H R Giger - The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961 - 1976

Giger Counter

H R Giger - The Oeuvre 
Before Alien 1961 - 1976
Scheidegger & Spiess
ISBN 9783039421367

Just a quick shout out to a really lovely (and inspirational, to boot) book which a very special friend sent from her home town of Chur, in Switzerland. The subject of the book is my favourite artist and it’s called H. R. Giger - The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961 - 1976, being a reprinting of what was originally a catalogue to accompany a 2007 exhibition, H R Giger, Das Schaffen vor Alien 1961 - 1976 at the Bünder Kunstmuseum in the small town where he grew up, which also happens to be Chur, although my understanding is he later moved to Zurich. 

The book has a lot of interesting early works, including a fair few I’d not seen before so, that was a nice thing. It also includes a foreword by Beat Stutzer and a separate essay by him called Between Stool and Bench: Aspects of Giger’s Reception. This looks at the relevance of Giger’s output appearing alongside artists contemporary to this early period of his work. A conclusion to this section seems to be that, like many artists, he’s said to be drawing from all the fears in the face of the cold war, the threat by nuclear destruction and the risk that human labour would be undermined by robots.

This section is then followed by a prologue featuring the work of older artists which are supposed to have been an influence on Dali, such as Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare and Max Klinger’s Isle Of The Dead. 

After this there are four more essays by a variety of writers, with each section split by a relevant selection of Giger’s work, relating to the upcoming sequence of writing. 

So Liberation Through Horror: Giger and the Fantastic in Art by Carlos Arenas, starts off as it means to go on by printing a quote from H. P. Lovecraft. It looks at what is considered fantasy art, talks about how he drew inspiration as a child from the works of both Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe (don’t we all?) and also lifts the lid a little on how Giger is also discussed in realms far beyond the usual scope of the visual arts... such as philosophy, social sciences, politics and discussions around the manifestation of the cyborg. 

Then we have The Beauty and Surrealism of H R Giger by Fritz Billeter, in which I found out that the pistol used in those sinister, baby bulleted birth machine paintings is actually a P38 Walther (turns out Giger was an avid collector of fire arms). Then we have another piece by Beat Stutzer called On Tachism, Bathtubs and Garbage Crushers; or, Observations and Remarks on Giger’s Pictorial Strategies which, aside from some of the influences made clearer, I have to confess was couched in language which was a little harder for me to understand on its own level, perhaps. Although, as always, that minor hurdle didn’t stop me from reading it. 

The book finishes with Portrait Of An Immortal Love: The Painting Li II by Kathleen Bühler, which is worth the price of the book alone (you know, if I’d actually bought it myself, thanks again Katrin) which talks about his history with his long term girlfriend of the time, aspiring actress Li Tobler. The paintings he used her in, which depict her decapitated head hooked up to his signature biomechanical shenanigans, were completed not long before she killed herself with a revolver and Bühler reflects on his relationship to her through his repeated use of her image and inspiration in his art, both then and later. It’s also noted he went on to marry someone who looked very much like Tobler too, before making a point of looking at the relationship between female death and beauty in art and... I think there’s some further reading opportunities I need to have a look out for in regard to this last subject. 

Overall, then, a pretty fantastic book and, even this jaded old book burrower was inspired once more by the works inside and, in most (but not all) cases, inspired by the more truthful ringing batches of analysis served up in this quite splendid tome. So, yeah, if you are a fan of the legendary Giger and his work then, H R Giger - The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961 - 1976, is definitely one to grab hold of. 

Bliss (2019)

Night Of The
Living Pez

Bliss
USA 2019
Directed by Joe Begos
Eureka Entertainment

Warning: Spoilers here be... you were warned.

I missed Bliss a couple of years ago when... I think it played FrightFest over here in the UK? I think it was a case of really not liking the poster design (I still don’t) and having other movies on my priority list that year. The only reason I came back to this is because the writer/director, Joe Begos, made another movie I saw recently called The Mind’s Eye (reviewed here) which was... well it was kind of an unofficial sequel to Cronenberg’s Scanners, to my mind. The stand out of that movie for me was the score by Steve Moore, which sounded a lot like early to mid phase John Carpenter by the finish of it. Anyway, astonishingly, I managed to find a soundtrack CD to that movie (which is great, by the way) and when I was looking at the website of the company that put the CD out, Relapse Records, I came across a couple of other CD scores by the same guy including this one, Bliss, which was for the same director. So there we are... I wasn’t expecting too much but I gave it a go and... wow.

I really wasn’t expecting to be as impressed by this movie as I was (so much so that I’m going to order a Blu Ray copy of it real soon... and the CD, of course). A certain amount of that is down to the director and crew. I don’t know who Begos is but it’s like, since The Mind’s Eye, his confidence and boldness with what he is trying out with the camera and editing has matured and grown to the point where he really delivers something which demands your attention. The crucial part of this movie for me though, was the absolutely brilliant, tour-de-force performance by an actress I’ve never heard of called Dora Madison, who plays the films central protagonist Dezzy.

Okay...the plot is extremely simple. Dezzy is an artist, working on a big piece on canvass for an exhibition but has been ‘blocked’ for months. She can’t seem to get the painting done and it’s got to the point where she has no rent money and is dumped by her agent. So she goes to one of her drug dealing friends, played by Graham Skipper from The Mind’s Eye and gets something called Diabolo, which is the drug ‘Bliss’, referred to in the title. The effect is marked and immediate and Dezzy is out of it until she wakes up at a party and then has a threesome with two friends... Courtney (Tru Collins) and Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield). Because she’s riding the effects of the drugs and booze she doesn’t notice when, during the sex session, Courtney delivers a vampire bite to her neck and sucks her blood and then gives her some in return. The effect on her painting, however, is beneficial and the rest of the film is about her getting paranoid, getting drugs, finally realising she’s a vampire and then killing people to drink their blood (in some fairly graphic ways) so she can finish the painting... because she will stop at nothing to complete the painting and, that’s kind of my way into the character because I can kinda sympathise with that. Anyhow, that’s the film in a nutshell, if plot is your kind of thing but it's the performance and direction which really make this one of the true vampire masterpieces of our time.

