#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.

#2: Regeneration

Regeneration

Dir.: Raoul Walsh

USA 1915

72 mins

IMDb page
Rotten Tomatoes

To be honest I was rather unsure about writing an entry for Regeneration on this site. Raoul Walsh’s early feature about New York street hoodlums is certainly historically interesting for a number of reasons, but it remains a silent movie of lesser merit than many others that came after it. In fact, watching it almost a hundred years on only emphasises the huge leaps of cinematic sophistication that were developed over the five or ten years immediately following it: visual techniques and narrative depth that Regeneration lacks. But ultimately I decided to include it here for numerous reasons; it is still very serviceable for a 1915 movie thanks to a few excellent scenes, and the director is hugely significant to American cinema – Raoul Walsh is the man who made The Thief of Bagdad (1924), The Roaring Twenties (1939), White Heat (1949) and High Sierra (1941) among a great many others. Mostly, though, it’s included because I have to take the DVD back to the library on Friday, and I highly doubt I’ll ever end up seeing it again.

All of this disclaimer-ing doesn’t bode too well in light of my promise to use Unsequence Cinema for recommending movies to people. However, I do indeed recommend Regeneration, but with some caveats: if you like American social-issue movies about crime and poverty, or just where they cross over with American gangster movies, and you want to trace these genres right back to their roots, then you are heading towards this movie whether you know it or not. Having said that, it doesn’t much resemble its celebrated descendents. There’s a perfectly good historical reason for this: consider that the classic movie-gangster archetype is basically a wiseguy anti-hero derived from the three lead characters in Little Caesar, The Public Enemy or the original Scarface (all released between 1930 and 1932) – movies that referred specifically to the desperate poverty of returning war veterans and illegal alcohol networks in cities like Chicago. Well, the era of alcohol prohibition in America didn’t begin until 1920, and the country didn’t opt into the First World War until 1917. So there’s no war veteran disaffection in Regeneration, and no bootlegging.

The film refers to its protagonist, Owen Conway (above centre, played by Rockliffe Fellowes), as a “gangster”, but in practice his crimes aren’t exactly of the ‘organised’ variety: he and his gang essentially just harangue people for their cash on the streets and in bars, not too far different from Max and Noodles’ childhood gang tactics in Once Upon a Time in America (1984) but without the forays into blackmail. Fellowes is a strong and sullen presence as Conway, and his ascension to the head of the street gang is shown to result more from his ability to fight for his own pride and survival, as well as for those less physically less capable than himself, than any ruthlessness or cruelty. His eventual rehabilitation (or regeneration into a do-gooder) is inspired by a beautiful young woman, an upper-class angel who founds a charity to look after the downtrodden of the neighbourhood Owen is apparently the scourge of.

We’re obviously way back into elementary film storytelling days here, so it’s unfair to criticise the threadbare plot arc. But some of the crucial scenes illustrating Owen’s growing love for the benevolent Marie Deering (Anna Q. Nilsson) are among the film’s high points, especially the one from which I’ve nabbed this screenshot:

Owen’s friend and ex-gang member, now working with Miss Dearing at the Settlement House, has persuaded him to help rescue an infant from the neglect of its violent father. Owen is reluctant but helps out, returns the child to its worried mother, and heads back to his hoodlum friends in the bar. Marie drops by briefly to thank him, and after she leaves he stares off into space while the other hoods pick up their (presumably unsavoury) conversation without him. He is clearly touched and coming to a profound realisation, and the combination of Walsh’s framing and the unfolding pace of the scene invests Owen’s character with real depth for perhaps the first time.

Most of Regeneration’s formal achievements are now so ingrained into film language that it would hardly seem like an endorsement if I listed them, but permit me a short lapse into terminology. I noticed a couple of nice dolly shots (one dolly in, one dolly out if you’re interested) and a symbolic dissolve that’s nice if rather out of place, but the framing is largely quite unremarkable: flat stagey ‘boxed’ rooms cutting to iris-in close-ups. The sheer antiquity and formativeness of Regeneration probably precludes any non-scholarly recommendation of it to others, beyond any special interest in early ‘social’ pictures, as I said before.

However, it is now remembered primarily not for its artistry but for its setting – Walsh filmed much of it on location in New York, with extras made up of real-life hoodlums, prostitutes and street urchins. An early scene on the dockside brought to my mind the New Jersey docks of On the Waterfront (1954), except fifty years before: a snapshot of an even more bygone era. (Rockliffe Fellowes even looks a bit like Brando in that film I think, and certainly has the stature.) The final sequence shows the city in a fascinating panorama. In fact it is this climax, during Owen’s pursuit of his thoroughly nasty ex-gang-mate Skinny (William Sheer) after the attempted rape of Marie, that outclasses the rest of the movie with its fine, suspenseful cross-cut editing between three different characters engaged in varying degrees of chase, tussle and escape through a grimy and towering New York tenement building. One emerges from the upper window and hangs from the washing lines – another bursts out into the street from the cellar, wielding a pistol – the third is frozen in moral turmoil somewhere inside. It’s a very well-staged ending.

