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Kinky, Kinky! Lucio Fulcis UNA SULL'ALTRA



Una sull'altra (aka Perversion Story of naked corpses) - IFE 1969 - Director: Lucio Fulci - Camera: Alejandro Ulloa - Production: Edmondo Amati, Maurizio Amati (. Empire Films; Productions Jacques Roitfeld, Coop Trébol Films) - Edited by: Ornella Micheli - Written by: Lucio Fulci (also story), Roberto Gianviti (also story), José Luis Martinez Molla - Music: Riz Ortolani - Starring: Jean Sorel (Dr. Geroge Dumurrier), Marisa Mell (Susan Dumurrier / Monica Weston), Elsa Martinelli (Jane), Alberto de Mendoza (Henry Dumurrier), John Ireland (Inspector Forest), Lucio Fulci (graphologist) Others - FSK: 16, not free holiday - Length: 99 min. - Italy premiere: 08.15.1969, German premiere: 09/24/1971

Lucio Fulci was at home in all genres. Born in 1927 in Rome director made by the late 1950s until his death in 1997, over 50 films. Among them were so down to earth, honest works such as the Heinz Ruehmann comedy Operazione San Pietro (The Adventures of the Cardinal Braun, 1967), Spaghetti Westerns such as the sound of revenge Western Tempo di Massacro (Django - His hymn-book was the Colt, 1966) and to live the almost delirious I Quattro dell'apocalisse (damn - damned to die; 1975), the effect retrospectively as the last breath of the ghost genre in Europe. Added are more likely a peasant-proletarian audience oriented genre parodies with the in Italy most popular comedy couple Ciccio Ingrassia and Franco Franchi, such as the films of the agent "002", not just the James Bond series, but the wave of "Eurospy" Thriller ridiculed and Adventure Films by Jack London, thrillers, end movies and gangster movies. And, of course, the bloody horror films, for which the director is well known outside of Italy best. Although these films show Fulcis sure sense of atmosphere (no matter how miserable dog act, the actors and how the special effects are cheap). They frighten but also back hardly a hideous, but they offer it within the offensive pointing gesture: In L'Aldila (ghost town of the Dead, 1981), Fulcis perhaps the most beautiful horror film, the Dietmar Dath with The salt-white eyes (2005 ) pays homage proved, were allowed to tear tear the most most incredible plastic spiders in film history a human tongue (!) and a hapless eyes (!), in Paura nella città the morti viventi (A zombie hanging on the bell rope , 1980) is a protagonist like their own vomit Intestines, which dramatically was rather pointless, but presented as a circus attraction in itself had its own value.

Fulci was foremost genre director, a filmmaker, his films for the audience and did not for the critics. And as he not infrequently the public in the second-and third-class movie theaters had in mind, he sought to deliver the thrills by which they should require, thus particularly Sex and Crime and kiss kiss, bang bang . With the decline of the terza visione cinemas late 70s, the increase in average ticket prices and the consequent disappearance of a certain style of popular and genre cinema in Italy, was transformed in the time interval between the reception of Fulcis films. Today it is - not only in Italy - some academics among his fans. And some of his films are well worth to be seen again.

sull'altra Una (1967), published by the U.S. under the label "Severin" a good DVD edition is, is one of those films and has one of the lesser known works of the director. This is perhaps because he is neither Western nor horror film and something so seemingly falls from the oeuvre of the Maestro. Most likely to be the film as a hybrid of the time in Italy as popular "movie sexy" and Gialli call, but without having bloody murders in the style of Dario Argento or Sergio Martino's come up. The title already promises racy and could be translated as "One to the Other." The (current) U.S. distribution title is even less subtle: He immediately announced a "Perversion Story" which appeared in Germany Una sull'altra under the speculative Dada-called "naked at nothing". The plot is quite simple: The marriage of a wealthy doctor Dumurrier George (Jean Sorel) with the ailing Susan (Marisa Mell) is at a low point. When Susan dies under mysterious circumstances, the notoriously unfaithful husband quickly gets under suspicion. After the death of his wife, George can be in the red light district of San Francisco and learns to drive a stripper to know that his late wife out of a face is cut. occur as further evidence to suggest that George murdered his wife, he is sentenced to death. At the last moment of his accident to the rescue ...

