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

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

Into Eternity

Into Eternity

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

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

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cold Fish

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

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

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

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

Fruit of Paradise

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

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

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

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

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

*

OPENING NIGHT

The Fairy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Opening Night film: La fée (The Fairy)

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

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

Artavazd Pelechian Shorts

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

Our Century

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

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

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

Leonardo's Diary (not at MIFF)

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

(There's more about Švankmajer just below.)

Zebraman 2

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

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

Class Relations (1984)

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

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

Tomboy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surviving Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outer Space

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

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

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

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

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

Other offerings to have escaped my attention last week

Some new canon fodder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And...

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

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

Some word on a few titles I've already seen

The First Interview

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

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

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

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

Now here's that list

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

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

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

Hi y'all.

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

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

Caveats

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

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

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

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

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

The decision's wholly yours to make...

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

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

15 HOT TIPS FOR MIFF 2011

Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

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

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

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

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

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

Guilty of Romance

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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