The trailer presents us with a vision of a classic crime film, complete with an 8 Mile-esque soundtrack and premise, but when we dig deeper we see it offers us much more than another tale about youth embroiled in crime. Tarek, played by Les Chantery, is a young Lebanese-Australian man who is stuck in a rut and a dead-end job as a panel beater. When presented with an opportunity to steal a vast quantity of pills from a drug-dealer’s apartment, he seizes it as an obvious chance to make a vast quantity of money and set himself up for life. Despite the trailer’s marketing itself to a younger generation with needlessly flashy editing and an overtly gritty sensibility, the film itself presents an interesting synthesis of the gangster film and that most steadfast of Australian cinematic traditions, the Australian ethnic drama.

Running against the grain of the gangster genre is the film’s ability to humanise these disreputable and oft-outright criminal characters and effectively communicate the very human costs that their lives have to both themselves and their families. Like the so-called ‘heroes’ of the gangster genre, Tony Montana, Vito Corleone, Henry Hill and Frank Lucas. the characters of Cedar Boys endure the same heady highs and harrowing lows of a life of crime and of a classically-informed tragedy, but do so in the vastly understated, fundamentally parochial manner that marks many of the best Australian character-based dramas.While many gangster films focus on characters with immigrant or ethnic characters, Cedar Boys also draws on a long Australian tradition of films dealing with immigration, ethnicity, racial tension, the fight to attain or resist assimilation and the loneliness and alienation of being a stranger in a strange land. From the misguidedly prejudiced They’re a Weird Mob to The Combination, Romulus, My Father, Romper Stomper and the astounding mini-series Marking Time, Australian filmmakers have been exploring and expounding upon the pathos of migrant life for decades.

A still from Serhat Caradee's Cedar Boys

The combination of these two genres gifts a third dimension to the film. The careful and patient attention paid to showing us the lives of the characters before before the fall makes the consequences of that fall devastating, to both the characters and audience. This gives the film a definite noir sensibility. This is nothing new in Australian film, the many shining moments of which include Two Hands, The Bank and The Square. This film is, essentially, more than the sum of its parts and they’re all good parts. - Morgan

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What strikes me perhaps most forcefully about Cedar Boys is the manner in which its atmosphere, sensibility and aesthetic are all procured through, and sustained by, an arguable lack. Digital video lacks the sumptuous analog texture and vibrancy of the 35mm film stock that informed crime epics like The Godfather (though shooting digitally gifts Cedar Boys with a greater sense of urgency, immediacy and spontaneity than that film), while the contemporaneous era in which the film is set lacks the overwrought sense of self that characterised the ’70s and ’80s and films (and media, more generally, regardless of its medium of production) of and about those eras, and even Australian currency lacks the sheer value and worth of, say, the British pound or the American dollar, imparting a certain provincial triviality to the proceedings in the context of global crime narratives.

Chief amongst these is that last: there is a charming and beguiling lack of pretension about Cedar Boys. There is no real effort made to aggrandise the grubby, low-down business of drug dealing or those who are drawn to it, and the privileges and advantages that Tarek and his friends risk their lives and their futures for are transient at best and heartbreakingly ephemeral at worst.   Sam, for instance, buys rims with his newly acquired wealth, in what might very well be seen as a vicious parody of the classic montage-sequence-as-indicator-of-success, while all Tarek wants, desperately, is to raise the funds necessary to fast-track his older brother’s legal appeal. The overarching message of Cedar Boys, to its audience as well as to those disaffected youths it hopes to portray (and these two groups may very well be separate), is that this, all of this, is fundamentally and inarguably not worth it, in the most literal as well as abstract fashions, and it manages to say so without preaching.

Aesthetically, this dearth of glamour is reflected always and primarily in the workmanlike cinematography, ‘workmanlike’ being a descriptor I choose carefully and without deprecatory intent: by this I mean the art direction to be rarely showy, always prizing functionality and the comprehension of the audience over the artistic qualities of compositions such as you might find in, say, the work of Scorcese (most, if not all, of Scorcese’s efforts in manipulating the frame alone could be framed in their own right, his penchant for characterising his cities of choice through their architecture is a trend that goes back at least as far as Mean Streets), and in this way Caradee retains the essential kernel of truth at the heart of his film: by not giving in to the desire to make things more than they are, a commendable instinct and one that the odious One Perfect Day (which deals with similar subject matter, if tangentially and with hands of ham) could have benefited greatly from. Les Chantery’s performance as the disabused Tarek is remarkable in its spareness, in its very minimalism; he conveys only just as much as is needed in the early stages in the film so that when he is finally called upon to express something, anything, in the vein of Travis Bickle, he seems to suddenly explode (though unlike Travis, it is grief rather than rage that fuels the fire and that mushrooms up from the ruins of his life). So it is that Chantery sublimates himself in service to the film, to the point that the untrained eye might suspect him of genuine reticence or some form of thespian incompetence when the reality is far-removed from such assertions.

That said, the film is rarely drab, in either performance or the visual aspect, but one occasionally wishes Caradee would loosen the reins ever-so-slightly: there are a handful of moments that display his natural cinematic flair (a late-night party at a suburban mansion, for instance, is luscious with wealth and dimly-lit sleaze), and on the quality of that handful alone, a few more would have been unlikely to endanger the serious (often dour) nature of the tale under discussion: indeed,  noir was always, historically, attracted to and informed by the stark lines and monochromatic obsessions of German expressionism and later architectural modernism, and in its unrepentant identification with the noir ideal, Cedar Boys could afford to freewheel further than it does.

If Cedar Boys can truly be said to fall down in any way, it is only in the straightforwardness of its gist, in its lack of twists and turns, in the telegraphing of its punches. As an exercise in mimicry of what, it might be argued, is a steadfastly American criminal-tragedy tradition, a staggering, stumbling post-modern behemoth like the permanently off-kilter Two Hands does a much better job of making the form its own, however grotesquely bloated it eventually becomes through its own narcissism.

I don’t think, however, that Cedar Boys should be marked on its ability to bend its genre of choice or its ability to make fresh again perhaps that most overdone of cinematic formulas. Instead, it should be marked on its honesty, its refreshing lack of irony, and its steadfast desire to depict a ethno-subcultural tradition: it’s more social document than narrative innovator. Cedar Boys is to be commended for, perhaps like (of all things) The Wrestler, being of the world it depicts instead of about the world it depicts, for better or worse (David Field’s The Combination functions in a similarly narratively transcendent manner). Its portraits are perhaps not deep, but they are vivid, and that counts for a lot. - Martin

Cedar Boys opens in a limited release in Australia and screening locations can be found at the official website. While the release is certainly limited, it’s not that limited, with the film receiving screenings at most Hoyts and Palace Cinemas.

If there is one truth to the art of theatre in the age of Shakespeare and the period directly following it (the Jacobean era, during which Ben Jonson ascended to the literary throne left empty by the Bard’s death), it is that boundaries, borders and segregating lines of distinction are not what they seem. They are, in fact, in a constant state of flux despite their apparent and implicit immutability, and this is never truer then when it comes to the depiction of what might perhaps be referred to as tertiary characteristics of gender and sexuality (that is, those characteristics of behaviour, dress and appearance that are entirely socially constructed rather than reliant on biological imperatives). However, this truth, much like the borders it describes, is itself subject to change and exceptions, and only through comparison with other forms of Shakespearean drama can these be truly appreciated or defined.

Three perfect examples of this behaviour as it relates to the theatre of Shakespearean times are the Bard’s Twelfth Night (1601), a classic comedy concerned with the manipulation of gender through the act of cross-dressing, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1612), which follows the narrative form of a modified revenge tragedy while depicting an overwhelmingly and oppressively male reaction to the concept of an apparently unmarried woman at the center of a sphere of political power, and the tragedy Titus Andronicus (1584-1589), which combines notions of racial difference with the threat of uncontrolled and uncontrollable female sexuality, its avatar of matriarchal terror simultaneously juxtaposed with the actualised notion of violated feminine innocence.

The Twelfth Night is a play most definitely born of the spirit of Elizabethan theatre, one which opens and immediately, confidently occupies itself (and thus, its audience) with the extended comedic implications of cross-dressing (that most classical of comedic tropes), the maintenance of a confused and confusing love triangle and the exacting of similarly comedic, though infinitely darker, revenge upon a figure of Puritan authority (a contentious issue in itself, given the historical context in which the play came to be written and performed). The play subsequently manages to manufacture a considerable degree of thematic stratification in a somewhat inadvertent fashion, thanks to the theatrical conceit of having its female roles played by pre-pubescent male youths.

Where, for instance, are the audience’s sympathies to lie in the confusing entanglement of role and gender which can be described as that of a man (Cesario) who is actually a woman (Viola), who is simultaneously adored in her male role by a woman (Olivia) and, implicitly, a man (Orsino) whom she in turn falls in love with, in a form only truly visible to the audience who are external to the play’s contrivances, as Viola (who is, in the physical reality outside of the play, actually being played by a feminised boy)?

The above-described sexual cacophony formed the basis for the so-called Puritan complaint on the nature of the theatre, best summarised in Phillip Stubbes’, “The Anatomie of Abuses” (1583). Stubbes wrote that there “are good Examples to be learned in [plays]. Truly, so there are: if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, lie and falsify…”.

Though the passage goes on in a similar fashion for more than fourfold the length of the above quote, and though this was not the sole facet of the theatrical tradition the Puritans took issue with, the essential “complaint” was that, in the theatre, one transcended boundaries in an unacceptable and sacrilegious manner, and all through the association of manners of dress both with position and gender, so that boys were women, and lowly actors took on the role of royalty.

The practice of associating gender with accepted Elizabethan behavioural models and manners of dress (that is, for instance, a woman was readily identifiable as a woman because she dressed and acted like one) had the two-fold effect of both producing the complaint and allowing for the theatrical trope of the so-called “convincing cross-dresser” whose disguise is utterly impenetrable to the other characters in the play (Viola, in this case).
Indeed, so deeply-rooted is this concept that Shakespeare happily switches Sebastian with Cesario and Viola the same, in Twelfth Night’s final moments. While the misunderstandings are now cleared up in the climax, Orsino continues to refer to the now-revealed Viola as “Boy”, which in the context of lines like, “Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times / Thou never shouldst love woman like me” (V.i.258–266) implies a certain homoerotic attraction and questions whether Orsino is, in fact, in love with Viola or Cesario.

While the ending that traditional Comedy required (one of semi-absolute resolution) has been produced, it also has the effect of underscoring the essentially conceited nature of the play’s characters, who are in love with the concept of loving, to the point that Olivia accepts Sebastian for Cesario unconditionally, as if she were simply in love with his/her physical appearance.

By the same token, Orsino waxes poetic to Cesario, of all people, on the deeper nature of a man’s love as compared with a woman’s love, which is made up in the “palate” and not in the “liver”, and states that Cesario should, “Make no compare / between that love a woman can bear me / And that I owe Olivia” (II.iv.91–101), the irony of his speech being that the charges he makes of a ‘woman’s love’ (i.e. “They lack retention” or may have their feelings changed easily) are qualities he fosters within himself, and which lead him to instantly accept the now-revealed Cesario/Viola gestalt in Twelfth Night’s climax. The gulf he quantitatively ascribes to the emotional characteristics of the genders is clearly not nearly as wide as he believes.

This self-indulgence is one reflected in the many upper-crust characters throughout the play, mirrored in the most decadent member of the cast, Sir Toby Belch, who simultaneously contrives to teach the Puritan steward Malvolio his place and, to a modern mind, hypocritically “marries down” to the gentlewoman Maria, whose aspirations are not condemned and punished as the former’s are. In Shakespeare’s world, however, marriage is not only a matter of class but also a matter of direction of intention and gender, as an aristocratic man may choose a mate regardless of social class, but a plebeian male does not have the same ability, nor may a woman of simple breeding actively seek out a partner above her supposed “station in life”.

