“Basic Instincts and Other obscure objects of desire”
Watching debuts at the Edinburgh Film Festival, made me
ponder “what constitutes a bad film”, in cult terms, and what represents a
trangressive, ‘Bizarre’, pleasure . The recent spate of what has dubiously been
termed “torture-porn” are excesses in
cynical miserabalism masquerading as topical allegory, neither poetic nor
pleasurable; slashed-up cornucopia of studio nonsense like the recent Babylon AD; then there are those which,
like true cult, internally contain their own contradictions, being too weirdly
uncontainable. “Classic” film philosophy splits on the axis of Bazinian and
Eisenstein; cinema as Platonic truth composition, and cinema as language in and
of itself montaging the imagination. Like the pure “spectacles” of the
surrealists, couldn’t a virtually plot-less “event” movie be the new avant
garde- the latest Eszterhas
penned effort a satire gorging on its own camp extremity, a pharmakon re-awakening
new modes of post-feminism with its deranged and masochistic Goddess with a
knife/beckoning finger dichotomy. Here’s the radical part: there are finally
the pleasures of the total-dream film.
Some movies, ranging from infamous McGregor/Judd flop Eye of the Beholder, through scream-camp
Basic Instinct 2 to auteur of
Euro-tic art Jess Franco’s Vampyros
Lesbos, wilt under even such spurious, sociologizing to reveal a completely
new metaphysical mad-dream. Pure art, if you like. Perverse cineastry.
A scorpion lingers in a pool like knotted flowers, a cloaked
brunette walks through coloured chambers fluorescent sinking in pool-mirror
Jean Cocteau surfaces, kites flying in the wind cast against white sunsets,
mirage into blood flowing on windows, and then the Countess bores her
charybdis-Baudelaire purple sex-eyes at the camera and it’s all terribly baroque.
All these films like dreams but none more so than Vampryos, evoking early Sunday mornings tapings from Channel 4 then
revisited late night viewings in Autumnal zones, alone within the house of
memory; it exudes bleary-eyed embers of
night-time places, saturated with a
narcoleptic flu-laden cough-medicine stoned surrealism and faint oppressive
swoon-like quality. But then the use of wide-angle pronounced shots, means
everything is askew, everyone is literally about to swoon within this film. Basic Instinct 2 is a landscape of
psychotropic motifs as Cronenbergian orgy scene geometries occur in tower skies
presided over by Foster's phallic gherkin blocks clothed in glass refractions,
and hyper-stylised underground dens. Virtually unchanged over ten years, time
has abstract frozen for the eponymous “Eye”, whilst the constant disguise-life of
quarry/beloved Judd symbolise what she is; celluloid idolic, a beautiful
cipher, the essence of attraction unwithering, Freud’s inscrutable woman. Christmas was when
she left; and Christmas it continually is, time fossilised like pure crazy
love, eating away at him and tempting him, like Cult cinema, from credibility
and pay-checks into its
V.U/‘stripen-mistress’ game. Franco’s use of filters diffuse colours,
natural and ambient light into intoxicating, exotic patterns; after all, as
David Thomson says, the unique orange grove light shading is what makes
Hollywood so scarily spell-ful. That greedy light admits Franco’s black-magic
stealing of movie iconicism, its phosphorescent
hues and blinding sky-line as maudy as the drifting jazz-tones which recall
Joronowky’s work on El Topo, when
they aren’t psychedelic spy-film fusions. Spatial dislocations enticed by the
editing style combine to make an abstract movie proceed with the elegiac
movement of dream logic, lurching back and forth with a kind of controlled manic
jazz.
