City of Pirates (1984)

Dir. Raoul Ruiz

Nobody can say why you go chasing a pirate down

the street but such a state of affairs makes possible

a certain number of anxiety dreams. Was it the pirate,

you ask yourself, or was it the paranoia?

          

from 'When the privateers returned from their pillage' by Steve Spence

There is no Johnny Depp in eyeliner complaining about why the run's gone in City of Pirates, a film by the late Chilean director Raoul Ruiz, a film made to be intentionally difficult to gain cohesiveness over, nor are there galleons or people walking the plank. A pirate can denote something outside of law and order, and honestly, it's too literal and tedious to immediately go to Depp when the idea of a place suggesting pirates is far more mysterious and befitting this film's dreamlike structure.  Many viewers will complain that there are no actual pirates in the film, nor cities of any kind, dismissing the allegorical versions offered. Personally I wasn't disappointed, the lights that seasonally brighten up on a bush in a character's "Garden of Allegory" representing the ones readied for a war between pirates and the country of Spain, but some may be taken aback by the fact that this never becomes important for an overall narrative, merely detail in a world to add character, and that one should be concerned for the battle on this plant when its discovered Spain has lost.

I admit to finding the film a struggle to sit through in the beginning, but in dealing with the film, the issue of what I brought to it in terms of residue biases is part of the subject itself. Isidore (Anne Alvaro) comes into contact with Malo (Melvil Poupaud), a young boy who is in fact a killer, descending into a non linear trip that includes murder and an island where a man Toby (Hugues Quester), owner of the Garden of Allegories, has an entire family living in his head. It felt too close to the stereotype of pretentious art cinema originally. But befitting the film, either it was intentional, or that I fully absorbed the tone of it, and avoided forcing my own subconscious tagging by narrative cinema onto it.That Ruiz partially improvised the film, creating dialogue just before shooting scenes, was a dicey thing to do, in terms of how it would affect the tone of the work, and I'm still at the stage as a viewer, while falling in love with City of Pirates by the end, that the opening quarter of difficult films like this can frustrate me until I acclimatise to them. I've only seen four of Ruiz's films and one short, from a man who made over a hundred films, shorts and television work. As well as difficulty in actually seeing his films, including this one, sadly you can have critical writing be very vague when it comes to the maze-like nature of his work - like the key needed to unlock the mystery in the centre of his The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979), the description needed to entice you into Ruiz's world, rather than make it sound like obtuse navel gazing that'll put the casual viewer off being curious, is usually missing.

Yes, many viewers will find City of Pirates' completely disinterest with linear cohesiveness frustrating and dismiss it, but the film is far from obtuse. Again for a second review in a row I can reference Un Chien Andalou (1929), and how it was made with every rational idea purposely excised from the finished work. With City of Pirates, anything that connected together the content in terms of a narrative was removed during the editing process. Ruiz, and I dare stake this claim, in a film set by the ocean as depicted in lush almost candy-like colours - hazy burnt pinks, oceanic blues, blistering oranges - despite seeing little of his work, is an individual who suits the metaphor of the Chinese boxes well. Even if the conclusion is there by the end, the greater significance is that the route through the films seem to be continually expanding as you go along, and altering into more and more tangents as they go. Like the following too:

As a film, any plot for it boils down to the protagonist tagging along with the child as his "fiancée", after he (or likely she) has murdered her adopting father, only to be pushed into an increasing sense that she herself is hiding a more homicidal person within her. What the draw of the film is, the greater importance clearly, is how this is represented. It's worth remembering too that City of Pirates is a film that's playful in tone. A lot of my problems with the film disappear when the adoptive father leaves quite violently, in an unintentional shift in tone, or possibly on purpose. The beginning of the film is jarring against conventional norms of narrative cinema. A sentient white ball that bounces by itself, the mother talking to the dead, random appearance by policemen, and the one unfortunate aspect that was either Ruiz intentionally mocking pretence or something that flaws the film a little, the use of actors quoting very descriptive poetry. I'm not a fan of poetry where elaborate vocabulary for whole verses is common, rather than use of metaphors, grounded yet imaginative verse, or completely visionary or intentionally nonsensical wording choices. There is still the poetry in the rest of the film, usually in duelling voiceover, debating existence and life, but it's not as problematic. That the more irritating aspects of the dialogue were all quoted by the father, who is continually offering his adoptive daughter/live-in maid money as if soliciting sex behind his wife's back, it is the possibility that its intentional.

It becomes clearer than mood and fluxations of it drives City of Pirates, and what appears to be slight and close to pretentious drastically changes if one remembers what their dreams are like. Far from a cheap defence, it's a remainder to reconsider the context for viewing a film like this then the critical opinion. Dreams can have narratives, but they also dispense of any 'rationality' and inherently disregard notions of storytelling which required a 1-2-3 creation of characters and story. In this context, the film works perfectly. After a beginning stumble, it works as an increasingly darkening dream. One that is clearly humorous. One that has black humour and purely unconventional images. The most distinct, in the beginning, is the camera from inside the father's mouth, looking out between the teeth at his wife inspecting them.

City of Pirates

Instantly with this image, you should realise this is a deliberately absurd work. Especially if you use an example not from the film like this to emphasis the absurd camera shot -

Justin Quinnell's Smiley Cam Research Project

Large portions of the film are like this. The protagonist lost amongst a potential lover who offers her everything from radios to food, to Toby himself, where the mother of the family inside his head never heard from but only heard of from the other individuals juggled about from his consciousness. Surrounding this Ruiz is technically accomplished at making the shots seen have a distinction and a logical, tangible frame to house these illogical aspects. In dreams, the depth is gained from the resonance of the images and the events, not the background behind them. The meaning and emotions felt are already there for you beforehand as, in deep sleep or day dreaming, you are pulled away from the necessity of having a rationality to all that you encounter or sense. The difficultly one may have in trying to gauge with 'difficult' films, books and such materials could easily, possibly, maybe, be removed if you could go through them as one would encounter dreams in sleep. Maybe even the poetry I had a bugbear with may have made more sense in the film's place if I could have fully embraced the film in a resting state fully open to its content. The film's too deliberate in tone to be merely random, even if partially improvised, and the film's technical brilliance means that obvious motifs can exist which string together.

