For this extra special guest Viewfinders post, composer Curtis Heath (STUMPED, HELLION, 1985) offers his insights on the techniques composers used to score for giallo films. Heath will join us this Friday for a one-time-only introduction for THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU, where he’ll bring in some of these very instruments and do a live demo before the film. Fans of giallo films and film scores will not want to miss this one. Get your tickets here.
THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU (TUTTI I COLORI DEL BUIO) is a different type of giallo. Director Sergio Martino attempts to replace the genre’s standard black-gloved sociopath with the Devil himself, à la ROSEMARY’S BABY, which had been a box-office and critical success the previous year. Occult themes, with all their psychedelic paranoia and sexual tension, provide the perfect backdrop to Bruno Nicolai’s unsettling score. But, what exactly are all these weird sounds?
Nicolai got his start in film as a music editor for Ennio Morricone, with whom he attended conservatory in Rome. Eventually their collaborations, with Nicolai orchestrating and conducting, would create an iconic sound that defined Spaghetti Westerns. In 1964, they joined other notable Italian composers in founding Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (also known as The Group or Il Gruppo) which was a collective dedicated to developing new, avant-garde musical techniques, sometimes by modifying the instruments themselves! This creative period matched perfectly with the irreverent, jarring giallo style.
Here are some of Bruno Nicolai’s instruments and techniques:
Prepared guitar and piano:
Inspired by John Cage, Nicolai would place utensils, scrap metal, screws and paper clips in the strings of pianos and guitars. This turned them into unpredictable percussive instruments.
Baritone Silvertone Danelectro:
Popular in Country and Western music, Nicolai used this instrument to conjure the American West in his orchestrations for Spaghetti Westerns. However, the gritty, dark low-end also works well for giallo.
Tape echo:
The Binson Echorec is an Italian invention that allows sounds to echo and loop on top of themselves ad nauseam. With the right sound input and the right knob twiddling, an entire new universe could be created. Pink Floyd would later adapt this machine and associated techniques to create many of their iconic sounds in the 1970s.
Farfisa:
This transistor-based keyboard had switches to emulate strings, horns, woodwinds, and organ… none of which sounded remotely like they’re named! PERFECT for giallo! (Especially considering you could save money by not hiring an entire string section.)
Mellotron:
Like the Farfisa, only the Mellotron had ACTUAL recordings of flutes and choirs on a series of tape machines hidden inside the unit. These pieces of gear are engineering marvels, or nightmares depending on who you ask.
Musical Saw:
Just a standard saw for cutting wood! Bowed properly, it creates a queasy sound similar to the sci-fi Theremin of the 1950s.
Waterphone:
Invented by Richard Waters in 1968, the instrument is a metal bowl, filled with water or oil, with long tines welded along its edges. The tines can be plucked or bowed creating an eerie effect.
October is here and the Halloween season is upon us. As you’re scheduling your own 31 Nights of Halloween, look no further than the AFS Cinema calendar to layer in rare theatrical screenings and more. This month, we’re presenting a variety of horror films, from a giallo series to a Japanese vampire trilogy to John Carpenter’s classic THE THING.
The Italian style of thriller that has become known as the giallo, is, when done well, fascinating and haunting, thanks in large part to the films’ scores. This series presents some of the best films of the genre, and some of the best soundtracks.
Inspired by the runaway success of the British and American gothic horror films of the sixties, Toho studios brought the vampiric tropes of the Dracula legend to Japanese screens with The Vampire Doll, Lake of Dracula, and Evil of Dracula – three spookily effective cult classics collectively known as The Bloodthirsty Trilogy.
It’s not only Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) –Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.) are invited to the party, too! By 1948 the character-driven horror films at Universal had petered out – along with the careers of Abbott and Costello. The genius idea to combine the comedy duo (playing for laughs) and the monsters (playing it straight) was a hit. Although it was a swan song for the monsters it was the first in a series of four comedic horror films for Abbott & Costello. Come celebrate Halloween with AFS while we laugh at the monsters and Abbott & Costello’s antics – no nightmares here!
A PhD candidate in philosophy explores being and nothingness as a vampire and craven junkie for that most precious sanguine fluid – blood. From writer Nicholas St. John (KING OF NEW YORK, DRILLER KILLER) comes a deliriously heady blend of Descartes and Catholic despair set to the colorful hip-hop conceits of Cypress Hill’s “I Wanna Get High”. An utterly original nocturnal trek through the metaphysical starring: Lily Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra and a third of the eventual Sopranos cast. THE ADDICTION is a bite in the night – Abel Ferrara’s New York –shot in stark black and white.
