Conspiracy Cinema at the IFI: Part II

The IFI presented a season of post-Watergate conspiracy cinema in June 2011, and now it’s having another conspiracy cinema season with a more European flavour. It’s rather appropriate that this German-flavoured season comes just as the GDPR comes into effect, as the GDR experience of surveillance and paranoia (that isn’t actually paranoia because they really are watching you) informs both the regulation and the season. These films reflect a time of political violence internationally by guerrilla groups and government militias, a feeling that anyone could be assassinated at any time, and the continual intrusion into private lives of shadowy forces.

 

Z

Saturday 12th May 2018
16.00

Costa-Gavras’ third feature made his international reputation, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1970; and more importantly making it onto Barry Norman’s 100 Best Films of the Century. It was inspired by the killing of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963 and was a defiant artistic gesture against the Generals in Athens. “Any similarity to actual events or persons living or dead is not coincidental. It is intentional” it proclaims in its credits.

127 MINS, FRANCE, 1969, DIGITAL, SUBTITLED

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL

Sunday 13th May 2018
16.00

A right-wing paramilitary group plots to kill French President General De Gaulle in response to his belated granting of Algerian independence. There is only one man for the job, Edward Fox as the professional assassin known as The Jackal. Learning of the conspiracy, police inspector Lebel (Michael Lonsdale before Moonraker) is given emergency powers to conduct his investigation and a game of cat and mouse ensues, with Cyril Cusack playing a memorable part. High Noon director Fred Zinnemann’s amps up the tension in this suspenseful adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel, which was itself inspired by an actual 1962 attempt on De Gaulle’s life.

143 MINS, UK-FRANCE, 1973, DIGITAL

THE FLIGHT

Wednesday 16th May 2018
18.15

Dr Schmidt (Armin Mueller-Stahl) has had it. He’s had with the GDR, he’s had it with the Stasis, he’s had it with the bureaucracy that pretends to be running a functioning Communist state by its own lights but sets the price of grain based on the market prices reported from Kansas. So he seeks the help of an underground faction to escape to the west. Incredibly Roland Gräf’s film was actually made in East Germany,  bankrolled by the state-owned DEFA studios. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 1978 Karlovy Vary Film Festival, it was the last film Mueller-Stahl made before, in a touch of life imitating art, he bolted from East Germany to West Germany in 1980.

94 MINS, EAST GERMANY, 1977, DIGITAL, SUBTITLED

INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION

Saturday 19th May 2018
16.00

Director Elio Petri surfed the same zeitgeist as Dario Fo’s play Accidental Death of an Anarchist with this stylish black comedy of endemic police corruption in Italy. Gian Maria Volontè plays a respected police inspector who murders his mistress and then, oh joy, handles the investigation of the murder himself. Like a more satirical riff on Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window he begins to drop ever-more obvious clues that he dun it, but nobody wants to know… This won the 1917 Best Foreign Film Oscar, but more importantly it boasts a terrific Ennio Morricone score.

115 MINS, ITALY, 1970, DIGITAL, SUBTITLED

THE PARALLAX VIEW

Sunday 20th May 2018
16.00

Alan J Pakula’s 1974 thriller sees Warren Beatty’s journalist investigating the possibility that powerful corporation the Parallax Organisation was behind a political assassination allegedly carried out by a conveniently dead lone gunman, and then murdered all the witnesses to the truth. Production was affected by a writer’s strike, and it shows, but there is a notable use of sound, as well as a scene where Gordon Willis allegedly cast a huge shadow over Beatty’s hammy breakdown to stop him embarrassing himself. The dazzling and famous highlight comes when Beatty is subjected to a test to see whether he fits the criteria for maladjusted misfit that Parallax likes to use for its lone gunmen. You know, people like say Lee Harvey Oswald, or James Earl Ray…

102 MINS, USA, 1974, 35MM

STATE OF SIEGE

Wednesday 23rd May 2018
18.30

Costa-Gavras again, this time his follow up to Z in 1972 in which he drew attention to US meddling in the internal politics of their near neighbours. Yves Montand is Philip Michael Santore, a CIA agent advising an unnamed Latin American government on the best method of dealing with terrorists. Enhanced interrogation the euphemism is now. Kidnapped by the very leftist guerrillas he’s been training the state to subdue he gets a taste of his own medicine, as he’s used as collateral in a prisoner swap. Media hysteria ensues, and Costa-Gavras critiques the brutality of Kissinger’s realpolitik, propping up right-wing dictatorships to prevent the emergence of left-wing dictatorships.

