With their celebrated masterpiece The Red Shoes currently showing on the big screen, Mike Pinnington considers the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger…

When I think about the moments of movie magic that have stayed with me well beyond the first viewing of a film, few can compete with the flights of fantasy conjured by filmmaking duo, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Each subsequent viewing of certain of their films (and there have been many) is accompanied with an anticipation of a warm, comforting hug; but, also, and as if for the first time, to be touched in head and heart with something of the ineffable-verging-on-the-miraculous.

The partnership of Englishman Powell and Hungarian émigré Pressburger is one of the most fruitful in British cinema history – they would work together (under the name, The Archers) between 1939 and 1972 on more than 20 features. I feel it is worth noting here that even a relatively minor P&P movie is better than much of what we might see at the multi-plex today, but they truly hit their stride with a phenomenal run during the 1940s in a perfect marriage of creativity and execution; that run produced no less than four masterpieces, beginning with 1943’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

But it was their following trio of phenomenal films that I can’t separate, either in terms of their resounding excellence or, indeed, which I saw first. (Whichever, it would most likely have been on an old black and white TV set during a happy weekend spent at my nan and granddad’s.) Chronologically, it begins in 1946 with A Matter of Life and Death, followed by Black Narcissus (1947) and, rounding out the perfect hattrick, 1948’s The Red Shoes. These were bold, even subversive, experimentations with style, form and more.

If I can’t place them in any kind of hierarchy, what this superlative triumvirate have in common are themes that ran like life blood through the best (and much of the rest) of The Archers’ oeuvre: identity, morality – ‘They aren’t poor, they just haven’t got any money,’ says Roger Livesey’s Torquil in 1945’s I Know Where I’m Going – romantic and platonic love, and the human condition.

Set during the Second World War, P&P delivered A Matter of Life and Death – hardly your typical propaganda film, it focussed not on the indomitable allies, but rather on the indomitable, unpredictable power of love. At its centre is the blossoming romance between David Niven’s seemingly doomed airman and Kim Hunter’s radio operator, with whom he shared what were anticipated by all to be his final moments. But, bailing out of his irreparably damaged aeroplane sans parachute, Niven’s Peter Carter, lost in the fog, somehow – initially at least – escapes the ultimate fate, only to be summoned to the afterlife, where a case must be made to ascertain the life or death of the title.

With scenes of life shot in glorious Technicolor and those in heaven a resolute monochrome (but one of a number of daring and effective aesthetic decisions), here Powell and Pressburger tell us that life, in all its visceral glory, is worth – and for – the living. In a sense hopelessly romantic, at no point during its 104 minutes does it lapse into cheap sentimentalism. The Archers had amassed a skilled team; with cinematographer Jack Cardiff and incredible sets – not least the still-impressive stairway to heaven – from production designer Alfred Junge, the film is a feast for the eyes as well as the soul, and looks as astonishing today as it must have when seen for the first time almost 80 years ago.

In the following year’s Black Narcissus, we find Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh corralling a group of nuns into establishing a Himalayan convent. Trouble emerges in the form of sceptical, antagonistic Mr. Dean, another colonialising Brit abroad played by David Farrar, with whom Kathleen Byron’s psychologically tormented Sister Ruth becomes increasingly, dangerously infatuated. For the mid-twentieth century, having much of your film hinge on an open-shirted male sex object wearing short shorts was not, as you might imagine, an everyday occurrence.

Again, colour plays a significant role, often setting the tone and signalling the real and implied danger to come. When Sister Ruth throws off the habit, swapping it for a red dress and lipstick to match, the effect is almost one of delirium –  in both her and the viewer. A psychosexual tour de force, Black Narcissus continues to stir the senses. Redundantly remade for TV in 2020, it didn’t hold a candle to the original.

The duo arguably reached their apogee with The Red Shoes, an innovative and daring demonstration of filmmakers at the very height of their powers. Using Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale – in which the wearer of enchanted shoes cannot help but dance until death – as the basis for a story about the dynamic between an ambitious young dancer (played by real-life ballerina, Moira Shearer), her composer lover, and a kingmaker impresario, The Red Shoes is a triumph of Powell and Pressburger’s shared belief in the power of art. Powell said of it that “We had been told for 10 years to go out and die for freedom and democracy… Now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.”

Technically stunning, it is the product of Powell’s reaching for what he termed ‘composed film’, a cinema that could draw you in and hold you, rapt, in a heightened state. A total work of art that brought together choreography, theatre, music, set design, innovation and the performers themselves, it is an unequivocal singular vision.

It is also an emotionally charged study in ambition, love, obsession and the complexity of the human condition. And, of their films that featured in 2022’s Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films of All Time, The Red Shoes sits pretty in joint 67th place, an honour it shares with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I. Other films of theirs that make the cut are, in ascending order, A Canterbury Tale; The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; I Know Where I’m Going!; Black Narcissus; and A Matter of Life and Death.

But, as the duo’s films regularly tell us, all good things must come to an end (they rarely delivered a straightforward, so-called happy ending). While they weren’t finished as a creative force (they would make a further nine films together), by the close of that decade, momentum – and success – began to fall away. After splitting from long term studio, Rank, a relinquishing of The Archers’ name and a catastrophic failure of the subsequent relationship with David O. Selznick (resulting in legal action), Powell and Pressburger would, via some missteps and an inability to ever truly match their golden years’ output, go their separate ways.

The afterlife of The Archers is mixed; by this time, they had been all but written off by a British film industry that they had given so much to. They were mothballed, dismissed as almost anachronistic in the face of the emergent angry young men of kitchen sink dramas such as Look Back in Anger, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In parallel came Powell’s deeply misunderstood solo outing, Peeping Tom (1960). It has since been largely rehabilitated and is frequently put in conversation with Hitchcock’s Psycho, made the same year, but on release it was met with blanket critical vilification. The ensuing years saw them become marginal figures at best.

It seemed the game was up. That is, until, their rehabilitation and vindication, which came from a surprising source – not from the UK, but the US. A new generation of filmmakers, men who would come to be in the vanguard of the so-called New Hollywood (including Francis Ford Coppola, Brian de Palma and Martin Scorsese) had seen, just as I later would, Powell and Pressburger’s films on TV in the living rooms of their youth, and lionised them. Citing their influence, Coppola would go on to invite Michael Powell – who would marry long-time Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker – to be ‘senior director in residence’ at his Zoetrope Studios.

