jennyhor2004 Reviews

Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

A surprisingly moral film about karma, forgiveness and redemption

[9/10 · 21 September 2012]

One of my favourite science fiction films since I first saw it in the mid-1990s on video loan from the University of Wollongong, "Wax or the Discovery of Television among the Bees" is a home movie featuring inventive computer animation, archived film reels, stills, experimental filming methods, not a little humour and some live action; together these illustrate an unusual science fiction plot of body horror, a murder mission, a particular view of history (especially the history of communication technology, Iraq, World War I and the travails of the Jewish people) and an existence beyond death.

The film tells the story of Jacob Maker (director David Blair), a disaffected nuclear technician at the Los Alamos nuclear science laboratory who feels guilty that his work in designing and testing remote-controlled missile guidance systems leads to refined mass slaughter; he tries to cope with the dissonance he feels between the nature of his work and his need to support himself and his wife by spending afternoons communing with his hive of bees. These are no ordinary bees: they're descended from a special breed of honey-makers brought back from Iraq, then British Mesopotamia, by Jacob's grandfather James Hive Maker (William S Burroughs – yes, that William S Burroughs, famous junkie and novelist!) and his wife's grandfather in 1917. One day while in a trance with his bees, Jacob receives an unexpected gift that totally transforms his life: the bees penetrate his head through his ear and punch the Bee TV into his brain. The Bee TV gives him a mission and a purpose in life: the universe is unbalanced and he must restore the balance by killing someone.

So a strange odyssey begins: Jacob ventures out into a missile test area, following the directions of the Bee TV, where he comes to The Garden of Eden Cave where he finds giant bees related to his Mesopotamian friends living in the Land of the Dead. Revelations about his family history, the true nature of his bees and details of his mission, including the identity of his victim, come to him. He may be the reincarnation of his wife's grandfather Zoltan Abbasid who married James Hive Maker's half-sister, a former telephonist, inventor of a kind of telescope and enthusiastic member of a society dedicated to communicating with the dead. James was jealous of Abbasid and arranged for him to be killed by his bees so he, James, could inherit Abbasid's bees. After death Jacob passes through lives in other dimensions before he is transformed into a missile sent to kill the reincarnations of those responsible for Abbasid's death, now living in Iraq on the eve of the first US invasion of that country in 1991.

It's a hokey story, yes, but one made serious and even plausible by the first-person / stream-of-consciousness point-of-view documentary style of narrative structure, presented in a casual, monotone and above all calm voice by Blair himself. Superficially linear in its story-telling, the plot flips back and forth between past and present, and between present and future, and presents a bewildering mish-mash of philosophies and mythology including esoteric occultism and spiritualism, Bible stories, motifs and themes, belief in karma and reincarnation, and New Age ideas about the karmic connections among the living that continue into their next lives after they have died. Startling and unusual computer animation tricks flip the screen, roll it, spin it around and even turn it into silhouettes of lever-arch folders to simulate the movements of birds and other flying creatures. Animated images can look quite dated but are still very inventive and Blair and his wife, both computer programmers, use them cleverly to create three-dimensional figures and geometrical shapes and patterns, and to emphasise the alien nature of the bees, the Bee TV and the worlds they normally inhabit.

The information overload fleshes out the very bizarre story of karma and transcendence with the goal of atonement and redemption for past sins and the love for humanity that overcomes violence and death. The joining of Jacob, Zoltan Abbasid and their two bomb victims after death suggests forgiveness on both sides. Karma works in such a way that those who kill with violence will themselves be punished with death by violence, as the dead seek vengeance on those who kill them. Jacob himself is both victim and murderer … or is it the other way around? In its own, rather flat way, "Wax …" turns out to be a surprisingly moral and political film. It passes no judgement on the morality of the Iraq War or the wars that follow in its wake but it does suggest that those who kill may themselves be killed in the same way … if not in this life, then in the next.

Repeated viewings are needed to understand the film more fully; each repeat reveals something new and unexpected humour emerges as well – how can there be telephones to dial the emergency number even in the deepest caves or the most barren deserts? Those overwhelmed by the many esoteric references that relate to nothing in their current lives (to say nothing of what they might have experienced before their birth and what will greet them in their next lives) can just relax and enjoy the strangest of strange head trips.

The Ring (I) (1927)

A rare Hitchcock sports movie about a love triangle

[7/10 · 21 September 2012]

An early triumph for the young Alfred Hitchcock, released in the same year as his better known "The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog", the boxing film "The Ring" deserves its own accolade as one of his more technically accomplished films from the silent movie era. Already the film features much symbolism in its name alone: there is the obvious reference to the boxing ring but the title also refers to a wedding ring, a bracelet and the love triangle that is the movie's heart. Themes familiar to Hitchcock fans are not so much in evidence here and the major attractions lie in Hitchcock's increasingly confident use of editing, montage, the camera as voyeur and development of character through action and emotion.

Jack Sander (Carl Brisson) works his way up as a boxer from fighting amateurs at country fairs to professional level. His main ambition is to succeed at boxing and earn enough money to marry the cashier Mabel (Lillian Hall Davis). However Mabel meets another boxer, Bob Corby (Ian Hunter), and falls in love with him. As Sander wins his bouts, he marries Mabel and continues to fight but gradually discovers his wife is still attracted to Bob. He vows to keep on fighting to a level where he can seriously challenge Corby. Eventually the match is arranged and everyone in town turns up to watch the match. Can Gander beat Corby and win back Mabel? Who will Mabel choose?

The story is hokey in its details but Hitchcock was more interested in the love triangle and the characterisation of Mabel, the most developed character, than in portraying boxing as a career in the 1920s. It's a given in many of Hitchcock's films that the main female character should be the most complex of the cast, no matter what the plot, and "The Ring" is no different here. Mabel is torn between the shallow, fun-loving life-style that Corby as an established professional boxer can offer her and the plainer, down-to-earth and genuine life that is Jack's to give. The inner conflict that Mabel experiences is most vividly expressed in the climactic boxing scene where she is seen racing from Corby's side to Jack's side and back again. Hall Davis is quite effective as Mabel and has a lovely beauty in several shots. Unfortunately her career in films was short-lived; the arrival of talkies cut short her success and she committed suicide in 1933. Brisson brings to his role an imposing physical presence and height, and experience as an amateur boxer; he's not much of an actor but he has a frank and open sincerity that makes him perfect as a wronged man. Ian Hunter as Corby hasn't much to do apart from playing suave and seductive; he was to have a long film career that lasted nearly 40 years.

The film shows German Expressionist influences in a number of scenes and although the plot can be quite involved, it is skilfully relayed so as to rely on very few titles cards and the flow of the narrative is not disrupted as a result. Throughout his career, Hitchcock never forgot his roots in silent film and a number of his later movies, even famous ones made in the late 1950s and early 1960s like "Vertigo", "North by Northwest" and "Psycho", feature extended scenes where nothing is said. The boxing scene where Sander and Corby settle their differences once and for all uses clever edits and a dream-like sequence simulating the effect of slight concussion to draw out and heighten the inner and outer conflicts of the two men: they are fighting not only for their reputations and careers, they are fighting for the love of a woman. There are scenes throughout the film where the camera is used as a voyeuristic device that lets us see how the rivalry between Sander and Corby develops and escalates.

It is a slow film in its first half and doesn't accumulate pace and tension until Mabel's adultery with Corby becomes overt and Sander's anger at her betrayal threatens to get the better of him. Minor characters such as Sander's trainer provide light relief and pause in the tension. Overall "The Ring" is recommended to Hitchcock fans to see how their favourite director was refining his signature style.

Franz Kafka's a Country Doctor (2007)

A bleak animated film about a doctor and his demons

[8/10 · 21 September 2012]

Excellent if visually grotesque animated short film based on Franz Kafka's short story of an unhappy country doctor forced to attend to a sick boy on a remote farm during the evening in the darkling depths of snowy winter, "Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor" is a meditation on existence in a meaningless and uncaring universe. The titular doctor (Sensaku Shigeyama: voice) is dragged out of his house and taken by two unearthly black horses to the farm while their groom rapes the doctor's maid Rosa at home. Beset by thoughts of his ill luck and grievances against his patients who apparently expect him to wait on them hand and foot, the doctor initially fails to diagnose the boy's illness; the boy's family then strip the medic of his clothes and shove him into the boy's bed where he finds the weeping, worm-infested wound that has ailed the youngster (Ippei Shigeyama) since his birth. Returning home with what remains of his clothes, the doctor finds the horses are travelling slowly and his journey back to Rosa takes forever in a frozen landscape of giant snow eyes, noses and ears.

The narrative is closely based on the Kafka original and the sense of alienation, the lack of insight into human nature, and absence of compassion and empathy for others, on the doctor's part which doom him to a hopeless servitude at the mercy of parasitical, exploitative villagers are obvious throughout. The plot lends itself readily to a surreal style of animation, at once two-dimensional and three- dimensional in look thanks to clever replication of shading and light falling on objects; the drawing might look crude but the simplicity gives the film a raw, often dark and creepy energy. The backgrounds sometimes look painted onto a board; figures flit across them like smooth stop-motion pieces pasted over; lines are feathery and fragile, giving objects a frail, insubstantial look; at times the foreground and the edges of the film blur and bleed, and objects closest to the viewer even bubble and shudder as if fragmenting and disintegrating. Colouring is restricted to black, white and grey shades in-between and red appears only in a couple of scenes where the doctor sees his patient's deep wound.

Characters may be deranged and twisted psychologically as well as physically and the doctor's paranoia about the people and animals he meets (and how it distorts his view of himself, literally, as his head balloons and deflates and his legs grow long or short) seems well- founded. It's hard not to think that " … A Country Doctor" is actually a psychological film about someone who has wasted his life doing as little as possible for a life of ease and comfort, and now that he is coming towards the end of his life, he is haunted by all the young patients whose lives he failed to save (because he didn't strive enough on their behalf) and their presence is driving him towards mental breakdown.

The actors who give voice to the doctor and the boy are trained in a type of traditional Japanese comedy drama called kyogen which is related to noh play. The actor playing the doctor and the people giving voice to the boy patient and the doctor's spirit consciences (also boy-like) are members of a famous kyogen acting family.

It's a bleak and despairing view of the human condition, especially of one individual who does not know himself and who allows himself to be used by others similarly uncomprehending of their own selves. The film suggests that people are always using one another for short-term gain while the universe observes them all indifferently.

Kony 2012 (2012)

Very slick film shilling for a US invasion of eastern Africa

[3/10 · 18 March 2012]

Having heard about this 30-minute feature going viral across Youtube and various social networking sites, I determined to watch this film championed by mysterious US charity Invisible Children for myself. I found it a very slick and manipulative piece of propaganda aimed at young people and families with children. The film starts with director Jason Russell and his family, and zooms in on his young son from birth on to his preschool years before branching out to the lost children of Uganda, children like Jacob who have lost their families and have been forced to join the Lord's Resistance Army as soldiers (if they're boys) or sex slaves (if they're girls) under the sinister charismatic leadership of one Joseph Kony. Russell dwells for a little time on Jacob and his experiences before delving into a drive for support and donations to help other young people like Jacob, and suggesting ways in which people can bring the issue of child soldiers and finding Kony to be brought to justice to the attention of others.

