Of recent gads had about Central Europe; the near future, and points of intersection

Long-time scanners of A Little Lie Down will know that many a post hereabouts begins along the lines of “Well, gosh, it's sure been a while between drinks” before leading into some sort of lame apology.

Well, with that acknowledgement made I can dodge that particular bullet for this late November '11 stocktake instalment of ALLD and just get the hell on with it.

Yes, a stocktake

A stocktake, that is, of things to come, of things to have recently occurred, and intersections thereof.

Two reasons for my not having contributed much to my own blog lately are:

1) I have an awful lot to write before this year is over for publications other than ALLD, publications of a reputable nature which, unlike ALLD, actually and necessarily operate to deadlines.

2) I have been preoccupied by being overseas, attending festivals in Cottbus (Germany, in the old East, not far from the Polish border and where all signage is in German and in Sorbian*), and in Prague, which dovetails neatly into item 1), for one of the things I have to write is a report on the 21^st FilmFestival Cottbus for Senses of Cinema for its next edition, and another is a report on the 12^th Mezipatra, the wonderful queer film festival in the Czech Republic, which I have notions I'll be submitting to another particular esteemed film journal, though I'd be foolish to say here just which when I couldn't altogether be said to have run it past them yet.

* No, this is not a typo.

I won't go into too much detail about either of these festivals here, in the interests of dodging ultimate duplication, other than to recount a few personal highlights of Mezipatra which would not necessarily be the stuff of a more formal festival report:

Chief amongst my highlights was moderating a Q&A with Todd Haynes after a screening of Far From Heaven (2002), chased down with a few drinks at Prague's legendary Kavárna Lucerna with the highly affable, accessible director; his lovely partner; a few fellow guests, and various of the Mezipatra staff. At Mezipatra director Aleš Rumpel's behest, I found myself toasting the table as only one too deeply versed in the Australian vernacular can, with a wholehearted “up your arse!” This, happily, went down rather better than, in hindsight, it conceivably might have.

Also: a day or two prior Mezipatra held, upon the hallowed ground of FAMU*, a Todd Haynes masterclass, conducted by Variety critic Boyd van Hoeij. Now you too can enjoy, as did I, a front-row seat for this terrific discussion. Haynes is a terrific speaker, warm, erudite and generous in equal measure, and there's well over two hours' worth of his thoughts upon the cinema - his, and all that which has inspired it.

* FAMU is, rather awkwardly in English, the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Read the list of notable alumni (some, like Věra Chytilová, these days serve as faculty!) on FAMU's Wikipedia page – and weep!

Here, notwithstanding my slight, doth-protest-too-much, old-school discomfort with embedding video content on my blog wholly the (recent) creation of others, is “Todd Haynes Himself” - the superb Todd Haynes masterclass given on the occasion of his retrospective at the 12^th Queer Film Festival Mezipatra in Prague.

Alas, there isn't (as far as I know) any video footage of my Q&A with Todd Haynes, but here at least are a couple of photos so I can still commemorate the occasion here. (With many thanks to Josef Rabara for the photos.)

The author (l) with Todd Haynes. This is immediately after a screening of a spanky 35mm print of Haynes' sumptuous Far From Heaven. Little does the director realise it, but deliberately pinned to my accidentally apt '50s-ish tuck shop frock - accidentally apt, that is, as I had in fact been prepared to conduct a Q&A that day after my favourite Todd Haynes film, Safe, rather than after Far From Heaven - is a badge bearing a detail of a photo, taken by the amazing Gregory Crewdson, depicting Julianne Moore in a state of terrifying domestic narcotism, bought originally in 2008 at a Crewdson exhibition held in Prague's Rudolfinum, as if to summon Todd Haynes to Zlatá Praha, celebrated alchemy capital of the world, within a matter of but three years...

(l-r) The author, Todd Haynes, festival director Aleš Rumpel (mid-translation) and programmer Lucia Kajánková. The latter two, atop all of the powers they demonstrate in abundance for Mezipatra in their respective roles, have truly formidable translation skills, taking turns in rendering into Czech some wonderfully well-considered but very, very lengthy responses from Todd Haynes to questions posed to him, whether by me or by members of a happily, highly engaged audience.

And now, especially for non-Czech readers of this blog and anyone else who wasn't at the festival and so likely hasn't seen this year's Mezipatra trailer, here then, the better to give you a sense of the festival's flavour, is this (dir: Tamara Moyzes):

Lastly on Mezipatra (for here and now), here's a photo of the beautiful, 102-year-old Kino Lucerna, taken on Mezipatra's Opening Night.

I love this place, even though the projection is occasionally a little pants.

Now, if you were to look closely, you might just spot me in the second row, covered in owls. A cautionary note: it is no longer safe to purchase a dress covered, one might have thought uniquely, in owls, in Hobart, under the unconscious presumption that its like will never, ever be seen North-si-eed, hemispherically speaking. However, the very day following the Opening Night shenanigans in Prague, I spotted the very same dress prominently on display in a groovy little Prague boutique. Globalisation, amongst its many other evils (and, granted, certain goods) has sadly increased the risk of same-garb embarrassment a hundred-thousandfold. None of us are safe from this scourge, no matter how far flung our travel destinations. None of us!

