I continue my trawl through films I saw last year that had a strong musical element. See the previous instalment here.
All You Need Is Death (2023)
This is Paul Duane's odd folk horror about these two song collectors who head up to Enniskillen because they hear there is a crazy lady (played by Olwen Fouéré, obv.) who knows a song that is indescribably ancient but has never been recorded or transcribed. Aspects of the film are deliberately enigmatic, like the early scene where the song collectors meet a client in a car park like they are conducting a shady drug deal rather than engaging in an entirely legal activity. And some of it is pretty funny, like when they meet an old singer (played by Brendan Gleeson), whose daughter makes sure they hand over any money for his songs to her and not to her alcoholic dad.
The soundtrack is by Ian Lynch. He is one of the Lankum people, so you probably have a bit of a sense of what the music sounds like: droney, trad adjacent, etc. He doesn't noticeably lend his vocals to proceedings, with the soundtrack mostly instrumental apart from a couple of points where we have characters on screen singing: the aforementioned Brendan Gleeson (who as well as being an actor has some interest in the world of traditional music), one of the song collectors (played by Simone Collins, who has a background in musical theatre), and then Olwen Fouéré herself singing "Old God Rising". That's the ancient tune the plot revolves around, a song in the language people spoke in Ireland before there was Irish, a song passed through the female line that no man is ever meant to hear. It is deliberately harsh and unnerving, sounding as much like a curse being called down as anything approximating to music.
But is the film any good? One of my friends said that she admired it more than liked it, and I see what she is getting at. You could argue that it is does well at first with the tension building as the song collectors move towards Enniskillen but that it becomes less coherent once the film has to deal with the complicated results of finding the song as opposed to the more focussed quest for it. And the film also has to roll with the limitations of its modest budget as it tries to portray the horrors unleashed by the cursed song. There might also be a sense that the film accelerates a bit too much in the last half or third, with perhaps a bit too much exposition left out in the interests of keeping things moving forward. Perhaps so, but I still like its enigmatic atmospherics and find myself interested in the idea of seeing it again. It is on IFI Home so Irish readers can check it out in the comfort of their homes.
A film of a live performance by Portishead in New York some time after they released their second album. It made me think of a few things. Firstly, there is Portishead's second album, which manages to sound broadly like the first album except not as good, despite being recorded in a rather different manner: instead of the music being mostly put together from samples it was created by weaving together pieces of original music. The other thing I found myself reflecting on is that while Beth Gibbons is great on record she is less brilliant at fronting a live band: there is something very draining about her way of hanging onto the microphone for dear life while singing every song, with a never changing look on her face suggesting she is dying of the anguish.
The Colour of Pomegranates (1969)
There is music in Sergei Parajanov's enigmatic telling of the life of 18th century Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat-Nova but really the film is all about the visuals. It is a stunningly beautiful work that repays trips to the cinema whenever it is shown while also being the kind of film that would annoy plot-oriented people. I have developed a theory that this film is a major influence on Wes Anderson, particularly the more recent of his works that did not trouble themselves too much with narrative. As well as going beyond narrative, Wes Anderson films share a commitment to making things look great and might even have recourse to a similar colour palette.
Lone Star (1996)
John Sayles directed this greatest of films, which features a star turn in flashback sequences by Kris Kristofferson as Charlie Wade, the terrifying sheriff of a Texan border community, with the rest of the film set in the then present day after the body of the long vanished Wade is discovered, triggering a murder investigation for which the current sheriff's late father and former sheriff is the prime suspect (there are a lot of sheriffs in this film). A big thing is the way buried secrets of the past don't always stay buried, while the film also interrogates the history of border communities in parts of the United States that used to be in other countries. I really can't recommend this film enough: I think it is one of the five best films I have ever seen.
Music isn't a big presence in the film but there is a bit of Tex-Mex-Mariachi style stuff going on, which fits the whole Mex-American theme.
Eno (2024)
Gary Hustwit made this film about the popular producer, but I think Eno himself had input into the film's central gimmick: that it is different every time it is shown. I only saw it once so I don't know how different it is each time or whether the film has some stuff it always covers with the variation being in how much of it appears, or if the film sometimes leaves out entire sections of Eno's career. What I saw was broadly chronological, interspersed with present day stuff in which Eno yapped away about stuff (either past stuff he had been doing or his curious eating regimen). There was little-to-nothing about Roxy Music but quite a bit about his time working with U2, which was actually very interesting (and possibly would be even to people who are not that pushed about the popular Dublin band). They had quite a bit of footage of Eno and U2 in the studio ("That's great Bono - now could you do it again with a bit more passion") and I was fascinated by how they interacted. I got the sense that one of Eno's strengths as a producer might be a natural aptitude for plámásing people and avoiding confrontation while still pushing them in particular directions. You also got the sense that the members of U2 (who were all still pretty young at this stage) were in awe of Eno as someone who had worked with Bowie and Roxy as well as releasing cool albums of his own.
Eno generally came across as someone who has worked out how to live.
The IFI has been showing a season of Bette Davis films and it is indicative of how many great films she made that the programme didn't include loads of her films I think of as total classics. These include Marked Woman (based on real events, with Bette Davis playing a "nightclub hostess" (it's not a pre-Code film so use your imagination) whose evidence takes down a fictionalised Lucky Luciano; Humphrey Bogart also appears as an analogue of district attorney Thomas Dewey (of "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" fame), Juarez (in which Bette Davis plays Princess Carlotta, whose husband somehow becomes Emperor of Mexico), and The Nanny (a disturbing domestic drama made by Hammer before they went big on what we think of as Hammer Horror).
In the season I did see her play the titular lead in Jezebel (1938), which was given to her as a consolation prize for missing out on the lead role in Gone with the Wind as it provided her with an opportunity to play a Southern belle. I'm not sure it is a great film but it was striking how negatively the white Southerners are mostly portrayed (the men are honour-obsessed idiots who spend their time fighting duels and scoffing at anyone suggesting the South would lose in a civil war), while the various enslaved African Americans (all admittedly minor characters) come across as real people and not the "Lawdy massa" stereotypes seen in other films of the era. All About Eve (1950) meanwhile could be seen as Davis's Sunset Boulevard, with Davis playing an ageing actress (all of 40 years old) facing a young rival. All About Eve is something of a camp classic and might also represent the point where Davis herself pivoted to playing full-on older ladies, somehow making a successful career of this in a business that is not normally considered too welcoming of older women.
The final film I saw was Another Man's Poison (1951), a British made film in which Davis plays a successful crime writer who finds things getting a bit awkward when the criminal accomplice of her estranged husband shows up at her house looking for him. I felt that it maybe suffers from a moralistic ending (the same might be true of All About Eve) and if it weren't for that the film would be almost like Bette Davis appearing in a Patricia Highsmith adaptation. It also features Emlyn Williams in a supporting role, a man whose other claim to fame is writing the book that formed the basis of The Smiths' "Suffer Little Children". There were other appealing films in the season (notably Now, Voyager and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?), but I skipped those as I had seen them relatively recently.
