Fire Dragon (1983)

 

Director: Chester Wong Chung-Gwong

Cast: Chung Kwan as John; Yi-Chan Lu as Jessie; Chien-Ping Li as Jessie; Hung-Lieh Chen as Sai-ichi; Ti Chin as Wesley; Jackie Chan as Alan (archive footage); Brigitte Lin as Lily (archive footage)

An Abstract Candidate

 

It is nice to know, early in his career, martial arts superstar Jackie Chan’s filmography gets into the more unashamed luridness and exploitation of Hong Kong cinema, where it is not enough to fire guns at a car in the opening scene to kill the driver, but to drop a giant net over it, as nets even confound automobiles let alone human beings, and then blow it up with a rocket launcher. The opening theme is going to break out into Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Hi-NRG dance music, and between this and Fantasy Mission Force (1983), Chan has even in just two films has a surprising amount of times where Nazis have been the villains, which is fitting as, part of its own tradition in this region’s cinema, this shamelessly recycles and re-contextualizes Fantasy Mission Force footage into a new film from the same year that film was released.

That film can be viewed as an early production in the “mo lei tau film” genre which the likes of Stephen Chow became famous for, which as a phrase can be translated as “makes no sense”¹ and in itself explains the tone of Fantasy Mission Force perfectly. That film was already weird and on purpose, with actors abruptly in a variety of costumes from steel helmets to dressing up as Scotsmen in kilts, to its tonal shifts from slapstick comedy to a jarring serious ending with characters dead. Fire Dragon manages to be its own take on what is usually equated to Godfrey Ho and producer Joseph Lai, a duo infamous from this period of re-contextualizing existing or unfinished films into what I have called for myself cut-and-paste ninja films, and here Fire Dragon shows this was something others did themselves, with the added peculiarity that the director of this film, Chester Wong Chung-Gwong, only has this film on their Internet Movie Database page. This possesses the same unpredictability of a Godfrey Ho film, when you can have someone get decapitated underwater abruptly by a motorboat engine passing by, or killers jumping out of birthday cakes to knife someone. The use of Fantasy Mission Force alone, a film where Chan was a comedic side character who took centre stage in the ending, is to the point of retelling a new story from it even when it makes no sense to, the scenes involving a haunted house of real ghosts from the previous film, strange in themselves, more strange here to use to introduce the characters, leading to actually bizarre results.

There is new footage here, a plot involving Chinese Nazis, nefarious individuals connected to two new heroes to fight them, a man and a woman, whilst the original cast of Fantasy Mission Force (including Brigitte Lin, a star in her own right including in Wong Kar-Wai films) are reused and attempted to be linked to as a band of criminals after gold. Jackie Chan gets ridiculous dubbing here as in the older film, more goofball with random blues guitar licks scoring his fight scenes here rather than the Godfrey Ho-like English dubbing he got earlier, reintroduced as in FMF fighting an evil sumo for his first scenes. It is clear this also comes when Chan started becoming a big name in his homeland, as there is a stand-in used in scenes whose face we never seen, even introduced in a room with posters and photos of Chan himself from other films used for the close-up shots instead of an actual face. Martial arts cinema had done this before Fire Dragon with Bruce Lee after his abrupt death in 1973, but there were actual actors playing Lee such as Bruce Lai as “Bruceploitation” stars, with their faces seen, which makes Fire Dragon a very odd contrast especially in mind that, decades after this film, Chan was very much alive and breaking in Hollywood by the nineties.

Adding to the strangeness is that this stunt double, alongside weaving new footage around Fantasy Mission Force (and old costumes from that film), does their own elaborate fight scenes with comedy and that blues lick. That is certainly memorable, and it explains touches like having the Nazis, or that they have women in cave women costumes, even fighting to the death, reflecting the scene where the leads (as reused here) encounter a village of Amazons. Fantasy Mission Force was already a bizarre film, and needing to match the footage here for a new narrative, the results get even weirder at times here even if they co-exist as equals in different ways of strangeness. It is also clear this managed to even access unused footage, or more versions of Fantasy Mission Force exist, as there are a few scenes that I never saw and feel hallucinated from out takes there, like torture involving German shepherds licking one’s feet on pain of a metal ball hitting repeatedly in the head when you twitch your legs back. There is also an attempt, not well, to link such scenes, such as the potential death by snu snu with regular sized, petite model-like Amazons for one too-lucky male figure. Fire Dragon, for someone not used to this type of cinema from Hong Kong, would not be viewed as good film making, not how cinema is meant to be constructed this way. Even Bernard Hermann’s legendary shower scene score for Psycho (1960) is used at one point, this region of martial arts cinema its own mad delirium that has to be accepted on its own terms.

It is the kind of film you still also have to admire for the chutzpah, where people were still filmed as extras on crucifixes at the Nazi camp, there just because as set dressing even if it would have cost more to film than add more spare old footage, the logic not found yet still earnestly trying to be entertaining if still exploitation. The story is thread bare, and yet as a Frankenstein’s project to retell a new film with vast limits of new footage, that in itself if you are prepared becomes the pleasure in its own form, the mechanizations of trying to make a new film from an old one like an experimental game, including the Jackie Chan factor, adding to the curiosity factor.

Abstract Spectrum: Random/Weird

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

============

1)      Stephen Chow & Hong Kong Mo Lei Tau Comedy, written by Nick Dodet and published for Pig China on March 8th 2016.

Games of the Abstract: Frog Fractions (2012)

 

Developer: Twinbeard Studios

Publisher: Twinbeard Studios

One Player

Flash / Windows

 

[Huge Spoiler Warning: The point of Frog Fractions is as much pure surprise from what you progress to. This review will include full spoilers, so play this game first if you wish to still have this surprise; thankfully, this is a game you can play with ease on PCs.]

