Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

Utamaro was one of the first period films made in Japan under the American Occupation. The Motion Picture section of CI&E (MacArthur’s Civil Information and Education division, who were responsible for pre-production censorship) only approved the script after they had submitted director and producer to intensive and gruelling cross-examination and were assured that it fitted the ideological guidelines of the new order. In this early period, the Occupation censors were fearful of period films, which they erroneously believed to be the chief purveyors of undemocratic values – ultranationalism, feudalistic ideology and militarism. Mizoguchi had to assure them that there would be no swordplay and that his hero was a man of the people, a democrat ahead of his time.

Many Japanese critics (e.g. Iwasaki, Sato, Shindo) believed that Mizoguchi was so hampered by the restrictions and his struggle to adjust to the new regime that the film failed to achieve the director’s usual high standard; but more recent re-evaluations (e.g. that of Kirihara) have found the film especially interesting as a reflection of the historical tensions of the era. The confusion and dispersion of the film’s narration, which the scriptwriter considered weaknesses that he was responsible for, no longer jar but, on the contrary, strike a modernist note. Many critics have also been attracted by the game of spotting the similarities between the film’s protagonist, Utamaro, and its director, Mizoguchi.

Mizoguchi’s regular scriptwriter Yoda, who worked with him (more precisely, for him) for 20 years, claimed in his memoirs that in the script for this film he was “almost unconsciously” drawing a portrait of Mizoguchi through Utamaro. The equation Utamaro=Mizoguchi has been irresistible to most critics as the two artists did have a lot in common. Both of them worked in a popular mass-produced medium operated by businessmen, and chafed under oppressive censorship regimes; both frequented the pleasure quarters and sought the company of geishas; but, most significantly, they both achieved fame for their portraits of women. In a highly charged scene in this film, Utamaro paints, directly on the back of a beautiful courtesan, a sketch that is later tattooed into her skin. One could say that this creative act (and the passion the artist displays in executing it) literalises the fact that both artists achieved fame on the backs of women – relying on them to arouse and express themselves, emotionally and aesthetically.

Utamaro worked in many genres (including porn) but he became (and remains) famous for his bijin-e (portraits of ‘beauties’). The genre was closely linked with the prostitution industry, as the prints were used as publicity for the courtesans, geisha and tea-girls who worked in the walled enclaves on the edges of Tokyo and Kyoto, euphemistically known as the Floating World, that serviced masculine desire with wine, women and song. Mizoguchi also worked in many genres, but became famous as a director of women’s films, especially films on the lives of prostitutes, geisha and fallen women. Both artists relied on artistic collaborators – wood carvers, colourists and live female models in the case of Utamaro; scriptwriters, photographers and star actresses, in the case of Mizoguchi. Mizoguchi’s artistry had a symbiotic relationship with the oppression and suffering of women, which generated in him a powerful attraction, emotional identification and rage. This has been partially attributed to his personal experience, episodes of which bleed into his films. (His sister paid for his education by becoming a rich man’s mistress; a geisha lover once attacked him with a knife in a fit of jealousy; his wife went mad.) Pascal Bonitzer (in the most penetrating essay on Mizoguchi’s cinema that I have read) argues that Mizoguchi was so enraged by the sins of Japanese men against Japanese women, and in particular at the sexual violence perpetrated against women, that, in a horror of penetration, he even refused to allow his camera to penetrate the scene of the crime – to reveal everything – and thus explains the director’s preference for the long lateral travelling shot, and his distinctive method of hiding acts of violence behind props or walls within the frame or locating them off-screen altogether. With the violence almost always off-screen, the horror is conveyed in the traumatised face of the victim – or onlooker.

The five women of the title – the refined courtesan Tagasode, the fiery geisha Okita, the respectable artist’s daughter Yukie, the shy peasant girl Oran and the plain artisan Oshin – cover a range of feminine types and personalities but they are alike in two respects. They all actively pursue the object of their desire, however puny he may be. They also share a respect for the power of Utamaro to make them famous in life, if not posthumously, to render them eternally young and beautiful. (These women had in fact very brief careers. Under the ruthless system of exploitation that operated in the pleasure quarters, young bodies were required. In the rapid turnover of staffing, they would be soon discarded and replaced by younger women.)

