Aelita Queen of Mars 1924 Soviet Sci Fi

Aelita, Queen of Mars, an early Russian Sci Fi film made by Yakov Protazanov (1881-1945) who'd worked in German and French film studios before returning to the Soviet in 1923, the year before Aelita was made.  Aelita thus exemplifies the ideals of the Soviet experiment, where dreams of modernity and progressive change flourished, briefly, before the Stalinist clampdown. Constructivism and Futurism, inspiring Eisenstein, and so many others.  This context matters, for it was the background to Shostakovich's opera The Nose (reviewed here).  The teenage Shostakovich is believed to have played piano at screenings of the film.  Although the plot is loosely based on a story by Tolstoy, Protazanov's film contrasts the reality of Soviet life in his time with a brilliantly exotic fantasy kingdom on Mars. 

Aelita lives in a palace designed in extravagant art deco angles with shards of reflective glass and strange perspectives. She wears a headdress of spikes, vaguely "Japanese", plays a fountain of light as if it were a harp and paints pictures with a shimmering wand. The Kingdom is ruled by The Elders, led by Tuskub, a malevolent-looking dictator, and Gor, a hunk known as the "Guardian of the Tower of Energy".  The soldiers are faceless robots whose movements are stylized and jerky  yet also vaguely reminiscent of the Ballets Russe.  Aelita's maid hops about in a cage-like dress, her movements  mechanical, though her personality is cheeky and vivacious.

Aelita's kingdom is so technologically advanced that it can send out radio messages to Earth.  At 6.27 CET time on 4th December 1921, a transmission is broadcast: "Anta Udeli Uta". No-one understand, except Engineer Los in Russia, who dreams of space travel and has drawn up plans for a trip to Mars. Los's best friend is Spiridnov, a wild-eyed intellectual, even more of a dreamer than Los. Significantly, Los and Spiridnov are played by the same actor. Los is newly married to Natasha, who is down to earth in every way. She is pursued by Erlich, a black marketeer who takes her to illegal speakeasys where people dance and drink as if the Old Days of  Tsardom had never faded.  She rejects him, but Los does not understand and goes away on a long business trip.  While Los is away, Spiridnov hides Los' spaceship plans in a hole behind a fireplace.When Los comes back from his trip, he thinks Natasha has been unfaithful and shoots her. As she lies in her coffin, Spiridnov appears.  Where's Los ? Los is building his space ship to escape, helped by Gussov, a cheerful Soviet soldier.  They have a stowaway, Kratsov, an inept bounty hunter who wants to arrest Los for murder and/or black marketeering, another sign that Los and Spiridnov might be two sides of a whole.

Aelita, meanwhile, has been watching Earth on Martian TV and sees Los and Natasha kiss. She's fascinated and rejects Gor, her suitor.  It's interesting that Aelita, although played by a female actress, is decidedly androgynous, her heavy makeup more masculine than feminine.  She's also unnaturally  flat chested, so perhaps there are other levels in this film the censors might have missed.  When Los and Gussov arrive on Mars, Aelita wants Los, though he's still in love with Natasha.  Gussov fools around with Aelita's cute maid, though he has a wife back in Russia.  The maid gets sent down to the dungeons for consorting with foreigners.  Gussov follows to save her, and rouses the prisoners to revolt.  "Freedom of speech put an end to thousands of years of slavery on Mars".  "It used to be like this in our country" cries Gussov. "October 25th, 1917" flashes  a subtitle Men are seen breaking their chains, beating weapons into sickles, placing sickles over hammers.  The Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" is declared.  Fabulous battlescene between the soldier robots and the Proletariats, who have boxes for heads.  The Elders are routed. Aelita  says that she'll now rule, alone. "I don't buy that" says Los, "Queens can't run revolutions". Sure enough, she orders the army to shoot the mutineers.  Los pushes her off the steps and "she" turns into Natasha. Suddenly Los wakes up. The words "Anta Uteli Uta" ring in his mind. Then we see a workman pasting a poster for a brand of tyres with that slogan.  Suddenly Los is back on earth with Natasha, who's very much alive. He runs to the fireplace, snatches up his plans for space travel and throws them into the fire "That's enough for dreams!" he says "We have other things to worry about".

