Robert Talbot And The Bride Of The Head

Discussing the concept of authorship in relation to mini-mogul Charles Band is more complicated than it might first seem. On the face of it, Band is a latter-day Roger Corman, heading a series of production companies specialising in low-budget cult horror and sci-fi films. As the 'studio head' and initial ideas man for his early companies (Charles Band Productions, Empire Pictures, Full Moon Entertainment), Band could ensure that his personal interests were present in films that he had little actual involvement in. Most prominent of these interests was the fascination with 'small things that kill you', which he himself traces back to his love of the final segment of 1975's Trilogy of Terror. We can see this interest expressed in films such as Parasite, Dolls, Troll, Ghoulies, and most successfully the Puppet Master series. Full Moon Entertainment established another important tendency in Band's output – the franchise. Full Moon produced films for the direct-to-video rental market of the early 1990s and the establishment of connections between the films helped to distinguish a clear brand and encouraged video renters to try all of their related products (adverts for future instalments, or Band himself showing off poster art for films in production were included after the films on the VHS cassettes).

Nowadays, as head of Full Moon Features (the third iteration of Full Moon), Band is more closely involved in production, directing some 20 out of 35 films. Here, Band's authorship is even less in question, as we can trace not only the premise back to him but also the execution of the individual film. Franchises and small killer objects have not lessened, with films like Doll Graveyard, Ooga-Booga, and the Gingerdead Man and Evil Bong series continuing the trends in a cheaper and dafter way. But there is an interesting middle period to Full Moon, when the company was known as Full Moon Pictures, that I think casts Band's authorship in quite a different light. We can almost see in the late 1990s that Band is something of a victim of his own success. He had already made a point of bringing all of Full Moon's successful franchises to a close while the company was still Full Moon Entertainment, but found that he was pressed to make more Puppet Master and Trancers films during the 'Pictures' years. These were uninspired and limp entries, seemingly designed to sabotage their franchises, and unusual in that the Pictures years were otherwise devoid of sequels.

Band instigated several new labels during this time, each aimed at a slightly different target audience. While Full Moon continued to make mainstream horror and sci-fi films, other labels focused on more specific variations. 'PulsePounders' produced kids adventure genre films, 'Filmonsters' likewise aimed at younger audiences but focused on resurrecting the classic monsters (Dracula and Frankenstein and the like), 'Monster Island Entertainment' produced Godzilla-style tokusatsu movies, 'Alchemy Pictures' focused on the highly dubious notion of ‘black’ horror movies made for an African-American audience (by white American filmmakers). Several other labels dealt with other markets. These new labels functioned as the equivalent of franchises, giving audiences 'more of the same', but without direct continuity links between films.

What does this tell us about how Band felt about his company at this point? Well, on one hand, it certainly reveals a level of optimism; he was confident that the company would be capable of producing such a variety of films without having to fall back on sequels and repetition. Yet at the same time it implies a certain degree of disillusionment with the success of some of his ideas. Instead of more specific Puppet Master films, Band wanted to make more general ‘small things that kill you’ films. Ragdoll, Totem, Hideous! and Blood Dolls can be seen as continuing the idea without continuing the series. It seems as if the company-cohesion of the 'Entertainment' years became a straight-jacket for Band, who wanted more variety in his output. This labels-approach would give Band more creative freedom, certainly, but it would also allow for diversification and marketing opportunities (each new film offers up the opportunity for new collectible figures). But what about more personal reasons? Did Band actually have a more – for the lack of a better word – ‘artistic’ agenda with this idea? To answer this question, we have to call upon two fictional characters that Band created during this period: Eugenia Travers and Robert Talbot.

Both of these characters have only ever appeared in a short promotional video for the still-unmade Bride Of The Head Of The Family (a project that I shall return to later). Eugenia is the titular Bride, the fictional star of the story, but Robert Talbot is more complicated – he is the pseudonym employed by Band at certain points during the Pictures years. In the promo video, his face is covered with a black hood and his voice has been digitally altered, establishing him as an intentionally ambiguous figure, just as much a work of fiction as Eugenia. Talbot’s credits include directing Mystery Monsters (for PulsePounders) and The Head Of The Family (for another label, Pulp Fantasy), and as the writer for Blood Dolls (for Full Moon Pictures). It is important to understand that each of these labels did not, at the time, explicitly relate themselves to Full Moon as the parent company. So, although nowadays Head Of The Family is considered a Full Moon film that Band is particularly fond of, at the time of its release, all reference to Full Moon or Band were removed. Why?