Vampyros has a
true jazz aficionado’s
disregard for the niceties of linear development and narrative convention. Anarchy
harnessed, the complex structure of jazz exists in his work as an appeal to
improvise to the tune of an organ-heavy Manfred Hübler/Siegfried Schwab theme
with electronically garbled, almost submarine vocals. Distorted voices merge
over in a collage like ethereal raps. just as Vampyros requires the visual equivalent of a jazz ear to “tune
into” its syncopated, math-jazz lounge rhythms and noises. Quentin Tarantino, someone
who knows well enough about pure-obsession with film and who celebrates the
grindhouse poetry, used V.L’s jazz strains as an influence for his Jackie Brown theme. The pleasure of a
startling soundtrack -Eye of the Beholder
had potential just as Bristolian merchants of Gothic-Soul Massive Attack were
asked to score it. With sparse snippets of frozen, crystalline dialogue and the
rumblings of a Mezzanine/Hundred Window, it could have fulfilled its latent destiny
and launched into lush nightmare rather than puzzlement. Currently, it’s tantalisingly
frustrating; a piecy ghost movie comprised of hums and clicks of camera
lenses.. Basic Instinct is just neo-noir funk, parody shrill strings
cum-hithers; shrink-talk dialogue between Dr Glass and Thewlis’s rabid London
copper on the “scent of Catherine
Trammel’s pussy” is set up almost solely as a glissando tension before the
dénouement of its portentous pay-off line- “It means…I smell blood”. BI:2 must be the thrill of cocaine sex
materialised in a head-rush translation to a music score, car-crashing the arty
psychological thriller compositions of Cronenberg perversities and the
sanatorium formalism of his earlier movies with the absolute abasement of a
cheap screw exploitation-video-thriller. Catherine Tramell’s exhibitionist
drug-den fuck is metaphor for the movie’s self regard; shot through oblique
camera angles fragmenting and re-metonymising Stone’s “look at me” like some
post-modern Petrarch object of adoration and incredulity. BI:2 is a random event sexualisation; a kind of meta-porn, the
exhibition of Sharon Stone’s ‘Mae-Davis’ aged starlet bared as flagrant
greedy-postfeminist- narcissism trip, its ‘diegetic justification’ a joke of
looping logic. The plots are just elisions, really. Eye of the Beholder’s about watching and perverse chastity but BI:2 is fetish; the entire movie logic
working up the necessary time for arousal, deferment being conducive to pay-off,
fermenting a series of puns, hints and sublimation teases delaying coupling
until the second hour. Even then the censor symbolically has quantumed the
game-play by censoring- like a deliberate conspiratorial pun- almost all the
sex. BI:2 is the guilty seduction by
something smart, alluring and ridiculous; like Catherine Tramell,
unapologetically fixated on the minutiae of the carnality and the delirious
Bataillean excesses of talent and time wasted on parody. Flouting banality and
boredom, it drives itself onto giddy pleasures which threaten to engulf it in preposterousness,
this film that drove respective critics into apoplexies of hate beneath which
simmered a terrible guilty desire.
Oh, they’re temptingly Rubensian, gorged with
text-inter-text these films; what they call scophilia runs riot alongside the
deeper pleasures of the curios and archives section of culture, bad-art
copulating with respectable works of art in phantom histories. Consider Joanna;
she’s Eye’s idol like Cohen’s “Suzanne” is the Sophia-goddess of knowledge,
like Leonard’s girl-deity she has “no love to give you”. To Know Judd is
to know emptiness and the movie’s profound shallow swallow-ness. Still more, Jo
Erris mirrors her name-sake
goddess of discord who threw the golden apple ‘For the Fairest’ beginning the
Trojan War. The Eye’s fading lost girl figure is like Don`t Look Now’s lost
child-dwarf leading him further finally through the abyss like Zarathustra. Eye
saves Erris slo-mo angel on a motorbike, delivering her into the underworld
like one of Orphee’s angels meets Kenneth Anger wild-pastiche parody trash. Free,
sometimes even nonexistent, narration is associated with that art cinema and testing, avant-garde
experiments not concerned with Aristotelian unities and that jazz. Like a new Kurtz
it goes beyond itself in search of the ‘Last Movie’/Last Movie and like Dennis Hopper’s Topo-like lysergic trip, it
swallows up sense in the riff-poesy beatnik connections. Fermenting subjectivity
is disruptive scrawl over bourgeois conventions. Eye of the Beholder and BI:2
both slaughter cod-psycho-analysis as archly as Hitchcock in Psycho by offering a plethora of hysterical
explanations and visual equivalences; Glass is asked straight-face to play out
his psycho-drama Marnie-aping
cure-screw inside halls of mirrors- penetrating his own toned reflection within
a monstrous build-phallus representing Psychiatric Law; snow-globes mimic and
short-circuit Citizen Kane’s ‘Dime-store
Freud’ before journeys to Alaska in Eye
of the Beholder. Scientists in hyper-real techo-films use tarot cards, Doctors
voodoo magic. All of which dissipate before the allure the female lead exerts. As
psycho-tattle, it’s beyond creepy-mordant, the weird casting of old Judd with
her edenic lips as boy McGregor’s surrogate daughter. Crashing her car in the
desert, forced to inject heroin, poor evil Joanna is subjected to a murky
Hitchcockian sadism reserved for his objects of obsession, utterly deserved. Tramell
is a blonde parody of Hitch’s blondes fused with Joe E but Countess Karody is
the real deal, all dark brooding eyelashes like a bride from the East, Romania , Spain , she blurs into one.
