Coming Attractions, or: Addenda to Last Week's MIFF Picks

(including an updated list of festival films with distribution, below)

We are now but a week out from the commencement of the 60^th MIFF and I expect we've all found a bit of time since my post a week ago to trawl through the pages of the MIFF program, whether in print or in the ether, to arrive at a some parts-informed, some parts-quixotic plan to engage with this elephantine festival as best and most comprehensively we can.

Since writing my last week's post, in which I tipped as many as 15 hot picks for the 2011 MIFF, I've delved further into the program and, naturally, come across numerous other offerings that deserve attention cast upon them.

Outer Space

Straight off, I am guilty of one serious oversight in my initial selection of 15, and that is my neglecting the coming to Melbourne of the great Austrian materialist filmmaker, Peter Tscherkassky, to present not just two packages of his extraordinary short films but also a masterclass.

(By 'materialist' I in no way mean to suggest that Tscherkassky is preoccupied in life with the accumulation of material wealth – he's far too firmly ensconced at the polar wrong end of the film production spectrum to be accusable of that – but rather that his is a practice in which the very material of film is critical, both to his films' means of production and to their very content. With respect to the latter, it's not just the found filmed image that lights up the screen in his works, with all its echoes of past big screen glories (or ignominies), but also everything else that is of the film itself: optical soundtracks, sprocket holes, and no small amount of flicker, all subject to hyper-quick montage and rapid-fire distortions and superimpositions, wreaking often terrible and cacophonous violence upon anything and everything ensnared within the frame.)

Outer Space (1999), which utilises select footage from Sidney J. Furie's little loved early '80s horror film The Entity starring Barbara Hershey, is the brilliant and exhilaratingly harrowing film of his I'm most familiar with, and while you can find it on YouTube, you'd have to be completely daft not to avail yourself of an opportunity to see to experience it, and many other of Tscherkassky's screen cultural history-pillaging works in a cinema during MIFF. For it is only in a darkened cinema, with his films projected onto a big screen and their soundtracks run through a cinema's sound system, that his work will be done justice to and their full impact felt.

Sure, it's a banal truism that all films are better seen in a cinema, but there are filmmakers for whose works this holds true more profoundly than for others. Tscherkassky – as with any materialist – is absolutely, essentially one such filmmaker. (Why, he even hand-prints his films!) Along McLuhanesque lines, in Tscherkassky's films the medium is indeed the message... and the message the messenger...

I'm sure, furthermore, that he'll make for a fascinating guest. Rare it is indeed around these parts to be granted an opportunity to partake of an audience with a film artist, who, notwithstanding that his is a cultural produce altogether reliant upon a regurgitation of (sometimes recognisable) found footage, is irrefutably the auteur of his films, so much incontestably more so than those who perforce must marshal and rely upon the cooperation of even the smallest of crews for their most personal, and indie-est, of indie productions. For it is just Tscherkassky, and Tscherkassky alone, of an order of solitary obsessiveness equal to that also necessarily found in lone stop-motion animators, who manipulates – and prints – every single frame – temporally and compositionally speaking – of his extraordinary short films.

Other offerings to have escaped my attention last week

Some new canon fodder

Buried deep within the shorts programs is Scenes from the Suburbs, a half hour-long short from Spike Jonze in collaboration with members of Arcade Fire. There's a whole lotta love out there for both Jonze and the revered Canadian indie band, but their admirers have got their work cut out for them even learning this film's in the program, what with so little focus routinely shone upon MIFF's short form offerings. Here at least is drawing a little attention to it now.

(Also buried in the various shorts programs, and granted but one opportunity each to light up the big screen during MIFF, are new works from Luc Moullet; Bens Russell and Rivers; Ken Jacobs, and Joan C. Gratz, whose stunning 1992 short Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase is one of my favourite animated films of all time.)