The film exposes both their pathetic vanity and the brutal lust and voyeurism of the male artist – who is often one of their clients, and certainly a servant of the system that exploits them. In the two crucial scenes when Utamaro, who has been suffering from a creative block, is first turned on and then artistically inspired by the bare body of young Oran, Mizoguchi prefigures and extends (beyond the West) the thesis of John Berger and the whole feminist critique of the functioning of the female body in art. --Senses of Cinema 

La Vampire Nue (Jean Rollin, 1970)

Jean Rollin’s second French feature (following The Rape of the Vampire ['68], and the incomplete L'itinéraire marin ['63]), and the second of his infamous erotic horror pictures, The Nude Vampire ('70) applies the cult auteur's trademark ethereal, opulent eye to rather standard vampire tropes. The tale of a wealthy industrialist (Maurice Lemaitre) who keeps a gorgeous young bloodsucker (Caroline Cartier) in his urban chateau, allowing her to prey on a suicide cult while scientists analyze her blood, it's a dizzying work of dreamlike malaise. Through this nymph, the rich man hopes to uncover the key to immortality, but his son (Olivier Rollin) falls in love with the beauty and becomes determined to free her. Set against a backdrop of Gothic castles and windswept beaches, the deadly familial showdown is observed with an omnipotent detachment, placing us in the shoes of lustful Gods who never pass judgement on those involved.

In the new collection of female-penned criticism, Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (edited by Samm Deighan; published by Kier-La Jannise and Paul Corupe's Canadian specialty imprint, Spectacular Optical), the essay "Cults of Decadence, Cults of Rebellion: La Vampire Nue and Fascination" (penned by Kat Ellinger) describes the director's opening tableaus as such:

La vampire nue opens with scenes of science and mysticism working in complete synergy; a naked woman, hooded, donates blood in a lab. Far from the sterile environment usually associated with this type of setting, the brightly colored bottles on display and the contours of exposed flesh elevate the mundane to the magical right from the first frames. Next, the unnamed female protagonist (Cartier) explores the drab streets of modern day Paris with timid curiosity, reminiscent of the wide-eyed wonder of the subject of Sir Frederic Leighton's painting Flaming June (1895). 

As Cartier's enigmatic center continues her trek, being watched from afar by a collection of pagan-masked hooligans looking to scoop her up off the streets, she enjoys a chance encounter with Olivier Rollin's equally striking male answer to her waifish awe-struck presence. It's this meeting of

innocents (despite one of them perceived as being a nefarious creature of the night) that allows the filmmaker to dive into his dissection of Parisian class structures, and the upper crust's elemental desire to extend life to infinity, just to further indulge bourgeoise whims. 

For Rollin, the vampire became a symbol that staunchly stood against the ways the mythical creature was used by his English genre contemporaries and predecessors, as the essay continues: 

Rollin subverts the trope of the vampire into one of enlightenment and transcendence, a far cry from the bloodsucking wretches hiding in the shadows of Hammer Horror. For Rollin, the vampire becomes a totem for the evolution of humanity: a master race, immortality brings a new independence from petty economic concern; carnal obsessions of the flesh are replaced by messages of purity and love. 

To go along with the 19th Century mythology, Rollin employs silent film technique, applying light and shadow to long stretches of pure visual storytelling that are accented by Yvon Serault's ominous plucked string score. This antiquated approach amalgamates with modern fashions and primitive medical technology to help create a timeless sensibility, drawing parallels between its oblique cultish narrative and countercultural notions regarding black magic that took root in 60s pop culture:

...individuals looked for spiritual meaning in a world fueled by sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, the fetishizing of commodities, and political unrest. As Christopher Partridge outlines in The Reenchantment of the West, 'As the inclusion of individuals such as Crowley on The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper cover, and the title of The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request ('67) suggest, even during the 1960s the truly eclectic nature of the occulture was becoming apparent.' 

