Review: Alice Lovejoy, ‘Army Film and the Avant-Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military’

What does the term ‘army film’ evoke? Stark factual reports of conflicts and strategies, drily instructional primers on conduct for new recruits? What further connotations of didacticism and aesthetic dreariness are introduced by the premise of military-made films from a communist, Eastern Bloc country? Alice Lovejoy’s remarkable book Army Film and the Avant-Garde blows away any such associations in a densely researched account of the Czechoslovak Army’s film production unit, an institution whose output embraced everything from sly comedy and lively neo-realism to Brechtian self-consciousness and impressionistic film poetry. Lovejoy already does a great service in unlocking a vault’s worth of rich material that, due to the specificities of its production, has gone all but unmentioned in previous histories of Czechoslovak cinema. But this is not all, as Lovejoy uses her specific topic to question established understandings of how Czechoslovakia’s state-socialist film industry functioned, making this book highly worthwhile for scholars of Eastern Bloc film in general.

Indeed Lovejoy’s account rests on the twofold assertion of the striking distinctiveness and telling connectedness of Czechoslovak Army Film (as the unit was officially known). On the one hand, Army Film was an ‘institutional exception’ whose unique conditions and remits allowed its filmmakers to exist at times in a virtual parallel world to the rest of Czechoslovak cinema, granted a license to innovate and to challenge impermissible elsewhere. On the other hand, Army production tended to typify, anticipate or even lay the groundwork for wider developments, such that Lovejoy’s findings lend both clarity and shading to our overall picture of communist-era Czechoslovak film.

In a chronologically organised account spanning from the late 1920s to the late 1960s, Lovejoy observes a surprisingly consistent cinematic audacity that she traces right back to the unit’s origins as the Ministry of Defence Film Group, established in 1929 under the leadership of Jiří Jeníček. Jeníček was a theorist and screenwriter who espoused the most progressive ideas about cinema and aesthetics, yet he was also committed to film’s role as a means of education and propaganda, a vehicle to strengthen belonging to the Czechoslovak state. In propounding a cinema that would both exploit cinema’s exhortatory functions and explore the medium’s inherent formal properties, Jeníček did much to shape the unique and lasting identity of Army Film. Czech cinematic avant-gardists, Lovejoy shows, were not averse to mixing the apparently antagonistic concerns of formalism and functionality, with advertising or industrial assignments considered a conducive field in which to develop one’s craft. It is as a ‘workshop’ for ‘experimentation’ – with the latter understood as training and the refinement of technique – that Army Film would continue to define itself through the post-war period. A spur to the artistic daring of the unit’s productions, that institutional credo would be sustained by the oddly privileged status Army Film enjoyed after the 1948 communist takeover, as a unit both ‘exempted from the nationalized film industry’ and protected by ‘the military’s central position within the Czechoslovak government’ (52).

As Lovejoy shows in her analysis of productions from the early 1950s, Army Film did not escape the dogmatic crudities of Czechoslovakia’s high Stalinist era, when the unit’s pedagogical mission was rearticulated as strict enforcement of ‘the Soviet model’ in all practical and ideological matters. And yet space remained even in those harsh times for vibrant formal experiment: Lovejoy offers evidence with František Vláčil’s 1953 Flying Blind Using System OSP, whose playful blend of techniques and ‘film-within-a-film’ structure turn this lesson on aircraft control into a self-reflexive meditation on film itself as an instructional ‘model’ – one that, unlike the Soviet political kind, proves ‘flexible and multifaceted’ (103). As a filmmaker who would establish himself as a major talent of Czechoslovakia’s 1960s New Wave, Vláčil’s appearance here is significant. Lovejoy uses his example to show how Army Film offered a valuable apprenticeship for a number of Czechoslovak cinema’s most important filmmakers, enabling a figure like Vláčil to develop the aesthetic qualities so renowned in his later civilian career: thus does this filmmaker’s attention to ‘sonic and visual atmosphere’ link a short instructional film to the baroque sprawl of Marketa Lazarová (1967).

A related argument is that Army Film’s output in many ways ‘paralleled, and at times exceeded’ the distinctions of Czechoslovakia’s famed New Wave, sharing a concern for formal innovation, an interest in the lives of young people and a tendency towards ‘political and social critique’: the army, after all, was the home of that well-known Czech icon of anti-establishment mockery, the Good Soldier Švejk, and Švejk proves a point of reference in more than one Army Film production (162). Again, though, Lovejoy stresses how such qualities arose in large part from a specific institutional identity, from Army Film’s conception of its specific role. What gained ground among Army Film leaders in the 1960s was a belief in the unit’s natural responsibility to address social issues and the concerns of young people, given that it represented an institution with which virtually all Czechoslovak youth came into contact through military service. ‘Auteurist experimentation’ and anti-war sentiment emerged as strategies of rapprochement between military and civilian spheres, attempts at preserving the Army’s legitimacy before a critically oriented youth (165).

Taken together, Lovejoy’s analyses offer a forceful qualification to the shopworn dichotomy, often invoked in commentary on East European cinema, that pits the creative agency of the individual artist against the negative, essentially limiting input of the state institution. Lovejoy also challenges the notion of the monolithically coordinated national film industry, detailing the way Army Film jockeyed with Czechoslovakia’s State Film bodies for its share of cultural prestige. A third important idea Lovejoy’s study brings to light is the presence of tradition – typified in enduring tropes like the ‘myth’ of the Western border – in a cinema whose history is easily defined as one of ruptured continuity and diktat-imposed doctrine.

