Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (29) West German Cinema Part Five - The New German Cinema: Enter Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946-82) was the only child of a broken middle-class family (his father a doctor, his mother a translator). He remembered family life as ‘rather chaotic’, lacking in the rules and regulations of middle-class life. The house contained ‘nothing but literature and art’. After his parent’s divorce in 1951 Fassbinder stayed with his mother. He was left very much to his own devices and his mother sent him off to the cinema so that she could work. This childhood loneliness and longing for love and affection left a mark on the characters in his films. His first feature was titled Love is Colder than Death  and was followed by a 1976 feature, I Only Want You to Love Me. From the age of seven he claimed to have spent every day of his childhood at the cinema. Hollywood genres were a benchmark for Fassbinder’s career as a filmmaker. His early education was at the Rudolf Steiner School (Sandford).

In the summer of 1967 Fassbinder joined one of Munich’s fringe theatre groups, where he acted in, directed, then wrote adaptations of various plays. “The ‘action theatre’ was very much of its time, anarchic, subversive and critical, reflecting and reacting to the events of the day” (ibid 64). Fassbinder acted in a play directed by Jean-Marie Straub appearing as one of the underground post-Brechtian theatre group in Straub’s short film The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp (1968). The authorities closed the Action Theatre because it had exceeded the grounds of its original permit being seen to have entered the realm of a ‘political cabaret’ contrary to the ‘predominantly artistic’ activities stipulated in its permit (ibid). Members of the Action Theatre regrouped and finally found a new home the following year. They performed two of their plays in monotone acting style on stage with minimal furniture. Using some of their theatre ideas the group made Fassbinder’s ‘gangster trilogy’ and  Katzelmacher plus two other feature films in 14 months,1969-70.

Fassbinder (l) 
The Bridegroom, The Actress and the Pimp

In The Bridegroom…, Jean-Marie Straub applied an austere aesthetic on Ferdinand Bruckner’s 1926 play ‘Sickness of Youth’. Straub said that in paring down the film version of the play from two hours to an 8 minutes narration he removed all explanatory psychology, deliberately eliminating all theatricality.  Expanded into a 23 min. triptych collage leaving only the relations between elements in the play, was intended as a contribution to the debate on the relationship between theatre and film ( Maureen Turim 342, Phillips ed. ).

Kovacs devotes a whole chapter of ‘Screening Modernism’ to the impact of theatrical style in late modern European art cinema coinciding with the parallel theatrical activities of many modernist directors evidenced in an exaggerated, unnatural, abstract acting style, an artificiality in conjunction with sets and expressive lighting.  In the New German Cinema this theatricality was pronounced in films directed by Herzog and especially Syberberg. Fassbinder’s style is hard to define, marked by theatre in many varied ways beginning with an artificial pastiche of the gangster genre in some of his early films. Kovacs notes that Fassbinder first adapted pastiche to some real life experience in Fear Eats the Soul.

Notes on four select features of Fassbinder’s entry into feature filmmaking 1969-71 follow.

Kovács describes as the “peculiar minimalist style” of Fassbinder’s second feature Katzelmacher (1969) - and also his first feature, Love is Colder than Death -  a mixture in the former of dispassionate Straubian theatricality and Antonionian long take style with no movement at all of figures in the bleached out empty space of white walls. This is in contrast to his later films in which “theatrical and motivational saturation takes over” (159).

Fassbinder, Hanna Schygulla,
Katzelmacher

Katzelmacher is an explicitly social-critical film which deals with the problem of the ‘Gastarbeiter’, the plight of the immigrant worker in Germany for whom Fassbinder had an affinity. The film’s title is a Bavarian colloquialism referring especially to the supposed sexual potency of southern Europeans. The film sets off the experiences of a Greek Gastarbeiter, Jorgos, against the suspicion, intolerance, and antipathy of four young German couples towards him. Katzelmacher is regarded as containing the most sustained deployment of alienation devices in any Fassbinder film. The characters rarely face each other when they speak. The choreography and circularity in repetition of the couples’ movement in the static long takes to a popular Schubert melody, underlines the boredom and one dimensionality in their lives.

