John Boorman
Magician of Light
September 5 to October 17, 2024
We're dedicating the start of our season to one of cinema's major visionaries, British filmmaker John Boorman (*1933). Shuttling between his homeland and Hollywood, Boorman is the director of legendary classics like the crime film Point Blank (1967), the adventure film Deliverance (1972), the fantasy epic Excalibur (1980), and the autobiographically-tinged tragicomedy Hope and Glory (1987). Not only did he repeatedly reinvigorate genres, he was also able to smuggle his very personal approach into the demands of commercial moviemaking – faithful to his poetic motto, "films should be poems, not novels."
Boorman does not belong to British cinema's dominant realist tradition as practiced by his contemporaries Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Instead, he ranks among a fascinating line of English outsiders going back to one of his major cinematic idols: Michael Powell, who – mostly with Emeric Pressburger – made a series of fantastic films which unlocked new storytelling possibilities with astounding ingenuity. Boorman celebrated the mytho-poetical power of this approach in the popular cinema of a later era: His sharply drawn images of worlds do not rely on naturalism, but instead reveal a dazzling intensity, often with surrealist shades.
He got his start in television: After a childhood marked by World War II, to which he dedicated a typically iconoclastic monument with Hope and Glory, and his own military service, which forms the background of his last film, the overlooked Queen and Country (2014), Boorman was hired by a local TV station. In the early 1960s, his innovative and successful approach to TV production earned him a promotion to the head of one of the BBC's documentary divisions, where he quickly ran into the limits of the form. With his debut theatrical feature, Catch Us If You Can (1965), he was able to turn his attention fully to fiction, especially since his sensational TV work had awoken the interest of producers. Boorman's first feature was inspired by the success of the Beatles movies: The plan was for yet another comedic pop entertainment set around the equally successful Dave Clark Five, but the director cranked up the satire. His disillusioned study of the society of the spectacle was a foretaste of the strong critique of civilization found in all his films.
Boorman continued seamlessly when he took the leap overseas: The instinctive trust of the freshly Oscar-crowned star Lee Marvin (with whom he remained close friends until Marvin's death) enabled Boorman's to make his debut in Hollywood. "Point Blank [...] was based on a pulp thriller that I tortured into an existential dreamscape," the director later wrote about the origins of this pioneering neo-noir. It was only thanks to Marvin's support that he was able take his own approach in the face of studio resistance. The film's bold genre revisionism via its auteur's distinctive signature made Point Blank one of the first sparks of the erupting New Hollywood era, while in Marvin's embodiment of the protagonist (the aptly named Walker), the ambivalent Boorman protagonist powerfully took shape: In a vendetta against a powerful syndicate, Walker must ultimately recognize the hubris and meaninglessness of his venture. A kind of vain search for the Grail remains the fate of Boorman's anti-heroes: A feeling of solidarity with nature and the elements as well as a fascination for archetypical myths had already led Boorman in his youth to the legend of King Arthur, which he would ultimately and triumphantly bring to the screen with Excalibur, and which shaped his approach to other film projects.
Marvin's own World War II experiences were a major inspiration for their follow-up collaboration, Hell in the Pacific (1968), but it was Boorman's characteristic vision that turned this lonely duel of two stranded soldiers (adversary: Mifune Toshiro) into a Beckettian end game in an intoxicating Pacific Islands landscape. The universality of Boorman’s critical vision consequently took very different forms: In the tragicomic social satire Leo the Last (1970), Marcello Mastroianni plays an unworldly aristocrat stranded in the slums of London, and in the disturbing masterpiece Deliverance, four city folks – including Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight – want to conquer a rapid river in canoes before it is contained by a reservoir. In their confrontation with the ferocity of nature and its inhabitants, the pride of "civilization" is shattered: Boorman, a specialist in daring metaphors, contrasts the rape of one of the wannabe adventurers with the rape of nature. That Boorman's conscious taboo breaking worked was due to his gift of showing violence without the typical embellishment of commercial movies; at the same time, this was also a manifestation of the ecological interest found throughout the filmmaker's entire oeuvre.
Boorman followed the international success with Deliverance with two overambitious flops which are now cult classics. In the bizarre science fiction film Zardoz (1973), with Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling, Boorman imagined a world of the future in which immortality has robbed an elite class of humans of all vitality. Boorman saw Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), with Richard Burton and Linda Blair, not as a sequel, but instead as an answer to The Exorcist (1973), which he had declined to direct and which he now followed up with "a film about good, not evil," disappointing everyone's expectations. Both works have since been rehabilitated as idiosyncratic, fantastic visions: Alongside Boorman's personal signature, they feature captivating and unusual special effects whose basic premises the filmmaker had developed for a project that he was never able to finance – an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
In his autobiography, Boorman notes that the work of a director is in fact just as strongly defined by the films that he was unable to make as by the ones that actually exist. Even if dream projects like his Tolkien adaptation (or the appropriately titled original work Broken Dream, which he pursued for decades) went unmade, Boorman was able to channel many of his ideas into other films: In this respect, with Excalibur, he reached a culminating point and, at the same, pulled off the feat of compressing nearly the entirety of his beloved King Arthur mythology into two-and-a-half hours. That Merlin the Magician became the main character says a lot about the film's creator: In the magical art of film, the magician’s power is reflected in legend – and that of shamans among indigenous peoples, as in The Emerald Forest (1985). Boorman made Ireland, where he shot Excalibur, his home and opened a production company there called Merlin Films.