It's darker content reveals itself to be a fully darkened core to the work rather than mere shades to it. I can laugh and include the ridiculous juxtaposition of images just before, but parallel as well in City of Pirates is an incredibly uneasy film while still being tongue-in-cheek and playful. Nasty in its violence, the boy floating paper boats made of money in a river of a man's freshly split blood. Almost Italian giallo in its use of knives and blood spillage:

City of Pirates

Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975)

With Toby, despite a friendship taking place, his treatment of Isidore at first, locking her up in a prison cell, is immensely unsettling. When its changed into a friendly relationship, it's not a jarring and offensive shift. In dreams, opposites can sleep so much closer together while in the everyday the idea of them moving into being different and one-and-the-same equally is disturbing. The same applies to Malo, the killer boy, sarcastic but with the halo of a cherub. No wonder, when actor Poupaud grew up, you'd want to hug him in François Ozon's Time To Leave  (2005). But the boy is also a serial murderer and rapist. Later he takes on the status of a deity for murder, more of an entity. (Alarmingly Ruiz makes one of his names Peter Pan.) The childish innocence of the tone - pirates, bright colours - is hiding a tragic tale. A woman who lost romance, as she explains her backstory, and, in the symbolism, may be a killer as well. The film is open to interpretation. You can argue she's a mass murderer. Argue, with a shot of a man's face reflecting at her in a mirror, that it's the guilty of a man by proxy of his anima. That everyone's dead and this is purgatory as viewed as a coastal paradise of hazy, post-shooting highlighted, eighties colour coding. It's a not a cheat, a con, for Ruiz not to answer this, to be intentionally vague. His job here clearly was to make a waking dream. Dreams inherently have each viewer/listener of them making their own interpretations of what they mean.

There's always been a paradox in that, structurally, cinema is of audio and visual content. Even when either is removed, the lack of either and the sense of this takes up the gap left. However, the paradox, is that narrative is seen as more necessary within films. Narrative is not inherently of cinema, especially as editing, or lack thereof, is more of the connection of images in new meanings. Dreams are of the same idea. (So, fittingly, Sergei Eisenstein and Salvador Dali can exist in the same club house). Even if a narrative exists, like you wakes up naked in class on the day of an exam you haven't prepared for, my own experiences in dreaming have shown that the sensation of progression, through events, is more dictated by the effect of what happens than a story with a beginning, a middle and an end being shown. How narrative got to be the main priority in cinema is probably the result of theatre and novels influencing the material filmed, through either can remove it from themselves as well. Unfortunately, this means City of Pirates is seen as experimental because it negates the importance of narrative cohesion. My difficultly with the film at first is as much a subliminal printing of all the Hollywood films we see as children. This is important as I had difficulty writing this review - asking why I suddenly loved the film halfway through, when my mind originally was numb through the first quarter, and what I got from it when I loved viewing it. Sensations. The sense of dread, curiosity, wonder. The last image has stuck with me. Two women talking by a window. A man with a rotting face points a gun at the side of his skull. The women become skeletons even though without ligaments, muscle, a tongue or a vocal box they couldn't talk. Death. Unease.

A woman lost without love who'd likely slit her adopted father's throat for a lark and deep seated revenge against him. Her adopted mother doesn't care about the various murders, and still loves her. Death still existing from a child, completely against the notion of childhood innocence. Fittingly comparable to the last film I reviewed here - The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013). I know too Ruiz was an exile from Chile when it became a dictatorship. When Isidore is imprisoned, was that on his mind? Yet he's still playful. A white ball, clearly on a string above, being spun around the mother's head as if possessed by the dead feels too whimsical on purpose to be a fault tonally. There is no need for Ruiz to have to divide this from the serious side of the film, as the viewer should themselves and the film is structured so these abrupt parings make sense together. The conscious structure of these irrational pieces was ignored by me at first, which I regret when I finally noticed and understood them. Rather than hold one's hand, the film lets you feel when you react to individually in seeing said images. With this film in particular, it emphasises for me the absurdity of letting narrative being a driving force when images and sound are the more important factors for a film. That, and as taking its cues from dreams, it already possesses a cohesiveness, but that cohesive structure belongs from something, dreaming, where the rational to have something explain all of itself to you, rather than take from it what you can, is literally asleep and not allowed to be involved in experiencing the dreams. With City of Pirates the point is to experience the sense of dreaming it. The try and make a narrative out of it makes little sense to do and is patronising to it and yourself.

========

Images, in order, from the following sources:

1. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zlc81EWkeDU/TKedkC6nJdI/AAAAAAAABFU/jyKLN328ND0/s1600/vlcsnap-2010-10-02-15h55m18s148.png

2. http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/7813/ruiz5qu7.jpg

3. http://www.utopia-britannica.org.uk/Assets/maze.jpg

4.  http://dcairns.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/vlcsnap-197666.png

5. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/

-bbwrZ9IoKEA/TzLR1daBeII/AAAAAAAAAC0/wm_XH2UcfZU/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-02-08+at+11.08.56+AM.png

6. http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image11/cityofpirates06.jpg

7. http://cdn.filmschoolrejects.com/images/deep-red.jpg

8. http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/post_images/6403/city%20of%20pirates.png?1314026129

9. http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/cityofpirates-window-red2.jpg

The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013)

From http://twitchfilm.com/assets/2013/07/StrtangeColorPoster-1.jpg

Dirs. Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet

As a side note, the viewing of the second feature length film of the directors of Amer (2009) does come with a strange anecdote of going to see it. There were tests being run just before a 3.20pm screening, and after some delay, the first images on the cinema screen were mute clip from The Truman Show (1998). If Jim Carrey had actually been in an avant garde psychodrama cribbing from the texts of giallo films from Italy, my head would've exploded. I have no grief with said cinema just to let the reader know. The screening was late but all the trailers usually played in front of films were skipped, and the film was presented to its best as a visual and audio barrage, so I have nothing to concern myself with. It's just that odd moment is very memorable.

