#7: Times and Winds

Beş Vakit

Dir.: Reha Erdem

Turkey 2006

111mins

IMDb page

Rotten Tomatoes

Turkey is not a country I know. I’ve never visited, or even flown over it, although I have stood for a while on headlands and cliff-sides of the Greek islands of Lesvos and Samos, staring out at the vast country’s Western coastline, acutely aware of the presence of small groups of Greek army personnel keeping watch over their old enemy. It’s been a long time, nearly a hundred years, since the resolution of a conflict that for the rest of the world remains a footnote (or epilogue) to the much more prominent narrative of the First World War. Take a look at a map and you’ll see just how close these eastern Greek territories really are to the Turkish mainland; Lesvos itself seems perpetually poised in between the jaws of a great Turkish bay that might snap shut at any moment.

Part of the reason Turkish cinema appeals to me – and this is very much an appeal to initiation, as Times and Winds is only the third Turkish movie I’ve seen – is the familiarity of the landscape[1]. Having spent many summers rambling around Greek hillsides, somehow both arid and green at the same time and fiercely hot, it’s interesting to see the kinds of places I had so thoroughly associated with the rural practices of Greek Orthodox Christianity just as deeply entrenched with the practices of Islam, with a separation of perhaps only a few dozen miles. It is an almost uncanny experience, if such a term can be applied to landscape. But of course it’s not just the landscape – it’s its cultivation, both in the agricultural sense and the more notional idea of how the character of the land intertwines with the habits and practices of those who work it, who live on it. In Greece one doesn’t need to walk past too many olive groves to find a tiny white church, almost never visited but kept immaculately presented, candles lit, or a cemetery with its ostentatious white marble and fading adornments from the life of the deceased. On the northernmost cliff of the island of Skiathos, only precariously walkable, stands a large wooden cross hundreds of years old; it’s as if the island itself is stretching to thrust its Christian symbolism as high as it can. An announcement to all-comers. In Times and Winds, on an equally precarious clifftop (although this time inland), the four central adolescent characters take turns to recite poetry for each other. Ömer, the son of the Imam, either doesn’t know any or isn’t interested. Instead he bellows one of his hated father’s calls to prayer into the air. The camera observes him from an opposing cliff; the sheer face of the drop and his distant young voice are the abiding impressions of the moment, when a religious imperative is sung out to reverberate across the landscape, or be smothered by the wind.

Quite why Ömer hates his father so much is never properly explained. He is sullen and wilfully self-isolated – in one scene Ömer silently refuses to budge closer to his father as the whole family of four poses for a photograph – and so one gets the impression it’s simply teenage disillusionment. (His father’s status as a religious community leader is also refreshingly underplayed, and Ömer appears to suffer no more on this account than if his father were a businessman or farmhand.) By contrast, his best friend Yakup, with his noticeably unbroken voice, comes across as sweet and friendly; he is also still something of a mummy’s boy and harbours a crush on their schoolteacher that’s not nearly as secret as he might hope. The escapist friendship between these two boys is the centre of the story, but it’s the peripheral goings-on in the village that consolidate the film’s themes of fatherhood and familial responsibility, while granting the viewer an insight into the reason for the unexplainable feelings of discomfort the boys have in themselves, and in the kind of grown men they may one day become.

Ömer’s secretive campaign to prolong his father’s illness is initially the engine of the story. Straight away there is intrigue: is the boy cruel, or will there be a revelation of abuse or maltreatment at some point over the next two hours? For Erdem, this would be far too easy. There is indeed an element of harsh patriarchy, but it comes from an unlikely source. In one of the most revealing of the aforementioned peripheral ‘adult’ story threads – and indeed it’s crucial that much in the village is kept from the children, reinforcing the generational divide and piling on further alienation – Yakup’s father is shown to be something of a runt in his own father’s litter. The old man has handed over his land to his two adult sons for cultivation; both have disappointed him in their failure to work it and respect their inheritance, but the efforts of Yakup’s father are particularly deficient. The grandfather’s dialogue consists entirely of chiding, accusing, and shaming his sons. He orders them to each build a stone wall around their halves of land, with distinctly lopsided results. What could have remained a tragi-comic moment later topples into full-blown inter-generational bitterness as the young Yakup witnesses his grandfather disparagingly kicking down the inferior wall. His father (the intermediary generation) looks on, downcast. At this moment Yakup’s disillusionment intensifies – are we always to remain subservient to our fathers, be they ogre-like or merely pathetic? What Yakup feels here is shame – he is ashamed of his own father. Something clicks into place, narratively speaking. Yakup and Ömer move closer together, become blood brothers before that ritual boyhood act is itself shown onscreen.

At this point I must reassure readers that Times and Winds is not as masculine a movie as I’m making out. In fact the film’s most beguiling presence is the girl Yıldız, whose fascinatingly indistinct character made me suspect that one or both of the boys might benefit somehow from spending more time with her, and not in a kind of pubescent sexual way either. I wanted them to broach the divide, instead of merely yelling distant threats to tell her parents on her after the boys catch the girls out watching and giggling over copulating ponies. When I say her character is indistinct, I don’t mean it’s inadequately drawn – quite the opposite. Where the boys are brooding, inarticulate, confused individuals (as boys their age tend to be), Yıldız is quiet but controlled, purposeful, and caring. And perhaps it’s the thirteen-year-old boy in me that wants Yakup and Ömer to force a revealing confrontation with her. I can remember all too well how strange girls seemed at that age. Strange but appealing. It is through Yıldız that the film’s first truly shocking moment occurs, and the viewer cannot help but feel that she simply doesn’t deserve it. I will spoil no further (but rest assured, it’s nothing morally problematic or harrowing).

