The '68 Comeback Special: Playing Soldiers

David Cairns and I have been digging into the films and events of the 1968 Cannes Film Fesitval, the fest who knew too much... The thing that pisses me off about the '68 Cannes Film Festival being cancelled is in part the phony piousness of the wealthiest members of the 'revolution' but more so because of the films they insisted no one see. Certainly if the slate had all been made up of the likes of Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, I think even Richard Lester could have been talked into protesting. That wasn't the case, as we know well. Even most of the failures were interesting (the loathesome Joanna, a kind of proto-Eat Pray Love, at least gropes around in the dark for ideology though it in no way 'gets' it) and the vast majority of the films that screened were fascinating and heartfelt, most brimming with radical political conviction. 1966-1972 were probably the most radical years of international cinema and the '68 fest could have been ground zero; it did ended up being a kind of groundhog day, predicting a few more years of hardcore socialist/marxist cinema, but the movements died down all around the art. Since that period, the lineups have been split between the political and the mainstream, but it'd be tough to think of a year that was so dogmatically bisected as 1968. Or rather it's tough to imagine another year in which Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush was the rule one on end of the competition and Bahrudin Cengic's punishing morality tale Playing Soldiers was representative on the other.

A young blonde boy rides a train to an orphanage full of Serbian soldiers (the subtitles made it a little tough for me to be sure of their ethnicity but that made sense to me) heading back from the front. World War 2 is still raging and as soon as he gets off the train he's going to be confronted with the mirror image of this gang of embittered, battle-weary men. He's being sent to an orphanage, his parents having recently exited his life. The catch: the orphanage is for the children of soldiers killed by the Nazis and he's a German. If the other boys knew of his parentage, they'd dispatch him with the same ruthlessness with which they murder a German Shepherd the minute the boy gets off the train. If they'd kill a dog for having the word "German" in its breed, imagine what they'd do to the child of party members? The man who runs the orphanage knows the boy's secret and has agreed to take him in anyway and hide this little fact from the other kids. He's the only person we meet who seems entirely good-hearted. Naturally he gets his faith in the innocence of children shaken and his partner is punished for good measure. All things considered the Lord of the Flies kids (the one point of comparison everyone makes) seem less evil because their beliefs are deliberately a little abstract. Playing Soldiers' politics are real and the story leaves quite a mark. The film is ultimately a humanist tract, it just comes by its conviction in the most painful way imaginable.
Playing Soldiers is in synch with Lord of the Flies in more than a few ways. Peter Brook and Cengic were both fans of murky black and white photography which acts as a kind of haze in which people become shades; where actions and their consequences are muddled. Water imagery gets used in both; there's a sexual assault in a shower room that could hardly be more terrifying, and shots of the boys emerging from a muddy pool puts one in mind of the denizens of Elias Merhige's Begotten emerging like the first men from primordial slop. I like the film as a precursor to Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, another unremittingly bleak boys' own adventure story. Shockingly, Del Toro has more faith in the decency of children than Cengic; things get bad in Devil's, but never quite as bad as they get here. Del Toro makes his distinction between the acts of children and adults separate enough to allow camaraderie across class and politics. Greed and childhood are the real enemy, though Franco doesn't exactly walk away unscathed. Cengic's after the idea of inherited ideology and pursues it in a way that never feels fictitious. The orphans of the committed must become committed themselves absent their parents guidance - they're all political muscle though they don't quite grasp what it is they're upset about. They've turned their anger at losing their parents into anger at the Nazis, a sly trick from our director. The first appearance of a chalk mark swastika has the same gut-knotting effect as the titular 'M' on Peter Lorre's shoulder or Janet Leigh's Ford custom 300 refusing to sink into the swamp behind the Bates Motel. It fucks with our sympathy. We cringe when we see the swastika, not because of what it means to us, but because it means the kids have turned on our young hero and his days are officially numbered. He's turned the Hitler youth paradigm inside out and its no less frightening to see kids trying to murder a young German who has no more real affiliation with the Nazi party than they do. A child with a gun aiming it another child will always disturb. Even today, in a ruddy awful print with functional-at-best subtitles, this was one of the more harrowing films I've ever seen. And it was never given the chance that the work of veterans Truffaut and Godard in past years because they'd fought so hard to close down screens. 

