Ozploitation article/reviews BIFF 2008

OZPLOITATION! Knockers, Shockers and the Coming (and Coming Again) of the R Certificate

[Ozploitation Retrospective notes for Brisbane International Film Festival catalogue, July 2008]

The Australian film industry in the Seventies was like Janus, the two headed Hell Hound emerging out of the barren, Menzies-stained cultural wastleland. One shiny, perfectly manicured head was called Art - everyone said they loved Art, forever patting his head and saying "What a good boy. Have another bowl of Chabilis." The second head was called Artless, who smelt like damp carpet and was forever licking his balls in public. Yet despite his appalling lack of social grace, you can't help but fall in love with Artless. It just takes a while to get his unique fragrance out of the cushions.

Quentin Tarantino loves Artless too. During his 2003 publicity tour for Kill Bill, his love letter to Seventies kung fu movies, Quentin raved to blank-faced Australian journalists about his favourite Aussie filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith. Blank. The director of The Man From Hong Kong? Still blank. "But he's made a lot of films..."

In Not Quite Hollywood, Tarantino is finally given the floor to enthuse at length on what he coins "Ozploitation", a cathartic squall of cinematic excesses reflecting the drive-in explosion in America from a few years before. For a good decade following the early Seventies our screens saw sex and blood, druggery and thuggery, kung fu kicks, music, more sex and vicarious thrills nestling uncomfortably next to pinafores and period prattling. For every Hanging Rock there was a Hanging Cock, and during that brief, seemingly forgotten and arguably Golden Age we were a miniature colonial outpost version of B-king Roger Corman's genre sausage factory New World, until the demise of the drive ins and rise of home video changed the B film market worldwide.

And good riddance, some would say. For those fascist aesthetes who pass judgment on a film's cultural importance with bourgeois buzzwords like "significant" and "profound", Ozploitation is the steady drip that won't go away. Gleefully un-PC and revelling in their own shock tactics and gratuitous, cartoonish nudity and violence, the most despised of all genres - sex, horror, action, biker and kung fu movies - were also among the top-grossing Australian films of the decade. One could argue sex films helped bankroll a bona fide film industry:

Tim Burstall's success of fourwalling his first commercial feature Stork in 1971 led Roadshow to bankroll Burstall's Hexagon Productions and Alvin Purple (1971), the first homegrown sex comedy under the new R certificate, and the first legitimate hit for the emerging "New Australian Cinema". It's like the Mafia underwriting cheques for the Kennedy campaigns, but with less gunfire. And yet the debt to Alvin Purple is hardly mentioned, and never in polite company. In a country which canonizes its pioneers, cinema strangely pays little heed to its own trailblazers.

Only a few years before, it was considered a joke to call yourself an Australian filmmaker. The Lucky Ones could make a fortune in advertising rather than slave in our version of Poverty Row making formulaic product for television's unblinking Third Eye. Suddenly it seemed most of us woke up from our sanitized Anglophile daydream: to the naked ear there was an instant audience more than willing to pay to hear Sailor Talk with an "Orstraylian" accent. Then there was (is?) our primordial fixation on SMUT. Senator Don Chipp's aggressive campaign to introduce the R Certificate coincided with the tide of cultural and sexual liberation washing over the dry continent, and within a year the brittle, oppressive wowserism of the Menzies-era thought police was becoming a glaring anachronism. Which is not to say it atrophied and blew away. Richard Franklin's filmmaking career was almost crushed by a well-orchestrated campaign by the Festival of Light objecting to his R-rated yet thoroughly innocuous comedy The True Story Of Eskimo Nell (1975), and he resorted to a nom-de-plume for his second, more salacious offering Fantasm (1976). Franklin's producer Anthony Ginnane was to become a pariah himself amongst the cultural elite, whose oddly parochial protectionist attitudes towards importing actors or exporting Australian films overseas were in stark contast with Ginnane's foaming-at-the-mouth internationist approach. To this day, Ginnane's ability to second-guess audience trends and to sell his "despicable" genre films to the world makes him one of the country's most victorious Sleazy Riders.

