Penelope

2006, UK/US, directed by Mark Palansky

Although the filmmakers might like to think Penelope is more social satire than fairytale, it succeeds pretty well in the latter vein: there’s real warmth to the performances from Christina Ricci and James McAvoy, especially in the early scenes where the characters haven’t laid eyes on each other due to Penelope’s apparent physical affliction. The film’s fantasy version of London populated with deliberately strange mid-Atlantic accents is also a compelling re-imagining of the location; Palansky recasts the city a little like Jeunet and Caro's appropriated a vaguely real Paris in their (more biting) Delicatessen, while he surrounds his leads with a great cast of character types (though I wish Richard E. Grant had ended up with a little more screen time).

Grave of the Fireflies

1988, Japan, directed by Isao Takahata


A war film that focuses almost exclusively on the the civilian experience of war, Isao Takahata's film follows two orphaned children in 1945 Japan, with an older boy (Seita) desperately trying to care for his young sister (Setsuko) in a situation where adults are either absent or are unable to see beyond their own straitened circumstances to take the children in. What gives the film much of its power is Seita's attempts, despite his own terrible experiences, to create a protective cocoon in which his sister can still have some semblance of a normal routine and even hints of a childhood notwithstanding the fires and deaths that have destroyed the city.

There's great power in Takahata's resolutely unsentimental evocation of a country slipping deeper into privation, where food and money are desperately scarce, and the normal care systems - both governmental and familial - have been strained to breaking point and beyond. As the film notes, wartime ultimately shreds the social fabric, with individual family members looking only to their own instances, and generosity the rarest commodity of all.

While civilian suffering in the war was undoubtedly terrible, and is given deeply affecting expression here, I do wonder if the choice of child protagonists allows the film to skirt some of the issues of adult responsibility that have proved so difficult to navigate in postwar Japan. It's instructive to contrast the film with Kazuo Hara's extraordinary, taboo-breaking documentary The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, released just a year before, which confronts the wartime roles of the military and political systems that ultimately created the conditions in which civilians suffered terrible fates.

The Good Shepherd

2006, US, directed by Robert De Niro

De Niro's account of the early years of the inception and early years of the CIA is compelling enough, but you get the feeling it's all very over-determined, as though the central conflict has an inevitable outcome designed to show Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) the error of his ways. Wilson's a spectacularly humourless man - don't these super-spies ever crack a joke? - who's barely capable of expressing affection to his family, and the film ultimately runs further with than conceit than with Wilson's actual motivations and beliefs as he becomes integrated into the country's espionage bureaucracy. The film has considerable value in outlining the ways in which wartime created the conditions for the post-war apparatus of paranoia (a self-fulfilling paranoia at times) but it's less successful in revealing much about a man whose character has been sketched in broad strokes early on.

Captain Blood

1935, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

You get the sense that Errol Flynn knew exactly what kind of opportunity had landed in his lap when he was cast as Captain Blood: he blazes across the screen, investing every line with a kind of larrikin enthusiasm, moving from high drama to comedy to swordplay with consummate ease, a gleam in his eye in almost every shot. The only downside is that the film flags somewhat when he's not onscreen, despite gripping battle sequences and a rollicking, partially fact-based plot.

Michael Curtiz shows his stripes in the early going, in the carefully-staged court sequences - great shadows loom over the spare set as the accused sweat in the makeshift dock - and on board the ship that takes Flynn and his fellow convicts to the Caribbean, the light from the water outside dappling Flynn's face. However, the grim tone of the first twenty minutes or so fades pretty quickly against the boisterous action, and even unpleasant events - such as Blood's all-too-abbreviated encounter with the dastardly Levasseur, played by the Basil Rathbone in love-to-hate-him mode - are quickly put aside by the demands of the plot.

This film is part of my Watching Movies in Africa project and I couldn't help wondering how African audiences must have reacted to the film's depiction of slavery. While the precipitating events at the beginning of the film are accurate enough, and resulted in the transportation of hundreds of white Englishmen to the West Indies, the film almost never shows any black slaves although they would have been in the overwhelmingly majority on the plantations; indeed, the black extras mostly serve as domestic servants rather than as field-slaves, although they are never individualized in the film. Captain Blood played at the Picturedrome theatre in Kumasi (Ghana) in January 1951, advertised with the slogan "Robin Hood in Captain Blood".

