Lindsay Anderson's British drama If.... couldn't have arrived in theatres at a more opportune time than 1968. The movie introduced Malcolm McDowell as rebellious student Mick Travis at an English public school bound by tradition and sadistic punishment. Soon after Anderson shot the film's climactic scenes of student revolt and massacre, student riots erupted in Paris and elsewhere. But it was "a very extraordinary coincidence," Anderson said; David Sherwin's screenplay, based on a story Sherwin co-wrote called Crusaders, had been in the works for years and wasn't created "in any way with a conscious knowledge or analysis of student movements in France, Berlin, Tokyo, London and Columbia University." (Sherwin said he borrowed the name Mick from "the hero at my prep school who could pee the furthest and was always getting flogged.")
The title If.... might be read as a warning: that if Britain (of which the school is a microcosm) didn't mend its unbending, class-conscious ways, the disaffected would rebel. But it is specifically a reference to Rudyard Kipling's 1909 poem about stiff upper lips and restraint, the attitude against which Travis and a few independent chums chafe. They have reached the point at which younger students kowtow to them, but they are under the thumb of the headmaster, the faculty and the favoured senior students, who respond to sullen attitudes with savage, officially sanctioned beatings. Within this world, Travis exercises his independence by nipping off to town and cavorting with a young woman (Christine Noonan) in a coffee bar. McDowell, whose 2002 interview about the film is woven into the two-disc Criterion DVD's audio commentary, says it was he who suggested that their romantic tussle be in the nude. Anderson hesitantly agreed, if McDowell would be the one to ask Noonan; McDowell told Noonan it was Anderson's idea. But his courage went only so far. "I had to go to the editing room and cut out shots of me and my penis. I didn't want any of those in."
Anderson had a stylistic field day. He used title cards as an alienation device. He shot a few scenes in black and white rather than colour - a spontaneous decision after it proved too expensive to light a chapel scene for colour. He favoured such surreal touches as a chaplain being pulled out of a drawer to forgive his attackers. And he borrowed his apocalyptic ending from a favourite film, Jean Vigo's 1933 film Zéro de Conduite. Trivia note: Sherwin, quoting Hollywood agent Harry Uffland, has said Martin Scorsese was such a fan of If....'s 1973 sort-of-sequel O Lucky Man! that he borrowed the name Travis for Robert De Niro's character in Taxi Driver.
Rebellion is at the heart of Monkey Warfare, in which real-life couple Don McKellar and Tracy Wright play former revolutionaries who are living outside the system and who find their relationship tested by a young firebrand (Nadia Litz). The DVD contains not only the 77-minute film (with commentary by the cast), but also an 88-minute "rough assembly" of the film (with commentary by the producer and editor). Oddly, this is the second film on DVD in two weeks to use the Fugs song Kill for Peace; the first was WR: Mysteries of the Organism.
Chris Marker's 29-minute film La Jetée (1962) is one of cinema's more sublime creations. In this film about time, memory and fate, survivors of the Third World War experiment underground with sending subjects back in time; the successful candidate is a man who has a single vivid memory of seeing a woman before the war on the observation deck at Paris's Orly Airport - and pursues that vision to the unsettling end. "Had he really seen it?" the constant narrator asks. "Or has he invented that tender moment to shore up the madness to come?" The film consists almost entirely of black and white still photos - Marker called it "un photo-roman," a novel in photos - unfolding as slowly or as swiftly as the plot requires. The story inspired Terry Gilliam's 1995 film 12 Monkeys, and 12 Monkeys' screenwriters detected its influence as well in James Cameron's The Terminator.
La Jetée was issued on a Warner Bros. compilation, Short 2: Dreams, in 2000, and is out this week on a Criterion disc with Marker's impressionistic Sans soleil (Sunless), a feature-length 1982 work in which footage from Japan, Iceland and West Africa accompanies a woman's narration of letters supposedly written by the man who shot that footage.
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So here's the premise of Black Snake Moan. A young woman's beloved goes off to war, she begins having reckless sex with other young men, one of them beats her almost to death, and a blues guitarist who has just been wronged by his own woman finds her and chains her to a radiator in a skimpy outfit for most of the film so he can restore her self-respect. Whether it's an exploitation flick or a tale of wounded souls finding their way is the viewer's call. Christina Ricci as the chainee, Rae, and Samuel L. Jackson as the chainer, Lazarus - she's white, he's black, it's the Deep South - certainly give committed performances. It's amusing in the bonus features to hear the explanations and rationalizations. "It's clearly a metaphor" (co-producer Stephanie Allain). "Really, we're doing a fable" (director Craig Brewer, who made Hustle & Flow). "We're tying up white women in the middle of Mississippi!" (co-producer John Singleton). Strangest line, by Brewer, who says the filmmakers were faithful to their muse. "It's our dog. We get to kick it."
*****
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As Conrad Black learns his fate in Chicago, anyone keen to see the man in action need only pick up Citizen Black, an iconoclastic Canadian documentary by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine. The tone is set at the start with caricatures of Black and wife Barbara Amiel by Frank magazine cartoonist Charles Jaffe. The wry, Black-deflating tone continues with Melnyk's narration. "Little did I know when I started this film that Conrad Black's career and reputation would self-destruct before my very eyes." She has clips galore of Black, interviews with those who have known or followed him, and much archival footage. The main extra is footage surreptitiously taken by Melnyk of Black pooh-poohing his critics at a pivotal 2003 meeting of Hollinger International shareholders.