgies only to leave when learning you have to study a lot whilst you are there. There is more emphasis on very kitsch rituals here, with man in an elaborate goat's head doing nothing but lounge around the proceedings, but there is also talk of having to do lectures, reading and studying to be a coven member, which is a progressing thing to include. Rather than just nude frolics in occult circles, this is enforcing that these covens are more than scintillating acts of fornication but an alternative belief system with its beliefs, study and discussion. One of the most rewarding moments is seeing these people, with clothes on again post initiation ritual, talking about Penny's initiation afterwards in a discussion group.

The rituals themselves, for entertainment's sake, are kitsch in an amusing way. The rituals are likely as accurate as Alex Sanders wished them to be, bearing in mind Derek Ford clearly wanted to add some additional spice to sell the content. The final, forbidden ritual we the viewers finally see is clearly this fully. An Egyptian ritual of people who love each other to the point they believe they knew each other in past lives, and wish to union even their souls, it means a lot of homemade Egyptian iconography. Most of the rest of this content, including restaging the meeting between the goddess of rebirth and Death, obviously has to be taken into consideration of how Wiccan beliefs are relatively young, properly founded in the early 20th century, and where their sources on witchcraft belief came from, but they feel more accurate depictions in spite of the content around itself. Plus, and this would not be a surprise, Alex Sanders of the head of the coven with his wife (not  as prominent despite her importance in the conven) was probably taking any advantage to promote his beliefs even if spicing up his practices up for this little movie. Anything which feels more provocative, or has non-coven members involved, was likely a compromise for him to get more eyes onto his belief practices, whether right to do or not.

It is a fascinating piece, as much for these scenes in the darkened cavernous ritual area, of their era, but also as still a good document of how these movements were bubbling under the surface at this time, feeling as appropriately normal as anything else not taking place in a darkened cavernous ritual area. Certainly, for a purely pleasing sit, this is only forty seven minutes and you get to enjoy a psych-music scored piece of homemade occultism, which no one should find disappointing unless you are one of those awkward people wishing to call these nice ordinary people blasphemers. As they themselves point out, a lot of the lore on witchcraft, even kissing Satan's arse in nocturnal rituals, are misquoted or were weaponized, whether old pagan gods turned into Christian demons or that the ritual arse kissing is speculated to only be the case because the deity is taller than a person and that was the only place to show devotion to them. Maybe from the director Derek Ford this is a smuttier take on that important idea, but as a cultural artifact, we could have just had the evil witchcraft clichés but thankfully ended up with something attempting to be progressive. One where I can end a paragraph with that thought now buried in a reader's mind.

 

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1) A great source book which covers this film is The Bodies Beneath (2019) by William Fowler and Vic Pratt, covering the many strange and unique titles from British cinema and television, which throws a lot more speculation on what is real and possible reel filmmaking for selling something saucy.

2) The pair of films has been sold together on Blu-Ray and DVD from the British Film Institution as a compelling double bill in 2019, both including Alex Sanders and including perspectives on occultism at that time including its growing acceptance to some.