It’s one of the best loved strands at TIFF, putting the ‘cult’ in culture. It’s launched J-horror, Eli Roth, Ginger Snaps and a million fanboy dreams. And it’s a different planet to me – despite a steady adolescent diet of slasher movies, even conversations about horror movies make me feel faint now.
SAUNA & DEADGIRL REVIEWS
Scream queen Shelagh Rowan-Legg emailed to say that, actually, Cabin Fever was her big moment with Roth, not Hostel (as opposed to what it says in the new issue of the mag). To atone, I’ll let her fill you in authoritatively on the spooky shenanigans thrilling audience’s neck hair – or leaving it unshivered – this year.
“A disappointing film, Sauna never quite decides what it’s about or why it’s supposed to be frightening. Set in the late 1500s, a long war between Sweden and Russia has finally ended with Finland being divided between them. Two Finnish brothers – Eerik, the grisled war hero, and Knut, the gentle scientist – accompany a trio of Russians through the far north to set the new political border. Eerik’s violent hatred of Russians leads him to kill a peasant and leave the peasant’s daughter for dead. As they travel north, the girl’s image haunts Knut. The group stumbles upon an isolated village in the middle of a swamp. The villagers are strangely clean and live near a haunted sauna that makes even animals gouge out their own eyes. Confused yet? Director AJ Annila wants to evoke the idea that hell is the place behind God’s back (i.e. the cold and barren north), where the devil can penetrate the mind and body. The film wants the audience to draw connections between Eerik’s violent nature, Knut’s lustful thoughts and the image of the Finnish sauna, a space where water and fire can wash away sins. But it tries to be too many things at once, and so becomes none. Although visually stunning, the story meanders too much to be truly frightening or even thought provoking.
“Certainly one of the most disturbing films of the Midnight Madness program this year, Deadgirl takes the idea of woman-as-object and pushes it to the extreme. Two stereotypical slackers – Ricky, the cute and nice one, and JT the one teetering on the edge of sanity – find the naked, dead body of a woman in a sealed room of an abandoned mental hospital. No one knows she is there, and as it turns out, she’s not really dead, but some feral animal that can’t be killed. JT, as the crazy one, immediately suggests using the girl as a sex slave; Ricky, in the role of nice guy (and in love with the pretty girl at school), is horrified at the idea but does little to stop his friend. Women are virtually silent in this film, but that perhaps is the point. Women have no voice when all men want to do is look at them. The dead girl is the perfect woman: she is naked and chained, and no one will rescue her. To JT, women are to be looked at and used for pleasure. But they are that same thing to Ricky; even though he would think of himself as the good guy, he spends most of his days staring at his love interest. There is even a touch of the homoerotic gaze, when for a brief moment in the library, JoAnn’s stereotypical jock boyfriend stares at Ricky the way Ricky stares at JoAnn. Stereotypes abound in the film as a subtext to the gaze; the male characters each represent a different stage of the evil of men: they all in the end treat women the same, no matter how long it takes them to reach that stage. To emphasize this, directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel let the camera linger in close ups on the faces of their male characters, twisting their own gaze on women into ours on them. And this, in the end, forces the audience to think about their own gaze, and whether they would rescue the girl or run away.”
WAVELENGTH
Thanks to Shelagh for seeing Deadgirl, which I was interested in – but would have passed out or walked out from after five minutes. Meanwhile, I was experiencing a different kind of late-night strange visions at the closing Wavelengths program, home of experimental film and – for the past two years – sold-out success (as in selling out all tickets, not as in programming ‘experimental’ ads or what have you) followed by all-night parties. This year’s filmmakers included James Benning and Nathaniel Dorsky, and an intense week ended on a high at Jackman Hall at what will one day again be the Art Gallery of Ontario but is currently a Frank Gehry-designed building site. There were two dual-projection films (which does indeed feel like watching four films): Vanessa O’Neill’s Suspension and Jennifer Reeves’ When It Was Blue.
Maybe it’s my early exposure to Derek Jarman, but I think all experimental film should be blue, and these films didn’t disappoint. O’Neill’s film was a rapt meditation on the horizon “as a point of calling – you want to get to it but you can’t get it,” as she put it to me. As we talked after the screening, eavesdroppers commented that they loved the film, and loved it even more after hearing her talk about it so passionately and articulately. The 10 minute silent film is the culmination of a series of drawing and painting works about the horizon, and it feels it: thoroughly worked, beautifully paced, minutely detailed in the syncing and slipping out of sync of the two layers of film. And it ended with a startling optical illusion in which the black-and-white film layer appears to turn the blue film layer the pink of the inside of an eyelid. Not so much blink and you miss it as capturing the feeling of closing your eyes on a sunny day after looking at light playing on water.
And there was more of the world in When It Was Blue, which cut together 16 mm film shot on Reeves’ trips to Iceland, Vancouver, Costa Rica, New Zealand and around the States to create a more experimental, more elegiac Koyanisqaatsi. Replacing the tinkly Philip Glass was a score mixed live by Icelandic bassist and composer Skúli Sverrison, which had the whoosh and swoop of his compatriots Sigúr Ros, while being a close encounter with the film’s images. Sverrison and Reeves developed their material alongside one another, meeting up with sketches and thoughts before Reeves cut the film to rough mixes. There’s a taut relationship between sound and image – not least because of the gorgeous non-musical sounds of nature that Reeves edited in counterpoint to the images – that kept my attention through the hour of passing, flickering, doubling images.
Both Reeves and O’Neill are committed to celluloid, Reeves even blogging about being a 16mm filmmaker at Not Dead Yet. When It Was Blue is her longest abstract film, and a complete change of pace after the black-and-white thriller The Time We Killed, which won the FIPRESCI prize at Berlin – an ultimately frustrating experience, she told me, that led to lots of interest from developers who eventually said, “Hmmm, we have to pass on that.” Fools the lot of them, as The Time We Killed is a sly, eerie, claustrophobic, sexy film. Reeves says she’s glad to be working back in non-narrative film, but that she learnt a lot about pacing and montage from making TWK. And it shows: one audience member at the Q&A described When It Was Blue as symphonic, and it has the narrative undertow of a piece of music. Sinuous, surprising and gorgeous, it’s more Kind of Blue than Beethoven. And – surely marketable – I swear that its cyclical images of the natural world and moving water are the best cure for jetlag I’ve come across…
More later, including a report on Agnès Varda’s hair, further ninja sightings, some underground TO film culture, and what’s up with smoking the Bible?
