Genres are, by their nature, formulaic however new examples of the genre need to be different otherwise audiences, having seen it all before, will ‘turn off’. One Missed Call is a Ringu rip-off, instead of video tapes and a week to live, the hapless victims receive a mobile phone call – uncannily from themselves – from a day or two in the future were they get to hear their last words. Then someone else in that person’s ‘contacts’ receives a call.
There is very little difference from Ringu, and other examples of J-horror: the emphasis on school girls; the useless cops; the slightly older man who tries to help; disturbing young children; long hair witches-ghosts; brilliant set pieces… And that’s why One Last Call is worth watching, for despite it’s overlong near-two hour length, there are many genuinely chilling moments. J-horror directors relish placing something uncanny in the mise en scene without drawing attention to it. So a routine search of an abandoned flat suddenly becomes creepy as you think, ‘Are those fingers sticking out of that cupboard on the wall?’ You look ‘closer’ to realise the bloody witch is in there.
Directed by the incredibly prolific Takeshi Miike (80 films in under 20 years), One Last Call is a worthy entrant to the J-horror cycle. Wonderfully composed shots – how the hell does he do that when directing four films a year?! – and a genuinely scary finale offers a satisfyingly cold-sweaty experience.
Wickus Van der Merwe from MNU attempts to persuade an alien to sign his eviction notice from District 9
Outline (no spoilers)
When an alien spacecraft arrives over Joannesburg, the locals resist the urge to attempt to blow it out of the sky and eventually they discover thousands of malnourished creatures seemingly trapped in the craft. The aliens are brought down and housed in a temporary camp in ‘District 9′ of the city. Several years later the authorities, increasingly alarmed by the growth of the alien population and the potential for civil unrest that contact between aliens and humans is creating, they decide to move the aliens to a new ’settlement’ outside the city. The job of organising the move is awarded to a faceless private corporation, MNU.
Commentary
This is a fascinating film if you are interested in science fiction and horror as genres. Everyone is playing spot the references and I’d go back as far as the ‘creature features’ of the mid 1950s (Them, Creature from the Back Lagoon, The Fly and The Incredible Shrinking Man – Philip French identifies Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the first Quatermass movie and the latter is a good call, I think), then on to the revival of some of those films (e.g. The Fly) in the ‘body horror’ period of the 1980s. More recently, the film echoes action films like Iron Man. Then there are the elements from the alien invasion movies with spaceships hovering above the Earth. There is also a link to the satirical use of aliens as giant ‘bugs’ in Starship Troopers, but this time via the kind of documentary approach utilised in Cloverfield. A film I was reminded of a lot is the wonderful Korean monster picture, The Host (2007) which shares several themes with District 9 and even some actual scenarios (e.g. in the operating theatre). There is a direct connection as well as both films feature creatures created by the Weta Workshop in New Zealand.
Science fiction and horror are often close to each other when dealing with narratives like this. District 9 was sometimes more like body horror for me, but that’s possibly because as a squeamish viewer, I am easily disgusted/revulsed by alien representations. Having said that, the aliens in District 9, the ‘prawns’, eventually become quite sympathetic creatures and I was rooting for them by the end. Before that though, their behaviour is pretty anti-social from a human point of view. This is quite clever in a scripting sense since it suggests that a) these are carnivorous aliens with different attitudes towards flesh-eating and b) that any sentient creatures forced to live in squalor will begin to behave in ‘uncivilised’ ways. In other words, we as an audience are required to think about our relationship to creatures that are both different and also similar to ourselves.
Perhaps the most important difference between this narrative and the ‘action spectaculars’ such as Iron Man, is that District 9 is mostly played ’straight’ – although I did find the opening irritating with its sense of ‘reality TV’ and a hero who at first seems like a cross between a South African Alan Partridge and David Brent. He gets a lot better as the film moves on and the actor (Sharlto Copley) has been highly praised by critics and popular audiences alike. Too many action pictures are tongue-in-cheek. The best genre pictures are played ‘for real’ and I think that is the case here. The sense of authenticity is also helped by not having the leads played by recognisable Hollywood faces – a real problem for so many South African movies destined for international markets.