Such reassessments would of course carry little weight without solid research to support them. Lovejoy’s scholarship is impeccable throughout, with in-depth archival study and new interview material sitting alongside sensitive, careful textual analysis that coaxes multiple meanings from this often highly concentrated material. I would have welcomed more detail on the fate of Army Film after the cultural hammer blow of post-1968 normalisation, while the title’s reference to the ‘avant-garde’ does not strictly apply to all the works covered here, with space left perhaps for further elaboration on the distinctions broached early on between cultural-political ‘vanguardism’, experimental film and the avant-garde proper. But any such issues pale beside the importance of this book’s specific discoveries and its wider implications. As if Lovejoy’s scholarly labours were not enough, she has also curated and co-subtitled the DVD that accompanies this volume, an invaluable, historically wide-ranging selection of 13 Army Film productions.

Jan Němec (1936-2016)

Jan Němec in his documentary Oratorio for Prague (1968)

The passing of Czech filmmaker Jan Němec on the 18^th March 2016 was something of a shock. Not only had the 79-year-old director been busy completing a new film, but Němec has always retained an image of impish provocation, of bravura, rebellious youth. The Czech New Wave – of which Němec is often labelled the ‘enfant terrible’ – is itself perhaps the most youthful of all film movements. This is in part because of the post-Prague Spring cultural clampdowns that blighted several major careers, together with the fading of Czech cinema from the world’s consciousness after the 1960s, both developments tending to freeze the Wave’s auteurs in an eternal youth, still most widely associated with the films of their salad days. This is clearly true of Němec, whose first two features remain his most widely known and acclaimed, and yet Němec really did retain his spiky élan and contemporaneity: his films of the 1990s and 2000s, made after a long exile, are experimental works produced with the latest technology, minor-key films that resound dissonantly against a homogenised capitalist world as his early films had once provoked communist authority.

Born on 12 July 1936, Němec had originally nursed ambitions in music – an interest later detectable in his film career – before being steered by his practical father towards the more stable vocation of film directing. Film school also offered a rare open door to a wayward student whose bad school record barred him from going to university. Studying at the celebrated Prague film school FAMU, the already independent-minded Němec was nurtured – and protected – by the director Václav Krška and inspired by world cinema classics impossible to see elsewhere. The filmmakers Němec most admired were Bresson, Buñuel, Resnais, Bergman and Fellini, artists he valued for producing intrinsically cinematic experiences irreducible to mere story. Evolving an aesthetic of ‘pure film’ that was unashamedly non-realist, Němec from the beginning typified the formalist, ‘fantastic’ wing of the New Wave, which had roots leading back to Kafka and the Czech avant-garde as well as the European art film.

Němec’s debut feature Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, 1964), adapted from a novella by Arnošt Lustig, is set during World War Two and concerns two youths who escape from a train bound for a concentration camp. This early New Wave entry is a brilliant and oppressive film with a haunted restlessness, Němec’s camera no less in motion than the desperate protagonists on which it is rigorously trained. If the handheld, tracking camera and near-total absence of dialogue are light years from the stodgy official cinema of an earlier generation, what startles even more is the way Němec interweaves reality, thought, memory and dream, shifting from one level to another in a way that challenges and disorients. Němec’s visuals likewise blend verité technique with a taste for imagery that, even when not overtly dream-like, is striking, bizarre and unnerving – as when one youth’s hand is covered with hordes of ants, an overt homage to Buñuel and Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1925).

Němec’s next film, The Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966), was created with his then-wife, noted screenwriter and costume designer Ester Krumbachová, and is the story of a group of picnickers cajoled and pressured to attend a lakeside banquet presided over by an outwardly courteous but tyrannical host. If this film trades its predecessor’s kineticism for a more stationary and composed style, it is equally alive with menace. In contrast to Diamonds of the Night, The Party and the Guests is dialogue-heavy, but the approach here is original for the meaninglessness and absurdity of the words used, for the way speech is smoothed over into banal platitudes that belie the increasingly chilling situation. An absurdist fantasy frequently likened to Beckett and Ionesco, this fable of persecution, complicity and false collectivity nonetheless had an unavoidably close relevance for neo-Stalinist Czechoslovakia, despite Němec’s claims that he did not intend the film as a direct political allegory. Unsurprisingly, that is exactly how the communist authorities saw it – they were aided in this by the apparently unintended resemblance of actor Ivan Vyskočil, playing the host, to Lenin himself – and the film was banned for two years. Later, following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the consequent return of hardline political ‘normality’, this film would join that select group of titles ‘banned forever’.

Martyrs of Love (Mučedníci lásky, 1966), a bittersweet portrait of lonely romanticism, is Němec’s final and most overlooked 1960s feature. At once a tribute to silent slapstick awash with bowler-hatted gents and a vehicle for stars of the contemporaneous Czech pop scene, this is a surreal whimsy suspended between the laughing twenties and the golden sixties, a lighter and fuzzier film that remains of a piece with Němec’s earlier work in fusing the worlds of reality and imagination – albeit in the register of daydream rather than nightmare.