Powell and Pressburger have since been rediscovered many times over. Subject to various retrospectives (most recently with BFI’s Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger), their films – frequently shown on the big screen – are reaching, and, I expect, thrilling, new audiences all the time.

Contemporary Western Cinema is, sadly, addicted to remakes and the rehashing of old tropes; it could do worse than to take a leaf out of the Powell and Pressburger playbook, filmmakers whose commitment to their art is rightly remembered and celebrated so enthusiastically today.

Mike Pinnington

The Red Shoes screens today @ FACT Liverpool; Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (Martin Scorsese, 2024) is currently available on BBC iPlayer

Biopic, mock-doc, juke box musical, exhibition? Mike Pinnington considers director Alex Ross Perry’s documentary, Pavements… 

Ambivalent, ironic, alienating. There is a prolonged moment at the beginning of director Alex Ross Perry’s documentary, Pavements, where you get a sense of what it must have been like as an unwitting 1990s music journo to interview Stephen Malkmus and his band, Pavement.

It feels, initially, impenetrable. And, it occurs to you, the next couple of hours could be difficult. Biopic, mock-doc, juke box musicals, exhibition; it’s hard to settle, to find the truth at the core of the film. What’s real, what’s not? Was that a sidelong glance and a wink at those who consider themselves to be in the know? Or, like the band’s critics have sometimes alleged, simply post-modern sleight of hand wind up. And, when you get Joe Keery (Stranger Things’ Steve Harrington) going full method in the ‘lead role’, it is in some way akin to watching a feature-length episode of Portlandia. Like Malkmus himself, then, perhaps arch is the best descriptor.

Ride out those challenging first scenes and things begin to take shape – albeit in unconventional fashion. After all, Pavement were never conventional. Better this than a typical, by-the-numbers beginning, middle and end telling of their tale. For the uninitiated, Pavement (Malkmus, co-founding member Spiral Stairs/Scott Kannberg, Mark Ibold, Steve West and Bob Nastanovich) formed in 1989, and are, for my money (and others’ besides), the band of their generation. By the time they come to prominence, grunge is over and the industry is looking for something, someone, anyone to fill the void. Pavement, if briefly, are the anointed ones. Kings of an undefined movement, they’ve toured with Sonic Youth and have the seal of approval from pretty much anyone that matters.

But there’s a problem. Well, problems. Not least, Malkmus especially is hung up on not being seen to sell out; even, it’s speculated, to the point of self-sabotage. Meanwhile, their off-kilter style is lampooned, in one case brilliantly, by MTV’s Beavis and Butthead, who wonder whether or not the band could be trying harder: “I want you to start over again, and this time try!”

The crux, though, is that the industry is only so forgiving. Only extends its hand for so long. And when Pavement deliver 1995’s three-sided opus, Wowee Zowee, it’s met with something akin to a bemused comparative shrug, suffering perhaps, as Malkmus points out, from the selection of slow burn singles, Rattled by the Rush, and Father to a Sister of Thought (in hindsight, this reception is bizarre: it was and remains a brilliant record).

It is during this, one of, let’s be honest, a few difficult moments in the band’s lifespan (see Malkmus’ increasing dissatisfaction with with life in Pavement, and his my-way-or-the-highway approach, the stuff with Billy Corgan, for instance), that the film comes into its own. By now you’re used to Ross Perry’s non-linear, non-traditional approach to telling the story of Pavement. So, when we’re presented with over-simplified fictionalised scenes juxtaposed with archive footage – interviews, performances, etc. – the result perhaps allows us to better speculate on internal wranglings.

This method is particularly effective in depicting the band’s ignominious appearance at 1995′s Lollapalooza, faced with a dead-end 3pm slot. Dead, that is, apart from those slinging mud from the front row. Pavement, understandably, down tools (although reports at the time have it that they were at fault). There is an alignment between Malkmus’ forlorn response to one-mud-pat-too-many slung in his direction and Keery’s performance, one of reflected fury, and a sinking in of the kind of pressure the band might have laboured under to fill the vacuum left in the popular consciousness by Nirvana (following the 1994 death of Kurt Cobain).

Little by little, Pavements draws you in. Or lets you in, I’m not sure which. Rather than obfuscate, the chicanery of the film works as a story-telling device, allows us to consider the feelings of its subjects, who, for the best part of their on-again-off-again careers, have kept the press and the fans alike largely at a remove.

So, when it comes to the denouement, coinciding with the opening in New York of the pop-up exhibition, Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum, it is with delight that we see the band’s reactions. There are broad smiles, teary eyes. Even Malkmus struggles to remain aloof when faced with the celebration of this band that (try as he might) wouldn’t die.

They come face to face – via ephemera, artwork, hand-written notes and lyrics – with Pavements past (including the clothes they wore, still covered in mud, at their ill-fated Lollapalooza appearance); contemporary bands Bully, Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail and Speedy Ortiz play covers of canonical, bonefide indie-classics; and, ooh, there’s Thurston Moore. Maybe, as a longtime fan, I got carried away, lost objectivity, but with Pavements, Ross Perry (who has said that the music documentary format has “run out of gas”) brings us closer to Pavement than other attempts, or at least reveals another perspective. It’s nice, after all of the artifice, to see the human side.

Mike Pinnington

Pavements screens 7.30pm @ FACT Liverpool, Wednesday 9 July 

Images/media, from top: Pavements artwork; Official video for Cut Your Hair; Malkmus/Lollapalooza, 1995

Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl reveals the actor and director was only too pleased to pour her not inconsiderable talents into the Nazi cause…

There are moments during Riefenstahl in which you wonder about the level of complicity and guilt of actor and director Helene ‘Leni’ Riefenstahl, despite her undeniable proximity to Hitler. After all, this was a German filmmaker who, merely by birth and circumstance, was unavoidably positioned – like it or not – to be co-opted by the Nazis into producing propaganda.

Arguably, you might think, she was no more guilty than the factory worker who, pre-war, had made cars, but was now turning out everything from bullets to aeroplane parts. Just another cog in the wheel of the fascist war machine.

