M. Stern’s Short Ends: End of the World Movies, Part 1 (Béla Tarr, Bruno Mattei)

It wasn’t completely by chance that my movie viewing began heading down an apocalyptic path when current events started getting serious. Some people, it seems, escape into meme-ready comfort TV, and others stare hard into the abyss with rigorously dismal cinema. I’m generally one of the latter types, and so it seemed to make sense to write about what I’ve been watching and I guess, maybe, to try to figure out why I’m putting myself through this. While I haven’t been watching any of the more directly topical blockbusters like Contagion or 12 Monkeys (though believe me, I think the latter movie’s a scorcher — the first I don’t remember well), I think that the best of the movies I’ve been watching – or even the less good ones – reflect our reactions to fear, uncertainty, tragedy, and utter lack of control in ways that, if they’re not necessarily easy to watch, can be valuable to think about. And the worst — at least one has a bootleg Terminator in it, but is nevertheless thought-provoking in its way.

While I had intended to do this as one post, I’m going to split it out into a couple as these reviews have run a bit long. What can I say, I over-write when I get antsy. Spoilers are to be found throughout, if you care about that sort of thing. Anyway, speaking of figures not known for their brevity…

The Turin Horse (2011) Dir. Béla Tarr

It seemed like a no-brainer, with the official onset of a global quarantine, to reach for whatever movie I could find by the most canonically morose living director in world cinema – Hungary’s Béla Tarr. I found The Turin Horse streaming, its relatively slim 2.5 hours marking the intentional end of Tarr’s filmmaking career and depicting, perhaps not coincidentally, the on-screen end of the world.

The film derives its name from an anecdote about the latter-day life of Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosopher, traveling through Italy, reputedly saw a man beating a horse. Nietzsche threw himself on the horse to protect it, weeping. Taken home, he then uttered his last sane words: “Mutter, ich bin dumm” (“Mother, I am dumb”). This anecdote – retold at the beginning of Tarr’s film – is as oft-shared among readers of philosophy as the one about Kant’s precisely-timed daily walks through Königsberg, Jeremy Bentham’s practical-to-a-fault mummification, and those tales of any number of philosophers’ masturbatory habits each as unique as a snowflake.

Scholars point out, however, that The Turin Horse story is apocryphal – it’s a bit too close to a fictional anecdote found in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and there is little historical evidence to corroborate that it happened.

The closest thing to a picture of The Turin Horse I could find to accompany this review.

It’s not hard to get why we keep telling it, though (or naming movies after it): Nietzsche was a man who saw atheism as an inescapable reaction to the modern world being demystified through science and reason, a world which now posed questions without viable answers, leaving those perceptive enough to appreciate the situation nothing but despair to grapple with. He believed that our most basic moral intuitions and social norms were false, and that to recognize them as such was to be set above those who believed, unquestioningly, in their universality. He was a philosopher preoccupied with the hideous anguish and, potentially, sublime beauty of an existence devoid of transcendence. In one final gesture of unmatched sensitivity, he collapsed at the tragedy of it all and never again spoke a word. (Nietzsche did, in fact remain sitting in a chair in complete silence for the final 10 years of his life). Whether or not it happened, the story seems to act as a capstone on the bleak, poetic irrationalism of his thought. To quote actor Gunnar Björnstrand, speaking to film critic Peter Cowie at the first screening of Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence: “Pretty strong stuff, isn’t it?”

The stuff of Tarr’s final film is unfortunately not quite that strong. At the beginning, the haunting voice of the film’s occasional narrator recounts the final equine encounter of Nietzsche’s sane existence, then assures us that “of the horse, we know nothing.” We then see a horse, being driven by a rustic farmer against the backdrop of a landscape with an unyielding wind blowing (it doesn’t let up through the duration of the film). We wonder if maybe we’re watching a piece of philosophical fan-fic fleshing out the story of a semi-mythical bit player. It’s been done to excellent effect before, in literature (Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas) and film (Tom Stoppard’s Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). It seems as though we’re being set up to see this great historical victim of abuse, having been saved by a philosophical titan, going on to live out the rest of its life like the donkey in au hazard Balthazaar; a picture of innocence in a wretched world.

In fact it’s not exactly clear if this is The Turin Horse we’re dealing with or merely a horse of a similar color. We see the horse occasionally throughout the movie, but most of the film is focused on the farmer and his daughter, living inside a small, sparse cabin. Day after day, the father wakes up in his long johns and the daughter mechanically dresses him. They saddle and unsaddle the horse. They do shots of brandy. She boils two potatoes and serves them each one. Everything they do, especially how they eat, has a ritualistic feel – the father scratches the skin off of his potato with one hand, smashes it and picks it apart, the daughter peels hers fastidiously with both hands. The characters gobble their respective potatoes while they are still steaming. The wind outside gets stronger.

