Although Vernon, Florida and Marwencol share obsessive subjects, their creator’s pursuit of the topic parallels their fixation. Throughout this series, obsessives mark themselves by following what could be a chance encounter as far down the rabbit hole as they can. Jeff Malmberg, after seeing his subject Mark Hogancamp’s dioramas in ESOPUS magazine, decided to film a documentary short about the man and his miniature world. Four years and numerous continent-crossing trips later, the final feature was complete. The yarn about Vernon, Florida runs that Errol Morris had heard rumours about a group of in the Florida panhandle who were deliberately maiming themselves in order to retire on the insurance money. Unsurprisingly, the inhabitants did not take kindly to Morris’ attempt to document this practice. The proposed feature, ‘Nub City’, never happened, but Morris discovered a more quietly peculiar collection of individuals about whom he could continue to make his film.

Both Malmberg and Morris both know how to do their job most effectively by getting out of their subjects’ way, or at least providing a finished product that gives a sense that they have. Marwencol is even credited as a film ‘About Mark Hogancamp’ rather than ‘A film by Jeff Malmberg’. Despite this, it is hard to shake off the notion of the directors’ sensitivity towards their subjects. Their openness is all the more surprising because they are both are in retreat: in Hogancamp’s case it is self-imposed; in the case of Vernon, it is closer to criminal hideout. Morris’ initiation into the ‘den of thieves’ is clear though: the glee of the anecdotes has a demimonde camaraderie and prideful one-up-manship to it, with his editing adding to the stories deadpan appeal.

Malmberg’s approach removes Mark’s creations from the threat of classification as ‘outsider’ art. While adding new names to the canon, there’s a danger that outsider artists will become not only diminished (and somehow patronised) in the institution, but perhaps more dangerously, legitimised. It’s a credit to the sympathy Malmberg has with his subject that the film only becomes entangled in these kinds of distinctions in its final third. As critic Elvis Mitchell points out, there is a parallel between the first time director’s anecdotal and unglamorous approach to his material and Hogancamp’s process: Marwencol is ‘about a man who goes through a life-changing event and becomes an artist as a result.’[1] This goes for Mark and Jeff.

While the film does not especially probe Mark about the analogues of his fantasy, the candour with which he presents his world (at times unsettling in its unvarnished appeal for love, lust, certainty and fulfilment) require no interviewer’s gloss. Although it can be queasy to see Hogancamp retreat to the ‘simpler’ time of World War II guts and glory, with all of its lurid bombshells, we accept them as products of the unconcealed escapism of a man with a legitimate need to retreat.

Throughout this series, obsession has most often been cast in a negative light, yet here it becomes the source of transformation. Many films sprang to mind within the framework of the professional obsession that could offer a more balanced view of fixation (artists, musicians, scientists, sportsmen – any high flyer whose story creates narrative pull between achievement and the more terrestrial world of human connection). Mark’s obsession, essentially a retreat from the uncontrolled outside world, never enters into the isolating mode we have seen in almost all of the other films in this series. Unlike Camera Buff’s hero’s alienating fixation on his art, its purpose is that it eventually leads him back into the world at large – not just of the final art show (where he struggles), but also of the film itself.

But it is not a simple case of Hogancamp returning to our world. The message of the film necessitates that we take his world seriously. Erased of his character, Mark’s quest sheds light on all artistic impulses: to provide a utopian aesthetic environment, but also create a balanced (if slippery) connection to ‘real’ life.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) d: F. Tashlin

‘Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.’ Werner Herzog

Welcome once again to the annual roundup of all things that combine the cute and the cinematic. If you’ve ever stopped yourself mid-ennui in a Truffaut film to remark, ‘Look at the little piglet!, this one is for you. From Puce Moment‘s beautiful borzoi, to Zazie‘s squirted pussy cat this is my selection of the best of fluff on film. (Incidentally, it seems the spaniel is the predominate film dog. Who knew?)

