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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1987
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EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL – 1987 IT'S THE DINOSAUR SHOW by Harlan Kennedy "I was inspired
to make this film after viewing a dinosaur exhibition," said Masashi
Yamamoto of his film Robinson's Garden (which has nothing to do with
dinosaurs). At film festivals, weird explanations well up from weird
film-makers. And the Edinburgh festival, spurred on by stern Cartesian traditions
of self-examination and scholarship, has always been as keen on the motive
as on the movie. This year's film binge, the 41st, gave us the usual 80-odd
feature films and hecatombs of shorts and documentaries. But more than ever,
it was keen on stopping visiting directors in their tracks – Peter Greenaway, Jim McBride, Derek Jarman,
Eldar Shengelaya, Nicolas Roeg, and Yamamoto – and asking them, "Why?" The dinosaurs that
inspired Yamamoto's film – the best from Japan this year – are (figuratively
speaking) the spirit of Japan and Japanese cinema past. And the story of a
wacky beatnik girl (Kumiko Ohta)
eking life out of an extinct patch of ground in modern Tokyo, where she grows
a vegetable garden and turns a ruined building into a designer squat, is the
story of new young filmmakers taking the wasteland of derelict traditions
and turning it into new life. Edinburgh has long
loved the dinosaurs in moviedom, as well as the
newer, lighter-footed species. Hit movies here are nearly always those
that comprise an aesthetic tug-of-war between new and old, radical and familiar.
Edinburgh went gaga this year, for instance, at Jim McBride's The Big Easy
(homage to old Hollywood crime tropes with a new streetwise shine and
sense of satire) and Wayne Wang's Slam Dance (ditto).
And when an Edinburgh audience asks its directors why they made their movies,
you feel it steering them toward giving the answers it wants to hear. Sample
Q&A sessions go like this: Edinburgh film buff: Did you have any trouble with your producer inserting
that tribute to Sirk's The Tarnished Angels in
the rape sequence during the Mardi Gras? Director: (Clearly not knowing what the film buff is talking about) Er...
well, no, the producer and I mostly got on just fine. I hadn't consciously
thought of Sirk... more, kind of, Blake Edwards. But
er... I'm glad you picked it up. If it's there. Some filmmakers are
happy to bullshit along with the audience and even pretend they did have such
notions. (Some even did have them.) But in the late Eighties, homage-making Hollywood-style seems a less interesting, more passé manifestation of the
interaction between past and present. Far more compelling is the kind of
tension between Then and Now emerging in new films from the East. Russia sent to
Edinburgh its by-now familiar fleet of glasnost-launched films. Though Eldar
Shengelaya's bureaucratic satire Blue Mountains
and Vadím Abdrashitov's sci-fi parable Parade
of the Planets have been knocking around festivals for a year or two,
each time they venture into a Western filmfest,
another champagne bottle gets smashed, as if Westerners were helping to
launch Gorbachev's liberalization. At Edinburgh, celebrations also included
a symposium on modern Soviet filmmaking. This once more made one quaff
freely of That Word (glasnost)
and as a chaser provided a new buzz-phrase: perelomni
moment (moment of rupture). Remember it, you'll have to use it a hundred
times over the next year. Mainland China's
rejuvenated cinema is the real, fresh thing. It has passed the difficulties
of appeasing the old guard while promoting the new – evident in films like
last year's Yellow Earth, in
which the new humor and landscape lyricism were hobbled by adherence to old
Maoist messages. Two new People's Republic films seen at Edinburgh suggest
real changes happening in the pulse of its celluloid. Tian Zhuang Zhuang's
Horse Thief heads for the harsh, vexed realm of the Tibetan plains.
This land bears much the same topography of guilt for Maoist China as the
Indian battlegrounds do for America. Its towns and villages were overrun by
the Red Chinese, and its religious practices punished or outlawed. In
landscapes of whistling primitivism, the film's petty-thief hero (Tseshang Rinzin) is banished by
his tribe and scrabbles for a living with his wife and child. The mute poetic
harshness of a silent movie (Stroheim's Greed or
Sjostrom's The Wind) is combined with a language of gesture and ritual
that, even when obscure to Western eyes, has a pungent kinetic force. Huang Jianxin's The Black Cannon Incident is less fluent
in its movie language but, like Horse Thief, tackles a vexed realm of Chinese consciousness that
is not geographical but ideological: the cold, windy plains of hard-line
Marxism. A young engineer (Liu Zifeng) is
appointed interpreter to the visiting German boss (Gerhard Olschéwski) of a Sino-German
engineering project. And then he's sacked on the flimsy suspicion of
anti-party activities. The cast immediately divides into Those Against Him –
led by the stern party secretary ("People call me a Marxist
granny," she says, surprised) – and Those For Him – including the
German boss. The witch hunt proves entirely baseless, but proves handy as a
catalyst for political satire and a prescription for China to dough off a few
tough old grannies of the old guard. Across the way,
Taiwanese director Edward Yang has made, in The Terrorizers, a kind of free-form
fiction film. He interweaves the lives of three different couples, strangers
to each other at the outset, in a mixture of accident and accidie. Anonymous phone calls, unhappy marriages, veiled emotional
blackmail, and terrorism (political and domestic) are symptoms of a big-city
anguish that almost, but not quite, forms itself into the hard lines of a
thriller. Yang's fans try to hoist him high with comparisons to Antonioni: the same eerie trompe
l'oeil cityscapes, the same
drifting anomie. The analogy's deserved, but Yang is also an original,
especially in a national cinema that apart from him and Hou Hsiao
Hsien (of A Time to Love and a Time to Die), has been chiefly notable
for the potboiling squawks and flourishes of the
martial arts film. Japan is also melting
down conventional narrative to produce films that are freer, weirder, and
more unpredictable. A savant at Edinburgh said that the theme of Masashi
Yamamoto's Robinson's Garden was the color green. Certainly trying to
pin down its fugitive plot and purpose is like trying to sculpt with water. And
what genre, pray, does Juzo Itami's
Tampopo belong to? Comedy? Cookery?
