Black Gate

My last movie of July 20 was a horror film from South Africa. Written and directed by Harold Holscher, 8 has elements of the classical ghost story embedded in a larger tale of folklore and tragedy. It’s a period tale, set in 1977, and is set in a farm named Hemel op Aarde: Heaven on Earth.

Not long after the start of the film the run-down farm’s inherited by a man named William (Garth Breytenbach), a failed businessman who wants to start over there along with his wife Sarah (Inge Beckmann) and niece Mary (Keita Luna). Mary, who came to live with William and Sarah after the death of her parents, is happy to come to the farm; she’s an inquisitive girl deeply interested in all manner of subjects, including African myth and insects. Sarah doesn’t care for these things, or for having to live far from the big city. William’s difficulty in getting the electricity running at the farm doesn’t help. Luckily, the White family is given a hand by an older Black man named Lazarus (Tshamano Sebe). William’s soon relying on Lazarus for all sorts of things, despite Sarah’s distrust. And despite the distrust of a nearby village of Black people, who know and despise Lazarus, and who have no use for William, either. Is Lazarus hiding a dark secret?

In fact, we know from the opening shots of the movie that he is. And as 8 goes on that mystery is unveiled; unveiled almost too completely for the film to stay a horror story, in fact. There’s an honesty and directness to the film that’s unusual in horror. There are few jump scares, and few horrific twists. Instead there’s an ultimately character-based story that comes close to being a kind of tragedy. You know why people act the way they do, and what Lazarus wants. You understand the price he has to pay for his actions. And you have sympathy for everyone involved.

It’s oddly colourful for a horror movie, too, rich and shadowed, but not afraid of the bright light of the sun. I found approaching it as a horror film left me wrong-footed; the farmhouse, which seems like a spooky haunted house in the early scenes of the movie, becomes less important narratively and thematically as the story goes on. If the usual haunted house seems to have something to say about (for example) class or power or history or the personality that dwells within it, Heaven on Earth comes to have less and less meaning, as the focus of the story increasingly moves away from the main building. What might have been an icon of colonial power is instead just a place where things happen.

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The evening of July 20 saw me stay at the De Sève Theatre after the Born of Woman showcase for a feature film written and directed by Jon Mikel Caballero: The Incredible Shrinking Wknd. It’s a time-loop story, a subgenre that strikes me as having increased in popularity significantly over the past few years. We’re at the point, then, that a time-loop story has to do something different to stand out. So what does Wknd do?

It’s the story of Alba (Iria del Rio), newly turned 30, who’s spending a weekend partying at a cottage in the country with a group of acquaintances as well as her boyfriend of three years or so, Pablo (Adam Quintero). Alba’s generally thoughtless and lives for the day; despite having spent time at the cottage when she was young, she forgets to bring bottled water to a house with no indoor plumbing. Pablo wants something more, and in an argument one night breaks up with Alba. And then, not long after, reality resets and Alba gets to live through the weekend again. And again, and again; and then she notices the weekend’s getting shorter, and the time she has to live through is dwindling.

I’ll note to start with that the movie’s technically well-done. It looks very fine, with colours that establish moods, and a good variety of visually-interesting natural settings. Iria del Rio gives Alba a charismatic energy while making it clear that charisma’s covering up a certain kind of emptiness; there’s less to Alba than there appears, in a nicely-calculated way.

Narratively, the movie’s clever, almost a necessity in a time-loop story. The dialogue’s solid, and there’s a very nice visual idea (best left for the viewer to discover) that brings out the way the weekend’s shrinking. That twist itself is handled well, giving an increasing sense of tension as well as contrasting nicely with Alba’s tendency to care only about the present.

It gets a little odd in that Alba herself doesn’t reset, which becomes a minor plot point. If she gets drunk in one go-round, say, she’s hungover in the next. This is perhaps a way to talk about consequences, but it raises questions about the mechanism by which the time-loop exists in the first place and whether matter’s actually being transported through time. This is a film largely uninterested in such questions, though, and indeed the lack of concern with why the loop exists and why it works as it does is one of The Incredible Shrinking Wknd’s more frustrating aspects.

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On the afternoon of Saturday, July 20, I passed by the De Sève Theatre for the Born of Woman 2019 series of short genre films directed by women. It was the fourth iteration of the showcase, and in four years it’s become a hot ticket; I nearly didn’t get in. But there was just space enough in the end, and so I was able to see the collection of 9 films representing half-a-dozen countries.

The showcase started with “Lili,” a 9-minute piece written and directed by Yfke Van Berckelaer. An actress (Lisa Smit), Lili, comes to audition for a role. The camera’s fixed on her, the man (Derek De Lint) she’s reading for unseen. He seems receptive to what she brings on her first reading, but has her try the dialogue again, and again, pushing her more and more. You can see what’s coming, and what the reversal will be, but the movie works because the slowly pushing-in camera’s a disturbingly effective point of view, because Smit in particular is very good in her part, and because the dialogue’s cleverly and subtly ironic.