Barred from film production in 1966, Němec rounded off the decade with television and documentary work. He made bizarrely staged musical spots for the singer Marta Kubišová, his second wife, and the documentary Oratorio for Prague (Oratorium pro Prahu, 1968), a remarkable record of the Soviet invasion ironically begun as a portrait of hippified Dubček-era Czechoslovakia. Footage from this widely shown documentary would turn up in Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1987), on which Němec served as an advisor and took a sly cameo as a man caught photographing the Warsaw Pact tanks.

In 1974, forced to choose between exile and arrest, Němec left Czechoslovakia. Moving across Western Europe and then settling for over a decade in the USA, Němec took on diverse projects abroad: for West German TV he made Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1975), an ingenious Kafka adaptation shot largely from the viewpoint of an unseen Gregor Samsa, and in California he became a pioneer of wedding videos, a delightfully perverse move for the director of The Party and the Guests. Yet Němec failed to kickstart a feature career in exile, and only found his creative feet again on returning to Czechoslovakia shortly after the Velvet Revolution.

Němec’s second major period of filmmaking, beginning in the 1990s, saw him working resourcefully on micro-budgets and forging an intimate, essayistic brand of cinema that showed undimmed commitment to the avant-garde. His first post-communist film was In the Flames of Royal Love (V žáru královské lásky, 1990), an outrageous and grotesque modernisation of an already outrageous and grotesque source, Ladislav Klíma’s 1928 novel The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch (Utrpení knížete Sternenhocha). He followed this with Code Name Ruby (Jméno kódu: Rubín, 1996), which, like its predecessor, was critically panned but which I consider one of Němec’s most original films. Part mockumentary and part fictional narrative, this film reimagines twentieth century Czech history as a quest to obtain the mythical philosopher’s stone, thus exhibiting a playful fabulism that recalls Welles’ F for Fake (1973). The 2001 Late Night Talks with Mother (Noční hovory s matkou), an at times mercilessly candid, confessional self-portrait with appearances by ex-wives Krumbachová and Kubišová, is visually distinctive for its bauble-like fisheye shots and marks the beginning of an engagement with the possibilities of digital video. It was also the first Czech film to premiere online.

Towards the end of his life Němec combined filmmaking with teaching at FAMU. His last films showed no sign of accommodation to cinematic norms and remained technically innovative. Toyen (2005) nailed Němec’s artistic orientations to the mast, a portrait of the eponymous Czech Surrealist painter (real name Marie Čermínová) that is itself an oblique, poetic work combining dramatic reconstruction, newsreel footage and Toyen’s own work, the different kinds of image often layered over one another. Heart Beat 3D (2010), derived from a script originally written with Václav Havel in 1969, was the first Czech stereoscopic 3D film. Němec’s final film, The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street (Vlk z Královských Vinohrad), has just been presented at Karlovy Vary. Continuing the autobiographical bent of Němec’s late work and accompanied by an arrestingly stripped-down promotional poster (see below), this film looks set to be both a summation of a remarkable career and a final attestation of an eternally vital, boundary-pushing talent.

The Divine Concupiscence of the Heretics of the Berlengas

A concupiscência divina dos hereges das Berlengas/La concupiscence divine des hérétiques des Berlengas, Mario Festa da Toga, Portugal/France, 1974

Starring: Augusto de Figueiredo, Ruy Guerra, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Maurice Nadeau, Teresa da Ávila, José Martinho, Amanda Lear

In 1973, Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship invited the celebrated, controversial filmmaker Mario Cândido Festa da Toga to return from exile and make a film in his home country. Seemingly an odd move for such a conservative regime, the invitation has been considered a calculating gesture designed to massage the image of an isolated, unpopular, indeed imminently doomed authoritarian government. Yet whether seen as a self-serving display of liberalism or an attempted cooptation of da Toga’s feted stature, this re-embrace of a wayward, unrepentant native son backfired spectacularly, with the resulting film proving too incendiary for its patrons and ending up widely banned and censured around the world. Just how did a film about 17^th century heretics directed by a 70-year-old former seminarian create such a scandal?

To answer that, some detail is first necessary about the now-obscure da Toga. Before he had even shot a frame of film, the young da Toga had courted outrage in 1920s Lisbon as an avant-garde prankster and priest. He saw neither his expulsion from the seminary nor his loudly proclaimed atheism as a reason to abandon his calling nor, more crucially, his vestments, which he delighted in wearing while engaged in disreputable behaviour, like carousing with girls on his knee, cutting his nails in public and robbing banks. His decision to join the Portuguese Surrealist group was equally audacious, not least because Portugal then had no Surrealist group, and the option of founding one ran contrary to his negativist principles. Alarmed by this scourge of café society, the municipal authorities’ response was to close the cafés, but da Toga only took to bothering people in Chinese laundries instead. He also began transferring his provocations to the vicarious medium of cinema.

Da Toga’s earliest films were short, silent exercises in slapstick sacrilege, featuring the filmmaker himself performing pratfalls during the entrance procession, delivering seltzer-bottle baptisms and, in intriguing acts of auto-anticlericalism, assaulting himself in public. These films caught the attention of the French Surrealists, and da Toga would develop a warm and garrulous relationship with André Breton’s group, despite his inability to speak French.

