Author’s note: this essay first appeared in the booklet for Indicator’s currently out-of-print limited edition Body Double Blu-ray. To see more Indicator releases head here. 

In the opening seconds of their documentary De Palma (2015), an elegant, comprehensive tribute to the eponymous filmmaker, structured around a searching interview with the man himself, co-directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow do something smart. They march straight up to the elephant in the room — the Gordian knot tying De Palma to his biggest influence Alfred Hitchcock — tap it on the shoulder, and politely ask it to exit the premises: De Palma actually begins with footage from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). In a film otherwise monomaniacally focused on its subject’s output, this choice to directly confront the stylistic and thematic effect exerted upon the American by the Englishman is disarming. In the film, as he has done in countless interviews, De Palma welcomes the comparison, expressing pride at having been the first and best to emulate the old master.

飞烁游戏平台app安卓版下载v2.2.4-游迅网:2021-8-21 · 飞烁游戏平台下载,飞烁游戏平台是一款非常热门的手游辅助的app，这里有时下热门的游戏，各种类型应有尽有，每个游戏都有相应的游戏攻略和游戏礼包，帮助你提高游戏水平。除此之外，每天还会推送各种游戏资讯，实时更新，让你第一时间了解最新的游戏动态和游戏行情，有什么需求可以一键 ...Body Double (1984), contains some of the most explicit Hitchcock references of his career, following the homage-strewn likes of Obsession (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980), and prefiguring the tricksy later likes of Femme Fatale (2002) and Passion (2012). For starters, there’s the kinda-sorta-hero, claustrophobic actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), whose anxious condition and aw-shucks vibe channels Vertigo’s Scotty (James Stewart). Jake indulges in oodles of compulsive scopophilic activity, linking him to Rear Window2021龙飞棋牌下载-2021龙飞棋牌app最新版下载-SNS游戏交友网:2021-6-8 · 龙飞棋牌app是一款2021年推出的全新棋牌竞技游戏，这款棋牌app多次测试，经过全方位的优化，多个技术难题的攻克，实现了苹果版和安卓版双端数据互通，再也不用受到设备的限制，百分百实名注册的真人玩家实时在线对局，公平公正的竞技快感一定会让玩家爱不释手，还不赶快下载2021龙飞棋牌 …

2021龙飞棋牌下载-2021龙飞棋牌app最新版下载-SNS游戏交友网:2021-6-8 · 龙飞棋牌app是一款2021年推出的全新棋牌竞技游戏，这款棋牌app多次测试，经过全方位的优化，多个技术难题的攻克，实现了苹果版和安卓版双端数据互通，再也不用受到设备的限制，百分百实名注册的真人玩家实时在线对局，公平公正的竞技快感一定会让玩家爱不释手，还不赶快下载2021龙飞棋牌 …Body Double, however, is to unfairly divert attention from the film’s own unique wayward charms. It’s a genuinely strange film, from its gloriously weird tone(s) to its appealingly off-kilter jumble of acting styles (laconic Wasson up against electric Melanie Griffith as porn star Holly Body); its surreally erratic pacing — at 114 minutes, it plays like a tantric masturbation session interrupted by flurries of frustration — to, most strikingly, its darkly gorgeous vision of L.A. as a neon-streaked valley of nightmares, vast yet chokingly oppressive. Credit here must also go to Stephen H. Burum for his gleaming widescreen cinematography, and Ida Random for her astonishing production design: she turns the interior of the film’s central location — the real-life, futuristic, octagon-shaped, top-of-the-hills, Lautner-designed house known as ‘The Chemosphere’ — into a seductive dungeon of moral turpitude.

When it comes to Body Double, ‘nightmare’ is the key word: poor Jake Scully seems to be living one. In the opening sequence, Scully, heavily made-up in the guise of a peroxided, rouge-cheeked, bondage-clad vampire, is stricken by claustrophobia in the middle of shooting a scene inside a coffin. He leaves the set with his tail between his legs, but perks up when he remembers his girlfriend is waiting for him at home. He picks up take-away hotdogs from a giant mobile hotdog stall — the compositional sexual innuendo of which is played to the hilt by De Palma — and bounds, puppy-like, into his house. Bad news: she’s in the middle of fucking another guy who, we later hear, makes her face “glow”, much to Jake’s chagrin. Then, after suffering humiliation at the hands of a comically cruel acting teacher who has no sympathy for his paralysing condition, Jake is suddenly fired from the film. He seems to find a friend in fellow actor Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry), who installs him in The Chemosphere, and, sensing his Peeping Tom tendencies, encourages him to spy on a beautiful female neighbour across the way. Serious complications, of course, ensue.

In his negative review from Monthly Film Bulletin, Richard Combs lambastes Body Double for its “lamely linear, piecemeal” narrative, and its “crucial lack of focus”. Yet such a view is predicated on a literal reading of events, rather than what should surely be seen as a deliberately woozy patchwork of disparate elements emanating from Scully’s fevered subconscious. Wasson’s stilted, somnambulant performance can be no accident; if we accept that he’s stumbling through the film in a liminal state of anxiety, fantasising himself as a sad-sack nearly-hero, it would explain why, taken at face value, large swathes of Body Double simply do not seem to make sense. There’s its absurdist, comic-suspenseful high-point, when Scully tails Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton), the endangered woman upon whom he’s been spying, to a shopping mall, stalks her, steals her recently-discarded panties from a bin, follows her to the beach, saves her from the clutches of a marauding “Indian”, then engages her in a preposterously passionate embrace, augmented by swirling 360-degree camera moves and Pino Donaggio’s glutinous strings. There’s the inexplicable, hilarious detour into a Frankie Goes to Hollywood music video. And notice how Scully’s vampire character is dressed almost exactly like Holly Body (Melanie Griffith), down to the peroxide hair and leather choker? The clue is in the title. At every step, De Palma challenges the viewer directly not to accept what they are seeing. The berserk ending, which pinballs between different levels of unreality, is one case in point. Yet even the main opening title card is a ruse: the words ‘Body Double’ appear against an arid desert background. As soon as we process the information of this jarring new setting, it turns out to be a fake backdrop, wheeled off to reveal the bustle of a studio lot.

飞服平台app下载-飞服平台app官方手机版 v1.0.0-清风安卓软件网:2021-5-8 · 清风手游网提供飞服平台app下载,飞服平台app官方手机版：为你打造本地最好的也是最牛逼的生态圈子给你体验，准确的去帮助你进行匹配还是蛮有意思，不管你是哪一个...,飞服平台免费下载地址...Body Double should be seen as a crucial forebear of David Lynch’s 安卓网飞app (2000), which is widely considered — unlike De Palma’s film — to be among the great cinematic deconstructions of Hollywood’s callous ‘Dream Factory’. In Lynch’s film, a wide-eyed young blonde actress Betty/Diane (Naomi Watts) comes to Hollywood with hopes of making it big, and seems on the cusp of success when a savage twist reveals the entire first segment of the film to have been nothing more than her extended dream, cobbled together, like most dreams, from repressed fears and desires commingled with the day’s half-clocked detritus. Remind you of Scully?

There are other eerie similarities with Mulholland Dr., not least that both films feature a horrible car crash that occurs on the eponymous boulevard. In Body Double飞牛网手机客户端 2.4.0 安卓版app:2021-11-26 · 飞牛网手机客户端 2.4.0 安卓版app 一家自营模式的全品类综合零售购物网站 授权方式：免费软件 软件类型：国产软件 软件大小： 28.06 MB 推荐星级： 软件来源：上海飞牛集达电子商务有限公司 更新时间：2021-03-04 15:31 运行环境：Android4.0Mulholland Dr., meanwhile, begins with a nasty smash on the same road. From the wreckage emerges bloodied Rita (Laura Elena Harring), who disappears into the world of the film, the dream of Diane. To watch the films back-to-back is a truly unsettling experience, the former haunting the latter like a malevolent ghost.

Mulholland Dr. influence aside, the languid, giddy Body Double also slots slickly into a long continuum of L.A. sleaze cinema. Scully’s third-act adoption of a swaggering pornographer-cum-P.I. persona (slicked-back hair, brown pleather jacket, unconvincing hardboiled patter), echoes the unlikely journey undertaken by George C. Scott — an anguished, Midwestern father looking for his porn star daughter — in Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979). De Palma plays it for laughs, Schrader doesn’t: they’re equally funny. Body Double also partially echoes Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982), which charts the frustrations of a struggling Hollywood Hills actress (Kristy MacNichol) before she becomes preoccupied with her dog, a vicious mutt who’s been trained to be racist. As it happens, De Palma cast the same dog in his own film: “I saw that dog — and dogs in movies don’t normally scare me — but this dog is terrifying. I was so impressed with that dog that I used it in Body Double”, the director told Film Comment in 1987.

Body Double is an obvious influence on Paul Thomas Anderson’s L.A. porn epic Boogie Nights (1997), the second half of which tracks the transition of the adult industry from wistful cinematic endeavour to coked-up, cheapo video oblivion: its story ends in 1984, the year of 安卓网飞app’s release. Perhaps not incidentally, both Boogie Nights and Mulholland Dr., in crew member Little Bill (William H. Macy) and director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) respectively, feature characters who, like Jake Scully, walk in on their partners in the midst of adulterous thrusting. Male frailty underpins all three films.

Then, of course, there’s Schrader’s low-budget L.A. sojourn The Canyons飞书会议官网APP下载安装-飞书会议APP安卓最新版下载 v1 ...:今天 · 飞书会议APP是字节跳动旗下的一款线上视频会议办公服务软件，三端互通，同时能容纳上百人进行视频，还能共享投屏，极大方便了在家办公人员，随时随地都可以参加会议，逼真的环境就像真实在办公司开会一样，有需求的用户欢迎前来下载。安卓网飞app, Patrick Bateman, liked to masturbate to the drill scene in Body Double. Writing in Reverse Shot, critic Nick Pinkerton suggested that one of The Canyons’ stars, Nolan Funk, “puts himself in the hunt for this year’s Craig Wasson Award for a mediocre actor playing a mediocre actor”. That seems a little harsh on Wasson, whose corn-fed, golden-mulleted, bewildered pluckiness affords the film what little heart it has. Indeed, Body Double may be a cold work, but it’s oddly enrapturing. Its joy lies in its impertinent impermanence, its miraculous ability to translate brash shallowness into endless replay value.

Author’s note: this essay first appeared in the booklet for BFI’s Life Is Sweet Blu-ray, which was released in 2017, and is available for purchase 安卓网飞app. 

by Ashley Clark

“You’re working with a genius. I’m not just a wanker. I can teach you things you never even dreamed of. I’m a magician.” — Aubrey (Timothy 安卓网飞app) in Life is Sweet

Few British actors can match Timothy Spall’s uncanny ability to burrow inside the skin of inept, off-putting or emotionally stunted characters, and make them so compelling: we can’t look away, even if we may wish to. Across a prolific career, many of the Battersea-born star’s most notable such performances have arrived in collaborations with the writer-director Mike Leigh – the pair are like the Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese of British suburban malaise. 

