October 2022

volume 32
issue 8

BOWIE
Myth,
metamorphosis
and
Moonage
Daydream
£6.50
 CONTENTS

BLONDE
Andrew Dominik’s film offers meticulously recreated
fragments from the tragic life of Marilyn Monroe.
The director explains to Christina Newland why his portrait,
like every other version of the star, is inevitably a fantasy

42

28
DAVID BOWIE
Brett Morgen talks to Jonathan Romney
about his spectacular Moonage Daydream,
an electrifying celebration of the life of
David Bowie. Plus: Dylan Jones on the
artist’s comic potential and producer
Jeremy Thomas on working with Bowie
48
TWIN PEAKS:
FIRE WALK WITH ME
When David Lynch’s film was released
30 years ago, many were dismayed – but
the intervening decades have seen its
reputation transformed. The film’s editor
Mary Sweeney talks to Nicole Flattery
IN THIS ISSUE
54
GEORGE MILLER AND
TILDA SWINTON
Miller’s supernatural fable Three Thousand
Years of Longing has little in common
with Babe or Fury Road – or has it?
He and Swinton explore the stories
behind stories with Isabel Stevens

60 DAVID CRONENBERG
COVER IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

Crimes of the Future resurrects a script the director wrote a quarter

of a century ago, a ‘posthumous dream’ in which the director
confronts the inevitability of disease and death, writes Iain Sinclair
 OCTOBER 2022 104
ORSON REVIEWS CONTRIBUTORS

WELLES
A speech from the

6
1954 Edinburgh
Festival 68 | FILMS
· Both Sides of the Blade
· Nope
EDITORIAL · Bodies Bodies Bodies

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Moonage Daydream bottles · Silent Land
Bowie’s spirit, and points music · The Score
docs in the right direction · Hatching
· The Gold Machine
· Dry Ground Burning
· Catherine Called Birdy

9
OPENING SCENES
·
·
·
·
Strawberry Mansion
In Front of Your Face
Funny Pages
Crimes of the Future
DYLAN JONES
is the author of David Bowie: A Life
and When Ziggy Played Guitar. His latest
book is Faster Than a Cannonball, an
· Intimate Distances original take on the 1990s, published
· BFI London Film Festival · Official Competition by White Rabbit in October. It
· Editors’ Choice · After Yang includes interviews with everyone
· In Production: Kasi Lemmons from Tony Blair and Noel Gallagher
· Moonage Daydream to Tracey Emin and Brett Anderson.
· In Conversation: Tom George · It Is in Us All
· Dream Palaces: Hanna · Bullet Train
Bergholm · The Forgiven
· Obituary: Bob Rafelson · Three Thousand Years of Longing
· Festival: Locarno

86 | TELEVISION
22 · The Sandman
IN THIS ISSUE

· Bad Sisters
· Paper Girls
LETTERS · Under the Banner of Heaven
· Atlanta: Season 3 IAIN SINCLAIR
· Surface

24
is a writer based in Hackney. His
books include Downriver, Lights out
for the Territory and London Orbital.
92 | DVD & BLU-RAY In film he has collaborated with

TALKIES · Putney Swope

Chris Petit, Andrew Kötting,
John Rogers and Grant Gee.
· The Long Take: The movement · L’Argent His most recent publication,
of time is what concerned · Hearts and Minds The Gold Machine, is set in Peru.
Eadweard Muybridge, says · Coming Apart
Pamela Hutchinson · Rediscovery: The Saphead
· Cine Wanderer: The brutalism · Archive TV: Elizabeth Taylor in
of the South Bank in a Hammer London / Sophia Loren in Rome
thriller is on Phuong Le’s mind · Running out of Time /
· Director’s Chair: Terence Running out of Time 2
Davies’ personal poetic tribute · Two Films by Vojtěch Jasný
to the late Mamoun Hassan · Among the Living
· Poll Position: The scholar and · Universal Terror: Karloff
film critic B. Ruby Rich takes · The Molly Dineen
on the Greatest Films Collection: Volume 4
· The Initiation of Sarah
B. RUBY RICH
· Lost and Found: Le Viager

114
is the editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly
and author of New Queer Cinema
and Chick Flicks, both from Duke
100 | WIDER SCREEN University Press. Previously she was

ENDINGS · On Maya Cade’s essential online

professor of social documentation at
University of California, Santa Cruz.

111
· The close of Hal Ashby’s classic resource, Black Film Archive She lives in San Francisco and Paris.
1973 buddy movie The Last Detail
leaves its protagonists disillu-
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
sioned by their inevitable
THIS MONTH 102 | BOOKS Christina Newland, Phuong Le,
reckoning with authority
IN… 1987 · Erika Balsom on the Pamela Hutchinson, Alex Ramon,
afterlife of Afterimage Erika Balsom, Henry K. Miller, Nicole
Tilda Swinton · Henry K. Miller on the writings Flattery, Liz Tray, Catherine Wheatley,
in The Last of of Cahiers editor Serge Daney Ben Walters, Michael Atkinson,
England, plus · Tony Rayns takes on Anne Bilson, Ben Nicholson, Ela
Full Metal Jacket Bittencourt, Kim Newman, Sam Davies
Herzog’s twilight novel
 EDITORIAL
Moonage Daydream bottles Bowie’s spirit,
and points music docs in the right direction
Quoted in David Bowie: A Life, Dylan Jones’s 2017
biography, Alan Yentob recalls a scene from his 1975
BBC documentary, Cracked Actor. Bowie is sitting
in the back of a limo, drinking from a carton of milk.
“I ask him about being in America,” Yentob says,
“soaking up all the idioms and culture there.” Bowie
replies, “There’s a fly floating around in my milk. There
is a foreign body in it, you see? And it’s getting a lot
of milk. That’s kind of how I felt. A foreign body.
And I couldn’t help but soak it up. I hated it when I
first came here, I couldn’t see any of it. Look, there’s
a wax museum! Fancy having a wax museum out in
the middle of a bleeding desert. Think it would melt,
wouldn’t you?” As Yentob tells it, Nicolas Roeg con-
tacted him after the film screened, the limo scene
essentially Bowie’s screentest for The Man Who Fell to
Earth (1976).
Roeg said in his autobiography that before he saw
Cracked Actor, either Peter O’Toole or author Michael
Crichton were going to be cast as Thomas Jerome
Newton, an alien who has come to Earth in search of
water to save his home planet. Bowie spoke glowingly
of Roeg: “He was very determined, very patient, and
obviously a good director, to be able to get that per-
formance out of me.” To his own mind, he was not a
good actor. He was too aware of his limitations, which
conversely was the great appeal of him on screen. In
every role he was always Bowie, unable to be sub-
sumed by his character, a limitation that illuminated
him. The alien let loose in America: it’s Bowie. The
ridiculous Goblin King: Bowie again. He felt a great
affinity with each of his characters, and each was an
extension of himself. “I felt very at one with the sneaky
little gangster guy in Into the Night, the cameo thing I
did for John Landis,” he said in a TV interview in 1987.
“I’ve got great empathy with that character. The least
like me I guess, I hope anyway, is [the vampire in] The
Hunger [1983]. I felt very uncomfortable with that role.”
Bowie is not on our cover this month as an actor,
but as the subject of a new film by Brett Morgen,
who has previously made docs about Kurt Cobain
and the Rolling Stones. Moonage Daydream, which is
released on 16 September, transcends the traditional
music documentary. It is a celestial meditation on life,
fame, loss and belonging. In places it reminded me of
Adam Curtis’s kaleidoscopic juxtapositions of images
and sounds as visual and aural assaults. Sounds and
visions. Sights and sounds. Elsewhere it evokes God-
ard’s 1 + 1 (1968). Images and metaphors are revisited,
a dreamlike state is created which is then punctured
Mike Williams
@itsmikelike
with snippets of interviews or detours into perfor-
mance. There is no attempt to tell a comprehensive,
linear tale, neither of a life complete nor its most inter-
esting fragments. It is an extension of the façade, the
character, and a glimpse of the longing and loss that
shaped it.
Music documentaries are one of the most hit-and-
miss formats out there. At their best they are rev-
elatory works of art, archaeological almost in their
unearthing of compelling stories of celebrated icons
and undersung cult figures. The films of Pennebaker,
Demme and Scorsese come to mind. Also personal
favourites such as Ondi Timoner’s Dig! (2004) and
Sini Anderson’s The Punk Singer (2013).
At its worst the music documentary is the most
cynical kind of hagiography. Ten years ago I was inter-
viewed by Morgan Spurlock for a documentary he was
making about One Direction. His focus, I had been
told, was the possessed fandom that surrounded the
group. Much of Spurlock’s work, including Super Size
Me (2004) and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011), had
been explorations of capitalism and its detrimental
effects on our bodies and souls, and so I was intrigued
by what he would bring to a film about what was
then the biggest pop band on the planet. We talked at
length about their fanbase and the tragicomic death
threats from children aimed at my colleague, who was
deemed to have wronged the many saints of 1D, and
about where this culture of toxic online fandom would
lead. In the end, that was not the film Spurlock made.
Simon Cowell, the band’s then-manager, took over as
producer and what was released was a bland look at
life on tour, the kind of thing that in the past would
have been a page in a teenage magazine but was now
a 100-minute extravaganza. What has followed has
been a swell of stage-managed cash-ins with the hot
pop star du jour which shows no sign of breaking.
In this issue we focus on the best of the form, as
Jonathan Romney talks to Brett Morgen about his
approach to Moonage Daydream. Meanwhile, Dylan
Jones writes about Bowie the comedian and producer
Jeremy Thomas revisits Ōshima Nagisa’s 1983 war film
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (which Bowie consid-
ered his “most credible performance”). Elsewhere
ILLUSTRATION BY MARC DAVID SPENGLER
Mary Sweeney and Nicole Flattery revisit Twin Peaks:
Fire Walk with Me (1992) 30 years on, a film that feels
very much part of Bowie’s oeuvre even if his screen
time runs to less than a minute. That’s presence, that’s
performance. To paraphrase an old joke, what’s this fly
doing in my milk? It looks like backstroke.
OPENING SCENES
London calling
Running from 5-16 October, the BFI
London Film Festival is back in full
force with films by Joanna Hogg,
Guillermo del Toro and Asif Kapadia
BY THOMAS FLEW
ABOVE
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
After two years of rapid change (turbo-
charged by the pandemic in 2020, which
led to a greatly reduced, online-focused
event) the BFI London Film Festival,
returning for its 66th edition in October,
appears to be settling into a successful
new format. The big recent additions
– glossy Gala screenings at the Royal
Festival Hall, showcases via UK-wide
partner cinemas, an online BFI Player
offering and a burgeoning Expanded sec-
tion, which this year includes the world
premiere of Guy Maddin’s Haunted Hotel:
A Melodrama in Augmented Reality – all
return in 2022. The festival team’s focus
is to fine-tune a more tightly curated pro-
gramme: around 30 per cent fewer films
are showing than in 2019.
LFF has commonly been known as a
showcase of the ‘best of the fests’, bring-
ing the big titles from Berlin, Cannes,
Venice, Sundance and beyond to the
UK for the first time. But an increased
number of world premieres points to
LFF as a destination beyond that label.
Director of BFI festivals Tricia Tuttle
says, “Having 24 world premieres,
including Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,
feels like a coup, and it underlines we
have grown the festival in stature while
reducing its scale.” Senior programmer
Michael Blyth agrees: “Over the last few
years we’ve done a lot of work to make
sure that LFF is a destination for new
films and world premieres. This year
9
OPENING SCENES
we have a very strong selection of world
premieres – more than we’ve ever had
before.” Premieres of films by British
directors are most prevalent, including
a new documentary by Asif Kapadia,
about which Blyth is enthusiastic: “It’s
a performance of the show Creature, by
choreographer Akram Khan, presented
in film form. It’s an interpretive, visceral,
experiential dance piece – a dynamic,
exciting piece of work.”
Another stage-to-screen adaptation
making its world premiere at LFF is
festival opener Roald Dahl’s Matilda the
Musical, directed by Matthew Warchus:
“It’s a rare moment to open any major
international festival with a family film,”
says Blyth. “Matilda is just a blast. It’s
such an imaginative, creative, fun film,
but it really does speak to a completely
different audience [to past LFF opening
titles]. The idea of having something that
kids can get excited about as an opening
night Gala sets up something different
for LFF.” Closing the festival is Pinocchio,
which for Blyth offers something more
serious than might be expected: “Pinoc-
chio might seem like this lighter family fun
moment, [but] there’s a darkness and a
complexity to it as well.”
But it’s not all about being the first
festival to get their hands on a film.
“World premieres are great, and they’re
so meaningful for filmmakers, but audi-
ences care about the films that they want
 10

to see,” Blyth says. UK audiences are

just as enthused about seeing the hits
from other major European festivals for
the first time. Some of the films making
their British debut as LFF Galas and
Special Presentations after showing at
other major festivals are Noah Baum-
bach’s White Noise, Darren Aronofsky’s
The Whale, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal
Daughter, Alejandro González Iñár-
ritu’s Bardo, Park Chan-wook’s Decision
to Leave and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of
Sadness – a big-swinging, vomit-spewing
social satire that cries out to be seen in
the 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall.
Another hotly tipped title is Damian
Marcano’s second feature Chee$e, a fresh
comedy from Trinidadian and Tobago
that was a breakout hit at Austin’s South
by Southwest.
Blyth offers a parting piece of advice
for LFF-goers: “Pick a film unlike some-
thing you’ve seen before, from a country
you’ve never seen a film from before, from
a filmmaker you’ve never heard of. Do
something different, because this is that
moment to take some risks.” His own
recommendation, a Macedonian feature
debut from Sundance, may be one to fit
those criteria: “You Won’t Be Alone is a 19th
century-set film about a witch who trans-
forms a young girl into a body-hopping ABOVE seem counterintuitive to be giving small- Night), before adding that “queer com-
Asif Kapadia’s Creature
entity that goes out into the world to dis- screen series big-screen premieres but, ing-of-age series High School, directed by
OPENING SCENES

cover life. It’s extraordinary in its beauty,
scope and intimacy, and at the same time
it’s fucking horrifically gory and violent.
It’s like an exploitation film by Terrence
Malick, an extraordinary film.” Tuttle is
equally eager to highlight some of the new
voices showcased by the festival: “I love
the creative ambition and distinctive per-
spectives illustrated in three UK debuts:
Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean, Thomas
Hardiman’s Medusa Deluxe and Dionne
Edwards’ Pretty Red Dress. When seen side
by side, they are so refreshingly unique
and make me feel optimistic about the
future of UK cinema.”
‘Doing something different’ for some
cinephiles might be as simple as sam-
pling the festival’s episodic offerings,
which rather than being siloed away
in their own strand are interwoven
throughout LFF’s programme. It may
BELOW says LFF series programmer Rowan
Adam Driver in Noah
Baumbach’s White Noise
Woods, it’s what their quality deserves:
“There’s now so much longform work
that feels incredibly cinematic and for-
mally inventive, and that can sit shoul-
der to shoulder with the best interna-
tional cinema. There’s also something
really exciting about seeing certain TV
shows in a collective setting – it creates
a shared cultural moment that is hard to
replicate with on-demand viewing. It’s a
real sense of occasion because it’s such a
special, one-off experience.” Woods does
acknowledge, however, that “not all TV
is best experienced in a cinema context
and part of the programming process is
making that distinction”. Loath to pick
one highlight, Woods references new
series from “heavyweight international
filmmakers” Lars von Trier (The Kingdom
Exodus) and Marco Bellocchio (Exterior
Clea DuVall and based on the memoir by
musicians Tegan and Sara, is also a total
delight – I challenge you to find a better
soundtrack this year.”
Also moving from the small to the
big screen, after a rapturous reception
at this summer’s Il Cinema Ritrovato
festival in Bologna, is Finnish minise-
ries Eight Deadly Shots (1972), which is,
for BFI head curator and LFF Treas-
ures strand programmer Robin Baker
“almost the star attraction” of the festival.
Of the five-hour series, which recreates
the build-up to a real-life mass shooting
and will be shown in its entirety at the
LFF, he says: “Everybody I spoke to who
saw it at Cinema Ritrovato described it
as not only their film of the festival but
also one of the best they’d seen for years.
Having that kind of discovery – and, to
up the stakes, we’re showing it on 35mm
– I can’t imagine it could be anything
else other than one of the hits of the fes-
tival.” Headlining the Treasures strand of
archival cinema is the world premiere of a
new BFI remaster of Gary Oldman’s Nil
by Mouth (1997).
With 160 feature films, as well as short
films, series and VR, it’s impossible in
this small space to highlight more than
a handful of the festival’s finest offerings.
But a final mention is due for the LFF
Competition, which for the first time will
be presented in collaboration with Sight
and Sound. On the following page, S&S
staff and LFF programmers introduce
the eight titles which will be in the run-
ning for Best Film.

The BFI London Film Festival runs from 5-16

October. Tickets for all screenings go on sale to
BFI members on 7 September and to the public
on 13 September at bfi.org.uk/london-film-festival

ARGENTINA, 1985
Santiago Mitre, Argentina
The thousands who ‘disappeared’
during Argentina’s 1970s dictatorship
continue to haunt the nation’s cinema.
Co-written by the director of La flor
(2018), Mariano Llinás, who also
penned last year’s eerie drama about
the disappeared, Azor, this gripping
Sidney Lumet-style courtroom piece
takes place after democracy has been
reinstated and follows the attempt to
try the junta’s officials for war crimes.
Spearheading “the most important
trial since Nuremberg” is a steely,
Wagner-loving prosecutor (ubiquitous
Argentinian star Ricardo Darín),
who pursues his case amid a mood of
political paranoia and ominous threats
against his family. Nothing less than a
nation’s first steps towards healing are
at stake. Sam Wigley
EYES ON THE PRIZE
The London Film Festival competition gathers the best of world cinema, with gems such as Hit the Road,
Monos and Another Round among recent winners. This year Sight and Sound is delighted to present the
official competition in association with the festival. Here we give the lowdown on the eight films selected
ENYS MEN
Mark Jenkin, UK
A hallucinogenic folk puzzle about
a naturalist cataloguing rare flowers
alone – or not – on a Cornish island in
the 1970s, Jenkin’s atmospheric second
feature shares many of the formal
singularities of 2019’s Bait (post-sync
sound crackle, 16mm grain, startling
compositions that foreground objects
as often as people), plus some new ones
(a saturated Nic Roeg-inspired palette).
The story is more mysterious and
cerebral, though, as it slips inside the
woman’s (Bait’s Mary Woodvine) and
the island’s past. Speaking to S&S as he
was about to edit it, Jenkin referenced
Jerzy Skolimowski’s British quasi-
horror The Shout (1978) as an inspiration
– seeing Enys Men alongside the Polish
director’s latest EO (also at LFF) would
make for a surreal eco double-bill. IS
BROTHER
Clement Virgo, Canada
Based on David Chariandy’s novel of
the same name, Clement Virgo’s drama
spans three time periods in Toronto’s
West Indian community, following
siblings Francis and Michael from their
troubled childhoods to their diverging
adult lives. LFF programmer Grace
Barber-Plentie calls Brother “a bold
and breathtaking story of brotherly
love”, praising Virgo for “creating a
vibrant world and sensitively exploring
complex but unbreakable family
bonds”. Fellow LFF programmer
Michael Blyth praises the drama’s
scope and ambition, describing it as
“an unbelievably beautiful-looking
film.” Virgo’s acclaimed films are hard
to find in the UK, making this a rare
opportunity to see one of his works on
the big screen. Thomas Flew
GODLAND
Hlynur Pálmason, Denmark/Iceland
Godland is a film of two brilliantly
formed halves. Lucas (a superb
Elliott Crosset Hove) is an initially
fresh-faced Danish vicar who’s
travelling to the site of a new church
in Iceland – a gruelling, Herzogian
odyssey. After reaching the brink of
madness, he arrives at his new parish
and becomes an unwitting player
in a domestic comedy. This change
of tone is surprisingly seamless and
makes Godland a rare film that can
claim to be harrowing and hilarious in
equal measures. The second feature
by Hlynur Pálmason (following
2019’s A White, White Day), it is most
memorable for its utterly masterful
filmmaking, from season-spanning
jump cuts to one unforgettable
panning shot. TF
CORSAGE
Marie Kreutzer, Austria
Kreutzer’s anguished yet humorous
portrait of the rebellious 19th-century
Empress Elisabeth of Austria was one
of the rare instances in Cannes this
year of a film that found an enthusiastic
critical consensus. A superb Vicky
Krieps – in her second collaboration
with the Austrian director – draws
out the complexity of the ageing,
disaffected monarch, aware that any
power she has depends on her beauty.
While Kreutzer presents Elisabeth as a
modern bohemian spirit, amplified by
a contemporary soundtrack, as in Sofia
Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2016), she
thankfully doesn’t polish her rougher
edges or portray her as a gilded-cage
victim. Kreutzer’s not had much UK
exposure; this seventh feature should
be a game-changer. Isabel Stevens
NEZOUH
Soudade Kaadan, Syria
Syrian director Soudade Kaadan’s
second fiction feature, after 2019’s
The Day I Lost My Shadow, is a tender
meditation on family, friendship and
freedom. A claustrophobic coming-
of-age drama set against the dusty
backdrop of a bombed-out Damascus,
14-year-old Zeina endures the
loneliness of being in the last family to
stay in the city, driven by the stubborn
determination of her father, who
refuses to leave their home. But when
a bomb creates a hole in her bedroom
ceiling, she and her mother are offered
a chance and a choice. Filled with
empathy and wonder, and seen through
the gaze of young eyes, this is a tale of
hope among the rubble. A profound
and heartfelt tribute to the displaced
and the lost. Hannah Gatward
11
THE DAMNED DON’T CRY
Fyzal Boulifa, France/Morocco
After his taut study of grief and
friendship Lynn + Lucy (2019), Boulifa
returns to the LFF with another
striking drama. Tricia Tuttle, the
director of BFI festivals, says: “The
Moroccan-British filmmaker offers
a glimpse of what is hidden within
private spaces – guarded secrets,
sexuality, shame, hope and a desire for
more than cultural expectations allow.
Employing a bold colour palette,
Boulifa delivers an atmospheric
domestic drama that recalls, in all
the best ways, Douglas Sirk and
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The film
is transgressive, tragic and beautiful.”
Appearing on UK soil shortly after its
Venice world premiere, The Damned
Don’t Cry marks Boulifa out as a true
directorial talent. TF
OPENING SCENES
SAINT OMER
Alice Diop, France
Alice Diop is best known for her
attentive documentarian’s eye, as
evidenced most recently in her
brilliant portrait of life in the Parisian
suburbs Nous (2021), but with Saint
Omer she has turned to fiction
filmmaking for the first time. A
courtroom drama based around an
accusation of filicide against a young
African woman – as observed by a
curious writer who has travelled to
witness the trial – it is, says Jonathan
Romney, S&S contributor and LFF
programmer, “a finely observed
film [which] features mesmerising
performances from Kayije Kagame
and Guslagie Malanda. It’s a
compelling work that sees Diop
achieving maturity as a fiction director
right off the bat.” TF
 12

EDITORS’ CHOICE Recommendations from the Sight and Sound team

LONDON PODCAST FESTIVAL MERCURY PICTURES PRESENTS

King’s Place, 8-19 September
Now in its seventh year, the London
Podcast Festival showcases a wide array
of talking talent across a live platform,
including an enjoyable range of film and
cinema content. The Disniversity team,
who meticulously analyse features from
the House of Mouse, will put on a live
exploration of Robert Zemeckis’s Who
Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). While The
Final Girls film collective, who always
provide fascinating insights into horror
and where it intersects with feminism,
OPENING SCENES
Anthony Marra, John Murray Press
Anthony Marra, a multi-award-winning
New York Times bestselling author, spent
seven years researching the American
film industry and its role in propaganda
during World War II. The result is
Mercury Pictures Presents, his third novel, PORTRAIT OF KAYE
in which an Italian immigrant flees
her past and winds up in Hollywood, Ben Reed
becoming a big-time producer at a Portrait of Kaye, which premiered at 2021’s Sheffield DocFest and was a deserving
film studio. Marra’s glowing prose winner of a special jury award, is a charming mid-length documentary (a lean 56
brings the intricate story to life, and his minutes) focusing on Kaye, a septuagenarian Londoner with agoraphobia. Her
chapter-and-verse world-building will vibrant personality – matched by her home’s idiosyncratic decor – and giggle-filled

will delve into the career of definitive
final girl Jamie Lee Curtis. There’s also
a celebration of the joys of the shorter
feature from 90 Minutes or Less Film Fest,
comment and criticism from the Fade to
Black team and news, jokes and guests
with The Empire Film Podcast.
Hannah Gatward, publishing
coordinator
thrill Golden Age devotees. Expect a
big-screen adaptation at some point.
Mike Williams, editor-in-chief
anecdotes make her company an utter delight, while director Ben Reed acts as a
trustworthy off-screen confidant (Kaye’s repeated phrase “Whatcha reckon, Ben?” has
become something of a catchphrase in my household). The film is streaming in the
US, via the Criterion Channel, but unfortunately not yet in the UK. Here’s hoping
that changes soon.
Thomas Flew, editorial assistant

HOWARDENA PINDELL: TSUCHIMOTO NORIAKI: FILM IS

A NEW LANGUAGE
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 30 October
This compellingly curated overview of
Howardena Pindell’s artistic practice
since the 70s reveals a formidable array
of formal strategies in the articulation
CHANNEL 4: 40 YEARS OF REVOLUTION of her responses to racism in those
decades. Not least in two striking
BFI Southbank, until 24 September moving-image works: Free, White and
“You’ve seen nothing yet,” boasted the advert for Channel 4 that ran in the Autumn 21 (1980), a dialogue between Pindell
1982 edition of Sight and Sound. “A very different channel it’s going to be... The films and a white feminist (also played by
we’ll show won’t just be ones we’ve bought but also those we’ve funded from scratch.” Pindell), and Rope/Fire/Water (2020), a
The results lived up to the hype but as the channel’s fate hangs in the air, with the hard-hitting meditation on racialised
threat of privatisation looming, judge for yourself with the BFI’s celebration of its violence in the US that you’ll find hard
40th anniversary. It has unearthed radical programmes and films from the first ten to shake once viewed.
years, showing how Channel 4 championed diverse perspectives, such as Out on Kieron Corless, associate editor
Tuesday, the world’s first networked gay and lesbian series. Also showing are films
such as John Akomfrah’s vital portrait of the Birmingham riots in Handsworth Songs
(1986, above) and Stephen Dwoskin’s protest against the media’s dehumanising
portrayal of disabled people, Face of Our Fear (1992).
Isabel Stevens, managing editor
A WORK OF LIVING BEINGS
Various London cinemas, until 25 September
A thorn in the side of state bodies
and corporations alike, the Japanese
filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928-
2008) is best known for his revelatory
1970s documentaries about the
Minamata disaster, which saw thousands
of people on Kyūshū, in the west of
Japan, contract mercury poisoning with
a 35 per cent fatality rate, caused by toxic
wastewater pumped into the vicinity
for 36 years by the Chisso Corporation.
This was only one of Tsuchimoto’s
subjects; his 1968 travelogue The World of
the Siberians will now be getting its
UK premiere thanks to this Open
City Docs retrospective, as will
Exchange Student Chua Swee-Lin (1965),
one of Japan’s earliest independent
campaigning documentaries.
Arjun Sajip, reviews editor
 14
IN PRODUCTION
Life hands you Lemmons
BY LEILA LATIF
As a director, Kasi Lemmons has often
played with the fallibility of memory,
with events in her 1997 debut Eve’s Bayou
masterfully shifting through a fluid sub-
jectivity. She’s recently revisited that film,
contributing to Criterion’s Blu-ray edi-
tion of the director’s cut. But in the years
between she has taken that sensibility to
biopics, telling “a story” rather than “the
story” of Harriet Tubman (Harriet, 2019)
and C.J. Walker (the TV miniseries Self
Made, 2020).
Now she is in production on I Wanna
Dance with Somebody, about pop icon-
Whitney Houston. “I approach it the-
matically,” Lemmons says, “to talk about
where home was for her, what was she
searching for?” Houston was ultimately
most at home on stage. “I came to her
relationship with the audience and how
essential it was. When that relationship
was threatened it rocked her world.”
Lemmons is also taking the opportu-
nity to highlight Houston’s formidable
stage presence: “These beautiful live
performances we are recreating were
so important to her.” But the film won’t
OPENING SCENES
simply replay her greatest hits; instead,
it’s planning to show the nuances in
Houston’s view of herself. “One thing I’ve
always been very attracted to is mirrors.
We are getting a lot of her internal life by
how she was in front of a mirror, whether
she was looking at it or not.”
Screenwriter Anthony McCarten,
coming to the project fresh from The Two
Popes (2019), is a seasoned biopic scribe,
having written films about Stephen
Hawking, Winston Churchill and Fred-
die Mercury. Naomi Ackie plays Hou-
ston, Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders is her
husband Bobby Brown, Stanley Tucci
her beloved mentor Clive Davis. “She’s
ABOVE Kasi Lemmons on the set of Harriet (2019)
NEWS
at the centre of these very different peo-
ple’s ways of loving; some are more toxic
than others.” For Lemmons, the priority
is to honour Houston without flattening
her in the name of ‘objectivity’. “There’s a
certain subjectivity that is familiar to my
work. She’s reflecting and we’re telling
the story through that prism.”
‘Eve’s Bayou’ is released on Criterion Collection
Blu-ray in the UK on 31 October
DISASTER ARTIST
Ruben Östlund relishes a catastrophe
– an avalanche in Force Majeure (2014), a
storm-beset yacht in this year’s Triangle
of Sadness. In his next, The Entertainment
System Is Down, the disaster is airborne
– when entertainment consoles stop
working, plane passengers cause chaos.
Östlund rarely uses actors twice, but
Woody Harrelson (the drunken captain
in Triangle) has already confirmed his
involvement.
O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?
Ethan Coen will write and direct a film
on his own for the first time, after nearly
40 years working alongside his brother
Joel, who went solo last year with The
Tragedy of Macbeth. Coen’s as-yet-untitled
road-trip comedy will star Margaret
Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan.
Production begins in the autumn.
GOING SOUTH
Ten years after his first feature, Stud Life,
Campbell X has finished principal pho-
tography on his second. In Low Rider,
a UK-South African co-production, a
woman travels from London to Cape
Town in search of her father. It was “a
wonderful opportunity to queer the road
trip and western genres,” X says.
It’s story time
BY THOMAS FLEW
Across the UK, history has come to life
on the streets where it occurred thanks to
StoryTrails. The immersive experience,
created in partnership with the BBC,
BFI and the historian and broadcaster
David Olusoga, incorporates moving-
image material from the BFI National
Archive, which allows the stories of local
people to be told in innovative ways.
Simon McCallum, archive projects cura-
tor at the BFI and a consultant on the pro-
ject, explains: “You can explore incredible
wraparound ‘spatial maps’ reimagining
your town and the stories of local people,
try out virtual reality experiences and head
out with your smartphone on augmented
reality trails to experience history where
it happened. All of these elements har-
ness cutting-edge technology to break
new ground in immersive storytelling.”
The project has already visited towns
and cities across much of the UK, and
McCallum has been delighted by the
enthusiasm it has met. “The opening stop
on the tour at Omagh saw a much greater
than expected turnout and the responses
in Dundee were really positive.” The Brad-
ford tour, in July, was led by local creative
Hafsah Naib, a visual artist and film-
maker. Her trail, titled ‘The Godfather of
Film’, was, Naib says, “about filmmakers,
cinema-owners and -goers in Bradford
who found belonging, purpose and love
through watching and making films. From
a cine club established in 1932 to the Asian
‘social centre cinemas’ that emerged in
the 1960s, the trail went through the vast
and vibrant culture of cinema that marks
Bradford as unique.” One piece of archival
material that Naib says really inspired
him was The Bradford Godfather, a 1976 TV
documentary about “Mr Fazal Hussain,
one of the city’s first South Asians, who at
the age of 73 was making the first Asian
feature film in the country. It’s unbeliev-
ably humorous and inspirational.”
Many of the tours have finished, but the
project will continue, with the final events
taking place in London in September
and, says McCallum, “a new feature doc”
presented by Olusoga telling “a new his-
LEMMONS PORTRAIT BY GLEN WILSON/© FOCUS FEATURES/EVERET T COLLECTION INC/ALAMY;
tory of one very special place, coming to
UK cinemas and the BBC this autumn.”
Find more information at story-trails.com. The
Bradford Godfather is streaming free on BFI Player
IMAGE BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
ABOVE
Fazal Hussain, the subject of The Bradford Godfather
 16
IN CONVERSATION
TOM GEORGE DIRECTOR
BY TREVOR JOHNSTON
The director of BBC3’s This
Country on his debut feature,
an Agatha Christie-inflected
OPENING SCENES
period comedy whodunnit,
See How They Run
As director of all 19 episodes of the award-
winning TV comedy This Country, Tom
George expertly calibrated the mockumen-
tary framework, showcasing Daisy May and
Charlie Cooper’s inventive writing and per-
formances as amiable Cotswold layabouts
Kerry and Kurtan. Few industry observers
would have guessed that his next move would
be See How They Run, a knowing 1953-set serio-
comic whodunnit based around the premiere
run of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap the year
before, boasting lush vintage settings and
a marquee-name cast including Sam Rock-
well, Saoirse Ronan, David Oyelowo and
Adrien Brody. George himself, however, sees
the underlying connections in this seemingly
unlikely progression.
TOP Saoirse Ronan in See How They Run,
directed by Tom George (above)
Q Charlie Cooper plays a lugubrious
theatre usher in See How They Run,
but otherwise were you trying to
make a swerve from This Country?
A At first glance they do look like chalk
and cheese, but what it amounts
to is that they’re both character
comedies, even if one of them’s a
murder mystery wrapped up in a
film about murder mysteries. And
that meta layer is another common
thread. You have the form in play
next to the comic element beneath
it, but it has to be tuned just right
so it doesn’t take over. That was
true on This Country and also here.
Q And ultimately one of the mysteries
it explores is why there’s never
been a film adaptation of Agatha
Christie’s most famous play, right?
A Actually, our producer Damian Jones
did at one point inquire whether the
film rights to The Mousetrap might
be available, and he was told that
wasn’t possible because Christie
stipulated the film could only be
made six months after the play had
closed in the West End. Seventy
years later, it’s still going strong!
But Damian also had the realisation
that there was the kernel of another
movie in there and commissioned
[the writer] Mark Chappell, who
took it and ran with it. We did two or
three redrafts together – a pleasure
working with a writer whose impulse
was always to improve what’s there.
Q You’ve got that meta layer, complex
procedural plotting and a historical
element too – were you ever worried
it would all get too congested
for the comedy to come alive?
A Yes, it was a tightly wound script, but
I make a point to have elements of
improvisation and play on set, which
not only embellishes what you already
have on the page but allows the actors
to bring truth and specificity to the
performances. A number of these
roles were written as very obvious
tropes – world-weary detective,
over-eager constable, demanding
commissioner – but through a
sense of play you could also root
the characters in something real.
I’m so excited for audiences to
see Saoirse in this as Constable
Stalker. The surprise for me wasn’t
that she absolutely got the tone
of it, but that she was so brilliant
at improv and running with the
moment in rehearsal and on set.
Q What will startle British film
nerds is the presence of significant
real-life individuals like Dickie
Attenborough and producer
John Woolf. Does it matter if
much of the audience doesn’t
necessarily know who they are?
A Commissioner Scott [played by
Tim Key] was a real person; those
are Dickie and Woolf ’s actual
wives, too. Maybe some viewers
will come in with the memory of
Dickie in Brighton Rock [1948], but
probably more likely it’ll be “Oh,
it’s Dickie from Jurassic Park [1993].”
For the vast majority of viewers
they won’t register at all, so we
couldn’t get too caught up in that.
It was liberating for us not to be
making a biographical film. They
had to come to life as characters.
Q Where did you find the line visually
between the grimy reality of 1953
London and some retro-cute
Wes Anderson-style confection?
A That tension you describe, between
a clear historical reality and a
contemporary take on that setting,
was written into the script. We
wanted the film to feel like a version
of 1953 but not to be beholden to
some sepia-tinted idea of that era.
The West End was this incredibly
vibrant locale, and the rather drab
police investigators have to feel like
interlopers, out of their depth.
Q Did landing this job give you
the sense you were taking
the creative surge in British
TV comedy forward into the
broader canvas of cinema?
A Armando Iannucci is a huge
influence, moving from character-
driven TV comedy and proving
that he could also deliver on the
big screen with The Death of Stalin
[2017] and The Personal History of
David Copperfield [2019]. For me,
whether it’s TV or film, it’s always
TOM GEORGE PORTRAIT BY CHRISTOPHER BROOMFIELD
about story, character and comedy
with performance tying everything
together. I always had a clear idea
how to make this film, and I’m just
glad that made sense to the studio.
See How They Run is released in UK cinemas on
9 September and will be reviewed next month
 17

DREAM PALACES
NATURAL HISTORY
12. Slats, the MGM lion
BY ISABEL STEVENS
On the occasion of Idris Elba’s new lion
hunt thriller Beast, let’s pay our dues to
the king of the motion picture jungle: the
first MGM mascot, Slats. Like any star,
Slats’ biography is shrouded in myth.
And he, and the other lions after him,
naturally had to have a much snappier
stage name: Leo.
Legend has it Slats was born in Dublin
Zoo (plausible: it had a glamorous and
lucrative lion-breeding programme) and
the “735 pounds of bone and muscle…
nine and a half feet from his nose to his
tail” was brought to Hollywood by trainer
Volney Phifer, although some sources
have Slats’ birth date as 1919, which
would make it impossible for him to be
the forlorn lion trapped in the ars gratia
artis (Latin for ‘art for art’s sake’) ribbon
– a logo dreamed up by publicity exec
Howard Dietz for Goldwyn Pictures in
1916. In his first appearance, appropri-
ately marking the start of Polly of the Circus CINEMA ORION LOCATION: EERIKINK ATU 15, TRIVIA: CINEMA ORION IS THE ONLY
(1917), Slats looks around, confused, head HELSINKI PICTUREHOUSE IN HELSINKI
OPENED: 1927 THAT STILL HAS AN ORCHESTRA
bowed: a far cry from the fierce roaring SCREENS: 1 PIT; THERE’S ROOM FOR
beast we know today (the roar only came SEATS: 214 (+2 WHEELCHAIR SEVEN MUSICIANS.
SPACES)
later, with sound and a different lion,
Jackie). Dietz chose the mascot of his
university’s athletic team: one based on
Finnish director Hanna Bergholm, whose blackly funny body-
the name of the owner (Samuel Goldfish) horror film Hatching is released this month, tells us how a

wouldn’t have had quite the same cachet.
Slats survived the merger that cre-
ated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924
and ‘Leo the Flying Lion’ entranced 50
million Americans on a tour to promote
the studio’s launch. But what was life
actually like for Slats? A picture from a
1928 tour shows him in a cage not much
bigger than he is. His new trainer (Hol-
lywood’s youngest animal ‘exploitation
rep’ Captain Frank Phillips) reportedly
went into the cage and “compelled” the
lion “to do his bidding”. A press book lists
Leo’s address as ‘Metro G Mayer Stu-
dios, Culver City’ but he actually lived
in amusement parks: Gay’s Lion Farm
(which once had 200 adult male lions)
and then Goebel’s Lion Farm. Perform-
ing lions were big business and could
earn $10,000 a month. When Slats died
at Philadelphia Zoo in 1938, Phifer asked
MGM for the remains and buried them
on his farm. A tender commemoration of
their deep bond or the return of a trophy?
In 2014, animal cruelty for art’s (or pub-
licity’s) sake was still sadly an attraction,
with a new Leo out once again perform-
ing for MGM’s 90th anniversary.
NEVER COWARDLY
The MGM lion
beautiful cinema in Helsinki changed the way she watched movies
The Orion dates back to the 1920s; its art deco
style is beautiful. I grew up going to it. As a
child I saw several Russian animations there,
such as Yuri Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog
(1975), which left a mark on my imagination.
Seeing Seven Samurai (1954) as part of a
Kurosawa retrospective at the Orion when
I was around 20 was formative. I’d first seen
it at 12, on TV, and later rewatched it multiple
times on DVD. But seeing it at the Orion was
the first time I was really seeing it. I’d never
fully realised how crucial the cinematogra-
phy and editing were in telling the story, the
way the wide shots and calm cutting rhythms
in the early sections give way to tighter shots
and more hectic editing towards the climax.
I’d always understood the plot, but now I
understood how astute the storytelling was. It
unlocked a new way of seeing.
The cinema’s Luchino Visconti season had
a similarly profound effect. The way he uses
every possible element in storytelling was writ
large, not just the editing but the lighting and
particularly the costumes: the way the cos-
tumes change throughout is a story unto itself.
The Orion really brought that home to me.
Until recently, the Orion was the home of
Finland’s National Audiovisual Institute; its
remit was to show classics from all over the
world. But in 2016, the Institute moved its
operations elsewhere. There was a general
worry that the cinema would be shuttered.
So filmmakers’, actors’ and directors’ guilds
teamed up with festival organisers to create
ELKE [the Centre for the Moving Image],
which by 2019 had made the Orion its home
and taken over fundraising, administrating
and programming, positioning it as an art-
house haven as well as a repertory cinema.
OPENING SCENES
It was bad timing, of course. In Finland,
as Covid spread, the cinemas were the first
places to be shut down, even when restau-
rants stayed open and people could meet in
bars without masks. They were also the last
venues to reopen. This led to some resentment
among filmmakers, who felt disrespected, but
fortunately this feeling found a positive outlet:
the Orion now not only screens international
arthouse movies but platforms Finnish films
as a core part of its mission, particularly those
that struggle to get distribution elsewhere.
During the day, the Orion shows interna-
tional greats to schoolkids to educate them
about cinema history. Any Finnish direc-
tor you’d care to mention would’ve got their
film education there at some impressionable
age: Aki Kaurismäki, Juho Kuosmanen, Alli
Haapasalo, Klaus Härö, the late Jörn Donner
[the only Finn to receive an Oscar to date, as
the producer of Best Foreign Film winner
Fanny and Alexander, 1984]. The cinema is now
attracting increasingly wide audiences by pro-
gramming new, offbeat films such as After Yang
and Cow, and screening modern movies from
Asian and African countries.
Until recently, Helsinki was very multiplex-
dominated; most of the indie cinemas had
died by the early 2000s. Now, Finns are miss-
ing those non-mainstream films, so more and
more cinemas like the Orion and the formerly
dormant Riviera are seeing packed houses.
Outside Helsinki, it’s great to see small towns
retaining traditional cinemas from the 50s.
Local residents are keeping them alive.
Hanna Bergholm was talking to Arjun Sajip
Hatching is released in UK cinemas on
16 September and is reviewed on page 73
 18

OBITUARY

Bob Rafelson
21 FEBRUARY 1933 – 23 JULY 2022

BY MICHAEL ATKINSON
One of the last of the red-hot American
New Wavers, Bob Rafelson was a central
figure in New Hollywood, particularly
during its 1969 to 1971 breakout years. He
helped to captain a film culture moment
when Dream Factory escapism was out
and lost American existentialism was
rushing in.
Born in New York to a Jewish family,
he was a cousin of Samson Raphaelson,
who wrote The Jazz Singer (1925) and sev-
eral films by Ernst Lubitsch.
OPENING SCENES

Rafelson’s one universally hailed mas-

terpiece, Five Easy Pieces (1970), bought
him time in the sun that only lasted a few
years; trouble was, he was an irascible
nonconformist not unlike fellow Jack
Nicholson co-conspirator Monte Hell-
man (as well as Rafelson’s signature hero,
Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea), and like
Hellman he didn’t much care for deal-
making and compromise. Over the next
half-century he made only eight more fea-
tures, sometimes dire, sometimes deft,
but the ferocious sense of cultural trag-
edy Rafelson had grabbed on to during
the Nixon years was no longer at hand.
Maybe Rafelson wasn’t so much an
auteur as a product of the zeitgeist –
he was certainly in the right place at
the right time, partying with the right
people. He had years of producing and
script editing for TV before allying with
fellow discontent Bert Schneider and
creating The Monkees – both the pop
group and the TV show – the success
of which launched the pair into movies.
Rafelson’s first, The Monkees’ self-
destructing, Duck Amuck-ish film Head
(1968), co-written by Nicholson, was
as experimental as Hollywood movies
would ever get, and, it’s been noted, the
first American movie that dared to roast
the war in Vietnam while it was raging.
It bombed, but the Rafelson-Schnei-
der-produced hit Easy Rider (1969) made
the boys solvent and Five Easy Pieces sanc-
tified Rafelson’s touch: an acidic sympa-
thy for an unseen America, a rueful fear
ABOVE of Marvin Gardens (1972), co-written by
Jack Nicholson
with Bob Rafelson
Rafelson and pop lyricist Jacob Brack-
on the set of Five man, and the two films together stand
Easy Pieces (1970)
as a bitter eulogy said over the shallow
grave of American Dreamism.
The rawness of those two films is per-
fectly judged, a clear-eyed and unstud-
ied embrace of dissolution and collapse.
Rafelson didn’t have the hectic casual-
ness of Robert Altman, the sad comedy
Five Easy Pieces of Hal Ashby or the shadowy tension of
sanctified his Alan Pakula, but he had an unerring eye
for stranded figures in the landscape, and
touch: an acidic for Nicholson’s reserves of bottled-up dis-
sympathy for satisfaction. Contrary to its youthquake
an unseen cultural context, the stateside New Wave
was a mass aggregate portrait of early
America, a rueful middle-age frustration, and Rafelson’s
fear of family, films revealed visions of lives spiralling
a maddened out and wasting time once the endless
opportunities of youth have disappeared.
questioning of After that, Rafelson seemed to
modern life’s lose focus – he spent a year in Africa
materialism researching a never-filmed project about
the slave trade, churned out the fun but
purposeless farce Stay Hungry (1976) and
got kicked off Brubaker (1980) for physi-
cally engaging with a studio exec. His
somehow seemed irrelevant in Reagan’s
America. Even so, looking at Nichol-
son in that film, scarred and weary and
unscrupulous, you can see what a few
more hard years of lostness might’ve
done to Bobby Dupea.
Black Widow (1987) was murder-mys-
tery hack work, while Mountains of the
Moon (1990) was another out-of-place
movie, a robust and sincere historical
epic – explorers Sir Richard Burton and
John Speke search for the source of the
Nile in the 1850s – that scratched a genre
itch for Rafelson but failed to find the
right story or a curious audience.
Nicholson tried to salvage Rafelson
with Man Trouble (1992) – an ill-advised
shot at romantic comedy, from the first
Carole Eastman script made in 17 years
– and Blood and Wine (1996), a sprightly
neo-noir that, in the 90s, could’ve
launched a young director’s career.
Rafelson had retired to Aspen by 2003,
a voice out of time in an American indus-
try no longer interested in highway exis-
tentialism or films about failure. More’s
the pity. As acclaimed as Rafelson was in
his Elvis years, his New Wave films, like
IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

of family, a maddened questioning of
modern life’s materialism, an emotional
dysfunctioning curdled into self-hatred.
All of that was in Carole Eastman’s script,
of course, but it was also there in The King
remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1981) is, despite its weak reputation, a
virtually faultless adaptation of James
M. Cain’s novel, but it’s a Depression-
era story of vice and desperation that
so many others from that thorny, gimlet-
eyed age, have a retrospective glow that
gets brighter the farther we get today
from American movies that dare to face
any kind of truth.

FESTIVAL
LOCARNO
BY NEIL YOUNG
The lakeside Swiss festival
had an eyecatching Douglas
Sirk retrospective and a new
artistic director still bedding in
Leopards proverbially cannot change their
spots. But film festivals, like all cultural events,
can and must if they are to remain relevant
both to the artform they celebrate and the
times within which they operate.
The Locarno Film Festival, one of few run-
ning continuously for more than seven decades
– for most of that period awarding the Golden
Leopard as top prize – has inevitably under-
gone numerous transformations since 1946.
And to paraphrase the song from Robert
Altman’s Nashville (1975), they must be doing
something right to last for 75 editions. But since
well-regarded artistic director Carlo Chatrian
departed in 2018 to take over at the Berlinale,
the Leopard has not exactly flourished.
Chatrian’s successor Lili Hinstin lasted only
two editions before resigning; Swiss program-
mer/critic Giona A. Nazzaro then assumed the
mantle, promising a shift in perspective away
from austere arthouse material and towards
intelligent genre fare.
The jury is still out on Nazzaro’s approach,
even after his second festival in charge, which
unfolded from 3-13 August in the well-heeled
IMAGE: © SIMON BEAUFILS; AGA WOSZCZYŃSK A PORTRAIT: THOMAS NIEDERMUELLER/GET TY IMAGES FOR ZFF
little city on the steep southern Swiss shores
of Lake Maggiore.
The most satisfied attendees this year
were those who concentrated on the fes-
tival’s Douglas Sirk retrospective, a near-
complete, mostly-on-35mm survey of the
German-born genre master who peaked with
melodramas Magnificent Obsession (1954), All
That Heaven Allows (1955) and The Tarnished
Angels (1957).
After his biggest hit, Imitation of Life (1959),
Sirk retired to a village near Lugano, an hour’s
drive from Locarno, where he and his wife
were familiar faces throughout the 1960s and
70s. As Sirk’s reputation steadily grew in
absentia, admiring acolytes beat a path to his
door – including Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
19
AGA WOSZCZYŃSKA WRITER-DIRECTOR
RISING STAR
BELOW BY THOMAS FLEW
David Depesseville’s Astrakan
Who is she?
Polish filmmaker Aga Woszczyńska co-wrote
and directed Silent Land, a tense and blackly
comic holiday drama that premiered at last
year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Her background
She’s a graduate in applied social science
from the Polish National Film, Television and
Theater School who describes herself as a
“director, screenwriter and anthropologist”.
Her films
Woszczyńska’s graduation short Fragments
premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight
in 2014. Agnieszka Zulewska and Dobromir
Dymecki (also the leads in Silent Land)
play a husband-and-wife estate-agent team
whose relationship, as cold as the corporate
Fassbinder would collaborate with Sirk buildings they lease out, appears to
in 1978, when the director – as part of his disintegrate in a series of disparate scenes –
hence the double meaning of the short’s title.
occasional Munich Film School teachings –
nia set sequel, where the
Silent Land is a Sardinia-set
“supervised” three shorts. The trio, long una- warm location fails to prevent further cracks
vailable due to rights issues, were presented at iage’s façade,
forming in their marriage’s
Locarno this year via new restorations. Fass- upted
the tranquillity interrupted
binder appears as a boozy bohemian at odds by the death of an immigrant
migrant
with a money-fixated New Orleans landlady in worker. Her next projectect will
Tennessee Williams adaptation Bourbon Street be Black Water, a Covid-
id-
Blues (1979), whose implicit critique of capital- inspired story of two women
sland.
stranded on a desert island.
ism makes it an ideal bookend with Sirk’s 1934
debut Zwei Genies. Where to watch
OPENING SCENES
Made in 1934 but set five years earlier, just Silent Land is in UK
before the Wall Street Crash, the 31-minute cinemas from 23
marvel begins in a mode of droll farce before September. Stream
widening its scope to demolish the rickety Fragments on Vimeo.
economic structures upon which the West has
long depended. That Sirk was fully formed
straight out of the gate means that it is not
WAIT FOR IT…
entirely unfair to compare his achievements
SPOTLIGHT
with the offerings of relative newcomers in
With the news that Víctor Erice
Locarno 2022’s competitions. is returning to the director’s chair
Most, inevitably, suffer badly from the jux- for the first time since 1992’s The
taposition, but Carlos Conceição’s Tommy Guns Quince Tree Sun, we survey the largest
25
(Nação valente) would perhaps have earned number of years between features
Sirk’s approval. A sly genre-bender, which within filmmakers’ oeuvres.
begins in 1970s Angola as a familiar indict-
ment of brutal colonialism, gradually reveals
itself as something much more unexpected,
23
swaggering into horror-movie territory for its
gangbusters final act.
The Golden Leopard jury, who rather
22
pointedly only gave prizes to three films, pre-
ferred another Portuguese-language entry.
In Julia Murat’s Rule 34 (Regra 34), a bisexual
21 21
Black woman juggles a legal career by day
STAR WARS (197 7) — STAR WARS: EPISODE I – THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)
and a lucrative ‘cam girl’ profession by night,
the latter leading her into hazardous zones
of BDSM and auto-asphyxiation. Easier to
admire than embrace, Rule 34 compels con- 20
THE RAINBOW THIEF (1990) — THE DANCE OF REALITY (2013)
SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3: BET TER WATCH OUT! (1989)
GILIAP (1975) — SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000)
ceptually and as a character study but is con-
sistently undermined by its flat televisual look.
DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) — THE THIN RED LINE (1998)
ANIKI-BÓBÓ (1942) — ACTO DA PRIMAVERA (1963)
This TV-friendly aesthetic was a recur-
ring bugbear among the new Locarno films,
making genuinely cinematic talents stand
out all the more. Prominent among these
was unheralded feature-debutant French
ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY
— ROAD TO NOWHERE (2010)
writer-director David Depesseville, whose
MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA
lyrical but hard-edged Pialat-like study of a
TERRENCE MALICK
MONTE HELLMAN
ROY ANDERSSON
troubled foster kid, Astrakan (in the Cineasti
GEORGE LUCAS
del Presente competition), was a refreshing
example of high creative and narrative ambi-
tion matched by skilful, imaginative visual and
aural execution.
 20

BY THOMAS FLEW

MEAN SHEETS
Wiktor Sadowski’s haunting poster, with its muted colour palette,
As the Venice Film Festival returns
for its 79th edition, we turn the clock stamps a subtle but unsettling effect on Peter Greenaway’s
back 40 years and look at one of the The Draughtsman’s Contract, a 17th-century set murder mystery
1982 edition’s standout titles. Peter
Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract
may not have taken home any awards
(Wim Wenders’ The State of Things won
the Golden Lion) but it marked its
director as a rising star of arthouse
cinema. A 4K remaster of the film is
being rereleased in cinemas and on
Blu-ray on the occasion of its 40th
anniversary, alongside a Greenaway
season at BFI Southbank in the autumn.
This poster, by Wiktor Sadowski
for the film’s Polish release, is typical
of the designer, using muted colours,
deep shadows and obscure overlaid
imagery to create a haunting, painterly
portrait of the film’s artist protagonist,
Mr Neville. His handwritten credits
– unusually detailed and prominent –
are appropriate for the film’s 17th-
century setting; on his sinister poster
for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven
(1978), he opts for block capitals and
a less precise calligraphy. Sadowski,
who began his career in the 1980s and
continues to work from his Warsaw
studio, now designs most frequently for
operas and theatrical productions.
OPENING SCENES

ABOVE ABOVE
Wiktor Sadowski’s poster for Days of Heaven (1978) Sadowski’s poster for the Polish release of The Draughtsman’s Contract
WHAT IF?

