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Managing expectations for a film can be difficult, especially where genre cinema is concerned. Even before you sit down to watch a horror movie, for instance, it’s typical to anticipate being frightened or at least provoked into some kind of visceral reaction. Rarely do you see horror effectively utilising new techniques in order to scare viewers.

Consider the jump scare, an all-too familiar trick that seldom fails to deliver. Its power to manipulate and hold the attention of the audience is an art in itself, which when perfected can be audacious and deeply disturbing. In Mulholland Drive, director David Lynch inverts this method to craft a scene that is so confident in its ability to terrify us that it actually lays out precisely how it will do so.

Eleven minutes into the film, we enter the fictional Winkie’s Diner on Sunset Boulevard. Two men are sat opposite each other at a table. There is nothing particularly notable about the inside of the diner. It is almost completely unremarkable. Why are we here? These men have not featured in earlier scenes. All we have seen so far is a jitterbug competition and a car crash that traumatised one victim so badly that she had to seek refuge in a nearby house. Is this scene part of that story? As viewers, we are left confused and on edge – but the mystery at hand is already working its magic.

Dan and Herb (played by Patrick Fischler and Michael Cooke), are noticeably different in their body language. Dan is anxious, uptight and possibly sleep deprived. By contrast Herb is relaxed and confident. Dan tells Herb why they are here. He has had the same dream about this place, this very diner, on two separate occasions. Both men are present in this seemingly mundane vision and both are scared beyond belief.

The cause of their fear is the presence of a man behind the building, who Dan can see through the wall. He says he never wants to see that man’s face outside of a dream but stops short of describing his tormentor’s features. Herb initially cracks a joke but becomes more intrigued as the story progresses. Upon its conclusion, he decides that they should both go outside and see if the man is actually there.

It is made clear that all this is not taking pace inside a dream, so there is little chance that the man is behind the diner. And yet everything about this scene suggests that it is indeed a dream. The camera is shaky, barely staying still and carelessly roaming up and down and behind the two characters. Despite the fact that we are in a busy diner in the middle of the day, the only discernible sound is of the men’s voices. There is no noise coming from the kitchen, the other customers or the street outside. The tension is palpable and increases further when they exit to investigate whether or not something wicked lies in wait. Perhaps this is the dream.

This is a jump scare par excellence – unlike any other in the history of cinema. It takes place in broad daylight in an urban environment. Lynch turns this seemingly safe space into a nightmare scenario where nothing is certain and danger lurks just around the corner. For his part, Fischler conveys more terror in five minutes than most actors manage over the entire course of their careers. He is sweating and short of breath throughout. When he finally approaches the rear of the diner, he moves tentatively, rigidly.

His fear of what is about to come combined with the atmosphere of the scene create a truly mesmerising piece of cinema that works despite the climax having already been spoiled just moments before. It almost doesn’t matter if the man is actually behind Winkie’s or not. The sense of dread that this scene engenders is so intoxicating that it perseveres for the proceeding two-and-a-half hours.

In Mulholland Drive, we are told to expect one thing but choose instead to believe something else. This thread runs right through the film, from the audition scene to Club Silencio, where everything has already been described in detail yet in the moment we are fully engrossed nonetheless. The way that Lynch constructs each scene in the film is extraordinary, but it is Winkie’s Diner which shows the director at his most blatant and manipulative best. As viewers we are conditioned to anticipate what comes next, but just when we think we’ve got the answers, Lynch changes the questions and stills gets results.

The post How Mulholland Drive perfected the art of the jump scare appeared first on Little White Lies.

The mayor of Paris came under pressure to explain why the Eiffel Tower did not pay its usual respects to the victims of Monday's terror attack in St Petersburg as it did for those killed in London, Orlando and Brussels. She then announced the Iron Lady would dim her lights on Tuesday night.

About 6,000 people took part in angry protests in Paris on Sunday against the death of a Chinese man shot and killed when police responded to a call at his apartment last month, police said.

France has launched a website and app on Monday which diners can use to check just how clean a restaurant is before visiting.

