Some Blue Eyed Revisionism

Men Who Hate Women (or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as the publishers will insist on calling it) is just a week away from it’s UK wide release, and the TV/newspaper wide coverage is starting to reach fever pitch. The booming voice has slipped into a TV spot even more breathless than the knuckleheaded advert discussed in the last post, and from a few adverts in the papers it seems like every publication and its’ dog is giving MWHW (aka TGWTDT) a solid four, if not five out of five.

Which is no bad thing, as I can’t think of a single Swedish title which has ever had comparable pre-release hype. Take your pick of any worthy or big Swedish classic, and I can assure you it’s never found 30 seconds of airtime during the advert break of Death Wish on ITV. The Swedish film industry has desperately been striving for an international breakthrough hit that will warrant the attention of the non-arthouse masses, and up until now repeated been failing at the task miserably. Case in point: the collossal flop that was Arn: The Knight Templar, a multilingual mess of a crusading action film. Built on a successful trilogy of books by a multimillion selling indigenous author, I doubt Svensk Filmindustri have ever thrown so much money in the direction of a single film. When said film then flops to the point of not even breaking the British or American DVD market, then you’re talking about a film of a sub-Seagal standards, without the comfort of the unintentional laughs.

Along comes another multimillion selling trilogy of Swedish books that are, shock horror, actually pretty good in the first place. But talk of not knowing a good thing when you see it, Stieg Larsson’s smash trilogy is optioned, and then commissioned for Swedish television. Recording starts, and it seems that halfways through the recording of the first book someone had the bright idea that maybe this could be sold much better internationally as a feature film. The rest as they say, is history.

It seems to be a trend that top-drawer television is growing to struggle with more and more, and the issue has been echoed in the UK with the Red RidingTrilogy . Another trio of feature length TV specials with a strong literary source, shot with big indigenous names in front of the camera, and genuine visionaries behind it the end product is programme which literarlly pops off the screen. The trilogy has been touring across the States garnering wholly justified ecstatic write-ups from every corner smart enough to look in it’s direction. To have the New York Review of books declare the trilogy ‘better than The Godfather’ carries no small weight. Even Swedish critics have been looking across at the trilogy with hungry eyes, calling for a similar mini-tour to put the ‘film’ back where it belongs: the cinema.

[for fine words on Red Riding and it's striking/stifling use of location and landscape, you could do a lot worse than check out David Forrest's take on 'The North as Abstract' over at Words on What I've Seen.]

While Red Riding has found it’s feet abroad as a markedly British art feature, the selling of the first part in what the distributors are calling ‘The Girl’ trilogy is being played on completely different terms. Audiences familiar with the Anglicized version of Wallander will be more than prepared for ‘The Girl’, as it comes from exactly the same production company (Yellow Bird Films), utilising a lot of the same crew in the production of the film. Both have a very similar feel, bleached colours palettes, following broken souls looking for answers in a series of brutal acts, which in part are endemic of Sweden’s national failings.

The audience unfortunate enough to be stuck in front of Death Wish last weekend will now be approaching ‘The Girl’ with anything BUT the above criteria in mind. The marketing engine can’t seem to decide if ‘The Girl’ being Swedish is a good thing or a bad thing. As previously discussed, the trailer remains mute, but for reasons known only to the advertising team, the promotional material would have you believe that Lisbeth Salander is blue eyed. The exact detail isn’t made clear in the books, and in a straw poll of two the verdict leant towards the literary Lisbeth having green eyes. What is certain is that actress Noomi Rapace has brown eyes, so there’s no doubt that some sort of photoshop skull-duggery is at hand. Which begs the question, why bother?

To present a a sharper vision of Swedishness? Sexy blue-eyed liberal foreignness, a scando marketing tag anyone can get on board with? Maybe if you consider the country in terms ‘racial purity’ and ‘ayrianism’, which last time I checked was one of the very cornerstones of what Stieg Larsson spent his life fighting against. A mountain out of a mole hill maybe, but bloody daft whichever way you cut it.

Doc/fest – Sacred Places

In the incredibly crowded, and slightly myopic sphere of a genre focused film festival the sheen of every filmmaker, every doc just pushing harder and harder slowly forces everything to be viewed through a dazed and distorted lens. Agendas to the left of me, oblique subjective camera angles to the right; here I am, stuck in the middle doubting my notions of what a doc actually is.