The art of sequencing a short film showcase can be overlooked, but in this case the arrangement of the shorts (most of which, in my opinion, were extremely strong to start with) was perfect. A good case in point was following “Lili” with the melancholic “Sometimes, I Think About Dying,” a 12-minute story from director Stefanie Abel Horowitz from a play by Kevin Armento, adapted by Horowitz, Armento, and Katy Wright-Mead, who also stars. It’s the story of Fran (Wright-Mead), a quiet, depressed woman who makes a connection with a male co-worker, Robert (Jim Sarbh). Will she be able to come out of her shell enough to maintain a relationship?

The movie’s almost unbearably painful in its portrait of a woman lacking in self-confidence. At the same time, Fran’s oddly sympathetic, so that by extension Robert feels like a lifeline for her. The orbit of the two of them is well-crafted, and the film really lands solidly because it knows where to end — not just what point of the story, but what seems like the exact right frame of film to end on.

Then different again was Australian writer-director Adele Vuko’s “The Hitchhiker,” about three women driving through the night to reach a music festival. Jade (Liv Hewson), the driver, picks up a hitchhiker (Brooke Satchwell), in part to distract her friends from innocent questions cutting near to a secret Jade doesn’t wish to reveal. The hitchhiker has a secret of her own, though, which only becomes clear once the friends pull in to a roadside bar.

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On Saturday, July 20, I was down at the Hall Theatre bright and early — relatively speaking — for an 11 AM showing of Ride Your Wave (Kimi to, nami ni noretara, きみと、波にのれたら), an animated feature from director Masaaki Yuasa. I’d seen two of Yuasa’s previous works, Lu Over the Wall and the excellent Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, and was eager to see what was in store this time around. As it turns out, Ride Your Wave, written by Reiko Yoshida, is a solid story that in a quiet way keeps doing unexpected things. It’s a romance, and then it isn’t; it’s a realistic story, and then it really isn’t. It’s a little reminiscent of Night Is Short, but is nowhere near as strange as that movie. Still, it does what it does quite well.

It follows Hinako (Rina Kawaei), a surfer and oceanography student, as she moves back to the coastal town where she lived as a child in order to go to university. There, she meets Minato (Ryôta Katayose), a young firefighter. They embark on an intense relationship — and then things go awry. It is in what happens next that the film perhaps gains its identity, though it’s worth preserving the twist that sets it up; enough to say that the supernatural manifests through water, in a kindly way. The question, then, is where the characters go, and particularly how Hinako will develop as a person.

That sounds vague, and Ride Your Wave isn’t. But it does take enough surprising turns it’s difficult to talk about as a story without giving away things better left to the film. So let me say this: it consistently nails the emotional tones it tries to evoke, and is a solidly-built story with a theme that slowly emerges of Hinako’s personal growth. It is a movie about her self-realisation, her coming of age, and it manages that in a surprising and touching way. It is a movie about sacrifice, and heroism, and letting things go, and it powerfully combines them all in Hinako’s story and background.

(I will note that there is one peculiar note. We learn something about how Minato and Hinako first met, or at least when they first met, that Minato knows but does not reveal to Hinako. It’s an odd choice to have him not tell her this thing, though it’s perhaps true that it comes to nothing. Still, it darkens Minato in a way I’m not sure was intended, turning him into a keeper of secrets, however benign.)

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There’s something about movies that fascinates us, likely because we’re so addicted to dreams we need them even awake. Whether laughing, crying, thinking, or longing, we need these special lenses to show our individual places within the world, to shape, guide, and make us — for a couple hours — want to be more than who we are.

Let’s look at a few movies that do precisely that so well, they transcend their medium.

LIFE

Life perplexes. Life mystifies. It teases, enraptures, amazes, enrages, and ultimately silences. The best films to capture the messy grandeur of life do all those things. The endings may not be clear-cut, the scripts at times largely improvised, characters will behave in ways we might not have predicted, but we love these movies for the heart they provide in an often uncomfortable world.

Amelie

If you’re one who never thought they’d see Amelie featured on Black Gate, welcome to Zig world. Everything is chance, even when we plan. Everything is wonderful, even when we cry. What if you could ensure that a life here and a life there would turn out a little brighter because of something you did? Would you do it? Amelie, by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, is a delightful fantasy of questions accompanied by a sense of wonder, one that reinforces the truth that just because life isn’t tidy doesn’t mean we can’t tidy our corners of it.