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Shambolic would be the kind assessment of this loose-leaf biography of the bohemian Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, who for five years at the end of the 1960s ran an experimental facility in London’s East End which aimed to treat patients without recourse to any traditional medical means. He gloats about how his method skips over such staples as tranquillisers and electro shock therapy in favour of old fashioned TLC. And the odd droplet of LSD.

On the plus side, the film is gifted with a smart and appealing central performance from David Tennant, who trades in a very nice line of ticks, stammers and hesitations as he intones Laing’s crackpot theories.

The film’s best moments are when it choses to demonstrate the arduous process of psychiatric care, such as a centrepiece where the rock star doc waltzes into an American institution that’s styled like a ’50s horror film and enters into a hushed discourse with an apparently catatonic patient. The camera barely moves, holding onto a simple two-shot within a cramped cell and allowing the actors to do their thing.

Otherwise, Robert Mullan’s film is something of a lost cause, to the point where it’s hard to see how it ever got the green light in the first place. It flits arbitrarily between incidental moments. There’s an almost complete absence of narrative progression, or anything that helps you to understand why this needed to be a feature film and not, say, a radio play or a magazine longread.

It’s like a lengthy shopping list of notable moments that have been totted up and, at random intervals, tossed at the screen with nary a care for how they might gel with one another. To the point where the film finally fades to black at what feels like the middle of a key scene.

The post Mad to Be Normal appeared first on Little White Lies.

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The task of selecting 10 great films by the late, extremely great German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder is not an easy one. It’s not that the pickings are slim – on the contrary. He was a director who worked fast, and the very process of making movies was something that, by all accounts, was as natural to him as smoking a cigarette.

Fassbinder surrounded himself with a group of creative enablers, many of whom would bow to his every whim. Maybe the relationships he had with some of his closest collaborators wasn’t always healthy, but the results are up there on the screen, as see in his 38 features, three TV serials and numerous shots.

Ahead of a full retrospective of the director’s work at London’s BFI Southbank, we count down 10 of his greatest movies. Although, there’s at least another 15 that could quite easily have made this list if we’re being brutally honest. Enjoy…

10. Martha (1974)

If you have a friend who’s about to be married, send them a copy of Martha to watch before they eventually tie the knot. Do make sure they’ve got a sense of humour, though, as they may well cross you off their Christmas card list. Margit Carstensen plays the willowy, introspective librarian of the title who is very suddenly swept off her feet by Karlheinz Böhm’s suave engineer Helmut. She decides to let love into her heart, but once carried over the threshold, the full-bore romance turns into something quite different. In many ways, this can be seen as a nice sister film to 1972’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, as both explore the violence inherent in unrequited love. Plus, both are driven by a harrowing central performance from Carstensen.

9. Katzelmacher (1969)

If Fassbinder’s debut feature, Love Is Colder Than Death, set the tone for his theatrically-inclined early years, it was his second film, Katzelmacher, where he consolidated his immense skill as screen dramatist. Influenced by Jean-Luc Godard, this bleak, dryly comic satire sees Fassbinder himself playing a Greek labourer arriving in Munich and being bullied by bored, racist and avaricious locals. It’s a film about how the devil makes work for idle hands, as these lethargic locals are driven towards violence by an extreme disenchantment with the system.

8. Fox and his Friends (1975)

Is it ever truly possible for a man to transcend his god-given status in the world? Avuncular, working class hustler, Fox (played by Fassbinder at his most lovably naive), strikes it lucky on the lottery and feels it’s time for him to mingle with the beautiful people. He falls under the spell of suave Eugen (Peter Chatel) but is unable to see that he’s being taken for one long ride. This is a tale of love and exploitation and is perhaps the go-to film when looking for examples of Fassbinder’s apocalyptically bleak worldview.

7. World on a Wire (1973)

Way before Shane Carruth was making time travel epics with the contents of his family lock-up, Fassbinder produced this three-part sci-fi opus based on Daniel F Galouye’s 1964 novel, ‘Simulacron-3’. Anticipating the current VR revolution with its use of some old crash helmets and rainbow-coloured wires, this multi-dimensional noir sees Klaus Löwitschs’s bewildered doctor investigating some strange deaths at the Institute of Cybernetics and Future Science, possibly related to a new digital simulation programme being trialled. This shows up a movie like The Matrix as the pseudo-philosophical, elbow-fighting poppycock that it is.

6. Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (1974)

This is Fassbinder’s heartbreaking paean to his leading man and one-time lover, El Hedi ben Salem. In the film the amateur actor plays a softly-spoken Moroccan labourer who falls in love with ageing spinster Emmi (Brigitte Mira) when she takes refuge from the rain in a dingy pub. Their tender relationship draws out the worst from those around them, but the brilliance of the film shines through in the way it perfectly balances political commentary with the sense of happiness these unlikely souls bring to one another. Read our review of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

5. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1973)

A restored version of this five-episode 1973 TV serial premiered at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival, and though it’s a lesser-known part of the Fassbinder canon, it’s also one of the finest things he put his name to. This rare foray into comic soap opera was the first thing he made for a mass audience and it follows a machinist dealing with workplace politics and his grandmother who embraces independence later in life. Everything here is made to look easy. As writer and director, Fassbinder never strains for meaning, simply allowing the disarmingly simple material do all the heavy lifting. Includes an incredible scene of Hanna Schygulla having a conversation with a friend while chomping on a massive bratwurst.

4. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972)

Cutting putdowns and fashionista sass talk abound in this dazzling, devastating three-way chamber drama (based on real events!) which almost works as an all-female reversal of Fox and His Friends. Margit Carstensen chews up and spits out the luxuriant scenery as the eponymous fashion doyenne who falls desperately in love with a young model (Hanna Schygulla), but their fleeting romance is quickly revealed as a professional power play. It’s long, claustrophobic and intense – one of those movies where paying close attention for the first hour pays off in the devastating closing stretches.

3. In a Year of 13 Moons (1978)

One of the most bleak films in a back catalogue coloured by incessant bleakness, In a Year of 13 Moons follows depressed transexual Elvira/Edwin (Volker Spengler) to the very edge of depression and confusion. Used and abused by everyone and anyone, Elivra wanders to old haunts and attempts to pin-point the moment where it all went wrong. One of the director’s most ruminative, philosophical films about the stigma of being an outsider and the difficulty of finding yourself within your own skin.

2. Effi Briest (1974)

This might be considered as the defining performance by Fassbinder muse, Hanna Scyhgulla, who plays a young girl growing up in German high society and marries before she truly understands the concept of love. Filmed in austere black and white with narrated interludes plucked from Theodor Fontane’s 1896 novel of the same name, the story follows the inquisitive Effi as she suffers the abuses of her social peers all because she was a born a woman.

1. Veronika Voss (1982)

This is representative of Fassbinder’s astounding “BDR trilogy”, made right at the tail end of his career (including 1979’s The Marriage of Maria Braun and 1981’s Lola). Veronika Voss, his penultimate film, appears to foretell his own demise as it follows a sports journalist who begins to snoop into the life of a mysterious cabaret singer (Rosel Zech) who once performed for the Nazis and even, allegedly, got physical with Goebbels. This is like Fassbinder’s twist on Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd, but instead of focusing on a laughable grotesque, it’s about a glamorous ghost attempting and failing to live a frazzled duel existence. The glistening black-and-white photography lends this deeply sombre tale a nostalgic visual counterpoint – like its tragic heroine, its trapped and torn between changing times.

RW Fassbinder plays at BFI Southbank through April and May. For more info visit bfi.org.uk

The post The 10 best films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder appeared first on Little White Lies.

A plump human brain, sapped of all emotion and sentiment, is meticulously lowered into a sleek, voluptuous shell that happens to be in the form of American actress Scarlett Johansson. Memories of happier times, of complex human relations, rippling sensations of pleasure and pain, have been suppressed so this dour, Cyborg footsoldier can operate as a robot weapon with the added bonus of moral sentience.

At points, you might see this central conceit as a metaphor for Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell, a retooling of Mamoru Oshii’s classic 1995 anime. Yet as the minutes slowly tick by and the chronic tedium sets in, it becomes clear that this is more like one of the early prototypes that went bananas and started popping off rounds at members of the public. There is a certain poetry, though, to the idea that this is a film which questions the existence of an inner soul, and which is itself about as soulful as a defective Game Boy.