Russell adopts a deliberate personal style to make very subjective appeals to people's emotions. His use of his son as willing collaborator is creepy as well as exploitative, to say the least. The filming methods used are so slick as to raise my hackles: the editing and the images, even the sloganeering and strategies suggested to raise other people's awareness, all look as if they'd been cooked up in an advertising agency that's done work for past TV current affairs programs. The themes pushed by "Kony 2012″ are so familiar as to be banal and devoid of genuine feeling: let's change the world for the better, let's be pro-active, let's protect innocent and vulnerable children from exploitation (speak for yourselves!), let's bond in solidarity with other aware young people and fight this monster Joseph Kony and triumph where older people can't or won't.

No historical context is given, which is extremely suspicious: the film never explains who Joseph Kony is, why he is such a bogeyman and who his Lord's Resistance Army is fighting against. What is his background, how and why is he a rebel, what political / social / economic conditions existed in Uganda in the 1990s that enabled him to rise to his current position as Uganda's Public Enemy No 1, and why should we get rid of him now when we could have got rid of him ages ago? Is the Ugandan government under President Yoweri Museveni so helpless that it must appeal to the outside world? Is Kony fighting the Ugandan government? Given that Museveni has just been "elected" to a 4th term and has been in power for 25 years with a blemished record in violating human rights, invading parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and holding elections that yield suspect results that support his continued rule, perhaps Kony is doing the right thing in resisting the Ugandan government!

The film's suggested solutions are pathetic and laughable: let's make Kony famous by plastering posters of him across cities around the world on 20 April 2012! Support celebrities like Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Bono against Kony! Buy the Action Kit package! Wear the "Kony 2012″ bracelets! Donate money to the cause! The Kony 2012 awareness campaign looks too much like an election campaign to ring true. And why should the public be asked to cough up money when famous Hollywood celebrities and other stars in politics and the commercial music industry have more than enough money among themselves to capture and bring Kony to justice and rehabilitate the child soldiers and sex slaves he has abused?

And now that all is said and done, one suspicion remains: the recent announcement of the discovery of at least 2.5 billion and maybe as many as 6 billion barrels of oil in Uganda couldn't have anything to do with the release of the "Kony 2012″ film? How cynical of me to think that a future invasion of Uganda by AFRICOM might need support from young people in the form of a "humanitarian" campaign!

In the meantime, hundreds of children in northern Uganda have fallen victim to a mysterious and fatal neurological disease known as Nodding disease spreading across the border from the newly independent Southern Sudan. It is arguable that this problem deserves more immediate attention and help than pursuing a shadowy warlord who may not even be in Uganda now or be alive still.

A Separation (2011)

Snapshot of how police-state theocracy grinds down people

[9/10 · 7 March 2012]

A tragic story about how good intentions can start off a snowball that turns into an avalanche of conflict, moral self-betrayal and tragedy in a context whose cultural, social and political oppressions feed into and off this downward slide. Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) are a middle-class couple fighting over the future of their daughter, Termeh: Simin wants to take her overseas so the girl will not have to grow up in a misogynistic theocracy but Nader can't leave his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who is in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's disease, behind and Termeh won't leave without Dad. Simin files for divorce and leaves Nader and Termeh to care for the elderly man but Nader also has to work so on Simin's recommendation he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a young working-class woman, to look after Grandpa. The work of looking after Nader's dad is too much for the pregnant Razieh who also has a small girl, Somayeh, in tow and so a series of mishaps occurs which escalate into confrontations that have the effect of straining Simin and Nader's fragile marriage further and roping in other innocent parties such as Termeh's tutor, various neighbours and Razieh and her husband Hojjat's relatives and his creditors. Along the way, Termeh, perhaps the wisest and sanest person in the film, learns a hard lesson about moral ambiguity, the class divide between herself and Somayeh, the oppressive role that religion is made to play in Iranian society, and how living in Iran with all its restrictions simply grinds good people like her parents, Razieh and others into situations where they abase themselves and one another.

So many problems as highlighted in this film exist in modern Iranian society due to its police-state nature and ham-fisted interpretation of Islamic principles and shari'a law. If the theocracy weren't so oppressive towards women, Simin would never have thought of leaving the country and Razieh might have left overbearing and violent Hojjat ages ago. If the government would allow free exchanges between medical professionals and scientists, help for Alzheimer's disease sufferers would be more available and Simin and Nader would know enough to realise that Nader's father is deteriorating rapidly and that he needs to be in a nursing home to receive 24/7 care. If the government weren't so strict and narrow-minded in structuring society along religious lines, the officials in charge of mediating disputes could offer better advice to parties in conflict other than rely on simplistic interpretations of Islam. Farhadi's genius in "A Separation" is to show at once how a theocratic society such as Iran's with its structures and ideology is ill-equipped to deal with day-to-day problems that Nader, Simin, Razieh and Hojjat encounter, and how they all end up not only coming to blows with one another but meaner and baser as a result.

Some people might believe that Islam is being criticised in this film but I disagree; true, Razieh relies too much on the Phone-a-mullah Helpline service for advice as to whether it's OK for a woman to wash an unrelated man's privates but her example is not all that different from those North Americans who rely on "What would Jesus do?" agony aunts on radio and cable TV for advice on losing weight, how to deal with kids skipping Bible classes and getting little Ebenezer or Jayleigh to do their creationist science homework (because the kids figured out they were being lied to). It's likely that Razieh has turned to an Allah-of- the-gaps religion for comfort from hot-tempered Hojjat, coping with his family and the pressure of poverty which forces her into accepting a job that's beyond her ability to cope with and requires a long commute as well. The real criticism should be aimed at the government for abusing Islam and its principles in such a way as to alienate Simin, Nader and Termeh from it and to reduce Razieh to a child incapable of making independent moral decisions. There is a suggestion in the film that Simin has told Nader that Razieh has confided in her of her (Razieh's) doubts about the cause of her miscarriage and that Nader uses what Razieh has told Simin and Razieh's own simple religious faith to blackmail both Razieh and Hojjat and make them look bad in front of Hojjat's family.

The acting all round is top class and viewers will sympathise deeply with the characters and above all Termeh and Somayeh. Moaadi especially gives a great performance as Nader and Sarina Farhadi as the intelligent and sensitive Termeh is also a stand-out performer. Filming with a hand-held camera throughout gives the movie a voyeuristic intimacy that involves the audience, particularly in its opening scene in which the audience is placed in the position of the court judge mediating between Simin and Nader as Simin applies for divorce. Viewers will see something of the daily grinding pressure on Nader, Razieh and the rest of the cast placed by the strictures of Iranian theocratic society as they try to do the best they can to survive and raise their children; the film clearly demonstrates this pressure is not unique to those characters but applies to all Iranians as they try to negotiate and organise their lives under and around the restrictions the government places on them. No wonder so many people are so desperate to leave the country, so much so that they are willing to pay smugglers and risk dangerous sea voyages to countries such as Australia and Canada.

Bellies (2009)

Delightful film about avarice and arrogance

[6/10 · 8 February 2012]

Delightful short film inspired in part by Rene Laloux's animated work, "The Bellies" features a simple story about human avarice and arrogance in controlling nature, and how eventually nature and unacknowledged guilt prevail over greed and materialism. An unnamed gentleman, gross and piggy-eyed, gorges on snails for lunch at a restaurant; his fellow diners, all much the same as he is, eat the same meal in a bizarre co-ordinated Mexican-wave mass action. After lunch he goes back to the company laboratory where visitors await him: he explains the process by which small snails are genetically engineered to grow into ginormous gastropods for human consumption and takes his admiring guests on a tour around the facility. After the tour ends and the gentlemen sign a deal, the self-satisfied owner walks around the facility grounds where giant empty snail shells abound. On a whim, he crawls inside one such shell to assure himself he's not hearing strange ghostly noises … The animated figures are CGI-created while the backgrounds look as though they've been done with pencil and paint. Special effects are computer-generated. The figures don't appear at all realistic but they are meant to satirise self-satisfied bourgeois conformity. There's no speech but sprightly and playful acoustic music accompanied by sound effects emphasise mood and create, sustain and build tension. The whole cartoon has a very clean, spare look in keeping with the sanitised and conformist future society portrayed.

The last third of the film is the most surreal and really fits in with a dream-like Laloux-inspired universe: our piggy-eyed company director is forced to suffer as his factory-farmed snails have suffered and must run for his life. The film makes a point about how pursuit of materialist pleasure ends up eating you, how ultimately a culture based on gluttony will cannibalise itself. The giant fork that pursues the man turns into a creepy spider predator with a life of its own.

It's a little slow and drags out the story in parts, especially during the graveyard scene where the company director starts thinking he's hearing distant voices … but overall "The Bellies" is an entertaining piece with a surprisingly deep message about a future, materialistic society and how it dooms itself into extinction.

Labyrinth (1963)

Surreal cut-out stop-motion animation film presents a nightmare world

[7/10 · 8 February 2012]

Superficially this looks like a Terry Gilliam / Monty Python animated cartoon and it is indeed very funny and quite surreal. A man with mechanical wings strapped to him visits a strange 19th-century European city whose streets and buildings are oddly empty. He has several weird adventures which culminate in his being captured by a mad scientist who early on has noted his presence and who probably rules the city. The scientist-ruler subjects the visitor to painful scientific examinations but he manages to escape and tries to leave the city. The ruler searches for him and sends out bat-winged scouts to find the visitor and bring him down.

The combination of stop-motion animation and collages of paper cut-out 19th-century figures and buildings gives the short a distinctive steam-punk look and provides opportunities for humorous sight gags. Insects with human heads and animated dinosaur skeletons don't look at all out of place – we accept them as inventions of the mad scientist-ruler. Colour is an important feature and its use is very striking and beautiful. The musical soundtrack assumes a major role in enhancing the action and tension of the plot and of the 19th-century atmosphere as the film is completely silent.

There are passages where the action seems fussy and dragged out – the scientific examination of the visitor is probably overdone though the animation is very droll and the use of colour very original in parts – and the film could have been edited for a faster, tighter plot narrative.

Overall "The Labyrinth" presents a world at once absurd, bizarre and entertaining but which turns out to be nightmarish and deadly. The city is more Hotel-California than the visitor realises: you can visit and stay as long as you like but you can never leave; a parallel with the authoritarian state that existed in Poland in the early 1960s, and the absurdities associated with totalitarian rule that went on in that country, can be observed.

The Thomas Beale Cipher (2010 Video)

Film has visual flair but insubstantial plot

[6/10 · 8 February 2012]

An unusual collage-type animated film that's based on the legend about the three cypher-texts that supposedly reveal the location of a treasure chest of gold and silver worth millions of dollars, "The Thomas Beale Cipher" is quite fiendish to watch and requires repeated viewings to understand and to find 14 supposed clues. Protagonist Professor Whie, a noted cryptographer on the run as a suspected Nazi spy, is on the trail of this chest and boards a train but shadowy figures claiming to be FBI are hunting him and he must evade them. An ingenious sequence of overhead luggage improbably slamming into one another and then attacking the agents saves White's hide and enables him to flee. That's pretty much all there is to the plot.

The film has the look of an aged historical document and the animation technique used appears to be rotoscope with cut-outs of material and real human eyes to give the film a fresh, rough-hewn look. Bits of fabric like tweed or carpet cut out into shapes of people or objects recall textures of materials once used on clothes or objects and add particular historical flavour. Main and minor characters alike look real yet slightly eccentric and one train passenger looks downright steam-punk weird. A beautiful woman looking out the window may be a stereotypical film-noir mystery dame. Characters wear clothes of flat floral or herringbone pattern and Professor White's glasses reproduce numbered code at various points in the short as his thoughts through his eyes lay out a hilarious plan of escape and deception.

The plot proceeds with the benefit of voice-over narration by White which allows the film to delve into a bit of flashback history about the treasure and Thomas Beale himself. The story is told with the use of first- and second-person points of view: White addresses the young woman (and the audience) and although the lady does nothing other than smoke and look out the window, she is in fact an active participant in White's scheme.