Robert Talbot was created as something of a 'get-out' for Band, allowing him to make films that he wanted to make, separate from the pressures of delivering the product that people expected from him and Full Moon. Head Of The Family is an exceptionally quirky film; although revolving around murder and a family of freaks, the film is a far cry from horror and instead opts for a more comical cult film tone. Myron Stackpool is the titular head, literally a gigantic MODOK-like cranium with tiny and ineffectual limbs. He controls his three siblings like puppets with something akin to telepathy. When local diner owner Lance accidentally spies the Stackpools abducting a man for experimentation (Myron wants to transpose his intellect into a more normal body), he threatens them with the police and blackmails them. The plot then thickens with schemes and counter-schemes between Lance and Myron, eventually culminating in a fire and the apparent deaths of most of the cast.

The following year, Talbot/Band made Mystery Monsters (subsequently released under the title Goobers), a strange story ostensibly aimed at children, but with little to appeal to anyone under the age of thirty without an understanding of the cut-throat business of television. Tommy has just landed a role on the top children's TV show 'Captain Mike's Mystery Monsters', starring three highly realistic monster puppets that seem to be alive. Shortly after he arrives, Tommy discovers that in fact the monsters are alive; they are demons from another dimension and their former mistress Queen Mara has travelled to Earth to retrieve them. As kids movies go, it's probably the only one you'll find that makes jokes about child stars needing analysts and comparisons between television and Hell. The same year, Band directed Hideous! for Full Moon under his own name. This film revolves around two rival collectors of medical oddities, Emile Lorca and Napoleon Lazar, who fight over a new specimen – a highly deformed human foetus with four eyes – only to discover that the creature is alive and has brought three other specimens back from the dead. All of the above films star J. W. Perra (a.k.a. Michael Citriniti) as Myron Stackpool, the demon Squidgy, and Emile Lorca, and are also unified by their lack of any traditional 'good guys' or strict villains. Instead, all three films play out more like episodes of Dallas or Dynasty but with freaks; their stories are of groups of amoral characters screwing each other over. The films are all written by Benjamin Carr (who would become the go-to writer for much of the late 90s at Full Moon) and revel in their casts of self-absorbed characters with Machiavellian designs on one another.

The glorious soap opera storytelling would reach its height with Blood Dolls, a Full Moon film directed by Band but 'written by' Talbot. The story is about the power struggle between the enigmatic billionaire Virgil Travers and the manipulative dominatrix-cum-businesswoman Moira Yulin. This film seems designed to be the encapsulation of everything that defined 'Full Moon'; Virgil Travers is a freak, a genius with a head the size of an avocado, and his trusted right-hand man, Mr. Mascaro, wears clown make-up and has his teeth sharpened to points. As figures, they are homages to the Puppet Master character Pinhead and the Demonic Toys character Jack Attack respectively. On top of this, Phil Fondacaro (a long-time Band collaborator appearing in Empire movies such as Ghoulies 2 and Troll and later Full Moon movies like Decadent Evil 1 & 2) appears as an eye-patch wearing butler with an electric cattle-prod, who forces a caged punk girl band to play mood music. And it wouldn't be a Charles Band film without killer dolls; this time they are a team of three racial caricatures that execute Travers' business rivals.

It is as if Band wanted to reclaim the essence of Full Moon for himself, condensing it down into a purely personal project (it is one of the few screenplays that Band wrote himself, albeit as Talbot). Killer dolls, kinky girls, weird machinery, clowns, freaks, Phil Fondacaro and franchising opportunities (the caged girl group were initially planned to tour as a Full Moon-backed musical act) are all contained within the film's eccentric 84 minute runtime. This consciously quintessential Full Moon movie was to then be incorporated into Band's more personal 'meta-franchise' of the Bride of the Head.

Which returns us to Eugenia. Head Of The Family, Hideous!, Mystery Monsters and Blood Dolls are all arguably linked by the unmade film Bride Of The Head Of The Family. This film remains a passion project for Band (17 years after its initial announcement he still hopes to get it made) but it is its very absence that makes it all the more interesting. Although the Talbot/Perra/Carr films described above have little relationship to one another in continuity terms, they are all intertextually unified by Bride Of The Head; the film is, obviously, designed as a direct sequel to Head Of The Family, with Myron meeting and falling for Eugenia, but the basic hair and make-up design for Eugenia is utilised in Mystery Monsters for the demon Esmerelda. The various deformed foetuses from Hideous! are implied to be Eugenia's creations, not least of all because of Virgil Travers' comments in Blood Dolls where he discusses his mother Eugenia's brilliant experiments in genetic engineering and describes himself as “perhaps her most perfect creation... although not, as you can see, altogether perfect”.

