1930's Oscars

Did anyone else notice that this years Oscar's ceremony was a flashback to the 1930's. It contained a depression era set, sepia toned back drops of store front hoardings, complete with a 1930's vaudeville dance routine, straight out of a Fred Astaire movie. Yep they got the message, America is about to enter a depression. And with the overwhelming win of Slumdog Millionare, the message could not be clearer, don't worry be happy. All that was missing was Hugh Jackman singing; Brother can you spare a dime.

They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,

When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.

They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,

Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;

Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,

Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,

Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,

And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.

Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,

Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,

Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,

And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.

Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime

Cinema of Anarchy

This week we are blogging about Revolutionary and Anarchist films, movies, DVD's etc. at the Carnival of Anarchy.

I have posted on some of my favorite films and libertarian perspectives on Film. And will continue to do so through the week.



See my previous posts on Carnival of Anarchy.

See:

Battleship Potemkin

Sacco and Vanzetti

V for Anarchy

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carnival of anarchy, anarchy, anarchists, blogs, blogging, weblogs, bloggers, libertarian, libertarian s ocialism, left libertarians, individualism,

Battleship Potemkin

A new restored version of the famous Russian film Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein has been released and will be playing on Turner Classic Movies, TONIGHT for those of you who have either Star Choice of Bell Satellite TV.

If you have never seen this revolutionary movie it is not only revolutionary for it's content but for its approach to cinema. It was the first Docu-Drama ever made, covering the Russian Revolutionary uprising of 1905.

1905 was the year the 2oth Century came into being and it was the birth of modernism which would result in WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution.

Independent filmmakers, restricted to limited exhibition outlets in a world of media conglomeration, can take heart from the fact that Battleship Potemkin, one of the most renowned films in the history of cinema and containing perhaps the best known sequence in the medium's entire history, was initially seen only by small audiences of film society aficionados and trade unionists. In this sense, it represents one of the most successful instances of niche marketing the world has ever seen.

The stories of its circulation are almost as mythical as its subject matter: it was banned as subversive in England and its circulation was highly restricted in the US, even before the implementation of the Hays Code. In the US, it was seen by small groups of filmmakers and critics, and in one enticing account of a screening in the New York apartment of Gloria Swanson, it was projected onto one of Gloria's satin sheets, when the absence of an available screen threatened to disappoint the eager but select audience.

At such a screening, David O. Selznick saw the film and wrote with great enthusiasm to his boss at MGM that a print should be obtained because it would be "very advantageous to have the organisation view it in the same way that a group of artists might study a Rubens or a Raphael". It was, he thought, "unquestionably one of the greatest motion pictures ever made" (this in 1926!) and the firm "might well consider securing the man responsible for it".

Battleship Potemkin is the film which brought Eisenstein, always a citizen of the world, to world attention. This fame both protected him - up to a point - and brought him to the constant attention of the authorities, involving him in a cat and mouse game for his entire professional life.

Although it has become an orthodoxy in the West to emphasise the repressive conditions under which artists, writers and filmmakers worked in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it is worth remembering that Eisenstein's experiences in the West were equally, if not more, frustrating creatively. Unfruitful episodes in Hollywood & Mexico left Eisenstein back in the Soviet Union with a nervous breakdown and a damaged reputation.

Battleship Potemkin overcomes its ideological constraints and uses its abstract form to produce at least one scene of unquestionable power. Sergei Eisenstein’s own comparison of his style to a "kino-fist" is an apt one; the film assaults the viewer’s sensibilities with forceful melodrama and rhythmic editing. Many scenes are calculated to elicit specific responses and, in fact, succeed, but this creates a certain feeling of manipulation because of the film’s overt polemic. Obviously, political concerns of a now defunct nation from over seventy years ago are not going to hold up well. The fact that the film remains effective on some levels is impressive and testifies to Eisenstein’s influential ideas about cinema. His principles of montage were vital to the development of film language and to cinema’s separation from other art forms into its own realm. A film based largely on these editing principles sacrifices some narrative concerns and tends to distance the viewer if not continuously providing ‘attractions’ or ‘stimuli’. Despite claims mentioned by some critics about the film’s perfect and concise example of film structure, Potemkin can be an uneven viewing experience.

Eisenstein freely admitted the influence of D.W. Griffith’s movies, particularly Intolerance, in his work and in the development of Soviet montage. It is not difficult to see the links between the rapid cutting in that film’s conclusion to the kinetic editing of Potemkin. For example, the numerous cuts in the Odessa steps sequence build the individual moments of terror into an almost unbearable emotional climax. Of course, Eisenstein expanded greatly on montage theory to not only build rhythm or suspense but to form intellectual concepts and associations. The dynamic editing of three lion statues to show the awakening of anger and rebellion is a simple but memorable instance of this metaphorical juxtaposition. Another apparent influence from Griffith would be the melodramatic elements that facilitate the film’s political goals. The tsarist forces are completely evil, and sympathy is evoked for the noble revolutionaries and their supporters; issues and characters are simplified for maximum emotional impact. The officers on the ship are given titles such as, roughly, "I’ll shoot them down like dogs!" when dealing with the disobedient sailors. All of the focused victims of the shocking violence on the Odessa steps are women or children. The idea of typage, casting often non-professional actors based on their physical resemblance to a character type, allows the film to forgo character development and individuality. The ship’s priest looks like a prophet from the pages of the Old Testament transplanted into the 20^th Century. Additionally, the absence of a main character, except that of the collective Russian people, corresponds to the Marxist principles of the film; one of the only possible protagonists, Vakulinchuk, dies early in the film for the revolutionary cause. This aspect also is reminiscent of Intolerance’s undermining of audience identification through its large number of characters and shifting focus.