Tony Pipolo describes Katzelmacher as “a textbook case of minimalist cinema within the modernist tradition.” As an example of a reflexive narrative film it “epitomizes Fassbinder’s position with respect to traditional narrative and avant garden cinemas.”  Its thematics on the futility of hope, the immobility of youth and perpetuation of the status quo also reappear in Fassbinder’s subsequent films (97). “It is precisely the form of the parable/allegory which Katzelmacher offers more directly and with more purity than any other Fassbinder film” (ibid).

Filmmaker, critic and friend of Fassbinder, Christian Braad Thomsen, identifies Katzelmacher as the first of his ‘bourgeois films’, as Fassbinder called them, in contrast to his ‘cinema films’. “What is ‘bourgeois’ is not the films, but the world they describe and criticise” (78). Katzelmacher ends with “two of the principal characters formulating their ideas about a way out of the milieu that threatens to suffocate them. If one were to define these sketchy dreams in political terms, then one points in a fascist direction. Erich sees the army as a way out and the possibility of change.” The other is anarchistic, “Marie dreams of a country without the concept of property where love is pure and beautiful.” Thomsen suggests that “simply and without moralizing, Fassbinder indicates the two paths we can choose, and in his future films he repeatedly tried to show the necessity and possibility of the second way” (82).

Margarethe von Trotta, The American Soldier

The last of Fassbinder’s gangster trilogy, his sixth feature,The American Soldier (1970), has been described as his “most perfect film” (ibid 71). It brings together more artistically the themes in the preceding two [gangster] films” and “masters the difficult balancing act between pastiche and parody, so that it becomes something quite different, a strangely poetic film with a characteristic austere and brutal tenderness” (ibid 74).  Fassbinder is clearly not interested in telling a story but rather setting up a series of iconic situations. “The theme is that violence is an expression of frustrated love.” Another of the themes coming through more clearly is “that police and gangsters belong to the same breed and have the same trade.” Thomsen sums up that The American Soldier is not merely referring to American genre models but “looks forward to the later complete and harmonious works which sprang from Fassbinder’s creative rage and which obstinately stuck to the path already laid out” (ibid).

 Wiegand notes that after Katzelmacher, Fassbinder’s style showed little development for several years while he constantly borrowed from different film genres (25). A significant film in the development of his oeuvre is Warnung for miner heilgen Nutte / Beware of a Holy Whore, his ninth feature, one of seven Fassbinder completed in 1970 including four tv productions “marking the end of the obsessively personal style characteristic of Fassbinder’s early films and paving the way for a more objectified  treatment of subject matter (Kuhn, Phillips ed. 88).  As an actively self-conscious film about filmmaking  although it could be said to be more about frustrations, mainly sexual, within the group while waiting for the arrival of the director halfway through so filming could begin.

Eddie Constantine, Hanna Schygulla
Beware of a Holy Whore

Beware of a Holy Whore is one of four such films made by European auteurs beginning with Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), then Truffaut’s La nuit Américaine / Day for Night (1973), and culminating in Wim Wenders’ The State of Things (1981) “a meditation on the state of the art” which ends with an independent German filmmaker being killed on a Hollywood street reflecting Wenders’ state of mind following his legendary difficulties over the completion of his Coppola produced Hammett(1982). Bluntly autobiographical of the breakdown during the filming of his previous film, Whity,  Fassbinder’s film, Thomsen suggests, is close to Truffaut’s with “cinema seen as a ‘holy whore’ which stands between the characters involved and the reality beyond the film production” (94).

Fassbinder’s first 11 features were produced under the Action Theatre label “which in its most literal sense was intended to advertise the blatant anti-illusionist, anti-theatrical posture assumed by Fassbinder and his acting company prior to the more commercial enterprise beginning with The Merchant of Four Seasons. The action theatre idea was to create “a sort of commune” in which everyone concerned […] was basically an author.” But Fassbinder himself declared later that this ideal was utopian and that works of art are inevitably created in an authoritarian manner ( Wilfried Wiegand interview quoted Pipolo fn p.95). The deliberately self-conscious gestures in these early films, along with their freewheeling stylistic references to prototypical Hollywood films, were perfectly consistent with the “reflexive posture.” Clearly, Fassbinder’s subsequent desire to reach a large audience necessitated relinquishing such a posture and the adoption of a more mimetic style consistent with the priorities of narrative cinema (ibid). Pipolo notes that "with Katzelmacher and In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) Fassbinder came close to creating alternative forms of narrative” (94).

