Sight & Sound - April 2024

DUNE April 2024 volume 34 issue 3 Denis Villeneuve’s brave new Part two world £6.50 PLus Radu Jude Louise Brooks Robot Dreams

IN THIS ISSUE CONTENTS 44 CHILDREN’S CINEMA Films made for children are often treated as a candy-coloured, emotionally simplified toy version of the real thing. But the best filmmakers understand that children are quick-witted, dark and complicated creatures. By Isabel Stevens 40 58 28 DUNE: PART TWO The challenges posed by Frank Herbert’s novels have proved too much for many filmmakers. Roger Luckhurst outlines this complex history and explains how Denis Villeneuve, who he also interviews, has finally done justice to the writer’s grand vision 50 RADU JUDE The Romanian director’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World offers a piercing satire for our times, one that takes aim at work alienation, the toxic world of social media and the normalisation of hate culture. By Jonathan Romney Sean Price Williams’s picaresque satire reaches far back into American history, and far out into new comic realms, to create an arthouse film that will have an appeal well beyond an arthouse audience. By Henry K. Miller Maestro, which explores the , which explores the life and loves of Leonard ife and loves of Leonard Bernstein, joins a rich tradition ernstein, joins a rich tradition of cinematic portraits of f cinematic portraits of composers. David Thompson omposers. David Thompson examines how convincingly xamines how convincingly classical music has been lassical music has been portrayed on the big screen portrayed on the big screen THE SWEET EAST MUSIC ON FILM

IN THIS ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS ROGER LUCKHURST writes on science fiction and horror, most recently in 2021’s Gothic: An Illustrated History. He teaches literature and film at Birkbeck, University of London. KATE STABLES is a critic who has written extensively for Sight and Sound, Total Film and the Guardian. DAVID THOMPSON is a director of arts documentaries, including filmmaker profiles (Roeg, Renoir, Tarantino, etc) for Omnibus and Arena, a freelance writer (co-editor of Scorsese on Scorsese, editor of Altman on Altman) and an occasional curator (Pialat, Eustache at the BFI). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Adam Nayman, Catherine Wheatley, Alex Dudok de Wit, Guy Lodge, Gabrielle Marceau, Carmen Gray, Rachel Pronger, Leigh Singer, Nick Bradshaw, Annabel Bai Jackson, Simran Hans, Kate Stables, Sophia Satchell-Baeza, Hannah McGill and more APRIL 2024 6 EDITORIAL British culture deserves better screen representation: Michael Sheen and Adam Curtis have found a way 9 OPENING SCENES · Opener: BFI Flare · Editors’ Choice · In Production: Richard Linklater’s 20-year film · In Conversation: Kevin Macdonald on High & Low: John Galliano · The Ballot of… Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor · In Focus: Four Daughters · Festival: Sundance · Reel Talk: The Cinema Museum · Mean Sheets: Frank McCarthy’s poster for The Dirty Dozen 22 LETTERS 24 TALKIES · TV Eye: Andrew Male finds the subversion beneath the action of Amazon’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith · The Long Take: Pamela Hutchinson pays tribute to the film historian Cari Beauchamp · Flick Lit: Nicole Flattery reads the electrifying source novel for American Fiction 114 ENDINGS · The quietly triumphant close of Housekeeping, Bill Forsyth’s adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s novel, sees its dreamy misfits throw off the shackles of conformity and make a break for freedom REVIEWS 68 | FILMS · The Delinquents · The Teachers’ Lounge · Robot Dreams · Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World · Monster · Red Island · Disco Boy · Copa 71 · Drift · Four Daughters · Pornomelancholia · High & Low: John Galliano · Banel & Adama · Drive-Away Dolls · The New Boy · Silver Haze · Shoshana · The Origin of Evil · Shayda · The Settlers · Memory 88 | DVD & BLU-RAY · Showing Up · Goodbye & Amen · The Man Who Had Power over Women · The Village Detective: A Song Cycle · Rediscovery: Black Zero · Archive TV: Roobarb… and Custard: The Complete Collection · Dazed and Confused · Jinnah · Impossible Object · The Roaring Twenties · Black Tight Killers · The Sting of Death · Lost and Found: Grandeur nature 96 | WIDER SCREEN · Michael Brooke on recent work by Agnieszka Holland at the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival and John Beagles on a touring exhibition by Eden and Andrew Kötting 98 | BOOKS · Kim Newman on a new survey of the macho action heroes of the late 1970s and 80s; John Bleasdale on a study of Todd Haynes’s creative process 100 LOUISE BROOKS The star looks back at making Pandora’s Box FROM THE ARCHIVE 111 THIS MONTH IN… 1974 Winstanley on the cover, with Connery’s ill-clad Zardoz inside

OUT NOW IN CINEMAS AND EXCLUSIVELY ON CURZON HOME CINEMA

EDITORIAL Mike Williams @itsmikelike Adam Curtis’s style is present in grainy archive footage and flickering screens that remind us we’re always watching and being watched “What is it that rises up the same moment it falls?” This is the question at the centre of three-part BBC drama The Way. It’s a collaboration between actor Michael Sheen, in his directorial debut; James Graham, whose Dear England, a play about men’s football team manager Gareth Southgate, just finished in the West End; and Adam Curtis, who has cast his documentarian’s eye on political, economic and social power through work such as The Century of the Self (2002) and HyperNormalisation (2016). Set in a dystopian present, in which a strike at the steelworks in Port Talbot proves the catalyst for a rapid unravelling of civilities between Wales and England, the English boot is pressed to the Welsh throat so quickly it feels like everyone was waiting for an excuse. Protest turns to riots, martial law is invoked, the border is closed and the family at the heart of the story, torn apart by their own infighting, must escape lockdown and deportation to a prison colony on Anglesey across a mythic landscape of ghosts and psychedelic visions. The answer to the question is “people”, uttered at the end of the first episode by the town’s alcoholic prophet as Port Talbot burns in protest. The prophet reappears in episode two as a wine-soaked Green Man figure pointing the way towards the green and unpleasant land of England via an underground railroad run from a dusty bookshop in Hayon-Wye. What started as a story of capitalism versus community becomes a tale of totalitarianism and terrified refugees. Not all of the early reviews for The Way in the English press have been kind, and it’s hard to disagree with some of the criticism. The dialogue is exposition-heavy, crudely drawn caricatures are stuffed into every narrative shift and the premise is too ambitious for three episodes. The influences are obvious and many. I noted Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), Shameless (2004-2013), Children of Men (2006), Black Mirror (2011-), Years and Years (2019) and Curtis’s Can’t Get You out of My Head (2021) on my first watch. The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002) and Ben Wheatley’s folk horrors came to mind with further consideration. Despite only taking an executive producer credit, Curtis’s style is present in grainy archive footage and flickering screens that remind us we’re always watching and being watched, the discordant score by Super Furry Animals’ Cian Ciaran heightening the dread. Those familiar with Sheen’s oratory skills will see his mark in the rousing speeches, the soul-searching between men and ghosts, and the idea that a beast rests within us all, individually and collectively, waiting to be stirred. Sheen, forged from the same steel as Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins, is a fierce advocate for the Welsh language, his nationalism never hidden, his pride as big as his baritone voice. But he’s no nostalgist and throughout the series the problems with romanticising pain as a replacement for a contemporary identity are referenced as much as the scars of historical oppression. Britain is in thrall to its colonial past. To some, those are the glory days, to others a source of deep shame. The British Empire was never an expression of British identity, it was always about England, and English exceptionalism is structurally ingrained into British culture. The United Kingdom is four very different countries and in each of those countries are distinct counties. There are seven officially recognised languages of the UK: English, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Lowland Scots, Cornish, Irish and British Sign Language. In total, the British Isles have 13 living native languages, of which two have been revived in the last 100 years, Cornish and Manx. When a certain type of Englishness is touted as the norm for all, everything that surrounds it is presented as parochial, irrelevant or invisible. Which is why, despite its flaws, The Way is a significant piece of mainstream TV. The opening scenes show a child’s birthday party, the wrong party masks delivered by mistake. A point about local politics is made when a toddler masked as Thatcher joins a line-up of other kids in Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un and Boris Johnson masks and is dismissed by the grownups as the greater evil. The real political act isn’t what you see, though, it’s what you hear. Welsh is spoken, not in a performative or instructional way, but as the first language of some of the guests. This summer Kneecap, a semi-fictional biopic of the Belfast rap group of the same name, will be released by Curzon in the UK, by Sony in the US. The film, starring Michael Fassbender and group members Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Próvaí won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance. Kneecap are controversial for their Republican politics and open drug use (their name comes from the traditional punishment for drug-dealing in Irish Republican communities), yet the most political thing about the film is that the whole thing is in Irish. That uses of Indigenous languages are considered defiant or groundbreaking is an indictment of the homogenisation of UK culture. We need more than one version of history and a broader spectrum of our present depicted on screen. With its accurate, if accentuated, Welshness married to a story that elaborates on a fear of erasure that a small, politically vulnerable nation with a history of oppression from its powerful neighbour might naturally feel, The Way aspires to the lineage of Nigel Kneale, Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale and Jimmy McGovern. It’s not in the same league as their work, but it’s playing the same game, and that’s enough to cheer about for the time being. British culture deserves better screen representation. Michael Sheen and Adam Curtis have found a way ILLUSTRATION BY FERNANDO COBELLO; BYLINE ILLUSTRATION PETER ARKLE

OPENING SCENES Trans films in the spotlight as BFI Flare returns The 38th edition of the London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival will platform inspiring and thoughtful stories of trans lives, including Elliot Page’s subtle family drama Close to You and Levan Akin’s Istanbul-set Crossing BY BEN WALTERS At this year’s BFI Flare, two special presentation screenings will explore aspects of the often complex dynamics between trans people and their families of origin. It’s a timely subject. The tenor of public discourse in the UK around the lives of trans people continues to degrade even as the stakes carry on rising. In February, two teenagers were jailed for life for murdering another teenager, Brianna Ghey. The judge stated that the killers were partly motivated by “hostility towards Brianna because of her transgender identity”. Following the verdict, Ghey’s mother Esther spoke publicly about her daughter’s life and showed empathy towards the killers and their families. This contributes to humanising the trans experience and the consequences of transphobia, subjects that the UK media and politicians typically meet with misinformation, ridicule and scaremongering. On the day Esther Ghey visited parliament, the prime minister jibed about the leader of the opposition’s difficulty “defining a woman”. Opposition politicians and journalists excoriated his tactlessness. Yet even if much of that pushback was hypocritical lip service, it’s instructive to note its context: a situation in which violence towards a trans individual was also understood as violence towards the nuclear family. Brianna Ghey’s life became worthy of (at least the show of ) respect when it was understood as being part of family life. This brings us to the screenings: Close to You and Crossing. Both were directed by cis male f ilmmakers (Dominic Savage and Levan Akin, respectively) but were created in collaboration with trans advisers, cast and crew. Set in Canada, Close to You stars Elliot Page as Sam, who is returning from Toronto to the small town where he grew up for his father’s birthday. It’s something of a landmark in industry terms: Page is the only out trans man in a position to produce, star in and co-write a feature centred on the trans male experience, and his openness about his own life (in, for instance, last year’s memoir Pageboy) brings an added sense of intimacy. Page will also deliver a talk at Flare, his presence adding a further frisson. Close to You was created in a similar way to Savage’s dramas for Channel 4, I Am… (2019-22), devised and plotted in collaboration with a prominent lead actor then improvised by the company. At first, the film seems to present a familiar scenario: a queer character’s uncertain return to their family of origin after a long absence. It quickly becomes clear, however, that Sam’s family are supportive of his transition and hold him dear – or at least this is the story they tell themselves and each other. Rather than the explicit conflicts and tensions ABOVE Elliot Page in Close to You 9OPENING SCENES

of traumatic rejection and overt bigotry, this is a dynamic of more subtle misapprehension, avoidance and selfcentredness. “There are a lot of people who on the face of it are open-minded but underneath there’s something they’ve not dealt with,” as Savage puts it. “Whatever they want to show they are, the reality seeps out.” In one exchange, Sam rejects the primacy of the bond of home: “Family’s not the most important thing. It’s not.” It’s a striking moment in its insistence that the value of queer lives is not dependent on their perceived compatibility with conventional structures. “Some people would find that heresy, almost,” says Savage. “Their whole lives are predicated on the notion of family, good or bad. But he’s right, you know? He’s right.” Crossing is also about a journey that unearths buried family issues, though from a different perspective. Young Georgian man Achi (Lucas Kankava) joins retired teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) on a trip to Istanbul in search of her niece Tekla, whom the family rejected when she came out as trans years earlier. Much of the film’s charm comes from their oddcouple bond, conspicuously unmarked by overt transphobia. The idea of trans identity as a threat is clear, though: Achi’s boorish brother describes it as “a real tragedy for the family” while Lia recalls Tekla’s existence as “a great shame for our family”. And while Sam is in nearly every scene of Close to You, Crossing is primarily driven by Tekla’s absence. It’s through Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trainee lawyer with an active dating life, that trans life comes vibrantly to the screen here. Inspired by a story about a Georgian grandfather’s support for his trans granddaughter, Akin (And Then We Danced, 2019) worked with trans organisations and advisers during the film’s development and production. The casting director, for example, was a trans man. “[Trans consultants were] concerned that it would be a tragic depiction of queer life in Istanbul,” says Akin. “That’s something I’m concerned about too. I want to show positive stories without being naive. We know the context but we want to tell stories about solidarity.” Crossing also offers a lively portrait of Tarlabaşı, the distinctive neighbourhood where Lia and Achi search for Tekla. “It’s the trans quarter but also home to sex workers, a Kurdish population, many others,” says Akin. “It was majority Armenian and Greek before the pogroms. It’s a distinctive neighbourhood and it was important to get the geography correct.” Through its complex networks of streets, people and groups, we see lives lived through forms of belonging and support that might step up where families fail. The Flare programme also offers extensive documentary representation of a range of trans subjects. Going by culture-war talking points, some might imagine trans and intersex participation in competitive sports to be a recent development – a misconception implicitly rebuffed by Julia Fuhr Mann’s century-spanning feature, Life Is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning. Sport isn’t the only major cultural platform with barriers to trans inclusion: another is explored in Ila Mehrotra’s India’s 1st Best Trans Model Agency. Fashion also comes into play in Amy Pennington and Jos Bitelli’s TOPS, which uses UK breakfastTV tropes to unpack trans men’s style choices. Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines, meanwhile, examines the specificities of gay trans male identity. Experimental approaches to trans subjects are on show too. Writer Paul B. Preciado’s formally innovative feature debut Orlando, My Political Biography uses Virginia Woolf ’s novel as a creative springboard. Reas, from Lola Arias, presents a carceral fantasia with voguing and musical numbers. And shorts programme State of the Art draws on influences from painting, drawing and dance. At a time when wider appreciation of the complex diversity of trans lives feels more important than ever, it is to be hoped that where festivals such as Flare lead, more mainstream platforms will follow. BFI Flare runs from 13-24 March at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player. Visit bfi.org.uk/flare for information Six highlights at Flare BY BEN WALTERS ABOVE Mzia Arabuli in Levan Akin’s Crossing LAYLA (AMROU AL-KADHI, UK) Flare opens with Al-Kadhi’s debut feature, a culture-clash romance starring Bilal Hasna and Louis Greatorex as a drag performer and her straitlaced beau. Informed by Al-Kadhi’s experience as drag artist Glamrou and an awareness of imperilled queer spaces, it premiered at Sundance. Look out, too, for Unicorns, Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd’s romance, inspired by pioneering UK Asian drag queen Asifa Lahore. LESVIA (TZELI HADJIDIMITRIOU, GREECE) Birthplace of the poet Sappho, the island of Lesbos (or Lesvos) gave its name to lesbian identity. This multilayered documentary about the Greek island is made by Tzeli Hadjidimitriou, a lesbian from Lesbos, and seeks to explore the hopes and desires of women who have been coming to the island since the 1970s as well as the thoughts and responses of locals. WOMAN OF… (MAŁGORZATA SZUMOWSKA & MICHAL ENGLERT, POLAND/SWEDEN) Set during the waning days of Soviet Communism, Szumowska and Englert’s drama maps the arduous journey toward personal fulfilment of closeted trans woman Aniela (Małgorzata Hajewska) against hopes of national liberation catalysed by the changing political landscape. Also at Flare, Marek Kozakiewicz’s documentary We Are Perfect uses an open audition process as a window into the Polish trans experience today. LADY LIKE (LUKE WILLIS, US) This year’s closing night gala is a doc portrait of UK-born RuPaul’s Drag Race season 14 runner-up Lady Camden, aka Rex Wheeler. The film promises to follow their route from growing up in Camden to performing on the local queer scene in San Francisco. It also examines the global profile afforded by the reality show while considering the form’s potential for both personal growth and community engagement. PINE CONE (ONIR, INDIA) Directed and co-written by Onir, who is one of India’s few out LGBTQ+ filmmakers, this semi-autobiographical story is something of a watershed. The story of gay director Sid (Vidur Sethi) is set against pivotal moments for gay rights in India (1999, 2009 and 2019), with a backwardmoving chronology offering an unusual perspective on the challenges and changes the character faces over time. DON’T EVER STOP (STUART POLLITT, UK) Pollitt’s documentary pays tribute to the famed UK DJ and music producer Tony de Vit, doyen of London superclubs such as Heaven and Trade, who died aged only 40 in 1998. Flare also offers tantalising docs about the Los Angeles disco institution Studio One, the recent world tour undertaken by musician Lil Nas X, the filmmaking duo, and couple, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, and the photographers George Platt Lynes and Jürgen Baldiga. 10 OPENING SCENES

