Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance

I'm currently reading Rebecca and Sam Umland's excellent 2006 biography of Donald Cammell, and as a taster for things to come I caught a screening over the weekend of Chris Rodley and Kevin Macdonald's 1999 documentary Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, the first important study of this criminally neglected film maker who took his own life in 1996 with a gunshot to the head. Cammell might have made just four films over the course of nearly four decades but he lived a rich and strange life. Before he made film making his life's work, Cammell was a portrait painter of some renown, he was a sexual adventurer among the glitterati of 60's Paris and London, extremely well read (Borges was a lifelong favorite) and was fascinated by esoterica and ritualism. Incredibly Cammell met Aleister Crowley when he was a young boy - Cammell's father wrote one of the first biographies of Crowley (The Man, the Mage, the Poet).

Donald Cammell interviewed in 1992

The core of the documentary is the incredible history of Cammell's signature film Performance admittedly much to the detriment of Cammell's other films - Demon Seed (1977) is passed over in one short clip, while the lost classic White of the Eye (1987) is discussed all too briefly. Cammell's final film Wild Side (1995) is barely mentioned perhaps due to the shoddy treatment the film received by the studio who financed it. That aside, the discussion on Performance is quite extraordinary. Almost everyone from the film is interviewed - Anita Pallenberg remembers acting the awkward love scenes with Mick Jagger and the aggravation it caused with her then boyfriend Keith Richards; James Fox recalls his sojourn among the faces of South London in research for the film ("Jimmy Fox was regarded as one of their own" confirms Johnny Shannon who played mob boss Harry Flowers in the film); Jagger himself reads out an impassioned letter he and Cammell wrote to Warners who were appalled by the film's violence, while Nicholas Roeg who forged a symbiotic co-directing partnership with Cammell for the film is visibly upset over his split with Cammell during the fallout from the film.

Johnny Shannon and James Fox

Elsewhere sharing their thoughts and memories of Cammell are his brother David (who was associate producer on Performance), Cammell's wife China (pronounced Cheena), Cathy Moriarty (who starred in White of the Eye), Barbara Steele who knew Cammell from the Swinging London days and Kenneth Anger who cast Cammell as Osiris, Lord of Death in his 1972 film Lucifer Rising. Cammell himself appears in the documentary interviewed in 1992 and is engaging, intelligent, charming and in good form. But in his private life Cammell was given to fits of black depression, frustrated no doubt by the amount of film projects he was force to abandon. Friends admit that Cammell was perhaps his own worst enemy, he simply couldn't work within a studio system of film making. One close friend speculates that Cammell's inability to get films off the ground ultimately freed him to commit suicide at his Los Angeles home in April 1996, with a bullet to the brain, eerily echoing a scene in Performance.

A quick glimpse of Donald Cammell under the covers with Jagger and Pallenberg,

from an outtake from Performance

Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance remains unavailable in any official edition at the time of writing, but the complete film can be seen over at YouTube. All four of Donald Cammell's film are currently available on DVD. Performance and Demon Seed are on Warner DVD. Dutch label Mælström put out a barebones but English-friendly White of the Eye (DVD reviewed here). The director's cut of Wild Side is available courtesy of Tartan, and includes Cammell's 14min short film The Argument, which was originally shot in 1971 but remained unedited until the film was reconstructed and mixed by Frank Mazzola in 1999.

Dawn Of The Dead - Complete Motion Picture Soundtrack

"Attention all shoppers..."

Generally speaking I don’t listen to soundtrack albums, preferring to experience a piece of film music accompanied by the images. However, I will make an exception for this incredible album compiled by two Dawn of the Dead obsessives who managed to track down just about every bit of music heard in the theatrical cut of the film and crucially present it here sans dialogue. Quite an achievement considering the bulk of Dawn of the Dead’s soundtrack was made up of tracks culled from various hard to find library music albums on the De Wolfe label. The music Goblin composed for the film has always been available – a Goblin-only soundtrack LP was issued soon after the film’s original release in 1978, and later debuted on CD in 1987. In 2004 Trunk Records took on the challenge of rescuing Dawn of the Dead’s lost library soundtrack, gathering together an impressive 39mins of music heard in the film, and released it as Unreleased Soundtrack Music from George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. In his liner notes for the album, label head-honcho Jonny Trunk wrote “Fans of the film in America have spent years trying to track all these originals down. It will take you years possibly, so don't bother.” Sound advice considering most of the albums Romero sourced the music from had long faded into obscurity, never pressed for CD. Even the Trunk album was incomplete, missing out on two of my favorites pieces of music, the track with the African drumming and chanting, used for the gun shop sequence in the film, and the weird phased version of the polka number The Gonk, heard when Steven emerges from the lift as a zombie.

 

Thankfully, these tracks and other elusive numbers have been located, and included in the unofficial double-CD Dawn Of The Dead - Complete Motion Picture Soundtrack which includes the library music and the film's selection of Goblin tracks. Even more remarkable is how fresh the library cuts sound, expertly scrubbed of the snap, crackle and pop of the original LPs and sequenced in the order heard in the film. This is an absolute essential addition to your Dawn of the Dead collection so I’d recommend you grab this right away. Rather than claim this labor of love for my own, I’ll direct you to where I found it, at the excellent Inferno Music Vault which offers some incredible soundtracks for your listening pleasure. Well worth spending some time there combing through the archives.
 

Gunnar Hansen on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Continuing a series recalling little nuggets heard on film maker commentaries. In this instalment Gunnar Hansen remembers filming a scene with Marilyn Burns during the legendary 27 hour shooting day and the moment when the mild-mannered actor transformed into his character Leatherface...

