Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (Dirs. Kwang-Chi Tu* and Rene Vienet, 1973)

From  http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/candialectics.jpg 

The follow film is an addition to my list ‘Cinema of the Abstract’. 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

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Taking a martial arts film called The Crush (1972) and redubbing it into comedic take on Socialist/Communist ideology, this depicts its struggle against corruption of its ideas and capitalism through the fight sequences of East Asian cinema while playing it up for humour. A Korean martial arts dojo, represented as a utilitarian dream of left wing socialists, is threatened by Japanese gangsters, representing bureaucrats, who threaten to stomp down their subversive activities to liberate the proletariat. Entering in the middle of this is the lone stranger skilled in his technique of martial arts, who finds himself between protecting his comrades and the offers of corrupt ideology.

The idea is on paper inspired and hilarious – evoking images of a proletariat crane kicking a capitalist while quoting Karl Marx at the same time – all the while using a genre which, while full of art, is full of work merely churned for capitalist gain, to project alternative ideas in an entertaining and more vivid way. Under an American view, despite the French dubbing and left wing European target audience, this is even more subversive, a Grindhouse staple, grounded through cheap cinemas in places like 42^nd Street in New York for profit, being used to fight such an idea while fitting the ideologies common in East Asian martial arts cinema of the bond and unity in martial arts schools and fighting for the downtrodden. The trope of good versus evil almost always existing in this genre is used to its least expected. (That this original film, from my small research, concerns Korean characters does misses a chance on the creator’s part considering the spreading of Maoism, the communist ideology of China, was significant in left wing politics not a lot of years before this film’s making, and likely** still as preached in 1972, but the idea still works as it is). I will openly admit that I did not get a lot of the references, and many won’t, including references to books of socialist ideas and the Structralist movement director Rene Vienet was part of which almost becomes a list the viewer must go and read after the film, but the idea could still work. The fact that the words ‘Castro’ and ‘comrade’ heard in the least expected places of cinema could illicit an amused grin from almost anyone, especially fans of the genre, helps the idea, and if done properly it would be a subversive and original experience. Using a technique (detorument) which is mostly used now for only comedic purposes, redubbing pre-existing cinematic material to create new messages, Vienet and his cast of voice actors had the ability to both project a left wing message and also play with cinematic form. A genre where dubbing is synonymous with its history and helped by it to its popularity, whether we purists who prefer original language soundtracks to our DVD copies will admit it or not, this concept the creators took doesn’t jar with the genre, but the material they decide to add to it (and admittedly for me, hearing actors of the genre dubbed in French with subtitles in a rare viewing experience) distorts the concept of layering dialogue on real individual’s mouths. As with any object, film can be manipulated into any different shape from what it was originally if someone else has an idea for its new form and the desire to do so; hell, this idea could be done if one mutes a martial arts film and ad-libs new dialogue for it, far from a flippant remark on my part but how it is possible for anyone to subvert something from what it was.

Sadly the actual results on this viewing do not live up to the premise. One of the biggest issues with works which re-use existing film material is the quality of said material for the purpose of the subject and how it is used, especially when the visual images are the original film with the changes completely vocal. The original film The Crush, if the material seen without the original script is enough, is okay for being manipulated for this idea but is frankly a generic piece of churned out material. This might not have been a problem, especially considering its redundant nature is played up to, if the contribution of the French creators the project fully relies on were on ball...which is not the case with a subpar contribution by Vienet into this melting pot. There are moments of interest and humour – the use of Socialist phrases for the first few times, the references to the film’s own artificiality – but a lot of it is both unfunny and insightful for a film trying to communicate very important politics through laughter. I will not comment on the ideological references I did not get, which is not the fault of the film but viewing a work catered to a very specific audience originally, but the rest of its script is deeply lazy and pointless crass with its constant use of swear words in the subtitles. It is important to say that there are multiple versions of the film available, including dubbed, and the translating of dialogue from one language to another is full of complexities that could be problematic, but it feels clear that most of the script is characters talking about destroying capitalism and swearing at bureaucrats’ ad-nauseum until it becomes incredibly tedious. Occasional use of crassness, including jokes about child sexuality that wouldn’t fly now but add to the subversive nature of the film, would make sense as crudity, and a well time use of words like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’, can be incredibly powerful tools to undermine and provoke ideas, as well as generate belly laughs, but like a lot of bad and cringeworthy examples of this humour in cinema, it is not very well used in the first place, and that’s not taking into account of it being over relied upon throughout the whole running time.

The result is disappointing, especially with an idea this inspired. It’s worse when, as a work provoking socialist ideas of the time, and facing right wing attacks back throughout the globe, this French work would be a miserable failure in my mind to try and convert people to fight for their fellow working man against corrupt businessmen. As a botched attempt on such a funny idea, it also commits the crime of wasting great comedic material. All there is left a peculiar experiment that could have been something special in another existence.