Perhaps this is part of Rollin's movies' appeal: the simple fact that they work as pop alchemy; combining symbols, fashions, sounds and artistic ideas into works of cultural dissection, singular in vision and execution. As Ellinger notes, Rollin was always reluctant to discuss influences to any meaningful degree, even if he "openly acknowledged his adoration for classic French filmmakers like Georges Franju, and also spoke about the art of Clovis Trouille or the poetry of Tristan Corbièrer." He was an artist making movies that reflected both his fetishes and observations regarding his home country's moral erosion, filtered through several lenses that combined into a signature style, never speaking about his work pretentiously in interviews and insisting that (like other great French Symbolists), "we use the light of our own imaginations to lead the way." -- Birth Movies Death

Yeelen aka Brightness (Souleymane Cissé, 1987)

The story is universal: a brave son must defeat his wicked father to save the world. The setting, if not Pan-African, is at the least Pan-Malian: a sprawling journey through Sudan and savanna, stagnant wetlands and sandstone cliff-sides. The time is eternal: an era before colonization, when each people had their land and the land their spirits. In this story, in this place, in this time Souleymane Cissé weaves his film Yeelen, a tale that is all tales in its scope, tragedy, and triumph. When first released in 1987, it heralded a breakthrough for African cinema, winning a Jury Prize at Cannes and becoming one of the first African films ever distributed on video. Though Cissé was trained in the Soviet Union and cut his teeth with documentaries, the film is a defiant rejection of many American and European cinematic modes, electing instead for a broader stylistic esotericism rooted in formalized rituals and ceremonies. Scenes and sequences move less like traditional narrative beats—though the story is linear, uncluttered, and straightforward—instead favoring the meticulous unhurriedness of a priest preparing for vespers or a surgeon for surgery. Scenes of eating and bathing, crafting and praying make up as much of the run-time as the film’s many battles, visions, and scenes of sorcery. In Yeelen we see another reinvention of cinema as an African art form, a continuation of the legacy of Ousmane Sembène and Idrissa Ouédraogo.

And yet the film can be challenging for many Western viewers. Yeelen, also known as Brightness, assumes deep familiarity with the peoples, histories, and cultures of Mali and wastes no time on explanatory exposition; so unconcerned with Western audiences, the film necessitated the addition of several introductory inter-titles giving viewers a crash course in West African cosmology and mythology. Perhaps daunted by this esotericism, many Western critics and scholars have treated the film through the lens of Campbellian monomyth. And though the film meets several of its criteria, to reduce Yeelen to a simple Hero’s Journey strips it of much of its nuance. It is more than a simple story of good versus evil, it tells of the salvation of peoples and cosmos rotted by greed and corruption while promising rebirth and salvation not just for its protagonist, but for the world itself.

At the heart of Yeelen is the concept of nyama, an animistic spiritual force believed by the Bamana people—the dominant ethnic group of Mali—to be inherent in all living things. As described by Suzanne H. MacRae:

“Nyama animates all living beings, including plants and animals, and controls the powers of nature itself, governing crop production and rain-fall. This psychic force impels all human thinking, will, and action, and in turn is released by all actions. It generates the underlying pattern or coherence of the entire world. Because it executes the operations of cause and effect, it could be termed African karma.”

Among the Bamana are the Komo, an ancient society of blacksmith/sorcerers both feared and respected for their power and control over nyama. In Bamana cosmology, the Komo gain their authority from their mastery of fire as a tool for transforming things and materials from one state to another, skills that are passed directly from father to son through rigorous training and esoteric lessons in arcane knowledge. To turn a chunk of metal into a plowshare or a lump of clay into pottery isn’t just craftsmanship, it’s an act of actual transformative magic empowered by nyama. Likewise, crafted objects like pylons and fetishes aren’t just things—they’re conduits for the force of nature itself.

As toolmakers and diviners essential to the survival of the Bamana, the Komo are supposed to be beneficent and magnanimous, but Yeelen examines a time when they were corrupted by the lust for power. The film opens with Soma (Niamanto Sanogo), a powerful sorcerer and member of the Komo, sacrificing a chicken to Mari, the god of the brush, to help him find his adult son Nianankoro (Issiaka Kane) who is prophesied to kill him. Led by a magical beam that works like a giant divining rod, he hunts the son he abandoned as a child so that he may slay him. Meanwhile, Nianankoro—spurred by a magical vision he sees in a jar of water he activates with spit, a substance believed to have great power by the Komo for its infusion of water with life force—sets off on a journey to find his father’s twin brother Djigui (Sanogo in a dual role) for help. 

