You know how it is. You wait forever for a bus to come, and then three come along at once. Now, if you replace the word ‘bus’ with ‘film’ and the word ‘come’ with ‘exit pre-production and begin the long journey towards a final edit’, then you’ll have a pretty good picture of what we’re trying to say here. Admittedly, that wasn’t the smoothest of intros, but it’s been while.

Keeping up the Anti/Type tradition of attempting to vary our films as much as possible, our latest three shorts cover all ends of the spectrum. We’re The People People See From Trains is a piece concerned with very grounded, universal themes; family and unspoken truths. The Yet To Be Titled Project project (snappy, hey?) treads on weightier ground, exploring death and fusion. Lastly, from Anti/Type’s northern HQ, comes Rumoured, a mystery about a man who arrives in a town with no memory.

The films are still coming together but will be hitting the small(est) screen sometime over the summer. But to keep the hordes busy in the meantime (someone has to) we’ll be releasing photos, posters and updates on the various occasions that we’re sober and not sleep deprived – starting with this one (from Untitled), while we are currently only one of those things.

We’ll never tell which one…

So it got me thinking. Is there an example of the creative arts that is beyond criticism? No matter what you think of it, whether you love it or hate it, see it this way or that, it always remains the same. You can hate it but not say it is bad, love it but not truly know it, interpret it as such but there is always an element of totality that is beyond you, something that cannot be interpreted or verbalised…like trying to explain who the ‘you’ in you is and how it came into being.

The irony of the two examples I have so far come up with is that even the idea of un-criticisable art is subjective…and still the infuriation grows. But before I think myself into a Kafkaesque corner I give you for your rumination, firstly Van Morrison’s otherworld on record Astral Weeks (I highly recommend Lester Bangs masterful review of it, to better explore the subject than I ever could) and secondly Come & See….now watch me as I fail to explain why I think this is.

Instead of attempting perfection, as most filmmakers instinctually try and do, the most beautiful shot, the most natural performance, the most gripping narrative, Elem Klimov created hell, not a depiction of hell but actually hell. A summation of all war films, all horrors, all grisly fables. Put it next to Shoah rather than Saving Private Ryan. I’ll warn you now you won’t enjoy watching it, and when something isn’t there to entertain, not even in the most primitive of senses, like Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy or a Swans record, then we struggle to render it with normal critical powers.

Well then, has it achieved its goals as a film? What are its goals? To disorientate the viewer? To bludgeon them with horrors and godless carnage? Well then yes, even those who hated the film can’t help but admit that. Perhaps it is goalless? A possibility with something as relentlessly nihilistic as this (until maybe that final abstract glimmer of hope, flashing image by image to Hitler’s youth, which signifies at least the possibility of redemption and change in human nature). If any film seeks to have no meaning as its meaning then this is it, so any meaning you give it is so transparently your own (some hope to fill the void) that the film staunchly remains untouched by what you think of it. It is pointless reviewing the film in terms of ‘stars’, 1 star, 5 stars, they’d mean the same thing, they’d mean nothing.

So on first viewing as the credits rolled up I thought to myself, ‘I wonder if Eli Roth has seen this’. Torture porn has bombarded us with hacked up limbs, castration, prolonged rape and agony and mouths sewn to arseholes (the perfect torture porn metaphor) and I wondered whether Roth or any of his cohorts had sat through Come & See, would they would have felt a slight twinge of embarrassment that all their efforts to disturb, upset and sicken had been outdone by the face of Aleksei Kravchenko. How they made this young man’s face age and contort as he makes his way across the limbo-like landscape of Soviet Belorussia in 1943 where he’s deserted by and eventually returns to a unit of partisans, is open to debate. Is it make-up, an incredible act of physical performance or the fact that rumour has it the director fired live machine gun rounds over the protagonists head during a stunning night time gun battle on the steppe?

Whatever the case, we watch his hair turn white and his face warp and wither from the terror of all he witnesses, it is the hell of the film in concentrated form, thehumanity of the boy dissolving from his features and we must be aware by simply looking at him that rarely has there been a better cinematic representation of war and the spiritual trauma it inflicts upon humanity.

