Second Run’s second Jan Němec film is released today, complete with a video appreciation from Peter Hames and a booklet essay from yours truly. None of the reviewers have spotted this yet, but a fair chunk of the second half was essentially recycled from the booklet for The Party and the Guests – though I gave the text a thorough going-over and updated the story of Němec’s career to include his latest film, The Ferrari Dino Girl (2008).

The DVD presented an interesting challenge that I hadn’t come across before, which is to do with potentially over-zealous subtitling. The Czech DVD (released by Filmexport Home Video) subtitles all the film’s spoken content in English – which might seem exemplary, but for the fact that the film is in Czech and German, and part of the overall feeling of disorientation towards the end of the film comes from the fact that the boys don’t seem to understand their captors. Interestingly, the hard-of-hearing subtitles also offered by the Czech disc simply transcribe what’s being said – i.e. the Czech is presented in Czech, the German in German, so the German dialogue is not translated for Czech audiences in any form. Given that there’s so little spoken content in the film, it might seem perverse to deliberately omit subtitles, but there did genuinely seem to be a case for it here.

In the end, Second Run consulted Němec himself, to find out which lines he specifically intended to be understood by an English-speaking audience, and the final subtitles reflect that.

Reviews

• The Digital Fix (Clydefro Jones);
• DVD Beaver (Gary Tooze);
• DVD Talk (Chris Neilson);
• DVD Outsider (L.K. Weston);
• Mubi (Glenn Kenny);

…plus more links in Second Run’s own webpage devoted to the film.

My third Second Run contribution is a fairly considerable departure from the first two (The Party and the Guests and Valerie and her Week of Wonders). Although I generally specialise in writing about European cinema, and indeed have no real track record when it comes to the Australian variety, I was commissioned to contribute a booklet essay to accompany Ann Turner’s debut Celia after I let slip that I’d been peripherally involved with the original UK cinema release in 1990 (I worked for the Everyman Cinema, which at the time had strong links with independent distributors Electric Pictures – which effectively meant that I was frequently roped in to help with their releases).

I particularly remembered this one, because the reviews were terrific, and yet it sank like a stone when it opened – a sobering lesson that critical acclaim may not be enough if the public doesn’t seem to be that keen to watch an Australian film made by and starring complete unknowns. Another useful lesson came from my first professional encounter with the British Board of Film Classification, which raised concerns about possible animal cruelty – proscribed by the 1937 Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act. Handily, the producers had anticipated issues like this, and were able to prove that the shot in question had been simulated, so the BBFC gave it a 15 without requesting cuts.

I’d always liked the film, and it stood up very well indeed – in fact, now that I’m a father myself it resonated with me much more deeply. The relationship between Celia and her father Ray is particularly well drawn: Turner both manages to get inside Celia’s head, with all the impulsiveness and unreasonableness that that implies, while at the same time presenting an entirely objective view of a man who isn’t wicked by any sensible yardstick – merely honestly baffled by his daughter’s obsessions and trying to do good by them while simultaneously trying to stay in line with the small-c conservative community that they inhabit.

The BFI Library was a major godsend when researching the piece, as they turned out to have an extensive collection of Australian magazines and cuttings, enabling me to trace the film’s long gestation (it won an award for Best Unproduced Script) as well as its reception both in its native country and elsewhere. The British reviews were every bit as good as I remembered, but I also found out that the US release was a disaster. It was already arguably a mistake for the British poster to hint that it might be a horror film (it’s much subtler than that), but the US version went the whole hog and retitled it Celia: Child of Terror. Ann Turner strongly objected, but she had no contractual veto, and the film duly died a death.

My booklet essay is a fair bit shorter than the one I wrote for The Party and the Guests, largely because I knew in advance that it would be sharing space with another piece, by Australian academic Joy Damousi, and the original folktale ‘The Hobyahs’. I was given a copy of Professor Damousi’s piece in advance, so that I could avoid overlapping material – and I tailored my piece so that it was more or less the same length.

Given the issues over previous ad campaigns, I was intrigued to see what Second Run would come up with for their cover. I knew in advance that they were determined to avoid the horror-film trap, and instead they came up with this:

The multiple layers of symbolism make more sense if you’ve seen the film, but the colour red is as important as the rabbits and the ghostly Hobyahs that can be seen scuttling out of the picture at the bottom.

Reviews

• DVD Beaver (Gary Tooze);
• DVD Talk (Chris Neilson)
• DVD Times (Gary Couzens);

…plus more links in Second Run’s own webpage devoted to the film.