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

Speed-reading towards illiteracy

Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller gave an interview recently to BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme, which poses some intriguing questions about how new cinemagoers experience the medium.

Miller cited Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By as a seminal text; the entire language of cinema was defined pre-sound. Miller was intrigued by the notion that there was a pure film language not reliant on the spoken word, and he decided to tell stories through that language; going so far as to describe Mad Max: Fury Road as a silent movie with sound – what matters is that one shot leads into the next shot to a purpose. As Miller notes this kind of cine-literacy is an acquired language, and a recent one; but it is one that can be mastered, in all cultures, before we’ve got a handle on actual literacy. But it’s his remark that we’re now all speed-reading stories (backed up by some statistics), that is a lit match tossed into a powder keg… Mad Max 2 had 1,200 shots, Mad Max: Fury Road had 2,900 shots, while Miller was told Jurassic Park had 950 shots, and Jurassic World by his estimation had more than triple that.

If we’re speed-reading stories, are we speed-reading into illiteracy? Back in 1997 Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese bemoaned the cine-illiteracy of young audiences:

ALLEN: I was talking to some college kids the other day, and they were bright kids who were going to a good college, and they had no idea about great directors. These bright college kids have no knowledge whatsoever of Truffaut’s films or Fellini’s films. And yet the universities do encourage them to read Mark Twain and Flaubert and Melville. … So many film students are film illiterate. They’re not unsophisticated. They probably know more about steadicams and special effects than the average audience. The guy who drives your cab will use those terms when talking about a film, but they’re illiterate in terms of —

SCORSESE: The lineage.

ALLEN: They’ve never seen any of these films. I think they have a different attention span. [My italics]

I admit my culpability in having that different attention span Woody Allen fretted over. I saw Scream as a teenager and was blown away by it. When I subsequently saw Hallowe’en I was inevitably bored by its slow pacing compared to its younger rival. I knew that without Hallowe’en there would be no Scream, I understood the lineage, I respected the execution, but I couldn’t stop myself wishing Carpenter would hustle things along a bit. As a result I’ve never re-watched Hallowe’en, while Scream remains one of my favourite and oft re-watched films. In 1997 Scorsese bemoaned his inability to be influenced by younger film-makers: “The young people today are the 21st century. I’m 20th century, I can’t help it. It’s hard to let new stuff in.” And there’s an equal generational problem in film criticism. The New Hollywood has been so valorised by audience that Bret Easton Ellis and Quentin Tarantino bemoan the 1980s to each other as the nadir of American movies. Whereas Back to the Future Day demonstrated the impact that decade’s movies had on their audience.

Miller extols the virtues of Buster Keaton and the montage technique of Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike, but will the youngsters who lapped up Mad Max: Fury Road delve back into cinema history to watch the movies that inspired Miller’s visual storytelling? No. If you are used to 2,900 shots a movie something that’s less than a third of that will bore you senseless. What was already a problem in 1997 is only going to get worse. ‘Jurassic World is a mere inept retread of Jurassic Park’ howl we who saw the original in the cinema. But, like a dead owl, the kids going to Jurassic World don’t give a hoot. They probably haven’t watched Jurassic Park all the way through because they find it unbearably slow-moving. This might explain the Russos’ baffling belief that the execrable Captain America 2 deserved an Oscar for casting Robert Redford and throwing 1970s paranoia shapes.

1970s paranoia was an organic cinematic response to the mood engendered by Watergate and Vietnam, and, like all movements that begin organically, when it became a commercial affectation it died a horrible death. The idea that Captain America 2 in rehashing a trope that was valid and original 40 years ago somehow itself becomes pertinent and (coughs in disbelief) original is as absurd as Gareth Edwards believing that his 2014 Godzilla is a good parallel for the trauma of Fukushima. If Sion Sono’s 2011 Himizu can react almost instantaneously to Fukushima in a valid and original cinematic fashion what makes Edwards think that Hollywood rehashing its interpretation of a 60 year old Japanese response to an entirely different national trauma is anything but a crass attempt to attach spurious relevance (via some extremely patronising cultural voiceover work) to the commercial imperative of rebooting a dormant franchise. But here’s the kicker – it doesn’t matter. None of the fulminations of film-makers or critics or punters of a certain age matter. My complaint that Jurassic World is not as good as Back to the Future doesn’t matter. Logic doesn’t even matter. The 12 year olds who go to Captain America 2 and Godzilla will likely never watch All The President’s Men or The Parallax View or Gojira because they’re too slow-moving and boring. 2045 will see Jurassic World as fondly remembered as Back to the Future is now, and all us haters will be so many Bret Eastons moaning that the 2010s were the nadir of American movies.

Perhaps we’re not speed-reading into illiteracy so much as into an eternal kinetic present. The past is a foreign country, they edit films boringly there.

Conspiracy Cinema at the IFI

The IFI is presenting a season of films this June playfully titled High Anxiety. As ‘filmnoia’ these are meant to encapsulate the post-Vietnam post-Watergate zeitgeist of chastened 1970s America. Invariably there is much idolatry of the faultless New Hollywood that was tragically killed off by Star Wars in this positioning, which regular readers of this blog will know I have little truck with. The truth is there are some great films here, some over-rated but good films, and by far the best film is the most defiantly Old Hollywood: The Manchurian Candidate, which is oblique in its violence, sexually charged without being sexual, and whip-smart and heart-breaking in its scripting; the kind of thing that Hitchcock might have directed on one of his darker days at the office. Let’s briefly trot thru the line-up of films in the season.

