My Cinema Discoveries of 2015

I still try to keep up with the current cinema but more than ever my time and money is being spent at the repertory houses these day. I probably saw twice as many old films as new releases on the big screen this year, with films actually being projected on film being the biggest draw – I attended 142 35mm screenings in 2015, and I also caught eleven on 16mm and three on 70mm.

Many of these were revisits, and I was delighted to catch fantastic projections of films such as Night Moves, The Thin Red Line, Showgirls, All That Heaven Allows, Klute, Le mépris, Frenzy The Awful Truth, In the Mood for Love, Seventh Heaven, Yojimbo and many other old favourites. I haven't included them on this list, though, and I haven't included the repertory cinema events that I had a hand in making happen as part of The Badlands Collective, though I'm incredibly proud of of what we have achieved this year, particularly our recent 35mm Barry Lyndon event and our exclusive UK screening of Rivette's amazing Out 1.

Instead, this list (which I have already started counting down here) is all about discoveries; films I had never seen – and in some cases had never heard of – before this year. I'd like to extend a special thank you to the BFI, the Prince Charles Cinema, The Barbican, the ICA, Tate, Close-Up and all of the other London venues keeping film projection alive and continuing to be adventurous in their programming. It has been a wonderful year and I can't wait to make more great discoveries in 2016.

25 - The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953) - BFI Southbank, 35mm

The second of the two films Lupino directed in 1953, after the more widely acclaimed The Hitch-Hiker, this tight drama is fascinating for its compassionate and non-judgemental approach to the characters. Edmund Gwenn is the man simultaneously married to two women on different coasts (Joan Fontaine and Lupino herself), but the film invites us to sympathise with him as it takes us through the incidents that led to this inextricable situation and suggests that everything he did was out of a misguided attempt to do the right thing. It’s an intelligent and mature piece of filmmaking that avoids sensationalism at every turn, and Lupino excels on both sides of the camera (even though she was reluctant to act in the film). Sadly, the film was a flop and Lupino didn’t direct another feature for over a decade.

24 - Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1989) - Tate Modern, 16mm

One year after he passed away, I saw my first film by Harun Farocki and instantly realised that I was discovering filmmaker worthy of further study. This particular film is an engrossing look at images and how we perceive them, with Farocki frequently returning to the same photographs and allowing us to view them differently in a fresh context or with additional information. How easy it is to overlook details that later take on a powerful resonance, as in the case of Allied aerial photographs shown here, which inadvertently captured images of Auschwitz while seeking other points of interest in the area. Farocki’s editing creates some striking associations and his commentary poses questions and ideas that continue to develop in the mind long after the film has finished.

23 - Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, 1964) - Cinémathèque française, Paris, 70mm

This late film from John Ford is regarded as an attempt by the director to atone for his depiction of Native American tribes in many of his earlier films and it focuses on the Cheyenne exodus on 1878, although there is some awkwardness in the film’s attempt to tell this story through the eyes of Carroll Baker and Richard Widmark (not to mention the odd comic interlude with James Stewart’s Wyatt Earp). Still, in the autumn of his career, Ford hasn’t lost his ability to take the audience’s breath away with his commanding use of Monument Valley and the brilliant orchestration of his action sequences. This is an extraordinarily beautiful film and it contains some of the most vivid imagery in Ford’s work, notably the shot of a beleaguered Karl Malden walking through fallen bodies in the wake of a massacre.

22 - Bless Their Little Hearts (Billy Woodberry, 1983) - Tate Modern, 35mm

One of the many gems uncovered in Tate Modern’s LA Rebellion season, this powerful film by Billy Woodberry looks at the emotional and spiritual toll that unemployment can take on a man, and the subsequent impact it has on his family. The film is full of beautifully observed details and is anchored by two outstanding performances: Nate Hardman as Charlie, trying to hold onto his dignity and fulfil his role as the family patriarch, and Kaycee Moore as his wife Andais who is employed but who looks increasingly likely to succumb to the exhaustion of trying to earn enough for two and maintain peace in her home. The film climaxes in an astonishing argument between them, in which the improvised intensity from both actors is spellbinding. Bless their Little Hearts deserves to be viewed as an equal to iconic films like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (Burnett is credited as writer and cinematographer here) and Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man.

21 - Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975) - BFI Southbank, 35mm

Famously derided on release by Roger Ebert, who gave it a zero-star review and claimed he felt soiled by the film, Mandingo is undoubtedly a difficult film to sit through. Richard Fleischer’s film takes a melodramatic and salacious approach this tale of Deep South slavery, with florid performances from James Mason and Susan George and an excess of sex, violence and general depravity, but the film’s impact is impossible to dismiss. Fleischer forces us to witness the ugliness of the slave trade and presents us with a complicated portrait of complicity in the relationships between its black and white characters. It’s an incredibly bold and uncompromising film to be released by a major studio, and forty years on it has lost none of its discomfiting, penetrating power.

20 - Street of Crocodiles (Brothers Quay, 1986) - BFI Southbank, 35mm

One of three Quay brothers films presented by superfan Christopher Nolan on new 35mm prints during the London Film Festival, Street of Crocodiles may be their most fully realised and most impressive work. Is there anything creepier than stop-motion dolls? The eyeless dolls in this one are particularly unnerving but the Quays manage to create an atmosphere that is at once disorienting, haunting and beguiling. The stop-motion work on display here is something wondrous to behold, and even if it’s hard to know why these creatures are doing whatever it is that they’re doing, the film has a captivating sense of dream (or nightmare) logic that kept me hooked, and the skill involved in the stop-motion work is wondrous to behold throughout.