Frog Fractions is more of an interactive farce in what was originally a flash animated game format. Its creator Jim Stormdancer, after a series of older games he developed created an absurd jaunt through genres, with no game-overs but only having to figure out how to progress. Contrary to its title, it is not edutainment, merely under the veneer of mathematics education where, at a pond, our titular frog has to gulp up insects with his tongue to prevent them eating his fruit; the score is kept in mathematical fractions. The joke something is amiss is found before you even leave the lily pad, in how when you unlock new tools, you can turn on and off lock on technology to the point an over-extended arguments for and against end up turning into a discussion on waffles.

The tale of Frog Fractions is seemingly innocuous even still by this point, up until you acquire warp drive in the unlockables and can venture up into the cosmos, right into a parody of a scrolling shooter and the game moving on from there. Frog Fractions is a gimmick game, which is far from an insult; even this extended joke is impressively when if you know the punch line for how many genres and moments this gets into. The jokes have aged at points, showing their time period when, as your frog decides to become President (and ruler) of the entirety of a planet of bugs, it has a parody of the opening to The West Wing, a popular American series in syndication from between 1999 to 2006. Others have stayed funny because the genre they referenced, the text adventure section, were obscure and deliberately there to baffle me let alone a younger person at the time exploring Flash games.

Scrolling and shooting insects eventually causes one to be arrested, but you have the luck to avoid being shot into the sun as a crime by becoming a bug citizen, all done in a quiz where any answer, even screaming about everyone being a bug, is the right one, among the jokes which still land. Baring some interactive sections, this is mostly an interactive story, one where the genre changes are instead deciding how to progress to the next chapter, the puzzle how to turn the page of this game metaphorically, with a few sections showing imperfections even if they are harmless. One great example of the later is how the rhythm game parody, of the dancing game Dance Dance Revolution to win bug presidency, is a mess to have properly beaten to win, any level of accuracy thankfully still a win and the scene able to still be a good one, legitimately, because it thankfully found a way to make the technical problems not a hindrance but the gag. Surprisingly there is one bottleneck which could cause some to struggle, and it is entirely because Jim Stormdancer picked a genre which was obscure back at this time, which is the text adventure section. This is not the game's fault, but that the text adventure, from the earliest days of gaming, involves purely text and builds a world you can interact but with the restrictions from that structure, that it offers its own challenges even for this very simple version. The predecessor to the point and click adventures, what typed commands are accepted before you get the puzzle of operating the bacon goop machine becomes the one potential challenge for any gamer, even next to the fun tangents into Frog Fractions teaches typing, a potentially fun arcade game in itself; you are having to figure out objects going with others in unconventional ways but also now with the idiosyncrasies of this founding gaming genre.

Most of Frog Fractions, though, is trying to figure out the progress without this additional challenge. Even cheating is part of the mechanics at one point, with the parody of Lemonade Stand, a 1973 business management game created by Bob Jamison, involving manufacturing insect planet pornography; destroying the planet's economy through inflation, by printing all the money you need, is an acceptable plan then trying to win in the simple business management simulation, with no consequences whatsoever. Again, this is a farce, ending on the credits with a metal instrumental over photos of insects strategically blurred to look rude, and from its origins as Flash game, this was meant to be an experience first as an interactive work meant to make the player laugh and play with bafflement. Adobe Flash animation was animation software produced by Adobe Systems Incorporated, existing between 2005 to 2020, and among its many uses, from animation to video games, it was capable of great creative work but also used to create silly short pieces, interactive or not, to make people laugh and create memes, to which Frog Fractions, from late in the cycle, proudly succeeds in doing itself. Its imperfections do not undercut its best moments, such as a sequence merely swimming underwater on Mars to your destination, whilst a narrator explains the origins of boxing, originally a sport derived from when men regaled boring tales at each other until one fell over, the punching rule a controversial one brought in later and superseding the original ones.

I admire it as a clever piece of interactive silliness, if aware of its limitations. Honestly, the hype of the game's legacy, becoming a sudden hit to circles who would find it, is its biggest enemy, because it puts on too much weight on a work which is at first a silly game, even with its parodies from the period to the limitations of the gameplay, and works even if you know the spoilers for its weirdness. The game was like catching lightning in a bottle, but I wish to still view it as the curious independent production which you return to once in a while. As I have by its original browser version and now, when Flash was discontinued in 2020, by Steam for free, I can appreciate the game returning to it in periods of time, return for the punch lines and the absurd tangents this gets into. It was a work meant to befuddle and it works, and the legacy from this became as well how Stormdancer felt he had to follow it up. They deserve their own days at the lily pond. The tale of the fabled Frog Fractions 2, by way of being housed in another game Glittermitten Grove (2016), is its own curious multimedia spectacle. Frog Fraction's downloadable content for the Game of the Year version, Hop’s Iconic Cap (2020), is seemingly a hat for your frog, which poses a question of how to review merely a DLC for a character accessory, but I suppose it is a really big hat and worth its own review.

Cosmos (2015)

 

Director: Andrzej Żuławski

Screenplay: Andrzej Żuławski

Cast: Jean-François Balmer as Leon; Sabine Azéma as Madame Woytis; Jonathan Genet as Witold; Johan Libéreau as Fuchs; Victória Guerra as Lena; Clémentine Pons as Catherette / Ginette

An Abstract Candidate

 

Fuckallismus!

Taking residence in a family run country guesthouse, Witold (Jonathan Genet), an aspiring novelist and law student who has to retake his exams, and his friend Fuchs (Johan Libéreau) believe themselves to be in the midst of a mystery when Witold finds a dead bird hung by its neck on a branch. Witold, visibly in emotional turmoil from the start, is nonetheless convinced of this mystery as further strange sights disrupt his reality - the maid Catherette's (Clémentine Pons) lip disfigurement, a tea kettle in a tree, strange images marked on the wall - as everyone around him in the family is as eccentric and in the midst of their own emotional angst. One such figure, the married daughter Lena (Victória Guerra), becomes a singular obsession for him. From the get-go, the idea that legendary Polish director Andrzej Żuławski's last film is seemingly a comedy of manners is itself a great conclusion for him to have done. Taking a novel by legendary Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, whose namesake fittingly travels through this modernised parody of a mystery, he makes a tale of purpose or coincidence, the seemingly strange choice for a director who was both acclaimed and infamous for his filmmaking style, its hyperbolic emotion, a great joke from the get-go before you get to the story itself. Why the bird is tied to a string like a noose is just the beginning of the questions which may be real, as even before the sparrow hanging, dialogue emphasises this has been happening beforehand the students arrived, with a plucked chicken left in the street a week before to dumbfound people.

