SubVerse

Check out some great animated pieces I found online this morning.

This is a music video from an Israeli singer named Oren Lavie, with some lovely uplifting stop-motion. Utterly charming…

There’s a page all about how the video was made: here. It notes: 

* Some of the bed sheets used in the video were taken from Oren’s own bedroom and are now considered collectors items, worth at the moment not very much and therefore used as bed sheets.

Here’s a trailer for a film called “Sita Sings the Blues,” that was animated by a woman named Nina Paley. 

Here’s the description:

“Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epicRamayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”

Very excited to see this movie. It plays on WNET PBS in NYC on March 7, then at the New York International Children’s Film Festival (NY), on March 14.

The website’s here.
And here’s a great NY Times article all about it too.

Yummm…
These first images released from Spike Jonez’ and Dave Eggers’ “Where The Wild Things Are” are making me very happy. (click the pics for larger images)

And you must check this out too: A small scene has leaked online, and it’s adorable.

You can really hear Eggers’ voice in the writing. And it has that casual, psychedelic feel of the old “Little Prince” film from the 70s. Just a kid chatting with his imaginary monster, the way any kid would.

And, though I know some people aren’t too excited that Jonez chose to use animatronic puppets for the Wild Things, I personally think it’s great. We’re so used to seeing everything done with CGI these days, but you just can’t beat the reality of old school, man-in-a-suit muppetry. It’s Big Bird, who’s just so clearly, physically there standing in front of us. He’s literally keepin’ it real. I applaud that.

“When I was growing up, only the geeky and socially marginal people were into stuff like Spiderman and JRR Tolkien. But in the last five years they’ve become the biggest entertainment phenomena around. How did it get so nerds are suddenly driving popular culture?

“I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these things. Now everybody’s into Tolkien. And I feel a little like, hey, I’ve been into that stuff my whole life. And in fact, you used to beat me up for it.”

- Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine

THE ONE PERCENT
Director: Jamie Johnson
Film website: Tribeca Film Fest
Johnson Interview: Filmmaker Q&A

FROM DUST
Director: Dhruv Dhawan
Film website: From Dust Press Notes
Both films viewed at: 2006 Tribeca Film Fest

“No great society has survived such a massive wealth gap;
who knows if ours will?” – Nancy Schafer

An extremely simple and personal film, The One Percent is a documentary that transcends its limits to become increasingly universal and political. Continuing in content and style from his first doc, Born Rich, director Jamie Johnson – an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune – reaches significantly further this time. Beginning as an exploration into his own class guilt over his inherited riches – the films uses diverse interviews with everyone from Steve Forbes to Ralph Nader to Katrina victims to Milton Friedman, the economist who coined the Regan-era term “trickledown effect” – to expand out into a powerful indictment of the stratification between the 1% of the population who own 60% of the wealth, and everyone else in this country.

Beginning with a surprisingly self-aware but obliviously wealthy friend who’s just bought a vast, light-filled loft across a parking lot from Chicago’s down-trodden Cabrini green housing projects, Johnson moves down to the streets. And in interviews with residents of Cabrini Green, we learn how Chicago has gone about gentrifying this neighborhood – by simply closing the schools and the hospitals and public services. Playing on the fear of crime and drug dealers as an excuse, the moneyed class running Chicago’s planning boards have gotten support to “clean up” these old neighborhoods. But Johnson’s interviews reveal a neighborhood where a generation of families have been raised – hopeless of getting out, but in harmony with each other – and where drug dealers are only one percent of the population.

But it’s the richest one percent of the country that’s making all the choices about who gets what. And this shocking little factoid, about Chicago’s closing schools to isolate and abandon the poor, seems like just a small metaphor for what the Federal government at large is up to. Johnson shows heart-rending imagery of the millions abandoned in Katrina, and makes good use of some Michael Moore-type animation to show how and why the country has changed since the days of the New Deal. How a process of governmental redistribution of wealth, that began with Reaganomics in the 1980s, has dramatically changed the direction this country is going. And Johnson’s film, with his incredibly intimate access to the richest of the super-rich, lays bare exactly how they work to preserve their monetary dominance.

But, in one beautiful sequence from the other end of the spectrum, Johnson takes a ride with an enlightened taxi driver caught up in the unfair economics of the Florida sugar industry. When Johnson admits he’s from one of the richest families in the world, the taxi driver takes it in stride. Then smiles a big smile and says:

“You may find this funny, but so am I… Except, not with money.”

