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

Of content elsewhere, new and old, and more on MIFF releases

Firstly, a stocktake

With but five further days to go of the 61st Melbourne International Film Festival, folks who missed it going live to air might like to do some catch-up listening to last Thursday's hour long "Max Headroom" MIFF special on Melbourne radio station 3RRR, in which I and estimable fellow critics Tara Judah and Josh Nelson set the 61st MIFF to rights, alternately waxing laudatory and scornful about umpteen of the festival's big screen offerings and various peripheral matters.

(A bonus? - seldom can Kylie's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" previously have been heard to emanate forth along the airwaves from Melbourne's legendary independent community radio station nonpareil, but it did, and, what's more, in context. Who'd ever hitherto a-thunk it?)

Our Kylie, all growed up, in Leos Carax' sublime Holy Motors

Speaking of 3RRR and Max Headroom specials, and with ACMI's thorough Guy Maddin season not long come to a pre-MIFF close, here's reminding y'all of the hour long "Max Headroom" Guy Maddin special I, fab fellow critic (and, latterly, MIFF's Next Gen & Shorts Coordinator) Thomas Caldwell and ACMI programmer and season co-curator Kristy Matheson perpetrated back in late June, replete with many minutes of interview gold contributed by Maddin himself. It's still available "on demand", courtesy of 3RRR, for another few months.

(Here's reminding you too of the double Guy Maddin book review of mine in the Senses of Cinema before last, the better that you, whether an old or a new convert to Maddin's singular cinema, might want to deeper immerse yourself in (critical writing on) critical writing on Winnipeg's finest and most delirious filmmaker.)

Speaking of Senses of Cinema, issue #63 finally emerged at the very end of July and with it, my festival report "The South’s Not Long for This World: The 26th Fribourg International Film Festival", accounting for my 3rd trip to this terrific Swiss film festival in beautiful, principally francophone Fribourg and my first experience as a member of a FIPRESCI jury, something I'm still savouring. Maybe everyone who lands one of these gigs is as lucky as I was (though I doubt it), finding themselves working entirely with altogether lovely, super smart and highly collegiate fellow critics; mad props and shout-outs go out to fab fellow jurors Sheila Johnston (President, Great Britain), Hauvick Habechian (Lebanon), Katja Čičigoj (Slovenia) and Nina Scheu (Switzerland) - wotta team! May that we all be reunited somewhere, sometime, and were that such a thing were possible here in Australia, where such juries, with all their exciting, horizons-expanding internationalism, are nowadays almost unheard of. (Grrr, argh.)

Image: Caroline Alexandra McCurdy

Moving on, in my last post (lawks, has it really already been a month?), I neglected to plug something I put out into the world, which, I'll concede, is unlike me. I refer to my guesting on the May 2012 edition of Hell Is For Hyphenates, in which I join HIFH hotshots Paul Anthony Nelson and Lee Zachariah in poring over the ever astonishing film work of my pick of a filmmaker to focus upon, Czech Surrealist Jan Švankmajer, after a precursory gloss over a few recent releases and a consideration of the sometimes vexing matter of film remakes.

Oh, and while we're on matters Czech, it was only last week that I was party to the incorporation of CaSFFA, or the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australasia. Just call me Paní prezidentka! Let's see if we can't just pull off a memorable inaugural festival in mid-2013. Much more news about this will emerge in due course.

Secondly, a MIFF release dates update

Before getting to the nitty-gritty, I feel I should mention another couple of avenues through which you might legitimately encounter films screening at this year's MIFF outside of this year's festival, perhaps then sparing yourself from needlessly making haste to see them at MIFF rather than catching something altogether scarcer, something which you really might not have the opportunity to ever catch on a big screen, or even on 35mm, ever again, or from the worry that to have missed them at this year's festival might be to have missed them altogether.

Firstly, any number of this year's MIFF titles will doubtless re-emerge at other film festivals staged hereabouts in the year ahead, whether, for example, at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, which often re-runs a handful or so of queer themed MIFF titles in the March of the following year, or at any of the multitude of festivals celebrating (typically only the recent) cinema output of a given nation.

To cite just one example, it has been announced that the Taviani brothers' highly regarded Caesar Must Die will screen at the forthcoming Italian Film Festival, running from 19 September through to 9 October in Melbourne, and at different times in other capital cities.

Credentialled industry bods could also look to the Festival Scope platform to access 10 out of 12 of the features in the TeleScope program and as many of the Accelerator offerings as well, presuming they're willing to pony up/have already ponied up for an initial subscription charge to stream them (and much, much more) on demand.

(To quote the latest Festival Scope newsletter: "Time to swan dive into Port Philip's Bay!")

Now, there hasn't been a terrific flurry of new release date announcements made or press releases issued by distributors and exhibitors over the few weeks since my previous post. There have nonetheless been a few of significance, with the most notable regarding Tony Krawitz's adaptation of my favourite Christos Tsiolkas novel, Dead Europe, which wasn't even in the MIFF program when I previously posted. That, and my need to remedy an error I made last time, have led me to update the table, below.

