Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1988)

39 minutes. 18 killings. 3 lines of dialogue. Alan Clarke’s Elephant is shark-simple in its relentless depiction of sectarian assassinations in Northern Ireland. It’s Bresson with guns, as a monotonous procession of shootings takes place with rhythmic repetition. A few shots establish a location into which a man will walk. He seeks out another man and shoots him. Then leaves. He doesn’t flee the scene: the drama of the murders produces no changes of pace or fluctuations of facial expression. We linger on a sullen corpse for a few seconds, then the process repeats again with a different shooter and a different victim. Occasionally the man we see turns out to be the victim, not the assassin. Occasionally, there is a second victim at a single scene. On one occasion there is a brief, mundane exchange of words. But for the most part, the formula stays the same throughout the film. Little attempt is made to exploit the format for a wide variety of murder methods – guns do the trick efficiently enough, thankyou.

    

The killings are covered predominantly with wide-angle lenses on a Steadicam. This gives the shooters a purposeful, inexorable force, and as superior field of vision, as they carry out their task. Gus Van Sant used a similar technique for his massacre-based Elephant, which takes its title from Clarke’s film, but there it expressed ineluctible lines of fate that would converge devastatingly at the conclusion. Clarke’s tracking shots are heat-seekers, zeroing in on a target with no meandering, accident or deflection. And there is no connection between them, no sense of a conspiracy being rooted out, or a ring being smashed, just a string of squalid slayings. You want to scour people’s faces for signs of remorse, conflict, fear or other emotional nuances, but these attempts will always be frustrated, either because figures have their backs to the camera, or because their faces are sternly illegible. This is as easy as getting out of a car. And then getting back in again. The victims are benign and ordinary in their shirts and woolly jumpers. Almost all die immediately, barely having chance to register more than a dumb recognition that there’s some guy at the door. They slump or fall like the overpacked shopping bags you put down when you get home.

            

Dennis Lim’s DVD review from the Village Voice puts it quite nicely, and uses most of the adjectives I wrote down in my notebook while watching:

Almost wordless and purposefully numbing, the film alternates between queasy motion (someone walks, walks, walks, and the Steadicam follows) and sickening stillness (someone is shot, and the camera likewise stops dead in its tracks). Clarke’s masterpiece, Elephant is detached and diagrammatic to the point of abstraction—it pares a cycle of senseless violence down to cruel, anonymous geometry.

Aside from the obvious shock value of seeing a set of killings that never coalesce into a narrative, there’s also a palpable sense of being kicked hard in the genres. Ouch. Isn’t TV drama, especially when its broadcast by the BBC, supposed to be a public forum for talking about political problems, current affairs and historical events? Isn’t it a way of making the news seem a bit more manageable, to situate it within a pleasingly contained, story-shaped vessel? Where is the context, the background, the psychological, character-developed, method-acted, micro-for-the-macro-allegorised, self-importantly-hyphenated drama of it all? That title comes from Bernard McLaverty’s description of “the Troubles” (itself an evasive, palliative descriptor) as “the elephant in the living room”, the enormous issue that people get used to and stop acknowledging. Well, elephant looks like the offcuts of a sanitised news archive, the deleted scenes of a war made to look like it wasn’t a war. It sounds like a trite concept, to show the human cost of conflict by excising everything else, but as a confrontational viewing experience it is a peerless pachyderm let loose in the lounge, refusing to play by genre rules: its perfect home, then, was on TV, becoming a cyclical installation piece in the corner of your front room.

An Excursion to the Moon (Segundo de Chomon, 1908)

[This post is an appendix of sorts to the larger post about Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon. If you want to draw your own comparisons between the two films, you can cross-reference the scene-by-scene frame grabs from each film by clicking between the two posts.]

As another academic year draws to a close and piles of marking start … er, piling up, I find myself with less time for blogging at length about things. So, I’m on the look out for things I can work through quickly, to keep things ticking over on this site (and because I enjoy writing for it). I know I promised a double-bill review of some Japanese King Kong movies, and a randomisation of Norman McLaren, more Star Wars randoms, more in the How Special Effects Work series, a post on Peter Tscherkassky’s amazing Outer Space, and probably a few others. In short, I promised you the Earth. And now here I am, giving you the Moon. Again. Will that do for now?

I wanted to do a scene by scene comparison of Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon in order to expand my notes here on that fabulous, important film. As an appendix to my ever-expanding scene-by-scene analysis of A Trip to the Moon, I present Segundo de Chomon‘s 1908 remake. Born in Aragon, Northern Spain in 1871, Chomón first worked for Pathé in 1901, where he helped to hand-tint prints of their films in Barcelona (an interest in colour films would stay with him throughout his career). He began making his own films the following year, and moved to Paris to work as a technical assistant to other Pathé film-makers in 1905. Later, he would serve as director of photography on Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) and produced in-camera special effects for Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927). Often remembered for his remakes and imitations of other trick films, especially those of Melies, Chomon’s work has it’s own visual wit and immense dexterity with special effects: magicians constantly perform the same tricks again and again with their own personal variations, so it doesn’t seem too odd to find trick films that are very similar in theme and structure. Special effects are always modifications of earlier tricks, visual solutions to the same problem of how to depict an impossible event, and though Chomón’s film is structurally very similar to Méliès’ original (itself an adaptation/absorption of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne), we might find some important differences:

From what I can tell, the figure on the right is very upset. He’s desperate for adventure, and I think he’s even yearning to go to the moon. His friends discourage him from jumping for it, and the professorial figure (i.e. the one with the big pointy hat) promises that they will go to the moon. They dance joyously, then exit screen left: as with Melies, they will enter the next shot from the right hand side of the frame, a neat bit of continuity editing, but also a temporal ellipsis. Time and space, in keeping with the theme of this film and others like it, are collapsed to give an impression of a breakneck, reckless voyage.