What Una sull'altra now very attractive, makes are his Mannerist, extremely exaggerated and often startling Stilismen that explicitly do not want the service of a realistic and credible cinematic storytelling. Fulci shall send a large number explicitly anti-naturalistic camera angles. There is the "impossible" view of the camera from a refrigerator would be out on the protagonists, an irritatingly artificial moment, as it is well established in American cinema with films like the first Blood Simple (1984) by the Coen brothers. In another scene the camera looks out from actually the floor of an apartment on the figures go up, so an embedded in the floor of the studio glass. In another sequence, a couple is filmed in the act by a delicate fabric. Again and again distorting wide-angle, the vertical lines at the edge of the field of view, the action is often filmed through mirrors, fast zooms directed against established visual conventions used and used subjective attitudes which are sometimes filmed with a handheld camera. An autopsy sequence Fulci realized by means of split screen, with decorative frames in each glass flask and Destillierutensilien draped in which liquids boil in all the colors of the rainbow. Time and again, images strictly divided into two levels of equal size, with a close-up in the one and a half shots in the other half. Some use Fulci and his cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa of how Orson Welles and Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane (1941) ground lenses. The hierarchical images, externalized power relationships that prove to be but often deceptive. At the end of the film then there is a fairly conventional resolution, where the tragic and unjustly sentenced to death for adulterers is, ironically, by avenging a crime of passion. But even here Fulci manages sustainable irritation: Our hero disappears just before the end of the film completely from the film. The last time we see George after he has entered the gas chamber. That he has survived, we learn only from the radio. The undermines, well, "happy ending" of the film and irritated sustainable: The protagonist may not be dead, but his total absence has yet clearly against the conventionality of the resolution. In a way, the unfaithful husband, at least in the cinematic space with the step has died in the gas chamber.

fact is not nearly as Una sull'altra low-brow as one might initially assume. In particular, cross-references brings Fulci film with an almost post-modern self-consciousness. There are some references to Michelangelo Antonioni Blow up (1966), when the mistress of the hero, a photographer, the studio sex pictures in pop art style to be made and how blase Photographer David Hemmings seduces a model at a photo shoot. From Hitchcock's universe is of course condemned the innocent hero, who himself remains ambivalent long. The covers on famous of Hitchcock's classics are particularly striking, obviously Handlungsort in San Francisco and the hallucinatory daydream splitter assembly, in which appears to the protagonist having sex with the doppelganger of his wife's pale, supposedly dead wife bier. If one drafted by something acting sex scenes, the rather tame lesbian seduction sequence with sadomasochistic Undertones and visits to strip clubs from is obvious that Fulci has actually shot a Italianized sexploitation version of Vertigo (1958).

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Eastern / Western: Ferdinando Baldi Blindman



Blindman / il cieco / Blindman, the executors - Italy-USA 1971 - Director: Ferdinando Baldi - Produced by: Tony Anthony, Allen Klein, Saul Swimmer - Story: Tony Anthony - Book: Tony Anthony, Pier Giovanni Anchisi, Vincenzo Cerami - Camera: Riccardo Pallottini - Music: Stelvio Cipriani - Cast: Raf Tony Anthony ("Blindman"), Ringo Starr ("Candy"), Lloyd Battista ("Domingo"), Magda Konopka ("Sweet Mama"), Baldassarre (Mexican general), Agneta Eckemyr Others - Length: 105 min - Format: Techniscope, 2.35:1 - German Premiere: 06.08.1972 - DVD by Sony (unedited, in its original format, including bonus material and original version with subtitles)

The idea, as protagonists of a Western gunslinger a blind use, should be one of the most abstruse ideas in the history of the genre. And accordingly it is not surprising that behind the programmatic title Blindman no American Genre post is hidden, but a largely Italian-funded Western. The idea for this movie was the team of actor / co-producer / co-authors Tony Anthony probably during the filming of lo straniero Tues silenzio aka the silent stranger (The nightmare of Kung-Fu, 1968), the first Spaghetti Westerns, the twisting not only in Japan but also thematically with the chambara Western all'italiana combined. It has a long tradition of Japanese genre films about the blind samurai (and masseur) Zatôichi, which has produced to date more than twenty films and the direct model to Ferdinando Baldi Blindman represents.

