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DIRECTED BY: Aleksey Fedorchenko
FEATURING: Nadezhda Smirnova, Yana Esipovich, Roman Mishin
PLOT: A series of vignettes depicting aspects of Mari culture, each revolving around a different female figure whose name starts with “O.”
COMMENTS: Aleksey Fedorchenko is perhaps one of the most creative and widely known auteurs in contemporary Russian arthouse cinema. His works Silent Souls (2010), Celestial Wives (2012), and Angels of Revolution (2014) form an atypical trilogy about Russian ethnic minorities, focusing on the Merja, the Mari, and the Khanty, respectively. The ethnographic and folkloristic approach is apparent even from the title.
Celestial Wives is a collection of short tales and micro-fiction written by Russian writer Denis Osokin, a close collaborator of Fedorchenko’s. A short prologue welcomes us to a pagan society where magical thinking governs people’s lives. The following series of vignettes deal with sexuality, our relationship to our bodies, and rituals. Fedorchenko puts women at the forefront, hinting at a matriarchal society; each tale focuses on a different female, her name always starting with “O”—a playful twist on the literary and musical form of the theme and variations. Each chapter takes its title from its homonymous heroine.
“Odocha” and “Onalcha” explore ideas of the sacred and acts of blasphemy. Through ritualistic acts, “Osylay” and “Ormarche” offer glimpses into Mari society’s relationship with Thanatos and Eros. Other segments focus on a destigmatized view of sexuality and the human—especially female—body. And then there are a few chapters that turn away from the purely anthropological, towards magical realist territory.
Here things become somewhat bizarre. Magical realism, often thought of as the mildest form of surrealism, is the most expressive way to translate an animistic worldview into visual language. “Oropti” and “Oshalyak” are the most notable examples of this stylistic shift. Demonic entities and evil curses appear on screen, not only as part of people’s beliefs, but as real phenomena.
All in all, this is ethnographic cinema with elements of magical realism. The short form episodes add an anecdotal style reminiscent of oral narrative traditions, while carefully composed shots enhance the pervasive lyricism. If you love poetic international cinema as a window on different cultures, you will enjoy this experience. But it won’t satiate the hunger for strangeness that hardcore fans of the weird seek.
PLOT: A look inside the troubled mind of a teenage girl who is dealing with a hostile school atmosphere, emotionally hostile parents, a fixation on the cool new boy, a random drugged-out loser who may be the best friend she has, and the disappearance of her little brother.
COMMENTS: Split-screen photography has been a filmmaking tool almost since the beginning of the cinema. The technique took a giant leap, though, with the debut of filmmaker Christopher Chapman’s “A Place to Stand,” the groundbreaking short that he created as part of Canada’s Expo 67. Far from merely dividing the image in twain, Chapman developed a technique of isolating images and enabling them to move through the frame in concert with other images, like a moving mosaic. It was called “multi-dynamic image technique,” and it gained a foothold in popular culture a year later when Norman Jewison deployed it in The Thomas Crown Affair.
Maybe it’s a Canadian thing, because Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments may boast the most splits any screen has ever seen. The story of a girl whose mind is shattered by disaffection and tragedy (a simile Tracey employs in her first monologue) is suitably embodied by a narrative and a screen image that is similarly fractured. Humans are notorious for holding multiple viewpoints and emotional states at the same time, and the mosaic method allows the film to display all of them at once. Unexpressed rage and undelivered ripostes share space with silent pain and vast landscapes, while grids of pictures give way to clouds of dozens of images, sometimes with a sharp triangle piercing the frame. One particularly memorable image features Tracey in a desperate run for freedom, perfectly overlaid with shots of a horse in full gallop while the score by Broken Social Scene lays down an appropriately desperate groove. Rarely has the complexity of the mind, especially that of a teenager, been captured with such fidelity.
The Tracey Fragments is a technical marvel. The film supposedly took a month to film and nine more to assemble, and the work shows as McDonald, editors Jeremiah Munce and Gareth C. Scales, and sound designer Steve Munro create an impressively clear story out of a deliberately jumbled set of pieces. It’s frankly remarkable that it works as well as it does, given that Tracey’s story is pretty one-note. While her life does seem legitimately grim, the nonlinear approach represents her situation as an unchanging condition: disaffected teen girl, touched by tragedy, cast among the losers in high school, disdainful of her aggressively distant parents, and yearning for a bland boy who promises escape but evidently is a cruel, cavalier lover. (If we can believe what we see; our point of view is entirely Tracey’s.) It’s authentic, but it’s not dramatic.
This was Page’s first release following the starmaking breakthrough of Juno (although Tracey was shot first), and it solidifies the actor’s inclination toward challenging material. Page doesn’t always look as scruffy and homely as the character’s situation would suggest, and Tracey’s monologues sometimes feel inappropriately formal and clear-minded for a girl in such distress. The whole film rests on Page’s shoulders, though, and he carries it with confidence. Notably, some scenes have taken on a stranger veneer with the passage of time. One of Tracey’s tormentors verbally taunts her for her lack of perceived hot-girl femininity, calling her “It” and demanding, “Is It a boy or a girl?” Scenes with Tracey and her therapist are particularly odd, with the trans actor playing opposite Richings in drag in an ex post facto head-scratcher.
