Spooks South of the Border

Mexican film making appears to be the most active of the Hispanic industries but outsiders continue to ignore it. We know it's there because observers, who would never go in, pass their U.S. Spanish language theatres and international celebrities occasionally have worked in their films - Toshiro Mifune, Alida Valli, John Carradine, Max Von Sydow.  Mexican cinema broke into the festival circuit a couple of times, once after World War II, with the films of Emilio Fernández, María Félix, Pedro Armendáriz and others. More recently, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón launched Gael García Bernal.  

Mexican trash cinema is more relevant for our purposes - fat comedians slapping the bottoms of naked women, Latino kung fu fighters and masked luchadore wrestlers.  Mexican monster movies penetrated VHS, notably with the collection that K Gordon Murray dubbed for the 'States. However the history, nature and quality of the country’s vast output remains largely mysterious.

A corner of the curtain has been pulled back with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, the Film Project restoring two nineteen-thirties titles, alongside their more austere ventures.

Ramon Peron’s 1933 la llorona (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwtlaAV) is said to be the first example of the Horror films which became a staple of the busy Mexican film business. It is clearly intended for the market that was absorbing the contemporary Hollywood entries. Among the Spanish language parallel versions of the first sound films, George Medford’s Dracula, shot on the decors of the Lugosi version, would have been an obvious model. Peron’s film got points locally for utilising Mexican subject matter, the legend of the wronged woman who becomes a weeping, child-drowning ghost.  The story comes back at regular intervals in their country’s films.

This production is clearly the work of people still learning sound filmmaking.  It is too slow and drab to be more than a curiosity for most of its run time. Severely padded, not unlike the first feature-length silents, this one kicks off with one of its unnecessary subplots, where a man passing a cemetery gate is terrorized by the Llorna shriek - CU of face with rictus grin and dissolve from the victim’s hand on the footpath to it on a sheet in the operating theatre. 

Ramon Pereda, the doctor there, goes home, where all is not well. His young son is enjoying his birthday party, unaware that he is menaced by the family curse, which claimed an earlier member at his age, while a sinister hooded figure with an Aztec ring is using secret passages that no one seems to have noticed.

In the library (a bookcase, a desk and a couple of suits of armor) Paco Martinez, the boy’s grandad, reads the story of the viceroy-era ancestor (also Pareda) who wouldn’t acknowledge his out-of-wedlock child, to the anguish of the kid’s mom, Adriana Lamar. In the street, frill collar foot-pads set upon Pareda in an unequal sword fight (passable choreography but dull choice of angles). Witness Marquis Alberto Marti comes to his aid, sending them on their way. Turns out that the aristo. is an admirer of Lamar and takes a dim view of the faithless lover, starting another duel.

     La llorna - wedding

Dastardly Pereda marries better in a lengthy church service and doubles back to collect his child from what he sees as his own house. In the ensuing friction, the mother dies and flies off as a double-exposed ghost. Back in the then-present, we get more action from the hooded figure, comic retainer Carlos Orellana  and  servants who have been in the family for generations. It’s time for Martinez to crack open another book of which the contents are represented by double-exposed shots of steel helmet conquistadors montaged rotating. Grandpa is killed with a stubby antique knife and the cops are called but the black hood figure makes off with the child,  placing it on the Aztec altar in the cellar, before the good guys catch up with them. Police inspector Alfredo del Diestro proclaims that there was no ghost, only to see a manifestation of La Llorna.

La llorna : secret passage

Simple minded stuff with a nasty/tacky quality not unlike like Edgar Ulmer’s contemporary U.S. The Black Cat, nothing particularly imaginative or accomplished here. Their Llorna doesn’t even weep let alone drown children, though it does manage the character’s shriek.  

However the second recovered piece, the following year’s El fantasma del convento/The Phantom of the Monastery (https://ok.ru/video/6739623611120) is a genuinely scary movie, more so than its Hollywood prototypes were prepared to be, and a distinct advance. Put that down to the Mexican industry’s growing experience and the promotion of  Fernando  De Fuentes from script collaborator to writer-editor-director, confirming his status as their leading pre-WW2 film maker. We are lucky that it arrives in an impressively restored, English-subtitled copy.

        Carlos Villatoro & Ruel

Credits cut straight to leads, elegant Marta Ruel with husband Enrique del Campo and their friend Carlos Villatoro stumbling about in some studio bushes, which the film assures us are a ravine. They look for shelter to Victorio Blanco, the cowelled monk encountered with his huge dog and he ushers them to the nearby monastery (locating long shots don’t match) where they get the whole treatment - vows of silence and separate cells, the shadow of a bearded monk flagellating, mummified hands, a meal that turns to ashes, a door barred with a decaying wooden cross and a Jeremiah quotation, and a howling wind which sends the anguished monks into despair.  Blacno & the dog, who Prior Martinez (la llorna’s grandad) told them didn’t exist, show up - don’t ask!

We get the backstory of Brother Rodrigo, who deployed a satanic book to steal the wife of his friend and who the monks attempt to contain in the closed cell.

Villatoro

When the visitors turn in, things get really spooky with the inexplicable bat shadow on the wall (an ingenious deployment of the film’s glass shot technology). Villatoro’s lusting for Ruel parallels that of the cursed Rodrigo. When he finds the barred cell open, he uncovers a shrouded body (clumsy face make up) wlth a shrunken hand which falls on the book beside it - and Ruel arrives, desire gleaming in her eyes.

Comes the dawn and the disturbed trio encounter jolly caretaker José Ignacio Rocha, who assures them there are no monks there and shows them the inexplicably decayed dining hall (which still has the accusing word “corbade” Ruel scratched on the long table) and a vault with the mummies of long-dead monks. The trio exit into sunny rural normalcy.

Despite the limitations of Mexico’s still early sound filmmaking (dodgy make-up and wardrobe and some unsteady pacing evident), this one mounts to the genuinely disturbing scene in the finally opened cell. The film has an intensity that its US models couldn’t or wouldn’t match. Fuentes had mastered ignoring logic and narrative in favour of atmosphere and shock. It is not the simple-minded affair it resembles, with Ruel’s cynical take on events set against formula elements. “Quien sabe?”

Long before The Exorcist, Mexican cinema had brought into play the exploitation potential of Catholicism -  religious robes & ceremony, damnation, scourging, crucifixion, resurrection. A comparison between this film and European Biblical movie drama makes a viewer sharply aware of differences. La Llorna has its extended Cathedral marriage and a third restored film, Juan Bustillo Oro’s Dos Monjes is also set in a Monastery. My favorite touch in Fernand Méndez' 1957 El Vampiro is the disinterred aunt who spends the whole film proffering a giant ceramic crucifix.  Mix this with indigenous religion, as in The Day of the Dead.  When it came to a battle of imageries, contemporary Marxist states were totally upstaged. Best they could manage was a few Union Parade banners or maybe a panorama of hands raising rifles above the heads of the crowd.