Predictably, too much of a good thing left Aussie audiences bloated and jaded, and looking for new thrills. Between Alvin... and its 1974 sequel Alvin Rides Again, the public's fascination for seeing sex on screen faded, only to be replaced by action and horror. Exit Alvin and Petersen; enter Stone, Mad Max, and a slew of cheap-and-nasties inspired by the success of cheap, nasty horror hits from overseas. Genre movies followed the Corman model, reflecting the simple carnal desires of their drive-in demographic: there were car films (High Rolling, FJ Holden, Oz) and biker films (Stone, Cosy Cool, Mad Max), all with blaring Oz Rock soundtracks. Some films even straddled the arbitrary divide between art and exploitation (the brilliant Hitchcock-inspired Long Weekend, for example) and, not surprisingly, do it with style and chutzpah. A few filmmakers like Burstall and Franklin were able to able to scale the walls out of the Exploitation Ghetto, but only just. On the other side of the wall, there existed master showmen with no pretenses towards making "art" - John D. Lamond, Australia's own Russ Meyer, had earlier devised the ad campaigns for Roadshow's controversial hits like A Clockwork Orange and Emmanuelle, then used his canny ballyhoo skills for his own nefarious ends: Felicity, Australia After Dark, The ABC Of Love And Sex Australia Style...

And yet, even at their most repellent and exploitative, Australian B-films are well-crafted, belying their pitifully low budgets, and have an exceedingly liberal dose of self-awareness that's irresistible. Remember Janus the two headed Wonder Dog? It's still the same creature; the two heads are merely that arbitrary divide between Art and Artless, and ultimately are both needed for the creature to exist. Please keep this in mind when the Artless part is dry humping your leg and his breath smells like the death of fun itself.

Alvin Purple (1973)

A knowing satire on the Swinging Seventies and the Permissive Society, Alvin Purple uses the classic English sex comedy model of a hapless, clumsy innocent who becomes an inadvertent sex symbol, gigolo and porn star! Despite its "sex film" tag it was a smash and has an enduring popularity due to its good-natured humour and Burstall's quirky direction, Brian Cadd's hit film score, and an assured supporting cast loaded with familiar TV and film faces. Then there's the endearing Alvin himself, Graeme Blundell, whose portrayal as the Vegemite-smeared Candide is as iconic as the brown stuff itself.

Friday 1st August 2008 9:10pm, The Regent 1

Patrick (1978)

Australia's response to the ESP horrors of Carrie and The Fury has a glass-eyed patient, shocked into a coma by the death of his mother, unleashing a Pandora's Box of destruction from his hospital bed. A sympathetic nurse and Patrick's doctor (Sir Robert Helpmann) uncover Patrick's traumatic past, and suspect there's an endless well of evil behind the vacant stare. Australian horror's first international breakthrough is a suprisingly effective and highly stylized exercise in tension, due to to Richard Franklin's sure hand and a layered script by Everett de Roche.

Saturday 2nd August 2008 8:30pm, The Regent 1

The Man From Hong Kong (1974)

The unlikely pairing of Village Roadshow and martial arts studio Golden Harvest produced Australia's only true blue kung fu flick. Imported kung fu superstar "Jimmy" Wang Yu plays a Hong Kong cop out to bust Bondian supervillain (and former James Bond) George Lazenby in a flurry of flying fists and tough guy theatrics. From the film's opening chopathon atop Ayers Rock to its window-shattering finale, expatriate action specialist Brian Trenchard-Smith keeps tongue firmly in cheek whilst wringing remarkably straight-faced performances from Rebecca Gilling, Frank Thring, a young Sammo Hung and Mad Max's Roger Ward and Hugh Keays-Byrne.

Sunday 3rd August 2008 9:00pm, The Regent 1

Turkey Shoot (1982)

Purist, trashy, joyously exploitative drive-in fodder set in a "futuristic" jungle prison where detainees slated for brainwashing are subjected to endless all-girl showers and torture sequences, then forced to participate in a deadly man-hunt in the North Queensland jungle. Trenchard-Smith's hyper-ludicrous hybrid of The Big Doll House, 1984 and The Most Dangerous Game was blasted by critics as the lowpoint of Australian cinema to date. Which is true, and proudly so; only now can its bleak, jet-black humour, prolific gore and imaginative genre-splicing place this disreputable chancre of a film as a true classic of Australian B cinema.