Historical Narrative in The Battleship Potemkin

"What are a few maggots?" asks Richard Hough in his book, The Potemkin Mutiny. He answers with the powerful story of the 1905 mutiny of the sailors of the Potemkin in their struggle against the repressive officers of the Russian Imperial Navy. In 1925, the Soviet government commissioned Sergei Eisenstein to direct a film commemorating the events of the 1905 revolution. Due to time constraints, he had to limit his film to just the Potemkin mutiny. His depiction of these events, in his film The Battleship Potemkin, has many significant differences with the historian's perspective that Hough offers in his book. Contrary to the belief of many modern critics, the actual historical events and details are impossible to determine beyond a reasonable doubt, but "there is no dispute on the main events, and their sequence." However, although Hough and Eisenstein differ, they both offer legitimate perspectives. Even if the events are agreed upon, "one and the same event may be incorporated in a work...in different guises: in the form of a dispassionate statement or in that of a pathetic hymn." Eisenstein is creating a narrative film, and Hough purports to write a history, but both are stories of the event with an intended audience and an intended effect. The small differences between the two perspectives offered by Hough and Eisenstein is significant and colors what the audience thinks of the mutiny and how they identify with it.

The new release of the DVD will be on Tuesday at stores like HMV. If you can't get it locally try Amazon.

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Starring: Grigory Alexandrov, Alexander Antonov Director: Sergei Eisenstein

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Sunday, October 21,2007 12:00 AM