EDITORS’ CHOICE Recommendations from the Sight and Sound team INSOMNIAC FILM CLUB Rio Cinema, deepermovies.com Rep film club Deeper into Movies doesn’t stick to one sticky-floored venue for its DIY screenings: it has a flavour of the Scala Cinema’s communal, anything-can-happen, back-room-ofthe-pub energy wherever it lands. It’s had Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch seasons, Simpsons marathons, a lecture on Sofia Coppola and screenings of The Holy Mountain (1973) with a live score. The programming is a mirror of Steven T. Hanley’s taste. And things are getting real personal for his new Insomniac Film Club – monthly screenings of films from Hanley’s VHS collection at Dalston’s Rio Cinema, starting at 11pm. Hanley tells me they’re going for “Scala, via the weird video store”, that disorientating feeling of getting sucked into a film you’ve never heard of at 2am and wondering if you imagined it. Katie McCabe, reviews editor DEATH LINES: WALKING LONDON’S HORROR HISTORY Strange Attractor Press Named after a 1972 cult film about a cannibal on the underground, this offbeat walking guide resurrects the ghosts of London’s horror film history. Lauren Jane Barnett, a horror aficionado and tour guide, takes in classics such as Peeping Tom (1960). The guide also functions as an alternative A-Z of horror, from Boris Karloff ’s hypnosis curiosity The Sorcerers (1967) to Cockneys vs Zombies (2013). Where to start? The Victorian East End is an obvious hot spot and the Tube’s claustrophobic tunnels prove conducive to picturing the subterranean horrors cinema has imagined there. But I enjoyed learning of the terror witnessed by the city’s pleasant landmarks, such as London Zoo, Kew Gardens and the tourist mecca that cinema built: Notting Hill. Isabel Stevens, managing editor SUZAN PITT FILMS Mubi, from 22 March I’ve seen only two films by the late American animator Suzan Pitt, but Asparagus (1979, pictured above) sticks with me like the memory of an out-ofbody experience. Somewhere between the trance-state illogic of Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and the off-world phallic imagery of Fantastic Planet (1973), this 18-minute fantasia on female sexuality – using a mix of cel animation and stop-motion – begins with a woman defecating said vegetable and culminates in all manner of surrealist necromancy filmed in a miniature theatre. Minds were surely blown when it screened with Eraserhead (1977) as a midnight-movie double bill in the late 70s. The Mubi bundle includes Asparagus and six other Pitt creations. Sam Wigley, BFI digital features editor IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? On Netflix Ella Glendining’s diary-like documentary seems to have found its audience on Netflix, where I discovered it unexpectedly nestling alongside a Kevin Hart blockbuster in the service’s top ten films. Glendining was born without hip joints and with short femurs, and realised in her twenties that she’d never seen anyone who looked like her; this observation sparks a hunt for people with similar impairments. Glendining is candid in her introspection about ableism, both internalised and societal, while her conversations with other disabled people are lively and welcoming. As Glendenning says, “Disabled kinship is the key to disabled joy,” and if there’s one thing Is There Anybody out There? has, it’s joy. Thomas Flew, editorial assistant HIPPODROME SILENT FILM FESTIVAL hippfest.co.uk, Falkirk, 20-24 March The prolific Frances Marion, silent Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, is just one focus of this Scottish festival. HippFest will showcase one of the films Marion solo-directed (Just Around the Corner, 1921) as well as her writing work for Mary Pickford (Stella Maris, 1918) and Lillian Gish (The Wind, 1928, pictured above). Its long weekend of dialogue-free cinema, live music and 1920s glamour takes place inside one of the most beautiful and oldest cinemas in the country. Tartan-themed highlights include Billie ‘Glinda the Good Witch’ Burke in Scottish-set drama Peggy (1916) and Jenny Gilbert’s poignant documentary The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1933), with a new score composed by Inge Thomson. Beyond these isles, there will be films from Ukraine, Czechia, Sweden and China, not to mention return visits to Hollywood to call on a young Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), a vivacious Clara Bow in Mantrap (1926) and an elastic Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Pamela Hutchinson, Weekly Film Bulletin editor DOUGLAS GORDON: ALL I NEED IS A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, until 15 March In one room of the Mayfair gallery, a jumbled mound of screens shows every film and video that the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon has ever made. This amounts to a considerable number over a career, now in its fourth decade, that has brought forth famed works such as 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006, co-directed with French artist Philippe Parreno). There’s also new film installation 2023EastWestGirlsBoys (pictured above), which focuses in on one of Gordon’s eyes where visual markers of Soho’s nocturnal neonscape are reflected, with the emphasis very much placed on erotic desire. Multilingual texts are liberally spread throughout the gallery in various formats – “I am the author of my own addictions,” goes one typically gnomic specimen. The show has the feel of an intense self-reckoning shot through with doubt at art’s capacity to make sense of the world. Kieron Corless, associate editor 11 OPENING SCENES

All about Steve BY ARJUN SAJIP The cameras have been rolling on Richard Linklater’s musical Merrily We Roll Along, whose title seems a sunny reference to its unhurried production: shooting began in 2019 and is slated to wrap in 15 years. The film is an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical of the same name; Paul Mescal is in the lead role as Franklin Shepherd, a Broadway composer who leaves the stages of New York for the soundstages of Hollywood. “I feel like this is going to be the bane of my life!” Mescal told Sight and Sound recently. “Answering these questions now is like, if it was a standard film, being asked about it on the second day of filming. I’m so far away from the end. But it’s one I’m really excited about. If Richard Linklater asks you to be in a movie, you don’t say no.” Linklater is no stranger to delayed gratification: his coming-of-age epic Boyhood (2014) was shot over the course of 12 years, with its young protagonist (played by Ellar Coltrane) ageing in real time. But Merrily We Roll Along is even bolder: it’s being shot chronologically in reverse, the nostalgia of its theme baked into its mode of production. One hopes that it will meet with more immediate success than its inspiration: Sondheim’s stage show was initially a box-office flop, just like the 1934 Broadway play, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, it was based on, and only found its feet commercially in subsequent decades following extensive rewrites. Linklater’s adaptation is based on the most recent version. Mescal describes Linklater as “so easygoing, gentle with his direction and just likes actors. It’s a common theme with directors I admire: they know that the magic they have to do is around performance, sometimes. They know you’ve got to be given creative space to go and do your thing, and only if they feel like something’s not working, [do] they step in.” ABOVE Paul Mescal IN PRODUCTION Creating space BY THOMAS FLEW A new podcast series is prompting discussion around disability on screen and within the film industry – topics that have too often been sidelined. Thanks to a £10,000 grant from social impact agency Shape History, BFI disability equality lead Clare Baines has created a podcast called Crip Club with the aim of fostering an online community. Its ambition, she says, is “to dissect the ableism behind the camera, on screen and in our cinemas through the lens of film discussion”. When using the word ‘disabled’, Crip Club “is inclusive of deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people, and those who have long-standing mental and physical health conditions”, including cancer. Joining Baines for each episode will be a fellow disabled film industry professional (the first three Crip Club episodes feature access consultant Charlie Little, programmer Tara Brown and filmmaker Jessi Gutch). The idea is to forefront disabled joy over the usual tired tropes of overcoming challenges and dealing with trauma. Each conversation is paired with an analysis of a specific example of ‘cripping up’, a common trend of non-disabled actors playing disabled characters in prestige, award-nominated dramas. “Honestly, it’s so juicy,” Baines enthuses when speaking about these close readings. Films put under the spotlight include Forrest Gump (1994), for which Tom Hanks took home a Best Actor Oscar, Terms of Endearment (1983) and Shadowlands (1993). In the last two films, Debra Winger played a woman with cancer and earned Oscar nominations; Baines notes that both films “follow the exact same tropes: they never define what the cancer is, they never speak about it, each time it’s seen from another person[’s point of view]… It’s interesting to see how that impacts people’s perspective of disability, of cancer, of that experience. The hard facts are that only three disabled people have won an acting Oscar. That means less than one per cent of the awards have gone to disabled people.” The actors in question are Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives (1949), Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God (1986) and Troy Kotsur for CODA (2021). Although she acknowledges that “creating a space specifically for disabled kinship” is one of her key goals, Baines is clear that she wants the podcast’s reach to extend to a non-disabled audience too. “[As disabled people] we’re also very reliant on allyship, support and companionship. [Saying] ‘You’re not allowed to be part of this club’ is very much not the vibe. The more the merrier. It’s for everybody.” Episodes of Crip Club can be found on Spotify, YouTube and other podcast platforms. For more information visit thecripclub.co.uk NEWS COLM INCHES Andrew Haigh, who recently directed Mescal in All of Us Strangers, is developing an adaptation of an as-yet-undisclosed short story from Colm Tóibín’s 2006 collection Mothers and Sons. “I originally got the rights to it before Weekend [2011],” Haigh told Sight and Sound at last year’s BFI London Film Festival. “I won’t say too much about it, but I have always loved that story profoundly, and it definitely speaks to a lot of my interests and desires in the kinds of films I want to make. I’m hoping I can make it relatively soon.” Haigh tends to alternate between very different projects, but this writer wonders if Tóibín’s ‘Three Friends’, which, like All of Us Strangers, explores queerness, grief and the power of music, might be that story. FRANZ ZONE As we wait for the UK release, on 7 June, of her migrant drama Green Border, Agnieszka Holland will begin shooting her Kafka biopic Franz. She is aiming for a premiere this year, to mark the centenary of the novelist’s death. “I would like to tackle the film as a sort of collage of scenes and stories from the life and books of Franz,” Holland has said. “We are building the blueprint of a whimsical and fictional docudrama in which nothing is impossible.” THE BASEMENT TAPES Film and theatre director Nadia Latif is currently filming her debut feature, psychological thriller The Man in My Basement. Set in the Hamptons and shot in the surrounds of Cardiff as well as New York state, the film stars Corey Hawkins as Charles Blakey, a down-onhis-luck fellow whose life takes a dark turn when a businessman (played by Willem Dafoe) makes him an offer that’s too good to be true. 12OPENING SCENES IMAGE: GETTY

IN CONVERSATION John Galliano was lauded as a fashion visionary early on, at his 1984 Central Saint Martin’s graduation show no less. He became the creative director of Givenchy in 1995, the first time a British designer (born in Gibraltar, he grew up in London) led a French fashion house. A year later, he took over at Christian Dior. He produced collections and profit at a furious rate, received a CBE and a Legion d’Honneur, and became addicted to alcohol and pills. In 2011, video emerged of him hurling racist and antisemitic abuse at strangers in a Paris bar. Dior fired him. Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low: John Galliano tracks this stellar career, ignominious fall and readmission into fashion’s high echelons at Maison Margiela. Q What drew you to the case of John Galliano? Did you know his work? A What interests me in both drama and documentary is moral ambiguity. I never intended to excuse or condemn him. I find him an interesting character. And a very open character in certain ways. He hasn’t got a PR person leaning into his ear. He’s being himself – for good or for ill. Like a lot of people of my age, gender and class, I was quite dismissive of fashion. I was fascinated to hear about somebody who is considered to be a genius, when I don’t really understand why. Q You’ve drawn rare interviews from fashion royalty, like Anna Wintour and Kate Moss. A Everyone has their own agenda. Mine is to make an interesting film. John’s not naive enough to think people will forgive him, but he wants to be understood. Dior want to accept, acknowledge and process his period of their history. As to why Anna Wintour was so helpful, the conclusion I came to is that she genuinely likes John and thinks he’s brilliant. She said to me, off-camera, “He’s one of one of the five 20thcentury designers who matter.” Kate Moss hates interviews. She steeled herself – she would answer a question and then go out for a cigarette! But the fact that all of those people want to talk about John, even though there’s not much to gain by it, actually makes me admire them. You can agree with it or not, but they’re standing up for their friend. ABOVE Galliano in High & Low RIGHT Kevin Macdonald Kevin Macdonald The director discusses his unvarnished account of a divisive fashion legend in High & Low: John Galliano INTERVIEW BY HANNAH MCGILL ‘The fact that Kate Moss and Anna Wintour want to talk about John, even though there’s not much to gain, makes me admire them. You can agree with it or not, but they’re standing up for their friend’ Q One observation in the film is that Galliano appropriated freely from other cultures in his work because he saw only surfaces. He didn’t do context. A That’s one of two comments which I think help you understand him. The other is his own comment about the appeal of escape. That is about somebody who can’t face up to pain and so escapes into fantasy worlds. Those two things are the key to unlocking him. Q You have him look into the camera, Errol Morris-style, which feels very intimate. A Yeah, it’s the Interrotron [a device Morris invented] – now they call it EyeDirect. He’s on trial in this film. You’re getting to look at him and judge whether you trust him. Originally, I was going to only have him appear on screen and everything else was just going to be voices. But there were people, particularly Sidney Toledano [formerly CEO of Dior, now strategic advisor to the CEO of the LVMH fashion group], who I thought we really wanted to see. So I put him in, and then everyone else. 14OPENING SCENES

Stories in brief BY CONOR RILEY CASTING A WIDER NET The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have announced a new Academy Award, for Best Casting. From April 2025, casting directors will become eligible for nomination in what is the first category added to the Oscars since Best Animated Feature in 2001. The casting directors’ branch was formed as part of the Academy in July 2013 and has almost 160 members. The first statuette will be given in 2026. UK INDIES STRUGGLE According to a BFI report, boxoffice revenues from UK-qualifying independent films fell by 49 per cent in 2023 – down to £37.8 million from 2022’s £74.7 million. The overall market share of 3.8 per cent was the secondlowest recorded for 20 years, with Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson’s The Great Escaper (pictured above) the only title to earn more than £5 million. FROM EIFF WITH LOVE The Edinburgh International Film Festival is introducing a new prize in collaboration with the Sean Connery Foundation, the new festival director Paul Ridd has announced. The Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence will be voted on by audiences and awarded at the 2024 edition, with the winner receiving £50,000. A prize of £15,000 will also be awarded for best short film. RIP CINEMA SCOPE Editor Mark Peranson has announced the end of Cinema Scope as a printed entity after 25 years. The magazine is the latest victim of a funding drought for the arts after the Canadian government pulled its financial support. Peranson writes in his Editor’s Note column: “The [film] world has changed plenty since 1999, and though I’ve done my best to try and change with it, maybe it’s time for different voices to assume positions of authority. Thanks to everyone who worked on this thing, too many to name. We were all in this adventure together, and you can never quarantine the past.” Q Kate Moss talks about bonding with NEWS Galliano over their mutual shyness and we see his intense nervousness. It highlights the psychological effects of extreme social mobility. A One thing I didn’t go into much in the film, because you don’t want to be accused of special pleading, was the degree to which he was bullied. He was effeminate. He had to lose his Spanish accent to fit in and every day was a calculation to reduce the risk of being beaten up. But he had this fantasy life: he’d put on his mother’s makeup and pretend to be Marlene Dietrich. And obviously, that plays very much into his fashion imagination. Q Your encounter with the target of one of his public tirades is unsettling. A Philippe [Virgitti] is a very vulnerable person. It’s hard to know the degree to which what happened contributed to that. It’s ironic that the individual who was most damaged is a VietnameseFrench man; his experience had nothing to do with antisemitism. It’s very complicated. The US distributors asked: “Where’s the bit where John goes and begs forgiveness? Or where he goes to Auschwitz?” But that isn’t how real life works. It would be false and propagandistic to make that film. Q Using clips from The Red Shoes [1948], a film made by your grandfather Emeric Pressburger, is an interesting way to reference your own Jewish roots. A It’s one of the many films that influenced John. Obviously, the theme, about dying for your art, seemed very applicable. But I did question whether to use it. What if my grandfather would absolutely hate this? But he was interested in ambiguity. During the war, the Archers’ films showed good Germans and Germans who changed their minds. I feel like he would have understood that sympathy for characters is a complex thing. Some people, in the US more than here, want to make it about whether you have the ‘right’ to tell a story. I find those arguments ridiculous. But I do have family who were on those trains. In my twenties, I wrote a book about my grandfather [Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, 1994]. I went to Eastern Europe and traced his Jewish relatives who died in Auschwitz. I had connected with that part of myself and I’m sure that’s partly why this interested me. I know some will disagree, but to me there’s a world of difference between somebody who uses those words to hurt in a childish, petty, disruptive way and somebody who is ideologically antisemitic. Kanye West is far, far more egregious if you think about what he has made acceptable to teenage boys. John was never trying to manipulate or influence people towards a political viewpoint. I subscribe to the view of the addiction specialist in the film, which is that it was a moment of autodestruction. It’s hitting rock bottom, very publicly. That’s the interpretation I choose. But you can watch the material and come to a different conclusion. Q There’s another background theme, which is the industrialisation of fashion in the 90s and the effect on its often-fragile creatives of the pressure to create ever more profit. A It’s the story of our world. Fashion had been a been a small, rarefied industry for the few aristocrats and movie stars who could afford these things. And then people like [Bernard] Arnault [the chairman of LVMH] saw an opportunity. He buys up all these brands incredibly cheaply and then thinks: “How do I make these [clothes] young and sexy and dangerous to appeal to people in their twenties?” He comes across John and then Alexander McQueen, and they bring that. He builds this enormous empire off the back of those two, and they end up… one psychologically dead, one physically dead. High & Low: John Galliano is out now in UK cinemas and is reviewed on page 79 15OPENING SCENES

