Paranoid Park: the Disappointment of the VIFF

I feel like I need to clean myself in some heretofore unknown way. Paranoid Park (TIFF review here) has left me feeling compromised and uncomfortable, not because it's intended to produce that effect, but because, I suspect, it's a false and bankrupt piece of filmmaking; at the very best, it's the work of someone who is deeply lost. I'm starting to think Gus van Sant belongs on a list with Elvis, Britney Spears, Tom Cruise, and Whitney Houston, as an American artist deformed and deranged by all the attention he has received, confused about himself beyond any redemption; if people were only more demanding of cinema, more perceptive, surely this would be transparently obvious. I begin to understand why Last Days stands out as his best film in recent years, since one suspects he could identify quite easily with Kurt Cobain, at this point in his career.

My reaction has nothing to do with the subject matter of the film. I greatly admire the novel on which Paranoid Park is based. I'd read it as a sort of homework, since I had no opportunity to preview the film and wanted to possibly be able to write about it. The book, by Blake Nelson, tells a very moving story, written with the directness, simplicity of language, and emotional integrity of our own Chris Walter, though with slightly less sex-drugs-and-profanity, since it's aimed at the Young Adult market. It involves a teenaged preppy skateboarder in Portland who defends himself against a thuggish railway security guard, and accidentally causes - or contributes to - his death. The boy is traumatized, wracked with guilt; he wants to tell someone, but the adults around him are either too caught up in their own confused dramas, or too inclined to mistrust skaters and assume the worst about them, for him to be able to unburden himself. His silently carrying the memory of this event forces him into a new understanding of life, and changes his relationship with the people around him; these transformations make up the bulk of the narrative, and are, more or less, its subject. Issues of class are also touched on: another skater implicated in the death, a street kid who had been hitching a train with the narrator, is forced into hiding, and his friends - also on the streets - are convinced, when the cops come around asking questions, that the middle-class kid narked on them, a subplot completely eliminated from van Sant's telling of the tale. It's a worthwhile book; it captures the deep sensitivity of the young, and how difficult it is for them to forge connections between their complex inner experience and the intimidating, condescending, and judgmental "adult world" that surrounds them. I would gladly recommend it to any teen reader, would give it to my kids if I had any; Nelson impresses me considerably, and adults will dig his book too.

I'm not sure who, exactly, the film of Paranoid Park is aimed at, but I think kids, for one, will be too smart to buy into it. Moviegoers might be easier to fool: at first, when you see Christopher Doyle's grainy home-movie footage of skaters, you feel excited, thinking that the film will harken back to Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy, which both used home movie footage to excellent effect. (I frankly forget if My Own Private Idaho does or not; it's been a long time). Van Sant's first two films remain my favourites, and everyone is encouraged to go see Mala Noche when it screens at the Cinematheque later this month; it's an interesting, important film, and tells a story about characters you will care about, and come to understand, and it contains complex and thought-provoking narratives about homosexuality, class, and social hierarchy in general. And it's pretty to look at, even if it was shot on a shoestring.

Unfortunately, any similarities between van Sant's earlier work and Paranoid Park disappear quite quickly into the film. The grainy footage of skaters skating - Doyle's skating scenes are one of the only consistent pleasures in the film - is soon replaced by a lengthy, Bela-Tarr-influenced tracking shot of one skater kid walking down a hallway in highschool that could be an outtake from van Sant's earlier Elephant -- except that this young actor, Gabe Nevins, is even more expressionless than the kids in that film. This is the first huge question the film raises: why does van Sant hide all the churning emotion of the text behind this blank-faced prettyboy's vacuous, unblinking gaze? Why did he even choose him at all (casting him off Myspace, in what seems a rather obvious publicity-seeking gimmick)? It's probably not the kid's fault that he can't act, or that, at the least, he completely fails to convey any of the inner turmoil he describes; one wonders if van Sant even informed him what emotions he was supposed to be showing at given junctures, or if he just had him walk around directionless and stunned. Nevins' voice-over narration is so sapped of feeling and so dumbed-down from the already pretty straightforward source material that it almost seems to suggest that this is van Sant's opinion of kids - that they're pretty to look at, shallow, and inarticulate; it's an injustice to the novel's rich main character, to Blake Nelson's sensitive handling of youth - and quite an insult to skaters, on top of that!

