Month: July 2019

Is violence the only way out?

Posted on by victorfraga

People often speak of the “pursuit of happiness”, but what about catharsis? That feeling of relief that washes over you may bring some of life’s greatest satisfaction, even if it is comparatively fleeting. This is because the release of catharsis is often preceded by intense, repressed anguish that has built and built and built. The films in this short list are of different tones and contexts, but they all contain moments of cathartic violence, moments where force is used, for better or worse, to darkly satisfying ends. The films are listed chronologically

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1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975):

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a quintessential example of the term ‘required viewing’. Most would corroborate this by saying it’s a classic of the New Hollywood period, features Jack Nicholson’s finest performance, and is one of only three films to win the five major Academy Awards.

All valid reasons, granted – but none are the reason. The real reason One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is ‘required viewing’ is its ability to reveal the nature of your nearest and dearest; for if a friend, relative or significant other does not loathe Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) within the first half hour, you need to reconsider the relationship.

Ratched exemplified the term ‘resting bitch face’ some 45 years before its coinage, yet that term actually does her a disservice for Ratched’s malice never ‘rests’. She is a petty tyrant to her core with no ability or inclination to help her patients. Rather, she delights in getting under their skin with her hateful passive aggression and, when that doesn’t work, outright bullying.

Her despicable compulsion to control hits fever pitch when she catches Billy – a stuttering, nervous wreck who’s a threat to precisely no one – in bed with a girl who McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) playfully smuggles into the hospital. When Ratched threatens to tell Billy’s equally tyrannical mother, he commits suicide.

It is a sickening moment. As she wrestles past the distraught crowd to reach his fresh corpse demanding that they “Let me through! Let me through!” I defy anyone not to be overcome with a dangerous kind of anger. McMurphy certainly sees the red mist as he throws her to the ground by her neck, putting every pound of body weight into the grip around her trachea.

Now strangling a woman doesn’t tend to be a good look but the toxic, fleeting catharsis of this moment is almost impossible to deny. Your allegiance will lie with McMurphy. Nicholson’s performance is charged with a palpable anger that mirrors your own and you just can’t help but shift in your seat, willing him to do some serious damage.

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2. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975):

We all know the scene – Hooper’s missing, Quint’s dead and the Orca is sinking. All Chief Brody has to defend himself with is an M1 Garand, harpoon and scuba diving tank, which he desperately throws in the shark’s mouth as the cabin floods with water.

What follows is one of the most electrifying climaxes in cinema history and a deft creative decision by Spielberg. In the novel, the shark succumbs to several harpoon wounds as it lurches towards Brody in open water, but this was not the ‘big rousing ending’ that Spielberg envisaged. Author Peter Benchley resisted this change initially but the final cut persuaded him, which was so explosively ‘rousing’ that it had audiences whooping and cheering.

It’s doubtful whether contemporary audiences would share this reaction, but there is no denying the scene’s immense sense of release. And End Titles, the blissful final piece of John Williams’s iconic score, is the pure sonofication of catharsis.

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3. Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978):

The cathartic act of violence in Midnight Express is a sweet reversal of fortune. In fact, the final confrontation between Billy Hayes (Brad Davis) and the bestial prison warden Hamidou (Paul L. Smith) is the sweetest revenge of any film on this list.

Hayes, sentenced to 30 years in a Turkish prison for smuggling hashish, leads a sub-human existence by the film’s end. He has been beaten and raped to the point of psychosis and despite the promise made by its title (Midnight Express is prison slang for escape), Hayes’ situation seems utterly hopeless.

So when Hayes is faced with yet another episode of sexual violence at the hands of Hamidou, he musters all the strength he has left to throw his gaunt, battered body into the guard’s immense bulk, causing him to impale the nape of his neck on a coat hanger. It is a jaw dropping moment and the massively welcomed demise of an underrated villain.

Midnight Express is also pictured at the top of this article!

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4. Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992):

Tarantino has become so noted for his cine-literate style, loquacious dialogue and extravagant bloodshed that one can forget just how nasty his debut really is. Now Reservoir Dogs makes an impression with its style and dialogue, too, but the violence is not ‘extravagant’ – it’s the most callous, painful and sadistic of Tarantino’s career.

