That was the 60th MIFF that was – Part III: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia through to Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City

This final part of my MIFF wrap was delayed in no small part due to Melbourne's just keepin' on givin' – why, in successive nights last week in Melbourne town, I attended the resumption of the Melbourne Cinémathèque's 2011 program (two terrific films by Masahiro Shinoda); the opening of the 2011 Russian Resurrection Film Festival (a quite good steam-powered gulag action flick in Aleksei Uchitel's The Edge), and a fundraising shindig looking to get some key cast and crew of Amiel Courtin-Wilson's Hail to Venice for its imminent screening in competition at the Venice International Film Festival, the first Australian film in a decade to compete there.

While I'm yet to see Hail, I none the less wish its unassuming director and his colleagues well in their quest, and for the film to be well received. My gut feeling is that it will be, and that we'll all be hearing a lot more about Hail yet.

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And, without any further ado, what this blog post title promises I now deliver:

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest is ostensibly a policier which unfolds at a very leisurely pace not far removed from 'real time', in stark contrast to the urgency of its frustrated principals' interest in finding a crime scene in the middle of the night, well off the beaten track, in the centre of Turkey.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Beautiful, honeyed night-time cinematography – in full 'Scope, what's more – makes most of Once Upon a Time a feast for the peepers, while strong characterisations from a terrific array of character actors gently, probingly and often humorously help tease out several intriguing subtexts from some Tarantino-esque exchanges and badinage which come across far more naturalistically than in any of his films.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is ultimately rather less about a search for a body out on the Anatolian plains than it is interested in using that search as a prop for an allusive investigation into problematic aspects of life in present day Turkey (and elsewhere), including urban/rural divides; big city/small town rivalries; the extant practice of arranged marriage, and other backwards sexo-political manifestations of an often still highly patriarchal society; bureaucracy and incompetence in governance, and more besides.

A lengthy morning-after coda to the captivating nocturnal first portion of the film is less aesthetically pleasing – I would have it no other way, though, during a long autopsy sequence – but is ultimately very satisfying in its deep mining of the film's rich subtexts; the full implications of one particular character's words and actions take a good long while to set in after the closing credits have rolled. A terrific film.

Opening Night - The Fairy

I covered the 60^th MIFF's Opening Night, and its whimsy-saturated choice as curtain-raiser, The Fairy – it seems half a lifetime ago, now – as many as four Little Lies Down ago.

Outside Satan

Bruno Dumont's latest has some imagery in it I'll probably take with me to the grave – there's one very memorable, profoundly bizarre sex scene that leaves a particularly strong impression – but I doubt I'll otherwise ever revisit it.

It gives every bit the impression of being precisely the film its maker wanted it to be, but as it operates on a wavelength I just can't tune into – there's some highly abstruse religiosity that inflects the narrative's events, something which doesn't much speak to me, incorrigible heathen that I am – I can't find much to rave about beyond its beautiful landscape cinematography. The deliberate anti-performances of its leads, equal parts neo-Bressonian and, I suppose, a function of their characters' mysticised, opaque motivations, did nothing to greater endear Outside Satan to me. Is that contrary to Dumont's intentions? I can't tell. At any rate, I'll be curious to see what he does next. I can tell he knows what he's doing, even if, in this instance, I don't.

Peter Tscherkassky – Programs One and Two and a Masterclass

I raved about Peter Tscherkassky's visit to MIFF, and in particular his masterclass based around a screening of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), as many as three Little Lies Down ago. Additionally, ahead of the festival's commencement, and in feverish anticipation of his coming, I wrote a few thoughts on Tscherkassky's practice which I now have to concede, having only just become acquainted with a whole lot more of his work through MIFF's programs, only apply in fact to much, but not to all, of his work. That was a further two Little Lies Down ago.

Post Mortem

I wrote as much about Post Mortem as I will probably ever care to as few as three Little Lies Down ago.

Sodankylä Forever – The Century of Cinema

I was surprised by the fairly modest turnout at the screening I attended of Peter von Bagh's documentary, which I'd have thought would have served as irresistible cinephile-bait. This was a double shame as I'd also have liked to have seen a great many more people catching the short which preceded it, The First Interview.

(I wrote a little about The First Interview (d. Dennis Tupicoff), and my very small part in its realisation, as many as six Little Lies Down ago.)

Sodankylä Forever – The Century of Cinema

Sodankylä is a town 120 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, and is host to the Midnight Sun Film Festival, from which all of the material in this documentary – but one 90 minute portion of a 270 minute long whole, I believe – is sourced. Von Bagh is the festival's director as well as this film's, though any such contextualising information is absent from The Century of Cinema, perhaps attributable to its being but one segment of a larger, unseen whole. Instead, it gets straight into the business of presenting thoughts on the cinema, on filmmaking, and on the events of the 20^th century's influence upon both from an extraordinary roll-call of major filmmakers, as prompted by von Bagh and delivered to attendees of Midnight Sun. These excerpted interviews are occasionally interspersed with scenes of folks wandering the grounds of probably the only film festival on the planet where, outside of the cinema, the sun never stops shining (and which was founded by the Kaurismäki brothers, a noteworthy fact I don't recall The Century of Cinema mentioning either).

Visiting this festival, both for access to the wealth of talent it clearly attracts, and for its unique astrological conditions, would have to be a very special experience. Consider me tantalised; Midnight Sun looks like a shoo-in for inclusion in “101 Film Festivals You Must Attend Before You Die”.

But back for a moment to Sodankylä Forever – The Century of Cinema. I greatly enjoyed hearing from the horses' mouths anecdotes from the filmmaking frontlines, whether from Miloš Forman, Jerzy Skolimowski, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Powell, Dušan Makavejev, Sam Fuller, or from countless others. Sure, most of the filmmakers profiled were of a certain generation (and 95% were male), but many – Fuller, for example, and several filmmakers to have worked under totalitarian regimes in Central and Easterm Europe – consequently had great stories of resistance and persistence to tell, linking struggles with filmmaking with wider struggles in wartime and its aftermath, regularly reminding this viewer of Sam Fuller's famous description of the cinema in Godard's Contempt: “Film is like a battleground: It's love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion.”

Surviving Life

I seldom see any one film twice at a festival but this was always likely to prove an exception, such is my long-standing fascination with Jan Švankmajer. Furthermore, I'm learning the Czech language, so another engagement with the wordiest Švankmajer yet was always going to be as much fun as I could possibly have doing my homework ahead of my next weekly class.