It's befitting the type of film The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears is that this kind of breaking up of cinematic conventions was done by accident before the film actually started. Done completely sincerely, it nonetheless takes the conventions of the giallo, a murder mystery story, and inverses them. Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange) arrives back in Belgium from his work abroad, only to find his wife Edwige (Ursula Bedena) is nowhere to be found. The building complex they are living in is a maze of hidden secrets and perplexing circumstances surrounding the environment. The fellow occupants have their own hidden sides, and nothing is what it seems. Joined by Detective Vincentelli (also played by Klaus Tange), reality becomes less and less tangible as the walls hide older ones, a killer is clearly within the building, and the circumstance are so severe Kirstensen even becomes his own killer, victim and witness at the same time one restless night. It is not a good comparison to say this is close to an original giallo. They could be campy, schlocky and significantly different even when they were stylish and artistic. For all their abstract moments, even Dario Argento's, they had a simple narrative that was followed closely. The Strange Colours... has a narrative, unlike Amer's three segments, but is likely going to be the more difficult of the two for people because it purposely goes away from what is easily understandable, using symbolism and outright surrealism for plot points. The film is very unconventional on purpose, the experimental style of the directors made clearly apparent again like in their previous work rather than for them to be making a throwback film. Umberto Lenzi's Eyeball (1975) this is not, a trashy and wonky Italian pulp film, but violently nasty, pulsating with sex and weird imagery, as much Art with a capital A and a sensority experience.

From https://static-secure.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/4/10/1397138290671/Aping-Bu-uel-a-scene-from-010.jpg

It feels right on point that critic Anton Bitel, in Sight and Sound magazine reviewing the fillm, suggested this was a treatise on the mind of a psychologically damaged man, Kristensen's possibly. When the Detective and the protagonist are played by the same person, it immediately suggests, to paraphrase a title of Video Nasty film, that this is nightmares of a damaged brain we're seeing. Amer, despite its three separate pieces that made its whole, had an obvious connective tissue - the growth of a girl into a woman, puberty and sexuality inbetween - while The Strange Colours... jumps from its narrative tracks to follow the mental environments of its characters. This is furthered by the trademark style of the directors, an exceptional and total cinematic flourish. It's not just the striking use of colours. Or the unconventional use of ordinary objects. It's the obsession with the smallest of details, amplifying them greatly. Rarely in films do you get the sound of leather stretched. As the sole other person in the theatre with me said, afterwards, there was an extensive use of added sound effects. Concerning one with all the aspects of a film - visuals, sound, editing and so forth - with as equal care never feels apparent in quite a lot of cinema when you many movies. Far from giving attention to itself with this, pushing you away from engaging in the film, it is as immersive as a dream, no matter how abstract the film around is, all interconnecting in a way perceived to make rational sense. Instead of becoming impatient in wanting a standard A-to-B narrative, which is a danger when viewing a work like this, this has its images and scenes connect together by themselves in a way that explains what is going on that you have to be willing to follow on their own accord.

When the detective has his own flashback to previous assignment, involving voyeurism and vengeance with red wrapped "sweets" and rings as claws, that seems to have no connection to what is originally taking place, it's clear it's not as random as Kristensen points it out to be in being mentioned as the film goes along. It's just one part of a clearer connected tissue of moods and ideas. The anxieties and lusts of a male where his wife interchanges with many other women, sex and death juxtaposed and combined as the apartment complex becomes a host of a single mind than a building. Turning an all changing entity of photo-optic tricks in the opening credits, that can house the most sadomasochistic acts, including an uncomfortable situation with glass, to the curiosity of a young boy. Never has the goal that Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali had in mind with Un Chien Andalou (1929) been a clear reference point for a film that is also indebted to a specific area of cult genre cinema, but it's the case with The Strange Tears..., especially the notion of removing anything that had an obvious explanation but using a well known narrative structure to construct a film around this irrational material. Everything has a purpose or is designed to juxtapose in unconventional ways. It becomes very obvious what has happened to Edwige, but the reason why it has happened, and the individual involved, who may be connected to the disappearance of an older man years before, as seen in someone else's flashback, is left a mystery. And it becomes more and more obvious as the film becomes more unconventional that the individual responsible is not necessarily a mere killer, and that something more complicated is going on. When a box of toys suddenly appear, with spiked wheels and erotic imagery amongst them, or a chapter on the desires of a woman, likely Edwige's, plays out involving a bowler hat, stop motion straight from Jan Svankmajer, and an inspired scenario taking place onscreen which uproots conventions of a chase sequence from giallo or slasher films. Even the title, a beautiful one, turns out to be a very obvious reference to something the viewer sees in the end but also hides so many potential signifiers within it, particularly with the amount of wounds and injuries that are inflicted to the human body. The previously mentioned scene of Kristensen literally being duplicated and taking on multiple roles against himself, harming himself, eventually, long after the film ended, becomes the obvious sign of the hidden paranoia of his that becomes more obvious as the other scenes play out.

