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.

Takin' care of business. Or: all the world's a cinema!

This latest had been my longest hiatus from blogging yet. It wasn't meant to be, but my circumstances over the last several weeks have not been conducive to setting thoughts, cinematic and otherwise, to pixels. My days have been full indeed, the demands upon my time and energies, many.

In resuming blogging I first surveyed my files and g(l)azed over notes I had made for what could have become a post published at the end of October, entitled “Keeping it real. Or: a few desultory thoughts upon a surprise nexus formed subsequent to the viewing of two new biopics and the same-day chancing upon an article on dubbing practices in the Czech Republic.”

Yikes.

The biopics in question are Gainsbourg and The Social Network. I reviewed them both on 3RRR's “SmartArts” as far back as October 28 and I can't say I now feel half as interested in writing anything much about them as I seemingly did back then, even if, from the title of that abortive effort, I was only aspiring to wax desultory upon them in the first place. Perhaps nothing more had been at stake than an elegant segue... into something I had really wanted to pontificate about: the dark art of dubbing. (About which, finally, a little more below.)

The here and now: firstest things first

One of the things keeping me from blogging was a very tight deadline for laying out the latest issue of Screening the Past, a special issue focusing on “Cinema/Photography: Beyond Representation”, guest edited by Des O’Rawe and Sam Rohdie. Were that the deadline hadn't been half so tight; I hadn't a show of writing my promised review of William Beard's Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin in time. Nevertheless, there's sure some mighty fine reading (and viewing!) there people – get to it! And I'm sure my review, come a relaxation of time constraints, will smuggle its way into the next issue of STP.

On the matter of venerable Melbourne-based online film journals, let me record here my utter dismay and astonishment that Screen Australia has pulled ALL of its funding of Senses of Cinema, that online film journal of possibly unparalleled international renown, esteem, contributorship and readership, in a decision which, for mine, speaks great, vacuous, parochial volumes about what the nation's premier screen cultural funding body values in terms of contributions to Australian screen culture. The near-sightedness of this decision is breathtaking in all its gormlessness. I am flabbergasted.

I have long enjoyed a strong affiliation with Senses of Cinema, having previously, as the site's designer/administrator over eight or so years, slaved away over the mark-up and illustration of literally hundreds of superbly researched and written essays, book and DVD reviews, annotations for the Melbourne Cinémathèque, Great Directors profiles, and film festival reports, along with having contributed no few festival reports myself (along with, in a former guise, a strangely hyper-real “bricolage interview” with a certain Richard Wolstencroft – may the ludicrous business surrounding his house being raided by the police looking for copies of L.A. Zombie, two whole months pursuant to a widely publicised and uneventful civil disobedience screening of the same, resolve itself with the barest minimum of juridical intervention).

While I am no longer on staff at Senses (albeit I am still doing some work for it, migrating archival content into Senses' spanky new content management system), I still personally feel this grotesque, and conceivably crippling, slight against this wonderful journal, profoundly. I hope many others out there, readers and/or contributors alike, will, on this news reaching them, feel similarly appalled. Oh if only, somehow, the collective umbrage of all the world's cinéphiles could somehow be monetised...

Now, where was I?

Oh yes.

Well, bugger that business about the biopics. Let's move straight onto the dubbing practices in the Czech Republic... Although... perhaps... not until I've given a further account of things of interest to have occupied me between blog posts.

Max and Moritz: A Juvenile History in 7 Tricks (Minus 3)

Penelope Bartlau, Megan Cameron, Moritz and KT Prescott in Max and Moritz. Photo by Sarah Walker.

Max and Moritz promised to be, according to my own promotional materials circulated amongst my cronies :

... a quite deranged expanded marionette theatre production of most of Wilhelm Busch's 19th century tale of a couple of very naughty boys who just might get what's coming to them – and how! But not before certain entertaining unpleasantries might first come to pass...

... under the direction of puppeteer extraordinaire Megan Cameron and with no small amount of on-stage shenanigans courtesy of the same, in cahoots with KT Prescott and Penelope Bartlau...

... with musical accompaniment from Dirty Nicola and the Cheap, Filthy, Pre-Loved, Shop-Soiled Spud Hussies (myself, Katrina Wilson & Nicola Bell).

Shop-Soiled Cerise BRINGING IT during Max and Moritz. Photo by Sarah Walker.

