Experimenting with film is exciting to me. It feels like it has purpose. -Kate Bush, Egos and Icons, 1993
Kate Bush has always been more than your average musical artist. Its not ordinary to have a chart-topping single when youre 19-years-old, let alone a number-one hit about a classic literary text of all things. From the onset, she was more than hooks. She was a wizard of merging artistic interests, folded together into a stunning presentation of everything she could offer as an artist. Bush is never satisfied, but geniuses so rarely are, and when she masters one art form, she moves onto another with a ravenous appetite for perfection. In her art she has combined music, dance, mime, literature, fashion, and cinema into one. Her art is overwhelmingly dense and, from the beginning, few could truly reckon with her talent. Her music videos and concert television specials, in particular, are the purest distillation of her skills, and in cinematic terms, share a kinship with the likes of Maya Deren, Jacques Rivette, Franois Truffaut, and Terence Fisher.
In an interview with a British Television station from 1978, Bush recalled a moment in her childhood which would have a lasting effect on her psyche and her engagement with art. She was struck by an image from a television adaptation of Wuthering Heights. She caught the last five minutes of it and, without context, the image of a ghostly Kathy (the protagonist of the novel) haunted her. It was an extreme close-up, with Kathy begging for a window to be opened so she could enter her old house. From her earliest inclinations as an artist, she was first and foremost interested in visual imagery. Bush would also say in this interview that she wanted to write a song about the image that had stuck with her, but she needed to read the book first so she could have context and get the tone right. What would become of this collision course of image, text, and music is her first number one single in Britain, Wuthering Heights. The music video that followed would be one of the best the genre has ever seen.
There are numerous videos for the Wuthering Heights single, but two are widely recognized as the canonical examples in Bushs oeuvre: The red dress video and the white dress video. Both present different formal takes on the single, and both are altogether dynamic in their connection to the song. The first of these, the white dress video, is shot on a sound stage with golden, harsh lighting, emanating from Bushs body as she does her interpretive dance of the song. She makes big, swooping gestures with her limbs and has wide Clara Bow-like eyes. The image is split into two separate sections to create one fluid imageone a close-up so you can see her facial reactions to the song, the other with a wider scope so you can see the gestures shes making to emphasize certain lyrics and passages of the song. Occasionally time-lapse photography is used to give off the illusion that Bushs body is splitting into parts as she moves like Da Vincis Vitruvian Man. Cinematically, this video shares DNA with some of the earliest short films, more specifically the Serpentine Dance experiments that many different directors used to showcase how images could move in a certain way, but updated to aesthetics that would be more commonly used in early experimental music videos. These techniques were used to better capture singular movement and siren, ghostly feminine images, like in Bruce Conners groundbreaking video for Breakaway, starring Toni Basil. It would be startling in its own right if it were the only video for Wuthering Heights, but Kate Bush did one better when she donned the red dress.
“Experimenting with film is exciting to me. It feels like it has purpose.” -Kate Bush, Egos and Icons, 1993
Kate Bush has always been more than your average musical artist. It’s not ordinary to have a chart-topping single when you’re 19-years-old, let alone a number-one hit about a classic literary text of all things. From the onset, she was more than hooks. She was a wizard of merging artistic interests, folded together into a stunning presentation of everything she could offer as an artist.
Few filmmakers have made films as thematically rich as those from writers/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the 1940s. From 1943 to 1949, Powell and Pressburger, better known as the Archers, made seven superlative films that leapfrog genres with heedless abandon, from wartime epic to fantastical romance to psychosexual thriller to ballet drama. Thanks largely to cinephilic champions such as Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who married Powell in 1984), as well as home-media ventures like The Criterion Collection, the Archers films have received a vital and necessary second life.
While the Archers 1940s-era septet have recognizable throughlines as well as a reliable stable of performers, three of those films are cut from the same cloth, despite telling radically different stories with varying tones. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death all take place, at least in part, during World War II, and all three films depict a nation at war, as much with other countries as with itself. When we think of British culture, we think of the stiff-upper-lip mentality depicted in popular culture for decades, typified by how Brits acted and reacted in World War II. But the Archers, in this wartime trio, debated the validity of fighting a war with that old-fashioned mentality, offering up films designed to be propagandistic enough to be approved for release but that also asked what it meant to be British in seemingly perpetual wartime.
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But war starts at midnight! – Clive Wynne-Candy
Oh, yes, you say war starts at midnight. How do you know the enemy says so too? – Spud Wilson
The nuance of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was likely always going to make it a sore spot for the British government. Colonel Blimp was not original to The Archers; he was a comic-strip character created by David Low in the 1930s, meant to skewer puffed-up elder statesmen of the British military. The stereotype of a fatheaded, pompous fool had pervaded the national consciousness so much that Winston Churchill feared the Archers adaptation would revive the publics critical perception of the military when support was needed the most. But while the title invokes Colonel Blimp, the lead character is never referred to as Blimp, and is much less foolish than he may seem when initially seen attacking a young British soldier in a Turkish bath. Powell and Pressburger used the character and the staid, fusty old notions of British militarism as a jumping-off point for a detailed, poignant character study.
