The Greatest Films Never Made

If you could programme a festival of the greatest films never made what riches there would be. Who wouldn't want to see Jack Nicholson as Napoleon in Stanley Kubrick's meticulously planned labour of love that he began working on in 1968 and never quite got out of his system. Around the same time the great Fred Zinnemann was set to film Andre Malraux's A Man's Fate with Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann and David Niven in what he thought would be one of the best parts of his career. The cast was signed, sets were built, a budget of $11 million was assigned to the project and then shortly before shooting in 1969 a new cost-cutting regime at M-G-M decided to pull the plug.

Orson Welles career was strewn with fragments of uncompleted films and unrealised projects. In 1975 when Welles received the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award the audience saw scenes from The Other Side Of The Wind, a semi-autobiographical tale of an aging Hollywood director played by John Huston who is trying to revive his career by making a movie dripping with fashionable sex and violence. The cast also included Peter Bogdanovich and Dennis Hopper. In 1976 Welles claimed it was almost finished. The footage now appears to reside in a Paris vault having spent the past thirty years imprisoned by legal disputes, difficulties arising from financial support from the brother-in-law of the Shah Of Iran and much more. Bogdanovich recently claimed that the film could finally see the light of day at next year's Cannes Film Festival. We'll believe that when we see it.

One of the great abandoned films may well be Henri-Georges Clouzot's L'Enfer. Clouzot was the Hitchcock and Haneke of post-War French cinema; a master of suspense and nail-biting tension responsible for classics like The Wages Of Fear (La Salaire De La Peur) (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955). In 1960 he made La Verite (The Truth) (1960) a courtroom thriller featuring one of Brigitte Bardot's best roles as a woman accused of murdering her sister's boyfriend. In the first flush of excitement over nouvelle vague mavericks like Truffaut and Godard , La Verite seemed terribly old-fashioned. L'Enfer (Inferno) was to be his rejoinder to those criticisms; a psychological thriller that would use all the cutting-edge techniques at Clouzot's disposal to depict the inner mind of a man consumed by jealousy. It would also embody a sense of the depressions and illnesses that had plagued his own life and " dramatize the feeling of anxiety that kept him awake every night"

Serge Reggiani and Romy Schneider were cast in a film that began production in the summer of 1964. Clouzot's exacting work methods meant that the production was soon way behind schedule. An exasperated Reggiani eventually walked off the set never to return. When Clouzot suffered a heart attack production was shut down and the film was abandoned. He would make only one further film before his death in 1977.

Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's dazzling documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno offers an exemplary account of what might have been. 185 cans of film and 13 hours of footage have sat unseen for forty-five years and they provide the backbone to a documentary that shows us wardrobe fittings, tests, behind-the-scenes footage and completed scenes from a film that could have been the equal of Hitchcock's Vertigo or Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. Berenice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin perform scenes from the script. There is a television interview with Clouzot from the 1960s. Fresh interviews from surviving crew members, including Costa-Gavras, testify to Clouzot's painstaking preparations and his plans to use lurid colours, reverse printing and distortions of both sound and image to create the psychological state of jealousy. Every scene appears to have been storyboarded. The script itself ran to a hefty 300 pages. The industry's normal rule of thumb is that a page of script is equal to a minute of screen time so we could have been talking an incredibly long film here. It is a project that seems to have become an obsession and as time wore on it was something that Clouzot could neither master nor control.

In 1994, Claude Chabrol returned to Clouzot's original script and made his own version of L'Enfer but it feels strangely old-fashioned and unsatisfying. The real tragedy of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno are the sustained glimpses of a film that might have been fantastic. The documentary is a wonderful feat of resurrection and is screening at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Saturday 14th, Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th November. Don't miss it.

Blogger: GFF Co-Director Allan Hunter

GFF 2010: It's A Boy!

If this blog came with sound effects then right about now you would be hearing a very dramatic drum roll as we confirm that the subject of the Festival's 2010 retrospective will be.....Cary Grant. Hopefully that will be followed by wild applause, lusty cheers, dancing in the streets and some responsible carousing in nearby taverns. If I had an ounce of Cary's athleticism I might even be turning cartwheels in the GFT foyer.