Sunday 3rd August 2008 11:10pm, The Regent 1

Stone (1974)

One-shot auteur Sandy Harbutt wrote, directed and starred in Aussie bikerdom's uncompromising counter culture classic. An idealistic young cop dons the denims of biker gang the Gravediggers to uncover a serial killer in their midst; as Stone descends deeper into their culture he finds, between the knife fights, skinny-dipping and psychedelics, the meaning of the term Honour Among Thieves. Harbutt's sympathies clearly lie with the outlaws, a stance at odds with the biker genre's usual conservatism and faux morality. Stripped of Mad Max's futurist trappings, Stone thus stands alone as a compelling, not to mention career-killing mix of kitsch and conviction.

Wednesday 6th August 2008 9:30pm, The Regent 1

The Adventures Of Barry McKenzie (1972)

Bruce Beresford's technically rough, hilarious bad-taste ode to the wide-eyed and obnoxious Fosters-soaked Aussie abroad rips Barry Humphries' character from the pages of Private Eye and brings him to life in all his technicolour triumph, as he tears a swathe through English politeness along with his pre-Dame Auntie Edna (Humphries again, in one of three roles). As Bazza, Barry Crocker - yes, THE Barry Crocker - has the big chin, the potty mouth and glaring anachronistic "Strine" lingo, and the blissful lack of self-awareness that nail the script's satiric swipes at all and sundry. With cameos from Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, and various other "pommie bastards".

Thursday 7th August 2008 9:30pm, The Regent 1

Long Weekend (1978)

Nature turns nasty in an underrated and, until recently, forgotten masterpiece of terror. Everett de Roche's remarkable two-character script pits a self-absorbed and relentlessly bickering city couple on a relationship-repairing beach retreat against an increasingly hostile, almost supernatural environment: birds swoop, the usually docile kangaroos slash and claw, and the reappearance of a dugong shot by Hardgreaves as target practice is harbinger of a fate which, to de Roche's credit, is never explained. Dark, suspenseful, ambiguous, and utterly enthralling, and hardly suprisingly, is due for a remake.

Friday 8th August 2008 10:50pm, The Regent 1

Post-seminar photo: Dani Haig, me, Brian Trenchard-Smith & Antony I. Ginnane

"Ozploitation" Seminar

In conjunction with our retrospective focus, this panel will explore the history of Australian genre cinema and the industrial conditions which led to cult classics like Alvin Purple, Patrick and Turkey Shoot making it to the big screen.

Guests: Brian Trenchard-Smith (director, Man From Hong Kong/Turkey Shoot), Alan Finney (actor, Alvin Purple), Mark Hartley (director, Not Quite Hollywood), Antony Ginnane (producer, Patrick & Turkey Shoot)

Chair: Andrew Leavold

Saturday 2nd August 2008, 12pm GoMA Cinema A

Grindhouse review

GRINDHOUSE 101 article

[Originally published in Rave Magazine (April 2008) Brisbane, Australia]

What is a "Grindhouse" exactly? It's the ghetto version of the drive-in, a rundown inner-city roach motel showing third-run chop sockeys and Italian cannibal films, the kind of place you might get an anonymous blowjob or a switchblade in the eye during a double bill of 2069 A Sex Odyssey and Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman. If you peer closely through the accumulated nicotine grease and tumbleweeds of discarded tissues, you might even recognize the same place your parents took you to the premiere of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ten years earlier. Steer clear of the uncovered beer and just stick to the popcorn – lord knows, it will stick to you.