Another film that struck a similar chord at this year’s fest was director Dhruv Dhawan’s shot-on-video doc, From Dust. The film exposes what’s happened to millions of inhabitants of Sri Lanka’s seaside villages that were destroyed in the December 2004 tsunami.

Right after the disaster, the government invoked a decades-old, never-before used law, saying that nobody could rebuild their homes within a hundred meters of the beach. The supposed reason was to act as a buffer zone against future tsunamis – even though the tsunami traveled many miles inland, not just a hundred meters. And everyone was supposed to be granted free new land and assistance to build on it – which was nice in theory, except that the land was up in the mountains, and these were fishermen who were feeding their families from their daily catch.

Now, well over two years later, none of the families filmed have even been given new land. And the beach-side properties that were taken away from them – living up to filmmaker Dhawan’s worst fears – have been opened up to development as tourist resorts.

In other words, the government used devastation of biblical proportions as an excuse to clear poor villagers from their land, and turn the beaches into profit-producing industries. (This is one of the exact same motivations the Bush administration has been accused of in not letting Katrina victims in New Orleans’ 9th Ward rebuild their homes.)

Of course, I understand, it can certainly be argued that using the beaches for tourism will bring in millions of dollars and may, in the long run, help the entire country’s economy. But, in order to get there, millions are being disposessed of their homes, their lives, their livelihoods.

As a film, From Dust is very slight, in a way that The One Percent is not. It focuses on just three main characters, and favors quiet poetry and long takes of social realism over delving into the political questions it raises.

But in conjunction with The One Percent, it reveals a trend that’s spreading all over the world – call it the ugly side of globalization, America exporting our “trickledown theory.” The wealthy class increasingly have their hands in the pockets of democratic governments everywhere, and are using invisible under-handed laws and sub-committees to redistribute land and wealth and power into the hands of the few.

This is certainly nothing new.

But it is ugly, and it’s happening during my lifetime. And I’m waking up to it.

One of the reasons The One Percent has stayed so strongly with me, is because – unlike so many other angry liberal films of the past six years – it actually offers an idea. A way out, a model, a road map for how to save this country.

At the end of the film, Johnson talks to Kevin Philips, author of “Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich,” a very humanist economist who reminds us of the Progressive Society that came into place after the Depression.

At a time of vast poverty, our country didn’t rise up in rebellion. We didn’t turn Communist or Socialist, as so many feared. Instead, for a brief period under FDR, people came together to help each other. A progressive government began building systems to redistribute the wealth through social services meant to help everyone out. A progressive government – i.e. a “big” government designed to help the 99% of the country that collectively share only 40% of the wealth.

If our country is ever going to climb out from under the current regime that’s controlled by and caters to the richest 1%, our society is going to have to wake up and become Progressive again, all on our own. And all together.

I personally think it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, a lot more people are going to have to suffer before enough people get angry enough to change things. But it’s good to see a film come along to remind us about the New Deal and the Progressive era as a model for what we could once again become.

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT
Writer/Director: Eric Eason
Film website: Journey to the End of the Night
Viewed at: 2006 Tribeca Film Fest

To start with the worst first – let’s call it a gauge, before I start waxing rhapsodically about the films at this year’s Tribeca Fest I loved – Eric Eason’s Brazil-set thriller was so bad, I literally had to walk out of the theater in physical pain.

The first few minutes of the film, I was actually pretty entranced by. The setting was exciting – seedy Sao Paulo at night. The photography was super-interesting, using both muted colors and film bleached to high-contrast. And it starred Mos Def doing a spot-on Nigerian accent as a migrant dishwasher caught up in a dangerous game of drugs and money.

But, by less than a quarter of the way in, it was clear the filmmaker had no idea what he was doing and was wasting my time. And I was ready to walk out.

The hard part was, it was the film’s cast & crew premiere – so all the stars were there, and the producers and the executives and their families, all filling the Reserved section in the middle of the theater. And I was sitting in the middle of the second row.

I held out for as long as I could, out of sheer embarrassment. Until it got to the point I actually wanted to go punch the filmmaker in the face for wasting an hour of my life and pushing me ever closer to my death.

So I noisily gathered my coat and my umbrella and my bag and my hat and squeezed my way out of the aisle. Of course, I then went for the wrong exit on the side, so the usher had to shine his flashlight across the theater for me – and spotlighted me as I crossed right in front of the actors and the producers and the executives and the filmmaker. What could I do? At least, I assured myself, if most of them were seeing the film for the first time, they were wishing they could walk out too.

