Black Gate

On Friday, July 28, I had two films on my schedule at the Fantasia Festival. The first was a German period crime film with biographical aspects, a movie called Fritz Lang that imagined the great director of the title mixed up with the killings that would shape his now-classic film M. The second was a screening of George Romero’s 1973 film The Crazies, arranged quickly by the festival’s organizers as a tribute following Romero’s death only 12 days before. Together the movies would make for a day that, to me, exemplified much of what is best in Fantasia: a profound appreciation of film history of every kind, mixed with challenging genre artistry.

Fritz Lang was directed by Gordian Maugg from a script he worked on with Alexander Häusser. Opening in 1929, the black-and-white film follows director Fritz Lang (Heino Ferch) in the wake of the relative failure of a string of Lang’s films, including his pioneering science-fiction movies Metropolis and Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon). Casting about for a new idea for a film that will satisfy him artistically and also make money, Lang hears about a series of murders in the city of Düsseldorf. He grows fascinated by the killings, and travels to Düsseldorf to take a hand in the investigation. But why is he so drawn to the lurid crimes?

There’s a kernel of reality in Fritz Lang. Lang did research the Düsseldorf killings, and they did partially inspire his next film, M (though at times Lang would downplay the link, pointing to other murders he researched). The movie at hand greatly expands Lang’s involvement with the murders, and invents any number of scenes in which he interacts with the police and killer. That’s fair enough for a historical drama, but at the same time the film’s primarily interested in what makes Lang tick — why he’s drawn to make a story of the killings, and how those killings parallel events in his life. In order to make those parallels dramatically forceful, the movie then has to dramatise certain events in Lang’s life which in reality are to an extent mysterious. Again there’s nothing wrong with that. But it does make for an odd and at times uneasy blend of period mystery and biopic.

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On Thursday, July 27, I planned to watch two films at the Fantasia International Film Festival. First, an artistically ambitious movie from the Philippines called Town In A Lake (Matangtubig). Then, later in the evening, a documentary about the quest to develop nuclear fusion technology called Let There Be Light. Both looked to be about the mysteries of the universe, in very different ways.

Directed by Jet Leyco and written by Brian Gonzales, Town In A Lake takes place in a small isolated town in the Philippine jungle with an official crime rate of zero. Until, as the movie opens, two girls are abducted. One is later found dead. The crime draws the attention of the national and international media, which descends on the town, disrupting the locals’ lives and mourning. Meanwhile, the investigation into the crime goes on. Who committed this evil, and why? Can there be a wholly natural explanation for it, coming on the heels of so much peace?

Watching Town In A Lake is only part of the experience of the film. It’s a story that doesn’t provide easy explanations, or even that much in the way of conventional character-centred drama. There are characters, and there is what is effectively a mystery story that ultimately takes on aspects beyond the merely rational. But these things emerge over the course of the film’s 88 minutes; we assemble the bits we’re given, the sounds and images we experience, and make the pieces make sense even as we’re absorbed by the sensory depth of the movie. This is a meditative experience, with long takes and subtle camera moves and a rich soundscape. Still, I found it took some pondering to understand (and I want here to express my thanks to filmmakers Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Gabriela MacLeod as well as critic Kurt Halfyard for a useful discussion after the film that clarified many things for me). There is a good argument that in attempting to understand what we see rationally, in attempting to work it out like a logic puzzle, one does not take the best approach to the film — that in so doing we come like the outsider media, imposing our own frames of understanding on matter that is richer and more allusive than can be explained by words and reason. “Relax,” runs one line of dialogue, “thinking won’t get you anywhere.” On the other hand, there is a counter-argument that if this is so, any explanation will be self-evidently insufficient, that the emotional and sensory resonance will naturally and necessarily dwarf the meaning of the logic. So it is here, I think. You can work out a perfectly sound explanation of what’s happening onscreen. But there is always more than the explanation can resolve. There are always more mysteries.

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I wrote the other day about 78/52, the first movie I saw at Fantasia on Wednesday, July 26. It played at the De Sève Theatre, the smaller of the two main Fantasia cinemas, and as it happened I’d see two more movies there the same day. The first was an Estonian movie (technically an Estonian-Dutch-Polish co-production) called November, a period piece set among Northern forests, rich in folklore and cinematic beauty. The second was a documentary called Tokyo Idols, about the Tokyo-centred industry of young female pop singers.

November was written and directed by Rainer Sarnet from the novel Rehepapp by Andrus Kivirähk. Shot in a sumptuous black and white, it shows us an Estonian peasant village in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, isolated among the deep woods, ruled by a family of Germans. We see the grinding poverty of pre-industrial village life and we see the German lords in their rich but decaying manor house. More significantly, perhaps, we see the world of spiritual forces and witchcraft within which the peasants live. Dead souls return to share a feast. Witches can teach a girl to take the shape of a wolf. Hidden treasures lurk under floorboards. Plagues take human form. And you can sell your soul to the devil to get a servant made of scraps of wood and other leftovers, a thing called a kratt; if you’re really cunning, if you know the trick of it, maybe you can cheat the devil and get away with your soul intact.

Against this rich background we see a love triangle develop. Liina (Rea Lest) is love with Hans (Jörgen Liik) who himself has his heart set on the German baroness. In and around this are other subplots and anecdotes of village life. A man becomes obsessed with the maid of the manor house. Older people see what might have in their own lives as Liina pursues Hans. Hans, meanwhile, also aspires to be a poet. But if he sells his soul for love, can he ever become the writer he wants to be?

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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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