Watching Ordet

The farm woman who has died in childbirth is stretched out in an open coffin as her weeping husband sits beside her. The mad brother who thinks he is the second coming of Christ walks into the room holding the hand of the couple's young daughter. As the small group of mourning relatives and friends looks on, wondering what blasphemy or sacrilege is about to be committed at this solemn moment, the would-be incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth addresses the dead woman in a calm and quiet voice. Rise up, he commands her, lift yourself out of your coffin and return to the world of the living. Seconds later, the woman's hands begin to move. You think it must be a hallucination, that the point of view has shifted from objective reality to the mind of the addled brother. But no. The woman opens her eyes, and just seconds after that she sits up, fully restored to life.
There is a large crowd in the theater, and half the audience bursts out laughing when they see this miraculous resurrection. You don't begrudge them their skepticism, but for you it is a transcendent moment, and you sit there clutching your sister's arm as tears roll down your cheeks. What cannot happen has happened, and you are stunned by what you have witnessed.
Something changes in you after that.
-- Paul Auster, from Invisible (2009).

unreal city

1. “I still have a strange sense of dissociation, as if I am an observer of someone else’s disaster movie.”

2. “It must have been 1951. Frankfurt was bombed flat during the war ... Frankfurt was indescribable. I’d borrowed a studio from a painter who was himself in Paris. I was working there for an exhibition in the Zimmergalerie Franck, and every morning I took my son to school. The walk to the school was across an enormous bombsite. A great heap of rubble, with here and there some places that had been flattened so you could walk over them like paths. There were some outer walls of houses still standing. A doorway, and some stretches of wall. It was a surreal landscape, and it inspired me enormously. If you walk through a town that lies in ruins, then the first thing you naturally think of is building. And then, as you rebuild such a town, you wonder whether life there will be just the same, or what will be different.” -- Constant Nieuwenhuys, interviewed in BOMB magazine, 2005.

3. “Night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so terrible and so unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently fixed in my mind. Big buildings and wide streets, cement and steel were no longer permanent. They, too, were fragile and destructible. A torch, a bomb, a strong enough wind, and they, too, would come undone or get knocked down. But I so loved the unity of those times. I loved Lakeview Avenue, my street -- and it was my street -- and I loved the Community Union. I mostly loved everything I was seeing, and especially all that I was learning.” -- Bill Ayers describes riots in Cleveland, Ohio, 1966, in Fugitive Days (Beacon Press, 2001).

Mobile phone pictures taken on Peterborough St, Avonside Drive, Madras St, Manchester St, Victoria St, Colombo St and in Lyttelton, Shirley and Woolston, between January 4 and March 2, 2012.

Do you believe in second chance?

My piece on Almodovar's The Skin I Live In is at Werewolf.

Destruction as the cause of coming into being

Preaching to the perverted (lost and found Blue Velvet)

There is more story. That’s the obvious and immediate thrill of deleted scenes or lost footage showing up, and adding to or expanding the experience of a film you love and know well, or thought you knew well. The same kind of thrill as finding more Heavenly Creatures – or an alternate version that extends the story by a couple of days – when you first heard about Angela Carter’s unproduced Parker/Hulme screenplay. The same kind of thrill – you imagine – that keeps fantasy and comic book fans going back for more, and generates entire internets of fan fiction. More story. Sometimes the new stuff, or newly available stuff, incorporates itself so smoothly into the old stuff that you can no longer consider the first version you saw to be complete (Apocalypse Now vs Apocalypse Now Redux or the 2010 Metropolis vs all the inferior versions). At other times, the deleted scenes are best left where they were (Reservoir Dogs would become more fully Mr Orange’s story, and probably a lesser film, if an editor were to put the cut scenes back in) and you might only watch them once, out of interest.

Fifty-one minutes of “lost” Blue Velvet footage was found in time for the 25th anniversary blu-ray release. This was both a surprise and not one; fans knew the deleted scenes existed and that they had once made up part of a legendary four-hour cut (some say three and a half hours). Cut scenes had been partially reconstructed from stills and text and there has been the weird phenomenon of a Blue Velvet poster (this hideous one, for an Italian release) depicting a moment that doesn’t exist in the film. But it’s one thing to know and another to see, which is why there was genuine excitement last year when the news came: the blu-ray would have the lost scenes, all scored and edited. It's a big deal. Just like Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) tells Sandy (Laura Dern) over a malt at Arlene’s, “I’m seeing something that was always hidden”.