There are two new films from MIFF favourite Hong Sang-soo: The Day He Arrives and Oki's Movie. I'm yet to hop on the Hong bandwagon, never mind the plenty of opportunities previously granted. So perhaps now's about time.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Madman are attached to this one, but it'd be an awful shame if it were to go to straight to DVD and a chance to see it on the big screen were to go begging. I've seen two of director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's recent films before – Climates and Three Monkeys – and wish I'd seen still more. Expect beautiful CinemaScope cinematography and, by most police procedurals' standards, a likely very languid pace indeed...

There's a new film from latter-day MIFF stalwart Jia Zhangke, I Wish I Knew. I wish I knew what so many other people see in so much of Jia's work, but this documentary about Shanghai sounds very interesting. Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien – another celebrated contemporary filmmaker I've never quite latched onto, aside from his splendid 1989 film A City of Sadness – is one of the many and various folks in this doco whose thoughts on the Shanghai of yesteryears are sought.

There's also a new film from that brilliantly nasty piece of work, Bruno Dumont: Outside Satan. I expect it will be stark and languid but punctuated by sudden bursts of ghastliness which may have some sort of significance of a religious bent. Or may not.

Belgian kitchen sinkers par excellence, the Dardenne brothers, have a new film. It is prosaically entitled The Kid with a Bike. My gut feeling: the kid may not wind up having a bike for the whole film. And/or the bike is but a MacGuffin. Either way, my prediction is for one unhappy kid. And for a depressed, but ultimately impressed viewer. Them Dardennes, they deliver.

Takeshi Kitano is back! With Outrage! Folks are saying it's a great return to form. Hooray! (if they're right.)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog's new-ish 3D cave art doco is a must-see! (obvs.) But now, or in release?

To my shame, I am yet to see a film by the fearsomely celebrated French auteur, provocateur and Deleuzian sensorialist (sic?) of renown, Philippe Grandrieux. This year's offering, It May be that Beauty has Strengthened our Resolve - Masao Adachi, looks like a suitably prepossessing initiation into the cult of Grandrieux.

And...

Of course, there's more, including a double return to the fold from the as ever capable-of-anything Takashi Miike, whose unfathomably prolific and protean work I hope I'll fall back in love with, and there's a whole slew of older canon fodder in the MIFF 60^th Retrospective section, including the excruciatingly uncomfortable viewing experience that is Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy.

It always astonishes me that every time this 1982 film re-emerges, it is said still to be little known and underseen. Really? Even now? Nevertheless, it is inarguably a great film and one which further debunks the myth that the English have a monopoly on the comedy of discomfort so exemplified by the works of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant – and nor did the English necessarily even arrive at it first. That said, perhaps it is only now that The King of Comedy's time has come and it'll find that audience long trumpeted as ignorant of its charms.

Some word on a few titles I've already seen

The First Interview

As I mentioned last week, I've seen Dennis Tupicoff's lovely, Agnès Varda-narrated short, The First Interview, and can recommend it highly.

I have a middling amount of enthusiasm for Bi, Don’t Be Afraid, which, as I now cannibalise my report for Senses of Cinema on the 25th Fribourg International Film Festival, is “an often droll film with simmering erotic undercurrents occasionally boiling over”, “languidly observ[ing] a few days in the life of six year-old Bi’s Hanoi family, newly extended through the surprise return of a seriously ailing grandfather”. It's quite a nice film enlivened by a little matter-of-fact perversity.

I have less enthusiasm for Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, which closed that same festival and about which I said in that same report “I didn’t much care for [its] guns a-blazing, gung-ho actioneering, no matter how commendable its explicit attack on entrenched corruption in Brazil. (Also, I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to run with a voiceover throughout an entire film.)” And I'm right; it's not.