Surviving Life

Happily, seeing Surviving Life a second time went some way to comforting me that I might not have been too wide of the mark in a hypothesis I advanced four Little Lies Down ago concerning whether Švankmajer has placed a Godlike entity in his film's dreamscapes, indicative perhaps of an inquiry on his part into the existence of a higher order of intelligence, much as had been striven for contact with by a number of other major figures, e.g. Tristan Tzara and William Burroughs, in their similarly frontier-probing, conscious mind-dodging art practices.

However, my second viewing prompted me to re-read what I'd first written on this film, only to find some serious shortcomings in my original articulation of this hypothesis, something which has gnawed away at me ever since, all the more so as I couldn't find time before now to right matters.

In particular, it must be mentioned that this entity I speak of, manifest as a haggard, foul-breathed old bag lady, is explicitly identified, both within the film's unreliable narrative, by the psychiatrist, and in the film's credits, as being (Evžen, the protagonist's) “super-ego”. It irks me no end that I failed to mention this the first time around, whether through tuning that out of my recollection when composing my initial appraisal or through too hastily cobbling that piece together. (Which is also to say: I can't bear to countenance the thought that I might have failed to pick up on something so obvious the first time around. And... yet?)

However, let's say that if super-ego she indeed is, then... whose? For this is not at all a clear-cut proposition. In her final manifestation (in which, compatible with my hypothesis, she proclaims herself to be known by all manner of recondite noms de Dieu, far in advance of the earthbound authority figures “Karl Marx” and “Napoléon” the psychiatrist had warned Evžen his super-ego would claim to be (correctly though, it must be said, as if in a wish fulfilled))... in her final manifestation, she is in fact appearing, and waxing omniscient, within Evžen's wife's dream.

But then, whether his wife even dreams that is up for grabs; it could well be that her dream is something Evžen had himself dreamt up in the first place. (In which case, perhaps the old crone is Evžen's super-ego after all!)

Surviving Life

With all of this play with Freudian and Jungian constructs of the human unconscious throughout, it's no surprise that the film should resolve with a variation upon that old chestnut, the primal scene. However, there's nothing pat about the superficially cliché parlaying of same to resolve Surviving Life's narrative, for there's nothing about any number of sequences leading up to those final explicative scenes which can be taken at face value. For, just as Švankmajer himself advised us in the film's introduction, he had always wanted to create a film within which the orders of reality and dream are blurred. A most disingenuous warning, it must be said: such play has long been the meat and potatoes of the Švankmajerian oeuvre. But Surviving Life might represent the first time in his work that dream has so been blurred with the 'reality' of dream, which is to say, Surviving Life is Švankmajer's Inception, albeit one rather more resistant to a definitive parsing than Christopher Nolan's blockbuster. I have already recommended to myself a further viewing, the better to sift through the devil in the details, the better to discern the godhead in the unconscious mind. This though will have to await my procuring a DVD from BontonFilm.

Tales of the Night

As an admirer of Michel Ocelot's Kirikou films, beautiful folkloric silhouette animations of a slightly adult bent, I was intrigued to see how he'd handle Tales of the Night, a compendium of six fairy tales inspired by folklore originating from every which where, each tale buoyantly conceived and enacted in turn by two projectionist-sorceror's apprentices, a young actor and a young actress, and listed in the MIFF program as suitable for ages 8 and up, “lovingly animated in silhouetted 3D”.

“Silhouetted 3D”! How on Earth was that going to be accomplished? Silhouettes can have... girth?

Well, of course they can't. The 3D in Tales in fact serves principally to add depth to the composition of its backgrounds, seldom impinging upon the foregrounded action where the various fairy tales' protagonists do their bit to prevail over whatever circumstances the two young thespians' flights of fancy have dreamt up for them(selves) in the sequences just prior.

Occasionally the fairy tales' heroes and antagonists might move along the image's Z-axis but, for the most part, it's business as usual for Ocelot; the 3D in Tales, whilst not unpleasant, doesn't really add anything to what is, happily, already a perfectly pleasant way to while away an hour-and-a-half, much in line with his previous works. That said, I'd have rathered that Tales of the Night was made, like Ocelot's earlier animations, with a slightly older audience also in mind.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

I wrote about The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye as many as three Little Lies Down ago.

The Kid With a Bike

The Kid With a Bike

The Dardenne brothers don't seem able to put a foot wrong. The Kid With a Bike is yet another terrific evocation of life on the fringes in struggletown Belgium, with a truly remarkable performance from its young lead (Thomas Doret) who plays Cyril, a boy strongly in denial of his abandonment by his father who, worse still, has not left Cyril his beloved bicycle.

Many are the adults who would like to help Cyril, but he has a terrifying propensity to bite the hands which feed him – figuratively and literally. In fact, Doret bodily throws himself so heartily into his role that I sincerely hope, for his wellbeing, that single takes were enough for the Dardennes! This all the more so as, while this film feels so real, its camerawork's dynamism and the images' compositional preciseness are such that one can't help but feel that some of its sequences must surely have taken several takes to get right. And, if so: poor Thomas! 'Cos he'd have had to have become just one big, giant bruise after a few takes of certain scenes in Kid With a Bike (and his castmates, too), such is the seeming reckless abandon with which he hurls himself about the place. (And not to forget that, at one point, he falls, with a sickening thud, out of a tall tree.)

I've gotta hand it to the Dardennes; they sure know how to work the smoke and mirrors to make it look like they're doing absolutely nothing of the sort, because, after all: seeing is believing, is it not? Oh, if only more filmmakers had such powers and knew to use them for such good! And so doing produced films which, like The Kid With a Bike and others of the Dardennes' before it, actually matter, actually manage to immerse the viewer in an appreciably 'real' world, and so consequently resonate long after the viewing is over.

The Mill and the Cross

Lech Majewski made for a very locquacious guest at this year's MIFF and it was fun to hear him pontificate at great tangential length on, for example, the very specific need for clouds shot in New Zealand (!) to round out his Breughel work-in-progress fantasia, The Mill and the Cross (the work being Breughel's 1564 painting “The Way to Cavalry”, the actor cast as Breughel... none other than Rutger Hauer).

The film itself, however, was hard to love, no matter how beguiling and/or grotesque some of its Inquisitorial and Passion play imagery, nor how intriguing and lofty its central conceit of presenting to us Breughel's epic painting, under construction, as a series of alfresco tableaux vivants, set against backdrops derived from actual Breughel paintings, each with umpteen superimposed planes of period-approved goings-on offset against it, with the allegorical aspects of “The Way to Cavalry”'s scenes being explained by Breughel as he goes about composing them.

