The Contestant (UK 2023: Dir Clair Titley)

Like many UK TV viewers, my first exposure to the direction in which extreme televisual 'entertainment' was headed occurred via Clive James. Clips from the Japanese show Za Gaman (retitled Endurance for western audiences) were regularly shown on his 1980s TV show Clive James on Television. The scenes depicted featured teams of people being subjected to various unpleasant and degrading tasks for the delectation of the viewing public; little did we know that, thirty years later, the old immorality would become the new morality when I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! arrived on UK TV in 2002, with some of the tasks in that show modelled on those in Za Gaman.

In 1998 a new programme debuted on Japanese TV; Susunu! Denpa Shōnen (translated as "Do not proceed! Crazy youth"). Running for four seasons, each with a slightly different emphasis, the format concentrated not on teams but a single person, and Clair Titley's astonishing documentary focuses on the 'lucky' contestant in the show's first season (Hamatsu Tomoaki, better known as Nasubi), entitled 'Denpa Shōnen teki Kenshō Seikatsu' ('Denpa Shōnen's Prize Life').

The show's basic setup featured Nasubi, chosen from a group of young (male) hopefuls, taken to an anonymous room equipped with little except for a rack of magazines and a telephone, stripped, and obliged to, as the show's title suggested, exist solely on the winnings produced from entering competitions in the mags. Nasubi is told that he will be filmed throughout his ordeal with the results unlikely to be aired; a lie, as the intention of the show was to build up an increasing viewer fanbase by broadcasting carefully edited footage of the contestant's stay in the room and his progress towards his goal of generating 1 million yen's worth of prizes.

This essentially cruel scenario is made worse by the privations in which Nasubi lived. Naked, his privacy covered only by an aubergine emoji (Nasubi's name, after his long face, literally means 'aubergine' and, apparently, was the origin for the social media vegetable/dick thing), the increasingly emaciated man is literally forced to stay alive by entering competitions that, if successful, will deliver food and other comforts. The sight of Nasubi forced to try and eat wet dog food (disgusting) and the dry version (better, but it's all relative) is as painful as his own mental downward spiral, carefully edited to make the guy appear zany rather than, as was the case, troubled and sometimes suicidal.

The person behind the show, producer Toshio Tsuchiya, is one of a number of people interviewed for the documentary, along with Nasubi himself, his mother Kazuko, and Juliet Hindell, a BBC journalist resident in Japan who covered the story; the latter provides the impartial but politely aghast response surely felt by most of those viewing this. Tsuchiya emerges as an unrepentant, confident figure, proud of his groundbreaking TV show. His mother comes across as concerned but helpless; there's little information about whether any interventions were staged to stop the misery - some human rights issues are highlighted - although the producer's wry smile in recollections suggests some very well worded contracts had been signed.

That Nasubi achieved his ¥1,000,000 was a miracle (and there is some - little - humour to be experienced in the bizarre array of those prizes cluttering up his tiny room); but the series picked up a massive following as it unfolded, meaning that Tsuchiya had the incentive to keep it going. Nasubi, expecting release, is transported to Korea to replay the whole game (without knowing a word of Korean, which he had to learn in order to compete) and then back to the studio for an ignominious final reveal. 

The post gameshow salvation for Nasubi, his subsequent recuperation of spirit and amazing charity work (to which Tsuchiya financially contributed, apparently), is both a fitting tribute to a man still very much with us, as much as a constant reminder of his resilience. Was Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, as the documentary gently suggests, the making of a rather awkward young man who had potential but had underachieved in life? Possibly, but the cultural and personal cost of the journey cannot be underestimated, despite The Contestant ultimately emerging as a life affirming film.

The Contestant opens in UK cinemas on 29 November.

Cats of Malta (Malta 2023: Dir Sarah Jayne Portelli)

I don't like dogs. Actually that's a little unfair; I've never grown up with them so have no experience of owning or living with the beasts; but if you're going to have a pet I'd prefer something that doesn't follow your shadow all the time, dribble at its first exposure to a bit of sun or go around producing really big turds. Like cats then.

I like cats. Which is why I liked Cats of Malta, a slight but captivating documentary whose title pretty much sums up its content (there isn't a cat in the documentary as big as the one on the poster though).

Filmmaker Portelli has Maltese heritage and lived on the island for four years from 2017 (ie over lockdown). Unlike the residents, who have clearly grown used to the intensive stray 'catfestation' of the area (there are 450,000 Maltese islanders and over two cats for every resident) the director noticed the way in which the animals had become part of the soul of the islands, and how the islanders, for the most part, lived either contentedly or ambivalently with their furry neighbours.