Being the age I am, the first I ever heard of Bette Davis was when Kim Carnes had a monster hit with the song "Bette Davis Eyes". Watching all these films had the tune going through my head all the time, so I've downloaded it and have been listening to it obsessively ever since. It's a great track, with Carnes' expressively raspy vocals combining with a very 80s backing to create an endearingly proto-goth sound. Carnes was herself a singer songwriter, but she did not write the tune. It first appeared as an album track on its co-author Jackie DeShannon's New Arrangement. It is worth giving the original a quick listen as it is so different from Carnes' version, sounding almost like something from a vaudeville show. It is a far less effective recording.
I became curious then about Kim Carnes. It is her performance and the production that makes her "Bette Davis Eyes" great, so could she perhaps have other hidden classics from that era lurking unheard by modern audiences? Sadly this does not appear to be the case, with the couple of other tracks I listened to from the album "Bette Davis Eyes" appears on not being that great: neither the songwriting, the production, nor Carnes' own performance is up to much on any of them. The one thing that did kind of impress me was a live rendition of the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb" I stumbled onto. As you know, that is a deeply problematic song with its lyrics about the kind of coercive control that is now recognised as a crime in many jurisdictions. On the live performance I saw, however, Carnes really gave it socks and there is definitely something interesting about a woman singing a song normally read as being about a man dominating a woman. It's not as good as "Bette Davis Eyes", but it's still worth a listen.
Meet Me In The Bathroom is documentary based on the book by Lizzy Goldman, which in turn took its title from a song by The Strokes. It is documentary about the New York scene of the early 21st century, focussed on the Strokes themselves and on other bands of that era: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, The Moldy Peaches, etc. When I first saw posters for the film my initial thought was that those bands were not actually good enough to justify a documentary about their scene. Then I though back to how exciting it was when the existence of the New York scene was announced to the world, because scenes are exciting in a way that individual bands are not. Also, having been told all my life that New York is an amazingly cool place, the prospect of there being actually cool music emerging from it was something that was easy to lap up. With the passage of time, my sense was that most of these bands had rather underdelivered, which raised the prospect that a film about them would be a bit of a trudge, leading to more discerning viewers being irritated by an endless parade of mediocre music juxtaposed against a commentary about how great the whole thing was. Nevertheless, I decided to take one for the team and booked myself in to see the film.
And it's actually very enjoyable. It does not necessarily shake me out of my belief that most of these acts were quite good rather than truly great, but it does communicate a sense of how exciting it must have been when the bands all burst onto the scene together. Formally it combines a lot of archival footage of the artists with recordings (possibly for interviews made for the book) of people talking about the scene. It is a very time-bound artefact, looking at a scene that emerged in the period when mobile video technology had become sufficiently cheap that it was possible for there to be loads of footage of the bands playing live and goofing around offstage, but from before the rise of people not paying for music precluded the emergence of such a scene.
The Strokes are the film's main focus, which is fair enough: they were the first of the bands to break big, and they also broke very big indeed, going almost overnight from playing toilet venues in New York to being superstars in the UK. It's easy to see why they were so successful, with catchy tunes and good lucks being a perennially winning combo. I'm still undecided as to how actually good they were, but they are definitely at least quite good, and the film has certainly made me interested in listening to their first album again.
One thing the film definitely did was confirm me in my view that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the most essential band to emerge from that scene. A lot of that is down to Karen O, but not everything. She is a very charismatic frontwoman, but there is an energy to how Nick Zinner's guitars and Brian Chase's drums play off her yelps that adds to more the sum of its parts. It's also striking that in a scene defined by its good lookers (e.g. The Strokes and Interpol), Karen O is surprisingly plain-looking (controversial), probably not even being the best looker in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (doubly controversial); yet for all, that throw her onstage and she transforms into a super-charismatic rock goddess. The film was also interesting on the pressure heaped on Karen O as the most visible woman in a pretty blokey scene.
My view on the other key band of that scene was also reinforced. The Moldy Peaches may have been a bunch of underachieving wasters who never followed up on their early success (quirky artistic success, not commercial success) but I still feel they had something, and hearing their tunes in the cinema alongside the others did not make me feel that I was wrong. Their underachievement is in some ways kind of surprising. There is a bit in the film where Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches is talking about supporting The Strokes on their first tour of the UK, where the latter were living the rock star dream as they discovered that on our side of the Atlantic they had become superstars. Dawson mentions being a bit older than The Strokes and saying to them, "Dudes, do you maybe not want to get completely wasted all the time so that you will be able to remember all this?" (to which The Strokes collectively responded, "SHUT UP KIMYA AND GIMME THE DRØGS! WHERE ARE THE SEXY GIRLS?").
Beyond that we're into first wave also-ran territory: Interpol (good looking, not obviously essential in the music department), Liars (tuneless), TV On The Radio (not sure I've ever heard anything by them), etc. Then the second wave, which is essentially James Murphy & Tim Goldsworthy's DFA Records and the acts associated with it. For the purposes of the film that was basically The Rapture (who were on DFA for a bit but then left because some kind of mysterious prickology was delaying the release of their album) and Murphy's own LCD Soundsystem, a band summoned into existence by the success of the "Losing My Edge" single. Obviously, you know the tune; in fact it is about you (and not because you are one of the kids who is coming up from behind). The situating of the tune in the film was interesting, as it came up in the context of how the rise of Napster and file-sharing was suddenly making everything available to everyone, killing off the cachet that came from having hunted down obscure old records. The film also mentioned how file sharing strangled bands' incomes, playing a large part in the decline of band-based music, which may well mean that the early 2000s New York scene is the last of its kind.
images:
The Strokes (Pitchfork: "Vintage Photos of the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, James Murphy, and More From Meet Me in the Bathroom")
I've been on a bit of a David Bowie roll lately, largely thanks to Brett Morgen's brilliant Moonage Daydream film. I went to see it again and enjoyed the experience much more the second time. Partly I was fortunate in that the screen was not hurting my eyes (I'm not sure if previously the awkwardness came from my eyes being shit or the particular combination of the Moonage Daydream montage and the IFI's screen 2 combining to downpress me, but I certainly got nothing like the same disturbance from the screening in the IFI's screen 3) but also I was approaching the film in a more relaxed manner, letting it wash over me without trying to identify the various bits of funny German expressionist footage they kept throwing into the mix. It's a great piece of work, submerging the viewer in Bowie's work while avoiding the standard music documentary thing of wheeling in Bongo to tell us all why Bowie was quite so important as someone who paved the way to the music of U2. I continue to be struck by the contrast between the audiences shown for his early 1970s Ziggy Stardust concerts and the Serious Moonlight tour of the 1980s, with the former audience being made up an excitable bunch of freaks and weirdos while the 1980s audience looked pretty square, even by 1980s standards. More generally I found myself wondering when Bowie's audience shifted from being primarily girls to primarily boys. Or did it? My beloved noted that there were always a lot of both, and one might perhaps overestimate the number of girls in the early years where the boys are all dressing like girls.
