FILM FILINGS 3.6.23
OVERVIEW
Renoir at Nashville’s Belcourt Theater
Movie Month Themes (Sam’s Reviews)
British Folk Horror (Christopher Witty)
Cool Movie News (Tarana Cinema)
Nathan Gilmore’s Movie Reviews
Jordan Poss’s Blog
This edition of Film Filings covers: a Jean Renoir theater experience at Nashville’s Belcourt Theater, my film-viewing habits of the last four months, an excursion in British Folk Horror with Christopher Witty in the U.K., Nathan Gilmore’s reviews of two European classics, and a peek at a cool film that is now in production!
1. Jean Renoir’s Le regle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) at Nashville’s Belcourt Theater.
This past February I took a jaunt to the much-beloved Belcourt in Nashville. The last time I was there was 2019 for showings of The Lighthouse and Seven Samurai. I’ve seen a number of other films there in the previous years. Arty? Sure. And you’ll get rebuked for regular theater manners (don’t try to peek into the theater hall before they’re done cleaning). So my friend Nathan and I are there, a little before the showtime, and finally get our seats. We sit down and wait through the indie movie previews—some which looked pretty okay—and then Regle du jeu begins. I had only recently seen La grand illusion for the first time, so this was my second Renoir film. Le regle du jeu is a farcical comedy. Among the French cinema crowd it’d be called (especially in the older days) a fantasy.
It’s set at a country estate, complete with servants, groundskeepers, and poachers. It begins by introducing us to our Big Hero, an aviator. But he’s upset because his girlfriend didn’t show up for his big return landing. We’re gradually introduced to all these characters and it’s quickly clear that everyone has a boyfriend or mistress on the side but, in French fashion, nobody’s all that concerned about it. Masters and servants commingle as if on equal footing, trading jibes and retorts (and mistresses). There’s a grand hunting scene which I’d be hard-put to say was fabricated realism. Perhaps it was. At this point in the movie it was hard to like anyone except the rabbits and pheasant being hunted.
As the stay at the country estate progresses, emotions run high: there are betrayals, chases and hiding, and finally a gun-romp that gets two servants fired. Then the love triangle becomes the pas de quatre! An undeclared fourth lover declares himself. He is played by the film’s director and has been the Aviator Hero’s confidante throughout. There’s yet more in the film’s complex denouement, and if you’re inclined to see the film I do recommend seeing it. It’s not my favorite, but that’s a game of preference. A lot of people will like it and, according to my friend Nathan, it grows on you.
2. Lotsa Movies
I’ve seen a lot of movies in the past seven months. Winter weather makes that a lot easier, and the experience has given me a lot of reason to jot down my reviews. NO WAY am I able to paste those all here, but please do check out my Letterboxd profile. I will, however, list all the films in each themed watchlist:
35 Film Noir (best to worst): Five Stars—The Desperate Hours, The Night of the Hunter, Touch of Evil, Le Deuxieme Souffle, The Blue Dahlia, Detour, Fury, The Seventh Victim, In A Lonely Place, I Wake Up Screaming, Leave Her to Heaven, Shoot the Piano Player, Laura, Niagara, Dark Victory, Mildred Pierce, Elevator to the Gallows, The Glass Key, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Four Stars—Clash by Night, Rififi, Kiss of Death, The Set-Up, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Lady From Shanghai, The Third Man, Ministry of Fear, A Double Life, Vertigo, Three Stars—Liliom, Brighton Rock, Pale Flower, Two Stars or less—Gilda, The Killers (1946).
26 Westerns (best to worst): Five Stars—The Searchers, Seven Men From Now, The Far Country, Secret of Convict Lake, Man of the West, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Tin Star, The Assassination of Jesse James, The Hanging Tree. Four Stars—The Red Pony, Shenandoah, The Undefeated, Night Passage, Day of the Outlaw, Terror in a Texas Town, The Great Silence, Wichita. Three Stars—The Wild North, Will Penny, 5 Card Stud, Rancho Notorious, The Big Trail, The River's Edge. Two Stars or less—Track of the Cat, Ride the High Country, Duel In the Sun.