The Blood of the '68 Comeback Special

When we screened Dr. Glas at the Totally Illegal Film Festival, the 'judges' were torn about whether its title character was in the right and where ace director Mai Zetterling stood on the issue of his guilt. It was a debate that raged for a half hour or so until The Long Day's Dying shut us up. David Cairns, lucky so-and-so, reviewed it as part of our joint unearthing of the wonders and horrors of the ill-fated 1968 Cannes, and reminds me why the project seemed like such a good idea to begin with. He's able to draw some beautiful conclusions about '68's dominant filmic language and direction (motions I second wholeheartedly) and gets at the beautiful oddness of Zetterling's camera. She was no cut-rate Bergman, he's quick to point out, but she did have her predecessors. What struck me upon first viewing was that it didn't seem to belong in 1968, but David grounds it and points out that boldness doesn't necessarily excuse a few trends wrapped in florid (if seductive) grammar. She was ahead of her time, but only just, and she puts as many feet in the recent, unfashionable past as the future. And so David once again proves once again that when our alien overlords finally arrive and start cracking the whip, we'll need that gigantic brain of his to help keep the human race alive.
Oh, and dig this Saul Bass-inspired poster. It gives the film the impression of being the first of Brian De Palma's pervy Hitchcock plagiarisms, instead of a richly nuanced but bleak and nightmarish look at sexual abuse. The film really is fascinating and worth the time it might take to track it down. No other film at Cannes that year could possibly have ignited the same amount of furious debate. There's sexual abuse of the same stripe in Petulia, but Lester's very clear who the enemy is. If George C. Scott had decided to off Richard Chamberlain that'd put the films on equal footing. You really must see it so we can talk more! Well...go on! What on earth are you waiting for?

Still Walking

This is going to seem very left field, but I asked Alexandra Maiorino what she thought of the sixth episode of the 4th season of The Walking Dead and she gave me this wonderful, concise paragraph, which spells out the show's major gender issues rather eloquently. Sorry we've never touched on the show before, but I thought it was worth your time. I don't 100% agree, I even kind of liked the episode, but this is a wonderful counterpoint to my surface enjoyment:

I honestly felt like that one was a waste of my time.  While I think David Morrissey is wonderful, I really don't care about the Governor or his dead-daughter issues. He's definitely the bad guy and I don't appreciate being asked to sympathize with him again. Wasn't half of last season spent on the Governor's man-pain and how similar it is to Rick's very important man-pain? I can't see why the writers are trying to get the audience to buy the idea of redemption for the governor directly after telling us, through Rick's decision, that what Carol did is unforgivable. It undermines my faith in the writers this season and makes me worry that the rule is still "If you are male, then your internal struggle is compelling and important and nuanced no matter what terrible things you do, but if you are female and you step out of line, you need to die/get lost." I'm so hoping I'm wrong about that, but 2 Governor-centric episodes placed so they put off daryl's reaction to rick's decision (killing that wonderful dramatic tension, by the way) don't inspire much confidence. I didn't mind the women so much except for the fact that one of them sleeps with the governor, making him the man on the show who has had the most on-screen sex, which I didn't need to see - and he's only been here for one and a half seasons. I do, however, mind that there is yet another precious little blond girl the audience must now care about; by my count, that makes 6 little blond girls who have been featured in some way on the show, not counting beth. I just think it was one of the worst times to show a full episode away from the prison, focusing on only one character.  I suppose I wouldn't have minded if they did that with carol, but the only female character who has ever gotten that kind of narrative attention - the kind where the story follows them even when there isn't a more important male character to focus on - is Andrea, and I don't want any of that bullshit for the show's most well developed and last original female character.  The idea that we are supposed to divert our attention to just the governor for two full episodes right at an important turning point (hopefully) in the prison dynamic is ridiculous, even without the absurd notion that the governor's personal turmoil is deserving of audience sympathy.

