{"id":20012,"date":"2020-08-26T16:51:42","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T15:51:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=20012"},"modified":"2024-04-09T13:04:52","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T12:04:52","slug":"taking-tiger-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2020\/08\/26\/taking-tiger-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking Tiger Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Another week, another obscure black-and-white science fiction film. I hadn’t heard of this one at all until it was announced in 2012 that co-director Tom Huckabee would be attending a rare screening in New York. The film is an oddity with a complicated history that I’m too lazy to try and condense so here’s the borrowed detail:<\/p>\n

IMDB<\/a>: In a dystopian future, Europe is unified under a totalitarian patriarchy, where each town is assigned a single economic purpose. In Brendovery, Wales the occupation is prostitution. Arriving by train from London is Billy Hampton, a young American expatriate and draft evader (Bill Paxton in his first lead role), ostensibly there to enjoy a sex-filled holiday. Unknown to him he is a time bomb assassin, programmed by a feminist terrorist cell to assassinate the local minister of prostitution.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia<\/a>: Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em>\u00a0is a 1983 American\u00a0science fiction film\u00a0directed by Tom Huckabee and Kent Smith, and starring\u00a0Bill Paxton\u00a0in one of his earliest on-screen acting roles. Originally conceived as an\u00a0experimental\u00a0art film\u00a0inspired by a novel by\u00a0Albert Camus’s 1942 novel\u00a0The Stranger<\/em>\u00a0and a poem by Smith, the film was initially directed by Smith and shot in Wales. Aside from Paxton, the film’s cast is made up of townspeople from the areas in which shooting took place. It was filmed without sound, with the intention of adding dialogue in\u00a0post-production. During post-production, Huckabee took over as the film’s director, abandoning Smith’s original concept and instead loosely basing the film on the 1979 novella\u00a0Blade Runner (a movie)<\/em>\u00a0by\u00a0William S. Burroughs. The film premiered on March 24, 1983. Over three decades later, Huckabee re-edited the film and released it as an alternate cut titled\u00a0Taking Tiger Mountain Revisited<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Tom Huckabee<\/a>: The story went through four distinct periods of creation:
\n1. Kent Smith\u2019s original script, entitled Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em>, written in 1974, based loosely on the John Paul Getty III\u2019s kidnapping of 1973 and Albert Camus\u2019 The Stranger<\/em>. It was set in the casbah of Tangier, Morocco.
\n2. After Bill and Kent got ejected from Morocco before shooting\u00a0even a foot of film, they drove to Wales, adapting the script significantly to the new location and the people and opportunities that presented themselves; but they ran out of film and money after shooting about half of their script.
\n3. After I acquired the footage in 1979, I knew I couldn\u2019t go back to Wales, so after editing their footage to about 55 minutes, I wrote a new story with a lot of help from collaborators, like Paul Cullum, Lorrie O\u2019Shatz, and Ray Layton. I incorporated the Burroughs material and dropped the 55 minutes from Kent and Bill\u2019s script into it. We wrote the ten-minute introductory section with the women and shot it on a sound stage in Austin, incorporating footage from another unfinished film by Kent and Bill called D\u2019Artangan<\/em>. I also built ten minutes of scenes from outtakes. In 1980, Paxton came to Austin for a few days to \u201cloop\u201d all of his dialogue, as no sound had been recorded in Wales. He improvised a lot of his voice-over narration, while under hypnosis. This film, called Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em>, was released on 35mm in 1983 and toured the Landmark Theater chain of art cinemas.
\n4.\u00a0 In 2016 I got a small advance from Etiquette Pictures for digital distribution and decided to do a major upgrade. I cut out ten minutes and added five, including the new ending, which comes after the end credits, significantly changing the message of the film. I reworked the narrative, making it easier to follow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In addition to the complications of the production it’s necessary to note that the title has nothing to do with either Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)<\/em>, or the Chinese opera the Eno album is named after, although we do get to hear about a tiger mountain. This reflects the equally tangled history of the “Blade Runner” title, which Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em> does have some connection with via William Burroughs’ Blade Runner: A Movie<\/em>. This was Burroughs’ cinematic reworking of a science fiction novel by Alan E. Nourse, The Bladerunner<\/em> (1974), a piece of futurism about the very American dystopia of a nightmare healthcare system. Blade Runner: A Movie<\/em> followed Burroughs’ earlier screenplay\/novella, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz<\/em>, although the Nourse adaptation was a much more ambitious scenario with little chance of ever being filmed. No studio in the 1970s (or today, for that matter\u2026) would have put up the money for something that’s like a wilder version of Escape from New York<\/em> with added gay sex and time travel, however attractive this may sound. As is well known by now, the treatment’s title was later purloined by another film that has little else in common with anything discussed here.<\/p>\n

