Battleship Potemkin

Introspective Peasants Revolting... Actually

Battleship Potemkin
aka Bronenosets Potyomkin
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
USSR 1925 
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

It’s been a few decades since I last revisited Sergei Eisenstein’s oft voted ‘number one film of all time’ classic Battleship Potemkin. So I thought, with the recent Blu Ray release by the BFI of the film coupled with the score that Red Ken, the then mayor of London, commissioned from the Pet Shop Boys for a free live performance accompanying the film in Leicester Square on 12th September 2004, this was a good opportunity to take another look. Although I bought the original CD album of this piece when it was released back then (which is also included in this recent BFI release, along with the Blu Ray), I’d never heard this particular score with the context of the images it was meant to accompany before. So I’m glad this version finally got a release.

Now, Eisenstein was all about the Russian propaganda of course and, this film made in 1925 was put together to commemorate the anniversary of the failed but inspiring Russian Revolution of 1905. And it was much widely acclaimed and, you can’t ask for much more than to have your movie banned in most countries on the fear that it would spark an uprising amongst the working classes in places like France and so on. Over here in the UK, the ban wasn’t lifted for a while and it was finally granted a release, with an X certificate, presumably to deter a certain section of the cinema going population, in 1954. 

The film is a ferocious beast of a movie in terms of the power of images and ideas, for sure. It’s also a case, for those detractors of the art of silent cinema, for a more naturalistic acting style in that medium... it possibly helps that many of the ‘so called actors’ were in fact common people from the streets and navy of good old mother Russia. There’s certainly not much in the way of overdramatic gesturing in this one. 

The film is split into five sections (translated as thus on this particular iteration of the film)... Men And Maggots, Drama On The Deck, The Dead Man Calls Out, The Odessa Staircase and Rendezvous With The Squadron. And it demonstrates a lot of Eisenstein’s signature directorial flourishes for sure. Obviously, Eisenstein was all about the editing and his cross cut montages... to show, for instance, the hard work of the men on the boat cross cut with the mouldering, maggot infested food they are expected to eat being prepared... are all present and correct.

As, of course, is his method of typeage... casting non-professionals to give them an authentic look as visual shorthand and then inserting them into little vignettes staged apart from the main action but made to look like they are part of it, in order to amplify the emotional context of the movie... like little static inserts whereas a film maker today would probably either zoom in or move the camera within the shot. But there’s a lot to be said for doing it this way too and it’s still an effective way of working, I think... if much abandoned in the method of execution these days. 

But there are other things which I feel are less said about the director’s work than is generally lingered on, due no doubt to the incredible impact of his other techniques. I mean, he was obviously as good as Fritz Lang when it came to directing huge crowds of people in unison but, the shot compositions are pretty good too. Like early in the movie when the diagonal ropes of the sailors hammocks as they sleep below decks are juxtaposed with similar shorts of different angles and then, later, reoccurring in the diagonal lines created by the struts, ropes and staircases on the walkways above.

Plus little details which are picked out such as the fallen crucifix of a wrathful priest embedded in the deck or the dislodged glasses hanging from a rope during the scene where the mutineering rebels take control back from their overseers. 

Then there’s the famous slaughter of the civilians by the police on the steps of the Odessa (not that this moment happened on these steps in real life)... one of the most influential sequences in the history of cinema, much used since and always cropping up in cinematic homage to this day, in a film already overflowing with influential and iconographic imagery (there’s a reason why directors like Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder and Michael Mann cite this as their favourite film). 

A brutal and gory sequence with such imagery as the head shot child dying, his mother carrying his body against the troops and also being shot down, the other mother shot and knocking her own baby carriage down the steps (in a fate the actress more or less met in real life 20 years later, when Stalin was having a go at everyone... how many times have we seen this moment reconstructed since?), the woman with the eye shot out and, of course, the montage of the stone lions rearing up from sleep to startlingly awake at last. You can see just why the film is still influential... it’s got some powerful, visual ideas used to push its agenda.

And it’s nice to see this version of the film retains... or perhaps rather recreates... the red coloured flag which Eisenstein himself had hand tinted for the film’s original premiere back in 1925. Which is a very nice touch for modern audiences to see, I think.

As for the score by the Pet Shop Boys... well it’s not bad ‘actually’ and doesn’t, for starters, detract from the movie (I may be hoisted up and taken to task for that but I think it’s fine, sorry). It’s pretty good and well spotted in terms of, for instance, where some sung lyrics might suddenly invade the mix at certain highlights to support and possibly elevate the spirit of revolution which infuses the tale. They could certainly even be accused of Mickey Mousing* it in a few sequences... for good or worse but, again, I think it actually works here.