Here the professor describes how the mission will work. It is and isn’t rocket science, folks (see, I can recycle jokes from earlier posts, too): the rocket is shot from the Earth to the Moon, but this is where Chomon trumps his predecessor, for while Melies’ lecturer had to draw the diagram with chalk on a blackboard, Chomon’s scientist has a superimposed animation of a spinning globe and a moving rocket aimed at the moon. It’s beautifully done, as perfect  a matte shot as you could hope to see in the early cinema period. Note that in both these scenes, the camera is closer than in Melies, and the performances perhaps more starkly individuated – there’s a lovely bit of business in the first shot where one of the friends tries to cheer up the miserabilist by popping a top hat on his head, to no avail. Chomon has a smaller cast, and so crowd scenes appear less cluttered. Similarly, you’ll notice that the perspective (see the telescopes in the background of this shot) is less vertiginous, less exaggerated in its distortions throughout.

The explorers go to watch the rocket being built – you can see its frame to the left of centre in this image. As with Melies, there’s an industrial accident for light relief: one man is accidentally hooked and hoisted by a crane. Are we supposed to mock the explorers for their clumsiness, their prim and proper incongruence on the shop floor? This composition is less “flat” than the Melies version, with convincing depth to the backdrop and strong lines across the frame, especially the gantry at the top.

In the next shot, it looks as though the explorers are now up on one of the gantries around the rocket-building yard. Space and time are still compressed – having seen the rocket being built, we’re now getting ready for the launch in the very next shot (it might be that they’re building a production line of rockets, but either way, we’re being shown the various stages of the mission in linear sequence). The gun that will launch the rocket points upwards and out of the frame in the background.

Unlike the Melies film, where the rocket is loaded into the canon by sailor-girls in hotpants, Chomon delegates this labour to a bunch of soldiers, but the composition is almost exactly the same. The explorers are themselves then loaded into the shell and popped into the barrel. The painting on the backdrop is immaculate – the lines of the brushed steel inside the barrel clearly marks out a space that might otherwise seem difficult to distinguish in a monochrome frame. The tinting of these images, often changing colour from shot to shot, delineates each scene.

A brief shot follows of the rocket leaving the gun, the force of the trajectory (which matches the direction of fire from the previous shot) indicated by that strong diagonal bisection of the frame.

Chomon’s recreation of Melies’ signature shot of the rocket penetrating the moon is similar, but significantly different, beginning with a dolly shot towards the sleeping satellite, but while Melies popped the shell in the Moon’s eye through the magic of a stop-motion substitution, Chomon slows down the action and smoothly flies the rocket into the moon’s gaping mouth. It’s a great, elegant effect without the violence of Melies’ version, even though it’s replaying the same joke of scale.

The moon landing now follows a familiar progression. They watch the sunset in the background. They settle down to sleep. It starts snowing. They retreat into a crater. Again, the action is closer than in Melies, and there is no display of stellar gods and goddesses. The disappointment for the explorers is that the climate of the moon is as unpredicatble as that of Earth. Luckily they brought little umbrellas…

In the underground cave, the explorers are attacked and abducted by moonmen, acrobats in suits with human faces (as opposed to Melies’ masked, exo-skeletoned crustacea). The action is frenetic, the shroomy backdrop impressively detailed. It looks like bits are missing from the film here, making the stop-motion substitutions as the mushrooms pop up, and the selenites appear, a little jerky. The explorers are hustled off the screen and brought to…

… the throne room of the king of the Moon. He’s a big, sultanic figure, his minions cowering before him. This is a more cordial meeting than in Melies’ film. The king even puts on a dance show led by a girl who is presumably his daughter:

Slightly oddly, this ballet routine takes up a good chunk of the film’s running time, repeating Melies’ interest in decorative female bodies, but transferring the pageantry from the Earth to the Moon. It’s all spoiled when one of the Earthlings, smitten with desire, grabs the king’s daughter and runs off with her. Understandably enfuriated, the king conjures his guards and sends them off in pursuit of the fleeing explorers.

One of the selenites is hand-tinted here, in this beautifully painted shot. The rocket is tipped over the edge to fall back to Earth, while the creatures are left behind on the edge of the Moon.

