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List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: TUVALU (1999)

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Tuvalu has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made. Please visit the official Certified Weird entry. Comments on this post are closed.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Chulpan Khamatova, Terrence Gillespie, Philippe Clay, Catalina Murgea

PLOT: Can a picturesque but dilapidated Turkish bathhouse pass a government inspection, and can love between a poolboy and a female patron flourish after the girl’s father is killed when a piece of the crumbling ceiling falls on him?

Still from Tuvalu (1999)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Stylized to the T’s and set in a bleak world where crumbling Romanesque baths sit in fields of rubble, Tuvalu shows all the right cinematic influences and has the instinctual organic oddness necessary to be canonized in the halls of weirdness. In fact, it falls short of making the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies on the first ballot by as slim a margin as is possible. Visually, Tuvalu is a stunner; it only falls short of classic status due to a stiff storyline. While it’s hard to imagine 250 or so more impressive weird movies to make the list ahead of this one, we’re going to hold back for the moment and hold out hope we do locate them; if not, we expect Tuvalu will be back to take up the slack.

COMMENTS: Stylistically, Tuvalu takes its cue from the weird world of , in more ways than one. Director Veit Helmer challenges himself to tell the story with the minimum amount of dialogue possible; only names and very occasional words (“no!,” “technology!”) are spoken. Remarkably, from the context, the characters convey almost as much information to us just by saying each others’ names with the proper inflection, and the story is effectively told entirely on the visual level. The color scheme is 1920s monochrome, sepias for indoor scenes and steel gray for exteriors, with a brief explosion of color appearing in the rambunctious storybook hand-tinting of the fantasy scenes. There are ample references to , too, with certain sequences cranked-up Keystone Kops style, and put-upon poolboy Anton (craggy-faced Lavant) constantly scurrying about his family’s Turkish bath putting out fires started by the eccentric denizens of this timeless movie-caricature world. More recent Tuvaluan influences come from famed French fantasists (in the rapturously baroque Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: TUVALU (1999) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: PINA (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Wim Wenders

FEATURING: Pina Bausch

PLOT: A selection of modern dances from avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch, interspersed

Still from Pina (2011)

with tributes from the dancers who worked with her and presented in 3D.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Pina Bausch invented weird dances, but filming them (even in 3D) doesn’t make a weird movie, just a movie about people performing weird dances.

COMMENTS: German choreographer Pina Bausch died unexpectedly just before Wim Wenders began principal photography on Pina; whatever profile of the working artist he might originally have planned, the film became instead a eulogy. Because Bausch believed that movement was itself a language that could express emotional truths impossible to say with language, it’s fitting that almost none of her words remain in the film but that her life is instead told through her abstract dances. (What quotes we do have are mostly platitudes for the comfort and inspiration of her dancers: “dance, dance, otherwise we are lost”). It begins with a semi-conventional staging of Stravinsky’s still-shocking “The Rites of Spring,” with pagan maidens anxiously swaying in nude-colored nightgowns until the high priest selects the unlucky gal destined to dance herself to death to ensure a good harvest. That’s as comfortably classical and representational as things get. When we move into Bauch’s own imagination, we encounter a dreamlike café where blind women crash into the walls, a ballet performed in the pouring onstage rain beside a giant craggy rock, and a woman who walks onto a train cradling a pillow and silently connects with a passenger wearing donkey ears. Next to a muddy lake, a hunched woman bears a sleeping man on her back, while further in the background another lady marches along with a tree growing out of her spine. Limp dancers manipulated like puppets by others are a repeating theme; for example, there’s one sequence where a man carefully positions two comatose lovers, placing the woman’s arm around the man’s neck and then hoisting her into his arms, but she always slips off and he repeats his manipulations over and over, performing the futile ritual faster and faster each time until he’s almost a blur on the screen. Dances from four of Bausch’s major works are recreated; Wenders sometimes pours the action out of the theater and into the streets of Wuppertal. A few shorter pieces were created for the film by her disciples in Pina’s surreal style. The stagings and costumes are minimalist but always evocative and interesting; color schemes are intense and dramatic. The musical accompaniment is tasteful, eclectic and melodic, ranging from the expected classical chestnuts (Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky) through jazz (Louis Armstrong) and Portuguese fado to moody modern avant-rock and electronica. I didn’t go into Pina as a fan of modern dance, and I didn’t come out one; but, even though the non-narrative feature did become a bit repetitive at 100 minutes, I’m glad I spent the time getting to know the woman and her craft. I don’t think Pina will spark the same interest in its esoteric subject as Wenders’ The Buena Vista Social Club did in Cuban music, but it’s impossible to come away unimpressed by the grace, dedication and creativity of the dancers, or by the love and respect that went into composing this tribute to Pina’s life work.