“Of the horse, we know nothing.”

While Wikipedia pegs this movie as taking place in the 19th century (due presumably to the transportation, style of heating, living arrangements, etc.) it’s details like this almost alien mode of potato consumption that make me think the movie, in fact, takes place in a sort of timeless semi-reality – along the lines of the fabulistic nowhere of Kafka’s The Castle. (I suppose it’s possible that it could be a super specific cultural practice, but I can’t see Hungarian farmers of any era willfully burning the hell out of their mouths with every potato). This sense is bolstered by the fact that, as the wind continues to howl, the farmer and his daughter have only two encounters with other humans. In the first, a man shows up looking for brandy and explains to the farmer that the village no longer exists. The farmer appears unrattled. In the second, a bawdy dance macabre of gypsies show up attempting to spirit the daughter away; the father chases them off with an axe. The father and daughter are entirely unmoved from their routine despite evidence filtering down from all quarters that something big is happening. The horse, meanwhile, seems like a bellwether for the impending apocalypse – refusing to eat and otherwise acting out as the situation outside degenerates.

On the final day, things change. They try to leave; it’s not wholly clear if they succeed and arrive in an identical cabin, or just return home. We see characteristically long, somber shots of the daughter staring out the window. The two try to light a lamp. It doesn’t work. Entropy, it seems, is signaling a victory. Fire no longer works, it slowly flickers out. In some of the movie’s most haunting scenes – confined to the last few minutes – only the howl of the wind is audible and the film cuts to absolute darkness.

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what the circumstances of the characters in this esoteric fable might mean. If we’re indeed seeing the abuser of the semi-historical Turin Horse cursed, as a stand-in for all banal tyrants, to remain in some loop of eternal reccurence, unwilling or unable to vary even minutely as things decay around him. Or if it’s a more broad meditation on our tendency to throw ourselves into ritual or keep our heads down and hope for the best, even as we’re watching things break down around us. Worthwhile topics for an art film of this type to explore, but I wish the movie would have been overall stronger.

Which is to say that despite those captivating, long-running shots synonymous with the name Béla Tarr movie, a minimal plot made for philosophizing, and the ending’s staggering collapse into black (which is excellent), I don’t think this one touches his masterpiece, Werckmeister Harmonies. That one makes me sob like a baby every time I watch it, no exaggeration – it’s up there with Tokyo Story in terms of movies that can provoke such a reaction. I think it’s precisely because in Werckmeister – in addition to the film’s formal beauty — amid the ominous and Kafkaesque imagery, it’s about a search for transcendence. From the opening scene, Werckmeister grapples with hope in its cryptic, mystical way, whereas The Turin Horse ignores its possibility outright. I think in some ways the former approach is both more affecting and sadder.

Even the score in The Turin Horse pales in comparison to Werckmeister; in Werckmeister, there’s a somberness and longing in composer Mihály Víg’s Badalamenti-meets-Philip Glass-style score that matches that of the characters. In The Turin Horse it leans too heavily on the Glass side, as repetitive as the characters’ existences, but not as powerful as their circumstances demand. This was an OK way for the world to end, but it wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for as the final statement from a talent as singular and significant as Tarr.

Shocking Dark AKA Terminator 2 (1989) Dir. Bruno Mattei
Right, so after all that going on about how I was watching movies about life and death (and mostly death), I’m writing up a schlockfest I’ve been meaning to write about for a minute that just so happens to be, at least marginally, an apocalypse thriller. It’s so much more, though. The release of Shocking Dark from Severin Films was one of the biggest deals of 2018 for Blu-ray collectors and it’s hard to think of a curio coming out from any distributor that has matched it since. The 1989 Bruno Mattei-directed, Claudio Fragasso/Rossella Drudi-penned film owes it’s notoriety to the fact that it is a work of copyright infringement so brazen that it had never gotten a release outside of continental Europe until Severin put it out. Its original release title, Terminator 2, and the accompanying cover/poster artwork, may give you a hint as to the nature of the grift at play that kept it confined to Europe, but this film’s disregard for trademarks is more than just skin deep.