Charlotte Rampling and Michael York make appearances too in what proves ultimately to be a curio more interesting in theory and in principle than in the experience of actually viewing it.

The Slap

Seeing the first two episodes of a television series soon to be broadcast is not something I would ordinarily make a priority of at a film festival, but I'm very glad I troubled to catch episodes 1 and 2 of The Slap on the biggest of the big screens in the Greater Union, before a full house, at this year's MIFF. For, atop enjoying those two episodes on their considerable merits, both in and of themselves as well as in successfully adapting portions of a book I greatly esteem, by an author, Christos Tsiolkas, whom I consider to be a really stand-up guy (and cinephile), seeing The Slap at MIFF has given me plenty of pause for thought on how narrow now is the gulf between television and cinema.

The Slap simply looked terrific projected onto the big screen. And of course it did – why wouldn't it, after all, when the present day TV industry standard, HD video, is what so many 'films' are now being shot on? The image quality is just superb; HD video needn't – and here, didn't – lose anything by being projected onto a cinema screen. And then there's The Slap's widescreen aspect ratio, something the cinema lorded over TV for the longest time, but which it no longer can claim bragging rights over. 16:9 is the norm for television now too.

There's certainly an irony in that, in television's earlier days, many shows were shot on film. And heck, live studio broadcasts were often filmed off television sets by studios and home viewers alike in order to record them for posterity!

Yet again, it is proven, that the more some things change, the more they stay the same.

Ruminations about the mutability of media aside, I'm really looking forward to the remaining episodes' broadcast later in the year on the ABC. Auntie's onto a winner with The Slap, and no mistake!

The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse

What an epic piece of transcendental miserabilism Béla Tarr latest (last?) film is. Some – if they even lasted the distance – might grizzle about The Turin Horse's amounting to little more than an exercise in aestheticising misery, but I'll have no truck with any such sanctimony here.

I was utterly mesmerised by The Turin Horse; I was there, in the image, windswept away. Inexorable, elemental forces were at play. Such beauty, such grace!, in the camera, gliding first this way and then that, pausing time to time to take stock of the precious little 'of interest' going on within a rough-hewn stone house in relief against a furious windstorm without, occasionally tiptoeing incrementally towards a window or doorway to get a better look at the deathly inhospitable land beyond, a world of increasingly little succour for the weatherbeaten father and daughter whose lives are the stuff of inescapable drudgery (and easy parody per this year's celebrated and well-travelled MIFF trailers), depicted in miniature and yet at great length, in The Turin Horse.

I've said it before – nobody, but nobody, gives long take like Béla Tarr. There are but 30 beautifully fluid, staggeringly well orchestrated shots in all of The Turin Horse's two-and-a-half hour runtime. That hoary old cliché about the camera being a character unto itself has seldom resounded so strongly. The camerawork finds a perfect accomplice in the score, in which variations upon the one figure are repeated time and again, its intensity swelling, pulsating, yet also sympathetic to the film's diegetic sound – when that house's door opens, the howl of the gale is just extraordinary – you are there, just as the sound of the wind always had been too, even with the door shut, integrated into, and perfectly modulated with the composed elements of, the overall soundscape.

Seeing The Turin Horse strongly reminded me of the Melbourne Cinémathèque's screening of Victor Sjöström's The Wind (1928) a few years ago when, in an inspired selection, it ran the music of the Dirty Three as The Wind's soundtrack, in turn reminding me of the Dirty Three's spine-tingling set at the Meredith Music Festival several years previous when the band and the elements were just as one. Supernatural forces certainly felt like they were at play that day; in The Turin Horse, similarly, an experience far transcending that of merely going to see a movie is on offer. Seeing it at MIFF – being it at MIFF – was an altogether transcendental experience, and one I'll long cherish.

Tomboy

Destined for release a little later this year through Rialto, Céline Sciamma's Tomboy is a lovely film on queer childhood graced by terrific, naturalistic performances. The kids in it are just superb, and the girl playing the title character's little sister is just adorable without any attempts on the director's part to imbue her with a contrived precocity as is so gratingly common in American TV and cinema in particular. I wrote a little more about Tomboy four Little Lies Down ago.

Zebraman 2: Attack On Zebra City

I wrote on this preposterous, throwaway but fairly enjoyable effort from Takashi Miike as many as four Little Lies Down ago. His other MIFF 2011 film, the samurai flick 13 Assassins, will be in release around these parts in just a few weeks and that I'm really looking forward to; I hear tell he doesn't wink at his audience even the once in it. Time will tell.

That was the 60th MIFF that was – Part II: Cold Fish through to Oki's Movie

Here's Part II of an A-Z of my 2011 MIFF, resuming from where I left off on Wednesday.

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Cold Fish

You can read my thoughts on Sion Sono's calculatedly unhinged Cold Fish as few as two Little Lies Down ago. My getting around to his other MIFF 2011 film, Guilty of Romance, will have to wait for its Madman DVD release.

Essential Killing

Essential Killing

I had very much looked forward to the second feature of Jerzy Skolimowski's comeback, and notwithstanding the interference run by some very inconsiderate, wouldn't-shut-the-fuck-up dingbats I had the misfortune to find myself sitting beside at the Forum, I enjoyed it very much.

Vincent Gallo, as Mohammed, a desperate Taliban fighter on the run in a palpably very alien environment – a wintry Eastern European hinterland rather than the desert rabbit warrens and plains of his flashbacks – puts his body on the line every bit as much as Skolimowski himself was wont to do, on either side of the camera, in the production of his earlier films. And hence: a First Blood for the 2010s, one where shades of grey in the morality-viewer identification nexus could scarcely be any shadier or greyer.

Highly accomplished sound design considerably elevates Essential Killing. In an incident early on in the film, Mohammed is subjected to an appreciably eardrum-pulverising attack which gives him about as awful a case of tinnitus as I'd care to imagine. The profundity of its effect upon him is very well conveyed and serves as an elegant aural metaphor for his inability to make sense of his plight, post-capture, in which he is at first taken to an Abu Ghraib-esque prison to be interrogated by thuggish American military – the piercing ringing in his head completely drowns out every word barked at him by his interlocutors, which he might very well not have been able to understand anyway – only to then be rendered to what we, but not he, can tell to be an Eastern European backwater, where, no matter how much of his hearing might return, he even more certainly wouldn't be able to understand anybody he should meet anyway. Whereupon he sets forth to make good an unlikely escape which will push his adherence to a halal diet to the very limit...