And? The most anticipated bit has become known as the “flaming nipple” scene, because it ends with a topless woman illuminating the seedy darkness of a bar with exactly that party trick. The same scene gives us more rampaging Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) and a moment in which Brad Dourif’s shock-haired Raymond, who never really has enough to do, orders “Pabst Blue Ribbon, one case, long neck” (apart from anything else, Blue Velvet is one of the great beer movies) at the counter while Frank terrorises a guy called Willard and also sets up the pool-table image that the Italian distributors loved – although we never see it from that angle. This scene would come just prior to Frank and his gang of perverts showing up at Ben’s house – Ben is Dean Stockwell, above – for a scene that is altogether seedier, more surreal and more central (perhaps the centre of the film). But much of the 51 once-lost minutes are taken up with banal home scenes of Jeffrey, his mother and his aunt Barbara, which anticipate the gentle eccentricity of Twin Peaks, although you could argue that aunt Barbara’s obsession with termites adds to the movie’s insect theme, and there is a scene at the Williams house that sets up a meeting between Jeffrey and Sandy ahead of her famous, and much better, entrance in the actual movie (be like the wind was apparently the direction Lynch gave Laura Dern – it worked). We get more scenes of Sandy’s jock boyfriend, Mike, who we barely glimpse in the film proper, and a series of scenes in which Jeffrey phones his college girlfriend, and gets dumped. A scene in the Slow Bar as Jeffrey and Sandy wait to see Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) sing has them sitting through the interminable support acts: a dog eating its dinner, a Z-grade comedian with a band and a belly dancer. In all, this Slow Bar stuff runs for close to nine minutes and it’s Lynchian quirkiana that somehow doesn’t fit this Lynch film but would work in his more indulgent, less narratively concise ones (were it looking more like it was shot on your phone than playing in hi-def it could slip easily into Inland Empire).

Mostly, these scenes would have been in the first third of the film, and would have it slowed down considerably – despite it and Lynch’s reputation, Blue Velvet is surprisingly economical and straight-forward in its storytelling – but there is one early Jeffrey scene that could have added something. When Jeffrey’s father is hospitalised at the very start, his mother calls him at college and tells him to come home. She rings during the middle of a dorm party. And where’s Jeffrey? He’s in the basement, watching a couple make out in a scene that establishes him to have been a voyeur well before he ever heard of Dorothy Vallens. But, again, it would slow the film down and Lynch doesn’t have flashbacks in this story, so it’s hard to know, if you're playing editor at home, just what you would do with it. But in any case, Bill Wyman (not the Rolling Stone) is right to say, in this great review of the blu-ray edition, that it is the one deleted scene that would significantly change our understanding of the film as we have come to know it. In the finished film, Jeffrey strikes us as innocent but curious, stepping into a new world for the first time; this deleted scene shows he has been at least part of the way into it before. But even if most viewers of Blue Velvet have had no direct knowledge of his history until now, that history was known to MacLachlan and Lynch – and some others – when the Dorothy scenes were shot. In other words, is there a way in which deleted scenes always leave traces, even subliminal ones, in the finished film?

Otherwise, one very quick scene has Jeffrey calling Dorothy’s house and getting a terrifying – even by phone – Frank on the other end. It’s pretty fantastic and short (only about 30 seconds), so it’s hard to know why it went. But the best – one I would have kept somehow, were I David Lynch – is Dorothy’s rooftop scene. This one establishes a tenderness between Jeffrey and Dorothy that also adds to the wider story. He is in her apartment. She is suicidal. She asks him to come with her to the roof of the apartment building. In the corridor, the lights flick on and off – a Lynch motif that usually indicates evil or supernatural trouble – and on the roof, the sky is lit up by blue-white lightning and the “Mysteries of Love” theme plays. Along with the lights going out when Frank dies, this is the closest that Blue Velvet gets to the more supernatural or gnostic visions of Lost Highway, Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive, where gaps between worlds opened up (and I’d recommend this recent Sight and Sound piece to anyone interested in Lynch-as-religious-artist). But, still, the surprising tenderness between Dorothy and Jeffrey here also seems, like the deleted voyeur scenes, to have left traces elsewhere in the finished film. And even if I never watch them again, my future viewings of Blue Velvet will be subtly altered by them (once seen, things are impossible to unsee).



Despite all this, though, there are still missing scenes that remain missing, or have not been included. There is a famous still (below) from a scene set in Dorothy's bathroom. It's not on the blu-ray: according to the screenplay, it involves Dorothy flushing the other severed ear down the toilet. Some things stay hidden.

