Of blogging further but fewer between

A generous shout-out from a Melbourne colleague-in-arms has inspired this post. Well, something needed to; nothing else's rattled my cage sufficiently just lately to distract me from my umpteen other sometimes gainful enterprises to inspire me to film-blog anew.

But Thomas Caldwell's kind ravings about A Little Lie Down on 3RRR's “Film Buff's Forecast” on Saturday just passed – accessible post-initial broadcast in podcast form – has goaded me into renewed activity, for he has made me aware that I have been remiss in a) giving lie to his assertion that I blog roughly weekly (by not blogging for close to a fortnight now – heavens!) and b) in not yet having restored to this blog a roll call of local bloggers whose writings on film y'all ought be acquainted with.

Re point b): the links I had established to other Melbourne film blogs – and indeed to other sites of interest – all vanished when I upgraded this blog's back-end a little while ago, the better to facilitate the appending to ALLD of all manner of groovy social media-friendly mechanisms.

Here then, as some sort of penance, and hopefully not running any real interference with Thomas' project to review Melbourne film blogs on a regular basis on Film Buff's Forecast – the very project to have inspired my belated return to blogging in the first place – is a minimally annotated account of those very links to blogs to have disappeared from these parts some weeks back, augmented by the addition of a couple of other notables.

In no particular order then, per their original listing as right-side column links previously grouped under the header “Essential fellow travellers MIFFing up a storm”:

MAN ABOUT TOWN
Richard Watts

It's on Richard's weekly 3RRR arts behemoth, “SmartArts”, that I enjoy a fortnightly radio segment. Richard is indeed the consummate MAN ABOUT TOWN – nary is there a day, nor an evening, when Richard isn't gadding about Melbourne town, getting in the thick of things artsy, openingsy and drinksy. He must, I think, ingest more art, including film, per waking hour than any other Melburnian. And he has the blog posts dating back to June 2004 to prove it!

Cinema Autopsy
Thomas Caldwell

Thomas, ever in greater demand hereabouts as a conductor of film discussion panels and the like, sees a lot of films so you don't have to. For this we should all count our blessings. At Cinema Autopsy, atop writings about more general matters cinematic, you can always be sure to find up-to-the-moment, intelligent and considered analysis of films freshly hitting the big screens at a googolplex near you, which increasingly bounce off his sonorous contributions to 3RRR's “Film Buff's Forecast” and to “Breakfasters” of a Thursday morning ~ 7.45am.

movie (a)musings
Emma Westwood

Emma gives good horror! Not that that's all that she's about – oh no no no – but it's clearly nonetheless a principal abiding passion. And hence her hunting down the likes of Pascal Laugier to discuss his almighty horror film Martyrs for an interview found in its entirety on her blog. Hence too, a little more recently, her posting “Ten of the Best Monster Movies”, which you really ought have a look at, 'cos Emma previously troubled to write a book on just that very subject and so is your go-to person when it comes to Mothra and friends.

Liminal Vision
Tara Judah

Tara is another who sees a lot of films so that you don't have to, ever writing about the experience in depth, sometimes letting fly with this or that academic line of inquiry (e.g., tags for a review of James Ivory's The City of Your Final Destination include “Psychoanalysis, Freud, The Real ...”). Tara knows several things or two, and so will you after dropping by Liminal Vision.

Cinetology
Luke Buckmaster

Cinetology, as part of the essential indie news web emporium Crikey, broke the story of MIFF's not doing the right thing by the producers of one of the greatest films of recent times, for mine, the extraordinary Son of Babylon (d. Mohamed Al-Daradj). (My thoughts on which are here.) But Luke's not all about scandal and scuttlebutt; he often gives good, raffish review too, with particular emphasis on stuff that's out now.

Screen Machine
eds. Brad Nguyen & Conall Cash

Many are the contributors to this fine portal of local film-crit which, aside from offering thoughtful, erudite examinations of Melburnian film cultural happenings after they've happened, also words us up very well on them beforehand. Yes, Screen Machine's weekly To-do lists compile close to everything on a week-in, week-out basis, that you – you insatiable cinéphile, you – might care to catch in sunny Melbourne town.

AND

Philmology
Josh Nelson (aka Dr.Philm)

In which, in recent posts, Josh takes on Joaqey Affix at their own game and fakes (?) an interview with Casey Affleck, as well as casting his eye over cinematic offerings ranging from The Human Centipede to Toy Story 3 (unravelling gender politics arguably at play in Pixar's latest and greatest in the process); from the ridiculous, to the sublime...

Jake Wilson
Jake Wilson

Jake Wilson's blog. An ex-colleague of mine at Senses of Cinema and for several years now a fixture at The Age, Jake, as you surely (!) know, is one of Melbourne's foremost writers on film. So get thee along to his blog.

And Now... For a Bit of Fun

Seeing as this is, to this point, still a bit thin as a first post for nearly a fortnight, and seeing as I really can't be arsed writing anything terribly in-depth about film just at the moment, I propose a little game, in the interests of a greater reflexivity here at ALLD. (And, but, lo! What's that – an ulterior motive, you say? Moi? Well, yes... Yes, it would be nice if you people – yes, I do know you're out there (and hence what's following) – it would be nice if you people actually troubled to leave a comment or two on your way out...)

So: below you will find five images. Each image corresponds to the first result from a Google Images search query to a search term by which people from far and wide have found their merry little way to A Little Lie Down.

Can you guess what each search term might have been? All of them pertain directly and literally to a film, or film cultural event, to have been discussed here previously. If you think you can guess any of them correctly – or wildly inaccurately, no matter – then please, BE MY GUEST, and pop your guess in the comments box.

(And for those of you possessed of a curiosity that simply demands immediate satiation, there are in fact answers at the very foot of this post.)

So, without any further ado:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

---

ALLD Search Term Quiz Answers

(Just turn your monitor upside-down)

5. (ǝɔıʇɔɐɹd puɐ ʎɹoǝɥʇ) ǝɟıl ƃuıʌıʌɹns
4. ƃuıɥʇ ʇsol ǝɥʇ
3. lɐʌıʇsǝɟ ɯlıɟ ɹǝɥʇo ǝɥʇ
2. ǝıqɯoz .ɐ.l
1. uɐɯ ɐ ǝʞıl ǝıp oʇ

Cabbage Patch Kids: Women Make Movies!

Two nights ago it was my privilege to sit on a panel at a Fringe Festival edition of Cherchez la Femme, an ever lively, informal, monthly feminist salon presided over by the formidable Karen Pickering.