With Moonage Daydream pushing my buttons it seemed only natural that this year I make some kind of engagement with the Dublin Bowie Festival. This takes place in January of each year, around the anniversaries of Bowie's birth and death. I've never bothered with it before so I can't say whether this year's programme was typical, but I can confirm that the line-up featured musical performances (by Bowie tribute acts and Bowie-linked musicians), a photographic exhibition, talks, and film screenings in the Light House cinema.
The film screenings included another showing of Moonage Daydream, which I skipped on the basis that i) it was only a week or two after my last viewing of it and ii) it was on very late. But I did go and see The Hunger, Tony Scott's film adaptation of Whitley Streiber's novel. Truth be told even if I was not on a Bowie kick I would have crawled out of the grave to see this, as it is a film I have long been fascinated by without ever actually seeing, ever since I read the book and found its evocation of immortal sadness intriguing. And the film is an interesting one to show as part of a Bowie festival, as he only really plays a supporting role. It is a prominent supporting role, but Bowie is very much playing third fiddle to Catherine Deneuve and Sarah Sarandon.
The basic plot is simple enough. Deneuve and Bowie are an immortal vampire couple, except something is going wrong with Bowie's character, who starts to rapidly age, his hundreds of years of undead life rapidly catching up with him. Deneuve's character is sad, but there's nothing really she can do about it. And hating being alone she starts lining up the Sarandon character as Bowie's replacement.
Plotwise I kept finding myself comparing it with the book, or my memories of it (it was thirty years ago, your honour), and at certain key points I found the film wanting in this department. But the look and feel of the film is incredible, with its dark lighting, shadows and close-ups making it like the bastard child of German expressionist cinema and film noir. There is some great fractured time stuff too, with edits jumping backwards and forwards between the vampires on the hunt and then laying into their victims. It also does a good job of communicating the idea that maybe the life of an immortal vampire isn't really all that, even if your centuries do not start suddenly catching up with you. I did find myself wondering if this might be the first screen depiction of a sad and sympathetic vampire. The film also seems to have largely established the idea that if vampires existed they would hang out in goth clubs (as featured in the memorable opening sequence with Bauhaus playing in a New York club while the two vampires stalk their victims), something that would eventually become something of a cliche.
It also features doves, which seem to have been a bit of a thing in films of the era. In The Hunger they hang around in a loft but seem to never deposit their droppings on the floor.
Plus the film features Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon getting it on. This may have been the elevator pitch.
Aside from the cinema I attended a couple of the festival's talks. One of these was billed as a listening party for the album Aladdin Sane. David Bowie has a lot of albums and Aladdin Sane is one of the ones I've never heard. For the listening party they had Hot Press journalist Pat Carty chairing a discussion with Gerry Leonard (guitarist on Bowie's last albums), Leah Kardos (an academic), and B. P. Fallon (famous Irish music biz character whose actual link to Bowie is not entirely clear to me but he did provide a certain "I was there man" vibe to proceedings). But billing this as a listening party was a think necessarily false advertising. With the likes of Tim Burgess and his Twitter listening parties participants could listen to the records while reading the tweets (and possibly posting their own), but you can't simultaneously listen to a record while also listening to some guys yap away about it. So for this event they started off by playing bits of the songs and then having a bit of yap, but as the yap started going on and on they gave up on the music as otherwise we would have been there all night. For me this made for an odd experience, listening to people talking about a record I had not heard, but it was interesting to hear the general view of the panelists regarding pianist Mike Garson, whose playing was deemed a bit plinky plonky. Actually it was B. P. who introduced the plinky plonky criticism (the phrase "plinky plonky vibe" may have been uttered) but there was no real pushback against him. Leonard, who had played with Garson on late Bowie records said something about how Garson was now a good friend of his but then admitted that the pianist definitely loved the plinky plonky.
More generally the tacit subtext to the Aladdin Sane discussion was that the album is not really that good. Maybe not bad as such but certainly not front rank Bowie. I was nevertheless sufficiently intrigued by the discussion to pick up a copy afterwards and yes indeed, it is inessential. Definitely some good tracks (notably the title track and the hit) and some rofflesome lines (the one about how time falls wanking to the floor) but a good few of the tracks feel like Bowie by numbers (save where he is trying to evoke the Rolling Stones). Maybe it is not too surprising he broke up the Spiders soon after it was released. But it's not actually that plinky plonky.
That said, I am wary of going all in on dissing Aladdin Sane for fear that at some point in the future the penny will drop and I will realise that actually it is amazing. This has happened before.
There were two interesting and almost in-passing references to money in the Aladdin Sane discussions. Leah Kardos mentioned that around the time the album came out Bowie began to experience financial problems. Ziggy Stardust had pushed him up a level but he was now finding that his outlays had gone up considerably (with a large entourage and touring machine to support plus a sudden need to take limousines everywhere as well as a mammoth coke habit) but his income had not increased proportionately. She suggested that the eventual decision to rake in the cash with Let's Dance and the Serious Moonlight tour was largely driven by a need to get himself out of this financial hole. The other money thing was a "probably shouldn't be saying this" comment from one of the participants that I think it would be inappropriate to reproduce.
The following day, a Sunday, I went out to Rathfarnham Castle to see an exhibition entitled Bowie: Icon, which was a collection of photographs of David Bowie by one Philippe Auliac. The pictures were worth seeing but I am not sure they were worth going to see, though I did like what I saw of Rathfarnham Castle itself and may well make a return visit sometime. On returning back into town I returned to Whelan's where Leah Kardos (academic, Wire writer, stylophonist) was treating us to an audiovisual exploration of themes in and influences on Bowie's last works, the albums The Next Day and Black Star and the musical Lazarus. This touched on a lot of stuff, but one thing I found interesting was the way Bowie kept referencing The Man Who Fell To Earth in his work. I was also intrigued by the stuff about a young Bowie appearing in a mime/dance troupe with the pub landlord from The Wicker Man (the actor, dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp), dressed as a similar kind of clown to the one he plays in the "Ashes to Ashes" video. The influences meanwhile pushed a lot of my buttons, with Kardos showing long clips from various Derek Potter dramas (reminding me that I have long been a Derek Potter fan without actually having ever watched any of his dramas all the way through). Some of this stuff was interesting to me in terms of what it said about Kardos herself, in terms of her age and background: she's from Australia and a good bit younger than me, and she seems to have come to Derek Potter through his being referenced by David Bowie rather than his being someone whose TV programme were always on when you were growing up.
