Only Lovers Left Alive: A Beginner’s Guide to Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film

Jim Jarmusch once said in his 5 rules of film-making, in Moviemaker, 2004 “authenticity is invaluable, originality is non-existent”. This applies to all art forms including, at the lower end of the scale, writing blogs.

Only Lovers Left Alive is his new film and it’s attracting attention because there are some serious Vampire fans out there. I like Jim Jarmusch films from Down by Law (1986) to Broken Flowers (2005). This new film is one of my favourites.

Only Lovers is humorous and tender. Yes vampires, but these vampires celebrate the otherness of life, they lead independent life styles and spurn the spotlight for a quiet life of creativity and pleasure.

What if Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve(Tilda Swinton) had survived the long centuries of Man as vampires, but they used the expanse of time to become all knowing geniuses? In fact time is not as important a dimension to them as space and entanglement. One is a musician who invisibly writes the music that has changed the world, giving it to humans or ‘Zombies’ in small gifts across the centuries. The other is a prolific reader, understands all languages, is a philosopher of all of nature and absorbs and loves the beauty of life.

Here is my brief ABC of Only Lover’s Left Alive and the trailer…I stopped at ‘D’ so as not to spoil the film, but you get the idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHO_L6QtvY

I’m on loan: Deadlock at Cambridge Film Festival

I’m currently writing as a festival reviewer at the Cambridge Film Festival this week http://www.takeonecff.com/.

Roland Klick is the director I never knew, and he has piqued my interest at the festival.

Taster here: my Deadlock preview for tonight’s 9pm screening…written for TakeOnecff

it’s not an acid Western, I never wrote that. It’s just a film of it’s time.

http://www.takeonecff.com/author/sarah-acton

Deadlock: The modern Western

Directed Roland Klick, Germany, 1970, 94 mins, (dubbed English)

A suitcase full of stolen money, bags of greed and distrust, beads of sweat, together with requisite close-up shots of shifty eyes, all generate a heavy Western-style masculine tension, and the increasing suspicion that things might not turn out too well at the end of Deadlock.

The traditional Western movie is violent, cynical and visually stunning, and in all, this rarely screened feature, Deadlock, does not disappoint. ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ were mostly made by Italians, but this film is an independent West German Western, made by auteur director, Roland Klick. In Klick’s artistic vision, Deadlock both embraces and transcends the ‘Spaghetti’ sub-genre which was itself coming to a natural decline by the early 1970s.

Deadlock stars Anthony Dawson (Blofeld, From Russia with Love and Thunderball), as ‘Sunshine’, and Marquard Bohm as ‘Kid’, as the gunmen with the suitcase, and Mario Adorf (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) as the desperate man who has seen better times, and who tries to get a piece of the action. It’s hard not to be reminded of Sergio Leone’s The Good the Bad and the Ugly as the Deadlock plot unravels. The Good the Bad and the Ugly was a massive international success by the time it was released in America in 1967, an influential film that expanded the depths of the Western experience for audiences with dramatic widescreen cinematography, and the musical soundscape of Morricone.

Whilst Deadlock follows many of the conventions of the Western genre, the costume and found-location setting are strikingly modern, as is the feel of the tracking shots. There’s no attempt made to recreate the look of the authentic wild frontier of America, except through signifiers in the character’s accessories, plot, and the desert. Deadlock was shot at a disused mine in Israel, a real location that Klick discovered whilst traveling. The abandoned decay of the backdrop creates an atmosphere of oppressive and bleak isolation.

Like many other Spaghetti Westerns, Deadlock is low budget and shot renegade style in the middle of nowhere, but the production values are high. Quality performances from Adorf, Bohm and Dawson, and the mellow effect of 35mm desert colours and well-framed shots give credibility to the plot and absorb the sun-bleached violence and downbeat climax.

The Can soundtrack bridges the gap between classic Western and a new generation of psychedelic interpretations out of the genre, leaning towards ‘El Topo’ or the scorched desert of ‘Zabriski Point’. All 3 were released in the same year at the turn of a new decade.

You get a sense that Deadlock sits between worlds of tradition and modern culture. It’s unconventional but with no great demand to radically rethink the established Western movie genre: just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Deadlock trailer 1970

Double Bills: Bill Callahan’s Tour Documentary with Bill Daniel’s Who is Bozo Texino?

Double Bills: Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse a Tour Documentary AND Bill Daniel’s Who is Bozo Texino?

I’m inspired today by Bill Callahan’s imminent album release, Dream River that will arrive in Rise, (Bristol) shelves on September 16th through Drag City. Here are some thoughts on what I’d like to watch it with on the big screen. Turns out it’s a double Bill night in order for me.

Apocalypse: A Tour Documentary (dir: Hanly Banks, 2012), is an intimate documentary of footage taken over two weeks of touring on the road with Bill Callhan in 2011. It’s reviewed here by Pitchfork, and as I haven’t yet seen it I’ll refer to Ian Cohen’s judgment. I’m a Bill Callahan fan, though, as you may imagine as a fan, the tour footage doesn’t sound particularly revealing but a continuation of the narrative of Bill’s mystique.

It’s an hour long so I’d screen along side another film to make an event of it.