In the movie, an algal bloom or toxic cloud of some sort has rendered the Venice of the then-future early-’00s a toxic wasteland. A scientist and maybe some other people have disappeared into the catacombs built underneath the city – apparently to expunge the pollution. The surveillance cameras in the tunnels have stopped working. This leaves the Megaforce Marines, a military team dressed like dollar store action figures, to go on a search and rescue mission accompanied by Sam Fuller of the shadowy Tubular Corporation who just sort of shows up, and Dr. Sara Drumbull, a doctor of something from somewhere. Frequent Bruno Mattei leading lady and Demons star Geretta Geretta plays Koster, who distinguishes herself as the only member of the Marines with a consistent personality throughout the duration of her appearance. She plays it big. Like, R. Lee Ermey big – berating and trading racial barbs with her Italian cohort, going as far as to ask – in one particularly inspired bit of dialogue down in the sewer-like catacombs – what his countrymen eat to “make their shit smell so bad.” (To once again quote Gunnar Björnstrand, “pretty strong stuff, isn’t it?”)

The smell of those catacombs is no human excreta, though. It is the stinky rubber monsters that are eating people, or wrapping them up in spiderwebs, or possibly turning them into other monsters – as is explained in one clunky line of kinda-sorta scientific dialogue – sandwiched in between interminable scenes of walking. Amid a monster attack here and there, the Marines end up finding the lost scientist’s daughter. Her face is affixed in sort of a pained contortion of fear, she whines constantly in an accent of indeterminate origin. She clutches Dr. Trumbull for safety and repeats her name every time anything threatening happens. So much so that if you watched this movie intending to drink every time a character said the name “Sara,” you would die of alcohol poisoning within a matter a minutes. At some point along the way we discover that Sam Fuller from the Tubular Corporation is actually an android, and the Tubular Corporation is, in fact, the samesuch corporate entity that destroyed the environment in the first place, intentionally, as part of an unnecessarily convoluted real estate scam.

The kicker, though, is an introduction of a conveniently and inexplicably-placed time travel pod left by The Tubular Corporation, allowing Dr. Trumbull and her Sara-screaming sidekick to return to the pre-enviropocalyptic past. They warp back and are followed by android Sam Fuller, who lands in c. 2000 AD and stomps on a remote controlled car in a shout-out to the officially licensed Terminator. He then has half of his face blown off, to mimic the look of the officially licensed Terminator as much as one could possibly manage with no budget, barely any time, and a limited amount of skill. Just as the action leading up to it is basicaly a knockoff of Alien made within the same parameters. Which I think is the beauty of an artifact like this.

I remember seeing an interview about 10 years ago with Luigi Montefiori AKA George Eastman, star of Anthropophagus and a few million other Italian genre films. He said that the Italian sci-fi movies of the era, unlike the horror movies, never really developed their own style because they were always knock-offs of U.S. movies. The more I see of these the more inaccurate that strikes me. This movie, Rats, and 2019, After the Fall of New York, are all way more similar to each other than they are to the contemporaneous U.S. science fiction films they intended to knock off. Watching these movies is almost like seeing the profitable elements of U.S. genre films filtered through a Five Obstructions-esque series of constraints. Concerns over intellectual property rights, of course, not being one of them — quite the opposite. It wasn’t a matter of needing to be original, but finding an original way to be unoriginal.

Which is why this movie got me thinking what’s so exciting about seeing unauthorized, international takes on familiar properties like this. When something like this gets rediscovered it’s always a surefire hit, take for example the wave of interest in Turkish Star Wars probably about 15 years ago. It doesn’t even have to be fully bootleg. Even in cases where a contract was actually brokered, like with the Japanese TV series that casts Spider-Man as an alien who operates a giant Voltron-style kaiju robot (has that gotten a proper stateside release yet?) there’s a sort of surreal sense of disbelief seeing such familiar characters used in weird, unfamiliar ways. The same reason we’re drawn to bootleg action figures and knock-off Simpsons gear. It’s endlessly fascinating to see the way people can get things kind of right while getting them completely wrong.

In a strange way, though, I think the impact of a movie like Shocking Dark has been blunted by the current technological moment. Advances in home digital filmmaking let basically anyone do their own lo-fi takes or mashups on whatever licensed property they please. My first time through Shocking Dark, I kept trying to think of it as I would have had I come across it 20 years ago. I couldn’t quite be as flabbergasted as I wanted to. Today, I can visit Vimeo and watch a pretty dead-on fan-fic “remake” of Robocop where the scene in which Robocop saves a woman by shooting her assailant in the crotch expands, or degenerates, into three minutes of Robocop shooting off the dicks of an advancing army of hoodlums. We see less labor-intensive labors of love like this all the time; Force Ghosts of pro-wrestlers cut into Star Wars and whatnot. The only recent thing I can think of that sets off my brain’s disbelief centers anymore is the re-shot Return of the Jedi ending featuring the real-life David Prowse under the Darth Vader mask, discussed in the documentary I Am Your Father, which is presumably hidden in an underground bunker to prevent Lucasfilm/Disney from eradicating it. Nothing else seems quite as shocking, and so Shocking Dark doesn’t watch quite like it would have.