There are bizarre stylistic choices made throughout the film, too: the music veers from entirely appropriate minimalist glitch electronica and moody Elliot Smith songs to bizarre and arbitrary-seeming carnivalesque passages from Nino (I shit you not) Rota, which mystified me, seeming to undercut the text, even to mock it. There are also various shots of Nevins which are very obviously intended to fetishize his beauty - to queer the camera eye and look at him with desire - but this too seems irrelevant to the material at hand and devoid of carefully thought-out purpose, feeling more like a gimmick designed to do nothing more than trigger reactions and to raise questions about what van Sant intends. I'm glad that van Sant is approaching queer themes again (and am still curious about his Harvey Milk movie), but there is only a very slight homoerotic element to the book, which you might not even notice. Paranoid Park (the film) nearly drools over Nevins at times, foregrounding what at most should be a hinted subtext and confusing and misdirecting the audience: is Alex - the Nevins character - gay? Is Jared gay? Is Scratch gay? No: the DIRECTOR is gay, and he can't let the film stand without making sure we know. I cared too much about the story van Sant was supposedly telling to not be annoyed at such irrelevancies.

Van Sant's tendency to call attention to his own directorial choices in framing Nevins is in keeping with the overall strategy of his film, which calls attention to itself as art object at every turn, using slow motion, repetition of images, jagged, non-sequential restructurings of perfectly linear source material, and so forth to aestheticize the experience to the nth degree, as if the point of the work of art is to be a work of art and to get noticed as such, not to speak to the community in any way, to have a theme, to have (gasp) a moral purpose, or (God forbid) to tell a story. It may be pointing at the moon, but it wants you to look at its finger. Even if we completely forget the source novel and view Paranoid Park on its own terms - it's a gamey, confused experience, and, like Todd Solondz's horrible, empty Palindromes, at least some of its bizarre choices seem to have been made simply so the press will have puzzles to play with. "Oooh, Mr. van Sant - why did you cast the film off Myspace? Why the charged glances between Alex and Scratch? What's the meaning of the Nino Rota music? Why did you scramble around the sequence of events? Why the repeated closeup of Alex writing the words 'Paranoid Park?' What are you trying to say about young people?"

Gus van Sant is trying to say nothing whatsoever about young people, I am quite convinced. He likes to look at them. Maybe he wishes he still was one. He doesn't really understand them, though he'd like to think he does, because he'd like them to like him. He'd really like MOVIE CRITICS to like him, too, and to take him seriously as an artist.

I can't help but conclude that THAT is the purpose of Paranoid Park. It's not even art for art's sake - it's art for the artist's sake. But what the fuck do I care about Gus van Sant?

Those who are curious about the film can see it at the Vancity tonight, as a post-festival encore. Compared to the above, the writeup clearly demonstrates how different people's takes on a film can be. Maybe if you go in with much lower hopes than I had, you'll enjoy the film more - who knows?

(Thanks to Simone and Frank, two fellow film buffs who, in different ways, influenced this review)

US peace activists denied entry into Canada, plus Strange Culture

Thought this was interesting - the US is putting peace activists on lists that will keep them from crossing the border into Canada, and our government is complying without questioning it.

Also of note to people concerned with civil liberties, there's an interesting political doc at the fest, Strange Culture, dealing with the disturbing case of Steve Kurtz. VIFF writeup here - not sure if it screens again, check it out.

Battle in Seattle and Redacted, as seen through a jaundiced eye

The neatest thing about Battle in Seattle, to me, is the cameo by Haskell Wexler. I didn't notice it when it happened - nor the quote from his most famous film, Medium Cool, which, I know now, is shown on a TV screen at the beginning of the movie - but I still smiled when I caught Wexler's name in the credits. Medium Cool is a well-respected piece of politically engaged filmmaking from the 1960's, starring Robert Forster (best known to young'uns as Max Cherry in Jackie Brown) as a reporter forced to question the media's role in the coverage of the Democratic convention protests of 1968. Wexler is sort of a hero to liberal filmpeople - he's shot many films, including John Sayles' Matewan and politically engaged docs like his own Bus Rider's Union. I will confess (to my embarrassment) to not having SEEN Medium Cool yet (Mark, Jack: forgive me!), but I know enough about the film and Wexler to like that Battle in Seattle pays its dues; writer-director Stuart Townsend noted when I asked him about Wexler's cameo that "Seattle was the first major mass mobilization in the USA since the Democratic convention riots," so he thought it important to tip his hat. He also explained, for anyone who sets out to "spot Haskell," that Wexler briefly appears holding a camera: "blink and you'll miss him."

