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. ↩︎
What’s it like being mental? I know this seems like a crass and antagonistic question to pose, but for some who suffer from various clouds of mental health issues (like myself), its something I always feel is on the tip of other people’s tongues if only they could flick it off. What does it look like to them? The Other Side of the Underneath, feminist surrealist Jane Arden’s 1972 film about a group of girls’ visions, therapy, nightmares and exorcism from “schizophrenia”, filmed in South Wales and, reportedly, with scenes filmed as the cast members peaked on LSD, is a raw, extreme piece of British psychotronica that feels filled with fumes of anxiety and banshee-delivered primality.
Beginning with a piece of prose on the screen about consciously awakening from a metaphoric coma, a rebirth from the celeste of mortal darkness, we’re instantly given a series of visual textures that defines the rest of the experience. Coal black muds and barren grass greens. A wind-whipped, poisoned air that will chloroform you before the cloth does. Industrial, rural textures of quarry town plumes. Mineshafts and flowers. Chimneys and horses. Isolated and cold. Smashed mirror handovers like fragments of the mind are gifts. From house, to church, to dream, to hillside, the film feels that pastoral chill across its forehead. The camera close enough to the girls in the home to be distorted at the extremities of the screen, close enough you can feel the heat off their eyeballs. Even the sound design coalesces with the misama on-screen. Doors creak open and merge into cello string screeches. A character’s vision of herself in a corner comes to play the aforementioned instrument as she scores her own mania:
“One cell, Multiply”
“One cell, Multiply”
As the strings are plucked. The film’s identity becomes at one with an incantation of hysteria that never leaves, even after the sound/visuals part from one another. There’s a genuine, beatified surreality to everything that normally you’d scoff at an artist for (and it does feel closer to pretentious at times) but the honesty and frightening lack of leash here makes it a true experimental, in-camera rage of catatonia and fear.
Arden’s filmmaking-as-therapy sees her making an endurance for audience and crew, as her catharsis of making art becomes antagonizing. This is meant to be a document of hysteria. Every scene filled with howls, wails, glassy tears and screams are like opening a vein to god. The girls, Arden’s real life theatre troupe, named Holocaust, are forced by character and, by extension, reality, to confront, hit and be intimate with themselves (and Arden’s husband Jack Bond, who appears briefly). Even Jane herself is inserted into the film as a therapist, making everything feel blended across interpretation. It’s a perverse, chaotic sentiment that turns the film into something almost confrontationally personal.
There are scenes of therapy that are catastrophically helpless, oppressed by ghosts of the mind. Visions of demons by bedside, sheep as protection totems, feather showers on wedding days that collide as funerals, contradictory displays of sexuality that wax and wane from euphoria to self-flagellation. The lack of true cohesion gives off a miasma so acrid that it clouds the mind. Even as it descends into Farmland Elvis sing-alongs, Cabaret nudity and Religious Martyrdom, the films sense of razor-edge frenzy never stops, and its dischordancy might stay as a constant refrain in your head long after the film ends.
As one of the of the characters states in the aforementioned therapy scenes, “Under each of us is all the pain. All the love. All this pain, its so simple. Just empty it out, there’s no change.”
The girls’ lack of diagnosis or closure is the fear that all of us have. An ear-gnawing rat that keeps us up at night on that fine line between sleep. What if I’m never better? Will those circles around my eyes be embossed forever as rancid trophies, or will I be crucified as a public cause? And something like The Other Side of the Underneath can only say, “What an obscenity”,as you see a projection of yourself on-screen.