Aided with a fetish from his mother, he travels into the liminal space separating the peoples in the Malian savannah, a mysterious place inhabited by beasts, monsters, and magical creatures like a man-hyena in a tree who prophesies about Nianankoro’s future. His adventure takes him into the land of the Fulani, a horseback riding nation of herders who mistake him for a cattle thief and capture him. Their king Rouma Boli (Balla Moussa Keïta) orders him killed, but Nianankoro enchants his executioners so their bodies freeze and their weapons combust. Seeing a potential powerful ally, Rouma Boli offers him his freedom in exchange for aid against a warring party that has killed many of his men. By hammering a specially prepared horse bone into a termite mound—an object considered magically charged by many West Africans as an inversion of earth; a space literally turned upside-down by insects—he summons a swarm of bees and a swell of bushfire that destroys the raiders. Hailed as a hero, Nianankoro is adopted by Rouma Boli who gives him the new task of curing his wife Attou’s (Aoua Sangare) infertility. Nianankoro’s healing magics prove too powerful and the two have sex. Nianankoro and Attou dutifully present themselves to Rouma Boli for execution for their adultery, but in an act of mercy he gives Attou to Nianankoro as a wife and sends them off to the land of the Dogon people, the third and final Malian ethnic group prominently featured in the film. 

Among the Dogon, Nianankoro discovers his uncle Djigui. Blinded by Soma for trying to use their powers to help people outside of the Komo, Djigui stole the Kore Wing—a carved board symbolizing the holy vulture which itself symbolizes the Komo—and took it to the Dogon plateaus to wait for Nianankoro to reach manhood. After Nianankoro and the now pregnant Attou cleanse themselves of their adultery by bathing in a local spring gushing forth from a cliffside without an apparent source, Djigui combines his mother’s fetish with the Kore Wing, revitalizing it as a tool powerful enough to counter Soma’s magic. Nianankoro finally confronts Soma and the two battle their magic against each other, resulting in an apocalyptic blast of light (or brightness, the literal translation of the word “yeelen”) that levels the verdant prairie into a sandy desert and turns father and son into ostrich eggs.

Here is where the monomyth model fails to properly represent the highly metaphorical underpinnings of Yeelen. The film ends with Nianankoro’s son entering the desert and recovering his father’s egg and the Kore Wing before leaving for a new land. As the son of a Bamana father and a Fulani mother raised among the Dogon, Nianankoro’s son represents a synthesis of three of Mali’s largest ethnic groups. His retrieval of his father’s egg and the Kore Wing bestows him with the power of the disgraced Komo to restore and recreate the fractured Mali as a peaceful, just land. But Cissé’s story requires the destruction of its hero sans apotheosis or revival. He shares no gained knowledge with his people, exercises no mastery over the worlds he transitions between. And crucially, he doesn’t restore the Komo. What magic is left in the world is transferred to the next generation. What they do with it is up to them.

Though the film is deliberately situated in an unspecified and ancient era (despite a few inconsistencies like one of the Dogon smoking a corncob pipe and Soma’s magical beam featuring faceted stones, a crafting technique not adopted until after contact with Europeans), parallels with modern-day Mali are inescapable. Though once the largest empire in West Africa, Mali was exploited and colonialized by the French in the late nineteenth century until it regained independence in June 1960. What followed was decades of political chaos and economic decline exacerbated by military coups, famine, and corruption culminating in the presidency of Moussa Traoré, a despot who killed protestors and political opposition. With Yeelen Cissé created a new creation myth for Mali, envisioning a nation united not divided by its ethnic and cultural diversity; it hopes for a country capable of ridding itself of its own evils through its own efforts. Only then will the yeelen truly return.

This article was written with the considerable aid of Dr. Elisabeth Cameron, Professor of African Art History at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Among her suggestions was the use of the term “Bamana” when referring to the Bambara people, as “Bamana” is the term they use to describe themselves and “Bambara” is a derogatory term literally meaning “unbeliever/infidel” which was invented and applied by outsiders as punishment for their refusal to convert to Islam in the mid 1800s. --MUBI

Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957)

A direct poem about life, consumerism and a society in the need of God and love directly written on celluloid, Pyaasa masterfully and heartbreakingly showcases Guru Dutt's idealization of a society whose main priorities are based on human relationships rather than materialism.

• It explains the consequences of a neoliberal economy where money and idols are worshipped instead of human beings.
• It showcases unapologetically the ugliest attributes of a society that dismisses the importance of family relationships and seeks personal recognition.
• It displays the lack of importance society gives to art as the most honorable and benign means we have for the exteriorization of the soul through brutal honesty.
• It ridicules the futility of intellectual discussions regarding how poetry, and any art for that matter, can be better if they treat certain themes, like nationalism and patriotism, or even love, instead of sadness and mourning.