And, yeah, that’s me done with this recent(ish) Blu Ray presentation of the 2004 UK screening of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. I’d like to think the director would have been okay with this freshly scored version and I think it doesn’t do the film any harm... as long as the kiddies who view it today in their new fangled film studies classes (wish we’d had those in my day) realise that the sonic environment of this version is unlike anything that could be heard contemporary to the film’s original release. I think it’s important that people know that before going in. And, if you are aware of that and haven’t seen this version... maybe pick up a copy. It’s still a pretty great movie.

*The once very popular but unfashionable for a while practice of a composer matching notes to catch on screen action in a film... yeah, they mostly all still do it and I don’t think it’s a particular bone of contention anymore, it’s nice to say. 

The Grandmaster (Yi Dai Zong Shi)

The Hand Faster

The Grandmaster (Yi Dai Zong Shi)
2013  Hong Kong/China
Directed by Wong Kar Wai 
UK cinema release print.

So here we have Wong Kar Wai’s new film, The Grandmaster, finally on a UK cinema release but in a heavily (by all reports) truncated version. Perhaps the reason the narrative kinda jumps around a little is because of the various cuts made to it... a film which the director apparently spent a year editing to get it how he wanted it in the first place.

The film tells the story of Ip Man, the Kung Fu Master responsible for popularising the Wing Chun style of fighting and also, of course, known as the man who originally trained the fighting and acting legend we know over here as Bruce Lee. So he’s a pretty important character and Wong Kar Wai obviously wanted to do the person justice... the film has been in various stages of production over the years, to the point that since this project was started, a few other Ip Man movies have already beaten this one out to release by a large chunk of time.

Now I’m already a little familiar with this director’s work on films such as ChungKing Express, 2046 (the sequel to his own I’m In The Mood For Love) and My Blueberry Nights (which I’m actually planning on rewatching and reviewing for the blog sometime next year) and so I was expecting to be watching a movie with absolutely mind blowing cinematography and a heavily saturated colour palette. Well, my expectations were half right... the camera work is really superb in that the slow progress of the camera through the compositions ensures that you get time to appreciate a lot of the beautifully balanced frames the director has concocted for this one. This time around, however, the colours seemed to be quite muted throughout a lot of it... but it really doesn’t matter as the shot design makes it very easy on the eye, in spite of this.

The title character is played by Tony Leung, who is a regular in a number of Wai’s movies and he plays the role here very confidently. However, just like a lot of made up heroic characters do, you really need a few more cracks in the whole “invincible hero” personae to make your characters interesting and, as this is based on real life, it looks like Ip Man didn’t really have any ostentations chinks in his armour so, consequently, the character does seem a tad dull at times.

This isn’t completely helped by the director’s very sedate approach to the mise en scene, it has to be said. Although you do have time to take in the beauty of the sets and landscapes, there are huge amounts of this film where nothing much happens. Now in some ways that’s a good thing because it throws the fastly edited (and sometimes slowed down) fight scenes into sharp relief and makes them more dramatic in contrast... but at the same time I found it to be maybe just a little bit lazy in terms of the scripting. I don’t know why, I usually love this kind of stuff, but the film certainly has a slowed down, almost voyeuristic quality in the way people and scenes are viewed, almost from a distance, without saying much. Normally a quality I embrace a lot more wholeheartedly.

It’s funny, it’s not like it’s a dialogue free movie, far from it. There’s a lot of talk all over it... but in between the talking and the action, the director likes to step back so you can, perhaps, ponder and consider things in your own time and, though I usually am very happy with that style of movie making, something felt a little odd and out of sorts with this one. I didn’t feel like I was getting a complete movie... partially, I guesss, due to the truncated version of the film playing over here and perhaps also because... I’m not sure the amount of material they could have filmed about this guy was interesting enough, maybe? That being said, however, they do start the movie when the central character is already 40 years old. The first four decades of Ip’s life are explained away as a "well off" man living off his family’s wealth and indulging himself in studies of kung fu. It seems very glossed over and I wonder how much of the excised footage included more of the back story for a few of the main protagonists in this one.

