Before Bergman

Before Bergman.

For a wide eyed film freak from the colonies, London in the sixties was like visiting 

Mars.  Battleship Potemkin got West End

Louis Brooks : Canary Murder Case - not Swedish

Theatrical seasons, though they did pull Ivan the Terrible  from a Sunday double feature with Three Faces of Eve (embarrassment in the booking office I suspect) and the suburban Repertory Cinemas occasionally filled their double features with items like Fedor Ozep’s 1934 Amok or Welles’ Othello.

I however discovered that the advantages weren’t all one way. The first thing I faced when I went to the London Times Sixty Years of Cinema exhibition at the Round House was a display of “lost” movies, featuring Louise Brooks in Malcom St. Clair’s (awful) The Canary Murder Case which I’d seen on Australian TV a few months before.

The late arrival of down under TV kept battered old theatrical prints running in the suburbs and the new medium was eventually deluged with the Hollywood back catalogues, meaning that the determined viewer had a better grip on the American sound film than Europeans - not that I noticed anyone here taking advantage of this bounty.

The night I landed in London, the then legendary Hampstead Everyman was in the second week of a thirteen (!) week season of the work of Ingmar Bergman. I piled into the Northern line for the last showing  of Törst -  and for the succeeding offerings. It took about four for me to realise how awful the early Bergman was.

That however left their first offering, which had finished while I was still on the water, 1947's  Skepp till India land /A Ship Bound for India / Frustration. During the subsequent fifty years I was vaguely aware that this one still eluded me - until last week when a sale priced copy of Madman’s DVD came my way.

Actually Bergman’s third film as director, it is already characteristically steeped in gloom. Heavy father Captain Holger Löwenadler (in the Sjöberg Barabas) has approaching blindness. He’s convinced son Birger Malmsten that the boy’s deformed by a humped back. The crew of the salvage ship they work dread the wreck they are resurrecting, full of mud & sea shells, will turn over. “She will pull us down.” Mum Anna Lindahl just waits for the day when her husband’s incapacity will mean they have to move to a cottage on shore and fallen woman Gertrud Fridh faces a return to her life of degradation.

Skepp till India land: Gertrud Fridh, Birger Malmsten

The film opens wordlessly with sailor Malmsten coming ashore (dock cranes against the sky) after seven years and mistaking a girl we never see again for Fridh, who it turns out has become an ailing, depressed recluse in the waterfront apartment of  the two ominous women listening at the key hole to the pair’s meeting.

Flashback takes us to Captain Löwenadler interfering with his son’s dream to become a real sailor traveling the world, by insisting he work on their salvage job on the day he should go for his passport.   

The most filmic passage has Löwenadler pass through the busy carnival (where Bergman does a walk on) to the seedy music hall with caricatures on the wall. He becomes involved in a brawl and shelters in singer Fridh’s dressing room before the police arrive. He then takes the girl to the secret flat that his wife has never seen, with souvenirs of his travels, and brings her back to the salvage boat, shifting Malmsten out of the mate’s cabin. (“You and your hump can go sleep with the crew”) Passive mum Lindahl has been through this before.

However after some antagonism (of course) the young people become an item and go off in the row boat to inspect an abandoned windmill. Capt. Löwenadler predictably takes a dim view of this and secludes himself, so the crew elect Malmsten to take over, with his dad coming out and slapping both his cheeks (the duellist’s challenge - get it!) only to be hit back for the first time. With the younger man now in charge, he has to substitute for their regular diver and Löwenadler is stroking his straight razor. He starts working the pump seen as shadow.

Manager Ake Fridell forbids the young suitor backstage access in the theatre Fridh has gone back to and maliciously describes her idea of a secure relationship with a rich man, which we have already heard - effective short scene very characteristic of Bergman. Malmsten sets out to sea.

Back in the present we have a confrontation which doesn’t fit with the grim build up.

Malmsten gives the only plausible performance, maturing in his time at sea which has reduced his (slight) hump to round shoulders. No one else makes any impact, with Fridh an unlikely vamp. The staging is filmic, with well chosen angles and the camera passing through the walls of elaborately built settings.  Photography by the exceptional Goran Strinberg (distantly related to the dramatist) is impressive but, like the Bergman regulars in support, was seen to better advantage in the contemporary films of Alf Sjöberg.