The Battleship Potemkin

TCM is pleased to present the U.S. broadcast premiere of the 2005 restoration of Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925), accompanied by a new arrangement of Edmund Meisel’s orchestral score, which Eisenstein himself authorized for the film’s Berlin premiere in 1926. This same version will be released on DVD by Kino in a 2-disc special edition. The Battleship Potemkin was recognized from the start as a landmark work both for its innovative use of montage and for its sheer power as propaganda. In particular, the “Odessa steps” sequence is arguably the single most famous and widely quoted passage in the history of film. But in a sense The Battleship Potemkin has been the victim of its own effectiveness. Reissued over the years in various censored and reedited versions, Eisenstein’s great vision has not been seen for several decades in anything like what the director likely intended. This new version, overseen by the film archivist and historian Enno Patalas, attempts to reconstruct, as closely as possible, the film as it was presented in Moscow during its initial release. THE FILM AND ITS CONTEXT The Soviets were inordinately fond of jubilees, so it was only fitting that for his second feature film Sergei Eisenstein would be commissioned to direct a multi-episode series marking the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution in Russia. The first episode was originally intended to focus mainly on the strike that took place in St. Petersburg in October 1905, with the June 1905 mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin to serve as a prologue. However, bad weather and logistical difficulties compelled Eisenstein and his crew to relocate to Odessa, and the Potemkin mutiny expanded into a full-fledged feature in its own right. (See Richard Taylor’s meticulously researched book The Battleship Potemkin: The Film Companion (2000) for further information on the film’s production history and critical reception.) While Eisenstein’s debut feature Strike (1924) still dazzles through its sheer stylistic daring, in The Battleship Potemkin he consolidated his skills as a total filmmaker, demonstrating greater control over narrative structure and pacing. The film is divided into five acts--“Men and Worms,” “Drama on the Quarterdeck” “An Appeal from the Dead,” “The Odessa Steps” and “Meeting the Squadron”--its structure deliberately recalling classical tragedy. While Eisenstein was always interested more in creating an effective and well-constructed film than in being literally faithful to the historical record, many of the key images in the script were in fact inspired by actual events associated with the Potemkin mutiny: the sailors’ refusal to eat borsch made from maggot-infested meat; the revolutionary activists Matyshenko and Vakulenchuk (spelled Vakulinchuk in the film) using that incident as a pretext to incite the other sailors to mutiny; the arrival of the battleship into the Odessa port with a red flag; the throngs of townspeople lining up to view Vakulenchuk’s corpse; and the Potemkin being greeted by cheering sailors on another ship. There was even a massacre of civilians by police on the famed steps leading down to Odessa’s port, though that was just one part of the civil strikes that occurred throughout the city and the resulting crackdown by the police and Cossacks. It should be noted that Eisenstein didn’t include at least one very significant event: the massive fire that devastated the Odessa port during the strike and claimed many lives. Neal Bascomb provides a compelling and detailed account of the mutiny in his recently published book Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin (2007). In addition to its innovative and much-analyzed photography and editing, the film was noteworthy for its unusual mix of professional and non-professional actors, based on the principle of typage or casting primarily according to physical types. Eisenstein’s assistant Grigori Aleksandrov played Gilyarovsky. The role of Vakulenchuk was filled by Aleksandr Antonov, a member of the Proletkult theater troupe in which Eisenstein had worked before moving into cinema. The film director Vladimir Barsky, an important figure in early Soviet cinema, played the role of Captain Golikov. Eisenstein also challenged the norms of commercial cinema by not relying on a single protagonist or romantic coupling to shape the narrative, emphasizing the notion of a “mass protagonist” instead. The Battleship Potemkin premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in December 1925 and was released in Moscow in January 1926. Barely completed in time for the premiere, it was initially more of a rough cut, as Richard Taylor has pointed out. The orchestral accompaniment, as was common practice at the time, was culled from pre-existing works in the classical repertoire. At its two main Moscow engagements, the theater exteriors were decorated to resemble battleships, and the staff were dressed in sailors’ outfits. Posters touted it as “the pride of Soviet cinema,” boasting of 300,000 admissions in the first three weeks alone. POTEMKIN IN BERLIN What really sealed the film’s success, however, was the sensational reception at its April 1926 Berlin premiere. The Soviet authorities actually sold the original negative to the Germans--a move that seems inconceivable today--but they retained the right to request new prints from it. Fearing a threat to “the public order,” the German censors initially banned the film outright but later demanded a number of cuts, mainly due to violent imagery. These included some of the shots depicting the body of young boy trampled on the Odessa steps. The film director Piel Jutzi was brought in to adapt the film for German audiences; among other things, he divided it into six parts instead of five. Naum Kleiman, the foremost Eisenstein scholar, has speculated that Eisenstein’s trip to Germany before the premiere was in fact to oversee the film’s reediting, so he may well have had some input into the German distribution version. The director also guided Edmund Meisel’s work on the score, encouraging him to emphasize rhythm over melody. For instance, the music accompanying the battleship’s climactic meeting with the squadron has a mechanical quality that underscores the film’s ties with the Soviet artistic movement known as Constructivism. Ultimately, cultural impact of The Battleship Potemkin in Germany cannot be overstated. Besides becoming a great popular success, it influenced artistic figures as ranging from Fritz Lang to Bertolt Brecht and the theater directors Erwin Piscator and Max Reinhardt. Not only did the film’s reputation in Germany help raise awareness of it in countries such as England and the United States, it even resulted in a second release of the film in the Soviet Union during the summer of 1926. However, the Soviet authorities’ decision to sell the negative to the Germans meant it would not survive in its original version. THE RECONSTRUCTION The pressures of censorship and the vagaries of distribution over the years have resulted in the situation that The Battleship Potemkin survives in several different versions, each with their own set of limitations. For many years the Museum of Modern Art circulated an English language version based on an authoritative print donated by the Eisenstein scholar Jay Leyda and supposedly provided by Eisenstein himself, but they altered the original intertitles, among other things making them longer and thus slowing the pace of the film. Another version with English titles was prepared by the British leftist filmmaker Ivor Montagu. In 1950, the film was reissued in the Soviet Union in a version supervised by Grigori Aleksandrov and accompanied by a serviceable, if pedestrian, score by Nikolai Kryukov. According to Enno Patalas, this version was missing some seventy shots, suffered from substantially reworked intertitles, and even reordered some of the footage following earlier, similarly corrupted versions. For example, the visceral impact of the opening of the Odessa steps massacre--in which the title “And suddenly…” is followed by a series of jump cuts of a woman’s head jerking back--was blunted by preceding it with shots of the soldiers’ boots and rifles to provide more of a conventional cause-and-effect structure. This version also used step-printing (the repetition of individual frames) to slow the movement down for projection at sound speed. In 1976, the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Yutkevitch, in collaboration with Naum Kleiman, created a new version that was the most complete and authentic to date, but its pacing was again compromised by the use of stretch printing, and it was still missing fifteen shots compared to the current reconstruction. Thus, while it contained fewer shots, at 74 minutes it still ran significantly longer than the 2005 reconstruction. Also, one could argue that the excerpts from the Shostakovich symphonies chosen to accompany the print added to its lugubrious atmosphere. The 2005 reconstruction relies heavily on the Jay Leyda print and written recollections for its shot list, but whenever possible uses early generation prints held at the British Film Institute because of their superior photographic quality. (The original negative still exists at Gosfilmofond of Russia, though it bears the traces of German censorship and according to the archive is too fragile to use for printing, as Patalas related in a 2005 article in the Journal of Film Preservation.) The intertitles recreate the original text as closely as possible, including the restoration of a Trotsky quotation as the epigraph; predictably, it had been replaced by a Lenin quote when Trotsky fell out of favor. The length of the individual title cards is also now more in keeping with the film’s rhythm as a whole, which is no small point since Eisenstein viewed them as a crucial component of his montage aesthetic. Lastly, as Eisenstein intended from the start, this version uses hand-coloring to tint the Potemkin’s flag red during certain sequences. In the documentary that accompanies Kino’s forthcoming DVD edition, Naum Kleiman sums up the difficult choices faced in reconstructing the film: “There being no absolutely exact film record from 1926, we cannot claim to have all the scenes in their full length. Often, what Patalas did was an extension of an already existing version, that is, of the censored version. Due to the disintegration of the film, or splices that have come apart, some parts had to be spliced together again. Some frames were lost in the process. Today it’s difficult to assess whether all that was added to the very last version changed the meaning of the film, or its rhythm, or whether it reinforced its visual quality. At any rate, we felt that we managed to approximate the original up to 99%, or even 99.5%.” Viewers already familiar with The Battleship Potemkin are likely to be struck with how much better the reconstruction flows as a film compared to previous versions. Combined with the superior detail and contrast of the new video transfer and the excitement of Meisel’s orchestral score, the reconstruction enables us to appreciate one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces in a fresh light. FILM CREDITS Producer: Yakov Bliokh Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein Script: Eisenstein, based on an idea by Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko Assistant Director: Grigori Aleksandrov Director of Photography: Eduard Tisse Editing: Sergei Eisenstein Cast: Aleksande Antonov (Vakulinchuk), Mikhail Gomorov (Matyushenko), Vladimir Barsky (Captain Golikov), Grigori Aleksandrov (Chief Officer Gilyarovsky), Aleksandr Levshin (Petty Officer), Beatrice Vitoldi (Woman on the Odessa Steps), N. Poltavtseva (Woman with the pince-nez), also Members of the Proletkult Theater, Sailors of the Black Sea Fleet, the Sebastopol Fisherman’s Union, and the Inhabitants of Odesssa. RECONSTRUCTION CREDITS Supervised by Enno Patalas in collaboration with Anna Bohn. Produced by the Deutsche Kinemathek with the support of Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, the British Film Institute, the Munich Filmmuseum, and Gosfilmofond of Russia. Colorization by Gerhard Ullmann. Musical score by Edmund Meisel (1926); adaptation and instrumentation by Helmut Imig. Music performed by the Deutsches Filmorchestra Babelsberg, conducted by Helmut Imig. BW-69m. by James Steffen