Fassbinder’s twelfth feature directed (also written) by Fassbinder in 18 months, Der Handler der vier Jahreszeiten / The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) based on a true story from his own family, was his first popular success with German audiences. Fassbinder regarded it a turning point in his career, less self absorbed, more objective story telling. For the first time, Kuhn notes (ibid p.90), psychology plays a part in characterisation and there is character development.  Hans Epp, a street vendor, is a typical Fassbinder hero; he meets betrayal and defeat at every turn, from the beginning subject to an oppressive mother. Fassbinder makes Hans something of a modern everyman, “ the story of almost everyone I know has lived himself […] Epp wishes to make something of his life but his education, his environment, his circumstances don’t admit fulfilment of his dream” (Fassbinder).  This indicates  an important shift in the filmmaker’s  perspective. “No longer preeminently the projected working through of his own anxieties, the film with its mimetic orientation, has a broader audience appeal” (ibid 91).

Hans Hirschmuller, Irm Hermann
The Merchant of Four Seasons

Fassbinder’s first film after his encounter with Douglas Sirk’s films is replete with stock melodramatic figures and plot developments but without pushing the melodrama to the point of parody instead “redefining melodrama as social parable […] finding ways to convert them into sophisticated, witty, and elegant entertainments” (Pipolo 126). Merchant succeeds, in good part, because of its melodrama allowing Fassbinder to introduce strong emotions into his films with a resonance missing in his previous work, creating sympathy for Hans rather then empathy. Following a Brechtian legacy of distancing he embeds Hans Epps’ story archetypically in the sociopolitical context of Germany in the 50s (Kuhn 92). Fassbinder’s second deployment of Sirkian melodrama followed in Angst essen Seele auf / Ali : Fear Eats the Soul (1973) in which he applies stylisation for heightened emotionalism inspired by Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows to the story of a real life relationship he found in a newspaper - that between a Turkish immigrant worker and an older woman.

Feature Films by Fassbinder 1969-73  following John Sandford’s groupings with month of film premiere included;  * indicates cinema release.

1. Echoes of Hollywood: The Gangster Trilogy  Love is Colder than Death (June 69)*,  Gods of the Plague (July 70)*, The American Soldier (Nov 70)*

2. Stylisation & Realism  Katzelmacher (Nov 69)*  Why Does Herr R Run Amok?  (Feb 71)*

3. !970 the Year of Experiment  The Coffee House (May 70 tv), The Journey to Niklahausen  (Oct 70 tv), Rio das Mortes  (Feb 71 tv),  Pioneers of the Ingolstadt (May 71 tv ),  Whity (July 71),   Beware of a Holy Whore ( Aug 71)

4. Breakthrough with the German Public The Merchant of Four Seasons (Mar 72)*, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Oct 72)*. Fassbinder’s international breakthrough was with Fear Eats the Soul  (March 74)*

Concerning Fassbinder’s project of stretching the notion of German history beyond 1933-45, as Thomas Elsaesser points out (268), if one considers 7 feature films and a tv series he made in the decade 1971-81 “not in the order they were made but in the chronology of the periods they depict, the scope and wealth of characters and situations, of stories, types and people is astounding.“  Beginning with the Prussian aristocracy in the 1890s in Effi Briest; proletarian life in the growing capital of the Reich, Berlin, 1922-29, in Berlin Alexanderplatz;  the rise of Fascism amongst the wealthy middle class, 1932-5, in Despair ; the career of a nightclub singer among upper echelons of the Nazi Party between several cities in Lilli Marleen; the economic miracle in the Cologne area, 1945-53, in The Marriage of Maria Braun; the Adenauer years and local politics,1955-8, in Lola ; show business, drugs and Munich high-life in the mid-50s in Veronica Voss; petty bourgeois family life in the Munich suburbs around 1960 in The Merchant of Four Seasons.  Other films, such as The Third Generation and In the Year of Thirteen Moons, continue this history up to the mid- and late 70s.