Along with my wonderful fellow panellists Namila Benson, Lou Sanz and Megan Evans, we discussed, at Karen and our audience's goading, matters pertaining to feminism and the arts.

Being the sort of person who is always sure to research matters extensively before daring to let loose any sort of commentary into the public sphere, I prepared several pages of notes for Cherchez la Femme, accounting for many of the major players and developments in “women's cinema” from the very dawn of the seventh art through to the current day.

My fear of public humiliation no doubt to some extent fuels my thoroughness in these matters and so, naturally, I made note of so many more women filmmakers and theorists, and pertinent moments in time, than I was remotely called upon to wax knowledgeable about. Of course, while it is generally best that any error on these occasions be on the side of being over-prepared rather than the opposite, I feel it is even better still to put to some use all of that extra, otherwise redundant preparation. And hence, this blog post.

A text I referred to extensively ahead of last Tuesday's forum was Alison Butler's Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen, part of Wallflower Press' “Short Cuts” series and which, atop giving a readily digestible guide to key developments and shifts in feminist film theory, offers a historical guide to women-made cinema, at least in so much as that might encompass films directed by women and, furthermore, films perceptibly bearing some sort of discernible authorial imprint, which is to say, its focus is on auteur films directed by women.

Running to just 144 pages, Women's Cinema is a great primer in the contributions women directors have made to the cinema across its 115 years... and counting. Indeed, it plays a vital part in the necessary rehabilitation of some very major figures in film history who still haven't received their fair due, none more so than Alice Guy, whose 1896 minute-long film The Cabbage Patch Fairy looks certain now to have been the first narrative fiction film ever made, and who even ran an American studio in the early 1910s. But that's not all, folks; she made early experiments with synchronised sound around 1905 (!), and many are now arguing that she, and not D.W. Griffith, was the first to use the close-up, on which cinematographic device hangs the whole of the subsequent Hollywood star system! (For better or for worse...)

She also had women playing men in films, the narratives of which, while often very brief, were wont to espouse highly progressive views. The list of her firsts could go on and on and on. And yet it wasn't long ago at all that hers was a name barely even mentioned in accounts of film history.

Clearly, a necessary part of the feminist “project” in film must be to excavate and celebrate the accomplishments of pioneering women in the industry whose achievements have been left in the margins for much too long.

On which note, I wish to devote much of the rest of this post to a major shortcoming I perceive in Butler's generally very worthy book. Of course, 144 pages can only be expected to encompass so much, and it is clear that the achievements of key players in areas of the production of “women's cinema” other than direction – actors such as Katherine Hepburn or Marlene Dietrich, or current-day producers like the estimable Christine Vachon, or male directors like George Cukor or Douglas Sirk, known for being “women's directors” – fall beyond the scope of this book.

So, sure, Women's Cinema is not meant as a comprehensive account of all those who can be said to have contributed to a women's cinema, just those who have made a directorial contribution, especially wherever that intersects with feminist film theory.

But this doesn't excuse what I perceive to be a terrible absence from Butler's book, an absence all the more glaring because it corresponds to a field of cinematic production and directorial/authorial practice where women have been pioneers many times over.

Here then, as a small corrective, is a shout-out to a few major women animators, without whom this most protean subset of film production – and, by extension, all of the cinema – would be immeasurably the poorer.

Lotte Reiniger

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is the oldest surviving animated feature film and features a technique indisputably the invention of its director: silhouette animation, a cinematic analogue to shadow puppetry.

Three years in production – Reiniger had to pose and re-pose her silhouette figures something along the order of 300,000 times! – The Adventures of Prince Achmed has lost none of its charm in the succeeding 80-odd years, and I can't recommend highly enough tracking down the British Film Institute's DVD release of it, especially as it features a terrific documentary on Reiniger.

Mary Ellen Bute

A highly influential animator, yet little-known today, Mary Ellen Bute was a pioneering synaesthetic animator, which is to say, she was one of a number of animators/experimental filmmakers around from the late 1920s/early 1930s onwards endeavouring to visualise sound.

Apparently her work was often seen in cinemas back in those halcyon days when cinemas ran shorts – even experimental work – ahead of feature film presentations. Were that we would see the likes of those days again.

Claire Parker (and Alexandra Grinevsky)

Alongside Alexandre Alexeïeff, in the early '30s Parker pioneered (with contributions in the prototyping from Alexeïeff's first wife, Alexandra Grinevsky) what is surely the most meticulous animation method ever devised, that of pin-screen animation, which achieves a beautiful, monochrome chiaroscuro effect derived from the shadows cast by the meticulous frame-by-frame arrangement of literally hundreds of thousands of headless pins embedded to varying depths within a screen.

Alexeïeff and Parker made a few stunning shorts employing this unbelievably painstaking method, but their best known film work is probably the beautiful still pin-screen images that accompany the opening voice-over narration in Orson Welles' The Trial. Don't though let that put you off tracking down their incredible 1933 short horror film, Night on Bald Mountain, just for starters!

Caroline Leaf

In the late 1960s, Leaf pioneered sand animation, a technique profiled at last year's Melbourne International Animation Festival, in which sand, or other grains or powdery substances, is poured upon a lightbox and, frame-by-frame, rearranged. It can make for beautifully fluid, texturally rich animations, whether of an abstract or narrative bent. Certainly, that most ubiquitous of cinematic transition devices, the dissolve (from one scene into the next), achieves new levels of poetry when done with sand... which leads me to...

Kseniya Simonova

You might not know her name, but perhaps you've already seen her work. Has not everybody in fact already seen viral clips of this extraordinary young woman's work as demonstrated on Ukraine's Got Talent?

Simonova is not just a sand animator; she's a performance sand animator. Her work is like a behind-the-scenes, making-of production of itself, a performance where the act of animation and the animation itself are inseparable, and where the whole concept of a frame, as a measurable, consistent, discrete unit of time, completely breaks down, is completely dissolved, for Simonova's frames are both frames-in-the-making and transitions from one frame to the next within themselves!

Deleuze would have loved this.

I'm reminded too a little of Jan Švankmajer's privileging of the visibly palpated animated object in his films. Not for Švankmajer concerns about wanting to remove fingerprints from moulded clay, erasing evidence of the human manipulation of marionettes or any other perceivable traces of the animator's artistry in the interests of a greater “suspension of disbelief” – quite the contrary! (All the better for nonsensing any suggestion that the realms of “reality” and “the imagination” might be entirely discrete constructions, never prone to slippage from one to the other, nor back again.)