The mood conveyed by the film as a whole – the editing, the pace of storytelling, and particularly the impact of the music – is rather a complex presentation. I’m tempted to even call it a ‘proposition’, because it its effect is so curious. While there are plenty of scenes of the children escaping for each other’s company in the wilderness, away from the village elders and the protocols of the schoolroom, the potential for romanticism (in the proper Wordsworthian sense) is constantly checked by Arvo Pärt’s grandiosely sad score. These children play, but they do so wistfully; there is a pervading sense of melancholy. It loads the whole movie down with portentousness, and not in a bad way. In a thinner or more simplistically sketched movie, the use of a score like Pärt’s could flag itself up as emotional shorthand. But again Erdem is too tasteful to allow this to happen; he handles his content wisely, deliberately and with adherence to realism.

However, this realism is stretched, if not entirely broken, by the film’s own signature stylistic move, one that fits the elegiac tone of Pärt’s music perfectly. I am referring to the impressionistic, non-diegetic bird’s-eye shots of the children lying down (asleep?), surrounded and occasionally covered by what’s on the ground around them: Yıldız mostly hidden by purple flowers; Ömer among dust and rubble. These are beautiful shots, no doubt about that, but difficult to interpret. I personally came away with the impression that these moments, placed at intervals throughout the film, are simply more emphatic variations on Erdem’s style of drawing attention to the gravity surrounding his characters. There are shots that point uphill, framing figures against the sky but making sure they’re rooted firmly in the earth. The aforementioned poetry recital scene on the cliff-edge seems to suggest both the danger of the drop and, conversely, the children’s sense of comfort and safety in the mountains they know so well. Several shots follow the children as they navigate the village, tracing their way round in the service of an errand or perhaps some troublemaking. Sometimes it appears that the children themselves are the centres of gravity; the camera is tethered to them, as they in turn remain earthed to the Eastern Mediterranean hills. Erdem’s 2010 film Kosmos features a man with a literally gravity-defying ability to climb: it’s a magic-realist element that allows the camera to dance around the character, picking up all the angles it can in a kind of dynamic interplay with his impossible clambering up trees and across walls. There is no magic-realism in Times and Winds, and so these shots are much calmer as a result, but the principle is evident. (This is another success of Erdem’s work: the style never outraces the possibilities of the story.)

The film unfolds patiently, its themes are complexly handled and not what I’d call “universal” – many of its observations are non-transferable to urban settings, for instance – but it’s these beguiling and moody shots of the children, laden with sadness, innocence and guilt, mostly closed-off to their families, that will keep viewers compelled. There have been plenty of arthouse movies over the last ten or fifteen years in which the minutiae of a childhood existence are studied with such a slight, hands-off approach that one wonders if the director is somehow afraid of interfering with the supposed ‘essence’ and authenticity of their own child actors; thankfully, Times and Winds is not one of them. It doesn’t just ‘observe’ and expect some kind of ‘truth’ to make itself known – it has a properly robust story behind it, a great script, and many fine performances. It doesn’t mind being manipulative, via its score among other things, because it has the courage of its own convictions. It knows the viewer will feel, and that feeling will be of substance. And so a confident, subtle and very modern piece of work then. Rightly lauded. Times and Winds is a keeper.

Incidentally, I don’t know why all that waffle about the Greco-Turkish War was necessary at the beginning of this entry. I suppose the movie has got me thinking rather nebulously, placing myself back on Aegean hillsides and dangerous cobblestones. I don’t have much rurality in my memory banks, so it’s nice when something appeals.

I have also (predictably) failed to update this page in a very long time. I intend to rectify this, but of course not every movie I see I am compelled to write something about. The Bourne Identity, for instance – I saw that for the first time recently and it’s good fun, but it doesn’t make me want to dive in. Another one was the 1968 rape-and-torture-fest WitchfinderGeneral: a classic piece of grim British censor-baiting fare that nevertheless left me unable to find an angle. And I did want to write about that one. (Perhaps I’ll have better luck with Blood on Satan’s Claw.) Brighton’s own Cinecity Film Festival is upon us at the beginning of November, so I’ll hopefully be able to file some shorter pieces about some of those screenings. (And without the ability to include screenshots! But that’s the most funnest part! Sulk.)

Anyway, if you are still reading, thank you. Feel free to argue and call me an idiot who can’t read a simple Turkish arthouse drama. Times and Winds has so much more to it than this entry attempts to deal with, but as always, I’m not claiming to be exhaustive. And I’m trying to avoid spoilers too, because Unsequence is a place to recommend. Until next time, which won’t be too long, I promise…

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[1] At least, in the country’s sunnier regions. Reha Erdem’s 2010 film Kosmos is set in the far grimmer climes of the snowy and troubled north-eastern border states.