The Pet Shop Boys will unveil their latest project - a soundtrack to the 1925 film Battleship Potemkin - at a free show in London's Trafalgar Square.

The irony is that this propaganda film for the Bolshevik Revolution was made four years after the Kronstadt rebellion occurred against the Bolshevik hegemonic state, by the same sailors.

The naval base of Kronstadt lies on Kotlin Island near the head of the Gulf of Finland. Peter the Great captured the island from the Swedes in 1703 and built it into a naval fortress to protect his new capital. The concentration of heavy armory and sailors on the small island made it a bulwark against foreign invasion, but also a tinderbox in times of internal unrest. During the stormy years 1905-1906 several mutinies broke out on Kronstadt. The sailors were important allies to the Bolsheviks after the February Revolution (1917), when the Kronstadt Soviet opposed the provisional government, declared a "Kronstadt Republic," and took part in the July 1917 mutiny. The famous cruiser Aurora, which had bombarded the Winter Palace on October 25, 1917 with its famous shot heard round the world, belonged to the Baltic Fleet based in Kronstadt.

It was a rude shock to the Bolsheviks when the red sailors of Kronstadt went into open rebellion in March 1921. The sailors saw themselves as loyal to the Soviet cause, if not to the Communist rulers. That bitter winter saw Kronstadt, like most other cities in Russia, hungry and discontented. Anger at material deprivations was compounded by the authoritarian regime the Bolsheviks were building, which seemed to violate the spirit of the revolution that the sailors had helped win. Popular unrest finally grew into strikes, which led to riots, lockouts, arrests. Finally on February 26, local Communist authorities declared martial law. A pattern of sharp protest and response escalated rapidly from here to a state of mutiny.

It is the source of the greatest political division on the left, between anarchists and Trotskyists, even to this day.

Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt By Leon Trotsky

SHAGYA BLOG: Kronstadt Izvestiia - " Four Legs Good "

The complete edition of
"Izvestiia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Sailors, Soldiers and Workers of the town of Kronstadt"

Demands of the Kronstadt Insurgents, Expressed in the Resolution of the General Meeting of the Crews of the Ships of the Line

Kronstadt, 28 February I92I

Having heard the report of the representatives of the crews despatched by the General Meeting of the crews from the ships to Petrograd in order to learn the state of affairs in Petrograd, we decided:

1. In view of the fact that the present soviets do not represent the will of the workers and peasants, to re-elect the soviets immediately by secret voting, with free canvassing among all workers and peasants before the elections.
2. Freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, Anarchists and Left Socialist Parties.
3. Freedom of meetings, trade unions and peasant associations.
4. To convene, not later than 1 March I92I, a non-party conference of workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd City, Kronstadt and Petrograd Province.
5. To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist Parties, and also all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors who have been imprisoned in connection with working-class and peasant movements.
6. To elect a commission to review the cases of those who are imprisoned in jails and concentration camps.
7. To abolish all Political Departments, because no single party may enjoy privileges in the propagation of its ideas and receive funds from the state for this purpose. Instead of these Departments, locally elected cultural-educational commissions must be established and supported by the state.
   ......................................
8. To abolish all Communist fighting detachments in all military units, and also the various Communist guards at factories. If such detachments and guards are needed they may be chosen from the companies in military units and in the factories according to the judgment of the workers.
9. To grant the peasant full right to do what he sees fit with his land and also to possess cattle, which he must maintain and manage with his own strength, but without employing hired labour.
10. To ask all military units and also our comrades, the military cadets, to associate themselves with our resolutions.
11. We demand that all resolutions be widely published in the press.
    .....................................
12. To permit free artisan production with individual labour.

The resolutions were adopted by the meeting unanimously, with two abstentions.

 President of the Meeting, PETRICHENKO.

      Secretary, PEREPELKIN.

SEE

West Side Story

Brecht Meets Oscar

Battle of Algiers

Ennio Morricone A Fistful of Composer

The Many Faces of Solaris

V for Anarchy

SPECTRE

Dimiti Shostakovich 1906-2006

Censorship and Art

The Fifth International

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, Kronstadt, DVD, TCM, 1905, Kino,montage, anarchism, Trotsky, mondernism, Russian Revolution, movies, film,

Blade Runner

Blade Runner along with Alien were groundbreaking movies by Ridley Scott.