NETHERLANDS FILMFUND NETHERLANDS PRODUCTION INCENTIVE AND BBC FILM PRESENT A VIKING FILM EMU FILMS PRODUCTION V I C K Y K N I G H T E S M É C R E E D - M I L E S C H A R L O T T E K N I G H T ARCHIE BRIGDEN ANGELA BRUCE LINE PRODUCER LEE GROOMBRIDGE CHRIS JORNA CASTING DIRECTOR LUCY PARDEE SOUND RECORDIST JOB MICHEL SOUND DESIGNER JAN SCHERMER COMPOSER E L L A V A N D E R W O U D E JORIS OONK EDITOR LOT ROSSMARK PRODUCTION DESIGNER ELENA ISOLINI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY TIBOR DINGELSTAD NSC EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS E V A Y A T E S F R A N K K L E I N C L E A D E K O N I N G SACHA POLAK VICKY KNIGHT JIM MOONEY WALLI ULLAH PRODUCED BY MARLEEN SLOT & MICHAEL ELLIOTT A FILM BY SACHA POLAK SACHA POLAK A FILM BY ‘R EMAR K ABL E... C A P TUR E S THE HUM OUR , TO NE A ND RHYTHMS OF WORKING-CLASS LIFE’ Sight and Sound I N CI NEMA S 29 MARCH VICKY KNIGHT ESMÉ CREED-MILES

THE BALLOT OF… Each month we highlight voters in our Greatest Films of All Time poll. Here the Irish writer-directors known as Desperate Optimists – the makers of Rose Plays Julie, The Future Tense and Baltimore – share their choices Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor BARRY LYNDON (STANLEY KUBRICK, 1975) Joe Lawlor: I remember seeing Ireland in a new, stunning way, very painterly. Kubrick’s got several films that you could put on the list, but there’s just something about the world that he creates in it, the humour and the playfulness of this character. A lot of our work is concerned with identity, and Barry Lyndon is about somebody faking somebody else or a bigger version of themselves, which resonated with us. SUNSET BLVD. (BILLY WILDER, 1950) Christine Molloy: There’s something incredibly bold about the structure of the film. You start with the end – this dead body in the swimming pool – and you shouldn’t do that, particularly in a film where there are only two or three main characters. Somehow, it imbues the film with this extra sense of intensity, mystery and foreboding. He’s also strangely embracing his own death, which is very clever. BLUE VELVET (DAVID LYNCH, 1986) CM: I can remember being in the cinema and watching the opening sequence with the fire truck and the white picket fence, and that sense of America and the angle of the camera. It’s disorienting because it’s a version of cinema that you haven’t experienced, so it just tilts everything in terms of its approach to storytelling and taking you somewhere unexpected, somewhere mysterious, which is like the real world, but it isn’t. Lynch is one of the few filmmakers who can tap into your innermost fears and desires and your dream life in a profound way. JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (CHANTEL AKERMAN, 1975) CM: I was at the A Nos Amours retrospective [at the ICA in London] of Chantal Akerman’s films when Chantal turned up one day unexpectedly and introduced one of them. It was actually close to when she died [in 2015], so in retrospect, it became very profound to have been there. Jeanne Dielman is a very demanding film. ‘Jeanne Dielman is a very demanding film. It demands that you stay with it. It’s the tensest I’ve ever been watching a film and, most of the time, she’s chopping carrots and making a stew for her really unappreciative son’ It demands that you stay with it. And that you stay with it on its own terms, until it begins to then take over. It’s the tensest I’ve ever been watching a film and, most of the time, she’s chopping carrots and making a stew for her really unappreciative son. THE RED SHOES (MICHAEL POWELL AND EMERIC PRESSBURGER, 1948) JL: It’s not about the story. It’s all about the storytelling. Particularly when the ballet is happening and the moment when she’s walking up and her feet go jumping into the ballet shoes. It’s the abrasiveness of those moments and how shocking they are. PARIS IS BURNING (JENNIE LIVINGSTON, 1990) CM: This was our daughter’s choice. She actually watched it on her own. She wasn’t prepared for its emotional impact or how much she was going to care about each individual character, and to fall into a world that she knew nothing about. JL: It’s that idea [as performer Dorian Corey says in the film] of: “You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better just to enjoy it. Pay your dues and just enjoy it. If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.” It’s a great moment when she’s putting on makeup and expressing these thoughts. SIR ARNE’S TREASURE (MAURITZ STILLER, 1919) CM: There’s such a contemporary quality to the story. You forget that it was made in 1919 – the early days of cinema. It’s so dramatic and intense. You just can’t believe that [Mary Johnson’s orphan girl] doesn’t know he’s the guy [who killed her family]. And how that part of the thriller unfolds is breathtaking. It’s black and white, [but] the landscape and the world of the film are so epic and powerful. MAEVE (PAT MURPHY AND JOHN DAVIES, 1981) CM: It was shot in Northern Ireland in the late 70s and into 1980 during the Troubles, so it’s very courageous guerrilla filmmaking. They’re running around the streets of Belfast as the Troubles are all going on. It’s a very philosophical film and at its heart is a debate between two young people. Also, it’s a rare film that looks at the Troubles through a female point of view. The performer wasn’t an actor; it’s one of the only things she’s ever been in and she’s pretty brilliant. [The film is] about being caught up in something in a period of time. It’s almost like Paris Is Burning. If they hadn’t made it, it wouldn’t have been captured. TOUKI BOUKI (DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBÉTY, 1973) CM: The film gets off to an unsettling start in the abattoir; it certainly grabs your attention from the very beginning. It’s so visceral. It’s a film where a lot happens but there’s a quietness at the core of it, which is kind of weird. It’s strange to be in a cinema where you can hear people around you. ORDET (CARL THEODOR DREYER, 1955) JL: We were asked if we wanted to programme a weekend of films at the Irish Film Institute. We chose six and the theme was the theatricality of cinema. Ordet was one of them. This is an incredibly expressed film in how it understands time, how it demands us to engage in its tempo. [It has] something surreal and dreamlike about it and strange characters going through psychological transformations. But it’s how it’s expressed, what the camera is doing, and how time is slowing down… Baltimore is released in UK cinemas on 22 March ABOVE Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann in The Red Shoes (1948) BELOW Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) 17 OPENING SCENES IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

IN FOCUS “As I understand it, I’m like the character of Rose in Titanic [1997],” says Olfa Hamrouni, who is looking straight into the camera at the beginning of the film about her life. “She tells her stories and the actors interpret this story. So I am Rose, but in Four Daughters.” A multilayered reflection on family and coming of age in contemporary Tunisia, this Oscar-nominated documentary by Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin, 2020) is not, on the surface, much like Titanic at all. Yet with this comparison, Hamrouni neatly summarises the meta-cinematic premise at the heart of Four Daughters, a film which harnesses the therapeutic and artistic potential of re-enactment to bridge the gaps in an otherwise untellable story. Hamrouni has four daughters. Teenagers Eya and Tayssir live with their mother in Tunis. Her two eldest, Rhama and Ghofrane, are missing in Libya, “devoured by the wolf ”. To find out what happened, Ben Hania has Hamrouni tell her family’s story, but she also invites an actor, Hend Sabri, to step in when the process becomes too emotional. Meanwhile, Eya and Tayssir appear as themselves alongside actors who perform as their disappeared sisters, while another actor, Majd Mastoura, plays all of the male supporting roles. A horribly gripping story unfolds, of mother/daughter relationships, patriarchal control and religious fanaticism. The women often pause mid-scene to discuss their past selves, or elaborate in to-camera interviews, talking across each other or offering contradicting accounts. When Ben Hania first met Hamrouni in 2016, she initially wanted to make a conventional documentary, but soon realised that wasn’t going to work. “What I needed, [in order] to understand the origin of this headline [the missing girls fighting for Isis], this news, this tragedy, was to understand the family’s past,” says Ben Hania. “Since the past is not available to be filmed, I thought about a wellknown cliché, which is re-enactment. I was thinking, ‘I need actors to bring this past to life.’ Not only to re-enact it, but also to offer the family the possibility to go through an introspective journey to understand the past and its ramifications, and how it all led to this tragedy.” Four Daughters taps into a rich lineage, from Werner Herzog’s ‘ecstatic truth’ to Abbas Kiarostami’s docufictions – films which make visible the fiction behind ‘nonfiction’ cinema. Yet although these ideas had been explored before by giving a voice to people often silent within Arab society – a working-class single mother and her teenage daughters – Ben Hania brought fresh power to a familiar device. Using actors opened up the film’s imaginative scope, but it also reassured the family about the validity of their memories. Ironically, Hamrouni felt she was more likely to be believed if an actor told her story. “Hend Sabri is a star in the region, Olfa is a fan of hers,” says Ben Hania. “So when I told her [Sabri would be playing her], she said, ‘Finally, people will believe my story. It’s not about acting, it’s about authority.’ That made me think about what we believe, what we consider as true and how we sometimes dismiss ordinary people like Olfa.” Sabri’s star power subtly shapes the film and we see the two-way negotiation between Hamrouni and her double, as they work together to refine the portrayal. In one of their first meetings, Hamrouni worries about the effect that telling her story might have on Sabri’s mental health. Sabri says that she has learned to put professional distance between herself and her roles, but Hamrouni is still concerned. “What if you can’t get the character out of your head, if they unnerve you because they seem too real? Kaouther isn’t going to invent anything… it’s all true.” Elsewhere, the power dynamics between actor and subject shift unpredictably. When Eya re-enacts a scene which implies abuse from their mother’s boyfriend, Mastoura becomes uncomfortable. “He wanted to cut it and we can understand why because he’s dealing with real people,” says Ben Hania. “He told me he’s just an actor, not a therapist. But Eya was reassuring him, saying she wants to play this scene. She’s saying to me in the movie, ‘Tell him that I’m an actress, and it’s just dialogue.’” The filmmaker keeps this exchange in the film and it’s electrifying to watch Eya seize control, as she tries to persuade Mastoura to return. “I’ve already replayed this scene with a shrink,” says Eya. “Film or not, I’ve moved on from this.” Sequences like this pick at the gauzy divide between actor and subject, pushing well beyond cliché. Four Daughters is at its most moving when it gestures towards the healing potential, a symbolic reclaiming of the narrative. For Ben Hania, too, the production process carried an unusual emotional weight. “I spent years with them, we became almost family,” she says. “I felt all the spectrum of possible emotion while doing this movie and I wanted to share this with the audience. But it’s Olfa and the daughters who were my compass of what to show, what not to tell, what to tell. They were the ones deciding their reality.” Four Daughters is out now in UK cinemas and is reviewed on page 78 The lost daughters Tunisian documentary Four Daughters explores how two teenage girls were lost to radicalisation from the point of view of their mother, using actors alongside family members to tell the story BY RACHEL PRONGER ‘What if you can’t get the character out of your head, if they unnerve you because they seem too real? The director isn’t going to invent anything… it’s all true’ ABOVE Tayssir and Eya Chikhaoui (right) in Four Daughters 18OPENING SCENES

FESTIVAL SUNDANCE BY NICOLAS RAPOLD Steven Soderbergh and Jesse Eisenberg make a splash alongside a host of strong documentaries in Park City Every January, the Sundance Film Festival launches a new fleet of movies from its unlikely perch in a mountainside Utah resort town. Branded as a Mecca for independent filmmakers, Sundance has become an occasion for rising talent to show off their commercial appeal as much as their artistic vision. Forty years after Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute took over the festival in 1984, it’s still a reliable place to see the start of a fresh cause célèbre (like, for example, last year’s Past Lives). That said, the standout at this year’s event came from a Sundance homecoming hero, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) director Steven Soderbergh. Presence is an unpredictable haunted-house film shot from the ghost’s point of view (with the first-person camera operated by Soderbergh himself ). Rather than running on cheap thrills, the story is grounded in a sharply drawn family drama: a mother and father, stressed out by her financial shenanigans, and their two teenagers. Only the daughter realises that something is awry in their new home and, as we view her daily life from the ghost’s seemingly concerned perspective, the fuse is lit for a clash to occur. A superb cast give the virtuosic feat of filmmaking a true emotional core, making the twists hit even harder. Uncanny premises fuelled a number of films by younger directors too: A Different Man follows the supremely ironic journey of an actor (Sebastian Stan) who has experimental facial surgery, while I Saw the TV Glow imagines the divergent paths of two fragile superfans who glom onto a (fictive) supernatural television show. Yet one of the best performances in the festival came from A Real Pain, a film that had the earmarks of sentimental convention but cut deeper through nimble humour. Succession star Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg (who also writes and directs) play cousins on a package tour of Holocaust sites in Poland. The odd-couple road trip resolves into a precise pair of character studies that illuminate ways of coping with generational trauma. While the Sundance mythos favours shoestring fiction auteurs, the documentary sections tend to be the festival’s strongest. The highlights this year shared a sense of inquiry and revelation, painful and otherwise. In the truly bold Black Box Diaries, Japanese journalist Itō Shiori recounts her own investigation of her rape by a prominent colleague, an endeavour chronicled through her video journals and undercover recordings. Union embeds us in the historic effort to organise workers at an American Amazon facility over the course of a year; its observational style candidly captures the underdog movement from a number of revealing angles. The eye-opening War Game follows a simulated sequel to the 6 January 2021 attacks on the US Capitol, as played out in a conference room of actual prominent politicians. And Look into My Eyes finds urban poetry and philosophical reflections in a series of New York clairvoyants, whose emotional value to their clients is palpable. Finally, it’s worth singling out a couple of directors who threw caution to the wind in committing to an off-kilter style. Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples qualifies in its tale of a sad-sack synagogue cantor (Jason Schwartzman) who reconnects with his old music teacher (Carol Kane) in a crosstalking comedy where awkwardness yields enlightenment (sort of). And Love Lies Bleeding – Rose Glass’s highly anticipated followup to 2019’s Saint Maud – pairs a nervy gym attendant (Kristen Stewart) with an aspiring bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian) in an amped-up romantic crime thriller. When the latter actually increases in height after an avenging act of violence, it’s a wild touch that suggests the extremities of passion. Some of these titles will eventually make their way into general release, but for now, Sundance has provided the stage for yet another class of intriguing independents. ABOVE Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain FOUNDED 1986 ABOUT MUSEUM IN KENNINGTON, LONDON, THAT HOSTS SCREENINGS AND HAS A WIDE-RANGING COLLECTION OF ARTEFACTS INTERVIEWED PHIL CLARK, PROJECTIONIST REEL TALK What is it that makes film on film special and/or unique for you? The screenings when everything comes together: busy house, buzzing atmosphere and a good condition film print. You look through the porthole and see the screen glowing almost magically. I enjoy the whole process: the preparation, working with the machines, finding parts and fixing faults. It can be frustrating, but it’s a challenge. Who wants to just click on a computer screen all the time anyway? Not I. Is there something you’d like to screen but haven’t been able to get hold of? Lots of titles are hard to find. Thankfully, some companies do still think keeping film prints is worthwhile, but often it’s private collectors who will make the effort. Then there are the two killers: vinegar syndrome [causing the deterioration of tape] and bad colour fade. One example is that, after a search, we finally found a 35mm copy of Network (1976) for a show. When it arrived it was indeed in colour, but only one: red. Remember, always have a backup plan! We run a monthly film noir strand and I’d love to show Wicked Woman (1953), a delightfully tawdry tale which has so far eluded me. So if anyone reading this has a print they can lend to us, please shout in our direction. What do you think the future holds for film? There’s room for screening from both film and digital. Film prints can look beautiful on the screen, but they need to be in good condition and shown properly. Let’s hear it for projectionist showmanship! The same goes for digital. Restorations of classic titles can look stunning, if they’ve been made with care. There is hope, though. Slindon Cinema [in Arundel, West Sussex] is run by a guy in his twenties [Joe Cornick] who only puts on film and recreates an authentic ‘going to the pictures’ experience once a month in a village hall. It’s a remarkable project and hopefully not the only one of its kind. The torchbearers keeping the projection of film on film alive THE CINEMA MUSEUM 19OPENING SCENES