The installation of Estado Novo in 1933, with its right-wing pro-Catholic ideology and repressive censorship, meant years of frustrated projects and marginalisation for da Toga. In consequence he accepted a postwar invitation from Breton’s reformed Surrealists, who wanted him to film them ringing Jean Cocteau’s doorbell and running away. Da Toga came to France via a circuitous route that took him first to Guatemala and a string of commercial assignments making comedias burdelarias, or brothel comedies, though he was hounded out of that country for the perceived national slander of his zany neorealist farce about overworked public hygiene officials, Land Without Soap (Tierra sin jabón, 1954). Once settled in Paris, da Toga forged a more sophisticated style that integrated absurdist improbability into a deceptively bland surface naturalism reliant on minimal editing, static camerawork and unprofessional actors. Over two decades he triumphed with a series of wry, often cryptic commentaries on the modern world, moving into fable-like territory with the celebrated Even the Flea Gets Fleas (L’homard rouge rit dans sa barbe, 1969). This film, the tale of an uprising in a pet shop crushed by the armed intervention of a neighbouring zoo, has often been interpreted as an allegory of brutal Cold War geopolitics and the failure of liberation movements in Bolivia, Czechoslovakia and Muswell Hill.

Indeed, amidst the convulsive and ultimately disillusioning climate that was the end of the 1960s, da Toga decided to retreat from contemporary themes and turn to the distant past, seeking consolation in the natural communion and pastoral plenitude offered by the ancient and mediaeval worlds. With The Corns of Sisyphus (Les cors de Sisyphe, 1970) and The Bucolic Plague (La peste bucolique, 1972), da Toga’s cinema lost much of its former dry facetiousness, its overt, at times studied sense of surrealist incongruity, and gained a meditative seriousness and composure, a radiant, even reverential tranquility.

Ironically then, when he began The Divine Concupiscence of the Heretics of the Berlengas, the film he would make upon his return to Portugal, da Toga had, at this stage in his career, little desire to shock or provoke, but was more concerned to inspire reflections on myth and faith through deliberate, contemplative pacing. Indeed, as critics and journalists converged on the scene of the film’s location shoot on Berlenga Grande, drawn by wild and sensational rumours – stories circulated of preliminary measurements of performers’ body parts, of gruelling nude improvisations, of over-enthusiastic cavortings by the foreign hippies recruited as extras, of growing qualms from the Portuguese culture ministry, and of da Toga’s distaste over the casting of Sacha Distel as Pope Leo X at the behest of the French co-producer – the director simply and proudly declared to the world’s press that his new film would feature ‘the most boring orgies ever seen’.

The film’s professed source of inspiration was a rarefied, even esoteric one: a clandestine 17^th century book, supposedly printed privately by a wealthy Portuguese hermeticist and vintner, one António Cabeça de Fumo de Seixas, and widely considered apocryphal, although it is scrupulously referenced in the film’s opening footnotes. Legendary for having been written in the world’s least indecipherable code, the book purports to be the secret journal of de Seixas’ executed second cousin, Simon Joao Alma de Aço de Seixas, a monk who had broken away from the Cistercians to found a heretical order based on a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of early Manichean and Docetist beliefs. Da Toga’s film is the story of this order, in all its intense devotion and steadfast purity.

Opening in a vividly evoked 17^th century Lisbon, brooding and portent-ridden beneath the towering menace of the Church, the film shows the newly founded heretical order plotting a radical spiritual experiment inspired by its extreme Gnostic theology. As propounded by the gaunt, piercing-eyed de Seixas, that theology runs as follows: if, as Gnosticism teaches us, the material world is base and profane, the body a mere ignoble container for the immortal spirit, then the only correct stance towards the physical realm is total contempt and indifference. Thus there can be no real objection in treating world and flesh as a disposal ground for the grosser aspects of the spirit. Such guiltless truck with the corporeal might even have the benefit of strengthening the spiritual sense, hardening the will towards divinity through its reaction to the base: as de Seixas argues, ‘Is not the gleaming sword whetted on the brutish stone?’ (This is, needless to say, a talky film awash with tortuous theological exegeses, something in part explicable by the fact that the long-exiled da Toga, for virtually the first time in his career, could here glory in the cadences of his native tongue.)

De Seixas resolves to test out the spiritual benefits of fleshly indulgence by enacting, over a specified period of time, a series of the most outrageous sensual misdemeanours, carnal enormities and hedonistic feats. For surely, he reasons, the greater the excesses committed – the more riotous the garb in which the material realm is clothed – the better would one be able to steel the spirit and uphold one’s proper neutrality toward the world. De Seixas selects just three others from the order to take part in his experiment, each chosen for his dedication and vital skills – these are da Mandrágora the physician, Radegondo the agronomist and Zeppo the puppeteer – and the resulting heretical vanguard decides to retreat to a small islet of the Berlenga archipelago, the better to practise its regime of vice away from the ever-vigilant eye of the Inquisition.