I have also seen, more recently, The Eye of the Storm, upon which a critical embargo has just been placed (dagnabbit!) and Norwegian Wood. Notwithstanding an impressive pan-cultural array of talent associated with it (the director is Tran Anh Hung; the cinematographer is Mark Lee "In the Mood for Love" Ping Bin, and it features a (dreadful, overstated) score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood), Norwegian Wood has completely put me off ever reading Haruki Murakami, whose book it adapts. What a ridiculous story, played so flatly, and with the great, tragic 'problem' at the core of the story being one so preposterously simple to remedy.

Now here's that list

It's ordered alphabetically this time. Bold type indicates where dates have been announced in the week since my previous post; all four films thus emboldened will enjoy at least a short stint at Carlton's Cinema Nova.

TITLE	DISTRIBUTOR	DATE OF RELEASE	SECTION
13 Assassins	Icon	8 Sep 2011	Accent on Asia
33 Postcards	Titan View	TBA	Aust. Showcase
A Separation	Hopscotch	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Africa United	Hopscotch	TBA	Next Gen
Another Earth	Fox	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Beauty	Palace	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Beginners	Hopscotch	25 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
Being Elmo	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Ben Lee: Catch My Disease	Madman	TBA	Backbeat
Bobby Fischer against The World	Madman	TBA	This Sporting Life
Brother Number One	Antidote	TBA	Documentaries
Buck	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Cave of Forgotten Dreams	Rialto	22 Sep 2011	Documentaries
Circumstance	Vendetta	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Drive	Pinnacle	TBA Oct 2011	Closing Night
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress	Madman	6 Oct 2011	Documentaries
Elena	Palace	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within	Madman	TBA	Crime Scene
Fire in Babylon	Madman	TBA	This Sporting Life
Footnote	Rialto	1 Jan 2012	Int'l Panorama
Guilty of Romance	Monster	TBA	Accent on Asia
HERE	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Hobo with a Shotgun	Transmission	TBA	Night Shift
Jane Eyre	Universal	11 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
Jiro Dreams of Sushi	Curious	TBA	Documentaries
Kill List	Madman	TBA	Night Shift
Knuckle	Hopscotch	DVD – 15 Sep 2011	This Sporting Life
Le Havre	Sharmill	TBA	Int'l Panorama
LennoNYC	Transmission	DVD – 11 Aug 2011	Backbeat
Life in a Day	Transmission	TBA Aug 2011	Networked
Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Martha Marcy May Marlene	Fox	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Medianeras	Aztec	TBA	Networked
Melancholia	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Mysteries of Lisbon	Rialto	1 Jan 2012	Prime Time
Neds	Transmission	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Norwegian Wood	Curious	6 Oct 2011	Accent on Asia
Once upon a Time in Anatolia	Madman	TBA	Crime Scene
Our Idiot Brother	Roadshow	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Outrage	Madman	TBA	Accent on Asia
Page One: Inside The New York Times	Madman	18 Aug 2011	Documentaries
Persecution Blues: The Battle for the Tote	Madman	TBA	Backbeat
Play	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold	Madman	11 Aug 2011	Documentaries
Position among the Stars	Antidote	TBA	Documentaries
PressPausePlay	Madman	TBA	Networked
Project Nim	Icon	TBA 2011	Documentaries
Red Dog	Roadshow	4 Aug 2011	Aust. Showcase
Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Route Irish	Transmission	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Senna	Universal	11 Aug 2011	This Sporting Life
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure	Madman	TBA	Aust. Showcase
Silent Souls	Icon	TBA 2011	Int'l Panorama
Sing Your Song	Madman	TBA	Backbeat
Submarine	Madman	1 or 8 Sep 2011	Int'l Panorama
Super	Roadshow	TBA	Night Shift
Tabloid	Antidote	22 Sep 2011	Documentaries
Take Shelter	Sony	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Terri	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975	Curious	TBA	Backbeat
The Eye of the Storm	Transmission	15 Sep 2011	Aust. Showcase
The Forgiveness of Blood	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Future	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Giants	Palace	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Guard	Transmission	25 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
The Kid with a Bike	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Salt of Life	Rialto	19 Jan 2012	Int'l Panorama
The Solitude of Prime Numbers	Aztec	TBA	TeleScope
The Woman	Monster	TBA	Night Shift
The Yellow Sea	Monster	TBA	Accent on Asia
Think Global, Act Rural	Hopscotch	TBA	Documentaries
This is England '86	Madman	TBA	Prime Time
Tomboy	Rialto	17 Nov 2011	Int'l Panorama
Toomelah	Curious	TBA Nov 2011	Aust. Showcase
Troll Hunter	Madman	TBA	Night Shift
Troubadours	Universal Music	TBA	Backbeat
Tyrannosaur	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Viva Riva!	Rialto	1 Jan 2012	Crime Scene
Win Win	Fox	18 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
X	Potential	Early Sep 2011	Aust. Showcase