Dead Europe

Re that error, my apologies go out to Hi Gloss Entertainment. I had had DVD releases for the three titles of theirs listed below down for October but my original source was evidently not really in the know; no DVD release date has, in fact, been scheduled yet for any of Italy: Love It or Leave It, Journal de France or The Minister. Two of these three titles (with one of them being The Minister) are presently, furthermore, under discussion for theatrical release.

All the usual caveats then about the following table, and more, apply. None of the following can be taken as gospel, not least for the fact that human error, my own most certainly included, can be a factor in information provided below not ultimately standing the test of time. Let the browser beware!

TITLE	DISTRIBUTOR	RELEASE INFO (where known)	SECTION
¡Vivan Las Antipodas!	Madman		Documentaries
[REC] Genesis	Vendetta Films		Night Shift
100 Bloody Acres	Hopscotch		Night Shift
11 Flowers	Palace		Next Gen
A Monster in Paris	Madman		Next Gen
A Simple Life	Dream Movie		Accent on Asia
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry	Madman		Documentaries
Alois Nebel	Madman		Animation
Amour	Transmission		Int. Panorama
Back to Stay	Transmission		Through the Labyrinth
Barbara	Madman		Int. Panorama
Beasts of the Southern Wild	Icon	13 September	Int. Panorama
Being Venice	Curious Film		Aust. Showcase
Berberian Sound Studio	Madman		Int. Panorama
Beyond	Rialto		Facing North
Beyond the Hills	Madman		Int. Panorama
Bully	Roadshow	23 August	Next Gen
Caesar Must Die	Palace		Int. Panorama
Chasing Ice	Madman		Documentaries
Croker Island Exodus	ABC	TV	Aust. Showcase
Damsels in Distress	Sony	6 September	Int. Panorama
Dark Horse	Roadshow		Int. Panorama
Dead Europe	Transmission	1 November	Aust. Showcase
Easy Money	Madman		Facing North
Ernest & Celestine	Rialto		Animation
Errors of the Human Body	Curious Film		Aust. Showcase
Farewell, My Queen	Transmission		Int. Panorama
First Position	Hopscotch	27 September	Next Gen
Girl Model	Aztec		Documentaries
God Bless America	Potential Films	15 November	Night Shift
Hail	Madman		Aust. Showcase
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai	Icon	18 October	Accent on Asia
Headshot	Madman		Accent on Asia
Holy Motors	Icon	23 August	Leos Carax
I Wish	Rialto	4 October	Accent on Asia
In the Fog	Sharmill		Int. Panorama
Italy: Love It or Leave It	Hi Gloss Entertainment		Documentaries
Jack Irish: Bad Debts	ABC	TV	Aust. Showcase
Jayne Mansfield's Car	Eagle	DVD, early 2013	Int. Panorama
Journal de France	Hi Gloss Entertainment		Documentaries
Killer Joe	Roadshow		Night Shift
Last Dance	Becker Film Group		Aust. Showcase
Le Grand Soir	Vendetta Films		Int. Panorama
Liberal Arts	Icon	2013	Int. Panorama
Make Hummus Not War	Antidote Films		Aust. Showcase
Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present	Madman		Documentaries
Mental	Universal	4 October	Closing Night
Metropia	SBS	n/a (has previously aired on SBS)	Facing North
Miss Bala	Transmission	22 November	Through the Labyrinth
Monsieur Lazhar	Palace	6 September	Int. Panorama
Moonrise Kingdom	Universal	30 August	Int. Panorama
No	Rialto		Through the Labyrinth
On the Road	Icon	27 September	Int. Panorama
ParaNorman	Universal	20 September	Next Gen
Paul Kelly: Stories of Me	Madman	18 October	Backbeat
Policeman	Curious Film		Int. Panorama
Rampart	Madman		Int. Panorama
Robot and Frank	Sony	15 November	Int. Panorama
Ruby Sparks	Fox	20 September	Int. Panorama
Safety Not Guaranteed	Rialto	18 October	Int. Panorama
Save Your Legs!	Madman	24 January, 2013	Aust. Showcase
Searching for Sugar Man	Madman	4 October	Facing North
Seeking A Friend for the End of the World	Roadshow	23 August	Int. Panorama
Shadow Dancer	Potential Films	11 October	Int. Panorama
Shut up and Play the Hits	Vendetta Films		Backbeat
Sightseers	Rialto	26 December	Night Shift
Sister	Palace		Int. Panorama
Sleepless Night	Vendetta Films		Int. Panorama
Sound of My Voice	Fox		Night Shift
Tabu	Palace		Int. Panorama
Teddy Bear	Vendetta Films		Int. Panorama
The Angels’ Share	Vendetta Films		Int. Panorama
The First Fagin	Ronin Films		Aust. Showcase
The Hunt	Madman		Int. Panorama
The Imposter	Madman		Documentaries
The Intouchables	Roadshow	25 October	Int. Panorama
The King of Pigs	Madman		Animation
The Loneliest Planet	Palace		Int. Panorama
The Minister	Hi Gloss Entertainment		Int. Panorama
The Sapphires	Hopscotch	9 August	Opening Night
The Sessions	Fox	8 November	Int. Panorama
The Taste of Money	Madman		Accent on Asia
This Ain’t California	Management of Doubt		Documentaries
Undefeated	Madman		Documentaries
V/H/S	Roadshow		Night Shift
Violeta Went to Heaven	Madman		Through the Labyrinth
Vulgaria	China Lion	23 August	Accent on Asia
War Witch	Curious Film		Int. Panorama
Warriors of the Rainbow – Seediq Bale: Part 1	Monster Pictures	13 September *	Accent on Asia
Warriors of the Rainbow – Seediq Bale: Part 2	Monster Pictures	13 September *	Accent on Asia
Wunderkinder	Umbrella	6 September	Next Gen
Wuthering Heights	Transmission	11 October	Int. Panorama
Your Sister's Sister	Madman	6 September	Int. Panorama

* You might like to note that Warriors of the Rainbow – Seediq Bale is being theatrically released as one film, not two.

