The Innocents (2021)

  Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents is an even more powerful film than his The Worst Person in the World. It has an even deeper moral mission. With miraculous performances by the central four children, it’s a gripping horror story with ever widening implications.

The title recalls Jack Clayton’s 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s The Turning of the Screw. There a governess — emblem of Restrained Civilization — discovers  a harrowing evil in her young charges, subverting the usual equation of children with innocence. In Vogt’s film, four children discover an ability to communicate telepathically, to initially constructive but ultimately disastrous end.

The drama occurs in a summer lull, when many neighbours are away on holiday and the school-free kids roam the playgrounds and forests. The setting is an apartment complex on a beach, i.e., the modern urban edging into the primeval source of life. 

The central figures are a family with two daughters, the observant young Ida and the older Anna, whose autism has suspended her ability to speak. As the opening shot is of a dozing Ida the whole story can be taken as her dream or as her narrative of moral awakening.

The two girls’ family is the film’s only complete unit. Against Ida’s wishes, they have moved to a new city for her father’s job. The sisters’ adventure and discovery derive from their relationship with two children from immigrant families, neither of which has a father. In contrast to Ida’s family blondness, the sinister Ben is East Indian and the sensitive Aisha African. Aisha’s facial pigmentation is a swirl of light and dark, heightening the theme of racial identification.

As if personifying the richness of imported racial and cultural diversity, the abnormal mental powers are introduced by Ben and Aisha. But any human power is ambivalent. Ben’s evil treatment of a black cat is an extension of the child’s amorality we see when Ida early pinches her unexpressive sister and — even worse — places shards of glass in her sister’s shoe. Aisha is the positive force, understanding, enabling, caring for the others and eager to oppose the evil.

But with the innocence that still emanates from children, Ben is as much the victim as the proponent of his evil power. At first he’s bemused by his ability mentally to move bottle caps. When he meets Aisha and her telepathy they bring Anna an ability conventional science couldn’t. She begins to speak. Instead of her chaotic etch-a-sketch swirls she draws the shark in the distant Aisha’s thoughts. 

Ben’s power turns against him when he finds he can control other people. He sends one stranger to kill a playground bully. Another is unknowingly locked out of his mission to kill the sisters. 

With the moral order thus upset, one of the mothers is killed, another mother kills her daughter, and the third seems on the verge of being despatched to kill hers. The murders among the mothers reveal a human nature run amok. Yet at the peak of his power Ben recoils on his floor, crying “Mommy!” He is himself the tragic victim of his own unnatural strength. 

During the climactic mental showdown between Ben and Anna, several other children in the complex, newly returned to end-of-summer real life, show an awareness of the event that the adults lack. So this story is not about individual freaks of nature but of a lurking, potentially assertive class. Specifically, the film allocates this power to our most powerless, our children. The adults here don’t know what forces they are suppressing in their ostensible control of their kids.

Here the film shows its political dimension. In The Birds Hitchcock undermined human complacency by unleashing a natural force that mankind usually controls. The film revived the Copernican revolution by dislodging man from the the center of his universe. Here Vogt attributes a monstrous, ambivalent power to a suppressed underclass. These children can be read as the suppressed, the oppressed, the neglected, in any contemporary society. The film reminds us that such forces need not stay helpless victim but can collectively assert a power we might well be advised to start treating with sensitivity and generosity instead of oppression.     

As the genre classically works, this is a horror story about the disruption caused by some monster. But here the monsters are not from outer space, or the Hydean beasts within that disrupt the Jeckyll order. The monster here is not even the supernatural force that occupies the children in Villlage of the Damned. Even more chilling, the evil here is an obviously hopeful good, the mental power that could liberate the helpless, that instead is turned to the evil of selfish abuse. Ben’s suffering from how he uses his power should be a global warning.       

 

 

You Don't Know Me (Netflix series)

  Sarmad Masud’s four-episode drama is a remarkable achievement: a searing exploration of racism that doesn’t mention the term. In this courtroom drama the British social system is the implicit villain and the drama’s characters its victims. Nowhere is the West's white persecution of the black stated but it pervades. 

The series opens with the prosecution lawyer (white, stern) lengthily detailing the young black accused man’s apparent guilt. The evidence is overwhelming. As this is TV-land we sophisticates may immediately conclude the guy must therefore be innocent. But it’s not that simple.

For the ensuing drama the defendant recounts the events that led to the drug-dealer’s murder and his own imprisonment. We may be tempted to reject the implausibility of a judge allowing such a lengthy statement by the accused. But if we stick with it — and each episode’s closing cliffhanger makes that easy — the payoff is considerable. 

The sweeping conviction of the prosecutor’s opening summary makes the drama’s title the hero’s defence. “You don’t know me.” From its secure perch the white world cannot know the underclass.  

The cast is largely Black. The jury is melting-pot mixed but the prosecuting team and the judge are white. The defendant fires his white lawyer because she won’t adjust her systemic process to his needs. Hence his four-episode monologue, enacted. He continually tries to set himself outside the black stereotype: “I sell cars.” They’re high-price cars, for a supportive white boss. Here the power is implicitly white, swallowing the stereotype of the criminal black.

That underclass turns into underworld. The black criminals wage their own internecine war. Smalltime dealer Jamil rises to relative kingpin because he hasn’t the hero’s will to detach from the street corner career. Even the flashy Jamil falls prey to his (black) overlord, the deceptively amiable Face. 

