(No Longer A) Mini-Review: Pitfall (1962)

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Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara

Japan

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Pitfall is a fitting follow-up from Death Laid An Egg (1968), two political films with abstract tones. But Pitfall’s politics, set within miner’s strikes and evoking the post WWII political strife of Japan, is more upfront, and while Death Laid An Egg is a testament to technical skill and unconventional editing, Pitfall is a completely lyrical piece. A man is killed by an unknown male dressed completely in white, watching on at everything that takes places as a newly born ghost and wanting to know why he was murdered. In ninety minutes, the debut of Hiroshi Teshigahara manages to develop a full, fascinating narrative whose mysterious tone, questions left unanswered, makes it more compelling and emphasises a bitter political commentary that can be seen within its allegory. But Pitfall is more than this, to be expected from a director whose next film after this was Woman In The Dunes (1964).

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For the most part, even at its goriest, perverted and questionable, Japanese cinema is calmer, considered and methodical in tone than their Western counterparts, the sense of contemplation emphasised in Buddhist and Shinto belief, as well as their other types of art, explicitly practiced. Even the exceptions, like director Shinya Tsukamoto, have embraced this tone for certain works when it seems appropriate, even melding it with the contrasting, more violently toned mood within the same film. Pitfall is as much about its visual and audio texture as its content. Teshigahara’s film, shot in deep focus, rich monochrome, is of sweat, blood, grains of sand or mud, the sodden shirts and skin of the characters in the hot sun festishistic and yet real, showing layers to human beings physically we take for granted. The story’s ominous tone, written by Kôbô Abe, is emphasised by this aesthetic of liquids and substances, natural or not, being graphically lensed, the murder that pushes the film into its more supernatural territory having a more impactful tone for the mess created to the participants and the pond land it takes place in. Even in animation, Japan and its countless artists have emphasised the small details of life like this, from the famous rainfall of Seven Samurai (1954) to their obsession with cicadas and their noisy cries, offering a view of terrain, natural or manmade, that pushes the cinematic image further than films made in other countries. This methodical, contemplative tone causes you to think about the content more and gives it greater impact on the viewer. It is filtered through a percussion heavy, unconventional score by Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi and Tôru Takemitsu that is comparable to Death Laid An Egg. In contrast to Guilio Questi’s film though – a Godardian genre piece steeped in baroque gestures and chique aesthetics – the score set over the naturalistic, supernatural Pitfall is more gradual, less tense and underscoring the mood rather than about to break out in frenzies compared to Death Laid An Egg, whose score perfectly matches a more lurid take on murder and the noises of hundreds of chickens in a battery farm together. As the ghosts of an abandoned village merely drift along like ethereal mannequins, the ordinary industrial countryside of rock quarries and mines becomes more fantastical, the border between the living and the dead only existing because the ghosts cannot be heard or seen. The actions of the mysterious man in white, and what entails, evokes a scathing damnation of how the Japanese public may have been treated by their government, a message like with Death Laid An Egg’s that is more potent in this current recession, while also still being the machinations beyond such petty reality, white the colour of death in Eastern culture and the man comparable to Death itself in his on-looking nature.

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I have only seen two of Teshigahara’s films, already mentioned by title in this review. There is still The Face of Another (1966), science fiction on the concept of identity, his later work, and a visual essay-like documentary on the work of architect Antonio Gaudí. I want to see them all. Once Pitfall was a mere curio from the British DVD company Masters of Cinema, unfortunately so out of print now it sells for silly money; now it’s far and away more necessary and greater in its slight but rich ninety minutes than more known films. On rewatches you realised how lucky you were to have watched some films for the first time many years ago, even when you hated them then, and like fine wine, some like Pitfall become superior to others in every way. You realise what you ingested with your eyes and ears back then, when you couldn’t even appreciate a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie properly as an adolescent let along a complex, lyrical film like this, and enjoy it while being grateful for being older, even in your early twenties, to be able to appreciate it now. 