THREE VENICE DIRECTORS’

UNREALISED PROJECTS
ONE OF THE BUZZIEST premieres at this year’s
Venice International Film Festival is not a film
but a television programme: after 25 years,
Lars von Trier has returned to The Kingdom,
LUCA GUADAGNINO (ANOTHER director
who has a TV pedigree with 2020’s We
Are Who We Are) also returns to Venice
with Bones and All, a horror romance
PRIOR TO HER 2007 feature debut Unrelated,
Joanna Hogg – whose Tilda Swinton-
starring The Eternal Daughter is another 2022
Venice premiere – had made her living as an
GUADAGNINO PORTRAIT: VIT TORIO ZUNINO CELOT TO/GET TY IMAGES FOR ZFF

his hospital-set horror miniseries, for a third set in 1980s America. Guadagnino itinerant director of TV series, from Casualty
instalmen
instalment, titled The Kingdom Exodus. Von (pictured left) has plenty of projects in (1986-) to EastEnders (1985-). But after
Trier st
started work on the third series the pipeline (a Scarface remake and an graduating from the NFTS in 1986 with her
as lon
long ago as 1998, but the deaths of Audrey Hepburn biopic to name just short Caprice (in which Swinton also starred),
two of the main performers – Ernst- two), but one which recently fell by the Hogg had ideas for other film projects that
Hugo
Hu Järegård that year and Kirsten wayside was his reinvention of Evelyn never materialised, including ‘London Paris
Rolffes in 2000 – interrupted those plans. Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Andrew Rome’ and ‘Gorgeous’, which she described
The
T Kingdom
Ki Exodus is von Trier’s first Garfield, Rooney Mara, Cate Blan- to the New Yorker as “James Bond meets the
project
p
proje since 2018’s The House That chett and Ralph Fiennes were slated to cosmetics industry” and “like Brazil, but in
Jack
J Built, which itself was originally appear, but Guadagnino admitted the a department store”, respectively. With her
conceived
c
con as a TV miniseries before project had been shelved this year, with Souvenir diptych completed, perhaps it’s time
morphing
m
mo into a feature film. no set timeline for its continuation. for these unrealised stories to be revisited.
 22
READERS’ LETTERS
SHAKE YER BOUKI Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973)
OUT OF AFRICA
With the Sight and Sound Greatest
Films of All Time poll coming soon,
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo’s praise of Lem-
ohang Jeremiah Mosese in the latest
Poll Position column (Talkies, S&S,
September) could not be more vital.
African cinema (like South Ameri-
can cinema) has always struggled for
OPENING SCENES
approval from Western critics, but it
feels as though the tide may be turn-
ing. As Aigbokhaevbolo says, Touki
Bouki (1973) featured in the 2012 Top
100 Poll and it will surely move higher.
I wonder, particularly in the light of
restoration work done by the World
Cinema Project and others, whether
other Mambéty films will feature?
I would also be surprised not to see
nods to Ousmane Sembène, whose
Black Girl (1966), Xala (1975) and Man-
dabi (1968) are all worthy of becoming
ROAD TRIP
It was such a pleasure to read your
interview with Panah Panahi about
his film Hit the Road (‘The only way
out is exile’, S&S, September). It
is by far the best film I have seen
this year. (I wonder if anyone will
be bold enough to vote for it in
the Sight and Sound Greatest Films
poll?) I really hope Sight and Sound
continues to give precious space
PANAH TAKES A TRIP Panahi’s Hit the Road
INNOCENCE REGAINED
In ‘The Tarantino tapes’ (S&S, Sep-
tember) a comment is made about
the unavailability of films, even in
the DVD era, specifically talking
about Claude Chabrol’s Innocents
with Dirty Hands (Les Innocents aux
mains sales). In the case of Chabrol,
every one of his 54 feature films
has been issued at some point on
DVD and I have a complete set.
Of course, obscure films may take
some tracking down but Les Inno-
cents was issued by Arrow Films in
volume 2 of its Chabrol collection
in 2007.
Graham Breeze, Ilkley
canonised; Med Hondo, whose Soleil
Ô (1970) and West Indies (1979) are
both bitingly funny and politically
astute; and Sarah Maldoror, whose
death in 2020 brought her films,
such as Sambizanga (1972), back into
prominence. And yes, Mosese would
be a bold but deserving recipient of
votes – although perhaps This Is Not
a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) is too
recent for people to deem it a classic?
I hope that with added diversity in
the participants, diversity in the list
itself will come. But I hope too that
as these films and filmmakers become
better known across the world, even
a white, British voter will have the
awareness to broaden their perspec-
tive past the European (and Japa- ON THE QT Innocents with Dirty Hands
nese) cinema that has dominated the
S&S poll for decades.
Steven Mulberry, Buckinghamshire
Pedro Almodóvar’s
and attention to these independent,
foreign-language films that need all
exquisite diary entry,
the help they can get to climb above ‘Memory of an empty
the canopy of blockbusters. It makes day’, was a fascinating
me worry about the future of cinema
when even a film as incredible as
glimpse into the
Hit the Road can only last a few life of one of my
weeks in cinemas, while the latest favourite directors
Marvel fare seems to stick around
for months.
Sabrina di Vecchio, Manchester
THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
Pedro Almodóvar’ s exquisite diary
entry (‘Memory of an empty day’,
S&S, Summer) was a welcome
addition to the issue. Not only was
it a fascinating glimpse into the life
of one of my favourite directors, but
it was also quite moving, particu-
larly when Almodóvar discussed the
nature of solitude when being a crea-
tive artist. I do hope that S&S con-
tinues this as a series and asks more
directors to contribute similar pieces
in the future.
Manvir Basi, via email
Get in touch
Email: sightandsound@bfi.org.uk
Twitter: @sightsoundmag
By post: Sight and Sound, BFI, 21
Stephen Street, London, W1T 1LN
LET’S GET PHYSICAL
Farran Smith Nehme’s superb
interview with Quentin Tarantino
and Roger Avary (S&S, Septem-
ber) raised some interesting issues
regarding both the durability and
availability of movies for home view-
ing. I still own a VCR and cannot
bear to part with it ‘just in case’, even
though much of my VHS collection
has been updated to disc. However,
I have lost cassettes thanks to the
magnetic tapes’ great enemy – mould.
Some of them, archived from televi-
sion, have yet to appear on either disc
or streaming.
I also remember purchasing discs
with an ‘Ultraviolet’ copy of the film
and accrued a reasonable-sized
collection; these movies stored in
the cloud could then be watched
anywhere on an internet-connected
device. This service, though, was
discontinued in 2019, so my collec-
tion is presumably still in the ether of
cyberspace but I am unable to access
it. It is akin to having a cellar of fine
wines but not owning a corkscrew.
The interview highlights the core
problems of streaming. The viewer
never actually ‘owns’ the movie and
companies can drop titles. Interest-
ingly enough, sales of CDs in the
US rose for the first time in 15 years
last year, in part driven by consum-
ers realising that with a CD they
do own the music – that’s not even
counting the remarkable resurgence
of vinyl. It will be fascinating to see
if there is a shift to consumers buying
physical media for films.
After I read the article, I sourced
Sight and Sound’s 100 Greatest Films
of All Time list from 2012. None of
the major streaming services offer
all of the top ten films as part of
their collection; they are, however,
all available on either DVD or Blu-
Ray. I will be keeping my discs, and
I look forward to making new addi-
tions after perusing this year’s 100
Greatest Films of All Time poll.
Richard Sherwood-Farnfield, Maidstone
My collection is
presumably still in the
ether of cyberspace
but I am unable to
access it. It is akin
to having a cellar of
fine wines but not
owning a corkscrew
24 TALKIES

The Long Take Pamela Hutchinson

@PamHutch

Eadweard Muybridge was a man capable of

almost anything, including stopping time

In this house, any new film that drops a
well-chosen early cinema reference gets
a round of applause. Jordan Peele’s new
supernatural thriller goes a few decades
further by namechecking a timeless piece
of pre-cinema, a crucial milestone on the
road to moving pictures. In Nope, Keke
Palmer plays Emerald, an animal wrangler
who pitches her skills to movie-biz clients
by claiming to be the descendant of one of
Eadweard Muybridge’s unnamed subjects.
The animals he photographed with his
battery of short-exposure cameras were
named, but the humans were identified
only by numbers. Emerald highlights
the inequality that means the white man
behind the camera is better known than
the Black man in front of it, and then offers
a revisionist view of Black film history.
“Since the moment pictures could move,
we had skin in the game.” Brava.
Muybridge used slow technology to
capture fast action: not for him the flexible
coils of celluloid film that could keep pace
with movement in front of a camera. That
wasn’t invented yet. He used heavy glass
plates, freezing a body in motion like a
pinned butterfly in a vitrine. Each image in
one of his action sequences is derived from
an exposure of less than 100th of a second.
And each sequence represents an action
that lasts just a few seconds, so the twist is
that whether we watch them animated by
digitisation or projected by Muybridge’s
own zoopraxiscope, our brains are not just
processing images but creating them, fill-
ing in the gaps.
Just like that, scholars, filmmakers and
artists have been filling in the gaps between
Muybridge’s images for more than a cen-
tury – creating new works inspired by his
pictures, or asking questions about his
down trees to improve the view, or posing nit’s 2003 book River of Shadows: Eadweard
on a precarious outcrop to add a tiny figure
to a stereograph. In between this phase
of his career and the next, most famous
one, he killed the man who was sleep-
Eadweard ing with his wife – and literally got away Muybridge’s hometown of Kingston
Muybridge with murder. Muybridge seemed to be a
man who was capable of almost anything,
invented a new including stopping time itself.
way of looking at A new documentary, Exposing Muybridge
the world, as well (Marc Shaffer, 2021) pays tribute to the
ones used for racist ethnographic studies.
Arguably, Muybridge’s ethical elasticity,
which first emerged with felling trees to
sell postcards of the Yosemite Valley, had
more serious consequences for the human
subjects he photographed.
What the documentary lingers on, in
particular, is how much of Muybridge’s
monumental 1887 collection ‘Animal Loco-
motion: an Electro-Photographic Investi-
gation of Consecutive Phases of Animal
Movements’ was anything but scientific.
Whimsical, intimate, comical: the bodies
are sometimes shown in action, some-
times still, occasionally augmented by ink
lines, other times arranged in symmetrical
patterns that look pleasing on the page.
Muybridge invented a new way of look-
ing at the world, as well as a new way of
understanding motion. The documentary
closes with a collection of works inspired
by Muybridge, from paintings by Francis
Bacon to the introduction of ‘bullet time’
in The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999). We
might contribute more direct connections,
including Thom Andersen’s 1975 essay film
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, with
its dry narration by Dean Stockwell and
pioneering animations; George Snow’s
hypnotic Muybridge Revisited (1986, avail-
able to view on BFI Player); Rebecca Sol-
Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.
And now, Nope.
Muybridge’s work is in the very DNA of
cinema, as Peele makes evident. In 2020,
upon Thames had a year of celebrations
that were planned to commemorate the
190th anniversary of his birth. Of course,
the pandemic interfered with the events,
but on YouTube you can enjoy a short
BYLINE ILLUSTRATIONS: PETER ARKLE; MAIN ILLUSTRATION BY MARC DAVID

bizarre body of work, his extraordinary life
history. Not for nothing were the optical-
illusion gadgets that inspired his own
machine known as ‘philosophical toys’.
And why avoid mentioning something of
his boggling biography? This Surrey-born
Victorian gentleman ventured to Califor-
nia, contorted his original name into a new
creation with echoes of Old English and
became a self-taught landscape photog-
rapher who went to extravagant lengths
to make jaw-dropping images: chopping
man’s technological ingenuity and melo- dance piece by BalletBoyz in homage to
as a new way of dramatic life, but also asks exactly the kind
Muybridge which made a virtue out of
understanding of questions that Emerald raises about his that challenge. Recorded on Zoom, and
motion compelling images. About the poses and edited using split-screens, superimposi-
actions Muybridge asked his models to tions and mirroring, Motion reimagines
perform in the nude: athletic feats for theMuybridge’s grid, and the movements of
men, but tea parties and domestic tasks his models, in a medium he might never
for the women. And then the occasional, have dreamed of – but is yet another one
baffling bout of bath-time slapstick. Aboutof his distant descendants.
why the famous background grid was
introduced when Muybridge came to pho- Pamela Hutchinson is a freelance critic and
tograph a Black man – a grid just like the film historian

Phuong Le
@phuonghhle
Concrete brutalism meets a London that’s
run out of swing in Straight on till Morning
For this month’s column, the cinematic
trip is local to S&S: the concrete wonders
that surround BFI Southbank in London.
Made during the twilight years of Hammer
Film Productions – before the brand’s res-
urrection during the 2000s – Straight on till
Morning (1972) is a work of transition and
transformation, spotlighting the beauty
and terror that come with the crumbling
of idealistic fantasies. Directed by Peter
Collinson, the psychological horror
thriller is a part of the popular ‘women in
peril’ tradition, in which female characters
are ruthlessly stalked and murdered by
men. Freshly arrived from Liverpool with
a head full of fairytale reveries, the plain
and gawky Brenda (Rita Tushingham)
has only one goal in mind: to find a Prince
Charming who will give her a baby.
Her prince, however, turns out to be a
serial murderer in the body of an Adonis.
With his soft, wavy blond locks and pierc-
ing blue eyes, Peter (Shane Briant) has the
sheepish handsomeness of David Hem-
mings, but his angelic good looks also
carry a hint of the grotesque. An already
jaded gigolo who targets middle-aged
socialites, he feasts on both their adoration
and their cash, which he keeps carelessly
in a kitchen drawer. When boredom seeps
in, he stabs his conquest to death before
embarking on the next hunt.
Blood-soaked deeds aside, Straight on
till Morning can also be read as an urban
horror tale, capturing the dying days of
fun-loving 1960s London. The opening
titles unfold like an ominous twist on the
kooky cartoon credits in Smashing Time
(1967), which also stars Tushingham as a
northerner heading to the swinging capi-
tal in search of adventure. In Collinson’s
film, however, as Brenda makes her way
through the crowded streets while a jazzy
score hums along, the seemingly typical
set-up has a cynical undertone. Emerging
from Earl’s Court tube station, Brenda
bumps into Peter in front of a newsagent,
the contents of her brown paper bag spill-
ing pitifully on the ground.
While their accidental brush is hardly
glamorous, the conversations that float
out of the shop are even grimmer. A long-
winded chat about overdue rent between
a tenant and his landlord reveals the
economic anxiety that pervades the city,
undercutting its swinging image. In Bren-
da’s next stop, at a job centre, her hopeful
expression is juxtaposed with others’ wea-
riness, driving home the financial precar-
ity of urban living. When she finally gets
some work, wrapping parcels at a hippie
fashion boutique, the location, so central
to the cult of music and fashion during
the 1960s, also loses its sheen. Whizzing
past the racks of colourful frocks and mini-
skirts, the film takes us instead to a dingy
back room and the monotony of Brenda’s
thankless daily tasks. It seems as if she
has bought her ticket to ride in Swing-
ing London a tad too late. The party has
stopped and all that is left are dirty glasses
in the sink.
In parting the kaleidoscopic curtain of
youth culture, the film probes the tension
between an alluring surface and what lies
underneath. Peter’s murderous impulses
arise out of a disdain for beautiful women,
as well as their worship of his own beauty.
Due to this strange and rather misogy-
nistic contradiction, Peter is drawn to
Brenda because of her “ugliness”, which
he equates to a kind of moral purity. In
visual terms, Brenda’s mousiness is a cruel
source of filmic spectacle. As the character
stumbles her way through various social
25
Ci ne Wand er er
humiliations, the camera seems to delight
in gazing closely at her unmade-up face,
which so often contorts into unsightly
expressions of pain.
This focus on Brenda’s plainness brings
to mind Melanie Williams’ astute chap-
ter on Tushingham’s image in Female
Stars of British Cinema. While the actress
embodies the vivacious spirit of 1960s
youth culture, Williams also notes how
the contemporary press scrutinised her
looks, highlighting her supposed lack of
attractiveness with sheer bewilderment.
And yet she is also the object of desire
in Richard Lester’s The Knack ...and How
to Get It (1965). By contrast, in Straight on
till Morning, Tushingham is no longer the
girl who has the knack. This is a London
where unconventionality and idiosyncrasy
have ceased to flourish.
As the relationship between Peter and
Brenda unfolds like a retreat into a fantasy
Neverland – he even calls her Wendy – it is
fitting that the encounter that finally glues
them together takes place on an out-of-this-
world ground: the South Bank. Having
endured yet another romantic rejection,
Brenda roams along the imposing path-
ways outside the Hayward Gallery at dead
of night. Seen in an extreme wide shot,
As the lead her small frame is a stick figure alongside
character the imposing structure. Her listless wan-
stumbles her dering is accompanied by the softly sung
theme song, which sounds like a rueful
way through lullaby, adding a giallo touch to the fore-
various social boding scene. High above, on the walkway
humiliations, between Queen Elizabeth Hall and the
Royal Festival Hall, Peter casts his gaze on
the camera Brenda like a master puppeteer ready to
seems to delight pull her strings.
in gazing The steely starkness of the London
tableaux, drained of colours, feels like a
closely at her descendant of A Clockwork Orange (1971),
unmade-up face where brutalist architecture and social
disorder intertwine. Compared to the agi-
tated editing found throughout the film,
the stillness of this moment makes for
an eerie reprieve, signifying not only the
downward spiral path that the characters
will soon take, as Brenda meets her fate,
but also a city on the cusp of change.
ABOVE
Rita Tushingham in Straight
Phuong Le is a Vietnamese film critic living
on till Morning (1972) in Paris
26 TALKIES
Director’s chair
In memory of Mamoun Hassan:
a poem by Terence Davies
“You have eight and a half thousand pounds.
Not a penny more. You will direct.”
I sat in his small office, stunned.
“But I’ve never directed before.”
“Now’s your chance.”
I was in my first year at drama school
and had written Children, sent it to
everyone and no one was interested.
And now this.
I was required to shoot a test clip,
which I did. Mamoun looked at it and
said, “The actors look a bit under-
rehearsed, but go ahead with the film.”
I walked out of the building unable even to
think. Guided by Mamoun’s lovely assistant,
I did a lot of work on my own and through
a haze of ignorance. It was a baptism
by fire but at least Children got made.
I had to return to drama school to
finish my course, but now I knew
my real ambition was to direct.
Two years later, around 1978, I got into
the National Film and Television School
and Mamoun was teaching there.
It was like meeting an old friend –
no time had passed. And he proved
a wonderful teacher. Where cinema was
concerned he was rigorous but there
was always generosity in that rigour.
He could be fierce but never malign.
He could be loquacious but it was
a loquacity that was always as elegant
as it was erudite. He “thought” in images
and saw that between every cut there
was an ambiguity. I can think of no one
else who had that unique ability. When
listening to him I always learned something
new and fresh from his passion for film.
Later we did some masterclasses at
the NFTS and the BFI on the South
Bank. And it was there that I last saw
him – he was as tall and elegant as always
but moved with caution, yet with his
lovely sense of humour still intact.
Whenever he rang me he’d say,
“Terry – Mamoun”, but always said my
name with an especial cadence.
And now he is gone.
He gave me a life.
He renewed me.
He took a chance on me when
THIS ISSUE
Terence Davies
nobody else would.
He was one of the great unsung
heroes of British cinema.
I loved that man.
Here is my poem
written in tribute to him.
TOUCH & GO
Do not go
(Oh do not go!)
Stay a while
So we may mend the past
Then bring it close to home
Then stall the hour passed
And with its passing
All our history falls
Into the limbo of remembered days –
And moments in the garden
Over food, over wine – a birthday
In the summer air.
Small and larger happiness
(tranquil in the tranquil light)
But in the quiet of the day
When a phrase or laugh from
years ago comes to the mind
To chill the heart
To chill the soul
To chill our frail mortality –
Waiting for our all known, long-feared end.
Turn the clock,
Check all time
Slow the heartbeat to a dead patrol
As all eternity awaits
To welcome us all home
As the small moment reaches out
Into the terrible dark.
Call me from the great dead dark MAMOUN HASSAN (12 DECEMBER 1937 – 29 JULY 2022)
Call me now and tell me not to grieve Film producer, director, Folk (1973) and My Way Home
For if you can – please do so now – screenwriter, consultant, (1978). He also commissioned
Or all I’ll have will be lecturer and teacher, Hassan’s Kevin Brownlow’s historical
long, influential career in the drama Winstanley (1975) and
Your silent leaving and a heart British film industry included Horace Ové’s Pressure (1976),
That bears a slow sad march becoming the first head of the before taking charge of
Back to the world which now BFI production board in 1971. the National Film Finance
PORTRAIT: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
does not possess you. There, he helped to launch Corporation from 1979 until
a new wave of British film its abolition in 1985, where
artists, first and foremost the his commissions included
Stay – just for a little while –
great film poet Bill Douglas Douglas’s Comrades (1986).
One last embrace – with his ‘childhood’ trilogy: See bfi.org.uk/sightandsound for a
Touch – then go. My Childhood (1972), My Ain full obituary

THIS ISSUE
B. Ruby Rich
Speak up for Sweetback and Dielman, but
are we ranking the films or ourselves?
A poll tax is a levy of a fixed sum on every liable
individual (typically every adult), without refer-
ence to income or resources.
Long ago, as a cub reporter/film critic,
I enjoyed the practice of list-making for
polls like this. Sight and Sound! It was pleas-
ant to be invited into the world of impor-
tance and pretension, where folks of note
could play jury, arbitrating a set of values
that would culminate in The List. But
no more: I gave up list-making years ago.
Why? Here’s my answer.
If professions need gatekeepers to
maintain a set of standards and decorum,
then in the case of film critics and schol-
ars the function has become twisted and
all too predictable in its mix of sobriety
and pretension, genteel shock value and
barely controlled narcissism. There are
basic ground rules, to be sure, as easily
discernible as a recipe book’s ingredients:
something mainstream to show pop-
ulism, something avant-garde to show
hipness, something old, something new,
something borrowed (from another cul-
ture, perhaps), something blue, or more
likely noir. Be sure to include a title that
nobody knows as well as a title that every-
one knows, include one long scorned or
long treasured.
My own lists back in the day were no
better, apart from championing women
and queer f ilmmakers and f ilms from
Latin America or the Latinx diaspora.
I sweated over them like everyone else,
then dashed them off at the last minute,
often forgetting a key film in my haste.
Ah, the choices. To include the list’s
perennial favourite Citizen Kane (1941) or
deliberately leave it off, or tweak those
who worship it by choosing Touch of Evil
(1958) instead (yes, I’ve done that), a mild
manoeuvre that hardly counts as subver-
sive. Yet today, I still watch interviews
with young filmmakers from around the
globe and witness with dismay the same
short, deadening list of directors to whom
they pay homage, whose pantheons they
yearn to join.
ILLUSTRATION BY BETH WALROND
List-making is by nature polemical.
Maybe a true expansion of the Greatest
Films of All Time Poll could at least have
an impact in one modest way – to get a new
generation to pay attention to filmmakers
other than those who hog the attention
(Scorsese, Herzog, Godard, Tarantino,
yawn). A grander list might revive other
figures from the past who deserve to be
visible again, not out of nostalgia but for a
fierce power in short supply today.
The films seen as having changed film
history are often the ones saluted today;
the ones that tried and failed are left off.
Those outsiders have my heart.
Consider Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss
Song (1971). Yes, Melvin Van Peebles
received attention in his old age, and
posthumously, in part thanks to his son
Mario. But I’ve long lamented the injus-
tice of this film (and some of his other
early work) not being recognised as the
wellspring of the American independent
film movement, its origin instead always
credited to Cassavetes. Putting Sweet-
back at the top of a list could remedy that.
But that would require acknowledging a
film that broke such new ground it didn’t
even belong properly to a genre, though it
spawned one.
And there’s Pink Flamingos (1972), the
John Waters tour de force. Waters could
be the alternative pick for an origin point,
with his no-budget filmmaking, casting
friends who became his Baltimore Super-
stars. And unlike Warhol, it was never a
Factory there, no one was tossed aside.
Stephanie Rothman is a genre film-
maker revived and celebrated by the first
round of feminist film festivals and writers
like Pam Cook in the 1970s. She mixed
female empowerment and solidarity into
sexcapades. Terminal Island (1974), her
best, was widely written about but quickly
forgotten, even though it deploys tropes
of female power, racism and the carceral
state in, gulp, a softcore setting.
Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966), another
discovery of the early feminist film years,
remains one of the most brilliant, aes-
thetically brazen and politically defiant
films I’ve ever seen. Its inventiveness,
and colour scheme, deliver an explosive
lesson in revolt and impunity made at the
moment Prague was opening up to the
West. A wildly empowering fantasia, it’s
an anti-capitalism shape-shifter that has
moved successive generations of young
women to go wild after seeing it. The
27
Poll positio n
only comparable US film is Lizzie Bor-
den’s Born in Flames (1983), which gains in
power and stature with each passing year
and deserves all that attention and more.
Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman…
(1975) justifiably appears on lists of the
greats, though when it was released Jonas
Mekas attacked her for selling out. Today,
it’s a sacred text. Lucrecia Martel started
out with video, a camera her father brought
home, and then? La Ciénaga (2001)!
Meanwhile, documentaries are, by some
unstated standard, downgraded when
polls come knocking. Jean Rouch and
Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961)
is the Rosetta Stone of modern documen-
tary, mixing the quotidian with reflexivity.
And contenders for genre brilliance have
emerged every decade, whether it’s Isaac
Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) or Patri-
cio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010).
Finally, though, I am not convinced
that polls make sense. Life today is lived
The films seen as through a set of contradictions: on the one
having changed hand, an era of image overload, a stream-
ing firehose of ‘content’ beguiles a public
film history are with websites, channels, platforms, festi-
often
ft theh ones vals and, less often, cinemas; on the other,
saluted today; the pressing demands of Covid, Trump/
Boris horrors, Ukraine and the Russian
the ones that invasion, the rise of fascism, climate catas-
tried and failed trophes, inflation, threatened recession.
are left off. The disconnect between screen and lived
reality could not be more stark.
Those outsiders In such times of crisis so brutal as to
have my heart make the body shiver, it is clear that we
who make lists pick these titles, in fact, not
for any one work’s intrinsic value so much
as a way to place snapshots of our own
past into the grand photo album of his-
tory. We are not ranking films, nor cinema
history – we are ranking ourselves.
And if films get mentioned along the
way… it’s a trick. Bravado covers a lot of
sins where polls are involved. But there’s
a poll tax in effect, too, that would replace
affection and worship with a list of
choices, a ranking of affections, a betrayal
of generosity. These films were in sync
with their moments, but what is in sync
today? Only the list of 2072 can say.
B. Ruby Rich is the editor-in-chief
of ‘Film Quarterly’
Hooked to the
silver screen
Brett Morgen’s spectacular Moonage Daydream makes electrifying use of the singer’s private archive to create
a visual and sonic celebration of the life of David Bowie. The director talks to Jonathan Romney
 H
30
ere’s the film that Brett Morgen might have
made about David Bowie. It would have fea-
tured the singer as a has-been who had never
progressed past the early 70s heyday of his
Ziggy Stardust character and had played the
same songs from that period for decades. It
would have shown that David Bowie per-
forming to an audience of down-and-outs in a
Berlin dive – then would have jumped to the
singer and Morgen himself at a Tokyo press
conference, announcing the completion of a
conventional Bowie documentary, and fielding
questions like, “Did you fuck Mick Jagger?” It
would have ended, Morgen says, with Bowie
travelling around Nepal on an elephant, “show-
ing old footage to the last people on earth who
had never seen Ziggy Stardust”.
That’s the film Morgen might have made
– the idea he pitched to Bowie at a meeting
in 2007. Instead, 15 years later, the American
director has made Moonage Daydream, which
is nowhere near as eccentric, but hardly a
by-the-book pop star documentary either.
Instead, Moonage Daydream is a celebration
of Bowie not just as performer, but as myth,
autodidact, Renaissance man, self-ironising
sage. Just as last decade’s V&A touring exhi-
bition ‘David Bowie Is’ presented the star as a
figure of elusive multiplicity, so Moonage Day-
dream attempts to capture the slippery muta-
bility of everything he embodied through its
kaleidoscopic splash of imagery. Indeed, it
was seeing the exhibition, Morgen says, that
helped crystallise his idea of what Moonage
Daydream should be.
Morgen, whose documentaries include
2015’s portrait of Nirvana’s lead singer Cobain:
Montage of Heck, describes Moonage Daydream
as “experiential” (it is designed to be pro-
jected in Imax, among other formats) rather
than journalistic. “My job,” Morgen tells me
via Zoom, “isn’t to provide information, but
IMAGE: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GET TY IMAGES
to provide an audience with something they
can’t get in other mediums. There are count-
less books about Bowie, there’s nothing else
I can offer in terms of biography – but there
is something intangible that can happen in
a cinema, and that’s what I’m interested in
exploring.” When Morgen made The Kid Stays
in the Picture, his 2002 film about Hollywood
producer Robert Evans, the idea “was not to
make a film about Robert Evans, but to make
a film that was Robert Evans, that personi-
fied him.” Likewise, let’s say, David Bowie Is
Moonage Daydream, and/or vice versa.
THE MAN WHO STORED THE WORLD
Moonage Daydream resulted from Morgen
being given unlimited access to Bowie’s
archive, documenting a career ranging over
six decades, up to his death in 2016: “Ephem-
era, music, film, video art – it was immense,
it took two years to work through.” The film
collages together, among other things, foot-
age from Bowie videos and feature films;
excerpts from TV interviews; Stefan Nadel-
man’s animations based on Bowie’s own art-
work, including his storyboards for a planned
1974 Diamond Dogs film; and glimpses of
Bowie’s amateur experiments with video art
in the mid-70s, big on feedback effects. “He
became slightly obsessed with shooting from
his monitor and creating a kind of ‘infinity
prism’. What was interesting was the sound
– no one’s in the room, [you hear him] talk to
himself… I remember at one point Stravinsky
playing in the background, doors opening
and somebody coming in, then smash-cut-
ting to some other time of day or night. He
was just doing this for himself.”
Morgen’s film is not a documentary about
Bowie’s biography or artistic breakthroughs;
the musical path was thoroughly mapped in
Francis Whately’s recent documentaries for
the BBC (Five Years, 2013; The Last Five Years,
2017; Finding Fame, 2019). Instead, Morgen
has made an unashamed spectacular – a full-
on Bowie Bomb as eruptive as the bursts of
colour that, in one of the film’s more impres-
sionistic sequences, represent the bass and
guitar notes of ‘Sound and Vision’. Moonage
Daydream lives up to its title as a sometimes
seemingly free-associative phantasmagoria. It
includes some vintage performances, notably
the 1973 Ziggy Stardust shows at Earls Court
and Hammersmith, and some searingly
recoloured stage images from that period.
The musical content also includes unseen
live footage, including a buoyant medley
of ‘Jean Genie’ and ‘Love Me Do’ with Jeff
Beck, filmed by D.A. Pennebaker at Ham-
mersmith Odeon, 1973; and ‘Heroes’ and
the instrumental ‘Warszawa’ at Earls Court,
1978, filmed by David Hemmings. Overall,
the playlist is anything but a standard hits
package: ‘Space Oddity’ only appears an
hour in, while the first featured number is a
thunderous ‘Hello Spaceboy’, originally on
the eccentric 1995 Outside album (“Not on
anyone’s bingo card,” Morgen says). The film
climaxes with the chorus from hippie-era
PREVIOUS PAGE
anthem ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ (“The sun Bowie as Ziggy in 1972
machine is coming down and we’re gonna
LEFT
have a party…”), even includes the same era’s A Michael Ochs portrait from 1976
portentous ‘The Wild-Eyed Boy from Free-
ABOVE
cloud’ (“The village dreadful yawns”), and, D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy
from the mid-70s US ‘Soul Tour’, an intense, Stardust movie (1979)

previously unseen performance of the Dia-
mond Dogs ballad ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me’.
Morgen is irreverent with the music:
using stems provided by Bowie’s lifelong
producer Tony Visconti, he and mixer
Paul Massey created mash-ups of the
songs, foregrounding piano for emphasis
or leaking one track into another. At one
point, the solemn performance of ‘War-
szawa’ is overlaid with the sound of South-
east Asian pipes – a side-effect in the edit
that became one of those happy accidents
Bowie himself valued in his work.
The images undergo a mash-up process
too – notably in the hectic imagistic fugue
of the film’s ‘prelude’. The funereal imagery
of Johan Renck’s video for Bowie’s song
‘Blackstar’, from his 2016 swansong album,
is juxtaposed with space footage from a
1960 Canadian documentary short called
Universe – “A big influence on Kubrick in
his design for 2001 – and I learned that
Bowie had a print of the film in the 70s
that he watched quite a bit.” Then comes
a flash flood of science-fiction imagery –
meteors! Metropolis! crowds watching the
skies! – and young English fans in the first
fevered burst of 70s Bowiemania, as Amer-
ican talkshow host Dick Cavett’s voiceover
ponders, “Who is he? What is he? … Is he
an agent of a foreign power? Is he a put-on?
Is he real? Is he nice to his parents?”
Also in this prelude sequence, Morgen
says, “You hear sounds from Triumph of
the Will; ‘Inchworm’, the first song Bowie
countless books
remembered hearing; Rutger Hauer from
Blade Runner… We wanted to create a
sense of transmissions from the twentieth
century.” Transmissions, of course, are the
theme of most first-generation fans’ first
experience of Bowie – ‘Starman’, as per-
formed on Top of the Pops on 6 July 1972, 50
years ago to the day as I write this.
If the prelude bursts on you in a frantic,
only just comprehensible rush, that’s the
point, says Morgen: “You’re not supposed
to understand what you’re seeing, you’re
supposed to let it wash over you.” Moonage
Daydream works, he says, exactly as rock ’n’
roll affected a young Bowie, when – as we
hear the singer explain – he listened to Fats
Domino, couldn’t make out a word, but
got caught up in the rapture nonetheless.
Providing the film with an unfamiliar,
immediately compelling throughline is
Bowie’s speaking voice. Culled from inter-
views over different periods, this thread
of the film has Bowie musing on religion,
the universe, society, culture – sometimes
cogently, sometimes artlessly but engag-
ingly revealing his roots as a 60s bohemian
magpie latching on to whatever thoughts
were in the air, or in fashion. We hear
him read a passage speculating on time
DAVID BOWIE 31
‘There are (“There is no beginning, no end… You find
yourself struggling to comprehend a deep
and formidable mystery…”) and musing on
about Bowie; androgyny and the eternal quest for what
there’s nothing he calls a “high priest form”, and on “our
refusal to accept chaos… one of the big-
else I can offer gest mistakes we’ve made.” He also makes
in terms of a sharply demystifying observation on the
biography – prestige of celebrity: “The artist is strictly a
figment of public imagination.”
but there is
something THE GREAT PRETENDER
intangible that The film begins – a bold move, as it’s hard
to imagine a bigger potential turn-off in a
can happen in pop movie – with a caption quoting Bowie
a cinema, and on Nietzsche and the repercussions of
that’s what I’m replacing God with ourselves. Such cogita-
tions could well set viewers’ teeth on edge,
interested in and indeed David Rooney in his Hollywood
exploring’ Reporter review says, “Anyone encounter-
ing Bowie for the first time in Morgen’s
film could be forgiven for concluding that
alongside the musical genius, he could be
a pretentious bore.”
No doubt you could find countless
instances of the ‘P-word’ being used against
Bowie over the years. But it would be
wrong to imagine the musical genius and
the philosophical daydreamer simply exist-
ing alongside each other. They are entirely
part of the same fabric – and Bowie him-
self was hardly without self-awareness in
32
this respect. Dan Fox’s 2016 book Pretentious-
ness: Why It Matters approvingly cites Bowie
as “pretentiousness in action” (and, you’d
want to add, in constant unstable motion).
Fox quotes Bowie in 1976 saying, “In my
early stuff, I made it through on sheer pre-
tension… Show someone something where
intellectual analysis or analytical thought
has been applied and people will yawn. But
something that’s pretentious – that keeps
you riveted.” Fox also quotes Bowie’s col-
laborator Brian Eno saying that he “decided
to turn the word ‘pretentious’ into a compli-
ment… [I] think that pretending is the most
important thing we can do.” What is Bowie’s
art of pretending, his sustained year-by-year
role-switching, but the invention of cosplay
as an all-encompassing design for living?
Bowie emerges from Morgen’s film as a
self-declared “generalist”, self-consciously
flirting with ideas, unashamed to identify
as a dilettante (“I was a Buddhist on Tues-
day… I was into Nietzsche by Friday”).
Without stating it in so many words – the
film has no voiceover commentary other
than Bowie’s – Moonage Daydream empha-
sises its subject’s career as an experiment
in sustained metamorphosis. Of course,
the description of Bowie as a chameleon
became a cliché almost as soon as he’d shed
his early 70s pre-Raphaelite locks for red
spikes and the persona of an intergalactic
B
ephebe. But Morgen’s film makes the meta-
morphoses visible, any number of Bowies
crammed into 140 minutes: the various
manifestations of Ziggy; the frazzled
wraith of his mid-70s US tours; the dapper
sophisticate of his 80s superstar period;
later, the elegantly weathered downtown
bohemian, seen Pollocking his studio floor
with paint… Then there are the filmed
personae: Thomas Jerome Newton, the
visiting alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth
(Nicolas Roeg, 1976); the corporate salary-
man in Mark Romanek’s ‘Jump They Say’
video. Morgen mixes these images to sug-
gest it’s all Bowie, whether it’s the singer
as himself sitting in an empty hotel room,
or Newton staggering through ruins. (You
only wish Morgen had also patched in Phil
Cornwell’s impersonation of a blue-suited
Bowie in 90s BBC comedy Stella Street –
“What an impressive refrigeration system”
– to see if anyone spotted the difference.)
“I didn’t look at The Man Who Fell to Earth
as Bowie acting in a film,” Morgen says.
“I employed the footage so if you showed
it to someone 300 years from now, they’d
go, ‘Wow, where’d you get that incredible
documentary footage of David watching
20 television sets?’ Being on stage, doing an
interview, acting in a film, being in a docu-
mentary – they’re all performances, it all
becomes part of the same visual language.”
y far the weirdest and most uncomfort-
able footage is of a white-suited, bleached-
haired Bowie drifting alone round various
places in Asia – queuing at Bangkok air-
port, dropping in on a Balinese gamelan
group, wandering through a strip club
where he politely declines a hostess’s atten-
tions. All this is from an obscure docu-
mentary called Ricochet, directed by Gerry
Troyna and released on VHS in 1984.
“When I found it,” says Morgen, “I freaked
out – I said, ‘This is the holy grail.’ It was
considered a bit of a joke in the Bowie
camp. It was the only footage in existence
that had the visual metaphor I needed for
[the idea of] ‘a stranger in a strange land’.
“It was so bizarre – who would film
themselves walking through a strip club?
Mötley Crüe would, but it would be for
a totally different purpose.” The Ricochet
clips present the most awkward of Bowie’s
guises – not the “old-fashioned beatnik
traveller” that Bowie claims at one point to
have become, but rather a colonial white-
flannel flâneur in a sub-standard Graham
Greene adaptation.
The interviews excerpted are undeni-
ably performances, especially a teasing,
somewhat flirty ’73 encounter with British
TV host Russell Harty (“Are they bisexual
shoes?” “They’re shoe shoes – silly!”). Nev-
ertheless we can’t resist looking to them for

self-revelation, glimmers of (you hesitate to
say it) an authentic self. In 1979, Bowie tells
British interviewer Mavis Nicholson that
he shelters himself from love, that unless
performing or writing, “I feel pretty much
like an empty vessel.” Isolation and numb-
ness are recurrent themes, as in the songs.
A 1974 appearance with Cavett touches
on his upbringing: “A lot of emotional and
spiritual mutilation goes on in my family.”
However, if this apparent self-revelation
is about selling an alienated persona, it’s
something that Moonage Daydream takes at
least provisionally at face value. The film’s
only lapse into kitsch psychologising rheto-
ric comes when it shows the young David
Jones, as he was, in a snapshot with his par-
ents – who then fade out from the image.
Moonage Daydream’s biographical con-
tent also includes a brief section on the
singer’s older half-brother Terry Burns.
His mental health problems have been
touched on elsewhere (as in Gabriel
Range’s 2020 quasi-biopic Stardust), as
has his role in alerting the young David to
assorted cultural discoveries: beat poetry,
art, jazz, the spectrum of what Bowie at
one point calls “the outside things”. What
Morgen doesn’t touch on, however, is the
art school tradition that was so central to
the emergence of the British pop imagina-
tion, a line running from alumni such as
Lennon, Townshend and Syd Barrett;
through Eno, Ferry and the punk class of
’76; to the Jarvis Cocker generation.
That ethos of eclecticism and discovery
– Bowie attended Bromley School of Art –
is central to the singer’s role as arch-fan and
as propagator of hip insider knowledge.
Just as many of us discovered Iggy Pop
and Lou Reed via Bowie’s early champi-
oning, in and out of the studio, he was also
Moonage
Daydream
should be taken
as a celebration
of Bowie, an
omnivorous,
unashamedly
awestruck
smörgåsbord
of his various
modes and
manners
ABOVE
Ziggy in full flight,
Hammersmith Odeon 1973
RIGHT
On the set of Mark Romanek’s
video for ‘Jump They Say’ (1993)
responsible for alerting music fans to Wil-
liam Burroughs, Jean Genet, German art
and Jacques Brel, whose severe ballad ‘My
Death’ he covered on Harty’s very main-
stream show in early ’73. But, hand in hand
with his advocacy of outsider heroes like
Genet-inspired dancer and mime Lindsay
Kemp, Bowie also offered a vista on new
sexual possibilities. Quizzing Bowie on
his bisexuality in the interview, Harty asks
him why Britain was then opening up to
greater acceptance of different sexual iden-
tities; Bowie replies that it’s about reject-
ing set social roles, refusing the fixed iden-
tities that you were traditionally expected
to assume: “Now people want a role in
society – they want to be an individual.”
That answer could have come, word
for word, from any articulate participant
in youth counterculture from the beat era
on, but here it has a newly minted sexual
dimension – and Bowie’s influence in this
was revolutionary, although arguably its
long-term effects wouldn’t fully flourish
until our own gender-reevaluating decade.
We get a sense of what that particular
Shock of the New meant back then, how-
ever superficial its manifestations. Among
male and female fans wearing make-up,
circa 1973, a girl says, “No one’s afraid to
walk around like that now – he’s broken a
barrier” (even if many of the boys we see
blokeishly fit the glam-era stereotype dis-
missively characterised in the music press
as ‘brickies in mascara’).
Bowie’s importance in this respect has
almost been erased from history by his 80s
reinvention as suavely relatable superstar –
which was why Todd Haynes’ reclamation
of Bowie’s queerness in his Velvet Goldmine
(1998) was so important. Moonage Daydream
itself arguably downplays this dimension,
DAVID BOWIE 33
although the original charge of his sexual
display emerges vividly in clips from his
1973 concerts, filmed for D.A. Pennebaker’s
1979 documentary Ziggy Stardust and the Spi-
ders from Mars, that come in tight on Bow-
ie’s crotch and the expanses of pale thigh
revealed by his costumes (had any male
pop star exposed thigh before, other than
the likes of Elvis or Frankie Avalon in beach
movies?). Morgen: “You try staring at that,
two inches from a 27-inch monitor, for two
years. That shot wasn’t used in the Penne-
baker film, probably because it was too racy
at the time. Such a remarkable moment –
and, man, I don’t know of a human that can
resist his sexuality, he’s so provocative.”
A CRASH COURSE FOR THE RAVERS
Moonage Daydream, as Morgen says, does
not contain new journalistic insights;
neither does it offer the critique that you
might yearn for if you feel that cultural
icons need eventually to be demolished.
The critique is partly implicit – Bowie’s
lowest point as song-and-dance superstar
is a clip of him shilling for Pepsi in an ad
with Tina Turner – and partly emerges
from Bowie’s own comments. He launches
his Let’s Dance album by stating his inten-
tion to start off the 80s “in a positive,
optimistic fashion”, but after that decade’s
unprecedented global success, we hear
Bowie admitting that he had hit an artistic
dead end: “The vacuum of my life.”
Otherwise, Moonage Daydream should
be taken as a celebration of Bowie, an
omnivorous, unashamedly awestruck
smörgåsbord of his various modes and
manners – albeit a very partial one, his later
decades represented mainly by a section on
his marriage to Iman in 1992 and imagery
related to his Blackstar swansong. As such,
it’s exhilarating, and often strikingly coun-
ter-intuitive – if not quite as outré as the
film Morgen originally proposed in 2007.
Bowie, it seems, “really appreciated the
pitch” but was already in semi-retirement
– and in any case, Morgen says, their meet-
ing was “testy”, Bowie laying quite aggres-
sively into the film the director had just
made, the animated documentary Chicago
10: Speak Your Peace.
The film Morgen has ended up making
comes across at once as a son et lumière
shrine to a self-created pop god; a celebra-
tion of Bowie’s mystery, whether “deep and
formidable” or superficial and glorious;
and, for newcomers, as per 1973 hit ‘Drive-
in Saturday’, “a crash course for the ravers”.
“I wanted to create the film,” Morgen
says, “in such a way that if you buried it in
the desert and society blows itself up, and
some sentient beings come to earth and
discover the film, they would be left to
wonder: was this a document of a life, was
this a prophet, was this one of theirs who
came to life 3,000 years before them? Was
this some sort of 20th-century religion?”
Well, some of us were there, and it was.
IMAGE: LESTER COHAN/GET TY IMAGES
Moonage Daydream is released in UK cinemas,
including BFI Imax in London, on 16 September
and is reviewed on page 76. The Man Who Fell to
Earth, The Hunger, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me are screening
at BFI Southbank in September and October
34

1960s/70S 1980S
Cracked actor Christiane F.
(Uli Edel, 1981)
Based on the nonfiction
book Christiane F. – Wir
Kinder vom Bahnhof (We
Children from Zoo Station),
this is a portrait of a
teenage heroin addict in
1970s West Berlin and
was hugely successful in
West Germany. Bowie
appears as himself
The Hunger
(Tony Scott, 1983)
This hyper-glossy erotic
vampire fantasy could
have been expressly
made to titillate lovers
of Bowie’s Thin White
Duke persona, casting
him as half of an undead
couple alongside
Catherine Deneuve.
Bowie later appeared
performing at a gig, as the presenter (and
although the footage was starred in a 1999 episode)
actually shot at a club in of a thematically related
New York. Songs from spin-off TV series of the
his ‘Berlin trilogy’ feature same title from the Scott
heavily and were released brothers’ Scott Free
on a soundtrack album. Productions.