After all, this is a film where the focal character – Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) – spends 90 minutes bleeding to death from a bullet to the gut. Despite his terrible injury, however, he finds the strength to bring catharsis and relief to a moment where Tarantino seems set on pushing Mr. Blonde’s (Michael Madsen) cruelty to an intolerable extreme.

After severing the police officer’s ear and dousing him with petrol, this sadistic crescendo appears to heading for a monstrous climax. Yet just as Mr. Blonde flicks his Zippo, he his hit by a volley of fire from Mr. Orange’s handgun, killing the abject psychopath several times over. It provides a sigh of relief after seven and a half minutes of masterfully unpleasant filmmaking – a mixture of diegetic sound, fluid camera movement, and fine performances from Michael Madsen and Kirk Baltz.

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5. Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, 2008):

In my previous list about violence, I quoted Unforgiven’s (Clint Eastwood, 1992) defining line of dialogue – “It’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take everything he’s got, and everything he’s gonna have.”

Well, that notion doesn’t apply here, not even slightly. Indeed, Eastwood was rather milquetoast back in 1992 because sometimes you’ve just got to kick ass – a lot of it – without a moment’s reflection. This is something that John Rambo understands in Rambo, by far the most violent instalment in the series.

Of course, the plot is utterly incidental. In fact, its mayhem has a context rather than a plot, and that context is the military dictatorship of Burma, in which Rambo naturally becomes mired once a group of missionaries are abducted by Major Pa Tee Tint and his army, who commit several massacres that are genuinely graphic and nasty.

The catharsis comes in the film’s climax, when the missionaries and mercenaries sent to save them are moments from death by firing squad. Just as the troops assume their positions, Rambo rises behind a grunt manning a Jeep-mounted M2 Machine Gun, cutting his head off with one heavy swoop of his machete. He then commanders the weapon and directs a burst of .50 cal fire into the driver’s head, turning him into pulpy splat.

With the weapon’s guard covered in gore and his mouth slanted with fury, Rambo proceeds to batter the army below with relentless gunfire – popping heads, blowing holes and breaking all kinds of bones. The violence is so high-impact – so very lumpy – that it satisfies whatever warped bloodlust the viewer may (probably) have.

Gwen

Posted on by victorfraga

Poor Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) has the weight of the world on her shoulders. Sharing a bleak cottage with her mother Elen (Maxine Peake) and little sister Mari (Jodie Innes), the vulnerable trio, unprotected by a father absent at war (probably the Crimean War), are under threat to move out as the neighbouring slate mine has an eye on their property to expand its operations. Gwen’s mother is unsympathetic as she is so stressed, constantly shouting at her and, often unreasonably, ordering her about. Her only companion is little Mari and her only consolation the smile of a handsome boy, Harri Morris (Gwion Glyn), who fancies her at the local chapel, which they attend every Sunday.

The family is threatened by frightening incidents. A sheep’s heart is nailed to their front door and their sheep are killed in the night. The sinister Mr. Wynne (Mark Lewis Jones) takes Elen aside after chapel and tries to persuade her to give up her cottage and land. She refuses. It is her home for her and her daughters and will remain so to await the return of her absent husband (the whole family is shown briefly happily re-united in former times). The forces of greedy capitalism will not be assuaged. The film builds up to an horrific climax at which the two young girls must flee their home.

The film is set in the beautiful but harsh landscape of Snowdonia in Wales. Great storm clouds gather over the mountains and eventually break into loud thunderclaps and increase the sound of the moaning wind that constantly fills the air round the cottage. Mists shroud the atmosphere out of which occasionally emerge threatening figures. The film is self-consciously a horror movie as well as a piece of social documentation. The horror is not only the usual Gothic side-effects but the injustice which the family must endure. The mother cuts herself to let out “sin”, she turns around at Gwen in her bedroom, seemingly made hideous by some disease, a horse that has been injured must be put down and hacked to pieces for meat to feed the family. Gwen cannot bear to kill the horse, that has bolted off after being frightened by a clap of thunder, or chop him up, so it is done by the bad-tempered mother. Gwen presents a picture of innocence continually tormented by the cruelty and harshness of the world.

