A PTSD-afflicted soldier on leave, but desperate to return to warfare, is granted his wish during a bodyguard job for a politically connected family in Alice Winocour's paranoid thriller.
Disorder is yet another addition to a long, tired line of spartan thrillers featuring troubled, quiet men of violence. Leavened by great acting and spectacular sound design, though, it packs enough suspense to be more engaging its peers. Read more here
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I've written a piece for The 405 about Hank Corwin's editing of The Big Short. It's on his use of footage in which actors are unaware they're the focus of the camera, and how this relates to authenticity in acting. Read it here An analysis of Iranian cinema and it's relationship to poetry, looking particularly at the connections between Mohsen Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence and Rumi's poetry on the nature of reality and human perception When film critics outside of Iran reacted to the new wave of Iranian cinema produced after the 1979 Islamic revolution, they often attributed the distinctive poetic realism of Iranian cinema, expressed through codified imagery and allegorical stories, to the requirement to circumvent the varying censorship regulations of the post-1979 Islamic theocracy. Gilles Jacob, director of the Cannes Film Festival: "...artistic revolution often takes place in those countries weighed down by restrictions, where artists are not free. Art is often born from constraint. On the other hand, when liberty is rediscovered, there is sometimes a diminution in quality because choice becomes immense, posing new problems." From the Iranian perspective, however, the foreign critics had arrived late and their lack of long-term historical perspective resulted in an exaggerated concentration on the effects of the state censorship. Although the effect of censorship and state control on shaping Iranian cinema is not to be ignored, the forces of poetic and cultural heritage largely formed the Iranian cinematic identity and contextualising Iranian cinema as 'art born from constraint' is to paint an art-form that organically evolved from a poetic inheritance as myopic.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is a remarkable classic of the silent era by the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, depicting the trial and execution of Joan of Arc at the hands of the English. The film is frequently listed today as one of the greatest ever made, but has suffered numerous spates of bad luck in its lifetime and come perilously close to the dustbin of history. Dreyer's version was the eighth attempt to film the story of Joan of Arc, but was far from a simple retread of the well-known story. Dreyer believed that the key to a film depicting the dreadful fate of Joan of Arc was to be found in humanising the deified through realism, immersive dimensionality in composition and an honest conveyance of emotion. As Dreyer himself explains: “All of these pictures express the character of the person they show and the spirit of that time. In order to give the truth, I dispensed with ‘beautification’. My actors were not allowed to touch make-up and powder puffs and, from the first to the last scene, everything was shot in the right order.”
The main character in my film is someone who is trying hard to focus on pleasant memories but whose mind is continually invaded by negative ones. The character never speaks, so lens whacking is one way in which I saw fit to translate his psychology visually. The film's aesthetic is based around light and it's relationship metaphorically to memory, so this also made the effect well suited. By detaching the lens and moving it back and forth in front of the sensor, focus can be shifted rapidly from a slight depth of field to deep focus, and light leaks in natural, smooth streaks and washes onto the sensor. Additionally, we also chose to flag around the backend of the lens to have more control over the light and distorted the image by twisting the lens away from the sensor at an angle. A lot of cameras nowadays can shoot without a lens, particularly DSLR's, but we were using a Panasonic AF101E which doesn't, necessitating taping down the contacts to fool the camera. What was achieved by DoP Garry Torrance can be seen below. I'm very fond of when equipment is misused or pushed further than intended for artistic effect. Either for DIY necessity or visual aesthetic, there's something pleasurable about being witness to crafty and brash invention. I had the joy of working on Josh Loftin's I Can't Be Kaspar as a sound recordist, a film which used cheapo-espionage cameras in lighters and glasses. Josh wanted the film to live inside the head of the central character and also film real situations between his actors and the public without visible cameras. There's many examples of rough-and-ready cinematography. Ben Wheatley's A Field in England used a Holga toy camera and cheap telescope glass to create a fantastic otherworldly atmosphere (watch their behind-the-scenes video here). The hard-to-find Another Girl, Another Planet by Michael Almereyda, a favourite of mine ever since I bought it on a whim from a Global Video bargain bin years ago, used a Fisher Price Pixelvision camera, which records on standard cassette audio tapes and renders everything in a shimmering lo-fi somewhere below corner shop CCTV in quality. You could call it a gimmick, but obfuscation becomes viewer engagement and peering into Almereyda's ghostly murk feels immersive and dreamlike for me in a way no film apart from Primer has since accomplished. UPDATE: I've uploaded my VHS copy of Another Girl Another Planet here I'd love to find more examples, or hear stories from other filmmakers who have dabbled in weird techniques and risked breaking their equipment for the sake of a film, so please comment below.
