November 2022

volume 32
issue 9

Je an-Luc Godard Fin

1930—2022

£6.50
 STRONG VIOLENCE,
15 CRIME SCENE DETAIL,
SEX, DOMESTIC ABUSE
 CONTENTS

F E S T I VA L B U L L E T I N

IN THIS ISSUE
27
Roundups of all the key films at Venice and Toronto, from Joanna Hogg’s haunting
ghost story, The Eternal Daughter, to Alice Diop’s powerful drama of infanticide,
Saint Omer, and Steven Spielberg’s heartfelt movie memoir The Fabelmans

62
CLAIRE DENIS
The director of Both Sides of the Blade
discusses the filmmakers and actors who
have inspired her, from Jacques Rivette
and Elizabeth Taylor to the Safdie
brothers and Alice Diop. Interview
and introduction by Caitlin Quinlan
FRONT COVER PICTURE BY PHILIPPE R. DOUMIC © DOUMIC STUDIO
34
JEAN-LUC GODARD
Endlessly changeable, endlessly
challenging the ideas of audiences
about what cinema could be, Godard
created an unparalleled body of work
that, like life, can only be understood
by experiencing it. By Kent Jones
56
NIL BY MOUTH
On the eve of its 25th anniversary
rerelease, Lou Thomas speaks to director
Gary Oldman to get an insider’s account
of the making of his brutally realistic
portrait of a London family’s struggle
with addiction and domestic violence

48 NEWMAN AND WOODWARD

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, the subjects of Ethan Hawke’s six-part
documentary series The Last Movie Stars, represented a golden era of stardom before
audiences began to grow wary of idolatry, switching their allegiances to actors who were
imperfect and relatable rather than godlike and untouchable. By David Thomson
 NOVEMBER 2022 104
JEAN-LUC REVIEWS CONTRIBUTORS
GODARD
JLG talking to
S&S about Vivre

6
EDITORIAL
sa vie in 1962 68 | FILMS
·
·
·
The Banshees of Inisherin
Blonde
All That Breathes

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Adieu, JLG: a revolutionary · Confetti
who always looked to the future · Don’t Worry Darling
· Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
· Decision to Leave
· Inu-Oh

9
OPENING SCENES
·
·
·
·
Emily the Criminal
Midwives
Sound for the Future
One Second
ROBERT HANKS
has been a freelance critic for 30 years,
writing about television, radio, theatre,
· Vesper film, books, music and design. He
· How Georgian film is · Girls Girls Girls has been writing and sub-editing
challenging tradition · After Blue (Dirty Paradise) for Sight and Sound since 2013.
· Editors’ Choice · Emily
· In Production: Luna Carmoon · The Woman King
· In Conversation: · Piggy
Peter Strickland · See How They Run
· The Pictures: Shuna’s Journey · Flux Gourmet
· Dream Palaces: Owen Kline · The Cordillera of Dreams
· The Score: Jocelyn Pook

86 | TELEVISION
20 · The Rehearsal
IN THIS ISSUE

· The Lord of the Rings: CAITLIN QUINLAN

The Rings of Power
LETTERS · This England
· House of the Dragon
· Five Days at Memorial
is a film critic and writer from
London with work published in
Guardian, frieze, ArtReview and
Mubi Notebook, among others.

22
· The Last Movie Stars

TALKIES 92 | DVD & BLU-RAY

· The Long Take: Kathy Burke · Burning an Illusion
should get more accolades, says · The Mummy
Pamela Hutchinson · Madigan
· Cine Wanderer: Phuong Le on · Viva Erotica
Interlude, Douglas Sirk’s return · Rediscovery: House of
to Germany Psychotic Women
· Poll Position: S&S’s horror king · Archive TV: The Roads KENT JONES
Kim Newman has a spare vote to Freedom/Eurotrash
is a filmmaker and writer. His films
for Let’s Scare Jessica to Death · Identification of a Woman
include Hitchcock/Truffaut and Diane.
· Frankenstein and the He is also the author of several
Monster from Hell books of criticism. In 2013, he

114
· Kuhle Wampe or, and Jake Perlin co-programmed a
Who Owns the World? close-to-complete retrospective of
· Buck and the Preacher the works of Jean-Luc Godard.
· The Hunchback of Notre Dame
ENDINGS · The Trial of Joan of Arc
· What are we to make of the title · Lost and Found: Megara
cards at the close of Jean-Luc
Godard’s 1967 film Weekend?
100 | WIDER SCREEN

111
THIS MONTH
· On Warhol’s vast film archive
and a Clara Ursitti exhibition
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

IN… 1952
Phuong Le, Pamela Hutchinson,
102 | BOOKS Carmen Gray, Brad Stevens, Adam
Marlene Dietrich Nayman, Ben Nicholson, Leigh Singer,
· Adam Nayman on the Jonathan Romney, Kambole Campbell,
on the cover and Coens’ human comedy Ben Walters, Bruce Jenkins, Maria
the first Greatest · Ben Nicholson on The Shining Delgado, Sophie Satchell-Baeza,
Films poll · Nick James feels Heat 2 Sam Davies, Neil Young and more
 EDITORIAL Mike Williams
@itsmikelike

Adieu, JLG: a revolutionary who

always looked to the future

The first
fir mention of Jean-Luc Godard d’elle [Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967], star-
in Sight and Sound came in a 1958 article ring Marina Vlady; the other, Made in U.S.A. [1966],
by the French
F critic Louis Marcorelles. with Anna Karina. They are completely different in
The piece,
piec titled French Cinema: The Old style, and have nothing to do with each other, except
and the New,
Ne explored France’s growing perhaps that they let me indulge my passion for analys-
fascination
fascina with film, the emerging ing what is called modern living, for dissecting it like a
intellectual
inte enthusiasts in Paris biologist to see what goes on underneath.” His 1970 mil-
whose
who interest in the form was itant manifesto, ‘What is to be done’, which was written
serious
seri and expectant, and the for Afterimage magazine, challenged the world to “make
thriving
thriv film criticism, which was political films” and to “make films politically”. He was a
not confined to the pages of high- master communicator who understood the power and
brow newspapers, but was widely potential of his mediums. If the moving image was his
available
avail to French readers who scalpel, the printed word was his mallet; a sharp inci-
saw ccinema as a basic ingredient of sion here, a whack to the temple there.
their intellectual
in nourishment. “The As technology advanced, Godard’s use of it evolved.
Descartes
D
De scarte who sleeps at the heart of He was an early adopter of digital, shooting the second
Frenchman,” Marcorelles writes, “is
every Frenc half of his 2001 film In Praise of Love on DV, and in 2010
inclined to stir at the sight of a film.” shot Film socialisme on HD video. He was not in thrall
Godard’s namedrop comes in a passage concerning to the past, his own or anyone else’s.
a group of young directo
directors making films outside the tra- Which brings us to 2020, and an 89-year-old Godard
systems. Praise is heaped on Claude
ditional production syste sitting in a comfortable chair in a pleasant domestic set-
Chabrol’
Ch b l’s LLe B
Beau SSerge (1958, considered the first film ting, wearing an emerald-green tank top over a loose-fit-
of the French New Wave) and excitement surrounds ting shirt, peering out over his trademark black-rimmed
his contemporaries: “François Truffaut has directed Les glasses, smoking an enormous cigar. He’s being filmed in
Mistons; Jacques Rivette made Le Coup du berger (a dif- portrait on a mobile and broadcasting live on Instagram.
ficult film, but one revealing a striking temperament); In just under 100 minutes he explores the intersection of
Godard was and Jean-Luc Godard made Charlotte et Véronique, with life, art and artifice. His scalpel is still sharp, mallet still
a master Nicole Berger and Anne Colette. Made at the direc- blunt. This kind of small-screen broadcast was not new
tors’ own expense, these films spring from a love of the to Godard. At Cannes in 2018 he took the press confer-
communicator medium and signal the arrival of a new generation which ence for his final work, The Image Book (a searching essay
who understood in ten years or so could dominate our cinema.” film about the Arab world that was awarded the first ever
the power and If Marcorelles was prescient, he had insider informa- Special Palme d’Or), via FaceTime, answering questions
tion. Godard made Charlotte et Véronique (written by Éric from journalists through an iPhone held high by his cin-
potential of his Rohmer) in 1957 while working alongside Marcorelles ematographer Fabrice Aragno. At the beginning of the
mediums. If the as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, for which Chabrol, Riv- Instagram Live, he discusses the news and its relation-
moving image ette and Truffaut also wrote. This unruly bande à part ship to real life, moving tangentially into a sketch for a
had met around 1950 in the front row of the Ciné-Club film he has imagined that tells the truth of the life of a
was his scalpel, du Quartier Latin and shared a disdain for the cur- news reporter (“They’re prepared to die for the news,
the printed rent state of French cinema, both the institution and but they’re not prepared to live their lives…”) Later he
word was his the product, which they referred to as ‘cinéma de papa’ discusses language and science and their complexities.
– daddy’s cinema. The legend that they marched into “I’m happy to have found filmmaking,” he says. “It’s a sort
ILLUSTRATION BY FERNANDO COBELO. BYLINE ILLUSTRAION PETER ARKLE

mallet; a sharp Cahiers editor André Bazin’s office and took over the
incision here, journal is of course apocryphal, but truth lies in the
a whack to the sentiment. Led by Godard, they railed against the lack
of individuality in cinema, where an obedience to the
temple there rules murdered creativity, vision and voice.
Godard believed in authenticity, in truth, a belief
which he carried from his New Wave work into his
more political filmmaking. Writing for Sight and Sound
near the end of this first period, a 1966 piece titled ’One
or Two Things’ begins thus: “Yes, I’m making two films
at the same time. The first is Deux ou trois choses que je sais
of antibiotic.” This broadcast acts as a beautiful bookend
to a life lived with passion and purpose. You can find the
recording online, and I thoroughly recommend it.
In the UK the Queen has just died, and the blanket
coverage can kid you into thinking not a single second
of her public life was not captured on camera. But
these images give us little about herself. What Godard
expounds on in this more-or-less-final interview was the
truth of his life encapsulated – not reverence nor bit-
terness towards the past, but his understanding of the
world as he saw it and of his place within it. RIP JLG.
Celebrate 60 Years of Bond
at the Royal Albert Hall with
the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

IN CONCERT
17–20 NOV

Red carpet,
photo opportunities
and more

© 2022 DANJAQ, MGM. TM DANJAQ. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

RELEASED JANUARY 2023
˙

COMING SOON
OPENING SCENES
Georgia on
our mind
A Room of My Own is the latest gem
from a bold new generation of Georgian
directors, but cinema in the former
Soviet republic is facing a government
crackdown on cultural expression
BY CARMEN GRAY
ABOVE
Taki Mumladze and Mariam
Khundadze in A Room of My Own
“It is my life, my body and my art, so why
should I compromise anything?” Taki
Mumladze is talking ahead of screen-
ings of A Room of My Own at the Batumi
International Arthouse Film Festival,
taking place in Georgia’s second-biggest
city, on the Black Sea coast. Mumladze
co-wrote the raw and intimate drama
with director Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze and
also starred in the film, winning the
Best Actress award jointly with co-star
Mariam Khundadze at the Karlovy Vary
International Film Festival earlier this
summer. It will be the first time the film
has been shown to audiences in Georgia,
a country where films with LGBTQ+
content are still controversial and met
with protests. Mumladze’s anticipation
is mixed with apprehension.
A Room of My Own was shot during the
pandemic with no budget and a small
crew of friends and family in the flat-
share the two leads were living in. Mum-
ladze plays Tina, a small-town girl who
was stabbed by her then-husband and
shunned by her family after a perceived
transgression. She rents a room in Tbi-
lisi from the more worldly party girl Megi
(Khundadze), who is waiting on a visa
to go to New York. Their mutual scepti-
cism thaws into a friendship that crosses
into sexual territory, as Tina gains a sense
of control over her own life.
“Mariam and I talked a lot about the
sex scenes, and it was our decision to
9
OPENING SCENES
include them,” said Mumladze. “I really
don’t like when women’s bodies are
sexualised through the male gaze but
I think in our movie it is very naturalistic.
I couldn’t talk about the importance of
being a free and independent woman if
fear of society’s reaction prevented me
from doing this myself. Sex is OK, and
we think the film can be like a manifesto.”
A Room of My Own is part of a wave of
arthouse cinema from a bold new genera-
tion of Georgian directors who have revi-
talised the industry following the civil
war of the 90s. Many of their films centre
experiences outside conventional family
roles for women and LGBTQ+ protago-
nists, questioning entrenched patriarchal
values in a nation where the Orthodox
Church still wields vast influence.
A number of these films have earned
high-profile global recognition. Ana
Urushadze’s wildly surrealistic, playful
debut feature Scary Mother (2017), about
a writer determined to publish her erotic
vampire novel despite her husband’s
resistance, won the award for Best First
Feature in Locarno and the top prize in
Sarajevo. While Dea Kulumbegashvili’s
mesmerising Beginning (2020), in which
the disillusioned wife of a religious leader
deals with the fallout of being sexually
assaulted by a police officer, scooped a
record four awards at San Sebastián.
But enthusiasm abroad has not always
meant popularity at home, particularly
 10
when LGBTQ+ themes are involved.
Georgian-Swedish director Levan Akin’s
And Then We Danced (2019) was acclaimed
after its Cannes premiere and became
Sweden’s Oscar contender, but its setting
of a love story between two men in a tradi-
tional dance troupe was met with violent
protests by the far right and members of
the church on its local premieres in Tbi-
lisi and Batumi, despite cordons of riot
police outside cinemas. However, many
Georgians welcomed the opportunity to
see such a story on screen for the first time.
Some breakout Georgian hits occupy
less contentious terrain. Alexandre Kob-
eridze’s offbeat charmer What Do We See
When We Look at the Sky? (2021), in which
a curse prevents a man and woman from
recognising each other after a meet-cute
on a bridge, swapped grit for whimsy
after his lower-profile experimental fea-
ture debut Let the Summer Never Come
Again (2017), a mobile-phone venture
into Tbilisi’s illegal underground worlds
of gay sex work and boxing.
Other successes abroad, such as Pris-
oner of Society (2018), a European Film
Award-nominated documentary short
about a trans woman who lives locked
up at home with her family, who fear
she’ll be killed if she goes out, have never
been screened in Georgia. Its director
Rati Tsiteladze, who was able to gain
OPENING SCENES
the family’s trust and access due to his
background as a former martial-arts
champion and television personality,
said he does not want to endanger the
protagonists; official anti-discrimination
laws were passed in Georgia in 2014 as
the country tries to meet human rights
criteria to join the European Union but
these do not reflect the unsafe reality.
At Karlovy Vary, Tsiteladze said, “I
believe Adelina’s story is so important –
the way it stands now she doesn’t have a
future in Georgia.” While there, he was
pitching for production assistance for a
follow-up on her experience immigrating
to Austria (an asylum process that the
first film’s success helped to facilitate).
Bliadze, the director of A Room of My
Own, spoke of a current exodus of young
people, particularly women, moving
abroad. “If my five-year-old daughter
ABOVE Prisoner of Society
decides to leave Georgia, it will be my
generation’s fault for not doing anything
to change the atmosphere in this country.
“While their parents were raised in
the Soviet Union, millennials were born
when there was already YouTube. These
generations are talking radically different
languages. And it’s not just generational
– nowadays ultra-nationalist groups of
homophobic and xenophobic people
are getting much stronger.” He mentions
last year’s obstruction of a planned Tbi-
lisi Pride march by far-right groups, who
beat more than 50 journalists, killing one.
“It was really hard for us to watch this.”
In Batumi, the festival pressed ahead
despite a shock cut of all government
f inancing this year (an emergency
fundraising campaign came to its rescue).
These are adverse conditions for one of
the country’s main forums for challeng-
ing cinema, and has compounded fears
of a government crackdown on cultural
expression under a more hardline regime.
In March, Gaga Chkheidze, the director
of the Georgian National Film Center
and a vocal critic of state policy, was dis-
missed by the Ministry of Culture and
replaced with their own deputy minister.
Chkeidhze, who has returned to his role as
director of the Tbilisi International Film
Festival, which has also had its funding
cut, said: “Everything is moving toward
total control of the cultural sphere by the
minister. This practice is well-known to
Georgian society, which went through
70 years of the Soviet totalitarian system.”
But filmmakers are confident it is
only a matter of time before attitudes
open up in Georgia. “I don’t think the
mob can hold back the younger genera-
tion, which through the internet is part
of a global ecosystem not consumed
by dogmatic thinking,” said Tsiteladze.
And, from Mumladze: “It seems like
some women’s whole lives are wasted
on self-preservation. If I didn’t think
we could change something, I wouldn’t
have made the movie. I hope a lot of
people see this who are not just in our
bubble. Art is powerful.”
A Room of My Own is showing at the BFI
London Film Festival on 15-16 October
Six recent Georgian films that
challenge the status quo
BY CARMEN GRAY
SCARY MOTHER (ANA
URUSHADZE, 2017)
Manana (Nato Murvanidze)
has penned an erotic vampire
novel and is determined to
have it published, in spite of
her husband’s shame at the
notoriety it could bring to
the family, and his increasing
intolerance for her wild
flights of imagination. A
stark, brutalist high-rise lends
atmosphere to this bold,
surrealist and dark-humoured
tale of oppression and inspired
escape by Ana Urushadze,
which became a festival hit.
AND THEN WE DANCED
(LEVAN AKIN, 2019)
Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) is
preparing for tough national
ballet auditions. But when
rival dancer Irakli (Bachi
Valishvili) joins his troupe, the
Georgian National Ensemble,
unexpected desires throw
the men off balance and
make them question their
commitment to the institution’s
strictly traditional, macho
codes. Their intense love
story includes scenes shot in
Tbilisi’s renowned techno club
Bassiani, a nightlife spot of free
expression and activism.
BEGINNING (DEA
KULUMBEGASHVILI, 2020)
Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili) is
married to a religious leader in
a Jehovah’s Witness community
targeted for persecution
in rural, predominantly
Orthodox, Georgia. Her
sense of entrapped isolation
is compounded after a police
detective, visiting to investigate
a church fire-bombing,
sexually assaults her – and
her husband blames her for
the violation. A work of slow
takes with a shocking finale,
this is a blistering critique of
patriarchal power.
PRISONER OF SOCIETY
(RATI TSITELADZE, 2018)
Adelina is a trans woman who
has spent more than a decade
shut inside the home of her
family, who fear she’ll be killed
if she ventures outside. In this
sensitive documentary short,
conversations with Adelina and
her parents reveal the heavy
psychological toll of societal
prejudice and the gap between
the official stance protecting
LGBTQ+ rights through
legislation in Georgia, and the
everyday violent realities that
prevent real freedom.
COMETS (TAMAR
SHAVGULIDZE, 2019)
Two women, who were
teenage lovers until they got
found out by a disapproving
town, reunite three decades
later to reminisce in a
backyard. While Nana
(Ketevan Gegeshidze) has
married and raised two
children, Irina (Nino Kasradze)
moved to Krakow to work
and has come back to settle an
inheritance. This understated
and bittersweet drama, which
was well received at Toronto,
veers audaciously into sci-fi
territory in its final third.
TAMING THE GARDEN
(SALOMÉ JASHI, 2021)
A favourite at Sundance, there is
a quiet, mythical quality which
imbues this documentary vision
of absurd entitlement in an age
of inequality. Centuries-old trees
are uprooted and transported
from the countryside to the
private garden of billionaire
Bidzina Ivanishvili, who
founded the government’s
incumbent Georgian Dream
party. The image of a gargantuan
arbour floating along on a barge
is unforgettably surreal, and
suggests a political elite that
thinks anything can be bought.
 11

EDITORS’ CHOICE
Recommendations from the Sight and Sound team
on what to see at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival

UNREST
Screening on 12 and 13 October
Unrest is Swiss director Cyril
Schäublin’s first feature after Those
Who Are Fine (2017). That film, about
a woman swindling elderly people,
was one of the most unsettlingly
peculiar and brilliant debuts of the
last decade in its playfully offbeat
exposure of contemporary compulsions
and anxieties. This new effort, which
debuted at the Berlinale, also wears its
big ideas lightly. Set in the 19th century,
it tells of a Russian anarchist’s visit
KLOKKENLUIDER
Screening on 8 and 12 October
British actor Neil Maskell’s directorial
debut brings the menacing tones and
uncomfortably dark humour that
marked out some of his most notable
roles – in Ben Wheatley’s terrifying
Kill List (2011) and Dennis Kelly’s
phenomenally stylish and unique
TV thriller Utopia (2013-14) – to this
CORSAGE
bleak drama that perfectly plays out
in under 90 minutes. As government Screening on 6 and 7 October
whistleblower Ewan (Amit Shah) With its chilly digital cinematography and a score by French singer-songwriter
and his wife Silke (Sura Dohnke) Camille, Marie Kreutzer’s latest film is a thoroughly modernist biopic of Empress

to a small Swiss watchmaking town
that’s caught up in the impetus toward
globalisation and standardised time.
It’s one of the most singular works
playing at this year’s festival, and not to
be missed.
Kieron Corless, associate editor
hide out in Belgium along with a
couple of strange bodyguards, it is
both very tense and very funny, a
carefully observed character study
that highlights a particularly British
cynicism; hopelessly floundering in the
face of institutional power.
Hannah Gatward, publishing
coordinator
OPENING SCENES
Elisabeth of Austria. Focusing on the empress’s early forties, it is a nuanced character
study made memorable primarily by Vicky Krieps’s central performance as the 19th-
century consort who is quietly, desperately, trying to bend her gilded cage out of
shape. Krieps excels at inhabiting prickly, headstrong, intelligent women, and her
performance here is riveting. Corsage is one of eight titles in Competition at this year’s
BFI London Film Festival; Sight and Sound is delighted to be presenting the entire
Competition.
Arjun Sajip, reviews editor

The
Sight and Sound
salon

DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA DIRECTORS SELECT THEIR

Screening on 14 and 16 October
The duo from Harvard University’s
Sensory Ethnography Lab, who gave
us a fish-eye’s view on the horror and
wonder of life aboard a commercial
fishing vessel in Leviathan (2012),
return with an even queasier odyssey
that again stakes out the sublime. Just
as their earlier briny epic probed the
collision between nature and human
ONE FINE MORNING interference with it via GoPro cameras,
Screening on 13 and 14 October Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena
A companion piece of sorts to her Things to Come (2016), Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, Paravel’s corporeal tour of French
a return to French-language filmmaking, similarly explores grief for a parent, with hospitals uses endomorphic cameras
Léa Seydoux playing a widowed mother, Sandra, who is watching her father Georg to explore every imaginable human
(Pascal Greggory) live with, and die from, Alzheimer’s. Both Seydoux and Greggory orifice. In Cannes it was the film that
are superb in understated but emotionally vivid roles, with Sandra’s sorrow balanced clocked the most walkouts and squeals
by the joy of a new romance, and of her relationship with her child. If you’re in the of disgust, and it is without a doubt
mood for a good cry, this is the LFF pick for you. this year’s most imaginative slice of
body horror.
Thomas Flew, editorial assistant
Isabel Stevens, managing editor
GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME
In anticipation of the launch of Sight
and Sound ’s Greatest Films of All Time
poll later this year, we are hosting
discussions with a selection of key
directors at this year’s LFF – including
many filmmakers in the official
Competition – who will talk about
their own top ten lists. As part of the
‘LFF for Free’ events, please join the
Sight and Sound editorial team at the
Bar and Kitchen at the BFI Southbank
to learn more about great films from
throughout cinema history – canonised
titles and curios alike – and debate the
necessity of canons, and the joys and
terrors of selecting just ten great films.
For more details, including timings,
check www.bfi.org.uk/lff
 12
IN PRODUCTION
Luna Carmoon’s Hoard
BY THOMAS FLEW
OPENING SCENES
Alongside its programme of new releases,
October’s BFI London Film Festival
will present a slate of works in progress
by UK filmmakers to industry profes-
sionals. Among those films is Hoard,
the latest project by writer-director
Luna Carmoon (two-time LFF alumna
with her subversive shorts Nosebleed and
Shagbands), which centres around a close
mother-daughter relationship, a bereave-
ment and a man’s unexpected arrival,
with the film split into sections set in 1984
and 1994. Sight and Sound heard from Car-
moon about her first feature film, which
she describes in deeply personal terms
when asked about her initial inspiration:
“If I’m honest, I wanted to die. I wanted
to write something so venomous that the
world would find it when I kicked the
bucket and be truly disgusted… It began
as a 20-page story and as it changed over
time, so did I. I healed and so did it, blos-
soming into something special.”
As with her shorts, Carmoon has gone
into her past to create Hoard: “It is drawn
from memories, my family, friends I grew
up with. I don’t want people to know if
it’s all true or all fabricated, but I can say
with my heart that it’s pumped with all
of me.” Using an old retirement home as
their production base, the crew “built
mini sets in what would have been retired
people’s bedrooms”, including a recrea-
tion of Carmoon’s childhood bedroom,
which she describes as “haunting… I got
to enter my memories physically.”
As for her principal cast of Hayley
Squires (I, Daniel Blake, 2016) and Joseph
Quinn (Stranger Things, 2016-), joined by
newcomer Saura Lightfoot Leon, Car-
moon is clearly delighted with what she’s
NEWS
ABOVE Luna Carmoon and cast on the set of Hoard
seen: “People need to pay more attention
[to Squires], because she is such a force,
such a talent. She’s like an old movie
star, she does it all with such precision.”
As for Quinn, “he is a transformer, a
shapeshifter, like a [Michael] Wincott,
or [an Oliver] Reed. I cannot wait for
people to witness him – if you recognise
him that is.” When will audiences get to
see Hoard? “Picture lock is looming… and
by the end of this year this turkey will be
all sewn up.” Programmers and buyers
may get a sneak peek soon, but audi-
ences will have to wait until next year.
BURNING LOVE
The Presleys are hot property right now,
as Sofia Coppola’s follow-up to On the
Rocks is set to be Priscilla, based on the
King’s former wife’s memoir Elvis and
Me. Austin Butler won’t be reprising his
role from Baz Luhrmann’s extravagant
biopic; Jacob Elordi is instead the Elvis
to Cailee Spaeny’s Priscilla.
PEDRO AND PEDRO
Pedro Almodóvar has dropped out of his
next project, starring Cate Blanchett, A
Manual for Cleaning Women – “a very pain-
ful decision”, he told Deadline – but he has
wrapped on another English-language
film, the 30-minute western Strange Way
of Life, which stars Pedro Pascal and
Ethan Hawke.
THE WORST PEOPLE RETURN
Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen
Lie (of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person
in the World) are reuniting for Norwegian
director Thea Hvistendahl’s debut, Han-
dling the Undead.
Label of love
BY THOMAS FLEW
After 12 years as director of
content at cult video label Arrow,
Francesco Simeoni has stepped
out on his own to found Radiance
Films. With the aim of offering
something new to the burgeoning
boutique label market, Radiance,
who have announced an opening
slate of ten titles, will release
two films a month. It will start in
January with yakuza film specialist
Yamashita Kōsaku’s Big Time
Gambling Boss (1968) and politically
active Italian director Elio Petri’s
Palme d’Or-winning The Working
Class Goes to Heaven (1971), a pair of
films indicative of the label’s MO.
Simeoni explains: “I really want
to go back to the days where I’d
pick up films on DVD by directors
I’d never heard of from periods
of a country’s cinema that were
underexplored. I wanted to bring
that back. I don’t know how much
people know about the films I’ve
announced, because they are quite
obscure, but that was what was
exciting to me… wanting to get
back to that sense of discovery.”
Further discoveries range from
A Woman Kills (1968), Jean-Denis
Bonan’s serial killer drama,
available outside France for the
first time (“Virtually nobody
knows that film, but that was
exciting to me,” says Simeoni),
to a more recent offering in Amy
Seimetz’s eerie lo-fi thriller She
Dies Tomorrow (2020). As for the
future of Radiance, Simeoni hopes
that the frequency of releases
will increase as time goes on,
adding: “Radiance is going to host
other labels.” He’ll collaborate
with international companies
to bring releases here that are
unavailable in the UK, respecting
the work that they have already
done, rather than duplicating it.
Certainly something for Blu-ray
aficionados to keep their eyes on.
Full details of Radiance’s launch line-up
can be found at radiancefilms.co.uk
ABOVE
Big Time
Gambling Boss (1968)
 14
IN CONVERSATION
PETER STRICKLAND DIRECTOR
BY LOU THOMAS
A new black comedy by the
OPENING SCENES
director of In Fabric combines the
unlikely subjects of art and food
Writer-director Peter Strickland’s fifth feature
Flux Gourmet, a funny, bizarre mix of a band
bickering and gastrointestinal woe, takes place
at an art institute that focuses on culinary per-
formance. As part of a month-long residency, a
trio of musicians perform experimental music
where they ‘play’ food mixers while processing
the sound of saucepans boiling and frying pans
sizzling. The band – Asa Butterfield, Ariane
Labed and Strickland regular Fatma Mohamed,
– have their work documented by Stones (Makis
Papadimitriou) and are instructed by Jan Ste-
vens (Gwendoline Christie). Strickland’s former
group The Sonic Catering Band reunited to
perform the music heard in the film on the same
equipment they’d used in the 1990s.
TOP Fatma Mohamed and Ariane Labed (left) in Flux
Gourmet, directed by Peter Strickland (above)
Q How did you begin developing
the story?
A I was interested in stomach
problems and how they’re this
hidden thing. If they’re tackled
in cinema, it’s done as a joke. But
they’re not, especially when it
comes to allergies and autoimmune
issues. It felt like there was
a gap that needed filling.
Q What piqued your interest in the
relationship between artists and
the institutions that fund them?
A I guess because it relates to things
way beyond art, to publishing,
to film, music, the whole thing;
the relationship between the
financier or the patron and the
filmmaker, the artist, musician.
It’s a very delicate relationship,
which can go very badly wrong.
A lot of egos are at stake on both
sides. I’m not a financier, I’m on
the other side of the table, but how
do I do this without playing the
victim? How do I play it more like
a referee, observing, not trying to
take sides? So, my job is to give all
the characters a hard time. My job
is to make all the characters behave
badly. I’m trying to look at every
point of view. I’m trying to see what
it’s like from the financier’s side of a
table, dealing with people who are
rejected, and the trolling you would
get from people who are rejected.
Q Where did the idea of recording
the sound of food being prepared
and cooked come from?
A It came from a dream I had. I was
a big fan of this band called Zoviet
France from Newcastle, an 80s
band who were very abstract. I was
massively into them. Around 1996,
I had a dream in which I went to see
them play live and they were mic’ing
up vitamin pills, the effervescent
ones, and turning it into this
hallucinatory, heightened sound.
What was weird around that
time is that other people were
cropping up doing similar things.
None of us knew of each other;
something was just in the air. So
[electronic musician] Matthew
Herbert was doing his Doctor
Rockit food thing at that time,
or you could see The Vegetable
Orchestra doing their thing.
Q Makis Papadimitriou, who plays
Stones, is Greek but speaks
in English in the film. Why
is the narration in Greek?
A I feel more and more that British
cinema isn’t as diverse as Britain
is becoming. You don’t hear
languages or accents. Everyone
sounds British. So it was very
important, especially post-Brexit,
to keep this European feel. I’m
half-Greek myself, so I feel almost a
personal sense of regret not having
kept up my Greek. And this is
maybe a sly way of learning some
Greek without paying for lessons.
Q The squabbling between the
band members is reminiscent
of This Is Spinal Tap [1984].
Did that film inspire you?
A I adore Spinal Tap. It’s one of
my favourite films. I wanted to
make my own version. Just band
politics. It’s not so much the
music, it’s the gang mentality. I
was never in a gang. I was always
on the outside looking in.
Q You’ve said that the film was
influenced by the performance
artists of the Viennese
actionism movement of the
1960s and 1970s. How so?
A They’re too hardcore for me,
those films, but their aesthetic
informed this film. Hermann
Nitsch, Otto Muehl and Kurt
Kren – ethically there are a lot
of issues with some of those
filmmakers. There was a lot of
slaughter involved, which, being
a vegetarian, I can’t really watch.
It’s in our nature as filmmakers to
question how much of ourselves
to reveal when we make a film.
It’s this game of hiding, revealing
and considering where the line
is when it comes to our privacy.
Shock value comes into that,
but it’s the easiest thing in the
world to shock anyone. It only
becomes interesting when it
provokes a discussion. Extreme
violence doesn’t interest me. It
doesn’t really provoke. There’s no
progression from that. Torture
porn, what is there to talk about?
Flux Gourmet is in cinemas and streaming now
 15

DREAM PALACES
NATURAL HISTORY
13. Black kites in
All That Breathes
BY ISABEL STEVENS
“There are hundreds of birds falling out
of the sky every day. It amazes me that
people carry on as normal,” remarks soap
dispenser manufacturer turned ama-
teur vet Nadeem Shehzad in Shaunak
Sen’s captivating documentary All That
Breathes. Sen describes his study of She-
hzad and his brother, Mohammad Saud,
and their makeshift injured bird clinic in
Delhi to me as a “love story between man
and bird” – the bird in question being the
black kite, a raptor that is as common a
sight in Delhi’s skies as pigeons are in
London’s. Although, due to pollution
and ever closer interaction with humans,
they are increasingly a common sight on
Delhi’s pavements.
Sen was immediately struck by the cin-
ematic potential of the brothers’ claustro- ILLUSTRATION BY PEICHI WU

phobic basement workplace, filled with

big industrial machines for their day jobs
on one side and these “magisterial birds”
in need of treatment piled up in boxes on
the other. He was certain about the kind
of film he didn’t want to make: “A nature
doc or a frank political film or a sweet
ANTHOLOGY LOCATION:
OPENED:
NEW YORK CITY
1970
TRIVIA: THE BUILDING WAS ORIGINALLY
A COURTHOUSE AND PRISON
film about nice people doing nice things.” FILM ARCHIVES SCREENS: 2 DESIGNED BY AMERICAN
SEATS: 259 ARCHITECT ALFRED HOPKINS
His camera mimics the philosophical
disposition of the brothers, alive to all

manner of wildlife on Delhi’s streets, Actor-director Owen Kline, whose directorial debut, the dark
from turtles and rats to pigs that have
ingeniously adapted to city life: “You comedy Funny Pages, is out now, discusses how his idiosyncratic
get used to watching animals in slow, tastes were developed in his local cinema in lower Manhattan
single takes,’ he explains. “Over time you
reflect on the entanglement of human
and non-human lives.” He took pains Someone asked me recently, “If you had to
to film the kites in a restrained manner: bulldoze all of the buildings in New York
“There are no extreme close-ups of flying except one, what would it be?” I said Anthol-
birds. I wanted to retain some of the awe ogy Film Archives without even blinking. The
and otherworldliness of the kites.” building, the programming, the people and
Neither are there lingering shots of the ethos really shaped me. I begged them
wounded birds: “I didn’t want to anthro- for an internship as a teenager and became
pomorphise the birds or sentimentalise the assistant to the archivist for the summer.
the situation.” After that, I was just in the Anthology family.
Along with the bird medic broth- At Anthology it is very specific experimental
ers, Sen makes an impassioned case to and ‘avant garde’ films that are the program-
reconsider the black kite – these abun- ming focus. They show films from people like
dant, tawny scavengers are disdained by the Kuchar brothers, Jack Smith, Jerome Hill.
many Indians as they are carnivorous. At 14, I helped to catalogue and photograph
“Birds normally occupy the fringes of the remaining Harry Smith collection, some
our vision. I wanted to centre them. I of his more personal works. Smith was the
want the audience to leave theatres and consummate artist and collector.
immediately look up to the sky.” I originally discovered Anthology at 13 and
realised it was not like other theatres, or other
All That Breathes screens at the BFI London Film rep theatres even. I grew up in New York
Festival on 7 and 8 October, is released in UK
cinemas on 14 October and is reviewed on page 71
renting movies from the Video Room, which
had a pretty extensive collection. When I
was around 14 I discovered Mondo Kim’s
and Kim’s Video [stores]; for a lot of people
they are the holy grail of video collection. I
was pretty monomaniacal at an early age,
interested in trash art, old comic books, The
Three Stooges, drive-ins and monster movies.
I created a kind of fallout shelter wall around
myself to absorb all of this media. The work of
Kenneth Anger and John Waters is so surpris-
ing and I just had no interest in commercial
movies or even the vast majority of independ-
ent movies coming out.
DO LOOK UP
A black kite in
George and Mike Kuchar were around a
All That Breathes bit at Anthology and their work really comes
OPENING SCENES
outta left field. For Funny Pages, [their short
film] Fragments [1967] was really important.
Lindsay Anderson’s films were also showing at
Anthology that first summer and being there
knowing I had to return to my prep school
when it was over meant that seeing [Malcolm
McDowell as] Mick Travis in if.... [1968] was
very effective. When school let out I’d run to a
screening of something like a restored 35 mm
print of Touch of Evil [1958] at Film Forum.
But even in places showing things in rep,
there’s a lot of politics around programming
and some people with archaic canons you have
to appeal to.
I’ve spent so many years going there I have
boxes full of ticket stubs from 1998 until now,
but the cultural experience that’s gone in New
York is in seeing commercial movies on film.
The only time I actually got into commercial
movies was at this multiplex in Queens about
ten years ago. There was this place that’s
not there any more called Sunnyside Center
Cinema; it was the only place in New York
that still ran 35mm print. Its equipment was
so old and for $6 for a Wednesday matinee you
could go see modern, hyper CGI movies like
Prometheus [2012] or Cowboys & Aliens [2011] on
a craggy film print, where it looks like you’re at
a drive-in. There’s this hypnotic flicker effect.
Just seeing current movies still printed to film
for a place that wouldn’t update its equipment
got me into popcorn movies.
Owen Kline was talking to Leila Latif
Funny Pages is out now on Curzon Home
Cinema and was reviewed in our last issue
 16

29,000
THE BUDGET FOR
SPOTLIGHT TURE
GODARD’S FEATURE
DEBUT À BOUT DE
SOUFFLE (1960))
IN BRITISH
POUNDS (400,000
000
9 or 10 FEATURE FILMS MADE BY
FRENCH FRANCS)
CS)

Things We
Know About
19 GODARD IN THE 1960S, HIS
MOST PROLIFIC DECADE

D
FILMS EACH WITH JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD

Godard 8 AND ANNA KARINA, HIS TWO MOST

FREQUENTLY USED PERFORMERS

FILMS CO-WRITTEN AND DIRECTED WITH ANNE-

10 MARIE MIÉVILLE FROM 1975 TO 2002 IN HIS MOST

ENDURING FILMMAKING PARTNERSHIP

THE LENGTH IN MINUTES

266
OF HIS LONGEST WORK,
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA

THE LENGTH IN MINUTES OF HIS SHORTEST (AND FINAL)

1 WORK, SPOT OF THE 22ND JI.HLAVA IDFF, A PROMO FOR

THE CZECH FILM FESTIVAL OF THE SAME NAME
OPENING SCENES

NUMBER OF COMPETITIVE WINS BY GODARD OF A PALME D’OR IN CANNES,

0 GOLDEN LEOPARD IN LOCARNO, CÉSAR AWARD IN FRANCE, EUROPEAN

FILM AWARD OR AMERICAN ACADEMY AWARD

HONORARY AND ‘SPECIAL’ AWARDS GIVEN

6 TO GODARD BY THESE SAME INSTITUTIONS

(ONE EACH AND TWO CÉSARS)

VOTES FOR GODARD’S FILMS IN S&S’S

238 2012 GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME POLL,

OLL,
SECOND IN NUMBER ONLY TO HITCHCOCK

VOTES HE’LL GET IN 2022…

CK

?
MIRYAM CHARLES DIRECTOR
RISING STAR

BY THOMAS FLEW

Who is she? Her films Caribbean island of Dominica

Charles is a filmmaker of Haitian
descent living in Montreal, whose
first feature, Cette maison, is a
poetic, fragmentary story based
around the death of her cousin
in 2008.
Her background
Her formal education in cinema
began at Concordia University,
Montreal, and since then Charles
has worked as a cinematographer,
as well as directing and producing
a number of her own short films.
Throughout her career, Charles
has interrogated themes of exile
and colonial legacy, preferring
to work in grainy, textured
16mm, as seen in 2018’s Drei
Atlas and 2021’s Chanson pour le
nouveau monde. Cette maison, also
shot on 16mm, blends fiction
and documentary elements to
evoke the trauma of a teenage
girl’s death and then transcend
it, imagining her at an age that
she never reached. Footage of
Montreal, Connecticut and the
allude to the characters’ feelings
of rootlessness, while scenes
shot on soundstages use black
backgrounds and sparse sets to
increase their artificiality.
Where to watch
Cette maison will be previewing at
BFI Southbank, London, on 31
October before its UK release on
4 November.

THE PICTURES
Spirited away
BY ISABEL STEVENS
In the 1970s, when Miyazaki Hayao was toiling
as an animator but was yet to direct anything,
he discovered the Tibetan folk tale The Prince
Who Became a Dog and dreamed of how he
would adapt this story of a young prince in
search of magical seeds that will save his
people from famine. Shuna’s Journey (1983) was
the result – not an anime but a graphic novel: “A
project as unglamourous as this would not go
far in Japan’s current climate… I have come up
with a visual adaptation of my own,” he wrote,
two years before the launch of Studio Ghibli.
After a near 40-year wait, Miyazaki’s
mythical adventure will finally be available
in English, shepherded and translated by
Sight and Sound contributor Alex Dudok
de Wit. In his introduction, he explores
THE GOOD SEEDS Scenes showing Shuna discovering a traveller who will tell him of faraway fertile lands, which he then journeys to find
IMAGES: COPYRIGHT © 1983 STUDIO GHIBLI
VALLEY OF THE PROLES The barren mountainous valley and hungry Yakuls, elk-like creatures that are also found in Princess Mononoke
17
how the 1980s was an extraordinarily
fertile creative time for Miyazaki and how
the novel anticipates many elements in
Ghibli’s films, from the headstrong female
characters (not in the original fable) to early
incarnations of the minonohashi creatures in
Princess Mononoke (1997) and Castle in the Sky
(1986). Readers who are eagerly awaiting
Miyazaki’s long-gestating final fantasy How
Do You Live? (in 2019 it was reported that he
was averaging one minute of animation per
month) can, in the meantime, lose themselves
in the elegant and ethereal watercolours
of mountainscapes and supernatural
creatures he created in this slender epic.
Shuna’s Journey is published by Macmillan on 1 November
OPENING SCENES
 18
THE SCORE
Jocelyn Pook
COMPOSER/MUSICIAN
BY MATILDA MUNRO
The composer and musician
talks about creating
soundscapes for Stanley
Kubrick and avant-garde
director John Smith
Across a three-decade career, the 62-year-
old composer Jocelyn Pook has brought
her haunting and transcendent compo-
sitions to more than 30 soundtracks for
film and television, including Stanley
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and
a piece for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of
New York (2002). She’s also played viola
and arranged strings for Laurie Ander-
son, Peter Gabriel and Massive Attack,
appeared in Derek Jarman’s Edward II
(1991) and collaborated with artists in
OPENING SCENES
experimental theatre, dance, the Proms
and the English National Ballet. Pook
spoke to Sight and Sound from deepest
Serbia, where she was chairing a jury at
the Nišville Jazz Festival.
Her career has been shaped by the
kinds of serendipitous eruptions of
chance that visit us when our luck is
good. The big one, for Pook, was the day
Kubrick called. He had invited a young
choreographer called Yolande Snaith to
work on his menacing swansong Eyes
Wide Shut after seeing a short film she’d
choreographed for the BBC. While
rehearsing the dance for the infamous
masked ball scene Snaith was playing
some music. When Kubrick asked who’d
made it, the answer was Jocelyn Pook:
it was her piece Backwards Priests (1997).
She received a call from Kubrick that day.
“A couple of hours later a car came to col-
lect my cassette. And a car came the next
day to take me.”
Pook was chauffeured to Pinewood
Studios to meet the director. “He made
you feel at ease. He was very warm and
always excited about music, and showed
me the masks they were going to use. He
hadn’t decided what he wanted, but he
said, ‘Sexy music!’ I was like, ‘What?’ You
think of Barry White.” Pook went on to
produce the original score, though “it
was tough – there was all this secrecy
around the film, and they were really
nervous about me having a video. I had
to beg them.
“As a child I dabbled in writing music,
but I thought you had to be a virtuoso
pianist and a conductor to pursue com-
position so I hadn’t thought it was for
the likes of me.” After her training at the
Guildhall School of Music and Drama
‘Kubrick was
very warm and
always excited
about music, and
showed me the
masks they were
going to use.
He hadn’t
decided what
he wanted, but
he said, “Sexy
music!” I was
like, “What?”
You think of
Barry White’
in the early 80s she toured with ABC
and Eurythmics and worked with col-
laborative Pina-Bausch-inspired experi-
mental theatre group Impact. “It gave
me confidence – I was working with
all these people who didn’t read music
and they were writing music happily.”
While she couldn’t get the record label
4AD to listen to her demos, by chance
her track on an obscure compilation fell
into the hands of an advertising exec and
was used to soundtrack a phone advert.
From the exposure came her first album
Deluge (1997), though controversy arose
as to whether the classical charts were
the right place for it, laced as it was with
non-Western modalities and pop ges-
tures. Two more albums followed. But
though Eyes Wide Shut was her second
soundtrack, the first was John Smith’s
Blight (1996).
Pook and avant-garde filmmaker Smith
had known each other for years – “I prob-
ably met him in the local pub” – when they
were living in artists’ co-operatives in east
London in the 1990s. “Apparently the area
had the highest concentration of artists in
Western Europe at that time.” Originally
commissioned for the BBC, Blight is a
document, rather than a documentary,
capturing the death-jerk of crumbling
terraces after an emotional campaign by
local residents to protect their homes
from demolition for the M11 link road.
ABOVE
Against a blue summer sky the builders’
Jocelyn Pook sweaty tattoos shine as they swing their
mallets, Smith’s signature playfulness
taking on a laconic tone. “Houses have a
soul,” the soundtrack offers.
As activists “were chaining themselves
to houses to stop demolitions, we’d always
felt sheepish that we enjoyed the benefits
of that situation, which was cheap hous-
ing.” This film was an opportunity to give
something back – interviewing the com-
munity who had lived their whole lives
there, the natural intonation of voices
repurposed as song “like an aural photo”,
working in harmony with Pook’s mourn-
ful string arrangements and the grinding
rhythms of collapsing brickwork. A resi-
dent’s voice sighs: “I don’t really remem-
ber,” and Pook makes it impossible to
conceive that she’s not singing.
Smith campaigned unsuccessfully to
be Pook’s plus-one to the Eyes Wide Shut
premiere. But working on Blight she had
already established some of her recur-
ring experimental practices, creating
atmospheres from audio excerpts of, for
example, the Arsenal match-day crowd
and her own answering machine. Her
2021 album Drawing Life quotes children
interned in the Terezin concentration
POOK PORTRAIT : WALTER MCBRIDE/GET TY IMAGES
camp during the Holocaust. “I do get
drawn to projects that feel like important
things,” she says.
To coincide with a retrospective of Smith’s films
this month at the Institute of Contemporary
Art and Close-Up Film Centre, London,
Pook’s soundtrack to Blight will be released
on vinyl by the independent label Purge
 19

MEAN SHEETS
The New York Film Festival
has been getting artists to
create beautiful and clever
posters for nearly 60 years
BY ISABEL STEVENS
Many festivals know the power of a good
poster – but one rises above them all in the
pedigree of the designers: New York. In
1963, pop artist Larry Rivers’ freewheeling
sketch of a camera, a spotlight and an actress
inaugurated the festival; 60 years later the
tradition of picking an artist (many New
Yorkers themselves) is still going strong.
Over the years the challenge has been taken
up by Andy Warhol (a vivid ticket-stub
screenprint), Saul Bass (a film strip-cum-
suitcase: a perfect visual summation
of a film festival), David Hockney (a
metaphorical open window) and Diane
Arbus (an ornate movie-theatre lobby).
The patron saint of NYC’s subcultures,
and the subject of Laura Poitras’s Venice-
winning doc All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,
Nan Goldin joins the ranks this year with
a 1979 photograph taken at a New Jersey
drive-in. NYFF has a great track record
of spotlighting female artists, including
Mary Ellen Mark and Cindy Sherman. My
favourite design is from 1973: who could
resist booking a ticket after seeing Niki de
Saint Phalle’s joyous slice of psychedelia?

OPENING SCENES
RIGHT
Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1973 poster; Saul Bass, 1964 (above)
WHAT IF?