Vampyros, made by
Jess Franco in 1970- lets pause to consider- Sorbonne surrealist, Welles AD
Jess Franco. Shlock-meister, flesh-peddling cult ironist Jess Franco, crowned
with sneering accolades of jaded filmic sybarites looking for the next
shuddering frission of debasement to their finely tuned sensibilities. Every hagiography
comes complete with - “he’s made some ba-ad movies”. And he has. Yet most
“exploitation” film-makers came from reputed schools: Tinto Brass (‘where
there’s muck, there’s Brass’) of Caligula
infamy initially came from the Marxist experimentalists- akin to Godard’s Vertov
collective. Maybe it’s the murkier end of a tendency within Sixties liberated
film art; itself borne primordially from modernism- the coalescence of Freud,
Jung, Lacan, Molly Bloom’s Monologue through to Finnegan’s womb-tongue. The Fin
De Siecle all car-crash born-sexed into the ‘nightmare’ of the Twentieth Century, those wet-dream
deconstructive visions of L’age Dor,
the visceral shock of the avant-garde with
Dali-esque unearthly alogical syntheses. The closest antecedent is
Warhol’s anti-cinema-including of course “Blow-Job”- Factory-pieces evolving
into Morrissey’s “Flesh for”
features; dark shadows of glam-stars re-creating pieces from the cultural
detritus of B movie monsters, as poly-sexual re-writes of the genre, writing
against like, well, like Derrida, or Robbe-Grillet.. Franco’s school shares
another feature with Warhol’s. Vampyryos
luminescent, cosmopolitan Soledad Miranda whose shiversome beauty like autumn
leaves; cheekbones like symmetry and eyes like sin resembled a Factory Icon, intimately connect her to
Eddie Sedgwick, Nico or Marianne; then dying at 27, that morbidly legendary age-
Hendrix, Jones, Joplin, latterday “saint” Cobain. Druggy icons/images like
drugs. The cult movie state is connected with the universe of ripping against the conscious world; they’re like
peyote. Nakedly subversive of genre,
Vampyros knows sixties light and
dark drug-dreams were in colour freak-outs not Hammer creaks; spiders’ webs are
‘replaced’ by draped fishing nets; and the mysterious kite stands in for bats. Floating in her Hockey Bel-Air meets Tangiers pool
with a crimson scarf on, Miranda is-heiress in San Tropez- Elle in a sea of liminality- somnubalist-
predator, the embodiment of sex - a lizard-a star-fish-the scorpion- her own
lover. Later she wears a fur hat and coat on the beach- pure aesthete. With sunglasses
and silk scarf she is bound in by her glamour; the brutal gothic tragedy of her
beauty in the psychedelic inflected
hedonism of the sixties sartorial style idiom spilling into film. Watch her
pupils after half an hour and they’re speaking a deep, Kiedeggard talk- the
sorrow of a beautiful woman, looking like Jackie O, sensuous honeyed-moneyed
decadence married with aloofness and haunted iris’s. Framed in the Countess’s psychedelic
Sapphic boudoir of velvet lace, Linda chooses to curve time through drug trip
temporal re-alignment for a limbo of potions and caresses. Instead of being saved, at the end Linda
willingly succumbs. Whilst going out into the desert, as the “trip” increases, Eye of the Beholder becomes like a
pursuit Zabriskie Point, a continual
trip into the maze, the desert being the space of psychedelic and solipsistic
soul searching, meditation and mortality played out in canyon sized gestures. Eye
acts out scenarios; pursuit, surveillance, asking her out in a Diner; as Joanna
crashes in the chase scene that is not a chase scene this is American cinema
married to the best and worst of the new-wave. Like BI:2 it follows the tropes of the US
genre flick and deconstructs them by splicing them together like Bowie and Barthes’s cut up
techniques.
At its worst these kind of films collapse; BI:2 has the ability to reduce critics
to paralanguage not only over “awfulness” but the obliquity of its mise en
scene ludus- Showgirls, on the other hand is high camp. Warsaw Dark, directed by uber- cinematographer, Christopher Doyle,
filmed in Polish without a script and screened at Edinburgh was a maudy,
metaphysical detective noir with girls, politics and ‘mind-fucks’. It could
have been- sans irony- Eye of the Beholder. The difference between the two
is a crystalline shine of composition as opposed to dim tone. Marrying elements
belonging to the "great culture", and genres least recognized for
their artistic values, such film makes its own history of cinema, eros and
thanatos, good and bad, collapsed into the death of taste and its resurrection.
Scopophilia, cinephilia, eye-candy