My Sassy Girl

2008, US, directed by Yann Samuell
The first five minutes of My Sassy Girl put me in mind of a director with a severe case of Amélie overload - hardly surprising when I discovered the perpetrator was Yann Samuell, who displayed the same affliction in his 2003 Jeux d'enfants. Nominally a remake of a Korean film I've not seen, great chunks of this effort feel like retreads of Samuell's first film. Where he could previously rely on Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard, both strong actors, to help paper the cracks here he's working with Elisha Cuthbert and Jesse Bradford: pleasant enough at times but not really capable of investing this silliness with any conviction. There are lots of visual ideas at work, but Samuell needs to work on the basics before thinking about the decorations: the plotting is nonsensical and Cuthbert's character is so fundamentally unsympathetic that the entire premise is fatally undermined.

Duplicity

2009, US, directed by Tony Gilroy
Despite the thoroughly of-the-moment narrative strategies, Duplicity seems to have been carved from old-fashioned Hollywood stone: two eye-catching stars, the kind of satisfyingly convoluted double-crosses Chandler might have enjoyed, and a script bristling with verbal darts. The structure is occasionally a little exhausting, dispensing information in fits and starts, and playing games with the viewer that would have earned a reprimand from S.S. Van Dine, but Gilroy makes excellent use of Julia Roberts and Clive Owen - there's a real sense that the two actors enjoyed working together - and he's as assured on caper-ish territory as he was on the chillier ground of his previous Michael Clayton. There's not much substance here to the portrait of corporate shenanigans, in contrast to the previous film, despite the enjoyable irony in the idea that corporations have acquired all the security paranoia of Cold War rivals; Gilroy deflates much of the film's satirical bite when we discover the enigma at the heart of the plot.

Hunger

2008, UK/Ireland, directed by Steve McQueen
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Steve McQueen's debut film is the way it imagines a world which remained visually off limits during the course of the Troubles. When I was growing up, Bobby Sands and H-Block were a constant presence in graffiti slogans and on the news, but the cameras never went inside the walls of the Maze prison where the hunger strikes took place. Sands and his fellow hunger strikers exist for most of us in just a few grainy pictures, often from happier days on the outside.

Here we see not just cells and inmates but the detailed rituals of life behind the bars of Long Kesh: the methods by which messages were smuggled into the prison, the ways in which the prisoners dressed and communicated, the often brutal searches by guards. There's a stunning extended shot during which a guard bleaches a prison hallway and then methodically brushes urine toward the camera, encapsulating the constant back and forth struggle between prisoners and authorities as well as the deadening repetitiveness of life in prison, during which time seems to extend without end.

By contrast, apart from intermittent snippets of Margaret Thatcher on the soundtrack, there's little sense of the outside world and the political and social context in which the protests took place. It's as if the film is less concerned with politics than with re-creating a set of extreme human experiences. While the policies of the Thatcher government were clearly problematic, both at the time and in retrospect, she's the easy target in some ways, too. The film doesn't quite play fair by demonising her intransigence while failing to mention that at least some of the IRA prisoners were less political prisoners than out-and-out thugs (and Thatcher came awfully close to being blown up just a few years later in a Brighton hotel; I've no sympathy with her politics but none for the idea of bombing her hotel, either).

Hans Holbein: The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521)

Steve McQueen: Hunger (2008)

There's a tendency, too, to reinforce the mythologies which the IRA adeptly employed in the course of the hunger strike, most notably in references to Christ's suffering. McQueen's apparently unsentimental depiction of the effects of the hunger strike aestheticizes Sands's body, reinforcing the sense of noble sacrifice without always subjecting his cause to rigorous examination: one shot is almost a literal copy of Holbein's profoundly unsettling painting of Christ's body as it lies in the tomb. There's more balance, and often brutal honesty, in the extended debate between Sands (an extraordinary performance by Michael Fassbender) and the prison priest, which highlights the critical role of Catholic clergy as mediators in the Troubles: you wonder if the reputation of the Catholic Church survived in Ireland for a few extra years by virtue of the often selfless interventions of individual men and women of the cloth in the North. McQueen creates a fascinating contrast between an ultimately pragmatic priest and Sands,who is driven - at least in this telling - in large measure by faith in his cause rather than by reason, and who is unwilling to question whether he's a leader or a pawn in manoeuvres happening far above him.

--

I've read several excellent analyses of Hunger online: I found Michael Sicinski and Glenn Kenny especially helpful in thinking about the film. [Update June 2011: Sheila O'Malley has a terrific consideration of the acting work in the film's extended central scene.]

Inspecteur Lavardin

1986, France, directed by Claude Chabrol

I watched this as part of the run-up to Flickhead's Claude Chabrol blogathon: more will follow in June. This is the second of the Lavardin films that Chabrol made with actor Jean Poiret, after 1985's Poulet au vinaigre. This sequel of sorts is more squarely centered around the Lavardin character, who didn't appear until almost halfway through the original film.

