We Don't Go Back #62: La Cinquième Saison (The Fifth Season) (2012)

To begin, some brief observations about La Cinquième Saison (The Fifth Season):

1. It's the first Belgian film I've really registered having seen. I'm not proud of that, although looking up significant Belgian movies, I found Calvaire (2004) which I reckon I really have to cover in this project sometime.  
2. My DVD copy is a Belgian import. I don't think it has a UK release. 
3. It was directed by Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth, who are apparently better known as documentary filmmakers.
4. It stars Aurélia Poirier (Alice), Django Schrevens (Thomas), Sam Louwyck (Pol) and Gill Vancompernolle (Octave). The children and the outsider get the top billing, which is unusual and significant with respect to how you have to look at the film.
5. What is up with the ostriches? No, seriously, no clue. Why the ostriches? 
6. Fred the Chicken was one of my favourite characters. I was rooting for Fred. 

We Don't Go Back #61: The Last Wave (1977)

So the official plan now is to write five posts a week until the book essays are done, and at least one of those every week is going to be a We Don't Go Back post, cleaning up the stragglers, as it were. I have a stack of movies to watch, old and new, and I'm resisting the urge to add new ones to the book list, if only because it'll never be done. Perceptive backers will have noticed that Under the Shadow moved from the We Don't Go Back list to the On a Thousand Walls list, but frankly, now I've seen it that's the only place to put it. .

For now, here's a look at The Last Wave.

The Question in Bodies #3: Videodrome (1983)

Most of our assumptions have outlived their usefulness

In 1997 David Cronenberg appeared on an episode of the BBC series Forbidden. He talked about Shivers, Crash (then new) and Videodrome. Cronenberg is a softly spoken, thoughtful sort of guy in front of the camera, considered, precise and very literate. On Videodrome particularly, he stressed his commitment to realism.

It occurs to me, watching Hollywood films in particular, that characters in the films take various stances, just as a plot point, that they are very moral or ethical, or someone is, or someone isn't, and it's really meant to make the narrative work, but that there is in fact no one making the film who really believes or really cares about what these characters care about. It's just another filmmaking device. I wanted to be more realistic than that on Videodrome, and not have any characters who very righteously make speeches about morals and ethics.

– David Cronenberg and the the Cinema of the Extreme (BBC2, 19th January 1997)

And this flies in the face of some of the lazier readings of Cronenberg's 1983 masterpiece. It's easy to look at Videodrome and see something surreal, stream of consciousness, where people behave according to no explicable schema. Or as something reality bending, a case of it-was-all-a-hallucination-OR-WAS-IT.

But that's not it at all: Videodrome is, by intent, a realistic film.

On a Thousand Walls #8: Under the Shadow (2016)

I remember a friend at university telling me how much she loved Iranian films, that Iranian films were all beautiful, and I suppose I've internalised that a bit, so that if someone mentions an Iranian film, I immediately think as a sort of reflex action, oh, that's a good movie, right?

In fact, it's generally part of the thing with foreign language films, in that foreign language movies are often better, yes, but that's generally because we don't see the crappy ones so much, because distributors tend not to bother to distribute them in English language markets. There are plenty of crappy films made in languages that aren't English, but we don't see quite so many of them.

I Blame Society #6: Firekind (1993); Killing Time (1991)

One of the good things about this strand of my blog is that I don't have to limit it to film. And while I don't read nearly as many comics as I used to, there are a very few authors and artists that I started following as a kid that I'll still look up from time to time today. So like if there's a new, rare, English translation of something by Enki Bilal, that's going to be mine, for example.

I bought 2000AD pretty religiously throughout my teens, and on and off into my 20s, and then stopped altogether sometime about 15 years ago. But very early on, I started noticing the writers who resonated with me. And I always used to get excited if there was a new strip by John Smith.

The Question in Bodies #2: Demonlover (2002)

With the speed in which the Internet has transformed our culture, and has transformed itself, it is perhaps inevitable that few things have dated more swiftly and more profoundly than films about the web.

Olivier Assayas' 2002 film Demonlover is not really an exception to this rule, but it nonetheless turned out to be one of the most prescient Internet Movies made before about 2010, and that mainly is  I think because it's not about the technology, but about how people respond to it, and about what it means for human identity and, inevitably, sexuality.

If you care about spoilers, and you think you might see this film, this post is going to give away nearly all the twists. That includes the pictures. Sorry. 

We Don't Go Back #60: The Owl Service (1969)

She wants to be flowers, but you made her owls.

The thing about mythology, or at any rate the mythology of place, is that it is cyclic, is that it is doomed to repeat itself, over and over. It writes itself into the story of the community, and it's always the tragedies that seem to cling the tightest to the land, wrapping themselves around the remnants of something very old.

Here is a stone with a hole in it. Here is a service of plates with a floral design reminiscent of owls. The story of Math Son of Mathonwy, fourth branch of the Mabinogion ends with an account of how Lleu Llaw Gyffes, cursed by his mother Arianrhod to have no human wife, marries Blodeuwedd, who the magician-king Math¹ made from flowers. But Blodeuwedd is unfaithful, falling in love with Gronw Pebyr of Penllyn. She convinces Gronw to kill Lleu with a poisoned spear, but Lleu shrugs off the dying, poisoned flesh and becomes an eagle. The magician Gwydion restores him to life. He comes to take revenge on Gronw. Gronw hides behind a stone, but Lleu hurls his spear with such force it makes a neat hole through the stone and breaks Gronw's back, killing him. Blodeuwedd's punishment for infidelity and murder (and it's only one more incident in a tale soaked from the start in blood, murder and rape) is to become an owl, forever. The stone, a hole through it, remains.

This is the setting of Alan Garner's novel The Owl Service, adapted for TV by the author in 1969.