The Ozymandias of Shadows

...reality is little more than a stage set, whose cast and scenery can be swept aside and replaced overnight, and... our belief in the permanence of appearances is an illusion."
- J.G. Ballard (in an interview with V. Vale, excerpted from CCCB catalog, 2008)

Film frightened people in its early days. The silent moving images of people looked like flickering ghosts on the screen. Most silent films did their best to eliminate this unsettling effect, and to make their characters seem as close to life as possible. Soundtracks were added to create a more uplifting mood, and eventually the slides would be painted by hand, to add blush to the cheeks and brightness to the screen.

Maxim Gorky, a soviet dramatist, described moving pictures (especially in its silent era) as “not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.” He called it the "Kingdom of Shadows". Today, this kingdom has grown into a ginormous entertainment industry, and we have all become its subjects. This much is obvious from the reaction garnered by my recent posts on films.

Those posts don't require further clarification, they speak for themselves. But if some of the responses in my mail are anything to go by, I think it's best to add that I'm not advocating - and would never say - that any director, or actor, or film, or the industry that churns them out to the tune of millions should be cancelled. I don't believe in cancel culture, but I do believe in being hoisted upon one's own petard.

The film industry is a worthwhile output for creativity, as with any other artform, but if it's going to be at the mercy of prententious and manipulative forces - then we have to call it out. You can't feel passionately about an issue, and in the next breath say it is above frank discussion or real criticism, because doing so means you are part of that cancel culture, too.

You may not be cancelling people for past abhorrent actions or beliefs, however you're cancelling people (a horrible phrase for any reason) who would speak out about them. I understand why you would do it; I understand why cancel culture is so appealing. It's easier to simply cancel out whatever it is you don't agree with, because to open your mind to an opposing view - and consider that you might be wrong - is a far harder, and a far less travelled highway.

But closed minds are like closed windows in a hot car, it's a climate in which wisdom, like fresh air, suffocates. This is why I, personally, welcome a difference of opinion; it is like a breath of fresh air to my current climate of knowledge. It doesn't mean I'm necessarily going to agree with you, but it does mean I'm open to hearing an opposing view.

It's true I've never held a camera or changed a lightbulb on set, and I don't purport to be in any way connected with the film industry. I've been on a few film shoots; I had the most horrendous experience on a makeshift one. I write about it here, here and here, and am not going to rehash old ground. But I've written five film scripts in my lifetime and all are archived with the Writer's Guild, yet I wouldn't call myself a scriptwriter, either. But I am a storyteller. I know stories. I also know what I like, and I can give good reasons for why I like what I like, and I don't think any of that should cause offence.

Moreover, I've been accused of using emotive arguments in those posts by appealing to a person's parental instincts, but I'm not saying we shouldn't make adult films in case our children watch them. Children are future adults, after all. I'm saying films should be made with good taste, and parental guidance is probably the best standard for good taste at first call. And, depsite how dated the framing becomes, it's the stories we write for our children that utilise timeless and universal themes.

Granted, there is an appetite for bad taste, and films neither require sophistication, nor warrant experimentation, but if you are going to use one or the other to help you elevate film to some fictional standard above its industry's aim of making money, then be prepared to take criticism at its highest level. Adult films require adult scrutiny. Most filmmakers understand this, else they would keep their output to an audience of one.

But if they wouldn't want their wives or daughters watching the films they watch or make, or, heck, if they're reluctant to have them even work in the film industry, then they have to at least ask this question of themselves: Why? Is it because they don't see women as their absolute equals, or because they want to protect them? And if the latter, then what are they defending them against? But this duality, at least, would indicate they had some semblance of humanity left.

Because whether you're one of the ruling elite of this kingdom or one of its lowly subjects, when one is immersed in an unreal celebrity culture where one cares more about the lives of celebri-demigods than one's own circle of family or personal friends, then the next logical step is to not care about anything at all. Because you've foolishly invested too much time and effort in caring about "unreality", you will begin to believe the illusion - even if it's one of your own making.

For truly, the industry stalwarts and their puppet celebrities live in a parallel dimension that's quite inaccessible, and for most people may as well be beamed from another planet. It is not merely the death of feeling; it means that people on a film set are more and more alienated from any kind of direct response to experience - which is irony squared as their craft is to portray exactly that on the screen. It's possibly why Marlon Brando, one of the greatest actors ever to grace the silver screen, ended up hating his own profession.

