Avenue Kurtodrome

Les Nuits Botanique offers a unique concept in Belgium: it’s a festival (in Brussels) that lasts a fortnight and allows lots of bands to appear in one of the venue’s rooms. There’s the Orangerie (the regular room), the Rotonde (a smaller and round room) and the Chapiteau, a big tent outside of the premises, just next to the majestical gardens. Tickets are valid for one room, which keeps the festival quite cheap: on average you’ll get to see three bands for 10 to 20 euro. And occasionally, Les Nuits Botanique raises the ticket price and opens all the rooms. In 2008 they did this for the line-up of May 9. For just under 25 euros you could watch I’m From Barcelona, Chrome Hoof, Minus, Get Well Soon, We Are Scientists, Two Gallants, V.O., Of Montreal, Blood Red Shoes, Timesbold, Nestor, The Germans and Forward Russia. We didn’t need that much incentive to get our asses to Belgium’s capital. Here’s an impression.

Two years ago ¡Forward, Russia! blew me away on Pukkelpop. Their concert may have been uneven, but the only way to describe the song Thirteen was “sheer brilliance”. Thirteen was the opening track of the album Give Me A Wall, which also contained the tracks Twelve, Fifteen (part 1), Nine, Nineteen… yes, the band didn’t bother to give their songs a name, they were named chronologically. So “Thirteen”, despite being the first track of the album, was the 13th song the band ever wrote. A gimmick for sure, but not as annoying as most of them.
Two years later the band has a new album, Life Processes, and decided there’s nothing wrong with giving a name to a song. (Suppose the band wouldn’t give up that trick and would even go as far as to name their children One, Two etc.) Last.fm allowed you to listen to the album before it arrived in the stores and my first conclusion was that the album had to do without mind-blowing tracks like Thirteen. Life Processes also contains a couple of songs that didn’t need to be on the album, but the hit and miss style of Give Me A Wall at least enabled the band to come up with excellent hits.
Add to this Tom Headwood’s peculiar vocals and you can understand why ¡Forward, Russia! annoys a lot of people. For my money, as long as they can come up with the occasional brilliant track I’ll love them. Hey, despite the uneven concert I even bought a T-shirt, mainly because it’s a beautiful shirt, but also because I want to believe there’s a future for a band like this. Even if a band’s member is called Whiskas (no really). Let’s hope there will be more tracks like Thirteen that are still on your MP3-player two years after the release (don’t worry band, I legally purchase my MP3s on eMusic and 7Digital). Let’s hope they don’t always feel the need to show off (occasionally that got in the way of the concert and the quality of the vocals). But let us believe for now…

Up next: the toughest choice. Of Montreal, Blood Red Shoes or Timesbold. Since Timesbold took longer to get started, my maths told me that if I went to Blood Red Shoes first, I could still get a large slice of Timesbold afterwards (well, if Blood Red Shoes were on time). They were. On stage just two people, Laura-Mary Carter and Steven Ansell. Steven’s conversations with the public were often kept at “Merci!” and the occasional word in French even some of the francophones near me couldn’t understand. Laura-Mary had apparently made a promise to herself not to look at the audience too much. Still, they promised themselves to rock’n'roll and that’s what they did. The concert was poignant even though it never became excellent and half of the songs sounded exactly like they did on the record. So at times you could’ve just stayed at home and played the album in random order, but you wouldn’t get to see these two young people who made an album on their own terms after touring the country from tiny venue to tinier venue and who were suddenly catapulted into stardom. Well, stardom… a lot of people were still unaware of the duo’s existence. Here’s to hoping their concert at Pukkelpop later this year will change them. For now, the record convinced me more than their live performance, but what a wonderful record Box of Secrets is.

Over to Timesbold. Definitely not the best concert of this band I’d seen, but then again, their concert at the AB a couple of years ago was extraordinarily good. I’m not sure whether the band had an off-day or if it was the room that bothered them. Timesbold admit they’re not the most professional band in the world and it’s always nice to see them have another technical problem (during which Jason Merritt will tell another story, funny and/or cringe-worthy). The Rotonde is, as mentioned before, a smaller room and very much round. This makes a lot of the concerts quite intimate. I’m not sure Timesbold like being so naked, surrounded by audience. A dark room with the audience in front of them becomes them better. Nevertheless, people who didn’t know the band might have picked up on the band’s greatness even if Timesbold had to do without it. Said someone in the audience: I can believe they’re very good, just not today.