Of MIFF, Maddin and Max Headroom

For Melbourne's cinéphiles and their fellow travellers, the greatest show in town is shortly to commence. Of course, I speak of the Melbourne International Film Festival and its second edition under the stewardship of über-cinéphile and former Senses of Cinema colleague* of mine, the wonderful Michelle Carey.

* Michelle is still a pillar of the Senses of Cinema team, serving as its Festival Reports Editor. It is I who have left, though I continue to contribute articles. For example, the next issue (due out... surely any day now?) will feature my report on the 26th Fribourg International Film Festival, while the miraculously still current issue features a lengthy screed in which I review two fantastic recent books on Guy Maddin: Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin by William Beard and Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin, edited by David Church.

Speaking of Guy Maddin

MIFF aside, far and away the greatest film cultural event to hit Melbourne town in 2012 (notwithstanding the formal inauguration of yet another fine local film journal, Screen Machine) is still underway at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. I speak of “Nocturnal Transmissions: The Cinema of Guy Maddin”, a really rather thorough* retrospective of Winnipeg's finest, most delirious and most exclamatory filmmaker, that great poet of Vaseline-smeared, amnesiac melodrama and recent Order of Canada awardee (!), Guy Maddin, running through to 27 July.

* But not completely thorough, even with as many as three weeks of screenings. Just below, for example, is a terrific Maddin short not screening as part of ACMI's season but which makes for an excellent companion piece to his brilliant The Heart of the World (2000) (one of my all-time favourite short films and more than just a little tinged with genius and reverence for the cinematic medium (just as, one might say, Maddin is himself tinged with irreverence for the 'medium' of the ghosts of cinema and Winnipeg's pasts, real and fabricated, that he himself bodily represents.))

The Heart of the World presents an altogether new Creation myth of the moving pictures, and so too does his under-seen 2009 short, Night Mayor. Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada, enjoy!



Maddin devotees and novitiates alike should be flocking in droves to ACMI to get a fix of that inimitable imitator's truly astonishing body of work. Equally, both camps could do a lot worse than to tune in, using Melbourne radio stations Triple R's recently launched “Radio on Demand” facility, to a “Max Headroom” special from Thursday, 28 June, where I was joined by tremendous fellow Triple R critic, Thomas Caldwell, super-dooper ACMI programmer Kristy Matheson, co-curator (with Maddin) of ACMI's extensive Maddin season, and a pre-recorded Guy Maddin himself, from whom I had gleaned an exclusive interview and no few pearls of wisdom.

For example, the answer to the question on every cinéaste's lips: will not real Vaseline forever trump digital? Tune in and find out!

A Max Headroom Maddin-MIFF segue

You can get it live, or you'll be able to get it “on demand” all the way up to six months later – your choice. Either way, be sure to catch the Thursday, 9 August edition of “Max Headroom” on Triple R when I join Tara Judah and Josh Nelson from the fabulous Triple R film criticism podcast, Plato's Cave, as we throw an hour's worth of musings at this year's MIFF from a fine vantage point, one full week into the festival, from where we'll cast an eye over what we'll have seen and what we'll anticipate we'll still yet see at Melbourne's film festival of film festivals. All the critical scuttlebutt from the 61^st MIFF – and more!, more or less.

A time-honoured tradition: MIFF 2012 release dates

Here follows a cannibalisation of last year's edition of much this same blog post. The devil is in the details.

Caveats

Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild:
a fabulous film indeed!
But can you not hold out until
it goes on general release (13 September)?

Please be advised that none of the following can be taken as gospel, for the distribution game is the stuff of whims, vicissitudes and, some have alleged, sorcery. Furthermore, some films may not be destined for theatrical release at all but rather may go straight to TV, DVD or Blu-Ray, online streaming or download, or even to YouTube, Vimeo and their like (to speak only of outlets a film might find itself distributed to legitimately). This means that MIFF might represent your only chance to see many of these titles on a big screen in Melbourne.

Last year I observed that I had never known there to be so many films screening at MIFF to have distribution lined up at a comparably early stage in proceedings. There were, however, a mere 81 such titles this time last year, whereas this year, I make it 92 (not including retrospective titles long ago to have been released to theatres and home viewing, like Hal Ashby's legendary morose laugh riot Harold and Maude from 1971.)

Madman Entertainment, while still having secured distribution to as many as 23 of the following titles, have nowhere near so large a representation in the following table as they did in last year's; Madman titles accounted for a whopping 37% (30 out of 81) of films to have distribution lined up ahead of the 2011 festival. This has dropped in 2012 to 25% (23 out of 92).