It’s still pretty wild, though. A film that was so sketchy its release had to be constrained to a continent where the film’s language wasn’t primarily spoken isn’t something you encounter every day. Severin did its usual great job of enhancing the Blu-Ray experience with add-on swag, in the form of a limited edition slipcase baring the bootleg Terminator 2 graphics from the original release. At the time the time the Blu-Ray came out, the story was that they would continue to sell until a studio hit them with a C&D. I don’t think it happened as movie studios, litigious as they remain, are probably a little too hip to the Streisand Effect to get goaded into sending a nastygram to a boutique indie outfit. It was a cool stunt though. The disc looks cool on the shelf, and if I ever have guests over — which is a rarity these days — I hope that they’ll be so distracted trying to figure out what the hell it is that they won’t even notice the more tasteless fare that I keep around, like my copy of The Sinful Dwarf, sitting nearby it.

More interesting though are the special features — essential viewing for a movie like this as, if you’ve taken the time to watch it, you’ll doubtlessly want some context for what the hell could have possibly been going on when it was made.

I personally find Claudio Fragasso’s takes on the films he wrote/directed in the era to be fascinating in general. His own rather ambivalent if not slightly tortured relationship with these movies gives a view into the contorted relationship between creativity and commerce, something I’ll get into more if I ever review Zombie 4: After Death. In the Shocking Dark interview with him and Drudi we get, expectedly, kind of a rundown of who knew what and how much when this hot slice of willful deception was being cooked up. Most of the responsibility for the borrowed Terminator is placed firmly in the lap of a duplicitous distributor. But at the very least Bruno Mattei had to know, right, because he was shooting a movie with a Terminator in it and he had to know that he, Bruno Mattei, wasn’t James Cameron? And while Fragasso claims that this one was the first and last flick he ever worked on with such disregard for if not the law in general, at least copyright law, didn’t Severin more recently put out The Night Killer, a Nightmare on Elm Street rip sold in Europe as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3? It’s all so weird and confusing and I love it all. I wish I knew how much more of this stuff was actually floating around out there.

The Geretta Geretta interview is likewise fascinating; in detailing her experience making this and other genre movies in Italy, she confirms that there was a lot of heart that went into them. It was a bunch of ex-pat actors doing the hell out of it because they thought any movie they were working on might be the one that broke big — and as outrageous as the final product may have been, I think that’s inspiring.

Going back to the strange, confusing experience of seeing something like this back before the Internet demystified everything, I can’t help but think that somewhere in the U.S., maybe in like Iowa, there must have been a foreign exchange student who showed up at some middle school in 1989, with a story of having seen an as-yet non-existent Terminator 2 with all sorts of weird plot details. For this, s/he was mocked mercilessly. It had to have happened at least once, right? Consider yourself vindicated, kid — who or wherever you are.

Next up …
If you’ve read this far, you’ll be interested to know I’ve got a review of one of my favorite (and now, on re-watch, favoriter) Tarkovsky films in the works, as well as my very favorite George Romero movie. And maybe some others, though honestly I might have to shift gears on my movie viewing to light comedies because I am afraid too much of the type of thing I usually watch is starting to make me flip out.

Anyway, if you dig this, follow me on Facebook or leave some love in the comments and maybe I’ll do these more often. Fiction should be coming out one of these days too … I think. Take care and stay safe.
-M.

M. Stern’s Short Ends (Movie Review): Je t’aime, Je t’aime (Alain Resnais, 1968)

Hey everybody, M. here.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I watch a lot of movies and, while I don’t consider myself a “film critic,” I like to talk about them a lot and write about them on occasion. I’ve decided to start posting movie reviews here in between author news, as that stuff tends to move slowly. You can expect some of my takes on gruesome Euro-horror, slashers from the classic era, and probably some new indie horror from time to time, as well as international art house stuff that I think could be interesting to genre fans, but may fly under the radar of strictly horror/sci-fi buffs (which is what this first post is).

A note on the name of this segment, “short ends” are the leftover, mismatched pieces of film stock that low-budget directors would often shoot movies on, leading to the variation in on-screen image quality you sometimes see. That’s sort of what I’m going for here.  Anyway, enjoy this first one–which sort of spiraled into an extended critical essay on memory and time travel. They won’t always be this long. I don’t think.