Jamil provides another play of the drama’s title. His own family is hitherto unaware of his drug career. If it’s a wise father that knows his son, it’s a wise society that truly knows its underclass, knows what has shaped it and responds with support not oppression. 

In contrast to Jamil’s family, the hero’s comprises a generous, loving mother, a sister tellingly named as a positive verb — Bless — and an old childhood friend, Curt, who tersely leaves the enemy’s thrall to support the hero. Out of respect for family, the hero endangers himself by alerting Jamil’s family to his whereabouts.  

These loyalties and challenges are amplified in the hero’s lover Kyra. She is an entirely engaging character — a sensitive, moral, beautiful, avid reader! —  who challenges her lover, his family — and us — with her own moral ambiguity. Her support for her jailed brother Spook, who betrayed the powerful gang, gives them an ineluctable grip on her. When they pull her back into prostitution the hero risks all to retrieve her — and with his family’s support. Bless reduces his dilemma to the simple but central question: “Do you love her?” That answered, he knows what to do.   

The drama’s ending is a Gordian knot that plays on our moral and racial judgments. We read the conclusion through a miasma of betrayals, rationalizations, compromises. It’s not a simple black and white.  

 

The Outfit

  Graham Moore gives this tight gangster film the feel of a stage play. Everything takes place in one space, the tailor’s shop. Characters enter and leave in a stagy manner. You’d think it was a filmed play but that’s not the point. The theatricality suggests an artificiality that coheres with the central theme: the thin veneer that civilization places over our innate and indomitable savagery. Fine clothes may make the man but the beast still lurks within. Within the individual and within the mean streets of the urban jungle. 

Within the nation too. As the graduate of Savile Row, master cutter Leonard seems a class, a world, apart  from the Chicago gunsels. Hence their sneering dismissal as “English,” as if he has no other identity than that arch of class. 

As he responds to the shifting incidents we’re impressed by Leonard’s mental agility and resourcefulness. Only towards the end, when he rolls up his sleeves, do we see that the classy cutter (“Not a tailor”) is cut from the same cloth as the Chicago killers. The arm tattoos reveal his natural fabric, the skin corrupted. 

Leonard ostensibly fled classy Britain to sell his classy suits in gangland Chicago. Boss Boyle was his first customer. As we learn, though, the London he fled was itself the thuggery and arson he finds in Chicago. 

As the senior Boyle observes, the difference between monkeys and men are tools. That’s evolution. Boyle has used guns to kill people — to “build” his rep, his gang, the neighbourhood. Leonard’s shears symbolize his traditional British craftsmanship (plus his lost wife’s devotion) but ultimately he turns their use to murder too. When he arrests his final thrust upon the fallen thug in midair Leonard saves those shears from an ultimate conversion to savagery. He keeps some control.  But they have killed a man as well as carving cloth.  

The opening narration proves a theatrical performance itself, one of the two recordings that will seal the poetic justice the cutter will deliver. Indeed his various ploys against the hoods are a dramatization of the many separate pieces the cutter must devise and wield to make the perfect “outfit.” Making a film is of course like that itself.    

Mabel proves another wolf in sheepskin, an apparent naif who plays her own games to con the cons, to escape the neighborhood that belatedly respects her thug father. Her scheme is an alternative craft to the tailor’s that she declines. 

The second fire is both a second end and a second new beginning for the cutter. Veneers and other fine suits are like that. They hide the embarrassing reality — but only for a while. Perfection is impossible because it can only be skin — or suit — deep. 

Crimes of the Future (2022)

  David Cronenberg’s striking explorations of the flesh work in three ways. Obviously, the spectacle of the various operations is unnerving, even revolting. This is the shock cinema we expect of Cronenberg.

But they also represent a celebration of our fleshly existence. Our insides are logically as beautiful as our outside. Especially during the years of covid the film luxuriates in the body corporeal. Even as it assumes a future from which pain has been banished it asserts our fascination with our flesh and fleshly experience.

Third, the sprit of this film is essentially comic. The spectacle wittily materializes the most common expressions of artistic inspiration. Repeatedly the dialogue cites inner beauty, the artist opening himself up, the power of internal experience and connection. This theme makes the script one of the year’s wittiest. However personal Cronenberg’s visual vocabulary, he is dealing with — and refreshing — the most traditional metaphors both for artistic creation and for human connection. 

This revived commitment to the flesh, to the organic in man and in nature, is a pointed response to the loss of the natural in our current lives. This is represented in extremis by the young boy who has grown dependent upon eating plastic — and is naturally (?) murdered by his mother. He literally eats a garbage pail, a metaphor as pertinent to our debased cultural lives as to our diet. An abandoned sea-hulk amplifies the definition of the manmade world as garbage.

So, too, the performance artist’s story plays against the background of a world whose loss of the natural extends beyond pain.  As his name suggests, Saul Tenser is the patriarchal soul of a future tense, drawn taut in resistance to the decay around him. Tenser looks like the resurrection of Bergman's Death. In shaping internal organs out of his creative ideas he revives the New Testament ideal of the Word Made Flesh. He is about a business far more serious, probing and profound than his aide’s name, Caprice, suggests. Of course artists always hide their seriousness. That’s how they penetrate us.

P4W; Not a Love Story -- reprint, Cinema Canada

 

"The victims' only hope is an indomitable seJf.