This might help placate certain conspiracy theorists to have surmised on this blog last year that Madman's huge representation amongst last year's MIFF offerings carried with it a whiff of impropriety...

Now, while some of the films listed below may well be released very soon after MIFF, there can be incentives beyond bragging rights to attending their screenings at the festival, as, for example, when guests will be in attendance to conduct introductions, Q&As, flesh-pressings and so forth.

In the particular case of many of the Australian titles, there can be the added buzz of attending what will be hometown world premieres, which can generate a peculiarly electric atmosphere which no other viewing scenario can ever hope to match. Being at such a screening when it goes well is a particularly salutary experience. (Also, there may be a party afterwards.)

However, the converse also applies. Attending a local premiere when a film tanks, with cast and crew present, can be awkward and dispiriting, as with MIFF's 2010 curtain raiser, the yet-to-be-seen-again, may-in-fact-never-be The Wedding Party (d. Amanda Jane).

It is also true that some of these films may not be released for quite some time. Referring to last year's list, one of the 2011 MIFF's most outstanding offerings was undoubtedly Nuri Bilge Ceylan's mesmerising Once upon a Time in Anatolia, which was only granted a theatrical release within the last month or two. The wait then can be long.

Okey doke. Thems are caveats enough. On with the main attraction!

* 13.8.12 My apologies to the folks at Hi Gloss Entertainment; information published here previously pertaining to release dates for their titles was erroneous. I had DVD releases for the three titles of theirs listed here down for October but my original sources were evidently not really in the know; no DVD release date has, in fact, been scheduled yet for any of Italy: Love It or Leave It, Journal de France or The Minister. Two of these three titles (I'm not sure which two) are, furthermore, presently under discussion for theatrical release.

The table below has been adjusted to reflect this.

There are a few further updates which could yet be made to this table to reflect announcements made, and press releases issued, by various distributors and exhibitors over the last couple of weeks; time permitting, I'll get around to updating this table within the next day or two accordingly.

TITLE	DISTRIBUTOR	RELEASE INFO (where known)	SECTION
¡Vivan Las Antipodas!	Madman		Documentaries
[REC] Genesis	Vendetta Films		Night Shift
100 Bloody Acres	Hopscotch		Night Shift
11 Flowers	Palace		Next Gen
A Monster in Paris	Madman		Next Gen
A Simple Life	Dream Movie		Accent on Asia
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry	Madman		Documentaries
Alois Nebel	Madman		Animation
Amour	Transmission		Int. Panorama
Back to Stay	Transmission		Through the Labyrinth
Barbara	Madman		Int. Panorama
Beasts of the Southern Wild	Icon	13 September	Int. Panorama
Being Venice	Curious Film		Aust. Showcase
Berberian Sound Studio	Madman		Int. Panorama
Beyond	Rialto	November	Facing North
Beyond the Hills	Madman		Int. Panorama
Bully	Roadshow	23 August	Next Gen
Caesar Must Die	Palace		Int. Panorama
Chasing Ice	Madman		Documentaries
Croker Island Exodus	ABC	TV	Aust. Showcase
Damsels in Distress	Sony	6 September	Int. Panorama
Dark Horse	Roadshow		Int. Panorama
Easy Money	Madman		Facing North
Ernest & Celestine	Rialto		Animation
Errors of the Human Body	Curious Film		Aust. Showcase
Farewell, My Queen	Transmission		Int. Panorama
First Position	Hopscotch	27 September	Next Gen
Girl Model	Aztec		Documentaries
God Bless America	Potential Films		Night Shift
Hail	Madman		Aust. Showcase
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai	Icon	18 October	Accent on Asia
Headshot	Madman		Accent on Asia
Holy Motors	Icon	23 August	Leos Carax
I Wish	Rialto		Accent on Asia
In the Fog	Sharmill		Int. Panorama
Italy: Love It or Leave It	Hi Gloss Entertainment		Documentaries
Jack Irish: Bad Debts	ABC	TV	Aust. Showcase
Jayne Mansfield's Car	Eagle	DVD, early 2013	Int. Panorama
Journal de France	Hi Gloss Entertainment		Documentaries
Killer Joe	Roadshow		Night Shift
Last Dance	Becker Film Group		Aust. Showcase
Le Grand Soir	Vendetta Films		Int. Panorama
Liberal Arts	Icon	11 October	Int. Panorama
Make Hummus Not War	Antidote Films		Aust. Showcase
Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present	Madman		Documentaries
Mental	Icon	4 October	Closing Night
Metropia	SBS	n/a (has previously aired on SBS)	Facing North
Miss Bala	Transmission	DVD, 5 September	Through the Labyrinth
Monsieur Lazhar	Palace	6 September	Int. Panorama
Moonrise Kingdom	Universal	30 August	Int. Panorama
No	Rialto		Through the Labyrinth
On the Road	Icon	27 September	Int. Panorama
ParaNorman	Universal	20 September	Next Gen
Paul Kelly: Stories of Me	Madman	18 October	Backbeat
Policeman	Curious Film		Int. Panorama
Rampart	Madman		Int. Panorama
Robot and Frank	Sony	15 November	Int. Panorama
Ruby Sparks	Fox	20 September	Int. Panorama
Safety Not Guaranteed	Rialto	20 September/18 October	Int. Panorama
Save Your Legs!	Madman		Aust. Showcase
Searching for Sugar Man	Madman		Facing North
Seeking A Friend for the End of the World	Roadshow	23 August	Int. Panorama
Shadow Dancer	Potential Films	4 October	Int. Panorama
Shut up and Play the Hits	Vendetta Films		Backbeat
Sightseers	Rialto		Night Shift
Sister	Palace		Int. Panorama
Sleepless Night	Vendetta Films		Int. Panorama
Sound of My Voice	Fox		Night Shift
Tabu	Palace		Int. Panorama
Teddy Bear	Vendetta Films		Int. Panorama
The Angels’ Share	Vendetta Films		Int. Panorama
The First Fagin	Ronin Films		Aust. Showcase
The Hunt	Madman		Int. Panorama
The Imposter	Madman		Documentaries
The Intouchables	Roadshow	25 October	Int. Panorama
The King of Pigs	Madman		Animation
The Loneliest Planet	Palace		Int. Panorama
The Minister	Hi Gloss Entertainment		Int. Panorama
The Sapphires	Hopscotch	9 August	Opening Night
The Sessions	Fox	8 November	Int. Panorama
The Taste of Money	Madman		Accent on Asia
This Ain’t California	Management of Doubt		Documentaries
Undefeated	Madman		Documentaries
V/H/S	Roadshow		Night Shift
Violeta Went to Heaven	Madman		Through the Labyrinth
Vulgaria	China Lion	23 August	Accent on Asia
War Witch	Curious Film		Int. Panorama
Warriors of the Rainbow – Seediq Bale: Part 1	Monster Pictures	6 September	Accent on Asia
Warriors of the Rainbow – Seediq Bale: Part 2	Monster Pictures	6 September	Accent on Asia
Wunderkinder	Umbrella	6 September	Next Gen
Wuthering Heights	Transmission	11 October	Int. Panorama
Your Sister's Sister	Madman	6 September	Int. Panorama