Trading Places

1983, US, directed by John Landis

There's something very precise about the opening to Trading Places, which uses an apparently ordinary series of establishing shots of Philadelphia to set up the film's key opposition between old money and the gritty lower depths, drawing the viewer almost imperceptibly from background scenery into the worlds of the actual characters. The shots are salso omething of a celebration of the city as it was in the early 1980s, whether it's the small family-owned stores, or the XXX theatres that sat cheek-by-jowl with City Hall.

The film benefits greatly from this sense of place, since it gives the central conceit a very concrete reality: the role reversal literally means a move from one neighborhood to another, a confrontation with another world that exists in parallel while usually remaining invisible. Landis and his stars, Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, milk the confrontation for all they are worth, each actor nimbly taking on the role of essaying both upper and lower class behaviour, and attempting to reveal some hidden truths in the process.

That said, the film remains very much of its time: for all the satire of the tenuous morality of the businessmen, in true Reagan-era style the stock market is still the potential saviour so that anyone with some old-fashioned up-by-the-bootstraps ingenuity can make a killing on pork bellies or frozen orange juice. Still, that doesn't stop you pulling for the little guy, as represented here by Eddie Murphy at the height of his comic skill; he had a glorious if ultimately rather brief run before descending into the most formulaic of fare.

(Sidenote: I was inspired to go back to the film, which I must have seen a dozen times on TV, after reading Dave Kehr's New York Times column a couple of years back; that piece includes a reconsideration of his own earlier thoughts on the film.)

Iron Man

2008, US, directed by Jon Favreau

I thought Iron Man the strongest entry in Hollywood's comic book summer of 2008. It's more tightly focused and less self-serious than The Dark Knight, and much less repetitive than The Incredible Hulk, which was just three increasingly loud rounds in the ring. And in contrast to the other films' conflicted leads, Iron Man allows its protagonist to have fun both in and out of character, even after he's dedicated himself to all things good.

While it's probably unwise to talk too much about realism in a film which involves a man zipping across in the sky in a suit of his own design, there is at least some concern to anchor the film in a recognizable version of the current world, whether it's the dust of Afghanistan or the glitz of California, which gives a dash of heft to the film's implication that American wars are driven these days as much by business needs as by military necessity (though I'm sure Hollywood won't turn down the opportunity to sell its products in Iraq).

The film is driven forward by Robert Downey Jr Mark II, making hay while the sun shines on his revived career as a leading man, and channeling his own playboy persona in the early going. In the end, the film can't help but revert to type, with ever-increasing effects leading to a final showdown, but it's smarter and sleeker than most of its peers and that, in the end, is about all you can hope for when you're in summer blockbuster territory.

Liar Liar

1997, US, directed by Tom Shadyac

Made at the height of Jim Carrey's 1990s arc to the A-list, Liar Liar is solid evidence of the pitfalls of churning out seven movies in four years. There's a terrible sense of diminishing returns as Carrey mugs for all his worth, but he's incapable of escaping the terribly sticky plotline. There's something unsettling about the way in which Carrey's character gets to behave like a nine-year-old even on his good days and still emerge triumphant - and what's with using the word "Creep" as a term of endearment for your child? Carrey's gift for physical comedy still enlivens the set pieces, and the film is at least snappily edited.

Superbad

2007, US, directed by Greg Mottola

Superbad hews close to the Judd Apatow TM formula, combining crude verbal invention with what's ultimately a rather sweet centre. Greg Mottola, who helmed half a dozen episodes of Apatow's television series Undeclared, is the director for hire on this occasion, and while he reinforces the sense that he's a very fine director of actors, he could probably afford to be a little less respectful of the script by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

The film is rather slow going at first, getting bogged down in lengthy verbal set pieces before setting up a familiar high school party scenario. Jonah Hill, in particular, is called on to deliver a series of turn-the-air-blue rants that might usefully have been edited a little more tightly, not least because the repetition renders the character as something of a one-trick-pony. Once the plot is set properly in motion, with the main characters embarking on a liquor-buying expedition, the film heats up. It's a surprisingly self-aware enterprise at times, with the characters themselves reliving especially hilarious moments either with the aid of CCTV tapes or through their own retelling of the story before it has even come to a conclusion.

Mottola does a fine job, as the action unfolds, of ensuring that each of the central characters has a moment to shine, though débutant Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who tears through the film delivering every line as though it's his very last, threatens to upstage everyone, especially more subtle performers like Michael Cera. There's also an air of warm nostalgia about the film - which recaptures something of the atmosphere of a high school standout like Dazed and Confused, which also took place over just one evening - despite the very contemporary setting, as if the characters are already looking past the end of high school to something more, while Mottola captures the Los Angeles locations with a surprising, low-key glow more usually reserved for small-town life.

