Jasper Sharp : Masters of Cinema

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11
Aug
The London Riots and Asian Cinema

You’ve probably heard all about the riots in London. They’ve been rather difficult to ignore, especially if, like me, you live in Peckham. In fact, there are police sirens periodically blaring outside my window as I write this post. It is mainly for this reason I’ve not had a chance to write a little about my experiences at the New Horizons Festival in Wroclaw, which I hope to do over the next few days. I say “mainly”, because actually much of last week was spent either catching up with the huge volume of work that has accumulated over the past few months or recovering from the hellish ordeal of getting back from Poland to London due to staggering ineptitude of LOT Polish Airlines, as those who follow me on either Twitter or Facebook may well know. Anyway, I won’t go into further details. Suffice it to say, I’ve travelled on some pretty shitty airlines on my time, but…

Peckham, the day after the riots

Back to the riots. Well, I don’t intend to add too much to the endless debate and conjecture about what has caused them, who is responsible etc, because this is a subject that has already been knocked about considerably in the nation’s media over the past few days, and it will no doubt dominate the national discourse for the rest of the year, at the very least. Besides, I don’t think I could put things much better than Seumus Milne in yesterday’s ‘These riots reflect a society run on greed and looting’ article in The Guardian, or the ‘Panic on the streets of London’ piece on Penny Red’s blogspot from Tuesday. I include these links mainly to record them for posterity, as something to look back on in the future when we’ve had a chance to get a little more perspective. Personally, my own feelings are whatever the ‘explanations’ for the huge amount of criminal damage that has been caused by the rioters, no one is ever going to convince me as to their justification.

A crime scene reconstruction in Lego of the Gregg's conflagration by my friend's 8-year old daughter

On my daily walks down Rye Lane in Peckham these past few mornings, I can’t help but think about the sheer pointlessness of the damage, the utterly emptiness of the gesture. If this was an act of defiance from a disenfranchised generation, then it was a pretty pathetic one and aimed in totally the wrong direction. Peckham is hardly the wealthiest community in London. Rye Lane already has its fair share of empty shop premises, with numerous others in the process of holding closing-down or liquidation sales. The street’s most iconic local pub, The Hope, closed a few months back and has now been replaced as a betting shop – oh the irony! The rest of the street mainly consists of privately owned African or Caribbean grocery stores or, in the case of Rye Lane’s major casualty on Monday, an off licence situated next to Gregg’s Bakery, now being demolished after it was completely gutted by fire. The looters were reduced to pilfering from stores such as Poundland, Poundstretchers, Mighty Pound, 99p Stores and Primark. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic, the sheer banality of evil.

Messages of peace and solidarity on the boarded up window of Poundland in Rye Lane, a scene that provoked a surprising emotional response in me

Still, out of the ashes, something positive already seems to be emerging, a more genuine sense of community spirit, a refusal to let the area be destroyed from rogue elements within. I’m certain Peckham will bounce back, although the detour I now have to take through the council estates round the back of Rye Lane while taking my son to his nanny do demonstrate what many have already pointed out in the media – that for all this talk about ‘Big Society’ motivating the government spending cuts, a complete different world seems exists outside of the daily experience of so many of us, where people live in cramped little estates with no money, no education, no jobs, no hope. One wonders how what is allegedly one of the richest countries in the world ever allowed things to come to this.

The sheer randomness of the devastation was brought home to movie fans with the news of the destruction of the Sony/Pias distribution warehouse in Enfield, North London, about which I tweeted news from Gigwise and The Guardian back on Tuesday and Screen Daily the next morning. The warehouse, owned by the UK’s largest independent home entertainment distributor, Pias, was razed to the ground, and with it the entire stock of a large number of DVD labels – and not major labels, but the kind of independent companies that, without which, the UK film market would be a desert: Arrow Films, the British Film Institute, Dogwoof, Artificial Eye, Palisades Tartan…

Sony distribution warehouse fire. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

Among these I’d like to offer my particular condolences to Terracotta Distribution and Third Window Films, two tiny labels run by friends of mine, Joey Leung and Adam Torel respectively, without whom the UK film scene would be an infinitely poorer place. These aren’t big companies; these are one man enterprises operating on a lot of love and not a lot of capital, releasing films they believe in and actively engaging with their audiences through events such as the Terracotta Far East Film Festival and East Winds: A Third Window Festival – Joey kindly let us have Terracotta’s Big Tits Zombie 3D for our Zipangu Fest Halloween Schlockfest double bill last year, while Adam gave us Confessions of a Dog for our closing film of the festival. Also Eureka have similarly been a wonderful energising force for me, with their brilliant releases of Japanese classics through their Masters of Cinema label, and Dogwoof too have built up an impressive roster of cutting edge documentaries that have spread beyond their niche markets and enriched the wider political discourse in Britain. And let us not also forget the large number of indie music labels who have similarly suffered immense losses due to this one incident. Let us pray the perpetrator of this arson attack is brought to justice as soon as possible.

