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The Red Krayola’s Anthemic Repetition in Born in Flames (1983)

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There isn’t much immediately noticeable structure or organization to Born in Flames, our current Movie of the Month, deliberately so. Lizzie Borden’s no-wave feminist screed was pieced together over five years of no-budget NYC filmmaking, building its narrative around the disunion and lack of cohesion among separate factions of political radicals who should all be united for a common cause. That story of gradual, incremental cohesion and those means of fractured, piecemealed filmmaking make for an excitedly dense picture, but also a stubbornly messy one. Before the disparate themes and feminist factions of Born in Flames cohere late in its runtime, one of the only aspects of the film that goes out of its way to provide the audience with a structural anchor is Lizzie Borden’s use of music, especially the repetition of the film’s titular theme song. There are needle-drops galore in Born in Flames, or at least more than you’d expect from a no-budget political bomb-thrower. Among less recognizable disco, reggae, and funk tunes that soundtrack the film’s many pirate radio broadcasts, the song selection includes more numerous, iconic needle-drops than you might fist realize: The Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child,” “New Town” from The Slits, etc. Less surprising is the repetition of a track from the NYC punk band The Bloods, since the vocalist for the group, Adele Birtei, is one of the two main radio DJs who provide a mouthpiece for the film’s opposing feminist factions. Birtei is shown performing in concert & “rapping” acapella on her radio show (a faux pas that made Boomer cringe), but her biggest musical contribution is providing vocals for a track by The Bloods that repeats three times in this 80min sprint of a feature film. Somehow, though, that Bloods contribution is still less prominently used than the Red Krayola song “Born in Flames,” which is the movie’s true thematic anchor in addition to being its titular anthem.

Artist attribution over “Born in Flames” is oddly iffy, as the song itself is a kind of political collaboration reminiscent of the one at a Lizzie Borden’s film’s core. The lyrics of the song are attributed to the songwriting collective Art & Language. The track also features vocal contributions from former X-Ray Spex member ­­Lora Logic, so significantly that it was included on the Essential Logic retrospective collection of her work, Fanfare in the Garden. Even The Red Krayola’s attribution is a bizarre issue in isolation, as the song arrived in an early era of their career when they were still billed as The Red Crayola. The band had a long journey form Texan proto-punk rock n’ rollers to No Wave scene peers with groups like The Bloods, but the pulsing, off-kilter dance punk messiness in their “Born in Flames” track is the exact right tone for Borden’s film, so much so that its repetition outshines the very similar use of the soundtrack contribution from The Bloods. The piano intro to The Red Krayola’s “Born in Flames” is the first sounds we hear in Borden’s film before a fictional news broadcast explains the sci-fi conceit of the failed socialist revolution dystopia where the story will be set. Adele Birtei warns her radio show listeners that they should get used to this political anthem, because “You’ll be hearing it wherever you go.” That’s no false promise. Each of the four times their titular anthem repeats in the film, its burrows further into your brain, making it feel like it’s the only song on the soundtrack, when that’s far from the truth. Re-watching Born in Flames specifically to pay attention to how & how often the Red Krayola song is employed on the soundtrack, this relentless repetition appears to be something much more thematically purposeful than just providing a rallying cry that echoes the film’s title. The Red Krayola’s “Born in Flames” only emerges in-film in a very specific, repeated instance, one that reinforces Borden’s central themes of women’s labor & true, ideal feminism.

Every time the Red Krayola song repeats in Born in Flames, it soundtracks a montage of women performing labor. In these montages, Lizzie Borden strings together a fractured, frantic vision of what’s often dismissively described as “women’s work,” offering a varied sampling of what appears to be documentary footage of women at work. This labor is visualized in grocery store checkout clerks, office receptionists, childcare professionals, dental assistants, nail salon technicians, school teachers, and so on. The domestic labor of pouring a husband’s coffee, feeding children, and washing dishes is presented on an even playing field with regular office work. Likewise, sex work is so normalized in these sequences it’s difficult to tell if the hand-on application of a condom is categorized as domestic labor or prostitution, since it’s immediately juxtaposed with images like factory workers shrink-wrapping chicken or hands plunging into a sink full of soapy water. In these disjointed, fractured flashes of “women’s work,” the only anchor providing cohesion is the repetition of the song “Born in Flames,” a steady constant that only appears in these specific montages. The one exception might be the song’s fourth repetition, which soundtracks a montage of political organization imagery: meet-ups, radio broadcasts, punk concerns, intellectual discussions, etc. Of course, political organization is its own kind of labor that deserves to be valued just as much as any other profession represented in these montages, a point that’s only made clear by the shared accompaniment of the Red Krayola song. As Born in Flames is a film about women’s labor and radical political organization, these montages are essential to its core concerns, creating a thematic throughline that establishes narrative cohesion out of the film’s general fractured vision of feminist unrest. There’s no question why it was important enough to Borden’s work to provide her film its title.