Is it a concert? Is it a talkshow? It’s We Are Scientists. Whereas Blood Red Shoes managed to utter only twelve words during the entire concert, We Are Scientists said enough between two songs to fill a complete novel. I had no idea how popular this band was until I went inside the tent. Are they good? Well, they’re certainly not bad, but I tend to prefer bands that let the music speak (rather than egos).

Which is why I let myself glide off to Two Gallants, appearing at the same time in the Orangerie. That room is a lot bigger than the Rotonde and it seemed as if Adam Stephens and Tyson Vogel felt a bit intimidated. Their Wikipedia entry labels them an indie rock band, but don’t be fooled by that: much of this concert proved the band also liked their concerts lo-fi and intimate. Add to this large technical issues on which plug needs to go where or tracks that may be classified as background music and you may understand why I felt a bit disappointed.

I confess I didn’t know Chrome Hoof, but I’ve never understood why I’m From Barcelona is so popular (especially not after last year’s concert at Pukkelpop, which a lot of people seemed to like but I hated). And some genius had decided to cancel the last train to Antwerp, so it was either hoping Chrome Hoof would be excellent enough to spend the entire night in Brussels waiting for the morning train home or going home earlier and enjoy cocktails with a couple of friends. I don’t think I need to tell you what my decision was, let’s hope the clue my review ends here is sufficient enough.

TOP 3 CONCERTS:
1. Blood Red Shoes
2. Timesbold
3. ¡Forward, Russia!

I was talking to a manager of my local cinema the other day and he told me that last year one of the projectors didn’t want to start working. The movie was INLAND EMPIRE and it took ten minutes before someone thought it may not be the director’s intention to start the movie with ten minutes of a black screen.

Ah, the things you can do to an arthouse crowd…

Another example: Who Wants To Kill Jessie? played in Brussels last year and had it not been for the fact that the subtitles were also shown upside down noone would’ve complained that the movie was projected the wrong way.

Watching quiz shows can be interesting: a Flemish knowledge quiz once asked the question what the first words in “The Jazz Singer” were:

a. You ain’t heard nothing yet
b. A hard man is good to find.
c. Are you talking to me?

… but much more important was the introduction to the question. It told us “The Jazz Singer” (1927) was not the first film with sound. The Germans were first in 1922 with a film called “Der Brandstifter”. It wasn’t a success, unlike “The Jazz Singer”, which is why that film is now seen as the first movie with sound.

Okay, it’s an odd subject for this silent section, but on the other hand it still took the cinema a few years to incorporate sound and vision.

So back to “Der Brandstifter”. I had never heard of this film (not even in books about film history), so I wanted to share this piece of information.

I found some info on it: “In 1922 the FIRST sound-on-film was presented at the Alhambra Kino in Berlin before an audience of 1000 people who had been invited to watch films made by the Tri-Ergon process. It was called Der Brandstifter (The Arsonist) and Erwin Baron played seven of the nine parts.”

In 1922, the Tri-Ergon Light-Tone process, which inscribes sound as a light track on the edge of filmstrips, is first presented in Berlin and becomes in its time one of the leading sound-movie techniques. The name Tri-Ergon refers to its three inventors: Vogt, Massolle und Engl. (Media Art Net)

I dug up some more info on the Tri-Ergon process, but that’s in German:

Das Tri-Ergon-Lichtton Verfahren Im Rahmen einer Matinee wird im Berliner Alhambra- Lichtspieltheater am 17. September 1922 der Film “Der Brandstifter” uraufgeführt. Er ist der erste Spielfilm mit integrierter Lichttonspur. Die Erfinder der neuartigen, ‘Tri-Ergon’ genannten Systems sind die deutschen Ingenieure Hans Vogt, Jo Benedict Engl und Joseph Massolle, die von der Radiotechnik zum Film gekommen sind.