The film’s first third is largely split between theological debate and the four monks’ endeavours to secure the necessary resources. They pool their meagre funds and send merchants, thieves and procurers across Europe and North Africa, finally assembling an ample stock that comprises masses of rich food and drink; dazzling beauties of both sexes intended to serve as concubines and catamites; lubricants, balms and fearsome instruments of stimulation; obscene woodcuts, etched erotica and engraved graven images; party supplies; potent aphrodisiac and psychoactive substances; mummers, sorcerers and performing oddities; a modest menagerie and aquarium; and a small militia to safeguard everything. The monks offer thanks to God for the goods obtained, and a prayer for success and safety in their adventure, these reverences accompanied by an inaugural, salutary enactment of self-love.

The next part of the film, depicting the sacred debaucheries committed in the heretics’ garishly painted prefab monastery, are the primary reason for its extensive controversy. Many of these scenes are perhaps familiar enough from alarmed press reports of the time for us not to go into much detail. Suffice to say that the monks’ methodical perpetration of a string of erotic, gastronomic and scatological excesses makes for a mercilessly graphic and sexually irritating spectacle replete with copious animal nudity, unsimulated borborygmi and a notorious sequence where the monks capture a band of pirates and force them to enact titillating passages from Ovid in the correct Latin. However, extreme and explicit as these scenes are, their offensiveness is mitigated by their distanced form of presentation, with sexual scenes saved from pornographic associations by being reduced to impassive, Noh-like rituals or described with complicated old-fashioned words in da Toga’s script instructions. (Besides, a much-rumoured ‘lost’ scene featuring anal stimulation with rosary beads is probably just a myth.)

What also got overlooked in the furore around the film is the way its crescendo of ever-mounting perversity and increasingly hard-won satiety is accompanied by a concomitant growth in spiritual enlightenment. This latter trajectory is even signposted by the Dantean headings that divide the film’s scenes into successive ‘spheres’ (‘Sphere of Wisdom’, ‘Sphere of Love’, etc), as modelled on the celestial ascent of the Paradiso. The monks’ spiritual progress also starts to take physical form within the action: da Mandrágora levitates during a coprophagic banquet; Radegondo develops stigmata while flagellating a stuffed pig; Zeppo achieves bilocation, enabling him to go and lie down during a particularly strenuous orgy; and de Seixas himself inadvertently acquires early sainthood while vomiting.

But spiritual ascendancy comes with a temporal price, as the film climaxes with the forces of the Inquisition descending on the monks’ retreat. The protagonists are hauled back to Lisbon to be interrogated, tortured, tried, sentenced and tortured, at the hands of Inquisitors dressed, pointedly, to resemble modern airport parking inspectors. Yet the cruel torture our heroes undergo only affirms their transcendent state, as they now prove insensible to all physical impressions, beyond pleasure or pain. In a majestically shot final scene patterned visually after Masaccio, Lucas Velázquez and cave painting, the monks are subjected to a public trial in Rossio Square, exposed to the humiliation of the crowd before their inevitable death sentence is passed. Yet the effect on the massed onlookers, seeing the four monks led out to their wooden stage, proves very different. The crowd falls into a hushed reverence, taunts and projectiles held in check, as they get to see how much these monks have endured in conducting their now widely reported experiment, how they have ruined and mistreated their bodies in the name of divine enlightenment. In a long-protracted, piercingly lit closing tableau of the holy quartet, slumped and near-insentient onstage, the evidence is offered up to our eyes too, as the camera allows us to scrutinise these four obese figures. With their puffy faces, rotten teeth and bulbous noses, their bellies that strain against the penitential garb of the San Benito, their lips that bear the spots of venereal disease, their hands and arms that have ballooned with gout and been contorted by self-abuse, they are a physiognomic testament to heroic endurance and devout self-abnegation.

The apoplectic response that greeted da Toga’s film mirrored this persecutory turn of events, sans the final public adoration. The Portuguese government immediately banned the film domestically. Unable to suppress it entirely due to shared distribution rights with French company Louche Films, the government had the Centro Português de Cinema’s name taken off the credits and denied the country’s involvement in the film, blaming it on the Spanish. At the 1974 Cannes festival, where the film was screened out of competition (in Marseille to be exact), audience members booed, rioted and drowned themselves in protest. The Vatican, unsurprisingly, was no less outraged by the film, and Belgium’s International Catholic Office for Cinema voted it the most blasphemous film of 1974 at its annual awards evening (a burnt wax effigy received the award in da Toga’s absence). The film also ran into considerable problems in Britain: chief BBFC examiner Stephen Murphy, sympathetic to the film’s cerebral approach to theological paradoxes and appreciative of its artistic merits, banned it, with the usual exemptions permitting screenings in the House of Lords and certain public schools.

The outrage the film provoked only intensified the efforts of critics to try and discern some meaning, purpose or ‘message’ in it. Various critics, notably those writing for communist-affiliated journals like Moscow’s Art of Cinema and Prague’s Film a doba but also Variety, read the story as a parable about waning Portuguese colonialism and rebellion, counter-insurgency and strife across Lusophone Africa (including the yet-to-happen Angolan Civil War). Positif’s Benoît Picayune, a longtime champion of da Toga who had authored two monographs on the filmmaker, didn’t. Most convincingly perhaps, British critic Rowland Drulag, in a festival report for Films and Filming (which, the film’s UK ban notwithstanding, ran images from the orgy scenes across five consecutive front covers), saw the film as a subtle satire on the spiritual inclinations of the sexually liberated 1960s counterculture – ‘those forlorn young heretics-in-search-of-an-Inquisitor who stew the sacraments of sex and the titillations of mysticism into a Marcusean neo-theology of holy eros’. Predictably, other, less scrupulous British critics lined up to impute further allegorical interpretations without having seen the film.

