Feature at Wysing
As soon as I looked at the first page of the book before the screening, I realised how wrong I had been to assume this film was going to be a spoof or a surreal reincarnation of many others made in Hollywood or Italy.
There must have been some long discussions about the fly page of the book which visually represents the concept for the film. To me the two colours of Blue and Red used for the design signifies peace and war in a much wider sense. Then there is the powerful symbol of the Eye of Providence which is also known as All Seeing Eye. Whichever meaning of the symbol we take, it eventually ends up telling us we are being watched and our destiny is decided. There is also a subtle close up of the symbol which shows only its bottom half, by which God becomes excluded?
The combination of this visual colour page and the very informative synopsis by Gerrie van Noord acted as the most helpful caption for the film, although there were so many symbols and codes for viewers to decipher. Like the two colours, most of what we saw on the screen had double meaning, and it seemed to me that on the surface there was a wealth of light references to many images that we all would recognise and reflect accordingly. To name a few, I could associate some of these frames with the 60’s and early 70’s films like Dracula, James Bond and of course a number of spaghetti Westerns. Beneath the surface, however, there were visual and verbal remarks on social class, pretentious intellectualism, racism, religeons and more. Krishna with his blue skin appeared in more than two guises to represent or symbolise divers figures.
Once we were engaged in the battlefield, the allusion to war and destiny, a Scandinavian Mythology, took us further to encounter other myths and legends - Prince Arjuna from Hindu and Warrior Hamza from Arabs of Middle East, and may be others I did not know. Valkyrie who oversees the fate of warriors in battle, guided the zombies to a corpse whose abdomen was opened, guts and gore falling out of the cavity, and the zombies got down to eating them ravenously. The scene was unusually long, as if there was a contest to find out which one of the people among the audience would be the first to vomit. My mind went to Iraq, South of Bagdad, some thirteen centuries ago. Hamza, a warrior was killed in the battle, and a woman called Hind walked to the battlefield to cut Hamza’s liver out and then chewed it and swallowed it in fulfilment of a vow. Hind’s father and brother had been killed by Hamza the warrior.
Shezad has shrouded so much myth, legend and history with gay and comic scenes or dialogues. The bitter truths occasionally comes out to above the threshold of our consciousness, forcing us to wipe the smile off our faces for a moment or two - and no character in the film did this better than Valkyrie, who was wearing Fascist style headgear, singing Wagner and leading us to death.
Abbas