The '68 Comeback Special: A Report On The Party And The Guests

When I was maybe 20 some friends of mine were arrested. No crime had taken place, someone had simply seen something that looked fishy and the police had been called. I thought it was due to a slight case of theft. The previous night we'd all gone out to buy flowers, it was one of our birthdays, only to find that the market had closed. Someone had left all the flowers outside the shop and we thought, well, why not? We wrote a note explaining the situation and slipped it under the locked doors, along with 20 dollars, much more than the flowers were worth. We left and thought nothing of it. At the end of the night I went home, my friends stayed out. The following morning I got a phone call telling me that three of them had been arrested. My mind went to the flowers but it was something else. One of them had been shooting at trees from the backseat of a car with a plastic six-shooter purchased at a K-Mart as a joke graduation gift for me. Someone had seen this, thought the gun real, and called the cops. Not 100% unreasonable, though I still hold a grudge against the witness. The friends who'd overpaid for flowers when they might have just stolen them had been arrested. All of the accused had never done anything close to an arrest-able offense before and to this day are all harmless. Indeed their social conscious and kindness is what defines them. They're going to make real differences and real changes and make lives better. They believe in positivity, in the power of one person in an overcrowded system and I believe they'll achieve it. I'm biased, but I couldn't get over the fact that these people, friends of mine who always radiated warmth and understanding, had been arrested.
I drove to the police station. I didn't know what else to do. The parents had been called and they were inside the tiny station lobby trying to talk to the desk sergeant, trying like hell to reason with him. I couldn't make out most of it because I thought it best not to intrude. What could a twenty year old do but make things worse? But one thing I heard very clearly: laughter. The desk sergeant was laughing. That didn't make sense. I stood up and walked over to the door to get a good look at what was happening. My friend's mother and her lawyer were trying to get this man, this stranger, to essentially let a woman talk to her frightened son. All she knew was that two armed police men had walked onto her property, guns drawn, made her only son get on his stomach where they handcuffed him, and then driven off with him. How does a mother make sense of that?

The crime had been explained to her, she knew it was bullshit, the gun her son had been waving around like a little kid was in fact plastic. The cops knew that; it was sitting in evidence after all. Though never did they mind that. The police took it all seriously until they didn't. This man, whose face I will always remember as having a mustache and no hair, but who knows what it really looked like, was looking at a scared mother and laughing at her. They would talk, the officer would pretend to empathize with them, then make a joke. A "Well, sure, that's why we're here," type joke, one of those things that says "this is on you, my hands are tied and I'm just as happy not helping you". In other words a joke with no punchline. He cut the lawyer off to make these jokes time and again. While they stood there talking I heard a door slam around the back of the building and realized they were taking my friends to their arraignment and the desk sergeant had no intention of telling the parents until they'd left the building, giving the cops a headstart to the courthouse. I sincerely feel he would have kept laughing at them all day given his druthers. We all arrived at the courthouse in time to hear charges read; if we'd arrived later and bail hadn't been posted in time they would have been sent to prison and because it was Friday they'd have had to stay there until Monday. Three days in prison because of this horrible man. Luckily it didn't turn out that way. Damage was done but I know I'm grateful there wasn't more, that the cop hadn't kept interrupting the lawyer and laughing. 