Unfortunately I have to disagree with him about excising the voice over from his 1992 Directors Cut of Blade Runner.

I found it less satisfying than that with the voice over, though I agree with him that the 'happy ending' in the original sucked.

He has reissued it again for release this fall containing 5 DVD's. And the narration is still excised. So I will see if it really captures the Noir genre it comes from which did often use voice overs.

There is no rambling voiceover by Ford, which the film’s distributors, Warner Bros, originally insisted on for the hard-of-thinking. Here Rick Deckard keeps his thoughts to himself and is infinitely more interesting for it.

This simple conceit makes the film a colder and lonelier place. It was always ravishingly dark. Scott’s vision of Los Angeles in 2019 is the ultimate movie dystopia: a fabulous hell of skyscrapers and monolithic Fritz Lang factories. The sky is cluttered with fuming aircraft and floating neon adverts. It never stops raining on the cramped and seedy streets, and everyone, apart from Ford, smokes like a chimney.

What does it mean to be human in such a diseased world? This is the thrust of Scott’s film noir, which has aged quite brilliantly.

Blade Runner's new cut

Twenty-five years after "Blade Runner" was panned by critics and pulled from theaters, British director Ridley Scott savors revenge with the final cut of the science-fiction film now considered a cult classic.

Presenting the new version of what he considers his most accomplished movie, Scott recalled the difficulties he had when he first pitched the work to Hollywood.

The response at early sample screenings before the official release in June 1982 was so weak that the producers forced Scott to add voice-overs to the film and change the final scene to make it a more "happy ending."

"I thought I'd really nailed it, I really thought I'd nailed it. And the person I used to show it to was my brother (director Tony Scott). And my brother, he loved it so much. Then we preview, and the previews are really, really bad, and my confidence is really dented," said Scott.

The reworking of the film led to "voice overs which started to explain what was about to happen, who the characters were and who was going to do what to who, which is the antithesis of a good movie making process," he said.

Over the years, five versions of the film have been released, including a director's cut in 1992. But Scott said the "Final Cut" -- which will be issued as a collector's DVD edition later in the winter -- was "really as it was intended to be."

So what did you really want to have in your Final Cut?

Ridley Scott: Well, certainly get rid of the voiceover once and for all. If you get rid of the voiceover, then you do not want the ending. This is a film noir. It's an Elmore Leonard kind of influence or Philip Marlowe. This is a Marlowe-esque kind of story which of course is Mr.Dick and Mr.Fancher. Do Androids [Dream of Electric Sheep] has about 17 stories in the first 25 pages, so there was a big distillation right down to the bottom line of what this is about. That was the agony and the ecstasy of working with Hampton and Michael Deeley way back when. We were trying to get this down to a screenplay that we could make. I was completely for voiceover. There was all this bullsh*t saying I was against voiceover. Absolute horse twaddle. I was there and when Harrison and I would talk about this saying, "You like this?" I said, "Well, I think there's a possibility that if we're confusing the audience who are saying, 'What's cityspeak? What is this? What is that?' We may have to explain a few things. If we can get the right words, then it could work." Because three years earlier, there was a film called Apocalypse Now where you have an incredibly important voiceover which is the entire internalization of Martin Sheen's part, who is a man who seems to be a nihilist where you would not know what he's thinking if he didn't have that voiceover. The voiceover was brilliantly written and brilliantly delivered by Martin Sheen. So I hung my hat on that thinking that it may be a possibility, because also it's Philip Marlowe, because also it's Elmore Leonard and Mr. Dick, Philip Dick. But that's the style. He's a cop. He's a dark cop who's a bit of an alcoholic. He's a nihilist who hates himself and hates his job. Sounds like Elmore Leonard to me. And therefore out of it should come a great voiceover. We couldn't crack it. And Harrison really tried and I really tried and I think the voice was becoming over explanatory. When all you're going to do is sit there and actually see how it evolves, or you work it out, 10 minutes off. A film should always be ahead of the audience, not the audience parallel to the movie.

Crave Online: There is a work print on the DVD which has a better voice over than the theatrical cut.

Ridley Scott: Yeah, it's okay. It felt like it could come in and it could be okay, and Harrison's got a great voice and a very listenable to voice, a very deep voice. But we couldn't get the words quite right so that Harrison felt comfortable, so it really did feel like him inside. Most of it was very tricky.

Another issue with the original release was the failure to release the awesome groundbreaking electronc sound track by Vangelis.

Android Love Cry

Just as a graphic novel will never be awarded the book of the year honors, Android Love Cry will never be acknowledged as album of the year. Why? Think about science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Science fiction is your first clue, we don’t suppose great literature can be science fiction, but Dick wrote some fantastic fiction, even a story (forty years before Philip Roth) pondering what if the Nazi’s had won W.W.II and occupied the United States. But you’ll never see his name listed with the greatest writers of his time, although his works have been turned into motion pictures including; Minority Report, Total Recall, Paycheck and Blade Runner.

What does Blade Runner have to do with Android Love Cry from Tigersmilk? The original title of the 1982 Ridley Scott film was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and certainly the music made by this trio could be the soundtrack for a modern remake of the film.

