The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: David Cairns

David Cairns 

...they not only conjure psychological states on the screen, but languish exultantly in them, only seizing the narrative ribbon as its last trailing tatters whisk past.

Known for: The Forgotten, LimerWrecks, Shadowplay, Natan.

Contributed to: Cineaste, Sight & Sound, The Believer, Criterion, Masters of Cinema, Arrow Video, Mubi, The Chiseler, Senses of Cinema, Electric Sheep. 

Noted champion of: Mitchell Leisen, Richard Lester, Lindsay Anderson, Ken Russell, Joseph Losey, Kathleen Byron, Frank Borzage, Julien Duvivier, Jean Epstein, Jean Grémillon, Lon Chaney, Victor Sjöström, Orson Welles, Bernard Natan.

Influences: "My only real influences in criticism, apart from everybody, are Colin McLaren, screenwriter, who taught me the joy of words, and B. Kite, who taught me (1) the joy of ideas and (2) what criticism is. Or at least he tried."

Scottish David Cairns (October 10th, 1967-) seems to never stop consuming and writing. Regular readers know he's got a new film to talk about in entertaining, brisk detail nearly every day. He says everything he needs to and before you know it you're scanning the backpages of his blog, Shadowplay, looking for more of his addicting prose. He devours books and films with uncommon speed, rarely letting a day pass without an update on what he's been taken with lately. But criticism came after filmmaking. He graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art, where he now teaches. His first film was a short called The Three Hunchbacks, which was the start of his award-laden first career. His 2001 film Cry For Bobo won approximately 23 awards from international film festivals, allowing him to make two more short films, write feature screenplays (one of which has just been produced) and opened the door for "a somewhat unhappy stint in kids' TV." His latest film is Natan, co-directed with Paul Duane, about the defamed innovator/producer Bernard Natan, who was almost single-handedly responsible for buttressing the French film industry after WWI as well as ushering the medium into modernity. Natan's story is incredible and tragic and he and Duane tell it splendidly. On the filmmaking: Paul Duane invited me into Natan since he discovered the story through my blog. Was never sure why he thought he needed me but I did my best to pull my weight.

Natan is just one example of the new, exciting ways Cairns engages with films. On his new foray into documentary and video essays: Through video essays and documentaries I'm now trying to combine the filmmaking and criticism. It's in progress, but shows promise. Needs to get a bit more fictional. He also contributes limericks that summarize films and size up performers at LimerWrecks. He recently studied Citizen Kane extensively, going from point-of-view to point-of-view, sizing up its many virtues in typically unique fashion. For several years he's been writing The Forgotten a now fortnightly column about movies that have fallen into obscurity, where he does some of his best writing. Cairns' writing is ruthlessly smart and dangerously witty; his pans are unparalleled in their mixture of Wilde-worthy bons mot, dark, often sexual humour, cheerful disregard for conventional logic that nods towards surrealism and a directness that can shock. His diction allows for no misinterpretation and often verges on poetic confession, all the better to let the reader into his world. He certainly uses parenthesis better than almost anyone. 

On The Love Parade:
In the film’s most daring number, he laments “But Nobody’s Using it Now,” perhaps the only time in musical history the leading man has been permitted to sing a tender love song (basically) about his own penis. And lubricious Lubitsch slips this, and much else, past those policing the nation’s screens, using the power of suggestion so that he could always blame any perceived salaciousness on the censors’ own dirty minds....Every time Lubitsch scored a hit like this (and he virtually reinvented screen comedy every five years or so), critics and audiences thought he had taken the form as far as it could go, but the best was always yet to come.