Opens October 23 – Additional showtimes to be added soon
How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 movie House? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby Doo as directed by Dario Argento? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip about a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home, only to come face to face with evil spirits, bloodthirsty pianos, and a demonic housecat. Too absurd to be genuinely terrifying, yet too nightmarish to be merely comic, House seems like it was beamed to Earth from another planet. Or perhaps the mind of a child: the director fashioned the script after the eccentric musings of his eleven-year-old daughter, then employed all the tricks in his analog arsenal (mattes, animation, and collage) to make them a visually astonishing, raucous reality. Never before released in the United States, and a bona fide cult classic in the making, House is one of the most exciting genre discoveries in years. Janus Films
In what may be the most expressive use of practical special effects technology in a horror film, John Carpenter, and effects guru Rob Bottin have created an unforgettably visceral and effective scare machine of a film about a shape-changing alien invader whose first casualties on Earth are the inhabitants of a polar research station.
Taking viewers on a chaotic journey through the liminal space of the Halloween season, The Eyeslicer Halloween Special feels like an acid trip down the Halloween aisle at Party City. The Special features work by over a dozen boundary-pushing American filmmakers (and includes shorts that have played at places like Sundance, SXSW, TIFF, and True/False). The Special is created by Dan Schoenbrun and Vanessa McDonnell (collective:unconscious, Chained for Life), executive produced by the radical artist collective Meow Wolf, and hosted by nine amateur Elvira impersonators we found on Craigs List.
Stephen King’s tale about a mother-son duo hiding an unusual secret. When they move to a small town in search of new prey, a high-school girl has to fight for her life in this gory (and at times humorous) horror film.
The fully-restored 1980 gem that made Martin Scorsese’s 11 Scariest Horror Movies Of All Time list. This movie represents a career peak for both star George C. Scott and director Peter Medak (THE RULING CLASS.) Oscar-winner Scott delivers major feels as a classical music composer consumed by grief after his wife and daughter are killed in a shocking accident. When he moves to a secluded Victorian mansion, he finds himself haunted by a paranormal entity that unleashes an even more disturbing secret. Based on actual events! (AGFA)
Margot Kidder is Danielle, a beautiful model separated from her Siamese twin, Dominique. When a hotshot reporter (Jennifer Salt) suspects Dominique of a brutal murder, she becomes dangerously ensnared in the sisters’ insidious sibling bond. A scary and stylish paean to female destructiveness, De Palma’s first foray into horror voyeurism is a stunning amalgam of split-screen effects, bloody birthday cakes, and a chilling score by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann.-Janus
Earlier this week, AFS members were treated to a Sneak Preview of THE OLD MAN & THE GUN, the newest film from AFS Grant recipient David Lowery. We were fortunate to have producers Toby Halbrooks and James M. Johnston join us for a special Q&A after the film, where they talked about working with the wonder duo of Robert Redford (for what is rumored to be his last acting role) and Sissy Spacek, and more.
Members get access to great sneak previews like this. Become a member today: austinfilm.org/join
THE OLD MAN AND THE GUN opens in theaters on September 28.
IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY screened on September 20, 2018 as a part of our Children of Abraham/Ibrahim series.
At once an ode and a requiem for Cairo, In the Last Days of the City, Tamer El-Said’s heartbreaking debut feature, is a master-class in capturing time and space. Though the Egyptian capital takes center stage here, this melancholic poem speaks to the magic and violence of the Arab metropolis at large, with Beirut and Baghdad also making an appearance, the former literally and the latter spiritually.
Khalid Abdalla’s disillusioned flaneur anchors the film in the soul-crushing years preceding the Arab Spring, but the greater power here lies in Said’s somber retrospection on the last decade. Though the vast majority of the film was shot before 2011, and took about eight years to finish, one gets the feeling it could not have been made without the numbing desperation that has overtaken the country following 2013. The film thrives in expressing the inexpressible, fixating on scenes of violence and chaos with the same reverence and attention it gives those of romance and friendship. In this way, Said faithfully captures the fever of and paradox of being a Cairene in the 21st century. His pseudo-documentary style is disheartening and alarming at times, but it also succeeds at capturing the nuance of Downtown Cairo’s aesthetic, at once one of decadence and decay.
