Herostratus (1967)

The main reason I came to watch 'Herostratus', other than liking the title and cover, is that it came out in the BFI Flipside series of DVD/Blu-ray dual format releases.  It's a run of obscure, interesting British films from the archives, forgotten marvels given a chance to shine again.  'The Bed-Sitting Room' (1969), which I very much enjoyed, was one such release, and on the basis of it and BFI's release of 'Winstanley' (1975), I find the line very encouraging.

Then, of course, there's the film's basic idea.  In short, a young man goes to an advertising agency to get maximum publicity for his act of suicide.  It's an unpleasantly interesting concept, grim, but ripe for satire and social commentary.  I'd say the film grapples with both of these, but fares less well as a drama or comedy.

So, we follow Max, the main character, as he approaches the advertising man Farson, a very sixties businessman who comes across like a Number 2 from the same year's psychedelic stand-out 'The Prisoner'.  Farson puts Max up in luxury and sets about publicising a sellably bland version of him to win public support.  The film then intercuts Max's reclusive days in a comfortable black void with archive footage of Ginsberg, Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler, and juxtaposes sexy dancing with swirling offal, while making ironic comparisons between Max's herostratic desire for suicide and the conspicuous death of Jesus.

It feels like an investigation of ideas, rather than a narrative- or character-led piece.  A discussion, and quite a long one, at two-hours and forty minutes.  At times I wished the film would hurry itself along.  Perhaps I'm too impatient to really engage with this kind of art, or perhaps the film was making its point more slowly than necessary.  I'm inclined toward the latter, as the release also features director Don Levy's 'Time Is' (1964), which wants to wow its audience with the suggestion that time, as we understand it, is a human construct, a point that it makes quite effectively in the first five minutes, but persists with for another 25 - perhaps appropriate, given the content.

'Herostratus' has a chilling lack of glossiness, making it resemble Eastern and European films more than the American sort that I've come to think of as cinema's default.  The blood red and golden lighting, and the frequent cuts away to black, made me think of the then-recent Ukrainian movie 'Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors' (1964).  (I feel pretentious comparing this art-film you probably haven't heard of to another art-film you probably haven't heard of; I'm only aware of them because I'm doing this film-based blog, and have deliberately sought out some obscure items in the hope of finding treasure.  Somehow it feels like it would be more acceptable if I was doing this with novels, because everybody knows books have an inherent cultural value).

I didn't find a lot of pleasure in 'Herostratus'.  It interested me, but stretched that interest very thin, and I found myself wondering whether I have too much love for the easy comforts of commercial cinema to really get on with art films.  Or maybe I just didn't like this one.  Never mind.


P.S. Herostratus, if you're curious, was an ancient Ephesian who set fire to the Temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the World) purely because he wanted to be famous for something.  It worked, and his name lives in infamy, as 'herostratic fame' today means fame at any cost, even fame for atrocities.  Anything to make one's name linger in the public mind.

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2013 Dies!

Well, that was the year of The Penciltonian.  What an exciting time!  What a world of adventures!  What!  Why?

I had hoped never to watch another film again, but the bright lights and colours have drawn me back.  Since the official end of the project and the blog, I've found myself compelled to watch the following motion pictures, which I report here in order to wrap up the year:

Iron Sky (2012)

This is actually a far more appropriate end to The Penciltonian than whatever the actual end was: an exciting Finnish/German/Australian/kinda-American film, riffing on a lot of the German movies I've been watching (even 1943's 'Münchausen', which I'd thought pretty obscure) and slathered in modern-style Wagner.  An action comedy about space-Nazis, an enjoyable and necessarily broad satire, which didn't end as I expected.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

On St Christmas Eve's Day, I actually saw a movie on the BIG SCREEN, something I had failed to achieve through the body of the year.  It's an excellent telling of the story, and is pretty close to being a perfect film.  Attractive, exciting, amusing and moving, and the muppets work surprisingly well alongside human actors, without seeming unduly ridiculous.  I'm sure I had more to say about it, but Christmas.

Witchfinder General (1968)

What a jerk!  I've always liked the Puritan style, and have seen photos from the film and admired Matthew Hopkins' hat and fine array, but he was a horrid fellow.  This film sits neatly alongside 'Häxan' (1922) and 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) as a tale of misidentified witches being beaten up by unchristian Christians - and it joins my beloved 'Winstanley' in being an inspiration for 2013's surprise hit 'A Field in England'.  This is a film of really horrible, hard-to-watch violence (which seems entirely appropriate, given the subject matter), and Pertwee-era-style crash zooms (which seem less appropriate).  Vincent Price IS the Witchfinder General.

War and Peace (1956)

I watched the first hour of this, but became immensely irritated.  It wasn't terrible, but it was slow and unexciting, and I'm no longer obliged to watch slow, unexciting films.  I have the liberty to escape such things.  I also grew aware that the film was not at all the best way to take this particular story.  As much as a massive, massive book is daunting, a film that boils a massive, massive story down to a few hours and makes it feel like any other romance, is a less appealing and less helpful prospect.

A borrowed and wearying cat on me, and upon you all.

So, what does 2014 bring?  I tried to make a list of my predictions, but the list started out frighteningly bleak and full of catastrophe (which celebrities will die, this year?), before becoming a sequence of portents of doom and stars of ill-omen, so I stopped making the list and wondered whatever was wrong with me.  2014 will be very lovely.  Amen.

Persepolis (2007)

Of the animated films I've so far watched - 'Yellow Submarine' (1968), 'Up' (2009) and this, 'Persepolis' is comfortably my favourite in animation style and in content too.  This is an adaptation of Majane Satrapi's graphic novel, and co-director Vincent Paronnaud borrows her occasionally Hergé-esque 'ligne claire' style and puts it in motion.  Most of the film is told in monochrome flashback.  The individual shots are clear, handsome and often striking.

I understand the original book was at least semi-autobiographical.  It's a story of young Marji growing up in Iran of the 70s and 80s, a country torn by war and revolution.  The children don't take it especially seriously, accepting only that people get arrested, soldiers march around with guns, and it's a fine time to lark around.

Things get grimmer as she grows older.  People die, or are imprisoned, and nobody can openly speak the truth.  It's still not a bad place to have a party, but it can end badly.  The revolution makes matters worse, not better, and the new government obliges women to wear veils.  A lonely education in Europe seems the only escape.  She grows up, endures a number of unenjoyable romances, and is left without any clear idea where she can call home.

