In this month's... Electronic Sound (No. 76)

Push and Mark, the editors of Electronic Sound magazine suggest reading the latest issue sitting outside with a cup of tea and that's exactly what I did earlier, with the morning sunshine bouncing off the magazine's customary expanses of white space. The lead feature in this month's issue is David Stubbs' interview with Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti as they reflect on the music they produced as Chris and Cosey. This piece works well as a sort of prequel to the Carter Tutti feature in the March 2015 issue of The Wire. It's good to be reminded of the couple's post-TG albums, 1981's Heartbeat and the follow-up Trance (1982), both retain traces of TG DNA in Chris' rhythms and Cosey's cornet playing. In some respects the music became less interesting as the 80's wore on but albums like 1985's Techno Primitiv and 1987's Exotika have their moments. Perhaps their most widely heard track, the 1983 single October (Love Song), a lovely electro-pop confection ought to have been a sure fire hit but wasn't, such are the mysterious ways songs catch fire with the record-buying public, or don't in this case, but Chris and Cosey to my mind have achieved a level of success far beyond record sales. As they explain to David Stubbs, as early as 1981, they were offered to join Grace Jones on a world tour, and there were invitations from Depeche Mode and Blancmange, all of which were turned down so they could concentrate on their music and raise their son outside the glare of the limelight. Cosey's health problems in the late 80's notwithstanding, the duo managed to weather their four decade long partnership with little turbulence - there were none of the chemical burnouts that Coil suffered or the kind of disquieting antics that supposedly went on within Psychic TV. Closing out the feature is handy little primer on Chris and Cosey's albums which are now long out of print on CD. Perhaps Mute might consider a series of re-issues at some point.

Satisfactions that are Permanent: Monte Hellman 1929-2021

Monte Hellman, the great American film-maker has passed away at the grand old age of 91. I was first introduced to Monte Hellman by Alex Cox, who often mentioned the likes of Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter during his introductions for film screened as part of BBC2’s Moviedrome’s cult film season. Indeed Hellman’s signature film Two-Lane Blacktop was screened as part of Moviedrome’s 1989 season, but this was just a little before Cinema became one of my obsessions. In fact for a number of years, Hellman’s film were almost like rumors; impossible to get hold of here in Ireland, and I had to wait a few years for the arrival of DVD to secure Stateside copies of Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and Iguana (all courtesy of Anchor Bay) and The Shooting (VCI). The best of Hellman’s films are hard to pin down, and their pleasures not easily explainable. They can be mysterious and elusive, obscure and aloof, but most film scholars will agree that his best work are among the most remarkable films in post-War American Cinema. He was also the greatest director, Peckinpah included, of Warren Oates with whom he made four masterpieces with: the aforementioned The Shooting, Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and their last film together, the underrated and underseen China 9 Liberty 37. I’m looking thru filmography section in Brad Stevens' excellent 2003 biography Monte Hellman: His Life and Films and I’m reminded of the often uncredited film work he did, having a hand in The Intruder, The Terror, Dementia 13, The Wild Angels, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Head, Shatter, The Killer Elite, Avalanche Express, The Awakening and Robocop. Hellman was famously generous and supportive to film students, often taking them out of the classroom and into the field on his own productions and in the 90’s he became a sort of godfather to the American Independent scene when he helped secure financing for Reservoir Dogs, earning an executive producer credit.

To mark the passing of Monte Hellman, I watched Two-Lane Blacktop last night. By right I should have chosen Ride in the Whirlwind or Iguana, two Hellman films I haven’t seen enough, but the pleasures of Two-Lane Blacktop are inexhaustible, and despite numerous screenings over the years, the film retains that special mythical quality. As ever I’m fascinated by the casting of James Taylor in the film, and here he delivers a strikingly hesitant, even uncomfortable performance. I often wonder was the making of the film difficult for Taylor who famously had never seen the film until it was released by Criterion in 2007 (which Taylor put down to in part to the film being long unavailable, which is true), so it’s nice to see him in the pictures below looking relaxed and cheerful.

