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!

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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!

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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.