Very few films have ever captured what that experience felt like to me, what it's really like to deal with the law when it's one man in front of you wielding power he's so drunk with that he doesn't seem to remember what it was like to be a human being before he'd been given a badge and a gun. I was feet away from that kind of corruption, I know what it sounds like, what it does to your brain. It actively rejects logic and does not let anything make sense. That kind of power has no master, no sense of fair play or compassion. It just laughs at you, at your pain, the fact that your attachments have left you open to harm. How foolish were you that you let this happen, that it's affecting you so badly? Franz Kafka got the ghoulish surreality of law and order. The word 'Kafkaesque' is funny to me because it comes from fiction - anything 'Kafkaesque' in life is meant to be compared to The Trial, but fiction can't compare to the mocking condescension that law enforcement agents have for the suspected criminal and anyone with the shit luck to be related to them. The Trial isn't prophetic speculation like 1984, it's a no-bullshit rendering of the way law works, outsized for the sake of maintaining something like safe distance from how scary the truth is.
Jan Němec's A Report on the Party & the Guests is one of the only films that has ever managed to convey that sense of abject horror I felt listening to the desk sergeant laughing at a woman trying to see her innocent son. The film has two acts. In act one, a group of seven people are killing time before a wedding party. They picnic and then wash up and walk through the woods to join the revelry. Through the woods come several menacing-looking men in suits. They quickly outnumber the picnickers and usher them off to some secluded corner of the grounds where a desk is placed and a man begins interrogating them. The man, played by Jan Klusák is absolutely terrifying. With his awful posture, his tics and his round but pointed features, he resembles a human weasel. He's the perfect embodiment of random, reckless, unearned power. He makes the seven guests get in line for no reason and then his men draw a line around them to keep them contained. They are never told what they've done. He seems to talk in riddles, making strange pronouncements that feel like threats thanks to Klusák's queer gesticulating and petulant expression. His eyebrows always give the impression that he's reacting to a dirty joke he's forgotten to tell and betray his clear attempts to seem like an imposing force and buttress his complete unwillingness to give these people the comfort of knowing why he's tormenting them. "What have we done?" "Don't you know?" I imagine Bradley Manning's had that conversation a few times. Klusák is never less than totally infuriating. When one of the women asks to go to the bathroom, he rolls his eyes like he was given too much information about her sex life. One of the men attempts to leave and Klusák dances around him and tries to assure him he should stay of his own volition. When that fails he cries and screams and has the men in suits apprehend him by force. His affect most resembles a jealous, bratty child, a kind of bureaucratic Lord Bullingdon. I assume Němec, like the rest of the Czech new-wavers, was no stranger to feeling completely impotent when faced with a body given power it cannot handle. 

And then just as soon as it started, the host of the wedding party (Ivan Vyskocil) arrives and forces Klusák to let them go. He asks forgiveness of the detained and they grant it to him. Just like that. They explain exactly what it felt like to have been waylaid so forcefully, almost like they're used to constant inquisition and it's important that Vyskocil understand the difference between this and any other sort of official harassment. And then it's onto the party and act 2. Briefly; if I haven't mentioned any aspect of the filmmaking it's because Němec might have been the least showy of his peers, at least grammatically. I'm still too much a novice to know for sure and have many, many more films to watch, but the whole point of a film like A Report on the Party and the Guests is to tweak reality in the slightest ways possible. People have to know something is up, that this isn't based on a true story, but all the stories of Czechoslovakia in 1967. It's meant to bypass the brain and head straight to the blood and bones. If one wants proof of the ease with which we can dissociate the truth behind The Trial and the way it's told just look at Orson Welles' excellent adaptation. It might as well take place on another planet. One can look at the diseased looking streets, the possessed lighting, the claustrophobia alternating with agoraphobia with such frequency you could get spatial influenza and say "How horrid...good thing we don't live like that!" A Report doesn't let us off so easy. If it had cut together with the Godardian, manic lust of Vera Chytilová's Daisies, possessed the bombastic dry humour of Miloš Forman, the pastoral romance or ebullient sexuality of Jiří Menzel, it'd distract you from the banality of evil. The film's most beautiful image, a candle-lit banquet in the middle of a forest, has to be as symbolically charged as it is staggeringly pretty or it wouldn't be here. Still, this must have felt like security camera footage to fellow dissidents. Not that any of them likely saw it; it was banned in Czechoslovakia.
Act 2 concerns a guest's sudden disappearance after everyone realizes they're sitting in the wrong assigned seat (the film's funniest joke). The host wants answers, but all anyone seems capable of supplying him with are resigned glimpses into the missing guest's character. Němec could be said to be playing in Buñuel's sandbox, but he has a single-mindedness that Don Luis abandoned when he started letting his first love, surrealism, creep back into his narratives in the early 60s. What we have here is the closest we've ever come to seeing Eugene Ionesco on the screen. The expressions of the actors and the things they say rarely match up. Anger explodes at a moment's notice, only to go completely unrecognized. People talk into a vacuum, knowing very well there words will only obfuscate the situation and enrage the host more. People don't just talk over each other, they talk past each other. When hound dogs are called for to hunt down the missing groom, it suddenly appears as though we've been watching a horror film the whole time and had no idea. A neat trick, and absolutely how it feels in reality. One minute you're watching the nicest kid you know buy flowers for his friend's birthday. The next morning a man in a uniform is treating him like a criminal and laughing at your attempts to make sense of the change. Maybe the joke is that there is no making sense of the change because that man knew that deep down that no one's actually guilty, so anyone can be and thus should be. Everyone makes mistakes, so everyone can be held accountable at all times for something. Original sin as law. The missing guest flees not just dinner but a way of life that can detain you for no reason because of an ideal you didn't know you were being held to. When questioned the vanished man's wife says, chipper as a lark, "He said he didn't want to be here. That here, no one likes anyone." Klusák returns to form a posse to hunt the man down and terror reigns supreme. The world's natural state is chaos in A Report on the Party & the Guests and after brief, false hope and celebration, it's time to return. Maybe Kuroneko wasn't the scariest film in competition...