I was also intrigued by Kardos's discussion of the Lazarus musical and the clips she showed from it. This had completely passed me by and I was barely aware of its existence. It is a jukebox musical (and so is suspect) but it seems to have not done a Mamma Mia and used the songs to piss on Bowie's legacy, instead having a plot based on recurring themes in his work, with Bowie himself being involved in its creation for all that popular Irish playwright Enda Walsh did the actual writing. Wikipedia lists it as being a straightforward adaptation of The Man Who Fell To Earth, but that was not really the impression I got from Kardos's presentation, though she did suggest that it certainly referenced that work (as does a lot of late Bowie material). It came across as being quite multi-layered and almost enigmatic, not something that just gives us a simple story that allows the cast to belt out the Bowie hits in a manner that might appeal to the casual Bowie fan. This may explain why it did not do that well.
I was also interested by the in-passing assertion that the second Tin Machine album is actually great; the Tin Machine reappraisal starts now!
I probably would have bought the big brainy book about late Bowie that Leah Kardos has written but she didn't have very many copies with her so that was that. I might look out for it.
And that was it for the 2023 Bowie Festival. Maybe next year I will go to some of the gigs.
images:
Moonage Daydream still (Irish Independent: "Moonage Daydream review: Bowie documentary as zany and brilliant as the man himself")
I went to London for a celebration of the centenary of the birth of screenwriter Nigel Kneale. Organised by Jon Dear, with the glamorous assistance of Toby Hadoke, Howard David Ingham, and Andy Murray, this was a day of screenings and panel discussions in the Crouch End Picturehouse.Nigel Kneale is not a household name by any means, but in his long career he produced striking work for television and cinema. He started writing for television in the 1950s, when TV drama was starting to become a thing, and while he initially wrote all kinds of stuff it is his science fiction and horror writing that he is remembered for. His best known works probably being the three 1950s series of Quatermass (a kind of proto-Doctor Who, except for grown ups), though he was still writing into the 1990s.
The first panel looked at Kneale's early work with the BBC, which started with literary adaptations and then moved on to The Quatermass Experiment in 1953 and its follow-up serials in 1955 and 1958, as well as his adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1954. These were the event television of their time, with questions being asked in parliament about Nineteen Eighty-Four and the streets reportedly emptying when Quatermass was on, though of course this was also a time when there was only one British TV channel. The details of television's early years brought up the panelists were fascinating. At that point television, even drama, was still mostly broadcast live; pre-recording was only used for material shot outside, which was still a bit of a novelty. Drama was also conceived in very theatrical terms, with Reginald Tate, the actor playing Quatermass in the first series, taking a bow at the end of the last episode.
One of the panelists had looked up what was actually shown on the BBC on the day the first episode of The Quatermass Experiment was shown. Initially there was alternating coverage of Royal Ascot and Formula One motor racing, then a short piece of children's programming, more Ascot and motor racing, and a news reel, all interspersed with interludes when nothing was being shown. And then a warning from the announcer that the following programme might not be suitable for children or those of a nervous disposition, before the ominous tones of Holst's "Mars" brought us into the world of Professor Quatermass and his experiment.
Another point made by the panelists (and one repeated through the day) was that for all Nigel Kneale's best remembered work dealt with science fiction and horror themes, he never thought of himself as a genre writer and was indeed very dismissive of science fiction. Partly that derived from his having a somewhat limited sense of what constituted science fiction, seeing it as something characterised by the US pulp tradition and screen material inspired by it. Science fiction fans will rightly grumble that the genre has so much more to offer. And yet if you look at what passes for screen science fiction now you see that it is dominated by films in which people in stupid costumes punch each other or by formulaic Trek Wars crap that is cosily familiar rather than in any way challenging. It's like the pulp tradition has taken over science fiction, so maybe Kneale was right to dismiss the genre entirely.
This discussion preceded a screening of "Contact has been established", the first episode of The Quatermass Experiment. Professor Quatermass is the director of a British space programme that has sent a manned rocket into orbit, but something has gone wrong. Eventually the rocket crash lands in south London, but inexplicably there is only one of the three astronauts left inside the capsule.
One thing that struck me with this episode was how the shadow of the Second World War hangs over Kneale's early work. After the rocket lands on a residential street displaced locals reference the Blitz, with one confused woman seeming to think that the V2 rockets are back. The later Quatermass and the Pit sees people finding something during tunnelling that they initially think is an unexploded German bomb (that drama's nightmarish climax sees people consumed by an urge to exterminate the different, which also evokes the horrors of the Third Reich). And Kneale's Nineteen Eighty-Four feels very much like it is set in a world where the Second World War never stopped (which I think was Orwell's intention but it is maybe less obvious to us when reading his book). I suppose in the 1950s the war was still very recent, with some food rationing still in place when the first Quatermass episode was broadcast. That the war, or something like it, could start up again must have been a fear forever lurking below the surface. The depiction of a street destroyed by a rocket must have triggered uneasy memories on the part of many viewers (and for all the studio bound nature of the first Quatermass episode, the ruined house set is surprisingly effective).
"Contact has been established" was followed by Tom Baker reading Kneale's short story "The Photograph"; the story is from much further back but this was broadcast in 1978, when Baker had only recently departed from Doctor Who (ironic in that Kneale thought Doctor Who was rubbish but also resented how its producers lifted his plots and themes). After a short break Jon Dear talked to Douglas Weir of the BFI about the restoration of Kneale's Nineteen Eighty-Four (out now (finally) on DVD and Blu-Ray); having seen that some years ago at Loncon I am looking forward to catching it again in all its restored glory.
Then we had a panel on Nigel Kneale in the 1970s. This was Kneale's folk horror period, with ancient evils supplanting the dangers of science gone wrong in his work (though arguably the danger of chthonic terrors from the past was also a theme appearing in some of his earlier work, notably Quatermass and the Pit, while the 1970s still saw Kneale engaging with science fiction themes in the likes of The Stone Tape and the final 1979 Quatermass series). By now of course television was a much more mature medium, broadcast in colour with drama no longer going out live. And there were more channels in Britain (three, to be precise). TV was also edgier: for all that Mary Whitehouse was clipping its heels, much more could be shown now than in the 1950s. There was an interesting point made by Una McCormack about how not all of this lack of inhibition in the 1970s was necessarily great, with the television and cinema of the era sometimes seeing sexism slide into outright misogyny (think about how common sexual assault of women is in notable works of the decade); she talked of Kneale acknowledging this and reacting against it in the likes of Murrain or the Beasts episode "Special Offer". You could see something similar in The Stone Tape, where Jane Asher plays almost the only woman in a drama otherwise featuring a lot of often boorish men.
