London Frightfest 2010, part # 2.

4:00pm
Wound
(David Blyth, New Zealand, 2010)

New Zealand filmmaker David Blyth is best known for his 1984 movie “Death Warmed Up”, which apparently beat Peter Jackson’s “Bad Taste” to the punch to become the first Kiwi gore film. I guess there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then, and 2010 sees Blyth returning to the director’s chair with “Wound”, an uncompromising descent into zero budget psychological torment which whilst clearly a lot more ambitious and unconventional than a standard issue splatter flick, at least proves his love of viscera remains intact.

Ostensibly exploring the world of an extremely disturbed woman who has been driven to kill her abusive parents and is haunted by the presence of her abandoned/dead daughter, “Wound” progresses via a feverish schizophrenic/hallucinatory dream logic that owes a great deal to the work of Alexandro Jodorowsky. And if the result ain’t exactly New Zealand’s answer to “The Holy Mountain”, Blyth certainly shares ol’ Alexandro’s distain for any notion of subtlety, and also his fondness for sledgehammer PRIMAL IMAGERY, bookending the film with two close-up oedipal gorefests that had even this battle-hardened horror crowd cringing in disbelief. Holy shit BBFC, did this one fall behind the couch while you were busy trimming ten seconds out of lousy Hollywood rape-revenge remakes, or what?

Secure in the knowledge that the faint-hearted will be long gone by the fifteen minute mark, Blyth proceeds to cheerfully throw incest, mental illness, S&M, clinical depression, rape, voyeurism and schizophrenia into the mix, and whether or not he manages to offer any genuine insight into those issues, or whether he’s merely putting in the hours in pursuit of a career in the tediously pretentious realm of ‘transgressive’ culture, is a question I’ll leave each viewer to decide for him/herself.

Personally, I didn’t enjoy “Wound” very much, just as I didn’t enjoy all that broken caps lock Lydia Lunch ‘poetry’ I waded through as an impressionable youth very much. But for the kind of film it is, I will at least cop that it was extremely well-realised, skating over a lot of potentially ridiculous and/or offensive material in a way that remained credible and non-exploitative throughout, an impression helped in no small part by the harrowing method-style performances of lead actresses Kate O’Rourke and Te Kaea Beri, both excelling in roles that could scarcely be more difficult.

One thing I found interesting whilst watching “Wound” was the extent to which the film’s contemporary setting and lo-fi, shot-on-DV look negatively effected my enjoyment of it. Not that I have a knee-jerk disapproval of such things you understand, but it occurred to me that when I watch disturbing lunatic films from the ‘60s and ‘70s (as a brief perusal of this blog’s archives will swiftly reveal that I am apt to do), the temporal distance between myself and the people and objects on-screen forms a kind of barrier, creating a kind of unreality that I find most pleasing.

At times, the woozy pace and non-linear narrative of “Wound” reminded me of watching a Rollin or Franco film, but something was kinda wrong. When the protagonist of “Wound” crams a corpse into a dustbin and wheels him outside to bury, she’s using a modern plastic wheelie-bin, like the one outside my house, and the guy is wearing ugly supermarket-bought socks like most men probably wear everyday. Putting such activity in the context of Real World just makes it seem ridiculous and uncomfortable, y’know? In a way that goes deeper than just the flatness and lack of definition of the Digital Video shooting?

What I’m saying is: I’m sure that back in 1973 there’d have been some unlikely ‘70s-style garbage contrivance, and the guy woulda been wearing AWESOME socks of some kind. I wasn’t alive in the 1970s. Things that happened there in weirdo horror films seem dreamy and different and fascinating to me; that’s probably part of why I enjoy them so much. The past is another country, quoth Graham Greene, whom I’ll bet never foresaw his words being used in this context. Consider: whenever someone goes to some crazy, anachronistic nightclub to dance to slightly-out-of-date music in a Jess Franco movie, it is clearly awesome. No questions asked. When characters in “Wound” go to some ‘90s style industrial S&M goth club and the film wants us to view it as some terrifying, underground nightmare place, it’s absolutely cringeworthy. You see where I’m going with this…? No, me neither really, but it’s some interesting stuff to ponder.

I’m certainly not suggesting that weirdo horror films were necessarily better in the ‘70s, or that people should slavishly try to recreate past eras in their movies or anything like that, you understand. Just observing that I probably tend to cut bad films from the past a lot more slack than I do vaguely decent ones from the present, simply due to this odd gauze of cultural/temporal dislocation. Or something. I dunno. The past four paragraphs haven’t exactly had much to do with David Blyth’s film, for which I apologise – thinking out loud alert over.

6:30pm
Amer
(Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, France, 2009)

Billed as a po-mo tribute to ‘70s Giallo and Italian pop-art cinema complete with recycled soundtrack cues and visual calling cards (see poster art), “Amer”s directors would, you’d imagine, have a thing or two to add to the issues I was muttering about above.

I suppose I was expecting “Amer” would be some kind of stylish, Tarantino-esque retro funfest. All fast edits and bright colours and goofy antics, and “ho ho, why yes, I DO recall that moment from ‘Don’t Torture A Duckling’, well played sir”, and so on. It’s probably about time somebody made a movie like that.

As it turns out though, “Amer” is not that movie. “Amer” is something else entirely, something that is quite unlike any feature length film I’ve ever seen. In fact, I was surprised that a film this overtly experimental and essentially plotless should be programmed at a horror festival at all. And when I say ‘plotless’, I don’t mean in the typically Italian “what the goddamn hell was all that about” sense of the term, I mean that “Amer” is actually an abstract film – a collection of images and visual textures, entirely devoid of narrative.