The '68 Comeback Special, Born to be Wildly Pretentious

David Cairns straps on his helmet and jumps on his hog for this week's '68 Comeback Special for a look at rogue cinematographer-turned-director Jack Cardiff's Girl on a Motorcycle. This film was met with howls of laughter and stark, outraged silence when I screened it last. I found it a suffocatingly hip proto-giallo with no murder, making the film an exercise in building tension and never releasing it. Cardiff, who is one of the greatest cinematographers in history, never really found his, uh, instrument as a director. The film of his I've enjoyed the most was a post-Dirty Dozen colonialist actioner called Dark of the Sun, perhaps it lacked the pap-psychology of Girl and was free of the unearned pretensions of this and his early, literary films. I've never understood why so many great cinematographers turn to directing and the care and patient craft they're known for just vanishes...but then maybe I've answered my own question. Nevertheless Cardiff sneaks a few beautiful shots in between the rear-projection and the oblique circus of the body. Alain Delon as a professor of sex is plenty hilarious, so it wasn't all bad.


An angel...drowned in tears

Maybe it's because he came from the godless no man's land of video installation art, which most critics view with the same contempt that Graham Chapman's King Arthur holds for Camelot, but no one I've read ever seems to talk about Steve McQueen's influences as a filmmaker. People are quick to reference other films on the subjects he tackles (addiction, slavery), but no one I've read has delved into how he came by his technique, at least not in the cinematic tradition. Having seen most of his stunning gallery work, it's easy enough to say that he just figured out in small doses how he wanted to show the world. Certainly one could look at Giardini, his half-hour split-screen effort that covers a neighborhood and its silent occupants over the course of a few quiet days, as a test-run for Shame's microscopic investigation of a man's routine, upset by intrusion and leading to self-destruction. The name most frequently dropped in discussions of 12 Years A Slave is Spielberg; Schindler's List, Amistad and The Color Purple are easy points of comparison but I don't think the two Steves have much in common as directors. In order to figure out where McQueen's roots are planted, look back further to his earliest short films. Look at the dark drawing room wrestling match in Bear, or the dreary countryside all around the stonefaced director in Deadpan. It's the same countryside that Michael Reeves and Piers Haggard used to haunt. The wrestling match may be in slow-motion and narrative-less, but it's quite clearly an re-staging of the centerpiece of Ken Russell's Women In Love. He and Russell share a fascination with the body and everything it can endure. Not to mention they're both fearless.


This is an English tradition from which McQueen's patience seemed to displace him. After all, the camera's movement is all but invisible when it does show up in Hunger, Shame and 12 Years, and Reeves and his generation could barely sit still. Russell in particular redefined where a camera could go and how fast it could get there. But you don't have to squint to see Michael Reeves in McQueen's cinema. The IRA soldiers of Hunger look an awful lot like the bored mods of The Sorcerers, notably Ian Ogilvy, who haunts the city at night like Michael Fassbender in Shame. The monster-under-the-surface theme propels both Shame, The Sorcerers and The She Creature. Most importantly, there's an awful lot that connects 12 Years A Slave to Reeves' magnum opus Witchfinder General

