KILLING FOR CULTURE

It's funny how things age differently. Some music sounds better today than it did when it was originally released, while a lot matures badly. For example, to my ears, most so-called punk and post-punk sounds like crap nowadays, belying the raw excitement of the times. To listen to erstwhile teenage heroes The Sex Pistols is like listening to crude heavy rock - which is, to all extents and purposes, of course what it was. Likewise, old Throbbing Gristle sounds particularly weedy and undercooked, giving question to even their musical validity, let alone artistic; whereas, on the other hand, the first few albums by Nurse With Wound and The Residents, whilst putting to shame their latter-day output, have a compellingly vibrant immediacy.

Music aside, I've been on a bit of a mondo genre-related movie kick as of late - and the outstanding two by Jacopetti and Prosperi, Africa Addio and Addio Zio Tom (full original versions) seem now to be blessed with an exhilarating freshness and timelessness. It's not that the themes are necessarily more relevant to us today, but that these are works of enduring artistic potency and immense endeavour. The meaningfulness of one's emotional response is more than ever intact - and it's not one founded upon whimsically nostalgic experiential associations, as with most revisits.

So it was while exploring this thread that I picked up Killing For Culture (David Kerekes & David Slater, Creation Books, 1994) for a reread. Described as 'an illustrated history of death film from mondo to snuff', the book is a fascinating resource full of detail on everything from feature films to mondo to so-called 'snuff'. It's the book everyone used to go to before the internet, for info on the Japanese Guinea Pig franchise, or classic underground horror movies like Emmanuelle In America and Last House On Dead End Street, in addition to the less well known Mondo Cane spin-offs. Kerekes and Slater at least seemed to know their stuff, and deserve some credit for their bravery.

Yet, in 2009, Killing For Culture seems noticeably quaint. And that's partly due to Creation Books' notorious mindset where attractive lay-out, correct spelling, and decent bindings are merely expendable inconveniences. But it's mostly thanks to this last decade's extraordinary innovations in people's access to technology and media creation, its distribution and digestion; and thus the almost total blurring of the lines between what is 'real' and what is 'faked' within the domain of TV and film since the book's publication. And that's if those lines ever really existed in the first place. Indeed, these cultural aspects have evolved so rapidly, the authors' own attitudes have been left exposed as hopelessly old-fashioned and, dare I say in this context, prudish. Whilst all the geeks, ghouls, and gorehounds were scrambling to exploit the texts as a catalogue-cum-directory, this likely passed unnoticed.

Its five pages featuring Africa Addio are particularly revealing in this regard. The film is described in deliciously forensic detail where discrepancies are pointed out between the narrative and the footage; scenes which are suspected by the authors of being staged are gotcha'd like smug airport security staffers confiscating 110ml tubes of handcream and unapproved mineral water. Hi-fives all round. This is all well and good until that curiously dowdy, now outdated, British habit of emotional detachment is employed, which allows for the maintaining of fine moral sanctimoniousness whilst secretly masturbating. Patronising references are made of the ignorant reactions of the 'casual viewer', tenuous accusations of directorial racism made, alongside the alleged setting-up of events, and the questionable manipulation of music and picture.

Well, of course there's manipulation - it's edited, it's a movie, it's a work of art, it's entertainment, whatever you want to call it. When we go see a film, watch TV, read a book, catch a concert, listen to an album, we passionately yearn to be manipulated, and manipulated bloody well. The hypocrisy of a shoddily assembled book on gore films, both real and dramatised, making that particular accusation is similar in tone to the police detective complaining of being 'forced' to watch pornos to determine possible obscenity charges. And then get paid for it.

One of the most critical reasons I believe Africa Addio retains such a hypermodern essence is its complete transcendence of western morality's issues on cruelty, gender, race, colonial guilt, and politics. Unlike many of the other copycat films which made self-conscious attempts to rationalise the material. It's worth seeing the Godfathers Of Mondo documentary where much background to the movie is explained by the creators, most telling being the incredible devotion that was expended upon the project. However, it's also here where a Kerekes way out of his depth is bafflingly drafted in as a talking head pundit.

Africa Addio possesses symphonic qualities intended to elicit a meaningful response and it forcefully accomplishes that. It's evident by the way you measure your own feelings; by the time of the closing credits one is overwhelmed by the beauty of the continent: its landscape, its animals, its people, its history - it's a paradoxical reaffirmation of life itself achieved through the masterful composition of audiovisual poetry of astonishing cruelty and horror.

FILLMORE DISCOS 29

In The Loop (****)
unthinkable: a UK comedy that's funny - unrelenting searing humour thanks to the genial writing skills of Armando Ianucci; fantastic cast with stand-out performances from James Gandolfini and Peter Capaldi - on the downside, there's a pointless tacked-on subplot so that Steve Coogan can cadge a role, but it detracts little from In The Loop's overall excellence

The Haunting in Connecticut (*)
any supernatural film requires a higher qualitative threshold for one to willing suspend disbelief, and since there's so very little to commend in this B-movie retelling of a so-called 'true story', and the mediocre cast have so little to give of themselves, it quickly veers into the unwelcome realm of derivative nonsense

Look (*****)
that Look is entirely made up of enacted CCTV footage is a surprisingly effective gimmick; it's also a measure of how inured we are to this format that within 10 minutes or so you barely even notice; the film itself is a series of loosely connected interweaving subplots, many of whose scenes are occasionally miss rather than hit, yet the good bits are extraordinarily effective, and their ultimate effectiveness creep up on you unawares to the point of eventually becoming moving and shocking, and that is in part due to the unsettling and desensitising effect of our own distant voyeurism

Iron Maiden: Flight 666 (**)
most heavy metal documentary reviews tend to have a reference along the lines of 'like a real Spinal Tap': personally, I see it the other way round: Spinal Tap represents the real heavy metal, the real model other metal bands aspire to, desirous as they are of living the perfect rock fantasy that belongs in the enduring teenage mind of the middle-aged male; Maiden's members come across as rather dull but decent enough guys, and do show incredible diligence towards their legions of worshipping almost exclusively male fanatics from all around the world - but their music seems to me, even by metal's conformist standards, so unremittingly dreary and one-paced, and beyond that the most drama we get to see in this boring film of this tiresome world tour is a minor accident to Nicko McBrain relaxing on the fucking golf course

The Last House On The Left (2009) (*)
for ten minutes of decent character-building your hopes are raised, but gradually as the frequency of the vertiginously stupid directorial decisions accelerates, you sink despairingly into the realisation of its lacking even the basic entertainment value of Wes Craven's otherwise crap original

Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring) (*****)
it's depressing how this medieval tale has degenerated via Wes Craven and the recent remake into a crude revenge narrative, one bereft of emotional impact - Bergman directs this beautiful, yet shocking, story and does it complete justice with his masterfully elegant and sophisticated touch

Surveillance (*)
it might be time to reappraise the career of David Lynch for this crime of offering his daughter the reins to direct another film - a blatant gesture of nepotism which heaps embarrassment on the family name with this spectacularly cack-handed attempt at a Twin Peaks

La Donna Nel Mondo (Women Of The World) (**)
mixed bag of footage from around the world, some (but not all) of which is eminently watchable; however, it is certainly not as cohesive a film as it might have been - one for the Jacopetti completists amongst us