BFI John Boorman Season – Zardoz (1974)
Films lurking at the apex of the alphabet are few and far between. Even a cinephile such as myself finds it difficult to offer movie titles beginning with that arrogant dash of a letter known as Z, there’s Michael Caine’s honourable sacrifice in Zulu or Costa-Gavras politically deadly Z, (which to my eternal shame I haven’t seen), the more historically attuned of you may consider Zéro de Conduite, Jean Vigo’s celebrated childhood paen which shares its qualities with the dark surveillance of Zero Dark Thirty. Then there’s Woody Allen’s schizophrenic Zelig or Antoninoni’s explosive Zabriskie Point, a film which arguably shares some contemporarily minded cultural concerns with tonight’s entertainment. With the possible exception of any of the Zombi movies, or Takashi Kitano’s Zaitochi for us cult and SF fans the first Z movie that springs to mind is the eccentric Zardoz, the post Bond Sean Connery starring oddity which has developed something of a devoted cult following, as part of the retrospective BFI season of John Boorman’s work this was an immediate selection for a big-screen reappraisal due to an urge to revisit a film I’ve never entirely enjoyed despite my affection for all things Science Fiction. I’ve seen the film maybe twice before and the only real moments that have stuck in my mind is the striking opening and unintentionally amusing conclusion, and I have to say that an enjoyable but slightly exasperating rewatch hasn’t entirely changed this opinion, although I was struck by a) the amount of drugs the filmmakers were clearly on and b) a small gloomy resignation that I couldn’t join them in tuning on, jumping up and dropping down. Or something;
As the BFI is festooned with posters celebrating Boorman’s work it amused to me see the tagline ‘Beyond 1984 ; Beyond 2001’ quoted on some marketing material, a mere seven years after the gradual appreciation of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey this was one of the last films of the cycle of distinctly odd and partially intellectual SF movies, before Lucas’s meek little effort obliterated ‘cerberal’ SF for the likes of Republic Serial inspired derring-do and scorched laser-blast swashbuckling silliness. In a far advanced civilisation – well, some of it has advanced – the human race has evolved to the point where powerful subjects known as Eternal rule over a sub-class of the dregs of humanity, a group hunted and killed by another strain of Homo-sapiens known as the ‘Brutals’. These swarthy, amusingly garbed barbarians are brainwashed through a religious spell of fire-arm rifle distributing giant floating heads, convincing the proles to exterminate their weaker brethren under the orders of a holy supplicance, in order to destroy the curse of life and pay treaty to the all-powerful deity of Zardoz. Whilst the elite class idly cavort and enjoy the wealth and resources of their godlike technology one rebellious leader of the exterminating underclass known as Zed (Sean Connery, anxious to shed his Bond image) manages to infiltrate one of the shielded villages, as a figure of curiosity to the Eternals Zed’s arrival upturns the society and a chain of revolution is set in motion, as he slowly seduces the senior matriarchs Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman) and ushers in a new stage of revolution, or should that be evolution?
Shot in the tranquil beauty of the Wicklow mountains of Boorman’s adopted Ireland Zardoz can best be described as a Heavy Metal strip crossed with a Michael Moorcock book, specifically his Dancers At The End Of Time series with the idea of an idle class of late civilisation humanity wielding incredible technological power over life and death itself, but suffering from a profound sense of ennui and moral incapacity as they have simply seen, done and experienced everything, yielding questions that perhaps a core tenet of our humanity is the limited lifespan we are granted upon the earthly realm. It has its assets, like many films of the period it has a specific visual charm which is a hangover of the psychedelic sixties – halls of mirrors, crazy framing, colours timed to ‘pop’ on the emulsion – which stands in contrast to the digitial holocausts of contemporary SF, all the optical tinkerings are practical models or in-camera feints, and I’ll always a smiling affection for these techniques on the big screen. And as is my idiom I must once again highlight the presence of Geoffrey ‘2001: A Space Odyssey Unsworth in the cinematographers chair, he was clearly the go to guy for SFX heavy projects in the Sixties and Seventies, and would you believe it we shall be seeing even more of his work next month as part of a different BFI film season, but I’ll just tease you with that clue and move on…..
The reveal of the background universe and what has happened to led up to this allegorical society is not a bad framing device from a genre perspective, it does provoke the requisite internal ‘aaah’ response but holds little depth in how Boorman explores the muddled metaphor, and any allegorical treatise behind the framing is lost among a rather cluttered and narcotic narrative which doesn’t really know where’s it going or what to do when it got there. I was amused to see the deployment of Beethoven’s 7th as a swirling aural ballet to the bookended on-screen antics, this piece of music has become increasingly popular (The Kings Speech and Irreversible to name but two fairly recent examples) and this may be it’s very first utilisation on the silver screen – and then after consulting with our digital oracle I found this which provides many more examples. So is Zardoz a groovy Griselda or a Debbie downer mmmaaannnn?? Well I think it has had its impact on the genre even as it is lampooned and dismissed as a messy embarrassment, that appropriation of older texts as source material (The Wizard Of Oz as a defining cultural instrument in this case) has become something of a crutch for the genre, and just a casual glance at the Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas invokes similarities with the pure visuals of their long advanced, neo-feudal society, and I’m pretty sure that Stephen King used the same framing tool as part of his Dark Tower odyssey.