Żuławski's unpredictability is his forte; like the best and true definers of auteur theory, they are never predictable in the types of genre they blend and tackle, and the bias of Possession (1981) as the key film of his career, and the only film of his most had been able see, does have a drastic effect on your attitude of his filmography as a whole, which has a vast spectrum of genres he tackled. Cosmos stands in fittingly among them; the only difference is that whilst the likes of Diabel (1971) have characters constantly screaming about death and misery, this is a farce where a family and their paying guests constantly scream about how each other not understanding them or how they have unrequited feelings for another whilst they are trying to collect all the peas dropped on the kitchen floor. Witold in particular, in his attraction to Lena, fits the template of the director-writer's male leads of films before in their obsessions, becoming more on edge than he was before, a neurotic who over thinks, is over enlightened and will eventually set off the catalyst for all this pressure in the guesthouse at the halfway point.

The film is exceptionally dense just in the literary and cinematic references alone, the dialogue and the story needing multi watches to fully digest, but the significant idea behind Cosmos is this pressure cooker farce, between love being a destructive and compelling force, which has been a common theme between the director's films, to that farcical nature, be it the childish older patriarch Leon (Jean-François Balmer), the idiosyncratic turns of phrase and punning, and the piss take of the notion of a mystery. The extremes, the hysterics, were for the psychology of Zulawski's films. This seemingly quaint film, tonally like many middle class French dramas, is exaggerated by hang ups and strange obsessions, when odd details appear or are presumed to be. It becomes slapstick in its own way, hormonal angst found seeing sensuous calves being bend and flexed, or the stain on the dining room wall which may be more of a stain, but could also be Witold's obsessions consuming him. That he is missing things, like the more explicit looking stain on a wall when he sees a rake, adds to this parody, especially as the clues and suspicious are curious, like the aforementioned tea kettle, as much as they can be morbid.

In the end none of the strange circumstances Witold encounters are anything else but odd coincidences or a result of someone's angst, even he going as far as contributing to the events with the most severe of the acts, an incident involving the pet cat that, in any other film, would damn him as a villain, but in the world of Zulawski emphasises the madness of the emotions. Tailed by his trusting friend Fuchs, smartly dressed but appearing in each scene with new bloody noses and bruises each morning from constantly disastrous cruising nights, they have to wrap their heads around the guesthouse owners and their quirks, which are just as irrational to our world as viewers. The matriarch Madame Woytis (Sabine Azéma) can get so overwhelmed, she actually freezes in the spot for a period of time like a malfunctioning machine. Leon, whose dialogue at first is witty and henpecked by his wife, but starts to take on childish plays on words and more swearing as he goes along. Their maid Catherette, who is baring a small lip disfigurement, is the sanest person in the house, but with someone in the family who is also played by Clémentine Pons later on in the film, continuing an obsession the director-writer has had with doppelgangers. And Lena, the object of Witold's overwhelming obsession, who is introduced lying on a bed without the mattress on the springs, does not react to severe events as the viewer would presume her to, and whose husband is more disconnected to her than he wishes to be. Then there is the other character who eventually dresses as Tintin, which in itself is just as strange in context as outside of it.

As the mystery is ultimately a farce, you are instead turning your attention to the world and its little details; a "metaphysical noir thriller" according to its late director, the title Cosmos is apt in how ultimately the mystery Witold is obsessed with is insignificant to the literal cosmos of human behaviour, able to see a rake etched in water stain in the corner of the wall but completely blind to the significantly bigger sexual symbolism in the same spot in the lounge. A pressurised farce, where the performances break into maniac expressions and dialogue as Zulawski trademarked as his own, the anxiety that is normally found in these type of French dramas, even when their scenarios are as absurdist in the plotting, is here acted out literally. Even in terms of the plot, this is the same, as the strange acts are part of someone's plan just to keep the people around them shocked alert. Sometimes as well, Zulawski even breaks into the completely unnatural when, at a dynamic moment, suddenly one man unzips his trousers and bees are projected from them, seemingly the most irrational and unexplained moment but in context a sudden break in the tensions.

As Witold reacts violently to each odd event which bursts his personal bubble, even beating his chest like a deranged gorilla at the dinner table at one point, everyone's internal emotions are literalised as part of Żuławski's trademark, slapstick for him kinetic and as exhausting for the characters themselves as it will be for some viewers. All Witold is able to find is absurdities with little connection, instead the real mystery to be found in dealing with his emotions for Lena, her emotions for him back and how her husband, a likable guy himself, reacts badly when he pegs what is taking place between them as they all decide to go to a summer cottage to escape the stress of the hostel. Żuławski's style is entirely artificial but for the sake of his own form of realism, hence why his most well known trademark, the hyper stylised and extreme acting style, is what it is, the idea mentioned before of literalising his characters' external concerns as much as the events they are negotiating around. Restraining his use of prowling camera movements for his final film, it makes his prescience known instead by gliding through the guesthouse corridor and tracking characters along through their monologues, the irony of his hyper dynamic style tackling a genre which would seem safe and dialogue heavy perfect as the final film in the shift in tone. It is fitting for such an openly brazen and intelligence person to conclude on for his filmmaking career this production, able to get away with actor Jonathan Genet doing one scene directly to the camera, in extreme close-up, in a Donald Duck voice and it making perfect sense in context.

