Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week. Maybe next week. The Lars Von Trier season continues. For nostalgia freaks out there, I watched both Breaking the Waves (1996) last week and The Idiots (1998) this week on video. Yes, actual VHS tapes. Since the image quality of these films isn’t that fantastic anyway, it didn’t really make much difference.

Riget II (1997)

Also following Twin Peaks, the second season of The Kingdom doesn’t match up to the first. There’s an unwillingness to play the horror straight any longer, and the show becomes too wacky for its own good. No wonder nobody was willing to back a third series and complete the story. This also mirrors Twin Peaks, which abandoned viewers in the Black Lodge with the notorious David Lynch directed episode 22 of season 2 (which may be, incidentally, one of the finest hours of television ever made).

The Idiots (1998)
Lars Von Trier likes to operate as a director on a film with a number of self-imposed rules. (This is played out to a greater extent in a film called The Five Obstructions (2003), which I have not yet seen.) The perhaps inevitable result of this series of rules was the Dogme Manifesto in 1995, which should be easy enough to find online if you’re interested. Tartan were nice enough to reprint it in full inside my copy of the VHS. The Dogme Manifesto generated an enormous amount of publicity and actually inspired a number of filmmakers worldwide to take up the gauntlet and give it a go. The first Dogme movie was Festen (1998) and The Idiots was the second. The Manifesto appeared just as CGI was on its first big upswing in the wake of Jurassic Park (1993), and the Manifesto called for a back to basics approach to filmmaking which cast aside all trickery and artificiality. Which is ironic because of course The Idiots is a highly tricksy and artifical movie, for all its claims to a lack of artifice. The film itself is at once both clumsy and obvious and fascinating and intense. Pretending to be retarded to highlight the hypocrisy of suburban bourgeois existence seems way too much like an idiotic adolescent prank (which may be the point). Cloaking your film in documentary realism (including interviews with the cast conducted in character by the director himself) doesn’t hide the very old-fashioned feel of the subject. There’s something very 60s about the commune set up by the idiots, and something very 70s about the way it all falls apart at the end.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

I don’t think you can trust a film buff who doesn’t like musicals. There’s singing, there’s dancing, there’s the two together in endless combinations, there’s music, there’s song, it’s all good. Musicals themselves however, at least in the West (nothing can stop Bollywood), hit something of a crisis point at the end of the 1960s. Chasing the success of The Sound of Music (1965), all of the major Hollywood studios embarked on a series of costly musicals, all of which tanked at the box office. For some years, even though musical was a dirty word, this didn’t stop musicals being made, and the more interesting ones all come from a similar place. They transform into self-reflexive meta-musicals; they are musicals about the possibility or not of making a musical in the modern world; they are films like All That Jazz (1979), One from the Heart (1982) and even Chicago (2002). Dancer in the Dark fits squarely in this tradition. Not only does it have the characters preparing an amateur stage production of The Sound of Music, it has a clip from 42nd Street (1933), and all of the musical numbers are filmed with 100 video cameras (an imposed Lars Von Trier rule, though he admits in the making of that he really needed 1000). The plot is one of blatant manipulation, and I guess it’s inevitable that this manipulation was also used by Von Trier to get Björk and the rest of the cast to the places they needed to reach. This was particularly hard on Björk, who’d only acted in music videos before this film and was accustomed to being in total creative control of all that she did.

Cold Mountain (2003)

I hated The English Patient (1996). It was a film that should have made you want to run off to the desert and have a mad, passionate affair with a mysterious stranger. Instead, you couldn’t wait to get out of the cinema. I’ve always felt that Anthony Minghella works much better in the crime genre. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) fitted him perfectly, a delightful throwback to the three episodes of Inspector Morse he wrote in the 1980s. It was with some trepidation then that I went to see Cold Mountain, which is a pretty good movie (I certainly liked it enough to buy it on DVD) and in any other year it might have won more than one Oscar. But the 2004 Oscar ceremony was the year of the hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) was a better film than anything else released in 2003.

No cinema visits this week and not many DVDs either. My excuse is that the first one is five hours long. It is, of course…

Riget (1994)

Also known as The Kingdom. And also known as Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital, although as a longstanding Stephen King fan, I’ve spurned this American remake as I would spurn a rabid dog. In the wake of Europa (1991), Lars Von Triers’ self-conscious attempt to create a masterpiece, he decided instead to work on a supernatural TV series set in a soap opera style hospital and abandon excessive technique. Out went storyboards, back projection and actors as robots and in came hand held cameras, rapid fire jump cut editing and actors given the space to deliver actual performances. What to say about all of this is that the “realistic” aesthetic that results is as much of a construction as that which had been achieved with all the pre-planning. But the end result is the real thing: a crazy story that swerves sharply between seriously creepy horror and totally zany grossout comedy. Each helps to ground the other instead of cancelling each other out. What makes the comedy work is that the horror is played absolutely straight, and what makes the horror work is that the comedy teeters right on the edge of tastelessness and then goes gleefully over it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl, indeed.