Split-screen is hardly an obscure technique. If you’ve seen any heist movie, you’ve probably been treated to a collage of lasers, hands, and beads of sweat. What distinguishes The Tracey Fragments is the way it gives the split-screen a psychological dimension. Instead of delivering information, it delivers character and mood. It’s not an entirely successful effort, as that mood has little chance to develop and grow. It does serve as a valuable reminder that all the cool things we can do with image and sound have the potential to do much more, if we give them a shot.
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Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon
DIRECTED BY: Jan Schmidt
FEATURING: Beta Poničanová, Ondrej Jariabek, Magda Seidlerová, Hana Vítková, Jana Novaková, Vanda Kalinová, Natalie Maslovová, Irena Lžičařová, Jitka Hořejšías
PLOT: In the wake of a nuclear apocalypse, a group of women wander the desolate landscape in search of life and sustenance, eventually discovering an old man living in the shattered remains of a hotel.
COMMENTS: There wasn’t a whole lot of software available for the early iterations of the Macintosh computer, but one of the more popular and memorable programs was a simulated game of diplomacy called “Balance of Power.” As leader of either the United States or the Soviet Union, you were tasked with responding to world events in a way that burnished your own country’s reputation and boxed out your opponent. Of course, this leads to political brinksmanship, with each escalation inching the two powers ever closer to the ultimate conflict. If you misjudged the situation, the game concluded with a black screen that provided a particularly chilling finale: “You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure.” It was a real gut-punch to a 15-year-old who only wanted to prevent the USSR from Finlandizing Austria.
I hearken back to this example of video game shaming because it matches the mood set by Late August at the Hotel Ozone. The suggestions of familiar tropes—the post-nuclear landscape, a group of young women fending for themselves, small traces of the world before—set expectations that this film is only too happy to crush. Director Schmidt crafts a stark future with a documentarian’s eye, depicting a world cleaved of hope, where even death loses its power to shock—because there’s nothing else left.
Most of the film is spent in the company of Dagmar, an older woman who recalls the times before the world ended and hopes there might be enough people left to rebuild humanity. In her charge are a group of young women who have learned the fundamentals of survival but have had little opportunity to develop their souls. They don’t say much, but their actions speak volumes. Finding a drum of petrol, they refill their canisters, but then one of them decides to set it on fire, for fun. Another takes the cache of bullets she has found and throws them into the flames, again for amusement. We’re quickly learning that life holds little allure to this group, something reflected in their treatment of animals. A girl rips apart a snake with her bare hands. Another teases a hungry stray dog before killing it with a bullet to the head. When they find a cow that they can kill for sustenance, the women tear at the flesh like ravenous hyenas. (The film’s lore says that none of these animal encounters are faked; if true, we’re also dealing with a snuff film.) Whatever rules we think society should have, they don’t matter here.
So stumbling across the old man at the hotel is like crossing a generational gap. Despite everyone around him having died, Hubert has persisted, maintaining the place in expectation of the day when guests will return as part of a pleasure trip. Dagmar and Hubert find some comfort in their shared experiences, and their very tastes mark them as alien. The girls are repulsed by the idea of drinking milk, and they are clearly baffled by the rituals of a dinner with silverware and candles. Reportedly, several of the performers were not professional actors (one account suggests they were members of the Czech military), and there’s something chilling about their sense of detachment. Hubert’s proudest possession, a Victrola with a recording of “Roll Out the Barrel,” is notable as the one thing that inspires something deeper in the women, a piece of art amidst the desolation. Naturally, it’s more important than life itself.
While the two old people are our connection to the familiar, the fact is that this is not their world. It belongs to the young women who have inherited the dying wasteland, and the violence that ends the film is woefully inevitable. This is an apocalypse for a reason, and this film takes the position that the world will not end with gut-wrenching action or even tear-stained melancholy, but rather with ignorance laced with id-fueled apathy. If we leave our children nothing, nothing is what they will take to their hearts. There will be no reward for failure.
FEATURING: Friedrich Haak, Hildegarde Watson, Dorthea House
PLOT: In ancient Sodom, young men revel in sensual choreography, inspiring the Lord’s anger.
COMMENTS: The first wave of the American cinematic avant-garde developed between 1919 and 1945. According to some of its pioneers, like Herman Weinberg, it encompasses everything except typical Hollywood productions. There is already a review of a compilation of American experimental films ranging from the movement’s early days till the 1970s on this site, which you can check it out if you are interested in learning more about this scene. It is in this context that we examine “Lot in Sodom.”