And what of the opinions of the film’s own creator? Having retired from filmmaking after completing The Divine Concupiscence…, da Toga remained in his home country, sitting out the overthrow of Estado Novo and observing the scandal, heated exegesis and final lapse into obscurity of his film with sanguine bemusement. In the years before his death in 1984, those interviewers who sought him out invariably found a good-natured, sun-tanned eminence given only to rare and gnomic pronouncements (his last interview consisted of a cough and a mere two words: ‘Not really’). When questioned about the film that had caused so much controversy and confusion worldwide, he would venture only a vague satisfaction combined with a light regret that the film had not gone far enough. It should, he reflected, have been set not in the Berlengas but 5000 miles further away on the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha.

(With thanks to four of film’s heretics for the images: Scavolini, Moctezuma, Mingozzi and Portugal’s other Cândido.)

Confessions of a Mass Observer

Sidney Bucket, GB, 1977

Starring: Richard O’Sullivan, Jon Pertwee, Liz Fraser, Donald Sinden, Robin Blackburn, Willy Rushton, Irene Handl, Anna Bergman, Edie Levy

Britain’s wave of 1970s sex comedies is usually considered one of the darkest chapters in British cinema history, the films written off as an unappetising mix of lame farce, sub-Carry On innuendo and grubby softcore. Yet for all the shame and critical distaste these titles inspire, they were often wildly successful with domestic audiences and in a few cases remain fascinating oddities for the discerning cultist. One of the strangest entries in the cycle – together with George Harrison Marks’ shambolic manor house romp My Sweet Lord! (1976) and the Amber Film Collective’s sexed-up depiction of railway construction workers, Shunt! (1979) – has to be Sidney Bucket’s 1977 Confessions of a Mass Observer (aka Vital Statistics), which found its ‘inspiration’ in the work of Marxist cultural theorist, historian and Cambridge don Edward Hobson (1918-1997).

Virtually forgotten these days, Hobson conducted his early research with the Mass Observationalist Society, a long-running affiliation of leftist intellectuals who, deeply sympathetic to the lives of ordinary people, devoted themselves to meticulously spying on them. Hobson left the Society in the late 1950s, objecting to its empiricist resistance to high theory, but the movement’s methods of direct observation – such as the use of interviews, open-ended questionnaires and binoculars – casts a long shadow over his mature work, which includes books like The Utilities of Leisure, The Culture of the Common, Hope I Lie with the Proles, A Sociological Apology for the Lower Classes, A Marxist Guide to Hobbies and Reading Habits Across the Outhouses of England.

Yet Hobson’s unquestioned magnum opus is his 1961 study The Likes of Us: Notes Towards a Materialist Investigation of the Historical Development of English Popular Traditions and Enjoyments, a 900-page account of working-class customs drawn from twenty years of Mass Observationalist and independent research. The book was judged highly original for its refusal to berate ‘mass culture’ in the manner of other social critics of the day, with Hobson determined to see in modern youth trends the remnants of an authentic demotic expression (one chapter reveals how the hula hoop craze originated with blacksmiths in 19th century Huddersfield). The book’s success turned Hobson into a public intellectual with a string of TV appearances to his name. The pinnacle of his media career was a series of (now lost) programmes for BBC2’s culture slot Monitorer (1958-65), which saw Hobson riding in a horse and cart around various English towns to investigate regional customs. Clog fighting, egg shackling, knur and spell, penny prick, orange rolling and darts were among the colourful practices run through the erudite but lyrical mill of Hobson’s spoken commentaries. Anthony Burgess, in a 1964 review for The Listener, enthused over the ‘robustious poetry’ of an episode that featured Hobson overseeing a fight in a Salford car park.

Confessions of a Mass Observer originated with Derek Bobkin, noted radical screenwriter, morris dancer and former student of Hobson’s, who proposed a dramatic adaptation of The Likes of Us for BBC1’s prestigious anthology series of socially educative single dramas, Play School (1970-84). Bobkin planned to make Hobson’s dense study accessible to a wider audience by means of Rouchian verité and Brechtian distanciation. Semi-dramatised vignettes of ordinary people enacting their native regional pastimes were to have alternated with symbolic sequences of black-faced Mummers reciting Hobson’s texts on a traffic island in Milton Keynes – an anti-narrative approach unified by overarching thematic structures of urbanisation and seasonal renewal. Rejected by the BBC, Bobkin’s original script was finally sold to Gusset Films, a small independent company that by the mid-1970s was avidly exploiting the vogue for sex comedies. Bobkin was himself appreciative of the sex comedy – he admired its explicit depiction of working-class trades – and he obliged Gusset by turning his script into a recognisable, if unique, example of the genre.

