A Girl and Her Blog are Eventually Reunited

Promotion for the first
Hobbit instalment assuming
Stalinesque dimensions in
Wellington, early in 2013.

Yes, lest anyone have thought that the wholly moribund appearance of A Little Lie Down was indicative of a retreat on the author's part from the world of cinema (or even from the “sundry other matters” which this blog's header purports the reader may also find addressed here), I've deemed it necessary to return to the Blogger coalface to chisel out an account of the year in film culture that was mine in 2013.

Indeed, it's been so long since the previous, Hobbit-heavy post here that a second fucking instalment of The Hobbit has already arrived in Melbourne cinemas. (Thankfully, it's a darned sight better than the first, and all credit to the wise heads who determined it'd be at 24 rather than at 48 fps that the media preview last week would be projected. That said, my criticisms in my last post regarding Jackson's vainglorious adoption of High Frame Rate technologies – and, by extension, shooting a film in this one, particular flawed format only to ultimately present it in multiple others, each unavoidably compromised by trickle-down shortcomings in the translation, and with, perforce, a corresponding diminution in cinematic vocabulary imposed upon all, especially with respect to any play with depth of field – still, vehemently, stand!)

But, look. I am already digressing.

What now follows will be a link-filled, media-rich reckoning of what I got up to in the year very shortly now to have been 2013.

I'll begin with work accomplished which had been harbinged here previously.

The fabulous Bright Lights Film Journal ran my review of Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study in its 79^th issue in February. It was a long time coming, my getting it to them and up to snuff, but I'm very glad that I did. It's a fine book, detailing thoroughly an often unpleasant, yet ethically complex realm of cinema which had never been given a tenth so comprehensive an account of before.

I alluded in my only other post here this year to ensuring there'd shortly be more on ALLD, and in Senses of Cinema, on legendary Czech animator Jiří Trnka. I came good on this promise in Senses rather sooner than on my blog; please refer “The Passion of the Peasant Poet: Jiří Trnka, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Hand” in February's issue 66 of a gal's longtime favourite film journal.

The context for my writing on Trnka is important, and is in fact key to my being so very busy this year that, till now, I had failed to blog even once since Thursday, January 3's “Less is more: If 3D is more 2D than 2D (and 48fps is even less truth per second than Godard's 24) then how much more 2D will 4D be than 3D?”

Less is more, indeed?

My Trnka piece appeared in Senses of Cinema under “Cinémathèque Annotations on Film”, indicative of its having been written to provide contextualising accompaniment to Melbourne Cinémathèque screenings of certain of Trnka's sublime puppet animation films. Moreover, I had made it a personal mission to get those films over here in the first place, through becoming a Cinémathèque committee member after enjoying many a long year as a dedicated regular at the Cinémathèque's Wednesday nightly screenings, and as she whose task it had been for many of those years to prepare the annotations for publication in Senses of Cinema in my role as that journal's tireless, seldom-complaining Web Designer.

Trnka's sublime A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959), which screened at the 1^st CaSFFA,
presented in conjunction with the Melbourne Cinémathèque

But rather more key still to acquiring those films for screening in Melbourne was the launch of the inaugural Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia (or “CaSFFA”) in May and June of this year, with me appointed as its first Artistic Director, who sought a partnership with the Cinémathèque in order to present these very rare films in sunny Melbourne on glorious 35mm, care of the National Film Archive in Prague and with no small amount of help from the Consulate of the Czech Republic in Sydney.

CaSFFA also presented an accompanying exhibition, “Jiří Trnka - Serving Imagination”, prepared by the Czech Centres, with other highlights of our debut festival including the presentation of a 50^th anniversary digital restoration of Štefan Uher's brilliant The Sun in a Net and our restoring some utility to the still beautiful, but overlong neglected RMIT Capitol Theatre, by presenting the bulk of our other screenings there, along with two memorable absinth- and Becherovka-soaked parties!

The Sun in a Net also appeared at the 1^st CaSFFA, co-presented by the Melbourne Cinémathèque
and with large thanks due to the enthusiastic co-operation of the Slovak Film Institute

Here's a taste of what you missed/a further reminder of all the fun you had, at the 2013 CaSFFA:

I'll pause here also to hail once again Alesh Macak's superb CaSFFA trailer, inspired by Linda Studená's super leggy designs, as seen all over all of our festival literature and collateral in promotion of our inaugural event!

A 2^nd CaSFFA – bigger! bolder! even betterer! – will be staged in 2014 in Melbourne and, I will carelessly not hesitate to rumour, elsewhere too. Really wonderful things are in store, folks – watch this space!