安卓网飞app first teamed with Leigh on the darkly funny BBC TV Play for Today Home Sweet Home (1982), playing a dyspeptic postman with a complex about his weight, and an endlessly antagonistic relationship with his wife. In Secrets and Lies (1996) and All or Nothing (2002), Spall again essayed everyday working men beset by marital problems: he was a paunchy, stressed photographer in the former, and a melancholic, slobbish cabbie in the latter; both characters had likely seen sunnier days. Spall has also worked with Leigh on the director’s two (to date) major forays into period territory. As the Mikado actor Richard Temple in Gilbert & Sullivan drama Topsy-Turvy (1999), he was portly and poignantly peacock-proud. His phlegmy, goblin-like incarnation of JMW Turner in artist biopic Mr Turner (2014), meanwhile, landed him the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

All of the above are, in their own ways, remarkable performances, and examples of Spall’s versatility and sensitivity. Yet for sheer film-stealing intensity, none can quite equal his startlingly unselfconscious – and frankly rather frightening – turn as the preposterous would-be restauranteur Aubrey in Leigh’s film Life is Sweet. 

Released in 1990, Life is Sweet was the director’s second consecutive intimate portrait of British life in the Thatcher era, following High Hopes (1988). Propelled by character rather than plot, and set in a sleepy, suburban sliver of North London’s Enfield borough, it follows a few days in the lives of a middle-aged, lower-middle-class, happily married couple and their family. There’s amiable procrastinator Andy (Jim Broadbent) and chirpy, innuendo-prone Wendy (Alison Steadman, then Leigh’s wife), plus their early-twenties twin daughters, Nicola (Jane Horrocks) and Natalie (Claire Skinner), both of whom still live at home. 

As well as family bonds, and Rachel Portman’s gorgeous, insistent score – a Gallic-flavoured waltz infused with equal parts pathos and pluck – the film’s connective tissue is the theme of food, as suggested by its mildly ironic title (Life is Bittersweet would be closer to the truth). Although the family make a point of eating together, the nervy Nicola suffers secretly from bulimia, and involves chocolate spread in her sex life with her disaffected boyfriend (David Thewlis), with messy results. Andy is employed as the head chef in an industrial kitchen, but, much to Wendy’s chagrin, is tempted by his palpably shady acquaintance Patsy (Stephen Rea) to invest in a ramshackle food van which requires more than a little work to be fit for purpose.

While clearly unwise, Andy’s purchase of the van – an off-white elephant which languishes outside the family abode – is made to look like a sensible enterprise when contrasted with the antics of Aubrey, an oddball family friend on the cusp of opening his own restaurant, “The Regret Rien: Tres Exclusive”. Already lumbered with a portentous name unsatisfactorily stranded between French and English, it is to be a garish, Edith Piaf-themed medley of haute and nouveau cuisine, offering such delights as ‘clams in ham’, ‘quails in a bed of treacle’, ‘liver in lager’, and ‘pork cyst’ (which is, according to Leigh, a genuine medieval dish). The restaurant’s opening-night fate is the event upon which the suspense of this determinedly low-key film hinges. The question, however, is not whether it will fail – we quickly learn that Aubrey hasn’t bothered to publicise it, and his waitress has quit before she’s even begun – but how spectacularly. 

We’re offered a concrete clue the moment Aubrey first bursts onto the screen after roughly a quarter of an hour. Framed through the front window of the family house, from behind a curtain, we see him screech up in a top-down, candy apple red convertible, trailing exhaust fumes. He is an instantly absurd presence, rupturing both the film’s laid back tone and its muted, pastel-hued colour palette. When he hauls his corpulent frame from the driver’s seat, we get a good look at his eye-popping outfit: giant sunglasses perched below a peaked cap, a San Francisco Giants bomber jacket, a canary yellow shirt, and electric blue tracksuit bottoms with massive high-top trainers. Compiled by costume designer Lindy Hemming, this ensemble is an explosion of American-influenced juvenalia (he will later be seen sporting a Mickey Mouse baseball cap), so loud that a home viewer may feel compelled to turn down both the brightness 安卓网飞appthe sound. “People thought the way he dressed was over the top”, Spall told The Guardian in 2001, “but a year later lots of fat middle-aged blokes started to dress like teenagers.” He reaches down into the car, grabs a pineapple (a gift for Wendy, apparently), flings it into the air, catches it, then adjusts his cap – a hint at the vanity to come. A subtle camera move to the left reveals that Nicola has been watching this performance from the window, and, understandably, she seems apprehensive about welcoming this visitor in. “Hi Natalie”, he mutters when she finally opens the door. “It’s Nicola!”, she spits back. It’s quite an entrance.

So what were the origins of this strange man? Like all of Leigh’s characters, Aubrey emerged from an intensive process of rehearsal, where improvisation and experimentation were encouraged before a final script was locked in place. As Spall told 安卓网飞app, “At the beginning of a Mike Leigh film each actor picks someone they know as the starting point for their character, and the problem with the person I picked, who shall remain nameless, was that he had absolutely no character whatsoever. The only personality he had was the one he invented for himself, which tended to change every day.” So, in Aubrey, Spall built up a synthetic man, defined from the outside in by his mutability and myriad affectations. Consider his speaking voice, a halting baritone burble which he punctuates with the meaningless phrase “ya know?”

Aubrey may seem like an incidental character, or even a mere laughing stock, but he is richly detailed, and offers a gateway to a number of the film’s knottier issues and Leigh’s enduring obsessions, including class, aspiration, and dangerous masculinity. The director is no stranger to creating nightmarish Thatcherite figures in his work, from yuppie couple Rupert and Laetitia in High Hopes, to the monstrous rapist Jeremy in Naked (1993) — in each case, the viewer is clear on how we were supposed to react to them: utter disgust. Aubrey, though, is more complex. When his dream turns sour, and literally nobody turns up to opening night, he marches out in front of the restaurant and embarks on a bitter rant about “working class morons” who should “eat their own shit … English dickheads, stick to your fish and chips!” Aubrey is, of course, the architect of his own downfall, yet I can’t help but feel a little sorry for him here, even if Leigh doesn’t. He has ambition, and international taste, yet Leigh seems to damn Aubrey with the peculiarly English concept of “having ideas above one’s station”. (By the way, 安卓网飞appcame out fourteen years before the first episode of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares: Aubrey would seem a prime candidate for the Ramsey treatment.) 

Another aspect of Aubrey’s brilliance as a character is that his weird presence provokes complicated responses from everyone around him. It’s a joy to watch other actors react to his often unreadable body language and bizarre actions — how did any of them keep a straight face while Aubrey hammers out a double-speed version of “Je Ne Regrette Rien” on his thighs while singing the words in a cut-rate Enfield Elvis voice? As a pair, Andy and Wendy are ostensibly friendly and welcoming, but their teasing of Aubrey often tips into cruel territory: they are laughing at him, not with him (Aubrey never laughs; in fact, he is chillingly humourless.) On their first visit to the Regret Rien, Andy and Wendy can’t restrain their amusement. You can’t blame them, of course: Aubrey’s idea of suitable decor is a wall-mounted taxidermied cat’s head, gas mask, and a knackered accordion, to represent “the street, the war … and the music of Paris”. And while Wendy appears to be doing Aubrey a favour by stepping in as an emergency waitress, one senses that she’s at least partially doing so to get a front-row seat at the inevitable car crash, which duly arrives. This type of ambiguous dynamic is not uncommon in Leigh’s work. In particular, Wendy’s amused chiding of Aubrey anticipates the way Poppy (Sally Hawkins) taunts and teases the unhinged cab driver Scott (Eddie Marsan) in his 2008 masterpiece Happy-Go-Lucky.

The most disturbing aspect of Aubrey is his predatory sexuality which, directed at multiple female targets, manifests both insidiously and aggressively. There’s a creepy moment in his first encounter with Nicola, when he complements her on her knees, causing her to immediately cover them up with her oversized “Bollocks To The Poll Tax” T-shirt. Disparate artefacts in Aubrey’s bedroom — a stack of Playboy magazines, the infamous 1980s Athena poster of a bare-bottomed female tennis player — hint at arrested development; a horny teenage boy trapped in a dangerously big man’s body. There’s outright misogyny, too, when he loses himself in a bloody revenge fantasy against the waitress who lets him down (“If I ever see her again, I’ll stick a knife in her guts. I’ll slice her face off.) He is reprehensibly lecherous toward his mousy kitchen “dogsbody” Paula (Moya Brady), whom he incorrectly addresses as “Pauline”. And in his final, dismal, alcohol-fuelled flourish, he tries to force himself on Wendy (“I wanna fuck you”), before stripping down to his underpants in the restaurant, and collapsing into a semi-coma. The last we see of Aubrey is a huge close-up of his face perpendicular to the ground. He grotesquely licks his fingers and mouths Nicola’s name — was he harbouring a desire for her the whole time? Leigh leaves it cryptic. 

Because Life is Sweet is a generally upbeat film, it can be easy to forget how dark it gets in places. And it is Aubrey — with his tempestuous cocktail of misogyny, vanity, and violence —  who brings this darkness. It is he who points most clearly toward the direction Leigh would take in his next film Naked, a scabrous and upsetting study of men who bolster their own fragile egos by attempting to control and seduce women.

In that 安卓网飞appinterview from 2001, Spall dubs Aubrey  “a complete tosser”, and describes his eventual meltdown as “the complete death of a hollow man.” Spall has a point, but, working in tandem with a director so focused on crafting detailed characters, he triumphs in transforming a human void into something bumptious, hilarious and, ultimately, deeply haunting. Ya know?

Author’s note: a version of this essay first appeared in the booklet for BFI’s brilliant box set “Alan Clarke: Dissent and Disruption”, which was released in 2016. The set is available for purchase here. This essay discusses the plot of Scum [the 1977 TV version] in detail, so if you want to experience its litany of heartbreaking abuses fresh, please read this after you’ve seen the film.

Shot on grainy 16mm inside, and on the grounds of Surrey’s cavernous Redhill Hospital, Alan Clarke’s borstal-set docudrama Scum (1977) is a riveting, necessarily discomfiting exploration of institutional malaise and its corrosive spiritual and corporeal effects.

It follows three young offenders — Carlin (an imposing early turn from Ray Winstone, who was paid just £365 to appear), Davis (Martin Phillips), and Angel (Davidson Knight) — who arrive at an unnamed borstal, where they are quickly confronted by its callous, manipulative staff and a trio of bullying inmates who tacitly collaborate with the officers to maintain a hierarchy of intimidation.

Carlin, freshly transferred from another institution for assaulting an officer, is warned by glowering senior screw Sands (John Judd) that he will not stand for any nonsense. The patently fragile Davis is remorselessly targeted, while Angel, who is black, is subjected to virulent racism from staff and inmates alike. Within the film’s brutal, relentlessly claustrophobic opening minutes, he is casually referred to as a “jungle bunny”, a “coon”, and a “black Brixton slag”.