Elsaesser concludes that Fassbinder, in contrast to Kluge and Syberberg, “made a decision to use narrative to tell stories in his reckoning with German history: to opt, in other words, for the illusion of realism, heightened by stylisation and artifice, and to go for this version of history to the cinema itself” (269). Fassbinder (as quoted by Mark Cousins in ‘The Story of Film’) puts it succinctly : “The ideal is to make films as beautiful as America’s but to move the content to other areas.”

Werner Herzog

While Fassbinder was making his move from writing and directing for fringe theatre and low budget features, Werner Herzog had, at the Berlin Film Festival, received the Silver Bear for his first feature - Lebenszeichen / Signs of Life (1967) gently focused on a stunted Romantic visionary - a German soldier with two others guarding a useless ammunition dump on a Greek island during World War II - who hears voices in the ground. Herzog subsequently authored the startlingly original put-downs of human aspiration marked by ascendingly ironic chapter headings in the visionary non-narrative, Fata Morgana (1968), filmed in the Sahara, full of ideas quoted in subsequent films. Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) is a grotesque ‘Bunuelian’ tale of a revolt by dwarfs “in an institution whose director is absent, like Pascal’s God” (Brigette Peucker, Philips ed.).  

Wim Wenders directed six short films and a diploma feature, Summer in the City (1970) centred on a man newly released from prison on a failed search for former friends travelling from one wintry city to the next, “locomotion and music [the film is dedicated to the Kinks] shown as the only possible source of human contact.” Wenders called it “a film about depression.“  His critical breakthrough came out of his friendship with writer Peter Handke who wrote the script for The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick (1971) based on his novel.

Wim Wenders

Bloch, a goalkeeper feeling his age, walks out on a game in Vienna then hanging around, commits an arbitrary murder, and in a vague attempt to flee Bloch ends up in an Austrian border village “sustained only by his love for American movies and rock music.” What appears to be shaping as a murder-thriller works against all expectations. Tony Rayns in ‘Time Out’ noted the sense in which “everything shown is at once subjective and objective,” in this respect outdoing even the first of Wenders’ road movie trilogy, Alice in the Cities (1974), thematically involving a burnt out journalist’s loss of faith in words. Jan Dawson notes a further achievement of Wenders in his films “using dialogue as form rather than content.”

Both the above observations deserve more elaboration in relation to Dawson’s further reference to Wenders’ films as “totally lacking in aggression.” In their pacing and perspective, is “the vision of an incongruous universe in which the human characters [free of psychological explanation] are seldom the most interesting item on the screen, the emphasis on the language of gesture rather than on dialogue - all these leave Wenders through the 70s closer to Ozu than the convention of Hollywood narrative,” the action film facade of The American Friend (1977) notwithstanding.

Wenders in an interview with Jan Dawson spoke of having Goalkeeper  “completely rejected any idea of […] psychological explanation of anything[…] already […] a very important break from American cinema,” something which he appreciated when he later saw Ozu films sensing a soulmate who earlier in his career had also been strongly influenced by American films while nevertheless retaining and developing his own style. Wenders debt to Ozu, it is suggested, was not a particular style or method - he had been using Ozu-like techniques before ever seeing an Ozu film- but rather “learning to trust his own vision” (Kathe Geist essay, Phillips ed. 387). Wenders said that he found that his own ideas of cinema were the same as Ozu’s : “his way of telling stories was so absolutely representational.”

Hans-Jurgen Syberberg

In 1968, after a decade of making mainly short documentaries for Bavarian television, for want of any opportunities in the film industry, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg made his first feature film, How Much Earth Does a Man Need? (1968), based on a Tolstoy short story in which Syberberg pays more attention to a series of images with mythic associations than to a coherent plot. The three main films prior to Syberberg’s magnum opus are built around key figures in modern German consciousness: King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the popular author Karl May, and Adolf Hitler. Hitler : a Film for Germany  (1977) is “a bewildering symphony of ideas, impressions, sights, sounds, and emotions” running 7 hours. In again creating the film’s own form through a series of images with mythic connections and operatic theatricality to replace a coherent plot, Syberberg marked his final rejection of Hollywood cinema still dominant in Germany (ibid 364).

