Flipside 004: Herostratus

[MichaelB]

BTW booklets are simply great, disregard the naysayers!...

Not so much naysayers as notsayers in this case, to be fair.

[BAD]

Ah, yes, print, where you do have the luxury of not having a 24/7 news cycle and online PR breathing down your neck to see live links within 10 days or less a lot of times.

Swings and roundabouts - deadlines are absolutely set in stone in a way that they aren't for online media (or rather, you can cheat by uploading something that isn't quite perfect and then adjust it later once you've appeased the PR people*), and of course you have to get it right first time, which certainly isn't a luxury!

*Not that I've ever done that myself, of course. Good Lord, no.

But, as for the booklets, I've just never considered them "supplements" as in they are not on the disc itself, so call it editorial choice that I do not include them in the reviews, but I do suppose that in the case of BFI and Criterion, exceptions can and probably should be made to expand that definition.

Frankly, I think it's highly questionable having a policy that doesn't take the totality of the package into account, regardless of label - and absolute lunacy when you're dealing with labels like the BFI, Masters of Cinema, Criterion or Second Run that put a huge amount of effort (and production budget) into producing booklets that sometimes add significantly to original scholarship.

For instance, Masters of Cinema's DVD of Godard's Une femme mariée looks pretty barebones until you open the booklet, a whopping 80-page labour of love that apparently took nine months to assemble. Buy all three volumes in the BFI's GPO Film Unit survey and you end up with the equivalent of a book that must be at least 200 pages even after you've filtered out repeated material - and virtually all the content was specially commissioned.

And the Flipside releases also heavily revolve around the booklets - which are especially important in the case of Herostratus and the Jane Arden/Jack Bond titles because of the lack of critical coverage available elsewhere. In fact, until someone picks up the relevant baton and writes something more substantial, the booklets are currently the definitive critical resources - and we were well aware of this when writing them, so under a lot of pressure to get the facts right, not to mention straightening out a lot of myth and misinformation along the way.

Since you've been sent checkdiscs, have you actually seen any of the BFI booklets? If not, I can very easily email you a sample PDF so you can see what you've been missing.

Well, I've only just begun covering Criterion and the BFI material. Now that I know how passionate people are about the booklets in them (which I have actually referenced in at least one Criterion review for another site) I will update my policy to ensure they are properly considered in each review.

As for the BFI checkdiscs, what happened with those is, my discs and my printouts of the entire booklets and press releases were separated. I have all the material now, but I unfortunately did not receive them until many weeks later due to a mix up. It wasn't BFI's fault, but my own contact in the UK. I only just received disc two of the Bill Douglas Trilogy, which was sent out to me by the BFI mistakenly with only the first disc.

But, these limited number of studios aside, probably 99% of the titles released have booklets that are completely worthless, if they have any at all.

[MichaelB]

Mondo Digital.

[MichaelB]

DVD Outsider.

[Adam]

Saw it projected at REDCAT on Monday from HD Cam, the BFI remastering.
An amazing film, often brilliant, although I don't know if i liked it, as I had a very strong dislike for the main character.
Some nice experimental touches used to reflect inner confusion/tension/despair of characters, not subtly, but well done.
The film is also about 2 hours 25 minutes, and it felt that long. odd thing to say. It felt long but not interminable, sometimes completely absorbing, sometimes very off-putting to me.
Lovely textures, color, and use of spaces, whether found (in modern buildings) or constructed (on sets).
A very interesting counter-presentation to the representations of swingin London of the 1960s.
It also incorporates some footage from the same Royal Albert Hall reading of Allen Ginsberg that Peter Whitehead has in one of his films - I wonder if the footage just came from Whitehead. Levy uses it as thematic expansion, but I don't really know if it was needed.
But the influence of this film on PERFORMANCE, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and uh, oh hell, what's that other film with the British kid who ends up leading a movement (not TOMMY), drawing a blank. Even the shot of Alex in Clockwork chomping on food gleefully near the end has a seemingly direct source in this film.

[MichaelB]

But the influence of this film on PERFORMANCE, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and uh, oh hell, what's that other film with the British kid who ends up leading a movement (not TOMMY), drawing a blank.

If...?

[Cold Bishop]

Privilege, I'd assume (although I wouldn't say lead), except the dates don't match up that well as far as influence goes.

[RossyG]

I'm amazed and saddened that the director and lighting cameraman of this brilliant film never made another feature. What a waste!

It also incorporates some footage from the same Royal Albert Hall reading of Allen Ginsberg that Peter Whitehead has in one of his films - I wonder if the footage just came from Whitehead.

Yes, it's the Whitehead footage.

[MichaelB]

Privilege, I'd assume (although I wouldn't say lead), except the dates don't match up that well as far as influence goes.

They don't match up at all - Privilege was shot towards the end of 1966, and Herostratus wasn't released till the following year. Granted, it's not impossible that Peter Watkins might have seen work-in-progress footage (independent British filmmaking was a very small world in the mid-60s), but it's a bit of a stretch.

[Adam]

Interesting. Maybe the influence went the other way. It is PRIVILEGE that I was thinking of. Thank you all.
Hmm, I need to see PRIVILEGE again. In a way, as I badly remember it, HEROSTRATUS and PRIVILEGE could be seen as two facets of a similar thematic investigation...maybe that was in the air. But there aren't that many films where an coarse youth is turned into an icon by a publicity machine or PR company. But in HEROSTRATUS, you never actually see a crowd or any publicity - it just is inferred by the actions of the PR person who is one of the three main characters. They mention announcements but one never hears one, etc...

Unexplained gaffe in the film? The PR man & his assistant decide that the main character should jump off a building on a Monday at quarter to two, when people are returning from lunch. But later when he is awoken for the day of, it is explicitly stated that it is a Sunday...

Anyway, I infer a deeper suspicion of publicity and encroaching capitalism in the UK in the 1960s & 70s than was experienced in the US, represented in films by following a process of the making of an icon/cult leader of some sort...

[jamie_atp]

So can anyone confirm for me where the main characters flat is located in London? I'm thinking it may be somewhere like Cromwell Road but not sure. Just curious!

[zedz]

(It's that spooky one-year bump phenomenon agan!)

[MichaelB]

TI also note that Levy's short film Opus from the same year was produced for the Central Office of Information. Is there a possibility that this would turn up if the BFI starts releasing sets of the COI films?

Twenty months on, I can finally confirm that Opus is being included in the fifth COI collection, Portrait of a People. It's out in July.

Also, while I've said this elsewhere, I should probably repeat it in Herostratus' own thread - which is that the existing single-format releases are going OOP and will be replaced by a new Dual Format edition. This will still contain both framings of the film, but the 4:3 one will be in 1080p and the 16:9 one will be in SD video only.

(It's not much of a loss - although Don Levy apparently preferred the widescreen framing, it's obvious that many of the shots were composed for 4:3, and apparently it was a royal pain trying to create a viable widescreen version. God knows what it looked like in the 1960s, when projectionists wouldn't have had the luxury of being able to adjust the framing from shot to shot!)

[nolanoe]

Just a quick question: will the DVD-version of this include the 4:3 version??

[MichaelB]

Just a quick question: will the DVD-version of this include the 4:3 version??

No - just the 16:9 version.

The new Dual Format version will contain the 4:3 version on Blu-ray, the 16:9 version on DVD, and the extras on both.

[nolanoe]

Well, I guess this does it then - where can I buy a cheap Blu-Ray Player??

[imhotep]

Well, I guess this does it then - where can I buy a cheap Blu-Ray Player?? ;)

Anywhere! Hope you are going Blu because it makes old films feel even more alive.

[antnield]

Graeme Hobbs' latest MovieMail podcast focuses on this "most influential of unknown films".

[MichaelB]

This will be reissued as a Dual Format edition on October 24 - details here.

[htshell]

This whole package knocked me out. What an amazing and adventurous film! The extras are just as good with the short films (particularly Malaise and Black Ice) being my favorites.

[RossyG]

EDIT: Oops. I just repeated what I'd said three years ago.

[colinr0380]

"Don't you recognise a genius when you see one?"
"Piss off"

Herostratus is a fascinating film, although I'm a little ambivalent about it. I love the ambitious editing scheme for the film and the stream-of-consciousness editing patterns displayed throughout, especially the flashes to moments to come, or moments past (the unbroken jug in the poet's room coming later in the ad exec's office), or moments equating characters together (the best one being the poet's moment of truth briefly flashing to Clio, the ad exec secretary in the position pinned against a wall for her final and more crucial scene to come, with Clio exactly in the same position that the poet is, just facing towards camera rather than away).

Yet I find a lot of the through-narrative material problematic for the way that each scene is about a single, easy to grasp idea that then gets stretched out past the point of redundancy (I'm aware that I'm bringing up Gaspar Noé a lot recently, but that is a similar approach that he seems to be using these days!), to the extent that I wonder if a number of these narrative scenes could have benefitted from being trimmed back a lot to their bare essentials, especially as a lot of the very interesting abstract editing only really occurs at defined key moments within a scene, or between scenes themselves. That could perhaps have helped make the film feel a little less exhausting and make the entire film play as interestingly as the more key moments. Although I wonder if there was an intent there to create a number of longeurs to sort of play around with time in the film itself, or turn moments such as the love scene into something hypnotic, and language into a Ginsberg style stream-of-consciousness mantra, which might be something that would be lost if the film were shorter.

I particularly liked the small abstract scenes within the larger film, such as Helen Mirren's sexy commercial for rubber gloves; the intercutting of different politicians together, earnest about nothing much in particular beyond their own presence in front of a camera; the narrated section about youth slowly corroding into aging, with the "Do you now have anything of worth to others?" pan over the elderly seguing into Holocaust footage; and especially the mid-film striptease intercut with cow butchering scene, with the woman sexily briefly revealing parts of her anatomy as the guts of the cow are exposed to our eyes too - this particular scene is also stunning for the way that it then cuts to a huge table of naked babies which is a shocking animalistic image (and a kind of repulsive one, since we have just seen what is done to animals), the Holocaust footage again, the unnamed woman who I assume is the Angel of Death in the film and that amazing series of Francis Bacon-esque still images showing blurred images of our protagonist's contorted face in mid-scream or convulsion.

Eventually it is Clio herself who ends up in the contorted images, which to me suggests a kind of transference of the poet's malaise on to her (preparing for her final scene in suddenly-realised captivity), and I found that actually made the film more engaging as finally the focus turned on a character I actually cared about rather than the pretty unlikeable and self-centred poet figure.

The poet himself seems fully intended to be a completely selfish and unsympathetic character, from the early compelling scene with the Asian seeming-prostitute on the stairwell to his flat in which he cannot bring himself to ask her for sex (spoilers, he'll turn out to be a virgin, only revealed after his sex scene with Clio), to the way that he petulantly destroys his already crappy-looking bedsit, to the way he gleefully runs through the streets whooping and waving an axe (which these days would probably get him shot by Police marksmen!), to the self-centred way he approaches his suicide and then pulling back from wanting to do it at the moment of truth only to shove someone trying to pull him back from the edge over instead! That final moment both damns the poet and ties the themes of the film together, in that it is about a wannabe artist thinking that he is suffering in solitude for his art but when push comes to shove he kills someone else in the futile, pointless gesture that he was going to make. Is he upset that he has been upstaged? Does he fade from the film as a pathetic, scared irrelevance at that point? Does he get a premonition of his own death in the gory, splattered remains on the ground below (tying in with the slaughterhouse footage nightmare he had earlier), as if he had actually jumped from the building and is now seeing himself outside his body at a remove?

This all ties in with the idea of fame (or infamy) without doing anything to really justify it. One thing that I think this suicidal poet story would need if the film were made today is that the ad executive would have to create a reality TV show around the run up to his suicide (with associated charity sponsorship and interactive telephone lines for viewers to call in and vote for the style of dive they want him to practice each week!) that would follow our suicidal protagonist going through minor trials (maybe a weekly visit to a slightly bored and disinterested psychiatrist, or an anguished art class in which viewers have to guess what the abstract art actually means), injuries (starting with 'accidents' and progressing up the scale as he prepares for the big finale) and crises of confidence ("I...just don't think I can do it. I've suddenly realised that there is something to live for!" Presenter: "You heard the man - if you want him to commit suicide call this number and leave your most depressing messages for him to listen to that will strengthen his resolve! 40p a minute from land lines but mobiles will cost considerably more") before the big event.

Anyway, I think Clio turns out to be the strongest character in the entire film. Perhaps more attention paid to developing her character would perhaps have balanced the film out and created more engagement than we are left with by the obnoxious poet!

In terms of film technique, I did find the regular decision to refuse to do two shots and instead focus on one character in a conversation for minutes at a time a little annoying. Sometimes it worked (as in the scene with the poet and the girl with the doll), sometimes not (as in the first scene in the ad exec's office, which felt needlessly elongated as it was).

So an interesting film if not a completely successful one. By far the best scenes are the all too brief flash edits creating connections between tediously drawn out narrative scenes. I would much have preferred if the narrative scenes had been dropped altogether, or stripped down into abstraction themselves and a sort of avant-garde non-narrative think piece created linking imagery together to comment on commodification, politics, history, art and advertising. Although that might have been asking too much, as I only really think a feature film has only just gotten that daringly ambitious (with the creation of a story through fractured and elusive narrative melding of created fiction and recontextualised stock footage material) with the recent film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

I will give Don Levy a lot of credit though for capturing some stunning imagery, for some beautiful juxtapositions of imagery and combinations of different speeds of footage together, and for seemingly being the master of the technique of shots showing a beautiful woman facing the camera down or walking towards it slowly!

___

On the extra films, Ten Thousand Talents is an OK but rather arch and goofy discursion about the properties of Cambridge gentleman students. Apparently Cambridge is full of men dressed as fairies dancing around waving their magic wands about the place, and every third person punting on the river has to fall in with a great splash! As Monty Python might put it "let's not go there, it is a silly place!" (and Monty Python seems a good reference for the magazine cut-up comedy sequence in Herostratus too)

The narrator does seem incredibly concerned about the ratio of male to female students too, going as far as to lambast the University for having created another men-only facility!

I get the feeling that René Clair's first directed film, the short Entr'acte with all of its crazy antics, might have had some influence here. Although this doesn't really reach the heights of Clair's film, it has a good shot at it!

Time Is on the other hand is absolutely magnificent, the highlight of the whole set. This is a narrated documentary about, well, what time is, how it is measured and perceived, relativity, subatomic particles, alternate backwards dimensions, and something about a chick getting ignominiously backwards-filmed back into its egg! I had great fun with this half hour film, felt like I learnt a little and certainly laughed more often than I did during Herostratus! I think having the structure of an scientific educational framework really helps here, as this allows Levy to fully indulge both the humourous side on show in Ten Thousand Talents with some stunningly beautiful uses of editing juxtapositions and different speed film footage showing pendulums swinging weightily, details in plane crashes, plants growing and entwining around each other speedily, hummingbirds flapping their wings slowly, candles melting quickly, a pane of glass smashing into pieces, and so on.

There is also an extremely funny piece explaining flighty protons, portrayed as a lady fanning herself who looks as if she has just stepped out of the court of Louis XIV, and sturdy electrons, a male motorbiker, which involves the flighty proton transferring between a couple of bubble cars! (There is also a great sequence of various women walking past the camera, which also seems to be playing into Levy's preoccupations!)

Finally, he also finds room to throw in a montage of clumsy ducks knocking into each other!

Cute, amusing, informative and doesn't outstay its welcome, this is a really great little film.

I'd also recommend one of the extremely short two minute pieces also on the disc called The Proof of Noon, which uses cut-up footage from Time Is and the same narrator, but this time reading a much more lyrical poem than intoning dry scientific principles!