Ihr neues Verfahren ermöglichte eine zeitliche Übereinstimmung von Bild und Ton und geht damit weit über die u.a. von Oskar Meßter und Léon Gaumont entwickelten Methode der Koppelung von Filmprojektor und Grammophon hinaus.

Das Tri-Ergon-Verfahren beruht auf dem Prinzip der Umwandlung von Schallwellen in elektrische Impulse, die wiederum in eine Lichtspur transformiert und so auf dem Filmtonstreifen festgehalten werden. Beim Abspielen werden dann die auf dem Filmband festgehaltenen Signale in elektrische Impulse zurück verwandelt, die ihrerseits die schallerzeugendie Membrane zum Schwingen bringen.

Die Filmproduzenten sind zu diesem Zeitpunkt jedoch nicht an dem Verfahren interessiert, weniger aus technischen als vielmehr aus künstlerischen Gründen. Tatsächlich kann sich der “tönende Film” aus diesem Grund noch nicht durchsetzen.

A site called Film Sound History explains the Tri-Ergon process:

Three German inventors, Josef Engl, Hans Vogt, and Josef Engl patented the “Tri Ergon” process. In 1922, Tri-Ergon announced the development of a glow lamp light modulator for variable density recording of sound. The Tri Ergon Process uses a technology known as variable density, which differed from a later process known as variable area. The Tri Ergon process had a pattented flywheel mechanism on a sprocket which prevented variations in film speed. This flywheel helped prevent distortion of the audio. Tri Ergon relied on the use of a photo-electric cell to transduce mechanical sound vibrations into electrical waveforms and then convert the electrical waveforms into light waves. These light waves could then be optically recorded onto the edge of the film through a photographic process. Another photo-electric cell could then be used to tranduce the waveform on the film into an electrical waveform during projection. This waveform could then be amplified and played to the audience in the Theater.

A friend of mine asked me if I could buy the Werewolves on Wheels DVD for him. I duly obliged.

Werewolf on Wheels may be far from what one’d call a successful movie, but there was a genuine oddness to it that kept me from hating it when I’d watched it years ago.
Tending to check freshly arrived DVDs (nothing more irritating than finding out a DVD you bought months ago isn’t working), I unwrapped the DVD and checked it.

The DVD menu worked properly and within no time I’d found out there was a commentary track available. I chose the commentary as my audio option and pressed ‘play’. The movie started playing and suddenly I was watching an entirely different version of Werewolves on Wheels.

The audio commentary by writer and director Michael Levesque and writer David M. Kaufman is more than enlightening.
If you want to understand Werewolves on Wheels, you’ll need to watch the movie with its commentary track on.

Werewolves on Wheels scores an abysmal 2.3 at the IMDb. The movie focuses on a group of bikers who are strolling on the grounds of a satanist cult. A biker girl finds herself taken to a black mass ritual and before you know it, she’s dancing with snakes. That’s when the bikers notice her absence and they try and rescue the girl from the satanists’ clutches. Which doesn’t go as well as they’d anticipated. Sure, they can butcher some satanists, but they end up being cursed. Some of them end up being werewolves at night. I wonder how this will end…

What is Werewolves on Wheels? It’s a biker movie with horror elements. The title may confuse you into believing it’s a werewolf movie, but it’s more of an occult movie. That you won’t see a lot of werewolves until the very end of the movie, has everything to do with the movie’s budget. While they were still shooting the movie they heard that they wouldn’t get the estimated days needed for shooting the movie and the director had to wrap the movie up at a faster pace, dropping several scenes they didn’t have time for.

But the movie, once it was finished, was still too long for the MPAA, who wanted to give the movie an X rating unless certain scenes were cut partially or completely. They found the movie much too gory and blasphemous.
If Werewolves on Wheels doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, this is partially why. The movie as it was shown was miles away from what had been intended. Different versions were made for different countries. At the end there were so many the director said: “It’s as if every time I see the movie I end up seeing a different version.”
The DVD version is a bliss: not only has the movie been cleaned so the night scenes look a lot better now (previous versions featured lovely nocturnal scenes with floating flames, because the movie was so dark you could hardly see that bikers were holding torches), some scenes are also restored. No explanation is given as to why not more of the cut scenes were shown in this DVD version. I guess we must assume they were lost or destroyed. Hey, it was the early seventies and things like that happened. Just ask the people involved with The Wicker Man.