Bonnie Sherr Klein's

Not a Love Stoiy

AFilmAbout Pornography

Not a Love Story is a sensitive and sensible survey of pornography. Bonnie Sherr Klein directed the film, with a major contribution by Linda Lee Tracey, for the National Film Board's Studio D, founded in 1974 as a filmmaking forum for women on social issues.

The film is structured on the princi- ple of expanding range. We are eased into the subject, then gradually con- fronted with an increasing sense of its scope and danger. Of our two guides, Ms. Klein is the innocent outsider be- coming introduced to the porno ter-

rain, and Ms. Tracey the more experi- enced explorer, extending her under- standing.

Linda Lee Tracey is the former strip- per who started the Tits for Tots strip- pers' benefit in Montreal. In her old act, as Fonda Peters (!), Ms. Tracey played a comic insouciance against the usual straight-lace of strip. An excerpt of her act establishes the frankness of the film and infroduces the topic on a note of comforting humor.

But there is cold comfort from the en- suing revelations. First we are shocked by the size of the pom business. To wit: there are more hard-core peep shows in North America than there are MacDon- ald's outlets. With an annual gross of $5 billion, the hard-core pom industry out- grosses the sfraight film and music in- dustries combined. Those are compel- ling stats.

The greater shock comes from the kind of things shown in pornography. Klein was careful to select moderate material, within the pale, but she still shows a horrifying pattern of torture, mutilation, and violence against the female form.

Very clearly, pornography cannot be excused as celebrating female beauty and natural, open sexuaUty. As Kate Millett puts it, "We got pornography when what we needed was eroticism." Pornography is opposed to eroticism, not its aid and support. It slavers for the notion of torturing and dominating the female figure. Hence the recurring im- age of women under two kinds of relat- ed suppression : in chains and gagged. The implicit theme of this monstrous machinery is that women are objects of sadistic violation.

Klein's larger point, and the principle on which her material is organized, is that pornography exerts a pervasive in- fluence. Obviously one is affected if one participates in the sexuality business; so Linda Lee Tracey quit. One is^ more grossly affected if one cashes in on the exploitation of others; hence the inter- views with merchants and clients of sleeze.

But Klein's key observation is that pom damages people who never ex- perience the thing itself For even non- indulgers are affected by the recurring images that wash over from hard-core to soft. Worse, we all suffer the insidi- ous habits of thought, associations, re- flexes, that this dominating imagery projects.

In this light, Klein sensibly includes male victims of this pornographic abuse of women. One member (so to speak) of the Men Against Male Violence Group admits that men are victimized by these fantasies, "the male myth of perform-

Holly Dale/Janis Cole's

P4W: Prisonfor Women

The title establishes a process of hu- manizing, of fleshing out a formula. "P4W" is the formula, an adminisfrative convenience, a reduction. The second part reveals the humanity behind the formula: "Prison for Women." The film itself celebrates the humanity of the tx)nvicts in Canada's only federal wo- men's prison, in Kingston, Ontario. By film end we have fulfilled the order of convict Susie's closing song: "Look and see what you have done."

P4W: Prison for Women is an examin- ation of the effects of prison upon fe- male convicts. Co-tUrectors Janis Cole and Holly Dale interview several in- mates who were convicted of major crimes but are extremely engaging chai^ acters. The message is two-fold: the de- humanizing horrors of incarceration and the marvels of the human spirit that still survives.

The film celebrates the women's sur- vival instincts. Forced into uniformity, they sustain their individuality by pe:^ sonalizing their cells. These are plucky gals. But the last image threatens to run out of control. The liveliest of our con- victs sits cockily on a washing machine and spits out a defiant and exfravagant optimism. Her wrists are taped. The quavering voice, the dreary setting, and her slightly mad spirit may lead us to read the tape as a sign of slashed wrists. But no. This gal remains hale and reso- lute. Cole and Dale say the wrists were|

taped for tennis.

Although the directors see their film as being primarily about the inmates' spirit of survival, a firm feminist voice emerges more strongly. We don't see any men in the film, but enough men are bitterly mentioned to make the prison signiiy the oppression and restriction of the patriarchal macrocosm.

So the only rehabilitation the convicts get is training to be a hairdresser. One lady bridles against serving three years in the laundry. Frequent complaint is made agafnst the powerful and un- s)Tnpathetic warden, a Mr. Caron. One

convict is told she upsets him because he can't stand her impression of happi- ness and security. A male judge vetoed a convitit's writing to her children. The convicts complain that when a riot broke out the male guards stood aloof and apart, watching amused as the female guards struggled to curtail the riot. The male aut^iority is not seen but it is felt — cold, commanding, compelling.

More dramatically, all the crimes we hear about are directly related to the women's oppression in a patriarchal so- ciety. One woman was sexually exploi- ted, another habitually beaten by her two men. A third, who was sentenced to 25 years after her robber husband killed himself, seems to have been damned for standing by her man. In sum, the wo- men's prison becomes a powerfiil meta- phor for a society in which men rule and repress women. The victims' only hope is an indomitable self And their bond.