Witchfinder General has an interesting reputation. I think it's thought of mainly as a horror film and having Vincent Price at his most sincerely evil would appear to validate that, but it's something different. Looking explicitly at the practice of burning innocents as witches to keep religious authority on its pedestal, Witchfinder General or The Conquerer Worm as it was called in the US, is one of the harshest looks at English history ever filmed. Matthew Hopkins, played by Price, was a real figure who killed something like 300 women in his lifetime. Here he stands in for the worst traditions of the English government; scholars have pointed out there was little accuracy in Reeves' depiction of Hopkins practices but that's hardly the point. Reeves was more interested in the feeling of truth. After all, being burnt alive hurts, trial or no trial. Reeves' depictions of the hangings, beheadings, burnings and drownings are still unbearably cruel today. The mass drowning in particular still curdles my blood. Reeves managed to tone down Vincent Price and get one of his iciest performances as the deceiving Hopkins; I don't think he ever bested his work here. Reeves never directed another film and this is justly the film he's best remembered for; it kicked off a wave of politically charged witch-burning films in the 70s that acted as mirrors to the modern era's repressive status quo. That sound familiar?
12 Years A Slave takes a very similar approach to its era and subject matter and is also based on a book, though it's much more closely adheres to provable fact than Witchfinder General. Solomon Northrup's book of the same name is based on his experiences as a kidnapped slave, an invaluable document that means the script already has the authenticity missing from Witchfinder General, but the important thing is the overlap in execution. Sometimes it's simple; a few beautiful shots of the countryside, of the indifference of nature which goes on being splendid no matter what man does to it, to break up the horror of humanity. But more often it's rougher than that. Reeves and McQueen want to put you inches from the whippings and brandings, to remove any chance of ironic distance. The events are in the past, but the pain should be present-tense. Reeves fought a very public battle with censors over the violence in Witchfinder General because he needed it to tell the story, the same way McQueen spares no whipmark and lets the weeping and wailing of bereaved mothers go on through multiple scenes. The horrors of Reeves' first two films were big and colorful; if he was pushing the envelope in Witchfinder it wasn't just to get a rise out of thrill-seeking audiences. He was trying to be honest and make English audiences realize what had happened to its people before things had become 'civilized.' Perhaps sensing that that particular story had been told, set his sights on a chapter in dire need of revisiting. McQueen can't help but render things beautifully but like Reeves his direction never feels less than totally honest. They went back in time to tell stories, not indulge their muse. Shame and The Sorcerers represent their respective artistic ids, untethered and pure. The scene of Karloff eavesdropping on the young couple swimming has the same cold sensuousness as Fassbender renting a room to try out 'normal' sex with a co-worker. An aside: Ian Ogilvy and Karloff represent both sides of Fassbender's psyche in Shame. Ogilvy slowly falls under the spell of Karloff's witchcraft and can't control his body. Fassbender wants to behave normally and rid himself of his vices but they hold him down and make him act against his best interest; he can see his idealized self just out of his grasp but can't reach it without self-destructing.

Both Reeves and McQueen shoot faces with rhyming clarity but also know when to cut away. They know precisely how much to show and how to get away with it. Both films have conflicting moments where the male hero is tortured by proxy, using a female intermediary at the hands of the sadistic overseer. In Witchfinder, Hopkins kidnaps young lovers played by Ogilvy and Hilary Heath, who've caught onto his witch-kiling scheme to stay above the law. In order to harm Ogilvy and get him to confess to bogus witchcraft so he can be 'legally' executed, Hopkins stabs Heath in the back repeatedly with a thin needle, a sight I have to watch through my fingers. In 12 Years, Fassbender's drunk slave owner Epps wants to punish the woman he loves, one of his slaves, and himself while he's at it but makes Solomon whip the girl on his behalf to make sure he isn't the one who walks away with the most damage to his mental health or pride. Solomon knows that Patsey would rather be whipped by a friend than by her master and rapist but he's been able to keep a certain remove from himself and his captors. Epps wants to remove it and break Solomon just as Hopkins wants to force a confession from the young soldier. The pain is only symbolic as both Hopkins and Epps both know that they're going to inflict the damage one way or another. They want pain to mean something because it's how they relate to the world. It's what keeps the illusion of their power alive. Also noteworthy is that in both films, our heroes are allowed to have revenge against their tormentors (Chiwetel Ejiofor whipping the overseer played by Paul Dano, Ogilvy overpowering Price with an ax), but it's fleeting and unsatisfactory. Anything more than that would be to cheat the past and have their heroes sink to a place where audiences can't follow them. The most memorable torture follows each; Solomon's day spent hanging from a tree, only his toes keeping him alive, and Ogilvy's screaming incoherently at being robbed of real vengeance, which would have truly put him on Hopkins' level. Ogilvy's impotent ravings are some of the most psychologically damaging sounds you'll ever hear. Just try and scrape them off your brainpan. Their almost as rough as the weeping mother in 12 Years.