actually began in the late 1960s and early 70s, Asian cinema increasingly responded to the Spaghetti Western. In Zatôichi to yôjinbô (Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, 1970), the twentieth film Zatôichi series, referred the order four coffins no longer limited to Kurosawa yojimbo (1961), but also to the corresponding scene from the European remake per un Pugno Tues Dollari (For a Fistful of Dollars, 1964; R: Sergio Leone). Influences of the spaghetti western to Japanese Kozure Okami - series (1972ff.), the Hong Kong productions of the Shaw Brothers and its rival company Golden Harvest, as well as John Woo's kinetic force ballets and Tsui Hark's Wuxia movies are also unmistakable. For example, quoting Bruce Lee in Rome turned directing meng long guo jiang (The Dragon strikes again; 1972) several times musically C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968; R: Sergio Leone) . Films like zhan shen tan (The Thunder Bay of Shaolin, 1973) referred explicitly to Leone's "Dollar" trilogy and Lung Chien tang ren piao ke (Wang Yu - More than 1,000 kamikaze; 1973) used as Morricone's title theme by il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (Bad and the Ugly, 1966). Especially the Hong Kong productions of the 60s and 70s, integrated international Influences. The Shaw Center, the mid-50's musicals, melodrama, opera adaptations, martial-arts - and produced wuxia films began in the late 60s to participate in international hybrids. The films of Chang Cheh and King Hu took over as motifs from the Japanese genre cinema and the Western all'italiana , including the exaggerated sound effects, new camera and editing techniques and the use of the zoom . parallel originated in Italy Westernmixturen with Japanese actors, such as Tonino Cervis oggi a me ... domani a te (Today I, tomorrow you; 1968) with Tatsuya Nakadai, the villains from yojimbo , and Terence Young's soleil rouge / sole rosso (red sun rivals, and in 1971 ) in the Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune, Alain Delon took over the lead roles. early 70s appeared more Italo Western martial-arts -crossings, such as il mio nome è Shangai Joe ( The man with the ball whip; 1972) botte and che, ragazzi (two through thick and thin; 1975). The Shaw Brothers involved at this time also in co-productions with the British Hammer studio produced, now Italian-Chinese community projects such as là dove non batte il sole (The Stranger and the Gunfighter, 1974) with Lee Van Cleef and Lo Lieh, Golden Harvest funded similar hybrids .

Inspired by the Zatôichi- series Blindman is thus at least in terms of its genesis is not as far fetched as it first may seem. He is not a direct continuation of the "Stranger" films, has directed the former Method actor Tony Anthony before with Luigi Vanzi (next lo straniero Tues silenzio the team created the minimalist low-budget Western Dollaro tra i denti un [A dollar between the teeth; 1967] and un uomo, un cavallo, una pistola [Western Jack, 1967]). Although Anthony's protagonist has here, as in the previous films no name. But even in his dress is different, the blind gunman, who took over for 50 000 dollars a task, 50 mail order bride (!) By the desert to drive and to deliver it to a group of Texan miners: instead of the torn Stetson of "Strangers" Anthony with this time a monster on the head that looks a little like a melted, brown carpenter's hat and is additionally provided with a small ammunition. Even the pink shirt, poncho and a black mare of the previous figure are missing. Instead, he has a blind horse, a disabled compass, a tattered duster and a bolt action rifle with a bayonet attachment, which serves as the cane.

Like the "Stranger" is the protagonist a hero is anything but sovereign and is hardly ever taken seriously by his environment. In general, the Plot as largely meaningless sequence of humiliation and retaliation is created. Even as we meet the blind, it has carved its partners over the ear and the sight, when he bitterly clinging to the tail of his horse in a city is just pathetic. Although the blind men who robbed him of the women (played by Beatles producer Allen Klein and the Beatles' roadie Mal Evans), blow it up. The 50 women, however, are now in the hands of psychotic bandit Domingo (Lloyd Battista), his moronic brother Candy (Ringo Starr [!] in his only western role) and their sadistic S chwester Sweet Mama (Magda Konopka). Together with the village beauty (Agneta Eckemyr) and a Mexican general (Raf Baldassarre) can be "Blindman" off while Domingo and company, at the end of him, the women, however, stolen by the Mexicans. As in previous Vanzis anti-Western, the hero at the end of the losers.