Fruit of Paradise

You can read my largely ecstatic response to the double-billing of Věra Chytilová's Fruit of Paradise and Jan Švankmajer's Surviving Life as few as three Little Lies Down ago, though were you to do so, I'd ask that you please bear in mind that I feel I need yet to qualify an ill articulated assertion or two I made back then, and about Surviving Life in particular. This is something I will do asap, in Part III of my MIFF 2011 A-Z.

Innocent Saturday

Alexander Mindadze's film, set around the discovery by a young member of the Communist Party faithful that all is not at all well with the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, really rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way at this year's MIFF, and while I can't say I loved it, I believe I can at least see where it's coming from.

The chief problem had with it seems to have been the ostensible idiocy of the conduct of the film's lead, Valerij (Anton Shagin), who fails to skip town with a pretty young thing by the narrowest of margins – a broken heel robs them of a ticket the hell outta there on evidently the only passenger train leaving Prypiat, a town an atom's split away from the smouldering reactor – and then foregoes any further wholehearted attempts to leave town, instead falling intractably back in with a bunch of knockabout good-time locals, including some erstwhile bandmates he'd previously fallen very heavily out with. (Matter of fact, he'd denounced some of them!)

Instead of fleeing, knowing that every second he and his friends remain in town further imperils, or at least, compromises, their very lives – as well as those, it is understood, of successive generations – they instead all throw themselves headlong into the bacchanalia surrounding a party for a triple wedding, as evidently do too the films' cameraman (Oleg “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days” Mutu) and editors Dasha Danilova and Ivan Lebedev – the screen is seldom still for more than a few frames at a time!

But here's the thing: Valerij's mannered, seemingly self-destructive conduct is not in fact so very odd; there's tonnes of this sort of gallows saturnalia in cinema produced and/or set in the states of yesteryear's Soviet Bloc. In, for example, the 1960s cinema of Slovakian auteur Juraj Jakubisko, or in the more recent cinema of the more celebrated Emir Kusturica, as well as in the films of many others, there is reflected clearly (and, from my own experiences in that neck of the woods, most assuredly!) something of the fatalistic character of the peoples in those parts of the world. For these are people who, if go down they must, they'll go down swinging...

(An aside: Anton Shagin is saddled in Innocent Saturday with a haircut-moustache combo so ghastly (but appreciably historically accurate) that I completely failed to recognise him as the actor who was so terrific as Mels in Valeriy Todorovskiy's absolutely fantastic musical of a couple of years ago, Hipsters. Oh won't some kindly soul release that around these parts on DVD? Must I do everything myself?

International Shorts – Misfits

Las Palmas

There was a clear stand-out in this fairly strong thematic compilation of shorts, and that was Swedish animator Johannes “Puppetboy” Nyholm's ingenious and utterly hilarious Las Palmas, in which several marionettes staffing a holiday resort, patronised by several other marionettes, have to contend with the havoc wrought by one most unruly tourist, played by a (live, human) baby!

Johannes Nyholm has uploaded an excerpt from the wonderful Las Palmas to Vimeo – this you have to see!

Two other strong works also came from Sweden, both giving the impression of being calling cards from directors keen to make features. Adam Berg's In makes for a very atmospheric and suspenseful several minutes mostly spent watching two men fumble about in the dark in a railway tunnel which seems to have more than the stock standard number of mysteries deep within it, while Hugo Lilja's gripping, half hour-long The Unliving riffs on the idea of zombies becoming a new proletariat, and is only just beginning to get to the meatiest of issues surrounding the difficult logistics and ethics of this scenario when it ends, too soon by half.

Still, The Unliving is so assured a production that I wouldn't be at all surprised if it reappears in its entirety within a feature-length extrapolation upon itself, so confidently are its themes, narrative directions and aesthetics handled.

The last of this package worth mentioning is Jonathan Caouette's All Flowers in Time, a happy little mindfuck of a short in which Chloë Sevigny clearly enjoys herself no end and a certain amount of wry social commentary gets utterly swamped by a relentless ADHD cavalcade of video art silly buggerising about. Still, boring it isn't.

International Shorts – O Canada!

The main attraction of this shorts package was always going to be the Spike Jonze/Arcade Fire collaboration, Scenes from the Suburbs. My anticipation was high; my expectations, however, were not met.

I probably should have read more from the get-go into the “Scenes” of the title – it hints at an excerptedness, an incompleteness, to match what the film ultimately feels like it delivers. It's most unsatisfying; Scenes from the Suburbs feels like it's just scraped the surface of a story that needs another hour for its telling.

The premise is well set – it concerns a few teens' coming of age in the thick of inter-suburban warfare, with the action unfolding at a measured pace and with songs from Arcade Fire's “The Suburbs” album intermittently underscoring the narrative. Time and care has been taken to ensure that the milieu and antagonisms are well established; the characters well fleshed out, the songs well used...

But unfortunately, half an hour in, Scenes from the Suburbs just ends, utterly anticlimactically, apropos of nothing in particular, just as its narrative was starting to take matters into interesting directions. It's most frustrating, and suggestive that the entire enterprise was really not as well conceived as it might have been.

Of the other shorts in “O Canada!”, Nadia Litz's How to Rid Your Lover of a Negative Emotion Caused by You! is a well performed, blackly funny two-hander, pleasingly following through to a satisfying conclusion a gross-out literalisation of new age notions concerning the benefits of the expulsion of negative emotions from one's, and, in a couple, one another's, bodies. And two short shorts involving trips to medical professionals, Anne Émond's single-shot Sophie Lavoie and Martin Thibaudeau's Cold Blood, both successfully subvert expectations to generate genuine pathos.

Into Eternity

I've already written as much as I care to on Into Eternity as few as two Little Lies Down ago.

Jeonju Digital Project 2011

Jean-Marie Straub's An Heir is unmistakeably a Straub film, for better and for worse. It certainly won't win anyone over who's seen anything previously from the Straubs and found it too austere and mealy-mouthed for their liking. Still: there's a tracking shot through beautiful Alsatian countryside to enliven An Heir's ponderous literary proceedings, which are in all likelihood allusively apropos of matters I'm ill-equipped to grasp or comment upon at the time of writing.

In To the Devil, Claire Denis has pre-emptively produced a documentary DVD extra for an as yet unfilmed feature of hers set around the alluvial borders of French Guyana and Surinam and focusing on the exploits of a gold miner of singular renown in the area, one whom you might say is something of “a character”. At least, he certainly will be once Denis and actor Jean-Christophe Folly, accompanying her on this shoot, are through with him. Interesting, but only to a point, and that point's one a few minutes shy of To the Devil's 45 minute runtime.