There’s plenty more than can be said about Regeneration, especially in comparison with Raoul Walsh’s later films, but as I’ve only seen The Roaring Twenties I’m not really in a position to go much further down that route. That the director supposedly came into this movie straight from working on the huge and groundbreaking D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation (1915) is notable: Regeneration can be seen to link two celebrated directors, each peaking artistically at very different moments in film history.

I think I’ll wrap this up with a screenshot-dump of interesting shots, beginning with this brilliant one of Skinny anxiously hiding out after stabbing a policeman.

#1: The Conformist

Il Conformista
Dir.: Bernardo Bertolucci
Italy 1970

111 mins

IMDb page
Rotten Tomatoes

It’s only right for Unsequence Cinema's first entry to be a striking and exceptionally well-made movie, and among my most recent viewings I can't think of a better candidate than Bernardo Bertolucci's breakout classic The Conformist. It was released to great acclaim in 1970, a time when cinema had largely broken free of heavy censorship (Communist and politically volatile states notwithstanding) and the acting we would now recognise as ‘naturalistic’ had established itself as a dominant style. True to its era, then, The Conformist has at least one brilliant performance (the lead, Jean-Louis Trintignant) and a few very taboo-breaking ideas working away under its surface. But its biggest achievement is its visual power – almost every shot is eyebrow-raisingly beautiful. I’ll upload some screenshots to prove it. It’s hard to believe some of these settings actually exist in the real world. They certainly don’t seem studio-built. Anyway, more of that in its right place.

I have to admit to initially missing a few of the more radical ideas raised by Bertolucci in The Conformist, and I think this is down to the very diverting central enigma of the titular character. Trintignant plays Marcello Clerici, an agent for the Fascist secret police whose motives are extremely difficult to pin down and whose reactions are almost equally hard to gauge. He is introduced in what appears to be a control room in a 1930s radio studio. While a jazz group performs on the studio floor behind him, Marcello explains to a friend what’s motivating him to marry a younger girl who is infatuated with him: “I don't know. The impression of normalcy… stability, security.” His friend enters the studio after the jazz band finishes and reads out a pro-Fascist diatribe supporting the alliance between Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Later, Marcello is interviewed by The Colonel for his position as a Fascist enforcer: “Did you ever ask yourself why people want to collaborate with us? Some do it out of fear, most of them for the money. For faith in Fascism, very few. But you, no. I feel that you're not governed by any of these reasons.” Marcello dodges the question, and on this point the events of the rest of the movie hang entirely. Why is Marcello doing this? The film’s title suggests plainly: the same reason he’s getting married – merely to conform.

The narrative is told mostly in flashbacks, sometimes very long ones, from the opening teaser scene of a troubled-looking Marcello in the back of a car in drizzly Paris. This scene is cut back to, briefly, several times during the ‘proper’ set-up of our main character’s mission to silence a vocal anti-Fascist Italian exile, and so the audience knows from the very start that something must not have gone according to plan. The fact that Marcello decides to use his honeymoon trip to carry out the assassination seems like it ought to be a bigger clue into his real motivation that it actually turns out to be. Without letting any spoilers out here, the film goes on to portray our ‘conformist’ as a reticent lover as well as a reticent Fascist: he seems as unable to consummate his marriage as he is to pull the trigger on his target, who, not quite incidentally, turns out to be his old Philosophy professor.

This slight plot contrivance aside (the movie is not too reliant on realism), it raises very interesting questions – how can Fascism be the answer to a social philosophical quandary? Does Marcello really believe in it? He is totally indifferent about religion, going through the motions at a confession requested of him by his fiancée before the offscreen marriage (even though he confesses to some quite startling things, he clearly doesn’t value the idea of a redemption before God). The audience is left to do its best cod-psychoanalysis on Marcello because he is so difficult to decipher. No one else in the movie seems to be able to work him out either; they often have gross misconceptions of him, none more so than his devoted young wife, who can’t see how obviously mismatched a couple they are. His disregard for her leads me neatly into an important observation I failed to make upon first viewing. There is a sexual factor somewhere behind all of this: the idea that Marcello may have been sexually repressed into toeing the party line just to lead a normal life, to conform in the way he apparently wants to, just for its own sake. Italian cinema of this period certainly played around with links between Fascism and sexuality, most notoriously by Pasolini in his final film Salo (1975). It’s worth mentioning here that both directors were famously left-leaning and vehemently anti-Fascist themselves, but Bertolucci’s angle is very different from Pasolini’s allegory of rape and Fascist power. The Conformist, while visually bold and spectacular, actually tells its story quite sensitively, even reservedly. The lead character is, underneath his veneer, palpably a mess of tics and neuroses, and Trintignant plays it perfectly.

I’ll give away no more of the plot, but I must mention two particularly brilliant scenes: one involves a huge bar and a dancefloor, the other a pair of cars picking their way through a snowy woodland road. Both of these scenes are astounding, and demand to be watched many times over. Keep an eye out for them.

I promised screenshots to illustrate how beautiful this film is to look at, and here are some choice frames. I don’t know exactly which members of the production team are responsible for these (Set design? Production design? Cinematographer? D.P.?), but this kind of photography really keeps the movie compelling throughout the frown-inducing uncertainties of the plot and characterisation.