19 - Variety (EA Dupont, 1925) - BFI Southbank, Digital

Variety is a film about a tragic love triangle set in the world of circus performers, but really it’s an excuse for director EA Dupont and the great cinematographer Karl Freund to indulge in a series of spectacular shots and sequences. This is one of those silent films that represents the high levels of adventure and sophistication in visual storytelling that filmmakers were reaching in the years before the transition to sound changed everything. It’s a feast of expressionistic filmmaking that reaches its peak in the climactic scene on a flying trapeze, when Emil Jannings (giving a typically large performance) faces a moral dilemma as he has to catch the younger love rival who has stolen his wife. Having loved both Variety and Dupont’s later Piccadilly, I’m now desperate to see his 1928 film Moulin Rouge too.

18 - The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, 1963) - Fabrica, Brighton,. 16mm

One of my major discoveries of recent years had been Shirley Clarke. Her 1961 film The Connection appeared on this list last year and everything I’ve seen by her so far has been daring, singular and memorable. The Cool World is a more naturalistic film from Clarke, away from the staginess of The Connection and the faux-documentary styling of Portrait of Jason, as she takes her camera out onto the streets of Harlem to tell the story of a black teenager trying to make his way in a world of guns and drugs. The rambling story didn’t always hold my attention, but Clarke’s depiction of everyday life in ‘60s Harlem certainly did, and the whole film has a restless rhythm, with Baird Bryant’s energetic camerawork and Mal Waldron’s jazz score contributing to the film’s vivid atmosphere.

17 - D'Est (Chantal Akerman, 1993) - ICA, 35mm

I knew I would have to say goodbye to A Nos Amours’ long-running Chantal Akerman retrospective this year, having found it such an illuminating and exciting series to follow, but I didn’t expect to have to say goodbye to Chantal Akerman too. This year I discovered a number of Akerman films, including her comedies A Couch in New York and Tomorrow We Move, and her powerful Conrad adaptation Almayer’s Folly (shown just after her death in a very emotional screening), but it’s the first film I saw in 2015, 1993’s D’Est, that sticks in my mind. A series of tracking shots through post-Soviet Union Eastern Europe, the film has an entrancing rhythm that recalled the hypnotic power of her earlier Hôtel Monterey for me, and some of its shots still linger in my thoughts. It’s the kind of film that only the endlessly curious and creative Akerman would have made, I will miss discovering her amazing body of work.

16 - Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937) - BFI Southbank, 16mm

It’s hard to keep up with the wisecracks and insults that are constantly being hurled back-and-forth in this brilliant ensemble comedy. Stage Door is set in a boarding house for actresses and the characters in this film are always in competition with each other, as they fight for the handful of roles available to young actresses in New York, but they also possess a touching sense of solidarity as they have to resist the lecherous and exploitative intentions of male producers. Everyone gets their share of the memorable dialogue, but it’s the sniping between Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, both in perfect harmony with each other, that forms the brilliant heart of the picture, while Andrea Leeds – playing a one-time upcoming star, now forgotten – gets a stunning sequence on a staircase late on as the film shifts from comedy into tragedy.

15 - Sherman's March (Ross McElwee, 1985) - BFI Southbank, 16mm

Sherman’s March is not really a film about General Sherman. It started off that way and Ross McElwee occasionally meanders back to the subject, but as he keeps running into old flames and meets potential new partners, the film’s inability to focus on the task in hand begins to mirror the distracted nature of a broken heart. "It seems I'm filming my life in order to have a life to film," he says, and while this may all sound unbearably self-indulgent, McElwee gets away with it thanks to his witty, humble demeanour and his genuine curiosity about both himself and others. Sherman’s March is also terrifically funny at times, notably when the brassy and no-nonsense Charleen Swansea repeatedly implores him to put down his camera and take a more old-fashioned approach to romance. "This is not art, it’s life!" she yells at him, but McElwee clearly can’t separate the two.

14 - Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969) - BFI Southbank, 35mm

"Look out Haskell, it's real!" a voice shouts as a teargas lands in front of the camera. It’s a moment when fact breaks through the film’s fiction, and the knowledge that the line was actually dubbed in later muddies that fact/fiction divide still further. Medium Cool might be seen as very much a film of its time, as it documents the turbulent end of the 1960s in America, but the bracing immediacy of Haskell Wexler’s unique 1969 picture still resonates today, as does the central exploration of how cameras capture and process social unrest. Wexler’s fluid storytelling, his vivid use of colour and his formal boldness ensures the film is a consistently stimulating exercise and it feels like one of the major American films that really tried to push the boundaries of what cinema can achieve.

13 - Bush Mama (Haile Gerima, 1979) - Tate Modern, 16mm

Another of the key works from the LA Rebellion group of filmmakers, Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama looks at a poor community in 1970s Los Angeles and challenges the systematic and societal constraints that prevent people from breaking out of poverty. The film is shot with a documentary-like urgency but is also full of grace notes, and elevated by dreamlike interludes and scenes that break the fourth wall, with letters from a prisoner being read directly to the camera. At the film’s centre is Barbara O. Jones, an incredible screen presence who was also magnificent this year in two films by Julie Dash: the 1977 short Diary of an African Nun and her beautiful 1991 feature film Daughters of the Dust, which was also shown at Tate Modern on a gorgeous 35mm print.

12 - Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944) - BFI Southbank, 35mm

The BFI’s Robert Siodmak season offered us a great chance to indulge in some classic film noir, with the highlight for me being this atmospheric and vividly realised tale of a man fighting to clear his name following his wife’s murder. The plot has plenty to offer in terms of surprises and suspense, but it’s the style here that intoxicates the viewer; shadow-filled bars, dingy backstage nooks and crannies, intimate clubs where jazz drummers beat out an infectious rhythm. Phantom Lady is full of instantly memorable sequences with Elwood Bredell’s expressive black-and-white camerawork making almost every scene visually striking. While this was my pick from the Siodmak retrospective, I also enjoyed discovering The Dark Mirror and The Spiral Staircase this year.

