'X:
THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES' WITH PERE UBU UNDERSCORE
Duke
of Yorks, Brighton, Sun 23rd Nov
”I've
come to tell you what I see!”
As
the record shows, Lucid Frenzy is a fan of David Thomas whether to be
found performing with his parent 'avant-garage' cult outfit Pere Ubu or branching out to provide live soundtracks. And here he was
doing both at the same time!
The
success of his approach may all be there in that word 'underscore'.
The most successful film soundtracks are often the ones that work
upon you the most subliminally, and there seems no reason to change
all that just because the musicians are live and present. As I said
of previous soundtrack to 'Carnival of Souls', “it
worked almost as the film’s unconscious, worrying away beneath the
surface”. For this reason Thomas may be deliberately working his
way down the food chain, from respected movies such as 'Carnival
Of Souls' and the Ray Bradbury-derived 'It Came
From outer Space' to this 1963 Roger Corman shocker.
Thomas himself has commented “the amateurish enthusiasm and
naive intention, as well as lack of budget, of the B-movie encourages
a kind of communal abstraction that approaches folk culture, and the
frequent lack of a coherent agenda leaves lots of wiggle room for
whatever personalised context or agenda an audience or band chooses
to overlay.”
And
certainly the film makes not a whole lot of sense, either narratively
or thematically. By playing up the arrogance and impatience of the
central character, inevitably called Professor Xavier, the film seems
to be be following the standard theme of hubris. He droppers his own
eyes with the magic potion like Napoleon brashly crowning himself,
and claims to be “closing in on the Gods”. (A plural form that
probably wasn't there in the first draft.) But, like a tabloid
kiss-and-tell, of course that pat morality is merely salacious. The
film was probably pitched either in order to have that big 'X' on the
poster, to allow some suggested nudity or - more likely - both.
But
there is a suggestion, waiting to be carried by an underscore, that
his (in an almost literal sense) insight is pitched as both
revelation and curse. As well as looking through ladies' clothes,
there's a sense he can see (in Eliot's phrase) the skull beneath the
skin, a drug-induced vision of the petty parochialism of Fifties
society. (And 1963 was still pretty deep in the Fifties.)
As
you might expect, the film most exults in the proto-psychedelic
X-ray-vision sequences. But it also follows a loose colour coding,
from the reassuring clean white coats of the hospital (from where
those dayglo X-ray sequences first make their outburst), to the lurid
colours of the fairground, then to the more sombre tones of the
bedsit as the powers become too much for him. His final claim to see
“the eye that sees us all” at the centre of the universe
seemingly comes from nowhere. (Though it is foreshadowed in the
opening image.) But, as is typical, that kind of leaves the question
open. Does he see the Sixties arriving with their cleansed doors of
perception? Metafictionally spy the cinema projector Or a God that is
not about judgement or intervention, but a science God who merely
observes us like the universe is his petri dish? So instead of
revelation or salvation you merely get stared back at? All or none of
the above? We just need something to nudge us into perceiving
incoherence as a kind of metaphysical mystery. Then, with nothing to
hold back our sight, we can just keep looking.
Afterward
the film it was hard to remember many actual musical incidents, but
perhaps that should be taken as a sign of an underscore doing its
job, of the thing working. If I've had more to say about the film
than the music, then it was most likely the music that took me there.
The mood of the music frames and filters the film, affecting you like
a half-remembered dream. Music is also inherently a kind of an x-ray,
you naturally hear sounds beneath others in a way you can't with
sight. The music makes it feel impossible that those pristine
hospital whites won't be ruptured.
There
were points, however, where the underscore just didn't go under
enough. Moments like a boom-tish on the symbol when an on-screen
character makes a crap joke are reminiscent of the jokey captions
early Channel 4 would add to trash classics. It feels like a snarky
hipster commentary on the film, a distancing device to reassure
everyone they're not really supposed to be taking this too seriously.
Whereas the point of the exercise is surely the opposite, not being
supposed to take it seriously is the very reason to try it – to
X-ray-up our eyes, to take the ludicrous premise to the max just to
see what's out there.
'THE
COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES' WITH JUNO REACTOR SCORE
Duke
of Yorks, Brighton, Thurs 27th Nov
...meanwhile
Juno Reactor (aka Ben Watkins) performed their score to Sergei
Parajanov's much-praised Aremenian film 'The Colour of
Pomegranates' (1968).
Now,
as the past history of this blog might have already given away, I am
not in the least interested in fashion in music. If people are still
making music in the key of the Nineties, mixing repetitive beats in
with melting-pot globalism under the sway of Transglobal Underground
or Dead Can Dance, it doesn't bother me in the slightest. But what
wearies me is when someone attempts a piss poor imitation of that
music, like they're aping last year's look. And my weariness
multiplies when they stick that cheap copyism over a film such as
this.
Its
one redeeming feature might have been as a masterclass in how a live
soundtrack should not be done. They played not just loudly but
obtrusively. It was as if the film was being drowned out by a club
night going on next door, but everyone was too polite to complain. It
was as if you'd travelled to Armenia to sample the way of life, only
to have the experience overwritten by some hippie-yuppie companion
you couldn't shake, ceaselessly going on about how 'spiritual' and
'meaningful' he was finding everything. Just as New Agers treat
foreign cultures as something which will look great hung up in their
apartments, Juno Reactor treat this film as a backdrop for their
pseudo-mystic muzak. I kept thinking it was like they were turning
the film into their own rock video, only to discover later that's exactly how this project started. Satire is once more
defeated by events.
Perhaps,
with it's non-narrative progression of images and tableaus, the film
becomes a natural victim for this sort of thing. It's more like
passing through a sequence of paintings on a common theme than
watching a regular movie. Though Parajanov was a compatriot of
Tarkovsky the film's more like Jodorowsky's use of film as a form of
ritual, if with less of his surrealist glee in sacrelige and more
under the Eastern Orthodox sway of ceremony. Plus, as the film was in
many ways a celebration of Armenian culture when it was under threat
of Soviet homogenisation, without prior knowledge of that culture it
can feel like looking at a set of symbols without a key. (Imagine an
alien landing on Earth just in time to catch Easter Mass, with no
context for what is going on.) Consequently it can look like a film
waiting for someone to come along and complete it, like there's no
existing text to overwrite. An exotic-looking placeholder, a templace
for whatever's on your mind. And this 'place to find yourself' is of
course the very way the Western world treats what it terms the
'undeveloped'.
But
that is in fact precisely the reason why the film shouldn't
be treated in this way. It's a kind of Jacobs Ladder, and needs the
soundtrack of ambient sounds and indigenous folk music to act as an
anchor between it's often-bewildering signifiers and the physical
world. With those ties cut it literally loses integrity, it falls
adrift on the sea of signs and becomes ripe for plunder. I listened
to the original soundtrack (via the magic of YouTube) as I typed this
up, and it sounded far more involving than Juno Reactor's shop-bought
samplers.
In
case I didn't make it obvious, I didn't care for this one much. You
can, should you choose, hear the whole thing here. But me, I'm linking to the trailer for the film proper...
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