Small distribution companies like these already have the odds stacked against them in the UK due to the deeply-ingrained winner-takes-all economic imbalances of the country’s entertainments market, the lack of support from the mainstream media, and the hefty premium required by the BBFC just to get films into distribution in the first place. Regardless of whether the substantial losses of the stock from all of these companies will be covered by their insurance or not, the biggest problem they all face at the moment is one of cashflow. To get a better idea of the problems facing small distributors such as these, check out this post on Third Window’s Facebook page – Basically once their stock that is already in stores across the country or held by online retailers runs out, that’s it – there’s nothing to replace it until they manufacture more units, which in itself is a costly business.

Third Window Film's release of Villain (Akunin) opens at the ICA next week

So I wish to end this post by adding my voice to the chorus of support for these companies, and in particular urge you to go to and see Third Window’s latest release of Villain (Akunin) when it opens in London next Friday at the ICA. There’s a lot more details about all this and how you can help in John Berra’s ‘Support Independent Distributors of Asian Cinema Following UK Riots’ article for VCinemashow and this post on Podcast on Fire, but basically it all boils down to this: show them you care by ordering their films from Amazon, or watching them online on Mubi.com. Don’t let the riots destroy our outlets for quality independent cinema.

Here are some links:

Third Window’s Amazon store

Third Window and Terracotta films available online at Mubi.com posted by Martin Cleary at New Korean Cinema.

Right, I’m off to Amazon to pick up my Cold Fish BluRay…

Posted at 15:46 on 11 August 2011 Filed under news.
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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.
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12
Aug
Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet on Blu-Ray

Now on Blu-Ray, Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973)

Up until a couple of months ago you’d have been hard pressed to explain to me the point or the necessity of getting a Blu-Ray player, but there’s been a number of releases recently that have made me change my mind about the new format. A good deal of these have come courtesy of the Eureka label, including the exclusive releases of F.W. Murnau’s City Girl, which I aim to cover on this site soon, and Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods, which I’ve just reviewed as part of the latest Midnight Eye update. The UK-based distributor is now also in the process of upgrading some of the more popular titles from its Masters of Cinema range to exploit the medium’s fuller possibilities, with July’s releases including another classic Imamura title, Vengeance is Mine, which I reviewed on Midnight Eye when the original DVD came out a number of years ago, and René Laloux’s trippy 1973 animation Fantastic Planet. I wrote something about this for Twitch when the DVD came out, but since the new Blu-Ray version is considerably expanded from this original release, I thought the best way to go was to present my original review here in a slightly re-edited version, with added comments pertaining to this reissue. Here goes, then…

Psychedelic French sci-fi from Rene Laloux

Back in 2006, Eureka was responsible for the UK DVD debut of René Laloux’s psychedelic animated sci-fi, Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage), which represented the first time the company had dipped their toes into the animation pool with their Masters of Cinema series, and it was particularly refreshing to see a company out there with the belief that animators are just as eligible for cinéastic canonisation as their live-action counterparts. Until then, there had been, and in fact still is really, a general tragic dearth of DVD releases of non-American or non-Japanese animation, and if anything Laloux’s 1973 Cannes Grand Prix winner serves to remind us of the rich tradition in European animation that bridges the gap between these two extremes.

It is almost de rigeur to cite Hayao Miyazaki’s seal of approval on any slightly off-centre animated release, but the claim on the cover blurb of the Blu-Ray and DVD that this adaptation of Stephan Wul’s novel ‘Oms en série’ “can be seen to prefigure much of the work” of the director of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away still seems pretty apt: it’s easy to spot more than a passing resemblance between this film’s depiction of two warring races battling it out in a hallucinogenic alien landscape of bizarre vegetation and strange buildings with that of Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind.

Rene Laloux provided an early influence for Miyazaki

The story charts the hostilities between the blue-skinned, red-eyed, web-eared Draags and the more traditionally humanoid but miniscule Oms (Nausicaa featured ‘Ohms’) with whom they share an antagonistic existence on the same planet of Ygam. One of the Om’s is plucked from his mother’s bosom as a baby by Draag girl Tiwa, re-christened Terr and raised as a pet. Tiwa is an indulgent keeper to Terr, nurturing him to adulthood and pumping him full of knowledge from the Draag’s shared information pool. The other Draags however, are complete shits, in one scene tying the hair of two tiny Oms together and forcing them to fight to untangle themselves. But soon Tiwa too becomes bored with her new plaything, allowing Terr to escape into the wild and share his knowledge with a tribe of wild Oms. But by this time the Draag’s are stepping up their plans to begin the merciless process of ‘de-omisation’ and rid the planet of their verminous competitors.