FUNimation release the 25th anniversary edition Blu-Ray/DVD of Katsuhiro Ohtomo's Akira today, a perfect opportunity to celebrate and re-evaluate the classic anime.
Condensing the plot of Otohmo's concurrently ongoing epic manga into a two hour film, the anime proved to be a runaway success and a gateway film for western audiences. The release of Akira in 1988, with the addition of Grave Of The Fireflies and My Neighbour Totoro the same year, marked a new sophistication in Japanese animation and the start of its mainstream success worldwide.
2019: It's been 31 years since Tokyo was reduced to a crater in a sudden flash of light, sparking World War 3. The remains lie as a black hole at the center of the new metropolis, Neo-Tokyo, built on the rubble. The egotistical Kaneda runs the Capsules biker gang, while long-suffering sidekick Tetsuo boils under his inferiority complex. A motorcycle crash after a run-in with an escaped subject of psychic experiments puts Tetsuo in hospital in the custody of the psychic project's leader, Colonel Shikishima, and reveals Tetsuo's own latent psychic powers. Dissident revolutionaries, apocalypse worshipping cultists and a secret government project related to Tokyo's destruction, known as Akira, whirl around the developing emnity between the ever-more powerful Tetsuo and the befuddled Kaneda. Who or what is Akira? Tetsuo seeks answers below Tokyo as he evolves increasingly god-like powers that eventually spiral out of control. The production techniques in Akira were ground-breaking for Japanese animation at the time, making full use of the mammoth $11mill budget and staff of 70 animators. Character's expressions and mouth movements were drawn to pre-scored dialogue, advanced multi-layered perspective was used for depth and sense of scale, and an expanded use of dark colours created authentic night scenes. Standard outlandish anime style was out, as was traditional heroic storytelling, in favour of darker and more realistic art, narrative and characterisation. Akira exploits Japan's specific societal concerns with overcrowding, youth alienation and generational disconnection from the wartime past, but also universal themes of technophobia, adolescence and the cyclical nature of war. Power is the core of the film; who has it and who wants to take it. Japan knows better than any country about the perils of technology and messiah complexes, and fear of power and its seduction pervades the film. Within the tangled web of themes and symbols in Akira is a confrontational allegory of generations, split by World War 2 and the nuclear bomb, that don't understand one another. However, all this grand subject matter in the film is in service to what is, essentially, a fast-paced action blockbuster with a moving story of rivalry and maturation.
Alongside the animation, Akira's soundtrack is another remarkable component. The hundredfold membership musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi were commissioned by Ohtomo following the success of their album Ecophony Rinne, which displayed a unique mix of traditional Japanese music and enterprising electronics. Led by artist/scientist Tsutomu Ōhashi, the collective recorded modular pieces based on various themes over six months, without the benefit of scoring to finished scenes. The influences were wide: Nogaku theatre, Buddhist chants, Christian choral, Balinese gamelan, progressive rock. The effect is a startlingly turbulent mix of ancient spiritualism battling modernity, which corresponds perfectly with the themes of the film. The freedom from the limitations of budget, time and scene-matching served the compositions, allowing focus on development of mood over pacing for the film's sequences.
Akira is a frequently baffling, convoluted film that suffers from the same frayed chaos as its setting. Despite this, the film holds together and the rambling strangeness and density are part of its enduring charm.