I mention this because Simonova's work clearly only gains from seeing her perform her beautiful – and emotive – animations.

It's animation, but not as we hitherto had known it. Surely animation festivals the world over ought be clamouring to have her grace their events?

*

Women's Cinema: in a cinema in Melbourne near you!

I'll wind this post up by noting that there are several films directed by women in Australian cinemas presently, and another, one of the very best films of the year in fact, due to be released here very shortly.

I was asked early on during Cherchez la Femme, apropos of a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, winning a Best Director Oscar for the very first time only this year, why it is that so few women are presently making films, or having their films distributed, and latterly, acclaimed.

Of course, the reasons that so few films made by women receive widespread distribution and/or are of the Hollywood big-budget blockbusting ilk are many and complex, but it is certainly not the case that women are making very few films at all, or that they are being altogether ghettoised and denied distribution. Things ain't totally bleak, as the following list of women-helmed feature films in distribution in Australia will illustrate.

The Tree (d. Julie Bertucelli)

In release now. Screened at MIFF. A beautifully lensed tale set in a south Queensland everytown in which Charlotte Gainsbourg's French migrant character loses her Aussie husband after he dies at the wheel, ploughing into the massive Moreton Bay Fig Tree that looms large – and then larger and larger – on their property. Perhaps her husband's spirit is then infused with the tree, as his favourite daughter, who frequently communes with it, believes, and perhaps not...

It's a lovely film, graced with superb performances all round, but I have to say it's somehow not as magical as I had hoped. I don't think it quite played up the supernatural-cum-magic realist elements of the narrative to the degree it ought to have; it feels like Bertucelli hedged her bets a little, making for a last act that is ultimately a little underwhelming, notwithstanding that it features a ferocious cinematic storm ripe for the likes of a Peter Tscherkassky to plunder.

The Kids are All Right (d. Lisa Cholodenko)

In release now. Screened at MIFF. I haven't seen it. I have heard some very good things but also note that it has infuriated several lesbian friends of mine.

Please Give (d. Nicole Holofcener)

In release now. Screened at MIFF. I haven't seen it either but note the presence in it of Catherine Keener, for whom I will always have time!

Sagan (d. Diane Kurys)

In release now. A biopic on French writer Françoise Sagan whose first novel, Bonjour tristesse, was adapted for the big screen in 1958 with Jean Seberg in the lead (d. Otto Preminger). Alas, I haven't seen Sagan.

South Solitary (d. Shirley Barrett)

In release now. Was the Opening Night Film of this year's Sydney Film Festival. Again, I regret to say I'm yet to see it.

The Waiting City (d. Claire McCarthy)

In release now. I've not seen it. Whereas...

Winter's Bone (d. Debra Granik)

Screened at MIFF. Will be released here 28 October. One of the films of the year! A great slice of Social Realist Ozark Gothic (if you will), a wonderfully atmospheric and really rather chilling descent into a desperate backwoods underworld where Southern hospitality is stretched to breaking point when it comes to matters surrounding methamphetamines and their production.

There are unfailingly terrific performances from the whole cast, most of whom are lumbered with extremely unattractive characters and made up to look like they really ought to grace Faces of Meth scare posters. I'll be sure to rave a little more in-depth about Winter's Bone a little closer to its release.

*

Now, it might well be the case that most of these films are independent, narrow release productions, but with the relatively limited exposure to a public that that signifies, a happy flipside exists too; you can be sure that these films represent much less compromise on the parts of their makers than invariably occurs when almost anybody, man, woman or beast, is entrusted with the big BIG dollars that are the stuff of Hollywood blockbuster production.

Something else to note: four of the films listed just above got an airing at Melbourne's flagship film festival ahead of a cinema release, while another opened the Sydney film festival. Let's pause then to consider the salutary influence of our major film festivals upon the exhibition and distribution prospects of films from women (and indeed, from all less enfranchised) filmmakers, and pause also to note, and to trumpet the fact, that the Artistic Directors of the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide Film Festivals are presently all women (Michelle Carey, Clare Stewart and Katrina Sedgwick, respectively), not forgetting that Anne Démy-Geroe oversaw the Brisbane International Film Festival from its birth in 1991 all the way through to just last year as well!

I don't know if that has much been commented on elsewhere, but that sure strikes me as a victory for female representation in the upper echelons of Australian film culture. The incumbency of women in programming films for the major festivals, as well as for other events, and within cultural institutions (like ACMI) is not in any way to be underestimated when it comes to getting more women filmmakers' work projected onto the umpteens of big screens around these parts, whereupon, it falls to us, to give them an audience...

*

Lastly, it would be remiss of me not to plug “Voice of the Grain: Films by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill” at ACMI over the coming weeks, beginning this Sunday. Jake Wilson has curated four programs, each a Sunday apart, spanning 50 years of the practice of the godparents of Australian experimental cinema. Go see!

Superstream, or: Many projectors make light work. PLUS!: Švankmajer

Superflux, a long-established live cinema quartet hailing from Grenoble, France, and presently touring Australia and New Zealand, hooked up last night with Melbourne AV collective Stream for a night of improvised, albeit to some indeterminable extent, rehearsed, “live cinema”. Kitted out between them with two prepared 16mm projectors; two digital projectors running video feedback and processing; prepared saxophone; bass guitar, and “noise toys”, Superstream let rip with a seriously cacophonous, multi-pronged flickerfest free-for-all of the likes not often seen around staid little Melbourne town.

It seems fitting that this occurred in Brunswick's venerable Mechanics Institute. I'm sure the night's events weren't quite amongst the goings-on its 1868 founders had anticipated would grace its premises but I can't help but feel they'd have appreciated the hands-on, bespoke approach to the AV mayhem that filled the Institute's performance space.

Cast upon, and across, a large grainy white canvas, multiple projections, thrown this way and then that, rectilinear as a rule but circular and elliptical as well, subdivided the canvas into frames (within frames, within frames), jockeying for position on a busy, collision-filled screen, ever toying with the chance/risk of generating some sort of transitory meaning or narrativity, never less so than when the projections thrown were less of an abstract nature and contained recognisable imagery, whether for split-seconds or for sustained periods.

When I say "recognisable", I mean by dint of containing shapes that conform at least roughly to forms assumed by human beings, animals, objects and environments (why, I'm sure at one stage I was seeing, even though its source footage was heavily solarised, a man in military garb grappling with a sealion. I do, however, concede that I might have been mistaken!) They might also have been recognisable by virtue of, on occasion, clearly originating from a familiar source. Amongst all the furious flickering, and the interference/complementarity of rapid-fire barrages of superimposed imagery and visual noise, I'm sure I recognised images/sequences from The French Connection and Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, along with generic Western footage and many other things besides!