Now, most people who know me know that the quality of the performance in a film rarely comes up but, this one’s hard to ignore as Madison gives her all to the role and really lets go of herself to deliver one of the grittier and gutsier acting jobs I’ve seen in a movie for a long time. And it works in spite of the character she’s playing. I mean, honestly, she’s a hard person to like. She’s bratty, antagonistic, generally unsympathetic and, normally, this would be more than enough to turn me off a movie but, somehow, the actress finds a little of the light of the character to keep me interested in this one (even though she wears a Death Waltz t-shirt and, honestly, vinyl is not my thing... give me a CD any day of the week). I think, for me, the absolute obsession of her to finish the art at the cost of everything and everyone in her life is the glimmer of empathy I needed to get me into the character. I used to love doing ‘fine art’ before I became a graphic designer and the obsessive ‘art trumps people’ kind of attitude you kinda need as part of your psyche to pull this stuff off was something I’d forgotten about but was happy to be reminded of.

And a lot of the scenes in this are wordless, as she gets naked in front of her canvass (both physically and spiritually) and just tears into it with paint and, yeah, sometimes blood. It’s astonishing stuff and the way the camera works in this, totally focused on her character the whole time, really pays off. Such as when the camera is doing 360 degree turns in a bar with a swirl of noise and music before we are suddenly jarred out of it with an overhead shot of her naked on the floor, back in her studio.

Indeed, the way her performance is captured is inevitably a big contributing factor towards the success of the movie too. There’s a party scene where various conversations are chopped up and cross cut to give a real naturalistic feel of people dipping in and out of conversations, fuelled by booze and drugs. My favourite thing, though, is there seems to be almost an absence of establishing shots for most of the film. So instead of going to the next scene, we’ll suddenly be surprised by already being in a different location in the next scene without any preliminary visuals to give us a location fix and this works really well as an on screen indicator of the level of paranoia and the drug/blood heightened sense of dislocation of the character. There are even a few of those shots where the camera is connected directly onto the actor so the front or back of her is static in the middle of everything else she’s moving around... it’s not done often these days but it’s a trick that never really gets old, it seems to me. It’s great stuff and, all the while, Steve Moore’s very different but still kick ass score punctuates the splintering visuals with something which lifts them even higher.

Also, in addition to all this (as if this wasn’t enough), there are some great new takes on the old school vampire legacy. Such as, when a vampire is staked in this... instead of crumbling to dust they just kind of melt away like ice cream (which I suspect is possibly how the practical special effect of this was achieved). Ditto, when a vampire is exposed to sunlight, it’s not a disintegration, it’s a full on blood splashed explosion of flesh. And some of the kills are really memorable too... in addition to seeing George Wendt (Norm from Cheers) come up very close and personal with Dezzy’s new vampiric blood lust... there’s also a scene where she literally pops a guy’s head back like he was a Pez dispenser, leaving the head attached by a hinge of flesh while she dives into the bloody stump of the neck for her next, urgent fix. It’s a memorable moment for sure.

And, yeah, that’s me done with Bliss (until I watch it again which, well, which will be when the Blu Ray arrives and I take an evening off from writing). This feels like one of the best vampire movies in the last ten years and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who has an affinity to films that portray obsession, horror, vampirism or, like this one, the thrilling intersection of all three. If you like that kind of stuff... go seek this one out now, it’s truly phenomenal.

Requiem For A Vampire

Unturned We Stand

Requiem For A Vampire
aka Requiem Pour Un Vampire
aka Caged Virgins
France 1972
Directed by Jean Rollin  
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Vampiric spoilers being
whipped up in the dungeons of this review.

Requiem For A Vampire is the fourth of Jean Rollin’s personal feature length films (aka non-porno and mostly vampire themed) following on from The Rape Of The Vampire (reviewed here), The Nude Vampire (reviewed here) and Shiver Of The Vampires (reviewed here). Although it’s not my favourite of his movies, it’s probably the one with my favourite opening sequence because it’s like a bizarre, non-sequitur of a back story fill in and, I appreciate the strange juxtaposition of elements presented in this imagery. It’s also one of his more problematic films for the British Board Of Film Censors as it’s always cut to ribbons over here by at least six minutes, due to the sexual violence and dungeon molestation scenes so... yeah... if you’ve not seen this and want to watch it, make sure you definitely ‘don’t buy British’ in this case. Get a nice American or French version.

Okay... so that opening sequence. Shots are being fired as two cars speed down a country lane, one in pursuit of the other. The front car is being driven by a guy with two female companions who are dressed and made up as clowns. One of the two women... and of course it’s two women because two female companions is one of Rollin’s main obsessions in his movies... is firing out the back of the car window. They manage to give their aggressive pursuers the slip by turning down a back lane but it’s too late for the driver... he has taken too many bullets. So the girls drive the car to the middle of a field, cover it and the driver in gasoline and catch it alight. Once again, Rollin gives us a strong, slightly surreal, visual image of a car burning in a field. We cut to the opening credits which picture the girls walking through the countryside as Pierre Raph’s passable score kicks in.

Various small things happen which take up the first half an hour. The two girls, Marie (played by Marie-Pierre Castel, from Shiver Of The Vampires) and Michelle (played by Mireille Dargent, who would appear in a few of the director’s next films), find a barn and change out of their clown attire and make up. They then find a motorcycle in a tower which, I think, the driver pointed them to prior to his death (if I am joining the dots correctly), before using sexual allure to distract a hot dog stand vendor so they can steal his money but then, one of them gets accidentally buried alive by an inattentive grave digger (don’t ask). However, she is rescued before the two stumble onto a river, with some blood dripping in it and come face to face with some bats in a forest which compel them to find their way to a castle. The rest of the movie is pretty simple too and here’s a quick summary...

In the castle they find a vampire cult lead by the half vampire Erica (played by Dominique, the pointy breast stabbing woman from Shiver Of The Vampires) and Louise (played by Louise Dhour). They also have some barbaric male companions who do lots of raping and molestation of both Marie and Michelle, plus a load of chained, naked girls in the dungeon, in scenes which do go on a bit, it has to be said. These vampire guys also all manage to sound like Robert Newton playing Long John Silver as they make piratey ‘Arrrr’ noises as their only form of communication, it seems to me. Then there’s the one they all worship, the old vampire (played by Michel Delesalle) who has bitten them all... they are supposedly all turning into vampires and Erica even has fangs now.  

