The Australian Film Institute announced that it is moving to establish an Australian Academy for the purpose of expanding and improving what are now known as the AFI Awards. The announcement is a tacit admission that the AFI’s only remaining real purpose has devolved down into managing and presenting its annual awards. Its claim to be Australia’s foremost screen culture organisation no longer has any validity and the announcement regarding the establishment of an Academy simply recognises this fact. For most of the last couple of decades the AFI has been slowly gutted and shredded of any of the duties undertaken by other national film institutes. Government funding for these activities has over time been callously, ruthlessly and in some cases ridiculously withdrawn. But it is now where it is.
The AFI was at one time an organisation which provided research facilities for scholars, managed a library of independent Australian and foreign films, exhibited cutting edge other stuff in its own cinemas, published material on film culture, history and production, managed a national cinematheque and ran the AFI Awards. Drip by drip the activities dried up and now only the awards remain though a check of its website indicates some other small and probably inconsequential activities are undertaken. Even the status of the Awards is under challenge with the emergence of the IF Awards as a rival for public funding and attention.
At present AFI members and film industry professionals vote for the AFI Awards in a complicated system that does not require those voting to see all the entries. Whether this produces the best result rarely matters. It usually produces the only result ever likely. Our good films are so few that egregious mistakes rarely occur. So…where are we now.
1. The AFI has lost its authority and its prestige. It is fighting for attention and relevance and has only its Awards with which to fight. It will get no extra help from the Federal Government funding body. (That body is now operating at such a level of philistinism as to produce despair. If this needs examples you need look only as far as the withdrawal of funding from Real Time and from the world’s greatest internet film site, Senses of Cinema).
2. We need a prestigious and valued Awards system to recognise and promote excellence
3. The models are those of the American and British Academies as well as those national arrangements that hand out the Cesars, the Davids and the Goyas.
4. The people who make up the industry have to become intimately involved and in particular those who are the high achievers have to put body and soul into the transformative effort.
If the AFI is to get this done it will no doubt be over a few bodies who nostalgically long for the return of days when the AFI did all he things mentioned above. It may also be over the bodies of the general members who no doubt still enjoy attending the AFI Award screenings. But an Academy made up of the industry’s long time best and brightest, if that’s what’s envisaged, does not have a place for them.
In creating an Academy, which I would expect would need to be followed by a name change to reflect this sole task, the AFI and those nostalgic for what once was should feel no guilt. Times have changed and the work the AFI once did and the things it once sold memberships for is being done by such institutions as the AFTRS and university film and media departments, continuing education, ACMI, GOMA, the NFSA, the Media Resources Centre of SA, the National Cinematheque (notwithstanding its total absence from the biggest city in Australia), the myriad of festivals, the expansion of film circulation via DVD, cable, online downloads and the coming national broadband network. When you think back to even thirty years ago most of those didn’t even exist.
The AFI played a major role in bringing many of them into existence but that role is over and if it is to achieve anything in the future it will be by massively expanding the profile and prestige of a national awards system whose voting is respected by the public and whose activity (sole) is the source of national interest. Good luck Al Finney. ….and maybe under this regime the now late Cecil Holmes might even gain the recognition that has long been denied him by the current system!
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
Suburban snow job
Spoiler alert. Some of the key plot elements of Snowtown are discussed here.
Success comes in the most unlikely places. I saw Snowtown just after it got a rave review in the Adelaide Advertiser and was announced as the winner of the audience popularity award at the Adelaide Film Festival. Wiser heads from outside the jurisdiction told me to ignore this home town bias. So as the film about the bodies in the barrels in the bank screened in a Sydney preview theatre, I squirmed with the rest of the audience during its slow revelations of paedophilia, murder and a few other unpopular human activities and felt distinctly uncomfortable in its most brutal sequence, a long torture/killing during which the young man at the centre of the film finally joins in the mayhem. I kept wondering who would want to put themselves through the unedifying ordeal of watching this movie and indeed paying to be put through it.
I found it interesting that the film-makers were concerned to show their social and community concern and the press book, which a friend passed on to me, set out in detail not merely how the production had been informed by consultations with the community to ensure respect but also by casting locals in many of the parts including key roles. The mother and the son were both amateurs who were spotted somewhere in the vicinity. Earnestness of intention was manifest.
Added to that, there are two sequences during the film where the locals sit around drinking, swearing and discussing things and they focus on what should be done to homosexuals, paedophiles and other social undesirables to rid the community of them once and for all. In the second of these discussions the smiling visage of the protagonist serial killer is a smirking, slightly superior presence, goading and provoking those in attendance to be ever more explicit about their desires to take revenge and inflict physical punishment on perceived miscreants. They are scenes where the roots of frustration, ignorance and a predilection for violent solutions are unearthed among the working and under classes of the suburbs. They are I suppose also an explanation as to why there was no great community outrage at any mysterious or unexplained disappearance of gays and others from that local community. I suspect that any locals seeing the film might take exception to this portrayal of callousness and indifference arising from their homophobia.
It’s a rich mix as they say and not without its detractors. I saw one tirade against the film delivered by some fresh-faced ranting know all on morning television. The know all did make one point however in wondering why the film had not been classified R. I thought that it warranted that as well though I have for decades been told that I am a fuddy duddy where it comes to matters like watching a few fingernails prised from their sockets.
But the surprise to me is that Snowtown has opened to very good business indeed. This may be partly explained by the mostly very supportive reviews it has received and its prize at Cannes, described in a press release by the film’s publicist as the “President of the Jury Special Award Grand Prix 2011 Critics' Week”. The first weekend screen averages on its 16 screens were over $10 grand. It might rake in a million or more if it keeps going at that rate.
Success comes in the most unlikely places. I saw Snowtown just after it got a rave review in the Adelaide Advertiser and was announced as the winner of the audience popularity award at the Adelaide Film Festival. Wiser heads from outside the jurisdiction told me to ignore this home town bias. So as the film about the bodies in the barrels in the bank screened in a Sydney preview theatre, I squirmed with the rest of the audience during its slow revelations of paedophilia, murder and a few other unpopular human activities and felt distinctly uncomfortable in its most brutal sequence, a long torture/killing during which the young man at the centre of the film finally joins in the mayhem. I kept wondering who would want to put themselves through the unedifying ordeal of watching this movie and indeed paying to be put through it.
I found it interesting that the film-makers were concerned to show their social and community concern and the press book, which a friend passed on to me, set out in detail not merely how the production had been informed by consultations with the community to ensure respect but also by casting locals in many of the parts including key roles. The mother and the son were both amateurs who were spotted somewhere in the vicinity. Earnestness of intention was manifest.
Added to that, there are two sequences during the film where the locals sit around drinking, swearing and discussing things and they focus on what should be done to homosexuals, paedophiles and other social undesirables to rid the community of them once and for all. In the second of these discussions the smiling visage of the protagonist serial killer is a smirking, slightly superior presence, goading and provoking those in attendance to be ever more explicit about their desires to take revenge and inflict physical punishment on perceived miscreants. They are scenes where the roots of frustration, ignorance and a predilection for violent solutions are unearthed among the working and under classes of the suburbs. They are I suppose also an explanation as to why there was no great community outrage at any mysterious or unexplained disappearance of gays and others from that local community. I suspect that any locals seeing the film might take exception to this portrayal of callousness and indifference arising from their homophobia.
It’s a rich mix as they say and not without its detractors. I saw one tirade against the film delivered by some fresh-faced ranting know all on morning television. The know all did make one point however in wondering why the film had not been classified R. I thought that it warranted that as well though I have for decades been told that I am a fuddy duddy where it comes to matters like watching a few fingernails prised from their sockets.
But the surprise to me is that Snowtown has opened to very good business indeed. This may be partly explained by the mostly very supportive reviews it has received and its prize at Cannes, described in a press release by the film’s publicist as the “President of the Jury Special Award Grand Prix 2011 Critics' Week”. The first weekend screen averages on its 16 screens were over $10 grand. It might rake in a million or more if it keeps going at that rate.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Sidney Lumet - New Yorker
Way back in 2004 I fronted up to a screening in one of those high quality but low comfort repertory cinemas in Paris where the then editor of Cahiers du Cinema, Emmanuel Burdeau, introduced a revival of Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind. Made in 1959, based on a play by Tennessee Williams and starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, it was a film that had taken on interest in the forty plus years since its release and subsequent plunge into near-oblivion. If its authorship was placed anywhere it would have been with Williams and no doubt the studio which made it was hoping for a repeat of the success of the earlier Brando/Williams movie A Streetcar Named Desire. Lumet, explained Burdeau, was not a director in whom Cahiers nor most other of the ‘serious’ critics had any interest back in the late fifties and early sixties. His first films were literary and/or theatrical in their origin and Lumet himself appeared to be just another of those technicians who had graduated from live New York television, a place where earnestness, importance and left-liberal sensibilities were predominant. At least that’s the picture we got, not having any opportunity to see any of the so-called legendary live presentations by the likes of directors as dissimilar as Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer and Lumet. Andrew Sarris lumped him into the ‘Strained Seriousness’ level in his seminal tome and it took a while for there to be any disagreement about that. Notwithstanding this somewhat neutral to negative view he was regarded as a good director of actors and over the course of a long career, from start to finish, I think he was one of those directors who when Sidney came calling, actors would say what time do you want me there rather than how much are you offering. After dealing with Williams, Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neil, Lumet had the misfortune to make the earnest Fail Safe (1963) at the same time as Kubrick made Dr Strangelove. But his career was into full stride and during the decade of the 60s he seemed to be a reliable director with a broad range of subjects, most of them with a violent edge. Notable successes were The Pawnbroker (1965), The Hill, a heavyweight expose of military prisons during WW2 starring Sean Connery as a prisoner and a sadistic Harry Andrews, an adaptation of the Mary McCarthy’s literary sensation The Group and the second Le Carre adaptation and the first on-screen George Smiley (James Mason), The Deadly Affair. It was hard to escape the idea that he was a director for hire with a good sense of quality material, a metteur-en-scene of some skill but not an authorial figure. What began to emerge in the 70s was Lumet’s ability to tell robust and exotic stories of life in the various strata of New York society. He never relocated to Los Angeles, preferring to live his life in Manhattan and his familiarity with the quirks of that city started to feed into a line of his work that marked out his territory. Starting with the crime story The Anderson Tapes (1971) again starring Connery as an ex-con who embarks on an elaborate robbery without understanding that the art of surveillance has dramatically increased and improved since he went up the river, Lumet managed to make a small group of his forty four films about police and criminal life on the streets of New York. That group will forever be the work that underscores his reputation. Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Prince of the City (1981), The Verdict (1982), Family Business (1989), Q & A (1990), Night Falls on Manhattan (1997) and, in one of those astonishing bits of bravura with which just occasionally old directors finish off their careers, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007). There are more than a couple of masterpieces in that group and Lumet seemed to be able to bring to this his specialty subject an eye for the various milieu of New York that opened up the city to scrutiny from a perspective that suggested a unique fondness and amiable love for the place and all its foibles. What diminished Lumet’s standing over the course of his long career was his preparedness to take on other things no doubt on a whatever comes along basis that the director for hire must take to keep the wolf from the door. What else can explain his willingness to get involved in such mediocre projects as The Wiz, Guilty as Sin, The Appointment, Murder on the Orient Express, A Stranger Among Us (an amazing misfire given its New York setting, but what can one expect of a movie with Melanie Griffith cast as a hard-boiled cop!) and several others. There were of course a couple of big time triumphs as well, most notably the Oscar-winning Network, a film which still strikes a chord, notwithstanding its rabble-rousing sensibility which one might have thought otherwise anathema to Lumet’s liberal outlook. The other triumph is his less well-known contribution as writer and producer to the TV series 100 Centre Street (2001 & 2002) in which Alan Arkin stars as an agonising liberal judge trying to deal humanely with the flotsam that comes before him each day. This is brilliant television, as good in its day and its way as The Wire would also be later in the decade. Here, in his quintessential New York setting, Lumet and his collaborators were able to put on the screen a parade of the quotidian reality of his beloved city and he did it without fanfare in a quiet and clearly generous way. Sidney Lumet died in his Manhattan home on Saturday 9 April aged 86.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Spy Games
Spoiler alert. Do not read this if you dont want know the main plot twist in The American. You have been warned.
When I sit down to write my personal history of spy fiction I shall digress only for a moment to consider where the genre incorporated elements of crime fiction and elements of intellectual authors at play (often under pseudonyms) to hide a paucity of observation. In the Le Carre world, spy fiction has always provided the opportunity to expansively examine other matters in which the author’s real interests are exposed – the futility of cold war politics was superseded in Le Carre’s world by adventures and explorations of colonialism, pharmaceutical conspiracies, American imperialism, Russian adventurism and so on.
But for those seeking only to write something generic the cheapest plot device was always the trope of the lonely agent/hitman whose task, unbeknown to him, is to arrange for and participate in his own assassination. It was a trope of the cheapest order and one which was and is fallen upon with monotonous regularity. At some point the avid spy fiction reader could pick it coming, often far too early.
I don’t think George Clooney is an avid reader of spy fiction. How else to explain his decision to make The American and for this hoary old chestnut of a device to be wheeled out yet again and presented as if it were new. There’s even the same ludicrous ending of many a tatty tale where the would be assassin of the professional assassin is assassinated by another who then tries to kill the professional assassin. Like duh!
From the credits on the movie George didn’t have that far to go from the comforts of his palatial quarters near Lake Como to make the movie. He also didn’t bring any mates to help him do it. But I guess a good time was had by all during the course of production. Aside from George, there’s not a major name anywhere on the acting or technical credits of anybody known beyond Anton Corbijn the tyro director of rock clips and movies about rock stars. Who sold what to whom about the project is mysterious to those of us without access to the great man (still the most handsome leading man since Alain Delon, notwithstanding the pepper and salt beard in the early scenes; still the most charismatic and watchable American star since Clark Gable) but I guess its not important.
The shots of the village, the countryside, the cafes, the meals prepared by the priest (Italian glug) and that swish restaurant with that rather out of character waiter (surely more old-style French than modern Italian) create a deep wistfulness and nostalgia for days and trips gone by.
And it would be nice to think you can now go in to an Italian post office and be served immediately.
When I sit down to write my personal history of spy fiction I shall digress only for a moment to consider where the genre incorporated elements of crime fiction and elements of intellectual authors at play (often under pseudonyms) to hide a paucity of observation. In the Le Carre world, spy fiction has always provided the opportunity to expansively examine other matters in which the author’s real interests are exposed – the futility of cold war politics was superseded in Le Carre’s world by adventures and explorations of colonialism, pharmaceutical conspiracies, American imperialism, Russian adventurism and so on.
But for those seeking only to write something generic the cheapest plot device was always the trope of the lonely agent/hitman whose task, unbeknown to him, is to arrange for and participate in his own assassination. It was a trope of the cheapest order and one which was and is fallen upon with monotonous regularity. At some point the avid spy fiction reader could pick it coming, often far too early.
I don’t think George Clooney is an avid reader of spy fiction. How else to explain his decision to make The American and for this hoary old chestnut of a device to be wheeled out yet again and presented as if it were new. There’s even the same ludicrous ending of many a tatty tale where the would be assassin of the professional assassin is assassinated by another who then tries to kill the professional assassin. Like duh!
From the credits on the movie George didn’t have that far to go from the comforts of his palatial quarters near Lake Como to make the movie. He also didn’t bring any mates to help him do it. But I guess a good time was had by all during the course of production. Aside from George, there’s not a major name anywhere on the acting or technical credits of anybody known beyond Anton Corbijn the tyro director of rock clips and movies about rock stars. Who sold what to whom about the project is mysterious to those of us without access to the great man (still the most handsome leading man since Alain Delon, notwithstanding the pepper and salt beard in the early scenes; still the most charismatic and watchable American star since Clark Gable) but I guess its not important.
The shots of the village, the countryside, the cafes, the meals prepared by the priest (Italian glug) and that swish restaurant with that rather out of character waiter (surely more old-style French than modern Italian) create a deep wistfulness and nostalgia for days and trips gone by.
And it would be nice to think you can now go in to an Italian post office and be served immediately.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Arthur Penn
I heard of Penn’s passing just as I headed out the door so no time then to contemplate the career of a director who for cinephiles at least had a very hot streak from The Left-Handed Gun (1958), through The Miracle Worker, Mickey One, The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde; Alice’s Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks (1976). That’s close to a couple of decades of remarkable film-making, all of them in some way peering under the skin of American history and society and finding a lot of pent-up lawlessness and violence.