MIFFy Simplicity, or: Surviving MIFF (Theory and Practice)

Hi y'all.

I've had the program for the 60^th Melbourne International Film Festival in my greasy little mitts just about long enough now to feel equipped to dispense some advice of, alternately, a utilitarian, and of a somewhat subjective, prejudicial but (dare I say) informed nature which might make your navigation through a typically dense festival program and schedule just that little bit simpler.

Of the utilitarian, I'll speak first. You'll find below a table listing all the various feature films at this year's festival which a cursory amount of research revealed to have distribution deals already inked. Release dates, in those instances where they have been explicitly stated in association with any given film, are listed alongside the titles, ordered by imminence of release.

Caveats

None of this can be taken as gospel, for the distribution game is the stuff of whims, vicissitudes and, some would allege, sorcery. Furthermore, some films may not be destined for theatrical release post-festival at all but rather may go straight to DVD, Blu-Ray or even YouTube, meaning that MIFF could represent the only chance to see them on a big screen in Melbourne.

To whet your appetite for the following list, here are a couple of observations. Firstly, I have never known there to be quite so many films screening at MIFF to have distribution lined up at this early stage in proceedings – a whopping 81 by my reckoning!

Secondly, of that 81, I make out 30 to be attached to Madman Entertainment – that's comfortably over one in every three! Thems are extraordinary numbers. The great majority of the Madman titles don't have theatrical dates against them, and many may be destined for DVD release only. That said, it hasn't escaped my attention that, over the past year or two, Madman have been very adept at securing two-or-so-week-long theatrical seasons, exclusive to Cinema Nova or to ACMI, for many of their titles ahead of a DVD release.

Nonetheless, if you want to be certain of seeing any of these films on the big screen, then to see them at MIFF is the wisest path to follow.

Furthermore, while some of the films listed below may well be released very soon after MIFF, there can be incentives beyond bragging rights to attending their screenings at the festival, as, for example, when guests will be in attendance to conduct introductions, Q&As, flesh-pressings and the like. Of those films listed below, this includes, at the very least, Eye of the Storm, POM Wonderful and Beginners. (More guests are yet to be announced. And who out there isn't holding out hope that Richard "Submarine" Ayoade mightn't yet be amongst them?) On that basis then, to savour a sense of occasion and to chance to get a word in edgeways to some of this year's wrangled talent, you might in fact be wiser to see a number of these fillums at MIFF after all.

The decision's wholly yours to make...

One last thing before we get to this handy list - let's dwell a moment, you and I, on my equally trumpeted, more subjective side to this post (assuming you didn't immediately cut to the chase and scroll down to the distribution table, you cheeky, impulsive thing, you).

This is where I get to convey my excitement at the particular titles in the program I feel especially to merit it. You might then, for what it's worth, like to take the following as my hot tips for the festival. However, a caveat must first be issued for this list, too. For I have not yet determined whether it's even possible to see all of the following. I'm still to map out my own festival schedule, you see, and so cannot guarantee that the following films don't at all clash, one with another. Fingers crossed that none do...