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

Aside from all of the in-the-moment image manipulations generated in the act of projection (as was also a large part of the spasmodically, illusorily rhythmic but mostly chaotic soundscape, via the manipulation of optical soundtracks), there was a great deal of play with emulsive chemical processes, not in-camera (presumably... surely that would be very dangerous!) but rather, prepared earlier, leading to some extremely eerie visuals, as faces, bodies and environments just melted away and decayed in a fashion no CGI will ever, ever better. (Be sure to see, sometime, Bill Morrison's stunning and exemplary Decasia!) These images, often digested subliminally, in concert and/or in antagonism with the greater bombardment of audiovisual (non-)information, are the ones from the evening I took home to bed with me...

Another pleasure: those moments when the whirr of 16mm projectors occasioned to be heard above the noise, or heard amidst it, providing the loud, but not quite too loud, noisescape with some faltering, underpinning rhythms, as well as conveying a strong sense of those projectors', and their projected materials', very materiality, the latter reinforced by moments when the film was evidently being spooled through a little skew-wif, as when sprocket holes started creeping their merry way across the screen.

And, for a little corporeality to add to all of this wonderful, frantic fusing of analog and digital projected materials: some playful, polymorphous shadow-puppetry penetrated the frame late in the piece from stage-right.

Extraneous to the performance per se, but expanding upon it in a pleasing historiographical sense, it was a pleasure to see eminent, old guard members of Melbourne's film avant-garde in attendance: here a Cantrill or three, there a Dirk de Bruyn. (Note to one and all: be sure to get along to "Grain of the Voice: 50 Years of Sound and Image by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill" at ACMI between October 10 and 31, curated by my former Senses of Cinema colleague and current day Age critic, the estimable Jake Wilson.)

Enjoying some after-show drinks with a good friend and various of the folks to have earlier provided such splendid (and free!) entertainment, down the road at the Brunswick Green on a busy AFL Grand Final Day night, I concluded I'd had myself a lovely evening, and that I've successfully stoked in myself quite the interest in attending more expanded, performative cinema events. I've been remiss in seeing all too few in times gone by, even despite – or perhaps because of – having been a party to amateurish perpetrations of such a couple of times in the past myself.

AND!

Jan Švankmajer in Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)

Along a more narrative-minded, but equally alchemical vein of image-smithing, I will take pause to announce how great a sense of anticipation I can't help but have towards the new Jan Švankmajer film, Přežít svůj život (teorie a praxe) (Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)), which may even (gulp) be his last.

My appetite could scarcely be any whetter... but lest yours need further whetting, here are a few stills from Surviving Life, which has just premiered at Venice and which opens in the Czech Republic November 4.

Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)

Funnily, extremely excited though I am, I can't bring myself to look at Surviving Life's trailer (viewable at Bonton Film). The stills, in all their Max Ernst collage-novel-esque glory, are more than enough to sustain me for now, whereas I feel to watch the trailer would be to spoil the joy I anticipate on ultimately seeing these images move. On, need it be said, as BIG a screen as possible.

I think it important, as a critic, to remember that one is still also a cinéphile, and hence prone to possibly slightly unprofessional adoration of certain film world figures whose work one can never engage with on quite the same level of detached objectivity as with the great morass of others.

And hence, this outburst of fannishness.

That said, perhaps it all evens out; no doubt the risk of disappointment is higher when more is invested in the work of someone whose work one loves and is forever championing. But then, perhaps we also can't help but be a little too forgiving on occasions, bringing more to a reading than is necessarily there to be read of what might, sometimes, really truly be a lesser work, the better to elevate and enshrine it in our hearts and minds and keep at bay any suggestion that our precious emotional investment could ever be compromised... Ah, 'tis the stuff of a Freudian field day, to be sure! And most aptly so, for so too looks Surviving Life!

Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)

Navel-gazing be damned. Old Švankypants has never disappointed me and I simply cannot wait to see Surviving Life!

Far from the Maddin crowd

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

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

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

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

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

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

But no cigar.

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

And watch, and indeed relish them, I did.

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

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

*

AND IN NEWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun! Surely!

*

AND!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bugger August; that was soooo last month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That took quite a bit of doing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right. That'll do for now.

In anticipation of a proper resumption of usual services shortly,

Yours,

ALLD.

That was the rest of the August that was... August 2010. (Part One)

Post-MIFF, and more particularly, post-Friday the 13^th, when my beloved little cat became an ex-Pushpaw, August has been a trying time indeed.

That's not to say I've been denied the pleasure of seeing films, although, alas, I've almost as good as missed attending as many as three whole film festivals (the Indonesian Film Festival; the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, and The Other Film Festival) due to my faltering health and energies.

Ahead of that fateful 13^th day in August, I did at least get to a media preview of The Other Film Festival and so can offer some thoughts on a few films to have screened at TOFF, if not on the festival experience, per se.

That said, I am disappointed to have had so limited an engagement with the TOFF this year as a) I worked for the festival a few years ago and enjoyed, and gained from, the experience tremendously and b) the festival, with its focus on “cinema by, with and about people with a disability”, both screens material acknowledging, and indeed celebrating, “otherness”... of which I am a fan..., as well as acting as (one hopes) a harbinger of a more utopian future where cinema is for, and accessible by, everybody, not just those boasting a full complement of senses, the capacity for autonomous bipedal motility and an at oneness with consensual reality, like I often am.

The good folks of The Other Film Festival have a dream, a dream I tells ya!, and, more importantly still, take measures through their own fine example to demonstrate that that dream can – nay, should – be a reality.

My TOFF films seen, then:

Rita (d. Fabio Grassadonia & Antonio Piazza)
A very fine 18 minute-long Italian short which does wonderfully well in communicating something of the experience of the blindness of its titular character, a strong-willed, ten-year-old girl (Marta Palermo), principally through a combination of effective sound design and strategically keeping the camera trained upon her highly expressive face for all of the film's housebound first act.

The second act begins when, heard well before he's 'seen', a bloodied intruder enters Rita's house, and one can't help but immediately fear the worst for the very vulnerable girl; any number of horror films previously viewed condition one to fear for any character claustrophobically framed, as here, when there are ominous bumping noises emanating from outside of the frame, even before matters of blindness are taken into consideration.

However, the intruder's visit ultimately proves a good thing... possibly... in an ambiguous, 'be careful what you wish for' sort of way.