Most of us from the Video Generation missed out on the Grindhouse experience, a dubious pleasure firmly rooted (ahem) in the libidinous Seventies which disappeared around the same time as Betamax. Not so the teenaged B-culture vulture Quentin Tarantino, who claims to have spent most of the early Eighties in similar shit-pits devouring the collected works of Lucio Fulci and Cirio Santiago. We're talking the lowest of the low-rent genres: Nazi sexploitation (Ilsa She Wolf Of The SS), amputee revenge epics (Crippled Masters, The Amazing Mr No Legs), The Sinful Dwarf, Avenging Disco Godfather. No taboo, no limit of bad taste, no exploitative hook was left unexplored. God bless the Sick, Sick Seventies.

Not content with reinventing the modern noir thriller, Tarantino continues Kill Bill's concerted program of genre appropriation (post-modern terminology for outright thievery) by crafting his ultimate tribute to the Seventies B-grade double bill. Now restored to its original format after its collapse at the US box office and subsequent poor faring as stand-alone features, Grindhouse pairs Planet Terror and Death Proof, along with a selection of faked trailers (Werewolf Women Of The SS to name just one) proudly under its deliberately rain-stained banner.

For all its numerous faults, Grindhouse is still a grandiose one-fingered gesture to the homogeny of mall-bound irritainment. At worst it's grotesquely self-indulgent and oversteps the staying power and genre savvy of its usually forgiving audience. To his credit, Tarantino's partner-in-crime Robert Rodriguez hits every mark in Planet Terror, a rapid machine-gun edit of a hundred apocalyptic undead shockers with some wildly imaginative flourishes. Tarantino's Death Proof, on the other hand, doesn't work as an exploitation OR Tarantino flick, and for all its annoying references to Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, he's forgotten the rules of what makes a great B film. Instead it's a two-act movie that gets bog-heavy in dialogue while looking for its third act.

The core problem with Grindhouse is simple. You can't make Outsider Art on an Apple Mac, and you certainly can't give two rich kids $50 million and expect them to conjure up the magic of a film made on one hundredth the budget. If I was Harvey Weinstein - just give me a few hundred more cheeseburgers and I'm almost there - I'd hand them half a million each and a few thousand feet of mouldering 35mm stock, send Tarantino to the Philippines and Rodriguez back to Mexico, and let them get down and dirty in their self-dug trenches. THEN, and only then, will my respect for them as filmmakers return in full.

Grindhouse cinema is, by its very definition, cheap and nasty. The latter you can fake; cheapness is something that exists in a film's very soul, and no amount of post-production effects can reproduce it. More significantly, no media hype nor gratuitous name dropping can make such a disreputable, grubby and inherently unacceptable genre "cool". To evoke the name Grindhouse is like pouring boiling oil on a rat's nest: you may not like the look and smell of what comes bubbling back out.

Rudy Ray Moore: The Dolemite Collection reviews

RUDY RAY MOORE The Dolemite Collection reviews

[Originally published in Empire magazine (May 2008) Sydney, Australia]

"Dolemite is my name, and fuckin' up motherfuckers is my game!"

Until recently, comedian Rudy Ray Moore was Black America’s best kept secret. While his foul-mouthed contemporaries Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor managed to seep into milktoast USA, Rudy didn't, and remained for most of his career on the segregated chitlin' circuit, only registering on Whitey’s radar once Hip-Hop Royalty acknowledged him as the Godfather of Rap.

And for good reason. Moore’s elaborate rhymes are modern rap’s forerunners and ghetto comedy at its purest: protracted boasting and roasting peppered with “niggers”, “cocksuckers” and “motherfuckers”, ceaselessly one-upping Whitey and high steppin' yellows amidst a torrent of almost incomprehensible ghettolingus. After piddling success as an R&B singer, Rudy self-financed a string of X-rated party LPs in the early Seventies which in turn bankrolled Dolemite (1975), the first in a series of Rudy Ray Moore party films released in May as “The Dolemite Collection”.

Technically the roughest of Rudy’s films, Dolemite is also the uneasiest mix of black action and Rudy’s unique proletizing, with the ever-present boom mike hanging like a third leg from the top of the frame. Busted out of jail to take on the dope and gun running in the ghettos, Dolemite (Moore) heads back to his pimpdom to find his club's been snatched by arch-rival Willie Green. Luckily his madam Queen Bee has trained his girls in martial arts - at the Chuck Norris School of Karate, I kid you not – and a war erupts just in time to redefine the term "kung faux" forever.

