The Great Dictator - Racism or Satire? You decide.

The road to the IMDB top-100 continued the other week with another Charlie Chaplain film, this time his landmark satire of Nazi Germany, The Great Dictator.  Made in 1940, just as the world was waking up to the terrors of what the Nazis were doing across Europe, the film is unashamed in its demonisation of them.  It was a film that at the time could be considered very brave to make.  The US was not at war with Germany, and such overt criticism of a head of state of a powerful westernised nation would surely have riled the corridors of power in the US.  Chaplain doesn't just satirise Hitler and the Nazis though, he outright mocks them through his own unique style of slapstick, giving all the characters stupid names, putting on a ridiculous German accent and effectively blowing raspberries in their faces.

One could argue that Chaplain almost goes too far here though.  Is the garbled fake German that he speaks still satire, or is it bordering on racism?  Chaplain plays two characters in The Great Dictator, and it is perhaps clear from his portrayal of those characters that he hold the Nazis in contempt rather than the German speaking diaspora.  Chaplain plays Hynkel - dictator of Tomania (Hitler) as well as a Jewish barber who is a hero from the First World War.  The barber is eloquent and well-spoken, Hynkel speaks in a garbled mash-up of fake German and semi-retarded English.  The barber is shown as resourceful and strong, Hynkel a devious man fearful of his supposed allies.  Chaplain's disdain for Hitler and what he has done to the German nation is clear.

The film is well-known for its final 15 minutes, in which the barber is mistaken for Hynkel and hauled in front of a Nazi rally to deliver a speech to the masses.  Rather than ranting about Jews, the barber gives a moving oration about the brotherhood of mankind, imploring the world to step back from the madness of war, recognise there is good in all, enough for all, and work together for a brighter future.  The cheering of the crowds as he finishes his speech can be read two ways, either there is hope for humanity as the crowd realise the truth in what he says; or that there is no hope as the baying masses blindly cheer whatever is put in front of them, be they peace-lover or war-monger.  However the film's final scene does leave us with a feeling of hope for the future of the German peoples and the world at large.

Undoubtedly The Great Dictator is a landmark piece of cinema.

2001: A Space Odyssey - better on a big screen

The BFI recently re-released Stanley Kubrick's classic science fiction opus 2001: A Space Odyssey into cinemas.  Thankfully this got outside the M25, and so it was that last Tuesday both Reading and Camberley Vue cinemas were screening the original.

I last saw 2001: A Space Odyssey the best part of 20 years ago.  Back then I wasn't anywhere near as into film and cinema-as-art as I am nowadays, but even then I was aware that I was watching a masterpiece.  It's a film about big concepts, like the evolution of mankind and the emergence of new forms of life.  It's about concepts that are meant to be barely comprehensible by our mortal minds, all bound up in the presence of the brutally alien monolith, the true intentions of which remain unknown throughout the film and remain open to interpretation.  Its mysteriousness rams home the idea that the next step in human evolution will be as incomprehensible to us as a space station is to a pre-humanoid ape holding a bone.

Everything in the film is based on a scientific grounding, and like most of Arthur C Clarke's work - it's less about the characters, and all about the concepts.  In fact, the film's most memorable character is a computer - the HAL9000 computer who tries to kill the crew of the ship when he realises that they plan to disconnect him.  This is the one plot point of the film that makes no sense, HAL makes one small mistake and the crew decide the solution is disconnection.  If we all decided to throw our machines away when they made one mistake, we would need a lot more computers.  Anyway, the point is about evolution as a concept, conflict between competing groups for survival, and when a new intelligence emerges, there is necessarily a conflict to see who remains on top.

Some may criticise its lack of pace, its overly long use of shots of ships flying around, the barmy 5 minutes of flashing colours that represent Dave Bowman's journey through the infinite, the simple characterisation or a multitude of other things.  But this film is one of the purest hard science fiction experiences ever committed to celluloid.  The film's use of classical music keeps the tempo up during what might have turned into tedious sequences of space flight.  Kubrick's intention here is to demonstrate how far humanity has come, to make us marvel at that the things we have come to take for granted.  It's a film that has a stark aesthetic too, the sets are flawlessly designed and colours are used contrastingly to make everything feel disconnected and confusing.  It helps us feel even more uneasy about the presence of the monolith and what it represents.

To some, the last 10 minutes are too confounding to be anything other than a boring mess.  There is hopefully a majority out there who understand what Kubrick was trying to do, but think he took it too far into the world of the abstract.  For me though, this sequence stands out in science fiction cinema as a perfect way to end.  The monolith appears in the film at the start to usher in a new age of humanity, and then again at the end to do the same.  We as post-modern Homo Sapiens cannot comprehend the confusion of the pre-human apes who see the monolith for the first time and are inspired to use tools.  Perhaps our confusion as we follow Dave Bowman though his accelerated lifespan is as close as we can get to theirs.  Kubrick's use of cuts to show us Dave's ageing and his own disorientation at the passing of time is flawless.  The film ends on Dave Bowman being reborn as a child and returned to look over earth from a protective bubble.  Interpret this as you will.  Have the aliens delivered us a god?  Has humanity evolved again as it did when our ancestors picked up the first bone and wielded it as a club?  Is future conflict inevitable in the future as it was in the past?