THE UNREALISED FILMS OF DEL TORO

WITH HIS STOP-MOTION take on Pinocchio A ‘SPIRITUAL SEQUEL’ to Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, DEL TORO HAS repeatedly spoken
coming to the BFI London Film festival, below) was reported to be in the works in 2007, about his desire to adapt Mary
and his vampiric debut Cronos (1993) being titled ‘3993’. Set in 1939 and 1993 (hence the Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) for the
celebrated in the BFI’s UK-wide horror palindromic title), it involved the events of the big screen. In 2014, he said that his
season ‘In Dreams Are Monsters’, it’s a good Spanish Civil War and, later, the opening of intentions would be to move away
time to be a Guillermo del Toro fan. But in unmarked graves from the war. Sergio g G. Sánchez from the action of the novel, instead
his 30-year-long career, plenty of opportunities was on board to write,rite, making Frankenstein’
Frankenstei s monster the
have passed the Mexican filmmaker by, with del Toro directing;
cting; protagonist in an adventure story.
not least his unrealised dream project, an another aborted However, returning
return to the topic in
adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains project from the pairair 2020, he seemed
see much more
of Madness (1936). Last year’s Nightmare was a US adaptation on interested in
i literary fidelity,
POSTERS COURTESY POSTERITATI.COM

Alley was co-produced by Disney-owned of the Sánchez-scripted

ipted suggesting that he would
Searchlight Pictures, but del Toro has never The Orphanage (2007),07), which want to make at least two or
worked for Disney itself, despite being in del Toro would produce.
oduce. three films in order to be true
talks with it to adapt The Wind in the Willows After a string of directors
rectors to the novel’
nov s breadth of
(1908) and remake The Haunted Mansion dropped out, the project narrative and characters.
narrati
(2003), Peter Pan and Beauty and the Beast. was abandoned.
 20
READERS’ LETTERS
HEAD IN THE CROWDS Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde
SOME LIKE IT HOT
I loved the friction between Andrew
Dominik and Christina Newland dis-
cussing Blonde (‘She was the aphrodite
of the 21st century’, Sight and Sound,
October). I was already curious about
the film and now – without hyperbole
– I’m twice as excited to see it. I’d never
want S&S to stoop to the clickbait
nonsense of most online film discus-
OPENING SCENES
sion, but that dash of good-faith, well-
informed conflict was very fun to read.
James Humphreys, Manchester
THE ART OF THE MATTER
I enjoyed your David Bowie special
(S&S, October) and look forward to
seeing Moonage Daydream. However,
Jonathan Romney was wrong to state
that Bowie went to Bromley School of
Art. He is not the first writer to incor-
rectly assume that Bowie was part of
what Romney describes as “the art
school tradition that was so central to
the British pop imagination” of figures
THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS
I enjoyed reading Violet Lucca’s piece
on the ending of Woman of the Dunes
(the Japanese title is Suna no onna,
literally ‘Sand Woman’) enormously
(S&S, September). It remains one of
my favourite films and I have watched
it again and again.
For me, as someone who lived,
worked and fell in love with Japan and
its people in the 1980s, when I first
read the novel by Abe Kōbō it stood
as a metaphor for the country. As an
outsider – or gaikokujin, as foreigners
were called then – I felt like the man
in the story at times. The country felt
just like a restricted world full of ten-
sion and angst. And yet I found, like
so many foreigners I met there, a place
I could not leave. I did, eventually, but
like the film the country remains in my
mind and under my skin.
Unlike the prisoner, Niki Jumpei,
whose name we learn at the end of the
I loved the friction
between Andrew
Dominik and Christina
Newland discussing
Blonde last issue. That
dash of good-faith,
well-informed conflict
was very fun to read
such as Lennon, Townshend and Syd
Barrett et al.
In fact, the then David Jones left
school at 16 to work in an advertising
agency. He did have an influential art
teacher – Peter Frampton’s father – but
that was when he was still at school.
Perhaps the key to understanding
Bowie is that he was, as Romney says
elsewhere in the piece, an autodidact.
Jon Dennis, London
I lived, worked and fell
in love with Japan and
its people in the 1980s,
but as an outsider –
or gaikokujin – I felt
like the man in Woman
of the Dunes at times
novel, I chose with some reluctance
to leave that wonderful country. But
like the sand, so beautifully and eroti-
cally filmed by Teshigahara Hiroshi
and cinematographer Segawa Hiro-
shi, and the haunting soundtrack by
Takemitsu Tōru, the country remains
under my skin to this day. Japan is
the second home I never really left.
I wonder if any of your readers share
my view?
Jonathan Levy, North Yorkshire
CHANGING CHANNELS
What a joy it was to read about the
physical form of rental stores while
holding a physical print copy of a film
magazine. Reading Thomas Flew’s
excellent piece (‘ The video shop
around the corner’, S&S, Septem-
ber’), I’m sure, offered everyone fine
memories of their own personal ver-
sions of this.
For me, streaming services may
offer everything everywhere all at
once, but they completely remove that
special feeling of browsing the shelves
at our local video emporium. Channel
5 in Rustington, West Sussex, may
have been tiny in size, but in terms of
childhood influence, it couldn’t have
been any larger. I must have spent
hours in there, much to my parents’
irritation, searching for something to
watch at the weekend.
FACE OFF Vincent Gallo in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro (2009)
JOIN THE CLUB!
Thank you for the many great recom-
mendations for film-related podcasts
(‘In pod we trust’, S&S, September).
I’m sure it has been a catalyst for
the loyal fans of podcasts that were
excluded to write in and make a case
for their favourites, so permit me to
join that club.
The Important Cinema Club is a pod-
cast created and hosted by Toronto
residents Justin Decloux and Will
Sloan. Since starting six years ago, the
show has amassed over 300 episodes,
as well as another 250 via Patreon.
Their remit is nothing short of all of
cinema, and as such there is no appar-
ent rhyme or reason as to what subject
they will cover next. When they do
focus on familiar names, they make a
point of ensuring their take is unique
– Episode 35, for example, ‘Fly Free,
Francis Ford Coppola’, covers Youth
Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009) and
Twixt (2011). Perhaps most impor-
tantly, they shine a light on the legacy
of artists on the fringes of mainstream
cinema, such as Roberta Findlay,
Get in touch
Email: sightandsound@bfi.org.uk
Twitter: @sightsoundmag
By post: Sight and Sound, BFI, 21
Stephen Street, London, W1T 1LN
It was a tremendously sad day
when, funnily enough, I took a CV
into the store looking for work having
just finished college, only to be told
they were closing down. It was dev-
astating. There was a Blockbuster
in a nearby town, but it lacked the
minimalistic charm and homely feel of
Channel 5, and it too went under just
a year or so later.
It’s just as vital to revisit and freshly
discover older films as it is to appreci-
ate the formats in which we were ini-
tially able to consume the artform, so
to read this article alongside the Tar-
antino and Avery interview in S&S
(‘The Tarantino tapes’) has had me
scouring eBay for VHS players and
dusting off my old collection of VHS
tapes. My heartfelt thanks for the nos-
talgia blast.
Christian, Rustington, West Sussex
Wakefield Poole, Taiwanese actor/
director Pearl Chang and the output
of the Poverty Row studios. Episodes
are charming, insightful and burst
with the passion of the hosts.
But what really sets the show apart
is that they have put their money where
their mouth is and started a boutique
Blu-ray label, Gold Ninja Video. They
put out spectacular releases of public
domain films, low-budget indie films
and martial-arts oddities, and are the
main distributor of the extraordinary
output of maverick filmmakers Matt
Farley and Charles Roxburgh and
their Motern Media empire.
As we are about to reconfirm the
canon, and hopefully add a handful of
new titles to the S&S Greatest Films
of All Time poll, I think of how Justin
and Will’s passion has opened my eyes
– and others’ – to the full breadth of
film culture.
(I feel I should confirm, I don’t
know either Justin or Will, and I’ve
never been to Toronto. I just love the
show and the label.)
Andrew Knight, London
22 TALKIES
The Long Take
Kathy Burke may be a national treasure, but
she’s never won the accolades she truly deserves
Twenty five years ago this month, Gary
Oldman’s directorial debut (still the only
feature he has helmed) was released in the
UK. Nil by Mouth is a melodrama led by
character and location, with a raw docu-
mentary edge. It’s the story of an extended
family in south-east London: the alcoholic
husband who beats his pregnant wife and
throws his junkie brother-in-law out, and
two generations of stout matriarchs who
somehow keep the household upright. Nil
by Mouth is a remarkable film, which the
BFI has newly remastered in 4K for its
screening at the BFI London Film Festi-
val, ahead of an Oldman retrospective, a
Blu-ray release and a cinema rerelease.
Welcome attention indeed for a film
about appalling cruelty that nevertheless
remains consistently tender and non-
judgemental towards its characters. It
didn’t make much money at the time, but
then it was never a terribly commercial
proposition, set in working-class streets,
with tough subject matter and a record-
breaking number of expletives. It may now
have been challenged in that last category,
but this dialogue still smarts. It’s not easy to
make the same single-syllable word convey
so many different meanings, but then Nil
by Mouth is an actor’s film. Oldman draws
the very best out of his capable cast (see
page 56 for an interview with him about
the film), which includes Ray Winstone
as Raymond and the miraculous Kathy
Burke as his long-suffering wife Valerie.
Burke gives a genuinely astonishing per-
formance. She has a quality of understate-
ment that is emotionally devastating, and
an exceptional capacity for bleak humour.
Her biggest scene occurs when Raymond
turns up on her mum’s doorstep in the rain
insisting he still loves her. Valerie’s bruised
face speaks volumes, as the last drop of
patience drains away from her eyes and she
tells him he’s only fooling himself.
Burke won the Best Actress award at
Cannes for Nil by Mouth, and rightly so. It
was quite a whirlwind: she wasn’t at the
festival but at home in London with no
passport, so she flew to the awards cer-
emony in a private jet belonging to the
film’s co-producer Luc Besson. The stuff
of overnight-success fantasies. However,
she was instantly put on the back foot by
Pamela Hutchinson
@PamHutch
turn in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with
Oldman), hosted documentary series for
Channel 4 and the BBC, and this year
directed Holding, an ITV drama adapta-
tion of Graham Norton’s crime novel set in
rural Cork. And she shouldn’t have to bear
the burden of raising the representation
of working-class women on screen alone.
I’m selfishly considering only how much I
enjoy watching Burke perform. I loved her
in her debut film, Mai Zetterling’s borstal
drama Scrubbers, in which the 17-year-old
plays potty-mouthed cell-block comedian
Glennis who has “cut here” tattooed across
her neck. Zetterling, like Oldman, was
another actor-turned-director and on the
set of that film Burke says she told her:
“You need to write, you need to direct, you
need to create your own work.” Burke has
taken those words to heart.
OK, I wouldn’t mind seeing Burke win
a few awards. Proper ones, before we get
around to the lifetime achievement non-
sense – she’s only 58. It’s difficult to avoid a
comparison with Olivia Colman, who just
like Burke broke a run of TV comedy roles
with a performance in an actor’s directo-
rial debut about addiction and domestic
violence when she appeared in Paddy Con-
You may want journalists who assumed she was simply sidine’s Tyrannosaur (2011). Since then, Col-
playing a version of herself. Hard to imag-man’s career has gone stratospheric and
to be sitting ine Burke pulling a Laurence Olivier and she has a shelf-full of Baftas, and an Oscar,
down as you saying, “It’s called acting, dear boy”, butfor performances in challenging roles. Or
read this: she would have been within her rights. with Winstone, whose career flared up
Burke trained at the Anna Scher Thea- again after Nil by Mouth.
Kathy Burke tre School in Islington, where she grew Acclaim would be nice, but a good
has never up and lives still, and has been acting on laugh is hard to beat so perhaps it’s back
won a Bafta screen since 1982. She was Bafta-nomi- to box-sets. Burke told Kirsty Young on
nated for Nil by Mouth but didn’t win. In Desert Island Discs that the role closest to
– not for her fact, and you may want to be sitting down her own self was the gurning teenage
pitch-perfect as you read this: Kathy Burke has never boy Perry she played alongside Harry
television won a Bafta. Not for her pitch-perfect, Enf ield’s Kevin. On the rare occasion
vanity-free, uproarious TV comedy, nor she did win a prize – a British Comedy
ILLUSTRATION BY BETH WALROND. BYLINE ILLUSTRATIONS: PETER ARKLE
comedy, nor her unflinching performances in small- Award for her role as the delusional Linda
for any film screen dramas such as Mr Wroe’s Virgins in Gimme Gimme Gimme (1999-2001) –
(1993), nor for any film. Is that any way to
Burke reproached the industry types for
treat a national treasure? failing to recognise the show earlier: “It’s
I’m not suggesting you should feel about fucking time… I think we’ve all got
sorry for Burke, who more or less retired to leave the Groucho [Club], sit at home
from acting seven years after Nil by Mouth.and watch telly like normal people. Then
Tremendously beloved, Burke works you’ll appreciate it.”
primarily as a stage director these days –
although she has made a few screen and Pamela Hutchinson is a freelance critic and
voice appearances (including a notable film historian

Phuong Le
@phuonghhle
Douglas Sirk’s return to Germany, Interlude, is
a lost masterpiece of longing and confinement
One of the beautiful things about grow-
ing older is that, with each passing year,
I find myself falling in love with melodra-
mas even more than when I was a teen-
ager. Perhaps such a devotion comes from
a growing awareness of life’s uncertainties
and the compromises that pave the path of
adulthood. Douglas Sirk’s films, many of
which are currently screening as a part of
a retrospective at the Cinémathèque fran-
çaise in Paris, are often about the crushing
reality of wanting too much and the inevi-
table acceptance that desires are better
left unfulfilled.
Sandwiched between the director’s
much more canonised Written on the Wind
(1956) and The Tarnished Angels (1957), the
lesser-discussed Interlude (1957) is nothing
short of a masterpiece. As in so many of his
films, Sirk uses a love triangle as a prism
to view the fragile parameters of feelings.
Starring June Allyson as the doe-eyed
Helen, who moves to Munich for work,
Interlude is strangely reminiscent of David
Lean’s Summertime (1955), as it also casts
Rossano Brazzi as the tall, dark, handsome
foreigner who awakens an American expat
to new passions. A famed music conductor
with a furious intensity, Brazzi’s Tonio cuts
a Mr Rochester-esque figure; he too has a
mentally unsound wife who is confined to
the couple’s impossibly lavish home. From
the ornate wallpaper that lines up Tonio’s
chateau to the open fields of Munich, flow-
ers proliferate on screen. Dazzling to the
senses, their omnipresence embodies both
beauty and impermanence, ideas that run
throughout Sirk’s oeuvre.
In Interlude, romantic illusions exist, not
only in longing gazes and furtive embraces,
but also in the form of cities. Shot entirely
on location in Germany, the film marks
Sirk’s cinematic return to his home coun-
try after emigrating to America in 1937.
The move was a politically motivated
one – Sirk’s second wife was Jewish – but
it also left him estranged from his only
child, Klaus Detlef Sierck, who became a
popular child star in Nazi cinema. In Los
Angeles, Sirk figured out the only way he
could see the face of his son again was to sit
through Nazi-made films. The pair never
reunited; Klaus was killed in battle in 1944,
still a teenager.
Considering such heavy emotional
baggage, the fact that Interlude opts to see
Germany through the rose-tinted glasses
of an outsider inspires a strangely moving
kind of optimism. Writing in 1972, in the
New Left Review, on the film’s depiction of
Munich, Sirk aficionado Rainer Werner
Fassbinder remarks on how “everything
seems false”. Indeed, the opening credits
and Helen’s arrival have a postcard-perfect
quality, as the camera counts all the sight-
seeing landmarks in the city, including
the monumental Bavaria Statue, a female
personification of the homeland, and the
world-famous Rathaus- Glockenspiel
clock. The streets are full of people walk-
ing, shopping, possibly falling in love; it’s
a post-war Germany that bristles with sun-
drenched vivacity. Interlude’s first glimpse
of the city is that of the Angel of Peace.
For a director whose home country held
so much familial tragedy and grief, the
decision to open with such an image is
overwhelmingly powerful, yet shattering
in its implication.
If Sirk’s view of Munich is a radical act
of reimagination, then the sequence set in
Salzburg, the Austrian city where Mozart
was born, further deepens the fantasy; it is
a dream within a dream. As Tonio whisks
Helen away on an impromptu day trip
there, the pair travel by car, but much of
the city is observed from a high vantage
point, which accentuates its otherworld-
liness. From the Winkler Terrace, the
lovers cast their eyes across the magnifi-
cent sight of imposing mountains, lovely
little stone bridges and the Hohensalzburg
23
Ci ne Wand er er
Fortress, one of the largest medieval castles
in Europe. “You know, it’s just like a
fairytale,” says Helen with a sigh. It’s the
kind of wistful utterance that foreshadows
incoming despair.
In the end, beneath the film’s impossibly
vibrant Technicolor tableaux, a current of
darkness envelops the characters. Con-
trasting with the open vista of Tonio and
Helen’s Salzburg, the chateau shared by
the conductor and his wife, Reni, is luxu-
rious yet overstuffed with old-fashioned
furniture, evoking doom and psychologi-
cal claustrophobia. When the tormented
Reni runs away from the marital home
and attempts to drown herself in a nearby
Sirk figured out lake, the previously vibrant colour palette
turns eerily chromatic, almost like a tinted
the only way he silent film. As Helen struggles to carry
could see the Reni out of the muddy water, the screen
face of his son becomes infused with various shades of
blue. Bound by their love for the same
again was to sit man, the two women are frozen in time.
through Nazi- The image betrays the complex layers of
made films. Sirk’s observation of Germany. The ideal-
istic beauty of Munich cannot contain the
The pair never well of trauma that lies dormant beneath
reunited; Klaus its cobblestoned streets. At any moment,
was killed in the dam might burst.
As a reworking of John M. Stahl’s When
battle in 1944, Tomorrow Comes (1939), which in turn is
still a teenager adapted from James M. Cain’s 1951 novel
The Root of His Evil, Interlude carries great
significance in its title. For Tonio and
Helen, their romance is a sweet reprieve
from the obstacles of living, a contrast to
Reni, who is trapped in a love song that
has overstayed its welcome. Yet, Helen
will not leave unscathed either. While the
character mostly dresses in white, when
Helen says her final goodbye to Tonio she
is draped in a dark navy jacket. She might
well be going home to wed a far less excit-
ing suitor, but their affair will forever leave
a mark on her psyche. For Sirk, I cannot
help but think of this film as a kind of cin-
ematic interlude to his career, one that con-
nects the aesthetics that he had developed
in the States to the nostalgia that he felt for
a place he once called home. It’s a hymn of
hope and remembrance.
ABOVE
June Allyson and
Rossano Brazzi in
Phuong Le is a Vietnamese film critic living
Douglas Sirk’s Interlude in Paris
24 TALKIES
Poll position
Mine may be a lone vote for a cult horror film,
but the Greatest Films poll is rightly personal
In Sight and Sound’s 2012 poll, John Han-
cock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) ranks
as the 894th Greatest Film of All Time. A
further click on the BFI website reveals
“one critic voted for this film”. Reader, I am
that critic. I’ve voted for it again in 2022. In
the build-up to the big reveal, I’m almost
more interested to see if the needle moves
for Jessica – which has had more attention in
recent years – than in whether Vertigo (1958)
gets bumped from the Number One spot.
Everyone asked to vote has their own
criteria: varying definitions of greatness,
personal enthusiasms balanced against
reverence for the canon, a zeal to overturn
established pantheons and elevate less
familiar films to cobwebbed plinths, even a
listmaker’s nagging need to ensure a top ten
represents a range rather than a cluster from
a favourite filmmaker or area of specialisa-
tion. The diva who took seven of her own
records to that desert island on the wire-
less has few equivalents in the diverse inter-
national electorate. No matter how much
consideration the voter might give to the
notion of ‘greatness’ as being distinct from
‘favourite’, it is, in the end, a personal choice.
The higher reaches of the list, with films
whose votes are up in the hundreds, are
where some sort of consensus emerges.
Yet even that is arbitrary and fragile. In
the inaugural 1952 poll, Robert Flaherty’s
Louisiana Story (1948) was joint fifth in the
top ten; by 2012, it was ranked 588th, with
a vote of two (one more than Jessica, admit-
tedly). A key change is simple: S&S now
polls a lot more critics than it did at the
outset (Louisiana Story got its place with
only 12 votes) and makes an effort to solicit
votes from a wider range of voices. This
inevitably means a longer list, with many,
many more one- and two-vote titles.
So, do I really think that a 1971 horror
movie is one of the Ten Greatest Films of
All Time? Yes, of course I do. I wouldn’t
have voted for it if I didn’t.
But it’s complicated. And personal.
I first saw Let’s Scare Jessica to Death at the
Palace Theatre, Bridgwater, in Somerset,
in 1973, when I was 14 (ie, underage for
the X certificate). It was the first grown-
up horror film that genuinely terrified me.
It combines the relentless approach of
George Romero with the quieter chills of
the classic ghost story as shuffling towns-
folk (bearing scars that show they’ve been
bled by the local vampire) besiege a New
England farm and mentally fragile incomer
Jessica (Zohra Lampert) finds her friends
taken from or turned against. A sequence
shot in broad daylight in which Jessica and
her nemesis Emily (Mariclare Costello)
take a swim is among the most purely
frightening moments of cinema, with
a payoff as Emily disappears under the
water while wearing a black bathing suit
only to bob up moments later in a soaked
19th-century wedding dress and advance,
zombie-like, out of the lake.
It’s a movie unconstrained by genre,
made by people who wanted to do some-
thing scary but for whom that wasn’t the
limit of their ambitions. The lasting impact
of a horror film can be gauged by how
often subsequent horrors riff on it – dec-
ades on, not a week passes without a film
xeroxing Psycho (1960), Night of the Living
Dead (1968), The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975)
or Halloween (1978). Jessica is evoked less
often, but Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth
THIS ISSUE
Kim Newman
(2015) and A.D. Calvo’s Sweet, Sweet Lonely
Girl (2016) use it as a touchstone.
For ages, it was a film only I seemed to
have seen, though its stature as a minor
classic has become more secure (it’s central
to Kier-La Janisse’s 2012 book House of Psy-
chotic Women). Horror films work on spe-
cific fears and interests. Certainly, there are
connections between Jessica and my own
experience: as a child, I was moved from
the city to the country by craftsman parents
who bought a derelict farmhouse (with an
orchard) and made a going concern of the
place despite a certain hostility from the
locals. This, loosely, is what happens in Jes-
sica. I had a similar, immediate, personal
connection with Don Taylor’s terrifying
TV episode ‘The Exorcism’, part of the
anthology series Dead of Night (1972).
I can also see how random circumstance
– unconnected with the quality of the film
but all to do with me – dictates my convic-
tion. I recognise that polling people for
the Ten Greatest Anything is inherently
absurd, but it’s also interesting. We learn
a lot from these lists, about ourselves as
much as the films we vote for (or don’t).
If the stars had aligned slightly differ-
John Hancock’s ently, Willard Huyck’s Messiah of Evil (1973)
might have got a UK theatrical release in
1971 horror the 1970s, but it was one of many, many
film Let’s Scare American independent horror films that
Jessica to Death didn’t (Jessica, in this respect, was lucky –
it was made by Paramount). I didn’t see
combines Messiah until it turned up on poor quality
the relentless VHS in the 1980s; I’ve still never seen it in
approach of a cinema. S&S didn’t review it until 2010.
Objectively, Messiah of Evil is close to Let’s
George Romero Scare Jessica to Death in quality. If I’d seen
with the it at 14, in a cinema, it might have left as
quieter chills big an impression on me as Hancock’s film.
So when asked to nominate my favourite
of the classic horror movies or film experiences or Great-
ghost story est Film of All Time candidates, Jessica is
confirmed in my mind while Messiah isn’t.
Now magnify that by every choice made
by every critic in the poll.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARC DAVID SPENGLER
Kim Newman curated ‘Vampires’, the latest
edition of Sight and Sound’s archive series
The BFI horror season, ‘In Dreams are Monsters’, runs across
the UK and on BFI Player from 17 October-31 December. ‘Let’s
Scare Jessica to Death’ plays at BFI Southbank in November
OUR LATEST 148-PAGE SPECIAL EDITION
AVAILABLE NOW
SHOP.BFI.ORG.UK
ACCESS
THE
ARCHIVE
90 YEARS OF SIGHT AND SOUND

AND MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN

FULL ONLINE ACCESS

WITH ALL SUBSCRIPTIONS

S I G H TA N D S O U N D D I G I TA L . B F I . O R G . U K
Image: Anna May Wong in Piccadilly | Photography: Fred Daniels/BFI National Archive
FESTIVAL BULLETIN
27

F ROM V ENICE A ND T ORON T O

ABOVE Paul Dano, Mateo Zoryna Francis-DeFord and Michelle Williams in Steven Spielberg’s heartfelt movie memoir The Fabelmans
 28
THE FESTIVAL BULLETIN
VENICE
ABOVE
Pope Francis in Gianfranco
Rosi’s documentary In viaggio
OPPOSITE, TOP
Joel Edgerton and Sigourney
Weaver in Paul Schrader’s
Master Gardener
OPPOSITE, BOT TOM
Tilda Swinton in Joanna Hogg’s
ghost story The Eternal Daughter
There were dark
undercurrents to many films
at the Lido this year, from
Gianfranco Rosi’s humane
study of Pope Francis to
Alice Diop’s powerful drama
of infanticide and Lav Diaz’s
brutal portrait of corruption
and decay in the Philippines
WORDS BY KIERON CORLESS
The Lido was bathed in constant sun-
light, Campari flowed in abundance and
the atmosphere felt consistently upbeat
at Venice this year, at least out in the open
air; a far more sombre mood prevailed in
the darkness of the Lido’s cinemas, where
many of the films I saw in my week there
took to confronting, perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, a sense of profound malaise in human
affairs. One of the most directly addressed
and globally scaled in that respect was In
viaggio, a documentary by Gianfranco Rosi,
which drew principally on archive to paint
an occasionally moving portrait of Pope
Francis, homing in on the more politically
charged elements of speeches he’s made
during trips to various countries, and on
his interactions not just with world leaders
but also with ordinary people and particu-
larly prisoners, both men and women.
Rosi shows us a surprisingly radical
figure, inveighing against a rapacious,
avaricious global order and pleading for
a properly engaged response to climate
change and a curtailment of war and weap-
ons sales, and on a more personal level for
solidarity, love, empathy and a rejection
of acquisitiveness. The stony expressions
this elicits from the likes of UAE president
Mohamed bin Zayed and Turkish presi-
dent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suggest he’s
often not the most welcome of guests.
The film is not without moments of
critical distance, and the pope is of course
the figurehead of a deeply problematic
institution; although he does address the
horrific abuses visited upon children in
Catholic schools and churches, and is not
above apologising for a misplaced com-
ment deflecting criticism of one priest
perpetrator. Nevertheless, his willingness
to say what some people, especially world
leaders, don’t want to hear is laudable and
Rosi clearly feels admiration for him, but
the larger point and sadness of the film is
the pope’s isolation and powerlessness; an
image of him in St Peter’s Square during
the pandemic, alone in a vast empty space,
conveys this eloquently. In viaggio reveals
someone who sees most of the ills of the
world, but despite his influence and reach
can ultimately change nothing; truly ‘God’s
lonely man’.
That phrase is of course from Taxi Driver
(1976), scripted by Paul Schrader, whose
Master Gardener also featured in Venice in
the Out of Competition strand; the films
comprising which were every bit as arrest-
ing as those in the Competition, if not
more so. The titular gardener is Narvel
Roth (Joel Edgerton) another of Schrad-
er’s spiritually damaged solo men, who
lovingly tends the well-appointed grounds
of a racially bigoted dowager (Sigourney
Weaver) with whom he has a weekly sexual
tryst. It transpires Roth has a dubious and
violent past, given visual expression by
Nazi tattoos on his upper torso. His pas-
sion for and deep knowledge of horticul-
ture has not only been a way of imposing
redemptive order on personal chaos, but
also a vocational second chance after grass-
ing on his former crowd of militia men.
Things are predictably upended when
the dowager’s mixed-race great-niece
Maya (Quintessa Swindell) is taken on
as his employee, but it’s still fascinating
to watch Schrader working variations
on his usual themes and obsessions. The
garden is both a character in itself and a
generative metaphor, suggestive of poten-
tial change and cyclical renewal. And
even if the Maya character is less realised
and credible than Roth’s, I still couldn’t
but admire the rigour and intelligence of
Schrader’s writing and direction; this is
one of the great careers in contemporary
cinema, and Schrader was accordingly
given a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Weaver’s curdled, clenched hauteur
in Master Gardener was a standout, but
across the board in Venice there were so
many memorably superb performances by
actresses. Fred Wiseman’s first foray into
fiction, A Couple, is a startling, despairing
monologue delivered by French actress
Nathalie Boutefeu in a beautiful natural
setting, in which she incarnates Sophia
Tolstoy and reveals her marriage torments
through her diary extracts and the letters
she wrote to her wayward husband of 36
years, the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy.
Penélope Cruz starred in two films in
Venice; in the one I saw, the social-realist

Sigourney Weaver’s curdled, clenched
hauteur in Master Gardener was a
standout, but across the board in
Venice there were so many memorably
superb performances by actresses
On the Fringe (En los márgenes) directed by
Juan Diego Botto, she is completely con-
vincing as a supermarket shelf-stacker in
Madrid terrified at the prospect of being
evicted from her home with her young son.
In Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Chil-
dren, Virginie Efira plays a warm, impulsive
40-year-old teacher whose new relation-
ship with a single father and his four-year-
old daughter provokes a reckoning with
her own childless state. And Kimura Fumi-
no’s graceful, understated performance in
Fukada Kōji’s Love Life as a young mother
29
THE FESTIVAL BULLETIN
trying to find her way through a miasma of
guilt and grief carries the film through to
its aptly low-key resolution.
But the strongest performances
appeared in two films in which the protag-
onists were negotiating sometimes haz-
ardous mother-daughter bonds. First up,
Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter was a
welcome surprise by virtue of the direc-
tor’s turn to genre, a ghost story complete
with a fog that seemed to have drifted
in from a 70s Hammer film and a creaky
old haunted house now pressed into ser-
vice as a hotel. Tilda Swinton plays both
scatty mother and dutiful daughter; the
latter, a filmmaker, has organised a stay in
the spooky hotel where her mother lived
with her family as a child, making surrep-
titious recordings of her recollections for
a possible film about her life. We’re on not
dissimilar thematic terrain to The Souvenir
Part II (2021) – how to fashion art out of
grief, the unknowable mystery of even
those we’re most intimate with – this time
with genre trappings which deepen our
sense of underlying urgency and anxiety;
the clever audio work and a sickly green
light are particular highlights. Swinton
is compelling in both roles, but there’s
also excellent support from Carly-Sophia
Davies as a hilariously rude and unhelp-
ful receptionist and Joseph Mydell as the
genial groundsman with his own cross to
bear, movingly related. Of all the films I
saw in Venice this one seemed the most
personal, to have the thinnest membrane
between director and film. It was also the
most pleasurable in the way it tapped into
the iconography of British ghost stories
I remember watching on TV as a child.
 30
THE FESTIVAL BULLETIN

The other one was Alice Diop’s Saint their own interpretations and connections; Two other films also had courtroom ABOVE
Kayige Kagame in Alice
Omer, in the Competition, one of the most and true to the protagonist’s sense of self- scenes at their centre. Argentina, 1985 sees Diop’s Saint Omer
original and exciting films I saw, which hood the film is unashamedly cerebral too Santiago Mitre – and his co-screenwriter
BELOW
ended up deservedly winning the Silver (it opens with Rama talking to a class Mariano Llinás, director of La flor (2018) Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985
Lion. (Sadly, I missed Laura Poitras’s por- about Marguerite Duras’s theory of subli- – operating in a more conventional, com-
OPPOSITE, TOP
trait of the photographer and activist Nan mating reality; later we see an extract from mercial TV-movie mode than we’re used Lav Diaz’s When the Waves Are Gone
Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea). A breathtak- to from them; it can only be a happy
which was awarded the Golden Lion, only ing passage near the end scored to a Nina occurrence that such stalwarts of the
the second time a documentary has won Simone song seems to open up a space for Argentinian independent scene get their
the top prize in Venice, after Gianfranco reflection, where nothing is neatly tied up chance on a film for Amazon at this scale
Rosi’s Sacro GRA in 2013.) Diop describes or explained; rather, the different elements and budget, especially given how sure-
it as a film about “the unspeakable mystery Diop has assembled are left to simply reso- footed and narratively astute the result
of mothers”, of whom there are three in the nate and strike sparks off each other. is. The film is based on a true story, an
film, plus one to be (this is very much a
film about women; only one man appears,
a pompous lawyer). It centres on Rama, a
young female novelist who attends the trial
of a Senegalese woman accused of killing
her 15-month-old daughter by abandon-
ing her to the incoming tide on a beach.
We’ve already been privy to Rama’s uneasy
relationship with her own mother, both in
the present before she departs for the trial
in Saint Omer and when she was a child.
Rama plans to write a contemporary ver-
sion of the Medea myth, but what she
hears in the courtroom (and outside it in
conversation with the accused’s mother), a
harrowing tale of racism, isolation, depres-
sion, voodoo and more, detonates some
kind of deep recognition inside her; there’s
a chilling moment, a mere exchange of
looks, which seems to act as a trigger.
To say more would be to spoil it, but
there’s so much to admire here, not least
the elegance of the filmmaking, the preci-
sion and formal control, and especially
the sense of openness. Performances are
understated, with eloquent glances and
silence leaving room for the viewer to bring

The Philippines in Lav Diaz’s When the
Waves Are Gone is a place of dank spiritual
rot, somewhere utterly beyond redemption
and slowly being eroded by the sea
unprecedented investigation and prosecu-
tion, in the early days of Argentina’s fledg-
ling democracy, of the men responsible
for the deaths and disappearances during
the dictatorship that preceded it. The
film manages all the big emotional beats
without betraying any of the characters’ or
story’s complexity, assisted by yet another
brilliant performance by Ricardo Darín
as the careworn lead prosecutor. Laura
Paredes steals the show though as a wit-
ness whose scalding testimony tips the
balance, reliving a traumatic birth during
which she endured appalling mistreat-
ment from her captors.
From a fictional recounting of horror to
the thing itself in Sergei Loznitsa’s The Kiev
Trial, which uses unseen archive footage to
reconstruct and immerse the viewer in Jan-
uary 1946, during one of the first post-war
trials to convict Nazis and their collabora-
tors of committing atrocities in Ukraine,
including the Babi Yar massacre. Each of
the 15 accused men clinically recount under
questioning what they did and why, which
includes ordering the murder of hundreds
of children as part of their ethnic cleansing
strategy. It’s only when we get to the wit-
ness and victim testimonies, with again
the most powerful being a woman who
was forced to act dead in a pit of bodies,
that the full horror feels viscerally close. As
this trial took place when Ukraine was still
part of the Soviet Union, viewing it at this
particular juncture brings all manner of
historical ironies in to play; in that sense it
felt as politically relevant as anything I saw
in the festival.
Industrial-scale murder provided the
context for the best film I saw in Venice,
only this time historical distance wasn’t an
option. When the Waves Are Gone is directed
by Lav Diaz (who won the Golden Lion
in 2016 with The Woman Who Left) and is
another of his X-rays of the Filipino soul,
taking as its starting point President
Duterte’s maniacal war on drugs, in which
thousands of people have been extrajudi-
cially murdered. Lt Hermes Papauran
(John Lloyd Cruz) is one of the top police
officers of his generation but is suffering a
profound trauma at being part of the force
on the frontline of Duterte’s barbarism,
expressed through a skin disease spread-
ing over his body. To add to his woes, a
psychotic former officer (Ronnie Lazaro)
he helped put behind bars on charges of
corruption is now released and on his tail.
Both actors are phenomenal; Lazaro is the
most scabrous, volatile presence I’ve seen
on screen in a long time, while Cruz sinks
convincingly deeper and deeper into lac-
erating dread and self-loathing with every
passing scene. These tend to play out at
length, like dense slabs that convey the
full weight of passing time. Larry Manda’s
cinematography is extraordinary, its pow-
dery greys and noirish shadows conveying
a sense of irreality, as if a depression were
being made tangible and manifest. What
really lifts the film to another dimension
though is its sense of scale, of a national
malaise, incarnated in the two men; the
Philippines figured here is a place of dank
spiritual rot, somewhere utterly beyond
redemption and slowly being eroded by
the sea. Diaz’s film is a tough but exhila-
rating watch that would grace any festival
competition in the world; why it wasn’t in
this one is anyone’s guess.
MORE HIGHLIGHTS
Luca Guadagnino delivers a tasty feast
and Alejandro G. Iñárritu misfires in
our round-up of Competition titles
BARDO: FALSE CHRONICLE BONES AND ALL
OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS LUCA GUADAGNINO, ITALY/US
ALEJANDRO G. IÑÁRRITU, MEXICO
In this bloated, pretentious
take on Federico Fellini’s
8½ (1963), we follow writer/
director Alejandro G.
Iñárritu’s avatar, Silverio
Gama (Daniel Giménez
Cacho), a Mexican journalist
and documentarian on
the eve of picking up a
prestigious award. A
narcissist pretending to
have imposter’s syndrome
because it’s the latest thing,
he mithers about success,
family, his sense of not
belonging and his country’s
history and culture. All is
told through a series of sub-
Buñuel dream sequences that
are as visually impressive as
they are intellectually empty.
A misstep for a brilliant
director in need of a good
subject. John Bleasdale
TÁR
TODD FIELD, US
Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett)
is a colossus of the classical
music world whose talent
is matched only by her ego;
her patterns of bullying and
predatory behaviour have
long gone unchallenged. Yet
if Todd Field’s sly, scathing
drama glories in Blanchett’s
stunningly physical Volpi
Cup-winning performance
– all imperious, oblivious
gestures and snappish,
up-tempo brio – it is not
a celebration but a brutal
cautionary tale about the
entitlement of genius. As
she’s increasingly haunted by
a past indiscretion that leads
to tragedy, it is viciously
satisfying to observe Tár’s
meteoric rise mirrored in
a decline so precipitous it
seems she might never stop
falling. Jessica Kiang
31
Timothée Chalamet and
Taylor Russell are the fine
young cannibals at the heart
of Luca Guadagnino’s
horror-cum-road movie.
The director’s return to the
(dis)comfort zone of Suspiria
(2018) pushes the boundaries
of teen horror, with pots of
blood and an atmosphere
redolent of 1980s classics
such as The Lost Boys and Near
THE FESTIVAL BULLETIN
Dark (both 1987). With great
sinister performances by
Mark Rylance and Michael
Stuhlbarg, this clever
adaptation of Camille
DeAngelis’s 2015 novel is a
delicious and nutritious
red-meat version of Twilight
(2008). Wryly funny,
ravenously romantic and
surprisingly moving, it won
its director the Silver Lion.
John Bleasdale
WHITE NOISE
NOAH BAUMBACH, US/UK
Noah Baumbach draws
on an expanded cinematic
toolbox in his ambitious,
spry and only slightly hollow
adaptation of the 1985 Don
DeLillo novel that satirised
consumer culture and the
existential fears of a family of
intellectuals. Adam Driver
plays Jack Gladney, professor
of Hitler studies at a small
liberal arts college; he’s our
entry point to a maximalist
world spanning neon
supermarket aisles and an
airborne toxic event. The film
has no shortage of fashion
flourishes (such as Driver’s
Godardian tinted glasses)
or stunning visual tableaux,
yet – as with the tablets
ingested by Jack’s forgetful
wife Babette (Greta Gerwig)
– there is a hole at its centre.
Sophie Monks Kaufman
 32
TORONTO
THE FESTIVAL BULLETIN
BELOW
Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light
OPPOSITE, TOP
Frances O’Connor’s Emily
OPPOSITE, BOT TOM
Sarah Polley’s Women Talking
The festival’s insistence on
gender parity has continued
to pay dividends, with many
of the most original and
intriguing films coming from
women directors, including
Rebecca Zlotowski and
Marie Kreutzer – while
Steven Spielberg was back
on top form with his movie
memoir The Fabelmans
WORDS BY TOM CHARITY
“Funny, these days, to hold a film festival
at all,” observes the director protagonist in
Hong Sangsoo’s modest, ingenious Walk
Up, one of precious few movies to acknowl-
edge even fleetingly the impact of Covid-19
on our lives over the past two-plus years.
(Another was Rian Johnson’s immod-
est and disingenuous Glass Onion: A Knives
Out Mystery, though only until his suspect
millennials were rounded up on a private
island at the behest of an Elon Musk-like
billionaire played by Edward Norton,
whereupon a dose of something undis-
closed permitted them to reveal their
Insta-smiles, if not their true faces.)
Be that as it may, the Toronto Inter-
national Film Festival (Tiff ) was back,
baby, the programme minimally trimmed,
virtual screenings a mere after-thought,
ticket prices sky high, the ticketing system
a shambles, and attendance, as far as the
naked eye could judge, busy, busy, busy.
Festival staff and volunteers wore masks;
the audience, mostly, did not.
Barring the last two years, I’ve attended
the festival annually since 2004 and it felt
good to return to the thick of it, connect-
ing with friends new and old, experiencing
movies with strangers, and, sometimes,
the women and men who made them.
The biggest coup on the VIP front this
year was a toss-up between Hillary Clin-
ton and Steven Spielberg, who won the
popular vote (the Audience Award) with
his gratifying movie memoir The Fabel-
mans, of which more anon. My own high-
light was seeing French filmmaker Alice
Diop dedicate her first dramatic feature,
the superb Saint Omer, to the inspiration
of Jean-Luc Godard, who bowed out mid-
fest. Diop’s film, based on a notorious case
of infanticide from a few years ago, subtly,
almost surreptitiously evokes complex
ideas and emotions around motherhood,
gender and marginalisation.
In this, it’s a fine example of one of the
most impressive aspects of the Tiff project
in recent times. Unlike certain other A-list
festivals we could mention, Toronto has
insisted on gender parity across the selec-
tion, and it reaps the rewards as many of
its most original and intriguing films come
from women directors: Aitch Alberto
(Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the
Universe), Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People’s
Children), Marie Kreutzer (Corsage), Caro-
lina Markowicz (Charcoal) and Sophie
Jarvis (Until Branches Bend).
Another case in point: Sarah Polley’s
Women Talking, her adaptation of Miriam
Toews’ novel, which like Saint Omer, was
inspired by a shocking news story: in this
case, the revelation that more than a hun-
dred women in a Mennonite community
had been drugged with animal tranquilis-
ers and repeatedly raped over the course
of several years – only to be told that they
had invited devils and demons down
upon themselves, or, worse, were imag-
ining these things. Toews (and Polley)
begin the story after the truth has become
inescapable, and a dozen women meet to
debate the appropriate response: to stay
and fight, or quit the community, leaving
the men.
Women Talking is a Socratic dialogue; a
distaff 12 Angry Men worrying at the articu-
lation of idea and action through speech.
Shot in near-monochrome, largely on one
set – a hayloft – and overwhelmingly in
close-up, Polley’s film is austere but delib-
erate, forcefully performed by an excellent
cast (Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Claire
Foy) and in the end it movingly crystal-
lises the paradigmatic cultural shift the
#MeToo movement has opened up.
The most prominent British films in
Toronto were directed by Sam Mendes,
Richard Eyre, Michael Grandage and
Stephen Frears, and mostly written by
men too, which tells its own story (we
might also throw in two superior Irish co-
productions, Martin McDonagh’s potent
The Banshees of Inisherin and Sebastián
Lelio’s The Wonder). Mendes’s Empire of
Light was the brightest showing from
the old guard, an original screenplay set
in and around a Brighton cinema in the
early 1980s. Olivia Colman is Hilary, who
works front of house with deference but
no great joy – until a relationship develops

Frances O’Connor’s Emily takes
the literary biopic by the scruff of
its neck and gives it a hearty yank;
Emma Mackey is sensational as
the eponymous Brontë sister
with a new, much younger Black co-
worker (Micheal Ward).
Ravishingly shot by Roger Deakins with
handsome production design by Mark
Tildesley (though the ‘Coming soon’ post-
ers in the cinema foyer seem to be mostly
a couple of years off ), this isn’t the Anglo
Paradiso we might expect, or at least, not
only. Mendes has made a surprisingly
trenchant and tender film about mental ill-
ness, doesn’t sugarcoat the racism rampant
in the era, and wraps it up in a love story
of unusual kindness and generosity. Bravo!
33
Also of note, Frances O’Connor’s Emily,
showing in the reliably solid Platform
showcase, takes the literary biopic by the
scruff of its neck and gives it a hearty yank.
Emma Mackey (Sex Education) is sensa-
tional as the eponymous Brontë sister, the
shy one – until a passionate romance gives
her the grounding for what will become
Wuthering Heights.
Space is short and I haven’t mentioned
the festival’s value-added status, what we
might dub ‘the Ides of Oscar’. In brief,
homegrown hero Brendan Fraser was
welcomed with open arms for his touch-
ing turn in a fat suit for Darren Aronof-
sky’s otherwise grotesque and misbegot-
ten The Whale. He is a shoo-in for a Best
Actor nomination, where he will likely be
in competition with Colin Farrell for his
career-best work in The Banshees of Inish-
erin. If there’s any justice, Rooney Mara,
Jessie Buckley (Women Talking) and Vicky
Krieps (Corsage) will be in the conversa-
tion for Best Actress, alongside Michelle
Williams, for playing Spielberg’s mum in
The Fabelmans.
But if Tiff ’22 will be remembered for
any one film it will be Spielberg’s. There
are literally skeletons in the cupboard here,
rigged in the service of one of his horror-
ific home movies for a shock scare that pre-
THE FESTIVAL BULLETIN
figures Gertie discovering ET. Critics, fans
and other armchair therapists will enjoy
the keys it provides to the director’s larger-
than-life, era-defining entertainments. For
the young Sam Fabelman, movie-making
is an escape and more than that, an esca-
pade, an adventure, a three-ring-circus.
This flamboyant, heartfelt film deserved
centre stage in the festival’s big tent.