11 - Él (Luis Buñuel, 1953) - ICA, 35mm

One of the major events in London’s repertory calendar this year was a fantastic retrospective of Luis Buñuel films at the ICA, including this bitterly funny film from his Mexican period. Arturo de Córdova is Francisco, a wealthy bachelor who becomes obsessed with the beautiful Delia Garcés and pursues her relentlessly, eventually winning her from the man she was engaged to. However, now that he has his prize, Francisco becomes consumed with paranoia and jealousy, believing every man who so much as glances at his wife to be a threat. Él is an incisive examination of male ego which is played a lot straighter than many Buñuel films, but as a result the more surreal and comic touches – such as a hilarious late scene in the church – have a startling impact. This is one of his greatest and most under-seen films.

10 - Providence (Alain Resnais, 1977) - Barbican, 35mm

Did any director explore notions of memory and the passage of time with as much wit, creativity and acuity as Alain Resnais? His 1977 film Providence comprises of the recollections and imaginings of an ailing author (John Gielgud), whose stop-start attempts to tell a story are personified by Ellen Burstyn, David Warner and a hilariously bitchy Dirk Bogarde. As the author struggles to keep his story together the film’s scenes have a habit of falling apart or being repeated in odd ways, and characters from one part of the narrative keep popping up unexpectedly from another, or else they are interrupted by a 1970s English footballer. Providence is a strange, beguiling film that is both one of the funniest Resnais made and ultimately very moving; and Gielgud – in a film that he often described as his favourite – is just marvellous to watch.

9 - The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971) - BFI Southbank, 35mm

In the same year that they collaborated on Dirty Harry, Don Siegel and Client Eastwood made this extraordinary Civil War drama in which Yankee soldier Eastwood, injured behind enemy lines, finds himself recuperating in a house full of Southern women. As Eastwood attempts to engineer the situation to his advantage by seducing and manipulating each of the women (including a 12 year-old girl), he refuses to soften his portrayal of this dark character or make any appeal for audience sympathy. Siegel keeps this gothic melodrama on the boil with his tight and provocative direction and the film boasts some truly remarkable scenes towards the end as Eastwood’s character finally gets his comeuppance. It’s a bizarre entry in both director and star’s bodies of work, but it stands as one of the most interesting and impressive films that either have made.

8 - A Poem is a Naked Person (Les Blank, 1974) - BFI Southbank, Digital

Getting its first theatrical release in 2015 after being hidden from public view for decades, Les Blank's A Poem is a Naked Person is ostensibly a profile of Leon Russell, following him as he performed at a series of gigs and recorded in his studio in the early '70s. Blank, however, finds much more to interest him away from Russell's music, and his film becomes a portrait of Oklahoma and the people that lived in this particular place at this particular time. There's a wedding and a pie-eating contest, we watch a swimming pool being painted and a building being demolished, a snake eats a chicken and a man eats glass (eventually), and Blank's uncanny ability to capture idiosyncratic characters and spontaneous moments makes every scene in the picture a surprise and a joy. Russell didn't like the film, but I can pretty much guarantee that everyone else will.

7 - It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine. (Crispin Glover, 2007) - ICA, 35mm

One of the undoubted highlights of 2015 was getting to spend an evening with Crispin Glover at the ICA. It began with an onstage performance piece and slideshow in which he recited extracts from a series of books, and it ended with a Q&A session that threatened to go on all night, with Glover giving each question an exhaustive and rambling answer. In between, we were treated to the singular film he co-wrote with Steven C. Stewart, a man suffering from cerebral palsy who portrays a sexual deviant and serial killer here. Despite the provocative subject matter and hardcore sex scenes, the film actually ends up being a very tender, funny and beautiful experience, with the knowledge that Stewart died just a month after shooting the film adding a sense of sadness to this realisation of his dreams. It's heartening to know that something valuable came out of McG's Charlie's Angels film, with Glover using that paycheck to fund this utterly unique and bizarre personal odyssey.

6 - Multiple Maniacs (John Waters, 1970) - BFI Southbank, 35mm

How wonderful it was to see the BFI devoting a retrospective to the 'Pope of Trash' John Waters. The biggest treat for me was the chance to see a film I had wanted to see for many years, his ultra-low budget 1970 film Multiple Maniacs, and it certainly didn't disappoint. Led by the incredible Divine, Multiple Maniacs features some of Waters' most inspired and gleefully blasphemous sequences, including the notorious 'rosary job' that Divine experiences in a church and a brilliant depiction of Jesus performing the miracle of the loaves and the fishes (here using sliced loaves from a supermarket and cans of tuna). Every time you keep thinking the film has reached its peak, it aims higher, with Divine being raped by a giant lobster and then rampaging through the streets as a Godzilla-type monster. It's outrageous, hilarious and one of Waters' best films.

5 - The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1993) - BFI Southbank, 35mm

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's extraordinary film examines the history of Taiwan through the memories and anecdotes of the great puppeteer Li Tian-Lu and forms a great companion piece to his previous work A City of Sadness. Unfolding through Hou's static but beautifully composed images and measured pacing, the film combines interview segments with dramatic recreations to probe the lines between memory and reality, between fact and fiction. While the more intricate political aspects of the material might be hard to follow for those not well-versed in the period of history being explored, the personal journey being undertaken here is both fascinating and deeply moving, and the film is simply a gorgeous cinema experience, particularly as projected on 35mm, with the splendid cinematography and entrancing rhythm being hard to resist.

4 - Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992) - Barbican, 35mm

"She's got more money than the World Bank!" is the cry when an African village hears that a former inhabitant is returning after prosperous decades abroad. They see her as the answer to all of their prayers, and she may well be, but she will only give them the money they yearn for on one condition – that they kill the popular local shopkeeper whom she blames for her exile. Djibril Diop Mambéty's incisive adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit exposes the greed, hypocrisy and deceit that money inspires in men. The gradual shifts in loyalty among the townspeople is depicted with a lot of humour but also with a bleak cynicism and irony, with the film succeeding as both a touching human story and a wider parable about African society. I still feel largely ignorant of African cinema but all my ventures into that territory keep serving up gems, with Souleymane Cissé's Finye being another great discovery this year.

