Jiřina Bohdalová as Ona/She, in The Murder of Mr Devil (Ester Krumbachová, 1970)
Function, allure and even murder. From housewives to manic pixie dream girls, the humble tights (or nylons, pantyhose, hoses – your preference, really1) have enjoyed a cinematic representation any star would envy. One such time capsule of the interwoven nature of nylons on film is Ester Krumbachová’s The Murder of Mr Devil(1970). Despite the implied supernatural elements at play otherwise, The Murder of Mr Devil highlights a gorgeous intersection of practical fashion and seductive personal style. Arguably, Ona’s2 (Jirina Bohdalová) consistent commitment to opaque black tights is born from necessity, as the only window in her flat seems to be consistently open (or have no glass at all?). Choosing to sleep in a fetching mint-coloured negligee paired with thick, black tights suggests a determination to preserve her own subtly opulent style despite the cold.
From Sybil Seely’s thick, black undergarments in One Week (Edward F Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) – an accurate depiction of the era’s necessary, sturdy housewifing attire – to generations of superhero films3, tights continue to tangle with cinema in the spin and drain of culture. Although tights, in various fabrics, forms and fashions, date back to as early as the 16th century, the rising hemlines of the 1920s saw a rise in their popularity – just in time for the new era of modern populist “sound” cinema. Tights, in classic black form, playful patterns and alluring sheer variants, have been captured on film across nations, classes and evolving trends.
The classique black tights, sheer or opaque, as the understated practical foundation or intimately suggestive fashion choice of (predominantly) women’s outfits, is the baseline of tights’ on-screen representation. But to limit their importance to simply practical items would be to omit some of their most interesting uses – and cinematic heritage – as indicators of personal style, identity-obscuring disguises and opportune murder weapons.
Poster for Black Tight Killers (Yasuharu Hasebe, 1966)
Mundanity as style or, perhaps more accurately, style despite mundanity, is exemplified in Ona’s commitment to tights as partners to her vastly varying hemlines, from micro to maxi, throughout The Murder of Mr Devil. Sybil Seely’s mid-calf plaid number paired with black tights in One Week is more plain than Ona’s also predominantly house-bound wardrobe. Tights as an item of allure can transform experiences and actions of mundanity. Ona’s legs in high-slit maxi dresses or full legs out in micro dresses are enhanced, not obfuscated, through the wearing of tights, bringing an intentional sensuality to daily mundane activities. Valérie Kaprisky as Ethel in La Femme Publique (Andrzej Żuławski, 1984) is another gorgeous example. Ethel transforms and traverses French domestic and the urban landscape in draped thigh-split dresses, revealing a suggestive lack of underwear.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, slits, or an explict erotic je ne sais quoi, isn’t necessary to ensure tights wow on screen. In fact, a skirt, or even bottoms, isn’t required at all. Judy Garland, as Jan Falbury, in Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950) delivers one of the most, if not the most, iconic moments for tights in cinema. Wearing a white shirt, black blazer, matching black fedora and only sheer black tights and heels on bottom, Garland belts out Get Happy. The sheer, perfect, tights contrast with the otherwise masculine, structured look without softening it, giving Garland as powerful and impactful a silhouette as the men in full suits alongside her.
Another powerful and impactful on-screen presence of black tights can be seen in the aptly named Black Tight Killers (Yasuharu Hasebe, 1966), with a gang of women utilising the practical nature of tights whilst still being able to cut an imposing shape in their matching leather jackets. A classic black tight, good enough to serve lunch in, good enough to kill in.
Ona’s only departure from classic black tights comes as she sits atop a large bag of raisins, gleeful in her fiendish activities, legs protruding from the thigh-high side splits of her floor-length brown dress. Her tights mirror this unbridled energy, a self-expression of freedom. Cinematic departures from plain tights often embody this type of woman, or girlish, freedom. Although not the first style trend/s to do so, a filmography encapsulating “twee” or, to be era-specific in the terminology, “indie” styles of (often young) women (somewhat leaning into the “manic pixie dream girl” trope) presents impressive and eclectic on-screen tights in varying patterns and colours; the blue tights of Jordana (Yasmin Paige) in Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2011), Eve’s (Emily Browning) black polka dot tights in God Help The Girl (Stuart Murdoch, 2014), Enid’s red tiger-striped tights to match her monochrome red outfit in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) and, of course, Clementine’s (Kate Winslet) remembered/imagined childhood green tights in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004).
Indie/twee film tights in their natural home, Tumblr.
Tights as fashion items can convey personal identity but they can also be a useful tool in the obfuscation of identity. Tights4 as disguises for illegal activities, predominantly robberies in various forms, take on the purpose of distorting rather than enhancing personal features. Early examples of this visual shorthand for mischief, malice or both, seen in Plunder Road (Hubert Cornfield, 1957) and Strongroom (Vernon Sewell, 1962), have a rather unsettling quality about them. The tights in these instances create an opaque, smooth plane, devoid of recognisable characteristics, the contours of the faces beneath creating shadows which, in the black and white images, present as sinister, almost non-human.
Perhaps more likely to be recalled when thinking of this visual motif is the use of sheer tights, which do lesss to truly hide one’s identity and more to pull at and rearrange, in funhouse-mirror-style, existing features. Walter Grauman’s Lady in a Cage (1964) leans into this unsettling quality. As a gang terrorises a trapped, well-to-do woman, the uncanny nature of their faces distorted through tights lends further unease to their acts and intentions.
James Caan as Randall, in Lady in a Cage (Walter Grauman, 1964)
This can create comical non-concealment of identity, such as Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona (Ethan Coen, 1987), with his character Hi McDunnough’s unmistakable features shining through. Another Cage pic, Wild At Heart (David Lynch, 1987), again leans towards the sinister in its use of nylons, with Cage’s short-lived partner Bobby Peru’s (Willem Dafoe) grotesque features emphasised by the not-nearly-thick enough barrier between him, his victims and us as the audience5. A special mention must also go to Tom Noonan as Francis Dollarhyde in Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1989), whose use of a sheer tight mask from his nose upwards seems to be used solely in aid of enhancing his creepy persona.
From the head of a murderer to their hands, tights can again be transformed, this time into weapons. Fetish content aside (e.g. Silk Stocking Strangler, William Hellfire, 2002), the use of tights as a weapon seems to come from the same place as their most basic use as clothing – practicality, since they are most often in reach as the victim is almost always a woman.Although not always, as highlighted in The Nylon Noose (Rudolf Zehetgruber, 1963), a tail of tights-based murders with far more bizarre, fantastical things happening alongside.
The Nylon Noose (Die Nylonschlinge, Rudolf Zehetgruber, 1963)
The Strangler (Burt Topper, 1964) draws inspiration not from the fantastic but from sadly horrific reality – the series of 13 murders, 1962-64, by a killer nicknamed The Boston Strangler6. Topper manages to reenact, with creative liberties, the real-life details of stockings as murder weapons in a sensualist and somewhat dehumanising manner to the (recently) deceased women, something for which cinema proves adept at unfortunately often. Fatal Pulse (Anthony J Christopher, 1988), a represenative example, draws on this theme of women as disposable items, beginning, in an almost parody of the slasher genre, with a topless blonde-haired woman scrambling from an assailant in her bedroom, only to be undone by her own white lace stockings.
Fatal Pulse (Anthony J Christopher, 1988)
The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975) sees the (implied) death of yet another woman, as the robotic duplicate of protagonist Joanna (Katharine Ross) twists tights taut in her hands, having been discovered. In this context, tights act as a tool of distancing from the violence the men of the town are undertaking upon their wives. Tights as tools of violence seem particularly gruesome, the weaponising of an inconspicuous object so closely tied to women’s daily lives, self-expression and sexual allure.
Katharine Ross as “Joanna”, in The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975)
Tights hold the ability to express the expected duality of womanhood – the dutiful housewife, whose aesthetics and dress are led by practicality and function, and the whore, dressed only to attract. Ona’s wardrobe and style in The Murder of Mr Devil doesn’t necessarily rest on tights, but they are the often overlooked foundation, a necessary element of life, like food or wooden furniture legs, without which everything becomes unstable.
Megan Mitchell
Weird Weekend present The Murder of Mr Devil on Friday 26th July, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Specific styles and variants which fall into the broad ‘tights’ family have been limited or omitted in this article, including stockings and fishnets (as they relate to showgirls, sex workers, fashion subcultures and women’s sexuality) and footless tights/leggings, as they truly deserve their own attention, and even lengthy articles. ↩︎
Ona is simply “She” in Czech; we’ve retained the original language throughout for the purposes of readability. ↩︎
Iconic Adam West’s Batman (Leslie H Martinson, 1966) may be the go-to mental image for this, and arguably – although pretty thick and more legging-like – Christopher Reeve’s Superman (1978-1983). ↩︎
NB this could arguably fall exclusively under “stockings”. However, inclusion is permitted with the understanding that identification of tights vs stockings, post-robbery modification – i.e. if tights have been cut to allow for ease of use – would be difficult. ↩︎
Coincidentally, Frederick Elmes noted his somewhat experimental use of tights stretched across the camera’s lens to create a subtle, dream-like effect for Wild At Heart during a post-screening Q&A at NYC’s Metrograph, April 13th 2024. ↩︎
Other filmic adaptations of this crime include The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968) and Boston Strangler (Matt Ruskin, 2023). ↩︎
When you read Divinity director Eddie Alcazar saying, “There is no script for this film,”1 for most armchair experts, that’s a big, flapping red flag. According to DC Studios CEO James Gunn, shooting with unfinished scripts is “the number one reason for the deteriorating quality of feature films.” Since taking on his new role, Gunn’s vowed not to green light a film until it has a finished script. Hollywood’s endemic lack of respect for screenplays (and their creators) is so notorious, though, that the mission statement is news, rather than the insight. Akira Kurosawa is oft-quoted in the same vein:
“With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.”
Of course, even the best scripts are far from sacrosanct. Film-makers often need to rip them up due to budget or scheduling constraints, unforeseen challenges with locations, or any other random adversities that impinge on production. Planned reshoots are standard stages in a big-budget film’s schedule and “we’ll fix it in post” a well-worn cliché. Even if all of those words make it to the edit suite as intended, whole pages, sequences, storylines can ultimately be stripped out, needs must.
Of his own accord, Barry Keoghan in Saltburn (Emerald F’nell, 2023)
Some of the most famous moments in popular cinema were unscripted or unplanned too, from now-notorious episodes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984) and Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023) to iconic lines like, “I’m walkin’ here!”, “Here’s Johnny!” and “Here’s looking at you, kid.”2 Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s screenplay for The Blair Witch Project (1999) was only 35 pages along and the dialogue intended to be entirely improvised, an approach which later influenced the production of Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (2010). Christopher Guest’s mockumentary ouevre showcases largely improvised dialogue, from Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap (1984), through his own Waiting For Guffman (1996) to Mascots (2016). And then there’s the improv-heavy, “line-o-rama” approach, proven and popularised by writer/producer/director Judd Apatow, where performers are given free rein in front of the camera to riff on and develop what’s on the page.
Closest to Divinity, in some ways, is Coherence, James Ward Byrkit’s well-received 2o13 sci-fi thriller, carefully planned but filmed without a script and with an improvising cast. Byrkit has explained:
Instead of a script I had my own 12-page treatment that I spent about a year working on. It outlined all of the twists and reveals, and character arcs and pieces of the puzzle that needed to happen scene-by-scene. But each day, instead of getting a script, the actors would get a page of notes for their individual character, whether it was a backstory or information about their motivations… The goal was to get them listening to each other, and engaged in the mystery of it all.3
Poster for Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973), by G. Dedieu
Other film-makers make a virtue of sparse or non-existent scripts, from page to screen. Screenplays are evidently much more than dialogue but, in those terms alone, there are films which are purposefully laconic. JC Chandor’s All Is Lost (2013) contains only 195 words in all its 106 minutes, and only 154 of those words for solo star Robert Redford.4 Luc Besson’s Le Dernier Combat (1983) contains only two. Not to entirely gloss over generations of silent movies (and their later tributes and homages), but there are many modern films that prioritise visual storytelling without aping young cinema. There are a number of films that indulge in sublingual dialogue, like Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973), Steve Oram’s Aaaaaaaah! (2015), Sasquatch Sunset (David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, 2024) or the gibberish stylings of Nude Tuesday (Armağan Ballantyne, 2022). There are more generally meditative works, works of slow cinema and, of course, the haiku-like screenplay for Walter Hill’s The Driver, “the purest I ever wrote”.