And, in other developments

As anyone who knows me might tell you, after they've weighed up what's at stake in compromising my privacy, I'm very fond of hotfooting it abroad to attend film festivals, whether as a member of the media corps, providing coverage for Senses of Cinema; representing CaSFFA; attending in a more participatory capacity, or a mixture of all three. One such multi-purpose trip I took mid-year, escaping Melbourne's winter for a preferable European summer, took in major festivals in the Czech Republic and Ukraine. And hence, September's 68^th issue of Senses of Cinema ran a report of mine entitled “Post-Soviet Bloc Partying West of the East and East of the West, Into and Out of the Past: The 48th Karlovy Vary and the 4th Odessa International Film Festival”. The smart money would have to be on some of the films mentioned within this piece making it to the 2^nd CaSFFA in 2014 – but which?

Excerpt from the June 30 edition of the
Karlovy Vary Festival Daily

Whilst in Karlovy Vary, I managed, wearing my CaSFFA hat (not depicted at right), to find my way into the KVIFF's daily paper. And in Odessa – where my film geekdom may have come close to reaching its apotheosis in catching a screening of Murnau's Sunrise, at sundown, with live symphony orchestral accompaniment, on none other than the Potemkin Stairs – I wound up giving an informal lecture-cum-Q&A to the festival's Summer Film School students entitled “Film Criticism Sans Frontières: The roles that critiquing and staging international and transnational film festivals can play in furthering critical practice and professional opportunities in the Internet age”. No, really. I believe it went quite well, if falteringly at first, with hopefully not too much lost (and maybe a little gained?) in the translation into Russian. Personally, I can't bring myself to watch it (not least for my mortification upon realising I'm wearing the same top in both the KV Festival Daily pic as in the clip from Odessa, below). While I'll concede that this post could come across as something of a trumpeting of one's own 'orn, truth be told, I'm actually not over-enamoured of the sound of my own voice...

Enter Guy Maddin

What would a year of Little Lies Down be (even if numbering in posts only two) without a guernsey for my favourite Winnipeger?

Early in the year, Slovenian print journal Kino! surprised me by commissioning me to contribute to a dossier it was compiling on zombie movies. In turn, I provided Kino! with probably the very piece of writing of mine on cinema of which I am most proud, “Guy Maddin, Zombie Master”.

To whet your appetite for something you'll, at least for the time being, only be able to obtain in, or from, Slovenia (or, I suppose from me directly, if you play your cards right (which is to say, ply me with liquor or with film festival accreditation)), here's the abstract for my essay, from Kino! no. 19/20:

Guy Maddin is a filmmaker almost invariably overlooked in the consideration of zombie films. This essay aims to right that wrong, not only by dredging up multiple clear instances where Maddin has explicitly employed the tropes of zombie films in his work, but also in demonstrating that, in fact, the entire cinematic corpus of Winnipeg's most celebrated filmmaker is predicated upon exhumation, on and off the screen. Maddin is forever resurrecting long dead film aesthetics, language, genres, performance styles and even entire lost films, whilst ever privileging an aesthetic of impossible material agedness and decomposition. His is a cinema full of somnambulists, amnesiacs and entranced obsessives whose actions resurrect elements of Maddin's often traumatic autobiography. It is a cinema absolutely bursting at the seams with zombie-ism and undeath. Maddin himself will be positioned both as zombie and zombie master, à la Bela Lugosi's 'Murder' Legendre in White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932). Moreover, his cinephilic audience, extensible to all cinephile audiences, will be implicated in zombie-ism as well. Ultimately at stake in this essay is nothing less than an argument for cinephilia as an entirely zombie fascination, with Maddin, one of the most cinephilic of all filmmakers, providing the perfect springboard for this argument. Along the way, analogues for Maddin's zombie film practices will be explored variously in the limitations of method acting, in the writing of Laura Mulvey and in the vexing matter of film canons.

Wheeee! 'Tis a fortunate thing indeed that I conquered some time ago my fear of overreaching. And another that such folk exist as my wonderful friend Maša Peče to incite me to write such things as this, as would likely otherwise never get written, in the first place, especially given my lamentable track record on my own blog. Consider here also my (admittedly scarcely trumpeted) desire to write a definitive critical history of orchids in cinema. Will not someone one day dangle before me money/liquor/film festival accreditation in order to goad me into actually writing it?

Closer to home

On many Thursday mornings fortnightly throughout 2013 I could be heard in my usual slot on 3RRR joining Richard Watts on “SmartArts” for the segment “A Fistful of Celluloid”, which would oftentimes begin with Richard noting that this several-year-old segment is increasingly conducted under the pall of a dreadful misnomer, as celluloid is surely not long for this world, followed by me mule-headedly insisting that there's plenty of life in the old girl yet, and more even than there ever will be in the inert digital image which, anyhow, isn't proven to be long for this world at all, quite the contrary in fact, given the dire problems yet to be surmounted in reliably preserving it... (Discuss.)