The late 90s saw Charles Band attempt to expand his Full Moon company into a media empire whilst at the same time carving out a far more personal and offbeat mythology that tied certain favoured films together. These were linked not through franchising, but through implied references to non-existent films and the use of non-existent cast and crew (Robert Talbot, J. W. Perra and others). Shortly after Blood Dolls Full Moon Pictures fell into hibernation for several years, eventually resurrecting as Full Moon Features. Though Band would helm many of the films from this point on, they would never display quite the same idiosyncratic vision as those that he made between 1996 and 1999.

                                                                                                                                       - P.S.

Undercover Authorship

The above image by Tim Burton expresses the young animator's frustration at the Disney Studio's insistence on conformity and determination to force individual talent into pre-set expectations. If you wanted to work at Disney in the 1980s, then you had to obey the strict rules of what constituted the 'Disney Brand'. Burton's unique style did not suit the studio much at all (though, given that fact, he did do rather well out of them - being able to make the decidedly un-Disney shorts Vincent, Frankenweenie and Hansel And Gretel) and he eventually left to pursue his own artistic agenda. This panned out quite well for Burton himself, but also rather well for Disney in the long-run, who have made a fortune out of Nightmare Before Christmas and have repeatedly tried to entice Burton back to put his own stamp on their established properties (successfully with Alice In Wonderland, unsuccessfully with Maleficent). Another frustrated animator with artistic dreams that ran against the grain of 80's Disney was John Lasseter, who likewise left Disney to follow his own star, only to find that that star brought him right back to making money for Disney again.

In both cases, individuals with a clear artistic stamp were forced out of the studio for not conforming to the status quo and were only incorporated back into the fold once their idiosyncrasies had proven themselves out in the real world. But what about those that were left behind? The other Disney animation directors of the 1980s that managed to toe the line and produced material that the studio executives were happy with? Were they in some way less artistically-minded? Did they simply keep their heads down and get on with what they were told?

I shan't try and offer up an overview of the people at work in Disney during the decade, but what I will do is look at the films of John Musker and Ron Clements in the context of 'authorship'. When we look at their filmography, we're struck with how mainstream it appears to be - you can't find another pair of directors from this period with as successful a track record as these two. The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, Treasure Planet, and The Princess And The Frog - each would seem to be 'Disney movies' first and foremost, providing us with all of the things that we would expect from the studio rather than any individual person (or persons). But when we look closer we can see a pattern of elements in their films that link them into a unified whole. It's not that these elements are missing from other Disney films, but no-one else combines all of these particular elements together in the way that Musker & Clements do.

While the previous post on Burton explored the concept of authorship largely in relation to aesthetics - the look of the films - with Musker & Clements we need to focus on the narrative structure and themes to see an authorial pattern. First off, the cast of characters; Musker & Clements movies will nearly always feature a hero/heroine, a love-interest, two comical sidekicks and a villain. At first glance, this might appear to describe any Disney cast, but bear with me. The hero/heroine and love-interest are of least interest here, not only do we find them in the majority of Disney films, we also find them in 95% of all Hollywood films. The other two categories are slightly different, though. All Disney movies have comic relief characters, but Musker & Clements have a particular affinity for the 'removable double-act' - two characters whose role is mainly to communicate with one another, rather than to contribute much to the plot. We can easily take Sebastian and Flounder out of The Little Mermaid and it will have little bearing on the way the narrative pans out. The same goes for Abu and the Carpet in Aladdin, Pain and Panic in Hercules, or Louis and Ray in The Princess And The Frog. Now, of course, it's not that these characters contribute nothing to proceedings, but that their roles (if any) are largely functional and could be performed by any random character. The botched murder of baby Hercules could have been given to undifferentiated goons, Aladdin's escape from the Cave of Wonders requires a flying carpet - but there's no reason for that carpet to be a character.

Two obvious counter-examples here might be Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King and Lumiere and Cogsworth from Beauty And The Beast, neither of which are directed by Musker & Clements. But although they are both comical double-acts, they differ from the above examples. In the first, Timon and Pumbaa are integral to the narrative; it is their philosophy to life that changes Simba in the second half of the film (it's not about their function in the story, but their personalities). In the other, the two belong to a wider cast of enchanted-object characters, Mrs. Potts most prominent among them. The dynamic is in fact a three-way one, with the more down-to-earth Potts acting as a buffer between the two in their constant bickering. Other examples of the character type - Mushu and Cri-Kee from Mulan and Meeko and Flit from Pocahontas - do serve the same function as in Musker & Clements films, but the films lack the other recurring elements (that I will discuss below).

