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haptalaonDamn I feel so frustrated but also haunted by Razzennest, which I suppose means it's good? Frustration is an interesting artistic feeling.
I was talking about brutalism recently with people & why people hate brutalism, & I was trying to articulate the way that midcentury avant garde relied on a kind of future shock? Not just edginess for its own sake, but trying to reflect the world that they saw - the future and the pace of change and the horrors of world war - as a fracturing and disorienting experience. It's fairly commonplace for your average art-looker-at to basically prefer a nice Manet or a Leonardo, representative art with that perfect blend of the realistic and the romantic.
The only problem with brutalism is that architecture is in the public sphere. But that's exciting too, right? It's that sort of, exciting utopian-futurism which belives the common man can be involved in art and the future too. Same impulse which put Radiophonic Workshop's experimental musique concrète out as the background texture to public news broadcasting in the era of a single television channel. Brutalism draws attention to its own thoughts about urbanism and time. In their hearts, most people feel like they are going to live in a Constable cottage. It doesn't help that brutalist buildings have been poorly maintained and the world has not made good on the utopian vision of socially mixed clusters with gardens in between. It's got a friction to it. It's uncosy.
Razzennest is - in the words of its film-within-a-film director:
folk horror? honestly?? corn rigs and barley rigs and corn rigs are bonny! Don't you ever put me in that category. They can keep all their ancient spirits and bad make-up for themselves. Eggers can suck my ass.
He tells us this on the director's commentary track as we watch his film: an art-movie of images accompanied by unsettling electric drones: empty rural landscapes, catholic iconography, no people, the caves. But all is not well in the recording booth. Tension between the large-ego auteur bad-boy, his crew (who did all the work) and the bubbly movie critic forms a kind of radio-play, experienced parallel to the wordless film - and then, the haunting starts breaking through. Razzennest stresses the audience, as your labouring brain over-works and detaches in its turn. It has a friction, and it also tires - disjointing the viewer out of autopilot viewing. It is effortful viewing.
If you buy into the reality of the fictional film Razzenest, there is a tug to try and shut out the harsh voices and be left to watch in peace. If you start having ideas about what you see, the radio-narrative interrupts you: the characters are a satire of art-film and film criticism. If one was wondering if Razzennest is a folk horror - the characters are too, it's part of the text. I'm reminded at once of David Rudkin's own hostility to Penda's Fen being seen as a folk horror.
I would watch the heck out of Razzenest. Am I being mocked for doing so? The beleaguered director explains that his silent film is about the Thirty Years War, a grinding apocalyptic horror which consumed Europe and in some areas, left as many as 60% of the population dead. In the empty fields and forests of the film, I'm reminded of the indigenous critic in Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched discussing the 'indian burial ground' trope in American horror cinema. He says that, on some level, he likes it and find it powerful: because America is 'all graveyard'. The film loops back and loops back to the caves, cut into the forest earth by villagers trying to hide. We don't know what did or did not happen there. The only faces in the film are roadside shrines and statues, the violence of Jesus on the cross and sorrow of Mary in a blue cloak. It is shattering. The director mocks the youthful American critic for not knowing about and never thinking about the Thirty Year's War - and he's right, I don't think about it either, but I'm thinking about it a whole lot now.
When the horror comes, it needed to be smarter. The film is thinking about genre, about arthouse, about folk horror, but it's clear that the real creators of the film have not resolved that tension for themselves. Revulsion is a form of obsession - one cannot hate without caring very deeply. As the actual director states:
a love letter to genre films and rain ridicule on pretentious arthouse films, but also to write a love letter to arthouse films and mock the inherent problems of genre films.
Which is to say - more friction, more frustration. But when the horror comes, for a while it is almost the most frightening film I've seen this year - but it can't keep it up. A sleek runtime of 80 minutes is still too much for what they have. Still: the film I wanted to see is in there, and yet the film is so aware of that too. Comedy is the artform of cowards.
But it works because it's folk horror, of the best kind: the horror of being the folk. The (real) director grew up visiting his grandparents' small village, who had lived through Nazi and Soviet occupied Austria, hearing their 'implausibly demonic' stories about the past. I'm reminded of Demon (2016), about a Polish wedding taking place on farm fields that have forgotten their own past. Last week I watched Chernobyl, and then read Svetlana Alexievich's oral history which inspired it. In many ways, the HBO series fails its source text - Alexievich has no interest in why the reactor broke or individual campaigning heroes. She writes about the grinding horror of being small. Most of her interviewees talk about how beautiful the nuclear zone is, with many of them choosing to live there because the water that is killing them tastes sweeter than the traumas of losing your village community, or returning to an active war zone. I though: boy, has Ukraine gone through it. I've always though of nuclear power as Stellar: the sun experienced as horror, the elements present at the dawn of time brought horrifyingly into the present, the animating inspiration of the eerie unseen for so many midcentury horror tales.
In one scene, Chernobyl compresses these stories into a single voice: an elderly woman stubbornly milking her irradiated cow, explaining to a soldier that she had survived the Tsar, the revolution, the Nazis and the genocides, the Holodomor, each time shedding relatives - but this land was hers and she was still here. It's all graveyard. And well - you've seen the news from Ukraine.
And so I think in Grenzfurthner's film - which he describes as a lifelong passion project, to make a film about the Thirty Year's War - there's his grandparents too. English films of this ilk think about the English Civil War or the witch trials as if they were still present. I confess, my family has history with burnt witches and it affects me very deeply - but these films are affectation, the emotions one feels when one has thought too much. The English Civil War is not ongoing. Being forced to look at the Thirty Years War - for really, the first and only time in my life - put me in mind of was the civilian horrors of Europe's century. Thinking about such things is more easily started than stopped.
Radio plays are on my mind because I recently shut my eyes and listenend to Don Taylor's The Exorcism, done as a radio play following his earlier television version (both available on youtube).
During lockdown, I was lucky to find a folk horror watch group on twitter - perfectly curated, it introduced me to some of my favourite television of all time (most notably, West Country Tales: The Poacher) In the days before christmas, he scheduled the television play of Dead of Night: The Exorcism, warning that the content was a little strong. Dear reader.
The Exorcism is the only horror film that has ever made me cry. What do we disclose, as film critics, when we talk about crying? It seems like a manipulative intimacy ("I wept, I chortled, I was moved, I was humbled!")
Two lovely couples are meeting for dinner at a lovely old renovated cottage and talking, rather smugly, about all their mod cons: awful, pleasant people. One has been in a quarrel with his socialist father about his career & selling out the values of his youth. The cottage doesn't like it. The cottage sheltered people in profound poverty, centuries ago, and they have been waiting.
The brooding horror finally breaks as a dead voice begins speaking through living lips about what happened here. It's unendurable. The sequence doesn't flinch. And there's nothing to laugh about. You can't make it stop. The pacing of the play is perfect, but when the horror comes no genre features are needed - no cleverness, no monsters, no novelty. She speaks.
Like Razzennest, this is folk horror at its best. The horror of being the folk. In an issue of Hellebore, Alan Moore says that rural horror is at its core fear of rural people. I don't think this is true: in my extensive viewing, folk horror tends to depict country people as dupes, with the real villains being some kind of aristocrat. Classist to the core, British society cannot admit working class agency - even to be a villain. Bad things happen in the countryside - but, overwhelmingly, they happen to tourists. British society can't admit working class personhood either.
The Exorcism's politics are obvious, but it doesn't matter: it's delivered so well that your heart breaks, and you come out of it angry and changed, and extremely aware that this is happening now also - that the horror never stopped, that it lives in the stones of our walls.
I watch the Exorcism with the looming threat of eviction muffling my days, too many rats scuttling about to make them stop or be worth bleaching the sideboards any more - some lights not working, others chewed through, some with exposed live wires, others which have left the ashes of small house fires on our ceiling beams because the heat was too close to the wood, the way mould crawls up the walls and anything damp rots. The landlord hasn't stepped in yet, except to make things more frightening. I think about my hundred-year-old home, and I think that how I am living is more normal than not - not an interruption, nothing temporary - that the natural state of human lives is poverty and war, with peacetime as the anomaly. I wonder who used to live in my house. It's all graveyard.
Re: Razzenest
Date: 15 June 2023 17:25 (UTC)In high school, I was a Spanish-American War guy -- I could tell you all about the long-term effects of the Spanish-American War on island colonization in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, on the significance of journalism to the war effort, the ongoing history of blockades and charity/nation-building efforts at once building up and pulling down the nations who receive it.
As I have grown older, I have been introduced to the large number of people who are all about the significance of the Napoleonic War(s).
In all of these, one may see the effects to the present day, what took place, what was set in motion. What I am saying is, the Thirty Years War is equally important within that context as well. If every man chooses a war to focus on the significance of, I do not think one can say that one is more important -- it is, again, all graveyard. This can be related back to the Vajrayana philosophy of "the world of the charnel house", although that's a very deep well on its own.
Related to both The Exorcism and Razzenest, I would recommend you read The Roses of Eyam, which is a play written by Don Taylor (who also did The Exorcism). It is very much about "the folk", the aftereffects of the English Civil War (about class as much as about religion), people dealing with mass death in isolation.
I must roll my eyes a bit at the "Eggers can eat my ass" line, but I think I am supposed to. The perspectives on The VVitch as folk horror, as a feminist film, as straight horror, as as as -- they are fascinating in themselves, and I would like to write about them later. As for the Northman, I would say that it is too cosmic in scale to be considered folk horror, exactly, but what else do you call it? Eggers has stated that his aim is to make films that the people at the time would have made, a magnificent excuse to obsess over archaeological remains of the 6th century for a few years. Historical drama is a limited term as well -- too often, historical drama is limited within the scope of perceived reality, cultural history, which calls for yet another post.
It's interesting that you mention Alan Moore here. He burned through his cultural cachet on either side of the aisle a long time ago, but I think that there is an overlap between this discussion of folk horror (such as it is), the world that is all graveyard, and something he wrote back in the 1980's -- Volume 3 of his Swamp Thing work. I highly recommend reading it, for multiple reasons.
More later, I hope.
Re: Razzenest
Date: 18 June 2023 08:56 (UTC)I've been to Eyam - I was quite young, and we had a serious car accident on the way when we skidded off a small mountain road into the forest - so I was frightened the entire time. They still have the cabinet in the church where the plague cloths were kept & I was very dubious about whether it was safe.
I'm very into Eggers' thing about using the worldview of their own era, it's fun and it creates films with a new kind of visual/cultural texture? I'm a bit obsessed with how the Lighthouse goes all in on 'self-abuse and drink will drive you MAD', it was such a dominant cultural meme for centuries. I've yet to see the Northman, I'm looking forward to it but I'm a bit ehh on violence and nastiness at the moment. (& yeah, i think the line in Razzenest is meant as a pastiche of a certain kind of Art Guy)
TIL about the Spanish-American war! & yeah, hmmm. That is interesting, everyone having one war, and the wars being in many ways interchangeable for what they mean. Do I have a war? Not sure. My dad is a Napoleonic war guy: he has a marble bust of Napoleon in his office. I asked my husband and he immediately went off about the Great Heathen Army and infodumped about Alfred. He says that Your War has to be old enough to no longer be directly political, also, which is an interesting thought.
I have never read Swamp Thing but definitely shall - I like Moore, by and large.