Cave of Forgotten Dreams

As I have previously pointed out, I am a great admirer of the work of Werner Herzog. And while he hasn’t exactly changed tack over the last few years, his recent documentary filmmaking has been especially impressive. Documentaries such as Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of The World approach perfection in the form, striving as they do for Herzog’s idea of “ecstatic truth” and the essence of the human soul. The director’s latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, may appear slightly different, yet has, in fact, the very same objective.

Through good fortune and reputation, the director had the chance to make a film about the cave paintings of the Chauvet Cave in southern France – the oldest known examples of prehistoric art, made roughly 32,000 years ago. Discovered in 1994 after remaining sealed for millennia, access to the public has always been completely restricted, given that human breath can cause mould to grow on the paintings. True to type, with a crew of only four people permitted, Herzog decided to make a 3D film, in order to make the viewer’s experience and appreciation of the cave more real. So, combining this footage with interviews with scientists and experts, he attempts to provide some sort of background and reason for these miraculous works of art.

Though it is not always executed to perfection, the 3D element is vital to the films success: immersing you as it does in the cave environment. It also allows you to appreciate the walls’ contours and their impact on the paintings. The “serene pace” of the camera’s movement ensures the images stay with you, for they truly are some of the most striking pictures you could ever hope to see – almost too good to be true. Herzog has spoken of the “intensity of the paintings” and the “drama” which affected him; I’m happy to report none of it’s lost here.

Paintings from the Chauvet Cave

There are, of course, some typically Herzogian flourishes in the film: such as an image of Fred Astaire dancing with his shadow in Swing Time (“the most quintessential moment in cinema” according to the Bavarian), plus the superimposed sound of a heartbeat and a crazy postscript involving mutant albino crocodiles; but they all serve a purpose. For Herzog, the key to the human soul is found somewhere in the “abyss” that he sees in the cave. To enter in there is to look back to simpler times and universal truth: why the need for artistic representation? Why no pictures of man?

I should point out that while it is an incredible watch, I didn’t think Cave of Forgotten Dreams quite scaled the heights of his last two documentaries; it felt spellbinding, though slight. Whether it was because it didn’t expose the lack of meaning in life and the cruelty of the world with the trademark bleak existentialism I have come to expect, I don’t know. What I do know is that it is a film that should be seen to be believed: a necessary use of 3D. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Gang Gang Dance and Highlife – XOYO 16/05/2011

 Eye Contact cover

On Monday, I had the rare treat of seeing a band I really love play an intimate show, just after the release of an amazing, critically-acclaimed new record. The venue was Old Street’s XOYO, the band were Brooklyn experimentalists, Gang Gang Dance, and the record is Eye Contact.

Providing the support was Highlife, London-born NYC musician Sleepy Doug Shaw, who also happens to be the current GGD bass player. I had heard last year’s excellent Best Bless EP and was interested to see him perform. I arrived about fifteen minutes after he started, so I can’t speak for the first few songs, but, from what I saw, he was playing completely different material this time around. Gone were the clean guitar lines and untreated vocals; in were reverb, delay and a host of other pedal effects. The songs were similarly circular, though, and characterised by loops and haunted vocals. Low-key in mood where the E.P. had been up beat and cheery, it was interesting without quite scaling the heights of the tracks that I knew.

Highlife

After Shaw had left the stage, several beers later, without a word, the space in front of the stage thickened up in anticipation for the main act. And the crowd itself was decent. A sell-out, as expected, it had an interesting combination of the older gent, the scenester couple and the ‘regular’ person; all of whom seemed to get more involved than many other small indie gigs in East London venues.

Minutes later, Gang Gang Dance came on stage to a hearty welcome, and, without too much faffing around, plunged straight into some recently released material that was both melodic and out-there, like the band themselves. The second song, ‘House Jam’ – part of which, incidentally, Florence (of Machine fame) cribbed and has to pay them royalties for – got the audience going a bit more. People  even began to sway and dance (yes, dance!) to the futuristic beat. 12-minute single, ‘Glass Jar’, was a particular highlight of the set, unfurling as it does so engagingly, along with new cut, ‘MindKilla’: the later getting the crowd the most frenzied. But, what was interesting for me was that they played a handful of new songs not released in the UK and extended others in a jam-like fashion, not pausing between songs.

GGD from my phone

I absolutely loved every single minute of it, sweatiness aside, and thought Lizzy Bougastos’ siren-like vocals formidable live. Even the Japanese guy who joined them on stage, dancing with a binbag, couldn’t detract from her magnetic presence. For anyone not familiar with their signature sound – or sound palette – it is nigh-impossible to describe; however, their melding of Eastern dance music, sub bass and space-age sounds is incredible to behold, when seen live. I just hope I get the chance to see them again soon, as they are without question one of the coolest live band’s I’ve seen.

GasLand

As I have said before, indignation – as frustrating an emotion as it undoubtedly is – is a good feeling to have when watching a documentary. It means the thing is working. Josh Fox’s directorial debut, the Oscar-nominated GasLand, definitely left me with disbelief and anger in spades, and, in doing so it is an exceedingly effective protest documentary.

The film tells the story of bespectacled thirty-something Fox, a Pennsylvania forest-dweller thanks to his Thoreau-esque “hippy parents”, who is offered $100,000 by a natural-gas company to use his land for drilling. Intrigued and perplexed, he investigates the matter further and discovers that his house is above a shale that is one of the world’s largest natural gas deposits: a “sea of gas”. Further investigation leads him to discover that the process used to extract the water from the ground, known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, has an execrable and toxic effect on the water table, people’s drinking water and the environment as a whole. Like the good, educated, middle-class crusader that he is, he decides the only logical next-step is to make a documentary film about the pernicious effects of fracking and natural gas extraction.

Fox at home

Facetiousness aside, the movie he makes is on a worthy subject and it’s an acutely revealing document. It shows how through the work of public enemy number one (or two, depending on your view) Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton (one of the largest gas companies) and lobbyists, Congress passed a bill exempting natural gas and oil companies’ from the Safe Drinking Water Act of the 1970s. Therefore, those companies have been free to pollute people’s water with carcinogens and other deadly chemicals, such as benzene. This mix of gas and the fracking liquid has caused not only tap water – yes, good ole H₂O – to be flammable, but also severe health problems, such as brain damage, in people who live near drill sites.

Not fit for tooth-brushing

Surreal shots of flammable water and ruined landscapes form just a small part of the impressive imagery on show in GasLand. The sheer poetry of the bucolic images of the forest and the plains, combined with Fox’s banjo playing, was impressive: a welcome antidote to the usual Inside Job-style barrage of charts and gaudy graphs. The director’s sub-Terence Davies gravelly voice-over work was occasionally annoying, but did spin a poetic line or two every so often, adding to the homespun and likeable tone of the doc.

Better than the eventual winner, Inside job, this is a brilliant, if 15 minutes over-long, film in a year of great documentaries. With the possibility of fracking hitting European shores soon, it is essential viewing.

Lumet and Pacino – Serpico and A Dog Day Afternoon

Despite once being sixteen and revelling in all things East Coast, gangster and Italian, I had never seen two of Al Pacino’s classic films: Serpico and A Dog Day Afternoon. So, in an attempt to appreciate two of the defining works of the late, great Sidney Lumet, I watched them both back to back. While both movies, in many ways, chart similar preoccupations of the director, they are actually very different beasts. Most obviously, genre-wise, Serpico is a curious blend of cop film and biopic, whereas A Dog Day Afternoon is very much a heist movie. However, neither of them is straight down the line.

The trademark social realism of Lumet is obvious from the very first minutes of Serpico; his New York has none of the glossy sheen of Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Woody Allen. What it does have is full-frontal nudity and rapes, chockablock as it is with hoodlums and vagrants. The film recounts the true-life story of New York cop Frank Serpico, an odd, honest officer infatuated with counter-culture who testified against police corruption in the NYPD. Covering a period of roughly twelve years, from Serpico’s graduation up till just after he is shot on the face on the job, the main signifiers of the passage of time are his shaggy dog and even shaggier facial hair.

I did enjoy the film and its unique combination of Greenwich Village hippy-dom and gritty urban policing, yet I also felt it didn’t quite satisfy me on either front. Initially captivating, the film loses its way slightly in the second half, where the testimony scenes are never as tense as they might have been. Even the much-lauded performance by Pacino wasn’t quite as awesome as I had expected – it was released a year after his outstanding turn as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part One, for God’s sake.

Not as much of a classic as people have made out, Serpico is a solid, interesting portrait of an outsider – with an incredible wardrobe. A Dog Day Afternoon, on the other hand, is definitely a classic. Once more a portrayal of a pariah, it ticks all the boxes that Serpico failed to. For example, the increased back-story we get in A Dog Day helps us to empathise more with Pacino’s Sonny more and the heist-movie twists genuinely make him a more complex and surprising character.

The bungled bank job that form the film’s core show’s Sunny to be a trapped, frustrated outsider, with Sal the Lennie to his George. Pacino is fantastic in the role: a perfect example of brooding brilliance and method acting that truly convinces. Again, the movie deals uncomfortable 70s themes – in this case homosexuality and trans-gender issues – whilst remaining tense and surprising. It also has interesting things to say about TV, news reporting, celebrity and entertainment. In that and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Lumet really did craft two of the best films in that genre. Just don’t believe the hype about Serpico.

A Visit From the Goon Squad

 U.K. Cover

Literary prizes are frustrating things. I mean, we all know that literature, like all art, is highly subjective – but its prizes are riven by politics, seemingly unearthing as many duds as genuine classics. At least that’s my take, having read a fair few recent Booker and Pulitzer winners; for every The Road or Vernon God Little, there’s a Tinkers or The Inheritance of Loss. So, given the fanfare of rave reviews, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, I approached Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad with much trepidation – even if it did seem like my kind of book.

Thankfully I was wrong to feel apprehensive and can safely state that it is a wonderful book and a worthy winner. It is a bold and idiosyncratic work, which has much wisdom to impart about its central subject matter of time and its effects – and, by extension, the concomitant themes of ageing, loss and compromise. Much has been made of its experimentalism, but I think far too much. Egan herself has said, “experimentation serving anything other than a human story is boring, and I’m not interested in it;” Pynchon or Robbe-Grillet it ain’t. The fact that every chapter is told in a different way: 1^st person, 3^rd person, even 2^nd person – with different focalizations – and that there is a chapter told entirely in PowerPoint, is definitely distinctive. But there would have been no other way to compose the story without seeming repetitive.

For the book tells the story of a large cast of characters orbiting round the twin suns of Bennie Salazar, an ageing record producer and former punk rocker, and Sasha, his faithful assistant. It spans continents and decades: from the 1970s to the future, and explores not just the Proustian themes of À la rechereche du temps perdu, but also the modern effects of technology on human interaction. Therefore, playfulness with form allows the author to paint a more detailed, vivid picture of these sad, changing lives destroyed by excess and tinged with failure.

Jennifer Egan

There is also a virtuoso mixture of genres: ranging from political satire, through David Foster Wallace-esque non-fiction parody, right up to a dystopian future – each one pitch-perfect. Yet, as you might expect, given the central nature of the music industry, many of these stories are profoundly melancholy and affecting, narrating as they do the fall out of past immoderation. Nonetheless, it is the wisdom and compassion of Egan – not the skilful writing – that stood out for me. The characters all seem realistic, no matter how outré their behaviour and it all works towards a conclusion that never feels sentimental or mawkish.

I would recommend this gem of a novel to anyone – as there genuinely is something for everyone. Don’t be put off by PowerPoint chapter (which works wonderfully, by the way) or the word postmodern. This novel-in-pieces forms a triumphant whole. I'm intrigued and excited to see what HBO make of it.