26 Thrillers & Neo-Noirs of the 60s and 70s (no particular order, but bold indicates my most-recommended): The Thomas Crown Affair, The Cincinnati Kid, Bullitt (rewatch), The League of Gentlemen, The List of Adrian Messenger, The Quiller Memorandum, The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain, The Whisperers, Robbery, Madigan, The High Commissioner, The Italian Job, McQ, The Mackintosh Man, The Seven-Ups, The Black Windmill, Dirty Harry, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Last Embrace, You Only Live Twice (rewatch), Black Sunday, How to Steal A Million, Classe tous risques (The Big Risk), and The Godfather Part II.
3. British Folk Horror
Christopher Witty, who wrote such a lovely essay on Val Lewton for us last year, has started a Substack which you can subscribe to here. Among the many film gems he's reviewed are a series of British folk horror. The following essay can originally be found here on his Substack and is re-posted with permission here:
‘Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men and the films that shaped a modern folk horror masterpiece.’
by CHRISTOPHER WITTY
When I read in Sight & Sound that writer-director Mark Jenkin had curated a season of short films, features and television programmes that inspired his second film, Enys Men, it was as though somebody had laid a corn doll gift at my door. Having already watched the accessible “Unholy Trinity” of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and TheWicker Man (1973), I found myself developing a need to explore the British films and television plays that helped develop that uniquely English sub-genre known as ‘folk horror.’ Preceding Jenkin’s announcement, a number of books simultaneously began to find their way to my door, as if they were urging me to dig deeper; books on legends of the British Isles, the Mabinogion (which served as inspiration for Alan Garner’s The Owl Service), Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War and William Harrison Ainsworth’s The LanchashireWitches, along with three exemplary contemporary novels, The Manningtree Witches by A.K. Blakemore, The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley, and The Woodwitch by Stephen Gregory, and an obscure out-of-print curio, The Corn Dolly, a 1976 children’s novel by Margaret Elliot. I didn’t consciously seek out these books, they were just suddenly there, and during a period wherein folk horror had made a slow but steady return to cinema screens, thanks in
large part to the films of Ben Wheatley, Ari Aster and Robert Eggers.
Before Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013), Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), and The VVitch (2015), however, folk horror had returned to ground after enjoying a particularly fertile run throughout the 1970s. In its absence, the slasher film took over cinemas, spawning ever more tiresome franchises that inevitably imploded in a series of meta-horrors. Occasionally, it would rear its head in films like The Blair Witch Project (1999), an ingeniously conceived project that used the now widely imitated ‘found footage’ formula and a marketing campaign that listed the actors in the film as still missing. It didn’t feel like it belonged with the glut of pre-millennial horror films that incorporated the CGI violence and knowing winks that only served to distance the audience from ever being truly scared. Instead, The Blair Witch Project played on the uncertainty that what you were watching may actually be real. That uncertainty, the lack of concrete knowledge that is the foundation of the eerie, soon gave way to a deeply unnerving feeling. I haven’t felt that way about a film since, and though Midsommar came close, as did Kill List, the violence in both soon overshadowed the feeling of disquietude felt in the early stages of the films. With Enys Men, however, the disquietude remains throughout.
First off, Enys Men is not a horror film, or at least not in the way we’ve been taught to recognise a horror film. There are no jump scares, cheap tricks, or ludicrously exaggerated ways to kill dumb disposable characters. However, it is bordering on folk horror, despite claims by some critics that it doesn’t really fall into that category either; I’ve heard it described as a metaphysical psycho-drama, and Mark Kermode labelled it, simply, a “Cornish film,” which is probably nearer to the mark, but he also said, correctly, that to try to understand it diffuses the experience. So why bestow a label on it at all when ambiguity can instill a much more unique reading in the mind of the viewer. The fact that it’s impossible to pin down exactly the kind of film it is, is what makes Enys Men such a memorable experience.