This is a genuinely bad film. The handling is assured but the dialogue still seems written and played for stage performance - Malmsten’s eager description of  a ship arriving at Africa or Löwenadler doing the monologue about listening to the sea in the shell for hours. The seafaring setting never really rings true. They don’t run to underwater footage. None of it has any real conviction.

We know that it is available because Ingmar Bergman became the pin up boy of the festival circuit and his name still has clout. This raises the interesting question of what sort of a film industry sustained such an unlikely talent through fifteen dodgy movies till he hit form with Sommarnattens leende / Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955. Most English language viewers know zip about the Swedish films between the silent work of Sjöstrom/Seastrom and Stiller (if they know those) and Ingmar Bergman. Even Gustav Molander, who appears to be the heavy hitter of this period, is rarely shown.

Curious I watched a couple of  these unknown titles, a ridiculously small but still revealing sample.

Schamyl Bauman’s Swing it magistern / Swing It Teacher lifts the corner of the curtain on Swedish film making in 1940 during a peak for their industry where they did forty films a year.

In this one, at Viran Rydkvist’s Comprehensive (co-ed) private school, young  Åke Johansson is handing round sticks of chalk to chew, so the kids voices won’t impress in the auditions that day. However the new music teacher proves to be cool Adolf Jahr, with a silly thin moustache, qualified Cathedral organist who can’t find a Cathedral. He fields the chalk thrown at him and runs auditions which sort out the vocal talents of the class. Of course, sixteen year old Alice “Babs” Nilson’s rendition of the title song, which he joins on piano, steals the show.

Swing it magistern  Adolf Jahr,“Babs” Nilson

However severe school owner Rydkvist doesn’t approve and, after a rendition for the board, Jahr has to promise not to do any more of that.

Meanwhile Johansson is organising the School’s Jatterostfest concert, where Babs will of course be the star turn, which is not surprising when she’s up against lady gym teacher Solveig Hedengran making those girls in baggy shorts do ill coordinated routines and head teacher Quar Hagman’s magic tricks.

Turns out that Babs is supplementing mum’s contributions to her school fees by singing at the local Shanghai Palais (one tracking shot around the small dance floor) where Jahr is also moonlighting. The so talented teen age girl, that he encourages, forms a crush on him despite his interest in Hedengran.

One of the pupils rats them out and Rydkvist visits the Palais and puts a stop to all that, forbidding the girl’s appearance at the school show. Enterprising Johansson gets her trapped in the boiler room for the performance but she escapes and is, of course, a hit.

Despite her wholesome (among the film's strengths is that the leads are so ordinary) image Miss Nilson's immense popularity outraged sections of her community, one cleric calling her "the foot and mouth disease of our culture."

The piece has some naive energy, despite going on too long and being short on imagination. The handling is better than competent but it disappoints in showing virtually nothing of WW2 Sweden. Outside the studio is represented a bit of playground and some ordinary back projection of streets and cars.

It’s comparable to the later US Donald O’Connor-Jane Powell teenager musicals but also not all that far away from the grim school in Hets/Frenzy, despite all the jollity. A sequel Magistrarna på sommarlov (1942) reunited Babs and Rydkvist.

It’s up for consideration because  Sandrews made an excellent quality DVD with good English titles.

Munkbrogreven / The Count of the Old Town, directed by Edvin Adolphson with some uncredited help from Sigurd Wallén, dates from 1935. This one survives because it’s Ingrid Bergman’s first speaking part. It turns out to be an unsophisticated piece where she gets attention mainly as a good looking girl (with poor posture) supporting  the movie’s top billed character grotesques.

The opening is the most filmic passage with bell chimes over wide shots of Stockholm’s old town introducing cloth cap robbers knocking over a jewellery store and fleeing the beat copper. The plot then develops to include the comic newspaper seller, suitor to the fish shop lady, and his lay-about friends whose day starts with contraband beer. Shadows falling on the cobbles introduce a bumbling detective duo.  

 

The newcomer, played by director Adolphson, shelters from the pair in the modest City Hotel, where he claims to be a resident in the room occupied by young Ingrid in her slip.

Romance develops between the two, running to him helping her to beat carpets on the line in the street while he hides the beer the comics don’t want portly policeman Weyler Hildebrand to find. The community like the guy, not least because he has a license to buy Swedish vodka which he shares round. They worry that he may be the jewel robber.

The fish shop lady’s personal advert brings a hand kissing aristocrat who offers to help her with her investments now that the robberies have extended to the bank, while the false bearded blind man prowls the streets at night from his room where the light still burns.