Histoire(s) e Godard
Endlessly changeable, endlessly challenging the ideas of
audiences and other filmmakers about what cinema could
be, Jean-Luc Godard created an unparalleled body of work
that, like life, can only be understood by experiencing it.
WORDS BY KENT JONES
The Queen, and then Jean-Luc Godard.
In the last few days it has been fre-
quently pointed out that for many among
us, Queen Elizabeth was a fixed point in
a constantly changing world. So she was.
And Godard was a constantly chang-
ing point in a fixed world. That is, a world
of fixed notions about cinema and how it
should be properly made and accounted
for, about the balance of power across the
world, about everyday existence and how
to define it, about our inner lives, about
freedom, about existence, about language,
about the living and the dead.
For me, for many of my friends, for
a handful of poets, musicians, philoso-
phers, cinephiles and, of course, filmmak-
ers, Godard was a North Star. Which is
why, when my wife quietly woke me up
the other morning with the news of his
death, my heart suddenly adjusted to a
new rhythm.
“No more Lubitsch,” said Wilder
to Wyler. “Worse than that, no more
Lubitsch pictures,” said Wyler to Wilder.
And now, no more Godard pictures. But
d
the many he left behind, of all shapes and
sizes, now radiate as brilliantly and widely
as the sunlight falling on outstretched
hands in his 1990 Nouvelle vague. Particu-
larly now, surrounded as we are by a dense
overgrowth of frozen media-approved
‘positions’ and dead-end obsessions with
surfaces and ‘optics’.
How to ‘explain’ Godard to younger
people who have come to expect eve-
rything under the sun to be explained,
categorised and prepared for? Godard
is no more explainable than a late Bee-
thoven quartet or a Georgia O’Keeffe
canvas. His films must be plunged into
heedlessly and without immediate under-
standing. There’s no explaining the stop-
motion passages of Nathalie Baye riding
her bike through the open air in Sauve
qui peut (la vie) (1980), or the overlapping
between ‘personal spaces’ in the first café
scene in Two or Three Things I Know About
Her (1967), climaxing with the universe
of coffee swirling in a cup, accompanied
by Godard’s own whispered ruminations
on his very existence. These are films that
can be described, positioned, compared,
analysed… but explained? Before anything
else, they must be experienced.
There has always been an urge to
explain Godard himself, to domesticate
him and box him into a corner. If I knew
nothing of Godard, here’s what I would
have learned from Vincent Dowd’s BBC
‘tribute’ – he had a tough time breaking
into the film business but finally exploded
on to the scene with À bout de souffle (1960),
he created a fresh, sexy, romantic new pop
aesthetic with his immortal 60s films,
those films had a big influence on Quentin
35
Tarantino, and he appeared once on The
Dick Cavett Show. Period. If I had looked
at the Guardian for further information,
I would have learned from Peter Brad-
shaw that “as the 70s moved on, Godard’s
strident political and intellectual stances
began to lose their cachet, and his work
reduced in impact in the 1980s.” So much
for, off the top of my head, Passion, Prénom
Carmen, Nouvelle vague, Histoire(s) du cinéma,
The Old Place, Notre musique, Goodbye to Lan-
guage and The Image Book, to name just a
few titles from the most prolific period
of Godard’s working life as an artist. Not
to mention the extraordinary two-minute
film from 1993 Je vous salue, Sarajevo, which
leaves me speechless each time I revisit it.
At least Bradshaw mentions the fact
that Godard was once a critic. If you’re at
all interested in the cinema, you owe it to
yourself to read Godard’s collected criti-
cism. I’m not at all sure that his writings
are any more penetrating than Rohmer’s,
Rivette’s or Truffaut’s, but they are more
deeply and even ecstatically engaged
with the actual life of cinema and its pos-
sibilities. “In the 1950s,” Godard once said,
“cinema was as important as bread… We
thought cinema would assert itself as an
instrument of knowledge, a microscope,
a telescope...” In his writings on Nicholas
Ray, Boris Barnet, Roberto Rossellini,
Jean Renoir, Hitchcock and Bresson,
Godard created an idea of cinema that
had grandeur and exalted spaciousness
enough to foster and provide spiritual sus-
tenance for an endless line of filmmakers.
The biographical details of Godard’s
life on earth are readily available to anyone
who is interested, but they do almost
nothing to illuminate our experience of
the work. Like Bob Dylan, Godard spoke
so fully through his art that he pushed
well past questions of what is and isn’t
‘personal’, all the way to a form of artistic
address liberated from time and identity.
To paraphrase Bob Dylan quoting Whit-
man, Godard contains multitudes. And
like Dylan’s music sonic boom, Godard’s
films are in conversation with all artists,
alive and long dead.
The career splits neatly into different
periods, if one is so inclined. There is the
stunning New Wave period, which begins
in the mid-50s, when already the Cahiers
writers were making their first shorts,
and ends with a sonic boom in 1967 with
DOUMIC STUDIO
Weekend. There is the Maoist/Dziga Vertov
Group period, the majority of the films
made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre
©
PICTURE BY PHILIPPE R. DOUMIC
Gorin, beginning with Godard’s May ’68
Cinétracts and ending in 1972 with Tout va
bien, shot right after his near fatal motorcy-
cle accident. There’s the period of experi-
mentation that begins in the early 70s with
36 JEAN-LUC GODARD
the start of his fruitful, lifelong partner-
ship with Anne-Marie Miéville – this rich
vein in Godard’s oeuvre, often completely
sidelined in official accounts of his career,
opens out to a stream of remarkable works,
big (Six fois deux, France/tour/détour/deux/
enfants, Histoire(s) du cinéma), medium (Soft
and Hard, Puissance de la parole, Liberty and
Homeland) and small (Lettre à Freddy Buache,
Origins of the 21st Century, Une catastrophe),
and it runs parallel to the 15 features he
made between Sauve qui peut in 1980 and
The Image Book in 2018.
How the different periods are char-
acterised depends on the forum or the
constituency. For the Vincent Dowds
of this world, there’s À bout de souffle, the
Anna Karina movies and that’s about it.
For Quentin Tarantino, it’s more or less
the same – first came the ‘fun’ movies,
and then Godard “disappeared up his
own ass”, as QT once put it. For many
who experienced Godard’s emergence
as a filmmaker as it was happening in the
60s, his is a kind of Preston Sturges story
of a rapid ascent to dizzying and exhila-
rating heights before dropping through
sheer into ever-increasing irrelevance.
Some decided that they’d had enough, as
if Godard’s public usefulness had expired
after the 60s came to an end – Vincent
Canby, a champion during Godard’s
alleged heyday, epitomised this dismiss-
ive attitude with the closing words of
his Nouvelle vague review in the New York
Times: “The party’s over.” For some in the
cinephile world, Godard was a modern
oracle whose every pronouncement was
received as some kind of poetic/philo-
sophical/political/existential truth that no
one else dared to speak: an enshrined 60s
classic, a Maoist diatribe, an eight-part
television series, a Dick Cavett appear-
ance, a Marithé et François Girbaud jeans
commercial – all equal.
PHOTO © RAYMOND CAUCHETIER
Godard arriveD AS a filmmaker at a
moment when masses of young people
were embracing music and cinema in the
same way that young people today are
clutching their iPhones. To be at dead
centre in the 60s, at the meeting ground of
Godard is
no more
showbusiness, artistic bravura and surging
youth culture must have been heady in the
extreme, and occasionally terrifying. Like
Dylan, Godard was appointed a standard-
bearer, and they both acquired the status
explainable
of enigmatic and near-messianic figure-
heads. They chose different escape routes.
Dylan went deep into the American past
with The Band. Godard threw himself
into radicalism. He would later dismiss
the Maoist years, while allowing that the
films had some “good moves”. His violent
break with his own practice served as a
way of divorcing himself from both stand-
ardised approaches to moviemaking and
distribution and his own youthful embrace
than a late
Beethoven
of the cinema itself – a giant step toward
self-definition. It was followed by the part-
nership with Miéville, the 1978 move to
Switzerland and the extremely contentious
and dynamic relationship with camera pio-
quartet
neer and Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beau-
viala, who laboured mightily to create for
Godard the 35mm camera he dreamed of,
one that he could keep in his pocket and
take out whenever he saw something he
wanted to film. There was also the rela-
tionship with the sound mixer François
Musy, beginning with Passion (1982), and
the embrace of video, which fundamentally
altered Godard’s approach to filmmaking
on multiple levels.
or a Georgia
O’Keeffe
The stories of Godard’s temper tan-
trums, capricious reversals and fractious
relationships with cast and crew members
are legion, as are his withering comments
about many of his fellow filmmakers. The
canvas
latter I would attribute to his sportsman’s
competitive streak (which undoubtedly
LEFT
PHOTO © RAYMOND CAUCHETIER
Godard with Jean Seberg during
filming of À bout de souffle (1960) in
a shot by Raymond Cauchetier
OPPOSITE
Cauchetier also captured Godard
with Anna Karina on the set of
Une femme est une femme (1961)
38

played into the very public and painful fight
in his return he picked with his old friend Truffaut), but
the former now strike me as a succession
of tortured steps on the road to becoming
a genuinely independent artist. From the
start of his career Godard took issue with
to basics,
the accepted practice of filmmaking, with
its hierarchies and its commonly practised
forms of budgeting and accounting for
time and money. Wasn’t it possible to work
in a different way that was acceptable to all
he grounded
parties and more conducive to artistic cre-
ation? For Godard, all roads led to video
and the editing room, where he was able to
control the means of production and post-
production – indeed, to merge them into a
single ongoing process. Francis Ford Cop-
his work pola once predicted that one day the tools
of moviemaking would be as inexpensive
and easily accessible as canvases, brushes
and paints. But did he know that Godard
had already reached that kind of mastery
in a solid
of his instruments? From the hybrid films
Numéro deux and Comment ça va? in the
mid-70s, through the two epic television
series, the endless run of short works and
sketchbooks, the culminating moment of
principle:
Histoire(s) du cinéma and beyond, Godard
became as physically familiar with his tools
as Yo-Yo Ma is with the cello or Sviatoslav
Richter was with the piano. And in his
return to basics, he grounded his work in
a solid principle that he articulated in his
montage is earliest days as a critic: montage is the rock
on which cinema is built.
There was the montage of images, but
also the montage of sounds, and of sounds
and images, and the layering of images into
the rock on
and over one another, resulting in an aston-
ishing range of homegrown techniques
and strategies that Godard employed to
increasingly nuanced effect. Did the lay-
ering of images lead to the manipulation
which cinema
of colour and light values, pushing both
into whole new painterly realms? It feels
that way to me. The flow of juxtaposi-
tions of visual and sonic forms (the sound
alternately deepens, widens, flattens and
extends the image) gradually finds its way
is built into the features, most spectacularly in the
breathtaking burst to vivid colour in the
second half of Éloge de l’amour (2001). As
much as I admired many of the features
from Nouvelle vague on, I was haunted by
the feeling that Godard’s real home was
now in video, where the authorship of
the images, his own or someone else’s,
was beside the point, and where he could
work at a rhythm that was fully his own. It
was only in the last decade, with Goodbye to
Language and The Image Book, that the fea-
ture filmmaking and the video/HD work
seemed completely aligned.
The issue of what Godard is ‘saying’
in his work has long been a problem for
viewers and critics. Like all artists who
operate by their own lights, he was in turn
assaulted and defended with torrents of
rhetoric, and in truth he played up the
idea of being an artist/philosopher/sci-
entist/researcher/historian/ethnographer,
OPPOSITE, TOP
and so on, sliding from one tendency to
Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989-98) the next to avoid being pinned down. But
OPPOSITE, BOT TOM
in the end, didn’t every road lead back to
Éloge de l’amour (2001) cinema? As Wallace Stevens put it, “The
JEAN-LUC GODARD 39
probing of the philosopher is deliberate.
On the other hand, the probing of the
poet is fortuitous.” He also wrote, in ‘The
Man with the Blue Guitar’: “Poetry is the
subject of the poem, / From this the poem
issues and / To this returns.” So it is with
cinema and all the other arts, whose point
of origin and ultimate destination is always
themselves. That’s not to say that all art
devolves into formalism. What we refer to
as the ‘theme’, based in close observation
of the world with an eye to transmitting it
back to the world, is a seed from which a
tree must be allowed to grow, as opposed
to a plan to be followed. Take Histoire(s) du
cinéma (1988-98). As straight history, it is
questionable to say the least… thus the (s).
As a meditation on the interplay between
fictional and documentary images in the
20th century, positioned within the grand
arc of western visual forms, it is some kind
of miracle. As a self-portrait, it is touching
and, in its final moment, deeply moving.
But it is not a historical treatise, nor is it
a philosophical essay. It is a work of art
whose values are not stated but embod-
ied, and it ends not in clarity but in mys-
tery. In other words, an experience.
Godard has been central to my life since
the age of 15, when I first encountered his
criticism (the films came later – if you lived
outside New York, they were difficult to
see). In 1978, when I was 17, I left home for
the first time. I went to Montreal to study
at McGill University. I took a film class
with Ron Burnett, and he told us that
Jean-Luc Godard was in town to conduct
a second round of discussions and screen-
ings with Serge Losique, founder of the
Montreal Film Festival, at Concordia Uni-
versity, just a few blocks away. I was aston-
ished that Godard was not only alive and
well (there was a rumour that the accident
had left him permanently at death’s door),
but that he was there in Montreal and that
anyone could go to the Saturday events,
the germ of what would eventually become
the Histoire(s). The format was a selection
of reels from other people’s movies in the
morning and a screening of a Godard film,
followed by a discussion, in the afternoon.
I remember that there was a reel of Dracula
(1931) before the screening of Weekend, and
a reel of New York, New York (1977) before
One Plus One.
The following Saturday morning, I
ventured over to Concordia. As I walked,
I glanced across the street and saw a man
in a dark overcoat with dark glasses and a
cigar in his mouth – unmistakable. I kept a
respectful distance. We arrived in the hall
outside the theatre at the same time, and
the door was locked. We sat down and
he started talking to me, first in French
and then in English. What was my name?
Where was I from? How old was I? The
conversation was quick and absolutely
unremarkable, but I will never forget his
presence, which I can only describe as
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
touchingly tentative and fully human.
When I finally saw his films, a light went
on in my consciousness of cinema, and
of myself in relation to it. My heart goes
out to people today, who make a point
40
of turning away from anything they don’t
immediately comprehend. At 20, did I
‘understand’ Sauve qui peut? Of course not.
But the “moves”, to use that beautiful term
of Godard’s, excited me and led the way
to understanding through familiarisation.
Nathalie Baye on that bicycle, her move-
ments suddenly arrested and broken into
stop/start segments… Isabelle Huppert’s
perfectly composed, placid face gazing
into her own inner world while she plies
her trade as a prostitute… the delirious
panning movement across clouds sail-
ing through a bright blue sky in the film’s
opening moments… Baye sitting alone in
a café in beautifully defined light – thought
and being in action… Let’s say that I felt
the film moment by moment before I put
it all together.
In the early 90s, there were concurrent
retrospectives of Antonioni and recent
Godard, at Lincoln Center and MoMA,
respectively. For me, it was Godard all
the way. This was my first exposure to the
video work, including those Girbaud com-
mercials, most of them structured around
repeated refrains of the words “la mode… la
mode…” spoken by an array of voices. I will
never forget the moment when, about four
commercials in, some alte kacker in the
back of the room started in at the top of his
lungs: “La mud, la mud, la mud… what the
hell are you people, nuts?”
At a certain point, for a brief moment,
I tried to argue with Godard. Contrary
to those who took me to task for it, the
impulse came not from an urge to destroy
but from a deep engagement with the work
over a long period of time. I did feel that
some of his unqualified fans were doing
him a disservice, but that was just a pre-
IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
text. At some point, everybody needs to kill
their masters, or at least to deny them. And
if I’m being perfectly honest with myself, I
resorted to sizing up Godard for posterity.
How ridiculous. “Prose is useful, moves
Godard was
the cinematic
poet of
solitude.
His solitude,
things, gives orders, is logical, serves for
argument, settles conflicts or makes war,
is privy to special interests, makes money,
passes information, and the rest,” wrote the
and everyone’s.
Jesuit priest and activist Daniel Berrigan.
“Poetry, on the other hand, is unneces-
sary in the sense that God is unnecessary.
Poetry is useless in the sense that God is
useless.” I committed the sin of describing
The existential
solitude
a poet in the terms of prose.
Godard was, I think, the cinematic poet
of solitude. His solitude, and everyone’s.
The existential solitude proper to every-
day life, the ground zero of absolute self-
proper to
definition, which cannot be summoned by
thought but only arrived at by chance, and
with a shudder. Only Godard has transmit-
ted this back to us in cinematic terms.
“Film is over,” said Godard to the jour-
nalist Fiachra Gibbons in 2011. “It’s sad
nobody is really exploring it. But what to
do?” Eleven years later, Godard is gone,
departed on his own terms, and there are
‘think pieces’ about whether or not he was
anti-Semitic and discussions of posting
trigger warnings before screenings of his
films. And what seemed fancifully pessi-
everyday life
mistic in 2011 now seems right on target.
Charmless, greed-propelled periods like
the one we’re living through now provide
fertile ground for something rich and sur-
prising to emerge in the cinema, with a
fresh connection to the past leading to a
new idea of the future. It’s not for us, who
experienced the glorious idea of cinema
that emerged in the 50s, largely invented by
Godard, to know what that future will be.
From this moment, as someone who
was born in 1960, I can say this. A long
time ago, I somehow found my way to a
filmmaker whose work enthralled me,
added another dimension to my vision,
and gave me courage and pride in the art
of cinema. In the words of a friend, also a
ABOVE
filmmaker, he protected us. His name was, Jacques Dutronc and Isabelle Huppert
and is, Jean-Luc Godard. in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980)
 Adieu, JLG

Filmmakers pay tribute

PORTRAIT BY PHILIPPE R. DOUMIC © DOUMIC STUDIO
42
LEOS CARAX
FRENCH DIRECTOR OF ANNETTE (2021) AND HOLY MOTORS (2012)
I’m 17 years old, I arrive in Paris,
I discover Pierrot le fou (1965,
above) at the Cinéma Saint-
André des Arts. I come out
drunk (or sobered?): so life (a
life) is possible after all? A few
steps from the cinema, I find a
100-franc note on the pavement.
I pocket it. “ This will be my first
cinema money,” I tell myself.
I’m 19 years old, I spend
two or three days on the set
of Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980)
in Switzerland. Godard has
not made a ‘cinema movie’ – a
mainstream movie – in 12 years.
The only conversation between
us took place when he was
driving me back to my hotel
one evening. He asked me: “It’s
not too airy in the back, is it?”
I responded: “No, it’s not too
airy.” (It’s never too airy.)
CHRIS PETIT
BRITISH DIRECTOR OF RADIO ON (1989)
AND LONDON ORBITAL (2002)
We all remember: “In
Switzerland they had… 500
years of democracy and peace,
and what did that produce? The
cuckoo clock.” Orson Welles,
who wrote the line, recalled,
“When the picture came out, the
Swiss very nicely pointed out
to me that they’ve never made
any cuckoo clocks – they all
come from the Schwarzwald in
Bavaria!” Now we can add Jean-
Luc Godard and Roger Federer
to the list.
It seems fitting that one
retires as the other dies, though
Godard must have watched a
lot more Federer than Federer
watched Godard. Celebrity
filmmaker quotes on Godard’s
death were so much cinephile
drool, ignoring the later little-
seen work – no mention of the
crabby recluse of Rolle or his
collaboration with Anne-Marie
Miéville, his companion for
Some years later. My second
film [Mauvais sang, 1986] has
just come out. Godard learns
that I’m not doing so well. He
calls me. We meet in Paris, we
talk. Shortly after, he offers me a
small role in his next film, King
Lear (1987). A few months later,
I’m in Rolle with my lover for
the shoot. It feels good to be
there, playing the fool around
a lake. The shoot is even more
familial, free and light on its
feet than that of Sauve qui peut.
Who’s the younger of the two
of us?
As a politicised student
of Hitchcock (combining
suspense, technique and
poetics), Godard never stopped
revisiting the 20th century (and
indeed, our whole history) and
alerting us: ideas, love, sex, evil,
over 50 years, whose own
career has gone almost entirely
unnoticed. Godard appeared in
two Miéville features (including
We’re All Still Here, 1997, right)
as a man racked by jealousy,
bookish, remote, endlessly
bickering and so berated by his
partner (played by her) that he
breaks down sobbing.
Perhaps his most revealing
remark about himself was he
had no imagination. Seen like
that, the work makes perfect
sense as text and image. Elia
Kazan, visiting the set of Vivre
sa vie, was uncomprehending
when told Godard never shot a
scene from more than one angle.
But his camera was never in the
wrong position and this refusal
of any conventional coverage
makes him unique. The lack
of a safety net means the work
should be seen as a whole to
the end.
beauty, our choices… nothing
is ever ‘either one or the other’,
as the world of bits (computing
variables that can take only one
of two possible values, 0 or 1)
would have it. But rather, one
thing yields two or three… or
millions of options. (Quantum
physics.) So it is our duty to
always react and re-act, to
rethink everything, to reimagine
everything always.
Until proven otherwise, it’s
not Godard who died on that
Tuesday morning, it’s us. Us, the
bit generation. Our 21st century
needs urgent reinvention. We
now need to be reborn, reopen
our eyes and our cinemas, and
learn our lessons. “Beauty is the
splendour of truth.”
Hail, Godard. Merde (and
please do not rest in peace).
LUCILE HADŽIHALILOVIĆ
FRENCH DIRECTOR OF INNOCENCE (2004),
EVOLUTION (2015) AND EARWIG (2021)
I’m 18 years old, I discover
Une femme est une femme (1961),
Masculin/féminin (1966), Vivre sa
vie (1962). With Anna Karina, in
whom I see myself, I learn that
the everyday can be transcended
by composition and editing
done with style, humour and
lightness, that cinema is a game:
with images, sounds, words
written or spoken, music and
silences – even with the credits.
I am enchanted, transported,
touched. I want to play too.
I’m 22 years old, I am at the
IDHEC [the Institute for
Advanced Cinematographic
Studies, a French film school]
and I’m trying to make films.
I discover Prénom Carmen
(1983) and Hail Mary (1985).
Maruschka Detmers and
Myriem Roussel are my new
models. Among our ‘professors’
is Agnès Guillemot, the Godard
Godard never stopped revisiting the
20th century (and indeed, our whole
history) and alerting us: ideas, love,
sex, evil, beauty, our choices… nothing
is ever ‘either one or the other’
editor. We see her as a high
priestess who will teach us how
exactly Godard transcends
the images he has shot. I learn
how creative editing can be.
The hierarchy between words,
gestures and music is abolished.
Nothing is forbidden, nothing
is sacred: jump cuts, continuity
errors, the uncoupling of
sound from image, words and
music cut in the middle of a
phrase, repetitions… But I
also learn that with freedom
comes extreme rigour, and that
a film is made in the edit, like
clockwork.
I’m 30, 40, 50 years old…
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98),
Film socialisme (2010), Goodbye
to Language (2014)… Godard
continues to surprise me, to
push me, to inspire me. Thanks
to him for his passion and
intelligence as a filmmaker.
PIERROT LE FOU AND PETIT SOLDAT IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

MARK COUSINS
BRITISH DIRECTOR OF THE STORY OF FILM (2011)
AND THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES (2018)
For my 40th birthday, my friend
Malcolm Fraser compiled for
me a CD of music. On one side
were ‘Douce’ – gentle – songs.
He called the music on the other
side ‘Thrawn’, the Scottish word
for obstinate or edgy.
Growing up working class in
the unnerving Irish Troubles, I
was unfashionably taken by soft,
douce cinema: burnished Gene
Kelly in An American in Paris
(1951), silken Grace Kelly in To
Catch a Thief (1955). Like many
teenagers I saw video nasties,
but the most thrawn films I saw
were by Sam Fuller.
Now that he has died, my first
thought about Jean-Luc Godard
is that he was a thrawn attack
on douce. The first film I saw
of his, Weekend (1967), is clearly
interested in choreography, but
it seems to take Kelly-Donen-
Minnelli Hollywood movement
and de-lubricate it, grind its
gears. The razor-sharp cutting of
music and sound effects in Pierrot
le fou is thrawn. Even in one of
his most heartfelt films, Vivre
sa vie, there is an attack on the
movie’s own beauties.
Alphaville (1965), La Chinoise
(1967), Une femme mariée (1964),
Hail Mary (1985), Le Petit Soldat
(1963, above), Film socialisme
(2010) – in fact most of Godard’s
cinema films – are a kind of
auto-immune disease. They’re
movies from the body of cinema
which nonetheless attack
the body. Thrawn is the key
signature.
KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO
BRAZILIAN DIRECTOR OF AQUARIUS (2016) AND BACURAU (2019)
The death of Jean-Luc Godard
brought back a piece of paper
from 1968, kept at the Brazilian
Arquivo Nacional and posted
on its social media. It feels so
Godardian. History, cinema
and politics finding common
language in text.
A set of notes on La Chinoise
written by a censor. This ficha
de censura (censorship card) was
written by Jacira Figueiredo
de Oliveira, whose brutal
persecution of filmmaker José
Mojica Marins (Coffin Joe) in
the 1960s has become notorious
to critics and academics. Here,
she seems to admire Godard’s
work before banning it.
She describes La Chinoise as
“the life of university students
The editing is first rate; Godard’s technique is undeniably
perfect. Mixing and sound are what one should expect from
this new master of French cinema. TO BE BANNED
Like many young filmmakers
in the 60s and 70s, Bernardo
Bertolucci idolised Godard.
Bertolucci’s early film Partner
(1968), in particular, was a
flinty work deeply influenced
by Godardian modernism, but
he told me that when he met
Godard on the festival circuit
with it, Godard said that
Bertolucci had made another
film as tight as a bull’s ass.
Maybe tight’s another word
for thrawn. Partly in reaction
to this, Bertolucci, a very
different man from Godard,
felt that Partner was as tight, as
thrawn, as he could go. And so
he retreated. His next feature
was The Conformist (1970), a shift
back on the thrawn-douce axis
in the direction of choreography,
Hollywood and elegance.
What’s the closest word in
French to thrawn? Hostile?
Inflexible? Têtu? Anyway, there
are ways to explain Godard’s
attack on the body of cinema.
He was about 15 when the
atrocities of the Nazi death
camps were widely publicised,
which seems to have enhanced
the moral seriousness of his
personality. He took against his
haute bourgeois background – his
mother from banking stock,
his father a physician. The
Protestantism of his upbringing
came with an asceticism which
he couldn’t entirely resist. Add
into this Bertolt Brecht’s feeling
that an artist should push the
audience away emotionally so
in Nanterre, members of
a communist cell, given a
raw treatment. Everyday
actions, their doubts about
which school of thought to
subscribe to (Moscow or
Chinese) are shared with the
audience in ways which are
impressionable. Vietnam,
apparently an obsession for
Mr. Godard, is once again
addressed. Godard gives us a
real lesson in communism with
this film. Cinema of the most
perfect kind, though the cause
is totally harmful/disruptive.
The release of this film in our
country is inappropriate on
all levels; even after its run
audiences will remember the
visual messages, the off-handed
JEAN-LUC GODARD 43
that they can pull them back It’s 14 years since I watched La feel slightly like the women in
in intellectually, and G.W.F. Chinoise. Is it good or awful? his life who saw his genius, and
Hegel’s idea that antithesis is More generally I’m troubled what was beyond…
crucial to understanding. With by douce/thrawn. Years ago I My second thought, the
this masala we’re not far off saw a TV programme by Godard opposite of what I’ve just
understanding my excitement and Anne-Marie Miéville called written, is that I’ll bite your
and shock at Weekend. Soft and Hard (1985). Despite head off if you attack Jean-Luc
It’s not always good to be on the title, they don’t address the Godard. He’s an enemy, but our
the side of attack. Lots of things douce/thrawn thing I’ve been enemy. Like Miéville sitting,
in society and cinema should be discussing. But Miéville was chatting to him on that couch
torn down, but Mao’s Cultural great with Godard (they met in in Rolle, Switzerland, I’m
Revolution was atrocity thrawn; 1970), and the programme is a exasperated with Jean-Luc in the
yet Godard didn’t recognise it series of domestic conversations moment, and unforgiving until
as another kind of Holocaust. I in their home. As I recall, they anyone attacks him.
got off on his Maoist films when talk of Godard’s film Détective And then? The flame-throwers
I was very young, before I knew (1985), and how he didn’t give are out. How dare you criticise
much about history, before I’d Nathalie Baye enough direction, the person who, through a kind
been to China (where I saw Mao and great lines. I like Détective, of thrawn hatred of cinema,
lie in state), but now I daren’t but Miéville pushes him, and I scorched, renewed it, made it
look at Godard’s Maoist films. feel like Miéville writing this. I re-available for inspection?
remarks, the communist
regime propaganda which is
known to preach SOCIAL
EQUALITY, but we know
too well that its governments
do quite the opposite. As the
saying goes: DO AS I SAY
NOT AS I DO. The editing is
first rate; Godard’s technique
is undeniably perfect. Mixing
and sound are what one should
expect from this new master
of French cinema. TO BE
BANNED due to breaking
current laws in our country
as stated in Decree Number
20.493.”
La Chinoise was shelved
for a full year, then it was
resubmitted and approved for
release with an 18 rating.
BAN APART The Brazilian censor’s verdict on La Chinoise (1967)
44
ALICE DIOP CHARLES
BURNETT
FRENCH DIRECTOR OF
SAINT OMER (2022)
Everything has been said
about the importance of
Godard’s work in the history
of cinema; everything will
continue to be said, so rather
than add my voice to the
concert of tributes and praise,
I would simply like to recount
a dream I had two years ago.
Upon waking, I wrote it down
in the Notes pages of my
iPhone. I found it yesterday
and share it here as is:
“It’s night, we are in the
empty streets of a housing
project on the outskirts of
a city. It looks strangely like
the one I lived in as a young
girl. Godard is naked, on
a scooter, riding down the
empty streets of this project.
I’m tailing him, the police are
tailing him, too, but they don’t
stop him. His naked body,
white, is a bright dot, a kind of
firefly illuminating the night.
For Godard this is a political
happening, a performance
that he calls ‘revealing the
migrants’.”
I had a dream
two years ago.
Godard is naked,
on a scooter,
riding down the
empty streets. His
naked body, white,
is a bright dot,
a kind of firefly
illuminating the
night. For Godard
this is a political
happening
AMERICAN DIRECTOR
OF KILLER OF SHEEP
(1978) AND TO SLEEP
WITH ANGER (1990)
The French New Wave was
basically the topic in film
schools in the 1960s when I
was attending UCLA, and
I imagine it was like that
everywhere. The figure that
stood out the most in the
movement was Jean-Luc
Godard.
There were a number of
French film students who
had taken part in the student
protest movement in Paris in
the 1960s. Godard reflected
this movement by creating a
new approach that spoke to a
new generation of independent
filmmakers.
When arthouses were
common in affluent
neighbourhoods and in college
towns, Godard became a
household name. His impact
on the art of filmmaking was
phenomenal. There was a
period in the 60s and later
where you could find a bit of
Godard’s influence in cinema
everywhere.
Did he have an impact on
me? Of course. As a film
student at UCLA in the
early 1970s, my peers and I
discussed him late into the
night at local cafés. It seems
that was the best time to be
involved in filmmaking. No
other director was analysed
or copied more. Ford and
Hitchcock were respected but
not copied. Though Godard
had a unique style and world
view, he was accessible to
filmmakers. He didn’t need
a circus of hundreds of crew
members to produce a film.
For me, his work gave the
impression that anything was
possible and within reach.
You wonder if Godard
will lose his relevancy? I
mentioned to a film student
that Godard died. She didn’t
know who he was. Foreign
film distributors and local
arthouses don’t enjoy the same
popularity. What was common
in the past is becoming rare
today.
I was at the Locarno Film
Festival many years ago when
it gave Godard an award
for his work. He was being
himself, very critical. I was
very excited witnessing him
being celebrated. He was just
how I imagined him to be.
JIA
ZHĀNGKĒ
CHINESE DIRECTOR
OF A TOUCH OF SIN
(2013) AND ASH IS
PUREST WHITE (2019)
I saw films by Godard for the
first time while I was studying
at the Beijing Film Academy
in the 1990s. Not at the school,
but in the screening room of
the French Embassy. À bout
de souffle (1960), Alphaville... I
found those films astounding.
I wrote down a sentence at the
time to record my impression:
“If you want to change the
world, start by changing the
language of cinema.”
SOFIA
COPPOLA
AMERICAN DIRECTOR OF
LOST IN TRANSLATION
(2003), MARIE
ANTOINETTE (2006) AND
THE BEGUILED (2016)
Of course like most
filmmakers I loved him and
he was and still is a huge
influence on how I work. I
always think of Breathless when
I’m filming and it made a big
impression on me as a kid. He
is our most beloved hero of
modern cinema.
HOU
HSIAO-
HSIEN
TAIWANESE DIRECTOR
OF A TIME TO LIVE AND A
TIME TO DIE (1985) AND
THE ASSASSIN (2015)
I saw À bout de souffle in Taipei
just before shooting The Boys
from Fengkuei (1983). I had a
strong reaction to his use of
the jump cut, so full of energy
and life, very young, very new –
you can’t find it anywhere else
in the cinema of that period. I
heard later that Godard didn’t
have enough film in each roll;
he had to cut when actors
were performing in the middle
of a scene. He asked them
not to move, to stay where
they were while he changed
to another roll, and then they
started again from where they
stopped. During the montage,
that caused the images to
jump, but he didn’t care. What
he did is so brilliant. It deeply
influenced my own ideas on
montage in all my films since.
(Republished from S&S,
May 2009)
I had a strong
reaction to his use
of the jump cut, so
full of energy and
life, very young,
very new – you can’t
find it anywhere
else in the cinema
of that period
CATHERINE
BREILLAT
FRENCH DIRECTOR OF
BLUEBEARD (2009)
AND ABUSE OF
WEAKNESS (2013)
It was through the New Wave
that I became aware that one
could be young, unknown,
not a professional filmmaker
and still make films. My
favourite films of the nouvelle
vague are Godard’s, from À
bout de souffle to Bande à part
(1964) and Pierrot le fou. But I
have special affinity with Une
femme est une femme (above).
I particularly like the rigour
of its framing, the impulsive
yet carefully thought-out
choices of colours, as well as
its ‘ultra-modernism’, which is
also ‘ultra-mannered’. Such is
the fate of modernism’s wish to
make a clean slate – sometimes
it comes out as ultra chichi.
And I love that!
Godard was obviously not
a fool and his constant self-
mockery doesn’t take anything
away from the cleverness of his
construction. It’s a wonderful
film. I love the egocentric play-
acting between Anna Karina
and Jean-Paul Belmondo
and the freedom and delight
of the director in shifting
between the playfulness of the
performances, the scrupulous
beauty of the framing and
the sharp colours of that
period. Obviously, I was just
fascinated, carried away – and
influenced. I have always said
that my film Tapage nocturne
(Nocturnal Uproar, 1979) was a
hidden remake of Une femme est
une femme. (Republished from
S&S May 2009)

PETER STRICKLAND
BRITISH DIRECTOR OF BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012), THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2014) AND FLUX GOURMET (2022)
By the time I became aware
of Jean-Luc Godard, a lot of
the tropes associated with his
rule-breaking had worked their
way into the cinematic lexicon,
yet that new language was
often utilised by other directors
without the unrest, passion
and venom that ignited his
detonation of filmic conventions.
With Godard’s work, I began
to respond to the idea that
narrative was only one facet of
the medium and that cinema
could also concurrently function
as confrontation, discourse and
a celebration of its form. The
films that affected me the most
were Le Mépris (1963), Une femme
mariée and Tout va bien (1972).
GODARD WITH CIGAR IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
Ironically, William Klein,
whose Who Are You, Polly
Maggoo? (1966) employed
a similarly tactile, pop art
approach to the glamour of
clothing catalogues and other
consumerist cornucopia, died
the same week as Godard, and
one can see the influence a film
such as Une femme mariée might
have had on him.
Le Mépris felt like a departure
from the playfulness into the
depths of a romantic lament,
yet the form was still being
dismantled with spoken credits
and other disruptions while
still serving the narrative. Tout
va bien had the most impact on
me and it’s a film that is still
choking from the fumes of May
1968, which might be one of the
aspects of Godard’s cinema that
hasn’t been adopted as much
by other filmmakers. We’re
currently enduring our own
cocktail of social calamities,
such as the Windrush scandal,
Brexit, a dismantling of workers’
rights, state capture by stealth
and a gradual return to serfdom
in all but name for many. That
anger and collective impotence
is erupting on to the screen, only
we’re missing a filmmaker of
Godard’s sophistication when
it comes to interrogating the
medium itself and transforming
the cry against injustice into
something radical.
Even one film
of his has so much
more character
to it than whole
filmographies
belonging to
other directors
I could think of
BÉLA TARR
HUNGARIAN DIRECTOR OF SÁTÁNTANGÓ
(1994) AND THE TURIN HORSE (2011)
Without him, the world would
be a different place today.
We would see different images
and have a different relationship
with cinema and the world
around us.
He didn’t consider us, the
audience, to be childlike or
foolish, but rather adults and
equal partners. He trusted us.
He knew how to gain our trust,
how to please us, how to serve
us, in the noblest sense of the
word.
His films have taught us
that cinema is not simply
showbusiness, but rather the
‘seventh art’.
We have learnt that the value
of a piece is not determined by
its box-office income, but by
how much it touches people,
how much it becomes part
of our everyday lives, thereby
becoming eternal.
The real test of a film
is whether it can still be
appreciated after a few decades’
time.
Godard’s oeuvre easily passes
this test. He did not accept any
form, school or style, because
he himself was the form, the
style and the school. He defied
all incomprehension. He defied
mockery and contempt, doing
his work with a wry smile and a
cigar in his mouth.
He gave us both strength and
a moral sense.
He liberated film itself, with
his clear view that the terminal
illness of the ‘feature film’ was
the linear narrative, which had
reduced the associative treasury
of imagery to a simple story, and
at the same time ‘murdered’ the
situational sensibility.
He showed us that film is not
merely a comic book based on
JEAN-LUC GODARD 45
There are many Godard films
I haven’t seen, particularly
from his later years. I can only
comment on his 1960s and early
70s output and even within that
period there are a few films that
I missed, but even one film of
his has so much more character
to it than whole filmographies
belonging to other directors I
could think of.
What is often not mentioned
when it comes to Godard is the
allure of his surfaces. He was
a director who understood the
power of cinematic lustre, but
that power can only come to
life with the kind of convulsive
energy that only he knew how
to harness.
a script, but a combination of
image, sound, rhythm, music,
movement and the human look,
and, as such, that it can become
a work of art.
He taught us that we have
nothing to fear, that we
are strong and free. All his
perspectives are about human
autonomy and the trials that
await us. His achievement was
the greatest thing of all: that we
would come out of the cinema
feeling differently from the way
we did when we went in. We
became autonomous ourselves.
We became something more
than we were before, if only
with the illusion that we had
become free. This is perhaps
the most important thing. The
illusion of freedom is the first
step towards true freedom.
To confront and put an end
to the pathetic servility that
still characterises the world’s
filmmakers today.
He made it clear in all of his
work that one cannot live life
on one’s knees, and one can
never make a true, genuine film,
either.
This great director is known
for the fact that if you take a
single frame out of any of his
films, you will immediately
recognise it as his work. It is
unique to him, unmistakable
because it is his true style and
his own language. Very few
people in the world are capable
of doing this – if any remain at
all – and this is what makes his
oeuvre so exceptional.
Artistic work of tremendous
value, on a large scale and with
a universal impact.
We all owe him a great debt of
gratitude for this.
We will miss him.
 JEAN-LUC GODARD 47

VOLKER SCHLÖNDORFF
GERMAN DIRECTOR OF YOUNG TÖRLESS (1966), THE
TIN DRUM (1979) AND SWANN IN LOVE (1984)
Wrapped in a black coat, collar
turned up, face hidden behind
sunglasses as if he were freezing
or needed to protect himself
from something – that’s how
I remember Godard in the
cold corridors of the Cahiers du
cinéma’s editorial office, on the
stairs to the Cinémathèque,
rue d’Ulm, or in front of a
popular cinema on the Grands
Boulevards. He was in his
late 20s, I was just 20, a huge
difference at that age. I wasn’t
the only one intimidated by him
during those first encounters.
Everyone saw him as an
aggressive provocateur who
questioned everything that
we, trained in classical cinema,
RAYMOND CAUCHETIER; ALPHAVILLE IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
someone does not have to
be filmed walking through a
door before they can be in a
room, that they do not have to
undress before they are naked
in bed or under the covers.
We didn’t think it was possible
that the audience would
follow this. Professionals, like
[Jean-Pierre] Melville, called
it sheer dilettantism. But the
cheekiness won out: it was not
just a provocation, it was a
new attitude to life. One with
more feeling and passion than
the strict pope Godard had
been credited as. And this new, ABOVE Claude Chabrol and Godard in the Cahiers du cinéma offices
relaxed way of experiencing the
world needed other means of Godard, had cheated on him (or are mutually exclusive. To prove
expression. The technique and
And then came even left him) while shooting it, he listed drastic examples;
À bout de souffle…

considered high and holy. His
first, Charlotte et son Jules (1958),
was nice, but we preferred
Les Mistons (1957) by Truffaut,
seen back-to-back with it at the
arthouse La Pagode.
And then came À bout de souffle.
I remember how, on the way
back from the Joinville studio
for the shooting of Zazie dans
le Métro [by Louie Malle, 1960,
on which Schlöndorff was
an intern], we were breathless.
©
PHOTO OPPOSITE
aesthetics of the nouvelle vague.
Personally, I soon got to
know him as a soft-spoken, very
sensitive, shy person. More
of a Kafka than an anarchist.
As Melville’s assistant, I was
working with him when Godard
showed up one day with a
shattering confession to the
‘father of the nouvelle vague’: he
had to give up filmmaking!
I left the room and a highly
embarrassing conversation
another film in Corsica. The
genius revolutionary of cinema
Speechless, we seriously contemplated suicide;
discovered that it in any case, he could never and
would never make another film.
is possible to do a Hours later Melville told me,
montage without still stunned, how far things had
come with Jean-Luc.
a ‘connection’, that – Imagine, he asked me in
someone does not all seriousness, what was more
important: Anna or the cinema?!
have to be filmed For Melville, such a question
walking through was incomprehensible. He
whether they all came from his
own experience I don’t know.
Godard used many of these
stories, after Anna Karina
returned to him, in his film
about a prostitute, Vivre sa vie.
He even shot the final scene
in front of Melville’s studio, in
front of the café that had been a
fateful setting in Bob le flambeur
(1956). But it is true that the
film ‘before the fall’, À bout de
souffle, remained a rather unique

Speechless, we discovered that began between the two of them. adhered to the code of his emotional outburst in Godard’s
it is possible to do a montage Anna Karina, the wonderful
a door before they gangsters: passion for one’s oeuvre – after all, the story was
without a ‘connection’, that Danish muse and great love of can be in a room work and passion for a woman by Truffaut.

BREAKING THE WAVE Anna Karina in Alphaville (above); Jean-Paul Belmondo, Godard and producer Georges de Beauregard, during the À bout de souffle shoot (opposite), in a photograph by Raymond Cauchetier
48

NEWMAN’S OWN

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, the subjects of Ethan Hawke’s

six-part documentary series The Last Movie Stars, represented a
golden era of stardom before audiences began to grow wary of
idolatry, switching their allegiances to actors who were imperfect
and relatable rather than godlike and untouchable

BY DAVID THOMSON

OPPOSITE
Paul Newman in The Hustler (1961)
ABOVE
Newman and Joanne Woodward
in From the Terrace (1960)
uring the dispute between Johnny Depp
and Amber Heard, as they failed to com-
mand sympathy or belief, a man I know
asked, “Why are we watching this?” As I
struggled to respond, I said, “Well, he’s
a movie star, isn’t he?” My son smiled
fondly, and I saw how Depp was no longer
a star; and how the idea of such creatures
was disappearing.
Maybe Paul Newman guessed this
some time ago. Before he died (in 2008,
aged 83) he had commissioned videotape
interviews with people he had known: this
included his first wife, Jackie Witte, three
children from that marriage, and then
three more with Joanne Woodward. You
can say this project came out of respect for
history, along with a decent edge of per-
sonal vanity.
Who knows what biographical prod-
uct Newman anticipated, or what then
prompted him to burn the tapes? I think
he was an uneasy man, and if that’s often
masked in actors, still it’s natural in most
of us. Maybe he was sad or confused at
the end: his state of mind then would be
a good subject for a film – a famous man
ready to stop acting.
Which is not quite what we have now
with The Last Movie Stars. The Newman
children reckoned they were sitting on
material for a documentary, as well as
the urge to honour Dad and Mum. They
wondered if Ethan Hawke could put this
together as a film.
That sounds tender and admirable, but
the six-hour product is a mess. Transcripts
of many interviews were preserved, and
the idea sprang up to get famous voices to
read from them. So George Clooney does
Paul (we know Clooney still, just); Laura
Linney is Joanne; Zoe Kazan is a pained
Jackie; and Brooks Ashmanskas chews
over Gore Vidal, who was a longtime
friend to the couple. The information in
this process has to be perceived through
the scrim of impersonation. Ashmanskas
is so inventive he makes Vidal seem bogus,
and it’s no surprise that Linney comes off
best. She is not a star, because she has set
herself instead on being as good an actress
as we have.
The untidy air comes not just from these
readings, but from the eager untrained
puppy attempt by Hawke to be ‘interest-
ing’ and to compile the film under Covid
lockdown so there is much clumsy virtual
chat with other actors – anecdotal asides
and their wistful thoughts on being stars.
This includes a sequence in which Vin-
cent D’Onofrio tries to demonstrate what
acting is, and nearly spoils our knowledge
of how extraordinary an actor he can be.
And, of course, there are film clips.
The problem with these extracts starts
with bewilderment at seeing such dol-
drums as The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
and From the Terrace (1960) taken seriously.
Those are Fox adaptations of Faulkner and
John O’Hara that illustrate how Holly-
wood was dying in the 1950s – and leaving
Newman looking rueful, lost but fatuously
beautiful. He made his breakthrough as
boxer Rocky Graziano in 1956’s Somebody
up There Likes Me (a role that had been
intended for James Dean), but he may
have envied how Jimmy had escaped the
curse of stardom while Paul was left with
49
far-fetched projects like The Silver Chalice,
The Rack, The Helen Morgan Story, Until
They Sail, The Left-Handed Gun (from a TV
play by Gore Vidal), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(which would be prim and absent-minded
without the physicality and ambition of
Liz Taylor), Rally Round the Flag, Boys and
The Young Philadelphians – and we’re still
only at 1959.
What did Newman know when? Of
course, he was beautiful (there’s no need
to defend those blue eyes, the carved glass
jawline, and the haircut made of steel). But
some men get edgy over being called beau-
tiful, and there are times with Newman
where you feel him groaning at being good-
looking. I don’t think he respected that
side of himself, and perhaps he recognised
how the medium was giving up on the
undimmed selfness that had made Gary
Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne
and Cary Grant so that they only had to
wait for good situations and decent lines
and a girl to say they were terrific. Those
old stars were unembarrassed in romantic
scenes, pious kissers, and so comfortable
as themselves. Only Grant nursed any
irony over the scam.
Whereas, Newman seemed aggrieved
IMAGES: SILVER SCREEN COLLECTION/GET TY; BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
or unconvinced, and unable to see what
he might do to be interesting. He made
one good film early on but did his best to
disdain it. I mean Otto Preminger’s Exodus
(1960), a model of fairness in what is still a
non-negotiable crisis. He sulks all through
that film, and allows not a hint of being
Jewish, the child of a well-to-do family
from the class fortress of Shaker Heights
in Cleveland, Ohio.
50
He was a star, no doubt about it; only
that could get away with such hollow
acting. But if he despised himself, then he
found fulfilment in the chronic loser, ‘Fast
Eddie’ Felson in The Hustler (1961). Robert
Rossen turned the Walter Tevis novel into
that rare Hollywood venture: a mordant
celebration of weakness, in which George
C. Scott’s character delivers a curt autopsy
on Eddie. A kind of self-pity was released
in Newman – it had been the wellspring
for Dean, Brando and Clift – and he
seemed to find a greater expressiveness in
being a louse.
But the business felt its moneylode lay
in keeping Newman gorgeous and reliable.
That would look increasingly uncertain as
the competition expanded with Beatty,
Redford, Nicholson, Hoffman, Pacino,
Hackman and De Niro. In that time, after
The Hustler, Newman delivered Paris Blues
(so bad it’s shocking); Sweet Bird of Youth;
Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (in a
studied cameo as a punch-drunk fighter);
A New Kind of Love; The Prize; What a Way
to Go!; The Outrage; Lady L; Harper; grim
and severe in Hombre, his sixth film with
Martin Ritt; Torn Curtain (that rarity, a mis-
cast Hitchcock picture); The Secret War of
Harry Frigg; and Winning (which indulged
his love of motor racing).
I’ve held back two saving graces from
that drab list: the etched portrait of bad
character in Hud (1963), and the remark-
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
able panache of outsider defiance in Cool
Hand Luke (1967). He’s impressively cold
and nasty in Hud, and deserved his Oscar
nomination, though maybe his character
requires more explanation. As for Luke,
it is as dazzling a masquerade in getting
down and dirty as Chaplin’s Tramp. But it
was a hard-times fable in which Newman
seemed free from his old inhibitions, even
if you wondered how Luke’s tough life had
left him looking golden and nourished.
Luke was the biggest hit he had had, and
a film in which Newman seemed to have
fun. It came on the threshold of the top
box-office earner for 1969, Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid, the first movie in which he
relaxed in the screen aura of being in love.
I’m not saying that was gay, but the sly
daring was in offering a fable where two
guys needed each other. Not as buddies,
but as bickering spouses. Katharine Ross
was along for the ride, though she knew
when to get out of the boys’ way. Butch Cas-
sidy was an oddly genteel version of Bonnie
and Clyde, with cool male assumptions that
the boys didn’t actually need sex. Naked
banks and shabby style were their thing,
along with comic riffs on how foolish it
was to be a hero in a western. Redford is
more interesting or withheld in the film.
But Newman was like a kitten in the sun,
luxuriating in being a fraud. This was the
first film that guessed his anguished self-
regard might be a spur to humour. If only
he had got Gore Vidal to write a comedy
screenplay about some Reaganesque char-
latan. Did they ever talk about such things,
or was their friendship celebrity window-
dressing? I think Vidal was more intrigued
by Joanne.
The boyish trick was rerun in The Sting
(1973), but the youthful teasing now
seemed more archaic and stilted. Newman
was the number one box-office attraction
cool hand luke
was a hard-times
fable in which
newman seemed
free from his old
inhibitions, even
if you wondered
how luke’s tough
life had left him
looking golden
for a few years, but far from the urgency
in American pictures of the early 1970s.
One picture made an effort to grasp real-
ity: WUSA, adapted by Robert Stone from
his own novel, the prescient portrait of a
right-wing radio station stirring up hatred.
It was a project Newman and Woodward
acted in and that he helped produce. It’s
braver than it seemed in 1970 and a meas-
ure of how Newman wanted to function
in a large America where his unease could
take shape as dismay over the nation.
He made more incomplete films in the
70s – Pocket Money, The Life and Times of Judge
Roy Bean, The Mackintosh Man, The Towering
Inferno, The Drowning Pool, Buffalo Bill and
the Indians, Quintet – but many of these pro-
jects felt half-hearted as if Newman knew
he was too old or damaged for the venture.
He was an epitome of American success, a
man who never lost his looks, but drawn to
stories of wrecked ideals as if there was no
other honourable way to be (think of Slap
Shot and Absence of Malice).
He insisted on acting his age (he was 11
years older than Redford or Beatty, and
only a year younger than Brando). He
made gestures towards finding causes
in America. He was maybe a Shaker
Heights liberal, but that’s unfair to a man
who began to put time and money into
philanthropy by developing a business for
ketchup, salad dressing and all the condi-
ments at a wholesome table. This was ear-
nest and it was detailed, with his smile dis-
ABOVE
played on every label. And Newman’s Own Newman in Cool Hand Luke (1967)
has given away $550 million for making life
OPPOSITE, TOP
a little better. (I like his lemonade as much Joanne Woodward in A Kiss
as I do The Verdict.) Before Dying (1956)

mong his causes, there was also Joanne.
And she is the mysterious part of this
story. What do we think about her? What
was it in her that made Newman drop
his first family? There are shy hints in this
documentary that Joanne liberated Paul
sexually, but he stayed so guarded in that
area on screen, and she had no interest in
being a 1950s knockout. Was she therefore
a great actress – like Laura Linney? It’s
hard to tell. She was touching as a victim
in A Kiss Before Dying (1956), and there were
moments when she seemed close to Grace
Kelly’s ladylike sexiness. Then she did
what was called a tour de force, winning
the Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957),
directed so the credits say by Nunnally
Johnson. She is clever in the film (or versa-
tile), but it feels as dead as Oscar bait. Few
people went to see it, and it did not estab-
lish Woodward as better than a curiosity.
I dare you to sit through it. She followed
it with No Down Payment, The Long, Hot
Summer and the appalling The Sound and the
Fury. She seemed over as soon as she had
begun. But did she care?
It’s hard to believe she had to make
movies, or felt the lust for self-expression
that extends from Bette Davis to Meryl
Streep. One can admire Woodward as a
maternal example and an encouraging
wife. She cared for all the kids, and gave up
career chances for them. But actors either
have that drive to pretend or they don’t.
For decades it was a need that inspired
us as a courage we lacked. But now we
wonder if stardom was just fuss and vanity.
Woodward acquired a small list of valu-
able supporting parts: she is brave with
PAUL NEWMAN AND JOANNE WOODWARD 51
Brando in The Fugitive Kind (1960); she
is touching as a suicide in WUSA; she
keeps throwing the ball back to George C.
Scott in the neglected They Might Be Giants
(1971); she does well enough in curiosities
like A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966).
But those films did not seem to believe
they had to be made, and she was seldom
ready for her close-up. Newman may have
had an affair; he drank too much. But the
marriage stayed in place, from persistence
and love – that’s what leaves it seeming
un-movie-like.
Joanne was one of Paul’s causes and so
he directed films for her, from Rachel, Rachel
and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-
Moon Marigolds even to a version of The
Glass Menagerie she had set her heart on.
Is it letting down the side to say Newman
was a dull director, while Woodward lacks
the extremism or the selfishness to be a
great actress? Or is that a point at which
we bump up against what we now expect
from movie actors in our sudden anxiety
over fantasising?
The empire of stardom was a treat for
70 years, but now we understand how it
permitted schemes of male supremacy and
women being objectified that have turned
toxic. There are star turns still, like Tom
Cruise zipping across the sky at 60, and
having a hit. Though he needs machines to
play against, not real women. Good luck to
him, but does he ever regret the lost actor
from Magnolia? In Andrew Dominik’s
Blonde, we are asked to torture ourselves
over Marilyn Monroe for 166 minutes. But
do young people now recall her, or bother
with guilt?
52 PAUL NEWMAN AND JOANNE WOODWARD

Perhaps Woodward’s heartfelt studies that old immaculate eminence; and

in distress helped Newman become a wracked with horror at seeing the mon-

The empire of better actor? At last, by the early 80s, he

seemed prepared to present failure. The
Verdict (1982) is a superbly crafted study
strous Trump as the last cracked star.
So it seems like an improvement that
we expect stars to be actors now, and that

stardom was in breakdown. Every fan he’d ever had

rejoiced at the opportunity it provided.
Not that we believe the lawyer Frank
describes the range and worth of some-
thing like Ozark (2017-22), in which Laura
Linney, Jason Bateman and Julia Garner

a treat for 70
Galvin is going to be redeemed and
reinstated by his victory in court. He
is too far gone, just as the legal system
is beyond mercy or repair. Surround-
are people we do not desire or want to be.
In that liberty, the figures on screen have
a chance to be looked at like characters
from life. Ordinary – that precious state –

years, but now ing him with great supporting acting

(it has Charlotte Rampling as a grave,
wounded soul), The Verdict is the best
with a hope of reclaiming reality.
We can tell ourselves we have grown
up. Cross your fingers. But does it really

we understand thing he would ever do, and it was a

travesty that when his Oscar came along
it was not for that film but for The Color
feel like that, or is there a remaining anxi-
ety that in saying farewell to movie stars
– those dinosaur Jack Sparrows – we

how it permitted of Money (1986), which is a betrayal of the

original Eddie Felson.
In his last years, Newman found des-
have given up on fantasy identification,
and even cinema itself, the gravitation
that drew us to James Dean or Natalie

schemes of olate ease on screen, and did beguiling

work in that mood of regret – Nobody’s
Fool (1994), Twilight (1998), The Road to
Perdition (2002) and Empire Falls (2005)
Wood, as well as Newman, and which
persuades too many that they love and
trust Donald Trump?
Trump is a demon who has dominated

male supremacy for TV. And Mr and Mrs Bridge (1990),

where he and Joanne were married for
James Ivory’s overly tasteful version of
attention until we shrank back in horror
to see that all narcissism wanted was to
be on TV. As and when he goes, politi-

that have the Evan Connell novel.

Newman then was 65, and that can be
a mercy for movie stars who no longer
cians may turn to a kind of exhausted
ordinariness just as some actors now
wince at stardom and try to act naturally.

turned toxic have to be glamorous enough to carry

the show. We feel we don’t deserve stars
now – we want people; we are even
ashamed of ourselves for believing in
Don’t we yearn for that calm?