Set over four decades, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp begins near its finale, as Great Britain struggles to gain a foothold over the Nazis. We first see our Colonel Blimp, the portly, bald, and mustachioed Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), beset upon by younger soldiers in the club where he now lives as part of a training exercise. Clive is infuriated because theyve started hours earlier than planned; before the smug young soldier leading the charge can explain himself, the two get into a tussle that speaks to why Powell and Pressburger wanted to tell this story. In the production of their previous film, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, the directors removed a scene where an elderly character tells a younger one, You dont know what its like to be old. (The idea that this could serve as the thematic backbone to an entire feature was provided by the Archers then-editor, David Lean.) Clives rage at being taken off-guard leads him to thrash young Spud Wilson and teach him a lesson: You laugh at my big belly, but you dont know how I got it! You laugh at my mustache, but you dont know why I grew it!
And so, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp flashes back 40 years, a rare instance where a movie indulging in the now-hoary in medias res technique pays dramatic dividends. The rest of the film focuses on three points in the life of the man known first as Clive Candy: his time in the Boer War, the devastating World War I, and his twilight years of service as World War II ramps up. For a war film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp offers exceedingly little bloodshed. Powell and Pressburgers film examines how such gruesome action informs men like Clive away from the battlefield, instead of depicting that action in full. Each section of Blimp shows how his noble efforts make him hardened and intractable over time, even against the tide of a truly tyrannical force. At first, Clives militaristic mantra is honorable: Right is might. But as the film reaches its third hour, he learns that his theory, one embodied by his nation, has been so cruelly disproven by the Nazi scourge that he and Britain must change their ways.
Few filmmakers have made films as thematically rich as those from writers/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the 1940s. From 1943 to 1949, Powell and Pressburger, better known as the Archers, made seven superlative films that leapfrog genres with heedless abandon...
Halfway through my first viewing of Zach Snyders Sucker Punchas I tried to disengage from the negative criticism floating around the film, as I admitted I was not only getting sucked in, I was actually moved by all of ita confused thought drifted into my head: Am I crazy, or is this a little bit like Gold Diggers of 1933? (Thats a rhetorical question, although I can already hear the response.) The thought was so ludicrous it felt like a hallucination, not to mention a sacrilege, but it kept nagging at me. Maybe 15, 20 minutes after that, theres a scene where the evil pimp-orderly Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) comes into the rebellious girls ratty dressing room to read them the riot act. On the wall is a collage of old movie posters, and I got a brief flash of the words GOLD DIGGERS behind his head. I paused the film, and squinted at the screen.
The posters I could make out were:
Night and Day, the 1946 biopic about Cole Porter, starring Cary Grant. Blues in the Night, the 1941 film about a guy putting together a jazz band. My Dream is Yours, the 1949 musical where Doris Day replaces a singer in his popular radio show. Thank Your Lucky Stars, the 1943 film about a wartime charity show, starring Eddie Cantor as himself.
Most notably, though, there was not one, not two, but three posters for various Gold Diggers film. (There had been many in the franchise: The Gold Diggers (1923), Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), Gold Diggers of 1933/1935/37released in each respective year, and Gold Diggers in Paris (1938).) The three overlapping posters created bristling antlers out of the word Gold Diggers flar-ing out around Oscar Isaacs head.
These posters were obviously deliberate choices. Each movie is a musical about a musical, films about creating music, about putting on a show. The posters are a statement of intention. Or, at least, a statement of aspiration. They place Sucker Punch in a continuum, and, in a way, tell us how to watch the film. Starting out with a shot of a gloomy old-fashioned proscenium with dark curtains, Sucker Punch is a version of the backstage musical, complete with dance rehearsals filled with the pressure of putting on a good show. Gold Diggers of 1933, the best of the Gold Diggers films, casts a shadow longer than Sucker Punch can ever hope to do, but the two films operate in similar ways, using dizzying artificial worlds of fantasy as a bulwark against the harsh realities of life beyond the lights. But something happens in both films: the fantasies shine the spotlight onto urgent social and political concerns, and so they are not just escapes from reality. They expose reality.
The four scrappy tap-shoed Gold Digger girls trying to survive in a harsh world arent dissimilar to the five scrappy leotard-wearing girls in Sucker Punch, trying to escape the confines menand a lunatic societyhave put on them. The characters in both films discover escape hatches through elaborately staged numbers. (In Gold Diggers, its the kaleidoscopic vision of choreographer Busby Berkeley; in Sucker Punch, its the alternate universes Babydoll creates whenever she dances.) These numbers reflect and distort the action going on just offstage. They are meta-commentaries on material that is already somewhat meta.
