Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco

I’m currently reading Steve Thrower’s Jess Franco book and enjoying it immensely. I’m thinking a more biographical flavoured book would complement it very nicely, I imagine the stories and adventures of Franco’s life, irrevocably intertwined with his film making would make for fascinating reading. Franco’s life archers over so many epochs - the rigorous censorship of the Francoist years, the permissiveness of the 70’s and the halcyon age of Exploitation Cinema, the slide towards VHS and the changing fortunes of low-budget film distribution, the porno years, the Franco revival with the advent of DVD and those final micro-budgeted films. Tremendously interesting times, places and faces but I imagine any biographer would have his work cut out for him, given Franco’s nomadic life, living wherever his latest international co-production led him…

For anyone curious about the book here are some shots I took of it...

Broken Mirrors...

I’ve just spent a pleasant hour and a half listening to Kim Newman and Alan Jones’ commentary track for Suspiria available on Nouveaux Pictures’ 2010 Blu-Ray. This is a very good, lively, engaging track, full of interesting analysis, factoids and trivia. I think I was most intrigued by Alan Jones’ revelation that one of Luciano Tovoli’s methods for achieving Suspiria’s singular look was by using mirrors to reflect the light. Jones describes a scene from the production: “All over the set, out of camera range are masses of mirrors all refracting the light on top of each other to make it as sharp and as vivid as possible” I like this idea of those big Suspiria sets full of mirrors - mirrors and reflective surfaces have a thematic resonance within the film, but perhaps more interesting is their powerful association with the Occult. Had Daria Nicolodi been on set I imagine she would have approved. Incidentally, be sure to check out Tim Lucas' post on the film and some of its more subliminal details - including a fabulous find involving the film's reflective director...

What Have You Done To Solange ?

Blow-Up was mentioned on FB recently and in the absence of Antonioni's film in my collection (a hole I need to plug), I reached for Massimo Dallamano's London-set 1972 giallo. Solange is one of the high watermarks of the genre and revisiting the film this morning, I very much enjoyed D'Amato's crisp, stylish photography, perhaps the finest work of his career - my memory is probably foggy on this point, but I'm wondering if the film's short flashback sequence was the only instance of D'Amato shooting in black & white ? Complimenting the luminous cinematography are the film's trio of beautiful actresses - Cristina Galbó and Karin Baal (who undergoes a subtle transformation from a stern, buttoned-up embattled wife to a sexy even resourceful companion as soon as Galbó is disposed of). And Camille Keaton, who is a haunting (and haunted) presence, entering the film like some kind of strange apparition - she reminds me of Sissy Spacek in Prime Cut...

Joe D'Amato as an undercover bobby in What Have You Done To Solange

Route One/USA

I celebrated 4th of July today with a screening of the 1989 film Route One/USA, Robert Kramer's 4-hour semi-fictional road movie which might be described as an Errol Morris rewrite of Easy Rider. Beginning with a verse from Whitman's Song of the Open Road ("The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose"), Kramer and his friend "Doc", just back from a 10 year stint in Africa, embark on a journey from the Canadian border following Route 1 all the way to Miami. Doc conducts interviews with the people he meets along the way - right-wing conservative Baptists, community care workers battling the sharp edge of poverty and crime in deteriorating inner-city projects, a journalist investigating murders by white supremacists, a man who collects ghoulish celebrity ephemera. Intertwined with these snapshots of American life is Doc's back story and about 3 and a half hours into the film Doc suddenly abandons the trip, which causes the film to fragment into a kaleidoscope of random scenes, before finally running out of road among the waterways and suspension bridges at the port of Miami. Epic in scope, epic in vision...

Red Triangle

My friend Simon is currently hard at work bringing BBC2's cult film series Moviedrome back to our screens, and it's got me thinking about Channel 4's so-called "Red Triangle" season of cult films which aired a little before my time, in the latter half of 1986 into the following year, offering late night viewers films 'for which special discretion may be required'. I'm looking thru the list of films and checking off what I've seen - which is less than half - Out of the Blue, the Antonioni film, and the Terayama films. Following the broadcast of the opening film Thermroc, Mary Whitehouse complained: "It's not good enough to slap on a warning symbol and then indulge in sadistic madness of this kind." If anything the list is a reminder of how cutting edge Channel 4 used to me. Nowadays it's inching ever closer to Channel 5.

