Three Films Make A Post: Watch Your Eyes!

Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho (2015): At times, this documentary about the great, weird acoustic guitarist, composer and esoteric stranger Robbie Basho by Liam Barker is very insightful, speaking with many of Basho’s surviving friends and companions, attacking the music from angles as varied as the artist’s ever-changing cultural interests. Those speaking about he music who didn’t know him do so with insight and love, having things of actual interest and meaning to contribute instead of soundbites.

Only two things mar the film: there’s no distance at all to Meher Baba and Sufism Revisited (the film even tends to call SR members “Sufis”, which is just wrong), which do straddle the line between cult and religion. And using a clearly ailing Country Joe McDonald and his dementia or Alzheimer-caused inability to remember things correctly as a sort of comic relief is just nasty and unpleasant in a way neither Meher Baba nor Robbie Basho would have approved of.

Il medium (1980): This is one of the last movies directed by the sometimes brilliant Silvio Amadio, and concerns clairvoyance, hauntings, potential possession and ghosts, all presented in a slow yet increasingly unhinged and irrational manner like only Italian filmmakers of the 60s to 80s knew to do. It’s not quite as mind-blowing as some of its siblings, and certainly doesn’t look as great as even Amadio’s own best films, but it does have the intense charm of watching a group of filmmakers (Claudio Fragasso is of course one of the writers) turning standard tropes and clichés increasingly strange.

Der Hund von Baskerville aka The Hound of the Baskervilles (1929): At least a third of this German silent adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s best Sherlock Holmes novel by Richard Oswald has been lost to the ravages of time and bad archival practices. The newest restauration and reconstruction uses still shots and synopses taken from censorship documents to fill the viewer in, and given the popularity of the book, and how much the first three of five acts where most of the missing material would be situated follows it, there’s little difficulty in following the proceedings.

Visually, the restauration looks fantastic, throwing Oswald’s expressionistically influenced staging into the proper shades of shadows, lights, weird angles, and improbably yet deeply atmospheric sets. There’s a lot to simply see and immerse oneself in here, as is only proper for the most Gothic of the Holmes tales.

The script does tend to get further away from the book the longer the film goes on, usually in less interesting and less effective directions, though everything ends in a pretty fantastic suspense set piece that also wasn’t in the book this way.