120 MINS, FRANCE-ITALY, 1972, DIGITAL, SUBTITLED

THE LOST HONOUR OF KATHERINA BLUM

Saturday 26th May 2018
16.00

Released just a year after Willy Brandt was forced to resign as Chancellor, following the explosive revelation that one of his closest advisers was a Stasi agent; undercover for 20 years!; this spoke to West German fears of being completely destroyed by unwitting association. Angela Winkler is Katherina Blum, a maid who sleeps with an attractive man. And also a suspected terrorist, and so she finds herself accused in private and public of being a terrorist too. Not based on BILD, for legal reasons, this was an indictment of media rush to judgement, aided and abetted by out of control forces of law and order.

106 MINS, WEST GERMANY, 1975, BLU-RAY

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR

Sunday 27th May 2018
16.00

Sydney Pollack shamelessly muscled in on Alan J Pakula territory with this post-Watergate slice of paranoia. Robert Redford is an unimportant CIA researcher Joe Turner who goes to lunch one day and is thankful that he did and had a long lunch because when he finally returns he finds everybody else in the office got shot. Kidnap a cute hostage (Faye Dunaway), fend off a European assassin (Max Von Sydow), unravel international global conspiracy that he’d accidentally stumbled on? All in a day’s work for a CIA desk jockey. Okay, maybe more than just a day, but still not bad for one unused to the field.

117 MINS, USA, 1975, BLU-RAY

KNIFE IN THE HEAD

Wednesday 30th May 2018
18.30

Angela Winkler again, this time playing the estranged wife of Bruno Ganz; who is Hoffman, another victim of wilful state character assassination. Hoffman is looking for his estranged wife when he gets caught in the suppression of a left-wing rally. He wakes up in hospital, partially paralysed and with severe memory loss. The police accuse him of killing one of their number, the left-wingers hail him as a victim of police brutality, he hasn’t a clue what happened. His attempts to figure out the truth lead to clashes with the authorities, and a grand metaphor for a country haunted by its violent past.

108 MINS, WEST GERMANY, 1978, 35MM

100 Best Films of the Century (sic)

Poring over Barry Norman’s ‘100 Best Films of the Century’ list last month set off musings on what a personal version of such a list would be. All such lists are entirely personal, and deeply speculative, but it’s time to be more ambitious/foolhardy than heretofore and nail this blog’s colours to the mast. Norman unapologetically focused on Old Hollywood, but Talking Movies has more regard than he for the 1980s and 1990s. The years to 1939 are allocated 10 films, and each decade thereafter gets 10 films, with an additional 10 films chosen to make up any egregious omissions. What is an egregious omission, or addition for that matter, is naturally a matter of opinion. Like the truest lists this was written quickly with little revision. If you don’t trust your own instincts why would you ever trust anyone else’s?

The first day to 1939

Nosferatu

The Lodger

M

King Kong

It Happened One Night

The 39 Steps

A Night at the Opera

Top Hat

Secret Agent

The Adventures of Robin Hood

Gone with the Wind

1940 to 1949

His Girl Friday

Rebecca

Citizen Kane

The Maltese Falcon

Casablanca

Shadow of a Doubt

The Big Sleep

The Stranger

Rope

The Third Man

1950 to 1959

Strangers on a Train

The Lavender Hill Mob

Singin’ in the Rain

Them!