It's sad, and difficult, and often great fun, so feels very much like real life.  The animation style is excellent, fascinatingly watchable, giving a stylised, childlike view of the world.  It's a very good film, and I found it to be quite an education.  'Persepolis' gives a picture of an interesting country of real, ambitious people, marred, oppressed and set back by a theocratic government of extremely conservative Islamic fundamentalists.  I've realised my knowledge of modern Iran is terribly limited, and though I used to work for an Iranian woman, I never really asked about the country she seemed glad to leave behind.

I'd be curious to seek out the original comic from which the film was adapted, and Marjane Satrapi's other writings, to learn more.  Since she co-directed the film, I can well believe it captures the spirit of the original.  I'd recommend it to almost anyone, though some of the language is sufficiently strong, and the themes mature, that I'd err away from showing it to a weakly child.  And since it's animated, you have the choice to watch it with either French or English audio.  Both seem equally legitimate, and I only went with the French because so much was actually set in France.

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I'd say it was worth your time.  Someone's borrowing my copy at present, or I'd lend it to y'all myself.

Miś (1980)

A cat, dressed as a rabbit

I was urged to watch 'Miś', and informed only that it was a Polish comedy, and a cult film.  I've been keen to see some Polish comedy, as everything I've seen from that nation has made it out to be entirely miserable and wretched, and I thought something with a lower body-count than 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1977) or 'Dekalog' (1989) would give me a brighter perspective.  That it was a cult film, I found marginally less encouraging, as that occasionally means it's a treat, but sometimes denotes something nobody could like accidentally.

I'm reluctant to use the English language title, 'Teddy Bear', as I can't believe it's a very accurate translation.  The giant straw animal, which has no effect on characters or plot, may be a bear but resembles no teddy I've ever seen, and I suspect it hails from a different tradition entirely.  The movie regards a man called Ryszard racing his ex-wife Irena to Britain and withdraw a small fortune the pair lodged in an English bank.  At the start she damages his passport, making swift passage through the iron curtain almost impossible, and the body of the film shows his elaborate but almost feasible plan to get to Britain, a scheme which requires him to find his exact double, and cause that double to lose his hair.

Distressingly, the subtitles were all in yellow comic sans.

The film was interesting, rather than enjoyable, which isn't ideal for a comedy .  Actually, I'm afraid it's interesting, rather than interesting, as it didn't keep my attention as well as I'd hoped.  Since amazon reviewer Richard J. Brzostek describes it as 'a hilarious comedy', I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, though, as it's possible I just don't get it; it's a satire on a political situation of which I'm almost entirely ignorant.  There are several scenes either presenting ridiculous exaggerations of aspects of life in communist Poland, or else giving a rye, unexaggerated look at exactly what happened in those days - and I couldn't tell which of these was being presented.

Either way, this is a Poland of austerity, cunning, and government excess, the latter to present a propagandist suggestion of prosperity, hence the giant toy bear.  In this picture of Poland, meat is so hard to come by that people have to go to the theatre to see a joint, and restaurants chain their cutlery to the table, but in such a way that only one person can use a spoon at once, as when one person pulls to make the chain longer, their partner's chain gets shorter.  I've been told this latter point was a real feature in some Polish cafes, but I'm not sure I believe it.

A teddy-bear?

The film does one thing that I like very much: I've long enjoyed foreign films' portrayals of Britain, which offer a surprisingly rare chance to see what stereotypes the world has of us.  Here, the British seem very calm and placid, in stark contrast to the manic Ryszard; bank clerks in London are prone to going on strike, but do so very politely and very meticulously, sitting quietly in their booths until the exact second their strike is due to end, before carrying on with their business.  Also, the British speak English, but with Polish accents.  For anyone else curious to see British stereotypes in European films, I'd recommend 'Laissez-Passer' (2002), a fine French movie set in the film industry of occupied Paris in the 40s, which surprised me with a sudden trip to England and a trio of petulant interrogators who won't stop making unwanted tea.  Ah, but now I'm talking about the wrong film, so shall stop here.


P.S. Wikipedia claims this film was out in 1980, but IMDB says 1981.  I've gone with the earlier date, as it suits my purposes.  I have two pretty exciting possibilities for 1981, but my backup for 1980 is famously awful.

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This isn't the version of the DVD I saw, so the quality, not least of the subtitles, may be higher

The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

Everybody smoked constantly in the 60s.

On this occasion it's Ulrike Meinhof

This film regards historical events of which I was wholly ignorant, but which would be far more familiar had I ever lived in Germany.  There's certainly enough here to make sense of it all to an outsider, though I was rather caught off-guard to find so overwhelmingly sympathetic a presentation of this violent terrorist group.  If I was simply given the resumé of the RAF (the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang) I might have counted them as plain villains, but this film gets into why they did what they did, and makes an extremely compelling case.

In short, Germany in the late sixties was a troublesome place, with its politicians supporting dubious American wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, and their police extremely violent in their dealings with peaceful protestors (a suggestion corroborated by 1992's 'Die Zweite Heimat').  People who where children during the Nazi government and World War II can see their parents' generation once more equipping the boots of oppression, a resurgence of those old terrors.  When it becomes clear that peaceful protests won't change the minds of the country's leaders - a realisation that eventually reaches everybody who's been on a protest march - people start to take up different forms of protest.  Bombs are harder to ignore.

Andreas Baader lights up a cigar at his trial

Since peaceful protest and violent action seem to be met with the same police response, the latter begins to look the more credible.  Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu, whom you may have seen in 1998's 'Run, Lola, Run') is firmly entrenched in the life of a pretty damn cool violent criminal (and hot-tempered jerk, to boot) when the film starts, but Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) is a journalist, a pacifist, a writer who uses words rather than actions, at least until Baader's circle condemn her for this, and give her a chance to be of more practical use.

Hers is the most fascinating role, and the most exciting performance, and I shall happily add Gedeck to my list of German actors for whose sake I actively seek out other films.  As to Meinhof, I place a lot of faith in the ability of a free press, online as much as on paper, to change minds and change society for the better; I can see, though, how somebody in Ulrike Meinhof's position could eventually resolve that words alone weren't changing society, that a gun would be louder.