The truth is, the film was really two-films-in-one. Mos Def starred in the first, and his acting was beautifully subtle, nuanced and smart. The guy’s amazing. And his scene as the dishwasher trying to pretend he knows what he’s doing with a group of dangerous African drug dealers, was unexpectedly scary and funny.

But the rest of the time we had to watch Brendan Fraser and Scott Glenn in an abysmally written and over-acted father/son drama that had absolutely no emotional or psychological truth to it. Catalina Sandino Moreno, the girl from Maria Full of Grace was there to stand around and look sad, as father and son fought over her. But I never believed any of them could ever fall in love, and with a plot line that evinced no understanding of humans or reality, lots of over-the-top emotional outbursts, and not a beat of forward movement in the story – you can understand why my fingernails were scratching into the armrest.

Eason had a small indie hit with a film called Manito four years ago. I didn’t see it, but here’s what I suspect happened. He probably spent years working on that script for his first film, and when it made him a name, people with money started coming to him and asking him what he wanted to do next. Problem was, he didn’t have anything else he’d written. So he had to write this next thing in a week, and get into production while the money was there and the stars were interested – and he never got to advance past a first draft.

It’s the same theory I have for why the two Matrix sequels were so bad.

What’s so scary, though, is that nobody involved in the project had the balls or the foresight to offer their editing services to him. If Manito was really as good as people said, then the fact that his second film is so shockingly bad, may say more about the way films are made and supported, than about this poor schnook’s failure as an artist.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to update the website.

It only took me a weekend to set the thing up (that is, after years of thinking about it), but I didn’t really plan for how time-intensive keeping content flowing would be. Not to mention, trying to have a creative side-project like this going, while keeping my creative screenwriting career afloat.

But now that I finally have a couple days free, there’s just so much I want to say. So much I want to share – music I’ve heard and movies I’ve seen that I want to write about. So I better get to it.

I’ve also got some incredible interviews with filmmakers I’m lining up, that I’ll be posting here in the next few weeks. And saving up for eventual inclusion in the SubVerse book.

I’ve been getting clearer on the concept for the book.

It’ll consist of in-depth conversations with writers and directors working on the edge, pushing at the boundaries of cinema, and questioning mainstream ideas about how and why films are made.

There will also be a number of sidebar sections, with filmmakers waxing about their favorite obscure films. A rare celebration of cinephelia among makers of cinema.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a ton of movies. I think I’ve seen around 100 movies in four months – and almost none of them have been currently released films. Rather, I’ve been seeing political documentaries, foreign films, unreleased American indies and films from the 70s – at revival houses and late night on DVD. These past few months in New York have been filled with festivals, and I’ve been becoming a real little cinephile.

This past week, I’ve seen nearly a dozen films at the Tribeca Film Fest here in town, and over the next few days, I’m going to try to write a little about what I’ve seen.

Only one was truly terrible, and at least two of them were unmissable masterpieces – which, sadly, and of course, will never get American distribution.

But never forget, a little persistence can get you a long way.

I recently read about a small Austrian documentary that sounded incredible. Thanks to the internet, I managed to track down and contact the film’s distributor in Luxembourg, who put me in touch with the filmmaker, who ended up sending me a DVD of the film himself.

Interview by Joshua Rubin

So, what is it about Parisian filmmakers that makes all their movies seem so sophisticated?

Is it the relaxed sexual morals of a city where there are naked girls in ads for tuna fish? Is it the philosophical climate fostered by street cafés and public intellectuals? Or is it how strong their coffee and cigarettes come?

In anticipation of the upcoming Rendez-vous with French Film Festival at Lincoln Center (March 10–19, 2006) – my favorite reason to be in New York every spring – I’m reprinting here an interview I did last year (for the Svedka Vodka blog, Garden of Sweden) with French film director Olivier Assayas.

I got to sit down with Assayas, and ask him his opinion on French and American cinema, during a screening of his powerful last film Clean. It stars Nick Nolte and Maggie Cheung, who won Best Actress when the film premiered at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. It was released in the U.S. by Palm Pictures, last spring. There are currently no plans to release a DVD in the States, but good Region 3 copies are available on the net.