This story is continually bleak. Except for the smile of the boy in the chapel and occasional sympathy of the local doctor (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), who, anyway, later falsely accuses Gwen of stealing some medicine, there is no relief from the depression and misery. Some may find this an overdrawn aspect of the Gothic effects of the film.

What Gwen does successfully convey, however, is the misery that befell so many of the peasantry in the United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century as the ways of capitalism and economic “improvement” strode across the country breaking up traditional ways of life, settled villages and family life. In the Highlands of Scotland, during the “Highland Clearances”, the Gaelic-speaking peasantry were thrown off their lands for the sake of more economic sheep farming. In Ireland (most of which was then part of the United Kingdom) the peasantry was evicted from their cottages, allowed to starve to death in ditches or flee to America in the wake of the Great Famine of the 1840’s. Not all of this was deliberate, but it was found to be highly convenient for the British government in clearing, what was then called, “rural congestion”. Likewise in Wales, the coal and slate mines broke up traditional communities to advance their ends.

Whether people were driven from their cottages quite in the way depicted at the end of Gwen may be debatable, but the horror motifs well convey the injustice of it all and the helplessness of those who tried to stand in the way of an all-powerful capitalism. Elen, if she had been less brave, would have sold her land to the powerful Mr. Wynne. She and her daughters, with a fairly small settlement, would have settled elsewhere in Wales, forgot their memories of their homestead, and become one of the numberless workers at the pitheads or slate mines of the Industrial Revolution. Such is the story of so many of the Welsh working class.

Gwen is in cinemas on Friday, July 19th. On VoD on Monday, November 11th.

The Wedding Guest

Posted on by victorfraga

The main enjoyment of a thriller like The Wedding Guest is having no idea what’s going to happen next, one’s mind racing to fill in the board before the pieces have been even revealed. Starting with British man Jay (Dev Patel) boarding a flight from Heathrow to Lahore, before taking us on an epic journey of the Indian subcontinent, its greatest asset, at first, is the way it keeps the viewer continuously guessing. Yet when it finally settles into a fixed gear, it slowly deflates into something mechanical and predictable, dashing to pieces its initial great promise.

I’ll try to spoil as little of the plot in my review. Let’s just say that when a movie is called The Wedding Guest, perhaps the titular character isn’t exactly a friend of the bride. After his for-hire job is botched, he heads to the Indian border with a new acquaintance in tow (Radhika Apte), quickly scrabbling to make things right.

Michael Winterbottom has always been obsessed with travel. Not only has he helmed every film in Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip series and adapted On The Road, but he has also filmed in locations as diverse as Bosnia, Italy and Texas. The Wedding Guest follows in this wandering tradition, but the sheer size and diversity of India seems to overwhelm him. By doing too much and going too far, he can’t quite slow down and figure out why the story matters.

Here he zooms in on the bureaucratic processes of travel, depicting the ostensible dull scenes of Jay renting cars, boarding trains and buses, and checking into hotels. With ID checks constantly needed, Winterbottom tries to suggest that there’s always someone watching. At the same time, India is presented as a land of opportunity and escape, a place to get lost in and start a new life. Spanning from the paradisiacal beaches of Goa to the ramshackle streets of Delhi, it’s a vicarious travelogue through the world’s seventh largest nation. With a better screenplay, this contrast between restriction and escape, bureaucracy and freedom may have pushed the characters to exciting heights, yet once the initial set up is over, The Wedding Guest runs out of interesting places to go.

There is never any real sense that the walls are closing in, both characters easily able to sojourn around the country with little to no possibility of actually getting caught. While it neatly advertises, especially through its sweeping landscape shots, India as a great place to be a fugitive, this hardly makes for a truly gripping thriller. The landscape simply destroys the story; the lusher the scenery becomes, the duller the story gets.

This lack of narrative tension may have been compensated by some sparkly romance, yet you can’t just dump two handsome leads in a five-star hotel pool and hope for the best: there has to be a reason why they become attracted to each other. Lacking this central hook, The Wedding Guest feels weightless — lacking that extra level of sophistication to really elevate it into something special.