McQueen also has a very important precedent in the work of Reeves' American counterpart, Curtis Harrington. Like McQueen, Harrington got his start making avant-garde short films that heavily influenced the feature films he'd make in the 60s and 70s. They essentially approached features from inverse angles. Harrington went from shorts to work-for-hire, turning sci-fi potboilers into Kenneth Anger-inspired (the two were good friends) pop-art subterfuge. His first assignment for American International Pictures were reshoots to turn a russian sci-fi film called Planet of Storms into Voyage To A Prehistoric Planet. My favourite addition involves Basil Rathbone being forcefed life-giving pills from his robot doctor in the middle of an interplanetary storm. This was the first clue that Harrington was in no way an ordinary director. McQueen worked the other way around, independent financing and picking stories he can organically apply his style. What they have in common is aesthetic control. They've each produced a handful of tableaux that I'll never be able to forget that lift their films above more ordinary takes on the same subject. Put Queen of Blood, Harrington's second sci-fi thriller, next to Space Probe Taurus, They Came from Beyond Space or one of Antonio Margheriti's Gamma One films, all roughly of the same vintage, and Harrington's strengths as a director stick out like a sixth finger. Similarly, place McQueen's Hunger next to Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father and McQueen emerges as an artist interested in appealing to more than just our love of a compelling story and/or our consciousness. Harrington and McQueen both share an interest in psychosexual tension and power structures, specifically social ones. Games, Harrington's third film, bears marked thematic similarities to the ground covered in the Epps section of 12 Years, and the brother-sister relationship in Shame, though Harrington's playing with a loaded deck and for much lower stakes.


The work that Harrington got out of Dennis Hopper is not dissimilar to what McQueen has been able to get out of Michael Fassbender. The cocksure but sensitive sailor in Night Tide feels like a cousin to the Fassbender persona, like his quietness, his indecision, his compassion to a fault raised the three characters Fassbender plays in the McQueen films. Both actors sense an opportunity to grow while in the hands of artists they knew and trusted. In Queen of Blood one can see Hopper working out his own method; so much broils under the surface. Similarly Fassbender couldn't quite keep his southern accent together for all of Ridley Scott's The Counselor, but really makes the effort to maintain a consistent dialect in 12 Years A Slave as the monstrous but clearly conflicted Epps.  Harrington and McQueen both had to keep a number of plates spinning and clearly had less interest in designing the life out of the performances, especially when dealing with the likes of Hopper, Fassbender, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Basil Rathbone and Brad Pitt, respectively. They let their actors breathe and find their own way through complicated and/or well-worn character types. They've gone the trouble of producing the most visually awesome versions of the stories being told (Slave narrative, sci-fi/horror) so it wouldn't do to hamstring their performers. Queen of Blood is perhaps Harrington's most sumptuous production, every shot art directed to look quite unlike anything ever attempted in American popular cinema. It most resembles Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires, another AIP production from the year before, but Harrington has such a bizarre, ethereal approach to his set-pieces that the whole thing floats by. Bava's compositions are sturdy as a pair of steel-toed boots, keeping the central mystery grounded the whole time. Harrington aims for the stratosphere and unsurprisingly flies right through it. McQueen's dramatic structure takes a similar tack. We know how long Solomon is kept in bondage, but McQueen hops around the timeline, focusing on the most important and harrowing representations of his experience. Like Harrington's astronauts, we float through Solomon's nightmare (McQueen's camera only occassionally feels as rooted to any particular spot as, say, Bava's) always a few feet above or below Solomon and often a far enough distance away that he can track a lengthy action scene without breaking continuity. Take for instance the scenes where Epps takes his aggression out on Solomon when he can't bring himself to harm Patsey. He chases Solomon around and through a pig enclosure, and McQueen stands back, letting us know exactly how far away from each other they are. It's distant but keeps the scene from feeling exceptional - this is what Solomon dealt with every day. Chasing him with the camera would have felt like undo emphasis. It also keeps it as dirty and absurd as it would have been, with both men sliding around in mud and being separated by the woman of the house like children. And so we drift from scene to scene, preserving the illusion of 12 Years passing without fretting over lost time. Harrington's approach to the deaths of major characters has the same sense of gliding. These things happen. He also loses a lot of time in the many months spent traveling to Mars' moon Phobos in Queen of Blood, but you never notice or mind because the journey is so full of his unique design. There's a mountain of difference between the two approaches, but they produce the same effect; integrity of momentum preserved by acute, confident visuals. When both filmmakers pause that motion and present us with firmly composed looks at the people who occupy their worlds, the effect is devastating. For a moment, a masterpiece painted just for us. They litter Queen of Blood, but the best of them lies in 12 Years when Solomon and a host of other slaves have just disembarked from a steamship. They sit in differently colored, dirty, faded clothes, their faces masks of exhaust and pain. 
These connections aren't intended as keys to the McQueen puzzle, indeed 12 Years A Slave could hardly be a work that stands more firmly on its own terms. But placing him in context has helped me like him as a person, as well as an artist. I can imagine his journey from installation virtuoso to internationally lauded filmmaker with unprecedented access to an international dream cast. I love the work that Reeves and Harrington did in the 60s and 70s, but I think I like them more because I know about their lives and the artists they were indebted to: Harrington owed much to his peer Kenneth Anger while Reeves found Don Siegel at his home to tell him he thought he was the greatest director alive. This puts more life into their films for me and the chill one gets from watching Shame or 12 Years A Slave can be warmed by knowing McQueen is part of a long tradition of artists who did great work as feature directors. I for one can't wait to see what he does next. After their third films Harrington turned increasingly to TV movies and Reeves passed away, far too young. I can't wait to see what McQueen does next. Might I suggest he follow in Reeves and Harrington's footsteps and give horror a chance?

