The apocalypse angel

Plays like the apocalypse. Fassbinder’s final film. Expressionist character sexual safari. The thought of murder often evokes thoughts of the sea and sailors. Querelle (1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is part entry into the filthy uninhibited sex drive of one man part processing his psychology his feelings his desires. These aren’t to be reconciled. The accounting isn’t neat or tidy. But volatile. Impulsive. Esoteric. Personal. Individual.

     I wanna say Querelle seems to constantly attempt constructing his own identity based on other men around him. Finding someone like you. The search to connect contrasted with masculine passivity. As a character he embodies freedom. His attitude confidence sly guile wily provocative defiantly content with himself on the outside. Tempestuous interior. 
     His perpetuating cycle of enacting his own destruction as both means and end is the end of the world. Revelations. Or atonement once again? Or both? Fighting his brother is fighting himself and he has no brother.
 
How cool is it that we get a return to the offputting wooden line readings with languorous pauses as characters look of into the distance their eyeline nowhere aimed at the character they’re talking to? And Xaver Schwarzenberger’s full on artificial color palette throughout the entirety of the film’s runtime? Amazing. Candy corn sky as source casting molten movie popcorn butter hue over all. Blue silver accents.
     Drone. Chanting. The air of a funeral elegy. Exalted mourning. All with the dispassionate disaffected defiance of a singular voice the likes of which we’ll never see again.

Light and shadow the two secrets of motion pictures

Lucid deathmarch. Drug addiction. Junk. Dope. Needle. Pills. Escape from the pain. Veronika Voss (1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is in terms of its aesthetic values a parody of a 40’s Hollywood schlocky B (yes I know that’s redundant) melodrama. But at its very core is genius. An interior portrayed through stark high contrast black and white imagery conspiracy plot that emerges as one of the few if not only original druggie films to say something new about substance abuse.

     It’s always bugged me how every drug abuse movie I can think of having seen always follows the same general plot. Rise and fall. Someone with everything loses it all. Loss of dignity. Loss of self. Rock bottom pasty sweaty desperate begging for another fix. And always so bombastic. The plot of Veronika Voss pits an aging former UFA star against her primary care physician DR KATZ. Veronika goes to this magnificent spa clinic brilliantly art designed all white complete with white plaster statues sculptures and any and all other decorative items likewhite. What is this place? Rehab? A methadone clinic? Worse.
     The doctor is her dealer. Man I am taken with this screenplay. The dealer is selling her patients dope that they in return sign their possessions home life over to her for. And there’s later some bureaucrat who’s on the take with them overseeing scrips for the state corrupt covering up anything that could compromise their racket. That’s it. There’s no resolution. No way to save Veronika. Dope costs a fortune. When she runs out of money she’s no good to the dealer so let her die.
 
Thematically I gotta say this but Veronika Voss feels like it in some way I can’t prove or describe link drug addiction with the Holocaust. There’s that one elderly couple that Robert’s gf goes to to try to pawn some priceless vase so Veronika can buy more dope who refuse to accept it. 
     Veronika lives in a house where all of the furniture is draped in cloth. Like someone who knows they’re going to die and has to take care of every loose end before they go. The elderly man has the concentration camp tattoo on his forearm. He was at Treblinka. The couple and Veronika are all trying to escape their pain. The mysterious question to ask is why won’t he giver the young woman money? “Do you see now why I want nothing to do with your world?” 
     Someone mentions that Goebbels blacklisted Veronika but it’s not confirmed. Which could mean only that she’s Jewish. There doesn’t seem to be enough to put together what I’m trying to say but the vase feels like precious artifacts stolen from Jewish people by the Nazis. I’m probably wrong. But the feeling is we know the elderly couple and Veronika both get their dope from Dr. Katz. They’re being sent to die. They are suffering their own pain.
     Veronika is a has been. Younger actresses are getting the parts she used to. We even see one fresh off the casting couch. This whole dark sordid blackmarket exchange of flesh and shooting up become indistinguishable. When Veronika runs out of money and Dr. Katz plans her demise after the farewell party locked in her apartment with no more morphine only pills she’ll od. And she does. And what day does that happen on? Good Friday. The day of Christ’s Crucifixion. Lamb of God. Veronika sacrificed by overdose.
 
Such an effective portrayal of addiction at the end Veronika in her apartment room in disarray. Fidgeting. Lipstick. Mirror. Country western music mournful sad on the radio way more powerful than any other loud obnoxious run amok shenanigans Hollywood’s done elsewhere. Xaver Schwarzenberger’s star filter takes on secondary meaning. Distorted reality.
     The expressionist black and white world of Veronika Voss is artifice awareness transport beauty by art. Don’t you dare say German Expressionism. There’s more to life than Caligari. This film is cold. Clinical. Controlled. Balanced. Death.
 