Back in those long lost 60s when discovering new directors was the game and we awaited solitary events like the Melbourne Film Festival for our first glimpse of the directors that cahiers and Sight & Sound were praising, coming across an American director like Arthur Penn at the very start of their career and then watching in quick succession a run of increasingly assured films was then, still is I suppose, quite a rarity. But nowadays when maybe ten thousand new films are made each year and you have access to thousands more of them very quickly, the discovery doesn't have quite the uniqueness it had then. Penn was in that tradition of Losey, Aldrich, Siegel, Fuller, Anthony Mann, Nicolas Ray, Raoul Walsh and no doubt many others of lesser ability and reputation who did their best work on violent subjects, or maybe subjects where America's peculiar closeness to guns, brutality and death was most nakedly and simply on display.
In retrospect the fact that the run seemed to end with what on paper must have looked like a sure fire success, a western with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. But it turned off critics and the public alike, one of those ironies of the business. Bonnie and Clyde will preserve his reputation for ever and the line in Night Moves comparing watching a Rohmer movie with watching paint drying probably made it into all the obituaries.
We never saw any of the ‘live television’ which first made Penn’s name in the 50s That pre-historical part of his career may yet come to light but not so far. We did see The Left-Handed Gun, Penn’s film of Gore Vidal’s television play about Billy the Kid and it became apparent there that Penn had a sense of adventure. The long static shot simulating the taking of a photograph was repeated countless times by others, the shot directly into the sun which allows Billy to appear as a ghostly presence before he blasts one of his enemies into oblivion, these became signs of a director wanting to experiment within the confines of Hollywood film-making. When he got the chance, after his second film The Miracle Worker won a bagful of Oscars, Penn took the opportunity, with Warren Beatty, to attempt to be an American Fellini, with Mickey One. That film remains a fascinating artefact of its time. The Chase and especially Little Big Man were fine westerns. The former has one of Marlon Brando’s very finest performances in amongst its story of over-wrought Texas oilmen and its sub-text of the forces that led to the Kennedy and subsequent Lee Harvey Oswald assassinations.
In the end Penn just faded away. Towards the end he even made a movie with the magicians Penn and Teller but nobody I asked has ever seen it. Since I mentioned it David Stratton has been in touch to say he's seen it and has passed on his noted about what he saw. Not something to write home about. Still the memory of the films from that hot streak period will live on and his place in the Expressive Esoterica section of the Pantheon, I think, is secure and something to be admired.
Back in those long lost 60s when discovering new directors was the game and we awaited solitary events like the Melbourne Film Festival for our first glimpse of the directors that cahiers and Sight & Sound were praising, coming across an American director like Arthur Penn at the very start of their career and then watching in quick succession a run of increasingly assured films was then, still is I suppose, quite a rarity. But nowadays when maybe ten thousand new films are made each year and you have access to thousands more of them very quickly, the discovery doesn't have quite the uniqueness it had then. Penn was in that tradition of Losey, Aldrich, Siegel, Fuller, Anthony Mann, Nicolas Ray, Raoul Walsh and no doubt many others of lesser ability and reputation who did their best work on violent subjects, or maybe subjects where America's peculiar closeness to guns, brutality and death was most nakedly and simply on display.
In retrospect the fact that the run seemed to end with what on paper must have looked like a sure fire success, a western with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. But it turned off critics and the public alike, one of those ironies of the business. Bonnie and Clyde will preserve his reputation for ever and the line in Night Moves comparing watching a Rohmer movie with watching paint drying probably made it into all the obituaries.
We never saw any of the ‘live television’ which first made Penn’s name in the 50s That pre-historical part of his career may yet come to light but not so far. We did see The Left-Handed Gun, Penn’s film of Gore Vidal’s television play about Billy the Kid and it became apparent there that Penn had a sense of adventure. The long static shot simulating the taking of a photograph was repeated countless times by others, the shot directly into the sun which allows Billy to appear as a ghostly presence before he blasts one of his enemies into oblivion, these became signs of a director wanting to experiment within the confines of Hollywood film-making. When he got the chance, after his second film The Miracle Worker won a bagful of Oscars, Penn took the opportunity, with Warren Beatty, to attempt to be an American Fellini, with Mickey One. That film remains a fascinating artefact of its time. The Chase and especially Little Big Man were fine westerns. The former has one of Marlon Brando’s very finest performances in amongst its story of over-wrought Texas oilmen and its sub-text of the forces that led to the Kennedy and subsequent Lee Harvey Oswald assassinations.
In the end Penn just faded away. Towards the end he even made a movie with the magicians Penn and Teller but nobody I asked has ever seen it. Since I mentioned it David Stratton has been in touch to say he's seen it and has passed on his noted about what he saw. Not something to write home about. Still the memory of the films from that hot streak period will live on and his place in the Expressive Esoterica section of the Pantheon, I think, is secure and something to be admired.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Eastern Promises
Vancouver’s special niche in the world film calendar has evolved, over two decades, from a small hometown event into one of the key portals for new films out of East Asia. Programmed by Tony Rayns and Shelley Kraicer, the Dragons and Tigers selection of 43 new feature films and 20 shorts, draws on productions big and small from 14 countries. The range is huge. Prestigious films from the major production centres Japan, China and South Korea, most previously premiered at earlier competitive events in Europe, repeatedly filled the festival’s biggest cinemas. At the other end of the spectrum, the eight film Dragons and Tigers competition for first time directors presented in the luxurious intimacy of VIFF’s own Vancity Theatre, again drew hardcore cinephiles and adventurous viewers. Neither element disappointed. Between these two groups were another set of movies having their international or North American premiere.
But first to the competition and the big shock. The jury comprised three of the biggest names around – Bong Joon-Ho, (the continent’s hottest director and one whose next film is currently the subject of much speculation even in the pages of the latest Film Comment which reports a rumour, not true says Bong, that he is teaming with JJ Abrams), supported by French-Canadian Denis Cote, a recent double prize-winner at Locarno, and Chinese master Jia Zhangke. They gave the prize, and the cash from local arts patrons Brad Birarda and Robert Sali, to Hirohara Saturo’s Good Morning to the World, a smart and beautifully directed story about a loner schoolboy searching for answers about a dead man he finds in the street. Honourable mentions went to Xu Ruotao’s Rumination, a very playful, neo-Godardian, portrait of China during the years of the Cultural Revolution played out in a desolate abandoned industrial estate by a troupe of actors summing up Chinese history in gestures and mime and to Phan Dang Bi’s Don’t Be Afraid, Bi!, a surprisingly frank examination of Vietnamese sexual desires.
The shock however was that the judges completely ignored Jo Sung-Hee’s End of Animal which might just be the most remarkable debut film from Asia since well, let’s make it personal, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu back in 1997 or Bong Joon-Ho’s Barking Dogs Don’t Bite in 2000. A broke down by the side of the road movie which might have been made by a young David Lynch, End of Animal is replete with enigmatic characters with psychic powers, last minute plot swoops, violent unexplained events, dark secrets, mysterious flashbacks and some blackly humorous collisions of all of the above. The assurance of its direction is extraordinary and it is aided immeasurably by the performance of young star Park Hae-Il’s performance as the mysterious stranger who knows all. Park, a star in the making with a couple of standout performances already under his belt was so impressed by the script that he agreed to do the movie for nothing. The film is next being screened in the London Film Festival so maybe its time will come in that neck of the woods.
While big names Miike Takashi (13 Assassins), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee who Can Recall his Past Lives), Sono Shion (Cold Fish), Lee Chang-Dong (Poetry), Jia Zhangke (I Wish I Knew), Hong Sang-Soo (Hahaha and Oki’s Movie) and Feng Xiaogang (Aftershock) expectedly delivered for their audiences, VIFF’s usual capacity to spring suprises was also on show with several international premieres. Imaizumi Koichi’s The Family Complete will make its name because of the seriously sexually explicit material it contains. A former gay porn star, Imaizumi’s third feature apparently continues his exploration of gay sexuality, this time around an SF plot involving a family struck down with a mysterious virus which firstly traps them into never aging but, more hilariously, produces sexual desire which causes all family members to only seek satisfaction with their own grandfather. Imaizumi, somewhat heroically given the context and the requirements of the plot, plays the grandfather himself, while his film riffs off Ozu and all the other Shockiku home dramas of Japanese cinema history. Very droll indeed but, as we were warned, only for the broadminded and maybe a tad too explicit for a nation which recently refused a local festival permission to screen Bruce La Bruce’s LA Zombie, a film which drew happy midnight screening crowds in straight-laced and innocent Vancouver.
Zhu Wen’s Thomas Mao is a droll two part exposition of the relationship between the esteemed painter Mao Yan and his long time friend the German art curator ‘Thomas’. Where the fiction begins and the documentary ends is the jokey sub-text to a movie which sets out to describe the friendship in two parts – the first in the wilds of Inner Mongolia and the second in Mao Yan’s studio where the painter makes yet another portrait of his fetish subject. Shades of Apichatpong.
Finally, leaving the intellectual world for a moment and the best for last, to a film that, literally I kid you not, caused among its large audience of young Korean women, gasps of pleasure, shrieks in fact, especially at the moment when its star Won Bin, last seen playing the son in Bong’s Mother, took off his shirt. He revealed both a bullet wound and torso of such honed and rippling musculature that the audience seemed to collectively swoon. But that was barely part of the excitement. Lee Jeong-Beom’s The Man from Nowhere, a huge domestic hit, posited a story of an ex-CIA (South Korean branch) hitman/agent, now passing his days in anonymity as a pawnshop proprietor, coming to the rescue of a drug addled neighbour and her child. Jokes abound, especially with the drug dealing community longing for a return to the certainties of military dictatorship, but it’s Won Bin’s magnetism and Lee’s breakneck pace direction and superslick editing that keep you on the edge throughout. There is enough plot for three movies but some seriousness as well in the background milieu of child prostitution and organ harvesting. You would like to think that the film’s reward might be as a sure fire international hit and something that might even attract the attention of American remakers.
For the record, Australia was represented at VIFF by Julie Bertucelli’s The Tree, a handful of docos and two shorts included in a compilation under the rubric ‘High School Stories/Teenage Hell – Felix Thompson’s (an expat) Bedford Park Boulevard and Alexander von Hofmann’s Tinglewood....unless of course you think we should claim Michael Rowe and his enigmatic Leap Year as one of our own.
But first to the competition and the big shock. The jury comprised three of the biggest names around – Bong Joon-Ho, (the continent’s hottest director and one whose next film is currently the subject of much speculation even in the pages of the latest Film Comment which reports a rumour, not true says Bong, that he is teaming with JJ Abrams), supported by French-Canadian Denis Cote, a recent double prize-winner at Locarno, and Chinese master Jia Zhangke. They gave the prize, and the cash from local arts patrons Brad Birarda and Robert Sali, to Hirohara Saturo’s Good Morning to the World, a smart and beautifully directed story about a loner schoolboy searching for answers about a dead man he finds in the street. Honourable mentions went to Xu Ruotao’s Rumination, a very playful, neo-Godardian, portrait of China during the years of the Cultural Revolution played out in a desolate abandoned industrial estate by a troupe of actors summing up Chinese history in gestures and mime and to Phan Dang Bi’s Don’t Be Afraid, Bi!, a surprisingly frank examination of Vietnamese sexual desires.
The shock however was that the judges completely ignored Jo Sung-Hee’s End of Animal which might just be the most remarkable debut film from Asia since well, let’s make it personal, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu back in 1997 or Bong Joon-Ho’s Barking Dogs Don’t Bite in 2000. A broke down by the side of the road movie which might have been made by a young David Lynch, End of Animal is replete with enigmatic characters with psychic powers, last minute plot swoops, violent unexplained events, dark secrets, mysterious flashbacks and some blackly humorous collisions of all of the above. The assurance of its direction is extraordinary and it is aided immeasurably by the performance of young star Park Hae-Il’s performance as the mysterious stranger who knows all. Park, a star in the making with a couple of standout performances already under his belt was so impressed by the script that he agreed to do the movie for nothing. The film is next being screened in the London Film Festival so maybe its time will come in that neck of the woods.
While big names Miike Takashi (13 Assassins), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee who Can Recall his Past Lives), Sono Shion (Cold Fish), Lee Chang-Dong (Poetry), Jia Zhangke (I Wish I Knew), Hong Sang-Soo (Hahaha and Oki’s Movie) and Feng Xiaogang (Aftershock) expectedly delivered for their audiences, VIFF’s usual capacity to spring suprises was also on show with several international premieres. Imaizumi Koichi’s The Family Complete will make its name because of the seriously sexually explicit material it contains. A former gay porn star, Imaizumi’s third feature apparently continues his exploration of gay sexuality, this time around an SF plot involving a family struck down with a mysterious virus which firstly traps them into never aging but, more hilariously, produces sexual desire which causes all family members to only seek satisfaction with their own grandfather. Imaizumi, somewhat heroically given the context and the requirements of the plot, plays the grandfather himself, while his film riffs off Ozu and all the other Shockiku home dramas of Japanese cinema history. Very droll indeed but, as we were warned, only for the broadminded and maybe a tad too explicit for a nation which recently refused a local festival permission to screen Bruce La Bruce’s LA Zombie, a film which drew happy midnight screening crowds in straight-laced and innocent Vancouver.
Zhu Wen’s Thomas Mao is a droll two part exposition of the relationship between the esteemed painter Mao Yan and his long time friend the German art curator ‘Thomas’. Where the fiction begins and the documentary ends is the jokey sub-text to a movie which sets out to describe the friendship in two parts – the first in the wilds of Inner Mongolia and the second in Mao Yan’s studio where the painter makes yet another portrait of his fetish subject. Shades of Apichatpong.
Finally, leaving the intellectual world for a moment and the best for last, to a film that, literally I kid you not, caused among its large audience of young Korean women, gasps of pleasure, shrieks in fact, especially at the moment when its star Won Bin, last seen playing the son in Bong’s Mother, took off his shirt. He revealed both a bullet wound and torso of such honed and rippling musculature that the audience seemed to collectively swoon. But that was barely part of the excitement. Lee Jeong-Beom’s The Man from Nowhere, a huge domestic hit, posited a story of an ex-CIA (South Korean branch) hitman/agent, now passing his days in anonymity as a pawnshop proprietor, coming to the rescue of a drug addled neighbour and her child. Jokes abound, especially with the drug dealing community longing for a return to the certainties of military dictatorship, but it’s Won Bin’s magnetism and Lee’s breakneck pace direction and superslick editing that keep you on the edge throughout. There is enough plot for three movies but some seriousness as well in the background milieu of child prostitution and organ harvesting. You would like to think that the film’s reward might be as a sure fire international hit and something that might even attract the attention of American remakers.
For the record, Australia was represented at VIFF by Julie Bertucelli’s The Tree, a handful of docos and two shorts included in a compilation under the rubric ‘High School Stories/Teenage Hell – Felix Thompson’s (an expat) Bedford Park Boulevard and Alexander von Hofmann’s Tinglewood....unless of course you think we should claim Michael Rowe and his enigmatic Leap Year as one of our own.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Walsh St Wager
The bet that Animal Kingdom makes is that audiences wont be sated by the extravagant vulgarity of Underbelly and will be prepared to come out to the movies to see something resembling a film a clef about another notorious piece of Melbourne’s criminal past. It shares one interesting element with The Wire. The most odious characters are neither the criminals nor the police but the lawyers. In The Wire the character who most makes your blood boil as he efficiently, and for high fees, frees his criminal clients from jail, turns a blind eye to gangland executions and exploits every loophole is the egregious lawyer who cheerfully gets his clients off a host of major violent crimes. In Animal Kingdom we accept gangland executions, revenge killings of and by police, the murder of a child, but we find really disgusting the amoral behaviour of the solicitor Ezra White, portrayed as a man of straightforward, nothing surprises me, efficiency by Dan Wyllie and, even worse, the smiling female criminal barrister who get their clients off. It’s an interesting turn of events. Somehow the notion of watching criminals do what they do has always been fascinating and touches something in us that admires slippery behaviour even when it’s violent. Watching lawyers go about their legitimate business of defending the interests of their crooked and violent clients is stomach turning.
The character of Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) also has some elements of interest. In a couple of scenes his psychopathic side gets a run through. The murder of the girl/child of course is one but at other times such as the scene where he meets his brother in the supermarket or harasses his brother Darren with questions as to whether he’s gay you get just a touch of a sense of the obsessive. The questions to the ‘gay’ brother are done in an outwardly friendly way along the lines of I don’t mind one way or the other but I just want to know but, like all psychopathic behaviour, Pope doesn’t know when to stop. But the scene ends with a whimper. It’s hard to know just how much Ben Mendelsohn’s performance throttles this aspect of Pope’s behaviour. Mendelsohn is not the sort of actor you cast when you are looking for someone whose mere demeanour can convey threat or menace. David Wenham has dibs on that trope but he’s already been there and much more effectively.