Also on the blu-ray: bloopers, a Siskel and Ebert clip in which Ebert demonstrates that he was on the wrong side of history, and the hour-plus Mysteries of Love doco from the DVD release a decade ago which re-establishes some things we have come to know as the folklore of the film: Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti writing “Mysteries of Love” because the production couldn't afford This Mortal Coil's “Song to the Siren”, which was Lynch’s favourite song at the time (he went on to use it in Lost Highway), and Rossellini basing her famous, traumatic nude scene on Nick Ut’s photo of a girl burned by napalm.

The three beautiful screen grabs above are from here. I thought my selection was random but now I’m noticing where a light source is in each pic.

The Christmas tree lights were on then off

Stills from Morvern Callar (2002, shot by Alwin H Kuchler) and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, shot by Seamus McGarvey). Blog title from Morvern Callar by Alan Warner (1995).

Days of Kevin

The Lynne Ramsay style may be Malickian but the psychology of We Need to Talk About Kevin -- some people are simply born evil -- is pure horror movie, or "a horror flick with pretensions" as one local reviewer sneeringly puts it, and whether or not this internet-sourced poster is official, it's a smart way to market it. (Also, isn't calling something "pretentious" on a par with complaining that a story isn't "realistic"? Some other "horror flicks with pretensions": Repulsion, Possession, Don't Look Now, Antichrist ... )

The very bad seed (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Like her second film, Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay’s daring suburban horror We Need to Talk About Kevin starts by putting us inside a traumatised consciousness. How often do we see Eva (Tilda Swinton) coming to, or remembering, persecuted by a sense of guilt and her memory, trying to understand her role in an atrocity? The atrocity has been committed by Kevin (three actors, most notably Ezra Miller), her demonic teenage son, but the point of view is consistently Eva’s. The Lionel Shriver novel apparently took the form of therapeutic letters, from Eva to her husband; Ramsay has dumped that device, not even offering a compensatory voice-over, but still drawing us deep into Eva's fragmented point of view, through Malick-style associative editing and imagery and through the sheer, unnerving power of Swinton’s acting. Ten years after Morvern Callar, which Kevin recalls like a fond memory in opening scenes at the Spanish Tomatina festival, Ramsay’s protagonist is older, unhappier, stuck in suburbia (despite stylistic overlap, this film is more depressive and tougher than Morvern Callar). Point of view is everything: in interviews, Ramsay has talked about her derailed plans for an adaptation of The Lovely Bones, which would have shifted perspective to the murdered girl’s father, as a kind of Hamlet haunted or driven mad by a ghost. More intriguing still, Ramsay has talked of wanting to remake We Need to Talk About Kevin from two other perspectives: the goofy, unknowing dad and the almost cartoonishly evil son. At how many points would their perspectives coincide? Of course it will never happen, but like her Lovely Bones, they are films we can imagine. 

River of flowers, Beckenham (22/2)

On February 22 last year, at 12.51pm, I was at the movies. I went from the movies to home to school, on wrecked roads clogged with traffic, drivers in states of shock or panic. At the school, or in the park next to it, all the kids sat in tidy, quiet groups with their teachers, waiting for their parents. It was the calmest thing when everything else around us was chaos. In places, liquefaction -- grey muddy water -- burst through the grass and pooled on the surface, creating piles of silt. There were aftershocks. But still the kids stayed put.

A year later, most of the same kids and many of the same teachers assembled in exactly the same place in the same way. Two minutes' silence, then balloons, a short speech, then class by class, they went to the river. Flowers came from home, from gardens, and were thrown into the river. I liked to think, as the flowers floated past, that some were coming from further up the river, from other sites -- other parks, schools, houses. Notes were hung from trees, some written by children, some by teachers, some by parents.

At the edge of the moraine

The chairs -- 185 of them, painted white -- look like they are awaiting the general resurrection of the dead. Empty seats for expected guests. Pictures by Christchurch City Libraries (from here). The installation at the Oxford Tce Baptist Church is by artist Peter Majendie.

Take the time to read this, this and this.

Two minutes of silence at 12.51pm, flowers in the river. Hundreds of flowers, thousands. "A roll call and then silence," said Catholic Bishop Barry Jones, on radio this morning. It is silent on the streets; when people phone, they sound subdued, cautious.

"I was just laying aside a Lausanne paper I'd bought in Zurich when my eye was caught by a report that said the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier, 72 years later. And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots." -- WG Sebald, from The Emigrants.

"Flower of wonder, flower of might: if I see thee on the other side, when I am dead, I’ll know there is an other side." -- Andrew Johnston, from "The Sunflower" (here).