Lemora

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LEMORA, 1973, directed and written by Richard Blackburn.

During the 1970s, a few notable films overcame the hurdles of a low budget through sheer brutal conviction (THE HILLS HAVE EYES), through an unsettling, dreamlike atmosphere (LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH), through a merciless demolition of its characters' principles and confidence (RITUALS), through guerrilla filming techniques (GOD TOLD ME TO), through the implications of disturbing concepts (THE BROOD), or even through the irrepressible joy of amateurs who wanted to prove their abilities (PHANTASM).

A favourite of mine, and a film that has never gained the reputation it merits, raised itself through pure style. Richard Blackburn's LEMORA provides a consistent visual scheme, and a consistent mood, that overcome its one weakness: an amateur cast with more enthusiasm than skill. Yet even here, two performances are able to stand out: the naturalistic and convincing work of its heroine, played by Cheryl Smith, and the mannered yet interestingly alien performance of its antagonist, played by Lesley Gilb. Smith is clearly a seasoned actress; Gilb might not be an actress at all, but she does offer a strong, unearthly presence.

"Presence" becomes the ultimate virtue of LEMORA. The photography, the lighting and colour schemes, the music, the constant evasions and implications of the script, give the film a tone unique not only for its decade, but for today. Despite a few unconvincing make-up effects, LEMORA succeeds in building dread, and although it might seem viscerally mild when compared to something like THE EXORCIST, LEMORA carries its own dark fairy-tale spells of uncertainty and mystery. It explains very little: although its antagonist reveals vampiric traits, her actual nature is never clarified. She seems like something pretending to be human, like a mimic or a mechanism; her intentions remain foggy right up to the ending and beyond, which might frustrate certain viewers but which leaves me impressed.

In his commentary on the Synapse DVD, Richard Blackburn cites as an influence on his film Arthur Machen's "The White People," and Mervyn Peake's "Boy in Darkness." Although his film cannot reach the heights of these influences, it does echo certain of their ideas and moods, and in digesting the sources, gains a certain originality of its own. This, in part, is what makes LEMORA strange, perhaps too strange to gain a wide audience, but strange enough to win admiration from those, like me, who love the indefinable, the chimaeric, the neither here nor there that somehow becomes an unforgettable landscape of its own.

Genocide Then, Genocide Now

Imagine, for a moment, that the United States had never gone to war with the Axis powers, and that American politicians, American media, had called the French resistance fighters "terrorists," the Warsaw Ghetto uprising "an unprovoked act of violence," and had expressed admiration for the "precision," the "efficiency," of German extermination methods.

Go ahead: imagine.

Or, instead, you could just watch American television right now, read American newspapers right now, listen to the blather of Democrats and Republicans right now, as America provides cash and bombs and fist-pumps for genocide.

Go ahead: watch, read, listen.

And after all of this attention paid to the current genocide, would you still swallow the lies and brain-dead slogans of these presidential ghouls? Would you still be "with her"? Would you still want to "make America great again"?

Go ahead: ask yourself.

SHRINKING OLD -- A Sonnet

SHRINKING OLD.

Why do you flee, you faces of the night?
You crowd my dreams, but vanish when the day
Arrives to chase my scattered loves away.
I die a little more beneath your flight.

You friends who shared my scrapes, my grins, my fright,
You fragrant women, tearful as you play,
And you my mother, you my father: stay
A moment longer with me in this light.

The sumac reds of autumn line my path.
I hear symphonies and songs while I remain
Alive in my desire, in my grief,

Alive within my creaking shell of wrath.
Yet often, I pursue the reds in vain:
Your faces dim the flame of every leaf.

Kubrick's THE SHINING

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THE SHINING forces me to wonder why a film so well-directed, so splendidly-photographed, should fail so thoroughly to scare me.

I could blame the source, a book that did nothing for me at all, but this would be unfair to a director as transformative as Kubrick. Like Tarkovsky, Bergman, and Lynch, Kubrick had his own perspective on the world, and his films owe more to that perspective than they do to any adapted text.

But unlike these other directors, Kubrick seemed to lack any strong sense of the non-rational. He was always good with the horrors of misapplied rationalism, and so we have the trial in PATHS OF GLORY, the megadeath plans in DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, the failure of Hal 9000 to understand the need for human beings on a human mission. In a Kubrick film, tools of reason are often put to work on goals unreasonable.

The non-rational demands different methods. To create atmosphere and anxiety in a dreamlike story, directors can manage well without any belief in the supernatural, but they do need to accept -- and perhaps even to fear -- the subconscious. IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, SOLARIS, THE MIRROR, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, THE SILENCE, HOUR OF THE WOLF, PERSONA, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, INLAND EMPIRE: these are nightmare films, and they speak directly to those functions of our brains that explore nightmares. Kubrick seemed more at home with fears of rationality gone cold: the military industrial complex in PATHS OF GLORY, DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, and FULL METAL JACKET; the manipulative state in CLOCKWORK ORANGE; the polite society unable to accept ordinary human strangeness in BARRY LYNDON; the tool that develops a will of its own beyond human concerns in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. These are nightmares of the conscious mind.

For this reason, the breakdown of Jack Torrance begins to seem as ridiculous and stylized as the antics of the cartoon characters who lurk at the margins of this film. Leering, rolling his eyes, lolling his tongue, he becomes Wile E. Coyote, and like the Coyote, he fails because of his own bull-headed stupidity. I, for one, have never been afraid of Wile E., neither in the Road Runner films, nor in THE SHINING.

This overblown, cartoonish view of madness becomes all the more unfortunate to me, when I consider the one moment of THE SHINING that left me unsettled. In the sequence where Danny sneaks up to the family apartment to get his toy fire engine, only to find his father seated on the bed and staring at winter light, Jack Torrance is calm and loving and, in his words, at least, reasonable -- yet I can see an odd glint in his eyes that hits me in places where his later bellows and prancing fail to reach. And the frozen alarm in Danny's eye tells me everything I need to know about his response to this calm and loving father.

Nothing But The Night

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NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT (1973). Directed by Peter Sasdy. Script by Brian Hayles, from a book by John Blackburn that I have not read. (Blackburn's tepid prose never fails to push me out before each book's Chapter Two.)

Why certain films become popular while others, no worse in technique or imagination, become ignored or even hated, remains a mystery. As a case in point, we have NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT -- hardly a great film, but at the same time, nowhere near as bad as reviews might imply. It moves at a rapid pace, it offers an escalating series of surprises, and it ends with a climax that even its detractors often praise.

One source of trouble might be the film's marketing. Promoted as horror, NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT is for the most part a police-procedural / manhunt / criminal investigation story. On these terms, I think it functions well, but anyone who expects the atmosphere and oddness of a horror film might be disappointed -- until the climax, which does convey a mood of sinister peril, and which does make the film stand out.

I would call this a structural flaw. At the heart of the film lurks an uncanny concept: far-fetched, but interesting. Yet this idea is tossed at the viewer in the final minutes. A writer like Nigel Kneale would have built up this concept at length, to explore its disturbing implications. Here, once the concept is revealed, the movie ends -- powerfully, strikingly, but abruptly. I would have preferred to see this idea given more attention.

I would have also preferred to see the good cast given more to do. After all, any film that includes Kathleen Byron had damned well better use her strangeness to its full extent, but this film never matches the courage of BLACK NARCISSUS. NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT's acting, like its direction and cinematography, are never less than competent, but could have been more.

The entire film could have been more, but it could have also been less. It never bored me, never forced me to look at the clock, never made me regret that I was watching it. Nothing would compel me to call this a bad film.

I only wish the film as a whole could have matched the power of its climax.