Which brings me, sans an elegant segue, to:
Critical failings of film festivals in Australia...

Chatting with the lovely Boyd van Hoeij in Kavárna Lucerna one evening, we got to talking about his role as one of four (including the delightful, impassioned and sage Tom Kalin – and hasn't Swoon (Kalin, 1992) aged brilliantly well!) adjudicating on the features jury at Mezipatra this year. While Boyd spoke of greatly enjoying his jury duty, having been on many juries previously, I had to confess that I've never served on a film festival jury, and instantly felt something a hick.

This point now dovetails neatly with a near-future engagement of mine to have just emerged. Come Thursday next week – that's December 8, at 7pm – in the absence of Josh Nelson, I'll be joining the remaining 2/3 of the fabulous Plato's Cave film criticism podcasting team – Thomas Caldwell and Tara Judah – on the second of their nine week live-to-air summer season on my beloved Triple R 102.7FM, already home to my regular fortnightly radio gig, “A Fistful of Celluloid” on Richard Watts' Thursdaily artsopotamus, SmartArts.

Per the Plato's Cave formula, I'll chew over three current releases with Tara and Thomas, with the remainder of the show turned over to discussion of some film cultural matter or other. It already having been suggested that I might like to tell a few stories from my recent European adventures, I further proposed that that

could easily be linked to a wider consideration of film festival culture and, in particular, to what I consider a major failing of film festival culture in Oz: a certain parochialism/provincialism, something which I feel has a negative trickle-down impact upon critical practice here (amongst other things).

When last did a festival here afford local critics a chance to mix with international peers (whether in a formal capacity, say, on a jury) or just through attracting international media to our far shores? Is not film criticism in Australia largely practiced in one great, blinkered, whitebread vacuum, largely marooning Australian critics with only their own for company (little wonder they so often turn on one another), robbing them of opportunities to develop a more internationalist perspective of film (festival) culture, notwithstanding the richness, diversity and heft of the foreign big screen offerings that unspool here more and more every year?

I'd already started to write a stroppy great rant about as much for this blog but would now rather instead focus those energies on delivering the same on Plato's Cave tomorrow week, whereupon Thomas and Tara can immediately present the case for the opposition, if there is much of a one, or at least get several strong opinions of their own on the matter in edgeways.

And after that episode has gone to air, and the podcasting fairies have waved their magic wands across it, I'll be sure to post a link to it here for all whom should transpire to miss it live but wish to catch up with it later.

Another very good reason for publishing something, right here, right now

Truth is too that I needed something to hang a promo on for the Australian Film Critics Association's Film Writing Awards, lest AFCA secretary Bernard Hemingway otherwise find out where I live and pop round to break my knees in frustration at my not having let him know what I, as a card-carrying member of the illustrious AFCA, would be doing (if anything!) to promote the AFCA's awards.

And, so, lo! Behold! And: go forth and compete!

I'll hasten to add that I'll certainly submit something to these awards myself, ahead of the looming deadline of December 31. Perhaps it'll be something to have first had a run here at A Little Lie Down. Perhaps, indeed!

I'll also give the awards a plug when I return to the Triple R airwaves a little later this morning at 11.30, joining Richard Watts on SmartArts and yakking about George Clooney's The Ides of March, Megan Doneman's documentary on Asia Nobel Prize winner, Kiran Bedi, Yes Madam, Sir, and this and that else besides.

*

A personal film criticism and publication diary for the remainder of 2011

Today, Thurs, Dec 1: I return to SmartArts.

Thurs, Dec 8: I fill in for Josh Nelson on Plato's Cave.

Mid-late Dec – I'll submit a report on the 21st FilmFestival Cottbus to Senses of Cinema (along with as many as two book reviews: dekalog 3: On Film Festivals (guest ed. Richard Porton) and Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin (ed. David Church)). Yikes!

Thurs, Dec 15: SmartArts – Reviews of Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In will be the likely order of the day.

Sat Dec 31: Deadline for submission to the Australian Film Critics Association's Film Writing Awards.

Also, then or thenabouts:

I will submit a review of Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study to Bright Lights Film Journal (I must mention that I saw an absolute cracker of just such a film in Cottbus, in new Russian feature, Twilight Portrait (dir: Angelina Nikonova)).

I will submit, presuming such are once more solicited, a wrap of the year that will have been 2011, to Senses of Cinema.

And I must submit a report on Mezipatra 2011 to a certain journal as well.

Busy times! (During which I believe the 3RRR subscriber magazine, The Trip, will post a slightly premature Top 10 of mine for 2011 as well. (What? - you don't subscribe? Well, that's easily remedied – now get cracking!))

Ah, how oft!

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

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

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

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

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

But that was then.

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

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

Venue: Czech Club: 497 Queensberry St, North Melbourne

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

Can you?