Anthony described his role now as a more everyday heroes: "He's not your typical gunslinger. He's more of an existential hero [...]. I never wanted to be a superhero;. I felt audiences could relate to me as someone in the street "Indeed I think the actor and his director Baldi with this film have created probably the most vulnerable Italo-Western protagonists. The film takes an amazing amount of space to put the handicap of the blind man in the picture, as when he relates a hotel room or difficulty without his gun and horse wanders helplessly. Ultimately Blindman but above all, a large-scale action Western that may come up because of the enormous budget with some impressive crowd scenes and good sets, by the bizarre elements of the film are still more evident. The principle described Anthony once as: "Everything was exaggerated, then played straight." Sun inhabit the baddies around a medieval castle, the bulk of the band seems less like Mexicans, but more like a cross between hippies and heavy-metal-barbarians. Otherwise, Baldi proves to be Champion in setting up more or less metaphorical castration pictures. As the blind man with "Sweet Mama" is fighting, biting him as this between the legs. After he broke her neck with his legs, said he shocked (!): "Being without eyes is one thing, but without that whew ..." The subject of necrophilia is touched also when the village beauty to be forced into a large-scale wedding scene to marry the now dead Candy. The detailed sequence in which 50 women will be dressed naked in a giant laundry for sale and to buckets doused with water breathing, similar to the sequence in which they half naked driven through the desert, the spirit lowest Exploitation cinema.

in the U.S. was $ 1,300,000 for the twisted and critics unanimously panned film no great success. A reviewer (Donald Mayerson) decried the "excessive, pointless, and sadistic violence, as well as [a penchant for] undraping women in the most humiliating way. " This can hardly be contradicted, especially since this was probably exactly the goal of the filmmakers. Outside the U.S., however, the film played over 15 million and has been a huge commercial success. In the Pakistani city Karachi, he was reportedly as many as six consecutive months in an always sold-out cinema. Today he is a curiosity from a time when the European genre films were produced on an assembly line, which despite its often crude plots crafted amazingly well and worked as an entertainment films work very effectively.

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Out now: Sergio Leone Bertz + Fischer!

for about two weeks Leone is my book published and available at last!

who get a first impression will gain from the book is on the side of my publishing the Contents and sample chapter . read

the book:

Sergio Leone (1929-1989) was one of the most important directors of Italian postwar cinema. His work takes both in terms of its artistic quality and its enormous influence on Italian genre cinema and in view of its outstanding commercial success in a special position. Even Leone's second , directing the Western per un Pugno Tues Dollari ( for a handful of dollar , 1964), despite the extremely advanced low budget quickly become one of the most successful post-war Italian films and drew a wave of over 500 Italian and Western European productions to be the same height and end of the "economic miracle" of postwar Italian cinema marked. Even after his first success was the genre cinema Leone faithful per un Pugno Tues Dollari did he follow four other Western all'italiana and once upon a time in america ( it once was in America ; 1984), his only major US-financed production, he devoted himself the gangster film.

This book provides a hermeneutical analysis of Leone's oeuvre, including detailed film analysis of il Colosso di Rodi ( The Colossus of Rhodes , 1961) to once upon a time in america (1984). It will be included in the analysis of individual cultural aspects of each development context and the contemporary reception and placed the films in their respective genre context - from Peplum and the variants of the Western all'italiana to the gangster film. In cross-plant sections are further aspects of the film industry transatlantic cultural transfer shows gender discourses in Leone's films and worked out the special importance of Ennio Morricone ( me playing the song of death , 1968), film music, especially for C'era una volta il West shown. Finally, image design and installation of Leone films, and the immense influence his work on film productions up in the contemporary cinema into investigated.

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A short update to my Sergio-Leone-book , in the Bertz + Fischer Verlag appears: the final corrections have been implemented and this morning are the proofs sent to the printer. In about three weeks my book will finally be available in the bookstore of your trust!

At 400 pages and illustrated with 363 photos illustrate the analysis of all related work as director Leone, biographical information, to date most complete filmography Leone and detailed essays on visual storytelling Leone, his influence on contemporary filmmakers and film music Ennio Morricone.