Then there’s lots of shenanigans where the two girls find that they can’t escape the grounds of the castle and the nearby cemetery (which looks familiar, it may be the one from The Iron Rose, reviewed here) as they always end back up at the castle. Their new job now is to entice nearby, local men into the castle for food. The double pigtailed Michelle takes her chores seriously... well, I say seriously. She finds a local, takes her clothes off and then the two of them chase each other laughing through the castle during many extended scenes as silly, comedy music plays. These scenes are nice to look at but, alas, they genuinely give a Carry On feel to the whole sequence, which is at odds with the rest of the movie.

These scenes are crosscut to Marie having sex with a guy but she hides him from the vampire cult. This gets her in trouble but the old vampire, in a candid moment with Marie, tells her that the others won’t properly turn into vampires and he really is the last of his breed. This makes no sense in some ways because, in the protracted dungeon rape scene, one of the barbaric males turns into a bat and hangs from a woman’s hair covered vulva in a nicely surreal, typical piece of Rollin image making. So, yeah, never sacrifice a good image for the details of the plot is probably the order of the day here (much like Argento, who admits to having the same disregard of the plot mechanics when it comes to being faced with a striking visual). But then, Michelle chains naked Marie up in a tower and whips her, in order to find out where her lover is. Marie won’t tell but Michelle then escapes with her because Erica was going to stab her eye out. Then the head vampire sacrifices his and Erica’s life by being sealed in a guarded tomb by his followers and the camera ‘irises in’ as the screen shrinks to a circle surrounded by orange.

So yeah, the story is simple and a lot of the acting is... questionable. But it’s Rollin so you come to expect that. As it’s Rollin, though, you also get a film filled with memorable and haunting images and a lot of beautifully composed frames. Once again, the director's use of colour is astonishing and, like in Shiver Of The Vampires, he sometimes pitches different colours like reds and blues together, colour coding different depths of the set to separate foreground and background in contrasting hues.

He’s also not shy of occasionally shocking the viewer with the juxtaposition of colours between transitions. For example, the shot of the vampire bat drinking the blood direct from a chained woman’s genitalia is all lit in red and held in the shot for a while. Then we get an edit to the old vampire in his coffin and... it’s a all lit in a bright, fluorescent green reminiscent of the greens that Mario Bava used to use in similar ways in his movies. It’s a shock to the senses, in the best way and looks fantastic, of course (well, Rollin’s cinema always looks fantastic).

Another thing he does a lot of here is take shots looking at different levels to add depth. So he’ll have an opening in a part of the screen with people framed in that opening to highlight the contrasting depths. Or he’ll take a shot from up on the ramparts looking down at several different landscape levels with the action going on in the bottom level. And, conversely, he’ll do a shot looking up from the bottom of a tower at a naked lady at the top, for instance. I notice he really makes use of the height and horizontal lengths of various locations here, probably more than he did in the previous film because this castle lends itself to that kind of frame design.

Also, in this film, some of the night scenes give a completely pitch black screen where nothing can be seen except the shapes or areas he chooses to highlight with his coloured lighting. So, for example, a tomb in the grave yard taking up about an eighth of the screen near the middle of a shot is the only thing the eye has to latch on to... and he does this several times throughout the movie with different objects such as grave yard markers or crypt entrances. The final shot of the movie where the camera becomes just a circle on the screen surrounded by orange further enhances the shot where that kind of dark and light visibility was already going on in the frame... which is a nice moment, even though it’s the end.

The film, like a few of Rollin’s movies, doesn’t end well for the vampires but, at least in this one, the two main female leads survive and escape their vampiric fate which, well, I don’t remember Rollin’s films always ending this optimistically... although, if your sympathies are for the vampire and his hopeful cult, then I guess it possibly doesn’t. Like all of Rollin’s films, Requiem For A Vampire is, if nothing else, an absolutely beautiful, rich visual compendium of surreal and sexy, gothic hued imagery which, frankly, should be of interest to any cinephile worth their salt. Not one of my favourites but still a key work and certainly brilliant enough that I could watch it fairly regularly (I must have seen this one at least five times by now). And, to date (although there’s a beautiful Encore DVD set of this film which is also worth having, for just the packaging alone if nothing else), the US Redemption Blu Ray version is the best transfer available... so maybe give that one a go if you have a multizone machine.

The Giallo Canvas

Laughing Windows,
Broken Blinds

The Giallo Canvas -
Art, Excess and Horror Cinema
by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
McFarland Press
ISBN: 9781476675398

Just a quick shout out to what I believe is one of the more entertaining, refreshing and illuminating books about various gialli in contemporary writing on the genre, The Giallo Canvas - Art, Excess and Horror Cinema by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Now I’ve found myself, at first accidentally, following the career of the writer over the last few years via expert inclusion on Blu Ray releases and essays in various venues such as accompanying leaflets and books. There’s even a brilliant episode of the podcast All The Colours Of The Dark which features her as the guest of honour, which is really worth a listen to (as are all the other episodes and anything hosted by Dr. Rebekah McKendry and Elric Kane). I’d not actually read an entire book by her before so I’m happy to start with one that is not only about one of my all time favourite genres of cinematic spectacle but also, in this case, approaching from a different and somewhat unique route... that of the overlap and relationship between various forms of art (mostly painting but not only limited to that) and themes and ideas that permeate a multitude of gialli.

Now, regular readers may be expecting a tirade of negativity from me in that the title itself (and some of the comments in the book) makes evident a perception that giallo is, perhaps, a sub-genre of horror cinema and, those same regular readers (I know you’re out there) will know that I don’t believe gialli are in any way an overlap of horror cinema (and neither are slasher movies for that matter)... if anything, they may be considered a sub-genre of crime films, if the point really needed to be pushed. However, I’m not going to labour that point here, specifically because Heller-Nicholas doesn’t ram that connection (or lack of) down your throat as some writers in the genre have and, mostly, because she’s easily written one of the most intelligent books on the subject going so... yeah, opinions on genre should be thrown to the side as this book is certainly one which is worthy of celebration.