#6: The Strange Case of Angelica

O Estranho Caso de Angélica

Dir.: Manoel de Oliveira

Portugal 2010

97mins

IMDb page

RottenTomatoes page

I sure am making things difficult for myself. When I started Unsequence Cinema sometime last year, the gist of my first post was that this might be a place where I could simply recommend movies to people. And here I am merely six entries in, they’re getting longer and longer and in every one of them there are caveats, conditions, acknowledgements of weakness or obscurity. I’ve been unable to do what I wanted here; that is, to be so inspired by my enjoyment of a film that I could recommend it unreservedly, saying “Just watch it, it’s fantastic.” Instead, the list is varied but small – Bertolucci, Raoul Walsh, Jean Rollin, Juraj Herz and Bergman – and my acclaim for the films has always been a little guarded.

Maybe there’s no such thing as having totally unreserved support for a piece of art. I know this notion is the antithesis to any kind of proper criticism, but there’s simply no way around the fact that every suggestion one makes to another person should be appended with the phrase “if you like that sort of thing”, just as a disclaimer, in the same way that “in my opinion” might one day be mandatory at the beginning of every sentence that offers a qualitative judgement. I’d prefer that we all just take this as an unspoken precondition of everything that escapes our lips, and then perhaps the time saved by omitting to pre-emptively apologise for believing our own opinions could be used more productively. We might win back a third of our waking lives this way. Just think of it.

What am I getting at? Oh yes, The Strange Case of Angelica. This movie has problems. It’s certainly not helping me to get back on track with my stated aim of using Unsequence Cinema to recommend, because it’s the one I have the most reservations about thus far. I’ll get to why, of course, but I think I ought to first explain why I considered it for an entry. 

This film is here primarily because it was written and directed by a 102-year-old man. As far as I’m aware, that alone makes it unique. The Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira has been making movies now for more than eighty years, on and off, which is of course a totally freakish achievement. Personally, I respect someone with a long career in the creative arts, and in cinema there’s no one I know of whose career has been longer. One of the most pervasive clichés within any kind of social cultural awareness over the last couple of hundred years is that the best artists peak early and extinguish themselves in a sad collision of misfortune, personal misadventure and critical misunderstanding. All the misses. Everybody’s heard it: if you’re a genius, you’ll know it yourself by 22, you’ll be dead at 27, and the rest of the world might catch up in time for some distant relative you’ve never met to live comfortably off your royalties. This model is cynical, and it fosters such utterly wrong-headed romantic notions that it can only be poisonous to the will. And so when I discover someone with a long and successful creative career, perhaps someone who is peaking in their seventies or eighties, it genuinely lifts my spirits. The very idea, then, that a centenarian is capable of helming a movie (although admittedly this is a low-key drama, not Apocalypse Now) will attract me by its novelty; its mere existence is a massive “fuck you” to those who would perpetuate the personality cult of the Art Martyr. And beyond even that, Oliveira’s later movies offer us the chance to ponder the changes that old age brings to the imagination – that quality so often held to be the purest reserve of children. When an old man sits down to create an original story, what have become the core concerns of his work? What has he abandoned or resolved along the way? In developments that may well be the result of declining physical dexterity as well as a natural distillation of themes and ideas, many older artists have simplified their output. For some reason, I’m thinking here of the uncluttered canvases of Georgia O’Keeffe from the mid-1960s onward, or the raw and lumbering final recordings of the delta blues guitarist Son House over the turn of the 1970s. Something about old age has forced them to reduce their art down to its skeletal form. In the cases of both O’Keeffe and House, the cause was indeed physical degeneration. I’m not saying this is the only way to go, and incidentally Oliveira is remarkably healthy, but I am saying that perhaps being grand is a young man’s gesture.

What I’m driving at here is that The Strange Case of Angelica is most assuredly not a grand gesture, and it really does feel like a film made by a very old man. It is quiet, considered, quaintly attractive to the eye – all made possible by the over-all simplicity of the film. But in this case both the positive and negative connotations of the word ‘simple’ are equally applicable. What The Strange Case of Angelica gains by its modestly charming aesthetic choices and tranquil pace, it almost loses by its unconvincing script and shallow gestures towards symbolism that turn out to be very woolly indeed. And because of how much I wanted to love a movie made by a 102-year-old man, it’s damn near heartbreaking that it turns out to be a handsome but ultimately meaningless experience.

But forget Oliveira’s age and experience for a minute. The opening twenty minutes is very strong indeed, and so even within the film’s own context it’s disappointing that Angelica doesn’t go on as well as it starts. The main character is Isaac, a solitary photographer boarding with a superstitious old landlady somewhere in Portugal. He is called upon late one night in an emergency: the daughter of a wealthy family has died and they want her photographed, one last time, looking beautiful and at peace. He arrives and the house is full of mourners, and a nun who is not well inclined towards the young Jewish man in their midst, but needs must – the dead Angelica is waiting on a chaise longue, and she most certainly lives up to her name. When Isaac looks through the viewfinder, the woman opens her eyes. Naturally he is spooked, and finishes the job quickly before rushing out of the house.

This is the beginning of Isaac’s doomed obsession with the dead young woman. It’s also the middle of it, and very nearly the end too. I’m being facetious, but really there’s no development of this idea beyond the initially striking opening reel. When she opens her eyes for the first time, the audience truly feels it. Later, in a turn that will challenge the commitment of some viewers despite the modest running time, she arrives on Isaac’s balcony as a ghostly apparition and the two of them float dreamily (and horizontally) through the night. The Strange Case of Angelica, then, verges on a sort of weird Gothic romance, and this tone is amply served by the slow and slightly overwrought performances, and beautifully framed interior scenes.