Critics scorched the earth so much in response to Sucker Punch that one might be inclined to tiptoe into the landscape tentatively, but this is ridiculous. You dont have to defend a movie as though it’s a criminal. At the time of its release, there were a handful of criticsDanny Bowes, Sonny Bunch, and Betsy Sharkey, among themwho wrote about the film in a way I found intriguing. In their words, Sucker Punch sounded ambitious, bold, and maybe a little bit dumb. But also interesting. Ambitious failures are often more compelling than connect-the-dots successes. I found some of the defenses unconvincing (outside of the trio of writers I mentioned), in particular the its a film about female empowerment! chorus, written by mostly young male writers. (Anna Biller, director of the great The Love Witch, handled that type of argument once and for all in a recent essay, not about Sucker Punch but about the need, in general, to label films we love as feminist" in order to justify loving them.) The queasily mixed messages of Sucker Punch are part of its unnerving mood, but it doesnt need to be labeled as feminist or its about empowerment! in order to justify engaging with its onslaught of ideas and emotions. If you compare Sucker Punchs critique of societys treatment of women to a film like Chantal Akermans Jeanne Dielman, it seems like a pretty silly and surface-level story. And it is.
But Sucker Punch shows enormous empathy for the double-bind of women, the damned if you do/dont realities of sexuality, the survival techniques women create to deflect how the world sees them. The film goes after a gaslighting patriarchal culture where women are, metaphorically, either in a mental institution or a brothel. Nobody will just let women be. Its world is a world run by men with a vested interest in keeping women divided and conquered. (One of the best parts of Sucker Punch is the cooperation and sympathy among the women. Even when they argue, there is space for different opinions. Gold Diggers of 1933, too, doggedly refuses to pit the women against each other. Even Ginger Rogers, the only one whos truly a gold digger, is treated with eye-rolling humor by the others. Its far closer to the actual reality of female friendship than a catfighting competition.) Sucker Punch pursues its targets with a CGI-generated sledgehammer wielded by a ponytailed girl in a babydoll dress. Its vision is hallucinatory and exaggerated, but the exaggeration makes its points in a refreshingly clear way.
The 6-minute prologue in Sucker Punch lays out the horrifying backstory of Babydoll (Emily Browning), all to the accompaniment of Brownings whispered, dirge-like rendition of Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This. The sequence is both ridiculous and a tour de force. I responded so strongly to the pain and pleasure of the images I wondered how much I was being manipulated. I answered my own question: This is total manipulation, but its extremely effective. Every scene surges with a barely controlled sense of injustice, desperate wish-fulfillment, outrage, and hope so strong its indistinguishable from loss. The world is one of Dickensian depravity poured through the paranoid filter of Ken Kesey. The message is way larger than the messenger.
Babydoll is thrown into an institution for the criminally insane, after accidentally killing her sister during a scuffle with their evil stepfather. Oscar Isaac, with Errol Flynn mustache, plays the subversive orderly, assuring Babydolls stepfather a lobotomy has been scheduled for next week. He leads Babydoll into what is known as the theatre, a gigantic echoing space where the other patients act out their aggressions, all under the watchful eye of Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino). Jon Hamm arrives to perform the lobotomy and Babydoll launches herself into a fantasy where the asylum is actually a brothel/strip club, with trapped girls entertaining high-rolling clients. The other girlsSweetpea (Abbie Cornish) and her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung)take Babydoll under their wing. In a cavernous rehearsal room, Babydoll is told by Guginonow a den-mother who clearly started out as one of themto dance. Babydoll sways back and forth and suddenly an entire world erupts, a world where she fights (and slays) a trio of gigantic samurai-robots. She is also given the tools for her escape by a character who shows up in each fantasy called Wise Man, played by Scott Glenn. When the number stops, everyone in the rehearsal hall is breathless and awestruck by her.
Throughout the rest of the film, Babydoll is called upon to dance over and over again to distract their male captors as the girls gather together the items they need to break free. Each dance creates a different universe. After the Samurai-Robot Ballet comes the Orc-Infested Battle of Leningrad, the Steampunk Nazi Show-down, the Fire-Breathing Dragon Tussle, and the Ticking Bomb on a Speeding Train Finale. In each, the girls transform into an Inglourious Basterds team of misfit Commandos, swaggering through danger, obliterating anything in their path. Zach Snyders imagination is on bombastic overdrive, but all of the actresses bring real feeling to the table. The film is Gothic horror, melodrama, and a music video, propelled by real trauma.
