Review - The Damned (1963)

Never mind reefer madness; young people are literally radioactive in Joseph Losey's clever, campy sci-fi drama, originally released in 1963. In a coastal English town, a vacationing American (Macdonald Carey), his young love interest (Shirley Anne Field) and her overbearing Teddy Boy brother (Oliver Reed) stumble upon a secret underground facility where a shady goverment official (Alexander Knox) is raising a group of children who are immune to nuclear radiation - and who radiate deadly gamma rays themselves. Unbeknownst to them, they're being bred to survive the all-but-inevitable nuclear holocaust and repopulate the Earth, that is, until the interlopers agree to help break them out. Shooting under the unrestrictive auspices of British film-mill Hammer, Losey brings his artful kitsch to life with all of the cinephilic relish of François Truffaut channelling Alfred Hitchock. He splashes the screen with joyful allusions to 'The Wild One'-esque biker flicks (motorcycle-bound delinquents), science fiction (men in Hazmat suits, black helicopters), and naturally, Hammer horror (a chilling point-of-view shot that tracks through the subterranean facility at night, ending up at a terrified little boy's bedside). Having had his own first-hand experience with overzealous government types, like those at the House Un-American Activities Committee who blacklisted him in the 1950's, Losey also infuses his genre romp with a decidedly personal angst. Cold-War paranoia looms large; it's antidotes, he posits, are the fearless vitality of youth (the captive children) and the introspective pursuits of the artist (Viveca Lindfors' philosophical sculptor).

Review - Radio On (1979)

A laconic loner traverses a bleak, post-industrial England via automobile in Chris Petit's moody, monochrome road movie, the first feature from the critic turned director. After learning that his brother has died under mysterious, possibly sordid circumstances, late-night radio DJ Robert (David Beams) drives from London to Bristol in search of answers, unaccompanied but for a tastefully selected stack of cassettes from Bowie, Kraftwerk and Devo. While he finds little in the way of an explanation, he does encounter a series of forlorn characters - including a disturbed army deserter fleeing service in Ireland (Andrew Byatt) and a German woman searching for her estranged daughter (Lisa Kreuzer) - that personify the despondency and doubt gripping late-70's Britain, soon to be exacerbated by impending Thatcherism. An overt cinephile, Petit packs his debut with visual and thematic allusions to decidedly un-British arts films like 'Two-Lane Blacktop,' 60's Antonioni, and most prominently, the road movies of Wim Wenders, who, not coincidentally, serves as a producer here. The music-obsessed, highway-bound protagonist could easily have drifted out of one of Wenders' psychic landscapes, but Petit still deserves a great deal of credit. No English film before or since has skated the line between dreary realism and arthouse aesthetics with such easy elegance, or punk insouciance.

Review - Ghost Dance (1983)

Part cine-philosophical tract, part free-form fiction, Ken McMullen's audacious feature blends 'Celine and Julie Go Boating' style feminist romp with graduate-level dialectics, though not particularly successfully. Pascale (Pascale Ogier) and Marianne (Leonie Mellinger) travel the shadowy streets of Paris and London in search of "ghosts," not the spirits of the deceased, but traces of people and events from the past that echo endlessly throughout our lives. They consider various phenomena that dredge up those figures and ideas - recordings, photographs, oral histories, the cinema - and how these phantoms invariably reappear and influence, or "haunt" the present. Along the way, the pair encounter several Carroll-esque characters (a phone-chewing electronics salesman and a weather obsessed drummer), consult a preeminent philosopher (Jacques Derrida, whose sagely observations and fourth wall prodding may be the highlight of the film), channel ancient warriors and visit a ruined future world.

Sadly, what could have been a fanciful inquiry into an intriguing subject is confounded by didactic passages that clash with the storyline, and slow the overall pace to a crawl. McMullen interjects opaque narration, interpretive performance pieces and other pretentious asides that try desperately to emulate film essayists like Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, but fail to capture their eccentric poetry, or sense of wonderment. The high-flown discourse and dreamlike plot never coalesce either, making for a wildly uneven viewing experience. Still, it is worth seeing, if only for a number of provocative images that mystify, and reveal ethereal connections. The opening and closing shots, which are repeated, resonate especially clearly; on a wintry beach, Marianne tries futilely to throw a large, poster-sized photograph of Pascale into the ocean, but the tide repeatedly washes it back in. Actress Pascale Ogier (whose mother was Rivette regular and 'Celine and Julie' co-star Bulle Ogier) would tragically die soon after the release of the film from a heart attack. By means of associations seen and unseen, in the past and yet to occur, Marianne's task is transformed into a symbolic burial, a prophetic ritual that illuminates the interconnectedness of generations. If only the director let the images speak for themselves more often.