Fantasma - Martinez, Del Campo, Ruel & Villatoro with Last Supper mural.

The personnel on these films continued working into the fifties and beyond. Generally, despite determined effort, I’ve never been able to see their other work, about which I remain curious. De Fuentes' excellent Vamonos con Pancho Villa did slip into my grasp a few years back, another film that is not as simple-minded as might be expected. That makes the current discoveries more valuable than they might be. The fact that The Ghost of the Monastery proved remarkable is a nice bonus. It really is time that I tried to track down Fuentes's other work. 

Santo's Mummies of Guanajuato -  compare Fantasma.

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Barrie Pattison 2025.

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2025.

A new Spanish Film Festival is a welcome reminder that even in what are not the best of times, it can still be worth going to the movies. As well as adventurous handling, the Spanish films are energised by showing recent history as a live issue. The selection I saw tended to the grim side. Alex De Iglasea and Santo Segura were missed. Let's also note these Hispanic Film events have a large Latin American element. Once again, we score a significant part of the year's best viewing. I regret that it's too expensive and too time-consuming to work through the whole card, but cherry-picking the 2025 selection had its rewards.

Rafa Cortéz’ (back after the 2006 Yo) provided Amanece en Samaná / Samana Sunrise, which turned out to be unexpectedly substantial.  It’s a (sort of) multiverse movie. There are a few of those in the manner of the lingering Marvel model - Redux Redux in the Sydney Film Festival. They get compared to Sliding Doors  (people forget Mario Adorf in Straße der Verheißung  (Street of Shame)  but this one veers closer to Jimmy Stewart's vision in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Luis Tozar, Bábara Santa-Cruz & Luis Zahera

The new film kicks off with two old-friend middle aged couples flying into a  pre-season Samana resort. Maria Louisa Mayol & Luis Tosar (previously together in Fatum) and Luis Zahera & Bárbara Santa-Cruz (Tres bodas da mes) are not the most interesting subjects, filmed too close and squabbling about opening the hotel's sealed liquor or  Tosar’s dull job in his father-in-law’s paper works - from habit he evaluates the Hotel’s menu cards. We wonder what the imposing actor is doing in this lightweight. We find out.

Maria Louise lets slip that way back she manipulated the loss of her car keys to set in train her marriage to  Tozar and, in the confrontation which follows, she hits her head on a rock. That puts her out only to wake as the long-time wife of Zahera, who she detests. The new sleeping arrangements send her spare. Everyone thinks she’s nuts when she tries to conform events to the old model. Holidaying Fellow guest, English-speaking therapist Charles Dance suggests, via his beach boy translator Andresito Germosen De La Cruz, that they should indulge her till she recovers and Santa Cruz keeps on banging her with Beach Tennis paddles to try and jolt her back to reality. 

The piece moves past the comic material into Maria Louisa’s alarming realization that she has ruined men in two realities and that her son now has Santa Cruz for a mother. Both Zahera and Tozar have disturbing monologues about the lives she has created for them. Maria  Louiza goes to sleep apalled but sun up brings yet another reality. There's no boring explanation footage either.

Production gives an illusion of lush life and the performers make what you would expect to be trivial material into something genuinely disturbing. This one is unsettling.

Marcel Barrena’s El 47  rivals it as a hit of the event.

His opening recalls the De Sica ll tetto.  Here the Catalan-speakers have been moved from now desirable Extremadura land to a remote hill area on the other side of the mountain from Barcelona. They try to exploit a legal loophole where they can squat a structure if it has a roof at sunrise, extorted by the building materials salesman and seeing their work smashed by the Guardia Civil patrol, when it remains incomplete by dawn.  They turn to Eduárd Fernandez for leadership and he says don’t build a district. Everyone work on putting up one house at a time. One scornful opponent says “Whose house gets built first?” and Eduárd comes back, “Yours!” The troopers, back next sunrise with sledgehammer workers, are outsmarted. We have established our hero, the officer, the residents and caring nurse-nun, Clara Segura whose religion is confronting to Eduárd.

Cut, with overlapping sound, and it’s become 1958 Torre Baró, a newly built-up hillside with bricks holding the flat roofs in place and residents complaining about inadequate power, water and transport. The men play cards out of doors and Segura has given up her calling to marry red Plaza Carelunya bus driver Eduardo and run the community school in an abandoned trolley car, where the kids have to hold the plastic on the window to keep out the wind.

There’s a fatal house fire.  The brigade can’t get the wagon up the grade and water supply fails, which is breaking point for Eduárd. He wants his bus company to run a Torre Baró route but no one seems to know how he should make an application, including the clerk who has to handle the paperwork. A fellow driver vandalises Eduárd's bus in protest and the union organiser claims to be unable to help. However a regular passenger is a council clerk and figures it out. Our hero says that one will be mayor one day.  Winning teen daughter Zoe Bonafonte is brought back from the station by the scornful policeman, when she’s caught joining in protest graffiti-ing city hall. The cop sees himself as being helpful (“People fall out of windows there”) The lavishly decorated council chambers and public buildings contrast with basic homes. When Eduárd finally gets to make his nervously rehearsed pitch,  they say the bendy buses can’t get up the hill.

Our hero won’t take no and hijacks his own bus for a rousing finale, where they have to board over potholes and knock down markers to make the climb. As they complete the run, the sedate scoring gives way to the cheering residents' traditional music, along with their towering carnival stilt men.

The film effectively offers incidents as spontaneous indignation. This gets to be winning as when Torre Baró’s women and girls, who never learned to read, file into Segura’s meager classroom for lessons or the diverse passengers elect to stay on Fernandez' co-opted bus - lawyer, well well-dressed older woman and finally the daughter. There’s not a dry eye in the house and they do it again with the school choir, where the other members leave the stage and Bonafonte standing alone does the Republican “Gallo nero, gallo rojo” song, to the befuddlement of the teacher.

Film making avoids glossy production values, matching the washed-out tones of the old location footage and conforming the format to the Academy frame, like The Phonician Scheme and this event's Ocho. Fernandez has made the jump from leading man to imposing character actor and, as in their immigrant smuggling piece Mediterraneo, he and director Barrena are an impressive combination. El 47 is pretty much the text book on activist filmmaking, though the most political it gets is the account of Falangists putting four rounds into the lead’s father. The makers must have liked that, using the actual driver character reading his late parent’s letter as an epilogue. The final insert of putting up the bus stop sign deserved a round of applause - and got it. How often does that happen at a movie?