Master of My Domain

Inadvertently humourous Czech poster for
Steve McQueen's Shame

Hi all.

After a little lie down that would do Sleeping Beauty proud, my hand has been forced into posting something here anew.

Some sort of catastrophic server trouble recently left stricken the good ship Senses of Cinema and had, in the process, left me incommunicado via email for two long weeks and unable to access any of my email from a further three or so weeks prior.

It wasn't until only just a little earlier today that Senses got up and running once again after a full fortnight's lay-off. Mind you, the spell on the sidelines has done it some appreciable good; in resurrecting the site, aspects of its design have been markedly improved, even if some elements of its facelift still need quite some fine tuning (as has been acknowledged).

All this being so, you'll now be able to access two articles I've written for Senses since last I posted here: "A Twilight Portrait: A Report on the 21st Film Festival Cottbus" in Issue 61 and "Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin by William Beard; and Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin edited by David Church" - a whopping double book review - in the current issue, # 62. Additionally, I contributed to Senses' 2011 world poll, published between these two issues.

But I have digressed.

My old sensesofcinema.com address had been my principal email address for over ten years. Seeing as a) I have not, strictly speaking, been in the employ of Senses of Cinema for some time and b) I have just now been made all too aware how compromising it can be sticking for so long with an email address which is administrated by folks who are effectively a third party, I have just seen fit to mint myself a brand new, personal domain, the better to gain complete control over my email and never again fall foul of such communications strife beyond my means to remedy personally.

Hence, cerisehoward.com has been born. On the web, a visit presently does nothing more than simply and peremptorily re-direct the curious visitor right here, to A Little Lie Down.

Well, it had to do something.

Owning an eponymous domain, I now feel the pressure to use that domain for some good beyond merely using it as an expedient for reliably sending and receiving email, so www.cerisehoward.com will likely, if not necessarily immediately, yet be stocked with content pertaining to my various activities across film, music, writing and so on. There are many projects afoot in these various fields and many worthy projects in them to have come and gone before, so it might indeed be nice to have them all documented, contained even, in a central repository.

Let's wait and see what develops there...

Meanwhile, if you're someone who's been trying to reach me via email these last few weeks and been foiled, please update your records so that you have my email address down as cerise [at] cerisehoward.com. Thanks!

*

Now, seeing as we've finally found ourselves enjoying another Little Lie Down, I think something of an update with respect to my activities in film is in order.

Aside from those aforementioned articles in recent issues of Senses of Cinema, here are some other things to have been going on:

I'm not long back from serving on a FIPRESCI jury at the 26th Fribourg International Film Festival. It was a great pleasure to serve alongside my esteemed, and altogether charming, colleagues, namely Sheila Johnston (president of the jury); Hauvick Habechian; Nina Scheu, and Katja Čičigoj. (I'm kinda tickled that the page on the FIFF website listing our jury's members has me down as representing Preston specifically rather than Melbourne!)

And the winner of the FIPRESCI Jury award is... (cue drumroll)... Countdown!

