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Capsules, Shorts

CAPSULE: “MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1920-1970”

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DIRECTED BY: James Agee, , Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Rudy Burckhardt, Mary Ellen Bute, Joseph Cornell, Jim Davis, , Marcel Duchamp (as Rrose Selavy), Emlen Etting, Oskar Fischinger, Robert Florey, Amy Greenfield, Alexander Hammid, Hilary Harris, Hy Hirsh, Ian Hugo, Lawrence Janiak, Lawrence Jordan, Francis Lee, Fernand Léger, Owen Land, Helen Levitt, Jay Leyda, Janice Loeb, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Dudley Murphy, Ted Nemeth, Tom Palazzolo, Bruce Posner, Charles Sheeler, Phil Solomon, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, Francis Thompson, Slavko Vorkpich, James Sibley Watson, Melville Webber

FEATURING: Too many actors (many amateurs) to list

PLOT: A collection of influential short experimental films spanning five decades.

Still from Our Lady of the Sphere (1969)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: To be clear, one of the individual films featured in this compilation (Meshes of the Afternoon) has already made the List. Many of the others are noteworthy, but we deem none quite List-worthy. As a collection, these discs are recommended for weird movie fans and adventurous cinephiles. This is a must-own, cornerstone release for dedicated experimental film devotees.

COMMENTS: Released by silent movie specialists Flicker Alley and curated by director/film historian Bruce Posner, “Masterworks of American Avant-Garde Experimental Film” is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin—although we might quibble about whether every one of these films is actually a “masterwork,” they are all, at the very least, representative of a major figure or category of experimental film. These shorts, spread out over two DVDs or Blu-rays, are  rich and challenging, and may be best experienced in small nibbles, one or two at a time, contemplated over a span of several evenings, accompanied by a fine sipping beverage.

The films are arranged chronologically and although they span the full range of artistic expression, they often fall into several distinct types or subgenres. One of the earliest forms is the “city symphony” (à la 1929’s Man With a Movie Camera), of which the very first film in this collection, “Manhatta,” is an example. In a city symphony the director simply takes his camera into an urban environment (in American film usually New York City) and films what he sees, later arranging the footage into a montage that paints a portrait of the town. There are five or six examples of the form here, and although this can be one of the dullest of formats, Francis Thompson’s 1958 eyebending opus “N.Y., N.Y.,” shot with an array of distorting lenses of the director’s own design, is a notably thrilling exception. Other film types you may notice are the figure study, where the lens focuses on the human body in motion (“9 Variations on a Dance Theme,” “transport,” Maya Deren’s “Meditation on Violence”) and purely abstract films (“1941,” which uses broken light bulbs and wet paint, or Stan Brakage’s “scratch on the emulsion” experiments).

An especially noteworthy subset of these experiments is the music

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List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: LOST RIVER (2014)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Christina Hendricks, Iain De Caestecker, Saiorse Ronan, Matt Smith, Ben Mendlesohn, , Reda Kateb,

PLOT: An urban fantasy/fairy tale set in an unspecified city in decline (which looks a lot like Detroit) where single mom Billy and her sons Frankie and Bones attempt to keep their home despite all obstacles and enemies: for Billy, a bank manager/underground club impresario, and for Bones, the neighborhood gang kingpin, Bully.

Lost River (2014)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Gosling calls Lost River (originally titled How to Catch a Monster) a dark fairy tale, inspired by both the 80’s fantasy films he watched growing up and by a stay in Detroit while acting in The Ides of March. It’s a very unorthodox melding, like lo-fi magic realism set against a documentary background. Some might feel it exploitative, which could account for the polarized reaction the film received.

COMMENTS:  I guess it’s a gauge of where we’re at in film culture when something like Lost River can arise from sunken depths to befuddle everyone. People were expecting a disaster of epic proportion, judging from its reception at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and the outright hostile reviews during its very brief theatrical run/VOD in the U.S. From that reaction, one would think that Lost River would be better paired with other recent cult “darlings” like The Room or Birdemic.

lost-river-film-ryan-gosling-700x425Happily, Lost River is nowhere near those icons of ineptitude, which makes the reaction to it even more of a curiosity.  Critics seemed to take it personally that a Hollywood Star would actually choose to make his directorial debut an artistic endeavor rather than some flashy franchise production. It is evident that Gosling isn’t at all shy about his influences—he was paying close attention while he was working with and —but I would think that would be something to be encouraged by, rather than excoriated.