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My second and last movie on July 19 was a documentary named for its subject: J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius (a film known in some quarters as Slacking Towards Bethlehem). Directed by Sandy K. Boone, it’s a history of a mock religion which got started more than 40 years ago, and still goes strong today.

It was begun by two bright misfit young men in the late 1970s, when Douglas Smith AKA Ivan Stang and Steve Wilcox AKA Philo Drummond took on aliases and began writing satirical pamphlets outlining the gospel and worldview of the Church of the Subgenius. They swiftly developed a specific tone and weird doctrine, praising the figure of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, a piece of 1950s advertising clip art. “Bob” (there must always be quotation marks around his name) represented a quality called ‘slack,’ which was never really defined except that it was a good thing to have; organised religions, by contrast, did not have slack. At any rate, the Church of the Subgenius developed a complex set of myths around gods, mutants, and aliens, and began selling their pamphlets through the mail. They came along at the right time to take advantage of zine culture as it developed through the 80s, and more and more people wrote away for their strange handmade tracts sending up the whole idea of mythology and religion. Live events followed, including annual “devivals” at which the end of the world is expected and awaited with joy. All the while the Church maintained its basic parodic aim and attitude, and, still in existence, keeps up that attitude in the face of an increasingly bizarre reality.

The movie tells us the story of the Church through a basically chronological structure. There are extensive interviews with Church members, especially the two founders. Ivan Stang is the more voluble, slightly manic with an odd edge, a recurring figure through the documentary that anchors the film. There are also interviews with well-known members of the Church, like Paul Mavrides, Alex Cox, Richard Linklater, and Penn Jillette. And there is a lot of archival footage, some of it taken by members of the Church and some of it footage from TV news shows showing baffled reporters trying to cover a Church event.

There’s a certain amount of care taken to explain to the wired world the zine subculture of the 1980s. The Church of the Subgenius took off in that context, reaching people who risked sending a dollar to a perfect stranger to get something weird in exchange. In the days before the internet, zines were a way for largely-bright and largely-young people to connect with each other, with the Church perhaps one of the odder examples of this alternative culture. Time having passed, it has also proved one of the longer-lasting.

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On the evening of July 19 I sat down in the Hall Theatre for a screening of It Comes (Kuru, 来る), a Japanese horror film. Directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, it’s based on the novel Bogiwan ga kuru, by Ichi Sawamura, with a screenplay by Nakashima, Hideto Iwai, and Nobuhiro Monma. It’s clever and colourful, and at two and a half hours it’s also a sprawling film that justifies its length by twisting in ways you don’t expect. It’s also a success, an entertaining and occasionally chilling movie that builds a universe without being too detailed about the supernatural horror lurking beyond consensus reality.

After a mysterious intro, the film starts with Hideki (Satoshi Tsumabuki) and Kana (Haru Kuroki), an apparently perfect young couple. Various bits of supernatural foreshadowing lead to the birth of their baby girl, Chisa, and Hideki throws himself into becoming the perfect father. But forces from his past are gathering, targeting Chisa. A friend, a professor of folklore named Tsuga (Munetaka Aoki, the Rurouni Kenshin movies) brings him to a disreputable writer, Nozaki (Jun’ichi Okada, Library Wars), and his spirit-medium girlfriend Makoto (Nana Komatsu, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures). But will even they be enough to stop the evil coming for Hideki and Chisa?

This all just hints at the complexities of the plot, best experienced unspoiled. It Comes is an incredibly well-structured and well-paced movie that builds through a good collection of horror set-pieces and quieter character-driven moments to a stunning large-scale climax boasting one of the most fascinating examples of religious syncretism I’ve seen on film. At the very end, it has one of the most charming visual moments I’ve ever seen to indicate that the supernatural’s been thoroughly dealt with.

It is important that it be so well-crafted, I think, because as it builds it goes to some very strange places. The colours are lurid, slowly growing more so. And the film does not hesitate to increasingly explore genre as the film goes on, as well; Hideki and Kana are more-or-less real people when we meet them, and then Tsuga is a perhaps little more than real, and then Nozkaki and Makoto more than that, and then when we meet Makoto’s sister Kotoko we meet a character on another level of genre reality. And yet the tones work. The operatic feel of the high genre strangeness is fused to the everdayness of the young parents. And the story of the baby facing possession is given a weird grandeur by the surreal witchery that must be enlisted to fight the bogeyman threatening the child.

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My last film of July 18 was in the big Hall Theatre. Knives and Skin was written and directed by Jennifer Reeder, and begins as a girl dies a violent death in a small midwestern town. In the wake of her disappearance secrets begin to come to light, and tensions rise among both her classmates and the adults. The movie proceeds to explore the town and its inhabitants in a series of sometimes-linked vignettes.