Happy reading!

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Who can kill a child? - CASE 39


Case 39 - USA 2009 - Director: Christian Alvart - book: Ray Wright - Camera: Hagen Bogdanski - Producers: Steve Golin, Kevin Misher - Music: Michl Britsch - Editing: Mark Goldblatt - Starring: Renée Zellweger, Jodelle Ferland, Ian McShane, Kerry O'Malley, Callum Keith Rennie, Bradley Cooper, Crystal Lowe and Others

the American horror film, the Ideas considered. The list of open and hidden remakes, the sequels and prequels, relaunches and updates of known substances in recent years is endless. From the mass of the culture industry as a relatively original copies variety stab at best often referred to as "torture porn" were tried out variants that Hostel movies by Eli Roth and the Saw series around. In the search for new material added Hollywood to Asian and European genre innovators like Ryuhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train , 2008) and Alexandre Aja (Mirrors , 2008) used. Christian Alvart could now also another German director of the Paramount try on a horror movie, which has refrained from Marcus Nispel's Friday the 13th remake in recent years vorzuweisen hardly genre productions. The result is

here only a potpourri of known motifs and more or less successful reminiscences as a new impetus to the genre, the name succeeded to date in France. As in The Omen (The Omen, 1976) there is a small child to look sweet, but deadly for his caregivers, the theme of demonic possession is including The Exorcist (The Exorcist, 1973), Ringu ( Ring, 1998) and its American remakes been treated. The investigators figure of Ian McShane (the great Al Swearengen in the HBO series Deadwood !) Motifs are introduced the police film, the murders themselves are as set-pieces with echoes of the Final Destination series staged . And when the camera Hagen Bogdanskis who has photographed include The Lives of Others (2006) and to Go (2000), the house explores a lower class family, then appear the interiors, as in any x-arbitrary Backwood horror film weathered, with the obligatory corroded surfaces, matte patina, all kinds of unhealthy mold and suspicious bruises. The result ultimately, a patchwork that is held together by the aesthetic use of cold, blue-gray tones, which through the excessive use of color filters and the set design almost all cinematic spaces. Sleeping pills are blue, paper cups printed in a mental hospital with a blue design and peas as blue-green as in Scorsese's The Aviator (2004). Sometimes people act like pale fish in an oversized aquarium. When the heroine, played by Renée Zellweger puts her house on fire, then it saves, what else, dear their goldfish as their new, diabolical adopted child.

Alvart has used the film magazine X-Tro edited and directed by his debut film Curiosity & the Cat (1999) with antibodies (2005) a German serial killer thriller. Without question he is familiar with the history of the genre. But as in antibodies here is much too obvious, too transparent, created too much on for effect. antibodies promised a Dostoyevsky quote at the beginning of the authentic rural scenery and good acting performances existentially profound, ultimately to as half-baked variation of The Silence of the Lambs ; disappoint (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991). Also Case 39 told in the core has a really unusual for the genre material. The history of the social worker Emily (Zellweger), which is unexpected for the single mother when she the little Lilith (Jodelle Ferland) receives is, in one of teenage angst dominated genre as an allegory for the excessive demands of a single mother is not necessarily an everyday material. developed fast, the little girl to the veritable domestic tyrant - Nomen est omen: a fatal enfant - and friends and family die in mysterious circumstances. Alvart metaphorically tells of how the involuntary break away nut all social contacts, life only more rushes past her, quite literally in the scenes in the office, in which he used time-lapse. Soon, each appears in the annoying sing-song please put forward as extortion, is called for expressions of love are answered with feigned white lies, at the end, separation, domestic violence and paranoia. But if Alvart then directly addressed this meta-level by telling the story in flashback from the Emily's unhappy childhood, he is taking no change for the psychological horror. It remains only a half-hearted attempt and a hint, hint for particularly obtuse audience. Which would have the bad version of Rosemary's Baby (1968) and blurred vision history can be - and the director plays several times - projecting itself to the serious beer demons horror. But Alvart is, however, from Sam Raimi's insane about of touch that even the PG-13 horror movie Drag Me to Hell (2009) gave another unique appeal. Once your system has distorted the visage of the demon, the child's face, then the substance is finally driven out the ambivalence. How much creepier because it was Narciso Ibáñez Serrador ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (one child to kill ..., 1976), in which we are nice, smiling neighborhood children, met the old one and just kill him then aufzurren to him armed with a sickle as a Piñata to use. But the wild 70's are long over.