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low) – Low

Personal Rating – 4 out of 10

* There is a discrepancy with original director of the film The Crush. This is the person listed on IMDB, but a site known as the Hong Kong Movie Database lists the director as Tu Guang-Qi (http://hkmdb.com/db/movies/view.mhtml?id=5325&display_set=eng). This complication found with information gives someone like me an immense headache, so I will warn you about this in case the information is wrong.

** My knowledge of Maoism’s history is equivalent to a goldfish’s knowledge of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, which I am just as terrible with, so forgive this uneducated minnow if this is completely wrong.

If you still want to see this film despite this review, it can be legally streamed (and downloaded) from the site UBU.com – http://www.ubu.com/film/vienet_dialectics.html. The quality of the material is terrible, but it is still watchable, and considering the obscurity of the film, it is always better to be able to actually see it than not see it. Also note that the version you see is supposed to be black and white. The original version may be in colour but this does not affect the central idea of the film at all.

I advise anyone to look on UBU, as for any film fan it contains countless experiment and avant garde works available legally to see. Again, the visual quality of many of them is adequate, but it is a trove as rare works and ones you likely have never heard of but will fascinate and delight after their viewing.

Addition - The follow review by Jonathan Rosenbaum adds a lot but also suggests that the version I watched was a recreation of the original work, adding to its improvised nature - http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=6675

Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (Jan Svankmajer, 2010)

Since I discovered the short films of the Czeck filmmaker Jan Svankmajer in college, borrowed from the private stash of DVDs in the office of the Film Studies tutors, I can say he is one of my cherished filmmakers.  Having seen all the other shorts and films, the through line from the famous short works to long form movies is a fascinating progression. One of the best living animation directors, his knowledge of traditional techniques (puppetry, stop motion etc) is matched by a distinct use of everyday objects – toys, wood, metal, animal bones, even pieces of meat – that are moved and crafted in ways that pushes the films into the areas of texture as well as sight and sound, allowing the viewer to ‘feel’ them by their nature and the grain and details you can see. This trademark, through decades of shorts, was combined with various types of ideas, from adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe and fairytales to satire, and his idiosyncratic obsessions such as childhood to food and the act of eating, the later the result of digestive issues as a child, and the attempts to fix it by doctors, that made him fascinated and disgusted by them. (Going into a Svankmajer work, you will both see food as a beautiful substance and utterly vile, which Surviving Life continues with the new addition of projectile vomit.) With his first feature film Alice (1988), Svankmajer would incorporate live action, but not in just having actors in front of the screen but having them being as much figures for the director to animate as well as actual people. Svankmajer incorporated this in short films, 1983’s Down To The Cellar a predecessor of his debut Alice, but after he started to concentrate on feature films, this has become a central part of his work. With Lunacy (2005), the film before Surviving Life, the live action would have completely taken over were it not for the continuous scenes of animated cow tongues that are intercut between plot points. With Surviving Life, Svankmajer’s fanbase is either met with an experimental tangent from his previous films, his bitterly humorous opening monologue to the camera introducing the film as a result of a lack of money for production, or a potentially new direction for the next decade.

Created using cut-and-paste photographic images, ‘like old children’s cartoons’ as the director compares it to in the opening introduction, Surviving Life follows an older man Eugenie whose life is punctuated by dreams of a beautiful, red dressed woman whose name continually changes and exists in a dream reality which continually fluxes out of his hands. Becoming a patient for a psychoanalytic doctor, and delving into other methods of guiding  his dreams, he tries to understand the images he sees every time he sleeps.

The plot sounds quite common and paradoxically, this is the closest for me yet Svankmajer has gotten to a ‘conventional’ story - including the layer of clues and images you discover on a second viewing - but is one of his least conventional works in a filmography that would be viewed as abstract against traditional views of animation. The cut-up images that make up the entire film, spliced with live action moments (usually close ups of intricate actions or gestures), is incredibly different from what I have encountered in cinema. If anyone, like I did as a child, used to cut out images from magazines or comics and either moved them about like toys, or spliced pieces of them together to create new ones, this is what the entirety of Surviving Life feels like, only taking to it to an entire feature length film, from the background to most of the moments, being created from two dimension images cut out and finished digitally on computers.