Apparently surrealism and dream imagery are only to be attempted when the director is a less well-known name. Either that, or most reviewers felt very uncomfortable with the approach in conjunction with the Detroit setting. There are several scenes with non-actors which briefly push the tone into docudrama, which is completely jarring with the “urban fairy tale” atmosphere Gosling is attempting to create.

lost river artGosling’s direction is very assured, aided by the lensing of Benoit Debie (Enter the Void) and the music of Johnny Jewel, which provide the proper atmosphere. Performances are pretty good all around: Hendricks, DeCaestecker and Ronan are fine, though it’s mainly the supporting characters that make an impression, such as Mendes, Mendlesohn and especially Matt Smith’s villainous turn, which is as far away from his Doctor Who as possible. One caveat: it seems a waste to get Barbara Steele and give her nothing to do. She’s more of a presence than a full character.

Whatever you might think of Lost River, I highly encourage you to search it out and make up your own mind.

Available on Blu-Ray and DVD with no additional features.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Indulgent and movie-like, Lost River is Gosling’s weird, let’s-do-this-thing folly.”–Brad Wheeler, The Globe and Mail (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015)

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As expected, The Forbidden Room has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies. Comments on this post are closed; please make all comments on the official Certified Weird entry.

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DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin,

FEATURING: , Clara Furey, Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles, Caroline Dhavernas, Paul Ahmarani, Noel Burton, , ,

PLOT: It opens (and ends) with a hygiene lecture about the importance of baths, and in between flows back and forth between tales about men trapped in a submarine, an apprentice lumberjack seeking to free a woman captured by bandits, a bone surgeon who falls in love with a motorcycle crash victim, and many more.

Still from The Forbidden Room (2015)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: We have an unofficial rule that no movie is placed on the List until after it is released on home video. But for that restriction…

COMMENTS: Wrapped in a robe (and draped in washed-out Super-8 color), Marv (Guy Maddin stalwart Louis Negin) confidently explains how to take a bath for bathing novices (“carefully insert your big toe into the waters. This will tell you if it’s too hot or too cold.”) The camera tracks down the bathtub drain until it finds a submarine, stuck at the bottom of the sea, with only 48 hours of air remaining and a captain who has left orders not to be disturbed. The sailors scarf down flapjacks, because the air packets trapped inside the pastries provide them with extra oxygen. Suddenly, a woodsman walks through a hatch, with no memory of how he got there. He explains, in flashback, that he is an apprentice lumberjack (a “saplingjack”) from Holstein-Schleswig on a quest to rescue the beauteous Margot from a group of bandits called the Red Wolves. After earning the brigands’ trust through a series of trials including finger-snapping and offal-piling, the saplingjack earns their trust provisionally and is allowed to sleep in their cave. There, Margot, now the leader of the Red Wolves, dreams that she is an amnesiac who wanders into a Casablanca-style cafe…

And that’s just in the first twenty minutes of this two hour feature which continually segues, Phantom of Liberty style, from one retro-absurdist vignette to another. Sometimes the next story is a re-enactment of a newspaper headline glimpsed by a character in the previous tale, sometimes it is a dream of mustache hairs. Along the way we get “The Final Derriere,” the lament of a man “plagued by bottoms,” sung by a scrambled-faced crooner; a bone surgeon erotically assaulted by curvy women dressed as skeletons, and “forced to wear a leotard!”; and a man who bids on a bust of the two-faced god Janus against his own double. This epic phantasmagoria is mostly presented in glorious two-strip Technicolor, but the film stocks vary and jump around (some segments are black and white). Periodically, a recurring morphing effect causes the entire screen to waver dramatically. Although this is a sound film, sometimes the movie turns silent and dialogue is conveyed by Maddin’s famously melodramatic intertitles; the characters soon forget they are in a silent film and start to speak again. Intriguingly, the stories backtrack, and then lurch forward in new directions, and by the end the entire Chinese puzzle box telescopes in reverse, backtracking through the labyrinth of stories and ending up where it began, with a wrinkled swinger in a bathrobe extolling the virtues of a good scrubbing.

