In short: Where Are You, João Gilberto (2018)

Documentary filmmaker Georges Gachot follows the traces of German writer Marc Fischer’s book “Hobalala” in an attempt to finish what Fischer started: find and hopefully meet the great Brazilian musician João Gilberto. For the last decades of his life, Gilberto spent an eccentric and reclusive life, apparently living in hotel rooms and avoiding personal contact with anyone as much as possible, for unknown reasons.

On the trail of Fischer on the trail of Gilberto, Gachot meets various other key figures of Brazilian music history, encounters saudade as well as more European coded versions of sadness, loneliness and nostalgia, and ends up in front of a closed hotel room door listening to Gilberto singing behind it.

Obviously, this is quite different from your typical music documentary, particularly since Gachot often seems to go out of his way to avoid naming, dating or categorizing – if you want to learn about Brazilian music history, you’re wrong here. Instead, this is a film all about the feelings Gilberto’s music evokes in Gachot, Fischer and others, the feelings Fischer evoked writing about the absence of Gilberto as an actual person to be communicated with, as well as the sad beauty of music, not of its historical context.

This approach stands the film in good stead, as does Gachot’s ability to relate to everyone he interviews on a personal and specific level that feels grounded in a genuine appreciation for people with their foibles and eccentricities, as much as a love for Gilberto’s work and Fischer’s book.

That Gachot is also clearly one of those “poetic truth” documentarians makes me a little sceptical about the factual truthfulness of the hotel room door ending, but it’s so perfect an emotional capstone (even more so when you keep in mind that Gilberto himself would die in 2019, never making the big stage comeback and the albums produced by sensitive young fans he so richly deserved), factual truthfulness isn’t the point.

In short: The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022)

aka Die innere Glut

In some ways, Werner Herzog’s documentary about volcanologist documentarians Katia and Maurice Krafft is a bit of a series of our hero director’s greatest hits: there are the artists descending into the abyss to wrestle the devil for some great shots of film; the awe and terror of nature (and what expresses this view of nature more honestly than a volcano?); people walking the tightrope between artistic/scientific (which are clearly much closer related in Herzog’s world view than in many other people’s) truth seeking of the highest order and simple suicidal obsession, or truth and madness; the filmmakers looking for the poetic truth more than the factual one.

This is not a complaint: there’s nothing wrong with having themes and interests - obsessions, actually - and a philosophy of the world. Nor is there anything wrong with sticking to expressing them, and certainly not in the case of a filmmaker quite as intensely interested in finding these things in actually very different people and places. And very particularly not in the case of an artist as interested in his obsessions as he is in the way his subjects see themselves, how they think and feel, and are in the world.

In The Fire Within, Herzog finds all of this not in his own footage, but the footage the Kraffts shot over the years, finding kindred spirits in the archive, editing their material into a film they themselves didn’t end up making; out of what they found, into the kind of tribute only very few of us will get (though, if you ask me, most of us would deserve).

Past Misdeeds: Sennentuntschi (2010)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


1975. Just after a small village in the Swiss Alps has buried its sacristan following his suicide, a bloody and battered young woman (Roxane Mesquida) appears in town. The woman doesn't seem to be able to speak, and is clearly either heavily traumatized or mentally ill, but the villagers at once blame her for the sacristan's death. After all, one of the villagers saw what he thinks was a woman in a monk's robe in the mountains the day before, so witchcraft must be afoot! This must make some kind of sense to the villagers, even though it's the sort of logic that's only logical if you're a surrealist. It sure doesn't help improve the situation when the local priest brandishes his crucifix in the poor woman's face and provokes her into a fit of panic.

Confronted with that sort of superstition, and a little bit infatuated with the mysterious stranger, the local constable Reusch (Nicholas Ofczarek), seemingly the only man in town who isn't batshit insane, takes charge of the woman and attempts to find out who she is and where she came from. He stumbles upon something strange: his new ward looks exactly like a woman who disappeared twenty-five years ago during the burning of a mountain cabin that killed three men.