Je t’aime, Je t’aime (Alain Resnais, 1968)
I had only seen two of Alain Resnais films (the big ones, Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima, Mon Amour) when I picked up the Olive Films release of Je t’aime, Je t’aime, but those earlier films are two of my favorites. In particular because at least in those movies, Resnais’ formal experimentation, even when it got way avant garde, had a distinct narrative purpose. As opposed to someone like the more frequently referenced Godard, whose visual experiments were (and are) showy and, in my opinion, not always particularly insightful. (An opinion that was shared, I discovered a few years ago, by frequent Godard cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who in an interview said, to paraphrase, that in every one of Godard’s film there was 20 minutes of brilliance for an hour of stuff that was completely annoying. It was a relief to hear someone spell it out.). Resnais on the other hand, at least in Marienbad and Hiroshima, used the form to illustrate a particular aspect of how people think. In Marienbad it was the circuitousness, obsessiveness and murkiness of memory in the context of trauma. In Hiroshima it was how our memories serve as direct emotional pipelines, connecting disparate events through time.

So what would Resnais do with time travel? Even given France’s tradition of arty, experimental takes on science fiction that we see in Godard’s Alphaville, Marker’s La Jetée, etc. this one is unorthodox to the extent that I keep going back and forth on if it is a time travel movie at all. It might, instead, be another take on memory, or even a movie about autobiography. This is due in part, as some special features on the disc flesh out, to an idiosyncratic director and maybe more so to an equally idiosyncratic French science-fiction author, Jacques Sternberg, acting as the film’s screenwriter.

“Why the hell is there a mouse on the beach?” “… it’s on vacation.”
The film begins with Claude Ridder checking out of a mental hospital after a suicide attempt. Ridder has slogged his way up through the publishing ranks and is, at the time of the attempt, a science fiction author (though this fact is only addressed occasionally and in passing) who has written stories or novels exploring the nature of time. The hospital is somehow affiliated with the top-secret Crespel Research Center, which has been experimenting with sending mice back in time and, now that the mice are no longer exploding, is ready to try it out on humans. Ridder’s unreformed suicidality makes him, in his own approximation and that of the research center, an ideal guinea pig for the experiment (though it’s not 100 percent clear why). Center functionaries pick him up on his way out of the hospital, pitch the idea and take him to the secret test location. He is injected with a sleep drug and placed, alongside a mouse, in a big gourd-like structure with a pillowy, doughnut-ish sort of interior. The idea is that he’ll be sent back to experience one particular minute of the past and called back to report. Things go haywire.

Ridder, unstuck in time, starts bouncing back and forth between experiences in his recent past. We’re not given any visual indication that he has been physically relocated into the past; rather the film cuts directly to a scene of Ridder snorkeling during a specific vacation with his live-in girlfriend Catrina. The scene cuts and repeats a few times, indicating “hiccups” in the time machine’s functioning. He then hops around through the previous decade of his life, and we see his recent life story told in non-linear snippets. We see him making his way through boring, banal workdays at multiple jobs. We see him waiting for a bus. We see him on a train with Catrina, discussing his wartime experiences as a soldier. We see scenes of domestic intimacy and others of presumed infidelity. Ancillary characters appear for a scene or two and drop out. Associations between historical snippets sometimes seem arbitrary. Other times, it seems like they’re driven by irrational connections of sense, sensation, emotion and so on—eventually coming to circle in around his negligent murder of Catrina, which may or may not have happened. All of this mirrors how our memories work. It’s not exactly how we’d think of a time machine working, even a broken one.

The cuts in the past speed up as the research center’s mission control in the present loses control of the situation. Ridder appears back in the time machine at irregular intervals but can’t open the door (or is afraid too, not knowing where in time he might be) and warps back out. When he is in the pod, he is in a panic–or mulling his love of Catrina, or his regret over having possibly killed her. When he is in the past, he doesn’t seem particularly aware that he has traveled through time to get there; it seems like he is remembering it, not reliving it. This makes it difficult to process the leaps Ridder takes back in time, and from time period to time period, as being distinct from flashbacks. Time travelers, fictional ones (and for all I know, real ones too) go back in time to change something, or to observe but explicitly avoid changing anything. If this is time travel and not just memory, it seems the broken machine condemns Ridder to repeat parts of his life at random in some kind of disjointed eternal recurrence.

The only real time travel “tell” that appears in Ridder’s past is his time-traveling companion, the mouse, in one beach scene. There is reason to believe, though, that Resnais had something more ambitious planned, stylistically, to visually illustrate the first-person experience of time travel.

“You won’t appear on screen.”
In Je t’aime, there’s hardly any indication that Ridder has relocated to the past. If anything it seems in the “past” scenes that his mind has warped into his past body. What we are watching is snippets of 1968 Ridder reliving 1951 onward. On first watch it feels like Resnais overlooked what makes time travel clear to a viewer. He may, however, have wanted to take on the difficult problem of depicting time travel in the first-person and just didn’t get there.