Dispatches from the frontlines of the 60th MIFF continued: Peter Tscherkassky + days 5, 7 and 8

Post Mortem
I had heard such good things about Chilean director Pablo Larraín's previous film, Tony Manero, that Post Mortem came as a great disappointment. An insipid, middle-aged gent works at a morgue and begins an infatuation with a down-and-out neighbouring burlesque performer, rendering him completely oblivious to the horror he abundantly evidently ought be feeling at becoming an accessory to atrocities being perpetrated against Salvador Allende and his regime. His is the most excruciatingly slow of slow-burn descents into madness; were only that he – and the film overall – were much less lifeless. Alfredo Castro's performance in the lead and the extremely drab cinematography both conspire to utterly enervate the film of any and all vitality and to altogether void the final still shot of any of the pathos and horror that its greatly overextended duration suggests it was clearly aspiring to.

Into Eternity

Into Eternity

This is an interesting Danish documentary considering best practices for the safe disposal of Finland's – and, by extension, the world's – nuclear waste, such that it will be safe not just for the foreseeable future but also far, far beyond – 100,000 years into the future, to be precise. For the most part needlessly subtitled – most of Into Eternity's energy industry talking heads speak perfectly good English – more is made in the program blurb of Michael Madsen's documentary asking the “mind-bending central question” of how we communicate with people 100,000 years from now than in the film itself, which doesn't really start to probe this line of inquiry until past the halfway mark.

Even then the interrogation doesn't much assume the more cosmic dimensions I'd hoped it might, instead giving more consideration to matters of governance, bureaucracy and statesmanship. It isn't until close to the film's end when the more interesting, philosophically weighty questions are explored along the lines of: given human nature, now and projected into the distant future, is it better to try to communicate to the future of mankind the existence of extremely dangerous materials buried not all that deep underground (the film doesn't countenance the possibility of any other form of intelligence roaming the Earth within the next 100,000 years), or is it better to cover the whole thing up such that it might become lost to posterity, presuming that it will never later be discovered and so never imperil anybody?

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

Oh, such gender trouble as is explored in Marie Losier's documentary on the pandrogyne that was (and, even beyond the grave, is) the union of industrial music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and their* late inamorata Lady Jaye Breyer!

* Gender trouble always leads to pronoun trouble, as well we all know, but here it assumes a whole new dimension!

Losier's Ballad is a lovely, scattershot tribute, punctuated by kooky performance artsy goings-on, to a relationship forged by a fascinating pair of individuals who sought to deny their own individuation in favour of becoming not just one with another but actually becoming one another. It's unavoidably weighted more heavily towards Genesis' accounts of things, due to his/hers/theirs, of the two of them, being the life spent more in the public eye and, hence, having been well documented; additionally, much of the production occurred after Lady Jaye's passing.

That said, one can't help but feel that Genesis' account of her (I use that pronoun now in the interests of simplicity) all-consuming love for her partner – which extended to the former Neil Andrew Megson's undergoing several cosmetic surgery procedures to greater resemble Lady Jaye – and vice versa) – tells it much like Lady Jaye would have told it, too. They really were each other's other half, literalised to an extent that may never hitherto have been realised in the union of one human being with another. And, hence, pandrogyny.

Here's hoping that some bright spark – hello the folks at the MQFF! – might think to lure Genesis out here for a presentation on this wonderful new gender construct/destruct of their own, peculiar devising.

Peter Tscherkassky – Programs One, Two and Masterclass
I think Peter Tscherkassky made for the most fascinating guest MIFF (in partnership with ACMI) has had in all my many years of engagement with the festival. While he was present for screenings of two exquisitely well projected packages of his extraordinary materialist short avant-garde works, and for generous and enlightening Q&As after both, the peak of Tscherkassky's visitation to Melbourne was surely in his gift of a masterclass to this year's MIFFgoers.

Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine

In this lecture, which he invited us to interrupt any time we had questions, Tscherkassky took us through the organisational principles, philosophies, dark-room jiggery-pokery and aleatory means of footage-wrangling behind his Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), in which footage principally taken from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is manipulated in conjunction with footage of those parts of a reel of film which are not normally ever projected – the instructions for a projectionist etched upon a few frames of any given reel of film ahead of that film's projection – to produce both a stroboscopic re-narrativisation of the Sergio Leone classic as well as a film essay upon the film's projection of its very self by its own protagonist!

The irony of Tscherkassky's, this most analog of practitioners', taking us through Instructions, screened ahead of the lecture and then in portions during it, through a necessary recourse to digital frame-by-frame analysis was, I'm sure, not lost on him, even as it wasn't spoken of during his address. (In fact, he fielded so many questions regarding his practice from a very engaged audience that it really is surprising it never came up. Whereas, in one of the earlier post-program Q&As, the matter of how he feels about women... for example, his mother, did! Perhaps it is ever the fate of the Viennese to be asked such things?)

But so dense is Tscherkassky's layering of fragmentary images, and so rapid the montage, consistent with a lot of avant-garde film practice, that in order for him to illuminate certain key frames within Instructions, which might not even have been consciously absorbed on an initial viewing, it was, of course, necessary to use a digital rendition of the film.

His wonderful masterclass aside, another clear highlight of MIFF 2011 has been seeing Tscherkassky's CinemaScope trilogy projected off superb 35mm prints. Outer Space and Dream Work, in particular, are just utterly ecstatic experiences, every bit as viscerally affective and entrancing as they are virtuoso works of dark-room voodoo.