For Your Eyes Only

1981, UK/US, directed by John Glen

Memory told me that this was going to be one of the more enjoyable Roger Moore-Bond capers, something of a return to basics with fewer giant sets and plenty of enjoyable stunt work. Memory is a cruel thing, however, since the film feels terribly flat at this remove. Given his background as a second unit director, it's no surprise that director John Glen generally does right by the chase scenes, but the pacing is abysmal. Shots end abruptly, there are ugly zooms aplenty, and the actors are mostly at sea (sometimes literally, of course). The most enjoyable sequence, an extended hillside chase involving a Citroën 2CV, comes early in the game, and after that it's a bit of an ordeal to the dénouement.

The Hero

2004, Angola/France/Portugal, directed by Zézé Gamboa (Original title: O herói)

Zézé Gamboa's debut feature ultimately seems more effective as a starting point for a discussion of Angolan political and social life than as a fully functional film. While it's well-meaning, trying to trace the effects of Angola's decades of civil strife, the character motivations are often rather poorly thought through, and in many ways the film is far more a creature of Hollywood narrative logic than it would like to believe.

The plot is centered on a soldier who has lost a leg in the civil war but who has no place in the Luanda to which he returns after years of fighting. The soldier, Manu, functions as a means to introduce to all levels of Angolan society - the homeless, those trying to keep households together, and the rich who've either lived abroad or who can leave if they wish. While there are moments of striking insight into life on Luanda's streets, they ultimately become lost in the increasingly melodramatic storyline, which moves spasmodically from one scene to the next, with little sense of organic development. The authenticity is undercut, too, by the use of several non-Angolan actors in key roles, most glaringly in the case of Manu himself, played by a Senegalese actor whose dialogue is then dubbed into Portuguese.

Whispering Smith

1948, US, directed by Leslie Fenton

There's nothing all that surprising in Leslie Fenton's Whispering Smith, but it's a well-made entertainment, the kind of effective, carefully made B-plus film that has essentially disappeared from movie screens (popping up, if anywhere, in the guise of episodic television). As far as the plotting goes, it's straight from Hollywood's old standby pile, but the film has a very decent budget that allows for some beautiful opening scenery and a number of well-staged train wrecks.

Alan Ladd is solid, if unspectacular, as the eponymous Smith, a railroad detective who has to deal with shenanigans that swirl around old pal Murray Sinclair (Robert Preston). Preston manages to upstage the ostensible leading man on several occasions, particularly in his early scenes with Ladd, who is recovering from an injury; there's an affection between the characters that's effectively rendered by the ease with which the two performers interact.

Fenton has a bit of a directorial tic, dollying into his actors to underline a plot development in a kind of visual exclamation point, but other than that he doesn't intrude overly on the performances, perhaps unsurprisingly given he started out as actor. He extracts especially enjoyable turns from William Demarest (whose rat-tat-tat delivery nonetheless seems mildly out of place in a Western setting), Frank Faylen as a strikingly nasty sidekick, and Donald Crisp playing against his more familiar fatherly type as the chief villain of the piece.

(Part of the Watching Movies in Africa project; Whispering Smith played at the King's and Pen-Agege theatres in Lagos in September 1956).

Wolfsburg

2003, Germany, directed by Christian Petzold


Although Christian Petzold works in a very different tonal register, Wolfsburg is sometimes strikingly reminiscent of Tom Tykwer's 1997 film Winterschläfer in its narrative strategies. Indeed, the two films are both centered around car accidents and unexpected new relationships, and both have carefully constructed outcomes with a measure of poetic justice. The similarities end there, however: where Tykwer, more than in his other films, creates a strikingly warm portrait of small-town life, Petzold is a merciless observer of the surfaces of modern life. The small town, near Wolfsburg, where most of the film takes place seems to have no centre, no stabilizing force, a problem mirrored in the main character's lack of moral centre. Petzold's characters work in a car dealership and a supermarket, at opposite ends of the economic spectrum, and all seem trapped in existences over which they feel little control. Their moments of happiness are illusory, supported by the shakiest of foundations if not by outright lies - just as the new life constructed by the characters in Petzold's earlier film Die innere Sicherheit reveals itself to be a house of cards.

The Band's Visit

2007, Israel/France/US, directed by Eran Kolirin

There's a gentle plea for tolerance at the heart of Eran Kolirin's film, which narrates the accidental visit of an Egyptian police orchestra to an isolated Israeli settlement, which might have come across as naive and sentimental were it not for Kolirin's dry humour and his ability to find genuine cross-cultural common ground. Just as the Egyptian cops realize that they will escape with their lives despite their wrong turn, Kolirin subtly but insistently portrays his Arab characters as citizens of the world who, like most of the rest of us, look for nothing more complicated than the pleasures of a night out with friends.