What is lacking in the action in depth, try the sound design with riots and constant spraying to gloss over. Again and again, unexpected noises are used as acoustic shock moments: a dog that barks a surprise, a hand that suddenly knocks on a window, a clock, the losrasselt. One, two, maybe even a third time this works, but to use again and again the same effect that causes addiction and ultimately boredom. Once, the surround-sound design used effectively: in a successful scene, probably a reminiscence of Candyman (1992) and The Believers (1987), when angry hornets buzzing noise across the screening room and contribute strongly to the intensity of terror on the screen. Basically, but striking, flamboyant as the soundtrack is, strums almost continuously, murmurs or rumbles it. How much would be threatened because at least once an unexpected absence of noise, music and atmosphere was rather run up a second time against a demonic power door locks or have zerdreschen that there are only so rumbles and rattles. Stylistically, the film is reminiscent of a moderate version of what David Bordwell as a style of "intensified continuity" has described: not really a departure from classic, causal and narrative style in Hollywood, but a striking dominance of large images (in this case as a telephoto settings of the volunteers before blurred background), and seemingly unmotivated crane shots and regulators. Or as Mike Figgis puts it: "If somebody goes for a piss [...] these days it's usually a crane shot."

is given away completely not Case 39. Bogdanskis camera work has its own charm, and ultimately the film is quite entertaining. Just something new you do not get offered. But perhaps one does Alvart also wrong, for some abrupt moments can be a not completely happy production history of this film suggests, the filming was started in 2006. Let's wait on, because with Pandorum Alvart has already completed his next project.

This criticism was first published in: Splatting Image, No. 79, September 2009 (before the start of Pandorum )

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Silence Under the Fist: Nicolas Winding Refn BRONSON

Bronson - UK 2009 - Director: Nicolas Winding Refn - Written by: Brock Norman Brock and Nicolas Winding Refn - Producer: Daniel Hansford, Rupert Preston - photography: Larry Smith - Edited by: Matthew Newman - Starring: Tom Hardy, Matt King, William Darke, Amanda Burton, James Lance Others

The Pet Shop Boys and New Order, Verdi (Nabucco , La forza del destino and Attila ), Puccini ( Madama Butterfly ), Richard Strauss ( An Alpine Symphony) and, of course, Wagner (Siegfried's funeral and Das Rheingold ). The history on film: A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Chopper (2000), Shock Corridor (1963), Scum (1979) and Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead (1988), British gangster films such as Villain (1971) and The Long Good Friday (1980) and, of course: Charles Bronson's stoic-locked masculinity, such as in Michael Winners Chato's Land (1972) or Walter Hill Hard Times (1975). This: Vaudeville, episode structure, shock strategies. Actually, says it all about this movie: mixed disparate individual pieces of popular culture and the legitimate, an anti-organic brew. This does not create a whole, should it not, why?

The 39-year-old Dane Nicolas Winding Refn has in his early films in which Pusher Trilogy (1996-2005) and in Bleeder (1999) to directors such as Scorsese, influenced by the immediacy of Mean Streets (1973), self-destructive to the, displaced masculinity of figures such as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980). The protagonists Refn live and die in a gray, cold world, where knowledge about the pop culture offers them no guidance. In this thirty- Bleeder stand in a grungy video library around and quoted by the arcane areas of film history, but in their relationships, as husbands, fathers or partners or even semi-competent interpersonal communication partners, they fail completely. They consistently make the wrong decisions, and thus screw up their lives, which in any case equivalent to a Sisyphusaufgabe.

Bronson is Refn's sixth feature film and he tells of a violent loser. The Briton Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy) is about 1974 with a sawed-off shotgun robbed a store and just 26 pounds. He is in jail and attacked so often, the guards that he still sits there today. On the English homepage of the film we are greeted by a counter that tells how long Peterson now even for the few pounds he had stolen, seated. In years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. There are almost 35 years. Besides his reputation as "Britain's most violent criminal" is the prominent prisoners, especially by his pen name "Charles Bronson" known, which he accepted in a short period of freedom for some illegal boxing matches and then retained in jail.