José Luis Guerín's Memories of a Morning is far and away the most engaging of the three films in the Jeonju Digital Project 2011, a veritable Rashomon ad absurdum, if you will, in which the factual death by suicidal plummet of a testifiably mediocre violinist in Barcelona is borne posthumous documentary witness through the recollections of a great number of neighbouring apartment-dwellers and shopkeepers.

While Memories is concerned with a tragic incident, and umpteen different takes upon it, it's very charming and funny and paints a delightful picture of modern-day suburban Barcelonan life. It comes highly recommended, though I'm not sure how easy it'll be to track down, not least for a fair while, anyhow.

Melancholia

Lars von Trier's latest film is a strident rejoinder to anybody who might ever think it wise to tell you when you're depressed that you should simply get over it – that, whatever it is, “it's not the end of the world”. Because, in fact, it fucking well is.

Melancholia

Just as with his notorious Antichrist (2009), von Trier opens proceedings with a sequence of supremely beautifully composed, ultra-slo-mo images, though here in exquisite full colour rather than in Antichrist's equally beauteous black-and-white. And while the film asserts that it's in two parts – "Part One" principally concerning a wedding which goes comically, then simply, very sadly, wrong, and "Part Two" the imminent apocalypse, beginning just a few days after the wedding – it really must be considered a film of parts in number three. For the introductory sequence features imagery synthesising elements of both the other two parts, with that imagery indigenous, as it will turn out, to neither of them, such that one can't help but suspect that the introduction must be a prognostication on the part of the film's melancholic protagonist, the bride Justine (oh, The Misfortunes of Virtue indeed!), of the apocalyptic events to come – in fact, she even explicitly big-notes her powers of clairvoyance at one point in the narrative proper – and hence: her debilitating, wedding-sabotaging despair, on what should have been the happiest day of her life. Because, when you know Melancholia to be bearing down upon you – for that is the name of the planet destined to collide with, and destroy, the Earth – what can you do other than play into its hands and fall irretrievably into despond?

Kirsten Dunst is, as everybody has said, very good indeed as Justine; a fine supporting cast has everyone from Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt through to Kiefer Sutherland and Udo Kier (as a dismayed wedding planner) really enjoying themselves as well.

A Melancholia and Innocent Saturday double-bill would make for an interesting inter-film conversation. But while I can only mildly enthuse over Innocent Saturday; I won't equivocate one little bit on my feelings for Melancholia – I think it's grand. One of the best at this year's fest, fer sure.

Oki's Movie

I wish I'd also seen Hong's The Day He Arrives at this year's MIFF, but, for now, all I have to say about the cinema of Hong Sang-soo can be found in a blog post, featuring a couple of paragraphs on Oki's Movie, had two Little Lies Down ago.

That was the 60th MIFF that was – Part I: Autoluminescent through to Closing Night

It had been amongst my best intentions to post several dispatches from the frontlines of the 60^th Melbourne International Film Festival but, too soon!, the end of the festival was upon me and I find that my blog post tally for MIFF 2001, including this post (but not, of course, including its implicit sequels), runs to but five instalments.

Still, I have no regrets, especially as one of my other outlets for waxing cinephilic, 3RRR's “SmartArts” program afforded me, in the absence last Thursday of its ailing host Richard Watts, but in the presence of kindly Triple R legend Tim Thorpe, an unprecedented 45 minutes of airtime to talk about all things MIFF. (I'll be on again tomorrow morning, too, at 11.30, with Richard back in the fold, to prattle on a little more about the 60^th MIFF.)

Meanwhile though, here's Part I of an A-Z of my 2011 MIFF. More will follow in coming days.

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Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard
Dirs: Lynn-Maree Milburn & Richard Lowenstein
Present for a post-screening Q&A: Richard Lowenstein; Genevieve McGuckin, and Mick Harvey

Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard

And so I begin with, in fact, the final film I saw at MIFF2011, and a very satisfying way it was indeed to close the festival (bar the shouting... of some last drinks).

One surefire testimony to an effective rockumentary is whether it inspires the viewer to want to further investigate the recording career of the documentees. I'm only really familiar with the late Howard's (no relation) early work with The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, but I'm now very keen to get better acquainted with his latter day projects, and you can call me a Jenny-come-lately all you like!

Instigated by Howard himself, who was aware at the time that he mightn't have terribly long left to live owing to a liver disease likely linked (if not by this film, directly) to a many years-long heroin habit, this heartfelt documentary's many pleasures include a wide-ranging selection of talking heads paying tribute to his influence upon the art of rock guitar, an influence which has clearly hitherto gone under-acknowledged. Additionally, I really appreciated Wim Wenders' appearance, which shed some light on how post-Birthday Party bands of both Nick Cave's and Rowland S. Howard's wound up featuring prominently in his 1987 classic Wings of Desire, something I'd long been curious about.

I saw Autoluminescent with a dear old friend in Matt Boyle, a most apt person to see this film with indeed as, way back in the mid-'90s, he and I performed some volunteer work at the then Performing Arts Museum, auditing its unruly film and video collection ahead of handing it over to the then Cinemedia. Now, come 2011 and lo!, and behold, if that isn't in the early moments of Autoluminescent some of the very footage Matt and I excavated during our PAM audit, in which a very young Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, and friend ham it up hilariously in a thoroughly ramshackle (presumed mock-)interview.

Volunteer work – the gift to others that often, and at the most surprising moments, keeps on giving back!

A Useful Life
Dir: Federico Veiroj

A Useful Life

An enjoyable featurette in which filmmaker and Senses of Cinema founder Bill Mousoulis' doppelgänger Jorge (Jorge Jellinek) learns that, yes, while Cinema is Life (he has toiled away for 25 years at the (fictionalised) Uruguayan Cinematheque in Montevideo ahead of its (equally fictionalised) close, due to its having become financially unsustainable), when Life becomes Cinema – as, for example, upon the now jobless Jorge's being let loose into the real world, with his every action newly being given a rousing, big band soundtrack (and who hasn't fantasised about that?), and with those actions now even extending to indulging in a little carefree stairway hoofing – things can take a turn for the even better. Because, you never know – you might just get a root.

Flip crassness aside, A Useful Life is a really charming film about cinephilia. It was paired with The Little Tailor (d. Louis Garrel), another film steeped in a love of the seventh art but about which I have much less kind things to say. The Little Tailor is not bad, per se, but to anybody wanting to re-live the joys of the French New Wave, they're still to be found fresher in the readily accessible early films of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol, etc (though it's early Godard and Truffaut in particular that The Little Tailor is channelling). Disappointing.