Illustrations of this are wide-ranging, but the best example comes not from Shakespeare himself, but from the lesser-known John Webster, in his The Duchess of Malfi, which, along with his The White Devil (1612) deals with many of the darker aspects of human nature, to the point that T.S. Eliot, in Whispers of Immortality (1920), wrote of Webster as always seeing “the skull beneath the skin”.

The titular Duchess is, to a surprising extent, one of the strongest heroines of the Jacobean period, even despite her untimely death well before the play’s end. She actively defies the stereotypical conventions of her gender which should by all rights make her simply the unwitting victim of this revenge tragedy, rather than its heroine. Instead she is both, a dichotomy reflected in her dual status as both a head of state and a woman supposedly unmanned, though in reality this is a ruse to protect her status and center of power, as well as her secret family fathered by Antonio, ostensibly a representative of the lower-class.

In many ways, the Duchess bears a strong resemblance to the previous ruler, Elizabeth I, referred to as the ‘Virgin Queen’ or ‘Gloriana’, who was simultaneously deified by her public and rumoured to have been maintaining a romantic relationship with her cousin and royal Master of Horses, Robert Dudley. This reflection on the passing of the Tudor era appears in many works of the Jacobean era, including The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), where the skull of a certain ‘Gloriana’ is key to the revenge plot, in itself surely not a coincidence. but it is only through her, in many ways inordinate, suffering that the audience gains knowledge of her inner strength. In many ways, Webster defies his contemporaries (of which Shakespeare was one) in structuring this revenge tragedy in such a way as to leave the “protagonist” dead well before the end of the play, her presence replaced by the (in many ways) generic male revenger, Antonio.

(The above is a short excerpt from the Richard III-esque cinematic interpretation of The Revenger’s Tragedy, starring Christopher Eccleston.)

The play is one made up of boundaries, and this understanding is reached within its first Act, during which Antonio returns from the French court full of admiration for its form and function, and implicit in his praise is a disdain for the Italian court to which he belongs and with which he is making a comparison. However, the reality is that borders in Webster’s play are much closer to home, and are circumscribed most particularly between the aristocratic upper class and the common man, as we discover when the Duchess is barred from remarrying by her controlling (and in many cases incestuously minded) brother Ferdinand, his apparent reasoning for which is his fears for the family bloodline, which he attempts to master and purify through his sister.

The Cardinal ponders, “Shall our blood/ The royal blood of Castile and Aragon/ Be thus attainted?” (II.v.22-24), a woman being simply a vessel for the fathering of heirs. While it is normally the place of a father and/or a husband in this social context to control a bloodline, Ferdinand takes it upon himself to perform this duty in place of either (one of many hints as to his desire for his sibling), and the Duchess’s refusals and flagrant disregard for Ferdinand’s commands drive him to have her murdered.

While revenge plays were generally written with a moral lesson at hand (as a form of theatre they were related to the 15th century ‘morality play’, after all), most often to do with the expunging of corruption and then, suitably, the death of the wronged revenger to correct the social order, most often due to a tragic flaw. How, then, do we reconcile the brutality of the almost saintly Duchess’s treatment at the hands of her brothers with her supposed crime, that of marrying beneath her social status, an act which Sir Toby on a whim manufactures without serious comment?

Indeed, such a reaction to female independence generally rested upon proof or suspicion of female infidelity (as with Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello), and Nicholas Brook surmises in his “Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy” (1979) that, “It has often been pointed out that there is a violation of the correct ‘order’ which is supposed to have affected Jacobean audiences with the moral force of a tragic ‘flaw’ but […] the play entirely assumes the audience’s complicity and therefore approval of the Duchess’s action”.

Titus Andronicus explores the touched-upon concept of female sexuality and conversely, chastity, in greater detail, both as a concept and as an almost physical item in itself, to which a form of ownership is ascribed. Here, we are presented with contrasts of character made through extremes, in the forms of the Lavinia/Tamora juxtaposition (that of virginal innocence versus the shadow of uncontrolled female power and sexuality in its ultimate combination, the barbarian Queen), and the equally extreme depiction of the Moor Aaron as simultaneously a singular force of evil and a loving parent as played against the the confused, wearied and titular Titus Andronicus, who starts the play as an Andronici war-hero and ends it crazed and more importantly, dead, but remembered as the type-cast revenging murderer, chiefly responsible for his daughter’s death.

(Above, the Anthony-Hopkins-flavoured adaptation of Titus Andronicus.)

Titus appears a play chiefly concerned with the control and dominance of female agency, and categorises it thus as entirely something for men to fear. Tamora is a representation of pitiless violence and sends forth her two lustful and murderous sons to do her bidding, and actively encourages their rape of Lavinia, and the Act in which this takes place places special significance on the horror of the ‘hole’ or ‘pit’ into which Bassianus (dead) is placed, and Quintus and Martius are held captive, whilst Aaron buries his treasure in a similar hole, all the while referred to as “this unhallowed and bloodstained hole” (II.iii.210) and “this fell devouring receptacle” (II.iii.235), and so the comparison between literal graves (holes in the earth) and the metaphoric imagery of the consuming female icon or genitalia is made (the concept that Freud would later christen “vagina dentata”, the toothed vagina which is linked with male castration anxiety).

Tamora is given power but this is a power that must be righted by the play’s end, as its only result is injustice, and so the ‘true’ male hierarchy must be reinstated, which it is. An understandable criticism of Titus has been that it is over-zealously misogynistic, and punishes both female characters in the play simply for their gender, a criticism borne out as even despite her brutal rape and disfigurement Lavinia is treated cruelly by her suspiciously deranged father, Titus, who as her father had previously denied her the right to marry Bassianus (thereby retaining and possessing Lavinia’s chastity).

While gender and sexuality may be alternately capable of flexibility and mutability within the typical structure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic traditions, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that these changes are short-lived and attempt to highlight, for the intended original audience, the requirement for a return to the accepted social order and the curtailment of excess female agency.

Amazon.com stock the 1999 Hopkins adaptation of Titus Andronicus, the 2003 Eccleston adaptation of Revenger’s Tragedy, T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland, Prufrock, and Other Poems, and, of course, the complete Shakespeare.

Works cited:

BROOKE, Nicholas. Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

ELIOT, T.S. The Wasteland, Four Quartets and Other Poems. Caedmon Press, 2000.

WEBSTER, John. The Duchess of Malfi. A.C. Black, 2003, 4th ed.

SHAKESPEARE, William. Twelfth Night (Folger Shakespeare Library Ed.), New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

SHAKESPEARE, William. Titus Andronicus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Author’s Note: This short review-cum-analytical-overview was penned several years ago, and having been touched up in places appears to pass muster sufficient to be posted to dear old Wonderbread, but remains above all a kind of brief conceptual summary of the issues at stake in post-colonial, globalised literature, the ever-evolving canon of which Massey’s The Floating Girl is certainly (if only tangentially) a part of. That said, the book functions, by and large, as a relatively simple and straight-forwardly told detective story and not as a self-consciously ‘literary’ text, and in its dedication to an unabashedly minimalist aesthetic such as befits serial fiction the book defeats any attempts at more in-depth treatises on its structure and contents through its sheer brevity. Perhaps more would be gleaned by analysing the series in its ten-book entirety, a task to which I am happily not equal.  — Martin Kingsley

Homi K. Bhabha’s poststructural theory of cultural hybridity (specifically to do with hybridity in the wake of colonial incursion) highlights that, following the highly aggressive encounters between colonising cultures and those who inhabit the place to be colonised, a “third place” is created, inhabited by an entirely different people to either of those that contributed to its creation yet owing much to both. These “third places” are geographical as well as cultural hybrids, composed both of equal trades of social practice, ritual and theory as well as the products of nationalist resistance, and may tend to produce cultural hybrids to inhabit more easily these new and largely constructed places.

Examined closely, it is hard not to see Japan as the 20th century’s greatest cultural hybrid. While popular examples of cultural hybridization at work include the emergence of the present-day Caribbean as a rebellious survivor of the worst excesses of British and French imperialist policy, it is only in recent times (especially during the years of economic paranoia that defined and characterised the Western world between the years of 1980-89) that serious attention has been focused on Japan and its societal structure post-World War II.

Neuromancer author William Gibson, in a Time Magazine article, “The Future Perfect“, attempts to place the particular cultural seed from which grew the West’s obscene and arguably often-xenophobic obsession with Japan, and situates it chiefly as a product of international conflict and post-colonialism. “Japan…was occupied by a foreign power intent upon a program of social reengineering quite unseen in history. America…set about restructuring the national psyche. America did not, however, follow through.” Gibson then summarises the key act or catalyst of colonialism from which Bhabha’s third place springs forth, “The full-on demolition of existing power structures and their replacement with alien, egalitarian equivalents”, and finally surmises that the Japan that fascinated America was a Japan that America was largely responsible for creating.

Japan became a focus for the Western world when, with the help of an inflated forty-thousand-point NIKKEI, it seriously appeared to threaten American bases of financial power. A mythology of technological and economical prowess evolved around the island nation, and the eventual outcome of aggressive Japanese financial policy was theorised in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, “Blade Runner”, with its poly-Asian populace and towering skyscrapers, and in William Gibson’s placement of the heart of a world-wide telecommunications network within Tokyo’s future city limits in 1984’s “Neuromancer”. These portrayals were not necessarily concerned with implicating Japan in a deliberate drive to bankrupt the Western world, but the evocative imagery involved nonetheless fueled an engine of North American paranoia that led inexorably to portrayals that did.

Sujata Massey’s The Floating Girl places a half-Japanese Californian woman, Rei Shimura, in modern Japan and uses her as a looking glass through which to examine current Japanese custom and society from the perspective of a Western foreigner, a technique by which Massey’s target audience is able to bond more easily with her protagonist, which functions as their avatar even as it remains hers, being as the book is written in English and only occasionally marked by the insertion of short, common Japanese phrases, and constructed and subsequently marketed in the vein of ‘pulp’ fiction. Massey attempts to elaborate, in an era unconcerned with the threat of a Japan climbing out of recession, on the stories of sexual fetishism, social conditioning and elaborate interpersonal custom that the process of ‘othering’ has produced in the Western consciousness, but does so in the manner of a literary ‘tourist’, mixing travelogue with narrative intrigue.

Lawrence Cahoon in his “Modernism to Post-Modernism: An Anthology” defines the othering process as a method by which social structures of all sizes are “maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization”. Other similar structures “must be represented as foreign or ‘other’ through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is ‘privileged’ or favoured, and the other is devalued in some way.” As othered as Japan may have been from the West, so to do we find echoes of the inverted Occidentalism movement (Rei’s boyfriend, Takeo, is shocked at the idea of gay-bashing occurring within Japan, “I thought that was only a problem in countries like the United States”), and Massey deliberately takes aim at the violence of these stereotypes as they affect both the Japanese and the gaijin.

Here, for instance, the gaijin who enter the country on the pretext of engaging with Orientalist sexual fantasies are the aggressors and possessors of the most repulsive personalities on show. Nicky, the chauvinist who places faith in the concept that, “You have boundaries, and they [Japanese women don't,” is ultimately undone by his Japanese lover, whose limits are what causes her to kill him. On the other hand, the Senegalese Marcellus has to play up to his image as a black American, and makes a similar point about feeling particularly predated upon because of his difference: “Nobody wants to see a dancer who reminds them of the salaryman who works in the same office.” Later, he remarks that, “There is a terror of people from different cultures.” Unfortunately, Massey herself seems to succumb to a desire to present the marginalised aspects of Japanese society in a way that seems sensationalist.

Having established her hybrid detective as a four-year resident (in essence providing at least some grounding beyond the initial culture shock presented in texts such as Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation), Massey presents her avatar as both knowledgeable of Japanese society and naïve of it, and the novel is subsequently littered with constant reminders of rules of Japanese etiquette, deliberately keeping Rei at a remove by having to take note of these things as opposed to unthinkingly accepting them.