This scene there's a tube...a bulb in my palm with the knife and there's a tube to feed the fake blood. We shot this over and over again because the tube kept clogging. There's a piece of scotch tape over the blade edge to keep it dull. We couldn't get the blood out of the tube onto the knife edge and so after the 4th or 5th take while they're all getting ready to shoot it I turned away from everybody and stripped the tape off the knife and the blood tube and actually just cut her. And the reason was at this point we were insane and now we're 18 hours into this 27 hour day and at this point I was so crazy I just wanted to get the film over with. And I didn't care about anything, I didn't care about hurting her, I just wanted to not do this again...

Gunnar Hansen, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Dark Sky DVD/Blu-Ray, commentary index point 71:01)

Art of Japanese Laserdisc

Over at the mighty Hero Never Dies blog, my good pal and all round Eastern Condor, Martin has posted up pics of two very nice acquisitions - the Criterion laserdiscs of Crash and Akira. I thought it might be fun to do a sister post based on that so below are pics of the Japanese laser editions of Crash and Akira.

The Crash artwork from the 1997 Herald edition (with yellow OBI) is really quite a beauty and captures well the film's strange juxtaposition of eroticism and violence, with a still shot of Rosanna Arquette's very desirable rear clad in short leather skirt, and fish net tights contrasting with the clunky leg braces and the vaginal-like surgical scar. It's a procative sleeve much like the Japanese artwork for the Shivers laserdisc and one I think JG Ballard might have enjoyed. (Please excuse the muddy looking Crash front cover - its much more vibrant in actuality, late evening summer sunshine is not ideal for laserdisc photographing)

This 1998 Japanese edition of Akira on the Pioneer label comes as a 2-disc gatefold set and features rather strangely, English credits on the back sleeve, with full Japanese credits on the insert. I wanted to get snaps of the gatefold image - but the dark glossy jacket didn't photograph well sadly. On the back side of silver OBI there are ads for two additional Akira-related laserdiscs - Akira Production Report, a 47min documentary on the film and Akira Sound Clip a 19min featurette on the soundtrack. Both of which are available on the Special Edition DVD (but not on the current Blu-Ray)

The Day Jobs of Philip Glass

I love this, and I wish I had a better scan... The Day Jobs of Philip Glass first appeared in the April 1992 issue of Pulse!, Tower Records in-store magazine. Illustrated by underground comic artist Justin Green as part of his Musical Legends series this very funny cartoon depicts a slightly surly mid-70's era Philip Glass driving a cab and plumbing apartments and lofts, just two of the jobs the struggling composer worked before his magnum opus Einstein On the Beach premiered at New York's Metropolitan Opera House and made Glass a household name. The 4th panel below, showing Time magazine critic Robert Hughes gasping in disbelief at the sight of Glass plumbing his new dishwasher really did happen. "But you are an artist" Hughes spluttered. Glass explained he was sometimes a plumber and he should be left alone to finish the job. In 1978 Glass finally handed in his cab license and ditched his overalls to became a full-time composer.

  

 

  

  

An anthology of Justin Green's musical legends which include Jim Morrison, Robert Johnson, Iggy Pop to name a few is available here (The lo-fi screenshots above are taken from the 2007 documentary Glass - A Portrait Of Philip In Twelve Parts)

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

My introduction to Jack Johnson was Miles Davis' 1971 album, A Tribute To Jack Johnson, a collection of music which served as the soundtrack for Jim Jacob's documentary on the life of the great American heavy weight boxer. For Miles the project had a personal resonance. He loved boxing and was a regular at the fights and as he alludes to in his own liner notes for the album, had tremendous admiration for how Johnson lived his life, his taste for fine clothes, fast cars and faster women, and Johnson's refusal to tow the racial line set by the white establishment of 20th century America. All of which is explored in Ken Burns' superb 2004 film Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson which traces the extraordinary life of Jack Johnson, the son of former slaves, who fled Galveston, Texas to seek his fortune and battled and bludgeoned his way to became the first black heavyweight champion of the world.

In telling the story of Johnson's life the film explores the emergence of professional boxing from its earliest days when matches were strictly unregulated underground affairs to the world-famous The Fight of the Century of 1910 when former undefeated heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement to fight Jack Johnson. The film is also a damning indictment of systematic suppression of blacks in the post-Reconstruction America. Ultimately Johnson's toughest opponent was Jim Crow, and he had as many battles outside the ring - his struggle against the racism within the boxing world which denied him for years a shot at the heavyweight title because of his color, the poisonous racial theorizing aimed at undermining his athletic achievements, and the contempt he earned for his relationships with white women. Johnson was fiercely intelligent, highly sophisticated and for a man of his time progressively-minded, opening up a speakeasy on the South-side of Chicago which catered for blacks and whites - "I have found no better way in avoiding race prejudice" Johnson once said, "than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist".

1909. Jack Johnson towers before a flattened Stanley Ketchel. Johnson hit Ketchel so hard it is said Ketchel's front teeth were found embedded in Johnson glove.

Unforgivable Blackness follows on the tradition of previous Burns films like The Civil War (1990) or Baseball (2004). Instead of the fragmented, frenetic pacing of contemporary TV documentaries (as well as the current vogue for applying three dimensional effect to photographs), Burns has a more classical meditative style, weaving together an incredible tapestry of archive photographs, personal correspondence, newspaper clippings and film footage (complete with subtle and sensitive sound effects to add additional life to the images). The film features insightful commentary from a wide range of personalities, including novelist and critic Stanley Crouch, essayist Gerald Early, Johnson biographer Randy Roberts, boxing writers Bert Sugar and W.C. Heinz, and James Earl Jones who played Jack Johnson on Broadway and film in The Great White Hope. Returning from previous Burns' films, Jazz (2001) and Mark Twain (2002) is the great Keith David who provides another fine narration, and among the excellent voice cast are Brian Cox, Ed Harris, Derek Jacobi, Amy Madigan, Joe Morton, Alan Rickman, Studs Terkel, Billy Bob Thornton, Eli Wallach, Jeffrey Wright and with great presence, Samuel L. Jackson as the voice of Jack Johnson. Wynton Marsalis provides the enjoyable ragtime score (with snatches of Blind Willie Johnson). Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson is available as a standalone 2-disc set or as part of an excellent value 10-disc American Lives boxset which rounds up a number of other Ken Burns films. Highly recommended.

Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive

This week I caught a screening of Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive, a film I hadn't seen in quite some time probably owing to Elite's no-frills DVD edition which suffered from excessive digital fog. In 2007 Dark Sky Films put out their DVD edition which added a second disc of extras but more importantly featured a much improved transfer. I picked up the Dark Sky disc soon after its release and quietly filed it away on the shelf and forgot about it - until now. Thankfully the intervening years haven't dampened my enthusiasm for Hooper's so called difficult second album (actually his third film, if you include his rarely seen 1971 debut Eggshells) and Eaten Alive remains as sleazy and violent as you imagined 70's drive-in films to be when you were too young to rent them at the video store.

Unlike George Romero who did an about-turn after Night of the Living Dead with the romantic comedy relic There's Always Vanilla, Tobe Hopper took a job directing a screenplay which was so slavish of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the comparisons between his breakthrough film and Eaten Alive seem unavoidable. The plot sees a disparate group of people wind up at the decrepit Starlight hotel in Louisiana to be picked off by a madman who's weapons of choice are a scythe and a ravenous alligator. As with Chainsaw, Eaten Alive was inspired by another American serial killer, this time, one Joe Ball, a WWI veteran who disposed of the bodies of over 20 women in a makeshift pool of alligators. Story wise both films may be cut from similar cloth, but Eaten Alive abandons the stark realism of its predecessor for something far more akin to a weird fairy tale, the stagnant bayous of Louisiana entirely recreated and reimagined at a soundstage in Los Angeles.

Watching the film again I was struck by the odd moments of strangeness - actor William Finley barking like a dog, for no apparent reason, or the surreal cutaways to a caged and starved monkey, balanced by scenes of pure menace, like the sequence where 8 year old Kyle Richards is terrorized by the scythe-wielding Neville Brand (a scene which probably caused the film's brief detention as a Video Nasty in the UK). Hooper had reigned in the bloodshed for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in an attempt to secure a PG rating from the MPAA but producer Mardi Rustam had no such concerns and the film doesn't shy away from bloody carnage. More problematic are the scenes of nudity which feel tacked on and probably were - Hooper left the film before completion and there are stories of additional scenes filmed following his departure.

Hooper's direction isn't as fluid as his other films, there's little of the show off camerawork that you might expect from the director, perhaps as a consequence of the limited scope of the sets, but the film conjures up a thick sinister atmosphere with its baroque lighting and the eccentric musique concrète soundtrack of tweeting electronics and music box chimes, meshing with the sounds of a radio spewing forth dreary country ditties. And there's the splendidly repellent art direction - the hotel, all mouldering wallpaper and strewn with discarded bric-a-brac, magazines, spectacles and a half-dressed mannequins. Of the cast Marilyn Burns spends most of her time gagged and tied to a bed while a young Robert Englund playing an obnoxious cowboy with a penchant for sodomy bags the film's famous first line. Stuart Whitman equips himself well as the helpful sheriff, Carolyn Jones acting underneath some old-age make plays the wizened brothel madam trying to unload some useless real estate, while a shell-shocked Mel Ferrer looks like he's wandered into the wrong the film. Effortlessly stealing the show however is Neville Brand who seems genuinely beyond the pale and clearly channelling a wellspring of alcoholic rage into his performance. Brand's hard-drinking had just about finished off a distinguished career and despite later appearances in The Ninth Configuration and Without Warning, Eaten Alive is effectively Brand's acting swansong.

No word about Eaten Alive is complete without mention of the film's numerous retitles. Years of choppy distribution has left the film with at least five official titles, 3 of which have been used elsewhere. Eaten Alive! was chosen as the export title for Umberto Lenzi's 1980 cannibal film (starring Mel Ferrer!); the film's UK title Death Trap is also the name of a 1982 Sidney Lumet film, and Horror Hotel was previously used as the US title for John Moxey's 1960 film City of the Dead. Apparently, the film might have been issued at one point as Brutes and Savages, also the title of a dreadful mondo from 1977 but I've yet to see anything that proves this. Personally, I like the eerily evocative Starlight Slaughter best. And finally no one it seems can agree on whether the creature in the film is in fact an alligator or a crocodile, least of all the person who compiled the closing credits, assigning effects artist Bob Mattey a credit for Mechanical Alligator and Crocodile...

Mindwebs: Short Stories from the Worlds of Speculative Fiction

Last night I finished Penguin's The Call of Cthulhu the anthology of H.P. Lovecraft stories I mentioned a few posts back, and for one final bit of cosmic weirdness before I break from Lovecraft I took a listen to Mindweb's radio production of his 1919 story Beyond the Wall of Sleep a tale of extra-terrestrial possession from another dimension... Running from 1975-1984, and broadcast weekly out of WHA Radio in Wisconsin, Mindwebs was a sort of halfway house between sci-fi radio dramatizations like Dimension X and X-Minus One and "a book at bedtime" program.