That was followed by a screening of Murrain, originally broadcast by ITV as part of the Against the Crowd anthology series. The film is based on two conflicts: the young vet representing science and modernity versus the superstition of the country folk, and then same superstitious country folk versus the eccentric old woman they believe to have cursed them. It makes for disconcerting viewing as it is never quite clear where your sympathies are meant to lie. Well, the vet is always operating with the most noble of motives, but beyond that it gets more complicated. Are the countryfolk bad because they are persecuting an old woman for no crime other than being a bit odd? Or is the old woman actually an evil witch who has brought a curse down on her neighbours? Or is she a woman of power who is merely striking back against her neighbours' persecution? The drama also retains an ambiguity as to whether the old woman is actually possessed of sinister powers, or whether the various ailments afflicting those who have slighted her are psychosomatic (which could be the case even if the old woman thinks she has cursed them). On the other hand, the farmer's pigs are actually suffering from a mysterious sickness (the murrain of the title), something that for them is unlikely to result from a belief in witchcraft.
Murrain is also surprisingly funny. Not funny all the time, but it has its moments. Like when the vet is in the village shop trying to buy stuff for the old lady. He asks the shopkeeper if she has any olives or chorizo; she gives him a look suggesting there is not much demand for such fripperies in these parts.
Murrain also gives us the great phrase from the vet, "We don't go back", with which he asserts his confidence that science will always provide the answers and that the old ways of superstition have nothing to offer us. The phrase gave Howard David Ingham the title for their book on folk horror, because the whole genre is largely based on the idea that maybe we will go back actually. By the end of Murrain even the vet's confidence in science seems to be shaken, for all that the drama's climax remains ambiguous.
That was followed by a panel on Kneale on film. For all that he wrote primarily for television, there are a good number of films based on his work or else scripted by him. Hammer made films of the three 1950s Quatermass series, the first two in the 1950s while Quatermass and the Pit (the best by a considerable margin) did not appear until 1967. He wrote some other films for Hammer (Abominable Snowman and The Witches) as well as an adaptation of H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon (which seemed to be always on television when I was a child). And he did some non-genre work (including, surprisingly to me, adaptations of John Osborne plays). But it was hard to escape the feeling that film was not really his medium, with his writing for the big screen being littered with projects that were stillborn or ended up as compromised failures (e.g. Halloween 3). Cinema is a more difficult medium for writers, with the amount of money riding on a picture meaning that someone like Kneale was never going to be given the kind of free rein he had on television.
And then we had a short clip from The Quatermass Xperiment [sic], the 1955 Hammer film adaptation of the first Quatermass series. A little girl playing on her own meets what we know to be a man transforming into something else, in a scene that cannot but evoke a disturbing counterpart in the 1931 film of Frankenstein. The girl was played by Jane Asher, who started out as a child actor. We then had the excitement of Jon Dear interviewing Jane Asher (Jane Fucking Asher!) as an introduction to a screening of The Stone Tape, in which she played the leading role.
Asher lent the day an air of star quality and was an engaging and entertaining interviewee. I was particularly amused by how one of her anecdotes pivoted to "He was a lovely man" when she discovered that its subject (a Stone Tape collaborator) was still alive. I had to admire her making a long round trip to attend the event, particularly given that she did not stay for the screening (she mentioned hating seeing herself on screen, something which I understand is not uncommon among actors). I was also struck by how there was an accidental echo of The Stone Tape in her appearance in the Picturehouse. In the TV drama she plays almost the only female character, isolated in a world of blokey blokes, while the Nigel Kneale Centenary event was also a pretty male-dominated affair, both in terms of the audience and the programme participants (there were several manels and no panel with more than one female participant); hopefully this event went better for her than The Stone Tape did for the character she played.
And so to The Stone Tape itself. As with almost all the screenings, this was my first time seeing this, though it is something I have heard discussed at folk horror online events. It is a feature length TV play first broadcast on BBC 2 in 1972. It mixes science fiction and horror, being in part a ghost story but also attempting to offer a scientific explanation for hauntings (the idea that places can somehow record events that have taken place in them, now often referred to as the Stone Tape theory, for all that the idea preceded the drama). And the play itself is about recording, as its premise is that a team of recording engineers are setting up in a country house to research new audio technologies. The house being haunted presents some challenges, but when they hit on the Stone Tape theory they start thinking that this could maybe be harnessed into a revolutionary new audiovisual recording medium. But this is horror so things do not entirely work out.
I mentioned that Jane Asher plays (almost) the only female character in The Stone Tape, a computer programmer. The sexism of the era is a bit of a theme to this one, with the married head of the project in a problematic relationship with her, while she often finds herself patronised by her colleagues. But what is really striking about the drama is the racism. The researchers are in competition with Japanese rivals, and every time they are mentioned (usually as "The Japs") the characters switch into the kind of parody Asian accent and facial contortions that would disbar you from public office if a recording of you doing it were to surface. And also the company they work for, Ryan Electrics, is owned by an Irishman; he never appears but whenever he is invoked the characters switch into stage Irish accents. Yet it is hard not to see all this as signs of weakness rather than confidence. It must gall these arrogant Englishmen to be taking orders from the scion of one of their former colonies. And for all their mocking of the Japanese, it is stated fairly explicitly that unless the team achieve their sonic breakthrough the British audio industry will be soon wiped out by its East Asian competitors. The sexism might also mask a blokey unease that women are now moving into the workforce and occupying roles that would previously have been the preserve of men.
I should also mention that The Stone Tape features an amazing BBC Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack.
I was talking after the screening to one of my neighbours about how Ireland and the Irish people are a bit of recurring theme for Kneale. As well as Ryan, he mentioned how in Quatermass II the revolt against the alien invaders begins on St. Patrick's Day and is spearheaded by Irish labourers. And there is an Irish drunk in The Quatermass Experiment. Irish names show up throughout Kneale's work. I'm not sure what the significance of this might be. Kneale was not from Ireland and as far as I know he did not have ancestors from here; he may never have visited the island. But maybe this is not so remarkable: there are lots of Irish people in Britain after all, and they are an easy kind of slight other to represent.
And then we had an odd thing, a live performance of You Must Listen a lost Nigel Kneale radio play broadcast in 1952. Again it combined technology and hauntings, with an initially comical tale of crossed telephone lines becoming more macabre as the intruding voice is revealed to be that of a dead person. It had a lot of characters, who were performed by programme participants and a few professional actors (these were not mutually exclusive categories). I was impressed by how Mark Gatiss, probably the most famous participant, took a relatively minor role.
You Must Listen reminded me somewhat of Robert Presslie's short story "Dial 'O' for Operator", in some respects a similar tale of crossed wires and temporal distortion, though in other ways rather different. Presslie's story did not appear until 1958, so it is possible Kneale's drama planted the seed in his brain.