The cross-cultural theme is exemplified in Kolirin's filmmaking style, which evokes early Jim Jarmusch - a scene where three characters sit debating the merits of Chet Baker in an apartment kitchen might have been lifted from Stranger Than Paradise - or Aki Kaurismäki, with whom Kolirin shares an ability to conjure brilliantly funny set-ups out of a well-placed camera and a healthy sense of the absurd. He's also blessed with a phenomenal set of actors; Ronit Elkabetz deploys the full measure of her charm, but the other performances are equally beguiling.

The film is also refreshing for the way in which it adds an alternative image of Israel to our collective consciousness, underlining the fact that the boondocks are the boondocks wherever you are: a sequence shot in a desultory roller disco could have been lifted from a French or American film, as the few dancers roll their way around the room hoping for a connection. That this connection comes by way of a visiting Egyptian policeman, in a hilariously funny reworking of the Cyrano mythology, is the icing on the cake.

La Vie des morts

1991, France, directed by Arnaud Desplechin

Arnaud Desplechin's debut film is an astonishingly assured bit of work, establishing many of his later preoccupations in concentrated form: provincial roots, a soundtrack that veers from rap to opera, and family dynamics brought to life by a large and varied cast. Just as the film brought Desplechin to immediate critical attention, it revealed actors like Emmanuelle Devos, Marianne Denicourt and Thibault de Montalambert, all of whom have worked with Desplechin again. De Montalambert plays a character who feels like a version of the characters played in more recent Desplechin by Mathieu Amalric: the two actors even look quite similar.

The film centers on a strange family gathering, with parents and almost-grown-up children coming together in a vigil for an unseen cousin who lies in a hospital bed following a suicide attempt. There's little mourning in Desplechin's gathering, however. While the stricken cousin is a constant topic of conversation, the director is more interested in the moments of connection between his characters: a girlfriend (Devos) who is thrown into the deep end of a family meeting, two generations bonding over a snatch of music, the warm banter between a father and his children.

What elevates the film from simple observation, though, is Desplechin's sense of pacing, of when to move his camera to another actor or another moment, and his ability to weave a series of vignettes into something that evokes the fabric of this particular extended family and its social milieu. His characters are rough around the edges, which is exactly what renders them beguiling, and their happiness and grief feel absolutely genuine; Desplechin manages the delicate trick of allowing us to feel part of the gathering without simply spying on the participants.

King Solomon's Mines

1950, US, directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton

King Solomon's Mines is one of those films that's very difficult to watch without being permanently distracted by the fact that the film belongs to another world. Or rather two other worlds, the late Victorian period when H. Rider Haggard wrote the original book and the period just before African independence when the film was made.

The trailer is itself worthy of note. It's a tremendously lurid bit of work, with a voiceover that demands to be heard to be believed: "Into the strange and wild interior of darkest Africa, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sent a motion picture company on safari. Here in its original setting, where no white woman had ever been before, was filmed the story of primitive savagery, of incredible danger." The white woman in question is Deborah Kerr, although there are probably a few long-dead missionary women, and many a colonial official's wife, who would contest her claim to have been the first white woman into the Congo.

The film itself is, inevitably, far less outlandish than its trailer. By the standards of the genre, Stewart Granger's Allan Quatermain is a pretty understanding great-white-hunter type. He's able to communicate effectively with his staff in their own language, although the film overstates the prevalence of Swahili across eastern and southern Africa. Quatermain is genuinely upset when an assistant is killed early in the film, and he has a well-developed sense of propriety in his dealings with various African tribes. Indeed, in the end, it's hard to decide whether the film is actually more patronising toward the African characters, whose customs are represented with at least some gestures towards anthropological accuracy, or towards Deborah Kerr's Elizabeth Curtis, whose primary mistake is to have been born a woman.

Leaving such weightier concerns aside, the film is an effective if lightweight safari adventure, with some striking scenery and animal footage. Structurally, though, it's rather weak: the middle section is an over-extended series of geographical or cultural challenges, and the film comes to an abrupt end almost without warning, as if the filmmakers realized they'd run out of time and had to scramble to tie up at least some of their loose ends.

(Part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. This film was widely shown in Zambia and Zimbabwe from the 1950s onwards, and younger audiences remain familiar with it. One of the more unusual aspects of the film from the perspective of my project is the fact that it was actually filmed in Africa, in what are now Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the 1950s, it was a rarity for Africans to be able to see themselves onscreen in any context, and it's likely that audiences valued the film on that basis even if the images of Africa were imperfect, at least viewed from the vantage point of the West in 2009.)