Of course, the big question about the film concerns what is achieved by mixing all these familiar elements in a narrative set in Johannesburg, the home city of writer/director Neill Blomkamp? Most reviewers seem to think that the opportunity isn’t really taken up as much as it might be. Pushing the responsibility for removing the aliens onto a private company might be quite realistic, but it doesn’t offer us the interesting dilemma of an ANC leader explaining the policy to the world’s media. The authenticity of the setting does work however and it seemed to me that the film was ‘South African’ in its feel for the environment in the same way that Gavin Hood successfully represents the townships in Tsotsi. Younger viewers may not be aware that the scenes of eviction of the aliens are shot to mirror exactly the ‘clearance’ of illegal settlements under the apartheid regime.
You could perhaps argue that Blomkamp is even-handed in making the ‘bad guys’ brutish Afrikaners and Nigerians, but there have already been complaints from some quarters about the depictions of the Nigerians. I’m not sure about this representation at all. Here’s a useful blog entry followed by a range of comments. I’m interested in the comment on the blog which mentions the Nigerian movies made in South Africa and therefore the suggestion that there is competition between South African and Nigerian filmmakers. I also note comments that see the Nigerians as standing in for the range of refugees from countries like Zimbabwe who have suffered from aggression after their arrival in South Africa. All the same, it is a brave (white) director who offers us images of superstitious/cannibalistic Nigerians as gangsters. Certainly there are Nigerian gangsters at large in many parts of the world, but I suggest that the filmmaker needs to be more clear about how he expects audiences to read his satire/allegory.
So, the film risks being seen as racist at the same time as it satirises the post-apartheid treatment of refugees in the RSA. Another problem is associated with one of several plot holes/confusions. What do we actually learn about the social structure of the aliens? How does gender work in their social system and what kind of class system do they have? We do discover something about the ‘hatching’ of eggs, but did I miss something about ‘queens’ or other females? Are most of the aliens drones – with only a couple of high order males who can fly the spacecraft?
Overall, this is an interesting film that probably tries to do too much and possibly gets tangled up in political and social issues it isn’t quite sure how to handle. Nevertheless it is worth watching and studying. Although it is distributed by Sony, it’s clearly a global film with a South African director trained in Canada and a film shot in South Africa with effects and post-production work in New Zealand. (It’s produced by Peter Jackson, but I’m not sure how important his contribution was.)
There is plenty of material developing the stories around this film and the Guardian’s film page makes a good starting place.
Here’s the short film that Neil Blomkamp made in 2005 and which he then expanded to make as District 9:
I imported this DVD from the US. The 2003 disc from Blue Underground is NTSC but coded Region 0. I was following up a suggestion from Stephen when I was discussing Let the Right One In and looking for different European takes on the vampire film.
Directed by the Belgian Harry Kümel, the film is a European co-production filmed in English with all the actors delivering their own dialogue. This gives an intriguing flavour to the exchanges. The date suggests an affinity with the more extreme end of European horror cinema, but I found this to be much more subtle and less sensational than, for instance, Dario Argento (which is not a criticism of Argento). The casting coup in acquiring Delphine Seyrig for the central role is the key to the film’s success. She is breathtaking in every way.
The film belongs, in one sense to the cycle of lesbian vampire films at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s. I confess that I avoided these at the time, though I remember some critical attention paid to this title and director. Seyrig plays the iconic character of these films – Countess Elizabeth Bathory who allegedly killed 800 virgins for their blood. This time, the ageless Countess is touring Belgium with her young companion, leaving in her wake a number of drained corpses of young women. When the couple arrive in Winter in the deserted seaside resort of Ostende, they are delighted that the isolated hotel on the promenade has only two other guests – a young couple in the honeymoon suite, supposedly waiting for a ferry to the UK (although the young man seems very reluctant to catch it). Now their fate is sealed.