The other character type is the villain. Now, Disney has a long tradition of famous villains - they've even become their own meta-franchise recently - but these villains are of a very particular type. Modeled mainly on James Bond bad guys, Musker & Clements villains are intelligent, sarcastic, have very specific multi-staged schemes, are obsessed with taking over whatever portion of the world they happen to inhabit (all of 'mousedom', the seas, Agrabah, the cosmos, New Orleans), and very often have some powered-up final form, like a video game boss (Ratigan and Ursula grow in size, Jafar becomes a giant snake, Hades calls upon the hired muscle of the Titans). While Gaston from Beauty And The Beast is clearly the antagonist of the film, he doesn't possess any of the above attributes. Neither does Ratcliffe from Pocahontas, Shan Yu in Mulan, Frollo in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, or Clayton from Tarzan. Once again, The Lion King seems to give us the exception - Scar fits the bill perfectly, and we have to reiterate the fact that it is not that each of these individual elements are unique to Musker & Clements, but that only they use this exact combination of elements.

But most striking device in the Musker & Clements tool-kit of animation filmmaking is not character types but a particular narrative approach; the two-goal structure. In most Hollywood films, the story is motored by the central character's desire to achieve their goal - to get the girl, to save the world, to find the treasure, to pilot the giant robot. This goal is established early in the film, and then circumstances and antagonistic characters thwart the hero/heroine's attempt to achieve this dream. But in Musker & Clements, the story is propelled by a character attempting to achieve a goal, which they do achieve at around the mid-point of the film, only to find that that goal has been transformed or replaced into a second goal, which now takes over as the focus of the story. Ariel is initially motivated to be a part of the surface world, and she achieves this goal only to have it be replaced by the more pressing goal of getting Eric to fall in love with her. Aladdin's goal in life is to become more than a thief and be a success - which the Genie makes a reality, only for the schemes of Jafar and the heart of Jasmine to take centre-stage. After finding out his true heritage, Hercules is motivated by one thing only: to become a hero. This he does by the film's second act, only for the sultry Meg to change the direction of his attentions. As is probably apparent from these descriptions, the second goal is always that of finding romance.

The Princess And The Frog is probably most overt in this respect, highlighting as its central theme the difference between what you want and what you need. The first goal is always what the character wants, a somewhat short-sighted or superficial desire. Once this has been obtained, its shortcomings become apparent (to the audience if not always the character) and so the second goal of settling down in a heterosexual relationship takes its place as the new, more worthy goal. You might want fame or money or legs, but what you need is the love of a good woman or man. As always, we could argue that The Lion King fits the Musker & Clements bill despite not being a Musker & Clements film. It has a comical double-act, a sarcastic and scheming villain and is very definitely a film of two distinct halves. But Simba has no immediate first goal. Although he certainly wants to be king (he just can't wait for it), he does not need to do anything to achieve this. It is not a goal but an eventuality. Only in the second half of the film does he develop a clear idea about what he needs to do and finds the resolve to do it.

The films of Musker & Clements allows us to see that an authorial stamp does not have to be as obvious as a particular aesthetic or overt thematic concerns, it can take the form of completely mainstream, commonly found elements (which at first appear to be no different to any other film) combined in a particular way to highlight a storytelling preference. John Musker and Ron Clements make their own films featuring comic relief characters that have little bearing on the narrative flow, witty and Machiavellian villains that tend to up the stakes at the finale, and heroes and heroines that pursue slightly selfish ends only to discover the joys of the opposite sex. But they also quite definitely make Disney films

                                                                                                                             - P. S.

Team Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas

To celebrate All Hallow's Eve, this month's post will look at the concept of authorship in relation to a Halloween favourite of many, the misleadingly titled Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. I'm intending to start a series of posts exploring the complexities of film authorship next month, and so it seemed appropriate to use Tim Burton, the most dubious of film auteurs, as a prologue to this.

In some ways, Burton is a prime example of the initial iteration of the 'auteur', the term Francois Truffaut used to describe a film director whose personal stamp could be seen in the finished film thanks to a recurring set of stylistic and aesthetic motifs. And it's certainly true that one can often identify a Tim Burton film just by looking at it (or even just the poster, in fact). There are certain characteristics that we expect in a Burton film, an almost unconscious checklist that audiences carry in the backs of their brains when going to see one of his films.

Another reason I evoke Truffaut rather than just the general concept of 'authorship' is because, for him, one of the defining features of the Auteur is that they express their personal vision while working within the confines of the Hollywood system. Anyone can make a personal film if they're being funded by an arts council or creating a personal avant-garde piece in their home, but to achieve it while working with a team of hundreds, with studio executives and producers looking over your shoulder, insisting that you make the film as appealing to as wide an audience as possible in order to increase box office revenue - well, that takes a very clear and uncompromising vision, says Truffaut.