As for the film, there's little question that the audience it's playing for will love it, and it drew warm cheers and whoops and applause at the screening I was at (and not JUST because it was shot in Vancouver with a local crew -- people ate it up politically, too.) Since it congratulates the viewers warmly at every turn for believing the right things, and confirms and rewards their (our?) every opinion, this is hardly surprising, tho'. It MAY have merit as a history lesson for some; it MIGHT open the eyes of viewers who haven't heard of the Seattle riots before; and it's laudable that it doesn't flinch from showing the city/ police as being excessive in their use of force: BUT, still, I'm really not sure what films like this accomplish. Call me jaded, and I am, but... remember all the hype and drama over Fahrenheit 9/11? Neverminding that it's not a very good film, it still had enormous momentum, yet did nothing to stop Bush from being elected a second time (and in a way, as a cinema-goer, I'm kinda perversely grateful: Moore would have been unendurable in his self-congratulation had Bush actually lost). Likewise, it's doubtful films like this will have any lasting impact on the WTO or global capitalism, raising the very valid question of whether, really, there is any point to them at all. Unless they somehow challenge us to think or act in a new way -- unless they provoke us to learn something about ourselves or the world -- unless they actually TELL US SOMETHING WE DON'T ALREADY KNOW, then I can't understand why they need to be made. I felt rather like I did when marching against the war in Iraq a couple of years ago: unconvinced that my being there did any good at all, even if I did feel slightly pleased with myself at the end.

I guess it's to the film's credit that that's the best analogy I can think of -- it's as useless as a protest march. If you dig protest marches, you'll probably dig it, too. At the very least, it made me want to watch This is What Democracy Looks Like again.

More significant, but also more questionable, is Brian de Palma's Redacted (that's the official site, but it's "under construction" at the moment, so you might also want to look here, where you will find a sizeable presskit for download). I expected to rejoice, watching it. I was very excited to hear that de Palma, whose last politically engaged film was 1989's Casualties of War, about Vietnam, had made a "furious and incendiary take on the Iraq conflict." Though he is often accused of misogyny and exploitation, anyone who has seen his early film Hi, Mom knows that de Palma is capable of using his penchant for pushing boundaries and his fascination with voyeurism for political ends, to assaultively provoke complacent viewers and challenge their preconceptions; and at least one of his middle-period films, Blow Out, is masterful at leaving the viewer feeling unclean as all hell, questioning whether his/her own cynical specatatorship is moral. Even his dumbest (Snake Eyes) and his most "offensive" films (Body Double, say) are richly crafted and thought-provoking on a meta-level. I'm almost always happy to watch his films, even when I don't like them.

For all the craft and fury that de Palma brings to bear in Redacted, though - ambitiously stitching together a narrative not unlike Casualties of War out of supposedly "found" footage from video diaries, video blogging, surveillance cameras, a French documentary, Youtube, and so forth -- at the end of it all, I just felt depressed. The subject matter is undoubtedly a part of that - it is based on a true story about five soldiers who participated in raping and murdering a 14 year old Iraqi girl and her family. Strong stuff it is - and it also takes on insurgents, Al Qaeda murder porn, beheadings, racism, and the idiocy of sending vicious rednecks into a complex diplomatic situation; it even allows those vicious rednecks to speak for themselves, the main rapist offering a speech in his self-defense that reminds one of Tony Montana speaking up for "the Bad Guy" in Scarface. It does all this, too, with abundant self-consciousness: the presskit describes it as a "profound meditation on the way information is packaged, distributed and received in an era with infinite channels of communication," and it may well be - people excited about self-reflexivity in cinema will find much to think about in it, and de Palma's detractors will even find themselves robbed of the predictable litany of objections to the film -- that he is just an exploiter, a parasite, a sadist, feeding off human misery, puffing himself up by attaching himself to the events he depicts -- because de Palma incorporates these very accusations into the text. Clever guy, de Palma. I have no congratulations to offer, though. When it comes to the war in Iraq, I've had enough; and to be honest, much as I was grateful to see him trying to make a real film -- I enjoyed the sheer beautiful fluff of Femme Fatale a helluva lot more.