19/09/86  Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1972)
03/10/86  Pastoral Hide-and-Seek (Shūji Terayama, 1974)
10/10/86  Throw Away Your Books; Let's Go Into the Streets (Shūji Terayama, 1971)
17/10/86  Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)
24/10/86  Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1981)
31/10/86  The Clinic (David Stevens, 1982)
14/11/86  Montenegro, or: Pigs and Pearls (Dušan Makavejev, 1981)
28/11/86  No Mercy, No Future (Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1981)
10/01/87  Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1980)
17/01/87  The Wall (Yılmaz Güney, 1983)

Swinging

Some filth for a Friday… I’ve been listening to Psychic TV’s Themes boxset this morning and one track in particular is worth a mention. Gobbledegook found on Themes 4: Lady Jaye features cut-up loops of Vegas-style lounge and big band swing music laced with hilarious dialogue from what sounds like a 70’s porn movie. The sleeve doesn’t list the source of the samples but a little detective work reveals the dialogue is taken not from a film but a bizarre spoken word comedy album from 1974 entitled Wife Swapping Swinger's Orgy Porgy Party, made I presume for an audience too squeamish to visit a seedy porno house (“Dramatic stag story with sexually orientated words and live action sounds” promises the sleeve !). I’m definitely going to seek this oddity out later but in the meantime some of the album’s X-rated gobbledegook can be heard here

Cronenberg's Frankenstein

I was reading an old Fangoria last night (#10 January 1981) and in the feature on Scanners, David Cronenberg mentions his proposed free-adaptation of Frankenstein which I had forgotten about. Fascinating to think what might have been, although motifs from Mary Shelley's book can be found throughout Cronenberg's work, most notably in The Fly. Elsewhere another tantalizing unrealized film is mentioned in a roundtable discussion article on the Horror film entitled "Anatomy of Terror", which alludes to a planned anthology film with segments directed by John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and Walter Hill, with Cronenberg penning the screenplay and story contributions from Carpenter and Hill. The mind boggles !

I mentioned Cronenberg's Frankenstein on Facebook earlier and Tim Lucas left an interesting comment:

(Cronenberg) had absolutely no interest in making this film. It was an idea of his producers, and they used it to create interest in their alliance with him.

Revisiting Black Sunday

I watched Black Sunday last night courtesy of Arrow’s excellent Blu-Ray. This was my first time seeing the film in HD and the effect was spellbinding, it now joins the pantheon of favourite black & white photographed films - Lolita, Night of the Hunter, Marketa Lazarova and so on. I don’t know how long the shooting schedule was but I imagine Mario Bava had a limited amount of time to plan and arrange his lightning from set-up to set-up - yet every frame of the film looks painstakingly designed and composed. I think Bava made better films than Black Sunday but the film is so intoxicating one can see why it remains the director’s most iconic film...

Incidentally, every viewing of a Bava film inches me ever closer to delving into Tim Lucas' monumental Bava biog All the Colors of the Dark which I was lucky enough to pick up a few years ago. The book is now OOP but a digital version of the book (with updates and enhancements) is available for instant purchase here. I may instead find myself reading the book on my ipad because the colossal hardback is not ideal for bedtime reading !

Video Vandals

I pre-ordered Arrow's limited edition Videodrome Blu earlier today, and dug out my old UK VHS edition for old times sake. Slightly different artwork from the more commonly seen design of James Woods dissolving into TV static, here it looks like he's being pulled into the Time Tunnel. The CIC sleeve is quite interesting for a rare admission made on the backside of the cover: "This film received an '18' certificate for cinema release. The version of the film comprised in the videocassette has been further edited at the discretion of CIC Video". I'm thinking CIC were nervous of the film ending up on a DPP list of outlawed titles ?

Fela Kuti

Listening to Fela Kuti’s 1974 album Confusion, essentially one monster 26min track spread over two sides of vinyl… One of my most prized boxsets is Knitting Factory’s Complete Works Of Fela Anikulapo Kuti – not quite the complete works, but near enough, the 26 CDs feature 46 albums encompassing the bulk of Fela's music released from 1965 to 1992, an extraordinary blend of African Highlife, Jazz, James Brown funk and drummer Tony Allen’s propulsive rhythms, As well as the music I love the album covers (reproduced on card sleeves in the boxset) which range from DIY cut and paste photo-montages to vibrant, cartoon artwork illustrated by Lemi Ghariokwu, and usually layered with satirical jibes at Nigerian life and anti-Government sentiment. The sleeve for the Beasts Of No Nation album recorded in 1989 after Fela served an 18 month jail sentence (on a trumped up charge so the story goes) features rat-faced United Nations delegates, protesters brandishing placards reading “Human Rights is Our Property”, and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and then South Africa Prime Minister P.W. Botha equipped with devil horns and vampire fangs. On the right hand side of the sleeve, Fela can be seen standing outside an open jail cell giving a triumphant black power salute... I’d love to own these on vinyl !