While many key film events in countries recovering from lockdown and experiencing some stability in health situation came out of hiatus or virtual space and have been held as in-person, the cautious approach of Canadian government in handling the pandemic compelled the organisers of high-ranking North American genre film festival to take the virtual route for the second consecutive year, despite moving festival dates almost a month forward. Bereft of presence of the international guests, they nevertheless succeeded in scheduling almost at the eleventh hour a number of theatrical screenings in appreciation of loyalty of their local spectators and as a token of hope for the next edition to take place as regular one. The titles overviewed in what follows mostly come from the library of films made available to the press and industry members, which did not include every highly-anticipated title in the programme. Given the universal scale of the crisis nations have suffered through for over a year and various personal traumas and the unprecedented (at least in the recent history) disruptions in interhuman relation and social activities- including filmmaking- it brought in its tow, there was no surprise to find patent marks of this global predicament in selected and showcased films.
In his new film, The 12 day tale of the monster that died in 8 days, Shinji Iwai, a Fantasia favourite who also received this year’s Career Achievement award from the festival, directly tackles the pandemic and mobilises generic elements to chronicle it in a condensed, bittersweet fashion. Adopting the hallmark of this era- video conversations and self-recordings- as its main strategy, the film can serve as a time capsule, fashioned around the enforced restrictions and bearing the signs of this crisis in both its subject matter and aesthetic approach. Imitating a video diary, The 12 day tale follows the story of a man who has ordered what is advertised as a tiny monster and hopes it will grow to stop the rampant virus. Despite the inherently limited and potentially boredom-inducing nature of the selected format, Iwai manages to perk up and enliven its material by borrowing from a national genre- and national culture- which is likewise characterised by a spectacle of disaster ( Kaiju or monster films). Iwai’s film becomes a reflection on how imagination can be stimulated in a bleak, cloistered status and utilised to express the concomitant concerns, hopes and frustrations. In keeping with the style of the film and its feel of immediacy, the generic ingredient is present in a rudimentary and muted shape. The shots of camera flowing over the empty or uncrowded streets which punctuate the film, let the film breathe and also underscore the characters’ sense of confinement in webcam scenes, which triggers recourse to flight of imagination. In its mirthful tone, the film also provides a light-hearted critique of online cultures and trends, which took advantage of social restrictions to solidify their dominance. The film is however marred by ending on an explicitly didactic note, that makes it feel virtually like a feature-length promo for hygienic measures.
Mostly known as an animator, Leah Shore was another filmmaker who in the live-action format dealt with pandemic squarely by focusing on one most impacted aspect of life, i.e. intimate relations. In her pleasantly cheeky short called Puss, a woman is desperately seeking for someone to get laid. Despite potentials of its subject matter and using a style similar to commonplace web videos, the film never falls into banality. Assuming a transgressive undertone, Puss encapsulates the pressure of forced celibacy which brings one to consider any possibility for seeking pleasure, even only at the level of imagination. Also of note in the same programme of erotic shrot which featured Shore’s film – titled Botanicum Eroticorum– was the Finnish comedy Night of the living dicks (Ilja Rautsi) with the premise of a woman who is unable to assert her viewpoint on sexuality getting hold of a pair of glasses that reveal men as creatures with priapic heads. For all its pleasant and surreal raunchiness at the level of pictures, the film still conforms to platitude and conservative notion of ‘love versus sex’, though the humorous tone of the film puts a damper on its patronising stance. The programme also featured Hold me tight (Mélanie Robert-Tourneur), an impressive portrayal of carnal desire with an intimation of its links to violence. A primitive space, antithetical to garden of Eden and dominated by the darkness becomes the stage for forage and fight for sustenance which then leads to exploration of bodily pleasure.