Cary Grant probably appeared in more great movies than any other star of his generation from Hitchcock thrillers like North By Northwest and Notorious to peerless screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby (pictured) and The Awful Truth to impeccable romantic weepies like Penny Serenade and An Affair To Remember. There are even some pretty terrific adventure stories in the Grant repertoire too including Gunga Din. His stunning list of co-stars ranges from Katharine Hepburn to Sophia Loren, Mae West to Ingrid Bergman, Deborah Kerr to Irene Dunne, James Stewart, Tony Curtis, Doris Day, Grace Kelly and so many more. The challenge is to show a selection of films that truly represents his thirty five year career. If you have a particular Cary Grant classic crying out to be seen on the big screen then let us know* and we might still be able to include it in the Festival's big retrospective next February.

The thing about Cary Grant is that he made it all seem so easy. He appeared effortlessly urbane and suave with a witty word for every occasion, a sense of style that every man still wants to emulate and the kind of timing that you see once in a generation. Just watch him walk across a scene and he seems so comfortable in his own skin, moving with an elegance and lightness of touch that almost makes him the equal of Fred Astaire. We know in real life he was someone who fretted and fussed, sweated and strained to get things right but on screen you would never catch him straining. Perhaps that explains why he never won an Oscar until his pal Frank Sinatra presented him with an honorary one in April 1970 for his "unique mastery of the art of screen acting".

It is more than twenty years since Cary died and yet his appeal has never faded. When the American Film Institute ran its poll to discover the greatest male movie stars of all time Cary was number 2, just pipped to the top spot by Humphrey Bogart. Every polished light comedian worth his salt is compared to Grant from Hugh Grant to George Clooney who may well be the closest we have to a contemporary screen presence worthy of the comparison. Nobody writes about film with more insight and wit than David Thomson and in his monumental Biographical Dictionary of Film he wisely notes: "There is a major but very difficult realization that needs to be reached about Grant-difficult, that is, for many people who like to think they take the art of film seriously. As well as being a leading box-office draw for some thirty years, the epitome of the man-about-town, as well as being the ex-husband of Virigina Cherrill, Barbara Hutton, Betsy Drake and Dyan Cannon, as well as being the retired actor, still handsome executive of a perfume company-as well as all these things, he was the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema."

We couldn't agree more and if you want to know the reason why then come and see the Cary Grant films in February. If you want to get into the mood for the retrospective or get into the mood for Christmas the GFT is showing The Bishop's Wife on December 13th, 14th and 15th. Did I really just mention Christmas?

Blogger: GFF Co-Director Allan Hunter

* email us on info@glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

How low is your budget? How good is your film?

Paranormal Activity has, as they say, taken America by storm. Oren Peli's scary movie has been hailed as the 21st century equivalent of The Blair Witch Project. The premise is as straightforward and simple as you could imagine; a San Diego couple move into a new home and things start to go bump in the night. They decide to set up video cameras to capture what happens in the dark but the demonic presence takes umbrage at their actions (how very dare they) and there is even the possibility that they may have opened a channel of communication. Spooky. It sounds as old as the hills but last weekend it earned slightly under $8 million from 160 screens giving it a per screen average of a whopping $57,000. Just to put things into perspective the number one film Couples Retreat (the dire Vince Vaughn/Jon Favreau turkey) earned just over $34 million from 3,000 screens giving it a per screen average of $12,700. A turkey that makes money then. Here's the really interesting thing. Universal are saying the budget of Couples Retreat is somewhere around the $60-$70 million mark. Paranormal Activity, made in 2007, is estimated to have cost $11,000. Bingo!

Apologies for the blizzard of figures being bandied about there but in Hollywood nothing matters more than the bottom line. In the current economic climate the size of your budget has almost become a proud symbol of your filmmaking ingenuity. The lower you can go the more resourceful you must be. Later this month, Britain will have the chance to see Colin, an apocalyptic zombie horror that director Marc Price claims to have shot on a camcorder for less than £50. Shane Meadows' recent mockumentary Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee was made in just five days for £48,000 and arose from the director's frustration with the endless uphill struggle to get a film fully financed in the UK. Why hang around waiting for a £1million or £2million budget to come together when you can just go out and shoot something guerrilla style. Meadows act of desperation has now become a philosophy and there could be more of his Five Day Features to come. kids director Larry Clark has apparently signed up to have a go, a prospect more likely to cause anxiety than keen anticipation.