From http://diaboliquemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/STRANGE-COLOURS-MIDLINE.jpg

It's not that rare to see experimental artists use pop culture that is seen as un-progressive and below high culture for a source of inspiration. Actually, its more common than you'd think. In most cases it's the reasons the material were criticised for that are the aspects latched onto by the artists to replicate in their work, Andy Warhol the obvious example. There is definitely a fan vibe to this film when the protagonist, part of an intercontinental telecommunications company, has so many main themes from Italian giallo on vinyl and plays them at convenient moments, the film littered with tracks taken from the original inspiration and providing the theme of Killer Nun (1978) an expecting resurrection as a tense and inspired ditty that gets into your head. And The Strange Colours... inherited the lurid side of the giallo - the nudity, the sexuality, and the linking of death and said sexuality together that'll be shocking for some viewers. A razor blade and a woman's anatomy, an image repeated multiple times, is something that you see at the beginning of the film and lets you in on what to expect for the rest of the running time. I admit I was concerned the film was going to get silly or undermine itself with questionable content, especially from a scene early on where a woman is completed naked on a balcony of the apartment complex for no discernible reason. But when, around then, it seemed to progress dangerously close to tasteless, fitting as it references giallo, not a good thing when it's trying to be a serious avant-garde film too, the equal opportunities attitude to both genders in what happens takes place and a much more complicated tone is revealed by the halfway point that prevents it from being mere ultraviolent softcore. Its a work of pure style, I confess that, but its a gem of this because it uses its style to create a tone of fear linking with anxieties of sexuality and violence that gives a depth to the proceedings. Using the ability of dream logic to transform moods into sensations that are more than enough to have a profound effect on you. The works that take their influence from "disreputable" objects tend not to stick with the structures and meanings of the originals, and transport them into a new context. As Kristensen becomes more entangled within a situation that becomes more of a cloud over him for the viewer watching the film, the sense of reality being altered that is apparent in giallo, where each plot twists changes the rules of how everything works, is here as well but with a significant difference. Each piece of information in a giallo, far from a breadcrumb to get one home, is a further complication in these films, but there's a conventional narrative surrounding them nonetheless which is not found here. Dropping the conventional narrative, this is no longer a stylish pulp journey for the sake of twists and turns that a giallo usually is, but concentrates itself, using the sub-genre's style, on the sensation of tension and sensuality. While Amer was about female sexuality, this is clearly about male sexuality. Amer had danger, death and fetishism, but this feels more chaotic, nastier and paranoid in tone to the earlier film. They mirror each other, but this one feels the more intentionally horrific once it gets to its ending, all stemming from a complete lack of understanding in femininity once you get what its title originally means. You could argue the reason why Amer ended as it does is explained in this film like a metaphorical prequel, although rewatching Amer is a must for me now.

After the viewing, when the lights came up after the end credits finished, I was the sole person in the screening room, the other individual who watched the film having already left as (presumably) the end credits rolled, creating a sense of having been dropped back into real life suddenly. It was startling. With its blasts of sound, heavy percussion based music cribbed from the original inspirations, visual manipulations and moments of editing that felt like a knife piercing flesh, it felt like the sensual overload I went into the screening hoping it would be, having left me disorientated for a long while after the viewing. The lights of the nearby bathroom were a heady, sickly yellow of artificial lighting, a cramped claustrophobic toilet cubicle with a grill behind you when you sit down. What's behind the grill, something I actually asked myself jokingly but with curiosity. Complete blackness. Maybe behind it, what was a respectable art cinema with modern architecture hid a secret or two like is found in the film when a wall is broken down. While The Strange Colours of Your Body's Tears doesn't provide intellectual meat to leave on, its a film that causes you to look and listen carefully around you when you leave the cinema and step back into the real world, causing one to see it through senses and emotions. Everything pulsated when I got on the train for the long way trip home, even though it was a bright English afternoon and no one was being killed by someone in leather gloves nearby like an Argento film. Probably the reason giallo was the object of obsession for the directors Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet is that it's the sub-genre where style and what is seen, felt and heard was so extravagant and obsessed over, from the music to the colours. And a story of murder and sex is always about sensation too even if it's pure fantasy. What's truly cinematic is when you can feel a film, not just look at pretty pictures on a screen. With a success rate of two out of two feature films, a great segment in the wildly varying (but underrated) The ABCs of Death (2012) and short features, the duo behind this are few of the only individuals who take reference from the history of cult cinema seriously and create results that actually have virtue to it. Not through indulgence, sarcasm, or merely presuming to replicate the older films, but by turning it into their own voice even if its divisive and for only a few. It's going to feel like hell for me waiting for their next film now. Even a short would suffice!

From http://www.critic.de/images/the-strange-colour-of-your-bodys-tears-03-The_S.jpg

Prata Palomares (1972)

http://titlovi.com/images/posters/Prata-Palomares_dfb6e998.jpg

Dir. Andre Faria

Honestly, as physically availability becomes less of a concern in how I treat what I look to watch for in cinema, the question of how cinema itself is treated is subjected to questioning. The notion of what cinema is meant to do and represent; as I watch this sort of cinema more, concepts such as tone, politics and structure are broken down. The lack of availability of a film like Prata Palomares, and the fact that its use of Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stone at the end will make it difficult to release the film uncut, makes the influence of films like this one more powerful for me, the suppression of films like it for distribution reasons adding to the potency of things it breaks. Films like this become difficult to gage with because of this, but have a more pronounced effect on your thoughts when you can gage with them. It's a perverse irony that this Brazilian film, made during a military government that prevented the film from being shown at two Cannes Film Festivals, is now only available for me to see, in a period of freedom of speech in most places, from a copy ripped from a VHS tape from an unknown dimension. Consumerism turns out to be more powerful than a dictatorship.