Having been accused of fighting, though he’s actually just been beaten up in his bed, Carlin is placed in solitary confinement. Upon emerging, he resolves to improve his lot by employing the unambiguous language of violence. In Scum’s most stomach-churning sequence, he thwacks one of the key bullies, Richards (a weaselly, pre-“Parklife!” Phil Daniels), in the face with a pool-ball-enhanced sock, then savagely assails arch-villain Pongo Banks (John Blundell), before informing him, in the film’s most oft-quoted moment: “I’m the daddy now!”—‘daddy’ connoting being the boss of the wing.

Carlin assumes control of Banks’ lucrative money-laundering scam, and the borstal higher-ups move him to a single cell on the proviso that he will use his newly elevated position to help maintain a semblance of order. With another explosion of uncompromising violence, this time assisted by a metal pipe, Carlin sees off a challenge to his position by an inmate from another wing. Then, for the first time displaying any hint of vulnerability, Carlin takes on a “missus”, the hesitant, fresh-faced Rhodes (Ian Sharrock), but only after explaining to the boy that he is definitely not gay. It’s worth noting that Carlin, as portrayed with a chilly cockiness by Winstone, is not a likeable character, nor is he positioned as a “hero” by Clarke and writer Roy Minton; rather, his propensity for violence allows him to become a useful cog in a rigged system.

Events come to a head when Davis, while working alone in the greenhouse, is raped by two other boys. Sands witnesses the rape, but does not attempt to prevent it. Later that night, the distraught Davis, having had his pleas for help ignored by another callous screw, slits his wrists and bleeds to death in his cell. Davis’ suicide is the catalyst for a riot that erupts in the borstal’s dining quarters. In the final, charged sequence, the administration delivers a patronising plea for conformity and order to a sea of stony faces before a minute’s silence. Further revolution, one feels, is brewing in the grey, chilly air.

Scum has a long-held reputation as a controversial work. It was originally made for BBC’s Play for Today strand in 1977, but was deemed too unsavoury by company management, who effectively banned from it broadcast. Only in 1991, a year after Clarke’s premature death from cancer, was it finally screened on Channel Four’s censorship-themed “Banned” season. Clarke and Minton circumvented institutional suppression of their work by remaking the film for cinema release in 1979 — this version was shot in a different location, features a handful of cast changes and increased levels of violence, but excises the relationship between Carlin and Rhodes.

The latter version almost escaped contention, but, following a 1983 screening on Channel 4, caught the attention of infamous moral crusader Mary Whitehouse, who took the Independent Broadcasting Authority to judicial review for allowing its transmission. (Whitehouse was left with costs of £30,000 — subsequently paid by an anonymous donor — when the Court of Appeal overruled the High Court’s initial decision to prosecute.)

All this attendant outrage — and the way in the which the 1979 film has been marketed as an aggro, bovver-boy romp in prior home video releases — has obscured the fact that Clarke’s original 1977 version is in fact a sublimely controlled, technically brilliant piece of filmmaking. Its spare, episodic plot is propelled by Ken Pearce’s crisp, unflashy editing, while the lack of a musical score fosters a bracing sense of realism.

Clarke would later become famed for his innovative deployment of long, prowling Steadicam tracking shots in films like Made in Britain (1982) and Elephant (1989), but Scum is characterised by its relative stillness. Clarke films mostly in mid-shot to keep the viewer distant, fostering an uncomfortable surveillant quality: the camera-as-loitering screw. He uses facial close-ups judiciously, for maximum impact, such as the devastating shot of the distraught inmate Toyne (Trevor Butler), who has just discovered that his wife has died.

Elsewhere, Clarke frames the action to accentuate how the employees and inmates alike are trapped literally and metaphorically by the building’s towering structure. This is most apparent in the brilliant, lengthy discussion scene between an older prison officer and vegetarian, lefty wiseacre Archer (future Shameless star David Threlfall), who verbalises the film’s politics: “The only thing I’ll take from borstal is evil,” he says, “[H]ow can anyone build character in a regime based on deprivation?” Though the meat of the sequence is artfully constructed from medium reaction takes, it is bookended by shots which place the men on extreme opposite sides of the screen, at the foot of the frame, dwarfed by the borstal walls.

Scum’s stark, unfussy formalism is offset by the occasional, striking expressionistic touch — consider the shot of a post-rape Davis howling in his cell, bathed in the electric, midnight-blue light flooding through his window. Or the brusque, immersive opening sequence: a point-of-view shot from inside a police car that’s careening towards a young man, who is eventually captured by another officer. Without warning, the viewer has been implicated in a glum safari where young men are the prey.

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Author’s note: a slightly different version of this essay first appeared in the booklet for Arrow Films’ “The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Collection”, which came out in March 2016. You can – and should! – buy this wonderful release from Arrow’s website. 

After making his sole science-fiction film (1973’s World on a Wire), Rainer Werner Fassbinder shot the glorious 安卓网飞app in September 1973 in fifteen days on a miniscule estimated budget of 260,000 DM. It went on to become one of the following year’s most critically acclaimed films, winning the International Critics Prize at Cannes, and effectively propelling Fassbinder, then aged just 28, beyond national treasure status and into the global auteur stratosphere.

Fear Eats The Soul is a heavily — and openly — influenced film which transcends its references to feel entirely fresh. After adapting Marieluise Fleisser’s play Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1928) for television in 1971, Fassbinder, who maintained a hectic schedule across cinema, TV and theatre, took an eight-month sabbatical from filmmaking. According to Fassinder’s biographer Ronald Hayman, during this time the director became acquainted with Hollywood melodramas, and fell in love with the female-driven films made by German émigré Douglas Sirk for Universal-International in the 1950s: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959).

These films were stylish, audience-friendly and unabashedly emotive, yet used such surface attractions as a way to broach potentially spiky social issues like class, racism and sexuality. It’s no surprise that the fiercely political Fassbinder — who also carried an irrepressible penchant for torrid drama in both his artistic and personal lives — was a fan. He was especially moved by All That Heaven Allows, in which the love affair between an affluent widow Cary (Jane Wyman) and her hunky young gardener Ron (Rock Hudson) is looked upon with disgust by her children and jealous neighbours alike. For Fear, Fassbinder took, and widened, the age gap between the lovers, and introduced a new racial element. (All That Heaven Allows has since been used as a template for Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven [2002].)

安卓网飞appalso has roots in an earlier Fassbinder film. 1970 thriller The American Soldier (1970) features a scene in which a hotel maid, played by the director’s frequent collaborator Margarethe von Trotta, recounts the bleak tale of Emmi, a cleaner from Hamburg, who met Ali, a Turkish worker, in a bar, and married him shortly after. The story has a baroquely disturbing denouement: Emmi is found strangled, with the letter ‘A’ from a signet ring imprinted on her throat. In the time between writing this scene and filming Fear, Fassbinder relented on the cruelty of this conclusion: there is, mercifully, no such violence in the latter film. He also updated the setting to Munich; and made Ali Moroccan rather than Turkish, to reflect the nationality of his leading man.

安卓网飞appis one of its director’s most astringent critiques of postwar German life: an acute diagnosis of the spiritual and physical cost of society’s failure to learn from past sins. It tells the story of the unlikely romantic relationship which sparks between two lonely outcasts: Emmi (Brigitte Mira), a widowed but spirited sixty-something cleaner who has been all but abandoned by her self-absorbed, grown-up children; and the eponymous Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a ruggedly handsome, considerably younger Moroccan gastarbeitar given to glumly pondering the limited role for many immigrants in German society: “German master … Arab dog,” he laments, in touchingly halting German, near the beginning of the film

After a brusque, whirlwind courtship, Ali moves in with Emmi, and they soon marry as a means to circumvent the spectre of Ali’s possible eviction. Yet even before Emmi bravely comes clean about her new relationship to her nearest acquaintances (she doesn’t really have any “dearest”, so to speak), she has already been forced to endure spiteful anti-immigrant rhetoric from her icy cleaning colleagues, who spit invective like: “They’re stingy, unwashed pigs. They have only one thing on their mind: women”, and “They live over here at our expense. You only have to read the papers.”

Her female neighbours, meanwhile, are portrayed as curtain-twitching, flamboyantly racist harridans. Assuming that Emmi’s surname, Kurowski, belongs to her, rather than her late Polish husband, they deride her as a clueless foreigner. Emmi is, in fact, a native German who once belonged to the Nazi party. (Not incidentally, Mira shares some life experience with Emmi: her father was Russian Jewish immigrant whose heritage the actress had hidden in order to survive Nazism. She even collaborated by acting in Nazi propaganda films for a short time.)

While it is reductive and clichéd to describe art focused on social issues like racism and xenophobia as “timely” or “as relevant now as ever” — do such intractable problems ever really go away? — it is nonetheless disquieting to view Fear Eats The Soul in a contemporary climate of rising far-right politics and its stealth codification into mainstream media. There’s no significant difference between the rhetoric employed by Emmi’s small-minded colleagues, and that of, say, British tabloid columnist Katie Hopkins who, in a Sun column in April 2015, described migrants as “cockroaches” and “feral humans” without a hint of official censure. Neither are a far cry from the viciously exclusionary wording of the 25-Point programme explicated in Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Program of 1920 (“Any further immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who have entered Germany since August 2, 1914, shall be compelled to leave the Reich immediately.”)

As Fear Eats The Soul proceeds, we see in painful detail how such sentiments translate into real-life terms. Almost as soon and Emmi and Ali marry, their union is smothered under a chloroform cloak of systematic prejudice and discrimination. One of Emmi’s children is so disgusted by the news that he kicks in her television, an act of petulance that would be comical were it not so vile. Her heinous son-in-law (played by Fassbinder himself, replete with a disgustingly droopy moustache) seems to be personally offended that a relationship across such a dramatic age gap could ever be conceived. Emmi is ostracised by her colleagues. In a particularly galling scene, Ali is refused service by a local shopkeeper who claims he cannot understand what he is saying (although the man later admits to his wife that he was lying). He then bars Emmi when she attempts to challenge him. Such is the totality of the venality visited upon the pair, it’s no surprise that it starts to turn inward on them. Emmi can’t help but reify her colleagues’ prejudices when they let her back into their circle at the expense of a young Yugoslavian immigrant worker, while the inscrutable Ali is driven into the arms of another woman, barmaid Barbara (Barbara Valentin).

Over 93 crisp minutes, Fear Eats The Soul constitutes an unusually sustained study in stark contrasts. It’s at once shabby and glamorous; boldly colourful and breezeblock bleak. For instance, it opens with the high-flown tones of an Arabic song (“Al Asfouryeh” by Lebanese chanteuse Sabah) ringing out on the soundtrack, its exotic beauty juxtaposed with a distinctly quotidian image: a static shot of a rain-slicked pavement at night, filthy puddles aglow with reflected green and red neon lights from passing cars and the streetlamps above. Like so many spectacles conjured by Fassbinder over his too-brief but prolific career, these opening seconds are simultaneously beautiful and dismal; moreover, they function as a perfect tonal analogue for the ensuing narrative. Accompanying this bewitchingly contradictory concoction of sound and image is a deadpan epigram which flashes at the foot of the screen: “Happiness is not always fun”. By the time the end credits roll, the viewer may justly wonder whether these words constitute the greatest understatement in cinema history.