So far there’s nothing stopping the film from being a nicely low-key success, but the number one problem is the script. It is just not a good script at all. At one point Isaac goes out with his camera to photograph some agricultural workers manually tilling the fields. He then pegs these developing prints – angry-looking rustic men with hoes – alongside the prints of the dead Angelica, who occasionally comes to life again within the frames. When asked why he has been photographing such an outmoded practice as manual agriculture work, he says something like “I prefer the old ways to the new”. I may be paraphrasing there, but crucially I’m not simplifying – the film really does offer nothing more than that statement. I’m crying out for this to be developed a little, or explained: if these images stand for Isaac’s growing isolation and distaste for the modern world, what’s the significance of their juxtaposition with the Angelica photographs? Am I not trying hard enough here? There’s no real link, just the pairing up of two things it’s possible for a wistful and detached arthouse film protagonist to be wistful and detached about. And later, there’s a truly bizarre lunch conversation about engineering, matter and anti-matter that comes out of absolutely nowhere and offers no further insight into Isaac’s predicament, either as a direct metaphor or as a way of establishing an ontological or epistemological world beyond/behind the modest little story at hand. Perhaps that’s not what the conversation is there for, but I’ve not come into the film expecting these questions to be addressed, I’m only responding to what’s there, what’s being established by the film itself. And unfortunately, the audience is asked only to accept that Angelica reveals herself to Isaac in the pictures and in ghostly form, and that he falls in love with her to the brink of a kind of mad despondency. How the other elements of the film relate to its central plot frankly escapes me. Reference points seem barely sketched in. It’s rare for me to say this of an arthouse film, but I think it needs to be longer. An extremely well-shot if incongruous fifteen minute discussion about anti-matter might make a beguiling centrepiece in a movie willing to put more flesh on its bones, but in The Strange Case of Angelica it takes up one sixth of the running time, and establishes nothing except that the landlady is a simple woman who doesn’t understand science, and Isaac is a “strange man”.

This is the scene that proved to be most divisive for the users of the now-ubiquitous IMDb; there are arguments on the message boards about it. The usual stuff, you know: one side with a predilection to bait arthouse fans (I have no idea how they even get to see movies like this if that’s how they feel), and the other side who are completely sold on the auteur credentials of the filmmaker or are unwilling to challenge something they’ve become emotionally attached to. I more often fall into the latter camp (and that’s why I banished myself from the IMDb boards a long time ago), but in this instance I get both sides. The fact is, The Strange Case of Angelica is a lovely film in many ways – it’s made with the assurance of someone who has long known how to stage, light and edit his films to get the precise tone and pace he wants – but as a result it’s the photography that will stay in your mind after you see it. The ideas won’t, because there are few. In these screenshots, I think it’s possible to detect the tone of the performances and the patience of each scene, and that in itself is the marker of some cinematic success.

I don’t want to leave Manoel de Oliveira on a bad note because it’s not a bad film, it’s just a strangely empty one, so I fully intend to watch another of his films very soon, a very old one, Aniki-Bóbó. This is his first feature length fiction, released in 1942, and if my memory serves me it was featured in Mark Cousins’ stunning The Story of Film last year. That was the real reason I found myself watching Angelica: of course I wanted to see the work of a centenarian filmmaker, but I also wanted the opportunity to see something he made in his early thirties, which in cinematic terms is practically an ice age ago. I may report back.

#5: Hour of the Wolf

Vargtimmen

Dir.: Ingmar Bergman

Sweden 1968

88mins

IMDb page

RottenTomatoes page 

Oh dear. I appear to have neglected this little blog-hole for a few months. It wasn’t an accident, I didn’t forget the password or anything; it was studious avoidance. I had a lot of second-year university stuff going on and I barely made it through with acceptable marks, so suffice to say the last thing I wanted to do on my off-time was sit down to a clicking-and-wheezingly overheated laptop for another round of wretched analysis, even if it’s of the extra-curricular sort and therefore doesn’t oblige me to shoehorn in words like ‘discourse’ and ‘hybridise’ just to prove to some utterly self-interested academic that we’re definitely reading from the same hymn sheet, yeah? Because, of course, we’re not. I spent weeks indulging forlorn fantasies of a time in the not-too-distant Summer when I could sit down and write about something purely for the enjoyment of it, and I suppose that time is now. 

I’ve seen quite a few movies since my last post back in February, but not nearly enough. They’ve been stockpiling away on my external hard drive this whole time. By God, there’s almost 350 of them: whole chunks of the filmographies of Renoir, Hitchcock, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Wilder, Buñuel, Cassavetes, Tarkovsky, Almodóvar; big daunting epics like Marketa Lazarová and Profound Desires of the Gods; even the impassible monoliths of Peter Watkins’ La Commune (Paris, 1871), Tarr’s Sátántangó, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 – Noli Me Tangere and Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (just who exactly am I kidding with those last two?). A lot of absurdly demanding viewing there, and I’m sure I’ll die before I see them all – I’m predicting an early demise, you see. Aside from back-to-back viewings of a few Jia Zhangke movies for a symposium at my University (of Sussex), I thought I’d take it easy with some shorter running times. No shame in that, is there? After all, the quarrelsome game-changing film critic Pauline Kael’s apparent favourite movie is only 37 minutes long. (Watch it, by the way – it’s fucking beautiful.) And luckily, most of the films of Swedish master Ingmar Bergman clock in around the 90 minute mark. So a Bergman it is today then. 

