Currently browsing FW Murnau:

19
Jan
Some Blu-Rays and DVDs that have recently caught my eye….

It’s taken me some time to be won over to the Blu-Ray format. Certainly there’s never seemed quite the same necessity to upgrade as there was with VHS to DVD just over 10 years ago, and for those with poor eyesight or without swanky new high-def flatscreens (and equally important, decent speaker systems), it might be hard to detect any tangible improvement over DVD other than that the cases are that little bit smaller so you can stack up more on your shelves. There was also the problem for distributors of what the hell are they were going to fill up all this extra disk space actually with, and the inflated costs of creating an adequate transfer in the first place – all of which meant that there were few niche releases to appeal to more hardcore cinephiles, so unless you were into your big studio productions, there wasn’t much to tempt you over.

The kind of images Blu-Ray was invented for - a shot from Kenneth Anger's 1954 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Well my mind was certainly changed over the past year. I’ve recently been savouring a number of UK released disks that really benefit from the bright colours and sharp images the format permits – so much so that I’m wondering if I could ever go back to DVD again. The first of these was the BFI’s wonderful release of The Magick Lantern Cycle, the complete works of experimental filmmaker and Aleister Crowley nut Kenneth Anger. Anger might be best known to many for his two wonderful Hollywood Babylon books, which dig the dirt on the various scandals that beset Tinseltown in its early years, but if you’ve never seen such films as The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963) or Lucifer Rising (1972) then, boy, I suggest you get your hands on this while you can. The RRP is £36.99, but I got mine from Amazon UK for £12.99, and its currently listed at £9.19. These luridly bizarre 16mm occult workouts look startling on Blu-Ray – you can see the very grain and texture of the film stock, its the closest one will ever get to seeing these films as they were meant to be seen, projected from film. Moreover, you also get a nice thick booklet about Anger and his films, and a fascinating feature-length documentary Anger Me (2006) about his fascinating life following in the path of the Beast, working at the Cinémathèque Française during the 1950s, and hobnobbing with such luminaries as Mick Jagger.

Kenneth Anger's homage to Aleister Crowley, Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) - the title alone should be enough to make you want to see this!

It seems to me, as DVD once did, that Blu-Ray is really best suited to experimental film, and top of my want list now is a UK release of the films of Stan Brakhage. Criterion put out their 687 minute release By Brakhage: Anthology 1 & 2, but I assume this must be region 1 coded, so no good for my current set up. Oh well, we can live in hope that the BFI will look into getting this out on the market before the coalition government’s cuts debilitate this hallowed institution too much.

Rage Net (1988), by Stan Brakhage - if anyone wants to put out a Region 2 Blu-Ray of Brakhage's films, I'm with you all the way

In the meantime, I’ll point you to another great BFI release that might have passed you by, which looks similarly impressive on Blu-Ray, which is Winstanley, a real oddity from 1975 co-directed by revered British film historian Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. Based on an obscure episode in English history shortly after the Civil War, it portrays a renegade group of known as the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, and their attempts to leave the system by claiming a patch of common land to live on and cultivate for themselves – Britain’s earliest Communists, as you might, whose Reclaim-the-Streets / Grow-Your-Own ethos seems particularly appealing in these times of inflated banker’s bonuses, VAT hikes and public sector layoffs. Brownlow and Mollo also made It Happened Here (1964), about a hypothetical Nazi Occupation of England during the war, although this is only available on DVD. My advice though, to film fans and especially filmmakers, Go Watch Winstanley! This is the perfect example of what independent filmmaking should be. The film is an aesthetic masterpiece, with some beautiful English landscapes shot in wonderful high-contrast 16mm monochrome, demonstrating that just because you’ve got no money, it doesn’t mean you can’t make a gorgeous looking film. Secondly, something so many independent filmmakers seem to forget nowadays – this film is actually ABOUT something. It was made because it says something its makers thought needed saying, not because they just wanted to make a film for the sake of making a film, which seems to be the predominant attitude with most wannabe filmmakers at the moment.

The true independent spirit - Winstanley (1975)

Another film that looks absolutely beautiful on Blu-Ray is Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), one of those films that was widely praised by critics when it came out, but now seems to have faded into memory, and it’s only 4 years old – Amazon have also got this at a knockdown price at the moment, at only £7.99. For the record, I think this portrayal of a young man’s attempt to sever himself from the ties of society and completely absorb himself in nature is one of the best films of the past decade. It’s beautifully acted, but the cinematography is the real star here, with the American landscape from the deserts of Arizona to the wilderness of Alaska shot so beautifully they become essentially the main characters in the film. I could happily keep this disk on all the time in my living room, as moving wallpaper.

Sean Penn's astonishing Into The Wild (2007), one of my favourite films of the last decade looking beautiful on Blu-Ray

This film would make an ideal companion piece to Werner Herzog’s masterful documentary, Grizzly Man (2005), one of the five films included on the Encounters in the Natural World Blu-Ray Boxset, alongside the surreal Antarctic antics of the 2007 title film and one of the directors most hypnotically bizarre, White Diamond (2004). Amazon currently have this down from £54.99 to £16.39, and christ, this was easily the best purchase I made last year. Utterly compelling.