This short silent—only about thirty minutes in duration—combines a familiar Old Testament setting with a modernist stylistic approach, diffuse sensuality, and a heavy innuendo. The plot revolves around Lot and his wife, the only honest people in a town full of perverts immersed in immorality. But the narrative isn’t as important as the way it is used to create an atmosphere of depravity. Human—mostly male—bodies dance semi-naked across the screen. The camera is voyeuristic, eager to consume and fetishize their bodies. Along with an underlying hint of violence, “Lot” can be viewed as a predecessor of contemporary performance art in the vein of ” Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men” (1989) .
In the film’s latter half the female body makes its appearance, similarly sexualized. Through Latin intertitles comparing the woman to a temple and symbolic Bible imagery (a snake, white pigeons), the film implies a sexual climax and an immoral desecration of the female body.
The scenery, often quite pointy, is a tamer version of German Expressionism. High contrast black and white lighting, along with distorting effects that multiply figures and objects, create a collage-like, almost cubist aesthetic. Archaic techniques like rear projection and superposition are also used extensively for a similar purpose. When examined in the correct historical context, this work is transgressive and daring. There is a pretense of moralism here, however, which makes it feel a bit dated. “Lot in Sodom” remains important because of its unique stylistic approach, but today its audience is mostly technicians interested in the history of visual effects.
PLOT: Dr. Azuma uses experimental cell-regrowth technology to resurrect his son Tetsuya, transforming him into a reluctant superhero and inadvertently creating a group of rebellious new humanoids who are prepared to destroy all of humanity.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Ambitious to a fault, Casshern is glorious excess, ricocheting from elaborate action sequence to moody introspection and back again, all against one ornately decorated backdrop after another. Even in its most intimate moments, this is a film that aims big: in plot, in look, in performance.
COMMENTS: The year was 2004, and the digital backdrop was ready to make a splash. A quartet of films offered an early look at the green-screen extravaganza that would come to dominate the cineplex, each one of them in their own way showing a path to the future. One of them, Able Edwards, looks exactly like its $30,000 budget. Immortal captured our attention by emphasizing weird flourishes. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow opted for star power, plopping some of Hollywood’s biggest names in front of glorious sepia-toned Art Deco images and directly into the heart of one of the most boring movies ever projected. And then there’s Casshern, Japan’s entry in the digital sweepstakes and probably the film that best augurs the current state of the movies; creating a fusion of intense action, elaborately appointed CGI landscapes, and liberal doses of operatic philosophical discussions conducted with aching intensity. Each, in their own way, led us to “The Mandalorian.”
Casshern has so much plot. It’s adapted from a 1973 anime series and absolutely feels like it, with volumes of backstory condensed into short bursts amidst the action and impassioned reflection. For most films, the showdown between humanity and the new creatures it has unintentionally Frankenstein-ed into existence would be conflict enough. Shellshocked Tetsuya finds an appropriately flamboyant opponent in Burai, the white-haired leader of the Neo-Sapien revolution.The history here, however, just keeps going back and back: to Tetsuya’s father as the inventor of neo-cells, to the intractable war between the two great powers, to the coverup of the true origin of humanity. Sometimes, Casshern has so much it wants to explain that it feels like it’s retconning itself in real time.
It’s all very, very serious. Tetsuya and love-of-his-life Luna can barely take a moment for themselves without reckoning with all they have lost. The various powers manipulating the situation from behind the scenes are too bureaucratic and officious to waste a moment on mustache-twirling. Even Burai and his grand pronouncements of world destruction are weighted with pain and vengeance. You would think that dressing themselves in fabulous supervillain gear, donning a logo that looks like the Nazis co-opted a 45 rpm adapter, and stumbling with unbelievable serendipity into an old factory for constructing killer robots would merit at least a moment of wry acknowledgement. But no, there’s not a smile to be found.
Music-video veteran Kiriya puts together some spectacular set pieces, including a tense escape from a laboratory under heavy fire and an exciting sword duel on the grounds of a decimated city. He’s always careful to keep the story rooted in philosophical quandary, though, which means the film is wildly inconsistent in tone and pace. (Shiro Sagisu’s score, which often feels wildly out of sync with what’s happening on the screen, doesn’t not help.) What’s most curious about this mix of moods is that everything feels essential, but mismatched, as if two different takes on the same material had been stitched together. A North American edit supposedly tightens up the more philosophical sections (and reportedly makes the story less comprehensible in the process), but it’s hard to see how that would help. For all the introspective diversions, “too slow” really isn’t one of Casshern’s problems.
For a superhero film that, for its look and its weight, could sit comfortably alongside any number of MCU and DCU entries, Casshern is not particularly fun, but it is fascinating. If you wanted to show how an anime could become live action, this would be a strong point of comparison. If you wanted to demonstrate the full potential of digital set design to create impossible worlds, this film opens the door. If you just want to embellish familiar sci-fi settings with a layer of existential dread, this definitely does the trick. All these things and more are possible. However, you just might want to decide which of those things you want the most.
(This movie was nominated for review by Andrew Milne, who called it “utterly inscrutable and deliciously mad.” Andrew also recommended it to Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending, who got to his review long before we got to ours. Well played, Tim. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
