JFL

The year is 1964. The Berlin Wall has been standing for three years and one of its direct consequences is a thriving organised trade involving the illegal transport of people across the border. The old-school thief Bruno is ordered by the East German Stasi to infiltrate West Berlin and kidnap the head of the smuggling organisation. However, Bruno decides to play a double game, thanks to which he finds himself between the grindstones of the secret services on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Dear Fatherland Be at Peace is the first and, as it happened, last entry in Roland Klick’s filmography that was made as a commercial genre commission and was supposed to be the beginning of Klick’s collaboration with producer Bernd Eichinger, who wanted to make ambitious commercial projects that would restore German cinema to its former glory and the international renown that it had enjoyed in the 1920s. Eichinger eventually succeeded, producing films such as The NeverEnding Story (1984), The Name of the Rose (1986) and Downfall (2004). For many, the combination of the visionary Eichinger and the idiosyncratic Klick promised to give rise to a spectacular future for the film industry, and their first project fulfilled these great expectations. Klick’s adaptation of Johannes Mario Simmel’s trashy Cold War novel towers over other adaptations of Simmel’s popular works, many of which were made by genre journeyman Alfred Vohrer. In collaboration with cinematographer Jost Vacano, Klick transformed a dime-a-dozen narrative into a dynamic thriller that highlighted the moral ambivalence of divided Berlin. Unfortunately, the promising collaboration between Eichinger and Klick collapsed due to creative and personal disagreements over the form of their planned second project, which was supposed be Klick’s adaptation of Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F., the famous autobiographical novel about Berlin’s underage, heroin-addicted prostitutes and rent boys, which Uli Udel eventually made for Eichinger. [written for the 2018 Summer Film School]

Roland Klick developed the screenplay about the aimlessness of lost youths and the dark side of West German society based on his own experience of offering shelter to a street kid in his own apartment for several years. The film follows seventeen-year-old Willi, who can’t hold down a job, constantly comes into conflict with the police and hangs around on the streets of Hamburg. On the one hand, he doesn’t know what he wants, but at the same time he knows very well that he doesn’t want to do what others tell him to do. His frenetic flight from the authorities and from himself leads him from the grime and decadence of the streets, through the establishments of trendy society, to an opulent home in the Blankenese residential district, back and forth in a frantic spiral. In the course of his impulsive odyssey, he encounters various characters who represent possible life paths that he could take, but who also bear the marks of fitting into a particular social pigeonhole. Supermarket shows the key principles of the director’s style in its purest form. On the one hand, Klick seeks out for his characters the ideal actors who fit their image, while at the same time incorporating the actors’ observed gestures and distinctive expressions into the characters. So, instead of trying to portray the characters, the actors directly personify them. He also lets the actors naturally enter the scene, which he has thought out to the smallest detail, and gives the cue to start filming only at the ideal moment. Thanks to this method, Klick’s films radiate unbridled energy and almost documentary authenticity. According to the director himself, he conceived the film as one long take, so he also needed a cameraman who could keep pace with the protagonist. He found just such a cameraman in photography expert Jost Vacano, who created a custom gyroscopic system enabling smooth shots with a camera in motion. Vacano further asserted his mastery while working on Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981) and during his years of collaboration with Paul Verhoeven on his key Dutch and Hollywood projects. [written for the 2018 Summer Film School]

Eggers’s take on Hamlet conceived as Conan the Barbarian with a bit of Norse mythology thrown in. This also describes the reason that The Northman is fascinating and why, at the same time, it doesn’t achieve the aura of revelation like the director’s previous two films. Whereas The Witch and The Lighthouse were supremely distinctive and original works, The Northman remains a variation on a familiar story. Therefore, viewers may be less absorbed in the narrative and less impressed by the wow effect that they would get from watching something essentially new and more aware of the finesse of execution and adaptive shifts. On the other hand, Eggers’s formalistic signature – from the well-thought-out long shots to the expressive design – is awe-inspiring in and of itself. The film also successfully evokes intense physical experiences by drawing viewers into a world of pagan mythology and merciless brutality. Eggers has stripped Hamlet of its Shakespearean literal insight into the protagonist, but that doesn’t mean that he has dispensed with its tragic or even topical elements. The fatal flaw of his Prince Amleth does not consist in the character’s indecision or any other character trait. Eggers bases his narrative on the contrast between personal will and supposed predestination, which he reveals as an extended arm of the patriarchy as a system of hereditary egocentrism built on self-destructive ideals of masculinity. These are motifs that Eggers had already explored in his previous films, though it is necessary to recognise that he depicted them there in more dreadful and disturbing outlines.