15 HOT TIPS FOR MIFF 2011

Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)

1. Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)
The new film from Jan Švankmajer is the one new film in the entire program I am beside myself with anticipation at the prospect of seeing. I have held off for the longest time from viewing even the long-available trailer for the latest, and, thankfully, not last feature (as had been rumoured) from the master Czech capital-S Surrealist – I've been dying to see Surviving Life move on the big screen, and on the big screen only. And now I will.

Quoth Miloš Forman: “Disney plus Buñuel equals Švankmajer”. Enough said!

(Except... to add that there's a whole lot more big screen Švankmajer action to be had up north a little later in the year. The Queensland Art Gallery's Australian Cinémathèque is running (even now, and into October) an absolutely extraordinary film program to accompany its current big exhibition, “Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams”, a film program so extensive in its coverage and interpretation of surrealism that I'm seriously having to consider missing a part of MIFF. I had hoped that MIFF – or perchance another Melbourne screen cultural institution – might avail themselves of a golden opportunity to bring to Melbourne some of the riches unspooling up in Brisbane. Alas, it would appear not. Why, in the last week of MIFF alone, the Australian Cinémathèque will screen (mostly 35mm prints of) films by Jean Rouch; Fernando Arrabal (oh how I would love to see Arrabal's work in a cinema!); Alejandro Jodorowsky (actually, I'll cut MIFF some slack on this one – they did screen beautiful restored prints of El Topo and The Holy Mountain a few years ago), and Louis Feuillade – they are, in fact, screening Feuillade serials at appropriately regular episodic intervals throughout much of the run of the exhibition.

In that last week the Australian Cinémathèque will also be screening Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast – happily, however, Beauty and the Beast will be appearing at MIFF, in honour of its place in the 1952 program, one of but three features to have graced that inaugural 1952 edition.)

2. Fruit of Paradise (1970)
This is the one old film in the program I'm beside myself with anticipation at the prospect of seeing. As well ought you be too if you're at all familiar with director Věra Chytilová's work – the ever astounding Daisies (1966), anyone? – as well as if, like me, you're a fan of Czech composer Zdeněk Liška. Various other heavyweights of the Czechoslovak New Wave have a hand in this one, too. A must see!

3. Class Relations (1984)
If you dare to call yourself a cinephile, but miss out on a rare opportunity to catch a Straub-Huillet film in Melbourne (and, in this case, one deemed almost “accessible” by the Strauboscenti, partly by dint of its being an adaptation of Kafka), you need have a good hard look at yourself. Seriously. And hell, you might even enjoy it.

4.. Sodankylä Forever - The Century of Cinema
+ the short preceding it: The First Interview

Another cinephiliac must-see! In the former, Peter von Bagh interviews

Istvan Szabo, Milos Forman, Jerzy Skolimowski, Ettore Scola, Miklos Jansco, Francesco Rosi, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Elia Sulieman, Michael Powell, Joseph H. Lewis, Richard Fleischer, Francis Ford Coppola, and, the man who got a street in Sodankylä named after him, Sam Fuller.
(Per the program notes for this film from the Vancouver International Film Festival)

Christ on a bike! How can anyone go past that?

PLUS! It's screening with the wonderful new short film from oftentimes animator of note, Dennis Tupicoff, which I have already seen, can heartily recommend and am happy to say I even had a very small part in realising. (I helped the director track down its narrator (who has bizarrely gone unmentioned in the MIFF program, but then, shorts are still, as ever, given far too short shrift in the program). The narrator? Why, if it isn't none other than Agnès Varda!)

The First Interview's a lovely film re-enacting a rare significant first to have evidently gone hitherto uncelebrated by the seventh art. It celebrates the first media interview ever conducted, which occurred in August 1886 in Paris when the renowned photographer Félix Nadar interviewed the famous scientist Michel Eugène Chevreul on the occasion of the latter's 100th birthday.