The dialogue in particular, in testament to translator and Żuławski documenter Daniel Bird for creating English subtitles for a film this quickly paced and dense, is a huge chunk of Cosmos' style. Restraining himself in terms of the more extreme moments of his career - from a man who had Isabelle Adjani writhing around in white milky liquid in the subway to On the Silver Globe (1988) and its mass anal impaling crucifixion - or in the use of constantly moving camera, the dialogue is still rapid fire and breath taking to follow, each character having individualistic quirks to them seen in their dialogue which, even if you were to struggle with at times, still paints their character in the poetic flourishes they use. That Żuławski has no qualms with referencing anything from himself to even Star Wars means the dialogue is exceptionally flexible and inventive, a reflection of how imaginative he was as a screenwriter. The acting as well is also exceptional as to be expected from Żuławski's films, able to convey just in exaggerated body language what their emotions are before they even speak. As a result, Cosmos feels like entering an alien environment, yet one relatively close to reality within a guesthouse full of arguments, constantly delicious culinary dishes and nature constantly appearing within the middle class environment, a slug literally letting nature be known sitting on the butter for the croissant. When the extreme emotions of the occupants of the house are shown, and reach their peak however, things drastically change, having to keep pace with Cosmos and see the literal "cosmos" of title in how dynamic and unconventional human behaviour is at its fullest.

As a result of this, the experience of Cosmos is an ever increasing series of stranger events taking place. As the realisation Lena is as interested in Witold is eventually known, the deliberately maniac energy is actually more pronounced in a film like this than in one like Possession as, while the later is more extreme in content and tone, the stereotype of what this type of slice of life drama with possible mystery content is belies the surprise of what actually takes place, having greater impact. Sadly, Żuławski would pass in 2016, just after this film, but with his final production Cosmos he was still as uncompromising as his reputation suggests, delightfully wild with intelligence and actively encouraging people to rewatch it over and over again to catch more details and moments of gleeful humour. Even ending the film, on the end credits, by breaking the forth wall and showing the film itself being produced is the sort of subversion befitting him, aptly ending the film and his life with waking up the audience too.

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Weird

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

Treasure Island (1986)

 

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz

Based on the novel by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Cast: Melvil Poupaud as Jim Hawkins; Vic Tayback as Silver; Martin Landau as the Captain; Anna Karina as the Mother; Jean-Pierre Léaud as Midas; Sheila as Aunt Helen; Lou Castel as the Doctor / the Father; Jean-François Stévenin as Israel Hands (The Rat); Yves Afonso as  the French Captain; Tony Jessen as Ben Gunn

An Abstract Candidate

 

Don't hit a blind man if you want to find treasure. Let a blind man hit you.

Among the curiosities Cannon Group produced or/and released, they secured a film by Raúl Ruiz, in the midst of his glorious eighties era, adapting Robert Lewis Stevenson's legendary pirate novel. The film we received, likely acquired due to the cache the novel has, is one which would have not been suitable for a family audience, in spite of the amount of death in the source novel, and is one that would befuddle many. Ruiz however loved the author, so this subversion of the text is not to destroy it at all, his own drastic adaptation not an absurd project he ended up on, such as Cannon financing Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (1987) where Godard completely went against the plan, but one Ruiz deliberately turned into the film it became.

It was a film too, mind, which he would come to revisit, the resulting production here fascinating as a mixtures of those who got involved with the film just in the cast - Martin Landau as the sea captain who visits our protagonist Jim Hawkins' home and begins the narrative, Anna Katrina as Jim Hawkins' mother, and Jean-Pierre Léaud as a mysterious writer following Hawkins as an outsider to the story itself. The dubbing adds to the strangeness to what is a film fully from this phantasmagorical era of Ruiz's career, set in the current day yet existing in a dream world. With the romantic music, of the tone not of a love story, at one point a constant in the early scenes, it feels unreal as we meet Jim Hawkins (Melvil Poupaud), a young boy living on an island at his parents' inn, only to be violently contrasted by the grimness of just content in the first act. This is not a film for the family as previously mentioned, for its tone and because this becomes a tale of a Jim Hawkins who, as a bystander, finds himself going through horrible events the adults play. As much as in the original novel, this includes the reoccurring theme for Ruiz of the menace of death. A blind man, as from the novel, signals the first outside threat when at first a sea captain (Landau) stays at the inn, leaving a glass eye as a threat. There is no innocence here, as before he even reaches Treasure Island, Jim will be traumatised by thugs raiding his home, being punished by them with belt shots, or his father's many staged suicide attempts finally succeeding.

But credit to Ruiz, his take on Treasure Island, whilst drastically altered and eventually a meta-textual interpretation fully retells the story in some new form, including nodding the source as a text within this world itself. It is an obsession for characters, the film eventually becoming a meta-dissection whilst reinterpreting the source, the adults actually playing out roles with Jim Hawkins a reluctant stand-in for this lead. It offers Long John Silver as Silver (Vic Tayback), the shoe maker who runs a Lebanese restaurant. Even if he makes a great omelette, done by using a syringe to extract the egg yolk, he is still the nefarious Silver, and this still involves ships and eventually getting to the titular island. The aspects which are entirely Ruiz stand out more as a result, torturing someone to know what their favourite song is, or this character believing all, regardless of virtue or sin, go to Heaven and thus a socialist.

Production wise, there is clearly the fact Treasure Island, if you attempted to film a faithful adaptation, would have been expensive, and there is the other fact that between Errol Flynn to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), pirates in cinema were not financially successful, in 1986 as well Roman Polanski's Pirates, as well as being a tumultuous production, was not a box office success at all as a big budget "proper" pirate film. Treasure Island is curious in its production companies as well, handled between Cannon Group, BFI Production, the film producing arm of the British Film Institute, our most significant institution in Britain for cinema, and Les Films du Passage, who produced other Ruiz films. None of them, even Cannon with their attempts to with the likes of Lifeforce (1985), were companies who specialised in big budget works either, so Ruiz's adaptation is as much improvised as throughout his career, shot in Senegal for a portion of the film, but changing galleons to modern ships and with the pirates their modern equivalents with assault rifles.