Oki's Movie
Or: Four Variations upon a Narrative Construct in Search of a Greater Truth (in Filmmaking, as in Life. Because All Life is Cinema, and the Cinema is Life). Or something like that.

This was my first, long overdue, engagement with the much exalted, renownedly cinephilic, reflexive cinema of Hong Sang-soo, and it was every bit that as much as I'd been led to believe. As to how I feel about it: I'm not yet sure, beyond knowing I'd like to see more of his work. Watching Oki's Movie, I got the feeling of an auteur striving for something beyond that which a single film can contain, can communicate; I got a real sense that Hong's approach to filmmaking might well be of a more oeuvrist ambition. Of course, I won't be able to test that hypothesis without seeing more of his films (and, alas, it looks like the screenings of his other film at this year's MIFF, The Day He Arrives, fall inconveniently for me). Still, colour me most intrigued.

And hat's off for the wonderfully awkward filmmaker Q&A depicted in the first of Oki's Movie's four story strands in which a filmmaker, post-screening, is grilled persistently by an audience member, not apropos his film at all but rather along much more personal lines than etiquette ever allows in these forums. But then, cinema is life... life is cinema...

Cold Fish
I enjoyed Sion Sono's Cold Fish much, much more than I suspect I should, in good conscience, ever have been able to. Offering up something of a highly bizarre love pentangle, Cold Fish is of that ilk of extreme Japanese cinema where I have no idea to what extent its cruelties and misanthropy – and especially its misogyny – are the stuff of postmodernist fun and games or to what extent they're simply an extension of the often matter-of-factly rape-y goings-on in films from the heyday of pinku eiga. In Cold Fish, how many parts wallowing in grotesquerie and taboo-tweaking (but... whose taboos? Only ours, as Westerners?) is Sono indulging in to how many parts black-as-pitch, satirical social commentary?

Cold Fish

This makes for a complex coming-to-terms with my own enjoyment of Cold Fish. I'm pretty sure Sono is playing its ghastliest sequences for laughs, and a Melbourne audience, almost despite itself in sometime disbelief, myself included, was forthcoming with them.

Truth be told, I do get a kick out of having my sensibilities challenged, and political correctness be damned, but with a film like Cold Fish, especially when so very well made – Sono is a very gifted filmmaker, and no mistake – there's always a strange aftertaste, and I'm never sure how much of it is distaste, and how much of it wonderment at how little I really know about, in this instance, Japanese culture, tempered by an uncertainty over whether I really wish to understand it better. Might my enjoyment of a film like Cold Fish, where part of the pleasure has to lie in being gobsmacked at the perceived sheer temerity and transgressiveness of its makers and the images and scenarios they've crafted, be lesser or greater compromised for better understanding the societal and cultural conditions which gave rise to it in the first place? And, were I to learn more about such things, is whether I enjoy it or not something I should then ascribe any importance to anyway? On learning more, there might be much weightier concerns to be troubled by than that which is contained by a few reels of film.

All About Ev(a|e) – Opening Night through to Day 4 of the 60th MIFF

Straight off: big shout-outs to all six to have signed up for MIFF's 60 Films in 17 Days Blog-A-Thon; I wish them all the best for what I consider to be a truly lunatic – if not even a somewhat cruel – undertaking.

Fruit of Paradise

Cruel? Indeed! For to needs average seeing three-and-a-half films every day for 17 days, and to write daily, and cogently, about the experience, whilst keeping healthy and somehow still finding time to keep in circulation amongst nearests and dearests, strikes me as a heavy cross to bear. Surely, were it not that this is MIFF's 60^th birthday, there is no way the festival would have thought to oblige bloggers under their auspices to report – in the inaugural year for such an initiative, what's more – on as many as 60 sessions at the festival. It's a figure obviously arrived at simply and arbitrarily to rhyme with the festival's anniversary.

I also can't help but think the imposition of such a demanding target is rather a bastardisation of the spirit of a film festival. For mine, a film festival is not at all just about watching films. To lopside the focus so seriously on the film side of the equation is to greatly disparage the festive side of things. It's to grossly over-esteem the most base form of cinephilia, that which pushes the line that he or she who simply sees the most films wins.

Of course, I won't deny that a festival is a grand opportunity well worth taking to glut oneself on a banquet of cinema from every which where and when. But surely it should also offer ample opportunity to be festive, to enjoy the company of others in an atmosphere conducive to impassioned, reflective, maybe sometimes even a little boozy, discussion and debate about the cinema and, oh, everything else besides: life, the universe and everything. Setting the world to rights over drinks one film analysis at a time.

Heck, I'll admit to a certain selfishness. I'm a little sad I'll not be afforded many leisurely opportunities to chew the fat with the blog-a-thonners in the course of this year's MIFF. They simply won't have much time for it.

But don't get me wrong – I really admire the pluck of all participants, atop any pre-existing admiration – considerable, in some instances – I already have for their critical faculties and output. (Some of these folks I know very well, some not at all, while their work for me had hitherto run the whole Rumsfeldian gamut.) I just hope that, atop their pluck, I'll yet get to admire their fortitude too. I sincerely hope they don't come undone along the way and regret the pact they've made with MIFF. Were any of them to fall debilitatingly sick, would the festival accept any responsibility or liability?

