Feeling lazy this week, so instead of some overlong essay on some obscure French film here's something I plan to do round once a month. I love the art of book covers and good book cover design. I will admit that a good cover has once or twice sold me the book even before I've read the back.
Anyway, here's my favs for this month.
And here's Nick reading an excerpt of his new novel.
I know very little of the world of 1949 metropolitan France. So I have no idea how close to the real thing is the world of Jean Cocteu's Orphée. But it doesn't matter. If this was a realistic setting or a place of fancy makes little difference to this take on a mythic tale. It still works well as a functional fantasy place for today's audience.
This world of Orphée is a world where the poet is king. Orpheus is our hero and he is a poet laureate loved by the masses like a pop idol. And like any hot music star, he is despised by the lower pseudo-literati. The jealous poet café-set don't hide their disdain for Orpheus or his writings which the public consume so eagerly. The main reason they hate him is because he is popular. Artists must suffer not succeed. In this film, the role of the artist is the role of tragic hero.
In the original myth Orpheus was the son of Apollo and Calliope, a hip-happening dude who grooved the ancient world with his lyre. He was such a hot musician even the trees and rivers swerved in his direction to listen. He was the mega-rock star of Grecian lands. He was married to Eurydice, but when fleeing the advances of Aristaeus - another son of Apollo, beekeeper and inventor of bookkeeping - she got snake-bit and died. Down to Hades she went and Orpheus, lyre in hand, went to follow. After pleading his case to Pluto and the missus Persephone (now there's a messy marriage) they allowed Orpheus to take Eurydice back home provided he never sets eyes upon her. Don't ask me why. Anyway, you can guess the outcome. Just be thankful it doesn't involve sex with some weird animal, as that seems the usual Greek god thang.
The gist of the original tale is pretty much told before the film begins. But what Cocteau wants you to be interested in is how he makes it different. This is the land of French poets rather than the land of Greek gods. And in this place Death is a major player. Cocteau's hero seems quite intrigued by the lure of Death. And Cocteau makes Death mysterious, sensual, even sexual. Long before Neil Gaiman's comic book version Cocteau created a sexy almost Goth style death in the guise of Maria Casares. Who, in the marvelous gowns (that can shift from black to white) creates one of the more elegant figures ever in cinema. She is striking, alluring and edged with a sinister shadow. I have little doubt Sonia Braga's Spider Woman was inspired by Casares mesmerizing, classy, amourous Death.
But that's enough about death. What this film is really about is poets. The French tragic kind who think they have to be all French and tragic to be poets. Orpheus more than most. And he does come across as an arrogant prat who doesn't know good things when he sees them. Typical of his kind, instead of being a reasonable human being he wants to grasp the unattainable and put it into a few wanky lines of poetry. Perhaps that's why Death becomes so enamored of him. She watches him sleep every night and becomes jealous of the sweet, blond and house-wifey Eurydice.
You know that eventually Orpheus has to travel to the underworld. Now remember, Orpheus' real world is Poet World; where poets are like supermen and everything is concerned with poetry. Even the dialogue flows like poetry. Who needs sporting heroes when you have heartthrob lamenting poets?
Orpheus is portrayed by the fine actor Jean Marais - the same guy from La belle et la bête - who was voted the world's most beautiful man. So if that's the real world, what must Hades be like? Well the realm of the underworld, the land of death, the place every lamenting poet dreams of is a land of poetry itself. Poetry expressed as only film and Jean Cocteau can.
The underworld is a place of camera tricks, a land of reverse shots, false perspectives, negative film, mirror tricks, rear projection, double exposures, slow motion. It is a land within the camera. It is the poet's eye. Sure, film effects wise, it's all obvious, but it doesn't take away from the power of the images. And we're talking today, not 1949 when such trickery was still quite fresh and exciting.
Still, it isn't too stale for today. That's because these dated in-camera tricks are still rich with meaning. These simple illusions and representive images. They are metaphor, simile and allegory. It doesn't matter how the trickery is done; it is the meaning that matters, the act of communication. Hence, they still work. And they remain fascinating, if quaint, due to their contexts. They become and remain poetry. If you were to criticise the "crude" techniques used then you might as well attack a poem or a novel for being merely ink on paper. Audience and filmmaker must share in the creative process. And Cocteau, with his film Orphée, demands it.
All endings are important to a film, but some endings are more important than others. And how Orphée ends means a great deal. Not surprisingly, it differs from the legend and Cocteau makes no apologies for that. It's why he happily tells you the legend at the beginning. He knows the knowledge will enhance the story, not hinder it. And the ending, elegent as it was, has a simple message. A message that film critics should learn the same way Cocteau wanted the critics to learn back in 1949.