Excerpts from Walter Hill’s script for The Driver (1978)
However, the received wisdom is that to start production without a full script (consensus seems to be somewhere around 20-25,000 words, though they tend to be measured in pages, roughly one per-screen-minute) is to court certain disaster. Many notable box office successes with a reportedly slipshod approach to pre-preparedness – e.g. Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008)5, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)6, Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)7 – contradict that, though. And recently, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie method for developing the Mission: Impossible films has flipped the concept on its head, purposefully devising, developing and even shooting the action set-pieces before a narrative framework has been decided in order to make sense of them.8
For Alcazar, though, shooting without a full script is simply a different mode of film-making, hewing more closely to his voluminous storyboards and informed by the stop-start nature of his production, principle photography stretching to a year, “over the course of seven different shoots.” As he describes:
I shot a bit, edited for two or three months, then shot again, because I wasn’t really confined by a script. I had my storyboards, but I wanted to leave it open for new and fresh ideas.My biggest goal is try to figure out a way to make films that don’t deny any creative ideas. It just sucks when you’re like, “Damn, I should have done this.”9
Actors, inevitably, had to sign on without even the promise of a standard blueprint. Lead actor Stephen Dorff was given just 30-40 pages of a script for Divinity, from which he then observed Alcazar “embellishing the idea”1. For Bella Thorne, in the admittedly much smaller role of Ziva, there was no script at all. Noting Divinity was also shot on film11, Dorff concluded, “[Alcazar] basically took some of the most challenging things and decided to make a movie with all of them. But that is what makes Eddie Eddie, and what makes this film dynamic and exciting.”
We’re used to hearing about how central storyboards and pre-vis are to modern film-making, especially fantastic or genre cinema, so perhaps it’s easy to imagine a tightly-visualised production where the action is locked down and the dialogue either spontaneous or superfluous, depending where we find ourselves on the spectrum of Alcazar’s “fresh ideas”. According to Divinity cinematographer and frequent Alcazar collaborator Danny Hiele, though, that’s not quite the case:
We did have storyboards, but they serve more as a general reference rather than a shot-for-shot blueprint. When the actors are on set and run through a scene, that’s when things really take shape. The storyboard informs us of basic needs like close-ups or wide shots. In essence, it’s like free jazz: we have a team and a general theme, and we improvise within that framework without going off on a tangent.
A key way that Divinity differs from Coherence, say, is that it was funded entirely, albeit modestly, by Steven Soderbergh, with no conditions. The results, inevitably, speak for themselves, but one through line in the praise and criticism of Divinity is the conclusion (or perhaps concession?) that it’s “best understood as a vibe”12, in the broader grand tradition of midnight movies – it needs to be experienced, among people, not read like a book – though perhaps that’s an easy shrug to “style-over-substance” criticism.
One thing we can assume, for better or worse, is that Divinity is exactly the film Alcazar (whose background is in VFX and 3D animation) wanted to make, whether he knew it or not. Curiously, though, for such an evidently auteurish approach, one of Alcazar’s drivers is the desire to cede control. Eschewing a more traditional script was a deliberate step towards that:
In visual effects, you do have full control over everything. You’re literally working in a 3D space where every character is a puppet. You move them frame by frame and you look at every detail. The reason I got into filmmaking was just so I don’t have to do all that stuff. With characters especially, I want to be surprised. I want people to surprise me with their performances, or whatever area they’re in while we create the film.13
So, no-script film-making is not new, nor is it necessarily out-of-fashion, but it’s still rare to intentionally barrel into principal photography with no script and no intention to write one. In this regard, the teachings of Scott Shaw, author, actor, filmmaker, composer, artist, journalist, photographer, blogger, erstwhile martial artist and proponent of Zen Filmmaking14, are instructive. In his own words:
The impetus for the birth of Zen Filmmaking occurred after the first weekend of production on The Roller Blade Seven. [Director Donald G Jackson] and I were very disappointed with the performances of the massive cast we had hired to take part in the film. We looked at each other and realized that the majority of them did not have the talent to truly pull-off the roll of the character they had been assigned. With this, we came to a realization to just go out and film the movie, not expect anything from our cast and crew, and make up the story as we went along. After a few days of this style of production, I had a realization, based in my lifelong involvement with eastern mysticism. I looked at Don and said, “This is Zen. This is Zen Filmmaking.” And, that was it.
Poster for Legend of the Roller Blade Seven (Donald G Jackson, 1992)
The foundation of Zen Filmmaking, and the guiding principle of each of the 161 films Shaw has directed since his first solo Zen Film, Samurai Vampire Bikers From Hell (1992), is…no foundation. More practically, no screenplay, as Shaw explains:
First of all, and perhaps most importantly, from a philosophic perspective, screenplays keep you locked into a stagnate mindset. If your film is created around a screenplay, then your cast and crew are very reluctant to allow things to change. But, if you go into a project with simply an overview of a story idea, then your project becomes free and new inspiration is allowed to occur at any moment. And, believe me, from someone who has made a lot of films, you never know what new inspiration will strike or what great unexpected situation will present itself when you get to your location, have your cast in place, and are open minded about what you will actually film.
The other reason to not use a screenplay is based upon the fact that in your mind’s eye you can write a great story, have it set in elaborate locations, and acted out by great actors. For anyone who has ever been on a low-budget movie set, you quickly see that this is not the case. So, what occurs by writing an elaborate screenplay is that you are only setting yourself up for disappointment. But, with no screenplay, you are free. Any production is allowed to happen as it happens and become what it becomes.
Shaw has developed six tenets of Zen Filmmaking which guide and shape his practice and that you can explore at his website, here. “If you acutely plan your productions, with screenplays, storyboards, and locations,” he argues, “there is no room for the instantaneousness of Cinematic Enlightenment to occur.” He concludes, “In Zen Filmmaking, nothing is desired and, thus, all outcomes are perfect.”
Sean Welsh
Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Eddie Alcazar, as told to Constanza Falco Raez, flaunt.com↩︎
Casablanca famously commenced shooting with only half a script; the equally famous “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” was dubbed by Bogart a month after filming concluded. ↩︎
James Ward Byrkit, “How Gotham Nominee James Ward Byrkit Made ‘Coherence’ in 5 Days with No Script or Budget”, Indiewire↩︎
Ref star Jeff Bridges, “They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn’t know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, ‘You got any ideas?'” (as reported by Gizmodo) ↩︎
Ref screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, “It was not at all locked in. We had enough to start shooting the first ten days. I was writing frantically ahead of schedule… If I wasn’t on call as an actor that day I was holed up in the cabin writing the rest of the movie.” (Money Into Light) ↩︎
Ref star Russell Crowe, “It had 21 pages when we started shooting…it’s the dumbest possible way to make a film.” (BBC Radio 1) ↩︎
Ref Writer/Director Christopher McQuarrie, “There’s that little GIF of Wallace And Gromit, and Gromit is putting the track in front of the train. That’s very much what making Mission: Impossible is.” (Empire Magazine) ↩︎
Frank Jaffe is the founder of Altered Innocence, the US film distributor specialising in “edgy and artistic foreign, queer, and coming-of-age cinema,” including WW-programmed films Sextool and She Is Conann. Originally from Pennsylvania, Frank moved down to Florida for high school and college, where he studied fashion merchandising (“very Legally Blonde”) and made his first steps into cinema and festival programming. In honour of our screening of She Is Conann, from Altered Innocence favourite Bertrand Mandico, we spoke to Frank, fresh from Cannes, about his path into film distribution, his label’s ethos and a wee bit on our favourite film of 2024, Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker.
[WW] How do you describe Altered Innocence?
[Frank ] My simple explanation these days is it’s kind of a boutique film distribution company specialising in LGBTQ and coming of age cinema. That’s the logline. When I was younger, working at Strand Releasing and I formed this company, it was kind of like a way to put out movies I knew were never going to come out. And also I’m a Blu-Ray nerd, so there were certain movies Strand would pass on and I would watch them and be, like, “Oh, my God, this is so gorgeous. I get why this can’t maybe get a theatrical release, you know, it’s kind of a smaller title, but, oh, my God, this looks so good on my TV, with Blu-Ray.”
So, that’s kind of how it started off. And then kind of filmmakers naturally got in touch with me, like Yony Leyser for Desire Will Set You Free. And then I distributed his documentary Queercore. So, it kind of started off more coming of age, beautiful cinematography like Violet by Bas Devos and Concrete Night by Pirjo Honkasalo, and then it evolved more LGBT because I am queer, so, that was kind of what happened. And essentially the label’s just been movies I like, and usually movies I like are movies other cinephiles like as well. So, I’m usually able to just connect on that level. And I don’t put out movies I don’t like. So, usually there’s a trust that is getting built with people that like the brand. And I think it’s also about just forming a community, finding other like-minded cinephiles and building that cool queer community.
And then, later on, I got into theatrical releasing and the company’s just expanded a lot. But originally it really was just very boutiquey, very, like, me hanging out in the aisles of Blockbuster, looking at all the weird coming of age films from labels like Picture This and TLA and Strand Releasing and things like that. So that’s kind of the aesthetic, you could say – it’s just modernised a little bit.
[WW] Did you find your way to it via your film festival work?
[Frank] It’s actually even simpler than that. We had a cinema on campus. It was about 300 seats, stadium seating, 35mm projection. And we would meet every week to programme it. I started this gay and lesbian film festival while I was there at college. And then one summer I interned at both Strand Releasing and Regent Releasing, which is now closed. That was part of Here TV. So I was very, very interested during college. And then, when I moved out to LA, I somehow got a job at Outfest for a season, for their film festival. And then right after it was over, somehow there was an opening at Strand Releasing, and that’s how I got in. You know, you always joke, with these small little distro companies, you kind of have to kill someone to get in. But it just so happened that one of the employees was leaving and it was just right place, right time.
[WW] Was your role at Strand similar to what you do now?
[Frank] I mean, a little bit. I was more in the home video department, so I was at the base processing orders. We literally had a warehouse attached to the office, and I would send DVDs to Amazon and to all our wholesalers and everything like that. I was also in charge of setting up each home video release, making sure the art… you know, eventually doing the art. I learned on the job how to do DVD and Blu-Ray authoring and helped out a little bit with acquisitions. Ultimately, Marcus and John, who run the company, were the main acquisitions people, but there were certain films I begged them to acquire, one of which was Yann Gonzalez’s first film, You and the Night. I begged them. I was like, “No, we have to do it.” And then, of course, they didn’t even give it a theatrical release. They just put it out on DVD and VOD, which was a little sad. I see where they were coming from a little bit, but I also disagree with it because I would have put that out in cinemas.
[WW] And now you’re in a position to put a film out in cinemas only because it deserves to be?
[Frank] Oh, yeah. Absolutely, I do, and the most difficult thing I am finding these days is that, when I started the company, it was very easy for me to tell sales agents and filmmakers, “I don’t do much theatrical, so this is only home video, but it’ll be a great home video release.” But now, because everyone knows I do theatrical releasing, the hardest thing I found is sometimes I think a title is probably just more suited for home video and I’d probably lose quite a bit of money on the theatrical, but it’s hard for me to tell the filmmaker. I think it has impacted some of my decisions, unfortunately. But I’m trying to get back to that and maybe just be more honest with the filmmakers. And if they hate me, they hate me. But I think I do want more films to get a release. Maybe I do have to be more honest. I don’t know!
[WW] How self-conscious is your curation now? Like, is there a distinction between “an Altered Innocence film” and a “Frank” film?
[Frank] It’s all Frank, Altered Innocence, it’s both, intermingled. It is me, so… I mean, there’s a couple films I’ve picked up where I’m just like, “Oh, I might not love it, but it does fit the brand. I think enough people will like it.” I have done that a few times. There’s certain films where, if I watched it at home, I’d probably be like, “Eh, three stars. I won’t watch it again.” You know, “Three out of five, it was fine. Whatever.” But because it does fit the mold a little bit more and could help the bottom line, help me release other cooler films, yeah, I’ve picked them up and I’ve put them out and, uh… They’re not bad films, but, yes, I have done that a little bit.
[WW] Have you got to the point of anyone pulling your sleeve with films you have to put out, as you did at Strand?
[Frank] Yeah, I get recommendations all the time, and some of them are really good recommendations. I mean, 100%, absolutely. I’ve even gotten pitches from filmmakers, randomly. That’s how I got A Dim Valley. That was a film I loved and I hadn’t heard of it. And the filmmaker emailed me, Brandon Colvin, who’s the biggest sweetheart ever. He just pitched it to me, I watched it, and I was just like, “Damn, this movie is so good.” And that’s happened. So I’ve gotten a filmmaker pitch and that was great.Yony Leyser was the same way. I’ve gotten tons of recommendations from other people, and that’s kind of motivated me to look for, like… Or it’s a film I’d seen a long time ago and then somebody who reminds me about it, and that motivates me to be like, “Okay, let me look for the rights. Let me see if it is available.” And of course, sales agents, when I go to these big film festivals, they’ll pitch me a title that I wouldn’t normally, like be like, “Oh, 100%, I’m going to watch that.” And then they convince me and then I watch, and I’m like, “Oh, no, they’re right,” you know, “that was that was pretty good.”
[WW] What is your process for sourcing / selecting titles for distribution? How much it is based on festival research, say, versus screeners you’ve been sent, existing relationships, independent research and/or films you’ve always loved and had in your pocket, so to speak?
