Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012) RB UK Artificial Eye
Gilderoy, a sound editor whose usual source of
employment has been for agricultural/nature films set in his homeland of
England, has taken a job in Italy on a giallo (the exotic Italian term of
affection for gothic films that mix brutal violence and soft core pornography)
film. It is not clear why Gilderoy has taken this job except perhaps out of
confusion that it was a film about horses. The film, which is largely about the
male priestly need to discover the mark of the devil in women through the usual
means of torture and persecution, does bear the ungainly title The Equestrian
Vortex. It is also not clear what Francesco, the Italian producer and dictator
of the project, sought in Gilderoy but one is not led to think the choice was
equally built on confusion but rather that given Gilderoy’s innocent, natural
pedigree Francesco sees a man with talents who will not be belligerent about
lacks of payment or for reimbursement for the cost of arriving at the Berberian
Sound Studio.
The film is about this cost and for Gilderoy it may
be entire. Horrified and disturbed by the misogynistic film he has been hired
to flesh out with sound, Gilderoy becomes immersed in a small battle with his
sense of decorum and righteousness in a way that is not comforted by his lesser
but still evident potential attraction to enacting revenge against women in the
name of a symbolic truth. For this is the claim of Santini, the bearded devil
who is the director of the film within the film, we do not glorify the violence
against women, we present it because it is the historical record. His film aims
to be a brutal witness to the brutality committed against the historical
female. But this is just sound, just words, and Santini, like the Giallo
tradition and countless others, is banking on having it both ways. Bearing
witness to the presentation of sexual and other violence against women becomes
also a source of titillation to its makers and its viewers. The witness to the
confession becomes the justification for the continuance of the very same sin,
the enjoyment of exacting revenge against the mystery and beauty of women.
Gilderoy is in over his head and the question left
by the film is to ask is Gilderoy a naïve conservative mother’s boy from a
falsely genteel world in need of an awakening or is he another victim, like you
and I, of the juxtaposition of cinematic truth with voyeuristic desires to see
the other raped and destroyed and unable to stand against the temptation of the
latter? I think the film is an interesting film and so the question is not
answered and I imagine my own response, in future viewings – which the film
encourages in its depth and lack of direct explanations of its logic, will be
largely connected to where I see myself on that same continuum between naïve
and simple truth and my own complicity with the evil I am and am in. That said
I offer here that the film is a rewarding tragedy about a good man who sought
the science of nature and was led instead towards a disturbance of resentment
and violence that exists and persists in truth but did not have a home in him
until he was forced to swallow its seed; a film made all the stronger by its
use of sound and its steadfast refusal to impregnate us with any disturbing or
rewarding images that it depicts in flesh gouging (more truthfully watermelon
slashing) 5.1 DTS sound. We are not tempted like Gilderoy, we do not see, we
only hear the depiction of the description. We would surely be more drawn to
the themes, but in a less powerful way, if we saw what Gilderoy had to watch.
But to show that which is only heard would be to overwhelm the theme of the
film – the complicity of bringing a voice to that which is perhaps best unseen,
especially when it pretends to edify as it degrades.
SRP:
11.99pounds
Also Released
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012) Ent. One
Cosmopolis is also a film firmly built on the
importance of sound. However, the sound here is the constancy of people talking
like they are characters in a book written by Don Delillo. This means that they
are characters that do not express who they actually are rather they speak only
as struggling voices seeking to articulate the abstractions that they imagine,
also abstractly, to be at the essence of who they are. The main essence and
idea of the film (of which there are many and thus in this way may encourage
repeat even looped viewings) is that technology and money are both sexy and
sexual ideas and that we live in their intersection, defined and frustrated by
both. This is the sort of idea that excites and stimulates cultural theorists,
those drawn to understanding the lives we live in terms of explanatory and
intimately complicated theories. My view, akin to my view of the film, is that
this is simply not true. Instead we live in confrontation with our ideas and
that it does not take a great deal of self-reflection to note that who we are,
or perhaps more to the case what we have just done, is built on a constant
lived refutation of our favorite principles. We are not the things that we
think we understand in words and sounds, our lives seek to underline those
thoughts and we daily, in our deeds, cross them out. Whether or not this is a
concern or a problem is also probably connected to the theories that we have
accepted about such actions. In any case, this is a film that is a theory with
pictures presented only as symbolic support or deepening for said declarations.
Beyond its respect for ideas and theories, the film is empty. I suspect that I
would find more truth and relevance, though less to talk about, in Gilderoy’s
nature movies.
SRP: $29.99
The Thompsons (Mitchell Altieri, Phil Flores,
2012) Anderson Merchandisers
This past holiday season I purchased a number of ten
horror movies on two DVDs for $5. The movies are not very good and the quality
of the DVD transfer is even worse. But for fifty cents a film I am still
delighted and if there is one scene that provides interest to me this delight
is further validated. The Thompsons is a fine quality transfer of a film that
would find itself as one of the lesser lights on one of these five buck
packages. A film about vampires, or something close to that, who are seeking
their own kind so in order to be cared for in a time of persecution and plight,
I recognized that even if I was of their kind that I would not have wanted to
provide them with any such care. The film like its main and subsidiary
characters is dull and violent, splashy with blood from bared fangs and necks.
The film cruises along with little tension until it screams to a halt with
tacked on platitudes about the importance of family and home. It is a tedious
experience that does not even offer the tease of a cheap thrill.
SRP: $20.06 `
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