Maybe it's just me, you know? Maybe I've just seen too many movies. I've sung along to too many protest songs and done too little to change the world: I do not believe even this film, angry as it is, will make the slightest positive difference in the state of the world. Audiences will go to it to vent their indignation and their outrage, will cheer at the scene where an internet protestor likens America to Nazi Germany, and will pat themselves on the back when the whole thing is done, but odds are, they will DO NOTHING that they would not have otherwise done, for having seen the film, that will help hasten the US retreat from Iraq. We simply cannot consume our way out of that war. The first world's addiction to stimulation of all sorts is PART OF THE PROBLEM, part of the reason that Bush is still in power, even though the whole fucking world knows better; the harshness of Redacted is first and foremost an indicator of just how little a threat the world of cinema poses to the powers that be. If Redacted could change things, they'd make it illegal; since it can't, again - why bother?

One interesting note about the Redacted presskit: it provides no information about the actual killings that the film is based on, nor does the film. One would think, for all the moral furor that supposedly motivates the filmmakers, they'd want everyone to go home and visit fuckin' Wikipedia or something, to see what actually happened. From that site:

"The Al-Mahmudiyah killings occurred on March 12, 2006 in a house located to the southwest of Yusufiyah, a smaller village, to the west of the larger town of Al-Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, Iraq in which five United States soldiers with the 502nd Infantry Regiment, Spc. James Barker, Pfc. Jesse Spielman, Sgt. Paul Cortez, , and Pfc. Steven D. Green (discharged before the crime was discovered), gang-raped and murdered a 14-year-old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qasim Hamza, after murdering her mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhsin, 34; her father Qasim Hamza Raheem, 45; and her sister Hadeel Qasim Hamza, aged 5. As of August 2007 Barker, Spielman and Cortez have been sentenced for this crime. The matter came to light when a private first class in the same platoon, Justin Watt, reportedly revealed the crime during a counseling session on June 22, 2006 following the deaths of two other soldiers in the same regiment. One of the soldiers, Steven Green, was honorably discharged from the Army on May 16, 2006, due to "antisocial personality disorder" and has been charged with these crimes by the FBI, not the military, as his discharge released him from military jurisdiction. Steven Green has been arrested as a civilian within the United States and as such has received the majority of press coverage related to the incident. The other four soldiers, SGT Paul E. Cortez, SPC James P. Barker, PFC Jesse V. Spielman and PFC Bryan L. Howard, were on active duty when charged by the United States military. Currently they remain confined to the Forward Operating Base in Mahmudiyah, Iraq. According to military spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell they could face the death penalty."

If Redacted sounds like something you want to see, don't let me stop you, but in my opinion, you'd be better off spending the time chasing down the links in the article that that's from, and asking what you can do to change a world where such things can happen. If you want to see a movie, just go see somethin' that sounds fun, for fucksake. Or a documentary. (I'm really hoping I'll like Adam Curtis' The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom; I'm told it's remarkable).

You know, it's nearly 4 AM, and I'm worn out. These films both play again as part of the festival, but I can't bear to chase down links. Go here and figure it out, if you're interested. G'night.

Bela Tarr's The Man from London at the VIFF

People with a taste for serious cinema who do not yet know the work of Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr are urged to check out The Man from London (that's a VIFF link, btw - the next screening will be on Friday at the Cinematheque, and is almost sold out; we can hope that it will repeat with other festival favourites at the Vancity Theatre). It's a predictably epic accomplishment, comparable to the greatest works of Antonioni, say, even if it's much smaller in scale than Tarr's previous masterworks, Werckmeister Harmonies and Satantango. An adaptation of a Simenon thriller about a briefcase full of cash and the various parties who are feuding over it -- sort of a No Country for Old Hungarians, if you will - the film takes very simple materials, elevates them to the level of high art, and lends a subtly self-reflexive element to them: the money that serves as the Macguffin had been stolen from a cinema, and the initial action of the film identifies our desire and our gaze very strongly with that of a voyeuristic protagonist, whose desire to enter the field of the seen initiates the drama of the film. Any element of "thrill" is drained from the proceedings, however; bleaker than the bleakest of films noir - it makes In a Lonely Place seem a feelgood light entertainment - The Man from London holds us and our protagonist accountable to the last detail for what transpires. Tarr cognoscenti will note a harkening back to themes from his Cassavetes-influenced early film The Prefab People, as well - showing how men are far less morally serious than their suffering and sympathetic (if at times shrewish) wives.