Sound-Shadows (d. Julie Engaas)

A semi-animated short which, like Rita, goes some way to convey the experience of blindness, in this instance portraying it as a synaesthetic affair. The narrator (Hege Norset Blichfeldt) explains how she perceives the world as a soundscape in which objects and people within it emit “sound-shadows”, enabling her to negotiate her environment. Pencil-drawn outline animation, sometimes superimposed over real-world backdrops, helps visualise for the seeing-unimpaired that which the narrator cannot see, as we understand it, for herself. A lovely piece of work.

The Sunshine Boy (d. Fridrik Thor Fridriksson)
A feature-length Icelandic documentary on autism narrated by Kate Winslet. It chiefly concerns the quest of an Icelandic woman (Margret Dagmar Ericsdottir) to better understand, and hopefully improve the lot in life of, her nonverbal, autistic 11-year-old son, Keli. To which end she and he travel far and wide, spending a lot of time in the United States and interviewing many experts in the field before ultimately finding some joy through the “Rapid Prompting Method” developed and practised by Soma Mukhopadhyay in Texas.

While the film feels a little like it could benefit from a bit of trimming, there's no denying the power of the film's understated but nonetheless triumphant close, wherein Keli, by degrees, demonstrably comes to be able to express himself, to communicate interests and desires that would not otherwise likely ever have been expressed, let alone met.

Sigur Ros and Björk feature on the soundtrack, which is of course no bad thing. And admirers of Errol Morris' “First Person” series, ca. 2000/01, will welcome hearing once more from the marvellous Temple Grandin, autistic inventor of humane slaughterhouses.

*

Post Friday the 13^th, Pushpaw's passing echoed wherever I went.

I caught Michael Winterbottom's neo-noir The Killer Inside Me just a few days later, which cheered me up no end. I jest. A friend who saw it at MIFF summed it up thus: “Spank spank spank, kill kill kill, spank spank spank, kill kill kill...”

I've not read Jim Thompson's 1952 novel, but it's hard to imagine it could be any much less pleasant a stroll through the mind of a psychopath, portrayed in Winterbottom's film by Casey Affleck. Affleck's performance as Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is chilling, to be sure, and his graphically beating to a pulp Hollywood lovelies Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson is just about every bit as shocking as what Gaspar Noé inflicted upon Monica Bellucci in Irreversible, Michael Haneke upon Naomi Watts in his US version of Funny Games and Darren Aronofsky upon Jennifer Connelly in Requiem for a Dream. There is an undeniable and inflated horror and astonishment in seeing beautiful, established stars, rather than mere nobodies, having horrific things meted out to them on the big screen. And doesn't Winterbottom know it! We are spared nothing.

The Killer Inside Me packs quite a punch, and ends strangely and strongly (with perhaps a tip of a Sheriff's hat to a certain illustrious Robert Aldrich noir classic), even if its protagonist's psychopathology is explained away in a fairly pat fashion (albeit one, I suppose, generically satisfactory).

Winterbottom continues to startle as one of the most protean and fearless filmmakers going, but let no-one tell you The Killer Inside Me is anybody's idea of a good time waiting to be had.

The following night it was off to the Melbourne Cinémathèque to catch the Alain Delon double of Plein Soleil (René Clément, 1960) and La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969). I had seen neither before and had read up only a little on them, so knew not really what to expect.

So, of course, wouldn't you know it, both come to feature Delon murdering somebody, though the deaths this time are, in both films, a darned sight less graphic – and a good deal more watery – than in The Killer Inside Me.

I don't really feel like writing expansively on either other than to say that a) both were made in a time of higher pants and b) La Piscine, boasting charms additional to Delon's surfeit courtesy of his real-life ex, Romy Schneider, as well as a young and gawkily beautiful Jane Birkin, is an absolute cracker... up until when the police are called in, late in the piece, subsequent to which point everything just drags. At that stage in the film, the only good that could come of introducing Mr. Plod to proceedings would be to have him summarily dispatched too...

Death even infiltrated my following night's trip to the theatre, though this time it came as no surprise when it showed its spindly narrative hand. I was joining my dear friend Richard Watts at the Opening Night of the Melbourne Theatre Company's production of All About My Mother, an adaptation of my favourite Pedro Almodóvar film, and one in which much of the narrative hinges upon a pedestrian being clocked by a passing car. (Sigh.)

Sadly, All About My Mother was highly disappointing. I had presumed to give it the benefit of the doubt; the adaptation was said to have come with Almodóvar's blessing and the original is heavily concerned with matters theatrical in the first place.

However...

From the very opening, things were a bit amiss. Alison Whyte, in the lead role, gave her Manuela a bizarre, plummified Australian accent... oh if only she could have sounded a little more European, any sort of European!

This accent robbed her character of believability and gravitas, and jarred all the more when she shared scenes with certain members of the rest of the cast who did adopt some sort of Spanish accent. (Whyte once or twice did, perhaps accidentally, ostentatiously roll an 'r' – which just made matters worse.)

This wasn't the least of its problems, however. The idea to have Manuela's son posthumously moping around the stage for most of the play's duration was surely an ill-conceived one. Even sillier, he silently interacted once or twice, apropos of nothing, with some of the living characters. I felt for Blake Davis, the young man who landed that largely thankless and, frankly, quite embarrassing, part.

Of course, Paul Capsis is always going to be entertaining, and he is perfectly cast as tranny hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Agrado. However, there really was no need whatsoever to have Agrado's addresses to the audience exist outside of the narrative; they had been perfectly integrated within it in the film.

And, while the first half held me, notwithstanding all of my reservations already outlined above, the arse fell right out of the whole production almost immediately after the intermission; the play's rhythm was gone, gone, gone. And not because of the intermission; the problem was that the second half began with an abrupt shift of mood, all easy laffs and camping it up, which just utterly smothered the following serious narrative developments.

There were some positives; I didn't mind the layered mobile screens that, three deep, inhabited, and subdivided, the stage throughout – screens in the double sense of being canvases for projections as well as being coverings behind which actions – diegetic and 'behind-the-scenes' – could be strategically unseen, or seen, to occur.

Wendy Hughes was fine too.

Let's hope though that the production of John Cassavetes' Opening Night, at the forthcoming Melbourne International Arts Festival, makes for rather more successful a theatricalisation of an already 'theatrical' film.