ENO chief claims opera screenings don't work?

"ENO Chief claims opera screenings don't attract new audiences" screams a headline. ENO Artistic Director John Berry is quoted as saying "It is of no interest to me....“My time is consumed with making sure the performance is absolutely as good as it can be, and getting that right on the stage, that is hard enough, and that is my focus, on live work." 

Berry is responding to a claim by Sky Arts that its partnership with ENO between 2003 and 2009 had not generated one production for broadcast, and that "organisations like ENO are often fearful that to screen their work on TV would “cannibalise” their audience."  Let's look closer into the story.  ENO's heritage is theatre. It's strange that a stage magazine doesn't comprehend this.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a story about how the MET HD broadcasts are making mega-millions for that house. Read my analysis of that here.  (also many, many other posts on film and music). But why should that mean everyone else has to do as the Met does? There's no market sense in a flood of broadcasts for the sake of broadcast, even if film maximizes audiences and brings in money. Not every opera house is the same. The Met and the ENO don't compare. It's the Royal Opera House and the Opéra de Paris that are the Met's real competition. And things can be done differently from the Met, whose house style is expensive but downmarket..

What the ENO does best is adventurous, quirky and risk-taking : once it was the "powerhouse". The ENO doesn't have the budget for top rank European singers, so it focuses on stagecraft. Sometimes, that's been a disaster, with directors who don't understand music, but in principle, what the ENO does well is live theatre. There's no reason why it can't do film, but that's not a top priority.

The rationale on which the ENO was founded was that it would bring opera "to the people" in their own language. While Lord Harewood was around, that was sancrosanct. Maybe the English language gives the ENO a unique selling point, but nowadays when most people know core repertoire in Italian, German or French, it's more of a handicap. You won't get top singers bothering to learn a part all over again for less pay than they'd get in a big house. Even John Tomlinson has said he has to catch himself to sing in English instead of following his musical instincts. Though it's good for up and coming English singers, it does mean we get stuck sometimes with "lesser luminaries" whose main achievement is that they speak English.

But what is relevant about the ENO's heritage is the idea that opera should be direct and immediate, appealing to ordinary audiences who don't compare it to La Scala, Vienna or whatever, but enjoy themselves regardless. The ENO's natural allies are houses like Amsterdam, Theatre an der Wien, Aix, Lyon, possibly Frankfurt and Berlin, even Helsinki. Good productions, whatever their language, speak to people.

And most damning of all, filming opera isn't the same as watching opera, or even directing. It involves a whole new set oif technical skills which stage directors don't know because that's not their job. A good film director not only needs to know how to make a good film but also to understand bthe production he's working with and the music behind the opera. Absolutely, this isn't a skill that just anyone can pick up. It also doesn't come cheap. A house would need a whole new set of technicians and processing staff. Even if they don't do it in house it will cost big money to outsource. And even if they find good partners, that doesn't  mean good quality control or even "opera focus". Furthermore, cinema audiences by their very nature aren't as interested in art so much as in entertainment.  We could end up with the tail wagging the dog. That's fine for Megabucks Met, whose values may suit the hinterland but it's a dangerous gamble for smaller, more innovative houses.

Last year Sky Arts and the ENO did a joint venture around Mike Figgis's production of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia. There were lots of reasons why that wasn't a success. As a film buff, I enjoyed it as an experimental hybrid of film and theatre, with the opera encased within. But most people aren't film buffs and want to see opera as opera as opera, not as experiment. Good opera, yes, but opera that just happens to be translated on film, nothing more esoteric.