This style of animation has been used by Svankmajer previously, including outside his film work, but here it is allowed to breathe out into this entire construction. The results are surreal, human beings and their photographic copies alive and mixed with a story where dreams are in the centre of the narrative. As he describes in a making-of for the UK DVD, Svankmajer has played with the concept of dreams in his filmography, but this is the first one where they are the central subject. With this, expect Freudian images of everything from eggs to flowers, giant hands coming out of windows to drag bystanders up to their doom, a dog with a suited office worker’s body, and an entire film where reality and the dreams, while separated, still bleed into each other, continuing Svankmajer’s message at the start of the film, through quotation, of how only by combining the both of them together can a human being be full. The result is unconventional even for animation, incredibly creative with its imagination and technical production, and with a wonderful sense of disgracefulness in Svankmajer’s old age, a newly acquired sense of vulgarity that did not even come out in Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), his take on sexual fetishes, but erupts in this wonderfully in its sex obsessed, puke filled, poodle fucking mentality filtered through the obsessions with childhood, food and the fantastical. This may have started in Lunacy, with its combination with the Marquis de Sade with stories by Edgar Allen Poe, but while that film was serious in its takes of blasphemy and of the concepts of freedom, the self proclaimed follower of Surrealist Art Svankmajer has properly added a sliver of crudity to his repertoire with Surviving Life and uses it perfectly. The film is also abstract in that, it does not only look at dreams but incorporates psychology. My knowledge of the area is slim, but my small reading is enough for me to realise that this adds further complicated strands to the plot. The plot is incredibly obvious by its ending but by invoking the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, personifying their real life combative and disagreeing views of psychology through living portraits which fight each other, Surviving Life introduces layers that, while very easy to grasp, cause the scenes you see to take on new and peculiar lights to them.

Upon watching this and Lunacy this year, I realise I am biased for Jan Svankmajer, but it’s through his skill of an animator and as a creative figure, still able to create such imaginative and stimulating work after fifty years or so since his first projects. To step into a Svankmajer film, while part of a rich culture of animation (especially European animation), is to encounter a truly unique voice, driven as much by ideas behind the images as by the creations on screen. Surviving Life combines a full narrative with this, as seen in his other features, and gets the best of both worlds. That it is also humorous and, by its ending, deeply poignant also adds to its quality.

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low) – High

Personal Rating – 10 out of 10

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

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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

Things (Dir. Andrew Jordan, 1989)

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

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From  https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeVIXiKa163tqV31_ASQM-FlgW43XJy6-9FhwdUL2hYt4hC3rDoy-Bkep7MLhjAMoYt2SWHU2nRNQDNBP-ndJDiCv9VXhRROyX7kgpHtpSeqilolhUZpj-UAs668ggyZXKq2LqVUP91es/s1600/things+1989+screen+cap.jpg

There must be a cautionary comment before this review starts that this will be a completely subjective rather than critical review. Up front, Things would be categorised as one of the worst films I have seen if viewed through the traditional quality scale of cinema. This review will however take a different turn that goes against this critical way of viewing films. I have drifted into a new direction with all the films I’ve seen since July 2012, but here this new mindset will go to its furthest length. If you want to see this film, it has to be viewed from different terms to find enjoyment and appreciation for it, particularly the view of these films that horror and cult film fans have (who may know of this film and be reading this review). Do not treat Things as cheap laugh or you will be incredibly baffled and hostile to it after the end credits.

Taking in what I could get from Things in terms of a plot, this Canadian straight-to-video piece of infamy starts with two men visiting the brother of one of them. What they realise however once they’re there is that the brother’s wife has been involved in an experimental fertility treatment that causes her to birth the titular ‘things’, giant ant-like creatures with piranha teeth that devour anyone in their sights. What you need to realise however is that this film not only has scant interaction with this plot but seems to be running away from its plot as far as possible  if it had been done on purpose. It would be avant-garde if it actually intended to alienate its viewers. The reality is that it wasn’t supposed to.

Made by two friends independently (director and co-writer Andrew Jordan and co-writer/star Barry J. Gillis) this is the cheapest looking and technically flawed film I have seen in a long time, most of its Super 8 filmed footage, because of the lack of sound with the material, silent until sound and dialogue was added in post-production. Viewed on an intentionally muddy DVD release to recreate its VHS origins (or maybe because the surviving source materials are videotape), many will be horrified (in the wrong way) by its lack of conventional production value, almost all set in a single house and almost completely lit in low-fi, bleeding red and blue lights that blur the images even more. The notorious reason why this obscure Canuxploitation film has gained a growing cult is its complete (and accidental) disregard for the concept of plotting, pace and the idea of film as a narrative story. The first half of the film consists of the three main characters talking about random topics and wandering around the house’s kitchen and living room – drinking beer, eating cockroach sandwiches, and noticing the once lost ‘Devil’s Daughter’  painting by Salvador Dali on a wall and a tape recorder in the fridge. And those last two aspects barely skim the odd moments which have nothing to do with the final narrative. The whole first half has little to do with the plot and may last between 30-40 minutes or most of the 85 minute film. When the ‘things’ do enter the fray the film descends further from its plotting, between moments of visceral gore and trauma dealt to the rubbery ant creatures, with scene of the characters looking around that can last many minutes, causing me to feel I was blending into the blood red lit walls. The 4^th, 5^th and 6^th dimension is even broken without it ever being referred back to.

