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Flashback 13: Losey, Joseph Losey

Shadow of the Vampire

Sometimes I have the impression that Joseph Losey (EU 1909 - Ing 1984) is unjustly forgotten and often. Forgetting of that, shame assumed, often server has also been involved. May be due to the fact that Losey of very large and extensive filmography, held in little more than four decades, very few films, if any, acquired the canonical dimension, the iconic value the passage of time given to the classics. Clarify: I do not mean that his films are without value or interest, they have it and perhaps much more than any of those movies that critics and historians very often attributed to a filmmaker who, in retrospect, it overrated. Even in spite of possible irregularities in its path. But his presence in the film, to be realistic, it was rather quiet. And speaking of discretion when compared to the rest of his generation: Kazan, Huston, Wilder, Hitchcock perhaps.

De Losey, when speaking, usually through The messenger (England, 1971). But The messenger or The go-between (title gave rise to one of the Australian pop bands of the 80 most interesting, incidentally), but is usually remembered as his work summit, is far from being the most interesting, at least for server. Yes, that is a moving and beautiful love story where the difference in class is a drag, as in most personal films Losey, no doubt, of his setting, and action photography (Julie Christie and Alan Bates extraordinary items) are in for good measure, either. But his excessive formal correctness, its academic aestheticism, its decadence protoviscontiano enough away so the best Losey.

soon to say: The Messenger ended so pompous to the teamwork that Losey had established with the playwright Harold Pinter from what was his best work: the very modest but very powerful The servant (England, 1961).

And it The servant has such complexity that, among other things, offers the ease of being seen through the prism of psychological terror, always give the impression of being filmed hand and eye nerve impulse (especially in its second part), even under its obvious staging calculated, controlled to the smallest detail. The servant it is a movie with that modern spirit, bold, very personal film that was emerging in those years in England (the angry young men, that of cinema Free ) signed ironically by an American exile and veteran.

I know that the ideological positions of Losey (avowed communist and therefore exile in England to escape the witch hunt maccarthysta) its most obvious reading is that of class struggle, metaphorically speaking, and a final settling of accounts, a rematch of class. But I've always liked to see the film as an ingenious variant while updating the figure of the vampire. And from the figure of a vampire, here on earth, too earthly, human, close, as Losey and Pinter develop the chronicle of a master-servant relationship, work more or less conventional in the beginning, degraded, perverted to unsuspected land towards the end. Here the "victim" (for their class), or the servant, is actually a potential perpetrator, a serial sociopath who appropriates, as any vampire, of aristocrat's will as it crosses over to vivify the moral degradation that has pushed. In The servant with whom there are no good because empathize that repels both Butler (huge Dirk Bogarde) Machiavellian social climbers, more sinister meaning, as the inevitable pathos of that aristocrat free will.

At the opposite end of the messenger , The servant is a disturbing film in which the dark, literally and symbolically, dramatic and formally, is gradually taking control. Is a Expressionist film, at the wrong time if you will, but expressionist. Expressionists are the games of lights and shadows, outlining the shades that will house taken, intervened. Expressionist compositions are those that tend to distort space and those that return reflections distorting mirrors that fits so obsessively Losey. Expressionist gestures are remarkably low light Bogarde almost spectral. And, finally, is the oppressive atmosphere expressionist, tense, which gives us the director, ultimately pessimistic, as the only possible landscape.

delire Perhaps, but those moments when I thought of Losey via Servant were those moments that I saw some films of Polanski, as many of Fassbinder and, lo and behold, one of Cronenberg (Dead Ringers especially ). No way, ideas of one.

(Joseph Abril)