While the narrator’s central complaint is that she is not “Japanese enough”, she actively rejects aspects of the society or fails to find them, after four years, worthy of notability and thus remark, which as a authorial technique handily helps to demarcates a work of travelogue from a work of narrative progression. She surrounds herself with portrayals of the people who inhabit this third place and the behaviours they happen to exhibit: in describing them (in finding them worthy of description), they are implicitly drawn opposite to Anglicized social stylings we as Western readers are automatically conscious of, but in the process of analysis they are objectified, in many cases classified amidst and often defined by a litany of brand names and clothing materials rather than by definitively human characteristics. Examples include, “faux- and genuine vintage patterned polyester, double knit and jersey”, (pg. 8), and later, “she looked like half the Japanese college students or office ladies that I saw on the street. I couldn’t pick her out of a crowd.” (pg. 149), and “the receptionist…was wearing a stylish polyester dress without a single wrinkle”, (pg. 199).

Shimura’s narrative is price- and brand-conscious in the extreme, noting the cost of items as lowly as the sun umbrella she rents (5,000 Yen) and the bikini wax she receives (after four years, she still draws a comparison-through-price with a similar service as might be offered in the US) and a lavender wig she purchases (2,500 Yen), as well as the brands of her lipstick (MAC), hair gel (Super Hard) and swim-suit (Speedo). Japan is one of the few Asian nations to accept, openly, Western cultural and material trends as well as linguistic conceits (English words are commonly assimilated into the Japanese language), and this is one of the key aspects that reflects Japan’s growing diversity, as its youth begin to identify more globally, but Massey’s Japan reflects this only on occasion, focussing as it does on the stranger aspects of manga and anime, and the people who move in such circles.

The Californian half-Japanese Rei Shimura may appear to be the perfect hybrid vehicle from which to observe Japanese (as Gibson refers to it) “mutant culture”, and the Indian/German Massey (who had at the time the advantage of two years’ residence in Japan and previous experience with alienation having emigrated from England to the US) may appear the perfect writer for the task. The end result, however, is one that seems almost deliberately sifted of depth, and can revert to type at a moment’s notice. Hybridity is a subject that seems to elude serious focus in Massey’s Japan. Click here to purchase a copy of The Floating Girl from Amazon.com, from whom you can also purchase Homi K. Bhabha’s foundational text, The Location of Culture.

Works cited:

Massey, Sujata (2001). The Floating Girl. Avon Books.

Bhabha, Homi (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.

Gibson, William (April 30, 2001). The Future Perfect. Time Magazine. (Vol.157 NO.17)

Cahoone, Lawrence (1996). From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

Denying that the period retrospectively known as the New Hollywood (often bookmarked for the sake of conceptual bookkeeping with the release of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde [1967]) produced some of the greatest American films of all time is the worst kind of anathema to most students of the silver screen, and for good reason. For a brief, shining moment, it was possible to be both an artist (an artiste, in fact, or even an auteur if it so pleased you to be) whose work was celebrated in locally circulated underground film journals and, simultaneously, a commercially successful director who was, metaphorically, invited to all the best parties, and under these conditions young, ambitious directors could genuinely thrive.

Michael Shedlin, in his overview (“Police Oscar”) of William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and subsequent interview with Friedkin (post-French Connection but pre-Exorcist) and in a statement bordering on the bleeding obvious, observes “the great majority of commercial films are produced not to express a particular artist’s passions, but to insure immediate cash income to the producers,” and that, previous to the release of independent darlings like Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, “to annoy the audience by rejecting or questioning its conception of reality [would have been] bad business, and therefore just [wasn’t] done.” (p. 1)

Shedlin niggles at Friedkin’s work and New Hollywood as a whole, but he’s right to amplify, of all things, the industrial aspects of filmmaking at the time: the studios had begun to lose touch with their audience, as detailed by Stephen Farber (no relation, sadly, to the great and now late Manny Farber), writing in 1970 of the financial crisis that struck Hollywood in 1969, not long before the release of the colossal box office flop, Tora! Tora! Tora!: “all the big bad movies are all losing money…almost all of the major studios have risked their futures on giant-budget films…that now will be lucky to recoup a quarter of their initial costs…they know they’re on the verge of an unprecedented financial disaster.” (“End of the Road?”, p. 3)

The New Hollywood was exactly what it claimed to be: Hollywood studios financially backing and distributing the films of young tear away film-makers with bright eyes and bright ideas, giving them budgets and industrial support to lend substantiality to their madcap schemes, as differentiated from the George Romeros or the Cassavettes, who received truly ‘independent’ financing and distribution. Talking of Easy Rider, specifically, Farber says, “none of these are Underground films…they are made for large audiences, with name actors, with very sophisticated Hollywood-level craftsmanship…[but] all are truly personal films in the sense that works by Bergman or Antonioni are personal films.” (p. 3.)

What films? How about Two Lane Blacktop (1971), Vanishing Point (1971), Easy Rider (1968), The Last Picture Show (1971), Scorcese’s Mean Streets (1973), Jack Nicholson’s break-out film Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Godfather (1972) and George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973)? All of these films showed America, by and large, as it had never been seriously and consistently depicted before, as a place without definition or certainty, riddled by crime, drugs and societal angst and American youth, in particular, as listless, unmotivated, desensitized, addled, angry and uncertain, a first for supposedly sympathetic protagonists in the mainstream American cinema: Jonathan Rosenbaum writes in “New Hollywood and the Sixties Melting Pot”, “a multifaceted redefinition of the American cinema was fully in progress that involved not only a re-consideration of what it had been, but also a great deal of thought about what it might be.” (p. 132)

As noted above, it is fruitless to try and deny that filmmakers and filmgoers both owe a great debt to the works of this period. It is not, however, nearly so fruitless to examine works of the time singularly and comparatively and come to the decision that, while they have much to offer, they are not the ideological be-all and end-all of America, nor, as has been claimed, the revolutions in filmic or societal commentary they might once have been considered.

Take, for instance, Easy Rider, the Hopper/Fonda/Southern co-production that launched, once and for all, the careers of both Hopper and Fonda with a kind of stratospheric velocity rarely seen, and I use this term advisedly, ‘nowadays’. Alongside Bonnie and Clyde, it spawned a series of increasingly more drug-addled road trip films, including Two-Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point (both released in 1971).

Featuring two classic ‘unmotivated heroes’, Captain America (or Wyatt) and Billy, who ride east in search of a good time, and who aimlessly discover hippie communes, ranchers, alcoholic lawyers, miles of pristine desert and, eventually, crazed gun-toting rednecks, Easy Rider works towards an overall indirect portrait of a fractured America (contrast this with Two-Lane Blacktop, wherein the film’s aimless protagonists never even conclude their race, the very crux of the film’s narrative!): in “The Allegory of Easy Rider”, Joe Lawrence references the film’s second act acid trip, noting “the orgy of the acid trip in the graveyard is America’s orgy as well. When Captain America says, “We blew it,” he speaks for twentieth century man.” (p. 666)

Which is all fine and good. Commercially, the film worked because it didn’t tackle such a colossally affecting issue from directly in front. Peter McInerney argues in “Apocalypse Then: Hollywood Looks Back at Vietnam” that this is because, “the Vietnam war has never been susceptible to traditional Hollywood treatment. The industry didn’t know how to be prowar when we seemed to be neither winning nor right. And it didn’t dare to be antiwar, except tentatively…or by inference and indirection: M*A*S*H was about the Korean War and Catch-22 about World War II.” (p. 23)

Taking the broader view, you are forced to admit that you underestimate the effect of Easy Rider down through cinematic time and space at your peril: the image of a young and beautiful Captain America, all sandy blond locks, smiles, sunglasses and sideburns, astride his stars-and-stripes-adorned chopper, is a powerful one: Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, for example, unabashedly idolizes Fonda as a kind of faded icon of the carefree ‘60s, converting him into the logically jaded philosophical extension of his idealist Captain America character. Combined with archive footage of Terrence Stamp from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow (1967), The Limey is less a film than a touchingly penned cinematic love letter to a decade long since confined to the distant past.

This, however, ignores the key fact that artistically and philosophically, Easy Rider is far less revolutionary a piece of socially aware filmmaking than most people presume and that, taken as a whole rather than as the sum of its parts, much like Midnight Cowboy, when you get down to the nitty and the gritty, there’s some glaringly crude work going on just below the surface and the Byrds/Steppenwolf soundtrack: Travis Brown Jr. in “On an Aesthetic of Highway Speed” characterizes it thusly: “it is barely changed in social message from The Wild One (1954), a bike flick of an earlier decade. The country’s still going to hell, mean people still abuse nice people, and kids still do the darndest things” (p. 26) David R. Shumway in “Rock ‘n’ Roll Soundtracks…” laments, “Easy Rider creates a powerful sense of generational solidarity only to undermine and finally destroy whatever utopian possibilities such solidarity might offer. The film leaves us united in our anger and our difference from “them,” but without any hope that our difference can make a difference.” (p. 39)

The method by which we gain the film’s ending, on the other hand, particularly incenses Stephen Farber, who asks, “Why should we praise a hippie-oriented youth film that stereotypes its enemies…ruthlessly…? This film is as crude as the part of America it is attacking.” Easy Rider and its ilk may have created and subsequently divided public discussion on issues of drug use, youth culture, borders and frontiers and above all, politics, but that doesn’t mean that it’s to be congratulated for doing so: its methods are deeply suspect.

The Exorcist is an entirely different beast, and possibly poorer for it, even as it contributes overall to the body of work of New Hollywood. Coming before The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) but after The Last House on the Left (1972), The Exorcist takes one of the oldest cinematic forms, the genre of horror, and attempts to redefine it, both in terms of its explicitness (legitimizing by use of sheer monetary might the juicy splatterflick aesthetics of groundbreaking low-budget films like Night of the Living Dead [1968], Last House… and the works of Herschell Gordon Lewis [1963’s Blood Feast, 1964’s Two Thousand Maniacs! and 1965’s Color Me Blood Red chief amongst them]) and its broad topicality, especially regarding religion (note also the later Fonda vehicle Race with the Devil [1975],  which deals with Satanists in middle America, a viciously ironic juxtaposition, and the early Polanski classic, Rosemary’s Baby [1968]).

However. ‘However’ is never a word one wants to hear, but in this case its use is justified. However, The Exorcist lacks, for all its slickness, a lot of what makes its brethren so interesting. It doesn’t have a true bone to pick like the other films, and enjoys its own carefully engineered and shot technicality to a degree far more pronounced than either of the other films already discussed, to the point where it actually overshadows its own vague ideology, which is all for the better: at its core The Exorcist is, metaphorically speaking, the extremely pretty but very simple child in amongst a family of wunderkind, speaking ideologically, ethically or morally. Friedkin himself says in his interview with Shedlin that, “I intend to do it as a straightforward, realistic film about inexplicable things…” (p. 9). Marsha Kinder, in “The Return of the Outlaw Couple”, takes that to mean that he set out to make a film possessing a “simplistic and reactionary” morality. (p. 9) Regan is a wonderful icon for the innocent-corrupted-from-the-inside, and if anything the true horror of the piece comes from her various journeys through the medical system at the hands of apathetic doctors and uncaring machines, but whatever the film is attempting to say is stymied and stultified by its impressive aesthetic, leaving you to be blown away by its looks but confused by its message, if it can be even said to have one worth discussing.

It is my firm belief, then, that Two-Lane Blacktop, of the three films under discussion, stands up to the test of time and ideological examination with far better results than when the same tests are applied to its kindred: this may be because the film refuses to espouse a distinct philosophical position, relying instead on its meandering to carry it through. Some might argue that the film catching in the projector gate, incinerating the film’s vision of America, is symbolically similar in its incendiary nature to the ending of Easy Rider, in which Peter Fonda’s custom chopper explodes and lies, burning, by the roadside as the credits roll, but I disagree. Rather, I feel that it symbolizes, in a manner very distinct of classic postmodern theory, a disdain for endings, a recognition that they aren’t useful or edifying, that America’s ending remains unwritten and that resolution or revelation isn’t to be found in the cinema, or at the very least in Two-Lane Blacktop, which is refreshing in an era of films so overtly political in nature and artistic disposition. Visually and aurally, it offers the least, choosing instead to reside inside a non-descript kind of minimalism. Again, refreshing: we’re discussing a film that has nothing to say, a rare beauty.