Still, its hard to play for-hire enigmas in the grand tradition of Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), The Transporter (Louis Leterrier/ Corey Yuen, 2002) and The American (Anton Corbijn, 2011). Show too much emotion and the spell is lost, but show too little and the audience is given little reason to care. Dev Patel does a good job of emoting through body language and facial gestures alone, allowing us to get some sense of who this guy is despite his otherwise gruff tone and curt speech patterns, but there’s only so much he can do after the blindingly exciting first act gives way to bog-standard thriller clichés. It’s almost as if he’s auditioning for a better role than this. Let’s hope, unlike Winterbottom, he actually finds what he’s looking for.

The Wedding Guest is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, July 19th. On VoD the following Monday.

Blinded by the Light

Posted on by victorfraga

Take the cheesiest film you have ever seen, multiply it by a thousand and you’re still nowhere near it. Blinded by the Light is one of these films so formulaic and thoroughly doused in saccharine that it could give you a heart attack. Yet, it’s surprisingly delightful to watch, even if you are not a fan of Bruce Springsteen (which I’m not, quite the opposite). Oh, the sweet dangers of sugar!

The year is 1987 and our protagonist is 17-year old British Pakistani Javed. He lives in the lacklustre and soulless town of Luton (incidentally, voted the “ugliest” town in the UK a few years ago), and watching cars drive past on the motorway from the hilltop is one of his biggest sources of entertainment. He puts pen to paper in an attempt to free himself from his humdrum existence. But he has no confidence in his words. His conservative Pakistani father believes that writing is not a job. It’s his school teacher who encourages him to carry on with it.

Racism is widespread and even normalised. A pig’s head is exhibited outside the local mosque, Javed is spat on on the street and made to move tables in a restaurant in order to make room for a group of white thugs, children urinate through the letter slot of Javed’s house, an his walls are vandalised with xenophobic graffiti. The far-right takes to the streets in order to demonstrate against “Pakis”. His family seem mostly unfazed. They never report the crimes to the police, instead proceeding to clean the urine and the graffiti themselves. They are conformists. They tacitly agree to their marginalised position in society.

Javed’s father insists that his son is Pakistani (despite being born in the UK) and that he will never be British. He demands that the young man stops writing. “How many Pakistani writers do you know?”, he asks. He believes that Javed should not challenge the established orthodoxies of his culture. He also believes that Javed should not date a white girl, and instead promises to find him an arranged marriage.

One day, a Sikh friend introduces Javed to Bruce Springsteen by lending him two cassette tapes. He immediately connects with the music. “It’s as if he’s talking directly to me”, he puts its succinctly. “I’ve just popped your Bruce cherry”, his friend boasts. The gleeful and optimistic lyrics about dreaming and self-empowerment progressively take over his life. The words pop up of the screen, fly and swirl around his head. At times, they are projected on the walls outside. It’s the content of these songs that will inspire Javed and instil his poems with colour and vibrancy. He eventually wins a contest in school with his poem “A Runaway American Dream in Luton”, named after the Springsteen song “Runaway American Dream”, and the prize could change his life forever. The problem is that his father isn’t too pleased about it.

It may come as a disappointment to many British people that the British Pakistani teen found inspiration in an American composer whose most famous album is entitled “Born in the U.S.A”. In fact, this is not a creative choice. Blinded by the Light (which is also the name of a Springsteen song) is based on a real story. And the fact that Springsteen is not British is not an issue. This is a film about universality of music and dreams. Springsteen could be American, Brazilian, Italian or Japanese. The identity of the movie itself is rather international. The production is British, the singer is American, the characters are Pakistani and director is Kenyan.

From a language and format perspective, Blinded by the Light is a squeaky clean, highly sanitised movie. This is an easily digestible and earnest movie with its heart at the right place, plus a a clearcut message of tolerance, diversity and racial reconciliation. Exactly as you would expect from a Gurinder Chadha movie. It’s worth a trip to the cinema. It’s guaranteed to put a smile on your face. But it probably won’t convert you into a fan of the Bruce Springsteen. Be grateful!

Blinded by the Light is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 9th, with previews across the country in the two weeks preceding the official launch. On VoD on Monday, December 9th.