The film itself is about the dangers of compromise. Two wounded revolutionaries wait in a church in a local village for a mission to be started. One pretends to be the priest that was supposed to take over the church, at first using it to bring the people together against the corrupt upper-class family that runs the town, but through an existential crisis becomes a lapdog for their words. All of this is presented in an abstract and unconventional film which shifts from the polemic to the gruesomely surreal. There's material reminiscent of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Glauber Rocha. The violence reminds me of José Mojica Marins too, whose horror films made him an unexpected political rebel when the same Brazilian government that suppressed this film banned his too. Prata Palomares is its own unique, charged film though, which like many films from South America I've seen, have a rawness where local culture, of countries and regions, meet the complications of politics, morality and urbanisation with a vivid metaphorical and phantastical bent. There's a brutalness in the violence and despair felt by the lowest in social ladders even in an abstract presentation. It's incredibly passionate filmmaking that is desiring to create real rebellion.

I confess the first part of the film, where the rebels are by themselves in the church, shouting at each other, was a struggle. In fact, for its moments of goodness, it's the worst of experimental polemic cinema, that which would actually compromise any revolutionary message in how it feels like it's a herd mentality wrapped in broad, unintentionally ridiculous pretence. But when a woman, a possible Virgin Mary figure for the revolutionary cause, enters their bubble and one of them becomes the "priest", the film truly starts to become a great work. Full of transgressive imagery - cannibalism, a church as a literal execution dudgeon, police death troops assaulting people - the issue in the middle of its message of how the left wing revolutionary can become compromised, distorted and a tool for the state is still relevant today and gives this messy film power. How anyone can confuse what they should do, regardless of political bench they're sat on, and end up being a lapdog or a deluded liberator. It does have some compromised thoughts. At first this sole female character of note is there only to give birth to the children of revolution, although this thankfully changes, in a film of archetypes and stereotypes, when even destroyed she's still the strongest force of the rebellion. It's also a revolution where one of the evil, decadent family - American, older woman pasted up in make-up, corrupt little girl who adores the violence - is clearly signposted as such by being effeminate and gay. This is a minor detail but it's another irony to write about with this film, where the issue of what one character's revolutionary ideals are questioned, that the message of the film is questionable in small details, the danger of this coming off as a brutish, heterosexual masculinity being projected from the film rather than an idealism for a new political utopia apparent in aspects like this. Details that could retrograde these ideals to the same mentality of the decadence its rebelling against. With someone like Alejandro Jodorowsky, he had the right idea of presenting decedent sexuality not in terms of specific sexuality, but when all sexuality becomes merely to consume another through corrupt and visually grotesque tackiness.

Despite these few details though Prata Palomares still has a great deal to stand out. The "priest" at first has the right idea - that the Christian God and Jesus were subversives for the downtrodden, or at least question God but use the cross as a symbol of unity - but he compromises himself into the puppet for others who wish to crush humanity through brainwashed spirituality. His desire for peace and non violence becomes as a means to shut up the anger of the downtrodden in a very clever flourish at one point. What makes the film spectacular when it fully immerses itself into its plot is how complex and unconventional it is. Even when corrupted, or just insane, the "priest" can be right. He destroys his comrade's revolutionary streak, in the best scene of the film, by pointing out that for all his polemic words, he's lost the one word needed to make his desire for upheaval of worth. Christians just need two sticks together in the shape of a cross he says, and his friend doesn't have this but empty phrases. But the "priest" is also a coward and easily manipulated, suffering from the same flaw. When revolution is seemed to have been won in the ending, what he does is no less ugly than what the former leaders did - in fact its more pathetic and off-putting in its farcical delusion of utopia. The one sole exception who is consistent is the woman, a politicised Mary Magdalene, who beret the men throughout the film for their compromises, but even she is literally silenced.

The film is difficult, shifting in place and full of dialogue that needs to be digested. The acting is stylised, with large portions screamed at high levels and a character at one point ramming his head into walls out of self mutilation. Sometimes the rebels just scream for large passages over what they're witnessing. It's an aggressive and abrasive work which matches its rich, ideological questions with the form of a blunderbuss shot, surreal images and a unconventional time structure even when following its small plotline. Unfortunately this reckless, difficult filmmaking is rarely seen now because even alternative cinema seems to have a tendency to copy mainstream filmmaking. By the seventies film could be trangresssive and legitimately dangerous, with many films that are still difficult to assess or handle even today for the modern cinematic canon. Prata Palomares is chaos onscreen and it's not surprising it was suppressed by the Brazilian government of the time, not just because of its message, but its tone and erratic nature which obliterates any sense of good taste. The difficulty of the film, even that sluggish first quarter, is now a nectar for me as a viewer. I am bored by what is to be expected and safe; it means nothing because I will forget it and, even by the virtues of mere entertainment, not have enough to actually entertain me. A film like this challenges my perceptions and my politics, and for glaring flaws, the challenge is rewarding as a film viewer but also in expanding the thoughts in my mind. Sadly films like this can only be seen, literally, on a muddy VHS rip from origins I don't know of. Thus it feels like a need to find films like this is a minor rebellion to clean out what I've been stuck with as cinematic art. Less elitism, more bored frustration, and befitting a film made to promote subversive ideology for utopian ideas, its complexity asks as well that even the concept of cinema should not be left to follow one style but question it continually. 

From http://i39.tinypic.com/10zwdmt.png

An Introduction For Angel's Egg (1985)

From http://guriguriblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/untitled-1.jpg

Dir. Mamoru Oshii

[Note = This was originally an introduction for a project I'm part of on the forums for MUBI, which is why its tone may be a bit different. I hope you all can get something of interest from it though.]