Watching the film again last night, it occurred to me that Taylor’s Driver is nursing a kind of death wish – not in the conventional sense, but it’s as if The Driver’s failure to make a connection with Laurie Bird’s Girl, results in his giving up the last vestiges of his humanity to meld with the Chevrolet 150. The Driver never sleeps in the film, unlike The Mechanic and G.T.O., and when The Mechanic suggests he get some sleep, The Driver replies: “I feel good. I can take it all the way”. It’s as it The Driver has become a man-machine, such is his obsession for motion. Famously in the film, the race between the Chevrolet and the Pontiac simply peters out, that the race was never about pink slips anyway, but about the rituals involved (engine maintenance, getting across states without being noticed, picking up the necessary cash at grudge matches). When G.T.O exits the film, the story finally runs out of road and the film is effectively over, and while The Driver has yet another drag race to take part in, the celluloid itself seemingly exhausted from these ever decreasing circles, combusts as if to say, “Enough, no more!”

Birth Certificate: Rating Birth of a Nation

I mentioned in yesterday's Birth of a Nation post that I first encountered the film in the pages of Empire magazine when their September 1994 issue reported that the BBFC had awarded the Connoisseur VHS edition a 15 certificate. In addition, the Board prepared an onscreen text introduction to the film alerting viewers to the film's racist content. This edition marked the first legal release of the film since the introduction of the Video Recordings Act in 1984, previously it had had a pre-cert release in 1981 courtesy of Spectrum Video. The Empire writer evidently didn't feel the BBFC introduction was warranted but nowadays I think it only proper that this important work of Cinema be openly acknowledged as a vile and deceitful film. Such things are helpful too in placating those who would consign the film to oblivion. Currently the Masters of Cinema and BFI Blu-Ray editions are no longer available to purchase on Amazon UK which is an ominous sign. Will Gone With the Wind be unavailable one day I wonder ? Thankfully Griffith's film can still be ordered direct from the labels.

Birth Pains: Revisiting D.W. Griffith's Racist Epic

I'm currently reading Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson’s brilliant and comprehensively detailed book 900 page chronicle of the American Civil War, and the occasion gave me opportunity to revisit Griffith’s Birth of a Nation last night, courtesy of the Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray. I’ve seen Birth of a Nation perhaps 3 or 4 times in the 20-odd years since my first discovery of the film in 1994, when Empire magazine ran a story about the BBFC's awarding of a 15 certificate for the film's VHS release on the BFI's Connoisseur label, an unprecedented age restriction for a Silent film. I remember too catching portions of the film in the latter half of the 90's when it was routinely screened here on one of Ireland's TV channels as part of a Sunday morning Silent slot. The film finally entered the Collection in the early 2000’s with Kino’s Griffith Masterworks DVD edition, followed by the MOC BR 2013 or thereabout. Screenings of Birth of a Nation have always been something of a dry academic exercise, and yet, I’ve always appreciated Griffith’s film as a landmark moment in the evolution of narrative cinema, and admittedly, it was convenient to put the problematic question of the film’s racial politics at arm’s length. In the 10 years or so since I last saw the film much of this distasteful content had faded from memory. But with the film fresh in my mind, I must now confront how absolutely despicable the film is in its treatment - on both sides of the camera, of African Americans. 

The worst excesses of the film’s racist cant are found in the second half of the film, set during the Reconstruction era, but throughout the film, African Americans are portrayed in the most dishonest and reprehensible manner, depicted as childish and subservient, drunken, wild and lascivious; with the history of the era warped to suit the themes of Griffith’s deceitful film. It says a lot about Woodrow Wilson’s own views on race, when he famously pronounced that the film was “… like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true" - an astonishing remark from a sitting American president. In the accompanying MoC booklet, Griffith is quoted quite unashamedly as saying he didn’t want to use African American actors among the principle players, and interestingly, there are plenty of African Americans among the wider cast. As per the legend, Griffith made the film without a written scenario so one wonders what exactly Griffith was barking at the African American cast members during the scenes he directed them in. Watching the film again, I had that unpleasant sensation of being complicit in the film’s vitriol and this screening may well be my very last. When Spike Lee included a scene in his 2018 film BlacKkKlansman, where some white supremacists giggle at a screening of Griffith's film, I think Lee was suggesting that Birth of a Nation as it stands today is a film best enjoyed by idiots. And he may be right.