Memory: The Origins Of Alien

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) first came out, no one knew about its most notorious scene. These days it’s been so referenced in films, television and popular culture that everyone, it seems, does so. If you’ve never actually Alien, treat yourself to watching it before seeing Memory: The Origins Of Alien. Or, indeed, before reading this review.

You’d be forgiven, as this new documentary starts, for thinking you’d wandered into a different film. Spiders on sun-drenched stone surfaces. Footage of Greek temples. But then, visuals clearly inspired by Alien show three Furies waking up on the floor of a spaceship interior and advancing towards camera. The voice-over invokes the myth of Clytemnestra and the Furies, although they are referenced rather than well explained so you’d be advised to click through the above links or google and look up references to them before seeing the film.

Greek temple/Furies bookend notwithstanding, this generally excellent documentary about Alien isn’t quite as integrated a whole as 78/52, director Philippe’s prior, terrific documentary about Alfred Hitchcock, the making of Psycho (1960) and the shooting of the infamous shower scene. However at a pitch level Memory: The Origins Of Alien at least follows a similar model: an examination of a film with a key shocking scene which resonated heavily through popular culture both at the time of its initial release and ever since. In the case of Alien, that would be the so-called chest-burster scene in which John Hurt, seemingly recovering from having an alien entity known after the film came out as a face-hugger clamped to his face with a tube inserted into his mouth, which creature has disappeared, being interrupted when eating a meal with crew mates by his suddenly becoming very ill before an alien entity fatally bursts out of his chest.

Alien differs from Psycho in that while Hitchcock’s film very much conforms to the idea of film director as auteur – there are other collaboators however (despite a specious argument that surfaces from time to time that Saul Bass not Hitch shot the shower scene) the whole thing was Hitch’s vision – Alien is somewhat problematic in that regard, being the product of at least three separate minds: US writer Dan O’Bannon, Swiss artist H.R.Giger and British director Ridley Scott. One can certainly play auteurist games with Alien and talk about it in terms of Scott’s wider body of directorial work, but no serious attempt at understanding the film can fail to examine the contributions of the other two contributors.

Indeed, watching this documentary, if anyone can lay claim to being auteur of Alien, it would be O’Bannon who wrote it and spent $1 000 of his own rather than the production’s money to hire Giger to make sketches and designs on paper before Scott became anywhere near involved. For a while, it was set to be directed by Walter Hill, a director who writes most of his films, but he wasn’t especially enamoured of the project and eventually left to make Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981). Hill’s name remains on all the Alien films as producer. A good half of the current documentary is devoted to O’Bannon, with a little interview material augmented by considerably more interview footage of his knowledgeable wife Diane. There’s a short if informative section on Giger and then, finally, the last half hour or so covers Scott’s involvement and the actual shooting, including the chest-burster sequence.

That makes the whole very much a film of two halves – the O’Bannon half and the Scott half. The O’Bannon half is the better one, packed with fascinating insights which make you want to go back and watch the original film all over again. The brief Giger section is just as good, although there’s not all that much of it. In the Scott section, Scott comes over as the right person to direct the film, in tune with O’Bannon and Giger, but there’s a sense in which Alien is more O’Bannon’s baby than Scott’s. Scott brought Giger back onto the project after Giger had been dropped against O’Bannon’s wishes during the period when Walter Hill was the director.

A number of pundits wax rather too lyrical about Alien and there’s no mention of the embarrassing moment after the chest-bursting in which the little post chest-burst critter hilariously dashes off screen like the Road Runner from Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons. The interviews in 78/52 threw all manner of light on various aspects of Psycho; those in Memory: The Origins Of Alien are a little less critical and a little more adulatory, which doesn’t do the piece any favours.

Yet, flawed as both Alien and this documentary may be, the former remains one of the great filmic SF texts while the latter proves a mostly worthwhile and compelling companion piece. If it doesn’t attempt to cover the series of films that followed – a little more on Scott and Prometheus, in particular, would have been good – it nevertheless throws considerable light onto how Alien got made (and how it very nearly didn’t) and most definitely merits just over an hour an a half of your time.