It’s almost impossible to imagine Born in Flames without The Red Krayola’s titular anthem driving its rhythm and providing it thematic structure. There are other songs used in the film that are just as essential to the soundtrack, but none feel like they could have held the same weight in repetition, not even contributions from other punk heavy-hitters like The Slits. That’s almost an indisputable fact, given the way The Bloods’ track repeats three times throughout, but makes for a much less memorable impact. In this case, the movie & the song are one and the same: a D.I.Y. punk collaboration meant to jolt its audience into political unity & direct, radical action. Repeating that message can only strengthen its cause, as it becomes just as much a political mantra as it is an earworm.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, the D.I.Y. feminist screed Born in Flames, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this exploration of its place in the No Wave movement, and last week’s look at Lizzie Borden’s follow-up film, Working Girls (1986).

-Brandon Ledet

Sex Work and Lizzie Borden

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My favorite image in the entirety of Lizzie Boden’s no-budget bomb-thrower Born in Flames, our current Movie of the Month, is the hands-on application of a condom. Casually included in one of the many montages set to Red Krayola’s titular anthem that repeats throughout the film, there’s something intensely provocative about that matter-of-fact condom application. Juxtaposed with a wide range of images depicting labor derisively considered “women’s work,” the hands-on work of applying a condom is (somewhat in dark humor) positioned as a burden often laid on women, no different than dental assistant labor, child care, call-center duty, or the factory work of shrink-wrapping raw chicken. Its contextless, matter-of-fact presentation leaves a lot of room for interpretation, though, dividing me & Alli on whether that image was being coded as domestic labor of professional sex work. Similarly, Born in Flames’s attitude toward sex work at large is open for interpretation, as it’s a narratively disjointed picture that relies in the strengths of ideas & images (like the contextless condom application) more than concrete explanations of intent. My personal interpretation of Born in Flames saw its attitude toward sex work as the only aspect of the film’s radical politics that did not age particularly well. In my view, the film advocates for the abolition of sex work as an industry, lumping it in with rape & gendered subjugation. Boomer & Alli both saw it differently, saying Born in Flames presents sex work as just any other kind of job (albeit one in desperate need of advocacy for workers’ rights), which would put it closer in line with modern political thinking on the subject, as opposed to the more hardline stances of feminism past. It could be that I was lumping individual characters’ negativity toward sex work in with Lizzie Borden’s own views; all sides of nearly every political issue are allowed to conflict onscreen in Born in Flames with equal weight. It’s tough to tell with just one picture as evidence, especially one this deliberately disjointed.

Thankfully, Lizzie Borden’s next feature film, Working Girls, delves further into this exact topic. Depicting a single workday in an upscale Manhattan brothel, Working Girls finds Lizzie Borden tackling the topic of sex work head-on and at feature length.  It even follows a much more straight-forward, linear narrative than Born in Flames, so much so that it could easily be adapted into a stage play. Weirdly, though, it never fully settled my mind on Borden’s political views of sex work as an industry, which is indicative of both her own internal ideological conflicts and the complex nature of the subject. ­­Louise Smith stars in Working Girls as an aspiring photographer with a live-in girlfriend (and daughter) who secretly pays her bills by working johns in a brothel/apartment that resembles a windowless version of the Seinfeld set. Over the course of the film she works a double shift, making money off a variety of men who visit the apartment by appointment and pay to spend time with her in rooms upstairs. As the title suggests, brothel work is depicted in the film as if it were any other kind of industry. The workers who comprise the operation are tasked to alternate personalities & functions, from receptionist to office girl to therapist to hostess to actor to lover to dominatrix to housecleaner, as the minute-to-minute demands of the job shift. The manual labor of condom application implied by that single image in Born in Flames is expanded to include used condom disposal, laundering of soiled towels, and the insertion of diaphragms. This matter-of-fact presentation of sex work in a functioning office context even comes with a demanding boss who takes credit for all their employees’ labor and changes the mood of the room depending on their emotional outbursts. Judging by its office environment hierarchies & work flows, Working Girls indeed reinforces the idea that Lizzie Borden views sex work as just being like any other profession. That would indicate Born in Flames’s views were much closer to modern radical politics than the prostitution abolitionist views of feminism past. That’s not all that’s going on in the film, however.

The function & method of sex work might be framed in the context of office culture mundanity in Working Girls, but the sex itself is a punishing, relentless nightmare that complicates that intellectual distancing. The disjointed landscapes of Art of Noise-style music & disembodied grunts mix with subtly grotesque expressions of masculine violence in a never-ending nightmare that resembles an early 80s slasher with condom-wrapped dicks instead of glistening kitchen knives. Consensual trading of cash for pleasure shifts into acts of rape within the span of a single phrase or physical gesture. The capitalist hierarchy & financial desperation that presses its boot on the neck of the workers with increasing intensity makes the cramped setting feel like an ongoing hostage crisis. Even the women eating junk food between customers is a stomach-churning display, an effect Borden plays for a sinisterly humorous tone. Working Girls is often darkly funny, but it is first & foremost dark, depicting even the most privileged corners of sex work as an inherently exploitative industry hinged on power, greed, and violence. Whether that criticism is aimed at sex work in particular or capitalism at large is up for interpretation (I assume it’s a healthy dose of both), as the brothel setting of Working Girls is essentially the entirety of capitalism in an apartment-sized microcosm. I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a film with this much sex play as aggressively unerotic as what’s on display here, resulting in what’s basically a horror film about the hour-to-hour mundanity of sex work (and, by extension, all labor under capitalism), a slow burn creep-out & a low-key political screed.