Because Burton is very much a Hollywood director with a clear and distinct visual stamp on his films, there would appear to be no reason to describe his authorship as 'dubious'. But this is where Nightmare Before Christmas comes in. Before writing this post, I did a quick search through some message boards and found that to this day - 21 years after the film was released - there are still people who believe that Tim Burton directed Nightmare. The mistake is easy to understand - his name's above the title, after all - but I'm always a little depressed by how little attention people pay to the credits. Do people's brains really just switch off the second the story ends? After Jack and Sally embrace and the camera pulls back, the screen goes black and there - in large white letters - is the phrase 'Directed by Henry Selick'. I'm genuinely baffled by how people can watch the film year after year, and claim to be huge fans of it, and yet not pick up on this.

But the purpose of this post is not to rant about Burton 'stealing credit' from Selick, or how the film is good only because it was directed by Selick instead of Burton (there are plenty of other people doing that on the internet), rather it is to demonstrate that the idea of authorship in film, of identifying a 'personal stamp' in a film, can be far more complicated that we might first think.

It's certainly true that Nightmare is Burton's baby; an idea for a 20 minute television special that he concocted while at Disney, alongside the original Frankenweenie, the utterly bizarre Hansel And Gretel and a host of unrealised projects (two of the most interesting of which would be Trick Or Treat and True Love). The original story and character designs were by Burton and it's here where we can most obviously identify his fingerprints - a tall willowy figure wanting to break away from the confines that society has placed on him, an inherent trait that prevents them from being able to achieve their immediate desire, a host of bizarrely proportioned creatures, architecture with funny angles and a recurring use of black and white stripes and checkerboard patterns.

But the finished film is just over 70 minutes, not 20, and Burton neither expanded the story, wrote the screenplay or directed the action himself. Although we can say that the central theme of the film and the overall aesthetic are his, the idea that any other aspect of the film belongs to Tim Burton the individual becomes a little stretched. First, the original story was adapted by Michael McDowell, whose main output has been writing episodes of horror anthology shows such as Tales From The Darkside, Monsters and Alfred Hitchcock Presents... as well as co-creating and co-writing the screenplay for Burton's Beetlejuice. The shifting of the story into a longer format was the result of McDowell, including the addition of the love story with Sally and the villain Oogie-Boogie. The screenplay itself was written by Caroline Thompson, best known for two other Burton scripts Edward Scissorhands and The Corpse Bride as well as several adaptations of children's literature.

Burton was still involved in the development of his story into full screenplay, but he had now become the 'producer leaning over the shoulder' who Truffaut considered an obstacle that had to be overcome. And we must also take into account Selick's claim that the film was largely improvised during the animation process, using Thompson's script only as a loose guideline. The story is already three-steps removed from Burton and yet, because of the core theme and aesthetics, we can still identify the piece as a Burton work.

But surely it's more accurate to just describe Burton as the 'original author' of the work - in much the same way that Dr. Seuss is the original author of The Lorax but had little to do with the expansion of the story into a feature film (for obvious reasons). Why do we credit Burton for the finished film and not just the initial source material? Part of the reason is because both McDowell and Thompson have worked with Burton before (and after). As writers they have a fairly good understanding of what boxes to tick in order to give something a 'Burton' feel. This, of course, is not authorship but rather a kind of work ethic, a shared idea originated by an individual but executed by many. What we think of as the work of Tim Burton is really the work of the Tim Burton Team, several talented people consciously evoking the expected style.

Another important point worth noting about the expansion of the story: 30 minutes of the film's runtime is taken up with songs (and that's not including reprises). Arguably the film's most important storyteller is Danny Elfman. While in a standard Disney musical, the 70 minutes would contain maybe five or six songs, Nightmare has ten. And while ordinarily the purpose of a musical number is to condense story time - the use of music in 'Part Of Your World' expresses Ariel's emotional state far more succinctly than dialogue alone could - Elfman's songs are largely about expansion. Scenes such as the town meeting or Jack's Christmas experiments could have been half the length if their subject matter were just stated through characters. This is not a criticism (it's not that the songs are 'padding'), it's to emphasise how the story is told more through music and movement than through words.

Elfman is of course a hugely significant factor in the 'Burton feel' of many films, from Beetlejuice to Batman, from Pee-wee's Big Adventure to Big Fish, and the amount of work put into the film by him seals the deal for many that Nightmare must be a Burton film. So, not only is the story the result of four other people in addition to Burton, but the atmosphere created through the soundtrack is also the result of our associating Elfman with the director rather than anything that Burton himself has done. On top of this, there is the 'look' of the film to consider. We have already discussed how the aesthetic elements of the film are recognisably that of Burton - we could take a still from any moment of the film and be able to identify it as coming from his mind. But a film is more than still images, it is about how those images flow together to create movement - the 'look' of Nightmare is just as much about cinematography (the way in which the camera interacts with what's in front of it) as it is about character design.