I was shocked, when we met, to discover that Assayas turned 50 this year. Both because his films seem so edgy and fresh, and because he only started to become known in the States this past decade, with his films – the coming of age story Cold Water (1994), the genre-crashing Irma Vep (1996), my personal favorite, the beautiful Late August/Early September (1998), and the daring but critically-panned Demonlover (2002). But, he has a good 20 films he’s written and directed, and he’s a long time writer for seminal French film journal Cahiers du Cinema.

I began by asking what he thought it was about these later films that suddenly attracted an American audience to his work.

ASSAYAS: Well, actually, I think Cold Water was a turning point in the way I was making films. Because, the first films I made were more specifically French. They were certainly not conventional films by any standard, but they were part of the Independent French cinema. And I think with L’Eau Froide, I kind of broke that mold. It’s a film I made with a very small budget, it’s a semi-autobiographical film with teenagers, and it was very much a way of reconnecting with the kind of filmmaking that made me want to make films in the first place. It really brought out a new freedom in me, that ultimately was the context within which I made the subsequent films – Irma Vep, Late August and even my documentary on Hsiao-Hsien.

SUBVERSE: There’s something beautiful about that, this idea that when you finally find what it is you really wanted to say to begin with, suddenly you get that worldwide recognition.

ASSAYAS: Yes. Right.

SUBVERSE: Because, your last two films, Clean and Demonlover, had big sections set in America, I’m wondering about your relationship with this country.

ASSAYAS: Recently, I really needed, for many reasons, to get out of France. I mean, not in a way of changing my way of making films, but I felt a little trapped in the framework of French cinema. I think crossing borders allows me to touch on subjects different from what French cinema is usually doing. It also has to do with the fact that I travel a lot, and my reality is multinational. So, I suppose I make films that are in connection with whatever I live.

SUBVERSE: Why do you say that French cinema made you feel trapped?

ASSAYAS: Because, I think the space for independent filmmaking in France has shrunk a lot. Now, the financing system has made things pretty tough. Now, broadcasting has the power over films. Films are made according to their potential on mainstream network TV. And, of course, that very much narrows the possibilities, in terms of storytelling, dramaturgy…

SUBVERSE: That’s exactly the story in Hollywood. The American film industry is completely run by money. But, I always thought that French filmmakers had more freedom because so much of the production money came from the government, and so film could be more of an art form than a business.

ASSAYAS: No. There’s much less money than you think coming from the government. The system of state grants is ultimately financed by a specific tax on tickets. So, there’s one tiny share of each movie ticket that goes to a fund that supports the making of movies. Ultimately, the state is not actually putting money in. It’s supporting a system that tries to make cinema self-supportive.

SUBVERSE: But, still, I get the sense that there’s so much more creative freedom allowed to filmmakers in France than in America.

ASSAYAS: That’s because you see the more daring French films. But they are difficult to make – they are very, very difficult to make.

SUBVERSE: You’re saying there’s just as much crap in France as here?

ASSAYAS: There’s even more! You have no idea. And whatever is exciting is really on the fringe. But, it’s that fringe that gets shown abroad. The rest is local mainstream comedies that are funny for French audiences, but they don’t make sense to anyone else.

SUBVERSE: Whereas it’s our crap that gets shown abroad.

ASSAYAS: Exactly! (laughs)

SUBVERSE: But still, I do think that the films – the independent films – that come out of France have an adult, artistic sensibility that even the independent films in America don’t reach. It just feels to me like French independent filmmakers have so much more respect for the audience.

ASSAYAS: Well, I think there’s a tradition in France of considering film as an art. Even if it’s kind of shrinking, still it’s very strongly part of the culture. Films are in the Art section in the newspapers, not in the Entertainment section. There’s very much this notion that film is an art, even with people who make only mainstream films. So, there’s a sophisticated audience primed for more mature movies. It’s there. And that’s of course a good thing for international film too. Small Art House films from other countries can often become big hits in France, I mean mainstream hits. In France you have a foundation of Cinephelia. Which makes – even when things are not so great – at least you can rely on that.

SUBVERSE: Do you think that’s something that started with the French New Wave in the 70s, or do you think it goes back further than that?

ASSAYAS: I’m sure there are many things that lead into it from before, but it’s very much what was established by the French Nouvelle Vague.

SUBVERSE: I’m trying to understand why we don’t have that in America. I suppose, here it’s always been a business, ever since cinema was invented and the first flicker arcades went up and the Warner brothers moved out to Los Angeles. Well, actually, the Lumière brothers invented cinema in France, but here we re-invented it as a business. And in France somehow you escaped our fate, maybe because it was slower to develop and it was more renegade at the beginning, people grabbing what equipment was available and making what they could with it.