Shirley Clarke

I also made some other appearances (so to speak) on the 3RRR airwaves this year, joining a crack couple of Plato's Cavers in Tara Judah and Josh Nelson for a couple of "Max Headroom" specials, both of which are still accessible online, “on demand”, as follows:

From Thursday, October 24: Tara, Josh and I wax lyrical about the cinema of Shirley Clarke, in celebration of ACMI's splendid season “Uptown Girl: The Cinema of Shirley Clarke”.

And from Thursday, August 1: Tara, Josh and I bitch, moan and wax joyous about the 62^nd Melbourne International Film Festival, in celebration of, ah, well, the 62^nd Melbourne International Film Festival, innit.

And lastly, much as was vaunted in ALLD at pretty well this same time last year, I'll have a contribution to Senses of Cinema's annual World Poll published any day now.

And that will about do for now, barring my customary pledge not to forsake this blog in the year to come... Well, let us wait and see.

Lawks! I almost forgot! Sundry other matters, matter to me...

Yes, it was a year when certain sundry other matters came into their own. I'll give a quick shout-out to the fab folk at Black Hole Theatre for inviting my lovely carny-lounge sometime trio, nowadays more oftentimes quartet Dirty Nicola and the Spud Hussies to tap into the musics of Jacques Brel, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter in accompanying some top-notch live puppetry at “Puppetry Slam Noir: How I Wish The Wish I Wish” at this year's Castlemaine State Festival. Fun!

The Spud Hussies – myself on bass, Katrina Wilson O'Brien on keys, David O'Brien on guitar and Nicola Bell on drums, with all keen and handy when it comes to contributing foley – may even have just landed a prize slot at the annual Great Trentham Spudfest in 2014 for our troubles – hurrah!

AND

I spent two weeks in November ensconced in the fabulous Footscray Community Arts Centre BRINGING IT with a fab bunch of magnificent lady folk working towards the realisation of something grandly theatrical which I'm not sure I can much speak about yet. But! As and when I can, you might hear about it here first.

But for now, till 2014, ahoj!

x Cerise

Ah, how oft!

Gosh, the tumbleweeds have been blowing round these parts awhile once more, haven't they?

Still, it's not that I've been idle. Far from it. It's just that my energies have principally been diverted in recent weeks towards that other sort of cinema: the theatre.

(This isn't the full truth: I did slave over a hot keyboard, battling a recalcitrant DVD screener, a very tight deadline and divers alarums aplenty in order to file an interview with Maryam Keshavarz, Iranian-American director of highly provocative Iranian lesbianeering flick, Circumstance, as the cover story of the latest issue of Cherrie to hit the streets (the magazine "for the not so straight girl").)

So, yes, the theatre. I am but one of three to constitute Dirty Nicola and the Spud Hussies (or, to give us our full due: Dirty Nicola and the Cheap, Filthy, Pre-Loved, Shop-Soiled Spud Hussies: myself on bass, Katrina Wilson on keys, Nicola Bell on drums and all of us on foley), finest purveyors of 'The New Sound' as applied to the live scoring of deranged expanded marionette theatre adaptations of macabre 19th century Wilhelm Busch morality tales told in verse. Such as Max and Moritz: A Juvenile History in 7 Tricks! Presently playing at the Czech Club in North Melbourne during the Melbourne Fringe Festival. And for three more nights only!

We've several shows behind us now and, happily, I can report that they've been going down a treat, both with Joe and Joanna Public as well as with some folk "who matter". The show is considerably evolved from its ramshackle but vivacious (and even then well-received) début late last year at the Village Festival in North Fitzroy's Edinburgh Gardens, which I blogged a little about way back when, going then into a little detail about some of the Czech marionette theatre traditions the show is indebted to.

But that was then.

Here's what you need to know about the now:

Max and Moritz: A Juvenile History in 7 Tricks
at the Melbourne Fringe Festival:

Venue: Czech Club: 497 Queensberry St, North Melbourne

Remaining dates: Tue 4 & Wed 5 Oct at 7.30pm
AND
Closing Night: Fri 7 Oct at 7.30pm, featuring a post-show set from Dirty Nicola and the Spud Hussies!

Tickets: Via the Fringe Festival website, by phone on 03 9660 9666, or at the door on the night.

Dirty Nicola and the Spud Hussies, with a glimpse of the Max and Moritz set behind, at the Czech Club, recently.