These thirteen pieces lead you into flights of imagination—story lines appear, old science fiction movies like Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain or The Omega Man rerun in your head. But this music isn’t your “Hearts of Space” smooth ambient sounds. This trio meshes improvisation seamlessly with the science. Bassist Roebke is quite adept at adapting his double-bass to his partners and their effects. Although the highlight of the disc might be the 56-second “Circuit Overload Demise,” where he opens with a monstrous attack of bass energy before playing against drummer and computer plunks, the display of control and power is awe-inspiring.

And Scott has announced the death of Science Fiction Film...

Ridley Scott says 'Sci-fi films are as dead as Westerns’

Me thinks he speaks tongue in cheek considering his latest movie is a Western. And in this case he can't complain if it bombs, he didn't direct it. And like Blade Runner it appears it too will be cursed by the critics. Much like Michael Cimino's over budget ill fated 'Heavens Gate'.

Brad Pitt plays legendary outlaw Jesse James in the Warner Bros. release;
The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford

Whether it directly resembles them or not, this impeccable new picture is at one with the adventurous spirit that produced such films as "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid," "Bad Company," "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid," "Jeremiah Johnson," "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Days of Heaven," "The Long Riders" and, yes, "Heaven's Gate," rather than with anything being made today.

Shot two years ago and long delayed in editing, pic marks an enormous advance for Dominik beyond his 2000 Aussie prison crimer "Chopper." Elegant, artful and consumed by a fascination with American history and Western lore, his adaptation of Ron Hansen's popular 1983 novel retills the once overworked ground of outlaw legend so thoroughly that it has become fertile once again. Pic's hefty 160-minute running time will no doubt cause carping in some quarters, but this is one film whose length seems absolutely right for what it's doing.

"Assassination of Jesse James" a celluloid crime

Coming from the production companies of the film's star, Brad Pitt, and Ridley and Tony Scott and based on Hansen's well-received novel, the film's pedigree probably means a solid opening week. However, word-of-mouth might kill the movie faster than Robert Ford killed Jesse James.

SEE:

LEM RIP

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Ridley Scott, Alien, Blade Runner, science fiction, government, film, movies, Phillip K. Dick, Vangelis, hollywood, Sci-Fi,
Film Noir

Torture Porn

I see that the MSM have spent this weekend focusing on what they call Torture Porn which I wrote about in Gore Kulture. Cliff from Rusty Idols and I then proceeded to have a running discussion on the phenomena in the comments.

From horror film to torture porn

Torture porn films - horror or hype?

Is there any escape from tired, old torture-porn?

Hollywood, movie fans shy away from "torture porn"

Held captive to torture-porn zeitgeist

Torture porn for popcorn eaters not up to snuff

Filmgoers may be fed up with sadistic gore

See

Gothic Capitalism Redux

Jack the Ripper

Emotional Plague


Serial Murder

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Censorship is Political

As all libertarians know political correctness is the basis of censorship. Morality is just an excuse when it comes to censorship. Sex, violence and obscenity are the social justifications for the thought police.

Censored: From Mickey Mouse to the Marx Brothers

Mr. Fox says a common misconception is that censorship activities were focused primarily on sex. He says B.C. censors cast a wide net and employed loose interpretation of the act, censoring for not only sexual morality and political content, but for social and even artistic reasons.

From movies to murals to FOI, censorship lives on

We might think porn was the main concern, but we would be wrong. Porn pretty much kept its knickers on back in the early 20th century.

Instead it was felt necessary to shield British Columbian moviegoers in the 1920s and 1930s from political controversies in the newsreels that used to precede feature films.

See:

Gore Kulture

Cops and Robbers Video

Life Is A Video Game

Canada Censors Cartoons


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Gore Kulture

No not Al Gore.

Gore as in Grand Guignol as in a specific sub genre of horror movies; slasher films, blood and guts movies like Saw, Hostile, etc.

The Peculiar Charms of the Grand Guignol

by Gideon Lester

"At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening's faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals."

-- Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol:
theatre of fear and terror.

We can go back to Shakespeare to find the first real case of Grand Guignol in theatre;

Titus Andronicus is a play with "14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity and 1 of cannibalism--an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines."

We seem to have moved from a rash of horror films to gore films in four short years. The gore phenomena is specific to the current mass culture we are experiencing.

We have seen an increase in horror films, just as we did during the depression and again during the Viet Nam war, horror films reflect the need for social catharsis during times of cultural stress.

The Gore film on the other hand was an underground phenomena, much like Grand Guignol. It first appeared not in film but in the fifties as crime and horror comics.

It existed since the early sixties, as a b-film phenomena in particular the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, but became popular in the eighties with the works of Stuart Gordon and Sam Raimi. It expanded in the nineties with the work of Clive Barker, in particular the Hellraiser series, now coming to the small screen as a computer game.

But these were horror movies, there was gore, but there was also humour, atmosphere, the gore was incidental, there to frighten you as much as the thing that jumps out of the dark.

But today the movies are Gore for gore's sake. In that they hearken back to Herschell Gordon Lewis work and Romero's Night of the Living Dead. But unlike them they are major studio releases, a popular film phenomena on the big screen and the producers of the goriest of the gore films; Saw I, II and III are Canadian.

It is reflective of the current social crisis of sociopathology that is in the headlines. Man kills and BBQs girlfriend

Take for instance the Picton murder case and its Edmonton counter part the serial killing of prostitutes, or this recent Edmonton case that was in the news for weeks;

Michael Briscoe, acquitted in the rape and murder of Nina Courtepatte, is haunted by his failure to intervene and try to save her when she was brutally attacked 2 years ago

Edmonton, with its record-high murder rate, is quickly losing its reputation as a safe city.

