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Reviews
Attention Scum (2001)
Strikingly adventurous piece of TV comedy
'Attention Scum' was broadcast on BBC2 at 11.45pm on six consecutive Sunday evenings in 2001. To the best of my knowledge, the BBC has never repeated it, allowing now-defunct satellite network UK Play to re-run the series a couple of times before it folded.
The programme was filmed on a budget on £60,000 and the BBC decided before it was shown that they would not commission a second series. It was directed by Stewart Lee, whose progressively hilarious 'This Morning with Richard Not Judy' was also scrapped, this time after two runs.
The show was perhaps the most experimental sitcom ever shown on British TV, merging a number of disparate segments into a coherent, increasingly obtuse whole. Johnny Vegas' drunken insomniac news presenter ranted about 'punk kids' on 24 Hr News; a frightening, Viking-influenced opera singer wailed about being outed as a lesbian by her parents, and how she was twinned with Skegness; 1789-era aristocrats invented the 'New Flippancy'; and Simon Munnery fought with tanks, belittled Plato and Shakespeare, and delivered some one-liners that cut right to the quick.
Ultimately, the show would have struggled to attain a higher level of difficulty or absurdity than it did, but that does not excuse the BBC's bizarre attitude to its more experimental comedy. Munnery now hosts an 'Experimental Half Hour' on Resonance FM, with such gems as Lenin and Prokofiev's walk in the forest to find magic mushrooms, and Karl Marx's stab at a 'Capitalist Manifesto': "Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh ... you have ..."
As the previous reviewer suggested, Attention Scum was hardly mainstream comedy, and it is difficult to see how a 'school' could grow out of its influence, as occurred with Monty Python, The Simpsons and certain other comedy shows. Attention Scum was a genuine one-off, hosted by a bizarre, wonderful combination between Nietzsche, Mayakovsky, Artaud and Bill Hicks. See it if you can, but I suspect that the BBC will not give you another chance. For shame.
Zvenigora (1928)
Astounding combination of Ukrainian folklore and future
Zvenigora is, in terms of narrative and content, one of the most remarkable avant-garde films of an exuberantly experimental period. The film uses the central construct of a legend regarding treasure buried in Mount Zvenigora to build a montage of scenes praising Ukrainian industrialisation, attacking the European bourgeoisie, celebrating the beauty of the Ukrainian steppe and re-telling ancient myths.
The narrative is built upon Modernist lines, disregarding the traditional, novelistic storytelling techniques and instead using abrupt shifts in time and using the constructive devices of avant-garde poets such as Blok, Bely and Mayakovsky to create a picture of modern Ukraine that pushes in several directions at once.
There are some incredibly striking tableaux that require the viewers to create a structure for themselves (such as the Bolshevik soldier directing his own execution) although the climax does draw the preceding events together, combining the dialectical threads of modern industry and the old man's myth together in two exhilarating scenes.
The cinematography is fascinating - elements of the style of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Protazanov and Kuleshov are recognisable, yet Zvenigora seems completely different to any of them. The juxtaposition of rapid montages, swift city tours and slow, poetic journeys around the countryside is powerful, and the mythical scenes, although winding, are beautifully realised with a dreamlike quality to them.
Zvenigora is not Dovzhenko's masterpiece, if only because his Earth (1930) is one of the greatest Russian films ever made. However, it is highly recommended, although if you are new to Russian film of the period it is probably not the best place to start.
Portret Doryana Greya (1915)
Innovative and acclaimed in certain quarters, now sadly lost
One of the earliest cinematic adaptations of any of Oscar Wilde's work, this production of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' was directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, who later became noted for his RSFSR theatre and his highly inventive theatrical productions of the mid-1920s. Meyerhold staged works by Ernst Toller, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Emile Verhaeren and a host of others after the October Revolution, but his pre-Soviet work included two films based on texts by leading Decadent/fin-de-siecle authors.
'The Picture of Dorian Gray' had a female actress playing the lead role, to emphasise the androgynous appearance targeted by Wilde's Gray, and Meyerhold himself played his friend, Lord Henry. Russian film did not reach either a popular or critical audience before the group of directors influenced by Lev Kuleshov (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko and a host of others) began to produce their brilliant montages during the NEP period. Consequently, the works of Meyerhold, Evgenii Bauer, the early Protazanov and others was ignored in the West, and many of these films, including Meyerhold's 'Dorian Gray', were lost.
Consequently, we can only imagine what this film was like, based on the few stills in circulation. Meyerhold frequently made use of modern art trends, in particular Constructivism, German Expressionism and Cubism (employing the likes of Aleksandr Rodchenko and Aleksandra Exter to design sets), and it is likely that he did so with this picture. Indeed, one critic has claimed that if 'Dorian Gray' had been seen in the West before Wiene's Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, then it might have won similar acclaim and exerted a much higher level of influence.
As it stands, the film was not noted until it was too late, and now it, like Meyerhold's film of Stanislaw Przybyszewski's novel 'The Strong Man', no longer exists. However, Meyerhold's theoretical works on theatre have survived, despite the director's execution under order of Stalin in 1939-40 (due to his refusal to toe the Party line during the 1928-32 Cultural Revolution), and they are probably the most useful tools for anyone wishing to inform themselves about the works of this great director.