The how low can you go philosophy seems to be fraught with danger. For one thing the philosophy or ethos seems to conveniently overlook the fact that most really low-budget, self-financed films exist because a lot of people probably didn't get paid for their efforts. It is not a basis on which to sustain a viable industry. It has become incredibly easy for anyone to make a feature film but it remains incredibly difficult for somebody to make a good one. I've recently watched a raft of low-budget Scottish feature films and believe me it is not an experience you want to share.

The one low-budget British triumph that you really want to shout about at the moment is Katalin Varga although that is a little tricky because technically it is a Romanian film. Director Peter Strickland was born in Reading and made a film called Bubblegum in 1995. Like many British filmmakers before he found it impossible to build a career in his own country. He wound up teaching English in Budapest and inheriting enough money from his uncle to possibly make a feature film. Katalin Varga was the result, a powerful, unsettling drama that was shot in seventeen days for around 30,000 Euros although Strickland claims the post-production costs were astronomical.

Set in a Transylvania of glowering skies and dark, gothic forests, Katalin Varga combines the earthy intensity of an Emile Zola novel with the grim fatalism of a Greek tragedy as it follows a woman who is banished from her village when her husband discovers that their son is not his son. What follows is a mixture of road movie, revenge saga, thriller and fairytale that is completely compelling.

Katalin Varga was rapturously received by critics at this year's Berlin Film Festival and hailed as one of the events great discoveries. It is a stunning piece of work from a talent who leaves you wanting to see what he might do next. The fact that it was shot for next to nothing makes for a good story but maybe we really need to stop getting excited about how cheap things are. It's not how low you can go that matters but how high you can aim.

Blogger: GFF Co-director Allan Hunter

Katalin Varga screens at GFT until Thursday 22 October.

Pigs, Eels and Insects

Asked to name a great Japanese filmmaker who would you choose? Akira Kurosawa perhaps? Ozu? Mizoguchi? There are certainly plenty candidates worthy of the honour but I wonder how many people would choose Shohei Imamura, the subject of a great retrospective at the GFT this month.

Imamura was once described as the "cultural anthropologist of Japan". Asked to define himself by the critic Koichi Yamada, he replied, " I am interested in the relationship between the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure on which the reality of everyday life in Japan is built. " His films are often blackly comic, visceral, populated by flinty, strong-willed women and able to reflect his feelings about the turbulent ebb and flow of post-War Japanese life.

Imamura was born in Tokyo in 1926, the third son of a doctor. A student of Western History at Waseda University, he spent a good deal of time immersed in the black market culture of the era. In the early 1950s he became an apprentice of Yusujiro Ozu, working as an assistant director on three of his films, including Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story) (1953). His own directing career saw him reject the rigorous aesthetic and restraint of an older generation. His best films would be fuelled by irreverence and a curiosity to explore what made Japan the country it had become. His first notable film Buta to Gunkan (Pigs and Battleships) (1961) is a scathing black comedy about the smalltime gangsters feeding off the rich pickings from the American naval base at Yokosuka. The film's biting satire and lack of sentimentality earned him comparisons with the great Bunuel.

Imamura's next impressed with Nippon Konchuki (The Insect Woman) (1963) (pictured above), one of the key films in his career. Sachiko Hidaro stars as the resilient Tome, a woman with the tenacity and survival instincts of a beetle as she endures all the hardships of the war years and the humiliations of the post-War period as she becomes a prostitute and eventually one of the most famous madams in all of Tokyo. There are obvious parallels in Japan's struggles with the price of progress, the repression of individuality and the exploitation of women.

Imamura often said that he thought his films would never be understood or appreciated by an audience outside of Japan but The Insect Woman was released in the UK and his international reputation began to grow in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, he focused on television documentaries picking away at the unhealed wounds of the war years. He returned to filmmaking with the masterly Fukushu Suru-wa Ware ni Ari (Vengeance Is Mine)(1979), an epic psychological drama based on the true story of one of Japan's most notorious serial killers and his horrific 78 day crime spree in the 1960s. The film achieves a startling blurring of fiction and documentary-like authenticity, the surreal and the disturbingly graphic. It casts an unblinking eye at a natural born killer long before Olive Stone was ruffling feathers.