Quest movie? Edinburgh audiences came out visibly salivating, with steaming
noodles printed on their retinas, suspecting they had seen the first film
to pioneer a new pornography – eating (Andrea Dworkin:
Stop
reading, cookbooks!). In the age of AIDS, will food movies now start
replacing blue movies? Talking of
free form, under director Jim Hickey, Edinburgh is fast becoming a free-form
festival. If you stumble into the wrong cinema, instead of your planned
session watching Hollywood on overdrive, you awake midst a seminar on
Scottish TV or a workshop on anything from apartheid to animation. This year
Edinburgh also introduced "case studies" on individual movies
(like Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an
Architect and Alan Clarke's Rita, Sue and Bob Too); these looked at script genesis and production history,
and then for discussion's sake threw them to the lions. The lions gratefully
tucked their napkins in and set to. Some movies were more like lions thrown
to the Christians: the sound of Calvinist self-righteousness getting its
teeth into permissive hedonism was especially loud in discussions of
Clarke's film. The wonder of British
cinema today is that for once there are enough films around worth discussing.
Three months after Channel 4's film supremo David
Rose got guerdoned at Cannes for his part in transforming U.K., movies – a
jury of Godard, Fellini, Bertolucci, and others awarding him the newly struck Rossellini prize
– good British films are still coming out of the factory. And Channel 4 is
still the main conveyor belt. Greenaway's film and
Clarke's, and Robert Smith's new The Love Child, were all funded or part-funded by Britain's most ciné-literate TV network. Smith's film shows the
best and worst of this new TV-generated cinema. It is "free-form"
in just the way the choice Oriental pics
above
are, leaving the audience to draw the lines between the scattered narrative
dots. This time they form a Bí11 Forsythias pattern of non sequitur and melismatic wit: as a young accounts clerk (Peter Capaldi, of Local hero) goes about dole-age Britain wondering if there is
more to life than his 9-to-5 job, his troublesome live-in granny (Sheila
Hancock), his girlfriend, and his unrealized dreams. The characters are
pungently likable or wittily dislikable, like Capaldi's
archly supercilious boss, who is full of career advice like "You need a
bijou little killer streakette." But The
Love Child also evinces the worst of the new telly-powered
pics: their visual undernourishment. It clumps from
one cramped character grouping to another. And whenever the camera does
pull back to show us panoramic Britain, all we see is poor lighting and
grainy texture. Meanwhile, the jury is
still out on the question "Is there movie life in Britain beyond Channel
4?" And if so, should we run it? Cannon Films has bankrolled two
first-time director films, Harry Hook's The best two British
films from non-TV sources were Clive Barker's Hellraiser,
from New World Pictures, and Joan Ashworth's 18-minute The Web, from the National Film
School. Hellraiser is a purulently enjoyable
romp about an unhappily married housewife (Clare Higgins) who takes her
gentlemen pick-ups up to the attic to murder them. Each corpse, and its
refreshing eight pints of red stuff, then helps to reconstitute her dead
lover, who dwells in the attic and wanders around in a cadaverous state
howling for reincarnation. Each victim and his nutrients further restore
him to recognizable human shape. The movie is red in tooth, claw, and imagination,
and as hermetically frightening as any film since Psycho. Joan Ashworth's
brilliant short from the NFS is a piece of miniaturist Gothic drawn from the
world of Mervyn Peake.
Gaunt-featured animated models – who look like cabbage-patch dolls from your
worst nightmare – prowl through dark alleys and cobwebbed castle corridors.
En route they do unspeakable things to each other with knives, machetes, or
looks. The faces and movements have a staccato, deadpan hilarity. The sound
effects – groaning doors, clumping or susurrating
feet – have an echoey, Beckettian
menace. And the whole film is like watching an army of homunculi emerging
from your deepest id and capering a dance to your destruction. A tough act to follow
– even for Edinburgh. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED
IN THE DECEMBER 1987 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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