Speaking of women, can someone easily explain Tilda Swinton's presence in the film, by the way? (I haven't really looked around the web - there must be a story here). Though she accomplishes much with her facial features, she really needed more work with her Hungarian before participating in the project; the dubbing was a bit distracting, in a film so meticulously crafted as this.

More information on the film is here - it was a very troubled shoot, during which a producer, I believe, killed himself, so if you're interested, do poke around online. No other film that I've seen thus far in the festival harkens back quite as dramatically to the glory days of European arthouse cinema -- it's filmmaking on the level of Tarkovsky and Bergman, a rare thing nowadays indeed. Not to be watched lightly.

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (an interview with Stephen Kijak)

Nerve Magazine music editor Adrian Mack turned me onto Scott Walker back when I was writing my Jandek piece for them. An obvious call: Scott Walker’s last two high art albums, Tilt (1995) and The Drift (2006) come across as Jandek for art snobs (as if Jandek weren’t an elite enough taste). Adrian also takes “full responsibility for turning Radiohead on to Scott Walker.” He has a story for us:

“This was before Tilt was released, but as I remember it, Radiohead had entered a studio Walker had vacated, and there were hair-raising stories about what he'd been up to in there. When I expressed my excitement over Walker's 60s material and did the whole salesman bit, Jonny Greenwood became interested. I was fairly drunk and it was a really long time ago, but I recall Greenwood muttering something about checking it out. A few years later, that Radiohead movie came out, and his music was in it... Incidentally, later that night, Greenwood kind of turned on me when I confessed that my friend had destroyed his and Thom Yorke's secret acoustic performance at the Railway Club a year or so prior. It's a long and crazy story, and Radiohead vowed they'd never return to Vancouver (they did, of course).”

Stephen Kijak (pronounced “kayak”), the director of the VIFF Scott Walker documentary, received a different story from Radiohead, but this doesn’t necessarily rule out Adrian’s version of things. "Colin at one point - I was asking him at what point they got turned onto him, and he said someone had taped the Boychild compilation for him. So it would have been around the early 90's. He said it was 'the album Marc Almond did,' because Marc Almond had done the liner notes. So I'm guessing someone just passed them a tape, and it just rocked their world. They had never heard the Nite Flites stuff before, so it was fun to play that for them, but, um Scott 3 and 4 loom large for them - "Duchess" is a big favourite, and "On Your Own Again," I know Ed says its his favourite record to have on tour. But yeah... the source of it. It" -- ie, Adrian's version - "could be true - they were doing OK Computer at Rack when Scott was doing sessions for Tilt."

Walker has had a bizarre and remarkable career. He’s recorded everything from Top of the Pops prettyboy romantic love songs, to Jacques Brel flavoured, brooding 70’s crooning, to late 70’s soulfunk/new wave fusion, to 80’s avant-pop. His current Hyperborean pinnacle of dauntingly dark and difficult music cannot be easily classified; The Drift, the album that I bought on Adrian’s recommendation, is such an alienated album, its points of reference so far removed from anything I understand or have yet encountered, that I find it chilling; it gets even chillier as you realize the amount of craft and deliberation that went into it – he’s no lone nut spewing, he’s got ORGANIZATION, he commands RESOURCES, which is far more disturbing. (Matt at Scratch, when I confessed that I found it unsettling, reacted in a sort of “of course” way, quipping: “it’s the end of music.” Yep). Kijak considers him “one of the most unique characters in music,” in that he’s “come all that way, and to not just be a rehabilitated 60’s popstar, but someone who has, in a way, denounced the past in order to move forward.”