The line between fiction and reality is further blurred by our protagonist, who simply goes by the first name of his actor, Khaled. Besides the name, film Khaled also shares the actor’s disjointed sense of belonging, with dizziness that accompanies those who have one foot inside their home and the other far away. Through character and visual motifs, Said places the film and its characters squarely in conversation with much of contemporary Egyptian independent cinema, particularly that of Ahmed Abdalla. While in no way derivative of Abdalla’s work, In the Last Days of the City shares delightful similarities with the themes of his filmography, and especially with Heliopolis (2009), Microphone (2010), and Rags and Tatters (2013). Heliopolis, in which Said actually had a cameo, similarly follows a filmmaker who does not know what he’s trying to capture, but knows he simply must film. Though Heliopolis focuses on the eponymous Cairo district, while Last Days focuses primarily on the downtown center, both share a potent sense of spatial tragedy as well as a desire to investigate and resist nostalgia, despite the temptation to indulge in its comforts. Less concerned with the past, Microphone echoes the need to capture the fleeting present, doubling down on the notion of filmmaking as archiving that is so prevalent in both the text and metatext of Last Days. Though radically different in its subject matter and use (or lack thereof) of dialogue, Rags and Tatters mirrors Last Days’ dissolution of reality through its obsession with the mundane. In their fascination with forgotten urban spaces and corners, both films seek to excavate the Cairo that is all but ignored by mainstream cinema and television, and in the process challenge our limited notions of what the city is or can be.
Many were at first shocked when Last Days was covertly ‘banned’ from being screened in Egypt, given it does not explicitly attack the government, but anyone who watches closely will see that it does so much more. By inviting us to such an alienated and contradictory exploration of Cairo, Said pushes his audience to soak in the discomfort of the present. And that’s bound to get folks riled up.
Contributed by Hazem Fahmy, University of Texas at Austin
From an outsider’s view, the Toronto International Film Festival may appear to be a glamorous, high-profile festival with back-to-back red carpet premieres of this year’s crop of Oscar contenders. For AFS Lead Film Programmer Lars Nilsen, the festival is a great opportunity to explore the pool of films that will someday make their way to the AFS Cinema. Fresh off his return from watching a personal record breaking 37(!) films, we spoke with Lars about his favorites from the festival. Be on the lookout for many of these film to make their way onto the AFS calendar in the coming months.
“This is a film co-directed by Ciro Guerra, whose films EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT and THE WIND JOURNEYS we’ve played at our cinema. BIRDS OF PASSAGE is almost like a Godfather film in its scope. It’s a film about a crime organization formed among indigenous Columbian people who have an encounter with some Peace Corps volunteers who really want to buy some weed. So they go from being these people who live in a barter economy to becoming business tycoons in a way, over a 15-year period. It’s a wide, sweeping film about the ways of the first world coming to these people. It is an exciting, action-packed, incredibly violent, emotionally resonant film; but it’s also a sort of political tract about Capitalism. And I always think it’s really interesting when there’s that kind of a subtext to a film.”
“Radu Jude (whose films AFERIM! and SCARRED HEARTS we’ve shown) has a new, fascinating film which takes place in his native Romania. It’s about people putting on a historical pageant about World War II, and what happened during World War II in Romania, which was a very complicated time period. The film is about three hours long, and it’s mostly just people having conversations and quoting from books. It’s Godard-ian in the sense that it’s a film that’s made out of material that is non-traditional film material. It’s really good, and a really important film for our time. I was watching it with a friend and we walked out of it like ‘wow, is America the most illiterate country in the world?’ because these Romanians are talking about everything from like political theory to Laurel and Hardy in their conversations, and the breadth and scope of their discourse is so wide. It’s a really special film, I liked it a lot.”
“Carlos Reygadas, who made POST TENEBRAS LUX has a new film that’s amazing in scope. Three-hour long movies is one of the themes this year at TIFF I have to say. OUR TIME is a three-hour long movie about a married couple who are intellectuals. He is a poet, they’re ranchers on a huge spread outside of Mexico City and their sex life is very eventful, which sort of sows the seeds of their destruction, or at least the destruction of certain concepts that they hold dear. It’s a really interesting film and I can’t say much about it without spoiling it. But for me, it was one of the most emotionally wrenching movies I saw at the festival. I think it’s kind of a masterpiece, actually.”
“There’s a very good new movie by Mia Hansen-Love, who has guest programmed for us before. It’s about a French journalist who was held hostage by terrorists and is trying to re-acclimate. He goes on a trip to India–which is the country where he grew up–and we see him trying to sort of rebuild his soul. It’s a sort of small film full of small observations and it’s just very good film with a lot of heart.”