On the one hand, it’s regrettable that Bay lost his perversely inflated budgets by liberating himself from the Transformers cash cow and thus has to make formalistic compromises after years of unbridled lavish spending. Bay himself bitterly admits this when he says that some of the CGI shots in Ambulance are “shit”. Still, it’s great to again see this John Waters of the mainstream and Dario Argento of action movies run riot. No one else has the formalistic skills of the master of superficiality. I don’t understand the criticisms that you have to shut down your brain to watch Bay’s films. On the contrary, you can fully enjoy Bayhem only when you switch your brain on and set it to camp mode. Bay doesn't make realistic films and he has no interest in classic narratives. At their core, his films cannot be enjoyed passively, so that viewers are “only” entertained or moved by them. This is beautifully illustrated by a comparison between the original Nordic dramedy Ambulance and Bay’s variation on it. The Danes took the genre elements and strained them through a filter of empathy and levity, thus creating a perfect film for viewers. Conversely, Bay took only the basic premise from the original narrative. He threw out everything civil or (cinematically) realistic and spread out before the audience his world of advertising über-reality and soap-operatic emotions, where everything is turned up not just to eleven, but rather to twenty. As in Zdeněk Troška’s works, in the Bayverse all of the characters express themselves mainly by screaming or barking out simple sentences with the nature of slogans. The less space characters have in the film, the more they are exaggerated caricatures modelled not on everyday reality, but on the manmade illusion of PR and music videos. All of the cars appear to be new and polished, the female protagonist has perfect make-up even in the tensest moments of a field operation and the police are recruited exclusively from the ranks of juiced bodybuilders. Like the aforementioned Argento, Bay doesn’t bother with bullshit like believability and logic, but is only and primarily concerned with making every single shot as stylish and spectacular as possible. And in that respect, Ambulance is an absolute feast. Bay has reached the (for now) peak of his ADHD filmmaking, wagering on one goofily contrived and spectacularly self-indulgent shot after another. In addition to that, he got drones to play with, or rather he got some skilful drone operators, whom he let completely off the leash. Besides the phantasmagorical drone shots and real action with a minimum of digital effects, what’s most amusing about Ambulance is Bay’s attempt to ride the wave of current progressive trends in Hollywood cinema. But because Bay himself is the essence of the term “douchebag”, his version of diversity and representation inevitably takes the form of an absurdly boorish caricature. Bay has simply proven again that his films primarily induce viewers to shake their heads in disbelief. And when properly tuned in, there is wonderful pleasure in that.