Also on their hits list came la infiltrada /Undercover a Spanish cop piece, which started with a couple of extra claims on our attention. It deals with the unfamiliar Basque Nationalists’ ETA movement, whose graffiti the art department dawbs on the genuine locations (and would have had to put in time scrubbing off after the shoot) and it features Luis Tozar again. His briefing, where he describes the difference between undercover and covert work, is the point where the film takes hold and once again the makers signal their approval by repeating it at the end. Tozar takes second billing to director Arantxa Echevarría’s regular star, Carolina Yuste - think a young, non-singing Barabara Streisand.  

 

Yuste has the central role of the provincial girl who witnesses a nineties ETA murder at the film’s opening, being inspired to become a cadet at the Ávila Police Academy. National Police commander Tozar spreads photos of the graduating class on his superior’s table and, over his objections, picks out hers, saying that all previous attempts to infiltrate the terrorists have been detected and they have to choose the least likely. Later at a key moment, a woman on Tozar’s team, who has become pregnant, similarly intervenes as their least suspicious-looking member.

The bulk of the films covers the eight years in which Yuste moves to San Sebastian and establishes herself with Basque sympathisers, fly postering the city and working with their theatre group till she is trusted to the point where they have her take in an organisation man wanted for a murder, getting a new apartment especially.  Tozar’s team is nearly caught putting in secret microphones. The fugitive turns out to be a presentable young man to whom Yuste is unwillingly drawn. His disconnected recall of the assassination attempt that put him on the most wanted list, is one of the film’s highlights.

 The film etches in the political background, where the National Police Unit is constantly frustrated by the successes of the competing Guardia Civil getting all the glory, so that what becomes eight years of work, with Yuste dealing on a daily basis with people who could kill her instantly, looks like being wasted. Funding cuts are given as an excuse but they suspect the influence of their law enforcement rivals who have just had a well-publicised success. The Basque separatist movement gets no analysis, with the film’s last word a reference to the eight hundred and fifty murders down to ETA.

Yuste resists orders to quit, though she now scrubs her skin after contact and conflicts with the organisation bigwig she drives for, facing off with him about his carrying a give-away pistol. He comes close to exposing her, calling the numbers on her cell ‘phone menu as he prepares his major outrage - and he has rotten taste in TV programs, does sloppy house cleaning and maltreats her cat, which becomes a key element.

The crisp location photography is an asset and editing, that breaks out in three second cuts during the action material, gets attention but it is the uniform standard of performance that is the main asset. This is not an unfamiliar subject. Think Bullets or Ballots, The Street With No Name or Nevada Smith. Miriam Hopkins’ “treating friends as enemies and enemies as friends” outburst in Virginia City is a remarkably close match. However this film can claim to be the most plausible and detailed version we have on film. It has been a hit in its home market. 

Julio Medem is on the way to being Spain's most admired director and there's no way to deny the ambition of his new Ocho/8.

However the film is hard to follow with its eight successive time shifts over ninety years from the Spanish Civil War to the present, marked by relevant changes in screen formats. Performers come back as their descendants to confuse the issue. 

Medem, Alvarro Morte & Javier Rey 

In 1930’s Spain, Republicans and the Royalists face off over the recent election as two babies are born in adjacent villages, with the doctor having to rush from one delivery to the other - in tinted monochrome Academy Frame.

Needless to say, the two children grow in hostile camps with Ana Rujas marrying Javier Rey the soldier member of the firing squad that offs his opposite number, the free thinker school teacher following an order personally signed by Generalisimo Franco. Rey becomes a conservative business success, who expects his wife to attend church in severe clothes, (veil & no neckline) She skips mass to make it with cab driver Alvarro Morte,  but their pairing is sabotaged by his mum’s demise, meannig her stuffy husband ends up raising a child that’s not his a couple of screen ratios later.

The first elections in forty-one years coincide with Catalan separatist demos in which one of Rujas' sons is killed by the other, who gets fifteen years (and a shift to full screen two to one) before the leads are united in one of those technically impressive but eerily off-putting aged make-ups.

The two branches of the family scrap at the wedding anniversary lunch, about the time Anna gets the grim prognosis and takes to the bed we saw her born in at the opening.

It’s meant to tell us something about Spain as a divided society where the Republican heritage is the one to treasure, while impressing with its inventive technique, but it holds attention more from curiosity than content - distractions like lengthy mobile camera work that has us trying to spot the invisible edits when characters leave the studio process photography car and enter genuine exteriors.

This one may have taken on the less-than-inspiring model of The Brutalist.

 

Marina Seresesky's Sin instrucciones/Babies Don’t Come With Instructions is a feel-good movie with a twist. This one is agreeable enough and has a good standard of production, though it seems made to order.

Paco Leon & Maia Zaitegi

Established comedian Paco Leon (Tribu, Mamá o papá) does the middle-aged dropout who has the perfect life as a Canary Islands drinks waiter with plenty of female company, when old fling Silvia Alonso shows up with a baby, which she dumps on Leon. She burns down his sea front home and scoops the cash out of the cafe till, so Paco’s options are shrinking but he pursues her to Blbao (lots of scenics in this one) with a photo of Alonso in a park there as his only clue. He gets arrested in the company of amiable unlicensed black umbrella salesman Malcolm Treviño-Sitté, whose help he enlists along with the scaffolder who saw our hero rescue the kid from a plank walkway despite his (laboured) fear of heights. They become the basis of his new life - eight years later and we cut to his playpen home where he raises Maia Zaitegi without too much reliance on teachers, of which the school councilor takes a dim view. 

To complicate matters Alonzo shows up again, having kicked her habit and acquired a so nice German fiancé. Ah! but there’s more.

Bright colours, beautiful people, baby poo, beach scenics, shooting on the roof of the Ghery Guggenheim museum, legal complications and a twist ending. The audience seemed happy.

Calladita, the first film of writer-director Miguel Faus, aims at being a sexy Latino lesson on social inequalities but runs too long and too familiar. Despite realist ambitions, it's a lesser entry in the Regles de jeu-Theorema-Parasite cycle about perverse relations between employers and servants. The hand of promoter Stephen Soderberg is vaguely visible - what credited Mike Judge contributed less so,

 The opening shot reveals Colombian maid Paula Grimaldo, framed in what proves to be a window whose glass she is cleaning. The symbolism of the invisible partition is maintained. Turns out that she is working for the rich Barcelona art dealer family holidaying in their Costa Brava rental home, while they nurse the sale of the giant garden sculpture that will be their biggest deal. Politeness and consideration are, of course, a deception as they string Paula along with the prospect of residency and the gift of an out-moded Super Mario console. She maintains the home's showroom finish, while encouraging stray cats with the canned sardines she was supposed to poison for them, after the grandfather has the owner take out the one she was petting with a shotgun blast, leaving blood for her to clean up. 