Well, I had myself a fine old time over three nights performing cinema (some folk, coming from other, hoarier traditions, apparently refer to it as “theatre”) for carny folk and fellow travellers, their families, significant others, and passers-by alike, at The Village festival in North Fitzroy's Edinburgh Gardens earlier in the month. Aside from bringing some compositional and bottom-end prowess to the production, mine was also the responsibility to supply some foley to proceedings, which was a helluva lot of fun.

(Now here's a hot tip: If ever you'd been wondering how best you might simulate the sounds of children being ground to a pulp in an old mill, might I be so bold as to heartily recommend the strained employment of an egg-beater against several clumps of cement in an ice-cream container?)

For all its wonderful reception, I can imagine that the spectacle our Max and Moritz provided might well have bewildered some of its audience. Some of that might have been a function of our presenting this as very much a work in progress, and as such, a little rough around the edges. Another part of it might have been that eyelines to the stage weren't uniformly excellent, something quite important when some of the performance is presented in miniature – oh for tiered seating in future! But, most of all, our Max and Moritz was presented after a very European tradition of marionette theatre – a quite Czech approach to things, in fact. It's a mixed-media, multiple-representational, collage tradition little known around these parts.

My introduction to this sort of theatre came through the cinema of Jan Švankmajer, especially those films of his where the protagonists inhabit a universe wherein they, or any other given character, may oscillate between being (portrayed as) a living, breathing, thinking human being, or a puppet, whether a miniature model or of life size, in the process collapsing distinctions between representation and actuality, autonomy and manipulation, the natural order of things and the fantastical, all in accordance with the time-honoured synthetic Surrealist tradition. See, for example, Něco z Alenky (Alice / Something from Alice, 1988); Don Šajn (Don Juan, 1969), and especially, Lekce Faust (Faust / Lesson: Faust, 1994).

* Note to self: at some point when writing extensively on Švankmajer on future, note that all too little has been written (at least, in English), even by the great Peter Hames, on Švankmajer's involvement in Prague's Laterna magika expanded cinema, with especial respect to his part in creating Kouzelný cirkus (Wonderful Circus), a staple of that theatre's repertoire ever since its premiere in 1977. Here's a promo clip that does a fine job of demonstrating the multimedia, collage approach to theatre/cinema as expounded by the Laterna magika:

My dear friend Megan Cameron, whose wonderful brainchild Max and Moritz is, developed a lot of her formidable Czech marionette theatre chops from a couple of long stints working in Prague with Divadlo ANPU. Here's a photo I'm very fond of I took earlier this year of Divadlo ANPU rehearsing a new production; I think it illustrates very nicely the multi-layered and interpenetrative nature of representation, characterisation and indeed framing freely employed in this brand of theatre:

Divadlo ANPU rehearsing

The more exposed I've become – as spectator and, latterly, in the case of Max and Moritz, as participator – to this sort of theatrical production, the more some extremely bizarre aspects of Jan Švankmajer's cinema have come to seem, if not so much any less bizarre, at least somewhat more explicable. All that business in Faust playing with an indistinction between a human order of being and a supernatural/puppet order is these days a good deal clearer to me as not simply whimsically Buñuelian, Brechtian or post-modernist manoeuvring on Švankmajer's part but at least equally an adherence to venerable Czech theatrical traditions in which representation is ever a slippery and unstable business indeed!

And then I went to Wellington

(If only, alas, for just a few days.)

Wellington's where, back in the day, I was a) born and b) spent many of my formative years, and I had been away from it for way, way overlong. The hows and whys are not the stuff of this blog, but a few choice snaps taken, methinks, are. Whose blog is it anyway? Yes, that's what I thought too.

Scenes from the 2010 Wellywood Collection

But one third of the spectacular view from the back of my Aunt's place in Wellington.

Why would you watch TV?

I sat here on the beach at Lyall Bay, making light work of a first paua fritter in 10 years, watching the planes come and go. Skull Island scenes from Peter Jackson's King Kong were shot nearby.

Colonial timber houses tumbling down the hillside at Lyall Bay. A whole different approach to terrace housing.

The Beehive, on the prowl, Dalek-stylee...

On the Cable Car, heading up to the Wellington Botanical Gardens.

Henry Moore's Inner Form, enjoying the view from the Wellington Botanical Gardens.

Gorgeous Second Empire building in Wellington's CBD.

This CBD Art Deco stunner is for sale! Will some kindly soul not buy it for me?

 *

In “Arty Bees”, a wonderful Wellington vendor of pre-loved books, I stumbled upon the find of my too few days spent in the Windy City: Gene Deitch's wonderful memoir For the Love of Prague (2^nd edition – there have now been five).