Animation Shorts

Kubla Khan

In a mostly underwhelming compilation of recent animated work, Joan C. Gratz's Kubla Khan stood out, with Gratz's psychedelically fluid claymation, rendered in her patentedly painterly style, a fine match for an accompanying recitation of William Taylor Coleridge's opium-sozzled poem. Hooray! – you can watch it here.

The one Australian short in this package was Aww Jeez (d. Michael Greaney), also a claymation and which got some easy laughs from riffing on a scenario in which an adolescent Jesus Christ is babysat by a rehabilitated Satan, with their stickybeak neighbour, Richard Dawkins, getting a droll word or two in edgeways.

Artavazd Pelechian Shorts

This program of three films was unreservedly one of the clear highlights of this year's MIFF, and you can read more about my thoughts on it two Little Lies Down ago.

Beginners

I feel a little bad about rubbishing a film which, it has been made well known, is a project very dear and personal to its maker, festival guest Mike Mills. But there's no dodging it: well made as it might be, Beginners lays on thick a self-conscious, greeting cards level of earnest quirkiness that, for mine, sabotages all hope it has of ingratiating itself on any sort of emotionally resonant level, notwithstanding good performances from a twinkle-eyed Christopher Plummer, a Mona Lisa-lite Mélanie Laurent and a mopey Ewan McGregor. Poor McGregor really doesn't have it easy as the film's lead; he's saddled with occasionally having to converse with a dog, to name but one of several ghastly, trite conceits and cloying narrative devices Mills imposes upon him and this film, to its considerable detriment.

Rabid dogs – talking or otherwise – couldn't have dragged me to the “Talking Pictures” conversation with Mills after seeing this film. Thing is, though, that I know other people will like Beginners for the very same reasons I didn't. I'll try not to begrudge them that.

Black Venus

Black Venus

Post-colonial feminist film theory has a new standard-bearer. Abdellatif Kechiche's follow-up to his superb The Secret of the Grain was my feel-bad hit of the festival, an unrelenting, unrepentingly harrowing and very long (159 minutes) depiction of one South African woman's suffering at the hands of two men who enchained her to a hateful, grotesquely exploitative and alcoholic life as the “Hottentot Venus”, an early 19^th century freakshow attraction, with first one of them manipulatively parading her before London's incredulous lower classes and then the other, even more forcibly, mock-setting her upon the Parisienne aristocracy. Alas, even worse indignities were to follow.

I generally bristle at talk of “brave” performances, as such is used all too often to describe when some Hollywood lovely is merely cast against type in some sort of halfway unflattering role (perhaps appearing without make-up (the horror!) or as a dreadful homosexual (further horror!)) But Yahima Torres is simply extraordinary as Saartjie Baartman, a role which calls for her to exhibit exactly the sort of behaviours – and to a similarly uncomfortable extent, the anatomy – which so tawdrily fascinated audiences rich and poor in the early 1810s, just as they did even more so those French anatomists who were keen to announce the “Hottentot Venus”, with her very pronounced buttocks and elongated labia minora, as the “missing link” between the animal kingdom and mankind.

Really strong stuff, I doubt I could ever bring myself to watch Black Venus again, but power to Abdellatif Kechiche for making it in the first place.

Class Relations

You can read my thoughts on Straub-Huillet's take on Kafka's Amerika as few as two Little Lies Down ago.

Closing Night – Drive

I should perhaps consider myself a little fortunate, but, unlike on Opening Night, this time I was where the action was, in cavernous old Cinema 6 in the Greater Union complex. Having missed her Opening Night address, I was happy to catch Michelle Carey's close-of-festival address to the freeloading and faithful, which inevitably riffed a little on the 60^th anniversary of the august festival she is newly Artistic Director of.

Her speech considered the manifold ways in which the business of running a film festival has changed over the 60 years since MIFF emerged out in the Dandenongs. Certainly, it's changed terrifically even in just the last few with, for example, almost half of the 'films' being projected at this year's MIFF being done so digitally – just as more and more of them are being produced using digital technologies in the first place.

The media landscape has changed very dramatically in even more recent times, too, and the one bum note of Carey's gracious wrap-up speech – little understood then as such by most of the crowd there, I suspect – relates to these very developments. It came when Carey acknowledged the sterling efforts of MIFF's blogathon heroes, leading to a well deserved round of applause for the six intrepid (foolhardy?) new media exemplars who'd each of them committed at the festival's outset, for no recompense, to endeavour to see, and regularly write upon, at least 60 films (or rather, “sessions”) during the festival. Sadly, however, none of those six were in Cinema 6 to receive their thank-you but rather had been, as had I on Opening Night, shunted off to one of the smaller cinemas at Greater Union, where once again no transmission was made of the events taking place in Cinema 6 and folks were left waiting in the dark, so to speak, for the film to begin.

One of the blogathonners, Luke Buckmaster, has already been vocal in his understandable disgruntlement at this careless slighting of the time and energies he and his fellow bloggers had devoted to the festival and, by extension, of an all-too-conceivable concomitant first principle undervaluing on the festival's part of press operating for non-traditional media outlets.

Myself, I think any arts organisation which still presumes traditional media to somehow be inherently superior to new media should be disabused of this notion pronto and not just because it's not, ipso facto, correct, but also because it's surely in these organisations' best interests to be mindful that coverage of their events in the new media world doesn't have limited currency the way print media can. Bad press nowadays can stay bad press for a very, very long time. Add to that the immediacy with which news and opinion can now be widely (and unpredictably) dispersed, wholly removed from the hidebound publication schedules of traditional media, and I think MIFF would be very wise to give a good deal of consideration to how it strategises its new media initiatives for next year's edition, with especial consideration necessary as to how it looks after those it engages with who work within that realm.

Drive

But let's put that behind us now and move onto the Closing Night film, Drive.

Nicolas Winding Refn's latest, Drive has an impassive protagonist in Ryan Gosling's Driver not a million miles – if several hundred years – removed from that of his previous film, Valhalla Rising.

Quite a few parts Jef Costello (Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï (1967)), the taciturn Driver works in Hollywood as... a driver, making a few extra quid on the side doing the odd getaway.

He'd probably get away with it, too, if it weren't for his fancying the woman (Carey Mulligan) at the end of the corridor on the floor of the apartment block where he lives. It transpires that her husband, immediately upon his release from jail, is being set up to take a fall by local mobsters, a fall which will threaten to take the Driver down as well.