Quiet Maid - Paula Grimaldo

Paula pilfers skimpy bikini-clad or topless blonde daughter Violeta Rodriguez’ pink cell ‘phone to arrange a Tinder rendezvous, making out with the contact while the family is away - anal in the pink (again) Flamingo float in the pool. The brother also goes full frontal and there’s the illicit beach party with the neighbor’s clued-in maid, attention-getting Nany Tovar, and the guy who turns agro when Paula won’t accept his come-on.

The plan of Paula, working to finance the education of her younger sister, hits the shredder about the time the family all prove to be despicable, even Gramps admitting that the residency thing depends on her staying with them as a menial. Climax and the point where the film can claim to be cutting edge, is the son, and his yobo drinking mates, all abruptly in big close-ups, offering the prospect of laying the money to solve her problems on the table if Paula will blow them. She gets to be the focus of our sympathy turning them down and he rats her out about the flamingo to mother Adriana Gil, still recognisable from her glamour parts - La Belle Epoque.  Complications with the signature to a Crypto fund - like the one that's a source of the finance for this film.  

Calladita is glossy but not altogether polished. Elements are planted obviously - the poison, the cats, the inflatable, the sculpture we expect to get smashed - but most are not deployed in the way we anticipate, which is not all that clever but still worth a look. Grimaldo is plausible and her being as calculating as the exploitator family is a passable twist. The film only has traction when she considers and rejects the low life solution to her problems.

An intresting enough opening offered hope for Sebastián Schindel’s grim Argie drama Una muerte silenciosa / A Silent Death. The staff at Alejandro (El Bar) Awada’s Estancia Copenhague Patagonia hunting lodge are helping American guests shoot an imposing Twelve Point Stag in the snow -- dark riders on the white background. The sheep-stealing family nearby are glimpsed through telescope sights on the hunting rifle. Told a few sheep are not a big deal, Awada responds “I will lose respect.” Meanwhile, there’s a triangle situation between youngsters - Gonzalo Garrido the photographer son, Ramiro Pintor, a dope-smoking smuggler and local girl Sol Wainer. Tensions develop when Pintor ups the price on the Mauser pistol Garrido wants to buy as a gift for his dad and it becomes an erratic murder weapon, killing the girl. The local gendarmes do interviews with the people who were in earshot of the lethal second burst of pistol fire.

Unsatisfied with the inconclusive investigation of his niece’s death, hunter Joaquín Furriel  (El año de la Furia) makes his own inquiry, despite his sleeping pill addiction and the suspicious circumstances of the driving accident which killed his brother, when the wagon they were in turned over.

None of the possibilities of the early scenes deliver. Frequently dim ‘scope images and art director detail (charging an ammunition clip,  the Copenhagen snow globe, a red lit dark-room, purloined VHS tapes, skinning stolen sheep) don’t make the intrigue any more involving. The cast suggests they might impress in better material.

Not every film was a beauty but I can't help wishing the material we get from other sources hit the standard of these.

Alvarro Morte, Javier Morgarde &  Ana Rujas filming Medem's 8

Barrie Pattison 2025

Imaginary Voyaging.

Facing Le voyage imaginaire again after all this time jets me back to my landfall in serious movie activity - the world of Penguin Film Review, Film Societies and “Film Appreciation.” where you could get by remembering half a dozen names - Sergei Eisenstein, John Grierson, David Lean in his Dickens Period, Leni Reifenstahl, Charlie Chaplin  - and René Clair.

 René Clair was supposed to be the fun one. It came as a blow to find his work was so clumsy in comparison to his American and German Contemporaries.

The restoration on  Paris Cinémathèque’s Henri site prompted me to have another look at Le voyage imaginaire. By 1926, our man had gained some traction. It features a couple of the players who will figure in Clair’s more famous works - Albert Préjean and Jim Gerald, unfortunately not the leads but a comic duo backing a Swedish ballet dancer named Jean Börlin and the winning Dolly Davis.

Voyage Imaginaire & decor

 Börlin’s bank clerk is harassed on all sides. Co-workers Préjean and Gerald bully him and he’s too timid to move on office Dactylo Davis. The bouquet he wanted to give her migrates round the bank ending in Prejean’s button hole in a lengthy, Chaplinesque routine that isn’t funny. A shawled crone arrives in a decorated auto and convinces Börlin that he will receive a magic ring guaranteeing a happy life. A loop falls off the curtain rail and his colleagues convince him it is the charmed object. Biographer Jean Mitry suggests this is derived from the fake enchanted umbrella in the Harold Lloyd Grandma’s Boy and we will get some of the trick photography (upside down camera, jump cuts) done better in the films of Buster Keaton.

The action moves outside and, like Nicolas Koline in  Le Braisier Ardent’s two years earlier,  Börlin tumbles down a (soso animation) rabbit hole, not into the Trouve Tout Agency this time but a fairy land - balloons, seashells, cellophane-covered walls and meshing teeth doors. The crone tells him that she is a fairy under an ugly spell which his kiss will remove and our hero reluctantly complies, turning her youthful. All her fairy sisters are eager for the same and soon the decor is full of underclad women. M. Clair’s notion of raunchy hasn’t come down the years well. The bad fairy is a fuzzy-haired (boot-polish) black girl who takes a dim view of our hero pairing with Mlle. Davis. Cinderella, Blue Beard (!) and Puss in Boots show up. Via some shonky mist FX work, the bank staff are transferred to the roof of Notre Dame - which does class up the visuals. Préjean, then a stunt actor, does all the dangerous stuff. (Clair will also shoot several films on the Eiffel Tower)

 From here, action moves to the Musé Grevin, where the waxworks (actors with painted eye lids) come to life After Hours and their tableau of The Terror condemns Börlin, now transformed into a bull dog,

René Clair

 to the miniature guillotine (don’t ask) from which he is rescued by Jackie Coogan and Charlie Chaplin (a passable imitator). Curiously, this was the only part of the film which I remembered from a fifty year back one-night run at London’s French Institute. A Happy Ending follows.

Le voyage imaginaire is recognisably René Clair and visibly French silent cinema, between Meliés & Ivan Mozjoukine - between primitive and accomplished. Not the work of a major talent but it is intriguing to see someone trying to push the envelope.

Clair did have his moments - Le chapeau de paille d’Italie, a WW2 run in the ‘States and three films with Gerard Philippe. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to play to his strengths. He should have stayed with Eugène Labiche and Hollywood. Too much of the rest was embarrassingly fun free and lame, outclassed by the best work of its day to which it was too often compared. With his  Académie Française status, no one was game to talk about the Emperor’s New Clothes.

 

The copy of Voyage imaginaire at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9hj-Cjcts has English subtitles, while the one on the Paris Cinémathèque’s Henri site is slightly better quality.