Throughout, Fassbinder layers a hugely emotive story with a remarkably affectless sheen, and surgically removes all traces of sentimentality. Consider the brutal editorial ellipses which rob the viewer of the chance to be present at the pair’s lovemaking, or even at their marriage ceremony. They approach the church, there’s a hard cut, and suddenly they’re outside again. No fuss, no fat, just the visual imparting of necessary information, and a stark reminder of the implacable march of time.

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Fassbinder constantly employs variations on this composition in scenes set in houses, restaurants, and, memorably, an outdoor cafe decorated with daffodil-yellow chairs. It’s here that Emmi finally snaps at her silent tormentors, but they don’t respond to her at all: they simply continue to gawp at the odd couple, dumb and hateful. As Reverse Shot‘s Chris Wisniewski astutely observes, this visual schema proves troubling for the viewer: “We are always complicit in that gaze, and we are always invited to judge Emmi and Ali, as we do everyone else, on the basis of race, class, and age, and in so doing, we are asked to ignore the overwhelming evidence of human goodness.”

And yet, despite Fear’s portrayal of German society as a seething pit of bigotry and censoriousness, it retains precious slivers of hope which pierce the clouds of despair with an almost shocking clarity. It’s hard for the viewer not to be jolted by the understated kindness displayed by Gruber (Marquard Blohm), the son of Emmi’s landlord and the one character who sees no problem whatsoever with the relationship. He seems to represent the Platonic ideal of goodness in German society, and his presence is proof that Fear isn’t wholly misanthropic. Meanwhile, though Ali ends the film stricken by a stress-induced stomach ulcer, and he may not even ultimately survive, Emmi is there by his side. Against all the odds, she hasn’t given up, and neither has Fassbinder.

Speaking of Ali, Fear Eats The Soul has a tragic postscript. Early in the film, Ali reveals his full name to be El Hedi ben Salem m’Barek Mohammed Mustafa — this was also the actor’s real name. According to Viola Shafik’s documentary My Name Is Not Ali (2012), he met Fassbinder at a Parisian cafe in 1972. Shortly after he became enmeshed in his director’s free-floating, sexually-charged creative ensemble, and ultimately became his lover for a time. After completing Fear, and struggling to deal with his feelings of jealousy towards Fassbinder, ben Salem stabbed three people in a Berlin bar, claiming they had made racist remarks to him. He then went to his director, reportedly saying, “Now you don’t have to be afraid anymore. I’ve gotten rid of my aggression.” Fassbinder helped ben Salem to flee the country, and covered for him at the Cannes Film Festival, where audiences were surprised by his absence. A few years later, ben Salem was captured and imprisoned in Nimes, France, where it is alleged he hanged himself, although competing reports suggest that Salem died of a heart attack while in prison, during a football match, aged 40 in 1976. Either way, knowledge of this sad context makes Fear Eats The Soul an even more unbearably poignant experience.

Author’s note: a version of this interview first appeared under the title ‘O Say Can You See’ in the Jan/Feb 2017 print edition of Film Comment Magazine, which is available for purchase here. Below is the full transcript of the interview.

Born in Port-au-Prince in 1953, Raoul Peck is one of Haiti’s few prominent film directors, and over the past three decades has been the primary exporter of Haitian cinema to the rest of the world. Operating in both fiction and documentary—though his work frequently muddies the boundaries between the two—Peck’s key areas of interest have been exploring the channelling of power from developed to developing societies, class struggle, and the impact of top-down political decision-making upon impoverished people. Some of his most powerful films include the esoteric, stylized Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1990), which blends home movies, photographs, old newsreels, and contemporary interviews to create an absorbing portrait of Patrice Lumumba, the 36-year-old who became the first Prime Minister of independent Congo in 1960, but was assassinated months into his tenure; and Fatal Assistance (2013), a calmly presented yet palpably furious polemic which targets the purportedly well-meaning NGOs, aid organisations and celebrities who clamoured to help post-earthquake Haiti, but ultimately created a giant bureaucratic mess.

Peck’s latest film, the scorching I Am Not Your Negro, is the result of long-time immersion into the work of the late African-American author James Baldwin. It is inspired by a 1979 letter written by Baldwin to his literary agent describing a new undertaking: his final book, Remember This House, recounting the lives and successive assassinations of his activist friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr: the book was never written, and Baldwin died in 1987. Granted access to the full Baldwin estate, Peck weaves together a dizzying portrait of the author and his ideas (typically hyper-critical of white America’s racist instincts and capacity for self-delusion.) The disparate material is bound together by a narration from Samuel L. Jackson, who embodies Baldwin in hushed tones simultaneously solemn and propulsive.

Ashley Clark: Tell me about your introduction to Baldwin.

Raoul Peck: I started reading him when I was fifteen or sixteen. The Fire Next Time [a book of two essays first published in 1963] was a revelation for me. I did not fully understand everything, but it opened the door to a wide new world—in particular, things for which I didn’t have a name or an explanation, but suspected intuitively. Like, “who am I in the world, and why is there a difference between what I read everywhere and what I see everywhere?” I started traveling when I was eight—I moved from Haiti to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Having learned about Africa from John Ford or Tarzan films, it’s quite an awakening when you arrive in the real place. It was the same when I came to Europe and grew up with French literature, at school—that’s what we learned, and also sometimes American literature. There were not many authors [from a different perspective], besides Aime Cesaire, or Latin American authors like Alejo Carpentier, who wrote beautiful novels about Haiti. We were always reading our history through third and fifth characters in a book, we were never the main story. So, Baldwin is the first author to really break through that for me. I didn’t even feel it reading Richard Wright, he didn’t produce the same affect. I think the difference was between novel and essay. Baldwin’s essays were direct, with no filter. Baldwin stayed in my life—I would come back to his books when I felt like I had to reboot myself. Baldwin is always good to let you feel reality as it is again, in a time of confusion.

I know that this project has been in the works for a long time, so could you talk about the process of bringing it together with the blessing of the Baldwin estate?

Ten years ago, I thought, “Okay, what difficult project can I tackle?”, because most of my projects are very complicated. With Baldwin I said, “Well, maybe it’s the time now,” but without really knowing what film I would be able to make. His estate is known for not giving access; for being very, very strict. But when I contacted them, luckily for me, they responded pleasantly, right away. They invited me to come and see them, and I met Gloria Karefa-Smart, Baldwin’s youngest sister, who has been his assistant from the age of 21. She went with him to Africa as a young woman and later also married an African man who was working in the U.S. She had seen my two films about Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the Congo (Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, 1990; Lumumba安卓网飞app — for her, this work of mine meant something very important. After I spent some time there, they offered me everything, and were open to whatever approach I wanted to take. They let me find the film—it’s not the kind of project where you just try on the first idea you have. I wanted it to be elegant: the perfect Baldwin film. I was always not satisfied about what I saw about him. Even the biographies about him I feel are not up to the man he is and he was. And for me, the strength, the importance of this man had to be center stage. The question in the beginning was probably: how do I bring that out in the foreground?  How do I make sure that Baldwin’s work, and his mind, are totally up front and center.  

One day Gloria handed me a letter about the book on Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers that Baldwin planned, but did not write. I felt, though, that [this book] was already written, but spread across his body of work. So, my job was to get the book together, stay close to his work, not use anything from me, and treat it as a huge puzzle that I had to assemble.

Can you speak about the challenges of threading together these reams of disparate material?

I had to start with the basics, which were the words. I spent much time indulging in all [Baldwin’s] books I had read throughout the years. When people say, “Oh, you took ten years to make the film,” I say, “no, it probably, it took 30 years to get all my old books and re-discover what I had underlined over the years!” It was to be a voyage, a tour of the past somehow, discovering along the way. After finishing what I called the “libretto” of this story I wanted to tell, using the letters, the story of the book that was not written, and other ingredients, I knew that I would use extensive segments of the film criticism that Baldwin wrote, which conjure a rich world of images and concepts. I put aside some images which came automatically to me, or that were dictated by the material itself, or cited by Baldwin. When he writes about John Wayne, or Gary Cooper, or Doris Day, I knew I would have to watch a number of these films again. A lot of them I already knew, but that was part of the search process.

Presumably you were working on other projects at the same time?

Yes, I had to build the production around that. So, we would have time where my editor was working alone, because she had the blueprint.  She had the text from beginning to end. She had really fixed images that I had already chosen. Clips that I had already chosen. She had enough to work on, to be sequencing. And then, at one point, she would eventually stop, but the archivist would go on for two months looking for material. I would give them long lists. Sometimes I would re-read a Baldwin book and find three or two notes in the bottom of the page, and I would say, “could you please try to find what he’s talking about, because I don’t know that film.” It was really detective work — to find a name that he mentioned, and there’s no photo of that person and we have to try to find through other books, to call people. Because everything really had to be genuine. It could not just be theoretical. Although [the film] is a lot of different pieces, it just makes sense together. These links are historical, associative or emotional, but there is a reason why every part of the film is there. Whether it’s music, whether it’s the sound, or a photo, or a film. I gave myself the freedom to say, whatever would happen, I will use it. Whatever material I find, I will use it. My job is to make it fit. So, I was not saying was I going to do black and white only, or color or video only, or 35mm or photos only. It was literally everything I could find and use I would. I knew that it’s just a matter of time until you find the right approach, but you can’t define this style or define the film even before you’ve gone through all this. I think it’s rare to give yourself that kind of freedom.

It’s funny, it seems like it’s a luxury, but also you only get one shot at this archive, so it’s kind of a double-edged sword, isn’t it?

…and you can’t make a film that is not at the level of Baldwin That would be a shame of a film, to have those type of rights in your hands [and waste it]. You know, normally you get an option for a book or even a chapter of a book, but you never get the whole life – all the books, all the published, unpublished, private letters, et cetera.  When you are that privileged, you can’t just go and do a quick film. I knew that whatever it would take, I would take the time to make it. That’s why I produced it myself. I’ve come through this in one of my first films. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Lumumba film, the documentary?

I have.

So hat was also, at the time, a very, very original approach  I don’t think anybody had done that before. By the way, it’s used a lot in film school, in colleges, for many different subjects. For me, […Negro] was a way to come back to the freedom of creation and creativity that is very rare in what we do because there are so many constraints, including financial, including time. So, in this film, to be able to go all the way… and when I say all the way, I mean there’s not a single second in the film that was not worked and thought and re-tried multiple times until it was exactly what it should be. Sometimes you get tired and say: “the film is OK, it’s finished. You don’t need to work on this or that, people won’t notice it.” You give yourself ten thousand excuses. But this film?  I feel that this may be the only time I was able to go through to every step and moment of the film. There is nothing I would do differently today.