Where that leaves Borden’s political views on sex work at large is still as hazy as the contextless, provocative imagery of Born in Flames, but that’s honestly a large part of what makes her work so engaging. According to Borden herself, she made Working Girls after collaborating with the women who starred in & crewed Born in Flames, noticing that a large number of them were financially dependent on sex work to survive (and had fascinating stories to tell on the subject). That at least acknowledges that if Borden was politically opposed to sex work as an industry, it was a question of anti-oppressive ideals, not of denigrating individual people it employed. The shame is that we never had a chance to see her expand even further on the subject. Because of the studio influence that compromised her later work, Borden considers Born in Flames & Working Girls to be the only two titles that are truly hers as the principle artist at the helm. With more, better funded movies her world view may have had a chance to clarify, evolve, or self-conflict in a clearer political display, but instead she’s been effectively silenced by a lack of opportunity. Luckily, the two films she was able to compete without outside fuckery are both ideologically dense, provocative works of D.I.Y. political filmmaking, as well as essential documentation of a long-gone, grimy era in NYC history. I’m unsure of my interpretations of either film, something that’s made no better through repetition, but I’m also awestruck by the potency of her D.I.Y. matter of fact imagery. Isolated images of a condom application, a greasy cheeseburger, a pantied spanking, and an exploding World Trade Center miniature will haunt me forever in their political implications & daringness to provoke. In two no-budget films, Borden left me with more to think about & debate within myself than most directors achieve with entire catalogs of professionally financed, polished studio productions. That’s about as punk as you can get, no matter what your exact political stances may be or how they may age with time.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, the D.I.Y. feminist screed Born in Flames, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at its place in the No Wave movement.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #60 of The Swampflix Podcast – Icaros: A Vision (2017) & A Mid-Year Return to the Best of 2017

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Welcome to Episode #60 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our sixtieth episode, CC joins James & Brandon to discuss the most noteworthy movies from last year they‘ve seen in the six months since they made their respective Top Films of 2017 lists.  Also, Brandon makes James watch the meditative ayahuasca drama Icaros: A Vision (2017) for the first time. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– Brandon Ledet, James Cohn, and CC Chapman

Blank City (2010) and Lizzie Borden’s Place in No Wave Cinema

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One of the most difficult things to grasp about Lizzie Borden’s no-budget bomb-thrower Born in Flames, our current Movie of the Month, is what cultural context could have possibly birthed it. The movie is in a temporal haze in its relation to the past, present, and future of political activism & D.I.Y. punk culture. Its dystopian sci-fi setting of an American revolution gone wrong is a warning of a plausible political future even if the good side “wins.” Its D.I.Y. punk aesthetic & political organization tactics feel as relevant to the present state of counterculture as any film I’ve ever seen, even though it was first released 35 years ago. Its vision of a grimy, nearly lawless NYC overrun by artists & radicals before Giuliani Disnified the city also could have been captured in a long gone past, solidifying the film as any kind of historical document. The past, present, and future of punk culture somehow being contained in a single picture is a lot of what’s impressive about Born in Flames’s accomplishments as a dirt-cheap game-changer. It also makes the film exceedingly difficult to contextualize, especially as its director, Lizzie Borden, has been left behind & deliberately forgotten in the decades since its release by a film industry that did not know what to do with her.

For a crash-course history lesson on Lizzie Borden & Born in Flames’s historical place in cinema, I recommend seeking out the “No Wave” documentary Blank City. While the documentary Kill Your Idols covers much of the No Wave scene’s musical projects, Blank City is an excellent, convenient primer on the scene’s cinematic output. The two mediums are impossible to fully separate, as the late 70s/early 80s reprobates who populated NYC’s No Wave movement attempted their best to be well-rounded artists in all fields available to them: painting, writing, filming, making music, etc. (no skill required, or even encouraged, for any one in particular). That means there’s a lot of overlap in the two docs’ subjects, but Blank City is especially useful as a crash course in the filmmaking end of No Wave’s accomplishments, as opposed to Kill Your Idols’s hagiography of acts like Sonic Youth, Suicide, and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks. Blank City is essentially a Letterboxd list in motion, assembling early clips from No Wave scene filmmakers like Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Lydia Lunch, Bette Gordon, Richard Kern and, just-for-fun, Multiple Maniacs-era John Waters. Buried somewhere in that sky-high pile of D.I.Y. filmmakers is Lizzie Borden herself, who is interviewed briefly about Born in Flames in particular. Since Borden’s only a small part of an ever-expanding ensemble, the documentary doesn’t fully satisfy as an autopsy on Born in Flames’s time & legacy, but it does help place Borden’s work in a clear historical context by profiling the art & artists that surrounded it.