Antartica from underneath - one of the least bizarre scenes from Werner Herzog's jaw-dropping Encounters in the Natural World (2007)

Moving on into more whimsical territory, a quick heads-up on a forthcoming Blu-Ray release which you might be interested in, Third Window Film’s upcoming upgrade of Tetsuya Nakashima’s much-loved Memories of Matsuko (2006), one of the best Japanese releases of the last ten years and a film whose eye-popping colours are sure to be well-serviced by the Blu-Ray format. The extra disk space hasn’t been wasted either – one of the special features is me interviewing the composer Gabriele Roberto, in which you can find out how an Italian musician came to be in Tokyo writing soundtracks for Japanese films.

Third Window Films enters the Blu-Ray market, with the upcoming release of Memories of Matsuko, featuring an interview with composer Gabriele Roberto by me

And this takes me finally to a batch of films put out by Eureka last year. I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it again, but the Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray-only release of Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods was the home-viewing highpoint of 2010, and probably the previous couple of years too. You can read my review of the film on Midnight Eye for why I think this is, but for I wanted to say that for those who felt left out by this Blu-Ray exclusive, 2011 offers some great news – it’s also coming out on DVD in a couple of weeks.

I can't praise this film enough. Shohei Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods, on BluRay only last year, now coming to 2010

This is the same story for a number of other Eureka releases too, some of which I will cover in due course either on Midnight Eye or this website. Basically, the Blu-Rays of Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp, FW Murnau’s City Girl, Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow are all coming out on DVD very soon, so if you don’t have a Blu-Ray player yet, you’ll still get a chance to watch them, and if you do – well, take advantage while they’re going cheap on Amazon!

Murnau's City Girl (1930), one of the Nosferatu/Faust/Sunrise/Tabu director's best, according to many of those in the know

By the way, I’d like this site to be as much a forum for discussion about films as me thrusting my own views, opinions and tastes upon you, so if you’ve any DVD or Blu-Ray recommendations of your own, don’t be afraid to chime in.

Posted at 12:36 on 19 January 2011 Filed under news.
5  
26
Jul
Eureka, we’ve got it! The longest version of Metropolis to date and other Lang stories…

Shinsedai now over and done with, and even though I wasn’t even there for it (though will be posting my distant observations sometime in the next few days), I’ve been taking a bit of a break from Japanese film over the past few weeks. Instead, as if casting my mind back to my week of adventures in April spent stranded in Frankfurt due to the volcano smoke, I’ve been reminding myself of the many joys of German cinema with a spate of late nights spent in front of the TV with my newborn son, loafing on the sofa bleary eyed during the small with bottle in hand (not mine, I might add, and nothing stronger than milk) and introducing him to the joys of Werner Herzog by way of the wonderful Encounters in the Natural World Blu-ray box set which, at the time of writing can be had for a mere 14.99 on Amazon.UK (a bargain not to be missed when you consider it’s been marked down from 54.99).

Brigitte Helm leads the excited charge in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)

However, I don’t want to talk about Herzog for the moment, but instead hark back further in time to when German cinema was quite incontestably (in my opinion) the best in the world. Admittedly, this was over 80 years ago, but during the silent era no studio ever bridged the gap between art and commerce as successfully as the Berlin-based UFA, or to give it it’s full name, the Universum Film AG. UK distributors Eureka have already left an indelible glow in my heart due to their peerless releases of Japanese films such as Humanity and Paper Balloons, Face of Another, House, which I reviewed for Sight and Sound in March of this year, and more recently the Blu-ray of Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods, but their championing of some of the best German silent films through their Masters of Cinema label really clinches it for me.

After discovering the company hold a monthly sale on their website, I picked up one of these early releases, Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond (1929), or Woman in the Moon, a couple of months back. Now, I’m not as familiar with the work of Fritz Lang as perhaps I should or want to be. I’d always considered him as playing slightly a second fiddle to UFA’s most celebrated genius, F.W. Murnau. This favouritism is no doubt more than a little coloured by Murnau’s premature demise in circumstances that have given rise to much mythologising, as well as leaving us wondering how the director of such macabre silent classics as Nosferatu and Faust might have fared during the sound era. Despite his sizeable output, Murnau perhaps didn’t have the same amount of time on this earth to put a foot wrong. Still, on the evidence of this film, to champion one at the expense of another isn’t entirely fair. What Murnau did with light and shadow, one might say, Lang did with line and form. The stories Lang told, which during this period were scripted by his then wife Thea von Harbou from her own novels, are less primal perhaps, but reward deeper analysis, and his work really sowed the seeds of cinema’s core genres – take for example, the secret-surveillance world of the Dr Mabuse films or his hugely influential spy-thriller Spione (1928).