For a good third or half of the film, the gang's actions, while increasingly extreme, with creeping body-counts, are presented as, if not a benign solution, at least a reasonable one.  I can't quite think how it worked now, as it seemed a logical progression while I was watching, and over the following week, but seems absurd and frightening now that I think back on it, a month later.  For instance, it's almost unthinkable that anyone would make a British film sympathetic to the bombing campaign of the Irish Republican Army, a violent order closer to home.  But, so far as I'm aware, the IRA's work was more about revenge, about who you were related to and how you were brought up, while the RAF's attacks were much more a response to the international political situation.

Police brutality

Bruno Ganz (oh, you know, Adolf Hitler) plays Horst Herold, a notable historical figure who doesn't even get a page on English-language Wikipedia.  Herold was in charge of the German anti-terrorist squad, and despite being innovative and capable, the nation's worst terrorist activities happened on his watch.  What Herold is keen to stress, at least in this film, is that there's no point in trying to track down and stop established terrorists without enquiring into their motives; more than once he out and says that the RAF have some justification, and that what must change is the activities of politicians - that American wars in the East are the reason for violent unrest at home, and that this problem won't go away.

It's surely a deliberate piece of casting, to see the man now so famous for playing the Führer in 'Downfall' (2004) voicing such controversial, relevant and liberal sentiments.  It's certainly a message worth listening to.  I still feel I've no idea why the 9/11 or 7/7 attacks occurred, since the way they were reported focused on inherent foreign villany, or religiously-motivated insanity, rather than enquiring into what the terrorists were so angry about, and how these desperate measures were reached.

Ulrike again, at the trial

The second half of the film regards the trials of the gang's surviving members, Baader and Meinhof chief among them.  The trial is presided over by judges unwilling to listen to or engage with the defendants, and it's uncomfortably reminiscent of the trial at the core of 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928).  Both films were able to work directly from court transcripts, and both seem grotesque travesties.  In each, the authorities are angry, rather than just, and the defendants are sure from the start to suffer at length, and to die, but not be forgotten.  What St. Joan lacked, which the RAF unfortunately did not, is a second and third generation of increasingly extreme and murderous terrorists in the outside world, inspired by their acts but entirely outside their control.  Actually, thinking about it, Joan may have had something like that too, but it's more of an issue here than in her film.

What came back to me several times in the week after watching this film was how the country rallied to the RAF's support.  When the police and the anti-terrorist department step up their search for the Baader-Meinhof gang, our heroes are forced to go under-cover, and though they already have a reputation for robbing banks (sort of hooray), blowing up office buildings and shooting policemen (markedly less hooray), a sizeable minority of the German public, when asked, proffer support for the gang, many saying they would shelter gang members from the authorities.  This wasn't just a violent gang threatening the nation, they were standing up for the people and against a malign state, and the people were glad of this.  It's certainly a more inspiring, more intelligent Crowd than we get in 'M' (1931) or 'Julius Caesar' (1950).  What I have since been asking myself: would I shelter gang-members, if they stood up in this way to authorities so cruel and wilfully ignorant of their electorate's needs, a state that needed to be stopped?  Maybe.  I'd like to think so, even.  Would I end up making bombs for them?  I hope not, as I'm terribly clumsy.


P.S. Oh, it's a good film, by the way.  A strong script, direction, hurdy-gurdy, hurdy-gurdy.  As happens on occasion, I seem to have found myself talking about the message and the ideas, and not about the film under consideration.  That probably means the film works very well indeed.

P.P.S. With 'Die Baader-Meinhof Komplex', 'Das Testament Des Dr Mabuse' (1933) and 'Die Nibelungen' (1924), I've achieved a pointless mini-goal of mine, to see films starting with the masculine, feminine and neuter German words for 'the'.  A complex, it seems, is masculine, a Testament is neutral, and a Nibelungen?  Well, actually that's plural in this case, so I haven't strictly speaking achieved what I sought, even if I did get a Die, Das and Der.  Thankfully homelands are feminine, at least in language, and 'Die Andere Heimat' (2013) is in cinemas this October, at least in Germany, and I'm very keen indeed to see it.

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This is a film worth watching.  It is, as you may expect, violent in a number of ways, though not gratuitously so - but if you think that may be a problem for you, steer clear of it.  Otherwise, give it your full attention.

Winstanley (1975)

It so happens that I like the message and the style of the occupy movement, whose camps could be found in most every city in late 2011, most conspicuously in New York, allowing the city to finally cast off the gloom of 9-11 and be about something new and more positive.  They were a visible sign of the people's dissatisfaction with the growing gap between the rich and the poor - heck, between the uber-rich and everybody else.  They made novel use of public space to oppose corporate personhood, made myriad inequalities harder to ignore, and put a public face, indeed many public faces, to those angered by certain unpunished or unpunishable villainies committed by banks, managers and ostensible 'wealth creators'.

They still do these things, though the camps are gone.  They're considered less newsworthy, but haven't gone away.  In their prime, I did what I could to furnish the movement with both moral and material support, here and in the States, and I'm trying to keep an eye on their continuing operations.  This 1975 film regards the Cromwell-era occupy movement, the Levellers, or the Diggers as they became known, led by the charismatic Gerrard Winstanley.  It's a true story, by the way.

Gerrard Winstanley burns a court summons

Just to give a very brief bit of historical context: this is shortly after Henry VIII, Queens Mary and Elizabeth, William Shakespeare, Kings James (of the Bible translation) and Charles I (of the decapitation).  The Civil War has just happened, and Oliver Cromwell is on the throne, sort of.  Despite this new age of kingless Puritanism, society hasn't really been levelled at all.  There's still a despot at the top of a hierarchy of lords, with the poor no better off than before the revolution.  (When Cromwell dies, some decades after the events of this film, Britain, rather embarrassingly, asks to have its monarchs back, and it's as if nothing has changed, but that's another century for another movie - probably with a lot of wigs in it).

So anyway, it's 1649, and Gerrard Winstanley has published a manifesto, 'The New Law of Righteousness', and has set up a camp, a commune of sorts, on common lands.  The lands sort-of belong to everybody (hence 'common'), but actually belong to Sir Francis Drake (who isn't that Sir Francis Drake, before you ask).  As we see, Drake doesn't like the idea of social levelling because (so he says) if there are no poor people, then he won't be able to keep to the Biblical precept of charity.  And while the lands are meant for common grazing of animals, the Diggers, led by Winstanley, are digging to grow their crops, and have built huts.  And this sort of thing is just not on.

Gerrard Winstanley again, because I like his face.

