Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s.
Much has been made of Iceman’s characters speaking the ancient Rhaetic dialect, unsubtitled, but that’s never a problem: Felix Randau’s no-frills revenge thriller doesn’t need any words. The juiciest bits of dialogue are the various grunts and shrieks uttered by the protagonist Kelab (Juergen Vogel).
The end-of-season contemporary writing slot at the Globe must be a proposal as full of promise for playwrights as it is perhaps intimidating.
I admit it took me a while to give myself permission to do this project. We English are very squeamish about altering Shakespeare. Our cousins in Germany thrive on radical undoings of our scared son, but we cross our arms and say no.
Underground Railroad Game is scabrous theatre – in every sense. To start with, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard’s two-hander is as down and dirty as anything you’ll find on the London stage at the moment, with one sex scene that’s belly laugh-out-loud funny, another which creates a silence of unease that chills the house.
For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting precisely those films that most of the rest of us delight in, the ones from the first decade or so of his career. From his debut Breathless in 1960, through the likes of Vivre sa vie, Contempt, Alphaville and Pierrot le fou – what an astonishingly prolific time it was for him – they practically constitute a roll call of the Nouvelle Vague.
Hazanavicius logs into the action in 1967, with the director (played by Louis Garrel) finishing La Chinoise with Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin). It was the year of their marriage, the two decades that separated the couple in age – she was still a student, but had already starred in his Weekend, too – proving no barrier to their love. Hazanavicius based his script on Wiazemsky’s roman à clef recollection of the period, Un an après, though he is on record that he emphasised the adaptation’s elements of comedy (something that Wiazemsky, then at the end of her life, was apparently very happy about).
La Chinoise did not go down well with audiences – we see walk-outs and napping at its premiere – while the screening at the Chinese embassy was even worse: expecting to be received with open arms by the Maoists with whom Godard was becoming increasingly involved, it was rejected as a “piece of shit”. But with the Evènements of May 1968 underway, politics was coming out onto the streets of Paris and into the lecture halls of the Sorbonne.
These are big set pieces that are beautifully recreated here. Godard's presence at the street protests is ironically marked by the recurring joke of how he breaks his glasses over and over again in the demonstrations (a nice late line in Stacy Martin’s voice-over suggests that it was the rising optician costs that finally stopped him joining them). More significantly, he was rejected by the student protestors, not least for arguing, in relation to Palestine, that the “Jews are the new Nazis” (plus ça change...). Intent on changing his creative direction, Godard was flummoxed by people coming up to him to ask why he wasn’t making movies like Breathless anymore (even a policeman, after a fracas, confesses how much he loved Contempt).
Losing his sense of humour in parallel with the lightness of that earlier work, Godard becomes increasingly narcissistic and his contretemps with Anna increase. There's an excursion to the South, during the days when Godard and fellow protestors were instrumental in closing the 1968 Cannes film festival, followed by an extremely well-shot long car journey back to Paris (the social upheaval had produced general strikes and shortages of petrol). Alienating his companions in the crowded vehicle, he argues for the destruction of the oeuvre of his one-time heroes such as John Ford or Fritz Lang, the frame of his previous admirations reduced to the likes of comic Jerry Lee Lewis.
'Redoubtable' has delved deep into Godard’s box of cinematic tricks
Hazanavicius’s film was released in the US with the title Godard Mon Amour, and despite all the mockery of his protagonist, the effect isn’t snide: the stylistic tributes from the director (best known, of course, for that other cinematic homage, The Artist) illustrate that. Redoubtable has delved deep into Godard’s box of cinematic tricks, with numerous citations (the Jean d’Arc moment from Vivre sa vie, for one), games with titles, as well as drops in and out of black-and-white and reversals into negative. There are some smartly ironic script touches – one scene has the two main actors appearing naked as they talk about the purpose of nudity in cinema – while cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman achieves impressive visual pastiche, matching the colour palettes and shots of Raoul Coutard’s 1960s work for Godard to perfection.
There’s considerable sadness in the long final scene. With Anna happily absorbed in the shoot of a Marco Ferreri film, Godard arrives from the set of his latest radical anti-project full of petulant jealousy and self-centred paranoia: the ship that is their marriage – Redoubtable was actually the name of a French nuclear submarine, its appearance in the title an increasingly ironic commentary to the developing action – scuttles to the accompaniment of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. There's a final coda that glimpses Godard engaged in the strictly collective group-management cinema of his Dziga Vertov Group phase. Dead, dead, dead...
The playing of the lead couple is supremely accomplished, Garrel growing increasingly ruffled and sulky as Martin blooms. They both feature with Hazanavicius (along with the director’s wife Bérénice Bejo, who plays a smaller role here) in the only extra on this release, a 20-minute stage appearance and Q&A at the 2017 London Film Festival. It reveals little, though Garrel, talking about his own scepticism, mixes it up with “septic”. Godard had a self-regard that didn't really admit scepticism, but the poisonous overtones of that second word catch the direction we see him taking in Redoubtable all too aptly.
