BFI Screen Epiphanies – Come & See (1985)
здравствуйте comrades. For my second free BFI screening of the year a number of strategies struck me on how to open a review. First of all the distinct lack of Russian cinema I’ve managed to cover over the years sprang shamefully to mind, I mean apart from a couple of stabs at Tarkovsky it’s not exactly been Kino-film 101 around here, right? Soviet film figures such as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovshenko and Vertov are powerful dormant bears of film culture, ushering in and developing critical cinematic syntax such as montage and shot to shot relations, while more recently figures such as Alexander Sokurov have prowled the world stage, regarded by many as among the greatest living filmmakers. Then of course I thought about the Second World War film, a genre which broadly speaking has been treated cinematically as an action filled romp, of boys own adventure and glorious men-on-a-mission movies, until the likes of The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan detonated a new assault of blood and entrail drenched realism, illuminating the full horror and sacrifice that such inhuman conflicts ignited across both the European and Pacific theatres. But then after last Thursdays horrific events here in the UK there really was only place to begin discussion of Elem Klimov notorious 1985 film Come And See, and that is the harrowing tableau of a human face frozen in absolute horror, all reason and sanity obliterated by the sights and atrocities it has witnessed, a scene akin to both the peasant boy Flyora witness to the brutal blitzkrieg Barbarossa campaign and my reaction to the results pouring in from the constituencies across the country.
The film is frequently cited in the same breadth as Passolini’s Salo, Haneke’s The Seventh Continent or Zukawski’s Possession as among the most harrowing art-house of the period, rest assured it’s a tough watch both sonically and psychologically, with some brutal imagery which fully unleashes the four horsemen of the apocalypse which are referenced in the films biblically plundered title ‘And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see! And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth’. The films stomach churning center-piece is the 45 minute obliteration of a Belarus village by a division of Wehrmacht psychopaths. It’s an unendurable, extended assault of forlorn screaming, of barking dogs, of indiscriminate explosions and gunfire, as the frenzied occupants of the doomed hamlet are corralled in the village church and burned alive – men, women, children, infants. Klimov frames this almost as some horrifically distorted bacchanal, with the Nazi’s (and let’s never forgot their sympathizers and accomplices) bawdily drinking, singing, dancing and carousing as they indiscriminately slaughter entire generations of families, with the lucky ones succumbing swiftly to the cleansing fire – you really don’t wish to know what happens to the survivors.
I suppose I should explain the ‘Epiphanies’ sobriquet, as this is a series of screenings that the BFI host for artists or scholars as works that they champion as having changed their artistic lives. This was the choice of theatre director Katie Mitchell who was interviewed prior to the screening, and no I’d never heard of her either as I’m such a pathetic philistine. In terms of technique Klimov was also a decade ahead of his peers on the other side of the Iron Curtain, as he assaults the viewer with a trident of techniques that firmly situate us in the disintegrating headspace of poor, orphaned Flyora. In one sequence empathic identification is forged when a barrage of artillery deafens our protagonist, causing the soundtrack itself to warp to garbled and discordant tones for the next twenty minutes of screen time – Spielberg truncated and ‘homaged’ that ideal at 0:42 here. The film is also notable for a generous disbursement of Steadicam use. After Kubrick’s profile raising deployment of the method in The Shining five years before it still hadn’t quite infiltrated the industry as a popular filming method, so Klimov’s ordering his camera to prowl POV style through the nightmare gets us directly into his Floyra’s headspace, where a minefield, an enemy or atrocity could be lurking around the next corner. This fluidity is punctuated with severe close-ups of grimy, trembling, tear streaked faces, the literal face of war with humanity ebbing away as the horror warps into a numbing spectacle of grotesque mangled bodies, indescribable cruelty, the relentless laceration of metal into soft flesh and bone. Finally, in a quite brilliant touch which is all the more pertinent now the film frequently cuts to Flyora’s terrified glances to the omnipresent Luftwaffe spotter planes circling the battlefields, providing a constant drone as literal agents of death that scuttle across the smoky graveyard smeared sky. If I was being a little bit flippant I’d liken the overall effect to Hieronymus Bosch crushed in the tank tracks of Sven Hassel, a constant assault of misery and mayhem on all fronts of cinematic representation – Come And See being an invitation to voyeuristic evisceration.