Though sometimes promoted as the first 3D documentary, fellow German  beat Wenders to the punch (at least by release date) with his equally weighty Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). When I watched Cave on a flat screen, I was convinced that, by not having seen it in 3D as intended, I was missing out on crucial visual textures. But (although I know I’ll be in the minority here), having caught Pina in a theater in all three of its intended dimensions, now I’m not convinced that 3D technology can ever add anything to a film’s visuals but a touch of novelty. The human brain automatically adds depth to a flat image, making 3D effects superfluous. Pina‘s dancers didn’t seem richer or more real to me simply because they were superficially curvier and stood out a bit from the background. In fact, they looked artificial and unnatural, in that peculiar way only modern computer-generated effects produce. The ersatz hyperreality of 3D may perform a weirdening function by enhancing the oddness of Pina’s otherworldly compositions, however.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Pina’s power comes from the way Wenders uses that illusion of living, flexing proximity to immerse you in Bausch’s dreamlike, emotionally vertiginous world. Watching Pina is like being inside one of Bausch’s surreal pieces.”–Jordan Levin, The Miami Herald (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: GIORGIO MORODER PRESENTS METROPOLIS (1927/1984)

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DIRECTED BY: /(version prepared by Giorgio Moroder)

FEATURING: Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge

PLOT: Freder, son of the man who rules Metropolis, discovers the plight of the subterranean workers who make the city run when he falls in love with a proletarian female preacher; his new lover is replaced by a robotic imposter who intends to lead the workers to ruin.

Still from Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is a powerful candidate for the List, but Giorgio Moroder’s Metropolis isn’t.  Kino’s 2010 “Complete Metropolis” restoration is now the definitive version of the film; Moroder’s re-imagining, with its synth-pop soundtrack and vocal intrusions by 1980s rock acts like Loverboy, Bonnie Tyler and Pat Benetar, is a curiosity.

COMMENTS:  Set in a massive, mostly underground city that’s equal parts Futurist dreamscape and Babylonian pleasure garden, Metropolis is an unqualified, iconic Expressionist masterpiece, and if you want to turn down the sound and watch it while listening to Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga mp3s, that’s not going to destroy its visual splendor.  Whatever questionable choices “Flashdance… What a Feeling!” composer Giorgio Moroder may have made with the proto-techno soundtrack that he added to this restoration (more on that score later), this Metropolis looks like it’s been struck from a pristine print, and it’s as feverishly hallucinatory as any other version.  The decision to tint most of the scenes works wonderfully (and may even have reflected Lang’s original wishes; tinting was not at all uncommon in 1927).  The colorization is tasteful and intelligent, with scenes on the surface bathed in radiant sepia, while the underground sequences utilize shadowy shades of steel blue and grey.  This process retains the film’s monochromatic scale, simply shifting the palette towards the blue or the amber spectrum.  Moroder added additional color effects for a few scenes; some of the equipment in mad scientist Rotwang’s laboratory glows with electricity, and when he transforms his robot into the image of Maria, the automaton’s eyes shine with an inhuman, metallic blue glint.  Because some segments of Metropolis were lost, Moroder also Continue reading CAPSULE: GIORGIO MORODER PRESENTS METROPOLIS (1927/1984) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: BEDWAYS (2010)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: R. Kahl

FEATURING: Miriam Mayet, Matthias Faust, Lana Cooper

PLOT: A female director wants to make an experimental erotic film, but never actually gets

Still from Bedways (2010)

beyond rehearsal.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The only list Bedways will ever make it on is a list of the most sleep-inducing films about sex.