Okay, so she had me right from the start with this one, literally from the first words of her introduction to the concepts she will go on to explore (in a much less formal and stuffy way than many academics go about leading a path to their imminent conclusion), by quoting an article by Virginia Woolf, writing about the first run release of The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. The way that distinguished writer’s view of recognising high art and the questioning which comes as a reaction to it, seems pretty similar to Heller-Nicholas’ own discoveries of giallo and alternative cinema via Australia’s Special Broadcasting System (SBS) and numerous visits to video rental shops in her youth.

The book is set up in various sections including ‘Clues, Presence and Painting’, ‘Painters’ and ‘Other Art Forms’ and each one of these is split into chapters which explore either a specific painter (such as Vermeer), other mediums such as sculpture, music, writing, theatre/film performance and, also, movies in which characters in the stories are themselves an artist in one medium or another... and the way each of these subjects informs and illuminates the story and ideas presented in various gialli, usually taking one or two examples in each chapter as the main focus. So one chapter might mostly focus on Vermeer as seen in The Forbidden Room and The Psychic (aka Seven Notes In Noir) while another may highlight the use of Francis Bacon’s paintings in Lizard In A Woman’s Skin.

And it’s a really great book illuminating, for example, the highlighting of the visual reference created to mimic art as a metatextual element pulling the spectator out of the event... just as Godard used to try and do to his audience all the time (I guess I should also, myself, reference Brechtian theatre here as an example of this) or the way clues are missed in various films due to the main character’s failure to correctly interpret the clues in a specific piece of art (think of the painting in Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and, of course, the tell tale mirror reflection of a painting of faces at the start of Argento’s Deep Red). There’s also some nice work done here with some really thorough interpretations of the various paintings seen (and sometimes fallen into) in The Stendhal Syndrome and similar interesting deductions and inclusions found in such gialli as The House With Laughing Windows and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. And she also looks at the links between giallo and fashion, highlighting Bava’s Blood And Black Lace as kickstarting this juxtaposition, along with the humourous observation that crimes against the victims in films such as these are also violent attacks on the ‘high price tag’ clothing they wear. I’m also glad that she takes the time to briefly name check some other good writers in the field, including the brilliant Rachael Nisbet.

I’m not going to give away too many of the fascinating pleasures which make up the minor masterpiece that is The Giallo Canvas - Art, Excess And Horror Cinema but I would certainly say that, if you are into giallo and exploitation cinema and are looking to read something different to the usual meanderings in this field, then this one is really worth a purchase. And, it also educated me in one very important point that may have escaped my attention completely if I hadn’t picked up this tome... that the mannequin on the old posters for Spasmo bears a striking resemblance to Tori Amos. Not to mention Heller-Nicholas’ conclusion section, which takes time to mull over the much overused critical phrase ‘style over substance’ and its use as a negative in relation to the genre when, in some ways, it could also be seen as a much more positive engagement with the subject. Yep, there’s some real next level observations in this book. Give it a go.

1900th Post - The Traveller

For my 1900th post I thought I’d try my hand at a very short piece of fiction. Hope you like...

I was nine years old when I first met the traveller.

It was around the end of August 1962. He spotted me in the street and we got to talking. He had one of those faces which always seem familiar and I kinda trusted him from the start. Good move by me, for sure.

He bought me a coffee in a local cafe and started to tell me about his talent for prediction. He must have been in his fifties and we hit it off straight away. At the end of what, even for me, was a most unusual conversation, he looked down at the comic I was reading. It was an issue of Amazing Fantasy and it featured the first tale of a brand new character called Spider-Man. I didn’t expect the comic to last but I kinda liked the story on this one. Anyway, I digress, he looked at the comic and pulled out two £10 notes which, frankly, was more money than I’d ever seen at the time... and told me to buy a few more copies of the comic and to save them for later. To take real good care of them and then he gave me a list of other comics which, he said, his contacts in publishing told him would be coming out in a few years. He told me to buy a few issues of each and to keep hold of them and to never forget. Just keep them safe. Put them in an attic or something but save them until I could sell them for some real cash. And after that it was a few years before I saw him again.

I don’t know why I trusted him then or, well, what made me do it anyway but I did what he said and didn’t think back on it. But then, every few years, I’d run into him in the street in exactly the same place and every time he’d have a hot tip for me. Like who to bet on in an upcoming Grand National or, as I got older, which artist to invest in. And, after a little while, I got used to him being right. I started looking forward to these random encounters and, though I didn’t see him every year, he usually had a good piece of financial advice with him. I managed to get the fees to pay for college to study the sciences, all off of the money made from buying the things he told me to procure. I mean, it took a while for the comics to suddenly become worth a fortune but, other stuff had a quicker pay off and, after a while, I stopped questioning him about why or how he knew this stuff because I’d figured it out by then, of course.

I mean, I didn’t know who Damien Hurst was but I know investing in his art helped me pay my way for a better house and the money I made meant I was doing my own research for myself. I was my own boss and the things I was interested in were what I got to study every day, in my own laboratory which, due to my mysterious (seemingly ageless) benefactor, I set up not far from where we’d first met.

And when those comics paid off in the late 70s and early 80s... which amazed even me (nowadays everyone knows who Spider-Man, The Hulk and The Avengers etc are)... I was able to use the money I’d invested in them to buy shares in a new computer company he told me about called Apple. It took a little while but, honestly, not too long before... well, you know Apple I’m sure?

Of course, by now I had a pretty good idea of who my mysterious benefactor was and, I suspect you do too, right? I mean, my scientific research into things that interested me was going pretty well and though I didn’t outright say much about it, I think he knew I had figured things out by now too... just as he’d figured things out back then, so to speak.

What I hadn’t expected was for the visits to not stop when I’d caught up with him... or we'd caught each other up.

I mean, sure, the visits slowed down a lot... the intervals when the traveller came to me were now sometimes as much as six years apart but, once I’d finished inventing the time machine (my chrono-perambulator, as I called it) which... well let’s still call him 'The Traveller' shall we? When I’d finished my time machine, which 'The Traveller' had told me never to tell anyone about, I expected the end goal had been reached but no, even as I went back to visit my younger self and advise him... um... me... about the comics and the art and everything else, I was still getting visits from myself. So I did what I always did and kept taking my own advice... or rather, his own advice. Gets confusing sometimes. 

