Nicholas Winding Refn is a precious filmmaker – look too hard and you might puncture the surface; look too carefully and the weight of his images could ring hollow. Few contemporary auteurs have gorged audiences so fully with their own vision, committed to their influence as much as to their cinematic label (his credit is now stylised as NWR). Spiritual successor to Lars Von Trier – though “he is envious of everything I have” – and a provocative, enfant terrible in his own right, Refn is a challenging figure to enjoy. “I’m a pornographer. I make films about what arouses me […] what I want to see,” he infamously commented, in an interview with The Guardian, a smile likely playing upon his lips. (Films such as Bronson (2008), Drive (2011) or Only God Forgives (2013) do little to alleviate accusations of misogyny, sadism and pugilistic, adolescent cravings). I, personally, have been unable to resist his work, even if I cannot always understand it – his thirteen-hour lumber, Too Old to Die Young (2019), being a recent epitome of such extravagance.
#byNWR is his latest, cinematic offering. Established as “an unadulterated cultural expressway of the arts”, the streaming platform – working alongside the Harvard Film Archive and MUBI – works to revive and restore a glut of unseen, forgotten content. Quarterly volumes are directed by guest editors (with titles such as ‘Smell of Female’ or ‘You Ain’t No Punk, You Punk’), typically given three chapters, which themselves are plushed with film, mixed-media, interviews and other loosely tailored items. Refn refers to their collection as a hobby – yet it might be more appropriate to term it an obsession, one that is intended to justify, and compliment, his own work over the past few years. “Our times need sex, horror and melodrama,” Refn lays out, art to displace “our comfort zones – of complacency, and, for most of us in the west, an easeful life.” Something to hurt us, something to digest over an extended period, as if high-fibre viewing. Each of the works collected and restored in #byNWR achieves a double-helix of wonder and repellent, ephemeral euro-porn/art house works that unapologetically exist to be seen.
I can only remark on what I have seen so far. Opening the first volume is Bert Williams’ The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965), a relic of the past whose stimulations go far beyond the carnal, striking something altogether temporal and unidentifiable. Williams buries his sole protagonist, the investigative cop Johnson, deep into the airless swamps of Bible Belt America, where (chiming with the fairy-tale mystique of Night of the Hunter (1955)) spiders, drifters, and crocodiles haunt its recesses. A mysterious young girl, Lisa, is discovered as the captive bird in the nest of “The Cuckoo Inn” – defiled, reportedly, by the wants of her absent father. Volume One continues with Hot Thrills and Warm Chills (1967) – cheap sex scenes interspersed with a dull plot – before concluding with the lurid, racialised Shanty Tramp (1967). Onward: Refn restores cult classics such as Night Tide (1961), featuring a feline-beautiful Dennis Hopper in a story of fairgrounds and mermaids, in addition to Roy Ormond’s fascinating bible trilogy: If Footmen Tire You … (1971), The Burning Hell (1974) and The Believer’s Heaven (1977). In the volumes since, the site has looked beyond to classic and lost punk films, abandoned home videos, and lately to low-budget, grindhouse fare. If you choose to watch these films you will recoil – but it is hard to resist a second glimpse.
In a time of streaming giants, Netflix and Amazon Prime soon to be eclipsed by Apple TV+, Disney+ and HULU, #byNWR holds its ground as a bastion of alternative creativity. Refn offers a free antidote (as of yet, there is no subscription fee) to the polished, formulaic trends in mainstream cinema. I am determined for the site to reach as many people as possible, and believe that everyone will find something of interest – in one chapter, or another – that reaches deep, with one long hand, and grasps tight onto that feeling you least expected.
“In a world of the instant,” the bio to the site reads, it is here “where we can share, enjoy, and look to the future – with hope, prosperity, and the idea that culture is for everyone.”
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