As a depiction of a human hell Klimov’s is the finest, not just in a war film but even in other genres adept at manifesting our worst fears, such as horror or science fiction, and it does so without utilising the sledge hammer methods of certain filmmakers. It is the subtle touches that present Come & See’s patiently escalated nightmare to us; villagers’ bodies piled up against the wall of a house, a mass of grieving women, a twisted effigy of Hitler, a tortuous journey across a swamp. Even the film’s main set-piece, the slaughter of an entire village by goading, laughing Nazis is shown relatively bloodlessly. It’s a method that allows us to pay attention to the images and sounds of human suffering and terror (including one of the most truly horrific offers of mercy possible) and not be distracted by the gleefulness of graphic images, of violence as spectacle.

But much to our distress, Klimov doesn’t stop with the film’s images. A third of the way through the film a bomb explodes near Kravchenko. From then on we share not only the hallucinatory effect of conflict upon the man’s mind but the damage inflicted upon his hearing. The film’s sound fades in and out, nauseating high pitch squeals swell and ebb away, masking dialogue, creating an auditory hell to accompany the visual one. Never has the film viewer been placed so internally within the machinations of war as they are in Come & See.

Lester Bangs would review an album by allowing it to saturate into his life, for weeks he would play it constantly, while he ate, while he slept, while he drank and ranted, while he prognosticated, defecated and masturbated, in search of that inner life, that angle no one else has grasped, the light and the soul of the thing. I can barely bring myself to watch Come & See a second time.

Klimov refused to make another film after this, make of that what you will.

BC

I’ve already established my love of John Carpenter, so I’ll establish this early on, The Thing is my favourite John Carpenter film. Like Alvy Singer I’m glad we got that out the way, now we can happily move on and not have that awkward moment when I announce my undying love for The Thing when you’re blatantly a Halloween kinda person. We’d pause, take an uncomfortable sip of our drinks and desperately try to catch the waiter’s eye for the bill.

But that won’t happen now so I can continue… There’s a terrifying sparseness to Carpenter’s early films that focuses his work supremely. Whatever genre he works in his minimalist approach exposes the core of the film, removing anything that doesn’t serve the story or the tone of the piece.

The Thing is a supremely simple story. 12 men, stationed in an Antarctic research station are picked off one by one by an alien creature that can mimic other life forms. That’s it, no fat, no excess, but all that space allows our minds to wander. With no explicit thematic target for the film to aim at, we start applying our own meaning, we start relating the groups spiralling paranoia to our own experience or whatever’s flavour of the month on the news, viruses, terrorists, religious fanatics, economic collapse, melting icecaps. That’s why I think, after initially terrible reviews, The Thing’s stock has risen. Like the beast itself it’s pretty damn difficult to kill, it transforms to suit the time, invisibly it becomes about us, about the world we live in and more than likely the next generation of film buffs will think exactly the same thing. We’re all infected.

But for all its political, biological, psychological subtext, it’s also great fun. It skips through genres without us even noticing; sci-fi, horror, whodunit, thriller, action, a surrogate western….and yes a siege film, Carpenter’s speciality; either defending…Assault on Precinct 13, Prince of Darkness, The Fog, Ghosts of Mars and to a degree Halloween, or attacking Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, the end of Vampires and They Live.

We’re scared but we daren’t look away because we might miss a clue because of all the genres it transforms into, horror is its most dominant. The horror genre, unlike nearly all others, has never been out of fashion. It may vary internally, but it’s always horror and although they may wear different disguises the root motifs very rarely differ. The Antarctic base is a haunted house, the beast in the men is a werewolf and they are picked off in true slasher style and so on.

In my opinion a horror film should be one or both of these things, scary and/or gory…I know I might be stating the obvious here, but in many horror films this simple factor is overlooked (Scream, ironically enough too busy telling us how much it knows about the horror genre, is neither). The Thing is supremely both. It’s scary in the ‘something jumping out on us’ way and even more effectively in the ‘slow, creeping terror’ way, that nerve jangling anticipation to nothing, which builds up unrealised fear in us like unused adrenaline shaking your muscles.