Ula Stockl

The Cat has Nine Lives (1968), the first feature by Ula Stockl, was funded by a grant from the Kuratorium after she had made shorts as a student of Kluge (she was his assistant on Yesterday Girl) and Reitz at the newly formed Ulm Film institute. Cat was ahead of the times as a harbinger for the full emergence of women’s filmmaking in Germany in the early to mid 70s in which Stockl participated with a series of medium length dramas for tv thematically linked around issues connected with affective relationships culminating with Erika’s Passions (1976) and A Woman with Responsibility (1977).

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Geoffrey Nowell-Smith ed. History of World Cinema “The New German Cinema” (Anton Kaes) 

Anton Kaes  From Hitler to Heimat 1989 

John Sandford The New German Cinema 1981 

Peter C Lutze  Alexander Kluge The Last Modernist 1998 

Karyn Kay  “Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave” review  Film Quarterly Fall 1975 

Timothy Corrigan New German Film 1983;  essay New German Critique Winter 1990 Klaus Phillips ed. New German Filmmakers 1984 : essays on 26 filmmakers incl. Reitz by Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart & Ruth McCormick, Schlondorff & von Trotta by Christian-Albrecht Gollub  

Thomas  Elsaesser  New German Cinema A History 1989 

Stuart Liebman   “Why Kluge?”   October 46  Fall 1988 issue devoted to Kluge

Heide Schlussmann  “Women and Femininity in the Films of Alexander Kluge 

Tony Rayns ed. Fassbinder BFI 1976  essays by Elsaesser (“Vicious Circles”), Rayns (“Syntax”)

Christian  Braad Thomsen  Fassbinder  Life and Work of a Provocative Genius 1991                                    

 Wilfried Wiegand “Interview with Rainer Werner Fassbinder” in Fassbinder  1981

Tony Pipolo “Bewitched by the Holy Whore”  October 21 Summer 1982                                                       

 Jan Dawson  Entry on Wim Wenders in Cinema a Critical Dictionary  vol.2  ed.R. Roud 1980 ; interview with Wenders, New York Zoetrope  1976

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

 6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

At the Classic & Lido in Melbourne and the Randwick Ritz - SMALL FEELINGS: THE FILMS OF JOHN CASSAVETES - A Complete Retrospective

Classic, Lido & Ritz Cinemas are exploring the career of American maverick and provocateur John Cassavetes with a complete retrospective of his directorial features, from his breakthrough Shadows through to his final film Big Trouble. This is the first time all of Cassavetes’ films have been exhibited together in Australia.

 

Cassavetes' films were hugely collaborative, emphasising the actor’s role in exploring difficult characters and “small feelings” often ignored by the studio system. Created outside of this system, his films ultimately defined the idea of the independent film and expanded the possibilities of the medium.

Every Thursday at 7pm from August 29 to November 14. Tickets are on sale now.

 

FILM PROGRAM
Thursday 29 August, 7pm: Shadows (1959)
Thursday 5 September, 7pm: Too Late Blues (1961)
Thursday 12 September, 7pm: A Child is Waiting (1963)
Thursday 19 September, 7pm: Faces (1968)*
Thursday 26 September, 7pm: Husbands(1970)
Thursday 3 October, 7pm: Minnie & Moskowitz (1971)
Thursday 10 October, 7pm: A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Thursday 17 October, 7pm: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)**
Thursday 24 October, 7pm: Opening Night(1977)
Thursday 31 October, 7pm: Gloria (1980)
Thursday 7 November, 7pm: Love Streams (1984)
Thursday 14 November, 7pm: Big Trouble(1986)

*130 minute director's cut
**108 minute director's cut

TICKET LINKS
Session times and tickets for Classic Cinemas here.
Session times and tickets for Lido Cinemas here.
Session times and tickets for Ritz Cinemas here. 