The connection between food and sexuality was also present emphatically in a refreshing erotic drama which belies its title by steering clear of explicit imagery. In Sexual drive (Kôta Yoshida) the sensuality is indeed sublimated into gastronomical pleasure and the association between the two is made through dialogues of a character who unifies the three episodes of the film and through his provocative language awakens in other characters their repressed emotions or makes them aware of their loved ones’ desires. Ironically, this mediator who brags about his sexual exploits is a far cry from the stereotypical image of a sexually-appealing man. He in fact has suffered a stroke that left him handicapped and this adds to the hilarity of the situation, not to mention that we are only given his accounts of the events and can never be certain if he is bluffing or there is a grain of truth in his claims. The film owes a great deal to the stellar, chameleon-like performance of the actor playing this role, who effortlessly transitions from a shy person to a mischievous manipulator. Though principally exploited by the film for a whimsical humour, adding erotic resonance to a seemingly innocent pleasure still can make one ponder on transmissibility and interconnection of sensations relating to bodily gratification.
The impact of emotional changes caused by pandemic on perception and brain function, in particular memory, has been a common experience. In the light of that, watching a film picturing an apocalyptic world where exposure to fresh air results in disintegration of memory and identity is an odd experience. The title of Kelsey Egan’s Glasshouse refers to a sanctuary housing an older lady and three young women as well as a young man with somehow impaired mental faculty, which protects its inhabitants against the surrounding air of oblivion. The presumed balance of this limited environment is however broken by arrival of a newcomer, who divines the buried mysteries and works his charms to break the existing order. Peculiarly the sanctuary has a vintage 19th century quality to it, which is specially manifest in the women’s costumes and even their retrograde masks. This evokes the air of a fairy-tale and also bestows upon the film a lyrical quality, further set into relief by a melancholic music and graceful tracking shots which explore this protected space. The peculiar feel of the film also resides in its juxtaposition of violence with a somehow old-style femininity. The innocent looking wenches are pictured gunning down the intruders nonchalantly and then use their corpses to cultivate fruit and greenery, without this inspiring in them any sense of disgust. The course of plot can surprise the spectator who, considering the director’s gender, might expect another tale of feminine camaraderie. Instead, the film hinges on the idea of fragility of memories and identities which can only be developed and maintained by dint of inanimate objects. Barely presenting a beacon of hope, Glasshouse portrays a lugubrious and nihilistic perpetual transience, amidst which identities can only be temporarily latched on to.
Renta Pinheiro’s King Car was another film in this year’s programme the intriguing premise of which was undercut by an overtly didactic orientation, even though as a genre film hailing from a South American country it was expected to be underwritten by social concerns. Having as its protagonist a young man born in a car and consequently been gifted with the ability to hear the car’s voice and also dedicated to green activities, the film reveals itself as an ecological Sci-Fi with apparent links to magical realism. The film’s central theme of ‘automobile vs. nature’ is uttered writ-large from its opening with image of decomposing cars left in the nature. Pinheiro, however, utilises this magical realist set-up for a plain and easy-to-read symbolism in order to hammer home its ecological message- which unreservedly denounces cars as dangerous and overpowering -and campaign against refurbishing old cars. Therefore, despite what might be implied by the earlier scenes, King Car features no sophistication in exploring the relation between the human and the car and so comparisons to films like Crash or Ferat Vampire would be out of place.
Another Let-down was Mickey Reece’s new atypical exercise in reimagining genres in the unexpected setting of the contemporary US. At first blush Agnes comes off as a new take on nunsploitation genre. As film begins, we see the eponymous nun starting to behave as if been haunted by devil and then an older priest and younger vicar are given mission to sort out the issue. The lustful nun and the rumours of impropriety surrounding the priest readies the spectator for modern take on The Devils, one which is leaning towards parody with the priest’s wisecracks and so-called improper language. The parody begins to even border on grotesquery with the introduction of the outcast priest renowned for his never-failing exorcism and his weird looking sister. Nonetheless, following a break in the narrative, the film abruptly veers in a different direction, to the extent that one might consider the first section of the film and even its title as red herrings. From this point on, the focus of the film shifts to Agnes’ friend, Mary, who after witnessing failed exorcism leaves the order and ekes out a parlous living. The film sort of prefigures this narrative shift in the very first scene by a zoom over Mary’s face. Passing flashes of Mary’s memories which build up a mystery around her constitute a level of consistency across the film. The film however frustrates the expectations these snippets raise as to revealing untold parts of her story. It appears as though the film simply basks in being cryptic. After flirting with generic elements for a considerable length of the film, Reece demonstrates a desire to tread deeper philosophical territories in the manner of Abel Ferrara without showing the required dexterity. Probably the questions tried to be tackled are too deep for a film that starts with not taking itself seriously. Towards the end, some potentials are shown for tying the loose ends through formation of a rapport between Mary and the vicar, but the film abruptly comes to a close. As a result, Agnes remains a formless creature rather than an achievement in bending and fusing genres.