The Snowman Merry Christmas,

(Dianne Jackson, 1982) Mr. Lawrence
Bowie appeared in an (Ōshima Nagisa, 1983)
alternative live-action Along with The Man
intro to the animated Who Fell to Earth, this
TV version of Raymond is generally seen as
Briggs’ children’s book, Bowie’s greatest screen
playing the hero James performance, playing
later in life. Major Jack Celliers, a
captured officer in a
Baal (Alan Clarke, 1982) POW camp on Java.
Brecht and Bowie Bowie incarnates
prove a perfect match tortured resilience, and
in Alan Clarke’s spare generates homoerotic
TV version of the sparks with one of
playwright’s first stage his Japanese co-stars,
work from 1918, about the another modernist pop
dark career of a poet and musician turned (briefly)
ABOVE Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) social outsider. In a actor, Sakamoto Ryūichi.
role formerly played by,
among others, Oskar
The Virgin Soldiers Bowie’s enigmatic, Homolka, Peter O’ Toole
Tony Scott’s
Bowie spent (John Dexter, 1969)
The Hunger
Bowie has an uncredited vulnerable performance and Rainer Werner
more than four two-second role as a drunken Fassbinder, Bowie
could have
as tragic alien Thomas acquits himself strikingly,
decades in films squaddie in a barroom scene
been expressly
in this adaptation of the Jerome Newton with an abrasive
and on television, Leslie Thomas novel. edge. The Guardian’s
made to titillate
both played off his Nancy Banks-Smith
whether starring lovers of Bowie’s
Pierrot in Turquoise or the existing image and praised his “powerful
or making Looking Glass Murders presence [and]
Thin White
came to define him voice sandpapered
creditable cameos. (Brian Mahoney, 1970)
perfectly flat”. Duke persona
A Scottish Television
His appearances production billed as “a Just a Gigolo
ranged from pantomime devised by (David Hemmings, 1978)
Lindsay Kemp”. Bowie After a lauded big-screen
landmark to appears with his dance guru, breakthrough, Bowie truly fell
forgettable to an esteemed mime artist, as to earth in this universally panned
‘Cloud’; he voices the thoughts historical drama that cast him
just plain fun. of Kemp’s Pierrot, and sings alongside legends Marlene
Here’s a rundown songs including ‘Threepenny Dietrich and Kim Novak.
Pierrot’ and ‘When I Live He plays Paul Ambrosius
of the highlights My Dream’. von Przygodski, a Prussian
of a second life officer who turns gigolo after
The Man Who Fell to Earth World War I.
on the screen (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
This adaptation of the
BY JONATHAN ROMNEY Walter Tevis novel remains
the quintessential Bowie role:
his enigmatic, vulnerable turn
as tragic alien Thomas Jerome
Newton both played off his
existing image and came to
define Bowie as we’d see
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

him over the next stage

of his career, the eternal
‘foreign body’ adrift in a
mundane world.
ABOVE David Hemmings’ Just a Gigolo (1978) ABOVE The Hunger (1983)

ABOVE Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986)
Yellowbeard
(Mel Damski, 1983)
Universally derided, not
least by several of its
actors, this was an all-star
pirate farce, co-written
by and starring Graham
Chapman and Peter Cook,
and featuring Peter Boyle,
Cheech and Chong, Marty
Feldman and John Cleese.
Bowie, wearing a shark’s
fin, has an uncredited
35-second cameo in a
scene with Eric Idle and
Madeline Kahn.
Into the Night
(John Landis, 1985)
Bowie takes a straight-
down-the-line supporting
role and acquits himself
with sinister aplomb as
a smooth, moustachioed
hitman in Landis’s little-
liked comedy thriller,
which sees him getting
into a knife fight with
Jeff Goldblum.
Absolute Beginners
(Julien Temple, 1986)
Bowie slyly embodies the
spirit of worldly temptation
as advertising man Vendice
Partners, channelling
the spirit of Ruby Keeler
as he tap-dances on a
typewriter to his song
‘That’s Motivation’. He also
wrote and performed the
title track, two years after
Temple directed him in the
standalone 21-minute comic
short Jazzin’ for Blue Jean.
ABOVE Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners (1986)
Bowie’s
performance as
Jareth, the spiky-
haired, child-
stealing Goblin
King could best
be described as
impish, but in
a menacingly
sexual way
Labyrinth
(Jim Henson, 1986)
Mixing creepiness and
Byronic dash, Bowie’s
performance as Jareth, the
spiky-haired, child-stealing
Goblin King could best be
described as impish, but in a
menacingly sexual way.
The Last Temptation of Christ
(Martin Scorsese, 1988)
One of Bowie’s more
downbeat, realistic
performances, playing
Pontius Pilate in a three-
minute scene in which the
weary, disillusioned Roman
governor quizzes Willem
Dafoe’s Jesus.
1990S
The Linguini Incident
(Richard Shepard, 1991)
Retitled Shag-o-Rama for
video release, this crime
comedy, co-starring
Rosanna Arquette and
Marlee Matlin, about the
misadventures of a British
bartender in New York,
remains one of the star’s
more obscure ventures. No
one had much to say in its
favour, except for the critic
Janet Maslin, who found
Bowie, as protagonist
Monte, “an amusingly
level-headed presence”.
Twin Peaks:
Fire Walk with Me
(David Lynch, 1992)
As errant FBI agent Philip
Jeffries, Bowie proves
his brilliance at playing a
man in a suit staggering
into a room and adding an
extra layer of weirdness
to a film that’s already a
consummate mille feuille of
weirdness. Bowie reprised
the role posthumously,
his voice issuing from a
giant kettle in Lynch’s
2017 TV series Twin Peaks:
The Return.
Bowie
contributes a
wry, zoned-out
and seemingly
bang-on
impersonation
of Andy Warhol
in Basquiat,
bringing
affectionate
insider insight
to his depiction
ABOVE Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat (1996)
Basquiat
(Julian Schnabel, 1996)
Bowie’s Andy Warhol
looks a scream. He
contributes a wry, zoned-
out and seemingly bang-on
impersonation in this
biopic of the late Jean-
Michel Basquiat, bringing
affectionate insider insight
to his depiction of New
York’s underground
godfather.
Gunslinger’s Revenge
(Il mio west) (Giovanni
Veronesi, 1998)
Italian-language western
starring Bowie as a
killer, alongside Harvey
Keitel and the film’s star
Leonardo Pieraccioni.
Barely known anywhere
else, it was a hit in Italy.
Bowie is “elegantly
depraved”, according
to George Kincaid on
the Spaghetti Western
Database.
Everybody Loves Sunshine
(Andrew Goth, 1999)
A Manchester-set gang
drama starring writer-
director Goth with drum-
and-bass artist Goldie,
Bowie plays an older
gangster trying to keep the
peace. Bowie “often seems
to be wandering in from a
movie on another channel”,
said Film Threat’s Scott
von Doviak.
DAVID BOWIE 35
2000S
Mr. Rice’s Secret
(Nicholas Kendall, 2000)
Canadian family drama
about a boy with Hodgkin’s
disease. Bowie plays Mr
Rice, a mysterious figure who
intermittently imparts wisdom
from beyond the grave.
Zoolander
(Ben Stiller, 2001)
What do Bowie, Victoria
Beckham, Karl Lagerfeld and
Donald Trump have in common?
They all have cameos in this
sublimely silly fashion spoof.
Bowie appears as himself, as
judge in a male models’ walk-off
contest. “OK boys, let’s go to
work.”
The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me
Lunch (Eric Idle, 2003)
Bowie cameos as himself,
holding forth on the career of
the mock Beatles in Eric Idle’s
anticlimactic second take of his
much-loved pop spoof.
The Prestige
(Christopher Nolan, 2006)
A suitable title for a film that,
at last, makes appropriate use
of Bowie’s elder statesman
aura; he’s imposing (and “dry,
amusing”: New York Times) as
inventor Nikola Tesla in Nolan’s
adaptation of the Christopher
Priest novel.
ABOVE Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006)
Arthur and the Invisibles
(Luc Besson, 2006)
Bowie does voice work on this
children’s animation, as the evil
emperor Maltazard (voiced by
singer Alain Bashung in the
French version).
August (Austin Chick, 2008)
Bowie plays a corporate raider
in this ill-received Sundance-
premiered drama about the
pre-9/11 dot-com bubble, starring
Josh Hartnett as a startup
entrepreneur.
Bandslam (Todd Graff, 2009)
Rock-themed comedy about a
young music fan, and a hardcore
Bowie obsessive. Another cameo
as himself, in his final screen
appearance.
36
From David Bowie’s fascination with Buster Keaton, Peter Cook and Spike Milligan to his performances
in Extras and Zoolander, comedy played a central but undervalued role in his dazzling career
Chameleon Comedian
In death, we probably know more about
David Bowie than we ever did when he
was alive. He spent many decades furiously
bombarding us with images and ideas, but
when he disappeared in 2004, following a
heart attack on stage – more than content
to wander around Manhattan in a baseball
cap, carrying a Greek newspaper to con-
found passers-by who might think they
had spotted him – he became invisible. He
wasn’t interested in convening or pivoting,
and certainly wasn’t interested in sharing
himself with the world. Not at the time.
Since his passing, however, much of
his life has opened up – so much so that
we might already know a little too much
about him. Each month there is another
book, another documentary, another
embroidered memoir from an acolyte or
band member.
IMAGE: STEVE SCHAPIRO/CORBIS VIA GET TY IMAGES
BY DYLAN JONES
Of course, we can’t, and shouldn’t blame
anyone for pursuing these paths, but in the
process, the king of enigma has become
someone who is now so ubiquitous that it
is difficult to find new things to say about
him. There are a few black holes left in
his life, and I know of one director who
is exploring a genuinely exciting sliver of
Bowie’s hinterland, but we can also look
forward to another tsunami of what could
broadly be categorised as ‘stuff we don’t
need to know’.
There is a ubiquity of imagery now,
too, as there is from every moment in the
extraordinary 77-year history of post-war
pop culture. The long narrative arc of
the rock era is finally nearing its end, and
consequently every frame of every roll of
film, every minute of every radio interview
and every loose-lipped quote is now being
catalogued, burnished and put up for
public display.
Ever the early adopter, in a sense Bowie
has been responsible for this, as his death
seemed to kickstart this massive collective
revaluation of the period. There are now
so many photographs of him on Instagram
that it almost seems as though the social
media platform was invented for him.
Out of all the hundreds of thousands of
images of the man that now swirl around
us, the one I always find most intriguing is
the one of Bowie on a train, heartily read-
ing a copy of Viz magazine and laughing his
little cotton socks off (trust me, they would
have been cotton). This is not the Bowie
we expect, this is not the austere, aloof BELOW
rock god we have been taught to worship. Bowie posing with a biography
of one of his comic idols, Buster
We expect to see Bowie photographed in Keaton, on the set of The Man
stark lighting, frowning perhaps, thinking Who Fell to Earth (1976)
 DAVID BOWIE 37

long and hard about his art, his craft, his

toil, and publicly demonstrating what an
exceptional artist he is.
But Bowie had a keen sense of humour,
he loved a dirty joke, and he always tried
to demonstrate this when it was appropri-
ate. Why else would he have appeared in
a 2006 episode of Extras, Ricky Gervais’s
glorious BBC sitcom, in which Bowie
creates a coruscating song, ‘Little Fat
Man’, that belittles Gervais’s loser charac-
ter Andy Millman, as the comedian looks
on? In this three-minute performance,
Bowie proved what an instinctive comic
actor he was, and makes you wish he
had pursued more parts like this, rather
than some of the many dramatic roles he
secured. (In 2016, Judd Apatow tweeted,
“Bowie on Extras was as good as comedy
gets.”) Bowie had emailed Gervais after
meeting him in London. “I don’t know
how he got my email address,” Gervais
said. “He’s like the FBI. But he said: ‘So
I watched The Office. I laughed. What do
I do now?’”
Indeed, why would he have appeared,
brilliantly, in a cameo in Zoolander (2001)?
Often playing against type, Bowie was
not afraid to look foolish. He also loved
Spongebob, so much so that he voiced a
role in an extended episode in 2007, Sponge-
bob’s Atlantis Squarepantis.
His personal humour was actually quite
base, which is why he enjoyed a lot of tel-
evision comedians from the 1970s and 80s
(he loved Peter Cook, Spike Milligan and
Eric Idle) and also why he liked slapstick.
In Rolling Stone in 1979 he said, “There’s
still a lot of Buster Keaton in everything I There wasn’t a and you weren’t even in it. Imagine how remotely comic in the Thin White Duke
do.” When Bowie found out that one of his we felt... It was my 32 Elvis Presley movies years either, but seeing that Bowie was
favourite photographers, Steve Schapiro, lot of comedy in rolled into one.” The thing is, he was most then attempting to be the world’s best
had worked with the Hollywood star in Ziggy Stardust successful as an actor when he wasn’t cocaine addict, this is hardly surprising.
his later years, Bowie was instantly won or the Thin trying too hard. I didn’t love him when he But when he loosened up later in his
over. “When David heard that I had pho- played Andy Warhol in Basquiat (1996), career, you could see that comedy was
tographed Buster Keaton, one of his great- White Duke, and I didn’t much like him in things like always lurking just below the surface.
est heroes, we instantly became friends,” he but when he Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) as About 30 years ago, I was at the Sunday
wrote in his 2016 book Bowie. Bowie even loosened up later his ability to impersonate people wasn’t Times, working on the magazine. One after-
paid homage to the actor in the video for always what it needed to be. But when noon the phone rang and I immediately
his 1993 song, ‘Miracle Goodnight’. “He in his career, he was engaging or casual, as in Absolute picked it up, expecting a call from a PR
also loved Tony Hancock and the Ealing you could see Beginners (1986) or Temple’s short film about a story I was trying to set up. But
comedies,” recalled Absolute Beginners direc- that comedy was Jazzin’ for Blue Jean (1984), he could be nat- it wasn’t a PR on the end of the line, it was
tor Julien Temple. “He could watch Tony ural, and consequently funny. He should David Bowie.
Hancock’s The Rebel on a weekly basis, and always lurking have done more roles where he could “Bloody hell, you don’t sound very much
he would laugh and laugh and laugh.” just below have played the man he was when he like my mother” he said. “Are you putting
Bowie was a genuinely funny man. the surface wasn’t performing or being interviewed on a voice? Ha, ha!”
Furiously bright, and able to decipher a by print journalists. If you watch him on I had interviewed Bowie the week
situation immediately (something every chat shows he could be a riot. before for a project he was involved with
famous person needs in order to prolong This actually isn’t so surprising. Before at the Imperial War Museum, and he obvi-
their career), Bowie would often use Bowie became successful with Ziggy Star- ously still had my number in his book, on
comedy to defuse a difficult issue or neuter dust in 1972 he had spent almost a decade the same page as his mother’s. Charm-
a problematic journalist. Whenever I inter- trying other ways into the entertainment ingly, he stayed on the line for over five
viewed him, I could tell when he was nerv- industry. He had been in an R&B band minutes, gossiping, laughing and evidently
ous about a question by the way in which and a folk duo, he’d tried mainstream pop gassed that there had been a mix-up. He
he smiled and tried to turn his answer into and even attempted a career as a children’s wasn’t embarrassed, wasn’t chilly, but was
a joke. Like all celebrities he occasionally entertainer. He’d done mime, jazz, and genuinely funny, suggesting other people
displayed his thin skin, but invariably he even gone down the comedy route for he might have called by mistake. Was he
would use humour to deflect and disguise a while, masquerading as a poor man’s being ingratiating? I don’t think so; he
his true feelings. Anthony Newley. Bowie didn’t appear could have simply offered a quick “Sorry,
He used it in his acting, too. Bowie fully formed at the start of the 70s, and in Dylan!” and put the phone down. But he
MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD/ALAMY

wasn’t the best actor, but he was self-
aware enough to know this. In an inter-
view with the NME in 1980, he said,
about the appalling Just a Gigolo (1978),
in which he had starred with Marlene
Dietrich, “Listen, you were disappointed,
ABOVE
Bowie with Ben Stiller and Owen
Wilson in Zoolander (2001)
fact already had ten years of experience
behind him, experiences which all fed
in to his new, sexy space-age guise. No,
there wasn’t a lot of comedy in Ziggy Star-
dust, but then the character didn’t call for
it. There wasn’t a lot of call for anything
was a funny man, and he was enjoying a
funny situation.
Who knows, it could have been the
germ for a little film, or a sitcom, or some-
thing with a proper punchline.
David Bowie: wasted comic.
38
David Bowie’s performance in Ōshima
Nagisa’s 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr.
Lawrence is among his very best. Here
the producer Jeremy Thomas recalls
their time shooting in the South Pacific
INTERVIEW BY LIZ TRAY
‘He was
happy
to be
It’s fair to say that 1982 was a busy year for
David Bowie. It started with the filming
of Tony Scott’s erotic vampire picture The
Hunger. It ended with him recording his
most successful album, Let’s Dance, with
Nile Rodgers. And in the middle, he found
himself on a desert island with legendary
buried
auteur Ōshima Nagisa making a brutal
prisoner-of-war drama, Merry Christmas,
Mr. Lawrence. Below, the film’s producer,
Jeremy Thomas, discusses the shoot,
happy accidents and Bowie, his friend of
more than 30 years.
up to
Liz Tray:After Ōshima saw Bowie in The
Elephant Man on Broadway, in 1980, he
asked him to be part of his next film. How
did you get involved?
Jeremy Thomas: I’d sat next to Ōshima in the
his neck
year that [Jerzy Skolimowski’s] The Shout
[1978] won the Grand Prix at Cannes. He
was in his kimono and I was a young guy.
The prize-giving dinner was different than
today. It was an intimate affair. And he was
very nice. We couldn’t speak any language,
in the
but we had drinks together and laughed,
then exchanged business cards. About
three and a half years later, he got in touch
and said, “I want to make this prison book.
Are you interested?” I loved Ōshima’s films
and knew them well, so I jumped at the
sand for
opportunity. We redeveloped the script
by Paul Mayersberg and Ōshima wanted
Robert Redford initially, he was blond
and blue-eyed. During casting, Sakamoto
[Ryuichi] and Kitano [Takeshi] came in
and then Ōshima said, “Can you get me to
David Bowie?”
nights
I instantly embraced the idea. He was
a great actor. He’s a performer. He per-
formed in the film, and in life. I had to get
to him, [but] not via his big management.
Because that’s the way it works on some-
thing like this. We had two mutual friends,
on end’
Italians who lived in London, who were
friendly with David and they arranged a
dinner. I said, “Do you know Ōshima?” He
said, “Of course I know him” and reeled off
all these film titles. I said, “Well, he wants
you, he needs you.”
IMAGE: © RECORDED PICTURE COMPANY
LT:Bowie had a significant and lifelong
interest in Japanese culture, film, theatre
and literature.
JT: He knew all about it. It wasn’t like he
was somebody going, “Who is this film-
maker?” He was such a clever man, David.
He knew everything about culture and
Japanese cinema. Ōshima was a ground-
breaking filmmaker. The content of his
films was radical and Bowie was very at-
tracted to the idea and put his heart and
soul into it, turning up in Rarotonga [in
the Cook Islands, where a large part of
the film was shot] on a desert island that
was eight miles around. It was very in the
zeitgeist, Japan, at that moment. Ōshima
was one of the greats and I think his films
are much neglected by the public, like
The Ceremony [1970] or Diary of a Shinjuku
Thief or Boy [both 1969]. He’s fallen out of
fashion but his films should be cherished.
Especially when you think of what he was
saying about Japanese society… I mean,
Parasite [Bong Joon Ho, 2019] is just like
one of his films, for example, what Ōshima
was trying to expose.
LT: By then Bowie had left Berlin and
started doing films but was about to take
a serious left-turn and make himself into a
million-selling stadium superstar.
JT: Yes, he was doing Let’s Dance, so he left
Rarotonga after filming and went to Aus-
tralia to do that song’s video with a lot of
people from the film. Many who worked
on that video were our crew, who he’d got
to know.
LT: A harrowing prisoner of war camp
drama, set in World War II, is an emo-
tive and complex subject to make a film
about, and then you juxtapose it with this
pure pop record he’s about to make.
JT: A lot of people didn’t understand. It was
a prisoner-of-war-camp film and maybe
what was radical about it, it wasn’t The
Bridge on the River Kwai [1957], with military
uniforms and saluting and all that; it was

not a camp like we’d seen before. In fact, it
was a fantastic love story between two men
[Bowie and Sakamoto, playing Major Cel-
liers and Capt Yonoi]. I understood what
it was immediately. It was subtext, but it
was a different sort of love, an admiration.
Celliers, his initials were JC, Jesus Christ.
He’s a blond God to Sakamoto. There is
respect between military men. [Australian
actor] Jack Thompson’s and Tom Conti’s
parts, they’re very nuanced. And Takeshi,
what he says at the end, that’s incredible.
“We are victims of men who think they’re
right.” But that’s the truth. And you can
see that we are currently [laughs] a victim
of people who think they’re right.
LT: Were you worried in those days about
how the audience would feel regarding
the queer subtext?
JT: It’s not the way I do things. Of course,
I’m thinking about the audience in one way.
But I also wouldn’t be making the films
I’ve made if I was thinking about them. I’m
thinking about: can this be a magnificent
film which will rock people’s socks off? And
sometimes I manage. But the thought is
not always, “Oh, is this going to be big box
office?” Because if there was somebody
who knew about that they’d be locked in
a box and fed caviar! A few people have
had that moment in their careers where
they’ve had the Midas touch, but it’s not
what I want. I’m seeking something else
with my choices and Ōshima fitted right
into that because I was an incredible fan.
And the subject matter was something I
could be involved with because we put in
the Britishness. We brought a very English
group in: the production designers; from
Chariots of Fire [1981] we had the art direc-
tor, Andrew Sanders; and Lee Tamahori
[Once Were Warriors, 1994] was the first AD.
IMAGE: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY
LT :What were your f irst impressions
of Bowie?
J T: Just a relaxed, easygoing, approach-
able man. I found him always to be just a
regular guy. Just a guy who didn’t have to
do anything with us. He came on and did
the Lindsay Kemp mime [in the cell scene,
as the firing squad comes to get him] and
Ōshima let him do it. He was a very culti-
vated person to be with. With the biggest
stars, there was the impression you have:
what they are is their public image, which
is maybe miscalculated.
When you work with somebody, you
see another side of them… but you can
be unlucky. I’ve been unlucky a couple of
times. [But] normally, it’s just the person
at work. A nice colleague who was really
happy doing this film. Yeah, [he’d ride
around on] the bicycle, among people
who never knew who he was. He cycled
around, he was free, people left him alone.
LT :Sakamoto wears make-up in the
film, and I read that, in the 1940s, it was
not uncommon for Japanese soldiers to
wear it.
J T : Well, that was very much Bowie.
Antony Clavet [who had done Bowie’s
make-up for Just a Gigolo, 1978, for Lodger’s
1979 album cover and for The Hunger] was
the make-up artist who had done Bowie
on tour and Bowie suggested to Ōshima,
“Listen, why don’t we get something spe-
cial for Ryuichi?”, who loved the idea.
Clavet did some very stylised make-up,
which was a miracle.
LT:The Cannes press conference is on the
film’s DVD extras. I enjoyed the relation-
ship between Bowie and Ōshima on the
panel, how they were together.
DAVID BOWIE 39
‘Bowie knew JT: Ōshima was an extraordinary man and
Bowie had a deep respect for him. He’d do
everything about whatever he told him, you know? He saw
Japanese cinema. Ōshima as a teacher and Ōshima gave him
Ōshima was a the space to do what he wanted. Such as
when he was happy to be buried up to his
groundbreaking neck in the sand, for nights on end. He was
filmmaker. The sitting on a chair in the hole before we put
content of his on the sand. You get him out quick. And
the moth [landing on Bowie’s head, in the
films was radical night scene] was a coincidence.
and Bowie was
very attracted LT: Were there any other happy accidents
in filming?
to the idea’
J T : Yes, the kiss [where Celliers kisses
Yonoi on each cheek, which seals his fate].
It’s slow-mo like that because the camera
jerked and we didn’t know for two or three
weeks, we had to send the rushes from
the desert island to Tokyo. Ōshima said
“OK, I’m going to print that,” click-click-
click, it was like 12 frames. That’s called the
random quality of art!
LT :After the f ilm, did you want to
work with him again? Or did you just
stay friends?
J T: I remained very friendly with him. I
probably saw him a couple years before
he died. Whenever I went to New York,
we went out, maybe for a tofu dinner with
him and Iman. We had very good mutual
friends and he stayed friendly, not an inti-
mate friend but a good friend in the city.
He was a cinema fan. We talked about
OPPOSITE, TOP films. He knew everything about every-
Producer Jeremy Thomas, first
assistant director Lee Tamahori
thing, a Renaissance man.
and Bowie during the filming I made Naked Lunch [in 1991, with
of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,
in a never-before-seen photo
David Cronenberg] and David told
me that when he was younger, he’d go
BELOW
Ōshima Nagisa (left)
to Soho with the book in the pocket of
with Bowie on set his jacket, peeking out, just to show that
he understood what was going on, though
he didn’t really understand what was in
the book at the time. He was an incred-
ible person who brought a bit of that fairy
dust into Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
And he knew that and he was very clever
with that. But he wasn’t overbearing. He
was a joy to behold, the way he was dig-
nified. Of course, I had worked with Nic
Roeg, I had done those two films with
him, Bad Timing [1980] and Eureka [1983].
So we also had that bond, having [both]
worked with Nic. Roeg was a very unusual
man, a brilliant person, brilliant teacher,
brilliant explainer.
LT :
He worked with Julien Temple as
well, just after you, on Absolute Beginners
[1986]. And on a short film, a promo for
one of his singles, called Jazzin’ for Blue
Jean [1984], which is incredibly funny.
And he’s a very good actor in that.
JT: Well, that never stopped, and in the end
he was working with Tilda [Swinton, in
the video for ‘The Stars (Are out Tonight)’
in 2013]. He never stopped being on the
forefront of imagination.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is available
to stream now on BFI Player
40
NEUTRON:
With their shared interests in
esoteric ideas and mutual capacity
for disrupting the mainstream,
STORYBOARDS
the thought of David Bowie
and Derek Jarman collaborating
is tantalising, if perhaps hard
to picture. And yet it nearly
happened. Jarman’s Neutron was to
FROM DEREK
be a brutal, post-apocalyptic film
set in a police state following a
nuclear holocaust and was inspired
by the Book of Revelations, Jean
JARMAN’S
Cocteau and William Blake. Bowie
would provide songs and play
Aeon, a romantic, captivated by the
idea of Arcadia. His opposite, the
PROPOSED FILM
street activist revolutionary Topaz
(a role lined up for Steven Berkoff ),
meanwhile, would take a different
path, only for the film to reveal the
convergence of the two characters.
WITH DAVID BOWIE
This visionary dialectic, belonging
to a tradition encompassing Persona
(1966), Performance (1970) and
Fight Club (1999), spoke to both
Jarman’s and Bowie’s interests
in the Jungian shadow, plus the
BY WILLIAM FOWLER former’s ongoing questions about
STORYBOARDS BY CHRISTOPHER HOBBS the role of the artist in society
and the influence of his co-writer,
the young leftist Lee Drysdale. It
also suited Bowie, who had often
talked about his schizophrenic
half-brother, Terry Burns, who had.
and about his own drug-taking,
which had at times caused the lines
between himself and his characters,
from Ziggy onwards, to blur.
A script, storyboards and even
costume designs for Neutron were
already being developed when
Bowie visited Jarman’s Charing
Cross Road flat in around 1981.
The meeting went well but when
Bowie left, Jarman retained
his discarded cigarette packet,
propping it up on his mantelpiece,
as if to show it off to friends. When
Bowie returned, the votive object
was still there. Presented alongside
various mystical paraphernalia,
including an original bound edition
of Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books
of Occult Philosophy (1531), Bowie
thought darker forces were afoot
and bailed. Or at least that was
how Jarman liked to tell it. In
truth, Bowie probably just got
distracted. Soon afterwards, Let’s
Dance dropped and his entire world
changed, again. Interviewed in
1999, Bowie vociferously denied
he was scared of Jarman’s occult
interests. “I would have given my
arm to work with Jarman.” He even
kept the script and drawings.
Back in the 1980s, Bowie also
kept some of the ideas, or so it
might seem. In 1984, collaborating
with Julien Temple, he made the
short, Grammy Award-winning
music film Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, in
which he played two characters:
the clumsy, comic Vic and the
flamboyant rock star Screaming
Lord Byron. The period saw
film and music culture splinter.
While Bowie became more self-
consciously commercial, at least
for a time, Jarman made The Angelic
Conversation (1985), scored by
queer occult band Coil, and The
Last of England (1987), the latter
drawing on the tone and imagery
of Neutron as it spat out Jarman’s
anger at the Aids crisis and the
Tory government. In retrospect,
that Jarman-Bowie collaboration
appears like something of a
significant ‘sliding doors’ moment.
ART WORK BY CHRISTOPHER HOBBS/BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
DAVID BOWIE 41

‘She was the Aphrodite
of the 20th century
And she killed herself.
So what does that mean?’
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde offers meticulously recreated fragments from the tragic life of Marilyn Monroe.
Here the director explains to Christina Newland why his portrait, like every other version of the star, is
inevitably a fantasy and why his film functions more like a piece of music than a work of narrative fiction
The gossip about Andrew Dominik’s
Blonde, his decade-in-the-making adapta-
tion of Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel of
the same name, is almost as ubiquitous
at this point as Marilyn Monroe herself.
The film, following Oates’ story, is a thinly
veiled fictionalisation of Monroe’s life
and death, with a particular focus on her
difficult childhood, her troubled relation-
ships with men and her own gynaecologi-
cal trouble, as she struggles to bridge the
gap between Marilyn the star and Norma
Jeane the traumatised woman. Suffice it to
say: there’s plenty to gossip about.
The film, which runs to a generous 2
hours 47 minutes, is full of surreal imagery
and sometimes astonishingly authentic
recreations of the visual vernacular of Mon-
roe’s life. On the face of it, it shares with
two of Dominik’s previous films – Chopper
(2000) and The Assassination of Jesse James by
the Coward Robert Ford (2007) – a dark inter-
est in imagined tales about larger-than-
life real people. The granting of the film’s
NC-17 (UK 18) rating, which prevents
many cinemas in the US from showing
it at all, resulted in much online intrigue
following a difficult hiatus after the film’s
shoot in 2019, during which editor Jen-
nifer Lame was brought in, according to
Dominik in Screen International, “to curb the
excesses of the movie”. Further media buzz
revolved around an aesthetically stunning
but otherwise enigmatic trailer drop prior
to the film’s premiere at the Venice Film
Festival in early September.
Speaking on a video call from Mel-
bourne, the respected Australian auteur
has an admirably even-keeled approach to
what I must admit are increasingly difficult
philosophical questions about the nature of
his project. Spirited and amicable though
the conversation is, it soon becomes clear
we are approaching Monroe – or at least,
Monroe’s fictionalised screen avatar – from
diametrically opposed perspectives.
At one point, Dominik mentions a new
television documentary, Reframed: Marilyn
Monroe, that purports to reclaim Monroe
with a feminist POV, saying that he hasn’t
seen it but feels that the entire gambit is
a mistake. I don’t have much choice but
to come clean and let him know that I’m
involved in it, as a talking head. Later, he
seems genuinely gobsmacked when I tell
him that many of my friends and colleagues
watch – and enjoy – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1953), which he regards, like most of Mon-
roe’s films, as what he calls “cultural arte-
facts”. Below, you can find a condensed
version of our lively sparring session over
what is sure to be the biggest conversation
starter at Venice this year.
Christina Newland: Blonde is a pretty
dense novel. How did you come across
it and how do you even begin to consider
structuring its adaptation for the screen?
Andrew Dominik: I didn’t think of making it
into a film when I first read it in, say, 2002.
I wasn’t that interested in it. But there was
a story I was interested in telling, which
is about how childhood drama shapes an
adult’s perception of the world, and I could
sort of see that within Blonde. I’m not even
sure if I knew that consciously.
But when the idea came to adapt it, it
was really about that. I tend to do that
stuff instinctively. The book is like a shat-
tered mirror – there are all these little
shards and it circles around, returning to
certain memories. It’s the feeling of being
inside somebody’s anxious thought pro-
cess. So I had to straighten that out a little.
CN:Can you tell me about recreating, in
such detail, say, the colour photos taken
by Milton Greene [who shot Monroe
more than 50 times]? How do you go
about that from a technical perspective?
AD: There are 28 addresses of hers that we
know of. So I just went to all of those places
to see which ones still existed, [to find out]
which photographs were taken there. But
the visual idea of the movie is to reference
the collective memory. It’s a weird déjà vu,
but the meaning of the images is different.
So, the image of her and Arthur Miller at
43
the window is a romantic image, but in the
film, it’s kind of ugly. She’s trapped in our
memory of her and trying to break out of
it. It’s a movie about the unconscious. And
we only know as much as she does because
she’s essentially living an unexamined life.
C N : And in terms of Ana de Armas’ in-
credible transformation, beyond hair and
make-up, how did you approach lighting
her and ensuring she resembled Monroe?
AD: We had all kinds of rules. Ana looks
more like Marilyn if you have the camera
‘We had all kinds up high. And if you’ve got a 50mm lens,
of rules. Ana her face – it’s more like Marilyn’s. We were
always trying to make her look like specific
looks more like images of Marilyn. It’s well thought-out.
Marilyn if you I’m not interested in reality, I’m interested
have the camera in the images. So I selected every image
of Marilyn I could find and then tried to
up high. It’s well stage scenes around those images. You’re
thought-out. I’m constantly referring to them.
not interested
CN: Another key aspect of the film is that
in reality, I’m you swap aspect ratios a lot, and move
interested in between colour and black and white fre-
the images’ quently, too. What’s the rationale for that?
AD:There’s no story sense to it. It’s just
based on the photographs. So if a photo-
graph was, you know, four by three, then
we do it four by three. There’s no logic to it,
other than to try to know her life, visually.
CN:What kind of conversations did you
have with Ana about embodying Monroe,
both physically and psychologically?
AD: I mean, she understood that there’s two
jobs: one is the anthropological, which
is that they look and sound like this. It’s
showing people photographs and saying,
“How can we make her look like this?”
Then Ana is trying to get her speech pat-
terns, her mannerisms. And a lot of that
changed over the years. When [Monroe]
started out she would stress every syl-
OPPOSITE
Ana de Armas recreating The
lable. By the time she’s got [acting coach
Seven Year Itch (1955), in Blonde Lee] Strasberg and been introduced to the
44
Method, it’s a different style of acting. In
the middle, you also have that 1950s car-
toonish presentational thing. Then there’s
a handful of interviews. So Ana is taking all
that stuff. Then we’re talking about what
person in what part. Then we’d do our
scenes together; I’d read all the other char-
acters and she would play her part.
A lot of her performance in the film is
comprised of single takes, more so than
I would do usually, where [in the past] I
would end up shaping performances a lot
more than I had to do with her. She was
pretty fucking incredible.
CN: For someone so beloved by women,
we don’t see Monroe in the film with many
close female relationships or friendships.
No Jane Russell, or anyone like that.
AD: Well, that’s the way the book is, and I
think it’s the way it was. I think Marilyn was
a guy’s girl. I don’t think she was a woman
who had a lot of female friends. But then I
think she was a woman who didn’t have a
lot of friends. There is a sense that we want
to reinvent her according to today’s politi-
cal concerns. But she was a person who
was extraordinarily self-destructive.
CN:I guess my feeling is that there’s a grey
area somewhere between victimhood and
empowerment.
AD: Well, I think she was clearly an extraor-
dinarily powerful person. But I don’t think
she was built for success in the way that
people see it today. So with everyone there
are moments of strength, and people want
to say that she took control of her life. But
she wanted to destroy her life.
CN: Would you say that in this story you
see Monroe as a symbolic vessel for a
story about childhood trauma or abuse?
AD: I’ve read everything there is to read
about Marilyn Monroe. I’ve met people
that knew her. I’ve done an enormous
amount of research. But in the end, it’s
about the book. And adapting the book
is really about adapting the feelings that
the book gave me. I see the film, in some
ways, as Joyce’s vision of Marilyn, which
is also really Joyce. So I think the film is
about the meaning of Marilyn Monroe.
Or a meaning. She was symbolic of
something. She was the Aphrodite of the
20th century, the American goddess of
love. And she killed herself. So what does
that mean?
Joyce is trying to understand how it
expresses a certain female experience, or
a certain human experience. You have to
play fast and loose with the truth in order
to have a certain narrative drive. But there
are a lot of psychological processes that
are dramatised in Blonde, a lot of Lacan-
‘We feel we
ian and Freudian ideas. For me it was just
have a special the scenes I found compelling. I went with
intimacy with my instinct and wrote it pretty quick. And
her character. I didn’t change it that much, even though
it was sitting around for 14 years. I know
That we could the ways in which this is different from
have saved what people seem to agree happened. Not
that everyone’s sure. Nobody really knows
her somehow.
what the fuck happened. So it’s all fiction
And maybe anyway, in my opinion.
the flipside
CN:Do you think the film does much to
of that is a
unpack or reverse the idea of Monroe
punishment being crazy or difficult?
fantasy, or a
AD: I think… it explains why. I mean, eve-
sexual fantasy’
ryone’s crazy. When we’re talking about
Marilyn, whether you’re reading a book
by Gloria Steinem [Marilyn: Norma Jeane,
1988] or by Norman Mailer [Marilyn:
A Biography, 1973 – which Steinem’s book
was written in response to], both are pro-
jections and fantasies. Marilyn represents
a kind of rescue fantasy. And the film is
no different. The film is a rescue fantasy.
We feel we have a special intimacy with
her character. That’s the attraction to
Marilyn, that feeling that we’re the only
ones who understand. That we could
ABOVE have saved her somehow. And maybe the
Ana de Armas in Blonde,
re-enacting Monroe’s performance
flipside of that is a punishment fantasy, or
in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) a sexual fantasy.
 BLONDE 45

CN: Can you elaborate on that? Because I think it’s very important to un- ‘Blonde is AD: Well, I think her life would have been
derstand that women in particular had to incredibly unhappy. There are moments of
A D : Well, she was a strange sex symbol exist within the confines of the world that
supposed joy and love, but years of unhappiness. If
because she doesn’t have to die at the end they lived in. But I feel there are cultural to leave you she found joy, she could potentially be alive
[of her films] like a Barbara Stanwyck or a repercussions to making certain choices shaking. Like today. You could be talking to her.
Rita Hayworth. But she had to be a little in terms of how we present a figure from
baby. So, when she sings ‘Diamonds Are a the past. What does it say to an audience
an orphaned CN: Tell me about your use of foetal imag-
Girl’s Best Friend’ – it’s like, is that sisterly that we’re not seeing that she formed her rhesus monkey ery in the film: of the unborn baby in the
advice, “If you’re gonna fuck, make sure own production company, or that she was in the snow. womb and with some scenes from inside
you get paid”? Or is it just romanticised involved in opposing the anti-communist the uterus during an abortion.
whoredom? witch-hunts by the House Un-American
It’s a howl of
Activities Committee in the 1950s? Or pain or rage’ AD: Well, she wants to have a child be-
CN: There are scenes of sexual violence that she fought against segregation on cause she wants to rescue herself. Her
in Blonde. I’m thinking particularly of behalf of Ella Fitzgerald, and so on? own experience of motherhood is disas-
the one in the studio mogul’s office. We trous, based on her own mother [who
know these things happened and still do AD: That stuff is not really what the film is spent years in a psychiatric institution].
in Hollywood. But what do you think the about. It’s about a person who is going to But that baby is real to her, and so that’s
film is saying about female victimhood be killing themself. So it’s trying to examine why you see the baby. I don’t think the
that we don’t already know? the reasons why they did that. It’s not look- scene would feel as real [otherwise]. And
ing at her lasting legacy. I mean, she’s not also, she’s having a reluctant abortion. So
AD: I don’t look at it on those terms. It just even terribly concerned with any of that it would be pretty horrible. I’m trying to
happens, it’s almost glossed over, and stuff. If you look at Marilyn Monroe, she’s create her experience. I’m trying to put
then the feeling follows her later. I guess got everything that society tells us is desir- the audience through the same thing. I’m
in a way I don’t see the film as essentially able. She’s famous. She’s beautiful. She’s not concerned with being tasteful.
female. I see it as being about an unloved rich. If you look at the Instagram version
child. I relate to it. of her life, she’s got it all. And she killed her- CN:
Blonde got an NC-17 rating in the US.
self. Now, to me, that’s the most important What do you make of that?
CN: Do you see anything optimistic in the thing. It’s not the rest. It’s not the moments
story? of strength. OK, she wrested control away AD: Well, I don’t think it’s reflective of com-
from the men at the studio, because, you munity standards. Personally, I feel like
AD: I mean, no. Blonde is supposed to leave know, women are just as powerful as men. the film does colour within the lines. Now
you shaking. Like an orphaned rhesus But that’s really looking at it through a lens people are expecting something a lot more
monkey in the snow. It’s a howl of pain or that’s not so interesting to me. I’m more in- salacious. It’s a drag to get [an] NC-17 be-
rage. Of all the films I’ve made, it’s the one terested in how she feels, I’m interested in cause it means people freak out. And we
that strikes me the most differently each what her emotional life was like. can’t get billboards.
time I watch it. BELOW
Andrew Dominik (far left)
CN: Your version, or Oates’ version, of this on set with Ana de Armas and
CN: And in terms of Netflix’s feeling about
CN: What you said about the idea of trans- character is so relentlessly unhappy. Even Bobby Cannavale, who plays Blonde: was your original cut much longer
The Ex-Athlete, based on
posing modern values on people from though she’s capable of radiating so much Monroe’s second husband, the
than the one that exists now?
the past, I agree that that’s not healthy. joy on the screen. baseballer Joe DiMaggio
A D : It wasn’t like [The Assassination of] Jesse
James. It’s my film. It’s just stuff that people
have made up on the internet, that there
was someone putting their thumb on me.
They worried about it for all the obvi-
ous reasons, but in the end, they let you
do what you want. Blonde functions like a
piece of music rather than in a narrative
nature. It sets up its own rules and you
have to pay attention to see how they echo
as you go along. So it’s working by a sort of
different criteria.

CN: Do you think there’s ever a risk that

the audience takes Blonde as gospel about
Monroe, even though it’s clearly based on
a novel? And does it matter?

AD: I don’t think that matters. Why would

it matter?

CN: I mean, it’s one of those things. Citi-

zen Kane is a masterpiece, but Marion
Davies – and William Randolph Hearst
– became understood solely through it for
a long time.

AD: Does anyone care, really? People who

make films tend to think they’re incredibly
important. But it’s just a movie about Mar-
ilyn Monroe. And there are going to be a
lot more movies about Marilyn Monroe.

Blonde will stream on Netflix in the UK from

28 September and will be reviewed in our next issue
46 BLONDE

There’s something
about marilyn
Andrew Dominik’s picks from
Monroe’s back catalogue

BEST FILM: SOME LIKE IT

HOT (BILLY WILDER, 1959)
“Obviously, this is her best film.”

BEST PERFORMANCE: THE

PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL
(LAURENCE OLIVIER, 1957)
“My personal favourite
performance is The Prince and
The Showgirl. She’s unbelievable.
In that movie, she’s so fucking
good. I didn’t even think she
was a good actress until I saw
that film, and I realised, ‘Oh
my god, she’s one of the greats.’
That’s the thing about Marilyn
Monroe. She hijacks the movie,
and whatever’s going on, you
can’t take your eyes off her.”

MOST REALISTIC FILM:

DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK
(ROY WARD BAKER, 1952)
“I think she’s playing a
character who’s sort of based
on her mother. We show that in
the film, in her audition scene.
If you watch that movie, you
get the sense of her. A line like:
‘I’ll be any way you want me to
be.’ She’s so desperate for the
man to stay. There’s no sense of
irony, or self-examination. It’s
completely naked, the way she
does it. It’s pretty amazing.”

MOST MEMORABLE
MOMENT: ‘HAPPY
BIRTHDAY, MR
PRESIDENT’ (1962)
“I think of the ‘late WORST FILM: THE
Marilyn Monroe’, and that MISFITS (JOHN
performance is almost HUSTON, 1961)
pornographic. In a way, it’s “She’s supposed to represent
like a human sacrifice, but it’s some kind of purity in the
a compelling piece of film. lives of these three broken-
It’s really fucked up.” down cowboys who are
somehow transformed for the
better through her. But really
what the movie is about is a
bunch of creepy dudes trying
to fuck this pilled-up divorcée
who’s a mess. It’s disturbing
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE/SHUT TERSTOCK

when you look at the film.

I see it as these men are
trying to take something from
somebody who has nothing
to give.”
48

IMAGES: CRITERION COLLECTION

Portrait of
the girl on fire
When David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was
released 30 years ago, critics and audiences, in love with the
quirkiness of Twin Peaks the TV series, were dismayed by the
film’s frank portrayal of incest and abuse – but the intervening
decades have seen its reputation transformed. Here the
film’s editor Mary Sweeney talks to Nicole Flattery

PORTRAIT OF MARY SWEENEY BY LENA HERZOG
In 1992, David Lynch’s film Twin Peaks:
Fire Walk with Me premiered at Cannes to
a reception notably different from that for
his idiosyncratic and beloved television
show Twin Peaks (1990-91). As if to set out
his intentions, the first shot of Fire Walk
with Me is a television set being smashed.
If Twin Peaks dealt in nostalgia – the fabri-
cated 1950s setting, the diner and apple-
pie cosiness – then Fire Walk with Me is
anti-nostalgia. In Twin Peaks, the murdered
Laura Palmer is completely absent, a void
for the projected grief and desires of the
townspeople; in Fire Walk with Me she is, to
borrow a phrase from another Lynch film,
Mulholland Drive (2001), ‘the girl’. In Twin
Peaks, she’s dead, reverentially wrapped
in plastic; in Fire Walk with Me, she’s very
much alive as Lynch lays bare the sexual
abuse and degradation she has suffered at
the hands of her father. Lynch undoes his
own fictions: everything implicit in Twin
Peaks becomes uncomfortably explicit.
Fire Walk with Me is an unrelenting
scream, and audiences were largely baf-
fled. Critics were cruel. Todd McCarthy
at Variety said, “Laura Palmer, after all the
talk, is not a very interesting or compelling
character and long before the climax has
become a tiresome teenager.” But it’s the
tight focus on Laura – in all her intense,
messy contradictions and scintillatingly
played by Sheryl Lee – that makes Fire
Walk with Me so remarkable. The mythol-
ogy is destroyed. All that remains is the
girl. As Laura tells hapless James Hurley,
“Your Laura disappeared. It’s just me now.”
Following the major success of Twin
Peaks: The Return (2017) and in the wake
49
of #MeToo, Fire Walk with Me has under- ‘It moved world, a darker world. There was already
gone a unique critical rehabilitation. Mary that established dread but the difference
Sweeney, a director, writer, producer and away from the was in the balance.”
long-time collaborator of Lynch who entertainment As Sweeney sees it, this shift in bal-
worked as an editor on the film, spoke value of the TV ance helps to account for the film’s hostile
to me about how its distinctive sense of reception. “It moved away from the enter-
dread was conjured. series. In Twin tainment value of the television series. In
“First of all, David really uses sound, Peaks, there was Twin Peaks, there was all the quirkiness
and sound design, to create a lot of dread all the quirkiness and charm of town life which Fire Walk
in all his films. That’s his playground. A lot with Me didn’t have. It became something
of Fire Walk with Me used things that were and charm of that was dealing in a much deeper, more
established in the pilot of Twin Peaks, right town life which powerful and emotional way with the
from the very beginning. So much of it Fire Walk with Me issues of incest and abuse in the family.
was already there: the location, the ceiling It was more a David Lynch movie, as
fan, the production design, the look, the didn’t have… It opposed to Twin Peaks.”
coral filter. The feature expanded on the was more a David The dismissal of the film had a lot to do
original in many ways, but it was a broader Lynch movie’ with its construction – its elisions, dream-
like logic and fracturing of time. This
approach now seems wholly sympathetic;
a cinematic rendering of how abuse vic-
tims often experience their reality, in ways
that are never linear or straightforward.
As a result of the abuse, Laura Palmer is
split in two: the beautiful, charming prom
queen we know, and the cold, self-immo-
lating figure we don’t.
Duality has always been a preoccupa-
tion of Lynch’s – “What is on the inside and
what is on the outside,” as Sweeney puts it.
“You can see that in Mulholland Drive, Lost
Highway [1997]. Darkness and confusion
is, as he says, a place where he gets a lot
of his creative inspiration. I loved working
OPPOSITE
Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer
in a non-linear fashion, too. It becomes
more like poetry or metaphorical, and the
ABOVE
Lee with Dana Ashbrook
language of cinema is so effective when
as Bobby Briggs speaking in metaphors. You don’t have to
LEFT
use the camera to explain things. That is
Mary Sweeney characteristic of the films we did together
50
– the way the audience is drawn in because
they have to fill things in with their own
emotional landscapes.”
Certainly, Fire Walk with Me is a far more
brutal viewing experience than Twin Peaks
– not that Sweeney was unfamiliar with
brutality: she edited the seventh episode
of Season 2 of Twin Peaks, in which Laura
Palmer’s killer is finally revealed; it’s argu-
ably the most pitch-black episode of televi-
sion ever made. One vast difference is how
much more culpable the townspeople feel
as they watch Laura spiral out of control.
She receives no help – she has to fight on
her own. “In Twin Peaks, it was all in your
imagination,” Sweeney says, “and I think
that was hard on people. You were being
dragged through what she went through.”
IMAGES: CRITERION COLLECTION
Was it a case of Lynch punishing the ‘I loved working PRESCIENT AND CORRECT
viewer for enjoying the spectacle of Laura in a non-linear It’s hard not to see the reappraisal of Fire
Palmer’s death? ‘This is what you get for Walk with Me as stemming from the many
treating a young girl’s abuse and murder fashion… It revelations we’ve had about gender-based
as entertainment: I’m going to show her becomes more violence over the last number of years. It’s
slowly being obliterated’? like poetry or almost taken time for the world to catch
“I don’t know if it was a punishment up with the film; the perspective shift from
per se,” Sweeney says, “I think David just metaphorical, Laura as cipher to heroine now seems
wanted to tell her story, and in the way he and the language deeply understanding.
tells stories. Wild at Heart [1990] preceded of cinema is so “It wasn’t a new subject,” Sweeney says.
it, and he started to get a little wild and “But in Fire Walk with Me it was dealt with
violent with that film. Fire Walk with Me is effective when in a graphic way that was quite disturbing,
the part he didn’t get to tell in the televi- speaking in and it was almost gothic in the depiction
sion series. He loved Twin Peaks, and he metaphors’ of her suffering. I think presentations of
loved how much everybody loved Twin abuse of all kinds have definitely moved in
Peaks but I think he returned to the preoc- that direction since we made that movie.
cupations he had in his filmmaking life at Lynch is prescient.”
the time with Fire Walk with Me.” That prescience is evident not only in his
depiction of victims, but more generally, in
his sense of how we perceive reality. “I show
Lost Highway in a graduate class I teach at
the University of Southern California,
and when that came out it really tripped
people up that the characters changed in
the middle of the movie. Mulholland Drive
expanded on the same idea: you can’t tell
where you are in the story. And when I
show these films now, with the non-linear
access to information and life that everyone
lives with presently, the students don’t bat
an eyelid. He’s an avant-garde filmmaker.
He’s always ahead of the curve and he
makes films in a way that allows you, the
viewer, to decide what they mean.”
Another significant departure from the
ABOVE
Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer,
TV series in Fire Walk with Me is the depic-
Ray Wise as Leland Palmer tion of Leland Palmer. In the film, he seems
LEFT
much more cognisant of what he’s doing
Lee on set with David Lynch to his daughter and is not simply being

controlled by the evil spirit of Bob. This
adds another element of terror – you can’t
just blame the bogeyman anymore.
As is now Twin Peaks lore, Lynch never
wanted to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer.
“He wanted it to be like The Fugitive [the
TV series, 1963-67], the way they never
caught the one-armed man,” Sweeney
says. “He fought with ABC over this and
held out the revelation until Episode 7 of
the second season. Because of that, you
couldn’t show Leland’s hand as a bad guy,
everyone had to be a red herring. That was
the major difference in Fire Walk with Me –
the gloves were off. We could assume that
most people who went to see the film – and
that wasn’t many after the first weekend
and the reviews – knew who the murderer
was, so it was fine to see the psycho side
of Leland.”
The correlation between power and
abuse, the veneer of respectability that
allows people to get away with horrific
violence: this has always been an interest of
Lynch’s. “He’s always been fascinated by the
underbelly, you can see that as early as Blue
Velvet [1986]. And in the case of powerful
men, the upstanding nature of their public
lives in opposition to the depravity of their
private lives – that’s a recurring theme.”
Fire Walk with Me understands that
there is an ostensibly ‘good’ victim in Laura
Palmer and a ‘bad’ victim in Teresa Banks,
the woman whose body is discovered at
the start of the film. Her body is discarded
on a slab; she’s forgotten, because of her
transient lifestyle and poverty. The film
feels very conscious of this dichotomy, and
it’s yet another way that Lynch upends the
conventional narrative. It’s been 30 years
since Laura Palmer died (again) but the
culture is more obsessed than ever with the
idea of the perfect dead girl. The prolifera-
tion of detective shows, the endless supply
of podcasts, the true-crime frenzy – where
is it all coming from?
“I really can’t stand it,” Sweeney says. “A
lot of the things happening in the world,
not to make a gross generalisation, but I feel
have to do with society moving away from
the norm of strong, white men as rulers.
Many men are feeling disenfranchised and
powerless. I worry about a backlash in the
progress women have made. There’s signs
it’s already happening.”
Sweeney’s fascination with dreams
and the unconscious has continued. She
teaches a course at USC called ‘Dreams,
the Brain and Storytelling.’ “That class
really came from my interest in neurosci-
ence and also my inability to articulate to
my students my own creative process. I
was basically using neuroscience to figure
out what I did as an editor, so I created
a class so we could explore it together… I
also asked my friend Jonas Kaplan, who
works in the Brain and Creativity Institute
on campus in USC, to come in and talk
about the research he’s doing in narrative
and storytelling and how the brain func-
tions. In that class, I teach films that have a
dreamlike quality, for example, The Diving
Bell and the Butterfly [2007], films that pull
you into the narrative.
“My fascination with neuroscience
vis-à-vis film is that the brain can’t resist
trying to make sense of everything in your
immediate environment. Art films are like
‘The brain can’t
resist trying to
make sense of
everything in
your immediate
environment.
Art films are like
puzzle-solving
for the brain.
They’re not telling
you how to feel’
ABOVE
Kiefer Sutherland, Chris Isaak
as FBI agents Sam Stanley
and Chet Desmond
T WIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME AT 30 51
puzzle-solving for the brain. They’re not
telling you how to feel. So at the end of the
tenth year of the course, Jonas suggested
we do a podcast.”
The result is Float, a series of conversa-
tions with filmmakers, artists of all kinds
and neuroscientists about creativity.
“During the various Covid lockdowns, we
made 16 episodes. It was a really great expe-
rience. The scientists were very into the
filmmaking stuff, and the filmmakers were
really into the neuroscience aspect. One of
the last episodes was with Chloé Zhao, and
we talked all about daydreaming and how
it’s essential to the creative process.”
The ending of Fire Walk with Me – Laura
smiling, the angel descending to finally
save her – is one of my all-time favourites.
Despite what has preceded it, it has, like
a lot of Lynch’s work, a sweetness and
strange beauty. “I’m so depressed by how
people don’t know how to end movies any
more,” Sweeney tells me. “Even great film-
makers. It’s definitely an unwillingness to
let go of the narrative, let go of the world,
and assuming the audience feels the same.
Endings like Fire Walk with Me and Mulhol-
land Drive – that’s how you end a film, on
an emotionally strong note. The ending
couldn’t be more important. They will for-
give all kinds of laziness and slowness in the
second act if you leave them emotionally
charged walking out of the theatre.’”
Screenings of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me take place at
BFI Southbank, London, in September and October
and at the Prince Charles Cinema, London, in October
The film is available on Blu-ray from Criterion UK
Float, with Mary Sweeney and Jonas Kaplan,
is available on most podcast platforms
52

ON EDITING FIRE
‘As an WALK WITH ME
I was almost never on set. I
editor, was editing on film. It wasn’t
digital editing. You need to

you have stay as close to camera as

possible as the dailies come
in. It’s very rare for me to

to be a car go on set. It’s a bad practice

for an editor because you’re
unconsciously informed by all

mechanic the things happening around

you, and that look influences
you when you look at the
and a poet’ dailies. If you’re not on set
you’re seeing the dailies in the
same way spectators see the
Mary Sweeney’s film. As an editor, you almost
notes on editing and have to be a car mechanic and
a poet. You have to make the
screenwriting film fly.