 *

And that will about do for now. I'm tired, pleuritic and cranky as I type this, but will commit to putting August properly to bed within the next few days, probably just after my Thursday's contribution to 3RRR's SmartArts (11.30 Melbourne time (GMT+10:00)), during which I'll no doubt talk about a few of the things I didn't get around to covering in this post, as well as this year's Message Sticks Film Festival.

Toodle-oo meantime.

That was the MIFF that was

And not before time.

Here's an A-Z account of films seen that screened at the 2010 MIFF, with a few words on anything I didn't find time or energy to write about nearer the day, and even fewer words about anything that I did, accompanied by a link to the corresponding previous writings, whether written whilst having A Little Lie Down, or for a festival report published in Senses of Cinema.

The following includes next to no words on films to have already received a general release, or which are very, very soon to. I'll endeavour to catch up on the likes of The Special Relationship, Splice, Four Lions, Boy and The Killer Inside Me in a separate future post.

Adrift

A lovely, languorous look at the lives of a few current day, existentially angsty Hanoi dwellers.

There's a little more on Adrift within my report for Senses of Cinema on the 2010 Fribourg International Film Festival.

Air Doll

Setting the action in a tumbledown Tokyo far removed from the neon-drenched playground for drug addled young émigrés depicted in Enter the Void (about which, finally, more below), Hirokazu Koreeda casts a little magic realist spell upon a sex doll and brings it to life (as embodied by Korean actress Bae Doona), all awhile enshrouding proceedings in a haze of melancholia.

While Air Doll's mood is all very minor key, and its ending is horrific, the film it most reminds me of is Edgar Wright and friends' wonderful, ultimately upbeat rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead. The premise of both films seems much the same: in an everyday megalopolis, everybody around you could overnight turn into killer zombies/animate sex dolls, and you'd be none the wiser.

(Speaking of Edgar Wright, I haven't yet seen Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which, on MIFF's final day, went toe-to-toe in its single screening with the only screening of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, an auteur stand-off which went unanticipated by the ultimately very annoying MIFF trailer, which, in correspondence with this year's festival's slogan “It's a Matter of Taste”, bellowed forth all sorts of inane, inexplicably American accent-inflected dialectical oppositions pitting auteur against auteur, beginning with “Apatow vs. Kubrick” (neither of whom, as with many of the names that followed, were represented at the festival anyway).

Clearly, come the festival's final day, the only contest between filmmakers being contemplated in any way by MIFF audiences was Wright vs. Apichatpong, i.e., whether to close their MIFF with the certainty of easy good times promised by Wright's Scott Pilgrim (due for a wide release within a week anyway) or with the sole Melbourne screening of this year's Palme D'Or winner, made by the man who made the unforgettable Tropical Malady (and who also had a directorial hand in the enjoyably forgettable, camp as all get-out The Adventures of Iron Pussy – true!)

For me, it would have been a no-brainer, had I not a non-MIFF commitment that day to spare me such an easy decision anyway. The upshot of which, notwithstanding that I've still seen neither: Apatow vs. Kubrick? Well that's just silly. But Apichatpong vs. Wright? Apichatpong, surely!)

Animation Shorts 1

Fatigue robbed me of most of this session. Were that I could remember, in particular, more than just the initial five of The Lost Thing's 15 minutes (d. Andrew Ruhemann & Shaun Tan). Why couldn't MIFF have more than just the one screening of its animation packages? The animations – and the animators – deserve better.

I can though remember Sarah Wickens' clever What Light (Through Yonder Window Breaks) clearly enough to mention it here and applaud its comedic, ontological play with light, zipping about an enclosed room full of everyday stuff to metaphorically and literally bounce off of.

Animation Shorts 2

Oh dear. Fatigue robbed me of some of this session, too. I was at least with it enough to appreciate how much the one film I was really looking forward to within this package, the Quays' Maska, went down like a lead balloon with the rest of the crowd. Its finish was greeted with no small amount of ironic cheering from a likely Tropfest-sensibilitied audience.

Perhaps that's fair enough; Maska probably would have been better packaged with the experimental shorts (much as, I'm sure, Guy Maddin's Night Mayor should have been too, rather than with the documentary shorts, which I missed, dagnabbit). On which note, the experimental shorts were sadly given equally short shrift within the program as the animations; there was in fact but one, solitary, far-from-prime-time screening at MIFF for each of Animation Shorts packages 1 and 2; “Doco Shorts” (perish the thought that we might not colloquialise the term “documentary” lest it sound, what, unsexy?), and “Experimental Shorts”.

But back quickly to the animations, and it's hats off to Tom Judd for Bruce, wherein an action hero is created out of pixels and meat, semi-Splice style, and made to perform in a real world 1980s platform game environment until coming to a comically pathetic end, and to Beomsik Shimbe Shim's bizarre and disturbing The Wonder Hospital, which might give pause to anybody out there considering putting themselves through any sort of irreversible procedure in the name of beauty. Kudos also to Emma Lazenby for Mother of Many, a lovely tribute to the undercelebrated art of midwifery.

Around a Small Mountain

Positively pithy by Jacques Rivette's standards, I can't say Around a Small Mountain did a tremendous amount for me; it seemed altogether too self-consciously minor.

I fancy that some folks out there are so besotted with Rivette that they'll declare this rather throwaway work, set around an ill-attended circus and starring a maudlin Jane Birkin and a quixotic Sergio Castellitto, a “minor masterpiece”. They can keep the noun; I'll retain only the adjective.

Bibliothèque Pascal

Notwithstanding a jarringly homophobic narrative development early on, this was one of this year's most exciting offerings. Take Suzy Bannion out of Suspiria and let her loose in the "porn torture"-riddled ramblings of a most unreliable narrator and you've got Bibliothèque Pascal.

A little more on Bibliothèque Pascal.

Black Bus

A documentary offering scary insights into applications of the male-chauvinistic doctrines of latter-day, post-‘modesty revolution’ Haredi Judaism. Not as enraging as it ought to have been, but it's interesting to note that the state of Israel is perfectly capable of persecuting its own every bit as much as its enemies.

There's quite a bit more on Black Bus at ArtsHub.

Border

MIFF's “Wild Things” section offered up both Border and Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar; therein lies the making for a wonderful Kuleshovian farmland double-bill. Considerably further removed from the norms of classicist narrative than Balthazar, the dialogue-free Border is a triumph of sound design in painting an audiovisual picture of hardscrabble lives eked out along the the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.

There's a little more on Border within my report for Senses of Cinema on the 2010 Fribourg International Film Festival.