*

OPENING NIGHT

The Fairy

The Greater Union complex on Russell Street, gussied up especially for the occasion, has never looked so good. And, with all due respect, I hope it never has to again, even if I am almost belatedly developing a strange sort of affection for it. It's simply no place for a venerable festival's Opening Night, not least come an anniversary edition, but MIFF was clearly hamstrung when it came to settling upon a venue this year.

Now, while it was a necessary evil to distribute the throngs who came to Opening Night into multiple cinemas within the GU complex, I was nonetheless disappointed at being sequestered away from the main arena, with it coming to transpire that the main events in Cinema 6 were not going to be transmitted into the other cinemas.

I don't think it would have been asking too much for MIFF to have hooked up a feed of the celebratory formalities occurring in Cinema 6 to all the other cinemas packed to the gills with opening nighters. Instead, bundled away with fellow media types, I was treated to a very underwhelming, altogether uninspiring pair of speeches from a couple of MPs, their by-the-book waffle not made any more compelling by frequent microphone cut-outs. The hour was only saved when Fred Schepisi was called to address the room; he immediately abandoned the dodgy mic altogether and simply took to projecting his voice to the back of the room, like an old pro – ministers, take note! (He did, however, hide in the dark while he regaled our very receptive room with his tales of MIFFs of yesteryear.)

Notwithstanding Schepisi's unanticipated cameo, it was a disappointment, both professional and personal, to miss seeing me old mucker Michelle Carey deliver her inaugural Opening Night address as Artistic Director of this sprightly, newly sexagenarian festival. If an Artistic Director gives an Opening Night address, and no media are there to observe and document it, did it really even happen? (Even if keeping us all in the dark is apt, in a punny sort of way.)

On the matter of the poor hand dealt to media, this too: it had proven to be hard work to secure an invite to Opening Night in the first place without resorting to either skulduggery or overobsequiousness, in stark contrast to the ease with which similar benison – and much more besides – can be secured at festivals overseas.

I have a whole dissertation in me upon the matter of Australian film festival culture with respects to an unfortunate, and I presume, nationwide, provincialism, which in turn I believe feeds into a narrow view of the hospitality that ought be afforded to festival guests (amongst whose ranks overseas festivals routinely consider media representatives, whether from near or from abroad).

But my thoughts on how we (“we” being MIFF; other Melbourne and Australian film festivals, and Australian film culture generally) could seriously lift our game and adopt a far less parochial, far more internationalist, outlook, the better to achieve a more internationally relevant film festival culture and, by extension, a more dynamic, outward-looking and extensively globally networked film industry, is beyond the scope of this blog post, and is rather more the stuff of a grand, lunatic research project, funding possibilities for which are being countenanced presently...

The Opening Night film: La fée (The Fairy)

Fortunately, Opening Night's film was a crowd pleaser. Directors Dominique Abel, Australian-born Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy delivered a quite charming, slapsticky, daggy yellow cardigan of a feature. (Present in person for Opening Night, I'll presume Abel and Gordon, who star in the film, too, also said (or humorously mimed) a few words to those fortunates gathered in GU Cinema 6.)

The Fairy reminded me of several Tati-esque cinema forebears. A succession of vignettes, it was not unlike a whimsy-saturated Roy Andersson film, if one was ever made depleted of almost all of his wonderful, piercing, mordant black humour. While I prefer my Tati stylings flavoured with more parts Roy Andersson or Elia Suleiman than this was, I still quite enjoyed The Fairy.

Artavazd Pelechian Shorts

MIFF promised us a revelation with this package of shorts from an only recently 'discovered' Armenian filmmaker, and boy howdy did it deliver, if not quite so emphatically with the first two of the three shorts in this selection, We (1969) and The Seasons (1972), as with the third, the frankly mind-blowing Our Century (1982).

Our Century

We and The Seasons struck me as being the love-children of Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes (1933) and Mikhail Kalatozov's Salt for Svanetia (1930), as if the Soviet montage applied to the latter ethnographic documentary (for want of a better pigeon-holing) had in fact been applied to the former. Very beautiful – and does Pelechian demonstrate a love of action at oblique angles to the frame, or what! – We and The Seasons both are possessed of a lot of jaw-dropping imagery (imagine, for example, a welter of weatherbeaten Bear Gryllses cast in “Man and Sheep vs. Wild”), but it was Our Century that, as an ecstatic apocalyptic space race fantasia, hit me with all the force of a revelation – by comparison, the trip sequence in Tree of Life suddenly seems almost trite, leaden, obvious, unambitious...

The more that Pelechian's work is surfacing, the more is being made of the originality and influence (putatively upon Godard in particular) of his 'contrapuntal' or 'distance' montage – the former term gets a work-out in the MIFF program and in Daniel Fairfax's excellent program notes on the MIFF website; the latter appears in an interview with Scott MacDonald in his essential A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers.