The sense of adventure is still there with only the edge of the morbid added. The compositions also stand out; shot by Acácio de Almeida, a regular collaborator at this point and prolific in Portuguese cinema, Treasure Island has Ruiz's trademarks of deep focus scenes (figures and objects like cats in the fore ground, characters in the background), and his vivid use of colour and lighting. Once we actually get to Treasure Island itself, the pace of the film fully, proudly, becomes its own spin of the source text as the meta-textual nature fully takes over, that this story and the character names are literally personas, for a game even with real casualties that has continued over many times. Arguments about game theory transpire over gun fire, whilst the one native on the island, the Ben Gun equivalent, has been using the treasure, diamonds in this world, as the perfect slingshot ammo. By the point of the finale, any question of wanting a faithful adaptation dissipates as this drastic reinterpretation of Robert Lewis Stevenson stands out as an admirable and strange adventure. Works of canonical legacy, especially when they enter the public domain, gain so much because the source text still exists proud of its virtues, with this one absolutely the case, and that the adaptations can vary so wildly with their own flourishes as the tale survives in multiple forms.

The first take of this tale I grew up with, with fond memories of, is a musical version with the Muppets and Tim Curry as Long John Silver, for Muppets Treasures Island (1996), and it is perversely appropriate that it can co-exist as Ruiz's, dimensions connected by the same text, even if Ruiz's has more cursing and significantly less Kermit the Frog. Ruiz's even takes its playful unrevealing of the reality into the oneiric, with a reoccurring obsession for Jim Hawkins being an action television show set in Africa the adults around him may be the stars of, which blurs the lines between what is real for him in the world, and what is staged and he needs to not take seriously for his safety. Sadly, even as a Cannon Group release, this has become obscure, Raúl Ruiz one of my favourite filmmakers still doomed to hazy VHS images even if appropriate for the sources, including if you find it with Spanish subtitles. It is a credit to Raul Ruiz that, in 1986 alone, he also released four others films, so Treasure Island even if an imperfect work was contrasted by the vast tableau of titles which came at the same time. It is telling he returned to this film, with the 2008 novel In Pursuit of Treasure Island, which in itself befits the project and his entire career, a text which can grow and change in new telling within another text.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric

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

Games of the Abstract: Super Castlevania IV (1991)

 

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

One Player

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

 

Returning to the Castlevania franchise, we get to a jump for the series where they transitioned into the 16 bit era of gaming. Whilst there was a divisive Game Boy game (Castlevania The Adventure (1989)), a significantly better Game Boy sequel (Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge (1991)), a maligned arcade game (Haunted Castle (1987)), and a MSX 2 game (Vampire Killer (1986)), this was a franchise which kept its main franchise on the original Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom console for Nintendo. The irony is not lost that, bringing the franchise onto the SNES, Konami even if making more spin-offs to the main franchise for the next few years would effectively focus more on widening the audience to the franchise, eventually leading to one of the game's most important, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997), being a Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation release, Nintendo 64 instead getting an attempt to bring the main franchise to the third dimensional polygons which was divisive. That does not dampen that Super Castlevania IV, effectively a remake of the original 1986 NES game which began it all, was their head long charge into a new era of technological tools to play with even if Konami would expand the franchise onto other consoles from here on.

Coming as a spruced up version of the original Castlevania, where Simon Belmont, heir to a family lineage who fights Dracula, has to deal with the Count, there is not much beyond this simple mission in terms of plot, what progresses is a series of levels travelling through the villain’s castle to the vampire lord himself. Made originally for the SNES, this throws itself into the aesthetic and technological boosts of the machine, it also contrasting Castlevania: Bloodlines (1994), the title released for Sega’s own 16 bit machine which had its own innovations. Both are straightforward platforming games – one direction, hit enemies with your vampire killer whip, and negotiate obstacles – before the series would help create the “Metroidvania” genre. Notably each has their own gameplay differences, and aesthetically they are different to, standing out from each other.

Even in terms of the colour palette between the pair being distinct, the pair together are a reminder that back at this point this was something that could vary between home consoles considerably even in this little touch; different technological choices means Bloodlines is a vibrantly morbid game in look, whilst in contrast Super Castlevania IV has a considerable amount of atmosphere to its aesthetic. The games do stand out from each other as, a side story, Bloodlines has the levels set in different countries and locations, allowing drastically different aesthetics per level, whilst Castlevania IV is set around one location, Dracula’s vast castle, and embraces a connecting aesthetic of a decayed and haunted environment which is out to kill your protagonist. The SNES game has its own personal quirks; probably one of the most obvious is using the console’s “Mode 7” graphics. Designed to allow a background layer to be rotated and scaled, creating many possibilities for different effects, this means using the graphical techniques to create a section where, comparable to those spinning tunnels in haunted houses people walking through, there is a quasi-cylindrical tunnel which rotates as Simon Belmont has to jump across platforms. There is also a section where the gravity changes, having to hang off a grapple hook, and the world rotates around him through this technique. Other techniques flourish on this game, all adding a quirk to the look of the game, such as when you are jumping on platforms attached to giant swinging chandeliers using a quasi three dimensional effect.

There is a great emphasis on platforming here too, where alongside the little touches, Super Castlevania IV intermingles its whipping of enemies with a lot more concern of how to negotiate around sections let alone the whole stage. Here you have full directional use of the whip itself, even the ability to swing it with full rotation using the directional buttons. The platforming is a little precise to the extreme, as this game fully emphasizes the need to memorize ahead, alongside the fact that here more so than Bloodlines, instant death pits and spikes are a lot more common. The passages even become puzzles in having to work around enemies who can knock you off platforms and that, with a surreal number of staircases floating in the air to work from, you will have a lot of scenarios where it is wiser to stay on them and whack a skeleton or two dead again before setting forth on the platform they are attached to. It is telling, even if Bloodlines was a harder game in its own way, particularly with less health power ups and a password system, Super Castlevania IV has plentiful amounts of health replenishing chicken to devour, if off the floor, between challenging sections. The gameplay additions built into the franchise so far too are also as important – powered by hearts you can collect from the likes of candles, side weapons are just as useful tools for boss battles but even to clear paths from awkward enemy placements, depending on what weapon you have collected.