The Reptile House is the alias of Findlay, which is the nickname of the author himself. A banner under which all collective writing, art, submissions and soon-to-be-screenings is nestled. Reflected in the dark terraces of The Reptile House is cinematic pain and oscillations coming from old Adidas brochures. Always open to collaboration. @antibloom
In the current climate of media, there has been an astronomical rise in true crime content. Big budget programmes about serial killers that inspire children’s Halloween costumes, podcasts detailing murder investigations that gain the listenership to affect, dozens of documentaries a year about horrific events beamed into our homes through Netflix and other streaming services. These compilations of tragedy and horror often reduce real pain and loss to pure sensation, turning the deplorable into entertainment. In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, he theorises on why so many are drawn to spectacles of tragedy. His thesis is that human beings are so interested in the grotesque manners of death as a way to alleviate their own anxieties about eternal darkness. Death is often so random and meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but in the world of true crime, death is explosive and unforgettable. Death has a meaning in true crime, even if that meaning often boils down to being the unwilling provider of late-night entertainment. Instead of true crime making it hard for people to sleep or go outside, it often seems to act as a calming supplement for its most regular consumers, in the way that car crashes provide stimulation to the characters in DeLillo’s world.
True crime largely oscillates between three major areas. The first is the examination of serial killers, the mindset and deeds of murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy compel a bizarre amount of people. The second is the mystery, where a documentary or a podcast take the audience through the potential outcomes step by step, either revealing the truth by the end or allowing the consumer to theorise their own murderer. In the case of the hit podcast Serial, the outcry of millions of outraged listeners has actually contributed to the overturning of a murder charge. The third is the more bizarre crimes. The kind of crimes that immediately take the observer by surprise, the ones that could be scattered in headlines for decades and still incite shock and awe. One of the most famous shock and awe cases is Lorena Bobbitt cutting her husband’s penis off, which has inspired numerous documentaries examining every detail of their relationship, even 25 years after the dismemberment.
While it’s true that true crime has reached new heights with the rise of podcasting and streaming services, the sensationalist fascination with depravity has been with us as a species for a long time. The case of Amy Fisher and the reaction to it from the television industry are living proof of this. The lurid tale of an underage girl shooting her boyfriend’s wife in the head, Fisher’s case fell firmly into the third designation of true crime media, a crime that was so compelling that three different television networks produced their own version of Fisher’s lustful murder. These three TV movies (The Amy Fisher Story starring Drew Barrymore, Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story starring Alyssa Milano, and Amy Fisher: My Story starring Noelle Parker) and the case itself have been largely forgotten by time, as new scandals and stories have dominated the airwaves.
However, filmmaker Dan Kapelovitz has resurrected these three forgotten artefacts of early ’90s pop culture, forging a singular narrative by splicing footage of the films together. Sometimes Amy Fisher’s face will change halfway through scenes, sometimes her parents will change, and occasionally all three Fishers will converge together in a single frame. The limitations of these films’ portrayal of Fisher and her lover Joey Buttafuoco are evident. Kapelovitz cannot change the intent from all three dramas to demonise Fisher, with at least one of the films depicting her as a crazed sex maniac who has purposefully sabotaged the life of her much older boyfriend. The misogyny is omnipresent in how her relationship with Buttafuoco is framed, and especially in the sequences following her murder of his wife. The frequent transitions between films during the second half amplifies how nasty these pictures were towards Fisher, with her descent into violence and madness being told with a perverted glee from all three initial filmmakers.
The sudden transitions from actress to actress, and most importantly, the quality in video production, take a little while to settle into. Having a shot of a crazed, beaded actor snorting cocaine behind the wheel of his car within the first couple of minutes, before suddenly cutting to another film’s shots of an insane asylum, was a particularly sobering way to start this experiment off. Yet, for decent stretches of the 75-minute runtime, the chopped nature of the presentation becomes almost irrelevant, as the tragedy of Fisher’s story dominates everything. There are moments where the constant switches start to blend together, where Fisher and Buttafuoco and all of the other characters in this story become unified figures, before Kapelovitz performs another trick in the editing booth to keep the distinction in the audience’s mind.
