Michael Mann: the keep

Showing posts with label the keep. Show all posts

Friday, 31 December 2010

The Keep analyzed by FerdyonFilms

Here is a helpful analysis of The Keep by Roderick Heath at Ferdy on Films.

An extract is below, but the full article can be found here:

Like Ridley Scott, Terence Malick, and a few other visually oriented directors of the time, Mann experimented with dispensing with the traditional brackets of narrative and tried to realise story through a kind of running montage. The Keep builds to one of Mann’s most hypnotic climaxes, cutting between Cuza bringing a gleaming talisman out of the cavern, and Glaeken climbing out of the ravine to save the day. The human and elemental dramas dovetail at last when Eva tries to prevent her father from removing the talisman from the Keep, prompting Malasar to demand of Cuza that he kill her and move on. As if in humanistic rewrite of the Abraham and Isaac myth, Cuza turns on the beast and demands of it, “Who are you that I should prove myself by killing my daughter?” before insisting that if the talisman is Malasar’s, he should be able to take it out himself. Infuriated, Malasar reduces Cuza to his crippled state again, but before he can kill Cuza and Eva, Glaeken walks in with his cosmic bazooka to scrub Malasar out, even at the cost of his own life on earth.

Read full article

Monday, 27 December 2010

The Keep now available at NetFlix

The Keep still isn't available on DVD but the good news is that as of early this December I discovered you can now get it on NetFlix, the streaming service for niche movies.

Read the write up, which concludes with:

Fans of Michael Mann, Ian McKellan or 1980’s genre movies need to see The Keep. As a long-unavailable piece of modern movie history it’s one of the most joyous discoveries on Netflix Instant Streaming. It’s not very good, but at least it’s utterly fascinating.

Here is the link to the article, with the streaming link here.

Friday, 24 December 2010

The Keep's Biggest Fan

Everyone has their favourite Michael Mann movie, each for a particular reason uniquely known to each one of us. The Keep is one of those movies that steps outside Mann's usual genre and has attracted criticism, but also praise. As the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I doubt there is a greater appreciator of The Keep than the gentleman who set up the fansite I am linking to here. The man behind it is Stéphane Piter, who introduces himself by saying:

I have a particular weak spot for a certain enigmatic and entrancing film from 1983 called ‘The Keep’. Ever since I first saw this film I have been collecting articles and interviews with the cast and crew involved, in order to find the film’s weaknesses, successes and failures to reveal the true story behind it.

Michael Mann has fired my imagination since the beginning. His technique of filming, editing and stylising his characters gives an impression of greatness, depth and suspense.

Take a look at the site, where there is just about everything you probably need to know about The Keep. You have to forgive his imperfect English translations of some interviews, but a small price to pay for this guy's passion for the movie. A big fan, he managed to meet Mann very briefly at one of Mann's collateral promotional events in France and collected an autograph. Anyone else out there met Mann and have his autograph? Would love to hear your story and experience.

Since the site is like the big fansite over at John Mounsey's Manhunter site, there is little point repeating it all here. Give the guy a visit and appreciate all his work collecting everything to do with The Keep! Visit his site by clicking here.

Michael Mann Keep Interview

Here is good interview regarding the process behind Michael Mann directing The Keep. Who would have known that the Romanian village was filmed in Wales! I was also surprised when at the end of the interview he answered these questions in the following way:

What other films or filmmakers have impressed you or influenced you?
You're influenced by who you like. I like Kubrick, I like Resnais immensely. I like Tarkovsky, although there's very little in Tarkovsky I'd want to do myself. In fact I fell asleep through half of Solaris, but I still love it. And Stalker. He has a Russian, suffering nerve of pace that it's hard to relate to, but you can't help being impressed and moved by what you see.

Do you want to produce films?
Yes, because there are more pictures I would like to see made than I can make or want to make. A case in point is a screenplay I wrote called Heat, which I love. As a writer, I really want to see this picture made. But as a director I don't want to touch it.

Mann then goes on to answer other detailed questions about the film, and rather interestingly about the notion of evil - something that is a vein throughout his movies - this constant counteraction of both good and bad in life:

But in this fairy tale we find the Nazi Wehrmacht – men dressed in totemic black uniforms with swastikas – things we can recognize and which set up a response.

Actually only about one-fifth of the film is involved with the Wehrmacht and the character of the Captain played by Jurgen Prochnow. The film revolves around a character called Glaeken Trismegistus, who wakes up after a deep sleep in a transient, merchant-marine setting some place in Greece in 1941. The movie revolves around him and his conflict, which seems to be fated, with a character called Roderick Molasar. The end of the conflict seems to fate him toward destruction. He may destroy Molasar or Molasar may destroy him, but in either case Glaeken Trismegistus must go to the keep.

And in the course of coming to the keep to confront Molasar, he has a ro mance with Eva, whose father is a Medi aeval historian named Dr. Cuza, very quick, very smart. At a moment in his tory when he is powerless – a Socialist Jew in Fascist Romania – Cuza is of fered the potential to ally himself with immense power. For him it's a deliver ance. And as a bonus he also gets rejuve nated. So he's seduced into attaching himself to this power in the keep.

And Molasar comes to life by taking the power, the souls, of the Wehrmacht Nazis.

What happens is that after the second time you've seen him, Molasar changes. And he seems to change after people are killed. After he kills things. It's almost as if he accrues to himself their matter. Not their souls; he doesn't suck their blood. It's a thing unexplained, his transformation is seen visually. He evolves through three different stages in the movie. He gets more and more complete. He starts as a cloud of imploding particles, then he evolves a nervous system, then he evolves a skeleton and musculature, and at the third state he's complete. And then it's a bit ironic when he's complete, because there's a great resemblance to Glaeken Trismegistus.

Is he evil personified?

No. Well, yes he is. Yes, Evil Personi fied. But what is evil?

Try Satan? Or Lucifer?

Yes, but think about that. Satan in Paradise Lost is the most exciting character in the book. He's rebellious, he's independent, he doesn't like authority. If you think about it, Satan could almost be played by John Wayne. I mean the Reaganire, independent, individualist spirit. It's all bullshit, but that's the cultural myth that the appeal taps into.

Is Glaeken Trismegistus the alter ego of Molasar? Is he the good side?

No, he's not. I tried to find a more surreal logic to the characters; so that there's nothing Satanic about Molasar. He's just sheer power, and the appeal of power, and the worship of power, a be lief in power, a seduction of power. And Molasar is very, very deceptive. When we first meet him, we too believe that he is absolute salvation. And it's all a con. Now when Glaeken shows up, the first thing he does is seduce Eva Cuza. So my intent in designing those characters was to make then not black-and-white. I put in things that are not normally consid ered to be good into Glaeken and qualities that are not evil into Molasar.

Read full interview by clicking here.