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All of which means that Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em> is exactly the kind of thing guaranteed to stoke my curiosity: a Burroughs-derived science-fiction film made on the cheap by Americans in south Wales, of all places. Why Wales? Because Bill Paxton had been there as a foreign exchange student. I’m not sure I would have been as interested without the disjunctive frisson of gloomy, rain-swept Wales in the mid-1970s colliding with William Burroughs. That said, the blu-ray release from Vinegar Syndrome<\/a> has two things immediately in its favour: for a micro-budget production the film has excellent photography (the black-and-white stock was provided by leftovers from Bob Fosse’s Lenny<\/em>); and there’s a surprising amount of unsimulated sex, something that isn’t such a big deal today but certainly was in 1974. The youthful Bill Paxton is gorgeous and exceptionally photogenic, so the film is a pleasure to watch even when little of substance is happening.<\/p>\n

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The narrative of Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em> is as vague as can be, unsurprisingly given the circumstances of the production, so it’s best to abandon expectations of being told a coherent story and regard the whole thing as a curious mood piece. Huckabee establishes the science fiction frame with a prologue sequence showing the feminist scientists discussing the brainwashing of Billy Hampton (Paxton), a process that involves, among other things, forcing him to question his heterosexual nature. Once Billy has been programmed with his assassin’s mission we see him on a train to the rural town of Brendovery where the SF scenario is maintained by continual public radio broadcasts describing the power struggles raging across the world. One of the few plot threads is delivered via the radio, the progress and eventual death of another assassin who passed through the brainwashing programme before Billy. Burroughs’ presence is felt most in these broadcasts especially the satirical touches, such as the description of Mormons and the Mafia joining forces in a USA at war with itself to defend Utah against the depredations of rival states. Equally Burroughsian is Billy’s encounters with two of the town’s teenage boys, one of them a thuggish type who enjoys playing with a knife, the other a gay boy who Billy possibly has sex with. Billy’s programming has left him confused and dissociated so we aren’t always sure that what we see on the screen is a real event, a memory or an hallucination. This quality and the frequently elliptical editing helps compensate for the film’s shortcomings, the most significant of which are the erratic post-production dialogue. Re-recording dialogue is a common procedure in film-making\u2014all Italian films used to be shot without any on-set sound recording\u2014but there’s usually the time and money available to make the post-production sound match the visuals. In Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em> the minimal dialogue and visuals aren’t always well-matched or properly synchronised although this too can be regarded as a parallel to Burroughs’ theorising about the malleability of recordings. In The Electronic Revolution<\/em> and in some of his novels Burroughs suggests a number of ways that sounds and visual images might be weaponised by scrambling and repurposing. Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em> is a fascinating demonstration of the way in which pre-existing visuals can change their meaning by simple recontextualisation.<\/p>\n

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Where the science fiction is concerned, the Burroughsian atmosphere of Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em>, together with its fragmented editing and mundane British setting places it closer to the New Wave of Science Fiction than most Hollywood fare, especially the work produced by the writers published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds<\/em> magazine. New Wave SF cinema, if it exists at all, has always been very small category; offhand I can think of the two films that JG Ballard always championed: La Jet\u00e9e<\/em> and Alphaville<\/em>; he also liked Godard’s Weekend<\/em> and Last Year at Marienbad<\/em>. After these you’d have to look to two films derived from New Worlds<\/em>-published fiction, The Final Programme<\/em> and A Boy and His Dog<\/em>, both of which were low-budget adaptations that deviated from their source material. Taking Tiger Mountain<\/em> feels closer to the spirit of New Worlds<\/em> than this pair, especially its presentation of sex. The sexual content of New Worlds<\/em> caused continual upset, as did the sexual nature of the New Wave in general compared to the often chaste and prudish space operas that preceded it.<\/p>\n

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The Vinegar Syndrome release contains the original 1983 print of the film together with Tom Huckabee’s Taking Tiger Mountain Revisited<\/em>, a further recontextualisation that adds digital effects to many of the shots, often with little purpose. I’d advise staying with the original. Vinegar Syndrome has distinguished itself recently with blu-ray releases of two other works of offbeat science fiction from the 1980s: Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky<\/em><\/a>, and Klaus Maeck’s Decoder<\/em><\/a>. The latter is heavily indebted to William Burroughs’ The Electronic Revolution<\/em>, and features a brief appearance by the man himself. If you’re as bored as I am by Hollywood’s bloated CGI-fests then the reissue labels are there to stimulate your interest and intellect.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The William Burroughs archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another week, another obscure black-and-white science fiction film. I hadn’t heard of this one at all until it was announced in 2012 that co-director Tom Huckabee would be attending a rare screening in New York. The film is an oddity with a complicated history that I’m too lazy to try and condense so here’s the … Continue reading “Taking Tiger Mountain”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Taking Tiger Mountain","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,28,7,5,20],"tags":[10861,10748,3532,1861,10863,145,137,10857,3809,10859,65,346,10858,10860,9203,3531,10862,1190],"class_list":["post-20012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-burroughs","category-film","category-gay","category-science-fiction","tag-alan-e-nourse","tag-albert-camus","tag-bill-paxton","tag-blade-runner","tag-bob-fosse","tag-brian-eno","tag-jg-ballard","tag-kent-smith","tag-klaus-maeck","tag-lorrie-oshatz","tag-michael-moorcock","tag-new-worlds","tag-paul-cullum","tag-ray-layton","tag-slava-tsukerman","tag-tom-huckabee","tag-vinegar-syndrome","tag-william-burroughs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-5cM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}