The first Conan film was a hit in its time and kicked off a wave of fantasy movies in the 1980s. However, none of the films that followed achieved similar success and if they enjoy any popularity today, it is as campy artifacts watched ironically. By comparison, Conan the Barbarian may seem slightly dated in its pacing today, but it is still fascinating thanks to its unique take on not only the heroic fantasy genre, but also its most iconic character. Unsurprisingly, the reason for this is the director and screenwriter, John Milius, who was lauded by Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola as the best storyteller of the New Hollywood generation. Milius created a reticent epic told primarily through images and the phenomenal myth-making music of Basil Poledouris. When the characters do express themselves verbally, it is mainly through monologues laden with melancholic poeticism (Osric, Valerie) or raw philosophy (Thulsa). As indicated by one of the film’s few dialogue scenes, as well as by a rare light-hearted exchange between Conan and Subotai, Milius peppered the narrative with vulgar theology and based the whole ethos of barbaric heroism on the opposition between the human and divine worlds. The main storyline thus inevitably leads to the brutally manual overthrow of the demigod who controls the minds of his followers. Milius’s Conan is no virtuous hero, but rather a properly superficial hedonist. Though we see him in a sombre thinker’s pose a few times during the film, behind his expression we sense emptiness rather than existential depth. His life is dedicated to instant gratification and mindless, brutal revenge, not to contemplating life or the death that he sows. It’s possible to draw the conclusion that the acting performances criticised by some are an intentional part of Milius’s uncompromising vision of a coherent pagan world. Conversely, the casting of the individual characters proves to be wonderfully ambitious and accurate in terms of type – from the elephantine non-actors and the statuesque though not superficially attractive women to the impressively multifaceted James Earl Jones. At its core, Conan the Barbarian is a typically Miliusian and thus a fiercely obstinate and insolently shallow rebuff of the high-concept blockbusters of the New Hollywood, while being not only a contemporary of such films, but also one of them. It belongs among them not only due to its director’s resumé and connections, but also as a creatively distinctive modern revitalisation of an old genre. Except Milius doesn’t look at old adventures with naïve nostalgia like Spielberg or Lucas and he doesn’t want to create modern equivalents of captivating flicks with swashbucklers in the mould of Errol Flynn. Instead, he serves viewers a brutal barbarian epic with a clumsy conqueror who was destined to become king (of Hollywood) through his own efforts. ___ PS: Not to mention the fact that Milius conceived Conan the Barbarian for the cinema. His raw epic about the clash of brute force and religion cannot be adequately put across anywhere else. Only on the big screen can one fully appreciate the film’s grandiose vignettes, which mirror the visual inspiration of (fantasy) epics ranging from Masaki Kobayashi’s Kaidan to Alexander Ptushko's Ilya Muromets in the spirit of the New Hollywood.

Virgins of the Seven Seas offers an ideal combination of period Eurotrash and the attractions of Hong Kong genre movies. Paradoxically, however, the film will irritate fans of exploitation flicks, who won’t tolerate the childish naïveté of kung-fu fighting and absurd training sequences. But for lovers of cinematic brutishness and for adolescent boys, or old men who preserve their childish view of the world through movies, Virgins is a diamond in the rough. Slapstick tastelessness is combined here with attractions from Spencer and Hill flicks, but instead of two Italian tough guys, the blows are dealt by scantily clad European beauties, who find themselves in the world of Chinese pirates depicted through the excessive aesthetics of genre movies from the Shaw Brothers studio. The legend of Hong Kong film production joined forces with the equally internationally ambitious West German company Rapid Film, which was behind not only the famous Schulmädchen-Report series of erotic pseudo-documentaries and variations thereof, but also the video nasty Bloody Moon and Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron. Founded by Wolf C. Hartwig, the company had previously used the exotic locations of Hong Kong to enhance the appeal of its genre B-movies. Thanks to the fact that it is a direct co-production with Shaw Brothers, however, Karate, Küsse, blonde Katzen, also known as Virgins of the Seven Seas, turned out to be a unique intermingling of the two production companies’ aesthetics. The film is thus formalistically reminiscent of the rather wild ADHD (before it was cool) style of Shaw flicks with frantic zooms, goofy acting and wu xia trampoline choreography. The German contribution, besides the choreography of some of the fight scenes, is evident primarily in the haphazard dubbing, which, due to its stylistic complexity and verbal expressiveness, bears comparison to the creations of the live-dubbed screenings at the Shockproof Film Festival.

The latest directorial effort by the Austrian-born, German-based Ernst von Theumer, a purveyor of trash flicks whose productions spanned the globe, is derived from the concept of its creator, which he spent years polishing. In terms of craftsmanship, Hell Hunters is a relatively competently made but thoroughly unimaginative low-budget action thriller about a hunt for Nazis in South America, skipping between foreign locations and barrelling through hackneyed clichés, unsurprising twists and adventurous peripetias toward the final shootout. Theumer always took pride in casting famous faces, and here he assembled a respectable gallery in front of the camera, led by Bond girl Maud Adams, erstwhile Hollywood heart-throb Stewart Granger, who in his old age found a second career in German productions not only as Old Surehand, and the unwanted Bond, George Lazenby. Together with other more familiar and appropriately old faces like William Berger and Herb Andress, they serve as supporting characters in the film or are delegated to performing bit parts, merely framing the main storyline involving the handsome Nazi-hunter played by Romulo Arantes and a young American woman portrayed by Candice Daly. Their escapades take the form of a bland buddy movie (with insipidly quarrelsome buddies with benefits), while their dynamic is based on the fact that he says everything is dumb, which he stops doing only when they are having a shag under a waterfall.