What drives a man to bury himself in jail - and that is what "Bronson" seems to aim with any new acts of violence? One reason we do not really know. Instead: Body cinema. Bronson / Peterson undresses, runs against the guards and the walls, smeared with blood, tortured a gay art teacher, terrorizing a frightened guards. Refn does not provide answers, not even simple. The man Bronson us remains alien and the appeal on the homepage to let him go at last, is in a strange contrast to the film, after which one has more of the feeling that the man was to us, please, but spared as long as possible in the outside world . remain Who wants to be like tomorrow on the road together beaten without reason by a bald-headed muscleman with retro mustache, just so the back is in jail?

Refn uses more than his movies before distancing and alienating effects: Some scenes are completely submerged in red or blue, some are shown in extreme wide-angle or use long parallel runs. The voice-over Bronson is not an objective, ordering instance, but often complacent and rhetorical. Time and again we see the protagonists pale makeup on a stage before an audience in evening dress. As he stands in a suit, isolated against a black background, and holds awkward conversation with himself once Refn projected to documentary footage of a prison rebellion instigated by him directly to the actor and the background. Hardy also between immobility expressivity and iridescent game refused nearby: he kept his smile switch on and off mechanically, can freeze their movements, or puts his head crooked jerky. Often shows Refn Bronson, as he filmed either in the full profile from the image frame or menacing stares head before the camera goes on, and then directly address the audience.

very beginning of the film proclaims, "Bronson" in the camera: ". All my life I wanted to be famous," identifies himself why so much with the movie star Charles Bronson ? About the "real" Bronson, their role as Charles Buchinsky 1921 Lithuanian son emigrants in Ehrenfeld, was Pennsylvania born, wrote James Dickey, author of Deliverance ( At death, each of the first ), was, despite his violent roles and his muscular body armor because " always about him a silent and reflective personality hidden somewhere within or beneath a body redolent of the workingman - the coal miner, the factory worker, or the truck driver [...] [;] a solid-hewn, aging, tough, essentially moral masculinity is Bronson's trademark. "The iconic actor Bronson was" a strong, no-nonsense one Whose appeal [...] does [...] lie [...] . In his integrity and his great animal vitality " He is also in films such as Death Wish (1974)" a kind of universal avenger - a one-man force against what he CONSIDERS universal evil " . We are not against what Michael Peterson / Tom Hardy moves out of this interpretation avenging angel, but that the man is wearing an all-encompassing anger in itself is beyond question. Bronson has become primarily a visual metaphor for anger - unrestrained fury. And so despite the distance a very intense film.

This criticism is First published in: Splatting Image, No. 79, September 2009

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Men in Black: Tropa De Elite

Elite Squad (The Elite Squad) - BZ-NL-USA 2007 - Regie: José Padilha - Kamera: Lula Carvalho - Produktion: Marcos Prado, Jose Padilha - Koproduzenten: Eliana Soarez, James D'Arcy - Schnitt: Daniel Rezende - Drehbuch: Jose Padilha, Rodrigo Pimentel, Braulio Mantovani - Darsteller: Wagner Moura (Capitão Nascimento), André Ramiro (André Matias) , Caio Junqueira (Neto), Maria Ribeiro, Fernanda Machado, Milhem Cortaz, Paulo Vilela ua - FSK: keine Jugendfreigabe - Fassung: OmdU - Länge: 115 min. - Start: 06/08/2009

Mit Elite Squad kommt nun der Berlinale-umstrittene Gewinner des Jahres endlich regular letzen in the cinemas. had chaired the jury at that time Costa-Gavras held, a director with Z (ALG-F 1969) in the late 60's popularized a similar movie style. Padilhas film talks about the BOPE, a Brazilian elite military police unit that advances regularly in the favela, to eliminate drug dealers and shoot out their own, often corrupt colleagues from dangerous situations - to shoot or, depending on your mood, even the same time. Padilha preferred film techniques that suggest a documentary gesture and target a verismo effect. Often, the hand-held camera pans in conversations between the characters back and forth, just as if nothing staged was. More often it takes the role of a participating observer, too, the camera man cowers away in action scenes, accompanied a journalist same embedded shoot-outs as well as the training missions in the city slums. In one scene, a few drops of fake blood spilled on the lens, leaving little pink spots hang for the rest of the set of the images. All this to say to us: We are in immediate, direct, unadulterated.