Winstanley's vision is simple and sensible: there's enough land in Britain for everybody to have some, so by farming the common land, nobody need go hungry; everybody just needs a little bit of land, and there's enough to go round.  This was apparently still true by the 70s, and unless the population is very much higher today, may still hold.  'Unemployment' as we think of it now didn't exist back then, and all you needed was a bit of space to plant barley, cut down some trees and build a hut and you had all the food and shelter you needed, like Minecraft or 'The Good Life'.  Despite this commendable aim, however, the camp is in terminal decline almost as soon as we see it.  Disgruntled locals, incited by a local parson, keep destroying the crops, meaning the camp cannot prosper.

I find there to be something compellingly watchable about the face of Gerrard Winstanley, at least as he's played here by Miles Halliwell.  He exudes a goodness, a niceness that I don't think I've quite seen anywhere else, and, though this is not a cheery film, every time the hope-filled Winstanley appears on screen everything seems brighter and better.  Though it all ends badly, I think I could probably pull myself out of a glum mood by watching this film for this performance.  Halliwell, like most of the cast, is not a professional actor.  His only other screen credit is for 'It Happened Here' (1964), by the same writer/director, in which he played a Nazi apologist teacher.  It's a pity he never got to play Jesus, as he would have been the best.

General Fairfax drops in.  Men ought still to style themselves so.

The only professional actor in the film is Jerome Willis as General Fairfax.  If you know your Pertwee Doctor Who, you'll recognise Willis from 'The Green Death' (1973) in which he played the manager of Global Chemicals.  His performance here as Fairfax is quite different, and the sight of him with the sharp beard and magnificent hair of the 17th century upper crust is an image to treasure.  Fairfax is an interesting character (and, I suppose, was an interesting person).  He's the highest authority seen in the film, and seems both wise and intelligent, not joining with the general condemnation of the camp, but listening open-minded to everything Winstanley has to say.  He comes across as gracious, like a good headmaster who has a genuine knowledge of all his pupils, an understanding of their motives and a love of fairness.

While there are no real villains here, as everybody seems to have a fairly reasonable motivation for their actions, David Bramley's Parson Platt is fairly close to the stereotype we hold of the puritans: the dearth of humour, the sexual jealousy and repression, the gaunt face of a sad panda; Gerrard Winstanley is far closer to the actual Puritan ideal, that of keeping God at the centre of every action and motivation, of breaking down clericalism, sacerdotalism and human hierarchy and making a beautiful and simple society in which to live and worship.  Platt, if understandable, is a horrible jerk.  The Christianity Winstanley espouses and practices is very appealing, honest, humble and gladdening.  The impression is very much that his society would have worked if those frightened by such proto-communism hadn't repeatedly taken to violence to suppress it.  Winstanley's Diggers movement collapsed, in the end, but was resurrected in the 1960s.  Noted '60s and '70s protestor and digger Sid Rawle appears in this film as a ranter, who joins Winstanley's camp mainly to mess around, burn Bibles and harass women.  Just as the story is tilting toward its bleak conclusion, Rawle's character takes his clothes off and runs around naked making a hulaballoo, and gives the characters a good laugh, at last.

An old woman laughs at a penis.

What is often said about the film, and rightly, is that it feels like it was really shot at the time it was set.  There's a documentary realism to it, and there's nothing here to tell you this is a mid-seventies production.  While a lot of Winstanley's dialogue is lifted from his writings, much of the dialogue and action has the spontaneous feel of improvisation.  Sights are seen that I expect far more from real life than from the movies: time is taken while trees are cut down and huts constructed, and when one of the men is trying to construct the side of a building a friend of his bothers him by repeatedly touching him on the head with a long piece of grass.  When it rains heavily, we have a lingering shot of one of the Diggers with a damp bogey dangling from his nose.  In the early and brief sequence of a Civil War battle, the directors borrowed real Civil War armour from the royal armouries, as it was cheaper and more convincing than making it new.  It feels very genuine, under all that fine word's meanings, and it's a real pity that there aren't more films with the feel of 'Winstanley'.

I really like this film, and having seen it a couple of times and read a little further, really like Gerrard Winstanley too, so am failing (as I may when I come to write up 1959's 'Ben-Hur' at Easter) to restrain my enthusiasms.  I suspect I've gone on for more paragraphs than I ought, and shall stop here so as not to try your patience any further, dear reader.

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Available on DVD, or as one of the rather fine BFI flipside releases which contain both a DVD and a blu-ray disc, and so are ideal if you want to watch these fine pictures in the highest quality while retaining the ability to put a DVD version in your computer to extract screen-captures.

Julius Caesar (1950)

Beware the Ides of March!

First things first.  This isn't the famous 1950s Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando - that was 3 years later.  This is a more obscure version with a very much lower budget, and a much more experimental directorial style.  And, of course, a 26-year-old Charlton Heston wearing what I can only reasonably describe as a pant, making his second movie appearance (his first being a silent version of 'Peer Gynt' for the same director in 1941).

Julius Caesar is my favorite Shakespeare play, and this version is probably my favourite Shakespeare film.  Quite a bit has been trimmed out, which I'd speculate was as much out of budgetary necessity as artistic desire, but I don't think the film is in any way damaged by the reduced number of lines.  I did, one year, take the Ides off work to watch three Julius Caesars in a row: this one (at 106 minutes), the 1970 version (116 minutes) which casts Charlton Heston as Marc Antony again, and the BBC Shakespeare version from 1979, with Charles Gray as Caesar, which runs longest at 150 minutes.  Watching them in that order, I got to see much of the play thrice, which is always a good way to watch Shakespeare, and got to discover new lines and scenes in each version.

Cassius Speaks

David Bradley (who, being an American, isn't the same David Bradley today famous for playing Argus Filch) directs, and takes for himself the plum role of Brutus.  He's good as an actor, but far more interesting as a director (and now, alas, better known for directing 1968 TV Movie 'They Saved Hitler's Brain').  The film never tries to be naturalistic, and so relishes in the merits of Shakespeare's text, rather than trying to pass off this ancient work of grand oratory as something casual or comfortable.  As the above screenshot may suggest, shots are often very dynamic, dramatic moments underlined quite blatantly by editing as well as performance.