Memory: The Origins Of Alien is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th, and then on VoD the following Monday, September 2nd.. Watch the film trailer below:

Phoenix (Føniks)

Posted on by victorfraga

Jill (Ylva Bjorkaas Thedin) has to learn how to behave like an adult from a very young age. She cares for her alcoholic and emotionally unstable mother Astrid (Maria Bonnevie) and younger brother Bo (Casper Falck-Løvås). Astrid is still young and good-looking, despite the black circles around her eyes and the dishevelled hair revealing her dysfunctional lifestyle and personality. She’s an artist, and her paintings populate nearly every corner of the cluttered dwelling somewhere in suburban Oslo. She’s extremely crotchety and volatile, and anger outbursts are part of their routine.

One day, Astrid is invited for a job interview at the local art gallery. Could she turn her life around and rise from the ashes like the mythical bird in the film title? Jill buys her a white blouse for the occasion in order to maximise her changes of landing the new post. The white garment is a peace token, but Astrid is hardly interested in reconciliation. Her reaction is disheartening, quickly veering from affection and perplexity into gratuitous aggression. Parallel to the job interview, Jill is also expecting her estranged father Nils (Sverrir Gudnason) to visit in a couple of days in order to celebrate her 15th birthday. Astrid is jealous and bitter, telling her daughter that her former partner will simply ignore the occasion.

Then tragedy strikes. Jill is left grappling with a devastating event, but decides to conceal the fact from everyone in order to carry on with her birthday celebrations as planned. Nils does show up, but he too has a very dirty secret in store that he won’t share until the very end of the film. Jill has contend with both failed motherhood and fatherhood, plus a vulnerable young brother.

The young actress Bjorkass Thedin is rather impressive. She embodies Scandinavian stoicism and determination. She combines innocence with a subtle joi-de-vivre at the face of adversity, and she has a very unorthodox way of dealing external pressures.

All in all, this is an effective drama with elements of kitchen sink realism and coming-of-age tale. There are also a few subtle horror devices, however they never come full circle. It’s a riveting movie which will keep you guessing what happens next, and how long Jill will manage to keep her skeletons in the closet (or rather monsters in the cellar, in one of those communal basement sheds common in many European countries yet virtually non-existent in the UK). Yet this is not one of those punch-in-the-face, memorable movies that will stay with you for a long time.

Phoenix is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, September 13th. On VoD on Monday, January 13th.

Are You Proud?

Posted on by victorfraga

Are you proud? Are you proud to be gay, to be queer, to be lesbian, to be bisexual, to be transgender, to be non-binary, to be gender dysphoric, to be asexual, to be intersex, to be… whatever you wish? This question is dividing the contemporary LGBTQ+ community on campuses, in academia, on the streets, in the bars and wherever we gather, and it probably will be evident enough at the forthcoming Gay Pride in London on July 6. In short, the community in the United Kingdom is very much in the same place as such communities in many privileged part of the globe and this documentary fully chronicles and surveys this.

Ashley Joiner’s new documentary Are You Proud? describes, firstly historically and then issue by issue, the journey of the LGBTQ+ community in Britain from first tentative attempts at legal reform to the full panoply of the challenges that we now face. This includes the attack of Clause 28, the Aids/HIV crisis, the backlash from the police after the initial legalisation to the fevered debate nowadays, the meaning of sexual identity is and how it relates to all the other identities that are found in the LGBTQ+ community (racism being a prominent topic).

We are given an account of the life of one man who, from his days involved in WWII, to a pretended marriage, producing children, came out years after he knew he was gay. We are treated to charming footage of men dancing together shortly after homosexual acts in private between men aged 21 and over were made legal, looking so conventional it is comic. We see interesting footage about an early demonstration on Highbury Fields. Michael Cashman movingly describes how gay men who had died of Aids related symptoms were “reclaimed” by their conventional families, their gay identities were whitewashed away, and they disappeared suddenly without explanation from the gay community.

The UK community suffered the particular insult of Clause 28 from its own government in which schools discussing sexual issues with pupils were forbidden to “intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”. The absurd assumption that homosexuality could be “promoted” demonstrated how nasty establishment residual prejudice could be.