Reportedly, Guru Dutt fell in love with actress Waheeda Rehman while being married to famous playback singer Geeta Dutt. Rehman plays the archetipically good-hearted and good-natured prostitute Gulabo, the main source of strength and inspiration in Vijay's life. The details about their relationship are unclear up to date; some claim Rehman didn't correspond him back. According to his brother Atmaram, Guru Dutt was "a strict disciplinarian as far as work was concerned, but totally undisciplined in his personal life". What remains as a fact is that both were driven to alcoholism, and both Guru and Geeta died because of that sickness. Guru combined it with an overdose of sleeping pills, whereas Geeta suffered heavy liver damage. When Guru died, he wasn't even 40 years old.

The tragedies of his unbalanced life somehow found their way into his films, where his poems reflect the world he still longs for, no matter how idealized his characters might seem. Pyaasa masterfully combines what Guru knew is commercially successful and appealing with India's signature stamp in cinema. Therefore, it is artistically and emotionally pleasing, while also achieving to be thought-provoking and socially true.

The true tragic poet is Guru disguised as a man named Vijay, and even if we are nobody to judge his personal life, nor to criticize his films based on his life, we can fully acknowledge the ugly truths that Pyaasa states about the society he sees, a world put upside down, hypocritical to the core, materialistically ambitious, that loves worshipping dead idols instead of valuing the living neighbor. It is a testament full of hope, with the finest atrezzos of the best Golden-Age Hollywood productions, with the aesthetics of a Japanese arthouse classic, sometimes with the female cast having Chinese mannerisms that we would see in modern Chinese films, but with its Indian heart put right in the middle, featuring an almost epic length, great musical sequences, heartfelt humor and, again, an ending that places a solution in spiritual nirvana and personal detachment rather than striving for finding your place within a crumbled society in all aspects.--Edgar Cochran, Letterboxd 

Alucarda (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977)

In an abandoned monastery, a young girl gives birth to a daughter; after she allows a witch to whisk her away to a nearby convent, evil forces close in on the woman. 16 years later, innocent Justine arrives at the convent after her parents pass away. She befriends Alucarda, the baby girl from the prologue, all grown up, dressed in black, and a bizarre creature indeed. The two girls encounter a hunchback who introduces them to Satan worship, and after Alucarda unleashes the spirits which killed her mother, the forces possess the two girls, resulting in some of the most outrageous horror setpieces you'll ever see!

Juan López Moctezuma, a collaborator of Jodorowsky (who claims Moctezuma stole money from him to make his films!) and one of the creators of the infamous Panic Theatre, has created a minor masterpiece with ALUCARDA. Those who associate Mexican Horror with Santo monster pics are in for a rude awakening. But the film is still just as wild as those films and then some! As Michael Weldon points out in his review for the film in Psychotronic, you'd be hard-pressed to find a horror film with more screaming. There are bloodier horror flicks and of course those with more nudity, but ALUCARDA is so jam-packed with both that even the most jaded fan will be rubbing his eyes in disbelief! Satanic rituals, coffins filled with blood, sadomasochistic flagellation amongst priests and nuns, nasty decapitations, and a fiery finale complete with Satanic scripture and multiple instances of spontaneous combustion that must have influenced DePalma's CARRIE, this flick is simply never boring! Some viewers have found fault with the script not deciding who the villains are, the church or the girls, but this adds a schizophrenic element to an already delirious viewing experience! The cast varies from superb to over-the-top, but most turn in admirable performances. Tina Romero in particular creates a very memorable character in Alucarda, and Susanna Kimini is an acceptable Justine. Claudio Brook (also in Moctezuma's MANSION OF MADNESS and the awful THE BEES!) in a dual role as the hunchback and as Dr. Oszek, the man of reason, and Tina French as the overly protective Sister Angelica are both quite good. --dvd drive-in 

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (José Mojica Marins, 1967)

Coffin Joe: cultural icon, counter-cultural statement, sadistic lord of carnival horror. Once seen, rarely forgotten, often underappreciated, Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe is a loose English translation) was the creation of Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins. He played the recurring figure throughout a series of his own films, created the iconic look – long fingernails, top hat and cape – and eventually became the living embodiment of the character, with “Coffin Joe” and “Jose Mojica Marins” blending into one and the same in the hearts and minds of fans. It is perhaps because Marins poured so much of his soul into his creation that the two names began to interchange so effortlessly, with Coffin Joe ultimately taking on a life of his own that far surpassed the notoriety of his creator.