The camera creeping through the hallways, the men casting distrusting eyes on one another and the husky…Jesus the husky freaks me out. And it’s gory, so very gory, Rob Bottin must have dropped all the acid he could and spent a month in Gigers house reading Lovecraft to come up with what we see in the film. The creature effects are still unbeaten to this very day, you only need to watch the pointless, imagination void that’s the 2011 prequel to realise this. Bottin’s effects are actually there, a simple factor that adds a hypnotic terror to the gore. CGI’s lack of ‘physicalness’ is not its main flaw. It’s the fact that it’s usually applied so lazily, an easy fix. Let me say now I’m not anti-CGI retroist, there are some truly wonderful examples of CGI artistry, but usually used in perfect synchronisation with physical effects, production design, lighting, sound, a good script, etc etc to aid the film. I often find CGI’s not a team player. Anyway don’t take my word for it, go and watch the heart resuscitation sequence again. I’ll wait don’t worry………………………………..great isn’t it!

It looks real and feels real because it’s as close to real as a head pulling away from its body, sprouting legs and walking away possibly could be (and is also accompanied with one of my favourite lines in movie history, mainly because it’s so realistic and I won’t believe it wasn’t adlibbed, Palmer’s “You gotta be fucking kidding”) The characters too are sparse, but with barely an inkling of backstory we still root for them, distrust them, fear for them and even at times laugh at them (Garry’s rant while tied to the chair). Character here is formed by action and within the escalating paranoia, inaction. It’d be perfect if each copy of The Thing came with a memory erasing device so we could experience the film fresh each time; to join the men in their terrifying lack of knowledge.

In wonderfully atmospheric sequences we drift around the men, dwelling momentarily on each one as they lay suspicious eyes on one another, each one set out in a small pocket of light from the darkness behind them. It’s here we make our choice, who’re you siding with?

BC

(dir. Martin Scorsese , 1973)

It was in this way that I first saw Mean Streets. I was 12 or there abouts.  I strategically had my father set the video well before any film started, so as to avoid the inevitable ‘this film contains violence, sex and strong language’, the mortal enemy of a pre-16 film obsessive. Not that my father was overly protective in this area, the cultural or artistic attributes of film often superseded the adult content (though after my ‘early setting’ strategy failed, the particularly strong warning before Blue Velvet put heed to a 13 year old watching Nastassja Kinski get smacked in the face)

So the morning after, I retrieved the video from the player entirely unaware of what was in store for me. My obsessional love for the movies comes from countless sources, Jimmy Stewart, Ray Harryhausen, Moviedrome, the cluttered video shop up my road, 18’s I shouldn’t have watched, 50’s monster movies, Cronenberg, a history of Hollywood on my father’s shelves and on and on. It’s all very much unmappable, some things are vivid but may not have had that much effect as I was led to believe on my young mind (doubling over at the fireside fart scene in Blazing Saddles), conversely footnotes or long forgotten Sunday afternoon viewings might be the reason I now have the cinematic kinks that I do….who knows. What I do know though is there are a million different reasons I love cinema, but there are 3 films I can say for certainty that made me want to have a crack at it myself. Apocalypse Now, Badlands and the 112 minutes my dad captured in the VHS player. Opinions ebb and flow, tastes change; I was a very different person when I first watched them, but they were there at the right place at the right time to mould an early filmmaking brain.

The Boss once said on hearing ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, “ I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind” and so it goes with Mean Streets, I was intoxicated as soon as I heard that huge Phil Spector drumbeat… Bum-ba-bum-BOOM…. ‘The night we met I knew I needed you so and if I had the chance I’d never let you go’…..and then that Kinetoscope like super 8 crackles into existence. From the get-go it had me. What was this radiant, nervous thing, like some natural history film of bar room hoodlums, dug up by archaeologists in Little Italy next to rosary beads, wide lapelled suits and labelled with no nonsense courier.