Rear Window

High Society

Moby Dick

Vertigo

North by Northwest

Rio Bravo

1960 to 1969

Last Year in Marienbad

The Manchurian Candidate

The Birds

The Great Escape

Billy Liar

Dr. Strangelove

Goldfinger

Dr. Zhivago

The Sound of Music

The Good The Bad And The Ugly

Once Upon a Time in the West

Ma Nuit Chez Maud

The Italian Job

1970 to 1979

Kelly’s Heroes

Aguirre the wrath of God

The Godfather

Dog Day Afternoon

Jaws

All the President’s Men

Annie Hall

Star Wars

Superman

Apocalypse Now

1980 to 1989

The Blues Brothers

Chariots of Fire

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Blade Runner

Ghostbusters

Back to the Future

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Aliens

Blue Velvet

Wall Street

Au Revoir Les Enfants

Die Hard

1990 to 1999

JFK

My Own Private Idaho

The Silence of the Lambs

Terminator 2

The Age of Innocence

Jurassic Park

Pulp Fiction

Speed

The Usual Suspects

Scream

The Matrix

Fight Club

2000 to 2009

Memento

Almost Famous

Moulin Rouge!

Ocean’s Eleven

Donnie Darko

The Rules of Attraction

The Lord of the Rings

Team America

Brick

Casino Royale

Atonement

The Dark Knight

2010 to the present day

Inception

Scott Pilgrim Vs the World

Incendies

Skyfall

Mud

This is the End

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Birdman

High-Rise

20^th Century Women

Taking Stock of Keanu

7 years ago to the day I wrote a piece on how Keanu Reeves, then 45, was dealing with mid-life cinematically. I think it’s time to check on Keanu again.

In the distant halcyon past of 2004 I wrote a profile of Keanu Reeves for the University Observer. He had just declined Superman for Warner Bros when I wrote that profile, and in 2010, not having any currently lucrative franchise, I said he’d be now be considered about 20 years too old to even audition, and George Reeves be damned.  In the Observer piece I’d cryptically noted that “The 40s is the decade where film stars have their last big roles”, but lacked the space to really flesh that out. Somebody, perhaps Barry Norman, had suggested Hollywood leading men lose their cachet on hitting 50, so their 40s are the years where they have both the maturity and the box-office clout to take on the roles for which they will be best remembered. Think John Wayne (Red River, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Sands of Iwo Jima, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Searchers), Gregory Peck (Moby Dick, The Big Country, On the Beach, The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, To Kill a Mockingbird), Michael Douglas (Romancing the Stone, Fatal Attraction, Wall Street, The War of the Roses, Basic Instinct, Falling Down). It seems a good enough theory.

Between 2004 and 2014 Keanu appeared in Constantine, Thumbsucker, The Lake House, A Scanner Darkly, Street Kings, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Henry’s Crime, Generation Um…, Man of Tai Chi, 47 Ronin, and John Wick. Like Jack Nicholson in the 1980s he’s not been afraid to play supporting parts. His gleefully self-parodic performance in a glorified cameo in Thumbsucker as a zen orthodontist who spouts Gnostic nonsense to the titular hero is by far the best thing in Mike Mills’ first movie. His turn in Rebecca Miller’s Pippa Lee is also a joy, as his middle-age failed pastor and failed husband screw-up embarks on a tentative romance with Robin Wright’s eponymous character that may just redeem them. Keanu’s sci-fi films, Scanner and Earth, struggled to find large audiences. Richard Linklater’s roto-scoped adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel is a good if odd film but Robert Downey Jr’s manic turn eclipses everything else, while Earth is a serviceable Christmas blockbuster in which Keanu nicely plays the emerging empathy with humans of the alien with awesome powers but the film struggles to truly justify remaking the revered original for the sake of CGI destruction sequences.

As far as leading dramatic roles go Street Kings’ Tom Ludlow must rank as one of his best characters. Ludlow is ‘the tip on the spear’ of the LAPD, a blunt instrument who stages ‘exigent circumstances’ to act on his Dirty Harry impulses and kill the worst criminals. Wrongly implicated in the murder of his former partner he jeopardises an elaborate cover-up by his friends in his single-minded search for the cop-killers, his unstoppable thirst for answers acting as a tragic flaw which reveals that his violent tendencies have been exploited by smarter people. Beside that career highlight The Lake House can seem insubstantial although it is a very sweet entry in the lengthy list of Keanu’s romantic dramas, while Constantine stands out commercially as the franchise that never was… Keanu’s chain-smoking street magus John Constantine bore little resemblance to Alan Moore’s comics character but it powered a supernatural thriller with exquisitely deliberate pacing, courtesy of future Hunger Games main-man Francis Lawrence; making his directorial debut. Utilising what Lawrence has since spoken of as the twilight zone between PG-13 and R it had a fine sense of metaphysical rather than visceral horror, and was Keanu’s best film since The Matrix.