[Frank] I think literally it’s kind of 25% across everything you’ve mentioned. Like 25%, it’s filmmakers I’m tracking, 25%, it’s sales agent pitches, 25%, it’s old films that I’m just like, literally, I’ve seen this film. I love it. So now I’m researching who the heck has it, where can I find it? And then the other 25% was sales agent pitches. When I go to these big film festivals, they send me the emails, like, “Here’s our slate.” And I’ll look for the gay titles or the, you know, cool, like… I always love seeing a still image that actually has like good cinematography. I’m like, “Okay, that’s that’s interesting to me.” And unique sounding scripts. I’m definitely more of a script guy – script and cinematography – than anything else.
And then, with Bertrand, because I’ve been following him for a while, I’m just constantly salivating for whatever he’s putting out next. I mean, he’s just one of the coolest guys working in cinema today. And so whenever he has another film, I’m extremely excited. Like, even for this one, the premiere was somewhere I couldn’t go. I knew the sales agent pretty well, I’d worked with him a few times and he’s the kind of sales agent that really wants you to see the film on the biggest screen possible. He doesn’t really want you to watch it on a screener. So for this one, She Is Conann, it was crazy, we actually organized like a private screening in LA, just for me. It was, like, insane. I probably can’t mention the cinema that did it for us, because they basically let me do it for free, which was so cool as well. We’ve got a great cinema culture in LA and there’s a lot of great theaters here that know that I’m doing small films and definitely sympathize with that. And so they just let me watch it at like noon on a Tuesday in their theatre. It was so cool.
[WW] What’s the most fun part for you? Is it hunting for rights?
[Frank] Hunting for the rights is pretty fun. I like meeting all these new people and finding avenues for collaboration. I think I just enjoy getting everything put together – you know, finding the perfect artist to work on the front cover art, and I always love the process of of massaging the trailer because I love trailers. I love coming up with a really sexy trailer. There are certain trailers where I’ll commission them and I’ll just know, at the end of the process, I’ll be like, “Wow, this is a trailer I’m probably going to watch like 200 times in my life, and I really enjoy it.” The best recent example’s probably The Wounded Man trailer. That’s a trailer I watch a lot. It’s a great one. But I have a lot of other good trailers. Concrete Night, Violet. I have this one trailer editor, I went to school with him, and he always creates great trailers for us. I don’t know, I kind of love the act of finally getting the Blu-Ray authored and then popping it into my player and watching it. That’s always really cool. It just looks so good. The final package. I like just seeing it all finally be, like, “Okay, it’s on my TV, it’s real.” And imagining other people doing the same thing, which is always really cool. That was such a big part of my childhood, DVDs and Blu-Rays, so it’s always cool to have that feeling of contributing to that culture.
[WW] Do you enjoy the sense of curating someone’s evening?
[Frank] No, I actually have a disconnect with how people run their lives, to be honest. So that that is not the exciting part for me. Literally, I’m so disconnected. I’m in my own little cocoon world, so picturing that, that doesn’t excite me, but I guess I just get excited by the idea of people enjoying cinema and, especially on Blu-Ray, enjoying really high quality. Basically, like, being in a cinema, is the quality. Not to brag, but I’m a really good video encoder and I actually pay a lot of attention to… I’ve kind of got one of those eyes that if there is compression artifacts, it bothers me. Low video quality really bothers me. That’s why I’m always shocked that people still can watch DVDs. You know, maybe I should wish for that eye, the eye that ignores all the issues. Some people live their lives blissfully ignorant of compression artifacts and things like that. Like, whenever a scene goes to dark and there’s all these blocky… I’m, like, dying. Like, I feel like it’s bullets riddling my body. And there’s a lot of Blu-Rays out there that are really badly encoded. I don’t want to name names, but a lot of people who put out movies, they kind of just hire a random Blu-Ray authoring place and they just do a really bad job. And it just, urgh, it bugs me.
[WW] Some people don’t even register wrong aspect ratios, when characters’ faces are not human shapes…
[Frank] I had that with Wild Reeds. That was a victory for me. André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds, I put that out from StudioCanal. I always notice that – because the HD master had leaked a long time ago, somebody had put it out in France. I looked at it, and I was, like, “That doesn’t look right. That aspect ratio…” The faces were, like, squashed. They were like a little pencil-y. And so when I picked up the rights to it, convincing them so hard. I was like, “Can you please look at it?” And they were like, “The aspect ratio is correct.” I’m like, “Yeah, the bars are correct, but that doesn’t mean the aspect ratio’s correct.” They’re like, “Fine, we’ll go and we’ll look at a release print,” but they hated me. Then they got back to me a week later and were like, “You are correct, it is wrong. We are redoing it now.” And I was like, “Yes! I knew it!”
[WW] How do you judge success otherwise? Is it peer approval, sales…?
[Frank] Sales are great [for judging success]. A good example of sales making me excited and feeling like what I’m doing is good is my release of Equation to an Unknown, which me and Yann Gonzalez worked on very closely together. And, you know, we can’t quite figure out what it is – besides the fact the movie is very good – but sales of that one, it’s one of my top-selling titles, and it’s just so weird, because it’s this sadboi gay porn arthouse film, and it just keeps selling and we’re very, very, very thrilled about it. We think it might just be a good word of mouth title. We even got Slant to review it and they gave it a positive review. So maybe it’s just like a kind of wild card, kind of “it’s a porno film, but it’s arthouse. It’s arthouse porn!” And there’s very few of those, to be quite honest. But compare that to the Halsted set, which has only sold okay, I would say, and the Bressan Jr films, which has also just sold okay. And I’m like, “Well, Equation to an Unknown sold so well, why can’t the others?” So, trying to recreate that magic is sometimes difficult. But, yes, very satisfying to know that certain titles that you’re, like, “Well, that’s just something fun we’re doing and we know we’re probably not going to make that much on it, but whatever,” and then all of a sudden it does great, and you’re just like “Amazing, fabulous,” you know? And then we screened it at the New Beverly, you know, which was crazy, and we had a sold out crowd for that. It’s been a blast.
[WW] Distributors don’t always make it easy to book their films, particuarly in Europe, but you seem to make a point of it.
[Frank] Yes. Well, it comes from booking films, because when I did the film festival in college, I was doing the direct booking for that, and sometimes it was a little silly. Like, there was a short film fee and it was, like, $200 from a European distributor. I remember one time, luckily the college paid for it, but I remember for Norway, we were trying to get a film from there, and they were charging us, like, $1,000. It was also a wake up call just talking to these small town, small LGBT organizations and they just want to screen a film for 30 people, you know? And I’m going to try to let them. Obviously, I still need to make a little bit of money on it, but try to do that in the easiest way possible, because I want the films to get out there. And if you’re trying to start a small, little micro cinema, charging $5 tickets or $7 tickets, then I want you to grow that. I don’t want to stop you from growing. The more they succeed, the more I succeed. So that’s where it goes. And they’re small films. I don’t have this weird personality that it’s, like, “Oh, these are huge films! If you want them, you got to pay for them!” You know, they’re small.
[WW] Sometimes their rationale is because the film’s so small, that’s why they need to charge so much, because it’s their only chance to make money.
[Frank] Yeah. That’s not really my business model. I somewhat see where they’re going with that, but I think you can only charge that if it’s something so specialized that you just know people will pay for it, because “it never happens” or blah, blah, blah. I remember one of the hardest films I had to distribute, a few years ago, was Stop-Zemlia, which was a Ukrainian film. And of course, I distributed it right before the Ukrainian war started. So when the war started, I was getting so many requests to donate the film. And I had to balance that. I did, like, half donations, half, “Come on, just give me a little something,” like, “I don’t want to be a war profiteer here, but at the same time, I can’t give all the screenings away for free.” So that was a tough one to distribute and I still have not made money. That’s a film I’m very much in the hole on, unfortunately. Great film! I knew it when I picked it up that it probably was never going to make money, and it didn’t.
[WW] Is there something you wish people understood better about what you do?
[Frank] No. I’m fine. As long as people keep watching the films, I’m very happy. One of the fun things about this company is I don’t want to be an A24 or Neon. I want to stay small. I don’t like dealing with… How to say it? I guess I was just imagining A24 having, like, 500 employees. I’m like, “I don’t want 500 employees. I don’t want to deal with those lawyers and things like that.” You know, The People’s Joker was… I’ve had enough time with lawyers in the past year where I really, don’t want to do that anymore.
[WW] On The People’s Joker, when did you first realise it was something you wanted to release?Did you see it at Toronto?
[Frank] No, I remember I heard about it a little bit at Toronto, because one of the stars of the film is actually someone I worked with for years at Strand Releasing, Nathan Faustyn. So it was crazy, because I heard he was in this film, and then I heard it got pulled. When I was hearing about it, I didn’t dismiss it, I just remember thinking, “Oh, that sounds really cool. I’m sure some big distributor will do it. I’m not going to even think about it.” And then it literally disappeared from my mind. And then Outfest said they were going to play it. And that was kind of the comeback tour, Outfest, technically the US premiere. I got a ticket to it and I just watched it. And as I was watching it, I was just, like, “Oh, damn, this movie’s really good.” It felt dangerous and underground, and it felt like a movie that not every person would get, but the right people would get 100% – 110%. I’d heard that maybe there was a distributor, but then Vera, at the screening, was like, “We don’t have a distributor.” And then I was like, “Okay, I need to try.” And then me and Vera met up and we have very, very similar taste in movies and culture and, you know, anarchist ideas. And so it was pretty much, you know, a match made in purgatory. I don’t wanna say heaven. Movie heaven. And then we decided to work together.
And, you know, I was a little afraid, but not that afraid. When I was watching in the cinema, I was just, like, “Oh, my God, this is such a parody.” Like, “I don’t know [yet] if technically, 100%, legally, it is a parody, but for all intents and purposes, the filmmaker just, you know, made a parody film. So, I don’t see why this is an issue.” And, yeah, we just started working on it and it’s had its ups, it’s had its downs. But right now, we’re just so thrilled with the response. I’m usually not trawling Letterboxd every day. But during the theatrical release, I was trawling Letterboxd every day. Just every day, just quickly checking, like, “Was I right? Okay, I was right.” Then the next day, “Was I right? Okay. Yes, I’m still right.” Because I was just always worried that, somehow… Because we did a tiered release where we started one week only in New York, then we went to eight other major cities, and then we went to, like, 30 and then we went to, like, 80. So every time a new week came, I was just, “Oh, the smaller cities, they’re not going to get it.” Or, “Somehow, the DC heads are going to hear about it. They’re all going to go to the theater this week and hate it,” or something like that. But it never happened. Every week, we just constantly get positive reviews. And if people hate it, they’re shutting their mouths about it, which is what Vera always says at all the movie screenings. Like, “If you love it, tell all your friends. If you hate it, just don’t say anything.” We’re still trying to figure out international distribution. Obviously, we want everyone to see it, so it’s still a bit of a journey to go. It’s definitely not over, but it’s been really fun.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Weird Weekend presented She Is Conann on Friday 31st April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow.
Find out more about Altered Innocence’s latest theatrical and disc releases here. Follow them on Instagram here.
She is Conann (2023) is a fantasy romp through barbarism, gore and spitty lesbian snogs. It reminds me of a sort of queer love child of Holy Motors (2012)and Highlander (1986). Surreal! Time Jumps! Episodic! Grotesque characters on a journey towards the inevitable! It is shot primarily in black and white, with flashes of technicolour in moments of emotional intimacy, at the flash of a gunshot, or bloodied frenzy. Director Bertrand Mandico immerses the audience in a stunningly designed series of worlds, shunning CGI for old-school, low-fi prop making, eerie prosthetics and lusciously dressed sound stages – hefty budget lines for latex, fake blood and foil. The moment horns emerge out of Conann’s nipples, piercing the skin and erupting like seedlings made me shudder and somehow my mouth wet. We meet Conann at different ages of her life, each played by a different actor and each world has a different aesthetic feel, with different (sexy) costume languages to match. The script is haunting (and very quotable), poetic and disgusting in equal measure. Moments in the film have stuck in me, heavy, violent, confronting.
All things considered, you seem ripe
We meet Conann at 15 – a slim, doe-eyed, beautiful, white girl who seems to have no agency in anything that happens to her. She’s captured by barbarians, and held in an (unlocked) cage… When Rainer (Elina Löwensohn) tells her to, she opens her cage door and simply walks out and poisons everyone. I find the early iterations of Conann hard to feel empathy for or with, she’s a blushing young girl and her actions unfold before her, guided by the hands of Rainer or others around her. She is a victim of external forces! Blindly enacting brutal violence as she goes! We don’t see her scheming, desiring, thinking or transgressing. There’s an interesting passivity to the context of her shoving a sword down another woman’s throat, it dripping with guts and bile as she pulls it out. What agency can and does she have to fall or not fall into violence when that is all she has known? Another example of a pretty, femme, white woman refusing responsibility for her own story?