The re-creation extends beyond a mere simulation of the occasion to suffuse the very aesthetic of the overall film – it's a steampunker's delight!

5. The Turin Horse
Unmissable: it really might be Béla Tarr's last film. And only 146 minutes long! Nobody gives long take like Béla Tarr. I believe there to be but 30 of them in all of The Turin Horse...

6. Jeonju Digital Project 2011
An anthology film commissioned, as is its wont, by the Jeonju International Film Festival and featuring new (digital) works from each of Jean-Marie Straub, Claire Denis and José Luis Guerín. Another must for the cinephilically inclined!

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

7. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
Because who out there wouldn't benefit from a primer in pandrogyny? I can only anticipate that this will be a fascinating, consciousness-raising and binary-demolishing doco on the union – a loaded term here much more, and more interestingly, loaded, than usual – between legendary Throbbing Gristle founder, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and her inseparable late inamorata and Psychic TV bandmate, Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge.

8. Essential Killing
Vincent Gallo as a nameless Taliban soldier on the lam in eastern Europe. Director: the resurgent Jerzy Skolimowski, whose retrospective at the Melbourne Cinémathèque a year or two back was, for mine, one of the best seasons they've ever staged. I'm excited!

9. Black Venus
A new film by Abdellatif Kechiche, the director of the brilliant, ultimately nearly unbearably suspenseful The Secret of the Grain? Rather!

10. Artavazd Pelechian Program
I feel I ought to have reasons to recommend this program. Why I haven't any: I've never seen any of his work. An opportunity to right a wrong where is concerned a major figure in the more eggheaded realms of cinema? – sign me up!

11. The Mill and the Cross
Rutger Hauer will make two appearances at this year's MIFF. One will be as a hobo with a shotgun in... Hobo with a Shotgun. Whereas, in The Mill and the Cross, he will essay the part of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I have such a thing for Flemish Renaissance painters, I can't tell you. Also, director Lech Majewski will be a guest of the festival.

Guilty of Romance

12 & 13. Guilty of Romance and Cold Fish
The former has some sort of distribution deal lined up; the latter hasn't. Whatever. Both are from Sion Sono, the nutjob behind Love Exposure. And therefore must be seen (to be believed).

14. A Useful Life
I have to see this principally because its lead is an absolute dead ringer for Bill Mousoulis, founder of Senses of Cinema and stalwart independent filmmaker recently of Melbourne but latterly of parts Grecian. And the lead character is... why, he's a film programmer at a cinémathèque in Montevideo, of course! Uncanny much?!

15. Mysteries of Lisbon
Some sort of fairly imminent release from Rialto notwithstanding, four-and-a-half hours of Raúl Ruiz at MIFF, even if made for TV, can never be enough. (But cue now another lament for the Surrealism program in Brisbane's passing Melbourne by – why, this very month, screenings of Ruiz's On Top of the Whale (1982) and the wonderful first film of his I ever saw, chancing upon it one afternoon on SBS many years ago, Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983), are happening/have already happened. Ah, perhaps I ought instead focus on the positive: after MIFF, there's still time to head up north and catch a number of Borowczyks, Greenaways, and, yes, Švankmajers!, amongst others...)

*

Here at last then, as promised far above, is a table listing release information for films at the 60^th MIFF. May that the following (and all the wafflesome waffle above) might help Melburnians with some tough scheduling decisions over the MIFF to come!

(And be sure to stay tuned for regular reports from the coalface throughout the festival.)

