In brief: A powerful vision of Japanese post-World War 2 fallout, allying pulpy visuals and plot elements with an engaged voice *****
Source: Hulu+
The trope of post-war women, In Europe and Japan, turning to prostitution, is so well-worn that mere allusion to it can render even the most sensitive and well-meaning film utterly tedious. Luckily, Seijun Suzuki has very little interest in sensitivity and came into his own by specifically avoiding the dull checklists that typified the industry in which he worked. So when he makes a film about that very subject, a gang of plucky women eking out a living through prostitution, it quickly sets itself apart. It does not simply avoid the norm, it establishes its themes and concerns as if no one else had ever even considered them before.
Our “heroes” are a gang of young prostitutes, helpfully colour-coded, who use their numbers to fend off outside threats. With the intrusion of a man, a returning Japanese soldier (Jô Shishido, rising to a more demanding role), the women’s values begin to crumble as their own sexual longings begin to supplant the capitalist veneer they themselves imposed.
Gate of Flesh is a film of antagonisms, all straining in opposition, creating a radical space in which a vein of genuinely fresh drama emerges. Even as the film openly invokes sexploitation elements, an unsurprising mainstay of Nikkatsu’s 1960s roster – they specialised in cheap and plentiful productions, mainly aimed at the youth market, and by the 70s would switch exclusively to producing soft-core porn features – it uses them to underpin a caustic social message, cultivating an unusual counterpoint of content versus theme. The sight of naked flesh being whipped here is less pornographic and more aligned with a society debased to savagery.
The women utilize sex only for money but find pangs of their own innate sexual desires distracting them. They develop a code of rules for their gang, to try and root out these gnawing urges, but their own laws eventually undo them. The occupying Americans are reviled yet vital, providing law, order, but also paying customers. Even religion is sullied, destroyed under the weight of earthly want. Meanwhile Japan is both shamed by its defeat, condemned both for being too soft to win the war while also being too hard and rigid beforehand, prompting the war in the first place. Its returning soldiers share the same condemnation: fools who fought a pointless war and also cowards who lost it. Perched atop these oppositions, the film’s wildest, most rambunctious moments are also where it is most vulnerable- exposing raw nerves and providing a supremely humanist account of Japan’s post-war plight.
Suzuki further refines this template with clever use of superimpositions. They are no longer the muddled visions of the drug-addled, as in his previous Youth of the Beast, instead they are the intrusions of memories and pure ideals that are, by their illusory nature, now isolated and redundant amidst the cacophonous and terrible reality. That reality, built loud and gaudy with Suzuki’s preferred pulp inflections, is entirely consistent and perhaps the film’s greatest triumph. The art design, by Takeo Kimura (a major contributor in many of Suzuki’s best-loved films), is remarkable. Theatrical effects are often employed – in one indoor scene a spot-light follows a prostitute as she gets undressed – and they imbue an Expressionist edge. The sets zero in on the sweaty bustle of a defeated Japan and, in their intricate design, offer countless paths through which the actors can scurry. But despite fervent movement, they are all unknowing rats trapped in a cruel and suffocating maze. Under Kimura’s eye, every frame enshrines desolation and feral want.
Suzuki’s vision of post-war Japan, finds it greedily picking through and cannibalizing the tattered remnants of its former self. It is an eye filled with both sympathy and self-loathing, and it stands Gate of Flesh alongside the very best of war cinema. Needless to say, it may also stand as Suzuki’s own finest achievement.
The Italian horror circuit through the 70s and 80s was a pretty small troupe, but who could complain with such talent? The movement was on the decline through the 80s but it’s fair to say that Michele Soavi had been picked out as the front-runner to cut the path into the 90s. Alas, that never really came to pass, for reasons I’m unsure of. Soavi still works to this day but he’s not made a horror film in two decades now. Perhaps the industry’s downturn quashed too many avenues, perhaps he just grew disinterested in it, I don’t know. What I do know is that Soavi’s early career as a horror director is marked by a couple of fabulously entertaining features.
He started as an assistant to Dario Argento, sometimes even appearing in front of the camera too. You can find him in Bava’s A Blade in the Dark, for example. Eventually he graduated to helming feature films of his own and opened with the hyper-stylized StageFright. Despite a close overlap with a Hitchcock title, StageFright vs. Stage Fright, rest assured it would be impossible to mistake the two, what with the synth-pop soundtrack and an axe/drill-wielding killer who wears a giant owl-head for the whole thing. Yeah, it’s pretty great. Still, it’s Soavi’s second film that I’ve chosen, because it’s arguably his best.