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
Over iterations she evolves from beautiful vessel to agent of her own death. Each time she evolves, she violently kills the younger version of herself – and there’s something irresistible about this – it feels easy to recognise the impulse to slay the version of you that was not strong enough, brave enough, good enough. Younger Conann doesn’t fight hard – why would you, when standing in front of an older, sexier, harder, well-dressed version of yourself? Yes, let me become her. But underneath the new costume and despite the new actor, there is still a strong sense of fatalism and self-obsession that follows the character, her worlds feel small and the camera rarely lets us zoom out. She’s stuck in these sound stages where others enter as fodder for her to kill – like putting mice in a snake tank.
You’re disgusting!
The film’s POV is often Rainer’s – in a pivotal shift, we’re told Conann has many years of bliss in the Bronx with her lover, but we don’t see that. We rejoin Conann’s story only when Rainer reappears. Rainer acts as guide, and narrator, a Faustian hellhound at the heels of Conann and audience. To see the film as Rainer’s story paints an emotive journey – he’s with us, portrayed by the same actor – from start to finish, and we’re offered flashes of genuine vulnerability, for example his disappointment that Conann can’t see his photographs as art, longing for her recognition and approval. We meet Rainer’s half sister – a ghoulish figure with a mic – an unexpected hint towards a past, a childhood. Conann is marketed as a queer film and Rainer is in many ways trans coded – uses he/him pronouns and is played by a female actor with a noticeably femme voice; in one moment he is thrilled to grow breasts, marking his transition to barbarian. He is also ostracised, derided and insulted consistently, his desire for closeness is rejected and he makes sneaky moves to steal Conann from the beautiful cis girlfriend – he is the evil demon that brings hell wherever he goes, his vulgar, inhuman face of a dog frequently fills the frame. His moments of vulnerability and pain – seen often only by the audience – bring him no empathy or kinship in his world. Only in death he discovers he has a heart, something the audience could feel long before he discovered its presence. It’s hard to watch. At times it feels like that often troped and relentless media portrayal of gender queer people as othered, unloved and unrecognised by those closest to them. But the film does give him a lot of time and space, we sit with him a lot, and there’s depth to his brilliant characterisation by Löwensohn – there’s a case to be made this is his film.
Blessed are the necrophiliacs never betrayed by their love
Another queer element of the film is the plentiful lesbian snogging – and the love between Conann & Sanja. They sign away their all their memories so they can be together outside of hell’s grasp (relationship goals?). The snogs – sometimes between Conann and her older/younger self – are often in the same grotesque language as puking blood, disembodied limbs – in one there’s a close-up of two tongues sloppy and sliding over each other. In the film, love is swiftly followed by betrayal, intimacy with cruelty (usually some variant of brutal murder of the lover). In the world of Conann, things are bad and get worse. In the queer canon, this is a well-trodden path – lesbians having a terrible time, someone watches the woman she loves die horribly. Here we get to see traumas march Conann towards ever more gruesome acts of violence, seemingly immune to the emotional impact of it all, she redirects that grief into making sure that everyone else feels a hell of a lot worse than she should. There’s something (not just the hair) that reminds me of the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror. If inside you there are two wolves, one is Conann and one is San Junipero, choose (at your peril) which to feed.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
Perhaps the time has come to disobey your mother, Conann
The film is rich in fluids – projectile vomiting huge quantities of blood, saliva dripping from cannibal mouths, teeth crunching down on ribs and flesh, milky gloop lacquering bodies, clots and guts sticking to freshly used swords. Even in black and white, Mandico lets us into the visceral pleasure/pain of cruelty. In many moments of violence, Conann has no regrets, few thoughts, a total disconnect from victim and context that allows us into the world of someone acting – on impulse? On desire? Or maybe just acting, just doing because she can, unrestricted by self control. Maybe that’s what got my heart rate up – what a fucking thrill it must be to just do. This ‘freedom’ is contrasted with the bookends of the film – Conann in hell, forced to eternally re-remember, re-find herself, re-play her story before forgetting and starting all over again. We see the horror and pain of re-meeting the worst parts of yourself, the grief of possibility as your actions are laid bare in front of you, unchanged, unflinching.
“A 14 berry coulis”
She is Conann is a rich, unpleasant, thrilling watch – it asks us to look at the parts of us we hope aren’t there and wouldn’t put on show. But a few days later, the images that still linger with me come from the very end of the film where the work speaks to something quite unexpected. The eldest Conann gathers a group of artists and tells them that she’s going to leave them her huge fortune – they’ll be set for life! They’ll be free to make the most radical art ever! They’ll finally have power and resource! But they have to eat her first. We watch them eat every last toe and pubic hair. The camerawork is sickening, the jewels stuffed into her eyeballs glisten, but it starkly brought me back to the real world conversations happening across the arts – who should artists or festivals accept or seek funding from (Baillie Gifford?) If you were offered power and resource to enact the change you make work about – would you take it, no matter where it came from? What makes a “consumable barbarian?”
LRG
Weird Weekend present She Is Conann on Friday 31st May, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
In the midst of dry ice, spotlights and close-ups, I love to see a moment of cheap DIY glam. Out of the sparkles appears Conann, with soulful tired eyes, grey-blonde hair with a slick of grease running through it, draped in the finest of garments, an emergency blanket.
It’s a 99p camp moment that literally saves you, warms you, soothes you and makes you glow. Something so affordable and life-saving that unfurls out of a drug baggy in a geometric tiled pattern. An airy ‘quilted’ blanket that glistens. God, I love emergency blankets. It’s a cheap wearable disco ball that prevents you from dying. It’s easy, bargain basement, eternal life vibes. But it’s also so gaybar disco ball, eyes-wide-open HD, and genius lighting design. I knew I loved these little lifesavers, but I really love to see them in a glamorous, big-ish budget film.
Soon after, we meet Rainer in a halloween costume mask. You could probably find a similar mask at any local costume shop, but here it is framed with a wig, and once again sparkles. And from within this scary halloween dog mask comes a sultry French accent…now that’s what I call camp.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
I love that I could recreate these looks at home. I could be ‘on set’ just messing about with cheap fun finds from local shops. I could be there; it’s comforting, it’s attainable. It gives school play but with a full grown-up cast and way better lighting and acting. It’s polished camp. But not overly polished. If it was polished much more I wouldn’t like it. It sits in the right place on the scale from DIY to pro. I always want a bit of both and here I’ve got it.
The film also sits in a good place between gross and beautiful. Another place I always want to be in. It’s challenging at times, there are scenes of gore and blood. BUT, it’s not trying to fully immerse you in the reality of that violence, viewers are given space to dip in and out. You know it’s dress-up. There’s room to put your own context on it and be self-reflective, at least I think so.
I get the idea of grease, filth and dirty-water-wet in the set and costume design. But, I know some real nice sleek hair gel has gone into it, some fabulous loose powder, and some meticulously made handicrafts. Albeit, with some real human-made spit.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
And then we have the sticky itchy SFX make up, which I personally hate the feeling of…ew. And, even though the make-up does not convince me that there is ‘real blood,’ I feel the realness of that gloopy fake blood and latex and scar-fluid on my face. It’s a really tactile icky instant response. And can you believe that people choose to put this stuff on their face for ‘fun’ or ‘art’? I am one those people. But the itchy sticky textures are paired with soft Super-8-ish haze and glittery water droplets. It adds to the horror, and the camp. It’s a lot, in the best way.
The set has this sense of huge vast space with lakes and clouds… I wanna be on set. I want to explore. It feels staged and planned and theatrical, but it does not feel contained. But, at the same time, the familiar references of the emergency blanket or party shop make it feel so nearby. It’s fantastical but feels ‘real’. I don’t mean real as in the story seems realistic, I mean that it feels so camp that it could be happening in my local gaybar… it’s quite Bonjour (RIP).
It’s camp enough that I don’t feel overwhelmed by the horror n gore; that feels especially important right now. I don’t want realism, I rarely want realism actually. I want a place to explore that is manageable, controllable and fits into a separate filing cabinet in my brain to the unorganised, ever-growing section of ‘real horrors’. When we witness Conann’s violent culling of everyone everywhere… I can hear the foley of someone stabbing a big bit of fruit or something else silly and squishy.
There’s a lot of moments where the third wall is broken and actors look directly into the camera. I like them, it’s fun. These are nice little reminders that this feeling I’m getting of being involved in the film was intentional. I already knew the third wall was broken, but these moments are a cheeky nod to it.
And towards the end when we get all the artists walking through into the film. It’s really real. We’re in it. It’s immersive in a similar way to a video game at times. It feels a bit ‘choose your own path’. Which character am I? Damn, and when all the artists are scrounging at the remains of a rotting corpse…honestly…if you know, you know.
Watching She Is Conann makes me want to make films again. I’m inspired by how a film can be so fun and so gay while also prompting self-reflection. I’d like to watch it again on the big screen, in the company of friends, with a big glass of wine.
Nat Lall
Weird Weekend present She Is Conann on Friday 31st May, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Nat Lall is a Glasgow-based film curator, known for their work with the Scottish Queer International Film Festival. Nat is also a filmmaker and DJ. Notable films include Pink Excavation (2018) and their musical alias is DJ FLUFFIE.
Where exactly does the Conann project come from? Is it a film, a play, or a hybrid piece of work?
I used theatre’s soil to make it grow. I had been circling the subject for a while. When I say the subject, it’s mostly the succubi, the demonic pacts – I had amassed a lot of notes about them, trying to give them shape. At the same time, Philippe Quesne, who was directing the Théâtre des Amandiers, suggested that I put on a show linked to cinema. And it came about like that, by spontaneously answering him, “If I do a project for the theatre, it will be a female-led Conan the Barbarian!” He was amused, and invited me to come and work at the theatre to start developing the project, to build the story. In my mind, this show was to be the genesis of She Is Conann. It included projections, a double director, trying to edit the film – it was a “preparatory show”. The Conann antechamber.
But the show didn’t happen?
No, it was due for production in 2020, in the midst of COVID restrictions, after which Philippe Quesne left the theatre. I still went through with the show, as we had imagined it, and I “filmed” it at the Amandiers. It’s a film that already has its title, La Deviante, which I will show later. There are also two other short films, excrescences of She Is Conann – We Barbarians, a virtual reality film about the damnation of actresses, and Rainer, a Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley.
We Barbarians (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
So She Is Connan isn’t a documentation from Les Amandiers?
No, indeed, it’s a film imagined for the cinema, nourished by the reflection of the preparatory show. I wrote the script in parallel with the experience at Les Amandiers, and shot it in Luxembourg in an old steel factory that was being dismantled. A really inspiring place, where metal was made (fittingly, for Conann), a huge territory (crossing it takes over an hour), with a capacity to accommodate incredible scenery. Each plot presented an imaginary of the film. I could contain all the sets I needed to make – here, my vision of 1998 New York, there, the outrageously large temple, elsewhere, the battlefields with a surreal checkerboard or the small lake of another world. The sunken bunker was also present – the field of possibilities was infinite. At the Amandiers, we had built fake mountains. I had them brought to Luxembourg to complete the picture.
Christa Théret as Conann in She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
Nevertheless, do you think She Is Conann still keeps, at least in its very first part, a trace of this theatre experience?
The Hell part, indeed, has kept a theatricality, with the chrome lodge – a representation of the underworld inherited from the opera and the studio. And the character played by Françoise Brion, a dead woman who arrives in this other world, condemned to recover her memory and relive the atrocities she committed. That is her damnation, to remember the barbarian she was – the cruellest show there is, that of the mirror of the soul. The dead woman is confronted with her doppelgänger, the barbarian queen, on her throne. And if the introduction evokes the theatre, it mainly refers to a forgotten part of French cinema, where the Faustian pact, the devilishness were represented in an omnipresent way, whether with René Clair’s Beauty and the Devil, Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du Soir or, of course, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. I wanted to revisit a neglected yet captivating genre.
The film has something operatic about it.
At the very beginning, I wrote songs for the play, something along the lines of a rock or pop opera, similar to what I had done with Apocalypse After. For the film, I asked Pierre Desprats, the music composer on all my films, to forget everything we’d previously done. This time, I was looking for percussion-based sounds, a drier general tone, with bold deliberate choices to differentiate the eras. I gave him references ranging from the introductory music of Bergman’s Persona, to Bernard Hermann’s scores for Hitchcock, Nino Rota’s ethnic collages for Satyricon, Wu Tang Clan-type rap for the Bronx, Plastikman for the warlike coldness, or more classically Purcell revisited by Michael Nyman in his minimalist period, up to the Paul Anka-style song that Barbara Carlotti interprets. For Pierre, it was a rather destabilising mess. But this choice gives a singular and intense result.
Theatrical poster for Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982), illustration by Renato Casaro
It’s clear you didn’t start from John Milius’ film.