The Last Movie Stars is available to stream

now in the UK on NOW TV

IMAGE: PHOTO BY DANIEL SIMON/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GET TY IMAGES

ABOVE Paul Newman as the alcoholic lawyer Frank Galvin in The Verdict
 Tull Stories presents

IN CINEMAS NOW with the support of the BFI, awarding

funds from the National Lottery
COMING SOON
THE 2022 GREATEST
FILMS OF ALL TIME POLL

SUBSCRIBE
TODAY
*PRICE BASED ON A 6-MONTH PRINT SUBSCRIPTION (UK-ONLY). PRINT SUBSCRIPTIONS START WITH THE NEXT
AVAILABLE ISSUE. ONLINE ARCHIVE ACCESSIBLE IMMEDIATELY UPON COMPLETION OF PURCHASE.
IMAGE: PEDRO ALMODÓVAR
 SUBSCRIBE
FROM
JUST £25*

IN THIS ISSUE
STRAIGHT TO YOUR DOOR

6 + 12 MONTH OFFERS

FULL archive ACCESS

90 years of sight and sound

b f i . o r g . u k / s i g h t- a n d - s o u n d / s u b s c r i p t i o n s
+ 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 8 9 5 5 7 0 7 0 ( 0 9 : 0 0 -1 7. 3 0 G M T, M o n - F r i )
56
‘I’m
On the eve of the 25th anniversary rerelease of Nil by
Mouth, Gary Oldman’s brutally realistic portrait of a
south London family’s struggle with addiction and
domestic violence, Lou Thomas speaks to the director
to get an insider’s account of the making of the film
Between 1991 and 1993, Gary Oldman
starred as Lee Harvey Oswald for Oliver
giving
Stone in JFK, Dracula for Francis Ford
Coppola and a white rasta drug dealer for
Tony Scott in True Romance. He followed
this wild treble by playing a corrupt New
York cop in Romeo Is Bleeding (1993) and
another, more vicious one in Leon (1994)
before an impassioned turn as Beethoven
in Immortal Beloved (1994). The in-demand
Oldman then turned down the antagonist
role of Deacon in what was then set to be
you
the most expensive film ever made, Water-
world (1995).
Energised by his discovery of Italian
neorealism and a desire to see the London
he knew on screen, Oldman developed
a story he’d had in his head for 30 years.
While living in New York in early 1995, he
wrote the first draft of his directorial debut
Nil by Mouth in three weeks. He wanted to
see his hometown represented differently
to the capital-set films of Ken Loach and
all
Mike Leigh, with characters who talked
like the people he had grown up with. “I felt
that if it was going to be a first film, write
what you know,” Oldman says, speaking in
a south London accent barely tarnished by
decades of Los Angeles living. “I remem-
ber a John Cassavetes quote: ‘There are no
helicopter crashes in my movies because
I’ve never seen one crash.’”
An unflinching depiction of working-
class life in south-east London, Oldman’s
the
film centres on cocaine-abusing, violent
alcoholic Ray (played by Ray Winstone),
his downtrodden pregnant wife Val
(Kathy Burke, who won the 1997 Best
Actress award at Cannes for the role)
and their young daughter. Val suffers
horrific verbal and physical abuse from
Ray and tries unsuccessfully to keep the
peace between him and her heroin-addict
younger brother Billy (Charlie Creed-
Miles). Laila Morse, Oldman’s sister,
dirt
plays Val’s watchful, worried mother
Janet, while Jamie Foreman is on ram-
bunctious form as Ray’s closest pal Mark.
A powerful film about addiction, domes-
tic violence and fractured families strug-
gling to get by, Nil by Mouth still has clear
relevance today, and its bleak realism and
gallows humour show no signs of ageing.
IMITATION OF LIFE
“This is after 25 years. I’m giving you all
now’
the dirt now,” Oldman says, leaning in
conspiratorially. On a baking August
day, he’s in a quiet, semi-hidden room
at BFI Southbank, London, to discuss
Nil by Mouth ahead of its anniversary
rerelease (remastered on 4K by the BFI
National Archive). Oldman is forthright
and revealing throughout our long con-
versation and – like his film – occasionally
lightens proceedings with hilarious, pro-
fane anecdotes.
While not entirely autobiographical,
broad events and details in Nil by Mouth
are drawn from Oldman’s life. He was
born and spent his early life in Hatcham
Park Road, New Cross. His father Leon-
ard used to drink in The Five Bells at the
end of the road, a pub Ray frequents in
the film. Much of the 53-day shoot took
place on the Bonamy Estate in nearby
South Bermondsey, with the cast and
crew vacating only weeks before the place
was demolished in February 1996. Other
scenes were shot on Old Kent Road, the
now-demolished Ferrier Estate in Kid-
brooke and across south-east London.
But Oldman is at pains to point out that
the film’s closing onscreen tribute to Leon-
ard shouldn’t be taken as a suggestion that
Ray was based on him. “I would like to
really emphasise, it’s not about my dad.
The memorandum at the end is my way of
saying, ‘He would’ve loved all this and it’s
a shame he’s not around to enjoy any of it
or to see any of it.’”
The film’s unsparing portrayal of alco-
holism, however, did have a basis in Old-
man’s life. Leonard died because of it,
while Oldman has been sober for a quar-
ter of a century. “It’s no secret that I’m in
recovery and it’s now 25 years, so I had an
insider’s understanding of it.” Winstone,
Oldman says, was very good at depicting
an alcoholic but had difficulty with the
scene in which Ray drunkenly rants alone
in his flat. “The thing Ray struggled with
a little was the self-abuse and talking to no
one. He just said, ‘What? I’ve just got to
talk to the universe?’ But I used to do that
in hotel rooms. My God, I wouldn’t wish
it on anyone.
“I was a happy drunk. I was a funny
drunk until I passed out. I wasn’t aggres-
sive or anything like that,” he adds, before
coming back to Ray: “From the first frame,
when he can’t get ice for the drink, it’s like
a bomb. You wait for it. But I’d used that
from other sources. My ex-brother-in-law,
he was provocative. He was very quick, he
had an itchy trigger finger with stuff. So,
in a way, I’m the good little girl in the film.”
The “good little girl”– Val’s daughter
from a relationship before Ray – observes
and hears horrifying episodes, sometimes
sitting at the top of the stairs. Oldman
explains how his upbringing mirrored
hers. “I saw it all. I used to just sit there and
© IRWIN RIVERA/CONTOUR BY GET TY IMAGES
watch. It all happened. With the kicking of
the door, ‘I want my kid back.’ My sister has
stood in the hallway with a knife going, ‘If
he comes in, I’m going to...’ The banging
on the door in the middle of the night.”
Although it’s not made explicit precisely
how Ray makes a living, he’s a criminal
LOREM IPSUM 57
58
involved in, at the very least, moving stolen
goods. This too is pilfered from Oldman’s
childhood. “I remember coming home
from school and there’d be rolls of carpet
in the hallway and boxes of stuff. They’d
go to my mum and say, ‘Can you just
watch this for a couple of days?’ The stuff
that had fallen off the back of the lorry.” He
remembers hearing knocking at the door
and hiding behind the sofa. “My mum
going, ‘Don’t answer the door.’ It was just,
‘Doesn’t everybody do this?’ That was the
thing, growing up with it.”
Amid the familial dysfunction that
inspired Oldman’s writing, there was one
part he struggled with. The film’s most
harrowing sequence sees Ray assault Val
so viciously she has a miscarriage. “The
scene where Ray beats her up was based
on something that happened within my
family. I couldn’t write how awful that
was. I couldn’t put it on screen, because
you wouldn’t believe it. Not my immediate
family, but an incident that happened. All
of this stuff was really pouring out of me.
But there were things I wrote that I then
rewrote, like you do – you’re this close and
then you get a distance from it.”
The scene remains tough to watch. Sue
Jones, the film’s casting director, who was
at drama college with Oldman, thinks
the film’s darker moments are depicted
incredibly well. “It was probably ahead of
its time in many ways,” she says. “I find it
interesting that an awful lot of people just
talk about [that]. Many people didn’t also
see the humour, because for me there’s
so much to love in that film. It’s not just
about alcoholism and domestic violence.
Quite a few of us didn’t understand why
‘ The thing some people weren’t getting the humour
at the beginning of the film. The scene at
Ray Winstone the pub, it’s hysterical.”
struggled with Oldman thought a sense of humour
a little in the was crucial for his cast. “Kathy was more
known for comedy. They all had to have
film was the a funny bone. That is really important
self-abuse and in this world. As much as you hear them
talking to no complaining – the people, not the actors
– they can also laugh at their predicament
one. But I and themselves.”
used to do that Winstone and Foreman were a source of
in hotel rooms. great entertainment for Creed-Miles. He
says: “Ray and Jamie were brilliant from
My God, I the off because they were good mates in
wouldn’t wish real life and the banter was just – them.
it on anyone’ They’re proper Londoners [who] had one
foot in that world.” Creed-Miles laughs as
he recalls a sequence in which Winstone
screams in his face before Burke arrives.
“Kathy, at the end of the scene, she’s
whacking me, I’ve got no top on. I had
fucking welts. I survived Winstone, not a
scratch. Kathy just waded in, completely
unexpected.” He adds: “I didn’t hold that
against her, it just happened. It’s the take
that stayed in there.”
Jones repeatedly begged Oldman to
take a part in the film but he refused. She
also says that initially the story had been-
more about the female characters but
evolved slightly during the rehearsal pro-
cess to be more about the men. “Gary used
to say to me, ‘There’s still another story
BELOW
Charlie Creed-Miles,
there about the women.’” With regard to
Jamie Foreman Burke, Jones believes she’d be the first to
and Ray Winstone
in Nil by Mouth
admit she doesn’t like watching herself on
screen. “She’s incredibly self-critical, but
OPPOSITE
Kathy Burke and
I’m sure mixed with that, she knew she
Ray Winstone could play that role.”
While alcoholism is portrayed with
a veracity relatively rare in British film-
making, a different type of addiction was
on Oldman’s mind when he first started
writing. “I was fascinated with Billy, the
junkie. I began with a sequence of him
with the light bulb going on in the garage
underneath the flats [after he had shot up
heroin]. Initially [the film] was just going
to be about Billy.” A thieving heroin addict
always chasing his next fix, Billy shows
Oldman’s keen eye for the addict under-
class. Though there’s a chance the actor
performed the role a little too well. Creed-
Miles says: “I’ve heard, even recently, that
certain people in the business assumed I
was literally an intravenous heroin user.
From some of the things I’ve heard over
the years, it is fair to say that I was prob-
ably overlooked for some jobs because
people thought, ‘Oh, don’t fucking touch
him, he’s clearly a lunatic.’ I remember feel-
ing a bit resentful about that at one point.”
AN UPHILL STRUGGLE
Nil by Mouth was well received by critics
on its release and its reputation has, if any-
thing, grown over the years. But Oldman,
who remains convinced some people in
the industry were against him, faced sev-
eral struggles getting the film made at all:
from a story leaked to the press suggesting
he was out of his depth on set, to trouble-
some bureaucracy during the shoot and –
as with so many independent film produc-
tions then and now – significant financial
obstacles. “No one wanted me to make it,
no one gave me a penny for it and every-
thing along the way was, ‘Don’t make this
film.’ It was a struggle on a daily basis, like
IMAGE: © SONY PICTURES/COURTESY EVERET T COLLECTION/ALAMY

dragging a locomotive up the side of a
mountain. There were people working on
the film that were against me.
“Not to sound like I’m knocking Britain
– things have obviously changed. But if
you go back 25 years, there’s an American
thing I embraced, which was, ‘I’m going
to write that book.’ The American will
say, ‘Go for it.’ You say that to a Brit and
they go, ‘Really? Must you?’ That attitude
was very prevalent back then. ‘What? He
thinks he could direct now?’ That was the
struggle. Every bloody day.”
According to producer Doug Urban-
ski, also Oldman’s manager and business
partner, neither Oldman nor himself knew
who spoke to the press. “But we do know
very early in the shooting, someone leaked
something saying, ‘He doesn’t know what
he’s doing,’” he says.
Oldman contributed a portion of the
$9 million budget, while some money was
raised by Luc Besson, who had directed
him in Leon and in The Fifth Element (1997),
with the shoot for the latter coming after
Nil by Mouth wrapped, between Janu-
ary and May 1996. Things were so tight
Oldman sold a Steinway grand piano
and “a bunch of stuff ” to keep production
going. Worried he couldn’t pay the crew,
his friend Marc Frydman weighed in with
$1 million and received an associate pro-
ducer credit for his troubles.
As for the bureaucratic hurdles he
faced, little has changed for the f ilm
industry in Britain, contends Oldman.
“Permits are hard to get, there’s no secu-
rity, there’s no police. You can’t lock down
a location, you can’t block a street. Those
things you can do in America. You can
IMAGE: ALAMY
‘No one close down Brooklyn Bridge and redi-
rect traffic.
wanted me to “I got moved because my permit only
make it, no covered half of the Old Kent Road. I put
one gave me the tripod on the other side of the pave-
ment to get a shot on a long lens and they
a penny for it complained I wasn’t allowed to. There
and everything were things so against me I cut scenes.”
along the way But Oldman remembered the advice of
his Dracula director. “Coppola once said to
was, ‘Don’t me, ‘Out of compromise comes great crea-
make this tivity.’ You hit a wall, then go another direc-
film.’ It was a tion and think, ‘Now it’s actually better.’”
Production struggles didn’t stop when
struggle on principal photography finished. In the
a daily basis, edit suite, Oldman had to wrestle back
like dragging control from an unnamed third party.
“They took it from the editing room and
a locomotive gave it to a different editor. They said, ‘It
up the side of won’t cut together. He doesn’t know what
a mountain’ he’s doing.’” Stephen Frears, who directed
Oldman in Prick up Your Ears (1986), vis-
ited the editing room and had more faith.
“He was very encouraged. He actually
said, ‘God, it reminds me of Marty.’ Like
Scorsese.” Later, Elaine May, a friend of
the film’s editor Brad Fuller, saw a cut and
had four notes. Oldman and Fuller incor-
porated three of them. “The next cut I
would refer to as the Elaine May cut. But
a fourth note I resisted. I said, ‘It’s my fuck-
ing film. It’s not hers.’”
Opportunities for Oldman to direct
since Nil by Mouth have come to naught.
In 2010 he began writing ‘Flying Horse’,
a script about Eadweard Muybridge, the
English photographer known for his pio-
neering studies of motion.
“I’ve been offered money to make it – but
not enough. I’ve worked with too many
NIL BY MOUTH AT 25 59
directors who sign off on stuff and don’t
have other things to fall back on. I have my
day job so I can earn a living. If you’re only
making money from directing and haven’t
done a gig for three or four years and you
get an opportunity to do something, I can
understand the desperation. You sign off
on a budget that isn’t realistic, you don’t
have enough days and you are compro-
mised. I’ve been on sets where that has
happened and I don’t want that.
“Do I think… [Nil by Mouth] is as good
as some people think it is? Not necessarily.
There are things I would change. It was a
moment in time. Could it be better? Yeah.
But it is what it is. It is my film, if there’s
things wrong with it, it’s me. It’s not, ‘The
producers made me do that.’ I would
rather make ‘Flying Horse’ the way I want
to and stand on that, than fail on other
people’s choices. It’s artistic discipline.”
As for the title? Nil by Mouth was origi-
nally called ‘Smoke’, partly because of the
suggestion that something combustible
lies behind it, partly because of London’s
1950s nicknames (the Smoke/Big Smoke).
But Harvey Keitel starred in a film of the
same name in 1995, so Oldman used Nil by
Mouth as a working title until Tom Stop-
pard came to visit him on set. The pair had
lunch on top of a double-decker bus used
as the canteen and Stoppard said it was “a
wonderful title”. “That was it for me. It was
like I got the blessing from the pope.”
The remastering of Nil by Mouth screens on 12
October at BFI London Film Festival. It will
be rereleased in cinemas across the UK and on
BFI Player from 4 November and on a limited
edition 25th anniversary BFI Blu-ray on 5
December. A Gary Oldman season runs at BFI
Southbank from 18 October – 29 November
60 NIL BY MOUTH AT 25
‘it’s
AUDITIONING FOR
GARY OLDMAN
As an actor you’re suddenly
horrific.
aware this is the moment. It
all hinges on this. Suddenly
you’re going out to play the
final at Wimbledon. That’s
how I felt. Everything just
but
went out of my head.
I couldn’t even fucking speak.
I can’t remember what he
said to me, but whatever it
it’s also
was he must have just put
me at ease. And I’ve thought
since, “Well, of course he
knew where I was, what was
the
going on internally for me,
because he’s been through
that a million times himself.”
I took a few minutes, went
truth’
through it and smashed it.
A few days later I got the call
saying, “Yeah. But this is top
secret because another actor
was promised that role.” And
that was someone I knew.
They said that until Gary gets
Charlie Creed- the chance to tell X, “You’re
not to say anything because
Miles, who plays they’re worried you’re going
addict Billy to go out, get drunk and start
telling the whole world. Then
in the film, on this fella’s going to find out
landing the part, the wrong way that Gary’s
got someone else to play this
working with part.” So it was this weird
Ray Winstone thing of being told I’d had it,
but I wasn’t allowed to say
and documenting anything. I always suffer from
brutality imposter syndrome, anyway.
ABOVE Charlie Creed-Miles as heroin addict Billy in Nil by Mouth
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
IN THE FILM
I remember being in cinemas
and people getting up at
that point and walking out
and I understand that. It is,
quote-unquote, too much.
It’s horrific. But it’s also the
truth. This does happen.
And so for me, that’s the
justification for presenting it.
CONTINUING THE
ALAN CLARKE
REALIST TRADITION
The film was groundbreaking
in the way that it didn’t
pull any punches. It was
family dynamics that I
knew and understood. A
lot of my friends who saw it
were laughing. They were
saying, “It’s like my family.”
People just thought it was
presenting a slice of life that
was real, but it was a rawness
they felt hadn’t been really
represented [at the cinema
before]. You had filmmakers
like Alan Clarke who were
showing sides of society
in those days, like in Scum
[1979]. And so it very much
felt like a continuation of that
tradition. And we were all
very fucking aware of that, all
the films we’d grown up on
that we felt represented us,
were those type of films.
‘As an actor you’re
aware in the
audition that this
is the moment.
It all hinges
on this. Suddenly
you’re going out
to play the final
at Wimbledon.
That’s how
I felt. I couldn’t
even speak’
RAY WINSTONE’S ADVICE
I’d grown up on films
like Scum. I knew of Ray
Winstone, but he was [Scum’s
lead character] Carlin to
me because Ray was Carlin.
Everyone I grew up with
knew every line of Scum. They
were the lines we quoted at
school. Ray was a cultural
icon to us. I remember Ray
saying something to me early
in shooting. He pulled me
aside and went, “Charlie, you
know how lucky we are to be
on this, don’t you? Actors, if
we’re lucky, have these ones
come along once every ten
years. I did Scum years ago.
I ain’t done much since,
to be honest with you.”
IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
DISCOVER THE WORLD’S BEST NEW FILMS,
SERIES AND IMMERSIVE STORYTELLING
5 – 16 OCTOBER IN CINEMAS AROUND THE UK
Supported by Main Sponsor Media Partner

THE FESTIVAL CONTINUES ON BFI PLAYER UNTIL 23 OCTOBER

 63

In her filmmaking, Claire Denis
has long defied categorisation. Her
interests in colonial history, love,
sexuality, the corporeal, and the
darker instincts of humanity have
played out in films that expand
the boundaries of genre, from
body horror to intimate romance,
science fiction to family drama.
Denis was born in Paris in 1946
but spent most of her childhood
in West Africa due to her father’s
government work. Her early life, split
between Cameroon, Senegal and
Burkina Faso, would directly inspire
her debut film Chocolat in 1988, in
which a French woman returns to
her childhood home in Cameroon,
and her drama White Material in
2009, but the impact of colonial-
been implicitly at the heart of much
of her filmmaking elsewhere, too.
As a young teenager, she contracted
polio and returned to France to
recover in a Parisian suburb. A film
education at IDHEC (L’Institut des
hautes études cinématographiques,
now known as La Fémis) followed,
leading her to become an invaluable
assistant director to filmmakers from
Jacques Rivette to Wim Wenders
to Jim Jarmusch after her gradua-
tion. In the 1980s, she travelled to
the US to work with Wenders on
Paris, Texas (1984) and Jarmusch on
Down by Law (1986) before making a
start on her own directorial career.
Beau travail, made in 1999 and
often considered her masterpiece, is a
dazzling portrait of jealousy and erot-
It was followed in 2001 by the grittier
cannibal horror Trouble Every Day,
starring Vincent Gallo and Béatrice
Dalle, while subsequent films The
Intruder (2004), 35 Shots of Rum (2008)
and Bastards (2013) convey the range
and breadth of Denis’ bold and chal-
lenging probing of the human condi-
tion. Let the Sunshine In (2017), star-
ring a radiant Juliette Binoche, was a
softer and more delicate portrait of a
woman searching for love, but what-
ever her subject or focus, Denis is
adept at elevating simple stories into
immersive and deeply felt cinema.
The filmmaker often works with
the same band of collaborators:
writer Jean-Pol Fargeau, cinematog-
rapher Agnès Godard and actors
including Binoche, Alex Descas,
Isaach de Bankolé. She recently also
teamed up with Robert Pattinson,
who played an isolated father on a
wandering spacecraft in 2018’s High
Life and had been set to feature in
her Stars at Noon alongside Mar-
garet Qualley before Covid delays
made it impossible due to his other
commitments. Both Denis’ newly
released Both Sides of the Blade, and
Stars at Noon, which debuted at
Cannes earlier this year, are based
on novels and depict heightened,
dramatic romances in complex
situations – a decades-old love
triangle in the former and political
trouble in Nicaragua in the latter.
During Denis’ visit to London for
the recent release of Both Sides of the
Blade, she spoke to Sight and Sound

CLAIRE DENIS
ism and its destructive powers have icism in the French Foreign Legion. Grégoire Colin, Michel Subor and about her lifelong inspirations.

At the Movies with...

The director of Both Sides of the Blade discusses the filmmakers and actors who have inspired
her, from Jacques Rivette and Elizabeth Taylor to the Safdie brothers and Alice Diop
INTERVIEW AND INTRODUCTION BY CAITLIN QUINLAN

IN THE BEGINNING I went back to France I realised how

I never expected to have a career. When
I was shooting my first film, I thought
it could also be the last. The idea of a
career as a child was not…the word was
never even pronounced by my parents.
They were a little afraid I chose cinema.
When I was living in [Cameroon’s capital]
Yaoundé, there were two theatres and
they had received something like 200 war
movies from the US. Can you imagine
being a child in the middle of Cameroon
and every film you see on a Sunday
afternoon is a war film about a Japanese
sailor and an American pilot, or planes
fighting in the sky? At that time, I hardly
IMAGES: ANTONIO OLMOS/GUARDIAN/EYEVINE; BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
many more films there were.
My grandfather came from the north of
Brazil and, as a widower, decided not to
go back and raised my mother in France.
My father was very French but was born
in Bangkok where his father sold French
cars. I wasn’t really aware of a global
cinema but I never felt France was the
place to be either. Not even now, actually.
I was attracted by America but I was not
ready to be someone with a country.
I didn’t want to be American, French,
I was happy the way I was – countryless.
I thought it was my destiny. The only
country I was really attracted to was

knew anything about America or Japan. England, specifically London. My best

I knew the war and what had happened
in Europe and Japan, but to see those
fights on planes and ships was very weird.
Like any child going to see a movie, we
were so excited but it was so unreal. My
mother was not a cinephile, she was just a
moviegoer. For my mother as a child with
her father, a good time was to go and see
a film. She very much missed the cinema
when we were living in Africa so she was
always telling me about films, and when
friend lived in Bethnal Green and each
summer I visited and we worked as sales
girls in Harrods. Bethnal Green was the
only place I really felt: “I want to be from
there.” I was interested in English cinema
but it was the music that was best. The
Animals, Eric Burdon, The Beatles all
meant a lot. I remember A Taste of Honey
[1961], Tony Richardson [pictured right
with Rita Tushingham] and all that,
but it was music that was really important.
64

‘I will never, until the day

I die, forget the scene
when Elizabeth Taylor is
getting out of the sea with
the white, transparent
swimsuit and all those
boys watching her’

A FILM EDUCATION I had never read any Tennessee Williams

When I was in college, there was a
cinephile club where we would watch
a lot of Eisenstein movies. The teacher
really wanted us to understand the
reason for filmmaking. When I was 15, I
started going to the cinema on my own
to see the new, opening films. It took
me a long time to discover there was a
cinémathèque. Of course, there was Au
hasard Balthazar [1966] and the nouvelle
vague. For me, Pierrot le Fou [1965] was
especially important. Le Petit Soldat [1963]
I only saw later because it was under
censorship. I was also very attracted by
F.W. Murnau’s films, always, as if they
contained some kind of secret that was
dedicated to me.
But I remember being extremely
troubled, not shocked, but something in
me changed when I saw Suddenly, Last
Summer [1959; pictured right]. I was
underage and I was with a friend from
school and we lied to get in. At that time,
and I understood the film more or less,
but probably not completely, and then
I became very eager to read his work and
to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [1958]. For me,
it was the expression of a sexuality that is
hurt – the way people are hurt, or defiled,
or banned. I will never, until the day I die,
forget the scene when Elizabeth Taylor
is getting out of the sea with the white,
transparent swimsuit and all those boys
watching her.
Then, also when I was in college, there
was Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero [1948].
At the end, there is a little boy who kills
himself. Of course, I knew about the
war, my parents told me a lot, but this
film made a change in my life. What is
the moment when life is so unbearable?
Being 16 or 17, you know exactly what it
means. Life is unbearable and I’d prefer
to die. I knew exactly what the film meant
for me at that moment and for Europe,
and cinema.

CINEMATIC PARTNERSHIPS I received a Telex from Jim. I was not

My dream was to meet Jacques Rivette
[pictured left] and I did meet him and
later worked with him. Everything he
wrote about film in Cahiers du cinéma
mattered to me, and his films were
so free, free in the sense that they
were made with the purest energy.
I remember very well when I met him.
At that time I was not thinking of a
career, and Jacques would never say he
had ‘a career’. He was just a filmmaker,
that’s it. Jacques was going to see films
every day. To work with him was to go
to a film a day. Jacques Rivette was the
man who held my hand and said,
“You don’t have to worry. Please, try.”
He was opening me out of my shyness
and I needed him to give me what
I needed.
When it came to working with Jim
Jarmusch, it was because I knew [the
star of Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise,
1984] John Lurie and he said to Jim,
“I know a girl, and she would be a great
assistant for you!” I was in Cameroon,
location scouting for my own film and
sure because I’d only met him once in
Cannes, but he said, “Come to New
Orleans, come to the Big Easy!” With
his films, admiration is not enough. It’s
a little bit boring, admiration. It’s better
to feel enjoyment.
My mother told me so much about
Bergman and Antonioni, so when
I reached the age of watching their
films I understood what she meant.
It was immense. I remember watching
L’Avventura [1960] around the age of
17 and it was a kind of coming of age.
Monica Vitti was one of my favourite
actresses. Like Elizabeth Taylor, she was
the kind of woman who I felt was like
myself on the inside. They represented
a type of femininity I could understand
and rely on and trust and admire. I think
of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands
too, how intelligent she is. How bright,
how luminous. I was younger when I
saw Monica Vitti and older when I saw
Gena Rowlands so it was a different
relationship for me, but Gena Rowlands
is incredible.

‘My dream was to meet

Jacques Rivette and I did
and later worked with
him. Everything he wrote
about film in Cahiers
du cinéma mattered to
me, and his films were
so free, free in the sense
that they were made
with the purest energy’
 AT THE MOVIES WITH… CLAIRE DENIS 65

‘Tarkovsky was a great

director and Stalker is one
of the films I like best. I
do think his films are great
but maybe they’re too
great for me. I’m not sure
I would die for his films’

THE MASTERS role in High Life [2018]. But the one

I worked with Tarkovsky on The Sacrifice
[1986; shot by Sven Nykvist, pictured
right], but it was his last movie. The
French producer had hired a casting
director and I think they had a bad
relationship with Tarkovsky, so they
asked me if I would accept the job
instead. At that time, I had even shorter
hair and I was very thin and wore no
make-up, and I think Tarkovsky thought,
“Oh, she’s a French woman but she looks
like a saint,” and he took me on. But my
participation was small. He was a great
director and Stalker [1979] is probably
one of the films I like best. I do think
his films are great but maybe they’re too
great for me. I’m not sure I would die for
his films.
In Satyajit Ray’s films, especially Pather
Panchali [1955], there was something that
I wanted to know. It took me time but
I went to India, to Calcutta, and I met
one of his actors and I gave him a small
and only for all filmmakers is Ozu.
Chantal Akerman was a very good-
looking young woman. We were friends,
but she was on her own quest and I
was on mine. She was very fun and also
very anxious, like so many of us, with
this kind of anxiety in her that was
sometimes destroying her. I could feel
that, of course. I met Marguerite Duras
and I’m still friends with her director
of photography, Bruno Nuytten. To
meet Marguerite Duras was to go to the
kitchen and learn how to cook. She loved
to cook. But she was like a rocket. She
would say, “Do this, do that! Are you
afraid? No!” Chantal was my generation,
but Marguerite was cracking the whip
behind her. “Don’t be afraid, do what you
feel!” One of the films I watch often is Le
Camion [1977]. I speak with Bruno often
about it and he says, “Oh, don’t tell me
you watched Le Camion, there’s nothing
there!” And I say, “It’s so beautiful!”

THE MAGIC OF ACTORS a secret. Like Marlon Brando. In France,

Like everybody, when it comes to great
actors, I would say Marlon Brando
[pictured left in A Streetcar Named Desire]:
the way he was able to be both man and
woman together, strong and weak. When
I was location-scouting in Tahiti, I saw
him. It was maybe a year before his death.
I saw him in the market, in Papeete, in the
distance, and I was overcome.
I would also say that Robert Pattinson,
since I saw him in Twilight [2008], is in my
mind forever. I could see something about
him and I was not disappointed when
I met him. It’s his intelligence as an actor,
not only because he’s iconic, or because
of his charisma. He has something more,
maybe Gérard Depardieu had something
similar, but in a very different way.
Isabelle Huppert, and Juliette Binoche
too, of course. I’m so keen on actors. They
belong to us, I think. They’re part of us.
Juliette [in Both Sides of the Blade] and
Margaret Qualley [in Stars at Noon] are
so brave. They bring to both films such
a strength, it was almost unexpected.
Margaret, I saw in Once upon a Time… in
Hollywood [2019; in which she plays Charles
Manson follower ‘Pussycat’] and I flushed!
She’s like somebody who never existed
before. I know LA, I’ve been to LA, but
suddenly, who is this girl hitchhiking and
crying? This beauty, this smile. She shines.

‘When I was
location-scouting
in Tahiti, I saw
Brando in a market,
in the distance.
I was overcome’
CONTEMPORARY FAVOURITES or twice a week, I feel bad. She’s very
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (4), INCLUDING SET SHOT FROM THE SACRIFICE BY ARNE CARLSSON

These days, I like to watch the films of
the Safdie brothers [including Uncut
Gems, 2019, pictured left]. They give me
what I need to feel alive and they give me
hope for filmmaking, the way they are, the
kind of people they are. I also really like
Apichatpong Weerasethakul – sometimes
I go to bed and I dream his films. And
Jim Jarmusch, I need his films so much.
The kind of films and dialogue he writes,
for me it’s always new. Alice Diop is
wonderful. When she doesn’t call me once
important to me. And also Mati Diop,
she’s my girl.
It’s very important to me to find a way
into the film [I’m making], maybe coming
from a novel or a memory, but I need my
own shape. If another film becomes an
inspiration, it blocks my own view. I try to
find a shape inside myself that I can rely on.
Both Sides of the Blade is out now in UK cinemas
and was reviewed in our last issue. The UK release
date of Stars at Noon has yet to be announced
 INCLUDES
•VINYL SOUNDTRACK
•4K UHD AND BLU-RAY
•STUNNING LENTICULAR
PICTURE OF NEW
COVER ARTWORK
•X4 12” ARTCARDS

V I
100
WIDER SCREEN
A look behind the scenes of
Andy Warhol’s vast film archive
and Clara Ursitti’s poignant
exhibition exploring the
colonial legacy in Canada
R E
68
FILMS
86
TELEVISION
The Banshees of Inisherin, Blonde, The Rehearsal, The Lord of the Rings:
All That Breathes, The Cordillera of The Rings of Power, This England,
Dreams, Don’t Worry Darling, House of the Dragon, Five Days at
Decision to Leave, Flux Gourmet, Memorial and The Last Movie Stars
One Second, Emily, After Blue
(Dirty Paradise), The Woman King,
Piggy, See How They Run and more
E
92
DVD & BLU-RAY
Burning an Illusion, The Mummy,
Viva Erotica, House of Psychotic
Women Rarities Collection,
Eurotrash, Buck and the Preacher,
The Trial of Joan of Arc and more
W S
102
BOOKS
A celebration of the Coen brothers,
a treasure-trove compendium about
The Shining and a page-turning
thriller in the form of Heat II
 68
FILMS
The Banshees period that saw McDonagh anointed
the next great theatrical sensation, his
of Inisherin blackly comic, often gruesomely violent
tales steeped in authentic locale and
DIRECTOR MARTIN MCDONAGH
caustic yet lyrical language.
WRIT TEN BY MARTIN MCDONAGH The Banshees of Inisheer (the smallest of
CINEMATOGRAPHY BEN DAVIS the three Aran islands, alongside Inish-
EDITOR MIKKEL E.G. NIELSEN
PRODUCTION DESIGN MARK TILDESLEY maan and Inishmore) was initially writ-
MUSIC CARTER BURWELL ten during this early creative burst, but
COSTUME DESIGN EIMER NÍ
MHAOLDOMHNAIGH never got beyond the page, McDonagh
CAST BRENDAN GLEESON deeming it not good enough. A quarter
COLIN FARRELL
KERRY CONDON of a century on, its author now an estab-
BARRY KEOGHAN lished filmmaker, comes The Banshees of
Inisherin, slightly renamed and presum-
SYNOPSIS:
ably reworked, as his fourth feature. The
Inisherin, the Aran Isles, 1923. While Civil
connections to the earlier plays are clear:
War rages on the mainland, two longtime
buddies, Pádraic and Colm, fall out when
raucously funny and furious banter; a
the latter abruptly ends their friendship. small group of characters placed in an
When a disbelieving Pádraic persists, Colm increasingly heated pressure-cooker sce-
sets an ultimatum: every time Pádraic nario; and, yes, as in previous McDonagh
bothers him, Colm will shear off one of his narratives, body parts bloodily removed.
own fingers. McDonagh has denounced some of
his previous work as “too plotty”, and this
REVIEWED BY LEIGH SINGER
feels a much more sober, reflective tale,
less punch-drunk on its own dramatic
The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple and dialogic showboating, certainly
of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant of Inishmore… compared to his previous two f ilms
In titling his gritty west coast Irish Seven Psychopaths (2012) and the Oscar-
dramas, Martin McDonagh certainly winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,
has a type. Those three plays were first Missouri (2017), both set in the US. Per-
performed (along with two others) haps a return to his roots – although
between 1996 and 2001, a dazzling McDonagh grew up in south London,
A more primal, his family were from, and frequently vis-
ited, County Galway – has re-grounded
mythic feel
shrouds this
him. Moreover, the shift from the actual
locations of his earlier plays to a fictional
disquieting island helps conjure up the more primal,
mythic feel that shrouds this disquieting
piece – easily piece – easily McDonagh’s best film since
McDonagh’s his 2008 debut feature In Bruges and argu-
ably his most resonant tragicomedy of all.
best film since
Though Inisherin doesn’t exist, the set-
In Bruges and ting feeds off a specific reality: 1923, amid
arguably his the Irish Civil War, which the islanders
can hear and occasionally see across the
most resonant
water. Meanwhile, conflict of a smaller,
tragicomedy more personal nature breaks out here
of all between two longtime friends, unassum-
ing, good-natured Pádraic Súilleabháin
(Colin Farrell) and the older, brooding
Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson).
Arriving at Colm’s remote coastal cot-
tage for their daily trip to the pub, Pád-
raic finds himself shunned. Baffled, he
presses his pal for a reason until, eventu-
ally, Colm gruffly reveals his hand: “I just
don’t like you no more.”
To Pádraic’s great confusion and hurt,
Colm freely admits that his change of
heart is not due to any specific incident
BROGUE NATION
Brendan Gleeson as
or comment that his younger friend has
Colm, Colin Farrell as made. It’s more a cumulative realisa-
Pádraic (above); Farrell
with Barry Keoghan as
tion that he finds Pádraic “dull” and will
Dominic (opposite) no longer waste his remaining years in

endless, aimless chat. Instead, Colm, a
mean fiddle player, believes he’ll spend his
time composing music – something mean-
ingful, lasting. Such a seismic upending
of the gentle daily routine causes conster-
nation throughout the small community,
Pádraic’s sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon)
and the assorted villagers veering from
bemusement to annoyance to a reluctant
acceptance. But egged on by the local
loudmouth simpleton Dominic (Barry
Keoghan), Pádraic himself can’t leave it, or
Colm, be. In desperation, to ram home his
point, Colm tells Pádraic that every time
he talks to him, Colm will shear off one of
his own fingers.
It’s a farcical premise: Colm’s earnest
artistic aspirations would of course be cur-
tailed by his own drastic measures. But the
senselessness of the whole squabble is the
point. There are clear parallels with the
mainland conflict between two factions
who just a year before were united against
the British. Early on, Pádraic observes dis-
tant cannon fire and mumbles to nobody
in particular, “Good luck to you, whatever
it is you’re fighting about.” As a metaphor
here, it’s perhaps a little too easily lined up
in McDonagh’s firing range.
Still, Banshees succeeds because it feels
like McDonagh’s real target is something
more ineffable, unquantifiable. Can Pád-
raic’s tedious ‘niceness’ compensate for a
dawning recognition of one’s own dwin-
dling days? Is Colm’s loner stance a viable
solution? (“Another silent man!” rails
Siobhán, trapped on an island of taciturn
drinkers.) No easy answers are forthcom-
ing. One can empathise with Pádraic’s
despair at being unceremonially dumped
by his only friend, but one can’t deny the
creeping entropy that Colm recognises as
embedded within their insular existence.
Inisherin may be a tight-knit body politic,
but poison drip-feeds into its vital organs,
through sadistic policeman Peadar Kear-
ney (Gary Lydon), a serial abuser of his
son Dominic; or the local store owner
gleefully spreading gossip. The ancient,
black-clad Mrs McCormick (Sheila Flit-
ton), part soothsayer, part crone, makes
foreboding predictions of imminent island
death, but Colm has picked up on a spir-
itual malaise that’s equally lethal. And he
just can’t shake it.
What makes McDonagh such a potent
writer is his leavening of existential woe
with mordant, absurdist humour. The
call-and-response rhythms and repetitions
of his heightened dialect are expertly
delivered by a cast familiar with his writ-
ing. Reuniting Farrell and Gleeson for
the first time since their glorious In Bruges
double-act is a real coup, rewarded with
arguably the former’s most complex work
to date, fretful and needy one moment,
then bolstered, often by drink, with an ill-
considered resolve the next. A glowering,
towering Gleeson equals his own screen
peaks, In Bruges and, for Martin’s older
brother John Michael, Calvary (2014).
Keoghan, as ever, pilfers every scene he’s
in. And Condon, a veteran of McDon-
agh’s stage work, brings a shrewdness
and stoic melancholy to Siobhán, the one
character who might be able to extricate
herself from Inisherin’s stagnant sorrows.
There’s a coherent feel to Banshees that
simply isn’t evident in McDonagh’s two
flashier ‘American’ films, and an under-
stated confidence maybe even lacking
in In Bruges. Ben Davis’s camerawork
finds pastoral beauty in the island’s sheer
coastal cliffs and verdant patchwork
f ields, but also plays upon its almost
tangible claustrophobia, often shooting
through restricted viewpoints (Colm first
appears within Pádraic’s reflection out-
side his window, a neat foreshadowing of
how stifling he finds Pádraic’s company).
Alongside Gleeson’s own impressive
fiddle-playing, Carter Burwell’s plaintive
harp– and glockenspiel-led score evokes
an aching sense of loss, against which
even personal kinships feel an inadequate
buffer. A sort of homecoming, then, for
McDonagh, and a return to form and
theme, but also an advance; a more com-
passionate, contemplative howl for his
islands of lost souls.
In UK cinemas from 21 October
69
THREE TOXIC MALE
FRIENDSHIPS IN FILM
BY PHILIP CONCANNON
MIKEY AND NICKY (ELAINE MAY, 1976)
All four of Elaine May’s feature films were
studies of betrayal within a relationship.
Mikey and Nicky is her least comic treatment
of this theme, and her most lacerating.
As Mikey (Peter Falk) and Nicky (John
Cassavetes) spend a long night wandering
the streets, their conversations reveal a
lifetime of shared memories and bitter
resentments. It feels as if both men have
bared their souls by the time we reach the
film’s climax, which sees their fractious
friendship come to a tragic end.
FILMS
MY BEST FIEND (WERNER HERZOG, 1999)
Few directors worked with Klaus Kinski
more than once; Werner Herzog ran the
gauntlet five times. In My Best Fiend, Herzog
recalls his turbulent relationship with
the brilliant but volatile actor, who once
destroyed an apartment during a 48-hour
tantrum. “Every grey hair on my head, I call
Kinski,” he says, but although they were
frequently at loggerheads, Kinski was also
the only actor who could embody Herzog’s
outrageously ambitious vision. They were
two wild men who needed each other.
AUTO FOCUS (PAUL SCHRADER, 2002)
Until he met John Henry Carpenter (Willem
Dafoe), Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear), star
of the US sitcom Hogan’s Heroes (1965-71),
had little acquaintance with sex beyond a
stash of porn mags hidden in his garage.
Carpenter introduced Crane to a world of
strip joints and orgies, and the pair began
videotaping their sexual escapades to
rewatch as they masturbated together. Auto
Focus is a film about one man unlocking and
stoking another’s buried compulsion, to the
point that it becomes all-consuming.
 70

Blonde
CERTIFICATE 18 166M

DIRECTOR ANDREW DOMINIK

WRIT TEN BY ANDREW DOMINIK
BASED ON THE NOVEL BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
CINEMATOGRAPHY CHAYSE IRVIN
EDITOR ADAM ROBINSON
PRODUCTION DESIGN FLORENCIA MARTIN
MUSIC NICK CAVE
WARREN ELLIS
COSTUME DESIGN JENNIFER JOHNSON
CAST ANA DE ARMAS
ADRIEN BRODY
BOBBY CANNAVALE

SYNOPSIS

Los Angeles, 1930s to 1960s. A young woman

named Norma Jeane survives childhood with
a disturbed mother to become Hollywood
star Marilyn Monroe. After a ménage à trois
with the sons of two famous actors, she
marries twice and has a liaison with the
president of the USA, before her death.

REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY

Although Andrew Dominik ’s Blonde

doesn’t actually feature the song ‘My Heart
Belongs to Daddy’, that title might have
been its tagline. In the first section of this
quasi-biopic of Marilyn Monroe – adapted
from Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 novel, which
speculatively reimagined the star’s life –
young Norma Jeane’s disturbed mother
points to the photo of a man who she says is DADDY’S GIRL extravagant, boldly confrontational film extremes at audition, the rising star out-
Ana de Armas as Norma
the child’s father. The obvious resemblance Jeane (above and below)
instantly knocks you out with the sheer raged that Jane Russell gets a higher fee
is to Clark Gable, but whoever it is, the intensity of its cinematic language – then on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
image become Norma Jeane’s ‘Rosebud’, requires you to take a few steps back as its ‘Marilyn’ sometimes protects and nour-
FILMS

structuring her life and her desires as an
obsessive absence.
Blonde follows its heroine’s experiences
with various inadequate or abusive daddy
figures, among them baseball player Joe
DiMaggio, playwright Arthur Miller, the
Darryl F. Zanuck figure who rapes her, and
John F. Kennedy, to whose hotel suite she is
dragged to administer businesslike fellatio,
in the film’s crassest scene.
The much-awaited Blonde doesn’t
entirely come as a bolt from the blue; Oat-
es’s novel was previously adapted for TV
(Joyce Chopra, 2001). But this stylistically
problems sink in. The most obvious hits
you straight away: a kitsch, purportedly
hallucinatory strand of imagery related to
Marilyn’s pregnancies, featuring close-ups
of a foetus in utero, later heard talking to
her. It feels at the very least like a hostage
to misreading, given the current assault
on abortion rights in the US.
The film is on surer ground in its pres-
entation of ‘Marilyn Monroe’ as an auton-
omous but not quite real entity, entirely
separate from the woman whose body she
inhabits. Early on, in a scene not based on
fact, Norma Jeane embarks on a ménage
à trois with two men who themselves
have father issues – the sons of Charlie
Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson – and
if the relationship works for a while, it’s
because these youths aren’t daddies to
her but quasi-incestuous siblings. It’s
only with them that she is seen enjoying
sexual pleasure, as their bodies merge
psychedelically and their bed becomes
the waterfall of her 1953 movie Niagara.
Encouraging Norma Jeane to admire
her (or Marilyn’s) body in the mirror, the
boys say, “Look… there she is, your magic
friend.” Stardom emerges as a matter of
neediness and narcissism, associated
with emotional orphanhood.
The film is built on meticulous copy-
ing. Dominik recreates famous images
from the films and still photos, the poses
immaculately restaged to the turn of an
ankle, the curl of a lock of hair. De Armas
is more than virtuosic in capturing both
the Marilyn we recognise and one we
haven’t often seen: the Actors’ Studio
alumna who pushes herself to emotional
ishes Norma Jeane, but in the long term
devours her. De Armas’s tour de force is
uncanny, moving and painful, but it risks
being overlooked for two reasons. One is
that she could be seen as merely imper-
sonating Marilyn. Yet that’s the point:
she’s playing a woman who learned to
impersonate herself, who quickly became
(as we might say today) her own tribute
act. De Armas’s performance may also find
itself undervalued because it’s not built
around the manifest display of agency that
we often expect of female performances
today: it may disappoint or offend that she
so foregrounds fragility, victimhood.
That emphasis is what makes Blonde
so hard to watch. In one sense, the film is
a comprehensive unmasking of showbiz
patriarchy (or daddyocracy), tending to
the grotesque: the crowds of men with
cartoonishly distended mouths outside
a premiere, the grim JFK scene. Norma
Jeane, of course, protests, sometimes only
inwardly; but her rage and self-awareness
never entirely come across on screen.
That’s because the focus is on spectacle
rather than the inner life of a beleaguered
woman and an extraordinary screen
talent. What ultimately emerges from
Blonde is a depiction of a martyrdom that
admits of no salvation for its subject,
other than as enduring image. It leaves its
Marilyn only as an icon – in the truly hagi-
ographic sense – doomed forever to fuel
idolatry and gossip. You end up concur-
ring with her protest: “What business of
yours is my life?”
On Netflix now

All That Breathes In the dingy environs of a concrete work-
shop on a tumbledown street in north-
east Delhi – in the smoggy skies above
DIRECTOR SHAUNAK SEN and the waste grounds below – Shaunak
CINEMATOGRAPHY BENJAMIN BERNHARD
RIJU DAS Sen’s deft, visionary documentary finds the
SAUMYANANDA SAHI modern city teeming with life, which is to
EDITOR CHARLOT TE MUNCH
BENGTSEN say a crucible of struggle, ferment, resil-
MUSIC ROGER GOULA ience and reinvention. “Evolution favours
experimentation,” we’re told in this fraught
SYNOPSIS
fable of two brothers aiding Delhi’s black
Two brothers, Nadeem and Saud, and their young assistant kites as they fall out of the sky. The film
Salik run a rescue centre for Delhi’s huge but imperilled
suggests a spiral dance between the pos-
population of black kites. The work is poorly funded and
incessant, while the political climate seems little more sibility and the necessity of adaptation.
hospitable to these Muslims than the polluted skies are to Every life form adjusts to the city,
the birds. muses Nadeem, the elder brother, in the
film’s occasional voiceover. Urban kites
REVIEWED BY NICK BRADSHAW are more evolved than their rural cous-
ins; some use cigarette butts as parasite
deterrents. It’s the very success of black
kites in Delhi, home to the world’s dens-
est population of the bird, that gets them
taken for granted, but Nadeem and Saud
have always revered their effortless grace
in the air; former amateur wrestlers, the
brothers are also self-taught experts in
bird surgery, renowned for their inventive
treatments of the injuries that fell so many
of the kites. (Sen doesn’t press the point,
but in Delhi these birds must fight for the
skies with the sharpened strings of their
colourful toy namesakes.)
Nadeem and Saud are Muslim, and
RAPTOR TENSION Assistant Salik, black kite in Islam feeding kites earns you sawab, or
Shaunak Sen’s deft, visionary documentary finds the modern city teeming with life
ALL THAT BREATHES
Confetti Confetti is evidently well aware of the obli-
gations that fall upon films about child-
hood health and parental anguish, the
USA/CHINA 2019 basic template and plot delivery tactics
invoked by the kind of disability-of-the-
DIRECTOR ANN HU
WRIT TEN BY ANN HU week shows that were once so common to
CINEMATOGRAPHY ERIC GIOVON US network television. Templates often
(CHINA) FREDERIC FASANO
EDITOR MARIE PIERRE RENAUD work, though – even the ones that work
PRODUCTION DESIGN ROX Y MARTINEZ up a soap-opera froth.
MUSIC CHRISTOPHER TIN
COSTUME DESIGN KIM MATELA Confetti’s plot centres around preter-
CAST ZHU ZHU naturally winsome nine-year-old Meimei
LI YANAN
HARMONIE HE (Harmonie He), whose inability to cor-
GEORGE CHRISTOPHER rectly read or write leads visiting Ameri-
HELEN SLATER
AMY IRVING can teacher Thomas (George Christo-
pher) to suspect that she is dyslexic. The
SYNOPSIS school’s headteacher, clearly in the busi-
Lan and her nine-year-old daughter Meimei travel from ness of delivering standardised classes
China to New York seeking specialist care after Meimei and under the impression that dyslexia
is diagnosed with dyslexia. While facing the challenges might be a dangerous communicable dis-
of immigrant life and precarious employment in a foreign ease, offers no help, so Meimei’s mother
society, Lan also struggles to locate sympathetic teachers
Lan (Zhu Zhu) relocates – with some-
able to give Meimei the help she requires.
what unconvincing ease – to New York,
REVIEWED BY TIM HAYES where she begins seeking treatment.
Their very first point of contact is author
Helen (Amy Irving), who turns out to be
exactly the kind of flinty maverick such a
mission requires – a bruised campaigner
not just in need of her own emotional
rescue after the loss of a child, but wheel-
chair-bound to boot.
The film’s central tensions are revealed
early, in order to draw audience empathy
as directly as possible, and the politi-
READING FRENZY Harmonie He as Meimei cal and cultural obstacles faced by the
71
religious credit – kites are said to eat away
your difficulties, wash away sins. Oppor-
tunistic scavengers, they help digest the
city’s waste – Nadeem likens them to
microbes in the city’s gut. But like Mus-
lims, kites are also meat-eaters; the broth-
ers’ first patient had been turned away
from the local animal hospital for being a
“non-vegetarian bird”. All the while, India
is busy building barriers of identity and
exclusion; Sen looks askance at the threat
of the country’s 2019 Citizenship (Amend-
ment) Act. “Life itself is kinship. We all
share a community of air,” Nadeem opines,
noting a new “disgust” at large. Perhaps his
hopes for studying abroad are also about
flight, or respite. Pervasive poverty and a
note of nuclear threat add to the oppres-
sive haze.
Men of burden and bliss, the brothers
keep their heads down, eyes on their work;
their eager young assistant Salik brings
some levity. Sen’s watchful, sculpted style,
meanwhile, bursts the human bubble,
with patient, exquisite panning shots
and focus-shifts to myriad other life-forms
occupying these spaces: rats, monkeys,
centipedes, snails. Layering urban ecol-
ogy, spiritual philosophy, politics and dis-
tilled character study, All That Breathes is a
remarkable, vital work of cinema.
In UK cinemas from 14 October
FILMS
characters in their native China are
framed only briefly before said characters
relocate to the US, where medical dilem-
mas centring around the constraints
imposed by money or resources will be
familiar to viewers, and clinic doors will
open if you just keep on keeping on.
Drawn from writer/director Ann Hu’s
own experience, Confetti tries hard to
downplay its own contrivances and takes
care not to obscure our view of the actors
or their faces, which is where most of the
action is. The film relies heavily on Lan’s
commitment to Meimei, and on her rising
despair as she attempts to navigate her
own situation as an immigrant with a low
paying job – in other words, it relies on
Zhu to convey all this without tipping into
wholesale pathos. It’s a close-run thing,
especially since the story reveals that Lan
is herself illiterate and has always been
unable to read or write in her own lan-
guage. She sends voice messages rather
than texts to her husband, kidding her-
self that he hasn’t spotted it. The parallels
this duly opens up between mother and
daughter conjure a few universal paren-
tal torments (“She is going to be a waste,
like me,” moans Lan at one point) potent
enough for their shadows to remain after
the film’s last-minute breakthroughs and
fortuitous coincidences have faded.
In UK cinemas from 21 October
 72