In a 2007 interview with Claude Rich (who played Claude Ridder) the Je t’aime’s star says that Resnais initially told him he, as Ridder, would not appear in the movie after the “contemporary” shots in the mental hospital and time travel pod. Rather his parts in the past would be shot in first-person perspective, or close to it, with his face appearing only in mirrors and other reflective objects coincidentally in the room. It’s hard to think through if this would have made a difference to the viewer. Though for me the concept brought to mind a time travel version of a show like Peep Show.

Resnais opted instead to place Ridder physically at the center of every scene shot in the past, which would maybe be noticeable to a director but I don’t think would stick out to even the most scrupulous audience without a heads up. While I’d like to think a perspective shift to the first person would have made it feel more time travel-ish, there’s other stuff that indicates these might have been thought of as flashbacks from the outset. Even when Rich talks about Ridder’s experiences in the film, he talks about them as memories—not things present-day Ridder is experiencing having traveled to the past. In an interview from around the same time with writer Sternberg, the tension between making a science fiction story and a personal film is likewise clear.

“I am Claude Ridder.”
Je t’aime screenwriter Sternberg’s expansive body of work, much of it science fiction, appears to have been only rarely translated into English, but fans of left-field continental progressive rock may appreciate that one of his story collections is the inspiration for the band name Univers Zéro [link is in French].

In an early-’00s interview about the film, Sternberg explains that the character of Claude Ridder is at least in part autobiographical (though it’s not clear if that means he once, like Ridder on screen, committed negligent homicide). The screenplay was, in fact, based on hundreds of small stories that Sternberg furnished Resnais with, allowing the director to choose which ones best built a coherent narrative and string them together within the science fiction framework (which was also of Sternberg’s devising).

Knowing this, the movie takes on a bit of a different shape. It’s no coincidence, for instance, that in one scene, Ridder is discussing a translation of Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a story in which the radically skeptical metaphysics of a society that may or may not exist, described in an encyclopedia, reshape the reality of the world of the narrator. There is a Borgesian circularity to Je t’aime and Sternberg’s role in it: Sternberg was a science fiction author who was obsessed with time, writing a film about a science fiction author who is obsessed with time, who gets caught in exactly the kind of time travel loop he would write science fiction about.

Going beyond that, Sternberg utilized various concepts throughout the dialogue Je t’aime that appeared previously in his work (the quasi-science fictional notion, for instance, that humankind was created to tend to the needs of cats). And Sternberg’s own memoir, a critic explains, was built around precisely the same apparently disorganized, non-linear structure used in this film.

As movie fans, we go to the special features for clarification. These facts about Sternberg, however, seem to introduce even more ambiguity about what this movie is supposed to be.

“Why am I so interesting?”
So is Je t’aime, Je t’aime science fiction? Is it something closer to surrealism (at points, it certainly resembles the work of Buñuel in the late-’60s/early-’70s)? Is it a personal art house film shot cut-up style for the hell of it? Is it an experimental anthology with an Amicus-style science fiction wraparound story? Is it a work of cinematic proto-hypertext? Could what it does be accomplished with no science fiction element at all–having Ridder wake up in an asylum, obsessed with the same things, unable to escape the weight of his memories until he is eventually overwhelmed by them?

The action of the film itself raises questions as well: why towards the end of the film do we start seeing surreal dream vignettes interspersed between Ridder’s past experiences? Why does Ridder at one point sink up to his neck in the doughnut? Is that a hallucination? A result of the failing time machine? Another dream?

Around 2005 I got sort of obsessed with the then recently-released Shaun of the Dead. A big part of this was because the movie was driven by a heartbeat of realism—comic realism, but realism—it (and the two follow-up movies) seemed to fundamentally be about what would happen if people who would go to see a movie like Shaun of the Dead ended up experiencing a zombie attack. It wasn’t just a horror-comedy, it was a personal horror-comedy that spoke specifically to the idiosyncrasies of the lives of its audience. While I couldn’t tell you ever Edgar Wright and Co ever saw Je t’aime, maybe there’s something to be said for Je t’aime’s blending of hyper-personal and genre as a sort of artsier, distant ancestor of those types of movies. Or even a precursor to something like Fulci’s Cat in the Brain, (even with Fulci’s movie being more directly a gore-filled riff on Fellini’s 8 ½).

Je t’aime is definitely not Resnais’ most consistent use of visual style to explore facets of the human experience. And I do think the experimentalism at times competes with the storytelling. In Ridder’s suicide scene, for instance, the desperate, weary contemplation and sudden commitment has an air of verisimilitude that makes it resonate nearly as strongly as the suicide of Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet) in Louie Malle’s heartwrenching The Fire Within (one of my favorite movies). It struck me that scenes like this could have been stronger were they tied together with a more conventional narrative. Sternberg had no problem reusing scenes for other literary purposes, but Resnais didn’t, to my knowledge, do the same thing on screen.