Caterpillar

A determinedly unrelenting, harrowing and unapologetically unsubtle indictment of WWII-era Japanese nationalism from Kôji Wakamatsu, one of the most prolific and renowned directors of pinku eiga in that disreputable, but increasingly re-examined, genre's heyday.

A “war hero” and rapist returns home to his village, reduced to nowt but a mute, burnt head, a torso and an aggressive sexual appetite, which his wife, dutifully battling her own repulsion, tends to. Occasionally she parades him about the village, dressed in all his military finery, bedecked in medals. He eventually meets an appropriately ironic end.

Nobody, having been spared nothing, has enjoyed themselves in the meantime.

Certified Copy

Was Abbas Kiarostami's first film made outside of Iran more parts Luis Buñuel than Richard Linklater? I think so...

Quite a bit more on Certified Copy.

Enter the Void

If ever I find myself at a party with Gaspar Noé, I'll be sure to keep him away from the punch.

His latest feature is sure one nasty, overlong, out-of-body bad trip that won't be namechecked in any Tokyo tourism brochures any time soon. Its lead, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a drug-peddling Canadian émigré, spends most of the film newly dead, a state we join him in experiencing, in accordance with theories exposited earlier in the film by Alex (Cyril Roy), one of Oscar's friends. Alex would have us believe that the experience of dying, as per The Tibetan Book of the Dead, has parallels in taking DMT, which Oscar is taking as he hits the town with Alex at the film's outset...

Enter the Void's first hour alone is troubling enough. Oscar clearly has the hots for his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), who, on getting reacquainted with his brother on arriving in neon-soaked Tokyo, becomes a stripper at a club run by a Japanese heavy. (Oscar meanwhile has been getting it on with a friend's mother. Ah – were it only Oscar and Lucinda! For added yuks.) Oscar and Linda, as we are none-too-subtly reminded once or twice, were orphaned through a horrific road accident not so very long ago... hence their (ahem) closeness.

Both are already leading a bottom-dwelling, downward-spiralling life in Tokyo ahead of Oscar's shooting death in a toilet cubicle.

Afterwards...

Well, the film's latter hour-and-a-half is, shall we say, rather laboured.... Navel gazing is taken to a whole new metaphoric extreme!

Time and again the camera skims across Tokyo rooftop after rooftop before entering some space or another where Oscar's nearest and dearest contend with the aftermath of his death. Each time the camera finally settles upon an enclosed space peopled by Oscar's folk tearing themselves and one another apart, the camera gyres wildly about that space, as if a hot air balloon barely tethered in swirling high winds; that space will eventually fish-eye in on itself and the camera will finally zoom down and out the other end through yet another umbilical rabbit hole in pursuit of variations upon the same...

That rabbit hole might be anything from a common kitchen sink plughole (in which respect Enter the Void superficially follows a time-honoured cinematic tradition) to a tray bearing a newly aborted foetus...

Interspersed amongst all of this are flashbacks through Oscar's life, leading to the moment of Oscar's very (re)birth, just ahead of which we aren't spared what is perhaps the cinema's most extraordinary cumshot (it's 'shot' vaginally, from within).

And that's about as much as I want to say about Enter the Void (other than also to mention that it has the most gobsmacking opening credits sequence you've ever seen) until I can see it again and check that I read it right. I have my doubts about certain elements... but that was probably just the drugs, right kids?

Film Socialisme

Never again, Jean-Luc, never again...

A little more on Film Socialisme.

Honey

Exemplary piece of so-called “slow cinema”. Must this term necessarily assume a pejorative dimension? Which filmmaker will yet reclaim this still newly coined term as a badge of honour and put to rest its bandying about as a damnation?

A little more on Honey.

I Killed My Mother

Ugly, ugly, ugly film by a precocious young man who knows how to exact strong performances from a cast (himself, as this film's lead, definitely included) but who seems clueless when it comes to lighting and composition. Nothing which can't be remedied.

A little more on I Killed My Mother.

I Love You Phillip Morris

Nothing less than a revelation. Roadshow, get with the program and RELEASE THIS FILM!

A little more on I Love You Phillip Morris.

In the Attic, or Who Has a Birthday Today?

My disappointment when I saw this last year was probably less based on the film's own merits than on my own expectations, likely unfairly high. That this was made by Jiří Barta, of Krysař (The Pied Piper of Hamelin) fame, had me expecting less a Czech stop-motion Toy Story, with a target demographic to match, than something of the power and virtuosity of The Pied Piper. I now really wish I'd seen it again, especially as I'm trying to improve my command of the Czech language.

There's a little more on In the Attic, or Who Has a Birthday Today? within my report for Senses of Cinema on the 2009 AniFest: International Festival of Animated Films.

Kawasaki's Rose

A fine new Czech film not a million miles thematically removed from The Lives of Others, but with all of its action taking place in the current day. When is a dissident not a dissident? I dare say this film resonates uneasily with any number of folks back in its home country.

A little more on Kawasaki's Rose.

Lebanon

I really didn't much care for Das Tank, accolades or no accolades. Nice sound design, but.

A little more on Lebanon.

Lemmy

Inept projection couldn't ruin this great fun, albeit overlong, tribute to one of rock 'n' roll's most indestructible, talismanic figures, Motorhead's Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister.

A little more on Lemmy.

Lola

Or “Monsoon Manila”. Or perhaps “Grandma vs. Grandma”. Certainly a highly immersive, neo-realist experience. Gets right in the wet, sticky thick of things, as two old ladies do their utmost to battle the elements and their lot in life in attaining moneys enough to do the right things by their sons, one of whom is now dead after an encounter with the other. Not half as grim as it sounds.

There's a little more on Lola within my report for Senses of Cinema on the 2010 Fribourg International Film Festival.

Mammuth

I don't know if it was just fatigue, but I slept through too much of Mammuth to be confident enough to say much of anything about it. This is probably a shame, as I loved directors Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine's previous film, Louise-Michel.

Matinee

A little regrettably, this enjoyable collision of William Castle-inspired schlockmongering and the Cuban Missile Crisis was my only dalliance with the Joe Dante retrospective at MIFF. I wish I'd felt I had the strength to sign up for Dante's four-and-a-half-hour long The Movie Orgy; it sounds like it was a lot of fun, along the lines of “That's Exploitation!”, an extraordinary compilation of trailers New Zealand outré film impresario Ant Timpson prepared for the 3^rd MUFF, back in the golden days of my involvement with said festival.

A little more on Matinee.

Osadné

A lovely, very droll documentary about a very small Slovakian village getting ever smaller and its attempts to stem that tide, ideally with the construction of a “chapel of grief”.