Disappointingly the film ends with White rushing into the hills while senior agent Black glares at him from the departing train. One hopes a sequel might be made but the short is so self-contained that I doubt that possibility. There are several sight gags – one funny one being where White hides behind a newspaper whose back page is emblazoned with his portrait, in itself probably a familiar trick disguise from Hollywood films - and ingenious camera angles and points of view that take advantage of the train-carriage setting with the overhead luggage section.

For such a good-looking film, the plot is insubstantial and the whole work would benefit from an expansion into a 30-minute piece with a few more, less complicated clues as to the characters' nature and motivations, and how White and Black are related to each other.

No I haven't worked out what the clues are but interested readers can Google thomas + beale + cipher + Facebook to find the Facebook page where people discuss the clues and a solution by Czech computer student Miroslav Sustek has been posted.

The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

Wonderful meditation on Armenian culture and life of famous poet

[8/10 · 2 February 2012]

A true labour of love, this film is a meditation on the life of the Armenian poet who came to be known as Sayat-Nova (Persian for "King of Songs"). Since the film isn't intended as an authentic blow-by-blow account of Sayat-Nova's life, here is a quick rundown of his life: born in Tbilisi in Georgia in 1712, Sayat-Nova acquired skills in writing poetry, singing and playing at least three types of stringed musical instrument. He entered the court of King Irakly II of Georgia as both full-time professional poet and diplomat and in his capacity as a diplomat helped forge an alliance of Georgia, Armenia and Shirvan (a former state now part of Azerbaijan) against Persia. Sayat-Nova was expelled from the court for falling in love with his employer's daughter and became a wandering troubadour. He entered the priesthood in 1759 and served in various monasteries, dying in Haghpat monastery in northern Armenia in 1795 when a foreign army invaded the building and killed the monks inside.

The film follows Sayat-Nova's inner life and impressions of the world around him based on his poetry and songs. The structure of the narrative is straightforward and organised into chronological episodes starting with the poet's childhood and youth and continuing into his time at the royal court and later entry into monastic life.

Each episode of Sayat-Nova's outer and inner life is an opportunity for director Parajanov to highlight the culture, music and society of the poet's time: to take one example, the poet's childhood becomes a device to emphasise the importance of learning, education and religious study in Armenian society at the time. Scenes of the young Sayat-Nova surrounded by open books on roof-tops stress the value of books and their preservation. When the young budding poet is tired of studying books, he hangs around wool-dyers and the bath-house and again various tableaux show the dyers at work. boiling pots of dye and drenching wool into them, and various men relaxing and being scrubbed in the bath-house. These and all other tableaux of 18th-century Armenian life and culture in the film are often symbolic in ways that may be religious or hint at something darker. Viewers are invited to wonder at the richness and complexity of the culture and values inherent in these scenes and to meditate on what meanings, personal or otherwise, may exist within. Magic may be found and for some viewers the past itself may come alive with personal messages for them and them alone.

For this viewer at least the music soundtrack itself is amazing: it has many Middle Eastern influences, Christian choral elements and there are even hints of musique concrète: in one scene, men are working on part of a church with chisels and the noise they make is incorporated into the soundtrack rhythm. The film suggests a link between one musical instrument that Sayat-Nova plays and his sexual desire: in one scene the poet traces spirals around the body of a lute as if tracing spirals around a conch (already established as a sensual symbol of the female body). The implication is that much of Sayat-Nova's poetry and music was inspired by personal lust and desire translated into inspiration. As though to drive the point home, the film provides an actual lust object of a muse played by Georgian actor Sofiko Chiaureli who handles five different roles in the film including the poet himself as a teenager. The very fact of a woman with flawless features playing an adolescent boy introduces a homo-eroticism into the movie which among other things got Parajanov in trouble with the Soviet government. Chiaureli and the other actors speak no dialogue and perform minimal actions with expressions that are either blank or at least gentle, kindly and serene. In maintaining a steady, calm composure throughout their scenes, not giving the least hint of injecting their own thoughts, feelings and misgivings into what they are doing, the actors demonstrate their skill.

Apart from necessary scene breaks there isn't much editing and the camera rarely moves so each scene has a painterly quality and is a diorama of moving characters who appear two-dimensional in the way they may move from side to side. Close-ups of actors playing Sayat-Nova and those who influenced his work portray them as if they are religious icons.

For Western viewers the first half of the film is of more interest in showing more of the traditional folk culture and values of the Armenians and the pace is steady though not fast; the second half of the film which deals with Sayat-Nova's inner life much more, with his dream and contemplation of death, is slower and more esoteric. As the poet revisits his childhood in parts, some scenes may confuse viewers with the sudden appearances of the same child actor who played Sayat-Nova early in the film. The last two episodes appear redundant as they revolve around death. In the second half of the movie also, there is a sense of aloneness and alienation: Sayat-Nova appears to be at odds with the monks in the monastery at times and doesn't participate in the monks' communal activities. At one point in the narrative, he even leaves the monastery to go and work among the common people. It is possible that Parajanov was projecting something of his own life and experiences in the "life" of Sayat-Nova as it plays out here.

Aelita, the Queen of Mars (1924)

Film firmly suggests people should be more realistic than idealistic

[5/10 · 2 February 2012]

Most current interest in this 1920s Soviet silent movie focuses on its sci-fi sub-plot of a trip that three Earthmen make to Mars where they are promptly embroiled in Martian politics and one of them, a revolutionary called Gusev (Nikolai Batalov), inspires the oppressed Martian workers to rebel against their despotic king and replace him with his daughter who is equally tyrannical. This sub-plot is part of a broad melodrama about an engineer called Los (Nikolai Tsereteli) who fluctuates between an erotic fantasy life revolving around an exotic aristocrat woman who worships him from afar and his real life in which his wife Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi), neglected by him, has an affair with a rich foreigner, Ehrlich (Pavel Pol).

Los's fantasy about the woman Aelita (Yulia Solntseva) begins when he and his colleague Spiridonov (Tsereteli again) receive mysterious radio transmissions from afar which can't be translated into Russian and someone in their department jokingly suggests the messages might be from Mars. Mars is a place where rich folks like Aelita and her dad King Tuskub (Konstantin Eggert) can spy on the affairs of other planets on a special TV made of geometric shapes and squiggly wires powered by Martian planetary energy harnessed by Gor (Yuri Zavadsky), the planet's chief scientist and guardian of radiant energy. Poor Martian folks on the other hand must labour in the labyrinthine dungeons of Mars and there's a rotating roster in which one-third of the workforce goes to sleep in deep freeze chambers when the available work dwindles. Good thing the capitalists on Earth never heard of that idea! Most of the movie's running time flits from Los's work ,which among other things involves volunteer work on an engineering project in the Soviet Far East and in his spare time constructing a spaceship capable of flying to Mars with Spiridonov, to Natasha working at a refugee centre, then an orphanage, and flirting with Ehrlich, to other sub-plots which include Gusev's on-again/off-again relationship with his wife and an investigation of Natasha's shotgun murder by the comically inept detective Kravtsov (Igor Ilyinsky). There is also a sub-plot that focuses on one man's attempt to cheat on the food-rationing system used in Moscow which calls audiences' attention to the economic and social plight of ordinary people in Russia at the time the film was made.

All this means that "Aelita " can be a bewildering experience for first-time viewers unfamiliar with the immediate post-1917 situation in the Soviet Union before Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920′s. Repeating viewings and a foreknowledge of the film's plot and themes will be necessary for some viewers to understand and tease out the various sub-plots. Several sub-plots are Los's daydreams which the film deliberately doesn't separate from what happens to the engineer in real life so the narrative, and in particular the ending, can be very confusing to watch. A pro-Communist / anti-capitalist message is present in the movie but director Protazanov's treatment of it is very ambiguous: Gusev has second thoughts about allowing Aelita to assume leadership of the Martian proletariat and his fears are well-founded. This particular moment in the film serves perhaps as a warning of what could happen to the Soviet government, that it might fall into a similar autocratic style of government as the previous Tsarist government: a prophetic message indeed.

Los realises his fantasy about Aelita comes to nothing but chaos, which might make viewers wonder whether it really is a fantasy that he has or something that actually happened to him. Fantasy women who hero-worship you don't usually try to co-opt you into their own nefarious schemes, do they? He decides that his goal in life is to be with Natasha, who miraculously is alive despite having been shot at close range multiple times earlier in the film, and work with her for the reconstruction of their country. Natasha for her part is willing to return to Los and give up Ehrlich. The film's message is that inner psychological rebirth is as important as political, social and economic rebirth if people are to co-operate and fulfill the goals of socialist revolution. Fantasising about flying to Mars as a way of escaping humdrum reality and the work involved in maintaining a marriage (and by extension, maintaining a community, especially a new revolutionary community) certainly won't help to bring about equality and prosperity for everyone.

The film's production values are very impressive: in particular the Martian sets, influenced by the Russian avantgarde art movement Constructivism with its emphasis on abstract geometric shapes and figures, look very futuristic and in some scenes are monumental. The make-up and costume design for the actors playing the Martians are similarly abstract and angular though the headgear looks comic. The style of acting varies in keeping with the plot and themes: generally the Earthlings move and act in a natural way while the Martians, lacking human emotion, have a stilted and robotic style of behaving. Aelita especially seems a child-like and petulant aristocrat compared to proletarian Natasha who is portrayed as a warm and caring, if rather flighty, young woman. The editing helps here too, cutting from Aelita at her leisure watching Los on her TV or lounging about to Natasha cooking stew and scrubbing wet clothes. Hmm, what does it say about Los and his attitude towards women and social class that Aelita is a naive fantasy ideal that turns dangerous and has to be killed off while the neglected Natasha is ready to offer him love and support if only he would pay more attention to her and their marriage? Ultimately for most people the main value of "Aelita " will be in its sets and design but for students of propaganda and Soviet history, the film has a great deal to say about the difference between fantasy and reality. The lesson is aimed as much at idealists and would-be revolutionaries as for those still wedded to capitalist ways of thinking.

Primer (2004)

Labour-of-love reworking of mad scientist story

[6/10 · 2 February 2012]

A low-budget film (it cost about US$7,000 to make) about four enterpreneurial engineer / scientist friends and work colleagues working on an invention and stumbling across the secret of time travel, "Primer" isn't an easy ride as a story but it is an interesting look at how real-life inventors in the early 21st century might go about creating, working on and protecting an innovation that's far ahead of its time and whose potential might not be realised until decades later when the appropriate social-cultural-economic-technological setting is in place. Up to a certain point, the film is more about two friends, Aaron (Carruth himself) and Abe (David Sullivan), and how their discovery of time travel strains their friendship and their relationships with other people, especially Phillip (Anand Upadhaya) and Robert (Casey Gooden) the other entrepreneurs, and affects their thinking and actions as they use time travel to engineer or re-engineer events to suit themselves but discover there are physical side-effects and ethical consequences to deal with that their training as technicians hasn't prepared them for. Although Aaron is the obvious ring-leader and appears in nearly all scenes, the film follows Abe's point of view.

The plot is fairly straightforward at least until Aaron and Abe start messing with time and go backwards and forwards in time, figuring out what their doubles might be doing in parallel time-streams, and at one point Aaron meeting his double and fighting him. The last 30 minutes in particular can be very confusing and viewers should see the film at least twice and maybe a few more times to make head or tail of it all. The point that Carruth may be making is that trying to control fate and how it might pan out carries significant repercussions not just for yourself and others immediately around you but for time and space themselves. Aaron and Abe play the stock-market but by the end of the film the guys look as though they haven't made any profit at all and are instead contemplating leaving the US and each other, with Aaron going to France and assuming a different identity.