Of course, any honest and thorough film about life in a women's prison must do something about lesbiansim. It will either skirt the issue or address it. Dale and Cole do something else. They trans- cend the issue of sexuality by showing— with an almost unbearable intimacy — two lovers preparirig for their separa- tion when one's time is over. This tender, dramatic episode typifies the delicacy and discretion of the film as a whole. The issues are explored, but with neither coyness nor sensationalism,

From this romantic relationship the film cuts to the convicts' relationships with their children. One recalls recent meetings, after the courts forbade their communication. Another makes a video- tape to send to her little girl. We get a close-up of her singing to her child. But for her telling a Peter Rabbit story we shift to a long-shot of the videotape machine and monitor.

The medium and the message are much improved over what convicts used to be able to do. But the dominant impression remains of a cold, mechani- cal, remote interference with the warmth of human normalcy,

36/Cinema Canada-November 1981

REVIfcWS

Maurice Yacowar

•

P4W ! PRISON FOR WOMEN d./p. Janis Cole, Holly Dale cam. Nesya Shapiro sd. Aerlyn Weissman ed. Janis Cole & Holly Dale asst. ed. John O'Connor original mus. Susie & Kas asst. to p. Beveverly J. Whitney p.c. Spectrum Films running time 81: 23 min. disL Pan-Cana- dian Film Distributors Inc.

ance, goal orientation." In one of the most moving scenes a writer and her l^usband probe — to the point of tears - their battle for a reasonable sexuaUly in a world of subversive excess.

JVot a Love Story is a sober, respon- sible film. It achieves a balance and restraint that seem positively saintly, considering the enemy. And yetfliefilni has aroused a furious opposition.

This attack upon pornography has been censored by the Ontario Censor Board (although one uncut screening was allowed at Toronto's Festival of Festivals). So the film suffers the ir- rational fate of Al Razutis' A Message From Our Sponsor in Ontario. The pom flows on, but a thoughtful analysis of (and warning against) the pom gets censored!

On other fronts, there has been some newspaper editorializing against the NFB spending taxpayers' money on a film about pornography. To this com- plaint there is a simple response: go see the film.

But there is no such simple answerto the irresponsible hatchet job done by , Jay Scott, film reviewer for the Globe and Mail. Scott called the film "boui^ geois, feminist fascism." To Scott it must be feminist to include males discussing their victimization by pornography; fas- cist to complain about continually see- ing one's gender fragmented, exposed,

tortured; and bourgeois to undertake critical analysis of a major social phen- omenon. His real objection to the film seems to be that it omits gay pom. By that principle he would attack a west- em for omitting ships and a pirate fihn for leaving out sagebrush. All in all, Scott's review was his worst job (and of a telling piece) since he used Altman's A Perfect Couple as an opportunity to deride Marta Heflin's rib-cage. Such in- sensitivity to the image and such dis- respect for the predicament of women are astonishing in a film critic who quite often commits responsible film criti- cism.

Even more astonishing was Scotfs closing salvo, a call for the Board to censor this film for its hard-core insets. Scott's shriek validates the film's point about the pervasive attempt to silence completely the voice of victim women. As Susan Griffin remarks, "Pornography is filled with images of silencing wo- men. Our silence is the way in which our status as objects is made real." In this line of thought, women must be obscene and not heard.

Not a Love Story is a search and a report that had to be done. It should have been made long ago and it shouitf be seen and discussed as widely as' possible. We are fortunate that the film was made by such responsible and intelligent artists.

But this film is one of those delicate, afflicted roses that must be defended against the invisible worms that fly in the night, be they defenders of a sick status quo, senseless censor boards, or wrong-headed personality-peddling c^ umnists.

Maurice Yacowar (

NOT A LOVE STORY d.Bonnisj Klein with participation of Linda Lee V assoc. d./ed. Anne Henderson p. Dorothysl H e n a u t a s s o c . p . M i c h e l i n e Le G u i U o u c a m . W Letarte 2nd cam./asst. Susan Trow loc. id.„ Gendron loc. business man. Andr^e "•^'"•J Jackie NevveU asst. picture/sd. ed. MichellT Guillou graphics layout Gayle Thomas ttU tion cam. Baymond Dumas original mu»,/M d. Ginette Bellavance lyrics Tina Home vocW Cathy IVIillermus.rec. Louis Hone eiec. p.K*'''

'• Shannon p.c. A National Film Board of Cfl (Studio Dl production, r u n n i n g time 70 nm^

Michael Snow's "Presents" (reprint, Cinema Canada)

 Presents

Michael Snow's new film is his most generous exuberant and buoyant offer- ing yet As usual, if s a meditation upon the processes of perception. As usual, too, it's a rich, spirited film that should tease viewers into new thouglits how- ever often it is viewed.

The film is structured in three precise pai-fs. The first two dramatize the dis- loitions which result when a willful artist imposes liimself upon the mate- rials of his craft. The third demonstrates the greater riches when the artist subor- dinates himself to the splendors of the world.

In the 10-minute first section, Snow presents the classical odalisque - a nude reclining in an artificial room. Snow opens with a thin vertical sliver of light, which he slowly stretches out into the full image. When his stretch reaches the Cinemascope proportion the woman has been rubberized, dehuman- ized, rendered grotesque. Here Snow exposes the filmmakei's intervention by prop, framing and manipulation of the formal elements of bis shot. Halfway through, the image is squashed into a horizontal slit, then stretched out again. Contrary movements are required to

make the whole. As in the film's overall structure, thesis and antithesis give way to the climactic synthesis.