Another reason the film has a very voyeuristic feel, a least for me, is that the director treats his extras in a similar way to how Sergei Eisenstein used to do it in the era of Soviet Propaganda films like Battleship Potemkin, October and Strike. That is to say, Eisenstein would pick out a few of the background characters and then (often reshooting them slightly out of the scene in question) highlight them and their reaction to whatever is going on in a particular sequence at a closer distance. This way, the audience feels they are watching events unfold in front of them with a common point of reference as to the effect the main characters and events are having on everyone. Wong Kar Wai does a similar thing here, either by cutting to various bystanders in a crowded bar, for example, or moving the camera so that a “non-character” will suddenly be filling or dominating a composition. We see the smoke rising from a lady's cigarette and the expression on her face as she contemplates the rest of the scene, for instance. There seems to be a lot of that going on which helped create the sense of a silent and laid back space for the actors and stories to breathe in... which is a bit of a trade off in terms of detail versus, as I said earlier, a sense of dullness pervading certain of the scenes.

That being said, you aren’t going to be too bored for long because the shot design is exquisite and a lot of it will hold your interest throughout. The fight scenes alone are well worth the price of admission on this one and the choreographer, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame, and director take care to use natural elements and work with them, making the fights more interesting... such as shooting them in the pouring rain or during snowfall where the ground is a bit more beautiful and treacherous. However, the film doesn’t follow a formula of, "the further you go the bigger the fight", as it would do in a Western, formulaic brawl movie... in fact, the climactic fight scene in the film certainly isn’t trumpeted as such and doesn’t even feature the main protagonist the movie is about... Tony Leung is not even present during this sequence. Instead, it’s only after the film has finished during the last quarter of an hour or so, that you realise you were just watching the last big fight sequence of the movie.

The other thing I felt this film lacked to a certain degree was emotion. There is a beautiful fight scene between Tony Leung and Ziyi Zhang (of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House Of Flying Daggers etc), playing his “almost love interest” Gong Er but, when the pay off to these sequences comes at the end of the movie, the emotional impact that they should have seemed maybe a little muted to me. It didn’t help, of course, that by that point in the movie the director elected to have music from Ennio Morricone’s score for Once Upon A Time In America playing through the scenes, so I was immediately popped out of the narrative while I was trying to identify the music. Even so, I suspect the toned down emotion of these final sequences maybe comes from a lack of the two characters full investment in each other, for reasons which are not made clear or glossed over in the narrative. Ip Man’s wife, not present for much of the narrative, presumably survived the war (unlike his daughters) and one wonders why he doesn’t try to get back to her at some point... love usually finds a way.

So, yeah, this is not the Wong Kar Wai I’ve known and loved over the years but, with all that being said, you’d be absolutely silly not to invest some time in this one because, frankly, even if he’s not dialled up to eleven here (which is, of course, only my opinion), he’s still delivered a beautifully haunting and, somewhat, melancholic cinematic poem in which many film lovers will find a lot to marvel at. Definitely something you should see before it leaves the cinema... unless, of course, you’re saving yourself for a good transfer of the full cut. The Grandmaster could well be a contender for part of my top 20 films this year and I’ll definitely be seeking out an alternate print of this one sometime soon.

Compliance

Stripping Yarns

Compliance
USA 2012
Directed by Craig Zobel
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: This review reveals things right from the outset that some people are going to feel are big spoilers.

Compliance is a film I might not have seen had it not been for the fantastic young lady who picked it out as our cinema viewing this week. As it turns out, I was pretty happy with the choice and the style of film-making on display but it’s certainly not going to be everyone’s cup of tea... including, as it happens, my multiplex companion who chose it from the array of movies on Cineworld’s website.

It's a movie which pulls you into a situation using a clever array of shot types and edits which are skillfully used to set up mini chapters and highlight certain moments for the viewer. It pretty much has no story and almost everything that happens in the film is either present or implied in the trailer. The film is all set during one night in a “Chickwich” fast food “restaurant” and tells of a group of people who are prank called and become complicit through that very long phone call, to the will of somebody pretending to be a police officer and who gets some of the employees in the restaurant to strip-search a young girl and enforce humiliating and provocative sexual acts on her before it is realised, after what must be many hours, that they have become accessories to a sexual crime.

The film is based on true events and it’s all geared up to get you to ask questions about how far these people go, why do they fall in line with an authority figure rather then start to question, a hell of a lot earlier, the things they are being told to do... and where is it that the point comes between being a victim and being an antagonist.