Each 30min episode of Mindwebs features the relaxed easy-going voice of Michael Hanson reading from the short stories of science fiction and fantasy heavyweights like Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick among others. Accompanying Hanson's voice is an eclectic selection of music - from Samuel Barber to Tangerine Dream - and a battery of sound effects (or technical operations as Hanson credits them in each episode's sign-off). Of the 169 episodes, 135 are available to stream or download at the Internet Archive. The sound quality of these recordings is generally very good, but shouldn't be judged against official audio books - there are some occasional sound drop outs, tape hiss and other anomalies but given the rarity of these shows, this is a minor complaint. Sadly, given the amount of copyrighted music there's little chance that the Mindwebs archive will be remastered for an official release, so grab this extraordinary collection while its available. (The Dimension X and X Minus One collections are highly recommended also)

Films and Filming magazine

During the second half of 2012, I obsessively collected issues of British film magazine Films and Filming which ran in its original incarnation from 1954-1980. The bulk of my collection is composed of a near unbroken run of Films and Filming from the 70's, a dozen or so issues from the 60's and a prized copy of Films and Filming #1 from October 1954 (pictured left). The magazine was pitched somewhere between the Hollywood glamour of Picturegoer (1913-1960) and the more scholarly Sight and Sound (1934-) and contained an eclectic mix of reviews, articles and interviews (Ken Russell was a favorite it seems),with excellent coverage on World Cinema (Eastern European Cinema especially), film festival screenings and a regular column about films playing on the London club circuit (did you know that Fando & Lis played in London as Tar Babies?). Interestingly the magazine had something of a gay bent (no pun intended) - in the early years the magazine's classifieds section functioned as a meeting point for the closeted gay community. It also ran gay-interest adverts, gave coverage to Gay Cinema (more about that later) and featured plentiful male nudity among its pages and occasionally on the cover. The following is my own humble tribute to this very unique magazine which I hope will give a flavor of what the magazine was like to read - right away I must add a disclaimer about the screenshots below, taken quick and dirty with my camera so any distortions, warping and skewed angles are down to my amateur fumblings...

One of Films and Filming's primary features was the preview section of forthcoming or new releases, usually a double-page spread of stills from a particular film. Given the magazine's penchant for nudity, quite a lot of cult and exploitation films were given exposure, like Jacopetti and Prosperi's slave trade mondo Farewell Uncle Tom from the September 1970 issue

Films and Filming had an official star-rated film review section in addition to capsule reviews found in the Documentary and Club columns. What's most valuable about the reviews is their lack of cultural baggage that comes with reviewing vintage films today. The Exorcist was famously panned, The Devils received a shrug of the shoulders while lavish praise was bestowed upon Performance. A good example of this is the December 1970 review of Night of the Living Dead which imparts some of the experience of seeing Romero's film with virgin eyes back in the day.

One of the pleasures of browsing through the magazine are the vintage film advertisements. From the July 1971 issue a rare ABC Cinema ad for The Baby Maker, a late sixties time capsule starring Barbara Hershey as a free spirited surrogate mother, coupled however unlikely with Dario Argento's early masterpiece The Cat O'Nine Tails. I could be wrong but I haven't seen this unusual ad reproduced in the various Argento books.

 

 

Among the more well known contributors to Films and Filming were the great film historian Kevin Brownlow (who wrote articles on the silent Ben Hur, and the films of Abel Gance), as well as regular staffers like House of Whipcord and Frightmare writer David McGillivray, and Michael Armstrong, director of David Bowie short The Image and more famously Mark of the Devil. Among Armstrong's best work for the magazine was a three part series which ran from March/April/May 1971 entitled Some Like It Chilled which examined some of the major motifs in Horror films.



Films and Filming's Letters page makes for especially insightful reading. Anyone with an interest in the film-going habits and attitudes of the British public during the 70's would find the views and opinions of readers quite fascinating. The tide of increasingly violent films that swept through cinemas during the tenure of British censor Stephen Murphy saw much debate in the Letters page. Films such as The Devils, Straw Dogs, Clockwork Orange, Soldier Blue generated a considerable amount of commentary which raged on and off for two years. The two letters below from the May 1972 issue are typical of the passions these films aroused.

 

 

From its inception Films and Filming catered to a gay readership in the absence of any dedicated gay magazines. The magazine was a champion of the Basil Dearden and Dirk Bogarde film Victim and as the 60's gave way to the 70's the magazine became increasingly brazen in its choice of covers - the September 1968 cover featured a male interracial kiss (from the film Two Gentlemen Sharing), and covers showing men in various states of undress would be a regular fixtures throughout the 70's. Inside the magazine there was coverage of Underground Gay Cinema, with retrospectives on Warhol and the magazine gave exposure to obscure gay films like Pink Narcissus and the films of Derek Jarman who scored covers with Sebastiane (November 1976 issue) and Jubilee (March 1978) 

Other marginal film makers who appeared in the magazine included David Cronenberg, interviewed in the October 1982 issue whilst promoting Scanners, the June 1974 issue featured a Norman McLaren career overview, and below, from the August 1971 issue, a report on American Underground film makers Curtis Harrington, director of the avant-garde Horror film Night Tide, and Conrad Rooks who made the psychedelic experimental film Chappaqua.

Further Reading

Memories of Films and Filming
A decade by decade gallery of Films and Filming covers
Films and Filming for sale at eBay

Cronenberg on Videodrome

Continuing a series recalling little nuggets heard on film maker commentaries. In this instalment David Cronenberg recalls a moment of protest by his leading man resulted in an impromptu director's cameo...

Jimmy Woods would not put on this helmet. He was worried he would be electrocuted. I thought he was kidding but he was serious. So that’s me in the helmet right now, those are my hands you are seeing, held up in front of the lens and it’s me in this shot because even though Carol Spier my production designer who designed the helmet put the helmet on for him, stood in a pool of water on the Videodrome set and fired up the helmet to show him he wouldn’t be electrocuted, he wouldn’t put on the helmet...