ASSAYAS: Yes. And I think that in France we’ve also been extremely lucky because, at two very specific important moments, there has been a political support for filmmaking. One was Andre Malraux [who was made Minister of Culture] under General de Gaulle, around the time of the Nouvelle Vague in the early 60s. And then, under President Mitterand, there was Jack Lang, who was also a great Minister of Culture, who also adapted the system to the modern media. I don’t think that political will creates filmmakers or creates the cinema, but the fact that there was some support from the structure allowed for filmmakers to develop in the same way that other artists develop. When you see, for instance, the careers of the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, they’ve been able to constantly develop their style the same way as painters or novelists work. And I think there’s been generation after generation of French filmmakers that have benefited from that.

SUBVERSE: We don’t even have anything like a Minister of Culture in America. We barely have funding for PBS. – One last question: Have you been courted by Hollywood? Have you ever been tempted to work here?

ASSAYAS: Once in a while I get screenplays, but I’ve never really taken it seriously. I don’t think I could function within the system. If I wanted to make a film in the states, I mean in English with American actors, I think I would be much better off financing it in Europe, because I can do it with the same level of freedom that I make my films with now. I mean, I’d be happy dealing with American actors, but I don’t want to be dealing with American studios or something. I just don’t have the patience.

Watching Pasolini’s Salò this weekend – a suggestion from the director on my current screenplay Kite – seems to have had a lasting effect on my psyche.

Kite’s based on an X-Rated Japanese anime, that we’re attempting to reimagine as a gritty, 70s style, artful exploitation flick, that pushes imagery of violence and sex in daring and uncompromising ways. Our influences are ranging from Lukas Moodyson’s Lilya-4-Ever to Chan-Wook Park’s Oldboy to Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible.

Salò, which I had never seen, seemed an obvious reference to add to the list. But it’s had a deeper impact on me than I expected. It’s made me particularly, queasily sensitive to images and descriptions of violence – which suddenly seem to be everywhere around me.

If I went to sleep after watching Salò that night (or rather, early that morning) with dark and disturbed dreams – the dreams have spread into my waking life in the days since…

- Reading this morning, references to rich young women being raped and scalped in Salman Rushdie’s Fury – imagery that was directly out of Salò.

- Reading in bed last night, an unexpected scene of gay erotica, a man being shaved by a straight razor, in David Benioff’s short story “Merde for Luck” – which was not violent, but turned my stomach with fear as it conjured images from Salò in my head.

- Over my coffee at Jack’s on West 10th, where I’m sitting now, a description in the New York Times by the French woman who had the partial face transplant last week. She describes the moment of waking up from an attempted sleeping pill suicide, and trying to light a cigarette. Confused that she couldn’t get the cigarette to stay between her lips. Looking in the mirror, and discovering that her labrador had chewed off her lips and chin and nose and cheeks.

- An article in the Village Voice I picked up, about the extended scenes of torture in the new horror film Hostel, comparing it to recent films of unrelenting cruelty, Wolf Creek and The Devils Rejects. How Hostel has been the highest grossing film for two weeks. And how Americans seem hungry for deeply disturbing images of sadism in our current political climate.

In the recent past, I could have let these descriptions filter into my consciousness without too much disturbance – maybe even, some titilation at their subversive button-pushing. But these past few days, since witnessing the deeply realistic acts of torture and sadism on my bedroom television screen, the merest mention of violence has made my stomach twist viscerally. And I’ve felt a heavy darkness fill up my chest, like from an imaginary gas pump shoved down my throat.

There’s a positive side to this, sure. Salò has removed my defenses – my mind’s normal ability to dismiss violence in the real world – by simply not engaging it. This modern inability to be shocked that we all worry about publicly, but secretly congratulate ourselves on. I had this same experience last year, after daring myself to watch one of those internet videos from Iraq, of a young man having his head sawed off. That instantly and deeply tore away my defenses, and for weeks afterward, I was incredibly sensitive to violence. But, to what end?

I’m not a violent person. I don’t need to have my awareness of the reality of violence raised, in order to inspire compassion and curb my cruel sadistic tendencies.

I’m an artist. (Well, a screenwriter.) Struggling with the question of whether or not, or to what extent, to include images of sadism in my work.