The second part is a hilarious 20- minute narrative in which the nude rises and joins a visitor to search for a trivial object. For the most part. Snow's camera is stationary, but the entire set moves back and forth. Both actors are hilarious in the stiff movements and in their heroic effort to handle their mov- ing set A phonograph plays classical music, its needle leaping crazily with the movement We hear Snow call out numbers to direct his actors. We see his crew reflected against the set. The man freezes in mid-air whenever the set moves him out of camera range. This is a slapstick exposure of traditional narra- tive cinema, in which a trivial drama is performed against an artificial setting and its entire world is manoeuvered by the director. The comedy lies in Snow making explicit the manipulation that is usually hidden.

As in the whodunit involving the body on the floor in Wavelength, and the classroom incidents in « » (informally called "Back and Fprth"), Snow raises the spectre of narrative cinema only to drop it in favour of analyzing the perception of experience. So in the latter stages of his narrative sequence in Presents, the romantic drama becomes a disaster movie. The furniture wobbles, crumbles, and is crushed. Finally Snow's camera breaks through the setting and we escape into the splendor of the real world. Our first image is the oppressive skyscraper, but we're free.

The third section is a 70-minute al- bum of intriguing rhyming beautiful, unsettling, and extremely personal shots of life, in all its fullness and chaos. Here Snow shows the world instead of a fiction. Here he allows the objects their own free movement unframed, un- ordered. There are passages of breath- taking beauty - the arc of a bird in flight the sinuous routes of machines on earth. There are passages of chuckling irony - a pan of a tlresser ends on a Genie ; next a worker unloads a barrow of trash.

Limited as stereotypes, these people interact v\ ith each other within the con- fines of an inept plot Not only do the episodes fail to contribute to anV un- . folding of Kelly's character, but they also seem gratuitous. The scenes at the monastery for instance, appear to have been written simply to feature the bear. Moi-eover, the plot-lines are so separate from each other that the movie ends three times. The major resolution, Kelly's facing of herself- that should reveal the

extent of her transformation - occurs first and far too early. The second, a nuisance that ought to have bfeen edited out, involves a renewed attraction between her father, and her remarried mother, who is soon removed from the story. Eventually, almost as an afte]> thought, the villain is set up to get what he, if not Russia, desei^'es. But because Kelly cannot take part in the revenge, the joke falls flat. This ending, however, reveals why the movie is not just bad but objectionable.

Kelly is not really the heroine's story, and hemmed in as she is by cliches and stereotypes she has -no chance to act. Always rescued by a father who knows best a spunky kid dwindles into a passive girl. Kelly insults children.
Anna Carlsdottir •

K E L L Y d. Christopher Chapman p. Samuel V. Freeman asst p. George Anthony exec in cliarge of prod. Robert Meneray sc Robert Logan mus. Micky Erbe, Maribeth Solomon song «ril Keep It With Me,» comp. by Maribeth Solomon, Micky Erbe, sung by Donna Ramsay r e c by Andrew Hermant art. d. Charles Dunlop superv. ed. David Nicholson, cfe. d.o.p. Paul Van Der Linden, esc. L prod. Fran Rosati casting Canadian Casting Asso- ciates sc. consult Francis Chapman cont Mai^ garet Hanly cam. op. Cyrus Block cam. op. (2nd unit) Rod Parkhurst f o e puller Brent Spencer foe. pullers (2nd unit) Then Eglseder, Peter Smith clapper/loader Harvey La Rocque ed. Byron white, Peter Dale loc. sd. mix Larry S'jtton boom op. Lars Ekstrom sd. ed. Fred Brennan Yanina Jezek (asst.) key grip John Dillard Brinson dolly grip Richard Allen, John Brown asst. grip Tom Hansen, Brian Kuchera prop, master Tracey Budd, Craig Ponton lassL) hair Salli Bailey make-up Sandy Cooper a-lL David MacLeod (1st), Kim Win- therl2nd), Val StefofllSrd) p. s e c Karen Hamasaki p. acct. Lacia Kornylo p. bookkeeper Joanne Jackson p; sec. Angela Gruenthal p. assL Vikki Haimila l o c man. Michael MacDonald assL art d. SLuzanna Smith, Daniel Bradette p a i n t e r Susan High gaf. David Anderson electr. Rob Brown best boy electric Rod Merrells gen. op. Glen Sherman set d. Steve Shewchuk asst set dresser Chris Merrells wardrobe Deborah Weldon, Jackie Mei' rells (assL) craft serv. Mike Brown driver c a p t Cy Bariy, drivers Mark Barry, Don Brown, Betty Elliot, Martin Gutkind, Hoy Hart, Ken McClennon stills Bruno Engler spec efx. John Thomas Rex Cooley (asst) Whitewater consult Robin Sims safety rafts Vivian Fehr pilots Tony Hugman, Scott Swan- son stunt doubles Betty Thomas, Graham Elliott, Erwin Oertli animals Hubert Wells trainers Che- ryl Shwaver, Karin Dew bear trainers Lloyd Beebe, Marinho t:orreira vet Terry Quesnel l.p. Robert Logan, Tv\'yla-Dawn Vokins, George Clutesi, Elaine Nalee, Doug Lennox, Alec Willows, Dan Granirer, Jack Leat Mona Cozart, Paddy While r e - r e c Nolan Roberts, Film House dist Paramount Pictures coL