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) d: J. Jireš

The Cremator (1969) d: Juraj Herz

Queen of Spades (1946) d: T. Dickinson

The Killing (1956) d: S. Kubrick

The Company of Wolves (1984) d: N. Jordan

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) 'd': M. Bay

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) d: R. Aldrich

All that Heaven Allows (1955) d: D. Sirk

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) d: M. Powell & E. Pressburger

Eyes Without a Face (1960) d: G. Franju

Puce Moment (1949) d: K. Anger

Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986) d: A. Clarke

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo (2011) d: J. Oreck

Zazie Dans Le Métro (1960) d. Louis Malle

Apocalypse Now (1979) d: F.F. Coppola

Pride of place this year goes to Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?’s Shamroy. This poodle is a running gag, but also something of a style icon. Shamroy, you brightened my year and here’s a showcase for you, long departed though you are.

BONUS:

Here’s one I find very cute but have no recollection of the source of. Answers on a postcard. This year, I promise to be more comprehensive about cataloguing this stuff. For the historical record you understand.

I’m very proud that my article ‘”My House Has Wings”: Edward James’s Follies,’ is published in the excellent new issue of The Coelacanth Journal. The theme of the issue is ‘High-Rise’, and my essay is a discussion of the polyglot Edward James, who is best known as a patron of the surrealists. After a traumatic marriage, James found solace in his utopia of Las Pozas, a small village where he built a series of outlandish structures in the rainforest. The Journal is 3 pounds plus postage, and also features great writing from Martina Schmücker, Phoebe Blatton, Louisa Bailey and Protoklis Nicola, as well as great visual contributions by Naomi Pearce and Stuart Middleton and Anthea Hamilton. Buy a copy here.

The King of Comedy, one of the hidden gems of Martin Scorsese’s career (along with the grossly underseen Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)) was made under unusual circumstances, and seems to split the critical opinion of the two films that created those circumstances: 1980’s Raging Bull and 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese, battered from making the former film and worsening health was encouraged by Robert De Niro, his preferred choice for the role of Son of God, to turn away from adapting Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel in order to produce a comic script the actor had acquired by film critic Paul D. Zimmerman. Since the film could be shot on location in New York City, they would also put themselves out of harm’s way of the brewing Writer’s Strike.

Despite the inauspicious circumstances of the shoot, the attention to detail of the film is one of its enduring qualities. Pupkin’s ‘primetime’ suits at his parcel courier job, Jerry Langford’s production offices with their Arne Jacobsen-style furnishings, Rupert’s unseen mother (Scorsese’s own mother in one of her many small parts across his films) – breathe outside life into the film. Where Taxi Driver isolates us in the mind of Travis Bickle, The King of Comedy places Pupkin’s delusions in contexts that render them brutually, realistically awkward, as his fixation and relentless self-belief shrivel. The King of Comedy steps outside the usual pattern of creative-dreamer-sensitive character identification that propel so many films, and shows the true cost of the dream world that the protagonists of films as diverse as The Wizard of Oz to Garden State inhabit.

A shot reminiscent of the final one from All About Eve

This film – very much a spiritual successor to Scorsese’s first major collaboration with De Niro in Taxi Driver – allows us to see Pupkin’s madness as but one species of mania, whether it is Jerry Langford’s paradox between ubiquity and isolation (flipping idly through channels in his penthouse), Rita’s peculiar belief in Rupert or Masha’s stalker.

Sandra Bernhard’s Masha is perhaps the highlight of the film. Her neurotic society stalker is played with flailing delight by the young comedian. Although only having turned twenty-six as the film began shooting, she appears far younger even. As overindulged brattishness turns to blackly comic amateur sensuality in the final scenes, Bernhard shows herself up to the challenge. It was Bernhard who provided some of the films few improvised moments. The scenario of Lewis encased in duct tape, prepared for his candlelit evening in her apartment gives Bernhard a comedic gift she does not squander.

Please be aware that the notes from this point deal with the film’s ending.

The final moments of the film are absolutely tantalising. With a final, ‘You’ll see,’ signoff from Rupert, a montage of archive footage of Pupkin’s rise to fame begins to play, as he converts his incredible life story into a bestselling autobiography (King for a Night) and his own primetime show. The ambiguity in this scene is perfect: has Pupkin been crowned the king in a last outrageous twist in the media satire, or are we witness to Rupert’s last, highest, flight of deluded fancy (perhaps honed at great length during his prison stretch)? The material gives us equal measure of both reading.