On Cinema Circus (a personal favourite -ed.):

Meanwhile, more hideous outsized masks are sported, embodying movie stars too authentically famous to be roped into this sideshow: Clark Gable comes first, Technicolor transforming his latex features to the cyanate blue of the freshly asphyxiated....Eddie Cantor (I think), eyes starting from their spheres in shocked reaction to some unseen cheese-wire garrote....The script, a drunken miscellany churned out with obvious contempt for audience and performers alike, allows for only the most disappointing kind of entertainment. Lee Tracy actually gets laughs, but only when delivering straight lines: whenever forced to deliver some broken-backed pun, he must call on all his reserves of self-belief just to get through it without organ failure. Likewise, the set-up to a tired joke-shop prank involving Jack La Rue and his dates (but not involving the shy baby chimp in Alice Faye's arms: he's just there, for no reason) allows La Rue to display courtly boredom and incomprehension at the serried acrobats displaying overhead, a joy soon fractured by the conscious attempt at humor.... Animatronic clowns, a vast inflatable blimp bestiary, Boris Karloff pumping smoke from his retinas, and Mickey Rooney, perhaps concealing even then, in the back pocket of his gorilla costume, his good-luck photograph of a naked, masturbating Judy Garland (to be revealed, decades later, to a dumbfounded Bruce Dern)... somehow the phantasmagorical, shrill, random and ugly cut-up poetry of the circus ring has been ramped up to a higher pitch of mania.

source: email interview

It was the best of times, it was 1968.

Over at Shadowplay, you'll find, next to a eulogy for Shirley Temple, David Cairns' latest issue of our '68 Comeback Special. This week he's got Jiří Menzel's Capricious Summer, a thing of aimless, ageless beauty. I fell hard for this film when I bought Criterion's Czech New-Wave boxset a few years ago. After the rich, politically charged farce of Closely Watched Trains, Menzel rightly felt he deserved a break from such serious cinema. Or rather, tension and plotting so fab, it plays like a splendid high-wire act. What better way to celebrate than with an actual high-wire act? Capricious Summer is about a group of men bewitched in different ways by the appearance of a magician, or rather, his voluptuous assistant. Its pleasures are myriad. Jana Preissová, the assistant, is one of the screen's most lithe and enduring sirens (Menzel sure had an eye. Try not to bond for life with Closely Watched Trains' naughty telegraphist played by Jitka Zelenohorská, whose only fault is that her name isn't Jitka Bendová like I thought it was. To be famous for having a pervy station agent stamp your butt in one of the most erotic scenes in history, you couldn't have a better name than Bendová. Alas...). 

Preissová does little but walk about collecting donations in an orange leotard and black face mask, but she's the kind of beauty you feel you've known all your life. Unsurprisingly, the three men at the heart of the story fall madly in lust with her. Watching her perform a pantomime of the high wire act in form-fitting pink cloth jumpsuit is unspeakably sensual. Watching the men watching her is an immense joy. Menzel works wonders with hidden depths. What looks like an attempted rape ends in an unexpected nap; the look on Preissová's face when she realizes what's happened is almost enough to give this film the top prize. But charming enchantments like this are rarely the sort of film that net fancy awards, for which the world is a shameful place sometimes. It's tempting to want to give Rudolf Hrusínský best actor or split the actress prize between Míla Myslíková and Preissová, for representing the problems of need vs. want so splendidly, but that prize would have to rest in Menzel's hands, who draws out their essence like a sorcerer. Hrusínský doesn't appear to have a great deal of range, playing sad, flummoxed and angry and sort of shuffling through every frame, but Menzel fits him in a world of such faded splendor, that he appears to have the dynamism of Brando at his best. And the women don't do quite enough to earn the prize, but Menzel projects them onto this backdrop in a way that renders them earthbound angels. And that is rather the heart of Capricious Summer. When you are a sad man with no ambition, a beautiful woman can be the most important thing in the world for a short time, even if your wife is, for all intents and purposes, perfect for you. On a more personal note, I cribbed a little from Capricious Summer when I made my film House of Little Deaths. I was totally in love with the way Menzel filmed his enchantress and tried to take a little of that magic for myself. That film has yet to be seen by a large audience, but here's a little look (best I could do on short notice) at what I was up to and how much I love this magical little movie. 