The Film of Illusion

The film lens is a second eye that diffuses an already diffused reality by the human eye.

Illusion isn't just the stock trade of film, however. Our brains invest in illusion as emotional currency for understanding the information our eyes process. It's the prevailing view today that, most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world - but that's not always the case. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences. All of this can bias us. For instance, visual illusions (such as the colour-changing dress that broke the internet) present clear and interesting challenges for how we live.

Mind breaking internet memes aside, the scientific understanding of deeper, almost philosophical truths about the nature of our consciousness says that it's really important to understand we're not seeing reality. We're seeing a story that's being created for us by the information captured by the eyes and processed through the brain. So, how do we know what's real? And once we know the extent of our brain's limits, how do we live with more humility - and think with greater care about our perceptions?

We need to be aware our perceptions can be toyed with, and played with - and that we even expect this from those who provide our entertainment, especially the film industry. And like on film, the stories our brains tell us about reality are extremely compelling - even when they are very, very wrong. Having those stories retold or filtered through even more manipulative technology than the brain means the people who tell these stories should be open to as much critical scrutiny as their films.

Imagine, for instance, this technology in the hands of talented narcissists with millions of dollars at their disposal spreading their worldview - well, you don't have to imagine it. It's already a reality. The problem with Birth of a Nation is not that it's racist, but that it's a good film. And Gone With the Wind is even worse. Because it's Birth of a Nation Disneyfied for a generation that still believed whites were superhero saviours and blacks no better than uneducated children. And allowing for inflation, it's still the highest grossing movie to date.

Art has always been about manipulation. Whether it be to the individual or to the masses: The ancient Romans didn't construct awe-inspiring buildings or hold gladiatorial combats across their Empire to benefit the conquered population. It was propaganda: It showcased the might and power of Rome. It was a way of selling the story of Rome, its martial and political ethics, and to inspire awe and admiration in the people they had defeated. Their architecture helped ancient Romans control millions of minds - similar to Nazi Germany, only Hitler's cronies achieved this with film instead of the billboard of architecture.

Nazi films portrayed Jews as "subhuman" creatures infiltrating Aryan society, and their filmmakers were great fans of the Hollywood template. And it wasn't just the domain of men: Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl was a German film director, photographer, and actress, known for her seminal role in producing Nazi propaganda - propaganda that the Nazis effectively used to win the support of millions of Germans in a democracy and, later in a dictatorship, to facilitate persecution, war, and ultimately genocide. After Hitler's defeat, Riefenstahl was only marked as a Nazi sympathiser, but in my opinion, she was as guilty as any prison guard in any camp, and should have been on trial for her work being a seminal reason those camps could exist in the first place.

This isn't about censorship or cancel culture; it's about moral responsibility. It sounds harsh, but you can aid and abet the horrific, systematic death and torture of millions without ever picking up a gun. Hitler didn't personally murder any of the minorities gathered in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany, but who would argue that he wasn't as culpable for the deaths of six million Jews, as though he had murdered every single man, woman and child himself? Riefenstahl helped build the camps, brick by brick, in spirit, if not physically, whilst Nazi movies created a reality of the Jew that never existed.

Make no mistake, Roman architecture has been knocked down by the ravages of time far easier than the imprint of Nazi filmed propaganda on the psyche of the German nation. The photographer's lens, the artist's easel, and the writer's pen in print tell stories in permanent ways, too, but it's in the power of film that technologically combines in these forms to allow for a greater manipulation of what we see, to side with a (usually single) director's vision of the world.

You just don't get this level of manipulation with other art forms. It's why I personally shun film for theatre, every time, for my entertainment. Try it. Pick up a scene of Shakespeare and enact it with your friends. Or just improvise. That's theatre. Real time means manipulation is at a minimum. Even in a professional production, a theatre play is always open to reinterpretations, and is alive for that evening's production. It isn't the edited vision of one direction; it's a true collaboration. Even when it's a play of one, the impermanence and permanent variations from the stage of a playhouse makes it a shared and thought-provoking experience.