  

3 - Soft Fiction (Chick Strand, 1979) - Tate Modern, 16mm

I had never heard of Chick Strand before Tate devoted a weekend to her work and that of her contemporaries, so Soft Fiction, on a brand-new 16mm print, hit me like a bolt from the blue. In this film, Strand asks five women to relate stories from their sexual histories directly to the camera. These stories are presented in a way that is sometimes unsettling and sometimes comical, but they are connected by the way they gave these women a greater understanding of their own sensuality and became key memories in their lives. These confessionals are intercut with a variety of poetic images as strand creates a stimulating and provocative portrait of complex emotions and subjective memory. It is a unique film from a director whose work clearly should be more widely celebrated than it is.

2 - The Memory of Justice (Marcel Ophüls, 1976) - BFI Southbank, Digital

This magnificent documentary by Marcel Ophüls begins with the Nuremberg trials and ends with America's involvement in Vietnam, and in the intervening five hours he interrogates notions of guilt, complicity and judgement by looking at a variety of atrocities committed in times of war. The film is an exploration of moral grey areas, with Ophüls asking questions about both individual and collective responsibility and drawing some incredible contributions from his interviewees, not least Albert Speer, who smiles with the calm authority of a man who knows what he managed to get away with at Nuremberg. Almost every scene in The Memory of Justice is riveting, challenging and devoid of easy answers. It is a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking and its new restoration allows us to view it as a truly essential work that feels as relevant today as it ever has.

1 - Scattered Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1967) - ICA, 35mm

Also known as Two in the Shadow, this was the last film made by the great Mikio Naruse two years before he passed away. It’s a beautifully measured portrait of two characters brought together by tragedy and finding an unlikely but deep romantic bond, with Naruse detailing the shifts in their relationship in beautifully subtle ways and drawing magnificent performances from his two leads, Yûzô Kayama and Yôko Tsukasa. Scattered Clouds is a film about love, guilt, responsibility and the external pressures that define whether or not a relationship can survive. One of the film films that Naruse made in colour, the film’s images are filled with melancholy beauty and Naruse’s compositions are always so potent. Scattered Clouds is a deceptively straightforward and simple film that reveals its enormous emotional power only at the end, with the succession of the three final scenes constituting a devastating climax. This is a final masterpiece from a director who – judging by my still too-limited knowledge of his work – made a habit of them.

"I really wanted viewers to feel at the end that they had been washed up, panting on a far shore, having just barely survived drowning in a narrative tempest." - An Interview with Guy Maddin

You don’t just watch The Forbidden Room, you surrender to it. Guy Maddin’s films have always offered a unique cinematic experience but his latest work is something else entirely. This is Maddin’s biggest, longest and most densely packed work; a multi-layered fever dream in which each story only leads to an even more bizarre one, drawing us ever deeper into a world that only could have emerged from Maddin’s imagination. Drawing inspiration from films that have fallen through the cracks in cinema history, The Forbidden Room encompasses life-giving flapjacks, vampire bananas, buttock-pinching, squid theft and lessons on the correct method for taking a bath, and all of this is presented in the director’s trademark surreal, hysterical and hyper-stylised fashion. Quite simply, there is nothing else like it, and I met with Guy Maddin during the London Film Festival, just a few hours before the film’s UK premiere at the BFI IMAX.

Are you going to watch The Forbidden Room on the IMAX screen tonight?

I think I'll watch a few minutes of it. I've been warned that the IMAX experience can be almost physically overwhelming at first, so I will watch the first few minutes just to see what the heck it looks like. I'll probably puke. And then I think we have a dinner to go to or something, so I'll be dragged away even if I did want to watch it, but I've already seen this movie too often. It's official. You know, everyone wants people to watch their films multiple times but I wouldn't wish the number of times that I've seen it on anybody.

Can you put a figure on it?

It's not as bad as my movie Brand Upon the Brain! when I was the stage manager for a live act, so that I saw 25 times or something. This one I've seen maybe six times, but in a really short span, you know? I've seen L'Atalante, Zero for Conduct, L'Age D'or maybe twenty times each, but that's spread over two decades so it's perfect, I only watch it when I feel I really need to see it again and I'm not force-feeding it. I do feel the movie gets better on a second or third viewing, but whatever, I'll be happy if somebody just watches it once.

I actually do really want to see it again, partly because it felt like it was too much to take in the first time around.

I'm glad you said 'too much' because I wanted the movie to be too much. You know, I have regrets about my ten other feature films because I always wish they were shorter, I feel I just called them finished a bit too soon and often a few months later I wished I could go back into the editing room and trim them, tighten the screws. The director's cuts of all my movies would ironically be much shorter rather than longer, but this one, editing it was a counter-intuitive experience because I really wanted viewers to feel at the end that they had been washed up, panting on a far shore, having just barely survived drowning in a narrative tempest. Knowing how much is too much in the right way is difficult. The initial cut was two hours twelve minutes, or something, and that was just plain too much, and getting it down to just under two hours seems to be too much but in the right way. I know I like brisk movies and the kind of mannered movie that it is always works better when it's short, but this needed to be too much.

It's not just the length of the film but the fact that it is so densely packed with stories, characters and incident. That's what really overwhelms.

There's the fragments of 17 feature films in there, and each script was written so the film would be 12-18 minutes long, so each fragment has a higher density. It has a feature film's worth of plot, maybe not character detail, which tends to be in broader strokes, but it's packed with crap.

There's your tagline.