Erotikon - the drama Janáček didn't write

Erotikon - the drama Janáček didn't get round to writing. It's a film made in 1929, a year or so after his death. You bet he'd have gone to see it, with Camilla in tow, because it was a sensation. It's still a landmark in European film history. Janáček would have loved it.

A stormy night in a small Czech village. A stranger misses his train and is taken in by the gruff station master. Station master's daughter, Andrea, is transfixed. She goes chastely to bed, but her sexuality's aroused. She writhes orgasmically in bed, alone, dreaming. Phone rings, wrong number, but now she and George the stranger are both up and one thing leads to another. This was one of the first explicit sex scenes on film, though you don't actually see them undressed. The final act is described by filming a water drop splattering on a pane and drifting slowly down....

Andrea is played by Ita Rina (1907-72) a Slovenian girl who in real life had run away from a small railway town to seek fame in the wider world. She has the kind of smouldering  charisma that lights the screen with personality. "I know you will never come back" she tells the man. Fatalism and realism. She doesn't manipulate the man even though what she's just done puts her outside the pale of small town society. Typical brave Janáček heroine.

But that one encounter made her pregnant so she's the one who has to leave. She gives birth in a hovel. More scenes of agonized writhing. Surprising how the movements of orgasm mimic the agony of childbirth. The baby's stillborn. "It's better for you this way" says the hard-bitten peasant midwife. Meanwhile elderly father in village defends daughter's virtue against his friends, only to discover a letter from seducer enclosing money. Father crumples, shattered.

Out on the street again, Andrea's attacked, but her rescuer (Hilbert) is injured. At the hospital he needs a transfusion and Andrea saves his life by giving her blood. So Andrea moves in with Hilbert, who is rich and drives a fancy car. One day they meet George in a piano shop. Hilbert takes a shine to him and they become a threesome, socially. But George and Andrea are still hopelessly in love. Soon Hilbert twigs. Long, tense scene where George and Hilbert play chess.  George wins, but Hilbert checkmates by saying he and Andrea are leaving for the South.

Previously, George had been in an affair with a married woman. He tells her it's all over and she leaves in a rage. Andrea arrives with a suitcase. Bliss, for a moment. But then she spots the married woman's powder compact. Is George a cad after all? Then the married woman's jealous husband arrives and Andrea hears the men quarrel about the affair. Horrified, she flees out the back door. Husband shoots George dead. Andrea returns to Hilbert who knows she was planning to leave him for George. When she tries to explain, he says, "Don't talk" and embraces her.

Ideal plot for a Janáček opera! Throughout the film, there are sequences just begging to be turned into music: the station master's rustic cottage, with a Virgin Mary over Andrea's bed,  his bucolic friends, playing cards and drinking flagons of beer. In the city, jazz bands, dancing on New Year's Eve, and huge empty stairwells, heavy doors. Vignettes like the beauty parlour where the married woman has her face massaged and her body pummelled - a synonym for sex.  The husband is so clearly defined you can almost hear his music - mock courtly bassoons and tubas, intercut with screaming brass. George is a tenor, Hilbert a baritone, and Andrea a glorious coloratura with a manic edge. The whole film is held together wirth recurrent images of trains, speeding, cars, telephones, the "modern" world relentlessly rushing forward. As Andrea leaves with Hilbert, the train carriage they're in mists up, and drops of water run down, like the rain on the windowpanes, long ago in Andrea's childhood home.

Erotikon was written and directed by Gustav Machatý (1901-63) based on a Czech short story. He was a musician before he started making movies, which might explain the powerful thematic design in the film. Strong images, but even stronger characterizations. So much is left unsaid in a silent movie, so Erotikon's force wouldn't translate easily into wordy arias.  Instead, short bursts of lyricism and passion, plenty of atmospheric effects and above all, erotic tension.

Machatý later made Extase (1933) which starred Hedy Lamarr (or Hedy Keisler as she was then, before Hollywood). It was famous because there was plenty of nudity - Hedy running naked through the grass, on a horse etc. but it's not as disturbingly erotic as Erotikon, where no-one actually takes their clothes off. Erotikon is dramatically stronger too, and Ita Rena is like an elemental force of nature. Too hot for Hollywood to handle. In any case, she quit the movies when she married and ended up a Belgrade housewife.