Fritz Lang’s curiously overlooked Frau im Mond (1929), or Woman in the Moon

I’m going to write more about Murnau at a later date, but for now, lets focus on Lang, whose best known work is, of course, his epic imagining of the city of the future, Metropolis (1927), a title that any serious film fan worth their salt will have seen at least once, and apparently the first ever work of cinema to be listed by the UNESCO Memory of the World as an essential cultural artifact. Serious film fans will soon want to be giving it a second look too, as they’ll know doubt be aware that it has come in for some substantial restoration and is due to be released with an extra 25 minutes worth of footage believed lost to the world for over 80 years, only unearthed recently in Argentina, of all places. This recent discovery of the dusty old 16mm dupe negative at the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires is nothing short of miraculous, and really raises ones hope that all those thousands of other titles believed no longer extant have at least some slim chance of turning up again somewhere in time. (As a quick aside, the BFI has just begun a season of “Elusive British films previously thought to be lost” entitled Long Live Film: BFI Most Wanted, which will be screening at the Southbank until 20 August). Anyway, the full story of the Metropolis restoration can be read about on the website, and the new version will be going out across the UK and Ireland from 10 September this year, with a DVD and Blu-ray to follow.

Visions of the future, in Lang's Metropolis (1927)

I was lucky enough, on one of my rare forays outside the house recently, to be invited to a press screening where I got my first glimpse of this new version. My first impression was just how clear the familiar footage, projected in this case from DVD, looked in this restoration. Its modernist designs looked so fresh, so pristine, it is almost impossible to imagine that the film was made 83 years ago. The older footage was understandably less clean, although it was integrated into the film perfectly, and while it was easy to see the joins, this didn’t distract from the viewing experience at all. In summary though, you’re pretty much getting a totally different experience watching this more complete version (there’s a few fragments still considered lost to the world), with at least one sub-story emerging into significant with the re-fleshing of the bare bones, and even the odd re-instated reaction shots giving a wholly different emphasis to key scenes.

The new restored Metropolis goes out across the UK and Ireland in September

The most head-scratching piece of the puzzle for me is that, given how timelessly classic this film is, how did we ever get in the situation where almost a quarter of the footage ended lost in the first place? The basic story is that after its premiere in Berlin on 10 January 1927 in the original 4189-metre director’s cut, Metropolis was released in the USA in a version heavily butchered by Paramount, with the intertitles rewritten, characters’ names changed, and large segments excised. Back in Germany, on 26 August the original was withdrawn and reissued in a similarly truncated 3241-metre version. The complete version of the film hasn’t been since, but at least on 10 September 2010, the general public will be as close to witnessing Lang’s full original as anyone has ever been over the past 83 years.

Wage slaves - the future labour force that keeps Metropolis ticking along

Frau im Mond was Lang’s last silent film and his second and final stab at science fiction after Metropolis (despite the title, his 1955 Moonfleet was actually about smugglers). It takes a radically different approach to its better known counterpart, more rip-roaring space opera than rigorous social allegory. Stripping the plot down to its basics, it portrays a group of benevolent scientists who create a space rocket only to find their efforts literally hijacked by a cartel of greedy capitalists who wish to co-opt their invention for their own nefarious ends, to gain access to the wealth of gold ore conjectured to exist on the dark side of the moon. There’s a bit of a sexual tension on the good guys’ side, with the female astronaut Friede (the “woman in the moon” of the title) the axis of attention among her two male rivals, and a rocket-obsessed 11-year-old boy also hops along for the ride.

Lang's final silent film and final foray into science fiction, Frau im Mond

At 163 minutes (as it plays on the Eureka disk), Frau im Mond is perhaps a rather lengthy undertaking, especially given that the first half is given over entirely to setting up the characters prior to their launch into space. It never bored me though. Again, I really savoured the modernist Art deco designs, even in the earthbound sequences. The general air of quaintness reminded me a little of the Tintin comic book Destination Moon from 1953, while the science behind the fiction was particularly intriguing, drawing heavily upon the writings of a certain Professor Hermann Oberth, a school master and amateur physicist who published heavily in the field of theoretical rocket science. The short documentary included on the Eureka disk is full of all sorts of fascinating insights. Frau im Mond included the first ever 10-9-8-7… countdown sequence, adopted by NASA for their first successful space rocket launch some 30 years laters, and the rocket technology underpinning it was considered so realistic that the film was subsequently banned by the Nazi party, who were then researching missile technology for military means, resulting in the V-2 long distance rocket that entered production in 1943. After the war, a large number of German rocket scientists were recruited by NASA to assist in their space programme.

Who needs a helmet? A moon landing as imagined in 1929, in Lang's Frau im Mond

But there are also other things – the film portrays how the characters are effected by the weightlessness of space, at a time long before anyone had ventured into the upper atmosphere, yet not its airlessness, allowing them to bounce about on the moon’s surface without helmets and oxygen tanks. The costly flop of Metropolis explains why the production values look a little slimmed down, with the moon basically little more than a painted backdrop, although this adds a certain retro something to proceedings, and invokes memories of the Georges Méliès proto-science fiction adventure film, A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) from 1902.

So while you’re waiting to reacquaint yourself with the Metropolis restoration, I heartily recommend you take a look at this lesser-known work, which might not have the same epic status, but is highly enjoyable and just as thought-provoking in its own right.

Posted at 14:41 on 26 July 2010 Filed under news.
3