Yeah, “The Forbidden Room – It's packed with crap!”

When you started working on the Seances project did you approach each short as an individual entity or did you always have one eye on a compendium feature like this later on?

The notion that we'd make a feature came out about halfway through. Whenever I approached a Canadian funding body with this project I got very enthusiastic responses, because it was a new media project, for one thing. All of the funding bodies are very eager to find out ways to get art onto the internet and to support Canadian artists, but the amount of money available just isn't film budget-level, and let's face it, while this is a new media project and it will have its companion piece on the internet by the end of the year, it's a film shoot and it costs money like a film shoot, especially as we're paying union rates to actors. We had to shoot a feature film just to fund the internet half of the project. We also knew it would take a few years to complete this and we're all feature film lovers, and we became terrified that so many years would go by without us having a feature film on our CVs. So it worked out just fine, I wanted a feature film but I also wanted the internet project, so they're like siblings, or I even thought of it as Adam dreaming his sinful Eve out of a rib. One of them came out of the other and I love them both equally.

I guess The Forbidden Room is a film that is big enough to get people's attention and so if they like it they can then dig further into the internet side of the project.

Yeah, it's a two-hour long commercial for the internet project.

I remember seeing you do a live reading of My Winnipeg in London some years ago, and you did the same kind of live performance with Brand Upon the Brain! It seems that a sense of theatricality and interactivity is something that you're continually trying to add to your films.

I chanced upon that. I had always been a filmmaker making films for myself and for a small number of people, and I'd always had a pretty high walkout rate. I had wanted to make a connection with an audience and I was disillusioned with how quickly people walked out, especially people who I thought would be hip. You know, when I was younger my favourite bands were British basement bands and do-it-yourself bands, I mean, I was right there when The Sex Pistols started – I'm the same age as John Lydon – and I liked the idea of getting a guy who couldn't play his instrument and putting him at the front. And that was me as a filmmaker, I didn't know how to play my instruments but I thought I was doing with movies what these basement bands were doing with music, and yet those very musicians would be the first people to walk out of my screenings in the late '80s, and the people that stayed were the ageing rep house movie queens who understood the codes that I was using, but whatever...I think I'm losing myself in my answer, just a second...what was your question?

It was a question about theatricality and interactivity.

Oh yeah. So, I became a filmmaker but I always called myself a movie maker, I made movies, but they just weren't engaging people the way movies do, they were boring a lot of people the way films do. But when I was shooting Brand Upon the Brain!, which was designed to be a silent movie, I realised that a lot of the pantomime that I was using wasn't going to work without sound effects and wasn't going to work without specific music, and maybe even without narration. And I also realised that a silent movie shot on Super-8 would probably only play on a Tuesday morning at TIFF, so about two or three days into this nine-day shoot I started to formulate hopes for a full orchestra, a foley artist, narrator, a year later I thought of a singer, and putting that show on nobody walked out, and I felt like a showman. It was nerve-wracking too, I was the stage manager when Lou Reed was a special narrator and he fell asleep, as he was given to do in public. I was so tense! I couldn't wake him for forty minutes as he was snoring away up on the microphone, and I was grinding my teeth so much I shattered a molar. But that's when I realised I was a showman, that I cared, I really cared about the audience, and when I was narrating My Winnipeg and I could feel the audience sagging too comfortably in their post-prandial torpor, I could rouse them by energising my performance a bit. I was a showman, I was trying to sell the movie to those people, and when I was making Seances I realised I could be a showman at the shooting stage, put on a show and energise the actors. I wanted to be an artist but I also wanted to be a showman because in film the two have always co-existed.

That stage-management experience must have stood you in good stead when it came to shooting in the bustle of the Pompidou Centre with the general public in attendance.

Yeah, you want to entertain them. Film sets are really boring, you've probably been to a few, you can't even tell who the director is, who the stars are, it's just a bunch of crew members sitting around scratching themselves and texting. They work hard too, but not often and it's boring to watch. I directed people out loud while the camera was rolling and helped people watching from just a few feet away sometimes understand what was going on. It also helped that the set at the Pompidou was just a few feet away from the cruisiest bathroom in Paris, and so all sorts of fantastic marshland mating ritual sounds were coming out of there.

Those are your foley artists.

Yeah! Exactly, just off-duty foley artists working on some strange new sounds. It helped create a sense of disinhibted wonder on the set, which was fun. I didn't direct anybody. Everybody showed up, there was no time for rehearsals, and I put them in a trance at the start of each day, supposedly, invoked the spirit of a lost film and invited it to possess my actors, to compel them to retrace the long forgotten plotlines of this lost picture. With the war whoops coming out of the washroom and my windmilling arms cutting up the air in imprecations to disinhibit, the actors just defaulted to what you see on the screen. The only directions I ever gave were 'smaller' and 'again', two words I'm not inclined to give or usually can't afford to give.

It's interesting that you say 'smaller'. Do people have a tendency to go big in that environment?

Yeah, it's the language of the scripts that does it. The language is very mannered. You know, Charlotte Rampling and Mathieu Amalric are amazing naturalistic performers, but you're asking them to improvise, there's an atmosphere around, people are watching, in Paris people can watch from above so you have half-chewed baguettes falling out of mouth-breathers onto the performers below...and we just kept rolling! “Keep rolling, just wipe the saliva off Mathieu's cheek, keep going!” I would say things like that out loud and we just added dialogue, sometimes we'd get the actors to record their lines in a quieter room later. There were often a thousand people milling around in the foyer of the Pompidou, but if you take a thousand people all talking French about a million heterogeneous subjects, it just becomes a big seashell sound, just white noise, so I kind of loved recording sound in that place. It seemed nuts, though. The sound man was shitting himself.

The other thing that's really striking about this film is the look of it. You have gone fully digital now but it seems like the film aesthetic is more prevalent here than ever before.