Thank heavens then for Sacred Places: a straight, observational, old skool doc, unburdened from the responsibility of pushing an agenda, or being wholly representative (even when it says it is not). Director Jean-Marie Teno takes her camera to the streets of St Leon in French speaking Burkina Faso, where Nanema Boubakar runs a cineclub screening films to all and sundry.

The festival notes salaciously describe this as an ‘underground’ cinema, but it’s nothing of the sort, it’s just a cinema that happens to be off the main distribution circuit. It is a smallish hut, with rows and rows of benches in front of a standard TV, the size of any you might in any western living room. Boubakar rents pirated DVD’s of the latest Hollywood action and kung-fu films for the evenings, and intersperses a programme thick with Jackie Chan and Wesley Snipes with the occasional African feature he can get hold of. Despite his illegitimate status, his margins are ridiculously tight, and Boubo (as he’s called) struggles to pay rent for the small hall.

To help him he enlists the support of Karo, his artisan friend who makes and plays the traditional djembe drum. He too struggles to make ends meet, but uses his talents as a musician and craftsman to find varied work as a music tutor, instrument tuner, and occasional the local troubadour/poet in the spirit of the West African Griot. In this capacity he does his friend Boubo a favour by doing the rounds, beating his drum and announcing the fine features expected at the cineclub that evening.

The status of these purveyors of culture is not raised, deified or criticized in any particular way. They are just working with the means they have, plying a trade and scraping a living with the arts that they love. When a director of one of the pirated films learns that his local cineclub is screening his films illegally the threat of high drama looms large.

But the ‘confrontation’ is left off screen, and in being interviewed after the event the director admits that he’s just glad that audiences are still being drawn to his relatively old film. He made it to be seen, it’s a shame that the pirated copy is such poor quality, but he still wishes he could make these films more affordable to the cineclubs. Exhibition is just as important as production, and cineclubs such as Boubo’s are giving new audiences the chance to find films they would otherwise be oblivious to. Boubo does of course pine after a particularly large TV, but it has less to do with his desire to present High Definition cinema, and more to do with his desire to draw more bums to his benches.

Western filmmakers/cinephiles/nerds would no doubt cry a river at the prospect of forcing 50+ punters around a 32” TV to see their widescreen, technicolour, 5.1 surround sound masterpiece, but this is cinema in one corner of the developing world. It’s not for us to say that this is or is not cinema, when droves of locals are more than willing to shell out a dime for the pleasure.

But then again, that’s the agenda I derived from the film, another point to illustrate my personal reflections on cinegoing past and present. The film itself stands well above that, and is a superb document of cinegoing in its own right.

Don’t Look Now on a laptop in Venice

Film is defined as much by its’ content and form as it is by it’s context. A boring discussion could be had volleying about film theory ‘til the cows come home on such a broadside, but film is about how we personalise the viewing experience; the company we kept, the events that led up to the screening, the location and quality of the material itself. A small revolution in mainstream film criticism could be enacted were critics not forced into a room full of other grumpy men on a Monday morning to watch the latest GenericRomCom®.

Regional cinemas have tremendous history of tapping into the value of films of local relevance. From the birth of Cinema, with the factory gate films of Mitchell & Kenyon in the North of England, but also in recent history with special screenings or the director Q&A for titles of local interest. Entrepreneurial spirits have even taken it a step further with rolling projection booths that can show John Ford westerns in Monument Valley, or Repo Man in an abandoned lot in downtown LA. Using the immediate locale to bolsters the core cinema experience beyond that of mere consumption is about as great as cinema gets.

With cinema drifting away from the communal experience more and more, the value of the private experience of a film needs to be considered. It might make filmmakers cry (or piss and moan) to think of people watching a film on a phone or a laptop, but loss of quality aside how does watching a film in 40 min bursts on the plane/train/automobile commute affect a viewers’ digestion of a film? How might that come to affect filmmaking in 20 years time?

My decision to kill an evening travelling through Venice by watching Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now was a personal experience which went above and beyond the norms of most bricks-and-mortar cinema experiences. Fighting exhaustion and sleep deprivation on arrival, I opted for a film on the laptop over idle and banal conversation with the gaggle antipodean travellers that filled the hostel I was staying at. For my sins I’d never got around to Don’t Look Now, and by gum if this wasn’t the time and the place to catch up with this British classic.

The viewing wasn’t in-and-of-itself too horrific, and my proximity didn’t bleed into the experience of consuming the film. The frantic build up to the twist-I-already-knew-by-osmosis was pretty intense, but the film was over before I knew it. A few interesting echoes to Antichrist, the meaning of parenthood, loss, subjective memory, and so forth and so on. Still, yes, lovely, good film, lights out, time for sleep.