One hint is the echo of a previous zoom shot of Pupkin regaling an imaginary crowd of cardboard fans. Their illusory applause and laughter is echoed here, but now with an unsettlingly repetitive theme tune. Pupkin’s suit too is maniacal: devilishly red with a matching bowtie, clashing all the more with muddy televisual quality of the image. This last detail sends us back to the beginning of the film, and the ‘filmed before a live television audience’ look of ‘The Jerry Langford Show’. As much as Pupkin’s dream seems unreal, the connection that this shot creates underlines the satire of the film: although Rupert Pupkin is a figure of delusional self-importance and grandeur, it is only in emulation of the absurd pomp that is beamed out to him every night across the television waves. All that separates him and Jerry is being handed the mic.[1]

P-U-P-K-I-N It's often misspelled and mispronounced

Camera Buff (which has the less sensational title Amator (amateur) in the original Polish) was Krzysztof Kieślowski’s first internationally recognised film, prior to the institution of martial law in December 1981, which stymied the release of Polish film beyond the domestic market. Having produced a variety of films (short features and documentaries that reflected both the realities of the Communist regime while offering guarded criticism), this film was his second feature, but marked a digestion of all his work until that point and its effect on his private life.

The plot seems to begin at the exact moment that most films reach their conclusion. Filip (Jerzy Stuhr, who had starred in Kieślowski’s first feature, The Scar (Plizna) the previous year) has a wife, friends, a job and is expecting his first child. From this, an inexplicable drive away from the ‘complete life’ begins. Filip’s wife Irka (Malgorzata Zabkowska) becomes increasingly frustrated at his alienation from their lives, while Filip believes he is immortalising it. The body of the film is then a tale of the uses of cinema (preservation, documentation, manipulation, propaganda) and the paradoxical removal from experience that comes with the attempt to capture the ‘realities’ of life.

In the best sense, Kieślowski’s filmmaking is still that of a documentary maker here. His tender application to the daily life of ordinary humans, the anxious approach to the politics of depiction, and the feeling of serendipity rather than artifice in his best shots: all of this extends from a firm grounding in documentary practice. Furthermore, Kieślowski chose to feature many non-professionals to depict themselves.

Kieślowski emerged from the National Film School in Łódź, along with Roman Polanski and Andrej Wadja (though unlike Andrzej Żuławski, whose Possession is the final film in this series). Like many of the centralised film schools in Communist Europe (FAMU in Prague seems to have provided a similar outlet), their influence lay not necessarily in the teaching environment – which could often be stultifying and prescriptive – but in offering a group of similarly impassioned people to interact and collaborate. There was also the opportunity to watch a broader selection of films than those offered to the general public.

Although Kieślowski claimed never to have shared the protagonist’s preoccupations (‘I wasn’t ever fascinated with the camera like that. Later on I made films because that was my profession, and I was too lazy or too stupid or both to change profession at the right moment.’) he does shares Filip’s reticence to share the title of auteur or artist. Instead, he considered himself an artisan. Even if Kieślowski had not been engaged in the difficulties of raising his own young family, his camera eye had turned to a young couple’s delivery of a baby in his 1974 documentary short First Love (Pierwsza Miłość). Kieślowski’s humility places him firmly in the world of the amateur film clubs that have such an ambivalent presence in the film. Although their subsidy was certainly in the service of glorifying the Soviet state, the reality they captured was impossible to convert to pure propaganda. Their legacy was celebrated in an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska entitled Enthusiasm, offering samples of the films in a recreated 1970s Communist milieu.

The self-reflexivity of the film is actually a double reflection: not just about a film about filmmaking, it is about Kieślowski’s specific experience of filmmaking. Although he has denied the central dialectic of the film – that ‘normal’ life is incompatible with artistic creation – the parallels with his own creations are clear. Kieślowski’s career leading up to this film had alternated between feature films and documentary pieces, mostly depicting single figures – a night porter, a bricklayer – and their nobility in the face of vast bureaucracy. Camera Buff finds Kieślowski at a crossroads, meditating on the difficulties of the past and setting an agenda for the future.

Please visit www.enthusiastsarchive.net to view an archive of the films from the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition.

Kane spoiled by the adoring critics

One of the fantastic things about education is that it forces you to do a lot of things you wouldn’t ever dream of doing without the spectre of obligation upon you. I would have sincerely doubted anyone who told me that I would find myself deeply, embarrassingly in love with Citizen Kane. Yet so it is.