Hour of the Wolf is, apparently, his only out-and-out ‘horror’ film, but a quick glance at the IMDb page reveals that Bergman’s late-1960s period also included the psychological merger/breakdown drama Persona and a made-for-TV movie involving dangerous ritual sexuality called The Rite, so it’s clear that he was at least comfortable with the kind of themes that, in another director’s hands, might lead quite naturally to a classic horror genre piece. I’ve seen neither Persona nor The Rite, so I can’t be of much help there – in fact I might as well come clean now and say that Hour of the Wolf is only the third Bergman movie I’ve watched. The others are the acknowledged classics Wild Strawberries and Through a Glass Darkly; both are visually stunning, emotionally fraught, eyebrow-raising and jaw-dropping in their own mournful and tragic and slightly tense way. Hour of the Wolf was made over a decade after the director’s ‘golden year’ (1957, when both Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal were released) and in that time Bergman had clearly been nudging at the boundaries of psychological cinematic provocation: the truly surprising incestuous content of 1961’s Through a Glass Darkly is no less envelope-pushing than the pure horror of Psycho or even Robert Mitchum’s sleazy paedophilic turn in Cape Fear. While there is no one specific theme in Wolf that might count as ‘adult’ content to quite the same level, the film is undoubtedly revelling in the freedoms afforded to it by that decade’s broken taboos. The result is twofold – firstly, it works on its own as a piece of unsettling hallucinatory psychological horror, and secondly, it reveals how close Bergman had actually been to that style over the preceding decade. It might well be thought of as ‘the only Bergman horror movie’, but it’s hardly much of a diversion. To my eyes, it seems like he only needed to darken the tone and the rest of his style almost realigns itself to match – the existential ruminations and remote windswept settings remain, and Sven Nykvist’s beautiful black-and-white cinematography picks out the pain and dread of the protagonists in close up as well as it does the lines of mania and dark purpose in the demonic Baron von Merkens and his constant houseguests. There is also the cast of regular Bergman players – Max von Sydow, Liv Ullman, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin – that make the film feel properly canonical, as well as the very familiar theme of an artist going through a personal crisis.

Max von Sydow plays the artist Johan in perfect sympathy with Bergman’s sense of pace and his by-then established commitment to using geographic isolation to reflect and influence mental isolation. Johan has retreated with his pregnant wife Alma (Liv Ullman) to a cottage on a rocky, wind-buffeted island, ostensibly for artistic reasons – he’s going through a period of stifled creativity, and the couple appear to be relying on sales of his paintings as their only source of income. Their home life is no romantic idyll, however, as the increasingly dour and disturbed Johan complains of being pestered by the island’s other inhabitants, and the viewer quickly suspects that these meetings might be outright delusions. Johan spends the days wandering around the island, attempting to paint but always at the mercy of these strange meetings – fending off the enthusiastic therapist Mr Heerbrand, or succumbing to the temptation of his ex-lover Veronica (Ingrid Thulin), both of whom approach him unbidden upon the craggy ridges and slopes. How ‘real’ these people are is not Bergman’s concern in Hour of the Wolf: they’re ‘real’ if they have an effect, and their capacity for tormenting him is very real. This is where Wolf diverges most crucially from classic horror tropes, both before the film was made and after (as I’m not attempting to set it in a chronology). Horror films will commonly establish their own principles early on as to where the fear that is to be engendered has its source – for instance, is it a fear of the supernatural, as in ghost stories? Or a fear of the mythical, as in monster stories? The ‘logic’ of ghosts in genre stories works differently from the ‘logic’ of monsters, but there is usually some adherence to the pattern of one character ‘witnessing’ something and attempting to persuade others around them that there’s definitely a threat. Cue scepticism, liberal amounts of fate-tempting, numerous reveals of the too-late or just-in-time varieties, and there’s your horror film. But what Bergman’s movie has, and in this he shares the curious achievements of plenty of off-the-wall exploitation/horror/giallo features of the 1960s onward, is a disregard for the ‘burden of proof’ dynamic that horror’s most famous and most conservative movies accept as a matter of course. One of the most creatively liberating results of the advent of ‘psychological’ horror is that it can incorporate traditional elements of supernatural, mythical and of course even ‘realistic’ horror (i.e. the threat is a murderer and he’s a real human being) and deploy it almost as iconography, as symbol, and so it has all the cultural import of reliably scary figures and tropes but doesn’t have to follow their exact rules. Dracula can come out in daylight, Polanski can have depraved hands clawing through the walls in Repulsion, Darren Aronofsky can plunge a perfectly serviceable feelgood ballet-dancing success story deep into mindfuck territory and totally get away with it. Likewise, there is no questioning Johan about these encounters that are very probably in his head; instead Alma is just doleful and wounded, knowing that no matter how much she loves her husband he is undoubtedly very troubled indeed. He is absent, withdrawn, and they both seem so doomed that the film doesn’t bother setting up the possibility of an escape or solution. Everything that’s spoken by Alma or Johan could potentially be the key to unravelling the mystery of just exactly what happens in Hour of the Wolf, or perhaps nothing could. It’s not a spoiler to mention that one exchange between the couple, concerning Alma’s idea of a soulmate-ish psychological empathy between two people who love each other, recurs at the film’s close to suggest that the ‘realness’ of the apparitions is a moot point. This is, crucially, because Alma begins to see them too. 