Angel's Egg is now an even rare type of creation in the Japanese animation industry. Experimental anime still exists, even in pulpier areas, but with the economic issues taking place globally many industries are playing it safe and drawing back away from areas of bolder creation. Hollywood even went away from the mid-budget hard boiled action and crime films that were part of its bread-and-butter at one point, so how could another Angel's Egg be made in anime now unless it was a suicidal risk? In the eighties, with an economic boom, so many anime works were commissioned even though they were just made to let someone experiment or to try any idea out. Mostly these works were made for the new, and at times higher budgeted, straight-to-video market, with creations like California Crisis: Gun Salvo (1986) and Cosmos Pink Shock (1986) examples of the most obscure of the obscure I've at least seen myself, usually up to a mere forty minutes or so long, one off pieces with no original source material or follow-on, and only available now thanks to Western anime fans who have acquired Japanese VHS tapes and put up digital copies online. Angel's Egg is more significant in this area because it's a completely abstract film that was made to be shown in Japanese cinemas. It didn't do well, understandably despite wishing for a perfect world of the opposite, but it has built up a reputation. A lot of it is to do with two key men who created it. Director Mamoru Oshii, who would go on to make entries for the Patlabor franchise, the two Ghost in The Shell films, Avalon (2001) and The Sky Crawlers (2008), a chequered career in cerebral, acclaimed animation and live action experiments. The other is artist Yashitaka Amano, known most for his illustrations for the Vampire Hunter D  novels and his work for the Final Fantasy videogame series. But the film has gained a lot of status by itself for a lot of good reasons.

From http://johnnywestmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/angels-egg.png

It's an incredibly surreal film. Even on this viewing, things in it do not make rational sense for me, more dreamlike and felt than connected together into a full conventional tale. But there is a clear through line within it. The world depicted is a dying one, desolate, destroyed, with remnants of a war still going on. A young girl wanders through an empty town keeping herself alive and carrying a giant egg, the egg incredibly precious to her that she guards it all the time. (The odd, accidental or purposeful, pregnancy motif when she carries it under her dress is either saying a lot about my own though process, or something to dig into another time with another person). A soldier encounters her, adamant to find out what's in the egg, following her with the possible intent of breaking it just to answer his questions. It's here that a very important piece of information about Oshii has to be taken into account. Oshii has been documented as being a Christian at some point, whether he is still or not unknown, to the point of considering entering a seminary. The drastic change, in the path of his life, that would lead him to instead become a celebrated auteur of anime cannot be ignored when viewing a film like this with its choice of Christian symbolism. Anime is notorious for its vague uses of this type of Christian-Judean religious symbolism, especially since the TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) became a leviathan of a work that brought more people to anime but made a hodgepodge said symbolism haphazardly with its real intellectual meat.  But Oshii's use of any symbolism, quotation or reference, even if you have difficulty with it, has always been done with some clear purpose, even in a film like this that is also clearly abstract.

From http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v178/brngrofdeth/tnt1.png

The soldier, with bandages on his hands and carrying a staff/weapon shaped like a cross, doubts his existence and the meaning of it. His interpretation of the story of Noah and the Ark, in a key monologue in a film mostly without dialogue, is a very disillusioned one. He even questions whether he actually exists. The girl believes devoutly in her egg being something of importance, maybe even an egg of an actual angel, but he wants to break it open to see if this is true or prove his disillusionment forcibly on another person. There is also a group of fishermen in the town, but their prey are giant shadows of fish, which their spears merely pass through and damage their surroundings. It is missing the point to say the film is about blind faith in a "fictitious" God. Atheism is a religious belief in itself, just one where there is no God and the Holy Book is of natural science with no suggestion of it coexisting with a spiritual entity, and disillusionment with one's beliefs can be encountered in any person like it did for Mamoru Oshii. The soldier is trying to find himself, while at the same time he is just as questionable in letting his nihilism cloud his judgement and bully a young girl. In a destroyed world, one would ask if God actually exists. Even in our own world, November 2013 as I write this, the situation of the world with its centuries of war, religious conflict and disillusionment, and the wider realisation of the atrocities committed globally has made the issue of the existence of a God (or Gods), and the question of the existence of evil, more pertinent. Even whether one truly exists could be up to debate, as the soldier suggests to the girl they are being dreamt by another, such an ironic idea when said by a character hand drawn and made to breath and be alive through another person's hands. Even those who stayed faithful to the belief in a Christian God can suffer as well; a term, "the dark night of the soul", was coined in the sixteenth century to describe a rare sensation where certain Christians felt they were completely alone, that God was completely absent in existence and their beliefs may have been wrong. In the New Testament itself, Jesus Christ, said to be part of God Himself as well as His Son, screamed while on the Cross why he has been forsaken for a brief moment. The crisis Angel's Egg depicts is that of the loss of a surface to even place one's foundations, one's feet, on. Oshii in his career would explore these themes in different areas, asking what makes us human, with the "soul" against technology in the Ghost In The Shell films, and in the plot events of The Sky Crawlers.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hLY9DmXXlH4/S76jjGnwoHI/AAAAAAAABu8/
DQYIuf9ZNao/s1600/vlcsnap-2010-04-09-04h13m34s50.png

The film looks beautiful. Painstakingly animated in ways rarely done now if ever. It looks legitimately ethereal in tone and look through Amano's character designs. It sounds beautiful and mysterious in its score by Yoshihiro Kanno. Its paced slowly, so slowly time seems to abruptly holt at one point with a character just sitting there in the dark. Unfortunately this kind of anime is not being made available. This film is not available commercially in the West, and other inventive works like Belladonna of Sadness (1973) aren't either. As much as anime at its best, in its pulpiest genre based material, can be so brave and creative in its aesthetics and ideas, films like Angel's Egg have been left stranded. The key target audiences of anime are young teenagers who haven't been given an opportunity to grasp slow paced, cerebral work that is not punctuated by Facebook links. Or adult geeks of both genders that, stereotypically but honestly at times, are more interested in alarming sexual fetishes involving fictional school girls or boys, or want to stay in their adolescences permanently, considering what is mostly being made now in anime, not something like this film about the existence of God. An audience needs to be built for Angel's Egg so it can be finally released. It's the strongest piece so far for me in Mamoru Oshii's filmography, and one of the most potent works made in this medium.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSPbsRBytjbbKL2BNIdzsXQX5t3PhgU1FtrNQ6Fj_xWLibRPUW_aNsa2NvAu7qiBPEI6oUjfx2jlfA7tUoHfmNn3L2rlU9CykR1RnuKUwWYvQjNFOLTi0Y3Lo__kHmz5wgqcJQvo8ggPn3/s1600/angel1.jpg

