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.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
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!
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