ON EDITING AS ‘When I’m ON HOW SHE WORKED ON SCREENWRITING

ABOVE RIGHT
David Lynch and
Mary Sweeney
BELOW
Mary Sweeney in the
projection booth at the Grand
Palais, Cannes, for the Fire
Walk with Me premiere in 1992
AN EMOTIONAL
EXPERIENCE
When I’m editing, it has to
work for me emotionally.
I consider myself the first
audience. I try to use the
performances and different
camera angles – and
silences, silences are very
important – to create an
emotional tenor. It’s a very
musical process too. I’m
not a trained musician,
but music was always very
important in our family.
Like music, you know when
it’s right.’
editing, it has WITH DAVID LYNCH ON Try, as a screenwriter, to
FIRE WALK WITH ME power through a first draft as
to work for me After a few weeks, after quickly as possible and not
emotionally. production was wrapped, I edit as you go. You need to
had a first cut. David came let it be as crappy as it needs
I consider in and we looked through to be or else all the fresh
myself the first the five-and-a-half-hour cut… ideas, the original ideas, get
We watched it on the flatbed whittled down too quickly. If
audience’ together, just the two of us. you’re too fussy too early, you
He had notes, and I had risk taking away the energy.
notes, we came back and we
repeated the process again.
He wasn’t in the cutting room
with me but we had these
private screenings where
we discussed which scenes
to lose and which to keep.

IMAGES: © MARY SWEENEY

 THE
IMAGINARIUM
OF
DOCTOR
MILLER
George Miller’s supernatural
fable Three Thousand Years
of Longing has little in
common with his Babe or
Fury Road – or has it? He
and star Tilda Swinton
explore the stories behind
stories with Isabel Stevens
OPPOSITE
George Miller
BELOW
Tilda Swinton as Alithea in
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Once upon a time there was a young boy
who grew up in a remote Australian town
where the open vistas and feverish heat
around him lent themselves to dream-
ing. He was hooked on Greek mythol-
ogy (his parents were Greek immigrants)
and when he stumbled on movies, it was
fantasy that snared him. He snuck into a
matinee of The Thing from Another World
(1951) – he couldn’t even see the screen, but
sat captivated by the whirlwind dialogue,
listening to the story of an alien on the
rampage in a similarly isolated but icy out-
post. Later, after entering a filmmaking
competition, he fell in love with cinema
and cut short his medical career. The fiery
outback and a fondness for chase movies
and chaos charged the dystopias that
launched his career. Then he journeyed
to Hollywood, where he conjured tales of
witches and devils, talking pigs and jitter-
bug penguins.
How to make sense of the curious
career of the 77-year-old director, writer
and producer George Miller – which
swerves from post-apocalypse (Mad Max,
1979) to supernatural comedy (The Witches
of Eastwick, 1987) to melodrama (Lorenzo’s
Oil, 1992) to family-friendly animation
(Babe, 1995; Happy Feet, 2006)? His latest,
Three Thousand Years of Longing, offers some
clues. It’s a fable about fable-making that,
like all Miller’s previous films, is rooted in
his love of storytelling and mythologist
Joseph Campbell’s writings. Miller maps
his characters through Campbell’s hero
myth, be it a pig or Furiosa – the rebel
warrior of Fury Road (2015), subject of a
prequel Miller is now filming, who he has
warned may not ultimately be the saviour
Fury Road declares (Campbell: “Today’s
hero becomes tomorrow’s tyrant”).
Three Thousand Years of Longing is full of
heroes and tyrants and many other strange
and sublime creatures and spectacles:
spiders dissolving into scarabs, musical
instruments that play themselves, a king
and concubines in a sabre-lined chamber…
It has half the budget of a cheap Marvel
film and twice the imagination. Adapted
from A.S. Byatt’s 1994 novella The Djinn
in the Nightingale’s Eye, the film follows an
anguished Djinn, or genie (played by
Idris Elba with a soulful voice, pointy ears
and long, sultry eyelashes), unleashed
from years of confinement in a bottle by
Tilda Swinton’s narratologist Alithea,
who acquired the trinket in an Istanbul
bazaar. In her hotel room, the Djinn
regales Alithea with stories across three
millennia, in the hope that she will make
three wishes that will grant him his free-
dom; but her grasp of mythology means
she knows all too well that “wishing is a
hazardous art”.
What emerges is a loquacious, melan-
choly love story; Miller has called it “an
anti-Mad Max”, though at times it shares
the same furious pace. Maximalism is
his response to our fast-paced, attention-
addled times: “You have to take account of
the current cultural evolution of cinema,
which is always changing and often chang-
ing a lot more quickly than we think. You
know, it’s not lost on me that most people
now watch a movie or a screen story on
more than one screen. And people are
speed-reading news, and on social media
[they] are offering up all types of stories.”
Making a self-reflexive film about nar-
ratology is, Miller tells me over lunch in
Cannes with Tilda Swinton, “what you
hope to do when you tell a story like this, or
any story”. He has been plotting to adapt
Byatt’s novella since he first read it. Byatt
is herself an inspiration for him: “She’s not
just a literary figure, she’s a scholar and a
real advocate for stories.” Indeed, Byatt’s
description of her novella as interrogating
“the serious life of fairytales” holds true for
much of Miller’s filmography. As he talks
about Byatt’s analysis of the Arabian Nights
and how the stories tighten their grip on
you with their digressions, Miller’s soft
voice becomes animated: “It’s Scheh-
erazade staying alive.”
Isabel Stevens: I’m struck by the similari-
ties between you as filmmakers. You are
both hooked on fantasy and surrealism
– and you also like to reinvent yourselves.
Would you agree?
T i l d a S w i n t o n : We’re both very curious.
I always say that my boredom threshold
is very low – meaning that I like to keep
going forward. I think it’s true of you too?
George Miller: If you’re curious about ex-
ploring, you’ve got to be. What I like is
that this film is different from what I’ve
done before. A.S. Byatt’s story was so
PHOTOGRAPHY BY VI OLET TE FRANCHI/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE
rich in content and paradoxical. Alithea is
a creature of reason. The Djinn is driven
by emotion and desire. One is mortal. The
other can live indefinitely. They encounter
each other in a hotel room in modern-day
Istanbul yet the narrative spans 3,000
years. So, in ways that I hope are fresh, the
film plays with some interesting questions.
Why are we hardwired for story? How do
we know what is real or not? What are the
gestures which define love?
56
TS: I’ve said many times that I always
intend a film to be my last; I’m constantly
looking for a way out. And then some-
thing will come along, just catch my atten-
tion. I’m always looking for the chance to
go into some uncharted territory. [That
was] working with George. It was origi-
nally Babe that got my attention – “That’ll
do, Pig” is the response in our house to
any, especially hairy, completed task – al-
though when Fury Road dropped on all
our heads, the width and depth of the
entire filmography really sort of resonat-
ed properly. The precision and mastery of
the way he uses the camera narratively is
exhilarating to witness.
And then it was the fact that I wasn’t
required to be the supernatural creature.
Alithea is a very human human who’s sort of
trying not to be human in many ways. Play-
ing a high-bound, organised, rational aca-
demic felt like a step outside for me. And
then seeing how to get her to step outside
of that into something closer to my own
rhythm. There’s also the link with Friend-
ship’s Death [Peter Wollen, 1987], the second
film that I made. It’s all set in a hotel room
and it’s an encounter between a journalist
and an extraterrestrial and they have the
conversation over five days about what it is
to be human. There’s a resonance to Three
Thousand Years there.
I S : How did you create a narratologist’s
wardrobe?
TS: In dialogue with the brilliant Kym Bar-
rett, our costume designer. We knew that
the gold-ear-tipped Djinn was going to be
pitched at a certain level in terms of strik-
ing a fantastical figure. Kym and I wanted
to find a way of Alithea occupying a some-
what heightened imagistic space alongside
him, so we decided to keep her colours
pretty clean and crisp – orange head, pinks
and greens and soft greys – and repeat her
shapes continually. So her shoes, for ex-
ample, are consistently one style of brogue
which changes colour, ditto her shirts and
skirts. One of my first pin-ups here was
Velma Dinkley in Scooby-Doo, although
Alithea is tidier… a more manga version. I
like to think of this film as having a streak of
live-action Miyazaki about it, and in respect
of Alithea’s look, her identifiable silhouette
and flash of recognisable tones, I see that
influence surface.
IS: George, Joseph Campbell looms large
across your films and thinking, but I imag-
ine particularly in this film?
G M : Yes. I think the template of Camp-
bell’s ideas of the hero myth are inherent
in almost every story. Most stories, from
the earliest times, require there to be some
sort of conflict. And I’m not even talking
just about written stories. I think it’s in the
stories we tell each other. I was just talk-
ing to someone here about the birth of
their child. And they were saying how it
was difficult. And Joseph Campbell said
one of the most evident hero stories is the
mother giving birth to a child. Because
the hallmark, the defining gesture of the
hero myth is the relinquishing of their self-
interest for a greater good. And without it,
there is no hero story. And you encounter
that in everyday life, in the great religious
myths, in the best political stories. In this
story there is some of this template. Alithea
relinquishes herself to make the wishes to
release the Djinn. So that’s the heroic ges-
ture. This is important when the Djinn re-
turns at the end, simply because he wants
to be in her presence. No other reason, not
because he’s under obligation. So it’s the
giving of himself.
IS: In 1997 you made a documentary with
a very similar title – 40,000 Years of Dream-
ing. Is there any connection to this film?
GM: It didn’t occur to me until now that there
was a connection between the two For the
centenary of the advent of cinema, the BFI
One of my first asked a number of filmmakers from around
the world to tell the story of the 100 years
pin ups here was of cinema. I had to make one on Austral-
Velma Dinkley ian cinema from the first silent feature on-
in Scooby-Doo, wards. But I realised that the absolutely
most unique thing about Australia is its
although Alithea Indigenous culture, because it’s one of the
is tidier… a oldest extended cultures. It’s continuous, at
more manga least 40,000 years. Since that time, people
now think that it goes back 75,000 years.
version. I like And so I tried to make the connection
to think of this between this and the cinema stories. How-
film as having a ever, some Indigenous authors had writ-
ten a book called 40,000 Years of Dreaming,
streak of live- and they asked me would I mind changing
action Miyazaki the title so it’s not confused with the book.
about it So I called [the documentary] White Fellas
Dreaming eventually.
T I LDA S WI NT ON
IS: George, you’ve worked a lot with special
effects – I’m thinking of your quest to get a
pig to talk in Babe [which Miller produced
and wrote]. The majority of the effects in
Fury Road were practical though. Were all
the effects here done digitally?
TS: Not all of them. My favourite moment
is that sort of Ray Harryhausen-esque
scene, that moment when [Idris] appears
out of the bottle. That was done in a tiny
hotel room set, which was about the size of
one of these two tables [around 1.5m]. And
he was sort of squashed in with his foot in
the door. I’m a bit old-fashioned that way. I
love models or like in Black Narcissus [1947]
when they use glass painting. I love the
practicalness of those films.
GM: I was amazed with the 3D printer they
used for the miniaturisation. Every object,
every book is a miniature version. The tel-
evision, the laptop, the table, the paintings
[and] photographs on the wall, everything.
The curtains. They were all miniaturised.
And Idris was inside of it. And then we
BELOW composited a life-size Tilda into it.
Tilda Swinton and
George Miller in Cannes
earlier this year TS: It is a sort of collage. Conceptu-
ally it was one of the first conversations
that George and I had, about these two
modes, or two scalings. There was the
conversation in the hotel, which we re-
ferred to occasionally as the play. And
then all the epic stories. I always thought
it would be easier if the Djinn brought
down a screen and said, “Now we’re going
to watch a film” – which is effectively what
we do. There’s these two realms: the
stories and the so-called reality. It was
interesting for me to negotiate these two
realms. All the stories were already shot
by the time I got there. It was a very good
idea of George and Idris’s to shoot the sto-
ries first so that Idris was able to report
[to me] what he shot.
GM: That was Idris’s first suggestion: “Yes,
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LOÏC VENANCE/GET TY IMAGES
I’d like to be in the film. But can we shoot
the stories first?” It hadn’t occurred to me
and it was the most obvious thing. And
not only that but that we filmed Idris tell-
ing Tilda the stories. Even if we weren’t
going to use it – although we did use some
of them. It was important that he didn’t do
[the narration for the stories] as a voiceover
 GEORGE MILLER AND TILDA SWINTON 57

in a studio. And we showed you, Tilda, the TS: If you want to see a wonderful relation- ‘The film plays [Pig in the City, 1998], on Happy Feet, and so
footage too. ship between a filmmaker and an editor – on. And she didn’t want to cut Fury Road –
George’s wife, Margie [Sixel] is amazing. with some but I knew she was the right choice, a little
TS: It was very useful, being aware of how interesting bit like Richard Taylor had known with
you were actually going to play out the GM: She doesn’t see herself as a profession- questions. that artist. Margaret’s a brilliant gardener.
tones of the different worlds, to see the col- al editor. It’s not like a career for her. It’s a You have to factor in all the forces that affect
ours and the camera movements. I was like long story… I don’t know if you know Rich- Why we are the garden: the sunlight across the seasons,
the first audience member. ard Taylor, he works with Peter Jackson at hardwired for what to grow where, what goes with this.
[special effects company] Wētā in New story? How do So it’s very similar to a film, when you’re
I S : When you were making this film, did Zealand? Richard told me how they used cutting on the detail and you’re planting a
you both have other films about stories to find their talent because they didn’t have we know what little bit of a film somewhere here and here.
within stories in your minds? a big population. Nowadays, they have is real or not? You have to be able to bounce between the
people come from all over the world. But What are the granular and the bird’s-eye view, and she
GM: I didn’t – the main influences were A.S. he told me once about walking through an had that instinctively. And she’s fierce. But
Byatt and Arabian Nights. The only anthol- arcade and seeing this artist doing carica- gestures which not in a way that completely destroys you!
ogy film I saw recently was an Argentinian tures and he stopped and studied the guy’s define love?’
film, Wild Tales [2014] – I was incredibly work and asked him, “Are you interested GE OR GE MI LLE R IS: George, I read you now only read non-
impressed because there were very loose in doing some work for us?” And so he fiction. Since you have such a passion for
connections between those stories. It came into Wētā. And within two years, storytelling, that surprised me.
wasn’t someone telling a story, though. he became the production designer on
Tintin [The Adventures of Tintin, 2011], which GM: Since I’ve found my way into storytell-
TS: Another film that reminds me of Three Spielberg was doing there. And I said to ing I’m more inclined to read nonfiction.
Thousand Years – and George, believe it or [Richard], “What did you see?” And he Histories and all matters scientific help
not, hasn’t seen it – is A Matter of Life and said, “I saw something that was a clue as temper the somewhat fanciful tales I seem
Death [Michael Powell, 1946]. The idea to a broader way of thinking”… The reason to have bouncing around in my head.
of the interplay between two worlds, this I mentioned it is [because] I sense that
huge philosophical debate, which in that Margaret has that too. I S : Tilda, what would you do if a Djinn
film happens in heaven. George, you will She had a big influence on Babe. We had offered you three wishes?
love it, too, because it’s about neurology. just got together and I showed her the
It is an absolute masterpiece about the first cut. And she sat and watched it and TS:Rather like not ever getting a tattoo be-
nature of reality and the fact that the brain went silent. And the first thing she said cause I find it hard to imagine not chang-
will dream things up to heal us. I can’t wait was, “You’re not going to release it like that ing my mind about anything permanent,
for you to dive into those films. I’d like to are you?” I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, my genuine impulse would be not to
be present in the conversation between “George, it has no narrative tension: it’s epi- spend a wish at all but to keep it in my back
George Miller and Michael Powell. sodic.” And she was right. She said, “What pocket for emergencies… is that a cop out?
we should do is put chapter headings to
ABOVE
G M : He was married to [the film editor] make a virtue of its episodic nature.” Idris Elba as the Djinn in Three Thousand Years of Longing is in UK
Thelma Schoonmaker. Then she worked on the second Babe Three Thousand Years of Longing cinemas now and is reviewed on page 85
DEATH MASQUES
AND CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
David Cronenberg’s tale of a pair of avant-garde celebrity artists putting on performances
of live surgery resurrects a script he wrote quarter of a century ago, a ‘posthumous dream’ in
which the director confronts the inevitability of disease and death, writes Iain Sinclair
One ordinary day in 2021, while there
was still a measure of available light in
two geometric windows, movie director
and novelist David Paul Cronenberg was
found dead in his daughter’s teenage bed-
room. Grey-white, liver-spotted, stiff and
naked on the bed, the resting cadaver was
embraced by his bereaved former self: a
fading future memory squeezed from the
pineal gland at the point when the illusion
of independent existence shuts down.
After which, according to Cronenberg’s
philosophy, there is nothing. There are
no demons and no angels to be found in
the late director’s compelling half-century
oeuvre. Approaching that 80th year to
heaven, every film has its special aura, the
fever that comes from being potentially the
last. This feels almost as rich and strange
as a new beginning.
In collaboration with her father, Caitlin
Cronenberg recorded the occult ritual,
when the ka, or body double, takes its
leave of the spiritless husk (in truth a cine-
matic prop). A last forgiving embrace from
the departing twin. Exchange of breath.
Painted mouth to painted mouth. The
Egyptian rite was choreographed at home
in Toronto in 57 soundless seconds. And it
can be read as the golden key to Cronen-
berg’s mysteries.
The Death of David Cronenberg (2021) is
a premature obituary report, expanding
through every receptive cell, so that each
millisecond lasts forever. The film was
conceived and produced at that career lull
when proposals stall, calls are not returned
and nagging inspiration is in conflict with
corporate indifference and studio politics.
A busy practitioner like Cronenberg was
required to move forward by stepping
back towards his apprenticeship of youth-
ful risk-taking as a film poet glorying in
obscurity. It was now seven years since his
last feature, Maps to the Stars (2014). That
Hollywood story of incest and arson and
addiction felt much further away than the
infinite possibilities of the 1960s, when
the young Canadian encountered Fellini’s
La strada (1954) and the New York under-
ground film scene promoted by Jonas
Mekas. The Death of David Cronenberg was a
home movie, a family movie, about mortal-
ity and a privileged but diminishing future.
The implication being that there are still
crimes to confess and celebrate. Being the
same age as Cronenberg, I appreciated his
hunch that 57 seconds might be a long eter-
nity in which to get everything said.
The living Cronenberg, an actor with
some experience, including commercials
and seven episodes of Star Trek, overdoes
it by a beat, a signalled twitch of the eye-
brows: he is outperformed by the disci-
pline of the unwrapped mummy in the
bed. The room is an upturned ark, and
the two windows, a triangle above a rec-
tangle, invoke panels from the Egyptian
Book of the Dead: the falcon shape of
Horus perched on a serekh. This is about
grieving, we are told, the loss of the direc-
tor’s wife. But instead of escaping from his
dead host, Cronenberg moves closer with
a gesture of tenderness, sending time into
reverse. What follows, one year later, is the
vivid Crimes of the Future, a feature film shot
in Toronto and Athens, but taking its title
from the retreating past, an apprentice
work he made in 1970.
Having witnessed the imploded grav-
ity of the home movie, and understood its
significance as a minimalist preface, we
begin to appreciate Crimes of the Future for
what it really is: a posthumous dream. An
elegant assembly of painted visions from
a manga codex. Tightly framed panels
expose wet meat, slithering and slipping,
but contained within a glistening post-
modern sarcophagus. Here is a perverse
ecology of resistance through acceptance.
This self-devouring cannibal feast opens
alongside a corrupted Homeric sea. Not
for nothing did Cronenberg give his 2014
novel, Consumed, its punning title. Cutting-
edge consumers of the latest toys make art
from their fetishistic obsessions. Torture
gardens flower and fruit as they slice open
the feeble membrane that contains them.
APOCALYPSE NOW
Location shooting in Athens for Crimes
of the Future brought benefits, especially
those accidental discoveries of what
Cronenberg calls ‘found footage’. Hunt-
ing for a street, a building, willing to
conform to an element in the script, and
coming across something old, ugly and
inevitable. Cronenberg, at the instigation
of his producer, Robert Lantos, revived
a pre-millennial script rescued from the
slush pile. It was the right time to revisit
a fable of ‘Accelerated Evolution Syn-
Forest fires raged drome’. Intimations of ecological disaster
to the north of were now daily news. Forest fires raged to
the north of Athens at the time of shoot-
Athens at the ing. Scorched birds fell from the sky into
time of shooting. respectable suburbs. Seagulls choked on
Scorched birds threads of plastic. Disorientated whales
swam upstream into London and Paris.
fell from the sky A boy squats at the shoreline, digging
into respectable in the mud. He is excavating for tasty
suburbs. Seagulls morsels, for detergent bottles and shop-
ping bags, not whelks and barnacles. The
choked on threads scene pulses with the palpable tension of
of plastic recurrent myth. Violent acts preordained
by landscape, blood and heritage. The
looming hulk of an overturned cargo
ship decays into a reef of oxidised rust, an
organic form. The boy is watched from a
high window by his mother.
The opening sequence of Crimes of the
Future is atypical in its deployment of the
long shots Cronenberg prefers to shun.
He avoids contamination by the approved
poetics of ‘slow cinema’. But the Mediter-
ranean atmosphere is overwhelming, the
Furies are lurking. Exterior: boy beside sea. Agi-
tated mother framed at window. Shouted warn-
ing. Interior: boy in bathroom. Boy munches
rim of plastic waste bin, the kind in which
water-preserving Greeks leave their used
toilet paper. Mother kills her heretic son,
smothering him with a pillow. She leaves
his cooling corpse for the alienated father
to find. This warped eco-prophet swallows
OPPOSITE a new and deadly communion in the form
Viggo Mortensen as performance
artist Saul Tenser in David
of a wine-dark ‘synth’ bar. Eat death to stall
Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future death. Homeopathic doses strong enough
62 CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
to kill a government snoop at first lick. So
far, so House of Atreus.
The rogue visionary is called Lang
Dotrice. All the characters in this film have
the culture-quote weirdness favoured by
J.G. Ballard. As well as referencing a family
of respectable British thespians, Cronen-
berg picks a first name that sounds like the
protagonist of Ballard’s High-Rise (1975):
Laing, the übermensch architect. There
is also an implied bow to Fritz Lang and
Metropolis (1927). And, more significantly,
R.D. Laing, the charismatic anti-psychi-
atrist. When I interviewed Laing for a
documentary in 1967, he spoke of the kind
of politicised behaviour Cronenberg grafts
on to his subversive activist.
“When I was in New York in January,”
Laing said, “I spent some time with [the
Alsatian artist and writer] Tomi Ungerer...
He is conscious of the smog biting into his
eyes, destroying his skin, eroding his lungs.
He’s aware of the enormous pollution, the
noise... All the senses are being worn away.
Yet Ungerer is consciously, and by his own
choice and his own definition, living in
hell. Manhattan is hell. And he feels that
is where he has to be. I can’t imagine a
more horrible environment has ever been
devised by human beings to live in.”
But Cronenberg can. He imagines it
as a set of forensically clean and bright
performance spaces hidden within a
doomed environment of peeling bureau-
cratic offices, dusty alleys and heavy metal
dumps. At the time when the director was
assembling the first draft of Crimes of the
Future, the painter Gavin Jones, haunting
Tower Hamlets Cemetery, was injecting
trees with mercury and other damag-
ing catalysts in order to prepare them for
future apocalypse. He wanted to record
the beautiful malformations of survival.
That theme – how we must embrace
the substances that are killing us – is com-
plemented by a showy narrative about
performance and surgery: surgery as per-
formance. A celebrity couple, surgeon and
organ donor, act out their Sadean cocktail
dance in a series of high-end public enact-
ments, with excited touch and orgasmic
gasp. The atmosphere is not derived from
the baroque Catholicism of a video-muti-
lated virtuoso like the French artist Orlan,
undergoing her cosmetic revision, but the
sinister rituals of the German anatomist
Dr Gunther von Hagens. Von Hagens
shaped his extreme body sculptures by a
process known as plastination. His sourc-
ing of material from Chinese prisons and
elsewhere was dubious. With his mask-
like face, business suit and fedora, the
artist-surgeon looked like Cronenberg’s
version of William Burroughs in Naked
Lunch (1991). The tumours and spectacular
poison-fed growths hacked out from the
abdomen of Viggo Mortensen’s ‘Tenser’
by Léa Seydoux’s ‘Caprice’ conjure the
wet pink obscenity of talking arseholes,
dripping phallic tentacles and butchered
centipede meat, in the Interzone of Naked
Lunch. Seydoux, controlling the ballet of
robotic scalpels, and sketching her designs
on tight flesh, excites both her victim/part-
ner and herself by fingering a decorative
device that works like a Burroughs soft
machine, like the melting keys of the type-
writers in Cronenberg’s nightmare vision.
These Crimes of the Future anatomists, hip
to entropy, are the love children of the
crazed Dr Benway (played for Cronen-
berg by Roy Scheider). “Now boys,” said
Benway in Naked Lunch, “you won’t see
this operation performed very often and
there’s a reason for that. It has absolutely
no value.”
These Crimes The customised sarcophagus in which
Tenser is secured for his showbiz surgery
of the Future is called Sark. The pod enfolds the film’s
anatomists, hip narrative in just the way the stretch limo
to entropy, are becomes both inner space and bodily
extension for Robert Pattinson in Cronen-
the love children berg’s 2012 translation of Don DeLillo’s
of the crazed Cosmopolis. The director has refined his
Dr Benway in style to the point where it operates like a
graphic novel; vivid panels in close shot
Naked Lunch and mid-shot are laminated as much as
lit. Philosophical exchanges run on longer
than the comic form generally allows –
unless it is being authored by Alan Moore,
who was always moving towards the liter-
ary epic of Jerusalem. High-spec set pieces,
involving animation, sophisticated CGI
technology and manual manipulation,
punctuate sequences in which Tenser,
hooded like the figure of Death from The
Seventh Seal (1957) or that lethal dwarf
from Don’t Look Now (1973), stalks the city.
Cronenberg populates a paranoid Wil-
liam Gibson or Philip K. Dick urbanism
with images and implications derived from
European classics recalled through his first
exposure to art cinema. He has mentioned
in interviews how he drew inspiration from
seeing a man walk up the wall like a vam-
pire fly in Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).
Accepting the critique of Crimes of the
Future as a set of jewelled but essentially
static panels – metal, flesh, costume –
aligns the film not only with the bande dessi-
née but, once again, with older forms like
Mayan codices or the Egyptian Book of
ABOVE the Dead. The body is the ultimate real-
Cronenberg with his cadaverous twin
in The Death of David Cronenberg (2021)
ity, Cronenberg states. He echoes Antony
Gormley’s respect for the eloquence of a
OPPOSITE, TOP
Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen,
hollowed human shell with its potential for
Don McKellar and Léa Seydoux inward exploration, cosmologies of muscle
OPPOSITE, BOT TOM
and sinew, infinite horizons, cells pregnant
Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen with past and future memory.
64

TIME FOR LUNCH
After viewing Crimes of the Future, I went
back to Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch with
the sense that I had misread the film at
the time of its release in 1991. Right after
the adaptations of ‘impossible’ novels
by Burroughs and Ballard, the director
began plotting and scripting the project
that would become Crimes of the Future a
quarter of a century later. Naked Lunch,
I recognised, worked its own magic as
soon as it was distanced from the sage-
green Olympia Press fiction credited to
William Burroughs in 1959. In a promo-
tional note, Burroughs says: “The body
knows what veins you can hit and conveys
the knowledge in the spontaneous move-
ments you make in preparing to take a
shot. Sometimes the needle points like a
dowser’s wand. These messages from the
blood are infallible.”
Cronenberg seems to have held that
prescription back until he came, in his
posthumous dream, to Crimes of the Future.
Now the surgical needles of the Sark jerk
like dowsers’ wands, scripting the wound,
unzipping flesh. The messages from the
blood are infallible. We must make our
treaty with inevitable cancers and malign
metamorphoses or witness the violent end
of our brief sojourn on this ball of dirt.
Naked Lunch, as the director acknowledged,
is not a translation of the novel. The film is
a canny Xerox, a new piece contrived from
unreliable biographical sources, scraps of
publications by Burroughs, Kerouac and
Ginsberg, and an obsessive visualisation of
everything that squelches and spits.
The hook for Cronenberg was the Bur-
roughs revelation that authorship is a curse:
once the Faustian contract has been signed,
there is no release clause. Burroughs fre-
quently acknowledged that the shooting of
his wife, Joan Vollmer, let in the evil spirit
and condemned him to become scribe to
the whispering voices. The sexualised port-
able typewriter is bad karma. Film direc-
tors of literary inclination began to think
of themselves as writers. Cronenberg and
Werner Herzog, for example, announced,
late in the day, status secure, that they
were really novelists. “I always thought I’d
be a writer, a novelist,” Cronenberg said
when he produced Consumed. He did not,
perhaps, recognise that he was a re-writer,
skilled at taking difficult works by Bur-
roughs, Ballard, DeLillo and reforming
them, like some Borges character attaining
authorship by typing out an original dupli-
cate of Don Quixote or Moby-Dick. To lay a
finger on those dangerous keys is to give up
your soul. To enter into a willing collabora-
tion with the insect Other.
The climax of Crimes of the Future comes
with a public autopsy – shades of von
Hagens – of the smothered child. Look at
the tragic abandonment of that curly head.
I came across an evocative memorial stone
from Middle Egypt, a niche occupied
by the carved figure of a young boy with
closed lids. The resemblance was uncanny.
The murdered child’s internal organs have
already been replaced by the police. There
are conspiracies on all sides. The autopsy
is also the point at which Cronenberg’s
graphic novel is exposed when viewed
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE 65
Cronenberg is alongside the visionary documentation
of this procedure, in the stunning The Act
skilled at taking of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, shot by Stan
difficult works Brakhage at the Allegheny Coroner’s
by Burroughs, Office in the autumn of 1971. Cronenberg’s
journey is concluded. The path not taken,
Ballard, DeLillo the film co-ops and elective obscurity,
and reforming must have brought him into contact with
them, like some the work of Brakhage. He has frequently
mentioned his engagement with Kenneth
Borges character Anger and Ed Emshwiller. In a statement
attaining composed for the magazine Film Culture in
authorship by 1962, Emshwiller begins with a denial: “I’m
not a writer.”
typing out an Living in France in 1971, Cronenberg
original duplicate produced a traditional ex-pat novel, one
of Don Quixote designed to be set aside. He read promis-
cuously and relished the linguistic richness
of famously unpopular works like Nightwood
by Djuna Barnes. Barnes loaned her first
name to the Lihi Kornowski character, the
murdering mother in Crimes of the Future. In
her 1936 novel, published by T.S. Eliot, she
composed her own crime of the future, by
setting the agenda for Cronenberg. “But
when you inbreed with suffering (which
is merely to say that you have caught every
disease and so pardoned your flesh) you
are destroyed back to your structure as an
old master disappears beneath the knife of
the scientist who would know how it was
painted... We all carry about with us the
ABOVE
house of death, the skeleton, but unlike the
Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux turtle our safety is inside, our danger out.”
OPPOSITE
Production designs for the Sark, Crimes of the Future is released on 9 September
the customised sarcophagus in and is reviewed on page 77. David Cronenberg’s
which Viggo Mortensen’s Tenser Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981)
is placed for his showbiz surgery are available to stream on BFI Player now

V I
100
WIDER SCREEN
A look at Maya Cade’s Black Film
Archive, which showcases films
made between 1915-1979 that
are available to stream online
R E
68
FILMS
86
TELEVISION
Both Sides of the Blade, Nope, Bodies The Sandman, Bad Sisters,
Bodies Bodies, Silent Land, The Score, Paper Girls, Under the Banner
Hatching, Dry Ground Burning, Crimes of Heaven, Atlanta: Season 3
of the Future, Official Competition, After and Surface
Yang, Moonage Daydream, Three
Thousand Years of Longing and more
E
92
DVD & BLU-RAY
Putney Swope, L’Argent, Hearts and
Minds, Elizabeth Taylor in London/
Sophia Loren in Rome, Universal
Terror: Karloff, The Molly Dineen
Collection: Volume 4, The Initiation
of Sarah, Le Viager and more
W S
102
BOOKS
The afterlife of Afterimage, the
writings of Cahiers du cinéma
editor Serge Daney and Werner
Herzog’s twilight novel
 68
FILMS
Both Sides rushing trains, neon-lit streets and Paris
rooftops so familiar from No Fear, No Die
of the Blade (1990), I Can’t Sleep (1994) and 35 Shots
of Rum (2008). Here, too, are the sexual
FRANCE 2021
tension and romantic ambivalence, the
tactile scenes of wordless lovemaking
DIRECTOR CLAIRE DENIS as featured in Trouble Every Day (2001)
SCREENPLAY CHRISTINE ANGOT and Vendredi soir (2002). Simmering in
CLAIRE DENIS
BASED ON THE NOVEL the background is the political context
UN TOURNANT DE of post-colonialism and global econom-
LA VIE BY CHRISTINE ANGOT
CINEMATOGRAPHY ÉRIC GAUTIER ics, key themes across all Denis’ work.
EDITORS EMMANUELLE PENCALET And front and centre are some of Denis’
SANDIE BOMPAR
GUY LECORNE most significant collaborators: Vincent
ART DIRECTOR ARNAUD DE MOLERON Lindon, Juliette Binoche and Grégoire
MUSIC TINDERSTICKS
COSTUME DESIGN JUDY SHREWSBURY Colin (his seventh feature with Denis),
CAST JULIET TE BINOCHE comprising the points of the love trian-
VINCENT LINDON
GRÉGOIRE COLIN gle that dominates the film’s narrative –
BULLE OGIER which is set to the melancholy strains of
Tindersticks, who have scored several
SYNOPSIS
films for the director since 1996.
Sara and Jean’s happy relationship is unsettled One of the most consistently brilliant
when François – Sara’s ex-lover and Jean’s
filmmakers working today, Denis took
erstwhile business partner and former friend
– suddenly reappears in their lives. Jean and home the Grand Prix at Cannes this year
François go into business again, while Sara for The Stars at Noon; Both Sides of the Blade
and François rekindle their affair, leading won her the Silver Bear for Best Director
to tensions. Meanwhile, Jean struggles to at the Berlin International Film Festival
connect with his teenage son Marcus. only three months earlier. But while all
the elements are in place for the expected
REVIEWED BY CATHERINE WHEATLEY
tour de force, there’s a mysterious lacuna
in Both Sides of the Blade, as if the whole
Claire Denis’s Both Sides of the Blade were somehow less than the sum of its
surely qualifies as a ‘late work’: now in parts. The film’s unfocused proposition
her mid-seventies, the director has been is reflected in the distributors’ struggle
making films since the 1980s, and this is to settle on an English title: Both Sides of
her 15th. Adapted with Christine Angot the Blade is a line from the Tindersticks
from the author’s 2018 novel Un tour- soundtrack and an apt metaphor for the
nant de la vie, it plays in many ways like excruciating scissions at the heart of
a greatest hits collection. Here are the the narrative, but the film has also gone
by Fire, and the French title translates
as ‘With Love and Fury’, a more fitting
SMOKE SIGNALS
Vincent Lindon as Jean (above)
description of the film’s tonal shifts.
Lindon and Binoche play Jean and
BED EDUCATION
Juliette Binoche as Sara
Sara, an apparently happy couple whose
relationship was formed in somewhat
complex circumstances. Both were in
relationships when they met: Jean with
the mother of his taciturn son Marcus
(Issa Perica, best known for Les Misera-
bles, 2019), Sara with the mysterious Fran-
çois (Colin), who was also Jean’s business
partner at the time. It’s never quite clear
how the events preceding the film’s nar-
rative played out, but at some point
François disappeared, Jean went to jail,
his ex-wife returned to her homeland of
Martinique (leaving Jean’s mother to raise
Marcus), and Sara and Jean fell in love.
Now François is back, stirring both Jean’s
abandoned ambitions and Sara’s anxious,
needy desires.
Apart from an early glimpse, François
does not appear on screen until around
the movie’s mid-point; for the first half of
the film he is a mere idea, a spectre that
the couple themselves seem to have con-
jured from their own insecurities. Much
of the action takes place in their well-
appointed Paris apartment, and the film
plays out like a chamber piece as director
of photography Éric Gautier’s camera
moves in close and the pair circle one
another, worrying at their wounds in an
attempt to gauge how deep they run. In
the background of many of these scenes
is an abstract painting of two figures,
one pink, one blue, over which looms

The chemistry between the three leads
is remarkable, and there’s tremendous
pleasure to be had just in watching
them: the glances, the touches, the very
breaths they share are almost palpable
a livid purple splodge: it resembles a
nuclear cloud. Trouble, it seems, is coming.
But the sinister hints that Denis
drops – that Jean was François’ fall guy,
that François has ulterior motives for
returning – come to naught. François,
when he finally emerges from the shad-
ows, is a faintly ludicrous figure: clad in
a football-manager-esque puffer coat and
shirts that strain at the buttonholes, the
once lithe, feline Colin is now puffy-faced
and paunchy. François’ grand seduction
of Sara is stalled by a tantrum when she
refuses anal sex, and culminates in the
bathetic image of him sulking on the
toilet seat of their tiny hotel bathroom.
Meanwhile, Jean, set up as a tragic
working-class hero in the mould of Jean
Gabin, turns out to be a preening, emas-
culated figure, a white man who lectures
his black son about race, and who spits
the words ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ at his faithless
lover’s face. As for Sara, played by Binoche
in her usual febrile register, she’s selfish,
self-deceptive and committed to her role
as the victim, even as Jean tells her he’s seen
the texts she’s been sending François. Her
increasingly risible denials play out in front
of that kitchen painting, but at some point
it has been turned upside down. Now it
looks for all the world like a clown face.
Is Both Sides of the Blade a deliberate
skewering of its protagonists’ self-impor-
tance? It would explain the film’s otherwise
jarring interludes: interviews that Sara
conducts as part of her job as a broad-
caster. The global crises outlined in the
film by real-life activists such as anti-racism
campaigner Lilian Thuram and educator
Hind Darwish barely register with Sara
or with us, so myopic is the focus on her
romantic intrigues. But snarky satire is
hardly Denis’ modus operandi, and the film
seems sympathetic to Sara’s distress, which
may be deluded but is also absolutely sin-
cere. The exact events that have brought
Sara and Jean to their current state of con-
stant, feverish argument are unimportant:
it’s the drama they love.
Binoche, Lindon and Colin play it
straight, throwing themselves into their
roles with ferocity. Their chemistry is
remarkable, and there’s tremendous
pleasure to be had just in watching
them together on screen: the glances,
the touches, the very breaths they share
are almost palpable. They’re given able
support by the great Bulle Ogier as Jean’s
exasperated mother, as well as Mati Diop
and Lola Créton in small roles that will
delight longstanding fans of Denis.
These performances can’t stop Both
Sides of the Blade from being a puzzling,
frustrating work, one that promises more
than it delivers, or delivers something too
subtle to fully grasp: “A fragment of some-
thing,” as Sara puts it; a piece of an unseen
whole. But perhaps the Berlin jury’s verdict
reflected the notion that even minor Denis
is better than most contemporary filmmak-
ing: for all its flaws, Both Sides of the Blade is
still a vivid, vibrant contribution to an out-
standing oeuvre.
Both Sides of the Blade is released in
UK cinemas on 9 September
69
CLAIRE DENIS AND GRÉGOIRE COLIN:
THREE KEY COLLABORATIONS
BY CATHERINE WHEATLEY
NÉNET TE ET BONI (1996)
Grégoire Colin has appeared in Claire
Denis’ films more frequently than any other
actor. Their first feature together (following
their collaboration on the 1994 television
film U.S. Go Home) sees Colin cast as Boni,
a pizzaiolo obsessed with the local baker’s
wife. Veering between childish petulance
and endearing vulnerability, Colin is
vivid as a young man terrified by the
looming prospect of adulthood, furiously
masturbating his days away in the flat he
shares with his pregnant schoolgirl sister
Nénette (Alice Houri).
BEAU TRAVAIL (1999)
FILMS
Widely regarded as Denis’ masterpiece,
Beau travail transposes Herman Melville’s
1888 novella Billy Budd to Djibouti, and sets
it within the world of the Foreign Legion.
Denis Lavant’s seething envy of new boy
Sentain fuels the narrative, but it is Colin’s
cool, reptilian performance as the recruit
that best embodies the film’s languorous
energies. The contrast between his smooth,
golden body, rangy and poised, and Lavant’s
craggy ball of barely repressed rage is a
triumph of casting.
THE INTRUDER (2004)
In this gorgeous, confounding film, Michel
Subor plays Louis Trebor, an ailing ex-
mercenary travelling through Asia and the
South Pacific in search of a black-market
heart transplant; Colin plays his estranged
son, Sidney. It’s a small role but a vital one:
in this otherwise bleak vision of human
self-interest, Sidney is a ray of hope. Colin
suffuses the part with a quiet grace, most
moving when he gazes tearfully, beatifically,
into the face of his own infant son with a
tenderness Trebor will never know.
 70
Nope
CERTIFICATE 15 130M 19S
DIRECTOR JORDAN PEELE
WRIT TEN BY JORDAN PEELE
CINEMATOGRAPHY HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA
EDITOR NICHOLAS MONSOUR
PRODUCTION DESIGN RUTH DE JONG
MUSIC MICHAEL ABELS
COSTUME DESIGN ALEX BOVAIRD
CAST DANIEL K ALUUYA
KEKE PALMER
STEVEN YEUN
FILMS
MICHAEL WINCOT T
SYNOPSIS
Quiet OJ and his charismatic sister
Emerald are struggling to keep their
Hollywood horse-wrangling firm going.
When they start noticing strange aerial
phenomena at their ranch, they decide to try
to make their fortune by getting undeniable
footage of alien activity. This proves to be a
dangerous plan.
REVIEWED BY BEN WALTERS
From the rectal probes of Communion
(1989) to the sphincter-like ships of Inde-
pendence Day (1996), the anal associations
of UFO pictures are well established.
Nope, however, frames the flying saucer
as a different orifice: the iris. Jordan
Peele’s third feature is a f ilm about
seeing, structured around the under-
standing that to “make you a spectacle”
(as its opening Biblical quotation puts
it) is to expose you to violence or destruc-
tion. If the film’s title suggests various
refusals, the most urgent is the refusal to
make yourself available to the gaze of the
other. This, the movie suggests, might
just save your life.
Nope follows Peele’s debut, the tight,
terrifying Get Out (2017), and its follow-
up, the unnerving, dreamlike Us (2019).
In his films, Black characters are placed
in existential jeopardy by brutal fantasy
figures – covetous body-snatchers, venge-
ful doppelgängers, predatory aliens – that
connote the ongoing traumas of racial-
ised injustice. Peele uses genre in bold,
distinctive attempts to trouble America’s
idea of itself, through style and subject
matter as well as by mobilising movie per
se, both as a medium of mass communi-
cation and as an industry capable of help-
ing shift structural norms. Nope, however,
is his first story about filmmaking itself.
Siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya, cautious
and solemn) and Emerald (Keke Palmer,
dynamic and flighty) inherit their father’s
Hollywood horse-wrangling company,
but neither has his knack for it. When
strange things start happening at and
above their ranch, OJ and Em recruit a
tech whiz (Brandon Perea) and a griz-
zled veteran cinematographer (Michael
Wincott) in hopes of securing lucrative
footage of alien activity. Another indus-
try veteran (Steven Yeun) is thinking
along similar lines at his goofy gold-rush
theme town nearby.
Though these characters are after fame
and fortune, this is no glib critique: Peele
is interested in the power dynamics of
the urge to see and be seen, how central
this queasy spectacularity might be to
America itself, and whether it should be
understood as a kind of death wish. Cam-
eras are all over the screen here, on film
and TV sets, CCTV loops and mobile
phones. One character talks about aliens
as “viewers”.
Such concerns run deep in Nope.
OJ and Em, we’re told, are descended
from the jockey seen in Eadweard Muy-
bridge’s earliest attempts to photograph
movement, making the hypervisible
Black man on horseback the founda-
tional figure of cinema, at once pioneer-
ing virtuoso and object of exploitation.
Kaluuya’s character conspicuously avoids
the camera while handling horses on
set, even as his name puts us in mind of
another Black man’s spectacular Bronco
ride across Los Angeles.
The extractive underpinnings of both
moving-image-making and mounted
American expansion merge in the
cowboy genre, to which Nope gestures in
ways both dignified (the siblings’ father)
and absurd (the goofy theme town). But
the film is also interested in more primal,
animalistic links between observation
CAMERA RANGE
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ
and destruction, the ways eye contact
can feel like or lead to death. Three key
instances: a horse panics on a soundstage
when looked in the eye; a rampaging
chimpanzee withholds lethal force from
someone whose eyes are obscured; and,
most audaciously, the extra-terrestrial
object keeping the ranch under surveil-
lance is ultimately revealed to be not a
ship but a living creature. Its way of look-
ing is not that of an alien scientist or colo-
nist but of a predator.
This hunter looks like a giant eye,
ravenously ready to ingest whatever
meets its gaze while keeping itself unseen;
there’s thrilling fun in trying to glimpse
it darting between clouds and over
hills. Without neglecting the stunning
California landscape, cinematographer
Hoyte van Hoytema offers vistas of the
wide open sky (populated with digitally
crafted clouds) to be anxiously scanned
for signs of movement, complemented
by sound designer Johnnie Burn’s eerie
wind textures.
Nope aims, then, to do for the sky what
Jaws (1975) did for the ocean, or Tremors
(1990) for the desert floor. Yet it lacks
those pictures’ satisfying clarity, tension
and bite. For a filmmaker so attuned to
the conceptual and political potential of
genre, Peele delivers its pleasures oddly
unevenly. The first hour is somewhat
lumpen, the logic around the alien hazy.
The film’s publicity calls this a “horror
epic” but it’s neither particularly epic (the
canvas is big, the cast small, the stakes
local) nor terribly frightening, with
impersonal jump scares and attacks in
place of the sustained, uncanny dread of
Peele’s earlier films.
Still, Peele is unique in delivering origi-
nal, timely and intriguing satirical block-
busters that get under the skin. Nope is
worth seeing, even if its tagline could be
‘Don’t look now’.
In UK cinemas now
 71

Bodies Bodies Bodies Bodies Bodies Bodies opens with just two bodies:
Bee (Maria Bakalova) and Sophie (Amandla Sten-
berg) are locked in a tongue-swirling, lip-biting kiss,
USA 2021 CERTIFICATE 15 93M 46S
surrounded by trees, birdsong and other signs of a
DIRECTOR HALINA REIJN
world unplugged. The effect of arresting intimacy is
WRIT TEN BY SARAH DELAPPE immediately undermined by a cut to the same pair in
STORY KRISTEN ROUPENIAN an SUV, deeply absorbed in their respective smart-
CINEMATOGRAPHY JASPER WOLF
EDITORS JULIA BLOCH phones. Sophie is bringing her new girlfriend to meet
TAYLOR LEV Y her old friends in an opulent mansion in the middle
PRODUCTION DESIGN APRIL LASKY
MUSIC DISASTERPEACE of nowhere. It’s a toxic environment, not just because
COSTUME DESIGN K ATINA DANABASSIS Sophie, fresh out of rehab, is now surrounded by copi-
CAST AMANDLA STENBERG
MARIA BAK ALOVA ous quantities of booze, coke, edibles and Xanax,
RACHEL SENNOT T but also for the tangled history she shares with afflu-
ent, obnoxious David (Pete Davidson), scatty Alice
SYNOPSIS
(Rachel Sennott), approval-seeking actress Emma SPOTLIGHT
Somewhere in present-day America, five friends and (Chase Sui Wonders) and class-conscious Jordan
two relative strangers gather at a remote mansion for
(Myha’la Herrold). Another friend, Max, has gone
a weekend of drugs and debauchery. These Gen-Zers’
mysteriously awol, and Bee and ‘vet’ Greg (Lee Pace,
already fraught murder-mystery game turns more serious
as someone is actually killed, and the others race to distinctly older than the other six), as the outsiders to Rachel Sennott
identify the culprit and survive each other. this established group, find themselves having to catch
up quickly with its destructive dynamics. BY ANTON BITEL
REVIEWED BY ANTON BITEL Focusing on working-class Bee as she struggles
first to find her place in this dysfunctional coterie
In the slasher subgenre, it is the younger generation and and then to survive, Reijn’s second feature (follow- It was while studying acting at
its peculiar anxieties that tend to be put under the knife. ing Instinct, 2019) plays out as both parlour game and NYU Tisch School of the Arts
The main characters are typically high-school pupils murder mystery. For the housemates decide to play that Rachel Sennott discovered
or university co-eds, cut off in their prime while on the ‘Bodies bodies bodies’, a variant on ‘Murder in the her flair for open mic comedy; ever
threshold of adulthood, or else surviving their youth dark’ that brings tensions and trust issues bubbling to since, comedy has been closely
both triumphant and traumatised. the surface – but as a hurricane raging outside brings intertwined with her acting. She
The subgenre may be most associated with the the lights and wi-fi down, and as one of their number developed her comic persona – a
70s and 80s – spearheaded by pioneering entries like turns up very literally dead with a bloody slash to the messy zoomer navigating the
Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), John Carpenter’s throat, the rest find this game brought to life, with a dating scene in a tough economy
Halloween (1978), Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the killer – or killers – in their midst, treachery at every – for the alternative stand-up
13th (1980) and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street turn, and the cadavers quickly piling high. Stripped scene as well as on Twitter, and,
(1984) – but it has continued to renew itself, chroni- of the group chats and podcasts, the Twitter and as an early adopter of front-facing
cling over the decades the changes in adolescent TikTok that define them, these young people are con- camera comedy, was quick to