But it's not just the creeping crime wave that's spooking people. It's the grim reality that we are now known for one of the most odious killings in the country.

Malls are supposed to be places where young people hang out, shop and flirt - not where a strikingly pretty 13-year-old girl is chosen at random to be raped and slaughtered for kicks.

I fear we are raising a society of sociopaths - kids who are so adrift, amoral and inured to violence that they have become completely indifferent to evil. They are drawn to it, it seems, out of twisted curiosity and sheer boredom.

How else to explain how a group of young people could lure Nina Courtepatte from West Edmonton Mall on the pretext of inviting her to a party, only to rape her and beat her to death on a golf course?

Brutality, savagery, gore, and cannibalism all underlie Grand Guignol and the Gore film today, as it does the headlines in your daily paper.

AN ALCOHOLIC who strangled his friend and then told police he did it so he could be sent to prison to exact revenge on a cannibal killer who murdered his girlfriend, was yesterday jailed for life. Alan Taylor said he never got over the murder of Julie Paterson, who was beheaded and partially eaten by psychopath David Harker in 1998.

New Delhi, Mar 22: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday gave a clean chit to Mohinder Singh Pandher, co-accused in the gruesome Nithari serial killings in the outskirts of Delhi. CBI blamed his servant for the macabre killings and also confirmed cannibalism in him. It said Pandher's servant Surinder Koli was a psychopath and blamed him for the killings

A religious cult leader who raped, murdered and ate at least three women in Papua New Guinea has been captured by a group of villagers.

Steven Tari, 35, who called himself the "black Jesus" was beaten by locals from the village of Matepi before being handed over to police.

The failed bible student had gathered around six thousand followers as he travelled through mountain villages promising disciples gifts from heaven if they joined his congregation.

But communities discovered he was indulging in cannibalism, sacrificing young women, drinking their blood and eating their flesh.

The Gore phenomena begins with Slaughter of the Lambs, and its overwhelming popularity. It is about the brutality of a serial killer who skins his victims, and the anti-hero is a cannibal; Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It coincides disturbingly with pig farmer Robert Pictons brutal murder and dismemberment of women in Vancouver, and its implication of cannibalism.

The disturbing fact is that our fascination with the Picton case is the same as our fascination with Dr. Lecter. Cannibalism being the final taboo leading to the mass media phenomena of Hannibal the Cannibal.

I'm not alone in my fascination with cannibalism — why else would there be five Hannibal Lecter movies? Soylent Green is made of people; the living dead will eat your brains at any time of dawn, day, or night; and the biggest blockbuster of 2006, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, featured droves of flesh-hungry islanders.

In fact cannibalism is American as Apple Pie. Even before the infamous Donner party case, the founders of America engaged in cannibalism and capitalism.

Jamestown aims for historic reign over Plymouth

JAMESTOWN, Va. -- The first permanent English settlement in North America has more personality than many other historic attractions.
Capt. John Smith, the pint-sized adventurer, left a breathless narrative of his exploits.
Commerce took root here, and so did tobacco and slavery.
Then there was the cannibalism.
Still, as the country prepares to commemorate Jamestown's 400th anniversary in May, many see this swampy outpost on the James River only as a coming attraction to the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth Rock about 13 years later.
New Englanders, for example, point to the Thanksgiving feast, the Pilgrims' pure pursuit of religious freedom and the Mayflower.
Jamestown, on the other hand, "is the creation story from hell," Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes in her new book, "The Jamestown Project." Conflict, disease, horrific killings and starvation are all part of the back story of Jamestown, founded in 1607 as a business venture.
But if not for Jamestown, scholars say, there may not have been a Plymouth, and we all might be speaking Spanish. The Spanish, intent on spreading Roman Catholicism, were turned away twice from the nearby Chesapeake Bay during the early years of the Protestant Jamestown settlement.
"There's no question that Jamestown throws down the gauntlet to the Spanish," said James Horn, who wrote "A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America."
Now, during an 18-month commemoration, Jamestown finally could outshine Plymouth and fully embrace what historian and writer Nathaniel Philbrick calls its proper claim as "the rightful birthing ground of America."
"Not only was the [Jamestown] settlement found more than a decade before, but the colony that developed from those beginnings was, in many ways, more quintessentially American since it was all about making money," said Mr. Philbrick, the author of "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War."

Another gore phenomena in media is the popularity of the Zombie. Zombie parties are occurring across North America. In Edmonton there is a Zombie club of folks who dress up in gory zombie costumes and wander the streets groaning and moaning.

At the University of Alabama they are offering a course on Zombies.

Do you hope that when you die, your corpse will return to life and shamble around, wreaking havoc? Have you ever wanted to taste human flesh? Or do you just want to be able to live your life without that crippling fear of someone eating your brains?

Those who said yes to any of those questions will find a kindred spirit in Sean Hoade, a UA instructor currently teaching creative writing, literature and English. In May, during the interim, he will be teaching EN 311-001, titled, Zombies! The Living Dead in Literature, Film and Culture.

Hoade said zombies are the perfect choice because they are the ultimate metaphor for human life.

"Anything that you look at," Hoade said, "the way we know people by sight but don't really know our neighbors ... race relations and class warfare - all of that is reflected in zombies. And that's why they've become so incredibly popular. [There are] zombie movies, zombie books, zombie graphic novels, so I think that it's only right for the English department to offer a class looking at all things zombie."