Its restless energy is a thing to behold. We see it very rarely in cinema, but when we do it is always from the young, hungriest of directors (Godard, Cassavetes, Tarantino), caught between disappearing back into low budget fumblings, cultdom or the video store and the opportunity to change the games like they invariably did. The 31 year old Scorsese was finely balanced, just like Keitel’s Charlie was between the church and the street, between redemption and De Niros sociopathic Johnny Boy; and with a choice between the pit and the unknown he threw all his energy into Mean Streets.

But here, from the same age as Scorsese was in 1973 (much to my infuriation), I see it’s a young man’s film, catching Scorsese between Corman and the encyclopaedic cineaste, and it caught a young boy’s eye. The restless and inventive camerawork (the pool room fight, Charlie’s drunken roam), the colours (the red bar, the blue streets), the time capsule nature of early 70’s New York, Johnny Boy’s skittish energy (the mailbox bomb), the intensified Catholicism as opposed to my own deteriorating one, the performances constructed out of documentaryesque ticks, method suffering and plain old not giving a fuck (the street dual with the bin lids), the unpredictable actions and the open ending. The film is as alive to me as any biological entity. My memory of it then and my appreciation of it now are two complementary states, both growing with me and never aging.

It was the first film where I wanted to figure out where it came from. Sure I’d investigated the Children of the Hydra’s Teeth and the Rancor as any young boy was meant to, but this was the first time I’d wanted to know everything, above and below the surface. Why was that shot there? Why did that young man shoot the drunk? How did they get the shot in the car when it seemed so full? Who sang that? Why did I enjoy these long moving shots so much? (Scorsese’s tracking shots nurtured my undeniable love for such things and brought me in a convoluted and exploratory way to Tarr, Klimov and Angelopoulos.) How was it lit? Where were these locations?

And slowly it starts to build an investigative cinematic mind. We’ve all got this handful of films. They may not necessarily be your favourites, though gun to my head these three are, but they’re the ones that started you off. Made you more than just the person who says ‘yeah I like the movies….I saw whatsimcallit the other night, really enjoyed it’, made you ask questions of the flickering surface, made you hunt high and low for the director’s other films, or the actors’ previous works, or the films that inspired it and in the end made you have that quite possibly deluded moment of ‘right I’m packing in the 9 to 5’ insightfulness where you say to yourself ‘the only way I’m really gonna figure out how this is all done is by having a go at it myself’. You know who you are and you have my sympathies and my adulation.

BC

Recently there’s been a lament for the lack of truly political musicians, those who release music that reflects and confronts the politics and causes of modernity. I don’t entirely agree that there’s a lack of these musicians; sure, at the superstar level there is, but in the lower echelons I don’t think it’s a lack of individuals that’s the problem, more the universal fragmentation of media and thought, and simultaneously (and somewhat paradoxically) the homogenising effects of globalisation, that creates a million causes and ideologies but labels and groups them as such to make them all appear the same. It’s a disorientating and tiring thing, and many find it best to ignore it or even better pretend it doesn’t actually exist. How could a singer possibly be heard over this, running the gauntlet on a tiny label or self-releasing, playing a diminishing number of venues that haven’t been consumed by Live Nation or O2, competing with a million more on Facebook or MySpace… no wonder they can’t be heard.

Film is a much louder medium; political films are made, even in Hollywood, but still the noise doesn’t abate. Films about recent political stories or conflicts are rattled off with disturbing immediacy, concerned it seems more with the money making power of being fresh in the public’s mind rather than the measured contemplative effects of reflection and perspective. Remember it took American filmmakers 3 years after the conflict to make any major statement about Vietnam (and no I’m not including Green Berets in this), now we get Zero Dark Thirty two years after the event (from a script rewritten after Osama’s death), a slew of Afghan movies while we can skip channels and watch it in real time and a Wikileaks film while Julian Assange is still washing his socks in the Ecuadorian Embassy’s sink.

We’re inundated with the political and those professing to be political, propaganda, blockbuster documentaries, military product placement, conflict fetishism, west is best, left is best, right is right, pity the poor people, snake oil blending seamlessly into the commercial break.

So they are there, in whatever form you wish to attribute to them, but the noise is so much that we don’t, or choose not to notice them. We don’t notice the political because for all the shouting we’re not exactly sure what it is anymore, where does the truth lie when there is so much pushing and pulling?