As an action film it's an abject failure. As a rare kind of Outsider Cinema it’s a different beast altogether, testament to Rudy's imaginative penny-pinching and savant genius. Thanks to his comedy albums as a fertile source for material, every line is a gem, a giddy string of profanities equally and infinitely quotable (Hamburger Pimp: "I'm so bad I kick my own ass twice a day!").

Rudy’s follow-up The Human Tornado (1976) or, more correctly, "The Human Tar-NAYduh!" starts off appropriately on stage with Rudy doing what he does best: beating a live audience (and us) over the head with a string of expletives. Within minutes he’s rhyming naked on the run and heads to LA where Queen Bee's gone legit, running a successful club to the horror of local mob boss Cavaletti, who locks two of her girls in his torture chamber and forces her to pimp for his rival club. Dolemite unleashes hell accompanied by even more aggravated mugging and playing up the absurdity of his persona, with the grunts, grimaces and Three Stooges goofs sped up for surreal effect.

As much as I adore the original Dolemite, this is undoubtedly Rudy's masterpiece. It’s like he’s slipped something in our drinks: colours are brighter, the “motherfuckers” are louder, the ghetto-honed charicatures are painted in broader strokes. It’s Rudy in hyperdrive, trading the naïve charm and disarming incompetence of Dolemite for an intense awareness of what pushes his black audience’s buttons, and the sight of Rudy as a black buck seducing the cow-chested Mrs Cavaletti literally brings the house down!

The nuttiness is kicked up a notch in the tale of Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil's Son In Law (1977), a stand-up comedian dragged to Hell and forced to agree to marry the Devil's daughter - an unsightly lass we all have the misfortune to witness. Once back, Petey thinks he can cheat ol’ Lou and exploit his new devilish powers along with his trademark "kung fool" to battle an army of polystyrene-horned demons. Paradise Lost it ain’t, yet despite the running watermelon gags and the sight of Petey as an eight year pimp-in-training emerging from his mamma’s belly, it resembles – for Rudy, at least – a real movie.

Having taken his Dolemite schtick as far as he could, Rudy aims for social commentary in 1979’s Disco Godfather, a PG-rated crusade against PCP featuring Moore as Tucker Williams, a rhymin’ MC at an all-black Roller Disco, yelling his "put your WEGHT on it!" mantra in more figure-hugging polyester shirts than ever. Visiting his nephew in a psych ward full of Angel Dust casualties, Tucker launches a campaign to “attack the wack”, and locks horns with gangster Sweetmeat who doses Tucker through a gas mask with hallucinatorily hamfisted results.

Existing in the cracks between Saturday Night Fever, Reefer Madness and an after-school TV special, Disco Godfather piles on its bug-eyed freakiness – drug-fried zombies cooking their chill'un, limbless basketball players fighting witches with samurai swords – with so much po-faced conviction that, despite its garish fashion and acting bordering on (and occasionally passing into) hysteria, it’s nowhere near as fun as it sounds. It’s a slightly downbeat note to mark the end of Rudy’s decade-long reign as the Bad Motor Scooter; for all their technical shortcomings, “The Dolemite Collection” has more soul than a hundred Harlem restaurants, more grind in their behind. And I KNOW you can dig it.

EXTRAS: Each disc has the same trailers, radio spots, an unimaginative text-based Dolemite Trivia, and Rudy's camcorder tour of locations around his neighbourhood. In other words, as poverty-stricken as Rudy's first production.

Alejandro Jodorowsky interview 2008

ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY interview

[Interview conducted by email late May 2008; originally printed in Rave Magazine (June 2008) Brisbane, Australia]

A Temple Priest shits into a glass bowl and it turns into gold. A cowboy rides past a river of blood from a hundred murdered brides. An armless dwarf, a legless midget, a sea of Christs and a skinned goat Crucifixion.