The audio commentary track confesses that the props used in the movie were real. And by props they meant the liquor and drugs. Which doesn’t mean people were constantly wasted, but the only people who stayed off all the substances were the director, the assistant director and the cameraman (something we should be grateful for). That did help the movie initially by creating a sort of bond between the actors. In fact, when some of the actors were killed, they insisted they wanted to hang around the crew until the movie was completed (rather than going home) because the atmosphere on the set had grown into something magical.
This camaradery is visible when you’re watching the movie. It’s one of the biggest advantages of the movie.

The audio commentary is also full of fun trivia: the tarot cards used in the movie were made by the prop team of the movie because they didn’t want a company asking them money for using their brand of tarot cards.

And so an audio commentary changed a movie from an acceptable 80 minutes of mindless pleasure into something else. You’ll get a more wholesome feeling when you’re watching the movie. You’ll still notice that there are a bunch of plotholes in the movie, but you’ll know whether it was the team messing up or whether it was because a related scene had to be cut. If you want a biker cult movie, I’d still recommend Psychomania any day, but there’s something to Werewolves on Wheels: its lack of budget to create a lot of werewolves, its anything-goes attitude, its sheer weirdness… in a way, this is a great example of early 70s cult movies.
Substandard in some ways, essential in many others.

The DVD was released by Dark Sky Movies. The extras include an audio Commentary with Michael Levesque and David M. Kaufman, a photo gallery, radio spots and theatrical trailers (incl. The Losers).

Gotcha! is one of those movies most people forgot, but one they easily remember when you mention the title. It’s a typical product of the Eighties: corny, as subtle as concrete, lots of spies and plenty of sex (especially in the dialogues).

Jonathan Moore (Anthony Edwards) goes to Europe for the summer holidays and meets an intriguing woman (Linda Fiorentino) who is actually (can you guess it?) a spy! She seduces him (not that difficult) and gets him to accompany her to East-Berlin (which is Eastern-Europe and that means… oh my God, the Russians!).

Not good there, go back to West-Berlin and the Freedom.

The first thing Jonathan Moore does when he’s back on the Good Side is visit Burger King where he orders “a large American burger with large American fries” and of course a tasty American cola. (Well, actually the first thing he does is raise his middle finger to East-Berlin, an act that makes an American soldier whisper “I wanted to do that for the last six months”.)

But how could this movie know that five years later down would go the Berlin Wall? When Gotcha! was made we were all in the middle of Star Wars (not the epic plan by George Lucas, but the big-budget movie by Ronald Reagan).

Yes, Gotcha is dumb, but still entertaining (apart from the dull first half hour).

Rémy Belvaux died Monday night near Paris (where he was living). Belvaux got instant fame for directing the Belgian cult movie C’est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog). In later years Belvaux worked mainly as a director of commercials. He died suddenly at the age of 39.

Writing an essential book on someone’s work isn’t easy, so you can expect how hellish it must have been to write an essential guide to horror films. Oh, and could you do that in 95 pages? Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell did it.
Such a work is bound to be incomplete: how can you compile 105 years in 95 pages? Well, first and foremost by starting at the Twenties and ending with the Nineties. For every decade, they made an introduction and then reviewed three movies that were saying something about their decade.
This is of course not enough and that is why Le Blanc and Odell also dissected the works of ten horror auteurs. After an introduction, two or three movies got a close examination.

That could still be a initiative that sounds well, yet falls flat on its face when executed. Le Blanc and Odell, however, didn’t fall into that trap. Almost every important auteur is mentioned in this booklet: if they were not one of the lucky ten, one of their works could have been mentioned in one of the decades (and with every reviewed movie you learn a bit more about the director or the studio). If that wasn’t the case either, they probably got mentioned in one of the introductions to the decades.