Guess Who's Coming To The '68 Comeback Special

Over at Shadowplay, David Cairns has one of the best of the lot, Days of Matthew, in our '68 Comeback Special. He does a truly awesome job summing up its cumulative effect and few missteps, which is handy because if I'd gotten it I would have compared it to one of my favourite films ever, Philippe Grandrieux's Un Lac, and called it a day. Grandrieux has never, to my knowledge, acknowledged the comparison, and there are enough elements that keep it from being a straight-up remake, but Days of Matthew does haunt Un Lac's simple story of a family, including a troubled brother with a dependency on his sister, living in a cabin on a wooded island that supports a logging community. Grandrieux and director Witold Leszczyński both use the story as ways of imparting their definition of cinema at their purest, each edit and close-up a window into their celluloid souls. Leszczyński died in 2007, right around the time Grandrieux would have been deciding to make the movie, so I like to think that even if he wasn't consciously paying homage to the great polish director, that some phantom took the form of coincidence and forced Grandrieux to tell this story when he did, just like all those terrible Hollywood ghost movies. Anyway, David's appraisal is nice indeed, and makes for a better read than my borderline-Buddhist musings, and he ties it quite nicely into the British new wave! Also worth pointing out that he's been telling the story of his and Paul Duane's fabulous, poetic documentary Natan over at Mostly Film.

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.

The 68 Comeback Special, The 68 Comeback Special

Over at Shadowplay you'll find David Cairns on the rather good, always beguiling Je T'Aime Je T'aime, by Alain Resnais. Resnais' Modus Operandi always resembled a failed experiment in time travel (this is what made him so good), so it makes sense that he'd actually make a film about a time traveller. If it never reaches the highs of Marienbad, Providence, or Hiroshima Mon Amour I think it's because he imposed rules and a structure on himself, which hems him in just a hair too much. When the '68 Comeback Special draws to a close I might revisit this fascinating work just for fun. But go and enjoy David's take on the film which is typically fantastic! And participate in his erotic questionnaire while you're at it. 

The Day of The '68 Comeback Special: Bandits In Milan

David Cairns, who, among other recent triumphs, has been married to his long-time steady (by Norman Lloyd! If that isn't a good omen...) and had a film screen at the Telluride film festival, continues our mining expedition through the forgotten 1968 Cannes Film Festival over at Shadowplay with this charming look at one of the few straight genre films that played the fest. That's not to sell it short, there's some intriguing stuff between the lines of this film, but that doesn't diminish its pleasures, including the proto-French Connection, 10-ish minute car chase that closes act 2. David puts it in perspective splendidly; a typically beautiful read. 

The Revenge of the 68 Comeback Special

David Cairns, the lucky (though deserving) sod, is enjoying the Telluride film festival with his brilliant new doc Natan but he hasn't neglected his responsibilities. He's served up a fine piece on Miloš Forman's terrific The Firemen's Ball over at Shadowplay. Head on over and take a look!

The '68 Comback Special: Anna Karenina or The Living Dead Of The Moscow Aristocracy

David Cairns is quite simply one of the finest and most entertaining film writers there is. I've never met him in person (an ocean tragically separates us. Betcha can't guess which one!) but I consider him a friend all the same and lucky to have encountered his many talents and his graciousness as a human being. I've spent many trainrides scanning the back issues of his remarkable blog, Shadowplay. Our love of the odd, the uncanny and the specific (not to mention the British) in film connects us. He's also a dynamite filmmaker, but you must surely have known that! Last week he kicked off a joint project we're undertaking - an alternating investigation of the films due to play at the ill-fated 1968 Cannes Film Festival. His first piece features not just an incredibly incisive written commentary, but a rich video essay he made with the help of Timo Langer. Next week he'll pick up the gauntlet I throw down here and on we'll go until we've left our brand on every film meant to sweep audiences off their feet that year. The story of the festival has more or less usurped the historical importance of any work scheduled, which is a sad thing indeed. We're aiming to shed a little more light (I've already done a little) on these landmark works and maybe pick some winners just for fun. This next film and I have something of a history...

Orson would have fit nicely into the film, come to think of it...