Don’t Worry Darling Directors seem to like trapping Florence

Pugh in nightmare scenarios and seeing
if she will break free. William Oldroyd
DIRECTOR OLIVIA WILDE did it in his 2016 feature debut Lady Mac-
SCREENPLAY K ATIE SILBERMAN
STORY CAREY VAN DYKE beth, as did Ari Aster in his 2018 horror
SHANE VAN DYKE Midsommar (the best use of an entrapped
K ATIE SILBERMAN
CINEMATOGRAPHY MAT THEW LIBATIQUE Pugh to date). Now it’s Olivia Wilde’s
EDITOR AFFONSO GONÇALVES turn, in her second directorial outing
PRODUCTION DESIGN K ATIE BYRON
MUSIC JOHN POWELL after Booksmart (2019). The societal cage
COSTUME DESIGN ARIANNE PHILLIPS in Don’t Worry Darling is a glossy Hol-
CAST FLORENCE PUGH
HARRY STYLES lywood simulacrum of 1950s company-
OLIVIA WILDE town suburbia, where Pugh’s Alice lives
GEMMA CHAN
in apparent connubial bliss with dapper
SYNOPSIS executive Jack (Harry Styles, suitably
Alice and Jack live in a cloistered community that revives bland). Following the protracted illustra-
1950s values and visuals, sending husbands to top-secret tion of the suspicious setting – the men
jobs and keeping wives at home, happy and obedient. in this desert hamlet commute in muscle
Alice slowly discovers that the town is a construct, a cars to a hilltop fortress; the women never
virtual reality world she has been forced to inhabit by her leave – Wilde whips back the curtain on a
dweeby husband. puppet-master set-up that will surprise
few and enlighten fewer.
REVIEWED BY NICOLAS RAPOLD
Also part of the cast, Wilde joins
Pugh and others in playing homemak-
ers delighted with crafting appetisers
and trading gossip. Alice gets a clue when
glitches pop up in the plastic-wrapped
surfaces of this red-meat highball para-
dise, and a neighbour friend (KiKi Layne)
kills herself. As in every other movie dys-
topia, the trade-off between lost freedom
and regimented success is made clear,
as Alice pushes against conformism and
AMERICAN IDYLL Harry Styles as Jack, Florence Pugh as Alice tries to crack the code of what might be
going on (think coercive fantasy under
the auspices of Jordan Peterson).
As high-gloss as the production design
of the film may be, the 1950s scheme feels
quite stale. It could be argued that the
movie’s vision of the decade is intention-
ally cliché, like self-consciously retro
barber shops, but it’s not just the visuals
that feel handed down. The movie coasts
on received ideas about sexism, making
a show of exposing power inequities but
limited by the banality of its set-up.
Much of this material has been picked
over in films like The Stepford Wives (2004),
or in more than one episode of The Twi-
light Zone (1959-64). There’s also the prob-
lem of arousing the interest of a culture
exhausted by television’s fake-realm fic-
tions, from The Good Place (2016-20) to
WandaVision (2021) to Westworld (2016- ).
False notes abound in Wilde’s film: Alice
staging a gotcha moment by asking
people where they’re from (had nobody
got round to asking before?); insipid car
chases; and fever dreams of 1930s-style
Busby Berkeley routines that suggest
a lazy evocation of old-timeyness more
than a spectacle of synchronised female
performance. For all the gossip circulat-
ing about its stars, you don’t have to look
outside the movie to find its deficiencies.
In UK cinemas now

The movie coasts on received ideas about sexism, limited by the banality of its set-up
FILMS

DON’T WORRY DARLING

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris It’s unfortunate that Mrs. Harris Goes
to Paris sees Lucas Bravo appear as a
and at times its starry-eyed reverie has a
kind of appeal. But by the end, viewers
smitten French dreamboat: his pres- of a flintier disposition may feel they’ve
UK/HUNGARY/BELGIUM 2021 ence recalls another vehicle in which he been made to swallow a few too many
plays the same role, namely the accursed charming coincidences, uplifting twists
DIRECTOR ANTHONY FABIAN
SCREENPLAY CARROLL CART WRIGHT Netflix series Emily in Paris (2020-21). and heartstring-tugging resolutions.
ANTHONY FABIAN The ghost of that show hangs over this Take the way Mrs Harris comes into her
OLIVIA HETREED
KEITH THOMPSON initially engaging period piece, whose money: not only does she win some cash
BASED ON THE NOVEL quirks finally descend into full-blown on the football lottery, she also begins
[ ’MRS. ’ARRIS GOES TO PARIS ]
WRIT TEN BY PAUL GALLICO smuggery as a succession of honh-honh- receiving her widow’s pension that very
CINEMATOGRAPHY FELIX WIEDEMANN honh-ing Frenchies line up to sigh, “Oh week, and obtains a reward for handing
EDITOR BARNEY PILLING
PRODUCTION DESIGN LUCIANA ARRIGHI Meessees ’Arris” at Lesley Manville’s a diamond ring in to the cops; plus her
COSTUME DESIGN JENNY BEAVAN indomitable Cockney sparrow. old pal Archie (Jason Isaacs) put a tenner
CAST LESLEY MANVILLE
ISABELLE HUPPERT Manville plays the kindly but put-upon on the dogs for her, and guess what?
LAMBERT WILSON Ada Harris – a cleaner and war widow Nothing bad ever seems to befall this
who suddenly comes into some money woman without an immediate knock
SYNOPSIS
and jets off to Paris with the dream of on the door and a smiling errand-boy at
The 1950s: when Ada Harris, a widowed cleaner from buying a Dior dress – with pleasing the threshold announcing a remarkable
Battersea, surprisingly comes into some money, she flies
determination, and the right dose of grief turnaround in fortune.
to Paris with the aim of buying a Dior gown. But first she
must win over the snooty denizens at the House of Dior and
motivating her eccentric behaviour. Mrs Save for its wobbly editing and the
change the lives of a few choice people. Harris, a genial, salt-of-the-earth type cloying supporting-actor style that’s usu-
(picture Vera Drake crossed with Pad- ally the preserve of Netflix, the film’s
REVIEWED BY CASPAR SALMON dington and you’ll be in the ballpark), production values are solid. One dreamy
soon wins over a phalanx of models, sequence of Mrs Harris luxuriating in
management figures, designers, and even the beauty of a gown attains a suitably
Christian Dior himself. Predictable fish- camp grandeur, and Jenny Beavan’s cos-
out-of-water comedy ensues, leading to tume design nails both the haute and the
the film’s nicest gag, just after Mrs Harris basse couture, hinting at Mrs. Harris’s
has cooked toad-in-the-hole for two glam- fashion smarts from the get-go. Viewers
orous young Parisians. “Crapaud… dans le undelighted by the adventures of Emily,
trou?” they whisper to each other in alarm. however, are unlikely to be very taken by
Mrs Harris’s dreams of a glamorous those of Mrs Harris in the same city.
life, of owning one beautiful object,
THE BELLE CHAR Lesley Manville as Mrs Harris place this film in the realm of fantasy, In UK cinemas now

Decision to Leave
CERTIFICATE 15 138M 50S
DIRECTOR PARK CHANWOOK
SCREENPLAY JEONG SEOGYEONG
PARK CHANWOOK
CINEMATOGRAPHY KIM JIYONG
EDITOR KIM SANG-BUM
PRODUCTION DESIGN RYU SEONG-HIE
MUSIC CHO YOUNG-WUK
COSTUME DESIGN KWAK JUNG-AE
CAST TANG WEI
PARK HAEIL
GO KYUNG-PYO
SYNOPSIS
Busan police detective Haejoon, whose wife works in
the seaside town of Ipo, becomes obsessed by Seorae,
the widow of a man who died in an apparent climbing
accident. His passion is underpinned by growing
suspicions that she killed her husband. Thirteen months
later, Seorae’s new husband meets a grisly fate in Ipo…
REVIEWED BY TONY RAYNS
Park Chanwook shot Decision to Leave in late 2020, on
the rebound from his regrettable le Carré mini-series
The Little Drummer Girl (2018), and was finally able to
premiere it in Cannes this year – where it won him the
Best Director prize. Probably a fitting reward, since
it’s hard to imagine that any other title in competition
was more insistently directed. With surprisingly little
plot to sustain a 138-minute film, Park and his cinema-
tographer Kim Jiyong devote much of their energy to
constructing high-impact and complex images from
start to finish. The tale of an insomniac, married
cop falling hard for a seeming femme fatale is not so
much told in a narrative sense as elaborated through a
lengthy suite of quick-fire scenes and artfully designed
imagery; precise meanings and significations remain
deliberately elusive until the tragic ending. Anyone
left hankering for Park’s time-tested ‘cinema of cruelty’
traits must make do with shots like a close-up of ants
crawling over the face and eyeballs of a corpse.
There’s a wearying sense of storytelling drift in the
final third, the ‘13 Months Later’ chapter set in the
seaside town of Ipo, but the strategy mostly works
fine. The film’s slam-bang opening scenes introduce
Haejoon (Park Haeil) as a big-city cop – he works in
the huge port-cum-resort Busan – with a frequently
absent wife, a drolly immature assistant and too much
time on his hands. Just as he’s complaining about the
dearth of local homicides to solve, a male corpse
shows up in the mountains near the city: apparently
a climbing accident, but the man’s Chinese-born wife
Seorae (Tang Wei) seems curiously unmoved, which
makes her a suspect. As soon as this exposition is out
73
SPOTLIGHT
TANG WEI
BY TONY RAYNS
Both technically skilled and bril-
liantly intuitive, Tang Wei has
achieved a lot since her major-film
debut in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution
(2007). The Chinese authorities
tried to ‘cancel’ her for performing
the simulated sex scenes in that film
(is anyone surprised that no equiva-
lent sanction was applied to her
co-star Tony Leung for his equally
unbuttoned participation?) but she
PARK LIFE Park Haeil as Haejoon, Tang Wei as Seorae simply ignored the blacklisting. She
laid low for a couple of years (there
of the way, Park shunts most of the procedural ques-
tions to one side – a subplot about the arrest of a local
were sightings on a drama course
at Reading University, where she
gangster is resolved in passing halfway through the was known as ‘Rebecca Tang’) and
film – to concentrate instead on the dance of ambigui- returned to the screen in 2009/10
ties between Haejoon and Seorae, a kind of rhapsody in two films beyond the reach of
of uncertainties. Beijing: Crossing Hennessy, a Hong
This is new territory for Park, widely known for Kong romcom by Ivy Ho (already
strongly motivated, vengeful characters, although a very successful screenwriter), and
there are teasing hints that something like the cat-and- Late Autumn, a Korean film (actually
mouse games of The Handmaiden (2016, also written a remake of a lost classic by Lee
with Jeong Seogyeong) may be going on here too. Manhee) shot in Seattle by Kim
This time, the images are as ambiguous as the motives Taeyong. Peter Chan brought her
and emotions: Haejoon and Seorae are constantly back into mainland Chinese cinema
brought together or juxtaposed in unexpected com- to play Donnie Yen’s wife in the
positions, often involving surveillance-cam footage or martial-arts movie Dragon (2011).
video calls. The mounting sense of delirium builds to Since then she’s made everything
FILMS
the scene in which Haejoon visualises Seorae killing from Chinese comedies (Xue
her husband by pushing him off the cliff, with Haejoon Xiaolu’s Finding Mr Right, 2013, and
himself present as an unseen observer. its even more successful sequel
The rhapsodic approach probably wouldn’t work so Book of Love, 2016) to the most
well without the ultra-charismatic leads. Park Haeil, a serious-minded arthouse movies
stage-trained actor brought into movies by Bong Joon (playing the troubled and troubling
Ho to play the prime suspect in Memories of Murder writer Xiao Hong in Ann Hui’s
(2003), is well-established as the Korean leading man biopic The Golden Era, 2014, and a
least likely to succumb to macho posturing. And Tang small-town woman and her dream
Wei has emerged as the foremost Chinese actress of doppelgänger in Bi Gan’s Long
her generation since her ‘scandalous’ big-screen debut Day’s Journey into Night, 2018), with
in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), sensibly balancing a brief detour to Hollywood for
her choices between mainstream entertainments (such Michael Mann’s Blackhat (2015).
as Finding Mr Right, 2013) and arthouse experiments She’s shown clear enthusiasm for
(Long Day’s Journey into Night, 2018). This is her second working with woman directors, and
Korean movie after starring in Late Autumn (2010), has shrewdly balanced mainstream
directed by her husband-to-be Kim Taeyong. Seorae entertainments with more ambi-
remains entirely enigmatic – a generic femme fatale – tious films like Decision to Leave.
until the closing scenes of the film, but Tang Wei turns She has also become a mother: she
the potentially thankless role into a magnetic centre of married Kim Taeyong in 2014 and
attention, making her the first fully-realised woman gave birth to their daughter in 2016.
protagonist in Park Chanwook’s cinema.
Decision to Leave (the Korean title Hye-eo-jil Gyeolsim
means more exactly ‘Decision to Break Up’) is not the
first Korean movie to sustain this type of ‘abstract nar-
rative’ approach. It was pioneered by Park’s slightly
older contemporary Lee Myungse in his films Duelist
(2005) and M (2007), both intended to establish the
actor Gang Dongwon as a major star. Gang is nowa-
days a bankable name, but Lee’s daring attempt to
dissolve all barriers between outer and inner realities
and value ambiguity was ahead of its time: both films
died on Korean release, and Lee has made little since.
Park, almost certainly with memories of Hitchcock’s
Vertigo in the back of his mind, has cannily trusted to
a fundamentally generic plot idea and two unimprov-
able lead actors to finesse the approach.
In UK cinemas from 21 October
 ++++
‘AN OVERLOOKED AND FORGOTTEN
PIECE OF WITCHY FOLK HORROR’
STARBURST

o
New t
BF I
e
Flipsid

AVA GARDNER STARS AS A MALEVOLENT TEMPTRESS

IN RODDY MCDOWELL’S AUDACIOUS FOLK HORROR
INCLUDES EXTENSIVE INTERVIEWS, ARCHIVE MATERIAL
AND A FULLY ILLUSTRATED BOOKLET

ALSO AVAILABLE

ORDER FROM
BFI MEMBERS ENJOY 15% OFF
 75

Inu-oh time, mixing history with myth. Where it struggles is in

keeping harmony between the two.
MORE FILMS BY
YUASA MASAAKI
Inu-Oh is a naturally gifted Noh performer, born under
DIRECTOR YUASA MASA AKI a curse that gives him a scaled back, one hyper-extendable
WRIT TEN BY NOGI AKIKO BY ALEX DUDOK DE WIT
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY SEKIYA YOSHIHIRO arm and a three-eyed face. When he meets blind biwa player
EDITOR HIROSE KIYOSHI Tomona, they join forces to become a daring new Noh
ART DIRECTOR NAK AMURA HIDEKI
CHIEF ANIMATION DIRECTORS NAK ANO SATOSHI troupe, whose lively performances (comprising recitations
K AMEDA YOSHIMICHI of fallen Heike soldiers’ stories, which allow Inu-Oh to
MUSIC OTOMO YOSHIHIDE
VOICE CAST AVU-CHAN reverse his curse one body part at a time) feature dazzling
MORIYAMA MIRAI set design and a sound closer to hair metal than to tradi-
TSUDA KENJIRO
tional Japanese music.
SYNOPSIS These shows are Inu-Oh’s major set piece moments, and MIND GAME (2004)
A blind musician, Tomona, meets Inu-Oh, a Noh performer they’re animated with the appropriate vibrancy and fast- Yuasa poured innumerable
cutting intensity, the enthusiasm of the masked (and there- ideas into his debut feature,
who has been cursed with a monster-like appearance. By
fore expressionless) Inu-Oh represented by the incessant a delirious mash-up of
recounting the stories of fallen soldiers of the Heike clan, Inu-
genres, techniques and
Oh reverses the curse, body part by body part. Meanwhile, Inu- movement of his gangly limbs. The performances involve
visual styles that sent a
Oh’s father and the military leader Shogun Ashikaga attempt to elaborate contraptions, from pulley systems to rope swings squall through the industry.
ban these ‘unofficial’ performances. to magic lantern slides, and are depicted in such a way The twentysomething
that we see both the beauty of the show and the work that protagonists discover
REVIEWED BY THOMAS FLEW
makes it possible, making this a true celebration of the art, themselves the hard
rather than a magical overcoming of its real-life limitations. way: they experience
The Tale of the Heike, a 14th-century Japanese epic compris- Off-stage, things are much less exciting. The anima- hallucinations, near-
ing various stories of the struggle for control of Japan by tion is less vivid and dynamic, the bright flashes of colour death experiences, yakuza
shenanigans and spiritual
warring factions, as told by monks accompanied by a lute- from the Noh shows making way for beige interiors and
ruminations inside a whale’s
like instrument called the biwa, became an early touchstone a flat landscape. (One significant exception is the beauti- belly before the film reaches
of the nation’s Noh theatrical tradition. Over 600 years ful sketch effect, like pastel chalks on black paper, used to its ambiguous ending.
later, in 2020, the story was retold by Furukawa Hideo in show how Tomona’s keen ear can create a radar-like image Mind Game’s sheer freedom
his novel Tales of the Heike: Inu-Oh, introducing the character of the world around him.) The feudal exposition might be of expression has drawn
that gives Yuasa Masaaki’s subsequent film adaptation its necessary for plot progression, but the overall effect is akin praise from the likes of Kon
name. The result is a movie that combines historical accu- to when Glastonbury Festival organisers bring activists on Satoshi and Daniel Kwan
racy with creative reinterpretation, a faithfully recounted to the Pyramid stage to make lengthy speeches between (of Daniels).
story of Noh’s development – with a monstrous curse acts. Such interludes are all well and good, but give us the
thrown in for good measure – counterbalanced by a wildly music, please!
(and intentionally) inaccurate depiction of the art itself.
Inu-Oh does what the original Tale of the Heike did in its own In UK cinemas now

FILMS
THE NIGHT IS SHORT,
WALK ON GIRL (2017)
In his belated second
feature, the director
returned to the student life
of Kyoto University, a milieu
he first explored in his TV
series The Tatami Galaxy
(2010). Assorted oddballs
cross paths on a sprawling
night out; fuelled by booze
and love, emotions run
high, the protean design
work vividly depicting the
characters’ inner lives. A
second-act musical climax
anticipates Inu-Oh.

DEVILMAN CRYBABY (2018)

Yuasa has directed more
TV series than features.
Arguably his best (and
best-known) is this, an
adaptation of Nagai Gō’s
1970s manga Devilman,
about a teenager who uses
his demonic powers to fight
malign presences in society.
The script parlays Nagai’s
warnings about war into a
critique of prejudices of all
kinds. The series is dark and
often vicious: the end of the
first episode is a masterclass
THE POWER OF NOH Inu-Oh in diabolical gore.
 76
Emily the Criminal
USA 2022 CERTIFICATE 15 96M 44S
DIRECTOR JOHN PAT TON FORD
WRIT TEN BY JOHN PAT TON FORD
CINEMATOGRAPHY JEFF BIERMAN
EDITOR HARRISON ATKINS
PRODUCTION DESIGN LIZ TOONKEL
MUSIC NATHAN HALPERN
COSTUME DESIGN AMANDA WING YEE LEE
CAST AUBREY PLAZA
THEO ROSSI
MEGALYN ECHIKUNWOKE
GINA GERSHON
SYNOPSIS
A young woman saddled with student debt and
a prior felony conviction, Emily struggles to find
employment in Los Angeles beyond her menial
food-delivery job. After a co-worker connects
her with a criminal ring, Emily is increasingly
drawn both to the allure of easy money and to her
recruiter Youcef.
REVIEWED BY JASON ANDERSON
“You can’t make money another way?” asks the
man who has introduced the heroine of Emily
the Criminal to a shadier way of making a living
on the mean streets of Los Angeles. Demon-
strating the steelier edge that serves her well
throughout John Patton Ford’s admirable
debut feature, Aubrey Plaza’s budding fraud-
ster replies by repeating the question back to
him in a manner that conveys just how little she
ought to be messed with.
The circumstances that pulled Emily into
the world of crime are clearly if somewhat
strenuously established by Ford’s script: the
FILMS
woman is saddled with the whole panoply of
socio-economic woes facing much of her gen-
erational cohort, from her crippling level of
student debt for an art-school degree she didn’t
even finish, to her unhappy cohabitation with
unpleasant roommates, to the meagre pros-
pects of any kind of meaningful, decent-paying
work. Though her best friend Liz (Megalyn
Echikunwoke) tantalises her with the possibil-
ity of a job at her ad agency and a meeting with
her boss (Gina Gershon in a brief but shrewd
appearance), Emily soon realises this may just
be a more posh-sounding form of exploitation.
In the face of all that, who wouldn’t leap at
the chance to earn $200 for walking into an
electronics store and purchasing a TV with a
bogus credit card and a freshly printed driv-
ing licence with someone else’s name on it?
With her recruiter Youcef (Theo Rossi) eagerly
accepting her goods and tracking her progress,
Emily graduates to a more lucrative but riskier
shopping expedition at a car dealership. When
the sellers catch on to the ruse, she displays
an impressive degree of resourcefulness and
ruthlessness. Her reaction to a later robbery
attempt at her apartment by a boxcutter-wield-
ing couple searching for Emily’s hard-earned
cash is distinguished by the same capacity, but
it’s not entirely a surprise: we’ve seen her bris-
tling, during the fruitless job interview that’s
the film’s opening scene, at a discussion of her
past conviction for assault.
Given Emily’s growing aptitude – after
some initial skittishness – for criminal enter-
prise, it’s little surprise she turns out to be
better equipped to handle the more treacher-
ous aspects of the business than Youcef, whose
gentler nature is obvious well before he brings
her home to meet his doting mother. The fact
that Emily so readily taps into her dark side
places the character alongside many of the
other women Plaza has played since perfecting
her reliably caustic brand of deadpan as April
Ludgate on the US sitcom Parks and Recreation
(2009-15). Indeed, with Plaza in the role, the
character’s eventual embrace of her moral flex-
ibility and capacity for violence is something
of a foregone conclusion, especially to anyone
who appreciated Plaza’s penchant for menace
in Ingrid Goes West (2017) and Black Bear (2020).
Whenever Emily is pushed to act on her
worst impulses, it’s as if Ford is similarly com-
pelled to steer the film into edgier terrain. At its
most effective, Emily the Criminal boasts traces
of the flinty variety of neo-noir epitomised by
Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) and William Fried-
kin’s To Live and Die in L. A. (1985); it mostly
eschews the ostentation that marks other tales
of ambitious, underprivileged youngsters rec-
ognising their flair for criminality, such as Boiler
Room (2000) and the Swedish hit Snabba Cash
aka Easy Money (2010).
Yet adopting a little more of its lead charac-
ter’s cut-throat attitude would’ve served Emily
the Criminal well. As fleeting as they are, the
film’s higher-tension sequences find Ford on
surer footing than he is with the more leaden
scenes that strive to convey a wider critique of
late-capitalist hardships or depict the burgeon-
ing romance between Emily and Youcef. An
actor best known for starring as another crimi-
nal who’s a touch too soft for life outside the law,
in the US biker drama Sons of Anarchy (2008-14),
Rossi gives some depth to a thin character, but
the love story is ultimately unconvincing – espe-
cially once Emily fully embraces the shark inside
her and Plaza unleashes the ferocity that’s her
most arresting quality as a performer. That’s the
point when Emily reverses the power dynamic
with her former mentor, and has a few things
to teach him instead. “Motherfuckers will just
keep taking from you and taking from you until
you make the goddamn rules yourself,” she tells
Youcef in a locker-room pep talk that could
double as an inspirational text for disgruntled
millennials everywhere.
On digital platforms from 24 October
FRAUD FOCUS Aubrey Plaza as Emily
Midwives
DIRECTOR SNOW HNIN EI HLAING
CINEMATOGRAPHY SOE KYAW HTIN TUN
EDITORS MILA AUNG-THWIN
RYAN MULLINS
SNOW HNIN EI HLAING
MUSIC OLIVIER ALARY
JOHANNES MALFAT TI
SYNOPSIS
A documentary about two women working at a
village clinic in Rakhine State in Myanmar. In a
fractious region in which the Muslim minority has
been the target of ethnic cleansing by the Buddhist
state, these women – one Buddhist, one Muslim –
struggle to provide care for the local people.
REVIEWED BY BEN NICHOLSON
“Without us, where would they go?” asks Hla,
the Buddhist founder of an antenatal clinic in
a rustic town in western Myanmar. She’s refer-
ring to the Muslim Rohingya women who live
in the area and are actively spurned by other
similar establishments. In 2016, the Rohingya
people, who primarily reside in Rakhine,
became the focus of a devastating campaign of
ethnic cleansing by the Myanmar military. Tens
of thousands have been killed and almost a mil-
lion fled the country. Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing’s
observational documentary Midwives follows
the fortunes of Hla’s clinic in Rakhine, and the
lives of its founder and her Muslim apprentice,
Nyo Nyo.
The f ilm’s opening sequence is precisely
what we might expect from a documentary
about midwifery: a pregnant woman arrives
at the clinic and, after some candid footage of
treatment and the averting of potential compli-
cations, gives birth to a healthy baby. However,
far from a conventional warts-and-all depiction
of a rural medical facility, what Hlaing crafts
is a more nuanced portrait in which the clinic
acts as a microcosm for contemporary Myan-
mar, pulling at the threads that weave together
the private and the public, the personal and
the political.
The most prominent of these threads is the
remorseless persecution that has drawn the
ire of the international community over the
past five years. While the film regularly utilises
news footage of chilling anti-Rohingya marches
– “Get out! Get out! Terrorist Muslims! We
won’t live with them!” – it’s how this dynamic
plays out within intimate sections of the popu-
lace that is one of the film’s most interesting
elements. “We have three Buddhist patients,”
explains Hla’s husband; “the rest are ‘them’.”
Even for a couple who have risked reputation
and livelihood by accepting Muslim women at
their clinic, old-fashioned language and per-
spectives still prevail. Though her affection for
Nyo Nyo shines through in various moments,
Hla’s response to her apprentice often seems
coloured by stereotypical, racially charged
assumptions. Hla regularly refers to Nyo
Nyo as kalar, which translates as ‘darkie’, and
which Nyo Nyo hates, as she later confesses
to camera.
Expanding beyond the two women them-
selves, Hla speaks openly about the way other
members of the town have shunned her and
her husband as a consequence of them treating
Muslims. Conversely, they have to be careful
not to allow Nyo Nyo ever to care for one of
their Buddhist patients. Despite this, when

WAVE OF THE FUTURE Midwives
the clinic is temporarily closed down, they help
unemployable local Rohingya by supplying
them with ice lollies that they can sell in nearby
villages. Elsewhere, Nyo Nyo is keen not to let
the fact that Rohingya children have been ban-
ished from schools prevent them from receiving
an education, so in her spare time she ropes her
husband into teaching a gaggle of eager kids.
In particular, they try to make sure the chil-
dren can speak the Burmese language rather
than just the Chittagonian Bengali dialect that
Rohingya typically speak; the language barrier
constantly rears its head in the clinic, and Nyo
Nyo’s ability to translate makes her additionally
valuable to Hla.
The tensions between the women are not
always the result of these wider social rifts –
Hla chides Nyo Nyo in ways familiar from
intergenerational relationships the world over.
Hla is something of a potty-mouth, and her no-
nonsense personality can feel brusque to both
friends and patients, but proceedings are also
punctuated by flashes of humour. Some of those
come as a direct result of unexpectedly robust
language – at one point, Hla plunges a spoon-
ful of pink medicine into a baby’s mouth, saying
“Take this, you little bitch” – while in others,
she and Nyo Nyo giggle together as they’re ser-
enaded by a ludicrous local man.
Throughout all of this, it is perhaps the
empathy and detail with which Hlaing cap-
tures life in Rakhine that makes Midwives so
moving. Where newsreels and military officials
strain to erase the individual from the homog-
enous Buddhist and Muslim masses, the film
explores the daily trials of real people. Even
when Hla and Nyo Nyo’s relationship takes a
difficult turn – as when Nyo Nyo decides that
she wants to set up her own clinic – the camera
remains a confidant and observer with a subtle,
sensitive gaze. Rather than allowing them to be
defined by their religions, Midwives treats Hla
and Nyo Nyo as distinct, complicated, resil-
ient women. In presenting the difficulty of their
lives and the ways in which they have defied
their situations, it finds hope in even the most
adverse circumstances.
In UK cinemas now
Sound for the Future
UNITED KINGDOM 2020
DIRECTOR MAT T HULSE
WRIT TEN BY MAT T HULSE
CINEMATOGRAPHY IAN DODDS
EDITORS NICK CURREY
MAT T HULSE
ORIGINAL SCORE SIMON FISHER TURNER
COSTUME DESIGN VICTORIA BROWN
SYNOPSIS
Documentary. Director Matt Hulse returns
to a 1979 recording of the Hippies, the group
he formed with his older brother (aged 12) and
younger sister (aged eight). Hulse interviews
family members and friends, and auditions
teenagers to re-enact elements of the Hippies’
brief career.
REVIEWED BY SAM DAVIES
“Art is long, life is short,” as some punk once
said. Or maybe art is short and life is long? In
Sound for the Future, director Matt Hulse revis-
its an old C90 cassette tape containing the
complete musical output of the Hippies, the
band he formed, aged 11, with his 12-year-old
brother Toby and eight-year-old sister Polly
in 1979. The result is a 100-minute film about
a bare handful of songs recorded more than
40 years ago. It shares a kitchen-table DIY
budget with its subject and takes a kitchen-
sink approach to the remembrance of things
past, shuffling between staged public read-
ings of adolescent diaries, the recruitment of
youngsters to stage modern-day reconstruc-
tions of the Hippies’ mayfly career, glancing
encounters with sources of inspiration such as
Sleaford Mods or Gang of Four’s Andy Gill,
and animated sequences riffing on the lyrics
of the Hippies’ greatest hits.
The result – if you squint a little – could be
filed near the likes of Charlie Kaufman’s Syn-
ecdoche, New York (2008), Jeremy Deller’s The
Battle of Orgreave (2001) or even Nathan Field-
er’s The Rehearsal (2022; reviewed on page 86):
all, at their various levels of fiction or meta-fic-
tion, fables of reconstruction driven by com-
pulsion, in which directors embark on increas-
ingly quixotic attempts to capture or frame in
art a source material – life – which just won’t
stop happening. But Hulse never seems to
settle on a way to approach his subject, or even
settle on what precisely his subject is, leaving
Sound for the Future to circle fretfully around
large holes where a narrative, argument or
line of thought ought to be. The family sad-
ness – separation and divorce – detectable
behind the Hippies’ brief activity and Hulse’s
lasting preoccupation with it decades later is
sketched in confusing, discontinuous detail.
The reluctance of key figures to be involved
may account for the sense of these gaps in
Sound for the Future: Hulse’s father only appears
briefly to cue up a Stranglers seven-inch in his
suburban semi, while Hulse’s older brother
Toby never shows up, an echo of his childhood
lack of interest in persisting with the Hippies
except as a time-filler during holidays.
So, driven by Hulse’s faith in improvisa-
tion, Sound for the Future becomes an uncer-
tain hybrid of documentary, re-enactment
and recording of its own making. None of
these strands persists long enough in the edit
to allow the film a through-line: they defer to
77
and digress into each other in a succession of
scenes that all feel transitional. Hulse’s faith
in free association leads to an interlude in
which he literally free-associates on the letters
E, A, D, G, B, E, the notes of standard guitar
tuning. We see him have ‘eadgbe’ tattooed on
his arm, and getting a Chinese word for music
tattooed on a trip to Beijing, where he also has
a miniature bespoke suit in the style of Mal-
colm McLaren made for his cherished stuffed
toy (and occasional mouthpiece) Snoops.
McLaren is an obsession: Hulse dances on his
grave in Highgate Cemetery, makes out with
the death mask on its headstone, and has a
pair of McLarenesque brothel creepers turned
into tap shoes – learning to tap-dance being
another of the film’s non sequiturs.
McLaren, who was always happy to be seen
as a manipulator of his younger collaborators
in punk, is also invoked by Hulse’s own recruit-
ment and direction of teenage stand-ins for the
Hippies. These modern-day recreations multi-
ply strangely: some march around with a huge
cardboard cut-out of the Hippies cassette,
some perform mock radio interviews, some
learn to play their instruments from scratch
on camera. They all gather on wasteland for
a bonfire of the film’s props, which might have
worked more cathartically if it hadn’t featured
in the film’s early scenes.
The Hippies’ music, meanwhile, has a gen-
uine artlessness and a zero-budget aesthetic
– Hulse, on ‘drums’, played chopsticks – that
clicks with the DIY post-punk scene raging at
the time. ‘Rabies’, given a prominence in the
film that implicitly marks it as their hit single,
FILMS
dispenses lyrics drawn from public health
messaging (“Rabies is a killer! A horrible
way to go!”) over a Moog monotone. ‘Dallas
City Ghost’ is a morbid blues about the Ken-
nedy assassination. With their flashes of the
Normal, the Shaggs, Dead Kennedys, Suicide
and Daniel Johnston, you can just about imag-
ine John Peel receiving the Hippies’ tape in
the post sometime in 1979 and playing it late
one night on Radio 1. Matt Hulse would never
have got over it.
In UK cinemas from 28 October
KID’S ROCK Matt Hulse
 78
One Second
DIRECTOR ZHANG YIMOU
SCREENPLAY ZHANG YIMOU
ZOU JINGZHI
BASED (WITHOUT
CREDIT) ON A
STORY BY GELING YAN
CINEMATOGRAPHY ZHAO XIAODING
EDITOR YUAN DU
ART DIRECTION LIN CHAOXIANG
MUSIC LAO-ZAI (AK A LOUDBOY)
CAST ZHANG YI
FAN WEI
LIU HAOCUN
LI YAN
FILMS
SYNOPSIS:
A town by the Gobi Desert during China’s
Cultural Revolution. An escapee from a
labour camp clashes with Orphan Liu, a girl
raising her vulnerable young brother alone,
as he goes to great lengths to see Newsreel
No. 22 – which, he’s told, contains a brief
image of his estranged daughter.
REVIEWED BY TONY RAYNS
Unlike his fellow ‘Fifth Generation’
graduates from the Beijing Film Acad-
emy, Zhang Yimou felt no need to begin
his directorial career with films either
literally or metaphorically about the Cul-
tural Revolution. Most of the others had
been zhiqing, ‘educated youth’, who ran
wild as Red Guards in 1966/67 and were
brought under control by being ‘sent
down’ to remote areas of the countryside,
where their faith in Maoism was, shall we
say, challenged. Zhang’s experience was
different. He was pulled out of middle-
school in Xi’an and sent to labour in the
fields for three years, then assigned to
a textile mill for seven more. This was
because of his ‘bad class background’: his
father had been an officer in the anti-com-
munist Nationalist army, and close rela-
tives had fled to Taiwan with that army
in 1949. In One Second (the title is a literal
translation of the Chinese, Yi Miao Zhong)
he has finally made a Cultural Revolution
film. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it has a
protagonist who is a ‘bad element’.
The film is Zhang’s third adaptation
from the fictions of Chinese-American
writer Geling Yan, whose name is
missing from the credits because she’s been and sounds a little like the young Jiang
‘cancelled’ since criticising Xi Jinping’s poli- Wen in Red Sorghum (1987). The way the
RED DESERT
Zhang Yi as the nameless
protagonist, Liu Haocun
cies. (The previous two were The Flowers character overcomes his ‘bad element’ as Orphan Liu (above);
of War, 2011, and Coming Home, 2014.) The background matches Zhang’s own trajec- Liu Haocun (below)
unnamed protagonist is an escapee from a tory. The festooned strips of film hanging
labour camp, first seen hungry and thirsty to dry resemble the bolts of dyed cloth in
as he struggles across the endless dunes of Ju Dou (1990). There are also visual remi-
the Gobi Desert to a small town; he imme- niscences of The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) and
diately heads for the cinema and sees an To Live (1994), making it all something of a
unkempt girl steal one reel of film from the return to roots.
knapsack of the motorcycle courier who is Sadly, what we’re seeing is not exactly
due to carry the print to the next town. The the film Zhang made. Shot in 2018, it was
evolving relationship between the fugitive announced as a competition title for Berlin
and the child (known locally as ‘Orphan in February 2019, only to be pulled “for
Liu’) turns out to be one of the film’s two technical reasons” at very short notice. It
story arcs, but the main one centres on the took some 19 months to revise the film to
fugitive’s determination to watch a current the Beijing Film Bureau’s specifications,
cinema newsreel – because he’s been told deleting various details and adding a new
that it contains a one-second glimpse of sentimental coda, plus shots alongside the
the daughter who disowned him after he end credits of Zhang’s latest discovery Liu
was arrested. Haocun (Orphan Liu) recording a bitter-
The main body of the narrative is sweet title song. Zhang had tried to head
devoted to setting up obstacles to (a) off objections by imagining a more pros-
the relationship and (b) the film viewing, perous setting than any real town of the
and then finding ways around them. This period (decent food, plentiful bicycles),
being a Zhang Yimou film, it’s equally but his underlying intentions just about
devoted to providing the director with survive.
the visual opportunities he relishes: vistas
of the treacherous desert dunes and the On Mubi now
dirt-tracks between settlements, a long
sequence showing the whole community
pitching in to salvage a reel of unspooled
35mm film that has been dragged along a
road, by gently cleaning and drying it, rib-
bons of film criss-crossing the booth when
the projectionist invents a way of screen-
ing the crucial fragment of newsreel as a
loop. A parallel is drawn between the fea-
ture being screened (Wu Zhaodi’s Heroic
Sons and Daughters, 1964, based on a story
by Ba Jin about a soldier’s reunion with a
daughter who was given up for adoption
at birth) and One Second itself, with Orphan
Liu becoming a surrogate for the daughter
the fugitive has lost.
What shines through is how much it
means to Zhang himself, with unmistak-
able evocations of his early films. The fugi-
tive (played by Zhang Yi) looks very much
like one of the convicts in the first film
Zhang photographed, Zhang Junzhao’s
The One and the Eight (1984), and even looks

Vesper Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s
sci-fi feature Vesper offers a compelling
preview of a future ruined by climate
DIRECTORS KRISTINA BUOZYTE
BRUNO SAMPER disaster. In the ‘New Dark Ages’, the
WRIT TEN BY KRISTINA BUOZYTE Earth is a toxic wasteland, ravaged by
BRUNO SAMPER
BRIAN CLARK man-made viruses and organisms that
CINEMATOGRAPHY FELIKSAS ABRUK AUSK AS were created to insulate humanity from
EDITOR SUZANNE FENN
PRODUCTION DESIGN RAMŪNAS RASTAUK AS the effects of ecological apocalypse. Most
RAIMONDAS DIČIUS humans, plants and animals are dead,
MUSIC DAN LEV Y
COSTUME DESIGN FLORENCE SCHOLTES and the ruling classes have retreated into
CHRISTOPHE PIDRE walled citadels. Vesper (Raffiella Chap-
CAST RAFFIELLA CHAPMAN
ROSY MCEWEN man), a young teenager, is accompanied
EDDIE MARSAN in her daily struggles to survive outside
the citadel by a drone, through which her
SYNOPSIS
father, paralysed in bed, communicates
Following the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystem, 13-year-old with her.
Vesper, who is caring for her father, scavenges to survive. Buozyte and Samper’s filmmaking is
One day she meets a strange woman from the nearby citadel,
at its best when imagining life outside
a refuge for the wealthy. The woman is keeping a mysterious
secret, one that could give Vesper and others like her the the citadels. Traversing foggy swamps
chance to do more than just survive. and woodlands, and switching between
hollowed-out husks of villages and sleek
REVIEWED BY K AMBOLE CAMPBELL futuristic machinery fallen into ruin,
Feliksas Abrukauskas’s cinematography
recalls Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). The
visual effects f ind an unsettling har-
mony between machine, flesh and flora,
while the production design emphasises
organic shapes and textures in archi-
tecture and vehicles: airships resemble
mosquitos, and the landscape is punctu-
ated by large, octopus-like domes that
are becoming rusty and overgrown.
MUDDY HELL Vesper Trees pulsate with unnatural life, while
The visual effects find an unsettling harmony between machine, flesh and flora
VESPER
Girls Girls Girls “You’re giving yourself a gift when you
strengthen the connection between your
body and mind,” coos a mindfulness track
FINLAND/DENMARK 2021 that Emma (Linnea Leino), an aspiring
CERTIFICATE 15 100M 55S
professional ice-skater, listens to after
DIRECTOR ALLI HA APASALO screwing up her triple Lutz during prac-
SCREENPLAY ILONA AHTIÅ tice. She is trying to be ‘mindful’. But on
DANIELA HAKULINEN
CINEMATOGRAPHY JARMO KIURU hearing “You’re giving your body a nice,
EDITOR SAMU HEIKKILÄ gentle massage,” Emma rips out her head-
PRODUCTION DESIGN LAURA HA APAK ANGAS
MUSIC TIMO K ÄMÄRÄINEN phones. This is the sort of gooey, disin-
COSTUME DESIGN ROOSA MART TIINI genuous ‘self-care’ nonsense that troubled
CAST A AMU MILONOFF
ELEONOORA K AUHANEN women and girls are given when they’re
LINNEA LEINO most in need of hard-headed advice; such
doggerel can be easy to drown in.
SYNOPSIS
Alli Haapasalo’s Girls Girls Girls
Finland, present day. At a party she attends with her friend explores the disconnect between our
Rönkkö, Mimmi meets Emma, an aspiring professional ice- ostensibly enlightened present and the
skater. The two embark on a passionate relationship, which
ancient pressures that still torture teen-
increasingly distracts Emma from her ice-skating ambitions.
Meanwhile, Rönkkö struggles to achieve sexual satisfaction age girls. Emma is a rail-thin perfection-
with boys. ist; Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff ) is a punk
who feels distant from her mother; and
REVIEWED BY VIOLET LUCCA Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen) is con-
cerned that she might be unable to feel
any carnal pleasure. These very different
girls, united by the uncertainty of youth,
attempt to navigate sex, work and their
families. (School and academic worries
seem absent; perhaps this is what free
college does to young minds.) Though
what is depicted often veers into coming-
of-age-film clichés, particularly in terms of
its thin narrative beats (after little-to-no
conflict beforehand, Mimmi and Rönkkö
WHERE THE WILD FINNS ARE Eleonoora Kauhanen as Rönkkö almost have a friend-breakup in the third
79
plant-like creatures reach out aggres-
sively from the ground; even bandages
are full of strange veins. And beyond all
this, there’s the horror of an underclass
of lab-grown slaves, genetically modified
for obedience and treated like machines.
With serfs and citadel oligarchs alike
abusing the slaves, the lines of Vesper’s
class warfare are blurred.
Dan Levy’s score conjures a sense
of foreboding, even grandeur without
overplaying its hand. But characters
and dialogue feel far less lifelike than
the world that surrounds them. Vesper
herself is thinly sketched, and even after
the appearance of the film’s main source
of intrigue, Camellia (Rosy McEwen),
an inhabitant of the citadel, the story
moves at glacial pace, peppered with
heavy-handed imagery; at one point,
characters signal their liberation by
howling like wolves. The visual effects
can only maintain interest for so long,
and while early interactions between
Vesper and Camellia bring interesting
clashes of perspective to the film’s hierar-
chical systems, it all gives way to familiar,
even predictable beats. The elements of
Vesper’s craft ultimately feel out of kilter,
fascinating world-building in conflict
with inert characterisation.
In UK cinemas from 21 October
FILMS
act, as you’d expect), the fights between
the girls – as well as the each girl’s internal
fight with herself – evinces a deep under-
standing of what it takes to define your-
self while on the verge of womanhood.
The film’s investigations of sex and
asexuality feel extraordinarily refresh-
ing, largely because they’re so casual. It’s
Rönkkö who pursues gratification from
various boys, not the other way around,
and sadly, she gets nowhere; one cutie
in a fabulous fur coat coldly informs her
that her advice on how to best move his
fingers inside her lacks “passion”. Mean-
while, Mimmi and Emma embark on
an intense love affair, but neither gives
any big speeches about their newfound
sexual identity. What troubles Mimmi
instead is the sense that Emma, who has
spent her life laser-focused on making the
European ice-skating championships,
is using their relationship as a means
of rebelling against all she’s known – or
simply indulging in something different
on a whim. Mimmi intentionally, colos-
sally wrecks things with Emma more
than once in the hopes of keeping her
sweet girlfriend on the right path. And
even if the fascination of this alternately
selfish and selfless behaviour is undone
by the film’s giggly final shot, the dynamic
feels very high-school – and very real.
In UK cinemas now
 80
After Blue
(Dirty Paradise)
FRANCE 2021
DIRECTOR BERTRAND MANDICO
WRIT TEN BY BERTRAND MANDICO
CINEMATOGRAPHY PASCALE GRANEL
EDITORS LAURE SAINT-MARC
GEORGE CRAGG
ART DIRECTOR JOCELYN DORVAULT
MUSIC PIERRE DESPRATS
COSTUME DESIGN PAULINE JACQUARD
CAST ELINA LÖWENSOHN
FILMS
PAULA-LUNA BREITENFELDER
SYNOPSIS
In the distant future, humans have left earth
for a far-off planet where men are unable to
survive. After teenager Roxy inadvertently
frees a captured witch named Kate Bush,
Roxy and her mother Zora are ordered to
leave their small settlement to hunt Kate
Bush through deserts and forests.
REVIEWED BY BEN WALTERS
A psychic, sensuous space-witch is dis-
covered buried up to her neck on an alien
beach of acid orange, purple and black
by a group of young women in between
bouts of skinny-dipping and slaughter. “Je
m’appelle Kate,” she drawls: “Kate Bush.”
Like most of After Blue (Dirty Paradise),
it’s a blatantly bonkers bit of business
delivered with a straight face. On-the-
nose pop-culture references are framed
by outré production design within what
feels like a sincerely psychedelic saga of
social struggle and self-discovery; broad
mythic storytelling and heightened emo-
tional stakes are mobilised, 20th-century
modes of exploitation genre and experi-
mental cinema are fondly pastiched, but
the film struggles to quicken the pulse.
Writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s
first feature, The Wild Boys (2017), saw five
adolescents shipped off to a desert island
in the early 20th century; After Blue, his
follow-up, is set in the far future, where
women live without men on a planet
named After Blue – humanity having fled
an unliveable earth only to discover that
those without ovaries now suffer unsur-
vivable internal hair growth. This brave
new world has fostered a kind of lo-fi
gyno-fascism, with hints of anti-scientific
micro-nationalist eugenics underpinning
a life of conformist pleasure-seeking,
opposition to nomadism and alternative
lifestyles, and the ostracisation or eradica-
tion of ‘bad seeds’.
Roxy (Paula Luna) is a young outsider
whose impulsive decision to liberate the
witch Kate Bush (Agata Buzek) from her
sandy constraints puts her at odds with
community elders. Roxy and her mother
Zora (Elina Löwensohn), the village
hairdresser, are ordered to catch and kill
Kate Bush, entailing a perilous journey
through surreal deserts and forests and
the uncovering of truths about the world
and their place in it.
After Blue is distinguished by its extraor-
dinary aesthetic sensibility, which rings
with echoes of all kinds of other works
while remaining bizarrely distinctive.
From its opening titles, it boldly evokes
the production design of grindhouse and
VHS-era genre films, its fantasy effects
achieved through in-camera and pre-
digital technologies. Sets and costumes
are ingeniously handmade, combining
fake fur and glamorous talons, plasma
balls and quartz crystals, chicken-wire
and neon tubes; locations feel like either
rickety studio stages or starkly gorgeous
natural locations; special effects lean on
gloopy exposed organs and rubber tenta-
cles, blacklight colour palettes and video
filters and effects. The world feels consist-
ent and weird, all stardust and mulch, top-
less warriors and telepathic horses, can-
nibal kisses and bioluminescent shrubs,
New Age androids and caterpillar-cigars.
Like recent filmmakers such as Prano
Bailey-Bond, Anna Biller and Peter
Strickland, Mandico seems invested in
a sincere excavation of genres once held
up for ridicule or scaremongering. Sci-
ence fiction, horror, spaghetti western
and psychedelic titles come to mind here,
including Barbarella (1968), with its sexy
alien vistas, El Topo (1970), with its cosmic
frontier mindscapes, and Blade Runner BUSH CRAFT
(1982), with its neo-noir genre-twisting. Paula Luna as Roxy, Agata
Buzek as ‘Kate Bush’
The 1980 video for David Bowie’s single
‘Ashes to Ashes’ also looms large, while
Pierre Desprat’s synth-heavy score
enhances the film’s retro vibe. A sense of
self-contained alternate reality is quali-
fied, however, by oddly specific contem-
porary cultural references, both grave
(racism against specific existing nationali-
ties) and bizarro (Gucci lasers and Louis
Vuitton robots).
This sensibility is in service of a
story that follows the trajectory of a
hero’s journey of exploration and dis-
covery; it’s a little like a quasi-feminist
Apocalypse Now, with Roxy’s Willard in
search of Kate Bush’s Kurtz via dream-
like encounters with bandits, bohemians
and bounty hunters. The combination
of woozy tone and stylised but rudimen-
tary characterisation, together with a
two-hour running time, makes it hard
to stay engaged. Yet intriguing strands
emerge. In the shifting mother-daughter
dynamic between Roxy and Zora, Luna
and Löwensohn convey a strong yet
testy bond befitting a duo who rely on
each other in opposition to social con-
formity while experiencing familiar gen-
erational friction; the daughter is seen
to be wiser in some ways, the mother no
less open to experiment.
Other themes include a sustained
interest in hair and hairdressing, with
various scenes of shaving and proposed
mythic links between hair growth and
kinds of evolution or extinction. The
western genre looms large too, through
horses, hats, six-shooters and question-
ably racialised sidekicks. It’s a melange
of spaceships, haircare and cowboys,
framed as an escapist, eroticised mood
piece in which cultural references meet
lightly drawn, quixotically motivated
characters. The result has the feel of a
playground storytelling adventure game,
leaving us at the whim of a bold, ingen-
ious, somewhat childlike imagination.
In UK cinemas from 7 October