No, not at all (laughs). Conan, in Milius’s version, is an emblem of virility, of testosterone. I went to the antipodes of that. I summoned a small part of Robert E Howard’s stories, a writer close to Lovecraft, who created Conan in 1932 before his premature death. In his work, Conan was a slender character, who climbed and slithered, which is far from the image associated with the character in the film. But I didn’t adapt the books, I re-read them, kept the original trauma of the killed mother and the idea of the barbarian slave’s revenge. Through my research, I was able to go back to the original Conann, the one from Celtic mythology, written with “NN”, the spelling I kept for the film. He is a conqueror who spent time with fantastic creatures called Fomorians, described as demons, or rather cynocephalic demigods, with dog or hyena heads. Now, I already had a demon with a dog’s head in my notes, so the connection troubled me a lot. It validated me in making this adventurous choice of a total reappropriation, of a multiple, polymorphic Conann crossing times. The re-inscription of the “NN” spelling to this iconic name is also part of the idea of femininity and multiples.
What did you hope to achieve, in completely unexpectedly revising this figure?
The desire to take stock of barbarism, culminating in what I believe to be the height of barbarism – old age killing its own youth.
Christa Théret as Conann in She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
Is the film shot on film?
Yes, it’s 35mm. We use half the frame, a thrifty scope, the one used in Italian westerns. And there are no special effects post-film-processing – everything is created during the shoot, on the spot, with the lights, the constructions and some transparencies. This is my shortest shoot – five weeks – so I had to think of the cut in an even more concise way than I usually do. I chose to shoot almost everything with a crane. I put a dolly track in one place and that conditioned everything we were going to shoot during the night. Because everything was done entirely at night, it was impossible to create darkness in this huge space, which in parts was open to the wind and rain. It was very tiring, with all the physical ordeals that this can pose, for the actresses and technicians, a total investment, without a net. I understand now that I could never have made She Is Conann like that if it had been my first feature film.
Because of the insecurity of the staging process and the virtuosity that it required?
In the sense that the only solutions to solve the problems were radical, and that I had to assume them with all the risks that this entails for each sequence – synthesise the staging as accurately as possible and make editing choices during the shoot, by betting on the tempo of the actresses’ performances. For example, when the 35-year-old Conann, played by Sandra Parfait, walks through the streets of the Bronx with Rainer (Elina Löwensohn). This scene took up four pages of dialogue in the script. I decided to do it in one shot – a walk back-and-forth through the humid streets. I knew that the actresses knew their lines, we had worked for a long time on the characters at the theatre, we knew each other well, we could take the most extensive sequences head-on, while doing very few takes.
Was this your first time using the crane? What did you discover in this process that made you want to come back to it again? It’s not just a system of elegance, you’re creating a floating effect.
I used it at the end of the shooting of After Blue, in the studio for the World of the Dead, with a decentering lens that breaks the balance between blur and sharpness. Here, I extended this principle over the length of the film with the same type of optics. Sometimes, I took the camera on the shoulder or on a dolly, but 80% of the film was shot sitting on the crane. As I like to impose on myself constraints that define style, it became a game, that of making the shooting time cohabit with the narrative ambition of the film. With this set-up, we think of the movements in the space by making the most of the heavy daily installation. I was perched on the crane and almost in telepathy with the grip and the crew. The most difficult thing was my vertigo, I never took my eye off the viewfinder, I clung to the camera to see only the film and forget the void. Perhaps the crane gives the vision that the dead have on the world. A fluid, floating vision, without ever being able to touch the ground. This formal approach makes sense for She Is Conann, in the way it accompanies the characters, always in perpetual mutation, moving from one world to another. We cross six stages, six ages, six periods, the film summons the history of cinema but also the great History. I had to make each chapter stand out while keeping a global coherence. This style, the staging, the use of black and white created unity in the rupture.
Claire Duburcq as Conann in She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
How do you manage to present an entirely feminised version of this figure, when working from a mythological figure, widely popularised in heroic fantasy literature and in cinema?
The 25-year-old Conann, played by Christa Théret, is non-gendered, completely they. I thought it was important to shake up the genres, to offer actors/actresses the possibility of playing a character originally anchored in virility. My desire was to take root in the original myth to better transcend it. The crossing of eras accompanies the very idea of ageing and the inner journey of this multiple character. To talk about this viral barbarism, I only saw a “monstrous” film, sharp, “ambitious” and yet always focused on intimate moments. I wanted to explore new areas of cinema and storytelling, culminating in old age killing youth.
Conann is then played by actresses of different ages, with very distinct personalities and characters. They embody the stages of a life in a brilliant way.
I don’t see constancy in being an individual, but distinct periods, changes as one gets older, the tragedy of which is self-betrayal. This is the driving force of the film – how one can betray one’s convictions, one’s ideals, one’s desires, how one hardens as one ages.
The other driving force of the film is more romantic – it is impossible love.
Conann’s first betrayal will be to transform her desire for revenge into love for her natural enemy. She betrays her desire for revenge. Revenge, this old rusty cinema mechanism, we must lay to rest. It is a narrative given, never contested, when it is actually a form of barbarism. Besides, I believe that this reassessment of revenge is found in all my films, be it in The Wild Boys or in After Blue. Conann, therefore, takes an unexpected route in the genre – she doesn’t take revenge, she betrays herself, after which she becomes a monster by diverting her convictions, by transforming herself into a frighteningly manipulative being, who becomes darker over time, even going viral.
Conann is “the barbarian”, but which barbarism(s) is the film about?
Cruelty, killing one’s ideals. Opportunism. Cynical capitalism and corruption. The last Connan, in “a refinement” of barbarism, perverts artists.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
They will ingest her.
She becomes a parasite. We think we are devouring her, but it is she who devours us.
The segment on “old Europe” is very impressive. The dialectics between horror and fascination in spite of everything is captured in one dialogue: “Europe is beautiful, it has style,” “Don’t talk nonsense, will you?”
There’s a symbolic imagery and a very head-on speech in that moment. I represent Europe with a French can-can dancer on a battlefield. There’s also the presence of the “masked capitalists”, taking a blood bath and the 45-year old Conann, who, whilst serving them soup, will end up slaughtering them. Their blood will feed the pool, because a new generation is coming and must soak its power. This is the first time I’m confronted with such a directly political form, condensed within a scene that synthesises a vision with no detours.
It is a film that travels through metamorphoses and worlds but in which there is no off-screen.
Yes, in the same way that we never see the sky. We are stuck with Conann and her compartmentalised memory. The camera surrounds the characters like a dragon, most often through a bird’s-eye view, a very oppressive way of dealing with space, with the night as an escape route.
French Theatrical poster for Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955), by Andre Bertrand
Who is Rainer, the dog-faced character played by Elina Löwensohn, the common thread in each episode?
To explain, I have to mention an important reference for the film – Max Ophuls’s Lola Montès. Lola Montès tells her story in a circus that has become her hell, reliving her whole life from her trapeze, before the big jump. This is the structure I used to build my story. Rainer is the equivalent of Peter Ustinov’s Mr Loyal in Ophuls’ film. His character is at the same time the most touching, the spurned lover, but also the one who pulls the strings of the decline, the most cruel. My Rainer is a little different. He is a demon who photographs death and bodies, half-Helmut Newton, half-Gerda Taro. But the first reference, engraved in his leather, is Fassbinder and his black romanticism. Rainer sniffs around corners to corrupt the characters, he speaks like a Shakespearean hero, his sentences echo like ironic oracles. He is a aspect of the devil, the arm of death, but most of all he is the one who humanises himself as Conann dehumanises herself. This crossing and this impossible love constitute a counterpoint to barbarism.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)
For Rainer, L’Atelier 69 made a prosthesis of a peeled dog’s head. And why the dog’s head, anyway?
Because in all mythologies, the dog is the one who makes you pass into the other world. The prosthesis had to be able to reproduce all of Elina’s expressiveness, she wore it like a second skin. We had to change it every two days (the prostheses get damaged quickly and can’t be glued again after 48 hours). Elina would eat alone in front of a mirror, in her corner, because we couldn’t remove this second skin. Because of the fitting time, she arrived and left after everyone else. Many people in the team discovered Elina’s face at the end of the shoot. For five weeks, they only saw her with her dog face. She had become Rainer. She fully inhabited the character, in her body, her voice and her expressions, it was extremely unsettling. Today, I sometimes dream of Rainer, my empathy “for the Devil”.
Should we also see in Rainer a reference to the first Daft Punk music videos, those directed by Spike Jonze?
That’s funny I didn’t think of that, even though it’s a music video I liked a lot in the late ’90s. But I do have a memory of a slightly thick, cartoonish dog face. It’s more the first version of Planet of the Apes that remains my reference, in terms of prosthesis and turmoil over human and animal cross-breeding. I’m utterly convinced that in the future, humans will be drawn to the animal identity, they will become hybrids of dogs, cats, reptiles, using surgery and genes. But it’s funny that you mention that music video. When I summoned the ’90s aesthetics for the Bronx part, I thought of a film that has influenced many music videos, as it happens – Coppola’s Rumble Fish. As well as One from the Heart, for the lyricism of the staging within a studio. And then a cult film in the US, sadly never released in France, Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, produced by Lynch and with Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan and Peter Fonda. A vampire film set in New York, made the same year as Ferrara’s The Addiction – another reference for this sequence.
Re-creating New York in Luxembourg?
It’s make or break. I worked with all the more care on the exteriors, interiors and dialogues for this sequence, to make it as real as I could.
When that sequence appears, it gives the film a new rhythm, which will continue to grow until the great final scene – looser, more open. This seems to me to be a new possible direction for your cinema, a breath that creates a space inside the saturation, the accumulation. Is it also a way for you to clarify the message, in a film that is more openly political? Is it a skilful and gentle way of addressing a generation that is less familiar with references but that is directly concerned by this message?
Exactly. The references are there, sometimes in spite of myself – I made them a construction material but not a quotation. There’s also the universal heroic figure. I wanted to be able to play with a kind of ancient superhero and make them cross time. Actually, this idea is rather Marvel-like, but created in the style of an artisan, iconoclastic auteur. It is, above all, a way of saying that we must not leave epic imaginary in the hands of the big studios. The film makes its way through my obsessions, through fantasy, through myth, to eventually arrive at our era and address a contemporary generation head-on. Each segment pushes a new cinematographic process to the limit. The same goes for the narrative, a crescendo, up to the ultimate closed hearing.
Would you agree that it’s an angrier film, or a disillusioned one, or rather a film in response to an era that is disillusioned?
I have a little difficulty using the term disillusioned, which for me implies a form of nonchalance, even cynicism, and that is precisely what I do not want. It’s not a disillusionment either, because I remain optimistic. An anger, yes. I believe that, here, it is present. Against authoritarianism, the thirst for power, the illusion of happiness, this world in which we are trying to lock ourselves. The ambient cynicism, the opportunistic speeches and the violence, which lead to totalitarianism. I am absolutely non-violent. But I use my imagination as a disruptive weapon when I feel that the walls are closing in. I try to offer a counterpoint, to a certain kind of cinema that denounces differently. “What cannot be avoided, one must embrace or bite it”, as Rainer would say.
The last part is terrible, from that point of view – “ingest or die!”
It’s a poison. You think you can make it your own, take your share of the loot without taking the poison, but the opportunism reveals the system in which you are immersed. I am aware that the film differs from my previous features and that it extracts itself from the unbridled dreamlike or imaginary obsession in which they were embedded. But if I used islands, planets…it was already to question us. After Blue tried to imagine a world after the polluted world. The Wild Boys condemned violent boys to become women and change their perception, in the deepest sense. The closed world allowed us to go to the end of the questioning. But reality was already there. She Is Conann is not a closed world in an ocean, but a succession of hatchings in troubled waters.
Interview by Philippe Azoury (Paris, April 25, 2023), published here by kind permission of UFO Distribution
English translation thanks to Meli Gueneau
Weird Weekend present She Is Conann, alongside We Barbarians, on Friday 31st May, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Adam Torel is the founder and one-man-band leader of Third Window Films, established in 2005 with the express intention of broadening the canon / taste / market for Asian cinema in the UK, beyond the J-Horror boom of the late ’90s and early noughts.When we were trying to source a screening licence for Sogo Ishii’s The Crazy Family for WWI, back in 2018, Adam was one of the first trees we shook for a lead. Now, the film is finally getting a UK disc release, part of Third Window’s Director’s Company series, and we jumped at the chance to screen it again, in a brand-new restoration, for its 40th anniversary. We spoke to Adam about the origins of Third Window and the work behind a release like The Crazy Family.
We started discussing last month’s screening, Kim’s Video, and how regional institutions, like the Florida video store where Adam cut his teeth, are comparatively unsung and undervalued.Adam had seen Kim’s Video while sitting on a film festival jury.
[WW] One of the through-lines for our monthly series is curation and the people who build collections and shape other people’s collections – arbiters of taste, I suppose, would be one way of saying it. Really, it’s about way-finders, as opposed to gatekeepers, and curating the canon in that sense.