We are now such cynical creatures (and much of the time justifiably so) that we see agendas rather than clear-headed attempts at portraying the truth. So take for example Gillo Pontecorvo, communist, resistance leader in Fascist Italy, idol of Third World cinema and orbiter of social circles that included Stravinsky, Sartre and Picasso. What would we expect if he took on say La Violencia and FARC or Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta? Propaganda for the left maybe? A rose-tinted view of Marxist politics?

Well in 1966 took Saadi Yacef’s account of Algeria’s National Liberation Front’s (FLN) struggles against the French, Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger and made The Battle of Algiers, and after juggling through title changes, differing protagonists and Paul Newman, he produced a film that had the wisdom to realise when either side is favoured the truth is brought into question.

It’s hard for modern audiences to know how to react to film so balanced, so stubbornly un-judgmental and although its famed style could easily have it mistaken for a newsreel (if not for Morricone’s predictably excellent score) this objective fashion also gives The Battle of Algiers a sense of fable, a warning from history, a caution spread out either way from one of dozens of colonial wars rewritten and rethought, from wars that consume continents to grudges that destroy families. How we repeat mistakes, how we’re doomed to become what we oppose, how violence breeds violence and tragedy more tragedy.

The French deny independence to the Algerians, they retaliate with the assassination of officials, the French turn the Kasbah into a ghetto and terrorise its inhabitants, the FLN bomb restaurants and bars, killing both French and Algerian in a truly chilling sequence, the French bomb back killing children and mothers which precedes a scene of hysteria and mayhem that could’ve been Afghanistan, Iraq, the Congo, Pakistan ortragically modern day Algeria; the Algerians riot, the French torture and so on and so on. Patterns emerge that could be applied on varying scales to all conflicts past and present. It’s boring to say there are no winners, but The Battle of Algiers at least rescues this remark from sound-bite status and reveals to us why this is.

It’s also telling that the film doesn’t conclude with Algeria’s independence in 1962, but concerns itself with events in the capital between 1954 and 1957. As The Battle of Algiers doesn’t have a conclusion as such, it prophetically illustrates that violence on this scale very rarely has a conclusion, the repercussions and traumas resonate throughout cultural and personnel memory. The vacuum left by colonialism leaves space for warlords and fundamentalism. revolutions lead to power struggles, which in turn lead to tactics learned from the oppressors used on the newly oppressed in the name of a nation once demanded by a now tyrannized people, who now cry for help and welcome the former conquerors back in the name of whatever buzzword so fits the time, who in time tighten their grip on the country, unable to leave due to resources or land or pride, winning battle after battle but blindingly losing the war, radicalising the people who rise up against the colonisers and as they have the greatest weapon of all, time, drive them out, leaving a vacuum to be filled by…

There are thousands of good films, there are many great ones, but there are very few important ones.

BC

No landscape is as intrinsic to different types of cinema as the desert: the western, the road movie, the dystopian picture, science fiction. A symbol of the external conflicts of man and nature and the internal tribulations of emotion. A substitute for other worlds or the end of the world.

It also often appears as a landscape where madness resides, chaos and the end of the road, the breakdown of the psyche, or the family (The Hills Have Eyes), or civilization (Mad Max), or morals (Laurence Of Arabia), a prism for greed (The Treasure Of Sierra Madre), revenge (Daratt), aimless evil (The Hitcher), even raised to levels of Sisyphean punishment (Woman Of The Dunes) and inevitably this seeps into the filmmakers… the heat and the space gets to them.

The equation goes like this: the desert is to the land what Herzog is to filmmakers. It’s in the old places we find such things… and so inevitably the Namib, which pushes hopelessly into the Atlantic and is itself pushed back into the continent, stretched and compacted into great canyons, spires of granite and empyrean tidal waves of sand. Harbouring near-immortal plants and besieged creatures. Fifty-five million years of shifting plates and spiralling climate have led it to this. Countless deserts within a desert, limitless vistas for a cinematic archetype.