You don't even need a stage. Immersive theater differentiates itself from traditional theater by removing the stage and immersing audiences within the performance itself. And theatre can use every new technology open to it: soundtrack music, computer generated props, holograms, and even shared VR headsets one day, can all take its place in its open arena. But theatre isn't reliant on any of it: It doesn't need technology as a middle-man. All a play needs is a space for a person to be. To be or not to be, said the wisest playwright I've ever read, is the question, after all.

You don't even need words. Mime if you want. Stand still, if you prefer. Direct yourself, or take direction from the moment: You are in the play. You are the play. The possibilities are endless, and it's better family entertainment than the TV set - and no pandemic or energy crisis can shut it down. I encourage my children not to sit and watch films from another's mind, but to stand up and present their own plays. It teaches you not just to have confidence in the sound of your own voice, but to embrace space and lend an ear to all the different voices out there. From the song of a musical to the song of dialogue, theatre has an unedited space for all.

Whereas film is the exact opposite - it's the edited space of one. The manipulation that is required to make it via its cinematography and editing processes, means it's manipulative by its very nature, when other artforms are not. The reason for this, in part, is film's reliance on technology. The minute the film camera is running the manipulation begins, and even the best actor wired for the truth, is hung out to dry on the cinematographer's and director's - and ultimately the editor's - line. The late, great - very, very great - Carrie Fisher knew this all too well when she said films were dreams, and they work on you subliminally.

The Illusion of Film

When [Daniel Scheinart and I] started directing, I really hated the job. I felt like I was just controlling these humans, forcing them to recreate something in my head."
- Daniel Kwan (the Daniels directing duo)

There is a caveat: Cinematic dreams require hardware. You cannot make a film without technology - without equipment to capture the scene and technology with which to play it, and store it. While film's reliance on technology makes it powerful, it is also its weakness: If the world regressed technologically, film as an art form would cease to exist with nothing to play it on. But as long as humans survived, stories would survive in oral form, plays would continue, and art would reappear on the walls of caves. Humans would draw as long as they had a single finger of a remaining hand and a piece of sand as a canvas.

Still, especially with the emergence of fake videos and new technology, there may come a time the film industry won't even need humans to make live action movies. Digital technologies will not only be able to emulate the best on-set cinematography (which is possible today) but one day cinema will be able to seamlessly emulate the mise-en-scène, and the actors themselves (even resurrect dead ones) to a point you won't know whether what you are seeing on the screen is from a camera lens, or digitally generated graphics.

And before senior filmmakers are horrified by this picture of their industry's future: the film industry needs to embrace it, because it's what film is all about. It's about the power of technology. Film couldn't exist without technology, and who are we to say at what point film technology should stop progressing, and that only certain equipments makes the best film? Isn't that really gaslighting audiences to question what film means to them? There is nothing wrong to want escapism from your film; it's what it does best after all, despite what some auteurs would tell you.

Filmmakers have always had their view of what pure cinema is, but their reasons seem tied to nostalgic bias more than anything. Two very big names in Hollywood, in fact, have indicated that film technology should have stopped progressing just after they themselves had reached puberty. Alfred Hitchcock always put forward his opinion that dialogue in film was secondary and the visuals were the most important. Coming from the silent movies era as he does, his view makes sense. One of America's most revered auteurs, Quentin Tarantino, has become a vocal critic about digital cinematography - which is a rendering of lighting effects after filming instead of during filming. Tarantino believes cinema should still be filmed with the hardware available when he was a child.

As I mentioned in previous posts about Ingmar Bergman, neither Hitchcock or Tarantino are de facto great men for their directing abilities; they are just men who happen to have the ability to make great movies. There is a great difference between Bergman and the other two men, however, in my opinion: Both Hitchcock and Tarantino are grounded enough to know they are there to entertain an audience and to serve the story; proof of this is in the fact that neither man has allowed their own personal opinions to interfere in the way they make films.

This is why Tarantino will always use any digital advancement (including digital cinematography) if he believes it will help him tell his story. It's why Hitchcock always made sure he locked down a full working script first, and - whether or not he cared about dialogue - he used sound and audio (and the absence of it) to maximum effect in his best films. And if Hitchcock or Tarantino were to have ignored the technological advancements of their time (instead of being the masters of film hardware they are) they would have missed the point of film, entirely.