As much as Blank City aims to document No Wave as an art movement, it’s also just a document of NYC when it was cheap living. The haggard leftovers of the first wave of CBGB-era punks had free rein of a crumbling city where rent, food, and (if you didn’t do too much) drugs were affordable in a way New York will likely never see again. The first film considered to be of the No Wave cinema era was born directly of this grimy, drugged-out punk scene Amos Poe, picking up a second hand Super 8 camera, slapped together a dirt-cheap documentation of local bands like Blondie, Television, and The Patti Smith Group he appropriately titled The Blank Generation (inspiring Blank City’s name by extension, naturally). Suddenly, artists who could never afford the production values of a “legitimate” movie, but wanted to dip their toes in every available medium, saw an opportunity to turn grainy Super 8 home movies into cinema. Inspired by the handheld immediacy of the French New Wave and rejecting the plotless art house experimentation of the Andy Warhol crew that preceded them, No Wave artists filtered straight-forward, narrative filmmaking through the no-budget, aggressively D.I.Y. means available to them. Like the stubbornly unpolished sounds of the No Wave music scene that followed first-wave punk, the movies coming out of the scene were deliberately amateur & unpolished. Against all odds, they often told coherent stories, but in a way that made the audience feely like anyone could do it (which was entirely the point).

Lizzie Borden arrives later than most in both No Wave & Blank City’s runtime. Like Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (which is scheduled to get a nice Criterion spit shine this summer), Borden’s Born in Flames is framed in the doc as part of a secondary push within the No Wave movement to include more femme creative voices. That context as a feminist corrective makes total sense on Borden’s case, as Born in Flames is itself an explicitly feminist text. In Blank City, Borden briefly explains her agenda behind the film to be bringing women together across all class, race, and sexual divides together in unity, something that needed to happen within the No Wave scene just as much as in the political world at large. She isn’t afforded much screentime otherwise, except to bring up something we wrestled with in our own Born in Flames discussion: the film’s ending. Borden both recounts how exploding (part of) the World Trade Center was accomplished with miniatures & rudimentary fireworks on a slim $200 budget and admits her own mixed feelings on that conclusion in a post-9/11 climate. Born in Flames is largely passed over in Blank City except for its significance as a feminist corrective and the shock value of that World Trade Center footage, but hopefully that was enough to make it stand out for people who had not yet seen it, lest it get buried under the mountain of other titles mentioned in the doc. It’s a significant work within or without its No Wave cinema context, which makes it seem worthy of much more attention.

Much of Blank City is a mind-blowing reminder of how many no-budget films there are out there worthy of the restoration treatment recently afforded Born in Flames & Smithereens. The documentary (smartly) fixates on the stars who made it out of the scene like Debbie Harry, Steve Buscemi, Vincent Gallo, Ann Magnuson, and Jim Jarmusch, as selling points for its subject’s significance. All I could focus on really, though, was the unlikelihood that I’d ever see the majority of the films on display in any proper format. It’s a shame too, because the material product appears to be surprisingly rich for an arts scene that sneered at gatekeeping requirements like training & talent. Even in its brief screentime, though, Born in Flames does appear to be a cut above most of the films detailed in Blank City’s loving portrait of a dead arts scene. It was helpful to see that its D.I.Y. aesthetics had a very specific context within a historical moment in punk culture & D.I.Y. cinema, but also reaffirming to know that it’s still a very special specimen within that context. There’s nothing quite like Born in Flames, even within the scene that birthed it.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, the D.I.Y. feminist screed Born in Flames, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #59 of The Swampflix Podcast: Ocean’s ∞ & Logan Lucky (2017)

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Welcome to Episode #59 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our fifty-ninth episode, Brandon & Britnee discuss the entire Ocean’s 11 franchise, from its 1960s Rat Pack origins to its 2017 off-shoot Logan Lucky. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas

Errol Morris vs Small Town Eccentrics

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I struggled a lot with questions of tone & intent in Errol Morris’s landmark documentary Gates of Heaven, our current Movie of the Month. In the film, Morris documents a small-town dispute over ownership of a pet cemetery with both an emotional & editorial remove, leaving a lot of room for interpretation in how he relates to his interviewees. Given the way the quaint subject is presented in Morris’s editing room choices, it’s often tempting to read an ironic humor in his fascination with his subjects (recalling more blatantly comedic works like Christopher Guest’s Best in Show in the process). The economic hardships detailed early in the film generate genuine empathy and the rich bastards who profit off it later in the narrative likely deserve to be mocked, but there’s still something uncomfortable about a young NYC intellectual invading small town communities to have a chuckle at the local yokels. Gates of Heaven never fully tips in the direction of outright meanness & big city elitism, but I can still detect those impulses lurking in its morally compromised DNA. You don’t need to look far into Morris’s other works from that late-70s era to justify that unease, either. The filmmaker abandoned a few much more blatantly exploitative false-start projects before he completed his critically lauded debut, the scraps of one even becoming its de facto sequel.