35 mm running lime 95 min. p.c Famous Players Film Corp. 1980

There are shots of unaccountable detail and white flowers, as if tearing away.a

68/Cinema Canada - May 1981

J

REVI

and appreciation, like the lengthy views
of a steamroller, later a snowplow, as
Snow's lingering camera seems capti- a grisly surgery.
vated by physical details. There are Presents is based upon the paradl sequences that rhyme textures - a of authorial personality. The first tvw/ blanket, then a field of snow. There are parts demonstrate the falsity and foHV^ moments of drama - from a hunter an art in which the creator obtrudes nis proudly displaying his moose head. voice and craft The third is a celeWfF Snow pans blurrily across fields of red tion of the woBWifwhich the dire^r

revulsion. No rose-lensed optimisK^

Snow cuts in an Arctic caribou hunt anO^

modestly studies and preserves in eter- nal "presents," and presents to us as delightful gifts (the third sense of "presents"). The paradox is that the film
is most personal in the section in which the artist does not intrude. He shows himself most profoundly when he shares whathesees.Sothis,thethirdsection,is . so much weightier and more moving than the illusionist cinema which he

' satirizes in the earlier comic episodes. The first tWo episodes are enclosing and false. The tfiird is an exhilarating exer- cise in opening out

The third part is a collage of apparent objectivity. Neither heard nor seen. Snow is present only by his iiripltcit functions of choice of material, filming and editing. But the world we see there is very much Snow's world. The section abounds with characteristic Snow shots - dizzying pans back and forth, and waves, and birds, and walking women. And a beaming Joyce Wieland hard upon (well; really soft) a shot of a happy family celebration. Not just the world opens out in that third section, but the private Snow as well.

The first part is accompanied by a modulating electronic drone, that seems to harmonize as the image comes into focus. In contrast the sound in the second part is rooted in the setting both in the character's room and in the direc- tor's operation. In the third part the sound works ambiguously between the synchronous and the imposed. Each cut is accompanied by a drumtap, like a pulse. We can't determine whether this tap causes, announces, or reacts to the change in image. That is the very am- biguity of the filmmaker's relationship to his image here. He is a present recorder. He is at once passive before the spectacle and active in its preserva- tion.

For all its Import, though, one must not lose sight of the sheer pleasure that thisfilm presents. If s not often that one feels regret when a Michael Snow film comes to its end. But here one is disap- pointed when that brilliantly executed slapstick sequence is over. And even more when his collage of splendid reality draws to a close. But then the quickening drum-pulse heralds our return to the worldbeyond thescreen. There we can exercise the sharper, appreciative eye for color and movement that Snow has primed. There his Presents will en- hance our own present.
Maurice Yacowar •

PRESENTS d/p/cant/^/sets Michael show sd. John Kamenaar, Bill Buxton, Brian Day cam. Keith.Lock p.man. Robin Collyer Lp. Jane Fellowes, Peter Melnick colour 16 mm year 1980 (with the "•iJlanceoftheCanadaCouncil)running time90 "lin; dist Canadian Filmmaker's Distri

On Cronenberg's Shivers (reprint, Cinema Canada)

 YOU SHIVER BECAUSE IT'S GOOD

Why David Cronenberg's The Parasite Murders was retitled Shivers I can't imagine. But even under its new title it continues to suffer the insensitive abuse that was reported (and well rebutted) in Cinema Canada No. 22. What has not been established is exactly what the film is saying through its shocking effects.

Shocking it certainly is. The film is a relentless flood of. murder, rape and upchuck. But complaining about a horror film's nauseating effect is like complain- ing about dancing in the streets in a musical, or horses and jeans in a Western. That's what we go to see one for. Nausea, fear and shock are the conventional effects of the horror genre. The critic's task is not to com- plain they are there (they come with the territory) but to work out how they are used.

The film opens and closes with a media-sell voice- over, detached from the action, oozing the complacency of modern urban man. The opening is a sales pitch for the Starliner apartment building on a Montreal island, where the drama will take place. The closing is a news bulletin by a go-go disc-jockey type, assuring the listener that nothing dangerous has happened. We've seen the danger, though, and been shocked out of the complacency of the frame voices. We must be further shocked at the complacency of the closing media man,

as the Beautiful People drive out in their performance cars to infest the world.

The film is a jeremiad about man's abandonment to the pleasures of the failing flesh. Mad Doctor Emil Hobbes has been experimenting with parasite implants to assume the function of flawed human organs. His pride is, of course, the sexual application: a parasite with aphrodisiac effects. He plants the red little phallic critters in his mistress, then waits for them to spread, turning the world into a great sexual orgy (the global village with a Playboy vengeance), thus saving man, as

Hobbes sees it, from the tragic fate of having lost contact with his body.

The film dramatizes the horror of what we often take to be one of the happiest triumphs of our time, the new sexual permissiveness. The key spreaders of the para- site are figures representative of the modern liberation of sexuality: the precocious Lolita-type, the adulterer, the old man with his megavitamin vitality, the Swedish couple, the bachelor swingers, hetero and gay.

Cronenberg's Emil Hobbes is a direct descendant of Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century philosopher whose Leviathan argued the primacy of the physical nature of man and his universe. Hobbes provided the philosophical rationale for Restoration libertinism, so Cronenberg goes back to his name for his horrific vision of the libertinism of our time. Indeed the shape of the little critters is a cross between your standard red phallus and your swimming whale.

