Ground breaking computer generated graphics from one of the pioneers, cool (and cool looking) Lillian Schwartz (1927-2024).
In Rotte Sun (Red Sun, 1970) four West German women decide to kill as many men as they can. It's a groovy era, though, so even with a packed agenda, there is always time to cut a rug.
Red Sun tries very hard to be daring in terms of its attitudes toward life, death, sex and revolution but is far too turgid and muddled to shock. It is oddly compelling, however, rather like watching the old, slow, pleasantly boring early iteration of reality TV show Big Brother, just punctuated by murder rather than arguments about who's eaten all the cereal.
Nuits Rouge, d. Georges Franju (1974)
Georges Franju's last film (a low budget French-Yugoslav-Italian TV production) has some of the kinetic energy of Judex, and even a little of its poetry, but only in very short bursts.
The plot, which is a load of Tin Tin type nonsense about the lost treasure of the Knights Templars, allows for action, intrigue and a somnambulistic Gayle Hunnicutt in a Catwoman outfit, killing people with deadly darts launched from a blow pipe.
It all ends in a James Bond style 'assault on the secret base' finale, which is quite hard for a director to pull off with seemingly only twenty people at their disposal. Franju manages it, of course, he's Franju.
Sylvia Koscina as the last minute heroine of Judex: Daisy, the fortuitously passing acrobat.
Judex, d. Georges Franju (1963)
Thirty years ago, when I was a film student, I'd spend my down days lying on the bed in my little room and watching film after film I'd taped off the telly over many years, sometimes all day until it was dark and time to go to the pub. I watched everything I could, but I had a somewhat self-conscious bias for 'the pantheon': Truffaut, Godard, Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Hawks, Hitchcock, Cocteau, Franju.
Hitchcock, Cocteau and Franju provided the most watched films - Vertigo, Orphee and Judex, respectively. Whatever criteria of film art I currently possess was largely formed by repeat exposure to these three masterpieces.
Judex has, over the years, become my favourite, not least because its wears its brilliance so lightly. Franju's homage to Louis Feuillade's seven hour crime serial from 1914* is a hugely engaging 90 minute film that moves quickly but smoothly, as if on castors, from one striking scene to another until it ends (the transitions sometimes take the viewer by surprise, and it takes a minute to become reoriented). Franju is an inventive and stylish director, but not a flashy one: his greatest skill here is in creating a wholly believable secret dream world where people with incredible talent (for good, for evil) are conducting an epic running battle while everyone else goes about their boring business.
Judex has an incredible internal integrity: everything is off by a few degrees, but it is never weird or outlandish - the settings and the situation and the people all makes sense, they are recognisably real. There is something of the 'uncanny valley' in it, i.e. the discomforting feeling real humans get when confronted with something almost but not quite human-like, here extended to a world which is familiar in most ways but simultaneously slightly askew. The viewer is not uneasy, however, instead they are intrigued and, besides, Franju does everything he can to entertain: a non-stop plot, crisp cinematography, wonderful visuals, convincing and attractive characters, and a great score of music and composed sound by Maurice Jarre.
Towards the end, the absurdities begin to pile up to almost delirious effect. The mysterious crimefighter Judex, who so far has been presented as an almost omniscient mastermind and technical genius, is reduced to sending the comic relief detective and his street urchin sidekick to a local bar to make a phone call to get help. From nowhere, a passing Circus provides a hitherto unknown beautiful acrobat (the wonderful Sylvia Koscina) who is immediately caught up in the action. Ironically, it is her, not Judex, who hastens the conclusion, becoming engaged in a life or death struggle on a Parisian rooftop with the delightfully evil, catsuit clad supervillain(ess).
The heroic acrobat Daisy also has the best line in the film (perhaps any film), when she meets up with her old flame, quite by chance: 'Remember my Uncle, the evil lion tamer? The lions ate him! We are free to be together!'
I've probably seen Judex forty times. I never tire of it, I hope I never will.
* an end title states that the film is 'in memory of an unhappy time', but then 1914 did mark the beginning of the slaughter of WW1, in which 1.3m French soldiers were killed along with half a million civilians.
I'm not an unhappy or cynical person, but I am something of a nihilist: I struggle to get the point of it all. That said, I am moral and law-abiding and absolutely fascinated with the world, particularly the world we humans have made for ourselves to see out our meaningless lives. As I stumble around I try to record as much surface detail as I can. I'm not a particularly good photographer, but I am persistent, and the world presents a never-ending cavalcade of stuff - here is just some of it.