There’s something about insane ambition in a film that draws me, films that juggle ideas like literature, endless plots, counter plots, ideas and obsessions snaking across the screen, seemingly not constrained by the single tracks of conveyor belt films, or even the mounting aspirations of more daring films which weave a second, third or fourth into the mix. The budget is just money, it’s the idea that’s king and true filmmaking is achieving that idea despite the restrictions of finance, time and man power.

Richard Stanley takes an idea (a long standing idea, I like to believe it was an obsession), of the Nhadiep, a mythical Namibian demon, as the first track, the foundation, and from there weaves all the ideas he can muster to and fro across it, in varying levels of opacity, horror, serial killing; a road movie, a chase movie, a myth, a western, the politics of a country under change, cinema, race… these and much more make up Dust Devil.

The B4 is the track, an absurdly uninspiring name for the road between Keetmanshoop and Luderitz on the cold Atlantic. Drive on it and some miles west you turn north and here you’ll find Bethanien. In the film it’s a town haemorrhaging civilization, a magnet for the demon of the title who feeds on those at the end of their road, the hopeless and the lost, enacting ornate rituals on their murdered corpses to gain control over the material world. Wendy, a woman pursued by her abusive husband from the sterile civilization of suburban Pretoria and to the brink of suicide, is suitable prey for him, dressed fittingly in cowboy boots, hat and long coat. In pursuit of the demon is a guilt-ridden police officer, torn between the white procedural world he inhabits and the black world of tradition and myth to which the creature belongs. He’s helped by Joe Niemand, a Sangoma, cinema projectionist and the narrator of the film (an excellent wild-eyed performance by John Matshikiza), to understand the thing he pursues.

The finale, filmed in the real-life sand choked ghost town near Luderitz, is a work of surrealist beauty. The deserted cinema, with sand pouring through the walls, and the earlier mention of Bird With The Crystal Plumage and Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires, stress the deep love of film ghosting through the picture. Stanley pulls out the motifs and symbols of midnight cinema to animate his ideas. Filmed in garish colours, the camera slung askew, often drifting omnipotently over the landscape, complementing, in a way that betrays Stanley’s music video roots, the increasingly dreamlike quality of the film (a style which brings to mind Russell Mulcahy’s equally demented desert film Razorback).

As the material world of the film unravels the threads of the film become indistinguishable, we no longer see it as ‘a bit of horror’ or ‘a bit of a road movie’, it becomes simply Dust Devil. An effect that allows the film to be part of that strange family of films that belong together but you’re never quite sure why… El Topo, Eraserhead, Freaks, Performance, Videodrome, Tetsuo, Society, PI, they belong together because they have nowhere else to go. As the Namib is many deserts within a desert, Dust Devil is many films within a film.

It’s a 4 star film, not a 4 star film in the way, say, The Shawshank Redemption is, a solid, well-constructed film, beautifully made and ordered. Dust Devil is unsolid, chaotic. Too often these quixotic attempts at film collapse under their own weight and the director becomes some kind of madman rather than a leader, wielding shamanic incantations rather than monopolistic control of the thousand threads of film. But isn’t that half the fun? Watching a film write its own language, constructing the grammar from whatever it desires? Throwing away the text books and finding friends and leaders in midnight movies and others banished to the sands.

BC

Anyway, after quickly establishing how much we liked the film, we quickly established something else: Kevin didn’t have a poster for it. Anti/Type likes to make posters. You’ll never guess what happened next!

Oh you did, did you? Well, we were being rhetorical and sarcastic, so we’re the real winners here. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Rhetorically. Yes, we offered up our services and crafted this effort for the film. And we’re as proud to showcase it here as we are to see it on the film’s official page.

Baba Yaga is about many things without ever being explicit. Its motives and themes are purposely meant to overlap and loop back onto each other. Fact and fiction don’t matter to it, as history (the mother of the story) doesn’t care for it. Only the reader, looking back, does, but as you will see they are corrupted. Interpretation is everything and whether we’ve achieved any of what we’ve set out to do is entirely up to you.