The film opens with again with Fassbinder a movie within a movie that foreshadows the extent of the meaning we’re about to get. One of Veronika’s old movies. She plays a drug addict. Her character deteriorating from drug dependency. “I’ll give you everything I possess. Everything I am. Now I belong to you. Everything I have belongs to you.” She’s talking to her addiction. To her dealer.
     And in the theater she watches full of fear. And at the end of the film she’ll finally add “all I have left to give you is my death.” The earlier scene is her watching a premonition of her deathmarch. And Fassbinder is there right next to her in the theater not saying anything. Just watching. And he’ll die in real life from drugs the same year this film was released. An actress playing an actress watching an actress. An addict can become different people on a whim invariably to manipulate gain sympathy confide confess subterfuge withhold intimacy for protection. Confusion. Despair. Death.

Beware of a Holy Whore

The last 4 years I've worked on sets for production--movies, TV, commercials--and it's the best place I could ever want to work. Of all the movies about movies, the more experience I have the more I get out of watching the ones that depict the process of production itself.

So what do we have? Both The Bad and the Beautiful (1952, Vincente Minnelli) and its sequel Two Weeks in Another Town (1962, Minnelli), Le mépris (1963, Jean-Luc Godard), Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (1971, Rainer Werner Fassbinder), La nuit américaine (1973, François Truffaut), and Living in Oblivion (1995, Tom DiCillo). I figured there would be more. Of course, there are other movies I'm not including because they only contain some sequences on set.

These films always involve bickering, creative conflict, affairs, and to some degree substance abuse. And my first reaction is hey it's not that bad, but then when I think about it, my only conclusion is oh yeah, that's right, all of that has happened even to me at some point. But it's still a lot of fun.

Initially I deliberated going to see Der Stand der Dinge (1982, Wim Wenders) because Robby Müller didn't shoot it, I had never heard of it, and because the log line I read was a film crew on location in Lisbon runs out of film and waits for funds to resume shooting, which sounded boring.

But having watched Hammett (1982, Wenders) the night before Der Stand der Dinge was to be screened in a theater, I said fuck it, I'm all in now. Restored from its original 35mm negative in 4K by the Wim Wenders Stiftung, the AFS Wim Wenders retrospective screened Der Stand der Dinge last night at the Marchesa theater and I went. And I was punching myself in the face for almost thinking about skipping it.

I don't know what happened with Hammett, but Der Stand der Dinge has the singular quality of the greatness Wim Wenders cultivates in Alice in den Städten (1974), Falsche Bewegung (1975), Im Lauf der Zeit (1976) into Der amerikanische Freund (1977). I've gotta start with the cinematography. Henri Alekan, best known for La belle et la bête (1946, Jean Cocteau), achieves photographic images that made me forget I was watching a movie and feel like I was in an art gallery discovering work that made me stop thinking and just enjoy the spectacle of viewing beauty. Der Stand der Dinge opens with sounds of wind, in a rocky barren landscape, on a post-apocalyptic figure wearing a particle-mask, oversized safety glasses, and a backpack, who carries a small handheld video camera. The black and white cinematography has a grainy, gauzed or greasy diffusion to it that gives the images a soft, classic, otherworldly German silent expressionist that probably never existed feel to it. And this phenomenal imagery doesn't stop until the end of the movie.

Wenders returns to his sparse dialogue, lyrical pacing, bypassing plot, focusing on authentic human nuances, punctuated by irreverent spontaneous humor, and casts an overall fatal, ominous sense of longing and loss in Der Stand der Dinge. The coastal Portugal resort where most of the film takes place provides endlessly gorgeous textures with the ever present beach waves serving as the aesthetically sublime dominion of black and white western European art films.

The opening movie-within-a-movie sci-fi piece uses a sinister Carpenter-like synthesizer score, which after a long gap, creeps into the world the characters inhabit outside the movie they're making.

Sam Fuller is back for his third consecutive Wenders film acting as director of photography JOE CORBY (wordplay on Hammett's DP, Joseph Biroc). Fuller is on-screen quite a bit this time and he's terrific: funny, seemingly ad-libbing, salty, world weary, cynical, and always puffing on his trademark cigar--he brings Joe Corby to life and makes this crew believable. One of Joe's complaints in a bar involves him lamenting the curse of the telephone, as he calls it: "good news, bad news, hypocritical news, news you never hoped for," and this is just one instance of a subtext of the impending fear of technology in the film. There's a later scene when DENNIS the screenwriter shows the director the movie they're shooting's assets on an Apple II computer. It's a prophetic warning: computers are going to devour the process of filmmaking.