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Grilled Fried Proletariat (Death Laid An Egg (1968))

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Dir. Giulio Questi

France-Italy

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The line between the lurid and avant-garde blurs with Italian genre films. Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) showed this, the film, for an improvised double bill, that I watched before Death Laid An Egg for a night’s viewing, a fitting signpost before the discordance of this one. Giulio Questi has an incredibly slight filmography, really only consisting of this, the infamous Django Kill! If You Live...Shoot! (1967) and experimental shorts that he has been making more recently at his own home, all of which I need to get around to. Death Laid An Egg however is a film that I have been wanting to see for years since I first heard about it from Mondo Movie, one of the first (and still one of the best) cult film podcasts in existence. The title sequence of Questi’s film, of chicken eggs being ovulated and chicken foetuses set to an abstract noise score, instantly sets up how confrontational and divisive it will be. Only a few will like it, but it lived up to its reputation for the bizarre fully.

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Death Laid An Egg is not what you would view as a typical giallo, which became more popular during the seventies, more closer to a politically layer story of greed and deceit...that just happens to be set in the poultry industry. Jean-Louis Trintignant, a face for cinema if any on the silver screen, is the husband of a rich woman (Gino Lollobrigida) who owns a chicken farm, a man with a peculiar sexual perversity. His wife Anna becomes suspicious of him while her cousin Gabrielle (the blonde, waif-like beauty Ewa Aulin) may be far less innocent then she acts to be. Eventually the strands connect together by the film’s end, but Questi’s film, edited and co-written by Franco Arcalli, is clearly designed to wrong foot the viewer from the beginning, to unsettle and attack them. I have heard it being compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End (1967), and it is not close to that film in tone, but is just as abrasive. You are kept back from the characters, by their cold personalities or questionable attitudes, and the reality of the film is, a critique capitalist Italy of the time in an absurdist genre movie, is that literally, as some illustrations show, the chickens seen crammed in Anna’s mechanised battery farm are us. The human characters are victims of their vices or trapped in their repetitious lives. The constant clucking and shifting head movements of trapped chickens is no different from Trintignant’s awkward body language as he goes from place to place. That the film goes as far as having mutant chickens – a plot point I will not go any further with to not spoil – emphasises this idea in an intentionally ridiculous way. With the tone of an episode of the British series Brasseye (1997), which had a similar idea as a joke in one episode, the weirdness of this sequence adds to the coldness of the business, willing to break moral boundaries, as well as potentially showing what the people could become if they let themselves stay in their predicaments.

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With a cold, distant look, the film is not accessible, but is striking. Utterly strange, its political message seems more noticeable. The atonal noises of the score by Bruno Maderna, percussion going on its own new rhythms and trying to harm the listener on purpose, chips away at conventionality while the editing breaks time structure so that numerous periods and moments can exist within the same minute of each other. You will be baffled by it, maybe laugh at the mutant chickens, but you realise Death Laid An Egg is a genre film being intentionally strange for impact, its world of industry and the middle class extravagance completely peculiar and off to be trustable or to be populated by anyone vaguely human except the skittish Trintignant trying to understand what is going on around him. It is an art film with a capital A but its pretensions make it the stronger and more a true cult film than if you were expected the usual blood and nudity. It’s something the Surrealist movement would have praised if it wasn’t only made in the Sixties after them.

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Mini-Review: Terminator Woman (1993)

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Dir. Michel Qissi

USA

Unfortunately most films made are a waste of time, and when they have covers that suggest something rewarding, that fact stings more. I don’t even know why it’s Terminator Woman, except to cash in on James Cameron’s films, as science fiction or heavy metal lyric connotations the title has are nonexistent in this martial arts thriller. Sent over to Africa to transport a witness against the international villain Alex Gatelee (Michel Qissi), LA police partners Julie (Karen Sheperd) and Jay (Jerry Trimble) find themselves under fire. Both martial artists, Julie is kidnapped and attempts to escape while Jay, with the assistance of a boy called Charlie (Siphiwe Mlangeni) goes to get her back from Gatelee, a hidden plunder of gold bars in the centre of the web alongside the witness.