The Man From the Alamo

1953, US, directed by Budd Boetticher

Budd Boetticher's second Western doesn't have quite the same punchy opening as his first, since he needs to spend some time acquainting us with the back story at the Alamo. As a consequence, his protagonist, John Stroud (Glenn Ford) isn't introduced until several scenes into the film, after we've met the key military leaders and grasped the seriousness of the situation in the besieged fort.

Still, he has the same quick way of sketching in the key details, outlining just why Stroud's escape is significant, and then focusing single-mindedly on the consequences. While the film is considered a dry run for Boetticher's later cycle of Westerns with Randolph Scott, it still has much to say about notions of loyalty and duty. Thus, in a brisk 80 minutes we cover loyalty to country, state, family - loyalties that are often split, as Stroud cares for a Mexican farmboy orphaned by a gang of brutal killers using the hostilities as cover their own activities.

As such, it's a surprisingly resonant little film, concerned to show the complexities and moral quandaries that Stroud faces, while also fulfilling genre expectations. There are gunfights, including a spectacular, and surprisingly extended, dramatization of the assault on the Alamo, and there's a thrilling dash across the prairie as covered wagons seek to outrun a band of marauding bandits.


(Part of the Watching Movies in Africa project; The Man From the Alamo played at the King's in Lagos in September 1956).

Watching Movies in Africa

In 2008, I began a research project about moviegoing across West Africa, with a focus on cinema audiences in the period from 1939-1962 -- the Second World War to the independence era. This is a long-term project that will form the bones of a Ph.D. dissertation (in African history).

I am still in the process of assembling and collating large quantities of data about the films that were shown, the locations where they were projected, and their relative popularity. Thus far, I have been concentrating on urban locations in Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal, with much more limited information on other parts of West Africa, and some comparative data from East and Southern Africa.

There are many different sources for information on film screenings: I have made use of newspapers, memoirs, novels and short stories, colonial administrative documents, and to a limited extent personal recollections. What is much more difficult to assess is the relative popularity of films, or to move beyond general assertions such as "everyone loved Westerns." From my initial data collection effort, based on a systematic collation of cinema listings from three different newspapers, some titles crop up so frequently that I am assuming they were reliable revenue-generators. That information is already painting a more nuanced picture of audience preferences.

As part of this project, I am also attempting to watch a reasonable number of the films that appear regularly in the film listings. I can't hope to project myself back to a movie screening in Abidjan or Kumasi, which would by all accounts have been a raucous affair, but I can begin to appreciate what people watched and, perhaps, why they made the choices they did. Unfortunately, many of the films are not easily available on DVD, which inevitably means my picture will be biased towards films that have been deemed worthy of continued circulation.

All this will of course influence the films that begin to appear in this space: expect an uptick in movies from the 1950s and before, and especially a glut of Westerns over the next couple of years...

2012 update: Since I began this project, I've zeroed in on Gold Coast/Ghana as my primary focus, and expanded the time period so that I cover roughly a 50-year span from 1925 (when early colonial censorship legislation was passed) to the early 1970s. While I continue to be interested in what people watched, and why, I'm also using Gold Coast/Ghana to a degree as an example of how the film industry, and particularly Hollywood, penetrated virtually every corner of the globe, and how they achieved that. In some respects, then, my project has shifted from something that might be easily classified as "African history" to something that is on the border between African history and cinema/business history.

--
Movies in the WMIA project (updated as often as I remember)

The Boy Kumasenu (1952, Gold Coast, Sean Graham)
Captain Blood (1935, US, Michael Curtiz)
Cobra Woman (1944, US, Robert Siodmak)
King Solomon's Mines (1950, US, Compton Bennett/Andrew Marton)
The Man From the Alamo (1953, US, Budd Boetticher)
Sanders of the River (1935, UK, Zoltan Korda)
Simba (1955, UK, Brian Desmond Hurst)
Something of Value (1957, US, Richard Brooks)
Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake (1942, US, John Cromwell)
Taken 2 (2012, France, Olivier Megaton)
War Arrow (1953, US, George Sherman)
West of Zanzibar (1928, US, Tod Browning)
West of Zanzibar (1954, UK, Harry Watt)
Where No Vultures Fly (1951, UK, Harry Watt)
Whispering Smith (1948, US, Leslie Fenton)

The Cimarron Kid

1952, US, directed by Budd Boetticher

Budd Boetticher's first Western is an enjoyable, efficient bit of work: the opening scenes sketch in the film's central problem swiftly, introducing us to the titular Cimarron Kid (Audie Murphy) and thrusting him into the situation that will set the action in motion (the Kid is attempting to go clean after a wrongful conviction, but an ugly encounter with a vindictive railroad detective makes him feel as though he has no choice but to join up with the Dalton gang.)