I confess that during the film’s opening half hour – which seems to follow a young girl painstakingly exploring her sinister and oppressive family home - I didn’t really get this, and drove myself nuts waiting for a story to begin to emerge. For this segment at least, the film teases us, offering characters who enter and leave and then return, and who even utter cryptic lines of dialogue from time to time. But that’s not what the film is about. I guess you could probably watch it and come away with some vague sense that we were following a girl through different events in her life or somesuch, but you’d probably have missed the point. “Amer” is pure cinema writ large - trying to connect the threads seems akin to staring at a Pollock painting until you’re convinced you can see a dog or something.

What immediately separates “Amer” from just about every other avant garde film I’ve ever seen though – and probably the main reason it’s playing here rather than at some contemporary art fest – is it’s exquisite production values and awe-inspiring cinematography.

On a purely visual level, each and every shot in this film is incredible. So much so, one suspects that above and behind any high-minded artistic agenda, the film is simply a brazen exercise in technical wizardry, demonstrating just how far-out cinema can get when one combines modern Hi-Def technology with the excess and visual daring of decadent-era European pop cinema.

And if the film does indeed work with a visual palette that often recalls the work of Argento, Bava and so on, it swiftly becomes clear that the directors are using these tropes in the spirit of a Liechtenstein-style artistic recontexualisation, rather than as raw material for a bunch of cool, referential horror movie stuff.

Usually when avant garde filmmakers are attracted to horror imagery, they’re working from a trash/kitsch/shock angle (see, oh I dunno, Nick Zedd or somebody), but Cattat and Forzani come at it from the opposite direction, clearly in love with the languorous pacing, rich textures, lingering tension and dense atmospherics of ‘70s cinema, and determined to take elements that were only hinted at in the work of Italy’s more consciously ‘artistic’ genre directors, and to push them about as far away from the limitations of commercial filmmaking as they possibly can.

Violent and fetishistic imagery may be used (incredibly effectively) in “Amer”s concluding segment, but for the most part the directors seem content to dwell on the strange way in which Euro-cult aesthetics can serve to raise what in any other film would be the mundane to the level of a kind of cosmic radiance.

Use of close ups is excessive and extreme throughout, to an almost unprecedented degree. Seriously – what “Lawrence of Arabia” did for sand, “Amer” does for pores, eyelashes, lips, beads of sweat. By the end of the film, the human body has become almost some endless, alien landscape, swathed in strange colours and tracts of imperishable desert. There’s enough eyeball on show to leave Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi weeping together in a darkened closet.

Ninety minutes of that I just couldn’t take, but thankfully there’re plenty more textures that get the camera’s love. Blindingly bright Mediterranean skies; wrought-iron railings and dense foliage; shards of glass scattered across a dusty bedroom floor; reflecting patterns of light against a taxi’s windscreen; a child’s hands prising glittering treasure from the fingers of an ossified grandfather; a bright cotton print dress rubbing against tender young thighs, and….. look, sorry, “Amer” is just an impossible thing to try to review in a conventional manner. I’ve heard of directors apporaching their films with a painter’s eye before, but this is just ridiculous.

And as I say, on this level, “Amer” is an astonishing achievement, no question. If any given five minute sequence from the film was crow-barred into the middle of a narrative movie, it would be an absolute jaw-dropper, enough to send you reeling, proclaiming the director in question to be a grand new cinematic stylist, the new incarnation of Fellini, or Bertolucci, or whoever.

But as a standalone piece, it is “Amer”s strengths which also serve to make it an absolutely maddening viewing experience. I don’t mind watching a film without a story, but one thing I do appreciate in my cinema is movement, and some sense of forward motion. Without getting too wanky about it, the desire to see people or objects get from A to B, to observe some sort of change or development within a shot, is a pretty basic component of what makes film appealing as a medium.

Cattat and Forzani, by contrast, seem determined almost to fight against the temporal flow of their film, treating the screen as a canvas upon which they can freeze each moment for as long as humanly possible. Instead of taking us forward to the next moment, most of the movement in “Amer” seems to emerge from the filmmakers’ desire to take us deeper and deeper inside the current moment, closer and closer to the subject until we can see the very fibres and stitches that compose the image. It is a very unusual and uncompromising approach to cinema, but one which, presented here in unadulterated form, can make for very gruelling viewing – the cinematic equivalent of trying to quench your thirst solely with espresso and absinth.

When we think of particularly gripping and audacious sequences from the films of, say, Argento or Hitchcock, we are seeing them, whether we like it or not, through the prism of the film’s narrative and forward momentum. However shallow or irrelevant those directors’ storylines may seem in comparison to their technical or artistic flourishes, however little we might care about the characters and their unconvincing motivations, we need that context to make the film work for us. If, as in “Amer”, we were simply to line up the tour de force sequences in succession, they would cease to be gripping and audacious, and would ultimately become meaningless, however beautiful they may look in the editing suite.

So if you happen to be a film technician or photographer with a particular fetish for Giallo-era imagery, then congratulations – you’ve got a new favourite movie.

And if you’re a struggling filmmaker searching for some cool ideas to liven up your horror/suspense flick, congratulations also – you’ve got a new crib-sheet.

If you belong to the rest of the human race though, I fear “Amer” may test your patience.

- - -

As a final note, I’d like to congratulate the organisers of London Frightfest for programming such an interesting line-up of films on their second screen. I’m sure that most of the audience, myself included, would have been perfectly satisfied with a bunch of fun, forgettable generic horror flicks, but instead we were gifted with four films which in their own way were all ambitious, unconventional, forward-thinking, and almost entirely devoid of genre cliché. And if I didn’t think any of them were quite 100% successful, I certainly enjoyed them all, and I’m very glad I had a chance to see them – well done guys, here’s wishing you well for next year.