Category: film

I seem to return to this short film every few years. Guy Maddin made it for a Canadian film festival. Twenty-two years ago, now. It’s under seven minutes long, and acts as a perfect distillation of a sector of Maddin’s interests as well as being a wonderful thing in its own right.

I first heard of Guy Maddin – and this dates me – in PSYCHOTRONIC VIDEO MAGAZINE. PSYCHOTRONIC was the magazine we read to learn about the films we’d never get to see, and that’s where I learned of TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL, complete with still photos. I was mesmerised just by the idea of the thing, the ideas in the thing and the images stolen from it. It took me until 2020 to own a copy, I think.

There is now an archive of forty scanned issues of PSYCHOTRONIC available online, which I will be diving into soon.

I suspect I’m going to put Maddin’s THE FORBIDDEN ROOM up on the big screen later. A film that’s still hard to find on digital media, but Amazon Prime Video has it at the moment.

Apparently I started a text file in April 2021 about some films I watched that month, and then didn’t do anything with it, so I’m putting it up here so I can find it later:

Daïchi Saïto – earthearthearth (2021)

“The expansive mountainscapes of the Andes are the basis for this new, 35mm film by Daïchi Saïto, who won the 2016 Tiger Award for Short Films with Engram of Returning. Once again propelled by the free, pulsating improvisation of saxophonist Jason Sharp, in which his heartbeat and breathing play a prominent role, the series of images slowly becomes more abstract. The end result is a hypnotic, sensory meditation on ‘our’ earth.”

Matthew Barney – Drawing Restraint 9 (2005)

“Drawing Restraint 9, a film by Matthew Barney with a soundtrack composed by Björk, represents the first creative collaboration of two of the most protean, dynamic forces in music and fine art.

“It is an apt pairing. Refusing to choose between pop pleasure and restless experimentation, Björk’s musical vision weds technology and emotion, countering gut-level expression with an insistence upon formal modernity and innovation.

“Similarly poised, and celebrated, within the world of contemporary art as Björk is within her own field, Matthew Barney is a visual artist whose ambitious, rigorous multimedia work encodes esoteric meanings while providing lushly immediate aesthetic rewards. Best known for The Cremaster Cycle, the sprawling sequence of five films made over ten years which was the subject of a recent Guggenheim retrospective, Matthew Barney’s work is multimedia in execution but singularly focused in conception: tightly unified fusions of sculpture, performance, architecture, set design, music, computer generated effects and prosthetics, Barney’s films deploy the full range of cinematic resources in the service of a hermetic vision rich with densely layered networks of meaning drawn from mythology, history, sports, music, and biology.”

Johann Lurf – Star – 2018 assemblage

“A film that defies easy explanation, ★ is filmmaker Johann Lurf’s inventive examination of how outer space has been portrayed in movies.

“You don’t have to be a scientist to find space fascinating. Few things in the universe have enthralled, perplexed, and inspired such a diverse group of people, from astronomers and philosophers to artists and ordinary people walking at night. Artists were so inspired by the heavens that they created artwork of celestial objects — even when you see a “photo” of other planets and stars, it is often an artist’s rendering. Lurf playfully shows how cinema turned the stars into endless metaphors, dreams, and warm blankets. There is no story or characters — only movie scenes worked together outside of their contexts. We put our own thoughts into the stunning scenes while each clip’s sound design presents us with ambience, brief dialogue, or loud music. The editing enthralls us as space is not depicted the same in every clip. If you have a love affair with movies and the sky, ★ is the ultimate romantic art film.” (Sundance)

Watching (a section of) SATANTANGO, I was moved to screenshot this image.

Director Bela Tarr (in tandem, one suspects, with Agnes Hranitzky, who was only later accredited as co-director but was with him since 1978 and collaborating from 1981, well before SATANTANGO was commenced) is more interested in composition than those very, very long takes might suggest. He can’t resist, at this point, a stagey one-point-perspective bit and a collection of complex shapes. I have this notion that his career progresses somewhat like Beckett’s, shedding complexities and adornments as he goes, in search of a final purified minimal form. Which Tarr does, in THE TURIN HORSE. He does not make another film after THE TURIN HORSE, because there are no Bela Tarr films left to make after THE TURIN HORSE. It is the final purification.