Because, I feel like there’s another, deeply negative effect that Salò has had on me. As my stomach has become increasingly susceptible to the violence around me, as my skin has become more porous and quick to crawl at sights of blood, I’ve started having very dark flashes. I’d describe them as waves of existential nausea. Where I suddenly become filled up with the feeling that this world is a very, very sinister place – inescapable and slaloming toward the abyss.

It’s a feeling I imagine people in asylums for the criminally insane have filling their heads on a permanent basis. Where all you see around you is the horrific. Where every new description of terror, every sight of a chewed up bone on the street, every disintegrating old man in a wheelchair staring helplessly as they’re pulled out of the world, compounds the horror you feel.

But for me, it’s only come in brief waves. Like a stab of adrenaline when the floor drops out from under you.

I’m very lucky. I have the kind of constitution that quickly overpowers the deep fears, with a strong assurance that the world is good.

And maybe that means I’m blind. Maybe I’ve been absurdly lucky, one of the rare people in the world to have witnessed no horror, to have experienced no trauma, no war, no genocide, no holocaust. And maybe films like Salò exist to wake me out of my stupidity, to see the true violence of the world.

But, as I lay in bed the other night, feeling the tremors and the guilt – another idea came to me.

Maybe there’s a reason I’ve been so blessed. Maybe there’s a higher purpose, if such a thing exists, for why I’ve been given both a peaceful life and a gift of writing.

Because, this world is a very sinister place, filled with horror. But it is also a stunningly beautiful place, filled with everyday acts of exquisite kindness. For every person whose head is sawed off on the internet by a desperate extremist or whose face is chewed off by their labrador while they try to escape from their life in their sleep – someone else falls in love. For the first time. And sees a world suddenly filled with light, brimming with possibility. Someone’s life is saved by an unexpected kindness, someone opens their home to a stranger and is rewarded with gratitude, someone passes out of this world in peace – and feels only joy as they are lifted away.

And it is that simultaneous crashing of contradictory realities that makes this world so complex and delicious.

Heard a great line on TV at 4 in the morning last night when I couldn’t sleep: “Know what the two best words in the English language are? Things Change.”

And maybe, this is my job. To see it all, and to write about what I can see. To remind those whose eyes are mired in the darkness, that the world is also made of light and that things change. And to remind those who are incapable of feeling the darkness, because they’ve never seen it, that the world is not kind to everyone and that everything changes.

Here’ some of Pasolini’s own writing on Salò I found.

Quite an intense subversive character. Poet, filmmaker, radical – murdered by a gay lover, or possibly a political assassination the week he finished editing Salò.

He makes it very clear here that his reason for making this film was to sensitize an audience to the horrors of fascism. And it’s hard to look at the images in this film – and not think of Bush’s Abu Graib.

…The entire film with its unheard-of atrocities which are almost unmentionable, is presented as an immense sadistic metaphor of what was the Nazi-Fascist ‘dissociation’ from its ‘crimes against humanity’.

Sade’s characters (who are clearly SS men in civilian dress) behave exactly with their victims as the Nazi-Fascists did with theirs. They considered them as objects and destroyed automatically all possibility of human relationship with them.

Practical reason says that during the Republic of Salò it would have been particularly easy given the atmosphere to organise, as Sade’s protagonists did, a huge orgy in a villa guarded by SS men. Sade says explicitly in a phrase, less famous than so many others, that nothing is more profoundly anarchic than power – any power. To my knowledge there has never been in Europe any power as anarchic as that of the Republic of Salò: it was the most petty excess functioning as government. What applies to all power was especially clear in this one.

In addition to being anarchic what best characterises power – any power – is its natural capacity to turn human bodies into objects. Nazi-Fascist repression excelled in this.

“Here, the most high-minded artistic and moral aspirations coexist with hype, corporate self-congratulation and a reavening hunger for money and attention. All the values and pathologies that define the movie industry, – and perhaps American culture in general – are concentrated into a bitter, dizzying espresso shot.”

- New York Times, Friday, January 27, 2006

SC: ARE THERE ANY PARTS OF FILMMAKING THAT YOU DON’T ENJOY?

KJW: There is a part that I don’t like because it’s difficult. A lot of what I want to express is coming from my sensitivity, my sense of this world, and sometimes I have to explain it, verbalize it, so that I can convince everybody to work with me and that’s very difficult for me so I don’t like it.

Sometimes there are certain moments in my life when I get a strong impression, and because it’s a strong impresion, I want to move it to my film. I have to describe it and explain it, but I don’t think it’s possible to explain that strong impression that I felt on that moment in my life to other people. It’s very difficult.