Triple Fisher does not reveal the hidden merits of these three individual films about the murder, in fact, it makes them all look terrible. There is little artistic merit in these pieces on their own, but Kapelovitz has found a way to make them mean something together. It is such a damning showcase of the way that the vultures within true crime media operated around cases of tragedy like this, and makes it clear how little things have changed in the last 30 years. A version of Fisher’s story told today would likely be more sympathetic and introspective about how she was manipulated by Buttafuoco, go further into her being a victimised underage girl instead of a malicious jezebel. But it would still likely end at the same conclusion of exploitative gawking, as most true crime seems to. DeLillo might have been right in 1985 when he wrote that “Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them”. After all, if you’re reading this, you’re interested in the catastrophe too.
Logan Kenny is an autistic, bisexual writer from Glasgow, full time student, occasional podcaster. Has written for Cinematary, Little White Lies, The Film Stage and a few other places that you might have heard of. Big fan of Winnie the Pooh
All art is theft. It’s how you disguise the crime that makes it your personal own and how it rests on the political scale. From tactile artifacts to even phrases you use, there’s some coalesced, malleable composition to it all, like a hot mould of glass ready to be shaped. In a cultural arena, this idea is even greater in its capacity. Cover songs, porn parodies, remakes, remixes. Directors of films stealing shots from other films where shots are stolen from other films, and now, in the Internet Age, it’s basically an industry of its own. From nascent days of videos like The Fartrix to our frightening new fatally dystopian love of DeepFakes, It’s always been an endless bread-fold of ideas that never seem to be unanchored from someone elses. Anti-Banality Union’s new film, Earth II, is a newer (r)evolution of this cultural economy of repurposing: a climate crisis mixtape of familiarity and fear.
Earth II collages and recontextualizes actors, characters, scenes and films that we know to turn them into a narrative equating to a 90-Minute Warning. Keanu Reeves is splaced in from films like The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic to become awoken to the impending doom of capitalism preservation over nature. Will Smith shown from films like I,Robot and Independence Day is recruited as a tool of the bourgeoisie. The editing of these new storylines out of old material creates new narratives. Incantations of the past now rendered anew as real life consequence as real life newsreel footage is edited onto TV screens and in radio. It’s tonally funny and ominous as films like They Live, A Perfect Storm, The Purge, Elysium and others are inserted. Creating chaotic, falsified feelings of bigger budget intention, like a true facsimile of creation. It’s a jarring piece of cyberpunk art that feels like a socio-political comment on our consumption of fear. As if the only for modern audiences to metabolize our world is to infantilize ourselves in nostalgia. These memories of warnings and visual echoes are our only grasp on looking to the future. Getting news stories from SNL or stock trading tips from TikTok while furiously refusing to look up. Earth II is invading our looking down too.
Structured in three loose parts, we have scared warnings to begin with. TV slots, boardroom meetings, external shots of a world as now. Skyscrapers from Lethal Weapon loom across a world surviving, to the fire, floods, storms disasters, and panic (added from things like the scariest part of Jumanji), then into a new Great Reset colony where utopia is just a word. Wealth gaps are even more catastrophic, worker lives reflect our own doom as Amazon Warehouse flesh-droids and the only way to end the obscenity is to blow it all up. If the natural world doesn’t come for us, please blow it up for us, Matt Damon.
“If the world does go on, it will not go on for everyone.”
It’s a true essence of punk ideology in this medium and a politically entertaining piece of near-nihilism that feels less of a warning light on the dashboard but a million car alarms in the night, harmonizing into the Jaws theme. The torrid Earth without us will sing on, but that means you’ll never get to watch First Blood again.
The Reptile House is the alias of Findlay, which is the nickname of the author himself. A banner under which all collective writing, art, submissions and soon-to-be-screenings is nestled. Reflected in the dark terraces of The Reptile House is cinematic pain and oscillations coming from old Adidas brochures. Always open to collaboration. @antibloom
Between 1967 and 1979, Jane Arden and her partner Jack Bond (in various combinations) wrote, directed, and produced three features. The second of these was The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), developed from the critically and financially successful stage production A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets, and Witches (1971). Enjoying runs at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre and London’s The Open Space, the show had been a collaborative production devised by “Holocaust”, the UK’s first all-female theatre group. Included amongst their ranks were the multi-media artist Penny Slinger, Shakespearean actress Sheila Allen, and feminist critic and “underground” theatre practitioner Natasha Morgan.