FILMS
or young adult culture and mores. Craven’s Scream fronted with their unmediated selves, and no one will take advantage of Instagram Live
(1995), for example, examined a video generation of come out looking pretty. during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
teens reared on endless rewatches of Halloween who “It’s okay to feel nervous,” Sophie tells Bee. “That’s At the same time, she was acting
are self-consciously savvy about the rules of the genre part of the fun.” Sure enough, for all the paranoia- in more established formats. There
being reinvented around them; it helped set the post- inducing tensions, brutal recriminations and bloody were student shorts at university
modern tone for the next era of horror. A decade and body count, Bodies Bodies Bodies is also very funny, nail- (including the lead role in Emma
a half later, Joseph Kahn’s Detention (2011) showed late ing with every line of dialogue these characters’ vanity, Seligman’s 2018 short Shiva Baby,
millennials trying to piece back together their identi- viciousness and vapidity. It takes a solitary death to which would go on to be expanded
ties from the super-fast flotsam and jetsam of a post- bring out the very worst in this already intoxicated, into Sennott’s breakout feature
postmodern information age. aggressive circle, and as their lies, betrayals and impos- role), an appearance in the HBO
And now, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s tures are revealed one by one, these BFFs are surpris- series High Maintenance (2018),
‘requel’ Scream (2022) follows the children of the origi- ingly quick to tear each other apart. As a whodunnit, a lead role with Ayo Edebiri in
nal Scream films’ characters as they attempt variously to it will certainly keep viewers guessing – and perhaps Comedy Central’s cable series
escape or recreate their parents’ legacy in a new gener- even questioning where the boundaries of the slasher Ayo and Rachel Are Single (2020),
ation, while Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies – though lie – but it also entertainingly skewers these zoomers’ and a recurring part in the ABC
less reductively self-reflexive about the subgenre and disconnection from both truth and reality itself. sitcom Call Your Mother (2021).
its place in modern horror – offers a far more incisive Curiously, in both her first two
dissection of Gen Z. In UK cinemas from 9 September features – Olivia Peace’s Tahara and
Seligman’s Shiva Baby (both 2020)
– Sennott plays a queer Jewish
woman at a funeral reception. In
the latter film, Sennott offers a
masterclass in cringe-inducing
comic tension as her character
Danielle, struggling to keep her
different identities (bisexual,
dropout, call girl) closeted, cracks
under the pressure of keeping up
appearances on a home turf she
cannot quite leave behind. And
in Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies
Bodies (2022), Sennott turns the
hopelessly dippy Alice from mere
comic side-character to the film’s
most memorable element of klutzy
chaos. Now in well-deserved
demand, Sennott perfectly embod-
ies Generation Z’s post-ironic,
LIFE IN THE FAST SLAIN Amandla Stenberg as Sophie and Maria Bakalova as Bee sex-positive attitude on screen.
 72
The ocean holds a mysterious power in
Silent Land Polish director Aga Woszczyńska’s haunt-
ing debut feature. Covering similar thematic
POLAND/ITALY/CZECH REPUBLIC 2021 CERTIFICATE 15 113M territory to Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) and
partly inspired by the 2013 Lampedusa
DIRECTOR AGA WOSZCZYŃSK A
SCREENPLAY AGA WOSZCZYŃSK A migrant shipwreck tragedy, Woszczyńska
PIOTR ‘JAKSA’ LIT WIN confronts Europe’s apathy towards humani-
CINEMATOGRAPHY BARTOSZ SWINIARSKI
EDITOR JAROSLAW K AMINSKI tarian crises through the actions of a Polish
PRODUCTION DESIGN ILARIA SADUN couple vacationing in Sardinia. Steeped in
MUSIC PIOTR KUREK
COSTUME DESIGN ANNA SIKORSK A ominous ambience, it’s a slow-burn drama
CAST DOBROMIR DYMECKI that questions the notion of freedom in
AGNIESZK A ZULEWSK A
JEAN-MARC BARR a morally corrupt capitalist society that
favours the elite over the many.
SYNOPSIS When seemingly perfect couple Adam
Sardinia, present day. A Polish couple on holiday fail (Dobromir Dymecki) and Anna (Agnieszka
to act when a labourer brought in to fix the swimming Żulewska) arrive at their rented accommo-
pool at their rented villa accidentally drowns. The police dation on the idyllic Sardinian coast, they
investigation and a developing friendship with two local discover the pool is broken. Though there
diving instructors forces them to confront their apathy at
is a water shortage in the area and their
the incident, turning their vacation sour.
palatial villa is surrounded by the Mediter-
REVIEWED BY K ATHERINE MCLAUGHLIN ranean Sea, they demand the owner imme-
diately fix the issue. Sure enough, a labourer
(Ibrahim Keshk) appears the next morning,
interrupting their peaceful holiday with his
drilling, his mere presence setting them on
edge. But when he accidentally drowns
in the pool, a police investigation begins,
and the couple’s initial inaction at the star-
tling sight of a human being bobbing life-
lessly in the water sets them on a stormy
course. Their psychological states fray as
Woszczyńska and Piotr Litwin’s screenplay
ON THE POOL Dobromir Dymecki as Adam, Agnieszka Zulewska as Anna scrutinises their moral centres.
The director conjures an air of hypnotic disquiet with her carefully arranged mise en scène
FILMS
SILENT LAND
Early on in this British crime thriller-musical,
THE SCORE as small-time crooks Mike (Johnny Flynn)
and Troy (Will Poulter) drive to the rendez-
UK 2021 CERTIFICATE 15 99M 55S vous where their handover, and prospec-
tive fortunes, will be made, Troy notes the
DIRECTOR MALACHI SMYTH
WRIT TEN BY MALACHI SMYTH many meanings of the word ‘score’: tallying
CINEMATOGRAPHY DARRAN BRAGG points or goals in a game; an informal term
EDITOR SADAF NAZARI
PRODUCTION DESIGN PAUL CRIPPS for hooking up with someone or acquiring
ALL SONGS BY JOHNNY FLYNN illicit substances; even a soundtrack.
ADDITIONAL SCORE JOHNNY FLYNN
JOE ZEITLIN It’s a hat-tip to the way the film’s title
COSTUME DESIGN HOLLY SMART encompasses the genre strands it attempts
CAST WILL POULTER
NAOMI ACKIE to weave together: folk songs from Flynn’s
JOHNNY FLYNN back catalogue, allied to a virtual three-
hander of betrayal, burgeoning romance
SYNOPSIS
and £20,000 in loot. If that seems an unu-
Two low-level crooks, Mike and Troy, take a bag of stolen sual combination, it may make more sense
money to a quiet roadside café, where they await the deal
when learning that director Malachi Smyth
that will make their fortune. Troy develops an attraction to
waitress Gloria and, as their relationship develops, starts to
had initially scripted his debut feature as a
question his mission. Meanwhile, Mike plots to double- straight thriller, only stumbling on to this
cross him. musical approach when listening to Flynn’s
2017 album Sillion during a rewrite. Smyth
REVIEWED BY LEIGH SINGER enticed the musician with his pitch and
enlisted him as co-lead, Flynn subsequently
rerecording his tracks with his castmates.
Flynn’s fans will likely enjoy his new,
recontextualised renditions; his acting, fill-
ing in Mike’s gone-to-seed good looks and
tetchy resignation at his receding options,
also works outside the musical accompani-
ment. Poulter and Naomi Ackie (who is set
to play Whitney Houston in an upcoming
biopic) can’t quite carry the tunes as well as
Flynn can, but the lo-fi, often almost-spo-
ROWED BUDDIES Will Poulter as Troy, Naomi Ackie as Gloria ken-word approach doesn’t demand vocal
The tranquillity of the glistening coastline
and the endless waves of blue sea, shot entic-
ingly by cinematographer Bartosz Swini-
arski, soon turn menacing. Using a combi-
nation of natural and artificial sounds and
images, Woszczyńska splinters the serene
atmosphere, guiding the viewer through a
sinister land where the police collude to pro-
tect travel industry capital over a human life.
At first the couple rejoice at being let off the
hook, but revelry in the town square (shot
in one impressive long take) grows disori-
enting – a traditional-dance sequence recalls
set pieces from recent folk-horror films. As
guilt eventually takes over, the couple’s initial
indifference becomes their undoing.
The director conjures an air of hypnotic
disquiet with her carefully arranged mise en
scène and the unnerving sound design. Chia-
roscuro lighting, a fridge filled with bottled
water left open on a scorching day, cicadas
in the trees, the noise of waves constantly
lapping on the shore all coalesce to dial up
the dread. Woszczyńska is interested in the
bigger picture, shooting incidents from afar
before narrowing her gaze, gradually zoom-
ing in on scenes of personal turmoil or emo-
tional bankruptcy. But it’s the understated
way in which she draws parallels between
moral decline and the planet’s dwindling
resources that lingers.
In UK cinemas from 23 September
gymnastics or jukebox musical razzle-dazzle
– rather, the sort of contemplative solilo-
quies these accomplished young actors can
readily convey.
The main issue is that, while the songs
skim prettily across the narrative surface,
the dialogue beyond the lyrics, despite the
odd sharp one-liner, has little dramatic or
psychological heft. The waiting game played
by Mike and Troy resolutely fails to generate
either mounting tension or Godot-style exis-
tential angst. It also strains credibility that
Poulter and Ackie connect so profoundly
so quickly, particularly given her additional
relationship baggage. Meanwhile, the back-
stabbing plan cooked up by Mike and his
wife Sally (Lydia Wilson) never convinces as
a viable or even necessary gamble, consider-
ing the low stakes and the absence of threat
from other criminals involved.
The provincial roadside café where most
of the story unfolds might appear a limited
setting, but Smyth and cinematographer
Darran Bragg keep the visuals varied and
fresh, including cross-cuts between croon-
ers and the occasional split-screen sequence.
There’s no faulting the ambition, but it’s
noticeable that one definition of ‘score’ – to
make a cut or notch – goes unmentioned:
ultimately, Smyth never really harmonises
his disparate elements into making their
own distinct, cohesive mark.
In UK cinemas from 9 September

Hatching
FINLAND/SWEDEN/BELGIUM/FRANCE/NORWAY 2021
DIRECTOR HANNA BERGHOLM
WRIT TEN BY ILJA RAUTSI
STORY ILJA RAUTSI
HANNA BERGHOLM
CINEMATOGRAPHY JARKKO T. LAINE
EDITOR LINDA JILDMALM
PRODUCTION DESIGN PÄIVI KET TUNEN
MUSIC STEIN BERGE SVENDSEN
COSTUME DESIGN ULRIK A SJÖLIN
CAST SIIRI SOLALINNA
SOPHIA HEIKKILÄ
JANI VOLANEN
SYNOPSIS
Twelve-year-old Tinja trains hard at
gymnastics in an attempt to please her
overbearing mother, a lifestyle vlogger who
presents her family as perfect. Tinja finds an
egg in the woods and hides it in her bedroom
until a birdlike creature hatches out and
begins to enact the girl’s subconscious desires.
REVIEWED BY ANNE BILLSON
Hanna Bergholm’s feature debut is one of
several recent horror films by female direc-
tors that focus on the intense bond between
mothers and daughters; prominent exam-
ples include Natalie Erika James’s Relic
(2020), Ruth Paxton’s A Banquet (2021) and
Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother (2021).
It’s a primal relationship ripe with potential
for existential as well as body horror.
Bergholm and her screenwriter, Ilja
Rautsi, approach this central theme as a
dark fairytale, with a biological Mother (as
she is named in the English-language cred-
its) filling the role of a Wicked Stepmother.
Mother has robbed her daughter, Tinja, of
her youth and identity by exploiting her as
a vessel for her own thwarted ambitions
as an ice skater, alluded to in framed pho-
tographs and a briefly glimpsed scar. The
fairytale ambience is further evoked in floral
wallpaper that stifles rather than prettifies;
a corvid that bursts into the family’s pristine
home and wreaks glass-smashing havoc
before Mother snaps its neck with unnerv-
ing coldness; and Tinja’s dreamlike noc-
turnal incursion into the forest, where she
mimics Mother’s actions by administering
the coup de grâce to a wounded bird (possibly
the corvid resurrected) before finding its
mysterious egg and embarking on her own
grotesque iteration of the warped mother-
daughter relationship.
Alli, as Tinja names the hatchling, devel-
ops from a shrieking animatronic puppet
reminiscent of the fearsome Skeksis in Jim
Henson’s The Dark Crystal (1982) into Tinja’s
doppelgänger, distinguishable only by its
unnatural movements and death’s-head
rictus as it acts out its caretaker’s transgres-
sive wishes, sometimes while Tinja herself
is having a seizure. Alli’s crimes evolve from
shredding a leotard (a gift from Mother) to
killing the dog whose barking disrupts the
girl’s sleep, and then to stalking and maim-
ing a rival who looks set to replace Tinja
on the gymnastics team. By refusing, for
much of the film, to explain how Tinja can
be in two places at once, Bergholm inserts
enough ambiguity into the psychic link
between girl and creature to keep the viewer
unsure as to whether the alter ego has an
independent existence or is all in her head.
The f ilmmakers fold coming-of-age
tropes into their scenario, including allu-
sions to eating disorders, with the symbi-
otic bond between Tinja and Alli sealed by
exchanges of blood, saliva and regurgitated
bird seed. Tinja’s baffled classmates think
she’s “weird” but never quite resort to out-
right bullying, and her milquetoast father
dismally fails to safeguard his daughter’s
interests, though he unwittingly provides
the film with one of its grim comic high-
lights when he backs off in embarrassment,
assuming the bloodstains on the sheets as
Tinja tries to hide a decapitated dog are
signs that she is menstruating. Meanwhile,
we’re encouraged to fear for the safety of the
73
fourth member of the family, Tinja’s bratty
younger brother, driven to spiteful behav-
OEUF MOTHER
Siiri Solalinna as Tinja
iour and bedwetting by Mother’s neglect
and his resentment of the sister who gets
all the attention.
There is additional deadpan humour at
the expense of Finland’s progressive eco-
FILMS
logical agenda – after Mother snaps the
bird’s neck, she orders Tinja to dispose of it
in the organic recycling bin – and an acerbic
critique of the hypocrisy of the influencer
lifestyle, in which Mother sees no contra-
diction between the happy family façade
she presents on social media and the enti-
tled way she brazenly conducts an extra-
marital affair, blind to the pain it causes
her daughter. Given the feeble nature of
the husband, who weakly attempts to jus-
tify his passivity, the film’s most emotion-
ally grounded character is in fact Mother’s
lover, a widowed handyman who sees all
too clearly the havoc the woman is wreak-
ing on Tinja’s psyche and seems poised to
help – until the doppelgänger menaces his
baby son, upon which he repudiates both
mother and daughter. Mother, naturally,
blames Tinja for ruining her love life.
With the help of a remarkable double per-
formance from her young leading actress
(Siiri Solalinna as both Tinja and her dop-
pelgänger), Bergholm builds a heartbreak-
ing portrait of an adolescent sacrificing her
own needs in a desperate effort to please
a mother as monstrous as the hatchling.
Their dynamic echoes the mother-daugh-
ter relationship in Carrie (1976), but with at
least one additional psychic twist: with both
Mother and Alli displaying scimitar-like fin-
gernails and, at one point, blood-smeared
faces, one begins to suspect that the hatch-
ling is a projection of Mother’s desires as
much as Tinja’s, the misdeeds of the parent
mutating into ever more grotesque variants
as they pass through the generations.
In UK cinemas from 16 September
 75

great-grandfather of Andrew Norton, a recurring fictional MORE FILMS BY

The Gold Machine alter ego of Iain Sinclair. In fact, In Tropical Lands was writ- GRANT GEE
ten by Sinclair’s ancestor, the botanist Arthur Sinclair; in BY BEN NICHOLSON
UK/THE NETHERLANDS/ITALY 2022 the film, it is the fictional Arthur Norton who detailed
his trek into the Peruvian jungle in search of virgin land
DIRECTOR GRANT GEE
ORIGINAL NARRATION ripe for exploitation. The film itself is divided into two
WRIT TEN BY IAIN SINCLAIR strands: one has Andrew Norton sitting in a room over-
BASED ON RESEARCH BY FARNE SINCLAIR
INSPIRED BY ‘DINING looking the sea as he ruminates on his family history, and
ON STONES’, ‘THE GOLD the other tracks his daughter as she follows in her ances-
MACHINE’ & OTHER
WRITINGS OF IAIN SINCLAIR tor’s footsteps.
FILMED BY GRANT GEE In reality, both Iain and Farne made the journey to Peru, JOY DIVISION (2007)
EDITOR GRANT GEE
MUSIC LEYLAND KIRBY and Gee’s film exists in concert with a book of the same Gee’s treatment of the
CAST STEPHEN DILLANE name by Sinclair, and a podcast providing reflections on history of Joy Division
MICHAEL BYRNE is as electrifying as the
the journey, produced by Farne. In the film, Norton (played
Mancunian band’s unique
SYNOPSIS silently by Michael Byrne) remains confined to his rooms,
sound was in 1979. Presented
Blending fiction and documentary, Grant Gee’s formally playful
where he was incarcerated in Sinclair’s 2004 novel Dining chronologically, the film
new film charts a journey to Peru through which a father and on Stones, narrating (in a voiceover by Stephen Dillane) is constructed around the
daughter – fictionalised versions of the writer, thinker and from afar; Sinclair’s elegant prose peers through the layers testimonies of surviving band
explorer Iain Sinclair and his daughter, Farne – reckon with of history built precariously upon one another, attempt- members, collaborators and
the legacy of a book written by one of their ancestors, who ing to connect with deeper substrata of understanding. contemporaries, but Gee
plundered Peru for colonial gain. Norton wrestles with the echoes of his great-grandfather, augments them with a blend
while Farne engages with Arthur Sinclair’s impact on the of archival footage, his own
REVIEWED BY BEN NICHOLSON evocative imagery, found
indigenous Asháninka people of Chanchamayo: “The
photographs and on-screen
wheels turn, bones are crushed.” text. It’s an enigmatic portrait
How far can we allow ourselves to be haunted by the mali- Gee does an excellent job of melding the film’s various that’s both raucous tale and
cious actions of our forebears? And how to exorcise the lin- elements and modalities in a way that draws out the best of poignant tribute.
gering burden they impose? These are the questions that are Sinclair’s poetic narration without ever mystifying or exoti-
wrestled with in a variety of forms throughout Grant Gee’s cising the film’s ethnographic footage. The involvement
essayistic new film, The Gold Machine. A literal and figura- of Pérez, Asháninka himself, brings both that viewpoint
tive odyssey to Peru, the film shifts perspectives and modes, and an academic rigour (he has worked extensively with
bringing together the experiences and sensibilities of col- anthropologist Elena Mihas, who also appears) that gives
laborators like the writer Iain Sinclair, his daughter Farne, The Gold Machine a genuinely collaborative feel, managing
and producer Gregorio Santos Pérez. to return some semblance of agency to those whose stories PATIENCE (AFTER
For Gee, the film is the third instalment in a loose tril- weren’t turned into 19th-century books. It may not atone SEBALD) (2012)
ogy about “the places books take us”, following Patience for ancestral crimes, but it is a valiant start. An attempt to reckon with,
(After Sebald) (2012) and Innocence of Memories (2015). In The and take inspiration from,

FILMS
Gold Machine, the book in question was written by the In UK cinemas now W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings
of Saturn (1995), Gee’s Patience
(After Sebald) is a dense,
rangy, utterly transfixing
work. Charting the author’s
walking tour of Suffolk,
the film combines beautiful
monochrome imagery with the
observations and reflections of
a cavalcade of writers, artists,
philosophers, publishers and
thinkers. Much like the book
that provides its focus, it
erupts with fascinating ideas.

INNOCENCE OF
MEMORIES (2015)
In 2012, Orhan Pamuk opened
a museum in Istanbul housing
objects described in his 2008
novel The Museum of Innocence.
Gee’s elusive and atmospheric
film explores the book, the
museum and the city Pamuk
calls home. A haunting piece,
it’s narrated by a character
who supposedly knew the
novel’s central characters,
creating new connections
between the ways the book,
the museum and the film parse
memories and evoke time
and space.

ON REFLECTION Michael Byrne as Andrew Norton

 76

more than present-day action, the story unravels like a MORE FILMS BY
Dry Ground Burning Greek tragedy. The narrative comes full-circle when the ADIRLEY QUEIRÓS
gun-toting Léa fails to stay out of jail, fulfilling the fate her BY ELA BIT TENCOURT
BRAZIL/PORTUGAL/USA 2022 comrades have tried to derail.
Queirós and Pimenta belong to a larger vanguard of
DIRECTORS JOANA PIMENTA
ADIRLEY QUEIRÓS inventive Brazilian directors that includes Affonso Uchoa,
WRIT TEN BY JOANA PIMENTA João Dumans, Juliana Antunes and Gustavo Vinagre, for
ADIRLEY QUEIRÓS
CINEMATOGRAPHY JOANA PIMENTA whom formal boundaries are supple and genres forever
EDITOR CRISTINA AMARAL shift, and who favour the expressivity of diverse bodies over
PRODUCTION DESIGN DENISE VIEIRA
CAST LÉA ALVES naturalistic dramaturgy or conventional staging. This pays
JOANA DARC FURTADO off handsomely whenever Dry Ground Burning shrugs off its HOOD MOVIE: IS THE CITY
ANDREIA VIEIRA
more fabulist trappings, as when Chitara and Léa discuss ONE ONLY? (2011)
families with partly absent parents, or adoring one’s chil- Queirós’s debut docufiction
SYNOPSIS
dren yet falling back into crime and not seeing them grow mines the contradictions
In Sol Nascente, a rapidly changing peripheral community between Brazil’s monumental
in Brasília, a group of armed women run and guard a rogue up – patterns of disruption and continuance, resilience and
capital, Brasília – founded in
refinery after discovering crude oil. Sisters Chitara and Léa vulnerability, setbacks and growth, mapped onto lives that 1960 and embodying the era’s
rekindle their bond during Léa’s reprieve from prison, while are ultimately too messy to be reduced to a simple dialectic. blind faith in modernisation as
Andreia campaigns to fight the militaristic regime for her It’s in these ostensibly more down-to-earth moments that a cure for societal problems –
community’s survival as its next councilwoman. the film really soars. and the poverty of the satellite
Stylistically, the movie’s naturalism accommodates cities to which the country’s
REVIEWED BY ELA BIT TENCOURT working class, including
myriad genre overtones, subtler than in Queirós’s earlier
work. Léa strikes a convincing enough figure to be an the construction workers
who built Brasília, were
In recent years, Adirley Queirós has playfully described his anti-heroine out of a weird western à la Kleber Men-
expelled. Blending archival
own work as “ethnographic sci-fi”. Watching his latest fea- donça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau (2019); sci- footage, observation and
ture, Dry Ground Burning, co-directed with Joana Pimenta ence fiction is also detectable on the fringes, with the fiction, the film interrogates
(who doubles as cinematographer), it’s clear this phrase is sisters at one point comparing their newfound status as the nationalist utopian ideal
still apt. Queirós is one of the most animated, charismatic gasolinheiras to being abducted by aliens. All this under- that belies Brazil’s history of
creators on the contemporary Brazilian movie scene, and lines the notion that oil-rigging might just be the stuff racism, labour exploitation
though the visual sobriety of his three latest films risks of daydreams. and class exclusion.
obscuring his satirical grit, an alertness to the humorous But the movie doesn’t really need such nods to futur-
undercurrents in his work always proves rewarding. ism. A few lushly dystopian scenes establish a landscape
In Dry Ground Burning, a group of women from Sol punctuated by metal grates and murky parking lots, with
Nascente (‘rising sun’), on the outskirts of Brasília’s satel- inmates being shuffled on to public transit, and military
lite city Ceilândia, find crude oil. Acting as a collective, police in a vehicle retrofitted with junkyard tech that’s
they become gasolinheiras: women who turn crude oil into later dismantled and burned. Visually, these scenes recall
gasoline for sale. They negotiate with motoboys, bikers who the duo’s previous collaboration, Once There Was Brasília
WHITE OUT, BLACK IN (2014)
FILMS

distribute it for a cut, while battling competing cartels that
threaten their livelihoods and their lives, in a loose parallel
with drug-trafficking. The irony at the film’s centre is that
Brazil’s nationalised oil industry, which has so far lined the
pockets of politicians and the rich, is both radically priva-
tised and collectivised. Rather than striking it rich, the
women enter and help develop an underground economy
whose anti-establishment ethos provides the pressure for
a fuming volcano of rebellion.
The story centres on tough yet benevolent oil kingpin
Chitara; her sister Léa, who, once out of jail, acts as the
gasolinheiras’ bodyguard; and their friend Andreia, who
runs for office as Sol Nascente’s district deputy. As mili-
tary police habitually sweep the neighbourhood in heavily
armoured vehicles, Andreia’s Prison People Party (PPP)
promises to end police curfews, fix the sewage and help
ex-convicts – many of whom are struggling single mothers
– with progressive policies. Told through reminiscences
(2017). Pimenta’s static, tenderly unflinching camera is also
remarkable at establishing and holding the sisterly inti- In Queirós’s nonfiction hybrid
follow-up, an intergalactic
macy that anchors the story.
warrior arrives from the
Indeed, in Dry Ground Burning, the future isn’t just future in Brasília’s satellite
female: it is Black, lesbian, profoundly matriarchal. This city Ceilândia in 1986, only to
community is carefully organised, and is supremely con- confront a brutalising reality:
scious not only of its marginalised position, outside most at the periphery’s disco, police
conservative networks of working- and middle-class fami- use a drug-sting operation
lies, but also of its power as a potential mass movement to assault Black partygoers.
and significant electoral force A scene in which the direc- The film is at once a scathing
political satire and a celebration
tors juxtapose the image of Andreia campaigning through
of the periphery’s political
a megaphone on a moving truck with footage of crowds consciousness and cultural
cheering for Jair Bolsonaro fleshes out this political poten- (particularly musical) creativity.
tial beautifully: you might imagine for a second that it’s the
PPP being feted, with fireworks ablaze to proclaim the
dawn of a new era.
In UK cinemas now

ONCE THERE WAS

BRASÍLIA (2017)
In this docu-sci-fi,
co-directed with Joana
Pimenta, a community of
outcasts organises to confront
a dystopian police state.
The directors frame the
militarised, dehumanised
regimes of tomorrow as a
mirror image – or a direct
consequence – of today’s
far-right movements. With
powerful non-professional
ensembles, jerry-built sets
and outmoded technologies,
the film celebrates the ardent
militancy and ingenuity of
nascent mass movements.

PETROL HEAD Joana Darc Furtado as Chitara


The period drama with a distinctly modern
Catherine Called Birdy sensibility has become a successful sub-
genre in recent years, from Sofia Coppola’s
DIRECTOR LENA DUNHAM Marie Antoinette (2006) to Bridgerton (2020-).
SCREENPLAY LENA DUNHAM
BASED ON THE BOOK BY K AREN CUSHMAN Lena Dunham’s 13th-century-set comedy
CINEMATOGRAPHY LAURIE ROSE Catherine Called Birdy, her long-gestating
EDITOR JOE KLOTZ
PRODUCTION DESIGN K AVE QUINN adaptation of Karen Cushman’s 1994 novel,
MUSIC CARTER BURWELL adopts a similar template to its stablemates
COSTUME DESIGN JULIAN DAY
CAST BELLA RAMSEY – a feisty female heroine, diverse casting,
LESLEY SHARP wry comedy, the use of pop songs to under-
SOPHIE OKONEDO
score key narrative themes – but eventually
SYNOPSIS reveals itself to be running rather deeper.
England, the 13th century. Fourteen-year-old Catherine may The year is 1290. Catherine (Bella
be the daughter of the local lord, but she refuses to behave Ramsey) is the 14-year-old daughter of Sir
like a lady. When her financially challenged father decides Rollo (a louche, scene-stealing Andrew
to marry her off to procure a dowry, Catherine determines Scott) and Lady Aislinn (Billie Piper), who
to do anything necessary to put off potential suitors and is used to living in comfort compared to
remain at home with her family. the peasants who inhabit the surrounding
Lincolnshire countryside. But the family
REVIEWED BY NIKKI BAUGHAN
is broke, and the only option is to marry off
Catherine for a sizeable dowry. Much to
her father’s chagrin, Catherine, nicknamed
Birdy, is unwilling to comply, and sets about
dismantling every potential match.
Played with charm and gusto by Ramsey
(who was in Game of Thrones from 2016 to
2019), Birdy is exactly the sort of charac-
ter you’d expect to appeal to writer/direc-
tor Dunham, whose work, including Tiny
Furniture (2010) and HBO’s hit show Girls
(2012-2017), has consistently challenged
patriarchal norms. From the moment we
IN THE MOOD FOR DOVE Bella Ramsey as Catherine first meet Catherine, who is indulging in
It’s refreshing to see a dystopian satire that uses fantasy and good humour to make its points
STRAWBERRY MANSION
The last century has supplied no shortage
Strawberry Mansion of dystopian movies, but recently – and it’s
not hard to see why – they’ve been show-
USA/UK 2020 ing up in droves. Since these films have
naturally tended towards the dark and
DIRECTORS ALBERT BIRNEY doom-laden, it’s refreshing to see a dys-
KENTUCKER AUDLEY
WRIT TEN BY ALBERT BIRNEY topian satire with rather a different tone,
KENTUCKER AUDLEY from co-directors, co-screenwriters and
CINEMATOGRAPHY TYLER DAVIS
EDITORS ALBERT BIRNEY co-stars Kentucker Audley and Albert
KENTUCKER AUDLEY Birney. Strawberry Mansion uses fantasy
PRODUCTION DESIGN BECCA BROOKS MORRIN
MUSIC DAN DEACON and good humour to make its satirical
COSTUME DESIGN MACK REYES points all the more effective, in ways that
CAST PENNY FULLER
KENTUCKER AUDLEY recall Michel Gondry, Jan Švankmajer,
and Terry Gilliam at his most whimsical.
SYNOPSIS It’s 2035, and the powers that be – the
2035. ‘Dream tax auditor’ James Preble, who ensures people government in cahoots with the ad indus-
pay tax on things that appear in their dreams, visits an try, essentially – have discovered not only
elderly lady, Arabella Isadora, who lives out in the country how to tax people for objects that appear in
in Strawberry Mansion. He finds that she’s been illegally their dreams (a hot-air balloon: $2; a buffalo:
recording her dreams, but his attempts to view them lead
5¢) but to introduce into those dreams con-
him into fantastical worlds…
sumer products that spark cravings when
REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP the dreamers wake.
James Preble (Audley) – schmuckishly
dressed, 1950s-style, in suit, tie and trilby
hat, with slicked-back hair and a mousy
’tache – is a ‘dream tax auditor’, tasked with
ensuring that citizens pay all due taxes on
their dream items. He himself is dream-
ing when we first meet him, ensconced in
a nauseatingly all-pink kitchen, into which
erupts his Hawaiian-shirted ‘buddy’ (Linas
Phillips) bearing a bucket of ‘Cap’n Kelly’s
Chicken’ and a litre of ‘Red Rocket Cola’.
THINK PINK Kentucker Audley as James Preble So effective is this suggestion that, having
77
literal mud-slinging with the village ado-
lescents (set to a languid version of Super-
grass anthem ‘Alright’, the first of many
string-heavy covers that also include Piper’s
own ‘Honey to the Bee’), it’s clear she is, to
paraphrase the character herself, certainly
no lady.
While some of the dialogue is rather on
the nose (at one point Catherine presents a
bullet-point list of “things a girl cannot do”),
Birdy’s fierce independence allows for some
fine moments of observational comedy,
such as her unashamedly female-gazey reac-
tion to a priory full of strikingly hot monks:
“I’m ever so confused about what God is
getting at here.” Elsewhere, Dunham deftly
explores the challenges of oncoming wom-
anhood, with the pains of first periods, first
loves and first betrayals all given her know-
ing treatment.
But it’s in the final scenes – which diverge
from the novel – that Catherine Called Birdy
reveals its true heart. As a twist in the nar-
rative pushes Birdy’s conflicted father to
the fore, Scott is commanding in moving
exchanges with first his working wife and
then his daughter, whom he comes to
understand just as she is about to fly the
nest. Here, the film finds particular potency
in reminding us that we can all find strength
in those who are willing to fight our corner.
In UK cinemas from 23 September
FILMS
woken, Preble stops off at the nearest Cap’n
Kelly’s, where the animated sales-chicken
sells him not only a bucketful of fried bird
but a helping of ‘chicken shake’.
And so to the roseate gothic pile of
Strawberry Mansion, whose proprietor,
a sweet little old lady named Arabella
Isadora (Penny Fuller), has, it turns out,
been preserving all her dreams on over
2,000 VHS tapes – an expressly forbidden
enterprise. Preble starts viewing the tapes
through a huge papier mâché headpiece.
And from here on in it’s dream within
dream within dream, featuring – among
much else – a tenor sax-playing frog-waiter,
a skyborne demon (both played by Birney),
a frigate captained by Preble and crewed
by mice, a field full of foliage-clad human-
oids, jellyfish, sea caterpillars, and a lovely
young woman with whom Preble falls
in love, and who proves to be Arabella’s
younger self.
All this is achieved with handcrafted
effects – the modest budget never proves
constricting – backed by a lively, evoca-
tive, synthy score from Dan Deacon and
enriched by Tyler Davis’s saturated cinema-
tography. Some may find the soft-toned
inventiveness of Strawberry Mansion a little
too sweet to take; but relax into it and the
film’s romantic charm and subversive satire
should soon weave their spell.
In UK cinemas from 16 September
 78
In Front of Your Face
SOUTH KOREA 2021
DIRECTOR HONG SANGSOO
WRIT TEN BY HONG SANGSOO
CINEMATOGRAPHY HONG SANGSOO
EDITOR HONG SANGSOO
MUSIC HONG SANGSOO
CAST LEE HYEYOUNG
CHOW YUNHEE
KWON HAEHYO
SYNOPSIS
Sangok, a fiftysomething Korean former actress
living in the US, has briefly returned to Seoul and
is staying with her sister, Jeongok. They spend time
together before Sangok goes to meet a filmmaker,
Jaewon, who wants to work with her. The two get
drunk while discussing potential projects.
REVIEWED BY THOMAS FLEW
Eight scenes, set in seven locations over 24
hours, make up this 85-minute film by the
Korean director Hong Sangsoo. In Front of Your
Face is his 26th feature; his 27th and 28th have
already premiered since this film opened at
Cannes last year. Hong works quickly, instinc-
tively and improvisationally with a small,
nimble crew; he is credited here as writer, direc-
tor, producer, editor, director of photography
and composer. His films are low-budget and
low-key, and aim to present scenarios of every-
day life with a purity and simplicity that higher
production values and higher-stakes plot points
might obscure.
Each Hong f ilm is best considered not
FILMS
solely on its own terms but in the context of
his ongoing project: a cumulative collection
of sketches with recurrent themes, locations
and character types, constituting a growing
anthology. In Front of Your Face continues this
endeavour, featuring two staples of Hongian
filmmaking: a lengthy, drunken conversation
and two characters with experience in making
cinema themselves. But there is something
new and special about this film – namely Lee
Hyeyoung, who in her first collaboration with
Hong plays Sangok, a fiftysomething former
actress who has returned to Seoul from the US
to visit her sister Jeongok (Cho Yunhee) and a
filmmaker, Jaewon (Kwon Haehyo). Almost
omnipresent in the film – we only lose sight of
her in brief moments when the camera lingers
elsewhere at the end of scenes – Sangok travels
from place to place, arranged meetings altered
by chance encounters.
In Front of Your Face begins in Jeongok’s living
room, where Sangok has been sleeping on the
sofa. Soon after waking, she intones a mantra-
like prayer, which we hear through voiceover:
“Everything I see before me is grace. There
is no tomorrow. No yesterday, no tomorrow.
But this moment right now is paradise.” Her
prayers recur throughout the film, illuminating
her thought process and – for reasons that are
revealed later in the film – giving Lee’s calm and
cheerful expression added poignancy.
During breakfast at a café and a stroll in a
nearby park, the two sisters converse, revealing
how little they know about each other’s lives.
Jeongok has no idea where her sister lives, or
what she does for money; Sangok is resentful
that some of her transpacific letters have gone
unanswered and blames this for their estrange-
ment. But the frost always thaws, and the
recurring image is of the sisters’ broad, warm
smiles. Lee and Cho are masterful in their use
of body language, making the way the charac-
ters interact seem like a kind of dance.
These scenes, like all the film’s scenes (and
indeed all of Hong’s films), are shot from one
vantage point, with a zoom out from the centre
at the start of each and camera pans where nec-
essary to refocus the action. Shot digitally in
relatively low quality, the images are thought-
fully composed, if never beautiful; the high
saturation gives the greenery in some scenes
an unpleasant luridness. Colourful high-rises
can be glimpsed through apartment windows;
looming over the sisters’ conversations, they
indicate how much the city has changed, throw-
ing Sangok’s financial situation into sharp relief,
and – once Sangok declines Jeongok’s sugges-
tion that Sangok move into one of the high-rise
flats – causing Jeongok’s resentment at her sis-
ter’s move to the US to bubble to the surface.
After taking leave of her sister, Sangok heads
to her meeting with filmmaker Jaewon, who
has requested an appointment. There is some
awkward politeness about a last-minute change
of venue, but a jump-cut propels the pair’s con-
versation forward. Jaewon wants Sangok to act
in an upcoming project; Sangok declines. But
the sudden presence of four empty liquor bot-
tles suggests a new openness between the two.
This beautiful, lengthy scene (almost half of
the film’s total runtime) plays out like a conversa-
tion between two sides of Hong Sangsoo’s per-
sonality. Jaewon is a clear stand-in for Hong the
filmmaker – his work is described by Sangok as
“like novels; short stories”, and Jaewon refers to his
ability to shoot and edit his own films – whereas
Sangok seems to represent Hong’s filmmaking
ethos and ideals, at one point paraphrasing the
film’s title by saying, “I believe heaven is hiding in
front of our faces.” The beautiful can be found in
the mundane, says Hong through Sangok, and
never is that clearer than in the moments during
this drunken encounter when Sangok clumsily
plays the guitar. She’s rusty, and plucks gingerly at
the strings, but her focus and sincerity make the
tune’s roughness all the more beautiful.
In UK cinemas from 23 September
SEOUL RAIN Kwon Haehyo as Jaewon, Lee Hyeyoung as Sangok
Funny Pages
DIRECTOR OWEN KLINE
WRIT TEN BY OWEN KLINE
CINEMATOGRAPHY HUNTER ZIMNY
SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS
EDITORS OWEN KLINE
ERIN DEWIT T
PRODUCTION DESIGN AUDREY TURNER
MADELINE SADOWSKI
MUSIC SEAN O’HAGAN
COSTUME DESIGN AUDREY TURNER
EMILY CONSTATINO
CAST DANIEL ZOLGHADRI
MAT THEW MAHER
MILES EMANUEL
SYNOPSIS
Aspiring New Jersey-based comic-book artist Robert
sees his art-school teacher get hit by a car, and
subsequently feels survivor’s guilt. Relocating from
Princeton to Trenton, Robert moves into a basement
apartment and enters an underground comic-book
community; he meets the embittered Wallace, a former
colour separator for a major publisher, who turns out
to be a dubious mentor on every level possible.
REVIEWED BY ADAM NAYMAN
Owen Kline’s Funny Pages doesn’t labour its timeli-
ness, but it’s nonetheless a movie of the moment.
Or maybe against it: for the last decade or so,
critics, audiences and filmmakers of every stripe
have been invited (or forced) to pledge fidelity to
various high-end cinematic comic-book universes.
What could be snider or more defiant in these
Marvel-saturated times than a wry comedy sym-
pathetically sketching the grimy life and mind of
a budding underground comic-book artist, a wan-
nabe Harvey Pekar?
There’s no splendour (American or otherwise)
in Funny Pages. With the help of cinematographer
Sean Price Williams, by now a virtuoso at con-
juring up everyday ugliness, Kline has styled his
feature debut as a throbbing, bloodshot eyesore.
The film’s lower-than-lo-fi look and loose hangout
vibe evoke the indie cinema of the mid-90s more
successfully than, say, Jonah Hill’s Mid90s (2018),
or any number of contemporary indie throwbacks.
At times, it’s as if Kline, who played a troubled
young son in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the
Whale (2005), were trying to channel the raggedy,
deadpan, cynical spirit of that director’s early work.
Funny Pages’ bracing cold open, which juxta-
poses skinny, ascendant adolescent artist Robert
(Daniel Zolghadri) with his paunchy, dilapidated
art-school mentor (Stephen Adly Guirgis), is even
nastier than that. Chewing over design ideas and
philosophies of drawing, the kid and his guru are
like two sides of the same coin. Then the teacher
dies in a sick-joke fashion that renders Robert acci-
dentally complicit – a passing of the torch that’s
also a punch in the gut.
In the aftermath of catastrophe, Robert ends up
ditching his prosperous, sceptical parents and set-
ting up shop in a blistering basement apartment in
scenic Trenton, New Jersey. Awash in delusions of
anti-grandeur, our hero is determined to use what
little resources he still has to pay his dues. It turns
out that living semi-legally in a fetid sweatbox is
a good way to save on rent, as long as he doesn’t
mind generationally older roommates who watch
old movies on a laptop and casually masturbate in
his presence. ($350 a month doesn’t even get him a
partition, let alone a door.)
Robert is suffering, but he’s also gathering mate-
rial and honing his craft. He even scores a day job
with a public defender who’s charmed by some
sample courtroom-sketch caricatures. To his

SHADY BUSINESS Daniel Zolghadri as Robert
longtime friend and fellow disreputable doo-
dler Miles (Miles Emanuel), Robert is an inspi-
ration. As the film goes on, their relationship is
pressurised by all kinds of bad vibes: not just
the usual jealousy and competitiveness but also
Miles’ possible (and in any case unrequited)
crush on his more successful and outgoing pal.
A third major character, Wallace (Matthew
Maher), transforms Funny Pages from an insular,
enervating duet into something broader and
even more hostile. We first see him being inter-
viewed for an upcoming court case in which he
is the (obviously guilty) defendant; he is also
a former comic-book colourist, and Robert
gloms on to him as a reluctant mentor, despite
the fact that the older man is palpably, seeth-
ingly out of his mind. The cautionary subtext is
double-edged: the suggestion is not only that if
Robert and Miles aren’t careful, they could turn
into a guy like Wallace, but also perhaps that if
they want to succeed in their chosen craft, they
can’t afford to be better adjusted. In a crowded
field, it’s obsessive, detail-oriented mania that
separates amateurs from professionals.
Maher, who’s popped up around the edges
of some major movies over the last few years –
from Lady Bird (2017) to Captain Marvel (2019)
to Marriage Story (2019) – is a master of discom-
fiture: everything about Wallace is credibly
unpleasant, pent-up and solipsistic, and there’s
a certain boldness in building so much of the
movie around his presence, especially given his
unlikely status as an aspirational figure. But
Kline writes himself into a corner by focusing
on a character who’s so hard to take. Eventu-
ally, all that’s left for Wallace to do is explode at
his younger admirer, and while the inevitable
blow-up has a few startling details (includ-
ing an unexpectedly grotesque gore shot), it
gives the impression of a filmmaker artificially
drumming up drama from a situation that is
essentially static. Funny Pages feels true to its
milieu and to the very specific kind of beta-male
pathology it prods without celebrating (or ana-
lysing), but that’s not the same thing as being
believable – or, ultimately, very enjoyable.
In UK cinemas from 16 September
Crimes of the Future
CANADA/GREECE/USA/UK/USA 2022
DIRECTOR DAVID CRONENBERG
WRIT TEN BY DAVID CRONENBERG
CINEMATOGRAPHY DOUGLAS KOCH
EDITOR CHRISTOPHER DONALDSON
PRODUCTION DESIGN CAROL SPIER
MUSIC HOWARD SHORE
COSTUME DESIGN MAYOU TRIKERIOTI
CAST VIGGO MORTENSEN
LÉA SEYDOUX
SCOT T SPEEDMAN
KRISTEN STEWART
SYNOPSIS
Performance artist Saul Tenser suffers as his body
generates new organs, which his creative partner
Caprice removes in art exhibitions. A man named
Lang Dotrice commissions them to perform a
public autopsy on his own murdered son Brecken to
demonstrate that mutations acquired by surgery can
be passed on genetically. Other forces intervene.
REVIEWED BY KIM NEWMAN
“Beauty is only skin-deep,” says the heroine of
Ib Melchior’s drive-in quickie The Time Travelers
(1964). “What do you want,” snaps the hero, “a
lovely liver?” In David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the
Future, a beauty contest for internal organs is one
feature of the world envisioned by the cinema’s
foremost prophet of the new flesh.
Cronenberg’s 63-minute 1970 film Crimes of the
Future was one of a run of experimental works
made before Shivers (1975), the film that first
worked his personal concerns (bodily mutation
and societal collapse) into commercial exploita-
tion cinema. Though the Canadian auteur began
as a filmmaker who generated his own material,
he has primarily worked from other authors’ work
since his Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone
(1983). The new Crimes is the first film to be
both directed and written by Cronenberg with-
out being based on another writer’s work since
eXistenZ (1999), which was in turn the first such
film since Videodrome (1983).
The world of Crimes of the Future is one in
which bodies can spontaneously generate mutant
organs. The organs that sprout in the body of per-
formance artist Saul Tenser (four-time Cronen-
berg star Viggo Mortensen) are removed by his
artist partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) as part of
their performances. There are mischievous par-
allels with Cronenberg and his milieu here: the
organisations and individuals that take an inter-
est in Saul as fans, patrons, sponsors or decriers
recall Cronenberg’s time as a grindhouse and
arthouse auteur, with the associated models of
funding and distribution. One critic (Efi Kantza)
complains that the numerous ears sprouting from
the head and body of a dancer (Tassos Karahal-
ios) are functionless, meaningless frills on a con-
ventional performance.
One marker of Cronenberg’s own scripts is dis-
tinctive character names; here, as well as Caprice,
we have Brecken Dotrice, Dr Nasatir and Dani
Router, worthy successors to Adrian Tripod
(from the 1970 Crimes of the Future), Roxanne
Keloid (Rabid, 1977) and Bianca O’Blivion (Vide-
odrome). Also distinctive is the bio-mechanical
technology – a breakfast chair that aids digestion
and a suspended bed that, through torturous,
tentacular penetrations of the flesh, will some-
how assist the user’s sleep. Remote-controlled
scalpels effect body modifications to redefine
beauty, pleasure and love, yielding the film’s
79
satirical slogan: “Surgery is the new sex.” We’re
back in Cronenberg country, though the rough-
hewn future is now Greece rather than Canada
– a setting imposed by co-production financing,
but used to great effect.
The government in the film sees the rate of
growth of internal organs – “accelerated evolu-
tion” – as a threat, and grubbily attempts to clamp
down on it. Symbiotic oppression and rebellion
have figured in Cronenberg movies since Stereo
(1969), and the various factions in Crimes might
have evolved out of ConSec (from 1981’s Scanners)
or the Realist Underground (from eXistenZ). But
it isn’t just the organisations that are shady. In
Crimes, Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), leader
of a pro-mutation sect, intends the public dissec-
tion of his dead plastic-eating son as a triumphant
propaganda coup for accelerated evolutionists.
Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (a delight-
fully twitchy, off-kilter Kristen Stewart) are quasi-
state bureaucrats required to internally tattoo
and classify new organs, but are also would-be
collaborators in the underground art world.
Router (Nadia Litz) and Berst (Tanaya Beatty)
are tech support for the large sarcophagus-like
apparatus used in some of the performance art
pieces, but are also playful, drill-wielding cor-
porate assassins. And Tenser himself – echoing
Mortensen’s role in Cronenberg’s crime movie
Eastern Promises (2007) – is working undercover
for the cops, having long since surrendered to the
pain of his profession.
Cronenberg has also weathered career ups
and downs, not least the contrived controversy
surrounding Crash (1996), but Tenser, like Max
Renn (James Woods) in Videodrome, is as much
FILMS
self-criticism as self-portrait. The film lays it on
thick with a wry humour that is perhaps the major
line of continuity between the Crimes of 1970 and
the Crimes of 2022. Cronenberg’s inventiveness
is undimmed, though he long ago shed the sus-
pense-heavy plotting that powered much of his
early work in favour of a more glacial, contempla-
tive approach. The thriller elements are merely
vestigial organs; the functioning body is deadpan
black comedy and modest speculation as to the
nature of creativity in a post-human future.
In UK cinemas from 9 September
ORGAN VOLUNTARY Léa Seydoux as Caprice
 80
Intimate_Distances A portrait of an urban thoroughfare as a
site of latent social exchange and potential
transformation, Philip Warnell’s hour-long
UK/USA/THE NETHERLANDS 2020 experiment assembles diverse documen-
tary modes into an open and unfamiliar
DIRECTOR PHILLIP WARNELL
CINEMATOGRAPHY JARRED ALTERMAN shape. One such mode is the ‘outside my
EDITOR JUAN SOTO window’ street study, with a lofty camera
MUSIC MICHELLE AGNES MAGALHAES
WITH MARTHA WOLLNER trained down on the unsuspecting street life
of a few blocks of Steinway Street in Asto-
SYNOPSIS ria, Queens. The view echoes the curtain-
A casting director prowls a street in Queens, New York, twitching studies of a St Petersburg street
apparently seeking someone with the right story to tell. corner in Viktor Kossakovsky’s Tishe!, or
She initiates conversations with a series of men, steering Vienna in John Smith’s Worst Case Scenario
towards a question about whether their lives ever suddenly (both 2003), except that Warnell’s extreme
jumped track. On the soundtrack, an Englishman reflects on
long lens and jagged pans and zooms
a life in prison and his eventual release.
carry a more intrusive energy, recalling the
REVIEWED BY NICK BRADSHAW weaponised camera gazes essayed in Theo
Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere (2021).
Gradually we recognise a subject: a
middle-aged, white-haired woman who
seems to be casing the terrain. “I’m on the
dance floor,” a message on screen reads as
she checks out passers-by; we also see her
sending private signals across the street
to an accomplice, presumably the cam-
eraperson behind the cut-in shots from
street level. The improvised interview
encounters that ensue, with a series of
burly men, might be compared to a vérité
doc like Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s
classic Chronicle of a Summer (1961), except
that the woman – Martha Wollner, we’re
SIDE TALKS OF NEW YORK Intimate Distances told in a title credit 20 minutes in, which
The joke is on the kind of cinema that takes itself seriously for the wrong reasons
FILMS
OFFICIAL COMPETITION
Official Competition A film titled Official Competition obviously
calls for a major festival slot – which indeed
this stylish farce enjoyed in Venice last year,
SPAIN/ARGENTINA/UK 2021 CERTIFICATE 15 114M 37S providing light relief in a heavyweight line-
up that might well have featured the ear-
DIRECTORS GASTÓN DUPRAT
MARIANO COHN nest likes of Rivalry, the apocryphal film
SCREENPLAY ANDRÉS DUPRAT seen rehearsed here. But the title also
CO-WRIT TEN BY GASTÓN DUPRAT
MARIANO COHN invokes competition as rivalrous warfare,
CINEMATOGRAPHY ARNAU VALLS COLOMER and Argentinian directors Gastón Duprat
EDITOR ALBERTO DEL CAMPO
PRODUCTION DESIGN ALAIN BAINÉE and Mariano Cohn, with co-writer Andrés
COSTUME DESIGN WANDA MORALES Duprat, cheerfully riff on all the myths
CAST PENÉLOPE CRUZ
ANTONIO BANDERAS about cinematic creation as an extended
OSCAR MARTÍNEZ process of ruthless combat.
The joke is on the kind of cinema
SYNOPSIS
that takes itself seriously for the wrong
Spain. On his 80th birthday, millionaire Humberto Suárez reasons. A millionaire, yearning for a
decides to produce a film and hires acclaimed director
new prestige monument to himself, and
Lola Cuevas. She begins rehearsals with Félix Rivero, a
Hollywood star, and high-minded stage veteran Iván Torres,
insisting on only the very best, options an
but Lola’s eccentric methods and the two actors’ rivalry acclaimed novel and hires a Palme d’Or-
cause unexpected problems. winning female director (the rarest of
breeds). She casts two differently pomp-
REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY ous male leads to play warring brothers.
One is international star Félix, played by
Antonio Banderas, who spoofs himself
with relish as a lunkish ageing playboy.
Banderas is the butt of one of the film’s
slyest jokes, when Félix’s co-star, stage
eminence Iván, snorts at the idea of
any actor becoming a token Latino for
Hollywood (a nice jab at the star of The
Mask of Zorro, 1998, and Spy Kids, 2001).
The solemnly high-minded Iván – played
by Oscar Martínez, who won Venice’s
IRREHEARSABLE Oscar Martínez, Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas Best Actor award in 2016 for the same
doesn’t mention that she’s a distinguished
documentary casting director – keeps rais-
ing the same leading questions through a
wireless mic: has their life ever suddenly
switched track? Have they ever been
driven to do something unthinkable?
Seeing that Wollner is somehow cast-
ing a part brings to mind another, more
reflexive mode of documentary in which
the filmmaking process is folded in to
the film – Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet
(2017), say, or Robert Greene’s Kate Plays
Christine (2016). And we can start to make
sense of the intermittent, oblique, Eng-
lish-accented voiceover testifying to an
offender’s time in and out of prison for an
unstated crime, a deposition introduced
as: “Script. Audition. Testimony. Profile.”
Yet if the prison we hear about, with its
vacant time and torturous isolation, is the
opposite of the bustling commons we see,
so the film breaks out of its set-up as a kind
of manhunt. Wollner’s method is open –
intrusive but receptive – and the stories she
solicits are given with cheer, thought, even
relief, most evidently in the case of Samir,
a would-be life coach in a dark place; their
encounter ends in a remedial, mic-muffling
hug. Brusquely challenging in form, the
film blurs boundaries, breaks down oppo-
sitions and takes its means as its end.
In UK cinemas now
directors’ The Distinguished Citizen – sneers
at the idea of award ceremonies, but
secretly rehearses a magnificently self-
aggrandising Oscars speech.
An electrically coiffed Penélope Cruz,
meanwhile, plays Lola Cuevas, an unpre-
dictable director with bizarre methods for
psyching up her actors. (One ploy involves
a cruel use of their various award trophies.)
Sexual tensions also come into play, the
two men resenting the instructions of a
confident younger woman; Lola, a lesbian,
puts them in their place by showing them
the right way to kiss their female co-star, an
extended gag involving a panoply of micro-
phones resembling an art installation.
Though it somewhat fizzles out after
the climactic twist, Official Competition is a
cannily paced, visually gorgeous pleasure:
staged in a glossily cavernous arts foun-
dation, it’s designed by Alain Bainée (ele-
gantly repurposing locations including the
San Lorenzo de El Escorial auditorium
near Madrid) and shot by Arnau Valls
Colomer with an eye for highly composed
tableaux. It’s up to the viewer, of course,
to guess which director Lola might be
modelled on – her butterfly glasses sug-
gest Isabel Coixet or Lucrecia Martel, but
then both Cruz and Banderas could no
doubt tell a story or two about the work-
ing methods of Pedro Almodóvar.
In UK cinemas now
 81

After Yang
DIRECTOR KOGONADA
WRIT TEN BY KOGONADA
BASED ON THE SHORT
STORY ‘SAYING
GOODBYE TO YANG’ BY ALEX ANDER WEINSTEIN
CINEMATOGRAPHY BENJAMIN LOEB
EDITOR KOGONADA
PRODUCTION DESIGN ALEX ANDRA SCHALLER
MUSIC ASK A MATSUMIYA
COSTUME DESIGN ARJUN BHASIN
CAST COLIN FARRELL
MALEA EMMA
TJANDRAWIDJAJA
JUSTIN H. MIN

SYNOPSIS

Jake, a human, brings Yang, an android,

into the family fold to be a playmate, tutor
and sibling for Jake’s young daughter. But
when Yang malfunctions, the whole family
mourns his absence, and in the course of
repairs Jake begins to discover the richness
of the android’s previously unsuspected
inner life.