The apartment setting, a self-contained tower on an island, is an image of the isolation of the sensually obsessed. The apartment facilities cater to the appetites

and to the image of the beautiful life, nothing else. The apartment residents are characterized as lonely, insular people, condemned to a sad privacy until the monsters free them for a horrible parody of community, love, encounter session, primal therapy, virtually every mind-blowing, self-exalting fad on the psychological market today.

Cronenberg often seems like an Old Testament prophet in his horrifying vision of what happens when man sells his soul for his appetite, values "guts" more than reason, and labors under the delusion that fulfilment can be had by ingesting something (a kiss, a pickle, a pill, a little critter, or what have you). It should bemuse the reader to find such a traditionally moral work attacked by such traditional critics as Messrs. Robin Wood, Gilmour, Fulford, and Knelman. Are they all secret swingers chafing under Cronenberg's lash?

True to the traditions of the genre, Cronenberg spe- cializes in the slow accumulation of danger, then fills familiar objects with threat. The parasites are passed on by sexual contact at first, but then they take on indi- vidual life and travel independently. They attack from washing machines, mail slots, bath drains, to the point that we're terrified at the opening of a fridge or a contact-lens vial. Such is their independence that one man even converses with his little critters as they throb tumescent in his tummy.

Cronenberg inflects the conventions of his genre. For one thing, his vision is heightened by the fact that these are not monsters from outer space but from within ourselves. The parasites are images of our own sexual compulsions. Thus they pop up in the horny.

One scene is a conscious variation on the famous shower scene in Psycho. Hitchcock had the lonely girl attacked from the outside world when she was most vulnerable. Cronenberg's attack comes from within, as the critter creeps up through the bathtub drain to sexually enter — and this is the crucial point - the girl (Barbara Steele) who has been moping around in pre-masturbatory loneliness and has been lying open in her tub as if in subconscious hope of such a visit.

The final overcoming of our central hero, the doctor (Paul Hampton), occurs in the apartment swimming pooL which is a public extension of that private tub. The doctor's nurse and her initiator (Steele) are in the

pool. That climactic scene has several shades of mean- ing. The wet blanket is finally getting into the swim of things, one might say. The girl's lonely tub has grown. It's also a parody of a baptism, as the community surrounds the pool to celebrate the immersion of their new member. Finally, his nurse's oral insertion of the parasite is a reversal of male penetration. In the last two respects, the scene is a witty play on the missionary position.

The film is most dependent upon its horror genre in its inflection of the traditional threat to human person- ality. In its forebears, the humans are endangered by depersonalizing, de-energizing forces. The film belongs to the tradition of zombie movies, like Night of the Liv-

ing Dead and the pod variant in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But Cronenberg dramatizes depersonalizing in sexual activity, the thing we have come to take as our most personalizing activity. That's what makes the film both so shocking and such a strong moral statement. Where we expect to find zombies we find people who are fulfilling our fondest fantasies, of sex unlimited by law or by physical capacity. The film is shocking because Cronenberg's zombies are what we want to be.

He draws us into this position in the scene where his hero doctor continues to chat coolly on the phone, impervious to his nurse stripping in front of him. He seems to bear out Emil Hobbes' contention that modern man has been cut off from his blood and his impulses. We expect, indeed require, him to make love to her, then and there. But of course he is a man of reason and responsibility. He is not the zombie but the rational man. The real zombies are the orgiasts, whose physical hyperactivity belies their void in will, soul and sense.

Cronenberg's film has suffered the same critical disdain that was accorded Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Perhaps serious art in the horror genre must expect to be reviled before it is understood. Shivers (by whatever name) will join those classics. If Cronenberg continues to grow this film will rank with Psycho as a personal stata»nent. At the very least it will rank with those other two films, as a powerful expression of an anxiety of its day, so deep it hurt.

Maurice Yacowar

54/ Cinema Canada

Genies--1981 (reprint, Cinema Canada)

 

/ dream of Genie with a gilty pate.
] don't know why: something I ate ?

(Traditional songi

The best one can say about this year's Genie Awards is that they could have been worse. Francis Mankiewicz's Les bans dibarras would be a distin- guished winner in any country in any year. So, for that matter, would be Micheline Lanctofs L'homme a tout faire. We can be grateful that there was

no unseemly rush to reward the lugu- brious Tribute, or the muddle-headed Lucky Star (wherein it is implied that a Jew can achieve heroism by adopting the mythology of the American gun- slinger, much as the supposedly "Cana- dian" film plunges into American genres, images, tones and values for self-fuliillment). Similarly, the indefen- sible Terror Train won nothing though its four technical nominations left it with excessive shreds of respect- ability. Such justice is rare in any awards competition, so we'can be grate- ful for small mercies.

But this relief should not divert us fiiom the essential wrong-headedness of the whole Genie operation. Simply, it is silly to celebrate Canadian film in such a transparently American ritual It recalls that Fernwood Tonite gag where Frank Sinatra Jr. establishes his own fame by singing "My Way" in exact- ly his father's tone and cadence.

This self-disrespectful imitation per- vades the whole show. It is implicit in the organization's name. The Academy of Canadian Cinema. The prize itself is a gold statuette that looks like an eviscer- ated Oscar, standing cross-legged to avoid further violation. So, too, the ironic aptness of its name : the Genie recalls a foreign giant that springs out of a magic lantern to bolster some 97- pound weakling(Aladdin Canuck, boy cineaste.').