Her role directing Triumph of the Will, 1935’s highly choreographed and stage-managed coverage of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, and Olympia (1938), a vision of athletic beauty that sought to capture the ideals of Athens, about the 1936 Berlin Games, is not in doubt. But how much choice could she have had in the matter? Was she not simply another of the many who would later claim to have been following orders? Indeed, post-war, she would be exonerated of anything more than her proximity to the regime.

When director Andre Veiel seems to belabour Leni Riefenstahl’s telling of a childhood anecdote – in which she refused to accept that she was in the wrong for stealing chocolate as a child, and subsequently suffering a beating at the hands of her father – you watch almost with a sense of ‘well, so what’. If anything, we’re hearing of a case of abuse, where the child in question wilfully, foolishly, sticks to her guns out of a not entirely misplaced sense of indignation.

But little by little, thanks to Veiel’s liberal and judicious use of her archive, a picture begins to coalesce, one showing that Riefanstahl was no naïve bystander. The childhood story about her insistence of being in the right, even when caught red-handed, it becomes clear, is merely symptomatic of a broader pattern of behaviour, of a sense of entitlement that would follow her into adulthood.

We come to see that she was an enthusiastic enabler, and happy promoter of Hitler and the Third Reich, only too pleased to pour her not inconsiderable talents into the cause. This realisation unfolds slowly but gains inexorable momentum. We learn how, documenting the invasion of Poland, she baulks at the reality only to play a role in the senseless deaths of the defeated. Later, she would press Roma children taken from an internment camp (all of whom would later be murdered at Auschwitz) into service as extras in her film Lowlands. We hear of her relationships during and after the war with prominent Nazis and Nazi-sympathisers (among them, Albert Speer, an architect who served as Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production).

It hits emphatically home as we watch Riefenstahl years later, in Sudan, working on a photography series with the indigenous Nuba people as subject matter. There, she’s shown frolicking with kids, handing out treats. Later, we’re shown a similar scene – and her true face. With another group crowding around her, her exasperation and, ultimately, her White Supremacist gaze, is exposed as she throws yet more sweets, not with joy but in an effort to extricate herself from the situation. Back on home soil, at what looks like the press opening of an exhibition of the photographs, she is pictured hobnobbing with the likes of Andy Warhol.

Throughout, a picture emerges of two things. One: that Riefenstahl lied repeatedly and compulsively about her complicity and philosophical position aligned to what she refers to in a phone call as ‘German predestination’, and Nazism. By the latter stages of her life, you suspect that she’d parroted her line about ignorance at the true extent of wartime atrocities – undermined time and again by Veiel’s film – so frequently that she no longer knew exactly where the truth lay. Two: that, as a result, she had become – was perhaps always – obsessed with controlling public perceptions of herself and her legacy (keeping an army of lawyers on the payroll, she was litigious in the extreme).

In the last segment of the film, as she is seen preparing to be interviewed yet again (despite insisting that she hates to do this kind of thing), you become aware that you’re sickened by her. To the end, she is still playing director, stage-managing her image, asking the camera man to avoid focusing on her wrinkles.

For someone so obsessed with avoiding the truth of the matter, this film exposes her, finally, as a vain, self-interested, unrepentant racist.

Mike Pinnington  

Riefenstahl is in cinemas now

“It remains a masterpiece of epic proportions.” Mike Pinnington does a deep-dive into Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is back in cinemas this weekend – 60 years after the director had wondered whether a ‘really good’ sci-fi film was even possible…  

During the writing of his 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, director Stanley Kubrick had, for a while, considered including commentary from an alien race who, looking on from afar, discuss and debate the relative merits of humanity in crisis. In the end, Kubrick decided against the decidedly Twilight Zone-inflected idea; but that he had considered it indicated his willingness to seriously entertain the possibility – or probability – that intelligent life beyond our own existed.

The idea was not a fleeting one – Kubrick did very little on a whim. “Space,” he’d said, “is one of the great themes of our age, yet it is one still almost untouched in serious art and literature.” Perhaps it had been a matter of time when, in the spring of 64, he’d written to one of the world’s preeminent science fiction authors, Arthur C. Clarke. His intention: to “discuss with you the possibility of doing the proverbial ‘really good’ science-fiction movie.” If Strangelove had been a commentary on Cold War tensions and the manic futility of nuclear capability, his next film would, in part, respond to the Space Race.

Having given the project some thought, he outlined for Clarke his aspirations. His main interest lay “along these broad areas, naturally assuming great plot and character: 1. The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life. 2. The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near future. 3. A space-probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars…” He also asked would Clarke consider “coming [to New York] with a view to a meeting, the purpose of which would be to determine whether an idea might exist or arise which would sufficiently interest both of us enough to want to collaborate on a screenplay.” It was eventually agreed that a book, which would also serve as screenplay, and film would be produced in tandem.

Progress was made, with a creative exchange of ideas flowing throughout. In March 1967, approaching what would have been the crunch stage of production, Clarke had given a keynote address to the American Astronautical Society, in which, quoting Indian philosopher Vinoba Bhave (though he’d incorrectly attributed it to then Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru), he said: “Politics and religion are obsolete. The time has come for science and spirituality.” In his copy of the address, Kubrick had underlined the second sentence. Uppermost in Kubrick’s mind was that, together, he and Clarke must achieve something containing a ‘mythic grandeur’.

The director had, for some time, been consuming a lot of science fiction, recreationally – in correspondence with a fan, he’d written how he was a “bit more of [an addict of the genre] than you might have suspected.” – and professionally. Indeed, he’d considered at least one other such option for adaptation prior to consulting with Clarke. Something that clearly fed into the genesis of 2001: A Space Odyssey was Clarke’s short story, The Sentinel (published in 1951), in which a pyramidal structure is found on the moon, left there as a beacon by ‘ancient architects’ of unknown origin.

In Kubrick’s vision, the inscrutable structure takes the form of a vast monolith; in a famed opening sequence, the audience has its first encounter with the monolith on earth, as it triggers evolution and the dawn of man, and elegantly propels the narrative into the story’s present. Meanwhile, the discovery of other monoliths seem to join crucial dots across time and space. Their role, never didactically explained, seems to chime with Kubrick’s musings that “There will always be dangers in space – but there also will be wonder, adventure, beauty, opportunity, and sources of knowledge that will transform our civilization as the voyages of the Renaissance brought about the end of the Dark Ages.”