* The list below has since been updated; see the following post:
"Coming Attractions, or: Addenda to Last Week's MIFF Picks"

TITLE	DISTRIBUTOR	DATE OF RELEASE	SECTION
Red Dog	Roadshow	4 Aug 2011	Aust. Showcase
POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold	Madman	11 Aug 2011	Documentaries
Jane Eyre	Universal	11 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
Senna	Universal	11 Aug 2011	This Sporting Life
LennoNYC	Transmission	DVD – 11 Aug 2011	Backbeat
Win Win	Fox	18 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
Beginners	Hopscotch	25 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
The Guard	Transmission	25 Aug 2011	Int'l Panorama
Life in a Day	Transmission	TBA Aug 2011	Networked
Submarine	Madman	1 Sep 2011	Int'l Panorama
X	Potential	Early Sep 2011	Aust. Showcase
The Eye of the Storm	Transmission	15 Sep 2011	Aust. Showcase
Knuckle	Hopscotch	DVD – 15 Sep 2011	This Sporting Life
Cave of Forgotten Dreams	Rialto	22 Sep 2011	Documentaries
Norwegian Wood	Curious	6 Oct 2011	Accent on Asia
Drive	Pinnacle	TBA Oct 2011	Closing Night
Tomboy	Rialto	17 Nov 2011	Int'l Panorama
Toomelah	Curious	TBA Nov 2011	Aust. Showcase
13 Assassins	Icon	TBA 2011	Accent on Asia
Project Nim	Icon	TBA 2011	Documentaries
Silent Souls	Icon	TBA 2011	Int'l Panorama
Footnote	Rialto	1 Jan 2012	Int'l Panorama
Mysteries of Lisbon	Rialto	1 Jan 2012	Prime Time
Viva Riva!	Rialto	1 Jan 2012	Crime Scene
The Salt of Life	Rialto	19 Jan 2012	Int'l Panorama
Brother Number One	Antidote	TBA	Documentaries
Position among the Stars	Antidote	TBA	Documentaries
Tabloid	Antidote	TBA	Documentaries
Medianeras	Aztec	TBA	Networked
The Solitude of Prime Numbers	Aztec	TBA	TeleScope
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975	Curious	TBA	Backbeat
Jiro Dreams of Sushi	Curious	TBA	Documentaries
Another Earth	Fox	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Martha Marcy May Marlene	Fox	TBA	Int'l Panorama
A Separation	Hopscotch	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Africa United	Hopscotch	TBA	Next Gen
Think Global, Act Rural	Hopscotch	TBA	Documentaries
Ben Lee: Catch My Disease	Madman	TBA	Backbeat
Persecution Blues: The Battle for the Tote	Madman	TBA	Backbeat
Sing Your Song	Madman	TBA	Backbeat
Being Elmo	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Buck	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Page One: Inside The New York Times	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Bobby Fischer against The World	Madman	TBA	This Sporting Life
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress	Madman	TBA	Documentaries
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within	Madman	TBA	Crime Scene
Fire in Babylon	Madman	TBA	This Sporting Life
The Forgiveness of Blood	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Future	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
HERE	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Kid with a Bike	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Kill List	Madman	TBA	Night Shift
Melancholia	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Once upon a Time in Anatolia	Madman	TBA	Crime Scene
Outrage	Madman	TBA	Accent on Asia
Play	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
PressPausePlay	Madman	TBA	Networked
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure	Madman	TBA	Aust. Showcase
Terri	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
This is England '86	Madman	TBA	Prime Time
Troll Hunter	Madman	TBA	Night Shift
Tyrannosaur	Madman	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Guilty of Romance	Monster	TBA	Accent on Asia
The Woman	Monster	TBA	Night Shift
The Yellow Sea	Monster	TBA	Accent on Asia
Beauty	Palace	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Elena	Palace	TBA	Int'l Panorama
The Giants	Palace	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Our Idiot Brother	Roadshow	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Super	Roadshow	TBA	Night Shift
Le Havre	Sharmill	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Take Shelter	Sony	TBA	Int'l Panorama
33 Postcards	Titan View	TBA	Aust. Showcase
Hobo with a Shotgun	Transmission	TBA	Night Shift
Neds	Transmission	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Route Irish	Transmission	TBA	Int'l Panorama
Troubadours	Universal Music	TBA	Backbeat
Circumstance	Vendetta	TBA	Int'l Panorama

PS Is it just me, or is the graphic design for the program this year – an anniversary year in which the graphic design for all the predecessor programs is celebrated in an exhibition now on at ACMI – very seriously underwhelming? And to think, for a welcome change, they'd done such a good job on the festival trailer this year, only to seriously drop the ball in this department. Meh.