There’s no fuss about the depiction of the return to Earth, just a single shot of the rocket plummeting past the stars. In the next shot…

… it lands back at the starting point. For this final shot of the film, they’ve taken the trouble to crown the explorers with meticulously hand-tinted pointy hats. The stencilled colour marks this out as a special shot. Notice that the rocket has been destroyed in the fall, and the explorers clamber out triumphant. They’ve taken no prisoners, except of course for the king’s daughter, who seems quite willing to become a trophy bride for an Earthman. So, while Melies’ film ended with a colonial conquest, making the moonman dance for the pleasure of the crowd, here the king’s daughter is presumably to be assimilated with her new society, a very different (but perhaps no less sinister) form of conquest.

Memento: “The Camera Never Lies”

[See also my article on the Christopher Nolan Batman films and my review of his latest film, Inception.]

I was reading Allan Cameron’s work on modular narratives this week, (you can read and download the introductory chapter here) in advance of a seminar that would include Memento, so I thought I’d throw down some notes. Hopefully they’ll come out in some kind of comprehensible order, but if it gets a bit disjointed, I’ll try and claw back some credibility by pretending that I was trying to write in a “modular” fashion.

Cameron describes a trend in contemporary cinema for a kind of reconfigured narrative:

In its cinematic form, database or modular narrative goes beyond the classical deployment of flashback, offering a series of disarticulated narrative pieces, often arranged in radically achronological ways via flashforwards, overt repetition or a destabilization of the relationship between present and past.

I’m sure you can easily think of some films that don’t tell their stories in a linear chronological order from start to finish (21 Grams, Pulp Fiction, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Irreversible are some of the key examples Cameron cites), but he’s not claiming that this is now the default setting for cinematic storytelling, only that the mainstream acceptability of these formal exercises suggests that “audiences are now acclimatized to achronological narrative structures.”

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Randomised

See also:

• Star Wars Randomised
• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Randomised
• Star Wars: Return of the Jedi Randomised
• Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Randomised
• Star Wars: Attack of the Clones Randomised
• Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Randomised

Continuing the occasional series of Star Wars Randomised posts (see here if you need to know what these are), I come to The Empire Strikes Back. This was the first Star Wars film I remember seeing in the cinema. My family was on holiday in Dublin, and I and my siblings were taken to see it as an evening treat. Mostly what I remember was Yoda, who I assumed was a member of the muppet family and therefore entirely hilarious at all times. But my memory of the story was bolstered by a second viewing (on a double bill with the earlier film), and by the toys, books, trading cards and magazines that help to extrude the afterlife of the film and embed it firmly in the brain.

The numbers randomly generated are: 25, 89, and 101. I take frame grabs from those minute marks and use them as prompts for discussion. The bonus number is 40: that’s the one I’m handing over to you, readers, so dust off your critical faculties and get ready to tell me stuff…
The Star Wars films move from planet to planet with the greatest of ease. This is not the barren, vast space of 2001 or Alien: it’s a galaxy teeming with life, each new world a monoclimatic, colour coded waystation for a a section of plot. There’s Endor, an entirely forested moon, Tatooine, the desert planet, Coruscant, its whole surface urbanised, and this – Hoth, all snow and ice. Its white surfaces are a retina-searing place for a battle, a bright open space that offers no shadows in which to hide. The Rebels troops are massively outgunned. They’ve just spotted the Imperial forces’ giant walking troop carriers (AT-ATs, if my memory of the action figures serves me right) approaching, their eyes aimed at the distant enemy. They know they’re pretty much screwed. It’s just a matter of buying some time while the Rebels evacuate their base. Writing this down, it sounds pretty trite, but the spectacle comes from the succinct reduction of the conflict to its powerful visual elements: definite lateral movement (the Rebels face and fire in this direction, the Empire advances inexorably from the opposite side), a diagonal composition in this shot scatters the troops in a loose, rather scrappy and pathetic formation. This will be intercut with the assured march of the Empire towards them. And when, oh when, will we get these wrist-mounted intercoms that science fiction has been promising us for so long? Again, there are few true gaps between places in the Star Wars universe: spatial gulfs can be spanned with this proliferation of communication devices, or hyperspace jumps that collapse huge distances in seconds. Scenes of isolation, out of radio contact or away from other people, are almost always scenes of isolation and fear.
For a smart-mouthed gun-slingin’ hero, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) certainly suffers a lot in this film. Here he is in a prison cell shortly after being tortured with some kind of electroshock machine, and shortly before being encased in carbonite (all of the nonsense science in Star Wars is stated with casual confidence – there are few astonishing “new” technologies for the people involved, rarely even any expressions of surprise as they arrive on strange new worlds): I remember seeing this as a six-year-old and asking my mum if Solo was dead. Whatever they were saying on the screen about his life signs, I couldn’t imagine how being “in a statue” was not the same as being dead. In this shot, though, Han is on the way to his statue-state. The torture has knocked the swagger out of him. The smirk has fallen from his mough, and the dark shadows emphasise the sag in his face, the pallor of his skin, the frown on his brow that expresses disappointment that his roguish heroism has been met not with a similarly spry, moustache twirling villainy, but with a medieval set of restraints, jabs and agonies. Why won’t the enemy spar with him on his own terms? the stark, corugated iron (?) backdrop and the off-centre framing accentuate the disempowerment. Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) has been moved to his defence from his earlier standoffish flirtation. Her hair is gradually evolving from the tight buns she wore in the previous episode, snaking down the sides of her head as her affection unfolds: sad to see that her initial assertiveness is being equated with tightness, a quality to be outgrown rather than one to direct productively. In the flirtation that characterises their relationship during most of The Empire Strikes Back (and reminds us that it shares a co-screenwriter with The Big Sleep), they are equally matched: by this point, he has gained the sympathetic highground by getting the crap kicked out of him, but he gains it at the expense of his agency and heroic prerogative.
The darkness of the film is often cited as its strength, positioned between the boyishness of the previous and the teddy bears’ picnic of the subsequent episodes. The shadiest chiaroscuro effects are reserved for the scenes of Oedipal revelation as Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) battles the arch-villain who turns out to be his father (he has, by this point, stopped coming onto his sister…). Here, Luke looks down into the pit where he has just thrown Darth Vader. The low shot and confident stance seem to give him a superior positioning, but his size within the frame, and the prominence of opaque spaces in the frame suggest that he is still in danger. The lightsaber is another bit of impossible science that makes perfect sense – it works like a sword, and permits the film to borrow the intimate aspects of swordfighting (the proximity to an opponent, they attempt to inflict injury directly to their bodies) as opposed to the remoteness of gunplay. Hence, emotional conflicts are usually manifest as sabre fights; they evoke a chivalrous age at the same time as their alien technology suggests an unfathomable futurity for the films’ spectators. Plenty of sf technologies aim to provoke the flash of recognition that comes from seeing a gadget that one hopes will eventually arrive to make life easier. Star Wars paradoxically provokes nostalgia instead: its technologies return us to the sword and the cloak. Its inventions are not necessities to one day make our lives easier, but tropes of other genres (pirate, cowboy, knight) shifting to the back and to the side in space and time.