Unlike Bloodline’s intercontinental trip around Europe, this traverses from the castle grounds, to the treasury and dungeons, towards Dracula. Dracula, having the advantage of being a super magical being, can turn anything clearly meant for mortals to traverse into death traps, and that is before you get to the monsters and figures from various backgrounds in terms of threats. Super Castlevania IV is tonally more somber, but it is still a game of campy gothic aesthetic, finding balances between these sides. One of the best levels, in the Halls where even if the ghosts you face can be hard, emphasizes this by having them, even ones who are dancing together, the main focus with their own devoted stage. Alongside having tables trying to attack you or dodging glowing ectoplasm, the final boss for the stage is a ghost couple, man and female, in ethereal waltzing embrace, attacking the player in synchronized choreography and fencing sword strikes.

Eyeballs from Dungeons & Dragons float to get in the way as you jaunt into the treasury and fight a giant bat literally made from gold doubloons, and all of this, for all the challenge the game presents, perfectly encapsulates the virtues of Castlevania. The tonal changes between this and the Mega Drive game do not change how both are from a franchise which allowed their artists and creators to be as inventive even in eccentric ways, thus explaining one of the bosses here being a giant skull where falling bone fragments are also a huge issue. I will still prefer Castlevania: Bloodlines, but with Super Castlevania IV, you see a franchise strut into the 16 bit generation without faltering, and they are both solid gems in their own right. As talked of, this would be a franchise changing into the late nineties, Symphony of the Night changing the gameplay into the Metroidvania genre it gave part of the name from, and with this among those before this change, there is even before this change the virtues of these games from the music to their atmosphere that became their personality. Finally getting to this franchise, these games really justify their legacy.

The Atrocity Exhibition (1998)

 

Director: Jonathan Weiss

Screenplay: Jonathan Weiss and Michael Kirby

Adapted from the novel by J.G. Ballard

Cast: Victor Slezak as Travis Talbert; Anna Juvander as Karen Novotny; Michael Kirby as Dr. Nathan; Mariko Takai as Nurse Nagamatsu; Robert Patrick Brink as Vaughn Koester; Diane Grotke as Catherine; Caroline McGee as Margaret

An Abstract Candidate

 

J.G. Ballard’s source text, if a choice of word which lacks nuisance, feels confrontational. Part verse text, part reflection of the period, in context it is still a transgressive text even if of its time period. For the film and text, the structure is how Travis Talbert (Victor Slezak), a doctor at a mental hospital, has reached a breakdown, his own mania having pushed his students to work on projects based on his obsessions, such as World War III, documenting the wounds that could happen in such a conflict for one of the earliest examples in the film. The resulting adaptation is a curious film, one which did not succeed for me but is nonetheless fascinating, a 2000s film of a lower budget yet explicitly tied to the early seventies from a 1970 novel built around smaller pieces written over the sixties. The malaise of the 1960s going through to the Vietnam War, the production goes over multiples themes like the fear (and secret pleasure) in outer space NASA disasters or sexual wounds from car accidents, this novel also the prototype of Crash, Ballard’s later novel and the 1996 David Cronenberg film adaptation.

Its entire world, of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and nuclear bombs, does have content I admire, as reflecting a source text I also admire and yet is a peculiar piece as well. It was a novel for its seriousness, and in mind that it was built from a serious context that we will get into later on, that can be viewed as having an unintentionally funny edge, or at least that which does not get the desired reaction, even baring in mind that the film adaptation does have interpretations of the source which clearly meant to be intentional if sickly funny.  The film’s transgressions, among themes, can go from using real life footage of face lift surgery, graphic but clinical as the grimness is in seeing something usually a taboo, the reconstruction of the body, or its continuing of Ballard’s clinical take of sexuality from his writing, be it the one hardcore shot of footage used here or matching the erotic, even the legitimately sexual and beautiful in the human body, against perverse fixations. There is even a recreation of a controversial piece, which was published separately beforehand, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, written in the style of a scientific paper trying to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan, when he was still the Governor of California.

The source text's structure means that this is less a plot onwards in the adaptation, and more of of events separated into chapters, as Talbert's mania continues and other doctors collect his research materials and creations to explain his psychosis. The tone of this entire production can be summed up with the “Imaginary Sex Death of Che Guevara” being an actual line of dialogue used in the film; it does come off as a parody, and I reflect that Ballard had a dry humour to his writing, with one of the reoccurring aspects from the novel being the surveys of sexual fantasies of famous people, collected from normal people off the streets, his attempt to tackle the cult of personality and celebrity culture growing at the time something I would not be surprised had as much a satirical edge as his serious reflections on this, as much as with tackling his fascination with sexual desire mutating from the malaise of the 20^th century.

The Jonathan Weiss co-written and directed work does feel matter-of-factly serious, which was what disconnected me from it, as this is attempting to tackle the kind of novel, from the era of Ballard’s more extreme work or William S. Burroughs’ cut-and-paste experiments, which could truly be “un-filmable”. Not because they cannot, but because you have to factor in tone, presentation and how the novels did not need to reflect having a beginning to a middle to an ending, something cinema is absolutely capable of, but in a different way due to have the projection of information has to be done with the confines of the moving picture form. The proto Crash segments, in staging automobile accidents, have not aged at all in how they have been adapted here, its conceptual auto disasters what Cronenberg managed to make timeless and transgressive in his adaptation. With dialogue feeling like Cronenberg here, Weiss' adaptation here has the strange air of referring to a work entirely of its time, of the seventies, and reflecting on the fifties and sixties beforehand, but caught in the late nineties into the Millennium as a production in look and resources. The fact that the themes and fetishistic details are obvious at times if weird is a factor to trying to digest this film, as it does not lead one by the hand or explain itself deliberately, like the operating room as the new modeling photo shoot location, but there are salient lines which feel more relevant as the time went on and the internet became more prevalent, when a doctor says of imaging new perversions to keep the act of sex alive. Some images like the case designed to personify a woman – a suitcase including vaginal smears, latex face mask moulds of her etc. – and to portrait her is something absurdist but also legitimately disturbing. 