Come one, come all! It's a show I'm very proud to be involved with, with the Spud Hussies a unit I'm even more thrilled to be in thick with, which - happy day! - will live on long beyond this show. And about future Spud Hussies excursions into 'The New Sound', post-Fringe and with, or without, puppets and thespians... I'll keep you posted.

*

Lest anyone be concerned that I've given myself over wholesale to pandering to the Euterpean Muse and will therefore be wont here on in to neglect the cinema (oh, had it only a Muse to call its own!), fear not! I'll be on the air on 102.7FM, 3RRR, once more this very Thursday at 11.30am in my customary slot opposite Richard Watts during his arts behemoth, SmartArts. Hurrah!

(My apologies for missing it a fortnight prior; on that occasion, I really was altogether too snowed under to surface for "A Fistful of Celluloid" and do it justice.)

*

Lastly, for now, Senses of Cinema, that august film journal of record still very dear to my heart, needs your help. Without it, it might not be much longer for this world, which is just too appalling a prospect to countenance. And yet countenance it we must.

Senses is reaching out to the cloud via a Pozible campaign in the hope that $15,000 - just enough to keep it afloat for another year while, hopefully, some other revenue-generating manoeuvres are successfully implemented - can be raised by 5 November. That's only 33 days away! And Senses still needs $7,745 - criminy! But... perhaps you can help?

Can you?

Parallel lines – of further adventures in film and the other arts

Some things to have consumed me, my time and my all-too-finite energies in recent months, keeping me distracted from blogging, include:

Tourists descend en masse
upon Bruges even on Segways!

1) A grand, month-long European jaunt undertaken back in March. It included a day spent, in tribute to Martin McDonagh's wonderful film of a few years back, lying low of an afternoon in Bruges which, as it transpired, is surely amongst the very worst places in the world one could attempt such a thing – canal-loads of tourists, even in the low season, inundate this most picturesque mediaeval theme park of a town, their cameras clicking ceaselessly all awhile. I dread to think how many times I appear in complete strangers' holiday snaps from those few hours spent in Bruges!

My trip also took in the 25^th Fribourg International Film Festival. Senses of Cinema published my report on the FIFF some weeks back; the wider issue it is filed away in (#59) has just last week gone live, so please do be checking it out. And, Melburnians, you never know – some of what I've covered in my festival report (and other writers in that same issue in theirs) just might word you up on some films destined for this year's MIFF, as was the case in several instances last year.

(Re MIFF: a little more below.)

2) Speaking of Senses of Cinema, and of the launch of its latest issue, here's word of a great weight of film cultural labour I've performed even while this blog lay completely idle.

For I have not long completed the colossal task of migrating into its new-ish Content Management System all of Senses of Cinema's archival articles, essays, dissertations, rants, thinkpieces, polemics, peer-reviewed jargonfests, buff fluff, scholarly considerations, minutiae trawling 'reconsiderations', book reviews, festival reports, interviews, annotations for the Melbourne Cinémathèque, DVD reviews, ruminations upon the rise/fall/rise/fall/rise? of Australian cinema, and so on, ever published.

It took quite some doing. But I'm better now.

3) A fair period has just passed of living between fixed abodes, which made it difficult to get into any sort of relaxed groove, the better to diligently attend to the rigours of blogging. (I am in fact not completely out of the proverbial woods yet but matters have significantly improved.)

4) There has most welcomely emerged a wonderful reinvigoration of my love of music with respect to both its appreciation and its creation, in and out of conjunction with the staging of an almost imminent theatrical extravaganza. (For more about which, see below.)

5) Then there's the matter of my own disposition towards inertia when uninspired. Not for nothing have I declared myself here a “procrastinateuse extraordinaire”. I am never more so than when snowed under with workaday worries and considerations which, not being the stuff of riveting blogging, shall not further be dwelt upon here.

Here endeth the apologia. And beginneth anew A Little Lie Down!

*

This Thursday (today!), I'll be back on 3RRR's SmartArts after four weeks in the (proverbial) wilderness. I'll be reviewing Michael Winterbottom's The Trip and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.

Now, notwithstanding sometime sudden onsets of mild performance anxiety, I always look forward to letting loose a little film crit across the airwaves, especially when, as with today's show, I've been able to discern some sort of serendipitous link between films I'll be covering, the better to more firmly cohere my segment's contents and to bestow upon “A Fistful of Celluloid” a greater fluidity. (Well, one can always hope.)

My today's consideration of The Trip and The Tree of Life will then riff on that old warhorse, “the personal is the universal”, a philosophy – and a mantra evangelised by many a writer and teacher of writing – I feel to be at the core of both films, if manifest in completely different fashions.