And here, from the 40th minute of the film, is your turn. What can you tell me about this frame? Anything at all. Surprise me…

Star Wars Randomised

See also:

• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Randomised
• Star Wars: Return of the Jedi Randomised
• Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Randomised
• Star Wars: Attack of the Clones Randomised
• Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Randomised

[For other Randomised posts, and an explanation of the rules of randomisation, go here.]

In a brazenly populist gesture, I thought I’d start a weekly(ish) series applying the rules of Randomisation to George Lucas’ reasonably well-known toyshop sf-western franchise. I’m going to start with the first film, i.e. the one released in 1977, before it was retitled Episode IV: A New Hope in 1981 (I once had a stand-up shouting match with a hardcore fan who swore blind that it had always been subtitled “Episode IV” since it’s first screenings. Thank goodness these days anyone with 30 seconds to spare and access to Google can settle these squabbles with more civility). However, I am lumbered with the 2004 DVD versions, so I’ll have to note “special edition” embellishments/vandalisms should they arise.

In keeping with the traditions of Randomisation, I won’t say much more about the film – I’ll just let the random number generator pick me three numbers, then grab the frames corresponding to those minute marks from the DVD, and get on with it. The numbers are 13, 66, 80. The bonus number is 109; this is a new feature I’m introducing for the Randomised series. I’d like you, dear readers, to fill in the entry for the fourth number for me. Please join in and help out on the comments thread below and see if you can suggest points of interest raised by the image.

Now, on with the pictures:
Well, this is a challenging one. Not the most “active” shot. This is the vacuum tube that is descending menacingly to suck up R2-D2 into the Jawas’ sandcrawler. It fills the dark frame, and the camera tilts down with its movement, in thrall to its big black mouth. It’s like a giant version of those pneumatic tubes they used to use to send messages.:R2 (follow him on Twitter here) is about to be sent like a memo into the inside of the transport. The Star Wars films are filled with shots of people (and other things) getting in and out of vehicles, racing through corridors, trenches, narrow spaces etc. It’s a real tug-of-war between wide shots of outer space or open landscapes, and people being passed from one metallic interior to the next. The Jawas, chirpy little buggers who come off like a swarm of eager market traders, make their living by rounding up and reselling old droids. The reduction of two of the films main protagonists (C3P0 is also picked up) to another bit of second-hand junk is at once a neat comic device for getting them to where they need to be (meeting Luke Sykwalker), and an establishing scene of their singular identity: no other robots in the series are permitted this level of agency, the chance to rise up from the pack, escape and go AWOL. This mammoth suction tube, a reversal of the escape pod that blew them out of the rebel ship at the beginning, is a reminder of others’ perception of the droids status as machines, commodities to be processed and delivered accordingly.
Here’s a shot that has been modified slightly for the DVD release. A large pink flash as an Imperial guard is shot in the assault on the detention centre. It seems like an attempt to tone down the violence, to soften the blows of Luke and Han’s rescue of Princess Leia. The guard’s right hand was going for his gun,  so we know that he represented an immediate danger, but this bad guy has been outgunned. In lessening the impact of the death, they could’ve censored the image by erasing the pain from his face, but it’s the pink flash that has been wiped away. That burst of candy-floss pink would, if nothing else, have clashed viciously with the colour scheme of the rest of the shot. The evil of the Imperial forces is suggested in part by their mastery of colour, mostly blacks and greys, with deep red in the back of this shot. See how the guard, in his uniform, almost disappears into the decor. Even the badges that signify his rank (or maybe his scouting abilities?), match the buttons on the consoles around him: he is shown to be another integrated component of the death star, and killing him just a necessary point in navigating the outposts of the space station.

