The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

The follow film is an addition to my ‘Cinema of the Abstract’ project on the film website MUBI, collecting together films of all areas of cinema that personify an ‘abstract’ and unconventional mentality and mood to them. This is not for academic reasons or as work, but a hobby that will also benefit in improving myself ability to write for a public and centralise my personal tastes and views on this obsession of mine, avoiding the pretentions and lackadaisical attitudes that I feel have plague film writing, and in the case of how this project was started, make a lot of para-cinema and cult film writing incredibly conservative in mind and taste.  All films that have this piece at the top with have an ‘Abstract’ Rating and a personal score at the end. For more information on this peculiar scoring system, and what the ‘Cinema of the Abstract’ list is, follow this link – http://mubi.com/lists/cinema-of-the-abstract

------------------------------------------

From  http://vintage45.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/hitchthebirds.jpg

Intending to spark a relationship with bachelor Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), Melanie Daniels (‘Tippi’ Hedren) goes to Bodega Bay only for a bizarre natural phenomenon to start to take place. In one of Alfred Hitchcock’s many acclaimed films, the entire Bay becomes swarmed by the avian wildlife when it starts to act aggressively.

The story could easily have been made into a B-movie, not an insult to its original source story, the creators of the film, or B-movies themselves, but a recognition that this is very much a story part of the ‘nature attacks’ sub genre that has existed over the years and was usually made into lower budget genre films. Sadly it’s also the kind of premise that is usually made into a cheap and boring quickie. In this case however it was the project of a talented A-list director, going from his 1960 success Psycho, backed by a talented production team who treated the material seriously. What makes the results stand up, even outside Hitchcock’s filmography, is that for a viewer like me fifty or so years later it is such a psychologically twisting and unnerving work. It is a film that has had so many psychological interpretations to it, and the material itself is openly full of them itself to make the interpretations justifiable. Long before the birds make their impact, the uncomfortable triangle between Melanie, Mitch and his mother is established and has an immense effect on how the story is interpreted. Openly said not to be an Oedipal relationship, his relationship with his mother and her fear of being alone, causing her to distrust Melanie, creates an effect where the violent bird attacks are transformed into a manifestation of unnerving hostility. At one point a direct link between Hedren’s character and the avian attacks is made by a minor character, showing that the film, which is more of a mood piece than a narrative, is fully engaged in the deeper interpretations of the story as well as the shocks.

The characters are allowed to time to be established and fill out, helping the film immensely, but the birds attacks themselves, while dated in terms of effects, still carry a level abstractness and visceral effect which makes them disturbing. The very well known moments – the first seagull attack, the crows on the children’s jungle gym – and the use of hundreds of birds onscreen allows the film to be far superior to most animal attack films, but the technique of layering images on top of each other that allowed the filmmakers to make the film is used to create almost abstract images. The first major attack on Mitch’s house exemplifies this; most of the birds are clearly added into the scene in post production, but they cover the screen to the point it becomes a collage of talons and wings violently fluttering over the screen. This frenzied interpretation of the attacks, with aftermath results that are still shockingly bloody despite the era it was made in, gives the film a rawness that puts it above so many asinine takes on these ideas. I cannot help but evoke memories of Birds of Prey (1987), a Mexican-Spanish take on The Birds (or rip-off if one was to be callous or blunt about it) which had more carnage and violence, not to mention canaries and pigeons joining the ranks of the homicidal wildlife, but was far more comically hilarious and incompetent than frightening.

Also in favour of The Birds is its use of sound. What immediately caught my attention was how unnervingly quiet film was, an incidental score completely absent. Hitchcock’s long time collaborator Bernard Herrman took a credit as ‘sound consultant’, the closest to a sound score instead being the electronic bird noises created by Oskarr Sala and Remi Gassmann. Freakish in their pitch, the long absences of sound in the film causes the bird sounds to raise the hairs on your neck as you realise another attack is about to take place. The film is brilliantly directed, the acting performances are perfect for the narrative, but it’s the use of sound which creates the power of the film. Contrasted by the innocent and sweet songs of the two lovebirds introduced early in the narrative, the only avian life that does not become hostile, the electronic noises of everything else is almost demonic in tone, adding to the fantastical nature of the proceedings. And what makes this more significant is that, thinking about it, most of the other films I have seen dealing with killer animals had scores. Some worked, but many were incredibly tacky. This almost avant garde attitude to the creation of the film is for more effective.

The Birds is my tentative tip-toes into viewing more of Hitchcock’s films, but with this I have started with a potent and luridly brilliant start. It is, if you strip away the artistry, a solid B-movie in how the plot would be viewed in other circumstances. It is however a solid B-movie whose drama is fully formed and is allowed to push its central concepts to their fullest. The ending scene, without spoiling, has been in my thoughts since viewing it, such a quiet and yet disturbing final image, the creators taking could have been hooky material and turning it into a legitimately great film and almost a masterpiece of unconventional filmmaking hidden in mainstream cinema’s clothing. That Hitchcock also made seagulls frightening rather than something to laugh at goes to show how good this film is.