We experience those elements – danger, wonder, adventure, beauty, opportunity and knowledge – most frequently through the eyes of Dr. David Bowman, one of five crew aboard the vessel Discovery, bound on a secretive mission toward Jupiter. It is a multi-sensory feast; more: a technological marvel. Little wonder that conspiracy theories about NASA and Kubrick cooking up the first manned moon landing a year after its release persist. Made in a pre-CG era, 2001 continues to thrill; from beautifully rendered spacecraft and pens floating in zero-gravity, to an incredibly tense spacewalk, it is nothing less than breath-taking to look at.

While Kubrick alone received the Oscar for special visual effects, perhaps the most spectacularly memorable scene was achieved thanks to Douglas Trumbull. Inspired by the work of artist John Whitney, with whom he had worked on 1964′s To the Moon and Beyond, using slit-scan photography, the 23 year old Trumbull created the iconic star gate sequence, which sees Bowman catapulted on an interstellar journey to a higher state of consciousness. During which, a kind of ascension – for the man, or the entire human race – is achieved. Maybe; for little is delivered to you tied with a bow in 2001; while it depicts brilliantly humanity questing to make the great unknowns known, never does it spoon feed the viewer, leaving audiences instead to draw their own conclusions.

What many people think about when they think about 2001 (even if they’ve never in fact seen the film), is the HAL-9000, or just plain HAL, for which Kubrick had consulted with IBM (forecasting likely developments in computing and AI). The ship’s supercomputer who goes rogue, HAL constitutes the primary threat encountered by Bowman and the Discovery’s crew. In one memorably terrifying scene, asked to perform a crucial task, HAL tells Bowman: “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” And, later, being shut down: “I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it.”

HAL’s apparently malicious behaviour (which some have read as akin to a mental breakdown, but likely has more to do with its planned role in the mysterious Jupiter mission), in stark contrast to Keir Dullea’s Bowman, who maintains a largely indefatigable demeanour throughout, resonates today with our darkest concerns around the future of AI. It also asks the current, very pertinent question, of whether AI will be bad due mostly to its maker.

It is in-part this combination of fear and wonder, allied to the ’mythic grandeur’ Kubrick had wanted to achieve, that makes the film so worth returning to today – a little more than 60 years since he extended the creative welcome to Clarke. Rarely can cinema have fulfilled, perhaps even surpassed, its maker’s ambitions so thoroughly, which means 2001: A Space Odyssey, remains a masterpiece of epic proportions.

Mike Pinnington

2001: A Space Odyssey screens at FACT Liverpool @ 3pm, Sunday 16 June

“Urban landscape and architecture are integral.” Anthony Ellis on how film can fix in our minds and memory a sense of place… 

General views are one of the more unusual aspects of filmmaking. They’re shots that set the scene and establish the location in which the action is taking place. Often this is a town or city, but it could be a building, or even a room. These images of place are often interchangeable across different film works, bought in as stock photography, for a corporate film or movie. Hence, general views will often include famous landmarks and perpetuate stereotypical views of a city. A similar imaging of place is outlined by Eisenstein in the opening chapter of The Film Sense, where he suggests that imaging is central to how we remember the streets of a city. Discussing his own difficulty in recalling the numerically named streets of New York, such as Forty-Second Street, he explains how he ‘had to fix in memory a set of objects characteristic of one or another street… the theatre, stores and buildings’ to help form an image of place. Gradually, an overall image of the street would emerge, that he could bring to mind.

Liverpool has a rich history in film and has been represented on the screen many times through these general views of place. There is even a council department, the Liverpool Film Office, that is dedicated to promoting the use of the city as a location. On its website, a section entitled ‘General Views’ is where prospective filmmakers can find images of key landmarks from the city, such as Lime Street Station and the Liver Building. Across these appearances in film, various images of the city are formed.

In the 1969 film The Reckoning, underrated screen star Nicol Williamson plays Michael Marler, a hard as nails executive who has long since upped sticks and moved south, working in London and living in leafy Berkshire, determined to leave his Liverpudlian roots behind. In the capital, he has found success and a lifestyle to match it, but he is reluctantly drawn back to the city of his birth after learning of his father’s illness. Once back home, he becomes embroiled in the social and political complexities of his past life. There, Liverpool acts as a backdrop for social tensions to play out across class, the lives of first-generation Irish immigrants in the city, and the North-South divide.

The imaging of Liverpool in The Reckoning, by acclaimed cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, is of a place in transition. The rundown Georgian terraces and sweeping long shots of the docks are contrasted with the modern high rises emerging across the city. This compares to a representation of London that has seemingly already been through this transition, however flawed that idea may be, with sleek Modernist office blocks and Marler’s own impressive, detached house representing place. It’s a selective imaging of the two cities, seemingly designed to mirror the identity crisis of the central character.

Perhaps the most striking image of Liverpool is a view a couple of miles from the centre, looking down into the city, with neglected terraces and derelict land in the foreground, set against the silhouette of the futuristic radio tower in the distance. On a wall, someone has daubed ‘No Popery,’ in a distillation of the religious and cultural tensions that existed in the city during this period. Here, within the perimeters of a single shot, two splintering urban forms are pitted against one another. The terraced dwellings, left at the back of the queue of modernity, waiting for the tides of economics and politics to change, whilst the radio tower symbolises a new wave of architecture sweeping across urban centres, in the vanguard and at the front of that same queue.

Through the mirroring of urban and psychological terrain, the film presents what could be described as a heightened form of Psychogeography, the concept whereby emotions and behaviour are affected by geographical location, as proposed by theorist Guy Debord in the mid-fifties. Marler traverses his identity crisis through the journeys that he takes in and between his birthplace and his adopted home: the imaging of the cities and the network of roads that connect them, parallel Marler’s neurosis, this being a product of the social, economic and political space that is unresolved between Liverpool and London, north and south.

This neurosis is let loose as he drives his prized Jaguar, the status symbol that encapsulates the dichotomy at the heart of his character, in a careering and dangerous manner along the streets of both cities. Roads, in turn, are a central aspect of the film’s representation of place. One striking image is of the A580 turn off sign for Liverpool and Southport, as Marler races down the motorway frantically, his anxiety ratcheting up as he approaches home. The anger and sadness that Marler feels, that he is unable to fully acknowledge, repeatedly unfolds as a destructive rage behind the wheel of the Jag.