Personally speaking, I think the reason that I didn’t appreciate Kane on first viewing was that I first watched it as a literature student. While it wasn’t a film that I disliked enough – or was arrogant enough – to dismiss (though there are plenty of those), I remember being distinctly underwhelmed. Rewatching it now, I can see that the reason its revered by filmmakers and film writers is for its use of specifically filmic techniques. Kane is rife with cinematic tricks. Non-genre films are rarely noticed for their special effects (most likely this is because they are in the service of an unshowmanlike verisimilitude rather than self-conscious spectacle), but according to Pauline Kael eighty percent of Kane’s stock was treated to add multiple exposures and impossible compositions. It’s a treat that’s only half-baked (or worse, given Orson Welles’ famous dismissal of the McGuffin of Rosebud as ‘dime store Freudianism’) for the literature student because of all these ‘distracting’ stunts and visual gimmicks.

That said, it’s also a film that you kid yourself you know better than you do. It’s been often parodied to the extent that the shorthand of Kane=Rosebud is known to those who have never seen the film (if Family Guy were less relentlessly shallow and anti-art, it might realise that its maelstrom of reference and inserts is at least in part in debt to Kane. As in all areas, the more recent Fox animation pales in comparison with the original and best’s take on Kane). It’s also contains multitudes – scenes from multiple viewpoints, achronological structure and a sketch-like approach that leaves whole scenes floating free from a digestible narrative context – and these multitudes are conveyed in such a frenzied, hyperstilized fashion that it is hard to encompass them in recollection.

Furthermore, the film can feel like listening to someone playing two different songs, in quicktime, simultaneously. The Screwball speed of the dialogue – just one way in which The Social Network plunders from Kane’s storehouse – is constantly competing with the density of imagery before you.

And most critically, its status as shibboleth rest heavily upon it. If the critics who vote in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound ‘best film ever’ poll were truly keen to offer it tribute, they would refrain from elevating it the heights of isolating greatness it has so consistently maintained. It’s humiliating to want to turn to people and say, ‘You know what’s a really good film? Citizen Kane.’

 It’s a great shame, because if it held non-classic status, people would be able to be personally seduced by its greatness.  Discussion and division amongst respectful – and healthily disrespectful – peers is what makes for a worthwhile critical community. I certainly felt betrayed by Shakespeare when I finally turned to Hamlet, and I think as a play it’s a victim of its unimpeachable reputation. It has been some time since the tides of critical debate have lapped against Kane’s greatness. Without the thudding consensus, audiences would take it to heart as a cult item and allow it to breathe and be reconsidered. I think those who dislike it should take the time to make an impassioned and brattish call against it (it’s a far from perfect film). Unfortunately, I’m not the one to hack it down so that others can rise to its defence: I loved it.

'Did you hear about that Citizen Kane? What a stinker!'

And I loved it for its small moments. Citizen Kane continually offers you the compliment of getting the hint yourself, especially in its most minor touches. There’s one shot I’d like to say a brief word about that stands in for any number of others with such plangency.

It’s a short shot in which Jim Gettes watches over Kane as he makes his demagogic and presumptuous speech to the masses. The comparison to The Triumph of the Will is obvious (its imagery was well-known in Hollywood at the time; apparently, there was a constant petty struggle to borrow MOMA’s copy of Riefenstahl’s film), but the fashion in which Kane’s failure to rise to political office is preempted in this scene is nothing short of genius. At the height of his grandstanding, the action cuts to a high window showing Jim Gettes – though we don’t know him yet, even though we’ve heard his name decried endlessly in Kane’s speech – surveying Kane’s peroration.

This new viewpoint has a sense of fatalism about it, with Kane’s laughably hubristic campaign poster dwarfed and his ambitions brought to a footnote in history; there’s something funereal about the fashion in which Gettes dons his bowler, and, at this height, the stage has a hint of the scaffold about it. Obviously, this position above Kane has a sense of omnipotence and puppetry (we see it pay off in the next scene as Gettes’ machinations come to a head), but there is a deeper visual meaning that is specific to this film in particular at play here.

In Kane, there’s a visual scheme that links memory with miniaturisation (we shrink into the snowbound scene through Thatcher’s diary, but more importantly the snowglobe allows this thought to be held in the palm of his hand). With this shot, we see Gettes and the camera simultaneously bury Kane in history, reducing his ambition to the same frustrated, painful past as the snowglobe scene.

