Film Reviews by JO

Debut feature of Peter Bogdanovich is an example of postmodernist film-making. The plot has 2 parallel narratives: an aspiring young director tries to coax an ageing actor, Byron Orlok (Karloff) into one last performance; meanwhile, a young, all-American boy next door murders his wife and mother before embarking on a random killing spree from a watchtower overlooking a highway. The dual narratives converge in a drive-in cinema where Orlok is making a guest appearance at a screening of one of his films (in fact, the not very scary 'The Terror' featuring an early performance by Jack Nicholson).

For its time, Targets is a bold, daring movie. It has a strong anti-Hollywood sensibility eschewing conventional film-making techniques in favour of the avant garde approach of European cinema. The camerawork by Laslo Kovacs is impressively sophisticated. The film features many shots taking the point of view of the gunman, putting the camera behind his sight lines making the audience question their attitude to violence (onscreen and off). The theme of the relationship between violence on and off-screen extends to the narrative. In one memorable scene Orlok describes himself as an "anachronism. My kind of horror isn't horror anymore". Daring film-making techniques must have been particularly unnerving for American audiences just 5 years after the Kennedy assassination. Like other films of the period, Targets does have a strong social message: here it's about the proliferation of guns in the private sector. Bogdanovich seems to be making a rallying call for greater constraints on guns.

Targets is an intelligently crafted film - albeit a bit too self-indulgent in places - which, like it's much better successor, 'The Conversation' depicts a snapshot of America at the time.

Culloden, made in 1964 on a shoestring budget, re-enacts the famous battle between the Jacobite clans and the English forces of 1746. The film was shot in the style of a news report with interviews with individual soldiers on the battlefield. The anachronism between the news report and the actual battle was innovative but perhaps resembles the broadcasts coming out of the Vietnam War at the time. It serves to disorient the spectator and offers a commentary on the way the media reports war. Most impressive is the way Watkins shifts the audiences perspective of the battle making you question your involvement in the events depicted. Watkins focuses on several different viewpoints: eyewitnesses, the perspective of common people and the Dukr of Cornwall’s biographer who views the battle scene through a telescope narrating the events that unfold (but the viewer doesn’t always see). At times satirical, at times distressing this is a brilliant and, for its time, radical movie about the horrors of war.