Our Favourite Films of the 70s

Here's a survey of our favourite films of the 1970s

Scout Tafoya
Apocalypse Now
Killer of Sheep
Sorcerer 
You and Me
Le Cercle Rouge
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Last Picture Show
Sweet Movie
Touki Bouki 
Dawn of the Dead

Tim Earle
Network
Jaws
The Conversation
Being There
THX 1138
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 
All the Presidents Men
Chinatown
Monty Python's Life of Brian 
Day of the Jackal

Lucas Mangum
A Clockwork Orange
Taxi Driver 
Deliverance
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Jaws 
Alien
Star Wars 
Halloween
The Exorcist
The Brood

Tucker Johnson
The Godfather Part II 
Apocalypse Now
Star Wars
Taxi Driver
Blazing Saddles
Barry Lyndon
Alien
All the President's Men
Young Frankenstein
The Exorcist

Gifford Elliott
Chinatown
McCabe and Mrs Miller
Day For Night
Godfather
Annie Hall
Network
Blazing Saddles
Jaws
Aguirre Wrath of God
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Special mentions: The Conformist, Claire's Knee, Dog Day Afternoon, French connection

Julian Lazare
A Clockwork Orange
Taxi Driver
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Suspiria
Deliverance
Aguirre, The Wrath of God
Days of Heaven
Brotherhood of Death
Enter the Dragon
French Connection

Dan Khan
Alien
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
3 Days of the Condor 
Network 
Badlands
Straw Dogs
Cries & Whispers
The Last Picture Show
Apocalypse Now
Being There

Noah Lyons
Suspiria
The Holy Mountain
Stalker
Eraserhead
Cries and Whispers
Annie Hall
A Clockwork Orange
El Topo
Alien
The Wicker Man

Beccah Ulm
Suspiria
Monty Python's Life of Brian
Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Soylent Green
Harold & Maude
Stepford Wives
Eraserhead
Black Christmas
When A Stranger Calls

Sean Van Deuren
Annie Hall 
Network
Love in the Afternoon 
The Mirror 
All The President’s Men
Le Cercle Rouge 
Husbands 
Barry Lyndon 
Scenes From a Marriage 
The Conversation