David Cronenberg, Videodrome (Criterion DVD/Blu-Ray, commentary index point 52:01)

 

Listening In Depth - Keith Fullerton Whitman's "Greatest Hits"

I'm currently listening to a very interesting project over at Soundcloud by experimental musician Keith Fullerton Whitman. Over the last 10 years or so Keith has been taking fragments of pop songs and applying all sorts of effects to them, chiefly slowing them down to half-speed and accentuating previously hidden elements of the music to reveal entirely new sound maps, best described by Whitman himself as “shining a flashlight into the dark corners of each selection, revealing the ghosts lurking within”.

Keith is streaming 100 of these “transformations” in a massive 10-part 12-hour block simply known as “Greatest Hits”. Additionally Whitman is offering listeners to chance to win a handmade, 10-disc set of “Greatest Hits” to the first 10 people to supply a complete list of the original songs used for the project. So far I’ve only been able to identify just a handful of songs - John Mellencamp's Jack and Diane, Edie Brickell's What I Am, Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield, and Duran Duran’s Save A Prayer. Remarkably much of the music sounds very shoegazey and this collection is required listening for those of you who enjoy the warm dreamy textures of The Cocteau Twins, Slowdive and Belong’s 2011 long-player Common Era

Keith Fullerton Whitman - Greatest Hits (Soundcloud) - sadly no longer available
 

H.P. Lovecraft - Rejuvenator

I must apologize for the dreadful punning title of this post but it goes some way in describing the profound effect the stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft have on me. Whenever I feel my love of Horror is flagging I turn to one of Lovecraft's anthologies to recharge the batteries. I'm currently re-reading Penguin's excellent Lovecraft collection The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories and it's always a case of one-more-story before I'm forced to put the book away and attend to other things. The majority of Lovecraft's work is now almost a century old but he continues to exert a huge influence over writers, film makers, artists, musicians and game designers. Films as disparate as Horror Express, Dead & Buried, The Thing, Pan's Labyrinth and The Prestige all feature unmistakable echoes of Lovecraft's work. Stephen King who famously described Lovecraft as the "dark and baroque prince" of 20th century Horror paid homage to him with The Mist and The Tommyknockers. And should one desire a musical companion on their journey to the mountains of madness, seek out Lustmord's 1994 album The Place Where Black Stars Hang, a collection of brooding isolationist pieces which perfectly capture the mood of the far flung desolate and alien landscapes found in Lovecraft's stories.

Above, artist Michael Whelan's Lovecraft's Nightmare, from 1982, partly used for the cover of H.P. Lovecraft anthology The Tomb and Other Tales. The artwork is now more well known as the cover of Obituary's 1990 death metal classic Cause of Death.

Penguin's three Lovecraft books (which also include The Thing on the Doorstep and The Dreams in the Witch House) are highly recommended for Lovecraft beginners, the collections are curated by Lovecraft's finest biographer S. T. Joshi and include near-definitive texts, and excellent, insightful introductions and explanatory notes.

Black God White Devil

Just a quick post... I was surfing earlier and came across to my extreme delight Black God White Devil, smartly jacketed in a Criterion sleeve. I was momentarily stunned that this had been announced under my nose until I realised I was looking at an imposter from the very fine website Fake Criterions... A key film of Brazil's Cinema Novo movement, Glauber Rocha's 1964 film Black God White Devil follows the fortunes of a poor farmer who kills a cattle owner and goes on the run to hook up with a religious maniac and later a revolutionary bandit, all the while followed by hired gunman Antonio das Mortes... A ragged, feverish film Black God White Devil is a heady brew of mysticism, religion and politics played out against some of the driest scorched looking landscapes in Cinema, the story propelled along by a Greek chorus of fantastic Brazilian folk songs. The violence is often surprisingly sadistic - a baby stabbed to death on a sacrificial altar, a bride raped on her wedding day - and the film is outlandish enough to include a startling tip of the hat to Eisenstein's Odessa Steps. Rocha's film sits somewhere between Gospel According to Matthew, A Bullet For the General and El Topo, and if all that sounds intriguing, this is the film for you (and hopefully for Criterion too!)

A Letter to Elia by Martin Scorsese

I can safely say the last time I watched the annual Academy Awards ceremony was in 1999. It was the year the Academy awarded the lifetime achievement Oscar to writer, producer, director Elia Kazan. As Kazan made his way centre stage to be presented with the award by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, the response from the attending film community was decidedly mixed. Warren Beaty clearly emotional stood and clapped, Steven Spielberg offered polite applause but remained seated, while Ed Harris and Nick Nolte sat stone-faced and arms folded, in no uncertain terms at odds with the Academy honouring a man who appeared as a "friendly" witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. For such a carefully stage-managed event, the Academy Awards has had a number of memorable gaffes and slips over the years, but Kazan's snub was one of show's most sour moments. At the time I was only vaguely aware of the Hollywood Blacklist controversy, but I still feel (as I did in 1999) that Kazan's treatment was shabby and he fully deserved the Oscar for his contribution to American Cinema.

A Letter to Elia, Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones' 2010 documentary about Kazan, only briefly mentions the Blacklist by way of an excerpt taken from Kazan's 1988 autobiography A Life (read by Elias Koteas) but position it as a defining moment not only in Kazan's personal life but in his film making life also. It was after 1952, the year Kazan appeared before HUAC, that the director made his most important films - among them On The Waterfront, East of Eden, A Face In The Crowd, Wild River and America America. A Letter to Elia continues in the vein of previous Scorsese documentaries, A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy; rather than a definitive career overview of Kazan, Scorsese discusses the director's films in the context of his own life - he saw in On The Waterfront the same streetwise toughs of his Little Italy neighborhood, and considered his difficult relationship with his brother in the light of East of Eden, a film Scorsese "stalked", obsessively following it around theatres in New York in the mid-50's. It's surprisingly frank stuff with Scorsese evidently reliving some awkward memories and emotions. That Scorsese was chosen to present Kazan with the Lifetime Achievement award was no coincidence, in the documentary Scorsese remembers first meeting Kazan in the 60's when he was in film school. Much later when Scorsese was a famous director he and Kazan become good friends, but Scorsese admits that he could never reveal to Kazan how he felt about his films. Instead he put it in a letter.