The documentary focuses on a number of people, of varying ages and genders (it was particularly heartening to see an 11 year old boy, very proud of his role in cat support), who voluntarily provide feline care services, whether feeding, neutering or befriending them, or in one case memorialising them in sculpture form. It's clearly an uphill task, made more so by an indifferent Maltese government more intent on encouraging rapid building development (with corresponding cat displacement) than acknowledging the contribution made by the cats to the overall mental health and well being of the islanders.

Of course not every islander is a cat fan - examples of human unkindness are referenced but, thankfully not dwelt on; the documentary is about selflessness and benevolence, after all. 

Cats of Malta won't make documentary of the year, but I don't think that was Portelli's intention. It's a small, but affectionate film; if you're a cat fan it's a fabulous hour and a bit of your time; if not, well...there's clearly no hope for you.

Cats of Malta is available now on digital download.

Dark Eyes Retrovision #24 - VHS Forever? Psychotronic People (UK 2014: Dir Darren J. Perry, Mark Williams)

It seems almost fitting to review this documentary under the 'Retrovision' strand; it's nearly seven years old now, but its subject matter harks back to a cultural phenomenon that has been increasingly fetishised and worried over in the intervening years: the boom in home video entertainment, the 'Video Nasties' farrago and the arrival of the dreaded Video Recordings Act of 1984.

Jason Impey's 2019 documentary VIPCO: The Untold Story, which covered some of the same ground, was remarkable for two things; the method used to obtain interviews with then VIPCO boss (VIPCO being one of the most successful VHS labels to emerge from the first wave of the video boom in the UK) Michael Lee; and the chance vs causality approach to the build up of his video empire (full review of that doc here). 

The chanciness of the growth in videos comes through in Perry and Williams's documentary, which broadly covers the period from 1978 (when JVC introduced the first video cassette recorder, priced at a whopping £799, to the UK), to the clampdown on videos which led to the 1984 Act of Parliament. The further away from this period that we get, the more difficult it is to remember the times in which it happened (if you were old enough). But the huge and sudden rise of independent video outlets, newsagents and corner grocery shops supplying uncertificated video tapes for rental to the public for consumption at home at the beginning of the 1980s was a cultural sea change not equalled until the world wide web started to gain mass appeal in the mid 1990s.

Now I'm a bit arse about face here. I reviewed this doc's sequel VHS Forever? Once Upon a Time in Camden over a year ago (you can read the review here), which focused on the Psychotronic Video shop in north London, and which looms large in the recollections of the various talking heads offering their testimonies; while it's true that the Forbidden Planet store - and others around the country - had been plying their (legitimate) wares for years before the Psychotronic shop, this was the place that made scores of weird and wonderful releases available over the counter (albeit in often nth grade quality copies).

As well as the fans and the dealers, who delight in the usual 'my-version's-rarer-than-yours' chatter, VHS Forever? Psychotronic People also includes 'names' like Lloyd Kaufman, Norman J Warren, and David McGillivray, all of whom weigh in on the crappy quality of the VHS versions of their movies, or act incredulous at the hypocritical approach of the Tory government of the day to the eventual clampdown. Slightly strangely, Caroline Munro turns up to wax lyrical about how she adores VHS covers, and gets to talk lovingly about the big box releases of Dracula AD 1972 and The Last Horror Film.  The company names that crop up, Intervision, Alpha Video, Medusa, CIC Video, Wizard Video, Astra, Magnetic Video and of course VIPCO, act as a kind of mantra for those in the know; it's a period in history that remains vivid for a small group of people, overlooked or forgotten by most of the rest of the population. "It was a disgrace to the country" says one, of the draconian police tactics, perhaps not realising that the same sentiment was echoed in the (small) section of the community who wanted the clampdown in the first place.

The 'Del Trotter' characters responsible for the video companies often had little interest in the contents of their product; they saw an opening and exploited it. That makes it rather strange that the titles on offer, provided more by accident than design, should have fuelled the interest of so many young horror fans; where would Euro horror have been without those camel coated purveyors of cinematic filth?

Perry and Williams' approach to assembling the film puts enthusiasm above technique, but it's one quite in keeping with the subject matter. What shines through is the passion of grown men (and it is mostly men) for whom this brief period of British cultural history has defined a lifetime of obsession and a residual anger about the curtailment of free speech and viewing liberty.

You can order the DVD of VHS Forever? Psychotronic People from here.

LFF 2019: White Riot (UK 2019: Dir Rubika Shah)

The viewing audience at the London Film Festival screening of White Riot was collectively asked who had been present at the now legendary Rock Against Racism/Anti-Nazi League march to Victoria Park, in London’s East End, in April 1978, an event featured prominently in Rubika Shah's new documentary. I proudly raised my hand, along with about a quarter of those present. The problem was that it was a punter who asked the question during the post screening Q&A, not the people who had made the film. Why was that a problem? I'll come to that later.