By contrast, the 1983 film adaption of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, starring Julie Walters and Michael Caine, has a radically different approach to imaging the city. The central character, Rita, works as a hairdresser whilst studying at university one day a week, as part of an open access course. The film follows her as she is enriched by the experience of university life, which opens doors to new friends and a newly found self-confidence that, conversely, creates tension with her family and sadness regarding the life that she is leaving behind.

The film is set in Liverpool but shot in Dublin and so the general views of the city show, amongst other places, Trinity College and Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, which are notable Dublin landmarks. Dublin was dressed to make it appear more British with portable props, such as red phone boxes, included to reinforce the image of place. There are many similarities between the cities, in the composition of the urban landscape, such as notable Georgian architecture, Victorian terraces, and the docks.

It is, though, a strange and uncanny amalgamation of place. To see Liverpool represented by another city, when the urban landscape and architecture of the city are so integral to the identity of the place, is disconcerting, even when represented by a city with close historical ties, such as Dublin. The urban landscape of Dublin and the voices of Liverpool seem somehow out-of-step.

Returning to Eisenstein, what image of place do we form across the multitude of these general views: are we able to navigate the Liverpool that emerges across the array of imaging? Think of the Liver Building, featuring on so many sport show intros and soap opera title sequences, broadcast across the nation, and then that same building in cinemas worldwide, in a different complex. The saturation of the image of the building to such an extent that its function is overwhelmed by its appearances as a sign. An imaging that exists across global electronic networks and the screens of the world, generated through the clandestine operations of F-stops and editing suites: the mediated city.

Anthony Ellis

Note: Information on film locations was taken from the Reelstreets.com website

Stills from top: 1–3: The Reckoning (1969. Director: Jack Gold. Production Company: Columbia Pictures). Images 4–5: Educating Rita (1983. Director: Lewis Gilbert. Production Company: Acorn Pictures)

A reminder of Jean-Luc Godard’s mercurial brilliance and antipathy to Hollywood, Le Mépris – his study of a poisoned marriage and poisonous film industry both – celebrates its 60th anniversary with a 4K restoration and a Blu-Ray and DVD release…

One of the most eagerly anticipated screenings at this year’s Cannes was a posthumous addition to the celebrated canon of Jean-Luc Godard, who died aged 91 in September 2022. Also shown during the festival was his 1963 film Le Mépris; marking its 60th anniversary, the film – JLG’s first colour picture – has been treated to a 4K restoration and Blu-ray and DVD release.

Translating to Contempt in English, its title is apt. Musing on the caprices of relationships and the film industry both, in one respect Le Mépris reads like a story for the ages. In it we follow Michel Piccoli’s screenwriter Paul, in negotiations with Jack Palance’s philistine producer Jeremy Prokosch. His job: to reinvigorate the script of an adaptation of The Odyssey, directed by non other that Fritz Lang (with the master playing himself as gently opinionated, somewhat resigned old hand).

Along for the ride is Paul’s wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot). They’re happy together and very much in love. But things begin to fall apart almost immediately on meeting Prokosch – Paul is caught between a juicy pay cheque that will guarantee the couple’s immediate material future and his wife’s judgement. Her contempt; which Paul earns for selling out? For openly flirting with the producer’s put-upon assistant? “Why do you hold me in such contempt?” he asks. She, and therefore Godard, never makes this clear.

Tellingly, it was shot during Godard’s marriage to then wife Anna Karina, and one can’t help but read Paul and Camille as proxies for the real life, off-set psychodrama the couple were apparently enacting. Camille donning a black, somewhat Karina-esque wig, in addition to Piccoli wearing Godard’s own clothes for the role seems to confirm things; after a short and tumultuous marriage, Godard and Karina would divorce two years later.

So: what to make of Le Mépris these six decades on? In some respects, one can’t help but consider it something of a curate’s egg; often, for example, I’m not sure what the director’s preferred reading is. Film within a film technical exercise? Acerbic critique of Hollywood? Bitter interrogation of Godard’s real-life relationship? It is, seemingly, a tangled melange of all of these things.

I think it is most successful, however, seen through the lens of its director’s opinion on life as a creative within the lingering vestiges of the Hollywood Studio System. (Indeed, Godard worked a difficult relationship of another kind – with the film’s own producers – into Palance’s relentlessly bullish Prokosch.) Viewed this way it prods, questions, and provokes, leaving one in little doubt as to the realities of the compromises demanded by such an undertaking.

Godard was hardly an outlier in this regard – it is not difficult to find others opining to similar effect. Not least Fritz Lang, who, by the time he was playing a version of himself in Le Mépris, had long called the US home. Writing his own dialogue for the movie, in response to the poisoned chalice offered Paul, he remarks: “Some years ago – some horrible years ago – the Nazis used to take out a pistol instead of a checkbook.” And speaking later that decade in an interview with Sight & Sound (Summer 1967), he said: “Hollywood exists only to make money. I haven’t seen an American picture in years that I would like to see again.” Life imitating art – and vice versa.

Perhaps the key word there is art. Even more rarely associated with Hollywood’s output today than then, it is a reminder that even if some of his films weren’t entirely successful, they were, and remain, worth discussing and ruminating over, always. In them, Godard strove for more than most; he saw, and was dedicated to cinema as an art form, above all else.

Special Features include: Il était une fois… Le Mépris (52mn) on the Blu-ray UHD; An introduction by Colin MacCabe (6mn) UHD; Paparazzi by Jacques Rozier (22mn); and Le parti des choses by Jacques Rozier (10mn)

Mike Pinnington

Le Mépris (Contempt) is available now

“Fears of a ‘great awakening’ in which robots become self-aware and decide that humankind itself is the greatest threat to the planet are not new.” Nik Glover on the AI debate currently raging – not least in Hollywood…

At the end of the last century, public debate on both sides of the Atlantic was marked by moral panics relating to: drugs, AIDS, pornography, video games, and satanism (represented by Dungeons and Dragons). These terrors were out there, and they were trying to get into us.

All of these scares would find their way into our picture houses, some up to 30 years after they occurred. See 2021’s excellent Censor as evidence; a poisoned love letter to video nasties, it is worth anyone’s time.