Takemitsu Requiem Black Rain (Kuroi Ame)

Toru Takemitsu's Requiem for Strings (1957) was performed twice this month. On 4th March, Kazuki Yamada conducted it in his debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. On 11th March, the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima disaster struck. Then a week later, the New York Philharmonic. Perhaps now Takemitsu's Requiem will get to take its place as core repertoire. It was written after the death of Fumio Hayasaka, the composer whose music is heard in the films of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa. In Japan, movies were seen as an art form almost from the beginning. Takemitsu himself was a keen film fan and wrote numerous movie scores. In the west, there's more division between genres, and more snobbery, but for men like Takemitsu, if a movie had artistic merit, it was an appropriate use of serious music. So it's fitting that Takemitsu's Requiem underpins Shohei Imamura's Black Rain (Kuroi Ame, 1989), made two years after Takemitsu's death. Full symmetry.

The film Black Rain is based on a 1955 novel by Masuji Ibuse (1898-1993), who grew up in the countryside around Hiroshima. Ibuse was with the Japanese Army in South East Asia. When the Bomb fell on Hiroshima, he was in a neighbouring village and witnessed the after effects at first hand.

It's 6th August 1945, Yasuko Shizuma is at her uncle's house near Hiroshima, where she's been evacuated to escape the fire bombing of Tokyo. Uncle Shigematsu's at work in the city. Suddenly a blinding flash, then darkness. Horrific scenes in the city. A short grotesque creature goes up to a man and cried "Brother! It's me" but the man can't recognize who it is under the burns. Only when he sees the child's school belt buckle burned into his skin does he realize the monstrosity is his little brother, covered in scars. There are real life photos of wounds like that. Be glad this is only a movie.

As Yasuko and her aunt escape in a boat, black rain falls on them. No-one knows what's happening.  Yasuko and her aunt don't seem injured.  Five year later, Yasuko has grown up in the idyllic farming village by the coast, where they still grow rice in the fields and catch carp in the river. But something's wrong. People are dying gruesome deaths, from cancer and from radiation poisoning. Because Yasuko's so pretty, she gets many marriage proposals but they fall through when people discover where she was when the Black Rain fell.

Jilted time after time, Yasuko makes friends with Yuichi, an ex-soldier with PTSD who attacks cars and bikes because he think's they're enemy tanks. He spends his time carving stone jizu (Buddhas) which Yasuko loves. One day Yuichi's mother comes and asks if Yuichi can marry Yasuko. Uncle Shigematsu's shocked as there's a huge social gulf between them and Yuichi's clearly insane. But Yasuko walks in and says that it's what she wants because with Yuichi she doesn't feel alien.

Uncle and aunt are falling ill. Somene's been eating aloe leaves in the garden (reputed to cure radiation sickness). Uncle thinks it's his wife. She, however, worries about Yasuko who seems perfectly healthy. One day she spots Yasuko undressing. There are weals on her skin and her hair is falling out. Shigematsu takes Yasuko to the river to catch carp. They spot the "King of the Carp" more than a metre long, leaping out of the water, strong and healthy. "I've never seen him before, in all these years!" gasps Shigematsu, hoping it's an omen. Soon Yasuko's so sick, she's taken away to hospital. Shigematsu says "If there is a mutli coloured rainbow, she'll come back." But you can see from his eyes he knows it won't happen.

There isn't a real soundtrack in Black Rain. Mostly it's just conversation, sound effects and silence, without distraction. This ma the movie feel intimate, enclosed, enhancing the sense of tense secrecy. Takemitsu's Requiem pops up in small snatches at key moments, such as when the aunt realizes Yasuko isn't well. At the end, when Uncle Shigematsu's eyes follow the ambulance down the valley and survey the hills and fields around him, the Requiem wells up, austere and moving, yet at one with the scene around him.The movie itself is beautifully shot - long, loving panoramas of rice fields, traditional farm houses and close-ups of leaves seen through sunlight. Excellent, sensitive acting and direction. I think I read the book when I was an undergraduate, because I remember how poetic the author's descriptions were.