Now, this sounds like a complete damnation of Things, but this is where my subjective and personal opinion comes in. If I had seen this when I was much younger, when I followed the concept of what ‘great’ cinema was through mainstream film magazines and canon lists, I would have despised this. What has happened now however is that, having taken a Film Studies course at college for A Levels and learn cinematic grammar, I have started to break down the ideas I have been given into my own opinions. To put it in a less pretentious way, it has made truly great films even greater but it has allowed me to cherish films like Things and even view them as artistically more creative and subversive in their failure than more better made movies. I was bored in parts of Things, continually dumbfounded by the directions it went, but never felt I had wasted 85 minutes of my life. In fact I am charmed by its ineptness and was never un-stimulated by it throughout the first viewing. Even the moments of boredom bring a smile on my face thinking back to it.

Yes it is a technical failure, but in not following the rules of how a film ‘should’ be made, it is a breath of fresh air to see after so many bland, ‘properly made’ ones. ‘Bad’ cinema can be far more interesting than merely being ‘guilty pleasures’ or ‘so-bad-they’re-good films’, but as legitimately abstract and creative in their mishaps and production hiccups. I have heard about the members of the original Surrealist Movement in the early 20^th century going to see bad films, not for cheap laughs, but because they saw their failings as undermining conventions and puncturing the realities of film to create dream-like effects, something that has become more potent for me just by viewing films for the interest of them. This is rare - most bad films are a waste of celluloid, usually for me examples of why sticking faithfully to clichés and bland story writing can make whole genres of cinema landfills despite their great films – but through one’s personal tastes and opinions we can all find movies which we are attached to  despite being viewed as terrible creations. This is not something that only exists for die hard film fans either, as when someone is attached to a film knowing it’s usually viewed in contempt but not only doesn’t sees it as a bad film, but finds enjoyment in it being a ‘bad’ film and being different from everything else. (For example, this is likely why Plan 9 From Outer Place (1959) is as loved as it is despite its reputation.) Legitimate avant-garde cinema is known for practicing what would be ‘terrible’ cinematic practices on purpose (like Jean-Luc Godard’s famous jump cuts in Breathless (1960)) to question and play with the form, and if anyone was to use aspects of Things on purpose, I would argue that the results would be legitimately great and fascinating cinema. Things itself is a memorable and constantly engaging film even in moments of boredom because you have no idea where it will go, utterly charming in its oddness if judged by its own perimeters. Things complete displacement from a narrative and a point to its existence, for example for myself as a viewer, is hilariously inspired in hindsight to viewing so many films that are handicapped by the idea of cinema as a story. The first half even reminded me of Andy Warhol’s The Nude Restaurant (1967), a semi-strange work that is people just talking for its whole length, if recreated as a home movie of Canadians drinking beer for hours and speaking the first things that come to their minds.

And of more importance to why this is loved by a small fanbase, that I will now add myself to, is because this is whole done within a film that can glad be put in the category of ‘weird’ cinema amongst the higher budgeted and more acclaimed occupants. The post-synch sound and video grain already creates a ghostly, Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009)-like effect on the movie, but starting with an opening scene, basement set dream sequence of an undressing demon woman with a rubber, budget store mask on is a perfect warning to the viewer of how the homemade cheapness and the peculiar choices of its creators have melded together in one strange viewing experience. This does not take into account the video inserts of a news reporter (porn star Amber Lynn) who is almost an omnipresent narrator who has no connection to the events in the main setting, and at one point talks about the director George A Romero trying to get back the copyright back to Night of The Living Dead (1968) and is never uttered about again. Things does have a narrative conclusion but how it gets to it has no interest in going from A to Z but rather from A to a completely different and made-up alphabet.

The results will test many, but someone who is familiar with this film or has a taste in viewing ‘bad’ cinema has the right mentality to get the most from it. This is the kind of film that, if viewed properly, becomes ‘good’ cinema for either a) how unique it is regardless of being a failure, b) a charm and sincerity to what you see, or c) pushes itself into a groove that baffles and amazes at the same time. Things ticks all three boxes, a personal project funded out of the creators own resourcefulness that, for its mistakes, has a lot more to love and appreciate than other films. Just remember to get yourself in the right mood to view, maybe bring some beer with you, and avoid the growing number of giant ant-like creatures that will appear from the television after putting the DVD disc or VHS in....

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low) – High

Personal Rating – 7 out of 10