Considering the people he trained with, the slow-burn aesthetic of The Church might feel surprising. In fact it was originally intended as a second sequel in the growing Demons franchise until Soavi wisely nixed the idea. He wanted to break free and craft something more reserved and atmospheric. The Demons films, the first two at least, are massively entertaining but they are not what we might call subtle. Indeed, if they were faced with subtlety, they would smash its head to a bloody mush against a wall while bopping along to a blaring heavy metal soundtrack.
The Church follows more in the footsteps of Argento’s free-form supernatural thriller, Inferno, although it does so with a much quieter, haunting aesthetic. And where Argento unhinges from narrative, assaulting viewers with a sensory barrage, Soavi remains engrossed in story, slowly ratcheting up the tension. The spectacle, ancient demons made manifest, is impressive and employed sparingly, heightening their effect. Meanwhile the soundtrack, a Keith Emerson score dotted with Goblin and Philip Glass compositions feels perfectly appropriate. Soavi’s sensibilities are, in many respects, more careful and mature than we could have any right to expect, and expand on the work of his formative influences, staking out his own place in the pantheon of Italian horror.
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue
Everyone seems to love zombie movies. They’re everywhere and everyone is touting their fandom. Discussions on the internet revolve around people imagining how they might survive a zombie outbreak and how excited they are that The Walking Dead is coming back on the air. While I’ve nothing against zombie movies, indeed I could count myself as a fan too, it always surprises me that, amidst this popular love of the genre, so few people seem to have seen anything outside of Romero’s original trilogy, a couple of other modern knock-offs, and the aforementioned The Walking Dead– each episode of which, based on my own cursory viewing, seems to be a 50/50 split between boring shots of people shooting zombies and those zombies then falling over, and irritating, whiny morons whining moronically about their irritations.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Romero looms large over the genre and his original trilogy of films, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead are the definitive texts of the modern genre, but his work also gave rise to a number of talented impersonators. The European zombie movement took off with a vengeance, in part fueled by Romero’s close work with Dario Argento. The Italian horror/exploitation scene was running wild in the 70s too, producing so many films it’s difficult to keep count. A few stand taller than the rest though, with Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters aka. Zombie aka. Zombi 2 (in Italy a ‘2’ was appended and it was marketed as an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead) commanding a pretty good audiences. Less well known is an Italian/Spanish co-production, shot in the UK, that boasts so many varying titles I believe it actually may have set a record. We’ll call it The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue as that’s the one I’m most familiar with, although you may also find it listed as: The Living Dead; Let Sleeping Corpses Lie; Don’t Open the Window; Do Not Speak Ill of the Dead; and various variations on all of those.
There’s nothing particularly glaring about the film’s production to make it stand out amongst the throngs of other cheap, quickly produced movies of the era but, take my word for it, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is easily one of the finest zombie movies ever made. It’s a fairly traditional affair, relying on the excitement of escaping from the zombies more than on dubious allegory to fluff up its ingredients. It finds our heroes desperately trying to stay alive as the living dead come to haunt rural England. What distinguishes the film is the quality of its set-pieces, which combine satisfying levels of gore with a strong sense of narrative tension and excitement. Unlike countless other zombies, there’s a real feeling of urgency to this one, coupled with strong design.
Also, it features the line, “You’re all the same the lot of you, with your long hair and faggot clothes,” which maybe my favourite line in all of movie-dom (you have to hear it in context). Doom Metal group Electric Wizard also liked it, sampling the line to open their song, Wizard In Black. Granted, this nugget of information will almost certainly never help anyone ever. But just in case, I thought I’d better include it anyway.
Bay of Blood (1971) Mario Bava
In the last article I did in this series I talked about the grand shadow cast by Mario Bava. He was a giant in Italian cinema and one of the most influential genre filmmakers around. First establishing himself as a cinematographer, he later became a director in his own right, presiding over a series of popular Gothic horror films including the brilliant Black Sunday (aka. Mask of Satan). As his career progressed, he helped to shape the tenets of what would be known as giallo, a sub-genre of films, distinctly Italian, that gelled mystery with gory, highly stylized murders- invariably involving blades and scantily-clad women. Growing weary of these films, and using his own money, Bava decided in the early 70s to try something a little new. So one day he kinda invented slasher films, as you do.
