Tag: psycho

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:

Drive (Pulsión)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This Argentinan short, although computer generated, has the feel of stop-motion. It brings to mind work by Lars Von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. A narrative conveyed by a series of disturbing vignettes (think: the opening minutes of Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) is put together with the same kind of fastidious technical attention to detail you find in the Quay Brothers’ films. A couple of scenes borrow directly from one of the murders in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but in a clever way that shocks you much as those scenes in Psycho originally did. There’s a Lynchian feel about the whole thing – not just in the strange, quasi-industrial sounds recalling Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) or the weird lighting and heavily controlled mise-en-scène, but also in the overall feel of strange and terrible things happening within families and local communities, people adrift within the darkness of human existence.

One single viewing is not enough for this film which really only reveals itself on repeated viewings. There’s so much going on here in the characters of a father, a mother, a teenage boy and flashbacks to the teenager as a small baby. After the death of the father who is run over while drunk, the relationship between the son and the mother moves into abuse as she hits him for not eating his food and voyeurism as he spies on her through her bedroom keyhole, referencing similar scenarios in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and, again, Psycho. Added to the mix are an animal corpse, a gratuitous rabbit killing and human murders. One particularly shocking scene involves the boy’s estranged friend kissing a girl near an abandoned, wrecked car and the boy hurling a brick at the amorous couple from behind a wall.

The vignettes make the locations appear as model sets suspended in darkness, each built upon a square patch of ground lifted from a wider Cartesian grid. These scenes don’t just appear then disappear in time, their appearance is also isolated spatially from everything around them. It’s an extremely unsettling experience and a unique, highly idiosyncratic vision. One can imagine Casavecchia going on to further forays short or feature length, animation or live action. If he does start working in live action, I hope he keeps returning to animation too because his use of the medium is part of the reason the film works as well as it does here – and it feels as if he has a great deal more to offer audiences.

Drive (Pulsión) played in Annecy where it won a jury distinction for powerful storytelling. Watch the film trailer below:

You Were Never Really Here

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Dazzling. Kaleidoscopic. Violent. Psycho. Taxi Driver. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is at once a rare piece of virtuoso cinema playing with the possibilities of the form and a dark journey into a Hellish American underbelly. The images are the cinematograph’s answer to great paintings courtesy of production designer Tim Grimes and director of photography Thomas Townend: the music is an unforgettable, sometimes pounding score by Jonny Greenwood interspersed with classic songs like If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked You A Cake, in this context all the more unsettling for their homeliness.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is completely out there. One could say he dominates the movie, but actually Ramsay’s images and sounds dominate it just as much as Phoenix does. He has a much bigger role here than he does playing Jesus in Mary Magdalene, out next week. It seems almost disingenuous that of the two roles, You Were Never Really Here is the one that should tower above the medium. Maybe that’s the problem with portraying good and evil: it’s much easier to make evil stand out. Not that Phoenix’s character here is entirely bad: his antihero possesses a certain moral ambiguity.

Joe (Phoenix) is a mercenary employed by rich fathers of disappeared teenage girls to track them down and rescue them from captivity – meaning enforced sex work in houses used by paedophile rings. Joe’s modus operandi is to work out how many people including guards or security are inside, then take a hammer and bludgeon them to death as he encounters them one by one in order to safely remove his client’s daughter and return her to her father.

But this is no linear plot. The narrative is fractured so that, for example, events seen at the start turn up again later on. Were you watching a flashback? A flashforward? These games are constantly played with the audience, so much so that the piece may actually play differently to you if you go back and watch it again. There are moments cutting from the adult Joe to glimpses of him experiencing trauma as a child, for example breathing with a polythene bag over his head. Who is Joe? What happened to him in the past to make him the way he is now? We are given hints but told nothing specific and expected to draw our own conclusions. A multiplicity of interpretations, perhaps?

He constantly looks in on the home of his ageing mother (Judith Roberts) to check she’s okay. When he first visits, she’s been watching a TV rerun of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and it’s scared her. As in, she’s enjoyed watching a really scary movie. She takes a shower. She’s as independent and strong-willed as he is – and Joe is torn between being frustrated by the fact and being a devoted son. He mimics knife-slashing outside her bathroom door while she showers inside.

The other major female character is Senator’s young daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), drugged to her eyeballs when Joe rescues her from a paedophiles’ brothel. A young girl with no idea of what’s going on or being done to her. Very different from the seemingly savvy underage child prostitute played by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and apparently at the opposite end of things from Joe’s own mother – young, healthy and adrift rather than old, frail and anchored. And yet, these archetypes are undermined in the course of the film: mother has become the victim and Nina has been rescued.

Finally, who is Joe? In the closing minutes, he performs an extreme act of violent self-harm right before our eyes. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it’s in his imagination. Or perhaps it isn’t and the narrative’s happy ending is in his imagination.