"When I hear the term independent filmmaker, I think immediately of John Cassavetes. He was the most independent of them all. For me, he was and still is a guide and a teacher. Without his support and advice, I don't know what would have become of me as a filmmaker. The question 'What is an independent filmmaker?' has nothing to do with being inside or outside the industry or whether you live in New York or Los Angeles. It's about determination and strength, having the passion to say something that's so strong that no one or nothing can stop you.  

John made it possible for me to think that you could actually make a movie—which is crazy, because it's an enormous endevour, and you only realize how enormous when you're doing it. But by then it's too late.  

He once said, "You can't be afraid of anyone or anything if you want to make a movie." It's that simple. You have to be as tough as he was. He was a force of nature."

— Martin Scorsese, from a tribute to Cassavetes published in 1989

"Without individual creative expression, we are left with a medium of irrelevant fantasies that can add nothing but slim diversion to an already diversified world. The answer cannot be left in the hands of the money men, for their desire to accumulate material success is probably the reason they entered into filmmaking in the first place. The answer must come from the artist himself. He must become aware that the fault is his own, that art and the respect due to his vocation as an artist are his own responsibility. He must, therefore, make the producer realize, by whatever means at his disposal, that only by allowing the artist full and free creative expression will the art and the business of motion pictures survive." 

— John Cassavetes, ‘What’s Wrong With Hollywood’, from the Spring 1959 issue of Film Culture 

"What makes a film? A script is only words and description—a shorthand for a life situation, an abstraction. The interpretation of the script and the life of the people within it are what makes it real and important. A big passage of dialogue ina. Nervous actor’s hands is a traumatic experience and will either end up being cut at the rehearsal stage or, if shot, deleted when the film is edited. A big passage in John Marley’s hands, or Gena Rowlands’s, or Lynn Carlin’s, or Seymour Cassel’s —is like no words at all: you’re not even conscious of the numnber of words being used, or the time that is passing."

— John Cassavetes, from an introduction to the published screenplay of Faces  

For more information, contact Head of Marketing Jaymes Durante: jaymes@movingstory.com.au 

 

 

 

 

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison enthuses over HOW TO MAKE MILLIONS BEFORE GRANDMA DIES (Pat Boonnitipat, Thailand, 2024)

The new Thai film Lahn Mah/How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is currently a box office leader in Asia. It is exactly the kind of product SBS’s Founding Fathers (& Mothers) had in mind, something to make migrant voters remember them on polling day, with the added fringe benefit of making those seem less alien to the wider population still mulling over multi-culturalism. I remember the politico who cheerily explained that it wasn’t there for punters who were too mean to lay out the cost of a foreign movie. 

Well currently SBS is airing Austin Powers Man of Mystery and Olivier’s Hamlet - time off for the subtitling unit. Can’t help but think that other outlets could meet that need without troubling the tax payer.

I came at How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies pretty much unprepared - minimal advance publicity and reviews in Chinese. Also my tolerance for films that give off feel good vibrations is limited. It took me a while to get into this one. 

Twenty-something Putthipong Assaratanakul is trying to monetise the family computer without much success. His sexy cousin Tontawan Tantivejakul is onto a better number nursing her grandfather through the last stages of a fatal illness, with an eye on the family inheritance. Cut from the delighted invalid’s TV showing a parade of fashion models to a line of white-robed monks at the old man’s funeral. Tantivejakul’s coming out of that manoeuvre with a house.

Assaratanakul hasn’t taken much notice of Usha Seamkhum, his isolated granny. He waits downstairs while his parents make one of their duty flying visits. Hey, didn’t we see that last week in the Spanish Casa en flames? Is this universal human behavior or do these guys watch one another’s movies?

Her scans reveal that the old woman has stage four cancer and he’s warned not to tell her. The bulb lights up. He gathers his things and moves in to tend to Seamkhum’s final days. This takes a sizeable adjustment for both of them, with him having to give the octogenarian sponge baths and rise at five AM to assist on her congee stall. Complications develop with his parents and waster uncle revealed with the surprise sympathy that the film manages to find for most of it’s characters. The inheritance plan and the character trajectories laid out prove unreliable. Only Seamkhum’s brother, who prospered from their family inheritance and is serving a luxury buffet when she brings her grandson to see him, proves contemptible. “Don’t come again.”