The main attractions of the film revolve around its reworking of the "mad scientist" stereotype: the mad men here are ordinary and likable worker-bee employees of some nameless IT or scientific corporation who do a bit of PC-tinkering on the side for bored teenage hackers in their garage and who stumble onto a major invention they're not too sure about and want to work on to fully understand it. As the truth dawns on them, they start using time travel to get what they want and rework events to suit them. They constantly react to things happening around them, they suffer strange physical ailments like bleeding ears and shaky hand control that forces them to write like small children and their solution to problems that occur from their time-travelling tinkering is to … do more time-travelling tinkering! A clear example of not being able to think "outside the box" because they're just too caught up in their invention and are fearful of bringing others into their secret so they suffer from restricted group-think. Eventually Abe tries to go all the way back in time to near the beginning of their project to fix things … only to discover Aaron's done the same! As might be expected of what is basically a labour-of-love home movie by someone with no experience of making films or education in telling a clear story, the acting is so wooden it could sprout leaves and the sets are basically what the crew could find in their home town and get permission from the owners to use. Carruth wrote, directed, scored the music, produced and played one of the leads in the film and he and several other actors drafted in family and friends to help out with filming and food and drink supplies. Scenes are set up and filmed very well with no jerkiness and the sequencing of scenes is easy to follow though the plot is not. Several critical passages in the film in which scenes appear to be edited choppily show a flair for using editing to suggest particular effects or make a point. The film sometimes has a fly-on-the-wall documentary-style appearance which enhances its freshness as a variation on traditional "mad scientist / sorcerer's apprentice" sci-fi films.

Carruth certainly has some talent as a director and while "Primer" could have done with a tighter script and a clearer direction in plot and how it develops – it's quite possible the actors improvised their dialogue and allowed the dialogue to more or less influence the direction of the story – the film does raise some very significant questions about the process of creating and developing an invention and how that invention and its potential might skew people's better reasoning and ethics and lead them down a road paved with good intentions to hell.

The Secret World of Arrietty (2010)

Socially conservative themes make "Arrietty" a disheartening film

[5/10 · 2 February 2012]

A charming offering from Studio Ghibli, based loosely on Mary Norton's novel "The Borrowers", this film is beautiful yet melancholy with themes of children on the verge of adolescence and a promise of love dashed, and a reconciliation between humans and nature, with all that that might promise, thwarted by ties of family and tradition. Sho is a young boy sent to live in the countryside with his grandmother to rest before major heart surgery, his parents having divorced long ago and with very little time for their son for reasons particular to them. During his stay he learns of a family secret: that the mansion his grandmother inherited from her parents has been host to a family or families of little people no bigger than the proverbial grasshopper's knee. As it turns out, a tiny family does live below the house: Arrietty and her parents have made a comfortable home and eke out a living taking bits and pieces from the family mansion at night when everyone is asleep. However during her first night foray with her dad Pod, Arrietty is accidentally seen by Sho. Over the next several days, Arrietty and Sho form a friendship but inquisitive housekeeper Haru, spying on Sho, discovers the little people's home and devises her own scheme to flush them out. Fearful of the human "beans" and their possible intentions towards them, Pod and Arrietty's mother Homily make arrangements to leave their home and migrate to a new territory where they hope to meet others of their kind.

Let's get the best and the worst bits out first: The film's main joys are to be found in the detailed visual backgrounds of lush green nature and an ambient soundtrack of chirping crickets suggesting a late summer atmosphere in which days are hot, humid and often rainy. On the other hand, the musical soundtrack by Breton singer / harpist Cecile Corbel, whose style initially seems appropriate to the film's whimsical subject and lightly serious scope, is instead loud, intrusive and saccharine. The animation hasn't significantly advanced since the early days of "Nausicaa and the Valley of Winds" – Arrietty's dress even flips up a bit to show off her pants – and a brief appearance is made by sinister rats, drawn to evoke the malevolence of the black monsters encountered in the likes of "Nausicaa …" and "Princess Mononoke", which turn out to be the film's red(-eyed) herring. Apart from these self-references, Studio Ghibli thankfully makes no other attempts to butcher motifs from previous works to insert into "Arrietty".

That said, we can go on with the plot and narrative which skilfully combine beneficent and sinister aspects of both human and Borrower nature: both Sho and the housekeeper Haru are curious about the Borrowers and wish them no harm but whereas Sho desires to help them in their precarious existence on the margins of human activity, Haru wants to keep them as pets and curiosities, perhaps to show off to friends or to treat as a little circus. Sho's grandmother exemplifies a different attitude: she has long had a doll's house ready for the Borrowers to accept and we must accept her generosity at face value; but it is possible that she also views the Borrowers as a secret family curiosity, something to pass down to younger people as a weird heirloom. The Borrowers for their part shun contact with humans to the extent that when an opportunity for reconciliation and a better, more mutual understanding is offered to them, they reject it and force Arrietty to bow to family ties and the need to be with others of their kind.

Character development is weak and one-dimensional and the friendship between Arrietty and Sho appears not so deep that Arrietty will necessarily remember the boy. He may well remember her as giving him hope and courage for the future. Arrietty is a typical plucky Miyazaki heroine but the film doesn't give her much to play on her strengths and parents Pod and Homily play family man and woman stereotypes: the patriarch as physically strong, stoic and whose decision is final, the mother as kitchen-bound, fearful and hysterical. Sho is a quiet, sensitive boy who meekly accepts what Fate dishes out to him and Arrietty, and the elderly, child-like Haru is played for slapstick laughs.

I can't see much really to recommend "Arrietty" to a family audience: the social conservatism is disheartening and it seems Studio Ghibli has all but given up on hope for young people to question and change their society, be it human or Borrower, in a way that accepts other cultures and points of view as equal and valid as their own. The message seems to be that the Borrowers as a metaphor for First Nations are doomed to die out anyway due to the sheer size of human populations compared to the number of Borrowers left: what a despairing message to leave with young viewers. The future for Arrietty herself looks dismal: settlement in an unknown territory might sound good in the short term but there's the possibility that her family will find it necessary to uproot itself again and any new friends the girl makes will have to be abandoned and forgotten like Sho. Rootlessness will always be this family's lot. Marriage to Spiller, a Borrower befriended by Pod, beckons and Arrietty will be expected to settle down to Homily's level. The treatment of adult women like Homily, Haru, the grandmother and Sho's unseen mother, however much played for laughs, is cruel to them and to Arrietty's prospects.

Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977)

Light-hearted and exuberant sci-fi comedy with a cutting comment about society

[7/10 · 2 February 2012]

One of a number of comic science fiction films made in the old Czechoslovkia in the 1960s – 70s, this film by the maker of "Ikarie XB-1″ (a famous but more serious sci-fi film of a space migration) revolves around time travel and a set of identical twins, and what happens when you mix the two together and throw away a time-synchronisation equivalent of a GPS system. Sight gags and sci-fi slapstick make for a light-hearted film about a topic and themes that in the West would either call for a more po-faced, serious drama treatment or just wouldn't be done at all. Though the plot becomes more bizarre as the film progresses, the pace is not so fast that viewers, even Western viewers with no knowledge of Czech – I saw this film without English sub-titles – can follow the shenanigans of central character Jan (Petr Kostka) as he goes back and forth in time to thwart a dastardly plot to give Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany a hydrogen bomb from the future.

Kostka plays identical twins Jan and Karel: Karel is a spaceship pilot who's also a womaniser and a drunk, Jan is his more sober and straight-laced brother. Karel gets a call to take some tourists on a trip to the past but before he can go to the port, he chokes on breakfast and dies. Jan has enough time to get his brother off to the morgue and into his uniform to impersonate him. Once aboard the ship, three of the tourists – they're actually ageing Nazi crooks in disguise – hijack the craft and take it back to Berlin in 1941. There they greet Adolf Hitler and present him with the case containing the bomb – but it turns out they picked up the wrong case and it's full of clothes. The crooks and Jan are bundled off to jail and must figure out a way of escape.

After escaping, the men go back to the present and their paths diverge: they go back to the period just before Karel dies and Jan then sets about changing the path of time so as to prevent Karel's death and sabotage the crooks' plan. This involves making another trip back to Nazi Germany but no-one has any proper sense of time so the second trip also slightly overshoots and the time-travellers arrive just before they arrived the first time. Don't worry, it does sound very confusing – you just need to watch the movie to be able to sort out which Jan is which and how successfully Jan1 manages Jan2 and Jan3 and is able (or not able) to preserve family continuity! Though made over 30 years ago, the film doesn't look at all aged: the light is clear and the lines are sharp, men's suits at least don't look dated and even interiors and furniture look contemporary. The pace is brisk but the plot is straightforward if increasingly convoluted towards the end. The music soundtrack is a major highlight: light, a little humorous and sprightly with space ambient effects and much use of synthesiser-generated melodies that sound at once a little alien yet familiar and reassuring.

If I'd seen the film with English sub-titles, I'd have been able to appreciate more of its humour and jokes; there are many witty sight gags including creative uses of dishwashing liquid in dissolving dishes (and more besides!), the car with the back hood that flips up of its own accord at inconvenient times and the green spray that neutralises and zombifies people, all of which are important in advancing the plot and resolving it. The back-and-forth time-travel and its non-synchronisation (everyone comes and goes at times that are just ahead of when you think they should arrive or depart) are a running joke that might have a deeper meaning: what if certain important historical events could have been cut off or avoided had someone done something earlier rather than later? There is a subversive message in all the time-travelling that goes on: Jan foils an evil plot thanks to his being in the right spot five minutes (or 50 minutes at least) before the right time and ingeniously manages to cover up Karel's untimely death as well. Now, if only he had gone back in time to try to stop the Soviets from marching into Prague in the 1940s or 1968 or whenever As science fiction movies go, the plot and characters, and especially Kostka's clever timing as Jan who must be in several places at once, are prominent. There are no special effects at all: all the science fiction is in the plot and in one of the film's running gags (the dishwashing liquid gag). "Tomorrow I'll Wake Up " is the kind of comedy I'd like to see more of and which has been sorely lacking in Western cinema (and still is) – fun, witty, exuberant and inventive with the possibilities offered by a science fiction standard – and with a bonus of a cutting comment on society about lost opportunities and the possibility of change.

Pilot Pirx's Inquest (1979)

Examination of human-robot relationships in a future society

[6/10 · 2 February 2012]

A joint Polish-Estonian production, this low-budget movie about a space trip that nearly ends in tragedy examines the theme of how humans and human-like robots might co-exist if the robots, made to serve humans, realised they were superior to their masters in some ways. A corporation that manufactures intelligent androids is keen to begin mass production but meets resistance from the public and governments. It is proposed that a small crew of humans and androids be sent on a mission to place two probes in the rings of Saturn: a simple enough job but the purpose of the mission is to observe the behaviours and interactions between the humans and robots. Commander Pirx (Sergei Desnitski) is selected to head the mission. He refuses at first but changes his mind and accepts the role after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt. During the mission, some members of the crew including crew physician Tom Novak (Alexander Kaidanovski) confide in him and reveal their identities as either human or robot and insinuate that other members may not be human. Pirx isn't sure who's telling the truth and starts feeling a little paranoid about what's happening around him on the ship Goliath. Still he's determined to find out who is human and who is not, figuring that knowing who is which is critical to the mission's success. In the meantime a rogue member of the crew carries out small acts of sabotage on the ship and sends Pirx a recorded warning and threat which Pirx plays. When it's time to insert the probes, the Goliath goes wildly off course through the ring belt, the ship is forced to accelerate suddenly and the humans on board face death from being turned into schnitzels from the incredible G-forces the Goliath encounters.