Hour of the Wolf is really about Alma and not Johan. She introduces the story direct to camera, and performs a sort of coda similarly, in retrospect. The audience’s struggle to understand Johan is her struggle, and her devotion to him is sad while somehow inevitable. It’s clear she has lost him at some point in the story that is about to unfold, and so from the very beginning the tone is tragic. Both Ullman’s in-character introduction and the sound recording of Bergman directing the construction of his own set that runs during the opening credits are conscious metafictional gestures, but strangely they don’t really amount to much. A quick search on that bastion of unassailable truth we all know as Wikipedia reveals that Bergman added these elements to counterbalance his own self-consciousness at the personal content of the film, as a way of flagging up the story as a construction, an invention. But he really needn’t have – as I mentioned before, the artist-in-crisis theme is well-explored in many of his films, and without the director’s somewhat nervous reaction to whatever he felt he was exposing too nakedly in Hour of the Wolf we would surely still be guessing now – by virtue of the ultimately unknowable, that perpetual motion device sustaining all great Art Arguments – which movie was truly Bergman’s ‘most personal’. But that’s not to say this one is; it’s just one of a few whose ‘constructed’ nature he has decided to flag most prominently. Who knows why he balked? Perhaps it’s been set down somewhere in print that I’ve yet to find. In fact, as I can only guess at the sheer size of the world’s Bergman scholarship, I’d say it must be. 

I’ll go on as if it’s still a mystery. Perhaps the exact content of Johan’s fears – the Bird Man; the old lady who, when she removes her hat, also removes the rest of her face – match Bergman’s down to the last detail. The chain of grotesque, macabre transformations and impossibilities that occur as Johan returns to the Baron’s house to reunite with Veronica is the stuff straight out of vivid nightmares, and this makes up arguably the film’s most striking sequence. Another candidate is a flashback, confessed by Johan to Alma in a climax of despair and guilt, in which the artist is suddenly provoked into fatally attacking a small boy who bothers him by the rocky water’s edge. It’s actually shot very differently from the rest of the film; it’s washed-out by sunlight, the camera spins queasily, the editing is like an experimental 16mm short. It’s an extremely effective few minutes, and even more so because it remains unresolved – like the other encounters earlier in the film, we’ve no idea if Johan really killed a boy. But he is weighed down as if he had, and this newly sunken depth proves to be the breaking point in their marriage. Johan attempts to force his loving wife off the island after this, and the Baron’s house beckons.

I’ll not attempt a full synopsis here; the film is too abstract for such formalities. It wouldn’t reveal anything or pique the interest of those who haven’t seen it. I try to avoid spoilers, as I’m always unsure exactly who I’m writing these entries for, but in this case the screencaps themselves could count as spoilers. Some of the shots in Hour of the Wolf are so breathtakingly beautiful, intimate and demented that you’d be better off going in totally cold – at least then you’ll not be waiting for the onscreen arrival of whichever startling image may have drawn you in. I suppose the safest way to end this entry now is to revert to the standard Unsequence Cinema question of how to recommend the movie. Well, if you’re familiar with Bergman already then you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into: his style is singular and this work is a particularly stripped-down and unreal variation upon that theme. It is properly dark and puzzling, even alarming towards the end. If you don’t know Bergman but you’re interested in seeing how an arthouse luminary might tackle a horror movie both feet first, set aside 90 minutes on a wet weeknight. The experience may prove to be memorable.

#4: The Cremator

Spalovač Mrtvol
Dir.: Juraj Herz
Czechoslovakia 1969
96mins

Juraj Herz’s The Cremator is exactly the kind of film I had in mind when started this site: it’s highly unusual, not particularly well known, and most importantly it’s very good indeed. Made in 1968, it is a product of a creatively healthy time for Czech cinema, and its assured combination of dark comedy and psychological fantasy-horror makes for a memorable and creepy viewing experience. The eponymous cremator is Karel Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrusínský), a man who cannot be distracted for long from his favourite conversational topic: death. To say he is proud of his job would be a massive understatement; he repeatedly expounds upon the spiritual significance of burning the recently dead of his native city, Prague. He holds close to his heart some Buddhist principles that may be quite fatally mangled, believing that cremation is the best way to return each man’s essence to the earth and be reincarnated, and (with more alarming implications) that death is the only real release from suffering. This can all be deigned from the eerily calm orations that make up at least 80% of all the film’s speech, and Herz visually matches this spoken dominance by keeping the audience’s view ruthlessly subjective – we follow only Kopfrkingl throughout, for better or worse, and at certain moments of heightened tension the camera entirely adopts his perspective. The tricks Herz uses to do this give The Cremator its expressionistic visual style and most significantly its editing style, which I’ll get to after I try to synopsise without dropping any big spoilers.

It’s not immediately apparent that the film is set sometime in the 1930s, but a visit by Kopfrkingl’s friend Mr Reinke sets the audience straight – he is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Nazis and the inevitable occupation of Czechoslovakia. Reinke plants a seed of doubt in Kopfrkingl’s mind concerning the ‘purity’ of his own blood, which leads him to ask his Jewish doctor Bettelheim about its nature – can it be ‘pure’ or ‘mixed’, or even perhaps ‘tainted’? “There’s no difference in blood.” He replies. “It’s like ashes. You say yourself that all human ashes are the same, be they French or Spanish, doctor or clerk.” But the old doctor’s words go unheeded as Kopfrkingl slips further into collaboration with Reinke and his Nazi sympathisers, acting as a spy and informant against even those closest to him.

