At the weekend I picked up an intriguing Masters of Cinema DVD. The 40-page accompanying booklet – featuring an essay and stills from the film – led me to expect great things, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Director Nobuhiko Obayashi was an experimental film maker who had become a big name in Japanese commercials in the 70s, directing hit ‘CMs’ starring the likes of Charles Bronson and Kirk Douglas, but he had never made mainstream narrative cinema.
Toho’s decision to let this outsider direct a feature demonstrated the crisis facing Japan’s traditionally rigid film industry at the time. Obayashi was asked by desperate Toho executives to deliver “the Japanese Jaws“, and House (Hausu) is what he came up with.
The film was supposedly inspired by the director’s young daughter, who one night pondered how scary it would be if your house attacked you. Her nightmarish ideas – a piano chewing off your fingers; electric lights dropping on your head; being mangled by the gears of a grandfather clock – are all present in this kaleidoscopic, funny and visually-innovative film. I hope these images whet your appetite to seek it out.
House features a cameo from groovy pop group Godiego. I love their soundtrack song “Cherries Were Made For Eating”:
Having been utterly stunned by the all-time classic cult animation La planète sauvage (aka Fantastic Planet), I was extremely keen to investigate further films by its director René Laloux. Like La planète sauvage, Les maîtres du temps (aka Time Masters) is based on a novel by the French science fiction writer Stefan Wul. Furthermore, as with the involvement in the earlier film of the brilliant Roland Topor, Les maîtres du temps is also centred on the work of a visionary visual artist – in this case the legendary Jean Giraud, aka Moebius.
Unfortunately, compared to its near-perfectly formed predecessor, Les maîtres du temps is a much more flawed piece of work. The budgetary constraints and production difficulties experienced by Laloux – this excellent article has more information about the director’s fascinating career – are evident in the wildly varying quality of the animation and the somewhat disjointed storyline. However, many sequences are just as bewitching as those in La planète sauvage, and the film is also pleasingly redolent of the 1980s in a way that particularly appealed to my nostalgic sensibility.
This brings me to the film’s soundtrack, which particularly impressed me. It was composed by Jean-Pierre Bourtayre, who throughout his lengthy career has scored many films and television series, as well as writing songs for the likes of France Gall and Françoise Hardy. His music for Les maîtres du temps often sounds uncannily current in its similarity to the Hauntological sounds of the Ghost Box label, and especially the Hypnagogic Pop of artists such as Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never. In fact I can easily imagine this film and its music having a typically Hypnagogic, half-remembered influence on artists from Francophone countries, such as France’s Valerie Collective, or the Belgian Dolphins Into The Future.
Whilst Alain Goraguer’s brilliant soundtrack to La planète sauvage is reasonably easy to obtain, this is sadly not the case for the music in Les maîtres du temps – although it does seem to have been released in France around the time of the film. Therefore, I recorded a couple of my favourite pieces of music from the DVD. You can listen to these below, along with an excellent disco track that Jean-Pierre Bourtayre recorded in collaboration with Bernard Estardy (with thanks to Soul Train), and a much earlier piece of film music composed by Bourtayre and Jean Bouchety (with thanks to A List Of Things We Lost). I now look forward to seeing the final feature film by René Laloux, Gandahar (aka Light Years). If it is as good as his other work, then I will no doubt write about it here too!
While I’ve been lazily chewing over the first issue of Fire & Knives, the likes of Eat Me Daily, Serious Eats and Kottke have pipped me to the post in blogging about this new food quarterly.
I was given a copy by the editor, Tim Hayward, a couple of weeks ago at, of all things, a family birthday party. It was pretty, it was about food so of course I loved it!
In homage to the tactile joys of eating and cooking, the magazine is beautifully presented, like a cross between an academic journal and The Believer. The thick, matt paper; the uncluttered design; the lovely colours; the handy size all add to the pleasure of reading – Eat Me Daily has some photos of the pages.
In this issue there are articles about cooking with tobacco, on the demise of the dinner party, a history of the Half Hundred (an inter-war dining club for Hampstead intellectuals), an unpublished review of Fanny Craddock by Elizabeth David unearthed at the Guildhall Library, a short story about a malignant quail and many other features by both established and new writers.
My favourite, though, has got to be Hayward’s piece on Vincent Price, “Theatre of Food”. We all know Price for his classic horror performances but did you know that he was also an art collector, gourmet and author of many cookbooks?
He was clearly a man who put his enthusiasm into all that he loved.
Mei Yau and I were recently discussing the unusual relationship that France has with American popular culture. We came to the conclusion that despite (or maybe partly because of) France’s general resistance to the sort of full-scale Americanisation that we have experienced in the UK, for years the French have appeared to be fascinated by a mythical, archetypal vision of America that bears little relation to historical or current reality. That is to say that whilst American culture and ideas have permeated almost every insignificant aspect of British life – due in part, no doubt, to our shared linguistic and cultural heritage – this has perhaps not happened to quite the same extent in France. Therefore, French film-makers, musicians and other artists have been able to explore and cultivate an idea of America that might seem ludicrous and contrived in a country such as the UK, where every other television programme or song on the radio is from the USA.
Examples of this can be seen in many different strands of French culture: the slightly bizarre popularity of Western-themed French language cartoons such as Lucky Luke and Willie Boy; the French film industry’s hero worship of such Hollywood outsider figures as Samuel Fuller and Mickey Rourke; Serge Gainsbourg’s scabrous yet also somewhat enchanted take on American trash culture in many of his most famous songs; the sincere fascination displayed by young French musicians like M83 and the Valerie Collective towards American teen films such as those of John Hughes, along with other more ephemeral aspects of 1980s US youth/pop culture that are often held up for derision and ridicule here in the UK.
This topic could clearly be discussed at much greater length, and maybe I will do so at some point. For now though, I’ll just leave you with a nice homemade video (not by us!) for a classic song that – along with the above links – hopefully illustrates to some extent what I’ve been saying.
On Monday, I ventured up to Camden to take a look at David Byrne’s Playing The Building installation at the Roundhouse. It’s an old organ which has been gutted and rewired so it can be hooked up to the pipes, pillars and beams of the venue. Each key on the keyboard now triggers mallets, airstreams and motors that make the room clang, drone and rumble as you play. After a long time spent queueing, I was finally able to play the organ myself – it was the last day of the project, and the place was quite crowded.
Hitting the highest keys caused hammers to tap bits of the room, which made amusing but not very sonically-pleasing clacking sounds. I avoided these keys and focused on the middle range, which made air stream along pipes high in the rafters, like blowing across the top of a milk bottle. These sounds were quite beautiful, and exploring the keyboard to find harmonic, resonant combinations of tones was a thrill.
The installation has since 2005 hit Stockholm, New York and London. If it comes to your town, I think it’s worth a visit.