Without context, the power of Marin’s work is frequently undermined. Instead, critics tend to look to the lack of budget and the sadism and violence inherent in the scripts, failing to see the meaning and metaphor behind the rough-around-the-edges delivery, or the passion poured into its creation. It is exactly this factor that makes Marin’s work so ripe for reappraisal. No less than it deserves. At the very least, his work should not be considered beyond its political and cultural context, anything less is to miss the point entirely.

In early 1964, the Brazilian military (with the help of the US government) staged a coup d’etat against President João Goulart that saw the country fall under a military dictatorship until March 1985. Within this regime the media was heavily controlled, especially when it came to material considered a threat to public morality. Censorship was rife and objection punished through imprisonment or exile. But independent filmmakers resisted, and it was in this climate that Brazil’s ‘Mouth of Garbage’ cinema – the Cinema da Boca do Lixo movement – was formed. Taking its name from a slum red light district of São Paulo, it encompasses a diverse collection of films characterised by their low-budgets and allegiance to exploitation cinema, often defined by violent, sexual or other sensational elements. Marins found himself at the heart of this movement, and in November 1964 – only months after the new regime took control – he released the film widely credited as Brazil’s first horror film: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma, José Mojica Marins, 1964). It caused outrage for its blasphemous delivery, graphic violence and sexual undertones.

This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver, José Mojica Marins, 1967) was the second part in what became The Coffin Joe Trilogy. Taking off at where At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul ended, the narrative returns to gravedigger Coffin Joe (who was seen being ripped apart by the ghosts of his victims at the end of the first chapter). He survives the attack, inspiring him to continue his mission: to create the perfect human through breeding with good female stock, an act Coffin Joe believes to be the key to immortality. In fathering the man that will lead the evolution of a master race, his legacy will live on.

Marins employs the defiance of Nietzsche, the confrontational aspects of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the surrealism of Buñuel, the blood and gore of Grand Guignol theatre, the shadows of Expressionism, and lashings of the Gothic grotesque to further expand themes explored in the first installment of the trilogy. Coffin Joe’s mission is unchanged: find a perfect woman and mate with her. The violence is as copious and brutal as in the first film. But here Marin is bolder, straying into the realm of the avant garde; a factor that became a far more prominent in his later films. Although he was working on another tight budget – most of the scenes were filmed in an abandoned synagogue, the actors all amateurs – this second part takes up the challenge of expanding the Coffin Joe universe; reaching far beyond the four walls of his humble home, or the local bar and graveyard settings of the first chapter. This time Marins sends him to hell.

And quite the hell it is indeed. The only scene filmed in colour in what is otherwise a black and white film, the lurid imagery conjures up hell as a psychedelic Sadean underworld, packed with writhing naked flesh; bodies hang from the walls, screaming and groaning in an orgy of pain and suffering, locked there for an eternity from which they can never escape. The most horrifying aspect for Coffin Joe is the sight of his exact double, sat on the throne, lord of the underworld. This discovery sends him reeling into a personal crisis, because he doesn’t believe in anything other than superior knowledge and intelligence. Hell is for the weak and superstitious.

These Sadean aspects are reflected in Joe’s torture lab – complete with a deformed henchman – where he takes women he kidnaps to test their suitability for his breeding programme by terrorising them with hundreds of spiders, feeding them to a pit of snakes when they fail.

One of the main criticisms of Marin’s work is that it is overly misogynistic due to its sexualised violence, and it would be easy to assume that his purpose is to sensationalise violence against women. But Coffin Joe’s violence is not gender specific: he is brutal to all humans (apart from children, who he views as innocent). As he gnashes his teeth, delivering diatribe after diatribe – all strongly aligned with Nietzsche’s philosophy on The Superman – it becomes clear his anger stems from a hatred of the human race in its present form, regardless of gender. The fact he doesn’t seek simply a womb as a vehicle for his unborn child, but a woman who can equal him, establishes that beneath the surface there is a lot more going on than simply sex. There may be a riotous celebration of carnality, and it’s part of the thrill, but there is also a dark nihilism at play that openly criticizes all levels of society, from the superstitious villagers and their reliance on faith and religion, to Coffin Joe’s megalomania as he becomes drunk on his own sense of personal power fueled by a knowledge that is deeply flawed. --Senses of Cinema 

Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971)

Peter Watkins' fictionalized documentary presents a group of anti-war activists at the height of the Vietnam War who, having been unlawfully detained, must choose between long term imprisonment or total freedom, on the condition they participate in a deadly law enforcement training exercise.