Having described three New Hollywood darlings in quick succession, one must then go on to recall the film brats all struck out, individually and then largely as a collective, inconveniently doing so in the face of the seemingly unstoppable blockbusting machines created by Lucas and Spielberg. The end result of the nigh-simultaneous and eventually cumulative failures of Heaven’s Gate, Cruising, They All Laughed, One From the Heart, Apocalypse Now (1979) was that the studios wrested back control from the young guns, chief amongst them Michael Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola. Roll on, the Eighties and innumerable sequels to solid Seventies properties (More American Graffiti [1979], for instance).

The following is, in a line, the totality of the argument for the last great American films being made during the industrial lifetime of New Hollywood: New Hollywood died and American film makers have been (apparently) pathologically incapable of making such films since then. It is, by its very nature, a theory for the deranged alone. What of Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Goodfellas (1990), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Requiem for a Dream (2000)? How is it possible to discount out of hand the considerable body of work belonging to the Coen Brothers, masters of the art of bringing Americana to the big screen, or Stanley Kubrick’s latter works, such as Full Metal Jacket (1987) or even Eyes Wide Shut (2001), or octogenarian Sidney Lumet’s strikingly vicious Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)? How is Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as the maddened Daniel Plainview in P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) any less captivating or complex than the sum of Robert DeNiro’s screen time in Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976), a film that Jonathan Rosenbaum, for instance, doesn’t have a lot of time for and dismisses entirely as “a violently Calvinist, racist, sexist, and apocalyptic wish-fulfillment fantasy, complete with an extended bloodbath, that is given all the allure of expressionist art and involves very few moral consequences for most members of the audience.” (p. 151)

Films such as I have listed above, and many others far beyond the scope of this short essay, are clearly as worthy of close analysis and celebration as anything the drug-addled children of the Sixties ever put together. To draw a line in the sand where the year 1979 slipped over into 1980 is the most arbitrary thing in the world: when America ceased to collapse in on itself at the end of the Seventies, as it failed to do a decade earlier and again a decade before that, it called as it always has for a new body of cinema to deal with that fact, and to discount all the cinematic work that has taken place in this new space, this new fractured America, is to do all of cinema a gross disservice. You can purchase the Criterion edition of Two-Lane Blacktop from Amazon.com, as well as Easy Rider, and the complete The Exorcist boxset.

Works Cited

American Graffiti. Dir. George Lucas. Perf. Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat and Harrison Ford. DVD.

Bates, Robin. “Connecting to Film History through Writing.” Cinema Journal 39 (2000): 83-89. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Brown Jr., Travis. “On an Aesthetic of Highway Speed.” Journal of Architectural Education 30 (1976): 25-27. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Carroll, Noel. “Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings.” Film Quarterly 34 (1981): 16-25. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Perf. Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson. DVD.

The Exorcist. Dir. William Friedkin. Perf. Linda Blair, Mercedes McCambridge, Max Von Sydow. DVD.

Farber, Stephen. “End of the Road?” Film Quarterly 23 (1970): 3-16. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Horwath, Alexander, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser, eds. The Last Great American Picture Show : New Hollywood Cinema in The 1970s. New York: Amsterdam UP, 2004.

Ingebretsen, Edward J. “Staking the Monster: A Politics of Remonstrance.” Religion and American Culture 8 (1998): 91-116. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Kinder, Marsha. “The Return of the Outlaw Couple.” Film Quarterly 27 (1974): 2-10. JSTOR. La Trobe Library.

Lawrence, Joe B. “The Allegory of “Easy Rider”" The English Journal 59 (1970): 665-66. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

McInerney, Peter. “Apocalypse Then: Hollywood Looks Back at Vietnam.” Film Quarterly 33 (1980): 21-32. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Michaels, Walter B. “The Road to Vietnam.” Modern Language Notes: Comparative Literature 94 (1979): 1173-175. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Shedlin, Michael, and William Friedkin. “Police Oscar: “The French Connection”: And an Interview with William Friedkin.” Film Quarterly 25 (1972): 2-9. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. Keyword: “the exorcist”

Shumway, David R. “Rock ‘n’ Roll Sound Tracks and the Production of Nostalgia.” Cinema Journal 38 (1999): 36-51. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Two-Lane Blacktop. Dir. Monte Hellman. Perf. James Tayler, Warren Oates. DVD.

Cumulatively, the period that began in the late 1940s and proceeded all throughout the ’50s and ’60s was one of unprecedented legal, industrial, ideological, methodological and artistic upheaval for the movie-making industry in the United States. Not since the very dawn of industrialized movie making and the subsequent birth of the major studios (RKO, Universal, Warner Brothers, United Artists and so on) had so much suddenly seemed both so tangible and so possible to so many, particularly those who had previously been shut out of the business by the big hitters. Kevin Heffernan, in his terrifyingly comprehensive article Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living Dead (1968), describes the period as one “during which issues of audience, text, and industrial context intersected.” (p. 75)

The Paramount Decision (United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 US 131) of 1948 played no small part in this aforementioned upheaval, as Bill Osgerby indicates at length in his article, Sleazy Riders: Exploitation, “Otherness,” and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie. Specifically, he writes that the Paramount Decision smashed the majors’ “‘vertical’ monopoly of distribution and exhibition” by ruling against “the major studios’ ownership of cinema chains” (p. 2). This wide-reaching decree birthed the possibility of independent production and distribution without reference to, or prerequisite involvement in, the pre-existing and entirely monolithic studio system. Osgerby notes “the majors sought to maintain their appeal through the production of spectacular ‘blockbusters’”, but that the colossal budgetary requirements of such films reduced overall output, creating a “gap in the market that the independents could exploit”, and singles out the independent production house American International Pictures, formed in 1956, largely because AIP is nothing if not the perfect poster-boy for the birth of the diametrically opposed anti-industrial ideology behind proto-’indie’ cinema in the ’50s and early ’60s.

In practical terms, in combination with changing audience desires, demands and the metamorphosis of the cinema-going populous’ ethnic and socio-economic makeup (to be discussed later), AIP flourished, almost entirely as a result of producing reams of films with minuscule shooting schedules, low production values and relatively infinitesimal production budgets. This was, by and large, the by-product of AIP’s retaining of cinematic powerhouse Roger Corman, whose truly vast output during the period preceding and subsequently containing the New Hollywood era is a perfect example of the eventual de facto industrial ideology behind the so-called ‘exploitation’ film, making Corman a prime innovator and perhaps the prime motivator behind exploitation film as we know it.

To talk about exploitation film, one must first firmly define the terms on which discussion is intended. Exploitation films did already exist in no uncertain terms during the hey-day of the Production Code and well before the Paramount Decision of ‘48 – notorious director Dwain Esper alone can be credited with the production and/or direction of some of the most famous early exploitation films, such as Maniac (1934), Reefer Madness (1936), Sex Madness (1938), How to Undress in Front of Your Husband (1937) and perhaps most incredibly, The Strange Love Life of Adolf Hitler (1948) – and, as well as sharing specific Code-era traits, these films shared a distribution circuit, a prototypical version of what David Andrews, in Sex Is Dangerous, So Satisfy Your Wife (2006), calls the “decentralized circuit of drive-ins, grind houses, and art houses” that “evolved outside the aegis of classical Hollywood” (p. 62) and eventually became the de rigueur places to view ’50s and ’60s exploitation cinema.

Again, what these films primarily shared besides places of exhibition was content, however retrospectively tame that content may seem as seen through the gore-tinted, highly sexualized, post-modern lens we must by default use to inspect the cinematic past: ‘exploitation’ cinema classically came out of a desire to experience, at a distance, transgressive behaviour or narrative material, and is united as an industrial and artistic genre by its focus on lurid (often violent or ‘ultra-violent’, socially taboo, ribald or sexually explicit in nature, either objectively or relative to the ‘mainstream’ cinema of the period) subject matter. For instance, and seemingly describing Esper’s highly indicative body of work to a tee, Eric Schaefer, in Gauging a Revolution: 16mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature (2002), talks of classical exploitation films couching themselves as morality plays and exposes on social ills, and subsequently “[offering] U.S. audiences sights forbidden by the Production Code as well as by many state and local censorship bodies” by “including moments of spectacle unlike anything seen in mainstream movies: scenes set in nudist camps, shots of striptease dances, and footage of childbirth, victims of venereal disease, and people engaging in a range of vices” (p. 5).

What changed between Esper’s hey-day and the late nineteen fifties/early sixties that produced such a definitive delineation between pre- and post-Decision exploitation cinema? In a word: audiences. Kevin Heffernan, standing on the shoulders of Thomas Doherty and William Paul, points out that ”the target audience for the horror film, like the movie audience generally, had drastically declined in age since the 1950s” (p. 65), a subject on which Doherty himself elaborates in The Exploitation Film as History: Wild in the Streets, “In the 1950s teen-age Americans, with more leisure time and discretionary spending power than ever before, coalesced into something approaching a distinct group… Television and the acquisitive life made it difficult for Hollywood to lure an adult audience into the theatres”.

Osgerby even finds that his “biker movies”, directly came about as a result of the “cycle of teen exploitation films that rolled out of Hollywood as the film industry responded to the decline in adult cinema audiences” (p. 1) Horror films were, however, the major draw card for young audiences in the period under discussion (David Bordwell in his staple text Film Art briefly concurs, p. 122), leading to the creation of what Heffernan calls the “kiddie-horror matinee” (p. 73), where in (using Heffernan’s examples) films such as Blood of Dracula (1958) and Captain Sinbad’s Magic Voyage (1963) were bundled together to provide a full afternoon’s entertainment. Teens, however, were not the only new demographic to come under the watchful eye of the film industry: African Americans, sensing the first inklings of serious social empowerment, were making a major impact on audience numbers.

In what remains a truly awe-inspiring statistic, Heffernan states: “by 1967, Variety estimated that black moviegoers represented 30 percent of first-run movie patrons while numbering only 10 to 15 percent of the general population.” (p. 62) As such, adult audiences were often treated to the bundling together of racial-drama features such as Black Like Me (1964) and classic horror flicks like Mad Love (1935) (p. 67, Heffernan, here, is again invaluable in the provision of real-world examples of matinee bundling), and it was into this new and strange arena that George Romero’s 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead was delivered (proving Heffernan’s point, the film “played its first-run engagement with the Poitier prestige drama For Love of Ivy ([1968]…this combination showed up the following week at the Nixon and the Eric Terminal, at 69^th and Market” [p. 74]).

In American Horrors, a 1987 Gregory Walled-edited collection of essays on the horror genre as it relates to the United States, it is stated that “1968 could be said to inaugurate the modern era of horror”, (p. 5) the “modern horror film” being “at once business, art and purveyor of entertainment and ideology” (p. 1). It keyed into the desires of the key demographics listed above by combining a (for the time) amazingly capable African American hero (personally, it is my suspicion that we don’t see such a by-and-large successful black protagonist in the independent cinema again until the release of Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song [1971]) with the trappings of the horror genre, and ladling on the Vietnam-centric social commentary for a newly socially conscious audience. Off the back of the introduction in that same year of the R-rating into the cinema, Night of the Living Dead reinvigorated the exploitation film not only with its vitriolic bleakness but its visual viciousness.

Like Rosemary’s Baby (also 1968), Night of the Living Dead brings to the screen a visual and thematic frankness hitherto not often seen in the afternoon matinee spot: its cannibalistic scenes share fragments of an aesthetic with Herschell Gordon Lewis’ lusciously enthusiastic Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964). Indeed, it was in this capacity that Roger Ebert first ‘reviewed’ Night of the Living Dead, describing in his article the subsequently oft-reported traumatizing effect the film had on its remarkably youthful daytime audience, “The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.”