Throw in a band which sets up in the street for the number which Ingrid reprises.

People turn out to not be what they seem and there is a quite lavish horse carriage multiple wedding where all the nice characters’ fortunes turn out for the best.

Passable entertainment, this is a curiosity. Removed from it’s original time and place the film is simple minded and routine with some resemblance to the courtyard movies being made in then contemporary France, like  Pabst’s Du haut en bas or Renoir’s Crime de M. Lange.  It would seem that it represents the more ambitious pre-Alf Sjöberg Swedish production. The film making is competent but ordinary with those involved sometimes having three figure filmographies running from  Sjöstrom silents to Ingmar Bergman. The designer did Scott of the Antarctic.

There is some kind of comment in the scene of one of the colourful oldies selling used clothing in what appears to be a doss house and on the place of liquor in a country which retained prohibition until the 1970s. Incidentally after that was lifted, all the winos I saw sleeping it off in doorways were in their twenties, which is revealing.

A French series of  Swedish Bergman (Ingrid this time fortunately) disks fielded this one in a sharp slightly contrasty, slightly cropped version as Le Conte du point au moine.

The one thing the earlier films have in common is that there is nothing notably Swedish about them. No one dies in childbirth. No one is crushed by loss of their faith.  I'll wait till I've seen three figures more to offer a conclusion.

 

Barrie Pattison 2020

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL 2017  part two.

Despite it’s apparently conventional film form, Philippe Van Leeuw’s Belgian- French- Lebanese Insyriated / In Syria accommodates a profoundly disorienting idea. Think Desperate Hours in a war zone.

In the apartment of a well-off Damascus family, three generations are now sheltering in what was recently a comfortable bourgeois home, with a lodger family and an Indian maid. Though traces of their normal life surround them, cell ‘phone reception is out, bomb blasts rock the building and snipers take down pedestrians in the parking lot.

Insyriated / Juliette Navis, Hiam Abass

The home represents the achievements of a lifetime to mother strong faced Hiam Abbass (Satin Rouge, The Visitor) which she refuses to abandon though her family are the building's only remaining residents. Looters on the other hand see nothing of value in her carefully tended consumer goods. Abass clings to the routine of normalcy, making tea for her father in law and berating her young daughter for washing her hair when water must be brought up from the cellar by hand. However new mother tenant Diamand Bou Abboud and her husband have stitched up a deal to leave the country with their baby.

That’s not going to fly. From the window maid Juliette Navis sees the husband shot down and Abass orders her not to speak, knowing that any rescuers are likely to be killed. Then there’s a knocking ...

Repeatedly the hardest thing to do is nothing - for people both sides of the barricaded doors. Self contempt and reproach build among the shut-ins. Comes the desperate after dark finale and there’s the disturbing spectacle in the marksman’s red dot playing over the faces of the characters we know.

The film develops a rare intensity in it’s scenes of crisis and moral complexities. Casting, performance and film craft are impeccable and any audience are soon confronted with the question of what they would do in the on-screen situations.

Agnieszka Holland is back on the festival circuit, though she has long since moved away from the Holocaust subjects for which they know her, doing series TV and versions of “The Secret Garden” and “Washington Square” - more familiar when it was adapted as “The Heiress”.

On the new film Spoor she shares director credit with her daughter Kasia Adamik. This sets it’s tone immediately with striking shots of deer antlers moving among the long grass at dawn already suggesting nature as a mystic experience, which is the way grey haired lead Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka’s character sees it. Like her neighbors she lives, with her adored dogs as companions, in in an isolated home in the woods. She chats to the wild boor that wanders into her yard and abuses a neighbor whose wire snares are a cruel death for the forest deer caught looking round at the audience. When Mandat-Grabka  takes a lover it is naturally entomologist Miroslav Krobot whose preoccupation is with the insects in the undergrowth here - nice shot of blue beetles mating.

Spoor /Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka, Miroslav Krobot.

Her uneasy appointment as local school English teacher is put at risk when she takes her charges on an expedition into the dark trees looking for her missing pets. The local priest, who is a cultural supporter of hunting, and the Polilja station cop, who joins the pack, are reduced to close-ups of lips framing platitudes about animals having no importance, no souls.

The only people who are exempt from the lead and the film’s assessment as crude intruders into this bucolic environment are the scrubbed up juveniles, an expelled city I.T. technician and the girl sex slave of the local bogus playboy club, and when bodies start turning up in the woods they are the ones who become the suspects.