“The new Claire Denis film HIGH LIFE takes place in a space station/penal colony where prisoners are being dispatched to the outer reaches of the universe to see what happens when they go into a black hole. It stars Robert Pattinson and its an odd sort of prison movie (in space), and of course, it’s directed by Claire Denis so it’s weird and unusual and I liked it.”
“Another filmmaker we love, South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo. We’ve shown several of his films. His new one, HOTEL BY THE RIVER, is part of his cycle of black and white chamber films with a small cast. It’s about a poet staying in a hotel, and his sons come to join him, and a couple of women recognize him as the poet he is, and there’s a lot of back and forth kind of like a drawing-room farce. I read a review immediately afterward saying that this was a “sad” new movie from Hong Sang-soo and it made me realize that everyone experiences movies so differently. I was laughing all the way through this film, and I didn’t think it was sad, I thought it was very drily funny, like so much of Hong’s work”
“There’s a good, talky (not in a bad way) new Olivier Assayas movie called NON-FICTION, it’s about a bunch of Parisian intellectuals who are authors and book publishers and people adjacent to the literary industry sort of dealing with the technological change and sort of what it means in terms of a shift in the French world of letters, if you will. It’s sort of a salon film. We experience the pleasure of good conversation with interesting people. There are some arch laughs, and a lot of very on-point cultural observations.”
“Chang-dong Lee’s new film BURNING (which is going to be playing at Fantastic Fest) is a pretty riveting film based on a Murakami short story called “Barn Burning”. I don’t want to spoil what the movie’s about, but it’s a really interesting story about a guy who falls in love with a woman, a romantic triangle with an older rich guy develops, and then the rivalry between the two men reaches extreme proportions.”
“The new film from Koreeda, whose film THE THIRD MURDER we just played, is called SHOPLIFTERS. This was the Palme D’Or winner at Cannes this year. It’s a pretty amazing neo-neo-realist film about a family of very poor people in a city in Japan who make a living hand-to-mouth: stealing, hustling, begging, living however they can. Things happen over the course of the family’s life of course, which I won’t spoil here. A really nice, really wonderful, well acted film.
“AMERICAN DHARMA is a full-length interview with the fascist, Steve Bannon. And a lot of people I talked to had real mixed feelings about this because they felt like, ‘why give the microphone and camera to this fascist to tell his fascist, racist stories?’ But (as always for me with Errol Morris films) I think it’s fascinating to hear from Steve Bannon. Because Bannon trips over himself, he trips over his logical fallacies at every turn, and it becomes more of a pathological document about what creates a Steve Bannon, which I think is valuable. And it’s creepy to spend time with Steve Bannon, there’s no doubt about that–but I also feel like I have insight into the sort of mental processes that create a Steve Bannon and I think it’s valuable for that reason alone.”
“I saw a movie called THE WILD PEAR TREE which is by the director of WINTER SLEEP, which won the Palme D’Or a few years ago (and which just played at the AFS Cinema) . This new film takes place partly in the Anatolian region of Turkey, partly in the cities, but it’s about a young man whose father is a poet. Over the course of his life his father has become a school teacher and a gambling addict and is generally kind of a fuck-up, and we see him through the son’s eyes. The son–so full of promise and ideals–judges the father. Over the course of the three-hour long film we see as he begins to forgive his father and draws insight over his own life from looking at his father’s ruined, wasted life: which may or may not have been so ruined and wasted, as it turns out. It’s like a big discursive novel that bulges out in some places and is understated in others, but is so full of detail that it gives you a vivid sense of time and place.”
“Frederick Wiseman is a filmmaker who we’ve played every film that he’s come out with since the AFS Cinema has been open, and I can’t imagine us not playing a new Frederick Wiseman film (or an older film as it’s restored). I think Wiseman is really in the top tier of our greatest living filmmakers. He has a new film called MONROVIA, INDIANA, and it’s in the manner of some of his recent films like IN JACKSON HEIGHTS where he goes and explores a neighborhood and sees how the neighborhood works. Here he goes to a small town in Indiana and he examines the process by which the town runs, by which the culture happens in the town, and how the school system works, and all of that. We see the mechanisms of small-town America circa 2018, or 2016, or whenever the film was made. And it has a whole new gloss now that Trump has been elected based on voters from towns like Monrovia, Indiana. I’m not sure the political tone was intended at the time the cameras were rolling, but it’s fascinating to watch people in church, to watch people having a wedding, to watch a Masonic ceremony, to watch a town council meeting, and to just see the way that small towns work. It’s not ‘urbane-New-York-guy-is-looking-at-small-town-Americans-and-judging-them’ I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not a film where we’re laughing at people. There are some times where we’re laughing with them, but it’s a film that really makes us think about what it’s like to be, for instance, a guy who runs a gun shop in Monrovia, Indiana.”