What makes The Conformist a thoroughly recommendable film is that it manages to balance the merits of an extremely tight piece of arthouse cinema with the scale and visual power of a ‘big’ production that doesn’t cut its corners financially. It’s such a confident movie that it almost strides right out of the frame, and is rightly heralded as a modern European classic. (This was never really in doubt – it must have garnered enough praise at the time for Bertolucci to be able to sign Marlon Brando on for his next feature, the even more successful Last Tango in Paris.) In 2010, Empire magazine voted The Conformist the 85^th best non-English speaking movie ever made, and frankly the competition up there is unreal. Watch it, but make sure you turn your brain all the way on first. You’ll need it.

Welcome, anyone!

Welcome, anyone, to Unsequence Cinema. I suppose my first post on this new blog site should be a short explanation of who I am, what this is, and more importantly why it is what I hope it is, or why it will be what I hope to make it.

My old neglected music blog

Who I am: a person called Dave. What this is: a place I can write about films I've seen. Why this is: demands a longer answer. I used to occasionally update a blogspot page called Argue With Silence, which began as a site about various forms of underground music before I got a bit bored with it and started adding all sorts of vaguely diverting nonsense about antique books and food festivals and my own inability to find the motivation to post regularly. When I started the entries in late 2007, it was under the assumption that underground music was "my life", and so it should thereby provide me with ample ideas and subjects, and endless inspiration. Unfortunately I was wrong. I have since become aware that I make a lousy music journalist, even a lousy music blogger, and standards are notoriously low where the latter is concerned. I became convinced that, while plenty of readers may have found certain individual subjects interesting, I was the only person who saw any sense in the seemingly random nature of the blog's total content. To call Argue With Silence the musical equivalent of a word association exercise would be to overestimate its thematic unity. It had none.

My local cinema, the wonderful Duke's on Preston Circus, Brighton.

And here I am embarking on a film blog with similarly disconnected content - hence its name, Unsequence Cinema. The only reason I do this is because I don't watch films by theme or genre - I watch them as they take my fancy. But I think this blog may succeed where the other failed. My reasons for hoping this are long and convoluted and as yet unformulated on paper (don't worry, I'll spare you), but it ultimately comes down to the relative ubiquity of storytelling techniques, visual techniques and film language, and the (often unacknowledged) familiarity most film-watching people have with these things, compared with their rough equivalents in music. If I were to start talking at length here about a particular Drowningman or Lungfish record I liked, you would need to have at least a passing familiarity with 90s American post-hardcore music to anchor my words anywhere meaningful in your own experience. But if I were to instead recommend an equally obscure (but much more 'canonical') old Eastern European satire movie*, you would at least expect to understand the way the story I describe might be told in pictures. (Screenshots are helpful as a visual aid; one can hardly expect album covers or waveforms to have the same engaging effect on a reader.) Also, when we talk about movies as opposed to music, we often have the advantage of a narrative line to use as a hook for drawing in the listener. Music doesn't have a storyline on its own, so if we can't directly play the music to people then we resort to gesticulating desperately about its "vibe" or the atmosphere it creates, and often failing to convey it. Because the vast majority of films are narrative films, we aren't forced to do the same when enthusiastically recommending a movie. And so, by the miracle of restrictive cinematic convention, we are rarely if ever forced to overhear a pub movie conversation open with a gambit like "I saw a film the other day with the most fabulous mise en scène!" Thank fuck.

This brings me quite neatly to the issue of 'critical language' and technical terms. I won't be using very much of this stuff. I'm not a film critic, and my time as a film student lasted one screening and one seminar before I switched to a straight English Literature degree (of which I'm going into my second year of very soon). I would likely misuse a lot of terms anyway, and I don't want to start pretentiously overreaching with my entries to Unsequence Cinema. The point of this blog page is to flesh out my thoughts on a number of quite unrelated movies, with a bit of background information thrown in and some lovely screenshots of anything I find particularly striking. And most importantly, Unsequence Cinema is here to recommend movies to people who might not have come across them before. Ultimately, I think the filmgoing public at large is probably a lot better equipped and more receptive to slightly unusual movies than most gig-goers are to unusual music. Audiences naturally try to piece a film together, to work out what the filmmakers are getting at, and this tendency lends itself to going a little outside of one's confort zone. Having said that, I have no great allegience to "weird" movies and Unsequence Cinema will certainly not be weighted in their favour.

I will try to occupy the position of an over-interested punter throughout, instead of a scholar, (which I am not) or a snob (which I really hope I'm not). I acknowledge that film debates are unavoidable as soon as one makes one's opinion known, and I try to avoid them if they are particularly facile or, on the other end of the spectrum, oblique or esoteric. What I'm trying to say is: there will be holes in these reviews if you look hard enough. I don't want to resort to essay language, and I'm not offering my views up as watertight. This is not a thesis.

Well, now the obligatory introduction is over, the movies....

* For some reason I was thinking here of Milos Forman's 1967 comedy 'The Fireman's Ball', banned by the Czech government for being a bit subversive. You'd never notice.