It's like the chemicals have really started roiling up, and yet a discerning eye can see that it's all digital and there are digital artefacts in there. On the website side there is going to be YouTube cat videos intruding and data-moshing. I wanted one foot firmly planted in each realm.

I adore the colours in this film. Every shot feels so vibrant and rich. What was your process for creating the visual style?

That's where my co-director [Evan Johnson] really saved me because I really did not have any mojo at all shooting this raw hideous colour footage. I knew how to move the camera the way I like it but I wasn't finding shots that looked good. Then somebody said “No, it looks good, it looks like a Chumbawumba video.” [laughs]

High praise indeed!

Exactly, that's what I said, high praise indeed. And then I went back to my flat in Paris and cried myself to sleep because I had just spent the previous three weeks shooting 700 hours of Chumbawumba. Nothing against Chumbawumba, but they did it, they perfected it, and I didn't want to be accused of copying them. Evan and his brother Gaelen, who is also the production designer, graphic designer and the music designer, they did some pixel-cooking and they found some palettes. We became obsessed with palettes, we watched a lot of Douglas Sirk movies – and our movie does not look like a Douglas Sirk movie – but Sirk was so amazing with palettes. I need money, I'm broke all the time now, so I did a lecture of Technicolor – me, a lecture on Technicolor! – at TIFF this past summer on Magnificent Obsession. To prep for it I just made a list of all the palettes, the pairings, but I'm an old house painter so to name these colours I was choosing old paint-chip colours. It struck me that the off-whites especially were intriguing, and I came up with colours like Continuous Towel or Eisenhower or Rock Hudson's Nipple. The potential for naming the colours really brought out an appreciation of how beautiful and delicate they were, but also how unlimited and riotous the palette combination potential is. Just the act of watching a Douglas Sirk movie and trying to come up with the names that seemed to fit really helped create a respect and an awe for the power of colour, because I had been just avoiding its volatility. I didn't want, like in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, an accidental little red raincoat to show up. I wanted to be in control of the colour all the time.

This whole idea of resurrecting lost films is fascinating. As cinephiles we incline towards despairing over these lost films. Did you feel in a strange position of enjoying the fact that these films no longer existed?

I became very ghoulish. When I was in Paris, we had planned to shoot a lost Three Stooges movie called Hello Pop! but it was found the day before we went to shoot it! Whenever I'd hear about movies being found people would say, “I guess you're pretty happy that movie got found.” No! I didn't want that movie found, I don't want any movies found! I was so ghoulish, I wanted more things to be lost. Whenever I found something interesting online I was heartbroken if it turned out not to be lost because I couldn't shoot it. There are a couple of movies I wish I'd shot and the project at one time was going to be much larger but I had to mercifully euthanise it in the end, it was killing me. There is an American exploitation film from 1974 by director Brad Grinder called Never the Twain and all that survives of it is a poster with a drawing of Mark Twain on it, and the cutline says “Never the Twain: the story of a man possessed by the spirit of Mark Twain, visiting the 1974 Miss Nude World pageant.”

That's incredible.

I know! I mean, come on, the script writes itself. But we decided to mash it up with a lost Euripides play called Hypsipyle, which features a lot of women who have just had enough of the men in their country and just slaughter them. Then Michael Snow and I had been talking, and I don't know if you know his movie La région centrale, it's shot with that camera that randomly goes in every direction, and twenty minutes of La région centrale are lost. So I got permission to use his camera to shoot this Hypsipyle/Never the Twain mash-up and I wanted to install it at MOMA, to just let naked women slaughter men for the day while the camera shot in the other direction. That's actually still got to be done, let's face it.

The Forbidden Room is released in UK cinemas on December 11th

Orson Welles: One Man Band

In April of 1953, Orson Welles was invited by the BBC to record extracts from Walt Whitman’s A Song of Myself for a radio broadcast. “The BBC recording is the zenith of his poetry reading,” Welles’s biographer Simon Callow notes, “not merely sonorous but deeply felt, a perfect congruence of reader and poet.” In fact, it’s hard to avoid the observation that Welles himself might have written some of these lines.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

In the preface to his new book One-Man Band, Simon Callow recalls the genesis of his attempt to survey the life and work of Orson Welles in 1989. He planned to write a biography that consisted of three volumes (the third of which, he originally suggested, should be a novel), but over the course of the subsequent quarter of a century that plan has long fallen by the wayside. This is the third instalment of Callow’s monumental project (following The Road to Xanadu and Hello Americans), and there is still more to come, as One-Man Band only takes us up to the completion of Welles’s Chimes at Midnight in 1967. Perhaps it’s appropriate that a biography of Orson Welles should expand so far beyond the scope of the biographer’s intentions; after all, Welles’s singular life and extraordinarily brilliant/eclectic/frustrating/confounding body of work surely merits a biography like no other. “Welles packed more living into his life, pursued more professions, thrust out in more directions and formed more intense relationships, than any twenty men put together,” Callow writes. In other words, he contained multitudes.

Read the rest of my article at Mostly Film

"Every detail and nuance, particularly if it's coming from your object of desire, is a sign to be decoded" - An Interview with Todd Haynes

Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt is such a perfect match for Todd Haynes’ filmmaking sensibility it comes as a surprise to discover that this is the rare instance of Haynes directing someone else’s screenplay rather than developing a project from scratch. Ever since he first came to people’s attention with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story in 1987, Haynes has established himself as one of the most interesting and original voices in American independent cinema, pushing himself in a new direction stylistically with each film while exploring a variety of themes and ideas with the same incisive intelligence. Carol might initially appear to be a companion piece to Haynes’ acclaimed 2002 film Far From Heaven, as he again depicts a forbidden love affair in conservative 1950s America, but the removal of a layer of meta-filmic artifice, which he so brilliantly utilised in that film, gives Carol a distinctly different flavour. It is a poignant, intimate and gorgeously crafted film full of tiny moments that linger and expand in the memory, and I had the opportunity to discuss it with Todd Haynes when he was in London for the film’s UK premiere.