The build-up to tfiis year's show reeked of this disrespect for Canadian film. The poster was a vulgar, sexist affront that pretended to be a Muybridge primer for artistic success through the casting couch. The ad run in the cinemas showed more Canadian than last year's but still relied on the lure of Jack Lemmon, Bruce Dem, Ann-Margret, as if they were Canadian stalwarts. Of course, none of the named showed. Hardest to swallow was the ad's closing salute to the audience for being such great supporters of Canadian film. It was enough to make you retch. Or at least, to kvetch.

The Genie show lived down to its promise. Brian Linehan was smooth and engaging enough, and he even braved the danger of wandering from his spot into comic and lyrical routines, but the show as a whole felt like the Oscar-nomination that it was. So we had the tiresome routine of envelopes and

"And the winner is..." The opening

gracious candor ("This is the first thing I Phoney ever won and I appreciate it"), followed by a well-intentioned portrayal of the arrogance and imperiaUsm of Her People. The Canadian crew on Atlantic City, USA was "professional in every way." she allowed, as if this were a matter of surprise or note. Then the poor girl was stuck on camera to announce the two design winners. As both categories were won by the absent Anne Pritchard, Ms. Sarandon accepted the awards she presented. Then she made the best editing presentation. Her prolonged stand poinffed to the paucity of stars on the Genie roster. Moreover, Ms. Seirandon showed all the poise and control of an epileptic ferret At the opposite extreme, Burt Lancaster's patriarchal appearance had dignity and style, but his Leopard and 1900 associations made him embody the American industry's rigid

sibilify of grit was killed in glitz.
As if the imitativeness was not depressing enough, the whole affair evoked a sense of waste, of lost oppor^ tunity. It is ironic that the theatre life of Canadian films is seemingly dependent upon the Awards' showcase, when, in fact, the Americanization of the celebra- tion discourages confidence In that

same product ~^^
Will The Handyman [L'homme a

tout faire) play across English Canada even though it didn't win any of the biggies ? Win Tom Peacocke's best actor award resurrect The Hounds of Notre Dame (before its American title-change

to 'Puppies of the Prairie Priest) ? Does anyone out there care ?

While the stars and asterisks gathered onstage for their (Oscarstyle) cham- pagne party, the Canadian film-fan had to feel a little flat. For like Canada itself, why should its film industry be sustained if it Is only a pale copy, of the American ? What should have been a celebration that promoted the Canadian in film became a squeaky pretense at being American. As far as Canadian content was concerned, the only subject dis- cussed with ardor was the background (and fore) of Trudeau's date (Kim Cattrall the lusty lack-lustre vaculfy from Tribute). Otherwise there was no challenge to the show's assumption that Canada's maturity and vyorth lie in how American It acts. •

Maurice Yacowar teachesfilm at Brock University, St Catherines, Onfah'c^ where he is also Dean of Humanities. He reviewsfilm on CBC-FXTS "Stereo Morning', and his new booK Method in Madness: The Comic An ofMel Brooks, m'/fbepufafisfiedt/ite

Benediction

  In this brilliant biopic of British poet Siegfried Sassoon several Sassoon poems are read over landscapes and war scenes. 

But the key poem is Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled.” It appears twice. At his first reading Sassoon finds it a brilliant advance from Owen’s earlier derivativeness. Here for the first time the poet finds his voice, his independence, his self-assertion and emotional freedom. But we hear it only near film’s end, amid the aged Sassoon’s looking back in remorse at a life marked by loss and his emotional paralysis. 

The title points to the film’s two central wars and their respective costs in humanity. The literal war is WW I. There Sassoon fought valiantly, then courageously campaigned against its unscrupulous and disastrous continuation. We see a range of the war’s consequent disability, physical, emotional and psychological.

The second war is the homosexual’s campaign to survive in a bigoted cruel world. Owen and Sassoon were both “disabled” by the war, Owen killed and Sassoon robbed of emotional fulfilment. Owen was Sassoon’s one great love. Because their’s was “the love that dare not speak its name” the two ardent poets’ sole physical exchange is the stiff handshake when Owen marches off to death. Sassoon never recovers from Owen’s loss.

With his usual eye — and heart — for the oppressed sensitive, director Terence Davies conveys the gay characters’ sentence to emotional crippling. That’s the second form of disability in these wars. When Sassoon is interviewed by the army counselor — who himself admits to being gay; “I trust you will be discreet” — they are shown primarily in alternating one-shots, defining the isolation imposed upon the forbiddenly compatible.     

Unable to fulfill his romantic nature Sassoon drifts into trivial affairs, with shallow rewards while they work and profound loss when they don’t. The successful poet is condemned to a failed emotional life.

Sassoon’s retreat into conventional marriage only spreads his damage, the corollary  costs of that war. We see the consequences of Sassoon’s frustration in his wife, when the ebullient Kate Phillips turns into the haggard Gemma Jones. The son is his own frustrated loner, of uncertain sexuality and stunted emotional connection. Sassoon’s desperate retreat into “normalcy” destroys his nearest as well as himself. That’s the point of the song cited from Stop the World I want to Get Off — a piquant satire of the “typically English.”

The doubled shadow of Owen’s “Disabilities” hangs over the film and Sassoon’s sad, sad life until the poem is finally heard. The film is truly a Benediction because it bestows upon the dead — and the living who remain with us — the blessing of acceptance and understanding that they were denied in life.