To be honest, I probably would have paid my £10 just to experience this on the big screen with surround sound.  2001: A Space Odyssey is a landmark in the history of science fiction in film.  It's a film that changed cinema, and I am very glad to have finally seen it on the big screen.

They Live - A working class fantasy

Had an Xmas film experience last Friday, more of that later hopefully, but on Thursday we went full-on anti-Xmas by watching the cult action thriller They Live.  Starring ex-wrestling star Roddy Piper, and set in the contemporary urban dust bowl that is 1980s Los Angeles.  Piper plays a drifter called George, down on his luck and heading into the city to look for work.  He settles in to sleep for a few nights at a local commune but is shocked to discover that there's some sort of subversive underground movement going on fomenting discontent and agitating to make people 'see' the truth.

When the police move in to break up the commune, George is landed with a pair of shades.  When looked through, the glasses reveal that the world around him is an elaborate fantasy, and the real world is in fact being ruled by a small cabal of aliens disguising themselves as humans.  Bill-boards and newspaper headlines are in fact subliminal messages urging people to conform and consume.  Aliens disguised as humans are using the real humans as slave labour, and buying the silence of those they can't brainwash into submission.  George immediately decides to deal with this in the American way, with a shotgun and an attitude.

They Live is a cult film for a very good reason.  It's an brilliantly silly fantasy that portrays the world's elites as literal aliens using the rest of humanity for their own profit.  Imagine if your boss was actually an alien trying to take over the world?  Then it'd be ok to shoot him in the face - the ultimate working class fantasy!  The film's politics might be ludicrously overt and the acting bad; but the film is full one-liners, inane action and has a really gritty feel to it.  The design of everything when George is looking through the sunglasses at the 'real' world is great, with lots of greyscale and monotone words on billboards saying 'CONFORM', 'SLEEP' or 'OBEY' (see picture).  It's so silly it's brilliant.  I.e. classic cult.

At 80 minutes long, They Live is no classic, but definitely worth watching.

Excision - seriously messed up

It's a long time since I saw a film and I thought it was completely fucked up, but Sunday night reset the timer on that as I watched the independent American production Excision.  I think this appeared on my film-radar after a RedLetterMedia review of films-you-probably-didn't-see-yet highlighted it as weird enough to bother watching.  The story follows Pauline, a moderately disturbed teenager living somewhere in American suburbia with her frustrated-but-trying-not-to-be parents and younger sister - who suffers from cystic fibrosis.

Pauline is fairly weird, but on the surface no weirder than one might expect from the average teenager.  She has bad hair, bad skin, dresses awkwardly, hates the cool kids and worries about her changing body. Oh and she fetishises dead bodies.  Amongst the film's many scenes that seem to exist purely court controversy, Pauline dreams about having sex with a cadaver missing half its head.

It's almost as if the film-makers are trying to get as much in as possible that will wind up middle-America.  There's a scene in which Pauline seems to fantasise about having an abortion.  There are several comic scenes in which Pauline appears to pray to god with joking repentance as if she were chatting to an older sister.  She obsesses over a used tampon and losing her virginity when she's on her period.  Just your normal teenager then?

I suppose the subtext to all this is that being a teenage girl is weird - this isn't something I have actual experience of, but I'm assured it's a very trying time in the lives of all woman.  Pauline's mother expresses many of the things that the world expects her to do, crucially though she understands the difference between what society expects and what goes on behind closed doors - whereas Pauline does not.  She gets annoyed when Pauline kisses a random boy at a high-society dance, but at the same time seems to understand what's going on and approves when Pauline goes off to have sex with a random boy from her school.  It's the rules of society and etiquette that Pauline doesn't get and doesn't care about.  Basically she's a teenager.

Pauline also wants to be a surgeon.  She obsesses about blood and viscera and dead bodies.  If you can't work out where the film is going with all this then you need to try harder.  Given it's 80 minutes long I wouldn't go so far as to say that Excision was a total waste of my time.  I laughed out loud 2 or 3 times, and for fans of horror there's certainly something nasty about the stuff that Pauline gets up to.  Overall though, this isn't a film I would really recommend to anyone.  It's more of a cinematic curiosity than anything else, proving that the American film industry does have a dark side that sits outside the Holywood mainstream.  Excision - if you're going to watch it, don't eat anything while doing so.