Takemitsu's Requiem wasn't written about Hiroshima or the Bomb, but the war experience scarred the Japanese people as well as the countries they occupied.
Sometimes art helps people to cope with trauma - Yukio and his bizarre granite Buddhas, for example. It's also important to remember that Japan was itself occupied by the Americans until 1952 and hard news about the Bomb was suppressed. Please read about Masako Ohki's Hiroshima Symphony, written at a time just like that pictured in the film. There's a whole raft of creative responses to the period, which will be worth studying. For western people, it's almsot a blank page, but perrhaps Japanese musicians and writers can fill us in.

Godzilla and the Sendai Tsunami

The Sendai earthquake and tsunami have obliterated  most of the coast of northern Japan. Photos of the disaster liook like Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty-five years ago.  Ground Zero, all over again. So I felt guilty that I was thinking of Godzilla (Gojira)at a time like this. But one survivor did say, "It's like a horror movie" so maybe I'm not alone. Godzilla films are much deeper than plain schlock.

Godzilla rises from the oceans, part dinosaur, part sea god, leaving a trail of radioactive footprints.  He appears first in an idyllic fishing village - a lot like the Sendai coast -- then marches on to Tokyo which he rips apart with his fiery breath. All the might of the military are tuned on him. Here, he's tearing apart electricity towers. But guns and bombs don't work. Finally, he's killed by a good scientist who sacrifices himself, not to stop Godzilla, but to destroy the dangerous weapon he has invented.The scientist had wanted to save Godzilla to studyhi, but was overruled.

Godzilla is a post-nuclear King Kong, but with far more troubling connotations. The original Godzilla movie (1954) was made less than 10 years after Hiroshima so the implications are obvious. "I don't want it to be like Nagasaki again" says the pretty cub reporter. But it also connects to deep-seated anxieties about military/industrial power. Japan is vulnerable because it has few natural resources other than the drive of its people. By watching these films, audiences could exorcise their fears, rationalizing them in the way nightmares defuse terror. Community spirit is a way in which people can support each other when havoc reigns all round. But the underlying message is clear: don't mess with nature. "I don't think he was the only Gojira" observes the prfessor at the end."As long a man keeps experimenting with weapons, another Gojira will arise, somewhere in the world".

Most people n Japan may live in cramped apartus filled with kitsch, and use metro systems so crammed they have to be pushed on board but the fundamental, ideal aesthetic is harmony. And war is the most obscene distortion of nature. With Fukushima in our minds we should take heed of what Godzilla stands for. He's not a villain. No simple answers. In the film, when Tokyo is destroyed, school girls sing a Hymn of Peace. It's dignified, elegant, an extremely moving expression of hope. At the end, the theme returns as the people salute the scientist who gave his life to protect the community. It's not armies that bring peace, but the altruism of ordinary human beings.

As I was reading up to write this I came across an article in the NY Times on the exact same theme. Read Japan's Long Nuclear Disaster Film by Peter Wynn Kirby who actually lives not far away in Oxford. 

Faust Feast, Oxford

"In the basement beneath the rolling Quad of Trinity College, a scholar is preparing to offer the devil his soul in exchange for absolute power".

A major festival of Faust related plays, concerts and films take place now in Oxford. Few places could be better posed for true Faustian atmosphere - gargoyles, medieval colleges, cobbled alleyways and above all, ancient libraries, filled with arcane and ancient wisdom. And, one might add, Faust-like scholars buried in books. But some of the "nerds" that have haunted these halls have gone on to unimaginable things and often they don't have to sell their souls. Tim Berners-Lee, for example, who created the World Wide Web, who was at Queen's.