The film has two good virtues. Set in Africa, the environment in look and palette adds a unique difference to an otherwise conventional martial arts film from the United States. Karen Sheperd also stands out; while the fights are slower and less creative than their Asian counterparts, she does well as a prescience onscreen. Aside from that Terminator Woman is merely mediocre and forgettable. It pretty much goes to its expected conclusion without any real surprise to it, and Jerry Trimble, with a dated hairstyle, really does not stand out as a lead. That the cover and title is trying to sell Sheperd, the giant chunk of the narrative he takes up as the lead, without any sense of him commanding it whatsoever, makes him more incongruous. Even an abrupt, but amusing, sequence with dirt bikes cannot make Terminator Woman worth its ninety one minutes. 

African policemen are armed with crossbows to stop crime. I've only noticed this now, but its completely obvious in this screencap.
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Videotape Swapshop Review: Street Fighter (1994)

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Dir. Steven E. de Souza

Japan-USA

The final review for the March-ial Arts Month for Videotape Swapshop, and in contrast to Mortal Kombat (1995), this is the review of the nineties adaptation of its arcade machine rival with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Street Fighter won, but the reasons why are in the review.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/13327/street-fighter-%E2%80%93-1994-director-steven-e-de-souza/

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Must Know The Meaning of Plus (Alphaville (1965))

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Dir. Jean-Luc Godard

France-Italy

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Jean-Luc Godard was once the most overrated director for me. Unlike the drastic change of mind, for the positive, I had for the films of Luis Buñuel, which has effectively changed my viewpoints of cinema completely in the last year or so, the change of mind for Godard has been slow and gradual while still as important. Even when I hated Godard for the most part, I still watched as many films as I could of his as a completists and a fan of cinema trying to figure out his acclaim was to cinema viewers, going as far as viewing Week End (1967), a film I despised once, six times even if the first four viewings were painful. As I saw the virtues in his work, I realised, with my growing maturity, how complex, brilliantly made and legitimately intelligent his work was. I even prefer his post-Week End work which has been dismissed as pretentious but is that of a veteran at the top of his craft, even when making a minute long short which has the soundtrack from a tennis match spliced into it. Amongst all the Godard films and shorts I still need to see, countless in number, I need to rewatch many films that I had dismissed before, especially the pre-Week End works that made his name.

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Using the pre-existing character Lenny Caution (Eddie Constantine), Alphaville is a science fiction film in which Caution, posing as a reporter, enter the titular city to bring back a professor to the Lands Without, only to see that the city is run by Alpha 60, a sentient computer who has removed “illogical” behaviour, human emotions such as love, sadness and joy, from the populous under the belief of the greater good. Upfront, Alphaville is drastically different from conventional sci-fi dystopia films with similar premises made now, even to later Godard films with precise, directorial styles to them. Alphaville was partly improvised and even the parts that may have been carefully planned out feel the same way to, low budget and stark in tone even with a rich plot to it, drastically pushing itself away from what would be expected from it. Using Paris itself at the time as the setting for the dystopia, most of the film’s science fiction is unshown ideas, background details and comments that have to be imagined in the viewer’s head. The gritty, darkly lit locations works effectively for the premise, but the concepts must be added to the film by imagination; terms like “The Lands Without”, cities like “Tokyorama” or “Cinerama museums” must be conjured up by the viewer rather than presented to you already visually. Then there is the core idea of how Alpha 60’s logic destroys the humanity in people, presented through Anna Karina as Natacha von Braun, beautiful but a cold vessel from a metropolis where crying is punishable by death and where the question “Why?” is replaced with “because”. Caution becomes enamoured by her and does what he can to break down the behaviour she has been givem. Very much a genre film rather than Godard’s more essay-like works, it expresses its story background and ideas through the mood of a noir film with a trench coat wearing hero, a femme fatale and questions left unknown.