Je t’aime has, if anything, gotten me interested in reading the works of Jacques Sternberg and revisiting the discography of Univers Zéro. I am still stumped on if this is really a time travel movie or not, or frankly if that is even an important question. Anyway, a person purporting to be me from the future just materialized in my apartment, warning me not to post this review. I now have to go kill him.

-M.

Welcome to 2020 (with a Capital M.)

Hey everybody, M. here.

Happy New Year, or belated New Year I guess. While developments have continued to be a bit slow-going, they have indeed been developing and so I wanted to post a quick update to get everyone hip to the latest goings on as they get going.

Preparing to be Startled with Startling Stories #1
Back in November I received a much appreciated surprise email from editor Doug Draa containing the galley proofs for issue #1 of the relaunched Startling Stories, indicating that go-time was approaching. I ran through my edits and sent them back, knowing now that I bear the full existential weight of any typos which may appear in my story, but content that the hotly-anticipated Startling Stories #1 is getting ready to bust onto the scene ray guns a’blazin’ (Disclaimer: my story, Payload, features no ray guns). Not only that, but as Mr. Draa has mentioned elsewhere, science fiction legend Robert Silverberg joined on at the last minute with a previously unpublished story which will appear in the mag.

Though a firm release date has yet to be made public, the consensus appears to be that it’s coming quite soon, with the good people at Wildside Press making mention of it in their 2019 year-end newsletter. And while it has yet to be posted on the public Startling Stories Facebook page, there is in fact some cover art ready for the issue that has been floating around in various channels, so I’m posting it below:

I have to say my jaw dropped when I saw this artwork, as I think this merging of a classic pulp vibe with some contemporary design elements is hot enough to turn the ice cold vacuum of space into a balmy island paradise.

I also can’t help but feel a connection with the events unfolding in the image. Like the fellow suspended in goo there, his blood presumably replaced with onax (a la Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco) to prevent him from exploding like a ripe watermelon dropped from a rooftop due to the conditions of deep space, I’ve felt like I’ve been in stasis for some time. And that grey creepin’ around there, what is its agenda? Is it planning to plant a bunch of alien eggs in my brain? Shut off my life support just for shits? Steer me to the portal to hell from Event Horizon and leave me babbling in Latin and gouging my eyes out? Or does it want to be friends? Does it plan to unfreeze me in order to bring me to a super fun alien party?

Anyway now that I’ve extended this metaphor far beyond where I should have stopped, I’ll talk about how I should, at some point in the future, be … 

Gettin’ Weird with Weirdbook
Due to the delays I’ve been hesitant to talk much about this one, but as things seem to be cranking up I figured it couldn’t hurt to mention that sometime last year I signed a contract on my story titled Birth, which is slated to appear in Weirdbook #44. While issue #41 of that magazine has been out for a minute, it sounds as though things are also starting to pick back up in terms of the publishing schedule over there, as it was made public over at Black Gate that Weirdbook #42 is in the hopper, and is going to be an issue entirely dedicated to stories by cyberpunk legend John Shirley.

As with my story coming out in Startling, I am feeling a strong impulse to talk about the one appearing in Weirdbook, but it doesn’t make much sense for an author to go around spoilering his own stories. I’ll move on to other stuff, then.

Other Stuff, Then …
What else is popping at M. Stern Headquarters? In addition to a few stories I whipped up towards the end of last year, some which I think are kind of funny and others pretty serious, I’m working on about three right now which fall I think into those same categories or somewhere in between.

Elsewhere in the offing I’m supposed to appear on an awesome horror movie podcast where I’ll be discussing (as it currently stands) the heyday of Italian horror/gore movies, how this gritty cinematic underground connects to and interacts with the art house tradition, and probably a bunch of other stuff.

And in keeping with that, I’ve officially decided that I will start doing some movie capsule reviews here as it seems sort of silly not to. I’ve got flicks by Alan Renais, Alexei German, and on the other side of the snooty spectrum, Joe D’Amato and Claudio Fragasso that I’ve got a thing or two to say about.

All this and more planned for after Startling #1 drops… Now I’m going to wrestle myself away from my keyboard and try to stop refreshing social media for at least a couple of minutes.

Take care everyone, hope 2020 is treating you well.
-M.

The Beginning Was The M.

Hey everybody, M. here.