The genesis of this film is unusual for you as you came to an already existing project rather than instigating it. What was the point of connection for you with this material?

I was given the script and the novel, which I had not read before and didn't know, in the same moment in May of 2013, and there had already been a long history preceding this project. I had actually heard about it through Sandy Powell who was planning to do costumes and she told me that Cate was already attached to this and Liz Karlsen was producing it, so I knew it existed, but I kind of forgot about it and was working on other things before it came to me. I read the novel and I read Phyllis's draft at that point, and I loved that book. I just thought it was such a beautiful, indelible and acute look at early love, and so interesting in relation to Patricia Highsmith's larger oeuvre of the crime subject, because it made you feel like falling in love was like having committed a murder, and having to recount and examine and all of the evidence stacking up against you to see what your chances are of getting away with it.

They even become fugitives.

Exactly, and separated from society. Every detail and nuance, particularly if it's coming from your object of desire, is a sign to be decoded and you start to fixate on it to try and read what it means, so there's a kind of pathology to it. I thought that was so accurate and unsentimental, and I felt it was something I had never addressed as a filmmaker in a movie before, like really telling a love story. It really made me think about point of view, and how great love stories, or so many of them, are usually rooted in the point of view of the more vulnerable party, the lover. That was absolutely true in the novel, but Carol offered the opportunity to track that very carefully and to watch Therese's point of view ultimately yield to Carol's point of view by the end, when their stations and their relationship, in terms of who is in the more powerful position, changes. So all of that was the way I started to think about it and then watching love stories on film, some I'd loved in the past and others I hadn't seen before, made me think about ways of sharpening that and making that more clear in the writing.

Do you always look at films from the period as part of your preparation for a project like this? Do you give your cast and crew films to watch as homework?

I sometimes look at movies from the period if it's relevant to what we're trying to do with the film, and sometimes not from the period, and sometimes both. It's unique to the project itself, it's not really a rule. For Far From Heaven, which was based very rigidly on movies from a specific time and place, and a language that they had defined and epitomised, yes I shared those very specifically with my actors. In this case there weren't specific films I was saying they had to watch but I shared my image book and the visual references with my DP, designer, the other creative departments and also with my actors, and I think that really did inform them. And then we found this movie called Lovers and Lollipops, which is a docudrama – I guess that's the most accurate way of describing it – made by Ruth Orkin and Morris Engel. They were husband and wife and they are probably best-known for a film called Little Fugitive that was made in New York, and all of these are in black-and-white and were made in the '50s. Little Fugitive is about a boy who runs off to Coney Island for a day, but Lovers and Lollipops took place in many of the locations that are in Carol, oddly enough, so it was really relevant. It had a female character at the centre of the story and the way she moved, and her range of gestures, was quite different from the way actresses from movies in that time behaved, and yet it was still quite codified and very particular to the time. It just felt more like a documentary, like it wasn't filtered through Hollywood language, and that was very interesting. I felt like there were aspects of femininity that had gone away, and that I wanted to be really true to.

To follow on from that point about the film's look, I want to ask you about how you work with Ed Lachman. You've collaborated a number of times now and each of your collaborations has had a very different aesthetic. At what point do you bring him on board to start defining the film's visual style?

Early. We begin these conversations quite early in the process, but in the case of Carol it was less time than I usually have with movies that I'm writing and researching and developing myself. In each case it really is like starting from scratch with a blank canvas. Ed really approaches it like a visual artist and thinks a lot about artistic references, but he also responds to as much specificity as I can give him. I think it's true for most creative partnerships, that they want the director to make them feel that there is a solid foundation upon which we are all standing, we're all in the same space, and then they can bring the specificity of their relevant departments to manifesting that.

I love the fact that you shot this in super 16mm. That grain in the image really brings it to life and looks so beautiful. How did you arrive at that choice?

We shot in super 16mm on Mildred Pierce. We have only ever shot on film but as stocks and lenses get more and more sophisticated and fine-grained, it's not necessarily better, but that's how technology moves. It occurred to me watching stuff on HD TV that had been shot on 35 film, it looks just like digital, you can't really tell the difference, and the grain component goes away. On Mildred Pierce we really want to degrade it and go in the opposite direction, to fuck it up a bit, and I loved the result. I loved also working with the little spring camera. I mean, it's problematic, it's dirtier, it gets dust and hair in it more often than 35mm, and we had some technical problems with lens fittings and focus issues on Carol early on that unnerved Ed, but all of those things are kind of great.

You mentioned Mildred Pierce there, and I'm interested to know how it felt to be making a feature film again after telling a story in a longer format on TV.

It's really, really different. The more open dramatic form of the miniseries was already an exceptionally different and interesting challenge, but you have to shoot so many pages a day for TV and that was the biggest daily challenge, I would say. Everybody I brought to Mildred Pierce came from big screen cinema and nobody had done TV before, so we were all really naïve and cocky that we were making a movie that just happened to be a longform dramatic thing that would be broadcast on HBO. But I loved working with HBO, and once we all agreed on the budget and were greenlit I felt a kind of security under me that I hadn't felt before.

In the current cinema climate, do you see that becoming a more natural home for the kind of stories you want to tell?

There are probably more and more dramatic programmes with female characters. Showtime seemed to specialise in women-driven stories for a while and HBO is catching up a bit, but all of that is helping competition and broadens what we get to see, and that has not been the case in independent filmmaking. It has really narrowed because people just don't go to the theatres to see those movies as much, so financing has dried up, And DVD sales, that whole ancillary part that supplemented independent filmmaking for so long, has now gone away with streaming and the way we watch things today.