The male character who is called in to the restaurant to spank and then receive a highly charged sexual act from the true, young, female victim of this crime is a problem issue. He comes off in the general public’s mind, in the movie, as kind of a rapist... but the pressure he is under to assist in something which he ultimately knows must be wrong, and the fact that he has already been drinking away some of the night and is ever so slightly impaired in his thinking because of this, muddies the issue somewhat and also gives you a sense of him being as much of a victim as some of the other people in this drama.

Again, it’s all about being aware of the gravity of events and actions and being able to determine, for yourself as an individual, where such lines are crossed. And the thing about that is... everybody is different. Everybody is adhering to their own variation and spin offs an objective value system which, frankly, is never ever going to be perceived at anything other than a subjective level, and this plays into the rationale behind the events depicted in the film and certainly gives you something to talk about after the lights go up.

The performances, as you would expect with this kind of movie, are absolutely flawless and brilliant. It’s the kind of ensemble piece that independently produced US films do so well and the acting talent is helped considerably by the way the movie is shot, edited and lit. This is a piece which is designed to make you feel uncomfortable and, from what I could see of the audience and their nervous laughter in some scenes, this seems to have worked well... I think my own problem with this is I am so jaded and aware of the tricks the director is going to use to produce this kind of effect, after years of movies, that it becomes a little blunted on me to a certain extent.

Starting off with some shortish, completely static shots edited together to build up a series of establishing shots (rather than go for the obvious, long master shot to open chapters), this builds up a certain tension within the audience because the viewer is conditioned to experience release on those kinds of long shots and this film deliberately doesn’t have very many of them. It’s intense and claustrophobic and this isn’t just because the action takes place in just a couple of rooms for the most part. It’s because the director slyly shies away from allowing much of a release from the medium and close up shots throughout the course of the movie. In fact, from the moment I first saw those opening, static shots cut together, I thought of Sergei Eisenstein and his theory of the way you edit films, from his stance back in the early part of the 20th Century at the dawn of cinema, and they are kinda put together like something you might see in one of his early, Soviet propaganda works in some ways. Also, these shot sequences are very much like the quick-edit transition sequences of the early works of Darren Aronofsky... although a fair bit slower, actually, and without the heavy sound/musical punctuation.

The shots in between these little set ups are a lot longer and rely a lot on hand held, slightly moving camera to create a sense of cinema-verite which is another neat trick because, when the film gets to a place where the director really wants to highlight a point... he’ll either stop the camera dead which goes directly into the subconscious as a cinematic punctuation mark, or zoom or cut to a tighter version of that shot to lend an emphasis to it (a technique which has almost been done to death in various well-shot US science-fiction TV shows over the last ten years).

There’s also an interesting choice of shots along the way which, despite the implied documentary leanings of the “camera as recorder” set up, show an underlying sense of artistic expression which all makes for a fairly effective cocktail of styles. The enforced fellatio scene, for example, is technically off shot and implied by the tell tale signs of stress implicit in performing such acts in a non-consensual environment... and as a result, the audience naturally fill in the blanks with their own imagination and it becomes a little more raw and shocking than it would have been if the director had just recorded the graphic act on film.

There’s also a surprising sense of humour present in occasional scenes which are less implicit, but still there... such as one of the waitresses paraphrasing an obvious line of dialogue from Kevin Smith’s Clerks which made me stifle a giggle (stifle because it seemed to somehow bypass the rest of the audience, who presumably didn’t pick up on it). Although this slight underlying humour, which to be fair is very minimal, does nothing to detract from the fact that there are very few truly sympathetic characters in the mix... everybody seems to be carrying around a little piece of damage which  makes for less of a connection with many of the characters involved.

The sound design and use of music is also quite intense and ultimately brilliant. The score is very quiet and subtle in most sequences. Bearing in mind the “camera-eye” style of filming, I was surprised the director chose to have any music in there at all, but it’s actually very effective and for the most part lurks within the subconscious before being allowed to overpower the soundtrack in some key moments. It perfectly matches the visuals and the rest of the foley and makes for an enthralling combination.

So yeah, I guess my verdict is in on this one. Compliance is a somewhat challenging but extremely well made piece of cinema, which perhaps doesn’t get as raw or confrontational as it could, but delivers a highly competent and classic cinematic approach to subject manner which many would not find to their taste. If you’re a fan of the motion picture as art, you will probably appreciate the level of craftsmanship in this film... although it’s not the most entertaining piece of drama out there. Cineastes will certainly enjoy the taste and restraint shown in this one while people who are not used to this kind of approach to a subject may find themselves less than enamoured of it.

One thing I do know for sure... while I was okay with the movie in general... it’s certainly not the best “date movie”.