The narrative arc is essentially the familiar one of the man misled past the point of no return, not dissimilar to my #1 entry The Conformist in fact, and a necessary dynamic in these stories is for the audience to want the character to resist capitulation, to reassert himself and come to realise what he is doing is wrong. As The Cremator adopts a dread-laden and claustrophobic vibe from its very start, it’s quite clear that Kopfrkingl will not come to that realisation. The issue then becomes how far he will go. There is a definite sense of inconsistency between Kopfrkingl’s Buddhist misreadings and the bullish Fascism of his friends. Sure, he’s incurably morbid and joyless, but does he have it in him to be a tool for a murderous state?

The extent to which he is just flat-out deranged is difficult to assess because, despite the overt references to Nazism and date-specific setting, the film plays out more as a fantasy than anything else. Realism has no grip on this story, which allows Herz and his editor the space to bring in techniques that really disorient the viewer – frequent cuts between extreme close-ups and medium shots make it difficult to discern when there is a change of scene and location, which has a kind of montage effect. In fact, it’s like Kopfrkingl’s life is lived entirely in montage and fluid cross-cutting. The scene changes often intersect in unusual and temporally impossible ways, as when Kopfrkingl is simultaneously witnessing a Jewish religious celebration and recounting it to Reinke: the latter wasn’t there, but his mouth enters the shot and asks probing questions right into Kopfrkingl’s ear as he watches. There is at least one example of a character reacting to the sound of something from the following scene – in fact, the sound cues the quick transition. If you like little touches like that, you’ll be regularly raising your eyebrows at The Cremator.

The horror element comes from Herz’s use of wide-angle lenses to emphasise subjectivity and the space of the interiors, and this can be really unnerving when combined with the fast editing and the impressive sets. The cremator’s imposingly large tiled bathroom becomes the scene of a particularly nasty act, and you can’t really go far wrong with an underground white room full of coffins, can you? The supporting characters add to the sense of unreality – everywhere he goes, Kopfrkingl sees a man bickering with his too-sensitive wife, an adolescent boy comically over-fascinated by his laconic girlfriend, and a silent dark-haired woman carrying flowers. Some of these people add comedic elements, but their behaviour seems completely locked into repetition. They’re like the anonymous aristocratic guests at Resnais’s mansion in Last Year at Marienbad – their intention may well be as satirical avatars or stand-ins, but their raw effect onscreen is first and foremost disconcerting.

There is a scene where Kopfrkingl and Reinke speak to each other about laying off the crematorium staff from different rooms in a brothel, and Herz plays masterfully with the set’s door frames and mirrors. Here is the clip: [I can’t seem to correct the aspect ratio, sorry!]



There are some very odd framing decisions too, partly in conjunction with the aforementioned wide-angle lens shots, and I can only guess that these eccentricities are there to create a visually unsettling relationship between the characters’ bodies and faces and the (frequently unusual) spaces they inhabit. For instance, during a late scene where the extent of Karel Kopfrkingl’s Nazi collaboration is shockingly revealed, Herz places Hrusínský in front of a huge hellish Boschian fresco, framing several shots to include the most of its detail and editing the sequence together into a dizzying montage that confirms the audience’s deeply felt dread and apprehension as to how pitch-black the movie is prepared to go. I won’t spoil it here, but remember while you watch that Juraj Herz is one of only two filmmakers to have survived Auschwitz. Knowing this, the denouement and final shot of The Cremator could make this film one of the most audacious works of fiction ever created by a Holocaust survivor on the subject.

If this all sounds a bit too rich in formal self-consciousness, then let me reassure you that every fancy technique is employed with great skill, and with enough regularity to elevate them from little visual tricks to the constituent parts of a proper bona fide cinematic voice. In other words: it’s consistently odd, but it’s just how the movie speaks. There’s so much more to say about it, but I will refrain from deep analysis: The Cremator is a nightmarishly strong statement about the potential for man to be swayed by mysticism and dogmas, as well as by flat-out coercion, and may well be one of the most distinctive movies ever to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain.

#3: The Grapes of Death

Les raisins de la mort

Dir.: Jean Rollin

France 1978

90mins

IMDb page

A confession of slight snobbery must open this Unsequence Cinema entry: I never would have undertaken any research into the films of Jean Rollin unless I’d read a DVD-review-cum-reappraisal in ‘Sight and Sound’ magazine a year or so ago, arguing that the director was far more than just a sexy-vampire-obsessed art-exploitation purveyor – he was, in fact, one of cinema’s foremost surrealists. Whether or not this bold claim holds water is irrelevant – it’s all the more odd that I pursued an interest at all, considering I have no real predilection for either cheap 70s erotica or high-art surrealism. But I do have a thing for little cinematic obscurities, and Rollin’s unique universe turned out to be so weirdly distinctive that I couldn’t help being drawn in.