To a modern viewer it might lack subtlety, but it seems wholly appropriate both for the starkness of the film stock, and for the play as written, with its swanky oratory and quotable speeches (often delivered as speeches, since there's a crowd to be persuaded).  I'd go so far as to say that this would be a very good version to watch if you're starting to study the play, since the themes, symmetries and rhetorical devices are so clearly highlighted as to be plain and evident to anyone lending the film their attention.  Sadly, the only version of the film I've been able to get my hands on looks, for want of a better word, 'crappy', and I suspect it passed onto domestic VHS somewhere between the original 16mm film and the eventual DVD, so giving it your full attention isn't as easy as it might be.

Julius Caesar and Marc Antony.

This is while Caesar's still alive, by the way.

So, what's it actually about?  I don't mean to assume that everybody knows all Shakespeare; off hand, I could only talk with any competence about five of the tragedies, three of the comedies and zero of Shakespeare's histories.  Despite its setting, Julius Caesar is counted as a tragedy rather than a history, since, though it's set in the past and regards real events, the core is about a good and sympathetic man who builds the road to his own destruction.  Who is that man, on this occasion?  Whose is the tragedy?  Studying this at school I assumed it was the tragedy of Julius Caesar, since (spoilers!) he gets stabbed to death by a gang of uppity senators, and that thereafter the role of hero passed from Caesar to Marc Antony.  This is sort-of right, but mainly wrong, as I've eventually learnt.  For one thing, it's far more morally interesting than that (and, given my suggestion that this film version lacks subtlety, I feel I should point out that Bradley makes a very good job of this moral complexity, even if he does make his Cassius unambiguously evil).  This is, in fact, a tragedy about Brutus.

'Oh,' I hear you cry, 'but Brutus is a murderer'.  Actually, I'll credit you with more intelligence than this, and it's my 12-year-old self I'm here addressing.  Yes, Brutus is one of the senators who stab Julius Caesar so - indeed, he's a close friend of Caesar, so his betrayal is worse than that of his peers.  The others act as much for personal advantage as for the love of Rome.  To oversimplify, Caesar is president but wants to be king, which will deprive the senators of power.  Brutus loves Rome, and can see the merits of his nation on the cusp of destruction, as Caesar edges towards both a crown and a claim of divinity, turning the mighty democracy into a theocratic despotism.  He alone can justify the assassination with sincere words: 'This is my answer: it's not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more'.

Cunning angles disguise a low number of extras in an excellent battle scene.

Marc Antony's excellent rabble-rousing speech (you know, 'friends, romans, countrymen', etc.), delivered with all the ingenuity and power of a tabloid newspaper, makes Brutus seem villainous indeed.  And, of course, the crowd goes wild.  You know, killing-people wild.  Just as in 'M' (1931), when the mob run rampant, inflamed by paranoia and ready to assume any innocent is the kindermörder, or as in the hopefully apocryphal modern tale of a crowd smashing up the home of a pediatrician because they think the word means pedophile, so here the people of Rome bring fire and fury, 'a sudden flood of mutiny'.  In a favourite scene of mine (marred, in this film, by an attempt at innovation which sees the action inelegantly superimposed on a border of burning buildings, a gang of plebians stab a poet to death because he happens to have the same name as one of the conspirators, Cinna.  And who'd have thought the young man had so much blood in him?

Anyway, one thing leads to another, and it turns into a war, the senators forced to take up arms against Marc Antony and the angry people of Rome.  At this point, it all becomes rather more political than personal, and the film chooses to accelerate toward the end with only an enthusiastically edited sequence of stabbing, dying and horseing.  It's an interesting war, from a historical point of view, as (for one thing) a young fellow called Herod so impressed the senators, for whom he was fighting, that they later made him the king of Judea (with, as they say, hilarious consequences), but that's so much another story that it's nothing to do with the play, still less the film, and I'll set aside my interest in minus-first-century history for another blog.  Brutus sees which way things are going, and does a king Saul, impaling himself on a sword.  Marc Antony later finds the body and finally gets it, after five acts of various people being hailed for nobility they lacked or condemned for an apparent dearth of the stuff.  'This was the noblest Roman of them all'.  The play doesn't quite end here, but the film does.  Charlton Heston. silhouettes, sad horn music, end titles.

This was the noblest Roman of them all:

All the conspirators save only he

Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;

He only, in a general honest thought

And common good to all, made one of them.

His life was gentle, and the elements

So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world 'This was a man!'

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On this DVD set, in a quality that is mediocre yet sufficient, one may find this 'Julius Caesar' and Bradley and Heston's other notable collaboration, a silent 'Peer Gynt' from 1941.  There are also a number of episodes of 'Studio One', a series which cut classic novels and plays down to 52 minutes and shot them as-live on video with a multi-camera set-up.  It's a bit strange, being so used to America's glossy TV output, to see some that wasn't shot on film with a single-camera, but there's plenty to enjoy in these very concise productions of 'The Taming of the Shrew', 'Wuthering Heights', 'Jane Eyre', and my favourite 'A Bolt of Lightning', in which he plays James Otis, who said "no taxation without representation," and threw the Boston Tea Party.  It's out of print at present, but if it comes back and you share my strange fascination with the acting style of Charlton Heston, you may like to give it a go.

King Ralph (1991)

So here's the idea: the entire British royal family is wiped out in a tragic, if mercifully quick, photography accident - and after some searching the sole surviving heir is found.  The problem is, he's common.  What, after all, could be more common, more unlike the staid English gentry, than a stout American who knows how to rock and roll?

I watched this recently as an antidote to 'The Birth of a Nation' (1915).  I knew I needed something fun and free, and 'King Ralph' serves that purpose very well.

'Spotted Dick?!'

Ralph, played with suitably gusto by John Goodman, has no idea he's in line for the British throne.  His leads a more-or-less contented life playing raucous piano in a Vegas bar, but finds the prospect of palaces and a kingdom of his own to be a tempting alternative.  Peter O'Toole takes it upon himself to train Ralph in the ways of etiquette, but it soon becomes apparent that Ralph is ill-suited to the post.  He's a good man, kind, gregarious and amusing, but considerably too outgoing to be the king that tradition demands.  What initially seems to Ralph like a life of luxury is soon too restrictive.  He wants to bowl, to go out for a burger, but he's too famous and too important to pass incognito, and is constantly called on for tedious but politically necessary duties.

He slips out one night and falls in love with a nice stripper by the name of Miranda, played by the ever-lovely Camille Coduri (oh, you know, she was Rose's mum in Doctor Who), a romance deemed inappropriate and eventually used against him by the villainous Lord Graves (boo!  hiss!), who wants the throne for himself.