The Forbidden Room is a tour-de-force summation of Maddin’s evolution-through-regression style. Disunity and fragmentation are the themes here (the opening epigraph from John reads “gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”). The lack of a strong central theme may be a slight weakness here that holds Room back from being one of Maddin’s top-rank masterpieces (compare the single-minded autobiographical obsessiveness of My Winnipeg or the Freudian incest hysteria of Careful). Yet, the film overwhelms us with shameless excessiveness, hidden treasures, visual marvels, and Maddin’s subconscious wit. It is the master’s most unabashedly surreal picture in some time (which says quite a lot), occupying a place in his oeuvre similar to INLAND EMPIRE‘s position in David Lynch‘s canon (although hopefully it will not be Maddin’s final word on the subject).

Just as the seminal Maddin feature Cowards Bend the Knee arose out of a “peephole” art installation, The Forbidden Room arose out of the “Seances” project (which in turn arose, ghostlike, from the ashes of an abandoned short film project called “Hauntings”). The premise of “Seances” is that Maddin reimagines lost films from the silent and early talkie era, which are today known only by their titles. The opening sequence of The Forbidden Room, for example, appears to be based on a lost hygiene film called “How to Take a Bath.”

One of The Forbidden Room‘s deepest mysteries is the identity of co-director Evan Johnson. Who is he? The movie has Maddin’s sensibilities written all over it, and if no co-director were named none would have been suspected. What did Johnson contribute? Why was Maddin so impressed with him to make him a protégé? And furthermore, who is the presumably-related Galen Johnson, who gets credits for music, a co-credit (with Evan) for visual effects, and titles? (The actual answer is prosaic: Evan Johnson was a former film student hired as a research assistant, whose contributions to the project became so significant that Maddin felt he deserved a co-director credit. Still, we like to think of Evan’s sudden elevation from Rug Doctor bottling plant worker to near-equal partner of the most celebrated avant-garde filmmaker of the day as the kind of plot twist that could only occur in Guy Maddin’s universe).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What narrative momentum there is has the choppy feel of unrelated serials crudely stitched together into a chaotic assemblage that operates, like all Mr. Maddin’s work, on hallucinatory dream logic. As a viewer you can supply whatever subtext comes to mind.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE BROOD (1979)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Art Hindle, , Samantha Eggar

PLOT: Horrible murders swirl around the family of a woman who is  under the care of a psychiatrist practicing “psychoplasmics,” an experimental therapy which elicits physical manifestations of psychic traumas.

Still from The Brood (1979)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The “deformed children” of The Brood might seem like a bizarre bunch to neophytes, but a glance at Cronenberg’s later works reveals they’re strictly a warm-up act where weirdness is concerned.

COMMENTS: The Brood includes a touch of the body horror that Cronenberg fans tune in for, though you have to wait until the end for the big reveal. Throughout most of the running time, this is more of a “regular” horror effort, with little monsters bashing in heads in bloody assualts (the broodlings favor wooden hammers as their weapon of choice, and although there are only a few attacks, they are very memorable and very traumatic). A psychological background gives the story texture that keeps it from sliding into slasher movie territory. Frank Carveth (the unremarkable Art Hindle) once had a happy family, but his mentally ill wife Nola (a remarkable Samantha Eggar) has been taken under the care of experimental psychiatrist Hal Raglan (the dependable Oliver Reed). On a visit to pick up his five-year old daughter from a visit with her mother at the “Somafree Institute,” Frank watches a public demonstration where Raglin, roleplaying a meek patient’s harsh daddy, bullies the man until he breaks out in sores of shame on his face (“go all the way through it to the end,” the therapist whispers as he eagerly anticipates the festering of the sobbing man’s impending wounds). When he takes the little girl back home, Frank discovers bruises and scratches on her back. Frank insists the girl’s visits be cut off, but an arrogant and uncooperative Raglan is not keen on changing the cloistered Nola’s therapeutic regime at such a crucial time, and insists the current custody arrangement must continue. Frank decides to conduct his own investigation into psychoplasmics.

The backstory that explains the level of intensity on display here, particularly in that final confrontation between Frank and Nola, is that Cronenberg was going through a divorce and custody battle of his own at the time he wrote up the scenario. The Brood is a step forward in Cronenberg’s oeuvre; it’s more polished than his previous efforts Rabid and Shivers, which were clearly ambitious exploitation movies. With its satirical shots at psychiatry coupled with a searing psychology of its own, The Brood takes a turn towards art-horror. It’s helped immensely by Eggar’s wild-eyed, all-in performance; she’s a nutcase, and an unintentional monster, but not an unsympathetic one. The Brood is an experimental therapy by David Cronenberg to elicit a cinematic manifestation of his own traumatic divorce, and its a successful one. It seems like an obvious influence on ‘s even stranger and more bitter breakup memoir, Possession, which it beat to the screen by a mere two years. The torture of divorce, from the husband’s perspective, was a big movie topic at the time—patrons going out to see The Brood might have rubbed shoulders with those lining up to see the Oscar-winning Kramer vs. Kramer.

