Black Gate

On Friday, July 28, I had two films on my schedule at the Fantasia Festival. The first was a German period crime film with biographical aspects, a movie called Fritz Lang that imagined the great director of the title mixed up with the killings that would shape his now-classic film M. The second was a screening of George Romero’s 1973 film The Crazies, arranged quickly by the festival’s organizers as a tribute following Romero’s death only 12 days before. Together the movies would make for a day that, to me, exemplified much of what is best in Fantasia: a profound appreciation of film history of every kind, mixed with challenging genre artistry.

Fritz Lang was directed by Gordian Maugg from a script he worked on with Alexander Häusser. Opening in 1929, the black-and-white film follows director Fritz Lang (Heino Ferch) in the wake of the relative failure of a string of Lang’s films, including his pioneering science-fiction movies Metropolis and Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon). Casting about for a new idea for a film that will satisfy him artistically and also make money, Lang hears about a series of murders in the city of Düsseldorf. He grows fascinated by the killings, and travels to Düsseldorf to take a hand in the investigation. But why is he so drawn to the lurid crimes?

There’s a kernel of reality in Fritz Lang. Lang did research the Düsseldorf killings, and they did partially inspire his next film, M (though at times Lang would downplay the link, pointing to other murders he researched). The movie at hand greatly expands Lang’s involvement with the murders, and invents any number of scenes in which he interacts with the police and killer. That’s fair enough for a historical drama, but at the same time the film’s primarily interested in what makes Lang tick — why he’s drawn to make a story of the killings, and how those killings parallel events in his life. In order to make those parallels dramatically forceful, the movie then has to dramatise certain events in Lang’s life which in reality are to an extent mysterious. Again there’s nothing wrong with that. But it does make for an odd and at times uneasy blend of period mystery and biopic.

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On Thursday, July 27, I planned to watch two films at the Fantasia International Film Festival. First, an artistically ambitious movie from the Philippines called Town In A Lake (Matangtubig). Then, later in the evening, a documentary about the quest to develop nuclear fusion technology called Let There Be Light. Both looked to be about the mysteries of the universe, in very different ways.

Directed by Jet Leyco and written by Brian Gonzales, Town In A Lake takes place in a small isolated town in the Philippine jungle with an official crime rate of zero. Until, as the movie opens, two girls are abducted. One is later found dead. The crime draws the attention of the national and international media, which descends on the town, disrupting the locals’ lives and mourning. Meanwhile, the investigation into the crime goes on. Who committed this evil, and why? Can there be a wholly natural explanation for it, coming on the heels of so much peace?

Watching Town In A Lake is only part of the experience of the film. It’s a story that doesn’t provide easy explanations, or even that much in the way of conventional character-centred drama. There are characters, and there is what is effectively a mystery story that ultimately takes on aspects beyond the merely rational. But these things emerge over the course of the film’s 88 minutes; we assemble the bits we’re given, the sounds and images we experience, and make the pieces make sense even as we’re absorbed by the sensory depth of the movie. This is a meditative experience, with long takes and subtle camera moves and a rich soundscape. Still, I found it took some pondering to understand (and I want here to express my thanks to filmmakers Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Gabriela MacLeod as well as critic Kurt Halfyard for a useful discussion after the film that clarified many things for me). There is a good argument that in attempting to understand what we see rationally, in attempting to work it out like a logic puzzle, one does not take the best approach to the film — that in so doing we come like the outsider media, imposing our own frames of understanding on matter that is richer and more allusive than can be explained by words and reason. “Relax,” runs one line of dialogue, “thinking won’t get you anywhere.” On the other hand, there is a counter-argument that if this is so, any explanation will be self-evidently insufficient, that the emotional and sensory resonance will naturally and necessarily dwarf the meaning of the logic. So it is here, I think. You can work out a perfectly sound explanation of what’s happening onscreen. But there is always more than the explanation can resolve. There are always more mysteries.

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