A Dismal Orb

It's not terribly obvious from the picture below, but I was sad to discover my copy of The Orb's Live 93 CD has succumbed to disc rot. This was not entirely surprising, considering the CD matrix bears the dreaded "Made In UK BY PDO" etching. It was discovered in the mid-90's that CDs manufactured largely between 1988 and 1992 at the Philips and Dupont Optical (PDO) plant in Blackburn (“4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire!") were beginning to exhibit discoloration on the playing side of the CD due to, and I'm quoting Wiki here, "lacquer used to coat the discs was not resistant to the sulfur content of the paper in the booklets, which led to the corrosion of the aluminum layer of the disc " I had seen the telltale signs on the Orb CD a few years ago but inspecting the CD yesterday, the rot had spread right around the edge of the disc and caused skips, splutters and drop outs on playback. 

No big deal, I simply bought a later repressing of the album yesterday, but I'm looking now at other discs of mine known to be affected – two Warp CDs - first pressings of Autechre's Incunabula and Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol 2. Happily, neither discs show any signs of deterioration, and both can be replaced easily enough. The one I'm most worried about is my copy of Coil's Unnatural History, which is not so easy to replace but luckily, the disc is so far unblemished. But considering the amount of optical discs I own, CD, DVD, BR it was a sobering moment to discover the Orb disc is no longer playable…

Fakes and Fakery (Marlon Brando and Films and Filming magazine)

A follow-on to my previous post about the 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon... I was amused to see this murky, blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Brando appearing on an issue of the long running English film magazine, Films and Filming. I've been a collector of the magazine for many years now, and I can say with absolute certainty that this particular magazine cover was mocked up for the documentary - no great crime in that but I'll take some satisfaction in calling it out. For the record, Brando made the cover of Films and Filming six times, most significantly he graced the inaugural October 1954 issue with On the Waterfront and made further appearances with the January 1956 issue (Guys and Dolls), March 1957 (The Teahouse of the August Moon), March 1958 (The Young Lions), December 1962 (Mutiny on the Bounty), and then perhaps as a sign of his decline, sat out most of the sixties until his last cover appearance on the September 1972 issue with The Godfather...

Listening to you Marlon

I watched the 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon at the weekend, and thought it a fascinating, absorbing piece of work, and quite a refreshing departure from the usual talking-heads biographical format. I’ve read two chunky Brando biographies over the years – Peter Manso’s 1994 book, and more recently William Mann’s 2019 biography, so there were no great revelations along the way, but I was surprised to hear Brando’s vexed comments about Francis Ford Coppola in the wake of Apocalypse Now: “Francis Coppola, he's a prick, a card-carrying prick, the cocksucker, how could he do that to me ? I saved his fucking ass, and he showed his appreciation by dumping on me". One deficiency of the documentary is the lack of onscreen dates for the snippets of audio heard in the film, and I wonder when Brando recorded those comments ? I suspect it might have been when Brando was working on his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, published in 1994, some three years after the release of the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness which revealed the full extent of Coppola’s struggles to get Apocalypse Now made, and presented Brando as a sort of brilliant but wayward force of nature that Coppola had to valiantly wrestle with to complete the film. One could hardly blame Brando for feeling so raw about it.