He won the Cannes Palme d'Or for Nayaman Bushi-ko (The Ballad Of Narayama)(1983), a shocking portrait of the primitive social order in a remote mountain village in the 19th century. He would win a second Palme d'Or (shared with Kiarostami) for the quirky, endearing Unagi (The Eel) (1997) following a convicted killer's attempts to re-engage with society.
Imamura's later films constantly sought an understanding of the present from the lessons of the past. The quiet restraint and dignified humanity of Kuroi Ame (Black Rain)(1989) offer one of the few times in his career when it is possible to view the legacy of his apprenticeship with Ozu. The subject matter requires no embellishment and invites no cynicism. On an August morning in 1945 the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima with results that are shown in graphic detail. Five years later, a family in a rural village are trying to think to the future in a community that remains physically and emotionally ravaged by the aftermath of what happened. The result is a solemn, unrelenting immersion in the legacy of humankind's barbarity.

Imamura continued to work into the 21st century, contributing one of the segments to the anthology 11'09''01 (2002). He died in 2006, a few months short of his 80th birthday. His legacy is a body of work that is independent, fiercely critical of Japanese society, distinctive in both its aesthetic and preoccupations and deserving of being much better known by western audiences. The GFT season Pigs, Eels & Insects provides the perfect introduction to his world. Don't miss the rare chance to see these films where the belong on the big screen and at bargain prices if you by tickets for the whole season.

Click here for details on the Imamura season at GFT

Blogger: GFF Co-Director Allan Hunter

Agnes A La Plage

There is a whole history of French cinema contained within the life and career of Agnes Varda. The 81 year-old made her first film La Pointe Courte in 1954, a remarkable debut that justifies her status as the godmother of the nouvelle vague. She later won the Cannes Palme D'Or for the graceful charmer Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo From 5 To 7)(1961). She was a close friend and collaborator of Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Jacques Demy who became her husband in 1962. She spent part of the 1960s in California taking pictures of The Black Panthers and making friends with Jim Morrison and a promising young actor called Harrison Ford. She has worked with Catherine Deneuve and Jane Birkin and directed Sandrine Bonnaire in perhaps her greatest performance as the forlorn young woman at the haunting heart of Sans Toit Ni Loi /Vagabonde (1985), winner of the Golden Lion at Venice. More recently her career has gone in a different direction with installations and a range of documentaries including Les Glaneurs Et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners And I) (2001).

Her latest film Les Plages D'Agnes/The Beaches Of Agnes (2008) is as quirky and idiosyncratic an autobiography as you could hope to see. It is an essay, a rummage through the attic of her memory and a salute to some of those she has known and loved, including the great French actor Gerard Philipe who died almost fifty years ago. The film is a testimony to Varda's irrepressible curiosity about life and people and her appetite for fresh challenges and new horizons. It is also marked by the sense of a woman who feels the hand of mortality gently tapping on her shoulder. So many of the people she has known and loved are long gone and there are affectionate nods in the direction of Delphine Seyrig, Philippe Noiret and Jim Morrison and the acknowledgement that all paths lead back to her beloved soulmate Demy who died in 1990.

The Beaches Of Agnes is not a maudlin film. Varda is too much of a vital spirit to allow that. The film captures her playful side as she sails up the Seine in a boat or includes a few ruminations on sex featuring a naked man clearly excited by his naked female partner. He's so excited that an otherwise inoffensive film has been lumbered with an 18 certificate in the UK, something that must bring a wry smile to Varda's face.

Varda has visited Scotland in the past. I remember one visit that included screenings of her feminist classic L'Une Chante, L'Autre Pas/One Sings The Other Doesn't (1976). Put her in front of an audience and she radiates charm and intelligence, seducing them with a genuine interest in hearing their response to her films. One Sings charts the friendship between two women between 1962 and 1976 and how they have changed. Did the film stand the test of time, she wondered? Did it genuinely reflect the experiences of women in that period? Draping her tiny frame across the length of a cinema seat like a cosy cat, she could have kept them enthralled all evening. Well, apart from the fact that I kept giving her an electric shock every time I passed the microphone her way. Sorry, Agnes.

The Beaches Of Agnes is a constant delight, especially if you have an interest in Varda's career or a love of French cinema over the past half century. Earlier this year it won the French Cesar for Best Documentary. It is well worth checking out when it plays at the GFT this week.

Blogger: GFF C0-director Allan Hunter