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low) – Low

Personal Rating – 10 out of 10

Essential Killing (2010)

Dir. Jerzy Skolimowski

Ireland-Hungary-Norway-Poland

IMDB Link - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1561768/

[Note – There will be one or two slight spoilers in this review, but not sufficient enough to give away major parts of the film. This warning is just to let you, the reader, know this before you continue in case you want to see this film completely cold without any knowledge on it at all instead]

Plot Synopsis

A political prisoner Mohammad (Vincent Gallo) escapes custody and finds himself within the snowbound environment of an unknown country. While avoiding the American soldiers who captured him, he is grounded down into a being purely intent on survival.

Background Information

While director Jerzy Skolimowski returned to making films with Four Nights with Anna (2008) - after 17 years of pursuing a career in painting (as well as acting in other films) - 2011 for the United Kingdom feels like the year that he has had a resurgence, with both the theatrical release of this film and the rediscovery (and the first DVD release of after years of praise) of his British production Deep End (1970). As a film viewer who has almost his entire filmography – except this film and The Shout (1978) – ahead of me to watch for the first time, I hope that this leads to an accessibility of his work.

Positives

The film effectively strips down the action film convention – the film is effectively an art house action film, something which delights me as action tropes can be profound if used right – of the escape scene to its barebones. Not only is the film’s length slight to most, although it felt long enough for me to feel complete, but the concern of Skolimowski is simply the desire of survival in such a situation. While it originated from a part of real life politics, that American soldiers were using an airstrip near his Polish home to transport Middle Eastern prisoners, Skolimowski purposely wanted to avoid making a political film. In the sole interview on the UK DVD, he suggested that Gallo’s character could either be a good man or a bad one, but the ambiguity of the character (and everyone else in the film) is writ large.

The result is a film where survival as a concept is the only subject. Many films involving escapes, more significantly the longer ones where characters are in a natural environment for a long duration, do not really take into account the potential issues people may face in such a predicament, but merely simplify it into avoiding the group of people (or person) after the character. Here, you have Gallo sticking his hand into an ant hill and licking the insects off his hand for sustenance, one of many images that I have rarely seen in other films. The issues of how one survives in this predicament are the most important aspect in the director’s film. The result is refreshing, enforced by Gallo’s performance. Never uttering anything throughout the film except noises, he does an admirable job as the individual followed throughout the whole film. That as an actor he put himself through a physically stressful shoot to make the film is admirable too.  His performance also enforces another aspect of why Essential Killing is as good as I think it is in that that the barrier between the ‘civilised’ human environments and the physically messy and primal natural wilderness is squashed; while he is still a human being, one who carries a handgun with him throughout and uses anything to assist his survive, Gallo on screen acts out an individual who has been forced to act out his animalistic side, where the primary emotions are pain, hungry and the desire to flee from danger. Gallo shows this succinctly in his performance, probably the result of the physical strain of the shoot, such as spending takes on camera walking in the snow bare footed or having to scramble through the woodland.

The portrayal of the environment and what the film looks like also breaks this barrier between the two sides. The film does look beautiful, its snowbound landscapes striking in appearance, but it is still wilderness, of dirt mixed with snow. Everything in the film feels this way – the violence is messier and physical objects and liquids have a murkier texture and appearance to them (not just blood but also including breast milk at one point). Even when a heavy metal track is being played in a vehicle Gallo tries to escape in, it is not a ‘clean’ sounding metal track but a mass of chaotic noises. Within the serene environments, a haphazard nature to every within it is shown that feels more realistic but also adds artistically to the issue of survival within the narrative.

Final Thoughts

Essential Killing is a highlight for me for 2011, a year which promises to be one of the best but I have been slow to catch up with in terms of new releases. Even if I had seen a lot more films though, this one would still be near the top and a near-perfect film bar one or two small issues. Since its premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival, a small but growing amount of critical praise surrounded the film has lead me to become more and more excited about seeing it, and now having viewed it, it didn’t disappoint at all. As I’ve already said at the beginning of the review, I hope from this year onwards there will be a push for Jerzy Skolimowski’s work to be more available in Britain, as I wait in anticipation to see Deep End at least by the end of December. It’s also a bookmark in both the current trend of ‘art house’ cinema meeting genre and of the more pronounced trend of 2011 in director’s subverting and playing with said genre conventions, both in mainstream blockbusters and underground works (my top and bottom list is bursting with these sorts of films already despite being small). This one lives up to the ‘essential’ of its title.