Peter Strickland
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Censor (2021)
Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond
influenced by Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Themes Visuals
Immediately, writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond‘s debut (alongside co-writer Anthony Fletcher) hearkens not just to the ’80s horror films it faithfully evokes, but to similar homages like Peter Strickland’s excellent Berberian Sound Studio , both of them meta-textual meditations on the effect of horror on not just those who watch them, but those involved in their making.
At times feeling in the same vein as Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and with a haunting final scene right out of David Lynch, Censor is an effective and affecting character study.
The film has already caught comparisons to Peter Strickland’s seductive Berberian Sound Studio —it has a comparable grasp on the decade-specific look and vibe of cult trash.
This background gives the film some interesting historical context, not unlike Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio .
Laced together with eerie sound design and sleek imagery that slowly gives way to the VHS filter, “Censor” suggests an innovative blend of Peter Strickland’s giallo homage “Berberian Sound Studio” and “The Ring.”
It some ways, it reminded me of Berberian Sound Studio , which also loves genre film deeply.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
influenced The Duke of Burgundy (2015)
Themes Visuals
Honest about his influences, he cites soft-core Europorn from the ’60s and ’70s as inspiration for this oddly affecting tale, hat-tipping such films as Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Jess Franco’s A Virgin Among the Living Dead.
Duke operates on dream logic from the start – references abound to Jess Franco and The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, to give you an idea of what universe we’re in – but the third act sees the visual motifs (panties, insects, the trunk) emphasized, and the character’s anxieties externalized, by way of Brakhage-esque experimental sequences.
Strongly influenced by Les Biches (1968), it’s as potentially as tragic as The Killing of Sister George (1968) and The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972).
Blow Out (1981)
Directed by Brian De Palma
influenced Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Music Plot Themes
As a psychological thriller, Berberian Sound Studio is often hypnotic, but it’s also a little one-note: About halfway through its slim running time, the film begins to repeat itself, offering only minor variations on its Blow Out-meets-Suspiria metholodogy.
Berberian Sound Studio has some of the vibe of DePalma's Blow Out (1981).
It’s tough to recall a thriller this obsessed with cinematic sound design outside of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, and it’s this seldom-discussed aspect of the filmmaking craft that makes Berberian Sound Studio such a strange but satisfying curiosity.
There was Brian De Palma's "Blow Out," which followed a movie sound recordist, and one could argue the case of "Singin' In The Rain," but perhaps none have gone into more depth than Peter Strickland's "Berberian Sound Studio," set almost entirely within the Italian post house of the title, and the British director's follow-up to his excellent 2009 Hungarian-language debut "Katalin Varga."
A sly variation on Brian De Palma's Blow Out by way of Peeping Tom, this barbed call out to Italian exploitation thrillers of the ’70s will be best appreciated by moviegoers familiar with the term "giallo”; others will find its dense web of allusions to real films of the period confounding.
Strickland is clearly a heavy-duty cinephile—Berberian Sound Studio paid tribute to Italian giallo, and there’s a dream sequence here that includes an homage to Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde short “Mothlight”—and he has a lot of fun early on establishing the parameters of his Eurotrash softcore aesthetic.
The abstract images that represent Gilderoy's fragile mental state are mirrored by the imaginary blizzard of moths, quoted from Stan Brakhage’s experimental short Mothlight (1963), that bombards Evelyn.
One should mention the butterflies: Strickland lets the bugs fly in a borderline-experimental sequence that’s a direct quote of Stan Brakhage’s “Mothlight.”
Persona (1966)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
influenced The Duke of Burgundy (2015), Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Visuals Themes
Initially, The Duke Of Burgundy appears to be Strickland’s take on Seventies’ Euro erotica (with a nod, too, to Bergman’s Persona).
Strickland, a stylist of the highest ilk who carved out the edgy psychodramas “Berberian Sound Studio” (about a reclusive sound engineer’s descent into madness) and “Katalin Varga” (a woman travels with her child to the town of a man who raped her), which reflected his protagonists’ inner struggles outwardly with haunting effective moodiness, does so again here, and with deeper conviction, employing smears of Ingmar Bergman (especially “Persona”), Nicolas Roeg and Jess Franco (the ’60s Spanish horror-meister) to create a beguiling interweave.
The Duke of Burgundy, named for a variety of butterfly, synthesizes cultural sources as sundry as the Sapphic playacting of Jean Genet’s The Maids, the psychic conjunction of Bergman’s Persona, and the insect symbolism of Wyler’s The Collector.
Indeed, Strickland references both Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” in a hallucinatory scene in which the haunted sound studio shows Gilderoy a film of himself getting out of bed, shot only seconds earlier, which then catches in the projector, burns and disintegrates, destroying the wall that protects his work from his life.
Eventually, he finds himself going mad and then something really nifty happens on screen that I don't feel like spoiling, but it reminded me quite a bit of Ingmar Bergman's Persona .
By the end Berberian Sound Studio dives right off the deep end with a moment similar to Bergman’s Persona , but its abrupt ending doesn’t make for a conclusion that’s too fulfilling.
Honest about his influences, he cites soft-core Europorn from the ’60s and ’70s as inspiration for this oddly affecting tale, hat-tipping such films as Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Jess Franco’s A Virgin Among the Living Dead.
The cyclist is Evelyn, played by Chiara D’Anna, whose demure Euro-exoticism appropriately recalls Maria de Medeiros circa Henry & June.
The Conversation (1974)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Music Plot Themes
Strickland obviously hasn't invented this approach, and Berberian Sound Studio bears a great resemblance to certain H.P. Lovecraft stories as well as, explicitly, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation , and not just because both movies follow isolated heroes who go about endlessly tinkering with audio effects.