Favela The subject has in recent years, particularly since Cidade de Deus (City of God, BZ 2002), the branch of the cinema created a niche that is often so overbearing as disparaging "world cinema" referred to. Many of these back as a 'left' films are understood in their construction of "realism" on Pontecorvo and Costa-Gavras' political propaganda films from the swinging 60s, in part, by the poetic realism of the French and the Neorealismo the Italian. This exercise Pontecorvo's masterpiece La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, ALG I-1966) in its skilful construction of realism, pathos and history probably the greatest impact. But the U.S. has in this New Hollywood new "ghetto movies" left their mark. It was particularly Scorsese and Altman, who turned himself from the 1970s repeatedly closed environment, these portrayed by an ensemble cast as a multi-perspective microcosm. As Altman is less for the fate of individuals as Nashville (USA 1975) self-interested and Scorsese explores particularly in New York, Little Italy and the Mafia in the New World, where he Las Vegas or New York in Casino ( USA 1995) and Gangs of New York (USA 2002) as an organism treated, so films like Cidade de Deus and Tropa de Elite fascinated by neighborhoods, Institutions, hermetically sealed environment. At least partially so that they follow an ethnographic orientation as part of the cinematic narrative. In Cidade de Deus was the object to be examined most directly the favela and its residents, at Padilho it is now mainly an elite unit, as it were the enemy of the favela, which is the real protagonists of the film structured in three acts.

beginning us, the voice-over in front of Capitão Nascimento (Wagner Moura), the main conflict: corruption in the regular police, a BOPE officer, of his successor studied (Nascimento himself), two potential candidates for this, the social environment, including the private conflicts. The second part describes the military training of recruits at a training camp and the first missions during "Operation Dad", the violent "cleansing" of the slums for the announced visit of the Pope. In the third, the shortest act to follow probation and failure of candidates as superior. Here is revealed then, a weakness of the concept that makes just the first half of the movie so much: In the end we can do little with the protagonists, they leave us cold, and not just because they are increasingly cruel act, but because sparked primarily interested in the environment and the open and hidden power structures (one of the recruit, the university training courses attended, preparing there before a paper on Foucault - a hint, hint for reviewers, optionally also a tribute to the historical document that has written a group of sociologists).

was repeatedly accused the film a fascist attitude. In fact emphasizes Nascimento, the central character of the movie, once, that he would only wear black uniforms . The emblem of the unit is a Skull with crossed pistols and a dagger, and the SS associations are obvious. The actions: The repeated torture, shown in detail with the plastic bag over his head, the beating, the initial shooting, then-question mentality. Once one of the officers can pull down the torture of the victim's pants, grabs a broom style and spits on the head. Mercifully Padilha can admit the victim so that he will not show even the rape. The training is to create prime target, Killer. At the very end of the film the more intellectual of the two young candidates is mutated in some of the death squad. As he is preparing a whimpering dealer, at least for his family with a disfigured face begs with the shotgun just knock away this explains the voice of satisfaction from the off, now he is finally a real BOPE-man.

Is it fascist to show it? Or does the movie especially fascism of his characters? - An old question whose answer often reveals more about the attitude of the reviewers than about the film. The fact is that the score here, so it exists, is very taken back by Foucault and Milgram references at the beginning or not. The main plot with the Pope's visit may be the clear positioning of the film: As the head of the Catholic Church comes to visit and is just in the head, in the slums descending. Just for this arrogance of power must die hundreds. As for the drawing of the BOPE, but I would bet that would occur for each critical article about the movie or the real, existing at least a young Brazilian BOPE police officer in such an elite unit. That the film ultimately remains open for any interpretation, but at least better than the audience to patronize permanent. A slightly stale flavor remains nevertheless. Perhaps, but the stems from the fact that you noticed sooner or later, how much one is the martial staging soldierly manhood unexpectedly into the trap.