mockumentary

Man Bites Dog Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

This may well be the darkest comedy there is. You may not agree at first, but you probably will by the end of the film. And you’ll probably feel like a murderer for watching it! This is one of the ultimate mockumentarys!

Why Watch Man Bites Dog?

If you like dark comedies – and when I say dark, I mean it!
If you like docu-fiction films (see Battle of Algiers or Che)
To learn how much ballast you need to sink a corpse
For a murderer’s ode to pigeons – actor Benoit Poelvoorde is crazy

The Breakdown

You’ll get an idea of what kind of a film this is from the opening. It starts with what looks like a normal scene. A man on a train is standing by the window as a woman walks past him along the corridor. However, as the man moves out of the way to let her pass, he rings a rope around her neck, forces her into a cabin and strangles her.

As you’ll quickly realise, this is not a serious film. However, you also won’t be surprised that it was highly controversial when it was released in 1992 (two years before Natural Born Killers).

Straight after the brutal opening scene, we meet Benoit (the murderer) again. This time, he is talking to the camera and telling us how to properly ballast a corpse so it sinks. Remember, ‘you need to ballast a dead body with 3 times it’s body-weight, and 5 times for old people as their bones are even more porous’ (Benoit’s quote, not mine).

The mockumentary style (mock documentary) makes the film even more real. Benoit looks straight at the camera a lot, and therefore straight at us. As a result, we are forced to get close to him and pushed towards identifying with him. The intimacy is stretched even further as we are introduced to his family and friends, who all say what an ‘affectionate and sweet’ person he is. But every time we start to get comfortable with him the director reminds us of his violence. For example, in one scene he starts playing with a few kids in a park making him appear normal, but the director quickly cuts to a montage of him murdering innocent people to remind us that he is a murderer.

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Conclusion

Man Bites Dog is provocative. But it’s also clever. It plays with us throughout the film, encouraging us to get close to a murderer before brutally showing us images that are undeniably wrong and shocking. There’s also a pretty meta commentary on both the moral obligation of the film-makers and the audience. Are the film-makers and us morally wrong for making/watching this film?

Either way, for more, I’d recommend checking out Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (with a young Woody Harrelson leading). Also check out Behind the Mask for a horror movie equivalent.

Perfumed Nightmare Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

Honestly, I was a bit confused at the start of Perfumed Nightmare as the tone seemed a bit off. The film was made in 1977, but the black and white footage looks even older, so I was surprised to have the fourth wall broken a few times by the main character, Kidlat, after he pulls an increasingly larger toy truck over a bridge. The genre is also deliberately hard to pin down. It gives off the appearance of a stylish, amusing ethnographical film set in rural Philippines to disguise its strong revolutionary undertones. Don’t let anything put you off from watching this movie though as it’s a brilliantly unique and clever contribution to the Third Cinema movement.

From: Philippines, Asia
Watch: JustWatch, IMDb
Next: Black Girl, Breathless, Born in Flames

Perfumed Nightmare – The Breakdown

There are a lot of familiar elements in Perfumed Nightmare as it deliberately borrows from a mixture of well-known revolutionary film-making. The frenetic pace of the movie, with cuts across time and a fuzzy narrative voice that seems to be a half-second behind the images, feels a lot like Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic film, Breathless. The fast paced montages of Filipino and Parisian society, which meshes together a range of stock and new images showing the evolution of society towards modernization, borrows from Dziga Vertov’s influential Man with a Movie Camera. Both of these influences (each monumental to the development of European film) are referenced by the Director, Kidlat Tahimik, to stake a claim for Filipino film within the context of cinema and to also set Filipino film apart by reclaiming the medium’s portrayal of the Philippines.

One of the best things Kidlat Tahimik adds to the revolutionary film movement is humor. It both makes the film more enjoyable whilst also targeting the ‘Third World’s’ portrayal by ‘the West’ to reclaim it for the Third Cinema movement. One example of this is in the inventive use of dubbing, in which all of the film’s white characters, whether in the Philippines or Europe, are dubbed and made into comedic caricatures. One white person in the Philippines is turned into a bumbling, arrogant, imperialist, through the dubbing, whilst Kidlat’s French beneficiary is turned into a money obsessed businessman. Whilst it is fun to laugh at the dubbed characters, which makes the film an easier watch, the dubbing is also used to subvert the portrayal of Filipinos and other ‘Third World’ characters in Western film who are typically voiced and spoken for by white European/American directors. Instead, it’s the white characters that are spoken for in Perfumed Nightmare.

The film’s visual gags also serve a similar function. The shots of Kidlat filling up chewing gum dispensers in some ridiculous locations for his French beneficiary, whilst funny, also serves to make fun of capitalism. If chewing gum dispensers in cemeteries is the peak of Western progress, then capitalism and Western imperialism seems pointless. The humor is a welcome addition to an otherwise serious revolutionary genre. It makes the film easier to watch, but also backs up the central theme of Kidlat’s Charlie-Chaplin-esque journey chasing the American Dream; that life is better in the Philippines. Perfumed Nightmare mocks and rejects the progress of globalization, imperialism, capitalism, and everything the West stands for in favor of a celebration of Filipino life.

What to Watch Next

There’s a few places you can turn to next after watching Perfumed Nightmare. The most obvious place to go would be to watch more revolutionary films from the Third Cinema movement such as Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl or Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga. You could also brush up on your European film history, which Kidlat Tahimik subverts in this film, by watching Breathless or Man with a Movie Camera. Obviously both of these film movements have plenty more examples than the four listed above, so please don’t limit your exploration to these four movies!

Man Bites Dog (Belgium) – Help Out an ‘Affectionate and Sweet’ Murderer