The problem I have with this guide is the errors they make. Mind you, this is a personal work, so if they feel that most Italian directors like Bava or Freda were nothing more than cheap imitators, then that’s their opinion. A wrong opinion, but an opinion nevertheless. They certainly have no sympathy for Lucio Fulci, he gets the harshest verdict: a complete loser, only capable of stealing ideas or showing mutilated bodies.
Well if they feel that way about him, then that’s their problem. But I think they should at least have tried to spell the director’s name correctly. He is mentioned three times as “Fulchi”.

There are more stupid errors: “Lucio Fulci’s [spelled correctly for a change] notorious Zombie Flesh Eaters was even marketed as Zombi 2 in some quarters to cash in on Dawn of the Dead’s continental title.” (p. 68) Could you get further from the truth? It might seem to the English that the whole of Europe is an unimportant mess of countries, but in fact Dawn of the Dead was only marketed as Zombi in Italy. Fulci is Italian, which explains why he chose the title Zombi 2 (the films are unrelated however) for his movie. So Zombi 2 is the official title of Fulci’s movie and the film was only called Zombie Flesh Eaters in America and England.
Likewise, I have problems with “[after Nosferatu Murnau] would go on to direct Faust (1926), [...] before moving on to non-genre projects.” (p. 14) Murnau made non-genre projects before Faust and even before Nosferatu.

But if you would the number of errors from the number of times Le Blanc and Odell tell you vital information, you’ll still have to conclude that for 95 pages and £3, this is a booklet worthy of your money. Before I leave you, I would like you to check the films and directors mentioned in Horror Films:

Twenties: The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Haxan, The Phantom of the Opera
Thirties/Forties: King Kong, The Ghoul, Dead of Night
Fifties: The Quatermass Experiment, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Les Yeux sans Visage
Sixties: Peeping Tom, The Masque of the Red Death, Rosemary’s Baby
Seventies: Theater of Blood, The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Eighties: Evil Dead, The Thing, Spoorloos
Nineties: Braindead, Dust Devil, The Blair Witch Project
Tod Browning: Dracula, Freaks
James Whale: Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, Bride of Frankenstein
Val Lewton (producer): Cat People, The Body Snatcher, Bedlam
Terence Fisher: The Mummy, The Curse of the Werewolf, Dracula: Prince of Darkness
George A. Romero: Night of the Living Dead, Martin, Dawn of the Dead
Dario Argento: Deep Red, Suspiria, Inferno
David Cronenberg: Shivers, The Fly, Dead Ringers
Joe Dante: Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins
Wes Craven: A Nightmare on Elm Street, The People Under The Stairs, Scream
Clive Barker: Hellraiser, Nightbreed, Lord of Illusions

And if that’s not enough, at the end of the book you’ll find 50 other films certainly worth seeing. I guess you know what to do know.

Horror Films by LeBlanc and Odell is part of the Pocket Essentials collection. They’re cheap and concise guides to directors, genres and subgenres.

I confess I don’t own a lot of movie books. I often find them too specialized. Mark Cousins wrote The Story of Film, a brave attempt to talk about all the movies made from 1895 to now, not just from Hollywood and the UK, but also from Europe, Asia and Africa.
The question is, can one book explain the entire history of cinema? And can Cousins write that book?

The answer:The Story of Film by Mark Cousins is an incredible read. £19 is a lot of money, but it’s not wasted on this heavy book.

The big problem with the book is that Cousins (film critic, producer and the second host of Moviedrome) can be a bit full of himself, but make no mistake, this man knows a lot about film.
He was asked to write a book in one volume about the history of cinema. The book is approximately 500 pages long and it’s well-written and highly informative.
Cousins doesn’t just focus on Western cinema, but also mentions Indian and African cinema. Of course he can’t write about everybody in just 500 pages, so he only wrote about those directors that had an effect on other directors.
While some favourites of yours may not have made it (and indeed he doesn’t mention B Cinema that much), this book has told me more about cinema than I’ve read in dozens of other works about film.