Miranda, confronted by Lord Graves

It's a rather bitty film, at least to begin with, as each fresh clash between Ralph's character and his office plays out as a sketch of sorts, this first half-hour sequence running too slowly to be a montage, but with too little direction or development to feel like part of a story  The scenes themselves are amply enjoyable (I particularly like Ralph's education on British foodstuffs, and alarm at the prospect of 'spotted dick'), but it feels rather as if a list of ideas was drawn up, and the audience was then presented with an illustrated version of that list, rather than a story with any flow or grace to it.

Things settle down in the second half, once all the ingredients are in place.  We want to see Ralph prosper, to prove that he can indeed rise to the challenge of monarchy, but we also want to see him happy, and the romance between him and Miranda blossom, and there's no way that all of these things can come to pass.  Despite my complaints about the choppy first part of the film, it soon settles into something more satisfying.  It's undemanding but charming, with a few good laughs and roles for most of Britain's upper crust of posh-seeming actors.  Pleasingly, it comes to the same conclusions about the British monarch as 'The Queen' (2006), while being in no other way similar to that fine film.

Ralph takes the king of Zambezi down the pub.

The only other complaint I'll level at 'King Ralph' pertains to Miranda.  We're told she hails from a Northern city famed for its steel-production (so, obviously Sheffield, where I live), except we're later told the city is in the North East (where I was raised, and nowhere near Sheffield), but it's entirely unbelievable that she could have gained the accent she displays living within a hundred miles of either of these places.  Admittedly people have said the same of my own accent, but I doubt whether I would turn into quite such a cockney if I lived in London for a few months.  I hope we never have occasion to find out, as I like my home much more than I like our capital, but living here has yet to turn me into a broad Yorkshireman.

P.S. On Tuesday I'll be popping up a post about all the films I've seen so far in the project and associated statistics.  On Thursday, we'll be looking at 'Brick', a very fresh noir from 2005.

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Feel an urge to watch the film?  Such desires can be salved by spending.

Taxi Driver (1976)

I mentioned my film-watching antics to my friend Rob Reed, who lectures in film-related things, so seemed likely to suggest films I hadn't seen and wouldn't have thought of.  He knows how ignorant I am of cinema (or rather, he knows which areas of film I've fixated on, and therefore what I've missed), and, when Christmas came, gave me a film wrapped in festive paper.  'Taxi Driver' was that film (or else this paragraph would seem irrelevant, would it not?).  

The only Martin Scorsese-directed films I'd seen at this point were 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988) and 'No Direction Home' (2005), a documentary about Bob Dylan - both of which apparently lay some way outside his usual style.  I had a notion that his films were violent, dark, and full of Italian-Americans shouting at each other (a prospect I've now found hails from his 1990 work 'Goodfellas', which Rob likewise pressed into my hands).

Oh look, some guns.

I suspected that this film would lead to a violent finale, but I wasn't certain even of this.  For the first half-hour, this could just turn into an idiosyncratic romantic comedy, except that our taxi-driving protagonist is just a tad too intense, too socially awkward, and then increasingly so.  For some reason, it hadn't to me occurred at all that the plot would actually be about a man driving a taxi around, but that's how it went.

From the off this was far more attractive than the other 70s films I've looked at so far.  Richer, more menacing, with the taxi prowling, leonine.  We see Robert de Niro thinking, as he drives his taxi, but we don't know what about.  Even in his narration, he gives few clues.  Only the music is overtly menacing - and it's Bernard Hermann composing, so it could hardly be otherwise.

I'll jump past the main body of the film, as I've no interest in reciting synopses in this blog.  In what I took to be the final ten minutes, the film seems to slip into another genre - the practiced violence, the spree I'd spent the last hour preparing for, is far, far dirtier, less clean and easy than I'd expected.  The colours fade and the world slips into slower and slower motion until time seems to stop to show us the whole mess.  Then, when I most expected the film to end, it doesn't.  There are five or ten more minutes, which serve to make the scenario even more unsettling, the idea that the events in this film could happen anywhere, to anyone, for no particular reason.

Bang!

I sometimes wonder what it's like to live in America, where films such as this are set, not in some bigger, cooler, distant and more important nation, but in your homeland.  The States always seem much grander that Britain, even when that just means grimmer and more horrible - and the accents, to one who never visited, mark New York out as a genre rather than a region.

Anyway, I feel I've been writing too many words about some films lately, so, while I could go on rather longer, I'll curtail this here.  Less is more, as they say.

P.S. Since the last update was from the 60s and this was from the 70s, you can expect an 80s film on Thursday, a 90s one on Sunday, and so on, until I grow bored and frustrated with the pattern.  It might prompt me to finally watch something from the 1950s, a decade untouched by the last forty-four films I've watched over the past four months.

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The film, if you yearn for it.

Goodbye Lenin! (2003)

I used to think of foreign-language films as rather specialist, indeed as rather unappealing, and I bought the (rather xenophobic, actually) stereotype of non-English-language cinema  being humourless and pretentious.  It wasn't until a neighbour coaxed me to watch 'Amélie' (2001) and another showed me 'Jean de Florette' (1986) that I realised foreign films were just, y'know, films, in foreign.

I fell into just as crude an assumption again this month: thinking my lodger (who is working class, socially conservative, uncurious and by his own admission has only read three books in as many years, the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy) would find no appeal in these films.  I was as surprised as glad, then, when he joined me for the latter two thirds of 'Goodbye Lenin!' seeming unperturbed by the German language with English subtitles, engrossed by a good story well told.  I assume too much, and ungenerously.

A statue of Lenin is carried away by a helicopter

Perhaps I should end my comments there.  I've said nothing of the film, but that it's good and enjoyable (surely the only things a positive review needs to convey).  I'll tell you what it's about.  It's a German comedy about the reunification of East and West Germany.  A brief and crude history primer if you need it: East Germany was the North Korea of its day, but communist rather than isolationist, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989  marked the sudden end of the Cold War that started in the 1950s.

The main character, Alex, lives in East Berlin, and his staunchly socialist mother Christiane slips into a coma for eight months, missing the whole thing - the wall coming down, the rejoining of the two Germanies - and when she wakes she's so fragile that any shock, particularly this shock, could kill her.  So her son and daughter, having just modernised their lives, wardrobes and decor, must hastily un-modernise and keep up the pretence that nothing has changed.