MEAN SHEETS The 1960s graphic work of Frank McCarthy found its home in action pictures Around the World Under the Sea (1966) Dark of the Sun (1968) The Train (1964) BY NATHASHA ORLANDO KAPPLER Adrenaline-charged scenes of brazen masculinity and patriotic pride leap out of Frank McCarthy’s film poster for Robert Aldrich’s 1967 war film The Dirty Dozen. Brilliant reds and blues clash together, signalling the inner rage at the heart of the film’s American antiheroes, headed up by Lee Marvin. He was joined by an impressive ensemble cast who quite literally come guns-a-blazing at their Nazi targets. Born in New York in 1924, McCarthy was a highly successful illustrator and artist whose career spanned 50 years. He produced commercial artwork for movie companies, book publishers and magazines, as well as paintings of the mythologised Old West. While McCarthy never quite reached the ‘poster auteur’ status of his contemporary and studio partner Bob Peak, his most celebrated designs of the 1960s, for action films such as The Great Escape (1963) and You Only Live Twice (1967), are characterised by a distinct flair for explosive tableaux. His handpainted illustrations possess a unique sense of momentum achieved through the use of striking colour schemes and the sheer amount of action he crams into his detailed scenes – frenzies of men set against backdrops of soaring planes, submarines and trains, with battlefield pyrotechnics galore. McCarthy’s endorsement of such macho swagger may seem archaic now, but his designs are a far cry from today’s action film posters, which so often rely on just a star’s face to sell an epic. 20OPENING SCENES

READERS’ LETTERS Get in touch Email: [email protected] Twitter: @sightsoundmag By post: Sight and Sound, BFI, 21 Stephen Street, London, W1T 1LN As an avid theatregoer, these last few months have been a delight. As well as a bubbling conversation about why musical theatre is facing a resurgence, I am gleefully enjoying every adaptation I can get my hands on. But it is disappointing to see the new film of Mean Girls receiving high praise (Reviews, S&S, March), given that its version of the Broadway production hit such a flat note. From the nauseating sequence during ‘Revenge Party’ to the melodic departures from the theatrical soundtrack, it left me wishing I was back at home watching the 2004 version. Cinema has always gone hand in hand with theatre, from its vaudevillian roots to films like Singin’ in the Rain (1952) that have become a part of the canon. I would argue that this bond goes further: cinema has made theatre accessible. Whether it’s adaptations of Shakespeare, or musicals like Annie (1982), Mamma Mia! (2008) or Dear Evan Hansen (2021), or new initiatives like National Theatre Live, cinema gives people outside big cities the chance to enjoy the theatrical experience. It’s such a disappointment when the screen version fails so blatantly to live up to the stage original. James Dow, Worthing In her otherwise insightful Flick Lit piece on John Cheever’s 1964 short story ‘ The Swimmer’ and Frank Perry’s 1968 film version (Talkies, S&S, Winter 2023-24), Nicole Flattery praises both Cheever and Perry, but ignores the achievement of Eleanor Perry’s screenplay. Cheever had contemplated but abandoned the idea of making Ned Merrill’s tale as a full-length novel. In her adaptation, Perry greatly expanded on the bare bones of Cheever’s brief prose, adding characters and dialogue to illuminate the author’s intentions. Writing about a key moment between Burt Lancaster and Janice Rule, Flattery declares, “The dialogue in this scene is electrifying and pure Cheever.” Maybe: but almost all of it was written by Perry. In the film, Cheever and Perry share a cameo as neighbours greeting Lancaster at a pool party. I know this because as a college kid on summer vacation in 1966, I worked on The Swimmer as a production assistant, commonly called a ‘gofer’ – the guy they tell to go for this and that. When the film was finally released, after Sydney Pollack’s extensive reshooting, I was disappointed that Rule was now playing Ned’s mistress [replacing Barbara Loden in the role]. I had been looking forward to taking friends to see the picture and pointing out to them, “See there where Burt Lancaster is tearing off Barbara Loden’s bathing suit? Right before that, I gave her a Coke.” Preston Neal Jones, Hollywood May I support Noel Hess and Kevin Rawlings (Letters, Sight and Sound, Winter 2023-24) in their plea for Arrow Video, the BFI or someone to enable a UK Blu-ray release of the 1971 film Unman, Wittering and Zigo? Comparisons to (the inferior) If.... (1968) and Straw Dogs (1971) have been noted, and 50 years after it first made its macabre impact it has scarcely dated. Overlooked in this welcome reappraisal has been the screen adaptation of Giles Cooper’s radio play by the novelist Simon Raven: he strengthened the role of Sylvia (Carolyn Seymour) and introduced a sly homosexual undertone to her husband, Ebony (David Hemmings). A renowned classicist, Raven emphasised the Ancient World’s belief in a well-governed state and fear of the mob, which resonates in the final scenes. Intriguingly, Alexander Payne’s new film The Holdovers (feature and review, S&S, Winter 2023-24) is also set in a boys’ boarding school in 1970, and also features a teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), who has a love of the classics. The students despise him for his reverence towards Marcus Aurelius and Thucydides, but when he takes the embittered pupil Angus (Dominic Sessa) to the classical antiquities room in a Boston Museum, the teenager starts to understand his passion. Hunham’s actions in the film’s final scenes have a touch of the Roman hero too. Early on in The Holdovers, the script namechecks the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: that film’s screenplay was substantially written by Simon Raven. William Reiss, via email The obituary of Norman Jewison published in the March issue of Sight and Sound was written by David Parkinson, not, as stated, by Sam Wigley. MEAN-MINDED CORRECTION POOL OF TALENT SCRIPT FOR ACTION SIZE WITH RELIEF How often will any of us be part of such an exercise in recognition and forgiveness? Mean Girls left me wishing I was back at home watching the 2004 version THE STAFF OF LEGEND David Hemmings in Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971) RESILIENT Aubrey Gordon TRUNK HISTORY Burt Lancaster as Ned Merrill OFF KEY Angourie Rice in Mean Girls I really enjoyed reading Katie McCabe’s review (S&S, March) of Your Fat Friend. I attended the Q&A screening with Aubrey Gordon and Jeanie Finlay at the BFI Southbank in London in February. I went in completely blind, with no knowledge of Gordon’s writing or her podcast, but it was immediately clear that there were a lot of her admirers present, excited to see the documentary, excited to be seen. I was struck by Gordon’s charisma, infectious humour, self-awareness and resilience, which she carries throughout her professional and personal life. Seeing her navigate her relationship with her parents and recognising their own complicated history with weight was particularly eyeopening for me. Many of us have grown up with a parent or guardian who made the odd remark about our bodies or eating habits. We may do our best to disregard it because they’re family, but how often will any of us be part of such an exercise in recognition and forgiveness, in which parents openly come to terms with the realisation that their words and actions may have had lasting repercussions on their child’s mental health? I am so grateful to Finlay and Gordon for making this cathartic, essential film. Diana Gasca, London 22OPENING SCENES

Beneath the comedy and action in Mr. & Mrs. Smith lies something dark and subversive Andrew Male @Andr6wMale In a May 2023 issue of New York magazine a wide range of gen Z and millennial New Yorkers were asked to describe their dream lifestyles in the city. Then the magazine calculated how much it would cost to live like that. The prices were, of course, astronomical and obscene. In the new Amazon comedy spy drama Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Donald Glover and Maya Erskine (who played Maya in Pen15, 2019-21) star as a New York couple living the kind of lifestyle envisioned in that article. They play a pair of disaffected government rejects (him from the military, her from the CIA), recruited and ‘married’, online-dating style, by a mysterious faceless corporation to work as well-remunerated high-risk assassins John and Jane Smith, passing themselves off as software engineers and living in a ludicrously upscale brownstone, paid for by the company. Inspired by the flashy 2005 Doug Liman action comedy of the same name, which starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as a bored suburban couple who discover they’re both secret agents assigned to kill each other, Mr. & Mrs. Smith was devised by Glover and Francesca Sloane, who previously collaborated on the surreal, sardonic comedy series Atlanta (2016-22). Like Atlanta, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a show that can be peeled back, layer by discomforting layer. Reviewers have understandably focused on the winning chemistry between Glover and Erskine and how well this action comedy also functions as a meditation on the difficulty of maintaining relationships in the 21st century. But, as with Atlanta, beneath the action, beneath the comedy, there is something darker and more subversive at work here, and it’s all centred around that lavish New York lifestyle. Late on in the season, John and Jane’s neighbour, a real-estate analyst played by Paul Dano, begins to wonder about the provenance of their gloriously decorated home. “The only people capable of owning anything like this are Russian oligarchs and Saudi royals,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense.” But John and Jane are able to live their dream Manhattan lifestyle because, simply put, they are willing to kill people for money and not worry about the moral implications. They are also willing to be employed on the high-risk freelance terms of the mysterious HiHi (who communicates solely via instant messaging), whereby three mission fails will result in termination. If Glover and Erskine’s characters were a lone duo of hired killers in a city of respectable normies it would be hard to extrapolate any wider metaphor from their situation. In Episode 2, ‘Second Date’, the couple attend an opulent black-tie silent auction in order to drug and kidnap a realestate mogul, played with insubordinate monied arrogance by John Turturro. After the pair accidentally inject Turturro’s character with a double-dose of truth serum he bares his soul to the gathered bidders, announcing, “I have billions of illegal dollars… I feel no remorse” and implicating other attendees in acts of financial and sexual immorality. If these are John and Jane’s targets, we think, they deserve it. However, in Episode 4, ‘Double Date’, the couple meet another pair of John and Jane Smiths and the wider ramifications of this encounter are chilling. Played with an insidious dead-eyed charm by Parker Posey and Wagner Moura, this Mr and Mrs Smith have been in the job for 15 years and love it. They eulogise “the money and the perks” and discuss the job’s many (life-threatening) challenges in platitudinous therapy-speak terms, such as: “Don’t get in the way of your own happiness.” They also reveal that there is a vast company hierarchy operating in the city. This ranges from “low risk” workers – uniformed delivery people who look a lot like Amazon couriers – to “super-high risk” workers like themselves. There is a brilliant dialogue exchange in Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), in which Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman is asked by a woman in a bar what he does. When he replies, “Murders and executions, mostly,” she mishears it as “Mergers and acquisitions” – the inference being that, well, they’re the same thing, aren’t they, and both pursuits are well suited to sociopaths. A quarter of a century on, Mr. & Mrs. Smith presents a world of employment in which all of us are operating in an amoral Patrick Bateman universe, independent contractors in the employ of ruthless organisations. The only difference between those at the top and those at the bottom is how willing we are to overlook any ethical and moral questions for the sake of the money and the perks. The lesser the remorse, the greater the rewards. Naturally, in this new, ruthless hire-andfire economy, there is also no retirement plan. When Erskine’s younger millennial Jane talks about the couple’s hopes of “making a certain amount of money and then… [get divorced and] part ways”, Moura’s gen-X John cracks up with a wheezing laughing fit. “Yeah,” he says, in between gasps, “Like you could just break up and quit, right?”, before turning to Posey’s gen-X Jane and saying in a stage whisper, “Can you imagine if the company was that open-minded?” It’s a chilling aside made all the more terrifying when, later in the episode, we find out more about what Posey and Moura’s “super-high risk” job entails. “We had to kill some other Smiths once,” Moura says. “How come?” Glover asks. “Maybe they were getting divorced,” Moura replies. The realisation hits home. In this new amoral high-risk gig economy we are in it to the death. Andrew Male is a freelance critic who lives in South London TV Eye Mr. & Mrs. Smith presents a world of employment in which all of us are operating in an amoral universe, independent contractors in the employ of ruthless organisations ABOVE Donald Glover and Maya Erskine in Mr. & Mrs. Smith 24 BYLINE ILLUSTRATIONS: PETER ARKLE TALKIES

The historian Cari Beauchamp revolutionised our understanding of early Hollywood Pamela Hutchinson @PamHutch The Long Take The writer and film historian Cari Beauchamp died last year, just before Christmas. She was 74 years old. I wanted to write something in tribute to her, to her trailblazing work and generous friendship, but just like the first time I met her, I found myself a little daunted, and therefore tongue-tied. Cari’s death, however, should not go unremarked. Her achievements were fundamental to film history, as she repeatedly blew apart and rebuilt our understanding of how Hollywood functioned. Her legacy is something to be cherished – and a high bar to meet. Beauchamp’s 1998 book Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood was remarkable for several reasons. One, because she revealed the extraordinary breadth of this woman’s creative contribution to Hollywood cinema. Two, because in telling the story of screenwriter Marion, in itself a compelling yarn, she generously made space for the women who surrounded her. In telling one woman’s story, Beauchamp painted a broader picture of female accomplishment, creativity, collaboration and mutual support – one modelled on Marion’s own faith in her own friends. Beauchamp’s further work on Marion’s peers, including Anita Loos, Mary Pickford and Marie Dressler, showed the same inclusivity, a strategy that prevents using one case of exceptionalism to erase other people’s brilliance. Third, and this should be underlined, the story was written with style and urgency. Beauchamp was as witty and eloquent as her subject. Delightfully, she believed books were meant to be enjoyed – to be savoured from first page to last. Who better to lift the women of film history out of the footnotes than a woman whose words were a pleasure to read? Without Lying Down put Marion, and her cohort of talented female friends, at the centre of the Hollywood narrative in a way that could never be forgotten. I didn’t know Cari well, but I first met her in San Francisco in 2017, at the city’s silent film festival. I was awkwardly starstruck, and flabbergasted that she was, if only dimly, aware of my writing. More than anything, I was grateful that I knew how to correctly pronounce her surname. Cari for years as a private investigator, learning how to ask pertinent questions and doggedly track down answers. Then came the campaigning years and in 1979 she became press secretary to Jerry Brown, the governor of California, perfecting a punchy writing style across hundreds of unignorable press releases. All of this was impeccable training for a journalist, and historian, with a mission. She used the political perspective of the second half of the 20th century to illuminate the facts of the first. That Beauchamp turned her focus, and her skill, to the slippery, self-mythologising world of Hollywood and wider film history is something for which we should all be grateful. She produced several books and documentaries and numerous in-depth magazine articles. Fascinated by film, but never starry-eyed – she once said she found actresses “depressing” – she kept her wits about her. She was, for example, the perfect person to write the story of how JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, embroiled himself in the American film industry and made a fortune in the process. The research was laborious, combing through boxes of contracts and correspondence, but the resulting book is a caper, of course. You could sense Cari’s disappointment when books or documentaries didn’t meet her expectations. By which I mean she might tell you, to your face. She was dismayed by superficial work and self-aggrandisation, by the absence of proper citations and by the over-familiar dance that entails pretending a certain figure has been overlooked, only to be rediscovered by one’s own fortuitous work. God, she would hate how much first-person there is in this column – even more than I do, perhaps. In one of her un-deletable emails, I find she said that, following the conclusion of one especially vast project on women’s cinema, “I almost feel that my work here is done.” Almost. For those of us left behind, with a stack of books to remember her by, the work continues. To live up to the standard she set: to dig deep, to fight for fairness, and to share one’s discoveries with a dash of style. Pamela Hutchinson is a freelance critic and film historian Beauchamp’s achievements were fundamental to film history… Who better to lift the women of film history out of the footnotes than a woman whose words were a pleasure to read? rightly held high standards for everyone, but she really did expect “Europeans” to know what to do with the English rendering of a French surname. It was not the only standard of hers I hoped to approach. Email exchanges and further meetings at film festivals opened up a line of communication that became very precious to me. Not just because Cari was so candid and funny, and frequently surprising. But also because she believed in the importance of connection. It really meant something to her that a person more than 5,000 miles away was ploughing a similar furrow. When I saw a season of Pickford films in Paris, Cari, a woman who knew those films backwards, wanted a full report. We were planning to meet up in Hollywood in spring 2020, but needless to say, my flights were cancelled and I regret that I was never able to reschedule the trip. Born and raised in California, into a generation defined by social protest, Cari was a progressive and a feminist, who campaigned in Washington for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which would explicitly prohibit sex discrimination. She had intended to study law as a postgraduate, but instead worked 25 ILLUSTRATION BY MARC DAVID SPENGLER