The seaside setting is very well-used. The wind-swept dunes and the dark building looming out of the night is the perfect Gothic setting. The only other location of note is Bruges which the young couple visit, only to stumble across the police discovery of another body. This sequence was so reminiscent of Don’t Look Now that I couldn’t help thinking that Nic Roeg must have seen it. The old medieval town with canals and narrow streets just cries out for fleeting glimpses of figures rounding the corner or the slow passage of the dead carried on a stretcher. Seaside and canals – there is something about the water’s edge as a signifier of moving into another world.
Large empty hotels are also disturbing environments and Kümel and his team are inventive with decor and costume. The first two-thirds of the film moves quite slowly, but the last third is action-packed. There is an interesting essay on the film in Jump Cut, arguing that the film offers itself up to a feminist reading. This is well-argued and pretty convincing. The young man is quite a problematic character and the narrative certainly tends towards sympathy with the three women.
I’m getting increasingly interested in the way in which vampire films play with the ‘rules’ of the genre. Daughters of Darkness utilises the fear of the light and running water and exploits the role of the vampire’s servant/companion played nicely here by the German Andrea Rau, who is interviewed in the DVD Extras. It must have been a nice change from her usual roles in German sex films. It’s interesting that although there is a fair amount of nudity including ‘full frontal’ shots of Rau in Daughters, the most erotic moments are probably associated with Seyrig’s gentle caresses and beautifully delivered suggestive dialogue. The role of the companion seems more complex in this film as there is a sense of her own desire as well as of ’service’ to her mistress. On the other hand, the role of the ‘vampire hunter’ in the narrative is more peripheral than usual – perhaps this is an attempt to implicate the audience with the hunter figure much more of a voyeur than an active agent.
This is certainly a horror film to watch again in terms of its take on the vampire genre.
Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist, photo by Christian Geisnaes
Antichrist has many of the qualities of previous Lars von Trier films and I have to use the ‘m’ word (‘misogyny’) immediately. It came up quickly in the Q & A at Edinburgh with its cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle – and continued to come up during the subsequent discussion, and it was clear that many in the audience rightly had issues with its politics. I can only offer my view below, as someone who has frequently ‘had problems’ with Von Trier’s representations of women – and I‘ve found that (two days on) I’ve not quite had the response I would have expected. I hope that my few thoughts might stimulate some discussion because I think it’s an interesting and brave film. The furore at its release is interesting as well, as it conforms to type. Without a comprehensive knowledge of the history of censorship, Antichrist falls into that category of film that creates a huge outcry, mainly from parts of the media that represent audiences who would never choose to go to see it and make it represent an evil that it simply does not equate to (Crash springs to mind as a worthy antecedent at the centre of a similar furore).
Antichrist is a powerful cinematic experience. The use of the image is tested to certain limits within a popular cinema context. Put this film in an art gallery, and you wouldn’t have the same kind of responses or issues. The fact that Von Trier chooses to work in a popular medium, deliberately with a view to changing the constitution and perception of that medium, means that his films can exist in a context that struggles to accommodate it. The particular challenge of his films is interesting when we are routinely able to ‘handle’ the unquestioned misogyny of mainstream cinema and extremes of representations of sex and violence that exist there. And it’s not that Von Trier’s film contains representations that are more realistic – as in the effects or results of violence or sexual obsession – the film is shot with his trademark attention to an ‘alienation effect’ to ensure that you are constantly aware that you are contemplating a work of art. And I mean ‘contemplating’ – Dod Mantle talked about the deliberate decision to slow the frame rate in order to allow the viewer to study the images being shown as you would contemplate a work of art in a gallery. Using high speed camera equipment (Phantom) some sequences were shot at 1,000 frames per second (compared to the usual 25). It is similarly relevant that Von Trier does overtly credit the