In Francis Coppola's The Conversation (1974), Gene Hackman played a San Francisco surveillance expert hired to make secret recordings of conspiratorial lovers, who gets out of his depth and descends into paranoia.
Here, as in The Exorcist, The Conversation, Blow Out and Écoute le Temps , acoustics – and the ambiguities associated with them – will come to the fore, as sound engineer Gilderoy (Toby Jones) mixes the ADR, foley work and musical score for a brutal and clearly misogynistic film (‘The Equestrian Vortex’) that we constantly hear but almost never see – even if the garish black-and-red opening credits to this film-within-a-film replace Berberian Sound Studio‘s own title sequence.
It will remind you of other movies – THE CONVERSATION meets a psychological meltdown meets the making of SUSPIRIA or maybe an Italian witch horror movie so wacky it was never seen in the U.S. – but you haven’t seen anything else really like it.
Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
influenced The Duke of Burgundy (2015)
Visuals Plot
Writer/director Peter Strickland's ("Berberian Sound Studio") latest begins with a bit of an ick factor as his opening lesbian S&M scenario ends with a behind-closed-door 'punishment' that sounds dreadful, but trust in this auteur as "The Duke of Burgundy" (a type of butterfly) blossoms into a louche hothouse Gothic that plays like Dario Argento's "Celine and Julie Go Boating" or Peter Greenaway's "Angels and Insects."
That’s largely a credit to the performances of D’Anna and Knudsen, who play things straight (so to speak), and who communicate volumes about their characters through the subtlest variations on their endlessly repeated scene — a structure that gives the movie a glancing connection with Jacques Rivette’s classic “Celine and Julie Go Boating.”
The Lickerish Quartet (1970)
Directed by Radley Metzger
influenced The Duke of Burgundy (2015)
Visuals
It’s a sadomasochistic passion play between two gorgeous females (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara D’Anna), shot in the lushly naughty style made popular by The Lickerish Quartet’s Radley Metzger.
Strongly influenced by Les Biches (1968), it’s as potentially as tragic as The Killing of Sister George (1968) and The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972).
The Duke of Burgundy, named for a variety of butterfly, synthesizes cultural sources as sundry as the Sapphic playacting of Jean Genet’s The Maids, the psychic conjunction of Bergman’s Persona, and the insect symbolism of Wyler’s The Collector.
To call it overwhelming and self-indulgent is to compliment it, since overpowering indulgence is one of the core motifs of the film and orchestrates the remarkable style; from the soundtrack by Cat’s Eye, channeling “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Twin Peaks,” to the striking cinematography by Nicholas D. Knowland, the voluptuous art-decoration by Renátó Cseh, and the vibrant costumes (and lingerie, which the opening titles don’t fail to mention) by Andrea Flesch.
Playing over these images is the soundtrack by the band Cat's Eyes, which is heavy in ambient female cooing that simultaneously evokes the theme from Rosemary's Baby and, more recently, the music of Air.
Strickland’s alertness to sound design carries over from Berberian Sound Studio, with scarcely audible insect noises (which, we are told, distinguish species) mingling with an evocative, Rosemary’s Baby–esque score by Cat’s Eye.
His “Berberian Sound Studio” (2012) was a loving tribute to the Italian giallo films of the 1970s, and he followed it with “The Duke of Burgundy” (2015), a lesbian romance that draped its powerful, unsettling emotions in the lusciously overripe style of 1960s European softcore.
In its playfulness and miniaturist style, the third feature by the Budapest-based Englishman Strickland is closer in spirit to his fiendish giallo tribute Berberian Sound Studio (2012) – which featured D’Anna as the only character who doesn't daunt Toby Jones 's paranoid Gilderoy – than to his primal rape-revenge drama Katalin Varga (2009).
It continues in the vein of his earlier films “Berberian Sound Studio” (2012) and “The Duke of Burgundy” (2014), which delivered magnificently cracked, pitch-perfect homages to Italian giallo horror movies and European sexploitation flicks, respectively.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Directed by Dario Argento
influenced Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Vocal performance artists (Suzy Kendall, "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage," "Torso" and Jean-Michael van Schouwburg) arrive to give voice to inhuman sounds.
"Blood and Black Lace." "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage."
It all sounds ridiculous, but Strickland knows how to use his camera: The imagery is somehow both sensuous and gruesome, which is the precise balancing act that the best giallo films — think Dario Argento’s Deep Red, or Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace — also manage to pull off.
Indeed, Strickland references both Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” in a hallucinatory scene in which the haunted sound studio shows Gilderoy a film of himself getting out of bed, shot only seconds earlier, which then catches in the projector, burns and disintegrates, destroying the wall that protects his work from his life.
Suspiria (1977)
Directed by Dario Argento
influenced The Duke of Burgundy (2015), Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Themes Characters
Berberian Sound Studio is Lost in Translation dressed up as Suspiria.
As a psychological thriller, Berberian Sound Studio is often hypnotic, but it’s also a little one-note: About halfway through its slim running time, the film begins to repeat itself, offering only minor variations on its Blow Out-meets-Suspiria metholodogy.
"Berberian Sound Studio" is a very peculiar movie, honestly — as if someone took all the raw footage from Argento's "Suspiria," and gave it to Antonioni to recut.
He doesn't much care for the movie either; though what he thought "The Equestrian Vortex" was about is never explored, it's instantly clear that he never imagined it would be a cross between Dario Argento's baroque Suspiria, in which ballet students endure supernatural torments at a haunted boarding school, and the German witch-hunt shocker Mark of the Devil, grandfather of all torture-porn.
Like Suzy Bannion in “Suspiria,” Gilderoy is a fish out of water tortured by his surroundings.
Like the heroines of the Suspiria -like film he is working on, Gilderoy is lost in an environment that he does not fully comprehend.