The special effects are uneven and often elementary to the extent of appearing cartoonish but they are adequate for the purposes of the film which gives the impression of being "hard science fiction" with its emphasis on scientific realism. There are just enough effects to make the society credible as scientifically and technologically advanced and at the same time a society we can recognise as ours. It's as if the movie takes place in an alternate 1970s where the spending priorities of governments and corporations were different enough that some areas of robotics and cybernetics developed faster than they did in our 197os, and so the parallel Earth got androids and we didn't. The world in "Test Pilota Pirxa" otherwise looks no different than what ours looked like over thirty years ago and the film itself now appears as a fictional historical drama.

The acting is low-key and straight with Desnitski dominating the bulk of the movie's scenes. He underplays his role as do all the other actors in a film heavy with dialogue whose sole purpose is to push the plot and explore the human-versus-robot theme. As Novak who reveals his robot identity early on, Kaidanovski impresses in a minimalist, subdued way as a being who understands little of human nature and its ways yet is keen to help Desnitski. Interestingly his character and another robot voice their hope that Desnitski's opinion of robots will be negative so that their makers can't go ahead with mass production, otherwise the robots that already exist will lose their individual identities and won't be able to exult in their special abilities which help form those identities. No point in being an Übermensch if you have so many millions of clones like you who can do the same things you can do; you would just feel like … well, you would just feel like yet another machine-cog in a vast network of machine-cogs.

The plot's resolution suggests that co-existence between humans and robots will always be ambivalent. Trying to second-guess what robots might be thinking and why they might do certain things and not others will be a major human preoccupation. As long as human and robot natures are kept separate with humans allowed to be irrational and robots restricted to acting logically and rationally, humans will always be able to control robots. Not a very satisfactory conclusion to reach; how human and robot natures will remain separate is never explained. The relationship between humans and technology already is a dynamic one in which technological advances and breakthroughs force us to change and re-evaluate our reliance and dependence on machines constantly so the same would be expected of human and android interactions.

The film can be slow and doesn't really start until halfway through once the Goliath blasts off. The early half of "Test Pilota Pirxa" plays a little like a straight spy thriller. Once we're in space and Desnitski begins questioning the crew, the paranoia and the tension start to increase. The climax isn't especially dramatic and no, it doesn't actually come when the rogue member's identity is revealed and he meets a just punishment – it comes much later after Pirx's court case, in which he is prosecuted for having endangered his crew during the mission, ends.

"Test Pilota Pirxa" could have done better in its investigation of human-android interaction and whether humans and androids can live together amicably. It takes for granted that robots will always be logical and there will be large-scale human resistance towards them; this attitude wouldn't necessarily exist in real life. Much depends on what the robots are designed to do and how generalised and specialised we humans want them to be. At least the film treats its audiences as intelligent and able to consider its concepts. The ambiguous conclusion suggests a reluctance on the film-makers' part to commit to a definite opinion as to whether co-existence is possible and if so, can be successful; what could be implied instead is a plea for tolerance and a "live and let live" attitude.

Tumannost Andromedy (1967)

Visually striking film with high production values

[6/10 · 2 February 2012]

A very visually striking film about the crew of the spaceship the SS Tantra, tasked with a mission to explore and map an unknown sector of space, and the utopian society on Earth that sent out the craft, this was intended to be the first episode of a series of movies about the SS Tantra people's adventures but its public reception was apparently poor so the entire multi-film project was abandoned. The fact that "The Andromeda Nebula" wasn't intended to stand alone explains various anomalies about it: the parallel plots on the spaceship and Earth are very weakly connected and neither is resolved within the film's 77-minute running time; and the characters are very unevenly developed with only one character, Commander Erg Noor of the SS Tantra (Nikolai Kryukov who has third billing in the acting credits), being the most rounded of the lot and one viewers will most readily follow. The film's constant flitting between story-lines based on Earth and on the spaceship can be very confusing and viewers need to be very focused on the relationships among the various characters, in particular the possible love triangle involving Erg Noor, Vida Kong (Vija Artmane) and Dar Veter (Sergei Stolyarov) which perhaps explains why Vida refuses to commit herself to a relationship with Dar Veter, and the infatuation astro-navigator Niza Crete (Tatiana Voloshina) has for Erg Noor, to understand the entire film as it scrolls along.

The SS Tantra is caught in orbit around the Iron Star and its crew intercepts a distress signal coming from a ship on a planet that also orbits the star. Erg Noor commands the ship to land on the planet and he leads a team to investigate. They find an alien spacecraft and also a ship from Earth, both having crash-landed on the planet. While trying to determine the cause of the disaster that befell the ship from Earth, the team is attacked by a mysterious predator that somehow penetrates a man's space-suit and eats him from within so that he simply disappears and his suit crumples up. The team retreats to the main ship but Erg Noor is determined to know the nature of the predator that manifests as a black shape-shifting cloudy mass, sends out electrical sparks and hides from intense light. The commander's stubbornness nearly costs the life of an important crew-member whose chances of surviving the trip back to Earth become remote.

Back on Earth, Vida and Dar Veter become very close while Dar Veter gets involved in various creative projects that include archaeology. The futuristic society on Earth is presented as a happy and healthy outdoor-oriented utopia where the air and environment are clean, the weather is always sunny and young people freely choose the adult mentor they believe will guide them. People wear distinctive costumes partly inspired by ancient Greek clothing and designs, greet each other with unusual and particular gestures, and use large television screens to communicate and entertain one another: there is an early scene in which characters watch a colourful dance performance of a woman replicated in multi-shots put together on a large screen on a wall. There's no need for obvious pro-Communist proselytising because the future society itself is the propaganda.

The ancient Greek influence finds expression in the set and costume design which tends on the whole to minimalism, graceful lines and simple patterns on pale or white backgrounds. In outdoor scenes this influence can be impractical (white clothes get dirty in archaeological digging work) and other scenes in which holiday rituals are celebrated look unintentionally (and hilariously) fascist with people lining up in robes before a giant statue of a hand holding a flame. The interior sets of the SS Tantra emphasise its spaciousness and smooth flowing lines with the futuristic technology hinted at: this is to demonstrate that the crew takes the technology for granted and regards it as a help. (Plus of course minimal sets are easy on the film's budget and the film "ages" more slowly and looks less dated over time.) Significantly the Tantra is not shown in its entirety in the film, avoiding the problem in "Ikarie XB-1″ where the spaceship looked very cheap and cartoonish, and exterior scenes focus on the exploratory vehicles, quite impressive and realistic in looks and design, that Erg Noor's team brings out to travel to the derelict spaceships. The enemy faced by the SS Tantra crew is very strange and creepy, created almost completely by the use of red and black-coloured smoke manipulated in ways to look almost life-like.

Overall the film is of interest mainly to people keen to know how set design can influence the look, style and atmosphere of films and how stylised acting can give the impression of an unfamiliar, even alien society. The film's problems with characterisation and plot stem from its makers' assumptions that it would herald an ongoing series of films in which different characters, presumably all introduced in the first film, would star: the film does finish with a sub-plot cliffhanger near the end. Too many characters with little to do other than look good appear. " Nebula" might have worked better as a TV series of 1-hour episodes like a Soviet "Star Trek" than as a full-length movie. Perhaps its support for Communism was too subtle for government censors at the time and the dilemmas Erg Noor faces were politically incorrect: even spaceship captains, however fictional, should always know where their supreme loyalties lie.

The Skin I Live In (2011)

Fussy, tricksy and not very deep or moving

[6/10 · 5 January 2012]

Georges Franju's sci-fi horror classic "Eyes without a Face" was overdue for a remake with updated cosmetic surgery and stem cell technologies and, seeing as how these days the Spanish are making the art-house flicks that the French used to be so good at, it's fitting that Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has remade that film in his own wacky Almodóvar way. Familiar motifs such as the narrative posing in flashback form, family skeleton secrets falling out of closets and reconciliations between mothers and children flesh out the original "Eyes …" plot and break every known moral convention to explore issues about identity, especially identity based on superficial criteria such as facial appearance and beauty, and stereotypes about gender.

Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a brilliant plastic surgeon whose wife was disfigured in a fire when her car caught alight. Although he saves the wife's life and repairs what damage has been done to her face, she later kills herself by defenestration in front of their daughter Norma. Norma becomes psychotic and stays that way for years until doctors judge her well enough to attend a wedding and its reception with her father. The girl meets Vicente (Jan Cornet) and the two sneak off into the garden for a pash. While making out, Norma hears the wedding singer warbling the song that had been playing when her mother threw herself out the window and the girl has a severe reaction. Vicente, frightened, runs away and Ledgard, searching for Norma, finds her catatonic in the garden. With the girl regressing permanently to her psychotic state, Ledgard hunts down Vicente, imprisons him and subjects him to a series of cosmetic surgery operations that include castration, a sex change and other changes: the result is the lovely Vera (Elena Anaya) who becomes the focus for Ledgard's obsessive desires and manias.

The script is skilfully written and proceeds at a fast pace yet by using a narrative structure of a series of introductions followed by flashback history, it sets before viewers a bunch of characters of whom we form first-impression opinions; all of these impressions are undermined by the film's second half which takes the form of memories seen through Ledgard and Vera's dreams. We begin to understand the true horror of Vera's experience at the hands of Ledgard who experiments on her as much out of curiosity and thirst for career fame and advancement of scientific knowledge as for vengeance. There could have been some very instructive lessons delivered about the seductive nature of scientific inquiry and how it can blind people to issues of ethical responsibility, exploitation of subjects (especially human subjects) and abusing their freedom and rights, and about the nature of freedom itself: can a person experience freedom and individuality even while imprisoned in an unwanted body and sexual identity and surrounded by another beautiful prison layer (Ledgard's palatial home)? We see Vera educate herself with yoga and art while trapped in her beautiful jail; would Vicente have become a more educated person if he had not been captured and tormented the way he has been? Who is actually more free, Vera or Ledgard? – Vera believes herself the prisoner but Ledgard, in thrall to his obsessions and desire for vengeance, may actually be the less free of the two. But this movie being an Almodóvar movie, deep lessons about obsession, revenge and power and control over other people are avoided; we get instead a moderately convoluted story that piles shock upon shock and laugh upon laugh while the background reverberates with the invisible noise of shattering moral conventions and continuous breaches of audience tolerance.

Visually the film is beautiful and, despite the use of muted blues and green, flamboyant in that distinctive Almodóvar way: there is an added clinical precision that wouldn't be out of place in a Cronenberg film, thanks to the subject matter and its treatment in the plot. Banderas does an excellent job as the quietly manic doctor / researcher who is as reasonable as a mad man can be, and Anaya acquits herself well as his victim. Maria Paredes as Ledgard's housekeeper (and secret biological mother) Marilia helps to keep the plot going smoothly. Minor characters are little more than cardboard cut-outs; even Vicente rarely rises from ardent young would-be lover and wronged prisoner.

Ultimately though "The Skin I Live In" is more fussy and tricksy in its plot, focussing on ideas and themes about gender identity that Almodovar has always been interested in, than deep and moving about the subject matter and the issues thrown up that are unique to the film.