It’s a piece of filmmaking of incredible economy, that only becomes more so in trying to capture it in mere leaden words. It’s ironic that a film about a man whose biography cannot be told because of his elevation, is itself obscured from view by critics who prevent us from truly seeing it for its high esteem. But I can’t really fault anyone for voting for it as best film ever: like the gimmick of Rosebud itself, the secret of Citizen Kane’s genius are forever out of grasp and therefore forever compelling.

Birkbeck College have once again been kind enough to allow me to host a series of screenings this Autumn term. The theme this time is Magnificent Obsessions: Films in thrall to mania, compulsions, fixations and addictions. The films are shown every Wednesday until Christmas and start at 6:30. There’s a brief introduction to each film and I produce programme notes to accompany each screening. I’m really proud to say Laura Mulvey, one of the most interesting and well-regarded interpreters of film,  will be introducing two of the films in the series. Leave a comment if you’d like any more information about the programme. This film screening series is free to attend and for educational purposes only. 

Wednesday 12th October
Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus/1959/Brazil/107 minutes)

Wednesday 19th October
Camera Buff (Krzysztof Kieślowski/1979/Poland/117 minutes)

Wednesday 26th October 
The White Diamond (Werner Herzog/2004/Germany-Japan-UK/94 minutes)

Wednesday 2nd November
Special Screening in alliance with Laura Mulvey’s Avant-Garde Cinema Course
Wavelength (Michael Snow/1967/Canada/45 minutes)

Wednesday 9th November
Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl/1945/USA/110 minutes)

Wednesday 16th November 
The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese/1982/USA/109 minutes)

Wednesday 23rd November
Special Screening in alliance with Laura Mulvey’s Avant-Garde Cinema Course
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai De Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
(Chantal Akerman/1975/Belgium/201 minutes)

Wednesday 30th November
Tropical Malady (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul/2004/Thailand/118 minutes)

Wednesday 7th December
Double feature:
Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg/2010/USA/83 minutes
+ Vernon, Florida (Erroll Morris/1981/USA/55 minutes)

Wednesday 14th December
Possession (Andrzej Zulawski/1981/Germany/127 minutes)

Here’s another in my series of Desert Island Discs. This week is Mike Leigh who was castaway on 21st September 1997 (the year of his underrated Career Girls). His choices can all be listened to here on Spotify. I chose to use the German version of ‘Mack the Knife’, though there is the US Original Cast Recording version available. Given that the music in Mike Leigh’s film is almost universally awful (besides Topsy-Turvy, which the first and last choices on this list looks forward to), I can continue to assume given his good taste here that it’s budget strictures that keep him using acoustic dross and drippy soul.

His choices were:

1. ‘So please you, sir’, from The Mikado (or, The Town of Titipu): W.S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan

2. ‘Mean Old Bedbug Blues’ by Bessie Smith

3. ‘Le Tourbillon’ from Jules et Jim: Jeanne Moreau

4. ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves)’ from Nabucco: Giuseppe Verdi

5. ‘Ballad of Mack the Knife’ from The Threepenny Opera: Kurt Weill

6. ‘Enigma Variations – Dorabella’: Sir Edward Elgar

7. ‘Clarinet Concerto in A major’: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

8. ‘The Long Day Closes’: Sir Arthur Sullivan

Mike’s choice for book was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his luxury was a lavatory and lavatory paper. For those looking for a brief reminder on his views on good digestion, look no further.

Here’s the first of a new weekly series I’ll be creating based on the Desert Island Discs of consequential people. The first is Dirk Bogarde. You can listen to all of the songs (bar Oscar Straus) on the playlist I created on Spotify of these songs. Go here.

Broadcast on the 28th September 1964.

1. Franz Liszt: Consolation No.3 in D flat major

2. Oscar Straus: C’est la saison d’amour

3. Franz Liszt: Piano Concerto No.1 in E Flat/Hungarian Rhapsody

4. Judy Garland & the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra: The Worst Kind of Man

5. Franz Lehár: Vilja (from The Merry Widow)

6. Ludwig Van Beethoven: Symphony No.5 in C minor

7. Carol Channing: Hello Dolly! (from Hello Dolly!)

8. Rex Harrison: I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face

Dirk chose The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss as his book and John Signer Sargent’s painting ‘Conversation Piece: The Sitwell Family’ as his luxury.