Emily
DIRECTOR FRANCES O’CONNOR
SCREENPLAY FRANCES O’CONNOR
CINEMATOGRAPHY NANU SEGAL
EDITOR SAM SNEADE
PRODUCTION DESIGN STEVE SUMMERSGILL
MUSIC ABEL KORZENIOWSKI
COSTUME DESIGN MICHAEL O’CONNOR
CAST EMMA MACKEY
ALEX ANDRA DOWLING
AMELIA GETHING
SYNOPSIS:
Yorkshire, the 1840s. Emily Brontë, her sisters
Anne and Charlotte and her brother Branwell have
creative storytelling gifts, but Emily’s rebellious
nature displeases her strict priest father. After initial
antagonism with the new curate, William Weightman,
Emily and William begin a secret, passionate affair that
may ultimately influence her own writing.
REVIEWED BY LEIGH SINGER
The thesis of actor-turned-f ilmmaker Frances
O’Connor’s debut feature is that Emily Brontë
wrote Wuthering Heights because she basically lived
it: a heated, thwarted love affair, ostensible com-
muning with ghosts, transgressive behaviour (here
including alcohol, drugs, a tattoo) and premature
death all stem from her own tragic history. Cue
withering looks from Brontë scholars, because
O’Connor has created her own ‘imagined world’ of
the wildest of three sisters whose literary success has
long outlasted their own sadly curtailed lives.
Ethical concerns of mixing-and-matching fantasy
with actuality are understandable, yet audiences
were happy to overlook the embroidering of authors’
lives in Shakespeare in Love (1998) or Becoming Jane
(Austen, 2007). The real question is whether such
fictions shed light on a subject’s emotional truth.
Would it be more illuminating if, as is widely sup-
posed, Emily Brontë never personally experienced
romance but still produced a novel as febrile and
impassioned as Wuthering Heights? Or would we feel
A VIEW TO A QUILL Emma Mackey as Emily Brontë
we better understood Brontë if we thought she’d
been inspired by a liaison with a man of God?
Just such a forbidden union, not based on fact,
underpins Emily, as sophisticated but emotionally
stunted curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-
Cohen) arrives on the windswept moors. Emily’s
severe parson father (Adrian Dunbar), demanding
a clone of refined elder sister Charlotte (Alexandra
Dowling), charges Weightman with improving
Emily’s French. Initially irritated by her challenging
of his unquestioning religious faith, Weightman is
soon led into temptation by her rebellious outlook,
saturnine charms and carnal poetry.
O’Connor – whose screen breakthrough was in
one of the less reverent Austen adaptations, Mans-
field Park (1999) – deftly avoids prettified, starchy
‘heritage movie’ tropes. Cinematographer Nanu
Segal deploys all manner of modern touches, often
shooting handheld and using natural light or can-
dlelight. But none of this can help the lukewarm
chemistry of the central pairing or make their whip-
lash-inducing changes of heart more convincing.
In fact, O’Connor’s habit of laying Abel Korzenio-
wski’s classical-style score thick on the action often
drowns out the lovers’ emotional connections.
Meanwhile, far more intriguing scenes of Emily’s
sibling rivalries, creative and otherwise, are con-
fined to the margins.
Fortunately, central to everything – literally, in
that O’Connor scrutinises the actor square-on in the
middle of almost every frame – is Emma Mackey’s
committed, intense performance. If her Yorkshire
accent sporadically wanders down the M1, Mackey’s
charting of Emily’s inner life compels throughout,
particularly when she defies, and defines herself
against, Branwell and, later, Charlotte (the bilingual
Mackey speaking French). In such moments, Emily’s
creative rewriting of emotional truth hits the heights
for which it strives.
In UK cinemas from 14 October
81
SPOTLIGHT
EMMA MACKEY
BY LEIGH SINGER
Unlike that small coterie of British
actresses – Jane Birkin, Charlotte
Rampling, Kristin Scott-Thomas –
whose careers partly encompass French
cinema, Emma Mackey can claim
actual dual heritage. Born and raised
in Le Mans by her French father and
English mother, Mackey came to the
UK to study at the University of Leeds,
later moving to London for stage expe-
rience, before quickly landing an agent
and a lead role in Netflix’s Sex Education
(2019-). A fantasy amalgam of UK teens
FILMS
in a US-like high school, its frank and
funny depictions of youthful sexual
escapades became an instant hit. Mack-
ey’s Maeve Wiley, co-founder of a teen
sex clinic, is a force-of-nature outsider
who conceals her vulnerability behind
tough talk and (occasionally) pink-dyed
hair. She became the breakout star in
an ensemble of burgeoning talent.
With just this series and independent
Irish thriller The Winter Lake (2020) on
her resumé, Mackey headlined Kenneth
Branagh’s all-star Agatha Christie adap-
tation Death on the Nile (2022), playing
the volatile ex-best friend of Gal Gad-
ot’s heiress victim (and chief suspect).
Amid a strangely artificial, CGI-heavy
production, Mackey’s visceral intensity
shone through. It was a similar story
for her French-language screen debut,
Eiffel (2021), playing the longstand-
ing forbidden love of Romain Duris’s
eponymous Parisian architect, Mackey’s
ardour and charisma triumphing over
unconvincing ageing effects. She’s now
back in period attire, captivating as
one of the tragic Brontës in Emily –her
most prominent screen work so far.
Mackey named actress/filmmaker
Greta Gerwig her ‘movie icon’ in a 2019
interview; she’ll soon be appearing in
Gerwig’s Barbie movie, due for release
in 2023, and has signalled a desire to
one day work behind the camera.
 82
The Woman King
DIRECTOR GINA PRINCE-BYTHEWOOD
SCREENPLAY DANA STEVENS
STORY MARIA BELLO
DANA STEVENS
CINEMATOGRAPHY POLLY MORGAN
EDITOR TERILYN A. SHROPSHIRE
PRODUCTION DESIGN AKIN MCKENZIE
MUSIC TERENCE BLANCHARD
LEBO M.
COSTUME DESIGN GERSHA PHILLIPS
CAST VIOLA DAVIS
THUSO MBEDU
LASHANA LYNCH
SYNOPSIS
The Kingdom of Dahomey, 1823. As the Agojie, an
elite cadre of warrior women, fight off incursions
from the rival Oyo Empire’s general Oba Ade,
their highly disciplined leader Nanisca has her
traumatic memories triggered, and her sense of
self challenged, by the arrival of determined teen
recruit Nawi.
REVIEWED BY ANTON BITEL
There is a paradox in the kenning-like title of
this latest feature from director Gina Prince-
Bythewood (Love & Basketball, 2000; The
Secret Life of Bees, 2008; The Old Guard, 2020).
A ‘woman king’ is surely a queen – but unlike
Shante (Jayme Lawson), the chief consort to
King Ghezo (John Boyega) and a woman who
very much desires the luxurious, sheltered life
of a conventional queen, the Agojie, a group
whose very name means ‘king’s wives’, in no way
conform to the expectations of their gender:
they are the king’s female guard, preferring the
hardship and discipline of a warrior’s life to
FILMS
the sex, marriage, baby-making and domestic
servitude that would otherwise be their lot.
‘Woman King’, it will emerge, is a near-mythical
status conferred upon a woman whom the
king regards as his equal in counsel and vision.
Equality, however, is an elusive idea here, under
constant negotiation.
There are other contradictions. For while
The Woman King is set in a particular time and
place – the West African Kingdom of Dahomey
in 1823 – and while Ghezo was an actual king
and the Agojie were an actual fighting force
under him, other characters are more nebulous.
The middle-aged Agojie general Nanisca (Viola
Davis) is named after a real person, except that
that person joined the ‘Dahomey Amazons’
as a teenager over half a century later, in 1889.
Similarly, Nawi (Thuso Mbedu), the 19-year-
old recruited to the Agojie after violently reject-
ing the older man her family has chosen to be
her husband, is named after an actual woman
said to have been the last surviving Agojie, who
claimed to have fought as a teenager in the
Second Franco-Dahomean War in 1892 (some
70 years after the film’s events), and who lived
till 1979!
So Dana Stevens’ screenplay (from a story
she wrote with Maria Bello) plays fast and
loose with historical chronology, while even
the recorded names Nanisca and Nawi are
Anglicised versions, with no close equivalent
in the local Fon language. Other characters,
like Nanisca’s tough lieutenants Amenza
(Sheila Atim) and Izogie (Lashana Lynch), or
the Portuguese-Brazilian slaver Santo Ferreira
(Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and his half-Dahomean
companion Malik (Jordan Bolger), are fictions
(although Ghezo did have close relations with
the Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de
Sousa). Even as the film concedes from the
outset the uncomfortable truth that the real
Dahomey under Ghezo was no less actively
involved in slave-trading than its enemy the
Oyo Empire, it also implies that by the film’s
end, such practices, at Nanisca’s urging, would
soon be replaced with palm oil production –
whereas in reality, Ghezo was still selling into
slavery both captives from raids (often con-
ducted by the Agojie) and even Dahomey’s own
citizens till the end of his reign three decades
later. Let’s not even mention the mass human
sacrifices carried out annually in the Kingdom
– after all, the film does not mention them.
None of this really matters. For with its rape-
revenge plotting (Nanisca’s opposition to the
Oyo general Oba Ade, played by Jimmy Odu-
koya, is deeply personal), its improbable reun-
ion of a long-estranged mother and daughter,
its emancipating romance and its exploits of
derring-do, The Woman King keeps reminding
us that it is a myth, and that its play on history is
exaggerated and idealised. Indeed, its empow-
ered women have not a little in common with
the all-female militia (in fact modelled on the
Agojie) in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018)
or the Amazon army in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder
Woman (2017), making this a sort of superhero GORE CURRICULUM Laura Galán as Sara
story avant la lettre set in an African past. Prince-
Bythewood’s film is not so much accurately rec-
reating the past as allegorising a timeless strug-
Piggy
gle – for liberation, for equality and for progress SPAIN/FRANCE/THE NETHERLANDS 2021 CERTIFICATE 18 99M 32S
– and it creatively engenders a brief moment
when men and women, white and Black, find DIRECTOR CARLOTA PEREDA
an agreeable accommodation with each other WRIT TEN BY CARLOTA PEREDA
CINEMATOGRAPHY RITA NORIEGA
and together overcome oppression. EDITOR DAVID PELEGRÍN
Certainly The Woman King is an adventure ART DIRECTION ÓSCAR SEMPERE
MUSIC OLIVIER ARSON
epic, full of vicious close-quarters battles and COSTUME DESIGN ARANTX A EZQUERRO
daring rescues, but it is also an exemplary inter- CAST LAURA GALÁN
RICHARD HOLMES
sectional feminist call to arms for the African CARMEN MACHI
sisterhood to keep building on the achieve-
ments of their female ancestors and to keep SYNOPSIS
fighting – and dancing – as they did, or might Sara is harassed at the local swimming pool by
have done, back in Dahomey, with or without bullies. A serial killer, who is obsessed with her,
the approval of their patriarch, in a film itself exacts revenge, kidnapping her attackers. As the
written, directed, shot and edited by an ensem- town searches for the teenagers, the stranger tries
to bond with Sara, who faces a choice about where
ble of women.
to stake her allegiance, and whether to pursue
retribution.
In UK cinemas from 7 October
REVIEWED BY CARMEN GRAY
Kids can be cruel – an unfortunate truth the
horror genre has long drawn upon to spectacu-
lar effect. Spanish director Carlota Pereda’s
psychologically rich feature debut Piggy (2022),
expanded from her 2018 short of the same name,
revolves around the terrorisation of Sara (Laura
Galán), an unpopular girl with weight anxieties,
by a clique of local teenagers.
Sara helps her parents in the butcher’s shop
they run in a Spanish village near the Portu-
guese border. For Sara, remaining within the
pink-hued walls of the family business – where
animals, in a bloody foreshadowing of events to
come, are carved up for sale – feels less fraught
with peril than venturing out for a swim. It’s a
sweltering summer, but Sara is self-conscious in
bathing attire, and fears a run-in with the local
kids, who taunt her with derogatory names and
oinking sounds. Rita Noriega’s camerawork,
while never seeming exploitative, frames Sara’s
body as her inescapable, preoccupying reality,
her sense of isolation only exacerbated by scroll-
PRIME AMAZON Viola Davis as Nanisca ing through social media on her phone, as the

in-crowd upload videos of themselves having fun
– as well as one post making a cruel joke out of a
photo of Sara’s family at their store.
Even Sara’s former friend Claudia (Irene Fer-
reiro), seeking acceptance by the group, goes
along with the bullying. Family offers Sara
scarcely more comfort: her mother (Carmen
Machi) regularly belittles her, and responds to
the revelation of her daughter’s bullying not by
intervening to stamp it out at its source, but by
forcing her onto a salad diet, as if Sara has only
herself to blame for her ostracism.
When Sara is ambushed and nearly drowned
by her peers at the local pool, left without her
clothes and forced to make her way home in just
a bikini, the distress and humiliation engendered
by the prank are so great we can’t help but be
reminded of the pig-blood prom stunt in Brian
De Palma’s Carrie (1976), which also features a
girl on the cusp of puberty who is subjected to
increasingly barbaric high-school persecution.
But Sara’s response is distinct. While Carrie
channelled her rage into telekinetic revenge,
Sara’s negotiation of violent impulses is more
grounded, ambiguous and complex, even as the
film’s gore level escalates and its crimes grow
more baroquely disturbing.
In fact, the vigilante retribution in Piggy ini-
tially appears not as a reaction from Sara, but
from a mysterious van driver (Richard Holmes)
who also happens to be at the pool that day. After
witnessing her ordeal, he begins to exact revenge
on the girls responsible. We soon suspect, having
seen the submerged body of a lifeguard in the
water, that this man has killed before. And so,
rather than venturing into the supernatural ter-
ritory of Carrie, Piggy’s narrative offers Sara the
option of radically disavowing her hostile com-
munity through allegiance to – and potential
romance with – a dangerous man.
This shadowy outsider obsessively circles
Sara, stocking up on her favourite comfort-eat-
ing snacks, intent on punishing each and every
one of her detractors. Meanwhile, the town
preoccupies itself with solving the mystery of
the girls’ disappearance. Pereda leaves us in
suspenseful uncertainty not only over the fate
of the missing bullies, but over how Sara really
feels about the miraculous appearance of this
defender, who seems as much stalker as guard-
ian, and who, protective though he may be, has
opted to take the path of lawless violence and
death. We’re left for most of the film to wonder
to what degree Sara will get her own back in an
explosive release of pent-up resentments, and
whether, as in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers
(1994), the outlaw, having tried to rescue a girl
from an environment of abuse, will enlist her
in his killing spree. As Sara launches her own
search to find answers about what has become
of her tormentors, she is soon forced to take a
stance on potential payback.
Pereda’s sensibilities, it turns out, are attuned
to independent female thought as a potential
way out of a legacy of oppression and patriar-
chal violence. The unexpected force of male
terror unleashed on the town breaks up the
community’s established hierarchies, but does
not ultimately manage to co-opt Sara’s agency.
The essence of real justice, amid the opposing
pulls of eye-for-eye retribution and forgiveness,
is a thorny question in Piggy. For Sara, brutality
remains an option, not a destiny.
In UK cinemas from 21 October
See How They Run
USA/UK 2022 CERTIFICATE 12A 98M 1S
DIRECTOR TOM GEORGE
WRIT TEN BY MARK CHAPPELL
CINEMATOGRAPHY JAMIE D. RAMSAY
EDITORS GARY DOLLNER
PETER LAMBERT
PRODUCTION DESIGN AMANDA MCARTHUR
MUSIC DANIEL PEMBERTON
COSTUME DESIGN ODILE DICKS-MIREAUX
CAST SAM ROCKWELL
SAOIRSE RONAN
ADRIEN BRODY
RUTH WILSON
REECE SHEARSMITH
SYNOPSIS
London, 1953. The cast and crew of the Agatha
Christie stage-play The Mousetrap are having a party
to celebrate the production’s 100th performance.
But a violent fight breaks out, and soon afterwards
one of the participants in the fight is murdered.
Two police arrive from Scotland Yard…
REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP
There’s no doubt about it: the whodunnit is
enjoying a euphoric comeback. Rian Johnson’s
Knives Out (2019, with its sequel Glass Onion
about to be released) announced as much,
the recent horror murder mystery Bodies Bodies
Bodies confirmed the trend and now TV direc-
tor Tom George (This Country, 2017-20) makes
his big-screen debut with a mischievous dive
into the genre that not only plays fast and loose
with its conventions, but even introduces
Agatha Christie (Shirley Henderson, billed
only as ‘Dame’) as a character.
We’re in London’s West End in 1953, and the
cast and crew of Christie’s drama The Mouse-
trap, which is destined – though they don’t yet
know it – to become the world’s longest-run-
ning stage-play, are celebrating its hundredth
performance. Joining the party, which includes
the stars Richard Attenborough (Harris Dick-
inson) and his wife Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda),
THE UNBELIEVABLE SLEUTH Sam Rockwell as Inspector Stoppard, Saoirse Ronan as Constable Stalker
83
are film producer John Woolf (Reece Shear-
smith), who’s hoping to make a movie adapted
from the play, and American director Leo
Köpernick (Adrien Brody), whom Woolf has
invited to direct it.
The biggest disruption to Woolf ’s plans
occurs when Köpernick, within the first few
minutes of the movie, is murdered. Since he
was an abrasive and quarrelsome character
there’s no shortage of potential suspects – not
least Attenborough, who’d just accused him of
making a pass at Sim. Enter the police: cyni-
cal, near-alcoholic Inspector Stoppard (Sam
Rockwell) and naive, over-enthusiastic young
Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan). Their
ill-matched partnership makes for consistent
comedy, with Ronan giving the film’s standout
performance against strong competition.
Mark Chappell’s script has fun sending up all
the conventions of the genre, kicking off with a
voiceover emanating, as it turns out, from the
character about to be bumped off. (“It’s a who-
dunnit – you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,”
he sneers just prior to his murder.) At one point
Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), the
pretentiously camp playwright brought in to
write the projected screenplay, comments on
the banality of using flashbacks in murder mys-
teries – upon which, of course, we slip straight
into a flashback. “Could they all have done
it?” speculates Stalker – an unmissable nod to
Murder on the Orient Express.
There are hints of Wes Anderson in these
self-aware games – though not so much so as to
make the movie feel derivative. The recreation
of 1950s London, its cars like giant clockwork
FILMS
toys, is affectionately done, and here and there
the plot even draws on truth – John Woolf was
a leading British producer of the time, and The
Mousetrap really was inspired by real-life events.
Even Sight and Sound gets a namecheck. What
more could anyone want?
In UK cinemas now
 84

Flux Gourmet A similar culinary collective features

in Flux Gourmet. A trio led by a woman
perfect synch; running jokes, like Elle
exclaiming, “Jan Stevens!” every time Jan
CUISINE AND HEARD
Asa Butterfield as Billy, Fatma
Mohamed as Elle di Elle, Ariane
named Elle di Elle – a pun on ‘low-density enters the room. The film is conceptual, Labed as Lamina Propria
UK/USA 2022 lipoprotein’, aka ‘bad cholesterol’ – has in that both visual and verbal content is
CERTIFICATE 15 111M 33S
won a prized residency at the Institute, generated by a set of ideas: the culinary,
DIRECTOR PETER STRICKLAND run by the outlandishly elegant Jan Ste- the sonic, the gastric.
WRIT TEN BY PETER STRICKLAND vens (Gwendoline Christie). Their resi- And it’s very European, while playing
CINEMATOGRAPHY TIM SIDELL
EDITOR MÁTYÁS FEKETE dency involves staged recitals of food and up a comically heightened Englishness:
PRODUCTION DESIGN FLETCHER JARVIS sound creation, sometimes incorporating on one hand, the tweedily cantankerous
SONG AND NOISE JEREMY BARNES &
HEATHER TROST performances by Elle (Fatma Mohamed) Glock and a performance from Christie
ROJ in a confrontational Viennese Actionist of positively regal eccentricity; on the
CAVERN OF ANTI-MAT TER
FILMS

DAN HAYHURST
THE SONIC CATERING BAND
COSTUME DESIGN SAFFRON CULLANE
CAST ASA BUT TERFIELD
GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE
ARIANE LABED
SYNOPSIS
Elle di Elle, an artist working with food-
generated sound, has a residency with her
trio at the Sonic Catering Institute. The
group gives several performances there, and
band member Billy embarks on an affair
with Institute head Jan Stevens, while the
Institute faces attacks from another group,
the Mangrove Snacks.
REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY
Peter Strickland’s past films, including
Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and The Duke
of Burgundy (2014), were not hermetic in
the absolute sense. They couldn’t be read
in terms of conventional codes of human
behaviour, as depicted in any form of
realist cinema, but they absolutely made
sense in reference to cinema itself: giallo
horror, Euro erotica and, for the more
approachably comic In Fabric (2018),
1970s British horror.
By contrast, Strickland’s Flux Gourmet
is as hermetic as they come. The only
immediately available frame of reference
seems to be the imagination, and the
career, of Strickland himself. What could
we possibly make of a setting called the
Sonic Catering Institute, if not for the
fact that the director has since the 1990s
been a member of the Sonic Catering
Band, which generates music from the
sounds of cooking?
vein, followed by ritual backstage orgies.
All these events are being officially
documented by a writer named Stones
(Makis Papadimitriou), who narrates
via voiceover in Greek. But Stones is
plagued by chronic flatulence, and seeks
the advice of the Institute’s physician, Dr
Glock, played with magisterial loftiness
by Richard Bremmer, whose intense stare
and death’s-head physiognomy worked to
alarming effect in In Fabric.
Jan seduces the youngest member of
Elle’s trio, gauche Billy (Asa Butterfield,
hiding behind an early-80s indie fringe).
Meanwhile, Elle struggles to find a name
for her group, Stones submits to Dr
Glock’s performative style of treatment
(“Why did I agree to a public gastros-
copy?” he muses), and the Institute suffers
a series of revenge attacks from a group
named the Mangrove Snacks, whom Jan
has turned down for a residency (“I don’t
like what they do to terrapins”).
Viewers averse to highly conceptual
cinema might see Flux Gourmet as a prime
example of that much-derided form, the
‘film where nothing happens’. In fact,
plenty happens in a film crawling with
plot strands, although their intermesh-
ing paradoxically creates an effect of stasis
rather than advancing action.
A UK/US/Hungary co-production,
Flux Gourmet is very much not the sort of
film that British directors are ‘supposed’
to make. It’s highly formal, built around
repetitions: a series of performances;
mimes depicting supermarket trips;
recurrent waking-up scenes in which the
musicians pull back their bedsheets in
other, a cast including Papadimitriou,
the Greek-French Ariane Labed and,
matching Christie for all-out ripeness of
style, Romanian-born Strickland regular
Mohamed (the silkily menacing shop
assistant of In Fabric).
The closest comparison for Flux Gour-
met in British or any other cinema is Peter
Greenaway, in its comic, mock-scholarly
preoccupation with bodily functions (sex,
taste, digestion) as well as in its sheer
formal abstraction and highly composed
depiction of the bizarre. But it’s hard not
to feel that Strickland has leaned a little
heavily on the formalism. Flux Gourmet
seems hung up on the repetition of cer-
tain ideas that don’t necessarily resonate
beyond themselves. There’s a certain
pedantic over-insistence in the humour:
the word “flanger” is only funny the first
six times. And the film doesn’t quite have
the organically eerie sense of an autono-
mous world taking shape before our eyes,
as in The Duke of Burgundy; here it’s as if
the machinery has been set up in advance
and we’re just watching it run through its
arcane operations.
Flux Gourmet is, of course, meticulously
constructed, right down to the design of
a very pre-feminist cooking manual; the
sound is as richly crafted as you’d expect,
and it’s beautifully shot by Tim Sidell
in hues that are often some way off the
standard colour chart. But the result
won’t appeal to every palate – not even
palates previously attuned to Strickland’s
singular cine-cuisine.
In UK cinemas now
 85

This understanding is conveyed through talking-head MORE FILMS BY

The Cordillera of Dreams
FRANCE/CHILE/SWITZERLAND 2019
DIRECTOR PATRICIO GUZMÁN
WRIT TEN BY PATRICIO GUZMÁN
CINEMATOGRAPHY SAMUEL LAHU
EDITOR EMMANUELLE JOLY
MUSIC MIRANDA & TOBAR
SYNOPSIS
Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán reflects on the impressive
mountain range (the Cordillera) that surrounds Santiago, the
city of his birth. Guzmán draws on interviews with artists,
writers and geologists who discuss the Cordillera and its
significance in the context of recent Chilean history – most
specifically the Pinochet regime and its aftermath.
REVIEWED BY MARIA DELGADO
Patricio Guzmán has described The Cordillera of Dreams,
which follows his Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl
Button (2015), as the final entry in a trilogy; all three docu-
mentaries are unified by his poetic narration of a political
journey through Chile’s recent history. Whereas Nostalgia
for the Light was set in the Atacama desert in the country’s
northern extremes, The Pearl Button turned its eye to the
country’s southern tip, where glaciers sit alongside the
stone carvings of the indigenous populations that once
lived along the coast. The Andean mountain range from
which The Cordillera of Dreams takes its name is described
by Guzmán as the country’s “immense spine”, framing the
capital city of Santiago and sitting as a silent witness to
the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime, which
forcibly detained Guzmán and thousands of others in
the national stadium in Santiago following the coup that
ousted Salvador Allende in 1973. Guzmán subsequently
left the country, but The Cordillera of Dreams demonstrates
artists and scientists, who discuss the Cordillera’s role in PATRICIO GUZMÁN
the Chilean imaginary. Sculptor Vicente Gajardo claims
that this “cultural landmark”, which surrounds Santiago, BY THOMAS FLEW
signifies the need to look at what is within and beyond.
Volcanologist Álvaro Amigo sees a journey into the Cor-
dillera as a journey into the past. Singer Javiera Parra and
writer Jorge Baradit identify it as a wall that both protects
and separates Chile from the rest of the world. For sculp-
tor Francisco Gazitúa, the Cordillera “holds the traces of
ancestors… 20,000 years of traces… a mystery that can’t be
explained, it just exists.” Such comments are emblematic THE BAT TLE OF CHILE
of a film that is able to meld the mystical grandeur of the (1975, 1976, 1979)
Released in three parts,
mountains – Lahu’s camera captures the range from a series
Guzmán’s thorough
of perspectives and angles – with the everyday: reflections investigation of the events
on Chile’s performance in the 1960 World Cup, familiar leading up to the 1973
images of the Cordillera decorating matchboxes. military coup that took
Indeed, Guzmán is a master of juxtaposition. A shot down Chilean president
of Guillermo Muñoz Vera’s mural of the Cordillera on the Salvador Allende’s
walls of a subway station platform, walked past indifferently government is a landmark of
by innumerable passengers, is followed by the impassioned documentary filmmaking.
It is remarkable for its
brushstrokes of Muñoz Vera capturing the rugged contours
attention to political
and colours of the mountains. The camera sweeps over the manoeuvrings at all levels,
graffiti-covered near-ruin Guzmán’s childhood house, only from senior figures to
to show the array of skyscrapers that now frame it. “This activist workers, who are
film is like the reflection of a past that is pursuing me,” states given ample attention via
Guzmán, but it is arguably Guzmán and cameraman Pablo on-the-ground footage and
Salas, whose filmed archive anchors the documentary’s interviews.
second half, who are actively pursuing and reframing the
past, providing visual evidence of that which the dictator-
ship tried to cover up: military violence, detention centres,
forced disappearance, street protests. Salas’s footage coun-
ters the politics of forgetting by showing both abuse and
resistance; it challenges a narrative that dismisses the dic-
tatorship’s practices as mere ‘errors’ rather than a systematic
process of annihilating those who challenged its ideology. NOSTALGIA FOR THE
LIGHT (2010)

FILMS
that Chile remains a key part of his identity, evincing, like Guzmán films Salas filming protesters targeted aggressively
Twenty years after the fall
the earlier films in the trilogy, the complex relationship by water cannon, illustrating how Pinochet’s imposition of a
of Augusto Pinochet’s
between memory, history, nature and geography with the neoliberal ideology that conflated value with profit contin- dictatorship, Guzmán visits
contextual sensitivity of an insider and the discerning eye ues to plague contemporary Chile. Chile’s Atacama Desert,
of an outsider. “In Chile,” states Guzmán, “what cannot be seen does not finding parallels between the
La Cordillera first emerges in an aerial shot captured exist.” The Cordillera of Dreams gives visibility to the unseen. astronomers who work there
by cinematographer Samuel Lahu; we see peaks of white This extraordinary, poetic, political work is a heartfelt cor- and the groups of women
rock nestled between clouds. This breathtaking vista is rective to a mode of being that intentionally turns away; it searching for the remains
accompanied by Guzmán’s steady narrative, reflecting on encourages the viewer to look deeply at things that have of their relatives, who were
‘disappeared’ by the regime.
the condition of exile as he returns to a city where he can’t been erased, overlooked, or, like the Cordillera, taken for
Both are refusing to forget
recognise the air he breathes. As a youth, part of a genera- granted. It brings into existence hidden histories as a way humanity’s past, argues
tion that was “far too busy building a new society”, he had of better contextualising the past and better understand- Guzmán. This is a beautiful
no time for the Andean mountain range. But as an older ing the relationship between landscape and memory that film, remarkable both in
man, he has shifted his gaze towards the mountains, recog- continues to shape the present. content and in form.
nising that they are “perhaps the gateway to an understand-
ing of present-day Chile”. In UK cinemas from 7 October

THE PEARL BUT TON (2015)

The Pearl Button focuses on
the surviving members of
the Alacalufe and Yaghan
tribes, finding parallels
between the persecution of
the indigenous population of
Chile and the persecution of
Pinochet’s dissenters. Where
Nostalgia for the Light focuses
on sand and sky, The Pearl
Button centres water, upon
which the aforementioned
nomadic peoples lived,
and into which Pinochet’s
victims’ bodies were
routinely thrown.

RANGE INTERLUDE The Cordillera of Dreams

 86
The Rehearsal
TELEVISION
DIRECTOR NATHAN FIELDER
WRITERS NATHAN FIELDER
CARRIE KEMPER
ERIC NOTARNICOLA
CINEMATOGRAPHY MARCO CORDERO
EDITORS ADAM LOCKE-NORTON
ANDREW FITZGERALD
STACY MOON
PRODUCTION DESIGN ROSIE SANDERS
SCHUYLER TELLEEN
COSTUME DESIGN BRIANA JORGENSON
SYNOPSIS
Nathan Fielder returns to screens with a
six-episode series of his unique brand of
bizarre reality television. Employing actors
and meticulous replica sets, he offers people
the chance to rehearse something they have
been putting off, allowing them to fine-tune
their performance before trying it for real.
REVIEWED BY BEN NICHOLSON
In the finale of his cult kind-of-reality
show Nathan for You (2013-17), the come-
dian Nathan Fielder sought to reunite
a man with his lost love. He went as far
as hiring an actress to play the woman
so that their fateful meeting could be
rehearsed and perfected ahead of time.
The potential of this technique must have
struck a chord: Fielder’s new show, The
Rehearsal, takes the same notion and runs
with it full tilt, producing one of the most
ambitious documentary programmes
of the year, mutable, often hilarious and
increasingly knotty.
The premise is straightforward,
though its application and connotations
are anything but. On the classifieds web-
site Craigslist, Fielder places a vague
advert asking, “Is there something you’re
avoiding?” A handful of respondents are
then offered the opportunity to undergo
a Fielder-facilitated rehearsal – for a
of confession arises, he is too nervous.
Nathan can’t understand what could pos-
sibly be wrong and – as in several similar
moments – can only reflect on this by
re-assessing his methodology. Because,
while Kor and Angela might be the genu-
ine flesh-and-blood people caught in the
middle of Nathan’s scheme, Nathan and
his commitment to his worldview are
absolutely the show’s primary subjects.
The effect of this is both discomfiting
and reassuring in equal measure. There is
undeniably a constant niggle in the view-
er’s mind about the ethical implications
of what Nathan is doing. Even beyond
the pre-defined theatre of the rehearsal
space, he manipulates people and lies
to them to further his experiment. As a
result, there is an ever-present concern
that the uneven distribution of power
is setting the participants up as punch-
lines. In an article for the New Yorker on
the finale of Nathan for You, the revered
documentarian Errol Morris described
the unease that Fielder elicits – we’re
never sure if we are supposed to be laugh-
ing and whether doing so makes us bad
people. At the same time, Nathan’s own
incomparably awkward presence at the
centre of the enterprise means that it is
often he – with his choices, his shortcom-
ings, his solipsism – who is open to the
confession to a friend, a difficult conver-
sation with a relative, or even the experi-
FAMILY PRACTICE
Nathan Fielder preparing
for reality (above and below)
biggest scrutiny.
In a show all about manufactured
ence of child-raising. These rehearsals are verisimilitude, there is always a wariness
meticulously mounted, with the produc- about taking anything at face value, and it
tion team recreating real-life locations is difficult – as with Fielder’s other work –
and actors embodying the other people to be entirely confident about how much
involved. Through the process, Fielder is staged, how much ‘real’. Still, as the six-
– perhaps it makes sense to differentiate episode series progresses into its second
between the creator and his on-screen half, Nathan himself becomes ever more
persona, ‘Nathan’ – records every success enmeshed in his productions, and events
and misstep, crafting sprawling flow dia- spiral into an almost nightmarish self-
grams that allow even the tiniest details reflexivity. As they do so, attention is
to be finessed. relentlessly drawn to the ways Nathan
When you look at the permutations seeks to control others. This not only
laid out, the scope of this entire project pre-empts potential criticism but also
is dizzying. The physical production skewers the notion that any form of real-
alone is a bravura undertaking. One ity television isn’t replete with these fabri-
participant, a woman named Angela, cations and imbalances. It’s impossible to
moves into a beautiful detached home determine what is real and what isn’t in
while the first 18 years of her potential The Rehearsal – but then, that’s the case far
baby’s life are rehearsed over a condensed more often than we might like to admit.
two-month period. Child actors are con-
stantly rotated as her son: ‘Adam’ grows Six episodes on Sky.com and NOW TV now
older every few days in an accelerated
simulation of maturation. Meanwhile,
the crew push carrots into the vegetable
patch outside, so that Angela can realis-
tically harvest the crops she’d sowed in
yesterday’s soil. The opening episode is
similarly painstaking: when 50-year-old
teacher Kor is shown a full replica of his
favourite New York trivia bar inside an
Oregon warehouse, he is struck dumb by
the sheer effort involved. The interior is
copied precisely, down to torn seat cush-
ions and crooked picture frames. The
intention is that Kor, who plans to reveal
a decade-old lie to his friend, Trisha, will
be 100 per cent prepared for every con-
ceivable eventuality.
Of course, real life isn’t like that.
When Kor finally does meet Trisha, and
the opportune pre-planned moment
 87

So far, The Rings of Power appears to be a prequel in SPOTLIGHT

The Lord of the Rings: name, but a remake in spirit. The story starts the same
The Rings of Power way, essentially, as the Jackson saga: Middle-earth is
apparently peaceful, but an ancient evil is stirring –
Morfydd Clark
DIRECTORS J.A. BAYONA
Sauron, the dark demigod who’ll come to be the Lord BY K ATE STABLES
WAYNE YIP of the Rings, presented again as a barely seen, imper-
CHARLOT TE BRÄNDSTRÖM sonal malevolence. He’s sensed by a fabulously long- Well before Morfydd Clark
WRITERS J.D. PAYNE
PATRICK MCK AY lived, wise character – here, the elf warrior Galadriel, was commanding armies in
GENNIFER HUTCHINSON our heroine, who refuses to give up hunting Sauron, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings
JASON CAHILL
JUSTIN DOBLE much like Gandalf in the films. of Power, Armando Iannucci,
BASED ON THE LORD OF THE RINGS
AND APPENDICES BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN
Galadriel was in the Jackson films, played by Cate who directed her in his 2019
CINEMATOGRAPHY ÓSCAR FAURA Blanchett; here, she’s played by Morfydd Clark. film The Personal History of
A ARON MORTON Galadriel’s elf friend Elrond is also present, with David Copperfield, described
ALEX DISENHOF
EDITORS JAUME MARTÍ Robert Aramayo replacing the films’ Hugo Weaving. her glowingly: “She has a
BERNAT VILAPLANA Another elf, Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova), nurses a great stillness, yet underneath
STEFAN GRUBE
CHERYL POT TER forbidden love for a human, Bronwyn (Nazanin Boni- it there’s an energy really
JOCHEN FITZHERBERT adi), recalling Arwen and Aragorn in Jackson’s films. buzzing all the time – it’s quite
PRODUCTION DESIGN RAMSEY AVERY
RICK HEINRICHS There’s a new hobbit (technically, a hobbit-related mesmerising.” Taking on the
MUSIC BEAR MCCREARY ‘Harfoot’): the perky, adventure-seeking Nori (Mar- dual role of saintly mother Clara
COSTUME DESIGN K ATE HAWLEY
CAST MORFYDD CLARK kella Kavenagh). The third episode brings in charac- and daffily dim child-wife Dora
ROBERT ARAMAYO ters we’ve glimpsed in flashbacks in Jackson’s films. in that Dickens adaptation,
MARKELLA K AVENAGH
ISMAEL CRUZ CÓRDOVA The series initiates three or four plotlines with only she combined a thoughtful
the vague linking thread of ‘evil returning’. For the sweetness with a giddy comic
SYNOPSIS first two hours, there’s little sense of what the story is sense previously unguessed at.
Middle-earth, millennia before the events of The Lord of about. This is more acceptable in a streaming series Most of this Welsh actor’s
the Rings. The elf warrior Galadriel has long hunted the than it would be in a movie (the 2007 fantasy film The early screen appearances called
evil sorcerer Sauron. When she is told by her king that she Golden Compass, planned as the first in a trilogy based for a charming earnestness –
must leave Middle-earth and return to the Elven homeland,
on Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ novels, found- including as a defenceless art
she defies his command. Meanwhile, other inhabitants of
Middle-earth witness strange new phenomena…
ered for that reason); but, cinematic appearance aside, teacher in The Falling (2014) and,
The Rings of Power doesn’t compare well with other in 2016, a reluctant husband-
REVIEWED BY ANDREW OSMOND modern TV series. Within the fantasy genre, Arondir hunter in Whit Stillman’s
and Bronwyn’s romance feels laughably makeshift next arch period comedy Love and
Early in Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings to, for instance, Jaime Lannister and Brienne’s story Friendship. The same year,
of Power, a shipload of voyagers approaches Valinor, in Game of Thrones (2011-19). When a human town is she was singled out as one of
heavenly realm of the elves. A celestial light pierces the threatened by tunnelling orcs, the action feels like a Screen International’s ‘Stars of

clouds. From it comes singing; the white-clad voyagers
start singing too, all but one. The cloud curtains part,
the glow intensifies. Our heroine, the sole figure refus-
ing to sing, can bear it no longer. As the light takes her
companions, she backs away, and dives into the ocean.
To haters of fantasy, it sounds like hogwash, but it’s
the one time the first three episodes of The Rings of Power
match the best of the cinema franchise they emulate so
extravagantly, Peter Jackson’s two Middle-earth trilo-
gies (2001-14). Beyond that scene, these episodes mostly
prove what anyone might have guessed: that a corpora-
tion with Amazon’s resources can create a series that,
in visual terms at least, convincingly resembles Jackson’s
blockbusters. The money is most obviously on screen
in the fairytale landscapes, which often contain water-
falls cascading over mountains or into the abysses of
dwarvish mines. But while the quality of the visuals sets
The Rings of Power apart from rival fantasies such as Net-
flix’s The Sandman and HBO’s House of the Dragon, it’s not
clear what this win is worth, creatively or commercially.
TELEVISION
rerun of similar scenes in Season 2 of Stranger Things Tomorrow’. Two small, sharp
(2017). The action scenes ought to be a strength of the TV roles in 2018 – the worn-sour
show, but have proved disappointing so far: two early girlfriend in Patrick Melrose and
battles with fantasy creatures – a giant troll and a mon- a naïve fugitive in The City and
ster wolf – are brief, clumsily shot and unconvincing. the City – showed versatility,
The performers are well cast; Owain Arthur and but didn’t raise her profile. Her
Sophia Nomvete, who play a royal dwarf couple, and memorably odd turn as the kind
the actors playing Harfoots, including Lenny Henry, but crazed Sister Clara in His
are certainly likeable. But no actor has the mythic pres- Dark Materials (2019) was the
ence that Viggo Mortensen and Ian McKellen brought first hint that Clark could roll
to Jackson’s films. a startling, dogged dark streak
Though The Rings of Power begins to grow into itself into her soft-voiced characters.
in the third episode, the show’s biggest problem so far is Her breakthrough was
that it can’t conceal how it’s driven by a brand. It may be an astonishing performance
visually and nostalgically pleasurable, but it’s essentially as a delusional nurse in hit
billion-dollar fan fiction. If the series can’t shake this feel- psychological horror Saint Maud
ing off, even Middle-earth devotees may abandon ship (2019), whipsawing between
like Galadriel, swimming away from the light. terrifying religious visions and a
fatal soul-saving fervour. While
Eight weekly episodes on Amazon Prime from 1 September the fearless, immortal Galadriel
in The Rings of Power seems
worlds away from the broken
Maud, they share a riveting
kind of conviction. Clark’s flinty,
rebellious, quest-obsessed
warrior creates a usefully steely
centre for Middle-earth’s huge,
tumultuous TV battleground.
CLARK PORTRAIT: GUY COOMBES

ELF OBSESSED The Lord of Rings: The Rings of Power

 88

himself as a class apart from the politi-
This England cians around him and the general public,
displaying equal contempt for both
DIRECTORS MICHAEL groups. “I shall be the sun and he Icarus,”
WINTERBOT TOM
JULIAN JARROLD Johnson jokingly reassures his fiancée
ANTHONY WILCOX Carrie Symonds (Ophelia Lovibond)
MAT WHITECROSS
WRITERS MICHAEL when she warns him that Cummings
WINTERBOT TOM needs to be reined in; but he shows little
KIERON QUIRKE
CINEMATOGRAPHY JAMES CLARKE willingness to confront ‘Dom’ until Cum-
EDITORS TANIA REDDIN mings’ unlawful drive to Durham makes
MARC RICHARDSON
PRODUCTION DESIGN NOAM PIPER it unavoidable. Branagh may be This Eng-
COSTUME DESIGN ANTHONY UNWIN land’s star turn, but the fall of Cummings
CAST KENNETH BRANAGH
OPHELIA LOVIBOND gives the series its most satisfying arc.
ANDREW BUCHAN Fortunately, This England is not just
TIM GOODMAN
concerned with what Cummings fre-
SYNOPSIS quently refers to as the ‘Westminster
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his bubble’. As the title suggests, this is a
government delay the UK’s response to the panoramic picture of how a pandemic
Covid-19 pandemic, fearing adverse public takes hold of a nation, and how an entire
reaction and a devastating impact on the society responds to a disaster. The model
economy. As the NHS struggles to cope may be Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion
with insufficient resources, Johnson falls ill (2011), which enjoyed a resurgence in
with the virus and his key advisor Dominic popularity in 2020; we even see Johnson
Cummings breaches lockdown laws.
and Symonds watching it at one point.
REVIEWED BY PHILIP CONCANNON (“It feels a bit like homework,” the PM
grumbles. “I’m more of a Carry On man,
myself.”) As an onscreen counter tallies
“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, the rapidly escalating case numbers, This
this England…” Kenneth Branagh adds England recreates events from the per-
to his onscreen Shakespearean reper- spective of the scientists, the media, the
toire by reciting John of Gaunt’s speech NHS staff and – most poignantly – the
from Richard II in the first episode of elderly and sick. Aside from a few jarring
This England. He does so in the guise of Euripides-inspired dream sequences, the
Boris Johnson, delivering it in rousing directors shoot everything in unobtrusive,
celebratory mode on 31 January 2020, the
TELEVISION
documentary style, and editors Marc
Richardson and Tania Reddin assemble
DE PFEFFEL KERFUFFLE
Kenneth Branagh
as Boris Johnson
these snapshots of British life in a kind of
mosaic. At times there seems to be little
organising principle behind the rhythm
of scenes, as the drama flits from one
location to another, but cross-cutting is
often used to potent effect, notably when
a distraught man pleading to be allowed
to visit his dying father in hospital is
juxtaposed with Johnson and Symonds
enjoying her baby shower with a gang of
friends at a plush country retreat.
The scenes of families being separated
by care-home windows and saying good-
bye to their loved ones over Skype are
raw and upsetting, and for many viewers
they will undoubtedly feel like picking
away at a still-fresh wound. This Eng-
land presents a populace in need being
governed by overconfident mediocrities
desperately out of their depth, and two
years on from the events depicted here –
as we face a long winter of discontent –
the personnel may be different but little
else about the way this country is being
run has changed. “It is insane that people
as ignorant and limited as me can have
the influence we do in the way that we
do,” Cummings says in This England ’s first
episode. It’s hard to argue with that.
Five weekly episodes on Sky Atlantic and
NOW TV starting 21 September

night Britain officially left the European

Union. Having survived a turbulent 2019
and won a convincing election victory,
Johnson is feeling on top of the world; but
later in the series, he recalls some more of
the Shakespeare’s text: “That England
that was wont to conquer others / Hath
made a shameful conquest of itself.”
This England is a study of a country
in crisis, and of the men charged with
steering the population through unprec-
edentedly choppy waters. The series
– conceived by Michael Winterbottom
and Kieron Quirke – focuses on the gov-
ernment’s dithering, confused response
to the Covid-19 pandemic, with Johnson
an increasingly beleaguered figure at its
centre. Peering out from behind some
rubbery prosthetics, Branagh captures
the panic in Johnson’s eyes and his evasive
body language when faced with a major
decision. He is an essentially unserious
man who would rather crack a facetious
gag or spout a quotation from Shake-
speare, Churchill or Homer than speak
plainly and honestly on difficult issues.
He is also a man who would rather
defer to Dominic Cummings whenever
possible. Having been played by Ben-
edict Cumberbatch in Channel 4’s Brexit:
The Uncivil War (2019), Cummings is here
portrayed by Simon Paisley Day, who
gives us a shadowy, tight-lipped figure,
always lurking in a vaguely threatening
manner. Fixated on focus groups and
data, Cummings worked with consider-
able autonomy inside Number 10 as he
pursued his vision of entirely reshaping
the way the government and civil ser-
vice worked, and he seems here to view
 90

offspring, it makes the show lurch, fur-

ther loosening the characters’ grip on
us. The now older, marriage-hardened
Rhaenyra, played by Emma D’Arcy, has
to grab our attention all over again. The
introduction of Game of Thrones tropes like
psycho-eyed princelings, a wrecked wed-
ding and a handicapped plotter also fuel
a sense that the show isn’t finding its own
voice fast enough. There are, however,
saving graces: Smith’s Daemon electri-
fies his scenes with transgressive threat,
sowing seeds of the chaos to come, and
Considine, making believable Viserys’s
guilt-ridden parenting and anxious, fear-
and-fury rule, brings thoughtful shades
of grey which the show needs more of to
deepen its melodramatic clashes.
It is also fascinating to see the plight
of royal women as political pawns and
brood mares become so central to Wes-
teros, as Rhaenyra and her ex-bestie and
new rival Alicent Hightower (Olivia
Cooke) fight to protect their increasingly
opposed interests. The female body, with

House of the events conspire to bring teenage Prin-

cess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock), daughter
DYNASTY GIRLS
Milly Alcock as the young Rhaenyra
its lusts, shamings and fatal risks, is key
to the first six episodes. The birthing
Dragon
Targaryen, Sian Brooke as Queen
of widower king Viserys (Paddy Consid- Aemma (above); Emily Carey as the bed is vividly, perhaps crassly depicted
young Alicent Hightower (below)
ine), close to power. as the female battleground, when early
DIRECTORS MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK
You can feel showrunners Ryan J. on Queen Aemma undergoes a brutal
GREG YAITANES Condal and Miguel Sapochnik reach- Caesarean section against her will – the
CLARE KILNER ing for a new tone here; the internecine operation intercut with a vicious blood-
GEETA V. PATEL
WRITERS RYAN J. CONDAL conflict is still there in full force but the soaked clash of tournament knights.
GABE FONSECA story is now more intimate, its first few Patriarchal scheming at Rhaenyra’s
IRA PARKER
CHARMAINE DEGRATÉ episodes carefully unspooling family jost- expense forms the season’s narrative
TELEVISION