There's a little bit more to the plot than that, but some of it's just the stuff of loose ends at any rate, and whether or not those ends get tied up is less interesting to contemplate than the film's aesthetics, which, with more than a gentle tip of a Trilby, harken brightly back to 1980s Michael Mann equally as to the heyday of film noir; one scene especially is very highly reminiscent of Robert Aldrich's classic Kiss Me Deadly (1955). But then, as the beardy grand old doyen of Australian film crit, David Stratton told Cinema 6 in an anecdote introducing the screening, this should come as no surprise. For Refn is a cinema brat, regularly taken along to Cannes from an early age by an uncle in the business.

A lot of fun, Drive isn't, however, for the squeamish; the violence in it, certainly played to some extent for laughs, is sudden, bloody and unapologetically brutal.

But those who like their films cine-literate, along Tarantino-esque lines, and who missed it at MIFF will still have an opportunity to get a real kick out of Drive when it hits cinemas in Melbourne mid-October.

Gleaning the Cube: Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies

Twentieth century painting has leapt ahead and left cinema way behind. Cinema hasn't even reached its Cubist period yet.

– Peter Greenaway, in Vernon Gras and Marguerite Gras (eds.), Peter Greenaway: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000, p. 132.

This famous Greenaway-ism couldn't help but come straight to mind when I sat down to watch Arne Glimcher's 2008 featurette Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies, a documentary studded with stars of the arts world and the academy which, irrespective of whether its director was aware of Greenaway's well-travelled quip, nonetheless stands in stark, if roundabout, opposition to it.

With regular interpolations from talking heads, Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (herein P&B) traces encounters Picasso and Braque had – or are conjectured to have had – with the early moving picture shows, leading to lots of surmising from the likes of Tom “cinema of attractions” Gunning, painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, Martin Scorsese and many others that cinema, one of several extraordinary new technologies that, as Scorsese intones in the introduction, “promised the annihilation of time and space, as it was known”, must necessarily have been a precursor to cubism's own reconfigurative challenges to the norms of space-time.

That's right: the central thesis of P&B is nothing less than that the advent ca. 1907 of cubism, one of modernism's great flag-bearers, might never have been were it not for inspiration drawn from an art form then so in its infancy that it would be many years before it would even come to be begrudgingly considered an art form at all. (cf. computer gaming presently.)

Let's consider a few of the arguments for:

In P&B, Julian Schnabel asserts that cubist painting clearly bears the influence of film in that, as with the moving image, it requires time to digest. One can't simply look at cubist art and read it instantaneously (the unavoidable and rather dodgy implication being that one can at visual art forms pre-dating cubism).

Picasso's Woman with Mandolin (1910)

Painter Eric Fischl suggests a little more convincingly that the play of light upon largely monochromatic cubist paintings finds an analogue in – and so therefore perhaps betrays a debt to – the play of light emanating from a projector as it throws black-and-white imagery upon a screen (upon a canvas, if you will) umpteen times per second.

And eminent Picasso biographer John Richardson makes much of parallels between a cinematic close-up and the claustrophobically large heads barely contained by the frames of certain of Picasso's paintings. Well, while these parallels are interesting, I should immediately note that film grammar didn't commonly extend to use of facial close-ups around the time of cubism's birth, and that the close-up, as likely pioneered by Alice Guy Blaché, while an innovation more or less contemporaneous with cubism, was nonetheless one whose time had not yet come...

Schnabel, Fischl and Richardson's assertions aside, P&B makes concessions to the received wisdom that other developments in the painterly arts directly influenced cubism: most significantly, the geometrical approach undertaken by Paul Cézanne. P&B also posits other antecedents to cubism: the 'fanning' of forms in Picasso's cubist paintings might well have been inspired by his regular exposure to the coded manoeuvring of fans by women in his home country. And the often imitated – and yes, often filmed – serpentine dance pioneered by Loïe Fuller (some spectacular footage of which, beautifully hand-tinted to emulate the effect of the lighting employed as an integral part of its performance, features in the documentary as well as just below), is also cited for the billowing fluidity of transient forms it generated.

It has to be said then that the documentary does not – perhaps can not – make an altogether compelling case for cubism's debt to the fledgling art of cinema. To weigh in too heavily to that argument is not, however, to focus on what for me is most interesting, is most telling, about this documentary.

For mine, the most illuminating aspect of Glimcher's film comes from its incorporation of a great many clips from several of early cinema's most important figures. It is these clips that form the most revelatory part of P&B, not because many of them are unfamiliar (though many are), but rather that, on reflection, many of them appear so much more radical than that which is commonly the stuff of cinema today, 100+ years and no few brushes with postmodernism later, and with the cinema so long enshrined now as an art form that its death is commonly proclaimed. Yet the clips in P&B of 'trick' films from the likes of Georges Méliès, Segundo de Chomón, J. Stuart Blackton (see Princess Nicotine (1909), just below), Ferdinand Zecca, Thomas Edison, et al, so full of joie de vivre in their self-consciously ingenious play with the kinematographic apparatus, appear so very much more modern than does, say, present day “Tradition of Quality” Oscar-bait like The King's Speech (d. Tom Hooper) and even, I would argue, Black Swan, the latter much ballyhooed as the work of a “visionary director” (Darren Aronofsky) but which, as I shall contend, is in no way a visionary film, with all the suggestions of revolutionary content and/or form that such an epithet connotes, but which is rather, formally and narratively, a highly conventional one.

In fact, when reflecting upon my recent experiences viewing The King's Speech, Black Swan and several other trumpeted mainstream releases in the course of my reviewing duties and in the lead-up to the awards season, I am struck that, to paraphrase Edmund Blackadder: it's as if “[modernism] was just something that happened to other people”.

Martin Scorsese knows something of what I speak. In P&B – his ubiquity is almost now to film history documentaries what Bono's is to music ones, albeit rather more welcome – Scorsese explains overlong his difficulty in translating to film instructions from the end of William Monahan's screenplay for The Departed: “and then a strange thing happens, a rat comes out...” How ever does one these days evoke strangeness on film? How does one aspire to produce a moment of poetry to order for a Hollywood blockbuster?

How indeed! Yet, extraordinary, is it not, that well over a hundred years into cinema's ascendancy, one of the acknowledged great masters of film struggles to produce that which was the bread-and-butter of primitive cinema? And has to look back to a film made before the turn of the 20^th century, Méliès' La danse du feu (1899), for guidance?

La danse du feu, incorporating elements of serpentine dance.