All signs of Western-style capitalism are covered up, with Coca Cola and the daughter's new job at Burger King carefully hidden away.  East Germany missed the 80s entirely, but had the 70s twice, and everyone seems rather alarmed to return to the clothing they'd never realised was horrible.  Despite this, the film eventually reveals a nostalgia for Soviet East Germany.  The main character initially bemoans the great labour of creating this bubble of faux-East, but seems happiest there, sad that his country ended and disappeared with such relief and so little ceremony - that people were glad to leave, rather than to move in, once the borders opened.

Alex films fake news reports to keep up the illusion

I'd wondered what a German comedy would be like, since the stereotype of Germans attributes to them a dearth of merriment - though, of course, I've remarked on excellent comic moments in German films such as 'Faust' (1926) and 'M' (1931).  'Goodbye Lenin!' is fun, rather than funny, the kind of tone one might expect from a romantic comedy.  Indeed, there is a romance between Alex and a nurse who tends to his mother, which looks briefly like it might be at the heart of the plot, but becomes almost irrelevant by the time the film is half-way through, as the focus switches to the convalescent Christiane.

In actual fact, the tone of this film reminds me most of 'Heimat 3' (2004), the sunniest of the Heimats, which was made in Germany at the same time as 'Goodbye Lenin!' and likewise regards the German reunification, though its extra duration allows it to run from 1989 to the Millennium.  The early 90s were probably the most fun and exciting time to be German, but it's good to finally hear a word, even a nostalgia-tinged one, in favour of East Germany, a nation I'd previously thought the world was glad to be rid of.

P.S. Though 'Goodbye Lenin!' is in German, the title really is in English, and, like 'Shaft's Big Score!' (1972) delights me by including an exclamation mark.

P.P.S. I'm trying to regularise the blog to two posts each week, Thursdays and Sundays.  I may visit Tuesdays on occasion for things which are not comments on films, or unlikely novelties.

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I'll persuade y'all to watch something in German eventually, so why not this?

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

This is one of three very different Russian Revolution films I'd like to cover during this 100-films experiment - and the only one in Russian.  The trio are 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971) which I like very much indeed, 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965) which I don't like at all, though I concede that it has great artistic merit; and this, 'Броненосец «Потёмкин»', which I admire as a piece of work, but can't claim to have a great preference on either way.  We don't watch propaganda films because they make us happy, but because they're well-wrought, interesting and historically significant.  One doesn't watch 'Triumph of the Will' (1934) through a joy at seeing Hitler's little face.  By no means!  It's a major piece of history in itself, and has brass bands and rich oratory (however objectionable) to keep the attention.

So it is with 'Battleship Potemkin'.  The propaganda films that last long enough to be counted as classics tend to be worth watching for their artistry and innovative techniques.  Most striking here are the montages, the tensest moments juxtaposing images - the mutinous sailors quailing beneath a tarpaulin, a firing squad of their fellows tensing to fire, the fire-and-brimstone priest thumping his hand with a golden cross, all cut together to produce the most emotive reaction in the spectator.  To make us angry at the unfairness, to see the suffering of fellow workers and the cruelty of oppressive officers.

It makes a compelling case.  I admire these sailors and pity the people of Odessa, gunned down by the Tsarist troopers for supporting the mutinous cause.  It's a revolution easy to support, but history has left it seeming bitter.  I don't know much about Soviet Russia, but I know I wouldn't want to live there.  The revolution, as in the microcosm of the Battleship, got rid of the most visible villains, but in the long-term life got no better.  If I didn't know this, such a film might have incited me to action.

It's constructed with an amazing clarity of vision based on political conviction.  Such fervour in the hands of an artist can produce incredible works, and the whole thing is about as striking and sure of itself as one could hope for in a ninety-year-old movie.

One of the delights of silent films is the choice of musical scores that tend to accrue.  I've watched several recently which gave me a selection of different musical styles to choose from, and director Sergei Eisenstein was well aware that this was how the future would be.  He said that 'Battleship Potemkin' would always be relevant so long as a new soundtrack was created for it every 20 years.  On this occasion, I watched it with the 2004 score by the Pet Shop Boys - a combination currently available only on Youtube, though film and music are both purchasable separately.  The new(ish) soundtrack is something one could dance to, or at least gyrate rhythmically to, and certainly gives the film a boost and an immediacy, but has the effect of making the flickering pictures seem ancient, as well as timeless.  Perhaps Youtube's diabolical picture quality played a part here - I know twenties films are capable of scrubbing up rather better than this, and I'm sure the film is available in a more beautiful state on shiny disc.  So yes, as I like the Pet Shop Boys' style, so I shall watch out for any future release marrying this soundtrack to a cleaned up print on blu-ray.  It's got to happen eventually.

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Why not watch a far better quality copy than I did? Or listen to the music - it's quite something.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

This entry may sum up with the greatest purity one aspect of this project: I've watched this film so you don't have to.  I've dreaded 'The Birth of a Nation' fro some while, having tried it in 2004 and given up bored after half an hour.  Here's a film that's way racist, way long at 190 minutes, and not especially engaging or rewarding to a modern eye.  I considered other options for this year, 'Der Golem', for instance, but 1915 simply is 'The Birth of a Nation' and to skip it out would be simply absurd.

The first half of this sentimental and differently-exciting melodrama shows two American families, one Northern, one Southern, divided by the Civil War.  We see the war, in all its glory and tragedy (the South were the heroes, by the way), and the ensuing reconstruction under the Neanderthal-faced Abe Lincoln, whose assassination is lavishly reconstructed at the film's mid-point.

John Wilkes Booth, after assassinating the president

The more notorious second half tells the tale of the liberated 'negroes' (as the film insists on calling them) and ruthless carpetbaggers (who are a cross between carpet slippers and teabaggers) oppressing the 'helpless White minority'.  The Ku Klux Klan is formed, apparently to seek something like good and equality through 'fair trials' and diabolical fancy-dress, and to quash these (obviously blacked-up) rascals who are, we are told, degrading America.

'The organization that saved the South from the anarchy of black rule'.  It's a very ugly piece of propaganda, but it seems to have worked.  The release and popularity of this film was almost wholly responsible for the re-emergence of the KKK in 20th Century America, a vigilante mob still exercising its brute force well into the 1950s.  The heroic young colonel of the film's first half is the instigator of this gang of terrorists, and the film would very much like us to admire him for it.  At the end, the spectral form of Jesus Christ puts in a cameo to lend it a little credibility.

The household servants are presented as benign (in short, they're submissive),

presumably as the one example with which to say 'this film can't be racist'.