For mine, I would like to posit an affinity in Pelechian's work – and, in particular, in Our Century – with the similarly musically kinetic, in toto associative montage in Jan Švankmajer's work and, in particular, in some of his short films. Our Century reminded me, more than anything else, of the Švankmajer of Leonardo's Diary (1972), which is a similarly ecstatic, virtuosic fugue of apocalyptic imagery indexed to a celebration of genius and human accomplishment, derived too from a collaged patchwork of found footage and self-generated material which, rather than the footage Pelechian shot of cosmonauts going about their business (he'd been granted extraordinary access behind the scenes of the Soviet space program), is instead an array of stunningly animated sketches drawing on the work of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Leonardo's Diary (not at MIFF)

Differing intellectualisations of montage might very well underpin Pelechian's and Švankmajer's practices but the work produced, I find, nonetheless generates very similar – and similarly rapturous – sensations.

(There's more about Švankmajer just below.)

Zebraman 2

Veering immediately from the sublime to the ridiculous, I chased the Pelechian program down with Takashi Miike's Zebraman 2. It was massively, forthrightly inconsequential, and kind of fun, and kind of not. Films like this have me wondering sometimes if there aren't aspects of Japanese pop culture that must be baffling even to the Japanese.

Miike remains an enigma. I'm really looking forward to his 13 Assassins, reputedly classicist after a Kurosawan fashion, which I'll see very soon in release. I know he still has it in him to produce something as profoundly consequential as Zebraman 2 so vehemently, wilfully isn't, but that said, I haven't adored anything of his since 2003's Gozu.

Class Relations (1984)

Straub-Huillet do Kafka, which makes perfect sense. As faithful a Kafka adaptation as I can think of, Class Relations is a perfect fit for the Straubs' patented artfully austere house style, although it hasn't a show of knocking off its perch as my favourite big-screen riff on Kafka, Pavel Jurácek and Jan Schmidt's wonderful Josef Kilián (1963). (Much kudos also to Koji Yamamura for his beautiful animation, A Country Doctor (2007))

Those Straubs, they sure knew how to light a scene! Their compositional sense is exquisite and immediately appreciable as such. The performance styles they elicit from their cast, however, are much more an acquired taste. Some of the cast – including Class Relations' lead (Christian Heinisch) – appear narcotised, wilfully indifferent, throughout this film, while others take more of a grandstanding approach to delivering their lines. All involved are likely, when sharing a frame, to become as still as mannequins while one of them soliloquises at length. Still, that's a good analogue for the dialogue in much of Kafka!

Tomboy

A lovely new queer film from Céline Sciamma, the director of the admirable Water Lilies (2007) (which I wrote a little about in a report in Senses of Cinema on the 2009 Melbourne Queer Film Festival). I found Tomboy very moving; it is my lot in life to invariably be very affected by films depicting the travails of fellow genderqueer folk, and of children in particular, all the more so when they're as well, and as naturalistically depicted, as in Tomboy. It's a beautifully measured film and I wish it to find crossover mainstream success; it's due a release in Australia soon.

All About Ev(a|e): Surviving Life and Fruit of Paradise

Curiously, Surviving Life has dropped “Theory and Practice” from its title (this is, however, consistent with the MIFF program), making my blog post of a couple of weeks ago a little less meaningfully entitled. Never mind.

Psychoanalytic film theory has a new textbook in Jan Švankmajer's sixth feature film. Not only is it his most accessible feature to date, it's also a fabulous primer in capital-S Surrealism, making explicit the indebtedness of that movement and philosophy – very much still alive and active in today's Czech Republic – to Freud's talking cure.

Švankmajer has never been such an open book before as in this film, which even goes so far as to arm its audience with the knowledge of how to decode, if simplistically, symbols and imagery which appear not only in Surviving Life but which are endemic to his cinema. This know-how is imparted at narratively expedient intervals in psychoanalytical sessions conducted within the narrative, overseen by animated portraits of Freud and Jung who duke it out for dominion over interpretation of the games played by a Švankmajer-surrogate's unconscious mind during his sleep.

The mixture of crisp cut-out animation and live-action representations of the same characters and environs throughout the film is very appealing and is consistent with mixed media, multiple-representational practices in Švankmajer's work generally (see especially Faust (1994)), as well as with traditions in Czech theatre dating much farther back still – Surviving Life's to-ing and fro-ing between animation and live-action is most definitely not, as a cut-out Švankmajer explains in a jokey prelude, merely a function of a low budget which demands low overheads for catering, per diems, etc!

There's a lot more I'd like to say about Surviving Life, pending a little more time to digest it and, ideally, a second viewing this Sunday. There was, though, one thing that really struck me so much on that first viewing that I want to mention it right here and now, and that's that within the film's dreamscapes, there's something... someone... stalking the protagonist's dream self, an omnipresent entity, perhaps even a manifest omniscience, which assumes the form of a scornful old crone who's given to occasionally making herself, and her thoughts on proceedings, explicitly known. Yes, quite to my surprise, Švankmajer would seem in Surviving Life to be hinting at the existence of.... God. Or of something like that.

Surviving Life

Where this really interests me is in connection with a section in Andrei Codrescu's fabulous book, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, in which Codrescu explains how Tristan Tzara, founder of Surrealism's forefather movement, Dada, relished speaking gibberish not merely as a provocation and catalysing kick up the arse of modernism but also, just conceivably, to aim to reach beyond conscious thought in a quest for transcendence of things worldly in a manner practiced by his Kabbalistic Jewish forebears.