Unlike Reefer Madness, for instance, no dollars were being made off the back of cheap laughs to be had at the expense of the film’s material or the paucity of the so-called horrific elements on display, which is amazing considering the film’s independent origins and the competition to be had from the early ‘blockbusters’, films made with almost unlimited access to resources and big-name stars, both things Night of the Living Dead lacks almost entirely. Night of the Living Dead brought about a turning point in the perception, appreciation and distribution of the exploitation film, serving as a amazingly stable bridge between the Corman-styled purely industrial money-spinners of the ‘50s (shot using black and white 35mm film stock, constrained within a single house, utilizing small numbers of actors and sparing special effects shots, Night of the Living Dead is the definitive example of a workably low film budget in practice) and the artistically ‘valid’ works of the New Hollywood, even then percolating in Californian film schools and on studio backlots. (For a more in-depth examination of the pivotal role Night of the Living Dead played in the legitimisation of exploitation cinema, see our other article, “Night of the Living Dead and the Rise of Exploitation Cinema”)

You can purchase the definitive Millennium (not the Anchor Bay 30th Anniversary edition, which adds new, re-shot footage and story elements for no discernible purposes and detracts thus significantly from the original masterpiece) edition of Night of the Living Dead from Amazon.com.

Works Cited

Andrews, David. “Sex Is Dangerous, So Satisfy Your Wife: The Softcore Thriller in Its Contexts.” Cinema Journal 45 (2006): 59-89. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art and Free Film Viewer’s Guide. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages, 2000.

Doherty, Thomas. “THE EXPLOITATION FILM AS HISTORY: Wild in the Streets.” Literature/Film Quarterly 12 (1984): 186-95. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. Keyword: Exploitation AND motion pictures.

Ebert, Roger. “The Night of the Living Dead.” Chicago Sun-Times. 5 Jan. 1967. Chicago Sun-Times. <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?aid=/19670105/reviews/701050301/1023>.

Heffernan, Kevin. “Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film:  Distributing Night of the Living Dead (1968).” Cinema Journal 41 (2002): 59-77. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. Keyword: Exploitation AND motion pictures.

Jancovich, Mark. Horror. London: B.T Batsford, 1992.

Night of the Living Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perf. Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman. 1968.

Osgerby, Bill. “SLEAZY RIDERS: Exploitation, “Otherness,” and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 31 (2003): 98. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. Keyword: Exploitation AND motion pictures.

Schaefer, Eric. “Gauging a Revolution: 16mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature.” Cinema Journal 41 (2002): 3-26. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. Keyword: Exploitation AND motion pictures.

Waller, Gregory A., ed. American Horrors : Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. New York: University of Illinois P, 1987.

Critical couple David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, in their jointly authored textbook Film Art, argue that the concept and physical actualization of ’setting’ is key to the art of film-making. Far more so, in fact (they claim), than in the realm of the theatre to which they so directly compare and contrast the cinematic, in doing so arriving at the conclusion that “[cinema settings] need not only be a container for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action.” (pg. 179)

It is ironic, then, that the methodology of the ‘restricted field’ of action or setting is, if anything, based on an explicitly theatrical convention that plays to the limitations of the stage: many famous plays are set entirely in one room or area so as to capitalize on the intimate and generally static nature of the stage area, including Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer-winning 1958 play J.B. (set entirely in a circus ring), Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men (adapted into a single-set Academy Award-nominated ensemble film, directed by Sidney Lumet) and Patrick Hamilton’s Rope’s End (adapted into the single-set film Rope, famously directed by Alfred Hitchcock), to simply name a few. Establishing a restricted field to mean the restriction of the narrative to the fewest possible settings and the least amount of physical space, why, then, does a restricted field of action still work in a cinematic context?

Firstly, from an artistic point of view, one of the most obvious advantages is that it allows your audience to focus entirely on the performative aspects of the piece.

Quentin Tarantino, in a 1994 interview with Film Comment coinciding with the launch of his Oscar-winning film Pulp Fiction, discussed his intentions behind setting the majority of his first, independent, picture Reservoir Dogs (1992) in a single warehouse, and came to the conclusion that, “…it plays with theatrical elements in a cinematic form–it is contained, the tension isn’t dissipated, it’s supposed to mount, the characters aren’t able to leave, and the whole movie’s definitely performance-driven.”

Tarantino has a point. It’s the very tension implicit in the constriction of spaces and spaces between characters used in films built around restricted fields that leads to moments of memorable dramatic tension, such as the famed “They’re coming for you, Barbara!” outburst in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, or the endlessly imitated Mexican standoff (and the preceding hour’s worth [Tarantino again: "…it takes longer than an hour…because you go back and see the Mr. Orange story…every minute for them in the warehouse is a minute for you.”] of overly-verbose bickering) from the final moments of Reservoir Dogs. Stuffing your characters into (figuratively speaking) a little box together forces them to interact, and (a favourite technique of Romero’s, though also in vogue with John Carpenter [see 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13 and 2001’s Ghosts from Mars]) often with time and the necessary ratcheting-ever-upwards of the tension factor, brings out the worst in them as an advisory on the worst excesses and tendencies of human nature.

Siege films may have perfected a manner in which to draw out the dark, exploitative heart of a restricted field, but submarine films deserve a mention for putting the sordid technique to a better, more illuminating use: Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981), clocking in at anywhere from two and a half to nearly five hours long depending on the version under discussion, is regardless of its extreme length almost entirely set aboard a cramped, claustrophobic German submarine and is incredibly revealing in its depiction of men under intense pressure and forced to live together, a sensation and experience replicated with somewhat less success in by a film emanating from somewhere closer to the heart of the Hollywood system, The Hunt for Red October. Indeed, Das Boot may well simply be the modern expression of a tradition in naval films extending at least as far back as the pioneering The Enemy Below (1957), a tradition promptly and firmly secured in the new year by Run Silent, Run Deep (1958).

There are, of course, always exceptions, films that set themselves strange restrictions outside of the generically imaginable: Die Hard’s Nakatomi Plaza is an exception to the rule by virtue of the skyscraper’s sheer colossal size: it singularly comprises the vast majority of the film’s sets, including carparks, offices, veritable labyrinths of air vents, elevator shafts and sub-basements, a hefty rooftop, and that’s only at a glance). The semi-documentary Russian Ark, too, falls into this category (filmed as it was in its entirety in the Winter Palace), restricted to a single location but exempted from the standard constraints by the scale of the locale. Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away (2000) makes more than fair use of the semi-barren island on which the film is mostly set, with its network of caves, expanse of beach and rocky peaks, and all in a fashion very similar to that of John Boorman’s 1968 Lee Marvin/Toshirō Mifune vehicle, Hell in the Pacific.

I’d posit, here, a key difference between ‘restricted’ and what, for want of a better term, I’d have to call ‘restrained’ fields of action. Taking Rope as my foremost example of a film with a restricted field (that is, the story plays itself within the apartment), compare and contrast a film like Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo (2002), which has few locations but is narratively gifted with geographical and physical freedom and mobility, no matter how relatively scant. The most restricted set of films that come to mind are those issued by notaries of the original Dogma ’95 manifesto (Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration [1998] and Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots [1998] are perfect examples of how this short-lived attempt at crazed purity-minded avant-garde extremist minimalism worked).

Conversely, films stuck in a kind of cinematic No Man’s Land regarding the whole issue might include those belonging ‘road trip’ genre (prime examples include Bonnie and Clyde [1967], Wristcutters: A Love Story [2006], Easy Rider [1969], Sugarland Express [1974] and Two-Lane Blacktop [1971]), explicitly about travel, mobility and movement but constantly constricting their characters within intimate vehicle interiors, bringing incredible technical restrictions with the decision to film on the road, and as such these films are often more concerned with fetishising the sheer joy of motion and travel than depicting the places where the film might stop for a while.

I think, so that my point might be outlined in a slightly more vivid set of colours, it would be best to contrast all of the aforementioned with, for instance, the sheer breadth of geographical focus present in Francis Ford Coppola’s disarmingly diverse Apocalypse Now (particularly in its recut three-hour-plus Redux form), the Italo-American transnationalist attitude towards geography of The Godfather, the city-wandering aesthetics of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Sunset, the glamourised globe-trotting of the Indiana Jones tetralogy and James Bond: 007 series, or even the vast fantastical world-creation of sword and sorcery epics like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia. These films are all lousy with, if anything, a lack of restraint and restriction: they instead revel in their own narrative freedom. Take Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man series (2002, 2004, 2007), for instance: the titular heroic character is based at a fundamental level on the dynamics of movement, which in turn causes the film to run along similar lines; where would it be without those trademark city-traversing Tarzan-esque sequences of swinging from building to building? Films like Babel, with their postmodern insistence on the conflation of time and space and their globalized attitude towards narratives, jump from continent to continent and socio-cultural background to background with the ease that might otherwise come from the flicking of a switch.

Leaving the previously-elaborated artistic considerations of a filmmaker to one side, then, let’s consider the slightly more pressing and always over-riding financial considerations involved in the ever-industrial process that is movie-making in today’s braver, newer world:

The locating of a filmic narrative within a restricted field can often be related as much to the financial impediments of a geographically or visually wide-ranging period of principal photography as to any personal attachment on the parts of the writer and/or director to narrative or creative minimalism. Take, for example, Vincenzo Natali’s remarkable independent sci-fi effort Cube (1997), a “low-budget” film financed by the Canadian Film Corporation: it takes place on a single 14′ x 14′ set endlessly replicated throughout the film.

The early works of George Romero, most especially Night of the Living Dead & its slightly more ambitious bigger brother, Dawn of the Dead, are similarly restricted to a single house and a mall respectively, and Day of the Dead, while made with access to a relatively larger budget, focuses its attention largely on the inside of a claustrophobically self-contained military installation. Peter M. Nichols of the New York Times suggests that Romero made Night… with $114,000 American dollars and Day… with a reduced budget of $3,000,000, figures that Katrina Onstad concurs with in the same paper but a decade later, simultaneously pointing out that the far less contained and more recent Land of the Dead (2005) cost roughly $16 million to make by comparison, which is telling in itself.

Another bastion of indie hope would be Kevin Smith. His Clerks (1994) was made on anywhere between $25,000 and $27,000 American dollars (see Peter Mitchell’s interview with Smith on the topic, or Brian Johnson’s similar piece filed with Maclean’s, or even Owen Gleiberman’s short piece on Clerks II for Entertainment Weekly , all of which concur roughly with the above-quoted figure), and is set almost entirely inside a tiny convenience store and carried in a similar fashion by the sheer eccentricity of its rapid-fire dialogue, all, I’d posit, as a result of such a tiny budget.

Even today, your budget severely restricts one’s options when it comes to how widely and freely you may range: independently produced Scottish BAFTA winner Outpost (2007) was completed at a cost of two hundred thousand privately raised British pounds (‘Govan zombies taste film success’, BBC Scotland, Apr. 16), and is set entirely within a cramped, supposedly abandoned Nazi bunker, but features almost exorbitant amounts of gun-action and professional-level special effects sequences, I’d suggest as a result of its investment in staying in the one location. Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), which predates it by nearly three decades, was made on a shoestring budget, but has almost obnoxious amounts of splatter and latex-based gore to make up for the fact that the whole film takes place in a small wooden cabin, empty bar for two poorly constructed bookshelves.

The message seems clear: the less you spend on your locations, the more you have to spend on your film as a whole. Which is not to say that these financial and artistic reasons for reining in your own film don’t cross over: Dan O’Bannon’s spaced-out sci-fi comedy, Dark Star (John Carpenter’s first major film, 1974) takes place entirely on a tiny junker of a spaceship, and while the film itself was a tongue-in-cheek student film shot on 16mm, O’Bannon went on to reuse the skeleton of the script as a foundation for the much higher-budget science-fiction classic Alien [1979], validating the set-up, which remains basically the same (alien gets loose on a cramped, poorly-lit spaceship filled with late-seventies Average Joe types and subsequently wreaks havoc to the tune of wholesale slaughter, the thought of being locked in with an nigh-invincible biomechanical nightmare without any hope of escape amplifying for the audience and crew alike the atmosphere of horror by at least a hundredfold).

Extended consideration would suggest that, though films with unrestricted fields of action make up a significant majority of the number, restricted film making quickly carved out for itself a niche worthy of critical and commercial praise far beyond the realms of your average ‘art’ film, and justly so, coming as it does from a proud history of staged drama and allowing as it can, verifiably, the opportunity to free filmmakers with even the tiniest of budgets from the requirements of an unrestricted classical narrative, and instead to produce a character-based screenplay with many potential strengths and minimal associated costs.