The film is structured around the killings of Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar. Now, you’ve made films about Lumumba, but I’m thinking about Thomas Sankara and 安卓网飞app as well. To what extent is the story of the diaspora, at root, all about the killing of leaders, of resistance thwarted at key moments, moments when things are about to change…

For me, it’s an important layer. The film has several layers and several stories crossing. I’m sure what touched me the most is, first of all, that Baldwin made a connection between those three lives, and that he understood they were important, they were not just random killings. They were very precise killing, and also they were connected. I had throughout the years understood that what happened to most leaders, black leaders, and third world leaders in the 50s and then the 60s, is that they were killed. They were either killed or had to go into exile or some of them were bought. And I know that from the Congo, that’s exactly what happened. They killed Lumumba and they killed many leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement. During the Civil Rights movement, it was the same, or the radical times, with the Black Panther leadership mostly were either killed, in prison, or became crazy, or would commit suicide. And the same people that had done that were the same people talking about, you know, rogue states or about non-democratic countries, et cetera, where they never gave them a chance, they never gave those countries a chance. Congo never had a chance: the only real free election was the Lumumba election.  So, the expiration and the assassination of these leaders is key.

By the way, both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were killed when they really became dangerous. They understood that there shouldn’t be an only black agenda, which was a way to pin them down. They became dangerous when they understood that it was about class, that it wasn’t about race. Race was just hiding the more fundamental problems of class opposition and the next big campaign was not a campaign about race but about poverty, against poverty. And that’s when both leaders were intellectually, as Baldwin wrote, getting closer and closer. They really became dangerous for the system because they had surmounted, they had left the original positions that were assigned to them. Stay in the big “black” cause and be the angry black man and that’s what you are, and we assign you as such. These men understood that they were first and foremost men and they were universal, they were international. When King started talking against Vietnam, that’s where he became dangerous. And so, with regard to your question, what I am trying to tell a younger audience is: know your history. Because until you know your history, you cannot fight. You cannot understand what’s going on. You can’t really identify with the enemy, in particular in such a confusing time, where you have workers voting for a billionaire like Trump. It is totally insane, it doesn’t make sense.

In the vein of much of your output, 安卓网飞apphas a poetic, free-flowing quality. Can you talk about the importance of artistry in your work generally?

My luck somehow is that I came right after what we call “militant cinema”. I watched my elders making films where it was about the content, the message, but not so much of the art. The sound could be lousy, the images could be shaky or blurred, but it was about the message. I grew up learning from them, but at the same time, I knew you couldn’t go on like that and just make propaganda. I knew that I wanted to make films that had to be films first, create characters—then you can inject content, or political positions, or whatever, but that’s the ground rules. That’s why I never distinguish [categorically] between my documentary and narrative films because always believed they’re the same thing. It was about creating, creating a story, except that those stories are real. My narratives are always based off of true stories or true events or true acts. And my documentaries, I always try to find a way to tell them as if it were a narrative. Some of my other films will very often have a voice, even two. In Fatal Assistance there were two voices, for the dialogue, in order to create a text where someone tells the story or is witness to the story. This is how you can maybe get closer to people instead of doing some raw documentary or issue film about this and that. So, yes, that’s very important to me. I think Baldwin has also, within him, that element. Not only Baldwin, but people like Chris Marker. Those instruments I learned very early on.

Baldwin’s criticism of film and media is piercingly prescient [Author’s recommendation: Baldwin’s 1976 book of film criticism, “The Devil Finds Work“]. He argues that the messages peddled by mass media are a central component of white America’s inability to confront many things about itself, its power structures and subjugation of minorities. There’s a breathtaking moment in your film, when you construct a montage of contemporary reality television, overlaid with the words of Baldwin talking about the frightening effects TV is having on the American public. And now a reality TV star is President.

Footage of reality TV is very difficult to get, quasi-impossible. The Apprentice would have been perfect in the film! Baldwin compared watching TV to taking narcotics, and he wrote that forty years ago when TV was not totally polluted. It speaks about the Trump generation. It’s what our media has become, it’s what the whole world has become. It’s the world of confusion, of superficiality, and people cannot make the difference between what is real, what is dream, what is illusion. And that’s a terrible, terrible, frightening thing. As long as we don’t confront those two levels of reality, again to quote Baldwin, “There won’t be any American dream.”

I have one final question for you. I have to ask about Samuel L. Jackson’s tremendous work. He brings an incredible dimension to the film. Can you elaborate on him coming in and the conversations you had about how he would deliver the voiceover?

I always refused the word “voiceover” or “narrator”.  If you do narrator or voiceover, you’re not making a film.  You’re making either press or formatted documentary, but you’re not making a creative documentary. When I came to the Baldwin film, I knew it was going to be key. Even the first person I recorded, I experimented with him until I had the right approach, and that’s what we used for the editing. For Samuel Jackson, I knew at the end, I would need somebody well-known to be at the level of Baldwin, that could help the film, and also a great actor. And I also knew I needed someone that has some sort of strict political credibility, which Samuel Jackson has in my eyes. People sometimes judge him by the films he does, but each time I have read an interview of him or his real-life attitude, I’ve always felt that he knows who he is, and I’ve always liked that. So, I had a very short list of people who could do that. I didn’t want to have somebody who might have been a great actor and well-known, but politically would be contrary to what the film means. The personal aspect was important for me. His people showed him a cut, and he said: yes.

The way I worked with him not to be a narrator, not to do a voiceover, but to work as you would for it theatrically: Take [Baldwin’s] words and make them yours. Don’t speak them if they don’t come from inside, from you. That means you have to create a character, you have to be Baldwin.  You cannot just see those texts from the outside. It cannot be your ad voice. It has to come really from the inside. You have to feel it. And once the actor understands that, that means that anything that he does is good, it’s great. The way he talks, the way he transmits the emotion of the moment, the beats of the silence – is it two beats, three beats? All this is part of the rhythm. You can’t invent that. That’s the same when I work with actors in a narrative. Every moment we do in rehearsal, we play with the text, we try stuff, we improvise, et cetera. Then, when the moment comes onset, you’re shooting, the actor is on his own. He’s the one giving it, and you just take. You can’t micromanage him. Your job is to bring him there and watch him there. You just take whatever he’s giving, and it was wonderful working with Samuel, because he got it very rapidly, he is very professional, and when we are recording, each time, he felt and I felt it if a particular sentence was not there. He knew it automatically, before even I could even say it, because we just felt it was not the right. It’s like music. When it’s just not the right note, you know it. You just feel it.

Author’s note: a version of this article first appeared in the January 2017 issue of Sight & Sound Magazine.

The intoxicating – for some – feeling of national progress engendered by the presence of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, seemed to embolden liberal-minded filmmakers to engage with traumatic material from a safe remove, particularly in the latter stages of his presidency. Consider the subjects of these backward-looking epics: reconstruction’s failure in The Hateful Eight (2015); slavery in Lincoln (2012), Django Unchained (2012) and 安卓网飞app (2013); the civil rights movement in Selma (2014); the whole shebang in Lee Daniels’ expansive The Butler (2013), a fictionalised biopic of Eugene Allen, the White House butler who retired after 34 years in 1986, and was present at Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

At Sundance 2016, in the early stages of Obama’s last full year, this trend reached its apotheosis, but felt different. Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation was a spirited if clodhopping reimagining of Nat Turner’s slave uprising of 1831, its title cribbed from the racist D.W. Griffith epic which screened at the White House in 1915. Parker’s film, emerging at a time of Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and economic inequality, sparked a feeding frenzy among distributors, secured a huge deal, and won the Grand Jury prize.

In 2016, explicit Obama nostalgia characterised two fictionalised biopics by independent filmmakers: rare if not unprecedented treatment for a serving president. Richard Tanne’s Southside With You whimsically reimagined Barack’s first date with Michelle Robinson, the future first lady, while Vikram Gandhi’s low-key Barry tracked Obama as he was defining himself intellectually, and forging his identity as a student at New York’s Columbia University in the early 1980s. The films contrast tonally but, especially when watched back-to-back, impart a powerfully rueful charge.

Obama’s impact was felt away from conventional cinema in 2016. “Before I met [Obama], I ain’t really see myself going nowhere, you know, I ain’t really care if I lived or died,” says a young black man in a scene during Beyoncé’s innovative visual album Lemonade, which was shock-released to great fanfare on April 23. “Now I feel like I gotta live, man, for my kids and stuff.” 安卓网飞app was one of myriad examples of final-year-of-Obama art to look at black experience with subjectivity and creative flair, from Donald Glover’s brilliantly strange FX show 安卓网飞app, to timely re-releases of classic, under-appreciated films from the LA Rebellion (including Haile Gerima’s blistering Ashes and Embers and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, an acknowledged influence on Lemonade), and the black stars of micro-blogging site Vine which, per The New York Times’ Jazmine Hughes, “became its own ecosystem of black culture, both by relying on familiar figures, experiences and jokes, and by creating the next batch of them.”

Well, in October, Twitter announced that it was closing Vine. A month later, a racist, sexist reality TV star was announced as Obama’s successor. As Trumpageddon hoves into view, it’s hard to know which direction black film will take: a further push into subjective, psychologically interior territory; a more explicit drive toward political bluntness? Late 2016 documentaries like Ava Duvernay’s 安卓网飞app and Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, while hugely divergent in tone and formal ambition, highlight the molten racism bubbling at America’s core, share a searing urgency and, just in time for a terrifying new administration, make an implicit mockery of Obama’s oft-stated belief that the arc of history bends toward justice.

Whatever happens next, black visual culture in the final year of Obama will be poignantly picked over for decades to come.

Follow Ashley Clark on Twitter @_Ash_Clark.

Editor’s note: In April 2015 I interviewed the actor John Turturro a few blocks away from where he was shooting HBO crime drama The Night Of (which was then titled, simply, Crime.) The interview never saw the light of day, so, given that The Night Of is currently out in the world, I’m posting it now.

Actor, writer, director, jazz aficionado: John Turturro has many strings to his bow. The native New Yorker and Coen Brothers favourite cuts a trim, sprightly figure at 58, and that angular face is refreshingly expressive beneath his trademark short curls. He’s a busy man these days, stealing the show in Nanni Moretti’s Cannes hit Mia Madre; appearing in forthcoming Steven Zaillian/Richard Price HBO thriller The Night Of; and plotting his next directorial move — a reboot of Bertrand Blier’s 70s sex shocker Les Valseuses. I recently met up with Turturro at a comfy Italian restaurant near his Park Slope pad — and mere blocks away from the HBO shoot — to chat breakthroughs, Barton Fink and balancing budgets.

AC: So, tell me about getting involved with The Night Of. In a long career, this is your first miniseries…

JT: They shot the pilot a long time ago, and I came in at the end of it. James Gandolfini did one or two days, but he passed away, and they asked me if I’d do it. I was a little torn about it, but I went for it. I play Jack Stone, an attorney who becomes involved in a case defending a man安卓网飞appplayed by Riz Ahmed — who’s accused of murdering a girl on New York’s Upper West Side.