The best Oz feature film to delve into the domestic lives of the criminal underclass remains Rowan Wood’s The Boys. That was a film where the sons, at least all bar John Polson’s wimp, could turn violent at a moment’s notice and you believed it. Fuelled by drugs and life choices, they were far more animalistic than the relatively ‘sane’ family here where only one mad dog, Craig, stands in for the uncontrolled and impulsive. Michod actually seems to want to emphasise the ‘nice’ suburban nature of the family, carefully setting his action in houses set among quiet tree lined streets.
The image we have of the criminal and police classes in the noughts is physical similarity. The crims, at least the Williams and Morans who appear in the paper are all overweight as if they have too much time to sit around at home eating or in cafes drinking cappuccinos. Policemen today, especially detectives in suits, are rotund and have round bald heads as if they have been over fed on too many late night Chinese noshups. (Even Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness has a paunch.) Or maybe with the cops at least somewhere there’s my memory trace of watching sixty hours of The Wire and seeing the police team dominated by guys like Bunk or the Sergeant or even McNulty who just eat and drink too much. (Except of course for the magnificent musculature of Lance Reddick as Daniels who gets to show off his pecs and abs at regular intervals, especially after he leaves his ambitious wife and takes up with the ambitious prosecutor.) In Animal Kingdom the ultra wiry Guy Pearce’s only nod to cop normality is a poorly cultivated moustache.
The one character/performance that is note perfect is that of James Frecheville as Josh. He captures perfectly male teenage hesitancy, insecurity, inarticulacy, diffidence and an ability to bottle up all the emotion. His hunching of his shoulders and downcast look has an exactitude about it that one hopes springs from great acting. In one so young it is remarkable to see.
Otherwise David Michod’s mise-en-scene is fairly lacklustre in giving his quite engrossing script any extra oomph. The scene where Josh runs away from Pope, begs a lift and, just as we think he might be getting away, has the car slammed, is done as near to blandly as you’ll ever see from a director who presumably has misspent his youth, like all others of his generation, watching Scorsese and David Lynch pictures. You have to wonder whether TV shooting styles, fear, good taste or simple reticence produced such a damp squib moment. It just moves the story along rather than giving some rawness and visceral excitement of the kind you find in the French Mesrine diptych for instance. Which I guess is about where the film mostly lands.
The character of Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) also has some elements of interest. In a couple of scenes his psychopathic side gets a run through. The murder of the girl/child of course is one but at other times such as the scene where he meets his brother in the supermarket or harasses his brother Darren with questions as to whether he’s gay you get just a touch of a sense of the obsessive. The questions to the ‘gay’ brother are done in an outwardly friendly way along the lines of I don’t mind one way or the other but I just want to know but, like all psychopathic behaviour, Pope doesn’t know when to stop. But the scene ends with a whimper. It’s hard to know just how much Ben Mendelsohn’s performance throttles this aspect of Pope’s behaviour. Mendelsohn is not the sort of actor you cast when you are looking for someone whose mere demeanour can convey threat or menace. David Wenham has dibs on that trope but he’s already been there and much more effectively.
The best Oz feature film to delve into the domestic lives of the criminal underclass remains Rowan Wood’s The Boys. That was a film where the sons, at least all bar John Polson’s wimp, could turn violent at a moment’s notice and you believed it. Fuelled by drugs and life choices, they were far more animalistic than the relatively ‘sane’ family here where only one mad dog, Craig, stands in for the uncontrolled and impulsive. Michod actually seems to want to emphasise the ‘nice’ suburban nature of the family, carefully setting his action in houses set among quiet tree lined streets.
The image we have of the criminal and police classes in the noughts is physical similarity. The crims, at least the Williams and Morans who appear in the paper are all overweight as if they have too much time to sit around at home eating or in cafes drinking cappuccinos. Policemen today, especially detectives in suits, are rotund and have round bald heads as if they have been over fed on too many late night Chinese noshups. (Even Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness has a paunch.) Or maybe with the cops at least somewhere there’s my memory trace of watching sixty hours of The Wire and seeing the police team dominated by guys like Bunk or the Sergeant or even McNulty who just eat and drink too much. (Except of course for the magnificent musculature of Lance Reddick as Daniels who gets to show off his pecs and abs at regular intervals, especially after he leaves his ambitious wife and takes up with the ambitious prosecutor.) In Animal Kingdom the ultra wiry Guy Pearce’s only nod to cop normality is a poorly cultivated moustache.
The one character/performance that is note perfect is that of James Frecheville as Josh. He captures perfectly male teenage hesitancy, insecurity, inarticulacy, diffidence and an ability to bottle up all the emotion. His hunching of his shoulders and downcast look has an exactitude about it that one hopes springs from great acting. In one so young it is remarkable to see.
Otherwise David Michod’s mise-en-scene is fairly lacklustre in giving his quite engrossing script any extra oomph. The scene where Josh runs away from Pope, begs a lift and, just as we think he might be getting away, has the car slammed, is done as near to blandly as you’ll ever see from a director who presumably has misspent his youth, like all others of his generation, watching Scorsese and David Lynch pictures. You have to wonder whether TV shooting styles, fear, good taste or simple reticence produced such a damp squib moment. It just moves the story along rather than giving some rawness and visceral excitement of the kind you find in the French Mesrine diptych for instance. Which I guess is about where the film mostly lands.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Rescued from the Waters - Fritz Lang's House by the River
Fritz Lang may be among the best-served directors for DVD extras which open up his films and enlighten audiences in ways that criticism on the written page rarely contemplates. Almost everything he ever made seems to have been released, including his silent films, and the range of extras, commentaries, special essays and so on seems to be bigger than for anyone else. The DVD of his 1950 film House by the River provides one such most enlightening extra – a forty minute plus recitation by Pierre Rissient as to the how the film was lost and then found.
When Pierre first came to Australia back in the 1970s he enquired then as to any likely interest in obtaining the Australian rights to the film. When I asked him how it was that he was able to offer them he went into one of his man of mystery modes and would only say not to worry they were legitimately in his keeping. Eventually I think he sold a print of the film to the National Library’s Film Lending Collection. The copy should now be held in the National Film and Sound Archive.
The film was made by Lang at Republic Studios. It was the only time that Lang made an American film that was not distributed by one of the majors of the day. Lang claims it was “offered to him” though it is easy to see why he would be attracted to the story of murder and the astonishing effect it has on those involved. The killer is liberated and believes himself to be a superman above the law. His brother is inadvisedly implicated and assumes all the guilt. But it had no stars who might sell a ticket.
Pierre Rissient recounts the tale of how the film fell through the distribution cracks in post-war France, notwithstanding that a legion of cinephiles, including all the famous later film directors, were keen to see it. He took it upon himself to track down the film and investigate the situation regarding the rights. The story of this effort, of many years, is recounted in the recitation that is an added extra for the DVD which is released in the US on the estimable Kino label. I recently bought a copy in Spain released under the exclusive label issued by the FNAC chain. The only drawback to the Spanish release is that the Spanish subtitles, while inserted electronically, are not removable so they have to be viewed as well.
The film was made for a studio that would normally fall into the poverty row classification. But, as Louis Hayward says when confronted by the facts of his disreputable life, “sometimes cheap perfume can be very exciting.” The script, the staging, the photography and the music score by the highly regarded George Antheil bespeak of a determined effort by Republic to do something of value. Antheil started as an experimentalist writing music to accompany Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique (1924) and had a separate concert hall career all the while. He composed music for De Mille, Ben Hecht and Nicholas Ray among others but his film credits are small by comparison with many others who worked for over thirty years in movies. The photography by Edward Cronjager is similarly superior and its use of shadows and darkness deserves comparison, as Pierre mentions, with the work of John Alton. The photography stands up very well especially when compared with the work that was done for Lang on other later films. A number of those films, but especially, Human Desire (1954), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) and The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1961) all have a cheap look about them as if their budgets prevented them being made with anything other than the flattest glare. House by the River stands this test of comparison very well.
For anyone interested in Lang’s work House by the River is essential viewing, not perhaps among his handful of very greatest films but surely one which explores the director’s themes with some subtlety. The DVD is even more essential because it sets down the effort that was made by Pierre Rissient, acting alone, to save the film from oblivion. The recounting of the story is fascinating in itself. We have a lot of reasons to be grateful that it’s now all there for us, a couple of mouse clicks and a credit card away.
When Pierre first came to Australia back in the 1970s he enquired then as to any likely interest in obtaining the Australian rights to the film. When I asked him how it was that he was able to offer them he went into one of his man of mystery modes and would only say not to worry they were legitimately in his keeping. Eventually I think he sold a print of the film to the National Library’s Film Lending Collection. The copy should now be held in the National Film and Sound Archive.
The film was made by Lang at Republic Studios. It was the only time that Lang made an American film that was not distributed by one of the majors of the day. Lang claims it was “offered to him” though it is easy to see why he would be attracted to the story of murder and the astonishing effect it has on those involved. The killer is liberated and believes himself to be a superman above the law. His brother is inadvisedly implicated and assumes all the guilt. But it had no stars who might sell a ticket.
Pierre Rissient recounts the tale of how the film fell through the distribution cracks in post-war France, notwithstanding that a legion of cinephiles, including all the famous later film directors, were keen to see it. He took it upon himself to track down the film and investigate the situation regarding the rights. The story of this effort, of many years, is recounted in the recitation that is an added extra for the DVD which is released in the US on the estimable Kino label. I recently bought a copy in Spain released under the exclusive label issued by the FNAC chain. The only drawback to the Spanish release is that the Spanish subtitles, while inserted electronically, are not removable so they have to be viewed as well.
The film was made for a studio that would normally fall into the poverty row classification. But, as Louis Hayward says when confronted by the facts of his disreputable life, “sometimes cheap perfume can be very exciting.” The script, the staging, the photography and the music score by the highly regarded George Antheil bespeak of a determined effort by Republic to do something of value. Antheil started as an experimentalist writing music to accompany Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique (1924) and had a separate concert hall career all the while. He composed music for De Mille, Ben Hecht and Nicholas Ray among others but his film credits are small by comparison with many others who worked for over thirty years in movies. The photography by Edward Cronjager is similarly superior and its use of shadows and darkness deserves comparison, as Pierre mentions, with the work of John Alton. The photography stands up very well especially when compared with the work that was done for Lang on other later films. A number of those films, but especially, Human Desire (1954), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) and The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1961) all have a cheap look about them as if their budgets prevented them being made with anything other than the flattest glare. House by the River stands this test of comparison very well.
For anyone interested in Lang’s work House by the River is essential viewing, not perhaps among his handful of very greatest films but surely one which explores the director’s themes with some subtlety. The DVD is even more essential because it sets down the effort that was made by Pierre Rissient, acting alone, to save the film from oblivion. The recounting of the story is fascinating in itself. We have a lot of reasons to be grateful that it’s now all there for us, a couple of mouse clicks and a credit card away.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Who's to Bless and who's to Blame
And so the the Salo saga ends….for the moment. For close to thirty five years Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo has been occupying the minds of Australia’s film censorship authorities and a lot of others. If you would like to get the full blow by blow details and many more besides you can go here to a splendid website devoted to many mind-boggling concerns with film and other censorship
http://www.refused-classification.com/Films_Salo.htm
What’s interesting and has attracted little recent attention over those 35 years is to note just who was in charge at the time. I think I've got this right.
In March 1976 when the film was initially banned those who did so had been appointed by the Whitlam Government. In 1992 when an attempt was again made to import it the film was initially banned by appointees of the Hawke Government. A successful appeal was upheld by the Review Board chaired by another appointee of the Hawke Government, Evan Williams, still currently the Australian’s film critic.
In 1998 when the film was re-banned, the decisions were taken by appointees of both the Keating Government, most notably the Convenor of the Board Barbara Biggins, who had been put there by Attorney-General Michael Lavarch to replace Evan Williams, and by the Howard Government. Ms Biggins was quick to fire off a salvo to the press when the latest un-banning occurred.
In 2010 when the film was passed for DVD release, the decision, and the subsequent appeal which also ended in favour of releasing he film, was made by still serving appointees of the Howard Government. The Classification Board is chaired by long time John Howard friend, confidante and former ABC Chair Donald McDonald who himself apparently voted in favour of releasing the film.
For most of the last twenty years, the politician who has shown most interest, indeed a dogged interest, in the matter is one time National Party and now Liberal Party Senator Julian McGauran. To gain an understanding of the degree of debate McGauran has indulged in the website above refers to much of his efforts in the Parliament. McGauran's most recent responses have included the following: (Salo) “is a handbook for deviants and could trigger crazed minds”…. “Salo is not another pornographic movie with consenting adults but a movie that depicts children.”…” Our chief censors have just made the job of vice squads around the country harder.” …” The lifting of the ban is detached from community standards and leaves no line in the sand – sending our censorship laws into outer space.”
Right… we get the idea, although I’m not sure we even still have vice squads and, yes, I guess its hard to have a line in the sand in outer space….enough already but perhaps its worth reminding ourselves of an earlier remark by McGauran when the film was re-banned in 1998: "I'm actually over the moon that the artists have been pulled back into line ... You must remember I'm National Party - artistic merit doesn't mean much to me. The Sydney-style view ... doesn't amount to a row of beans."
So there… prepare to read reports of just how disgusting the film is all over again when the DVD reviewers get to work…and remember it was a mate of John Howard who did it, or at the very least, was one of those who did.
http://www.refused-classification.com/Films_Salo.htm
What’s interesting and has attracted little recent attention over those 35 years is to note just who was in charge at the time. I think I've got this right.
In March 1976 when the film was initially banned those who did so had been appointed by the Whitlam Government. In 1992 when an attempt was again made to import it the film was initially banned by appointees of the Hawke Government. A successful appeal was upheld by the Review Board chaired by another appointee of the Hawke Government, Evan Williams, still currently the Australian’s film critic.
In 1998 when the film was re-banned, the decisions were taken by appointees of both the Keating Government, most notably the Convenor of the Board Barbara Biggins, who had been put there by Attorney-General Michael Lavarch to replace Evan Williams, and by the Howard Government. Ms Biggins was quick to fire off a salvo to the press when the latest un-banning occurred.
In 2010 when the film was passed for DVD release, the decision, and the subsequent appeal which also ended in favour of releasing he film, was made by still serving appointees of the Howard Government. The Classification Board is chaired by long time John Howard friend, confidante and former ABC Chair Donald McDonald who himself apparently voted in favour of releasing the film.
For most of the last twenty years, the politician who has shown most interest, indeed a dogged interest, in the matter is one time National Party and now Liberal Party Senator Julian McGauran. To gain an understanding of the degree of debate McGauran has indulged in the website above refers to much of his efforts in the Parliament. McGauran's most recent responses have included the following: (Salo) “is a handbook for deviants and could trigger crazed minds”…. “Salo is not another pornographic movie with consenting adults but a movie that depicts children.”…” Our chief censors have just made the job of vice squads around the country harder.” …” The lifting of the ban is detached from community standards and leaves no line in the sand – sending our censorship laws into outer space.”
Right… we get the idea, although I’m not sure we even still have vice squads and, yes, I guess its hard to have a line in the sand in outer space….enough already but perhaps its worth reminding ourselves of an earlier remark by McGauran when the film was re-banned in 1998: "I'm actually over the moon that the artists have been pulled back into line ... You must remember I'm National Party - artistic merit doesn't mean much to me. The Sydney-style view ... doesn't amount to a row of beans."
So there… prepare to read reports of just how disgusting the film is all over again when the DVD reviewers get to work…and remember it was a mate of John Howard who did it, or at the very least, was one of those who did.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
Just when you think you’ve got a handle on a Federal Government led by a Prime Minister who alerts the media as to the whereabouts of his church attendance each Sunday you get another small and unwanted shock. This is an additional shock to that associated with the Government’s pandering to the religious right involved in the almost certainly futile attempts to censor the internet. These efforts on the internet are being led by of all people, the almost cartoonish political pygmy Stephen Conroy. Watching or listening to Conroy trying to explain or justify any policy decision is wince-inducing. How simple does the brief have to be before he remembers the details in reasonable order one is forced to wonder. Never mind for the moment, for out of the blue, we have a new entrant in the beat Tony Abbott at his own game stakes, the Minister for Home Affairs, who has fired in yet another appeal against yet another decision to allow Pasolini’s Salo to be screened, this time on DVD. The Minister, the suspiciously named Brendan O’Connor (who he you may well ask), has asked the Classifications Review Board to take yet another look at Pasolini’s little nature study of the end of fascism, thus drawing attention yet again to a movie which for reasons that escape normal human intelligence politicians simply cant leave alone.