The film manages the tightrope between saccharine and cynical with remarkable skill. Even the upbeat ending is made acceptable when we see it has been set up - the silver belt gift, Seamkhum’s afterlife plan. The one departure from realism, the Miss Julie pan to the characters young, is where it should be to have an effect.

My feeling that I was being presented with an exotic soap opera evaporated under the impact of skilful filmcraft. The city we see is not familiar and brought to life by the people we get to know attempting to create a good life. Particularly the open-air train becomes a motif, (telling shot of Seamkhum’s reflection on its window after the grim news) along with the alleyway shop-home contrasted to suburban comfort, the shoe warehouse, the community pool, the crowded hospital waiting room, the street market, where gran’s friend is also condemned by cancer - all more plausible in soft colour and unfamiliar groupings. It is hard to resist the final drive past the places picked out earlier and now signalled by announcements rapped on the coffin.

The creatives are not established, with the director having done some episode TV and Usha Seamkhum’s long experience confined to commercials. There is some overlap with Bad Genius (Nattawut Poonpiriya,Thailand, 2017) where Sarinrat Thomas, who plays the lead’s mother (a nice piece of writing & performance) was the headmistress.

This is not an impenetrable festival piece like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. A Saturday run, at the Event Centre, was well attended. I would have been surprised to see as many people downstairs at Twisters.

The Current Cinema - Thoughts on THE BIKERIDERS (Jeff Nicholls, USA, 2023)

 

Tom Hardy (r)

The Bikeriders  is interesting almost for what it seems desperate to avoid. Which is it doesn't want to be seen as an 'exploitation' picture where people remember the sex, the blood and the gore and overlook the crap acting, the cheap effects, the risible story line and find merit in other bits and pieces. 

So..tarting at or near the start, everyone who reviews the film goes back to Brando in The Wild One as a point of reference and the famous ' Waddya got" response to what it is he's rebelling against.

But the tone for the genre was set almost simultaneously by a movie and a book. Roger Corman's The Wild Angels was a common or garden story lifted to prominence by the sheer brilliance of its film-making  (by both Corman and by Peter Bogdanovich who did the second unit work), with all the motorcycle riding scenes done without back projection or any other fakery and providing audiences with an exhilarating sense of speed and danger. Corman embedded himself into the Hell's Angels club  and filled them up with beer and marijuana. 

Jodie Comer, Austin Butler

The film's sense of excitement was such that the Venice Film Festival chose it as their opener in 1966. AIP exploitation cinema came a  long way that day.

Then in 1967 Hunter S Thompson wrote "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs". It was product of Thompson's year long close up look at the gang and pulled no punches in its description of drug use and dealing, common violence, pack rape and other unedifying activities. It sold millions. The floodgates were open and have never closed. And Australia has made its contribution most notably through the Mad Max movies but also one of the most famous one offs in our cinema Sandy Harbutt's Stone. I'm sure Thompson's book provided the basic research for many of the dozens of movies that have followed.

Almost every one of them is likely to feature some attempt at least at outrageous violence. Stone for instance  was made memorable by the scene of the piano wire strung across a road which neatly decapitates an enemy.

Toby Wallace

Now Jeff Nicholls didn't want to be lumped into this morass. He wanted to make a movie that, once again, Cannes or Venice or Berlin might take seriously. Hence he chooses to make the film as some pseudo documentary with characters talking direct to camera, supposedly a photographer seeking info to back up a picture book of the gang. There are some violent moments, most notably where the shard of glass gets embedded in a fist but for the rest, like the pack rape which occurs off-screen, not so much and in the end (spoiler alert) the gang leader gets shot dead. 

If this film is going to win any awards it might be for the new category of "Casting". Two Brits, Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer, play the leads and the young Australian actor Toby Wallace, last seen as the hyperactive young juvenile delinquent in Babyteeth does a top turn  as a would-be gang member who, first spurned in a clever scene which tests his loyalties, comes back to take revenge. It's a great entree to a Hollywood career.