Where do you stand on the whole “TV versus film安卓网飞appdebate that’s been bubbling away the past few years.

I guess television is becoming the thing people are talking about. A lot of movies — when they adapt books — are disappointing because you feel like they have to rush it in two hours. But everything is so different now. Movies were a communal experience originally and there weren’飞鸭Ai app手机版下载_飞鸭Ai安卓版免费下载-4162下载网:2 天前 · 飞鸭Ai app是一款通过云端挂机赚钱软件，用户只需要提供一台手机就能进行操作，而且云端托管不需要消耗你的手机内存和电池，平台发布的任务全程都是云端自动操作完全可以解放你的双手，还能给你带来收益，是一款非常不错的手赚软件。’ve never wanted to do a TV series. I’ve done many guest spots in series, but this is good because you can sink your teeth into it, and I’m working from home.

You live just up the road from the shoot? That’s convenient! Have you lived here most of your life?

I was born in Brooklyn but I was raised in Queens. I spent the first five, six years of my life in Hollis, which is a black neighbourhood 安卓网飞app飞猪app下载_飞猪旅行省钱软件手机版下载安装 安卓版 V9.5 ...:1 天前 · 飞猪app 安卓版下载 手机扫描下载 苹果版下载 手机扫描下载 0 0 类型：便捷生活 版本：v 9.5.4.103 大小：89.7M 更新：2021-06-17 12:41 语言：简体中文 等级： 平台：Android 厂商：支付宝（中国）网络技术有限公司’ve lived in Manhattan, and I’ve stayed in Connecticut. I went to Yale, and I’ve lived all over the world. I’飞鸭Ai app手机版下载_飞鸭Ai安卓版免费下载-4162下载网:2 天前 · 飞鸭Ai app是一款通过云端挂机赚钱软件，用户只需要提供一台手机就能进行操作，而且云端托管不需要消耗你的手机内存和电池，平台发布的任务全程都是云端自动操作完全可以解放你的双手，还能给你带来收益，是一款非常不错的手赚软件。’ve worked in the States.

Do you ever get tired of traveling?

No, I like Europe a lot. I’m very comfortable there. I did three movies in Italy last year 安卓网飞appNanni Moretti’s 安卓网飞app; a film with a friend of mine, Marco Pontecorvo, who was my cinematographer on Fading Gigolo; and Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Do The Right Thing

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My father was a builder. My mother was a singer. She wanted to be a dress designer, but she quit school. She worked at sewing a lot, but she used to design wedding dresses on her own. She could draw. She was very talented — in our family she was maybe the most talented.

Your early movie roles were typically intense, antagonistic characters…

I got my start in William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A., I did The Sicilian with Michael Cimino, and 安卓网飞appfor Scorsese. Even though the movie Five Corners [a 1987 film in which Turturro plays a psycho returning to his old neighbourhood after release from prison] wasn’t that successful, a lot of people took note. It was a great part.

And then you played the memorably horrible racist Pino in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing…

Well, Spike saw me in Five Corners and cast me. He’s a good friend of mine. We’re the same age. He grew up in an Italian neighbourhood, I grew up in a black neighbourhood.

I read that the locals on the Do The Right Thing hated you… they thought you really were a racist!

People used to watch the rushes, and people see the same thing every day. If you’ve never worked on a movie, people think that’s who you are. It’s part of the gig.

Did you ever worry about being typecast, as a twitchy, intense guy?

Well, thankfully over the years directors like the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, Francesco Rosi and Tom DiCillo have given me lots of opportunities to play all kinds of roles. I didn’t want to play one thing, and I’m not good at playing one thing, that’s not what I do. I like to try things… 让我们的电视更好用 电视安卓端好用APP推荐_值客原创 ...:2021-2-27 · 让我们的电视更好用 电视安卓端好用APP推荐,由什么值得买值友发布在好物社区的真实分享，本文是作者亲身的购买使用感受以及中立消费见解，旨为在广大网友中传播更好的消费主张。’t… Charles Laughton is another one.

Another of your classic roles is the eponymous playwright in the Coens’ 安卓网飞app, for which you won the best actor award at Cannes ’91. It such an intense role, but what was it like to play?

I spent a lot of time preparing. It was a really great collaboration between me, Joel, Ethan and Roger Deakins, the cinematographer. My wife was pregnant — my son, Amedeo, was born in the middle of that shoot. It was like doing a play, it was so quiet. I got to work with lots of wonderful actors. If I could work with Joel and Ethan every couple of years I would, but they don’t always have roles for me. I’ve done a play with Ethan, and they exec produced my film 安卓网飞app(2005).

I have to ask you about your role as Jesus 安卓网飞appthe bowling pederast 安卓网飞app安卓网飞app’ The Big Lebowski. Is this the part that people ask you about the most?

It’s one of them. It was kind of inspired by something I had done on stage — a play called La Puta Vida at The Public, NY, many years before that. I would like to revisit it. When the movie came out, I think it did better in the UK than it did in the US. I don’蝴蝶飞直播app_蝴蝶直播在线观看_蝴蝶直播ios苹果手机下载 ...:1 天前 · 多特安卓下载为您提供蝴蝶飞直播app 安卓版,手机版下载,蝴蝶飞直播app apk免费下载安装到手机.同时支持便捷的二维码扫描下载功能! 推荐您安装2345加速浏览器，保护上网安全，瞬间启动，极速浏览 …’t get all the humour initially. Young people love the film. The Dude just wants to be free, and be a fuck-up. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody, he just wants to exist in a perpetual state of adolescence. It’s like a Cheech and Chong movie… but better written!

Film viewers might not know that you’re also a big theatre guy.

I studied in New York with [legendary acting coach] Robert Modica, then I got a scholarship and went back to school, to Yale. And then I worked with the playwright John Patrick Shanley, that’s where people first saw me. I like doing theatre, it’s just hard to do everything. And since I’ve directed, I need to work out what I want to concentrate on. I have the opportunity to do that. I did The Cherry Orchard with Dianne Wiest; and The Master Builder in Brooklyn. I’ve done Samuel Beckett twice. Without sounding narcissistic, I think our production of Endgame was very successful. I get Beckett. I love doing Greek plays. I did a lot of new plays when I was younger, but recently I’ve done classics. I’ve always loved Othello, but they always want me to play Iago. I did a reading with Alan Cumming where I played Othello. Now it’s not politically correct, even though I look more Moorish — I’m from Southern Italy. I was more attracted to that role.

The Big Lebowski

飞牛网手机客户端 2.4.0 安卓版app:2021-11-26 · 飞牛网手机客户端 2.4.0 安卓版app 一家自营模式的全品类综合零售购物网站 授权方式：免费软件 软件类型：国产软件 软件大小： 28.06 MB 推荐星级： 软件来源：上海飞牛集达电子商务有限公司 更新时间：2021-03-04 15:31 运行环境：Android4.0“whitewashing” casting in Exodus: Gods and Kings, in which you played the Pharaoh Seti…

安卓网飞app’飞鸭Ai app手机版下载_飞鸭Ai安卓版免费下载-4162下载网:2 天前 · 飞鸭Ai app是一款通过云端挂机赚钱软件，用户只需要提供一台手机就能进行操作，而且云端托管不需要消耗你的手机内存和电池，平台发布的任务全程都是云端自动操作完全可以解放你的双手，还能给你带来收益，是一款非常不错的手赚软件。’安卓网飞app… white. I don’t. As a matter of fact, Italians weren’t considered white until after the war. We were always “other”, and… the census changes. You do those kinds of big budget movies, and the people who criticise movies in general… well, they’re not trying to get the money to do it. Even people like Ridley Scott have to be given money to do it. It is what it is — it was an old-fashioned type of thing. It’s always been the case. Charlton Heston played two of the biggest Jews of all-time — he was Moses, Judah Ben-Hur, and he played Michaelangelo — and he had nothing to do with those backgrounds! People accepted it in those days. Audiences didn’t go for Exodus as much, but when I was told people were booing it I was like, really? Ridley has asked me to do a bunch of things over the years and it never worked out. I’d like to work with him again actually.

You’ve also appeared in the 安卓网飞app movies [as the eccentric Agent Seymour Simmons]. How do you feel about being in bigger budget stuff? It’s not something you’ve been associated with throughout your career…

飞信交友【安卓热门app特别版】.rar百度云_百度网盘下载 ...:2021-6-13 · 飞信交友【安卓热门app特别版】.rar百度云网盘下载，资源大小2.89 MB，搜索盘不提供保存服务，飞信交友【安卓热门app特别版】.rar下载地址将自动跳到百度云网盘下载。— not opulent — 飞猪app下载_飞猪旅行省钱软件手机版下载安装 安卓版 V9.5 ...:1 天前 · 飞猪app 安卓版下载 手机扫描下载 苹果版下载 手机扫描下载 0 0 类型：便捷生活 版本：v 9.5.4.103 大小：89.7M 更新：2021-06-17 12:41 语言：简体中文 等级： 平台：Android 厂商：支付宝（中国）网络技术有限公司’安卓网飞app’t want to do a TV show; there was nothing I loved enough that I wanted to be on for five years. Then a few years back Adam Sandler asked me to do Mr. Deeds — I’d done SNL; they wanted me to do a big role, but I ended up with a small part. Then when they asked me to do Transformers, well, I’d turned down so many of these movies over the years that my eldest son said to me: “Just do it.” I did it, and it’s like doing something very physical, energetic… it’s like a sketch versus a really detailed thing. I’m not interested in those movies. I don’t watch those movies. But when I do it, I still have to do it.

What’s Michael Bay like?

I basically based my character on Michael Bay! [laughs] I was watching him and I got a kick out of it.

You recently directed Woody Allen in Fading Gigolo. He very rarely acts for other directors — what was he like to work with?

Once I got past his merciless criticism of the different drafts of my script, I loved working with him. You don’t have to agree with him, but if you want him to be in it, you have to consider what he’s saying! I’d done a play with him. Woody held the screen in a humorous way, a romantic way. He has weight. Until you’安卓网飞app’t realise how good an actor he is. A lot of actors who are comedians on television, I don’t think they could do what Woody does when he acts in films. He doesn’t change externally, but he’s good physically; he’s a good athlete. He’s a very underrated actor.

You’re quite a double act [Allen, bizarrely, plays Turturro’s pimp]…

I thought we would play well together. Sometimes you watch movies and you see these pairings and there’s never any chemistry! When Joe Pesci was with De Niro it was brutal and it was funny. They were really good together. Al Pacino and John Cazale, they had done these plays together. Gandolfini was always good when he acted with a woman. He wasn’t narcissistic at all, he put all of his attention on the woman, and he was surprisingly very sexy. But when you put a pair together, most times it’s like they’re edited, cut together, you can just tell that they don’t have that rare chemistry.

Is there anyone you really want to work with?