For the record I myself was once a member of this Review body. I am pleased to advise that while I was frequently accused of worrying too much about what children might get frightened of, like that great space-age spider in something called An Ewok Adventure or some such, we never actually banned anything in my time. In one special case that was tested when we faced considerable pressure to take action over a dire flick (in my view anyway) called I Spit on your Grave. The film had been referred to the Board, despite being in video circulation for years. Some cheapjack lawyer down in Tasmania had discovered his clients were getting a lot of sympathy from judges in that backwater when the lawyer mentioned that his clients’ criminal behaviour had resulted from a viewing of the aforementioned movie. Banning it would apparently cause violence towards women to cease instantly down there among the apple pickers. A narrow majority thought the film didn’t deserve to be verballed in this way and wouldn’t play along. Nothing more was heard about any further outbreaks of serial criminal behaviour resulting from seeing the film. Or, if it was, nothing more was reported to we members.
But back to Pasolini and bear with me. After my tenure was not renewed my services were availed of on a number of occasions to write submissions on behalf of distributors who thought a crummy classification decision had been made about their investments. One such was a distributor and exhibitor of Hong Kong movies who had paid a fair bit upfront to acquire the rights to a film called The Man Behind the Sun, an earnest, vulgar and extremely graphic account of the activities of the infamous Japanese medical experiments carried out on Chinese slaves during the 1939-45 War. One of the encyclopaedists has since described the film as a ‘revoltingly explicit dramatization of the war crimes Japanese soldiers and scientists perpetrated on their Chinese captives.’ Too true.
Notwithstanding the unedifying content, the distributor had paid his money upfront and didn’t have a chance of getting it back if the film were banned. The Appeals Board, which included my old friend the late Keith Connolly let the film through and the distributor did quite nicely out of it, screening it to a mostly Chinese clientele in a Chinatown cinema. The film didn’t travel well however. Electric Shadows Cinema in Canberra, noting this success, put it on to dismal business and yanked it after a week. About the only attention it attracted was from the RSPCA who rang to say that they heard there was a scene in it when live rats were set on fire. This is so said the cinema management, explaining that rats were used by the Japanese to develop anthrax spores. The RSPCA advised that they would be contacting the Canberra Times and organising a protest outside the cinema if the film were not taken off. The cinema management asked what time they proposed to be there so that he could ensure that the rest of the media were also alerted. The RSPCA then thought better of it and allowed the film to disappear quietly.
But back to Pasolini and Salo. The film was banned in the early 70s. There was a memorable screening of stills from the film at the Sydney Film Festival presented by that critical old stager Gideon Bachman. But the film stayed banned until the early 90s when it was passed with an R (Restricted) classification limiting the audience to those over the age of 18. Just before the rights were due to expire, some five years later, somebody, probably with a nod from the Howard Government, fired in a request for a review and the Appeals Board, which Howard and his henchmen hadn’t had to stack with dogmatic and religious types because that had already been done by the previous Labor Attorney-General Michael Lavarch, duly banned it. The distributor actually consulted me about what might be said in the film’s defence but was otherwise utterly undisturbed I suspect. Attempts have since been sporadically made to import the film legitimately again. (Copies of the film have been clandestinely circulating in video stores for decades.) But to no avail. One attempt was even made, I believe, by the redoubtable Melbourne Underground Film Festival. But no.
Recently however it appears that the film has been passed for DVD distribution and yet again the Federal Minister, this time from the Rudd Government (see above), has promptly moved to prevent this. The aforementioned O’Connor has asked the Review Board to again ‘review’ the matter. We will shortly know whether the Board remains the bastion of conservatism that Lavarch established and Howard maintained it or has been allowed to assume a degree of liberalism.
But….will the farce surrounding this film ever end. Please…. it just isn’t worth that much effort and worry….leave it alone….get on with doing something useful…Like the internet, Salo is out there and if the ‘review’ overturns the decision you can still find it in DVD rental stores if you ask or you could still just order it on Amazon and import it through the mail. I doubt the slightest attention will be paid...
For the record I myself was once a member of this Review body. I am pleased to advise that while I was frequently accused of worrying too much about what children might get frightened of, like that great space-age spider in something called An Ewok Adventure or some such, we never actually banned anything in my time. In one special case that was tested when we faced considerable pressure to take action over a dire flick (in my view anyway) called I Spit on your Grave. The film had been referred to the Board, despite being in video circulation for years. Some cheapjack lawyer down in Tasmania had discovered his clients were getting a lot of sympathy from judges in that backwater when the lawyer mentioned that his clients’ criminal behaviour had resulted from a viewing of the aforementioned movie. Banning it would apparently cause violence towards women to cease instantly down there among the apple pickers. A narrow majority thought the film didn’t deserve to be verballed in this way and wouldn’t play along. Nothing more was heard about any further outbreaks of serial criminal behaviour resulting from seeing the film. Or, if it was, nothing more was reported to we members.
But back to Pasolini and bear with me. After my tenure was not renewed my services were availed of on a number of occasions to write submissions on behalf of distributors who thought a crummy classification decision had been made about their investments. One such was a distributor and exhibitor of Hong Kong movies who had paid a fair bit upfront to acquire the rights to a film called The Man Behind the Sun, an earnest, vulgar and extremely graphic account of the activities of the infamous Japanese medical experiments carried out on Chinese slaves during the 1939-45 War. One of the encyclopaedists has since described the film as a ‘revoltingly explicit dramatization of the war crimes Japanese soldiers and scientists perpetrated on their Chinese captives.’ Too true.
Notwithstanding the unedifying content, the distributor had paid his money upfront and didn’t have a chance of getting it back if the film were banned. The Appeals Board, which included my old friend the late Keith Connolly let the film through and the distributor did quite nicely out of it, screening it to a mostly Chinese clientele in a Chinatown cinema. The film didn’t travel well however. Electric Shadows Cinema in Canberra, noting this success, put it on to dismal business and yanked it after a week. About the only attention it attracted was from the RSPCA who rang to say that they heard there was a scene in it when live rats were set on fire. This is so said the cinema management, explaining that rats were used by the Japanese to develop anthrax spores. The RSPCA advised that they would be contacting the Canberra Times and organising a protest outside the cinema if the film were not taken off. The cinema management asked what time they proposed to be there so that he could ensure that the rest of the media were also alerted. The RSPCA then thought better of it and allowed the film to disappear quietly.
But back to Pasolini and Salo. The film was banned in the early 70s. There was a memorable screening of stills from the film at the Sydney Film Festival presented by that critical old stager Gideon Bachman. But the film stayed banned until the early 90s when it was passed with an R (Restricted) classification limiting the audience to those over the age of 18. Just before the rights were due to expire, some five years later, somebody, probably with a nod from the Howard Government, fired in a request for a review and the Appeals Board, which Howard and his henchmen hadn’t had to stack with dogmatic and religious types because that had already been done by the previous Labor Attorney-General Michael Lavarch, duly banned it. The distributor actually consulted me about what might be said in the film’s defence but was otherwise utterly undisturbed I suspect. Attempts have since been sporadically made to import the film legitimately again. (Copies of the film have been clandestinely circulating in video stores for decades.) But to no avail. One attempt was even made, I believe, by the redoubtable Melbourne Underground Film Festival. But no.
Recently however it appears that the film has been passed for DVD distribution and yet again the Federal Minister, this time from the Rudd Government (see above), has promptly moved to prevent this. The aforementioned O’Connor has asked the Review Board to again ‘review’ the matter. We will shortly know whether the Board remains the bastion of conservatism that Lavarch established and Howard maintained it or has been allowed to assume a degree of liberalism.
But….will the farce surrounding this film ever end. Please…. it just isn’t worth that much effort and worry….leave it alone….get on with doing something useful…Like the internet, Salo is out there and if the ‘review’ overturns the decision you can still find it in DVD rental stores if you ask or you could still just order it on Amazon and import it through the mail. I doubt the slightest attention will be paid...
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Oscar Washup
Oscar 2010 – Last words
“There was no joy for the Australian nominees…The closest thing to a win for an Australian, was an Austrian, Christoph Waltz, claiming best supporting actor for playing a scheming Nazi in Inglourious Basterds.” Gary Maddox in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting, from deep in the bowels of Pyrmont, on the Oscar ceremony. For a rather more droll, Brit-take-the-piss report try here http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/08/oscars-2010-highs-and-lows
The SMH is one of those papers with a schizoid view of the Oscars. Its writers relentlessly rubbish them while its editors are no doubt happy to publish endless column inches about them. Even by the end of the week, commentator David Dale couldn't resist further notes: “The biggest winner The Hurt Locker (weekly box office up 12% - ed) will go on to even bigger earnings. Precious probably wont be assisted by its wins. A low-budget tale of squalor and child abuse sounds too much like a typical Australian film to attract Australian audiences.” That squelch was in The Tribal Mind, SMH 13-14 March…Meanwhile writer Louis Nowra, making a new reputation for himself these days as Demolition Man after recent jobs on David Williamson, Bob Ellis and Germaine Greer in various intellectual publications, surfaced again to remind everyone of his brush with Kathryn Bigelow fame, by reminding the SMH gossip columnist that he “wrote the screenplay” for Bigelow’s K-19:The Widowmaker. Nowra’s other claims about the film were that he never saw it, that Harrison Ford got paid a million a day for 20 days work and the film broke even at the box office. Louis added what he called “a little known Hollywood fact. No movie that has ever featured a submarine has ever lost money.” Not sure if all those things are true. Any assistance with information about box office flops featuring submarines would be welcome…. Louis has had other brushes with Hollywood, most notably with the Weinsteins in their Miramax period when his play Cosi was adapted into a movie in 1996 directed by Mark Joffe. At the time, Louis apparently acquiesced quietly, as far as is publicly known, when a happy ending was substituted for the play’s downbeat finale.
I saw The Hurt Locker yesterday. Mmmmmmixed feelings. I suspect its not as good as Generation Kill, the seven hour mini-series made for HBO by the creators of The Wire, of which I've only watched one ep thus far. Very gruelling but covers similar stuff, right down to the wrestling and fighting in the barracks. ...and the lead guy in The Hurt Locker is a psychopath who spends much time placing not just himself but his mates in danger. For that he gots socked once and has an angry speech of ten seconds duration delivered at him by the wounded buddy. but filmed with great skill in the I'm going to make you feel you're there style. Yet again its a film for the political moment that pinches the prize.
“There was no joy for the Australian nominees…The closest thing to a win for an Australian, was an Austrian, Christoph Waltz, claiming best supporting actor for playing a scheming Nazi in Inglourious Basterds.” Gary Maddox in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting, from deep in the bowels of Pyrmont, on the Oscar ceremony. For a rather more droll, Brit-take-the-piss report try here http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/08/oscars-2010-highs-and-lows
The SMH is one of those papers with a schizoid view of the Oscars. Its writers relentlessly rubbish them while its editors are no doubt happy to publish endless column inches about them. Even by the end of the week, commentator David Dale couldn't resist further notes: “The biggest winner The Hurt Locker (weekly box office up 12% - ed) will go on to even bigger earnings. Precious probably wont be assisted by its wins. A low-budget tale of squalor and child abuse sounds too much like a typical Australian film to attract Australian audiences.” That squelch was in The Tribal Mind, SMH 13-14 March…Meanwhile writer Louis Nowra, making a new reputation for himself these days as Demolition Man after recent jobs on David Williamson, Bob Ellis and Germaine Greer in various intellectual publications, surfaced again to remind everyone of his brush with Kathryn Bigelow fame, by reminding the SMH gossip columnist that he “wrote the screenplay” for Bigelow’s K-19:The Widowmaker. Nowra’s other claims about the film were that he never saw it, that Harrison Ford got paid a million a day for 20 days work and the film broke even at the box office. Louis added what he called “a little known Hollywood fact. No movie that has ever featured a submarine has ever lost money.” Not sure if all those things are true. Any assistance with information about box office flops featuring submarines would be welcome…. Louis has had other brushes with Hollywood, most notably with the Weinsteins in their Miramax period when his play Cosi was adapted into a movie in 1996 directed by Mark Joffe. At the time, Louis apparently acquiesced quietly, as far as is publicly known, when a happy ending was substituted for the play’s downbeat finale.
I saw The Hurt Locker yesterday. Mmmmmmixed feelings. I suspect its not as good as Generation Kill, the seven hour mini-series made for HBO by the creators of The Wire, of which I've only watched one ep thus far. Very gruelling but covers similar stuff, right down to the wrestling and fighting in the barracks. ...and the lead guy in The Hurt Locker is a psychopath who spends much time placing not just himself but his mates in danger. For that he gots socked once and has an angry speech of ten seconds duration delivered at him by the wounded buddy. but filmed with great skill in the I'm going to make you feel you're there style. Yet again its a film for the political moment that pinches the prize.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
John Dankworth
Many years ago MUFS screened the first ever Joseph Losey film that I associated with the director. It was a low budget Brit crime story made in 1960 for peanuts at the Merton Park Studios. Till then, and resuming immediately thereafter, Merton Park was a home for B features like the Scotland Yard series. The Concrete Jungle as it was first known here in a version that had been cut for American release but was later better known by its original title The Criminal, was a knockout movie, full of raw violence in both its criminal demi-monde and within the British prison system. It contained some ferocious verbal and visual asides about British class systems. Everyone had their place you see and those who transgressed by seeking to go elsewhere were punished. John Bannion, the ambitious crook played by Stanley Baker was always a doomed man, a thieving boy who created misery for those around him by seeking independence. Among the people involved along with Losey were the great actors Stanley Baker, Sam Wanamaker and Patrick Magee, all of whom I think I was seeing onscreen for the first time. The Australian Kenneth J Warren who played the pyschopathic thug Clobber had a terrific part as well. On the soundtrack, it was the first time I heard the voice of Cleo Laine. She sang the lament reprised throughout the film “all my sadness, all my joy, came from loving a thieving boy”. The music for the film was written and played by another then unknown, John Dankworth. It all came flooding back when I heard of Dankworth’s death this week, another of the titans gone
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Eric Rohmer 1920-2010
In 1978 when we were visiting Paris for just the second time we found ourselves sitting in a plush private theatre next to a young woman who had also been invited along to a screening of Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name by our mutual friend Pierre Rissient. The producer of the film Robert Altman was in attendance.
At the end of the screening Pierre was invited by Altman to join him for dinner and we three of us found ourselves looking for somewhere to eat. Since then Mary Stephen, Karen and I have remained firm friends, our paths crossing in all sorts of places, Paris mostly, but others as well. Mary went on to make films herself, including her beautiful second feature Justocoeur (1980) which I invited to the 1981 Melbourne Film Festival and more recently she has crossed continents in her career as a film editor.
Mary has had little luck in getting her many film-making projects going but not long after arriving in Paris she did have the good fortune to meet Eric Rohmer and he cast her in one of his films,The Aviator’s Wife/La femme de l’aviateur (1980), and gave her employment as assistant to his Chief Editor Cécile Décugis. (Among other things, Cécile had edited Godard’s classic Breathless/A bout de souffle.) The acquaintance made became, as with many of Rohmer’s collaborators, a firm and lasting friendship and in the early 90s, after Cécile’s retirement, Rohmer asked Mary to edit his film Conte d’hiver/A WinterTale She continued to be his editor until his last short film.
Most of Rohmer’s features were produced by the formidable Margaret Meneghoz, the head of the production and distribution company Les Films du Losange which Rohmer himself had founded with Barbet Schroder in the early 60s. However, his last three films The Lady and the Duke (2001), Triple agent (2005) and The Story of Astrée and Céladon (2007) and some shorts made in the intervening years were produced by the indefatigable Francoise Etchegaray through the smaller Compagnie Eric Rohmer. (For The Lady and the Duke, Francoise enlisted the support of Pierre Rissient and obtained finance from Pathe. Pierre Cottrell who had produced some of Rohmer’s early films was the Associate Producer.)
Eric, Françoise and Mary formed powerful bonds and it was somehow poetic that Rohmer died on Mary’s birthday thus, as she says, linking them forever. Rohmer’s bonds with Mary extended beyond her editing. As a classically trained musician she was integral in incorporating the music in Rohmer’s films and for a number of them she and Rohmer took a joint credit as composers of the score under the pseudonym of Sebastien Erms.
Before embarking on his film-making career, Rohmer was editor of Cahiers du Cinema during the years when it lead the world towards new perspectives on the American cinema and, by virtue of the fact that its key critics Rivette, Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol all went on to become and remain major figures in French film-making. Rohmer also established another name for himself as well, as the co-author with Claude Chabrol, of one of the first book length studies of a major film-maker. Their study of Hitchcock is still quoted today and was a key step in taking consideration of Hitchcock’s work far beyond that of a mere master of suspense.
For many long time cinephiles the first experience of Rohmer’s cinema came in his Ma Nuit Chez Maud/My Night at Maud’s in 1969. Set in Clermont-Ferrand, the city closest to the exact centre of France, it told of a bachelor who commits himself to one beautiful girl, unbeknown to her, but is then tempted by the exotic free spirited Maud. After a long night of talk and tease and tantalising moments he drives away. For some it seemed the epitome of the kind of cerebral and sophisticated French cinema for which film festivals and art houses were invented.