Elem Klimov never made enough film, and although it’s romantic to think that this was due to him having nothing left to say following this ultimate statement on warfare in cinema I think it was more to do with tussles with the Soviet Goskino film-board, whom of course sanctioned or suppressed material at the whim of the prevailing political winds. They loathed the film for its ‘dirty aesthetics’, yet despite the challenge it found its way to the international festival circuit, and curiously managed a staggering 30 million admissions in Russian territory alone. As for the screening itself, well, I’m sorry to say this was one of the poorest experiences I’ve endured at the BFI. They did announce that the 35mm print they had acquired had been tested and found to be of such despicably poor quality that they had to make alternate arrangements, cannily securing the Super VHS master loops from Channel 4’s transmission of the film in the 1990’s. This quality was fine for the first twenty or so minutes, then some interference became apparent from the source master and the digital projection which resulted in blocky glitches populating the screen like a ‘snowstorm’ aerial failure. A very apologetic curate came out and explained the issue and that they would continue the projection so I stuck around – it was physically still watchable just immensely distracting – figuring that once they changed tapes the problem could be rectified and thus my patience was rewarded. Still, at the end of the day this was free to members so I can’t complain too much, and the glitches only blighted about 30 minutes of the two and a half hour film. For sheer metaphysical horror of what we deluded creatures feel justified to inflict upon each other in the name of nationalism, of prestige or of power or pride Come And See is an equal to Apocalypse Now, a harrowing vision of hell literally let loose upon the Earth, all encapsulated by Flyora’s shattered, weeping face as witness for us all;
BFI Days Of Fear & Wonder SF Season – Solaris (1972)
So finally after our long and exhausting odyssey through distant and dystopian worlds we nervously colonize our final planet – Andrei Tarkovsky’s hellacious hymn Solaris. I always aim to crown the year with a genuine classic, so the opportunity to terraform two instincts with my final push on the BFI’s Days Of Fear & Wonder season was aligned in the celestial heavens. Any SF fan worth their silver hued spandex will eventually find themselves metaphysically wandering around that soviet-era space station, grappling with deep metaphysical mediations on consciousness, memory and the implacable intangibility of time. I’ve seen Solaris a couple of times over the years although no revisits have occurred during this alleged 21st century, so this big-screen transmogrification was quite an experience, despite the faded and slightly distracting embossed font English subtitles adorning the BFI print – there was more squinted reading during this three-hour picture than I anticipated. Tarkovsky is undoubtedly one of the greatest two dozen film-makers ever to have lived, his ascetic texts a Venn diagram of time, memory, mortality and the impact that these elusive concepts have upon the human condition, yet for me this is probably his most accessible work, although as a SF classic it’s not exactly exploding with logic muttering mechanoids, interstellar dog-fights and sexy green hued sub-orbital species. What it trades in is ideas, of concepts and queries of our uniquely human space in the cosmos, providing no easy answers to those infinitely impenetrable questions – Who are we? Why are we here? and sometimes in those darkest of moments just what is the fucking point?
Some brief context – as a Russian film made in the early 1970’s it’s a definitive cold war creation, one part political to two parts metaphysical, widely conflated as an ideological reaction to that other colossus of intellectual SF cinema that was propelled into orbit a mere four cycles earlier – an experimental Sputnik to Kubrick’s Dionysian Apollo. The plot is deceptively simple – psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is enlisted to travel to the distant aquatic world of Solaris and board a government space station hovering over a mysterious alien sea, regular contact has been lost with the modest crew and rumors abound of some uncanny phenomenon. Somehow, with a methodology beyond our human comprehension an entity has been plucking thoughts and memories from the mission staff and rendering them physical and corporeal, in Dr. Kelvin’s case a reanimation of his deceased wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk) who committed suicide a few years earlier. Half-seen and barely remembered glimpses of the other station staff also materialize, but the emphasis focuses on Kelvin’s grief and uncertainty, a rational architect of the human mind facing an implacable oddity – death and impossible rebirth.
In the first movement of the film Kelvin pensively wanders through his rural garden grazed with the threat of an encroaching technical society. This pastoral Eden includes the trappings of modern society – vehicles, roads, and communication equipment – which sits uneasily with the quietly intransigent, simple agrarian beauty of the local flora and fauna. This is a common motif in Tarkovsky’s films, he likes forlorn figures listlessly wandering through ruined yet beautifully decaying landscapes, the mortal uncertain of its place among the eternal. Like 2001 the film is similarly bisected with intertitle cards which must have been a conscious reaction to the Odyssey, alongside a distinct sense of detached alienation in the urban as Kelvin (a comment on this chap-sticked chap? That’s cold) travels to the city in this acclaimed sequence;
That earthbound journey to the mission is Tarkovsky’s diametric riposte to the celebrated Stargate sequence of 2001, a film he legendarily dismissed as ideologically dead. He was withering in his view of our basic, intrinsic humanity and relations to society being reduced to a mere adolescent cog in the wider plan from our celestial forebears – that’s some communist, earthy agrarian belief in the power of the masses wrestling with the capitalist techno fetishism that 2001 celebrated. Forgive me a quick aside but I’ve recently assimilated a brilliant observation, some critic revisiting the 2001 re-release remarked that the intertitle signaling of our species evolution in the film has the next phase in evolution grammatically sentenced not after the celebrated bone/spaceship match-cut, but only when we embark on the Jupiter mission after we have conquered our local orbit and built these majestic machines, a subtle but crucial distinction. It amuses no end to read these opinions, the legendary egos of these cinema titans butting heads like the territorial displays of magnificent stags, each wielding their intellectual instincts across their interpretation of cinema culture.