When I was young I used to wear a plaid shirt. It wasn’t fashionable, it was pretty chunky and shapeless, but it kept me warm. I wouldn’t say I didn’t care about fashion, I just didn’t know anything about it. Where does an 11 year old get fashion tips? The thing was I should have carried on wearing it, because they’re everywhere now, I was so far ahead of the curve, the curve was looking to me for prophetic fashion tips… so I like to think. And we come to the axiom, if you do something long enough it’ll soon come back into fashion… you just gotta weather the storm first.

Though being one of the gateway films for the new Hollywood revolution Easy Rider became the celluloid time capsule for the hippie dream at the same time as the dream was coughing up its own cancerous demise. They were selling hippie wigs in Woolworths and we were all being lied to, the Manson murders were a few months away, soon to be followed by Altamont. And soon the 60’s turned to the 70’s and coke and punk, then the 80’s and unfettered capitalism, AIDS and MTV. The postmodern, ironic 90’s spelt the death of sincerity, and the 00’s…well I have no idea…talent shows, skinny jeans and the return of cold war paranoia but this time over some folks who worshipped a different version of the same Abrahamic God and we assumed all lived in caves? Whatever they stood for by this time Easy Rider had become a relic, the perfect film for those who are struggling to come up with a fancy dress costume and know the first line of ‘Born to be Wild’.

But as everything has a tendency to be cyclical, no matter what they try and feed you, we may be able to look at Easy Rider with our ‘economic meltdown, environmental Armageddon, perpetual war’ glasses on and sternly tell the million and one ideologies, philosophies, splinter groups, cults, diets and fashion labels to please be quiet and stop distracting us as we try to assimilate something tangible from a very intangible world.

Suddenly the film seems to have something to say to us, but it’s best to clear all the bullshit that’s accumulated in our wardrobes, bookshelves and browsing histories first before we heed it.

Easy Rider hasn’t dated particularly well, its aimless philosophical wanderings appear as what they are, and Schrader may have been right when he wrote that it has ‘the sophomoric desire to ‘astonish’ the self-congratulatory piety of an aphorist who has just demolished a series of straw men’, but it is also genuinely sincere and I’m not sure how any of us know how to handle this anymore.

It has two men who are genuinely trying to discover reason in their lives and in the world they live in (both it appears as the form of actors and filmmakers). They approach this task with open hearts and open minds and there is no cynicism in their intellectual and spiritual endeavours, they are not played for laughs, or littered with self-knowing winks at the camera, they are certainly not self-referential and are not cool because cool sells, they are cool because cool is good and different and relative. When cool was something to do with expression rather than something to laud over people.

So post everything we can now look at the journey they take as at least some kind of attempt to find meaning when there was once none and now there is too much; the equally terrifying and beautiful prospect of drawing your own map rather using someone else’s. Easy Rider is the logical, but somewhat simplified, extension of Thoreau, Muir and Kerouac. No matter that it ends in tragedy, it is the search that matters, the journey that overcomes the film’s shortcomings. Schrader’s Porky Pig is forgiven because at least someone’s going about their lives with serious intent and an honest heart (conveniently ignoring the drugs in the petrol tank naturally!).

So I don’t need to tell you the plot of Easy Rider, you’ve already seen it, or read about it or seen it replayed in a hundred lesser films, but watch it again with a clear head, take everything it offers on face value, rather than fettered through the prism of perfume adverts, or comedy sketches, or satire, or posters on a student’s wall. It’s an honest film about the hopeless task that faces us all.

BC

In his biography of the great man Vincent, Lobrutto quotes Kubrick as saying:

“Control is… the essence of what filmmakers are about, they want to control the universe.”

As an example of this idea Kubrick is perfect. When we think of him we think of control, filmmaking at its most exact, sophisticated, every angle, movement, line and thought meticulously planned, meaning upon meaning, concept upon concept, symmetry within symmetry. But of course it can be applied further, a cinematographer will tell you their art is the control of light, an editor will tell you they fashion order from raw materials no matter how complex the end result. The director, the centre of the machine, organises all these units, managing personnel, time and talent to compliment perfectly the aesthetic.

It’s a vision of order.