Detail from Holocaust Manifesto (1971).
Despite this success, between 1983 and 2009, the Arden-Bond films were unable to view in Britain. Some even believed them missing, whilst many of those involved in the making of these deeply-personal and often-fraught productions had yet to rediscover a platform or desire to talk about them again. Consequently, the films were neglected in both writing and conversation. Even in the immediate aftermath of their resurfacing and restoration in 2009, discussion of the Arden-Bond films remained sparse. It has only been gradually across the past decade, and predominantly only in the last four years, that more writing has started to emerge on this work, thanks mostly to work of feminist groups such as Another Gaze and Invisible Women, and to PhD candidates invariably connected to these initiatives.
In many ways, it is this sense of unearthing something “forgotten” that has fuelled the revived interest in Jane Arden and her collaborators. Accounts from scholars and programmers often recall their first, tantalising discovery of Arden’s work, and the obsessive connecting of dots that followed. Susan Croft, for instance, recounts her happening upon a scuffed and faded copy of an Arden play text in the now-defunct radical London bookshop, Collet’s, back in 1981. It was to be a ‘significant, joyous’ discovery, that would in no small part inspire her Unfinished Histories project, salvaging and preserving memories from a bygone era of experimentation and rebellion.
My own “origin story”, as it were, bears many parallels with Croft’s. I first encountered Arden by chance, whilst browsing a second-hand bookshop on the Great Western Road in Autumn 2018. Not a complete work, merely a provocative title – “Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven”– listed in a catalogue of plays included in the back pages of another, tangentially related text. It was enough to spark four years of internet rabbit holes, email interviews, and convoluted inter-library loans.
From performance of Jane Arden’s Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1969) in the Drury Lane Arts Lab. Photograph by Peter Smith.
In the limited writing I devoured both in the immediate days that followed and in the subsequent years, as increasingly more became available, I observed two interesting trends. What caught my attention was that, although these two trends could be observed in almost every single response to these films, the two ideas seemed to be in complete opposition to one another.
The first was a frequent tendency to identify the films of Arden and her collaborators as completely unique, as divergent from British Cinema. ‘What do you think of when you think of British film?’ begins an introductory note for Arden and Bond’s final feature. ‘Probably not the 1979 puzzle picture that is Anti-Clock.’ Even Jack Bond himself appears to have adopted this stance when he proposes (somewhat audaciously) that his work with Arden is ‘not in a context.’ The films are positioned as something alternative, outside of history, perhaps even a little dangerous, and they are marketed consequently. After all, isn’t that part of the fun of watching a film at a “Weird Weekend” festival? That sense of stumbling across some hidden, esoteric gold; of entering in to some rare, in-the-know club?
The second trend, equally prevalent, was the desire to make comparisons with filmmakers working before, alongside and after. Contemporaneous reviews of Separation and The Other Side of the Underneath were laced with references to Accident (1967)and Blow-Up (1966), to Bergman and Fellini, whilst more recent writing has considered resonances with Derek Jarman, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Maya Deren. But how could a film be so unlike anything else and yet so similar? How could one critic (here unnamed) claim an Arden film was ‘so unique’ and yet ‘so quintessentially of its time’ in almost the same breath?
It begs the question: just how other is a film like The Other Side of the Underneath? For British Cinema scholar Julian Petley, not that much:
‘the vaunting and valorising of certain British films on account of their “realism” entails as its corollary […] the dismissal and denigration of those deemed un- or non-realist. […] [There’s] another, repressed side of British cinema, a dark, disdained thread weaving its way through the length and breadth of that cinema.’
As we start to trace that thread and connect those dots, it becomes clear that, without diminishing the astonishing power or achievement of The Other Side of the Underneath, this film was not born in a vacuum. Rather, the work of Jane Arden and all her collaborators emerged from and fed back into a vibrant network of people, institutions, and ideas. As Penny Slinger – a member of Holocaust and “Visual Consultant” on The Other Side of the Underneath – would be the first to remind us, collaboration is an essential component of art, and ‘no woman is an island.’