In The Trip, it's manifest through the very particularity of its casting. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play versions of themselves, with select aspects of their personal lives (and Coogan's in particular) fictionalised to some humourously unknowable, but telling extent, as with these same actors' casting in the same director's recent Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.* "Coogan" and "Brydon"'s respective lots in life, ** and the one-upmanship-driven dynamic between them are milked not only for much of The Trip's abundant comedy but also for the considerable pathos the film surprisingly generates.

* Note to self: be sure to take on the mandatory-for-all-critics-at-some-point challenge of a consideration of that great shibboleth, the “unfilmable novel”, in a future post.

** By "Coogan" and "Brydon" I am referring to the gestalt entities derived from conflating the real, off-screen Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon with their fictionalised counterparts in The Trip, and in Tristram Shandy before it.

That pathos is a function of the protagonists' differing levels of success achieved relative to the levels aspired to; of the differing weights of importance they ascribe to one-upping one another, and, most profoundly come the dénouement, of their differing approaches to and appreciations of family and interpersonal relationships. In offering Coogan and Brydon as dialectical opponents, The Trip tells us much about these two gestalt entities 'individually' and specifically, but, in opposing one man (“Coogan”)'s lonely, insecure, insatiable quest for fame and fortune against another (“Brydon”)'s simpler, non-aspirational, domestically-centred contentment with his more modest lot in life, it also speaks to something universal. And that something is that great chimera, happiness, and that to which people will resort in its pursuit.

The Tree of Life parlays an absolutely extraordinary gambit in its equating of the personal with the universal. Why, the film has barely started before it unfurls an astonishing, extended representation of the coming into being of life, the universe and, oh, just everything. It's Terrence Malick's way of putting into perspective a very personal tragedy, an incident infinitesimally tiny and insignificant in the greater scheme of things, but universal in its impact. For who wouldn't, even many years into a life of comfort and of accomplishment in, say, the corporate world (or anything at all, really), having evidently risen far above humble beginnings (for example), still pause nonetheless, time to time, a la The Tree of Life's Jack (Sean Penn), to seek answers of the cosmos, of a universe which may or may not be part of some grand design (the film wisely hedges its bets on this matter), for, say, the incomprehensibly cruel loss of a beloved sibling, way back when.

The Tree of Life goes to great and spectacular lengths to position the personal and the universal as one and the same, even aestheticising equally Jack's flashbacks into his childhood and his consciousness' into the dawn of time. The latter is to 2011 as 2001 no doubt was to 1968; the former is tantamount to the most stunningly beautiful home movie ever made. I can't wait to see it again on the big screen, and it's very rare I feel that way about something I've only just seen for the very first time. The Tree of Life is glorious cinema writ not merely large but universal!

*

The discernment and appreciation of chance parallels, motifs and themes running across multiple films is far more than something I'm occasionally drawn to ahead of doing a spot of radio; it's also (and much, much more so) a hallmark of film festival-going. It's something which considerably and unpredictably enriches the greater festival-going experience (even if sometimes also serving to render indistinct narratives, aesthetics, polemics, etc., to have graced any given individual film amongst a mass of others with which it might be found to have commonalities, blurring them all together in the memory).

Which thought brings me to the Melbourne International Film Festival, now looming large on the Melbourne calendar – its 60^th anniversary edition begins in just a shade over three weeks' time!

There could scarcely be a better time, then, to re-boot this blog than when Melbourne's film culture is about to experience its peak two-and-a-half weeks for the year. I hereby pledge to do as I did last year and cover the festival from go through to whoa...

You might, meanwhile, like to be kind, rewind, and cast a glance over my last year's coverage as an appetiser.

*

What else is afoot?

In film:

I have committed to writing book reviews for various journals for publication later in the year. Book titles include, but are not limited to, Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study.

And a collaboration is under way with a European festival with respect to some programming sourced from 'round these 'ere parts destined to be taken to 'round thems, and about which too much more right now would be premature to say beyond stating that it's all very exciting! And that I have some wonderful support from a few local bodies too.

In music and theatre:

Coming to you later this year at North Melbourne's Czech Club, where it'll be running throughout the Fringe Festival, Dirty Nicola and the Cheap, Filthy, Pre-loved, Shop-soiled Spud Hussies (myself on bass; Katrina Wilson on keys; Nicola Bell on drums; the three of us altogether on foley) will provide live, original musical accompaniment to a rather more polished and wonderful vaudevillian theatrical production of Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz: A Juvenile History in Seven Tricks, replete with marionette and human cast members, than already went down a treat at last year's Village festival in North Fitzroy's Edinburgh Gardens. Stay tuned for more about this in coming weeks as well as for details of further Max and Moritz action to follow at other festivals later in the year!