It’s been a minute — longer than I had expected, as the inaugural issue of Startling Stories has been delayed and I haven’t had much else to report in the way of fiction-related developments. I do prospectively have another story slated to come out at this point, but I’d rather not make the details fully public until there is a little more movement on that front. While I can’t imagine that there are many out there reading this, I wanted to post something to let those curious (or those stumbling by due to coincidence of keyword) know that I hadn’t disappeared off into the ether.

I suppose the one semi-significant development at M. Stern Headquarters is the creation of my Facebook author page, which I encourage you to “Like” if you haven’t already. The news has been, of course, really slow over there as well, but I’ve been posting interesting music clips from time to time in lieu of any substantial updates.

A note on the title of this post — it is a reference to the weird work of German pseudoscience from the 1970s, “Der Anfang war das Ende,” which translates to The Beginning was the End, subtitled: “der Mensch enstand durch Kannibalismus – Intelligenz ist essbar,” meaning roughly, the human emerged through cannibalism — intelligence is edible. Of course this may be more familiar to some as a lyric from the Devo track Gates of Steel, and in fact the synth pop band’s shtick was highly influenced by the book, especially in their early days as a more experimental, conceptually challenging act.

The book was written by a fascinating New Age-y type named Oskar Kiss Maerth (nutbar or grifter to some, OKM to his friends and/or adherents), and details the entirely baseless but nevertheless compelling idea that the mechanism which drove human evolution was cannibalism among apes. Maerth, having purportedly eaten some monkey brains while traveling through southeast Asia, concluded that consuming brains increased the sexual potency and the intelligence of the eater. In our pre-human history, some apes stumbled onto this, which sent them off eating each other’s brains at scale. They got smarter, ate more brains, and climbed up the evolutionary ladder to the top of the food chain where we now reside. These days we fail to eat each other’s brains in most cases, but are the beneficiaries of our cannibalistic progenitors’ lack of scruples.

For those who can understand German, here is some footage from German television of Maerth hanging out in a monastery in Asia wearing long flowing robes, surrounded by children and delicious monkeys.

When I initially had planned this blog entry I’d intended to also explore a theorist of consciousness whose ideas I take quite a bit more seriously than Maerth’s, Julian Jaynes, but I honestly don’t know if “idea blogging” still exists in the way it did say a decade ago. Have all those think-piece writers of the early Web 2.0 era become podcasters now? I barely pay attention. 

I’m also still considering putting a review or two of some of the art house and b-horror/exploitation stuff I watch up here, but while I certainly love writing that sort of thing I find that there are people and websites out there capable of doing it more comprehensively. Plus, this is here primarily for people to explore what I’m doing in terms of my work as an author, which I consider to be a separate kind of thing from criticism.

At any rate, hopefully I’ll have some actual news soon — I have actually just in the past few months been writing stories at an unprecedented (for me) clip, but I have never been one to talk about things as I’m working on them or to discuss the submission process. I suppose I am old-fashioned in the sense that I don’t like to pull back the curtain too much.

Hope anyone who is reading this is enjoying their summer. Be safe and don’t engage in cannibalism — it hasn’t been proven to make anyone smarter, but it can definitely lead to kuru.
-M.

It Starts …

Hey everybody, M. here.

As you may have noticed, this website is in a bit of a state of disarray at the moment, which I hope to remedy in the coming weeks/months/years.

If you’ve made it here then you probably already know this, but I’d like to announce for those who just happened upon this site out of curiosity, coincidence or some quirk of Google’s search algorithm that my science fiction story titled “Payload” will be appearing in the debut issue of the new Startling Stories — the classic pulp mag now being re-launched by Wildside Press and editor Douglas Draa.

This publisher/editor combo has been super successful in re-launching the time-honored weird fiction mag Weirdbook, and I’m stoked beyond stoked to have a place in their new science fiction-focused endeavor. I’ll be using this space to keep the world posted on the magazine’s release and how to get your hands on a copy either in print or via e-book. I’ll probably also be sharing these updates on my author page on Facebook (which is going to require me to start an author page on Facebook — so look for that, too).

I’m also thinking of ways I can make use of this space in between news about any fiction I might have coming out. While I’m not super hot to become an active fixture of the blogosphere or do much “media criticism,” I do read books and watch movies like they’re going out of style (in fact some of them have) and I have a tendency to go on at length about them. So some of that as it pertains to genre fiction might appear here soon. I am thinking this could be a better place for such things than social channels geared toward shorter posts (and memes, and baby pictures, etc.). And, for that matter, it might go over better here than it does when I occasionally strike up a conversation with a random, perplexed person sitting next to me in a coffee shop.

Other than that, I’ll leave you with a generic but sincere promise that I’m hard at work on more stories. There’ll be much more to come!
-M.