Technophobic cinema has always existed; it just found new urgency via the mediums of broadcast signals and VHS. Videodrome (top, 1983) beamed a body-altering signal into our living rooms, an analog process of insemination that perfectly reflected the horrors of the Reagan decade. Taking the creeping Red Scare of the McCarthy years, and turning it into a faceless and remote antagonist even more mysterious and malignant, 80s horror cinema surveyed the wonders of science and asked the obvious question – what if it all goes wrong? It’s a question we find ourselves struggling with once again.

In the intervening years, what has changed in cinema, and in the world, since those early, simpler days? Today’s debate surrounding the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence resonates with cinema of the late 20th century – fears of a ‘great awakening’ in which robots become self-aware (albeit in a recognisably ‘human’ way) and decide that humankind itself is the greatest threat to the planet (The Matrix, 1999).

The contemporary debate is often seen in economic terms. What happens to all those writers, designers, visual artists, and other creatives when studios decide that handing their functions over to a reliable algorithm that can’t strike for better conditions is a better use of their resources? The current Writers Guild of America strike is in part attributed to concerns over programmes like ChatGPT being used to ‘strike break’ – filling in for pesky humans while they argue over money. The scenes of angry crowds attacking robots for taking away gainful employment in AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001) may not be as distant as we imagine.

So: where are we now? Programmes like ChatGPT need large data input to be able to replicate, with reasonable originality, story formulas. Would 100 years of Disney animation movies, books, and series be enough to come up with the next live-action Little Mermaid? Could you really see a situation where a Fast and Furious sequel, or a Disney live action remake, couldn’t be entirely scripted by AI?

Actors are already monetising their rights over the use of their voices for generations to come. Darth Vader will probably never be recast, even when the venerable James Earl Jones passes on. The actor reportedly signed over the rights to the use of his archival voice work to create dialogue for the inevitable future episodes, enabling Ukrainian tech start-up Respeecher to use AI to do just that. The National Association of Voice Actors has called for firmer regulation to sort the humans from the robots. As far back as 2000, Oliver Reed was digitally resurrected in Gladiator. Peter Cushing, Marlon Brando, and Carrie Fisher, among others, have since been reanimated in similar fashion. As Lister observes in Red Dwarf, death’s not the handicap it used to be.

Perhaps our modern concept of inspiration itself is at stake. There is a cynicism inherent in inventions like ChatGPT about what lies at the heart of human creativity, and where it aligns with simple productivity. The algorithm crawls through millions of lines of script to find patterns – connections between subjects, opinions, linguistic tropes, and renders new interpretations on any subject requested by the user. The result is therefore a collation of human inspiration, rather than an invention. Of course, it could be argued that the majority of cinema designed by humans arrives along the same lines. This echoes Mark Cousins’ argument in The Story of Film that Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) couldn’t exist without Lubitsch, Vidor, and Chaplin. This argument essentially draws on the Greek perception of inspiration, that it is a gift derived from higher beings, rather than the later concept that it is birthed from reactions to the world around us, or conflict within the unconsciousness of the artist – more immaculate conceptions.

The Age of the Uncanny

We all have foundational moments with art, and they are all rooted in our childhood. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was my formative experience of CGI – the too-smooth rendering that replaced the more endearingly performative stop motion animation, and actual puppetry. While this first encounter transformed audiences’ understanding of what could be achieved with CGI, it would not be long before lesser technicians would ground the technology once more. It’s just possible that an AI boom could be followed by bust for the same, very human reason – it’s incredibly easy to make Bad Things.

Because the 90s did not immediately represent the triumph of CGI. While James Cameron became its chief exponent and populariser (The Abyss, 1989; Titanic, 1997; Avatar, 2009), a legion of less judicious filmmakers decided that its possibilities were simply too exciting not to explore. The Langoliers (1995) is a curio for Stephen King completists only; unless you enjoy numbingly and distractingly poor computer graphics. Its depiction of plain-of-reality-devouring flying testicles with teeth is for the ages. It certainly can’t be said to reach uncanny valley, the liminal space between the recognisably artificial and convincingly human.

Things reached a head, ironically (or not), in 2001. Four years after Titanic had realistically depicted the world’s greatest ocean-going manifestation of hubris (at an astronomic cost), a slew of movies appeared which seemed to throw into question whether it had all been a fever dream. In the same year that Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings movie premiered, a litany of camp, poorly rendered visual effects feasts sloped into cinemas. The Mummy Returns, Spy Kids, and Pearl Harbour were hits. Evolution was not, although it’s well worth a watch.

Lord of the Rings was a watershed. Its computer-generated vistas and battle scenes (aided by incredible miniatures and makeup work) have been endlessly copied with diminishing returns ever since, particularly by Marvel, including in the recent and entirely unconvincing Ant-Man: Quantumania (2023). This, along with de-ageing technology, is probably the most pernicious result of the age of CGI. CGI doesn’t need AI to be bad, it just needs bad input.

Visual effects are one element that AI will undoubtedly influence – those endless lists of digital artists at the end of blockbusters might shrink in coming years – but the technology of automating the movie business goes far beyond our current perception of it. Actors, writers, and visual artists will all have to respond or risk losing human rights they didn’t even realise existed. The right to conceive stories. The right not to be resurrected. The right to innovate.

The Great Awakening

Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) posits a love affair between a human and an AI programme. Falling in love with – and out of control of – your own creation is as common a story trope as they come, from Frankenstein (above) to The Duke of Burgundy (2014).

The powers that be in the movie industry may be falling in love with the idea of automation as a way of cutting costs and increasing their power over the creatives, but what price inspiration? Audiences have long been prepared to accept stock themes and content; will they baulk at seeing a gone-but-not-forgotten star speaking rehashed versions of popular old clichés against CGI backgrounds?

Well, the second Avatar movie took over $2 billion dollars. Perhaps no one will notice much when the revolution comes.

Nik Glover

Images/media, from top: Videodrome still; Industrial Light & Magic; Frankenstein still

Trickster or sage? A film about father of video art Nam June Paik looks to bring his enduring genius to new audiences… 

It’s impossible to overstate the influence and importance of Korean artist Nam June Paik (1932–2006). In her first feature, subtitled Moon is the Oldest TV, director Amanda Kim lovingly traces and illustrates his story with no small degree of relish. No bells and/or whistles are spared. Actor Steven Yeun reads Paik’s own writings, while it is scored by non-other than Ryuichi Sakamoto. In addition, it benefits hugely – and Kim selects and organises judiciously – from some incredible access to what amounts to a deluge of footage.