While Reusch is away talking to the retired cop who worked the case in the 50s, the priest attacks the nameless girl with a knife, and drives her to flight. On her way, she accidentally causes a miscarriage (her fear of crosses is again to blame) in Reusch's former girlfriend (now the mayor's wife), which conclusively proves to anyone not Reusch that she is in fact a witch.

Next time we see the girl again, she arrives at the mountain cabin of farmer Erwin (Andrea Zogg), his son-who-thinks-he's-his-nephew Albert (Joel Basman), and their newly arrived helper Martin (Carlos Leal), who is on the run for the murder of his wife, and therefore just as insane as everyone else in the movie. Because they were just having an orgy with home-made absinth, the men kinda-sorta assume the girl's a Sennentuntschi like in the old tale about a straw doll brought to life by the devil. Clearly, the girl's suffering won't end with her arrival.

All the while, Reusch discovers the dark secret of his village.

So, the classic continental European artful exploitation movie, horror department, is alive and well and living in Switzerland, it seems. Even though director Michael Steiner deconstructs most (yet not quite all) potential supernatural aspects of his story and the Sennentuntschi legend, he's doing everything else I've come to expect in and hope from this kind of film.

As the plot synopsis should have made clear, the film is heavily over-written, full of preposterous plot ideas (only about half of which I've mentioned) and melodramatic explanations for everything that's happening, populated by (predominantly male) characters who are all so clearly out of their minds as to make a girl who can't speak, acts like a child and turns dead guys into straw dolls look positively normal. In addition Sennentuntschi is told with a structural trick I'm not going to spoil that I don't think makes the film any better, but clearly makes it a hell of a lot weirder; in fact, I'm utterly unsure if Steiner wants his audience to be surprised by that trick or not - his film is sending very mixed messages about it.

This may sound as if Sennentuntschi weren't a good movie at all, but the opposite is true. There's a lot to be said for the film's over-serious rediscovery of much of what was good about European genre cinema of the 70s, the rediscovery of a combination of strangeness, metaphorical overload, and classic exploitational values, as well as for its the willingness to be nasty and cruel to its characters, even those it clearly doesn't hate. I, for one, can't help but respect a film that gives up clarity for the possibility of surprising its audience. But then, that's what I would say.

On the film's metaphorical level, Steiner seems to be quite obsessed with dualities. At least, the film is stuffed full with them, from the boring man-woman and rationality-superstition ones to the structural one I'm still not willing to spoil. As is good and well-loved tradition, the film's narrative logic and the reasons for its narrative logic can get a bit confusing, which seems to be a fitting way to construct a narrative about characters who are all not exactly mentally healthy.

Not confusing at all is Steiner's visual mastership. The director uses the impressive Swiss landscape to build a mood of overwhelming strangeness, and to intensify the already over-heated feelings of his characters, grounding the strangeness of what is happening in the very real, yet also very strange mountain landscape of a place whose harshness seems to influence the state of mind of the characters populating it for the worse.


I also found myself very impressed by Roxane Mesquida's performance. Her combination of childlike body language, the visible remnants of hurt and pain, a peculiarly innocent sexuality and a very calm sort of madness dominate the film's best moments without being showy. If not for Mesquida's performance, the part of the film's metaphorical level that's all about contrasting "maleness" and "femaleness" would probably be quite annoying, but the actress turns what could be a mere symbol - and a symbol of various conflicting things, by the way - into a person. Plus, most of the male characters' problem isn't their maleness, but their being murderous rapist assholes, a fact the film seems to realize about half of the time. Which again puts Sennentuntschi directly in the tradition of classic European exploitation movies, where the subversive, the uncomfortable and the conservative have always been entwined in the most interesting, yet also often very uncomfortable, manner.

Northmen – A Viking Saga (2014)

A small band of Viking outcasts surrounding young Asbjorn (Tom Hopper) were outlawed by King Harald because they “have opinions Harald doesn’t like”, or so Asbjorn tells us. Seeing as they begin the film crashing their boat against the coast of Scotland while they were actually trying to reach Lindisfarne for a bit of rape and pillaging, one might think of somewhat different reasons, but oh well.

