Snow, madness and bleak midwinters

IIt may be summer in the north where Londoners, New Yorkers and Mediterranean holidaymakers are turning bright red and fainting in the streets but down south the recent solstice has meant that it’s time for Mzansi to turn on the heaters and fill up the hot-water bottles.

As cold fronts arrive and our not so snowy winter sets in, here are three films from colder climes that share wintry backdrops and snowy landscapes as the setting for their bleak tales of winter discontent and serve as reminders of how much colder and more miserable we could be but for the accident of geography and the circumstances of history.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL

Marketa Lazarová – YouTube

Under celebrated beyond its native land at the time, director Fratišek Vláčil’s 1967 epic medieval drama is now celebrated as a classic of the 1960s Czechoslovak New Wave and has been repeatedly voted as the best Czech film of all time by critics.

Based on a 1931 novel by Vladislav Vančura, the story takes place in the bleak snow laden and unforgiving environs of 13th century Czechoslovakia where robber knights rape and pillage and peasants cower in fear as Christianity begins to sweep away the last vestiges of paganism in the countryside.

When two unscrupulous robber knights kidnap Marketa, the virginal daughter of a feudal lord, her planned entry into a convent, her life and the lives of her kidnappers are changed forever by the journey they undertake through the harsh and unforgiving winter plains and increasingly dangerous villages.

Loose in its adaptation of its source material, beautifully and bleakly photographed in atmospheric black and white by cinematographer Beda Batka and edited and directed with a surreal and modern hand by Vláčil, it’s a boundary pushing film that still impresses and earns its reputation as one of the greatest historical films ever made. The uncertainty that hangs over its characters and story, the brutality of its evocation of the middle ages and the philosophical struggles for mental and personal freedom serve to place it within the encroaching momentous events of its era – just before the brief idealism and hopes of the Prague Spring were thuddingly crushed by Russian tanks.

A thoroughly intriguing and impressive film that evokes, like few others, a memorable and fateful winter of terrifying discontent.

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THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC

The Shining – Rent or buy Apple TV +

You need only look at the length and breadth of issues covered on its Wikipedia page to understand the place in film history and pop culture that Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 Stephen King adaptation still has in pop mythology 45-years later.

From its eerie opening tracking shot and foreboding electronic score by Wendy Carlos to its memorably blizzard-enveloped climax, Kubrick’s distinctly carefully composed and masterfully executed horror remains the ultimate cautionary tale of the insanity that isolation and a bleak midwinter can help to unleash on seemingly ordinary souls.

When recovering alcoholic and struggling writer Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as the winter caretaker of the sprawling and empty Overlook Hotel, what seems to be the perfect job to break his writer’s block soon becomes a fatal nightmare for Jack, his long-suffering anxious wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and solitary son with clairvoyant powers Danny (Danny Lloyd).

Using the then new technology of the Steadicam and all the elements of the medium from sound to design, composition and music to full effect, Kubrick patiently ratchets up the tension to increasingly quietly terrifying levels as the audience becomes imprisoned in the claustrophobic descent into the madness of Jack and the dangers he poses to his family.

By the time it’s snow-drenched, windswept and scream-filled memorable finale in the hotel’s maze arrives, Kubrick has managed to make you as terrified as his hapless subjects.

Famous for its execution and infamous for its director’s tyrannical treatment of Duvall and his insistence on hundreds of takes in the pursuit of icy perfection, it’s a horror film still unlike any other and a cinematic masterpiece that offers new portent and conspiratorial possibilities with each rewatching. There are winters on screen and then there’s the winter of The Shining.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Archangel – Rent or buy Apple TV +

No-one loves the unforgiving winter snow, ice and wind of Canada’s remote Manitoba province as much as perhaps Winnipeg’s most famous son, director Guy Maddin who, in a career spanning three decades, has mined its landscape and eccentric characters for the creation of a singular cinematic aesthetic that incorporates the aesthetic of the silent-films that Maddin was first entranced by as student, to invigorating and surreal modern effect.

This, his second feature film from 1991, uses Winnipeg as a stand-in for its setting of the Arkhangelsk region of Russia during the brief moment of Canadian intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1919. From this basic premise, inspired in part by Henry Green’s novel Black, Maddin creates a surrealistic collage of strange characters, dreamlike imagery and darkly humorous classic silent-film tragedy references that work together to create a cinematic winter that’s playful, curious and emotionally effective —   all shot on 16mm film for the paltry sum of $430,000.

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