It’安卓网飞app’s lots of directors I’d love to work with that I haven’t worked with. But I can’t sit around hoping, waiting for that to happen. Sometimes people think, “飞书_飞书app_飞书app安卓-太平洋下载中心:2021-4-29 · 飞书app是专为企业打造的高效沟通协作工具。飞书app安卓版作为新一代的企业生产力应用，可以帮助企业提升工作效率，降低生产成本与管理成本 ...’安卓网飞app”, which is kinda stupid. People have camps. I don’t know why. I think Boyhood and 安卓网飞app have good interesting directors. I really like the Dardennes brothers. I think Two Days, One Night is an important movie.

安卓网飞app

I liked A Most Violent Year. And I’m a big fan of Oscar Isaac, I like him a lot. He’s my kinda actor. I loved Inside Llewyn Davis — 飞牛网手机客户端 2.4.0 安卓版app:2021-11-26 · 飞牛网手机客户端 2.4.0 安卓版app 一家自营模式的全品类综合零售购物网站 授权方式：免费软件 软件类型：国产软件 软件大小： 28.06 MB 推荐星级： 软件来源：上海飞牛集达电子商务有限公司 更新时间：2021-03-04 15:31 运行环境：Android4.0’飞书手机版下载-飞书app安卓下载 3.20.7版-3234游戏网:2021-3-21 · 腾讯会议app安卓版 1.5.6.405 办公财务 / 23.11 MB 腾讯会议绿色版 1.5.6.405 办公财务 / 23.11 MB 同类排行榜 1 牙美总代搜薇:zslmileer营销软件 办公财务 / 29.56 MB 2 一代女皇微zslmileer总代米乐儿app 办公财务 / 29.56 MB 3 一定嗖微zslmileer总代米乐儿 ...’飞牛网手机客户端 2.4.0 安卓版app:2021-11-26 · 飞牛网手机客户端 2.4.0 安卓版app 一家自营模式的全品类综合零售购物网站 授权方式：免费软件 软件类型：国产软件 软件大小： 28.06 MB 推荐星级： 软件来源：上海飞牛集达电子商务有限公司 更新时间：2021-03-04 15:31 运行环境：Android4.0“Listen, the guy is good, you’re the writers, all you gotta do is give him a line where he says ‘One of my parents is Italian or Jewish or whatever’”. When someone’s that good, I was excited to see it.

安卓网飞app

Rarely. If I see it on TV安卓网飞appI did this movie called The Truce (2007), that’s a movie I’ve seen a lot of times. I’ve taken it to a lot of places because I worked a long time on it, and I supported it a lot. But beyond that film, no. I saw Do The Right Thing at a recent 25th anniversary thing, and I think it holds up really well.

Barton Fink

What do you do to relax?

I love sports. Basketball, I’m a Knicks sufferer. When I’m Europe I get into football. calcio! I like dance, too. I’m a big flamenco fan. There’s a woman, Soledad Barrio, her company is Noche Flamenca, I always go. Dance was part of my training as an actor. I was always interested in it but at a certain age you have to go one way or another. I like it when people can express themselves without words, and flamenco stuff, when it’s done really well, I like a lot.

I’ve heard you’re a musical guy.

I played drums for a while. I played the piano, and I wish I’d have stayed with it.

What music do you listen to to relax?

Depends on what project I’m working on. I don’t listen to rap music, even though the neighbourhood I came from, Hollis, was one of the places where rap was invented. I never really got into it. I like Andre 3000 from OutKast! When Public Enemy came out I listened to that, too. I grew up with a lot of black music, but I’m not listening to 50 Cent or Eminem. I think there’s a lot of filmmakers who try to use rap, and you can tell it’s not in their bones. I grew up with James Brown. He was a rapper before rap. I saw him perform. I love jazz music, and I used a lot in Fading Gigolo. I love Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, Gene Krupa, Gene Adams. I always wanted to make a jazz film. I want to make it with real musicians, guys who never made it. I wrote a sketch out, but I want to talk to Woody about it. A singer, Woody, and Clint Eastwood — guys who are sidemen. They lose their singer. They always think they’re on the verge of making it, but they’re 80 years old. If Morgan Freeman played an instrument, I could put him in there. But I don’t think he plays. Clint is 84, but he just did American Sniper. His mother lived until she was 100. He stays in good shape. So does Woody.

安卓网飞app’安卓网飞app

I’ve optioned an old French movie from the 1970s, Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses. It wouldn’t really be a remake, because it was inspired by a relationship with somebody that I really like. I’m putting together a budget now. The book that it’安卓网飞app… it’百分网APP(破解游戏盒子) v4.6.2 百分网APP(破解游戏盒子 ...:2021-6-3 · 百分网APP破解游戏盒子，是一个专为喜欢游戏破解，BT游戏，BT网游的玩家打造，我们专注于首发游戏，提供安卓最新最好玩，更有同步更新破解！在这里，你只要下载百分网客户端即可随时查看安卓 …“This is misogynist!” I said “Not really”, though it pushes to the edge of that. The movie Blier won the Academy Award for, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, is a little subtler than that. Blier has been really great with me. I’ve taken some stuff from the 安卓网飞app book [which Blier also wrote]. It’s fuckin’ wild. I saw it when I was 19. It affected my whole life! I’m not a hoodlum, but the sexual freedom of the movie was at a time when nobody was worrying about AIDS — everybody was naked all the time. It’s really a filthy book. The film was banned in some countries. But in the US, Pauline Kael was a big champion for The New Yorker, and it did well I think.

[Editor’s note: off the record Turturro also told me about his plans to resurrect his Jesus character; that’s now public knowledge.]

You mention Pauline Kael. How do you feel about critics?

I used to like to read Kael because I liked the way she wrote, even if I vehemently disagreed with her. It was like a friend who was very smart telling you what they thought, and it was a very emotional thing. Maybe there’s more films that critics have to review now, but sometimes they just engage from here [points to eyes] up — and I don’t think they watch with a regular audience a lot of times, they watch it with a critical audience. Some people say they never read critics. Woody says he never reads critics. Ben Kingsley said he hasn’网飞中文版最新安卓app5.3.1下载-网飞下载-游侠手游:2021-6-4 · 游侠手游提供网飞中文版最新安卓app5.3.1。网飞中文版最新安卓app5.3.1是一款电影电视剧租赁平台app，丰富影视剧集在线观看，优质资源汇聚快速了解最新信息，感兴趣的小伙伴快来下载网飞中文 …’飞猪app下载_飞猪旅行省钱软件手机版下载安装 安卓版 V9.5 ...:1 天前 · 飞猪app 安卓版下载 手机扫描下载 苹果版下载 手机扫描下载 0 0 类型：便捷生活 版本：v 9.5.4.103 大小：89.7M 更新：2021-06-17 12:41 语言：简体中文 等级： 平台：Android 厂商：支付宝（中国）网络技术有限公司’t want to let it inhibit you. I’ve never let it inhibit me. I like the sensibility of criticism, though, because it’s not sentimental. Sentimentality leads to brutality and stupidity. Sentimentality is the other side of brutality. I remember watching these TV shows as a kid and everyone was happy, and I said to my father “安卓网飞app’t we be like those people on TV?” and he said “‘Cause that’s not the world.”

Ordinarily I wouldn’t do one of these pics but it’s John Turturro innit

Author’s note: Around Easter time 2015, I dropped in on Sankofa Video Books and Cafe in Washington, D.C., with the intention of drinking some fine Ethiopian coffee, and the vague hope of catching up with its co-proprietor, the great director Haile Gerima. As it happened, he strolled in moments after I did, and we got talking. I bought a bunch of his films on DVD (support the artist!), an act which may have persuaded him to accept when I enquired whether I could return the following day for a more formal interview. Gerima was insightful, thoughtful, and extremely generous with his time. The following feature first appeared in the January安卓网飞app安卓网飞app, but I’ve added in a couple of links and details here, plus a not-fit-for-the-newsstands picture of me grinning alongside him. Enjoy.

The career of Ethiopian-born, American-based writer-director Haile Gerima is a fascinating case study of the challenges faced by left-leaning, formally experimental black filmmakers who wish for their work to be widely seen. Consider, for example, the fate of his 1993 film Sankofa, a visceral, tonally poetic, and visually seductive study of an American fashion model who is magically transported back in time from Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle to the antebellum American south, and transformed into a house slave. Here, she falls in love with a rebellious field slave who implores her to poison her white owners.

Like a more esoteric forebear of 12 Years a Slave (2013), but with no golden-locked Brad Pitt figure to salvage the day, Sankofa is a stark immersion into the plantation experience for both central character and viewer. While functioning as a resounding endorsement of the liberating power of self-knowledge, Sankofa, through its complex, detailed portrait of intra-slave relations, also offers a sharp comment on the continued sublimation of slave mentality and practice within contemporary American society. As 安卓网飞app told journalist Assata Wright, “If you view America as a plantation, then you can codify the different classes and interest groups within the society. You find overseers, head slaves, you find plantation owners in a very advanced, sophisticated way.”

Despite Gerima’s serious pedigree — he came to prominence in the 1970s alongside the likes of Charles Burnett and (not that) Larry Clark as a leading light of UCLA’s feted “安卓网飞app” movement — the fundraising process for Sankofa took nine gruelling years. Despite the film’s evident artistic qualities and positive critical reception at international festivals, major American distributors, skeptical of its earning potential and cowed by its revolutionary thrust, wouldn’t touch it.

Sankofa

Unbowed, Gerima opted for the exhausting self-distribution route. (He wasn’t starting from scratch, though: In 1982, Gerima made Ashes and Embers, an elliptical psychodrama about the spiritual awakening of a troubled black Vietnam vet-turned-actor: its bleak tone is conspicuously antithetical to Hollywood’s 安卓网飞appfication of the war. To enable its release, the director, alongside his filmmaker wife Shirikiana Aina, and sister Selome, set up the company Mypheduh Films in the basement of his home in Washington, DC. Ashes and Embers has recently been restored and released by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY label.)

So, in the pre-lightweight digital days, Gerima took Sankofa to thirty-five different cities, and it ultimately grossed nearly $3m. It was especially successful with black audiences. As Gerima writes on his website, “I witnessed theaters across America turn into night schools, as intense discourse was sparked among audience members … the black image was re-framed on-screen.”

In 1997, using the Sankofa windfall, Gerima and his family upgraded their operations to a large property unit in Washington, located a stone’s throw from the prestigious Howard University, where Gerima has been a professor of film since 1975. They converted it into Sankofa Video and Books, a venue which, as I discovered on a recent visit, still thrives today. Its walls are lined with DVDs and books about black history, literature, and culture, while Gerima frequently hosts screenings in the spacious parking lot, and schedules open mic nights for poets and musicians.

A cafe was added in 2007, where one can purchase food items named after esteemed African and African-American directors (“a ‘Charles Burnett’, for example, is a panini filled with pesto, smoked mozzarella, dill, tomato, and olives, suggesting that no sheep were killed in its creation.) Of his venue, the stocky, white-bearded, softly-spoken 69-year old tells me, “When the black community meet here they call it ‘liberated territory’, which means a place where folks can come to study and think critically.”