Two versions of Christopher Marlowe's Faust. One by Creation Theatre Company takes place in Blackwell's Bookshop, next to the Quad at Trinity. Imagine, the reality of a bookshop famed for its erudiite stoock, but actors wandering about. Very apt. "Ile burne my bookes!"

Another staging of Marlowe's Faust runs from 9th to 13th February in Corpus Christi College auditorium. Arthur Kincaid directs and acts as Faustus. A true town and gown production, half students, half normal locals. Interesting too, that these productions will use slightly different editions of Marlowe as well as different settings.

Goethe's Faust gets a much welcomed outing from 24th to 26th February in Queen's College Chapel with the Eglesfield Players. A modern translation, staged in a chapel, with a chorus in the cast, the production will "bring all the dramatic (and comic) potential without losing sight of its academic and religious debate" and its resemblance to Oxford life over the ages.

George Lord Byron's epic Manfred gets a reading by professional actors in New College Chapel on March 27.  Manfred of course inspired Schumann, but it's not a piece that lends itself easily to the stage, so hearing it read by people who know drama should be a good experience.

There's so much Faust-inspired music it's hard to imagine it in one concert - Mahler, Busoni, Berlioz, Gounod etc. So see what they do on 5th March at Corpus Christi. The films are Istvan Szabo's Mephisto based on the novel of Klaus Mann and Faustus a ten-minute art piece shot in Merton Chapel.  They're not showing F W Murnau's classic film Faust, but you can watch that on this site  in FULL DOWNLOAD. For more information contact the Oxford Faust Festival on email oxfordfaustfestival@gmail.com. Prices are low, and the Films are free but this is such an adventurous project, it's worth making an effort to participate.

Berlin - Symphony of a Great City DOWNLOAD

Berlin : Symphony of a Great City (1927) is showing again in London this weekend, but here is the FULL DOWNLOAD. It's also available on DVD, which is worth getting as it's a cleaner version with music, because this is a film that you can watch over and over again without getting bored - like a symphony! It's not a film in the usual sense of a narrative motion picture. Instead the very concept comes from abstract music. Multiple, diverse images are used like themes in music.  They're layered and juxtaposed like musical ideas. The images are grouped in several main "movements" that as a whole follow a trajectory from morning to night. A snapshot of the life of the city. Please read my analysis of this wonderful work HERE, describing the structure and individual images some of which aren't readily obvious.

The idea of film as music wasn't unique, since early audiences were often more used to music than movies, and several early films unfold as "movements". The full title of Nosferatu is Nosferatu : eine synfonie des Grauens, "a symphony of horrors". This, too, is available in full download on this site. But Berlin : Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt develops the idea on a grand scale. Because it's abstract, much more detail is possible, and more possibilties of interpretation. Like music! The Director, Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941) also made experimental films, bypassing actors and plots. He used technolgy as a pa[nter might, exploring the possibilties of light, shadow and movement for their own sake.  The process dictates the form. Please see one of Ruttmann's early Lichtspiele HERE. They were made in co-operation with Hanns Eisler, who wrote music to be played live as the films were screened.  So again, the concept of music combined with film before the technology to make sound movies was even possible.
Plenty more on this site on earlty art film, Eisler, Weimar etc and many full downloads.

The Portuguese Nun - Eugène Green

Reactions to The Portuguese Nun (Eugène Green, 2010) say as much about the viewer as the film does. It's fantastic, but at first everything seems to be wrong.

Julie, a French actress (Leonor Baldaque), arrives in Lisbon to shoot a movie, but no-one else has arrived. A tram moves through the city's vertiginously steep cobbled streets. Houses are perched at strange angles, but you're lulled, for Lisbon really is like that. Then you realize something's not right. The streets are completely deserted.  When other people appear they stare directly at the camera, making uncomfortable eye contact. Actors don't do that, nor ordinary folk. Movement is unnaturally stilted, shots held long after they should move on. Then you realize that it's deliberate. You're being nudged into an alternative reality where time and logic don't apply.

