NOTHING PERSONAL (NETHERLANDS/2009/URSZULA ANTONIAK)

Sat by her window on a busy day, a red-haired woman named Anne observes the pedestrians and café dwellers outside. This is the final snatch of urbanity for her before she sets off hiking in the rugged moors of Ireland. On her travels, she bewilders tourists who witness her eating leftover food pilfered from bins, and throws off the lecherous gestures of a truck driver who picked her up by screaming like a banshee. Clad in unoffensive neutral colours, Anne appears to be at peace in the presence of untouched nature, but at the discovery of a seemingly unoccupied lake house she finds herself bothering the occupier, a widower named Martin, for bed and board. Martin accepts on the condition that she assist him in his gardening, beginning an unusual relationship that approaches something like mutual solitude.

Transnational director Urszula Antoniak sidesteps the obvious option of making Anne (or even the entire film) mute in order to hit home her isolation, but the character’s refusal to divulge information about herself, coupled with her hard-to-place accent and fiery disposition, depicts her as an untamable sprite figure. Little is revealed about Martin either, and in this way the two have an unspoken understanding, one that the audience can latch onto the moment the characters realise a shared taste in music. It’s a film one could imagine Michael Winterbottom making in a slow year, but Antoniak shows only enough of her story to leave the viewer wanting to revisit it again and again.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) (NETHERLANDS/2009/TOM SIX)

An exhausted trucker, defecating on the roadside after a long haul, is shot soundlessly by a trench-coated man in sunglasses. So begins Tom Six’s notorious horror film, modelled in the manner of Hostel or Saw but ending up much more like Videodrome. Our main characters arrive in the form of American tourists Lindsay and Jenny, two naïve gal-pals trying to navigate their way across Western Europe. Broken down on a Landesstraße in Germany, the girls are taken in by the enigmatic Dr. Heiter who spikes them with Rohypnol. The addition of Japanese tourist Katsuro allows Heiter to begin his experiment and fulfil his twisted dream – to make a human sewage line.

It is hard to know how to react to The Human Centipede (First Sequence). Clearly, the main goal of the film is to repulse, which it manages in abundance thanks to lingering shots of the centipede in ‘motion’. What makes the experience incredibly uncomfortable is the inherent comedy in Heiter’s mission – it’s hard not to laugh at Katsuro’s confused anger. While it is never explained, one can assume that Heiter’s goal has an erotic outcome, but the campy acting makes it hard to take seriously. But while to many it may just be a juvenile gross-out movie, The Human Centipede is at least an interesting exercise in suspense, and the next logical step in torture porn. A sequel of sorts is on its way, leading one to ponder what other dastardly schemes Heiter has in mind (a digestive ouroboros?).

LYRICAL NITRATE (NETHERLANDS/1991/PETER DELPEUT)

In his 1991 found-footage project Lyrical Nitrate, filmmaker Peter Delpeut strings together an abstract ode to cinema. The footage, culled from various turn-of-the-century films from the collection of distributor Jean Desmets, had originally been printed on coloured nitrate film stock which has left the images in some way deteriorated. Delpeut arranges his film clips into categories which evoke the experiences of watching film. For example, the first segment, ‘Looking’, sees actors in various films addressing the camera with their gaze, accompanied by a frenzied attack of intertitles in different languages. The film doesn’t follow a strict narrative, although a basic sense of mortality is echoed in its structure.

Though some might say that the similarities between Delpeut’s process and the one Bill Morrison used for his 2002 film Decasia are so close as to suggest plagiarism by the latter, such a question ignores the nature of the found-footage genre. As Jean-Luc Godard once noted, “it’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to”. This however does not excuse the two films from comparison. Whereas Decasia creates controlled chaos through its presentation of odds and ends of unknown films, most of them damaged beyond recognition by natural causes, Lyrical Nitrate honours cinema through identifying patterns. Montages of similar clips from different films suggests an element of collective perfectionism, as if filmmakers were constantly collaborating to document life as best as possible. The film’s everchanging colour values have a hypnotic effect, rendering the film a gentle, ghostly experience.

THE VILLAGE ON THE RIVER (NETHERLANDS/1958/FONS RADEMAKERS)

A Golden Globe winner and contender for the 1959 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The Village On The River follows the affable Dr. van Taeke, a turn-of-the century medicine man determined to make a difference to the lives of inhabitants in a small riverside village. With his unflappably cool bedside manner and his equitable compassion, van Taeke becomes a close personal friend to many of the villagers, rich and poor alike. But when a local man known as Long Lent is found hanged from the bell-tower, a dark shadow is cast over the village, and soon another man is mysteriously murdered and left in the polder. As life falls apart for the locals, van Taeke’s alliance with his more disadvantaged patients is brought to light by the village council, who see him as an enemy and, exploiting his weaknesses, reduce him to nothing better than a village idiot.

While it is a remarkable work in its own right, the film does invite cursory comparisons with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s taut thriller Le Corbeau (1943), in which a well-respected physician is falsely indicted by a series of poison pen letters. But where Le Corbeau manages to build paranoia and suspicion with a consistent tone, The Village On The River negates its own emotional clout with some peculiar pacing. A curious flashback sequence with a sailor and a salacious gypsy girl sits uncomfortably amidst a maudlin pub scene. Having said that, the film handles death respectfully, and the funeral sequences are absolutely stunning.