Monthly Archives: September 2022

The Outsider and His Art

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The image of the starving artist, living in poverty and misunderstood by everyone during his own lifetime, is an age-old cliché but is often based on true accounts. One of the more famous examples is Niko Pirosmanashvili, a self-taught artist from Mirzaani, Georgia, who was not motivated by money or fame but often used his paintings as barter for bed and board. He was born in 1862 and died in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1918 of alcoholism and starvation but his work is now considered part of the Russian avant-garde movement which flourished between 1890 and 1930. Pirosmani, the 1969 film biography by Russian director Giorgi Shengelaia, is an attempt to capture the spirit of the artist’s work without resorting to the usual biopic structure of dramatizing key events or providing any psychological insight into the subject. Instead, Shengelaia presents Pirosmani’s life as a string of episodes that are closer in style to an ethnographic documentary while duplicating some of the artist’s most famous paintings as part of the narrative landscape.

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Trance State

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The Polish film industry is not exactly famous for its contributions to the science fiction genre but there have been a few novel exceptions over the years. Piotr Szulkin’s O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985) and Andrzej Zulawski’s On the Silver Globe (1988) are among the more renowned titles although they are much closer to art house/avant-garde cinema than accessible commercial entertainments for the movie-going public. Much more audience friendly but even more obscure is Medium, a fascinating blend of science fiction, murder mystery and the occult, which has slowly developed a cult following since its original release in 1985 (It can be streamed on Youtube with English subtitles).

The Polish film poster for Andrzej Zulawski’s ON THE SILVER GLOBE (1988)
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Georges Franju & Jean Cocteau: Thomas the Impostor

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World War I has been the subject of some of the most powerful and prestigious films in cinema from King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and more recently, Sam Mendes’ 1917 (2019), nominated for ten Oscars including Best Picture. All of those films captured the grim horrors of the battlefield, the demoralization and death toll of the troops and the often reckless or unnecessary military strategies of commanding officers. Going against the grain is Thomas l’imposteur (Thomas the Impostor), based on Jean Cocteau’s 1923 novel which was inspired by his own experiences during WW1 as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. Directed by Georges Franju from a screenplay by himself, Cocteau and Michel Worms, the 1965 film views war through the experiences of two idealistic dreamers, one an aristocrat, the Princess de Bormes (Emmanuelle Riva), the other an orphan (Fabrice Rouleau), who lies about his age and invents a fake backstory for himself so he can enlist. The result is a unique take on the Great War which combines the ambiance of a dark fairy tale with a realistic but emotionally detached approach to the events as they affect the two main protagonists.

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Surf’s Up!

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West Coast surfers in the late fifties knew Bruce Brown as a fellow surfer who started filming his surfing exploits with his buddies before Gidget became a best-selling novel in 1957. Hollywood bought the rights and turned it into a hit movie in 1959 starring Sandra Dee. For most movie audiences, it was their first exposure to the popular sport of surfing but Brown was already well known among California surfers before that due to his own surfing movies. He would shoot them without sound and travel around showing them to fellow surfers while narrating the footage in person; occasionally a yet-to-be-famous band called The Beach Boys provided musical accompaniment.. His first documentary effort Slippery When Wet appeared in 1958 and he followed it up with six more surfing features over the next seven years. It was in 1965 when Brown became a household name after the release of The Endless Summer, a surprise box office hit that inspired a whole new generation of surfers and ended up on the top ten list of many major film critics. In 2010 it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress which solidified its reputation as the holy grail of surfing documentaries.

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The Sociopath’s Playbook

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The Japanese film poster for THE BEAST SHALL DIE (1959), directed by Eizo Sugawa.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a sociopath is a person who has a personality disorder which causes them to behave in an aggressive, violent or unpleasant way towards other people. The general opinion among psychiatrists is that sociopaths are not born that way, which is usually the case with psychopaths. Instead, sociopaths are shaped by their environment and experiences. A classic example of this is profiled in Eizo Sugawa’s Yaju Shisubeshi (English title: The Beast Shall Die). The protagonist of this 1959 psychological thriller is Date Kunihiko (Tatsuya Nakadai), a quiet, well-mannered graduate student who is exceptionally gifted as a writer and athlete. Behind his benign façade, however, is a cunning sociopath with a plan that slowly reveals itself as the film unfolds. As portrayed by Nakadai, Date is a truly chilling figure and one of his least known but most potent early performances. It deserves to be included with his more celebrated work in such Japanese masterpieces as Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (1959-1961), Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom (1966) and numerous collaborations with Akira Kurosawa such as Sanjuro (1962), High and Low (1963) and Kagemusha (1980).

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Homeward Bound

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The original film poster for Children of Nature (1991), an Oscar nominee from Iceland.

Films about aging and the elderly are not that prevalent in Hollywood’s yearly production schedule of new films for obvious reasons. It is not a subject that most moviegoers seeking escapism, especially younger viewers, want to contemplate. It is also a risky commercial proposition unless the film is a heartwarming drama with broad appeal (Driving Miss Daisy, 1989) or a feel-good comedy like Harold and Maude (1970), which was a box office flop on its initial release before it went on to become a profitable cult hit. Of course, some of the undisputed masterpieces of 20th century cinema have focused on senior citizens like Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D (1952), Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) but these are not mass appeal attractions but the favorites of a niche art house audience. Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Children of Paradise aka Born Natturunnar (1991) is certainly a film that belongs in this latter grouping but is distinctly different in tone, combining social realism with deadpan humor and a touch of magical realism.

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Ants in Your Pants and Worse!

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There have been killer ant movies before – Them! (1954), The Naked Jungle (1954), and Empire of the Ants (1977) come to mind – but Phase IV, released in 1974, may be the first and only killer ant art film. With its abstract, almost experimental approach to narrative and character development, it’s a much closer cousin to something like…say, Last Year at Marienbad (1961) than Them! While it was marketed as a science fiction film and clearly belongs in that genre, the film was both puzzling and disappointing to a certain sector of that audience that expected a killer ant movie to deliver thrills, chills and a satisfying ending.  Yet, once you accept the fact that Phase IV is not a conventional sci-fi film and will not conform to the genre conventions that you expect, you may find it absolutely chilling and brilliant. 

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