 

And then came John Wick…

RIP Barry Norman

I was saddened yesterday to hear of the death of former BBC film critic Barry Norman. I can’t add to the obituaries, all I can contribute is a personal note on what I think he meant to me and other film fans of my generation.

Barry Norman for a whole generation was the archetypal film critic. His avuncular remarks from his comfy chair in the studio that morphed with changing fashions over the decades let you know exactly what films were worthy of recognition and championing in the ongoing narrative of cinema. His retirement from the BBC in 1998, volubly aghast at what Hollywood was purveying as their stock in trade, seems like a merciful escape for him now that some American film critics are writing serious thinkpieces about their duty to avoid reviewing much of Hollywood’s current (even worse) stock in trade lest it destroy their critical palate. I watched Film 98 and its previous incarnations religiously, and howled in outrage every summer as Norman buggered off on his holliers just as we all most needed his guidance on what blockbusters were worth watching.

Norman was famously unimpressed by the ego and entitlement of famous actors and directors, from John Wayne to Mel Gibson, and would never have stooped to the recycling of breathless press releases gushing about the all-time record box-office grosses just achieved by … (never of course adjusted for inflation, for painfully obvious reasons) that drives so much of online film commentary. Instead he took the long view, a very long view indeed. His 1992 book 100 Best Films of the Century ostentatiously dwelt mostly in the past; a duty given the tremendous present bias that afflicts our culture; with only 5 films being made after 1980. I read it an impressionable age, and when revisiting it after a decade was aghast/amused/astonished to discover I had been parroting many of Norman’s contentions under the genuine belief they were my own opinions.

Not of the individual films, I hasten to add, but the broad sweep of cinema as outlined in his contextualising introduction to his picks. Some of the lines about certain films still resonate, Apocalypse Now being the best example; I read his piece on it before seeing it, yet frame in my mind in his terms. Barry Norman was such a fixture that something similar happens with Back to the Future II. I didn’t see it in the cinema, but I think of his review on BBC and the scene he picked to illustrate it whenever I see that scene in the movie. What he talked about on Film affected what I thought was worth watching, even if I disagreed. He valorised Woody Allen for years, and I never got it; but I eventually investigated 1970s Woody and thus began to appreciate the body of work. Alas, I never made it to the Helix in DCU years after he’d stopped presenting to see him speak on some of his favourite Old Hollywood films, but I still have his book, and helpfully someone on IMDb has used it to create a watch-list of Norman’s picks: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls055207230/

 

The Birth of a Nation, Battleship Potemkin, The Gold Rush, The General, Napoleon, All Quiet on the Western Front, Frankenstein, Duck Soup, It Happened One Night, The 39 Steps, Top Hat, Modern Times, La Grande Illusion, Oh, Mr. Porter!, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Vanishes, Pygmalion, La regle du jeu, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, The Grapes of Wrath, The Thief of Bagdad, The Bank Dick, His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Bambi, To Be or Not to Be, Double Indemnity, Laura, Les enfants du paradis, I Know Where I’m Going, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Big Sleep, The Best Years of Our Lives, My Darling Clementine, A Matter of Life and Death, Great Expectations, Bicycle Thieves, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Red River, The Red Shoes, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Whisky Galore!, The Third Man, Orphee, Rashomon, Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, The Lavender Hill Mob, The African Queen, Jeux Interdits, High Noon, Pat and Mike, Singin’ in the Rain, Genevieve, Shane, Seven Samurai, On the Waterfront, La Strada, Bad Day at Black Rock, Pather Panchali, Richard III, The Searchers, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Nights of Cabiria, Paths of Glory, Some Like It Hot, Psycho, A Bout de Souffle, Lawrence of Arabia, The Leopard, Bonnie and Clyde, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Z, The Wild Bunch, M.A.S.H., The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Cabaret, The Godfather, Mean Streets, Sleeper, The Godfather: Part II, Chinatown, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, Gregory’s Girl, E.T, Ran, Hannah and Her Sisters.