Filmmaking is only a medium to support the craft of storytelling. Or it should be. The films Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind aren't telling a story, they are pushing a false worldview in the form of a story. It's an abuse of film. For instance, Gone With the Wind is a very badly written book, and I would be surprised if few could wade through the thick melodramatic mulch today. The film adaptation, however, continues to dazzle audiences - white and black.

In an ideal world, you would hope that any artistic medium would not manipulate, but communicate its story. Although all art is prima facie about manipulation, the best of human art speaks to you, it doesn't dictate. The manipulation is only an emotional jolt for the process of thought to begin, not a bleaching exercise to wash the brain of thought: Great art tells you to think, it doesn't tell you what to think. But that doesn't mean it will make it the most popular amongst mass audiences.

That is the power - and danger - of film. The reason being that all of the above doesn't necessarily mean a movie will be commercially successful, or conferred high art status as a result. Cinematic artform isn't elevated to high art in or of itself, or because of the talent of the artist or because of the materials used; it's the reaction on the audience that confers that status. A film may be ignored by one generation, only to be lauded by the next to confer it a cult status, for example. And although most art only asks for a personal reaction, film asks for a mass reaction.

This dichotomy in film between the director and the audience sometimes seems as rigid as the dichotomy between science and magic - and at best, it feels like an uneasy relationship. Artists don't make art to make money, true artists make art that make money; in the film industry however, artists have to make their work make money to continue their craft.

The difference is pivotal one. Streaming platforms such as YouTube and Blogger and their younger counterparts have opened up free and accessible opportunities for creatives to find an audience, but the tenets of film remain the same. It needs a mass audience. It needs relatively large amounts of money for its production. The truth of that statement is apparent with every director who makes their film for the watercooler moments, not realising that what they're really thinking, and what their industry is really saying is that, in all honesty, a director's work in film is never going to be better than the latest audience's reaction to it - if they want the finance to direct the next one, that is.

But any filmmaker worth their salt knows the real focus should be on telling the story, and to treat filmmaking as simply the medium with which to serve the story. The story will find its audience eventually. The greatest directors have always seen film as secondary to the story they want to tell. Otherwise, you are at the whim of your audience, and not the other way around. Arguably, many directors have managed to do both, but only a few have had the guts to put the story above all else - and it's those directors we today call geniuses (even if it's not in their lifetime).

Because to make a truly great, and timeless, film you need to stay true to the story - not to any ego or worldview, but the story. This is why stories for children remain universal. Naturally, film directors have their own personal stories to tell, but there comes a point when you realise that the story will require you to be true to the craft of telling it. The stories Hitchcock and Tarantino tell are their own, but they know the authentic telling of the story is what must come above even themselves.

They might think movies were made best with the old tech available when they were young, but film is future technology, and the situation today has always been par for the course. Film just needs technological advancement to catch up with its capacity for magic. Film is about illusion; it's about the simulation of reality. Let's be honest about it. People in love with illusion, however, often find it hard to face reality. Only once you accept it, can you then control it. Hitchcock would have loved to have had the technology to make films without the actors if legend be true, and ironically, digital processes will eventually give a director like Tarantino even more control. And for a director, the Ozymandias of Shadows, control is key - and sometimes their greatest futility.

Nowhere is this need for control more clearly seen than the representation of women in the film industry - on and off the screen. Both Tarantino and Hitchcock have had issues with abusing actresses - Tarantino with Uma Thurman and Hitchcock with Tippi Hedren - which has cast a long shadow over their work. The allegations against both men have felt newly resonant in the wake of the #MeToo movement that swept Hollywood, and although it won't cancel out their achievements, it will mean their stories will be reappraised by newer audiences. And it will only be how honest they were to the craft of storytelling within the medium of film that will ultimately save them for future viewing.

The Achilles' Heel of Ozymandias

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Hitchcock's resonance with cinema audiences - while also maintaining credibility with his utilisation of camera techniques at a consistently masterful level that still inspires filmmakers today - is undeniable, but his portrayal of women leaves a lot to be desired. It makes some of his films unwatchable to me. Even in his later films, women often remained (treacherous or corrupt) objects of desire. And who can watch Marnie or even Frenzy without thinking they were watching Hitchcock's subconscious desires against Hedren herself?