SARA HESS lings and betrayals as Viserys struggles spine. But as it slogs dutifully through
KEVIN LAU
EILEEN SHIM with a frustrated Rhaenyra, while the her turbulent coming of age (those regal
BASED ON FIRE & BLOOD BY GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
CINEMATOGRAPHY FABIAN WAGNER
scheming noble houses of Hightower Daddy issues, that HBO-obligatory
PEPE ÁVILA DEL PINO and Velaryon shove child brides under his first brush with incest, a treasonous first
EDITORS TIM PORTER nose. With spiky exchanges taking place affair), it feels smaller, slower and signifi-
SELINA MACARTHUR
CHRIS HUNTER in the Red Keep’s courtyards and council cantly less playful than the original. Game
PRODUCTION DESIGN JIM CLAY chambers, things are kept claustrophobi- of Thrones showrunners David Benioff
MUSIC RAMIN DJAWADI
COSTUME DESIGN JANY TEMIME cally tight, though the hardened Game of and D.B. Weiss constructed an epic nar-
CAST PADDY CONSIDINE Thrones fan might pine for the confident, rative switchback from the original books,
MAT T SMITH
MILLY ALCOCK kingdom-sweeping scale of yore. putting their own wittily transgressive
EMMA D’ARCY There’s no denying that House of the spin on a show that constantly upended
RHYS IFANS
STEVE TOUSSAINT Dragon is a lush, good-looking show, our expectations. House of the Dragon feels
strikingly shot and thick with dragon- blunter and less artful, predictable where
SYNOPSIS emblemed medieval production design, Game of Thrones was laid with startling
Centuries before the Game of Thrones, but the series’ attempts to step out from snares and eruptions. Six episodes in, it
Westeros’s ruler King Viserys, of the its predecessor’s shadow while also hon- seems a gorgeous but brittle confection
Targaryen clan, must ensure his succession. ouring its heritage fall flat. The focus on (rather like the vast tabletop model of
His daughter Princess Rhaenyra navigates
castle politicking comes at the expense Old Valyria that obsesses Viserys), which
the attempts of the Hightower and
Velaryon families to supplant her, but as the
of crowd-pleasing blood-and-mud battle favours spectacle over substance, histori-
Targaryen family grows, rival claims and sequences, while a dragon-fuelled side- cal exposition over character, and point-
murderous tensions mount. plot involving a piracy row with rival edly Big Themes over compelling drama.
kingdoms feels like fan service. There’s
REVIEWED BY K ATE STABLES no existential threat to the kingdom here; Ten weekly episodes on Sky Atlantic
and NOW TV from 22 August
it’s just a chance for Viserys’s ambitious
Game of Thrones (2011-19) towers over brother Daemon (Matt Smith) to dem-
its own realm, that of TV ‘high fantasy’, onstrate his talent for violent death-or-
like a colossus. Its influence has bitten glory grandstanding.
deep into The Last Kingdom (2015-22), The The show goes long on dragons but
Witcher (2019-), The Wheel of Time (2021-), short on fun, often too busy plough-
and has even made itself visible in the bat- ing through the compendious Martin-
tling heroine of The Lord of the Rings: The penned Westeros history on which the
Rings of Power (2022-). It looms unhelpfully show is based. Compelling characters
large over the franchise’s long-awaited are also thin on the ground. Amid a
prequel, a handsome but plodding family pleasingly multicultural cast, Rhys Ifans’
saga, liberally seasoned with sex and vio- manipulative Lord Hightower and Steve
lence, tracing the vicious Targaryen suc- Toussaint’s blustering ‘Sea Snake’ Velar-
cession struggle nearly 200 years before yon lack both heft and juicy, earthy dia-
the events in Game of Thrones. The Targa- logue. And when a mid-season ten-year
ryen dynasty is decadent but secure (with time jump brings key cast changes and
a dozen dragons as nuclear arsenal), until a teeming cohort of feuding Targaryen

Five Days at Memorial In late August 2005, two weeks after Hur-
ricane Katrina had ravaged New Orleans,
causing 1,800 deaths and over $120 billion
DIRECTORS JOHN RIDLEY worth of damage, a flustered President
CARLTON CUSE
WENDEY STANZLER George W. Bush told journalists that Con-
WRITERS JOHN RIDLEY gress needed to “take a sober look at the
CARLTON CUSE
BASED ON FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL: decision-making that went on” in the early
LIFE AND DEATH IN A STORM- days of the disaster. Historians have since
RAVAGED HOSPITAL BY SHERI FINK
CINEMATOGRAPHY RAMSEY NICKELL concluded that there had been very little
MARC LALIBERTÉ decision-making, and several filmmakers,
EDITORS LUYEN VU
COLIN RICH among them Spike Lee in his 2006 HBO
JOANNE YARROW documentary When the Levees Broke, have
MARIE LEE
VIK ASH PATEL accused politicians of neglecting the city’s
PRODUCTION DESIGN MAT THEW DAVIES Black and working-class residents, who
MUSIC TORIN BORROWDALE
COSTUME DESIGN DEBRA HANSON were often left – literally – to sink or swim.
CAST VERA FARMIGA Based on a 2013 book by journalist Sheri
CHERRY JONES
MICHAEL GASTON Fink, Five Days at Memorial revisits the
MOLLY HAGER awful aftermath of the disaster and casts
CORNELIUS SMITH JR
a clinical eye on the disturbing events at
SYNOPSIS New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center,
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 2005, corpses are whose staff seem at first to be heroes. The
discovered in the chapel of Memorial Medical Center in doctors and nurses work day and night,
New Orleans. They appear to have been euthanised by with no power and waning food supplies.
doctor Anna Pou. The five days leading up to their deaths Water is everywhere – falling from skies,
are chronicled – as are the efforts of the investigators, often streaming from eyes, flooding the base-
despite the reluctance of state officials, to prosecute Pou. ment, coursing down cheeks in the steamy
heat. But it’s morphine, administered by
REVIEWED BY SUKHDEV SANDHU
the seemingly diligent Anna Pou (Vera
Farmiga), that does for many of the sick.
The first five episodes offer an infra-
structural critique of Memorial – and, by
implication, much of American healthcare.
The hospital, it turns out, was built below
Water is everywhere – falling from skies, streaming from eyes,
flooding the basement, coursing down cheeks
FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL
The Last Movie Stars Towards the end of Ethan Hawke’s six-
part documentary The Last Movie Stars,
which delves into the personal and pro-
DIRECTOR ETHAN HAWKE fessional lives of Hollywood couple Paul
EDITOR BARRY POLTERMANN
VOICE CAST GEORGE CLOONEY Newman and Joanne Woodward, Hawke’s
LAURA LINNEY daughter Maya repeats some advice he
gave her. A relationship is actually between
SYNOPSIS
three people, she reminds him; a couple’s
A documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne shared time “creates this different person
Woodward that showcases previously unreleased
that is the two people together”. It gives
interviews with the couple and their friends, read aloud by
contemporary stars. It explores the intersection between Ethan, previously unsure of how to focus
Newman and Woodward’s private and professional lives, his documentary, his eureka moment. This
and incorporates commentary by the actors who are exchange between famous dad and rising-
‘performing’ the interviews. star daughter, which itself invokes that idea
of a triplicate of forces, has a vague ring of
REVIEWED BY VIOLET LUCCA truth. But though it reaches for meaning,
you couldn’t quite call it insightful.
Its inclusion embodies the documen-
tary’s ‘by us, for us’ ethos. Touting never-
before-seen interviews that Newman
gave for an abandoned memoir project
– interviews performed in this docu-
mentary by contemporary stars (George
Clooney plays Newman, Laura Linney
Woodward) – the series examines the
collision between Newman and Wood-
ward’s personal and professional lives.
Many of the actors who ‘play’ the inter-
view subjects offer their own insights into
the couple’s lives, as well as unabashedly
geeking out over the craft of acting. This
approach leaves some surprises even for
those familiar with the couple’s respective
careers, but is less rewarding for viewers
91
sea level, had no plans for mass evacuation
in the event of flooding, and is overseen by
a remote, profit-motivated company. The
final three episodes chart the efforts of
two plain-speaking investigators (Michael
Gaston and Molly Hager) to discover
what compelled Pou to seemingly break
the Hippocratic Oath, and bring her to
justice. The narrative is interspersed with
archival news footage that’s at least as pow-
erful as the scripted drama.
For such a lengthy series, it’s surprising
how cursorily writer-director duo John
Ridley and Carlton Cuse treat themes
such as race, religion, even money. Farmiga
and Cherry Jones (playing a resource-
challenged incident commander) do
wonders with dialogue that is little more
than expository. Questions – what are the
duties of doctors? – are raised without
being adequately tackled. The most cru-
cial question of all, concerning Pou’s guilt,
is largely fudged.
Still, the most chilling detail comes
at the end: by 2018, $14 billion had been
spent on a network of levees and flood-
walls to protect New Orleans from future
flooding. Due to rising sea levels, it may
need updating as early as 2023. Five Days at
Memorial may be less a work of history than
a premonition of horrors ahead.
Eight episodes on Apple TV+ now
TELEVISION
who tend toward a harder-edged view
of Hollywood. As his friend Gore Vidal
says, Newman’s ascent was possible only
because Jimmy Dean, the one young
Method actor who rivalled Newman in
sheer handsomeness, had died; in one
interview, Newman admits, “I don’t have
the immediacy of personality… I’ve got
both feet firmly placed in Shaker Heights.”
The unsentimental nature of fame
comes through in other ways: another nep-
otism baby, Zoe Kazan, who performs the
interviews of Newman’s first wife Jackie
Witte, embarrassedly informs Hawke that
she’s never seen any of Woodward’s movies.
Woodward began her career by nabbing
an Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957),
but her opportunities faded as she aged
and took on less work in order to raise
Newman’s kids. (Newman is unsparing in
his appraisal of his performance as a father,
as are his children from both marriages.)
But perhaps the saddest indictment of
what Hollywood clout can turn into is the
section on Newman’s Own, the actor’s line
of food and drink. At least in Newman’s
case, the brand’s profits go to charity, but
the documentary rightly acknowledges
that his salsa is now better known than
Cool Hand Luke (1967). Time makes fools
of us all, is the message – a far wiser one
than most popular film histories offer.
Six episodes on Sky.com and NOW TV now
 92
Burning an Illusion
The politics have moved on in the 40 years since
Menelik Shabazz’s groundbreaking feature, but it remains
a vivid and powerful picture of Blackness in Britain
REVIEWED BY ARJUN SAJIP
Menelik Shabazz’s first feature, Burning
an Illusion, the pointed tale of a young
Black woman’s romantic travails and
political awakening in West London,
must have felt like a breakthrough in 1981
– the first theatrical release since Horace
Ové’s Pressure (1975) to have been writ-
ten and directed by a Black Brit. Like
Pressure, it had been funded by the BFI;
unlike Pressure, it was not shelved for
three years over concerns about its depic-
tion of police brutality. But for Shabazz,
it turned out to be a culmination, not a
commencement. Despite his repeated
efforts to get creative projects off the
ground, it would be the only fiction fea-
ture he ever directed.
Spanning a little over a year in the
life of Pat Williams (Cassie McFarlane),
Burning an Illusion leads us through this
twentysomething’s coming of age in
a compressed but largely convincing
DVD & BLU-RAY
manner, from her blossoming relation-
ship and subsequent disillusionment
with mercurial apprentice toolmaker
Del Bennett (Victor Romero Evans), to
her growing friendships with two very
different Black female friends, to her
increasingly militant worldview once Del
is served a four-year prison sentence for
violent conduct.
Grace notes abound: the countless
permutations of Pat’s hairstyle, the subtle
slide of her accent through the course of
the film from mostly RP to mostly West
Indian, the nightclub performance by
lovers’ rock icon Janet Kay (whose ‘Silly
Games’ was used to unforgettable effect
in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe episode
‘Lovers Rock’, 2020). With sequences
filmed on the balconies of Trellick Tower
and the streets of Notting Hill, Ladbroke
Grove and Westbourne Grove, the loca-
tion shooting is also a delight.
Without adducing structural racism,
it’s hard to see why this film never led
to more feature-film work for Shabazz,
who died last year. Though he went
on to make his mark in other ways –
filming documentaries, creating Black
Filmmaker Magazine (bfm), founding the
bfm International Film Festival – his
propensity for bold-brushstroke narra-
tive deepened by detailed, thoughtful
Menelik Shabazz; UK 1981; BFI;
Region B Blu-ray; English SDH;
Certificate 15; 106 minutes; 1.66:1.
Extras: commentary by Shabazz,
actors Cassie McFarlane and Victor
Romero Evans; introductions by
production design and his sensitive Shabazz and McFarlane; short
direction of actors are evident in this documentaries Blood Ah Go Run
(Shabazz, 1981), Step Forward Youth
film. This new restoration by the BFI (Shabazz, 1977); trailer; gallery; sleeve
brings out the film’s sheer chromatic viv- with original poster artwork; booklet.
idness, but even without the pinpoint
sharpness it’s clear that this is a work of
significant promise.
The audio commentary by Shabazz,
McFarlane and Evans is reasonably edi-
fying; McFarlane, in particular, rarely
misses a chance to offer an opinion. Sev-
eral of her comments illuminate the differ-
ent (and to some extent gendered) ways
the film can be read. One in particular
relates to the film’s equivalence of the trap-
pings of femininity with political naivety.
The movie opens to Judy Mowatt’s
song ‘Slave Queen’: we see Pat first at
the hairdresser’s, then at home applying
eye-shadow and mascara in the mirror.
Later, her worldview maturing, we see
her removing her make-up. For Shabazz,
that scene is key, marking the point where
Pat jettisons “the mental chains alluded to
in [‘Slave Queen’], which has to do with a
certain [Western] notion of beauty”. But
for McFarlane, who finds this inverse rela-
tionship between maquillage and political
consciousness less than straightforward,
BURNING POINT
this comes off as paternalistic. “African
Cassie McFarlane as Pat (opposite
women have worn make-up for centuries,” top); McFarlane with Victor Romero
Evans as Del (opposite bottom);
she retorts. “I know [this scene] is essen- Romero Evans, second from left,
tial to the film, but this is a film of its time.” with Del’s friends (below)
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

Until Del’s incarceration, Burning an
Illusion maintains one illusion particularly
strongly: that the characters can live largely
untouched by white power structures
93
Such a disagreement points to a
conundrum that is, for many people
of colour, existential: the difficulty of
compartmentalising behaviours into
clear-cut Black and white modes. At
what point does an us-versus-them
schema lose its internal consistency?
Many of the offspring of the Windrush
generation, born in the UK but of West
Indian extraction, were deeply confused
about their identity. This bewilderment
is on full display in Step Forward Youth,
Shabazz’s very first film, a half-hour
documentary from 1977, which is also
included on the Blu-ray disc. This collec-
tion of interviews with alienated Black
youngsters derives its power from the
unguarded honesty of the testimonies:
girls who feel their West Indian iden-
tity slipping away and cling to reggae as
their only link to a Jamaica they see as
their homeland; boys who can already
see their dire job prospects leading them
into criminality. Every youth who speaks
is certain of one thing: they do not see
themselves as British.
It’s far easier today, with so many Black
icons in mainstream British culture, to
not see Blackness and Britishness as
mutually exclusive. In the 1970s, when
almost every authority figure one could
think of was white, and National Front
ideology was encroaching into the main-
stream, the idea that to be British was to
DVD & BLU-RAY
be white would have been far harder to
escape or shout down. Until Del’s incar-
ceration, Burning an Illusion maintains
one illusion particularly strongly: that the
characters can live largely untouched by
white power structures. But that illusion
is soon burned, and Step Forward Youth
is about as far from post-race as you can
get – as is Blood Ah Go Run, a 20-minute
documentary also included on the disc,
shot in 1981 in the weeks after the New
Cross Fire that killed 13 Black youths.
The voiceover, in which we hear the
word ‘racist’ six times in the first two min-
utes alone, offers a take on the incident
and the state’s response that would never
have been aired by public broadcasters
or the mainstream media.
In many ways, the three films in this
Blu-ray package are of their time. Black-
ness and Britishness feel less like anto-
nyms today, and women now are far
more likely to be depicted as co-leaders
of resistance to oppression, rather than
as followers – like Pat – in the footsteps
of politically conscious men. But four dec-
ades later, Black British film, telling Black
British stories, is still not in the rudest of
health; the ‘cancelling’ by Vue cinemas of
Rapman’s Blue Story just three years ago,
following an outbreak of violence in a
Birmingham multiplex after a screen-
ing of the film, is only one symptom. As
the unequal impact of Covid-19 on com-
munities of colour draws scrutiny, and a
constricting economy further squeezes
the marginalised, now is as good a time
as any to question why the film industry is
leaving television – with the likes of Steve
McQueen and Michaela Coel – to tell the
stories that need to be told.
 94

THE MUMMY MADIGAN

Terence Fisher; UK 1959; Second Sight; Region B
Blu-ray; English SDH; Certificate 15; 88 minutes;
1.66:1/1.37:1. Extras: new commentary by Kelly
Robinson; archive commentary by Marcus Hearn,
Jonathan Rigby; appreciations of film and score by
David Huckvale; making-of featurette; featurettes
on Hammer at Bray Studios and the Hammer
Rep Company; original promo reel; stills.
REVIEWED BY KIM NEWMAN
Having mounted a hostile takeover of
horror with The Curse of Frankenstein
(1957) and Dracula (1958), distinctive
reimaginings of classic British properties
previously monopolised by Hollywood,
Hammer Films were approached by
American companies like Universal and
offered remake rights to the monster
franchises of a generation earlier.
Retaining the Frankenstein/Dracula
team of director Terence Fisher,
screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and stars
Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee
– plus many other behind-the-scenes
craftspeople, and even sets, props and
DVD & BLU-RAY
Don Siegel; US 1968; Powerhouse/Indicator; Region
B Blu-ray; English SDH; Certificate 12; 101 minutes;
2.35:1. Extras: commentary by Kim Newman and
Barry Forshaw; archive interview with Richard
Widmark; Super-8 version; isolated music and effects
track; image gallery; theatrical trailer; booklet.
REVIEWED BY TREVOR JOHNSTON
VIVA EROTICA
It’s now difficult to watch this Don Derek Yee, Lo Chileung; Hong Kong 1996; Kani Releasing;
Siegel crime pic as anything else but the Region A Blu-ray; Cantonese; English subtitles; 99 minutes;
1.85:1. Extras: audio commentary by Brian Hu and Ada
opening salvo in a rogue-cop triptych
Tseng; interview with Lo Chileung; booklet.
that also includes his Clint Eastwood
collaborations Coogan’s Bluff (1968) and REVIEWED BY TONY RAYNS
Dirty Harry (1971). Though that puts
the spotlight on Richard Widmark’s Derek Yee, the kid half-brother of actors Paul Chin
abrasive NYC detective, the film was Pei and David Chiang, came into the Hong Kong film
actually mounted as an adaptation of industry as an actor and quickly became a star of wuxia
Richard Dougherty’s portait-of-an- swordplay movies for Shaw Brothers. The moment
institution bestseller The Commissioner Shaws ended regular production in the mid-1980s, he
(1962), which assessed the challenge reinvented himself as an independent director and won
of policing in a time of shifting mores. commercial and critical success from the start with
Hence the central plot, following socially conscious genre films like The Lunatics (1986) and
Madigan’s pursuit of an unstable killer C’est la vie, mon cheri (1993). Viva Erotica (largely directed
who’s stolen his pistol, is distracted by his former assistant Lo Chileung, according to the
from and slowed down by the dilemmas

costumes – The Mummy is a collage of audio commentary on the disc) was his sixth credited
facing Henry Fonda’s seemingly arrow- feature and another big hit.
plot elements of all five ‘mummy’ movies
straight police chief. In his subsequent Made on the eve of Hong Kong’s return to China’s
Universal made from The Mummy (1932)
Eastwood vehicles, Siegel made sure sovereignty in 1997, it’s a state-of-the-industry satire
to The Mummy’s Curse (1944). Though
to keep the badass lawman protagonist which takes in everything from triad involvement in film-
Karl Freund’s 1932 film – a misty gothic
centre stage. financing and the rise of softcore pornography to the
romance with Boris Karloff – provides
Moreover, while Widmark, from his plight of art-minded directors. A profusion of in-jokes
the opening discovery of a tomb and
startling debut as the laughing psycho will sail past viewers who didn’t follow Hong Kong
revivification of the monster as an
in Kiss of Death (1947), was certainly movies in the 80s and early 90s, but terrific performances
unwary archaeologist (Felix Aylmer)
capable of playing it on the edge, he’s from the leads and the film’s overall brio give it a lasting
mutters an incantation, the bulk of the
not completely off the leash here. Even entertainment value.
plot is drawn from pulpier, sillier 1940s
the opening arrest-gone-wrong set-piece Sing (Leslie Cheung, coming off two Chen Kaige
pictures in which Tom Tyler and Lon
casts doubt on the effectiveness of his films, Farewell My Concubine, 1993, and Temptress Moon,
Chaney Jr dragged legs and clutched at
all-guns-blazing approach. Perhaps 1996, as well as starring roles for Wong Kar Wai) is an
throats at the behest of fez-sporting high
censorship issues affected the portrayal ambitious director whose last two features were flops.
priests. Top-billed Peter Cushing, as
of law enforcement, marking this He’s in a torrid relationship with a policewoman (Karen
the lead tomb-defiler, is given the limp
down as a transitional genre piece. But Mok, also a Wong Kar Wai star). His hapless producer
the old mummy had, while Christopher
while the action’s relatively tame by persuades him to accept gangster money to write and
Lee’s imposing, lithe, bandaged Kharis
Dirty Harry standards, the exploration direct a sex-positive movie called Viva Erotica, to star
is transformed from simple thug to
of police corruption through the the boss’s current squeeze Mango (Shu Qi, a Taiwanese
Terminator-type unstoppable force,
commissioner’s secret affair with a starlet in the process of becoming a serious actress; roles
crashing through French windows,
married woman, and the way that for Hou Hsiao-hsien awaited). Most of the movie details
surviving a spear through the chest, and
loosens his strict authoritarian approach Sing’s struggles to accept the demands of the softcore
hauling the heroine (Yvonne Furneaux)
to police operations, is fascinating, genre, which rub off on all his personal relationships.
into a swamp. Raymond Huntley
thanks to Fonda’s buttoned-down, spot- When a studio fire delays completion, he gets the job
earnestly adds to the list of victims while
on performance. Still, it’s obvious that done by recognising the humanity of his sex-star leads –
George Pastell glowers as the disciple
Siegel is keener to film shootouts and and, in a showstopping finale, getting his entire crew to
who ferries Kharis from backlot desert
fisticuffs than people talking in rooms, work nude to make the actors less embarrassed.
to 1890s England.
and that gives the movie a sluggish and Along the way, some real-life directors are parodied
Note also a comedy drunk cameo from
impatient quality. – including ‘Derek Yee’ (played by guest-star Lau
Michael Ripper, who would become as
enduring a fixture in Hammer’s monster- Chingwan), a disillusioned arthouse filmmaker who
Disc: A clean transfer of a slightly dowdy
blighted village inns as the horse-brasses commits suicide, and schlock-meister Wong Jing (played
print, but the real treasure here is the by another guest-star, Anthony Wong). The film also
and the bulbs of garlic.
commentary by Kim Newman and Barry parodies other films’ depictions of sex – the opening
Forshaw, exceptional in the way it lays
Disc: In addition to featurettes and a scene with Leslie Cheung and Karen Mok is wildly over
out the progression from novel to movie, the top – but it’s notably non-moralistic and goes out of
commentary carried over from previous
and explores the pathway from Madigan its way to rehabilitate the ‘images’ of sex-stars Shu Qi
issues, this edition includes informed,
to 70s rogue-cop movies and precinct- and Elvis Tsui, the latter a softcore veteran who is shown
interesting pieces by David Huckvale
themed TV detective shows. In a brief to have a happy family life and a wife who isn’t entirely
on the film and (especially) Franz
interview shot for French TV after happy with his line of work.
Reizenstein’s score. An outstanding new
Against All Odds (1984), Widmark reflects
commentary track by Kelly Robinson
urbanely on a long career. DISC A more than adequate HD transfer from a newish
contextualises the film by covering the
whole history of mummies’ curses, as Hong Kong company which distributes its discs in
Egyptology crazes of the 19th and 20th the US. The commentary by Chinese-Americans (an
centuries inspired writers and filmmakers academic and a journalist) is rich in film industry
to create a persistent sub-genre. gossip but surprisingly unaware of Leslie Cheung’s
transformative roles for Chen Kaige.

REDISCOVERY
House of Psychotic
Women Rarities
Collection
IDENTIKIT
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi; Italy/ W.
Germany 1974; Severin; Region
A Blu-ray; English SDH; 102
minutes; 1.85:1. Extras: intro by
Kier-La Janisse; commentary
by Millie De Chirico; Chandra
Mayor on Muriel Spark; trailer
I LIKE BATS
Grzegorz Warchoł; Poland 1986;
Severin; region-free Blu-ray;
Polish; English subtitles; 81
minutes; 1.66:1. Extras: intro by
Kier-La Janisse; commentary by
Kamila Wielebska; TV spot.
FOOTPRINTS
Luigi Bazzoni; Italy 1975; Severin;
Region A Blu-ray, 2 discs; Italian;
English subtitles; 93/96 minutes;
1.85:1. Extras: US and Italian
cuts; intro by Kier-La Janisse;
commentary by Kat Ellinger (Italian
cut); interview with actress Ida
Galli; video essay by Alexandra
Heller-Nicholas, Craig Martin;
interview with cinematographer
Vittorio Storaro; trailer.
THE OTHER SIDE OF
THE UNDERNEATH
Jane Arden; UK 1972; Severin;
region-free Blu-ray; English
SDH; 111 minutes; 1.33:1. Extras:
commentaries, stills galleries,
trailer, booklets. Extras: intro by
Kier-La Janisse; workprint version;
cast interviews; conversation
with actor Penny Slinger; Penny
Slinger: Out of the Shadows trailer
BY SOPHIA SATCHELL-BAEZA
COUNTERCULTURAL CURIO
Jane Arden’s The Other
Side of the Underneath
House of Psychotic Women
A new box-set celebrates and illustrates Kier-La
Janisse’s critical-confessional book about female
neurosis in horror and exploitation cinema
The history of cinema is riddled with
paranoid, neurotic and unstable women,
which is perhaps why Kier-La Janisse’s
book House of Psychotic Women hit a nerve
when it came out ten years ago. This
much-loved look at female neurosis in
horror and exploitation cinema distinc-
tively merged genre study with the raw
and painful intimacy of memoir, before
autofiction had the cultural cachet it has
now. There is a lineage of writers meld-
ing film criticism and memoir behind
her, from James Baldwin and Roland
Barthes to Lesley Stern and, in the same
year, Nathalie Léger’s book on Barbara
Loden’s Wanda (1970). Yet in its frank and
unabashed portrayal of the writer’s per-
sonal struggles with mental health, and
its dogged attempts to find “the common-
alities that present themselves between
the events of my own life and those that
unfold onscreen”, Janisse’s book feels
unique as a purging, and a parsing, of the
demons that haunt her.
Severin’s new box-set House of Psy-
chotic Women Rarities Collection brings
together four restorations of cult curios
that appear in the book, all featuring
volatile, amnesiac or insatiably murder-
ous women protagonists. Released to
tie in with the recent expanded edition
of House of Psychotic Women, it showcases
some lesser-known or underseen exam-
ples of female neurosis.
The Welsh playwright and actor Jane
Arden’s nightmarish debut feature The
Other Side of the Underneath (1972) was
restored by the BFI back in 2012, although
it’s still not as well known as it should be,
even in the UK. That it’s the only film
directed solely by a woman in Britain in
the 70s is remarkable enough (and often
mentioned), but it’s also astonishing for its
distinctive, disturbing merger of psycho-
drama, feminist consciousness-raising and
countercultural self-exploration through
hallucinogenic drugs, consumed during
the production by its young all-female cast:
a women’s radical theatre group known,
not unproblematically, as Holocaust.
Although I wouldn’t describe Arden’s
film as either horror or exploitation, it
has, of the four titles, the most in common
with Janisse’s wider project in her book
of using film as an avenue for catharsis.
In Arden’s film, the cast re-enact trans-
formative, often harrowing instances of
sexual awakening and oppression drawn
from their own lives, much of which was
improvised from discussions in group
workshops. Alongside these theatrical
set pieces of funereal marriage ceremo-
nies, female crucifixion and psychedelic
rock gigs-cum-gory massacres are vivid
therapy scenes that unfold with an
unguarded intimacy that blurs the dis-
tinction between performer and patient,
director and therapist. The Other Side… is
more explicit than other films in the box-
set in raising the question of who is truly
‘mad’: the women themselves, or a society
whose incessant demands pushed them
there in the first place?
Elizabeth Taylor stars in the wonder-
fully unhinged Italian neo-noir Identikit
(1974), which follows a woman’s Euro-
pean quest in search of lethal liaisons. It’s
sometimes known as The Driver’s Seat, the
title of the 1970 experimental novella by
Muriel Spark from which it’s adapted.
The film adheres remarkably closely to
the book’s nonlinear story of psychologi-
cal alienation; but while Spark’s text is
taut and controlled, Identikit is more of a
free-for-all, with whiplash tonal shifts.
The film takes place against the rapidly
changing sociopolitical landscape of 70s
Italy: a chaotic new world of domestic
terrorism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and horny
macrobiotic fanatics. Andy Warhol even
makes an eerie, heavily dubbed appear-
ance as a member of the British aristoc-
racy. Warhol created many silkscreen
portraits of Taylor over the years, mostly
between 1962 and 1965 – when Cleopatra
(1961) and her relationship with Richard
Burton had established her as the world’s
most glamorous woman, and an Oscar
for BUtterfield 8 (1960) had confirmed her
credentials as a serious actress.
Identikit is a world away from BUtter-
field 8, but both Taylor’s performances
splice together ferocity and sexuality
with a bruised vulnerability and stub-
born pride. Camille Paglia isn’t always
right, but she hit on something when
she described Taylor as a “colossal
pagan goddess”. Taylor emits the kind of
95
murderous, chaotic energy and haphe-
phobic horniness that can only emanate
from an ancient Wiccan wellspring.
Even after her cult-worthy performance
in Joseph Losey’s Boom! (1968), among
others in her extraordinary late career,
Identikit is still cited as Taylor’s most bonk-
ers feat. With a cascade of black hair
and kohl-lidded eyes, Taylor prophesies
The Cure’s Robert Smith, though her
wardrobe of psychedelic housecoats is
closer to Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping up
Appearances. Her steely delivery of obtuse
reflections and statements of existential
malaise blows Boom! out of the water.
“When I diet, I diet. And when I orgasm,
I orgasm,” Taylor pronounces gravely. “I
don’t believe in mixing the two cultures.”
From Warhol to Warchoł: the lurid
Polish horror-comedy I Like Bats (1986)
was the first feature directed by Grze-
DVD & BLU-RAY
gorz Warchoł, better known as an actor
(Three Colours: White, 1994). I Like Bats is
a strange proposition: a vampiric blonde
(Katarzyna Walter) with an erotic fixation
on bats satiates her hunger in the dark
corners of a Polish town whose pictur-
esque street scenes of children smoking
and Eastern Bloc architecture clashes
with the synth-laden charms of a neon-
lit titty bar. Pressured by her mother to
settle down with a suitable man, Isabella
falls for a hunky psychiatrist and runs off
to his sanatorium, ostensibly to cure her-
self of vampirism. Janisse’s introduction
to the film is a masterclass in enriching
context. Drawing on anxieties about
Polish sovereignty, parasitical relation-
ships and ideas of marriage as a form of
imprisonment or death (cf The Other Side
of the Underneath), Janisse also places the
film in a broader lineage of Polish vam-
pirism in film and literature.
I didn’t get on as well with Footprints,
Luigi Bazzoni’s 1975 giallo about an amne-
siac translator – played by a bewitchingly
unreadable Florinda Bolkan, the Brazil-
ian star of European genre films like Lucio
Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971).
Bolkan plays Alice, a woman trapped in
a maze of shifting identities and haunted
by memories of an old science-fiction film
that left a “terrible impression” on her.
Although its confused interweaving of
names and characters is frustrating, Foot-
prints does show how one’s fantasy inner
life (in which film-watching can play an
integral part) bleeds into, and informs,
the present. In that sense, it is the perfect
House of Psychotic Women film.
House of Psychotic Women is published by FAB Press
 96

ARCHIVE TV
The Roads to Freedom
Eurotrash
What do a philosophical drama from 1970 and Channel 4’s
long-running post-pub celebration of Continental schlock
have in common? Nothing, and a whole lot

ageing swingers and women with unfea-

sibly large breasts. The content varied
very little over the years; likewise, the tone
and the format: de Caunes, alone or with
a co-presenter, would appear in front of
a garishly coloured cartoon background,
a human in Toon Town, telling “my Brit-
ish chums” about the superior romantic
prowess of Frenchmen in an exaggerated
French accent, and making vaguely sug-
gestive remarks. The reports featured
an ironically prim voiceover by Maria
McErlane; interviews in other languages
were dubbed into comical British accents
– Alan Bennett Yorkshire, Barbara Wind-
sor cockney. For the first few seasons, de
Caunes co-presented with the kilt-wear-
ing fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier
– the shtick was that de Caunes was the
slightly more sensible, savvy one who
could be trusted with an autocue, while
DVD & BLU-RAY

Gaultier was an embarrassing toddler

GALLIC PRAWNS
Jean Paul Gaultier and Antoine
de Caunes present Eurotrash
EUROTRASH
UK 1993-2004; Network; region-
free DVD, 20 discs; English SDH;
Certificate 18; 3,240 minutes; 1.33:1.
BY ROBERT HANKS
Over the summer, BBC4 repeated The
Roads to Freedom, a 1970 adaptation of
Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy of novels The Age
of Reason, The Reprieve and Iron in the Soul
(1945-49). Over 13 50-minute episodes,
it followed the struggles of a Parisian
philosophy lecturer, Mathieu Delarue,
from the summer of 1938 until shortly
after the fall of Paris: Mathieu strives to
be free but is held by back by desire, by
circumstance, by convention, above all by
weakness. The first six episodes drama-
tise Mathieu’s struggle through his futile
attempts to raise the money to pay for his
lover, Marcelle, to have an abortion. He
is squeezed between his sense of what
he ought to do and the revulsion he now
feels for Marcelle; and gnawed at by
desire for Ivich, young sister of his former
pupil Boris, and envy for his friends
Gomez, a Republican officer in the Span-
ish civil war, and the devout communist
Brunet, both secure in their dedication
to a cause. At his lowest point, Mathieu
steals the cash for the abortion from the
bedroom of Boris’s (much older) lover
Lola while she lies there, seemingly dead
– though it turns out she was only tem-
porarily comatose after over-indulging
her cocaine habit. Meanwhile, Mathieu’s
old friend Daniel seethes with secret
hatred for both himself and Mathieu,
and between bouts of rough, paid-for sex
with lean young men seeks new ways of
torturing himself – setting out to drown
the pet cats he loves, and even marrying
Marcelle, whose bourgeois mind and
feminine smell disgust him…
The drama was nominated for multiple
Baftas, for Michael Bryant’s performance
as Mathieu, David Turner’s script and
James Cellan Jones’s direction. Bizarrely
and frustratingly, though, it has never
been released on home media. Still, it
remains a gripping watch, remarkable –
compared not just with other television
of the period, but with most drama today
– for the frank way the characters discuss
sex, the ease with which the drama shows
the worst emotions, selfishness, cruelty,
cowardice, as part of the fabric of daily
life; and maybe more remarkable for being
a drama of ideas as much as emotion.
And the cast is great – Daniel Massey as
Daniel, Rosemary Leach as Marcelle and
Georgia Brown as Lola. Since Lola is a
cabaret singer, Brown gets to do quite
a lot of singing – including a very good
‘Mack the Knife’ in German, and the
theme song, ‘La Route est dure’ (‘The road
is hard’ ), which sounds like an authentic
French anthem but was written by Cellan
Jones. I hope the BBC makes it available
again, in some form, soon.
It’s a leap, in time and tone, from here to
Eurotrash, Channel 4’s long-running late-
night excavation of Continental naughti-
ness. Across 11 years, an eternally youth-
ful Antoine de Caunes presented 160
half-hour compilations of reports from
Europe on fetish-themed restaurants, the
porn industry, drag queens, trans women,
who wouldn’t stop saying rude words, in
spite of de Caunes’ warnings that these
things couldn’t be mentioned on British
TV. After he left, de Caunes was accom-
panied, intermittently, by a shifting cast
of glamorous European women.
Bits of Eurotrash were genuinely inter-
esting – Eddie Izzard explaining the
Euro was a pretty good concept, though
not given room to breathe – but riffling
through Network’s possibly over-com-
prehensive box-set (can there really be a
market for this much Eurotrash?), a lot of
it feels very samey. Still, for some years it
was one of Channel 4’s top-rated shows;
and it feels prophetic now, a forerunner
of show-it-all shows like Embarrassing
Bodies and Naked Attraction; and perhaps,
in establishing a market for Continental-
style unembarrassability, it paved the way
for that great Dutch import Big Brother
(2000-18) and all that followed.
It wouldn’t be hard to link The Roads to
Freedom and Eurotrash though a narrative
of decline – how British television went
from being a home for serious, philo-
sophical drama to nurturing seaside-
postcard vacuity, while admiration for
Continental culture was replaced by nah-
nah-nah sneering, or something – and it’s
not entirely untrue. But plus ça change…:
it’s noticeable how in both programmes,
Frenchness is a tool for talking about the
stuff we’re not sure we ought to be talking
about. British people can’t have rough
gay sex on TV, but French people can;
British people can’t say ‘penis’, they have
to leave it to a French fashion designer;
and somewhere along the way, there’s
always a Frenchman called Jean-Paul.

IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN
Michelangelo Antonioni; Italy 1982; Cult Films; Region B Blu-
Ray; Italian; English subtitles; Certificate 18; 130 minutes; 1.77:1.
Extras: interviews with widow Enrica Antonioni, critic Pasquale
Iannone; intimate video diary of Michelangelo Antonioni.
REVIEW BY LILLIAN CRAWFORD
Ignoring the Wim Wenders collaboration Beyond the
Clouds (1995), this is the final film of Michelangelo
Antonioni. Certainly it is the culmination of the great
Italian director, pulling ideas and images from across
his filmography, especially his lifelong perplexity at the
female mind. He always frames women as the subject of
study, elusive and disappearing as in L’avventura (1960),
which starred his then partner Monica Vitti.
Like that film, Identif ication of a Woman has two women
at its core. The first is Mavi, a young aristocrat, played
by Daniela Silverio, whose stunning blue dress cuts
through the set’s smoke-filled rooms in this restoration.
Then there’s Christine Boisson as Ida, a theatre actress
still bound to another lover. They stand in for the flames
of Antonioni’s own life, Vitti the enchanting star and
Enrica Antonioni the younger model, both of whom
served as muse to his cinema.
In many ways this is a less surreal or oneiric equivalent
of Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), characterised instead by
Antonioni’s distinctive sense of existential absence. The
male lead is a film director called Niccoló, played by the
Cuban-born actor Tomás Milián, searching for his latest
project and the woman who will both be its star and
his lover. Like Fellini’s Guido (Marcello Mastroianni),
he too is planning an epic science-fiction picture, in
this case about a spaceship which can approach the
sun. There’s a fascination with the nature of things that
always returns to feminine mystery.
What stands apart in Identification of a Woman from
Antonioni’s other work are the sex scenes. They are
deftly shot, sometimes funny (after a passionate session
of love-making Mavi tells Niccoló that her doctor says
she shouldn’t have sex for a while), and focused on the
women’s pleasure. Whether Antonioni comes close to
understanding that pleasure is a moot point, but the film
at least gives insight into his mode of investigation and
the questions that puzzled him at the end of his career.
Disc: This Blu-ray premieres a 2K restoration which
enriches the bold colours by contrast to the familiar
fog and smoke of Antonioni’s mise en scène. There’s a
30-minute interview with Enrica Antonioni, who met
her husband when she was 18 and he was 58, and claims
that their relationship dynamic inspired the film. The
hour-long With Michelangelo follows an elderly Antonioni
making art and living with his family.
KUHLE WAMPE IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
FRANKENSTEIN AND THE
MONSTER FROM HELL
Terence Fisher; UK 1972; Second Sight;
Region B Blu-ray; Certificate 15; 95 minutes;
1.66:1/1.37:1. Extras: commentaries by Kat
Ellinger and Marcus Hearn/Shane Briant/
Madeline Smith; appreciation by David Huckvale;
featurettes on the film, Fisher and the score.
REVIEWED BY KIM NEWMAN
Though not Hammer’s final gothic
horror, Terence Fisher’s last movie
concludes the series he began with The
Curse of Frankenstein (1957). If the lush,
spirited, wittily gruesome earlier film
is Fisher’s My Darling Clementine, this
is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance –
claustrophobic (95 per cent set inside
a drab 19th-century insane asylum)
and revisionist. Peter Cushing’s Baron
Frankenstein was always an amoral
fanatic; here, he’s also a fallen idol,
viewed askance by a disciple (Shane
Briant) who models himself on the
young Frankenstein but is disenchanted
when he actually works with the man.
Cushing, gaunt in a curly wig,
remains obsessive and energetic – one
surprisingly undoubled action moment
has him jump off a table to wrap a
coat around the Monster’s head – but
Frankenstein is a diminished figure. At
the end of the line, all Frankenstein’s
work is futile and doomed. The title
emphasises the infernal wrongness of his
ingeniously pointless cobbling together
of a hirsute creature (Dave Prowse)
who is “no good to himself or anyone
else”. This Baron is tone-deaf, can’t
understand higher mathematics, grossly
insensitive, advocates forced breeding
(birthing a monster is the heroine’s “real
function as a woman”), literally kicks a
discarded brain out of a bowl and howls
over an eyeball joke (“Let us hope it is he
who shall see”).
In this context, the Baron’s never-
give-up attitude is his most frightening
feature. Even as he sweeps up the
bloody mess of the latest disaster, he
raves about his ‘next’ experiment (“more
biochemistry”). An insistent farewell
shot frames Frankenstein through the
bars which once caged his monster,
segueing into a model panorama which
confirms that a man we have assumed
unjustly committed is exactly where he
ought to be, in a madhouse.
Disc: Held over from previous issues are
features on the production and Fisher
and a commentary track with co-stars
Madeline Smith and Shane Briant;
new additions are appreciations of
the film and James Bernard’s score by
David Huckvale and a contextualising
commentary from Kat Ellinger. Most
importantly, this transfer – unlike
a recent US release – offers the full
version of a film which has often had its
more horrid moments snipped.
97
KUHLE WAMPE OR, WHO
OWNS THE WORLD?
Slatan Dudow; Germany 1932; BFI; Region B
Blu-ray & Region 2 DVD dual format, 2 discs;
b&w; German; English subtitles; Certificate
PG; 75 minutes; 1.19:1. Extras: commentary by
Adrian Martin; introduction and Q&A by Andrew
Hoellering; shorts: Bread, Beyond This Open Road,
Housing Problems, Eastern Valley; booklet.
REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP
Often described as the only communist
film to come out of the Weimar Republic,
Kuhle Wampe was co-scripted (and
possibly co-directed) by Bertolt Brecht.
Directorial credit, though, went to the
Bulgarian-born Slatan Dudow, also a
staunch leftist – as were co-screenwriter
Ernst Ottwald, director of photography
Günther Krampf, producer Georg
Höllering and composer Hanns Eisler.
In structure and style the film is
unconventional – sometimes naturalistic,
at other times more detached, in line with
Brecht’s ‘new objectivity’. The action falls
into four sections. In the first, a young
DVD & BLU-RAY
Berliner, Franz, kills himself after failing
to find work. In the second, his parents
and sister, evicted from their apartment
for non-payment of rent, move to the out-
of-town campsite of Kuhle Wampe.
More upbeat is the third section – a
celebratory sports festival (swimming,
rowing, motor-bike racing, etc)
attended by thousands of young people
and enlivened by deliberately hammy
theatrical performances from musical-
dramatic group Red Megaphone.
Finally, as the youngsters return to the
city, an animated political debate breaks
out on a crowded bus, conservative
oldsters vs young radicals.
Stark black-and-white images dominate
– the hurtling bicycle wheels of the
opening, tracked by Eisler’s restless score,
as young men race around Berlin after
non-existent jobs; a boozy nocturnal
engagement party; industrial machinery
stark against the sky. Performances
are to some degree subordinate, but
several stand out – notably Hertha
Thiele (Mädchen in Uniform) as Franz’s
independent-minded sister, Ernst Busch
as her on-off boyfriend and Martha
Wolter as her politically committed
friend. She has the last word, as the young
people leave the train: “Who will change
the world? Those who don’t like it!”
All too true, alas, though not in the way
the filmmakers hoped. Months after its
release in May 1932, Kuhle Wampe was
banned by the Nazis. Even before then,
the Weimar regime censored several
scenes, cutting at least five minutes. Alas,
only the censored version survives. But
its telling power and aspiration remain.
Disc: Slight vertical projector streaks
in several scenes, but nothing serious.
Extras include an interesting line-up of
British 30s social-problem shorts.
 98
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME
Wallace Worsley; US 1923; Eureka/Masters of
Cinema; Region B Blu-ray; b&w; silent; Certificate
PG; 100 mins; 1.33:1. Extras: audio commentary
by Stephen Jones, Kim Newman; interview with
Newman on adaptations of the book; interview
with film historian Jonathan Rigby; booklet.
REVIEWED BY K ATE STABLES
BUCK AND THE PREACHER
Sidney Poitier; US 1972; Criterion; Region B Blu-ray; English SDH; “This picture is a legitimate example of
Certificate PG; 103 minutes; 1.85:1. Extras: on-set footage of Sidney Poitier movie elephantiasis,” was Time magazine’s
and Harry Belafonte; 1972 interviews with Poitier and Belafonte from Soul! verdict on the sheer scale (19 acres of
and The Dick Cavett Show; interview with Mia Mask, author of Black Rodeo:
A History of the African American Western; interview with Gina Belafonte. elaborate sets, 2,500 extras, a record
US$1,250,000 budget) of Universal’s
BY ALEX RAMON ambitious 1923 adaptation of Victor
Hugo’s novel. Lon Chaney had sought
Among the more successful elements of Jordan Peele’s the film rights as a natural fit for his
flawed, ambitious space-cowboy foray Nope (2022) is the film’s extraordinary physical transformations on
intelligent engagement with cinema history and visual culture. film, and his feral, focused performance
A particularly significant reference is to Sidney Poitier’s 1972 made him a worldwide star.
film Buck and the Preacher, the poster of which is seen displayed in Director Wallace Worsley’s sweeping,
the home of horse-wrangler protagonists OJ and Em Haywood Paris-wide historical epic was the
(Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer), as Peele places his film in seventh screen incarnation of the story
the context of Black western forebears. (Theda Bara’s Esmeralda-centred loose
Nope’s nod to Buck is exceptionally well-timed, since Poitier’s take The Darling of Paris had appeared as
first film as director now arrives on Criterion Blu-ray. Rooted in recently as 1917), and the most faithful.
DVD & BLU-RAY
1970s western revisionism and burgeoning Blaxploitation, Buck It winds together deftly the pure and
casts Poitier alongside Harry Belafonte as cowboys in the late impure stories of Esmeralda’s admirers
1860s who end up uniting to lead a wagon train of Black settlers (and that of her father, Ernest Torrence’s
from Louisiana to Kansas, all the while trying to outwit the expertly volatile Clopin), catching the
white raiders hired to either intimidate the travellers back to the tension between the riotous poor and
plantations of the South, or murder them. the heedless nobility at Quasimodo’s
With echoes of John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950) and numerous Feast of Fools crowning, and the giddy,
westerns focused on the bonding of contrasting male characters escalating violence of the mob’s final
(Poitier’s wagonmaster Buck is a wily former soldier; Belafonte’s assault on the cathedral. Lavishly
‘Preacher’ is really a hustler), Buck and the Preacher is highly allusive. mounted, and played with peak silent-
But to view the film merely as a Black Butch and Sundance is to era expressiveness (Patsy Ruth Miller’s
diminish it: Poitier’s film goes deeper, supplementing shoot-outs, Esmeralda vehemently defending
chases and comic high jinks with more serious intent, evident in her virtue is a highlight), the film
its credit sequence and title-card preamble. This opening, with bounces confidently between romantic
sepia-toned images of African American pioneers, not only lays melodrama and surprisingly violent
out the film’s post-Civil War context from a Black perspective but Gothic thrills (Variety warned that it
also announces its intention to challenge historical erasure: “This was “murderous, hideous and repulsive”
picture is dedicated to those men, women, and children who lie in and that “No children can withstand its
graves as unmarked as their place in history.” morbid scenes”). Chaney’s grotesque
A subversive streak is evident in numerous aspects, from make-up is still mildly unnerving –
the film’s nuanced depiction of the relations between African- bulbous warty eye, tombstone teeth and
American and Native American characters to the space given to distorted cheeks, all bulging through his
the character of Buck’s wife Ruth (invested with strength and gargoyle expressions. His Quasimodo
complexity by the vital Ruby Dee). Poitier’s own performance is full of restless physicality, compared
is compelling, but the film’s wild card is Belafonte’s turn as the with Charles Laughton’s 1939 dialogue-
wisecracking Preacher, who packs a pistol between the pages of driven version. But even when riding
his Good Book. Introduced during some enthusiastic al fresco the bells like a giant see-saw, or cutting
ablutions, Belafonte’s pleasure in roughing up his image and a jeering jig 100 ft above the ant-like
persona – yellowed teeth, wild eyes – is palpable; he also has the crowds, Chaney brings a piercing pathos
film’s strongest character arc. to his every scene.
Despite some heavy-handed elements (Benny Carter’s score,
performed by bluesmen Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and Don DISC: An impressive 4K restoration,
Frank Brooks, is over-insistently employed in the film’s opening with some inevitable faint scratching
stages), Poitier – replacing Joseph Sargent as director – shows and clouding, shows off the impeccably
great assurance for a first-time filmmaker in modulating shifts detailed sets (the cathedral frontage
that Chaney capers across is a diligent
from action and comedy to more reflective, emotional moments,
bringing out the strengths of Ernest Kinoy’s screenplay. Poitier’s copy of the real thing). Nora Kroll-
career as a director would encompass both worthy efforts (the Rosenbaum and Laura Karpman’s
lushly melancholy new score, full of
1973 romance A Warm December) and woeful ones (the 1990 Bill
Cosby comedy Ghost Dad); this film, undervalued on release, pipes and strings and plangent bells,
remains a highlight, and richly rewards rediscovery. adds to the film’s rich emotional tones
(there are no sound effects, which gives
Disc: A characteristically fine set of extras accompanies the 4K an authentic 20s feel). A fine, wide-
restoration. Aisha Harris’s sharp booklet essay, an interview with ranging commentary and Philip Kemp’s
Belafonte’s daughter Gina, and Mia Mask’s talk ‘Expanding the meaty booklet essay provide ample
Western’ all provide illuminating insights and context. amounts of production history.
THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC
Robert Bresson; France 1962; BFI; Region B
Blu-ray; b&w; French/English; English subtitles;
Certificate 12; 64 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras: Geoff
Andrew talk on Bresson; audio commentary by
Kat Ellinger; short films: Women’s Work in Wartime
(1918), Masculinity in Modes (1931); ballet extract The
Legend of Joan of Arc (1958); trailer; stills; booklet.
REVIEWED BY HANNAH MCGILL
Presented here in a new 4K restoration,
Robert Bresson’s take on Joan of
Arc’s 1431 trial for blasphemy is
characteristically stern, yet hypnotically
involving – a film that stirs the emotions
with minimal emoting. Though Bresson
took most of his script from the real
written account of the trial, his film, as
Lillian Crawford’s essay accompanying
this release observes, is no historical
re-enactment. It is crisply modern,
imbued with Bresson’s own perspective
on its events, and a conscious rejection
of other characterisations of its central
figure, including Carl Theodor
Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc
(1928). As Joan, Florence Delay (then
Carrez) is unruffled and direct, her
undemonstrative performance adding
searing poignancy to lines like “If
you throw me in the fire, I will not
speak differently.”
Kat Ellinger’s authoritative,
thoughtful and original commentary
positions the film within Bresson’s
oeuvre; contemporary cinematic
trends more generally; and the great
abundance of Joan of Arc-inspired art.
Particularly interesting is Ellinger’s
eloquent dismissal of the common
view of Bresson as predominantly a
technician – austere though they may
be, she argues, his films teem with soul
and emotion – and her analysis of what
she regards as his proto-feminism. Joan
is untroubled by stereotypes pertaining
to femininity: she regards her body as
a vessel for what God requires of it,
and speaks to men as equals. Yet her
femaleness persists regardless of how
she sees herself and wants to be seen:
her captors are endlessly preoccupied
by her body and the social messages
it bears, fetishising the matter of her
virginity, and subjecting her to sexual
harassment. Joan’s lack of interest in her
own sexualisation, as Ellinger points
out, is part of what marks her as a
heretic – in the context of 1950s cinema
as well as that of medieval France.
Disc: The disc also includes a warmly
informative introduction to Bresson’s
wider work by BFI programmer-at-large
Geoff Andrew. Two short films about
JOAN OF ARC IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
male and female clothing and work
conventions in the early 20th-century
UK are a tenuously linked but cheerful
addition; and there is a snatch of footage
from the preparation of a Joan-themed
ballet in Russia in 1958.