Before his breakthrough with My Night at Maud’s, Rohmer had made two features and two dramatic shorts in the series of “Six moral tales” and an uncountable number of educational documentaries. On the latter he learned the craft of his film-making, absorbing the one shot/one meaning narrative methods of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, thus seeming to arrive in the late fifties as a fully prepared film-maker.
After My Night at Maud’s Rohmer completed his series of Moral Tales with the similarly successful Claire’s Knee (1970) and Love In The Afternoon (1972). In each of the tales, and in most of Rohmer’s work, there is a focus on an array of women who are strong, smart, beautiful, ever-fascinating, eternally tempting and eternally wise. To play these characters Rohmer discovered a host of extraordinary actresses, all of them beautiful in ways beyond classical good looks, all expressive, aware, lively and capable of delivering conversation about moral matters with an exactitude and conviction that produced a seeming instant truth. For all his films’ apparent simplicities, Rohmer’s characters always rang true and his women were an eternal life force. The actresses Beatrice Romand, Arielle Dombasle, Marie Riviere and Anne Tesseydre among many (David Thomson estimates thirty to forty) have assumed luminous places in the memory thanks to Rohmer’s cinema.
In the mid-70s Rohmer embarked on a planned series of adaptations of classical literature, but after two films Die Marquise von O (1976) and Perceval le Gallois (1978), both of which flopped, Rohmer returned to his metier with two more series, the first being ‘Comedies and Proverbes” made between 1980 and 1987 and then what seems his finest work, the four films which comprise the Tales of the Four Seasons. Much of the focus of all of them was on the misunderstandings of young people in love. The contradictions between the mind the heart were never so clearly, often painfully, revealed. By this time in his life, Rohmer felt little need to travel outside Paris and rarely attended festival screenings or even the openings of his films. He preferred to hang out at near home, taking pleasure in the company of the many young Parisians who idolised his work.
Rohmer took the best part of a decade to complete the Tales of the Four Seasons. During that time he didn’t allow the grass to grow making any number of short films which allowed him, and his crew to experiment with new technologies and equipment. Many of the shorts were assembled into feature length films, most notably the delightful Les Rendez-vous de Paris (1995). This experimentation bore its finest fruit in Rohmer’s first digitally filmed feature The Lady and the Duke, a film set during the French Revolution in which all the backgrounds were taken from paintings by Jean-Baptiste Marot based on the etchings of the period and digitally edited to produce a picture of Paris of quite astounding exactitude.
We were in Paris at the time when Triple Agent premiered and its release was accompanied by an astonishing burst of activity – the cover stories of both Cahiers and Positif, lengthy interviews in both, a retrospective of almost superhuman completeness at the Cinematheque (it included most of the aforementioned educational documentaries and several sessions devoted to discussion of his art and craft) and adulatory reviews everywhere. Given this attention I was later astonished that most of the major Australian film festivals weren’t interested in screening that film, nor his last feature, but it’s never too late.
For those who might want to track down Rohmer on screen I can advise that a couple of years ago I was attending a film festival where Jacques Rivette’s 12 hour television series Out One was being screened. For various reasons I only managed to sample one episode. In it the actor Jean-Pierre Leaud was playing a man unable to speak who was conducting an interview with an expert on the novelist Honore de Balzac. The questions were being put by handwriting them on cards. Undeterred, the expert extemporised at great and sometimes droll length on Balzac’s themes and style. It was a performance to treasure and, as far as I recall, the only time I saw Eric Rohmer in a dramatic role on film. He made cameo appearances in many other movies, including Mary’s Justocoeur, but otherwise there is a wonderful edition of the French TV series Cineastes de Notre Temps directed by Janine Bazin and Andre S Labarthe devoted, with much love, to Rohmer and his work. Subtitled copies of it on DVD are in private circulation so it’s a matter of asking around among the cinephiles and collectors if you want to see it.
Eric Rohmer is not merely a key figure in the cinema, providing a rich legacy for review and contemplation. His work is also a testament to the uniqueness of French production which gives its key film-makers the freedom to make their own way and seek out new and personal ways of telling tales. Many follow in his footsteps though none has his unique combination of grace, serenity, affection for beautiful women, bemusement at love’s foibles and elegant simplicity of filming.
Eric Rohmer was born Maurice Scherer in 1920 and died aged 89 in Paris on January 11. For an intimate appreciation of him can I suggest that you look at the tributes on Mary’s Facebook page in which her sadness is lyrically expressed.
At the end of the screening Pierre was invited by Altman to join him for dinner and we three of us found ourselves looking for somewhere to eat. Since then Mary Stephen, Karen and I have remained firm friends, our paths crossing in all sorts of places, Paris mostly, but others as well. Mary went on to make films herself, including her beautiful second feature Justocoeur (1980) which I invited to the 1981 Melbourne Film Festival and more recently she has crossed continents in her career as a film editor.
Mary has had little luck in getting her many film-making projects going but not long after arriving in Paris she did have the good fortune to meet Eric Rohmer and he cast her in one of his films,The Aviator’s Wife/La femme de l’aviateur (1980), and gave her employment as assistant to his Chief Editor Cécile Décugis. (Among other things, Cécile had edited Godard’s classic Breathless/A bout de souffle.) The acquaintance made became, as with many of Rohmer’s collaborators, a firm and lasting friendship and in the early 90s, after Cécile’s retirement, Rohmer asked Mary to edit his film Conte d’hiver/A WinterTale She continued to be his editor until his last short film.
Most of Rohmer’s features were produced by the formidable Margaret Meneghoz, the head of the production and distribution company Les Films du Losange which Rohmer himself had founded with Barbet Schroder in the early 60s. However, his last three films The Lady and the Duke (2001), Triple agent (2005) and The Story of Astrée and Céladon (2007) and some shorts made in the intervening years were produced by the indefatigable Francoise Etchegaray through the smaller Compagnie Eric Rohmer. (For The Lady and the Duke, Francoise enlisted the support of Pierre Rissient and obtained finance from Pathe. Pierre Cottrell who had produced some of Rohmer’s early films was the Associate Producer.)
Eric, Françoise and Mary formed powerful bonds and it was somehow poetic that Rohmer died on Mary’s birthday thus, as she says, linking them forever. Rohmer’s bonds with Mary extended beyond her editing. As a classically trained musician she was integral in incorporating the music in Rohmer’s films and for a number of them she and Rohmer took a joint credit as composers of the score under the pseudonym of Sebastien Erms.
Before embarking on his film-making career, Rohmer was editor of Cahiers du Cinema during the years when it lead the world towards new perspectives on the American cinema and, by virtue of the fact that its key critics Rivette, Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol all went on to become and remain major figures in French film-making. Rohmer also established another name for himself as well, as the co-author with Claude Chabrol, of one of the first book length studies of a major film-maker. Their study of Hitchcock is still quoted today and was a key step in taking consideration of Hitchcock’s work far beyond that of a mere master of suspense.
For many long time cinephiles the first experience of Rohmer’s cinema came in his Ma Nuit Chez Maud/My Night at Maud’s in 1969. Set in Clermont-Ferrand, the city closest to the exact centre of France, it told of a bachelor who commits himself to one beautiful girl, unbeknown to her, but is then tempted by the exotic free spirited Maud. After a long night of talk and tease and tantalising moments he drives away. For some it seemed the epitome of the kind of cerebral and sophisticated French cinema for which film festivals and art houses were invented.
Before his breakthrough with My Night at Maud’s, Rohmer had made two features and two dramatic shorts in the series of “Six moral tales” and an uncountable number of educational documentaries. On the latter he learned the craft of his film-making, absorbing the one shot/one meaning narrative methods of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, thus seeming to arrive in the late fifties as a fully prepared film-maker.
After My Night at Maud’s Rohmer completed his series of Moral Tales with the similarly successful Claire’s Knee (1970) and Love In The Afternoon (1972). In each of the tales, and in most of Rohmer’s work, there is a focus on an array of women who are strong, smart, beautiful, ever-fascinating, eternally tempting and eternally wise. To play these characters Rohmer discovered a host of extraordinary actresses, all of them beautiful in ways beyond classical good looks, all expressive, aware, lively and capable of delivering conversation about moral matters with an exactitude and conviction that produced a seeming instant truth. For all his films’ apparent simplicities, Rohmer’s characters always rang true and his women were an eternal life force. The actresses Beatrice Romand, Arielle Dombasle, Marie Riviere and Anne Tesseydre among many (David Thomson estimates thirty to forty) have assumed luminous places in the memory thanks to Rohmer’s cinema.
In the mid-70s Rohmer embarked on a planned series of adaptations of classical literature, but after two films Die Marquise von O (1976) and Perceval le Gallois (1978), both of which flopped, Rohmer returned to his metier with two more series, the first being ‘Comedies and Proverbes” made between 1980 and 1987 and then what seems his finest work, the four films which comprise the Tales of the Four Seasons. Much of the focus of all of them was on the misunderstandings of young people in love. The contradictions between the mind the heart were never so clearly, often painfully, revealed. By this time in his life, Rohmer felt little need to travel outside Paris and rarely attended festival screenings or even the openings of his films. He preferred to hang out at near home, taking pleasure in the company of the many young Parisians who idolised his work.
Rohmer took the best part of a decade to complete the Tales of the Four Seasons. During that time he didn’t allow the grass to grow making any number of short films which allowed him, and his crew to experiment with new technologies and equipment. Many of the shorts were assembled into feature length films, most notably the delightful Les Rendez-vous de Paris (1995). This experimentation bore its finest fruit in Rohmer’s first digitally filmed feature The Lady and the Duke, a film set during the French Revolution in which all the backgrounds were taken from paintings by Jean-Baptiste Marot based on the etchings of the period and digitally edited to produce a picture of Paris of quite astounding exactitude.
We were in Paris at the time when Triple Agent premiered and its release was accompanied by an astonishing burst of activity – the cover stories of both Cahiers and Positif, lengthy interviews in both, a retrospective of almost superhuman completeness at the Cinematheque (it included most of the aforementioned educational documentaries and several sessions devoted to discussion of his art and craft) and adulatory reviews everywhere. Given this attention I was later astonished that most of the major Australian film festivals weren’t interested in screening that film, nor his last feature, but it’s never too late.
For those who might want to track down Rohmer on screen I can advise that a couple of years ago I was attending a film festival where Jacques Rivette’s 12 hour television series Out One was being screened. For various reasons I only managed to sample one episode. In it the actor Jean-Pierre Leaud was playing a man unable to speak who was conducting an interview with an expert on the novelist Honore de Balzac. The questions were being put by handwriting them on cards. Undeterred, the expert extemporised at great and sometimes droll length on Balzac’s themes and style. It was a performance to treasure and, as far as I recall, the only time I saw Eric Rohmer in a dramatic role on film. He made cameo appearances in many other movies, including Mary’s Justocoeur, but otherwise there is a wonderful edition of the French TV series Cineastes de Notre Temps directed by Janine Bazin and Andre S Labarthe devoted, with much love, to Rohmer and his work. Subtitled copies of it on DVD are in private circulation so it’s a matter of asking around among the cinephiles and collectors if you want to see it.
Eric Rohmer is not merely a key figure in the cinema, providing a rich legacy for review and contemplation. His work is also a testament to the uniqueness of French production which gives its key film-makers the freedom to make their own way and seek out new and personal ways of telling tales. Many follow in his footsteps though none has his unique combination of grace, serenity, affection for beautiful women, bemusement at love’s foibles and elegant simplicity of filming.
Eric Rohmer was born Maurice Scherer in 1920 and died aged 89 in Paris on January 11. For an intimate appreciation of him can I suggest that you look at the tributes on Mary’s Facebook page in which her sadness is lyrically expressed.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
DVD Dialogue - You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, USA, 1936)
So why this film to kick off a new series?
A series? Hmm. We’ll see how far the enthusiasm of the new year lasts.
As a DVD it does several things brilliantly. The copy is superb. The film is a Walter Wanger production and without knowing exactly what’s happened there seem to a lot of Wanger’s productions being circulated in very poor copies. The bootleggers have had a field day issuing his films in cheap editions using very poor material. For years there were copies of Algiers and Scarlet Street being offered cheap but the copies were terrible. Even SBS played a copies of those films that were very poor indeed. I think Wanger’s productions may have gone out of copyright and anyone could put them out. The only problem was that the material available, which needless to say wasn’t being supplied by the legitimate heirs and successors of Wanger’s immensely high quality output, was in very poor shape. So it’s a pleasure to see that Universal has been putting Wanger’s productions out on DVD using material clearly close to the original negative.
As well the single extra on the film is magnificent. So credit where it’s due.
Was it a Wanger project or Fritz Lang’s?
Well according to David Thomson, it arose when Wanger and Sylvia Sidney bumped into Theodore Dreiser who said he was writing a piece about Bonnie and Clyde. Dreiser said it would make a great movie and Sylvia a great Bonnie Parker. After they had a script, Sidney suggested Lang. She had just been in his first American film Fury (1936) and no doubt saw him as perfect for the task of making a movie about a guy hit with the full force of the law for something he hadn’t done. The Bonnie and Clyde aspects got played right down. Henry Fonda, always brilliant playing troubled, virtuous men, is an ex-con trying to go straight but defeated at every turn. A decision, prompted by an excited new wife, to go house-hunting instead of turning up for work on time proves a fateful moment. Then there is the long elaboration of a robbery and its aftermath for which Fonda’s Eddie Taylor gets the blame. The sequence involving a pair of eyes looking through a gap in a car windshield in pouring rain, the attack using tear gas, the single unknown man who drives the armoured car away and the heard but not seen accident, is magnificent.
One of Lang’s best films?
Absolutely.
What about this single extra?
It’s a piece in which Claude Chabrol, all of 70+ plus, looks at the film on a viewer and analyses Lang’s film-making skills with quite remarkable perception. Chabrol is also interviewed and these sequences and bits and pieces of illustrative material from the film are incorporated into a very fine piece of film criticism. Whatever you thought you knew about You Only Live Once you know a whole lot more after seeing this. Chabrol has this fascination with Lang’s staging that enables you to get much additional meaning and much greater appreciation of Lang’s skills. This would not have been an expensive film. Most of it, even the outdoor post robbery and flight sequences are done in the studio or with back projection.
Chabrol’s analysis is most acute. There is even one lateral tracking shot, when Eddie is being escorted towards Death Row and is flanked by a guard and by the kindly priest Father Dolan where Chabrol notes how the camera loses the characters from the middle of the frame. He is perplexed as to why the shot is there in this fashion as he doesn’t concede that the clumsy look is intentional. This is film criticism of a very high order and, as I guess as I have been saying for ever, the opportunity that DVD has opened up for new methods and techniques of criticism has added immensely to the sum of our knowledge and broadened the way we can actually dissect films.
Chabrol was once a critic and has no doubt retained these skills.
Yes. Mind you very few film-makers outside that small coterie of French critics cum film-makers, mostly from the fifties and sixties, have ever had these dual skills capable of closely-argued and rigorous analysis and fine film-making. Maybe Lindsay Anderson and Peter Bogdanovich qualify. Hasn’t been anyone else who has come to film-making from these roots for decades.
Chabrol actually made a film that seemed to be a homage to Lang’s Mabuse character?
Indeed. I think it was called Doctor M. I may be one of the few in the world to have seen, it at a market screening at a festival in the early 90s. The less said the better I’m afraid. Chabrol is a true inheritor of Lang’s legacy. As an imitator he failed.
A series? Hmm. We’ll see how far the enthusiasm of the new year lasts.
As a DVD it does several things brilliantly. The copy is superb. The film is a Walter Wanger production and without knowing exactly what’s happened there seem to a lot of Wanger’s productions being circulated in very poor copies. The bootleggers have had a field day issuing his films in cheap editions using very poor material. For years there were copies of Algiers and Scarlet Street being offered cheap but the copies were terrible. Even SBS played a copies of those films that were very poor indeed. I think Wanger’s productions may have gone out of copyright and anyone could put them out. The only problem was that the material available, which needless to say wasn’t being supplied by the legitimate heirs and successors of Wanger’s immensely high quality output, was in very poor shape. So it’s a pleasure to see that Universal has been putting Wanger’s productions out on DVD using material clearly close to the original negative.
As well the single extra on the film is magnificent. So credit where it’s due.
Was it a Wanger project or Fritz Lang’s?