Barrie Pattison 2023

Panahi & Torture Porn

Jafah Panahi's Iranian Yek Tasadef Sadeh/It Was Just an Accident has become the film of the moment by default. Carrying off the Grand Prix at Cannes had already made it priority viewing but history caught up with Panahi, who was fronting a retrospective at the Sydney Film Festival when Israel started bombing the country from which he'd exiled himself. Panahi missed introducing the Sydney premier screening, the first ever for a paying audience we were told, caught up in frantic phoning home. Like his fellow Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, as time passed, his work has become more serious and more substantial. Panahi has felt compelled to put on show his view of the Islamic Revolution and has been thrown into jail and home detention, banned from working or leaving the country - ineffectually, as is now widely documented. The controversy over his It Was Just an Accident, its faults and qualities, abruptly became incidental in the face of world events. 

Movies in which victims subsequently face their tormentors are not a new development. Include a couple of Arch of Triumphs (Lewis Milestone & Warris Hussein), John Huston's We Were Strangers, Costa Gavras' L'Aveu and Polanski's Death and the Maiden. None of those offer the farcical elements  Panahi chooses to include.

The film begins with family man Ebrahim Azizi, driving at night in the desert with his pregnant wife and excited young daughter. The subdued speech patterns repeat the manner of the Iranian films we know. 

Wild dogs scurrying through the beams of moving headlights make a striking image. The family car hits one and events take an unexpected turn when they pull into an isolated service point for emergency repairs. Owner "Jughgead" Vahid Mobasseri conceals himself and calls associates to tell them he has located "Eghbal The Gimp".  Out of sight, he strikes down the unsuspecting father (it's a long time since I've been in an audience where two thousand viewers gasp simultaneously) and sets about burying the man alive in the desert. However, the prisoner assures him that he is not the officer responsible for regime tortures he takes him to be, and that his amputated leg is the result of a more recent injury than the one suffered by the limping commander. 

Plagued by doubt and in the unaccustomed role of avenger, Mobasseri contacts a bookstore owner fellow victim for a positive identification and the man sends him to mutual acquaintance Mariam Afshar, who was not restricted by a blindfold (a motif in the film) in her confrontation with the sadist. Now a wedding photographer, she is doing pictures for another former prisoner Hadis Pakbaten and the girl's groom-to-be Majid Panahi. Still in their wedding finery, the pair are recruited along with Ashar's one-time fiancé Mohamad Ali El Yasmehr. Divisions grow with Ashar reproaching El Yasmehr for his failing her in her time of emotional need and him turning on white collar worker groom Panahi for his risk-free lack of commitment. Elyasmehr, the most agro of the group, is the one to abandon them first.

Their deliberations are the heart of the It Was Just an Accident, mainly filmed in sustained mobile wide shots, as the group accuse one another of character failings, confront the hindrance of petty corruption of security men with their own credit terminals and hospital staff expecting cash and pastries as they deal with the captive's wife's delivery, of which the group become unwilling expediters. In with disturbing accounts of their former imprisonment - The Gimp placing blindfolded Pakbaten on a scaffold for three hours, a noose round her neck with the threat of rape, so that she will go straight to hell, where a virgin would have entered heaven.  ISIS is invoked along with the reference to Samuel Beckett in the single tree desert setting. The film's mix of the ridiculous with the appalling is its unique quality.

  Jafah Panahi

The climax is a one-take monologue by Azizi,  his eyes covered, his body language minimised by being roped to a tree. He is the only member of the cast with extensive listed performer credits and he handles the extraordinary demands. Azizi dismisses his captors as people who have shown that they lack the resolve for the challenge they have chosen.

The ending is the extraordinary, sustained shot of the back of Mobasseri's head.

Predictably, It Was Just an Accident also carried off the Sydney Film Festival's Competition Prize. That would have happened with a less accomplished production.. 

As I was watching it, I had a growing sensation of familiarity - not just the deja vus expected from comparing the big Celebrity Director productions I've mentioned. There was clubbing the fiend and locking him away immobilised, the shovel in the vehicle, recruiting fellow victims and particularly facing uncertainty about his true identity. It took me a day to associate this with the 2013 Mi Mefakhed Mehaze'ev Hara/Big Bad Wolves from Israelis Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushadoan. That's not going to be a popular connection. Though the publicity says Quentin Tarantino no less claimed that Big Bad Wolves was the best film of its year, it was one of the nastiest video nasties. 

In that one, school girls are found murdered and violated - shown in disturbing detail. The jaded police officers discover her school teacher has a pedophile background and, once removed from the case and connection with the authorities, one goes vigilante. This is splatter film rather than festival fare but the matching details accumulate. I'd have liked to ask Panahi if he's seen the Israeli film or researched the same incidents.

Big Bad Wolves - Lior Ashkenazi, Rotem Keinan

Now, I don't want to jump into learning about life from Bugs Bunny the way Paddy Cheyevsky has William Holden accuse Faye Dunaway in Network. However, I can't help wondering about the resemblance between the new festival hit and the twelve-year-old exploitation film, coming from countries that are now busily reducing one another's cities to rubble. 

Think about Donald Trump berating the latte drinkers of Hollywood until George Clooney did that scorching open letter documenting their industry as a better expression of the American Dream than Trump's gaudy  Tower. We've got Trump and Hollywood in much the same relationship as the Ayatollahs and Rosoulov/Panahi or even popular Iranian films like the Sperm Whale comedies where nostalgic professionals celebrate their protestor youth by lip synching Grease's "Tell Me, Tell M, Tell Me" to a bootleg Betamax, Think of US comedy programs as our best commentary on the L.A.Riots (The Daily Show ran that marvelous shot of the girl demonstrator blowing soap bubbles at the National Guardsman in full armor, which didn't make it into news coverage) I recall Jennifer Reeder, director of her own accomplished ultra violence movie Knives and Skin, saying “In the Trump area, art & culture will save us.” I can't help feeling that somewhere in this jumble of ideology, opportunism, outrage and self-expression, there is a signal that's more significant than the ones we are getting. 

The movies told us about the so-called Sexual Revolution or the fall of Communism well before news media. Is it happening again and what is the message this time?

For a second opinion try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rhxNDq5eT4

 

Cinema Reborn 2025

Cinema Reborn week is a welcome oasis in the desert of vintage film activity here, a timely reminder of the fifty-year absence of a National Film Theatre. This year's event was a useful mix in age and subject matter. Its purpose is to showcase restorations, which streamlines the work of locating and justifying material. Growing numbers indicate that it is finding its audience. I didn't try to work through the card, concentrating on unfamiliar material. That means that this report doesn't necessarily single out the best entries. Old favourites like Paisan, My Darling Clementine or Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors dip out.

However, opening night provided another look at George Cukor’s Holiday ( I keep on seeing it every twenty years) confirming that it is, with all its shortcomings, one of the most endearing films of its day.