Tarkovsky’s films are saturated in symbolism, circle and water motifs, the physical earth inexorably aligned with elemental forces which bind our human reality together. The rural is poised against the urban, the intellectual against the spiritual, a philosophy of constant icy curiosity. The editing and the way he covers scenes is just fascinating in comparison to the American model, rather than editing down eye-lines and utilizing the usual shot/reverse/shot paradigm Tarkovsky has his camera listing and pensively moving from characters in the scene, continually pondering, curiously querying the deeper fundamental wrestling with our place in the universe. This ambience is enhanced in the rather detached and unemotional performances of his actors, like 2001 this is a Siberian film from a contemporary standpoint. There are no great emotional conflicts or stand-offs despite the notion of a loved one returning to life and seeking answers, with a glacial pacing that requires a rather reflective mood to fully immerse yourself in.
The film was based on the cult novel by Stanislaw Lem, a writer I’ve not gotten around to although I think I might give him a shot this year. In its most oblique moment ‘Man needs man’ is asserted during the films most expository dialogue scene, where the scientists seems bored and nonplussed by the now routine supernatural phenomenon, prone to philosophizing over the cause rather than the effect. One directorial flourish I couldn’t quite crack was the colour gradiants utilized in the film, some of the memory scenes are golden-hued, in others the film oscillates between black and white then color (you can see that in that extract above), they seem rather arbitrary than narratively enforced, lacquering the film with an amber scented sense of mystery. Is the miraculous reproduction of Hari her soul reconstructed? She swiftly seeks the sweet embrace of oblivion when ‘she’ self actualizes her position in the world, just as the original imprint did. It night be the most oft-cited comment on the film but yes it is an internal journey, a SF mounted inquiry of the soul rather than yearning for the stars. What makes us human? Why does this simulacra of Hari (and this assersion is crucial and the lynchpin of the film) still have those memories indolent of Kelvin’s recognition and memory of ‘her’, so do we only reside in others memories after death? If all these worlds are yours then where is the penitent solution, especially considering the films final troubling suggestion that all is illusory and imaginary, and some questions can never be answered.
Tarkovsky is one of the all time great directors whose films demand an intellectual challenge to excavate, that aforementioned visual and thematic density mixed with his specifically austere pacing and style certainly don’t whet everyone’s appetite, but this documentary is a pretty good start. I quite enjoyed Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 remake which took a rather more direct and emotional approach to the same material, although Soderbergh has penitently washed his hands of the project and branded it a profound failure – seems a bit harsh. This is a fantastic piece on Solaris and it’s sister SF piece Stalker which I saw at the BFI shortly before I launched this blog, now there’s another challenging film which I hope to get around to some day. A quick aside – there is a whole slew of communist SF cinema which never penetrated the Iron Curtain during the cold war, much of it is still quite difficult to apprehend in the West but a slow thaw of releases and a 2011 BFI season are slowly bringing a glasnost to this neglected universe – I must rigorously inspect the credentials of this East German boxed-set. So that’s the end of another year and another fantastic BFI season, I’ve been mulling over what to start next year as an annual project and I think I’ve come up with a plan. Although I will be continuing the Fritz Lang season as I do enjoy the diversity of publishing reviews of films made before the 1970’s I think we need to turn our attention to another German tyrant whom, coincidently, I shall be witnessing in the flesh at an event over in Westminster – Werner Herzog. But let’s close the year with one of the most opaque and stimulating sequences I’ve seen this year, time, thought and memory suspended in the physical dimensions of this fleeting reality, whatever it ultimately means is irrelevant to its austere and mysterious beauty;
BFI 58th London Film Festival 2014 Programme Announcement
It’s all go isn’t it? Not twenty four-hours after I smugly accept an invitation to the press screening of the newly hewn digital print of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the BFI’s exclusive screening rooms over in Soho next week (pauses…..takes a big breath) than the offers of on-line screeners from TiFF start to trickle through, I’m not even in the fucking country and I’m being thrown the proverbial celluloid bone. To compound matters further the full 2014 London Film Festival Programme streaked across the ether today, and as usual lo there was much rejoicing and gnashing of teeth. You can read my official blurb here if you are so inclined, my initial reaction is slight disappointment at the lack of any major surprises, but as always when you comb through the programme a few treats are coaxed forward. So here as usual is a Menagerie specific round-up of what I’ll be making specific efforts to see, alongside some of the more widely distributed trailers for the gala screenings which may also float your film cruise boat. I’m off to the official public launch at the Southbank tomorrow evening after a brutal itinerary of day job appointments, although I have managed to schedule in a matinee screening of the Dardennes latest at the recently enshrined Victoria Curzon, just to keep the momentum going. So let’s begin with the big opening night extravaganza;
I happen to think that Cumberbatch is hugely overexposed at the moment and maybe should be selecting projects with a little more strategy, yet another ‘prestige’ British film is so predictable if you ask me. Also, as fascinating as Turing and Bletchley Park was it’s hardly new territory in terms of recent coverage, and I can pretty much envisage the entire film from that trailer, right down to the final scene blurb which inevitably will reference Turing’s recent pardon and his rehabilitation within the establishment. If it’s sandwiched between other material and I’m already embedded in a screening room for the day then fine I’ll see it, but I won’t be pulling the stops out for that one…….