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land (2004 Video)

Well-presented and informative documentary

[9/10 · 5 January 2012]

This is a highly informative documentary on the role that the US media plays in encouraging support for the Israeli government and its oppression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (West Bank and Gaza) and how this support influences US foreign policy in the Middle East. Through interviews with various academics, critics, journalists, religious leaders, peace activists and others, the program examines the methods that the Israeli government and its allies use to hide the truth about the harassment of Palestinians by the Israeli Defense Forces and to portray Israel's occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land as necessary and urgent self-defence. In particular, the role of American journalists and the American media organisations that employ them in disguising the truth is examined.

The film's style is simple and straightforward, built as it is around a wealth of newsreel reports punctuated by excerpts of interviews with guest commentators who include academics Noam Chomsky and Robert Jensen, British journalist Robert Fisk, peace activist Hanan Ashrawi and Tikkun Magazine founder Rabbi Michael Lerner among others. There's a certain polish to the film's presentation, especially in its use of animation and tables, though it is not at all sickly slick and the narration is very sparing, limited to relaying important information to viewers, and serves to introduce interviewees who expound at further length on the topics covered. The film reveals, among other things, that the US- Israeli relationship is of mutual benefit at the Palestinians' expense: the US relies on Israel to use most of the aid it receives from the US into buying American weaponry and other military technology and to test these on unwilling Palestinian guinea pigs, and to play the local sheriff in the Middle East to protect US political and economic interests in that region.

The film's structure centres around a list of strategies that the governments of Israel and the United States, their agencies and the US news media use to deceive the American public into supporting Israel. Particularly pernicious as a strategy is the US media's deliberate ignorance of individuals, groups and organisations, often Israeli and/or Jewish as well as Palestinian and/or Muslim, working to relieve the Palestinian people's suffering or calling attention to the abuses inflicted on them. This ignorance would suggest that the media in the United States (and also in many other countries including Australia) either willingly co-operates in constructing a pro-Israeli narrative about the intransigence and barbaric behaviour of Palestinian people especially if they are Muslim; or has been browbeaten, even threatened, into such co-operation by pro-Israeli lobby groups and institutions. In the US, the main lobby organisation is AIPAC (American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee) and in Australia its equivalent is AIJAC (Australia Israel Jewish Affaris Council) which is known to have intimidated the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service into reporting news about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways favourable to Israeli interests.

The other strategies discussed include the reporting of Palestinian violence in a context-less vacuum (so it appears to happen spontaneously without cause and gives the impression that Palestinians by nature are savage and Israel must always be on the alert); defining what is newsworthy (so Israeli victims of violence get more attention; this drives home the notion of Jews as eternal victims of persecution); Israel's colonisation of Palestinian territory being made invisible; the idea of the United States as an impartial and neutral referee; and the idea that any offers of peace to the Palestinians are always rejected by them (because the context in which such offers are made and the fine print within are never revealed in reports). Other ways in which Western audiences are co-opted into supporting Israel go unmentioned but deserve attention: in particular, Israel's use of the Shoah (Nazi-Jewish Holocaust) to beat European governments into coughing up money, none of which actually goes towards Shoah survivors who might be living in penury in Israel.

"Peace, Propaganda …" is a well-presented documentary, quite detailed in parts, and easy to follow. I recommend the film as a primer for those not familiar with the methods and strategies the Israeli government and its supporters uses to intimidate and silence politicians and media organisations around the world who have misgivings about the way Israel treats Palestinians and about the fascist, racist path that country is following in order to pursue such a policy. Media students would do well to watch the film which calls into question the nature of the relationships between the news media and governments, and which also highlights the need for the news media to tell the truth over the pressure to appear "unbiased" or "balanced" in its reporting. Ah, "fair and balanced" reporting: that doubtless is another strategy the apologists for the Israel government like to use

The Iron Lady (2011)

Film glosses over more unsavoury aspects of Margaret Thatcher's career

[3/10 · 27 December 2011]

I steeled myself to watch this film; I had seen the trailer and it had filled me with fear. Donning a Kevlar vest and protective wrap-round glasses to deflect excessive radiation, I entered the cinema with grim anticipation of camp heart-of-darkness horror. As it turned out though, "The Iron Lady" is more sugar-sweet seduction than full-steam-ahead torpedo fire and that soft approach may be more insidious for the target audience. The use of Baroness Thatcher's dementia to explore the woman's history in flashback sequences is a useful distancing device that at once humanises her but removes and dehumanises the victims of her policies, and this becomes both the film's saving grace (aside from its lead actor) as a character study and its weakness as a historical document.

The film simply wouldn't have worked without Meryl Streep in the lead role: Streep all but submerges herself in the character of Thatcher. Her portrayal of MT looks eerily accurate: she embodies MT's vulnerabilities as wife, mother, politician, Prime Minister and dementia victim as well as the woman's more familiar public face as formidable and steely. One highlight scene comes near the end in which MT in the twilight years of her reign holds a meeting with her Cabinet and one man confesses he hadn't given her an important timetable and the paper he has handed to her is a first draft; Thatcher rips him apart over his spelling and tardiness and the other ministers around him wilt from the full force of the burning light streaming from her being. At once viewers see MT as she must have appeared to her minions – exacting and tough as nails – and also cracks in the carapace: the expression on her face after her ministers depart softens and shows exhaustion and her fingers and hands tremble, as though to suggest that whipping the errant minister took more out of her than of him.

Apart from Streep's astonishing acting, the film itself has little plot and must rely on Thatcher's career from the 1950s to her downfall in 1990 for narrative direction. Jim Broadbent and Olivia Colman as Thatcher's husband Dennis and daughter Carol are little more than one- dimensional stereotypes: Dennis shows nothing of the forceful millionaire businessman who supported MT financially and smoothed her path to No 1 top dog, and Carol is reduced to a caregiver role. (In real life, Carol is a journalist / writer / media celebrity who started her career working for The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.) Son Mark Thatcher barely figures in the film and that along with other moments indicates an extreme unwillingness on the script's part to confront some of the less savoury aspects of MT's general career and ideological persuasion: far from refusing to work with fascist thugs as suggested in the film's Falklands War episode, the British worked with fascist-ruled Chile during that war; and MT's son was later investigated by South African authorities in the late 1990s for loan sharking and was also accused of racketeering in Texas about the same time. (And of course there was that little Equatorial Guinea coup d'état attempt escapade in 2004 for which Mark Thatcher was fined 3 million rand and received a suspended jail term.) Other characters in the film simply flit by and register very little on viewers' radar.

Even as a sympathetic and small-scale character study, the film has obvious flaws and omissions: what happened in the young Margaret Roberts's life as grocer's daughter that made her decide to enter politics at a time when women were expected to be wives and stay-at-home mothers? What happened later on to prompt her to challenge for the Conservative Party leadership in the mid-1970s? (It cannot just have been a desire to upset people.) Why did she decide to change her image from a dowdy housewife politician with a shrill voice to a hard-headed plutonium blonde bombshell with the deep throaty tones? Where and how did she acquire and adopt the economic philosophy, championed by economists Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek, of less government intervention and greater privatisation of the economy that was to transform Britain so much during her tenure as Prime Minister and beyond? The film's narrow focus on Thatcher as a child of the working classes fighting entrenched social and economic class-based attitudes and becoming a role model to all women diverts viewers' attention away from asking these and other uncomfortable questions about how politicians use public relations and spin-doctoring to further their careers and impose particular ideologies and polices on a restive populace. Posing MT as a role model for girls and women in fighting gender inequality also overlooks the fact that MT is consistently shown to be a woman with a somewhat masculine style of thinking and behaving that likely would alienate and drive away any potential female friends and allies.

Remove Streep and what is left? Hardly anything that would qualify as a film: the ending in which the ghost Dennis finally disappears from Thatcher's life is comic and leaves the film hanging as it were from an invisibly crumbling cliff. This in itself says something that subtly and ironically undercuts the film's message: for all her being championed as a role model and leader for women in politics, Margaret Thatcher ultimately depended on a man of wealth and elevated social position to rise to the top.

Melancholia (2011)

Portrayal of depression as escape and freedom from middle-class shallowness and hypocrisy

[7/10 · 24 December 2011]

"Melancholia", is Lars von Trier's beautifully realised contribution to the sci-fi apocalyptic fantasy / black comedy movie genre. The film continues ideas from "Antichrist" concerning the nature of the universe and humankind's insignificance within an indifferent cosmos: all the knowledge, science and religious faith we can muster won't help us solve our own problems and certainly won't help us survive a collision with a stray extra-solar planet. The only thing we can do is face the certainty of annihilation with the serene and passive calmness born of depression and lack of hope: a despairing message, yes, but one that's perhaps more reasonable than trusting in a non-existent God or belief systems that so far haven't delivered on their promises of benefitting humans across the Earth.

Eight minutes of silent slow-motion visual beauty in which the film's main characters and motifs appear in haunted nature tableaux to the music of Richard Wagner's prelude to the opera "Tristan und Isolde" form the extended introduction. (The music repeats throughout the film to overwrought drama-queen effect.) Allowing for possible inaccuracies and bad science in the collision scene creation – after all, no-one's ever witnessed anything the same or similar and lived to tell the tale – I find this perhaps the most gorgeous and poetic summation of the film's concerns.

What follows after is a footnote character study of two sisters and how they cope with life and the knowledge that everything that's hit them before which they survived won't help in a Final Judgement. The first half of "Melancholia", labelled "Justine", follows bride Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and new hubby Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) arrive a little too fashionably late for their reception thrown by Justine's sister Clare (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her rich husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). The reception lasts most of the day and into the night but it's not a happy one: Justine's estranged Mum and Dad (Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt) disgrace themselves; Justine's boss (Stellan Skarsgård) trails her for advertising copy; and John whines constantly about how much money the reception is costing him and Justine had better be happy and grateful for his generosity. Justine becomes depressed: her parents show no sympathy but remain self- obsessed, her boss attempts to manipulate her and corporate invertebrate Michael is incapable of understanding Justine and her problem family. By the end of the evening and the dawn of a new day, Justine has told off her boss for the prick he is and her parents and new husband have abandoned her.

In the second half, titled "Clare", the film targets Clare and John in their reaction to the news of the looming collision between Earth and Melancholia. Justine has descended into full-blown depression. Although John attempts to protect Clare and their son (Cameron Spurr) from the dreadful news about Melancholia, he ends up giving in to despair. Justine accepts the news of Earth's demise with calm and serenity and Clare bounces from helplessness to headless-chook panic and action to fruitless religious "ritual".

Apart from Justine herself, delivered by Dunst in a sterling performance in which her blank face masks a million-and-one emotions and thoughts, the acting is cardboard cut-out cartoonish: Rampling redefines snarling bitterness and sarcasm, Hurt sleepwalks through his role as feckless womaniser and Sutherland's character is a mere whingeing rich- boy unable to have a decent civilised conversation with his wife or sister-in-law. Gainsbourg, looking gaunt and nervy, nails the panicky sister down pat. The cinematography, jumpy and amateurish in the style of a home videorecording, throws viewers' attention onto the to-ings and fro-ings of the characters as they grapple with belief and faith in science and the reality of what's happening in the sky. It might be said that the choice of filming style is unfortunate for the subject matter and is ultimately the film's downfall: the camera really should have kept still most of the time and all the characters portrayed in a remote way as though in a diorama setting that shows off Clare and John's palatial home and the surrounding forests and other greenery. Clare and John would then be seen as symbols of a helpless hysterical elite that has no more idea about how to deal with global crises than we plebeians do. As it is, we lose sight of what "Melancholia" is telling us about human society and its self-centredness in a world and universe that demand our attention more than ever, and the film becomes a fussy study of shallow rich people. Depression becomes one character's way of realising that humankind lives in fantasy where having a dream job, a dream spouse and a dream family and home turn out to be unfulfilling and oppressive: depression becomes a kind of escape and freedom.