Cut to somewhere in the middle of the film. Joe has delivered hammer blows to the head of two suited thugs. One of them, who has admitted that he wasn’t the murderer on this occasion, lies dying on the floor. Joe lies down beside him and allows the dying man to hold his hand. A moment of tenderness in the aftermath of violence.

The film constantly shifts the audience’s allegiances like this. Sometimes we warm to Joe. At other times, he’s our worst nightmare. He doesn’t say a lot. The strong script is generally sparse on dialogue, preferring to provide the wherewithal for the film to weave its magic/wreak its havoc in sounds, images, performances, editing and music. As such, it’s a highly visceral experience almost unimaginable in a medium other than cinema. It’s also indubitably dirty in its subject matter, in its manipulation of the cinematic medium and in its dealings with the audience. Even down to its enigmatic title, taken from the book from which it was adapted. If you were never really here, then that begs the question, where were you really? Should you have been here or should you have been somewhere else? Or did you really imagine the whole thing?

You Were Never Really Here was out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 9th. It’s available for digital streaming on Monday, July 2nd.

78/52

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock) first came out in 1960, no one knew about the shower 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 seen Psycho, treat yourself to watching it before seeing 78/52.

This documentary is called 78/52 after the shower scene’s number of set-ups (78) and cuts (52). Psycho was shot in four weeks; one of the four was dedicated to shooting that one scene.

In some ways, 78/52 doesn’t do what it says on the tin. It talks a little about the context of the film in Hitch’s career, a lot about Psycho the film and the cultural phenomenon – much more than this writer expected, actually, given that it purports to be a film about the shower scene – and then, quite some way in, gets round to talking in great depth about the shower scene. Which, for the Hitchcock nerd like myself or the Psycho admirer is fine.

Hitch himself and numerous key cast and crew members have long since passed away, among them leading lady Janet Leigh, leading man Anthony Perkins, designer Saul Bass and composer Bernard Herrmann. Despite these obstacles, Philippe has assembled an extraordinary cast of interviewees including numerous directors, editors, technicians, writers and actors as well as descendants of Hitch (granddaughter Tere Carrubba), Leigh (actor-daughter Jamie Lee Curtis) and Perkins (director-son Oz Perkins II).

In something of a coup, he also has Janet Leigh’s body double from Psycho Marli Renfro and there are alumni of the 1998 shot for shot Psycho remake too, not to mention Stephen Rebello whose excellent book Alfred Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho sits on my shelf. As if that wasn’t enough, their number also includes both Guillermo del Toro and the directing duo Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson whose respective latest films The Shape Of Water and The Endless are to be found elsewhere in this year’s LFF.

The interview material is wide-ranging and often revelatory. I consider myself a Hitchcock buff and heard or saw things here I’ve never heard or seen before. The only real problem is that in editing the documentary down to a taut 91 minutes, there must inevitably be a lot of material that had to be either left out or taken out. This results in the occasional anomaly, such as for example the implication that all Hitch’s films in the fifties were colour while Psycho was in black and white when the geek will know that Stage Fright (1950), Strangers On A Train (1951), I Confess (1952) and – most importantly because it breaks Hitch’s run of colour films from Dial M For Murder (1953) to North By NorthWest (1959) – The Wrong Man (1956) were also black and white. But such minor blips scarcely detract from 78/52’s monumental achievement of presenting afresh a film that many of us thought we already knew intimately, inside and out.

Speaking of minor elements in the film, for those audience members who can bear not to get up out of their seat the moment the credits roll, there’s a nice little something at the very end of the credits. Hitch, who on Psycho’s first run insisted no-one would be admitted after the film had started, would I think have heartily approved. Although he had such a strong understanding of audiences that he would also know that most punters wouldn’t possess the necessary patience.

78/52 is playing at BFI London Film Festival on 13th and 15th October, and a week later in the Cambridge Film Festival. The movie is out in cinemas on Friday, November 3rd, and then on DVD on December 11th, and BFI Player in the new year.

This is NOT just a film!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

Phew, it’s finally the end credits, this is such a relief, this is just a film after all! Or not? Some movies are so disturbing that you are glad that they have finally come to an end. But what if some of them do NOT find closure after the lights go on? Some characters in such films are so strong that they refuse to cease to exist. Instead they acquire a life of their own, either through the soul of the poor actor who impersonated them in the movie, or through a gullible and easily impressionable fan.

From Hithcock to Fassbinder, from the United States to Brazil, from horror to sexual liberation, sometimes fiction just wants to become reality. These characters are shining examples of anti-mimesis, a philosophical stance in the direct opposition to Aristotelian mimesis (the representation of the self through art). Its most notable proponent is Oscar Wilde, who opined in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”.