 So there I was in 2012. I was 59 years old and, honestly, The Traveller seemed like he was getting slightly younger every time he popped up. Or, at least, the frequency of his trips, from his point of view at least, were obviously getting less spaced apart and I was really catching up with myself, if that’s the right way to say it.

I never once questioned the paradox I was living. I guess a more philosophical man might have stopped to wonder how this cycle got started in the first place but... well, I have no room for philosophy. I am a man of science or I would have never invented my chrono-perambulator in the first place.

But, I’m getting away from myself again... so there I was in 2012 and he tells me to start building a big storage warehouse out of town and to start filling it with canned foods and then, he tells me, start storing water around about mid-2019 and also... you know those little surgical masks you see people wearing in countries where they’re worried about infectious diseases? Get some of those, he says. So, since I know enough to trust myself, I did what he... is ‘he’ the right word? I did what 'I' said.

So now it’s 2020, right? I’m just getting the first reports of the new breed of Coronavirus in China and I figure, this is it, we’re going to have a pandemic this year... just like The Traveller implied...

I was hoping to see him again just to make sure we’d survived this whole Covid 19 thing okay but, I tell you, now I’m self isolating with my stash of water, tinned goods and, yes, loo rolls... well, I really worry when I think about when he last came to see me a few weeks ago. I’d gone back and advised myself to stock up on these things as soon as I had a spare minute, of course.

However, when I last saw him he was looking decidedly dishevelled... a far cry from the impeccably dressed, older version of myself I had been used to seeing over the years. I even think I noticed a rip on his sleeve but I didn’t say anything about that... nor about the bruise on the left side of his head, either. He said he couldn’t have more than a few minutes stay this time because he had to get back to... well wherever... make that whenever... he came from but he just wanted me to know that, 2020 was just the start of our problems and, stupid as it may sound, I should try my best to gather some of the things on the list he handed me as soon as possible. He knew I was good for the money, he'd... okay, we’d... been investing in profitable items for almost sixty years but he warned me I needed to keep an open mind about how things were going to go.

He then went his merry way but... I don’t know... I’m not so certain I’ll be seeing him again. He bounced back to his own time quicker than usual (the shorter the length of the journey the shorter the duration of the visit before the physics of the situation mean that it’s a good idea to bounce back to your point of departure or... untested things might happen to you... don’t ask me to explain the technical stuff unless you can keep up).

Anyway, I hope I see him again someday but, in the meantime, I have the latest shopping list to get to. The machine guns and ammunition shouldn’t be a problem. But the amount of timber and the necessity for crossbows might take a little longer. Goodness knows how I’m going to be able to get all that Holy Water from the church though... I wouldn’t even believe in such a thing if it wasn’t on this list. I wonder what happens to make me become all religious in the future? Only time will tell, I guess. Like I said, I hope I see that traveller again soon... there are some pointed questions I’m just going to have to ask him.

The End

Welcome To Marwencol

A Figure Perspective

Welcome To Marwencol
by Mark Hogancamp & Chris Shellen
Princeton Architectural Press ISBN: 9781616894153

Welcome To Marwencol is a beautiful book that I was given by somebody special in my life for Christmas. It’s a gorgeous tome telling the story of artist Mark Hogancamp and highlighting some of his photographic work after he recreated himself in the wake of an almost life ending event. If any of this is ringing any bells then you should take a look at the movie about this guy, where he is played by Steve Carell, called Welcome To Marwen, which I reviewed last year here (and which ranked quite highly in my end of year films list). There’s also a documentary film about him called Marwencol which I will need to catch up to at some point soon.

Like many biopics, the Steve Carrel movie made a fair few minor changes to the truth of the situation and this book, which showcases Hogancamp’s work, seems somehow more up to date (even though it preceded the Hollywood biopic). It’s also a fairly depressing story and it goes something like this.

Ex navy man, illustrator and alcoholic Mark Hogancamp was in a bar one night when he admitted to somebody in there that he was a cross dresser. As he was leaving the bar, the guy he’d been talking to and several of his friends jumped Hogancamp and gave him a seriously life threatening beating which he almost didn’t survive. He was placed in an induced coma for quite some time because the injuries were so awful as his face was peeled back and the doctors gave him a prosthetic eye socket to replace the one which had caved in. When he awoke, he managed to recover enough to be able to speak and move about again but he has no memories of his life before the beating. However, from what he could learn of it, he has tried to improve his outlook on life from what it was... including giving up his reliance on alcohol.

After the accident, he could no longer draw because his hand shook too much and he was initially afraid to venture outside his home for quite a while. But then he started to build the fictional, miniature town of Marwencol, in Belgium, perpetually stuck in a bubble that preserved the time to World War II. He populated this with heavily customised dolls and figures of alter egos of himself and friends and, even the five evil SS Men in the town who cause so much trouble for ‘Hoagy’ are based on his real life attackers. The plots to the adventures he ‘records’ photographically and in incredible detail, sometimes get quite convoluted... with very specific death rituals to truly kill an SS man, to stop them from re-spawning and... a time travelling witch called Deja Thoris (I guess Edgar Rice Burroughs fans will know where she gets her name from). There’s even another dimension with a knight who brings permanent death to the characters and a nazi encampment built around the other side of Hogancamp’s trailer where Hitler lives.

And it’s a wonderful book. The photographic artwork is truly beautiful, capturing a curious blend of gritty realism juxtaposed with a kind of fairytale whimsy. Fairytale whimsy with alcohol, cat fighting, torture and horrendous bullet wounds. These photos are really a labour of love and are dotted throughout the book which explores Hogancamp’s ‘recreation’ as a human being and then looks at his technique (to the point where he eventually embraces the digital camera... he’s a braver man than I).

The book also shows off a little of his early drawing skills and also the plans he knocks up now if he’s adding a new building to his ‘set’. There’s even a photographic plan of the town on a double page spread where most of the buildings are. And the final little extra dash of brilliance, for me, was the fact that Hogencamp’s scaled down alter ego is also busy building an even smaller model town as a hobby in his plastic reality... there’s a wonderful shot of the figure with a box housing two very small figures. It’s great stuff.