Let's come back to Black Swan, and contemplate it alongside Dario Argento's classic Suspiria (1977), a film often being mentioned in the same breath, and another film I've viewed only recently (on DVD) which Black Swan carries many echoes of, Juraj Herz's Morgiana (1972).

As is probably now common knowledge, Black Swan concerns Nina (Natalie Portman), an uptight ballerina obsessed with perfection who desperately wants to be cast in the featured dancer role in a production of Swan Lake. The white swan incarnate – all fragile beauty and innocence, all Nina needs do to land the role she yearns for, according to the exasperated advisement of her sleazy, cod English-speaking, Euro-pudding refugee director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), is get in touch with her inner Black Swan – her sexual self, her impulsive self. She needs to surrender to being, and ease off on all her frigid striving towards becoming.

Black Swan

However, the more she looks to embrace the black swan within, the more she becomes unhinged. Severely sexually repressed, a la Carole (Catherine Deneuve) in Polanski's Repulsion (1965), Nina's environment and those who people it intermittently and increasingly become mocking, threatening. And thus the film's narrative ostensibly becomes more and more ambiguous and fragmented and episodes within it more hallucinatory: is what we're seeing what Nina's actually experiencing? Where does Nina's reality end and paranoid fantasy begin?

I would assert, however, that Black Swan lets rip with episodic bursts of delirium only in the service of advancing the film's narrative. Black Swan's is a wholly subjective delirium, not delirium for delirium's sake. No matter how sophisticated its play with modes of “reality”, nor how many games of “if this, then... that?” that might needs be played in wake of viewing it in an attempt to identify and reconcile the phantastical elements of its protagonist's journey with those grounded in “reality”, the better to futilely hope to arrive at a definitive reading of the film's narrative, Black Swan the film just isn't delirious.

Morgiana

Consider Morgiana, with which Black Swan rhymes in several respects, most notably in that both posit a dialectical, literally black-and-white opposition between forces of purity and forces of wickedness across the battleground of a single white female body (in Black Swan, that of its protagonist; in Morgiana, that of the one actress (Iva Janžurová) occupying two roles).

Morgiana

Now, there are certainly sequences where the expressionism and derangement infusing the whole film is expressly subjective (if often bizarre: for example, though we don't know this at first, certain beautiful, bouncing, extreme wide-angle camera manoeuvrings represent the POV of the film's eponym... a Siamese cat!). And conversely, Black Swan does conspicuously apply a few impressionistic strategies to generate mood and thrills exceeding the simple need to communicate the fragility of Nina's mind and body. Occasionally, for example, it's the camera, rather than Nina, that pirouettes during a dance sequence. But that is as nothing compared to Morgiana which, far exceeding any narrative expedient to convey the two sisters' mental disintegration, pitches for a hallucinatory heightenedness throughout. A la Suspiria, Morgiana parlays an unrelentingly portentous soundtrack which, underscoring its truly loopy dialogue delivered with such camp aplomb, is a fine match for its consistently fish-eye-popping visuals, generating and sustaining an oneiric atmosphere and an air of unreal menace for its entire running time. Morgiana and Suspiria are true children of Gunning's cinema of attractions, hearkening back to modernism's heyday, playing and appealing tirelessly to the gallery, neither film pretending for one moment to present a world that demands it be believed in, just one that demands it be marvelled at.

Black Swan, for all its bouquets and descents into madness, is a very traditional film. It has its attractions, its moments of spectacle, but they're steeped in a whole different sensibility, aligned with a Bordwellian Classical Hollywood Narrative tradition, privileging a seamless, mechanical narrative – never mind how unreliable the narrator – over matters of style, mood and atmospherics. Lest there be any doubt, Thomas Leroy truly gives the game away. For most of the film his sleazy characterisation is so arch and his accent so ripe that you might think he's aiming to hit as high a water mark of camp unreality as Alida Valli's toothsomely demented ballet instructor, Miss Tanner in Suspiria. But late in the film Leroy, who until this point had spoken only in heavily accented English, storms out of a rehearsal muttering furiously in French, which sadly explains away – or at least, is clearly meant to – both his manner and his cod English and the daft lines he speaks in it. He (“Thomas Leroy”) had been French all along! That explains it!

Contrastingly to Black Swan, both Morgiana and Suspiria have perfectly reliable narrators, but their narratives are so utterly batshit crazy bonkers and their attractions so foregrounded that the narratives, and characters' psychological motivations, are borderline irrelevant. The experience is the thing: the witting awareness that one is watching a fucking movie, and it's fucking incredible!

Suspiria

Yeah, so here's sending a big yah boo, bollocks to the grimly perfunctory way narrative is advanced in so much contemporary cinema; the correspondingly perfunctory mise en scène employed by its makers has robbed the moving picture shows of so much of what made them so magical, so marvellous, in cinema's halcyon pioneer years. Privileging “closed romantic realism”, as Mark Cousins somewhat pejoratively coined it in his The Story of Film, has rendered so many of today's moving picture shows so much less attractive, and, incredibly, yes, so much less modern than films from back in those early 20^th century days when cameras very seldom moved, pantomimical performers routinely stared down the barrel of the camera to ingratiate themselves to the audience, and seamlessly incorporated CGI was not even the nightmarish pipe dream of a pioneering stop-motion animator's pipe dream...

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Back now to Greenaway's gripe that opened this piece. “Cinema hasn't even reached its Cubist period yet”, says he.

Bollocks, says I.

Just for starters, and with apologies to Breton and his first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924):

Abel Gance is cubist in split-screen.
(See Gance's use of “ Polyvision” in Napoléon (1927). 1927! Greenaway wouldn't even be born for another 15 years!)

Abel Gance is cubist in multiple-exposure.
(Again, see Napoléon.)

Busby Berkeley is cubist in choreography.

Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) is cubist in telling it like it is.

The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999) is cubist in bullet time.

Peter Greenaway is cubist in making Peter Greenaway films. As well he knows.

Guy Maddin is cubist in camp.

The cinema is cubist after Barthes. Well, everything is cubist after Barthes. Because after Barthes, after all, all bets are off.

And cinéphilia in the age of Web 2.0 is almost unbearably cubist. With the advent of the blogosphere, RSS feeds, Twitter, etc., never before have so many had so much to say about so much to so many others so immediately. Never before has so much critical appraisal of any given film (or any indeed of any given thing) bombarded us so instantaneously, so constantly; never before has our own critical output been subject to such immediate and vigorous feedback originating from so many widely differing points of origin – geographical and critical – offering so many nigh on simultaneous points of view as now. Criticism in this Web 2.0 world, in its creation and in its consumption, is truly a cubist enterprise.

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.