From archive and specially recorded interviews, we are introduced to his widow, contemporaries, art historians, critics and family members, and shown how an encounter with John Cage changed the course of Paik’s life and led to an enduring friendship. (We learn, too, of the Kafkaesque nightmare Paik endured in childhood, in which he could speak Korean at home, but only Japanese once on the street.)

His country divided and a growing chasm opening up between him and his father, from privileged beginnings, in 1957 Paik bolted to West Germany, where he studied music, intending to become a professional composer. At that time, he said, he’d believed that “a few geniuses had fallen from the heavens, and they should be German or French.” Attending a performance by John Cage, in which he was one of the few in the audience who stayed until the end, “something strange happened.” 1957, Paik said, was BC: before Cage. “It was really very profound.” A leading figure in the post-war avant-garde, Cage gave the student license to push through boundaries – “the license to be free” as he put it.

Realising then that he “wanted to carve out a different path” he bought a TV – then advanced technology – and opened up the back. He became inspired to be a TV artist. But this freedom, what for Paik is a kind of vocation, really, comes at a cost. His early experiments in art actions are misunderstood, or worse, seen as a kind of side show. But he perseveres – what else can he do? He joins the recently founded international, multi-disciplinary artist saboteur group Fluxus, and we follow his onward journey to the US, where he arrives in 1964 with an ever-multiplying collection of TVs.

Although he wasn’t famous, or even “New York famous”, as someone puts it, he is becoming both well-known and respected in this burgeoning multimedia field. “Successful artists, they impoverish their output by concentrating on marketable style. For me,” Paik said, “it was experiment for experiment… Newness is more important that beauty.” But pioneering vocations don’t pay the bills. He is an artist working in a medium that as yet has no market. We watch, aghast, as he humbly writes letters, asking for money. Paltry amounts to get by, to be able to buy some groceries. On the brink of defeat, and considering leaving America behind, he receives funding in the form of a grant from the Rockefeller foundation, to work in studios with then cutting-edge tech.

He declares that he wants to “shape the TV screen canvas.” As he put it:

As precisely as Leonardo

As freely as Picasso

As colorfully as Renoir

As profoundly as Mondrian

As violently as Pollock and

As lyrically as Jasper Johns

After his time on the metaphorical breadline, it’s genuinely thrilling to be privy to Paik grasping the opportunity to fulfil his visionary ambitions. And to see his prescience clearly demonstrated with projects like Global Groove, a hectic collage of sound and image that bears no little resemblance to our experience of today’s media saturated reality. In Good Morning Mr Orwell, meanwhile, he outlines his belief in the idea that technology, harnessed positively, can cross boundaries, reaching audiences (via satellite) including in Korea and behind the iron curtain, demonstrating his duty to disrupt on behalf of optimism.

But, just like a dodgy old satellite TV feed, it has its share of blind spots. Rarely does Kim dwell to fully contextualise or bask in the profundity of Paik’s work. What, I wonder, will audiences new to Paik glean as they watch him repeatedly attack his piano; traipse through streets with a violin trailing behind him (as bemused, largely disinterested crowds pass by); or sticks his head in a pot of smoosh. More Chaplinesque trickster than sage? It fails, too, to properly situate him in his milieu of provocateurs. Perhaps the problem is a result of assumed knowledge on Kim’s part. Or preaching to the converted. Jonas Mekas, Merce Cunningham and others pop up with nary an introduction, mentioned in the same breath are the likes of Allen Ginsberg.

Those of a certain age or the necessary grounding in the flurry of cultural connotations flying rapidly before them will be on steady ground, but everyone else will have to intuit or take for granted their significance. Unlike contemporaries such as Andy Warhol (who, strangely, doesn’t warrant a single mention in the film’s run time), household names these are not.

Amid such oversights, however, there remains more than enough to recommend Kim’s polished if conventional film. It is at its best when profiling and adding biographical flesh to the bones of this singular artist. It is unflinching as we hear of his financial dire straits, and later, his failing health owing to a stroke. And it is ebullient in conveying Paik’s belief that TV – and other technologies – shouldn’t necessarily produce passive audiences. “I think talking back is what democracy means.” For Paik, then, it’s not as Marshall McLuhan asserted, that the medium is the message; the medium is simply the medium, to be done with as we choose.

An aside: by luck or judgement, the film’s release coincides nicely with the V&A’s Hallyu!, a major exhibition celebrating and showcasing the Korean Wave. Exploring South Korea’s contribution to global popular culture – from cinema, drama and music, to fandom, beauty and fashion – one is in no doubt that the enduring genius of Nam June Paik played its part.

Mike Pinnington

Nam June Paik: Moon Is The Oldest TV is in cinemas and available to stream now

How could seeing an exhibition at the cinema compare to the real thing? Mike Pinnington on why the two needn’t be mutually exclusive experiences…

Something strange has been happening at cinemas of late. A film of an exhibition has been doing serious business at the box office. The film in question is Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition. Now, the company behind this success story, Exhibition on Screen, has another release: Tokyo Stories (based on a 2021/22 exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum).

Not so long ago I’d been more than a bit sceptical about the prospect experiencing an exhibition at this remove. I mean, how could it compare to being there? Does it even count? But much of my scepticism fell away after a screening of the film of a show I wouldn’t otherwise have got to see: the V&A’s David Bowie is.

Mediated by a screen, the quality of experience is altogether different. A film can’t hope to replicate the experience of standing, for as long as you like, in front of an artwork, to really breathe in the details, the colour, the beauty. But what it can do is introduce other, additional, elements. This includes taking us behind the scenes of exhibitions, to meet curators, gallerists and, crucially, artists themselves. We can hear directly from them about their own stories, their relationships with materials, genre, medium, place, the inspirations behind their work.

So it is with Tokyo Stories, a film that treats the megalopolis as a lens through which to explore Japanese art. It takes us beyond the immediate touchstones of manga, woodblock prints of Hokusai’s great wave, kabuki, sumo, and cherry blossoms, to reveal – via some key contributions – a city still considered by many to be so unknowably alien.