W Is For…Wax, Or The Discovery Of Television Among The Bees (1991)

From http://sharetv.org/images/posters/wax_or_the_discovery_of_television_among_the_bees_1992.jpg

Dir: David Blair

I will openly admit my gratefulness for the internet. The director of this film has, thankfully, released a hypertext version of this film on his own site, but the original feature film version of Wax... is difficult to find. I confess I am grateful for the internet for making it possible for me to view and review this film, hoping that one day a version is released more commercially for more people to be able to see it. Its the kind of film you want to discover and talk about on a film blog, and even if its a small review, I hope this encourages more people to go out and track it down. Maybe if enough people are interested Wax... could get a great reappraisal from attention like this.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/15720/w-is-for-wax-or-the-discovery-of-television-among-the-bees-%E2%80%93-1991-director-david-blair/

From http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/123/541/12354136_640.jpg

S Is For...Separation (1968)

From http://infini-tropolis.com/reviews/images/separationHEADER.jpg

Dir. Jack Bond

Probably one of the more divisive films for me in this series, but Separation managed to still have some great virtues of it. This review will probably show me becoming more admiring of the film if I was to see it again. It'll probably be like The Otherside of the Underneath (1972), the sole, single directorial credit for Seperation's main actress Jane Arden, another difficult experimental film uncovered from British cinema history I will have to ruminate on.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/15730/s-is-for-separation-%E2%80%93-1968-director-jack-bond/

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/separation/w448/separation.jpg?1289466373

P Is For...The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

From http://magnoliaforever.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/the-phantom-of-liberty.jpg

Dir. Luis Buñuel

It took many years for me to finally appreciate Buñuel as a film director, but I wouldn't have been surprised if I liked this film back when I thought he was overrated. It may have helped me love his films a lot more earlier. This and his autobiography My Last Breath would have helped me admire his craft immensely. In terms of my favorite of the director's, The Milky Way (1969) is his best for me so far, but this is just behind it. It does reach back the furthest to his origins in the Surrealistic art movement; research his past especially a project involving a giraffe and it makes a lot of the moments in this, including his obsession with strange bird life, even more significant. Its absurdity and sketch-like nature does make it an interesting film in his filmography in that it can both be seen as a very accessible movie and yet still difficult because Buñuel's sense of sketch comedy is completely dry and acidic. 

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/15354/p-is-for-the-phantom-of-liberty-1974-director-luis-bunuel/

From http://imageshack.us/a/img571/3017/thephantomoflibertyavi0.jpg

M Is For...Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwpA93t7th4JkATlk62Fv-dqqaIi27wr4SAw9yst992tRtF2xzhu-66QmPZBAkDOGC9rzcyBIHM80glTnEv8PB8f-wl_ugjGazwOz9wNU_t2tN227YwFYSoPLEaMDPinmVbqnlYz3TMIcQ/s400/maya+deren.bmp

Dirs. Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid

A short review for a short film. Short films deserve to be included in this series as well, especially one as important as this.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/15844/m-is-for-meshes-of-the-afternoon-1943-director-maya-deren/

From http://old.dokument-festival.cz/files/zk_pictures_232_1422_e0c685d9.jpg

One Screen Distortion Makes You L-A-R-G-E-R [*Corpus Callosum (2002)]

From http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/1255/corp1cd7.jpg

Dir. Michael Snow

One of the first avant garde films I saw was Michael Snow's legendary Wavelength (1967). Depending on your opinion, it is a) an examination of space and time in a single forty or so camera zoom, or b) forty or so minutes of staring at a wall. I hated it, and it didn't help that, since Snow's work is not officially released outside of cinema screenings, that it was a murky and digitally blurred version. I want to rewatch it, more so if I could see a good 35mm print on a big screen in my dreams. The films of the Canadian avant garde filmmaker/jazz musician have now become of immense interest for me, thanks to my growing flexibility with unconventional and experimental cinema. It also helped that I have discovered Michael Snow has a sense of humour. So Is This (1983) has you read a film as a text, complete black screen with sentences, one word at a time, being shown. Its already a brilliant work but gets better when I discovered this secret behind Snow. It also admits how most people would react with it with a self reflecting sense of humour, and takes pot shots at Canadian film censors with additional subliminal swear words. This discovery may make Snow even more accessible now, as a normal man who is willing to use humour within his experimental works to emphasise the points made, and *Corpus Callosum is such a film.

From http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/corpus-callosum_michael_snow.jpg

*Corpus Callosum is a ninety minute series of absurd moments. Most of it consists of people in a Toronto office stuck in dead end work, with tangents including an extended one of a family in a gaudy, pop art decorated living room. Using what he could afford, or intentionally using cheap looking computer effects for a cartoonish feel, Snow distorts both what is in these scenes and the film itself. People contort or become one single rectangular entity. Some, using distinct same clothes on different actors, are duplicated and interact with their mirrors. People abruptly disappear, expand or have any conceivable body part expand to absurd proportions. The rooms and objects in them do this too, the sequences in the gaudy living room having a wall of props move, disappear and even explode on cue, while the image the viewer sees are manipulated too. Continually moving to the right when the camera does move, the filmed image is bent as well with one sequence literally turning the world upside down.