Still from The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).
Although The Other Side of the Underneath may have gone unseen for almost thirty years, this does not mean that those involved in its making were obscure figures. By the late-1960s, Jane Arden was already pretty notorious: infamous in London’s “Underground” scene, and recognisable to many due to her outspoken appearances on television on panel shows such as Not So Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life. Certainly, her reputation was such that Jim Haynes felt her a safe (or should that be a profitably “unsafe”) pair of hands to commission a play he hoped would bring audiences in their droves to raise funds for the iconic, if financially unviable, Drury Lane Arts Lab. The result was the much-lauded Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1969), co-directed by Jack Bond.
Anecdotally, Arden was even a subject of gossip in certain circles, with her husband Philip Saville’s affair with the artist Pauline Boty rumoured to have inspired the multiple-Academy Award-winning film Darling (1965), starring Julie Christie.
Similarly, artist and actress Penny Slinger was gaining a public platform by the end of sixties, and across the seventies could be seen on talk shows and cultural programming. Both Slinger and Arden were interviewed and invited to write in a range of mainstream and “underground” publications, including Cosmopolitan, The Observer, Spare Rib, and International Times [IT]. As well as helping their ideas to reach large readerships, these newspapers and magazines also often featured commissioned or reproduced pieces of poetry and visual art.
When the Holocaust group held their first meeting in 1970, not only did these women already have a platform, but they were incredibly focused and organised when it came to their mission. They even released a manifesto, as the British “Free Cinema” movement had done before them in 1956 (although a radical feminist desire to ‘explode’ the language of the patriarchy means its content often tends towards oblique poetics).
Detail from Holocaust Manifesto (1971)
To understand the contexts from which The Other Side of the Underneath emerged, we must also explore the crucial role played by the “Underground” venues in which Arden and Holocaust’s work was staged, such as the Drury Lane Arts Lab (1967-69) – subsequently the Robert Street Arts Lab (1969-71) after closure of the original – and The Open Space on Tottenham Court Road (1968-1976). These were spaces where one could expect to run into such legendary figures as David Bowie, John and Yoko, and William S Burroughs. More crucially, these were also spaces where artists like Holocaust’s members could share their work, network with other artists, and keep a finger on the pulse. In a recent account, David Curtis elaborates that we cannot underestimate ‘the vital role played by the Labs in the development of [their visitors’] chosen art forms, as artists came together around a common vision.’
The venues not only had an impact on the ideological development of the work that emerged from them, but also influenced their aesthetic development. Early productions, such as Jeff Nuttall’s no.14 – The Cage Show (1967), were described as ‘characteristic of much that followed on the Lab’s stage in their mix of aggression, physical performance and improvisation.’ There is the suggestion of a distinctive Arts Lab aesthetic, an idea developed in a description of Portable Theatre’s Inside Out (1968) from the following year, which was ‘cinematic, in the sense that it consisted of a number of short scenes with blackouts.’ This, Tony Bicât writes, ‘became the house style.’
These characteristics can be observed in Arden’s work across mediums. Improvisation, aggression, and physicality all converge in the “group therapy” sequences of The Other Side of the Underneath, where (under the influence of LSD), Holocaust members were invited to delve into repressed trauma in extended sequences which often climax in overwhelming outbursts of pain and emotion. We can also observe an affinity with the ‘cinematic […] short scenes’ common in Arts Labs shows in The Other Side of the Underneath’s attention to montage and episodic vignettes.
Still from The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).
The UFO Club was another popular hotspot of the ’60s “Underground”, whose personnel overlapped with the founders and administrators of The Arts Labs. The UFO also facilitated an exchange of talent and wielded an aesthetic influence on Arden’s work. The liquid light projections of Mark Boyle, for instance, which regularly featured at both The UFO and The Labs, are also to be found in Arden and Bond’s Separation (1967), where they provide integral structural and artistic meaning to the film. Even following her collaboration with Boyle, his influence remains in Arden work. In The Other Side of the Underneath,we see lights projected on top of the performers as a means of visualising the subject matters (hetero-patriarchal authoritarianism, for example) which have oppressed the characters/actors.