Bordwell & Thompson’s Film Art, Hitchcock’s Rope, John Carpenter’s Dark Star, Romero’s Night, Dawn and Day of the (Living) Dead, the original and uncut Das Boot, Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, the BAFTA-winning indie-flick Outpost, and Raimi’s Evil Deads I + II may all be picked up from Amazon.

Works Cited:

Apocalypse Now: Redux. Dir. Francis F. Coppola. Perf. Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper and Harrison Ford. DVD. Miramax, 2001.

Before Sunrise. Dir. Richard Linklater. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy. DVD. Columbia Pictures, 1995.

Before Sunset. Dir. Richard Linklater. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy. DVD. Warner Independent Pictures, 2004.

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art. New York: McGraw Hill, 2002. 179.

Dark Star. Dir. John Carpenter. Perf. Dan O’Bannon. DVD. 1974.

Das Boot (the Boat). Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Perf. Jürgen Prochnow and Herbert Grönemeyer. DVD. Columbia Pictures, 1981.

Die Hard. Dir. John McTiernan. Perf. Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia, Alexander Godunov, Reginald Vel-Johnson, and Paul Gleason. DVD. 20th Century Fox, 1988.

Gleiberman, Owen.

Traditionally, New York and Los Angeles have formed (and informed, with their distinctive architectural sensibilities) the environmental backbones for any number of films noir. Chicago, too, has had at least a little exposure in its time, on account of the masses of gangster lore directly associated with the Windy City. Boston, however?

Not so much. That is, not, at least, until 2003 (with the release of Clint Eastwood’s Academy Award-nominated and -winning Mystic River, based in turn on a book by Boston crime writer Dennis Lehane). Before that, the last certified noir effort ostensibly set in Boston was 1950’s Mystery Street, starring Ricardo Montalban and directed by John Sturges, who went on to direct The Great Escape and also incidentally produce The Magnificent Seven. The writer of Mystery Street, Sydney Boehm, penned roughly ten certifiable classic-period films noir (including several that starred the ever-reliable Edward G. Robinson) in his time, many of them A-listed (Sylvia, Hell on Frisco Bay, Black Tuesday, Rogue Cop, The Big Heat, Second Chance, Union Station, The Undercover Man).

With the success of Mystic River, Boston (a city sorely in need of cinematic attention) suddenly became of interest to Hollywood, and within four years, we were gifted with Scorcese’s The Departed and Ben Affleck’s Lehane-optioned Gone Baby Gone. Lacking the cosmopolitan nuance of New York, the plain-to-the-eye vice of Las Vegas, or even the colourful reputation for ethnically-diverse casual violence commonly associated with South Central Los Angeles, this working-class Irish-Catholic town has become the new center of a seemingly conscious movement, an emergent school of ‘Boston Noir’ (Lehane’s words) interested in questioning the kind of workaday existences played upon in, for instance, Paul Schrader’s Detroit-based 1978 directorial debut and subtly noir-influenced ensemble piece Blue Collar.

For all that the ever-ephemeral noir owes to early Weimar expressionism and the tastes of French cineastes, it’s what J.P. Telotte calls above all a “distinctly American creative form” (p. 3), and can be (indeed, often is) used as a way to parse the social undercurrents of America without coming to necessarily feel the appropriate amount of societal guilt.

The seminal American noir text, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, while being in no way as comprehensive as one might still like, opens on a cracking high when it concurs, and subsequently notes that film noir is “literally ‘black film’, not just in the sense of being full of physically dark images, nor of reflecting a dark mood in American society, but equally, almost empirically, as a black slate on which culture could inscribe its ills and in the process produce a catharsis to relieve them”. (p. 1)

James Naremore, the last of the critical big guns in the everlasting war to justify and/or discredit the validity of the much-vaunted auteur theory, argues in “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea” that, since “nobody is sure whether the films in question constitute a period, a genre, a cycle, a style or simply a phenomenon,” (p. 12), then “a plausible case could indeed be made that, far from dying out with the old studio system, noir is almost entirely a creation of postmodern culture–a belated reading of classic Hollywood that was popularized by cineastes of the French New Wave, appropriated by reviewers, academics, and film-makers, and then recycled on TV.” (p. 14) Naremore  seems to be arguing for a loosening of restrictions, greater fluidity between genres and the lessening of categorical requirements: that is, he’s indirectly making an argument for the existence of so-called ‘neo-noir’, the postmodern re-imagining of noir through a modern lens and sans the monochrome, a category into which a film like Gone Baby Gone must surely fall.

Casey Affleck’s baby-faced private detective is quite clearly another in a proud line of bitter, defeated, streetsmart gumshoes that extends all the way back to Rick Blaine and Mike Hammer, living on the edge of criminality and at the edge of their means, though his quick temper leaves him more surely in the company of Hammer than Bogart. Robert Lang suggests, in an analysis of the homosexual and homophobic overtones of violent early film noir titled Looking for the Great Whatzit, that the “steady weakening of the professional identity of the detective–observable, for example, in such noir films as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder My Sweet (1944) and Out of the Past (1947)–ends in the figure of Mike Hammer who, as neither cop nor crook, appears in both the film and the novel to have lost all traces of a professional code by which he operates as a detective.” (p.35.)

It isn’t simply Casey Affleck, however, who finds himself tarred with the necessarily black brush of noir disaffection. The entire cast, with their machinations and intrigue, violent appetites and misanthropy, are torn straight from the same kind of cloth from which Chandler, Hammett and Cain once wrought their own Machiavellian agents. Tolette again, in “Rounding up “The Usual Suspects”: The Comforts of Character and Neo-Noir”, finds that “film noir has always provided us with a host of characters who seem to challenge our expectations, whose motivations are far from transparent, whose desires seem to cut across the grain of the status quo” (p. 14), a judgement he subsequently uses to justify the character-driven sensibilities of early neo-noir’s self-appointed poster child: Christopher McQuarrie’s The Usual Suspects.

But what of the aesthetic? What of the deep golden tones and the blue shadows, the fantastic oranges, the sunsets and the dingy, bronzed backstreets of Gone Baby Gone’s Boston? Arguably, the film’s strangely varied palette makes for a film just as tonally dark as anything David Fincher ever burned into a piece of celluloid. Gone Baby Gone is optically noir in the same way that subversive serial-killer-killer show Dexter is: a sunbleached Miami coastline and Alan Ball-esque suburban fantasy imagery working hand-in-hand (coexisting happily, in fact) with blood and grit on a fairly colossal scale.

Rian Johnson’s 2005 indie-film Brick, also, is set in ever-sunny early ’90s California, and thus bears almost none of the traditional visual cues and hallmarks associated with classical noir, with its cast composed entirely of disaffected SoCal teenagers. Still, it imbues its very firmament with the correct noir sensibility we have all come to know and love, exhorting vicious nihilism from every unblocked pore and topping it off by tearing wholesale huge chunks of Dashiel Hammett from the Jungian ether in the name of postmodernism.

The film seems to penetrate the need (indeed, seeming prerequisite) for a black-and-white aesthetic, for “oblique camera angles, low-key lighting, unbalanced compositions, reflective surfaces [that] logically suit its dark subjects (crime, corruption, the eruption of desire)” (p. 4, J.P. Tolette’s “Self Portrait: Painting and the Film Noir”), and come out the other side with its attitude still well intact, as is the nature of ‘neo-noir’. We can see from these examples and, notably, Gone Baby Gone, that film Noir is here to stay. Like the proverbial return of the dark past we cannot escape the dark interior of the world we inhabit, nor the creative works of those who seek to draw it out.

Acquire Dennis Lehane’s Gone, Baby, Gone, and/or the fine film adapted from it from Amazon.com.

Works Cited:

Gone Baby Gone. Dir. Ben Affleck. Perf. Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Amy Ryan, Ed Harris. 2007.

Lang, Robert. “Looking for the “Great Whatzit”: “Kiss Me Deadly” and Film Noir.” Cinema Journal 27 (1988): 32-44. University of Texas Press.

Naremore, James. “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea.” Film Quarterly 49 (1996): 12-28. University of California Press.

Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, eds. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook P, 1979.

Telotte, J. P. “Rounding up “The Usual Suspects”: The Comforts of Character and Neo-Noir.” Film Quarterly 51 (1998): 12-20. University of California Press.

Telotte, J. P. “Self-Portrait: Painting and the Film Noir.” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3 (1989): 3-17. University of Chicago Press.

Obsessed as it so openly is with the “grey” space between worlds, sub-cultures and people, it seems overly fitting that The Grey Space, the debut release from Elefant Traks-backed Sydney-side duo Horrorshow, should happen to be both the very definition of a out-of-left-field, “indie gem” release that fuels its exploits with a combination of sheer hi-octane musical moxy, a vision verging concurrently on the deeply personal and the joyously irreverent, and that raw, devil-may-care spirit peculiar to those with nothing to lose, while being simultaneously an LP possessing of such deft polish and a meticulous eye for detail as one might otherwise have only come to expect from a well-established and tour-honed act.

Horrorshow: Uplift

In a year that saw the release of Bliss ‘n’ Eso’s monolithic Flying Colours, The Herd’s razorblade-laced production bonanza Summerland, Astronomy Class and their full-flavoured, reggae-rich inauguration Exit Strategy, Muph + Plutonic’s And Then Tomorrow Came, Downsyde’s All City, Drapht’s Brothers Grimm, TZU’s Computer Love, Pure Product’s Eviction Notice, Sydney-side compatriots Spit Syndicate’s Towards the Light and The Tongue’s Shock and Awe, The Grey Space is ably capable of trading evenly matched musical and lyrical blows with any of the aforementioned luminaries. Purposefully lacking in the bombast, antics and nigh-glossolalia of B’n'E, vocalist/lyricist Solo instead projects at every level what is, for my money, one of the most sincere portraits of an artist in love with the nature of his work and the turning of his world ever laid to tape, perhaps best captured on the heart-stoppingly charming and mind-bendingly catchy “All Summer Long”. In search of a comparison, it may be fair to suggest he channels Urthboy at his most romantic and his least embittered, even if his sentiment lies perhaps somewhere else, somewhere closer to the momentary and slightly wretched wistfulness of The Tongue (for comparison, sample “That Word”, a highlight from Shock and Awe, an otherwise largely unsympathetic album predicated on The Tongue’s fairly one-note self-imaginings as a roustabout and understated raconteur).

Horrorshow: Put it to Your Head

Producer Adit oversees the installation of incomparably tasteful and surprisingly (nay, refreshingly) prominent bass lines reminiscent of the work of Marcus Miller into feature pieces like “Put It To Your Head”, What’s Going On-era brass arrangements into the undeniably playful “The Headline”, and a searing, funk-laden electric guitar that solos over “Note to Self (No. 81)” and that wouldn’t sound at all out of place on a hot slab of classic Isley Brothers wax. That he is a relative newcomer to the scene is made even more remarkable by the fact that, at his best, Adit can cut a soul track to challenge any in the game, up to and including the work of Plutonic Lab on Muph + Plutonic’s seminal 2004 release, Hunger Pains (”Paracetamol”, for instance, equally notable for its featuring Muph in a moment of rare and bemusingly sincere modesty). As a pair, they’re certified dynamite: the brighter Adit’s flair for sumptuous production burns, the more self-effacing Solo becomes, documenting (with naught but intricate rhymes and an easy, nigh-laconic drawl to his name) a world of sad-eyed girls and ancient-eyed adolescents, vague regrets and small pleasures.