Ireland also became an important foothold for Boorman's filmmaking. "The choice for a British director is to stay home and do small pictures, or to go to Hollywood and make big ones – or to do a bit of both, as I have done. There is certainly no stability or continuity. Our lives are frittered away on movies we fail to make," writes Boorman in his first autobiography Adventures of a Suburban Boy (2003). After he translated his ecological concerns into the enthralling rain forest adventure film The Emerald Forest and had another international success with Hope and Glory, his New York-set family comedy Where the Heart Is... (1990) became a kind of sticking point: "The trouble is, it's still a Boorman film. It's not yet a Disney film," said the head of Disney at the time, Jeffrey Katzenberg – the perfect expression of a neoliberal era in the movies, wherein management increasingly focused on commercial optimization and successively eliminated any of the artistic freedom Boorman had known in the New Hollywood years.
Despite complicated circumstances and comparably smaller budgets, Boorman's filmmaking has lost none of its quality or originality in the past two decades. He turned to contemporary political subjects with the Myanmar political thriller Beyond Rangoon (1995), with Patricia Arquette, and the drama In My Country (2004), with Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson, about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee, and in The General (1998), he tells the story of a legendary Irish gangster and people's hero, which led to his second Best Director Prize at Cannes and brought international renown to his lead actor Brendan Gleeson. Boorman combines the film's thriller elements with his sense of absurd humor, which in his late work appears increasingly as an expression of his surrealist vision: In The Tailor of Panama (2001), with Pierce Brosnan and Jamie Lee Curtis – maybe the most successful film adaptation of a John le Carré novel – as well as in the Irish doppelgänger fable The Tiger's Tail (2007), with Gleeson.
With Queen and Country, finally, he continued his witty autobiographical approach from Hope and Glory. On the surface, Boorman's last work again appears like a breezy key film, and yet the dark and mythical elements that have shaped his work crop up before the final shot shows a whirring camera: the perfect farewell gesture of a cinephilic filmmaker who again and again sought out new challenges and memorable images to study and deepen the medium's poetic magic. "Film remains a language," says Boorman: "that is easy to understand but hard to speak." (Christoph Huber / Translation: Ted Fendt)
Introductions to selected films by curator Christoph Huber
We're dedicating the start of our season to one of cinema's major visionaries, British filmmaker John Boorman (*1933). Shuttling between his homeland and Hollywood, Boorman is the director of legendary classics like the crime film Point Blank (1967), the adventure film Deliverance (1972), the fantasy epic Excalibur (1980), and the autobiographically-tinged tragicomedy Hope and Glory (1987). Not only did he repeatedly reinvigorate genres, he was also able to smuggle his very personal approach into the demands of commercial moviemaking – faithful to his poetic motto, "films should be poems, not novels."
Boorman does not belong to British cinema's dominant realist tradition as practiced by his contemporaries Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Instead, he ranks among a fascinating line of English outsiders going back to one of his major cinematic idols: Michael Powell, who – mostly with Emeric Pressburger – made a series of fantastic films which unlocked new storytelling possibilities with astounding ingenuity. Boorman celebrated the mytho-poetical power of this approach in the popular cinema of a later era: His sharply drawn images of worlds do not rely on naturalism, but instead reveal a dazzling intensity, often with surrealist shades.
He got his start in television: After a childhood marked by World War II, to which he dedicated a typically iconoclastic monument with Hope and Glory, and his own military service, which forms the background of his last film, the overlooked Queen and Country (2014), Boorman was hired by a local TV station. In the early 1960s, his innovative and successful approach to TV production earned him a promotion to the head of one of the BBC's documentary divisions, where he quickly ran into the limits of the form. With his debut theatrical feature, Catch Us If You Can (1965), he was able to turn his attention fully to fiction, especially since his sensational TV work had awoken the interest of producers. Boorman's first feature was inspired by the success of the Beatles movies: The plan was for yet another comedic pop entertainment set around the equally successful Dave Clark Five, but the director cranked up the satire. His disillusioned study of the society of the spectacle was a foretaste of the strong critique of civilization found in all his films.
Boorman continued seamlessly when he took the leap overseas: The instinctive trust of the freshly Oscar-crowned star Lee Marvin (with whom he remained close friends until Marvin's death) enabled Boorman's to make his debut in Hollywood. "Point Blank [...] was based on a pulp thriller that I tortured into an existential dreamscape," the director later wrote about the origins of this pioneering neo-noir. It was only thanks to Marvin's support that he was able take his own approach in the face of studio resistance. The film's bold genre revisionism via its auteur's distinctive signature made Point Blank one of the first sparks of the erupting New Hollywood era, while in Marvin's embodiment of the protagonist (the aptly named Walker), the ambivalent Boorman protagonist powerfully took shape: In a vendetta against a powerful syndicate, Walker must ultimately recognize the hubris and meaninglessness of his venture. A kind of vain search for the Grail remains the fate of Boorman's anti-heroes: A feeling of solidarity with nature and the elements as well as a fascination for archetypical myths had already led Boorman in his youth to the legend of King Arthur, which he would ultimately and triumphantly bring to the screen with Excalibur, and which shaped his approach to other film projects.