For iconic photographer Daidō Moriyama, “Tokyo”, in particular Shinjuku, “is a stadium of desire.”

Study it for long enough and desire, as well as a plethora of other things, will be found in the incredible Tokyo diorama of Sohei Nishino, who explains: “The importance of this work is that the Tokyo I see is important for its historical value, happening in a truly universal moment.” Elaborating, and getting to the nub of the richly textured image, he says that his work “is based on reconstructing the memory of experience.”

Of course, an unavoidable aspect of memory and experience for Japan, is the Second World War and the terrible traumas wrought by that conflict. The work of Tanaami Keiichi takes in the wartime of his childhood and the post-war influences that flooded Japan, especially from the US. “The most shocking thing for me were the air raids,” he poignantly recalls; in his pop infused works you can clearly see such tensions at play.

By contrast, in the absurdist photography and sculpture of Mohri Yuko, we see the comical and haphazard side of Tokyo. Her ongoing Moré Moré Tokyo (Leaky Tokyo) – fieldwork, 2009 – documents and takes inspiration from the often ad hoc, idiosyncratic looking repair jobs she began to spot on Tokyo’s underground. “Once, when I was walking through a train station, I saw a bucket in a completely unexpected place, and I wondered why it was there.”

Photographer Ninagawa Mika, meanwhile, addresses in her work a global rather than local issue. “I think that the idealised image of women has probably not fundamentally changed. People are starting to talk loudly about the need to improve the status of women. I think that is a good thing; but I don’t feel may things have improved on a daily basis. There was a time when I was making artwork driven by that anger.”

For artist collective Chim↑Pom: “It’s like we are hanging out on Earth, in Tokyo… The city of Tokyo itself is extremely destructive. Buildings are physically torn down, scrapped and built over again. I think the city of Tokyo can only be seen through destruction and creation.”

Through these and other voices Tokyo Stories tells the many intertwining narratives of the city; to contradict clichés, add to our understanding, exceed our wildest expectations, lifting a veil on what previously may have seemed impenetrable. Exhibitions on screen cannot replace the experience of visiting a gallery or museum; but as long as they understand that this isn’t their job, they can offer valuable complementary encounters with art and artists.

Mike Pinnington

See Exhibition on Screen: Tokyo Stories 23 May @ FACT Liverpool

Images, from top: Exhibition on Screen: Tokyo Stories poster; Untitled by Moriyama Daidō © Moriyama Daidō, courtesy Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, Tokyo; Detail of Sohei Nishino Tokyo Diorama, 2014 © Sohei Nishino; Tanaami Keiichi in Tokyo ® David Bickerstaff; Tokyo from Utsurundesu Series by Ninagawa Mika, 2018 © Ninagawa Mika, courtesy the artist and Tomio Koyama Gallery

“They burned with brilliant intensity; an intensity that couldn’t be sustained.” Mike Pinnington on The Velvet Underground, and how a new Criterion Collection release captures their story alongside the hyperbole…

In his expansive biography of the band, author Victor Bockris cites a 1978 RCA press release, describing The Velvet Underground’s key themes as “perversity, desperation and death.” It’s a well-worn take, one which, even by that time had lapsed into something combining both cliché and legend. To this day, what precedes The Velvet Underground most is their reputation – one made in the maelstrom of Warhol’s mid-late 1960s Factory era New York, and then shortly thereafter muddled by personality clashes, ego and acrimony. They burned with brilliant intensity; an intensity that couldn’t be sustained.

They are, for good reason, one of the most mythologised bands of their generation – perhaps of all time. As Joe Harvard writes in his book regarding their debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico: “Any survey that concerns itself with rock as it is now played tends to place them in the top two or three [most influential bands of all time]”. How to capture their story today, so that their essence, influence – and astounding, transcendent sound – are given room alongside the hyperbole?

Director Todd Haynes has had a very good stab at it, producing a richly layered love letter to the band; it reflects on and appropriates from the era, using avant-garde techniques as well as archival footage. Andy Warhol, whose genius for spotting and guiding talent (usually to his own ends, it must be noted), looms large. Like Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Haynes’ film weaves a visually – and it goes without saying, aurally – compelling multi-media tapestry of the times that helped produce the VU.

But it is strong on context, too. Using a split screen structure and employing Warhol screen tests to great effect, we learn of viola playing John Cale’s classical musician training and, declaring “I had to get out of the valleys”, his subsequent departure to North America from Wales. Meanwhile, in Long Island, Doo Wop loving Lou Reed drifts from lower middle-class obscurity to the tutelage and nurture of poet and mentor Delmore Schwartz – via the electro-shock treatment he endured aged seventeen. In this unfolding manner we hear how guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker were added to the band, which would make, as Cale puts it, a “weirdness [that] shouldn’t have existed in this space.”

Chronologically structured as it may be, the film never feels procedural. Setting the scene for the New York which the Velvets would come to embody and soundtrack, we hear from Jonas Mekas, the iconoclastic cinephile who would pave the way for underground American film and, not insignificantly, introduce Warhol to singer and model Nico. Referring to the creative landscape he helped sculpt, Mekas declares (with no little triumph), “We are not part of the subculture, or counterculture; we are the culture!”

Via Cale, Mekas, and additional commentary from the band’s other surviving member Moe Tucker, as well as Lou Reed’s younger sister Merrill Reed Weiner, actor Mary Woronov, writer Amy Taubin and minimalist composer La Monte Young, we are treated to a kaleidoscopic primer for time and place. Some of the most powerful and resonant commentary is provided by The Modern Lovers’ founder Jonathan Richman who, as a teenager, found in the music of Reed, Cale, Tucker and Morrison a deep affinity.

In an interview included on the recent Blu-ray release (where aficionados and completists alike will find much satisfaction), Richman recounts how he wasn’t so much a fan of the band as he was a student. Said with guitar in his lap: “The sound that they made helped me learn who I was,” and that their music showed him “how to live”. Finally, tears now visibly welling up in his eyes: “My last word on the Velvet Underground, and all the people connected with them, is this one: GRATITUDE.”

Fittingly, Haynes’ tribute to The Velvet Underground could be considered the last word on the band. The director has made a film of reverence and distinction that will delight and illuminate fan and student alike.

Mike Pinnington

The Velvet Underground Blu-ray is available now via Criterion Collection