The final third of the book houses a photographic comic strip... like those old Fotonovel’s from the 1970s and 80s, telling tall tales of small people and its both charming and, sometimes, possibly a little unsettling too. But it is wonderful stuff and it's the kind of content I could look at for hours on end. I wish they’d do a show of his work here in London, England sometime.

Anyone who’s into the world of model making, miniatures, dolls and action figures would really like Welcome To Marwencol and its a definite recommendation from me (as was the movie). I can only hope that there’s a follow up volume sometime soon and I would love to see some of the comic panels as larger shots, unencumbered by the commentary. For more information on Marwencol and to buy this wonderful book, go to http://marwencol.com and may your stay in the town be as enjoyable as mine was.

The Greenaway Alphabet

A Pip Off The Old Block

The Greenaway Alphabet
Directed by Saskia Boddeke
2017 Netherlands
Raindance Festival Screening 29th September 2018.

Wow... what an utterly charming film.

The Greenaway Alphabet is a documentary, it is said, about the film-maker/artist Peter Greenaway... although I’m sure that it’s designated as such merely for the convenience of cataloguing the type of film it purports to be (something I suspect, with his affinity for lists and categorisation, Peter Greenaway himself would approve of). What it actually is, in fact, is more an exploration of the artist in relation to his 13-16 year old daughter Pip Greenaway (depending on when various parts of the film were presumably shot or... possibly... when Peter remembers the age of his daughter with any degree of accuracy).

Now, I always liked Greenaway in my teenage years and, very specifically, three films he made in relatively quick succession, all of which will eventually get reviewed on this blog (I have the Blu Ray upgrades, just not a large measure of that man-made phenomenon mistakenly known as time), those being A Zed And Two Noughts, The Belly Of An Architect (my favourite) and Drowning By Numbers (which I well remember seeing at the now defunct but always splendid Lumiere cinema  in St. Martin’s Lane, when it was released into the wild back in 1988). I remember the soundtracks CDs to those films were a common musical background whenever I was working on various art and design projects at College.

Later on, the director’s work slowly disappeared from my life as I didn’t have time to keep up with him but those three films in particular were very much a part of me by then. Interviews with other people and first hand accounts from various collaborators made me begin to think of Greenaway as “a bit of a nutter” in later years but, what this ‘documentary’ does is show us that the man/artist is far from the awkward behemoth some of those collaborators made him out to be and is, instead, a quite interesting and warm human being... as is his daughter Pip, who is seen interacting with him and asking all the right questions to allow her father to reveal himself without the barriers perpetually going up. That is to say... all the wrong questions, which is what makes them so right.

The film is shot, with a lot of love evident in every frame, by his wife and mother of Pip, Saskia Boddeke. She is a multimedia artist in her own right and has collaborated with Mr. Greenaway a fair amount too. The documentary is partially shot, it seemed to me, in a way which might have... only at times... been reminiscent of Peter’s moviemaking with things a bit like the multimedia paintbox of delights movie that is Prospero’s Books. And, of course, the greatest result of their collaboration, their wonderful daughter Pip, is evident in most of the film too.

The film starts off by going through the words and concepts associated with Peter Greenaway as explored by him and his daughter as an alphabet, starting at A, going through to B and, a little way in, deviating from the expectations of the order of the piece by going to a later letter before coming back to one which we covered earlier and then missing out a whole bunch of others. It actually reminded me of the infuriating... but fun... red herring style appearances of some of the 1-100 numbers hidden throughout the frames of Drowning By Numbers but the lovely director Saskia was there at the screening (with Pip in the audience to answer the odd question too) and she explained that it was never her intention to shoot every letter but merely to use this as a starting point, so to speak, to the journey of the film. The title was always going to be The Greenaway Alphabet, however, in memory of the this being ‘a thing’ in the Greenaway household when Pip was growing up.

And I have to say that the film completely surprised me. Not only is it warm and engaging (far more emotionally warm than a typical work by her husband, I would say) but it’s also a lively, visual spectacle too, as the director juxtaposes various images and situations against each other to make sometimes startling visual metaphors, utilising drawing over the images and moving split screen segments to enfold the viewer in an experience which feels, by the end of the movie, something much more than the sum of its parts.

The Q & A at the end of the session was quite interesting and informative about the way different countries reacted to the various screenings. For instance, Saskia pointed out that the mostly British audience for this screening was much more staid and serious than in some countries where the quite wonderful humour of the piece elicited much more emotive reactions... but I guess the sourness of our self expression here is what makes a British audience what it is. So the Q & A was certainly illuminating, although there was an awful moment when one person in the audience suggested that the film was coming from a perspective of  white privilege in the arts. Well, when you have a cast, effectively, of two people... there’s not really much you could do about the racial mix, which I think is what that particular audience member was trying to relate, much to the bafflement of the director (and disenchantment of the rest of the audience, most of whom were probably equally perplexed by this odd question, which seemed almost a non-sequitur in the context of the film we had just watched).

And I don’t have much more to say about The Greenaway Alphabet... not anything I could think of as a valuable criticism, in any case, since the film is just perfect the way it is. I honestly hope this film gets the critical attention and monetary awards it so readily deserves. I would love to have this thing on a nice Blu Ray disc and would hope to watch it again if I ever got an opportunity. It’s almost certainly going to be one of this year’s top ten movies in my end of year list and I would urge any fan of Peter Greenaway... or of art and its importance to the warmth of the family unit... to try and hunt down this film and take a look. A short review for a truly wonderful piece of cinema. This is the only film I saw at this year’s Raindance festival but, honestly, I’m so glad I chose this one. I certainly wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I did... truly remarkable.

Mr. Turner

King Arter

Mr. Turner
UK/France/Germany 2014
Directed by Mike Leigh
Entertainment One Blu Ray Zone B

I’ve always been a big admirer of Mike Leigh and will always think of him as one of the more opulent of the great British directors in the history of the medium. That being said, Mr. Turner is a film that I spent quite some time avoiding.

There were two reasons for this... firstly, although I am by profession a graphic designer and had the traditional ‘arty’ schooling that such a vocation demanded back in the days when education and actual knowledge about your subject were less scorned commodities than they are today, I’ve never really been enamoured of paintings with traditional subject matter. So artists like Turner, Constable, Whistler etc were out while people like Dali, Pollock, Warhol and Rothko were in, as far as I was concerned (and my tastes really haven’t veered much since those days, to be honest). So a film about Turner was not really ever going to be my first port of call.