A little more on Osadné.

Rubber

A highly enjoyable film of great originality, great silliness and, ultimately, a great body count, courtesy of an irascible, jilted, psychokinetic killer tyre. Also notable for taking the film-within-a-film narrative device to new levels of absurdity.

A little more on Rubber.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Director Mat Whitecross is a very energetic fellow; track suit panted, he presided over a Q&A in Abu Dhabi last November after a screening of his and frequent collaborator Michael Winterbottom's The Shock Doctrine, a recent screen elaboration upon Naomi Klein's disaster capitalism opus of the same name.

Whitecross could barely stand still for a moment on that occasion as he rattled off quick-fire responses to a very inquisitive crowd. And it's that same sort of manic energy which he brings to the hyperactive opening of his Ian Dury biopic, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, for better, and for worse.

It begins with a mad great flurry of rapidly edited images and vignettes, mixing animation with live-action, archival material with live rock 'n' roll and no small amount of fourth wall breaching, with Andy Serkis' Dury addressing a crowd within a theatre in a fashion not unlike Bronson in Nicolas Winding Refn's film of the same name, if he'd instead been positioned in London's Hackney Empire where Madness performed for Julien Temple (and Luke Cresswell)'s The Liberty of Norton Folgate.

In fact, I'd say Whitecross is heavily indebted to Temple and to the multi-media mosaic approach he adopted in his brilliant corrective to his own Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle of 1980, 2000's The Filth and the Fury. An approach brought rather more successfully to bear in Temple's documentaries than in this biopic, especially within Sex & Drugs' opening half hour, when it tramples all over any hope for the film to get into a rhythm. It does settle down and come good after that though, and lets us get to know the principal characters rather better.

Admirably, this sure ain't no hagiography. Sex & Drugs makes Dury out to be something of a bastard when at his worst. More frustratingly, it's quite narrow in its focus, which is especially honed upon Dury's relationship with his son, Baxter (Bill Milner), and upon Dury's relationship with his own father before him (Ray Winstone). The film doesn't cover a great timespan, and doesn't offer all that much of an insight into the wider world of the times.

Performances, however, are absolutely superb: for those too young to recall the real Ian Dury, Andy Serkis simply will be their “Spasticus Autisticus”. And the music is fantastic, with The Blockheads providing the music for Serkis to sing over. If only “I Want To Be Straight” could have been included on the soundtrack and woven into the narrative.

Quibbles about a few shortcomings aside, it was a worthy and enjoyable Closing Night film, in a year in which far less flattering opinions were widely held of the film that opened proceedings.

Son of Babylon

One of the films of the festival, without a doubt. I've already said it often, but that won't stop me saying it again, for anybody who came in late: Son of Babylon plays not unlike a cross between John Hillcoat’s recent Cormac McCarthy adaptation, The Road, and something out of the Rossellini canon circa Germany Year Zero. With a dash of Turtles Can Fly thrown in for good measure.

It's a terrible shame that its screenings at MIFF went against its makers' wishes, as documented earlier in this blog. Oi vay.

A little more on Son of Babylon.
Some thoughts on “the Son of Babylon affair”.
And there's still more on Son of Babylon within my report for Senses of Cinema on the 2009 Middle East International Film Festival.

Survival of the Dead

Better than Diary of the Dead. But really: has the Dead series not already proven undead enough? I think it had its Day long ago.

A little more on Survival of the Dead.

Symbol

This wonderful Japanese absurdist comedy is my my unheralded highlight of the festival.

A little more on Symbol.

Tehroun

A most unusual Iranian thriller which comes undone in its last act. Tehroun is likely the only film that will ever make me feel any sympathy whatsoever for the sort of man who would hire a baby for begging purposes.

There's a little more on Tehroun within my report for Senses of Cinema on the 2010 Fribourg International Film Festival.

Tetro

Had the last half-hour of Francis Ford Coppola's latest been as good as all that preceded it then this would have been a masterpiece. A massive improvement upon Youth Without Youth, mind you.

A little more on Tetro.

The Day Will Come

A histrionic, bourgeoisie-bashing German thriller that left me cold. Were that it had been made by Claude Chabrol!

A little more on The Day Will Come.

The Housemaid

I wish I'd seen Kim Ki-young's 1960 original, also screening at MIFF. I'm very glad though that I did at least see Im Sang-soo's 21^st century re-imagining of it, which is a terrifically well-paced thriller, offering insights into the lives of South Korea's ultra-rich elite, and which ends... memorably.

A little more on The Housemaid.

The Illusionist

A beautiful piece of work. May that more scripts by great auteurs, unproduced in their lifetimes, find their way into the hands of brilliant and sympathetic animator-directors.

A little more on The Illusionist.

The Juche Idea

A smartarsey, semi-mockumentary extrapolation upon the revolutionary film theories of Kim Jong Il. Some great found footage aside, The Juche Idea is just too darned smug for its own good.

A little more on The Juche Idea.

The Trotsky

Imagine the love child of Wes Anderson's Rushmore and Lindsay Anderson's If...., and you've got The Trotsky. Great fun.

A little more on The Trotsky.

To Die Like a Man

An underwhelming potboiler – especially given its praise on the festival circuit elsewhere – featuring a grand old clichéd coupling, an ageing drag queen and a junkie lover. There's been a little Catholicism and a little magic realist whimsy thrown into the mix, but To Die Like a Man still ain't no great shakes.

There's a little more on To Die Like a Man within my report for Senses of Cinema on the 2009 Mezipatra Queer Film Festival.

The Wedding Party

A very underwhelming Opening Night film. Rumour has it that it won't surface again for some time, not least before it's undergone some serious tweaking in the editing suite. I'd recommend, just for starters, getting rid of the reedy voiceover bookending the film in a wholly tacked-on-seeming fashion. The mostly peripheral character the voice belongs to seldom impresses as an observer of the wider goings-on within the film; having hers then serve as the voice of the whole film is a wholly wrongheaded manoeuvre.

A little more on The Wedding Party.

World on a Wire

An extraordinarily prescient, made-for-TV production, anticipating the narrative and metaphysical concerns – if not the fashions nor the pacing – of The Matrix and Inception, by 26 and 37 years respectively. It's all the more extraordinary to consider that it's an adaptation of a novel, Simulacron-3, by Daniel F. Galouye, another nine years older still (and which is apparently also the inspiration for the 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor (d. Josef Rusnak), which I haven't seen).

Nearing 30 years after his death, will this be the last great Fassbinder rediscovery? I have my doubts...