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It does show though, quite early on in his career, where Godard would go, not alien from the old master who made Film socialisme (2010) decades later with manipulation of words, visuals and sound throughout it. Sadly the version I viewed of Alphaville did not subtitle a part of it that I would have immensely taken a lot from – a series of diagrams that manipulate images and words that Alpha 60 monologues over in his omnipresent, deep, electronically aided voice – but the breaking down of standard conventions of narrative and structure Godard is famous for is here and allows him, like in his other work, to place idea after idea within pockets and gaps within the main film. Alphaville works as a sci-fi story immensely, but cannot be viewed in terms of a conventional film, missing the point to how it alters its narrative trappings subtly and abstractly. What could be viewed as logic or plot gaps, like for me in the first viewing of this film years ago, turn out to be gaps Godard put in there on purpose so the viewer would start thinking about how and why they watch the film. Of course, Godard is clearly passionate for the pulpy storytelling and the aesthetics of “coolness”, Constantine’s grizzled looks sitting well in a world of blackened streets, guns and smoking, but what prevents it from being a dated European arthouse film from the Sixties is that Godard takes advantage of the dormant science fiction writer inside him to his advantage in probing views of humanity and what society means. Logic by itself creates a dictatorship where art is lost, perceived to be for the better by higher-ups, and language is watered down as words are banned from the dictionary. Even the cinema, in a brief anecdote, Godard’s obsession, becomes a place where illogical people are put into and killed on mass through electric shocks. The film is a melding of real ideas of politics, pulp storytelling, grim social commentary and science fiction as a vessel for “what-if” scenarios. By its end, Alphaville emphasises how this tangential mass of pieces in his work, once a great flaw for me, is in fact his greatest virtue as a director.

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Mini-Review: Family (2001)

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Dir. Takashi Miike

Japan

I am a huge fan of Miike, but I realise that from a self proclaimed director-for-hire the massive output and the variety of formats he works in could lead to an erratic filmography. Sat between truly great films like Audition (1999) and Ichi The Killer (2001) is this work, bizarrely split onto two discs as two eighty or so minute films. A manga adaptation about warring yakuza, backstabbing and a budget large enough to afford a tank and a water-ski shootout, Family has the traces of all that makes Miike interesting. Brothers from a family broken into pieces by yakuza in different areas of the crime underground, a viewpoint from minorities in Japan, and a female character who is a Christian. Unfortunately it is an exceptionally dull story. Nothing in the film is inherently original or of interest, worsened by the technical quality. It is filmed on a cheap digital camera, which looks awful; Miike can use digital to his advantage, such as the probing of the image and voyeurism in Visitor Q (2001), but here it makes everything sparse and lacking. Miike also sadly continues the trend of using generic heavy metal music, at pointless loud volumes, over sequences that comes off as noise, surprising when he is very adept in his sound and music track choices.

It is a slug to get through both parts. It also makes the more gruelling sequences, such as a prolonged rape scene starting with molestation with feet, dubious. I will defend Miike over stuff like this, especially since he always, even in lurid genre works, makes such sequences discomforting and prevents the viewer from being able to shrug them off as merely sequences, but Miike needs to have made a good film around such sequences to prevent them from being merely tasteless, the result of which adds depth to them or sticks a metaphorical knife in the viewer’s brain to startle them. Since this is a poor film, barring some experiments with sound and image, such sequences just come off as pointlessly offensive, not helped by the fact that, while Miike is known for improvising or changing his scripts and stories during filmmaking, he is dependent on scripts being good or having something of interest for him to run with like many other directors. Family as a whole has no sense of Miike being fully engaged with it. It was made between some of his best work, showing this is a minor blip in his filmmaking, but unfortunately it is one of those true mistakes in a director’s filmography that discolours it. It is not an interesting failure one can learn to appreciate or actually love, by itself or in context of an auteur, but something so rudimentary you don’t want to own it even if it means a gap in the filmmography of one of your favourite directors.

Videotape Swapshop Review: Out for Justice (1991)

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Dir. John Flynn

USA

Another review for Videotape Swapshop, and part of the ongoing story of my complicated relationship with Steven Segal.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/13089/out-for-justice-%E2%80%93-1991-director-john-flynn/

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