The final panel looked at Kneale's legacy. Stephen Gallagher compared Kneale to Stephen King, in that both writers revolutionised horror by placing it in everyday contemporary settings (sadly no one noted that we were attending an event in Crouch End, setting and title of one of King's most effective short stories). There was also reference to the disturbing prescience of his late 1968 TV play The Year of the Sex Olympics, which prefigures much of the reality television that blights our age, with something like Naked Attraction almost looking like it took Kneale's play as a template. Mark Gatiss mentioned that at the peak of The League of Gentlemen's success, he tried to push the BBC's controller to commission a new series from Kneale, still living at the time. However, he was told that there was no place on the BBC for someone whose career started before the invention of the remote control.
And then the day closed with a screening of Quatermass and the Pit, the 1967 Hammer film version of the 1958-59 TV series. Directed by Roy Ward Baker and with a strong cast including Andrew Keir as Professor Quatermass, James Donald and Barbara Shelley as palaeontologists, and Julian Glover as an army officer. Like much of Kneale's work, this combines science fiction and horror, with Quatermass's space research interrupted by the discovery of strange hominid remains during construction work on an extension to the London Underground's Central Line; that initial find is followed by ever more disturbing revelations about the true history of humanity.
It is a stunning piece of work, with the tension building as the awful truth is gradually uncovered and the drama moves towards an apocalyptic climax. Maybe the closing section of the film is ever so slightly rushed, but Kneale nevertheless did an amazing job condensing a TV series of more than three hours into a film of 97 minutes, with the propulsive energy of the narrative carrying the viewer along without leaving them time to ponder possible logical gaps in what they are watching. Much of the horror comes from people realising things or just having an idea at the edge of their understanding: there is an astonishing scene early on where a tough policeman comes close to a breakdown merely be viewing odd graffiti marks in an abandoned house. As one of the panellists earlier remarked, The Quatermass Experiment is about an alien incursion happening now while Quatermass II has an invasion that began a couple of years ago, but in Quatermass and the Pit the alien invasion took place five million years ago and basically succeeded, profoundly altering the course of human development but not in a good way (this a year before the publication of Erich Van Daniken's Chariot of the Gods).
The film also looks amazing. It has the saturated colour of Hammer films of the era but somehow this all seems more impressive in what was then a contemporary context rather than being in some backward corner of Mitteleuropa. Like other Hammer films Quatermass and the Pit is also happy to focus much attention on the good looks of a female lead. Yet for all that Barbara Shelley appears in a succession of stunning outfits, she is never presented as the kind of sexy lady seen in other Hammer films (for comparison see her performance in the latter part of Dracula, Prince of Darkness); the film's poster is somewhat misleading in this regard.
And that I suppose was that. I enjoyed the event a lot, with the combination of programming and discussion working very well. The material shown to us was particularly well chosen, presenting a fascinating overview of Kneale's career, building like one of his works to a terrifying climax, in this case Quatermass and the Pit. The panels were full of interesting people whose insights greatly improved our enjoyment of the screenings and had me thinking of more things to watch. Overall the event had the feeling of a cosy SF con (there was even a slightly redux Lally Wall). Looking back though I found myself thinking about two things the panellists did not really touch on. The first was Kneale's non-genre work, only really mentioned in passing. There was a surprising amount of this, including an episode of Kavanagh QC (his last work according to IMDB), an adaptation of Sharpe's Gold, the previously mentioned John Osborne screenplays, and an adaptation of Wuthering Heights (which admittedly is semi-genre). What I was curious about here is whether in his work on these non-genre pieces he still somehow injected some Kneale magic into proceedings, or whether they are essentially pieces of generic hackwork that could have been written by anyone. The other thing I found myself wondering was whether Kneale ever considered moving into direction, thereby trying to become a proper auteur director rather than a writer who had to worry about how his work would be realised. Books like Into the Unknown by Andy Murray (on sale at the centenary event but sadly all copies were snapped up before I could buy one) or We Are The Martians (edited by Neil Snowdon) might provide further insights into these questions.
I saw these in the before time as part of an IFI season of films about couples who kill. Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder, is a definite noir classic about a guy who thinks he is pretty smart (Fred MacMurray) and a dame (Barbara Stanwyck) who is playing him for a chump. If you have not seen it, the title comes from a term in life assurance policies whereby the insurer pays out double for particularly unlikely events, in this case a fatal accident on a train. As can be imagined, the plot involves a life assurance policy with just such a clause and a murder made to look like a fall from a train. The film is a masterful depiction of obsession leading to folly and delusion, with a typically noir inversion of the moral code through making the murderous insurance salesman the protagonist.
Billy Wilder made a lot of films and I don't know to what extent he is seen as making films with recurring themes, but there are definite elements here that find echoes in his other work. William Holden in Sunset Boulevard appears to have taken over the insurance salesman's apartment; in certain other regards the protagonists of both films follow a similar trajectory. The closing scene between the salesman and his loss adjustor colleague (Edward G. Robinson) recalls the ending of Some Like It Hot with its faint suggestion of homosexual attraction (though I could be reading too much into what is actually a more traditional paternal relationship). And similar to those other films, there is an air of loucheness to this one. In the opening it is presented as entirely normal that an insurance salesman would engage in lewd banter with the wife of a potential client, while later a minor character talks about how much he is looking forward to seeing a visiting "osteopath".
The Getaway meanwhile is a Sam Peckinpah directed film about a crim (Steve McQueen) who has to make a getaway after a heist goes wrong when other crims try to double-cross him. He is aided and abetted in this endeavour by his lovely wife (Ali McGraw). The film starts well with largely wordless scenes showing the crim in jail, the machinery of the jail juxtaposed with the mechanistic tasks pursued by the prisoners. It goes downhill once he gets out. The whole heist-gone-wrong plot is a bit plodding and predictable while the film as a whole has a tiresome air of macho blokey bollocks to it (see also: all other Sam Peckinpah films).
Peckinpah films are sometimes like artefacts from an era of unreconstructed offensive sexism and The Getaway is no exception in this regard. The scenes in which for reasons a rival crim kidnaps another couple and then starts shagging the woman, who turns out to love getting some good lovin', leaves a nasty taste, particularly as it is all largely played for laughs.
The various scenes where Steve McQueen's character slaps Ali McGraw around are also quite distasteful, not least because they were in a real-life relationship at the time that was reputedly characterised by domestic violence. Some of the other quirks of the Peckinpah style also grated with me. The slow-motion arcs of blood in the death scenes were a bit comedic; these may once have seemed ground-breaking but now (and perhaps already by the time this film was made) they are little more than Peckinpah cliché.