COMMENTS: In movie within the Bedways movie, director Nina has started to make an erotic film with two actors, no script, and no idea what she might want to say.  That’s less a plot hook and more autobiographical confession for this confusing, meandering movie with dull dialogue that frequently seems improvised.    As far as weirdness goes, well, the characters actions are sometimes inexplicable and unmotivated—out of nowhere director Nina slaps actor Hans in the face, which leads to not to angry recriminations and saucy drama, but to a bout of friendly play-wrestling.  The film also tries to be really meta and confuse us about whether we’re just watching actors playing actors, or actors playing actors playing roles (as the promo material puts it, “the boundaries between acting and reality begin to disappear”).  Often, it’s unclear whether the actors are discussing real life events, or rehearsing scenes for the film—but that effect is mainly achieved by filming generic, banal conversations (“are you going on the ski trip this weekend?”)  All this disconnectedness led to a strange effect: I had no feelings whatsoever for these characters.  It’s not that I disliked them; disliking them would have been a pleasant diversion.  I felt about them the same way I do about my neighbor three doors down whose name I don’t know and whose face I can’t place.  Other than the fact that they have normal, healthy sex drives, and that pensive Nina doesn’t know what to make of that fact, I had no idea who any of these three people were or what they want from life.  I suppose, perhaps, that inspiring complete neutrality towards your characters is an interesting trick: not even the best, and not even the worst, directors can pull it off this consistently.  Bedways also demonstrates the old saw that it’s easy to take the fun out of sex when you over-think it.  Sure, there’s plenty of rutting in dingy Berlin locations—one brief bout of penetration and a much longer explicit female masturbation scene amidst tons of softcore posturing—but, this being an art film that feels the need to justify its prurient interests, the hot action is frequently interrupted by characters wondering about God’s existence, quoting Foucalt, or watching an industrial dance band with a lead singer who strikes bizarre poses that may make you spontaneously cry out, “Now is the time on ‘Sprockets’ when we dance!”  Any fires of passion that the movie might stir within you are quickly doused by a cold shower of pretension.  The movie wants to ask serious questions about the nature of film, such as “must movies always be about something?” and “is it possible that cinema is just a masturbatory medium for the director?”  Unfortunately, Bedways answers both these questions in the affirmative.  The unfinished, untitled movie-within-the-movie has one big advantage over Bedways: it never got made.

Bedways was barely released as it is, and I feel safe in saying that if there were no explicit sex in this movie, it would never have seen the light of day.  In a bit of ironic foreshadowing, actress Marie complains that if she actually masturbates while Nina films her, then it won’t be acting.  Actors who are willing to go this far and expose themselves this intimately deserve to appear in projects that will actually help their careers.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A worthy attempt to merge the worlds of art house and erotic cinema … blurs the definition of erotic cinema by giving us a well-crafted and incredibly dramatic film with some penetrating sex thrown in.”–Don Simpson, Jesther Entertainment (DVD)

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

PAUL LENI’S WAXWORKS (1924)

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Kino International included ‘s 1924 Waxworks in its German Horror Classics collection.  While the usual Kino craftsmanship has gone into remastering and merchandising, the inclusion of Leni’s breakthrough film is a bit of a misclassification.  Waxworks is not a “horror” film.  It is representative of what may possibly be the most experimental period in the medium of film: German .  This style exploded with Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which turned out to be an even more influential film than D.W. Giffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915).

Leni was among the apprentice filmmakers and artisans profoundly influenced by Caligari. That inspiration came to fruition in the anthology film Waxworks (screenplay by Henrik Galeen, also responsible for Golem-1920 and Nosferatu-1922). Leni’s breakthrough film is no mere carbon copy of Caligari.  Indeed, Waxworks is something of a yardstick for what an anthology film should be. (later an esteemed director whose credits include 1937’s Life of Emile Zola, the superior 1939 remake of Hunchback of Notre Dame, and 1940’s Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet) plays several characters, including the poet hired to write an article about wax figures of historical tyrants in a sideshow museum.  This framing sequence segues into a fantastic, carnivalesque omnibus.  In the first segment, plays Al-Raschid.  In this introductory Caliph vignette, Leni’s design work with Max Reinhardt is at its most impressive and expansive.  The ambiance is, paradoxically, both larger than life and remarkably introverted.  Fanciful, intricate roads wind and turn, leading to the Caliph’s aberrant belfry.  Gloom-laden canvases, crackling signs, and a towering wheel are remnants of a spidery, crepuscular  bacchanal.  Caligari‘s design is comparatively static next to this fluid, humorous, and transcendental Arabian tale.

Still from Waxworks (1924) gives a harrowing, anemic performance as Ivan the Terrible.  Angular and clammy, this segment is a paranoid fable which ends with a stark, memorable scene of the scourged despot forever turning the hour glass, convinced of his fate (death by poisoning).  Leni’s use of Eastern Orthodox iconography, inhabiting a shadowy world, is refreshingly and expressively idiosyncratic.  Helmar Lerski’s cinematography, which proved to be a considerable influence on Eistenstein, aggrandizes Ivan’s maniacal state.

The Jack the Ripper finale has been much discussed and is more a sketch than a climax. plays the infamous Whitechapel serial killer who dominates the shadows, blade in hand, awaiting the poet and his lover.  This surreal whisper was originally intended to lead into a fourth narrative based off Vulpius’ “Rinaldo Rinaldini.”  Although the dreaded captain’s wax likeness can be seen in several scenes, budget restraints forced that narrative to be deleted.

After Waxworks, Hollywood beckoned.  Considering what was to follow in Hitler’s Germany, Leni’s departure from his homeland may have saved the Jewish artist, but, most cruelly, fate prematurely deprived him, and us, of his life and art.