All this is set to a rich orchestral score, which may be a more modern addition.  It's rather odd to see such American scenes of alarm overplayed with Grieg's characteristically Norwegian Peer Gynt music, or 'O Christmas Tree' (though it may have been the equally irrelevant 'The Red Flag').  Colonel Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant was apparently made to the strains of the British national anthem, a tune which may have a different meaning in the U.S., but I felt compelled to stand up in salute to her majesty in any case.

One of the most striking discoveries in the 100 films experiment is how competent, stylish, ambitious and advanced films were a century ago, a time we think of as their infancy - and how the advances from then until now have been slow, gradual and constant.  The adventure from 1913 cinema until 2013 isn't marked by milestones and watersheds (except perhaps the arrival of talkies, which so far seem to have emerged over-night fully formed), but by seemingly seamless development.  The more films I view, the more I can see how cinema got from the 1910s to the 1920s, from there to the 1930s, and so on.  Technically there's little between this and 'Die Nibelungen' (1924) bar a honing of special effects.  Decades famed for their distinct flavours - the 60s and 70s, for instance, flow smoothly from one to the other.

The North marvel at the South's bravery in war

To bring this back to 'The Birth of a Nation', here are superimposed images placing models ablaze in the same short as fleeing crowds; a camera clearly fixed to a moving vehicle to keep pace with actors on horseback; shots are juxtaposed with the understanding that viewers will know how to read the links between images; intertitles introduce scenes (as they did a decade earlier) but also provide excerpts of dialogue or context within the scenes.  In 1915, the movie and the movie audience are both highly advanced.  This is a flm wholly confident of its ability to use all cinema's techniques to tell any scale or complexity of story.  Of course, it looks crude and ancient now, but who was to know back then how far cinema might develop.  If director D.W. Griffith didn't anticipate the coming of sound and colour, then the epic scale of this achievement, with its cast of hundreds, its historical re-enactments and battlefields filled with smoke, horses and explosions, must have looked like the greatest film it was possible for humanity to produce, the eventual pinacle of the medium.  I wonder what film holds that title now.

Daisies (1966)

I came to 'Sedmikrásky' with no clues at all to its style or content, as it was passed to me without cover or introduction by my friend Opai, who DJs a radio show of excellent or terrible music (the like of which one could never hear in any other circumstances), and who, I reasoned, could recommend me films nobody else would know existed or dare to advocate.

The opening credits - the wheels of a persistent machine, intercut with grainy footage of bombs and exploding planes - suggested that this film might regard some desperate post-apocalyptic struggle for survival.  I was wholly unprepared for what ensued: an unreasonably bizarre and psychadelic Czech comedy, the sort of thing you might see spoofed but would never believe actually existed.

'This film is dedicated to those whose sole

source of indignation is a messed up trifle'

Perhaps it might be clearest if I described the first scene, tinted a grey blue.  Two young women in bikinis.  When they move, they creak INCREDIBLY LOUDLY as if crudely hinged.  One, named Maria, begins to pick her nose.  The other, also named Maria, plays the trumpet.  Since the world is so bad, they resolve to become equally bad.  Maria slaps Maria into colour, and into the world.  Are they angels?  Robots?  Women?

They dance in a full-colour apple grove before falling into an apartment, and taking a man out for lunch.  They eat at him, and this tinted in every colour you might know.  The man is in no way extraordinary, and they make sure he catches his train.  The train is made of colour.  If it wasn't played out under such whimsical music, it might have taken me longer to realise this was a comedy.  That's not to say it's bad or not funny, just that this is unlike anything I've ever seen, as if writer/director Věra Chytilová has heard the concept of 'comedy' described to her but never seen any before making the film.

Maria and Maria take a man out for lunch

The sound, the music and foley are no more predictable than the pictures.  Footsteps are loud and almost wholly un-footstep-like.  Just as limbs may creak like barn doors, so motions may make the sounds of ukulele and harpsichord.  At one point the apartment seems to be host to an off-screen typist, as a loud typewriter permeates the scene as if it were a newspaper office.  Eventually this transpires to be music, rather than sound effect, typed percussion.  At one point the telephone rings so long, unnoticed, that I thought it too may be incidental music.  Eventually Maria picks it up, only to exclaim into the receiver 'Rehabilitation centre!  Die, die, die!  He he he he he he he!'  She hangs up, the picture fills with a dozen sudden close-ups of red roses, and we again hear 'die, die die'.  This is after she had tried to recreationally gas herself, but accidentally left the window open.

Maria has cut her head off with scissors

The men in the film are tedious, anonymous, appearing at dates to be charmed then outraged, then hurry to catch their trains; or else not seen at all - heard knocking at the door and asking to be let in, or only heard over the telephone.  The Marias take a phone-call from such an un-named admirer, all the while using scissors to snip the ends off sausages, cucumbers and bananas.  It's an uncomfortable sequence, but they seem to be having great fun; I found myself feeling like a woman watching a film made for men.

I shall say now, I have remarkably little idea what is going on in this film.  I've never seen anything even slightly like this, and I'm still trying to make sense of even a minute of it.  For the first hour I simply boggled at it, worked out it was a comedy and wondered whether at any point it would burst into a particularly avant-garde episode of 'The Goodies'.  It would be easy to look at this in the standard way of investigating any startling and apparently insane sixties artworks, and assume that everybody was on every drug at all times, but the end left me wondering whether these unpredictable antics were meant to be taken more politically - but I'm glad I couldn't work out any clear meaning behind it.  To analyse this fun would be to kill it, and I look forward greatly to seeing this again and finding it no less surprising.

'How do you know you exist?'

I can't help feeling that, just trying to describe the film's contents, I've made it sound much more orderly and deliberate than it feels.  Skipping once more through the scenes, I find I've been inventing sense for it and making links that aren't there at all.  It flits like a dream: there are dozens of dead butterflies, suddenly they're being made coffee in the public toilet, they steal from a handbag, they hop upstairs, they set their apartment on fire, delighted, to strains of choral music.  If you have the chance, you should probably watch this.

P.S. The film was banned in its native Czechoslovakia, so it sounds like somebody got it, or didn't.

P.P.S. The next film I'll watch will be the oft-recommended 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' (1920), and the next blog post will regard 'Finding Neverland' (2004).  Merry Epiphany

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I don't believe a film has ever left me quite so confused or amazed while being so enjoyable as this.