My report on the FIPRESCI jury prize winner, Huh Jong-ho's cracking genre(s) film Countdown (2011), will appear soon on the FIPRESCI website alongside reportage covering several other aspects of the 26th FIFF from my fellow jurors.

Furthermore, I will yet have a full report of my experiences at this year's festival in Fribourg in the next issue of Senses of Cinema. (I've previously also covered the FIFF for Senses in 2010 and 2011.)

What else?

Some radio I've done in recent times can be accessed online.

The kind folks at 3RRR - I'll be back on the air in my usual spot on SmartArts opposite Richard Watts a week today (Thursday 26 April) - have made accessible online a spot I did back in February when I reviewed My Week with Marilyn (d. Simon Curtis, a film rather more interesting for its dramatisation - and perhaps meta-dramatisation - of a pitting of Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh)'s old school hammy thesping against Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams)' high-maintenance Stanislavskian new school method acting, than for its more conventional biopic aspects); Steve McQueen's grim, sexually frank depiction of dysfunctional, downward spiralling siblings adrift in the big smoke, Shame (rather humorously, this film is known in the Czech Republic, after a rather unfortunate translation, as Stud! - see the poster above), and the rather misleadingly titled Leonardo Live (d. Phil Grabsky), a behind-the-scenes look at the lead-up to the Opening Night of the blockblusteriest of all blockbuster exhibitions, the National Gallery in London's "Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan".

If that weren't enough, RRR's internet fairies have also put online in its raw, unedited entirety an interview I conducted with legendary avant-garde artist, progenitor of industrial music and "pandrogyne", Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who came to Melbourne to partake in a fantastic, consciousness-raising Q&A after a screening of Marie Losier's beautiful experimental documentary, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, as well as, it transpired, to perform with Psychic TV at a memorable "secret show" at The Toff in Town the night following.

Lastly, back on December 8 - soooo last year, I know - I had a ball filling in for Josh Nelson on 3RRR's always splendid Plato's Cave film criticism podcast during a special live-to-air summer season. I saddled up my high horse to kickstart a discussion about the parochialist failings I (continue to) perceive in Australia's film festival culture, after having first mused with Thomas Caldwell and Tara Judah over the merits of Puss in Boots (d. Chris Miller); Gus van Sant's perhaps unfairly disdained Restless and the really very stabby The Yellow Sea (d. Na Hong-jin).

If you haven't yet, now's a very good time to subscribe to Plato's Cave.

On the matter of fabulous film crit podcasts, the lovely folks at Hell Is For Hyphenates - that's Paul Anthony Nelson and Lee Zachariah - have asked me to join them as a guest on their May edition. Asked to pick a filmmaker whose work we'll ultimately come to collectively dissect, after first setting any other number of film critical matters to rights, I settled on...well, perhaps I won't spoil the surprise just yet. But suffice it to say it's someone who some recent time spent in the Czech Republic only did more to further expand my already considerable appreciation of...

If you haven't yet, now's a very good time to subscribe to Hell Is For Hyphenates. (May I especially recommend you listen to the episode where Christos Tsiolkas guests and a fabulous conversation about Pier Paolo Pasolini ensues!)

Also looking ahead, I'm to introduce a 3RRR subscribers' screening on Friday 4 May of Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil (1968) at ACMI, a full eight days before its official ACMI season begins (you lucky 3RRR subscribers, you! Excepting, of course, any dyed-in-the-wool Rolling Stones fans, who invariably hate the film, finding it unbearably pretentious and stingy on the Stones footage...) Here's the trailer:

Lastly, I'm still working on my review of Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' alarmingly filmographically and theoretically comprehensive Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study for Bright Lights Film Journal. The number of films of that ilk I've watched, in a few frenzies of catch-up viewing staged necessarily a few weeks apart - well, it takes a toll, I tells ya!

*

I would like to finish this post by stating in pithy but no uncertain terms that if you live in Melbourne and don't get to the William Kentridge exhibition at ACMI before it closes in late May, then you'd have to have rocks in your head. That is all.

Far from the Maddin crowd

Gentle reader, you might recall from my previous post that I have, per my preferred modus operandi, happily boxed myself into a corner and committed to reviewing William Beard's Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin for the next issue of Screening the Past.

Now, while being a great admirer of Maddin's works, I still haven't, by some stretch, seen all of his films; why heck, I haven't even seen all of his features!

An ideal I almost always hold out for, for as long as ever is possible, is to view on the big screen the films of anybody whose work I have come to admire or obsess over. And for many a long year I've held out thinking that surely, surely, somebody in Melbourne would stage a Maddin retrospective or season before long. Why, he's been a staple of MIFF programs for several years now, dating back as far as Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (with the doco on Maddin's struggles to make that film and conquer his own self-doubts, Waiting for Twilight, screening at MIFF that selfsame year of 1998.) He's a name (albeit not exactly a household one), a bona fide auteur, a man now with a substantial and accoladed back catalogue ripe for the picking and exceedingly rich in intertextuality, that greatest of boons for a prospective programmer. Furthermore, there's nowadays quite the heft of critical literature penned about (and, indeed, by) him.