1970. The war in Vietnam is escalating. President Nixon has decided on a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia. There is massive public protest in the United States and elsewhere. Nixon declares a state of national emergency, and - we presuppose in the film - activates the 1950 Internal Security Act (the McCarran Act), which authorizes Federal authorities, without reference to Congress, to detain persons judged to be ‘a risk to internal security’. In a desert zone in southwestern California, not far from the tents where a civilian tribunal are passing sentence on Group 638, Group 637 (mostly university students) find themselves in the Bear Mountain National Punishment Park, and discover the rules of the ‘game’ they are forced to undergo as part of the alternative they have chosen in lieu of confinement in a penitentiary. Group 637 have been promised liberty if they evade pursuing law enforcement officers and reach the American flag posted 53 miles away across the mountains, within three days. Meanwhile, in the tribunal tent, Group 638 - assumed guilty before tried - endeavour in vain to argue their case for resisting the war in Vietnam. While they argue, amidst harassment by the members of the tribunal, the exhausted Group 637 - dehydrated by exposure to temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit - have voted to split into three subgroups: those for a forced escape out of the Park, those who have given up, and those who are determined to reach the flag...

--Peter Watkins

World on a Wire aka Welt am Draht (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)

A tiny topless discotheque, somewhere in a future that looks very much like 1973, filled with bulked-up black bodybuilders, flexing and voguing in leopard-skin briefs; a zaftig blonde Euro-grotesque, wandering like a washed-up Heimatfilm Jayne Mansfield among the musclemen, tenderly caressing biceps and pecs as she passes; a blockheaded hero in a too-tight suit, caught between two (or is it three?) realities, and slowly losing his mind… Every story Rainer Werner Fassbinder ever told depicts a highly personalized social totality in miniature—“a world in a nutshell”—so why should his long-unseen foray into the speculative and inner-spatial realms of science fiction, World on a Wire, have settled for anything less?

A story of realities-within-realities, built upon the sort of Chinese box metaphysics that Philip K. Dick perfected and the brothers Wachowski would later make safe for multiplexes, RWF’s two-part, 205-minute television miniseries has finally been resurrected and returned to cocaine-mirror crystal-clarity in a new restoration supervised by The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. Set largely in an Alphaville-esque Seventies-moderne Paris, World on a Wire might as well have been staged as a series of Roxy Music album covers in the anti-theater of the New German Cinema wunderkind’s desires. Every image teems with two-headed two-shots of echt Seventies film-scene lounge lizards (watch for a youthful Werner Schroeter and his ever-stunning muse, Magdalena Montezuma) and ever-more-paranoiac quasi-action film pirouettes (fistfights, little white Corvettes, screen-filling fireballs) as scientist/hero/sucker Fred Stiller (an athletic and, according to cast and crew members, deeply soused Klaus Löwitsch) falls ever deeper into the mirrorworlds of corporate cover-up and virtual realities behind “Simulacron,” a computer capable of modeling the future spending habits of potential consumers in cyberspace, all at Big Business’s malignant behest.

Shot during a pivotal moment in Fassbinder’s career, on hiatus from the lengthy production of Effi Briest and in the same year as Martha and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, World on a Wire marks an unlikely genre-deviation from the director’s more typical lushly melodramatic and often gleefully embittered films. As a result, it deserves recognition on at least two planes of space-operatic history: first, as an accomplishment to stand alongside those great moments in television science fiction engineered by the extraordinary Nigel Kneale (Quatermass and the Pit), and second, as a decidedly auteurist celebration/rethink of two disparate though not entirely dissimilar sorts of cinematic science fiction.