Errol Morris would eventually enjoy a successful, prolific career as a documentarian, but his early professional years were more or less defined by false starts. Werner Herzog literally ate his own shoe because he was incredulous that the Gates of Heaven project would ever be completed. It was a fairly safe bet that it wouldn’t, as it was Morris’s third attempt at making a film to date, with nothing substantial to show for it. His first abandoned project was a documentary on notorious serial killer Ed Gein. Morris took an edgy, provocative approach to the subject, interviewing Gein himself and making plans to dig up the killer’s mother’s gave to prove suspicions that her body had already been exhumed. When Herzog showed up ready to dig up the grave, Morris chickened out and the project was never completed. The same goes for Morris’s second attempt at documentary filmmaking, a project that was initially going to be titled Nub City. Foretelling Gates of Heaven’s humorous gawking at local yokels, Nub City was meant to be an investigative piece about the curiously high number of citizens of Vernon, FL who had amputated their own limbs to collect insurance money. It’s unclear if Nub City would have lived up to its exploitative title as a total “Getta load of this freak show!” endeavor or if it would have balanced that impulse with the same empathetic & economic concerns that complicated Gates of Heaven’s potential irony. What is clear is that the impoverished insurance scammers Morris hoped to document were not fond of the scrutiny. The filmmaker was beaten up by the Marine son of one of his potential subjects, received death threats, and smartly abandoned the project.

Unlike the Ed Gein project, an untitled narrative crime thriller screenplay, and a documentary about an unscrupulous court case expert witness nicknamed Dr. Death, Morris did not abandon the Nub City project entirely. He instead pivoted by using interview footage from other, non-insurance scamming locals to scrape together an eventual sequel to Gates of Heaven titled Vernon, Florida. As an art project, Vernon, Florida is more formally daring than the already context-light pet cemetery document of Gates of Heaven. It’s a film comprised entirely of leftover scraps, something you can feel in every second of tis meandering, non-sequitur interviews with local eccentrics. On the Florida pan handle (not too far east from here, despite my viewing of the film requiring subtitles) Vernon is portrayed to be a quaint town crowded with Southern Eccentrics. Without the David vs. Goliath capitalist narrative of Gates of Heaven or any kind of narrative direction at all, these subjects’ eccentricities themselves seemed to be the crux of what’s on display. Occasionally an old man will do something adorable like show off his pet tortoise, but the residents of Vernon are mostly shown as babbling kooks who can bore any open ear for eternity with go-nowhere stories about anything: turkey-hunting, buying a van, God, suicide, the word “therefore,” why we should bring back tar & feathering, etc. Without plot or music providing this empty pontification with any momentum, Vernon, Florida is stubbornly directionless. At its best it feels like the avant-garde indulgences of Werner Herzog or Harmony Korine; at its worst it feels like the art world ancestor to The Jerry Springer Show. Either way, it confirms my suspicions that in his youth Morris approached his small-town subjects with an unhealthy dose of ironic detachment.

Morris matured greatly by the time he completed his next documentary in 1988, the pioneering true crime pic Thin Blue Line. Meanwhile, interview clips from Vernon, Florida have been consistently used to mock poor Southerners (again, sometimes with merit), most recently as commercial bumps on the Adult Swim comedy show The Heart, She Holler. It’s a film that’s nowhere near as essential as Gates of Heaven, defiantly so, but it is one that helps illustrate that landmark work’s more unseemly impulses. At least the morbid fascination with this tone echoed in comparable, narrative works like Trash Humpers & Even Dwarfs Started Small didn’t risk exploitation of real-life, economically devastated people for the sake of artistic effect, a mistake many young provocateur documentarians make, including the greats.

For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the landmark pet cemetery documentary Gates of Heaven, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this look at its resulting promotional-stunt Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, and last week’s comparison to the Christopher Guest comedy Best in Show.

-Brandon Ledet

Defining “A24 Horror”

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By now, I hope everyone’s learned to call bullshit whenever they hear the term “elevated horror.” Audiences who checked out from the genre back in the dismal days of the torture-happy, nu-metal scored 2000s might have to do mental gymnastics to justify enjoying high-profile entries into a canon they’ve deliberately chosen to ignore in the years since, but anyone who’s been paying attention in the last decade knows that the days of the genre being defined by Saw & Hostel sequels are long behind us (well, mostly). Horror has been enjoying a huge creative upswing in recent years, offering young & hungry directors room to experiment in a creative medium that has a built-in commercial potential, an increasing rarity outside the $100+ mil blockbuster landscape. Some lingering genre-bias held over from past eras of torture porn & slasher sequel exhaustion makes “horror” a dirty word in some critical circles, however, which has been inspiring some people to justify removing the descriptor from titles they believe to be a cut above the norm. This goes beyond labeling any horror film with an attention to atmosphere & craft as “elevated” too. There was an attempt to reframe Get Out as a “social thriller,” an entirely new genre descriptor that willfully ignores that film’s continuation (and subversion) of classic works like Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and the better half of Wes Craven’s catalog. While promoting his recent film A Quiet Place, actor-director John Krasinsky talked down the genre as much as he could, saying he sought to make “a good movie,” not a horror movie, as if those terms were mutually exclusive (not to mention that his film is about as genre-faithful as they come). As these examples pile up (see also: The Babadook, It Follows, The Invitation, Raw, etc.) terms like “elevated horror” have become so widely applied to so many disparate films that they’re entirely useless as descriptors. They’re basically just frustrated admissions that there are horror movies with artistic merit, which, duh.