Meanwhile, Tarantino's world building series of hyper-violent films may have strong female characters, but almost all of them have had to overcome serious abuse to showcase that strength. However, the difference between Hitchcock's and Bergman's depictions of women and Tarantino's is this: Where the formers' female characters would have been partly to blame for the abuse, the latter's heroines eventually hand the abuser his ass on a plate. Both are false, male representations of women - but I know which one I prefer to watch.

It's clear Tarantino hasn't allowed his close associations with former film producer and convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein to affect his films, and if anything, Weinstein wouldn't survive two seconds in Tarantino's film world - because while it's a visceral and violent world, it is generally a just and fair one albeit in a black and white way, where the good gals win and the bad guys lose. He rewrites history where Hitler gets a divine form of justice and serial killers get a good dose of their own medicine. It's ludicrous. It's completely unreal. But that's my form of escapism.

Tarantino's close association with Weinstein really shows how far directors will go to get finance for their films to be made, but Tarantino hasn't made the engine of his films a vehicle to drive Weinstein's worldview. He hasn't defended Weinstein, rather has owned up to his own culpability, while Thurman has openly forgiven Tarantino for his transgressions with her on the set of Kill Bill. But Tarantino is far from perfect and full of contradictions: A twitchy nerd with a foot fetish who just so happens to be an auteur filmmaking genius, and who has laid a lot of groundwork for Hollywood's recognition of other voices by openly admitting he has stolen ideas from them for his own work. But his devil-may-care attitude over such issues, which might have seemed cool in the nineties, now feels as irresponsible as the hitmen portrayed in his films.

In fact, it will be Tarantino's cinematic bent for violence (and women's feet) that sometimes overshadows the story, which may leave future audiences bemused if they progress far enough away from blood and guts (and fetishism). The worst film in his filmography - even by his own admission - is one that failed to avoid those pitfalls. Deathproof serves poorly executed ideas instead of a story and is made memorable only by his signature brutal violence. But if your films are reduced to a bloody climax, then eventually they will end up as an anti-climax. Indeed, Tarantino wanted so much to be the antithesis of the "nice-guy/feel-good" heroes of the eighties he despised, that his reactionary filmmaking has not only caged him into the nihilistic nineties he helped visualise, but it also subjected us to the numerous shadows his cinematic light cast in the succeeding decades.

In the last 30 years, audiences have watched a great number of filmmakers take inspiration from the visceral and genre-loving style of Tarantino, and the results have been mixed, to say the least. There's an entire subsection of modern hitman movies, for example, that are just all kinds of bad, and it's in part because of a misapplication or corruption of Tarantino's filmmaking voice. In such Tarantino rip-offs, it's not merely the "quick flow" and "snappy beat" of the cinematically aware meta-dialogue that makes every character seem as they've just come from watching a Tarantino film, but it's the violence that is portrayed simply for the sake of portraying violence that drowns any story there may have been to begin with in its own fake blood. (The characters would probably call it Kensington Gore to sound clever, and then go on a full four minute diatribe about it.)

Conversely, there are other titles that find their own special ways to translate Tarantino, using it as a kind of starting point in the larger aim of creating something unique and far less pretentious. It really does take genius to turn plagiarism into critically acclaimed homage, but the secret is to use it as a tool to serve the story. And as long as the violence in Tarantino's own films are used just enough to serve the story, then his filmography will remain the exciting, history-bending adventures that first proclaimed him as a talent to watch - even if it has meant a proliferation of Tarantino mini-mes creating a lot of cinematic pulp fiction we really, really could have done without.

Even the way Tarantino's films were made have made a mark on popular culture; American anthology horror television series American Horror Story in its tenth season gave one of its characters dialogue about actor Laurence Fishburne turning down Pulp Fiction (because he thought Tarantino's 1994 movie glamorised heroin). It may have seemed like a death blow to Fishburne's career until five years later he found global fame in what became a sci-fi classic. Thus, in AHS's Double Feature "Red Tide", a character gives a speech about Fishburne in a cemetery to vampires as a metaphor for artists and fame, luring them in with stories about Pulp Fiction and The Matrix and how true talent always wins out. It truly is the stuff of legend - even if it confuses luck with talent. Both films were surprise hits to their directors, so surprising for the Matrix directorial duo that they had no idea how to continue: The reason the Matrix follow-ups failed so miserably was because the films stopped serving the initial story.