The film can and has been read from a variety of political viewpoints – a critique of the self involved, Ivory Tower dwelling countercultural movement who deny human barbarity at their peril? A poisoned and bewitched servile class kept in mental chains by the hypnotic possession of religion and an urge to bow the divine as an excuse for unleashing tangible horrors? The hippy dream taken to its logical conclusion as an ideological nightmare? Is Sean Connery’s moustached and crimson nappy sporting Zed really a stand-in for Manson and his families unorthodox version of cultural revolution? Only the giant floating head knows, and he ain’t yapping. I’d like to keep this review relatively short so I’ll just wrap things up by saying I can see what fans appreciate in Zardoz but I’m no zealot, it is very much a product of its time and is thus quite the bizarre and idiosyncratic beast, a curio which doesn’t quite meld its cultural commentary with its psychedelic pondering, indulgent and irascible in equal measure – but I do still like the opening.
As I meandered home after this screening with a slightly puzzled expression on my face I was reminded of Beyond The Black Rainbow as a more recent example of unusually psychotropic Science Fiction, although I’m quietly furious that the bloody film never received any sort of release here and I’m still praying for some sort of DVD or Blu-Ray miracle. In terms of the more esoteric SF of the period may I humbly suggest Robert Altman’s little considered Quintet which is a real cult competition, then of course there is the ecological concerns of Silent Running and The Omega Man which together offer a far more effective use of the counter-culture, post-holocaust landscape, as does A Boy & His Dog which shares many of the allegorical dimensions of Zardoz and other societal shimmering SF serials. Closer to home was the Skynet heralding supercomputer of Colossus: The Forbin Project which is a personal favourite, then there’s A Clockwork Orange and The Andromeda Strain which cast long shadows across the genre even after a certain Space Opera detonated in 1977 and transformed the genre and movies in general. What’s next? Well, I’m accelerating matters to warp-speed for a more up to date look at the universe of SF, so join me as we both seek Oblivion….
BFI John Boorman Season – In Conversation
In the few years before I premiered this humble site I was an infrequent visitor to the BFI and an eager participant in some of the special events and screenings that the institute hosted – I’m guessing there are no surprises there. There are a few memorable evenings I wish I could have shared with you, such as the four-hour screening of the remastered and restored Heaven’s Gate for example, then there was the Peter Bogdanovich Q&A which was one of the first special film events I visited in the capital, narrowly preceded by an explosive screening of Paths Of Glory introduced by Christine Kubrick no less, the first Kubrick related event I ever saw at any cinema, unless you count the opening night viewing of Eyes Wide Shut in a mostly vacant Odeon back in Brighton in 1999. Why this murky wander down distant memory lane I hear you ask? Well, one of the other events I attended was an entire weekend of screenings and events which was collectivized under a ‘Crime Season’ banner back in around 2004 or 2005, a criminal programme of events over the course of a bank holiday weekend which included the screening of one of my favourite 1990’s films The Grifters alongside a Q&A with Stephen Frears and special guest screenwriter Donald E. Westlake, the author of the beloved Parker series of books under his Richard Stark pseudonym. The night before the institute screened Point Blank which was based on the first of this rogues gallery of tales, and alongside Westlake was none other than director John Boorman to offer his recollections and anecdotes that prowl around the making of his first American film. My memories are of a very amusing and self-deprecating fellow who wasn’t afraid to slam the then relatively recent remake starring a certain Mel Gibson before his precipitous fall from grace, clearly when you reach a certain age or stage in your career you really don’t care what other people think as his thoughts and opinions were, shall we say, quite deliciously candid. It was a pleasure to see that the BFI have commissioned a full retrospective of Boorman some eight years later, a blessing to commemorate the award of BFI Fellowship, so I popped along to the South Bank for a second evening in his illustrious company for an interview, Q&A and ceremony hosted by critical Positif cinema legend Michel Ciment.
The interview was a little dry I have to say, with anecdotes and stories having to be coaxed out with the dexterity of pulling an irritable tooth at times, but once he got into his stride Boorman was quite an amusing raconteur, with particular emphasis being placed on the early stages of his career. I think I’ll save the specific stories around Hell In The Pacific for a standalone mini-review, I’ve been meaning to revisit that favourite of many for a while as I never rarely gravitated to its rather obvious metaphorical designs, but the amusing production stories around Toshiro Mifune’s antics are too good to abandon. Boorman was most illustrative when he launched a gentle tirade into the so-called infestion of screenwriting gurus, their insistence that every film has three acts to a cookie cutter template with story arcs for all the main protagonists and a clearly defined antagonist wrecking the surprise and joy of movies, like Lean he started as an editor and the way he built and continues to build his films is to fashion scripts and pacing around ten reels of roughly ten minutes each whereby (as he put it) ‘the format organically inputs into the form’ – this was good stuff.