In 2015 The Brood joined Scanners, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and Naked Lunch on the Criterion Collection label. Along with the usual extras, the release includes Cronenberg’s second low budget experimental movie, 1970’s Crimes of the Future, as a bonus feature. Crimes is the story of a rogue dermatologist who accidentally wipes out all females on the planet. Crimes is probably far weirder than The Brood, but not nearly as accomplished.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“In true Cronenberg fasion [sic], we are, instead, presented with something much, much weirder.”–Jerry, “Danny Isn’t Here Mrs. Torrance (DVD)

Capsules

LIST CANDIDATE: THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

The Ninth Configuration has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of All Time. Please post any comments on the official Certified Weird entry. This post is closed to comments.

AKA Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Scott Wilson

PLOT: A U.S. Marines psychiatrist is assigned to an experimental program in a castle housing soldiers who are suffering delusions; he bonds with a militantly atheist and misanthropic astronaut, but harbors a deep secret of his own.

The Ninth Configuration

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Obsession is fertile soil for a weird movie. The Ninth Configuration is a movie set in a madhouse that sets out to do nothing less than to prove the existence of God; it doesn’t, naturally, but the ambition involved makes for some strange choices, and invokes a passion that carries the story over some rough patches.

COMMENTS: The Ninth Configuration posits that a world without God is a madhouse. An unexplained epidemic of apparent insanity strikes Vietnam War vets and other military types, including a NASA astronaut who’s now afraid to go to the Moon. The suspected malingerers are sent, naturally, to a castle in the Pacific Northwest, where they await the arrival of one Colonel Kane, a military psychiatrist with some odd ideas of his own. By the end of the film, Kane’s unorthodox therapeutic methods involve the inmates putting on a Shakespeare play cast entirely with dogs, roleplaying that they are prisoners of war and the hospital staff Nazi concentration camp officers, and inexplicably flying through the castle corridors in a jet pack. In other words, it’s sort of a wacky combination of M*A*S*H* and the early reels of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with a touch of Spellbound (a movie which is explicitly referenced—whether as a hint or a red herring, you’ll have to watch to find out).

That outline makes Configuration sound like an anti-authoritarian satire—which it is, at times. The main point of departure is that the comedy is tinged with a very melancholy performance from a world-weary Stacy Keach, and the characters argue a lot about the existence of God. The movie itself is, in fact, more schizophrenic than its Corporal Kliner-esque caricature patients, bouncing around from mood to mood and finding time to shoehorn in a hallucination where the astronaut encounters a crucifixion on the Moon and a barroom brawl that pits a single Marine against a motorcycle gang. The origin of the plague of mental illness is never explained, although we can presume it’s a metaphor for the situation of men who have lost faith in something larger than themselves.

It’s no spoiler to point out that the argument that Blatty advances for God’s existence here is that a seed of universal love can be the only explanation for a man taking the irrational action of sacrificing his life for his fellow men. It seems to me that there is a fatal logical paradox with this argument from altruism, however. If someone wants to commit a selfless act—say, to quiet their own doubts, or assuage their own guilt—then by definition, the act will not be selfless. In his defense, I don’t think Blatty is naive enough to suggest that he has discovered the magic bullet proof of God’s existence with The Ninth Configuration; he merely finds that the existence of altruistic love suggests and supports the idea of a created universe. Whether you agree or not, you have to admit it’s the kind of subject that doesn’t get addressed often in movies, even weird ones. As the work of a passionate first time director shooting for the moon, The Ninth Configuration is recommended, but more for what it attempts than for what it achieves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I’ve got a weakness for a certain kind of wacky personal filmmaking—movies… that aren’t ‘well made’ by any standard but clearly mean so much to their creators that all aesthetic rules crumble in the face of their bizarre, unaccountable intensity. William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration may be a classic of this peculiar genre…”–Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader

(This movie was nominated for review by Kat, who said that there was an “atmosphere of overwrought emotion and barely concealed hysteria about the whole thing that left me feeling a bit creeped out.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)