The first two-thirds of the narrative show the humanity of the crew in a vacuum, or to be precise, placed on a will notify status--that's what the call sheet says the day before you are to show up for work when they don't officially guarantee what time you'll be starting, if at all. I can relate to the financial anxiety of the crew around this part of the movie. But the final act follows the director FRIEDRICH MUNRO (Patrick Bauchau) to LA where he's going straight to the source for finishing funds. King of the road Wenders again captures the location perfectly both tonally and photographically. Friedrich (or as the American crew call him, "fried rice") rents a large convertible, sun pouring down on him in an empty parking lot, and blasts X's "Los Angeles," cruising with the wind in his hair as Exene belts her furious anthem.

As fried rice passes a marquee what else but John Ford's The Searchers (1956) is being advertised.

Friedrich finally confronts the elusive producer GORDON (Allen Garfield) in an RV. While the mobile home drives all night, the two men discuss aesthetics, old Hollywood road movies, the economics of filmmaking and digress into other general ranting and raving as Gordon lounges with his dachshund while the aim of Der Stand der Dinge coalesces, and reinforces the bleak, hopeless demise of individual filmmaking. But oh so beautifully.

Aside from maybe the best black and white cinematography I've ever seen (as Joe Corby says: "life is in color, but black and white is more realistic"), it's the insightful musings on the process of filmmaking and entertaining glimpses into the restless crew, their hang-ups, and the little reflections and jokes that go far in delivering the most entertaining aspects of the film. Like the funny scene when the script supervisor (played by Viva) comments on the exclusion of females in the framing of the Polaroid shots her adolescent daughter takes on set; or what seems like an awkward scene where that girl and another child hear her mom in bed with another man but she says "do you think they're fucking"; or when the Geoffrey Carey played character has the hilarious moment with the child as he's hanging laundry, remembering his awkward characteristics as a teen in LA, from Clearasil, to braces, to stuttering to "wait, what was the last one, oh yeah, cancer." I hate to spoil these scenes though, the unexpected is part of the essence of why they're funny.

Der Stand der Dinge is way better than I could have imagined. Wenders at his most, eccentric and insightful. Beautiful. Very funny.

--Dregs

Orphans of the Storm

As long as I can remember being obsessed with movies I've compiled my own lists. Sure it's fine and dandy when a critic focuses on a film and provides insight into what we are seeing up there. But what about the opposite?

Sometimes there are interesting elements of a movie that aren't up there on the screen as we watch it. How often have you heard someone asking, "have you seen the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now? it's actually better than the movie itself." I'd never go that far. But, that's just me. I worship Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Coppola).

There are tons of rumors and gossip like this. I'm not as drawn to that as I am to the confounding instances of a movie being disowned by its director. And this seems to always involve an up and coming auteur battling with a studio, and a large budget at stake. We'll never see Orson Welles' original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); David Lynch wants his name off of Dune (1984), produced by Dino De Laurentiis; producers hijacked Backtrack (1990, Dennis Hopper Alan Smithee), which I learned about from Fat who shared this article; David Fincher says he lost creative control of Alien³ (1992) to 20th Century Fox; the producers taking Wild Side (1995) out of Donald Cammell's hands allegedly precipitated his suicide; Terry Gilliam didn't entirely get to craft his vision as he wanted on The Brothers Grimm (2005) because of the Weinsteins. I wish I had a list of these kinds of movies.

It is annoying to enjoy the work of a director and find out one of his or her movies ended up in a form that he or she wishes to ignore. But for me I still watch these orphaned movies, fascinated, stubborn, unwilling to skip over them. Admittedly, I've always been compulsively enamored with directors above all else.

The Wim Wenders retrospective is about halfway through and I am very into it. Chronologically the program is at the point where Hammett (1982, Wim Wenders) was released. The 4K restorations of all of the theatrical exhibitions so far have been released thanks to Wim Wenders Stiftung, and the foundation's website lists every title in his filmography except Hammett.

Last night for the first time I watched Hammett and it wasn't shown in a theater. I watched it on DVD at my home. Yeah, shitty, I know, tell me about it.