In comparison Rueben Martell delivers a more convincing result with his Don’t say its name, in which he makes use of underrepresented setting and characters for a generic experience. The film depicts a series of mysterious murders apparently committed by a supernatural being and the challenges a female indigenous tribal police officer facing in investigating and stopping them. The story of the film is unmistakably informed by and represents indigenous people’s concerns, even if in terms of the generic approach it stays loyal to conventions and doesn’t attempt a novel take. Don’t say its name is marked by its ambivalent position towards the traditions. The unnatural entity, even though woken up by wrongdoing of a non-indigenous person who is eventually given his due, is driven by a blind hatred and begins targeting the indigenous people on account of their association with non-native companies. This features a more sophisticated approach compared to the more typical image of supernatural as an ally to the native people and even their protector (the short film She whistles by Thirza Cuthand, also included in this year’s festival, is good example of this tendency). The film as well seems to deal with the question of collaboration with non-indigenous entities and presents it as an inevitable reality. This idea that the indigenous people need to stop being fixated in the past is even worded expressly in a line of dialogue. That the main protagonists of the film are indigenous characters who work within the system should be seen in this light. It’s as if the film attaches legitimacy to the liminal position of these characters who navigate the line between indigenous and non-indigenous cultures and making them feel relatable gives ballast to to this attitude. In my view Martell had a bigger achievement in presenting these characters than in merely making a different type of horror film.
A liminal status, albeit of a different nature, also defines the main character of All the moons (Igor Legarreta), in which the undying character of vampire is stripped from its aristocratic origins and airs and embodied in its almost polar opposite. Set against a time span of historical violence, the film follows the trend of viewing the vampire (or generally speaking unnatural creature) as a victim and goes further in that direction, not only owing to the age of its protagonist, but also because of its transformation into a borderline entity. In this film- which earned Legarreta the best director award from the festival- a mysterious woman saves a wounded small girl from amidst rubbles of a shelled orphanage and resuscitate her into an undying creature. Years later and after mysteriously overcoming the vulnerability to light, the never-ageing girl ends up in a farm whose owner had lost his young daughter in an accident and despite his initial reservations about the girl’s weirdness an emotional bond between them develops. The girl also makes the acquaintance of a young boy, which might prod us to anticipate something along the lines of Let the right one in. But this thread doesn’t develop much, since the young boy, following other villagers, turns his back on the girl. So the relation between mortal and non-mortal remains only materialised in form of a father-and-daughter relationship, inevitably bound to a quicker expiry. The farmer whose faith is almost faltering following his loss and therefore needs only a push to break free from narrowmindedness of religious teachings becomes a borderline character in his own right. Unlike others, he is able to perceive innocence in a preternatural character who simply feasts on animals’ blood for survival. Losing enough traits to be able to mingle with human-beings and yet carrying enough elements of unnatural to be looked own on as diabolical, the girl finds herself cursed to live in something akin to a limbo – which in boy’s words is worse than inferno- for supposedly an eternity. All the moons and its central theme seem to have even more resonance by coming out at a time when questions of death and extending life at the cost of isolation have been busied minds with more force.