Jackie is actually an illustration of the opposite of Wes Anderson. Here we also have characters looking into the camera in centred compositions, characters in spacious interiors with fragmented sets and often a bold colour palette, as well as other stylistic devices primarily associated with the quirky hipster auteur. However, whereas Anderson takes delight in artificiality and stiffness suddenly interspersed with eruptions of chaotic bustle, Larraín shows the depressing nature and heaviness of rooms intended for dolls. Through the story of the first lady, who has to build a legacy of future history on a foundation of a sudden tragic loss, it surprisingly says a lot about Anderson’s creative method, which also composes from historical and artistic artefacts an idealised image of a Camelot that will never be again, but which we admire with even greater melancholy.

The myth created and told by men, which is repeated here in commentary with the stub that “so many directors with such a strong sense of the female soul come from patriarchal Japan” is a paradox that Only on Mondays mirrors with surprising expressiveness. Shaped as it was by men, Japanese culture reinforced the ideals and values of women, which were unsurprisingly supposed to revolve around servile submission to men. As such, most of the great “women’s” films by classic directors show women as beings defined exclusively by their relationships to men or rather by their subservience to them. In the best case, we can still defend this today as an appropriate portrayal of Japanese society at that time and the successful programming of the Stepford Wives there. Into this context come director Kô Nakahira and screenwriter (and future new-wave director) Koichi Saitó with seemingly another film that pretends to understand women. It would be very easy to brush off Only on Mondays, with its female protagonist who seems alarmingly dumb from today's perspective, as a portent of the Nikkatsu studio’s future series of films involving the lascivious exploitation of women. Upon closer inspection, however, the film proves to be a less sentimental, new-wave paraphrase of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, as well as a reflection of the absurdity of the gender roles that women play for men. The central protagonist, an 18-year-old call girl named Yuka, declares that she wants more than anything to make men happy. This code that pervades her entire being proves to be systematically instilled in her by various characters, led by her own mother, who is a veteran of the same profession. Furthermore, Yuka finds out in the course of the narrative that fulfilling men’s desires is an impossible task. Everyone expects something different from her or rather projects a different ideal onto her, but Yuka herself does not understand that she is only supposed to play a certain defined role for everyone. These roles are repeatedly and literally illustrated through mutual appeals, but their absurdity reveals the inner falseness and degeneracy of the given relationships. As a result, Kô Nakahira created much more than just a playful vehicle for up-and-coming starlet Mariko Kaga. His film rightfully ranks among the respected works of the Japanese new wave of the time. This is thanks not only to its expressive and refreshingly unbridled formalistic aspect, but also to its deconstruction of the longstanding conservative values handed down across generations of patriarchy and further strengthened in the context of capitalism, which reduces everything to a commodity.

In his ambitious, surreal treatise on grief and pain, Carlson Young straddles the line between symbolism and literalism, the result of which is reminiscent of a walk through Pan’s Labyrinth accompanied by Tarsem Singh. The Blazing World is most impressive in its first half, in which it leaves viewers speechless with its unsettling, impressively filmed dream sequences (though the point of it all is rather obvious). What is even more regrettable is the mechanical nature of the narrative with its video-game structure in the second half, where everything is anchored in rationality, but also explained and thus to a significant extent rendered banal. An identical theme of loss and the difficulty of coping with it, also turned into narrative imbued with symbols and genre elements, was recently expressed more imaginatively and (at least for me) more enchantingly by the similarly polarizing indie gem Starfish.