While some people may worship at the protean altar of the crowd-sourced IMDB Top 250 or the too cool for film school hipster fashions of the Sight & Sound poll this will always be for me the North Star of cinema. An unapologetic focus on Old Hollywood, foreign films picked because they made a huge impact not because you need to fill a quota, the silent era dismissed in just 5 films rather than (as Sight & Sound’s polled experts are wont) pretentiously behaving akin to a lover of the theatre who bemoans everything since the Greeks, and the recent past put on hold to see how it sets before celebrating it: only 5 films since 1980 in a list compiled in 1992, and only 12 films admitted from the 1970s. Norman never pretended the present moment was uniquely awesome.

Barry Norman’s legacy is to forever be the voice in your head which asks, “Yes, this film is fun, but will it endure?” In a way every Irish film critic of my generation, professional or dilettante, will have internalised for life Barry Norman’s scepticism of commercial success being equated with artistic quality as well as his sardonic “…And why not?”

RIP Michael Dwyer

I was saddened to hear of the death of Irish Times film critic Michael Dwyer. Many words have been written about Dwyer’s contribution to Irish cinema, his founding of the Dublin International Film Festival, and his work in building an audience for foreign films in Ireland. I can add little to such perspectives, what I can add is a personal note on what I think he meant to me and other film fans of my generation.

As the elder statesman of cinema at the Irish Times from a ridiculously young age Dwyer was more influential than anyone with the exception of Barry Norman in forming the archetype for a whole generation of what the role of a film critic was, and what films were worthy of recognition and championing in the ongoing narrative of cinema. My own personal experience of Dwyer’s writing falls into, yes, a three-act arc. First was the period of adoring respect – the religious reading of the Irish Times every Friday to see what films were good, what films were bad, what directors deserved respect, and the continual processing of his casual asides into an expanding mosaic of just what films from cinema past and present were important and good.

Then inevitably came the teenage age of rebellion. This began for me with sneering at his (still) frankly embarrassing laudatory review of Titanic in 1998, and then found greater expression in criticising his Top 20 Films of the Year lists which seemed to take a peculiar joy in not featuring films from the Top 20 Highest Grossing Films of the Year lists. Eventually this perception of an utter disjunct between critic and audience led to a jaded boredom with his perspective and a cynical distaste for the clichés of his style, especially when writing about sex and violence in movies, which found voice in a polemical University Observer piece about the tired and tiresome predictability of critical responses to films like 9 Songs and The Passion of the Christ.

The reappraisal came later, after I had finished writing my abrasive film column for the University Observer and had started writing reviews, when I realised just how difficult it sometimes is to sum up your reaction to a film in a short word-count. Indeed I could not possibly have hacked it as a film critic for InDublin, writing up to 6 reviews a week, had I not downloaded Dwyer’s review of 300 and taken it apart to understand how he structured his reviews – which gave him the head-start needed to make the sometimes tortuous work of reviewing seem easy. At this juncture, having cycled back to a position of mature rather than adoring respect, it was fitting that I finally met Michael Dwyer at a press screening of Youth without Youth. He was charming and talkative about the decline of Coppola and the history of InDublin and made me feel like I truly belonged to Graham Greene’s ‘mornings in the dark’ corps.

Other people have written about Dwyer’s tangible legacy but from my perspective his legacy is to forever be the voice in your head which asks, “Yes, this film is fun, but will it endure?” In a way every Irish film critic of my generation, professional or amateur, will have Barry Norman’s sardonic “…And why not?” and Michael Dwyer’s critical perspective internalised for life. And so long as we all keep hearing that voice then a part of him lives on forever in his readers.