Something that’s much easier to define is the term “A24 horror,” which has a very specific connotation, but still embodies what people typically mean when they say “elevated horror.” The production/distribution company A24 has consistently attached themselves to some of the film industry’s most exciting creative projects in the last few years, including some of my all-time favorite works in any genre: 20th Century Women, The Florida Project, Good Time, Moonlight, Spring Breakers, etc. Their taste for well-crafted, thematically daring cinema extends to the horror films they distribute as well, works that often fall under the supposed “elevated horror” umbrella. Let’s just assume that when someone says “elevated,” what they mean is “artsy-fartsy”: movies that value atmospheric dread & experiments in craft over traditional horror genre payoffs like masked killers & jump scares. What’s helpful about using “A24 horror” as a lens to discuss this artsy-fartsy horror style is that it narrows down the pile of titles worth discussion. A24 is a small company that only puts out so many titles a year in any genre, but their selection is so specific & consistent that it does have its own distinct, identifiable vibe. So, what are the films of the “A24 horror” canon? The films Tusk & Green Room are a little too traditionalist to qualify, as they deal more in familiar genre payoffs than the atmospheric dread that typically guides A24’s artsy-fartsy style. A Ghost Story, Swiss Army Man, and Life After Beth are all morbid genre deviations that could be described as horror-adjacent, but don’t quite comfortably fit in the genre’s parameters. Similarly, the films Krisha, Ex Machina, Under the Skin, and Enemy all nail the atmospheric dread aspect of the “A24 horror” subgenre, but use that effect outside the confines of strict horror classification, potentially excluding them from the conversation. When we discuss “A24 horror” as a descriptor, then, we’re only really discussing four titles: The Witch, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, It Comes at Night, and Hereditary. Those four titles also happen to be among the best horror films in recent memory.

As a pair, The Witch & The Blackcoat’s Daughter feel like the baseline definition of what “A24 horror” looks & feels like. Both films deal directly in demonic, occultist genre tropes with a very long-established tradition within horror cinema lore, dating at least as far back as Häxan. They also both rely much heavier on dread & tone than the more immediate, tangible payoffs of more commercially-minded horror films like A Quiet Place & IT. What distinguishes them from one another is how A24 chose to distribute them. The Blackcoat’s Daughter had a years-long, troubled road from when it was a film festival darling titled February to its short-lived theatrical run & eventual fade into streaming platform oblivion (which is a shame, because its sound design & visual mood really deserve to be experienced as big & loud as possible). It’s sad to say so, but that’s a fairly standard, appropriate release model for a modern artsy-fartsy picture with limited appeal. Selling The Blackcoat’s Daughter as a wide-release genre picture, as if it were a Blumhouse-produced Purge or Insidious sequel, would have been a little disingenuous, essentially tricking fans of traditional jump scares, monsters, and gore into watching a quietly disturbing art film. That’s exactly what A24 did with The Witch. It may have been Swampflix’s Top Film of 2016, but wide-release horror audiences (generally) hated that film’s artsy-fartsy guts. The exact limited imagination of what horror can be that inspire the genre’s detractors who whip out defensive, apologetic terms like “elevated horror” & “social thriller” also turned supposed horror enthusiasts against The Witch for not delivering the exact genre thrills they expect from wide-release entries in the genre. A24 also sold The Witch as a terrifying spookfest with wide appeal, something I personally appreciated for being able to see it large & loud (with a vocally unappreciative crowd), but left a lot of first-weekend horror audiences feeling ripped-off. It was in that wide divide between artsy-fartsy cinema nerds who appreciated that film’s effective sense of atmospheric dread and pissed-off horror traditionalists who found the film to be a total bore that the “A24 horror” genre was born that very weekend.

If The Witch & The Blackcoat’s Daughter established the “A24 horror” baseline, then the more recent works It Comes at Night & Hereditary have served to test its boundaries. Personally, It Comes at Night is my favorite film of the pair, if not only for its stubborn doubling-down on The Witch’s least commercially appealing impulses. It Comes at Night is a film about dread. More specifically, it’s about a very particular kind of grief & dread that only hits you late at night when you’re unable to fall asleep to relieve the pain of your own oppressive, obsessive thoughts. That’s a daringly abstract villain for a monster movie, which left many audiences pissed, since they were expecting the “it” from the film’s title to be a physically-manifested monster (which is essentially what A Quiet Place turned out to be a year later). Hereditary plays with the opposite end of the “A24 horror” spectrum, lightening up on the atmospheric dread to delve further into its family-in-crisis drama through a tangible, horrifically violent threat, even if a supernatural one. Guess what? Wide audiences still despised it, saddling the film with a D+ CinemaScore for not being “scary” in a traditional, easily identifiable way. A large portion of that reaction is due directly to A24’s marketing, which repeated the often employed claim that Hereditary is “the scariest horror event since The Exorcist” (a tactic last used by Paramount to promote mother!, hilariously). Hereditary is a long, weird journey into bizarrely-expressed themes of grief & familial resentment, which could also be said about It Comes at Night. The difference is that Hereditary is much more accommodating to a wider audience, especially in a go-for-broke third act that delivers the exact genre film thrills traditional horror enthusiasts supposedly want to see, achieved through relentlessly nightmarish imagery. They (mostly) hated it anyway, which is just as much an intrinsic part of “A24 horror” as atmospheric dread at this point.