A Letter to Elia is a fascinating film, Scorsese's passion for Kazan's films is infectious and has awakened my own interest in Kazan. I've begun reading A Life (and I'll be first to admit that Kazan was a sonofabitch) and in the next few weeks I hope to catch screenings of A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden and A Face In The Crowd, and pick up the Blu-Rays of Panic In the Streets and On the Waterfront. A Letter to Elia can be currently seen by US readers on the PBS website while readers in the UK and Ireland can catch the film on Film4.

In A Silent Way - Jesús Franco 1930-2013

When the news reached me yesterday that Jesús Franco had passed away, it came as a gentle surprise. I knew Franco’s health had been perilous in the last few years – recent interviews with Franco filmed for various DVD supplements were sometimes painful to watch, but despite all this I always had this notion that Franco was immortal, that he would continue to grind out zero-budget quickies long after all the rest of us had bit the dust. I won’t mourn Franco’s death but instead celebrate the career of an extraordinary artist. In the grand scheme of things few people in this world will get to leave behind such a rich and dense body of work like Franco has and I have no doubt that his filmography now finally complete will be studied, discussed, argued and obsessed over as long as people watch movies. How's that for immortality.

I’m listening to a lot of jazz at the moment and I mention this because in a strange way I've always associated Franco with Jazz. One of the first things I discovered about Franco was that he was passionate about Jazz. He often signed his films with the director-pseudonym Clifford Brown, the name of an influential American trumpeter who recorded in the '50's before his untimely death at 25 in a car accident. I would even suggest that Franco's body of work perfectly embodies the spirit of Jazz. One of Cinema's most prolific auteurs, Franco's filmography is a vast ocean of shifting styles and moods, and like Jazz is complex, formidable, it resists any easy definition of what it is exactly. His films include plenty of bum notes and fluffed solos, but he also made films that were blazingly progressive, full of emotion and liberation.

Black Angel's Death Song... Jess Franco on trombone in Venus In Furs (1969)

Franco was legendary for his rapid-fire work rate, stories about the director juggling three of four films simultaneously may well be true (Franco has always denied this), his sprawling filmography reads less like a director's CV and more like a list of sessions by a jobbing horn player. Jimmy Cobb who played drums on Kind of Blue, once described Miles Davis' great masterpiece as "just another date" and one wonders if Franco thought a masterpiece like Succubus, or Eugenie de Sade was "just another production". Probably. Franco had little regard for his own films and would always say he was happy just making movies. The final word goes to the man himself. When asked in 2009 why he made films, Franco replied, "Because I love Cinema. It is the most important thing to me. Life is Cinema"

Deranged - Notes on the German DVD

This weekend I revisited Deranged, Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby's film about one of Wisconsin's most famous sons, Ed Gein. This is a film I waited years to see, I had only a tantalizing review of the film in the pages of Shock Xpress to tide me over. In 2002 I finally saw the film courtesy of the MGM Midnite Movies DVD, and it didn't disappoint. Deranged is quite simply one of the finest Horror films of the Seventies. The US MGM disc which is still in print over a decade later isn't a bad edition of the film - the film looks vibrant and sharp but ignominiously is double-billed with the 1980 cannibal comedy Motel Hell. More significantly, the MGM edition features the R-rated cut of the film, missing a short sequence excised from early unrated theatrical prints. Fortunately, in 2007 German label Universum Film/Legend put out their own edition of Deranged, similar to the MGM disc transfer-wise but crucially re-instates the missing sequence where Ezra Cobb plucks the eye out of a severed head, saws off the top of the skull and scoops the brain into a coffee cup. In addition the German DVD includes 80mins worth of extras among the must-see Deranged Chronicles: The Making of Deranged. Before we go any further I can confirm that this German DVD is English-friendly, containing the original English-language audio track and removable German subtitles (across the entire disc - film plus extras).

Deranged fans owe much thanks to producer/editor Michael D. Moore who was responsible for making the full uncut version of the film available. Moore, a huge fan of the film managed to track down the last surviving uncut print and after purchasing the worldwide rights to the film restored the film to its former glory. Or perhaps it should be ragged glory. The rescued footage is of very poor quality, dark and splicy but one should know that this is as good as it gets. The brain-scooping sequence itself is brief, less than a minute of screen time, but Tom Savini's effects are spectacularly visceral:

Moving on to the extras... Deranged Chronicles: The Making of Deranged is a 36min documentary directed by Michael D. Moore in 1993. The film features talking head interviews with Deranged's producer Tom Karr and co-director Jeff Gillen reminiscing about the film, how the project came together (originally called Necromaniac), their memories of the production, and Karr showcasing some of Savini's ghoulish props. The bulk of the documentary features Karr's remarkable 16mm footage filmed on set - we see Roberts Blossom quietly preparing for his scenes, the special effects team rigging gags and props, plus the cast and crew generally enjoying themselves amongst the body parts and putrefying sets. The footage itself includes a cheerful running commentary by Savini pointing out some of the faces on screen (including glimpses of Alan Ormsby) and confessing he had the hots for the actress who plays Ezra Cobb's barmaid victim. The 16mm footage itself is of variable quality, the colors have soured some what, and evidently the entire documentary has been culled from a dupey looking VHS tape. It's all very watchable, and the brain-scooping sequence actually looks a shade better than the same footage put back into the film.