influence of Tarkovsky on this film. The particular quality of an artwork is, I think, enhanced as it is completely shot on digital. Other filmic devices Dod Mantle discussed were the deliberate decision to abandon the 180 degree rule in the sequences at the family home (post tragedy), which creates a dynamic contrast against the more static sequences. This was very clear as you watched it – the disintegration and the disassociation taking place within the marriage. This does work incredibly effectively as well as the single framing that results for each of the protagonists, emphasising their painful, painful isolation in this grieving couple. In lesser hands, it could just appear chaotic and disorientating. In the context of this, the female genital mutilation is not (as has been portrayed in some responses) the central narrative focus, but occurs at a specific narrative moment and expresses a particular emotion of Gainsbourg’s character. Is it gratuitous? I read an article in last week’s Observer Film supplement that felt it was, and decried the film’s casual use of it, quoting Ousmane Sembène Moolaadé as a far more sensitive treatment of this issue. This seems to imply that the film lacked humanity in its representation of its subjects. But this seems a different kind of human expression – of intense misery, grief – of darkness and despair – recreated through visual symbolism in a highly-aestheticised piece of art. Inevitably, it will always be testing and challenging our ability to feel connection – empathy, sympathy – because of this self-consciousness but I do not think it necessarily ‘achieved’ alienation. Somehow, through the extreme events and high art aesthetic, those people and their emotions were real. The intensity of the chamber-piece style and the particular actors involved is, as in other Von Trier films, a vital factor in that communicating the emotions convincingly. Despite what he must put them through, you would guess Von Trier is an actors’ director – the aesthetics serve the performance and foreground it rather than detract.
So, back to the misogyny. The narrative does superficially present a story that warns of the atavistic and illogical and dangerous influence and acts of women. A bald telling of the plot details would make this clear (which obviously I won’t do). However, this film (more than others I have watched by Von Trier) does create a powerful balance between its apparent mistrust of women and the ineffectual nature of patriarchal behaviour. Dafoe’s character is clearly the logic and control of male patriarchal authority which the film consistently questions, even whilst representing female extremes. It is clear that these extremes are produced in the context of this kind of patriarchal control and the lighting and colour choices emphasise the theme. The institutional look of the apartment they inhabit (the bathroom especially with the utilitarian basin and toilet and bland hospital-style tiles) together with the greenish colour bias seem to emphasise this unbalanced pathology within the marriage. The role of nature (conceived as its own separate character) is also a central theme – through the evil that men do, a battle between instincts and logic and a questioning of our relationship to the ‘beasts of the field’ – all represented visually in a highly aestheticised and anti-naturalistic form.
The final, fine balance is achieved through the dominance of the role ascribed to Charlotte Gainsbourg (who won the acting award at Cannes) compared to Dafoe – her dominance of the screentime and her devastating performance is a strong argument for credible female empowerment in this dark and challenging story.
A few years ago, the UK Film Council bemoaned the lack of school-based genre films coming from UK producers, asking why it wasn’t possible to emulate Hollywood teen films. I think that there might even have been a project or competition of some kind set up. Tormented looks a bit like a promising competition entry. It has met a mixed response from its target audience, who were initially attracted, but then, presumably because of bad word of mouth, stayed away in droves for its second week when it dropped an alarming 78%. I suspect that the real test may come when it goes out on DVD. There is a strong suggestion that many young people now find cinema prices too high and are waiting for DVD.
I found the film quite interesting as a genre exercise, but I’m not the target audience. I’ve also not seen most of the Hollywood films that provide the generic material here, but I have seen many more British films than the young commentators on IMDB and this certainly affects my reading of Tormented. What’s interesting is that the film studiously avoids direct Hollywood cultural references and comes across as very ‘British’.