Well according to David Thomson, it arose when Wanger and Sylvia Sidney bumped into Theodore Dreiser who said he was writing a piece about Bonnie and Clyde. Dreiser said it would make a great movie and Sylvia a great Bonnie Parker. After they had a script, Sidney suggested Lang. She had just been in his first American film Fury (1936) and no doubt saw him as perfect for the task of making a movie about a guy hit with the full force of the law for something he hadn’t done. The Bonnie and Clyde aspects got played right down. Henry Fonda, always brilliant playing troubled, virtuous men, is an ex-con trying to go straight but defeated at every turn. A decision, prompted by an excited new wife, to go house-hunting instead of turning up for work on time proves a fateful moment. Then there is the long elaboration of a robbery and its aftermath for which Fonda’s Eddie Taylor gets the blame. The sequence involving a pair of eyes looking through a gap in a car windshield in pouring rain, the attack using tear gas, the single unknown man who drives the armoured car away and the heard but not seen accident, is magnificent.
One of Lang’s best films?
Absolutely.
What about this single extra?
It’s a piece in which Claude Chabrol, all of 70+ plus, looks at the film on a viewer and analyses Lang’s film-making skills with quite remarkable perception. Chabrol is also interviewed and these sequences and bits and pieces of illustrative material from the film are incorporated into a very fine piece of film criticism. Whatever you thought you knew about You Only Live Once you know a whole lot more after seeing this. Chabrol has this fascination with Lang’s staging that enables you to get much additional meaning and much greater appreciation of Lang’s skills. This would not have been an expensive film. Most of it, even the outdoor post robbery and flight sequences are done in the studio or with back projection.
Chabrol’s analysis is most acute. There is even one lateral tracking shot, when Eddie is being escorted towards Death Row and is flanked by a guard and by the kindly priest Father Dolan where Chabrol notes how the camera loses the characters from the middle of the frame. He is perplexed as to why the shot is there in this fashion as he doesn’t concede that the clumsy look is intentional. This is film criticism of a very high order and, as I guess as I have been saying for ever, the opportunity that DVD has opened up for new methods and techniques of criticism has added immensely to the sum of our knowledge and broadened the way we can actually dissect films.
Chabrol was once a critic and has no doubt retained these skills.
Yes. Mind you very few film-makers outside that small coterie of French critics cum film-makers, mostly from the fifties and sixties, have ever had these dual skills capable of closely-argued and rigorous analysis and fine film-making. Maybe Lindsay Anderson and Peter Bogdanovich qualify. Hasn’t been anyone else who has come to film-making from these roots for decades.
Chabrol actually made a film that seemed to be a homage to Lang’s Mabuse character?
Indeed. I think it was called Doctor M. I may be one of the few in the world to have seen, it at a market screening at a festival in the early 90s. The less said the better I’m afraid. Chabrol is a true inheritor of Lang’s legacy. As an imitator he failed.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Solrun Hoaas
Our friend the film-maker and, more recently, print maker Solrun Hoaas died last Friday 11 December, aged 66, after what might be described as a short illness. Karen and I have gathered some thoughts together and I have attached some additional thoughts offered by Andrew Pike and Merrilyn Pike. I hope they will remind you of Solrun’s life and her achievements and, if you are hearing of her for the first time then you may be curious enough to check out a couple of websites which have more biographical and filmographical information about her here. http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/hoaas.html and http://www.roninfilms.com.au/person/350.html
Solrun was born on 15 August 1943 in Trondheim, Norway to missionary parents who had been in China before the war. She was the only girl and had three brothers. After the war the Hoaas family returned to China, but the revolution in 1949 saw them move to Hong Kong for a year, then to Kobe, Japan, where they lived throughout the ‘50s and part of the ‘60s. The home was a Lutheran church school in the Aotani district of the city. After attending the Norwegian primary school in Shiotaki near Kobe Solrun went to the Canadian Academy, an international school in that city. Upon graduation from its high school she spent a year in the United States, then travelled to Norway where she enrolled at the University of Oslo, majoring in socila anthropolgy. In 1969 she received a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship to do graduate studies at Kyoto University and that is where she met Roger Pulvers. They were married in February 1970 in Kyoto and divorced in 1982.
Karen and I met Solrun and Roger when they arrived in Canberra in the early 70s. They both threw themselves enthusiastically into the local theatre scene, Roger as a writer and director, Solrun as a designer. We knew that they had met and married in Japan, a country where Solrun had also spent much of her childhood and adolescence as the daughter of Christian missionaries.
As it happened Karen and I came back to Melbourne in 1980, the same year that Roger was appointed to a job with the Playbox Theatre. When Solrun arrived she was admitted to the post-graduate course in film production at Swinburne College. We kept in touch. Solrun was a prolific film-maker and one of her films went on at my 1981 Melbourne Film Festival. It was her graduation film for Swinburne In Search of the Japanese, a satiric study of Australian incomprehension of Japanese/Australian relations.
We came back to Canberra in 1985 but we were close friends by this stage and our years in Melbourne saw us sharing each other’s company frequently, especially at Christmas. In one memorable Christmas a boat load of Solrun’s relatives were visiting. Her niece Guro-Marte was doing a part of her medical degree at an Australian hospital and the family descended to join her. All told another ten people or so from Norway joined us around the Christmas table for an especially festive occasion.
Her films, which she continued to make prolifically, by now were being distributed by Andrew Pike’s Canberra company Ronin Films and she had ambitions to make dramatic features. Before that could happen she with Karen as co-producer and some funds from Andrew Pike had got funding from Film Victoria, for an hour long documentary on Japanese war brides. This was to become Green Tea and Cherry Ripe. It was filmed in Melbourne and post-produced in Canberra. For six months or so Solrun lived in Canberra again, the office next to mine in the deepest reaches of the backstage of the Canberra Theatre became an editing suite, the editor Stewart Young lived in our house in Narrabundah (Heights), and the film took shape. Eventually it went out on national TV and I imagine the odd copy is still purchased from the Ronin Films back catalogue. It’s a touching documentary about a group of women that Solrun located and with whom she maintained friendships thereafter
Solrun then got funding for a script she had written for a dramatic feature about a Japanese War bride living in Australia in the 50s. Part of the funds derived from the direct investment in the project by a major Japanese distributor which Solrun negotiated personally. Karen had to decide whether to join the film production or stay with the Electric Shadows Bookshop she had opened. She stayed with the bookshop and Denise Patience came on board as Producer. Aya starred Nicholas Eadie and the Japanese actress Eri Ishida. Regrettably it didn’t click with the Australian public and Solrun never got another chance to do another feature film.
This wasn’t for lack of trying or lack of enthusiasm. She wrote a large number of scripts, many of them dealing with themes involving Australia and Japan, but they were not received sympathetically. Undeterred she continued to travel to Japan and also accepted invitations to visit South Korea. As was Solrun’s wont, she pushed the authorities until she got a visa to North Korea as well and, seizing the moment and using the new digital technology, put together a remarkable little film about her travels. This was Pyongyang Diary one of the first films to show anything of what life is like in this odd and very secretive society. It earned her more than a little money, some festival screenings and an ASIO interview. She followed this film with another documentary about North and South Korean relations, Rushing to Sunshine which also had some international success.
In recent years Solrun had devoted much of her time to studying and practising print making. She was an inveterate student, constantly enrolling in classes to study new technologies, and latterly getting herself very involved in print-making classes. Much of the visual material she used for her prints derived from stills of her own films which she reworked and recoloured into quite remarkable pieces of art. In the last year or so she had been represented in a number of group shows and had solo exhibitions at Gasworks Arts Precinct, the Joshua McClelland Print Room, the Benalla Gallery and the Albion Street Gallery in Sydney.
It’s only a couple of weeks ago that Solrun rang to say that she had been diagnosed with a cancer. There was some hope that it might be operated upon but further tests would determine that. Last Friday she went to hospital for a scan, suffered a heart attack and went into a coma. Only a matter of hours later it was decided that the life support systems should be turned off. It was shockingly sudden.
We are left with extraordinary memories of a wonderful person. Our walls at home are decorated with a number of her prints and they will serve as a constant reminder of the life and work of a great and loyal friend with whom, for the first time in a couple of decades, we wont be sharing Christmas. We will miss her.
Geoff Gardner & Karen Foley
Andrew Pike writes
Filmmakers often make much of the fact that their second features are harder to “get up” than their first, and that’s certainly true of Solrun. After her first feature, AYA, the components never really came together for a second film, though she kept working away at screenplays. Some of these scripts were superb works and maybe they can now be published, or even better produced posthumously. Two stand out in my memory. THE OKINAWAN DAUGHTER was a large-scale piece about an Australian retiree who travels back to Okinawa to look for the Okinawan woman with whom he’d had an affair during the Allied occupation of Japan. It’s a screenplay rich in romance and drama and action, and it would have been a perfect vehicle for Bill Hunter or Tony Barry, but sadly it never found the right producer. On a more personal level, MISSIONARY KID was a reflective autobiographical “essay” film about Solrun’s experience growing up as the child of Christian missionaries in Japan: it was a very moving and beautifully crafted work that was so unconventional that it never really had a chance of finding production funding. Ronin put some money into another documentary project to be called something like IN SEARCH OF MIYOSHI UMEKI, attempting to trace (or reconstruct) the life story of the Japanese actress and singer, Miyoshi Umeki, after she had won an Oscar for her role in SAYONARA and had done a few other films and a stint on TV before disappearing from public view.
Solrun had some loyal supporters at Film Victoria and the Australian Film Commission although the wider Australian film industry often ignored her work. While this caused her much frustration, she never gave up developing brilliantly original and distinctive treatments and screenplays that were works of art in themselves, and all of which remained determinedly idiosyncratic and pure to her own vision. She never sought to sacrifice her artistic ideals or aspirations for simple financial gain. All of the projects that she developed reflected her superb use of language and her rich cultural background in Australian and Japanese literature and history. The characters and stories and ideas that she created were strong and hauntingly beautiful. Nothing she did was tentative. As a writer she could have easily adapted her screenplays into novels or short stories but she never seemed to want to do that, as though that would mean giving up on them as films.Solrun’s completed works remain a great tribute to her persistence in the face of quite severe odds. Her Hatoma series, which she filmed by herself, with no assistant, and with minimal funding on a remote island in southern Okinawa, were an extraordinary achievement: the films were shot on 16mm without synch sound, over a period of many months, and often under very difficult conditions. They still screen today in Japan.Her film on Judith Wright, AT EDGE, is an experimental work rather than a conventional documentary, with sound that moved deliberately in and out of synch, much to the confusion of librarians who would sometimes ring to say there was a problem with their video or DVD. Regardless, it still circulates quite widely.Her other documentaries have reached wide audiences. GREEN TEA AND CHERRY RIPE on Japanese war brides in Australia, still has enthusiastic viewers and hasn’t dated at all. And the first of her two Korean films, PYONGYANG DIARIES sold well to TV internationally and to the ABC here in Australia.It was fascinating to see her work her way through the production and completion of AYA, another film in which Ronin invested a considerable sum. The final film was very true to the script, and she took confident command of every stage of the process, working closely with producer Denise Patience. I remember especially her enthusiasm for the music (released on a 45rpm disc, still boxed in bulk in the depths of my garage) – both the original compositions by Roger Mason and the 1950s Japanese pop songs which she had found and cleared for the film. The editor of AYA, Stewart Young, remembers Solrun as being well-organised and well-prepared, and that she always knew what she wanted, more so than most first-time directors. That was very much our impression too as her backer and distributor. Her confidence and cultural sophistication made her an excellent teacher and she taught many short courses and gave lectures for AFTRS and other institutions. She often helped filmmakers and artists in other fields find their way in Japan. She certainly helped me a great deal with contacts and to enrich my first deep immersion in Japanese culture. I remember vividly trekking with her into remote mountain villages to Japan to attend traditional festivals which she would film often under very daunting conditions which never seemed to bother her.Personally, she was a loyal and stimulating friend. Many years ago she frequently baby sat my daughters, Harriet and Georgia, and much later took an active interest in what they were doing. We were often given amazing masks to “store” indefinitely because she didn’t have room for them in her little Melbourne flat. As her distributor, she could often be exacting about how she’d like things done, but she was never wrong and never unreasonable. We all admired and respected her work and her professionalism and above all the quality of what she was wanting to do. She was open to all forms of art and always embraced the artistic endeavours of other people and could be very supportive and encouraging to us all as our projects developed. We will miss her keenly.
From Merrilyn Pike: I saw Solrun as the genuine article, in terms of her absolute commitment to following her sense of living for the art, whichever it was she was engaged with, and whatever it cost her. And it cost her a lot, though in the end she has such a fine body of work as a legacy.My feeling of connection with Solrun comes partly from a shared feeling for Japanese culture and aesthetics, with which she was imbued, and I always valued that she could bring such a broad culture, including a deep knowledge of European drama and literature as well as her Japanese background, not only to her art but to her everyday conversation. These conversations were always stimulating, and I am sorry there will not be any more of them.
Solrun was born on 15 August 1943 in Trondheim, Norway to missionary parents who had been in China before the war. She was the only girl and had three brothers. After the war the Hoaas family returned to China, but the revolution in 1949 saw them move to Hong Kong for a year, then to Kobe, Japan, where they lived throughout the ‘50s and part of the ‘60s. The home was a Lutheran church school in the Aotani district of the city. After attending the Norwegian primary school in Shiotaki near Kobe Solrun went to the Canadian Academy, an international school in that city. Upon graduation from its high school she spent a year in the United States, then travelled to Norway where she enrolled at the University of Oslo, majoring in socila anthropolgy. In 1969 she received a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship to do graduate studies at Kyoto University and that is where she met Roger Pulvers. They were married in February 1970 in Kyoto and divorced in 1982.
Karen and I met Solrun and Roger when they arrived in Canberra in the early 70s. They both threw themselves enthusiastically into the local theatre scene, Roger as a writer and director, Solrun as a designer. We knew that they had met and married in Japan, a country where Solrun had also spent much of her childhood and adolescence as the daughter of Christian missionaries.
As it happened Karen and I came back to Melbourne in 1980, the same year that Roger was appointed to a job with the Playbox Theatre. When Solrun arrived she was admitted to the post-graduate course in film production at Swinburne College. We kept in touch. Solrun was a prolific film-maker and one of her films went on at my 1981 Melbourne Film Festival. It was her graduation film for Swinburne In Search of the Japanese, a satiric study of Australian incomprehension of Japanese/Australian relations.
We came back to Canberra in 1985 but we were close friends by this stage and our years in Melbourne saw us sharing each other’s company frequently, especially at Christmas. In one memorable Christmas a boat load of Solrun’s relatives were visiting. Her niece Guro-Marte was doing a part of her medical degree at an Australian hospital and the family descended to join her. All told another ten people or so from Norway joined us around the Christmas table for an especially festive occasion.
Her films, which she continued to make prolifically, by now were being distributed by Andrew Pike’s Canberra company Ronin Films and she had ambitions to make dramatic features. Before that could happen she with Karen as co-producer and some funds from Andrew Pike had got funding from Film Victoria, for an hour long documentary on Japanese war brides. This was to become Green Tea and Cherry Ripe. It was filmed in Melbourne and post-produced in Canberra. For six months or so Solrun lived in Canberra again, the office next to mine in the deepest reaches of the backstage of the Canberra Theatre became an editing suite, the editor Stewart Young lived in our house in Narrabundah (Heights), and the film took shape. Eventually it went out on national TV and I imagine the odd copy is still purchased from the Ronin Films back catalogue. It’s a touching documentary about a group of women that Solrun located and with whom she maintained friendships thereafter
Solrun then got funding for a script she had written for a dramatic feature about a Japanese War bride living in Australia in the 50s. Part of the funds derived from the direct investment in the project by a major Japanese distributor which Solrun negotiated personally. Karen had to decide whether to join the film production or stay with the Electric Shadows Bookshop she had opened. She stayed with the bookshop and Denise Patience came on board as Producer. Aya starred Nicholas Eadie and the Japanese actress Eri Ishida. Regrettably it didn’t click with the Australian public and Solrun never got another chance to do another feature film.
This wasn’t for lack of trying or lack of enthusiasm. She wrote a large number of scripts, many of them dealing with themes involving Australia and Japan, but they were not received sympathetically. Undeterred she continued to travel to Japan and also accepted invitations to visit South Korea. As was Solrun’s wont, she pushed the authorities until she got a visa to North Korea as well and, seizing the moment and using the new digital technology, put together a remarkable little film about her travels. This was Pyongyang Diary one of the first films to show anything of what life is like in this odd and very secretive society. It earned her more than a little money, some festival screenings and an ASIO interview. She followed this film with another documentary about North and South Korean relations, Rushing to Sunshine which also had some international success.
In recent years Solrun had devoted much of her time to studying and practising print making. She was an inveterate student, constantly enrolling in classes to study new technologies, and latterly getting herself very involved in print-making classes. Much of the visual material she used for her prints derived from stills of her own films which she reworked and recoloured into quite remarkable pieces of art. In the last year or so she had been represented in a number of group shows and had solo exhibitions at Gasworks Arts Precinct, the Joshua McClelland Print Room, the Benalla Gallery and the Albion Street Gallery in Sydney.