For more on the special edition alterations, some of which continue this project of “cleaning up” the film or mollifying the killings, follow this link.
In the garbage compactor (Brits like me might have called it a “rubbish squasher”) on the Death Star, Princess Leia and Han Solo struggle to get on top of the “garbage”: the Empire clearly has a different kind of garbage to the rest of us. I see no milk bottles, potato peelings or ice-cream tubs. If you want to judge a regime by what it bins, then the Empire is clearly fixated on machines, metal and rubber piping. And you can bet they’re not planning to recycle any of this stuff. The compactor is lit like an infernal backstreet, like the outsides of clubs where you see people get mugged in movies set in New York. And it’s not very well designed: surely a waste disposal unit big enough for people to get inside (there’s a door) could easily be fitted with an emergency “off” switch? But then, the functionality of the Death Star’s equipment is wholly ruthless. Not a single surface, fitting or fixture dedicated to leisure. I say this not as a flippant swipe at the film’s design, but to remark upon its singular efficiency. George Lucas is renowned for marshalling the finer points of design and environment to create an impression of lived-in worlds, but actually I find them to be wholly subordinated to the project of setting up a dichotomy between rustic rebels and machinic rulers. The Empire’s war rooms, detention centres and hangars are fussily clean and smooth, so to find our heroes suddenly in the digestive system of the centre of operations, and for it to still be full of metal, is a nice touch.

Now, over to you. What do you make of this image from the 109th minute of Star Wars? Show me how it should be done:

Don’t Look Now: “Did You Really See Her?”

You can download a PDF version of this post here. In the PDF version, the layout and images are a little more carefully formatted and stable. 

[This post is intended for readers who’ve already seen Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now: it contains major spoilers, and assumes knowledge of the plot. If you need a reminder of the story, try here. I wrote most of this while re-watching the film (trying to practice typing without looking at the keys!), so apologies if some of the prose is a bit scrappy. I’ve polished up some of it, but thought I’d leave most of it intact.]

Don’t Look Now is, when taken from one particular angle, a film about imperfect vision. It shows us a story of eyes deceived, beliefs challenged by visual evidence, even as the film itself conducts its own experiments in superhuman looking by conjoining separate spaces through graphic matches that suggest a world ordered not by random chance but by the interconnectedness of disparate phenomena. The tension between these two kinds of vision, the one flawed, partial and human, the other selective and authoritative, is one of the things that makes the film work and helps to structure its ambiguous play with superstition and clairvoyance.

It might seem like a film about mystery, but it’s all signposted from the first scene, where the kids play outside while the parents read and talk indoors. Various cinematic techniques are used to introduce the question of vision, and to make affective links between characters who might not otherwise be spatially connected. Above, you can see a pair of consecutive shots in which Laura (Julie Christie) puts her hand to her mouth, followed immediately by a cut to her daughter doing the same. In another example, little Christine throws a ball, and the next shot shows her mother catching a packet of cigarettes:

Matches-on-action are usually used to imply spatio-temporal continuity between separate shots of the same activity , but here the matches are between distinct locations. These seem like superficial matches to show the prelapsarian unity of the family, but the graphic matches are used at several points in the film to draw connections between various phenomena. The visual similarity of the red forms of spillage on the photograph and the drowned child’s coat  (the red zones occupy roughly the same areas of the frame) sets up a portentous link between the two moments, a clue which John (Donald Sutherland) will spend the rest of the film refusing to acknowledge:

But if the connection between the church and Venice and the death of the child is meant to serve as a warning, then why is it built on similarity? The dwarf and the child are not the same, and it is a confusion between the two which will ultimately lead John into mortal danger. If the supernatural world is sending messages, then they are not clearly legible ones. Elsewhere, vision is portrayed as untrustworthy, partial and fragmented, with faces obscured or ambiguous figures glimpsed:

Julie Christie meets the two English women when one of them gets something in her eye (the other is blind): mirrored images in the bathroom fragment vision. This film is fascinated by the tricks eyes can play, or the beauty of certain effects: light playing on the canal connects to the rain falling on the pond, igniting a memory of the aftermath of Christine’s death. Through the figure of a blind psychic, the film entertains the possibility of a superior mode of sight that comes from sense experiences beyond the eyes.

Does the film want us to conclude that the woman really is psychic and having visions of death and the dead, and thus that it is Sutherland’s incomplete vision, his disbelief in the fact that his daughter is not there in Venice with them that leads him to be killed? Or does it let the viewers decide for themselves whether the premonitions are real? Actually, I suspect it makes it fairly clear that faith in biological sight is misplaced.

The pile-up of blurred lines between memory, premonition and present experience is the organising principle of the justly famous sex scene. Notable amongst movie sex for being a regenerative moment between a married couple as opposed to an inevitable plotpoint for a male hero and his designated shag, it also fits perfectly with the film’s visionary aesthetic. Beginning with tender foreplay, as the lovemaking escalates, it is intercut with flashforwards to shots of the couple dressing and remembering the sex. As the forward-looking shots become more frequent, they might be seen to take over, making the present action into flashbacks, or at least overlapping the temporal spaces and endowing each image with multiple indentities as present moments, memories or predictions and working them into an affective whole of conflated experiences. Perhaps this scene suggests a moment of closeness between the couple by allowing them a privileged, unified experience where the moment, its aniticipation and its memory all come together: it’s a shame that subsequently, they will judge these multi-temporal visions very differently.