Selick's personal stamp is most easily seen in the cinematography of the film; the way in which the camera navigates the spaces of the scenes are what most obviously draw comparison with James And The Giant Peach and Coraline. Take the opening sequence, 'This Is Halloween', for example. A casual viewer might only see the 'Burton-ness' of the scene, seeing the curved walls and wonky corners of the streets and buildings, the colourful creatures of Halloween Town, and the atmosphere created by Elfman's song, and make connections with other early films such as Pee-wee and Beetlejuice. But a more canny spectator will look at how the camera moves through the scene, how it skirts passed the scarecrow just as the wind spins it around, how it drifts through the street as each character sings their piece, and most strikingly how it circles around the effigy that reveals itself to be Jack Skellington in his big entrance, and see the hand of Selick at work. One aspect of stop-motion animation that often gets completely taken for granted is that camera movement has to be animated as well. The camera doesn't just float through a scene as animators busily attend to the character models. The movements just described above would have had to have been created frame-by-frame in conjunction with the character animation. This is a level of elaborateness that we often find in Selick but rarely find in Burton.

As this post has already run far longer than I intended it to, I shall quickly reiterate my main point about film authorship: when we think about the look or feel of a particular director's body of work, what we are really thinking of is not a personal vision or expression by some genius individual. Rather it is a collaborative work resulting from several parties all working towards a common artistic goal, a goal that it often shaped by the individual whose name appears above the title, but which is realised by the talents of many artists. When we think about the distinctive 'Guillermo Del Toro look' what we really mean the work of Del Toro's recurring team of designers (Mike Mignola, Wayne Barlowe, etc.) and production crew (such as cinematographer Guillermo Navarro) rather than just the director himself. But much as a band will be overshadowed by their front-man/woman, a film's production crew will often be overshadowed by the single person that we associate with that particular style - even when the person had precious little to do with the actual production of the film.

Happy Halloween!

                                                                                                                             - P. S.

Depiction and Fiction: An Epilogue

As an afterthought to that post, I thought I would quickly add one more example in the form of the ‘Dreamland’ amusement park – a fictional fairground that exists within the world of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. It was one year ago today that I first posted on the subject of Depiction and Fiction in relation to this film, as a tribute to mark the death of Kon. He has now been gone for four years and as such I find this particular moment all the more pertinent.

The story of Paprika is about a machine that allows one to enter into another person’s dreams, and so we can read the name of the park ‘Dreamland’ as a play on this. Like the rides of Pooch Island, what we have here is a fairground that exists only as a depiction, with its rides and attractions only appreciable on the aesthetic rather than experiential level. But if we look at the mascot figures appearing on the sign, the story becomes more conceptually complex.

As many of the previous posts on this subject would have pointed out, we have a multilayered complexity to the mascot figures; they are animated depictions of model depictions of fictional characters – doubly-fictional characters in the diegesis of Paprika. But eagle-eyed viewers will notice that these figures are the lead characters of Kon’s last – still unfinished – film The Dreaming Machines. The moment is designed as an inside joke, a reference to a film still in preproduction, but it turns Kon’s film into a text-within-a-text, a fictional film that the characters of Paprika might go and see.

The fact that the film will probably never be completed makes this moment all the more bittersweet – our only glimpse of Kon’s final work will always be nestled within another fiction, a depiction of a film appearing in his actual final film. This makes the end of his career, quite fittingly, a little like a cinematic ouroboros, always conceptually folding in on itself, much like the subject matter of his work.

                                                                                                                             - P.S.

Luis Bunuel: Playing God

This is the third and final part of my old undergraduate essay on the subject of Luis Bunuel’s auteurism. I should take this opportunity to highlight that I am well aware that Bunuel’s name has been incorrectly spelled throughout – I blame my computer, which does not want to let me access the appropriate accents.

III. ACTS

While the previous post focused predominantly on Bunuel’s control over filmic reality (either by taking on the role of God within the fiction, or shamelessly placing characters in ‘unnatural’ situations), the films discussed in this post demonstrate a central component of this control – one which harkens back to the films discussed in the first post – that is, the notion of time and space and their somewhat mercurial nature in cinema.

Both of the themes that were central to Nazarin and The Exterminating Angel, namely outright manipulation by Bunuel-the-God and the concerns with faith and religion, are found succinctly demonstrated and explored in Simon Of The Desert, Bunuel’s last Mexican film. With a runtime of less than 50 minutes, the film’s brevity and wit often undermine it multifaceted themes and fascinating ideas.