The Rock Against Racism movement shone briefly from 1976 to 1982, its momentum boosted by affiliation to the Social Workers Party sidearm the Anti-Nazi League. RAR was created at a time when racist attacks were on the rise, the National Front were marching on London's streets and the police, some of whose senior officers were also NF members, were unwilling to tackle the problem. RAR's focus on racism in music was specifically a response to Eric Clapton's infamous address to a 1976 concert audience, in which he drunkenly endorsed the views of Tory Minister Enoch ('Rivers of Blood') Powell. RAR's gigs were unprecedented in their support of the movement's aims to achieve “a rank and file movement against the racist poison in rock music,” underscoring their explicitly political message with bold scheduling of punk and reggae bands on the same bills.

White Riot charts the formation of RAR by Red Saunders, a photographer and Agitprop performer, who had been a fan of Clapton's in the 1960s and was shocked and outraged by his 'send them back' comments. RAR's growth as a movement, mainly achieved through the gigs, its cut and paste magazine 'Temporary Hoarding' which aped fanzine culture of the period, and sheer bloody hard work by a small number of people, mirrored the corresponding rise of the recruitment of disaffected youths - largely working class skinheads - by the NF, headed by John Tyndall.

Talking heads in the documentary are fairly thin on the ground. Apart from Saunders, contributions from the RAR workers are a little on the anodyne side (and the DIYness of their recollections, delivered rather laconically, often feels quaint rather than passionate). And of those musicians interviewed - Clash drummer 'Topper' Headon, Matumbi's Dennis Bovell and Pauline Black from the Selecter (who to be fair didn't come on the scene until the second wave of RAR with Two Tone records, technically outside the scope of this doc) - are very much of the 'we helped out' variety, rather than offering any significant cultural perspective.

So it’s largely left to the images to do the work, many of which are admittedly incredibly powerful. Anyone who has watched the opening scenes of Jack Hazan and David Mingay's 1980 docudrama Rude Boy (which provides a lot of the archival material for this film), particularly after a gap of many years, will not fail to be shocked at the tribal, anarchic footage of late 1970s London, with police, skinheads and political agitators engaged in angry, vicious and sustained street fighting. Viewed through the prism of history this footage remains troubling, in the same way as, for example, the ongoing conflict on the streets of Northern Ireland around the same time. But the problem is that such footage also becomes redactive if not accompanied by any attempt at contextualising it in terms of present day political considerations. What was the lasting impact of RAR? Did anything change? This aspect, sadly, is totally missing from the documentary.

And herein lies the problem with White Riot: by accident or design the filmmakers have created a historic artifact whose contemporary relevance is left for an audience to deduce. The post screening Q&A, with Shah and co-writer/producer Ed Gibbs in attendance, attested to this. Asked by one audience member whether their non contextualised, archival approach to documenting the events on screen could potentially 'fossilise' them, rather than rendering them powerful and still relevant, Shah simply did not understand the question. In a later response regarding the choices about when to end the RAR history - the film culminates with footage from the 1978 Victoria Park gig, again extensively borrowed from Rude Boy, and TV news shots (much of which was not subsequently broadcast - another fact not followed up within the film) - Shah responded that she wanted to offer audiences 'a happy ending.' It seemed that the filmmakers were happy for White Riot to be received as an exercise in curating archival footage into a linear story, the achievement of this being the single criterion of success for their film (Shah and Gibbs were more passionate – and confident - in talking about the mechanics of making the film, such as rights clearances, than the theories behind it).

Perhaps it's wrong of me to include the filmmakers' Q&A responses in a review of the documentary, but I refer to my opening comment by way of a conclusion. Shah clearly wanted White Riot to portray an important and historically pivotal collection of events (and call me cynical but I’m not sure about this: I don't recall any significant political or police based policy shifts arising from RAR’s work, and indeed any happy ending looked for would have been seriously compromised by one fact - the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979). But should it really have taken someone in the audience to ask the question that finally connected the events on film with lived experience? Not every picture tells a story.

War of Words: Battle Rap in the UK (UK 2016: Dir Tom Worth and Craig Tuohy)

Like many people over the age of, ahem, 40 - well ok 50 - my experience and understanding of the battle rap scene (a fast, furious and frequently very funny offshoot of the more mainstream rap genre) has been limited to Eminem, the 2002 'rap odyssey' 8 Mile, and the mainstreaming of Professor Green, whose put downs and character assassinations, an important part of this movement, have successfully transitioned into his successful music career.

Worth and Tuohy's documentary on the UK battle rap scene was five years in the making, but with its intensity and (pardon the borrowing of the word) flow feels like it could have been put together in 48 hours - that's not a criticism - and its hour and a bit running time passes in a flash.

Part of the reason that the battle rap scene has remained underground, if far from un-noticed - just witness the crowds at the events on screen - is that the average content of the rappers' battles is so eye poppingly obscene that it wouldn't stand a chance of being shown on any mainstream media - not that they need it, their lives being filmed and broadcast almost entirely via social media.

War of Words expertly captures the rawness of the verbal attacks and the non violent, peace keeping culture that underpins their outbursts - as one describes it, they're like boxers in the ring who forget their differences once offstage. The timescale of the documentary demonstrates the scene's transition from a freestyle approach to a more rehearsed rapping style, without sacrificing the shock of the rhymes but allowing a wider and more diverse group of people to participate.

Apart from the live footage, War of Words is brilliant in its portrayal of the almost Hogarthian rapper population, with great names like Lunar C (comedy gold), Stig of the Dump and Eurgh, all competing for centre stage in a relentless display of braggadocio. But the film also takes some time to concentrate on decidedly ordinary rappers Marlo and Shuffle T who - as the film's publicity states - look more like internet nerds than tough hip-hop guys, as they prepare for battle against Detroit legends MarvWon and Quest MCODY. Unlike the smooth and perhaps more fluent US exponents of the scene, the UK rappers use rhymes less cliched, funnier (and sarcastic) with a rough round the edges approach that makes the contrasting styles fascinating viewing.

I admit it, I'm old enough to have lived through punk rock, and watching Tom and Craig's footage - expertly dividing itself between the battles and the personalities behind the mouths - is pretty similar to punk gigs of 1977; profoundly DIY, alienating to outsiders, but to those involved providing a close knit community of people sharing something very difficult to understand and appreciate from an outsider perspective.

Go see it.

Life, Animated (USA 2016: Dir Roger Ross Williams)

The viewing remit of DEoL continues to expand in the new year with this stunning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, who previously made the Oscar winning Music by Prudence (2010).

Life, Animated is the extraordinary story of Owen Suskind. Until three years of age Owen was a healthy baby (if a little overdistracted by his surroundings) but in his third year he withdrew from life and gave up talking - he was subsequently diagnosed with autism. Owen's despairing parents Ron and Cornelia (whose presence in the film shows just how much they have lived and breathed the ups and downs of their son's development) feared the worst for their son, but a seemingly gibberish utterance by him turned out to be a line from one of the many Disney films which he watched obsessively. Quoting whole blocks of dialogue from these movies became his communication lifeline and way back from silence to language. By using characters and situations from Disney films to help illustrate his feelings, he was able to navigate through a sea of confusion in a world where he was previously unable to relate to those around him. It must have been an extraordinary revelation for his family, all desperate for Owen to regain his essential humanity.

The Owen Suskind we see for much of the film is a confident, articulate young man who runs a class at his school for other kids whose disabilities limit communication. At one point in the film he's even invited to guest speak at at Autism convention in France (one can only guess at the challenge involved in learning enough French to deliver his halting introduction, in that the task of putting his own thoughts together for the address seem insurmountable in their own right). Disney hasn't 'cured' him but it has helped, along with armies of largely unseen support teams, to give him a chance of an independent life and eventually even a job - in a cinema, natch.

As always with documentaries like this there's a thin line between exploiting Owen and simply setting up the camera to observe him (Williams seems to favour a non interventionist approach - for example when Owen, newly moved into his independent living space towards the end of the film, pleads with the film makers to help him access his mail box, they fail to act).

Aside from the Owen's parents, whose fear for their son's continued independence after their death is understandable, perhaps the most interesting relationship is with his older brother Walt. They have a solid bond but the spectre of what will happen to Owen in the long run, and how that will impact on Walt's life choices, is well defined and very poignant. Walt clearly wants a brother he can relate to as an equal - at one point he has a 'birds and bees' conversation with Owen which possibly fires up the younger sibling and results in him coming on too strongly to his girlfriend (who is very sweet but seemingly quite immature) and who subsequently finishes with him; the break up is carefully managed by care workers looking after either side like solicitors in a divorce settlement.

Telling a story of a quarter century of living in just an hour and a half inevitably leaves more questions than answers. We see how Owen uses Disney characters to voice his concerns, hopes and fears (and the extent of how much these characters mean to him is clearly shown when two of the Disney voice artists turn up at his school), but that angle is only surely part of his development - other assistance is skirted around because it doesn't serve the central conceit of the film. But this is a minor quibble in an outstanding documentary which resists over Disneyfying the idea of Owen as a Peter Pan figure but does go some way to suggesting a greater value to the Disney stories than the schmaltz they are often seen to be.