If you’ve ever been to Venice and walked around without a map, you’ll know how perfectly cast it is as the backdrop for this story. Any stroll through the backstreets, particularly at night, can turn into a fiendish, circular journey where landmarks will seem to repeat in random order, canals will seem to move their position or reverse their direction. It’s eerie how easily Venetian pathways can mess with your sense of direction, your faith in your remembrances of space, place and time. Out of the holiday season, it’s a mournful, even morbid place, and the film exploits these qualities to the full by making it an architectural analogue of the characters’ mental and visual indecisions. The blind psychic, on the other hand, can navigate it with ease because the sounds are so acute, the echoes so instructive. It is vision, often the most trusted of the senses, that is portrayed as unreliable.

It’s a film about grief, but grieving doesn’t mean sitting around crying – for this couple it means considering and modifying their beliefs about death, time and memory. Laura hides her medication, favouring the clarity of natural vision over medically regulated perspective. John sees his wife’s supernatural beliefs as irrational; he describes her to the authorities as “not a well woman”, and it is this refusal to attribute visual evidence to something other than physical presence that leads him into danger: seeing something that looks like his daughter, he cannot connect the little figure in the red coat whose appearance has been previsualised and warned against. Ultimately, then, the film is reliant on John’s misperception, building up to a shock ending that is foreshadowed heavily in the opening scene and  in every other glimpse of his killer-to-be.

The collage of momentous fragments of the opening scene is matched by the death-throes montage that unlocks its significances at the end: all the pieces of the puzzle find their connections to one another in a final spatio-temporal flurry of overlapping times and places, signs and omens. The visual trope of the graphic match, where dwarf and child are made to appear similar, coded by the vivid red macs they wear, even repeating the shot of each figure reflected in the surface of the water, tricks John into accepting that his daughter might be alive before his eyes. But these cannot be John’s vision, because he wasn’t there to see Christine reflected in the water – the film is repeating its own imagery, and giving equal significance to this kind of visual inference and to witnessed sightings, ensuring that seeing something firsthand is not given precedence over other kinds of knowledge and belief. John and has wife have shared similar experiences and interpreted them in very different ways. He sees a premonition of his own funeral but can’t believe that it isn’t evidence of Laura’s physical presence, and can’t accept that his senses might have deceived him. She blithely accepts the evidence of second sight, while he ignores all of the portents, and is punished for trying to believe his senses in the face of other forms of evidence.

You can download a PDF version of this post here. In the PDF version, the layout and images are a little more carefully formatted and stable. 

Links:

• Review by Bryant Frazer at Deep-focus.com.
• Review by Sameer Padania at Kamera.
• Review, production stills and posters at Screenonline.
• Review by Damian Cannon.
• Brief Synopsis at Britmovie.
• Review at The Terror Trap.
• Brendan Dawes’ interesting experiment with distorting every frame of the film. Difficult to explain, good to look at.
• Review from The Observer by Philip French.
• A review, comparing the film to Donnie Darko, by Jon Ware at Warwick blogs.
• DVD discussion at DVD Times.
• Images of the original locations for the shoot from Reel Streets.
• More locations from Movie Locations.
• Nicolas Roeg talks to Channel 4 about the film.
• The Telegraph’s Must-have movies.
• Penguin study notes for Daphne du Maurier’s story. [PDF]
• Review at Antagony & Ecstasy.
• A planned remake was announced in 2005, but there hasn’t been much development, so hopefully it’s dropped off the slate altogether.
• Screenplay review at The Script Factory.
• Don’t Look Now in the BFI’s Top 100 Films chart.
• Biography of Nicolas Roeg at Screenonline.
• Member reviews at Green Cine.
• Extensive review at Pajiba by Ranylt Richildis.
• Donkey Punch director Olly Blackburn meets Nicolas Roeg for Time Out.
• Nicolas Roeg Interview at Screenonline.
• Interview with Roeg from SFX magazine, 1999.

Remembering She

I had a strange and unsettling viewing experience this week. Having found a special offer on the 21-disc Ultimate Hammer Collection DVD boxset, once it finally arrived I wondered when I was going to get chance to watch it all? I’m a sucker for a big boxset, but time is tight. There is some good stuff here, like Plague of the Zombies, The Devil Rides Out and The Nanny, but will get round to Viking Queen or The Reptile? I hope so, because even in its weaker moments, Hammer is a historically interesting place to visit, even when it is cosier, more familiar than it is scary. The first film in the chronological collection (which starts in 1965 – it’s not complete, but a good sampler of the post-Bray studios period) is She, an adaptation of H. Rider Haggard‘s 1887 story of Ayesha, queen of a lost African city who cannot die. She is waiting for the return of the lover she killed 2000 years previously, and believes she has found him in the form of an English explorer. The plot isn’t important right now, because watching it again, I came across a scene which had haunted me as a child, though I hadn’t remembered which film it had come from. Even after nearly 30 years, it came back to me, shot-for-shot. In the scene, Ayesha, believing she has been betrayed by a group of rebellious slaves, orders their execution by having them thrown, chained together, into a deep, fiery pit. For years after seeing this sequence it would come back to me and make me shudder at the plight of these poor guys – I remembered clearly the low whimpering noises they made as they were dragged towards the pit, and the screams they issued as they fell. I had only misremembered the pit as a bottomless chasm, an eternal tumble into pitch blackness. To find that it was actually filled with lava was strangely reassuring: I had previously thought to myself, years after seeing the film in my childish naivety, that “the slaves are still feeling”. It scared me, and it made me sad whenever I remembered it.