The generic mix here is comedy/horror and the narrative model is the ‘revenge of the wronged on his persecutors’. A boy bullied at school commits suicide and returns to execute his tormentors one by one. This is of course, a familiar trope of the Hollywood teen slasher film, but it also has British antecedents. Many UK teens seem blithely unaware of the heritage of British horror – a good reason why the UK Film Council should be concerned to give low budget UK horror a higher profile. The film that I was most reminded of was Theatre of Blood (UK 1973) in which Vincent Price is an ageing Shakespearean actor who murders each of the theatre critics who have given him bad reviews. Each murder corresponds to a Shakespearean scene. That film was a masterpiece. Tormented certainly isn’t, but it does have some neat touches that suggest a scriptwriter (Stephen Prentice) who might know his British horror history. However, the interview with director Jon Wright on BBC Film Network contradicts that idea completely. Wright is a first time feature director with a strong background in music videos. He’s from the 1980s generation who grew up on Hollywood teen slashers and clearly hopes to get into Hollywood filmmaking. He suggests that he was the one to turn a slasher script into a comedy. He does make one telling point – that making a low budget feature is like making short films in that you don’t have much money per minute of film. Tormented is certainly quite conservative in its look but overall, apart from some hoary black and white heavy breathing sequences, it looks OK in high key CinemaScope (shot on the Red One digital camera according to Sight & Sound).
The main reason why it is so difficult to replicate Hollywood high school movies in the UK is that the UK schools system is so segmented and class-bound. It’s rare to find a large comprehensive school which is representative of a the full range of abilities and social class backgrounds in many UK towns and cities. Filmmakers and TV programme-makers have responded by opting for either an independent fee-paying school (preferably with boarders adding to the narrative possibilities) or a rundown inner city comp. The last school based horror/thriller The Hole (UK 2001) went down the private school route, which allowed it to bring in American stars (including Thora Birch). Tormented, filmed in the West Midlands used two schools in the region, a grammar school and a comp in Sutton Coldfield. The school in the film is clearly meant to be a grammar school. For those outside the UK a ‘grammar school’ in the UK is usually, but not always, a selective school (based on merit, not fee paying). Those in wealthy areas often ape the trappings of upmarket independent schools.
The middle-class setting allows more glamorous scenes (a poolside party) and more ‘beautiful’ students, represented here by Alex Pettyfer’s Bradley and some of the cast from the successful E4 TV series Skins. The one touch of subtlety was I thought the casting of Tuppence Middleton as Head Girl (not sure about calling her ‘Justine’ though). She looks and acts very much like a grammar schoolgirl from earlier times and I liked the mise en scène of her very ordinary suburban house. But this may be both the strength and weakness of the film. There are ’serious’ elements in the film (as well as little realist touches – did I hear a joke about oatcakes, a local delicacy?), including the treatise on bullying, that don’t mix too easily with the overall mayhem and in narrative terms these all refer back to Justine. In some ways, the ending of the film is just too ‘clever’ to fit in with the slasher business.
The two classics of UK horror comedy, An American Werewolf in London (UK/US 1981) and Shaun of the Dead (UK 2004) worked so well because they were both very funny and genuinely scary (Werewolf) or at least highly intelligent about their selected repertoire (Shaun). Tormented isn’t funny enough or scary enough.
I’m not sure what it says about contemporary culture when it regularly seems to be the case that the most compelling, the most intelligent and the most provocative films turn out to be variations on themes from the horror repertoire. I expected a great deal of Let The Right One In, released in the same slot in the UK calendar as The Orphanage in 2008. I wasn’t disappointed. Like that film and the Japanese Ring series, this new Swedish film cries out to be a study text – though I did wonder as I watched it that some students might not thank me for introducing them to such a disturbing tale.
If you haven’t yet seen the film, you probably know that it features a 12 year-old boy, Oskar, living in a nondescript Stockholm suburb in the winter of 1982. He’s bullied at school and not really supported by his parents who are separated. One day a 12 year-old girl, Eli, appears next door – but of course, she isn’t really 12 and she isn’t exactly a girl. What follows is a story that mixes the traditional narrative of a vampire movie with a youth movie focusing on the bullying at school and a kind of romance. At times comic and occasionally delving into social realism, the narrative also refers to fairy tales and gradually manipulates its audience into a moral dilemma around identification with the predicament of the vampire and the murders of innocent people. At times, the film feels like a children’s film and at times it is very ‘adult’. This confusion is in itself disturbing.
