Crea­ture

Michael Pow­ell strived through­out his career towards a con­cept he called ​“com­posed cin­e­ma”: the bring­ing togeth­er of per­for­mance, music, and image into film as a sin­gu­lar whole. Pow­ell want­ed to make a ​‘bal­let film’, as opposed to a ​‘filmed bal­let’, in which the cin­e­mato­graph­ic tech­niques of cin­e­ma do not sim­ply record but are worked into the chore­og­ra­phy of the dance.

Describ­ing his new film Crea­ture, Asif Kapa­dia calls it ​“pure cin­e­ma”: noth­ing more than per­for­mance, music and image. Pow­ell often attempt­ed to cre­ate a ​“com­posed” film, the best-known of which is 1948’s The Red Shoes, which fea­tures a 17-minute bal­let sequence. The aim had orig­i­nal­ly been to make an entire film as a bal­let, but it is near impos­si­ble to sell the idea to a pro­duc­er that a cin­e­ma audi­ence will embrace a total nega­tion of dialogue.

Return­ing to the image-based sto­ry­telling of the silent era to some may feel like going back­wards. But to Pow­ell – and now to Kapa­dia – it is an enhance­ment of form.
In Crea­ture, Kapa­dia has realised Powell’s dream of a fea­ture-length bal­let film. At 87 min­utes it is still a palat­able run­time for what is essen­tial­ly an exper­i­ment. Com­plete bal­lets have long been record­ed and exhib­it­ed in cin­e­mas. There is demand for what is often a more acces­si­ble mode of per­for­mance. But the edit­ing and cin­e­matog­ra­phy of those streams is sta­t­ic and one-dimen­sion­al to mir­ror the eye of an objec­tive observer.

By con­trast, Crea­ture is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between direc­tor and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er which uni­fies film and dance. The bal­let itself is an orig­i­nal piece by Akram Khan cre­at­ed for Eng­lish Nation­al Bal­let, which has pro­duced the film, who has chore­o­graphed some of the most rad­i­cal and excit­ing pro­duc­tions in con­tem­po­rary dance. It’s easy to see why the project has appealed to Kapa­dia, who has rarely seemed con­tent with con­ven­tion­al, talk­ing-head doc­u­men­tary in films such as Sen­na and Amy. Here he trans­forms the bal­let live stream into a work of cinema.

Crea­ture works so effec­tive­ly because the sto­ry is a sim­ple and ancient one of beau­ty falling in love with the beast. Com­bin­ing Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck with Mary Shelley’s ​‘Franken­stein’, Khan tells through move­ment a romance in a dilap­i­dat­ed Arc­tic research sta­tion between a test sub­ject (Jef­frey Cirio) and a clean­er called Marie (Eri­na Taka­hashi) as the doc­tors and mil­i­tary at the sta­tion come between them. It’s sim­i­lar to Guiller­mo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which also attempt­ed to express for­bid­den love and alien­ation through sheer bod­i­ly expression.

The cre­ation is rev­o­lu­tion­ary. It is the work of a col­lec­tive – of direc­tor Kapa­dia, chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Khan, cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Daniel Landin, edi­tor Sylvie Lan­dra, sound design­er Stephen Grif­fiths, and com­pos­er Vin­cen­zo Lam­agna exist­ing as a sin­gle mass which ebbs and flows in the filmic space. It is there­fore also a cel­e­bra­tion of British diver­si­ty, of dancers and cre­atives with her­itage from across the globe, brought togeth­er in a bold artis­tic front. Crea­ture announces a new fron­tier for cinema.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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