Halfway through my first viewing of Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch—as I tried to disengage from the negative criticism floating around the film, as I admitted I was not only getting sucked in, I was actually moved by all of it—a confused thought drifted into my head: “Am I crazy, or is this a little bit like Gold Diggers of 1933?” (That’s a rhetorical question, although I can already hear the response.) The thought was so ludicrous it felt like a hallucination, not to mention a sacrilege, but it kept nagging at me. Maybe 15, 20 minutes after that, there’s a scene where the evil pimp-orderly Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) comes into the rebellious girls’ ratty dressing room to read them the riot act. On the wall is a collage of old movie posters, and I got a brief flash of the words “GOLD DIGGERS” behind his head. I paused the film, and squinted at the screen.
When Katy Perrys Firework begins playing for the first time in Jacques Audiards Rust and Bone, its not especially noticeable. The song is part of the background music at Marineland, the aquatic park where Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) works as an orca trainer, one of several upbeat pop songs that serve to get the crowd excited during the routine animal performances in the outdoor amphitheater. Its only after the minute-long section of the song has ended, and the soundtrack has shifted to tense orchestral music, that it becomes clear how indelibly Firework will be seared into Stephanies psyche, probably for the rest of her life.
The presence of contemporary pop songs like Firework, especially in mainstream Hollywood movies, is usually unremarkable and often little more than an afterthought, with songs just as likely chosen for marketing purposes as for artistic ones. But filmmakers with strong visions can harness the undeniable power of a huge pop hit like Firework and transform it into an essential storytelling tool, as Audiard does in Rust and Bone and as the directors of the far more multiplex-friendly movies The Interview and Madagascar 3: Europes Most Wanted do as well. It may be a coincidence that the filmmakers behind all three movies chose Firework for the most pivotal and memorable moments in their films, but its no coincidence that Perrys empowerment anthem has the ability to speak to artists with very different creative goals.
Written by Perry along with Ester Dean, StarGate, and Sandy Vee and taken from Perrys 2010 album Teenage Dream, Firework is one of Perrys biggest hits, and it seems tailor-made for the movies, with its soaring earworm chorus and its inspirational lyrics that are specific enough to stick in your mind (the singular use of firework is especially uncommon) but generic enough to apply to almost any situation involving believing in yourself and pursuing your dreams. Its not necessarily a great song, but its the right song for what each of these films is aiming to convey at a particular moment.
The second time that Firework surfaces in Rust and Bone, about 50 minutes after the first, its significance is clear: Stephanie is now in a wheelchair, following an accident that left her legs severed below the knee. The choreographed performance between orcas and trainers, set to Firework, was the last thing she experienced before her terrible injury, and the song is now a symbol of the life shes lost and has struggled to rebuild. Much of that rebuilding has come from her burgeoning relationship with Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), an underground mixed martial-arts fighter and itinerant laborer who has shown her more compassion and patience than anyone else in her life. The two have just had sex for the first time, in a scene that is sweet and passionate and a little awkward, and Ali has left Stephanies apartment with a casual farewell that doesnt match her clearly stronger feelings of attachment.
Vulnerable yet undaunted, Stephanie sits on her balcony, Audiards camera first capturing her from behind. As Audiard cuts to a side view of Stephanie, she slowly starts miming the hand motions from her aquatic performance, first in silence and then as Firework gradually fades in on the soundtrack. As it does in most instances in all three of these movies, the song begins here with the line Ignite the light and let it shine, sparking the light in Stephanies eyes as her hands are outstretched and open. The song builds to its chorus as her motions become more confident, forceful. Her expression goes from wistful to triumphant, her hands poised and powerful, pumping to the beat. As the song continues to play, Audiard cuts to Stephanie, using a cane and her new prosthetic legs, walking for the first time into the empty amphitheater where she used to perform. Shes finally found the inner strength to confront her trauma, and while a lot of that came from Ali, plenty of it came from Katy Perry, too.
Theres a surprising amount of emotional power to the use of Firework in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldbergs The Interview as well, even if it first appears as the target of a somewhat obvious joke. Vain talk show host Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his more pragmatic producer Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) have traveled to North Korea to interview dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park), an apparent superfan of Daves vapid celebrity-interview show. Theyve also been tasked by a CIA agent (Lizzy Caplan) with secretly assassinating Kim, although Dave has started to bond with the lonely despot, who has a secret fondness for cheesy American culture.
When Katy Perry’s “Firework” begins playing for the first time in Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone, it’s not especially noticeable. The song is part of the background music at Marineland, the aquatic park where Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) works as an orca trainer, one of several upbeat pop songs that serve to get the crowd excited during the routine animal performances in the outdoor amphitheater. It’s only after the minute-long section of the song has ended, and the soundtrack has shifted to tense orchestral music, that it becomes clear how indelibly “Firework” will be seared into Stephanie’s psyche, probably for the rest of her life.