The Posthuman Dada Guide (I haven't it handy, so I can't quote page numbers) goes on, if I recall correctly, to assert that William Burroughs was striving for much the same end in his application of his celebrated cut-up method, where texts were reduced to particles and reassembled randomly, the better, hopefully, to reveal in the reassembly the hand of a divinity who might not be unknowable to us were we only, all of us, to be able to transcend the crippling limitations of language and its structures.

And now in 2011 here's Švankmajer, cutting up images, images of his narrative's players reorganised in a similarly recombinatory fashion, within a narrative wholly concerned with exploring the root functioning of a human mind, its motivations, and its memory, replete, replete, I say, with simply oodles of unmistakeably Edenic imagery and featuring an inamorata named Eva (sure, that is the name of Švankmajer's late wife and long time collaborator, but...) and with an all-seeing Godlike being overseeing the workings of the protagonist's unconscious throughout... Curiouser and curiouser!

It was certainly inspired programming that put Surviving Life back-to-back with fellow Czech Věra Chytilová's Fruit of Paradise (1970). Oh, such dialogue as flowed between them, for Fruit of Paradise is a veritable tripped-out Carry on Garden of Eden!

Considerably more formally experimental an affair even than the director's earlier, beloved Daisies (1966), Fruit of Paradise is amongst the most beautiful films I've ever had the pleasure of seeing on a big screen, beautiful in equal measure to its resistance to any easy articulation of what the fuck it's all about. It's a little bit Zabriskie Point – with rather more emphasis on the Zabriskie than on the point. It might be parts a cautionary allegory about the perils of knowledge in a society in which, back in the day, knowledge's possession could be seriously compromising. It's definitely in part a serial killer flick. And there's a very bizarre love triangle thrown in there too. But mostly it's just one glorious, messy, genuinely psychedelic enigma. As such, it sure won't be everyone's cup of Fernet, but it sure is mine. And oh that Zdeněk Liška score – it's sublime!

I would urge anyone who saw Fruit of Paradise and who would like to know a little more about it and its creators to turn firstly to Jim Knox's excellent program note on the MIFF website for insight into a film, and several of its esteemed makers, very dear to his (and my!) heart.

As for me, I'll be pausing some more in coming days to ponder this business of some of the art world figures I've long most esteemed and whom I associate with some of the most out-there, probing, revolutionary art practices and accomplishments of the 20th and 21st centuries, evidently demonstrating a not at all incompatible keen interest in bothering God, something I've never myself consciously thought to devote much time nor energy to at all.

*

To close, I really can't be arsed knocking up another iteration of my MIFF release dates table, but here's word nonetheless of a few more release date developments:

The Woman: 18 Aug 2011
Persecution Blues: The Battle for the Tote: 25 Aug 2011
Face to Face: 8 Sep 2011
Fire in Babylon: 15 Sep 2011
Project Nim: 29 Sep 2011
The Innkeepers: TBA

Of mothers and mants: some of MIFF days 9 and 10

I Killed My Mother

Director Xavier Dolan, recently turned but 21 years of age, is Hubert, the 16-year-old gay lead in this new comedy-of-sorts which begins looking for all the world as if it'll be utterly insufferable... but proves otherwise.

Hubert, for the most part, cannot stand his mother (Anne Dorval). Hence we are subjected to recurring shouting matches and antagonistic games of silly buggers between the two of them, often held within the incredibly dingy house they both call home. At least, I think it's dingy. It's a little hard to tell, because you can barely ever make out any of it. It's always extremely poorly lit, and I found it impossible to tell whether it's meant to be, i.e., whether it's a deliberate aesthetic strategy on Dolan & co.'s part, perhaps the better to plunge us impressionistically into the ever strained atmosphere of the household. Or, likelier, it's simply just very amateurishly lit, and a match then for the often very awkward compositions that plague the entire film.

Nevertheless, I somehow found myself interested in whether Hubert and his long-suffering mother mightn't be able to reconcile matters. Seems no amount of ostensible technical incompetence can rob a film of its heart, and I Killed My Mother, which gives every impression of coming from a very real place, has plenty of it. And there are some real laughs to be had, in close to equal weighting with the film's more histrionic elements.

In summary, then: a rather flawed film, but one which still has some appeal.

Matinee

#1 festival guest Joe Dante gave a wonderful introduction to the underattended screening of this little known 1993 gem; I dare say he'd have given just as good at the Q&A afterwards as well, but, alas, I had to skedaddle to be sure to catch Hirokazu Koreeda's Air Doll (more on which, soon!)

In the meantime, I thoroughly enjoyed this nostalgic trip back to a more innocent time, when the Cuban Missile Crisis was newly scaring the bejeesus out of Americans and, more importantly, multiplexes hadn't been invented yet!

Set in Key West, Florida, Matinee concerns itself with the intersection of the real world backyard scares of the missile crisis and the rather safer big screen ones of Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), an Alfred Hitchcock by-way-of William Castle-esque figure rolling into town to drum up business for his new gimmick-laden feature film, Mant!.