It's the memoir of a man uniquely placed to observe and comment upon the experience of living in communist Czechoslovakia for 30 years; Deitch, an animation producer – a UPA alumnus, no less – was the only American resident in Prague throughout 30 years of communist rule (and beyond! When originally he'd intended to stay for no more than 10 days...) Deitch enjoyed considerably more freedom of movement and considerably less harassment by the state than the rest of the population, bestowing upon him a privileged position both in society and as a documenter of communist Czechoslovakia's everyday, absurdist drudgery and, eventually, the seismic events that proved the regime's undoing, ever the outsider, looking in...

As a Czechophile, that's already premise enough to have got me interested in his memoir, but the jackpot is that Deitch's book also recounts his time overseeing production of cartoons, including an Oscar winner (Munro (1960)) and numerous Tom and Jerries destined for the American marketplace, created by workers in none other a studio than Bratři v triku (“Brothers in T-Shirts”, but, equally, “Brothers in a Trick Film”), the Prague animation studio founded in 1945 by none other than legendary Czech puppet animator, Jiří Trnka!

One passage early on recounts how Deitch, before becoming acquainted with his new workmates, had been naïvely fearing the worst, conditioned by American propaganda to expect them to be a bunch of humourless, party line-toeing drones toiling away mechanically and unemotively at their work; it couldn't help but remind me of the fancifully draconian production line approach to creating cels and merchandising for The Simpsons as envisioned by Banksy as occurring in China in his recent Simpsons title sequence that many of you would have seen by now:

I can't say enough wonderful things about Deitch's memoir. Of course, I now desperately want to get a hold of its most recent edition – I'm three behind. Until I do though, there is “The Occasional Deitch” online to tide me over and... a feature-length documentary film adaptation of his memoirs to also hunt down!

Finally: a few musings on the practice of dubbing

An article from 2008 I stumbled upon recently on the website for Radio Praha, “The continuing Czech love affair with Jean-Paul Belmondo”, considers the enduring appeal in the Czech Republic of a French actor not greatly well known these days beyond France outside of cinéphile circles (within which, of course, he is revered, especially for his roles in Godard's A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) and Pierrot le Fou). What for me makes this especially interesting is that, as this article would suggest, there is a high likelihood that most of his Czech fans have probably never actually heard Belmondo speak – at least, not in his own voice.

(Instead, one of the two actors known to have been his voice for Czech audiences throughout Belmondo's career is none other than Jan Tříska, so brilliant as the Marquis in Švankmajer's Šílení (Lunacy).)

Jan Tříska in Šílení

When we view a film in which there are “stars”, that is, established performers known to us through previous exploits on- (and, just as often, off-)screen, we can't help but take that prior exposure to those performers in with us on viewing them enacting new roles; that exposure can't help but inform - and even prejudice - our subsequent engagements with those same performers. Thus is created, and cultivated, their star personae.

One essential element for anglophone audiences in the construction of star personae in the Hollywood system is, of course, voice. It is very rare – outside of the conspicuous or mannered adoption of an accent or some sort of speech “impediment” – that a star's voice isn't recognisably the same from one role to the next. We pretty well take it for granted – I doubt any of us ever rarely spare the matter much thought at all – that an actor, already familiar to us, will sound much like he/she always does when we go to watch them in a new role. Likewise, we take it for granted that their lip movements will reliably synch well with the dialogue on the soundtrack.

Throughout much of Europe, however, including the Czech Republic, local voice talent is often employed to dub the dialogue in foreign films, for theatrical release and for television. In these cases, wherever established actors are involved, there are particular local actors assigned as the voice of those stars. This consistent assignation of voice to foreign star no doubt helps cultivate, and by degrees, cement, those stars' personae within those marketplaces; otherwise, just imagine how weird and distancing it would be to hear Sean Connery dubbed by an appreciably different voice every time you saw an old Bond film.

But then... imagine never even realising that Connery himself has one of the most distinctive voices on the planet, with that rich, thick Scottish brogue so beloved of parodists throughout the anglophone world!

I wonder how often Hollywood stars meet their matches? Has Brad Pitt ever met the Spanish Brad Pitt? Has Angelina Jolie the German Angelina? What would happen if ever Belmondo and Jan Tříska were cast together? Perhaps they could dub one another - in many nations, who would ever be any the wiser...

That's enough for now

Chances are the next post to A Little Lie Down will come rather sooner than this one did. Meantime, I'll be joining Thomas Caldwell on this Saturday's Film Buff's Forecast on 3RRR, midday-2pm. Tune in! Turn on! Etc.

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.

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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?

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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.

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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...

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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!