The first half of the film is evocative and gripping. with the intriguing wild life straying through the foliage and seen as targets by the hunt-and-drink lot who seem to be violating  the natural order, with the dead animal heads strewn about their houses, paralleling the grotesque costumes of their seasonal celebration.

When the conventions of the who-dun-it assert themselves the film becomes less than it looked like it was going to be. It’s still a well crafted and played entertainment but it’s also a disappointment. The cast and technicians are regulars in Slavonic production.

The film’s comic spooky mood gets and holds attention and suggests new ground.

From Cédric Klapisch we expect something lively original and maybe even charming. His l'Auberge espangol trilogy provided that. No such luck here. The new Ce qui nous lie / Back to Burgundy is overlong and repetitive. It is great to look at, full of ‘scope vistas of seasons transforming the Burgundy vineyards - along with beautiful people - but they get to be boring company.

Pio Marmaï  comes back to the family vineyards after five years in Australia (!) - cut from him waiting on the bus stop with the circus poster, after a run in with dad, to the same stop showing a new circus poster and him with a rucksack & beard. His siblings Ana Girardot and François Civil are running the business. Hospitalised father Éric Caravaca (the only familiar face in a sea of fresh talent) dies and the trio face the question of how to deal with dividing the estate menaced by tax debt. Oliver Assayas’ 2008 L'heure d'été / Summer Hours kicked this idea about rather better.

There’s more wine making detail than anyone could ever want (“only wimps spit at a tasting”) and at great length the action gets to pivot on whether the most talented wine maker among them will carry on the family tradition. There were films like this about tobacco growing. I can’t help wondering whether we’ll think about this one the way we do about those in twenty years time.

Giradot comes across like gang busters and the rest are equal to the task but even the best passages, like the brothers lip-synching the dialogue between her and the stroppy picker who they see romancing Giradot in the distance, have a current of meanness out of character with the director’s best work.

Put this one down as the major disappointment in my highly selective viewing.

With Ucitelka / The Teacher  Festival Favourite Jan Hrebejk and his regular writer Petr Jarchovský are back on familiar ground documenting the abuses of Communist control in 1980s Czechoslovakia which we saw in their Kawasaki’s Rose.

This one starts confusingly with widow teacher and party secretary Zuzana Mauréry calling the new roll in her 1983 Bratislava suburban school class room, cross cut with what turns out to be a parents meeting called to discuss an allegation of her misconduct.  

Ucitelka / The Teacher - Zuzana Mauréry

We hear she’s into manipulating the families of the children in her class to provide services she wants - smuggling food to Russia, house keeping, running errands or fixing her appliances. Some of the parents are hearty supporters of her methods which include providing test answers to their children to boost their grades.

This comes to a halt when young ribbon twirling gymnast Tamara Fischer, who has been told in front of her class mates that she’s the dumbest kid there, puts her head in the gas oven. Her dad Martin Havelka places a complaint and when the school calls a meeting to determine action, he’s told that he’s an unreliable participant because punching out a stroppy foreigner got him a jail spell. Similarly disgraced window cleaner Peter Bebjak (himself a director of similarly themed efforts like Cistic) was a scientist before his wife broke with the restrictions of the socialist community and fled abroad. Mauréry sees him as replacement husband material and gets him the spot as school janitor, which comes with a flat. She encourages his artistic son who innocently gets involved in a foreign exchange voucher scam.

The meeting becomes tense and attention goes to Bebjak when he stands up - but he just wants to use the loo. The kind of moment we expect from Hrebejk.

Even an account of her dismal pupil success rate fails to swing the meeting against Mauréry and it looks like the head teacher will have to give her a promotion and a rise to defuse the matter.

The final montage of the subsequent lives of the kids is quite touching and following the coda in the class room with the Václav Havel photo on the wall, takes some of the bitterness of what we have been watching.

Performances are superior but craft aspects are mixed as with the irritating panning in the opening meeting. This one is uneasy viewing with it’s comedy elements and the sadistic treatment of children not only by their elders but also by their peers.

Then there was Song Chuan's unexpected Ciao Ciao a Chinese-French co production which paints a vicious picture of rural China?

Bookended by shots of the line of green and red train carriages running distant through the verdant countryside, this one covers the return of local girl Zuquin Liang/Ciao Ciao to her Yunnan province village. The kids call out “whore” when they see her city clothes and her family is made up of retrenched dad who is first seen catching a green river snake to use in his home made remedy and mum  getting by putting out for the local bootlegger. She complains that back breaking work in the tobacco fields for a year earns less than a city job in six months. She tells Ciao Ciao that at least she’s pretty and will have to use that to escape drudgery.