Profane, disturbing, infuriating, inspired: the world of Chilean-born mystic artist and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (or, in his words, the “Jodo Multi-Universe”) is a multi-tiered journey into the furthest reaches of human experience, be it real, hyper-real or otherwise. His two most characteristically perverse works have been mostly out of circulation since their releases; now El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), films as enigmatic as their Creator, are restored to the Dendy George Street screen courtesy of IMA in pristine, restruck 35mm prints.

Via email from Paris, his home since his “Mexican phase”, Jodorowsky speculates on the filmmaker as shaman, film as alchemic trigger, and his role as Creator of an incredible new Multi-Universe.

Andrew: When I saw El Topo and Holy Mountain aged 20, I was affected the most by the potent images and baffled by the non-linear narrative. Now at 38 I’m looking for symbols and ideas behind those symbols; in twenty years time I will no doubt see something else. Is this not what art is meant to be – ambiguous, timeless, multi-layered, designed to provoke and infuriate as well as inspire?

Alejandro: Yes. I always tried to create images with many interpretation levels. Every spectator in front of one of my image can have a different reaction. Laugh, cry, get mad, love and hate. But the unique thing I am looking for as a unique reaction of the audience is when they look at the picture, even if they doesn’t understand it completely, they will never forget it.

I haven’t seen the remastered version of Holy Mountain, but the new print of El Topo looks absolutely stunning – the colours! The clarity! Just how much time and effort went into perfecting the new prints of Fando And Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain?

I remasterized the three pictures in only one week in New York. I could do that because I had an amazing technical crew. Allen Klein invested in this remasterization 500 000 dollars. May he be blessed.

You were quoted in the Sixties as saying “We are not; we are becoming”. This is alchemical, is it not? How would you describe this philosophy to those who have never heard of alchemy or other esoteric systems? And how can films - like psychedelics, like meditation - trigger the alchemical idea of transmutation?

The whole Alchemy can be summed in one sentence: “the spiritualisation of the matter and at the same time materialization of the spirit”. In the Christian symbology Jesus Christ represents the materialisation of the spirit and Virgin Mary the spiritualization of the matter. Through meditation, this process happens in ourselves. Our mental learns to drive it’s material life to realization and in the same time our body learns to integrate the spirit. Here’s what my movies are containing.

I find this interesting: souls are eternal and interdimensional, and yet are trapped in these eating, shitting, fornicating, procreating and ultimately decaying and dying three-dimensional biological machines. Some people crave the mystical experience and yet react strongly to or reject depictions of such primal things as blood, conflict, sexuality, death, putrefecation and even bodily imperfection. Why do you think there is such an unbroachable divide between the spiritual and the carnal for many?

For more than 2000 years religion has divided our being in body and soul as if they were separated. It is the matter of the universe that is producing conscience. We are the song of the stone. Christ, the Virgin Mary and the 12 apostles same as Buddha and Mahomet have produced each in his life no less than six tons of shit.

Jung’s influence on both your art and your work in psychoanalysis is strong, but there are also echoes of Wilhelm Reich – which of his theories appealed to you and why?

I like in Reich his theory of “Orgon”. A sexual energy, which fulls the atmosphere. Which is in fact only the “Prana” of Hindu mysticism. The healing virtue of the orgasm is a genius idea.

Fando And Lis and El Topo both appear to be heavily influenced from your work with Teatro Panico. Theatre and cinema are not dissimilar but are still two different languages – how did you go about translating your stage experience into films?

I don’t translate experience. I inspired myself of schizophrenic people. I can be a lot of characters. The theatrical director is not the movie maker, not the poet, not the mime, not the therapist, etc… I believe that every man can be multiple, like for example Leornado da Vinci or Jean Cocteau.

The Holy Mountain is the closest you have come to making a science fiction film. If you had made Dune, how would you describe it now? And if you had no budgetary restrictions, what kind of science fiction film would you make?

If you want to know this, read my two comic books : The Incal and The Metabarons.

Like Bunuel, your Mexican films resemble no other films made in Mexico. You both have an outsider’s perspective on its unique landscape and iconography. As someone born outside of Mexican culture, what were you able to draw from this unique experience?