But no. No-one here has yet done Maddin any sort of justice, and here I must, frankly, even point and wag the finger of blame at myself. Staging a Maddin retrospective was a notion I strongly entertained myself for quite some time, particularly so when still in the thick of MUFF. (That's the sometimes disreputable, sometimes deservedly so, Melbourne Underground Film Festival, for whom I curated some interesting programs, staged some strange events and ran no small amount of damage control over its fledgling, ramshackle first three years.)

But subsequent to my time with MUFF, with MIFF reliably bringing us in turn each of Maddin's new features and a sometime sprinkling of shorts along with them, my enthusiasm for trying to stage and bankroll a Maddin spectacular off my own steam slowly diminished, and I've let the idea slide.

Oh, but to think... I was in London a little over two years ago, only weeks out from a thorough Maddin retrospective at BFI Southbank. I came oh so close!

But no cigar.

So now it falls to me, ahead of devouring and reviewing William Beard's comprehensive-looking new tome on Maddin, to finally get acquainted with those few major titles of his to have given me the slip and which I've been dying to watch all along. So it's to my DVD and poky little home screen I now turn to watch The Dead Father and Tales from the Gimli Hospital for the too, too-long awaited first time.

And watch, and indeed relish them, I did.

And rather than immediately document my thoughts on these two early Maddins, fool! that I am, I sooner turned to Beard's book to pore over his chapters on them both. And now my newest, and heretofore unconfided, best laid plan – to write up here some sort of account of the umpteen ways The Dead Father and Tales from the Gimli Hospital would doubtless clearly prefigure his later, better known and better travelled works – The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon the Brain!, My Winnipeg, et al – appears utterly redundant. Because our man Beard is just all over it. He – with Maddin's acknowledged cooperation – is simply exhaustive in adumbrating every little tip of Maddin's hat to cinema's most heightened yesteryears, in identifying the point of origin of every little exaggerated gesture lovingly pastiched to the brink of delirium, in charting (safely assuming, I think, that the book carries on in the same vein) the evolution of all of Maddin's antediluvianist manoeuvrings and all the richly, often hilariously, Freudian obsessions that riddle his most singular and post-ironic of oeuvres. All that seems, so far, to be missing, is a little Vaseline smeared around its edges...

Short then of a really compelling reason I cannot yet anticipate, I likely won't much mention my own private Maddin-a-thon again around these parts before such time as I'm ready to trumpet the publication of my review of Into the Past in the next Screening the Past. That'll be towards the tail end of the year. But no matter, dear readers, there's plenty enough else grist meanwhile for the Little Lie Down mill. Plenty enough else indeed!

*

AND IN NEWS

Come Tuesday, 5 October, come one, come all! To the Melbourne Fringe Festival edition of “Cherchez la Femme” at The Penny Black in Brunswick, which will focus on “Feminism and the Arts”.

I have been kindly asked by the formidable Karen Pickering, whose brainchild this ever lively monthly feminist salon is, to join an illustrious panel featuring the likes of Namila Benson, Lou Sanz and Dr Megan Evans to discuss with you, oh glorious public, artsy matters of import to feminists and all their fellow travellers...

Flattered, it will be my great honour to throw my five cents into a very stimulating night spent setting the arts world to rights, interspersed with outbreaks of … variety!

To wit, and I quote from this event's Facebook page:

Song and dance goodness provided by the divine Jane Dust, Emily Jarrett, Eloise Maree and Kitty Bang, who've promised to share some of their own feminist inspiration with us all. It's going to be a huge night and tickets are now on sale at:

http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/cherchez-la-femme/

Fun! Surely!

*

AND!

If you've got this far it probably didn't escape your attention that just off to the right and back up a bit is a little box headed “Pocket blitherings”, in which is gathered as many as four “tweets” attributed to my good self.

Yes, I've lost the good fight and upped and joined Twitter.

But it's not all bad. In fact, I fancy some good can yet come of this!

Why... if only I'd already enlisted by the time I emerged from a preview of Richard Gray's delightful, tender début feature film, Summer Coda, on Tuesday morning just passed, so that I could have immediately let fly a pointed, pithy little snark to the effect of “Here's the film that ought've opened MIFF, had it only not been or felt beholden to run with an undercooked Premiere Funded feature instead.”

But let us not lament this lost opportunity (mine, or MIFF's). Sure, you'll all have now to wait instead till nearer its release in mid to late October to hear any tell of how lovely and moving a film Summer Coda ultimately is, recovering beautifully from a slightly wobbly first 15 minutes to have me, come the credits' roll, yearning for a home among the orange groves! (Of Victoria's Sunraysia region, that is.)

Here on in then, if I've just watched me a film, and feel that in the experience there's a high horse worth a-straddlin', you'll not be made to wait to hear tell a little bite-sized something all about it, ideally ahead of a more banquet-sized consideration of the same here and/or on my regular Thursday fortnightly spot on Richard Watts' SmartArts on Melbourne radio station 3RRR. (Exceptions being those strange, increasingly pointless instances (in a post-Twitter age) where publicists insist no advance word be leaked of a given film's merits, no matter whether that word might even turn out to be positive.)

That's all for today's show, folks.

PS A cursory scan of the index of Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin shows no mention of Jack Smith. No mention at all! So perhaps, as with even the most obsessively thorough of (cinéphile) enterprises, there will be blind spots in Beard's book yet, after all.