Marriage to the bootlegger’s tearaway son (the kids shout “drunk”) looks like an out but that disintegrates when his dad’s business is busted by the local cops on about people dying from home made liquor and she starts pairing with the urbanised town hair dresser who promises to take her back to Canton.

This one bears little resemblance to the Asian films in the mutiplexes, with its bilious colours,  raunchy make out and it’s depiction of petty corruption with gift cigarettes or the mayor sending out the emigrating workers with red rosettes that match uniforms of the kids’ band that plays them off as they are instructed to remember the one child rule despite the enticements of the big city. It’s not in the class of  say Jackie Chan’s Railroad Tigers or Ann Hui’s Huang jin shi dai /The Golden Era and it would be interesting to understand the mechanism which put Ciao Ciao in a festival and those into restricted distribution.

Newton proved to be an endearing if unpolished Indian drama from Hindi screen writer Amit Masurkar whose only other major project as director was the 2014 comedy Sulemani Keeda, about Hindi screen writers.

The new film is something different to the Bollywood movies that occasionally surface here. To start with, it has another look. The ‘scope image is soft and the colour less brilliant suggesting a cut price offering but the obvious budget limitations (small cast, a few real locations) don’t inhibit the story-telling in a film which relies on the strength of it’s subject and the appeal of its leads.

Rajkummar Rao is young and idealistic or is it egotistic when we see him refuse the arranged marriage with a girl who is uneducated and under aged. As a reserve poll organiser, he is briefed on the scale and importance of the up coming national election and he queries the procedures for dealing with the murderous Maoist insurgents bent on disturbing the vote. Sure enough, when the regular poling officer is told he hasn’t been given a metropolitan spot, he begs off (heart condition) and the unbending Rao is the one sent into the remote jungle where the Marxists Nayals are rampant. We’ve already seen a
candidate gunned down, fresh from promising every child a lap top and a cell phone.

Rao heads a less than stellar team arriving at an outpost commanded by officer Pankaj Tripathi who urges them to just fill in the paper work and forget about the idea. He has to be threatened with a written complaint to make him head up the security team taking the pollsters to their designated station, which proves to be a ruin in a burned out village - one the army has pacified. Promising new star Anjali Patil joins them as and goes about the task wearing her bright Sari while Rao’s lot have been got up in camouflage flack jackets and steel helmets.

Despite obstacles that include the fact that the hand full of locals they have come to record have no idea what the election - or any election - is about, Rao pursues his task, working up to a confrontation with the military guides. A weak coda damages conviction.

The film weaves between significance, comedy and tension with the odd flourish like a montage of shots of the real candidates who are represented only by symbols on the voting chart. It’s not all that compelling but it does raise a serious issue in a manner we haven’t seen before and has novelty value to paste over it’s short comings.

If you’re thinking too much Akira Kurosawa is never enough, there are a couple of feature length documentaries on his work but you had to settle for director Steven Okazaki’s Mifune the Last Samuri to go with the retrospective. A film that covers the life of the most famous Japanese actor since Sessue Hayakawa and reminds us just how good the films that represent his collaboration with the “perfectionist” Kurosawa are, can’t be a bad thing.

This one reproduces the mainly black and white footage beautifully and it’s interesting to hear from Mifune’s collaborators. The women have aged remarkably well. Dealing with survivors has brought some unfamiliar names into the foreground.

Filming Mifune ; the Last Samurai

That said, this one is for the choir. There is little on the actor’s pre-Rashomon career about which we know so little. The only other director who gets any attention is the remarkable Hiroshi Inagaki and that for his Myamoto Musashi films. His 1958 Muhomatsu no issho / The Rickshaw Man is well on the way to being Mifune’s best performance and it gets one still photo here.

Then there’s the discovery of the fact that while the juvenile did Seven Samurai in a bald cap but Takashi Shimura actually shaved his head for his part.

Keanu Reeves’ narration is unobtrusive, mainly adding a selling point to the production. Director Steven Okazaki’s documentaries and features extend back to the nineteen eighties.

Picking my way through this event is cheating of course. It means that I don’t run the risk of seeing the truly awful or the unexpectedly excellent which is what the festival experience is all about. Maybe I’m past that.