Every encounter is extraordinary. A stranger is about to kill himself and changes his mind on meeting Julie. His apartment's lit by candle. Then as mysteriously as he came, he disappears from the story. Julie meets a six-year old boy, Vasco, in a largo (small open square). In a disco, she's picked up by a man whom she decides is the reincarnation of Dom Alfonso, a gay king. Even stranger he agrees. In a streetside chapel a young nun prays in ecstasy, sleeping only between Matins and Lauds.  By now your antenna for logic should be vibrating extreme alarm. Something's definitely very odd..

Then it dawns on you that the movie is like a dream, where things move in slow motion, where every word carries portent, and every incident is pregnant with meaning though it's not rational or followed through. Dreams are like that. Logic is irelevant but they feel intuitively right. Eventually Julie confronts the mystery nun in the chapel. (Julie's playing a nun in the movie, and filming it in the same place). "I am laying a siege on God" says the nun. She prays contemplating ectasy in the full faith that God's mysteries will reveal themselves in their own way even if we don't notice. The original nun Julie's acting about lived in a time when convents were so dissolute that people stopped believing and Portugal was "for once, in the avant garde". So says the nun! Ironically, this is one small detail that's true, woven into the narrative blurring the joins between reality and fantasy.

The dialogue between Julie and the nun in the chapel is utterly surreal, yet, as in the most wonderful dreams, it feels like profound revelation, though it doesn't make logical sense. Yet for Julie, it's a turning point,  and she realizes that the point of life is to do good for others. She adopts Vasco. which might work in a movie but isn't nearly so simple in real life. Julie's clear, unsettling stare and heavy brows remind me of baroque Madonnas - or the children who saw the Virgin at Fatima. There is nothing logical in what they saw, but their miracle - or dream - has still managed to inspire.many, whether or not it's objectively "true".

Then you start to wonder what else there is in this dream fugue where simple things carry such weight? Why does Julie speak fluent Portuguese although her Portuguese mother died when she was a child? How can a child like Vasco exist without papers? And who are the film crew anyway, they're all speaking Portuguese, not French. We know that Eugène Green the director doubles as the film director Eugene Verde,  But who is Eugène Green?. There's a film called The Not So Great Eugène Green but he's not involved in it. The main site with info is called "Little white lies". The man himself doesn't leave much of a paper trail.  The Telegraph critic states outright that he doesn't know Green's work. The Observer critic claims to,  so perhaps  he might explain. Is there a bigger story here than meets the eye?  Is  Eugène Green as mysterious as Julie?. He's fascinating, anyway as he's created an audaciously imaginative movie that will utterly confound those who take things too literally.

"Life is too important to be taken seriously". Humour often disguises wisdom. Then the hints make sense. "I don't like French films" says the hotel clerk, "Too intellectual". This is a French film, yet the key is not to be intellectual but to drift into its gentle, unpretentious good humour. Dreams fall apart when you're too self conscious, but then you lose their magic.  That's why I loved The Portuguese Nun (currently screening at the ICA). In its quirky, understated way it's sending up the whole idea of art as a conscious process, and telling us, perhaps, to stay cool and absorb without always having to be "right". And as for Eugène Green? He reminds me strongly of Fernando Pessoa, whose surname simply means "person". Pessoa created multiple identities who each wrote in individual, distinct styles. Truly amazing personality and work.  Surreal, baroque, Kafka with warmth, wit and colour. Pessoa is a lot like Lisbon itself, operating on many different levels of time and place at once. Hence the film's loving vistas of narrow cobbled streets and dizzying angles, the tower of Belém, and the idea of a nun from the past (based on a novel) and a movie about a movie being made about her. Devious puzzles! Pessoa lives! Get the DVD when it comes out and enjoy it with a bottle of tinto.