Those Daltons are a strange bunch: outlaws to be sure, but also a family (literally in some cases, since many of the gang members are brothers) that is tight knit, tolerant of at least some idiosyncrasy, and staunch in defence of its members. If anything, indeed, it's a little too idyllic; it's hard to reconcile the easygoing atmosphere of the lawbreakers' home base with their criminal ambitions, while only the Kid appears to have been pushed toward a life of crime (and even he gets a pretty good shake from the local Marshal).


Still, the film isn't designed to bear too much weight: it moves along briskly and cleanly, and Boetticher assembles his action scenes with great skill (a dual robbery, intercut in the early stages, is especially good, while two parallel scenes of bloodless ambush are strikingly shot, with gun barrels emerging menacingly but silently between the slats of a horse stall). Even here, relatively early in his career, Boetticher is making imaginative shot choices: the train robbery near the beginning of the film is shot with the camera moving back down the carriage, more and more passengers entering the frame, while late on he has an arresting shot in which two characters move into the shadows, their silhouettes framing the Kid as they debate his fate.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

2008, US, directed by David Fincher

It's hard not to make the immediate comparison between The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Forrest Gump, given that the two films share a writer and, at first glance, apparent thematic similarities; in a critical world that generally gives pride of place to the director-as-author, and which lauded David Fincher's previous film, Zodiac, it's interesting that the director comes across, in many a critical commentary, as a minor player on Benjamin Button. As my wife noted, though, the Forrest Gump comparison could easily be made with more or less any film that covers a significant span of the twentieth century (even a film made well before Robert Zemeckis's film, and in a very different context).

Where Forrest articulates little sense of why he does what he does, Benjamin's desire to go out into the world is a conscious choice, and he is aware of the ramifications of his own choices - he's no naif, and he acknowledges his own failings, at least in the torch-carrying department. He, too, is a participant in history, but the only president we see here is Theodore Roosevelt, long before Benjamin is born, in an opening anecdote about time and the inevitability, sometimes ugly, of change (that anecdote, like the later sequence explaining an accident, or the running jokes about a series of lightning strikes, recall Paul Thomas Anderson's playful narrative strategies, particularly in Magnolia).

The film is suffused with a remarkable sense of nostalgia, not just nostalgia for the lives the main characters might have led in different circumstances, but nostalgia for worlds gone by, for memories of youth, even for the objects that accompany a life: shots of framed pictures in a New Orleans home, for instance, with all the weight of personal history such images may bear. The inevitable tick-tock progression of life is set in yet sharper relief by Benjamin's unusual aging process, and those moments where he seems to overcome his unusual station in life, in the central romance but also, beguilingly, in an extended sequence in Murmansk with Tilda Swinton (how many films can there be that cast that city in such a glow?), are intensely sad even as they represent Benjamin's sweetest memories. Even the framing device, set against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina and inevitably somewhat obvious, is still of a piece with the film's great theme of inevitable decline, of the impossibility of fighting against elemental forces; the modern sequences are filmed in radically different shades, abandoning the warm browns and yellows of the past for the harsh surfaces of a modern hospital (the old nursing home is long gone).

Freedom Writers

2007, US, directed by Richard LaGravenese

Freedom Writers returns to the picked-over territory of the teacher-in-the-'hood but adds a layer of authenticity that's missing from more cynical productions like the Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle Dangerous Minds by giving voice to the students at the heart of the film. Thus, the film, based on an actual series of events, occasionally follow those students home rather than focusing exclusively on their middle-class teacher (Hilary Swank), but it also, more importantly, allows us to hear them in their own words, quoting extensively from the journals that provide the film with its title.

As naive as the film is in terms of how it presents possible solutions to inner-city traumas, there's something oddly refreshing about how resolutely it wears its belief in human nature on its sleeve, and how it insists on the possibility of redemption and triumph. It's also notable, in a minor key, for being willing to admit that the average saint (whether teacher or liberator) might not be a picnic at home - Swank's character isn't so much a burden as completely oblivious to the impact of her own choices, something that's perhaps more insidious. The film might, though, have profited from a little more focus on that home life, which is telescoped into the occasional scene (the texture of domestic life was surprisingly rounded element of the subsequent LaGravenese/Swank collaboration P.S. I Love You).

Death Defying Acts

2008, UK/Australia, directed by Gillian Armstrong

Death Defying Acts is fatally unsure what kind of film it wants to be: Gillian Armstrong seems torn between her art-film instincts, which served her well in her early career, and the conventions of a major-budget production. The result is an unfortunate muddle, which screeches to a halt whenever the film switches into a more aesthetically self-conscious mode.

