Archive for the ‘Alex Dally MacFarlane’ Category
Notes for a Film Review
Monday, January 12th, 2009
There’s still a little behind-the-scenes turbulence here at the cabal in the aftermath of a server migration. (Which would be why you’re seeing Alex’s story for a second day.) Please bear with us for another day or two while thing settle down.
I’ve heard so many comments about The Glass Flames in past months, all opinion without substance: “so strange, so sexy, you must see it.” But my curiosity eventually sent me to the marketplaces where homemade films are sold on DVDs with purple backs.
The opening scene is of a prostitute lying on her back, wearing only jewellery. The camera is from the viewpoint of the person having sex with her, who must be crouching. This continues long enough for me to notice small, red and orange pieces of glass tied into her black hair. The glass flames of the title? And there is a word tangled in jewels around her throat.
After she has come, the scene changes: a drabby block of flats with the title painted on the side. ‘this is a true story’ appears in small letters under the title. (I love fake true stories.)
More instances of the word. I still can’t read it.
The story unfolds: a break-up, a mutual turn to prostitutes, except it’s always the same one. When the girl visits her, they use a two-way glass dildo with small, smooth-tipped flames sculpted up its sides.
Why this repetition of images? A pretence at heat? Hot and fragile at once?
Halfway through the film, I’m thinking that the quality of the film-work speaks of webcams and cameras fastened to necklaces: low quality visuals, shaky camera movements, poor focus. And the dialogue ranges from brilliant to the banality of everyday life.
“I like fire,” she says during one sex scene, and it must be a trick of light but it looks like there’s a brief flame in her hair.
No wonder so many people watch this film: it’s half sex.
Near the ending. She’s masturbating to a camera (on a shelf?). Someone bangs on the door, over and over, shouts in a foreign language. She looks frightened.
She takes the glass flames from her hair and arranges them in a circle around her bed. They turn into fire. (This bit can’t be real.)
“My name is,” she whispers to the camera, and the repeated word comes into focus when spoken: a strange mess of sounds, ‘cz’ and ‘kh’ and ‘fl’, and I can’t say it properly.
She smiles as the flames burn brighter, higher, consuming her bed. Shouts, “I’m running away!”
The final scene: a fireman enters the room and finds no body, only the glass flames and a glass woman-shape, completely hollow.
During the credits, there are photographs: the flames on sale in a charity shop, the hollow woman-shape on display in a gallery, an orange-winged bird perched on a wall. (The bird, like the glass turned to flame, is a marvellous piece of visual fakery, made to seem more real by the lack of CGI/illusion elsewhere in the film.)
Seeking the Manticore
Monday, December 29th, 2008
He first saw a manticore in the pages of a children’s bestiary: bright colours in a cartoon outline, with a smile on her face that made him doubt the text’s description of the manticore as ferocious. Amid the chaos of his sister’s playing, he sat with the book in his lap and ran a finger across the manticore’s bright red lion’s body, the scorpion tail, the face of a woman with long hair like his mother’s.
For many years he did not see the manticore again. Textbooks passed under his eyes — geography, history, biology, chemistry — and every one dealt with the real.
Then, in his twentieth year, he saw her three times. A girl in his politics lecture doodled her in the margins of her notebook. A boy he loved and lost across the marketplaces of Turkey carried her in a tattoo on his dark hip. Finally, in a quiet temple, he looked up at a bell hanging from the roof and saw the flick of her tail, the smile on her face.
Something in the tilt of her eyebrows convinced him that this was the same manticore, staring at him from these varied media across the world.
He looked for her, afterwards — peering inside stray books, examining murals, watching the movements of a painted woman. He saw her more frequently.
In a London market, after sampling a row of wines as pale as his hair, he thought he glimpsed a scorpion tail disappearing into an alleyway. Abandoning the final glass, he ran into the alleyway and saw it again: a tail flicking around a corner. He followed, not even noticing the burst rubbish bins under his clean shoes.
Five streets later, he cornered her.
Baring her teeth like a lion, raising her tail as if she would strike, she faced him. “Leave me!” she shouted, a wild voice from her woman’s mouth.
“I… you’re real!”
“I won’t be caged, I won’t be held up like a trophy. Stop following me! Leave me alone!”
“That was never my aim,” he managed, and took a step back. “I was only curious.”
“And then you’ll want to look at me always, keep me by your knee like a good little cat.” Her tail flicked. “Go away!”
He stammered, more confused than he’d ever been. “I will, I will. I didn’t expect to find you. I… I’m sorry people cage you. Can I… stop that happening?”
With narrowed, untrusting eyes she said, “Tell everyone I am a story. Never real, never. Never something to look for while I seek out your nice food.”
“I will.”
He did better than that: he never mentioned her, except to tell excited children that it was only an old story and that manticores never existed. Whether they believed him, he never knew.
He kept the memory of her to himself.