There is a lot to admire in The Atrocity Exhibition but it reveals how much of the source text requires to be dissected and looked at in context to why Ballard wrote it. The novel is a peculiar one, which can be in legitimate danger as time passes of having been an indulgent piece meant to just shock. This is especially the case as there is no real plot that could be used to bring the viewer easily into this, the closest to a narrative progression in the film how eventually, after Travis' trajectory is shown and people try to examine his subconscious, he disappears and they take after him. The source material, openly influenced by Burroughs, was written with legitimate tragedy at its heart, the death of Ballard’s first wife Mary in 1964, the novel admitted as a coping measure for this sudden loss¹, and in mind it reflects even in its transgressions on the fear of nuclear winter, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and other concerns from the era all woven together in an attempt to find meaning within all of them. The novel, alongside being a series of smaller texts altogether, has touches like Talbert having different names per chapter, undercutting the sense of this all following a cohesive trajectory of cause leading to event. Ballard even structured this book with the idea that, if anyone wanted to pick a random chapter to read first and read the whole book in order, that was perfectly acceptable¹, and there is the sense that this film, whilst experimental and out there, does pull back from the extreme of a list based or segmented structure, still semblance of a theming rather than the lucid extremes of a surrealist film from the past decades before.

Some of it is having to work around the transgressions that the mind can conjure up perverse images of but a film cannot without obscenity laws being brought, such as that infamous Ronald Regan chapter, which is not the scientific research paper of before, even if the image of having sex with a woman, nude and hanging out of a car, with a picture of Ronald Regan on her face is bizarre and funny in its own way. Having to work around the cultural baggage which requires context, even something like this not being the Regan most known, the future president, brings up the issue of context being required, such as with the use of the footage from the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 28th January 1986, where the shuttle when attempting to lift off into space tragically exploded during the launch process. That footage as well, and images of Japanese citizens who have suffered radiation disfigurement, do raise justifiable questions of whether this filmic adaptation comes off as the pretentious man’s shock compilation by accident, as those images, without absorbing their meaning and history context, can be exploitation in a very negative way.

Even seemingly benign images, to the film's credit, have more weight to them, such as adverts for a line of Crash Test Dummy toys, a red car among them one I had as a kid, which connected to the real life ones used to research car crashes; able to be crashed and broken into pieces when ran into table legs and sideboards of walls, these adverts for toys for children gain sinister connotations with what they are linked to. The thing is, needing to be faithful to the source text means The Atrocity Exhibition can be a barrage of images for a viewer, one I admire and could easily come to love, but with the ambivalence due to how The Atrocity Exhibition is a film to admire but one whose form even causes one to ponder what the source novel’s original intentions were. Especially as it exists as a work from a different era one attempts to see the relevance of decades on, this is absolutely a case of a film, now of a time before in historical context, attempting to evaluate a work from an earlier time before, which does feel a lot of questions surrounding its form fully.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Perverse

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

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1) An analysis of The Atrocity Exhibition from A Useful Fiction, published on February 14th 2018.

Eden and After (1970)

 

Including a review of N. Took The Dice... (1971)

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Cast: Catherine Jourdan as Violette; Pierre Zimmer as Duchemin; Richard Leduc as Marc-Antoine; Lorraine Rainer as Marie-Eve; Sylvain Corthay as Jean-Pierre; Juraj Kukura as Boris; Jarmila Kolenicová as Sonia; Ludovít Króner as Franc

An Abstract Candidate

 

We are already into the unconventional when the opening credits invoke a late sixties Jean-Luc Godard production, spoken aloud with arrangements of words in-between staff/cast credits like a psychosexual word association game. “Game” is apt, as acclaimed novelist and later filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet came to filmmaking as making openly artificial works. His film here is a game, an abstract one with the tropes of a genre thriller played by its characters as a game.

In the centre of this is Violette (Catherine Jourdan) and a group of disillusioned university students who hang out at a café called Eden, acting out scenarios as Franc (Ludovít Króner), the waiter, is their fabled sinister butler who may have been involved in white trafficking and drugs smuggling (or not) in a previous life. They play out mock games of violence, male and female members, such as an act of rape or Russian roulette with the twist of one person wearing a blind fold with the gun, and a die being rolled to choose the target with added randomness. Though I will view Robbe-Grillet's work as being artificial on purpose, I cannot help to see a post May 1968 haze seep over this. There is a cynical sense that these misanthropic students belong to a group who, after the May 1968 protests in France where across the country and in different forms the left wing challenged the right wing, were left in a permanent ennui when they were not able to change the world. With no sense of meaning or ability to change the world, these students at Eden now stage poisonings steeped in boredom. The world around them is abstract by itself, with this marking Robbe-Grillet's first colour film too, the world as precisely put together and contrasted even when, as a Tunisian co-production, he filmed in the real Tunisian landscape.

It stands out fully in mind to this, even in terms of his obsession and hatred of the colour green, jettisoned entirely on camera here next to other primary and secondary colours. Aptly the staged deaths in Eden are within a café which is an avant-garde installation in itself, with erotic photography on the walls contrasted by pop art squares of pure primary colour as the tables to seating cubes followed the same aesthetic choices. Even when the film, as mentioned, moves to Tunisia, filming in real locations as part of its conspiracy plot involving a man known as Duchemin/the Dutchman (Pierre Zimmer) and a picture in Violette’s possession, the locations are still striking especially in the buildings and their interiors, designed with pure white with blue prominently used for the likes of the doors. As a result, a vast amount of scenes in movement and still shots are eye-catching, the cast figures made by the director to position and pose in the midst of all this, as they themselves play out choreographed games even with real death involved.