But for all that, the film has a strong visual sense. As previously noted, the images of jail life are stunning. Another scene that gives rise to some striking images is one where McQueen & McGraw escape emerge in a dump having escaped from the cops in a garbage truck's trash compartment. Neverthelss the film remains fundamentally not that good but might be of interest to film history types or fans of domestic violence. Otherwise don't bother with The Getaway: watch (or rewatch) Double Indemnity instead.
images:
Double Indemnity (Guardian: "My favourite film: Double Indemnity")
The Getaway (Basement Rejects: "The Getaway (1972)")
Everyone loves this; everyone except me, for I found it to be dull and fundamentally inconsequential. It follows an odd semi-relationship between a precocious teenage child actor mutating into a kid entrepreneur and a somewhat aimless woman in her 20s. And it's set in 1973 or 1974 with the post-October War oil crisis in the background (at one point a truck runs out of petrol and rolls down a hill, which I think might be a metaphor of some kind). It all looks great and has a great soundtrack and features great performances, not least from the principals (Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim), but I found it really hard to care about the story or the characters. I think maybe a lot of this is down to the characterisation of Gary Valentine, the kid entrepreneur. Basically I hate entrepreneurs and having to spend time in the company of some 15 year old and his stupid business ideas was like a sojourn in hell. Alana Haim's character (also called Alana, which suggests a lack of imagination on somebody's part) was a lot more appealing but that made her association with the kid entrepreneur all the more disturbing.
But as noted, nearly everyone else in the world loved this. The only other gripes I saw focussed on the age difference between the semi-couple at the story's heart. At the start he is 15 while her age is somewhere into the 20s. There's no suggestion that they are even approximating to getting it on but that still is a whomper of an age difference; if a film featured a romance between a man in his twenties and a 15 year old girl then there would be uproar. I have to say though that the age difference did not jar so much with me while I was watching the film. Partly I was preoccupied with how boring the film was but I think also Gary's precociousness masked how young he was, while Alana's slight frame and lack of focus in her life made it easy to subconsciously think of her as younger than she was. Also I am so used to films in which women in their 20s play teenagers that the age difference was easily forgettable when they weren't ramming it down our throats.
People also did not like that there is a racist minor character in the film.
Overall though I think this film is like The Master, a previous Paul Thomas Anderson: full of strong performances and scenes that linger in the memory, but something that was an ordeal to get through when I was actually watching it.
Derek Jarman died some time ago but there is currently a retrospective exhibition of his work on in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and I think it is worth your time. I somehow found myself at the opening, where there was free beer, which meant I had a quick viewing but will need to go back to examine it in more detail. The exhibition has considerable audio-visual elements to it, with various of his film work being shown there, including Super8 classics like A Journey to Avebury and the various pop videos he directed (the latter sadly being shown in non-ideal circumstances - a monitor in a corridor at a small-child's eye level).
The Irish Film Institute has been showing a season of his feature films. Last week I caught his Caravaggio from 1986, which deals impressionistically with the painter's life, focussing in particular on his relationship with a Roman bruiser (who becomes his model) and the bruiser's wife, played by Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton respectively; this was one of Bean's first screen roles and he starts as he means to go on. Caravaggio himself is played by Nigel Terry while various other stars of the British stage and screen show up in a variety of roles. The film looks stunning, despite its all having been filmed indoors in some bunker complex, with the lighting deliberately mirroring the chiaroscuro effect of Caravaggio's art. It is in some respects impressionistic rather than plot based, but that is not a criticism.Caravaggio is rather focussed on the artist's homosexuality, with one particularly memorable and homoerotic scene being the one where the painter throws gold coins to the topless bruiser, who takes them in his mouth. Nevertheless, the film is somewhat restrained in its depiction of homosexuality: although Jarman was keen to push the envelope, there was only so far it could be pushed in 1986. In other respects the film sanitises Caravaggio's life, downplaying the extent to which he was always killing people in drunken brawls. But it remains a classic of arthouse cinema that I recommend to all readers. If stuck for time the Pet Shop Boys video for 'It's A Sin' is the redux version. Yesterday I saw Jarman's Edward II, from 1991. Adapted from Christopher Marlowe's play (from 1594 or thereabouts). This film is more focussed on narrative than Caravaggio, but it similarly rejects realism, being shot entirely in what seems to be a concrete bunker with anachronistic elements deliberately embraced. It tells the story of that unfortunate king, whose love for another man shocks the establishment, ultimately leading to his overthrow and murder. Tilda Swinton plays the Edward's queen, whose neglect by her husband drives her into the arms of Mortimer, his main enemy (played in turn by Nigel Terry). I felt a bit like the king's enemies got the better roles here, with Swinton and Terry shining over Steven Waddington as Edward, though I was also impressed by Andrew Tiernan as Gaveston, the king's lover. In contrast to Caravaggio, this film really goes for it in terms of gayness, with the opening scene being Gaveston learning that he is free to return to England while two sailors get it on in the bed he is sharing with them. Jarman tries to present Edward as some kind of gay rights martyr, with at one point his army being a load of protesters waving Outrage banners, but I remained somewhat unconvinced - Edward still comes across as a weak figure and the author of his own misfortunes, who is unwilling to subordinate his private fancies to the needs of the state (compare with Shakespeare's Henry V and his renunciation of Falstaff on his accession to the throne). Nevertheless, the film is a fascinating piece of work, which left me eager to investigate further both the work of its director and the playwright on whose work it is based.
On a flight to Canada with my mother I watched this film, which is the one about Jack, an ageing alcoholic cock-rocker, played by Bradley Cooper (who also directs), who meets, discovers and falls in love with up-and-coming pop singer Ally, played by Lady Gaga. The film is a loose remake of two previous films and the plot is broadly formulaic (her trajectory is upward while his leads down into the bottom of a whisky glass, with tragedy ensuing) yet I nevertheless found it quite affecting and my hard heart was melted by the sad ending (curiously a slightly different sad ending to the one I expected, which may or may not be one similar to the Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand previous versions).
One thing I found mildly amusing was that Jack meets Ally when she is performing in a bar most of whose performers are transvestites. To me this seemed like an ironic nod to how Lady Gaga was once dogged by strange rumours that she was secretly a man (or a transsexual, or a something (you know how it is with rumours)). I was also struck by how this was a film without villains. Ally acquires a manager who is set up to some extent in opposition to Jack, but while he is a bit smooth, to me he does not come across as a bad person or as someone exploiting Ally; when he vetoes a joint tour between Ally and an increasingly erratic Jack, he is clearly doing so to protect his client. That said, his actions do precipitate the final tragedy, but the real villain here is alcoholism and Jack’s inability to moderate his drinking.
To some extent Jack and Ally are presented as inhabiting briefly overlapping musical words, his one of blues-bore country rock and hers a more pop sound. Somewhat surprisingly I did find myself thinking that Jack’s music sounded a lot more appealing than the pop stuff (though I suppose the film’s director is going to give himself the good tunes). I may have to start investing in records by Stevie Ray Vaughan and similar.