One can also sense a delicate note of relevance to our experience of change of attitude towards future in Junta Yamaguchi’s indie Behind the infinite two minutes. Within a limited space and with barely-there special effects, Yamaguchi’s exuberant debut- which received a special mention from the festival’s New Flesh jury- carries off a spectacular piece of mind-blowing cinema by virtue of a mathematical script and precision of execution. A young man suddenly discovers a two-minute time mismatch between two monitors in the same building, which literally puts two timelines in conversation with one another. Attracting the attention of the man’s friends and companions, this escalates into an uproarious sequence of overlapping events. The script basically draws on the typical glitch of delay in communication and expands it enough to support the dramatic development. Yamaguchi and his scriptwriter have essentially structured the film around two-minute intervals and timed in such a way that characters interact at precise time with the screens corresponding to their past or present. Achieving this almost perfectly in a single take is an outstanding feat in and of itself. It is as if the film is folding over itself and interacting with its replicated bits. The most obvious concept brought up by the film is future-awareness, which even in small scale of two minutes seems to exert a strong obsession and subsequently makes characters feel compelled to follow the foreseen future, as if the future is pulling their strings. In addition to testifying to virtuosity of the filmmaking team, using a single take creates a sense of continuous present which works as counterpoint to the (relative and out of synch) past and future times in monitors. In the context of the film, this continuous diegetic time- which envelopes the other fragmented timelines- becomes a reaffirmation of living in the moment and an appreciation of the present time, just as characters eventually refuse to submit to pre-planned future and be ‘re-set’ and instead carry on with the course of what they have been through.
If Yamaguchi’s film was my biggest discovery, the title in the programme that I most looked forward to was the first English-language film of his maverick compatriot, Shion (or Sion) Sono. Prisoners of Ghostland features a dizzyingly imaginative landscape that disregards all temporal and geographical boundaries. Hybridising eastern and western cultural emblems and iconographies, Sono in his typical madcap manner pales the similar-minded efforts by Tarantino and Takashi Miike, for in his film ‘West’ and ‘East’ do not constitute two different entities but blend together in a single geographic location, one naturally born from the director’s unruly imagination. In this world samurais and gunslingers stand side by side, while its populace embodied by a mix of East Asian and western actors switch at will between speaking Japanese and English. This extreme hybridity is inevitably accompanied by an eclectic referencing of films and genres, as film borrows from a wide gamut of genres including westerns, Samurai films, hoist films and post-apocalyptic films and reconciles them in its mixed-bag of a narrative which yet remains straightforward and coherent. Played by the Hollywood star Nicholas Cage, the hero of the film who serves time for bank robbery and resulting manslaughter is missioned to return the runaway granddaughter of a governor- who in his barely-veiled perversity harks back to John Huston’s character in Chinatown– from a wasteland guarded by ghosts, without any resort to violence. Aside from a whole range of cinematic references, the nuclear catastrophe which also became the main topic of one of Sono’s earlier efforts – and clearly one of his lingering preoccupations- finds its way to narrative. For all its outlandish setting, the narrative trajectory of Prisoners of Ghostland remains rather simple, tamed and archetypical, specially in comparison to the director’s best-known cinematic sagas. Even elements of excess are deployed frugally- like detonation of bombs tied to the hero’s body- and often translated into poetical imagery (such as shooting the kid or slashing the geisha). It appears that in consideration of a wider spectatorship Sono viewed the heterogenous world of his story already overwhelming and refrained from further burdening the audience with an unorthodox narrative marked by unaccustomed twists, or simply this time the narrative has not been his main concern. There are characters such as the swordsman Yasujiro with potentials that remain underexplored. For a director who has a penchant for making long films, the running time of the film is surprisingly short, considering the plenitude of its characters. In final analysis, Prisoners of Ghostland above anything else is an eye-popping visual bricolage imaginatively assembled from incongruous material and although a pleasant watching experience, still remains a lesser-work in Sono’s audacious portfolio.
On the other hand, the main character’s journey in Phil Tippet’s labour of love stop motion, Mad God is fully shrouded in mystery and the film’s enigmatic narrative leaves it to the spectator’s imagination to decode. Evoking simultaneously Terminator and Divine Comedy, the film charts a descent into a vertically structured series of worlds- a marker of director’s avowed influence by Jung- which are harrowingly dystopian at every level and invariably gripped with war, slavery, surveillance of reign of monsters. At one level the human figures are shown perpetually created as faceless masses, put to labour work and casually destroyed, often by their own handiwork. One can only infer that the unnamed masked hero is en-route to destroy this system at its origins. As befitting a film beholden to Jungian texts, elements of magic and fantasy are intermingling with those associated with a futurist dystopia. Axiomatically, Tippet’s purely visual handling of the material and absence of any expository spoken line deepens the mystery evoked by this arcane layered landscape and intensified by the unconventional order of narrative (which recounts half of the journey in a linear fashion and the rest in flashback). The wordless nightmarish tone of the film might recall dark imagination of Quay brothers, though their films cannot compare with Tippet’s ambition of building a world of an epic scale. Despite the sense of unease Mad God can spark- specially at a time the uncertainties haven’t yet fully resolved- seeing the wild and awe-inspiring imagination of an independent artist coming to fruition after three decades in a personal project that all but hews to generic and narrative norms would fill the heart of every true cinema lover with sheer delight.