The film’s premise is almost like a sequence from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian; Simon (Claudio Brook) is a saintly hermit in what appears to be the earliest days of the Christian faith, revered by the locals as a miracle-worker and pious Holy Man, he spends his time standing atop a huge pillar, praying up to the heavens for the sake of the sinful mankind. At the film’s opening, the priests show their appreciation of Simon by presenting him with an even taller pillar to stand on. But this is the beginning of a sequence of events where Simon finds himself confronted with the temptations and abuses of a distinctly Bunuellian Father of Lies.

The film does not simply present a narrative of religion and faith, as Nazarin does, but rather presents an entire cosmology, complete with Devil and God. While in the other film, we must argue for the existence of God within the otherwise realist story, in Simon Of The Desert the existence of God is clear; miracles occur with sledgehammer subtlety – hands grow back from stumps in front of a crowd of hundreds. However, with these miracles comes a level of acceptance not found in the previous post’s films. The return of the man’s hands is met with the same enthusiasm as a magician’s trick, and both participant and onlookers are quick to carry on with their lives as if nothing unbelievable has happened. Within the diegesis, God’s existence is so certain it is taken completely for granted.

The film’s most interesting character is clearly the Devil. Played by Silvia Pinal, the lord of Hell here is earthy rather than evil, espouses views synonymous with Bunuel on religion as a cause of repression and, as an extension, destructive perversion. He/She is a shapeshifter, appearing in a variety of guises, from Edwardian schoolgirls, naked crones and even a highly unconvincing Jesus Christ. The Devil takes full advantage of the tricks of editing and framing – appearing behind Simon while he looks at her elsewhere off-screen.

 

 

Indeed, Pinal’s character can be seen as the embodiment of Bunuel’s personality incarnated within the diegesis. Equipped, it seems, with her knowledge that everything around her is taking place within a film, the character is a direct link between Bunuel-the-God and the characters of Bunuel’s fiction.

Simon himself, too, is a fascinating character. Much like Nazario, he is a man whose faith is pure but, in actuality, also quite useless. He stands atop his pillar, praying for the world and waiting for God to finally receive him; a vivid visual representation of the faithful’s alienation from the real world. Unlike Nazario, for whom this uselessness becomes a revelation, Simon remains oblivious to simple human nature. His inability to understand the concept of ownership, seems to be presented as ridiculous but also, perhaps, somewhat charming. Bunuel’s ultimate treatment of Simon is in many ways better than his treatment of the Mexican priest; he is allowed to remain in ignorant bliss, his faith never particularly wavering, even in the face of modernity.

The film’s finale sees Simon whisked away by the Devil to a 1960s nightclub. Simon is now dressed in modern garb, complete with beatnik-like haircut, while the Devil sits next to him, moving her body to the music. The brief moment with the two at the table drinking is perhaps the most complex in the film. Simon appears more bored than anything by his surroundings and – through the simple gesture of lighting the Devil’s cigarette – has clearly developed a certain tolerance for his companion. Though there is no clear indication that the Devil has ‘won’; Simon has not been sucked into some lifestyle of debauchery nor is he horrified by his predicament. Despite a mild interest in the name of the dance (‘Radioactive Flesh’) he is perfectly happy to return to his pillar unchanged by the experience. Here – as with Exterminating Angel – we have an example of the characters being allowed to remain ‘pure’, Nazario, the dinner guests, and Simon are not changed directly by Bunuel, only by the circumstances that he has concocted or, in the case of Simon, are not changed at all. Simon’s choice to retain his faith despite all he as been through is in sharp contrast to Nazarin, where faith in humanity is presented as a far greater force.

The common, and most obvious, interpretation of the ending is that the Devil has brought Simon forward in time in order that he might see out the last days. However, given the apparent significance of the Devil’s relationship to Bunuel and the ease with which Simon believes he can return home (as if it is another space rather than time), it might be reasonable to surmise that in fact the Devil has pulled out of the diegesis and into the real world, the world of Bunuel. Thus the diegesis can be succinctly viewed as a construct, a created reality within the world which we inhabit and therefore subject to the rules fashioned by its creator. Space and time, then, are only as consistent as deemed necessary for the telling of the story.

But Bunuel’s greatest juggling act of space and time can be found in his theological epic The Milky Way; though only 90 minutes, the average length of his films, it seems considerably longer, its absence of cause-and-effect logic destroys any frame of reference that an audience might have for gauging the length of the ‘story’ (such as it is).