Oms vs. Draags

Blessed with an all-pervading psychotropic atmosphere and a wonderfully trippy soundtrack from Alain Goraguer’s not to dissimilar to the later work of Gallic retro-boppers Air, Fantastic Planet whisks you right back to the early 70s (the full soundtrack is included on the new Blu-Ray, a welcome addition, but I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to include it on a separate CD? If you want to listen to it now, you basically have to do so through your TV rather than a CD player, using up a lot of electricity and boosting your carbon footprint in the process. Maybe there’s a way around this, but I’ve yet to discover it). I hesitate to use the word ‘surreal’, because it has become so dulled by overuse as to become almost meaningless, but if there was an animated work that warranted such a label, it is this one. Be warned though – the drug-inspired and often highly sexualised designs complete with images of bare-breasted aliens will probably deter the more Victorian-minded from presenting this to their pre-teens as a Disney substitute. This is definitely one to be filed under the category of “adult art animation”.

Included on the Blu-Ray is Alain Goraguer's gloriously retro soundtrack

That said, it is also doubtful whether most modern-day adults will pick up on the underlying metaphor. The humanoid ‘Oms’ and the domineering Draags were regarded at the time as a allegory for the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslavakia, although in this respect it is also worth quoting from Craig Keller’s brilliant essay ‘The Schizophrenic Cinema of René Laloux’, contained in the disk’s accompanying booklet, which makes the astute comment that “One might reflect on the connotations inherent to names like Terr (“terre” is French for “earth”), Oms (“hommes” = “men,” “mankind”), and Draags (“drogues” = “drugs”), although searching for a more complex allegorical interplay between these three referents is unlikely to result in anything that can be said to scan sensibly.” The film was in fact a French-Czech co-production made at Jiri Trnka’s studios in Prague (where the Japanese stop-motion puppet animator Kihachiro Kawamoto also served an apprenticeship earlier in the decade – in fact, as much as Terry Gilliam’s animated interludes for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Laloux’s film bears a distinct similarity in ambience and design to Kawamoto’s collage animation The Trip (Tabi), which also critiqued the Soviet invasion). In marked contrast to Kawamoto’s happy experiences in Prague however, the five years it took to complete Fantastic Planet were allegedly something of nightmare for the French animator, who was almost ousted from the director’s chair by various Czech rivals during the production.

Don't mess with Draags, kids

All of this information, and a good deal more regarding Laloux’s background and that of his collaborator, the illustrator-musician-writer-filmmaker Roland Topor, is contained in one of Eureka’s customarily informative colour booklets, which at 56 pages is now double the size of the one included with the original DVD release. The Blu-Ray package also expands on the number of Laloux’s other short films from the two included first time round (his 1965 cut-out collaboration with Topor, Les Escargots, and a really intriguing cel-animated piece created long after his association with the illustrator had ended, this time realised with the staff of Pyongyang animation studios in 1987, entitled Comment Wang-Fo Fut Sauvé) to five.

Classic animated surrealism, Les Escargots (1965)

The first of these shorts to be included, Les Dents du Singe (1960), is a real treat. Basically, the story of how Laloux got into the world of animation is pretty weird in its own right. He actually started off working at La Borde Psychiatric Clinic in Cour-Cheverny in 1956, a sort of progressive lunatic asylum in which the inmates were encouraged to participate in creative activities as part of their treatment. Laloux oversaw the first of these, Tic-Tac (1957), a live-action shadow puppet theatre in the vein of Lotte Reiniger and filmed in 16mm monochrome that somehow ended up on French television. This was followed by his first colour film Les Achalunés, shot using backlit pieces of tinted glass. Sadly, neither of these are included on the disk, although clips from Tic-Tac appear in the 27-minute French documentary from 2003 entitled Laloux Sauvage, in which Laloux gets to tell his bizarre life-story firsthand. Anyway, Les Dents du Singe (1960) was the last such collaboration with the clinic’s inmates, and the one that effectively propelled him into a new phase in his artistic career, marked by his fruitful association with Roland Topor.

Well, there’s clearly a lot to be said about Laloux’s idiosyncratic output, so I’d advise anyone interested to check out this great new release of a truly wonderful film. I ended my review of Eureka’s first DVD of this film in 2006 thus: “Having gorged myself on the contents of this beautiful disk several times now, I am left with an overwhelming appetite to see more of Laloux’s mesmerizing work in the animation field. His 1988 feature Gandahar sounds really intriguing… Anyone at Eureka listening?” Well, whether they were listening specifically to me or not (probably not, let’s face it), Eureka did end up releasing a DVD of Laloux’s final animated feature (btw, not only was Gandahar also animated in North Korea, but equally bizarrely, a certain Bob Weinstein is credited as the producer of the English-laguage version), and also his 1982 feature Les Maîtres du Temps. Perhaps these will be due for a Blu-Ray upgrade soon too?

Stephan Wul's novel of Fantastic Planet now published in English by Creaton Books

As a quick postscript, I should mention that Stephan Wul’s 1957 novel on which Lalous based his animation is now available in an English-language translation from Creation Books. There’s a bit of info on Wul in the Blu-Ray booklet too. Apparently his primary profession was not as a science fiction writer, but as a dentist, a profession which he found considerably more lucrative despite the high regard his stories were held in (although let’s face it, no one is talking about the quality of his root canal work now, are they).

Posted at 16:55 on 12 August 2010 Filed under news.
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