Eden and After, in all honesty, is a work of pure style, knowingly an abstract collage of Alain Robbe-Grillet's obsessions turned into genre tropes as an artificial construct. Duchemin, as a mystery man, first shakes the film towards a plot, the catalyst when he enters the café and shows the learnt knowledge of esoteric abilities to the students from living in Africa, such as powders which induce one’s worse fears. His existence, and possible faked death, pushes Violette to travel to Tunisia and a conspiracy, involving her fellow students and Franc who are after a picture she inherited from her late uncle. The plot itself is a machination, mere context, a structure for the characters and Robbe-Grillet's obsessions, contrasted as much as Duchemin’s erotic masochistic-sadist art, posing his mistress and other women completely naked against white background, against harsh props such as inside steel cages or against doorways. Ultimately this is a mood piece, prominently evoking Robbe-Grillet's real life practices in BDSM among the fascination with games and the structure of games. This could provide some viewers with great discomfort, as he contrasts the full eroticization of women, lusted over in their nudity, against their apparent pain in chains, tied to wheels and being bound. Bear in mind, whether your position on these images, his own life included the importance of Catherine Robbe-Grillet, his widow who worked on this film in the cast and whose career has included being a writer of sadomasochistic writing. With a marriage to the end of his life which included sadomasochistic practices and an open relationship on both sides, she also would become a dominatrix who work continued into even her eighties onwards¹; details like this, of someone important in the director-writer's life, does need to be factored in, his legitimate desires in sado-masochism in real life and his films to be contrasted by the woman who together shared a loving relationship and this obsession with. It at least complicates this even if, truthfully, these scenes are the ones in Eden and After which may prove the most discomforting even if they are entirely artificial even in how the characters are depicted.

Even in mind to this, his general fascination (and clear fantasies) of beautiful women in forms of restraint, usually naked here, is an acquired taste and one that become more prominent in his films when they found colour, the erotic becoming more a factor as he went with his film career. The artifice is still there in the actresses (as people and their bodies) posed and contrasted against pure white and manmade objects, and even the male actors are figures he places onscreen. The use of blood, obviously fake but profuse and in vast quantities in deep poster red, is more lurid and shocking in its artifice, such as a suicide in a pure white Tunisian bathtub of stone, the transgression found in something so strikingly simple as using colour itself in purely fictional and un-realistic form. The irony is not lost knowing Alain Robbe-Grillet was an author, using words first, using the visuals themselves here to great effect, which is why too Igor Luther as the cinematographer and Anton Krajcovic for art direction deserve a huge amount of praise for what the pair brought to the film with Robbe-Grillet.

The second half of Eden and After, in Tunisia, still progresses the template of a plot, but is also more of a non-linear piece with Violette experiencing the web of deceit and conspiracy in her relationship with Duchemin and those trying to find the picture. It is, even for Robbe-Grillet's films I have seen, a work which is explicitly more of a conceptual piece, an avant garde production just as liable to have turned into a later era Jean-Luc Godard film as it is undoubtedly a lurid genre piece from this era of sexploitation. The content of the film, more extreme than before, is of a type Alain Robbe-Grillet would fit more in with his later films if still out of synch with them, too avant-garde and too idiosyncratic for even that sexploitation tag to fully work for them. Certainly it is as compelling as it is incredibly idiosyncratic, the equivalent for a famous author penning a pastiche of a genre story, dissecting it entirely to contrast its tropes into striking images, legitimately in this case for the images onscreen.

This was not the end of the film as, creating its mirror sibling, an alternative cut called N. Took the Dice (1971) was produced. Deserving to be included in this review side-by-side, Robbe-Grillet created a remix of Eden and After, which included existing footage with outtakes and materials from the shot itself. The narrator, with dice, talks at the beginning directly to the viewers on TV having to be in an order, with shows that need to be explained, with a complete lack of enigma; the irony is that, whilst this deliberately obfuscates this later eventually to question this concept, Robbe-Grillet here is playing a perverse game of taking a work, originally meant to deconstruct a story, and turning into a work of telling a new story, through reused footage and that not used in the original version.

Tonally it does feel different, right in the beginning with significant greater use of footage of the locals in the Tunisia shot before.  Violette is now the nameless figure to be christened Eve, a figure N. is aware of from his past as he gives her this name and gives us this tale she is within. Duchemin is now a nefarious older man with connections to female slavery with an interest with Eve, the painting of the first film still important but the context changed. This does not feel like a pointless reinterpretation as, whilst the use of older footage is prominent, the context is radically changed, and the previously unseen footage adds a lot. There is even humour, like the fake advertisement (using scenes in the Eden cafe) of a personal anti-pick pocket/theft device for women that can fit in their pocket. Now a story of Duchemin being a trafficker in kidnapped women, Eve his newest target, and other characters trying to rescue her, Robbe-Grillet not only changes the story completely, showing how stories can be told with the same footage, but this even brings in realities within realities, where alternative realities between Tunisia and the Eden cafe can be entered between each other, becoming as abstract as the original as a result in its own distinct way. The only aspect which is unexpected to Alain Robbe-Grillet himself is that far less, if almost none, of the BDSM themes are here, and whilst sensuality is referred to, it is never explicitly depicted either even in nudity, which also changes the tone. The more expected aspect, considering its sister film, is when this ends with the joke that our lead has won a washing machine, least a post card says so. It is not really a spoiler to a production which, whilst taking a subversive route by actually telling a story, is still an Alain Robbe-Grillet film which is going to undercut this game itself. N. Took the Dice does work as its own film, but honestly, it needs to co-exist with Eden and After; together they make a compelling pair, Eden and After the superior film but N. Took the Dice as rewarding when the two can reinterpret the other.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Avant-Garde

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

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1) The Thin End of the Whip, written by Toni Bentley, published for Vanity Fair on February 2014.