So next time you watch a jarring film and encounter a mighty or threatening character, don’t simply dismiss them as fictional. In fact, they might be waiting for you just around the corner. Or worse still, they might be living inside of you, dorment, just waiting for the right moment to bust out of your chest, kill you and take over your reality. Ouch, cinema can hurt!!!

…

1. Norman Bates in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

The crossdressing and incentuous mommy’s boy Norman Bates was played by Anthony Perkins, who also had serious mental health issues and a split personality – as he attempted to fight his homosexuality. Perkins was deeply closeted, self-hating and subjected himself to a series of psychiatric attempts in order to “cure” his same-sex attraction. He even used electroshock aversion therapy, precisely at the moment the gay liberation movement was smashing LGBT taboos. The knife in the famous shower sequence was replaced by an electroconvulsive therapy machine in real life, and both the victim and the perpetrator were Perkins himself. He died of Aids-related pneumonia in 1992, after living a life as lonely and dysfunctional as Norman Bates.

DMovies does not perceive homosexuality as a disease, and instead we celebrate sexual diversity. Perkins’s egodystonic attitude towards his sexuality represents the dysfunctional element here.

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2. Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)

Ted Levine should have received a Best Supporting Actor award for his role as Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, the twisted serial killer who skins females and dances in front of the mirror with his penis stuck between his legs, concocting a mock-vagina. His character was so controversial that, besides copious amounts of hate mail from across the world, the movie role offers largely became scarce. Most significantly, the habit of watching copious amounts of hardcore pornography for the role took a psychological toll on the man whose friends and co-workers describe as “the nicest guy you will ever meet”. Could the perverted crossdresser eventually take over Levine’s life?

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3. Armin Meier in Germany in Autumn (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

The West German omnibus film about the 1970s terrorist incidents known as German Autumn is composed of contributions from different filmmakers, including the enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The controversial director opted to show terrorism within a domestic environment: his very own house. He documents his stormy and abusive relationship with his mother Lilo Pompeit and his partner Armin Meier. The latter killed himself after not being invited to Fassbinder’s 33rd birthday party, shortly after the film was completed. Meier’s body was later found in Fassbinder’s apartment, the same one as in the movie.

Most of Fassbinder’s films did not have credits in the end, suggesting that the director did not want to separate fiction from reality. Such a harsh world mandates harsh cinema. Or is it the other way around?

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4. Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

The Italian director confessed that the rape sequence in this famous sexual liberation movie was non-consensual in an interview three years ago. He then tried to play it down by arguing that only the butter element wasn’t disclosed in the film script, but that Schneider was aware of the violence all along. One way or another, there was at least one non-consensual element in the sequence. The impact on Schneider’s life was tremendous. The French artist never again filmed another sex scene and she suffered from depression until her untimely death to cancer in 2011, suggesting that the butter rape indeed afflicted the woman for the rest of her life – click here for more about the infamous event.

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5. Fernando Ramos Da Silva in Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1980)

Possibly the most subversive Brazilian film ever made, Pixote is a riveting documentary-like account of Brazil’s delinquent youth and how they are used by corrupt police and other crime organizations to commit crimes. The film featured Fernando Ramos da Silva as Pixote at the age of just 12 and the veteran Brazilian actress Marília Pêra as the prostitute Sueli (both pictured below). Despite the director’s financial support, Ramos da Silva went back to a life of crime and poverty a few years after the film was completed. He was killed at the age of 19 by the same police which he tried to evade in the movie.

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6. Chucky in Child’s Play (Jack Bender, 1991)

Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were 10 years old when they kidnapped, tortured brutally murdered two-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool, in 1993, Thompson and Venables snatched the toddler from a shopping mall and took him to a railway line where they beat and sexually assaulted the young boy. They left Bulger’s mutilated body on the railway tracks to die. The case shocked Britain due to the level of sadism and young age of the murderers. Thompson and Venables were supposedly inspired by the evil toy Chucky in the horror film Child’s Play 3, which they watched shortly before the murder.

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7. Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)

Stone’s controversial satirical crim film has been associated with several serial killers, including the homicidal couple Sarah Edmonson and Benjamin Darras. In 1995, the murderous duo dropped LSD and watched Natural Born Killers repeatedly before going on a drug-fueled crime spree of robbing and shooting a convenience store clerk that left her a quadriplegic. During the crime spree, Darras shot and killed a Mississippi businessman. Edmonson was sentenced to 35 years in prison, while Darras is doing a life sentence. They were attempting the emulate the murderous couple in the ultra-violent flick.

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Such dangerous fiction can have loud reverberations into reality. Sometimes it’s be best to build a very tall and robust fourth wall keeping fiction where it belongs. But just how do we stop a character from jumping it?