The Manchurian Candidate June 1st & 2nd @ 6:25pm

The pick of the bunch is the first out of the blocks. Catch this tonight if you can. A superb Laurence Harvey stars as Raymond Shaw, an unpopular soldier who unexpectedly returns as a war hero from the Korean War to the political machinations of his terrifying mother Angela Lansbury, a witch-hunting Senator’s wife. Frank Sinatra is his old army c/o trying to work out the mystery of just what happened in Korea that fills his men’s nightmares, and director John Frankenheimer ratchets up the tension as George Axelrod’s script satirically skewers McCarthyism while breaking your heart along the way.

Klute June 4th & 5th @ 4.50pm

Sex, lies, and audiotape. Widely regarded as the film that legitimised profanity as a hallmark of serious movies Alan J Pakula’s 1971 exercise in paranoia sees Donald Sutherland’s enigmatic small-town PI John Klute travel to the big city to investigate the possible involvement of his friend with Jane Fonda’s nervous call-girl, and her possible involvement in his mysterious disappearance. The sound design is extraordinary as ambient noise swamps the possibilities of recording the truth, and this arguably established the house-rules for all subsequent 1970s filmnoias. Keep an eye out for Roy Scheider’s ridiculous outfit in his cameo as a pimp.

The Parallax View June 6th @ 3.00pm & 7.05pm

Alan J Pakula again, this time Warren Beatty is the lead in a 1974 thriller about a journalist investigating the possibility that the powerful corporation the Parallax Organisation has been behind not only a political assassination allegedly carried out by a conveniently dead lone gunman, but the clean-up murders of all the witnesses of the assassination. 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…

Chinatown June 8th @ 2.10pm & 6.30pm

If Roman Polanski’s film was just a little less self-regarding it would be a far better film noir. Jack Nicholson gives a terrific performance as the cock-sure PI suddenly out of his depth against Faye Dunaway’s ambiguous femme fatale and John Huston’s monstrous patriarch, and there are wonderful moments and lines throughout. The enormous self-importance of Robert Towne’s screenplay sinks the film from its potential heights but is unsurprising given that he reputedly told anyone who would listen that the success of the 3 hrs plus The Godfather was entirely attributable to his dialogue polish on one 3 minute scene…

The Conversation June 9th @ 6.45pm

Francis Ford Coppola’s small personal movie between The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II stars Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who finds a simple job developing into something much more disturbing, which eventually pushes him to the very limits of his sanity. Walter Murch’s sound design is extraordinary and best appreciated on a big screen, but I’ve never thought that Coppola’s script was good at making us care about the possible murder plot Hackman stumbles upon; the physical distance his camera maintains from the camera being sadly replicated as an emotional distance maintained by the audience from the characters.

Night Moves June 12th @ 5.00pm

A staple of late-night TV schedules (TV programmers can be very easily amused sometimes) this 1975 movie sees Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunite for a more subdued outing than their 1967 collaboration Bonnie & Clyde. Hackman is a defeated PI who discovers his wife in adultery, but is unable to satisfactorily resolve that situation or any other case he is working on. Perhaps a lament for the lost idealism of the New Frontier in the age of Watergate, or perhaps just another deconstruction of American myths by Penn that has aged far less well than his Bonnie & Clyde.

Rollover June 18th @ 3.15pm

Yes, Alan J Pakula for a third time. He never stopped making paranoia movies, and this 1981 effort may have had the amazing good fortune to become relevant thirty years after being dismissed as pessimistic and incomprehensible, because of the second defining event of the last decade, the credit crunch. Jane Fonda stars as a company director’s widow who romances Kris Kristofferson’s financial trouble-shooter, brought in to steady the corporation, who ends up involved in an extremely risky deal with Saudi Arabia that goes belly-up in such spectacular fashion that it leads to the meltdown of the entire Western economy.

Winter Kills June 25th & 26th @2.00p

Adapted from another book by Manchurian Candidate novelist Richard Condon, this thriller stars John Huston as Not Joe Kennedy, who after 19 years is told by his son Jeff Bridges that he finally has a good lead on who really assassinated Huston’s other son, the President Not John F Kennedy. Winter Kills had an extremely troubled production, with director William Richert having one of his producers murdered, so this is a welcome chance to belatedly see Huston chewing scenery in such a ripe scenario of what could be classified alongside Inglourious Basterds as the genre of fantasy historical revenge movies.

Missing June 25th & 26th @2.50pm

Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek star as the father and wife of an American missing in Chile, in acclaimed Greek director Costa-Gavras’ first American film. An attack on Henry Kissinger’s brand of realpolitik, here masked by hypocritical mutterings about truth, justice, and the American Way, this vividly recreates the feel of Pinochet’s Chile; a regime enabled by CIA connivance in the overthrow of Allende’s democratically elected socialist government. There is a sense of kicking a dead donkey about this as Nixon was already out of power, but Costa-Gavras at least clothes his political points in empathetic flesh and blood characters.