And in words:

My novel is resolutely not writing itself but we'll be setting that small matter to rights later in the year (one hopes). Meanwhile, my research for this project, already gestating overlong, carries on apace...

On which note, I'd love to hear from anyone who knows of any novels wherein a caricaturist features as the protagonist. Anyone know of any? Anyone? Any?

*

More from me soon,

x Cerise

Takin' care of business. Or: all the world's a cinema!

This latest had been my longest hiatus from blogging yet. It wasn't meant to be, but my circumstances over the last several weeks have not been conducive to setting thoughts, cinematic and otherwise, to pixels. My days have been full indeed, the demands upon my time and energies, many.

In resuming blogging I first surveyed my files and g(l)azed over notes I had made for what could have become a post published at the end of October, entitled “Keeping it real. Or: a few desultory thoughts upon a surprise nexus formed subsequent to the viewing of two new biopics and the same-day chancing upon an article on dubbing practices in the Czech Republic.”

Yikes.

The biopics in question are Gainsbourg and The Social Network. I reviewed them both on 3RRR's “SmartArts” as far back as October 28 and I can't say I now feel half as interested in writing anything much about them as I seemingly did back then, even if, from the title of that abortive effort, I was only aspiring to wax desultory upon them in the first place. Perhaps nothing more had been at stake than an elegant segue... into something I had really wanted to pontificate about: the dark art of dubbing. (About which, finally, a little more below.)

The here and now: firstest things first

One of the things keeping me from blogging was a very tight deadline for laying out the latest issue of Screening the Past, a special issue focusing on “Cinema/Photography: Beyond Representation”, guest edited by Des O’Rawe and Sam Rohdie. Were that the deadline hadn't been half so tight; I hadn't a show of writing my promised review of William Beard's Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin in time. Nevertheless, there's sure some mighty fine reading (and viewing!) there people – get to it! And I'm sure my review, come a relaxation of time constraints, will smuggle its way into the next issue of STP.

On the matter of venerable Melbourne-based online film journals, let me record here my utter dismay and astonishment that Screen Australia has pulled ALL of its funding of Senses of Cinema, that online film journal of possibly unparalleled international renown, esteem, contributorship and readership, in a decision which, for mine, speaks great, vacuous, parochial volumes about what the nation's premier screen cultural funding body values in terms of contributions to Australian screen culture. The near-sightedness of this decision is breathtaking in all its gormlessness. I am flabbergasted.

I have long enjoyed a strong affiliation with Senses of Cinema, having previously, as the site's designer/administrator over eight or so years, slaved away over the mark-up and illustration of literally hundreds of superbly researched and written essays, book and DVD reviews, annotations for the Melbourne Cinémathèque, Great Directors profiles, and film festival reports, along with having contributed no few festival reports myself (along with, in a former guise, a strangely hyper-real “bricolage interview” with a certain Richard Wolstencroft – may the ludicrous business surrounding his house being raided by the police looking for copies of L.A. Zombie, two whole months pursuant to a widely publicised and uneventful civil disobedience screening of the same, resolve itself with the barest minimum of juridical intervention).

While I am no longer on staff at Senses (albeit I am still doing some work for it, migrating archival content into Senses' spanky new content management system), I still personally feel this grotesque, and conceivably crippling, slight against this wonderful journal, profoundly. I hope many others out there, readers and/or contributors alike, will, on this news reaching them, feel similarly appalled. Oh if only, somehow, the collective umbrage of all the world's cinéphiles could somehow be monetised...

Now, where was I?

Oh yes.

Well, bugger that business about the biopics. Let's move straight onto the dubbing practices in the Czech Republic... Although... perhaps... not until I've given a further account of things of interest to have occupied me between blog posts.

Max and Moritz: A Juvenile History in 7 Tricks (Minus 3)

Penelope Bartlau, Megan Cameron, Moritz and KT Prescott in Max and Moritz. Photo by Sarah Walker.

Max and Moritz promised to be, according to my own promotional materials circulated amongst my cronies :

... a quite deranged expanded marionette theatre production of most of Wilhelm Busch's 19th century tale of a couple of very naughty boys who just might get what's coming to them – and how! But not before certain entertaining unpleasantries might first come to pass...

... under the direction of puppeteer extraordinaire Megan Cameron and with no small amount of on-stage shenanigans courtesy of the same, in cahoots with KT Prescott and Penelope Bartlau...

... with musical accompaniment from Dirty Nicola and the Cheap, Filthy, Pre-Loved, Shop-Soiled Spud Hussies (myself, Katrina Wilson & Nicola Bell).