[Adam] When I worked at the video shop, I was like that. I was really into independent films, and I lived in a small town in Florida. There was nothing there, but there was this amazing video shop that I ended up working at. I was always into film, but it was there I got into, you know, hardcore, like, super-rare films. And that video shop, the owners just basically bought every single VHS that was ever released, whether they liked it or not. They just thought, “We need to buy everything and keep it in the shop,” you know, to keep these films alive. And they never threw anything away. So, as films would lose their licenses or they would become out of print, copies still existed in this shop.
The owner of the shop made his money through real-estate, but his passion was cinema, this tiny shop in Florida that nobody ever really came to, but you’d have, like, 50,000 films. They’d been buying VHS since the format started, so there were all these films that you could never find anywhere, ever. And this was obviously before the internet as well, so if you wanted to find out about something, you would go to the shop, and these two – this owner and this manager – they basically had an encyclopedic memory in their brain. You’d come in, or a customer would come in, “Yeah, I remember this movie when I was, like, 15 and, like, this cat died,” and they’d just, boom, they’d know exactly what it was, who directed it, who the cameraman was. It was an unbelievable experience. Actually, I wasn’t old enough to work there, but I managed to convince them to let me work there when I was 16. And I worked there for four years, just watching movies in the shop, day and night, and then taking stuff home and watching it till the morning. I couldn’t sleep very well at the time, so I’d be watching all day and night.
I got into Asian cinema because it was the films that you couldn’t see, even though they had everything. I was always trying to find the films that were just impossible to find. At the time, [Asian films were] really hard to see overseas, so I was, like, “All right, I’m going to get into Asian films and do all these trades with Video Search of Miami and all these places.” They’d send you a catalogue of handwritten titles, in the post, and you’d get it, and you wouldn’t even know what any of them was, because it’s not like you could look on the internet and say, “What’s this Centipede Horror?” You’re just like, “Oh, Centipede Horror, that sounds all right.” And then you would either trade them with what you had or you’d post the money in the post, and then, months later, this VHS would arrive. And I would just do that and then copy them and bring them in the store myself to rent out to people.
So, obviously it was a bit dodgy in that respect, but, you know, that was the only way that you could see these films. And also, this was in the ’90s, and Tartan Films in England were becoming this big thing for Asian films. So, me being in America and buying a lot of those Tartan DVDs and VHS from the UK, I’m English, so I thought, “I’m going to go back to England and see if I can get a job at Tartan Films.” And I went back, and I got a job interning there at first, and then became an employee, and that, I guess, started the concept of me working within the world of distribution, not just, like, being interested in it.
[WW] So, what was the step to you setting up Third Window?
[Adam] When I got into Tartan Films, I guess it was around the time that everyone fell in love with them. They were releasing all these bangers every month, and it was a sort of golden age for them. Not just Asian cinema, but for all sorts of films. And then, as the DVD market started to peak, and as J-Horror started to fizzle out, I was there telling them, “Stop just putting all these shit, long-haired ghost films. If you’re gonna buy J-Horror, or, like, genre films, there are all these films from Asia.” But, you know, the thing about a company like that is your image, as a consumer, is, “Wow, they’re this amazing company and everybody must love cinema a lot.” When you end up working there, nobody knows anything about cinema, except for the interns, you know, or, like, the really low people. So, you get a bit disillusioned, and you’re like, “Well, there are all these great films, but they’re just a business,” you know? “They’re just thinking about what to make money with.” So, I started saying, “All right, I’m going to get these films that I think are good for you.” Actually, I initially went to the boss, Hamish McAlpine, with titles, saying, “Look, I’ll buy these films for you and you can release them, because it will make the company better and you won’t have any risk on the money for them.” I went and bought these films, and then, when I told him that, he fired me immediately. In my mind, it was a good thing. But he was, like, “You’re a traitor to the company, and you’ve gone behind my back.”
When I started Third Window Films, my whole point was being a company that anybody could just mail and I’d reply back to them. Because any company or any person that owns a relatively large company, even if they’re distributing minor cult films, he has no connection at all to the consumers. So, he doesn’t care, he’s just living in Soho with, like, a Lamborghini and asking people from the office to sit outside for his car so he doesn’t get a ticket. That’s basically the way that he ran things. And I was really sort of against that. But I thought, you know, “Wouldn’t it be great if I pay for them, and therefore there’s no risk on you?” But, for him, it’s all about money, it’s he that decides everything, and if you go against him, you’re… So, he immediately fired me, the moment I said that, and then I thought, “Well, I better just start it myself.”
[WW] And you make a point of being more collaborative, more kind of collegial, of having good relationships with other people in the industry.
[Adam] It’s really important for me. I mean, I don’t have the name brand or the money or the status to do what I want, like Hamish McAlpine, so I need to be on good terms with everybody. There’s loads of times when I work for, like, months for free, just to help out, even other distributors, where even it could be a loss to my own releases. For example, with films like Crazy Family, the rights are so complicated that I need to basically work as a sales agent on behalf of the Japanese, for free. So, no commission. But what I do is, in order to clear the rights, I need to go to the producers or the rights-holders and go with, like, this much money from all these distributors. Then I can go to them and say, “Look, I have $30,000,” or something like that, “we can do a deal like that.” I work as a producer as well and you always have to think of how everybody would think of an outcome.
So, what I do is, including films like Crazy Family, or any of these other titles that I do, I find distributors overseas, like Error 4444, who are also handling Crazy Family, which I’ve also sold to France and Germany and all these other countries, and then take all their money, together with mine, and go to the rights-holders. But at the same time, that loses sales for me. Even if the region codes may be different, I can still get some sales to America, but now I won’t be able to. And it’s not like I’m getting the film for free myself in exchange, nor am I getting a commission for their sale. And in order, also, to make their release easier, I need to make loads of bonus pictures, subtitling, do all these things for free and then give it to them to make their release easier. It causes a lot of time and stress, and I get nothing out of it. But if I don’t do these things, the films don’t get released at all because the Japanese, like, with Crazy Family and Mermaid Legend, all these films haven’t been released in 40 years because it’s too hard to work with the Japanese rights-holders, especially if the rights are a mess, and also in terms of restorations as well. You can’t just say, “Well, I’ll pay you for the license fee,” then use that to make the restoration. The companies are going to say, “No, you have to pay us the money for restoring and pay us a license fee on top of it,” which is impossible. So, that’s why I do all these things and get all this money from here and there. Like financing a film, like producing a film, it’s imperative to do these things, just for the sake of these films.
[WW] We have a very limited experience of the same process, with some non-English language films. The energy, psychic energy, expense – it can be a wild amount of investment and time.
[Adam] Working with Japanese is not easy at the best of times. Luckily, I do speak Japanese and I live here, so that does move things forward. But there is a reason why Japanese films just don’t get released overseas. I’ve lived here for long enough, I understand how they work, but that also means that I need to switch my mind to…a Japanese mode when I deal with them. But then also, like, the Western mode when I deal with the Westerners and the Western companies and back and forth. And especially for contracts as well, I need to make the contracts in certain ways, and I have to translate it to Japanese. With these, like, ’80s films, especially the Director’s Company, because it’s from a company that went bankrupt, it’s especially complicated. I’ve been working on these for a long time and, in the end, because I’m selling it to all these other distributors in order to get the ball rolling, not only will I lose out on the financial aspect of it, but there’s nothing exclusive about it. When I did Door recently, which was a huge amount of work, and then I sold it to an American company called Terror Vision, and everybody’s like, “Wow, Terror Vision rescued this film Door.”
I’ve only recently started to realise that I should put my logo on the front of the data before I send it [to partners], so that at least, when they put their release out, it says “Third Window Films” on the front. I guess I’m not very good at promoting myself or my company, even, which is just me anyway. But I do realise, for example, there are many film producers that you look on IMDb and they’ve got these lovely profile photos of themselves, and you actually look into it and they’ve done nothing whatsoever. There are other people that do all the hard work and don’t get the credit. But do you really want to put the energy into promoting yourself, or is it the promoting the product? It depends on the person, I guess.
[WW] How do you gauge success, for yourself and for Third Window?
[Adam] Just the sales units. I mean, I also work as a sales agent, for titles like Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River and all that, where I take the film from the beginning and I bring it to festivals, I create a buzz, I do PR, and then I sell it, the rights only, as a job, so I get a commission for that. And in that case, if I sell the remake rights, which I’ve done for a few films, I get money, so that’s fine for me. It helps me buying, like, these tiny, obscure films, but, otherwise, yeah, I guess it’s sales. But it gets hard, because sales just aren’t that good. I would have never done this in the past, but maybe I need to release a film like One Percenter or something, like, a genre film, because maybe that will sell more to people that haven’t heard of Third Window Films, and that might get them into watching the films, which are completely different films anyway. But I’m just trying to try different things, because it’s a lot harder nowadays. I see companies like Radiance, who are doing massive amounts of sales, but they’re a lot more structured, and they’re also not handling just Asian films. When you’re dealing with niche Asian, or especially Japanese-only films, it’s just too niche, I guess, even if you do try to release, like, an action film like One Percenter every so often. It’s tough. I never wanted to distribute a film that has already been distributed, or has a chance of being distributed. You know, my mindset was always, like, if somebody’s going to distribute this film, then there’s no reason for me to distribute the film.
[WW] How do you practically approach something like The Crazy Family, then, that’s arguably even more niche than the earlier Ishii films?
[Adam] Yeah, more obviously genre films have been distributed. I mean, Crazy Thunder Road was a real pain because the music rights had never cleared for overseas use and we had to clear them, but I think Burst City is quite well-known enough that releasing Crazy Thunder Road off that, because it’s a better version of Burst City, made it a little more accessible, ’cause it’s a sort of rock-and roll-punk film. But Crazy Family, even though it’s not really been seen, it’s a film that everybody sort of knows of, like Typhoon Club. Everybody thinks it’s amazing, but it’s just not available. But I’d always wanted to release Crazy Family because it’s my favourite of his, or one of them. I mean, he’s got so many great films that are so different. Years ago, I was looking out for the rights and I ended up at Toho because WField and Toho owned the rights, and neither can move without the other. And Toho were just impossible to work with. If you asked to do a one-off screening, even if it’s a ten-seat cinema, it’s, like, $1,500 minimum. But they don’t care, because they own Godzilla and they’re making so much money.
When I came to Japan, I started learning a little more about the culture here, and also working with Korea before and working with Hong Kong, the reason why they do these things is because even big companies like Toho or Toei, the international divisions are so small. We’re talking a couple of people. Toho, a little more, but Toei’s, like, two people. It’s not worth it for them to draw up a contract and do all this stuff for one screening, unless it’s $1,500. So, those companies, they all have a rule where it’s just, “We’re just not going to sell it.” A film festival can’t play it, or we’re not going to sell the rights to it, unless it’s… For Toho, they won’t sell any film for under $10,000. Any film. Doesn’t matter if it’s, like, a film that no-one’s ever heard of, that’s never been released. They just don’t care. It’s a mix of them not caring and also that they’re just too busy. Japan, it’s all based on the domestic market, because all the money is made domestically. It’s like India, the reason why Indian films aren’t released properly overseas is because everyone who works in the Indian film industry works on the domestic side of it. So, conversely, the reason why Korea is such a big thing and Korean films are such a big thing is because they have had K-pop and everything to expand around the globe and therefore each company has a massive section for International. And they all speak English really well and know exactly what the international market is like, so they know what prices they can sell it at and how to deal with distributors, and all these things which the Japanese just don’t know. For example, Kadokawa is a massive company, they’ve been around for 100 years, they have all these films, and they have one person who handles international film festivals, she doesn’t fucking understand a word of English. Her job is working with international film festivals, she can’t fucking speak English! It’s unbelievable, when you think about it, but, like, that’s just Japan.
Before I came here, when I was working as a festival or buyer or anything, I was like, “What are you asking me, $2,000 for a fucking film screening?!” Even if we had an 800-seat cinema, it’s not going to make the money back for us. Like, it’s crazy. And then I came here, and I realised, like, “Ah, that’s the reason why.” I still think they’re ruining Japanese film culture because, by not doing the deals, no films are being released, and then when you have a new film that you want to go overseas, people are going to be so far away from Japanese film culture that they’re not going to be interested in buying your new film. Also, working as a producer here and distributor also here as well, I realised it’s just such a small amount of money, compared to the amount of money we’re going to make in Japan, that, like, is it even worth it? You have to put so much energy in for such a small return. I mean, you have to really think of the big picture, so that’s why, I guess, you have all these issues with so many of these films, especially the older ones, because there are less and less people alive who are even connected or remember them.