Armstrong also hamstrung by the fact that while the idea of Harry Houdini - her central character - is compelling, behind the mask he comes across as an unappealingly hypocritical man, possessed of an abiding, and overwrought, obsession with his mother. This is, of course, a conscious choice on Armstrong's part as she exposes the illusionist's hypocrisy - as a man not averse to a spot of cheating who then embarks on a crusade to expose what he views as psychic charlatans - but his disagreeable nature makes it very difficult for the audience to then follow the director into the story's more conventional romantic recesses. It's a shame, because there are several wonderfully atmospheric moments that capture the textures of another era - in no sense depicted as a more innocent time - and its pastimes and obsessions.

Wanted

2008, US, directed by Timur Bekmambetov

One of those films that belongs only on the big screen, not so much for its aesthetic qualities but for the fact that the kinetic action, blown up well beyond life size, masks absurdities that are much more obvious when the explosions are reduced to televisual scale. The film was shot in Chicago at the same time as The Dark Knight, ironic since it owes something of a debt to Christopher Nolan's earlier Batman Begins, most obviously in the way in which both films anchor the hero's development of particular skills in a rigorous training process (perhaps this is also present in the original graphic novels). Despite the eye-catching action - which reminded me at times of the deliriously over-the-top antics in Shoot 'Em Up - what sticks with me most is the film's merciless depiction of the soul-deadening effects of the cubicle-infested office environment.

Ghost Town

2008, US, directed by David Koepp
No matter how good a filmmaker's intentions, it can be hard to escape genre conventions, though David Koepp tries mightily for most of his film's running time, preserving the improbably-named Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais, playing very much to Office-type) as a truly obnoxious human being as long as he possibly can before bowing to the inevitable. Still, before getting to that point he's occasionally able to mine something deeper, identifying a deep, and affecting, strain of loneliness, in Gervais's character; it emerges, for instance, in a striking shot of Pincus surrounded by darkness, framed almost like a Rembrandt painting. Koepp makes good use of his camera in the early going, too, particularly in a scene crammed into a tiny hospital office as Pincus's life spirals crazily out of control, though he can barely move a muscle; the verbal back and forth in the same sequence is beautifully timed, as though the words simply don't have the room to emerge in the cramped space.

Catch Me If You Can

2002, US, directed by Steven Spielberg

Catch Me If You Can plays as something of an anthology of Spielberg's strengths as a pop filmmaker, and particularly his skills in crafting a clean narrative where everything seems to tie, almost inevitably, together. On one level, it's old-fashioned storytelling, and yet what's notable is that Spielberg makes something really rather difficult - editing a collection of shots and scenes into a coherent whole that makes perfect sense - into something almost invisible; it's a gift that much less appreciated, I think, because he's doing it in a pop context.

The subject matter here lacks the self-conscious profundity of many latter-day Spielberg movies, and you can sense him having fun with a shaggy dog story that's the more delicious for being true. Sequences like that where his protagonist, Frank Abagnale (Leonardo diCaprio, perfectly cast), meets his future in-laws in the patrician South are beautifully intercut with the tumbling of Frank's world behind the scenes: there's the familiar Spielberg focus on objects, with the G-men's guns in the foreground, but also the clear action such that we always know who's doing what to whom even as the scene shifts back and forth.

Earlier, there's also a lovely shot where we see Frank sit in the gloomy foreground and his mother (Nathalie Baye) in the back, bathed in light from the kitchen window, as Frank desperately tries to maintain his illusions about his parents; it seems like such a simple dichotomy, the light-dark opposition, yet it functions perfectly to illustrate Frank's struggle in that specific moment, so that it's not a simple visual trick but rather an enhancement to the development of the character.

The Price of Milk

2001, New Zealand, directed by Harry Sinclair

Harry Sinclair's second feature feels rather like a loosely connected set of sketches, so it wasn't a great surprise to discover that he started out as part of a musical/comedy duo (the other half being Don McGlashan) with TV and film experience (one of their short film collaborations, in which they play all of the roles, is available online).

As with almost all films with sketch origins - explicit or not - some segments work better than others: there's a running joke about New Zealand's hair-raising rural roads, and even more alarming driving styles, that's especially funny if you've ever had to deal with some of the corners in question, whereas the segments featuring a mystical Maori woman seem to rehash some standard stereotypes about the country's first residents (I may be missing something; Sinclair's father was one of New Zealand's most noted historians of an earlier generation, so perhaps his sense of these things is more acute than mine).

Visually, there are several clever, low-budget effects - a house that appears to be moving and levitating is especially amusing - and a number of striking shots, especially as Miranda Otto runs across North Island farm country trailing a red sari; Sinclair has a real sense of the uniqueness of New Zealand's landscape, and succeeds in capturing something of the isolation so elemental in Vincent Ward's early films, particularly Vigil.