But look at all the shapes in this. The containers, and the containment. Binocular lenses, a fence, wires, window frames, window glass and net curtains. He may be in his home, but he’s standing there like a camp prisoner and all the elements make it clear he’s boxed and pinned and there’s no escape for him.

I want to write something longer about Tarr (and Hranitzky, and Krasznahorkai) at some point.

SATANTANGO is on DVD and Blu-Ray.

First, I dearly love the poster, which I presume is Polish, because Polish film poster art is always the best:

Stanislaw Lem’s PILOT PIRX stories are always considered to be on the softer end of his output — less philosophically knotty, less difficult. People take that to mean that the Pirx stuff is confectionery. That doesn’t mean they’re not interesting stories.

The setup is fairly standard. Top spacepilot Pirx is assigned a mission to lay probes in the Cassini Division, with a twist: some of his crew are androids, and he has to guess who is synthetic and who is human. If the android(s) evade detection and pass this fairly over-the-top Turing test, they get to go into mass production. The stress of this burden may prove too much for a new artificial mind with otherwise superhuman resources. Which leaves Pirx with the condundrum at the heart of the story: how can human weakness be used to thwart artificial superiority?

“Pirx is known for his unblemished honesty… as a human being, he does have some weaknesses.”

The androids herein are termed “anthropoid automations, so-called ‘finite non-linear.'” Pirx: “The pilot’s union will never allow it.” Space pilots union!

This is a Polish/Soviet co-production, and the biggest sign of that is the appearance of Alexander Kaidanovsky, star of Tarkovsky’s STALKER, released in the same year (1979). Also of note: Arvo Pärt scored a good deal of the film, which is kind of amazing, done in the year before Pärt left Soviet Estonia, where the Soviet end of things was sourced.

There’s an oddly Western feel to a lot of it: a Pam Am plane, people reading NEWSWEEK in English, mentions of the UN and UNESCO, Pirx in a denim leisure suit like Steve Austin, talk of Soviet-US cooperation, a Ballantine’s Scotch Whisky-branded ashtray. One imagines that, for at least some section of its original audience, that must have let some alien futurity leak into the setting.

Some of the camerawork has an unusual documentary feel to it, which compares interestingly with what must have been, for the place and period, an expensive production. It’s talky like British sf tv of the same period. There’s a lovely bit where a speech at the UN about the non-linears becomes one frame in a four-part screen showing the testing of crash dummies, all done in black and white.

The back half of the film is inside the spaceship, and it’s actually a marvel of solving design with little money. It’s utilitarian, clever with its use of space, drab in a way that mirrors ALIEN (which must have been in production at the same time) and well-directed. The ending, as convenient and telegraphed as it may appear, has a wonderful piece of imagery at its core, and the coda works to destabilise what came before. It’s a lot of fun, it looks and sounds great, and it’s thoughtful in that wonderful, lost 1970s way.

PILOT PIRX’S INQUEST (UK) (US)

Robert Eggers seems to be emerging as a director of painstaking miniatures. I love this. His attention to and evolution of the details found in early film are wonderful — I find myself thinking that Guy Maddin would admire this film immensely. I think some films should be miniatures, I think art should support the miniature, and I hope Eggers and his people get to make a lot more films like this.

This is a documentary by Ingmar Bergman about the island of Faro. It is, frankly, as miserable as you can imagine.

It’s like a compressed version of the decades-long British “Up” documentary skein – footage from different eras repeating staging, schoolkids interviewed on a bus found years later so we can see how their dreams died. An island slowly being choked off by neglect. Bergman lived and worked on Faro on and off for forty-odd years. Articles about Faro tend to cast it as an enchanted island. Apparently very few people on Faro saw it that way. But there is a sequence in the middle, where dozens of people come together to thatch a barn in a traditional style, that does approach magic. One of the old men overseeing it explains how the local reeds are used to waterproof the structure, showing how the rain runs down the fold of the reed. Of course, during that whole piece, there is this exchange too: