Monster Cam

There deserves to be a history of that technique, common to many horror films, in which the audience sees as if from the killer or creature's perspective. A shaky handheld camera brushing through leaves and shrubbery, poking round corners, lurking, crouching, a heavy breathing soundtrack. These elements will be familiar to any fan of the slasher genre.

To a certain extent, the origins of this technique must be technologically determined. It is scarcely possible to imagine without a camera sufficiently light and flexible to be highly mobile. The development of handheld camera technique (form Vertov onwards?); the invention of the steadicam;  the techniques and special equipment necessary for underwater shooting, as in Jaws and Zombie Flesh Eaters; these will need be signal moments in its development.

Perhaps we will find the roots of the point-of-view-as-monstrous in film noir: Polonsky's Force of Evil, Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake. A little later, in 1950's alien invasion films like It Came From Outer Space, in which a sort of blobby, wobbly effect irising the frame - and originally in 3D - makes us aware that we are seeing through alien eyes. From there, we will find it used extensively by Hitchcock, most notoriously in Psycho - a film which had a profound effect on the development of subsequent shockers (the influence of Hitchcock on Mario Bava and Dario Argento, for instance, is well known). Likewise, those British horror films with Freddie Francis as either director or cameraman.

There is a moment in Harry Bromley Davenport's bizarre British sci-fi/horror, Xtro, in which the build-up of tension towards one of the earliest attacks by the dad-creature (echoes of PKD's 'Father Thing') is suddenly interrupted, and for no apparent reason, by a scene in which the boy, Tony (played by Simon Nash) walks in on his mother and her boyfriend in flagrante. From the way it is cut in, between two sequences of monster cam, creeping up in the undergrowth of a completely different house; from the way this moment seems at first to bear no relation narrative-wise to the surrounding events; one can only conclude that its express intention was the association of the monster cam technique with the primal scene of Freudian psychoanalysis. A similar development can be found in the more recent ,Splice. Here the process of getting under the skin - and by extension, through the eyes - of the spliced animal, Dren, proceeds - as if by a matter of course - from the moment Dren watches her two creators getting down on the sofa.

From the beginning of John Carpenter's Halloween, we seem to be in similar territory. Nonetheless, through the course of the film's first two sequels, as the antagonist becomes more and more inhuman; the killer p.o.v. shot becomes associated with a machine vision which brings the narrative of this most controversial - supposedly even amoral (shades of Theodore Roszak's novel Flicker) - of cinematic techniques back to the question of technology. The express purpose of Halloween III in particular, as with so much of the work to bare Carpenter's name in this period - seems to be to draw a direct link between George Romero's zombies and the automation of American factory life, the increasing spread of techniques of control and surveillance in society. This potentially brings the development and spread of CCTV technology back where it belongs - as part of an aesthetic history of the cinema, and leads ultimately to the so-called New Aesthetic indelibly associated with the Cameron-ite project of Old Street's 'silicon roundabout'; likewise to the found footage thrillers of the last decade and a half, from Blair Witch to Rec, Cloverfield, and perhaps in particular Paranormal Activity.

Music, Sound and Time in Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan

Early on in the new film by former philosophy teacher, Bruno Dumont, Alexandra Lematre's character (identified only as "elle") takes an in-ear headphone from the pocket of her hoodie and slips it in her ear. We, the audience are never made privvy to the music she listens to, but the gesture draws attention to the absence of music in the film. As traditionally defined, there is no music in Hors Satan - no silken Hollywood strings, no pop songs, no diegetic performance, no non-diegetic score. Even the kind of sonic re-structuring usually handled by a sound editor is missing, for Dumont did not hire one.

No music, nor very much dialogue either - and most of that which there is is largely inconsequential. But Hors Satan is not a silent film. Far from it. We hear birds tweeting, cocks crowing, leaves rustling, as well as several more revealing sounds - a camera dolly rolling over its track, the wind blowing against a microphone.

In an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon, the director explains, "We recorded only live and "mono" sounds. What you hear in the film are the actual sounds recorded during shooting. I didn't alter or re-record them. I wish some noises weren't there, but I kept them anyway, stoically. . . The sound material is very rich and untamed. Therefore, when there is a moment of silence, you can feel it loud and clear."

At one moment, after it has been raining, we hear water running over a corrugated iron roof and falling to the ground. The two main characters pause in their journey to watch and listen, and we listen with them. These characters frequently take time out to simply stand still and pay attention to some ambient sound. And even in their absence, the camera will likewise pursue such sounds to their sources, becoming, in the process, a character like them. Sound - and a certain quasi-musical attentiveness to sound - thus subjectivizes, and in so doing constructs an audience that will be willing, like the film's characters to offer a certain attentiveness toward sounds, to give them time, without preconceptions.

How can we describe the sense of time experienced in the films of Bruno Dumont? It is certainly very far from the clock-time of Hitchcock, the almost Taylorist efficiency with which narrative details are revealed and slotted into the perpetual motion machine of the diegesis in North by North West or The Man Who Knew Too Much, for example. We find with Dumont a concern with rhythm and tempo that goes beyond brute functionalism, and there is evidently something musical in this. But neither are we dealing with the languorous time of Apichatpong Weerasthakul, nor the deep time of Bela Tarr, which would be something like the Erfahrung of Walter Benjamin.

Karlheinz Stockhausen once remarked that "Wagner, more than any other western composer, expanded the timing of western music: he would have been the best gagaku composer." While the first half of this statement is undoubtedly true, I'm not so sure about the second half. Think of the constantly held back, teetering sense of anticipation, of desperate yearning for an impossible fulfillment, found in Tristan und Isolde. Perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect this is something foreign to the Japanese gagaku tradition. But maybe not so much to the cinema of Bruno Dumont - even if only to an earlier film such as Twenty-Nine Palms, in which the palpable sense of dread, of waiting for some seemingly inevitable horror hangs suspended in each crawling take, like the infinitely delayed resolution of some dissonance in the middle voices.

Hors Satan is different in this respect. The shot lengths are generally shorter than in his earlier films (though still considerably longer than most mainstream films), the forward motion of the narrative less precipitous. Perhaps this film is closer to the sense of time alluded to in Stockhausen's reference to gagaku.

In his book, Haunted Weather, David Toop, in the midst of a discussion about contemporary Japanese electronica, describes this 7th and 8th century court music which, he says, survives largely unchanged to this day, "So measured in the progress of its percussive markers that it draws the image of a footstep raised to move forward yet caught in a universal power cut, gagaku's timbral consistency is a gaseous astringency of reeds, flutes and free reeds."

Toop quotes William P. Malm's book on Japanese Music and Musical Instruments, which claims that the chords of the sho bamboo reed pipe do not serve the functions of tension and release allotted to western functional harmony, "Rather, they 'freeze' the melody. They are like a vein of amber in which a butterfly has been prepared. We see the beauty of the creature within but at the same time are unaware of a transparent solid between us and the object, a solid of such a texture that it shows that object off in a very special way."

Stockhausen discovered gagaku music when he travelled to Japan in 1966 to complete his Telemusik at the NHK electronic music studios, where composers like Toshiro Mayuzumi and Makoto Maroi had been creating electronic music for over a decade. Mayuzumi would score over a hundred films, including several by Imamura and Mizoguchi, both of whom are renowned for their long takes and slow, refined pacing.

Despite the sometimes austere titles, Mayuzumi's electronic music, such as 1953's X,Y,Z for musique concrète, (contemporary with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's concrète opera, Orphée 53), exhibits a kind of delirious playfulness, equal parts hallucinogenic Looney Tunes pandemonium and delirious melodrama, as pitch-shifted horns and bird tweets give way to echoplexed weeping.

Moroi and Mayuzumi's collaborative work, Variations on 7, is, however, more restrained, with a much greater economy of means, while still remaining very different from either the French concrète of Schaeffer and Henry or the sine tone based electronic music of Stockhausen and Eimert in Cologne. "One probably reason why this work seems to compelling and relevant now," says David Toop, "is the directness, the clarity, the sense of pure intent."

And this last seems to me a good description of the attraction of Dumont's film-making. He is one of the few directors working today willing to impose restrictions upon himself, to act with a strict economy of tools and means. Utilising a restricted repertoire of shot lengths, camera heights, and angles. Even if his short lengths were to be reduced much further, there would still be a certain sense of slowness to his film because there is none of the usual digital busyness of superimposed sonic and visual detail (/clutter). He does this without nostalgia: there is nothing old-fashioned looking - or sounding - about his films. But there is this sense of "propriety" as he says of Alexendra Lematre's performance. And the drama comes from the disproportion between this propriety, this certain holding back, a resistance to express even, and the sometimes quite startling events which unfold; events which in another context, filmed in another way, might seem, as Dumont says in the above cited interview, quite normal. This is the source of Dumont's "slap in the face"; a slap which is in many ways very musical. Like a snare drum erupting in the midst of a performance of John Cage's 4'33''.

Two Late Expressionist Utopias: Frau im Mond and Tabu

At the turn of 1930s, two of German expressionist cinema's leading lights left the dark shadows of the catacombs and the back alleys in search of other worlds. Both Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau had featured utopian imagery in their films before: think of the fairground scene in Sunrise, or most famously, Lang's city of the future in Metropolis. But both of these films feature distinctly urban utopias, whereas Tabu (1931) and Frau im Mond (1929) each take flight from the modernist city. The former looks back to the traveller's tales of exotic lands that inspired early utopias such as Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, while the latter looks forward to the 'hard' science-fiction of Arthur C. Clarke et al and the Apollo moon landings.

While the bare bones of Frau im Mond's plot, about a rocket trip to the moon and the happy couple that choose to stay there, may recall the late Victorian scientific romance of H.G. Wells, it is the little details that make it so prophetic – and the story behind the story that make it so historic. Advertised as “The first utopian film based on scientific fact,” Frau im Mond's rocket trip contain a number of features that put it closer to the Apollo landings of forty years later. Firstly, and most conspicuously, there is the countdown to lift-off, never before featured in fiction (let alone fact), and apparently invented by Lang on something of a whim for the purely dramatic reasons of building up tension (Alfred Hitchcock, who had only recently returned to England after a spell working at UFA studios in Berlin, may well have been taking notes).

Rather more profoundly – from a scientific point of view at least - Lang's film showed the world its first depiction of a liquid fuel rocket composed of two stages, jettisoning its first stage after take-off – just as the American space rockets of the sixties would. Such an extraordinary prophecy is made only slightly less incredible by certain details surrounding the film's production. The story, by Lang's wife and frequent collaborator, Thea von Harbou, was inspired by a small book written by Hermann Oberth, entitled 'By Rocket Into Planetary Space'. Originally intended to be Oberth's doctoral dissertation but rejected as too “utopian,” the book detailed the theories Oberth had been working on since a childhood exposure to Jules Verne. Oberth, along with his colleague, Willy Ley, from the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, a German amateur rocket enthusiasts club, would ultimately serve as technical advisors on Lang's film.

Also, in Oberth and Ley's circle at the time, was a young man named Werner von Braun. In the 1930s, as a member of the SS, von Braun would design the V-2 rocket, which bore the insignia of the woman in the moon at its base. The Nazis apparently considered, Lang's film so close to the scientific truth of their weapon that they had the film suppressed and all its models destroyed. Despite the destruction wrought by von Braun's invention on Western cities, and the use of concentration camp inmates as slave labour (resulting in more deaths in the rocket's construction than as a result of its firepower), within just a few years of the World War Two ending, von Braun's name would turn up in the American mainstream, advocating space travel in the pages of Collier's magazine, and even designing (with Willy Ley and Disney imagineer John Hench), the TWA Moonliner, a rocket bearing a distinct similarity to the V-2 that stood as the tallest structure in Disneyland's Tomorrowland.

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Coming two years after the Jazz Singer, Frau im Mond was probably the last great silent science fiction film. In the year of its release, F.W. Murnau, dejected by the failure of his first talking picture, the now lost Four Devils, left his adopted Hollywood home for the South Pacific. Schooled in the romantic theatre of Max Reinhardt, it may have been the orientalist tendencies in so much nineteenth century music - from Schumann's Das Paradies und die Peri to Bizet's les Pecheurs de Perles - that led Murnau to seek his own escapist exotica.

Murnau's Tabu is a film whose images teem with music. We see its characters singing, drumming, playing the guitar, and, frequently dancing. Despite Murnau's embeddedness in the film's habitat (he was by that time living on Bora Bora) and the realist intentions behind the choice of real locations and native actors, the dancing we see was in fact tightly choreographed by Murnau and his collaborator Walter Spies to fit into their conception of 'architectural cinema' (and the real locations and natural light certainly do not seemed to have stemmed Murnau's love for suggestive use of shadows). Likewise, the music composed to be performed in theatres alongside screenings of Tabu bares about as much relation to the authentic music of the South Seas as does The 101 Strings in a Hawaiian Paradise.

Composer Hugo Reisenfeld, whose first work on film was as a music arranger on film adaptations of the operas Carmen and Siegfried (for Raoul Walsh and Fritz Lang, respectively) initially proposed using themes by Bizet, Massenet, and Mendelssohn, and, although these were ultimately not to be used in the film it nonetheless gives you an indication of the way he was thinking. Though the music is often in sync to images of the islanders playing their own instruments, the soundtrack gives us, somewhat incongruously, a symphony orchestra throughout, frequently reprising themes from his earlier Murnau collaboration, Sunrise (along with a bit of Smetana's Má Vlast).

Tabu had begun life as a collaboration with the ethnographic film-maker Robert J. Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), who had intended to make a political documentary about white exploitation of the islands' natural resources. Apparently the hard-drinking, heavy smoker Flaherty soon fell out with the ascetic Murnau over the latter's preciousness concerning the waxed floors of his yacht. As the story of Murnau's film moved further away from political critique towards exotic fantasy, celebrating the idyllic lifestyle and 'primitive' rituals of the islanders, Flaherty was ultimately banned from the film unit, left to stalk the production like a jealous lover.

One week before Tabu's American premier, Murnau was killed in a car accident, while work on the music was still underway. On a documentary featured on the Eureka Masters of Cinema DVD, his grand-daughter recalls him as a great lover of music who knew many operas by heart ("from Beethoven to Bach"). Shortly before his death, he had signed a contract with Paramount to produce five new sound pictures, all of which were to be shot on the South Sea Islands. Alas, we will never know whether the resources of sound film might have led Murnau to find more sonic sympathy with the islands where he had chosen to live out his final years.

They're birds, aren't they?

There are so many things to love about this article, about a crow attacking female joggers in Eltham park, from the front page of South-East London's fine local gazette, The News Shopper (a title which conjures up the image of some Chris Morris-esque anchor, trawling the aisles of a supermarket, stacking up his trolley, and finally bringing to the check-out his bounty of news stories). There is the caption beneath the (above) photo which reads "menacing" in inverted commas, there is the official advice for runners to wear hard hats, there is the image of park wardens crowding round a tree making bird noises (a tactic yet to succeed), there is the sidebar entitled "When crows go bad". But best of all for Hitchcock fans is the little tease that the avian attacker has "an eye for blond females." Tim Webb from the RSPCA is brought in to explain that crows have a very long memory, suggesting that “At some point in the past this crow may have had a bad experience with a blonde female.” (Haven't we all, you might say.) So, like all good movie psychos, the bird had a damaged childhood, the attacks are merely the result of some barely repressed trauma ...

"The Dead Don't Talk."

If Hitchcock's rule of suspense states that the very terrifying thing that everything in the montage is leading you to expect must never actually happen, in the gialli cycle of films that spanned Italy's long 1970s, the thing almost invariably does happen, and usually in a manner even more gruesome and terrifying than we were led to expect (the death of the drunk in Lucio Fulci's Il Gatto Nero is exemplary here). But if these films differ from the Hitchcockian model in this sense, they nonetheless share that "specifically visual intelligence" that Fantastic Journal saw in the Red Riding Trilogy on Channel Four. Like Hitchcock's films, gialli almost always tell their entire story, even the characterisation, anything, in fact, that might be of interest, through the images (or rather through a combination of image, music and sound design that specifically excludes dialogue). Interviewed in 1994 at a U.K. horror convention, Lucio Fulci apologised that the only uncut print of his film, Zombie Flesh Eaters, available for the screening was in Italian and without subtitles, "But the dialogue isn't really important. The dead speak the international language."

It is partly this absence at the linguistic level that sets the gialli apart from the American film noir they are so often compared to. Despite having a similarly pulpy literary source, gialli and film noir differ on a number of levels: for the hardboiled language and frequent recourse to voice-over in noir, gialli substitutes minimal, superfluous speech; for noir's succession of cops and professional private eyes, gialli offer up a series of bumbling amateur detectives (Tonino Valerii's Mio Caro Assassino, being a rare exception), who often cause more death than they prevent; in place of the complex psychology of motive evoked by noir to explain its murders in terms of the symbolic order's own inherent transgression, murder in a giallo film is often explained in terms of a highly libidinised supernatural phantasy (the Lacanian Real); and for noir's long shadows and chiaroscuro lighting, gialli substitute a predilection for bright, over-saturated reds and yellows (giallo is Italian for 'yellow', a reference to the yellow covers of the Mondadori publishing house's yellow-backed paperback thrillers of the 30's and 40's). It may be instructive to compare the cool, reserved, minimalism of Jacques Tourneur's (1942) Cat People, in which nothing is ever quite seen, with the lurid maximalism of Fulci's (1981) Il Gatto Nero, in which everything is always seen, and usually in unpleasantly tight focus. Despite similar thematic ground, the style and sensibility of the two films could scarcely be more different.