LOST AND FOUND
Sakis Maniatis, Yorgos
Tsemberopoulos, Greece 1974
BY NEIL YOUNG
AT TIC STORY Megara
Megara
Nearly 50 years after the collapse of the Colonels’
junta in Greece, this starkly simple documentary
about radicalised farmers stands as a landmark
Oligarkhia (‘rule by the few’) and ploutokra-
tia (‘rule by the wealthy’) are two Greek
words describing political systems – often
overlapping, frequently synonymous
– with similar consequences for the dis-
empowered majority: oppression, impov-
erishment, exploitation. In the area cur-
rently covered by the European Union,
one of the most recent examples of true
plutocratic/oligarchic misrule was to be
found in Greece itself from 1967-74.
The ‘Regime of the Colonels’ was effec-
tively a dictatorship under Georgios Pap-
adopoulos; until massive street-protests
by workers, students and farmers in late
1973 laid the groundwork for the return of
democracy after the junta’s fall in summer
1974. This period of tumult is perhaps
most urgently and effectively captured
by Sakis Maniatis and Yorgos Tsembero-
poulos’s 69-minute documentary Megara,
which chronicles the uprising and the
resistance of ordinary farmers triggered
by the seizure of their land in the Megara
region near Athens.
Giving a voice to the voiceless through
extensive interviews with the smallhold-
ers themselves, Maniatis and Tsembero-
poulos (in their only collaboration to
date) rousingly combine their own mate-
rial with newsreel footage depicting the
November 1973 protests and the over-
throw of the colonels’ regime. Maniatis
(the bulk of whose subsequent credits
are as a cinematographer) worked on the
editing with sufficient speed for Megara
to premiere in Berlin’s fourth Forum of
‘young’ cinema in June 1974, where it took
the international critics’ Fipresci prize.
Relatively infrequently screened since,
Megara has enjoyed a new lease of life in
the current decade. It was among a select
number of classics restored as part of the
Hellenic Film Academy’s 2021 initiative
‘Motherland, I See You’, organised to
mark the bicentennial of the 1821 Greek
Revolution against Ottoman rule. The
initiative’s function as a kind of travelling
film festival has seen Megara play interna-
tionally again, as well as at the Thessalon-
iki Documentary Festival in March this
year; and in June it was shown as part of
the inaugural Evia Film Project (EFP).
An initiative of Thessaloniki film festi-
vals, designed to boost an area ravaged by
wildfires in August 2021, EFP took place
over five days in a handful of venues in the
northern section of Evia (also called Evoia
and Euboea), Greece’s second-largest
island. EFP included daily showings of
works on ecological themes as well as dis-
cussions of how filmmaking can be made
more sustainable, and associated green-
related topics.
As no active movie-house exists
in northern Evia, venues had to be
99
improvised – including long-disused
former outdoor cinemas in two tourist-
oriented seaside towns, Edipsos and
Limni. Megara was screened at the roof-
top cinema of the Demotiko theatre
in Limni, apparently unused since the
mid-1990s. Both of the directors – now
in their seventies – were present to intro-
duce the picture, then take part in a lively
Q&A during which, clearly still commit-
ted to activism and progressive causes,
they linked the ‘people power’ depicted
in their film with criticisms levelled at the
government for their perceived mishan-
dling of the 2021 fires. (Tsemberopoulos,
who went on to direct four fiction fea-
tures between 1984 and 2013, is himself
an Evia native.)
Warmly received by the EFP audience,
most of them from Limni and nearby,
Megara amply lives up to its reputation
DVD & BLU-RAY
as a landmark in Greek cinema. Some-
times described as the first cinematic
fruit of the country’s hard-won freedom,
it shifts between stark monochrome (for
the interviews) and pungent Eastman-
color (for footage of the Megara area),
the latter a wonder of ochre oranges and
lush greens.
“People are never asked for their opin-
ion,” one farmer comments, and Megara
amply compensates for decades (or even
centuries) of such marginalisation. The
directors lay out the facts simply: how
the government transferred ownership of
a chunk of land to shipping tycoon Stra-
tis Andreadis for him to construct an oil
refinery. In a couple of hours bulldozers
– protected by legions of police – cleared
away more than 6,000 olive and pistachio
trees, many of them reckoned to be half a
millennium old.
The damage (a microcosmic foreshad-
owing of the destruction Evia’s trees suf-
fered in last year’s fires) was quickly done,
but the sorrowful farmers turned their
grief into radicalised political engage-
ment, eventually taking to the Athens
boulevards and later gaining compensa-
tion for their loss. Calm and ruminative
when allowing the farmers to speak at
length, Maniatis’s editing turns more
rapid-fire in the latter stages, excitingly
conveying the tumult of political his-
tory in the making. Megara would form
an ideal double-bill with Costa-Gavras’s
Oscar-winning Z (1969), an expat vision
of junta-era Greek political corruption
and violence which can feel like a work of
Hollywoodesque sensationalism along-
side the searing simplicity of Maniatis and
Tsemberopoulos’s clear-eyed vision.
 100
WIDER SCREEN
Andy Warhol,
silver screen
One of the authors of the
years-long project to
document Warhol’s vast
film archive describes the
arduous cataloguing
process and the intoxicating
thrill of discovery
BY BRUCE JENKINS
The most celebrated period of Andy
Warhol’s painting practice in fact coin-
cided with the artist’s entry into film-
making. Over a six-year span (1963-68),
Warhol shot hundreds of films, ranging
from the short (approximately four-
minute) Screen Tests to epic-length fea-
tures such as Sleep, Empire and the 25
hours of **** (Four Stars). While some of
these films were widely circulated in the
1960s (Kiss was among the Film-Makers’
Cooperative’s rental leaders and The Chel-
sea Girls opened theatrically), most were
never publicly shown or even printed,
and existed only in 16mm camera origi-
nals. In the early 1970s, Warhol withdrew
all of his film work from circulation, and
it was not until the mid-1980s that the
Whitney Museum persuaded the artist
to release his huge collection to the
newly created Andy Warhol Film Project
(AWFP), with the Whitney tasked with
cataloguing the films and the Museum of
Modern Art partnering for preservation
and storage.
The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Rai-
sonné 1963-1965 is the second volume from
the AWFP, following Andy Warhol Screen
Tests in 2006. Callie Angell, author of that
volume, had worked for years research-
ing the entirety of Warhol’s filmmaking,
but her death in spring 2010 brought the
project to a halt. By autumn 2011 a new
team was in place, with the production
period evenly divided in two: 1963-65,
to which I was assigned, and 1966-68,
which was taken on by Bill Horrigan
from the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Both of us worked with Claire Henry,
Angell’s longtime assistant at the Whit-
ney, who managed the huge files (view-
ing notes, interviews, images) Angell
had amassed and helped arrange for the
transport of films from the storage vaults
in rural Pennsylvania to MoMA’s Film
Department in Manhattan.
There was a certain joyfulness at the
start of the process with the new team
flying to New York to meet up with
Henry and the AWFP’s director, John
Hanhardt, at the Whitney’s offices. We
headed off to MoMA for lunch and
a screening of some rare Warhols to
whet our appetite for the project. The
real work, however, would entail a far
more spartan and arduous years-long
encounter with Warhol’s films in airless edit-
What
emerges is
ing suites along a corridor at the rear of the
Film Department offices.
not simply the
massiveness
These were episodic marathons in which
I obsessively unreeled mainly short black-
and-white silent films in a vain attempt to
of Warhol’s know each work frame by frame, while Bill
cinematic attempted to transcribe the dialogue-heavy
dramas unfolding in Warhol’s longer sound
output but the productions. The sessions continued for
extraordinary three years until I was diagnosed with a
diversity of condition in 2015 that required a year-long
leave. I would return and complete the
this work research and writing for the years 1963 and
1964. As with Angell’s death, a decision was
made to add new researcher-writers and
to focus on the films from 1965. That team
consisted of AWFP stalwart Claire Henry;
filmmaker Tom Kalin, who had been serv-
ing as the project’s technical advisor; and an
international cohort of scholars.
What emerges from this volume is not
simply the massiveness of Warhol’s cin-
ematic output but the extraordinary (and
previously unnoted) diversity of this work.
Coming into this project with a knowledge
of some of the artist’s canonical films, I was
intrigued to discover his series of dance
films (many featuring the mercurial dancer-
choreographer Freddy Herko), his attempts
to emulate the poetic cinema of the era (par-
IMAGE: ANDY WARHOL FILM PROJECT
ticularly the lyrical films made by another
painter turned filmmaker, Marie Menken),
and his direction of an ‘underground’ nar-
rative feature starring Taylor Mead, an
ABOVE
Andy Warhol’s
icon of the New American Cinema. There
Couch (1964) were at least two unfinished feature films:
 101

a chronicle of a day in the life of the young 1967 advert for the blankets, and an antique
poet Kenward Elmslie and a horror-fantasy Clara Ursitti: Amik print reproduction of The Right Hon. Lord
film, Batman Dracula, involving an ambi- Chancellor on the Woolsack (1858). In Important
tious collaboration with Jack Smith (in the People (2022), hats made of silk, beaver felt,
title role) that yielded nearly eight hours of
The artist’s poignant exhibition birchbark, deer skin and spruce root also recall
footage, including some of the most stun- explores the troubled history of colonial legacies. The blankets are perhaps the
ning imagery Warhol ever shot. colonialism within Indigenous most poignant symbols – in one of two major
There were any number of eureka film and sound installations which form the
moments: an outtake roll from Kiss in which
communities in Canada centre of the exhibition, the artist and her
Warhol halts the scene to reposition his BY SUSANNAH THOMPSON interviewees debate the veracity of widely
subjects, revealing his strong directorial circulated claims that the British deliberately
presence; an early colour roll (Bob Indiana, used smallpox-infected Hudson Bay blankets
Etc.) shot handheld and outdoors; and In a small, round room at Glasgow’s Gallery of to subdue First Nation people as part of the
two versions of a gallery show of works Modern Art a wooden pole dissects the space colonial project in the 1700s.
by the artist Marisol – one using virtually above head height. Over this pole, hanging The works themselves, Not Land. Not Water
every filmmaking technique he had thus heavily, is a work whose title deftly describes (2022) and A Space for Listening. A Space for Future
far mastered (mobile framing, pixilation, its form. One of the largest castor glands I have ever Exchange (2020-22) record Ursitti’s research resi-
in-camera editing) and the other a resolutely seen (2022), ostensibly a mixed-media sculpture dency with White Water Gallery in North Bay,
static long take. It provided a window on with sound, is a gargantuan set of (what Canada, and visits to Nipissing Nation Terri-
to the aesthetic decisions the artist was appear to be) beaver testicles, convincingly tory (where the artist was born) and the Teme
making about the formal options that came made of recycled leather jackets. As the last Augama-Anishnabai Nation Reserve where
with his new medium. No less striking was work in a large solo show it is an incongruous she spoke with elders, trappers and commu-
an insight into the consonance between and comic conclusion to a sobering exhibition nity workers. Against the historical context of
Warhol’s f ilmmaking and his painting by Glasgow-based Canadian artist Clara the objects, the films present a contemporary
practice, with its proto-cinematic modes of Ursitti, exploring the connections between portrait of traditional economies and ways of
image reproduction, repetition and seriality. Scotland and Canada through the historic living on and from the land, the men’s deep
Warhol specialist Neil Printz and Angell trading of beaver pelts. The exhibition’s title, understanding of biodiversity, of what can be
had even coined a phrase for this aesthetic ‘Amik’, is translated as ‘beaver’ in Algonquin eaten, foraged, exchanged, which animal is
synergy: “one big picture.” and Ojibwe languages and it can be seen as prey for another, and who wins or loses in such
Of course, all this emerged slowly over a defining symbol of the relationship between survival-based pursuits.
the course of nearly eight years and the colonial settlers and Indigenous communities In the 45-minute video installation A Space
viewing and reviewing of hundreds of rolls and their land. for Listening. A Space for Exchange, the screen is
of almost entirely reversal camera originals Since the mid-1990s, Ursitti’s expansive flanked by a felled tree whose smell infuses
– the same material the artist had loaded practice has encompassed handmade the space. The images show the trapper’s land

WIDER SCREEN
into his Bolex camera, exposed, taken to sculptural objects, found objects, film and from moving vehicles, on foot and from interior
the lab and then viewed. The intimacy of video, sound, installation, performance and, windows. Drone footage shows the sheer scale
this encounter was enhanced by watching most notably, scent-based interventions. of the territory. Expanses of forest, lakes and
the films at Warhol’s intended 16 frames per The sound element of One of the largest castor rivers are overlaid with running commentary
second, one third slower than the speed glands I have ever seen invokes scent in a jarring and conversation offering meaningful insights
in which they were shot, with the image attempt at synaesthesia, whereby the voice of a into the lives of First Nation people and their
slightly flickering and the protracted tempo- seductive, French-accented woman describes relationship with the environment.
rality imbuing the imagery with a dreamlike various epicurean delights while the audience In the last few years Glasgow Life, which
affect. And then there were the ubiquitous stare at the unlikely source of these pleasures: manages 11 museum sites in the city, has
white dots at the heads and tails of rolls castoreum, a natural food flavouring used attempted to begin work on decolonising its
that flashed past the opening and conclud- to replace vanilla, is harvested from beaver collections, making visible Scotland’s legacies
ing shots – numerical code stamped into glands. This history formed Ursitti’s starting of colonialism and empire. ‘Amik’ handles such
the ends of 16mm film stock and typically point for ‘Amik’. The by-product of trapping, aims with care. Ursitti’s work is elucidatory
discarded. I came to see their presence as castoreum has also been used to scent tobacco without slipping into didacticism, presenting
both testament to Warhol’s frugality and a and perfume and is used as a hunting lure. In its subjects and objects with respect and
reflexive acknowledgment of the medium’s the artist’s hands, it forms a subversive base close attention to both form and content.
materials. Periodically, I would insert my note to an exhibition examining human, In the artist’s efforts to create a genuine
pencil point into the circular openings to animal and botanic migration. ‘space for listening’, her own voice is largely
confirm that the roll was indeed an original The exhibition venue, once the Royal absent. Rather, she foregrounds First Nation
rather than a print. Exchange Building, provides further context perspectives directly, allowing marginalised
Warhol would eventually abandon this for the exhibition’s themes. Among the objects people a place to speak and be heard.
silent mode, with its deep connections to on display many reveal Scotland’s colonial
early cinema, to embrace sound and the history, including The Woolsack (2022), Hudson ‘Amik’ is at the Gallery of Modern Art,
realist temporality of the 24-frames-per- Bay blankets of Perthshire wool and fleece, a Glasgow, until 26 January 2023
second projection.
Given my two-year portion of volume
two, I operated almost entirely within the
quiescence of that monochrome world of
distended movements and oneiric revelries,
of sleepers and lovers, poets and dancers,
intimates and strangers – all captured
through the singularly receptive lens of
Warhol’s embracive gaze. The technical and
aesthetic choices Warhol made in these early
films reveal deep resonances with his other
IMAGE: COURTESY AND © THE ARTIST

visual art practices and position the film

work as central to his wider artistic oeuvre.

The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné 1963-1965

is published by the Whitney Museum of American
Art and Yale University Press. It won the 2022
Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award ABOVE A still from A Space for Listening. A Space for Exchange 2020-22 by Clara Ursitti
102
The Whole Durn
Human Comedy:
Life According to
the Coen Brothers
AUTHOR JOSEPH MCBRIDE
PUBLISHER ANTHEM PRESS
PAGES 118
ISBN 1839983310
REVIEWED BY ADAM NAYMAN
Having recently opined online that David
Fincher was not fit to carry Orson Welles’
viewfinder, Joseph McBride happily
finds worthier Gen X heirs in Joel and
Ethan Coen. McBride, who has written
definitive critical biographies on Welles,
as well as John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch and
Steven Spielberg, is an amiably princi-
pled gatekeeper – and his selection of the
Coens for book-length treatment, while
slightly surprising, is welcome. The
Coens are hardly underdogs – or under-
discussed – and yet there’s always been a
reluctance among a certain wing of clas-
sical auteurists to welcome them into the
fold; this slim but dense overview leads
them through the metaphorical Gate of
Horn with their heads held high.
The Whole Durn Human Comedy is
named for a crucial, offhandedly reveal-
ing line in 1998’s The Big Lebowski – a
movie whose barely disguised anxieties
about potency and perpetuation place it
BOOKS
on a larger continuum of circularity that
some writers would trace as comprising
the Coens’ narrow yet endlessly regen-
erative thematic terrain. McBride takes
a different tack: his book is organised
very self-consciously as a defence against
those critics who perceive the Coens’
cinema as hostile and misanthropic –
or worse – and respond in kind. Each
chapter takes one aspect of the case for
the prosecution – the idea that the film-
makers are heartless cynics, for instance,
or that they persist in unflattering charac-
terisations, or that they often disappear
up their own smart asses – and subjects
it to withering, rigorous cross-examina-
tion. These provide, if not absolution,
then at least a stay of execution. The
image that comes to mind is James Fran-
co’s doomed bank robber in The Ballad of
Buster Scruggs (2018), manfully ascending
the gallows and smiling at the sobbing
outlaw in the noose next to him. “First
time, huh?” he asks him.
Raising Arizona (1987) opens with
mugshots being taken of Nicolas
Cage’s small-time criminal, a near-
perfect portrait of recidivism, and
McBride identif ies his own hapless
repeat offenders. Barely ten pages have
gone by before he’s excoriating expert
witness/hanging judge J. Hoberman
for his “intemperate” bias against the
Coens – an animus framed smartly as
an extension of Hoberman’s Village Voice
predecessor Andrew Sarris’s scepticism
ab out “American (but similarly
European-culture-oriented) directors”
like Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick.
Citing Hoberman’s observation in his
disparaging 2010 review of True Grit
that “The Coens are still themselves,”
McBride asks, not so rhetorically:
“Who else should they be?” In true
auteurist fashion, his respect for his
subjects stems from their determination
to stick to their guns.
At times, McBride is tempted away
from his admiration: his anguished
wrestling match with the intolerable
cosmological cruelty of A Serious
Man (2009) provides a particularly
compelling throughline. For McBride,
McBride’s book the film, which, like Burn After Reading
is organised very (2008), was largely underrated in the
immediate wake of the Oscar-winning
self-consciously triumph of No Country for Old Men
as a defence (2007), reveals the Coens’ “limitations
against those as existential comedians”. It’s a curious
conclusion to reach about a movie that
critics who arguably expanded the brothers’ scope.
perceive the More curious still, McBride laments the
Coens’ cinema film’s refusal to “explore the full nature of
human existence” – a task that he surely
as hostile and understands is beyond any artist, even
misanthropic ones as ambitious and overweening as
– or worse the Coens, and antithetical in particular
to their stylised specif icity (for a
sentence or two, he actually sounds like
Barton Fink).
Framed by a deliberately artificial
period folk tale and organised visually
around drawings, diagrams and scrib-
blings that represent attempts at dis-
tilling the mysteries of the universe (or
“the full nature of human existence”), A
Serious Man is, to paraphrase Michael
Stuhlbarg’s deceptively put-upon (but
in actuality quite self-inconveniencing)
protagonist Larry, “an illustration” – an
exercise in control that paradoxically,
and potently, vibrates with humility.
Also, while McBride is obviously right
ABOVE to invoke the Book of Job as the Coens’
Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry
Gopnik in the Coen brothers’
model (an irreverent act of adapta-
A Serious Man (2009) tion on a par with their patchwork
Homer-isms in 2000’s O Brother, Where
Art Thou?), he misses the crucial theo-
logical punchline that the film’s parade
of rabbis, far from embodying extreme
inadequacy, are all vindicated by the
end – including the gormless junior
rabbi who tells Larry, with a Nostrada-
mian accuracy immortalised in the final
shot, that if you look, you can see God
in the parking lot.
For Coen aficionados whose shelves
are already stocked with the extant
literature (both for and against) that
McBride eloquently subsumes (or
rebuts) over the course of his gratify-
ingly granular analysis, the main attrac-
tion of The Whole Durn Human Comedy is
its extended consideration of The Ballad
of Buster Scruggs, an anthology-style Net-
flix production too recent to be consid-
ered in depth by other authors, includ-
ing me in my book on the brothers.
Rightly describing Scruggs as having “all
the qualities of a culminating work” –
an apt assessment as the Coens remain,
four years later, in a holding pattern
with regards to future collaboration
– McBride rescues an inadequately
recognised film from its marginal repu-
tation. Not only is he right that Tim
Blake Nelson’s eponymous and cheer-
fully sociopathic Roy Rogers-style hero
represents a spokesman of sorts for the
brothers and their allergy to sentiment
(specifically in the context of westerns),
but he uses the film’s episodic structure
– its magisterial procession through a
series of narratively self-contained but
philosophically conjoined allegories –
to narrate the Coens’ own drilling down
through layers of pastiche towards their
own enduring core values. He arrives at
the conclusion that The Ballad of Buster
Scruggs reveals “the nightmares behind
the dreams we used to live by”, a state-
ment exactly as grand as the film – and
its makers – deserve.

In the documentary Room 237 (2012),
Rodney Ascher delves into a handful
of complex theories about the hidden
meanings of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
(1980). Interpretations range from it
being an examination of genocide to a
coded confession by Kubrick that he had
faked the Moon landings. These kinds of
theories – and to a lesser extent, criticism
in general – can often be preoccupied
with finding a single, cohesive model for
understanding their subject. No such
accusation can be levelled at The Shining:
A Visual and Cultural Haunting.
The Shining: A Visual This is the second in a series conceived
by the book’s editor Craig Oldham called
and Cultural Haunting Epiphany Editions. They take fictional
texts from movies and make them extant,
EDITED BY CRAIG OLDHAM using the form of a prop within a film to
PUBLISHER ROUGH TRADE BOOKS
PAGES 466 reappraise the film itself. Following They
ISBN 1914236173 Live: A Visual and Cultural Awakening (2019),
this volume is a handsomely boxed loose-
REVIEWED BY BEN NICHOLSON leaf book, framed as though it was the
writing project Jack Torrance undertakes
in the film. This sprawling sourcebook
includes new articles, reprinted texts by
Freud and Lovecraft, scrapbook-style
cuttings and photo booklets.
Among the new writings are a fascinat-
ing array of contributors and subjects.
Two of the film’s stars, Shelley Duvall
and Danny Lloyd, offer quite different
personal reflections on the shoot, while
It’s a dazzling power read and I was driven through its 466 pages in less than 24 hours
HEAT 2
Few films have been given the intense
attention to detail accorde d by
superfans to Heat, Michael Mann’s epic
film crime drama of 1995. There’s even a
podcast called One Heat Minute in which
every one of the 166 minutes that make
up the film’s battle of wits between cop
Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and top-line
thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro)
is treated to its own analytical episode.
The film has retained and grown its
fanbase more successfully than most
1990s films.
Small wonder then that Heat 2 shot to
HEAT 2 the top of the New York Times bestseller
list on its recent release. It’s what we
AUTHORS MICHAEL MANN & MEG GARDINER
might call a pre-novelisation of a film
PUBLISHER HARPER COLLINS that will be both sequel and prequel to
PAGES 466 Heat – hopefully one that will come to
ISBN 9780008222741
our screens in the next year or two – and
REVIEWED BY NICK JAMES it’s a dazzling power read. I was driven
through its 466 pages in less than 24
hours, aided by how easy it is to visualise
characters you’ve already seen embodied
on screen by the likes of Pacino, De Niro,
Ashley Judd, Val Kilmer, Wes Studi and
many more, and by Mann’s preference
for a telegrammatic prose style that leans
lightly but constantly on terse technical
cop and perp lingo. I say Mann’s prose
style despite the book having been
co-written with veteran crime author
Meg Gardiner, because its surface zing
of description and dialogue is so familiar
103
author John Grindrod navigates the
architectural implications of the Over-
look Hotel’s haunted corridors and the
strange in-betweenness of hotels more
generally. Several of these essays interact
with Duvall’s own interview, foreground-
ing her place within the film’s history and
legacy; from BFI programmer Michael
Blyth’s piece about her performance to
literary translator Jen Calleja’s discussion
about imagining the events of the film
from the perspective of Duvall/Wendy.
All of the facets that come tumbling out
of this box of riches are brought together
by the unbound central text, produced in a
typeface approximating that of Torrance’s
typewriter. It begins with 15 pages of the
famous “All work and no play…” line before
revealing dozens of miniature essays
covering multivalent topics: the weather in
the film; Frank Lloyd Wright’s inspiration
on Kubrick; The Shining’s kinship to Last
Year at Marienbad (1961); typewriter art
renderings of characters and locations. In
his recollections, Lloyd writes: “Whether
it’s a growing admiration for the film or
a pretty far-fetched conspiracy theory,
Stanley Kubrick gives the audience the
opportunity to come up with their own
explanations and answers.” It’s fair to say
that this immersive exploration into The
Shining allows you to follow your own
threads to a similarly enriching effect.
BOOKS
from Mann’s scripts, which can only mean
that Gardiner has done an excellent job.
Heat 2 hops and skips behind and
ahead of the core story of the original
film, concentrating in its prequel ele-
ments on the origin story of McCau-
ley’s coldness, explaining why he adopts
the mantra of having no attachments
you can’t walk out on if you see trouble
coming. What happens to Chris Shi-
herlis (Val Kilmer), the one thief who
survives at the end of Heat, provides
most of the sequel. Leaving his wife and
child as McCauley’s code dictates, the
wounded Shiherlis has to make a new
life in Paraguay, working for a Chinese
family involved in high-tech crime (some-
thing of a return to the themes of Mann’s
underrated 2015 film Blackhat).
But, of course, there is also a grand
Heat 2 finale that draws Shiherlis back to
Hanna’s territory and involves what, for
me, is the book’s one disappointment:
a new unsubtle bad guy who’s just
plain vicious and who is slightly out
of keeping with the careful balance of
attention the original film pays to the
personal codes of each character. That
said, this is an unmissable adrenaline
rush for all Heat fans. It’s full of echoes
of Mann’s other work, even the home-
invasion elements of Manhunter (1986),
and not just a blueprint for a film we
hope to see.
104
FROM THE ARCHIVE
JEAN-LUCANDGODARD
‘VIVRE SA VIE’
Here we revisit Sight and Sound ’s first interview with Godard, by Tom Milne, conducted at the
1962 London Film Festival screening of Vivre sa vie at the National Film Theatre in London
Born in 1930, Godard completed five
short films: Opération béton (1954), Une
femme coquette (1955), All the Boys Are Called A When the nouvelle vague started,
Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules (1958)
and Une histoire d’eau (1958) before making
his phenomenally successful first feature,
À bout de souffle (1960). His second film,
Le Petit Soldat (1960), banned on political
grounds (the ban has just been lifted,
subject to certain cuts which Godard
at present refuses to accept), was fol-
lowed by Une femme est une femme (1961)
and Vivre sa vie (1962). At present he is
working on a sketch for the three-episode
Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du monde, and
Les Carabiniers, adapted from a play by
Benjamin Joppolo. In May 1963 he will
start shooting on Pour Lucrèce (from
Giraudoux’s play, known in Britain as
Duel of Angels). Like most nouvelle vague
directors, Godard’s films have been made
very cheaply, and he comments, “The
dream of the nouvelle vague is to be able
to make high-budget films. Spartacus? Riv-
ette should have made it, not Kubrick.”
Among his dream projects: Moll Flanders,
and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, filmed with
his wife, Anna Karina, in England.
The following interview was
recorded when Vivre sa vie was shown
at the London Film Festival, and
Godard attended the screening.
Q It is often said that the nouvelle
vague directors claim to be
totally uncommitted. Leaving
aside the question of political
SIGHT AND SOUND, WINTER 1962-63 BY TOM MILNE
commitment, would you say that
you are artistically committed?
several films included scenes of wild
parties, and everybody pounced on
them to label the nouvelle vague as
interested only in wild parties. But
it was really mere chance – just as at
one time Jean Gabin was a deserter
or a member of the Foreign Legion
in all his films, and nobody went
about drawing conclusions. In any
case the word ‘commitment’ is mostly
used wrongly, generally by people
on the left. One is not committed
just because one makes films about
the working class or about social
questions; one is committed in so
far as one is responsible for what
one does. In the early days I felt
less responsible because I was not
fully aware, but now... yes, I am
committed in that I grow more
and more conscious of what I am
doing and my responsibility for it.
Q It seems to me that the keynote
of your early films was simply
the joy of making films.
A Yes, I think that’s so. We were all
critics before beginning to make
films, and I loved all kinds of cinema
– the Russians, the Americans, the
neorealists. It was the cinema which
made us – or me, at least – want to
make films. I knew nothing of life
except through the cinema, and my
first efforts were films de cinephile, the
work of a film enthusiast. I mean
that I didn’t see things in relation
to the world, to life or history, but
in relation to the cinema. Now I
am growing away from all that.
Q Would it be true then, to
say that Vivre sa vie is a
new departure for you?
A No, I feel rather that it’s an arrival.
I like to say that there are two
kinds of cinema, there is Flaherty
and there is Eisenstein. That is to
say, there is documentary realism
and there is theatre, but ultimately,
at the highest level, they are one
and the same. What I mean is that
through documentary realism one
arrives at the structure of theatre,
and through theatrical imagination
and fiction one arrives at the reality
of life. To confirm this, take a look
at the work of the great directors,
how they pass by turn from realism
to theatre and back again.
Q Like Jean Renoir, you mean?
A Renoir is a model example, because
he not only does it supremely well, he
is aware of it. From the neorealism of
ALL IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
Toni [1935] he arrived at naturalism,
moved off into the theatre again,
and now in television is seeking the
utmost simplicity. I started, as I
thought, in realism, but I now realise OPPOSITE
that À bout de souffle was made quite Jean-Luc Godard
106 FROM THE ARCHIVE

‘Vivre sa vie is a realistic film, and at the same time

extremely unrealistic. It is very schematic: a few bold
lines, a few fundamental principles. I was thinking, in
a way, as a painter, of confronting my characters head-
on as in the paintings of Matisse or Braque’

RIGHT
Jean-Luc Godard on the set of
Vivre sa vie (1962) with Anna Karina

ABOVE AND OPPOSITE

Karina in the film
108 FROM THE ARCHIVE

meant. But it didn’t mean anything. curious thing is that I think the film
unconsciously on my part. I thought If you see a bouquet of flowers on looks carefully constructed whereas
I knew what it was about, but now, a table, does it mean something? I made it extremely rapidly, almost
a year or two later, I’m conscious It doesn’t prove anything about as if I were writing an article without
that I had no idea. I thought it was a anything. I simply hoped that the film going back to make any corrections.
realistic film, but now it seems like Alice would give pleasure. I meant it to I wanted to make the film like this,
in Wonderland, a completely unreal, be contradictory, juxtaposing things without shooting a scene and then
surrealistic world. I feel, though, which didn’t necessarily go together trying it in another way, although
that with Vivre sa vie I am beginning, a film which was gay and sad at the one or two scenes were re-shot. But
gradually, to make more realistic same time. One can’t do that, of I somehow felt that I had to find
films, more concrete films if you like. course, one must be either one or the out right away what I wanted to do
other, but I wanted to be both at once. and do it, and that if it was going to
Q Is this the reason for the be good it would be good first time.
Brechtian influence in the film? Q Do you consider the editing Vivre sa vie is a realistic film, and at
A Yes, I discovered the theatre. I wanted of your films important? the same time extremely unrealistic.
to do Pirandello’s Six Characters in A For me there are three equally It is very schematic: a few bold lines,
Search of an Author but the rights were important moments in making a a few fundamental principles. I was
too expensive. I should have liked to film – before, during and after the thinking, in a way, as a painter, of
do it to show the common ground ‘People didn’t actual filming. With somebody like confronting my characters head-on as
between realism and theatricality. Each Hitchcock, everything is calculated in the paintings of Matisse or Braque,
has its separate frontier but there are like Une femme down to the last second, and so so the camera is always upright.
certain points at which they merge. est une femme the editing is less important. À
because they bout de souffle owes a great deal to Q Long shots and elaborate camera
Q Truffaut once said that if the the montage. It is a film in three angles are always rare in your films.
public did not like a film of his didn’t know movements: the first half-hour fast, Is this perhaps because your point
then he considered that it was a what it meant. the second moderato, and the third of departure is always a character,
failure. Do you feel that Une femme But if you see allegro vivace again: I thought of and you like to keep close to him?
est une femme is a failure because the film this way before actually A Perhaps – as a general rule I like
it did not attract the public? a bouquet beginning shooting, but in a rather to use medium shots, possibly
A No, I don’t think so, because a of flowers vague way. Vivre sa vie, on the other because long shots are more
certain number of people liked it. on a table, hand, owes very little to the editing, difficult. Certainly close shots are
You must remember that Truffaut as it is really a collection of shots more moving, if they are good. One
is half producer, half director – in does it mean placed side by side, each one of might say Rossellini’s failure is that
the morning he is a businessman, in something?’ which should be self-sufficient. The the principal feature and beauty of
the afternoon an artist – and so this
question of the public is more pressing
for him. I think one must aim to attract
the widest possible audience, but
obviously this will be smaller for Vivre
sa vie or [Jacques Rivette’s 1961] Paris
nous appartient than for [William Wyler’s
1959] Ben-Hur. One must be sincere,
believe that one is working for the
public, and aim at them. In my early
days I never asked myself whether the
audience would understand what I was
doing, but now I do. If Hitchcock, for
example, thinks that people will not
understand something, he will not do
it. At the same time I feel that one must
sometimes just go ahead – light may
always dawn in a few years’ time. But
of course one must be sure one knows
what one is about, because if one
just goes ahead and does something,
saying, “They won’t understand but it
won’t matter,” one may be disastrously
wrong and find that it does matter.

Q I brought this up because the

opening scene of Vivre sa vie seems
to me to be a bold directorial
conception which stands a strong
chance of being misunderstood.
A Perhaps, but I think that as soon as
people see something a little unusual
on the screen they try too hard
to understand. They understand
perfectly well, really, but they want to
understand even more. If you show
them someone drinking tea or saying
goodbye, they immediately say, “Yes,
but why is he drinking tea?” People
didn’t like Une femme est une femme RIGHT
because they didn’t know what it Godard in 1962

‘I have made his films is that they are shot from
remote distances: he probably shoots
four films in them like this on the assumption
three years that his underlying conception is the
and I am tired. most important thing, but people
seen from a distance are rarely very
What worries moving. I have always traced a
me is that I find character’s history from an emotional
I am no longer point of view, trying to make the
audience understand and become
thinking in involved with him. Les Carabiniers will
terms of cinema, be my first film to deal with a group
but I don’t know of people rather than an individual.
whether this is Q What exactly is the role of
good or bad’ improvisation in your work?
A Strictly speaking it’s wrong to say
that I use improvisation, except in
so far as I always work at the last
minute. I always use a written text,
though it may often be written only
two or three minutes before shooting.
My actors never improvised, in the
Actors Studio sense, in À bout de
souffle, though they did a little in Une
femme est une femme. Usually the lines
are written at the very last minute,
which means that the actors have no
time to prepare. I prefer this, because
I am not a director of actors like
Renoir or Cukor, who can rehearse an
actor over and over until he manages
to coax out a good performance. I like
to sneak up on an actor from behind,
leaving him to fend for himself,
following his groping movements
in the part, trying to seize on the
sudden, unexpected, good moment
ABOVE
which crops up spontaneously; and so
Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie gradually I build up an idea of what
I am trying to do myself. With Vivre
sa vie, for example, I started with
the idea that it was to begin where
À bout de souffle left off. Patricia, in À
bout de souffle, is a girl whom we see,
as it were, from behind, and who
faces us fully for one brief instant.
So I knew that Vivre sa vie was to
start with a girl seen from behind – I
did not know why. It was the only
idea I had, and I couldn’t tell Anna
much, so she cast about without
knowing what I wanted, while I
tried to work out my conception.
We certainly improvised in the sense
that I changed my mind all the time,
deciding to do this, then that.
Q Why are you interested in doing
Pour Lucrèce? I should have
thought that Giraudoux’s style
was a little too mandarin for you.
A I have always wanted to do a classical
play – classical in the French sense,
that is, as I consider Giraudoux
to be. The cinema is always talked
about from the point of view of
the images, and at the moment I
find myself more interested in the
sound. I want to carry this interest
to its logical conclusion and simply
direct a voice on the screen, show
someone more or less motionless on
the screen speaking a fine text. At
the beginning of the film, perhaps,
there will be the camera and the
actors taking up their positions with
their scripts, beside a chair or in a
garden, and then beginning to read.
You will see them reading their lines,
109
until gradually we will have moved
inside the play and the scripts will
no longer be seen. The beauty of
the cinema is that, whereas in the
theatre if someone dies, at the end
he must get up and one does not
really believe it, in the cinema one
can indicate that it is only an actor,
but at the same time one can believe
in his death because the cinema is
real, it films reality. So, starting from
theatre one can move into reality. And
another thing that interests me about
the play is that it is about purity. It is
about a woman who believes that she
is Lucretia, and the end of the film
will consist of Giraudoux’s words:
“Purity is not of this world, but once
in ten years its light shines briefly.”
Q Have you any idea what you want
to do next, in the sense of how you
would like to develop as a director?
A In a way I have had enough. I have
made four films in three years and
I am tired. I would like to pause for
a while. What worries me is that
I find I am no longer thinking in
terms of cinema, but I don’t know
whether this is a good or a bad
thing. When I was making À bout
de souffle or my earlier shorts, a shot
of Seberg would be made from a
purely ‘cinematic’ point of view,
making sure that her head was just
at the right cinematic angle, and so
on. Now I just do things without
worrying how they will appear
cinematically. I really don’t know
whether this is a good thing or not.
THE
AUTEURS
SERIES
LIMITED EDITION
ARCHIVE SPECIALS
AVAILABLE NOW
SHOP.BFI.ORG.UK
Image: Spike Lee | Photography: Nicolas Guerin

THIS MONTH IN
IN REVIEW
CASQUE D’OR
Lindsay Anderson reviewed Jacques
Becker’s Belle Époque tragedy (pictured
below):
“The movement of the whole picture
shows a highly developed command of
tempo, a rhythm which can accommodate
the long, sustained look at a scene, as well
as the series of swift, detailed glances.
The images are of continuous but simple
richness – in particular a poetic use of
close-up such as is possible only to an
artist who has achieved great sureness of
his attitude, as of his métier.”
LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES
Seventy years ago, an essay titled ‘The erotic cinema’, Gavin Lambert was unimpressed by
by avant-garde filmmaker Curtis Harrington was this early Jean-Pierre Melville title
(pictured below), adapted by Jean
excuse enough to make Marlene Dietrich the Cocteau from his own novel:
cover star for our October-December 1952 issue. “It is difficult to suggest how the
entranced, enclosed dreamworld of
Wrote Harrington: “Her style throughout the the children, as Cocteau describes it,
years remains constant, within little, characteristic might be represented in the cinema;
the novel is written in a poetically
variations, and as a personification of sexuality distilled, allusive prose, held together
her lustre never dims. Dietrich’s creation of ‘Lola by mood and interior concentration and
not narrative structure. An admission
Lola’ in [1930’s The Blue Angel] is a genuine, direct of defeat seems to be implied in the
thing; in her subsequent characterisations under passages of commentary, taken from
the novel and spoken by the author
Sternberg she reached an almost mythical stature, over various episodes in the film. At
and her vehicles were exclusively concerned times the film seems to be trying to
be no more than a series of animated
with the portrayal of female sexual power.” illustrations, determined by a literary
text; the direction is stiff and chilly,
fatally lacking passion.”
THE SOUND BARRIER
Lambert was equally disappointed by this
feature, despite its director’s dab hand:
INSIDE STORY “The Sound Barrier confirms, if further
proof were needed, that David Lean
With thoughts turning to the latest Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, is one of the most accomplished
this issue brings the opportunity to look at the humble beginnings of this decennial technicians in British films… But
marker of cinephile tastes. Won by the four-year-old Bicycle Thieves (1948; pictured everything else is much less congenial…
above), this inaugural edition saw just 63 critics name their top tens. Among those There are no emotional tensions,
bending the rules were Henri Langlois, who selected ‘Chaplin’s 1916 films’ as his top and only two minor performances by
IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
choice, and Lindsay Anderson, who squeezed three films into his number nine slot. Denholm Elliott and Joseph Tomelty
The restrictions caused a fair amount of disquiet among the participants, it seems: really communicate character… This is,
“Most critics were unanimous in finding the question unfair. ‘What an awful idea’, really, a machine age film, remote in its
‘What a thing to ask’, ‘I feel simply broken’, ‘disturbing’, ‘impossible’, ‘barbarous’, human fictions, released and free only
‘silly’ and ‘lousy’ were among the comments passed.” in some striking aerial images.”
1952
111
VENICE
Penelope Houston visited the Lido
for the 13th Venice International
Film Festival, where René Clément’s
Forbidden Games (pictured above) took
home the Golden Lion of Saint Mark,
as it was then known. The 12-strong
competition also included a Ford
(The Quiet Man), a Wyler (Carrie), a
Mizoguchi (The Life of Oharu) and a
Rossellini (Europa ’51), but Houston
was decidedly unmoved:
“ To a newcomer to the occasion,
a continental f ilm festival seems
agreeably to unite the divided worlds
of the cinema: art and trade, serious
criticism and the most expertly
staged commercial display. If the
latter element appeared slightly to
predominate at Venice, and if the
awards had in a few cases an air
of diplomatic compromise, it was
because the f ilms… too seldom
deserved the occasion. Whether the
world’s industries can really support
two annual festivals such as Cannes
and Venice is of course, a perennial
question; what one missed at Venice,
for all its attractions, was the
excitement of discovery.”
ELSEWHERE IN THE ISSUE
· A note welcomed the permanent
opening of the National Film
Theatre (pictured below; now BFI
Southbank): “Painting, music, the
theatre and literature have long had
nationally endowed showplaces. The
cinema now joins their company.”
· A 1914 essay by George Bernard
Shaw titled ‘ The cinema as a moral
leveller’ was republished, arguing for
state support of the cinema.
· László Benedek, director of The
Wild One (1953), recalled being asked
by Stanley Kramer to direct an
adaptation of Death of a Salesman.
 EDITORIAL

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Mike Williams

MANAGING EDITOR Isabel Stevens
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Kieron Corless
ACTING REVIEWS EDITOR Arjun Sajip
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Thomas Flew
WEEKLY FILM BULLETIN EDITOR Pamela Hutchinson
BFI DIGITAL EDITOR Henry Barnes
BFI DIGITAL FEATURES EDITOR Sam Wigley
CHIEF SUB-EDITOR Jamie McLeish
SUB-EDITORS Robert Hanks
Liz Tray
RESEARCHERS Mar Diestro-Dópido
Carly Mattox
CREDITS SUPERVISOR Patrick Fahy
CREDITS ASSOCIATES Kevin Lyons
James Piers Taylor
ART DIRECTOR Leo Field
PICTURE RESEARCHER Sophie Contento
ASSISTANT DESIGNER Bruna Osthoff
2021 REDESIGN Pentagram

PUBLISHING

PUBLISHING COORDINATOR Hannah Gatward

ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES Media Shed
Tim Porter
0203 137 2406
timp@media-shed.co.uk
NEWSSTAND DISTRIBUTION Seymour
020 7429 4000
info@seymour.co.uk
BOOKSHOP DISTRIBUTION Central Books
020 8525 8800
contactus@centralbooks.com
ORIGINATION Rhapsody
COLOUR REPRODUCTION DawkinsColour
PRINTER Walstead Group
TYPEFACES Plaak / 205TF
Big Caslon / Font Bureau
Caslon Ionic / Commercial Type

EDITORIAL ENQUIRIES SUBSCRIPTIONS NEXT ISSUE SOCIAL MEDIA

21 Stephen Street 020 8955 7070 Digital edition available from Facebook: SightSoundmag
London W1T 1LN sightandsound@ 31 October Twitter: @SightSoundmag
020 7255 1444 abacusemedia.com On UK newsstands from Instagram: @sightsoundmagazine
bfi.org.uk/sightandsound Annual subscription rates: 3 November
sightandsound@bfi.org.uk UK £50, Eire and ROW £75
15% discount for BFI members

VOLUME 32 ISSUE 9
ISSN 0037-4806 USPS 496-040
Sight and Sound is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (which regulates the UK’s magazine and newspaper industry).
We abide by the Editors’ Code of Practice and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism. If you think that we have
not met those standards and want to make a complaint please contact mike.williams@bfi.org.uk. If we are unable to resolve your complaint,
or if you would like more information about IPSO or the Editors’ Code, contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk
Sight and Sound (ISSN 0037-4806) is published by the British Film Institute, 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN and distributed in the USA
by UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080
Copyright © BFI, 2022. The views and opinions expressed in the pages of this magazine and on its website are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily
those of the BFI or its employees. The contents of this magazine may not be used or reproduced without the written permission of the Publisher.
The BFI is a charity, (registration number 287780), registered at 21 Stephen St, London, W1T 1LN
 ‘TO SHOOT A FILM
IS TO ORGANISE AN
ENTIRE UNIVERSE’
INGMAR BERGMAN

D
H E TH I R
T
IN A ME
LU
4 VOECTION
L
COL

A 5-DISC BLU-RAY BOX SET

FEATURING 8 LANDMARK TITLES
INCLUDES:

THE DEVIL’S EYE (1960) • THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960) • THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (1961)
WINTER LIGHT (1963) • THE SILENCE (1963) • ALL THESE WOMEN (1964)
PERSONA (1966) • THE RITE (1969)

ORDER FROM
BFI MEMBERS ENJOY 15% OFF
1 14
ENDINGS
Weekend
What are we to make of the title cards that
proclaim the finish of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967
film – and of so much more than that?
BY BRAD STEVENS
Weekend was the last of three features
(not counting several contributions
to anthology films) made by Jean-Luc
Godard in 1967 – the year of my birth.
He was barely a decade into his career,
and would continue directing for more
than half a century. Yet already there is
that unmistakable sense of everything
coming to an end: civilisation, interper-
sonal relationships, cultural traditions
(represented by Emily Brontë, who is
immolated, and Mozart, as well as off-
hand references to The Searchers, Battle-
ship Potemkin, Johnny Guitar and The Saga
of Gösta Berling). Even leftist politics in
the film seem to interest Godard less
as a force that might bring about radi-
cal change, ushering in a new and fairer
society, than as the best available tool
for charting and comprehending the
inexorable processes of destruction.
Weekend concludes, appropriately
enough, with an act of cannibalism, a
wife devouring her husband’s corpse
before joining a band of guerrillas. But
what strikes me as more relevant now
are the end title cards, which declare
first “fin de conte” (‘end of story’), then
“fin de cinema” – a relevance magnified
(playfulness being the keynote of this
oeuvre) instead of diminished by the
revelation that these titles are part of a
typographic joke, the ‘e’ of ‘conte’ posi-
tioned lower on the screen so that both
texts can be imbricated with a final cap-
tion displaying the film’s certificate of
censorship: “fin / visa de cont / rôle cinéma
/ tographique 33349”. Members of the nou-
velle vague tended to regard cinema as
a medium of supreme importance, the
telescope through which they viewed
the universe. For Godard, this was both
too much and not enough. His ambi-
tion was not to celebrate, but rather
to become cinema, and if he appeared
more interested than his colleagues in
what was happening ‘elsewhere’, this,
perversely, became proof of how thor-
oughly he had achieved his goal: any-
thing could be transformed into cinema,
simply by virtue of the fact that he was
observing it.
The circular nature of this aspira-
tion went hand in hand with Godard’s
insistence on discovering dead ends
everywhere he turned. Even that rejec-
tion of closure which characterised his
output from a relatively early stage ironi-
cally reinforces this, the fundamental
principles of storytelling existing purely
as objects of abject derision. Opening
up in Godard is invariably a means of
shutting down, fin de conte indicating not
merely the conclusion of this particular
story, but the termination of narrative
itself. Yet his cinema was always one of
contradictions, with endings, no matter
how apocalyptic, forever heralding fresh
beginnings. The director’s all-embrac-
ing pessimism might even, when looked
at from the right perspective, be a form
of optimism; his inveterate cynicism
certainly did not prevent, and in some
ways actually enabled, a seemingly inex-
haustible fascination with new regimes
of imagery, the visual degradations asso-
ciated with VHS recordings, mobile
phones, video cameras and 3D being
probed and tested with a disinterested
curiosity that stubbornly refused to rule
out the prospect of unearthing hitherto
concealed realms of beauty.
“The cinema is an invention without a
future,” declared Louis Lumière in 1895,
a statement quoted in Le Mépris (1963).
And the possibility that Godard may
have invented this ‘quotation’ – much
as he once fabricated an interview with
Roberto Rossellini – does not, in this
context, make it any less ‘genuine’. Dis-
courses relating to the Death of Cinema,
which have assumed an increasingly
prominent position in cinephile circles,
define filmmaking and film viewing as
acts of mourning, practices of value
precisely because, for complex reasons,
they are perpetually on the verge of
extinction ( jeremiads on the death of
the novel have nothing like the same
resonance). And despite important pre-
decessors such as Jean Cocteau (who
described cinema as ‘death at work’) and
Orson Welles, this concept has come
to feel as if it were somehow Godard’s
personal property. How wonderfully
appropriate it was to find Welles name-
checking him – from beyond the grave,
as it were – in The Other Side of the Wind.
And while Godard himself has now
joined these ‘immortals’, the outpouring Members of the nouvelle vague tended to
of grief that accompanied his demise regard cinema as a medium of supreme
(far from unexpected, after all, at the importance, the telescope through which
age of 91) can barely be comprehended
without reference to this notion. It is as they viewed the universe. For Godard,
if what has passed from the world is not this was both too much and not enough
just a single auteur, not even perhaps
the greatest auteur of his generation,
but rather our chosen representative of
cinema in its totality. One might even
say that the death of cinema has died
with him, a Godardian conundrum he ABOVE
would doubtless have appreciated. The end titles of Weekend
####
“MAGNETIC and
MYSTERIOUS”
THE GUARDIAN

“Sebastián Lelio’s BEST FILM.

Florence Pugh is ASTONISHING.”
THE WRAP