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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1980
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EDINBURGH
FILM FESTIVAL – 1980 SHINING DARK
HORSES by Harlan Kennedy This was the last
Edinburgh International Film Festival to be directed by Lynda Myles,
Scotland's very own movie messiah. In eight years as director, she has
turned the event from a solemn Calvinist watch-in into one of the youngest
and most forward-looking festivals in Europe. Fellow Caledonian Jim Hickey
will be taking over next year, after Myles leaps the Atlantic to take charge
of the Pacific Film Archive at Berkeley. Edinburgh under Myles
has always been hotter after movies trouvés
than
prestigious big-budget cinema, and this year's lineup of shining dark horses
was typically and wondrously eclectic. Hong Kong murder thrillers, feminist
documentaries, early silent and sound films from the National Film Archive
unreeled in staccatolike succession. Rich retrospectives
of new Scottish filmmaker John Mackenzie and veteran American
B-feature maestro Joseph H. Lewis flashed through the
movie projectors. Among the movies,
common trends quickly popped up as cinema and television sidled ever nearer
to each other. "Feature films" – those old 35mm warhorses at
regulation ninety minutes plus – were outnumbered this year by movies with a
variety of lengths, at anything from three minutes to seventy-three and in
either 16mm or Super-8. From the United States, for instance, stomped a gang
of Super-8 punk movies, flaunting a mite too ferally
their mega-Warhol overkill of "bad" acting and ad hoc scripting,
but still an eye-opener to the possibilities of cheap, viable, and often
striking filmmaking. Also came an avalanche of weird and wobbly low-budget
features. Charlie Ahearn's Twins and Eric Mitchell's Underground
USA are nose-thumbing comedies made at the point where punk meets junk.
Moving up the pile was Joel DeMott's Demon Lover
Diary, a fitfully sparking "documentary noir"
about
the infighting among a film crew shooting a horror movie. But best of all the
U.S. independent films was Victor Nuñez's Gal
Young Un. The story basics are
straight out of Awful Warning melodrama. Down Florida way, handsome fortune
hunter meets sere but moneyed widow and marries her. Soon the home is echoing
to the patter of his not-so-tiny mistresses, and the old lady is left
managing her bridegroom's new moonshine whiskey business. Will she grin and
bear it, or up and take revenge? Nuñez
paces
the film like a master, with creaking, rocking chair silences and slowly
crescent menace. The shooting style is plain and patient, but the rewards
arrive in a rivetingly cathartic climax and in the
growing authority of Dana Preu's performance as the
old lady: walnut features, wispy hair, and a dryly glowering stoicism. Britain's independent
films were more "finished" than America's, but could have used some
of the latter's shabby fire. Of the half-dozen movies entered by the British
Film Institute Production Board, the most watchable
was Richard Woolley's Brothers and Sisters, the weirdest were Yvonne Rainer's
Journeys From Berlin/1971 and Anthea Kennedy
and Nick Burton's At the Fountainhead. All
were heavily freighted with sociopolitical message making, which seems to be
a sine qua non of the BFI's funding requirements
these days. Brothers and Sisters uses a crosscut
thriller format as the vehicle for its exploration of sexist attitudes in
modern Britain. A prostitute is killed, and the police investigation passes
over two brothers of upper-class birth: One has become a Sloppy Joe liberal
living in a commune; the other is an army major full of bluff stuffiness and
made-to-order male chauvinism. The liberal's hypocrisies are neatly exposed,
and so are the frailties beneath the major's Blimpish facade. Which of them dunnit? – if either – the film asks. And by withholding a
definite answer, while dangling a real killing over these case study
characterizations, the film cleverly catalyzes our interest in which of their
diverging brands of sexual prejudice (and, by extension, our own) might have
exploded in murder. Brothers and Sisters is
stylishly shot, with bright colors and trompe
l'oeil angles. It's too talky by half, but then
what recent BFI film isn't? At the Fountainhead is too talky by
three-quarters, a didactic drone-on set in modern Britain with bits of
archive and newsreel footage from Third Reich Germany. Directors Kennedy and
Burton lay out before us, like a corpse on the anatomy table, the experiences
of a real-life Jewish refugee who fled to Britain from Nazi Germany in the
thirties and of three friends who stayed behind in partitioned Germany. The
split-narrative method heats our blood in order to move us to conclusions
that are contradictory, naive, or both. Germany also rears its
head in Journeys From Berlin/I971, a political-psychological collage that lasts a full,
feeling 125 minutes. Again the voice track works overtime, but at least the
images are more hypnotic: a jazzy jumble of the animate and the inanimate,
the dramatic and the iconic. There is also underground film critic Annette Michelson
jawing through some rivetingly surreal and
outspoken scenes as a patient in psychoanalysis. It's hard to imagine
any of these films unfurling on the big screens of commercial cinema. They
belong inalienably in the twilight land between movies and television, and
so does Ken Loach's latest, The Gamekeeper. This
isn't as good as Black Jack,
his masterpiece of offhand eighteenth-century manners, and it
tends to plop Britain's leading drama documentarist
back
into the salt-of-the-earth socialism that has been his television
stock-in-trade. But at its best, this feature-length portrait of a North
Country gamekeeper's daily and seasonal rounds, from shooting poachers off
the land to loading His Lordship's grousing guns, has the compassionate
objectivity and thumbnail detail of a modern Defoe. Also caught in the
cinema-television border country is Scottish director John Mackenzie's new
film, The Long Good Friday. Owing to a producers' wrangle, no one yet
knows if this barnstorming melodrama will end up on the big screen or the
small. And, indeed, a retroactive schizophrenia seems to have hit the movie.