I think a great double-bill partner for Akira would be Shane Carruth's Upstream Color. Biological manipulation, bewildering puzzle narratives and great soundtracks. Watch them early and you can spend the rest of the night trying to work out what the hell both of them are really about.
For more Katsuhiro Ohtomo animation, watch Construction Suspension Order and Memories, for which Ohtomo directed the section Magnetic Rose.
The best promotion of the continuing power of punk is how much Ayatollahs hate it. Shaytan has all the best tunes. ***UPDATE 12/11/13*** Two members of Yellow Dogs, drummer Arash Farazmand and guitarist Soroush Farazmand, were tragically killed in a shooting on the morning of the 11th. If you like the band then perhaps, in honour of those two, you would like to learn more about or support one of the groups that help Iranian refugees, political prisoners and/or fight for human rights reform in Iran, such as the ICHRI, Amnesty and the CDHR.
Bahman Ghobadi's drama No One Knows About Persian Cats is set in the underground rock scene of Tehran. The underground scene in Iran is no joke, prison and the lash can be expected for your troubles. Music as a whole isn't considered very favourably within the official strictures of the Islamic Republic, western music less so, and punk is essentially an enemy of the state. "Although music is halal, promoting and teaching it is not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic," said the Supreme Killjoy, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in 2010. This was in response to a question about classical Persian music lessons from a devout follower, the Ayatollah's answer to those looking to express themselves through rock music is decidedly less gracious. On August 16th, police raided the concert of Iranian metal band Dawn of Rage and arrested 200 fans, stripping some to look for "satanic symbols", despite permits being sought and received through the Ministry of Culture. Many bands that make music outside of the approved system, such as The Yellow Dogs featured in the film, are forced to flee or accept the full force of the government oppression when their popularity makes continuing underground impossible. However, the sheer mass of internet savvy youth and illegal satellite dishes in Iran mean they still have an impact. Before Khamenei, at the birth of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared music to be "a drug" and proceeded to ban all types of music, instruments and music schools. "We must completely eliminate [music]," Khomeini told the Kayhan newspaper after the revolution. Despite the Ayatollah's outrage, the Qurān does not categorically condemn music. Khomeini's position was a traditionalist, reactionary interpretation based largely on the hadith. Often the conservative rulebook would dip into the bizarre, such as the decree that made chess haram until 1988; the pollution of idols, see? In the 1980's, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) was charged with overseeing the production of music, first producing firm guidelines and then consolidating and unifying regulation and censorship in 1987 in line with post-revolutionary values. Musical instruments were only deemed acceptable for sale in 1989, when Khomeini relented on some of his absurd decrees shortly before his death. Despite gradual loosening of the rules for Persian traditional, western classical and pop music since then, only 20 percent of the music produced in Iran today is met by approval from the MCIG. Women in particular struggle under ridiculous rules; female singers can largely only accompany a male, not be the the lead or sing solo. In Michel Gondry’s 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the viewer is presented the atemporal perspective of the central character’s actively disintegrating memory. The viewer observes a spatially and temporally fragmented world designed to visualise the errant and subjective nature of memory. The narrative devices employed in the film produce what is arguably one of the most successful representations of the interconnectedness of time, memory and perception in cinema. However, the necessarily linear nature of the film medium creates limitations in how the signification desired by the filmmakers can be delivered. In literature, William Burroughs‘ experimental semi-autobiographical novel Naked Lunch abandoned narrative consistency in favour of thematic continuity, with the aim of a more 'truthful' telling of Burroughs’ subjective experience. The non-linear structure of the novel enables the reader to experience the divided and self-destructive nature of the drug addict and the incoherent form of the novel is a metaphor for the author‘s memories and state of mind. Similarly to Eternal Sunshine, though, the novel may thrash back and forth in time, but the position of the reader follows, in one way or another, the path dug by the narrator. While the reader may skip back and forward themselves to re-evaluate the text, the superposition held by the reader is reliant on the memory of what has been read in conjunction with what is being read in that moment. The sequential art of comic books does not suffer from these same limitations in how it is experienced by the audience. Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics writes: “Unlike other media, in comics, the past is more than just memories for the audience and the future is just more than possibilities! Both past and future are real and visible all around us! Wherever your eyes are focused, that’s now. But at the same time your eyes take in the surrounding landscape of past and future.” The past, present and future of the narrative can be displayed simultaneously on a comic book page, enabling authors to exploit the exclusivity of a single image and the intercourse between two or more. The reader ventures back and forward in the story at will, with at least some visual acuity left to the surrounding panels. Although comics do seem, at first glance, to be a simple amalgamation of the graphic arts and prose fiction, this description belies the unique properties of the medium. The sequential art format of the comic offers a unique method of communicating narratives concerning time, memory and perspective. Here I'll look at how just one sequence of pages in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (the greatest comic of all time, if you ask me) performs the impossible of warping the space-time-comic-strip continuum, and what this achieves for narrative and character. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan discusses how comics differ from almost all other forms of visual media. "[T]he modern comics strip and comic book," he argues, "provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines." McLuhan designated comics “cool” media, an audience-inclusive genre, in that it requires the audience to actively conceive of the sense information which is not provided. This is opposed to film which, designated a form of “hot” media, turns the viewer into “a passive consumer of actions”. The active engagement involved in comic reading that McLuhan is referring to is what Gestalt psychologists call ’the law of closure' - the experience of stimuli, not fully perceived, as a whole. In film, closure between frames operates on a largely subconscious level as our minds fluently connect the independent images into a story of continuous motion. The space in between the sequential images in comic books results in more conscious closure, though, as McCloud explains: “The closure of electronic media is continuous, largely involuntary and virtually imperceptible. But closure in comics is far from continuous and anything but voluntary! Every act committed to paper by the artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice. An equal partner in crime known as the reader.” Scotland's Africa in Motion film festival has just finished so I thought I'd write about the African sci-fi and fantasy cinema that is of particular interest to me. Afrofuturism is an aesthetic born of the African diaspora and found in afro-centric visual art, music and literature. The aesthetic unites science fiction, historical and alternate-history fiction, magic realism, fantasy, and African myths in the context of 20th-century technoculture. Originating in the music and persona of Sun Ra, but defined by Mark Dery in his 1995 essay Black to the Future, the Afrofuturist aesthetic foregrounds Black agency and creativity. Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody-Freeman, in The Black Imagination and the Genres, define the core principle of Afrofuturist fiction as: “Imagined futures in which African descendant people as well as other people of color are neither conspicuously absent nor marginalized as background or expendable characters, but…instead not only present but rather active agents—protagonists and heroes—in events which take place here on the planet Earth or elsewhere in the universe, set in the past, alternative pasts, distant and near future times”. Although conceived outside of Africa by Afro-Americans, Afrofuturism has a proven reflexive relationship with the old continent. The separation between the speculative fictions of the diaspora and native Africans is less distinct that in the 1950's, when Afrofuturism was born. Looking at African speculative fiction and fantasy cinema through the scope of Afrofuturism connects the geographical separation from heritage felt by the Afro-American artists to the dehistoricisation and cultural alienation inflicted on native Africans by colonial oppressors. The artist and writer Tegan Bristow, in her article We want the funk: What is Afrofuturism to the situation of digital arts in Africa?, published in the journal Technoetic Arts, considered how the ideas developed through Afrofuturism are being explored in contemporary African arts. Often this development is discussed alongside the unique use of communications technology by Africans, such as the Kenyan phone banking system or BRCK. Although often dismissed as technologically backwards, and therefore unable to express the same speculative fascination with technology as the West, Africa defies simple stereotypes and is producing great science fiction and fantasy art, from an African perspective. Afrofuturism is now more than just an American aesthetic, being taken up by Africans and becoming a more global celebration of Black culture. Solyaris (1972) |
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