BFI FILM CLASSICS Discover more and add to your collection at www.bloomsbury.com/BFI BFI Film Classics have introduced, analysed and celebrated cinema’s most memorable works for over 30 years. The Red Shoes Mean Streets Rushmore It’s a Wonderful Life The Deer Hunter Point Blank Eraserhead Lost in Translation “Magnifi cently concentrated examples of fl owing freeform critical poetry.” Ð Uncut

Nicole Flattery @nicoleflattery Flick Lit “History is a motherfucker,” declares an FBI agent faced with an impossible, surreal task in Percival Everett’s The Trees. The 2021 novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, presumably brought Everett more attention than he’d been accustomed to at that point. He had published regularly, and had an outstanding and varied body of work, but his novels didn’t always receive the attention they deserved. I’m sure Everett, whose work is often about the commodification of art, was aware of the grim and comic irony of an awards body changing his luck. The Trees was the first novel of his I read, and I found it to be unruly, clever and strangely funny. As the novel is about retributive, ghostly justice for lynching in the American South it was not exactly laugh-out-loud on every page, but it had a sense of humour, a certain mischievousness. Most unusually, the writer seemed to be enjoying himself. Still, I was unprepared for the acerbity and anarchy of Erasure, Everett’s 2001 novel, which has now been adapted by the director Cord Jefferson as American Fiction. Erasure follows Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, scholar and writer of experimental novels (you know they’re experimental because they have footnotes) whose work isn’t selling. Facing a family crisis, he decides to write a ‘Black novel’. He’s radicalised into betraying his artistic principles by the success of another author, Juanita Mae Jenkins, whose only experience of the crime and gritty inner-city she’s writing about comes from a visit to Harlem in her childhood. She is Oberlineducated; her previous work experience is in publishing: her novel is called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. Monk’s hatred for this book, and for the lazy thinking this sort of book inspires, rouses him to sit down and write My Pafology under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. He sends it to his agent, partly as a joke and partly as a punishment. His agent sells it for $600,000. The editor describes it as “an important book, magnificently raw and honest”. Film rights are sold. Stagg R. Leigh gains an enormous following with his mysterious past and hard-luck tale of incarceration. The book’s title is changed from My Pafology to the simpler, more effective Fuck. With the creation of this product, and the money that’s now ceaselessly rolling in, Monk’s self-hatred only intensifies. “Certainly,” he says, “I felt a great deal of hostility towards an industry so eager to seek out and sell such demeaning and soul-destroying drivel.” Erasure is a great book that’s hard to praise because it so mercilessly mocks the language of praise. Everett’s target isn’t just mainstream publishing or film hacks, it’s bullshit of all kinds. Early in the novel, Monk encounters Davis Gimbel, an editor of a tiny literary journal who, after disagreeing with Monk after he delivers a paper, throws his car keys at him. Gimbel is surrounded by his entourage, “a changing but constant stable of four young, aspiring writers who would evaporate and be replaced by the next crop”. No one is safe in Everett’s satire; the small and second-rate aren’t necessarily virtuous either. When I was watching Jefferson’s film, I felt some of that ruthless tone had been slightly lost. In American Fiction, the edges are smoothed, meaning is ascribed, the musical beats are emotionally instructive, Monk learns lessons – lessons that aren’t always there in the novel. The biggest omission from the film, however, is the absence of Fuck, the novel, which takes up a large chunk of Erasure. Van Go Jenkins, Monk’s hood creation, is a low-level criminal and rapist, surviving day to day on the street, poorly educated and father to four babies by four mothers. By including chapters from the novel, Everett is suggesting that white readers who engage with this type of novel are not only congratulating themselves for their sensitivity but are also likely titillated by the violence and poverty. In Jefferson’s film, two actors perform a number of early scenes, but only the reader has the full advantage of knowing what pandering, ridiculous nonsense Fuck actually is. It makes everything that follows darker, more absurd. (I howled at the fake New York Times review that claims, “The characters are so well drawn that often one forgets that Fuck is a novel. It’s more like the evening news.”) Still, American Fiction is an intelligent, confident film. Monk is perfectly inhabited by Jeffrey Wright, playing a man who simply can’t win. Monk’s family situation shows that real life is afforded none of the pleasures of fiction: there are no neat endings, there is no control. And when the satire lands, it really lands. What a total joy it is to be in a cinema with a crowd of people laughing at a Percival Everett joke. His work has always been both very silly and deeply serious: an often overlooked combination. In his late sixties now, the world is finally coming round. History may be a motherfucker, but we occasionally – only very occasionally – get something right. Nicole Flattery’s novel ‘Nothing Special’ is published by Bloomsbury No one is safe from Percival Everett’s satire in his electrifying 2001 source novel for American Fiction What a total joy it is to be in a cinema with a crowd of people laughing at a Percival Everett joke. His work has always been both very silly and deeply serious ABOVE Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison in American Fiction TALKIES 27

SANDS OF

TIME The challenges posed by the epic scale and byzantine plot twists of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels have seen filmmakers from Ridley Scott to Alejandro Jodorowsky left stranded in quicksand. As Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two reaches UK screens, Roger Luckhurst outlines the history of the books and their troubled screen adaptations and explains how the Canadian director has finally done justice to the writer’s grand vision

orld-building is central to science fiction creation. Delighted immersion in the sheer complexity of an invented world, filling out backstories, puzzling over plot holes, debating which variant is part of the ‘canon’ and which not, is at the heart of engaged fandom. Don’t ever cross the Trekkies or Whovians. Get your Star Wars chronology straight. The transmedial tentacles of the Marvel Cinematic Universe swallow billions of dollars to capture billions of eyeballs. The ‘Duniverse’ that emerges from Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune might seem superficially similar. Following an interplanetary romance centred on the desert planet of Arrakis where ‘spice’ is harvested – a powerful drug that enables consciousness to be expanded and interstellar space to be ‘folded’ for travel – the novel evolved first into one trilogy and then into a second, before at least four more trilogies were orchestrated by Herbert’s son Brian after Frank died in 1986. Then there were the illustrated editions, chronologies, atlases and travel guides to the dune planet Arrakis and all the worlds beyond – as well as board and computer games (some of them very influential). There have also been two TV miniseries (Dune, 2000; Children of Dune, 2003), with the Dune: Prophecy series due later this year. And there are also all those attempts at a film. Roger Corman had the rights in 1971, but couldn’t develop it. Producer Arthur Jacobs tried to tempt David Lean to make it (he quickly declined). There was the legendary unmade version by Alejandro Jodorowsky, abandoned in 1975 after two years of intensive pre-production in Paris. Ridley Scott spent six months on an adaptation immediately after Alien (1979) before backing out. The baton then passed to David Lynch, who got it to screen in 1984, but his version was critically maligned and a box-office disaster. The losses ended any chance of the planned sequels – or of Lynch working as a hired hand in the studio system ever again. Finally, Denis Villeneuve delivered his version for Warner Brothers, one that was menaced by Covid delays and a simultaneous streaming release, but which became a global hit in cinemas after the lockdown years. We took off our masks to watch the desert rebels put on theirs. The first weekend response to the release of Dune: Part One led to the sequel being green-lit, and if Part Two triumphs too Villeneuve has said scripting for Part Three, based on Dune Messiah, is well progressed. Finally, the spice has flowed. The Duniverse might seem overwhelming, and perhaps you have an aversion to feverishly whispered expositions of the feudal histories of the millennia of enmity between House Atreides and House Harkonnen within the galactic Imperium. This is what sank Lynch’s relatively faithful take on the book, and the kind of thing that Villeneuve wrestles hard to simplify. But world-building requires these ‘infodumps’, and Dune perhaps more than most. Herbert’s book was always more than a space opera about byzantine courtly intrigue. Published only three years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped kickstart the modern ecological movement in America, it was deadly serious about planetary ecology. Herbert himself created a six-acre experimental eco-farm in the 1970s on the west coast and tried to live self-sufficiently. Control of spice, that vital yet limited commodity, might come to seem like the geopolitics of oil, which crashed the global economy in the early 1970s, and the goo Baron Harkonnen lives in for much of Villeneuve’s Part One definitely looks like crude oil. The book also dealt with a dangerous mix of politics, autocratic leadership and messianic theology, and did so through the prism of Islamic apocalyptic movements in the Middle East. This has never felt more urgent or relevant than now, but was always there: Herbert picked the name Arrakis to echo Iraq. The different versions of Dune in fact offer an intriguing history of our changing priorities. Herbert’s novel was turned 30 DUNE: PART TWO

down by more than 20 science fiction publishers, in part because of its gnarly complexity, but mainly because its lead protagonist, Paul Atreides, is ultimately a sulky antihero, agonised by his manufactured role as the Mahdi, the ‘Righteous One’ prophesied to return to signal the Last Judgement. He does not want to lead the violent jihad or holy war that his spice-fuelled visions can foresee. For Herbert, the Dune novels became ripostes to the intellectual elite that secretly run the universe in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books. Herbert had worked as a journalist and political speech-writer and came to distrust manipulative charismatic leaders. He was also distantly related to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the anti-communist demagogue of the 1950s. As a result, Paul had much more in common with a perverse J.G. Ballard antihero or a hapless Philip K. Dick protagonist. Science fiction editors hated it, and only a publisher of car manuals would take it on at first. The book was picked up quickly by science fiction fans, but it also appealed to campus radicals and visionaries in the counterculture, which was beginning to make waves in 1965. Paul went to the desert and had holy visions after ingesting ‘spice’, the drug that holds this intergalactic universe together. Herbert had experienced hallucinogenic visions with psilocybin mushrooms and had a sustained interest in mycology. Dune’s desert-culture setting echoed the 1960s hippy trail through the Middle East, Afghanistan and India. The romance of an Englishman fighting with the Arab rebels against the Turkish empire in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was also obviously an influence on Herbert, and Lean’s astounding visual sweep is clear to see in Villeneuve’s reach for a similar desert sublime. Paul rejects his high-born status and joins the Fremen rebels. He’s sticking it to the Man. He’s the easy rider of sandworms. Herbert was always more of a libertarian than a countercultural hippy, though: he wrote a brilliant novel in 1968, The Santaroga Barrier, about the insidious conformity of a West Coast druggy commune. Later he professed admiration for Ronald Reagan. But it was clearly the trippy, visionary and self-actualising New Age elements of Dune that appealed to Jodorowsky, the maverick Chilean-French doyen of early 70s acid cinema. His film The Holy Mountain (1973) had been a hit in America, partly through John Lennon’s embrace of it. In the hilarious documentary about the proposed follow-up, Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), Frank Pavich interviews the still excitable director Frank Herbert’s book was always more than a space opera about byzantine courtly intrigue. Published only three years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped kickstart the modern ecological movement in America, it was deadly serious about planetary ecology PREVIOUS PAGE Zendaya as Chani and Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides in Dune: Part Two ABOVE Chalamet with Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica in Dune: Part Two LEFT Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

about his plans to cast Orson Welles as the monstrously obese Baron Harkonnen, Mick Jagger as his depraved nephew (a part taken by Sting in Lynch’s film) and Salvador Dalí as the Emperor. Each planet was to have had music by a different band, including Pink Floyd for Arrakis. An encounter with the band at EMI Recording Studios in Abbey Road, mixing The Dark Side of the Moon, about to be the most successful album of the decade, had Jodorowsky shouting at them for eating burgers and disrespecting his high ambition. Jodorowsky brought together a design team for the ages: Dan O’Bannon, who had acted in and designed effects for John Carpenter’s 1974 student film Dark Star, the bande dessinée artist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, science fiction illustrator Chris Foss and the agonised Swiss painter of airbrushed nightmares H.R. Giger. The quartet would go on to work on Ridley Scott’s Alien, and Scott immediately hired Giger to design for his aborted attempt at Dune. Pavich tracks the influence of Moebius’s storyboards and costume designs through to later films, from Star Wars (1977) to Flash Gordon (1980) and Masters of the Universe (1987). Giger’s drawings for the home planet of the evil House Harkonnen are central to Villeneuve’s extraordinary sequences set there in Dune: Part Two, a weirdly luminous, impressively realised black-and-white vision of galactic Nazism. If Jodorowsky’s vision was dashed on the rocks of studio caution about giving millions to an acid-head, Lynch was given carte blanche after the success of The Elephant Man (1980), which had somehow manged to transmute the avant-garde outsider art of Eraserhead into eight Oscar nominations. Lynch (having turned down George Lucas’s offer to direct Return of the Jedi, 1983) was hired by Dino De Laurentiis and fitted with a tight studio strait-jacket he hated. Eighty sets were built on Mexican soundstages for the four planets Lynch envisioned for his film, all distinct, yet sharing a baroque steampunk aesthetic of retrofuturism that feels quite familiar these days (the sets of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, for example). Some 1,700 people were employed on the shoot, which ran into difficulties early on. The script was too faithful to Herbert (who was in constant touch with Lynch) and massively over-long. Lynch’s practice of improvising elements with his actors on set bled time and money. Just last year, film journalist Max Evry produced a lovingly obsessive oral history of Lynch’s Dune with the excellent title A Masterpiece in Disarray. After a very long editing period, hacking the film down to 140 minutes, the studio evidently lost confidence in the project. The advance buzz was toxic, the first reviews venomous: “Stupefyingly dull and disorderly” (The Washington Post), 32 DUNE: PART TWO

“As difficult as a final exam” (Time), “Incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless” (Roger Ebert). No wonder Lynch doesn’t much like reflecting on this part of his career. The film certainly is stilted and static, with low-grade special effects even for 1984 and a plot that requires lots of voiceover narration from virtually every character. Princess Irulan (a young Virginia Madsen) sounds completely bewildered by her own summary of this universe in the prologue, her disembodied head bobbing gently against a star-field. But the film is also, at times, utterly astonishing in its visionary mise en scène, elements of which were still resurfacing in Lynch’s late masterpiece Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Even so, Dune II, which Lynch started to write with Herbert, was never going to happen in the wake of the dismal reception of the first film. The sun set on planet Dune – at least until the pair of miniseries arrived on TV in the early 2000s. Villeneuve seemed destined for the same kind of Lynchian ill-luck, with delays on both Part One (Covid) and Part Two (the actors’ and screenwriters’ strikes) that pushed back their release. Yet in each case delay seemed to help create anticipation. Dune: Part One built on the technological sublime that made Arrival (2016) a highconcept hit, while his reprise of Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) had shown his ability to occupy and still find room to breathe within beloved science fictional universes. Dune: Part One follows quite closely the scenes plotted out by Lynch and the TV miniseries, but it succeeds in combining the wide sweep of grand action sequences with intimate human-scale scenes with much surer pacing. For the most part, it understands how to dramatise convoluted plot machinations through dramatic action (although Part Two, like Lynch’s film, still relies on a voiceover by Irulan). Most importantly, advances in CGI at last render battle scenes and giant worms with the grandeur of Herbert’s vision. It means this behemoth of a production doesn’t collapse under its own weight. Dune: Part One feels like it addresses the climate crisis with a slow reveal of the ecology of the desert planet that sharpens the contrast between the brutal imperialist expropriation of raw materials by the Imperium and a different vision of coexistence with Arrakis lived by the Fremen rebels. But Part Two does not really focus on this aspect at all: Villeneuve has described it instead as a war film. It centres on the politics of guerrilla resistance against colonising imperial armies. If this makes it sound like the Avatar series (2009-) or Gareth Edwards’ The Creator (2023), Dune feels more concretely grounded. Herbert was fascinated by the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), which had been conjured by dissenting desert prophets of the Middle East over millennia of fierce apocalyptic visions of freedom from oppression. There is something quite daring, given the state of modern Middle East sectarian politics, to have a central hero – played by Timothée Chalamet – incarnating the Islamic Mahdi, the last prophet who comes out of hiding to announce the holy war and the final drive to paradise. Paul Atreides, however reluctantly, leads what he explicitly calls in the film the “fundamentalists” into battle. This is dissident, messianic Islam, and if Paul is ultimately out to topple the Emperor Shaddam, this looks like a Shia Islamic sect confronting dominant Sunni Islam. Yet Herbert deliberately drew on many religious traditions – the term ‘Mahdi’ is undisguised, but some have suggested that the secretive female sect who have engineered Paul’s existence is called the Bene Gesserit because it sounds a bit like the good (‘bene’) Jesuits. And Paul is increasingly hailed as the Kwisatz Haderach, a term borrowed from the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition: kefitzat haderech (‘the shortening of the way’). Herbert was writing at a time when New Age thought wanted to synthesise the world’s religions, and his book appeared within a year of Carl Jung’s final work, Man and His Symbols. As an autodidact, Herbert was steeped in this material too – Jung’s work categorised the heroes and villains, gods and goddesses, from world folklore into simple archetypes. Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two seems to address a more divisive and sectarian 2020s than this 60s dream. The key challenge Dune presents to all its adapters is the issue of the ‘white saviour’ narrative: Paul as Lawrence of Arabia, leading the native peasantry into battle as archetypal hero. The debates Villeneuve stages over leadership and the different versions of belief represented by central figures of the Fremen rebels, Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and Chani (Zendaya), do much to question this saviour role. Herbert’s second book, Dune Messiah, really worked to pull that icon down, and it will be fascinating to see how Villeneuve uses his third and final visit to the Duniverse tackle the treatment of Paul Atreides as the hero who turns into an anti-hero in the course of the books, if that is the way this goes. I have some hopes this will work along the same arc as Alien, Aliens (1986) and Alien 3 (1992): first contact, then war, then the quiet, horrified aftermath. That’s a great model to follow. Fingers crossed. The advance buzz on David Lynch’s Dune was toxic, the first reviews venomous… but though the film is stilted, with low-grade special effects, it is also, at times, utterly astonishing in its visionary mise en scène OPPOSITE Concept artwork by Chris Foss for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s proposed adaptation of Dune, and H.R. Giger in the early 1970s in front of some his sketches for the planet of the Harkonnens Frank Herbert took inspiration for the geography, history and politics of Arrakis, the desert planet, from many books about Arabia, including Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (1959) and an account of an Islamic revolt in Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise (1960). One of the most obvious reference points was David Lean’s epic film Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Peter O’Toole’s searing blue-eyed beauty in the role (pictured below) helped Lean re-establish a heroic narrative about T.E. Lawrence’s campaign to lead an Arabic revolt of Bedouin desert forces against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Lawrence became a national hero once his acts were known, reinforced by his account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). He died in 1935, a hero, but his reputation had started to tarnish in the years after World War II. Lawrence was a complex, contradictory figure, and this contributes to the way Paul Atreides in the Dune series exists in an ambivalent space between hero and antihero, messianic leader and manufactured fraud. Biographers conjecture that Lawrence was stricken with selfloathing and traumatised by his capture by Turkish soldiers in Deraa in 1917, which may have involved sexual humiliation or rape. He was a repressed English gent, who after the war staged his own punishment beatings. These whippings, conducted by Lawrence’s servant, were staged in a highly ritualistic fashion. These revelations about Lawrence emerged publicly in 1968, the year before Herbert’s Dune Messiah was published. Timothée Chalamet’s slightness and androgyny works well for the ambiguous Lawrentian figure of Paul. In Dune he is initially mocked for his feeble masculinity, surrounded by a muscular warrior class. But the arc of Dune is not the boy becoming a man so much as the boy mournfully embracing his awful destiny, engineered by larger forces, including the plan of the witchy women of his mother’s line. Chalamet’s androgynous stardom helps Paul to become a fascinating update on Lean’s late imperial epic of ‘desert power’ for an age now much queasier about the consequences of intervention into the Middle East. Enter Sandman BY ROGER LUCKHURST The legend of T.E. Lawrence, particularly as seen in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, was a key influence on Frank Herbert’s novels 33