Mant!, viewed in snatches during the latter half of the film, is itself a rather wonderful creation, and one which would have done Roger Corman proud. It concerns a rogue man-cum-giant-ant, and brought home to me the fact that the happy hucksterish likes of William Castle long could have laid claims to have pioneered 'expanded cinema', and that it really oughtn't be considered the exclusive domain of the cinematic avant-garde, as some histories would have it...

While the missile crisis is an important, well integrated backdrop to the film's narrative, and the sense of time and place are well established accordingly, there's no losing sight of what Matinee is chiefly about: the joy of going to the pictures in a bygone era when the cinema was king and there was no better, more fun place to go of an afternoon or an evening.

Oh! – and rhymingly happily with the gloriously daft Rubber, seen earlier at MIFF, a young Naomi Watts appears in a sequence parodying the anodyne Disney movies of the time, a sequence in which her character and her dapper but ineffectual boyfriend need not fear baddies, because her Uncle is a heroic, no-nonsense shopping trolley...

AND …


COMING SOON …


IN A SHORT ENGAGEMENT EXCLUSIVE TO THIS BLOG!

My thoughts on Air Doll, Peepli [Live], MIFF's animation packages, and more...

MIFF days 7 and 8

Time's against me, so I'd best make rather brief my account of a few films seen over two of the last three days at MIFF, though I might come back in a day or two to write a little more expansively on one or two of them, those as which most deserve it, none more so than would the first cab off the rank.

I Love You Phillip Morris (d. Glenn Ficarra & John Requa, writers of Bad Santa)

The highlight of the festival for me so far, an absolute revelation! I'd heard from abroad it was good; it's been in circulation, of a sort, for quite a while already. Locally, Roadshow has been sitting on it for months, apparently clueless as how on Earth to pitch to the mainstream so extremely black and unflinching a comedy, based upon extraordinary true recent events, as this, in which Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor play lovers...

Carrey has never been better than as conman and escape artist nonpareil Steven Russell. McGregor, as Phillip Morris – the film has nothing to do with the tobacco industry – is greatly affecting as the object of Russell's madly, hilariously criminally expressed affections.

No film has pulled the rug out from under me so brilliantly – or with anything like close to as much chutzpah – as this in a long time. I'll be appalled if Roadshow release this straight to DVD; I Love You Phillip Morris is simply brilliant.

Tetro

I thought Francis Ford Coppola's previous film, 2007's Youth Without Youth, was a dreadful load of old tosh. With Tetro as further evidence, I'm coming to think that Coppola may be going just a little bit mad, but I do have to concede that, barring Tetro's last half hour, when the wheels really come off, Coppola can still turn it on. For this rather strange tale set principally in Buenos Aires, of filial failings and inverted Oedipalism, is strikingly beautiful to behold, presented, flashbacks aside, in gorgeously crisp black-and-white 'Scope. And there really is no telling how the narrative, principally concerning a strained reunion between long estranged brothers (Vincent Gallo as Tetro, a mercurial failed writer, and Leonardo Di Caprio lookalike Alden Ehrenreich as virginal little brother Bennie), will pan out. While this is for the better for its very intriguing first hour-and-a-half, it's for far the worse in its utterly daft last half hour. Still, I'm very glad I rose above my doubts and bothered to see it. (And you can never include too much of Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann in a film.)

Kawasaki's Rose

Although a Czechophile, I am far more conversant with films from the dizzy heyday of the Czechoslovak New Wave than I am with those of one of the Czech Republic's most celebrated latter day directors, Jan Hřebejk. I'll be concertedly looking deeper into his earlier work shortly, most impressed as I, and a few fellow Czechophiles, were with this multi-stranded, cleverly flashback-free, Lives of Others-inspired current day look back into pre-Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia.

Its title refers to a complex origami creation, which, while having some direct narrative significance within the film, is more meant as a metaphor for the many layers underlying the reality of life for those now thriving in a post-communist state but whose earlier lives may have been marked with fateful compromises and Faustian pacts.

Atop its many other merits, it's a terrific film for a learner of Czech, with a wonderful final sequence marked by a thesauran explosion of insults that one character had long wanted, with good reason, to hurl at another. I'll be looking to grab this one on DVD when Madman get around to releasing it locally, the better to learn the Czech for “fuckwit” and “rotten cunt”, without which my life, and in particular, my Czech vocabulary, is sadly incomplete.

The Juche Idea (d. Jim Finn)

I didn't much care for this semi-mockumentary investigation into the little-travelled revolutionary film theories of North Korean despot Kim Jong Il, which accord with the “Juche” ideology first expounded by his equally lunatic father, Kim Il-sung. I found it messy, nowhere near as funny as it thought it was, and ultimately rather tiresome. Its best moments were when footage from North Korean films (and television?) was left to speak for itself, rather than when anti-capitalist mock-Kim-isms were given to a faux documentary subject – a woman purporting to be on a Juche arts residency in North Korea (as if!) – to blither to the camera.

In its favour, it did feature fabulous footage, all too briefly, of a woman juggling three live doves, one of the strongest and strangest images of this year's MIFF.