Bugger August; that was soooo last month

In the interests of maintaining a semblance of a resumption of usual services, and lest anyone fear this blog be taking a turn for the moribund, please find following a (one) blog post appertaining to the cinéphilic life in Melbourne, Orstraya, as given due consideration by an eagle owl, the film buff's spirit guide, etc etc yadda yadda blah, with all due apologies for the delay, consequent in some small part to a birthday had, against one's wishes and against one's better judgement, the week prior, and all the all-engulfing hoopla attendant upon it – ticker-tape parades, audiences with foreign dignitaries, a few drinks too many at The Tote chasing down a colossal Czech feast, and whatnot.

But life hasn't, these absent last two weeks, been all beer and skittles, overcoming a bout of pleurisy and delusions of grandeur. I've busied myself playing my behind-the-scenes part in letting loose into the world a new edition, #28, no less, of the venerable Melbourne-based film journal, Screening the Past. (Its first issue, long before my involvement began, emerged in 1997. 1997! Just imagine! – film had then just barely itself been invented, never mind the Interwebs!)

What's that – films? Yes, I suppose I've still found time to see a few of those lately. Blathered about some of them on the radio a bit, too, both today just about gone, and on the Thursday a fortnight prior.

Today's blatherings principally concerned the mock-mockumentary I'm Still There; Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and the very slight, but fun, The Extra Man. The lukewarmth I felt towards all three of these productions may not have been the stuff of scintillating radio. I'm not sure.

Whereas a fortnight ago my on-air focus was fixed on MIFF alumni The Killer Inside Me; Lebanon, and the wonderful Boy, along with the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival, and in particular its bringing to Melbourne the superb Reel Injun, a documentary investigation of the relationship between Hollywood and American indigenous folk, from the days of proto-cinema to very near to the current day, and not merely restricted to the depiction of native Americans in front of camera but, crucially, shining a light on their longtime involvement behind it as well.

Alas, I've neither the time nor the energy just now to wade in anywhere near as deep as I'd like in waxing critical upon all of these and other things to have unspooled before my beady, bloodshot little eyes these last sixteen days.

Why, I'm fatigued too from devoting energies and hours to under-the-bonnet tinkering for, would you believe, another august Melbourne-based film journal, Senses of Cinema, whose colossal archive is, by degrees, being migrated, in no small part by yours truly, into its mostly spanky new content management system. I have just today flicked a switch ensuring Issues 38 through to 51 – 750 wonderful articles on film in total, a few of which are mine – now seamlessly appear only at the 'new' site.

That took quite a bit of doing.

Still, in these last umpteen days, I've nonetheless also managed, remembering... the canon is my friend, the canon is my friend... to get along to big-screenings of Melville's Le Cercle Rouge and Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, both long overdue. (Mental note to self: Inaugurate “A Little Lie Down vs. The Canon” in a future, in-depth post.)

And I've committed to writing a review of William Beard's Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin for the next issue of Screening the Past. As an ardent admirer of Maddin's fruity films, this commitment must, atop reading Beard's account of Maddin's entire filmography and his analysis of the Winnipegian's arch and antediluvianist practices, needs occasion several viewings of Maddin's films. Hurrah! I only have so many about the house so, whilst tracking down others to bring into my home to watch, I have also treated myself to a few short Švankmajers to tide me over. (He is a kindred spirit and genius, surely! If one with nothing much really in common.)

And, to wrap, it's now to pause to note the passing of some true greats.

Satoshi Kon: much, much too soon! I adored Perfect Blue from the very get-go; notwithstanding that it's an anime, it's one of the greatest gialli of all time. And Paprika. Paprika! What a magnificent great cavalcading headfuck that film is; Inception Schminception! Millennium Actress, viewed for the first time upon learning of Kon's death, is very good too, if played in a wholly different register to Perfect Blue and Paprika...

Which reminds me... a party I was late to just last night is Centre Stage, Stanley Kwan's wonderful 1992 tribute to iconic 1930s Chinese actress and suicide, Ruan Ling Yu, in which Maggie Cheung plays Ruan as well as herself, and in which much original footage from Ruan's work appears, along with re-creations, in which respects it was very appositely double-billed by the Melbourne Cinémathèque with Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas' valentine to Cheung, in which she plays 'herself' essaying the lead character, in front of, and away from, the camera, in a deranged director's (Jean-Pierre Léaud, having a grand old time) remake of Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires...

Which is, at length, by way of saying that Kon's Millennium Actress reminds me, for all the right reasons, of Centre Stage. Pending an abundance of spare time, I will write about this at length.

Vale also fellow Japanese animator Kihachirō Kawamoto, whose stop-motion puppet works drew from Japanese folkloric traditions as well as from the inspiration and tutelage of Czech puppet maestro Jiří Trnka. He did at least live though to a ripe old age.

And, lest I forget, it's farewell too to Claude Chabrol, one of the principal kickstarters of the French New Wave, all of whose films I've so far seen I have enjoyed, all of them enough to know that I ought to have seen still more of them. Ain't that often the way?

Right. That'll do for now.

In anticipation of a proper resumption of usual services shortly,

Yours,

ALLD.