You have been making independent films for 25 years now. Is it much harder to get films like this made now than it might have been earlier in your career?

It's different each time and not necessarily easier at any given point. I feel like there are all kinds of internal and external changes that are hard to generalise on, because each of my films and my subjects are different enough that I could say 'Oh, it was the film that made it harder or easier'. Velvet Goldmine, because it had a music theme and a lot of young people in it, was a little bit easier to finance, but it was still a very modest budget and I've never felt that I've had any other than a modest budget for the ambitions of the project.

One of the things that struck me about Carol is that it feels like there isn't a frame wasted. What was the editing process like on this film?

There was a lot that we cut out of the movie that was in the script and we shot, great stuff, nothing that I didn't like per se, it was just more than it ultimately needed. My process in cutting is really determined by screenings that we have and the notes that I get, from colleagues, friends and people I don't know, they're not studio test screenings but screenings we set up ourselves. People give extensive notes on the various versions that they see, and it tells me everything. Of course, you hope to find consensus in the reactions and it made what needed to go, what needed to be pruned, and what needed to be balanced pretty clear.

The whole movie feels like it is constructed entirely from glances, gestures and small details of behaviour. It's such a quietly powerful film.

Yes, I think so. I didn't really think of it as so quiet when I was making it, but I think it's just my preference. I really love the disquiet that Therese would feel in the company of Carol, and that there was not a simple, easy or immediate rapport between the women. I mean, there was a conflict, there was interest and curiosity, but there are a lot of moments that were indecipherable to Therese. Carol came with a complex web of issues in her life and an ambivalence about this relationship that Therese has to keep navigating, so that silence and those moments of indecipherability were really important and loaded. They create anxiety but they also create desire, and I love the tension that produces.

When they first exchange glances in the toy store you can sense a spark and some kind of connection being made. Is the kind of chemistry that exists between Cate and Rooney something you can work on with the actors or is it something that you get lucky with?

It's a question that keeps coming up and one that is always impossible to answer. There is no way to create chemistry, and I don't even know if I believe in chemistry. I feel like it's actually the product of a lot of work and thought, and a balance between yielding to emotion and suppressing emotion, and the audience creates the chemistry. All you can do is provide a conscious series of decisions and specific choices showing who these people are and expressing it at different moments, and to use all the tools of the medium – the music, the visual language, the silences – to inform those things. Then it's up to the viewer, they bring the emotion and they bring what's alive to the film.

So what is your process for working with actors? Do like to rehearse with them?

It depends on the movie, it depends on the schedule. In this case we had two weeks of rehearsal built into the schedule, which I love, not all actors do but these actors did, and it meant a lot to everybody to protect that. People think of the term 'rehearsal' like you're blocking the scenes or moving around on a set and deciding where you're going, but really it's mostly just sitting around and talking, examining the backstory, asking questions, examining certain lines for what they mean and maybe stuff can go: “Let's lose that, we don't need it, it's reductive, it's redundant.” It's an editing process and a process of filling in the kind of history that actors rely on.

Finally, what is it that attracts you to female-driven stories?

I think it's because women bear a unique burden in society that men sometimes get to escape, having to represent and uphold institutions of family and raising children, as well as satisfying male needs. Their lives are intrinsically built into the constraints and trade-offs that we make in our daily lives, which are more about real life. I like movies that remind you of your real life and make you think about the fact that there are no heroes in real life, that we make tough choices, and those are the kind of characters that I'm particularly drawn to.

Carol is released in UK cinemas on November 27th

Out 1 at The Prince Charles Cinema

Alfred Hitchcock might have felt that “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”, but I've always loved a marathon cinema experience. The opportunity to immerse myself in a single work of art that stretches far beyond the conventional boundaries of cinema is one I'll always try to take advantage of, and some of my most memorable film experiences of recent years have been epics. I'll never forget the experience of seeing Béla Tarr's Sátántangó on the big screen, spending a weekend with Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz on a beautiful 35mm print, marvelling at the scale of Bondarchuk's War & Peace, and watching a significant portion (though not, alas, the full 24 hours) of Christian Marclay's The Clock.

Over the years there has been one title that I've particularly yearned to see in a cinema, but which has proven to be extremely elusive. Jacques Rivette's legendary Out 1, noli me tangere runs for 773 minutes and has rarely been shown in its entirety since it was made in 1971, though not for the want of trying; our friends at A Nos Amours have tried in vain to track down a print on a number of occasions. When we heard about the film's recent 2k restoration and the forthcoming blu-ray set, we decided this was probably the only opportunity we'd ever get to give Out 1 a big screen outing, and so The Badlands Collective has joined forces with A Nos Amours and Arrow Films to present what we feel confident in describing as the repertory cinema event of the decade.

Out 1 will be shown at the Prince Charles Cinema across two days – November 28th and 29th – and with similar events taking place in France and across the United States in November, it feels like we are part of a long-overdue international tribute to Rivette, a filmmaker frequently overlooked and forgotten. The idea of watching a 13-hour film may be an intimidating one, but Rivette's style is playful, beautiful and engaging, and the cast is populated by some of the key figures in French cinema of the era – Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Michael Lonsdale, Eric Rohmer, to name a few. Out 1 on the big screen is pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime experience and we want to share it with as many people as possible, so please help us spread the word. To ensure this event goes ahead we need to sell enough tickets to cover the cinema's running costs for the weekend, so if you are attending we'd appreciate it if you booked your tickets as soon as possible. Join us for what will surely be an unforgettable celebration of unique, challenging and magical cinema. (And for those who share Alfred's bladder concerns: yes, there will be toilet breaks.)

Tickets for Out 1 at The Prince Charles Cinema can be purchased here.

If you have any more questions about Out 1, they may be answered in the FAQ article that we have compiled for the event.

I really hope we see you at the movies!