Marvin's own World War II experiences were a major inspiration for their follow-up collaboration, Hell in the Pacific (1968), but it was Boorman's characteristic vision that turned this lonely duel of two stranded soldiers (adversary: Mifune Toshiro) into a Beckettian end game in an intoxicating Pacific Islands landscape. The universality of Boorman’s critical vision consequently took very different forms: In the tragicomic social satire Leo the Last (1970), Marcello Mastroianni plays an unworldly aristocrat stranded in the slums of London, and in the disturbing masterpiece Deliverance, four city folks – including Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight – want to conquer a rapid river in canoes before it is contained by a reservoir. In their confrontation with the ferocity of nature and its inhabitants, the pride of "civilization" is shattered: Boorman, a specialist in daring metaphors, contrasts the rape of one of the wannabe adventurers with the rape of nature. That Boorman's conscious taboo breaking worked was due to his gift of showing violence without the typical embellishment of commercial movies; at the same time, this was also a manifestation of the ecological interest found throughout the filmmaker's entire oeuvre.
Boorman followed the international success with Deliverance with two overambitious flops which are now cult classics. In the bizarre science fiction film Zardoz (1973), with Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling, Boorman imagined a world of the future in which immortality has robbed an elite class of humans of all vitality. Boorman saw Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), with Richard Burton and Linda Blair, not as a sequel, but instead as an answer to The Exorcist (1973), which he had declined to direct and which he now followed up with "a film about good, not evil," disappointing everyone's expectations. Both works have since been rehabilitated as idiosyncratic, fantastic visions: Alongside Boorman's personal signature, they feature captivating and unusual special effects whose basic premises the filmmaker had developed for a project that he was never able to finance – an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
In his autobiography, Boorman notes that the work of a director is in fact just as strongly defined by the films that he was unable to make as by the ones that actually exist. Even if dream projects like his Tolkien adaptation (or the appropriately titled original work Broken Dream, which he pursued for decades) went unmade, Boorman was able to channel many of his ideas into other films: In this respect, with Excalibur, he reached a culminating point and, at the same, pulled off the feat of compressing nearly the entirety of his beloved King Arthur mythology into two-and-a-half hours. That Merlin the Magician became the main character says a lot about the film's creator: In the magical art of film, the magician’s power is reflected in legend – and that of shamans among indigenous peoples, as in The Emerald Forest (1985). Boorman made Ireland, where he shot Excalibur, his home and opened a production company there called Merlin Films.
Ireland also became an important foothold for Boorman's filmmaking. "The choice for a British director is to stay home and do small pictures, or to go to Hollywood and make big ones – or to do a bit of both, as I have done. There is certainly no stability or continuity. Our lives are frittered away on movies we fail to make," writes Boorman in his first autobiography Adventures of a Suburban Boy (2003). After he translated his ecological concerns into the enthralling rain forest adventure film The Emerald Forest and had another international success with Hope and Glory, his New York-set family comedy Where the Heart Is... (1990) became a kind of sticking point: "The trouble is, it's still a Boorman film. It's not yet a Disney film," said the head of Disney at the time, Jeffrey Katzenberg – the perfect expression of a neoliberal era in the movies, wherein management increasingly focused on commercial optimization and successively eliminated any of the artistic freedom Boorman had known in the New Hollywood years.
Despite complicated circumstances and comparably smaller budgets, Boorman's filmmaking has lost none of its quality or originality in the past two decades. He turned to contemporary political subjects with the Myanmar political thriller Beyond Rangoon (1995), with Patricia Arquette, and the drama In My Country (2004), with Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson, about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee, and in The General (1998), he tells the story of a legendary Irish gangster and people's hero, which led to his second Best Director Prize at Cannes and brought international renown to his lead actor Brendan Gleeson. Boorman combines the film's thriller elements with his sense of absurd humor, which in his late work appears increasingly as an expression of his surrealist vision: In The Tailor of Panama (2001), with Pierce Brosnan and Jamie Lee Curtis – maybe the most successful film adaptation of a John le Carré novel – as well as in the Irish doppelgänger fable The Tiger's Tail (2007), with Gleeson.
With Queen and Country, finally, he continued his witty autobiographical approach from Hope and Glory. On the surface, Boorman's last work again appears like a breezy key film, and yet the dark and mythical elements that have shaped his work crop up before the final shot shows a whirring camera: the perfect farewell gesture of a cinephilic filmmaker who again and again sought out new challenges and memorable images to study and deepen the medium's poetic magic. "Film remains a language," says Boorman: "that is easy to understand but hard to speak." (Christoph Huber / Translation: Ted Fendt)
Introductions to selected films by curator Christoph Huber
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