Horrorshow: All Summer Long

Moving with commendable efficiency and yet without undue haste, Solo covers everything from the glamour and the soul-sucking drain of the endless party circuit (”The Party Life”) to nostalgic recollections of a misspent delinquent youth (”Uplift”, “Waiting For The 5.04″, [another "train" song in the Aussie hip-hop canon, and one that compares favourably with The Hilltop Hoods' "Station to Station" and Seth Sentry's "Train Catcher"]) and the ramblings of a depressive (”Celapram”), and between meaty, unabashedly vital verses even finds time for jazzy interludes to make True Live proud (”Days Past”) and a little freeform spoken-word poetry (”Dire Straits Pt. 1″). Though I’m naturally averse to making such a declaration, I can’t manage to get around the simple fact that, from end to end, The Grey Space is that rarest of things: an album, complete in every sense of the word and almost Brutalist in its construction, such is the clinically brilliant and uncompromising nature of its track listing, the quality of which is sufficient to make one wonder wherefore art the B-sides?

The Grey Space: a new and devastating salvo loosed from the ever-swelling and increasingly variegated arsenal of an Australian hip-hop scene that has finally and resolutely come of age. Everything that Eminem is to readily courted controversy, introspection on the vaunted nature of celebrity and meta-textual examinations of the fabric of West Coast hip hop or that Bliss ‘n’ Eso and The Hilltop Hoods are to spirited celebrations of the ties that bind the inebriated antipodean brotherhood of man, Horrorshow is to the tumult of exuberant and irrepressible youth. If you like what you hear, we strongly urge you pick up a copy from Amazon or download it as MP3s for only US$0.99 a track and support some world class Australian Hip Hop.

Track Listing:

1. Uplift

2. Waiting For The 5.04

3. Choose None (feat. Just Enuf)

4. The Party Life (feat. Nick Lupi)

5. Days Past

6. Dire Straits Pt. 1

7. Celapram

8. All Summer Long

9. Put It To Your Head (feat. Fame)

10. No Rides Left.

11. The Headline

12. Note to Self (No. 81)

“We sat two hours in front of the room where the censors were looking at the film…and finally they came out and they said, ‘Mr Lang, this film has practically everything about which we disagree and which we cannot accept but it is done with such integrity that we don’t want to make any cuts.’” — Fritz Lang, interviewed by Powers, Reed and Chase in 1973 – (“Fritz Lang: Interviews”, 171 [note that, unless otherwise indicated, all references to interviews with Lang come from this text, being as it is the authoritative compilation])

When one tracks the progress of the German Expressionist movement as it relates to the development and refinement of means of cinematic expression, the progression unearthed is undeniably one that trends towards integration and consolidation with more classical and conventional forms of aesthetic articulation as they directly related to the medium of celluloid: augmentation, rather than demonstration, discretion rather than ostentation.

Placing Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came Into The World (1920), Fritz Lang’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) at one end of the scale and Lang’s undeniably masterful M (1931) at the other, we quickly come to see the evidence of a stark and blisteringly accelerated evolution, taking place over the course of a decade and moving quickly away from the conspicuous visual stylization, unashamedly overt and deliberately two-dimensional set design and manifest obsession with the painterly and the emotional that marks the image system of an early German Expressionist film.

Ever-more-concerned not with the depiction but the reproduction of a recognisable reality, over this ten year period we see the results of an inexorable swing towards total thematic and artistic consolidation within the realms of the pragmatic and the unabashedly ‘realistic’: as the understanding and implementation of geometry trends back towards the linear and the definitively Euclidean and away from the determinedly abstract, and the architecture transmutes from the monolithic and the obtusely monumental to merely the Gothic and overly prodigious, so too do the cast of characters become less like a set of hideous Caligari-esque caricatures and more like the people they purport to represent, in line with the dichotomous requirements of a self-styled ‘realist’ outlook.

The films of German Expressionists begin, then, to conceal their once-patent artistic affiliation so as to more readily allow the so-called ‘man on the street’ to identify with their content and narrative, a process that finds its eventual apogee in the American films noir Lang would direct and help to influence into perpetuity, where the real world and the world of Expressionist art blend seamlessly and overt surrealism is confined to dream sequences, most memorably in Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940).

Indeed, the connection between the tropes of Expressionist and later Modernist art and the image system of the classical film noir is so strong as to have precipitated the authoring of a paper on just such a subject (“Self-Portrait: Painting and the Film Noir.”) by renowned film critic J.P. Telotte, who summarises an aesthetic of noir very close to Lang’s own: “oblique camera angles, low-key lighting, unbalanced compositions, reflective surfaces [that] logically suit its dark subjects (crime, corruption, the eruption of desire)” (4) It is unsurprising that it is Lang to whom such a style is chiefly attributed, for he was its foremost living practitioner; in his own words, speaking in 1958 to Jean Domarchi and Jacques Rivette:  “[Murnau] left very early for America, and was already dead when I arrived there…” (23)

Peter Lorre’s biographer, Stephen D. Youngkin, concurs (aptly and with great brevity restating the thesis which I have described above) in the following passage, noting “realism and expressionism set parameters that embraced light and dark, sound and silence, emotion and reason, sanity and sickness, revenge and justice. Lang was at his artistic best when searching out common ground amongst them.” (56)

And thus it is that we arrive finally at M, most probably Lang’s finest work, combining that streamlined-and-integrated Expressionist eye-for-detail (noted above and that we first begin to see seriously developing in the grandiose science-fiction aesthetic of Metropolis [1927]) with an everyman’s sensibility designed to pluck at the heartstrings of every parent and upstanding citizen in post-WW1 Deutschland and beyond, drenched as the film is in a fervent desire to plug directly into the common fears of a German populace surrounded by post-war violence and lurid tales of mass murderers operating in the Rhineland (Lang says as much to Powers, Reed and Chase, 170).

Jason Crouthamel, in a study of sexuality and violence in post-WW1 Germany, notes the presence of “…infamous serial killer, Peter Kurten…after the war Kurten became a full-fledged serial killer, murdering dozens of young women in a frenzy of sadism that terrified Dusseldorf for months in 1925.” (76) Crouthamel even goes so far as to suggest that Kurten was the model for Peter Lorre’s Beckert, a claim that originates with one of Lang’s contemporaries, critic Siegfried Kracauer, whom Lang personally found odious and whose claims he refuted with little patience or care: in his 1963 interview with Gero Gandert, his response to the suggestion of Kracauer’s potential legitimacy is a curt, “First, Kurten was not an admitted killer of children, second, the screenplay for M was finished before Kurten was apprehended.” (36)

Nevertheless, despite his protestations, Lang and his long-time collaborator, wife Thea von Harbou, were clearly aware of the zeitgeist into which their work was being born. On release (says Youngkin), “moviegoers blocked the sidewalks. Automobiles jammed the street. Insider the theatre, spectators clapped and whistled for and against capital punishment while Kurten sat on death row…Classic stature came to Lang’s favorite film overnight and stayed.” (63)

Understandably so. In every way, M is a triumph, not least in its sheer technicality, in the audacity of its presentation: Lang’s first ‘talkie’ (synchronised sound having only been employed at a commercial level since 1927, with the release of The Jazz Singer), diagetic sound is nonetheless deployed with an incredibly progressive sense and understanding of its capacities to enhance the cinematic experience (Lang to Gero Gandert in 1963: “…when the silence of the streets is sliced to shreds by the shrill police whistles, or the unmelodic, constantly recurring whistling of the child murderer, that gives mute expression to his compulsive urges.” [35]) This fact is made more amazing still by the relatively infinitesimal number of prior examples in the canon able to be considered beforehand.

There is no amateurish fumbling, no conservative treatment of the material at hand: this is an all-out assault on the senses of an audience unaccustomed to being pounded and battered with such ferocity.

Having lost (or rather, readily surrendered) the ability to ably call on the surreal and the overtly sublime, Lang instead begins to focus on the play of light and shadow, using unconventionally harsh lighting rigs that emphasise either extreme of the monochromatic palette to be found in 35mm black-and-white stock, obsessing now over the placement of every vicious line, carving up his frame as he blasts the city of Berlin and its soundstages with phosphorescent bulbs. To Andy Klein, it is as if “everything seems determined by some odious geometry, a rigorous mathematical system too complex for humans to ever comprehend.” (1)

And it is Berlin and no other: undoubtedly so. Peter Hogue, in his Film Comment article, “Fritz Lang: Our Contemporary”, argues “…the crime story is a function of, and occasion for, a wide-ranging portrait of a city…” (10) The city is as much a character in this film as any of its motley crew of grifters, pickpockets, panhandlers and policemen. They are all bit players besides the Teutonic marvel of Lang’s Berlin, which leads a dualistic existence with its long paved avenues and sunlit streets, always filled with the sounds and sights of playing children, beneath, behind and above which always lies the sordid implication of sleazy underground clubs, sprawling shadowlands and vast industrial complexes lit with much homage paid to the technique and implication of heavy-handed chiaroscuro lighting design.

To observe the comings and goings of the police and the criminal underclass is to watch the scurrying of rats; Lang at one point shoots the interception of the now-marked Beckert from above, and the resultant melee is almost comical in its absurdity, recalling some kind of warped Chaplin sketch gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Hogue warns the reader of the dangers of becoming caught up in “the technical felicities and social ironies often rehearsed by film scholars” (10), and rightly so, for there is so much more to Lang’s masterwork than simple technical competency on a grand and illustrious scale, and to Lang than simply that he was cast in the role of “geometrician of doom” (11). Lang, to Hogue and subsequently to myself, is about more than the implications of a fatalistic geometry for a city under siege from within: he notes that “the vertiginous shot of a geometrically abstracted stairwell is associated” not with more symbolic abstraction, but the very real and concrete “absence and death of a child…his films…evoke common human experience” (11).

Youngkin recounts, utilising extensive referencing of on-set accounts, how Lang abused and drove Lorre ever onwards in search of the perfect performance as they reached the penultimate scene, summarising the process thus, “Described as brutal, abusive, exacting, driven, omnipotent, imperious and autocratic…Lang was a perfectionist…” (p. 59) “…[he] had literally beaten a performance out of Lorre.” (p. 62) Though one may actively cast a shadow of doubt over Lang’s methods, their outcome cannot be denied:

“… I have no control over this. This evil thing inside me, the fire, the voices, the torment! It’s there all the time — driving me to wander the streets, following me silently, but I can feel it there — it’s me, pursuing myself — I want to escape, to escape from myself but it’s impossible… I can’t escape, I have to obey it, I have to run endless streets — I want to escape, to get away and I’m pursued by ghosts — ghosts of mothers and of those children, they never leave me, they are there, always there, always, always except when I do it — when I … then I can’t remember anything and afterwards I see those posters and read what I’ve done. Did I do that? But I can’t remember anything about it, but who will believe me? Who knows what it’s like to be me? How I’m forced to act — how I must! — must!– don’t want to — but must — and then a voice screams — I can’t bear to hear it — I can’t go on, I can’t go on …”

In a 1964 interview with Michele Manceaux, Lang recalls, “during the silent movie era we were forced to prefer action. Now, I don’t think that action is superfluous, quite the opposite, but one can also explore character. In a film one must find everything…” (39) Where there has been until now such art and such artifice, there suddenly stands, at the trembling climax of M, a single, static shot of a bent and bowed Lorre at his theatrical best, disallowed his signature theme or the ability to remain partially shielded from the camera by the diffusing stratum of a shop window or the edge of the frame: hounded on- and off-camera to his wits’ end, besieged within and without, for long moments pausing and clutching at himself before erupting into paroxysms of guilt, fear and loathing. If ever Lang’s Expressionist urges were sublimated by the thoroughly Prussian industrialism of his chosen profession, they vent themselves here, as Lorre’s febrile and impassioned ranting threatens to warp the very nature of the cinematic reality we have faced. If ever there was a time to suddenly feel sympathy for the Devil, this is it. The superlative 2-disc Criterion re-release of M might be purchased from Amazon for a surprisingly reasonable sum.

Works Cited

Butler, Erik. “Dr. Mabuse: Terror and Deception of the Image.” German Quarterly 78 (2005): 481-97. Project MUSE. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Cowen, Michael. “The Heart Machine: “Rhythm” and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” Modernism/modernity 14 (2007): 225-48. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 20 Apr. 2009 <http://0-muse.jhu.edu.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au/journals/modernism-modernity/v014/14.2cowan.html>.