I did not find "Melancholia" at all depressing or pessimistic and there are actually frequent moments of deep black humour throughout the film. The look is beautiful and the themes are deep and worthy of attention; shame that the film is not tighter in its narrative and the camera style is completely wrong for the film's subject and themes. The science could have been a lot better: where are the earthquakes, over-blowing volcanoes and tsunamis that should have been the result of the intense gravitational attractions, what happened to the atmosphere burning up as the planet Melancholia draws near, does Earth get knocked out of its trajectory around the Sun, what about all the conservative politicians and the geologists and engineers in the pay of mining companies trying to convince us all that Melancholia doesn't exist or won't endanger Earth even though the evidence is 99.9% against them? As John says in the film, we should allow for a margin of error.

Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

Cynical and manipulative cut-and-paste job of other Miyazaki films with conservative message for girls

[3/10 · 24 December 2011]

Up to and including "Spirited Away", the animated films by Studio Ghibli are of a high standard both technically and in spirit. With "Howl's Moving Castle", the soulful quality of the earlier films that peaked with "Princess Mononoke" disappears and what we get is an empty shell of a story that exploits typical Studio Ghibli motifs and themes and the studio's technical virtuosity. All the familiar devices of earlier films – a young female protagonist on the verge of adulthood, elderly women, a flawed hero with shamanic characteristics, heroes and villains manipulated by more powerful characters of uncertain quality, sophisticated flying technology in an alternative 19th-century steampunk world – are worked over in a fantasy aimed (cynically it seems to me) at a mainstream Western audience and the result looks very cheesy and manipulative with an ulterior message that superficially celebrates female bravery but channels it into socially restrictive roles.

The story's heroine is a plain-jane working-class hat-maker called Sophie who accidentally meets a young wizard Howl and so arouses the jealousy of the Witch of the Waste who turns her into an old woman. Sophie runs away and meets a scarecrow called Turnip who takes her to Howl's over-sized trailer-park home. Here she meets a fire demon called Calcifer and Howl's child assistant Markl. Sophie insinuates herself into Calcifer, Markl and Howl's lives by claiming to be a cleaning-woman and through her association with the unlikely trio, is drawn into a war between Howl's country and an enemy realm missing its Crown Prince; during the film's course the war also moves into Sophie's country. Howl is forced to participate in this war at the cost of eventually losing his humanity through repeated transformations into a bird creature. Sophie comes to realise that Howl and the Witch of the Waste are pawns of more powerful forces, represented in part by Madame Suliman, the former mentor of Howl, and Sophie's work for the rest of the film is cut out trying to locate Howl's missing heart, the mysterious connection between Howl and Calcifer, ending the war and locating the missing Crown Prince.

Working out all the different strands of the film and connecting them together might take viewers 2 – 3 viewings which would expose them to an excess of saccharine musical schmaltz and a deadly "love conquers all" radiation cloud in the tradition of Beauty-and-the-Beast stories. I think if I had to sit through this film again, my hair and teeth will start falling out, my skin will break out into ulcers and bruises will mysteriously appear and spread. Characters are poorly developed and the love Sophie feels for the feckless Howl is so unbelievable as to be laughable; she would have been better off taking her chances with Turnip who performs a noble act of voluntary self-sacrifice in comparison with Howl who fights because he is compelled to, not out of free will.

The war merely forms a backdrop to the events and all the various characters can do is try to stop it without understanding anything about the lead-up to it and why Suliman forces Howl to do her dirty work; or participate in it. Even the animation of the war and its participants looks like a cut-and-paste job of previous Miyazaki / Studio Ghibli films like "Nausicaa of the Valley of Winds", "Porcorosso", "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" and "Princess Mononoke": several flying machines look like those giant bug monsters of "Nausicaa …" with wing-flaps added as an afterthought. Backgrounds are visually gorgeous at first but turn out to be generic according to the role they have to play so, for example, town scenes have a dreamy alternative-universe quality similar to scenes in "Kiki's Delivery Service" which takes place in a similar alternative 1950s universe that might well follow on in the future from "Howl's Moving Castle".

The film is too long and its story is too intricate to work as a family film, the characters are shallow and implausible, the animation is cynically overwhelming and unoriginal. Worst of all is the film's message about what happens to girls eventually: they get to play brave heroines for a brief while and once they are adults, they can be either beautiful scheming bitches like Suliman or domestic-goddess workaholics like the geriatric Sophie slaving away for love. Issues like the nature of war – Miyazaki made the movie partly in protest at the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 – are sidelined so much that all the eye- blinking in the world couldn't make them more missed. No way in the world would I recommend this film for families with young daughters. I feel so cheated having seen it.

Once Upon a Time in Norway (2007)

Quite good and informative about Mayhem, less so about black metal

[7/10 · 12 December 2011]

This one-hour film is a straightforward blow-by-blow chronological account of the early career of Mayhem, one of the pioneer bands of Norwegian black metal which since the late 1980s has exploded across the world and become Norway's most significant cultural export and contribution to international youth music and culture. Mayhem itself continues on an on/off basis with bassist Necrobutcher and drummer Hellhammer at the helm since 1995. The documentary concentrates on the band's history from its 1984 founding by guitarist Oystein Aarseth aka Euronymous and Necrobutcher through its revolving-door personnel up to and just a little beyond Euronymous's murder by Varg Vikernes in 1993. The film is good and very informative but I feel it could have lightened up on the information and gone for a more general overview of Mayhem's history and the birth of black metal.

The film's structure is dominated by interviews with various members and ex-members of Mayhem including Necrobutcher himself, Kjetil Manheim and Billy Nordheim, and various friends and associates including Darkthrone guitarist Nocturno Culto, musician Anders Odden and ex-Emperor man Tchort. Almost immediately the major focus of the interviews is Euronymous, in particular his attempt to dominate and control the music's development and direction, and his eccentric character and bizarre sense of humour: these factors led directly or indirectly to his death. There is some discussion of Mayhem's musical and philosophical inspirations and of the band members' desire to create fast, aggressive and extreme music with the intent to shock. The musicians admit to flirting with Satanic beliefs, Nietzschean philosophy in a rather superficial way, nihilism and Aleister Crowley's Thelema philosophy: anything that legitimised and support their desire to shock and rebel against perceived traditional authorities in Norwegian society. There is little investigation in the film of the philosophical underpinnings of black metal apart from the musicians' own observations otherwise.

As the film progresses, slowly but surely – there is a lot of talk and the detail about what Euronymous got up to, his political beliefs and his attempt to run a record shop and label is immense – viewers get an inexorable sense of progress towards the moment when Euronymous is killed so when the murder does happen, it comes as an emotionless, matter-of-fact anti-climax. Perhaps the film-makers' approach to making the documentary is just too calm and measured for the subject matter. Even the discussion of various church burnings that took place around Norway, including the destruction of the historic Fantoft stave church (it was rebuilt by 1997), in the early 1990s by fanatical black metal fans and hangers-on appears relatively unemotional, at least to my Australian senses. Norwegians are such cool, calm and collected characters! As would be expected, excerpts of early Mayhem songs are played here and there though in my opinion there is just not enough music to carry the film. The overall tone can be very dry, even intellectual. The passage dealing with Swedish vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin, his psychological problems (he was possibly borderline schizophrenic), a near-death experience as a child and his gunshot suicide comes across as very clinical. With a film like this, there needs to be a fair amount of music throughout the proceedings to convey a sense of urgency and passion; to help viewers understand the power of black metal and how it inspired a small group of socially alienated individuals; and ultimately to inspire viewers themselves to find out more about the early Norwegian black metal scene and check out classic works like Mayhem's first album "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas", Emperor's "In the Nightside Eclipse" and Darkthrone's "A Blaze in the Northern Sky".

Maybe the documentary could have concentrated less on the details of Mayhem's history and a little more on issues such as the cultural policing of the extent and boundaries of black metal vis-a-vis death metal and other forms of heavy metal, an obsession beloved of heavy metal magazines and websites; the rivalry between Norwegian black metal bands and Swedish death metal bands which reflects past historical resentments; when talking about doing something itself becomes dangerous if it inspires others to carry out the act spoken of; and burning churches as a way of gaining acceptance into a social network and later gaining power over it. There's an interesting diversion when interviewees talk about why Euronymous took photographs of Dead's death scene: was Euronymous really that twisted or did he take the photos as a way of "proving" to himself and to others that Dead really was dead? Many people find accepting a piece of news difficult until they have seen it for themselves on the TV news or in the newspapers.

The narrow focus of the documentary also means an elephant in the room is completely missed: just what social conditions prevailed in Norway in the 1980s that a group of young men, well brought up, highly intelligent and very likable, should feel alienated from society enough that they find relief in playing extreme music and through that end up involved in extreme behaviours such as beating up homosexuals and elderly people, burning churches and killing people? Does Norwegian society or any other advanced Western society for that matter) provide adequate creative outlets for youth so that when they do things that threaten to get out of control, there is an agency or a code of etiquette or conventions that can provide them with advice and guidance so they can rein in their impulses themselves? A lesson that could be learned from this documentary is missed.

Fireworks (1947)

Coming-of-age film of sexual awareness

[7/10 · 12 December 2011]

Quite a remarkable debut film from a 17 year old Kenneth Anger, this is a coming-of-age piece recreating a dream he had: the film explores homosexual attraction, submission and sadomasochistic violence. A young man (Anger himself) wakes up from a dream about being saved by a sailor in a large room of objects: among other thing, several photographs of a sailor carrying an unconscious man who could be Anger's character himself, a hand with its middle finger amputated, a clay figurine. He dresses and goes out into the night; at a bar, he picks up a sailor who struts and poses for the enthralled youngster. The sailor beats up our man who then goes back outside but is accosted by a group of sailors who strip him, gang-rape him and thrash him with chains. The scenes of violence are extreme and painful to watch but are skilfully done so that the viewer imagines the worst being done to Anger's character, not actually see any torture or punishment.

The 14-minute film appears to be ambivalent about celebrating gay sexuality: Anger's character experiences liberation but it looks extremely degrading and you wonder how much suffering he undergoes is necessary. Sure, scenes at the end of the film suggest the youngster is fulfilled – the photographs can be disposed of, the hand is mended and the visual narrative hints at an important rite of passage being completed – but all the same, you feel the young man will keep going back for more of the same punishment. Still, the depiction of raw sexual attraction, willing submission, violence and pain leading to transformation and fulfillment is very powerful, even beautiful at times, especially as it's coming from a very young film-maker. There is humour both bawdy and witty, particularly in scenes featuring the pouring of milk over the young man (hint, hint) and some fireworks being set off from an unusual launch-pad! The piece looks conventional enough and Anger hadn't yet learned how to layer images one over the other and edit shots to enhance the narrative and bring the film to a climax. Instead the orchestral music score, sounding very typical melodramatic Hollywood of the period (1940s), is put to work creating the appropriate moods, ratcheting up tension, bringing suspense and celebrating the protagonist's sexual awakening. Though there are a couple of scenes where the joins in the musical soundtrack are awkward, overall the marriage of music to plot and mood is well done. Close-ups at critical points in the film, taking place during the rape and torture scene, bring out the protagonist's pain and the brutality of sailors beating him with chains as he suffers without protest. There's a little bit of a religious element here: the young man is Christ-like in his willingness to suffer and the pouring of milk over his body could be construed as a resurrection.

Even at this early stage of his career, Anger was demonstrating a unique vision and a style of filming quite unlike what his film-director contemporaries were making. Sound is completely unnecessary: the protagonist is never named and so he might be considered representative of all young sexual novices who must undergo necessary ordeals to become fully adult and sexually aware.