I have to say up front that I had a wildly different reaction to this film than the rest of the theatre did. The crowd was, by and large, audibly positive. This is a movie that has clear feminist principles, and is very direct about putting them on the screen. To judge not just from the reaction during the screening but the question-and-answer period after, many viewers responded to that, and good for them. Personally I didn’t care for the movie. I am going to explain why, but it’s important to note that this is a film that has the potential to work much better for people who are not me.

At its core, I felt that the dramatic structure of the film did not work. The various scenes did not seem to work as an ensemble, and individual characters did not have stories that felt fully developed. Much of the more interesting events that did happen had no obvious connection with the disappearance and death of Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley). The movie felt to me like a series of short films, or ideas for short films, that did not cohere.

For example, near the end of the film the high schoolers who we’ve more-or-less followed through the film hear that one of their friends is on top of the school and might be about to jump. A group of a half-dozen or so teens gather out front of the school. It turns out that the youth on the roof isn’t going to jump, he just liked the view because it’s one of the few places he could see the road out of town. This is a problem for a number of reasons, but the first one is that a longing to get out of the town has not really been touched on or explored earlier in the film. It’s a perfectly credible motivation, but with no set-up or development it feels oddly gratuitous.

Then you wonder why, if this young man liked looking at the road out of town, nobody noticed the youth going up to the roof on any previous occasion. This brings up another problem: this town does not feel like a community of people who’ve known each other all their lives. People are too easily surprised by each other, or know too little about each other.

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Before my second film of July 18, a surreal science-fiction movie from the director of Crumbs, I had time to catch a panel discussion. Returning Life to the Departed: Adventures in Genre Cinema Restoration was moderated by Heather Buckley, producer of films and of DVD supplements, who introduced David Gregory of Severin Films (also director of Blood and Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, which Buckley produced), Joe Rubin of Vinegar Syndrome, and, by Skype, James White of Arrow Films. All those companies preserve, restore, and reissue vintage genre, exploitation, and cult movies.

I’m not going to go through the entire panel because it was filmed, and you can find it on Fantasia’s Facebook page. I do want to note a few highlights. Buckley asked the panel at one point how their restoration process evolved and how they did what they did, and Gregory made the point that there was no one way to restore a film as it had to depend on what materials of the original are available. Sometimes those materials might be so bad that the film might look like it wasn’t worth putting out (he cited The House on Straw Hill), but the flip side is that those materials will only get worse until the film is lost (for Straw Hill he talked about cobbling together a version from two prints and a mold- and water-damaged negative). The ideal was to work from the original camera negative or something that had been protected in a lab. Rubin agreed, but noted for exploitation films the negative often doesn’t exist. Every project will have its own issues and shortcomings and things the restorer will have never had to deal with before. He talked about how low-budget movies did not usually get to have a timer sit with the cinematographer or director when the first prints were made to make sure the film looked right. Gregory noted that often the director or cinematographer will often say that a restored film is the best that film has ever looked.

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I expected my last film of July 16 would be a documentary called Blood & Flesh – The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson. You may not have heard of Adamson. I hadn’t. He was an exploitation filmmaker in the 1960s and 70s, responsible for titles like Satan’s Sadists, The Naughty Stewardesses, and Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, as well as not one but two separate films titled Psycho a Go-Go (Technically, one was Psycho à Go-Go; note accent). Introducing the documentary, Fantasia co-Director Mitch Davis described Adamson as more of a hustler than a filmmaker, then called up director David Gregory to briefly explain the film’s genesis. Gregory said it began as a special feature for a Blu-ray release, but the more he investigated Adamson, the more he realised the material was worth digging into more deeply. Thus, it’s now a feature, covering Adamson’s life, the films he made, and his awful death.

(Before the documentary played, we saw “When Larry Met Stanley,” a six-minute short directed by Katy Jensen and Mike Leans. It features Larry Cohen, an independent B-movie director, recounting directly to the camera an anecdote about the time he met Stanley Kubrick, when Kubrick was just starting out as a director. It’s a cute story, and Cohen, who passed away earlier this year, tells it well.)

Blood & Flesh opens at the end, with Adamson’s murder. It then goes back to work its way back through Adamson’s life. He was the son of a B-movie actress and B-movie director, and got his start in film working with his father. He later teamed with producer Sam Sherman to set up Independent-International Pictures, turning out grindhouse schlock through the 60s and 70s, chasing whatever was in the zeitgeist — biker films like Satan’s Sadists, blaxploitation like Black Samurai, softcore sexploitation like Naughty Stewardesses.

He withdrew from film as the industry changed in the late 70s, emerging briefly to make never-released “documentaries” about alien visitations, which he apparently believed in. Then, in 1995, he went missing. His body was soon found. He had been murdered by his live-in handyman. The case was briefly a media sensation, apparently a case of life imitating art: the director of cheap horror films brutally killed.

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