Secondly, one of the things I really like a lot about Leigh’s cinema is the naturalistic acting and situations which he gets from his performers. I believe that a lot of creating of the parts and rehearsal time to build the roles and improvise the dialogue and action are a big part of his films and I just couldn’t see how this seemingly rigid, ‘biographical’ straight-jacket could sit too well with this style of artistic expression (it’s one of the reasons why I’ve also been avoiding Topsy Turvy).

However, I recently found out that, although not a specific admirer of Leigh like myself, my father had a strong desire to see this one and so, after my mother bought this for him for Christmas, I was in the seemingly unenviable position of having to watch it after all and... I have to confess... I liked it as much as my father did (which, for the record, was a lot).

Now I don’t have a great deal to say about this movie, to be sure but, I didn’t want to let myself down on my ‘see a film and then write about it’ promise to myself so... here I am writing about the thing. So be gentle with me if this is not as 'up to scratch' like some of my other reviews may, or may not, be... depending on your taste.

Okay, so lets start with the easiest thing to say in that the performances here are all absolutely marvellous. Especially, of course, when you have the wonderful Timothy Spall in the title role of J.M.W Turner. This performance is especially interesting due to the fact that, for the most part, Turner could apparently be a man of few words and much of where his dialogue might have been is, instead, transformed by Spall into a series of grunts and gestures. The other thing about it is, it would seem from the performance and ‘story arc’ here (if that is the right term to use in this instance), that Turner wasn’t exactly a spectacularly nice man and his relationships with other people were sometimes not the best that they could be.

Another excellent actor in this is Dorothy Atkinson as Turner’s housekeeper (and sometime sexual partner, it would seem, among many) who really does kind of suffer as much as some of the other characters with Turner’s lack of... empathy, shall we say... with those around him. The character is kind of sidelined in the main narrative in terms of her impact on the man but ever present, hovering around the shots and the way she lets things slide and tolerates the whims and neglect of Turner is quite telling, in a way, about the mind of the painter. I believe that in real life she followed Turner into death only a couple of years later.

Now I really don’t know anything about Turner... although, I seem to remember the ‘incident’ depicted in this at the Royal Academy with the red buoy added to the painting and the quote about this act as being like Turner firing a gun shot, did come up in a lecture at college once... so the intentions of the director to deliberately inject Turnerisms visually into the movie are well beyond me to identify. However... coming from a cinematic artist who I would equate with having a fairly loose approach to his work, the shots seem to be much more rigid in their compositions and the frames have a richness of colour and light which I would, perhaps in my ignorance, term painterly. So I suspect the director has done his best to recreate some of the more famous of Turner’s works within the camera to the point that even I could tell that something was going on here. At the very least, I’m sure Leigh has enriched his compositions with the energy of the man’s paintings so, you know, if you’re a fan of Turner’s work then this picture is probably something you should see.

The film is intriguing, though, more for what isn’t said than what is and the actions (or lack of social niceties in some cases) paint an almost incomplete but appetite whetting portrait that arouses the curiosity and allows the audience to imply the arc of the character in his final years (which is the period portrayed here). Indeed, this conclusion of the sly spectacle of the ‘less is more’ approach here may well be because I have gone into the story completely ignorant of any aspect of this man’s life and, perhaps, the impressionistic strokes of Leigh’s artistic palette are meant to stimulate recognition of a story already well familiar to the majority of the audience finding their way to this work. However, as someone completely oblivious of the man’s path through life, I was certainly never bored with the characters on screen. Nor of the beautiful visual designs in which they’re captured so... you know... it’s okay to go to this one knowing nothing about the subject, too.

One scene, or series of scenes in particular, held my interest... when Turner goes to take another wife he gets a photographic portrait of himself taken for her... before bringing her back some time later for a shot of them both. His questions to the photographer and his own obvious technical expertise about lighting and so forth are highlighted, as are the hints of his expectations of the perceived future demise of his profession when photography started to capture realistic facsimiles of the everyday world. These are a nice couple of scenes and, like certain others, prod your brain into thinking about how Turner might have felt and reacted to this new fangled invention... the threat of photography.

And that’s really all I can say about Mr. Turner. As a big admirer of Mike Leigh I have to say that, although this is not on of my favourites of his works (I suspect Naked, Life Is Sweet and Happy Go Lucky may forever be my top three) it certainly is a spectacular and thought provoking film and, if you are a fan of cinema, or of Turner... and absolutely definitely if you are both... then you should probably take a look at this one as soon as possible. Another masterwork, of sorts, by one of the great British writing/directing talents of our time.

Merry Christmas 2017

Merry Christmas to
all of my readers...

It’s been an interesting year and, once again, thanks to everybody who looked at this blog, even if it was only once... it’s always very much appreciated.

I think I’ve proven to myself that there’s absolutely no way I’m going to accurately predict what reviews are coming up in 2018, other than the usual end of year fixtures. Once again, I didn’t even get a fraction of the posts that I wanted to get done up here but, this year in particular, there’s a pretty good reason for this...

I’ll touch on this again in my inevitable End of Year Best Movies listing but I will mention here that, probably the main reason I’ve not got all the films watched and reviewed that I wanted to this year was because my cinema attendance was probably a fair bit greater than usual. Which puzzles me because I’m told that this has been the worst single year for cinema attendance since the 1980s. Well, that may be so but I can confidently say that, as far as I’m concerned, this has been one of the best years for interesting and rich film experiences in cinemas for quite some time. Also, it seems that the Americans have been making some extraordinary product this year too. So, I dunno... maybe when there are really varied and interesting films at cinemas... movies like Wonder Woman, A Ghost Story, Miss Sloane, Brigsby Bear and La La Land... then the kinds of people who do attend cinemas are maybe not necessarily actual fans of fine films. That is to say, maybe they’re there for the buckets of popcorn and an unwavering devotion to the, somewhat stagnant, blockbuster style ‘event movies’ where everything is edited together very abruptly and lots of things explode.