Having climbed out from under the rock of oppression and the description as filthy, dirty, perverted and dangerous, the LGBTQ+ community has constantly sought to claim its own narrative as proud and out. This has led to, especially under the influence of sexual and gender identity politics, initially so valuable in getting rid of insulting narratives, to an obsession with identities, sexualities and life-style and the interactions between them. I think this is a pity, but we are going to be detained in this place for some time yet.

This documentary does full justice to the situation of the LGBTQ+ community, including some of the downsides such as the commercialisation of Pride, and it deserves to be seen widely. I wonder what the situation will be the situation in 50 years’ time.

Are You Proud? is out in cinemas on Friday, July 26th. On VoD Friday, September 20th.

Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

What is art? Why do artists make art? These questions lie behind Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest film, like his earlier The Lives Of Others (2006) a German story exploring that country’s history and identity. It clocks in at over three hours, but don’t let that put you off because it needs that time to cover the considerable ground it does. Never Look Away spans the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in WW2, the liquidation of people considered by the Nazis inferior and therefore unfit to live and the very different worlds of post-war art schools in first East and later West Germany. This means it also spans two generations: those who were adults during the war, and those who were children at that time and became adults in post-war Germany.

Six year old Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) wants to be an artist. He is taken to Dresden by his Aunt Elizabeth (Saskia Rosenthal from Lore, Cate Shortland, 2012) to see an exhibition of Degenerate Art mounted by the Nazis. He is fascinated. She tells him she rather likes the works displayed, but warns him not to tell anyone else. Later, he finds her playing the piano nude. She extols the mysteries of art to be found in life and exhorts him to “never look away”. She’s both creatively gifted and mentally ill. Being taken away in an ambulance to be incarcerated in a hospital she again issues that same exhortation. She will never leave the hospital system, thanks to Nazi doctors who have the power of life or death over their patients.

During the war, one night Kurt watches tin foil dropped by bombers around his home “to jam radio communication” before they drop bombs on Dresden in the distance, razing it to the ground.

After the war, Kurt – now a young man (Tom Schilling) – works painting signs until his boss, impressed by Kurt’s artistic skill, has him apply to Dresden art school where he falls in love with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer) whose gynaecologist father (Sebastian Koch from The Lives Of Others) regards him as inferior stock and tries to destroy the couple’s relationship. After a promising career as a Socialist Realist painter of murals, Kurt with Ellie in tow defects from East to West Berlin a couple of months before the Berlin Wall is built. Kurt becomes a student at that hotbed of modern art Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and later a famous artist.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, but it’s difficult to give away much more without spoilers. The whole is based on the life of internationally renowned artist Gerhard Richter, who has read the script by the writer-director and made one or two suggestions which were incorporated. However, Richter has subsequently disowned the film (despite not having viewed it). Kurt’s tutor at the Kunstakademie is based on equally celebrated artist Joseph Beuys. Von Donnersmarck describes the piece as a work of fiction, although a great deal of the material appears to be historically accurate with names changed.


This is masterful storytelling with top-notch performances. More importantly, it seems to pick at the soul of a nation (Germany). There’s a lot of very nasty material festering beneath the surface and as you watch certain elements really start to get to you. Having watched it twice, this writer can attest to its being even more powerful on a second viewing: lots of little details elude you first time round as you grapple with the shocking overall story only to make themselves known second time around as you have a chance to take in the detail.

Never Look Away garnered two well deserved Oscar nominations earlier this year, for Best Foreign Film and Best Cinematography (it was shot by Caleb Deschanel whose impressive credits include The Black Stallion, Carroll Ballard, 1979). Alongside The Lives Of Others, which dealt with the Stasi (the East German secret police), it feels as if von Donnersmarck is building a panorama of German history through a series of historically grounded narratives of which this is only the second.

Finally, the German title Werk Ohne Autor translates literally as Work Without Author in reference to the artist’s claim that the photographs which form the basis of paintings “are just photographs”. This film suggests there’s a lot more to these apparently random images than that. Possibly the most effective slice of narrative storytelling we’ll see in the cinema this year. Supremely powerful, dirtylicious stuff.

Never Look Away is out in the UK on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, October 28th.

Never Look Away is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.