It’s only a couple of weeks ago that Solrun rang to say that she had been diagnosed with a cancer. There was some hope that it might be operated upon but further tests would determine that. Last Friday she went to hospital for a scan, suffered a heart attack and went into a coma. Only a matter of hours later it was decided that the life support systems should be turned off. It was shockingly sudden.
We are left with extraordinary memories of a wonderful person. Our walls at home are decorated with a number of her prints and they will serve as a constant reminder of the life and work of a great and loyal friend with whom, for the first time in a couple of decades, we wont be sharing Christmas. We will miss her.
Geoff Gardner & Karen Foley
Andrew Pike writes
Filmmakers often make much of the fact that their second features are harder to “get up” than their first, and that’s certainly true of Solrun. After her first feature, AYA, the components never really came together for a second film, though she kept working away at screenplays. Some of these scripts were superb works and maybe they can now be published, or even better produced posthumously. Two stand out in my memory. THE OKINAWAN DAUGHTER was a large-scale piece about an Australian retiree who travels back to Okinawa to look for the Okinawan woman with whom he’d had an affair during the Allied occupation of Japan. It’s a screenplay rich in romance and drama and action, and it would have been a perfect vehicle for Bill Hunter or Tony Barry, but sadly it never found the right producer. On a more personal level, MISSIONARY KID was a reflective autobiographical “essay” film about Solrun’s experience growing up as the child of Christian missionaries in Japan: it was a very moving and beautifully crafted work that was so unconventional that it never really had a chance of finding production funding. Ronin put some money into another documentary project to be called something like IN SEARCH OF MIYOSHI UMEKI, attempting to trace (or reconstruct) the life story of the Japanese actress and singer, Miyoshi Umeki, after she had won an Oscar for her role in SAYONARA and had done a few other films and a stint on TV before disappearing from public view.
Solrun had some loyal supporters at Film Victoria and the Australian Film Commission although the wider Australian film industry often ignored her work. While this caused her much frustration, she never gave up developing brilliantly original and distinctive treatments and screenplays that were works of art in themselves, and all of which remained determinedly idiosyncratic and pure to her own vision. She never sought to sacrifice her artistic ideals or aspirations for simple financial gain. All of the projects that she developed reflected her superb use of language and her rich cultural background in Australian and Japanese literature and history. The characters and stories and ideas that she created were strong and hauntingly beautiful. Nothing she did was tentative. As a writer she could have easily adapted her screenplays into novels or short stories but she never seemed to want to do that, as though that would mean giving up on them as films.Solrun’s completed works remain a great tribute to her persistence in the face of quite severe odds. Her Hatoma series, which she filmed by herself, with no assistant, and with minimal funding on a remote island in southern Okinawa, were an extraordinary achievement: the films were shot on 16mm without synch sound, over a period of many months, and often under very difficult conditions. They still screen today in Japan.Her film on Judith Wright, AT EDGE, is an experimental work rather than a conventional documentary, with sound that moved deliberately in and out of synch, much to the confusion of librarians who would sometimes ring to say there was a problem with their video or DVD. Regardless, it still circulates quite widely.Her other documentaries have reached wide audiences. GREEN TEA AND CHERRY RIPE on Japanese war brides in Australia, still has enthusiastic viewers and hasn’t dated at all. And the first of her two Korean films, PYONGYANG DIARIES sold well to TV internationally and to the ABC here in Australia.It was fascinating to see her work her way through the production and completion of AYA, another film in which Ronin invested a considerable sum. The final film was very true to the script, and she took confident command of every stage of the process, working closely with producer Denise Patience. I remember especially her enthusiasm for the music (released on a 45rpm disc, still boxed in bulk in the depths of my garage) – both the original compositions by Roger Mason and the 1950s Japanese pop songs which she had found and cleared for the film. The editor of AYA, Stewart Young, remembers Solrun as being well-organised and well-prepared, and that she always knew what she wanted, more so than most first-time directors. That was very much our impression too as her backer and distributor. Her confidence and cultural sophistication made her an excellent teacher and she taught many short courses and gave lectures for AFTRS and other institutions. She often helped filmmakers and artists in other fields find their way in Japan. She certainly helped me a great deal with contacts and to enrich my first deep immersion in Japanese culture. I remember vividly trekking with her into remote mountain villages to Japan to attend traditional festivals which she would film often under very daunting conditions which never seemed to bother her.Personally, she was a loyal and stimulating friend. Many years ago she frequently baby sat my daughters, Harriet and Georgia, and much later took an active interest in what they were doing. We were often given amazing masks to “store” indefinitely because she didn’t have room for them in her little Melbourne flat. As her distributor, she could often be exacting about how she’d like things done, but she was never wrong and never unreasonable. We all admired and respected her work and her professionalism and above all the quality of what she was wanting to do. She was open to all forms of art and always embraced the artistic endeavours of other people and could be very supportive and encouraging to us all as our projects developed. We will miss her keenly.
From Merrilyn Pike: I saw Solrun as the genuine article, in terms of her absolute commitment to following her sense of living for the art, whichever it was she was engaged with, and whatever it cost her. And it cost her a lot, though in the end she has such a fine body of work as a legacy.My feeling of connection with Solrun comes partly from a shared feeling for Japanese culture and aesthetics, with which she was imbued, and I always valued that she could bring such a broad culture, including a deep knowledge of European drama and literature as well as her Japanese background, not only to her art but to her everyday conversation. These conversations were always stimulating, and I am sorry there will not be any more of them.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Delayed Reactions
When I recently left for Vancouver I had a short list of books to buy that haven’t been published or distributed here. (We have much to thank the British publishing cartel that runs things here.) They included four of Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder novels, a highly praised novel based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s love life, “Loving Frank” by Nancy Horan and the new George Pelecanos, ‘The Turnaround’. I headed into the excellent Chapters bookshop in downtown Vancouver and gathered them all up, and more, including an unnoticed Elmore Leonard and a wonderful surprise, a book titled “The Easiest Thing in the World’, the unpublished fiction of the late George V Higgins.
Higgins essentially started a new stream of American crime fiction some forty years or so ago with “The Friends of Eddie Coyle’. He wrote books about his local crime milieu, mixing in the elements of local politics, corrupt churches, even more corrupt government officials, and focussing especially on the low life. His narratives moved along via their characters’ speech and his ear for dialogue and criminal argot was marvellous. His criminals were mostly a newly described form of the urban poor, living in cheap housing, making ends meet with cheap jobs, never knowing when the law would catch them. They did things like supplied guns or set buildings on fire or manhandled recalcitrants. None of it was high-paying. Donald Westlake’s urban gang, was a later comic variation on this form of criminal behaviour. (The gang leader Dortmunder’s wife worked a day job in a supermarket and stole stuff so that the couple could eat.) Higgins’s (and Westlake’s) criminals probably would have made more money, and had less aggravation, if they had worked a steady job. Higgins was largely devoid of humour if not of irony but his influence now spreads far and wide, well into mainstream fiction. His successors write gritty fiction set in the regions outside New York and LA, often located in the criminal heartlands where police don’t go and murders, robberies and drug trafficking are the order of the day.
George Pelecanos is one of the most notable of Higgins successors. He writes razor sharp stories of Washington DC low life and the police who battle to keep a modicum of control and laces his narratives with an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock music. No scene takes place where you don’t get a sentence telling you what’s playing on the car radio or drifting out from an open window. On the cover of The Turnaround there is a photo of the author with the inscription that he is producer and writer for The Wire. Now I had heard of this US TV series but, like The Sopranos and The West Wing, haven’t seen a single episode. Watching these things on commercial TV is out of my bailiwick. The pain of 17 minutes of ads per episode is beyond torture. But I’ve frequently been urged by Rod Bishop and Bob Gardini and others to give in and buy or rent the DVDs.
But a day after finishing Pelecanos splendid new book, a dark tale of youthful stupidity that crosses the racial divide and twists around to eventual redemption, there at JB Hi-Fi are the first four seasons of The Wire for $19.98 each. “Boy are these selling” says the singleted and ear, nose and lip pierced youth behind the counter and so I start. Needless to say the story is that I am a now an officially registered addict. The first series takes the old Howard Hawks/Rio Bravo trope of gathering together misfits, drunks and social incompetents into a crack team to take on the drug lords of Baltimore. Their individual and eccentric skills complement each other perfectly of course, after the usual comic misunderstandings. But the story, as in the best of American crime fiction, gets down into the back blocks where the police are barely competent, sexist, prejudiced, venal and mostly just potter along. They are trying to maintain order in a city where there is a gun murder most days of the week.
The second series is more ambitious, a look at Baltimore’s ailing port and docks. The longshoremen’s union is down to a hundred or so members because the work has disappeared. The union leader, a good/bad guy has hatched a cunning plan to get more state investment but needs money to grease the palms of politicians who will make the decision. He is pursued relentlessly by a senior police (as they call themselves) because he got in first to donate a window to the local Polish Catholic Church. The union leader funds his campaign by facilitating large scale theft and smuggling on the docks but things go wrong when a container full of Russian whores being smuggled in is opened to reveal 13 dead bodies. The complex interaction of black and white politics, the ever present drug scene, prison and street milieus is, well, even more addictive.
George Pelecanos wrote the scripts of a couple of episodes in the first two series but in the third series he has been promoted to producer and you assume it was he who brought in some additional celebrity talent to write some of the episodes. Richard Price and Dennis Lehane among others get credits for an episode each. So, I’m half way through series three. It’s working its magic all over and the box with series four is awaiting. All this for $19.98 each for 12 hours or so of prime viewing per carton. Heavenly really.
Higgins essentially started a new stream of American crime fiction some forty years or so ago with “The Friends of Eddie Coyle’. He wrote books about his local crime milieu, mixing in the elements of local politics, corrupt churches, even more corrupt government officials, and focussing especially on the low life. His narratives moved along via their characters’ speech and his ear for dialogue and criminal argot was marvellous. His criminals were mostly a newly described form of the urban poor, living in cheap housing, making ends meet with cheap jobs, never knowing when the law would catch them. They did things like supplied guns or set buildings on fire or manhandled recalcitrants. None of it was high-paying. Donald Westlake’s urban gang, was a later comic variation on this form of criminal behaviour. (The gang leader Dortmunder’s wife worked a day job in a supermarket and stole stuff so that the couple could eat.) Higgins’s (and Westlake’s) criminals probably would have made more money, and had less aggravation, if they had worked a steady job. Higgins was largely devoid of humour if not of irony but his influence now spreads far and wide, well into mainstream fiction. His successors write gritty fiction set in the regions outside New York and LA, often located in the criminal heartlands where police don’t go and murders, robberies and drug trafficking are the order of the day.
George Pelecanos is one of the most notable of Higgins successors. He writes razor sharp stories of Washington DC low life and the police who battle to keep a modicum of control and laces his narratives with an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock music. No scene takes place where you don’t get a sentence telling you what’s playing on the car radio or drifting out from an open window. On the cover of The Turnaround there is a photo of the author with the inscription that he is producer and writer for The Wire. Now I had heard of this US TV series but, like The Sopranos and The West Wing, haven’t seen a single episode. Watching these things on commercial TV is out of my bailiwick. The pain of 17 minutes of ads per episode is beyond torture. But I’ve frequently been urged by Rod Bishop and Bob Gardini and others to give in and buy or rent the DVDs.
But a day after finishing Pelecanos splendid new book, a dark tale of youthful stupidity that crosses the racial divide and twists around to eventual redemption, there at JB Hi-Fi are the first four seasons of The Wire for $19.98 each. “Boy are these selling” says the singleted and ear, nose and lip pierced youth behind the counter and so I start. Needless to say the story is that I am a now an officially registered addict. The first series takes the old Howard Hawks/Rio Bravo trope of gathering together misfits, drunks and social incompetents into a crack team to take on the drug lords of Baltimore. Their individual and eccentric skills complement each other perfectly of course, after the usual comic misunderstandings. But the story, as in the best of American crime fiction, gets down into the back blocks where the police are barely competent, sexist, prejudiced, venal and mostly just potter along. They are trying to maintain order in a city where there is a gun murder most days of the week.
The second series is more ambitious, a look at Baltimore’s ailing port and docks. The longshoremen’s union is down to a hundred or so members because the work has disappeared. The union leader, a good/bad guy has hatched a cunning plan to get more state investment but needs money to grease the palms of politicians who will make the decision. He is pursued relentlessly by a senior police (as they call themselves) because he got in first to donate a window to the local Polish Catholic Church. The union leader funds his campaign by facilitating large scale theft and smuggling on the docks but things go wrong when a container full of Russian whores being smuggled in is opened to reveal 13 dead bodies. The complex interaction of black and white politics, the ever present drug scene, prison and street milieus is, well, even more addictive.
George Pelecanos wrote the scripts of a couple of episodes in the first two series but in the third series he has been promoted to producer and you assume it was he who brought in some additional celebrity talent to write some of the episodes. Richard Price and Dennis Lehane among others get credits for an episode each. So, I’m half way through series three. It’s working its magic all over and the box with series four is awaiting. All this for $19.98 each for 12 hours or so of prime viewing per carton. Heavenly really.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Revolution in the air
Who can tell a moment when the human heart is moved. In Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer young ballet student Li Cunxin, enduring the agonies of classical ballet training during China’s years of Cultural Revolution, watches an ‘illegal’ videotape of Mikhail Baryshnikov, gently soaring the air in a series of solo steps and leaps so simple, graceful and beautiful that he, and we, are in emotionally wrought awe.
The dynamic trajectory of the film changes instantly. Li can no longer be just a dancer seeking his 'freedom'. He has to be a great dancer. He has to produce a similar awe as that produced by Baryshnikov all those years ago in a dorm at ballet school.
To Beresford’s credit, as we start to see more of Li as a mature dancer stunning American audiences in his adopted country, the director does something unusual. At least these days it's unusual. He lets us see it. The camera placement for the dance sequences is absolutely precise, classical one might say. Beresford’s remark that before embarking on filming he went back and watched a host of Fred Astaire pictures is something we ought to take seriously. Maybe he saw Yolanda and the Thief or The Bandwagon or Funny Face or Silk Stockings, all by acknowledged Hollywood masters with the luxury of a big studio support and budgets to match.
Whatever the inspiration, the film, almost suddenly, moves up a few notches. We become more intensely involved with the characters and their dilemmas. But mostly we want to see more of Li Cunxin’s dancing and we are grateful that Beresford decided to show as much as he did. By the end, I was rather hoping that we would see, in the fashion of some of the great Metro masterpieces, the whole of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, rather than just some edited highlights. Like Oliver Twist, we wanted more. Sadly not to be.
For a director who has routinely coarsened his subject matter, and it was quite an achievement to coarsen the already vulgar Barry McKenzie comic strip as well as those two David Williamson adaptations, frequently encouraged over-ripe acting turns and only ever seemed to half edit his films, I have to say I was astonished at how good and emotionally satisfying Mao’s Last Dancer was. The second half in particular is probably as good as anything Beresford has done before. Who would have thunk it.
So, having got this far why not go further and say how much such filming differs from others once on offer or shortly to be on offer. It serves as a sharp reminder of just how easy it is to ignore the classical principles of telling a story with music or dance on film. I fear that the descent has been largely caused by those who make video clips for MTV, a source of reference that needs to be deeply discouraged. Baz Luhrman’s photography and editing on Moulin Rouge was so deeply inefficient in showing the actual dance, as opposed to vague colour and movement scenes was the worst recent example.
The forthcoming Bran Nue Dae, which premiered recently at the Melbourne International Film Festival follows another tack and seems to have decided early on in the film-making process to seek to appropriate the look of happy and enthusiastic amateurism that made the stage original such a heart-warming and unique piece of theatre. The producer of the film was even so bold as to say, and I paraphrase from memory, that nobody involved in the movie knew how to make a musical and they just made it up as they went along. The happy enthusiasm doesn’t stand up to the rigorous scrutiny of the camera and the musical and dance sequences, the raison d’etre of the piece, are simply one mess after another. That’s a pity.
The dynamic trajectory of the film changes instantly. Li can no longer be just a dancer seeking his 'freedom'. He has to be a great dancer. He has to produce a similar awe as that produced by Baryshnikov all those years ago in a dorm at ballet school.
To Beresford’s credit, as we start to see more of Li as a mature dancer stunning American audiences in his adopted country, the director does something unusual. At least these days it's unusual. He lets us see it. The camera placement for the dance sequences is absolutely precise, classical one might say. Beresford’s remark that before embarking on filming he went back and watched a host of Fred Astaire pictures is something we ought to take seriously. Maybe he saw Yolanda and the Thief or The Bandwagon or Funny Face or Silk Stockings, all by acknowledged Hollywood masters with the luxury of a big studio support and budgets to match.