I mention this now to share a little revelation, though it may be peculiarly personal, and to pay tribute to the selective power of memory, excerpting these few shots and storing them up as a marker of how cruel the world could be, how inhumane powerful rulers could become. Posting these images now is amusing; I’d even begun to doubt whether I had ever really witnessed this grotesque scene, or just fabricated it out of my worst imaginings, but there it is, clear and complete in readily-available digital form, a memory mastered and overcome. Oh, and I notice that it now has a “U” certificate: “suitable for all”, indeed …

Screed for Speed

Had there ever been a film that so succinctly enacted its high concept than Speed? [See end of post for some notes on “high concept”] It’s so precisely executed that I can’t even decide whether I like it or not – all the adjectives I reach for are double-edged admirations of its “efficiency”. In case you need a reminder, the idea is this: a former bomb disposals expert (Dennis Hopper), thwarted in his attempt to extort money by threatening to kill a lift full of hostages, plants a bomb on a bus that will explode if the vehicle’s speed drops below 50mph. LAPD SWAT guy Jack Traven (named after B. Traven, mysterious pseudonymised writer of Treasure of the Sierra Madre) has the task of keeping the bus moving and plotting a solution while passenger Annie (Sandra Bullock) takes the wheel. The third act (each act built around a different hostage situation) sees Annie kidnapped and strapped with explosives on a brakeless subway train. In short, the film generates situations of “suspense” out of a literal, downright Newtonian articulation of that word: a an elevator hung on insecure cables threatening to plummet, a bus maintaining constant velocity against a succession of solid impediments and gravitational pulls, hanging slo-moed in the air as it makes an impossible leap  across a gulf in the road, a train performing the opposite action of trying to slow to a halt (and landing, self-reflexively outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, where that other epic of vehicular trajectory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is showing).

Mapped onto the skeleton of these machinically structured sequences is a burgeoning romance between the two leads, borne perfunctorily out of the intensity of the situations (they even say so themselves). The forward thrust of bus and train force them (twice) into hurtling embraces, as if trajectories of plot and object are perfectly twinned. The multicultural group of passengers are mainly there as ballast for the bus, fodder for the threat, and to utter expressions of amazement designed to prompt and voice the expected audience responses: “This guy is nuts!”, “This is not a good plan!”, “What?!”, “You gotta be kidding!” (actually, I can’t remember whether or not anyone says that, but I’m gonna take a guess) or, directed knowingly at Keanu/Jack, “You’re not very bright but you got some big round hairy cojones” (if only the marketing department could have worked that line into the title…). The film’s every machination is manouevred into frame by the simplicity of its concept, stated out loud by Hopper’s terrorist, as if it were not clear enough, when he details “the rules” – the bus’s bomb-rigged structure is a promise of non-stop action, a promise of shark-like relentlessness: if it stops moving, it dies. Terrorist plot = narrative conceit.

What happened to transform Dennis Hopper from countercultural icon of the New Hollywood cinema into perfect casting for a deranged terrorist? Or maybe it was never such a stretch from cinema’s edgiest biker-hippie in Easy Rider to a guy over the edge entertaining himself by placing elaborate booby traps in the Man’s own modes of transport – elevators, buses, trains. The cause just got a little confused along the way. This was the 1990s, back when terrorism was a consequence free plot-device perpetrated by disillusioned white guys out of step with society but at least highly rational and precise in their plotting. As Sandra Bullock asks at one point: “What did we do, bomb the guy’s country or something?” “No”, replies Keanu, “It’s just a guy who wants money.” But Speed refuses to go there on some of the dilemma’s terrorist threats; despite an early reference to “shooting the hostage” to save the rest of the endangered citizens, Keanu never has to make that choice, never has to flatten the schoolkids on the crossing, and the pram the bus crushes turns out to be full of tin cans. This film doesn’t deliver grotesque or shocking thrills, as Richard Dyer writes:

Speed teasingly draws back from delivering such an experience, even when it titillates us with the promise that it’s about to show us a white, middle-class mother and baby smashed to smithereens. […] Speed largely avoids giving us time to note death: there are innocent bystanders knocked off and some police, but by and large the film is oddly benign. Old ladies petrified to leap from leaps, babies in prams, poor commuters of colour on the unstoppable bus, such people are safe in Speed, not expendable as they might be in many other films. The price is elsewhere, in things. It is the transport system itself that is smashed about: cars, lorries, barriers, planes and even the roadway in a final eruption of a subway train from below. It is an orgy of destruction of one of the great frustrations of modern urban living – getting about.