Crouthamel, James. “Male Sexuality and Psychological Trauma: Soldiers and Sexual Disorder in World War I and Weimar Germany.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 (2008): 60-84. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Grant, Barry K., and Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang: interviews. Univ. P of Mississippi, 2003.

Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2008.

Hogue, Peter. “Fritz Lang Our Contemporary.” Film Comment 26 (1990): 9-13. Academic Research Library. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Kaes, Anton. “The Cold Gaze: Notes on Mobilization and Modernity.” New German Critique 59 (1993): 105-17. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Klein, Andy. “Fritz Lang.” American Film 15 (1990): 56-59. Academic Research Library. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Lungstrum, Janet W. “The Display Window: Designs and Desires of Weimar Consumerism.” New German Critique 76 (1999): 115-60. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 21 Apr. 2009.

Naremore, James. “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea.” Film Quarterly 49 (1996): 12-28. University of California Press.

M. Dir. Fritz Lang. Perf. Peter Lorre, Ellen Widmann, Inge Landgut, Otto Wernicke,

Theodor Loos. DVD. Criterion, 1998.

Rubin, Martin. Thrillers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Symons, Stephane. “Deleuze and the Various Faces of the Outside.” Theory & Event 9 (2006). Project MUSE. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 20 Apr. 2009 <http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.3symons.html>.

Telotte, J. P. “Self-Portrait: Painting and the Film Noir.” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3 (1989): 3-17. University of Chicago Press.

Titford, John S. “Object-Subject Relationships in German Expressionist Cinema.” University of Texas Cinema Journal 13 (1973): 17-24. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Willis, Don. “Fritz Lang: Only Melodrama.” Film Quarterly 33 (1980): 2-11. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora.

Youngkin, Stephen D. The Lost One A Life of Peter Lorre. New York: University P of Kentucky, 2005.

Photo Credit: Leo Fuchs

Pool hustling, state-sanctioned deathmatches between heavily armed Japanese teenagers, and high-octane hybridised football/roller-skating skirmishes undertaken as a foil for the violent desires of the masses all may not, initially, appear to have an awful lot in common. Appearances being, as they are, deceptive, it’s important to note that all three cinematic narratives (respectively, Robert Rossen’s The Hustler [1961], Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale [2000] and Norman Jewison’s Rollerball [1975]) are ostensibly and verifiably films with game-based narratives, in which there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, points to be scored and sanctified sets of rules to obey or to break. They only vary in the degree to which they are willing to take and to run with the definition of the word ‘game’.

Murder may not, according to a certain set of societal standards, be a ‘game’, per se, but you need not look further than the inglorious history of the gladiatorial arena (and various celebrated filmic interpretations thereof, going back as far as sword and sandal epics such as Delmer Daves’ Demetrius and the Gladiators [1954]) to see that it can be made part of one with ease, and has (amongst many others, Paul Bertel’s Death Race 2000 [1976], Paul Michael Glaser’s The Running Man [1987], and it would be impossible not to mention Ridley Scott’s Gladiator [2000])

Games, of all sorts, are important to human beings: they’re an intrinsic part of our psyches, infect and affect every facet of Western culture with some fragment of themselves, and that’s whether we recognize the fact or not. It should naturally follow, then, that games are an important part of storytelling, and nowhere is this more evident than in the world of moving pictures: if there’s a game to be played, no matter how obscure, you can rest relatively easy in the knowledge that, in all probability, there’s a film somewhere out there to satisfy its proponents.

In keeping with the principles of good storytelling, however, films that feature games prominently are not always about the games that are played:

In the future wake of mass unemployment and proportional youth disenfranchisement, Battle Royale finds the Japanese government setting up annual games of death between members of a single, randomly-selected, Japanese ninth-form class; the unwilling participants (chief amongst them, our protagonist Shuya Nanahara) are kept from escaping with fitted explosive collars, similar in design (though admittedly the idea is less crassly executed here) to the ‘intestinators’ in the Christopher Lambert pulp sci-fi/prison flick, Fortress [1993].

The aim of the program, though never explicitly discussed, appears to be Orwellian in nature: simultaneously terrifying the populace so as to keep them in line, whilst providing violent tittilation as a form of distraction (in what is admittedly the most charming moment of synchronicity in an entirely too-compelling essay, Anthony Antoniou suggests, in The Cinema of Japan and Korea, that “[...] blurring the lines between entertainment and propaganda, in order to keep the masses docile and distracted […] is reminiscent of Norman Jewison’s Rollerball (1975)”) (p. 225)

Battle Royale details a world in which children are abandoned or callously mistreated by adults and authority figures (Shuya’s unstable father commits suicide in plain view of his son, while another character is sexually abused by her alcoholic mother, and two others are killed by a teacher simply to provide object lessons, before the game proper has even begun), education is a thing of the past and death is an amusement, Antoniou goes on to argue that the film uses ‘the game’ as a way of issuing, through the eyes of its victims, “a savage indictment of a failed competitive education system, a nation’s disaffected youth, and a proud but ailing martial civilization punishing the next generation for its own failings.” (p. 228)

Despite already being contentious in its subject, Fukasaku digs himself a deeper (that is, far more contentious) philosophical hole by consciously couching the film and its terminology in the realm of the ‘game’, even to the extent of flashing up the names of the dead students, in the manner of a scoreboard, so that we, the audience, can keep casual track of the carnage (an assertion supported by Antoniou’s own observations on p. 227).

As mentioned above, Jewison’s Rollerball is not dissimilar in its own approach to the game-based narrative, though it belongs to an entirely different era of film-making and approaches its subject with a certain hip ’70s hallucinogenic sensibility: the film pits James Caan’s champion athlete Jonathan E. (heroic, quiet, muscular and virile Texan that he is) against his corporate overlords (personified by John Houseman’s part avuncular, all serpentine Mr. Bartholomew) at an emotional and intellectual level, while simultaneously having Jonathan engage in well-paid transnational athletic combat with other young men, both at home and abroad, with crippling injury or death going from a possibility to a certainty as the film progresses; the conflicts run parallel to one another and intersect on the playing field: John Hassard et al. point out in Body and Organisation that, “Jonathan’s bruised and bleeding body is continually counterposed to the distant gaze of the suited executives who watch from behind glass.” (p. 77)

Thelma Altschuler, in “Using Popular Media to Achieve Traditional Goals” (a tellingly titled essay), posits that Robert Rossen’s arguable masterwork, The Hustler, is a prime example of the aforementioned phenomenon, distinguishing between the “pure game” (played between Eddie Felson and Minnesota Fats) and the rest of the film’s narrative, the vast majority of which is concerned with the ‘game’ that Bert and Eddie play, a contest of will rather than skill, which Eddie tragically and inevitably loses (due to what Alan Casty calls his destructive “desire for money and status within his art”), as he must in order to develop the necessary ‘character’ to achieve the film’s final, Pyrrhic victory.

So it is that game-based narratives have their protagonists face off against antagonists (the other Rollerball teams, the other students, and Minnesota Fats, respectively) in the game of their choice, as engaging in the game brings them into contact with the narrative’s true antagonist, as the basis for higher-level interpersonal and societal conflicts beyond the scope of the arena: Rollerball’s Jonathan E. has his Mr. Bartholomew, and so, too, naive school student turned combatant Shuya Nanahara has his Mr. Kitano (his former teacher, now a director of the deathmatch in which Shuya is a participant), and “Fast” Eddie Felson has, as described above, Bert (arguably the most developed of the three, described by Casty as the ultimate combination of “satanic power and human weakness” [p. 8]).

Casty, in his essay The Films of Robert Rossen, aptly points out that, where The Hustler is concerned, “what is important is the way he is playing pool [...], the way he is winning and why”. Casty recognises that The Hustler is infinitely more concerned with the state of play regarding the hearts and minds of Americans than anything that ever happened on a pool table. It is, he suggests, not about pool sharks and pool players, gamblers and gambling, but rather depicts “the struggle between the girl and the gambler for the unformed soul and the unshaped energies of the pool-playing young American, skilled but isolated, without purpose, mission or connection.” (p. 8)

Naturally enough, however, the similarities eventually break down, be they artistic or philosophical in nature: Where The Hustler and Battle Royale have a firm grasp on lucidity and complex narrative, Rollerball sacrifices a certain amount of itself to the altar of ambiguity in the name of squeezing in large amounts of surrealist imagery, which hinders the search for certainty in analysis.

The Hustler makes sure to spend its time in the here and now and centers itself closely around the life and times of its protagonist, Eddie, both Rollerball and Battle Royale make a special point of contrasting high-brow art and culture (symbols of normality and the outside world) with the brutality of the killing fields their respective protagonists engage with.

Both, for instance, open with classical compositions playing over relatively innocuous scenery: in the case of Rollerball, Tomaso Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor” complements the stark, darkened Rollerball stadium, while Battle Royale contents itself with Giuseppe Verdi’s “Dies Irae,” which plays over violent waves crashing onto a section of coast line. Again, as the narratives progress, both films counterpose compositions in lieu of purpose-built soundtracks with increasingly violent imagery and greater ironic effect: Royale favours Bach, Johann Strauß Sr., Johann Strauß Jr. and Schubert, while Rollerball fancies Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.

This isn’t the sign of a spectacular auteurist at work: Thomas Fahy (Killer Culture: Classical Music and the Art of Killing in Silence of the Lambs and Se7en) points out that many horror/thriller films “equate classical music with the art of killing” and “[create] a tension between culture and barbarism” (p. 28); both films are making an obvious and much-belaboured point about the connection and contrast between brutality and high culture, and the effect that can be visited on an audience by removing any kind of demarcation between them, similar in concept to what Bruce Sterling in his 1985 preface to William Gibson’s Burning Chrome called the “one-two combination of high-tech and low-life”. (p. 3)

The motivation here is clear: to expose the barbarous lows to which humanity can sink; “savagery becomes an “art” that reflects the violence, hatred, indifference, deceit and depravity endemic to modern capitalist society.” (p. 28) Fahy, again, has his finger on the pulse.

The closest The Hustler can come to approximating this is in the oppositional traits of its main protagonist and his love interest: the well-educated, literate ‘college girl’ with aspirations of becoming a writer, and the burly street-wise hustler, but that is clearly because its aim is different, its target similar (not merely capitalism, as in Rollerball, but the very foundation of the American psyche, the American Dream and the competitiveness it inspires, comes under attack) but still not in line with those of the other films. Casty notes that, “only in one scene, in the open air […] can Eddie verbalise his sense of his skill as more than a tool of conquest […] perhaps such things as fights and pool games can best be employed as negative symbols of imperfect humanity.”

Finally, there is also the matter of the relative success of each film, in its attempt to extend itself on wings of metaphor. Of all three, Rollerball is the one to fail grievously, clutching for dear life its precious artistic ambiguity to the last. As Jonathan E., wounded and exhausted, faces down his corporate masters in the ruins of the blasted arena, the film’s twin salvos, against facets of machismo and corporate culture both, should meet and detonate; instead, it must be said that they fizzle, as Jonathan E., far from making of himself a sacrifice in a doomed world, instead rises up from his grievous injuries, born up by the chanting of the audience, and skates on into an unknown future, solidifying a theory brought up Asbjorn Gronstad in One Dimensional Men: Fight Club and the Poetics of the Body, that “the body of the hero of the quintessential action movie is damaged only to confirm and preserve the dominant, one-sided masculinity inhabiting the psychology of the film’s narrative origin” (p. 12)

In that one moment of reverting to type, all of Jewison’s good work is undone. Nothing has been resolved, obliterating the whole point of summoning up the game’s for use as a narrative technique in the name of (admittedly impressive) effects sequences, which stands in contrast to The Hustler and Battle Royale, which see their games through to the end, summoning them up to deal with both of their parallel plots: respectively, Fast Eddie finally beats Minnesota Fats in a mirror sequence to the film’s opening confrontation, and eclipses Bert in doing so (though at a terrible cost), and Kitano, Shuya’s tormentor and the representative of a whole society, is dispatched in the same classroom where the game began. The conclusions are artful and largely complete (Battle Royale leaves a small opening for a sequel, which was eventually completed), and prove the worth of the narrative trope.