Whatever the inspiration, the film, almost suddenly, moves up a few notches. We become more intensely involved with the characters and their dilemmas. But mostly we want to see more of Li Cunxin’s dancing and we are grateful that Beresford decided to show as much as he did. By the end, I was rather hoping that we would see, in the fashion of some of the great Metro masterpieces, the whole of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, rather than just some edited highlights. Like Oliver Twist, we wanted more. Sadly not to be.
For a director who has routinely coarsened his subject matter, and it was quite an achievement to coarsen the already vulgar Barry McKenzie comic strip as well as those two David Williamson adaptations, frequently encouraged over-ripe acting turns and only ever seemed to half edit his films, I have to say I was astonished at how good and emotionally satisfying Mao’s Last Dancer was. The second half in particular is probably as good as anything Beresford has done before. Who would have thunk it.
So, having got this far why not go further and say how much such filming differs from others once on offer or shortly to be on offer. It serves as a sharp reminder of just how easy it is to ignore the classical principles of telling a story with music or dance on film. I fear that the descent has been largely caused by those who make video clips for MTV, a source of reference that needs to be deeply discouraged. Baz Luhrman’s photography and editing on Moulin Rouge was so deeply inefficient in showing the actual dance, as opposed to vague colour and movement scenes was the worst recent example.
The forthcoming Bran Nue Dae, which premiered recently at the Melbourne International Film Festival follows another tack and seems to have decided early on in the film-making process to seek to appropriate the look of happy and enthusiastic amateurism that made the stage original such a heart-warming and unique piece of theatre. The producer of the film was even so bold as to say, and I paraphrase from memory, that nobody involved in the movie knew how to make a musical and they just made it up as they went along. The happy enthusiasm doesn’t stand up to the rigorous scrutiny of the camera and the musical and dance sequences, the raison d’etre of the piece, are simply one mess after another. That’s a pity.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Direct Speech
A long, long time ago, back in the sixties and into the seventies, the British director Peter Watkins established a certain reputation for himself with his first film, made for TV, Culloden (1964). Thereafter he made The War Game for the BBC. The films were made as if they were newsreels of the time. An unseen interviewer observed momentous events and directly questioned participants in the Battle of Culloden and survivors of a nuclear explosion. They became Watkins themes, anti-militarism, anti-state authority and anti-nuclear politics and his technique in telling his stories remained rather uniquely his for some time at least.
Watkins was seeking a new immediacy, a direct confrontation, head to head, face to face, between people on the screen and people in the audience. He wanted the barrier of the theatre's wall to be broken down. It was very effective and shocking to some. The BBC refused to show The War Game on TV but allowed it to be screened in theatres. It was feared that people might confuse it with the real thing if they tuned in without any foreknowledge of what the director was up to. Memories of Orson Welles famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast were invoked.
Watkins went on to apply his technique to other less directly confronting subjects, the mystery of pop idolatry and its use by the authorities to keep the population quiet in Privilege and the life of the Norwegian painter in Edward Munch. The methods in my view wore out their welcome and seemed affected, predictable and precious by the mid seventies, which was about the time that Watkins stopped finding money for his work and went into other fields. Since then I've seen two of his works, a personally presented slideshow about nuclear weapons installations in Europe full of forebodings about nuclear war and a long piece done for TV, recorded digitally in a factory with litle pretence at realistic settings, about the Paris Commune which BIFF showed some years ago. The latter again uses the technique of actors speaking directly to camera as if being interviewed by an unseen reporter.
By now the technique is no longer, may never have been, something unique to Watkins work. It's been deployed by low-budget film-makers everywhere. The employment is not even frequently used for political analysis or highly ambitious subject matter. Australian films as diverse as the pooh joke movie Kenny and the low budget horror story Lake Mungo give it nods. But it seems to be back most notably and for greatest effect in Neill Blonenkamp's District 9, a science- fiction movie filled with spaceships and aliens set in a state battling to contain citizen hysteria at the invasion of the Earth by a bunch of downtrodden and rather bedraggled refugees.
The refugees, a million or so of them cowering in a junked and broken down spacecraft hovering over Johannesburg, are allowed entry under strict conditions and promptly tossed into a Soweto like camp where they are allowed to eke out livings, scavenge for food, become increasingly lawless, accumulate illegal weapons and involve themselves with shady criminals exploiting their status and breed in massive numbers. They are repulsive in every sense to those seeking a quiet well-ordered existence and repulsive as well in their looks. They are dubbed prawns and they move with astonishing speed and strength but show little other signs of wishing to bring down the established order.
But the established order, fearing them, wants them moved to safer conditions where a better eye can be kept on them and thus the entry is paved for Wykus van der Merwe, a venerable South African name, once the surname of the country's cricket captain among other achievements. Wykus being where he is is the result of nepotism but the slow thinking dill throws himself into the task with huge energy and when inevitably betrayed by politicians with surprising resilience. He first knows what he wants to do - read the prawns their rights, confiscate their weapons and move them to a concentration camp. I need say no more, the parallels with South African politics, the plight of refugees everywhere, state indifference, fear and hatred of strangers come bursting out. When he discovers what it feels like to become such a person he rises up in protest.
District 9 is the best commercial entertainment of the year thus far and it was made by a bunch of unknown South Africans and Peter Jackson and his intrepid CGI masters at Wing Nut Productions in New Zealand. Its galling really that Jackson can do this but it proves once again that an ounce of real talent is much better than a ton of government intervention, script conferences, mentoring, fresh drafts, and layers of bureaucracy. The money follows Jackson because he has skills and visions that nobody else has. (I wish he hadn't bothered to apply those skills to Tolkien, but that's another story.)
But I cant help wondering just how much the way of telling the story in District 9 owes just a bit to the techniique and political fervour of the long ago and now sadly overlooked Peter Watkins and the lonely course he pursued around the world seeking to present a new form of political discourse about the threat of the state.
Watkins was seeking a new immediacy, a direct confrontation, head to head, face to face, between people on the screen and people in the audience. He wanted the barrier of the theatre's wall to be broken down. It was very effective and shocking to some. The BBC refused to show The War Game on TV but allowed it to be screened in theatres. It was feared that people might confuse it with the real thing if they tuned in without any foreknowledge of what the director was up to. Memories of Orson Welles famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast were invoked.
Watkins went on to apply his technique to other less directly confronting subjects, the mystery of pop idolatry and its use by the authorities to keep the population quiet in Privilege and the life of the Norwegian painter in Edward Munch. The methods in my view wore out their welcome and seemed affected, predictable and precious by the mid seventies, which was about the time that Watkins stopped finding money for his work and went into other fields. Since then I've seen two of his works, a personally presented slideshow about nuclear weapons installations in Europe full of forebodings about nuclear war and a long piece done for TV, recorded digitally in a factory with litle pretence at realistic settings, about the Paris Commune which BIFF showed some years ago. The latter again uses the technique of actors speaking directly to camera as if being interviewed by an unseen reporter.
By now the technique is no longer, may never have been, something unique to Watkins work. It's been deployed by low-budget film-makers everywhere. The employment is not even frequently used for political analysis or highly ambitious subject matter. Australian films as diverse as the pooh joke movie Kenny and the low budget horror story Lake Mungo give it nods. But it seems to be back most notably and for greatest effect in Neill Blonenkamp's District 9, a science- fiction movie filled with spaceships and aliens set in a state battling to contain citizen hysteria at the invasion of the Earth by a bunch of downtrodden and rather bedraggled refugees.
The refugees, a million or so of them cowering in a junked and broken down spacecraft hovering over Johannesburg, are allowed entry under strict conditions and promptly tossed into a Soweto like camp where they are allowed to eke out livings, scavenge for food, become increasingly lawless, accumulate illegal weapons and involve themselves with shady criminals exploiting their status and breed in massive numbers. They are repulsive in every sense to those seeking a quiet well-ordered existence and repulsive as well in their looks. They are dubbed prawns and they move with astonishing speed and strength but show little other signs of wishing to bring down the established order.
But the established order, fearing them, wants them moved to safer conditions where a better eye can be kept on them and thus the entry is paved for Wykus van der Merwe, a venerable South African name, once the surname of the country's cricket captain among other achievements. Wykus being where he is is the result of nepotism but the slow thinking dill throws himself into the task with huge energy and when inevitably betrayed by politicians with surprising resilience. He first knows what he wants to do - read the prawns their rights, confiscate their weapons and move them to a concentration camp. I need say no more, the parallels with South African politics, the plight of refugees everywhere, state indifference, fear and hatred of strangers come bursting out. When he discovers what it feels like to become such a person he rises up in protest.
District 9 is the best commercial entertainment of the year thus far and it was made by a bunch of unknown South Africans and Peter Jackson and his intrepid CGI masters at Wing Nut Productions in New Zealand. Its galling really that Jackson can do this but it proves once again that an ounce of real talent is much better than a ton of government intervention, script conferences, mentoring, fresh drafts, and layers of bureaucracy. The money follows Jackson because he has skills and visions that nobody else has. (I wish he hadn't bothered to apply those skills to Tolkien, but that's another story.)
But I cant help wondering just how much the way of telling the story in District 9 owes just a bit to the techniique and political fervour of the long ago and now sadly overlooked Peter Watkins and the lonely course he pursued around the world seeking to present a new form of political discourse about the threat of the state.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Donald Westlake
Someone emailed about my earlier blog on Westlake that was prompted by a viewing of the Costa-Gavras film The Axe. I mentioned that in one very funny Westlake gave over some time to spoofing and ridiculing Australian tabloid journalists. The book was Trust Me on This (1988)and it spawned a sequel Baby Would I Lie (1994) which had the added joy of spoofing and ridiculing the country and western music scene. The latter had the great joke about Elvis Presley suddenly materialising in a box at a theatre and saying he had to dash because he had just spotted Glenn Miller at a local supermarket!
Thursday, June 18, 2009
The Tremor of Forgery
Looking back I think I may have first become fascinated with forgery as a pre-teenager reading those novels and memoirs of derring do in World War 2. Books like The Great Escape, The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story and so on were filled with information about forged passports and identity papers which stood up to scrutiny and caused the Germans to be outwitted by supersmart Brits, Aussies and Yanks so unfairly incarcerated. Later spy fiction made a contribution and then in 1967 or ‘68 there was the line uttered by Orson Welles in Michael Winner’s I’ll Never Forget Whats ‘is name when he says of a painting something like: “It’s one of sixteen Vermeers in the world, thirty three of which are in America”. Later on, the most thrilling ongoing character in modern literature, Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, introduced us to his skills at forgery in the first book of the series and went on to have a continuing relationship with the painter Derwatt, whose paintings he sold at high prices on the market, notwithstanding suspicions they were forged. Derwatt was supposed to have died you see, but in fact, in a cunning career move, he had faked his death in order to drive up his prices and was happily alive and out of harm’s way in New York, gleefully painting previously unknown Derwatts which Tom was slipping into the market at premium prices. I hope you got that. Wim Wenders made a movie of the first Ripley/Derwatt story, one of his best, called The American Friend. Nicholas Ray, by then sick, old and crotchety played Derwatt most memorably
I once met Highsmith and she told me how she loved writing about Ripley because she could let him get away with just about anything including murder. Her readers wanted it that way and she was happy to oblige. It satisfied a lot of her own darker impulses to be able to write about a character with so many unredeeming features, make him attractive and allow him to manipulate other people’s propensities towards illegality when tested.
I also once met the film-maker Errol Morris. It was early in his career when he had brought his second film Vernon, Florida to the 1981 London Film Festival. He was a nice guy and he sent his film out to Australia the next year. After that he gradually made for himself a very significant reputation as a documentarist able to extract truth from situations and people where it’s not readily apparent or always on offer. Thus my attention was caught recently noticing on the New York Times website that Errol Morris had posted a series of pieces on the subject of a forger on a blog under the series heading Bamboozling Us. Heading straight for it as fast as the nation’s intolerably slow download speeds will allow, I read a fascintating account of the life and career of one Han van Meegeren and his forging of a Vermeer that he sold to Herman Goring and which for some time was regarded by leading art experts as authentic.
I suspect Errol wanted, or maybe still wants, to turn this into a movie, though I can see how the subject would lack the visual punch that are a feature of the director’s work. None of the active participants are alive and Goring even blew up his mansion where the painting was displayed to stop the Russians getting their hands on his legacy. The big Nazi gave the painting to a servant near the end of the war suggesting she could live comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of her life. She handed it in. It’s a fascinating story with a lot of resonating moments for those who follow a thread that in my case at least runs from Colditz to Welles (himself fascinated by forgery and whose F for Fake studies another high ego practitioner of the art, Elmyr de Hory) to Highsmith, Ripley, Rene Clement, Alain Delon, Wim Wenders, Denis Hopper, Bruno Ganz, Nicholas Ray, then much later the book and the film of The Girl with the Pearl Earring, and all the way through to Errol Morris (ignoring if possible Liliana Cavani’s godawful remake of the Highsmith novel with John Malkovich, hopelessly miscast once again, as Ripley). Morris indeed takes it full circle as his interest is in a forger from the Nazi era who was called to account for activities at the end of WW2. Van Meegeren faked eleven Vermeers including the one he sold to Goring. Morris’s interest is not just in how the forger and his forgery work but also on whether this forger was a Nazi himself and thus used his skills to ingratiate.himself into the Nazi inner sanctums. These and a whole host of other big and small ideas are explored in the seven part series that Morris posted here at
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/category/bamboozling-ourselves/
It has obviously drawn a lot of interest as Errol’s most recent post notes that there have been more than seven hundred responses published since it started to appear. The latest post this week at
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/more-bamboozling/?th&emc=th
contains additional information so the series may not yet be over. For myself, the fascination remains lingering but awful for in this age of Bernie Madoff I still seem to at least half-admire people with skills sufficient to bamboozle the wealthy into believing anything you tell them or sell them.
I once met Highsmith and she told me how she loved writing about Ripley because she could let him get away with just about anything including murder. Her readers wanted it that way and she was happy to oblige. It satisfied a lot of her own darker impulses to be able to write about a character with so many unredeeming features, make him attractive and allow him to manipulate other people’s propensities towards illegality when tested.
I also once met the film-maker Errol Morris. It was early in his career when he had brought his second film Vernon, Florida to the 1981 London Film Festival. He was a nice guy and he sent his film out to Australia the next year. After that he gradually made for himself a very significant reputation as a documentarist able to extract truth from situations and people where it’s not readily apparent or always on offer. Thus my attention was caught recently noticing on the New York Times website that Errol Morris had posted a series of pieces on the subject of a forger on a blog under the series heading Bamboozling Us. Heading straight for it as fast as the nation’s intolerably slow download speeds will allow, I read a fascintating account of the life and career of one Han van Meegeren and his forging of a Vermeer that he sold to Herman Goring and which for some time was regarded by leading art experts as authentic.
I suspect Errol wanted, or maybe still wants, to turn this into a movie, though I can see how the subject would lack the visual punch that are a feature of the director’s work. None of the active participants are alive and Goring even blew up his mansion where the painting was displayed to stop the Russians getting their hands on his legacy. The big Nazi gave the painting to a servant near the end of the war suggesting she could live comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of her life. She handed it in. It’s a fascinating story with a lot of resonating moments for those who follow a thread that in my case at least runs from Colditz to Welles (himself fascinated by forgery and whose F for Fake studies another high ego practitioner of the art, Elmyr de Hory) to Highsmith, Ripley, Rene Clement, Alain Delon, Wim Wenders, Denis Hopper, Bruno Ganz, Nicholas Ray, then much later the book and the film of The Girl with the Pearl Earring, and all the way through to Errol Morris (ignoring if possible Liliana Cavani’s godawful remake of the Highsmith novel with John Malkovich, hopelessly miscast once again, as Ripley). Morris indeed takes it full circle as his interest is in a forger from the Nazi era who was called to account for activities at the end of WW2. Van Meegeren faked eleven Vermeers including the one he sold to Goring. Morris’s interest is not just in how the forger and his forgery work but also on whether this forger was a Nazi himself and thus used his skills to ingratiate.himself into the Nazi inner sanctums. These and a whole host of other big and small ideas are explored in the seven part series that Morris posted here at
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/category/bamboozling-ourselves/
It has obviously drawn a lot of interest as Errol’s most recent post notes that there have been more than seven hundred responses published since it started to appear. The latest post this week at
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/more-bamboozling/?th&emc=th
contains additional information so the series may not yet be over. For myself, the fascination remains lingering but awful for in this age of Bernie Madoff I still seem to at least half-admire people with skills sufficient to bamboozle the wealthy into believing anything you tell them or sell them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)