In just four films, “A24 horror” has become such a distinctly identifiable tone that you can see it echoed in other genre titles A24 never had a hand in releasing: The Neon Demon, Goodnight Mommy, Tale of Tales, etc. Calling these works “elevated horror” is an insult to just as worthy genre entries that don’t focus entirely on atmospheric dread & metaphorical subtext, as it frames them as “lowly” by comparison. The term “A24 horror” is much more useful, as there’s a specificity to its implications. Although A24 distributed the Kevin Smith horror “comedy” Tusk, that’s far from the first title that comes to mind when you hear the term “A24 horror”, maybe even behind other titles the company never touched. “A24 horror” is distinct, succinct, and doesn’t insult other, more crowd-easing genre entries in the process. I’d even prefer use of the term “artsy-fartsy” over “elevated,” since it’s at least honest. There’s nothing inherently worthier about a horror film just because it focuses on craft & atmosphere over delivering the goods. In fact, since we appreciators of the “A24 horror” subgenre appear to be in the minority and most audiences are displeased with what that approach offers, it’s arguable that this end of the genre spectrum is the lower, less-respectable medium.

-Brandon Ledet

Best in Show (2000)’s Comedic Perversion of Gates of Heaven (1978)

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One of the most difficult things to pinpoint about Errol Morris’s landmark documentary Gates of Heaven is the question of its tone. In the 1970s, a feature-length documentary about something as quaint as a pet cemetery was met as an absurd concept (so much so that Werner Herzog ate his own shoe over it), so it would be tempting to read a humorous irony into the interviews Morris conducts for the film. There’s no narration, editorializing, or extratextual context provided for the film’s oral histories of an inter-family dispute over ownership of a pet cemetery. The most of his own personality Morris imposes on the story is in his choices in framing & editing, which have a proto-Wes Anderson flavor in their sense of symmetry & color. When an eccentric pet owner sings to their dog or recounts a long, rambling non-sequitur story about their tragically uninteresting children, it’s presented in such a matter-of-fact delivery that it’s difficult to tell if & when Morris is finding them as humorous as his audience does. This documentation of small-town disputes & niche pet-culture eccentrics later turned out to be a huge, blatant influence on the comedic sensibilities of director Christopher Guest. One of Guest’s improv-heavy mockumentaries, the 2000 comedy Best in Show, even mirrored Gates of Heaven’s documentation of eccentric pet owners & the commercial industries that surround their devotion to their animals. And since Guest’s tone is blatantly comedic, the way his own filmmaking style accentuates the quaint humor of his characters is as an excellent demonstration of just how tonally vague Morris’s own style remains.

It’s hard to believe Best in Show was released almost two whole decades ago. Its cast of Guest-regular performers (Bob Balaban, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Michael McKean, Jennifer Coolidge, Ed Begley Jr, etc.) look so oddly young in retrospect, after watching them age in other projects in the years since. In addition to being a time capsule, Best in Show remains an incredibly endearing comedy, something that’s difficult to achieve in a film that openly (even if gently) mocks the kind of pet-obsessed eccentrics who are more sincerely profiled in works like Gates of Heaven. Errol Morris’s influence on Best in Show is most apparent in the film’s earliest stretch, when these characters are first introduced. Before they converge for a climactic dog show competition, each contestant is individually interviewed in their home environments, which often resemble the 1970s decor of Gates of Heaven’s pet-owner homes (right down to the amateur dog portrait art in the background). Most of the individual contestants are coupled off romantically, except for Christopher Guest’s own bloodhound owner, which is a distinct departure from Errol Morris’s style, which tends to focus on one orator at a time. The bloodhound owner would fit right in with the Morris doc, though, almost recalling the quiet sweetness & tragedy of the lonesome Floyd McClure, the pet cemetery entrepreneur who kicked Gates of Heaven’s entire story into motion. The similarities between the two works becomes less apparent as the contestants coverage for the actual dog show competition, because Best in Show then resembles a traditional sports movie narrative instead of a quaint documentary. In the early, introductory stretch, however, you can detect Morris’s fingerprints all over the picture, something that’s only betrayed by the movement of Christopher Guest’s camera.

Part of Morris’ distancing tone is in how his film captures long uninterrupted oral histories of a pet cemetery dispute in a static camera, only coloring interviewees’ input through the background imagery he chose to frame them with. To establish a more distinctly comedic tone, Guest more often “interviews” two characters at the same time, allowing more improvisational play & establishing a quicker pace. There are more interviewees, more live pets, more location changes, more camera movement, more everything. Instead of framing his characters with Wes Andersonian symmetry & calm, he allows the camera to drift back & forth between speakers to accentuate a ridiculous statement or an incredulous reaction. If there is a blatant sense of humor to Gates of Heaven, it’s to be found in the film’s matter of fact documentation of mundanity. Best in Show runs with that thread, making its characters out to be incredibly boring, in that it’s genuinely incredible how boring they are. As much as anyone can assume what Morris was up to in his work, I don’t think Gates of Heaven is mocking his subjects the way a mockumentary must, by design. Similarly, Christopher Guest’s own characters are played with a kind of sweetness (give or take a high-strung yuppie couple with an unseemly J. Crew catalog addiction), even if their extreme mundanity is supposed to be read as humorous. Guest just makes their screentime quicker, broader, and more dynamic in motion than Morris does, because Guest must establish a comedic rhythm instead of allowing one to arise naturally (if at all).