REVIEWED BY JESSICA KIANG

Not every relationship is commutative;

not everything works as well backwards
as it does forwards. And so it is with
the delicate, exquisite sensibilities of
Korean-American director Kogonada,
who proved so adept, in his superb and
singular feature debut Columbus (2017), at
locating the extraordinary and the trans-
cendent within the everyday asymmetries
of the modernist architecture of Colum-
bus, Indiana.

In After Yang, his Cannes 2021-selected
follow-up, Kogonada attempts a reverse
alchemy, designing a dizzyingly high sci-fi
concept and parsing it for humbler truths
about our daily lives. But to find poetry in
the prosaic contours of a suburban bank
building is inspired; to be similarly win-
some and wonderstruck in the presence
of already awesome, uncanny, not-yet
possible technological landscapes can
feel oddly insipid.
Yang (Justin H. Min) is a hyper-lifelike
android, purchased by Jake (Colin Far-
rell) and Kyra (Jodie Smith-Turner) to
be a brother to their adoptive Chinese
daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjan-
drawidjaja). Yang is programmed to be
the ceaselessly attentive, wise and com-
passionate elder sibling that traditional
family planning so seldom produces.
He’s also to be a font of knowledge about
Chinese culture, offering up “Chinese fun
facts!” at every juncture so that Mika gets
to know her heritage.
Mika is devoted to her mild, serene
brother, and Jake and Kyra have come to
rely on him in ways they’re not even aware
of. So when Yang suddenly shuts down
and repair proves tricky, the three remain-
ing family members start to grieve him in
different ways.
Yang’s absence is initially a destabi-
lising subtraction, like a missing tooth.
For one thing, it means the family can
no longer compete in the Family of Four
category in the regular online dance com-
petition that opens the film with such
unexpectedly joyous, silly verve – a mood
never again glimpsed.
Kogonada prefers a muted register,
which suits the film’s beautifully doleful
production design and Benjamin Loeb’s
purposeful, warm-toned, watchful cam-
erawork. Characters move through these
hushed still-life compositions as though
half-aware they are occupying someone
else’s future. Kyra, especially, is undemon-
strative to the point of being, well, robotic
– as though at some point between now
and this unspecified era, human beings
have evolved beyond vivacity and become
a numb, affectless species, never display-
ing any of the messier emotions.
Jake bought Yang through unofficial
channels; now, when he brings the ‘corpse’
(Yang is partly organic, so the prospect
of his ‘decomposition’ is frequently men-
tioned) to a backstreet technician, he dis-
covers an inexplicable, thumbnail-sized
piece of tech embedded within.
The first assumption is spyware – per-
haps Mika’s big brother is a plant for Big
Brother? It seems a stretch given the ordi-
nariness of the family (Jake runs a failing tea
shop), and on closer inspection the galaxy
of tiny gif-length clips the chip contains are
too absurdly banal for that. Yang, an experi-
mental model, had been outfitted to record
snippets of life as and when it occurred to
him to do so. So these random assorted
moments are Yang’s ‘memories’ and, touch-
ingly, they reveal that this machine, which
Jake assumed had no capacity for emotion,
not only seems to have loved them all, but
had a secret interior life that none of them
knew anything about.
FILMS
This is a beautiful thought, and if it’s MADE TO MEASURE
Colin Farrell as Jake, Jodie
hard to get away from the cliché of the Turner-Smith as Kyra, Malea
what-is-this-thing-you-call-love robot who Emma Tjandrawidjaja as Mika,
Justin H. Min as Yang
wants to be human, it’s also hard not to be
moved by the insignificant details Yang
felt worth hanging on to – the arrang-
ing of a family photo; the branches of a
tree; his own reflection in a mirror, smil-
ing faintly; a seconds-long loop of a girl
(Haley Lu Richardson) at a pop concert.
Later still, Jake’s perusal of Yang’s
memories leads to even deeper, more
existential discoveries, but these, like
so many of the film’s more fascinating
avenues, remain underdeveloped. Jake
has some sort of antipathy toward clones;
it’s a detail that could lever open an inves-
tigation into the dividing lines between
the soul, technology and the biological
body, which have repercussions across a
vast range of hot-button topics. But the
subject is largely let drop for fuzzier, more
general musings on love and life.
Similarly, Yang ponders the mean-
ing of cultural identity within the film’s
overtly multiracial (perhaps post-racial)
milieu. But Yang’s “Am I really Chinese?”
question is never really addressed. Kog-
onada’s gentleness is a lovely virtue, but
it’s perhaps ill-suited to the harder explo-
rations this futurescape teases; each time
After Yang favours plangent, bittersweet
mood over actual insight, it feels like
a retreat.
In UK cinemas and on Sky Cinema
from 22 September
 82
Moonage Daydream
USA/GERMANY 2022
DIRECTOR BRET T MORGEN
WRIT TEN BY BRET T MORGEN
EDITOR BRET T MORGEN
SYNOPSIS
FILMS
A documentary covering the life and career
of David Bowie as musician, actor and
artist, largely focusing on his work from
the early 1970s to the year 2000. The film
is told almost entirely in his own words
and features extensive unseen live footage,
clips from cinema that inspired him and
interpretative animated sequences.
REVIEWED BY SAM DAVIES
There’s a famous image in Nicolas Roeg’s
1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth in
which David Bowie’s character, Thomas
Jerome Newton, a new arrival on the
planet, is shown half-cut and hypno-
tised by a bank of TV screens: a Babel of
channels that he’s hooked on surfing. It’s
famous partly because of its assonance
with Bowie’s real-life ability to absorb
and refract the proliferating media chaos
of the late 20th century. It’s also, you sus-
pect, a touchstone for Brett Morgen’s
Moonage Daydream, a gloriously maximal-
ist, often psychedelically overloaded blitz
of Bowie’s music, paintings, ideas, influ-
ences and interviews from across the five
decades of his career.
The clips, like the hits, just keep
coming. With access approved by the
Bowie estate to, reportedly, millions of
unseen archival items, Moonage Daydream
is replete with new live material, which,
remastered by Bowie producer Tony Vis-
conti, sounds remarkable – an early ‘All
the Young Dudes’ and an incandescent
‘The Jean Genie’ (with Jeff Beck on lead
guitar) in particular. Morgen also weaves
a constant pattern of visual references
and samples at an almost subliminal
rate of turnover: glimpses of Murnau,
Keaton, Lang, Ōshima, Kubrick, Roeg,
flashes of Bowie’s acting and paintings,
and occasional bursts of animation inter-
preting Bowie’s chords and harmonies as
super-saturated blooms of colour.
Borne by this torrent, the viewer might
be put in mind of Godfrey Reggio’s
Koyaanisqatsi (1982), or even Adam Curtis’s
more recent rewiring of documentary’s
visual grammar, a hypertext of allusion
and interconnection. It’s of a piece with
Morgen’s previous work in music docu-
mentary, though – most recently Cobain:
Montage of Heck (2015), which essentially
interpreted the Nirvana singer’s early
artistic development through anima-
tions developed from his notebooks and
mixtapes, and Crossfire Hurricane (2012), a
kind of tone-poem collage of the Rolling
Stones’ first two decades.
As with those films, Morgen dispenses
with the staple of almost every other
music documentary: talking-head inter-
views. With some artists this might repre-
sent a risk, but in Bowie’s case, he’s said so
much of interest that Morgen has more
than enough material to use, and it’s a
pleasant change to watch a documentary
not stuffed with prefabricated opinions
and over-rehearsed memories. Outside
voices come from Bowie’s TV interviews,
with figures like Dick Cavett, Valerie Sin-
gleton, Mavis Nicholson and a sneering
Russell Harty. Bowie, an actor forced in
conversation to improvise, is playful but
serious, shy but candid; there are none
of the PR-approved laugh lines of the
modern-day chat show.
As free-association, a riff in the key
of Bowie, Moonage Daydream proceeds
chronologically, but Morgen is never tied
down to dry narrative, not least because
almost nothing is footnoted: dates are
sparse and captions and citations absent
except where offered by Bowie himself.
It gives time a certain elasticity: Bowie’s
1970s get the most screen time, under-
POP PHILOSOPHER
David Bowie
standable given that there are artists work-
ing today who might have based entire
careers on ideas or aesthetics culled from
a single year of his work in that decade.
After his commercial peak in the 1980s
and his marriage to Iman, Bowie’s 1990s
and 2000s flash past as domestic bliss
and occasional prophetic comments on
the internet’s new forms of chaos. Morgen
sensitively addresses Bowie’s distant rela-
tionship with his mother and the loss
of his half-brother and first inspiration,
Terry, who changed his life by introduc-
ing him to Kerouac and Coltrane; but if
Bowie’s first wife and family (including his
son, the film director Duncan Jones) are
mentioned, I must have blinked.
The through-line Morgen f inds in
Bowie’s long career and discography is
ambitious, explicitly taking him at his
most cosmic and existential, from the
very opening quotes in which Bowie
discusses Nietzsche and the disappear-
ance of God. It’s a pitch of thought I
didn’t initially think the film could sus-
tain: Bowie was fascinated by the sur-
face detail of pulp and pop culture, and
the way they could articulate profound
and radical ideas, but would never have
presented himself as a philosopher. But
Morgen threads together Bowie’s recur-
ring reflections on his own existential
and even spiritual development. Trying
to find meaning in a transient world;
trying to find himself, or any self at all,
in a string of transient identities; trying
to find meaning in pleasing others and
then himself again. And in his last decade
and final statements, The Next Day (2013)
and Blackstar (2016), we get the sense that
Bowie was allowing five decades of work
and art to stream through him – all chan-
nels open, like Thomas Jerome Newton.
In UK cinemas from 16 September

It Is In Us All
IRELAND 2021 CERTIFICATE 15 91M 31S
DIRECTOR ANTONIA
CAMPBELL-HUGHES
WRIT TEN BY ANTONIA
CAMPBELL-HUGHES
CINEMATOGRAPHY PIERS MCGRAIL
EDITOR JOHN WALTERS
PRODUCTION DESIGN JOHN LESLIE
MUSIC TOM FURSE
COSTUME DESIGN GEMMA KEENAN
CYNTHIA
FORTUNE RYAN
CAST COSMO JARVIS
RHYS MANNION
ANTONIA
CAMPBELL-HUGHES
SYNOPSIS
Involved in a fatal car crash while visiting
his mother’s Irish homeland, London
businessman Hamish strikes up a
friendship of sorts with 17-year-old Ewan,
who also survived the accident. With both
men struggling to find their place, they
develop an intense connection that has an
emotional impact on them both.
REVIEWED BY NIKKI BAUGHAN
Quite what is in us all is never made
clear in actor-director Antonia Camp-
bell-Hughes’s debut. Loneliness? The
capacity for self-destruction? A morbid
fascination with our own mortality? The
film explores all of these themes with a
cool detachment, Campbell-Hughes
getting into the minds, if not completely
under the skin, of her troubled male
characters. But her visual confidence
and eye for emotive detail mark her out
as an exciting filmmaking talent.
London businessman Hamish
(Cosmo Jarvis) is in Donegal, visiting
the house his estranged aunt has left
him in her will. He’s only been in the
country a couple of hours when he’s
involved in a car crash that leaves a
15-year-old boy dead. More injured, in
every sense, than he’ll admit, Hamish
is visited by Ewan (Rhys Mannion), a
IN HOT WATER
17-year-old who survived the accident,
Cosmo Jarvis as Hamish and who lives on a nearby farm with
his grandfather. Thrown together by
extreme circumstance, and by the fact
that they are both motherless, the pair
quickly forge a bond.
A lifetime of emotional repression
– stilted Skype conversations with his
father (an unrecognisable Claes Bang)
hint at the coldness of their relation-
ship – has left Hamish wound up so
tightly that his psychology permeates
his physiology. With a clipped accent
and straight back, he holds himself
together (both figuratively and, in one
toe-curling post-accident scene, literally)
without anything approaching support.
So unable is he to connect with anyone
that an opening sequence with a flirta-
tious car-hire receptionist, which could
easily have been comic, is uncomfort-
ably tense.
That tension pervades the rest of the
film as the aftermath of the accident –
for which Hamish is not held account-
able, though he clearly feels responsible
– begins to crack him open. Despite the
sexual undercurrent of his pull towards
Ewan, there’s something more primal
at play; the fascination he has for the
younger man feeds into the loss and iso-
lation he’s been carrying for years. The
discovery that his late mother wanted
to move to Ireland with him when he
was an infant forces Hamish to confront
what has always been missing.
Sterling performances from Jarvis,
Mannion and Campbell-Hughes as the
deceased boy’s grieving mother (nota-
bly the film’s only female character) are
bolstered by the stunning Irish scenery.
Moody camerawork by cinematogra-
pher Piers McGrail captures the bleak,
treacherous beauty of the landscape,
the mists rolling across the hills making
certain sequences look like they’ve been
shot at the very end of the world – fitting
for this story of a desperate man facing
up to the fact that he may very well have
run out of road.
In UK cinemas from 23 September
83
SPOTLIGHT
Cosmo Jarvis
BY NIKKI BAUGHAN
Born in New Jersey but raised in
Devon, Cosmo Jarvis started out
as a musician before venturing
into the world of film with 2012’s
The Naughty Room, a bold drama
about a young man imprisoned
in the family bathroom which he
wrote, directed, produced, edited,
scored and starred in for BBC4.
That achievement saw him named
as one of Screen International’s Stars
of Tomorrow in 2013; small roles
followed in the likes of The Habit of
Beauty and Monochrome (both 2016).
FILMS
His casting as the enigmatic
Sebastian in William Oldroyd’s
sumptuous, Bafta-nominated
Lady Macbeth (also 2016) saw him
nominated as Most Promising
Newcomer at both the British
Independent Film Awards (Bifas)
and the National Film Awards.
Three years later, Jarvis showcased
a similar blend of machismo and
vulnerability in Irish drama Calm
with Horses, playing a troubled
mob enforcer in a performance
that again saw him nominated for
a Bifa, this time for Best Actor.
Jarvis brought charisma and
sensitivity to Nathalie Biancheri’s
Nocturnal (2019), his nuanced
performance breathing new life
into the May-December romance
narrative. Two America-set features
came in 2020: Coney Island drama
Funny Face, in which Jarvis features
as an angry young man forging a
relationship of sorts with an equally
disaffected Muslim woman, and
The Evening Hour, in which Jarvis
shines as an aggressive, seduc-
tive Kentucky drug dealer.
This year he brings his natural
style to two very different films:
Carrie Cracknell’s adaptation of
Jane Austen’s Persuasion, in which
he plays the dashing Wentworth,
and Antonia Campbell-Hughes’
debut It Is In Us All, which is
underpinned by his compelling
central performance as a desper-
ate man haunted by his past.
 84
Bullet Train The over-reliance on generic tropes, how-
ever, becomes tiring. Intertextual references
abound – think Tarantino, TV advertising,
CERTIFICATE 15 126M 20S Bad Boys (1995), Source Code (2011), Get Out
(2017), music videos – and there are contrived
DIRECTOR DAVID LEITCH
SCREENPLAY ZAK OLKEWICZ philosophical discussions about the original
BASED ON THE NOVEL 1940s Thomas the Tank Engine book. But Bullet
MARIA BEETLE BY ISAK A KŌTARŌ
CINEMATOGRAPHY JONATHAN SELA Train has nothing new to say about the things
EDITOR ELÍSABET RONALDSDÓT TIR it’s referencing, and so the result is surface-
PRODUCTION DESIGN DAVID SCHEUNEMANN
MUSIC DOMINIC LEWIS level pastiche repackaged with a hyper-pop
COSTUME DESIGN SARAH EVELYN soundtrack. That it’s targeting online audi-
CAST BRAD PIT T
JOEY KING ences is clear: with an eye on its own virality,
A ARON TAYLOR-JOHNSON it switches between whiplash edits and slow
motion in scenes that can be pasted directly to
SYNOPSIS
social media.
Assassin Ladybug is hired by Maria Beetle to steal In keeping with the Marvel-meets-Taran-
a briefcase from a Kyoto-bound train. His mission
tino aesthetic, ultra-violence is shrugged off
is complicated by other assassins on board who
have competing agendas. As the train nears Kyoto,
and issues of identity are subject to knowing
Ladybug forms alliances with them to set up a winks. Ladybug chastises himself for ‘mans-
showdown with crime lord White Death. plaining’, while Black assassin Lemon (Brian
Tyree Henry) jokes about the white guys fall-
REVIEWED BY REBECCA HARRISON ing for “white girl tears”. Gender-flipping the
source novel’s Prince (Joey King), and intro-
Wending his way along a speeding Japanese ducing a Black woman (The Hornet, played by
bullet train, Brad Pitt’s Ladybug is having a Zazie Beetz) to up the cast’s diversity, the film
bad day. An assassin who refuses to carry a pays just enough attention to representation
gun and speaks in platitudes half-remembered to avoid the worst criticism. Yet while Henry
from his therapy sessions, he’s the antithesis steals every scene, it’s a white man who ends
of the suave action hero. Aesthetically stuck in up walking off into the sunset in an originally
the 90s, with a bucket hat and a penchant for Japanese story.
saying ‘whack’, he sets a comic tone for a film There’s something of Murder on the Orient
in which nods to action, horror and gangster Express (1974) or Snowpiercer (2013) about
movies pile up higher than the body count. Bullet Train’s smart decision to keep everyone
Alongside Pitt’s camp performance, there’s confined to train carriages for the film’s first
much to like about Bullet Train, whose sheer sil- two thirds. But in its final bombastic act it
liness makes for great escapism. There are well- switches modes – to the film’s detriment, with
FILMS
choreographed fight sequences that take place chaotic set-pieces and poor CGI. It’s a shame
in the gaps between seating, and humorous that the filmmakers didn’t trust the spatial
interactions with nonplussed passengers. The and dramatic tensions provided by the train
space is beautifully designed and lit; sumptu- journey, and opted instead for seen-it-all-
ous red, gold and green hues in the bar give before spectacle.
way to candyfloss pinks and an eerie neon glow
in an anime-themed carriage. In UK cinemas now
RAILWAY KILL DEN Andrew Koji as Kimura
The Forgiven
UK/USA 2021 CERTIFICATE 18 1 17M 9S
DIRECTOR JOHN MICHAEL MCDONAGH
WRIT TEN BY JOHN MICHAEL MCDONAGH
BASED ON THE NOVEL BY LAWRENCE OSBORNE
CINEMATOGRAPHY LARRY SMITH
EDITORS ELIZABETH EVES
CHRIS GILL
PRODUCTION DESIGN WILLEM SMIT
MUSIC LORNE BALFE
COSTUME DESIGN KEITH MADDEN
CAST RALPH FIENNES
JESSICA CHASTAIN
MAT T SMITH
SYNOPSIS
Driving at night to a house party held by their wealthy
friend Richard in the Sahara, London couple David
and Jo Henninger fatally run over a young Berber
man, Driss. Richard reluctantly agrees to accompany
Driss’s father Abdellah across the Moroccan desert,
while Jo becomes involved with fellow guest Tom.
REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY
North Africa has often figured in literature and
film as a place where Western characters find them-
selves tested, burned down to their essence, in the
crucible of Saharan heat. Two prime examples
are Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990)
and Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is
Afraid… (2015), both based on Paul Bowles stories,
both depicting the desert as a site of high peril for
disrespectful outsiders. Adapted from Lawrence
Osborne’s 2012 novel, John Michael McDonagh’s
The Forgiven plays with these ideas: at one point,
the Moroccan cook at a Saharan palace speculates
jokingly about the brutal reprisals that surely await
David Henninger (Ralph Fiennes), an English
doctor whose drunk driving has killed a young
Berber man named Driss (Omar Ghazaoui). But
David will undergo a rather different experience as
he is forced to contend with the maxim uttered by
the dead youth’s father Abdellah (Ismael Kanater):
“Everything must be faced.”
Ostensibly a caustic comedy-drama about the
attitudes of blasé, blinkered Westerners abroad,
The Forgiven feels somewhat like The Sheltering Sky
as it might have been made by Accident-period
Joseph Losey. It is scrupulous in avoiding false
glamorising of the Arab world; indeed, while it is
another expression of David’s cultural arrogance,
it could also be seen as a sign of his lucidity when
he sneers at the opulent decor with which his host
Richard (Matt Smith) has embellished his palace:
“I hate all this ethnic pretence and affectation.”
McDonagh’s fourth feature recaptures the moral
seriousness of his second, 2014’s Calvary, following
the genre-chic facetiousness of his misconceived
War on Everyone (2016). The writer-director’s way
with well-turned acidic lines can feel too neatly
lapidary, but he knows it. When one palace staff
member makes a profoundly disobliging comment
in Arabic about David’s wife Jo (Jessica Chastain)
that sounds like a traditional proverb, a co-worker
wryly responds, also in Arabic, “You should have a
Twitter account.”
The Forgiven is meticulous in depicting its char-
acters’ flaws. Even when charming, the Western
characters are arrogant, racist, blithely callous:
nothing stops their party, not even the presence
of a dead boy’s grieving father. But the Moroccan
palace staff too are contemptuous towards the
visitors – misogynistic, homophobic, and cyni-
cal when waving David off to what they see as
certain doom. The most likeable house guest is
Tom (Christopher Abbott), a financial analyst

QUEEN OF THE DESERT Jessica Chastain as Jo
who at least has the merit of being unasham-
edly upfront about his attitudes to sex and
money. Even Jo, established at the start as the
put-upon younger wife to an alcoholic boor,
emerges as much less sympathetic, promptly
forgetting both her husband’s absence once
he leaves the palace, and the very fact of
Driss’s death.
McDonagh is characteristically canny in
his playful direction of the actors, even when
dealing with near-stereotypes – with Smith
elegantly lofty as the party host, Abbott’s
Tom using self-effacing humour as a protec-
tive façade for his privileged self-indulgence,
and Alex Jennings incarnating the very breed
of posh party animal that Fiennes played so
memorably in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger
Splash (2015). The most striking false note is
Caleb Landry Jones’s braying turn as Richard’s
extrovert boyfriend.
Though Chastain and Fiennes don’t entirely
convince as a couple, Chastain impresses as
an abruptly liberated sensualist: Jo’s pleased-
as-punch swagger after an adulterous night
is priceless. By contrast, Saïd Taghmaoui is
sympathetic and down to earth as Abdellah’s
right-hand man Anouar, whose company
allows David to thaw, and who has his own
unimpressed take on his native culture: where
Europeans cherish their fantasy of the desert,
Anouar yearns for Sweden.
Fossils are a key metaphor: Driss’s commu-
nity digs them up and sells them, though his
father sees trilobites as embodying long-buried
evil. Like the trilobite, David’s true core has to
be unearthed, gradually exposed to daylight as
the layers he has built up are stripped down in
a process of gradual humanisation; Fiennes, as
good as any living actor at portraying English
desiccation, excels as David’s tender, scarred
humanity is gradually released from his shell of
colonialist contempt.
The harsh pallor of Fiennes’ skin tones
stands in stark contrast with the Condé Nast
Traveller lusciousness of red-haired Chastain
framed against orange dunes and cerulean sky.
DP Larry Smith, who also shot McDonagh’s
The Guard (2011) and Calvary, lays on a hothouse
opulence, heightening the artifice of the luxury
with which the Westerners shut out the realities
of the world outside – right up to the pitiless,
surprising ending as everything, finally, is faced.
In UK cinemas now
85
into full-blown CG fantasy. The Djinn’s “extrava-
Three Thousand gantly unlucky” life takes him from unrequited
Years of Longing love for the Queen of Sheba (he’s shunned for
the all-too-perfect King Solomon), through the
AUSTRALIA/USA/CHINA 2022
scheming Ottoman court of Suleiman the Mag-
nificent, to an enslaved young 19th-century bride
DIRECTOR GEORGE MILLER who wants to up-end the patriarchy through
WRIT TEN BY GEORGE MILLER magically acquired knowledge.
AUGUSTA GORE
BASED UPON THE SHORT At his best, Miller is a virtuoso at deploy-
STORY ‘THE DJINN IN ing kinetic, outlandish visuals, with a puckish
THE NIGHTINGALE’S EYE’ BY A.S. BYAT T
CINEMATOGRAPHY JOHN SEALE humanity that other action maestros often lack.
EDITOR MARGARET SIXEL But this film looks unrelentingly plastic (Covid
PRODUCTION DESIGN ROGER FORD
MUSIC TOM HOLKENBORG lockdowns enforced green screen even for some
COSTUME DESIGN KYM BARRET T modern-day urban locations) – unlike, for exam-
CAST IDRIS ELBA
TILDA SWINTON ple, Fury Road, with its grinding metal and chok-
A AMITO LAGUM ing diesel practical effects.
At the film’s worst, even master cinematog-
SYNOPSIS
rapher and long-time Miller collaborator John
Narratologist Alithea Binnie buys a bottle from a Seale seems shackled into making a glorified
Turkish bazaar and inadvertently releases an ancient
perfume ad. And some of the humour, notably an
djinn, who must grant her three wishes to secure
his freedom. To persuade his reluctant captor, he unfortunate fat-shaming slapstick episode, falls
recounts the fantastical tales that brought them flat. But every now and then a flight of imagi-
together, reaffirming the power of storytelling and nation truly soars: the Djinn’s waking dream,
the nature of desire. a cascading, golden spiderweb-like network of
connections across time and space; or Solomon’s
REVIEWED BY LEIGH SINGER living, breathing mutated musical instrument to
woo his Queen, a very Cronenbergian construc-
A pet project that has occupied director George tion (let’s call it ‘Chimes of the Future’).
Miller on and off for over two decades, Three To give Miller and Gore credit, while each
Thousand Years of Longing finally appears as the of the Djinn’s stories imparts words of warning
f ilmmaker’s self-declared “palate cleanser” about unbridled desire, fear, power and the like,
between Mad Max epics – Mad Max: Fury Road they stop short of doling out neatly wrapped mes-
(2015), frequently cited as the 21st century’s sages in the manner of J.A. Bayona’s A Monster
Greatest Action Film so far, and the upcoming Calls (2016) and its titular yarn-spinner. If any-
road warrior-queen prequel Furiosa. It is, safe to thing, Three Thousand Years of Longing leaves things
say, quite the gear-change. too vague, so that when it eventually resolves
FILMS
Miller and his daughter Augusta Gore have Binnie’s wish-making dilemma and confronts
freely adapted A.S. Byatt’s 1994 novella The Djinn her largely solitary existence, there’s a nagging
in the Nightingale’s Eye. There’s an Arabian Nights sense that some primal emotional thrust has been
flavour to this premise, the first clunky clue lost in translation. “Love is a gift,” not something
dropped with the Shahrazad Airlines plane that that can be willed into existence, one character
transports narratologist Alithea Binnie (Tilda says late on. Whether that notion has been fully
Swinton) to Istanbul to lecture on the shifting explored or obscured by the digital pyrotechnics
power of myth in the age of science. “All gods and is very much open to question.
monsters outlive their purpose,” she confidently Still, Swinton and Elba make an engag-
opines, “and are reduced to the role of metaphor.” ing double act, the former clearly relishing yet
A shimmering, spectral figure, grimly staring her another outré accent-hairdo-outfit combo, the
down from the rapt audience, loudly disagrees. latter savouring the opulent, eloquent narration.
And when Binnie buys an antique bottle trinket Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL) explores a very
from the city’s bazaar, and inadvertently opens different musical palette from his bombastic Fury
it whilst scrubbing it clean, she unleashes the Road score, ranging from Middle Eastern percus-
Djinn within. sion to unabashed, string-laden romance. The
This Djinn (Idris Elba), with elvish ears and whole project is clearly a labour of and about love
a two-tone beard, is now beholden to her and for Miller and his team, its inventiveness and ear-
obliged to offer three wishes (though for the nestness often competing with its more garish,
actor’s fans, a pliant Elba clad in just a bathrobe clodhopping choices. If that’s the sort of ‘Djinn
might well already constitute wish number tonic’ that refreshes Miller enough to reinvent the
one). The obligatory provisos apply – no wish- action wheel once more in Furiosa, it’s hard to stay
ing for infinite wishes, immortality or other too mad with the results.
cheats – and Binnie, as an expert on storytell-
ing,
ng, is warily cognisant that all wish stories are In UK cinemas now
themselves
hemselves “cautionary tales”. So, attempt- t
ing
ng to win her trust and gain the free-
dom only possible once the wishes are
dispatched, the Djinn launches into a
centuries-spanning
enturies-spanning series of tall tales
that
hat detail his own history of empow- w
erment
rment and entrapment.
It’s here that the film
breaks out from verbal
verb
bal
a
sparring
parring in Binnie’s
plush hotel suite
DJINN
JINN UP!
Tilda Swinton,
Idris
dris Elba
 86
The Sandman When he finally escapes, after 106 years,
Morpheus finds his realm in ruins and,
though humbled by his incarceration,
DIRECTORS MIKE BARKER seeks to restore his dominion to its former
JAMIE CHILDS
MAIRZEE ALMAS glory. The first half of the series, which
ANDRÉS BAIZ covers his quest to regain the totems of
CORALIE FARGEAT
LOUISE HOOPER his power (a pouch of sand, a helmet and
HISKO HULSING a ruby), involves a journey to Hell and the
WRITERS NEIL GAIMAN
DAVID S. GOYER search for John Dee (David Thewlis), aka
ALAN HEINBERG Doctor Destiny, who is using Morpheus’s
JIM CAMPOLONGO
AUSTIN GUZMAN Dream Ruby to cruelly manifest not just
AMENI ROZSA dreams but nightmares in the real world.
TELEVISION
LAUREN BELLO
HEATHER BELLSON It is evident from the first episode where
ALEX ANDER the series’ strengths lie. Sturridge is strik-
NEWMAN-WISE
VANESSA BENTON ing as Morpheus: lit with eerie perfection,
JAY FRANKLIN each shadow on his face seems sharpened
CATHERINE
SMYTHE-MCMULLEN to resemble a wound, and his hollowed-out
CINEMATOGRAPHY GEORGE STEEL vocal tone is eerily memorable. The show
SAM HEASMAN
WILL BALDY follows the comics’ strategy of making us
EDITORS SHOSHANAH TANZER feel Morpheus’s presence through his fre-
JAMIN BRICKER
KELLY STUY VESANT quent absence, imbuing the scenes where
PRODUCTION DESIGN JON GARY STEELE he does appear with a dangerous, height-
MUSIC DAVID BUCKLEY
COSTUME DESIGN SARAH ARTHUR ened energy. The series is never more
CAST TOM STURRIDGE thrilling than in the fifth episode, ‘24/7’, in
DAVID THEWLIS
GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE which Dee traps the patrons of a diner and
KYO RA uses Morpheus’s ruby to torture them in
creative ways, the nightmarish possibilities
SYNOPSIS
of superpowers reaching a twisted apex in
Morpheus, the immortal King of Dreams, is this claustrophobic setting.
held captive for 106 years, with devastating
The horror in such real-world scenes is
effects for humanity. He escapes and sets
about to find his talismans, planning to impressively evoked, with no shortage of
restore his kingdom to its former glory. realistic gore and bold use of shadow and
Morpheus is then tasked with finding Rose suggestion. But things fall apart when
Walker, whose ‘dream vortex’ power threatens we leave the waking world. Largely, this
the entire universe. is due to the visual effects: the backdrops
to the action in The Sandman’s metaphysi-
REVIEWED BY LEILA LATIF
cal realm are woeful. The frisson Thew-
lis and Sturridge generate in a simply
Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman has had a dif- dressed set makes the transition to plas-
ficult path to the screen. The acclaimed ticky nonsense in front of 90s screensaver-
comic book, published between 1989 and level graphics all the more jarring, while
1996 by DC Comics, was long considered the show’s depictions of Hell itself are
too vast, strange and unyielding to film, entirely unconvincing.
and languished in development hell for The cast goes some way to compensat-
years, but Netflix has now succeeded in ing for this. Thewlis’s Dee is a compelling
bringing it to the screen in a ten-part series. antagonist – sadistic, yet strangely sym-
Covering the comic-book storylines pathetic. Jenna Coleman evinces movie-
‘Preludes & Nocturnes’ and ‘The Doll’s star charisma as occult detective Johanna
House’, the show begins with Morpheus, Constantine, Kirby Howell-Baptiste
King of Dreams (Tom Sturridge), being matches Sturridge’s otherworldly qual-
imprisoned by the magician Roderick ity as Death, and Boyd Holbrook proves
Burgess (Charles Dance) in a glass orb. terrifying as nightmare-turned-serial-killer
The Corinthian. The series attempts to bal-
ance the darkness with comic relief, some
AND NOW THE
DREAMING STARTS
Tom Sturridge as Morpheus
of which works well: Stephen Fry doesn’t
overdo it as gentle bodyguard Gilbert, and
John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the
Angry Inch, 2001) is as charming as ever as a
down-on-his-luck Broadway star. But other
attempts at levity have a deadening impact;
Cain and Abel (Sanjeev Bhaskar and Asim
Chaudhry) played as a pair of bumbling
brothers with a cheap-looking CGI gar-
goyle prove particularly embarrassing.
Throughout the ‘Preludes & Nocturnes’
storyline, the show gets away with the tonal
tightrope act: the daftness of the Biblical
brothers is quickly forgotten when we see
Dee eviscerating innocent bystanders or
Death meditating on mortality. The show’s
gravitas is especially evident when Mor-
pheus and Hob Gadling (Ferdinand Kings-
ley), a man to whom Morpheus has granted
eternal life and whom he meets every 100
years, engage in a series of reflections on
existence. The script keeps it simple even
in this existentially resonant encounter, and
the actors elevate the laconic dialogue.
But the show loses its way tonally
from Episode 7 onwards, as Morpheus’s
androgynous sibling Desire (Mason Alex-
ander Park, wringing every drop of juice
from the role) plots Morpheus’s downfall
using mortals Rose Walker (Kyo Ra) and
Rose’s grandmother Unity Kinkaid (Sandra
James-Young). Too much time is devoted
to the saccharine nurturing of family bonds
and lightweight CGI action. The dream
sequences themselves are too grounded in
logic: our heroes seem trapped in strangely
pedestrian incarnations of what the comics
envisioned. And though the show’s fidel-
ity to Gaiman’s original narrative will reas-
sure fans, at points the uninitiated may be
scratching their heads.
Ultimately, the show’s greatest strengths
lie in its overarching mythology, the dark-
ness and intelligence of the source material,
and Sturridge’s consistently memorable per-
formance. The showrunners would do well
to make more of all this connective tissue in
future instalments.
Ten episodes on Netflix now
 87

The camera frequently zooms out, scrolls along a catalogue of MORE WORKS BY
Bad Sisters freeze-frame options and then zooms back in on a scene from SHARON HORGAN
BY TARA JUDAH
the family’s rich, complex history. The series moves with ease
DIRECTORS DEARBHLA WALSH between past and present, sating curiosity just enough before
JOSEPHINE BORNEBUSCH
REBECCA GAT WARD returning to the present day, where tensions are bubbling as
WRITERS K AREN COGAN two inept insurance men try to avoid a pay-out by establish-
AILBHE KEOGAN
DANIEL CULLEN ing that foul play lay behind John Paul’s death. Each episode
PERRIE BALTHAZAR advances the amateurish insurance investigation in the vein of
PAUL HOWARD
DAVE FINKEL a bumbling thriller, with odd couple half-brothers Thomas and
BRET T BAER Matthew Claffin, played by Brian Gleeson and Daryl McCor- CATASTROPHE (CHANNEL 4,
BASED ON THE SERIES ‘CLAN’ CREATED BY MALIN-SARAH GOZIN 2015-2019)
CINEMATOGRAPHY NICOLE HIRSCH WHITAKER mack, oozing sleaze and charm respectively.
EVELIN VAN REI This extremely funny take
Duff excels at embodying the downtrodden Grace, her
TIM PALMER on gender dynamics in
DAVID PIMM sunken shoulders and apologetic posture testament to the modern marriage earned
EDITORS DEREK HOLLAND years of emotional abuse she’s suffered from her husband. Her
ANNE SOPEL Sharon Horgan and Rob
PRODUCTION DESIGN MARK GERAGHTY meek, grieving demeanour stands in stark contrast to the stoi- Delaney, its co-creators,
MUSIC TIM PHILLIPS cism of her sisters, each of whom had some kind of unpleas- -writers and -stars, a Best
CAST SHARON HORGAN
CLAES BANG ant relationship with John Paul, toxic masculinity incarnate. Writer: Comedy Bafta and
ANNE-MARIE DUFF The sincerity of Eva (played by Horgan) anchors the series nominations for both a
dramatically, holding it back from veering too far into cartoon- Peabody and a Primetime
SYNOPSIS Emmy Award in 2016.
ish stereotypes. That said, Bibi (Sarah Greene), whose visually
Grace is grieving the mysterious death of her controlling husband Showcasing Horgan’s
defining quirk is an eyepatch, takes a near-piratical approach unique brand of screwball
John Paul when Thomas and Matthew Claffin, of Claffin & Sons
to her sister’s husband. It’s her idea to kill him, and after she sarcasm, the series follows
Insurance – which will go bust if it honours JP’s life insurance
pay-out – turn up to investigate Grace and her sisters, each of
convinces Eva to assist her, the sisters’ faces – in one of only a an optimistic American
whom had a motive for murder. handful of such visual explications – appear as one, their reflec- businessman (Delaney)
tions superimposed in glass, revealing a perspective aligned. and a pleasantly bitter
REVIEWED BY TARA JUDAH Reeling the series back from its occasionally absurdist edge, Irish teacher (Horgan)
the show’s creators ground the characters in very real, topical as they navigate love, sex
and babies.
The old adage that blood is thicker than water flows through encounters with misogyny. Eva, Grace and Bibi aren’t the only
the latest black comedy series to be co-written and executive Garvey sisters to face John Paul’s rampant ego full on: Ursula
produced by Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe, 2015-19; Shining (Eva Birthistle) is blackmailed by him, via catfishing and digi-
Vale, 2022-). Adapted from the 2012 Belgian TV show Clan tal-era cruelty, over an extramarital affair. A much-needed strain
(aired as The Out-Laws on More4 in the UK), the ten-episode of light-hearted comedy comes in the form of the fifth sister,
Bad Sisters, first fruit of Horgan’s recent multi-year deal with Becka (Eve Hewson), a naive, charismatic millennial trying to
Apple TV+, brews a perfect storm of dark secrets behind a balance self-employment, self-actualisation and sexual confi-
wholesome family facade. With a stellar cast of British and dence with meet-cute romance. WOMEN ON THE VERGE

TELEVISION
(W NETWORK, 2018)
Irish actors, including Horgan herself, Bad Sisters is a deli- It’s in large part thanks to the cast that the series succeeds in
Co-created with Lorna
cious, intriguing caper. delivering convincing drama, smart comedy and compelling Martin, inspired by
The five Garvey sisters have lost their parents and since whodunnit mechanics in equal measure. The shifting tonal her Grazia column
vowed to look out for each other. We first meet Grace (Anne- beats are deftly underscored by music from Tim Phillips and ‘Conversations with My
Marie Duff), quietly snivelling while preparing sandwiches PJ Harvey, while new resonance is given to the lyrics of Leon- Therapist’, this six-
for her late husband’s wake, trying to remain composed as ard Cohen’s ‘Who by Fire’, which plays over the opening titles. part series continues
she stares wistfully out of the window, before comically blow- Sung by Harvey, the song’s searching questions of the song – Horgan’s moral project
ing her nose with an almighty honk. This knowing blend of ‘Who for his greed, who for his hunger?’ – become accusatory. of interrogating gender
imbalance and toxic
austere drama and borderline gross-out humour characterises Recurring aerial shots of winding coastal roads provide rare
masculinity, through three
the series, which bears tonal similarities to Disney+’s recent external perspective, and signal that all routes, no matter how thirtysomething ‘hot mess’
dark comedy hit Only Murders in the Building (2021–). close to the edge they skirt, eventually come together. But one Dublin women who want
It’s one of several character introductions that, helped by question lingers after watching the four episodes available to it all: career, babies and a
the fast pace at which they unspool, set a tone of nervous ten- review. While all four of Grace’s sisters hated her misogynistic, half-decent bloke. The show
sion and structure for this island-set series: nervous tension sadistic, controlling husband – who Bang plays with aplomb is funny, but has a belly full
that builds until things spiral out of control. And though – the biggest mystery becomes how he weaseled his way into of anger.
the overarching narrative is set firmly in the present, starting their lives to begin with.
with the funeral of Grace’s husband John Paul (Claes Bang),
the majority of its most gripping drama is told in flashback. Ten episodes weekly on Apple TV+ from 19 August

MOTHERLAND (BBC, 2016-)

Horgan is one of a team of
co-creators and co-writers
on Motherland, but her
signature wit can still be
found in the acerbic dialogue
and occasionally absurd
circumstances encountered
by the show’s characters.
And while Horgan doesn’t
act in this decidedly more
British than Irish endeavour,
the cast – Lucy Punch and
Diane Morgan especially
– do the material proud,
leaning heavily into the more
cringeworthy moments of
motherhood.

SISTER PACT Eve Hewson as Becka, Sharon Horgan as Eva, Anne-Marie Duff as Grace, Eva Birthistle as Ursula, Sarah Greene as Bibi
 88
Paper Girls the Teenagers. The girls accidentally travel
to 2019 and must find their older selves to
try to get back to 1988.
DIRECTORS GEORGI BANKS-DAVIES As a metaphor for the paper girls’ own
DESTINY EK ARAGHA
K AREN GAVIOLA fear of ageing and distrust of authority,
MAIRZEE ALMAS these warring factions are not subtle (the
WRITERS STEPHANY FOLSOM
CHRISTOPHER CANT WELL Old-Timers are led by a sinister man liter-
CHRISTOPHER C. ROGERS ally called ‘Grand Father’, played by Jason
LISA ALBERT
K.C. PERRY Mantzoukas), but these thematic streams
K AI WU are warmed by affecting scenes between
TELEVISION
K. PERKINS
FOLA GOKE-PARIOLA the girls and their older selves as they
BASED ON THE COMIC confront the dark realities of growing up:
BOOK WRIT TEN BY BRIAN K. VAUGHAN
AND ILLUSTRATED BY CLIFF CHIANG disillusionment, death and disappoint-
CINEMATOGRAPHY ZACK GALLER ment. Erin ends up not as president, but
TARIN ANDERSON
EDITORS ROBERT KOMATSU as an anxious legal aide, reeling from her
EMILY GREENE mother’s death; Tiffany is admitted to her
IVAN VICTOR
JENNIFER BARBOT dream school only to be expelled, moving
PRODUCTION DESIGN MICHAEL GRASLEY home to pursue creative hobbies; KJ has an
MUSIC BOBBY KRLIC
COSTUME DESIGN MARCI RODGERS adulthood in the closet to look forward to;
SOLOMON FOBB and Mac has glimpsed an even more desta-
CAST CAMRYN JONES
RILEY LAI NELET bilising future for herself.
SOFIA ROSINSKY While these moments of confrontation
FINA STRAZZA
between the girls and their adult counter-
SYNOPSIS parts are relatable and well acted, they slow
On their morning route, four pre-teen paper the narrative to a halt. They also dominate
girls team up after they are unwittingly drawn each episode so much that one wonders
into a conflict between two time-travelling if the infrequency of the action sequences
factions from the future. The girls are sent were less a choice than a concession to a
to the future, where they are forced to limited budget. Paper Girls suffers from the
confront their older selves and ultimately inevitable comparison to Netflix’s unprec-
join the conflict in the hopes of ending it edented phenomenon, Stranger Things (also
before it begins.
about a group of 1980s pre-teens battling
REVIEWED BY GABRIELLE MARCEAU supernatural elements encroaching on their
small midwestern town), which benefits
At dawn on 1 November 1988, the morn- from one of the largest TV budgets ever.
ing after Halloween, 12-year-old Erin (Riley Though it doesn’t deliver the supernatural
Lai Nelet) sets off on her first paper round. thrills and the era-specific immersion of the
She teams up with the three other paper larger series, Paper Girls leans into the psy-
girls, KJ (Fina Strazza), Mac (Sofia Rosin- chological nuance and the sheer pluck of its
sky) and Tiffany (Camryn Jones), after one characters. Its most surreal moments aren’t
of their own is attacked by a group of teen the time-tripping dinosaurs or the portals
boys excited by the permissiveness of Hal- in the sky, but the deepfake Ronald Reagan
loween. Before long they are accosted by that Erin debates in her dreams.
other teenagers, who steal Tiffany’s prized But watching Paper Girls, one wonders
walkie-talkies. But these boys are odd-look- who the series is meant to appeal to: fellow
ing and speak an incomprehensible lan- 12-year-olds, excited to project themselves
guage; eventually, they draw the girls into into a high-stakes time-travel scenario?
a time-travelling war between two factions Gen-Xers nostalgic for the cultural mark-
– the powerful and mercenary Old-Timers, ers of their youth? Or the millennials who
and the STF, a resistance group also called dominate Stranger Things’ vocal fanbase?
As a time-travel show, Paper Girls might
more intelligently have mined nostalgia
PRE-TEEN TITANS
The heroines of Paper Girls
for the 1970s, for 1999, or even for 2019,
the pre-Covid-19 era that in many ways
now seems like halcyon days. But the
show doesn’t take advantage of this time-
hopping, settling for making the accu-
rate but unsurprising point that small
American towns are often out of step
with progress. Things change, through
both building and decay (by 2019, the
malls have been abandoned, while the
quarry has been turned into an upscale
housing development), but visual mark-
ers for the eras are thin on the ground.
The series instead relies heavily on music
cues, which are on the nose and occasion-
ally confusing (a significant moment in
the 2019 timeline is soundtracked by an
LCD Soundsystem song from 2007).
Paper Girls is based on a comic by Brian
K. Vaughan. While it’s less political than
some of his previous comics, such as the
9/11 superhero story Ex Machina (2004-
10) and the Iraq War-set Pride of Baghdad
(2006), issues of racial intolerance, homo-
phobia and financial precarity still pursue
the girls throughout the timelines. Their
prejudices and traumas are yet more
legacies passed on from the previous gen-
eration that they’re struggling to shed.
In Vaughan’s breakout comic series, Y:
The Last Man (2002-08 – adapted for TV
by the FX network last year), an unex-
plained cataclysm claims the life of every
male creature on the planet. Yorick, the
only man left, is an unemployed magi-
cian surrounded by exceptional, highly
capable women, including a president, a
geneticist and a secret agent. Paper Girls
echoes this theme of female ambition and
exceptionalism as well as the dangers of
unchecked progress. Y: The Last Man
takes place in a world where women have
already ascended to the height of power,
but as the first paper girls in their small
town, our foursome strive to grow up on
the frontier of a new age.
Eight episodes on Amazon Prime now
 90

Atlanta: season 3
DIRECTORS HIRO MURAI
IBRA AKE
DONALD GLOVER
WRITERS DONALD GLOVER
STEPHEN GLOVER
JANINE NABERS
TAOFIK KOLADE
FRANCESCA SLOANE
JAMAL OLORI
IBRA AKE
JORDAN TEMPLE
STEFANI ROBINSON
CINEMATOGRAPHY CHRISTIAN SPRENGER
STEPHEN MURPHY
EDITORS ISA AC HAGY
KYLE REITER
PRODUCTION DESIGN TIMOTHY DAVID O’BRIEN
JONATHAN PAUL GREEN
COSTUME DESIGN TIFFANY HASBOURNE
CELIA YAU
CAST DONALD GLOVER
BRIAN TYREE HENRY
LAKEITH STANFIELD
ZAZIE BEETZ

SYNOPSIS

Less a story arc than a series of short stories, Season

3 of Atlanta comprises ten half-hour-ish episodes.
Some show incidents in Amsterdam, London,
Paris and Budapest from rapper Paper Boi’s tour of
Europe with his manager Earn and associate Darius;
ETHICAL MORMON Andrew Garfield as Jeb Pyre
others are stand-alone vignettes of racial issues and
identity politics in US cities.
Under the Banner introduce us to the vast and influential Lafferty
family, referred to as the ‘Mormon Kennedys’, REVIEWED BY TONY RAYNS
of Heaven and to the wider practices of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS for
DIRECTORS DAVID MACKENZIE
short). The most effective material focuses on The four-year hiatus in the production of Atlanta
COURTNEY HUNT the Church’s misogynistic power structure, (2016-) has faded nothing but, rather like David
DUSTIN LANCE BLACK where LDS men are the ‘priesthood holders’ Lynch’s return to Twin Peaks in 2017, turned the
ISABEL SANDOVAL
THOMAS SCHLAMME while a woman’s role is to produce children and series into something richer and stranger.
TELEVISION

WRITERS DUSTIN LANCE BLACK obey her husband. The ill-fated Brenda (Daisy There are some strands of continuity. Brian
EMER GILLESPIE
GINA WELCH Edgar-Jones) is more worldly and independent Tyree Henry’s deeply insecure rapper Paper
BRANDON BOYCE than the other Lafferty wives, and she immedi- Boi is now an international star, performing (or
INSPIRED BY THE BOOK BY JON KRAK AUER
CINEMATOGRAPHY GONZALO AMAT ately raises eyebrows with off-colour remarks pulling out of ) gigs in various European cities.
TOBIE ROBITAILLE and her willingness to question the standard Donald Glover’s Earn now copes easily with the
CRAIG WROBLESKI
EDITORS JUSTIN LACHANCE way of doing things. “Mind your property,” the stresses and strains of being Paper Boi’s manager,
MARK MANOS family’s patriarch (Christopher Heyerdahl) but still has frequent bad dreams and still worries
CHRIS MCKINLEY
BEATRICE SISUL sternly warns her husband. about his biracial ex Vanessa (Zazie Beetz) and
BYRON SMITH Black has created two fictional detectives to their daughter Lottie. LaKeith Stanfield’s serene
JOSH SCHAEFFER
PRODUCTION DESIGN RENEE READ lead this true-crime story. Jeb Pyre (Andrew Darius is still living out of Paper Boi’s wallet and
MUSIC JEFF AMENT Garfield) is a devout Mormon who has never still looking for still-higher highs.
COSTUME DESIGN JOSEPH LA CORTE
CAST ANDREW GARFIELD doubted the teachings of his church, while But while they try – and often fail – to stay one
GIL BIRMINGHAM his partner Bill Taba (Gil Birmingham) – a step ahead of the rich and poor Europeans who
SAM WORTHINGTON
W YAT T RUSSELL Paiute, and the only non-white member of want to exploit them in one way or another, racial
this community – presents a more cynical out- tensions are hotting up back home: a middle-class
SYNOPSIS
sider’s view. Watching the relationship evolve white guy has to pay reparations to the descend-
Utah, 1984. Brenda Wright Lafferty and her infant between these two excellent actors is one of ants of slaves owned by his ancestor, another has
daughter are found murdered, and her husband the series’ most rewarding aspects, and their to deal with the fact that his young son has learned
Allen is taken into custody. As Mormon detective cultural perspectives freshen up a show that
Jeb Pyre interrogates Allen, his investigation
can be tiresomely generic in its approach,
unveils the dark secrets of the Laffertys – a
prominent family in the Church of Latter-day
with its tremulous handheld camerawork and
Saints – and challenges the tenets of his own faith. murky palette.
There’s more than enough material here for
REVIEWED BY PHILIP CONCANNON a miniseries, but it’s the introduction of a third
timeline that really causes problems. Every
Under the Banner of Heaven has been a long- time a character evokes an incident from the life
gestating project for screenwriter Dustin of Mormonism founder Joseph Smith, it leads
Lance Black, who spent years developing it as to an unnecessary historical re-enactment of
a feature before expanding it into a seven-part said incident. Black tries to draw direct paral-
miniseries. It’s easy to imagine that abandoned lels between the Lafferty case and the origins
film version zeroing in on the investigation into of Mormonism, but the 19th-century scenes
the brutal 1984 killing of Brenda Wright Laf- look cheap and unconvincing, and they bring
ferty and her 15-month-old daughter, but Jon nothing to the central drama besides inter-
Krakauer’s 2003 nonfiction account of the crime rupting its momentum. By the time we reach
dug deeper to explore the often violent history the incoherent cross-cutting at the climax of
of Mormonism, and Black’s attempt to include Episode 5 (the last episode made available to
that historical context in his adaptation has left critics), the loss of a more focused feature-film
this series feeling distended and unbalanced. version of this tale begins to feel regrettable.
Black – who was raised in the Mormon faith
– structures his story through flashbacks that Seven episodes on Disney+ now RAP SHEET Donald Glover as Earn, Brian Tyree Henry as Paper Boi

more from his Black nanny than from him, and a
mixed-race high-school kid has to learn to find his
inner ‘Blackness’, whatever the cost. And Earn’s
dream in the opening episode ‘Three Slaps’ recalls
first the racial ‘cleansing’ of Oscarville, Georgia, in
1912 and the subsequent damming of a river that
turned the site into Lake Lanier, and second the
ordeals of Black kid Loquareeous (Christopher
Farrar) at the hands of the white lesbian couple
who foster him. These stand-alone episodes, usu-
ally with entirely fresh casts, punctuate the series
in a way that suggests you can take the boys across
Europe but can’t take Atlanta out of the boys. By
teasing out underlying themes, they give the series
another kind of continuity.
The stand-alones generally reference recent
news stories or hushed-up histories, in much the
same way that Damon Lindelof ’s self-described
“expensive fan-f iction” miniseries Watchmen
(2019) started from the little-known decima-
tion of the ‘Black Wall Street’ in Tulsa in 1921.
The protean Donald Glover, though, is not too
interested in setting a new syllabus for Black
History Month, however useful that may be.
Rather, he and his writing/producing team set
out to explore what notions of ‘Blackness’ and
‘whiteness’ actually mean in 2022. Their interim
conclusion: it’s complicated.
The lesbian foster parents (inspired by the
real-life Jennifer and Sarah Hart, who killed them-
selves and six Black foster-kids in 2018, having
failed to scam enough cash from social services to
support the ‘family’) trade on a non-existent sym-
pathy for Black orphans while doing their best
to erase all traces of Black identity in the kids. In
London, the South African billionaire Fernando,
who rarely leaves a luxury pad concealed behind
a row of terraced shops, describes a dream of
ecstatic union with a naked Black ghost. In the
US, African-American high-schooler Felix is told
as he’s lifted into an ambulance that a patron will
pay his medical and college fees because “being
shot by the police is the Blackest thing you can do”.
The name of Clarence Thomas (far-right
Supreme Court justice) is at one point thrown as
an insult, meaning a Black man who thinks and
behaves ‘white’, consolidating the general per-
ception that ‘whiteness’ and ‘Blackness’ are more
states of mind than racial markers. Glover brings
the issue back home by having Earn discover that
he has a doppelganger (played by Tobias Segal),
a Jewish family man who pops up in Episode 4 to
offer wise words to a man in trouble and whose
image is the last thing seen in the season’s final epi-
sode. To be continued, presumably, in the already-
shot Season 4, which will bring Atlanta to a close
when it airs later this year.
Atlanta doesn’t look or feel like most TV and
maintains an exceptionally high standard of writ-
ing, performance and conceptual finesse. The
stand-out episode of this season is probably the
eighth, ‘New Jazz’, in which Paper Boi ingests
a “Nepalese space-cake” and experiences a trip
through Amsterdam night-life, encountering
both a mouthy young woman who seems to be
an avatar of his straight-talking mother, and Liam
Neeson, who explains the remarks he made in
2019 about hunting down a Black guy and goes
on to say “the best and worst part about being
white is, you don’t have to learn anything if you
don’t want to.” Written by Glover and directed by
his frequent collaborator Hiro Murai, ‘New Jazz’
is an instant classic.
Ten episodes on Disney+ now
91
Surface SPOTLIGHT
Gugu
Mbatha-Raw
DIRECTORS SAM MILLER
KEVIN RODNEY SULLIVAN
WRITERS VERONICA WEST
ERICA L. ANDERSON
TONY SALTZMAN
LEIGH ANN BIETY BY RAFA SALES ROSS
GLENISE MULLINS
CINEMATOGRAPHY TAMI REIKER
ELIE SMOLKIN Having exhibited an avid
CLAUDINE SAUVÉ
EDITORS MAT THEW RAMSEY interest in the arts from an
REBECCA VALENTE early age, Royal Academy of
VICTORIA GRIMSLEY
PRODUCTION DESIGN JEREMY STANBRIDGE Dramatic Art alumna Gugu
COSTUME DESIGN SARA BYBLOW Mbatha-Raw commonly
CAST GUGU MBATHA-RAW
OLIVER JACKSON-COHEN displays a graceful yet deeply
STEPHAN JAMES felt empathy in her work, be it
ARI GRAYNOR
through conveying the stifling
SYNOPSIS ripples of trauma as Hannah
Shoenfeld in The Morning Show
Sophie has recently survived a suicide attempt that
permanently erased her memories. Upon returning to the (2018) or the pained ache of
seemingly idyllic life she led before the incident, she finds diaspora in her performance
herself unable to grasp what could have possibly pushed her to as Prema Mutiso in Peter
breaking point – until a mysterious man walks into her life. Landesman’s Concussion (2015).
Brief stints in long-running
REVIEWED BY RAFA SALES ROSS shows such as Holby City (2004),
Spooks (2006) and Doctor Who
In 2017, HBO’s hit series Big Little Lies furthered the appeal (2007) stand alongside two
of the traditional whodunnit by enticing viewers into the career-defining Shakespeare
uber-private bosom of the privileged American neo-Wasp. performances on stage: in
The show ushered in a new era for the sleek psychological 2005, she was Juliet to Andrew
TV thriller, opening the floodgates to a vast offering of not Garfield’s Romeo at Manchester
only whodunnits but howdunnits and whydunnits. Royal Exchange, and 2009
It’s no surprise, then, to see Reese Witherspoon, one saw her play Ophelia to Jude
of that show’s stars, attached as an executive producer on Law’s Hamlet at the Donmar
Surface. This venture from Apple TV+ feasts on the cogs in London and on Broadway.
and gears of Big Little Lies while regurgitating tropes from Mbatha-Raw embodies
TELEVISION
other recent successes such as Netflix’s stalker suspense Shakespearean tragedy with
You (2018-) and David Fincher’s twist banquet Gone Girl the same endearing earnestness
(2014) to create a Frankenstein’s monster that masquerades that makes her frequently stand
as a neatly packaged erotic thriller. out as a charmingly high-
The three corners of the central love triangle comprise spirited supporting character
Sophie Ellis (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, also an executive pro- in Hollywood productions,
ducer), whose recent attempt at ending her life succeeded such as the hit Marvel series
only in ending the life she once knew, wiping out her Loki (2021) and Ava DuVernay’s
memories; her husband, handsome hedge-fund manager 2018 film A Wrinkle in Time,
James Ellis (Oliver Jackson-Cohen in his most interesting an adaptation of Madeleine
performance to date); and Sophie’s onetime lover, mysteri- L’Engle’s much-loved 1962 sci-fi
ous police officer Baden (Stephan James). novel. Mbatha-Raw’s best roles
For a show sold as a sexy psychological thriller, Surface is are those that harness her ability
as deprived of sensuality as it is of suspense. The two men to float effortlessly between
predictably spiral while fumblingly attempting to charm the joyful and the forlorn, the
Sophie by one-upping one another (“Who do you believe, prime example being Kelly in
Soph, me or him?” shouts a crumbling Baden as James the acclaimed ‘San Junipero’
desperately grasps at the notion of his wife’s amnesia being episode of Black Mirror (2018).
the couple’s “second chance”). Sex is key to the characters’ The actor’s latest project,
motivations, yet the show treats it as an afterthought, the Surface, is a rare miss in a
steaminess of hot showers failing to conceal the frigidity of sprouting career of often
the encounters, the characters mere pawns of a script that’s understated turns. Still,
woefully ill-equipped to highlight the quality of the cast. with three films currently in
Showrunner Veronica West (the 2020 TV version of production, Surface could well
High Fidelity) gives the married couple his-and-hers side- be a mere bump in an otherwise
kicks in the form of preppy Caroline (Ari Graynor) and solid body of work from one of
finance-bro cliché Harrison (François Arnaud) – both Britain’s more interesting stars.
seem surplus to requirements. Sam Miller, of I May Destroy
You fame, directs four of the eight episodes but is plagued
by the same scripting trouble: the narrative hoop-jumping
required to bring out even a sliver of subtext, which ends
up dissipated anyway by over-exposure.
GUGU MBATHA-RAW PORTRAIT: MICHAEL WARLEY
The show’s saving graces are its polished costume and
production design. Sophie’s wardrobe is one of Surface’s
most fully formed characters, and the Ellises’ lavish town-
house a fitting reflection of the protagonist’s vapidity. Alas,
it lands as the plump cherry atop a dry cake: pleasant, but
inadequate to justify the indulgence.
Eight episodes on Apple TV+ now
 92
DVD & BLU-RAY
Putney Swope
Robert Downey’s daring, dated 1969 curio combines the
jerky rhythm of a sketch show with hints of Beckett and
Godard to create an anarchic satire on race and capitalism
REVIEWED BY HANNAH MCGILL
Though its take on US race relations is
unfashionably irreverent, its humour fre-
quently as befuddling as only decades-old
political satire can be, and its production
values as patchy as those of your average
student comedy revue, Robert Downey’s
Putney Swope (1969) commands great
affection and respect. Its elevated status
among Hollywood’s elite is reflected here
in a lush 4K restoration by the Academy
Film Archive and the Film Foundation,
achieved through funding from the
George Lucas Family Foundation.
So much establishment love is perhaps
unexpected for such an awkward, oddball
film; but it reflects the personal esteem
afforded to the director himself, who
died in 2021 at the age of 85. If Downey’s
most widely recognised contribution to
mainstream Hollywood was the fathering
in 1965 of one of its most prominent and
highly paid stars, Robert Downey Jr, his
influence as a filmmaker is also consider-
able, particularly in the more cult-literate
corners of the American indie market.
His work has been loudly championed
by Paul Thomas Anderson, who also cast
him as an actor in a number of films; and
traces of his anarchic and theatrical style
can also be detected in the work of Jim
Jarmusch, the Coen brothers and Spike
Lee, and the experimental television
work of Louis CK. Conversation about
Putney Swope also spiked around the 2018
release of Boots Riley’s stylistically and
thematically similar Sorry to Bother You,
although Riley claimed he had never seen
the earlier film.
Here making its UK Blu-ray debut,
Putney Swope depicts a Madison Avenue
advertising agency which is thrust into
escalating disarray after its head dies sud-
denly during a board meeting. (Fans of
the Coens’ 1994 corporate comedy The
Hudsucker Proxy may experience some déjà
vu here.) Bungling attempted subterfuge,
the remaining board accidentally votes in
as his replacement its sole black member:
Putney Swope. Swope promptly fires all
the white board members, renames the
agency Truth and Soul, and disallows the
acceptance of any advertising contracts
for alcohol, cigarettes or war-themed
Robert Downey; US 1969;
Indicator; region-free Blu-ray;
b&w; English SDH; Certificate
15; 85 minutes; 1.37:1. Extras:
toys. At the same time, he encourages a
newly extreme aesthetic sensibility that
2001 commentary by Downey;
2019 commentary by critic Sergio
sees the adverts the company does take
Mims; audio interview with
cinematographer Gerald Cotts;
on charged with sex and surrealism. As 2001 video interview with Robert
Downey; 2016 Film Forum audio
the ads cause excitement and consterna- Q&A with Robert Downey;
tion, Swope faces increasing agitation original trailer; 2013 trailer
commentary with Dan Ireland;
behind the scenes, as employees, clients image gallery; booklet.
and his new board of radical black activ-
ists challenge his methods and compete
for his time and influence.
Synopsised thus, the film sounds fairly
linear – a workplace-as-America comedy
along the lines of Office Space (1999) or an
unusually politicised plotline from Mad
Men (2007-15). It isn’t. The boardroom
scenes are stagey, repetitious and frac-
tious, seeming to bear as much influ-
ence from Samuel Beckett and Jean-Luc
Godard as from any American comic or
dramatic convention. The breaking up of
the main narrative to include the adver-
tisements themselves – which are gor-
geously produced, still funny and edgy,
and by far the most effective element of
the film’s satire – gives the film the jerky
rhythm of a sketch show or stage revue.
Further distance and tonal oddness is SYSTEM OF A DOWNEY
conferred by the fact that the actor play- Antonio Fargas as ‘The Arab’ and
Vincent Hamill as ‘Man in the White
ing Swope, Arnold Johnson, had his Suit’ (above); Arnold Johnson as
entire vocal performance redubbed by Putney Swope, with Lloyd Kagin
and Marie Claire (opposite, top);
Downey himself, who lends the character Johnson as Swope with board
a comically gruff, deadpan delivery. members (opposite, bottom)
 93

A white writer-director redubbing a Black

actor’s performance seems incendiary stuff in
this day and age, and indeed it has been cited
by some critics as evidence of the film’s racism.
It is presumably one of the reasons for com-
parisons to Sorry to Bother You, in which a black
telemarketer succeeds so long as he sounds
white. Downey himself, however, credits the
decision to simple low-budget expediency: the
actor wasn’t performing well, and time was
running out. “I think he was upset,” Downey
concedes in one of the extras included in this Putney Swope is a strange and often jarring
package, a 2001 video interview, “but he liked blend: sophisticated and innocent, elaborate
the movie. And then he started trying to talk and spontaneous, progressive and dustily ribald
more like me.”
Disingenuous or not, this is typical of
the Downey we meet in the extras, who is
unfailingly positive, avuncular and unpre-
tentious, whether interacting with an inter-
viewer, a Film Forum audience or his peer
and fan Jonas Mekas. Commentaries – one
by Downey, one by critic Sergio Mims – are
lucid, informative and often amusing. A
2019 audio interview with the film’s cinema-
tographer Gerald Cotts is lightweight, due
to an interviewer who doesn’t seem to have
prepared any questions, but still yields some
interest, thanks to both Cotts’s affability
and his enduring mild indignation at having
borne disproportionate responsibility on set
as a result of his relative clear-headedness.
Asked whether anything was difficult, Cotts
responds: “Everything was difficult… and,
I have to say, there was a certain amount of

DVD & BLU-RAY

marijuana.” Downey, Cotts said, was capa-
ble of functioning even when high; less expe-
rienced crew members not so much, since
they “didn’t know what they were doing to
begin with”.
Infuriating though it doubtless was to deal
with, this variability of ability and looseness
of approach undoubtedly contributes to the
enduring curiosity value of Putney Swope. As
a satire on advertising, the film remains star-
tlingly punchy – not least because in the time
since it was made, grabbing consumers with
imagery and messaging that upsets or shocks
rather than seducing them has become a
standard trick. Truth and Soul’s high con-
cepts – a gorgeous model sashaying past a
passed-out, trash-strewn bum; a sports car
that crashes on-camera; an airline that prom-
ises orgies – predict the trend for confronta-
tional and sardonic advertising imagery that
would peak in the 1990s, with controversial
ad campaigns by Benetton and lurid fash-
ion photography by David LaChapelle and
Terry Richardson.
It is no less a satire on America’s civil rights
movement, however, and in that regard can
feel by turns daring and dated. If the rise
and collapse of Putney’s empire is a rather
insightful contemporaneous take on the
struggles of the Black Panther Party with in-
fighting, infiltration and leaderly megaloma-
nia, the film’s Japanese and Arab characters
are lampooned with startling crudeness. It
is, in short, a strange and often jarring blend:
sophisticated and innocent, elaborate and
spontaneous, progressive and dustily ribald.
Most of all, however, it feels idiosyncratic: a
manifestation of the weirder margins of the
New Hollywood, uncorrupted by money
men or star culture, still thought-provoking,
and still defiantly, discomfitingly peculiar.
 94
L’ARGENT
Robert Bresson; France 1983; BFI; Region B
Blu-ray; in French; English subtitles; Certificate
12; 84 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras: 2022 conversation
about Bresson’s films between Geoff Andrew,
Jonathan Hourigan and Nasreen Munni Kabir
at BFI Southbank; short scene analyses by
ex-Bresson assistant Hourigan; audio-only
appreciation by Hourigan; video essay by Michael
Brooke; experimental short Value for Money
(1970) with Quentin Crisp; trailer; booklet.
REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP
The last, and perhaps the bleakest,
of Bresson’s 13 features, L’Argent is
adapted from a story by Tolstoy, ‘The
Forged Coupon’, and traces the tragic
consequences after a truck driver
inadvertently passes on counterfeit
bank notes. But where Tolstoy’s killer
protagonist finally finds redemption,
there’s no such hint of grace in Bresson’s
film. Even when confessing to murder,
Yvon Targe (Christian Patey) shows not
the least sign of contrition.
The austere pessimism of Bresson’s
late work, its harsh worldview and
DVD & BLU-RAY
deliberate lack of emotional variance (no
one in L’Argent ever smiles, apart from a
little girl) was never to everyone’s taste.
Pauline Kael wrote of “the inhuman
pride that I think poisons so much of
Bresson’s later work”, and even though
the film won Best Director at Cannes, it
was booed. By casting non-professional
actors (or ‘models’ as he preferred to
term them) and making them repeat
their lines through 30 or 40 takes, he
deliberately aimed for uninflected
performances. “An actor can’t be
natural,” he maintained.
Most of the action – and there’s a good
deal of it in this 84-minute film – takes
place obliquely, off-camera. Bresson
prefers to focus on hands rather than
on faces, and often on doors. We only
know that Yvon has committed his first
killings when we see blood swirling in
a basin as he washes his hands. There’s
no non-diegetic score; the only music is
when someone plays Bach on a piano.
Reacting to criticism of his work,
Bresson liked to quote Racine: “ They
think simplicity is a sign of meagre
invention.”
Materialism is of course indicted
(money as ‘the root of all evil’), but class
figures too. The forged note passes
from the son of an affluent family to the
middle-class camera-shop owners to the
working-class Yvon, on whom all the
guilt falls. Bresson depicts a cruel and
unjust society where the most vulnerable
suffer, where money warps and destroys
all gentler impulses. His final film
ends with a cut to black – no credits.
Darkness covers all.
Disc: Generous collection of extras, of
which the most unexpected is David
Blest’s teasingly eccentric 1970 BFI
b&w short, featuring bizarre goings-on
on a Suffolk beach.
HEARTS AND MINDS
Peter Davis; US 1974; Criterion UK; Region B Blu-
ray; Certificate 15; English SDH; 112 minutes; 1.85:1;
Extras: director commentary; outtakes; booklet.
REVIEWED BY NICK BRADSHAW
Made as Richard Nixon was finally
extricating the US from Vietnam, Peter
Davis’s Oscar-winning documentary
polemic Hearts and Minds is less anti-war
agitprop than an attempt to write the
first draft of history, at a time when the
meaning of the US’s Vietnam failure/
crime was still up for grabs, at least
in the West. Assembled from 850
16mm camera rolls – 200 hours – of
interview and field recordings alongside
interspersed newsreel and the occasional
burst of pop-culture montages,
contrapuntally edited and structured
by argument without voiceover, it’s still
one of the most sweeping and elegantly
composed of war films, and a damning
portrait of power.
Rhyming sequences of five
consecutive US presidents’
rationalisations and lies about the war,
and an ominous shot of a B-52 bomber
lifting itself into the hazy sky, bookend
the film; the title quotes Lyndon
Johnson’s prophetic yet glibly unheeded
assertion that “the ultimate victory will
depend on the hearts and minds of the
people who actually live out there”,
but the remark that looms darkest
across the whole film is foreign policy
mandarin Clark Clifford’s stage-setter.
The US, he notes, had emerged from
World War II with global power such
as the world had never seen; the feeling
arose that “possibly we could control
the future of the world”. From the
nation’s re-enactments of its own War of
Independence to the pomp and fanfare
of its sports fields and civic parades to
the racist depredations, bloodlust and
mindless machine-tooled murderousness
of American fighters dominating a small
poor nation the other side of the world,
the film looks at this new superpower in
all its many parts, and the tragic tension
between its professed righteous values
and its will to win. That image of the
B-52 taking wing is a vision of a nation’s
(or a species’) technological prowess
outpacing its moral capacity.
The film remains a potent warning to
any imperial nation entertaining reckless
incursions elsewhere; it shows the
sprawling, interminable consequences
of a policy lie. But at the end of another
calamitous cycle of Western ‘liberal’
interventions, fought by those who will
have spurned the lessons of Hearts and
Minds and by those perhaps raised on
it, we could use more surveys like this –
and to think about them harder.
disc: Lovely celluloid hues on
Criterion’s Blu-ray. Extras include
plentiful interview and other outtakes
and Davis’s commentary.
COMING APART
Milton Moses Ginsberg; US 1969; Kino Classics; Region
A Blu-ray; b&w; English SDH; 110 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras:
interviews with Ginsberg (2003/2019); excerpt from Actors
Studio memorial for Rip Torn; shorts by Ginsberg – Kron
(2011, re-edited 2020), Milonga in a Lonely Station (2020).
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL ATKINSON
Jim McBride’s seminal work of experimental cinema
David Holzman’s Diary, a ‘documentary’ portrait of a
fictional film obsessive, was released in 1967. Milton
Moses Ginsberg’s rarely seen Coming Apart followed on
its heels. It’s a rough-hewn ‘mock doc’ manufactured
by a fictional character in the new age of confessional
cinema, to which anyone with a camera and a set of
neurotic obsessions could ostensibly contribute. This
simple strategy comes with a predictable set of pitfalls,
which McBride escaped thanks to the charm of his
lead, played by L.M. Kit Carson, and the protagonist’s
delicately warped relationship with cinema.
Ginsberg, in the first of his three features, lets his
concept limit itself: Rip Torn is a barely employed
psychiatrist who, we gradually learn, has rented
out a New York apartment under a fake name and
positioned a hidden camera so it records the room
through the mirrored back wall. Into the room come
women – unstable ex-patient Sally Kirkland, ex-lover
Viveca Lindfors, a variety of other would-be lovers and
patients – all filmed secretly as Torn endeavours to have
sex with them, often but not always successfully.
The film’s loose narrative arc follows the unhappy
Casanova’s emotional collapse (he’s also enduring an
off-screen divorce), but from a 2022 perspective that’s
not quite what’s happening. His savoir faire certainly
crumbles in the last segments, but for most of the film
he’s in control, glancing conspiratorially at the camera
when an oblivious woman becomes unstable or says
something embarrassing, and the queasy upshot is a
predator luring women with lies and sweet talk, and
recording the encounters without their knowledge,
which was and is a crime. Why he would do this,
beyond simple satyric vanity (Torn plays devious and
manipulative better than he plays vulnerable), is the
question. McBride had his confused hero explain his
inquisitive motivations to us directly, but Ginsberg’s
lost man remains a cipher, his elaborate ruse and lousy
treatment of women revealing little about his interior
life. His life might be falling apart, but he’s still a creep.
It’s far less a film about self-interrogation than about
voyeurism and toxic masculinity; taken that way, it’s
a nasty, riling work that could be said to be ahead of
its time, prophetic at least of the vexations of revenge
porn and webcam hacking and the like. The acting
is improv-fiery, the sex nearly explicit, but there’s a
retroactive Weinstein-like whiff about it, whatever
Ginsberg, who died last year at 85, intended.
Disc: A deliberately amateurish film restored to its
COMING APART IMAGE: KINO LORBER
optimum amateurish grain. Of the extras, his 2011
feature Kron, getting its first release here, is a lovely,
rather Greenaway-ish reverie about a fictitious clock
repairman and his meditations on time and memory,
indexing Chris Marker and roping in film clips from Un
chien andalou (1929) to Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945).

REDISCOVERY
Herbert Blaché; US 1920; Eureka/
Masters of Cinema; Region B Blu-
ray; b&w; silent; English intertitles;
Certificate U; 84 minutes; 1.33:1.
Extras: audio commentary by film
historian David Kalat; video essay
by David Cairns; alternate version of
The Saphead; comparison of versions;
audio conversation between Keaton
and Kevin Brownlow; 1958 Keaton
interview; Keaton radio interview;
featurette The Scribe (John Sebert
1966) –Keaton’s last film role – plus
Sebert commentary; booklet
REVIEWED BY NICK BRADSHAW
THE BLING RING
Beulah Booker and Buster
Keaton in The Saphead (1920)
The Saphead
Despite the rather fusty melodrama at its heart, Buster
Keaton’s first feature film displays all the star’s luminous
magnetism and hints at the sleek, sparkling comedy
he would pioneer over the decade that followed
Perhaps the clue is in the title. In his first
feature film, The Saphead (1920), Buster
Keaton plays a low-watt rich innocent, a
pampered naïf of very little brains who
bears the world’s brickbats with hapless
bewilderment. He eventually acts on the
world, albeit mostly by others’ designs,
and with perseverance it even leaves a
smudge on him, though not so much as to
disturb his essential slumber. He’s not the
Buster we revere, the dreamer spurred to
ingenuity and dexterity; this Saphead is a
stunted conception. And yet Keaton here
is luminous, magnetic; he bends the film
into weird shapes, with its legs set in fusty
stage melodrama and its eyes looking out
to Buster’s onrushing brand of sleek,
modernist American comedy.
And then again, the film offers a pre-
cious demonstration of Keaton’s more
versatile acting skills, too. Even if it
adds up to less than his more minimal-
ist performances, his turn as Bertie Van
Alstyne, in the company of a number of
fine drama actors giving the rote mate-
rial a sincere lift, shows he had range;
we see his last celluloid smile for over a
decade, and one of his warmest roman-
tic connections, with the bright-witted
Beulah Booker. The puzzle of the film,
then, is who put Keaton up to this cast-
ing, in 1920, when he had just parted
company with his mentor Roscoe ‘Fatty’
Arbuckle and was about to launch his
own flurry of short two-reelers from his
new Keaton Studio. (Keaton tried con-
vincing his producer, Joseph Schenck,
to let him jump into comedy features as
“the coming thing”, but Schenck stuck
with the safer bet.)
The play itself had already been
through some turns. Bronson Howard’s
Wall Street satire The Henrietta was first
staged in 1887, helping establish the repu-
tation of William H. Crane, who starred
as potent speculator Nicholas Van
Alstyne, ‘the Bear of Wall Street’, with
Stuart Robson as his callow son Bertie
‘the Lamb’. Crane reprised the role in
Winchell Smith and Victor Mapes’s 1913
update The New Henrietta, now oppo-
site Douglas Fairbanks, who took the
character (if little else from the play) out
west for his film debut in 1915’s unloved,
Arizona-set The Lamb. By 1920, when
theatre impresario Marcus Loew’s new
Metro Pictures had acquired the play
for a more faithful adaptation, Fairbanks
was making The Mollycoddle for his own
studio, United Artists; in Keaton’s tell-
ing, Fairbanks suggested as his replace-
ment the slapstick comedian who’d “never
had anything on but misfit clothes and
slap-shoes”. “Dress him up and he’ll play
Bertie the Lamb for you,” Fairbanks told
the film’s producer.
Or perhaps Schenck just saw a chance
to promote his new star in a big-budget
prestige production. If so, it worked.
After a couple of bits of set up – old Van
Alstyne is brought a tip to invest in a mine
out west (‘the Henrietta’) by an old com-
rade, while his son-in-law (Irving Cum-
mings) shows us his colours by shredding
a plea for help from his now-destitute ex-
mistress Henrietta before asking his wife
to win him financial favour from the old
man – we meet Bertie, taking afternoon
breakfast in his morning silks. Rather,
we study him: the camera moves in for a
95
puzzled close-up as he works through his
soft-boiled eggs, servants discreetly wait-
ing, his impassive face and languorous
timing suggesting nothing happening
upstairs.
“Bertie had been in love for years and
decided something must be done about
it,” remarks a title card, and so he launches
a soft-boiled mission to woo his father’s
orphan ward Agnes (Booker). Seeing
as she’s already sweet on him – it seems
just about everyone who doesn’t work in
finance is – the only hurdles are those he
imposes himself: waiting with flowers at
the wrong train station, trying to show
that he’s a hard-living playboy by gam-
bling the night away (no dice: blackjack
is an alien concept and the police won’t
even arrest him). All this is very mild
satire; Bertie isn’t even an idiot savant,
just a daffy one – David Cairns, in a video
DVD & BLU-RAY
essay on this edition, compares him to
Bertie Wooster, but while his retainers
show him loyal amusement, there’s no
Jeeves to compensate here; I also thought
of Harry Enfield’s Tim Nice-but-Dim. It’s
telling, at any rate, that the references are
to English whimsies; later there’s some
Pooh-ish business as Bertie approaches
the altar with a wedding ring ready in
every pocket, just to be safe. Then again,
just as things are looking cosy, the story’s
Henrietta intrigue kicks back in, and sud-
denly Bertie is on the floor of the New
York Stock Exchange (he has bought a
‘seat’) and in scenes of mass hostility and
scrum violence – the NYSE apparently
populated entirely by hazing frat boys –
in which Harpo Marx would have been
at home. At the same time as he was
shooting The Saphead, Keaton was set-
ting up his first shorts at his studio down
the road from Metro; before its release
he would have his dadaist flat-pack home
satire One Week out in the world, and the
fully articulated Buster persona and atti-
tude were up and away.
This restoration by the Cineteca
Bologna, in Masters of Cinema’s Blu-
ray release, brings out the opulence of
Metro’s handsome production and the
beauty of Charles Allen Gilbert’s graphic
intertitles, as well as the flatness of Her-
bert Blaché’s direction. Extras include the
Cairns video essay and three fine essays,
a David Kalat commentary track, several
Keaton interviews, an alternative version
of the film from the export negative and
a short overview of the differences, and
not least Keaton’s final short film, John
Sebert’s 1966 construction-site safety info
film The Scribe.
 96
ARCHIVE TV
DVD & BLU-RAY
Sid Smith/Sheldon Reynolds; US
1964/65; Network; region-free Blu-
ray; English SDH; Certificate PG;
104 minutes; 1.33:1. Extras: American
broadcast version of Taylor film;
Taylor rushes; image gallery; booklet.
REVIEWED BY ROBERT HANKS
PROMISING YOUNG ROMAN
Sophia Loren
Elizabeth Taylor in London/
Sophia Loren in Rome
Loren’s city symphony offers all the intimacy and fun that
the Taylor lacks, in this pair of mid-60s travelogues by two
of the biggest stars in the world at the time
It’s hard, from this distance, to have a
really clear sense of the magnitude of
Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren’s
stardom at the time this pair of TV spe-
cials was made. Cleopatra (1963) had just
made Taylor the highest-paid actress
in the world, probably the highest-paid
woman in any job. After the tragedy of
her third husband (Mike Todd, killed
in a plane crash) and the scandal of her
fourth (Eddie Fisher, stolen from Debbie
Reynolds) she was a figure of inexhaust-
ible interest; but public access to such
figures was far more restricted than now,
and it was still possible to throw around
words like ‘mystique’. Loren didn’t gener-
ate quite the same wattage, but there was
enough of it to push her through the lan-
guage barrier, to become the first actor
of either sex to win an Oscar for a perfor-
mance that wasn’t in English, in Vittorio
De Sica’s Two Women (1960).
From the informative booklet note
by Geoff Leonard and Peter Wallace, it
seems that Elizabeth Taylor in London was
almost an accident: Norman Baer and
Philip D’Antoni had quit working in
radio to set up a TV production company
and thought they needed a show with a
big name to kickstart their new career.
CBS had done good business with A
Tour of the White House (1962 – directed
by a pre-Planet of the Apes Franklin J.
Schaffner), featuring Jackie Kennedy,
and A Look at Monaco (1963), fronted by
Grace Kelly, and they liked this idea.
Realistically, though, Taylor was out
of Baer and D’Antoni’s league, and in
any case had always turned down TV
offers. But as it happened, she had been
seriously ill and the comparatively unde-
manding schedule of a 50-minute pro-
gramme suited her; and she was in love
with Richard Burton, who was filming
the historical drama Becket in London. It
probably didn’t hurt that they offered her
what was reputedly the largest ever fee for
a one-off television appearance – at least
$250,000. In any case, she agreed almost
immediately, with a bare minimum of
negotiation. It was a big gamble for a new
company, but in commercial terms it paid
off – half a million in sponsorship from
Chemstrand, makers of artificial fibres
and, according to Leonard and Wallace,
a US audience of 90 million.
In artistic terms – well, I wouldn’t
go as far as Anthony Burgess, who in a
review for the Listener called it “the most
deplorable programme of the year”, but
it’s pretty turgid. There are a lot of hand-
somely shot locations – the opening aerial
shots of early morning London are par-
ticularly gorgeous, with the distinctive
glow you get from old colour film – and
some quaint, somewhat over-scripted
encounters with ‘typical’ Londoners: a
drayman, a roadsweeper, a cheery bar-
maid, a cab-driver, Billingsgate fisher-
men, a bobby on the beat breaking out
into John of Gaunt’s speech from Rich-
ard II (“This earth of majesty, this seat
of Mars…”), as they so often do… And
there are moments when Taylor man-
ages to suggest an endearing ironic dis-
tance from the whole business. In gen-
eral, though, a deadening reverence and
sentimentality fall over the whole thing,
emphasised by John Barry’s rather soupy
score. Taylor is called on to recite a lot of
poetry (“Earth has not anything to show
more fair…”, “How do I love thee? Let me
count the ways…”) and speeches by politi-
cal figures from Elizabeth I to Churchill.
Apparently Burton had coached her; but
the result was to kill off any sense of fun
or individuality. At one point she rhap-
sodises about London’s “colourful place
names” – “the roll call of neighbourhoods
that once were separate towns and vil-
lages and now make up the web of the
city: Neasden, Dollis Hill, Willesden
Green…” This is objectively quite funny
(and the fact that the script was co-writ-
ten by S.J. Perelman, who supplied some
of the Marx Brothers’ best gags, opens
the possibility that was the intention),
but Taylor sounds as if she were reading
names off a war memorial, with a dying
fall on “Willesden Green”. And though
this is supposed to be a personal journey,
Taylor revisiting the city of her childhood,
she is clearly out of her element; it’s a tour-
isty, greatest hits version of the place, the
London Everybody Knows.
Still, its success led to Sophia Loren in
Rome, which has all the intimacy, fun and
(apparent) spontaneity that the Taylor
was missing. Part of the reason is lan-
guage: Italians couldn’t be expected
to chat to the cameras, so instead we
get some whimsical but sharply edited
sequences of Roman daily life that seem
to hark back to the city symphonies of
the 1920s. And Loren herself is more
engaged and relaxed, and much funnier:
during a clearly contrived visit to Mar-
cello Mastroianni, she pulls off a double-
take worthy of Cary Grant (maybe he
showed her how when they were filming
The Pride and the Passion, 1956, and he was
proposing to divorce Betsy Drake to
marry her). Again, there’s some beautiful
footage of the post-war city, and this time
the Barry score feels less all-encompass-
ing; it’s a lovely little period piece.
The transfer on this Blu-ray is good;
the American version of the Taylor
programme is basically the same but
with occasional announcements that it
is presented by Chemstrand, “makers
of fibres for the way we live today”, and
reminders of the advantages of acrylic
over wool carpets.

RUNNING OUT OF TIME
RUNNING OUT OF TIME 2
Johnnie To/Johnnie To & Law Wing-cheong; Hong Kong
1999/2003; Eureka/Masters of Cinema; Region B Blu-ray; in
Cantonese/Mandarin/English; English subtitles; Certificate 15;
93/95 minutes; 1.85:1. Extras: audio commentaries by Asian film
expert Frank Djeng; RooT audio commentary by writers Laurent
Cortiaud and Julien Carbon; archive interviews with Carbon and
Courtiaud/To/ star Lau Ching Wan/ composer Raymond Wong;
documentary Hong Kong Stories (Yves Montmayeur 2003); making-
of featurette; image galleries; theatrical trailers; booklet.
REVIEWED BY TREVOR JOHNSTON
Though he is revered by Western cinephiles for his
Melville-infused crime pics, including The Mission
(1999) and Election (2005), Johnnie To’s Hong Kong
filmography encompasses a much wider span of
genres, including comedy and romance, and this
two-disc set shows him applying a very much lighter
touch to police procedural material. In 1999, when HK
cinema was at a low-ish ebb, To sold a brief outline to
his producers – Andy Lau and Lau Ching-wan play
a thief and a cop, Andy dons disguises – and got a
date to start shooting before he had an actual script.
Enter newly arrived French wannabe-screenwriters
Julien Carbon and Laurent Cortiaud, To took a punt,
and within weeks they were shooting. The result is
shaped by Canto-pop and celluloid icon Andy Lau’s
soft-grained screen image, and while he was unwilling
to have his villainous schemer display too much
outright malevolence, his combination of chiselled
charisma and enigmatic motivation is still irresistible.
Lau Ching-wan’s detail-oriented police negotiator is
an effective foil, relishing the cat-and-mouse game with
this elusive suspect.
But To’s ever gliding, pressing, surging camera,
and how it accentuates the kinetic impact of the
action, remains the most enticing factor, especially
in the somewhat sequel, where plot coherence and
credibility – hardly the original’s strongest suits – are
jettisoned entirely. Here the mercurial Ekin Chen
swans into the master criminal role, as a magician who
regularly defies the laws of physics. With all bets off
plot-wise, we are soon in the realm of arrant nonsense.
Written by committee and initially assigned to To’s
assistant Law Wing-cheong, the project was taken
over by To in midstream. He does contribute a couple
of set pieces from his very top drawer, though: firstly,
there’s the automotive pursuit of a soaring bald eagle
(don’t ask) through the city streets, followed by a
two-man bicycle chase on rain-slicked neon-lit streets
by night, dispatched with an absurdist choreographic
elegance that surely nods to Jacques Tati. Yes, both
films demand that you acquiesce to their shamelessly
carefree construction, and not everyone will be
willing. But for those in the mood, this is an attractive
sampling of the wider Johnny To spectrum.
AMONG THE LIVING IMAGE: KINO LORBER
Disc: Pristine transfers, plus an array of interview
material gathered from previous US and French DVD
releases, make for a useful package, showcasing the
fanboy French screenwriters’ moment in the Hong
Kong spotlight. Top-notch commentary tracks from
Frank Djeng, packed with factoids and opinion, and he
certainly does his best to sell the sequel’s madcap appeal.
Two Films by
Vojtěch Jasný
DESIRE
ALL MY GOOD COUNTRYMEN
Vojtěch Jasný; Czechoslovakia 1958/1968; Second
Run; region-free Blu-ray; Czech; English subtitles;
Certificate 12; 100/114 minutes; 1.37:1; Extras: short
film Bohemian Rhapsody (1969); documentary feature
It’s Always Cloudy Here (1950); audio commentary on
All My Good Countrymen by Mike White, Spencer
Parsons and Chris Stachiw; Vojtěch Jasný interview
(1988) and introduction; Drahomíra Hofmanová
interview; Peter Hames on Jasný; booklet
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL BROOKE
Though this marvellous release
promises only two films by Vojtěch
Jasný (1925-2019), it actually showcases
four, tracing an abiding fascination with
Czech rural landscape from his 1950
debut to the last films he made in his
native Czechoslovakia before the 1968
Soviet invasion drove him into exile.
It’s Always Cloudy Here, co-directed with
Karel Kachyňa, has a stereotypically
socialist realist story of a farm
administrator charged with transforming
productivity, but the treatment of the
changing landscape constantly betrays
its makers’ real interests. By Desire (1958),
Jasný had ditched ideology in favour of an
overtly poeticised treatment that evokes
the work of Oleksandr Dovzhenko while
anticipating the Czechoslovak New
Wave. Though schematic in outline (its
four parts inspired by the seasons), it’s
hypnotically beautiful, from the opening
shot of young boys running across a
hillside, cawing in harmony with the
crows, to its concluding study of an
elderly mother’s final days.
Desire’s third story is about a woman
who won’t participate in compulsory
farm collectivisation, a theme Jasný
expanded a decade later in All My Good
Countrymen. Regarded by Czechs as one
of their supreme film masterpieces, it
grafts Jasný’s preoccupations on to a
grippingly detailed village saga spanning
1945-58, charting collectivisation’s
impact on ancient traditions. Its rueful
honesty about human nature led to
it being banned until the 1989 Velvet
Revolution. Bizarrely, so was the
short Bohemian Rhapsody, a wordless
celebration of Czech folk culture (parts
of which could be seamlessly spliced
into The Wicker Man): a closing funeral
procession was interpreted as an
allegory of the Soviet invasion.
Disc: The Czech National Film
Archive’s 4K restoration of All My Good
Countrymen is stunning, but the HD
remasterings of the other films look
terrific too. Generous extras include
interviews with Jasný and actress
Drahomíra Hofmanová, plus critical
apparatus from Peter Hames (on video
and in the booklet) and a commentary
from the Projection Booth podcast on
All My Good Countrymen.
97
AMONG THE LIVING
Stuart Heisler; US 1941; Kino Lorber; Region A
Blu-ray; b&w; English SDH; 69 minutes; 1.37:1.
Extras: commentary by Jason A. Ney; trailers.
REVIEWED BY KIM NEWMAN
An early film noir, which shows the form
evolving out of the horror movies and
social issue films of the 1930s into the
distinctive era-defining genre it would
become in the 1940s. On the death of his
mill-owning father, John Raden (Albert
Dekker) returns to the town the old man
practically founded – which is as warped
by his abuse and wealth as his family.
He also discovers from the genially
corrupt family doctor (Harry Carey)
that his twin brother Paul (also played
by Dekker) didn’t die at ten years old as
he had been led to believe, but has been
confined to the family’s abandoned,
decaying mansion with a single servant/
keeper (Ernest Whitman).
It’s possible Paul wasn’t mad when,
at ten years old, he tried to attack his
DVD & BLU-RAY
father, who was beating his mother
– now he has uncontrollable violent
episodes if he hears or imagines he
hears a woman screaming. Of course,
Paul escapes – in a creepy touch, he
arranges the corpse of his keeper with
hands pressed over his ears – and
drifts into town, where he catches the
eye of a gold-digger (Susan Hayward)
and generally interacts with people on
the level of a ten-year-old… until the
noise becomes too much. Inevitably,
stranglings ensue. Equally inevitably,
a lynch mob presumes that the sane
brother is responsible and swarms
through the night intent on hanging the
innocent man.
The script is by Garret Fort, known
for Dracula (1931) and other Universal
horrors, and Lester Cole, later one of
the blacklisted leftist Hollywood Ten
– which goes some way to explain the
distinctive mix of ‘monster’ material
(dangerous innocent Paul is a cousin
to the Wolf Man) and anger at the
corrupting influence of capitalism and
hypocritical establishment figures on
this American backwater. Dekker works
harder as the mostly likeable killer than
as the beleaguered innocent, but plays
a much more complex duality than the
usual good-and-bad-twin business. And
the film’s real monster, never seen on
screen, is the brutal patriarch buried
in the opening sequence – giving this a
perfect American gothic feel.
Disc: Interesting commentary by
academic Jason A. Ney. Terrific
transfer, highlighting the shadowy
cinematography of Theodor Sparkuhl.
 98

The Molly Dineen THE INITIATION OF SARAH

Universal Terror: Karloff
NIGHT KEY
THE CLIMAX
THE BLACK CASTLE
Lloyd Corrigan/ George Waggner/ Nathan H. Juran; US 1937/1944/1952;
Eureka; Region B Blu-ray; b&w; Certificate PG; 68/86/82 minutes;
1.37:1. Extras: commentaries, stills galleries, trailer, booklets.
REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP
By the mid-1930s, horror movies, previously the mainstay
of Universal Studios, seemed to be losing their appeal. So
when in 1936 mounting debt forced Carl Laemmle to step
down from the studio he had founded and ownership passed
to the Standard Capital Company, a change of direction was
suggested. But then, what to do with one of Universal’s prime
horror stars, who had incarnated, inter alia, Frankenstein’s
DVD & BLU-RAY
Collection: Volume 4
SOUND BUSINESS
BEING BLACKER
Molly Dineen; UK 1981/2018; BFI; Region 1
DVD, 2 discs; Certificate 15; 146 minutes; 4:3,
16:9. Extras: Q&As from the 2018 cinema release
of Being Blacker; 2017 interviews with Blacker
Dread and Molly Dineen; Dineen’s short film
Sugar Minott (2010); TV trailer (2018); booklet.
REVIEWED BY HANNAH MCGILL
These two documentaries bookend
Molly Dineen’s documentary career to
date, as well as forming a crucial record
of a corner of UK musical history.
Sound Business, completed in 1981,
was her graduation project from the
National Film and Television School.
A fan of reggae since her teens, Dineen
sought to explore British reggae club
culture via interviews with the members
of two prominent sound systems, Sir
Coxsone International and Young Lion.
Almost four decades later, Dineen
Robert Day; US 1978; Arrow; Region B Blu-ray;
English SDH; Certificate 12; 97 minutes; 1.33:1.
Extras: commentary by Amanda Reyes, visual
essays by Stacie Ponder and Anthony Hudson,
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Samantha McLaren;
interview with screenwriter Tom Holland.
REVIEWED BY KIM NEWMAN
American television horror thrived in
the 1970s, yielding some important
gothics – but also often used the tactic
of the ‘haircut’, making lightly disguised
variations on established theatrical hits.
The Initiation of Sarah is one of several
TV movie derivatives of Carrie (1976).
The pitch might have been ‘Carrie goes
to college’, which ties in with such TV
precedents as Satan’s School for Girls
(1973). Analogues to the characters in
the Stephen King novel and Brian De
Palma film are present and correct: the
telekinetic wallflower is Sarah (Kay
Lenz); the nice girl is her foster sister
(Morgan Brittany), who has to shun her
to pass her own sorority initiation; the

monster, Fu Manchu and The Mummy: Boris Karloff?

returned to forge a solo portrait of one mean girl is the manipulative sorority
Night Key was one answer, with Karloff for once playing the
of her interviewees, Blacker Dread queen (Morgan Fairchild); and the mad
good guy: a frail, aged inventor, losing his sight (Karloff was
(pictured above) – back then a young mother is a witch (Shelley Winters)
49 at the time), who ill-advisedly offers his newly devised
and politely passionate member of Sir who wants her protégée (and perhaps
‘magic ray’ security system to his former partner, a slick
Coxsone International; by 2018, a record daughter) to use her powers for evil.
operator who stole the credit for his previous system. Cheated
shop proprietor and stalwart of Brixton’s It rings changes by playing King’s story
a second time, he devises an ingenious revenge; but then a
Jamaican community with a complicated on campus, featuring an Animal House
ruthless mob move in on him.
private life and a few legal issues. war of upscale and outcast sororities.
It was a troubled production, with directors hired and fired
This release, tied to the BFI’s 2022 The cruel prank, which seems to involve
before the writer, actor and director Corrigan landed the
reggae season, is the first time the older splattering Sarah with nastier stuff
job. There were several rewrites and cast changes, too. But
film has been properly commercially than pig’s blood (they probably told
the result is diverting, even if it hardly qualifies as a ‘terror
available; each project makes sense of the the network’s Standards and Practices
movie’; crime thriller with touches of humour comes closer to
other. By Dineen’s own self-deprecating department it was just mud), not only
the mark.
account, Sound Business is a rough entity; spurs psychic revenge but encourages
Over the next few years the quality of Karloff ’s assignments
“brilliantly researched,” as she puts it, a new-made coven to sacrifice the
fell off: several of his films were made for Poverty Row studios
“and pretty badly done.” She was, she outcasts’ outcast (quiveringly played by
such as Monogram. Wearying of this, he accepted a stage
says, laser-focused on the way the music Tisa Farrow) in a ritual involving robes,
offer, playing the homicidal Jonathan Brewster in Joseph
was played – “I was excited to tell people chanting and a hedge maze.
Kesselring’s ultra-black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. Hugely
about a huge, rather unacknowledged Robert Day, director of Hammer’s
popular, it ran on Broadway for three years. His prestige
part of British culture” – perhaps to the She (1965), plays up the soap opera
renewed, Karloff returned to Hollywood in an A-listed
exclusion of a wider portrait of London’s diva clashes – and it has a wealth of
production: his first colour movie, The Climax (1944).
Jamaican culture. vivid personalities, even down to the
Adapted from a stage play by Edward Locke and set in the
Whether or not one agrees with lesser sisters played by Talia Balsam
world of Viennese operetta, it plays out like a sequel to 1943’s
this assessment – Dineen’s interview and Nora Heflin. Day conveys psychic
Phantom of the Opera, from which it used the set. Karloff, in a
material, by turns raw, informative and events by having Lenz stare while
role originally planned for Claude Rains, is an opera-house
charming, is arguably enough in itself cutting together skewed close-ups
physician who develops a murderous obsession with one of
– the later Being Blacker attends to the of her face with the ill-effects of her
the female singers. (For once, he could act with a minimum
other extreme, looking in depth at the powers – which she uses to punish folk
of make-up.) The thin plot is padded out with too many fluffy
background that produced this beloved, who deserve it, qualifying her more as a
operetta sequences, and the ending turns incoherent, but
complex figure. The dynamic between superheroine than a monster.
Karloff at his grimmest compensates for some of the vacuity.
There is tighter plotting in The Black Castle (1952), with them is both endearing in its warmth,
and intriguing in its odd-couple mutual Disc: This gets a luxurious treatment,
Karloff in a supporting role; top billing goes to Richard
respect. Why, Dread is asked, did he and balancing academic and cult
Greene (soon to be famous on television in The Adventures of
his friends welcome Dineen into their approaches to the material – with
Robin Hood, 1955-59), playing a Brit aristo seeking to revenge
world? “She wasn’t going to make any Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and
the killing of his friends by the malevolent count of a schloss in
money off it,” he muses. “And if we could Samantha McLaren considering
18th-century Austria. Karloff again plays a medic: here he’s the
help her pass her exams – that would witchcraft TV movies in the context
count’s doctor, who sympathises with the Brit but then loses
be brilliant!” Anyone questioning her of second-wave feminism while Stacie
his nerve. This was the directorial debut of Nathan Juran,
presence was told, “Leave her alone; she’s Ponder and Anthony Hudson take a
previously a noted art director (How Green Was My Valley, 1941;
one of us.” Notes an amused Dineen: “I more flip approach and commentator
Winchester ’73, 1950); not surprisingly, the gothic sets – which
didn’t know any of this was going on.” Amanda Reyes balances insight with
he himself had designed – are brimming with atmosphere.
affection for the era’s TV product. It
Disc: Extras include absorbing also looks splendid – far better than it
Discs: Crisp, clean visuals for all three films from 2K scans.
interviews which round out the working would have done on original broadcast.
Chatty but instructive two-person commentaries, and an expertly
informed booklet by Karloff specialist Stephen Jacobs. and personal relationship between
Dineen and Dread.

LOST AND FOUND
Le Viager
Pierre Tchernia and René Goscinny’s delightful tale, about a
greedy family waiting for a man to die so they can inherit his house
in Saint-Tropez, is one of the best loved of all French comedies
Not back to the future – but forward
(and simultaneously backwards) to the
past! Egged on by a cheerfully upbeat,
lyrical score by Gérard Calvi, Le Viager
(The Annuity) kicks off with an ingen-
ious two-and-a-half-minute retro-credit
sequence typifying the irreverent take on
history of its co-screenwriter, René Gos-
cinny (who, along with Albert Uderzo,
created the Astérix books).
First we see a space-rocket swooshing
back down on to its launch pad – and
thereafter reversed newsreel footage
sweeps us back through the years: state
processions, horse races, military parades,
the Tour de France, athletics – all walking,
Pierre Tchernia, France 1972
running, riding steadily backwards. Ships
are de-launched, smoke is sucked back
REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP into the muzzles of cannons, parachut-
ists ascend the sky en masse, bombs are
sucked up into planes, bombed buildings
MORTGAGE BROKEN
Odette Laure as Marguerite, resurrect – and so on, until we find our-
Jean-Pierre Darras as Émile
selves on a street in 1930 Paris when, as
a voiceover tells us, everything can now
start moving forwards again.
So begins one of the best loved of
all French screen comedies. Released
in 1972, Le Viager was the first feature
directed by Pierre Tchernia (who also co-
scripted and whose voiceover we’ve just
heard). He was to direct only three more
features, but nonetheless was widely
known as ‘Monsieur Cinéma’ – this being
the title of the popular TV quiz show
about movies that he presented (with a
couple of breaks) every Sunday afternoon
from 1967 to 1980. Another nickname was
‘Magic’ Tchernia, not least for the infec-
tious enthusiasm and good humour with
which he presented everything from his
movie-buff programmes to the Eurovi-
sion Song Contest.
And so it’s on that 1930 Paris street
that we find Louis Martinet (Michel
Serrault), an unassuming 59-year-old
bachelor who, worried about his state of
health, has come to consult Doctor Léon
Galipeau (Michel Galabru). Galipeau,
deciding that the old boy can’t last more
than a year or so (though he feeds him
reassuring noises), learns that Martinet
has few resources, must soon quit his job
– but has just bought himself a charming
old cottage in an obscure hamlet on the
Côte d’Azur called Saint-Tropez. And the
good doctor sees his chance – un viager!
Well-known in France, a viager is a
reverse annuity. The owner of a property
sells it to a purchaser in return for a down-
payment (le bouquet) plus guaranteed
annual cash payments for the rest of their
life – and the right to live in the property
until they die. Usually negotiated directly
between the two parties – often with the
help of a lawyer – it’s essentially a bet on
the longevity of the owner. If they die
soon, the purchasers have got themselves
a bargain. If not… (Perhaps the most
notorious example of this was a woman
in Arles, Jeanne Calment, on whose
house a local notary bought a viager. The
lady died in 1997 – at the age of 122. The
notary had long pre-deceased her.)
Exultantly, Dr Galipeau calls together
his family – his brother Émile (Jean-Pierre
Darras), his wife Marguerite (Odette
Laure), his sister in-law Elvire (Rosy
Varte) – to tell them of this unmissable
opportunity. “Martinet can’t last more
than two years,” he asserts confidently.
“Faites-moi confiance!” (“Trust me!” – a line
that becomes a running gag throughout
the film.) And so the viager agreement is
signed. Ill-advisedly, the brothers adopt
the lawyer’s suggestion that the annual
payment should be indexed – to the price
of aluminium. “It’s only for two years,”
Émile whispers to Léon.
Tchernia’s film presents a satire on the
avarice and unscrupulous dishonesty of
the French bourgeoisie that’s as cynical
and mocking as anything in the movies
Claude Chabrol was directing around
this same period. But where Chabrol’s
assaults on his native class (The Unfaith-
ful Wife, 1968; The Breach, 1970; Just Before
Nightfall, 1971, etc) play out in terms of
savage melodrama, Le Viager adopts a
playful tone of high farce. Jokes, visual and
aural, abound: when Dr Galipeau tells
Martinet that a viager “is so simple, a child
could explain it”, we hear a child’s voice
(Michel’s daughter, the 11-year-old Natalie
Serrault) doing just that, while animated
stick-figures on a blackboard act out the
transaction). From time to time a celes-
tial choir comments rhapsodically on the
action as the screen turns celestial blue.
99
A montage of Galipeau family Christmas
dinners takes us through the 30s, with
each year a card arriving from Martinet
telling them – to their frustration and fury
– how well he’s doing and thanking them
DVD & BLU-RAY
for their generosity towards him. (With
war approaching, the price of aluminium
is climbing steadily.)
As Martinet heads contentedly into
his seventies and eighties (Michel Ser-
rault was 43 when he took the role), the
Galipeaus grow increasingly desperate,
their schemes to destroy the old fellow
ever more venomous. Tchernia and Gos-
cinny don’t shy away from poking fun at
the paranoia of the war years, with the
family trying to bring Martinet down
by denouncing him first as a pro-Nazi,
then later as a secret Gaullist. On both
occasions their scheme is fatally ill-timed.
Several murder attempts backfire even
more disastrously; a double would-be
booby-trap makes for one of the film’s
black-comedy high points.
Right to the very end, celebrating his
100th birthday, Martinet remains bliss-
fully unaware of the Galipeaus’ mali-
cious schemes, tearfully evoking their
memory as his selfless benefactors. Ser-
rault’s charmingly naive performance is
a delight, but he’s backed by a sterling
cast – not just the Galipeau clan, includ-
ing Claude Brasseur as their jailbird
youngest member, but Yves Robert as a
pompous functionary, never without his
halberd, who ends up reduced to renting
pedalos. Gérard Depardieu shows up in
a small early role as a ne’er-do-well, along
with the director himself in a cameo as a
frustrated TV producer.
“I have never addressed myself espe-
cially to children, young people or adults,”
wrote Goscinny, “I have done things
which seemed to me to amuse everyone.”
With Le Viager, he and Pierre Tchernia
consummately succeeded.
 100
WIDER SCREEN
Black Film Matters
In the year since its launch, Maya Cade’s Black Film Archive has
become an essential online resource bringing together Black films
made between 1915-1979 that are available to stream online
BY ALEX RAMON
While it may seem that Twitter brings
little of cultural value into the world,
exceptions do remain. One such is Maya
Cade’s Black Film Archive. Beginning
as a Twitter thread during 2020’s turbu-
lent summer of pandemic and protest,
Cade’s impulse to compile a comprehen-
sive list of Black cinema has since blos-
somed into a free-to-use online database,
what she calls a “living register” of more
than 200 Black films released between
1915-1979 that are available to stream. In
the year since its launch on 26 August
2021, blackfilmarchive.com has estab-
lished itself as a vital resource, one that
exemplifies the current drive to chal-
lenge the marginalised or undervalued
contributions of Black creatives to his-
torical cultural production. This is, after
all, as Cade puts it, a period in which
“people are taking a moment to reengage
with history”.
As a self-financed enterprise, BFA is
clearly a passion project for Cade, based
on both her long-nurtured love for, and
intellectual engagement with, Black
cinema. Born in New Orleans and now
Brooklyn-based, Cade has worked as a
writer and as an audience development
strategist for the Criterion Collection.
Having received the National Society of
Film Critics Film Heritage Award and
a Special Award from the New York
Film Critics Circle for her work on
BFA, she recently became the recipient
of a two-year Library of Congress schol-
arship grant to research “Tenderness in
Black Film”.
That topic seems appropriate given
that Cade has talked openly about feeling
emotionally sustained by Black cinema
during the multiple upheavals of 2020.
“Like many of us when we were stuck at
home and asking ourselves what brings
us inspiration or joy, I felt myself gravi-
tating toward Black films: rewatching
them, absorbing them, living with them,”
she has said. “I’m a lifelong cinephile and
I’ve always really loved and studied Black
films, so I just deepened that knowledge
during the pandemic.”
Cade’s definition of what constitutes a
‘Black film’ is essentially straightforward.
She explains that the films in the archive
were selected because they each “have
something significant to say about the
Black experience; speak to Black audi-
ences; and/or have a Black star, writer,
producer or director”. For Cade, BFA
offers the opportunity to perceive Black
cinema in terms of a continuum. “All the
films on the site are in conversation with
each other,” she says. “How does Black-
ness exist across time? What I hope
people understand is that there are infi-
nite things that the past has to teach us
about the present.”
Working with a small team, Cade has
carried the project’s ethos of inclusivity
and connection into the design of the
site, which is exceptionally welcoming,
uncluttered and easy to navigate. The
visitor is initially greeted by a gif: a strik-
ing image taken from a dance scene in
Oscar Micheaux’s Birthright (1938) – a
title which in itself feels significant for
a site dedicated to reminding visitors,
especially Black visitors, of a rich cultural
heritage that’s too often been occluded or
erased. The films are grouped by decade
and by genre: comedy, western, music,
sports, blaxploitation, drama and docu-
mentary; thumbnail images of each film
link to succinct descriptions (all writ-
ten by Cade) and to streaming links to
YouTube, Tubi, the Criterion Channel,
Kanopy and other services.
The appealing, open layout invites
visitors to make their own connections
and discoveries. That said, one appro-
priate starting point is undoubtedly the
site’s selection of so-called ‘race films’.
These were independent productions
made between the mid-1910s and the
1940s by (mostly) Black producers and
filmmakers, and which were exhibited
in Black-only spaces, offering a counter
to the racist stereotypes prevalent in
mainstream Hollywood cinema of the
period. What’s striking is the diversity of
this material, which encompasses silent
comedy (such as the 1915 slapstick romp
‘All the films on Two Knights of Vaudeville), melodramas,
religious films and documentaries, as
the site are in well as films recasting established Hol-
conversation lywood genres in an all-Black milieu,
with each other. such as The Bronze Buckaroo (1939), one
of several westerns starring Herbert
How does Jeffrey (known as the Sepia Singing
Blackness exist Cowboy). In a male-dominated epoch,
across time?’ Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 fieldwork
footage – documenting her ethno-
graphic work undertaken in the Ameri-
can South – is also a particularly valu-
able inclusion.
Central to this period is the work of the
aforementioned Micheaux, the writer,
director and producer who made more
than 40 films spanning the silent and
sound eras, including Within Our Gates
(1920), a rebuttal to the racism of D.W
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Spen-
cer Williams’ films are equally distinctive,
with the director developing a compel-
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
ling expressionistic style in the remark-
able The Blood of Jesus (1941), which casts
ABOVE Cathryn Caviness as a dying woman
Spencer Williams’
Dirty Gertie from Harlem
undergoing a test of faith; and in the
U.S.A. (1946) fabulously titled Dirty Gertie from Harlem

U.S. A (1946), a free adaptation of W.
Somerset Maugham’s short story ‘Rain’.
Some of these f ilms have already
become more accessible in recent years
thanks to the 2015 DVD/Blu-ray box-
set Pioneers of African-American Cinema,
released by Kino Lorber in the US and
the BFI in the UK. But part of the value
of BFA is the way in which it substan-
tially expands upon that collection’s nar-
rative. From documentary shorts such
as The Negro Soldier (1944), highlighting
the contributions of Black men to the
American war effort, through Arthur
H. Leonard’s 1947 musical drama Sepia
Cinderella, featuring Sheila Guyse and
the first (uncredited) screen appearance
of Sidney Poitier, to Larry Peerce’s One
Potato, Two Potato (1964), a portrait of the
pressures facing an interracial couple at
the height of the civil rights movement,
BFA features a wonderfully wide range
of material, much of it underseen and
undercelebrated. Alongside the expected
blaxploitation classics, for example, the
1970s section highlights such astutely
intersectional gems as Larry Bullard
and Carolyn Johnson’s A Dream Is What
You Wake up From (1978), which combines
narrative and documentary techniques
to explore the contrasting experiences of
Black families.
BFA’s current cut-off date for the films
it features isn’t arbitrary. Rather, Cade
chose it as she regards 1979 as a transi-
tional moment in Black film following
the release of Sidney Lumet’s all-Black
musical The Wiz. Noting the disjunc-
ture between the general perception of
Lumet’s retelling of The Wizard of Oz as a
flop, and Black audiences’ abiding affec-
tion for it (it was one of Cade’s go-to films
during lockdown), Cade contends that
the commercial failure of The Wiz made
Hollywood studios reluctant to continue
to fund Black-focused films, which led
Black stories to be taken up by the L.A.
Rebellion directors and other independ-
ent filmmakers from the 1980s onwards.
The nee d to limit this initial
iteration of the archive is perfectly
understandable. Cade’s notion of 1979
as a transitional moment for Black
film could be critiqued, however: it
overlooks or undervalues independent
Black filmmakers working before that
date, and also exposes the US-centric
underpinnings of BFA in its current
form. This is evident in the archive’s
recourse to a structure based around
such quintessentially North American
genres as the western and blaxploita-
tion, and the fact that films made out-
side the States remain so sparse within
the selection. Notably, most of the
few African or Afro-Caribbean films
featured, such as Ousmane Sembène’s
Black Girl (1966), Perry Henzell’s The
Harder They Come (1972) or Djibril Diop
Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973), boast the
101
Black Film American ‘endorsement’ represented by
inclusion in the Criterion Collection.
WIDER SCREEN
Archive is as The paucity of non-US films indicates
an essential American dominance of the discourse –
resource, one and of streaming services – and suggests
the urgent necessity of thinking of Black
that contributes film in yet more plural, global contexts.
to the reshaping In addition, viewers using the archive
of perceptions outside the US may feel frustrated at
the inaccessibility of some films from the
of Black links provided.
film and the Cade emphasises, though, that BFA
cinematic canon is a work in progress: an archive that
will be updated and expanded through
the suggestions and recommendations
of users and also through her ongoing
Library of Congress research. The site
still stands as an essential resource, one
that contributes to the reshaping of per-
ceptions of Black film and the cinematic
canon more broadly. Just as books such
as Stephen Bourne’s Black in the Brit-
ish Frame (2001) and Deep Are the Roots:
Trailblazers Who Changed Black British
Theatre (2021) have highlighted the pres-
ence of Black creatives on UK screens
and stages across the decades, so BFA
places the emphasis on plenitude. The
site replaces a rhetoric of scarcity when
it comes to Black representation with
one of abundance, as it shows Black
filmmakers, performers and screenwrit-
ers working across a range of budget-
ary scales, modes, mediums and genres
throughout cinema history. As Cade has
remarked, “The act of making Black film
history accessible is the act of transform-
ing collective memory. To intentionally
ABOVE preserve is to remember, and to remem-
Spencer Williams’
The Blood of Jesus (1941)
ber is to reimagine what the future
can hold.”
LEFT
Oscar Micheaux’s
Birthright (1938) To explore the films, visit blackfilmarchive.com
102
The
Afterimage
ReadeR
EDITOR MARK WEBBER
PUBLISHER THE VISIBLE PRESS
PAGES 352
ISBN 9780992837 761
BOOKS
REVIEWED BY ERIK A BALSOM
When I first encountered articles from
Afterimage – the London-based journal
active between 1970 and 1987, not to be
confused with the US publication of
the same name – it was at university, as
nth-generation photocopies and reprints
in anthologies of film theory. Essays
like Peter Wollen’s ‘Counter Cinema:
Vent d’est ’ (1972) and Paul Willemen’s ‘On
Reading Epstein on Photogénie’ (1981)
met me decades later and an ocean away,
extracted from the volumes in which they
initially appeared. Afterimage had an after-
life. Yet discerning the overall character
of the journal proved elusive; copies were
hard to come by and it was never digit-
ised in full. How was I to know that it
had foregrounded the voices of filmmak-
ers and come from a position resolutely
outside the academy? Or that it hosted
competing conceptions of how f ilm
could be political, from Third Cinema
to Co-op experimentalism and the neo-
Brechtianism of Huillet/Straub?
Now, with the appearance of The After-
image Reader, edited by Mark Webber
and published by his imprint, The Vis-
ible Press, it is possible to delve into a
wealth of texts from one of the UK’s
most adventurous film publications. If
Virginia Woolf ’s insight that “books con-
tinue each other, in spite of our habit of
judging them separately” is true – and I
believe it is – then this is all the more so
with short-form criticism. Although the
passing of time can obscure the original
web of discourse from which critical
interventions emerge, to publish in peri-
odicals is to converse with interlocutors
known and unknown. The Afterimage
Reader encourages a consciousness of
this fact, sketching the publication’s key
concerns by assembling 34 contributions
from across 13 themed issues, including
all editorials. As with previous books
from The Visible Press, the emphasis is
on making primary texts available rather
than providing commentary. (Webber
offers a brief introduction, but readers
seeking a robust historicisation of After-
image should consult Nicolas Helm-Gro-
vas’s authoritative 2017 account in Moving
Image Review & Art Journal.)
Afterimage was founded by Simon Field
and Peter Sainsbury in 1970, on the heels
of a vogue for “little magazines” that had
begun in the 1960s. It sought to expand
UK film culture beyond the mainstream,
abiding by the noble conviction that
“there is little value in a magazine which
reflects generally accepted tastes”. Popu-
lar cinema is markedly absent from its
pages, with one exception that proves
the rule: Noël Burch and Jorge Dana’s
‘Propositions’, from the densely theoreti-
cal issue five, touches on Secret Beyond the
Door… (1947) and Citizen Kane (1941), but
was written out of what Burch terms
the authors’ “common hatred” of Holly-
wood. Afterimage unapologetically made
the margins its centre. To read through
Webber’s selections – from Simon Har-
tog’s ‘Nowsreel, or the Potentialities of a
Political Cinema’ (1970), an international
account of leftist newsreels, to Paul Ham-
mond’s ‘In Quay Animation’ (1987), from
the final ‘Animating the Fantastic’ issue –
is to move through shifting affirmations
of what might constitute the cinematic
vanguard. Scripts, interviews, screeds,
poetic meditations, historical reassess-
ments: Afterimage embraced an expan-
sive idea of how film could be explored
through writing.
The friction energising the journal’s
first decade is encapsulated in the double
editorial of issue two, ‘Avant-Garde
Film’. In a first text, Field champions US
experimental film; this is followed by a
second, in which Sainsbury, drawing on
the work of Walter Benjamin, argues
that this same sphere of practice “fails
to liberate either art or artist because it
refuses to concern itself with any social
dimension of liberation”. Afterimage was
polemical and partisan, but its position
was never unified, with early issues navi-
gating between a concern with form and
a commitment to counter-ideological
struggle. In the issue four editorial, which
seeks to reconcile these positions under
the framework of an “epistemological
cinema”, Sainsbury notes that “the fact of
internal dissent…drew disparaging atten-
tion”. To a contemporary reader, however,
this is a strength, a way of glimpsing the
fault lines of the time.
Sainsbury left Afterimage in 1974 after
becoming head of the BFI Produc-
tion Board; Field, today a producer of
films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
remained until the end, joined in the
1980s by scholar Ian Christie (under
the pseudonym Guy L’Éclair) and Film
and Video Umbrella founder Michael
O’Pray. Over time, the frequency of pub-
lication slowed, and the emphasis shifted
away from what Wollen deemed, in an
influential 1975 article partly inspired by
Afterimage, “the two avant-gardes”. The
title of the double issue ‘Beginning… and
Beginning Again’, published in spring
1981 after a three-year hiatus, speaks to
the fate of the journal as much as its con-
tents. Galvanised by the International
Federation of Film Archives conference
in Brighton in 1978, the issue explores the
Eden of pre-classical cinema, while inau-
gurating a second phase for the journal,
one in which overtly political approaches
would cease to figure centrally. Later
With the issues include a split focus on filmmaker-
appearance of theorists Raúl Ruiz and Jean Epstein
and monographic publications on Derek
The Afterimage Jarman and Michael Snow. The singu-
Reader, it is lar figure took hold, usurping pluralistic
possible to rubrics like ‘Third World Cinema’ (issue
three) or ‘Hearing: Seeing’ (issue seven).
delve into a The development of Afterimage in its
wealth of texts second decade is symptomatic of the
from one of waning of a post-1968 vision grounded in
anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist senti-
the UK’s most ment. It also makes visible key structur-
adventurous ing absences that had shaped the jour-
film nal’s conception of politics all along: race
and gender. The writers of Afterimage are
publications almost exclusively white and male, as are
the filmmakers discussed in its pages.
Feminist work gets scant treatment and
the enduringly important surge of Black
British practice goes unremarked, even
though both are undeniably vital cur-
rents of UK independent cinema in the
1980s. The publication never claimed to
IMAGE; BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
be comprehensive. Nevertheless, return-
ABOVE
ing to it today, at a time when the need
Street of Crocodiles (1986) by the for revisionist histories of this period is
Brothers Quay, who are
discussed in Paul Hammond’s
urgent, these omissions are as glaring as
essay ‘In Quay Animation’ the journal is otherwise inspiring.

Serge Daney is a hallowed name whose
work has scarcely appeared in English,
and Semiotext(e) deserves credit for pub-
lishing this collection. But it is neverthe-
less a disappointment, and probably does
Daney a disservice by giving us so much of
him; or rather, so much of a certain part of
him. Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing about
the pressing need for English-language
translations of Daney’s work, once called
the 1980s “the Daney decade”, and his
image is associated with themes redolent
of that decade, like TV channel-hopping.
This book, however, is drawn mostly
The Cinema House from the period 1973-81, when Daney was
& the World: at the helm of Cahiers du cinéma, and while
the received wisdom is that he and co-edi-
The Cahiers du Cinéma tor Serge Toubiana ended the magazine’s
Years, 1962–1981 Maoist arc during that time, plenty of the
writing here is as boring and politically
evasive, or even culpable, as anything pub-
BY SERGE DANEY
EDITED BY PATRICE ROLLET, WITH lished at the height of Cahiers’s ‘red years’,
JEAN-CLAUDE BIET TE AND and is unredeemed by any felicity of style.
CHRISTOPHE MANON
TRANSLATED BY CHRISTINE PICHINI In ‘The Critical Function’, published at
PUBLISHER SEMIOTEXT(E) the start of this period, Daney answered
PAGES 616
ISBN 9781635901610 those who said that “every Marxist knows
that the dominant ideology belongs to
REVIEWED BY HENRY K. MILLER the dominant class and that a film is yet
another tool for the bourgeoisie to impose
upon us its vision of the world”, and that
film criticism along these lines was there-
fore redundant, by claiming that the
magazine’s task was to show “how it was
The novel reads like some Herzog movies play: as delirious fiction grounded in palpable physical realities
THE T WILIGHT WORLD
The first time I met Werner Herzog – it was
in 1974 – he told me insistently and repeat-
edly that he didn’t dream. Times have
changed. Herzog, now 80, has published a
novel, and the word ‘dream’ runs through it
like the refrain in an Everly Brothers song.
‘Fever dream’ and ‘nightmare’ crop up too.
Heroically translated by Michael Hof-
mann, the somewhat over-written book
reads very much like some Herzog movies
play: as episodic and sometimes delirious
fiction grounded in palpable physical reali-
ties. Given the setting, the small but once
strategically important Filipino island of
THE TWILIGHT WORLD Lubang, its mountainous parts covered in
tropical rainforest, you might expect paral-
AUTHOR WERNER HERZOG lels with Herzog’s Amazon jungle movies,
PUBLISHER BODLEY HEAD
PAGES 144 Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo
ISBN 9781847927231 (1982). But the Herzog movie it evokes
most keenly is Rescue Dawn (2006): in par-
REVIEWED BY TONY RAYNS
ticular, the scene in which US Air Force
troops are forced to watch an instructional
film about self-camouflage and survival in
a jungle. They respond with derision and
catcalls, but the film’s advice proves ger-
mane to Dieter (Christian Bale) when his
plane is shot down in Laos.
In The Twilight World, Herzog tries
to get inside the mind of Onoda Hiroo
(1922-2014) during the 29 years he spent
‘defending’ Lubang from American forces
between 1945 and 1974; Onoda was
famously the last but one of the Japanese
soldiers in South-east Asia who refused
103
imposed” in each and every instance; and
this gives a flavour of the reviews that
make up much of the book.
But the analysis from which Daney
begins is painfully simplistic, and will
hobble any criticism that flows from it.
His reviews are often highly abstract, not
making contact with what’s on the screen.
This volume is a translation of a French
one published in 2001, which was followed
by three more covering the 1980s and early
90s, and despite the foregoing one hopes
that Semiotext(e) will follow suit. The
later, more personal writings in this book,
such as the long ‘Hong Kong Journal’
from 1981, are more rewarding. I found
myself reading it as a kind of companion
to Olivier Assayas’s films, Assayas having
started out as a Cahiers critic under Daney
in 1980 (another oeuvre that could do with
an English translation).
This is a curious way to make an intro-
duction, however. The Cinema House and
the World is a contribution to intellectual
history, but there is too much of it, and it
would have benefited from more obtrusive
editing. There is an enthusiastic introduc-
tion by A.S. Hamrah, and a preface by the
original book’s main editor Patrice Rollet,
but practically nothing to contextualise the
work, give some sense of what was distinc-
tive about Daney as a critic, or tell us about
the man himself.
BOOKS
to believe the Pacific War ended in 1945.
Herzog tops and tails the book with short
sections in the first person (how he met
Onoda in 1997, how Onoda took him to
the notorious Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo)
but writes most of it as an omniscient nar-
rator, imagining the tactics and routines
that underpinned Onoda’s stoic resistance.
Herzog understands Onoda as a man who
follows his orders (use guerrilla tactics to
defend the island until reinforcements
arrive; do not commit suicide; spread dis-
information if captured) until his former
commanding officer is brought out of
retirement to order him to stand down.
Plenty of others have tried to understand
Onoda (most recently Arthur Harari, the
French director of Onoda: 10,000 Nights in
the Jungle, released in the UK in April) and
Herzog is ahead of most in grasping that
Onoda’s mindset is in lockstep with Japan’s
imperialist-fascist ambitions of the 1930s
and 40s. But Herzog is one more West-
erner who fails to heed cultural commenta-
tor Donald Richie’s sound advice, that to
get to grips with Japanese individuals you
need to take into account Nihonjinron, the
pseudo-science of Japanese uniqueness,
which is inculcated in all Japanese from
kindergarten onwards. Still, it’s the most
entertaining account of Japanese survival-
ism since the narration written and spoken
by Josef von Sternberg for The Saga of Ana-
tahan (1953), albeit minus its focus on sex.
104
FROM THE ARCHIVE
ORSON WELLES
THE THIRD AUDIENCE
In 1953, a couple of years after shooting Othello, the director was invited to give a speech at the Edinburgh
Festival by the BFI’s Summer Film School. Here we revisit his still relevant observations on the struggle
between art and commerce that lies at the heart of filmmaking and why television just might be the future of film
ON THE FILM INDUSTRY
Whenever film students, or film scholars,
or anyone not actively concerned with the
commercial world of filmmaking, invite
someone like myself to give a lecture,
they always talk about art. But we are
businessmen. If I were a painter, I might
have to starve for a while, but I would find
paper or canvas or even a wall on which to
express myself. Being a filmmaker in the
commercial world, and not in the docu-
mentary or avant-garde field, I need a mil-
lion dollars to make a film. You have to be
a businessman to handle a million dollars.
I remember sitting with Jean Cocteau
and René Clair in a meeting of this sort,
intensely serious, and we were regarded as
being cynical because we refused to talk
about anything but what films cost.
The invention of the moving picture
was a moment of historic importance
equivalent to the invention of movable
type. Let us suppose that the business of
publishing books was just beginning, and
that, because the manufacture of movable
type was so easy, an enormous industry
had just grown up. Then suppose that only
two types of books could be published:
little tiny ones that very few people would
read or buy, and books like Gone with the
Wind. How many books would have been
published, in fact, or would even have
been written, if an author, in order to get
SIGHT AND SOUND, JANUARY-MARCH 1954 BY ORSON WELLES
a publisher to publish what he had writ-
ten, had to assume the responsibility of
addressing himself to an audience of 60
million people?
There is nothing wrong with popular
art; some of the greatest artists in the world
have been popular artists. But the trouble
with films is that they cost too much. I am
now acting in a film in London [Three Cases
of Murder, 1955], made from a short story by
Somerset Maugham. Knowing him to be
a writer who works at the normal speed,
it should have taken him no more than
four half-days to write that story, but it will
take five weeks of shooting to make that
same story a film. Logically, it should not
take any longer, or, at the very most, twice
the time it took Maugham, but with hun-
dreds of people clanking around a great set
where the camera is so heavy it takes three
people to move it, a faster and more eco-
nomical method of work becomes impos-
sible. We are now all trapped by a standard
of technical excellence, which we dare not
fall below without being attacked by the
whole system – from the distributor to the
exhibitor, from the highbrow to the low-
brow critic, from everyone, in fact, except
the public.
I think movies are dying, dying, dying.
But I do not think they are going to stay
dead for long. They are like the theatre;
the theatre is dying all the time, but it never
dies altogether. It is like the cycle of the
seasons – it has its summer, autumn and
winter. Now the movies are in the autumn
of the cycle.
ON THE FILM PUBLIC
For the first time in the history of the
world, a creative artist is now given the
Movies are opportunity to address 60 million people.
The trouble is, it is not simply an oppor-
dying. But I do tunity, but an obligation – he must address
not think they them. The new artist goes out to Holly-
are going to wood or Rome or wherever it may be, and
until the industrialists grow wise to him,
stay dead for he may create something out of himself,
long. It is like something original. Then they grow wise
the cycle of the to him, and make him feel responsible to
the industry. In fact, he simply becomes a
seasons. Now responsible man who does not like to steal
the movies are from the people who are paying him.
in the autumn So we have to f ind some ground
between the experimental 16mm avant-
of the cycle garde – although that medium is important
– and the commercial production, which is,
anyway, dying from an economic point of
view. If the Eady plan [a tax on box-office
receipts to support UK film production]
were taken away from the British film
industry, if government aid were removed
from the French, the Italian or the Spanish
industries, they would collapse. India and
Japan are the only two national film indus-
tries that are paying their way. What we
 need, in fact, is to hold a world congress to
discuss the whole economics of filmmak-
ing, and to study the public. We talk much
about the public, but the fact is that the
film public is petit bourgeois. What the
big commercial film is doing is to inter-
pret for the lower middle classes what the
upper middle classes liked yesterday. That
is not snobbery – I am simply using terms
of social reality. Another curious thing is
that this film public has no shape.
If I were to play King John at the Edin-
burgh Festival, I would know the shape
of my public; but a film is manufactured
and then shipped out to a series of halls
throughout the world into which a huge
and amorphous public pours. Nobody
really knows anything about it. It is made
up of everybody, of kings and queens
and cleaners and clerks. The best thing
commercially, which is the worst artisti-
cally, by and large, is the most successful;
and, that being the fact, how can we be
surprised if the level of films goes down
and down?
The creative f ilmmaker may well
wonder where he is going to find his
ALL IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
public. He is generally faced with two
choices; he can either make straightfor-
ward commercial films, films that the
public can be expected to pay to see, or
he can do exactly what he wants and be
supported by his government. Neither
alternative, on its own, is a good one.
I reject state patronage to the exclusion
of all other forms, but I think it is a very
serious thing when a government gives
no help. America needs a BBC and Brit-
ain needs a CBS. If the cinema is to be
a stable industry, it must be economically
possible for a man to produce a film with-
out going to his government, but, on the
other hand, he should be able to go to it
if he wants to.
I would like a public and a film in
which it is possible to exchange and com-
municate ideas and information. Cer-
tainly, in an educated world, there will be
200 million people who will be bored to
death by the most ‘difficult’ film we make
today, but as things stand only so many
people will listen to Mozart. That is a
limited public. It grows by what it feeds
on. You must nourish that public, and
you cannot do so with 16mm avant-garde
films, because that is too far away from
the general public to be an important
source of expression for the filmmaker.
The biggest mistake we have made is
to consider that films are primarily a form
of entertainment; they are only inciden-
tally a form of entertainment. The film is
the greatest medium since the invention
of movable type for exchanging ideas and
information, and it is no more at its best
in light entertainment than literature is
at its best in the light novel. This doesn’t
mean that the great public of today should
be abandoned, but I think there should be
other publics, smaller ones, and cosmo-
politan ones, to see things forbidden by the
code of Hollywood, the censors of the Vati-
can and whatever the gentlemen in Britain
are called. There must be a relatively free
There is nothing exchange of ideas. To achieve this, we have
to find a way of making films – and here
wrong with television may help us – by which, if two
popular art; or three million people see them, we have
some of the a return for our money; which involves
the creation of a true international audi-
greatest artists ence; and a struggle with the mysterious
in the world have national forces in the world which call
been popular themselves governments. But out of such
a victory would come the raw material for
artists. But the a great new enterprise.
trouble with
films is that they ON ROME, HOLLYWOOD AND ELSEWHERE
It is old-fashioned to blame Hollywood.
cost too much We have seen Rome turn into a small Hol-
lywood, and England try to do so and
fall flat on its face. Hollywood has simply
been the biggest and most productive film-
making centre. It was a cosmopolitan place
and it might have happened anywhere. It
only happened in a suburb of Los Angeles
because Cecil B. DeMille was prevented
from moving on to Nevada by the snow.
ABOVE
The fact is that everything wrong with
Orson Welles Hollywood is also there in Rome today.
 107

OPPOSITE
Orson Welles in the title
role in Macbeth (1948)

RIGHT
Welles as Othello and Suzanne
Cloutier as Desdemona in
his 1951 adaptation

BELOW
Welles on the set of Othello

I do not know whether a happy

marriage can exist between
Shakespeare and the screen,
and I certainly know that I did
not succeed in making one
108 FROM THE ARCHIVE
The Italian films, by the way, cost a great
deal more than their publicity indicated.
Rossellini is an extremely expensive direc-
tor. The Italians did not make their films
cheaply – it was simply that there was no
way of their costing more. They should
neither be praised nor blamed for this.
Having always been a calligraphic people,
they reacted against calligraphism after
the war, and many of the results were
called neorealism by one side and bad
movie-making by the other.
When I referred to England falling
flat on its face, I did not mean artistically;
I meant, by trying to industrialise its film
business on such a scale. England is the
only film industry without a tradition.
They were making films in Stockholm,
Budapest and Copenhagen 40 years
ago, but they were not making them in
London. You walk into a studio in Eng-
land today, and the number of people
who have been in films for more than five
years is hardly enough to push a camera.
ON THE WIDE SCREEN
When someone asked Cocteau what he
thought of the wide screen, he said: “The
next poem I write, I am going to get a
big sheet of paper.” We must stop think-
ing in terms of technique. I do not think
the film public deserves anything bigger
or better than it has got already. Films are
big enough for a while. One of the biggest
distributors in England, an intelligent
and talented man, recently ran in a popu-
lar provincial theatre the film The War of
the Worlds; and he installed for that week a
large screen, although there was no men-
tion of this in his publicity. Afterwards he
conducted a poll among the audience,
and not one member of it, not one person
who visited the theatre during that week,
knew that it was a wide screen. One of the hopes of the
ON FILMING SHAKESPEARE
movies is television, and not
I am not necessarily in favour of put- just television as a means of
ting Shakespeare on the screen. I do diffusing movies. The lightness
not know whether a happy marriage
can exist between Shakespeare and the
and ease of some television
screen, and I certainly know that I did productions contain a lesson
not succeed in making one. But in this for filmmakers to learn again
age, there are many questions which
cannot be discussed in front of 60 million
people, and that is the audience a present-
day filmmaker is required to aim at. One
method of getting away from banality is
to return to our classics, and it is for this
reason one sees filmmakers experiment-
ing with Shakespeare, some disastrously,
and some otherwise. Macbeth was made
in 23 days, including one day of retakes. ABOVE
Welles as Lord Mountdrago
People who know anything at all about in the portmanteau film Three
the business of making a film will realise Cases of Murder (1955)
that this is more than fast. My purpose in OPPOSITE
making Macbeth was not to make a great Welles

film – and this is unusual, because I think
that every film director, even when he is
making nonsense, should have as his pur-
pose the making of a great film. I never
thought I was making a great film, or even
an imitation great film. I thought I was
making what might be a good film, and
what, if the 23-day shooting schedule came
off, might encourage other filmmakers to
tackle difficult subjects at greater speed.
Unfortunately, not one critic in any part
of the world chose to compliment me on
the speed. They thought it a scandal that
it should take only 23 days. Of course they
were right, but I could not write to every
one of them and explain that no one would
give me any money for a further day’s
shooting. I believe that we have got to
find in films an equivalent for the repertory
theatre in spoken drama. The experiment
in America failed because it was judged on
the same level, and distributed in the same
way, as the work that took four months to
make. However, I am not ashamed of the
limitations in the picture.
Othello took not 23 days but four years to
make. It did not, however, take four years
to shoot. Actually, its shooting period
was about the normal one, but there were
times when it was necessary to disband
the unit, because I had to go away and act
elsewhere. Macbeth, for better or worse, is
a kind of violently sketched charcoal draw-
ing of a great play. Othello, whether suc-
cessful or not, is about as close to Shake-
speare’s play as was Verdi’s opera. I think
Verdi and Boito were perfectly entitled to
change Shakespeare in adapting him to
another artform; and, assuming that the
film is an artform, I took the line that you
can adapt a classic freely and vigorously
for the cinema.
ON FILMS AND TELEVISION
The technical excellence of the images
in that Punch and Judy set, television, is
about as bad as a picture of a Chinese play,
in which someone brings on a chair and
tells you it is a mountain. Yet the public
is sufficiently held by that. In fact, one
of the hopes of the movies is television,
and not just television as a means of dif-
fusing movies. The lightness and ease of
some television productions contain a
lesson for filmmakers to learn again. Tel-
evision is an exciting thing because it is
in the hands of the first generation. Films
have not exhausted their technical and
artistic possibilities, but the majority of
movie-makers today belong to the second
generation, and they are ashamed of the
first generation.
It is rather as if we had just left a period
of Elizabethan eloquence and entered a
more cautious, lyrical and decadent period.
The possibilities of the Elizabethan period
were no more exhausted than the possi-
bilities of the language were exhausted; it
was just that people became afraid of the
richness of the language. You can still do
anything with films, and television is not
a substitute for them. Eventually it may
become a means of distributing them, but
it will never give the director the scope that
the film camera can give him. Television is
an actor’s medium. It is going to reduce
the director to something like his posi-
tion in the theatre. But the great power of
the film, the use of the image as such, will
always belong to the cinema.
109
‘I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MORE
INTERESTED IN EXPERIMENT,
THAN IN ACCOMPLISHMENT’:
THE CAREER OF ORSON WELLES
George Orson Welles was born in
Wisconsin in 1915 and moved with his
family to Chicago in 1919. In an unsettled
childhood, he moved around the country
with his father, a businessman and
alcoholic. His mother died when he was
nine, his father when he was 15. Welles used
his inheritance to travel around Europe
throughout his late teens, and it was in
Dublin that he discovered theatre and
began acting in plays. Upon his return to
the US he would begin to work in radio
alongside his theatrical output. From 1935
Welles would take part in the Federal
Theatre Project, staging plays including
his famous Voodoo Macbeth, set in Haiti and
performed by an all-Black cast. In 1937 he
co-founded Mercury Theatre with John
Houseman; their 1938 radio production
of The War of the Worlds made Welles an
instant star. He would sign a Hollywood
contract with RKO Radio Pictures the
following year.
Welles’s innovative directorial debut,
Citizen Kane (1941), was highly influential
and is widely considered one of the
greatest films ever made – it topped
Sight and Sound ’s poll from 1962 to 2002.
He wrote, produced, directed and starred
in the film and was aged 25 when it
was released. This was followed by The
Magnificent Ambersons (1942), a drama set
at the turn of the 20th century, which was
released in a version heavily cut by the
studio, but is still regarded very highly.
Welles’s original edit was never released.
Journey into Fear (1943) saw Welles act,
produce and write, but not direct.
Welles’ third feature as director,
The Stranger (1946), a film noir set in small-
town Connecticut, is now less critically
acclaimed than his first two, but was the
most successful of the three at the box
office. It was followed by another noir,
The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and a pair of
Shakespeare adaptations, Macbeth (1948)
and Othello (1951).
Welles would continue working until his
death in 1985, a giant of cinema whose
merits continue to be fiercely debated.
THE ORIGINAL ISSUE
PUBLISHED IN
JANUARY-MARCH 1954
BY
ORSON WELLES

THIS MONTH IN
IN REVIEW
MAURICE
James Ivory’s Maurice received a
positive notice from Claire Tomalin:
“[E.M.] Forster enjoyed writing
Maurice, and his pleasure makes
itself felt in the book, which has
a confident pace and tone. The
film moves swiftly too; its weakest
passage, curiously, is the opening
section, which has a fruitiness alien
to the rest. After this it is subtle,
intelligent, moving, and absorbing;
also extraordinary, in the way it mixes
fear and pleasure, horror and love.
It’s a stunning success for a team
who seem to have mastered all the
problems of making literary films.”
HOPE AND GLORY
John Pym on John Boorman’s semi-
Tilda Swinton lets out a primal scream in a still from autobiographical wartime coming-of-
Derek Jarman’s The Last of England in our Autumn age story (pictured above):
1987 issue. Coverage of the film was limited in the “What makes Hope and Glory singular,
if not quite unique, is its tone. It
magazine, but its Edinburgh premiere was noted, sometimes shades into sentimentality.
if only for the film’s lack of commercial prospects: Boorman has acknowledged
with gratitude the influence of
“[It’s] a defiant fist shaken in the face of Thatcher’s growing up in a family dominated
Britain but hardly likely, with virtually no script or by forceful women and of having
three daughters of his own; and he
discernible storyline, to persuade producers to find has, not unnaturally, several soft
him the money to make more films like Caravaggio.” spots. But sentimentality is only an
undercurrent. Boorman knows how
to write and direct scenes which play
in the cinema. He understands scale,
INSIDE STORY
and he has too, unexpectedly, an eye
The wait for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket had been so lengthy that expectations and an ear for understated comedy.”
were feverishly high. Terrence Rafferty describes the tentative critical response:
“Ever since 2001, which was greeted rather rudely on its… release in 1968, [critics BEYOND THERAPY
have] been worried that they’re not quite evolved enough to penetrate the mysteries of
This much maligned psychoanalytical
Kubrick’s higher consciousness… Now Kubrick’s ‘Vietnam movie’, Full Metal Jacket,
comedy from Robert Altman has a
has arrived, in an atmosphere of muted awe – though no one seems quite sure what it
setting (either New York or Paris)
is. It’s one of the strangest war movies ever made, at once so hysterical and so austere
which is tricksily never made clear.
that it suggests an unnatural coupling of Sam Fuller and Robert Bresson. In a sense,
Richard Combs reviewed the film:
it’s the picture he has been working up to all these years: The Big Dead One.”
“[It is] a conventional enough comedy
in which the therapists are crazier
than their patients, with all the
farcical toing-and-froing intensified
by everyone’s self-consciousness about
their ‘problems’. What the double-
handedness about the setting does is
to give all the agonising about identity
an objective cast, a social reality that is
itself a riddle. Either these characters
are in New York, in which case all
the foreign pretensions, the French
food and phoney accents, are one
sign of displacement and uncertainty.
Or they’re in Paris, in which case
the ‘phoneyness’ is real and it’s the
characters who are displaced.”
1987
111
A YEAR WITH ANDREI TARKOVSKY
A few months after the death of the
legendary Soviet Russian director,
Michał Leszczyłowski, who edited his
final film The Sacrifice (1986, pictured
above), recalled his experiences with
the auteur:
“His illness had come suddenly;
none of us was prepared for it. I did
know that in December 1985 he had
not been feeling well and had had a
thorough medical examination; but
I was surprised when on Christmas
Eve, before leaving for Florence, he
asked me to take him to the airport.
On the way, he began dictating the
final version of the synchronised
soundtrack, what should be the space
and contrast in the sound image. He
ignored my questions, simply saying
that in all probability he would not
be returning to Stockholm after
Christmas and instructing me to see
to the film’s completion. The day after
Christmas, I learnt that Andrei had
cancer. We mobilised all our resources
to finish the film precisely as Andrei
instructed us, to have it ready to
show him so that it was wholly and
indisputably a Tarkovsky film.”
ELSEWHERE IN THE ISSUE
· The 41st Edinburgh
International Film Festival was
deemed a “reasonably solid
success”. The festival’s most
notable titles included Alan
Parker’s Angel Heart and Peter
Wollen’s Friendship’s Death.
· Kim Newman spoke to director
Clive Barker about his debut
Hellraiser and his transition from
writing to filmmaking; Barker
called the film a “perverse
love story”.
· An extensive feature, titled
‘Gorbachev ’s cinema’, surveyed
the state of filmmaking under the
Soviet leader, reporting from the
15th Moscow Film Festival.
· Kawakita Kashiko, a Japanese
film lover and cinematic
ambassador, reminisces about 50
years of film festivals, starting
with the world’s first: Venice
Film Festival 1932.
· “Subtitles have quite arrived,”
announced John Minchinton
in a feature about the art of
subtitling’s blossoming on TV.
 EDITORIAL

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Mike Williams

MANAGING EDITOR Isabel Stevens
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Kieron Corless
ACTING REVIEWS EDITOR Arjun Sajip
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Thomas Flew
WEEKLY FILM BULLETIN EDITOR Pamela Hutchinson
BFI DIGITAL EDITOR Henry Barnes
BFI DIGITAL FEATURES EDITOR Sam Wigley
CHIEF SUB-EDITOR Jamie McLeish
SUB-EDITORS Robert Hanks
Liz Tray
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VOLUME 32 ISSUE 8
ISSN 0037-4806 USPS 496-040
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1 14
ENDINGS
The Last Detail
The close of Hal Ashby’s classic 1973 buddy movie,
which follows a pair of US Navy officers escorting a
likeable young seaman to prison, leaves its protagonists
disillusioned by their inevitable reckoning with authority
BY NICOLE FLAT TERY
Near the end of Hal Ashby’s 1973 film
The Last Detail, Larry Meadows (Randy
Quaid) tells his new friends that “if it
were summer, we could have a picnic”.
It then cuts to the trio eating hot dogs
in the snow. This is the thesis of Ashby’s
brilliant film: we might all have a pretty
good time, if everything were com-
pletely different.
The Last Detail is a road movie without
a car where prison is the final destina-
tion; it’s a buddy movie where the bud-
dies have been thrown together because
of kleptomania; a romance where the
girl is getting paid by the hour. Based
on a script by Robert Towne, who
would go on to write Chinatown (1974)
and Shampoo (1975), it follows two US
Navy officers Billy ‘Badass’ Buddusky
(Jack Nicholson) and Richard ‘Mule’
Mulhall (Otis Young) who are charged
with escorting young Seaman Mead-
ows to prison. Meadows has been con-
victed of stealing $40 from a charity
run by the wife of a senior officer. This
woman’s charity only extends in one
direction. For this crime, Meadows has
been sentenced to eight years in jail. He
is only 18 years old.
Unsurprisingly, Billy and Mule end
up taking pity on the sweet and open-
faced Larry, and together they try to
pack a decade’s worth of experiences
into a week: cheeseburgers, milkshakes,
losing his virginity, bar-hopping, ice-
skating at the Rockefeller Center. They
have a per diem, after all. Even the fun-
niest scenes are charged with sorrow –
Billy, Mule and Larry in a hotel room,
blind-drunk, laughing at nothing, mock-
f ighting, mythologising. The room
feels alive – cramped, hot, clouded in
cigarette smoke, empty beer cans aban-
doned everywhere – as Billy attempts to
get Larry riled up over the unfairness of
his situation. “Don’t you ever get mad at
nobody?” Billy asks him. “Well, not at
somebody who’s just doing their job,”
Larry replies. “Who then?” Billy asks.
It makes sense that the final scene in
The Last Detail is Billy shouting, “Tell-
ing me how to do my goddamn job? I
know how to do my goddamn job.” It’s a
furious and futile response to their mis-
treatment by their senior officer. After
Larry arrives at the prison beaten and
bloody, the senior officer asks Billy and
Mule if they abused him for fun. “Was
this your idea of a good time?” he chal-
lenges them. The film is obsessed with
the idea of having a good time – how
to find joy when you’ve experienced so
little of it. Of course, Larry’s injuries
are from being beaten up by Billy after
he tried to make a run for it – but Billy
and Mule lie on his behalf: “He didn’t
try to escape, sir.” It echoes an earlier
moment, in which a woman at a trendy
Buddhist party suggests she could help
Larry flee to Canada. Throughout,
Larry has been enlivened by Billy and
Mule: he stands straighter, orders what
he actually wants in restaurants, finds a
new will and forcefulness. He declines
this woman’s offer as he doesn’t want the
men to be punished. “They’re my best
friends,” he tells her.
Ashby’s anti-authoritarianism had
never endeared him to studio bosses,
but it’s the same prickliness and sharp
intelligence that drives The Last Detail.
This is Ashby’s America – sadistic,
racist, unjust, greedy, worsened every
day by ‘people just doing their jobs’. In
a sweet moment, Larry lies in bed with
a sex worker (Carol Kane) paid for by
Billy and Mule, and is captivated by
her, giddy from his first sexual encoun-
ter. She announces she has a nice body,
“not great but good”. Her hard evalu-
ation of her body’s capitalistic worth
meets his doe-eyed lust. The Last Detail
is largely about how love, passion and
friendship can survive under a crush-
ing system. It’s the same idea behind
Ashby’s eccentric hit Harold and Maude
(1971) and his masterpiece Being There
(1979). The final years of Ashby’s life
were a tragedy: a string of flops in the
1980s, a litany of insecurities, dead at
the age of 59 from cancer. As Rosanna
Arquette says at the end of the docu-
mentary Hal (2018): “ They didn’t
respect him and it killed him.” But, as
in The Last Detail, when the good times
were good, they were very good. The brief look of stunned devastation
In the f inal moments, Larry is
dragged up the stairs to his fate by two that passes over Jack Nicholson’s
officers. He doesn’t get to say goodbye; face at the end of the film is worthy
he doesn’t even get to turn around. The of any Hollywood romance
brief look of stunned devastation that
passes over Nicholson’s face is worthy
of any Hollywood romance. Then Billy
and Mule are on the road again, uncer-
tain, disillusioned by the pain they’ve
caused Larry, angry at the degradation
they themselves have suffered. If it was
summer, they could have a picnic. It’s a ABOVE
Jack Nicholson and Otis Young
fitting end to Ashby’s dirty, grubby, cyni- are confronted by a senior
cal, profane and heartwarming film. officer at the close of the film