Bava’s film kinda set the tone for how skinny dippers get treated in all slasher flicks hence
Although it’s exact origins are tricky to pin down exactly, since bloody death had been a mainstay of cinema for a while already, there’s little doubt that without Bava, what would become known in the US as ‘slasher films’ simply would not exist. To that end, Bay of Blood was a formative start to the movement, defined by narrative so pared down that it frankly bordered on the abstract. Although the template is well set now, there was a time when a group of people showing up in an isolated place and all being summarily slaughtered in various different ways wasn’t justification enough for a film to unfold. Weird, right? It was Bava’s tale of a contentious inheritance in a small lakeside community that cheekily demonstrated that sometimes, killing’s all you need (The Beatles claimed it was ‘love’ but they hardly seem trustworthy).
Given its extreme violence and rudimentary narrative Bay of Blood was a shock to the system at the time, prompting many horror fans to discard it as a completely inane gore-fest. Sure, that’s what 99% of slashers are, but Bava’s film, brimming with paranoia, does build a legitimately interesting result, suggesting a pernicious fate which, in the film’s conclusion, transcends familial and generational lines. The slasher film as a kind of filmic ‘standard’ would be cemented in due course, but Bay of Blood is perhaps the earliest clear adherent to the format, supplanting narrative justification (a mainstay of giallo) with ever more brute force. The result remains one of the finest slasher films ever made. Indeed, maybe even the very best of them all. And in the US it got the rather fabulous title of Twitch of the Death Nerve.
Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Grey (1932) Carl Theodor Dreyer
Dreyer is generally regarded as one of the finest directors in the history of cinema. That’s fairly understandable since that’s exactly what he is. However while much attention is lavished on the likes of The Passion of Joan of Arc (which is, to be fair, an easy contender for the title of greatest film ever) and Ordet, his bizarre 1932 horror film Vampyr is often forgotten. I say it’s a horror film but it’s altogether stranger than that: a kind of lucid dreamscape involving a man possibly encountering a vampire, being ensnared by it, or simply passing on to the other side himself. Pick your interpretation, the film remains intensely watchable regardless.
Although time is often unkind to films beyond a certain age, Vampyr’s washed-out look is partly by design. Discovering a light-leak in the lens early into the production, Dreyer asked the cameraman not to fix it because he liked the diffuse, hazy look it gave the film. Elsewhere he shot through gauze to texture the image, all of which only heightens the oneiric bent of the exercise. Disinterested in narrative logic, the film assembles a fabulous array of odd and intriguing visuals, conjuring up spectres of death in the oddest of places. As mentioned above, the film can be interpreted allegorically or can be followed in more literal, and decidedly supernatural, terms.
Thought-provoking and atmospheric, there really aren’t many equivalents to Dreyer’s film, which remains a crystallised dream from so many years ago. In many respects, the film is timeless, harnessing the eccentricities of the production, some intended, some not so much, to create a project that stands apart from both Dreyer’s other work and cinema in general. Its influence can be traced through to David Lynch and others but it remains a singularly important work all of its own and a necessary trip for all of cinema’s dreamers.
The Pendulum, The Pit, and Hope (1983) Jan Švankmajer
If you’re stuck for time but would like a quick shot in the arm, then this one’s for you. Created by Jan Švankmajer, one of the world’s finest animators, here he adapts Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, conjuring up an abstract, nightmare vignette set in labyrinthine tunnels with a deadly, bizarre apparatus threatening the unnamed protagonist. Using primarily live action, the film blends in his trademark stop-motion techniques to filter the otherworldly into the frame.
Staying close to the original text’s style, Švankmajer seeks to heighten the experiential by presenting the entire film in a first-person perspective, the lens of the camera literally the eye of the tortured protagonist. This blends with the claustrophobic set design and the details of hideous minutiae to create a particularly jarring and atmospheric rendition of the tale, perhaps the best ever filmed.
The Face of Another (1966) Hiroshi Teshigahara
The sixties was a great decade in general for paranoid identity studies. Though spoiled for choice, it would be easy to nominate Japan’s Hiroshi Teshigahara as their king. The Woman in the Dunes is probably his best known film though my preferences tend more towards his later film, The Face of Another. Alongside Pitfall, they form a loose thematic trilogy on the subject of fractured minds, societies, and identities.
The story concerns an engineer whose face is badly disfigured in an industrial accident. He becomes reclusive and angry, unable to deal with this injury. Things look up when a doctor offers him an experimental treatment, essentially a lifelike mask that can replace his entire face. The only issue is, since his face is destroyed, it will have to be another man’s that forms the model. This doctor’s office is a completely abstract space, free-floating and amorphous, and the discussions there wax more philosophical than medical. Concerns are raised that, with a new face may come new behaviours and indeed, perhaps an entirely new identity. These concerns are well met as our protagonist, recognizing the potential to start entirely anew rather than rekindle his old life, begins to adopt increasingly aberrant behaviours.