DON’T LEAVE HOME opens on September 14 at AFS Cinema. Filmmaker Michael Tully and actress Anna Margaret Hollyman will be in attendance at shows during the first weekend. Get your tickets today.
On this episode of the AFS Viewfinders podcast, we visit with Austin-based filmmaker Michael Tully, whose new feature film DON’T LEAVE HOME opens September 14 at AFS Cinema. Tully has been immersed in the film world for years, not only as a filmmaker but also as a writer for Hammer to Nail, cinephile, and now teacher. His previous features include SEPTIEN (2011) and PING PONG SUMMER (2014), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In this conversation, Tully talks about his experiences teaching film classes, hitting the international festival circuit, why he had to shoot his new gothic horror film in Ireland, what makes sound design key to making an effective horror film, and more.
Written by Associate Professor Karen Grumberg, of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at UT.
The three Israeli Palestinian women in Maysaloun Hamoud’s debut film, IN BETWEEN, are, first and foremost, women. The fact that Hamoud is Israeli Palestinian herself may lead viewers to expect her film to focus on the political dimension of their existence; while the political is never far from the everyday lives of Israeli Palestinians, though, it recedes to the background in IN BETWEEN, allowing for the women’s stories to emerge in all their intimacy and universality.
Laila (Mouna Hawa), who hails from Haifa, is a beautiful, unconventional, chain-smoking lawyer; she shares an apartment with Salma (Sana Jammelieh), a DJ who disdains her Christian parents’ constant attempts to marry her off. Their life of non-stop nightclubs and casual drug use is suddenly disrupted by the arrival of a third flatmate, Nur (Shaden Kanboura), an observant Muslim from Umm al-Fahm. Though Nur is initially put off by her new roommates’ unapologetically secular lifestyle – and they by her conservatism – all three gradually realize that their similarities are greater than their differences. The film highlights concrete signifiers of the women’s differences: it lingers on Laila’s crisp white button-down shirts as she dresses for work, on Selma’s defiantly shapeless dress as she prepares for yet another meeting with a potential suitor, on Nur’s careful wrapping of her headscarf. As soon as it acknowledges these differences, though, it works to expose them as superficial.
What binds them together is how they experience relationships as women who don’t fit into the roles that their families, societies, or partners wish them to occupy. The experience of feminist autonomy granted by life in a hedonistic Tel Aviv clashes with the discrimination these women experience as Palestinians; though not dominant in the film, it hovers always just beneath the surface. Meanwhile, the expectations of a patriarchal society constrict these characters and force them to make difficult and painful choices. And they make them, courageously.
Since its 2016 premiere, the film has received numerous accolades, in Israel and abroad, most notably in the form of the Cannes Women in Motion Young Talents Award. Hamoud has also, perhaps inevitably, been criticized for accepting Israeli funding for the film, a choice she has eloquently defended. The most ironic reaction of all was expressed by the municipality of the conservative Umm Al-Fahm, which called for a boycott of the film for its irreverence and requested that the Ministry of Culture ban its screening. This outrage, and the death threats Hamoud has received since, are perhaps the greatest confirmation of the urgency and relevance of IN BETWEEN.
For the 12th year running the Austin Film Society, the UT Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Initiative for Communication on Media and the Middle East (ICOMME) present Children of Abraham/Ibrahim, a selection of recent films that shine a light on the diverse people and perspectives of the Middle East. The series kicks off with IN BETWEEN, which plays at AFS Cinema on September 5th. Get tickets here.
Richard Linklater’s SLACKER, released nationally on July 5, 1991, has left a lasting impression on the independent filmmaking world and Austin’s own film scene. Back in July 2001, AFS celebrated our Founder and Artistic Director’s groundbreaking film with a ten year reunion at the Paramount Theatre. Cast, crew, and just about everyone who lived in Austin in the early 90s were brought together to remember the making-of the film.
Limited edition programs were made for the occasion, featuring notes from Linklater, producer John Sloss, film rep John Pierson, Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black, and more. Take a few minutes to flip through this unarchived treasure.
The Zellner Brothers’ newest film, DAMSEL, opens today at AFS Cinema. This re-invention of the western genre shows off some of their trademarks—it’s unpredictable, contains a unique brand of humanism, and features their off-kilter sense of humor. We asked David and Nathan Zellner to share their shortlist of westerns that influenced their take on the genre.