As per usual, festival included amongst its offerings a handful of genre films from yesteryears, obscure or otherwise, brought back in a restored glory. An interesting find in this lot was a black-and-white Swiss sci-fi The Unknown man of Shandigor (Jean-Louis Roy, 1967) which amalgamated spy thrillers and mad scientist formula in a refined and tasteful spoofy structure that rather than meaning to spark an outright laughter, borders on a deadpan absurdity. The film follows the attempts made by rival groups of spies to snatch a secret formula that can undo and reverse the effect of an atomic explosion. The inventor of the formula is however sworn to keep it away from anyone’s eyes and protect it within confines of his insular and impenetrable lab. The Unknown man of Shandigor carries marks of a period when cold war and post-atomic bomb fears and rivalries were fresh and topical – and hence spy thrillers were in vouge- and in its poking fun at that situation takes on a tongue-in-cheek nihilistic tone. The unhinged inventor of the film bear traces of Dr. Mabuse- revamped by Lang only a few years earlier- in being supposedly impossible to capture and using security monitors as his all-seeing eyes. Ironically though and unlike scores of his predecessors, the professor’s invention is not a destructive tool but one that can save the world and yet it becomes the subject of the same fierce competition as the arms race. As such the film holds a cynic view of the science. The humour of the film also consists of a self-reflexive gesture; the secret formula is shot and turned into moving images and spliced to the end of a home movie. The film’s minimalist approach to sci-fi, as well as having a scientist and his daughter at its centre might bring to mind Alphaville as a reference point. However despite its idiosyncratic story, Roy’s film doesn’t exhibit the same level of ambition in experimenting with cinematic form as Alphaville does and rather pursues it in a more-subdued and lighter manner. Its comic strip-like narrative also shows inconsistencies and half-baked ideas – like the musical skills of a band of spies which seems more like a justification for casting the legendary singer Serge Gainsbourg- which would emphasise the spoof function of the film. There are yet noticeable elements in film which could be construed as knowing nods to Godard’s masterpiece (like shots of the mileage counter accompanying the scene of the Asian spy or the talking computer that addresses the same character and issues orders).
For reintroducing and retrieving the forgotten legacy of genre cinema, a great credit must be accorded to dedicated writers, historians and scholars of the field, of whom Kier-La Janisse is a quite familiar name to serious fans. Clocking in at over 3 hours, Janiss’ almost encyclopaedic documentary Woodlands dark and days bewitched should be seen as the continuation and culmination of her unflagging work as a genre film historian. It presents a pioneering attempt in limning a detailed and expansive image of folk horrors from its origins up to its present-day incarnations. Mainly composed of interviews and film clips with animated Guy Maddin’s collages popping up as punctuations, the film is primarily of informative value and does a commendable job especially in presenting the origins of folk horror and its underlying themes in British cinema- where the subgenre was first identified- and then in the US. But when it comes to exploring the folk horror and its equivalent in the rest of the world, the film seem to lose its focus and become less organised. Even the term ‘folk horror’ seems to be less systemically applied vis-a-vis films in this section. It feels as if for this particular section the director was driven by a desire to embrace as many films as possible for the sake of diversity. This can be simply attributed to the overburdening weight of the material the Janisse aspired to cover. Put it another way, territories the film tries to expand its exploration of concept into are too wide for single film -even one of this remarkable length- to shoulder. Barring this, Janisse succeeds in establishing a multi-coloured picture of Folk horror as a site of resistance and an avenue for repressed cultures to rear their heads. Would Woodlands dark and days bewitched– which was awarded the best documentary by the audience’s vote- add further impetus to this subgenre and encourage more filmmakers to consider adopting its format for reflecting and addressing our current tensions and traumas? To answer this, we have to wait till next editions of Fantasia!