Teshigahara’s film is visually gorgeous, appropriately utilising black-and-white despite it being somewhat out of vogue by the mid-sixties. His father being a master of Ikebana, the traditional art of floral arrangement that branched, often literally, into huge and remarkable organic sculpture, Hiroshi was entirely at home in the avant-garde and unusual. To that end he surrounded himself with a bevy of experimental artists, adapting novels from the acclaimed Kōbō Abe, with cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa, set and prop designs by noted architects and sculptors, and a musical score by Toru Takemitsu. It is a formally bold film, with its intellectual concerns writ neatly into its every nook and fold and stands as one of the high-points of 60s cinema, in Japan and elsewhere.
Film school has become quite a hassle these days. First off, you have to pay for it, and then you probably have to attend stuff or something. I don’t really know, I never went to film school, but I’ve met a few people who have and they inspired this article. So if you don’t have the money to go to film-school, or you just want a refresher in how to do film, then I’m here to help. Today I’m going to walk you through, ‘How to become an expert in silent cinema.’
In this image, the cameraman has accidentally left his finger on the lens
Silent cinema is important because it’s old. Ask any film student and they’ll tell you that they love silent cinema. In fact, it’s one of their favourite things. They’re drawn to its oldness, its silence, and its age. You see, back then directors really had to hone their craft to find their art because it would take many, many more years before cinema matured to the point where it could tackle real issues like: chainsaw-wielding maniacs; quasi-incestuous referencing of other films; and what actresses look like with no clothes on. It’s hard to believe, but as any film student can tell you, people nowadays don’t really appreciate that once upon a time, people showed up to watch silent films like they were regular films, because that was the best they had.
Due to inflation, silent films feel a lot longer now than they did when originally released
Still, in these modern, rapid-fire crazy days, it’s difficult to find time to sit through silent films. Seriously, some of them are literally hours long. That might have been acceptable back in the 1920s, when people sought arduous tasks to stave off their inevitable death to typhoid, but nowadays we have to more carefully ration our time between so many tasks. And after all, when you pay for a cellphone data plan, you really should use it as much as possible.
Metropolis was shot on location in Berlin. The city never really recovered from wartime bombing.
So here’s an easy step-by-step guide to quickly honing your critical skills and becoming a silent cinema aficionado…
So where to start? First things first, watch German director, Fritz Lang’s epic 1927 “masterpiece”, Metropolis. Be warned, it’s nearly three hours long, no one says a word, and everyone just flaps their arms around like morons, but silent cinema isn’t a topic like economics or spotting doctored US birth certificates- you can’t just claim to be an expert without putting in some time first. Bring your cellphone with you. It’s okay to look away from the screen for long periods. It’s a general rule of cinema that if no one is saying anything, then nothing important is happening. Also remember that since silent cinema has no sound, it can easily be watched in fast-forward because the “actors” don’t start sounding like chipmunks. But don’t be a total philistine about it, slow down to regular speed for the bits with explosions, even though they’re pretty lame by modern standards. Also look out for points of female nudity. Sure, it’s kinda weird since she could be your great-grandmother, but this is “art” we’re talking about, so pay attention.
Key words: Metropolis; Silent Cinema; Nudity
Little known fact: Metropolis also paved the way for Showgirls
In the film, you cannot hear this stupid drum thing
If you happen to be watching the film with others, remember that it is entirely acceptable to talk during silent cinema. Since there’s no speaking, normal film rules – such as keeping talking to a minimum except where loudly declaring, “Oh, one of my favourite bits is coming up soon!” – can’t reasonably be expected to apply. Since you have to ‘read’ silent films, via inter-titles, foreign film rules apply here. So feel free to keep a running commentary of events, talk about how people ‘back then’ would be amazed by this sort of thing, and about how, while the film certainly isn’t much to look at now, the trained eye can spy a lot of little ideas that were later realised in normal film.
Key words: Normal Film; Foreign Film; Commentary
The dumb expressions of ‘Expressionism’
So, with the hard work of sitting through the film out of the way, it’s time to start reaping the rewards. Firstly, you need to learn the basics about how to describe silent cinema. Luckily, Metropolis is representative of all silent cinema. You just watched the best. Although you shouldn’t state it so bluntly, everyone was basically just trying to make Metropolis but Fritz Lang got there first. One notable exception is Charlie Chaplin. He fell on his ass a lot. He inspired Walt Disney to invent cartoons, which are cool, but we’re on a grander journey here. When describing silent cinema the most important term to use is ‘expressionism.’ This is a descriptor of how silent cinema is kind of like real cinema. It’s called ‘expressionism’ because, since they couldn’t talk, the actors had to make big, stupid expressions just to keep the audience from leaving. It may look pretty dumb now but remember, back then lots of people had polio so they were used to people moving all weird. You might even say that silent cinema and polio go hand in hand.