In terms of an overarching fascination Boorman’s characters go on journeys – not quests but journeys and there is a crucial difference in that their isn’t a clearly designed goal or objective at the start of their mental or physical expeditions, although when Ciment raised this observation it was met with a rather dismissive shrug, So I’ve decided to devote some time to cover three of John Boorman’s pictures, being realistic I can’t commit to any more than that given work commitments over April but I think my choices should provide some appropriately illuminating viewing. As a small aperitif I thought it best to briefly graze over some of his core work, his best known films which I haven’t selected for this brief programme, nevertheless those of you with a skilled eye should be able to discern what I have in store, purely by a process of omission and my predilection for the more fantastical and bizarre end of the celluloid spectrum;
Point Blank – Normally this would have top of my hit-list but as mentioned I’ve already seen it on the big-screen, there is plenty to talk about with this crime masterpiece so maybe I’ll come back to in the future. David Thomspon has published a pretty good reassessment of the film in this months Sight & Sound to celebrate its modest re-release, although I must confess there wasn’t much new or particularly inciting in his analysis which mostly rehashed old ground and well rehearsed opinions. Yes the film is infused with a sly sexual nature to the violence, yes the ability of a foreign, ‘alien’ creative to come to America and see its capitalist society with fresh unsullied eyes was quite revealing back in the 1960’s, then there is the theory that the entire piece is Walker’s final fever dream hallucination as he bleeds to death on the cold, mausoleum floor of Alcatraz, a strand of film criticism which is increasingly and rather ineffectually deployed these days to anything remotely psychoactive – I’ve seen these ‘it’s all a dream or nightmare’ tags tediously hung on just about anything by Nolan which is just lazy criticism, pure and simple. In any case Point Blanks fractured and displaced structure is a potent precursor to Nicholas Roegs psychoactive work of the following decade (and also casts my mind to Trance which I shall be seeing at the weekend),like Bonnie & Clyde or of course Easy Rider these movies heralded the entire golden age of American cinema to come, when the lunatics sequestered the asylum.
Deliverance – Now of course it would be all too easy to make any ‘squeal piggy’ gags or references to the South’s legendary hospitality in conjunction to this wilderness survival classic, one of the iconic screen representations of rednecks and their rather unusual & uncomfortable displays of affection for portly tourists. It’s a great companion piece to Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort if you ever fancy a bayou survival double bill, a machismo fuelled nightmare which has quite the fascinating production history.
Hope & Glory – Boorman’s most autobiographical picture, this testament to a childhood perversely enjoyed under the spectre of the Blitz is an amusingly entertaining bio-pic, it also garnered a fine haul of awards and recognition across Europe and the States in a blitzkrieg of praise. Although I haven’t seen it in many years if memory serves it has quite an effective blend of comedy and horror as Hitlers aerial onslaught was seen as a terrifically exciting game for a charcoal faced, breathlessly excited wee nipper, the ruins and craters of every nights assault serving as the next days hiding places and treasure troves of artifacts and collectables.
The General – After he moved to Ireland Boorman made this critically acclaimed Belfast crime drama which stratospherically raised the profile of supporting celt Brendan Gleeson, his portrayal of the charismatic organised crime figure Martin Cahill forming the buttress of his career and he’s never looked back, working with the modest likes of Spielberg, Scorsese, J.J. Abrams, Ridley Scott and Paul Greengrass over the past fifteen years. I’m still not entirely sure why Boorman opted to shoot this in Black & White, only the second monochrome of his career after his 1965 debut Catch Us If You Can, I shall have to do some digging around as one assumes it wasn’t just due to budgetary constraints?
Quite an eclectic talent I think you’ll agree, perhaps no unimpeachable masterpiece with arguably the exception of Point Blank – yeah in its own quiet way it’s that good – but certainly enough of a range of variety in material which would make other helmsmen and women green with envy. After the Q&A Boorman made quite a moving speech explaining how back in 1951, just after it opened he started haunting the NFT to watch films by Griffith, Keaton and Chaplin where he gained his film education – and let’s not forgot that this was before TV when these texts were more easily accessible – so the fact he was standing on that very same stage some sixty years later was quite a humbling honour. The fellowship accolade was presented by Sinead Cusack (which would explain the presence of her spouse Jeremy Irons in the audience) and crowned with a well crafted montage of his fifty years in the business, before his well deserved standing ovation. So by now you can probably guess two of the three films I have planned for this mini-season given my affinity for fantastically and futuristically themed cult movies, hopefully the third will be something of a surprise and a teeming change of pace from the normal parade of new releases, horror and crime vagabonds that wander through the Menagerie. Speaking of the BFI we have much to anticipate as 2013 soldiers on – there is the intriguing sounding Gothic season which begins in October which seems certain to offer some spooky celluloid offerings, more ambitiously from my perspective a certain living German legend is being honoured, a prospect which has my has my head spinning at the possibilities…..
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