Overleaf: watch the preview for Redoubtable
The bestseller Sapiens (2011, first published in English in 2014) by the hitherto little-known Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari has sold enormously well, and justly so: recommended by Bill Gates no less, it has become a worldwide publishing phenomenon.
It was 80 years ago next month that Neville Chamberlain returned with the good news of peace in our time. The Munich Agreement was greeted as a triumph for the appeasers. The price Britain had to pay was a minor stain on its conscience: the decimation of Czechoslovakia. The country was only 20 years old, but the borders of Bohemia and Moravia had been defined many centuries earlier.
Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s It Happened Here surely deserves the acclaim often accorded it as “the most ambitious amateur film ever made”, and the rich supporting extras on this BFI dual-format release make clear why. Best of all is a 65-minute interview with Brownlow, in which he recounts how he set out in 1956, at the age of 18, to make this ambitious “alternative history” of England living under wartime Nazi collaboration.
The development of the film – the 17-year-old Mollo came on board the following year as co-director after Brownlow sought his advice on war-time costuming and design, only to be told squarely that his solo efforts to that point weren’t up to much – is a tale in itself. Working with amateurs and filming at weekends, they took eight years to reach the final version that played at the 1964 London Film Festival.
Crew included future talents such as Peter Suschitzky in his first major cinematographer role, alongside Peter Watkins as an assistant director. Filming started on 16 mm, before backing from Tony Richardson at Woodfall Films enabled a move up to 35 mm “short ends” (film stock unused at the end of a reel) that came partly from Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. It made for an economy of both process and style, one that in no way reflected in the scale of the final film, however.
There was nothing amateur about the film’s central idea either, with its premise that the Germans had invaded England following the British retreat from Dunkirk, driving resistance underground; by 1944, however, the partisans were beginning to resurface, supported by invading American troops, as seen in the film’s final scenes, which are as unflinching a portrayal of the reality of resistance movements as you will find. The Nazi-supporting “Immediate Action” (IA) movement rapidly stepped up to run a British administration that proved very ready to collaborate.
It Happened Here more than stands comparison with last year’s TV adaptation of Len Deighton’s SS-GB, bringing home how the limited resources of the film worked in its favour, its laconism most of all foregrounding psychology. Heroine Pauline is evacuated from partisan territory back to bomb-ravaged London, along whose streets the Nazis strut (pictured above left). Despite trying to escape involvement in anything political, she joins the IA as a nurse, her decision driven by a typical “try to get back to normal” mentality (the non-professional Pauline Murray’s clipped delivery is very much in Brief Encounter spirit). In her exposure to the realities of life within the system – from the blimpish, rabble-rousing speeches to how it treats the weak – as well as by witnessing the fate of some erstwhile friends who had chosen a different direction, Pauline is forced to confront the consequence of her choices, becoming something of an Everyman character in the process.
It looks now like a piece of guerrilla filmmaking ahead of its time (though the period authenticity isn’t something usually associated with that style)
Brownlow and Mollo establish the historical context of the time, as well as the meaning of National Socialism, with a brilliant faux German newsreel “Mirror on the World” which dates the new Anglo-German cooperation back to the famous Christmas truce of WWI. It’s so much more than pastiche (the full 10-minute version comes as another extra here), catching atmosphere outstandingly: like the periodic radio broadcasts through the film, voice work was done by the same BBC announcers and commentators who had worked through the war.
But it’s the scene that follows the newsreel that really unsettles, as some of Pauline’s IA colleagues articulate the essence of their Nazi ideas, ranging from attitudes to the Jews and the “slime of Communism” to eugenics (main picture). The directors had been associating with some of the British Far Right as part of their research, and here they simply sat some of them down and allowed them to express their beliefs in practically documentary style.
It proved too much for distributor United Artists, however: despite critical controversy, It Happened Here was released in May 1966 with that crucial scene cut. It’s restored here, of course, and Brownlow’s commentary gives the full story behind that. It wasn’t the directors' only disappointment: they never saw “a brass farthing” back from release, despite a degree of box-office success (made on a budget of around £7,000 in the money of the time, it took more than three times that sum in the UK alone). Branded “uncommercial”, they took another decade to make their second film, the English Civil War drama Winstanley.
Brownlow has since had an illustrious concurrent career as a film historian, whose work with silent film, including the full restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, speaks for itself. This new 2K remaster from original camera negative marks his 80th birthday, and It Happened Here looks now like a piece of guerrilla filmmaking ahead of its time (though the remarkable period authenticity that was so crucial for Mollo isn’t something usually associated with that style). But the relevance of its commentary on human nature and society living through times of national upheaval has never gone away. Chilling.
Overleaf: watch the original trailer for It Happened Here