Issue 3: Spring 2009
Editorial- Spring 2009
A Nocturne (Bill Mousoulis)
From where I'm sitting, last year's Cork Film Festival was a pretty outstanding edition. Terence Davies, one of the world's finest filmmakers, was present for a complete retrospective of his almost unerringly exquisite works. Buster Keaton's greatest masterpiece, Steamboat Bill Jnr (1928), and his most famous, The General (1927), were both screened. Canadian Super-8 specialist John Porter proved Super indeed (as is discussed elsewhere in this issue), and the 'Free Radicals' experimental film programmes boasted work of the quality of Siegfried Fruhauf's Night Sweat (2008) and Christoph Rainer's excellent Fawn (2007). Marcel Wehn conducted an intensely, and quite unexpectedly, moving documentary séance of Wim Wenders early years, One Who Set Forth (2007). And Wenders' contemporary, Werner Herzog, returned to full form with the aid of a suicidal penguin in his splendid Encounters at the End of the World (2008).
With the passing months, memories of these films have merged into a warm haze of satisfaction which, in turn, has become the residual affective index of Cork '08. Yet one highlight lacks: A Nocturne (2007), an Australian underground vampire movie by Bill Mousoulis. For many years a key figure in Melbourne independent filmmaking, Mousoulis has created a vast body of work, mainly shorts but also eight features of which A Nocturne is the latest. I was familiar with some of these and an admirer of his Lovesick (2002) in particular. Yet A Nocturne appeared in some ways a departure for Mousoulis, especially in terms of its genre.
"I pride myself on making strange films. It's to do with impurity (of genre, plot, style, etc.), the way I mix things up, the way I seem to be using something conventional, but then I don't follow through with that." If we take this nearly decade-old statement as Mousoulis' directorial declaration of intent, A Nocturne remains completely consistent with his ongoing aims. Nevertheless, it would have been hard to predict that Bill's ‘strangeness' would veer into territory better defined by the examples of such B-movie masters as Jean Rollin and Jess Franco than by regularly cited influences like Godard, Akerman or Rossellini.
Steeped in Goth chic, A Nocturne doesn't skimp on the ensanguined visual eroticism proper to the tradition of poverty row fangfests. And lead actress Vanessa de Largie compellingly incarnates the genre staple blood drinking lady-vamp. Yet the cinematic genealogy that I'm trying to claim for A Nocturne has deeper and more interesting implications than Halloween party iconography. It also concerns the radical privileging of moments of extreme affective intensity chiefly arising from an intense engagement with performative physicality and narrative disorientation over the smooth unfolding of traditional linear storytelling. Another common factor is a liberating lack of self-consciousness. These filmmakers are not afraid of appearing absurd, naïf, reclaiming certain elemental powers of cinema with a freedom and a poetic fearlessness that passes under the sign of Feuillade. Reality and the fantastique bleed into each other as small budgets allow for both the real world and the unvarnished reality of illusions occurring in the real world to create a haunting atmosphere quite beyond the hermetic reach of big budget productions.
Of course, there are as many differences as similarities between Rollin, Franco and Bill's latest feature. But they all stake out a fertile territory at the intersection of the rude, unfussy potency of stock B-movie impulses and a variety of experimental traditions resulting in a sort of cinematic art brut. The fragmentation of A Nocturne, in which characters appear and vanish without warning, and subplots pop up for a scene or two never to be developed, never mind completed, serves a very specific purpose. It gives rise to an uncanny sense that it is a film made for its characters, one that seems to assume the audience already possesses knowledge of the workings of the supernatural subculture it chronicles. These smudged margins lend an eerie credence to an imaginary milieu. Scenes of blood-drenched savagery alternate spasmodically with largely still passages of vampires languishing in the grip of ennui. It is a film structured less around a causal progression of events than a moody, random alternation of states of consciousness resulting ultimately in a starkly existential statement. Small wonder that this passionate, visionary work which eschews narrative slickness for an occasionally clunky, often moving heart-on-sleeve ferocity was so resoundingly rejected by the Cork audience. In fact, they gave Bill the single most negative reception of his entire career. This is a telling gauge of the aesthetically conservative nature of much of this city's film culture, where the tradition of the ‘well told story' remains unassailable.
Vanessa de Largie in A Nocturne
Although A Nocturne's fragmented structure might serve a slightly more project-specific purpose, it teeters on the brink of Jess Franco's vertiginous anti-narrative approach to cinema-as-carnival. With an estimated 188 films to his name, Franco is now well into his seventies. A prodigious powerhouse of incessant creativity, his magnificently undisciplined career has resulted in an apparently unstoppable stream of cinema of wildly varying quality. Yet his best, his worst and everything in-between almost invariably feel part of the same deranged trajectory through the shifting circumstances of exploitation cinema, a winging improvisation in which flights of breathtaking inspiration and audacity can take off from clouds of ineptitude and sloppiness. Taking his cue from jazz music, he obsessively teases out his intertwining fixations with erotica and pulp fiction, occasionally scaling the heights of formal experimentation within the surprisingly flexible parameters of his elementally basic field. And, whatever the outcome, Franco's intense involvement is frequently palpable- detached professionalism remains a very rare sin. Along the way, he has been responsible for several unqualified masterpieces of exquisitely oneiric, darkly lyrical fantasy, including Virgin Among the Living Dead (Une Vierge chez les morts vivants, 1973), Female Vampire (La Comtesse noire, 1973) and She Killed in Ecstasy (Sie Totete in Ekstase, 1971).
Serge Daney distinguishes between love of cinema and passion for cinema. The latter state concerns the expressive evolution and refinement of the art, typified by the work, one might suppose, of such singular giants as Godard, Dreyer and Garrel. Love of cinema, on the other hand, is fetishistic, stemming from contentment with the medium as it already is. In the acceptance speech Franco made on receiving his honorary lifetime achievement Goya award this February, he described himself as simply ‘a man in love with cinema'. Perhaps nowhere better than in Jess Franco's oeuvre is ‘love of cinema' embodied. Yet complacency is hardly the first quality one associates with Franco's often defiantly free, personal and gloriously extreme riffs on familiar B cinema patterns. The fevered mirror he holds up to cinema reveals not a static museum of ossified formulas but a rich arsenal of figurative possibilities. Jess Franco is cinema- cinema in all its crassness, vulgarity, brutality, puerility, vitality, invention, wonder, joy, eroticism, poetry, violence, bizarreness, obsessiveness, mystery. And, of course, addictiveness.
So how about an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar for George Kuchar?
-Maximilian Le Cain
Lina Romay in Jess Franco's Exorcism (1974)