And what he wants all life's critics to learn. Wisdom is discovering what to take seriously and what not. And if you choose to take Orphée seriously or not, Cocteau still wants you to enjoy yourself. And if you do enjoy it then that only reinforces the truth that Orphée is one of the most interesting, important and influential modern fantasies made.
A final note: If you have seen the superb Angels in America you will recall the long finale set in heaven. The locations were all carefully picked as corresponding to the locations of the finale of Orphée. Plus earlier on in Angels there is a scene directly taken from La belle et la bête (and, yes, it's a safe guess I'll write about this film in the near future). Knowing this gives an underlying meaning to Angels in America and in retrospect even enhances contemporary meaning to Cocteau.
Thanks to the rise of digital media and the interweb fan films are now common place. That's been a good thing for developing filmmakers, pranksters and tube-leeches like myself. But prior to the digital age fan films were a different beast. They were harder to make, distribute and circulate. They could easily be as much a production as any professional film. Indeed, a fan film back then was relatively rare, let alone one that gets attention. So when a good one came along it had the opportunity to be an event.
None more so than back in 1977, in the same year that the original Star Wars came out, the parody film Hardware Wars was released to its own huge success. It won a slew of awards and made a lot of money in relation to its tiny budget. Over the decades it has developed legendary status with independent filmmakers and film followers and given proper respect to the director Ernie Fosselius and producer Michael Wiese, both now regarded as gurus in the independent scene. You can read the story about Hardware Wars in Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind the Camera by Clive Young, though you can also access that particular chapter at Michael Wiese Books.
Anyway, now that you can go to Youtube and the like and see endless homemade films and parodies I think it is worth another look at this almost 32 year old film and acknowledge it as the one and true parent of the contemporary fan film and, of course, all Star Wars parodies from Space Balls to Family Guy and Robot Chicken.
Having made films like The Green Slime (1968) and Message From Space (1978) may not show it but decades of filmmaking, especially in the Yakuza genre, made Kinji Fukasaku a director in strong command of his craft. His adaptation of Koushun Takami's future shock novel Battle Royale (2000) is both successfully subtle and outrageous.
Being set on a small island where 42 school children must kill each other off in 48hrs sounds like a Paul Verhoven version of Lord of the Flies, but such a comparison is misleading. The point of this story is rather divergent from William Golding's apocalyptic tale. Rather than a sombre fable Battle Royale is more a slap in the face satire about false values imposed on teenage life. It's like an ultra-violent version of Lindsay Anderson's If..., but a very Japanese one.
It's directed at that culture's popular teen melodramas rather than Britain's boarding schools. But if anything is lost in the translation it isn't enough to dilute an anger aimed at a society failing to nurture their children and prepare for them a viable future. Indeed, the anger is so strong that the work is belittled being compared to uber-violence Western filmmakers whose cynicism is far too often aimed at their own audiences than the subject at hand.
Battle Royale is one of the most violent films I've enjoyed, but to call it gratuitous would suggest a lack of empathy for the characters. What makes this film hurt so much is the care taken to show the personalities of the hunted and hunting. And this multiple narrative of relentless blood splattering is played out under a sense of regret for the lives lost. The film is a traumatic lament for the destruction of innocence, an indictment on the resentment adults have for youth.
Perhaps this film forces the point too far that children grow up to become, as adults, almost a different species. But it is a valid issue that the cultural gap of generations has become insurmountable.
However, any point would be lost if it weren't for the earnest performances of the various uniformed teenagers and the beautifully underplaying Takeshi Kitano. His is the pivotal role of a once caring schoolteacher who has become the ruthless overseer of the game. His character is the doorway to understanding why a 70-year-old director would make such a shocking pop-culture pseudo-snuff extravaganza. The why seems important indeed and fathoming the why is what makes Battle Royale far more than a slick murder fest for psycho movie fans.
However, it isn't a film for everyone. It isn't sadistic cinema, but it is most certainly cruel. The message is expressed deftly with anguish and fear and does not want the audience to get away unscathed. It's hard not to be affected by this film's unrelenting violence (though recent torture porn movies risk softening the effect), but you might find yourself just as likely to be cringing away from its images of homicidal teenagers than be daring and delve into the pain of youth to seek some truths.
I can quite understand why some would consider this film simply as a callous exploitationer aimed at those with a fetish for school uniforms, but I think that's forgetting the Japanese mentality this film is addressing, especially the cultural memory of war.
Battle Royale is a very good film saying very bad things. But then, the truth hurts. And this truth is finding new reference. The novel is still a steady seller internationally and so to the epic manga series. The initial fan following at first felt it had run out of steam after Battle Royale II: Requiem, but no, it is becoming clearer that the subversive, rebellious institution that is Battle Royale is going nowhere but deeper into the sub-cultural sonsciousness.