Interesting too to hear Brando say he re-wrote “the entire script” which sounds on the face of it rather fanciful but according to Peter Cowie’s 2000 book on the film, Coppola was having discussions with Brando about the film as early as February 1976, just a month or so before filming began in the Philippines. Like so many great films, the precise authorship of Apocalypse Now is perhaps unknowable, but if I had to choose a side, based on everything I’ve read about the film over the years, I’d credit the bones of the film to Coppola and John Milus, with Brando’s contributions confined to shaping the Kurtz character. Still, it’s pleasing to note that Brando’s first appearance (if you could call it that) in Apocalypse Now is as a voice on a tape recorder…

Nosfera-Vu

Herzog's Nosferatu came up in a conversation on FB last night, and the notion was put forward on how the film might have played had Tangerine Dream wrote the score. It was an intriguing idea (and one I had not previously pondered on!) and while the kind of music Tangerine Dream wrote for Sorcerer would have been ill-fitting for Nosferatu, the film might have worked very well with music from Tangerine Dreams's earlier albums on the Ohr label - namely Alpha Centauri, Zeit and Atem. But I digress.... With the film fresh in my mind, I’m sinking my teeth into Popol Vuh’s soundtrack courtesy of this 1992 CD on the Italian High Tide label, which collects all the music from the two soundtracks Popol Vuh recorded for the film, that is the Brüder Des Schattens - Söhne Des Lichts album, and On The Way To A Little Way (Soundtracks From "Nosferatu"). All needlessly confusing, but if you want all the music Florian Fricke wrote for the film, without the edits done to the 18min title track on Brüder Des Schattens - Söhne Des Lichts – the centerpiece of the film’s soundtrack, this CD is the one to seek out. To the best of my knowledge, the High Tide edition is fully authorized by Florian Fricke, but the Popol Vuh back catalogue is such a mess that one is never quite sure. Reissues on CD have been poorly served over the years by the absence of original tapes and much of the core albums are taken from needle-drops and have been subjected to noise-scrubbing mastering. So much so, anyone looking to put together a collection would be best advised to seek out the early CD releases…

The Sound of Hz (Main compilation)

I'm currently listening to Robert Hampson's post-Loop isolationist project Main, and I’m reminded that one of the tracks on the group’s 1996 collection Hz, is dedicated to sound designer extraordinaire Alan Splet. I’d actually forgotten about this until I went looking in the CD notes for something and came across the dedication. This is more than idle name-dropping, as the music that Main were making during this era was very much in the vain of Alan Splet’s work – all hissing, gaseous drones, clanking metallic reverberations and ominous rumblings – the kind of nightmarish sounds Splet created for Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet and Mosquito Coast among others. I’m pleased that I dug out this Main collection, a double-CD no less, because it’s an album I don’t listen to enough, requiring headphones and a quiet room to fully appreciate all those delicate, lowercase sounds. The packaging on this collection is rather lovely too, instead of the fuzzy video and computer screen textures of previous Main releases, the Hz album is adorned with striking images of rock and lichen textures, plus graphic symbols which I presume relate to the music in some way. There’s a kinship here with the design concept of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, and I see on the credits of the Main album, another David Lynch reference, the images credited to one Frank Booth…

The Tin Drum (1979, dir. Volker Schlöndorff)

I watched Volker Schlöndorff's film last night as a sort of fitness test for watching The Painted Bird, a film I made up my mind not to see when it first emerged, but in a cruel irony, a friend gifted me a copy of the Eureka Blu-Ray over Christmas, and it now stands on my shelf daring me to watch it. I think I wanted to see how I felt about things after watching The Tin Drum, and while Schlöndorff's film is not an especially disturbing film, it has its moments of cruelty and unpleasantness. But what a remarkable performance by David Bennent as Oskar, and while I knew him best from Ridley Scott's Legend, I really couldn't guess his age watching The Tin Drum, so much so that the scenes where he expresses his sexual maturity were quite uncomfortable to watch. I've since discovered Bennett was 12 or 13 during the making of the film, but these scenes in the film remain difficult to measure even as an afterthought. This reminds me that I must watch Gary Rhodes's Banned in Oklahoma documentary on the Criterion DVD before it gets retuned to the shelf.

Whatever about The Tin Drum as a sort of litmus test for watching The Painted Bird, there may be one unforeseen consequence of revisiting the film for my book reading plan for the year ahead. I recently picked up, and was looking forward to reading the critically acclaimed 2020 book The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, but after seeing that queasy scene in The Tin Drum, where a swarm of eels emerge writhing from a purified horse head, I think I’ll be putting Patrik Svensson’s book on the long finger…