Dartmouth Films

Director : Tina Jenkins

What Inspires Me?

The great era of film between 1969 and 1977. I remember bunking into the local ‘flea pit’ at 14 to watch A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick. It had a profound impact. There were already gangs roaming estates in bowler hats and codpieces in response to the film. There had been a murder in the name of the book (no wonder Anthony Burgess disowned it) and we young nihilists thought it was the end of civilization. If you look at the film now, it is as familiar and contemporary as it is telescoped and dated.  It is a surreal horror in all its sadistic cruelty and sexist violence. I don’t like the film. It’s pretentious and operatic and peculiar, much like Kubrick’s more intellectual pieces, but it has this mesmerizing inner strength of a master at work. You don’t like it, but you can’t look away. At the centre is Malcolm McDowell; nostrils flared, defiant, bullying and cowardly in equal measure, like the leader of a hooligan chapter or rampant criminal fraternity. It was and is a tour de force that cannot be denied and captured the disenfranchised adolescent’s need to wreak havoc. It still scares me. I always find Kubrick disturbing. He leads us to the edge of the precipice and forces us, with his big, rough hands, to look straight down into the abyss. What director is doing that now?

I went on to watch amazing films; Five Easy Pieces, Sometimes a Great Notion, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Nashville, The Wedding, Heaven’s Gate and Deliverance. It was like this grand awakening. The films were ugly, uncompromising and constructed like documentaries. The acting was method at its most extreme, beyond the exploration of Brando, who looked formal by comparison. They all had daring and the vision was bold and unconstrained by the demands of opening weekends and phalanxes of terrified studio executives. They were singular visions that suited the disillusionment and existential despair of the period.

It has all changed, though never by as much as we remember. I’m only recalling the masterpieces. It was also the period that bought us Zardos, Twinkie and The Swarm.

But letting the many rotten tomatoes get squished in the dump truck, I do believe that it was an amazing period and I’m glad it has come to be recognized as such. Even the big budget commercial movies had real power and integrity; The Great Gatsby, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Godfathers, Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo. They still stand up today and their structure and scripting are impeccable.

I feel lucky that my cinematic education began back then. You always carry your best films with you and if we can capture a fragment of that in any of our upcoming projects, it will be a job well done.