Many of the films set-pieces are dependent on the workings of machines, the red-hot friction of careening metal, the tenacious but faltering grip of overladen cables, the disconnection of wires from bombs, overheated conversations over telecommunication systems, all measured by numeric displays, speedometers and time pressures. The strained disintegration of metal and plastic pushed to its limits, of vehicles on the verge of breaking down and/or up, is a nice metaphor for the machinic construction of Speed, with its single-entendre title, minimal dialogue and set-piece simplicity.

Notes:

Justin Wyatt on “high concept”, from his 1994 book High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood:

The term “high concept” originated in the television and film industries, but it was soon adopted by the popular presses, who seized the term as an indictment of Hollywood’s privileging those films which seemed most likely to reap huge dollars at the box office. Clearly the studios are most interested in those films with an increased likelihood of  a solid return, and high concept has been used as one catchphrase to describe any number of commericial projects. […] According to the folklore of the entertainment industry, high concept as a term was first associated with Barry Diller, during his tenure in the early 1970s as a programming executive at ABC. Diller received much credit for bolstering the network’s poor ratings, partly through the introduction of the made-for-television movie format. Since Diller needed stories which could be easily summarised for a thirty-second television spot, he approved those projects which could be sold in a single sentence.  This sentence woud then appear in the advertising spots and in TV Guide synopses. […] Disney president Jeffrey Katzenberg, on the other hand, attributes the term high concept to Michael Eisner. According to Katzenberg, Eisner used high concept while working as a creative executive at Paramount  to describe a unique idea whose originality could be conveyed briefly. Similarly, Columbia Pictures Entertainment president Peter Guber defines high concept in narrative terms. Rather than stressing the uniqueness of the idea, Guber states that high concept can be understood as a narrative which is very straightforward, easily communicated and easily comprehended. The emphasis on narrative as the driving force behind high concept masks another aspect to the usage of the term within both the film and television industries. While the idea must be easily communicated and summarised, the concept must also be marketable in two significant ways: through the initial “pitch” for the project, and through the marketing, the “pitch” to the public.

An article by Steve Kaire at the Writers Store, “High Concept Defined Once and For All“, offers some advice on how to write a good high concept pitch. These are the five suggested requirements:

YOUR PREMISE SHOULD BE ORIGINAL AND UNIQUE: In seeking originality, we are not talking about reinventing the wheel. We can take traditional subject matter that’s been done before and add a hook or twist to it which then qualifies the material as original. Using the kidnapping plot, there have been dozens of films which covered that subject area before. In the film Ransom, Mel Gibson plays a wealthy businessman whose son is kidnapped. That story in itself offers nothing new. The hook of the movie which makes it original is that instead of paying the ransom, Gibson uses the ransom money to pay for a contract hit on the kidnappers. That twist makes the film original and therefore High Concept.

YOUR STORY HAS TO HAVE MASS AUDIENCE APPEAL: That means it’s possible to meet Requirement #1 by creating an original story that’s never been done before. But that story may be so odd or strange that the appeal exists only in the mind of the writer who created it. No one else. An example would be if a girl woke up one morning, turned into a butterfly, and flew to the land of Shangri-La. That’s never been done before but who cares? Mass appeal means that nine out of ten people who you pitch your story to would say that they’d pay ten dollars to see your movie first run based solely on your pitch. You have to decide either you’re writing for your own enjoyment or you’re writing to sell. If it’s to sell, then you have to take the marketplace into account.

YOUR PITCH HAS TO BE STORY SPECIFIC: That means that within your pitch, you have to have specific details which make your story different and adds color and depth. Let’s take the bank robbing plot. If you came up with a story about three people who want to rob a bank by digging a tunnel underneath it, the response would be, “So what?” A twist on that genre is the movie Going In Style. It’s about three senior citizens who attempt to rob a bank. The wheelman has had his license revoked, the lookout is visually impaired, and the brains of the operation is 75-year-old George Burns. Those specific details enhance the story and keep it from being stale and generic.

THE POTENTIAL IS OBVIOUS: If you’re pitching a comedy, then the potential for humor should be obvious within your pitch. People should smile or laugh when you tell it. If you’re pitching an action movie, the listener should be able to imagine the action scenes in his head as your pitching. I sold a project to Miramax called My Kind of Town with the Wayans Brothers attached to star. It is about two guys who want to make a new start in life. They pack up their car and take off with no particular destination in mind. Entering City Hall in some tiny Southern town to get a map, the roof collapses on them and they sue. They win the lawsuit but the town can’t afford to pay them so they’re given the town. The potential for humor is obvious when the Wayans Brothers are given a Southern town to do whatever they please with it.

YOUR PITCH SHOULD BE ONE TO THREE SENTENCES LONG: I’ve had thousands of projects pitched to me in over twenty years and writers mistakenly think that the longer the pitch, the better the story. No one wants to listen to a pitch that’s a half hour long when I could read the script in less time. I tell writers “Pitch me your story in a couple of sentences.” Most cannot because they don’t know what the five requirements are and lack the practice in condensing and fine-tuning their pitches in advance.