So, a friend of mine, a few years ago, found all these negatives for Director’s Company, including Door and Typhoon Club and Crazy Family, all these films. Obviously, I loved Crazy Family, but him finding the negatives started the process, this rights clearance issue and these re-scanning of films. And because I started releasing all these Director’s Company films – first of all with Door and Typhoon Club and Guard from Underground – I thought, “Well, Ishii Sogo was part of the Director’s Company,” and Crazy Family was his only film for them, except for Half Human, which is a short film, “that needs to be a part of this series, because it’s a seminal film of the Director’s Company.” The thing about Ishii Sogo, he’s a director. There are some directors who also understand the other aspects of the industry, like Tsukamoto Shinya, who understand about distribution, understand about rights, ownership. But Ishii Sogo, he goes to anybody, “I’m just desperate to make this film.” Like, “Just make it happen.” And he goes on to the next project. So, he doesn’t understand about the rights to the film, who owns it. So, his films just get lost, in that respect. And he’s always onto the next film, so he doesn’t really, I guess, care so much about finding out about what happened to the last ones. I wanted to release some of his other films, like Angel Dust and Labyrinth of Dreams, but that would be just more hectic. Considering I’m already focused on the Director’s Company series at the moment, I might as well just put all my attention on The Crazy Family. There are more obscure titles from the Director’s Company that become a little more sellable, once people are buying into that label, that sub-label, and therefore, it keeps it going a little more. It was only around for ten years, and most of the films from the company aren’t very good and so it’ll probably fade out by the end of year, I’d imagine, and I’ll have to move on to the next thing.
Theatrical poster for The Crazy Family (illustration by Teruhiko Yumura)
[WW] And so, you always have your eye on the next thing, you must have stuff percolating. Or do you have to kind of keep your entire focus on the current thing?
[Adam] I need to plan at least a little bit ahead, but a lot of the time things just fall out of the sky. This Director’s Company series was just a situation where I ran into somebody, they had these negatives and, okay, let’s move on with that. But I don’t even know what I’m going to release next year. I know what I’m releasing this year, in terms of other titles, but next year I have nothing. So, I need to hope that new films get made, or things fall into place.
[WW] When you have the film and you know you’re going to release it, I understand that you do the subtitles yourself. Does that mean translation or preparing the materials, or both of those things?
[Adam] For the feature subtitles, usually I don’t, because they’re usually ready. You know, I think most Japanese films, even if they’re old, they usually have feature subtitles because they’ve played at a film festival in the past. There have been some films where I’ve just re-subtitled the film myself. Like Door and Door II, I just did them myself, because in those cases, I was also working with the sale agent for them, so I needed to have subtitles to show them to film festivals. So, in those cases, I will do the subtitles, but it’s mostly for the bonus features.
Obviously, I need to save as many costs as I can, so usually I do all the subtitling for the bonus features, like audio commentaries, making-of’s, interviews – anything like that, I’ll do that. For the translations, usually [I work] with a few different people. I have a Japanese friend that speaks English, who lives in England, to do some work, to read through, and then I’ll read through and I’ll send it out to a few people, and we’ll just fix it up, in that respect.
For the extras, first of all, when I came into the industry 20 years ago, and it was like you could sell a DVD with burned-in subtitles and, like, no extras and, like, you’d sell it for 20 quid and it would totally be fine. Now, everybody wants fucking all these extras and, like, stupid packaging and all that. And as somebody not from that generation… I don’t even have a television, I don’t care about 4K or anything like that. For me, it was just more important that I was seeing the film, and nowadays, that just doesn’t work. But, then again, nobody watches the extras, but you’ve got to have them on there.
Sometimes, I try to find people on YouTube that have made, like, good video essays and just ask them, “Do you want to do one for me?” I think the problem is sometimes you end up just going back to the same old people. But then, I think, as a consumer, every time you look and it’s another commentary by this person or it’s another one by that person, it gets a bit stale. The design, as well, for posters, you don’t really want to ask the same designer every time, but you find somebody who’s easy to go with and it just becomes a sort of go-to. It’s just, I guess, ease of a rhythm, I guess, than trying to find out new people and hoping that they turn out well or not. Because you could go and make the effort to find these people that sound like they could do a good job, and then you get the product, you’re like, “What the fuck is this?”
The Crazy Family (逆噴射家族, Sogo Ishii, 1984)
[WW] How do you feel about piracy? Are there degrees of it that you’re comfortable with?
[Adam] Yeah, I mean, it’s a double-edged sword, because I understand why somebody would want to help enrich others with a film that is not available anywhere, and therefore they put it on the internet. Of course, at the same time I’d be like, “Well, I’m just not going to release that film now,” because it’s available too easily on the internet. But then again, I might think, “Well, the moment I release my copy, it’s immediately going to be put on the internet anyway.” Which is a reason why a lot of Japanese companies don’t want to sell the films for small amount, because they sell somebody the rights for, like, $3,000, and then the person who puts it out makes it available to be pirated when it’s a film that has never been pirated before and therefore it’s going to kill their sales.
When I bought a film recently from another company, I put it out, and then it got put on the internet, and they were, like, “Now we’ve lost the US sale for it,” because now it’s just too easily available everywhere, and what can I do? But I understand that that makes them think, “Well, we’re just not going to want to sell it for anything less than an amount that makes it worth it being now available to anybody online.” So, it’s complicated. But I think people who are going to download it are going to download it whether or not there’s a copy to buy anywhere.
I think there’s so many people nowadays that they’re just used to it. It’s unbelievable sometimes. I’ll post up something on the Third Window Films’ Facebook, and the moment I put it up, they’re like, “Can somebody send me a download link?” I’m like, “What the fuck?” But that’s just the mindset of people now, especially people that are from an era that films are so readily available, internet is so fast that that’s how they think. Maybe they don’t think it’s a bad thing and you can’t tell somebody with that mindset, “No, you should be paying for this.” And the world has changed with Netflix, because somebody could pay £10 a month and have access to thousands of films. And it’s like, “Why should I rent this one film digitally for, like, £3? I can pay £10, £5 a month and get MUBI with 1,000 films,” or, “£5 is close to zero, I’ll just download it”, you know? There’s no gap any more, in that respect. And, in that case, what am I to say? That’s just the world we live in. That’s why we have to make these collectors editions, because it has to be worth something that people want to have in their home, that they’ll pay the amount for. Otherwise, if it was just a disc with no bonus features on it, people will just download it anyway.
One of the reasons I moved to Japan – I enjoy living in Japan so much – is that I was getting a bit tired of distribution in the UK, because of piracy and such. Japan has no piracy, no piracy whatsoever, because the police cracked down on it, big-time. The whole market is completely different. Video-on-demand is really not a big thing here, despite the fact we have such great internet. It’s like going back in time, you know? The UK market, it’s all day-and-date, you release it in cinemas and you’re on digital, and it’s all the same day. Back in the days of distribution, before Netflix, you always had the holdbacks, and you’d have a VHS rental. Before sell-through, you’d have a copy just for rental shops. The world has changed so much, and with that, film distribution. But Japan is like an outlier because most films only get a theatrical release here and don’t get a video release or VOD release. Recently, VOD has become a little more, but there’s no sell-through on a lot of titles, a lot of it’s just rental. You still have video rental shops as, like, a normal thing. And people still go to the cinema, and there’s still a hold-back of, like, six months or so between the theatrical and the video.
The cinema experience is quite different here because a film can only be seen in the cinemas, and therefore, you know, you have to go to the cinema to watch it. And it also allows for the film industry and for independent cinemas to continue going, where you can see so many independent films in cinemas. I think one of the reasons I stopped theatrical distribution in the UK was cinemas would take a film of mine, not put any of the posters up, not promote it at all, and then, like, give it a fucking 11am slot, and then nobody would come on the first day and they would just cancel it. And, it’s like, well, what about word of mouth, you know? There are so many films, if it wasn’t for word of mouth, the film would have died. And in Japan, you can have a film made for, like, $5,000 by a student get a three-week run. Boom. No problem. Every day. And that allows for word of mouth and for things like One Cut of the Dead to become huge successes. And the cinema will do so much effort to promote your film. That really made me fall in love with distribution again, because they’re keeping it like the old style.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Weird Weekend present The Crazy Family on Friday 26th April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Third Window’s restoration of The Crazy Family is released on Blu-ray on 17th June, 2024, as part of their Director’s Company series, details here.
NB skip the italicised synopsis to avoid spoilers.
The Kobayashi family fulfils a long-standing ambition by moving into a two-storey, three-bedroom suburban house. While his son Masaki studies hard for university entrance exams, his daughter Erika rehearses for a possible record company audition, and his wife Saeko busies herself running the household, breadwinner Katsuhiko submits to a gruelling daily round of commuting, work and exercise. The apparent idyll is disrupted when Katsuhiko’s elderly father Yasukuni arrives for a visit and outstays his welcome. Katsuhiko privately begins to worry about a return of “the sickness” to the family. Goaded by the women’s complaints, Yasukuni is preparing to leave when Katsuhiko has the idea of digging a cellar for him under the living-room. He attacks the floor with saws and axes, assuring his horrified family that the cellar will also serve as a fall-out shelter. Soon armed with power tools and increasingly obsessed, Katsuhiko works day and night on the excavation, forgetting his office job and oblivious to the effect on the others in the house. Masaki becomes a zombie recluse, immersed in esoteric revision; neglect drives Saeko into frenzies of frustration; Erika throws tantrums in her room. Katsuhiko presses on until he strikes a nest of white ants and diverts all his energies to the task of exterminating them. He tries to go back to his job, but the thought of white ants haunts him and he is soon back in the living-room cavity – where he ruptures a water main. Hysteria grips the house and Erika attempts suicide. During the night, Katsuhiko barricades the doors and windows to keep everyone in and tries to trick the family into a group suicide. When this fails, Katsuhiko goes on a would-be murderous rampage and the family turn on each other. Next morning, Saeko prepares breakfast as usual. Katsuhiko is ominously silent until another idea strikes him: they must demolish the house so that they can make a fresh start. Everyone but Erika enthusiastically pitches in, and they leave the house as it collapses. Some time later, all five members of the Kobayashi family are living happily in the wide open space between two motorway flyovers…
“Kramer vs. Kramer,Ordinary People and The Family Game are all admirable films dealing with family problems. They are serious films, much praised by critics, and some people regard them as masterpieces. But some of us think differently. We consider them timid films, more or less like the TV family dramas made for middle-aged audiences, and the critics like them more than we do. And so Sogo Ishii and I decided to make a more radical film on the same subject. We wanted a film about the family that would be filled with fun and poison… There are four things that traditionally frighten the Japanese: earthquakes, thunder, fire and fathers. This list is as valid now as it ever was”.
Co-writer Yoshinori Kobayashi’s comments explain clearly enough where Gyakufunsha Kazoku is coming from (although the joke of bracketing Morita’s subversive Family Game with the two American films may be less apparent here than it is in Japan), but nothing could fully prepare any audience for the way it moves or the final direction it takes. Sogo Ishii’s film is a live-action comic strip, each sequence shattered into component images like panels on a page and edited to rock rhythms. The stylistic attack is matched, blow for blow, by the ruthlessness and cruelty of the humour: satire, slapstick, pain and black comedy are primary elements, but the film goes beyond them all into an area harder and more vicious than anything seen on screen since the early days of Monty Python. Its triumph is that it is (a) consistently funny, and (b) sustained as a narrative, rather than collapsing into a series of sketches. And the bizarre, ‘visionary’ ending (reached by way of a ‘special visual effects’ sequence created by the brilliant avant-garde structuralist film-maker Takashi Ito) is at once a serenely logical extension of the premises of the storyline and a twist that retrospectively gives a science-fiction gloss to the whole proceedings.
The Crazy Family (逆噴射家族, Sogo Ishii, 1984)
At the risk of hammering the jokes into the ground, it should be pointed out that the film’s humour springs from two central paradoxes. First, the proposition that the family’s hard-working, selfless, long suffering breadwinner is actually a seething mass of paranoia, haunted by the ‘imperial’ past (in the person of his senile father) and unshakeably convinced that there is a deep rooted ‘sickness’ in his family that only his love can cure. Second, the proposition that a family would destroy its own house in the name of saving it from attack by white ants (which represent Japan’s version of dry rot and are not, as might be imagined, monsters dreamed up by the scriptwriters). A Japanese audience is alerted to these paradoxes by the title, which translates literally as “The Back-Jet Family”. The reference is to an incident that occurred at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in the early 1980s. A pilot named Katagiri was about to land a JAL airliner at the end of a short, internal flight. At the crucial moment, he fired the plane’s back jet, causing the aircraft to crash and killing many of the passengers. Pressure of work was blamed for Katagiri-san’s crack-up.
These paradoxes clear the way for the film to tackle its prime targets: the masochism of male students who willingly submit to cramming for exams; the vacuousness of the ‘interests’ that teenage girls are encouraged to pursue; the stereotype of suburban wives as barely repressed Mata Haris; the matching stereotype of suburban husbands as timorous creatures brought out in hot sweats by any sexual proposition; and the general notion of the Japanese nuclear family as an ad-fed unit that literally has no space to accommodate its grandparents, no matter how large its impeccably crafted house. Every one of these is gleefully pushed to an extreme, and the ‘saving grace’ of irony is completely absent. The film also represents a major step forward for Sogo Ishii, whose previous features - Crazy Thunder Road (1980) and Bakuretsu Toshi (Burst City, 1982) – were anarchic fantasies about neo-fascists, bike gangs, urban breakdown and mass sodomy conspicuously lacking in aesthetic judgment and control. Ishii (now approaching his twenty-ninth birthday) has this time gathered a team of outstanding collaborators – including the cinematographer Masaki Tamura, who also shot Fire Festival – and come up with a film that not only means business but also delivers. He has also had the wit to rescue Hitoshi Ueki from the oblivion of Japanese TV by casting him as the appalling grandfather, a role that deliberately evokes his ’60s heyday in the Irresponsible film series.
