Black Gate

On Wednesday, July 26, I watched three movies at the Fantasia Film Festival. The first, which I’ll write about here, was a documentary about film itself. Or, more precisely, a single movie. Or, even more precisely, a single scene of a single movie. Directed by Alexandre Philippe, 78/52 is a 91-minute film that takes an in-depth look at one of the most famous sequences in cinematic history: the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Opening with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe — “The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” — the movie examines the scene from all angles. We hear about its place in film history, in the context of 1960, in Hitchcock’s career. We hear about its structural significance in Psycho, about its symbolic significance. We learn about the technical processes by which the scene was put together, its edits and sound cues and of course the soundtrack music. We hear an analysis of the acting. And we learn about the reaction of the first audiences to what was one of the most startling moments in film history.

The conceit of the black-and-white film is that we see interviewees in different greenscreen-composited rooms of the Bates Motel discussing different aspects of the scene. I didn’t find that really worked — the lack of interaction between the rooms and interview subjects means there’s no sense of connected space between them — but the material’s strong enough to make up for it. 78/52 presents an in-depth analysis of its subject without being dry or pedantic. Without making too many overstated claims, it effectively establishes the importance of the shower scene. Different perspectives bring out the subtexts at work. The complexity of the scene’s established, and also a sense of mystery, a sense that it has a kind of depth that can’t really be explicated however much it’s talked about.

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On Tuesday, July 25, I watched two movies at the Fantasia Film Festival. One was Atomic Blonde, which I’ve already written about. Right before that, though, I was able to see Death Note: Light Up the New World (Death Note – Desu nôto: Light Up the New World), the latest installment in the live-action Japanese Death Note film series. The movies are of course based on the best-selling manga by writer Tsugumi Ohba and artist Takeshi Obata; three movies have preceded this one, 2006’s Death Note and Death Note: The Last Name along with spin-off Death Note: L Change the World in 2008. There have been anime adaptations, light novels, TV mini-series, and, infamously, a Netflix remake. I cannot claim to be familiar with the source material of the Death Note franchise, but I found myself curious about the film and decided to see how this movie worked as an introduction to the story.

Light Up the New World is the first Death Note film directed by Shinsuke Sato, who helmed the wonderful adaptations of the Library Wars novels. You can see a similar visual sensibility in the lighting and sets, a near-future feel that helps make the fantastic aspects of the story more credible — precisely because the story isn’t grounded in everyday realism, it’s easier to believe. The movie starts with a quick introduction: the lord of death sent a notebook into the world that commands a Reaper, an angel of death named Ryuk (voiced by Shidô Nakamura); Ryuk would kill anyone whose name was written in the book. Pleased with the results of this ploy, Death now sends six books into the world, and awaits results. Which come to a boil some time later, as the movie begins.

There’s a prologue in Russia, then a chase scene in Japan, following a woman running through a crowd scribing names and slaughtering people. This leads to a discussion of the current situation: years after the original Death Note, when a youth named Light Yagami (Tatsuya Fujiwara, reprising his role from the earlier movies) built a false identity as ‘Kira’ and drew a crowd of followers by killing powerful evildoers, someone claiming to be Kira is back at work. Is it really Yagami, returned from the dead, or is someone acting in his name? The Death Note Task Force is reconstituted, and the police set to work desperately trying to track down the new Kira.

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I had two events on my Fantaisa Festival schedule for Monday, July 24. First, I planned to see a stop-motion film from Japan called Junk Head. Then, I’d go to see a presentation by author Grady Hendrix of his book Paperbacks From Hell, about the boom of horror paperbacks in the 70s and 80s. I’d end up speaking briefly with Hendrix after his presentation, which led to my interviewing him for Black Gate; you can see that interview here. So in this post I’ll be talking about Junk Head, an astonishing achievement in science-fiction that well deserves an article to itself.

Junk Head was written and directed by Takahide Hori, who also edited the film, created the soundtrack music, and handled sound effects. He also, with only one or two others (principally Atsuko Miyake), animated the film, did the voice work, and made the puppets and props and sets. By any measure the film’s an accomplishment, and as a near-one-man labour of love, it’s spectacular. Hori uploaded an early version of the film, when it was a half-hour long, to YouTube; you can see it here. The version I saw at Fantasia went on for another hour and 24 minutes, and whether he ends up adding more to it or not — I heard different things, all at second- or third-hand — it tells a complete story. (Thanks to a heads-up from Sandro Forte of Cinetalk.net, I can add that Hori and his team are working on a prequel they’re funding through Kickstarter; I strongly recommend checking the campaign out.)

Title cards at the start of Junk Head give us the background: it’s the far future, when human beings have become effectively immortal by making their bodies inorganic, but as a result cannot reproduce. And now a terrible plague is striking down the world’s population. There’s only one hope. Someone has to be sent into the abysses upon which this future civilization’s built, a labyrinth of tunnels and spaces long since abandoned to clones once used for labour. In the centuries since, the clones have mutated in strange ways, and built their own cultures among the concrete of the lower levels. To save humanity, genetic material from the clones has to be recovered — but how to get genetic material from the seemingly sexless clones? And how are beings not designed to reproduce accomplishing the feat, anyway?

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