Key words: Cartoons; Expressionism; Polio
This scene uses expressionism to signify that something is happening up high and to the left of the cameraman
Chin up, oppressed under-classes
As mentioned previously, silent cinema is a sub-genre of foreign film. Due to a lack of amenities and technical know-how, old films and non-English-speaking films aren’t really capable of properly fleshing out their product to fit into recognised genres like: Action Movies; Thrillers; Romantic Comedies; Yet Another Fucking Comic Book Adaptation; Franchise Reboots; or Films That Won Tom Hanks an Oscar. That’s not being unfair to them of course. They do some really good work considering their unfortunate circumstances. Some foreign films have even stumbled on methods that real directors later used to make great films. For example, although Bladerunner is arguably the most original film ever*, it can’t help that it was made after Metropolis which means some bits overlap a little. Consider, for example, the chins of Metropolis’ Gustav Fröhlich and Bladerunner’s Rutger Hauer.
Key words: Bladerunner; Genre; Chins
*If you scoffed loudly here, thinking, “Has this moron never even seen Dark City!?” then, great work. I could probably learn some things from you.
In early films you will often find editing blunders like this, where they accidentally put a load of weird shit in the same frame
A really important point is that Metropolis is a German film and as such, is about Hitler. World War 2 lasted from 1939 to 1945 and divided German history into three separate blocks of time: Before World War 2; Actual World War 2; and David Hasselhoff. Everything from ‘Before World War 2’ provides hints about why World War 2 happened. This is called foreshadowing and good films use it a lot to predict the future. Demonstrating how we’re building a case here, we might say that Metropolis is an expression(ism) of World War 2. This is super-important. Write it down!
Key words: German; World War 2; Foreshadowing; World War 2; WW2; World War 2
Triumph of the Wall
All possibly Nazis, maybe
I think the Nazis built one of these. They probably did. Yeah, I heard that somewhere. They totally built one of these.
Extending our analysis, the Nazis hated Jews. So it’s wise to posit, as a college professor of mine once did, that the ugly guy who built the robot is a stereotypically Jewish caricature because the clearly five-pointed star adorning the wall of his laboratory very nearly almost has as many points as a Star of David, albeit not quite specifically actually as many points as a Star of David. The Nazis also didn’t like black people and Metropolis was made in black-and-white. That is foreshadowing and shadows are also black. Again, this is really important, write it down! Such inferences show the depth of the film, and your depth of thought in reaction to the film. Still, what’s paramount is that you remember it’s not just what’s on the screen that’s important to win conversations, we also must bear in mind that film was a product of its time. Setting up this kind of scholarly perspective is important because, without it, you run the risk of accidentally sounding like you’re close-minded.
Key words: Nazis; Star of David; Really Important!
Behold, the Star of Five-to-Possibly-Six Points
Caligari’s Cabinet was deceptively spacious but very poorly constructed
Advanced Lesson: Okay, let’s push even further ahead. This is pretty advanced, so you might want to watch the film again if you have a chance. Just set it at 8x speed or so, that’s slow enough. Every so often you’ll encounter someone else who has actually seen Metropolis. They are out there. So what can you do to get the upper-hand when talking about film in front of them? Try the following sentence…
“While Metropolis clearly represents the apogee of the Silent Cinema art-form and consequently, of Expressionism as a film grammar rendered fully manifest, its visual thesis is unmistakably indebted to the pervasive chiaroscuro of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released seven years earlier.”
Learn this sentence and wield it responsibly. This is a last resort. It simply translates to this: Fritz Lang, who directed Metropolis, ripped off someone else but made it better. So he’s like Quentin Tarantino’s granddad. And don’t worry, ‘chiaroscuro’ doesn’t mean anything. It’s total gibberish. If that line doesn’t silence any dissent then don’t worry. You’re an educated person, after all. Simply mumble the name, Siegfried Kracauer (Sig-Freed Crack-Hoor), before calmly excusing yourself.
Key words: Bullshit
Yes, I do know a lot about silent cinema. You’re absolutely correct
So there you have it. You are now fully equipped to dominate at discussions about silent films.
Concentric Ocelot Party 