Like a series of sketches, or more accurately parables, the film unfolds at its own pace, following the incidents that occur to two tramps on their way to Santiago, on a pilgrimage of sorts. These incidents demonstrate a multitude of theological views and counter-views, highlighting above all the contrast between genuine faith (which the director has lightly mocked in other films but never outright condemned) and the crimes against humanity for which orthodox religion can be responsible. Much like an extension of Simon Of The Desert, the film plays with diegetic reality as much as with time and space – there are no clear-cut definitions between fantasy, reality, past, present, future, fiction or flashback.

Within the first few minutes of the film we are presented with this scene (and I'm not entirely confident about this video working here... if not, I'll just have to post it separately later):

This sequence, barely a few minutes long, is packed with so much ambiguity and controversy that it could constitute an essay in itself. Structured in the form of a traditional flashback; the cut to the female figure that bears a resemblance to the Virgin Mary and a young man we therefore take to be Jesus followed by a return to the two tramps would imply that the Jesus-figure is Pierre, the older tramp, in his younger years. The dialogue in the two scenes reinforces this interpretation.

In itself, this creates a complex relationship – Pierre is presented as Jesus, just as Jesus is presented (via the act of sharpening a razorblade) as Bunuel; a holy trinity of character, director and God is created. But the complexity continues beyond this. As the film progresses, we learn that the figures that we have seen are in fact Jesus and Mary. A conversation between staff members at a restaurant is punctuated with examples; one waiter suggests that Jesus must have run and laughed like anyone, and the film cuts to Jesus running to meet his disciples. Subsequent appearances by both Jesus and Mary also firmly place them within the same cinematic time and space as the other characters, thereby forcing us to reappraise the moment above not as a flashback but as a cross-cut, a juxtaposition of two separate actions occurring within the same cinematic timeframe.

But this interpretation also fails as, after uttering the words “Wise woman, your mother”, the two tramps come across a boy sat at the side of the road. He is dressed in a blue shirt and shorts and has drops of blood on his palm, chest and across his forehead. These stigmatic wounds clearly relate this child to Christ and we might interpret that the film is going to be full of different figures who represent different aspects of Jesus (later in the film the two come across a ‘shepherd who talks like a priest’). But even this fails to hold up, as the child is the same boy whose face had been washed by Mary moments before – simultaneously undermining the possibility that he is the Jesus figure or that the previous scene had been occurring ‘at the same time’ as the tramps’ conversation.

The simple cut has rendered any hope of narrative space/time causality utterly null and void. This will continue throughout the rest of the film. Historical eras blend into each other without characters batting an eyelid; the two tramps settle down for the night but can here the noises of a ceremonial orgy taking place a few metres away in broad daylight; a priest advises a young couple about celibacy from both outside and inside their bedroom; characters appear and disappear without notice.

We have returned to the realms of Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or. Indeed, the opening of L’Age d’Or where Imperial Rome is founded upon the final resting place of a group of Roman Catholic Bishops would fit perfectly into the logic-defying world of The Milky Way. The presence of Mary and Jesus within the diegesis makes it clear that in this world God too must be viewed as real. However, in a more extreme fashion than either Nazarin or Simon Of The Desert the reality of God is explicitly negative, presented as the cause of much discontent. Though Bunuel presents himself as God, this is less a self-aggrandisement project than it is a case of casting himself in the role of the villain.

IV. REVELATION

Bunuel’s control over his films’ realities was not only an example of highly individualistic direction but also a totally distinctive way of creating cinema. He did not just play God in his films as a response to his own Catholic upbringing – another way of mocking the establishment – he created a cinema that was so different to the tradition of narrative-driven films of the time that playing God was the only way to direct them.

These intricate diegesis’ were entire universes unto themselves, working by their own inscrutable laws of logic. No-one other than their creator could possibly have guided these tiny existences to their necessary conclusions; Hitchcock could never have coped with the timeless spaces (or, perhaps, spaceless times) of The Milky Way. This film was part of the final phase in the director’s career, one that increasingly looked to the past. In Belle De Jour, we find in the final sequence a conceptual remake of the beautiful ‘magic mirror’ sequence from L’Age d’Or; complete with an inexplicable view to the outside world, and a characters’ descent into fantasy that appears to almost be a Pavlovian response to the ringing of Bunuel’s extra-diegetic bells).

Bunuel’s very last film, That Obscure Object Of Desire, is clearly a cinematic apocalypse, it’s final on-screen explosion is both justified within the film’s plot and functions as a decisive indicator from the director-God that his cinematic kingdom has run its course. Shortly afterwards, Bunuel shuffled off this mortal coil and no doubt ascended to meet his maker – razorblade in hand.

                                                                                                                    - P.S.