From http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image10/corpuscallosum2.jpg

The result is playful. Knowing absurd in how it causes you to keep an eye on what will be effected. Objects, people, environment, even colour is effected and manipulated in the film. It's an experiment in image and content, but it comes off as bizarre segments which go out of their way to distort everything into peculiar shapes and types, the very rudimentary nature of some of the effects actually adding to the idea. If it wasn't for a lack of a narrative, the already thin wall between avant garde cinema, absurdist comedy and cult cinema would be pierced by a film like this. A film like this undermines the division between the sides by using "weird" images and comedic skits to their own effect in showing the manipulation of the image too. *Corpus Callosum is all the moments of breaking expectations and what is expected in conventional cinema stripped of a narrative, put together as a full ninety minute compilation. It's very much an avant garde film, minimal at times with prolonged moments of nothing happening as you wait for what's next and get absorbed by the droning mood of the work. But it still plays with the exact type of bizarre image manipulations that take place in something like Nobuhiko Obayashi's Hausu (1977). It even shows some vulgar humour with a truly giant member, coming off as a sexual fantasy cut short by the work office bell.

From http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/corpuscallosum-home.gif

The settings in the film are Snow poking fun at real life drudgery. We don't know what the office workers do around their computer desks, and for all we know they aren't doing anything adding to the joke, but seeing them at times be as bendable as taffy and in strange manipulations is liberating, the recesses of the mind's imagination having fun with bending reality. The living room sequences are traditional family life - pop art crossed with a sitcom set - put through the same bendings. The other sequence, at first out of place but finally making sense, is a God's eye view of a class of school kids during an exam, only for them to all notice us, the camera eye, and deal with it. By physically manipulating their own surroundings, the kids are the only individuals in control of their world in a reality where the adults are manipulated themselves. It's also seen as an auto-retrospective of Snow's work. Having not seen a lot of his films, it's difficult for me to comment on this, but I can comment on one of the final sequences, where characters watch one of Snow's own films from the fifties in a cinema screening room, the director weaving together his life into a self reflection. It evokes Lisandro Alonso's Fantasma (2006), set in a cinema complex where, as we follow a man in a minimalist journey around the rooms, he eventually goes see one of Alonso's own films. Like it, *Corpus Callosum becomes a theatre-within-a-theatre by doing this, seeing Snow's own mind within a creation of his, best amplified by the beginning showing the camera zoom into the security camera screen and view the doorway it will eventually go through within a reflection of the reality. Everything after this is understandably, because of this potential symbolism, possible because it sets up having its own set of rules. So far as to even have its own end credits, in a ninety minute film, at fifty to sixty minutes into itself, catching this viewer off and furthering the breaking of convention for a joke.

From http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image10/corpuscallosum4.jpg

Considering the exclusive nature that dangerous coats this sort of cinema - difficult to see, acclaimed by privilege film critics at festivals that could be argued to be elitist - this is only "difficult" in that avant garde cinema requires some patience and a willingness to follow it by its own rules before making a judgement on it. The distinction that understandably causes a lot of people to badly react to this sort of cinema is in most cases likely a surprise at having to try to view something which plays with a different tone, this film at times liable to be frustrating to even those who love it. But this is why "experiment" is the perfect word for this cinema to use, in that breaking from conventions of cinema on purpose, the reaction it causes can be anything. Even with the same minutes of the film, the experiment can cause two or more different emotional reactions. But like genre and cult films, this one presents its rule breaking by the use of comedy, absurdity, and in one moment, eroticism grossly exaggerated, the same playfulness that with a vulgar sense of the strange it has no shame is using.

From http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/images/Wfilmfest03_Corpus_Callosum.jpg

Its lack of availability is a shame, for by being only available in cinema showings at art museums and specialist film theatres, it becomes an elitist product against the tone and purpose of the film, Snow disconnecting perceived expectations from an art film in favour of making the dumbfounding and silly the examples of reality being questioned. The punchlines are the examples given to his discussions of the form of image, sound and framing, and you are allowed to laugh and think about them together at the same time. Not the presentation you think of when you think of experimental films you can only see rarely at museums, and frankly even those films are unfairly ostracised into being education rather than ventures into experimentation a viewer should be able to enjoy just for disrupting images and sounds in new ones. *Corpus Callosum emphasises for me that it is possible for avant garde cinema can be just as rewarding in terms of creating new, enticing images and sounds as well as provoking deep questions, that they are possible to actually enjoy for creating said new images and sounds like an optical illusion or an  absurd gag do when they manipulate the same things. The film never feels serious as what is stereotyped for an experimental film to be, undermining the notion by being legitimately hilarious in its intentional moments of weirdness. Viewing it, the idea that experimental film is seen as only education, filmic vegetables to the meat of entertainment cinema, is baffling when it gets as much glee from a penis gag as well as with its structuralist presentation. In many ways, the broadening of my palette for this type of cinema is because, like finding that Snow had a sense of humour, I found these films weren't just educating my eyes and brain, but could be as entertaining a blockbuster, silly like a comedy, titillating like porn, frightening like horror films, kinetic like action cinema or animation, and that they could be as much inclined to the basic delights of entertaining you through their subversions as well as using the formalist camera zooms and minimalist soundtracks to force you to question the meaning of the visual and audible.  This is where *Corpus Callosum gains its greatest virtues from, and this is how someone should enter the film through. That if it has a very intellectual message behind it, you should not try to drag it out viewing it but find entertainment through the base pleasures of stuffed foxes exploding and a man literally being given birth to through dodgy CGI, and realising the intellectual meat of the film will come when you enjoy these absurd pleasures first and then think about them. And considering how bizarre those images sound even in a review, it's impossible to consider the film on just cerebral levels as, using the area between the two hemispheres of the brain as its title, it has the same purpose as that area of brain matter in having two different sides, the creative and logical, the serious and the absurd, have an interconnecting conversation with each other with the film.

From http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image10/corpuscallosum6.jpg