Again, I’m not sure exactly how much humor or ironic detachment Errol Morris intended his audience to read into Gates of Heaven. All Best of Show can illustrate is how that movie may have looked if it were clearly tipped in that direction, fully committed to establishing a comedic tone in capturing the eccentricity of hopelessly devoted pet owners. The two films do feel oddly complementary, though, even if only because they both find an endearing sweetness in most of their subjects, no matter how distanced they remain from them. Best in Show resembles Gates of Heaven (especially in its earliest, introductory stretch) not necessarily because of its similar subject matter, but because it finds genuine fascination in the eccentric mundanity of the pet industry it depicts.

For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the landmark pet cemetery documentary Gates of Heaven, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at its resulting promotional-stunt Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #58 of The Swampflix Podcast: Lynne Ramsay & Caché (2005)

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Welcome to Episode #58 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our fifty-eighth episode, James & Brandon discuss all four feature films directed by the notoriously “uncompromising” Scottish auteur Lynne Ramsay, including her most recent work, You Were Never Really Here (2018). James also makes Brandon watch Michael Haneke’s surveillance footage whodunnit Caché (2005) for the first time. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

Werner Herzog, Gates of Heaven (1978), and the Artistic Value of the Side Show Publicity Stunt

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Werner Herzog’s entire public persona is a kind of performance art, the documentation of which has become increasingly crucial to his filmmaking projects in recent decades. A Werner Herzog “documentary,” no matter its subject, is just as much about the filmmaker’s own philosophical worldview as it is about the world outside his mind. This suits the audience just fine, since Herzog is what would classically be described as A Character, someone who’s naturally entertaining and whose mere presence is always a kind of performance. A succinct, early taste of this performance art can be found in the Les Blank short-doc Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which takes Herzog’s natural presence as a one-person side show as literally as possible. Staged as a promotion for Errol Morris’s debut feature Gates of Heaven (our current Movie of the Month), Blank & Herzog collaborate to document a blatant publicity stunt in which, as the title suggests, Herzog eats his own shoe in front of a live audience to draw attention to his friend’s work. With clips from Gates of Heaven interspersing with Blank’s Always for Pleasure–mode of documenting the labor of food preparation (if you can consider a leather shoe to be food), and Herzog’s signature pontification on the nature of art & humanity, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is an essential, one-of-a-kind collaboration between three of the most prestigious voices in documentary filmmaking. That’s an absurd thing to be able to say about what’s essentially a 20min infomercial for another, more substantial work.

Herzog opens this film complaining that television & talk shows are “killing” culture. He ends it confessing that filmmakers are also cheap illusionists & clowns, that his own chosen profession is embarrassing. Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is self-aware of its participation in the death of culture. Just as its title is a cheap provocation, the event it documents is advertised in circus-style side show posters promising the shoe-eating stunt to a potential live audience. Herzog eating his own shoe is a stupid, pointless act designed to grab public attention for better art he believed deserved it. Supposedly, Herzog first jokingly bet that Errol Morris would never have the courage to complete a feature length documentary on a subject as inconsequential as a pet cemetery business. The story goes that he said if Gates of Heaven were ever completed & screened for an audience, he would eat his own shoe. Morris does not appear onscreen to confirm the terms of the bet in Les Blank’s short, nor is it confirmed whether the shoe Herzog eats is actually the one he was wearing when he made the bet, as he claims. The entire act is performance art born of flippant humor & male bravado, staged without apology as a publicity stunt to draw attention to Gates of Heaven, which had then yet to secure theatrical distribution. Les Blank shows an interest in the preparation of the shoe as it transforms into “food,” carefully documenting the hot sauce, duck fat, garlic, and vegetable stew used to soften & flavor it. Mostly, though, he allows Herzog to ramble on like a carnival barker throughout the stunt, pontificating as much nonsense as you’d likely encounter in a television broadcast or a talk show, yet framing it as art.

The idea that Gates of Heaven’s topic was too inconsequential for a documentary feels so foreign in a 2010s context. Some of my favorite documentaries in recent memory have been on topics as miniscule as erotic tickling, trash harvesting, and a single dead dog (as opposed to cemetery full of them). It’s also arguable that critic Roger Ebert later did much better by promoting Gates of Heaven in his own way, raising its profile by often citing it as one of the greatest films ever made. Herzog’s side show publicity stunt’s own value as a work of art is in making an even smaller film than the one he promoted with it. If Gates of Heaven’s topic was too absurdly thin to justify a documentary (something I doubt Herzog ever said or believed) then Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is an even more extreme distillation of that same kind of art. This is an advertisement & an awkwardly staged performance art piece that somehow makes for compelling filmmaking thanks to Herzog’s natural charisma & gift for shit-talking. Like Gates of Heaven, it’s proof that you can make a worthy documentary on just about anything, even a frivolous bet that may or may not actually have even been real. In 2018, it likely would only have been presented to the world as a DVD extra. In 1980, it was art.

For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the landmark pet cemetery documentary Gates of Heaven, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet