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.
Fear No Evil, d. Frank LaLoggia (1981)
An atmospheric, slightly hysterical movie teling the hitherto untold tale of the son of the Devil's troubled teenaged years in in the suburban hell of Rochester, New York, Fear No Evil has a great punk / new wave soundtrack, an often unwholesome blend of sex and violence, and a genuinely exciting, partially animated climax in which Lucifer Jr. is destroyed by the coruscating, cleansing light of a processional cross to semi-psychedelic and eye rubbing effect.
Patty Hearst, d. Paul Schrader (1988)
'Marie Antoinette didn't know anything about the French Revolution until they cut off her head'.
On February 4th, 1974, 19 year old heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a terrorist group called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). The original plan was for the SLA to exchange her for some imprisoned comrades, but this didn't happen, and the group refused all offers of ransom money from her parents.
After two months of imprisonment, sensory deprivation, indoctrination, intimidation and rape, Patty was given the choice to 'join or die' so, on April 15th, she helped the SLA rob a bank whilst wielding a machine gun.
Hearst was finally returned to her family in September 1975, 17 months after being taken prisoner. The following year, she was sentenced to seven years in prison for bank robbery and using a firearm during the commissioning of a felony. Brainwashing was not used as a defence, as it had no precedent in law. The sentencing Judge stated: 'rebellious young people who, for whatever reason become revolutionaries, and voluntarily commit criminal acts will be punished'. Motherfuckers*.
Paul Schrader's fast moving film is unambiguous about the ordeal that the previously sheltered and naive Hearst goes through, and Natasha Richardson plays Patty as permanently scared, off-balance and confused (her IQ dropped by about 30 points during her captivity, and her health was seriously affected). Crammed into a small apartment, the SLA spend their time doing calisthenics, posing with guns and sleeping with each other. Worst of all, THEY WILL NOT STOP TALKING, not even for a moment - endlessly and monotonously droning on about race, about class, about power, about violence, about sex, about money, about offing pigs- the whole scene is claustrophobic, suffocating, stultifying, deafening - it makes your brain itch. After half an hour I was ready to shoot someone.
*Hearst was released after two years at the behest of President Carter, and later pardoned.
The prodigious Jeff Keen cuts, rips, scratches, scribbles, burns, melts, mutilates and defaces his way to fervid, febrile creation - snapshots taken from his 1967 film Cineblatz.
Jeff Keen (1923-2012) is one of my all time art heroes. Keen was an autodidact who never joined any part of the establishment, not even briefly and, as a result, received none of the attention and accolades due to him as one of the greatest and most original British artists of the 20th century. Posthumously, his reputation has grown, but still not enough. He is one of my biggest influences.
His films are perhaps his primary artform, and they remind you of why Edison called his early cinematic device the Kinetoscope – they are full of motion and energy, crazed, febrile things that burst onto the screen in a barrage of crashing planes, mushroom clouds, plastic soldiers, fires, floods, sexy girls, hairy men, super heroes and super villains, starring his friends and family and set to intriguing and ear popping soundtracks. The young Keen had fought in World War Two (he called it ‘the best time of my life’) and the violence and anarchy of that experience was a major and indelible influence on him.
After leaving the Army, Keen spent a single term at Art College, but was working as a gardener with Brighton Council’s Parks Department when he made his first short film in 1959. A confirmed cineaste, it suddenly occurred to him that he could make a film himself, so he borrowed an 8mm camera and set out on a fifty year career as the UK’s most innovative radical film maker.