I met Denis Villeneuve the day after the London premiere of Dune: Part Two. This is a giant behemoth of a production, a sublimely expensive sequel out of the Warner Brothers studio, and the full force of a slick publicity machine had opened its maw to swallow a whole floor of an exclusive London hotel for the press campaign. I walked down a long corridor as if into the throat of one of Dune’s giant sandworms. The Quebecois director has been on a major run of critical and commercial successes since Sicario (2015), a sequence that includes the high-concept firstcontact science fiction film Arrival (2016) and an impressive revisiting of an established science-fictional universe in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). He seemed very willing to plunge into the arcana of Frank Herbert’s densely imagined universe of Dune, which has attracted and defeated many directors over the decades. Villeneuve is the first, it seems, to have found a way to start to tame it cinematically. Roger Luckhurst: I’ve read that your first encounter with Dune was a paperback cover in 1980, when you were thirteen: the hero Paul’s intense blue eyes staring out at you from a desert landscape. Denis villeneuve: Yes, I’ve been involved with the world of Dune since that age. I read all Frank Herbert’s novels at the time. I was a hardcore, original Dune trilogy fan. I got The Dune Encyclopedia, the essays, the drawings, the outlines, everything! I’m even in touch now with that original cover artist, who designed that image of the French edition of Dune I read as a kid in Quebec: I wanted to work with him; it had such an impact on me. Many have wrestled with adapting the complexity of Herbert’s fictional world. It’s fascinating, but textually very dense. What makes Dune so interesting is Frank Herbert’s level of sophistication and detail, how he describes every last element of each ecosystem, all the different flora and fauna, the tiny, perfectly realised details of every different culture. Especially the Fremen culture of the desert, all their different techniques of survival in that environment – it’s all so beautiful and poetic. But you have to just surf on the top of that, just give a glimpse of it; there’s no way to bring all that to the screen. I didn’t know how the people who loved the books would react, but ‘THE STORY IS NOT DONE YET’ Dune: Part Two director Denis Villeneuve reminisces about his days as a hardcore teenage fan of Frank Herbert’s source novels, explains why he sought inspiration for the film in Road Runner cartoons and outlines his hopes and ambitions for the final part of the trilogy INTERVIEW BY ROGER LUCKHURST DUNE: PART TWO 35 PORTRAIT: PETER FISHER/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE

we had to choose to embrace just one aspect of the book, which is the Bene Gesserit plot line. Other elements had to fall away. You could do a whole other film just focused on the mentat [the human computers in the novel], or on the Spacing Guild [the posthuman navigators of the spaceships] – they would be interesting to see, of course, but we had to choose. And there are some legendary failures to adapt Dune: the glorious but unmade attempt by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the abandoned Ridley Scott version, the compromised version of David Lynch, a later TV series. Did that knowledge burden you? Did you go back to any of them? I had to act like they had never been made. I remember being very excited by the Lynch version coming out – and there are many aspects of it that I still love. But I came out of that film the first time, thinking “This is Dune, but it’s not.” It’s a David Lynch film, in a really good way, but it was not the Dune I had been dreaming of. My goal was not to put any of myself into that universe, but more to try to bring Frank Herbert’s vision to the screen. My ambition for Dune was that fans of the book would find some of the tastes and smells, the poetry, the atmospheres, the colours on the screen. It’s in the small details that they will see the book realised, and that’s why I tried to steer away from any influences other than the book. But, of course, there are some moments, I’m sure, that are pretty close to other versions. I had a discussion with Ridley Scott, who considered developing a version of Dune, but he said he couldn’t see how to do the sandworms, that it was destined to fail in the late 1970s with the state of special effects at the time. Of course, now, we have the computer power to realise this, which didn’t exist at that time. Now we can make sandworms something powerful and mesmerising, not something that would inevitably be comical. The documentary about Jodorowsky’s Dune [directed by Frank Pavich, 2013] is a beautiful and very funny movie, and I suspect that Jodorowsky’s version of Dune would have been a fantastic Jodorowsky movie: maybe not a good adaptation of Frank Herbert, but a great movie all the same. He is like a planet on his own. I want to see that film. The thing is, to see the film like that, undone, unmade, we can all project our perfect movie out of the fragments we glimpse. One connection to you is that Jodorowsky asked Charlotte Rampling to play Lady Jessica in PREVIOUS PAGE Denis Villeneuve ABOVE Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a role played by Sting in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation OPPOSITE TOP Zendaya as Chani, who is sceptical about treating Paul as a messiah figure RIGHT Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides his version, and she is the Reverend Mother in your adaptation. She told me about that; I did not know. It blew my mind when she told me, I couldn’t believe it. She said that when I offered her the part of the Reverend Mother, she felt she could not say no: she was destined to be in Dune somehow. The Dune: Part One release was delayed by Covid; Part Two was pushed back by the strikes in Hollywood. It must seem sometimes as if there is a curse on Dune productions. The Covid period was intense. Releasing at that time, it honestly felt like all odds were against us. But for Part Two, what was positive about waiting for the strikes to resolve was that we had the time to organise releasing the film in film prints in 70mm and in Imax 70mm. That was not in the original plan, we didn’t have the time, but the period of the strikes gave us a bit of space to work on that, which was a real gift. And the prints look amazing. If not Dune adaptations, was there a range of films that acted as influences on you, films that you wanted to show the cast and crew? ‘I’m aware there have been pioneers who have explored this territory before, like Moebius in his graphic novels. We owe these guys everything. We all read them when we were young: they were the gods’

Not really. I didn’t set up any screenings of films – I always said: read the book. The book is the Bible for us. We were not trying to be connected to the world of cinema at all. When we started Part Two, of course, we had already set up our base camp in this universe – all the references had been established, and that made it easier. But I remember in the editing room, I said to my editor, Joe Walker: “I want you to watch Chuck Jones’s Road Runner cartoons.” Why? Because there’s something about the compact, high-level efficiency of the storytelling in those cartoons. It was not about being comical: I just wanted to put an electroshock through my system. I thought this when I was shooting too – throwing a hand grenade into my process, something that would destabilise things: shoot like Road Runner! Now I’ll contradict myself: I did make references to some movies I like from time to time. For instance, there’s a moment when Paul is trying to do the ‘sandwalk’ in the desert, and he’s doing this with such bravado, he thinks he’s doing well, when a Fremen just glides across the foreground looking bewildered and a little amused – that’s something I stole from Lawrence of Arabia [David Lean, 1962], when Lawrence is playing with his cloak and shadow on the sand and he’s caught doing that by a horseman in the foreground. That’s unavoidable: Lawrence of Arabia was in the DNA of the Dune universe from the start, of course. For the look of the technology of the spice harvester machines and spaceships, did you also go back to the book? Did any influences come from places like the storyboards Moebius drew for the Jodorowsky adaptation? We worked with a small group of artists and designers and we all tried to avoid references from outside too much. I loved the weird octopus-like shape of the harvester they came up with. It felt like a creature that was coming from a dark dream. At the same time, I’m aware that there have been pioneers who have explored this territory before, like Moebius in his graphic novels, the ones like The Incal [the Moebius/ Jodorowsky comic published between 1980-88, with several later instalments]. We owe these guys everything – everything. We all read them when we were young: they were the gods. I’m only here because of those guys. Some of the most striking scenes are on the Harkonnen home planet, Giedi Prime, shot in a very steely black and white. How did that distinct look come about?

This was something that emerged even in the screenplay. One of the aspects I love in the book is that if you want to know about the culture of the Fremen you look at the desert, the impact of the ecosystem on their culture, on their way of thinking, on their religion, on all of their techniques of living. It’s intricately and beautifully explored. Herbert has this notion that the environment will affect all of the cultures that we see, and offers clues about how those environments have led them to develop, why they look and act like they do. On Giedi Prime, I don’t recall that there is that much information about the planet itself in the book, but I wanted to use the same kind of approach. It’s a world disconnected from nature, that has absolutely conquered its environment and has become a completely artificial, plastic world. I thought that one thing that could give good insight into their psyche would be that if instead of revealing colour it was a place that killed colour. When you are under their sun everything is stark black and white. I was excited by this idea, but Greig Fraser [the director of photography] was super-excited. When you say the two words ‘black’ and ‘white’ to a director of photography, they become very happy. We explored several avenues about how best to do it, and we came to the idea of using infrared. There’s something about it that creates a very eerie feeling, particularly in the darkness of the eyes. You can even see the veins of the characters lit up in their bodies, it’s really strange. It’s part of the spectrum of light that always creates weird things on camera that can still surprise you. Greig did some experiments and modified the camera and we shot all those sequences in infrared. I said to the studio: “You understand that there’s no way back from this. We’re not shooting in colour and then changing it in postproduction – it’s going to be shot this way, and that’s going to be it!” I love this kind of commitment, and I like to do things in camera as much as possible, and even on a movie of that scale the studio said: “It’s OK, we trust you.” It’s a way of emphasising that Harkonnen thinking is binary, brutal, without nuance. They are fascists. It gave me the chance to try to recreate that atmosphere of footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will [1935] or other Nazi propaganda movies. It’s just an accident of timing, but it also reminded me of those incredible black-and-white sequences in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. I adored that film! I’m not sure what technique he uses, but I was trying for a similar effect. I wanted to ask about the place of Islam in Herbert’s book, and you filming so extensively in Jordan and Abu Dhabi, and what it was to deal with this given the very difficult state of the Middle East just now. The book was written in the 60s as an extrapolation, a projection into the future of what had happened in a broad sweep of history from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s obvious what the book is reflecting on: that era of colonisation, of the exploitation of natural resources, in the Middle East. I wanted to respect all the vocabulary, all the details of Herbert’s extrapolation. And, of course, the Fremen are inspired by Middle Eastern and North African Arabic culture. It’s a very rich culture, I now know Jordan well, and I wanted to do a proper representation of its complexity. I remember once on the set of Blade Runner 2049 that Hiam Abbass [the Palestinian actor and director] arrived, and she looked

around the set, and all the languages of the signs were in Hindi, or Korean, or Japanese, and she said, “Oh, Arabic culture does not exist in the future!” It broke my heart, because she was right, the Blade Runner universe was always very Asian, inspired by Japan and Hong Kong. For me, Dune was definitely a way of saying that Arabic culture does exist in the future. I didn’t want anyone to say that I had whitewashed the Fremen. I wanted to represent the Fremen religion as accurately as I could, but also to reflect, just as the book does, on the danger of blending religion and political power. For me, sometimes the Fremen feel very close to home, because I come from a culture in Quebec that before the 60s was very dominated by Catholicism. We were ruled by the Church – politics and the Church were entwined – and the people suffered from that, I always felt. Making Dune, I was not always thinking about the politics of the Middle East: I was thinking about home. I thought one of the strongest elements of the film was the way in which you stage an internal debate among the Fremen about the nature of faith, that this religion is not just a monolithic thing. Exactly: there are nuances in the Fremen world. This is an important point that we wanted to make, to stage that debate between Stilgar [Javier Bardem] who becomes a fundamentalist, and Chani [Zendaya] who is much more sceptical about seeing Paul as a messiah. There’s obviously a risk that the central character, Paul Atreides, might fit into the classic ‘white saviour’ narrative, even though the whole arc of Herbert’s Dune is designed to pull that archetype of the hero down. Did this worry you? After the success of Dune, I understand why Frank Herbert felt the need to write Dune Messiah, and say this more explicitly, because his intentions were not always that clear in the first book. It was a bit ambiguous. It wasn’t always that clear that Dune was meant to be a cautionary tale, a warning about messianic figures that create cults. In Dune Messiah he makes it clear that Paul is not a hero, because he was, I think, frustrated by how readers had perceived Paul. In order to make that clearer in Dune: Part Two, I used the characters of Jessica [Paul’s mother, played by Rebecca Ferguson] and Chani much more prominently than the book, where they were more in the background. I pulled them up much closer to the surface. There’s a moment in Part Two where we start to see events much more through Chani’s eyes, and that’s essential to make sure that it is absolutely the opposite of the ‘white saviour’ movie: it’s a critique of that. Timothée Chalamet read the book, and he always referred back to the book for his portrayal of Paul. He understood this too. And does that mean it’s important for you to do the third film based on Dune Messiah, to get the full arc? Exactly. I want to do the third film, and Legendary [the producers] want that too. I don’t want to rush it, though. Very often third instalments seem to be made very quickly – too quickly. If there is to be a third one, it has to be thought through properly. It can be a very powerful movie about the aftermath of the war. But in all of these films, it’s always the screenwriting stage that is the most daunting – it’s where you can really fuck it up. You need time to get it right. But I’m excited, because everyone is asking about the third one, which means they are projecting a further future out of the first two. The story is not done yet. Dune: Part Two is out now in UK cinemas and will be reviewed in our next issue ‘I come from a culture in Quebec that before the 1960s was very dominated by Catholicism. Making Dune, I was not always thinking about the politics of the Middle East: I was thinking about home’ OPPOSITE TOP Javier Bardem as Stilgar ABOVE The sandworms that produce the ‘spice’ on Arrakis LEFT Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica

Sean Price Williams’s picaresque satire, written by critic Nick Pinkerton and featuring a career-making performance by Talia Ryder, reaches far back into American history, and far out into new comic realms, to create an arthouse film that appeals well beyond an arthouse audience BY HENRY K. MILLER Good satire is disconcerting – it won’t let you know precisely where it stands, and it won’t let you off the hook. The Sweet East is very good satire, and very funny; sometimes satirically funny, sometimes just – very funny. It is also thrillingly, elliptically shot, pared down to essential images that somehow add up to an epic; and it has an extraordinary, eclectic, multi-layered soundtrack, made up of bits of records you’ve never heard before tangled together with original cues from assorted soloists, plus the 1993 summer smash ‘Mr Vain’. Fêted at Cannes, The Sweet East is the directorial debut of Sean Price Williams, best known for his work as cinematographer on Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time (2017), and the writing debut of Nick Pinkerton, who has appeared in these pages on many previous occasions as a critic. They have called their film a picaresque, and it meets the dictionary definition, as a deliberately episodic tale following an untrustworthy but appealing protagonist – high-school runaway Lillian – on a journey across the American north-east, and through encounters with antifa ‘artivist’ protesters, a closet white supremacist English literature professor, an Islamist terror cell, and a group of independent filmmakers who make her, briefly, into an It girl. “A thing that drives me absolutely fucking nuts,” Pinkerton says, speaking from his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, “is that this film about a teenager is seen as having been ‘made by two old white guys’. No, an old white guy wrote it, and an old white guy directed it, but it was made by a bunch of people,” many of them much younger – in particular its star Talia Ryder, 19 when the film was shot. It is a sublime comic performance, and a courageous one. On paper, the role of a 17-year-old coquette who makes liberal use of the word ‘retard’ is not generally the stuff of which agents’ and talent managers’ dreams are made. Ryder began her career aged 12 in the Broadway production of Matilda, she has done Netflix movies and Eliza Hittman’s indie coming-of-age tale Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), and some appreciable proportion of the world’s population saw her in the video for Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Deja vu’. Williams had to reassure her team at UTA, one of the major agencies, of their intentions, “Rightly so”, he says – an uncharacteristic concession to the Hollywood way of doing things – and both he and Pinkerton are effusive in acknowledging her contribution. Recounting their “obvious compunctions going in, as two guys in their forties telling a story of contemporary youth”, Pinkerton sees Ryder as “somebody who understood, perhaps better than either of us, what the movie was doing”, and who was able to keep Lillian authentic – though The Sweet East is not what is normally understood by the term ‘realist film’. Both Williams and Pinkerton have accompanied The Sweet East on its travels since its release in December, and have seen it connect with audiences they hadn’t anticipated, far beyond habitués of the art cinemas where it is usually shown, the downtown New York scene with which they’re associated and the places where the film was shot. Williams, speaking from a Malibu beach house – “I hate it out here, it’s so corny to be the New York guy who hates LA” – professes himself surprised at how The Sweet East played on the West Coast, which he regards as “another planet”. In LA it had “sell-out screenings, lots of positivity, it’s been kind of wonderful”. Both testify to its youth appeal. Pinkerton introduced it at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky (“The youngest crowd that they’d ever had”), and the night before we speak it had sold out a music venue in Cincinnati. It helps that in addition to the relatively unknown Ryder, the cast includes two stars of the moment, Ayo Edebiri and Jacob Elordi, both recent Saturday Night Live hosts, the latter playing a posh English actor doing an iffy American accent. Prominent on the film’s mood board is another picaresque tale of directionless youth, Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (1973), his follow-up to If…. (1968), again starring Malcolm McDowell as Travis, now a malleable young man whose good nature leads him to be bounced pinball-like around various manifestations of British decline. Anderson had been a prominent critic, at Sight and Sound among other places, before becoming a filmmaker, and remained a stentorian voice within British film culture afterwards, and the parallel with Pinkerton is irresistible – except to Pinkerton himself, who is not keen to endorse it. In fact, the influence of Anderson comes through Williams, via his father, who had seen O Lucky Man! “probably right back from Vietnam, and it was a big deal to him”. He showed it to his son on VCR in the 1980s, along with If…., “my favourite movie my whole life”, and both remain touchstone films. Williams sees O Lucky Man! as “a much grander movie, maybe a better movie”, and his love for it is palpable. Travis finds nothing to smile about, still less admire, in early 1970s Britain, but this is far from being the case with Lillian’s adventures in 2020s America. Even Lawrence, the bachelor professor with the swastika duvet cover, has something to offer – and this has sent some of the film’s American critics into conniptions, with Richard Brody of the New Yorker writing that “the film’s ideas are all in Lawrence’s mouth”. Fearlessly and brilliantly played by Simon Rex, Lawrence, certainly the film’s most loquacious character, puts Lillian up in his home after she claims that she is on the run from an abusive boyfriend, stealing a story one of the antifa protesters has just told her. As Lillian well knows, Lawrence’s intentions are not wholly honourable, and what follows is the film’s richest comedy, as Lillian feeds his fantasy – without satisfying it – and Lawrence fills her ears with his abundant opinions about the ascendancy of chaos, lunacy and bad taste. That not all of his ideas are absolutely wrong, that Lillian is not entirely deaf to them, and that Rex brings a certain amount of pathos to the role only enhances the joke. Without addressing Brody directly, Pinkerton discounts “the tendency to ascribe to one or another character the voice of the movie”, though for him it’s Lillian if it’s anyone. The audience has ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE EAST ABOVE Director Sean Price Williams (left) and screenwriter Nick Pinkerton OPPOSITE Talia Ryder as Lillian 41 POLAROID PHOTO: LAURA BREGMAN

a special relationship with her, and not simply because she is the protagonist. Only we see that she – to put it charitably – reinvents herself for each group of people she meets, and that sense of complicity is intensified by Williams’s decision to show her looking directly into the camera, most memorably during the film’s titles, as she sings into the mirror. Another of Williams’s favourite films, part of the inspiration for this sequence, is Stephen Dwoskin’s Dyn Amo (1972), which is composed of four stripteases, with the fourth and by far the longest turning into a kind of occult ritual, performed with frequent looks to camera. Williams calls this “one of the greatest experiences I ever can have watching a film: you’re being looked at more than you’re looking.” This leads him into a wider consideration of his style: “When people say that the best editing is editing you don’t notice, I don’t agree with that. I like grain, I like things that give away that you’re watching something that is made by people.” In theory, this knowledge should lessen our involvement in the film, but in practice it can create a kind of intimacy – our involvement is never absolute to begin with and acknowledging that doesn’t break the spell. What the three main groups Lillian encounters have in common is an affinity with American romanticism. Lawrence is an Edgar Allan Poe specialist; magically, the filmmakers who discover Lillian immediately after she skips out on him, Molly and Matthew (Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris), are making a period film that takes place more or less in Poe’s heyday; and the shy terrorist Mohammed (Rish Shah), who puts her into a kind of protective custody after Lawrence’s less closeted neo-Nazi friends come looking for her, is a practitioner of ‘life in the woods’ à la Emerson or Thoreau. There is a wonderful scene in which Molly and Matthew, auditioning Lillian, excitedly outline their film, As It Turns, set in a “community of love” that is a composite of the real experiments in living that sprang up across the north-east in the 1840s, places such as Brook Farm, Massachusetts, founded by followers of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. “If we are not being as experimental as these intentional communities, if we aren’t having that same freedom, then we fail here with this film,” says Matthew – not the voice of the movie, of course, but certainly a voice in the movie, part of what Pinkerton calls its “democratic rabble” of voices. “I don’t believe that the American experiment is a failure as of yet, but how much potential in leaving the crowned heads of Europe behind, how much potential, wonderful, thrilling potential is in that,” Pinkerton says, deadpan. “Those foundational ideas are still very moving to me. As to how they’ve practically played out…” Molly and Matthew, lamenting the potential that was squandered when these experimental communities went into decline, know where to place the blame: “the canal boom”, at that time the cutting edge of industrialism and a force for homogenisation. The scene is played for laughs, but, even more than Lawrence’s monologues, it is not simply a joke; and a later scene in which Mohammed rhapsodises about the flora and fauna of New England is played virtually straight. The link between the experimental communities of the 1840s and the world of independent film is not casually made. The Sweet East is “in the 99th percentile, so far as American independent movies go”, Pinkerton says, “in terms of public profile, in terms even of box office”, but it hasn’t made any real money, and nor could it – notwithstanding its festival buzz and the presence of Edebiri and Elordi. “Do we do business when we play? Million per cent.” But eventually a movie has to be screened in the absence of its makers – not every screening can have a Q&A. The distribution and exhibition landscape is more forbidding than ever, and for ‘canal boom’ read ‘streamers’. Williams takes aim at the monopolies whose business model is: “Put your business entirely in debt, offer your product for free so you kill all the competition and then hopefully one day you’ll be in the black again.” Williams and Pinkerton are old enough to remember a slightly, in some ways, less dispiriting environment – they both worked for the storied Kim’s Video in New York, and Pinkerton wrote for the Village Voice while it was in print – but neither are prone to nostalgia, and this might be the secret of the film’s generation-bridging success. Lillian begins the film wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt that turns out to be Williams’s from his own teens 30 years ago. As Pinkerton says, Led Zep were “not exactly at the height of their powers” in the 1990s, and the difference between wearing a T-shirt from a 15-years defunct band and a 45-years defunct band is not very great. “I hated being a teenager in the 90s,” Williams says, “because it always seemed like another time would have been better.” Mademoiselle Lillian, c’est moi. Facing the future, Pinkerton says the standard model for successful indie filmmakers is to stop making indie films, but it is hard to picture them working for what Williams calls the “ugly machine”, and they don’t seem resigned to that fate. The Sweet East is released in UK cinemas on 29 March and will be reviewed in our next issue. A Lindsay Anderson season plays at the BFI Southbank, London, throughout May ‘When people say that the best editing is editing you don’t notice, I don’t agree with that. I like grain, I like things that give away that you’re watching something that is made by people’ SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS BELOW Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri as filmmakers Matthew and Molly 42 THE SWEET EAST

DYN AMO (1972) Nominally based on a stage play, Stephen Dwoskin’s Dyn Amo begins with a striptease performed by Jenny Runacre, at first indifferently, but then, as the camera closes in on her face, and the music – a Phil Spector production, ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ – starts to loop and distort, with special intensity, as she returns the spectator’s gaze. The Brooklynborn Dwoskin was one of London’s leading underground filmmakers, and he shot Dyn Amo, his second feature, in a real Soho strip club. The film culminates in a remarkable, sustained turn by Linda Marlowe which forces the viewer to question where character begins and actress leaves off; feminist critics at the time saw the film as laying bare the normally suppressed mechanisms of cinematic voyeurism. Like all Dwoskin’s early 1970s films, Dyn Amo has an outstanding score by minimalist composer Gavin Bryars. O LUCKY MAN! (1973) Lindsay Anderson’s prominence as a critic and commentator made it difficult for British reviewers to see his films in isolation from his forthrightly expressed views, but it is never wise to look to artists for political answers, and O Lucky Man! is a portrait of Britain that has survived the passing of the political context in which it was made. Malcolm McDowell plays a sales rep for a coffee manufacturer, whose tour of duty in the north-east of England turns into a nightmare, before he is rescued by a touring band led by Alan Price, formerly of the Animals, plus a hanger-on played by Helen Mirren. Price’s songs for the film are shown being performed in the studio, an idea inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play Mother Courage and Her Children. The Sweet East borrows a piano cue used for the band’s arrival in London (and not included on the soundtrack album) to mark Lillian and Lawrence’s arrival in New York. EDGAR ALLEN POE (1909) For many years it was common to credit D.W. Griffith with the invention of the close-up, but before he introduced it into his toolkit he directed this misspelled minibiopic. One of more than a hundred films that Griffith made in 1909, it is a half-reeler consisting of four scenes in three settings, done in five shots, showing Poe tending to his sick wife Virginia, being inspired to write ‘The Raven’, pitching it to publishers, first unsuccessfully then successfully, and then returning home, proceeds in hand, to find that Virginia has died. In The Sweet East Lawrence shows it to Lillian, who is “just glad they figured out how to make movies less boring than this”, but Griffith is one of the film’s presiding spirits. The name Lillian echoes that of Lillian Gish, whose many starring roles for Griffith include Way Down East (1920), evoked not only in The Sweet East’s title but in one of Lillian’s escapes. More than most movies, The Sweet East is rooted in deep cinephilia. Here are three of the films to which it is most heavily indebted BY HENRY K. MILLER Inspirations 43 IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

ADVENTURES IN MINI MOVIEGOING The films we watch as children cast their spell on us and watching them as adults, exiled from our childhoods, gives us a brief interlude back there. To adapt the author Katherine Rundell, on the joys of children’s books, “You are given space to… [watch] again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra.” But where are children’s films in critical conversations about cinema? There is much discussion of childishness – popular cinema is often described as ‘infantilised’ – but how often do we consider what children want and need from films, and what they are watching and where (outside the usual narrow, artificial controversies about the dangers film poses to their innocent minds)? How are their critical faculties and understanding of cinema being nurtured, or not…? Are we perhaps, rather like the father in My Neighbour Totoro (1988): conscious that the soot sprites exist but too busy and distracted to delve into that fantasy world? Do we underestimate the intricate craft that goes into making a film that is both simple and sophisticated? Films for children of primary and preschool age are rarely accorded the same degree of critical inspection or esteem as ‘our’ films, except sometimes when they are the handiwork of a lone auteur such as Miyazaki. How visible are good, adventurous children’s films? Where are the prizes for them? At last year’s Bafta ceremony Guillermo del Toro complained about the existence of a separate category for animation, saying “[It] is not a genre for kids.” I don’t think making films for kids is a lesser art either (and I don’t believe del Toro, maker of the 2022 Pinocchio, really thinks so either). But since children’s films never come into contention for the big awards, maybe they deserve a category of their own? For don’t children deserve as rich and rewarding a cinema as adults? In 1977, Wolf Donner, director of the Berlinale, was asked by a group of young reporters from a children’s radio station why they couldn’t attend the festival, which was restricted to those aged 18 and over. He didn’t have an answer. The following year, the Berlinale included the programme ‘Cinema for People Six and up’ which drew an audience of over 12,000. But 45 years later, Berlin remains the only A-list festival to have a children’s strand: Generation has two competition programmes spanning different age ranges, it has its own prizes and is presided over by its own juries consisting of children of the relevant ages. Some festivals – including London – have family strands; but for the most part, adventurous children’s films Films made for children are too often the poor, neglected orphans in critical discussions of cinema, treated as an inevitably candy-coloured, emotionally simplified toy version of the real thing. But the best filmmakers know that children are quick-witted, dark and complicated creatures – and they make movies to match BY ISABEL STEVENS OPPOSITE The dog/robot pair at the heart of Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams exist in their own underworld, in children’s film festivals, of which there are many around the world, if you are willing to go down the rabbit hole to find them. Satyajit Ray was, as well as one of the great masters of cinema for grown-ups, the author of children’s cinema classics such as the 1969 fantasy musical Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (with its surreal six-minute ghost dance sequence), as well as 21 novels and numerous short stories aimed at children. Speaking to Filmfare magazine in 1980, he lamented the paucity of children’s films: “The trouble is that here children are so deprived that whatever you give them they’ll start by accepting it. It may be once in three years you have a children’s film. They’ll come out happy because something has been made for them.” He wished for a future where children had more choice and could become more discerning audience members: “If they were given twenty films to choose from, then the question of quality would become important. They would start comparing, reject a few, accept others. That situation has not come and is not likely to come as far as I can see.” What would Ray make of the choice of films available to today’s children? Up to a point, his dream has been realised. Over the last 40 years we have witnessed what has been in many ways a golden age of cinema made for children which has also How often do we consider what children want and need from films, and what they are watching and where… How are their critical faculties and understanding of cinema being nurtured, or not? 44