So why then Beasts Of The Southern Wild?

I think, after that period of assessment that those of us who think about film far too much go through, it’s to give me hope. Not hope in the syrupy Hollywood sense, where I can lead a better life and change the world; it’s the hope that chaos is a thing that can be befriended and we don’t all have to be Stanley Kubrick to make great art. It’s a masterpiece in a different sense to say Barry Lyndon or 2001, it’s not an untouchable, unachievable thing; it’s very much within our reach. I didn’t leave the cinema crushed by a sense of intimidation; I came out reminded why I stupidly wanted to make films in the first place.

It seemed, to my eyes at least, fashioned from chaos. That kind of free flowing cinema which is either meticulously random or randomly meticulous, drawn together by an associative form of editing, creating narrative and character development by showing rather than telling, where brief snippets of events and dialogue speak oceans. Once we accept this rhythm the film flows over us, a cascading chaos of images that make perfect sense if we allow them to.

We see Bathtub, a community in the Louisiana bayou, fervently autonomous, poor, entranced by its own history and its place in a small corner of a large world. We see two of its residents, six year old Hushpuppy and her father Wink. We see water sustaining life and taking it. We see the spirit of community and the destructive nature of alcohol. We see Wink coarsely teaching his daughter the harsh truths of the world, the fine balance of things. We see man’s effect on nature tipping the balance. We see Wink become ill. We’re left wondering whether he’s ill because the balance has been tipped or the balance tipping because he’s ill, after all he’s Hushpuppy’s world, so close to orphanhood as she is, the spirit and knowledge of the Bathtub shaped into an unpredictable man.

We see prehistoric beasts blurring the line between literal and metaphorical. We see the waters rise and the community washed away. We see them stand their ground against flood and forced evacuation. We see the threat of civilization. We see Hushpuppy searching for her mother. We see funeral pyres and hospitals. We see a hundred things within each ‘see’, a photomosaic of storytelling. You can lose yourself in pictures like this if you want to, or you can criticise the hell out of it…whimsical, sloppy, over-simplified, meandering, I can take that it isn’t a film for all tastes, it has a style and a feel I am particularly susceptible to.

One thing I take exception to is the accusation of the glamorisation of poverty thrown at Beasts Of The Southern Wild, as if poor people can’t be the subject of fantasy, as if we haven’t got enough ‘gritty’ and stereotypical depictions of poverty to ease our charitable souls, as if even though it has obviously stylised production design and prehistoric beasts marching through the bayou it shows people below the bread-line laughing as well as losing, drinking and drowning… y’know the things middle class people do as well. Is it that we don’t have our fill of victims in the film? Wink, is a prime example, he’s brave but he hits his daughter, he’s caring but to modern parents also neglectful, he defends a community most of us would see as hellish to live in; we’re not happy with such contradictions.

The standards by which we judge poverty have led us to be prejudiced even if we do mean well. Dwight Henry who plays Wink, a baker before he took to acting, gives a performance of such raw life that it only seems possible by performers in his situation (think Q’orianka Kilcher in The New World as well); free from the structures of previous roles, he is able to construct a performance of such brilliance that it’s hard to think it could be repeated, it’s too good for awards. It again is as if he has accepted that chaos isn’t a thing to be feared or removed. Acting is a raw, revealing and sometimes foolish profession, but if you are aware of this……

I get carried away sometimes. Certain films take hold of me like a beautiful suffocation. The symptoms are such. Firstly I begin to grin as though the madness of the image has infected me (I recall, Aguirre, Apocalypse Now and There Will Be Blood), then I’ll lean forward in my chair as though if I got closer I could see round the image to catch a glimpse of the secret machinations of the thing… then, only occasionally I’ll lift my hands to the screen as if I am in some heated debate with the film… God knows what I’d do if I was standing up. It’s the chaos I reckon; only films that seem to have abandoned themselves possess me like this. My blood gets up and the images get to me to the point where I can’t tell inside from outside… Aurochs, floodwater, stonewall cinemas, floating brothels, firesides, bookshops, bathtubs, icecaps, beautiful women and the river flows on by as it always has.

BC