Co-director Jeff Gillen mucking around on set with unnamed extra

Actor Roberts Blossom posing for a wardrobe test with wig and dead skin mask

 

The next set of extras concern Ed Gein. Tom Karr returns for the 20min Ed Gein Story, Producer Tom Karr On Location in which Karr recounts from a graveyard no less, the strange story of grave robber and murderer Ed Gein. Karr is also seen wandering around what is apparently the old Gein farm which was burned to the ground in the late Fifties by the locals of Plainfield, Wisconsin. It's a good piece overall, even if it does remind one of Robert Downey Jr's American Maniacs program from Natural Born Killers. This short film was made in 1993 and shot on video. Quality is decent enough. The next extra is preceded by a disclaimer about the picture quality, and is most likely included for historical value. Produced in 1981 (while Gein was still alive) by Michael D. Moore, Ed Gein American Maniac covers much of the same ground as the previous extra, supplemented with audio interviews with police officers involved in the Gein case, and narrated by Moore himself in the style of a hardboiled private eye, ("Ed Gein was a real piece of work"). This curious 24min featurette also appeared on an earlier US tape.

 Tom Karr standing in what's left of the Gein farm in 1993

 

The remaining extras on the DVD are trailers. First up is a 3min promo-trailer for a 1995 shot-on-video atrocity Creep, it's inclusion here is I suspect that Tom Karr and Michael D. Moore are named on the credits as associate producers (and one of the actors in the film is wearing a Deranged t-shirt). The final extra on the disc are three different trailers for Deranged ("The nightmare of insane murder and lingering death"), one of which contains a few frames of the eyeball-plucking scene. Finally, worth mentioning that the German DVD comes with an excellent quality 23 page booklet about the film, sadly the text is in German only but the booklet features some very nice b/w production stills from the film. The German DVD is available from Amazon UK and Amazon Germany

Clive Barker's Salomé and The Forbidden

My previous post opened with a bit of a boner when I mentioned that Clive Barker made his directorial debut with Hellraiser in 1987. In fact Barker had experimented with film in the previous decade with a series of short, amateur Super 8 films ("pocket money cinema" as Hellbound writer Peter Atkins fondly recalled). The Dark Tower, a sword and sorcery fantasy from 1972 featured crude stop-animation and owed a large debt to Ray Harryhausen, while Jack O Lant, also from 1972 has been described as something akin to a Hammer sketch as a semi-naked bride frolicked around a graveyard. Both these films are most likely lost forever, but two very accomplished Barker films have survived and are well worth investigating.

Made in 1973, Salomé emerged out of Barker's fringe-theatre days when he and his friends staged a production of Oscar Wilde's Salomé, which included an eyeless Doug Bradley, and the bloody severed head of John The Baptist. For the film version Barker marshaled the minimal resources at hand - a super 8mm camera, a single light source and the cold, damp basement of a florist's shop to shoot in and fashioned an eerie, erotic, and strikingly visual adaptation of Wilde's single act play. Made entirely without dialogue the film has a narrative of sorts but a knowledge of the story might help going in: Salomé stepdaughter of King Herod is enraged by the imprisoned John the Baptist’s resistance to her charms. Later Salomé performs the dance of the seven veils for her lustful stepfather in return for the prize of John the Baptist’s severed head. Herod fulfills her request but is so disgusted by Salomé that he has his soldiers crush her with their shields…

Speaking warmly about the film in the early 90's Barker offered the early Warhol films as influence, but the film is best placed among the magickal films of Kenneth Anger and contemporary Underground films like Pink Narcissus and the Super 8 experiments of Derek Jarman. Watching the film it's quite obvious Barker was even at that young stage a precocious talent. His expressionist use of light and darkness quite ingeniously creates the illusion of space in an otherwise cramped one room set and the film is brimming over with strange visuals - in the absence of props and art direction (except for some cabalistic drawings smeared on walls), Barker focuses his camera on the interaction of his actors among the inky shadows. Faces emerge out of the gloom and appear obscured behind plumes of smoke while other cast members are heavily made up (like a sinister gypsy-like Doug Bradley appearing as Herod) or seen wearing unnerving kabuki style masks. It's a hugely impressive work and manages to pack more nightmarish atmosphere into its brief 8 minutes than most feature length Horror films can dream of.

In 1975 Clive Barker acquired a 16mm camera and began his next film project which he worked on and off for 3 years before the film was ultimately abandoned. The Forbidden is a far more esoteric work than Salomé. Barker admitted the film was loaded with codes and symbolism that had little or no meaning to anyone other than its author but described the film as a riff on the Faustian myth. The Forbidden defies interpretation but in the film a man (played by Peter Atkins) is seen indulging in various erotic and sometimes violent pleasures which are later punished by various hands who flay him alive. The skinned man then wanders through a landscape which resembles an etching from a book... It's a tenuous unreliable description at best, made even more difficult that the film was shot in negative which results in an extremely odd visual style - images appear like Rorschach tests and actors swap their humanness for something far more alien.

In comparison with Salomé which merely hinted at the dark eroticism of Wilde’s play, The Forbidden is a far more transgressive work with moments of unsettling violence and sadism. A man is violently strangled and the long flaying sequence is surprisingly visceral (how this effect was achieved is best left unrevealed). Perhaps the most provocative aspect of the film is its sexual content. There’s some heterosexual lovemaking as well as a homo-erotic sequence where a naked man dances in a frenzy brandishing an fully erect cock (apparently Clive Barker himself). More fascinating still is how the film precedes Barker’s later work especially The Hellbound Heart novella and Hellraiser. The frustrated protagonist of the film feels like an embryonic form of the Frank Cotton character from The Hellbound Heart, while the unseen surgeons who perform the flaying are like place-holders for the Cenobites. Throughout the film there are images and ideas that are strangely familiar – the visual motif of light reflecting of upright nails, the protagonist occupied with a jigsaw puzzle, a living skinless man, and animated shots of black birds flapping, an image that reappears in The Hellbound Heart. Barker also reused the title of The Forbidden for a Books of Blood short story, later filmed as Candyman.

