Sunday 28 October 2012

The Candid Eye [Central Bazaar (1976)]

From http://img.filmous.com/static/photos/85223/poster.jpg

Dir. Stephen Dwoskin
United Kingdom
Film #27, for Saturday 27th October, for Halloween 31 For 31

From http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/7135/vlcsnap8502.jpg

[NOTE: This review has screenshots with near and full frontal nudity and are NOT SAFE FOR WORK. I hate the idea of having to put this warning just because of the final image mainly, but I have to take into consideration it may not best in every local to view these pictures there. I intended to screen-cap them myself from the DVD but the technology failed me miserably, so I have had to use ones of varying sizes from other locations like my other reviews, especially since I did not want to make it seem like it was a film just of women in various states of undress for titillation and involves men as well. If you are fascinated by what you see, the DVD is still available in the United Kingdom from our retailers.]

From http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/5485/vlcsnap11352.jpg

The following film that I am writing about wasn’t intended to be part of this season at all. It is the sort of obscure and unconventional cinema I like to dig myself into when I’m watching films in my everyday life, especially as a British Film Institute release from an organisation known for releasing obscurities like it. An experimental film, in which the late director Stephen Dwoskin filmed a group of volunteers in his house for over a week like a proto-Big Brother, it has nothing to do with the horror genre, but within its two and a half hour running time Central Bazaar became a far more fitting choice for the season than what I was originally going to review. Allowing the individuals, male and female, to channel out their emotions and passions fully, Dwoskin affectively filmed a psychological session that lasted a whole week or so, all filmed in a red covered room with no open windows, preventing the individuals from knowing when it was night or day, and affectively creating a ritualistic tone close to Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) (Review Here). There is a danger in putting this in the season that I could seem subconsciously puritanical on a surface level, full of full frontal male and female nudity, or even homophobic or phobic of transgenderality, with scenes of sexual interaction between men and cross-dressing. This sexual nature, nearly about to become pornographic in a group massage scene later on if penetrative sex was to have taken place, is actually beautiful once I got passed the disorientating tone of the film within the first half, a continuation of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) in bright colour and fantastical costumes that shows a shedding of shame and a liberated nature to the volunteers’ interactions with each other. However, a sense of unease for very different reasons stays continually with the viewer throughout the whole film.

Central Bazaar is as truly experimental as that word implies an attempt to create a film different from conventions whether it works or not. This is an exceptionally difficult film, consisting entirely of prolonged images and sequences of the individuals interacting in front of Dwoskin’s juttering camera as it collects together fragments of them, their interactions and the objects around them. My head did hurt throughout the film, trying to grasp, not the meaning behind the images, but what lead to them being put on screen. It is a difficult film in the truest sense, compounded by a score that, while brilliant, is utterly unnerving for most of the film’s length. It is this score that contributed the most to this film being added to the season, a sonic noise that moves betweens electronic sounds to unsettled gramophone music for children.


The film can be seen as a mirror to our repressed desires, literally shown by real people within the circumstances, but interconnected to it is a disturbing yet necessary relinquish of emotions less than desired by the viewer. Unlike Flaming Creatures, an American experimental film which realised perverse joy through a low budget glamour of Hollywood cinema, Central Bazaar for its moments of pleasure is undercut by a downward drop in most of the scenes. The painted white faces, naked bodies covered in glitter and masks can become grotesque or battered down by the anxiety of those behind them. Then the facades start to crack, with individuals starting to weep and needing to be comforted by someone with them, or in the worse cases, violence starting to take place even if its implied, from wrestling between a woman and a man, to a squabble between four of the men with one in blackface punching the one who has him in a headlock on the floor in the chest repeatedly. The sense of madness is permeable, effecting me as the film went on, its two and a half hours going through a delirium, and sensuality between it, before spending the whole of its final quarter, in full detail, creating a sense of exhaustion in the viewer as the volunteers onscreen start to remove the makeup and feel the effects of the days, the red curtain behind the camera evoking David Lynch and the insanity he portrayed in his films later on.

Halloween as a season seems to evoke the liberation of desires both pleasant and unsettling to people. Horror films do this as well, purging one through the gruesome while allowing you to have pleasure at the same time. The origins of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome from a Halloween party where patrons went as ‘their madness’ is brought to mind for me in the case of Central Bazaar, a trance-like mood throughout it that sucks you in as the individuals involved act out their nightmares as well as their desires, the horror of seeing people in this presentation at first altered into a sympathy for them tinged with the horror of seeing their joy grounded by the stress they exhibit on their faces. Is it exploitative on the director’s part to have made this film? It is from the perspective of a voyeur, but unlike reality TV we are with the participants rather than gloating at them, showing for me the horror of the outside world and its restrictions as well against what is shown onscreen. Three occasions the individuals talk or sing to the camera, and at one point one man pretends to be a living puppet whose ‘strings’ are pulled by the other participants, the theatrical self-recognition of their situation in these moments obvious after viewing the film. The cathartic material, that will be pretentious and unbearable for most to sit through but fascinating to others, is fitting for this month as it is a season, beyond the horror films and candy, of releasing deep emotions, dressing up in costumes and letting one’s  desires come out behind them. Again, Central Bazaar is not for everyone, but it pulled me into its madness and I have to praise it as a brave experiment which has a power to it. It left my mind battered but rather than being vague and arch, its devotion to raw emotions made it potent rather than cold experimentation. And unexpectedly, shot in the United Kingdom by the American Dwoskin, I have a great British entry finally in this season that is not in the horror genre at all, showing that our history of neglected experimental cinema in the British Isles may have far more bite over most other films made here.

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