I'd first heard about Hammett a while back watching a documentary about filmmaking, or Hollywood, or directors, or Coppola, or American Zoetrope, I can't remember exactly. But on at least one occasion I know it was spoken of with a negative connotation, and even in the context of contributing or exemplifying some of the factors leading up to the demise of Zoetrope Studios along with One from the Heart (Coppola) released the same year.

I love thinking of the film school brats of the 1970s as an American professional sports league, and fans having their favorite teams, remaining loyal to them through thick and thin. From 1970-1984 I'm a Coppola fan all the way. But Carpenter during the same period is just as impressive to go back to, hell often more impressive.

So despite the evidence that points to Coppola bullying Hammett away from Wenders, wait a minute because of the evidence that points to Coppola bullying Hammett away from Wenders I was endeared by its trainwreck of creative conflict and other odd characteristics.

Throwing out my or anyone's sensible criteria for appreciating a movie, I couldn't get enough of the artificial look the sets and lighting give off. What I mean is the sources of the lights are hard and not as diffuse as other less distracting methods of lighting--but I like this effect. Having been shot at Zoetrope Studios plays into Hammett as a throwback to 1940s Hollywood studio filmmaking. Wenders' early films shot by Robby Müller are striking because Müller sculpts light like an artist, and the locations are pre-existing spaces not studio sets. And around 1982 no one wants movies to look fake like the 40s movies do now to us, but I do because I'm into nostalgia, especially for this time in film history.

Also Wenders' earlier films are as sparse with dialogue as his desolate landscapes are void of civilization. Even though that's one of the greatest strengths of those films, Hammett is a non-stop bombardment of machine-gun fire period pulp slang dialogue. It doesn't at all feel like Wenders but it works.

Finally, since I'm slowly now beginning to actually say something about Hammett itself, the casting from Frederic Forest as HAMMETT down to several supporting characters fits in and nails the homage of the 40s noir films this is modeled on. Forest is also one of Coppola's best collaborators going back to The Conversation (1974, Coppola), and Apocalypse Now (1979, Coppola). David Patrick Kelley plays a hoarse whispered gunsel worthy of Elisha Cook, Jr.'s turn as the counterpart goon in The Maltese Falcon (1941, Huston), which is funny because Elisha Cook, Jr. also stars in Hammett. And Roy Kinnear channels Sydney Greenstreet's heavy from The Maltese Falcon just as accurately.

Who knew Jack Nance would turn up in this thing as a sex-trafficking blackmailer? Hammett boasts a formidable array of cult character actors and Nance seems to be the clincher. Director Sam Fuller also shows up again in a Wenders movie after his noir appearance in Der amerikanische Freund (1977, Wenders).

In a case of history repeating itself, this rare instance of a movie about a writer unwittingly becoming a character in one of their own type of tales happens again with The Brothers Grimm, and in both cases it sound like the director started with their first choice of cinematographer only to see them fired during production--Robby Müller and Nicola Pecorini, respectively. Anyway initially I thought the premise of a writer stumbling into one of their own stories sounded unappealing to say the least, but afterwards I've found that in these two cases I really like these movies.

--Dregs

BEARDS NOT WORDS: (OR) Bostwick Redux

Tight bro @todf just put up the screen you see below, some introductionalizing textery from inexplicably talked-a-lot-about-by-us-on-Reviewiera film from 1982 and overall life model MegaForce. The film is, as the textery suggests, a thing of joy, inspiration, and rocket-powered beards motorcycles. (I will be suggesting to IMDB.com that "a thing of joy, inspiration and rocket-powered beards motorcycles" replace the description of the film currently available:

Story about a rapid deployment defense unit that is called into action whenever freedom is threatened.

Though I am very excited about any IMDB movie description beginning "Story about". Wouldn't want to mistake anything for a documentary or non-narrative exercise!)

So I thought it would be fun to take a quick look back at a thing we return to as a dog returns to its vomit. Enjoy!

• Bostwick—Probably the single least explicable entry in the archives. Plucked bloody from the heart of conversation between Tinzeroes & Fat, this one is the most MegaForce moment in the history of Reviewiera.
• Red-Hot Flower of Hysteria—Offhand mention of MegaForce in Tinzeroes' magnum opus on SF zine Cheap Truth
• serpent-skinned—Offhand mention of MegaForce in a long ode to a mediocre childhood and the horror movies thereof
• Quick Look at the Cover

It's no Buckaroo Banzai, but as a relic of a simpler time, it will do. There is little wrong with a reminder that a more or less successful premise for a more or less successful film used to be "let's go tearassing around the desert on some dirt bikes and add laser effects later".

—Fat, under a fluttery banner reading DEEDS NOT WORDS