In my sophomore year at Emerson College in Boston, I lived a solitary life in a grungy apartment in Lechmere, or as its known locally, that part of town where nobody goes. My days were pretty routine: go to class, eat, go to the Boston Public Library and rent ten DVDs from their basement - naturally they put the foreign films where sunlight couldn't touch them or the creeps who wanted them. I discovered not one but two films that played the 1968 Cannes Film Festival while I was a regular there. The first was Miklós Jancsó's The Red & The White, a film that I recognized right away as a masterpiece. It perplexed me that something that dripped with greatness in the way this did could possibly be left off most canonical lists I'd encountered, but also entirely off my film school curriculum. Maybe the loss at the festival had kept it off that many more radars? Likely as not it wouldn't have made much of a difference. After all, when's the last time anyone talked about Chronicles of the Years of Fire or The Hireling? The other competition entry I found was Alexsandr Zarkhi's Anna Karenina, which kicked my brain's ass. 

I'd picked it up because I'd recognized Tatyana Samoylova on the DVD box. I still had a mad crush on the feisty revolutionary bride from Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying and figured this would be as good a showcase as any for her. I quickly lost myself in the plot, thinking the movie was just a little too kind to the Tolstoy and subsequently had no cinematic fire in its guts. And the way they'd dressed and presented Samoylova just seemed so...wrong. Her expressions seemed to be a series of lies.  Anyone who's seen The Cranes Are Flying knows what truth looks like when it burns across someone's determined face. It was a joyless watch, and in my state (hungry, cold, miserable, living with only insects in a filthy apartment no one ever visited) was too much for me to handle. A second viewing explained that that was indeed the point. The most successful adaptations of Karenina have to accept this up front and find a way through it or find a way around it. Joe Wright's version might be my favourite, not because it's revolutionary in the telling, but because he and Tom Stoppard made its heroes actors and boorish theatre patrons for the audience/aristocracy (audienstocracy? I'll work on that) to gawk at. The story has been told so many times that you've got to supercharge your grammar. Zarkhi's choice - to go right up to the edge of horror and pull back at the last moment - is a good one but it doesn't let an audience breathe or find anything resembling hope within the already very sad story. 

Zarkhi frames everyone who isn't one of our four or five leads as if they were the living dead. Across the Croisette, Dominique Delouche was trying much the same thing with his version of 24 Hours In the Life of a Woman but his mode is different. If Delouche was in the realm of Carnival of Souls or the later Daughters of Darkness then Anna Karenina is clearly at a ball thrown by Hammer Studios. The make-up sits nicely between vampire and zombie and wasn't the ghastly pallor of the filthy rich practically the British studio's greatest weapon after Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing? Rodion Shchedrin's music is so overpowering it seems like some of James Bernard's more insistent brass. What's fascinating is that it also anticipates the direction the studio would take. The colour scheme and montage that would fit comfortably in Demons of the Mind or Hands of the Ripper. Everything here spells fright and cruelty, from red-and-blue-tinted erotic nightmares, dances that turn into churning maelstroms and people failed by man and beast with disastrous consequences. And certainly the ending is about as subtle as anything in Rasputin, The Mad Monk, but we can't entirely blame our director for that, rampaging music and psychological lighting notwithstanding. 

But of course the horror we're meant to notice is that of the stifling life Anna is doomed to if she doesn't flee. Zarkhi overplays his hand a touch here. Anyone who didn't know how it ends will have guessed by the time Anna boards the coach to Oblonsky's house. Everyone around her is dead. The production design, make-up and mise-en-scene make it perfectly clear where she's headed. Zarkhi essentially treats her near-death disease as her entry into purgatory and from then on she looks as though she's just missed the train to hell. Complimenting or criticising this movie is a little tricky because it clearly accomplishes its goals, but in so doing have made a sort of horrific living wax museum drama. Zarkhi had been making films for forty years when he made Karenina and his hand is steady, to say the least. The cinematography is showy but engrossing. Between the constant woozy motion around drawing rooms, theatres and gardens and the fact that the film appears to be flickering as if through a candle-powered projector, it looks and acts like almost no other film. It's sort of Barry Lyndon but capable of running at speeds up to Ken Russell. There are some truly unforgettable images and scenes here like the single breath-taking shot where a character decides to take his own life. What makes that more miraculous is that it's followed closely by the film's most lighthearted moment: Kitty and Levin struggling with their ring fingers, which looks too perfect to have been planned. Those graceful acceptances of human behavior made this deliberately heavy film seem worth its terrors.