Cousins explained his choice as follows: if A makes a new form of cinema and other directors (B-H) follow him, Cousins’ll briefly mention B,C,D,E,F,G and H after talking about A.
If, however, director E was directly influenced by the work of A and took those ideas a step further, Cousins will mainly talk about A and E.

He also divided his book into the three most important periods of film:
A. Silent Cinema
B. Sound Cinema (1928-1990)
C. Digital Cinema (1990-now)
Why? Because there have been lots of changes in cinema’s history, but these three are the most important changes of them all. First they learned how to make still move, then sound was added and from the nineties onwards digital effects were good enough to add something to the cinema we already knew and liked.

Within those three chapters Cousins skips flawlessly from continent to continent, making you feel inadequate about the small size of your video library.

As an added plus, the book is full with beautiful stills and photographs (more than 300) and they’re a joy to look at.

But not all is well: the book’s editor was sloppy and left quite a few spelling mistakes in the book. Plus, Cousins occasionally has it wrong (the first time is on page 8 when he says DVD stands for Digital Video Disk - when in fact the V stands for Versatile).
But if you’d like to correct the man on his knowledge of directors, you’ll have a much tougher time.

When nearing and reaching the era of digital cinema Cousins does tend to become a bit more personal in his choices. Then again, it’s always hard to write history and his choice of who’s becoming the first director genius is as good as mine.

Is this a perfect book? No, but such a book will never be written. Is this a book that does an astonishing job in reviewing the most influential and important cinema of the first 110 years? Definitely.
Let those who think they can do better, try it. We’ll see who’ll have the last laugh.

Mark Cousins
The Story of Film
suggested price: £25 (hardcover), £10 (softcover)

The book has also been published in the US (by Thunder’s Mouth Press), but you’ll have to get used to the horrible cover. A Spanish translation has also been made.

Preceded by the warning that “this film was transferred with the best available elements which unfortunately don’t measure up to Anchor Bay’s usually high standards” Anchor Bay set themselves up for a lot of ridicule on Amazon’s site.

There’s also a fierce debate as to whether “Season of the Witch” is anamorphic widescreen or hard-matted. Sadly, I have no idea what I’ve just written.
Nevertheless, ever since Mr Lustig left Anchor Bay and started up his own company (Blue Underground), Anchor Bay seems to have taken a tendency to release DVDs of lesser quality.

Is the Season of the Witch a major improvement on the VHS edition? Apparently not ‘major’, but don’t let a bunch of American VHS owners confuse you: in the past years I’ve only seen ONE non-US VHS tape of this film, so it’s pretty hard to track down. Also, if you don’t live in the US your VCR has to play the movie on NTSC playback (which also loses a bit of quality).

Furthermore, “Season of the Witch” is not necessarily the most important reason you’ll buy this DVD release. The DVD also features “There’s Always Vanilla”, a very rare Romero movie (which was never released before).
Now where Anchor Bay could’ve done a better job on “Season” itself, you’ll have to understand that with a movie as rare as “Vanilla” it’ll be hard to get an awesome copy. We’re now talking about a source that’s as easily available as the Turkish heroic movies Mondo Macabro has released last year.

And that’s not all: the DVD release also has a trailer for “Season of the Witch”, a different opening for “Season” (released as “Hungry Wives”), a trailer for “Hungry Wives”, the Romero episode in the AFI Directors series and a featurette called “The ‘Lost’ movies of Romero” where the director talks about his work.

So, to summarize, did we get a crispy new transfer of “Season of the Witch”? No. Did Anchor Bay somehow redeem themselves? Yes, by releasing “There’s Always Vanilla” and tons of extras they did. However, they know as well as I that this release would be purchased for the extras alone, so they probably thought they didn’t need to spend money on getting a perfect transfer for “Season of the Witch”. We’ll let this pass just this one time, okay guys? Next time… bad review!

As for the movie, if you also think that “Martin” was one of the better Romeros, check out “Season of the Witch”. It’s not as good (but still good) and a very interesting case study. And if “Season” isn’t your thing, hey, there’s always vanilla!

You should’ve known I would end with that pun.