Half the time, it comes on like a late-night cops-and-robbers hokum shown on
the tube; the other half, it boasts a flailing wit and vigor that deserve to
be writ large on a movie screen. Eddie
Constantine glooms
magnetically as an American mafioso, Helen Mirren is the female interest, and Bob Hoskins burns
up the screen as the (anti-) hero, a cockney tycoon lording over an empire
of corruption and turning out sumptuously uncouth one-liners. What The Long Good
Friday doesn't solve is British cinema's nagging problem of finding its
own ethnic and cultural identity. A filmy haze of parochialism surrounds
Mackenzie's film, with its Little England version of a U.S. crime thriller,
and the same goes for Franco Rosso's Babylon. Rosso's picture of West Indian immigrants battling to
assert their Rastafarian culture and music in eighties London, amid community
bigotry and police harassment, reeks of provincialism: not just because its
story is like an Anglicized Rockers, but because the feisty black slang fizzles out in the
damp, vernacularless English air. Whenever the festival
looked too much as if it was sagging into the sloughs of provincialism,
however, Lynda Myles sagely hoisted
it up with a gala preview of a new international "biggie." This
year's major British premieres included Walter Hill's The Long Riders, Stuart Rosenbergs Brubaker, and Roman Polanski's Tess. Also raising the high-polish quotient
was the Joseph H. Lewis retrospective. All
right, so the choice of Lewis for an Edinburgh
special tribute – after earlier ones to Douglas Sirk,
Raoul Walsh, and Jacques
Tourneur – sometimes looked like scraping the auteur barrel.
But at least there is a daft stylishness about Lewis's movies that rinsed
the eyes out after long hours of sociological or semiological
solemnity. Complementing the
riotous geometry and shadow play of Lewis's best films – like Undercover
Man and The Big Combo – was
a little pastiche film noir
made
by a Glasgow-born student of Britain's National Film School. Sandy Johnson's
Never Say Die is a chunk of underworld derring-do set in forties
Glaswegian gangland. The images may be secondhand, but they're miraculously
well observed – from queasy Vertigo stairwells to Fritz Lang
cassoulets of ominous shadow. The craftsmanship
is all there. When Johnson finds his own style, there'll be no stopping him. From Europe and points
east, three new films claimed attention. Jacques
Bral's Exterieur
Nuit is a marvelously gloomy odyssey: a
tenebrous trawl through low-life Paris interweaving the lives of two young
men, both indolent and jobless, and a spiky, macho, taxi-driving woman with
whom one of them has a romance. The reversal of sexual stereotypes – the men
are passive, the woman virulently active (she even beats up and robs her own
customers!) – is only one of the film's surprises. Bral follows
his characters through a Stygian cityscape in which time doesn't so much
stand still as spread out in all directions, creating a brooding, dark
infinity. From Poland came Krzysztof Zanussi's Constans (Constancy). Though well to the
fore among Polish artists currently belaboring their nation's status quo, Zanussi has never been one to take a pickax to the
bulwark of social oppression. Instead, he chips away with a surgeon's
scalpel, locating the weak spots before he makes his first incision. Constans
is typical of his mazelike morality
dramas: with a complex, twining vision of his country's hypocrisies and a
hero whose professional skills link him to the corrupt Polish establishment
even while his heart and conscience cry out in protest. It's a strong,
cutting, immaculately argued film. Lastly, Edinburgh's
devotion to the undersung glories of Hong Kong
cinema ushered in yet another Far Eastern sleeper, Ann Hui's
The Secret. This explosive murder thriller, centered on a brutal
killing in a park, is like an Orientalized Nicolas Roeg movie. Time, place, and camerawork are in perpetual
swooping, darting flux. And though the film's last few minutes derail into
absurdity, the preceding mayhem and momentum are terrific. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED
IN THE DECEMBER 1980 ISSUE OF AMERICAN FILM. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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