Category: Films

This was a bit of a hotchpotch, connected only by their “fringe” geography, but interesting nonetheless.

The Travelling Players, Theo Angelopoulos, 1975

Slow cinema. Very slow cinema. I see that The Travelling Players is almost four hours long. I’ll give it a go; I should know enough Greek history to grasp something of it, but the style – elliptical, demanding, non-linear – may defeat me. It’s about WWII, the civil war and its aftermath. Like la Movida Madrileña, this came from a fractured country at the end of military repression, but it had none of the obvious energy of, say, Almodóvar.

Black Cat, White Cat, Emir Kusturica, 1998

Chaotic and exuberant. It’s set amongst a Roma community on the banks of the Danube and is the polar opposite of slow cinema. This did remind me of Almodóvar in its all-embracing acceptance of all human behaviour.

Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014

Hmm. Visually it gripped: poor dwellings in Cappadocia looking like half-eaten gingerbread houses. It’s about a hotel owner and landlord, but I’m guessing that it’s also about Turkey itself.

Danish films this week. The Dogme 95 manifesto, the “Vow of Chastity” is dogmatic and downright puritanical:

• Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
• The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.)
• The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
• The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.)
• Optical work and filters are forbidden.
• The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
• Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
• Genre movies are not acceptable.
• The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
• The director must not be credited.

Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

For me, the hand-held camera stricture made the clips we saw feel claustrophobic. I wasn’t too bothered that Dogme 95 films had passed me by; with their limitations and purity, I feel little inclination to try to catch them up.

Festen, Thomas Vinterberg, 1998

I knew about this film even though I’ve never seen it so its big reveal wasn’t a surprise, and I can see that the style – close-ups, overlapping voices, uncertainty and confusion – worked well for the plot.

Open Hearts, Susanne Bier, 2002

Young couple, happy, he is badly injured in a car crash, the aftermath. Yes, well filmed.

The Idiots, Lars von Trier, 1998

I could get past the tacky premise: a group of agitators pose as people with learning difficulties/neurodivergence as some kind of anti-bourgeois action. I really couldn’t see how this was sticking it to the privileged and it alienated me completely.

An explosion of countercultural output following the death of Franco in 1975 and decades of repression. The collective id escaped its box, and forbidden feelings spilled out into all forms of culture. There wasn’t much of a Spanish film industry before this – perhaps it was seen as a chink through which ideas could enter Franco’s Spain.

I don’t like Pedro Almodóvar’s films. I was totally alienated by the last one I saw years ago – a rape scene played for laughs – but, given the context, his films make some kind of sense. You could rage against the Catholic Church and patriarchy or you could poke cartoonish, bad-taste fun at it.

We saw clips from Dark Habits (1983) and What Have I Done To Deserve This? (1984). Nuns shooting up and a taxi driver claiming proudly to have forged letters from Hitler. As I said, bad taste. Also non-judgemental and sympathetic – qualities perhaps lacking in the Spain Almodóvar grew up in. But still . . . no.

The other film was Jamon Jamon (1992) by Bigas Luna (Life of Brian immediately sprang to mind), which looked like an extended advert or pop video with its great images.

As an aside, it was amusing to think of doing this lesson over Zoom about Spanish films, speaking English and sitting in a Dutch hotel room.

I think I tried Fassbinder in my twenties when I wanted to be “cultured” but, without a primer and too used to Hollywood and the BBC, I really didn’t get him. Too earnest. It didn’t even improve my German. It makes me appreciate all the more the benefits of being led to the trough!

So:

• Pre-war and wartime flight of film talent from Germany, leaving not much behind.
• Literature and theatre were the first art forms to be revived after the war.
• Reticence in post-war Germany about using film for anything more than entertainment – too tarnished by working with the Nazis.
• Oberhausen Manifesto 1962 calling for new German film: Papas Kino ist tot.
• Television was obliged to support film-making after 1974.
• Auteur theory.
• Seen against the background of the Red Army Faction, the “German autumn” (1977) and the 1972 Munich Olympics. I’d rather forgotten what an angry decade that was.
• This was only about West Germany.

Fear Eat (sic) The Soul, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974

Fassbinder didn’t go to film school; he learned via theatre and collaboration and his output was prolific and varied. Here he echoed the melodramas of Douglas Sirk (also German, I have learned): a love affair between an ageing Putzfrau and a young Moroccan. The clip we watched had me hooked: the whole mise en scène from the use of colour, distance and symbols (grilles and stairs). Fassbinder sympathised with the marginalised, and this comes across very clearly. Perhaps I might watch it one day.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975

Based on a 1974 novel by Heinrich Böll. After the tableaux of the previous film, this was very confusing: multiple points of view and uncertainty for the viewer about what was happening. In that way it reflected the disruption and danger of the 1970s. It seems to be about how an innocent woman is punished for spending one night with an alleged terrorist, mistreated by the police and vilified by the media. I can’t say I want to see the whole film, but it did remind me that previous generations have been just as outraged by the abuse of authority as anyone today.

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, Werner Herzog, 1972

Herzog really is sui generis. I’ve seen the film before, but this time it was great to linger on the painterliness of some scenes. And then there was the action – less great. I suppose the knowledge that the film crew really were shooting the rapids on flimsy rafts might add to some viewers’ enjoyment, but not mine. I really don’t expect actors to put themselves in physical danger for my entertainment. And, after that po-faced comment – of course I want to watch it again.

Director Thorold Dickinson with Mervyn Johns, Nova Pilbeam, Jack Hawkins

Originally commissioned by the War Office but released commercially by Ealing Studios. Its message was the familiar “careless talk costs lives” one. Context was important: the knowledge that this was life and death stuff, that some of the actors had been given leave from the forces to make the film, and that it would have been watched by real wives, parents and siblings of people risking their lives in the armed forces. In other respects, it was a film that rattled along to its doomed conclusion (although successful as a destructive mission) and presented its crucial message very effectively. Mervyn Johns was perfectly cast as the unassuming little man who hears everything and passes it on to the Nazis: never overplaying his part but always there as a reminder to the wartime audience to be discreet. Interestingly being a blabbermouth crossed social lines: the upper-class officer and the regular private were each as foolish as each other, and the worst offender was a wing commmander.

Like “Went The Day Well?”, its occasional violence is quite shocking because it seemed so unexpected for a film of its time. It’s as if these films tried to jolt the British public into an acceptance that violence and brutality were a means of defence as well as aggression. I can only be glad that I’ve never been in a position to test that proposition.