An excellent overview of Walker’s career, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, plays Sunday at 6:30 at the Granville cinemas, with the director in attendance, I'm told (it will also screen on the 2nd and 11th). It features the testimonials of David Bowie, Brian Eno, and many others who have been influenced or affected by the music of Scott Walker, or played with him; avant garde monocerous horn player Evan Parker even turns up, having been called in by Scott to record on his 1984 album, Climate of Hunter. More exciting, the film has considerable footage of the reclusive Walker performing in studio and talking, in a most relaxed and open fashion, about his music. What follows is an interview I did with Stephen Kijak, a few days before he was to depart for Vancouver...

Allan: What was your history with the music of Scott Walker? When did you first start listening to him?

Stephen: 1991. It was a CD issue of Boychild, which is a compilation that Fontana Records put out. It was the first time Scott Walker stuff had been on CD. Universal released – through Fontana – 1, 2, 3, and 4 on CD in the UK, and did this compilation called Boychild. That was the first thing that I got my hands on. Someone had actually played me the track, “The Old Man’s Back Again,” parenthetically subtitled “Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime,” which is pretty much the coolest title ever to come out of the late 60s. It just hooked me. It’s really a simple case of an obsession, starting at that period, and I just went back... He really became one of the great musical discoveries of my life; I heard in it everything that I was into. As the years ticked on, I just collected more and more, so by the time Tilt came out, I was fully committed to the cause of Scott Walker. Allan: Was Tilt at all unsettling?

Stephen: No – it was thrilling. I loved it. I like really dark, difficult music. I was a bit of a Goth – I liked Einsturzende Neubauten, I liked industrial music, I was into punk, so the noisier elements of it – what people say was dark and impenetrable – just to me was thrilling, that a man who had once done Tony Bennett covers was giving us this pitch black music. It was more like still life painting... I think in the film someone compares him to Francis Bacon, and it’s totally true. It was startling, but thrilling as well.

Allan: Do you have a favourite?

Stephen: I can’t pick, you know? I did the movie. I embrace it all – I had to. Each phase of it holds fascination for me; it’s like – “which side of this diamond do you like the best?” He reflects and refracts all these different things. By default, since I’ve been so immersed in every other period, I’m dipping into the weird 70’s country stuff, just for freshness – that’s the stuff I’m not as familiar with.


Allan: That’s from the vinyl only, unreleased period? (Walker has several albums that he blocks from coming out on CD, I learned from the film. They may, however, have had limited release in Japan, if you can figure out how to order from Amazon Japan. I've done it for some mini-LP style Sun Ra stuff... For example, here's a CD of Til the Band Comes In, selling used on the site for about $200 Cdn. Stretch and We Had It All are quite a bit cheaper, one one CD).

Stephen: Yeah – the album Stretch, for example, has some really great shit on it! He covers Bill Withers, you know, doing “Use Me.” It’s great stuff!

Allan (bursts out laughing): He does “Use Me?!” (Great song - you can hear the original here).

Stephen: He does “Use Me!” Oh my God, it’s so good.

Allan: Did you get to talk to him about why he doesn't want those albums to come back out?

Stephen: We really didn’t get around to it, to be perfectly honest. I mean – he’s not a fan of those records. He does speak about it a bit – it was the imbibing; he was very drunk, he had lost his way. He was trying to find his way back to songwriting and people just wouldn’t let him do it. What do you do, you gotta pay the bills!

Allan: How did you get in touch with him?

Stephen: I’ve been asked this question a lot, and to be honest, how I found his manager’s fax number still remains a mystery to me. I can’t remember how I did it, but somehow I did – I don’t know if it was online, finding a number and changing the digits and getting their phone number. You know what I mean? Just weird detective work eventually got me in touch with the people who manage him. And I just started sending them ideas and introducing myself and seeing if he’d be open to letting me do this film.

Allan: Was he less eccentric than you expected?

Stephen: Completely. Well – I mean, I had done enough research, and I had spent a lot of time with his management, so you start to get a picture of the man through other people, but yeah – you still never really know what you’re going to be confronted with. But there was just something in his manner – he was extremely polite and courteous, just a really nice guy. It kind of dispels all the myths of, kinda, “the Phantom of the Opera of Modern Rock” that a lot of people have in their heads. But that’s not to say that there isn’t still some very weird schism between the really nice man and the really dense and abstract music that’s pouring out of his brain. Which is a zone that I wanted to kind of leave as enigmatic as possible. You can’t explain it away, really, and I didn’t want to. It’s part of his mystique and what makes him an interesting artist.