charmed adults: Studio Ghibli emerged in the 80s, Aardman and Pixar in the 90s, Cartoon Saloon and Laika in the 2000s, and notable directors have made forays into cinema’s Neverland: Wes Anderson with Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and Isle of Dogs (2018), Spike Jonze with Where the Wild Things Are (2009), Martin Scorsese with Hugo (2011), David Lowery with Pete’s Dragon (2016) – not to mention Céline Sciamma’s screenplay for My Life as a Courgette (2016). Children’s films have struck a nerve in wider cultural conversations, most notably the two Paddington films (2014 and 2017), which confronted issues around immigration and Brexit; more recently, the animations Turning Red (2022) – in which a giant red panda becomes a metaphor for menstruation – and Nimona (2023), an epic science fiction fantasy with LGBTQ+ undercurrents, are proof that Western kids’ films have started to diversify. These films are for the most part readily available online within a few clicks, but if Ray went to a cinema today, what would he see? A lot of high-speed syrupy slush, but very few independent or daring children’s films made with the impulse Ray cherished: “to instil a sense of good taste”. LOVE, DOGS AND ROBOTS In this sorry landscape, Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams is an outlier. An adaptation of American illustrator Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel about a dog who builds himself a robot friend, the film is released in cinemas in March. In a fractured theatrical landscape where films are designed and marketed to different groups, Robot Dreams is, in Berger’s words, “a film for everyone… Of all my films, this is the most open. I’m very happy that in the cinema, you have people from different backgrounds and ages, sharing the same experience”. The Spanish director bought Varon’s slender novel for his daughter before she could read. A decade ago, after finishing work on Blancanieves (2012), his silent, monochrome reimagining of Snow White in 1920s bullfighting Spain, he plucked it randomly from his bookshelf and was surprised by the grip its 82 pages still had on him. The “melancholy comedy” that Berger crafts from Varon’s pictures, keeping her hand-drawn 2D style, is a perfect example of a film that is both simple and highly sophisticated. The film sticks to the book’s straightforward, dialoguefree story about the dog and the robot’s mutual joy in their new-found friendship, and subsequent sorrow at their accidental parting, but it adds deeper stabs of loneliness and despair. These are balanced by a delight in the capacity of music and dance to forge bonds, and the creation of a wondrous comic backdrop for this emotional epic that is both real and unreal – a grungy 1980s Manhattan, a fantasia filled with different animal citizens. “The audience can project themselves,” Berger says. “They don’t really see the animals. It’s like a fable.” Introducing the film to an audience of children, Berger asked them what their favourite animals were: his saga contains so many different species – including a drum-playing octopus – that he felt able to promise that, whatever they said, they would see up on screen. Berger didn’t intend the film for children (“I am selfish… I made it for myself and also for an imaginary cinema”), but he ‘Very few animation films deal with emotion. Most are comedies or action… with more fireworks and rollercoaster rides than storytelling. Drama needs a little more time. That’s why Miyazaki’s films are longer’ Pablo Berger talks about its conception in the universal language of make-believe: “I’m an old-school director; for me, the script is the treasure map.” He likes the idea of parents or guardians bringing youngsters to it: “Parents who have suffered so much watching films that the kids have pushed them towards because they’ve seen commercials. And it’s not the kids’ fault that they see commercials everywhere. The fast-food chains are promoting them. Robot Dreams could be one of those rare times that the parent chooses the film and says, ‘Maybe you haven’t seen the commercial. There’s no toys of [the characters]’… and afterwards it could spark a conversation between the parent and the child about relationships, about loss and overcoming loss…” Although Robot Dreams is suitable for any child who can sit through its 102 minutes, it’s also demanding of its audience, little or large. It doesn’t hurtle along, like so many children’s films: “Very few animation films deal with emotion. Most are comedies or action… with more fireworks and roller-coaster rides than storytelling. Drama needs a little more time. That’s why Miyazaki’s films are longer.” The sense of abandonment and cruelty in the film is acute, particularly when the forlorn, rusting robot endures a winter alone on a fencedoff beach, his parts gradually harvested by passers-by. “We are treating children with respect. We are treating them like adults. We know that they can relate to the characters and understand the story.” The film offers plenty for adults to reflect on too: romantic disappointment looms large in films and our inner emotional lives but for Berger, “We talk less about the break-ups between friends or best friends and the mourning of friends.” And yet, that ABOVE The psychic hero of Laika’s ParaNorman (2012)

R obot Dreams raises the question: do we underestimate what children can handle? The children’s author and illustrator Tomi Ungerer, who die d in 2019, believed so: “I think children are thrilled with fear, and they have to be taught how to get over it.” Cartoon Saloon director Nora Twomey, who worked on a 2012 adaptation of Ungerer’s Moon Man, concurs: “That whole idea of, not really conquering, but growing bigger than your fear is something that I’m really interested in, and giving children the tools to learn how to deal with things. If you try to wrap children in cotton wool, you’re not doing them any service.” When making films, Twomey says, she always tries to hold on to the child within herself and memories of running down the stairs of her childhood home, convinced monsters were running after her. And so there is no small amount of peril in her films. In My Father’s Dragon (2022), a fantasy buddy movie where one half of the friendship happens to be a dragon, the financial situation that faces nine-year-old Elmer and his mother is scary. Even more terrifying are the threats facing 11-year-old Parvana and her family in The Breadwinner, Twomey’s 2017 adaptation of Deborah Ellis’s novel set in modern Afghanistan: while Parvana escapes through cut-out animation into Afghan folklore, the cartoon’s depiction of the brutality of the Taliban regime and its treatment of women and young girls is unflinching. Halfway through production of The Breadwinner, the studio had a test screening to make sure audiences aged eight and up could handle it, inviting children, parents and teachers. “I stood in the lobby afterwards to just try and get a sense of how people were feeling coming out. And the young people just bounded out, chatting to each other, talking about different characters... It didn’t seem to deeply affect them. But the parents and the teachers were red-eyed, and a lot of them came up and said that we wanted to be careful what the age group was. What upset them most was thinking about how a young person who was the age of Parvana, the central character, would react to it.” When the film received a 12A certificate Twomey argued for a broader PG classification: “I felt that children younger than that are able to decide for themselves. Since then, though, I’ve looked at it and said, ‘OK, it is a signal to parents and children as to what they can expect.’ It’s been interesting hearing how children and parents have made those decisions for themselves. “I’m not personally interested in telling stories where somebody has got superpowers or has something more than any of the rest of us have,” she continues. “I love films that show the vulnerability of life because I think there’s greater strength and greater bravery needed when you don’t have superpowers. You have to face things that might be much, much bigger than you. In my own lifetime I’ve had to have really difficult conversations with young children about the fact that at one point I was going to lose my hair and my eyebrows and how we were going to deal with that as a family and what I could hang on to, what they could hang on to, what promises I could make, what promises I couldn’t make.” is a universal emotional experience, from childhood onwards. What adults bring to the film are more of their own memories of faded relationships and Berger seems to deliberately draw on those, notably with his recurring use of Earth Wind and Fire’s toe-tapping direct address to our hippocampus: “Do you remember / The twenty-first night of September?” – the song tinged with sadness when rendered by the robot’s metallic whistle. Perhaps, too, adults will bring an awareness of the situation in 1980s New York, of the relationships decimated by the Aids crisis. What appears a very simple story is actually emotionally and intellectually complex. And at times eccentric. In one dazzling sequence, the snowy, beach-ridden robot dreams and climbs out of the film’s frame, like Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. (1924), but is stopped short at the screen’s edge; so he flips the action 180 degrees to reveal a radiant yellow brick road wonderland, into which he vaults. Here, a chorus field of giant daisies tap dances in geometric formation, as if growing in a Busby Berkeley musical. Following the rainbow, the robot comes to the dog’s home – but when he presses the doorbell, the façade collapses on him like the house in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and our hero is back on the snowy beach. “This scene starts and ends with a homage to Buster Keaton,” Berger says. “The film is always looking to silent cinema… the one that has probably most influenced it in terms of tone is Chaplin’s City Lights [1931].” Berger reconnects the cinephile with their inner child – “in this scene they can really grab a lot of Easter eggs” – and in doing so rekindles a sense of awe at cinema’s magic powers, while reminding us that any great children’s film stretches its audience’s imagination. ‘That whole idea of, not really conquering, but growing bigger than your fear is something that I’m interested in, and giving children the tools to learn how to deal with things’ Nora Twomey BELOW Cartoon Saloon’s The Breadwinner ((2017) CHILDREN’S CINEMA 47

A nother filmmaker well versed in fear, and trusting of children’s ability to digest it, is Chris Butler of Laika studios, the stop-motion expressionists behind films such as Coraline (2009) and ParaNorman (2012) – he directed the latter, and describes it delightfully as “a gateway horror movie”. Norman sees and talks to dead people and this ‘weirdness’ makes him an outcast in his town. For Butler, it’s about maintaining a balance – “whenever you have something that is very intense, being sure to burst the bubble by having a moment of levity or comedy. I have a love of horror movies: if I was making a horror movie for adults, I wouldn’t worry about constantly giving them an out.” He considers most children’s movie-making in the streaming, multi-screen era too anodyne: “I don’t like the idea of animated movies as a babysitting device. I hate it. I understand why it’s necessary but I hate the idea of making something that is so safe, so put through a filter, that you can just plunk a child down in front of it and they’re fine for an hour and a half. I want to make something that challenges a child to think. If I go back to my childhood, the books, the TV shows and certainly the movies that I liked most were the ones that pushed me a bit. “I’m all for complexity in kids’ movies today, I do think sometimes we get a little bit too caught up about explaining why a bad guy is bad, or, ‘Maybe they’re not so bad after all.’ And I’ve even done that myself in ParaNorman. I do think there’s a danger there that you start to even everything out. If you go back to traditional folk and fairytales, and their purpose in the socialisation of children, part of it was to present something that was frightening. Sometimes we move away from that in order to make things safer. I don’t want to get into didactic filmmaking, but I do think part of a kids’ movie is imparting some kind of emotional truth which is a lesson. It needn’t be as on the nose as a moral, but it should make a child think about who they are and what they’re doing.” Butler welcomes the way that streaming has ushered in more inclusivity and diversity but worries about the industry’s reluctance to make kids’ movies that break the mould: “I’m starting to notice that everything feels the same, everything is following that same structure. There’s numerous reasons, but a big one is that it’s parents who choose, particularly with films at the cinema”. Of concern, too, is that streaming has changed the way movies are conceived – it’s all about grabbing and maintaining attention. He remains hopeful, though: “When I got into the industry, there was nothing. I was working on straight-to-video Disney sequels. If you were looking for quality, complex, sophisticated animated movies for kids, they were few and far between. And now, in the past 10 years, there’s thousands of them. In fact, the challenge is probably more to get people to know that they exist, rather than to get them made.” THE TREASURE SEEKERS Raising the profile of independent and adventurous children’s films – not just animated ones – is the onerous and littleheralded work of family film programmers. Mike Tait has spent the last 12 years at Discovery Film Festival in Dundee showing fiction and documentary films from around world that don’t have UK distribution ‘I don’t like the idea of animated movies as a babysitting device… I hate the idea of making something that is so safe, so put through a filter, that you can just plunk a child down in front of it and they’re fine for an hour and a half ’ Chris Butler BELOW Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach’s Chicken for Linda! (2023) – “Not the ones you’ll see advertised on the side of a bus”– alongside programmes of short films for preschool kids (with related craft activities) and relaxed screenings; recently, they have introduced a ‘pay what you can’ model to encourage parents to take a punt on the unknown. Foreign-language films, in particular, present a challenge: convincing parents that kids are capable of ‘different ways of watching’ when dubbed versions either aren’t available or aren’t desirable, because of the way they drain away cultural specificity (Tait: “Hey, there’s people your age in this other part of the world… with American accents”). He always introduces a film by reassuring audiences, “It doesn’t matter if you don’t catch everything, you’ll get the idea. Because cinema is a visual medium!” Appreciating that subtitles are a barrier to many, not just non-readers, Discovery has on occasion employed live readers, but that costs: the readers have to watch the film to get an idea of how it works and then read subtitles aloud for every showing – you get some idea why children’s films that aren’t in English find it so hard to get a footing in UK cinemas. There are though so many excellent unsung films out there: from last year’s Discovery programme Tait picks out two Norwegian gems: Titina, about an Italian dog who accompanied Roald Amundsen’s 1926 flight over the North Pole, the animation interlaced with archive footage; and Dancing Queen, a live-action film tackling issues such as death and body image, which Tait describes as “Rocky set in a middle school in Norway, but about dancing not boxing”. Death haunts another of the best films I’ve watched this year, one that is currently on the kids’ film festival circuit: Chicken for Linda!, a Franco-Italian animation directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach. If it was live-action, you might call 48 CHILDREN’S CINEMA

CINEMAGIC FESTIVAL, BELFAST The UK’s first family film festival, Cinemagic celebrates its 36th edition this October – but events run all year, including a season at Queen’s Film Theatre this March which features a screening of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) with live musical accompaniment. A sister festival is held in Dublin. DISCOVERY FILM FESTIVAL, DUNDEE Based at Dundee Contemporary Arts over three weekends in October and November, DFF combines screenings with creative activities and is co-programmed by a team of teenage Young Ambassadors. Partner venues present screenings across Scotland. THE ENCHANTED CINEMA, UK-WIDE A touring live cinema project that invites kids to be part of the orchestra providing soundtracks to screenings of films such as The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). See thecabinetoflivingcinema.org.uk LEEDS YOUNG FILM FESTIVAL Held each Easter holiday, LYFF has an international outlook; last year’s programme included films from Poland, Brazil and Australia. ‘Movie Club’ sessions allow children to discuss what they’ve seen. FAMILY STRAND, LONDON FILM FESTIVAL Kensuke’s Kingdom and Cameroonian animation The Sacred Cave were among the highlights of last year’s section. FAMILY FILM WEEK, LONDON The Barbican Cinema’s annual event is big on animation, with Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds and the Dutch stop-motion film Oink in its 2023 lineup. Held each October, with workshops and special intros aplenty. INTO FILM FESTIVAL, UK-WIDE Every November since 2003, IFF has celebrated cinema for five to 19 year olds, with screenings across the country expounding the educational benefits of cinema. SMALL WORLD CINEMA, LONDON Established in 2015 to introduce a younger audience to “classic and world cinema in a fun and interactive way”. Welcoming of children with additional needs, who may find it hard to visit a regular cinema. it neorealist: it tells the story of a single mother determined to make up for treating her daughter Linda badly by getting her the chicken she wants to eat, but being thwarted as the city shuts down for a 24-hour strike. The film is rooted in children’s psychology and delves into the mind of a bereaved child but is told in a delirious Fauvist style, broad, bright brushstrokes dancing before our eyes. “It all starts with an injustice,” the filmmakers told the website Zippy Frames, “because it is something that concerns children a lot, that they experience very regularly. We want to make a film very close to them, which is itself like a child. A turbulent, not well-behaved child, the most disruptive for a class, a group, a society, but also the most touching one.” France and Scandinavia are where interesting children’s films are most reliably found but a new adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel Kensuke’s Kingdom, about a shipwrecked boy and his dog, shows that the UK can make them too. The timely ecological fable is an adventure yarn which doesn’t talk down to children as it dwells on topics such as humans’ impact on the world and even nuclear war. THE CHILDREN’S CINEMA In 1958, Amos and Marcia Vogel’s New York-based Cinema 16, one of the most daring and influential of all film societies, mounted an experiment: The Children’s Cinema, “for youngsters four to eight”, introduced an alternative approach to children’s film programming. “Most of the stuff that was considered good children’s films we knocked out,” Vogel said in an interview years later. “We would take films that weren’t considered children’s films; we made them into children’s films.” Lotte Reiniger’s cut-out fable The Grasshopper and the Ant (1954) joined Buster Keaton’s aeronautical antics in The Balloonatic (1923) and Shirley Clarke’s study of children at play in In Paris Parks (1954). I learned of this through the New York alternative cinematheque Light Industry, which recently reassembled the eclectic line-up of shorts as a homage. Light Industry’s Thomas Beard summed up the experience: “It really affirmed for us what Amos and Marcia Vogel maintained with their own children’s programmes – that these little moviegoers have much more adventurous sensibilities than they’re often given credit for.” He adds: “They also really loved when we opened up our booth to show them how the 16mm projector works, which is of course a kind of fascinating alien technology to them.” The highest-profile programme carrying on the Vogels’ legacy is the Berlinale. The Generation competitions, head programmer Sebastian Markt tells me, aim “to broaden the idea of what cinema for young audiences can be. That often means we go beyond what would be considered family or children’s [films] as a genre.” Markt and the programmers will consider “any film that concerns the realities of children or young people”. He points to The Quiet Girl, Colm Bairéad’s 2022 adaptation of a Claire Keegan novella about a neglected nine-year old girl, which had its world premiere in the Generation strand for under-14s. “Often filmmakers are surprised being invited to this section, and that’s the most satisfying experience, to be able to accompany them through the festival and see how amazed they are by how a young audience engages with their films and sees things that they wouldn’t have expected them to see.” This year, Wang Xiaoshuai presented the second part of his ‘Homeland trilogy’, chroniclingChina’s recent history, which began with his epic melodrama So Long, My Son (2019). Above the Dust (Wo Tu) explores the country’s land reforms and rapid urbanisation from the perspective of a young boy in a village who doesn’t understand what’s going on. Whether it’s in films explicitly made for children or those that can be reappropriated for them, more than 60 years later the Vogels’ artistic statement for their programme sets out a simple but still relevant guiding principle for anyone wondering why a robust, daring and wild children’s cinema is worth fighting for: to offer a view of the worlds of reality and fantasy, as only cinema can reveal them. Robot Dreams is in UK cinemas from 22 March and is reviewed on page 71. Chicken for Linda! plays in London at Ciné Lumière on 23 March and at the Barbican on 20 April. Kensuke’s Kingdom screens at the Brighton Festival in May Foreign-language films, in particular, present a challenge: convincing parents that kids are capable of ‘different ways of watching’ when dubbed versions either aren’t available or aren’t desirable, because of the way they drain away cultural specificity ABOVE The adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s Kensuke’s Kingdom RIGHT The dog protagonist of Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams Children’s Cinema directory The UK film festivals and family clubs programming global and independent kids’ films 49

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