I’ve only seen two of his movies: Fascination (1979) and The Grapes of Death. The pair are generally regarded among his best, and after seeing a few clips of his notoriously dumb and shitty Nazisploitation movie Zombie Lake (1982) I can believe it. Fascination is sexy, Gothic and mysterious, but ultimately it’s very much an exploitation/erotica movie with only a few good bits of photography to recommend it higher than a thousand other curiously unconsummated softcore flicks. However, Rollin conceived The Grapes of Death squarely as a horror flick: there’s no mysticism, no nude vampire sisters, no faux-profundity in the dialogue, and the result is a successfully striking piece of genre cinema. Most of his films have a very pervasive atmosphere of remoteness, and he clearly had an excellent eye for evocative location shooting on a limited budget. Rollin applied these two established knacks to a leaner, flat-out scarier premise than his usual films, and managed to deliver a movie that achieves some way beyond its promise. I’m no aficionado but, to my eyes, The Grapes of Death must be one of the most thoroughly out-there films I can think of that’s ever likely to be mistaken for a zombie movie.

The plague-struck French villagers aren’t zombies, of course, because they don’t eat people. They remain ‘themselves’ after infection, except they have a tendency to murder those closest to them – family first, then anyone who unfortunately crosses their paths. One of these unfortunates is Élisabeth (Marie George Pascal), who is on her way by train to visit her boyfriend at the rural winery in which he works. The winery has, unknown to her, been spraying its vineyard with a new pesticide, and hey presto: a plague of sores, murder and general melty-faced homicidal unpleasantness ensues. Rollin plots are so skeletal that they barely matter, and so I don’t consider that much of a spoiler. Very little dialogue and screen time is dedicated to the cause of the outbreak, and in a way that’s its strongest connection with other classic zombie movies. The Grapes of Death is made up of ominously paced, gruesome set pieces – a string of dread-filled and beautifully photographed escape scenes that lead inevitably into the next deeply unfortunate situation. The characters react quite realistically too, which is a rarity in horror, especially in movies so stylised as this. Élisabeth’s first contact with the villagers after her friend is murdered on the train is a great example of this: she is baffled into hysteria by their unwillingness to help her reach the police. She doesn’t try to deal with the problem herself as a lot of modern horror protagonists inexplicably do (it’s usually treated like a matter of Fate or some such bollocks) – she is legitimately terrified and seeks only safety from the infected.

Along the way she meets Lucie, an angelically innocent blind village girl who lost her way after the trouble started, circling the sharp and craggy hillsides with outstretched arms. Élisabeth guides her home, finds the whole place ruined and corpse-strewn, then tells her she’s not at her village, this is somewhere else. Lucie knows she is lying, and demands to find out why. Élisabeth never gets the chance to explain that everyone is dead, but by nightfall the pair discover that ‘dead’ isn’t quite the state her former friends and family are now in. The villagers awaken and hunt the two women down with flaming torches and the single-mindedness of a lynch-mob… only much slower.

There are a few more characters involved in The Grapes of Death, but I’ll leave the narrative alone and mention instead the movie’s real strength. Jean Rollin has tapped into the audience’s fear of the wilderness, of isolated places, of antiquated places in fact, and has shot the creepiest scenes in daylight. Night does indeed fall upon Élisabeth’s predicament, and horrible things do happen, but the night scene’s most memorable shot is of Brigitte Lahaie, in a long white night-dress, in and out of focus as she carries a torch towards the camera:

A lot of the camerawork is handheld, which could account for the wavering focus that the cameraman was perhaps not entirely in control of, but this fits the atmosphere perfectly. The situation Élisabeth finds herself in is unreal, dreamlike, and we can imagine her struggling to digest the events that surround her. This is not to say that the camera squints and wobbles because it is meant to represent her point of view throughout, but there are several strange and lethargic dialogue scenes, shot front-on and in shallow focus close-up, in which the characters read their lines directly to camera. Élisabeth’s distraught face, filling the screen, is lingered upon. This is another world entirely from modern horror’s quick cutting jump-scare tactics.

The film has its flaws of course, and if 1970s horror has never interested you then I doubt The Grapes of Death has the power to convert. Anyway, it’s hardly representative of a decade in European genre cinema. There’s a strange conversation about Fascism and the French Resistance that’s so aggressively shoehorned in that it comes across ridiculously – as if a bit of political banter is appropriate during a pandemic. The visual effects are quite primitive too; the decapitation scene should be very nasty but comes across as cartoonish. However, this is made up for by the executioner later kissing the severed head on the lips passionately, and with a brutish catharsis of grief, as if he wasn’t to blame for its doll-like dead stare. I also very much like the horde of crazed homicidal villagers muttering “Je t’aime Lucie!” as they go about their pursuit of Élisabeth: a very nice touch, un-zombielike in the extreme.

I’ve also avoided mentioning the opening set-piece on the train until now because, frankly, you need to watch it for yourselves, and it’s on YouTube so I can just do this:

This one scene convinced me I needed to watch the movie. I absolutely love the long shot at 2m55s: a quick fade of the soundtrack, then a very tense thirty second handheld panning shot looking in on empty carriages in near-silence, then… well, watch it if you haven’t already.

The closing paragraphs have tended to be quite long so far in these entries, but my summary here is short: if you like 1970s horror movies of any kind, you really must watch The Grapes of Death. It’s very, very odd indeed, and you won’t soon forget it.

Edit: Yes I have noticed the mouse cursor is in these screenshots. No I'm not doing them again, neither am I editing them and re-uploading them. Yes I'll make sure it doesn't happen again.