No amount of whispered, meaningful monologue can hoodwink the viewer into believing that this movie is anything more than an shapely, empty vessel with delusions of existential sci-fi grandeur. Johansson scowls for all she’s worth as Major, a hot-headed government agent on the hunt for a serial killer who appears to be targeting the good folk at Hanka Robotics, particularly those involved in the cybernetics programme that bought her into being. The company’s central defence is something called a Spider Tank, which is a tank in the shape of a spider, and nothing more than that.

Filler shots of bustling cityscapes feel cribbed from Blade Runner and Windows 95 screensavers. Gigantic female effigies, projected as skyscraper-sized holograms, beam with eerie smiles and their presence is somehow meant to cut through all the blue-grey futuro bleakness. But like so much in the film, this ends up being nothing more than decoration, a hint towards the kernel of an idea.

Ghost in the Shell is a come-sit-on-my-knee lesson which states that all the lavish, wannabe eye-popping production design in the world don’t mean squat if you’ve got no characters, no story, no action and no faith in the audience to take up the thread of your weak drama. This is a film in which people tell you that they are going to a place to do a thing, and then they go to a place and do a thing. Even the opening title cards which explain the time and setting are worded in a way that is at best banal and at worst incoherent.

The most notable aspect of the film is the outrage it has caused among those who feel the role of Major has been “whitewashed”, with a white Western actor taking a part that was originally written as Japanese. Although the story takes place in what seems like a futuristic version of Tokyo, it’s actually now a cosy, anonymous melting pot of ethnicities and accents, inferring perhaps the world has become a post-racial utopia where the stigma of skin colour, custom and language have been all but erased.

The real question, however, is whether the film deserves to be discussed on such serious political terms, considering its own intellectual ambitions are so limited. The sheer scale of the enterprise, and the fact that it has been made to connect with a mass audience, are the only reasons it should be engaged with on that level, even if its insidious promotion of stars over diversity does nothing to actually enhance the experience of the film. Sanders has the chance to comment on his choice to switch the ethnicities, but he sheepishly opts to hide any politics between the edits.

Yes, it’s kinda cool that you’ve got “Beat” Takeshi Kitano with a bizarre triangular peroxide haircut and a six-shooter as Major’s badass mentor, and he gets by far the best line in the film. And Juliette Binoche, as one of the chief scientists at Hanka, takes her role of philosophical guide more seriously than she perhaps needed to. Otherwise, this movie is all flash and no function. Luxuriate in the wan visual dazzle if that’s your thing, but otherwise remain mindful of the irony that you’re watching a film about the spiritual aspects of brain functions with yours firmly set to sleep.

The post Ghost in the Shell appeared first on Little White Lies.

This week’s top Science news

The opium poppy is no longer the starting point for many street drugs

Artist: Thomas Bayrle

Venue: Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

Exhibition Title: One Day on Success Street

Date: November 29, 2016 – March 26, 2017

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. Photos by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Press Release:

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA) presents “One Day on Success Street,” a major survey and first American museum presentation dedicated to the renowned German artist Thomas Bayrle. The exhibition traces Bayrle’s exploration of the profoundly complex impact of technology on humans and their environments over the course of his nearly 50-year career and across a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, video, collage, and installation. A centerpiece of the survey will be Wire Madonna, a newly commissioned site-specific installation created for ICA Miami’s Atrium Gallery that sees the artist interpreting the icon of Madonna and Child in steel, marking the artist’s largest sculpture to date. The exhibition marks ICA Miami’s final presentation in the landmark Moore Building, as it prepares for the opening of its new permanent home in the Miami Design District in late 2017.

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

1. Any of the various types of flies that bite or annoy livestock. 2. One who persistently annoys.

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The New Yorker

Prince William and his wife the Duchess of Cambridge will arrive in Paris on Friday afternoon for a jam-packed two-day trip. Here's what's in store.

noun: An illiterate person. adjective: 1. Illiterate. 2. Not alphabetical.

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