Not that I’m saying these aren't valid expressions of film as art... of course they are (and I love them too)... but maybe the kinds of collective audiences who make up these screenings are so fixated on this kind of, ‘almost exactly the same as any other’ dose of cleverly put together spectacle that they’re missing out on some of the more original and moving product out there. If that’s the case, we are in for a terrible time at the cinemas over the next few years as companies jostle to make an abundance of superhero movies (which are almost the only things which are making any money at the moment) at the cost of everything else. That would be a shame but, on the other hand, if they continue to go down that line then I’m pretty sure the already over saturated market will be delivering some truly worrying box office returns to the companies after a while... and then they’ll start panicking and maybe begin taking a few risks on different styles of cinematic art again... perhaps.

We shall have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, it will be business as usual at the NUTS4R2 blog. Things which I definitely know will be happening are the review of today's Doctor Who Christmas Special within the next day or so... plus the Best Movies of 2017 and, at some point in the next month, the Best Score CDs of 2017. And, of course, my Annual Cryptic Movie Quiz is up and running right here so, if you find yourself at a loose end over the next week, maybe give that a go.

Either way, though, have a very Merry Christmas and I hope this yuletide holiday brings you a brief respite from the strange horrors of the world right now. Have a great time.

The Monuments Men

The Art Of War

The Monuments Men
2014 USA/Germany
Directed by George Clooney
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers which, in no way, 
give away the course of the story.

There’s a scene about three quarters of the way or more through The Monuments Men which best demonstrates one of the things I found a little disappointing with this film overall. One of the lead protagonists has stepped on a landmine and cannot move for fear of blowing up himself and his colleagues. We’ve all seen this scene before in countless war movies, of course, and it’s a cheap but effective trick used by directors for decades to build up suspense, tension and force the audience to empathise with their characters even more... but this time it doesn’t quite work in it’s intent. At least that’s how it felt for me.

Instead of being played fully for tension, the director, as is his right, seems to want to play it for yet another in a series of “war romp” scenes. It’s not a funny situation but it’s played quite lightly and, for me, this really highlights the movie’s one, main flaw. There’s no edge to it and almost no consequence. It’s also dealt with in an unrealistic manner too... I thought the central characters were smarter than this.

Now my reaction to this might just be one of conditioning, to be honest. I’m really not one for watching too many war movies but we have been under fire in recent years from films like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and The Pianist, which show the horrors of war and pull, relatively few, punches in showing the raw misery that conflict will always bring into being. The Monuments Men, on the other hand, seems to be of direct lineage from films such as Kelly’s Heros and The Dirty Dozen in it’s genetic make-up (two films, I hasten to add, that I’ve not yet seen... so if I’m wrong in this judgement, please feel free to take me to task over it in the comments section below) and, naturally, films like The Inglorious Bastards and Tarantino’s own war movie in this vein, Inglourious Basterds (not actually a remake or homage to the former, in fact)... the latter being perhaps the best of this lineage to combine the War Is Hell but also, the bizarre War Is Fun element of a conflict which has been the subject of so many hundreds of movies since the 1940s.

It’s a decision and Clooney goes with his gut and delivers a war romp which is, in all honesty, quite entertaining... but finds itself at odds with itself, I believe, because some of the scenes he’s written in to deliver “the dark edge” are perhaps played a little too lightly for their own good. And I’m not putting that down to the acting because everybody in this movie... Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban and even Clooney himself, are all absolutely brilliant in their performances and it doesn’t seem to be their tone which is the problem.

For instance, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, when it comes to a movie set during the Second World War, that some of the main protagonists are going to wind up dead at various points in the movie. However, I found that, even though I liked all these characters, I didn’t really feel much when they died. Don’t get me wrong, the other characters on screen did... but I, as the audience, didn’t feel much. Similarly, when a couple of characters realise the gold they’ve been running their hands through is comprised of the gold fillings of dead victims of the German concentration camps, although we are given time to dwell on this horror, along with the characters, we don’t really feel it as such. At least I didn’t and, believe me, I’m not taking the actual events any less seriously for it.

I think the “lightening” effect I’m talking about here is something which came in the struggle to find the perfect edit and sound mix from the film. And also perhaps from the baggage that some of the actors have brought with them from other roles. Many of these are noted for giving some great comic performances and maybe that’s thrown into the mix too. Perhaps some shots needed to be a little longer or maybe have a less beautiful score than the “classic war anthem” style of composition, with direct lineage from the scores of Ron Goodwin, that master composer Alexandre Desplat has delivered... much to my puzzlement as this score doesn’t seem to me to fit his usual modus operandi, although it’s still a score and a half, to be sure.

So yeah. The film does seem a little, “war light” in places. Especially after such a brilliant opening montage of static shots of works of art juxtaposed with the sounds of hammer blows. This short sequence was almost stomach turning, when seen on a big screen, in the way the sound and image worked together in rhythm and sets you on edge for an intense and dynamic darkness which never quite delivers, at least on that front.

Okay, so that’s a pretty negative view of the film so far so let me just temper that a little and tell you about the good way of looking at this...

It’s actually quite fun and it’s well acted, holds your attention and doesn’t, not even once, get boring.

It was possibly scripted so that certain scenes would go to the various “stars” in the movie to play to their strengths but, honestly, it doesn’t look or feel like it’s been tailored for specific performers in that way and it flows beautifully, not feeling like a series of separate incidents highlighting characters... even though it kinda is in many ways, as the lead protagonists work in smaller, separate units for the majority of the film and only come together for key scenes every once in a while. It’s a solid little story and although it certainly doesn’t drum home the horrors of war I was talking about earlier, they’ve not been forgotten or pushed to the background either (maybe tonally but not in terms of sweeping them under a rug or something like that).

What we have in The Monuments Men, I think, is one of those films which is going to play on television during seasonal holidays like Christmas and Easter for decades to come and will, in future years, be rightly identified as a classic. I know, for instance, that when future generations sit down and watch this, they’ll see a snappy and solid little war movie with a great cast of actors who all died many years ago and wonder why this didn’t make a bigger splash when it landed at the box office on its release. The haze of nostalgic rediscovery is as valid a process of receiving the art form as any other, it’s my belief, so I think this film will be remembered well when it starts to be included in text books of the history of war films in years to come. But don’t take my word for it... go and see this possible classic in cinemas now while you still can. It’s nothing like a perfect movie for us now... but it may well be a perfect movie in the future.