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