Set in 1973 on a remote Cornish island (Enys Men, pronounced Enys Main, is Cornish for “Stone Island”), an unnamed wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine) is given the task of observing a rare flower and recording its development. Isolated, she experiences visions of both the island’s and her own past. She is also visited by a boatman, though you’re never sure whether this is happening in the present, or if it’s another of her memories taking form as time begins to fold in on itself. She discovers the ghosts of miners below, while Bal Maidens (female manual labourors who also worked in Cornwall’s mining industry) inhabit the island aboveground. Atop a rise, a menhir (an upright standing stone) is the first thing she sees when she opens her front door in the morning. As darkness falls, the moonlight gives it an ethereal quality.
In a wide shot early in the film, we see her walking along the rise, disappear behind the stone, and for an instant that I can’t fully explain, I had the uneasy feeling she wasn’t going to come out the other side. The moment is revisited towards the end of the film, and I’m still at a loss as to how exactly Jenkin managed to make me react in such a way to something so innocuous as a woman walking past a stone. The film is filled with moments like this. There’s a perpetual foreboding that brought to mind Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), a certain dread that something is either happening or is about to happen, but when and if it does, we’re not going to be given the comfort of a rational explanation.
This is a film of image and sound. There is very little dialogue (as should be expected from a film with only one principal character), and when there is, it’s usually a thought out loud or the disembodied voices coming through the transmitter that links the woman to the mainland. Jenkin’s brutal, jagged editing splices together extreme close-ups of faces, rocks, teapots and lichen, with wider shots of the island, the sea, and the house at once giving the sense of something closing in and watching from a distance. Jenkin’s decision to shoot on 16mm colour film with a Bolex camera makes the whole thing look like a rough-hewn document lost to time. That it only invites questions where we were hoping to find answers makes it all the more disquieting. It really is extraordinary filmmaking.
So, what Jenkin calls the DNA of Enys Men are the films of various length and medium that he’s chosen to share through the British Film Institute. After watching Enys Men, it’s apparent which have had the clearer influence, though they are all embedded in the fabric of his film in one way or another. And, unsurprisingly, as it happens, there are few that can be labelled pure horror. Some of the feature films he’s included are Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012), David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) — a fever dream not unlike that endured by the woman in Jenkin’s film — and LongWeekend (1978), an Ozploitation gem that shares Enys Men’s underlying message that the land is sentient, and definitely not to be fucked with. One film not included in the season is John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), though Jenkin does make mention of the similarities between the scenes showing the discovery of a piece of broken, lettered driftwood. These are all fine films, but of the features, it’s Ben Rivers’ incredible black and white film Two Years at Sea (2011) that has left its stamp on Enys Men’s use of sound and image.
Like Jenkin, Rivers shot his documentary about Jake Williams, a man who shunned modernity to live in remotest Scotland, on a 16mm Bolex camera and hand processed the film himself. Held up as an example of ‘Slow Cinema,’ Two Years at Sea has next to no dialogue, the occasional burst of diegetic music, and very long takes in which nothing appears to be happening. Yet, something is happening. All the time. Just watching someone be without explaining how they got where they are or where they came from is a factor in Enys Men’s story. The obvious difference between the two films is that Jenkin’s is a work of fiction, and so clues, no matter how ambiguous, need to be dropped in for the narrative to work. Rivers’ film, on the other hand, doesn’t call for explanation, yet the aesthetic is the same. Of the short films, Wind (1999) is a highlight. Written and directed by Jenkin’s fellow Cornish native Bill Scott, it’s twelve minutes of pure invention, deploying modelwork and rear projection to tell a funny, virtually dialogue-free story about an incident at a lighthouse. Its influence may not be explicitly evident in Enys Men, but it did inspire Jenkin enough to realise that he could make films in and about his neck of the woods entirely on his own terms.