Silmido (2003)

South Korean incident from late 1960s is heroic movie material

[7/10 · 12 December 2011]

Apparently based on actual incidents, this epic film ought to have been just a straightforward "Dirty Dozen" action film with a sketchy plot, loads of violence and boot-camp brutality, displays of macho camaraderie and a schmaltzy message about dying for your mates and country; "Silmido" is all of that on one level yet turns out to be more. Perhaps its Korean setting and the very contemporary nature of the politics invoked – the Korean War technically hasn't finished – help shove the film into a realm audiences inside and outside the country can relate to but I'm not sure that explains the feeling I have that "Silmido" would affect a lot of people who have no knowledge of the country's history in a very personal way.

The plot is easy to follow: in the late 1960s, after some North Korean agents have been captured and executed by South Korean military forces after confessing that they were on a mission to kill President Park Chunghee, the South Koreans themselves toy with the idea of sending men on a similar mission to kill North Korean leader Kim Ilsung. Under orders from the government, the army sends over 30 hardened criminals on death row and other outcasts to Silmido island to undergo a brutal training regime that will transform them into elite assassin force Unit 684. For much of the film, viewers are treated to harrowing if well-staged scenes of unrelenting Spartan training and often sadistic torture; the proceedings can be hard to watch sometimes and the film's pace never lets up. When the men have been disciplined and honed into an efficient fighting force, the government orders change and the army is now faced with a fanatical killing machine it does not know what to do with.

The plot is mostly predictable: men who can't handle the training drop out and there's a token death; the army leaders and soldiers who train the would-be assassins are suitably granite-faced and apply the requisite beatings and excessive machine-gun fire punishments. There's room for slapstick humour in one scene where a man runs into a river before his minder even has a chance to brand him with a hot poker! The music soundtrack is stirring and heroic to excess and there is plenty of Korean-style OTT melodrama; compared to other east Asians, Koreans have a reputation for being highly emotional and intense people and "Silmido" milks the emotional potential inherent in scenes between individual characters who have personal crosses to bear and old scores to settle.

Where the film really lifts its game is in what goes on between the army and the government represented by stock character stereotypes outside Silmido island: the general political situation changes, South Korea decides it's better to co-exist with and even do deals with Kim Ilsung, and senior bureaucrats and politicians waive away the creation of Unit 684 as though the 31 remaining men in the unit are just so many flies to be swatted away. The hoplites' loyalty to their country and fighting zeal count for nothing but their very testoterone-charged fanaticism, the bonds of loyalty among themselves and to their superiors, and their readiness to face death so that they can truly feel alive now make them a serious threat to South Korea's security. At this point in the film, non-Korean viewers realise there are two ways to go: the plot could just let the men go off to North Korea with the army and government cynically figuring that the North Koreans can handle them their own way; or the men could self-destruct. As Koreans know already, the men do self-destruct but the ways in which they do it turn out quite unpredictably. Their demise is at once heroic and pathetic and the film's coda is quietly powerful and depressing in a way that only skillful and clever Korean film-making can make it.

The incidents of "Silmido" are particular to Korean history, so much so that I don't expect Koreans born after the period of military rule (which ended more or less about the late 1980s or early 1990s) to know those events, but the film's themes of political expediency, bureaucratic indifference, the cynical exploitation of loyalty, camaraderie and patriotism, a government's inability to consider the consequences of creating a killing machine with only one short-term purpose in mind and the psychological effects that intense military training might have on people are surely issues that will resonate with viewers beyond Korea. Above all there is something exhilarating about men who, in training to face certain death, discover purpose and new life, and you can't help but feel that in spite of their brutal training and psychological transformation, they experience a kind of freedom and become supermen, far beyond the confines of the society that originally produced them.

Black Metal Satanica (2008)

Not very Satanic and serves best as an introduction to black metal

[5/10 · 24 November 2011]

This documentary promised initially to be a fairly in-depth investigation of the Scandinavian black metal music scene and its agenda and for the first half hour "Black Metal Satanica" did entertain with a pleasing mix of band interviews, music and historical archive material. Over the rest of its 80-minute course though the film deteriorated into an unfocused parade of interviews which suggests director Lundberg lost control of the project and let the musicians he interviewed take over. I was quite disappointed at how the film turned out as the mostly Swedish interviewees were well-spoken, polite and thoughtful, and offered interesting insights into the general tenor of the scene and their own motivations for joining it; they gave the impression of being able to answer almost any challenging and provocative questions Lundberg could have put to them. The film also offers snapshots of very interesting and often expressionistic black metal film clips and energetic concert footage. The mostly black metal music soundtrack which also features a little ambient music and even some Christian church choral music in parts runs throughout the film and gives it an energetic and aggressive ambiance though it is never intrusive.

The most interesting section of the film is its examination of black metal's opposition to Christianity and how this derives from the history of Christian proselytisation in Scandinavia at the tail-end of the Viking period: in many parts of Norway and Sweden, communities were forced to accept Christianity and baptism under threat of invasion. The film omits to add that temples dedicated to Odin worship were razed and churches built in their stead which would have explained the church burnings that mentioned later on. A link is made between Scandinavia's Viking history and culture on the one hand and black metal on the other in a superficial way: the interviewees talk about self-respect and resisting the Christian influence on current society but there is little about the appeal of Viking values such as individualism, curiosity, an adventurous spirit which drove the Vikings to explore and colonise Iceland, Greenland and parts of North America, self-reliance and a desire to beat the elements, transcend death and be remembered for heroic exploits.

After this stirring episode, the film investigates early inspirations like the northern European physical environment and climate, and bands like Bathory, Mayhem and Burzum on black metal generally (no mention of Darkthrone and Emperor?) and delves into various black metal recreations such as grave desecrations, murdering homosexual men, church burnings, studying Anton Szandor LaVey's Satanic Bible, self-mutilation and apocalyptic fantasies. Distinguishing between Norwegian and Swedish BM is non-existent; the credits that introduce each interviewee/s at least could have indicated which country they were from and Lundberg could have asked some Swedish subjects about when and how BM became popular in Sweden. I begin to wonder whether Lundberg is becoming enthralled or overwhelmed by the style of BM rather than its substance. There is plenty substantial that is suggested by the interviewees and the activities covered here which is not covered in much depth: black metal's emphasis on pseudo-Nietzschean elitism, freedom of expression and individuality, and closeness to and concern for nature which lead to a love of land, nationalism and Romanticism (and National Socialist beliefs) which in their turn feed a hatred of humanity, pessimism about the future of the planet and ultimately a desire for an apocalypse or a series of disaster events that will sweep humans away into the dustbin of history and cleanse the Earth.

Past the halfway point, the narrator with the irritating American accent drops out and the film becomes a series of the same talking heads covering familiar ground. At one point the topic of Christian black metal (a mostly American sub-genre phenomenon in which BM elements are in the employ of a robust take-no-prisoners Christianity that shoots first before proffering the other cheek) is broached to the interviewees who express surprise and disbelief and for a brief moment the film shows some sparkle. When the closing credits arrive, I realise I didn't learn much from "Black Metal Satanica" that I wasn't already aware of and that there is plenty more Lundberg and his guests could have spoken about. Why does black metal have an elitist point of view rather than an inclusive democratic one? How much influence does Nietzschean philosophy have on the music and the sub-culture that surrounds it? Is that influence a superficial one or are black metal followers aware that to be an Übermensch, one must not only continually test oneself against insuperable odds but welcome such tests joyfully?

Black Metal Satanica? - not very much so as it turns out: the film serves best as an introduction for viewers not familiar with BM who moreover will have to do some extra homework on the BM agenda if they want to understand it fully.

Zoo (2007)

Film suffers from treating its subject too gently and gingerly

[9 November 2011]

Based on the case of a Boeing employee who died from a perforated colon while being anally penetrated by a horse in Enumclaw, a town in rural Washington state, "Zoo" (the term is short for zoophilia, the sexual love of animals) is a brave attempt to address a highly controversial and polarising issue in a dispassionate way that neither condemns nor sympathises with the people involved in bestiality. The film recreates the events leading up to the man's death and its aftermath in a way that's part documentary / part drama with re-enactments of scenes and emphasising a soft, dream-like mood with delicately muted, wafting music. Director Devor uses four narrators, talking to an unseen listener, to retell the events from the point of view of the people who knew the man, referred to in the film as "Mr Hands", and this approach thrusts (um) the viewer right into the twilight world of zoophiles: how they found each other through Internet contacts, how they organised their tryst and their reactions when the man was injured and when their secret activities became known to the outside world.

The film has the air of a noir mystery: the majority of scenes are filmed in shadow, at night or in dark colours with blue being predominant. The story unfolds slowly and elliptically and anyone who is unaware in advance as to what the film is about may be puzzled at the indirect way "Zoo" tiptoes around the subject until near half-way when a news report drops its headline in deadpan style. The pace is very steady, perhaps too steady and slow, and the film often dwells on several still camera shots which look deliberately staged as if for static display purposes. Close-ups and landscapes often look very abstract with washes of blue across a background; an orchard looks like a misty fairyland beneath a light coating of rain. The mood is even and quite blank until a scene in which police investigators viewing a DVD recording appears; the police react with horror and shock watching the act of buggery and only then do viewers feel something creepy crawl up their spines.

For all its delicacy, "Zoo" gives the impression of something much bigger than its subject matter struggling to make itself seen and heard: the zoophiles give the impression of wanting companionship, a sense of belonging, a need to share something special that gives meaning to their lives, and thinking they have found it. They seek a utopia in which everyone is equal and no-one is judged by how much money s/he earns or how educated s/he is. The places in rural Washington where many of them live look impoverished and some zoophiles may well be drifters or marginalised people barely managing to make a living and survive. (Difficult to tell as many scenes are recreations of actual events with actors playing the zoophiles.) If the film had directly addressed the need of the zoophiles for meaning, for companionship, it might have been able to gain more co-operation from the people involved; as it is, the level of co-operation it got is very restricted. The dead man's family refused to be interviewed for the film which is a pity as the wife and child might have presented him as more well-rounded than he appears in "Zoo".

The film also suffers from subjectivity and could have done with a more objective view of its subject. Interviews with psychologists and psychiatrists on zoophilia and perhaps other conditions such as lycanthropy (identifying oneself as an animal rather than as a human) might have shed light on why some people are sexually attracted to animals and to some kinds of animals in particular. The goals of the project would still be met: the issue would not be sensationalised and viewers might come away with a greater understanding of zoophilia and other bizarre philias. Instead the film can only concentrate on the horse-trainer, Jenny Edwards, who took charge of the horses after the incident became public: she admits that after having followed the case in its detail and ordering one of the horses gelded, that she's "on the edge" of understanding the zoophiles' obsession. It appears also that the director and film-crew were as much in the dark as Edwards was while making the film; even after its completion, the film-makers still were scratching their heads trying to make sense of what they'd done. Not a good portent for a film.

Yes, zoophilia is a difficult subject to talk about, let alone film, without making it look disgusting, degraded or ridiculous and pathetic. "Zoo" tries hard not to take one side or the other but with a subject like this, the attempt to be "balanced" is a tough act indeed to pull off. Some viewers will be irate that the film advocates no position at all, as if it's the film-makers' duty to tell them what they must believe. I think though that to achieve the "balance" that "Zoo" strives for, the film-makers should have pulled back from their subjects and taken a more generalised view of the issue of zoophilia; the police officers, the courts, psychologists and medical who dealt with the dead man and his friends should have been consulted for their opinions about zoophilia.