Be that as it may, after that tiny mishap Asbjorn and his men – dude with bow, old guy, guy who doesn’t like Asbjorn very much but will come around in the end, etc (all acted well enough for what they are) – do stumble upon a group of Scottish soldiers whom they proceed to kill, acquiring a Scottish noble daughter named Inghean (Charlie Murphy) in the process. Inghean, the men think, just might be what will buy them places in the closest Viking settlement. Alas, Inghean isn’t just any noble daughter but actually the daughter of the King of Scotland himself, so soon there’s half an army on our protagonists’ tracks. Worse, they won’t even be able to trade Inghean in for their safety, because while the king “only” wants his daughter killed if necessary, his favourite mercenaries leading the hunt, Bjorn (James Norton) and Hjorr (Ed Skrein), think it’s much better politics to slaughter her in any case.

Well, at least a friendly Christian warrior monk (Ryan Kwanten, who isn’t as atrociously miscast as you might expect) is around to help the Vikings out a little while they and the increasingly friendly Inghean are looking for a way to leave Scotland.

Now, as I might have mentioned a dozen times or so before, pseudo-historical pulp action movies have an easy time with me, so it probably won’t be much of a surprise that I found myself enjoying Claudio Fäh’s German, Swiss, South African co-production with a bunch of English language actors quite a bit, despite the film’s obvious flaws.

Among these flaws are: you know which colour scheme and you can – if you want – just mentally insert my usual rant about colour films who don’t actually want to take on the visual responsibility of colour but are too chickenshit to actually be black and white here; a script I’m pretty certain if seen filmed a dozen times or so before with slightly different character names and ethnicities; characters who generally aren’t terribly well individuated beyond their names and hair styles; various wasted opportunities to add any kind of thematic weight to the film (and there’s quite a bit of weight pulp adventure can carry, if the people writing it just want it); and the fact that these Vikings and Scottish clanspeople don’t actually act according to the things we know about their cultures.

Fortunately, some of these flaws are problems that I am not exactly happy to encounter yet which still are not too problematic for the enjoyment of the film at hand – apart from the non-colour scheme that wastes quite a few clearly impressive landscape shots for no reason at all. While I naturally prefer the thematically enriched kind of pulp adventure more, there’s nothing really wrong with the more basic version presented here, where every man speaks in gruff grunts that suggest bad hormone problems or damaged vocal chords, at least when he’s not fighting, a situation that can only involve him loudly shouting “Yaaaaaaargh” while showing off his perfect, perfect, teeth, and where there’s clearly nothing at all going on in the characters’ heads. At the very least, director Fäh knows how to film these things clearly and sometimes even moodily (of course – again! – except for that darn lack of colours), and does a fine enough job pacing the series of chases and skirmishes that make up most of the film’s running time. Sure, he’s no Neil Marshall but there’s no shame in that.

While this still sounds like I’m damning the film with faint praise, I honestly quite enjoyed Northmen, its focus on being the simple pulp action piece it wants to be, the grace that comes to a film without pretensions and without the need to apologize for not having pretensions via irony or by being offensively bad (like, say, much less fun Viking movie Hammer of the Gods).

Technorati-Markierungen: swiss movies,german movies,south african movies,reviews,action,adventure,pulp,claudio fäh,tom hopper,ryan kwanten,charlie murphy

On WTF: Sennentuntschi (2010)

I don't think I've ever talked about a Swiss movie here before, but who can resist a perfect piece of art house exploitation cinema like Michael Steiner's Sennentuntschi? It's the sort of film that could have found a place of honour in Tohill's and Tombs's Immoral Tales if it had been made a few decades earlier.

It's not a perfect film, but I'll go into some of Sennentuntschi's flaws and more of its virtues over at WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: swiss movies,reviews,horror,thriller,michael steiner,roxane mesquida,nicholas ofczarek,other places