The film is based on a novel (2004) and adapted for the screen by the author, John Ajvide Lindqvist. As I understand it, there are significant omissions from the book narrative in the film. The film’s director is Tomas Alfredson, about whom I know very little except that he seems to have a reputation in Swedish TV and cinema for surrealist humour. He adopts a distinctive style for the film. In many sequences he uses a very shallow field of focus and combined with the expanse of snow in many scenes this allows a distorting effect for the occasional flash of colour. The snow also provides an appropriate backdrop for the blood (and a joke about ‘yellow snow’). The ‘Scope frame is also well used (and the print I saw was an excellent digital print). I also liked the music track which feature symphonic music performed by the Slovak Symphony Orchestra and Swedish rock music from the period.
The apartment where Oskar lives is in a block that reminded me of the soul-less buildings of Kieslowski’s Polish films and throughout the film the snowy mise en scène made me think of countless Scandinavian/Canadian/Russian narratives – some films and many crime novels. I think that the use of the winter scene is one of the strengths of the film. I’ve read several reviews and there are definitely observations that I will follow up. One is the historical setting. I’m not sure why 1982 is chosen. As one reviewer points out, this was the year that Sweden had some issues with the Soviet Union and there is a possible link between fear of the foreign intruder and the arrival of this ‘Romanian-looking’ girl – who teams up with the flaxen-haired Swedish boy. Neil Young (the film reviewer, not the singer) refers to this in terms of the beginnings of Muslim immigration in Sweden. I’m not sure about this, but there must be some significance intended by the historical setting – I assumed that there was a connection to a ‘real world’ incident.
What I liked most about the film was that I wasn’t sure what would happen next. I knew that the vampire conventions would be brought into the narrative, but I couldn’t (didn’t have time and didn’t really want to) work out the context in which they would be applied. The USP of the film is, I think, in the moral questions it raises. How can you have a ‘good’ vampire? What does it mean if we will a character to take revenge? (What do we make of authorities in liberal Sweden who don’t appear to punish Tomas when he does retaliate?) During the screening, I thought about fairy tales. Now, I can’t remember why I made the connection. Undoubtedly there are some nice narrative touches and some interesting ’significant objects’. I’ll return to this after reading the novel. My only concern is that the Hollywood remake has already been announced. I almost wish that Eli had decamped to wherever the would be producers of an unnecessary remake are based.
There is some useful material in the film magazine Little White Lies. Read the online magazine here.
I was pleased to get the rare chance to see a 1931 classic in a new print on a BFI re-release. I don’t remember seeing the film before, although the image of Fredric March as Mr Hyde is very well-known. The whole experience was a real treat and I wasn’t prepared for either the brilliance of Mamoulian’s approach via camerawork, editing and production design or the sheer eroticism of the film pre Hays Code. The film begins with an audacious subjective camera shot, seemingly hand-held, but presumably on some primitive form of dolly.(This follows a sequence of passionate organ-playing that must have been an inspiration for Monty Python.)
There is already quite a lot of material out there on the film and there is no need for me to repeat it. Here are two blogs that offer (1) a short interview with Mamoulian and (2) a formal analysis with loads of screen grabs showing the compositions and glorious wipes:
I suspect that the fans of the film who have only seen it on TV or DVD have missed some of the erotic charge of the film, partly because US TV versions were cut for a long time (as was the initial UK release), but also because the big screen has the kind of mesmeric effect in Mamoulian’s hands that you just can’t get on a small screen. In the final sequence there is a shot in which Mr Hyde approaches Jekyll’s fiancée from behind (as depicted in the poster above) and the subjective shot makes the woman’s dress seem almost touchable – and what dresses they are in the film, close fitting and low-cut. In his ‘Cinema One’ book on Mamoulian (1969) Tom Milne sets up a spirited defence of Mamoulian in the face of later critical apathy.
Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) was a Georgian from Tbilisi who trained as a theatre director in Moscow and then travelled to first London and then New York, directing both straight theatre and opera. In cinema by the late 1920s he was seen as a real innovator in the use of sound, the roving subjective camera of Jekyll and Hyde and later the first Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp in 1936. He was seduced away from Paramount by the moneybags at MGM (where Garbo’s Queen Christina was a highlight) but after Becky Sharp, his career faltered and he became known for films which he left for various reasons, the last of which was the ill-fated Cleopatra in (1963). The last film he completed was Silk Stockings in 1957, the Cold War musical version of Ninotchka, with the sublime Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire. Milne argues that Mamoulian’s sense of rhythm and timing in shooting and cutting was such that all his films could be seen as musicals.
I can see that my viewing is Mamoulian-light. I have Golden Boy (1939) to watch but now I must also seek out Applause (1929), City Streets (1931) and Love Me Tonight (1932).
Here is the famous scene between March and Miriam Hopkins, demonstrating what Hollywood lost when the Production Code came in:
Nick posted his reaction to El orfanato a couple of months back and now that I’m teaching the film, I’d like to expand on his comments about one of the best films of the year in UK distribution. The DVD of the film offers a rich mixture of extras and commentaries which help to explain the director’s approach – and why it was so enthusiastically ‘presented’ by Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro’s name on the credits helps to sell the film in the US and UK, but it is a little misleading in terms of audience expectations. El orfanato is much more closely connected to Spanish cinema history/influences than El laberinto del fauno, even though the latter refers more directly to Spanish history. The different box office careers of the films are interesting – in Spain, El orfanato was the much bigger success, grossing over €24 million and taking top box office position for the year (by comparison, Pan’s Labyrinth took under €8 million). In the US, the fortunes of the films were reversed with Pan’s Labyrinth taking five times more at the box office ($37million to $7million). In the UK, Pan’s Labyrinth took slightly more. Overall, the figures show a very successful pair of films, which are both Spanish-language productions with a focus on children in various genre mixes that involve horror and fairy tales. The difference between the other genre repertoires involved in the mix is the means of separating them.
Perhaps the most interesting essay on El orfanato that I have read was published in Sight and Sound, April 2008. Maria Delgado situates El orfanato in terms of the lost children and families from the Spanish Civil War, making the observation that it is only within the last year that the Spanish government has finally passed legislation that allows families to finally come to terms with their losses:
Spain’s Law of Historical Memory was finally passed by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government late last year, with the result that the bodies of between 30,000 and 150,000 civilians who opposed the right-wing Nationalists during the Civil War and its aftermath can be exhumed from the mass graves in which they are believed to lie. The Orphanage adeptly explores the legacy of a buried past.
Delgado references a wide range of films in her persuasive account of how El orfanato is so deeply embedded within Spanish film culture. I haven’t seen all the films she mentions, but certain links – to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and to both The Spirit of the Beehive and Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens) are ones that struck me straight away. The last two titles both feature Ana Torrent, then aged 6 and 8 respectively. She made her name with these two films, becoming a child star right at the end of Franco’s domination of Spanish culture – when children were venerated in cinema and society at large. Both films were critiques of fascism presented in highly ambiguous metaphors. In Cría cuervos, Ana is a little girl who believes she has murdered her father – motivated by her mother’s death for which she thinks her father was responsible. (The father was an Army Officer and Ana’s family offers a kind of microcosm of Spain under Franco.) Ana’s mother is played by Geraldine Chaplin (director Carlos Saura’s wife) and she also plays the older Ana who is later revealed to be telling the story in flashback. In El orfanato, Geraldine Chaplin plays the ’spirit medium’ who Simón’s mother hires when he goes missing.
None of these references will mean much outside Spain, but they clearly had resonances for sections of the Spanish audience. Some other aspects of the plot offer more universal symbols associated with 20th century wars – e.g. human remains hidden in ovens.
The extracts I have been using during an event analysing El orfanato are:
What has struck me most is the repetition of quite specific elements across several films. For instance, drawings of ghosts by children occur in The Ring (US 2002), The Others, Dark Water and El orfanato. Children’s games such as hide and seek or ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ appear in The Innocents, Dark Water and El orfanato etc.
I’ll try to add to this over the next few weeks.
In the meantime, here’s a useful fansite reference:
venicelion
Rona
nicklacey
keith1942