Each bottle of wine has a different taste according to where the grapes are grown. The Burgundy is different from Beaujolais but none of them are superior to one another.

In the second part of Holy Mountain, in which you are introduced as a Master, the intricate overhead shots - showing the table in the centre of the eye, and the tiny figures walking around huge symbols - are incredible. I understand you were working with a substantially bigger budget than El Topo, but I can only imagine how much preparation and execution went into the entire movie! Just how complicated did the Holy Mountain shoot become, and how satisfied were you with the results?

In reality, at this time I demanded to the movie to be as profound as a sacred text, an evangel or a sutra. I wanted a cinema able to change the human being, illuminating him. I didn’t used actors. In this movie a millionaire is a millionaire, a whore is a whore, a nazi is a nazi, a degenerate is a degenerate, a shaman is a real shaman. I filmed 35 hours in incredible circumstances where we risked our lives. For example we all jumped in the middle of the Caribean Sea where there are sharks. Why we did this? For me the ocean was the symbol of the mystery. I wanted us to get free of the rational prison to fully enter in the deep dark waters of the unconscious. We all almost drown. The technical crew instead of filming us saved us. The two hours duration of the Holy Mountain are only a trace of an essential mystical and missed experience. I wanted to illuminate the people I filmed. Instead of making holy monks I made amateur actors ready to prostitute themselves in the industry.

In the Tarot, I’ve always been interested in the Hanged Man, a card which I believe is a signal of potential transformation. This theme is throughout El Topo and Holy Mountain, as is (I suspect) a great deal of Tarot-inspired imagery. What is your interpretation of the Hanged Man?

The Hanged Man cut himself from the world to find his real inner self.

I have spent a great deal of time working in the Philippines, filming a documentary about their famous midget James Bond called Weng Weng. In their culture, dwarves and midgets are revered as special and almost holy, as if blessed by God, and not cursed or feared. What is your instinctual belief, and the source of your fascination with using their images?

I love all that is not mediocre and reveals imagination. The monsters are for me forms of biological art. They are a special form of beauty. Hyeronymus Bosch understood that, Bruegel, Goya, Velasquez, Picasso, all the surrealists, and in cinema Todd Browning, Buñuel, Fellini, Guillermo del Toro and many others. When I was a kid, 8 years old, my favorite hero was the Frankenstein monster.

What are your feelings these days about your lesser-known films Tusk and The Rainbow Thief?

I don’t like them. When I shot these two pictures, I was in misery, and needed to feed my family. I was obliged to make concessions.

You described the world (or worlds) you create as Jodo Universe. What form does Jodo Universe take these days?

Now it is not Jodo universe, but Jodo multiuniverse.

Witches' Hammer review

Senses of Cinema WITCHES' HAMMER review

[Originally published online for Senses of Cinema’s Senses Of Cinema's Cinemateque Annotations (August 2008) Melbourne, Australia]

Witches’ Hammer/Kladivo na čarodějnice (1970 Czechoslovakia)

Prod Co: Filmové Studio Barrandov Dir: Otakar Vávra Scr: Otakar Vávra, Ester Krumbachová, based on the novel by Václav Kaplický Phot: Josef Illík Ed: Antonín Zelenka Prod Des: Ester Krumbachová, Karel Škvor Mus: Jiří Srnka

Cast: Elo Romančík, Vladimír Šmeral, Soňa Valentová, Josef Kemr, Lola Skrbková, Jiřina Štěpničková

"Whoever believes that any creature can be changed for the better or the worse, or transformed into another kind or likeness, except by the Creator of all things, is worse than a pagan and a heretic."

- Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger/“The Witches’ Hammer”, c. 1496, Part 1, Question 1

Coming from a country rich in experimental, absurdist, surrealist-tinged and fantastical cinema, the Czech film Witches’ Hammer is a surprisingly formalist and unambiguous comment on life under a totalitarian regime. Based on actual transcripts of Moravia’s witch-trials during the period 1667-1695, and using the same allegorical language as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon, the message is as subtle as a two-foot bodkin to the inner thigh: positioning religion as a state-bound brand of delirium and control. To director Otakar Vávra’s credit, the hysterical and wildly expressionist flourishes Ken Russell brought to his version of The Devils in the following year are toned down to produce a deliberately measured pace and a mounting sense of doom as the veil of fear descends inexorably over a 17th Century town held in the grip of religious paranoia and delusion. Absent too is Russell’s garish palette; Witches’ Hammer’s stunning black-and-white photography compounds its stark opposites with images of an ever-mounting number of smouldering stakes, one for each doomed townsperson suspected of witchcraft, and silhouetted like burnt matches against the grey sky.