In the finished film, directed by prolific sexploitation filmmaker and former club owner Sidney Bucket (he of Bucket’s Boudoir and Lamp-Post Luxury Revue Bar notoriety), Hobson himself is consigned to the background in favour of a bumbling fictional nephew called Nobby (Richard O’Sullivan). Sent down from Cambridge for accidentally wounding his team’s cox in the boat race, Nobby arrives, cap in hand, at his uncle’s mass-observation institute, based in a disused public lavatory in Leytonstone and here named The Collective for the Research and Understanding of Mass-Popular English Traits and Traditions (CRUMPETT). As luck would have it, Hobson (Jon Pertwee) is about to take up a visiting professorship at the University of Bristol and needs someone to complete the remaining research for a mammoth study of popular traditions, provisionally titled Probing the English.

Nobby’s first assignment is to secure additional research funds from wealthy philanthropist, soap manufacturer and morality campaigner Lord Longhurst (Donald Sinden), who seems to believe he is funding a comprehensive and extremely explicit study of the lax moral health of the young – specifically female secretaries, au pair girls, nurses, sixth-form schoolgirls and trainee policewoman – rather than a materially grounded investigation of Whit Walks, pigeon-fancying and domino championships. This misunderstanding seems like a comment on the complex mix of purposes at the heart of the film itself, which lurches through a series of farcical tit-flashing exploits while struggling to faithfully evoke a class-specific structure of feeling.

The episodic plot centres round Nobby’s misadventures while out mass-observing. He starts by going door to door in a series of working-class disguises, the better to infiltrate the lives of his subjects, but this backfires in predictable fashion: posing as a schoolboy showing off his new Sunday clothes for a sixpence, he knocks at the door of a buxom housewife (Liz Fraser), but before Nobby can ask about her favourite folk songs, she has pulled his clothes off and started examining him for nits. He beats a hasty retreat lathered in carbolic soap. A more surreptitious approach goes equally awry when Nobby is caught up a ladder peeping in on a Women’s Institute seminar about jam-making. The most successful phase of his research comes when he hires a troupe of nubile female models to tour English seaside towns with him in a charabanc. Gullible men are lured onboard by the models, only to be duped into expounding at length about their hobbies, fears and opinions of the monarchy.

Giant wads of empirical data are collected, and the film’s finale sees the return of Hobson, who is invited to give a talk and slide show based on his study at a Silver Jubilee variety evening, in between a knobbly knees contest and a disappearing act by the National Union of Miners. The actual working-class audience before whom Hobson now speaks angrily rejects his findings, and in a rather predictable climactic turn towards slapstick, the attendees pelt Hobson with rock buns and challenge his analysis of base-superstructure relations. This village hall melee is only curbed when Nobby, rushing to the stage to protect his uncle, crashes into the as yet unused slide-projector that he had absent-mindedly loaded with glamour shots belonging to the female models. The slides are scattered among the crowd, and the dialectical dust-up comes to a halt as assailants find themselves mesmerised by the minute and mildly titillating photos.

Hobson is now struck by a popular interest he had never observed before: the British public’s enthusiasm for images of half-covered tits and bums. This leads his research in a new direction, signalled in the film’s upbeat coda: Hobson reclines in his newly spruced-up headquarters, being massaged by the models and reading Wilhelm Reich, as Nobby arrives to tell him that his proposed study of cross-class bottom-pinching has been awarded a massive endowment from Lord Longhurst.

Unsurprisingly, at the time of its release Confessions of a Mass Observer was either ignored or panned by critics. It was dubbed ‘another noisome entry in Britain’s sex-farce plague’ (Monthly Film Bulletin), ‘woefully under-theorised’ (Daily Express) and ‘a turn off’ (Marxism Today). Others expressed bafflement at this dalliance with material as crude and outdated as mass observation. None of this of course harmed the film’s box-office success, and in later years it has enjoyed low-level cult interest, fuelled by persistent rumours of an alternative cut made for the West German market featuring hardcore political digressions. (Among the mythical excised scenes are Roy Kinnear’s turn as a radical Soho bookseller and a pub singalong to the full version of Cornelius Cardew’s polemical theme song.) Apocryphal as such elements may be, and confused as the film undoubtedly is, Confessions of a Mass Observer warrants our attention as the rare sex comedy that reflects on the genre’s working-class cultural roots in explicitly political, historical, materialist, ethnographic and holistic terms. To give the last word to Gusset’s own, admittedly somewhat hyperbolic promotional campaign, ‘This is the film that makes Linda Lovelace look uncommitted!’

Jacques Rivette (1928-2016)

By way of a (very belated) tribute to the great French director Jacques Rivette, who died earlier this year, I’d like to share my first encounter with his monumental Out 1. This was at the NFT/BFI Rivette retrospective in 2006, where the full-length, 1971 version of Out 1 (aka Out 1: Noli me tangere) received its effective UK premiere, its 13 hours stretched over – or packed into – three days. For me, the hours spent outside the cinema were barely a break with the movie, as I trailed around London by myself and sat up in pubs till very late still lost in its crazy detours and dérives, its nebulous but keenly felt paranoia, its shifting webs of vivid yet inscrutable characters. Without giving too much away, there’s a very rarefied but still palpable terror in the way the whole magnificent structure finally, ruthlessly wipes itself out, collapsing back into chaos, until we’re left with Bulle Ogier’s face endlessly reflected in the mirrors of a mysterious, once-barred room, a half-real, half-fraudulent breakdown on an empty beach, and an offhand closing suggestion that the whole thing may begin again. Cinema as free-association, as auto-therapy, as the weird existential adventure of sitting conspiratorially in the dark with a group of other people for three days – one hour, in fact, for every member of the film’s own dream conspiracy.