Breaking the Waves (1996)

In which Lars Von Trier becomes the great filmmaker he was always intent on talking himself up to be. This is an astonishing achievement, and it has lost none of its power 11 years later. Utililising the same hand held jump cut madness that informed Riget (1994) (though hinting at self-consciousness with a series of chapter break interludes set to 70s rock classics), Von Trier captures an emotional reality from his performers that is almost too painful to bear. There is a sense that as an audience we are intruding on private moments in private lives that were never meant to have been filmed and never should have been. And yet there they are. How must it feel to be Emily Watson, 28 years old, in your first film, knowing that you will perhaps never find a role as unique as this in the rest of your acting career? How must it feel to be Lars Von Trier, to find that you’ve achieved by learning to direct actors what you could never have achieved by focusing on storyboards, camera technique and lighting an entire film with sodium vapour lamps intended to light Scottish motorways? Von Trier finds his centre as a filmmaker, Emily Watson is nominated for an Oscar, and the future looks very bright indeed. Breaking the Waves is one of the most extraordinary films ever made, a breathtaking, inadvertent masterpiece of the highest order. If you haven’t seen it, put it at #1 on your 1001 films to watch before you die list. You don’t want to miss this one.

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

Hostel Part II (2007) *

Nerds with too much time on their hands really seem to have it in for Eli Roth, a mouthy American with a gift for self-promotion and actual filmmaking talent. For my part, it’s about damn time someone a) expressed a desire to make proper R-rated horror movies with nudity and gore and b) showed that he knew how to do it. Although I’ve previously ranted about horror sequels here, at least this one has been made by someone who shares some of my views, oddly enough. Part II presents more of what was good about the original Hostel (2005) in triple portions with all the trimmings. Roth is aware enough of the genre and the extent to which women have been abused in it to play some extremely sly games with audience expectation. The first death is so baroque it no longer exists in reality, the second death happens off-camera, and Roth uses the tried and tested “Final Girl” formula in a new and disturbing way, informing his audience of pasty male youths that they should watch what words they use around women, since some of them may not take it very well.

Die Hard 4.0 (2007) *

One can only assume that Live Free or Die Hard, the onscreen American title, has been borrowed by something else at this time. Kim Newman, in the latest issue of Sight & Sound, has, rather unsportingly, pointed out all of the things that are wrong with this film, and he is entirely correct about all of them. However, as long as things exploded and Bruce Willis hit people, I had no complaints. The McClane/fighter jet interface was absurd, but no more absurd than anything in Die Hard 2 (1990).

Die Hard (1988)

I needed me some more McClane, so I dialled up the original for some legendary hijinks. Die Hard just gets better every time I watch it. Away from its original reception in 1988, it becomes apparent just how supremely well crafted it is, how perfectly cast, how flambuoyantly filmed, how incisively edited, and how brilliantly directed. I’ve gone on here before about how great John McTiernan is as an action director, but one example will suffice. When McClane makes it up to the roof to radio for help (”terrorists” have taken over a building), the leader sends three of his minions to get him. McTiernan films this on a real roof with a camera laid on a track that swings through 180º to show very clearly how two of the terrorists are driving McClane into a trap where the third one is waiting. McTiernan does all this in one dynamic shot, an object lesson in proper action filmmaking that today’s over-edited, all-CGI bad boys could do with learning.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

One wasn’t enough so I checked out the third film as well, to which Samuel A Jackson brings his A-game. It lacks the claustrophobia of the first film, unsurprisingly, and ups the ante on the threat level, as does Die Hard 4.0 (2007). One thing: for some reason unknown to me (namely that they’re a bunch of bastards), Buena Vista Home Entertainment, or Disney, insisted this film be released in the UK in 1995 with a 15 certificate, and to meet this, the film was cut by themselves in consultation with the BBFC. And you would think, 12 years down the line and several Die Hard box sets later, that this would have been reversed at some stage, and the proper uncut 18 certificate version of the film would have been released in the UK. But this hasn’t happened. Obviously, I own the uncut Region 1 version of this film.

The Element of Crime (1984)

Naturally enough after all of those explosions, I longed for a little more meat, and I may have got it if I’d been able to see what was going on. Amusingly, on one of the commentaries, there’s some joshing about this along the lines of didn’t anyone on the set know how to read a light meter? This was Lars Von Trier’s first film, made when he was only a couple of years out of film school, where the courses seemed to have consisted of Blade Runner (1982), the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and a lot of other arthouse films of the 1980s. Von Trier has the glacial pace of late 70s/early 80s art films down pat, and he shrouds the onscreen musings in an extremely penumbral gloom cast by shooting everything with sodium vapor lighting as used in Scotland to light motorways. I am not making this up.

Epidemic (1987)

Made as a bet for one million Danish kroner (which is a lot less than it sounds), Von Trier’s second film chronicles both the scriptwriting phase of the film itself in grainy monochrome 16mm and includes brief snippets from the film that’s being written in nicer 35mm black and white. The conceit of the film is that Von Trier and Niels Vørsel write the plague of their film into existence in reality through the act of writing itself. It’s a lot less interesting than it sounds, though one amusing passage, thrown in because it seemed like a good idea at the time, tells of Vørsel’s attempts to write a novel about Atlantic City by getting female teenage penpals who lived there to write to him about it.

Europa (1991)

At least this resembles a proper film with actors, a script and cinematography where you can see what’s going on. Von Trier, however, is still in his art film, self-indulgent phase, so the backgrounds have been filmed first, and the actors are filmed separately later in an overcomplicated mix of rear and front projection, all intended to conform to the 800 shots of the storyboard. Although Von Trier claimed this was intended as a masterpiece (he says things like this, primarily, I think, to annoy people), he himself realised that the superabundance of filmmaking technique was a dead end, and he threw it all away when he moved onto The Kingdom (1994), where nothing looked beautiful, the performances of the actors move to the fore, and Von Trier starts himself on the road to the breakthrough international success of Breaking the Waves (1996).