Playwright Philip Barry was part of the between wars US theatre scene, the world of  Eugene O’Neill and The Theatre Guild. It’s his association with Katharine Hepburn that we now remember, though his plays were always being re-shaped for US TV in its first decades. Even if it wasn’t part of the Philip Barry cycle - Holiday 1930 with Robert Ames, this version, Philadelphia Story & High Society - this entry could still coast to a significant place in our attention on its ability to showcase the celebrity leads so nicely.

Columbia was working through a run of these dialogue comedies, regularly having George Stevens or Alexander Hall at the helm and this is one of their better examples. However, it does seem cut-price when you stand it up against Metro’s production values. We get lighting reflected on those marble pillars that are a plot point, showing they are obviously wallpapered. What was Franz Planer thinking? Doris Nolan and Henry Kolker do have something on the way to being the high points of their careers but they  are  never going to be competition for Mary Astor and Edward Arnold, who we’ve seen doing these characters in other films

Here, Cary Grant arrives at the Park Avenue mansion address of a fiancée he’s just met on a ski holiday. Convinced she must be a secretary there, he presents himself at the kitchen only to learn that she is the daughter of the house. He’s directed to the elevator and, instead of chic Doris Nolan, he faces her character-laden sister Katharine Hepburn, not quite settled into her movie personality but already irresistible. About now, Cary does the full Bob Fosse somersault from a standing position (audible audience gasp). Of course, the two are meant for one another, though the film’s strongest moments come from that weepy stand by, their misery-making loyalty to the sister. Kate sending off her soul mate to reconcile with her sibling chokes the viewers every time.

Really, there’s no question of which sister cheery Cary is going to pair with. Indeed it’s hard to understand why he ever got himself engaged to the mean blonde, who endorses her father’s rapturous account of the joy of making money, that just sets the man up as a target, even without any Miser Grandet resonance

The film adaptation, by Sidney Buchman (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)  and Cukor regular writer Donald Ogden Stewart hasn’t quite banished the theatrical form, which keeps breaking out with snatches of calculated dialogue. Some opening out filmed with Scotsmen and farmers has been deleted.  The act structure is still glimpsed showing the official engagement celebration in the area rimmed by the house’s grand stair case, simultaneous with broken hearted Kate, who had planned her own intimare gathering, upstairs in “the play room” become a shrine for the dreams that the children had when their mother set it up while she was still alive.  Alcoholic (another monologue) brother Lew Ayres, making his presence felt, began his uncompleted symphony on the piano there, before magnate father Kolker insisted he had to go to the family business and stay till six every day as an example to the staff.  There’s also a Marionette Theatre commandeered by Grant’s friend-academics Jean Dixon and Edward Everett Horton (he's a holdover from the 1930 version) to comment the action.

Holiday - Ayres, Hepburn & Grant

Turns out that raised-poor Cary has just made a killing in The Market and feels that’s enough money for him to have the life he wants while he’s still young, which horrifies Nolan and Kolker.  Won over by finding a now well-off suitor, dad has a place marked out for Cary at the company, where he can make more money than he needs. This is the point where the ideologies of the day get a nod - suffragettes, the fascist threat, organised labour.

Director Cukor uses the same device over. Dixon watches the dialogue with her partner, to come in for the final resonant lines in the way that snobby cousin Binnie Barnes is squired by Henry Daniel through their scenes without comment until he finally weighs in with the line that makes the audience detest them as much as Kate does.

Inevitable as it may be, the ending is irresistible. We get the common-for-the-day scene where the character we like looks like being trapped in the terrible home (compare Anne Revere in The Locked Room, Hobart Cavanaugh in Dark Hazard) giving Hepburn a chance to be even more winning, before the great timing of that last corridor scene, where Kate strolls in distracting Cary in the middle of another acrobatic turn - repeat of the gasp - though not wanting to spoil the fun - I think that prat fall is done by a stunt double. I’d have to see it again.

The festival circuit doesn't run to retentive memory. Names who were once hot tickets often produce blank stares now. Think Bimal Roy, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson or Gilles Carle. Don't try to find them in the Sight and Sound Poll.  An even more conspicuous example is Lino Brocka, once the recognition point with the booming Filipino film industry of the Marcos era. Brocka's Bona appeared here, prompting me that it was decades since I looked at his work seriously. A check of YouTube reveals a quite extensive selection, most of it without translation. I plan on exploring that and my own dust-covered pile of DVDs. I'll be back to this subject.

It’s hard to believe that critics saw Lino Brocka as a Filipino Ingmar Bergman, singling out individual works as masterpieces. A more talented Raffaello Matarazzo would be closer to the mark. Brocka himself had no such illusions, chatting about his “bold” (porn) films and participating in his country’s thriving production line, when their industry was rated an impressive number six in the world.

Brocka’s Bona dates from this boom and comes back to us through a curious chain of events, after enterprising enthusiast-entrepreneur Pierre Rissient had the original materials deposited in a French archive, now enabling this sharp, sub-titled digital restoration.

 Bona is a suitably lurid Latino melodrama pushed along with craft skill, which would have satisfied its target audience and adds to its curiosity value. It has two major assets. One is the lead performance by the winning Nora Anor, then leading Filipino star, who ran up a hundred and seventy-five movies. The other is Brocka’s detailed filming of Manila’s Tondo tenements, something Imelda Marcos opposed. They said “She doesn’t want the world to see the slums she herself never visits.” We get patching the rusting tin roofs on basic housing without running water, the idlers’ drinking drowning out the hymns of the church next door and kids playing with paper boats in streets flooded by rain - though the picture of community is supportive is not hostile.

The film opens with the Quiapo district roads thronged with worshipers throwing towels to the sweating men who are dragging the massive wooden religious statues of Manila’s Feast of the Black Nazarene. In the heaving crowd, we spot young Nora, expressing the same devotion that motivates her life as a groupie for movie extra Phillip Salvador. She brings snacks to him on locations, after getting her autographed fan photo.

When life in the family home becomes impossible, with dad Venchito Galvez taking his belt to her, Nora moves in with Salvador, who spends most of the picture in his Y Fronts. Nora shops, scrubs his floors and (significant detail) carries back tanks of water to heat for his bath. She nurses Salvador when the local yobos beat him up and tolerates his bringing back girls to the home - including a pregnant teenager whose abortion she has to help finance at the same rate as the last girl he took to the medico.

Nice young neighbour Nanding Josef comes on for Nora but she’s fixated on Salvador and ends up going to Josef's wedding to one of her friends. Though Salvador finally takes an interest in her, stretched out under the mosquito net on his floor, the situation of course deteriorates. Salvador’s one effective scene is his self-pitying monologue outlining his failure with movies - actor, voice dubbing, stunt man, extra. Nora can’t go home again and she finds that her man plans on selling the shack and migrating to the ‘States, married to mature new fling Marissa Delgado,  to whom he’s been passing Nora off as his sister.  Time for a suitably sadistic ending as befits one of these. 