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

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

Tourists descend en masse
upon Bruges even on Segways!

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

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

(Re MIFF: a little more below.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What else is afoot?

In film:

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

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

In music and theatre:

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

And in words:

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

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

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More from me soon,

x Cerise

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.

2010: A Film Blog Odyssey

And a happy new year to you too.

It's time to get this blog back on track. The demands of as silly a silly season as a seasoned silly seasoner such as myself can recall for many a long year have been many and various and have kept me away once again from this blog for longer than I had ever intended.

Of course, it being a new year, the immediate temptation is to get things back on an even keel by the simple expedient of casting an eye over the year that just was. Well, I've done quite a bit of that already, if principally on air, and some of that has been recorded for posterity on the 18/12/10 edition of 3RRR's Film Buffs Podcast. My blatherings kick in soon after the 1:21:35 mark.

(An edition of Film Buff's Forecast I joined Thomas Caldwell in the co-host chair for two weeks earlier is also now accessible in its entirety; gluttons for punishment might like to download it too, the better to hear me prattle on at some length about Gaspar Noé's Enter The Void and François Ozon's La Refuge, and, if memory serves me correctly, to also chip in with a little pouring of scorn upon the ghastly The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a close rival to The Tourist as the most dreadful film I saw in 2010.)

Yesterday I submitted a written consideration of the best of the year that just was to Senses of Cinema for its annual world poll; it'll be online mid-January and I'll promptly link to it then. I did consider posting it here too, but in the interests of not running interference with Senses, I've thought better of posting... most of it.

Speaking of Senses of Cinema, one of the things that kept me away from here over December was meeting a commitment I had made to migrate in their entirety issues 20 (May–Jun 2002) through to 37 (Oct–Dec 2005) of Senses into its new-ish content management system. If you contributed any articles to Senses of Cinema in that time, you might be curious to see them in their swanky new skin. Just head to those URLs you've had bookmarked all these years and you'll magically be seamlessly transported to their new incarnations.

Also, whilst on the topic, as mentioned in ALLD's previous instalment, Screen Australia has pulled all of its funding of Senses of Cinema (don't get me started again...) In light of this horrendous and astonishing decision, perhaps you're of a mind to show Senses a little love back for all it's made freely available to you over the years? If that be the case, Senses of Cinema is accepting donations.

I have digressed.

So, what I'll do here now is simply give shout-outs to as many as ten films gracing my Senses poll submission that have heretofore gone unmentioned in this blog. Perhaps their 2010 release pre-dated ALLD's advent back in July, maybe they just slipped through the cracks, a function of my last few months' lesser engagement with this blog, or one of just sheer dumb luck.

In no particular order then, and represented not by name, not even by word but, rather, pictorially, the better to preserve some mystery ahead of Senses' eventual publication of my poll contribution, as well as to (sometimes heavy-handedly, sometimes hermetically) rhyme metaphorically with the text around them, scattered throughout this post are (stills from) some of my top films for the year that was 2010.

Fuckety-bye, 2010. You've been a right handful. Here's looking ahead to a wonderful 2011, wherein, if all goes according to at least one of several plans in various stages of development, several future postings to this blog will originate in parts abroad. Stay tuned... Here's also hoping that Jafar Panahi gets freed, or serves his time only in order for his career to assume a trajectory not unlike that of Václav Havel's. And that rumours of Kodachrome's death have been greatly exaggerated...

Meanwhile, in the immediate future, I've got several more discs of Madman's beautiful Ozu boxset to enjoy a leisurely wade through.

Happy viewing in 2011, y'all,

Cerise.