 

 

In 1994 the existing footage of The Forbidden was assembled and edited into a 36 minute film and along with Salomé was given its first public screening as part of a wide retrospective of Clive Barker’s work. The following year both films were released on VHS by Redemption as part of a program entitled Clive Barker’s Salomé & The Forbidden which featured interviews with Clive Barker, Doug Bradley and Peter Atkins. In addition both films were given excellent avant-garde electronic scores by soundtrack composer Adrian Carson. Redemption’s tape was later upgraded to DVD, as a stand-alone US release, and in the UK as the bonus disc of Anchor Bay’s 2004 Hellraiser box set. I suspect these films will leave the average Pinhead disciple bemused but fans of Clive Barker's work should seek these films out.

The Hellbound Heart

In the next few days I’m hoping to catch a screening of Hellraiser, a film I have fallen out of love with it over the years. This sudden and unexpected interest in the film was prompted by my reading of The Hellbound Heart, Clive Barker’s 1986 novella which the author himself would adapt for his directorial debut. I first read The Hellbound Heart some 25 years ago and whatever memories I had of the story had long since been absorbed into Hellraiser. The novella which first appeared in the horror anthology Night Visions 3 is little more than a short story (it can be easily read in one sitting), but despite its brevity makes for a fascinating comparison with Hellraiser. Hardly surprising that the majority of the short story was retained for the film, even down to specific dialogue, but Barker managed to improve upon certain aspects of the story. In the novella, Rory Cotton (renamed Larry in the film) and Kirsty are simply good friends but in the film the ties are closer still, their relationship recast as father-daughter, later accentuating the film’s dark sexuality with Frank Cotton's incestuous desires for Kirsty, his niece. In the novella Frank and Julia's brief affair adds up to little more than some rough sex, which hardly seems motivation enough for Julia to commit murder to supply Frank with sustenance, but in the film their encounter is given much more weight in a brilliant sequence where Julia and Frank consummate the affair intercut with Larry skewering his hand on a nail, a subtle commentary on the sado-masochistic nature of Julia and Frank’s relationship, and crucially makes Julia's obsession to restore Frank more plausible. At times the film also surpasses the novella in purely visual terms, like the sequence where Frank is resurrected from the pool of Larry’s blood. In the novella this moment is not especially memorable but in the film Barker and his special effects team conjure up an astonishing tour-de-force of surreal, gloopy splatter.

The sweet suffering... a moment of exquisite pain from Hellraiser

The film doesn’t always have its own way, at times the novella wins out with sophisticated and evocative writing. The brilliant opening sequence of the novella where Frank invokes the Cenobites is heavy with ritualism, the Cenobites described in quasi-religious terms as  "theologians of the Order of the Gash", with Frank preparing for their arrival with a display of various offerings – urine, severed dove heads, sweets and flowers (the only one of the items the Cenobites accept). Barker writes:

He had worked ceaselessly in the preceding week to prepare the room for them. The bare boards had been meticulously scrubbed and strewn with petals. Upon the west wall he had set up a kind of altar to them, decorated with the kind of placatory offerings Kircher had assured him would nurture their good offices: bones, bonbons, needles. A jug of his urine-the product of seven days' collection-stood on the left of the altar, should they require some spontaneous gesture of self-defilement. On the right, a plate of doves' heads, which Kircher had also advised him to have on hand. He had left no part of the invocation ritual unobserved. No cardinal, eager for the fisherman's shoes, could have been more diligent
 

The Cenobites are more mysterious, less stylized, perhaps less ridiculous than their filmic counterparts (although the idea for Pinhead was more or less formed even at this early stage - "Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone"). In the second appearance by the Cenobites in the novella and film, Kirsty strikes up a bargain to lead them to Frank, ("Oh yes. We know Frank") but the film unwisely diverges from the original story by adding a scene where Kirsty slips into another dimension and is pursued by a grotesque wall-hugging creature. It’s a moment that does much damage to the serious adult tone of the film, due in some part to some unconvincing animatronic effects. The climax of the film suffers a similar fate when the character of the sinister derelict (a character created for the film) reveals his true self as a winged monster – another ludicrous moment undone by some mediocre effects work. The novella’s climax by comparison is far more restrained and interestingly, the idea for the derelict can be traced back to a very peripheral character in the novella, the enigmatically titled Engineer. In the final scene of the novella the puzzle box is placed back in Kirsty’s hands:

As she turned away somebody collided with her. She yelped with surprise, but the huddled pedestrian was already hurrying away into the anxious murk that preceded morning. As the figure hovered on the outskirts of solidity, it glanced back, and its head flared in the gloom, a cone of white fire. It was the Engineer… Only then did she realize the purpose of the collision. Lemarchand's box had been passed back to her, and sat in her hand.
 

The Hellbound Heart is a grey area in the Clive Barker cannon. It's an important piece of writing - one of the author's purest works of Horror fiction, but still the novella remains one of Barker's most obscure books (it's currently out of print in the UK), paradoxically so considering the novella was the starting point for Hellraiser, Barker's signature work and a film that spawned no less than 8 sequels, inspired numerous comics, graphic novels and toy spin-offs, and introduced the world to an iconic movie monster. Whether you care or not for Hellraiser, The Hellbound Heart is highly recommended for all you seekers, sensualists and explorers in the further regions of experience.

"What's your pleasure sir?" A keeper of the puzzle box. Artwork from Clive Barker's Book of the Damned: A Hellraiser Companion (Vol. 1 1991)

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