Cenen Ramones’s script is delivered with reasonable craft skill. The camerawork looks pro even if one scene has the roll with Aunor’s close-ups just out of focus and the post-synch. voice track is irritatingly unvaried.

 The oldest film in the event, Stella Dallas was a Big Picture, state of the art for 1925. Sam Goldwyn (that’s the “G” in MGM) had struck a new Distribution Deal with United Artists and he was going to show everyone that he was an important producer. He acquired a best seller by a woman called Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote “Now Voyager” similarly dealing with a disfunctional mother-daughter relationship. Forget about divisions in a classless society. This one is a damp-eyed weepy. Goldwyn crewed it with prestigious Hollywood talent. The adaptation was by Frances Marion, one of the most powerful women in Hollywood after her association with Mary Pickford. Her titling here is particularly skillful.  Leading  Cameraman Arthur Edison would film Frankenstein, Mutiny on the Bounty and Casablanca and editor Stuart Heisler, later directed the admired Storm Warning, one of the first screen treatments of the Klu Klux Klan.

Goldwyn’s masthead star Ronald Colman and dignified Alice Joyce (opposite George Arliss in both versions of The Green Goddess) are billed above the central Stella Dallas character, which went to Belle Bennett, not a star though she had filled featured spots in some ambitious films. Seeing it as her breakout part, Bennett had made herself over, gaining weight and dressing cheaply. Her success here did get her leads in similar sudsy material (The Woman Who Was Forgotten)  before her early death in 1932.

The big winner would have to be director Henry King, already celebrated for the Americana archetype movie, Richard Barthlemess’ Tol’able David.  Stella Dallas’ major success (it recovered Goldwyn’s over spend and showed a handsome profit) must have figured in awarding King the contract with the Fox Corporation which would run for thirty years, making him one of the richest and most firmly established Hollywood film makers - the Willl Rogers State Fair, the Dione Quintuplets movie with Jean Hersholt again, Tyrone Power films including Americana hit Jesse James, leading to King’s most notable work, a run with Gregory Peck, starting with The Gunfighter and 12 O’Clock High.       

After the disgrace of his magnate father’s financial failure, Colman’s Stephan Dallas is reduced to handling legal affairs at the small town mill and boarding with the white trash family whose daughter Stella/ Bennett sets her cap at him, distracting Ronald from her brat brother’s bare-assed antics framed in the porch window behind them.

They marry and have a daughter (the appealing Lois Moran, who had been an item with Scott Fitzgerald)  but Belle’s boisterous lifestyle puts a strain on the relationship, particularly when Colman finds Jean Hersholt (the Stroheim Greed) in the house using his horse trainer methods to fix Belle’s sore back. Colman impresses his employers and is transferred to the New York office - nicely handled moment when the three family members show different reactions in the same frame. 

Belle objects, using Moran’s up-market local schooling as an excuse for staying behind, and Colman goes off and re-encounters now widowed old flame Joyce, who is too virtuous to exploit the situation. With gossip about Hersholt as an excuse, the school ejects Moran. Escaping to a society tennis club holiday, the girl meets teenage Doug Fairbanks.  However Bennett’s grotesque appearance embarrasses her daughter and Belle hears about it through the train compartment wall.  Rather than destroy her daughter’s happiness, she leaves, sneaking back to watch her daughter's wedding to Fairbanks through the window.

A current viewer is likely to miss touches that place the film. Dallas snr’s demise is shown as the smoking pistol dropping on a newspaper headline, like Briggite Helm’s degenerate suitor in the Metropolis montage. The lovers are first seen on a long rope swing, as in Wings. Fairbanks grows a mustache to match his famous dad. However the distance from our time is one of the things that makes Stella Dallas still remarkable. As with other multiple-remake works, like Rain, Beau Geste or Ben Hur, the silent version is the one that carries conviction. The attitudes and situations belong to that era. Subsequent filmmakers have their time cut out time shifting the action, as demonstrated in sound versions of "Stella Dallas" with Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Midler - not to mention rip-offs like the one where it’s Al Jolson moved on in the rain outside the wedding.

The new transfer is handsome. Copied from an early generation, tinted and backed by an excellent Stephen Horne orchestral score, it will be the closest most of its audience come to the vintage movie experience.  How many consider that they are among the first people ever to watch hundred-year-old drama, pretty much in the form it was first presented?

After her working on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  Fran Rubel Kuzui's 1988 Tokyo Pop turned out to be a nice change of pace, though it fell between the distribution cracks.

In this one. Punk-cut blonde Carrie Hamilton gets tired of being backup singer for no-talent groups in New York and, deciding that L.A. is as bad, she sets out for Tokyo without speaking any Japanese or having enough money. She gets as far as The Mickey House, a plausibly small & shoddy Tokyo hotel, decorated with Disney memorabilia. The receptionist calls “Shoes!” indicating she should go bare foot and the shower cuts out. Americans there try to bring her up to speed. Though she protests she's a band singer, the best she can find is being an escort in a Karaoke bar. The Mamasan with big red glasses leads the customers in encouraging her into the “Home on the Range” sing-along.

Stranded when the Taxis won’t take her back without a street map to guide them, she stops off at a street food stall where the boy idlers bet Yutaka Tadokoro that he can’t pick her up but, despite his limited English, he manages to get her into one of the numerous Love Hotels complete with censored porn videos. She resists his advances and sleeps in the bath. When they run into one another again and manage a better understanding, he takes her on a tour of the local colour - markets, roller skaters in the street, the pigs blood scarlet pillar open air passage way, the grill your own flapjacks cafe -  and they pair off with her interjecting “slow” into the make-out. No nudity.

Tokyo Pop - Carrie Hamilton, Yutaka Tadokoro

Turns out his mates make up a pop band, who push the idea of recruiting her as a Gajin (cf. Tokyo Vice) vocalist because blondes are then all the go in music groups. They get a spot introducing Sumo wrestlers but Yutaka won’t be in it,  even if it is National TV. The only way ahead seems to be with imperious producer Tetsurô Tanba (Suna no utsuwa/ The Sand Castle, The 5 Man Army - at last a familiar face), who dismisses bands who turn out to audition for him and refuses demo cassettes, even if they get delivered as a Gorillagram. Hamilton won’t settle for that and barges into his office, impressing him with her chutzpah. 

Success follows but she has to decide whether this is fleeting, with the alternative of heading back to the U.S.A. still wearing Tadokoro's red Band Shirt. 