At the film’s core are two bleakly contrasted figures. Representing authority and control is the autocrat Bobling, a famed inquisitor coaxed from retirement to smoke out the town’s pagan elements. A vainglorious hypocrite, he proclaims worldliness a sin in one breath whilst wallowing in the most grotesque of indulgences in the next. His target is the local Deacon Lautner, who is at once a deeply moral man and a self-confessed sinner whom we suspect has carried out a sexual relationship with his young charge, Zuzana. Boblig relentlessly pursues Lautner, usurping his position and privileges along with his material possessions whilst Lautner’s fellow clergy fearfully abandon him in droves. He also sends sends countless innocents through his Inquisitor’s threshing machine. As the litany of forced confessions grows, including that of the doomed Zuzana, Lautner’s various shades of grey are brought back into sharp contrast, and he becomes an almost Christ-like figure made noble through his suffering.

Witches’ Hammer presents a cruel, unforgiving universe painted in blacks and whites: women are perceived as either hags or harlots, men as sinners or saints, while the most profound example of this schizophrenic split is to be found in the film’s title. Characters constantly refer to “the Book” – not The Bible, which is hardly ever mentioned, but the Malleus Maleficarum, the Inquisition’s handbook on the torture and execution of suspected witches, and a manifestation of the Church’s temporal supremacy that is constantly flipped through like the I Ching for inspirational epithets. Ultimately, one has to wonder where God exists within this depressingly human equation. “I’m not a theologian”, one of Boblig’s underlings confesses to Lautner, his blackening teeth barely making a crooked smile, “I’m a jurist”. God, it seems, has left the building.

“Power and truth are two different things”, a defeated Lautner tells his accusers, underscoring the struggle between those consolidating their power within the circle and those honest enough to remain on the outside (whom history consigns to being crushed under the dialectical wheels). The film’s binary opposites are found everywhere – truth and lies, dogma and heresy, the spiritual versus the carnal, and in the sometimes arbitrary and paradoxical split between Good and Evil. The underlying dualistic notion that the world and all that is worldly is sinful inevitably has at its core a deep loathing of sexuality and a mistrust of the fallible flesh. This inevitably unhealthy pathology is neatly set up in the film’s opening. Cutting between a wide-eyed monk describing the torments of the damned (“A woman’s womb is the gateway to hell!”) and shots of voluptuous young girls bathing, the naked innocence of the latter is at once tainted by the monk’s foaming-at-the-mouth vitriol.

Witches’ Hammer is by necessity a contradictory beast, both a genre film and a political fable sanctioned by a totalitarian regime. Its generic qualities recall the perfectly-executed excesses of The Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968) with Boblig a mirror image of Vincent Price’s monstrous Matthew Hopkins, and no more so than in its most disturbing scene of Boblig’s Inquisition poking and prodding a girl’s naked, broken body under the sign of the cross. As for its Iron Curtain origins, it’s too easy to label the film’s premeditated targets as either organised religion (presumably the reason the film was permitted to be made in the first place) or Czechoslovakia’s Communist overlords, a critique which most Czech New Wave films appear, at first glance, to be sneaking under the radar. As a philosophical meditation it runs much deeper, presenting the Church as a disorganised and inherently corrupt bureaucracy ossified by constricting dogma. This view is as timeless as it is unambiguous, a metaphor for any worldly apparatus designed to steamroller over the human spirit. A humanist horror film and an indisputable work of art, Witches’ Hammer drives its point home with a cold, methodical rhythm that has weathered the test of time more successfully than many of its modish, pop-centric contemporaries.