Hoade said the class will also discuss what zombies being reanimated corpses indicates about people's fears.

"Death is so sanitized now that [even] being around a dead body that isn't reanimated is incredibly spooky. So we're going to look at how the fear of the zombie is actually a fear not just of death, because we're all afraid of death, but a fear, actually, of the dead also."

The class won't strictly focus on the intellectual aspects of zombies. Students will also be able to participate in a variety of zombie-related activities.

"We're going to engage in mock cannibalism," Hoade said. "We're going to [have] human-flavored tofu. It's based on what people who had to resort to cannibalism, like the Donner party and that plane crash and things like that, what they said human flesh tastes like.

"I ordered putrescine, which is the chemical that dead things give off," he said. Putrescine, which is a chemical compound used by the body for cellular division, is responsible for the smell of rotting flesh.

"We're probably going to do a zombie walk, which is we're all going to get made up as zombies and walk around campus and terrorize it. I'll have to see if that's allowed. We're also going to eat Jell-O brains. [The purpose of the activities are] just to try to get into the zombie mindset ... We might go over to the graveyard and lie down on the graves."

Zombie mindset? Zombies have no brains, no minds, thats why they eat brains, they lack intelligence. Just like the folks at PETA.

The folks in charge of PETA love all of God's creatures—with a few notable exceptions. Asked by BlackBook whether the animal-rights group opposes human cannibalism, Dan Mathews, the group's outrage-provoking vice president, quips, "No, as long as the person being eaten is Anna Wintour." It's far from the first time PETA has gone after the Vogue editor in chief, whom it accuses of doing more than anyone else to keep the wearing of animal pelts in style.

The aristocracy has a history of fascination with death and haute coutoure, they go together like art and suicide.

WHEN Victoria Beckham heard that the flamboyant fashion guru, design muse and socialite Isabella Blow had attempted to kill herself in 2005 by throwing herself off a bridge in London, she remarked, "What genius!"

After school, Blow lived in a squat in London and took cleaning jobs. Then she went off to New York, where Brian Ferry, an old friend - introduced her to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Blow hung out with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who wanted to know her when he saw she was wearing one pink and one purple shoe.

But for all the name-dropping, there have been two main role models in Blow's life. The first is the Duchess of Windsor, of whom a stylised portrait hangs in her hallway. "Wallis was ugly, like me, but she made the best of herself. I wish I'd lured a king." The other is Blow's aforementioned flesh-eating grandmother, Vera Delves Broughton, a photographer, explorer and big-game fisher. Until recently she held the record for catching the biggest fish in European waters (a tuna, which took 16 hours to reel in).

As for the cannibalism, Blow explains, "She was once in Papua New Guinea. She had some dinner and said, 'God, that was delicious. What was it?' It turned out to be a poor local tribesman who had been grilled up. In her Who's Who hobbies, my grandmother listed 'Once a cannibal'. Ha, ha! I'm so like her. Very wild!"

Christianity itself is based upon the disturbing concepts of cannibalism of its God and the idea of the Living Dead; the resurrection.

Or was Pope Benedict biding his time? Last week he published an Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis — The Sacrament of Love. In part it is a summary of the conclusions of the Synod of Catholic Bishops held in Rome in October 2005 — the start of the liturgical Year of the Eucharist promulgated by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II — and as such carries the authority of the whole Church. But it is also a theological tour de force showing the clarity and cogency that are particular to the writings of Joseph Ratzinger.

Sacramentum Caritatis opens with a lucid exposition of the Catholic belief on the Eucharist. The priest’s words of consecration during the Mass turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ — a transformation Pope Benedict describes as ‘a sort of “nuclear fission” which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world’.

This belief, with its connotations of cannibalism and human sacrifice, has always been hard to take. Even in Christ’s lifetime, many of his disciples, according to Saint John, regarded the idea as ‘intolerable ...and stopped going with him’. It was a defining bone of contention between Catholics at the time of the Reformation. Luther downgraded the change from transubstantiation (the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ) to consubstantiation (bread and wine remain bread and wine but co-exist with the flesh and blood of Christ), and Calvin disbelieved it altogether.

The recent rash of zombie and gore films reflect a culture inundated with death. Senseless death, be it wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and through out the middle east, vast unimaginable death from starvation, mass rape and murder in Dafur, or disasters such as Tsunamis , hurricanes and earthquakes that slaughter thousands and decimate cities.

Our fears of death and the unknown are now amplified by our fear of pain. Gore movies are about pain. Blood and guts, yes but the Saw phenomena is about pain, torture and self inflicted pain.

It is Abu Gharib and Gitmo brought to the large screen. We know not what torture Arar Mehar went through, or those held in CIA black prisons. But when we watch Saw we get a gleaming, an inkling of what it feels like to be held incommunicado and tortured. For no good reason. What does the torturer want? Like those held in sensory deprivation in Gitmo, we do not know.

The horror film since its origins in the silent era was fear of the other, the monster. Today with the advent of the Gore film, the monster is us. We suffer the emotional plague of isolation and alienation in a capitalist culture out of our control and dashing headlong into oblivion.

See

Gothic Capitalism Redux

Jack the Ripper

Emotional Plague

Rape

Serial Murder

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horror,, gore,, horror films,, Zombie,,crime, women, Canada, Supreme Court of Canada, crime