Second to Wind is Oss Oss Wee Oss, a short documentary filmed in Padstow, Cornwall on Mayday 1953. Directed by Alan Lomax and narrated in semi-rhyme by Charlie Bate of Padstow and Charlie Chilton of London, it’s an affectionate look at a fertility and resurrection ritual, filmed with the utmost respect for its subject. In contrast to the hustle and bustle of Lomax’s film is Derek Jarman’s Journey to Avebury (1973), a series of shots of the surrounding countryside and home of the largest megalithic stone circles in England. Taken as a whole, aspects of all three films are present.
But of all the films Jenkin appears to have revisited with Enys Men, none are more apparent than those produced for television throughout the 1970s and into the early ’80s. Of these, the films Lawrence Gordon Clark produced for the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas feature prominently: his adapations of M.R. James’ A Warning to the Curious (1972) and Charles Dickens’ The Signalman (1976), and, more noticeably, his final film for the series, Stigma (1977).
A departure for Clark, Stigma was the first of the films in the series that was neither a period piece or an adaptation of a classic ghost story. With its modern (for its day) setting and focus on body horror, it’s easy to draw direct parallels between Clark’s film and Enys Men. After the removal of a large stone unearths the remains of a witch, a wife and mother begins to bleed profusely from tiny pinpricks in her skin. The ordeal she undergoes is similar to that of the woman in Enys Men, whose own scarred body begins to grow lichen as it mirrors the flower she’s been observing. Stigma also has not one, but two strong female protagonists, another departure from the male-dominated tales that came before it. Males are reduced to onlookers and, like the boatman who comes and goes in Enys Men, the husband in Stigma is shunted into the background while his wife is forced to suffer alone.
Finally, Penda’s Fen, Alan Clarke’s 1973 Play for Today scripted by David Rudkin, is the most complex of all Jenkin’s choices. A somewhat confusing blend of social commentary, critique on rural masculinity and folk horror, it’s as engaging as it is frustrating. Yet that more than explains why its ambiguous appeal has found its way into Enys Men’s DNA. Jenkin freely admits to prioritising feeling over understanding (he also cites Robert Bresson as an influence), and it’s to our benefit as cinemagoers that he’s following the paths laid down by Roeg, Clark, Robin Hardy and Nigel Kneale, while treading them side by side with Wheatley, Aster and Eggers.
***
Outside of Jenkin’s selections, I’d also recommend the following:
· The Owl Service, an eight-part adaptation of Alan Garner’s children’s novel, originally
broadcast over the winter of 1969-70.
· The aforementioned “Unholy Trinity” of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s
Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973).
· Children of the Stones, another eight-part series for children, filmed in Avebury, Wiltshire,
and broadcast in 1977.
· Any or all of the following films and plays scripted by Nigel Kneale: The Quatermass
Xperiment (1955), adapted by Hammer Films from Kneale’s six-part television series for the
BBC; Quatermass II (1957); Quatermass and the Pit (1967); The Witches (1966); The Year
of the Sex Olympics (1968); Murrain (1975); and The Stone Tape (1972) — this last entry is
the only one of Kneale’s works selected by Jenkin.
· The following Ben Wheatley films: Kill List (2011); Sightseers (2012); A Field in England
(2013); In the Earth (2021).
· Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), directed by Ari Aster.
· Two short films by Robert Eggers: Hansel and Gretel (2007) and Brothers (2015); and his
first two features, The VVitch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019).
4. RAYMAR, A MEDIEVAL FILM IN PRODUCTION
Tarana Cinema on Instagram is making a film! It's called Raymar and is a medieval French romance epic. From the Substack page: ‘Raymar is a Medieval Epic Pilot starting Production in March 2023.’ The script is done and the crew are already on location building sets. Check out everything so far on the Substack and the Instagram page.