Allan: Did you see any hints of eccentricity or darkness in the interviews, maybe that didn’t make it into the film?

Stephen: Not really – I mean, the darkness is there. I mean, the man tells you he’s been carrying around this image his whole life of the beaten dead bodies of Mussolini and his mistress.
Allan: Right! I had forgotten about that...

Stephen: That tells you something. That’s something that reverberates through his life, you know? It’s there. I feel like some people want it to be more explicit than it is, but I just think, “Watch the film a bit closer, it’s all in there.” When the man says “My life and my work are the same thing,” that’s the answer, I think.

Allan: Yeah. The only thing I couldn’t make sense of in the film – when Brian Eno is talking about the Walker Brothers' Nite Flights, there seems to be a consensus that that’s a singularly difficult or avant garde album. I can’t really hear that – it seems like pretty standard 70’s pop to me.

Stephen: Well, the song “Nite Flights,” it’s almost like a template for all of New Wave to come, in a way. It feels very much in line with what Bowie and Eno themselves were doing, with Heroes and Low. But I think he’s thinking in particular of the track “The Electrician,” off that album. That just pushes it into another direction, and there’s just a hint that Scott is working on a level that’s a little removed from where pop music would eventually go.
Allan: Was it intimidating or weird contacting Eno or Bowie?

Stephen: It was my idea to get Bowie to executive produce, just because I knew he was such an enthusiastic fan. Yeah – you get a little skittish before Bowie's about to walk into the room. But really, everyone kind of came together around a genuine love of Scott Walker's music, so that kind of set a tone for it all. Eno was great. It was probably one of my favourite interviews to do, just 'cause the man is so fucking smart.

Allan: He's an extremely articulate guy.

Stephen: He's so articulate, and - it was just one of those rare interviews where you could just use everything he said. It could have been the Brian Eno show, he was just so captivating.

Allan: Just something you might find interesting - I saw Eno perform live in Tokyo, in, I think 2001, in a very rare concert appearance, and of all the people I saw perform when I was in Japan - Sonic Youth, David Byrne, Lou Reed, Joe Strummer - he was the only one who had taken the time to work out a speech in Japanese. You could tell he didn't actually know how to speak it, but he had it all written out, introducing his "atarashii ongaku" to the audience - his new music, and his pronunciation was pretty good! It really impressed me, and them, that he did that.
Allan: A final thing. There's a remarkable shot of Scott singing in studio that you used, and you cut away from it to an animation. I was kind of screaming in frustration, because I wanted to see more of it. Did Scott place restrictions on how much footage of him you could use?

Stephen: No, he actually stopped. That's all there is! He sang like, another line, and then he stopped recording. The famous "one take vocals" for this albums - they're really rigorous songs to sing, which probably part of the reason they'll never be done live. He once told me to just get across the songs themselves was just such a feat it would kill him. So... yeah, we used almost every frame of him we had at the mike.

Allan: Are there going to be any really interesting extras on the DVD, when it comes out?

Stephen: Well, the DVD's come out in the UK, and they've done kind of a dumb thing and taken the 25 minutes of Scott Walker interview and put it on a limited edition disc that you can only get through HMV, whereas on the regular disc it's just extra interviews with everybody else. But in North America, we're going to try to cut it a bit differently and we're going to go back in and I'm going to put some extra studio stuff on, because a lot of the fans have been saying that the one thing they really want. The diehards - they want to see him just kind of puttering around the studio. Which our distributors thought, "Oh, that's boring - let's just put more Bowie interview," or something. I'm like - "Ohh, all right. They're paying for it, so we can only argue so much.

Allan: Right.

Stephen: But it's probably going to end up being a case where different DVDs in different territories have different goodies on them. But the British DVD is great, it looks good. We've got the whole lost Neil Hannon interview, which, due to time and editorial constraints, we couldn't use in the film. It'll be a nice package, but we're psyched that it's gonna be coming around on screens and things. It's going to come out in America in January. I think we're still working on a Canadian deal. But uh... if people are tenacious, they can get their hands on it.