The first of these lies in World on a Wire’s recurrent visual fascination with infinitely receding corporate office corridors framed with quattrocento perfection, a motif that’s less reminiscent of John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s Dark Star than it is of Ernie Gehr’s optical compression chamber, Serene Velocity. That Fassbinder might locate his film’s future among the structures of Gehr’s impossible space-place suggests the range of the filmmaker’s resources. That he might upend the most famous moment in then-contemporary sci-fi—Kubrick’s deployment of The Blue Danube in zero gravity—while panning across a sideboard covered in cold cuts and congealed canapés during a cleverly calculated corporate press conference reveals the depth of Fassbinder’s furiously “fuck off” mirth in the face of forever constricted means. Made for German television’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk for, according to The New York Times, “900,000 Deutschmarks (more than $300,000 at the time),” World on a Wire actually enjoyed a rather lavish budget among RWF productions of the time.

As much as in, say, Robert Wise’s Executive Suite or Jean Negulesco’s Woman’s World, the face of corporate politics may belong to men, but its often bare and delicate backbone belies the strength of the women who actually give World on a Wire its spine. A pair of starlet turns send the film sensually into the stratosphere. The first of them is fully embodied by Barbara Valentin, perhaps best known as the bar owner and couscous-cookin’ lover of Ali in Fear Eats the Soul, here dazzling as the aforementioned Mansfield simulacrum sent to monitor Stiller’s industrial rise and fall. The second is a somnambulistically sultry performance by the breathtaking Mascha Rabben, who wafts through the proceedings as Stiller’s eventual lover and the daughter of his predecessor, the super-scientist whose disappearance initially sets the action in motion.

A head trip filled with headaches, set in a world where anyone might be an apparition and everyone behaves like one, World on a Wire is nothing short of a gale-force blast from futures past, and for longtime Fassbinder freaks or welcome newcomers to the fold, one of the cinematic (re)discoveries of the year. 

-- Film Comment

Hour of the Furnaces (Fernando E. Solanas & Octavio Getino, 1968)

The title of this three-part agitprop documentary comes from a quote Che Guevara used to open what was to become his last public statement, the “Message to the Tricontinental”, in 1967: “It’s the hour of the furnaces and only the light shall be seen”. The author of the quote is José Martí, Cuba’s nineteenth century national hero. This double reference, to a revolutionary who died fighting Spanish colonialism, and to a revolutionary who had just died fighting neo-colonialism, cues the viewer to think of the parallelisms between contemporary liberation struggles and Latin American wars of independence in the nineteenth century; namely, a voluntarism and a nationalist anti-imperialism that effectively trumped other epistemological categories. In this regard, the film’s strong bias against validating questions of power that fall outside the realm of political economy is a reflection of its times. At the same time, however, this limitation should not blind us to the film’s greatest strength: the clear articulation of a revolutionary discourse through an equally revolutionary means of representation.

Shot clandestinely between 1966 and 1968, during the initial stages of what would come to be known as Argentina’s infamous “dirty war”, the film was screened clandestinely as well, to sympathetic audiences of workers, anarchists and revolutionaries who would regularly interrupt the projection to discuss concepts and issues raised in the film. Given the limits of space, I will focus on only one of these themes, the relationship between violence and liberation, by calling attention to the central role that violence plays in the dialectical unfolding of the film’s three part narrative, a narrative where Part 1 corresponds to the thesis of the current status quo; Part 2 to a prolonged antithesis of Peronist struggle; and Part 3 to a soon-to-be-achieved synthesis. Through this dialectical structure, the film rearticulates violence not only as a Marxist would – that is, as a symptom of the changes in modes of production – but also as a Leninist and especially a Maoist would: as a tool to be actively wielded against an oppressive status quo in order to overthrow it. - Senses of Cinema 

Part I: Neocolonialism and Violence 

Part II: Act for Liberation

Part III: Violence and Liberation

Adam Caldwell - Paintings

Artist Statement:

My paintings and drawings juxtapose elements of abstract expressionism and classical figuration. During my training at the California College of Arts and Crafts, I began to create collage drawings that layered disparate images on top of one another; I now use oil paint in a similar way, starting with an abstract background and then adding more photorealistic details, allowing the work to dictate its own construction. The resulting palimpsest of figures and abstract shapes represents the conflicted and paradoxical emotions that underlie my work. My paintings evoke the tensions between mind and body, self and other, present and past. They also raise questions about the nature of identity, particularly concerning issues of gender and sexuality. I am deeply concerned about the world around me, and my work reflects my reactions to social issues such as war and consumerism by contrasting images from American advertisements and popular culture with images of rituals from around the world.