Despite their lack of assurance, the leads become endearing and Kuzui manages to keep the locating business coming - Hamilton framed by Washington Square, the Tokyo neon streets,  Tadokoro fishing with grandfather Taiji Tonoyama in the concrete sluices provided, Hamilton entering through a tunnel exit packed with black-hair-and-suit pedestrians, become the one blonde patch in frame. Throw in his moving into the flat that their success has made possible, reflecting that most Japanese don’t leave the family home till they get married. Novelty with minimal technique make this one agreeable.

 

Probably the most challenging film in the event was Gibel Otrara / Fall of Otra, which last passed this way as a cut-down black and white single-showing item. 

The restored version has gotten back some of its original colour - sepia, which intermittently goes to as near to a full range of tones as unstable Ruskie-color could manage. Now it comes with information about the fall from grace of Russian director Aleksei Gherman, whose troubled career included Twenty Days Without War, My Friend Ivan Lapshin and Trial on the Road - all remarkable. Then under official disapproval, he was forbidden to make films but the script Fall of Otrar co-written with his wife Sverlana Karmelita went into 1991 production under then-student director Ardak Imirkulov, starting his career in the little-documented but imposing Kazak industry.

Fresh from seven years where he rose through the ranks of Genghis Khan's forces to the point of commanding a thousand men, Kipchak warrior Dohka Kydraliyev presents himself in Urzench, the capital of Khorazm, to Khan Tungishbai Dzhamankulov, as a deep cover agent, bringing with him the plans for the Mongols' wall-smashing machinery. More worried about conflict with neighboring Baghdad, the ruler sends him off to the Merry Tower of torture to be crucified. This one is a candidate as the most violent film of all time. Rescue takes the form of intervention by his loyal followers and the Khan's imposing Matriarch mother. Our hero gets an agreeable night (“I want a Chinese women with small feet”) but slips off, kitting himself with the sentry's weapons and outfit in recognisable Gherman pouring rain. 

It takes a while to get through the court intrigues, the unpardonable murder of the Mongol Emissaries and looting their caravan, which triggers invasion, where Otrar is the last of the kingdoms to crumble. The lead has changed his features by pushing his face into a hot coal brazier. The finale of Part 2 has the siege portrayed with further brutality - the machine for cutting out the tongue of a warrior who cries symbolism in the collapse of the mosque, as the invader captives face boiling water poured into their wall excavations. Probably best not to ask what happens to the horse they drive off the city wall to fall into the roof below. The climax is the execution of the defeated ruler, brought in a cage carried by naked prisoners to the presence of Genghis Khan, for execution by pouring molten silver onto the wax covered face - we had that (with less emphasis) in Andrej Roublev, which like Ivan the Terrible, prefigures this one. They even throw in True Grit's signaling the lead's escape by lighting a fire on the distant hill. The film continues with accounts of the later lives of survivors and a visit to the ruined mosque where the coloured panel chamber is now reduced to monochrome.  

A synopsis suggests that there was another now-deleted sex scene. The urge behind such extreme material is something on which we can only speculate. The Fall of Otrar is uneasy entertainment and we need to be prompted on the ideology it is meant to endorse. Like all Gherman's increasingly intense output, this one however remains indelible.

 

 Leila wa al ziap /Leila and the Wolves surfaced in 1984.  Sorbonne graduate Lebanese director Heiny Srour has status as the first woman director to have a film at Venice. She talks a great game -  filming in war zones, battling the rigours of desert conditions which destroyed film and equipment, the established attitudes of technicians clinging to feature film conventions and populations where her notions of female independence were often considered a shocking attack on family values, along with rulers who supported alliances hostile to Arab causes. Srour’s unit came under live fire on location - a journey from a comfortable middle class home to ferocious revolutionary. 

It's hard work to absorb the historical and agitprop content but the indignation burns through. What we get is a part narrative mixing historic footage, dramatisation and symbolic material. Filming extended over five years, with chasing finance taking a disproportionate amount of the time. The autobiographical element is obvious.  The cyclical account of women taking part in revolutionary struggle and then expected to return to traditional family roles becomes central.

On-screen lead Nabila Zeitouni’s concern is stirred by a 1980 London photo exhibition chronicling the Palestinian struggle, where there are no images of women. This is visualised/symbolized as a broken hand mirror. Zeitoun's character takes this as a challenge, herself filming reconstructions of conflict in Syria, Lebanon and the UK. Repeated scenes show men in their trunks frolicking in the surf, while black chador women sit in a circle on the beach under the sun.

We see archival footage of British soldiers, tropical kitted in their kaki shorts, interfering at gunpoint - a staple of the cinema we grew up with but this is not Sanders of the River. Here they are the colonial oppressors. It's not quite as jarring as the Genina 1942 Italian Bengazi where drunken Australian soldiers intimidate the innocent grape grower but offers the same brand of cultural dissonance. Current events in Palestine contribute alarming topicality. 

Leila and the Wolves itself is difficult, uneven and unequal to its pretensions but also sometimes impressive and disturbing.  Having been assured that it was a Socialist, Nationalist, Feminist work we damn well better like it.

This is one of several pieces on show, where the image quality of the original was degraded in working from original materials in sixteen millimeter. We get the impression that this format resists the efforts of current restorers. That puts at risk a large slice from our memory banks.

The same is true of David Noakes’ convincing How the West Was Lost, considered a highlight. It covers the 1946 strike of workers on the Strelley Station in the N. W. Western Australian Pilbara.

Conditions which can now be seen as shameful had been accepted after a Parliamentary enquiry ruled that native labor was necessary to the Pastoral Industries. Aboriginals on the stations had no option but to buy their needs from the company store. If they walked off, the police would bring them back over the store debts that they had no chance of repaying from the meagre wages. Their leaders were outraged that they were near slave labor on land given away by people who didn’t own it, land they had never ceded. They had no status as citizens and no vote. 

Similar conditions in the American South are widely documented. The 1932 Hollywood fiction film Cabin in the Cotton’s depiction of Planters and Pickers makes a striking comparison, though there the injustices are softened and the issue of race has less significance.

At great risk, the Strelley Mob walked off, often joined by the people from other stations. Some were able to survive in the desert, not returning and claiming that the strike has never been settled. Others went into mining. This is shown in dramatisations, interviews and official archival material. Disturbing footage shows strikers held in chains. These incidents were documented in the 1984  book “How the West Was Lost” by Don McLeod, a white prospector who took the part of the aboriginals and this is used along with spoken storytelling as the basis of David Noakes’ film. Strike participants and their families joined in the filming, checking staging and viewing rushes for accuracy.

The film was well received in event showings and as an informational tool, despite unpolished production.  This one was clearly on the wavelength of the Cinema Reborn audience, with a near-capacity attendance and sustained applause.

Stella Dallas - Colman, Moran & Joyce.





Barrie Pattison 2025

Leila and the Wolves.