“Basic Instincts and Other obscure objects of desire”

“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