Tony Rayns
Tony Rayns’ new book Just Like Starting Over: A Personal View of the Reinvention of Korean Cinema will be published in 2024.
This article was originally published in Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan 1, 1986. Re-published here by very kind permission of Sight and Sound.
The complete archive of Sight and Sound magazine (dating back to 1932) and the Monthly Film Bulletin (1932-1991) is available in digital form for your desktop.Access is included for S&S print subscribers or can be purchased for £35, here.
Weird Weekend present The Crazy Family on Friday 26th April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Watch ICO’s three-part conversation with Tony Rayns
One of the ironies of living in an age of plenty is that it becomes impossible not to feel as if the walls are closing in. The commodity that seems to be in shortest supply during Japan’s period of high prosperity is space and it’s the lack of it, both physically and mentally, that begins to drive people quietly out of their minds until they themselves become the metaphorical termites they so feared quite literally undermining the foundations of their own home. It’s a desire for clearly-defined individual space that sees the Kobayashis longing to escape the cramped conditions of the post-war danchi housing estates, but achieving their dream of becoming homeowners only seems to compound their anxiety. After all, what are they supposed to want now?
Posters for The Crazy Family (1984), A Sandcastle Model Family Home (1989) and The Family Game (1983)
The cinema of the 1980s is filled with “crazy families” and a sense of impending doom that the salaryman dream is about to implode. The danchi had been a byword for post-war aspiration, but all the respectable salaryman wants is to get off them and become master of his own domain, as the owner of a home in the suburbs. One of the chief reasons the Kobayashis wanted to move seems to have been a mutual desire for privacy in which the children could have their own rooms leaving the parents space to restore their intimacy as a couple. Of course, this desire is immediately frustrated by the arrival of the grandfather, which forces the parents to sleep apart and provokes a crisis in their new utopia as it becomes clear that once again there is simply not enough space for everyone.
A Sandcastle Model Family Home (砂の上のロビンソン, Junichi Suzuki, 1989)
The Kidos, a similarly ordinary middle-class family, experience something similar in A Sandcastle Model Family Home (砂の上のロビンソン, Junichi Suzuki, 1989), in which the parents spend their evenings sitting in a cupboard watching TV with headphones on to avoid waking their children who all sleep together in the main room of their tiny danchi apartment. When they win a mansion in the suburbs in a competition to find the ideal family for an ideal home, they think all their dreams have come true, but the changing nature of aspiration in the high pressure Bubble society quickly undermines their familial bonds. All they have to do is live in the house for a year for it to become their legal property, but during that time they must agree to have their entire lives on show and allow the general public – including, at one point, a party of elderly people determined to hold a funeral there – into what is quite literally a show home. Not only do they experience constant harassment from unsuccessful applicants to the competition, but also fierce, class-based resentment from those around them and, most particularly, the father’s colleagues, who demote him to demonstrating their revolutionary blender at a supermarket until the act of performing family life eventually destroys the familial unit completely.
The Family Game (家族ゲーム, Yoshimitsu Morita, 1983)
Yoshimitsu Morita’s TheFamily Game (家族ゲーム, 1983) similarly hinted at the hollow performativity of contemporary family, though the Numatas are among the small number who show no desire to leave their danchi home, even if the father is forever ordering people to his car so they can “talk without whispers”. Like Mr Kobayashi and Mr Kido, Mr Numata is a hardworking salaryman, largely absent from the domestic space, though on the rare occasions he is present simply orders everyone around, at one point telling one of his sons that they have no need to think for themselves because it’s his job to think for them. He also tells his wife it’s her job to manage the domestic space, over which he accepts no responsibility, largely leaving her to parent alone but forever blaming her when his sons don’t live up to his expectations. A traditional housewife in a very conventional family, she is lonely and unfulfilled, quietly regretting having had children so young and reflecting that her life would be easier if her kids were just nicer. The children, meanwhile, are forced into the roles of good son and bad, with the youngest rebelling against social expectation by slacking off at school until the incredibly strange tutor his parents employ begins to take a paternal role and teach him to think for himself only to see him accept conventionality on achieving their shared goal of getting him into the better local high school.
Mr Numata’s obsession with getting into the right schools is indicative of a society ruled by status and hierarchy with the father, of course, sitting at the top. Mr Kobayashi and Mr Kido are evidently less comfortable in that position or with the constraints of the salaryman existence, while Mr Kobayashi’s conviction that his family suffer from the “disease of modern life” also hints at his own anxiety about the negative effects of consumerism. He worries about his daughter’s immaturity and precociousness and his son’s obsessive studying to get into a prestigious university, reflecting that the space he thought would save them has only driven them further apart, while putting distance between himself and the corruption of the city has in fact compounded the family’s madness. The solution that he finds amounts to a deconstruction of the family unit, in which the world they inhabit becomes open and borderless, perhaps devoid of privacy but equally of constraint.
These Bubble-era families are all in their way “crazy”, struggling to redefine themselves in age of excess and increasing individualisation which leaves them dissatisfied with their allotted roles and the diminishing returns of conventional success. The persistent claustrophobia of life lived under oppressive social structures and the breakneck pace of a nation shooting straight past the economic miracle can’t help but drive them out of their minds, resulting only in a kind of unseeing mindlessness or an unstoppable desire to burn it all down and seek freedom in the now abundant space of civilisation’s ashes.
Hayley Scanlon
Weird Weekend present The Crazy Family on Friday 26th April, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Hayley Scanlon is a Japanese and East Asian Cinema specialist, writing at Windows on Worlds. Follow Hayley on X, here.
Quentin Tarantino interviewed in Video Archives (MTV, 1993)
In 1993, Quentin Tarantino marked the VHS release of his debut Reservoir Dogs with a trip to Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. Already the most famous ex-video store employee – at least, famous for being so – QT made the appearance at his former workplace to honour his full circle moment. “People who work in video stores,” he told MTV cameras, “you’re in a grand tradition. This is the new film school, so keep it up!” 1
By all accounts, the employees of the Kim’s Video mini-empire were the ne plus ultra of that species (and many of them were or did become film-makers of note2). Video store clerks everywhere may have been the architects of your evening’s entertainment – and many a night was made or laid waste by a selection from an employee picks section – but rarely, alas, did Blockbuster FOH staff curate the store’s inventory itself. That’s a claim Kim’s clerks could make, since the shop’s stock was shaped and informed by them from its inception, the nascent Kim’s an extension of film student Matt Morello’s own collection.
Kim’s other claim to fame was the consummate surliness of its staff, reported in the New York Times’ piece on the 2004 closure of its Avenue A location. To some observers, the employees were “haughty” and “hostile”, the store’s heyday a “reign of terror”. The obituary continued:
“It was like an S-and-M relationship,” said Michael Robinson, a 14-year East Village resident, about the interaction between customers and some Kim’s clerks. Recalling a disparaging remark a clerk made about a mindless comedy Mr. Robinson intended to rent, he added: “You had to go all alpha male on them to get them not to bother you. But I do miss having it here now.”
Kim’s Video signage
Whether they had to be assholes just to get hired, or if working there brought out in each of them their inner asshole is an open question. Another is, was it strictly necessary? Depending on your perspective, Kim’s either encouraged high standards of cine-literacy or discouraged (disdained?) curiosity – scourges of ignorance or punishers of naivety. And because the gold they jealously guarded was coveted by wave after wave of fresh-faced enthusiasts, they thrived / got away with it. Another Kim’s customer recalled, “Even when people were officially boycotting the place because of the mean service, they would go back just to browse.”
Nick Zedd, film-maker and one-time Kim’s employee, concluded, “Bogus snobbery is a sign of genuine insignificance and Kim’s clerks epitomized this form of neurosis.” But he also offered the following context:
“During its heyday, all Kim’s employees were paid in cash, below minimum wage. This resulted in inventory shrinkage as a form of revenge. One employee absconded with an entire collection of VHS tapes which he now hordes [sic] in his own ‘video grotto’3 on the Upper West Side.”
Where enthusiastic collecting and a deficit of personality meet, there’s a tendency towards gatekeeping. Gatekeeping itself can be a form of (self)preservation, a way of looking after a fiefdom that you’ve either established or bought your way into – drawing up the bridge against those who, you can only assume, would destroy it. Or, in other words, normalise and mainstream it, thus ruining your retreat from the world, spoiling the safe place you’ve found away from the anxiety of existence and the pain of being alive.
Promotional image advertising the return of Kim’s Video to New York
There is also, in fairness, a nobility and a utility in caring for something that society, mainstream culture, or people at large have either rejected or consistently undervalued. The sense of self (and self worth) that such a pursuit offers can be difficult to give up, even in part. Anyone who can be persuaded to defer to your authority is not a threat, while any challenges must be ruthlessly dissuaded. So, when Kim’s clerks defended the store, with extreme prejudice, against the intrusion of amateurs and gadabouts, they were curating the clientele as much as the collection.
There seems to be an essential tension between collecting and hoarding, championing and gatekeeping4. But what happens when the thing you protect is no longer under threat, either because it’s seemingly been saved or even finally destroyed5? Video stores, some valiant exceptions aside, are largely a thing of the past but the energy they focussed had to go somewhere. The gatekeeping tendency certainly endures and, for this writer, reached its apotheosis in a recent episode of The Video Archives Podcast, hosted by Tarantino and his erstwhile collaborator/fellow ex-clerk Roger Avary.
Those compelled by the kinds of parallel worlds conjured by Tarantino with his movie-movie universe – or, in general, alternative histories, fake movies, greatest movies never made, expanded universes of lore, etc, etc – would have been drawn to this very special episode which promised to pay tribute to the reportedly recently departed Rick Dalton. QT and pals would expound at length on the life and career of the star, animated by Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (2019) but otherwise fully imaginary.
This seemed, in theory, like a fascinating experiment in world building, a playful synthesis of both Tarantino’s fictional work and his new focus on film criticism, the throughline his encyclopedic cinephilia. Listening, though, it’s an oddly alienating experience and it’s not, perhaps, immediately obvious why. It does become clear – what better situation for the hoarding cinephile, whose fiefdom is under threat by vastly increased (and always increasing) access to film knowledge (if not always to films themselves), an explosion of insight and opinion, to hold forth on a world of films that no-one knows anything about, that no-one can know anything about, except you?6
Sean Welsh
Weird Weekend present Kim’s Video with Directors Q&A on Friday 28th March, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
When Video Archives closed, less than two years later, after a brief and ill-advised relocation to Hermosa Beach, Tarantino bought up their inventory (“Probably close to eight thousand tapes and DVDs.”) It now forms the bulk of his home collection, and the basis for The Video Archives Podcast with Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary.↩︎
Esteemed Kim’s alumni include the men Michael M Bilandic, Dylan Kidd, Alex Ross Perry, Todd Phillips, Spencer Riviera, Sean Price Williams, Nick Zedd. ↩︎
A video grotto is like a man cave which excludes customers, rather than simply women and children. ↩︎
In some ways, the tension between collecting and gatekeeping is mirrored in the relationship between exhibition and preservation (a dialectic that goes at least as far back as the days of Henri Langlois and Ernest Lindgren, two heroes of preservation with differing views on exhibition). This conflict is also found in the quandary facing anyone engaged in researching, preserving and restoring films that are considered marginal – the free sharing of those films (and related materials) on torrent sites, private and otherwise, and on more public-facing platforms, in one persuasive sense means more eyes on these films. They deserve a bigger audience, after all, that’s the impetus behind preserving and restoring them in the first place. But since those efforts require manpower, resources and money, there’s a financial imperative that can be undermined if and when the film (and/or related materials) becomes freely available. It’s one of the most (only?) persuasive arguments against piracy, that it undermines livelihoods in the first instance as well as future efforts in the same regard. That argument is unlikely to find purchase with most people when it’s made by Disney or any other major studio. However, when the project is personal, or the organisation niche and underfunded, it holds weight. One problem facing independent (broadly encompassing DIY alongside small to mid-size distributors) efforts in this area is that the economics are not clear to most people, should they even be interested. ↩︎
These brief notes don’t afford adequate space to satisfyingly grapple with the rise of streaming, the attendent death and rebirth of physical media, nor piracy, torrenting, listicle programming, AI and the end of work, etc, etc. ↩︎
You would think, perhaps, that making your own films would be the ultimate scratch of that itch, but then many people peskily insist on the death of the author, that once the film is made its meaning belongs to the viewer, so, no. ↩︎