Sankofa Video and Books is also a crucial part of Gerima’s independent filmmaking apparatus, fitted with editing facilities where he and Shirikiana can cut their films, and educate students. Gerima, who was extremely generous with his time, showed me to his downstairs editing suite and ran me a series of a clips from his ongoing project, The Children of Adwa, a documentary about the Second colonial Italo-Abyssinian War, which lasted from October 1935 to May 1936. Gerima inherited the project from his father, playwright and historian Abba Gerima Tafere, the author of books like Gondere Begashaw, a chronicle, written in the Amharic language, of anti-fascist uprisings during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in World War II. Gerima has been recording the testimony of Ethiopian fighters for around 20 years, and intends to make the entirety of his research available to historians.

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The Children of Adwa is a companion piece to both Teza (2008), his award-winning historical epic, and more specifically Adwa (1999), a lyrical documentary about the victory of the Ethiopian patriots over Italian colonial powers in the eponymous concluding 1896 battle of the first colonial war. 安卓网飞app screened Adwa at the Venice Film Festival, and its conscious reframing of history through the director’s national lens, plus its unsparing exposure of Italian brutality, offended local sensibilities. “People stormed out,” he recalls. “Here was an Ethiopian history coming, and it ruined their ideas. Italians always say to me, ‘we built roads, we built clinics and hospitals, we weren’t as cruel as other colonialists’, and I would say ‘Oh no, I remember my father’s book!’”

Gerima’s father was his first conduit to a life in art, and a key figure in introducing him to liberationist, anti-colonial politics that would definitively sequester him from the mainstream. When Haile moved from Ethiopia to Chicago in 1967, he attended drama school, studied as a playwright, and would act in his father’s plays. It was at UCLA, however, where he developed his filmmaking chops. After making a pair of ruminative, dreamlike shorts which filtered black liberation struggles through the respective individual consciousness of a college basketball player (Hourglass, 1971) and an imprisoned woman (Child of Resistance, 1972), Gerima made his feature bow with the staggering Bush Mama (1975). Broaching questions of class, race and gender in a manner rarely seen, this riveting blend of vérité-style docudrama and Brechtian agit-prop centres on a black female welfare-recipient (the charismatic Barbara O. Jones) and her broken family surviving in LA’s impoverished Watts district. Its opening authorial credit gives the game away regarding Gerima’s intentions: Rather than “directed by”, a scrawled legend daubed in white reads “Answerable: Haile Gerima, 1975”.

While extraordinarily relevant in a modern climate of #BlackLivesMatter and student protests at the University of Missouri, Bush Mama was the product of a specific political context (the Vietnam war, anti-colonial struggle, institutional racism) which deeply impacted the filmmaking approach of Gerima and his colleagues: “In the early 1970s there was a rainbow of people who had been casualties of racist cinema, who wanted to countermeasure,” he says. He cites filmmakers like Jorge Sanjinés from Bolivia, Glauber Rocha and the Cinema Novo from Brazil, Miguel Littín of Chile, and Fernando Solanas of Argentina as influences. “Their films mediated our ambiguous relationship to cinema; saying ‘Yes, it can be used against itself.’ The fact that cinema was a perpetrator of imperialism created a very ambiguous relationship for me. I wanted to use film against its own established legacy of what it had been doing to non-white people. This came down to the idea of intensely questioning the cinematic grammar itself.”

Bush Mama

Another huge influence on 安卓网飞app was Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, widely regarded as the father of African cinema: “When I saw [Sembene’s 1963 debut] Borom Sarret”, he says, “I thought, ‘Oh, I can make an Ethiopian film! It doesn’t need to have an English script.’ English is a very imperial language, and [its prevalence] makes you feel like all your characters have to speak it to be in a movie. I saw Sembene’s film, and that very same night I stopped writing my next movie Harvest: 3000 Years in English and started writing it in Amharic.”

Filmed in Ethiopia in the direct aftermath of the overthrowing of Emperor Haile Selassie, this stunning monochrome drama chronicles a peasant family toiling under the scornful eye of a wealthy landowner. Alongside Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977), Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982), and Billy Woodberry’s 安卓网飞app(1984), it’s one of the indisputable high points of the “LA Rebellion”, a term retroactively coined by African-American historian Clyde Taylor in 1986.

As it happens, Gerima is not overly fond of the moniker: “It’s not truthful,” he says. “The very people who endorse this movement now rejected it when it happened — the establishment negated and undermined every innovative form we stumbled through, like jazz.” Gerima is also skeptical of the notion of the Rebellion as solely a black cinema movement, as it is widely regarded (for example, a recent Tate Modern retrospective was entitled LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema). “Initially it had Latin Americans, Asian students, and even some white kids who were into this idea of a cinema of liberation. But then, typical of the black bourgeoisie in America — and the pitfalls of black nationalism — it was excised from its historical context to make it a ‘black’ phenomena because America deals in race relations only.”

He continues, “I had more identification with a Brazilian filmmaker who I did not even like as a person, but he was a proponent of the liberationist cinema we were all thinking of.” (For his part, Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and mastermind of the ongoing LA Rebellion restoration project, has written: “I believe the name is not only historically justified, but accurate … To ignore the specific cultural and political context of post-Watts Black America would do an injustice to all African and African American filmmakers at UCLA.”)

Gerima is circumspect yet piercingly honest about why the UCLA school of filmmakers have not enjoyed the careers their talents should have ensured: “We could not sustain a communal, collective co-existence beyond our school days, and that has impacted on all of us. Also, we were naive on the business aspect. We were alienated with the ugly culture of capitalism, but we never converted a socialist business idea, to co-produce each other’s movies, to co-exist, in a very formidable way; it’s a shame.” Gerima recently took to website Indiegogo in an attempt to fund a new narrative feature (Yetut Lij), but fell well short of the ambitious $500,000 goal. The process of finding funding may not get easier as the years go by, but Gerima keeps busy, and will remain an inspiration for all advocates of non-mainstream, anti-colonial, liberationist cinema.

Auteur and author at Sankofa Video Books and Cafe

Author’s note: A version of this article originally appeared in the June 2015 print edition of Sight & Sound Magazine.

Black Audio Film Collective, 1989

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It’s no accident that the word ‘Audio’ shared level billing with ‘Film’ in their name: sound held equal importance with image in the realisation of their multilayered output. This remained the case when the group disbanded, and three founding members — director John Akomfrah, producer Lina Gopaul, and sound designer Trevor Mathison — re-emerged in 1998 as the collective Smoking Dogs Films.

Mathison was born in London, of Jamaican heritage, in 1960. His intricate work incorporates elements of dub and musique concrète, and functions as a binding agent for the stylistically disparate visual information featured in the group’s work. Akomfrah cites Mathison as a crucial collaborator: “The musical worlds of these films take the form they do partly because I’ve worked for so long with Trevor,” he told Sound on Film’s Daniel Trilling in 2011. “We’re both very interested in noise, for want of a better word: what Trevor at one point called the ‘post-soul noise’. These are sounds that take their cue from pre-existing black musics … but they’ve been defamiliarised, put through a sonic box that renders them strange and unusual.”

“Strange, unusual sounds” pepper the landscape of Akomfrah’s directing debut Handsworth Songs (1986), an essay film about the social unrest in the eponymous West Midlands district, which invites the viewer to reflect on how mainstream news grossly simplified the complex roots of the conflict. Mathison’s meshing of vocal loops, political broadcasts, dubby beats and surging electronics evokes specific musical influences — reggae soundsystem pioneer Jah Shaka (飞客网盘app下载_飞客网盘app安卓版下载_软吧下载:2021-11-16 · 飞客网盘app介绍： 飞客网盘app是一款好用的网盘应用，致力于为您提供一个私密的云端存储空间，你可将你的重要文件同步备份至云端，也可进行高速的离线下载。非常的快捷好用，是您的贴心 …); industrial pioneers 安卓网飞app; David Byrne and Brian Eno’s cut + paste classic ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts飞客网盘app下载_飞客网盘app安卓版下载_软吧下载:2021-11-16 · 飞客网盘app介绍： 飞客网盘app是一款好用的网盘应用，致力于为您提供一个私密的云端存储空间，你可将你的重要文件同步备份至云端，也可进行高速的离线下载。非常的快捷好用，是您的贴心 …The Ghosts of Songs’, the film boasts “a polyvocality of recorded testimonies and intercessional poetic voiceovers that, contrary to the ‘explanatory’ panoptical impulse of the documentary narrator, build an oblique relation to the audiovisual track.”

As well as conjuring fractured, haunting aural landscapes (see/hear also: 1989’s Twilight City), Mathison excels at integrating existing music to imaginative effect. In Who Needs a Heart (1991), a bleak docudrama about London-based 1960s self-styled revolutionary Michael X (aka Michael DeFreitas), avant-garde jazz largely stands in for dialogue. Why imagine words, the film seems to ask, when the feral, squawking horns of Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy evoke the pain and paranoia of the characters and the era appropriately enough? Jazz is also to the fore in The Stuart Hall Project (2013), which matches the melancholy-suffused music of Miles Davis against various archival recordings of the eponymous scholar in a moving, time-collapsing duet (“When I was 18 or 19,” says Hall in the film, “Miles Davis put his finger on my soul”).

Trevor Mathison

In postcolonial-historical collage The Nine Muses (2010), Mathison’s scope is at its widest, forcing the viewer to challenge received canonical wisdom: he blends a vast range of classical texts (read by actors in voiceover) with Arvo Pärt liturgicals, negro spirituals and Indian courtly music to bewitching effect. Mathison also appears in front of the camera, playing a silent, deadpan wanderer stranded in a succession of ice-white Alaskan landscapes.

In essay film-cum-Afrofuturist fantasy The Last Angel of History (1996), meanwhile, interviews with esteemed black writers, cultural critics and musicians (including George Clinton, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Derrick May, Carl Craig etc.) are interwoven with the fictional story of a “data thief” who must travel through space and time in search of the code that holds the key to his — and the black diaspora’s — future. Yet subversively, almost none of the cited artists’ music is deployed in the film. “Last Angel proved conclusively to both me and Trevor that you could actually use your own sounds to bring [these worlds] into being,” Akomfrah told Trilling.

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One of dubmorphology’s most recent projects was the ambitious 飞傲音乐app下载-飞傲音乐播放器安卓版下载_红警家园网:2021-1-3 · 飞傲音乐app是一款非常好用的手机音乐播放器软件，专为播放高品质音乐而生。相信不少玩HiFi的朋友都听说过飞傲品牌，而这款飞傲音乐app专为安卓手机打造，专为手机解码耳放设计，提供了非常不错的本地音乐播放体验，赶紧下载吧。 软件特色, a “memory collection spaceship” installation at Tate Britain. It’s a collaboration with writer Gaylene Gould, who told me about their process: “We sat piecing together ideas and concepts, trying to map the complex mess of human behaviour. Trevor, who is also an accomplished artist, would quietly draw a sketch that perfectly encompassed what we’d been trying to grasp. The swiftness with which he is able to embody a complex idea is astounding. I’m convinced he’s a wizard.”

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