4. NATHAN GILMORE’S MOVIE REVIEWS
My friend Nathan Gilmore is embarked on an odyssey of important classics. Here are two of his most recent reviews:
LA STRADA (Federico Fellini, 1954 — Italy)
by NATHAN GILMORE
Sunday viewing: Federico Fellini’s “La Strada” (1954). Along with Maria Falconetti, Giuletta Masina’s is one of the great faces of cinema. By turns, it registers childlike earnestness, pure delight, deep sorrow— and plays on the emotions with the deftness of a master violinist. Light and dark are used with their usual symbolisms; characters are basically flat. But the movie derives all of its considerable power from the character of Gelsomina, played with astonishing power and beguiling charm by Giuletta Masina.
The #movie is a dreamlike fable, made potent and poignant by the juxtapositions of mood and character and maturities: Gelsomina is, with her moon-faced innocence and liquid eyes, ineffably childlike, yet still stronger and more powerful than Zampano, who is brutish, strong and powerful in every sense, except a moral one.
His few attempts at goodness are clumsy, childish, as he tries to feed Gelsomina and explain his crimes.
Gelsomina, hunched childlike, whimpering like an infant, then asks "if I don't stay with you, who will?" (I thought of Balthasar in Bresson’s film, which would make perfect companion viewing). In all her childishness, her goodness makes her far more an agent than Zampano’s blustering, animal senselessness. Zampano relates to people through two modes: rage and manipulation. Gelsomina, though she speaks about a third as much as he does, is far more human and vastly more relatable.
We leave her like a child, tucked into a blanket.
The movie could have ended at Zampano's abandonment, and been just as effective. The final scenes of Zampano’s comeuppance and own abandonment at the beach, I read as slightly vindictive, and much too pat.
That may, however, be a consequence of the effect that Giuletta Masina’s character had on me. I wanted her to have the last word, the last scene— embodied in that utterly expressive and completely unique face. #film #cinema #fellini #criterion
THE 400 BLOWS (Francois Truffaut, 1959 — France)
by NATHAN GILMORE
Sunday film viewing: “The 400 Blows”, dir. Francois Truffaut (1959).
I think this is the first Truffaut film I’ve seen.
It is both similar and dissimilar to the work of the other French auteur I’m most familiar with: Robert Bresson. Performances are uniformly stoic, no method acting here. The lack of emoting plays an interesting part: as in Bresson, we are forced to supply the emotion for ourselves, to hold in our own imaginations what the characters must feel, thus to identify with them. No single shot, except for the famous ending one, of the film is made for pure effect— the movie only forces us to live with this family, with this boy, and to come to grips with the issue they do.
“I told them the truth, but no one believed me. So I prefer to lie.” This is the boy who cried wolf, except that his cries went unheeded from the beginning. No one bothers to come to his aid the first time he cries.
Here, the Bressonesque lack of emotion means something more— might Doinel have been treated more sympathetically, more humanely, if he had acted out with rage and grief, rather than merely a boy’s pranks and mischief-making? Who are we to sympathize with? Doinel is not an unjustly abused little waif: he is a bratty, disruptive, mischievous kid who merits the disappointment and worry he causes. The title comes from a French idiom meaning “to raise hell”, but I read it as a pun: little by little, blow by blow, his childishness is stripped away by a humorless adult world that brooks no childish exuberance.
But neither are the adults, blustering and angry as they are, entirely in the wrong. They are simply trying to deal with a difficult situation.
There are no heroes here, no villains, only flawed people acting by turns selfishly, childishly or overbearingly. And we are not given a moral comeuppance, no neat end of the story.
The end that we get is a famous shot in film. It is the face of a boy, running away from a world that does not understand him, and refuses to understand him. Throughout the entire movie, he has been in the wrong. But his is the last word, and the last, the parting shot.
6. JORDAN M. POSS’ BLOG
FINALLY, over at Jordan M. Poss’ blog he gives us his thoughts on the depiction of confusion and chaos in war films, and a fun review of films he saw in 2022—everything from Top Gun: Maverick to lesser-known 80s war films. Jordan is a must-read for me throughout the week—he’s always fair-minded, scholarly but not arcane, and with a variety of cultural interests.