Some of the denser pictures have lumbered over to London from their Cannes celebrations, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s dense metaphor on the modern Soviet body politic seems scarily apt, given the current not in the slightest terrifying rumblings of conflict on the news cycle. Following the Cannes plaudits I checked out his earlier film The Banishment which was pretty much 157 minutes of serious Soviet severity, a film you admire as you endure. I expect more of the same.
This Sundance scorcher has been getting some strong praise, it looks like J.K. Simmons could be in for acting awards come the statuette season, who knew that Jazz could be so violent?
Speaking of violence I’m so happy to see this made it over, such a fascinating premise of a full cast of deaf-mute non-professionals exposing urban and social displacement. If you think Boyhood has this years most original technique then consider this – the film has no subtitles. Alongside Interstellar, these are the two films I’m most excited to see for the rest of the year.
This looks visually alluring although I find some of the recent crop of Chinese financed epics a little cookie-cutter. I’m much more excited to see if this makes the programme once I get my paws on the full list tomorrow, that sounds amazing from Mr. Body Hammer himself.
Whilst I’m particularly nonplussed by the special guests this year – the closest approximation is legendary documentation Frederick Wiseman whom is promoting his new film National Gallery – we always need to seek out a strong documentary, and this has been exploding across the global circuit so I’m glad to see it here. No trailer yet hence the alternate hilarity above, a bit of whimsical pyrotechnics among the serious fare, if you will.
OK this made me laugh, Godard at the fucking IMAX? In 3D? That could be quite an experience, and full marks to the LFF programmers for getting a slot at the biggest screen in Europe which isn’t exactly the usual home of such continental curiosity. I’m no massive fan of his and find most of his recent films quite tedious, but his latest is supposed to be an absolute cracker, if you’re in the mood for some extremely self-reflective meta-wallowing on the art-form.
Well, it wouldn’t be the LFF if they didn’t give us more Sono who always gets favourable treatment, I think they’ve brought every one of his films over since I started attending. I’ve posted this before but it takes us to a nice round ten movies on the hit-list.
Scorsese and the BFI’s patronage of the immortal work of Powell & Pressburger continues with a 4K restoration of the beloved Tales Of Hoffman, which is incidentally George A Romero’s favourite film. I won’t bother with the inevitable ‘film being raised from the dead’ quip….
And here is the closing night gala, more WWII themed explosives which I get behind with a little more passion due to David End Of Watch Ayer in the driving seat, but the war-wounds of Monuments Men are playing up when I watch this old chap, it looks a bit like those bloody yanks have decided to win the war single handedly again the bloody rotters. So that’s that, more to report once we’ve had the chance to review the programme a little more forensically…..
Mean Tiger, or White Streets?
It doesn’t take long does it, to return from a holiday and get back into the grove of everyday life, it’s all bit like going from the starstruck purlieus of a Sofia Coppola picture into the stark tedium of a Mike Leigh drama – welcome back to local government. Still, at least my staff have made some strides with some projects in my absence, and I get to ask Boris for £7 million squid for a scheme I’m leading on next week, the chaotically coiffeured cretin. Until then movie visits are looking sparse so tonight’s entertainment will be of the home variety;
The phrase ‘amongst the best Russian action films ever made’ doesn’t get bandied around a lot, but I’ve good things about this evocative tale of a ghostly German tank which haunted the Western front back in 1944 – something a little different, comrade.
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Then I figure it’s time to revisit an old friend, partially inspired by that BBC4 Soundtrack series I thought it was time to take a wander down to an early Scorsese joint, a film I haven’t seen in years. it’s been pretty slow trailer and news wise over the past week or so hasn’t it, but I guess I should link to the full preview for one of the best of the year – we shall speak no more of this until the end of the year.
Minty's Menagerie 
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