That is the only secret: Serve the story. Don't put the medium you use above that aim. Don't use either to serve yourself. To the Bergman fans out there, that's my problem with their revered director. You may be passionate about the man; I am passionate about the story. I'm certainly not saying I can compete with Bergman (or his acolyte Woody Allen) in creativity; they have aspired to a greatness few attain in the film industry (which history will treat more as an indictment of their eras than anything else). But for me, their films do not serve the stories they purport to tell, no matter how visually appealing, or cleverly edited, or intelligently written. I still can't sit through an Allen film, like I'm unable to make it through Gone With the Wind, without wanting to turn away from the well-meaning, but white, male bias of its world.

I always kept this in mind with the female characters I've penned: I have only ever written five film scripts - through the years 1998 to 2010 and all of them are filed with the Writer's Guild - and even back then, I wrote all the female characters as people, not women. I'm not a woman, I can't write from a female perspective, but I am a person. In my first script (which I thought lost, until I discovered it on a floppy and sent it on to my Guild) the woman is a financially independent creative, who happens to be blind and in love with a taxi driver from "the wrong side of the tracks". That script is now over twenty years old, and was an open love letter to Tarantino. Even in the most far-out fiction, the only way to conquer the blank page is to start with the first step of familiarity: In another script I wrote, twelve years ago, the story doesn't focus on street prostitutes as stereotypical victims, but as mothers and sisters who are willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to protect their family. That was a love letter to my mother.

My mother was never a prostitute or an abused woman, but she was a woman who broke her back in a car accident, and she never allowed it to break her spirit. I remember a comment from a funding company willing to buy that script, where they asked me how I made my female characters "so real". There was no "girlie talk" between girls; it was two friends talking together, not concerned about getting a man, but getting ahead. I thought it was obvious: You don't write to gender, you write to the humanity within us all. What I am happy to note is when I read these scripts today, I feel no embarrassment over the female characters I created, because they sound relevant. They weren't scripted to stand in some far off corner of the screen with their breasts hanging out, or to be given the full focus of the screen (à la Bergman) with their breasts hanging out. I didn't want to see my mother or my wife represented in that way. Not then, not now. Because it would be a lie.

There will most certainly be women who disagree with me, and that's fine: But they must know they are role playing from stories written for them by society. Those roles were written by men and are selling women short. Love your bodies, but think bigger than your breasts, is what I say. But if you enjoy the fairy tales spun since the first camp fires, that's fine, too. Because it's your choice. Just remember, it may not be the dated framing that attracts you to them, but their universal themes of storytelling. Today's retelling of Cinderella may be more about persevering through tragedy than waiting for some prince to save the day, but it's its themes of loss and connection that make it timeless at its core.

We have the choice, too, thanks to our streaming devices to watch, or not to watch the illusions presented to us yesterday and today. It all depends on what stories you want to see unfold on the screen. As long as we are aware it's all a magic trick; reality is what we are unable to see, not what we have been allowed to see. English novelist J.G. Ballard put it so well when he said that what we believed to be reality was little more than a stage set. Film appeals to us because our own brains breast feed us on the same brand of manipulation.

But ask yourself, as a director, if your filmography were to act as a flashback of your life, what would it say about you? What does Tarantino's, Hitchcock's or Bergman's say about them? It will reveal an Achilles' heel shared by many: The mediocre ones focused on themselves. And while the greats focused on a balance between the medium used and the story itself, the geniuses focused on serving the story they wanted to tell. They knew they were storytellers first and foremost, and film just happened to be the medium they felt comfortable telling their stories in.

On this final point, it's one possible reason why Tarantino keeps claiming he will limit his own directorial output to ten films, and then focus on the theatre and writing books. He understands that film has limitations when it comes to storytelling, and it remains in the shadow of both books and plays. It's also evidence that Tarantino's prime aim in making films is to tell stories, and he is simply leaving one medium for another to do that. Or maybe as Tarantino gets older he has come to the realisation that all a filmmaker really is, is an Ozymandias of Shadows, who leaves behind in the sands of its running time an IMDB filmography, as a testament to the fleeting nature of greatness - or mediocrity, as the case may be.

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