I spent the last week hanging in nature, watching rainbow lorikeets frolic in their blissful ignorance of climate change, and splashing my feet in very clear ocean water. Given that research shows spending even 10 minutes in nature reduces stress/anxiety, I came back to my minor asphalt jungle feeling pretty zen.
What better time to dive into some nihilistic cinema? After a week spent with Jesus (#9) it seems fitting that the pendulum should swing the other way. In watching Scorsese, Ferrara and Pasolini contend with their Catholic guilt I realised that not being Catholic I have none. After seeing Romeo + Juliet (1996) as a teenager I thought it would be pretty cool to get a tattoo of the Sacred Heart on my chest once I turned 18, and I am frequently grateful that I now live in the timeline where this did not happen.
There are churches in America where tourists can visit and watch/Instagram the congregation from separate spectators seating. While I can contemplate the implications of God’s silence with Bergman, Malick and Diane Keaton, when it comes to stories about Jesus I’m destined to identify from the spectators seating only.
I feel like I’ve taken enough deep breaths of oxygen, I’m ready to hold my breath and dive.
The films I’m watching this week…
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
(Sam Peckinpah, 1974)
The most nihilistic seared-into-the-brain film I’ve seen is probably I Spit on Your Grave (1978), a rape-revenge film that makes zero pretence that the revenge portion provides any sense of protagonist catharsis — it is a cold laying out of a violent event that begets ensuing violent events. For me it made the reportedly controversial Straw Dogs (1971) seem conventional and tame by comparison.
That said, Peckinpah is the poster child for nihilism in New Hollywood, and:
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is easily Peckinpah’s bleakest, most brutal film, and that in itself is saying something. It’s also a film that seems almost wilfully self-destructive, inasmuch as it is completely uncompromising in its vision of an utterly amoral and violent world. – Sense of Cinema
Download (limited time link), free to view on YouTube
Ms .45
(Abel Ferrara, 1981)
Continuing with the films of Abel Ferrara, here we have a mute young woman who is raped on her way home from work — twice! — and so takes to dressing in a sexy nun outfit and stalking the streets of 80s NYC, murdering any man who dares make an advance.
This would be in stark contrast to Carrie Mulligan’s character in the recent Promising Young Woman (2020), whose method of vigilantism is to fake paralytic inebriation, then when a rapey young man takes her home, have a brief but stern talk with them. How stern? Sometimes she uses swear words.
Also, using the “Director Year” attribution, I realise I’m guilty of perpetuating the director-as-author myth (not that I’m gonna stop), so I want to highlight that star Zoë Lund also wrote Bad Lieutenant (#9), in which she plays a pivotal role.
She seemed to embody the kind of wild-woman caricature of the 1980s post-punk aesthetic — she was a writer, musician, model, a lifelong heroin user who espoused the virtues of the drug, she had tumultuous relationships with turbulent artists, and died of an overdose in Paris in 1999. She was 17 while shooting Ms. 45.
Lund claimed she wrote the script for Bad Lieutenant in a couple of weeks. Officially the film is credited to both her and Ferrara, and rumours circulate that the script was actually secretly written by her boyfriend at the time. Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver (1976) in a couple of weeks, is male and somewhat uglier, encountered none of this doubt.
Download (limited time link)
Khtobtogone
(Sara Sadik, 2021, short)
I was a Sega kid, so when I’m invited to play Mario Kart 64, beyond Mario and Luigi, I don’t know who the characters are. I don’t understand what the magic power-ups do. I do understand how to get Sonic spinning up like a supercharged yoyo and pinballing along to collect a whole lot of gold rings, but you can’t play as Sonic in Mario Kart.
The natural progression for the Sega kid was to PlayStation 1. Of course, at the time no one called it PlayStation 1, much like people didn’t say “World War One” because that would be pretty pessimistic. My favourite PS1 game was Driver. This was before I’d seen Walter Hill’s stylish/stoic film which the game was so clearly inspired by (or Nicholas Winding Refn’s similarly inspired-by take). What made me invest many hours in Driver was not just the ability to do sick handbrake turns and burn rubber away from the cops, but that the game featured a very capable film director mode — you could replay an entire car chase and carefully position and cut between camera setups (tripod, in-car, chase), all using the rudimentary PS1 controller.
While kid me had made some satirical documentaries about the family dog, this was the first I saw how composition and editing could totally change the excitement of a sequence — having a vehicle zoom past inches away from the viewer was much cooler than sticking a camera a block away and slowly panning to follow. Unbeknownst to me, I was participating in the embryonic stages of the incongruously spelled portmanteau “machinima” — making cinema with video games.1
Cut to present day and a YouTube search lists an abundance of films made within Halo, Half-Life, The Sims, etc. ranging from 30 seconds to feature-length.
It seems undeniable that storytelling with game characters has its own definite dehumanising quality. Unlike the crafted images of traditional animation or Pixar CGI, these are recycled digital assets, designed to be the emotionally generic host onto which the player projects their own thoughts/feelings as gameplay requires. It’s the fundamental difference between storytelling and games — the former invites the audience to emotionally identify with the character, the latter requires the reverse.
What intrigues me about Khtobtogone is that the filmmaker is not using the video game world/characters of GTA V to do car chases and shootouts, but tell an introspective story about love and masculinity, and that Sadik is almost surely aware of the aesthetic irony.
Free to view on Le Cinéma Club until Friday
That which remains in mind…
Jennifer Agutter was 16 when shooting Walkabout (#8); along with the 17-year-old Zoë Lund in Ms .45, these things seem impossible now — have we regressed, culturally?
Were you a Miami Vice (2006) naysayer, or are you also glad the film is finally getting the respect it deserves?
Did the end of Promising Young Woman (2020) also not sit right with you?
After watching The Courier (2020) I could not shake the thought: is it possible to tell the difference between Benedict Cumberbatch and a talking cucumber?
This song, which will convince you that everything is going to be okay.
When I first saw the punching animation in Doom I declared we had surely reached the pinnacle of lifelike video game graphics.