While my sleep didn’t feel broken, I didn’t realise quite how stupid I was to leave the processing of a film like that to my slumbering self. At breakfast the next day I learnt from my Australian room-fellows that for reasons unknown I was repeatedly calling out and screaming at five in the morning in a language wholly foreign to them. I’m not prone to night-terrors in the least, but then I guess an unconscious exception had to be made for Don’t Look Now.

Walking around the city the next day I can’t say I was particularly weirded out by my experience (and nocturnal response) to the film. The city was the same, though the pale and washed out colours of a wintery Venice felt a world away from the sweltering day of Indian summer I was experiencing. Anorak-ish compulsion forced me to track down the church being restored in the film (the eglise San Nicolo dei Mendicoli). But that wasn’t particularly cathartic. A very nice church, which surprisingly makes zero mention of the film, or its production, anywhere in it. It’s just another church in Venice, just a bit off the beaten track.

Strolling about in the evening was a little eerier, as it recalled the claustrophobic, echoing back alleys which Donald Sutherland seems to endlessly be running through in the film. The fact that you can be completely isolated one minute, and in the middle of a high street the next is strangely unique to the historical architecture of Venezia, and is unnerving enough without the recollection of Sutherlands waking dreams. The strange parallel between the crowded ‘real’ or conscious world, and the labyrinthine unconscious world and its’ lurking shadows/killers is an obvious if extremely effective one, really underpinning the flitting perspective between premonition and reality. The city’s casting is absolutely integral to this, and it’s a small miracle that Venice as a location hasn’t been done to death in horror films since. Only the recent Shark in Venice seems to think of the city as a natural backdrop for terror, and that was shot in Bulgaria.

Getting back and re-watching the film in the comfort of my own home I can’t say I was able to find any obvious seeds of deep set horror in it. I can only assume the film is actively working on levels I cannot even begin to comprehend. Which is terrifying in its’ own right, but this does explain how the film manages to both grow in the memory and get better and better on successive viewings. By all means watch it where you like on what you like, just don’t watch it before going to bed, in Venice.

The State of Swedish Cinemas Today

It’s not often you can blame a single supermarket (branch, not chain) for both winding you, shattering your childhood memories, and brining a glaze of tears to your eye. Unimposing as it may seem, this very supermarket did just that.

But first some clarification: growing up I had the good fortune of living in Sweden, and being of certain stock both in genes and culture I will forever be pining for the Holms. Or more precisely the Stock-holm, and its’ southern isle where I grew up.

In primary school I remember brashly boasting that I could see the new multiplex, the Palace of Cinema (or Biopalatset to give its indigenous name) from my bedroom window. It took some precarious leaning out of said window, but I could see the red glow of the sign, and it took me less than two minutes door to door. Lasting memories of seeing Jurassic Park with both my parents at a very tender age (as allowed with the Swedish 11-A certificate) was unquestionably a formative experience. Countless 90’s Batman films, less so.

Biopalatset was run by the Sandrews corporation, whose rivalry with SF Bio was a constant thorn in the side of every child post-Christmas. Everyone was guaranteed to receive cinema gift vouchers for Xmas, and the days up to New Year would be busy with cine-going. Yet making plans with friends was always compounded by the fact that I would have vouchers for SF and Alex would have vouchers for Sandrews. Two incompatible sets of vouchers meant that instead of 1 free cinema visit for the both of us, we instead had to make do with two discounted trips. I’m sure it was tremendously profitable for all conglomerates involved. But that was life, and ultimately I saw more films, which was probably for the best.

When I was a fair bit older I moved back to the UK to start university. A year later Sandrews went bankrupt. Now I’m not saying anything, but then who am I to say if it was more than coincidence?

In the short term Sandrews was sold onto a new conglomerate called Astoria cinemas, who after considerable restructuring attempted to carry on business as usual. Yet in the face of the established SF cinemas the new Astoria chain was unable to secure enough exclusives from America, and after two years they too went bankrupt. SF leapt on the chance to buy up the competition, but many expected Sweden’s stringent anti-trust laws would defer any risk of a monopoly. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case as no other bidders were willing to shoulder the multi-million kroner debts that had been building up.