Körkarlen The Phantom Carriage of New Year's Eve

Nothing like a good horror story to cheer you up for the New Year. After seeing Victor Sjöström's Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage), first screened 1/1/1921 anything will seem joyous. Even the Salvation Army comes over sexy. Can you miss this?

Sister Edit, a sturdy-looking maiden is dying on New Year's Eve. She has one last wish, to see David Holm. He refuses to come. His wife runs in, kissing the girl's hand. What's going on? Cut to David Holm and his drunken mates, carousing in the graveyard. Last year their pal George died on the stroke of midnight. "George went to university at Uppsala" says David, "He knows things". But still ended up a bum.

The men fight, and on the stroke of midnight, David falls over and cracks his head. Up draws a rickety old carriage pulled by a wasted nag. It's George. "Whoever dies in sin at midnight must harvest souls for a year". The Grim Reaper takes David on his rounds.

In the photo, notice the use of double images to create a ghostly effect. That's David's dead body there. This film was made during 1920, so the technique was brand-new, hauntingly atmospheric. In the current DVD restoration, the soundtrack is fantastic. Hollow, metallic sounds like a slowed heartbeat, or the ticking of a clock that isn't right. This is a soundtrack that actually follows the action. It skips a beat when David jumps. Wonderful atmospheric scenes of the phantom carriage harvesting souls on land and sea and in the sky, collecting the souls of rich and poor. Extremely beautiful in its own eerie way, like abstract art. "A moment here is like a hundred years on earth" says the Grim Reaper.

David was once in a a happy family but he took to Demon Drink. His wife ran away with the kids, his brother was led astray. Enraged, David hunts for ex-wife threatening to kill her. Exhausted, he collapses outside a brand new Salvation Army Hostel on New Year's Eve. He's taken in by idealistic Sister Edit who spends all night mending his shabby coat. Since he's the first guest, she pledges herself for a year towards saving him, parallel with the idea of last person dead being forced to collect souls. Both a kinky kind of penitence. Very subtly, the film hints that Edit's sexually attracted to David (played by the director Victor Sjöström himself). He looks too much like a hunk to be consumptive, but that's why he's dangerous. He delights in coughing on people so they will get TB too. And so he transmits it to Edit.

Meanwhile Edit bullies Mrs Holm into taking him back. But David hasn't mended his ways and threatens to kill her and the kids, so terrified, she runs off again. Still, Edit can't die until she's done her duty by David. She argues with the Grim Reaper, forcing him to give David one more chance to reform. They stops outside a slum. "Who is dying here?" asks David. The men enter, (invisibly, of course). Mrs Holm is preparing to kill the kids and commit suicide because she's lost hope. At last, David is moved enough to repent his wicked ways. And Mrs Holm takes him back and they all live happily ever after, as Edit's given her soul for David. (She's collected by "the other ones" ie angels, ventures the Grim Reaper.) If this sounds sentimental, do not worry, it's not  Acting is exceptionally natural, especially for the period. Sjöström as David Holm is full of life and vigour (which is why Edit fixates on him).  

Körkarlen is nothing like the silent films of the era. Instead it achieves its effects by subtle atmospheric plays of light and shadow and double images which move and realign so smoothly you almost forget what's real and what isn't.

The original novel, by Selma Lagerlöf (another of these progressive Scandinavian and Finnish feminist authors) is apparently more into social issues like drink, TB and slum control via The Salvation Army, all perfectly valid in an era before penicillin and social security, Sjöström however is working in a completely new medium, with completely new ideas.  Elsewhere they're filming The Keystone Cops. Sjöström's doing  a psychological study and high art. The supernatural effects to enhance the unstable balance between inner and outer reality, so they express what the characters can't. .As they're riding along, the Grim Reaper says to David, "If there's one thing I could tell people, it would be to hope their lives reach maturity before they are felled". In other words, to learn wisdom and goodness before it's too late. It's not Salvation Army hell, brimstone and hard living, but basic good sense. Not at all a depressing movie, despite the subject.