Shop-Soiled Cerise BRINGING IT during Max and Moritz. Photo by Sarah Walker.

Well, I had myself a fine old time over three nights performing cinema (some folk, coming from other, hoarier traditions, apparently refer to it as “theatre”) for carny folk and fellow travellers, their families, significant others, and passers-by alike, at The Village festival in North Fitzroy's Edinburgh Gardens earlier in the month. Aside from bringing some compositional and bottom-end prowess to the production, mine was also the responsibility to supply some foley to proceedings, which was a helluva lot of fun.

(Now here's a hot tip: If ever you'd been wondering how best you might simulate the sounds of children being ground to a pulp in an old mill, might I be so bold as to heartily recommend the strained employment of an egg-beater against several clumps of cement in an ice-cream container?)

For all its wonderful reception, I can imagine that the spectacle our Max and Moritz provided might well have bewildered some of its audience. Some of that might have been a function of our presenting this as very much a work in progress, and as such, a little rough around the edges. Another part of it might have been that eyelines to the stage weren't uniformly excellent, something quite important when some of the performance is presented in miniature – oh for tiered seating in future! But, most of all, our Max and Moritz was presented after a very European tradition of marionette theatre – a quite Czech approach to things, in fact. It's a mixed-media, multiple-representational, collage tradition little known around these parts.

My introduction to this sort of theatre came through the cinema of Jan Švankmajer, especially those films of his where the protagonists inhabit a universe wherein they, or any other given character, may oscillate between being (portrayed as) a living, breathing, thinking human being, or a puppet, whether a miniature model or of life size, in the process collapsing distinctions between representation and actuality, autonomy and manipulation, the natural order of things and the fantastical, all in accordance with the time-honoured synthetic Surrealist tradition. See, for example, Něco z Alenky (Alice / Something from Alice, 1988); Don Šajn (Don Juan, 1969), and especially, Lekce Faust (Faust / Lesson: Faust, 1994).

* Note to self: at some point when writing extensively on Švankmajer on future, note that all too little has been written (at least, in English), even by the great Peter Hames, on Švankmajer's involvement in Prague's Laterna magika expanded cinema, with especial respect to his part in creating Kouzelný cirkus (Wonderful Circus), a staple of that theatre's repertoire ever since its premiere in 1977. Here's a promo clip that does a fine job of demonstrating the multimedia, collage approach to theatre/cinema as expounded by the Laterna magika:

My dear friend Megan Cameron, whose wonderful brainchild Max and Moritz is, developed a lot of her formidable Czech marionette theatre chops from a couple of long stints working in Prague with Divadlo ANPU. Here's a photo I'm very fond of I took earlier this year of Divadlo ANPU rehearsing a new production; I think it illustrates very nicely the multi-layered and interpenetrative nature of representation, characterisation and indeed framing freely employed in this brand of theatre:

Divadlo ANPU rehearsing

The more exposed I've become – as spectator and, latterly, in the case of Max and Moritz, as participator – to this sort of theatrical production, the more some extremely bizarre aspects of Jan Švankmajer's cinema have come to seem, if not so much any less bizarre, at least somewhat more explicable. All that business in Faust playing with an indistinction between a human order of being and a supernatural/puppet order is these days a good deal clearer to me as not simply whimsically Buñuelian, Brechtian or post-modernist manoeuvring on Švankmajer's part but at least equally an adherence to venerable Czech theatrical traditions in which representation is ever a slippery and unstable business indeed!

And then I went to Wellington

(If only, alas, for just a few days.)

Wellington's where, back in the day, I was a) born and b) spent many of my formative years, and I had been away from it for way, way overlong. The hows and whys are not the stuff of this blog, but a few choice snaps taken, methinks, are. Whose blog is it anyway? Yes, that's what I thought too.

Scenes from the 2010 Wellywood Collection

But one third of the spectacular view from the back of my Aunt's place in Wellington.

Why would you watch TV?

I sat here on the beach at Lyall Bay, making light work of a first paua fritter in 10 years, watching the planes come and go. Skull Island scenes from Peter Jackson's King Kong were shot nearby.

Colonial timber houses tumbling down the hillside at Lyall Bay. A whole different approach to terrace housing.

The Beehive, on the prowl, Dalek-stylee...

On the Cable Car, heading up to the Wellington Botanical Gardens.

Henry Moore's Inner Form, enjoying the view from the Wellington Botanical Gardens.

Gorgeous Second Empire building in Wellington's CBD.

This CBD Art Deco stunner is for sale! Will some kindly soul not buy it for me?

 *

In “Arty Bees”, a wonderful Wellington vendor of pre-loved books, I stumbled upon the find of my too few days spent in the Windy City: Gene Deitch's wonderful memoir For the Love of Prague (2^nd edition – there have now been five).