The monopoly was set, and all that was left outside SF were the independent cinemas. Former Sandrews cinemas like Victoria fell under the mantle of indie out-fit Svenska Bio, others were boarded up or sold to other interests. Victoria is a fine example of a cinema working hard to survive in the pockets outside the mainstream. As can be seen in the photo, the cinema is now subtitled ‘barista’ supplementing film exhibition with the sale of coffee. A bit of a shame, but then you can’t begrudge the efforts of the indies to stay afloat.

And so to the supermarket. The multiplex I could see as a kid was Biopalatset, run by Sandrews, and built into the basement of the Söderhallarna shopping centre. When I was a teenager SF opened another multiplex, Filmstaden Söder, in the other end of the shopping centre, for such were the heady ways of this cinematic rivalry. Opening to great pomp, the complex boasted ear-blisteringly loud speakers in every imaginable crevice. It was the local cinema of choice for epic fare like the Lord of the Rings, or even the Epic FAIL of Star Wars: Episode 1.

It was to my horror then that on a recent trip to Sweden I found the still relatively fresh multiplex Filmstaden Söder had been turned into a brand new, not even day-old supermarket. As if to echo the irony of the two multiplexes’ close proximity/competition, this new supermarket is built underneath a rival supermarket. Who says markets cannot effectively compete under the shiny mantle of Swedish socialism?

Walking into the former foyer of the cinema I just felt a wave of sadness for the disappearance of something nominally ‘cultural’ and part of my youth having been turned into another surplus-to-requirements supermarket. Beyond my own nostalgic feelings for a multiplex of all things, a deep seated worry towards the precedents of exhibition history also presented itself. Simply put, the transformation of cinemas into supermarkets is the death knell of a cinema trade in recession. In broad terms, in both Sweden and the UK, the death of the weekly cinemagoing of the post-war generation was brought about by television, with the conversion of cinemas into supermarkets being a direct result of the widespread closures. The marks of the last wave can be seen in both Stockholm (with the kvartersbion) and Sheffield (with the suburban cinemas) with the sites of previous cinemas clearly marked on the sites of modern supermarkets. The Co-op in Crookes, the Nettos in Walkey and Hillsborough for Sheffield, and a number of ICA’s in Östermalm and Kungsholmen are but a few you can mention.

This latest wave started in Stockholm thre years ago when SF sold off the historically important Röda Kvarn cinema in central Stockholm. Opened in 1915, Röda Kvarn was the oldest surviving cinema in region, a proper picture palace of the grandest ilk which was meticulously maintained. It cost a margin extra to go there, but there was little chagrin in paying to see modern film in a bizarrely historical setting. When it was sold off there were a few voices of discontent, balanced with an appreciation for the (at the time) struggling SF to sell off a cinema on Stockholm’s equivalent of Bond Street. In a matter of months the cinema was turned into Stockholm’s first Urban Outfitters, and the private boxes of old now took a different role as changing booths for the cities well moneyed hipsters.

With cinema-going in Sweden on a marked upturn in recent years you would think that the selling-off would have ceased, but with the monopoly that SF has on the mainstream it carries on regardless, cherry picking what stays open and what gets shut. As the closures show, their priorities lie solely towards profit over quality and diversity. Prices go up, the number of screens drop, the range of films gets slimmer, overall accessibility decreases, audiences miss out.

It’s difficult to say what impact this is all having on the nation’s film production, as to many eyes it’s in rude health. Let the Right One In and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo have caused ripples internationally this last year, but these success are far too irregular for a nation which consistently punches above its weight in the world of popular music and literature.

But there are glimmers of hope. The last single screen local cinema (or Kvartersbio) in Stockholm, Bio Rio in Hornstull struggled on for a long time, run by a very old but very determined man. It used to be my grandparents weekly cinema of choice, and only a couple of years ago I saw Death Proof there. Truly a cinema across the generations.

Box office, ticket tearing and projection were all run by this one guy, who was persistently in the local press telling of his struggles to keep the rent from skyrocketing. When he announced his retirement many thought that was another cinema shut, but full plaudits to the cultural organisation Folkets Hus och Parker (the National Federation of People’s Parks and Community Centres) for stepping in and reviving it. Renovation, installation of digital projectors with the option for 3D film and live link ups to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and a bursting film programme aimed directly at increased audience engagement. And reasonable prices too.

It’s only a 200 seater cinema, and it deserve better than parallels drawn to David and Goliath. It remains a tremendous hope in an otherwise dark situation. A glimmer of hope for the way things should be. A real palace for cinema, and not just another filmic supermarket.