Films so far

Brief, informal reactions to a few films - don't want to trouble with putting up links, but it can all be found at http://www.viff.org/ ...

Losers and Winners will reward anyone interested in the description of the film, or concerned with globalisation. I learned more about the Chinese from this than I did from Antonioni's much longer documentary - or any one other film I've seen. Quite funny at times. Shot on video, but you'll forgive it.

Shotgun Stories tells its story well and is quite gripping, with a nicely handled ending and a strong, smart, cinematic eye. Southern poverty, male threat displays, a poisonous snake, and stopping the wheel of karma. A small film, but a pleasure to watch.

The Elephant and the Sea I walked out on. Interesting set up, but the shot-on-video look was getting to me and I was exhausted from the day's previous films and some writing I'd been doing.

Taken for a Ride is a significant, compelling documentary about corporate manipulation of urban planning - basically, it's about how General Motors and the highway lobby fucked up American public transit. It's unfortunately fairly specific to the US (especially LA), but there's a cool NFB thing on cars that screens with it, called The Cars in Your Life, that is brilliantly crafted and surprisingly fun to watch. Everyone in the Bus Rider's Union should go see this.

10+4 is very much in the mode of Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami, but don't be put off that it's a sequel to 10; not having seen 10 won't harm your enjoyment of the film. This is probably one for cinephiles, though - or for people with a personal connection with the theme of breast cancer; the director, Mania Akbari, had lost a breast, and the film is entirely made up of conversations between her and family, friends, and strangers about her feelings about her disease and treatment. Intimate, provocative, and, well, I really like the Kiarostami thing of shooting people riding around in cars; but I ended up napping during the last bit. I really have been wearing myself out lately; it shouldn't be seen as a commentary on the film.

The Matsugane Potshot Affair: pleasantly twisted, subdued Japanese black comedy that surely will be compared to Fargo, tho' the pacing is closer to Jarmusch than the Coens. The film drags you into a familial mess and winkingly sullies you. Lots of quirky humour, and an ambitious step up from the relatively straightforward, equally delightful Linda Linda Linda (by the same director). I agree with friends of mine that both films would've been better 10 minutes shorter, but don't let that stop you from checking this out.

Atonement: (I did not choose to see this film myself, note). I had forgotten, due to long exposure to really good cinema, that a movie could be made with hammers. The sheer lack of subtlety in Atonement -- which proudly leaps from cinematic cliche to cinematic cliche, overstating everything it can -- does a great deal to ruin Ian MacEwan's finely told story of frustrated love and familial meddling. I liked the palette of the film, and the ideas behind it, but nothing else. The audience members who applauded enthusiastically at the end probably watch a lot of TV or something.

Control: I admit to not really knowing the work of Anton Corbijn, but his first film, about Joy Division and the suicide of Ian Curtis, is filled with astonishing and striking compositions, in gorgeous black and white (see the image above, for instance). It's one of the many things that are remarkable about the film, which, one feels, provides a completely authentic (if fictional) visual record of how Manchester looked between 1973 and 1980. The music is also really good, and Sam Riley makes a striking Ian Curtis. Alas, if you need your cinema to be something MORE than a visual experience - if you'd like to be intrigued by the characters, their actions, opinions, and motivations, this film - which filters the story through the perspective of Curtis' widow, who wrote the book on which it is based and co-produced - will not fully satisfy; the dialogue is simple and, while the performances are good, without anything of substance to say, the actors can only do so much. Not what it could have been - though I am singularly hard to please with "lives of the artists" films. Question: this film, like 24 Hour Party People, suggests that Curtis had watched Herzog's Stroszek (a film which ends in suicide) prior to his own suicide. Is that true?

I have one last film to write about - Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (just as soon as I transcribe my interview with the director), and recommend that film to anyone passionate about music, for a glimpse at an unusual career. Check in tomorrow AM for the finished piece. Beyond that, the must-sees on my list at present include Bela Tarr's The Man from London, de Palma's Redaction, van Sant's Paranoid Park, and James Benning's casting a glance. Curious about several others, but these ones are definite... kind of worried about Bruce Sweeney's American Venus, but I'll check that out, too; I've only really loved one of his films, Dirty...