It's the memoir of a man uniquely placed to observe and comment upon the experience of living in communist Czechoslovakia for 30 years; Deitch, an animation producer – a UPA alumnus, no less – was the only American resident in Prague throughout 30 years of communist rule (and beyond! When originally he'd intended to stay for no more than 10 days...) Deitch enjoyed considerably more freedom of movement and considerably less harassment by the state than the rest of the population, bestowing upon him a privileged position both in society and as a documenter of communist Czechoslovakia's everyday, absurdist drudgery and, eventually, the seismic events that proved the regime's undoing, ever the outsider, looking in...

As a Czechophile, that's already premise enough to have got me interested in his memoir, but the jackpot is that Deitch's book also recounts his time overseeing production of cartoons, including an Oscar winner (Munro (1960)) and numerous Tom and Jerries destined for the American marketplace, created by workers in none other a studio than Bratři v triku (“Brothers in T-Shirts”, but, equally, “Brothers in a Trick Film”), the Prague animation studio founded in 1945 by none other than legendary Czech puppet animator, Jiří Trnka!

One passage early on recounts how Deitch, before becoming acquainted with his new workmates, had been naïvely fearing the worst, conditioned by American propaganda to expect them to be a bunch of humourless, party line-toeing drones toiling away mechanically and unemotively at their work; it couldn't help but remind me of the fancifully draconian production line approach to creating cels and merchandising for The Simpsons as envisioned by Banksy as occurring in China in his recent Simpsons title sequence that many of you would have seen by now:

I can't say enough wonderful things about Deitch's memoir. Of course, I now desperately want to get a hold of its most recent edition – I'm three behind. Until I do though, there is “The Occasional Deitch” online to tide me over and... a feature-length documentary film adaptation of his memoirs to also hunt down!

Finally: a few musings on the practice of dubbing

An article from 2008 I stumbled upon recently on the website for Radio Praha, “The continuing Czech love affair with Jean-Paul Belmondo”, considers the enduring appeal in the Czech Republic of a French actor not greatly well known these days beyond France outside of cinéphile circles (within which, of course, he is revered, especially for his roles in Godard's A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) and Pierrot le Fou). What for me makes this especially interesting is that, as this article would suggest, there is a high likelihood that most of his Czech fans have probably never actually heard Belmondo speak – at least, not in his own voice.

(Instead, one of the two actors known to have been his voice for Czech audiences throughout Belmondo's career is none other than Jan Tříska, so brilliant as the Marquis in Švankmajer's Šílení (Lunacy).)

Jan Tříska in Šílení

When we view a film in which there are “stars”, that is, established performers known to us through previous exploits on- (and, just as often, off-)screen, we can't help but take that prior exposure to those performers in with us on viewing them enacting new roles; that exposure can't help but inform - and even prejudice - our subsequent engagements with those same performers. Thus is created, and cultivated, their star personae.

One essential element for anglophone audiences in the construction of star personae in the Hollywood system is, of course, voice. It is very rare – outside of the conspicuous or mannered adoption of an accent or some sort of speech “impediment” – that a star's voice isn't recognisably the same from one role to the next. We pretty well take it for granted – I doubt any of us ever rarely spare the matter much thought at all – that an actor, already familiar to us, will sound much like he/she always does when we go to watch them in a new role. Likewise, we take it for granted that their lip movements will reliably synch well with the dialogue on the soundtrack.

Throughout much of Europe, however, including the Czech Republic, local voice talent is often employed to dub the dialogue in foreign films, for theatrical release and for television. In these cases, wherever established actors are involved, there are particular local actors assigned as the voice of those stars. This consistent assignation of voice to foreign star no doubt helps cultivate, and by degrees, cement, those stars' personae within those marketplaces; otherwise, just imagine how weird and distancing it would be to hear Sean Connery dubbed by an appreciably different voice every time you saw an old Bond film.

But then... imagine never even realising that Connery himself has one of the most distinctive voices on the planet, with that rich, thick Scottish brogue so beloved of parodists throughout the anglophone world!

I wonder how often Hollywood stars meet their matches? Has Brad Pitt ever met the Spanish Brad Pitt? Has Angelina Jolie the German Angelina? What would happen if ever Belmondo and Jan Tříska were cast together? Perhaps they could dub one another - in many nations, who would ever be any the wiser...

That's enough for now

Chances are the next post to A Little Lie Down will come rather sooner than this one did. Meantime, I'll be joining Thomas Caldwell on this Saturday's Film Buff's Forecast on 3RRR, midday-2pm. Tune in! Turn on! Etc.