Furthermore, a visit to The UFO or The Arts Labs was often an overwhelmingly embodied, multi-sensory experience. One could expect a raucous live band (such as the one we encounter in The Other Side) playing alongside projections of Mark Boyle’s lights, whilst simultaneously some experimental Andy Warhol films and recorded sitar music competed for attentions. When Jack Henry Moore, a ‘key countercultural figure involved in London’s psychedelic UFO club’, co-directed Vagina Rex, it was little surprise that the production ‘overwhelmed the audience’s senses.’ All this perhaps informed Arden’s penchant for rapid cutting and montage; for her combinations of various film stocks and tapes (most evident in Anti-Clock); for her particular attention to the expressive potentials of synchronous and asynchronous soundscapes; as well as a tendency to feature screens, and projections, within screens.
Still from Separation (1967).
The label “Underground” that became attached to these venues and artists is also perhaps misleading. By 1970, the success of the Labs had inspired a mushrooming of similar hubs across Britain, which Richard Neville argued helped to further spread and popularise their aesthetic styles: ‘it is by interlacing the country with such outposts of cultural revolution that the Underground has consolidated itself.’ Indeed, sites like The Labs, The Open Space, and UFO contributed to a slackening of boundaries between what was considered dominant and what was considered “counter-” culture. As theatre historian and Channel 4 executive Peter Ansorge notes, ‘between 1968 and 1973 [The Arts Labs] played as vital a part in the life of our subsidised theatre as the Royal Court, National or Royal Shakespeare Company.’
Peter Brook, then co-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was often known to pop a head in and stand at the back for performances at The Arts Labs, and was rumoured to have attended a performance of Vagina Rex. As Sheila Allen recalled, ‘that’s where [Brook] went most weeks to find out what was new,’ and it is fascinating to note the various ways in which Brook and Arden’s works appear to influence one another, with their shared interests in cruelty, in Brechtian songs, and in placing large demands on their audiences.
Still from The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).
Furthermore, many of the key figures working in these venues and alongside the Holocaust group hailed from institutions that could hardly be described as “underground”. In fact, quite the opposite, with many being educated and first meeting in prestigious cultural institutions such as the University of Cambridge and the Slade College of Art. The Chelsea College of Art alone provided three members to the Holocaust group: Liz Danciger, Susanka Fraey, and Penny Slinger.
We might speculate that it was in one of the arts schools that Sally Potter could have first encountered the Holocaust group, as she was regularly performing in their spaces with the “Group Events” collective in the late-60s. Perhaps Potter attended a performance of Vagina Rex whilst involved with the early days of the London Filmmakers Co-operative, then housed at the Drury Lane Arts Lab at the same time as Arden’s play was being performed. Is it conceivable that the vision of the all-women crew on The Gold Diggers (1983) might have taken its cue from the Holocaust project?
In resisting the desire to single out The Other Side of the Underneath as an isolated, anomalous film, we instead insist upon its firm place in the British cinematic and cultural canon. Hailing from a period which is often conceptualised as a series of ‘success waves: anger, satire, Swinging London, hippiedom, Hollywood-led cosmopolitanism…’ perhaps we might consider the achievement of these women as belonging to, if not a fully-fledged movement, then perhaps an additional moment, with a thread of influences and influencees that mark the film as both urgent and important.
Matthew Gray
The Other Side of the Underneath screens at Weird Weekend III, 12:30 on Saturday 29.10.22 at Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, part of the House of Psychotic Women strand. Matthew Gray will join us to introduce the film.Get your tickets here.
Matthew is somehow making a living doing their dream job of reading scripts and supporting emerging screenwriters. They also love to write about and programme films, with a particular interest in those mavericks and outliers that don’t quite conform to our dominant narratives of British Cinema history.