Finally readers will be pleased to hear that this film features Sam Elliot (the cowboy from The Big Lebowski). He basically plays the same part as he does in The Big Lebowski. image source (Guardian: A Star Is Born soundtrack review – instant classics full of Gaga's emotional might)
Ari Aster was widely praised for Hereditary and now he has returned with this offering, which can still be seen in the cinemas. You may well be broadly aware of the film’s premise, which is that a bunch of American students head off to take part in the midsummer festival of a weirdo cult in a remote part of Sweden; high-jinks ensue when the less appealing aspects of the cult's way of life become apparent. Unusually for a horror film, the action mostly takes place during daylight (the festival is so far north that there is almost 24 hour sunlight). It also takes place in a strange alternate universe where none of the characters have ever heard of either The Wicker Man or Nazi paganism. Of course, many people have never heard of these things, but the American characters are mostly students of folklore and folk traditions, so you would think that both of these would have impinged on their consciousness.
The spectre of The Wicker Man does of course haunt this film, with its similar basic setup, but the film plays with that a bit, using deliberate misdirection. At one point we learn that each year the cultists choose a young lady to be their May Queen, and we think we know where that is going; we are wrong. But the film is also its own thing. Where Howie was alone in investigating Summerisle, here there are a group of American visitors, joined by an amiable English couple (whom I got very fond of and wished they were appearing in a film with a more pleasant outcome for them). The film plays on the tensions between the visitors that in large part distract them from the more unsavoury aspects of the Swedish community’s life: two of the Americans are research rivals, while in turn the romantic relationship of Dani and Christian (mmmm) is in the throes of disintegration.
That relationship is interesting, with the two strongly played by Jack Reynor as Christian and Florence Pugh as Dani. It is easy to see Christian as a bit of a dickhead and I certainly found myself initially thinking of him like that, but I think there is a bit more to him, at least with respect to his relationship to Dani – he is in this relationship that has really run its course but is unable to leave her because she is in a very bad place and to do so would make him a heel (or so he seems to think, perhaps it would be better for everyone if he were to cut and run). The bros he hangs out with are however almost completely terrible.
It should be noted that Pugh’s performance as Dani is particularly striking in the sense of strength and fragility it presents. Anyone who has seen her in Lady Macbeth or the not-good film The Falling will not find this a surprise. Another thing that should be noted about the film is the bright colour palette, which is not too much of a surprise for a film mostly taking place under the heady lights of a Scandinavian summer. What is particularly striking about this is the way the film evokes the magic mushrooms consumed by the characters at key points in the story, with colours and flowers pulsing in an unstoppable manner. Kudos should also go to the musical soundtrack by Bobby Krlic of the Haxan Cloak, which includes both the tunes performed by the cultists (like the Summerislers, they are a musical bunch) and the more usual kind of scored accompaniment, yet even the latter feels as much like part of the sound design as something meant to just signify mood to the audience. In this it reminded me of the soundtrack to Dunkirk, and I was going to launch into a discussion about how this represents and interesting new direction for soundtracks, until I recalled seeing the same kind of thing recently in the 1977 film Suspiria.
I am however not sure if Bobby Krlic did the song about the bear that appears not in the film but in an advertisement for the Bear In A Cage novelty tie-in product.
Film also features weird sex scene.
images:
välkommen (Guardian: Midsommar: what the hell just happened? Discuss with spoilers)
Handing on the torch (Vanity Fair: Midsommar’s Showstopping Flower Dress Was So Heavy They Hid a Chair Under It)
In Dublin this August the Hugo Awards for the best science fiction and related stuff from 2018 will be awarded. Dublin will also be awarding Retro Hugos for material from 1943. In a previous post I linked to where most of Retro Hugo finalists in the novel, novella, novelette, and short story categories can be found online. But what of the other categories? Sadly here things seem to be a bit more difficult, but there is still more than nothing that can be looked at online for free.
Best Graphic Story
Readers will I think struggle to find some of the finalists in this category. Jack Cole's Plastic Man #1: The Game of Death is available in full on the Digital Comics Museum for online reading and downloading, but that seems to be the only finalist readily available in full online. The blog The Wonders You Can Do has an interesting post summarising and analysing Wonder Woman #5: Battle for Womanhood (by William Moulton Marsden and Harry G. Peter), complete with some illustrations. The Black Gate blog meanwhile has an illustrated summary of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon: Fiery Desert of Mongo. Hergé's The Secret of the Unicorn is available in many libraries and all good bookshops; a summary with sample illustrations can be seen on Tintin.com. That seems to be it. Libraries and bookshops may also have reprints of the other finalists.
That leaves I Walked With a Zombie, for which YouTube has just a trailer. It might be available from commercial streaming services.
Best Professional Editor, Short Form
Here are links to what the Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists the finalists as having edited in 1943. Have a look at each issue's table of contents and see if it tickles your fancy. If you have infinite time, consider popping over to the Internet Archive to skim some of these issues.
Samples of Hannes Bok's art can be seen here on the blog Monster Brains. Readers can also check out his illustrations to Robert W. Chambers' "The Yellow Sign" in the September 1943 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.
While primarily famous for her saucy covers for Weird Tales, Margaret Brundage appears to have had a fairly quiet year in 1943, producing just the one somewhat tame cover then. A Google image search gives a broader look at her career.
Virgil Finlay's work can be seen on the covers of the March 1943 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and the February & May 1943 issues of Super Science Stories.
Unless you have been living under a stone you almost certainly are broadly familiar with the illustrations Antoine de Saint-Exupéry created for his own book The Little Prince, but if you need a refresher check out this post on the blog Faena Aleph.
J. Allen St. John's work can be seen on the covers of the January and February 1943 issues of Amazing Stories.
The art of William Timmins can be see on the covers of the February, June, and October 1943 issues of Astounding Science Fiction.
Fanzine and Fanwriter
FANAC.ORG is an amazing archive of fan stuff of yore. The people that run it created a portal page for fanzines from 1943 there, and there you will find links to scans of the finalists in both of the fan categories.
In case you can't remember, the best fanzine finalists are: Fantasy News, editor William S. Sykora Futurian War Digest, editor J. Michael Rosenblum The Phantagraph, editor Donald A. Wollheim Voice of the Imagi-Nation, editors Jack Erman (Forrest J Ackerman) & Morojo (Myrtle Douglas) YHOS, editor Art Widner Le Zombie, editor Wilson “Bob” Tucker
The Best Fan Writer finalists are:
Forrest J. Ackerman
Morojo (Myrtle Douglas)
Jack Speer
Wilson “Bob” Tucker
Art Widner
Donald A. Wollheim
So there you go. With voting in the Hugos and Retro Hugos closing on 31 July, this does not leave much time to research your ballot.
In the meantime, here is another picture of my cat, with SF books in background:
All You Need Is Death (2023)