 

 

Best of Enemies (Morgan Neville/Robert Gordon, 2015)

I usually find little I feel like watching on in-flight entertainment, so on yesterday’s trip back to the UK I was happy to discover ‘Best of Enemies’, a recent documentary about Gore Vidal and William Buckley’s famous televised debate during the 1968 Democratic Convention, among the available choices. The debate might seem an unsustainably slight subject for a 90-minute documentary, but the film offers a consistently entertaining wealth of detail about the two antagonists and the debate’s political and cultural context, perhaps even shooting off in too many directions and leaving certain tantalising questions unanswered. Did Buckley come to regret the homophobic insult he notoriously wielded against Vidal after being called a ‘crypto-Nazi’, or simply that he lost his cool? What was the truth of Vidal’s accusation that Buckley had distorted his military record? Marshalling a chorus of talking heads sympathetic to both sides, the film makes grandiose claims for the pivotal biographical and cultural importance of the debate, which isn’t always entirely convincing: is it accurate, for instance, to implicitly tie Buckley’s regrets about his behaviour to interview footage of a rueful older Buckley longing for death? What gives the film most substance though is the assertion that the debate, in setting up a spectacular confrontation between two irreconcilable culture warriors, anticipated a contemporary media culture in which reportage or more constructive argument have given way to showy slanging-matches between well-entrenched viewpoints and the vituperative bon mots of polished pundits. The assertion is interesting and, up to a point, convincing, but it fascinates most in also highlighting the differences between Vidal and Buckley and today’s media personalities. I’m saying this as a big fan of Vidal’s writing, but it seems remarkable today that two such preening monuments of East Coast sophistication and mannered articulacy could have commanded such widespread public interest – Buckley in particular being a caricaturist’s dream of ostentatious verbiage and odd behavioural tics. If the film doesn’t quite justify the assertion broached by one commentator that Buckley was a master at demolishing his opponents’ arguments, with much of what he’s shown saying here seeming simply ad hominem or mean-minded, watching the film did make me kind of wish he could be our right-wing hate figure du jour.

Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophüls, 1988)

Last week I felt a perversely irresistible impulse to watch Marcel Ophuls’ 1988 documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. Running for four hours twenty minutes, this is a mammoth chronicle of a man notorious even by Nazi standards, a former Gestapo chief in Lyon who was recruited by US intelligence after the war and who would later help stage a neofascist coup in Bolivia. In and of itself Barbie’s tale is one of prolific, near-grotesque malevolence, ranging from well-documented personal involvement in grisly torture to paramilitary adventures and cocaine-trafficking in South America, and yet Ophuls largely eschews sensationalism. Formally the film chiefly comprises a series of talking-head interviews in rooms, with geographical shifts signalled in perfunctory shots of local vistas and snatches of native songs, while the content is concerned with elucidating the circumstances surrounding Barbie’s activities, grappling with the tangle of contradictory accounts and the haze of participants’ poor memories (or conscious evasions). The betrayal and death of French resistance leader Jean Moulin, the recruitment of ex-SS officers as anti-Soviet intelligence agents, the overlapping worlds of Nazi exile and death-squad politics in 1970s Bolivia, are all episodes scrutinised with a near-legalistic eye. The film’s concern for minutiae, as attentive to political intricacies as to the gory details of Barbie’s exploits, could well prove challenging to those with little prior knowledge or only a casual interest in these subjects.

As other commentators have observed, the starkly terrible figure of Barbie is something of a cipher here: as an individual he remains enigmatic, just as the elderly Barbie, seen in interview footage from the time of his eventual capture, is calmly impassive in person. The film is interested rather in that wider, less spectacular guilt that emanates out from its central figure. Ophuls is unforgiving in tracing the ‘lesser’ culpabilities of those who crossed paths with Barbie, facing down everyone from the former CIC officials who worked with Barbie to an elderly woman who stood by as her Jewish neighbours were taken away by the SS.

This is a dogged, heavy and unredemptive experience, as it clearly should have been. And yet, dare one say, it possesses a strange humour and even buoyancy, mined from the human details of Ophuls’ encounters with his interviewees. There is, for instance, a perverse cosiness about the circumstances in which many of the interviews are conducted, belying the harshness and discomfort of the encounters themselves: subjects pose beside richly decked Christmas trees or swimming pools, cigars and glasses of wine are luxuriantly consumed, and Ophuls initiates one of the film’s most confrontational and sinister exchanges, with a Bolivian former bodyguard and friend of Barbie’s, while clad in a dressing-gown. Being, I confess, relatively unfamiliar with Ophuls’ work, I found myself fascinated by the severe yet urbane and ironic figure that the documentarist himself cuts throughout the film. Never quite centre-stage in the Michael Moore mould (though a couple of aggressive encounters with subjects unwilling to have themselves or their habitats filmed certainly evokes Moore), Ophuls’ angry onscreen wit nonetheless offers the view an apt guide through this litany of collective crimes, at once amplifying the horror and making it bearable.