Selling Out

It would be nice to think that all the attention that SBS is getting is only its just desserts for its wholesale introduction of crassness into a service that was once a stand out cultural beacon in the wasteland of free to air television. There was once nothing like it in the world. During those golden decades when David Stratton was presenting both new films of the highest quality and, in parallel, an unrivalled collection drawn from the greatest films of the past, the station represented something unique and precious. It owned soccer and cycling, its documentaries were as the program called them “Cutting Edge”, it gave us international news reporting each night of the highest order and set new standards for subtitling (see below). Then the management let both the key people and the high standards slip away. They thought they knew best but it’s plain to see of course they really have very little idea. I didn’t mind the channel showing commercials between programs but clearly the advertisers did and the old thin edge of the wedge finally destroyed the channel’s credibility for those of us who welcomed its presentation of the world's best movies.

It has taken a simple dummy spit from a newsreader (who apparently from the news reports alleges breach of contract because she wasn’t given enough prominence or wasn’t treated with sufficient gravitas) to start the process which just may bring the whole edifice down around the shambling buffoons now running the place. They claim success by having raising the ratings from an average of 6% to 7.5%. (one article suggested that they had raised the ratings by 25%, an assertion of innumeracy if nothing else.) This group includes Board Members like former Packer operative Gerald Stone and former Howard acolyte Christopher Pearson. Pearson once assured the readers of his column in a Murdoch rag that SBS would not be placing ads in the middle of movies. I haven’t seen, nor had reported to me, any recantation so maybe he still believes that’s the case.

Now SBS is on the back foot. Its newsreader is having meetings with senior management about exit or, most unlikely, re-entry arrangements and its senior management is drawing headlines like “Mary Kostakidis’ walkout highlights how SBS has been hijacked by deluded management” (SMH, 25/26 August). An ominous note from contrarian Paul Sheehan headed “SBS an indulgence we don’t need” (SMH 27 August) should give us all the shivers. What hope is there for it to revert to its more modest ambitions and its unique programming? Probably not much but there might just be a small moment at hand for someone in the political class to rise up and say enough is enough, that management and the governing board have failed and that they all need to move on and take their failure with them.

I mentioned above the work that David Stratton did in presenting the riches of the world’s film heritage for over twenty years. The program was generally called Cinema Classics and I estimate that David screened more than a thousand films in that time. It was a program replete with everything from curiosities like the Mexican Bunuels (just now re-screened at BIFF) to virtually every film made by Akira Kurosawa. If you made a copy of each you would have a library of unsurpassed breadth and quality. Of course we all forgot the films were on and forgot to set the recorder and went out drinking or whatever. But you have the right to expect that SBS would have retained the unique subtitles that it created for each of these works. (Often those subtitles were the first ever to be done of some films. I’m told there are copies of these films circulating, illegally, in quality US video rental stores. Piracy is a crime but cinephilia trucks no such restrictions.) But has SBS preserved this unique material or have its managers, amongst all the other mayhem they've committed, let this resource be lost or destroyed? It’s a question that needs an answer by somebody competent to examine the channel’s activities in recent years.

Action Men

The multiplexes have suddenly delivered a small set of films about men in action that provide some interesting turns. Kevin Costner, Anthony Hopkins, Bruce Willis and Tommy Turgoose all give us some variations on men being violent. Costner's Mr Brooks has so much plot and so many characters it takes an eternity to tell its tale of a nice well-mannered serial killer whose alter ego is the real villain. Thus Costner can be a nice guy, mostly, and its left to William Hurt sitting in the back seat to say, or put in front of us, all those nasty guilt ridden things that schizophrenic serial killers may or may not endure. The conception is cute and if it had been made back in the glory days of RKO it may have been genuinely disturning because Jacques Tourneur and De Witt Bodeen may have worked out a way to keep us guessing as to whether Mr Brook's shadowy accomplice is real or imagined. Much may have been made of the alter ego's impotence perhaps. It has only one moment that one might call Hitchcockian when Costner agaonises as to whether he should save his daughter from prison by devising a murder that will get her out of the suspicions of the police. It doesn't last long. Fracture has a similar Hitchcockian moment, better done and with a bit of oomph when Ryan Gosling as the young lawyer tryinjg to nail ultra smart murderer Anthony Hopkins has to decide whether to abandon his integrity and 'frame' the man we clearly know committed the murder for the murder. It doesn't last that long but the film's plot at least has you wondering how the moral dilemma is going to be resolved and what twists and turns it will take to do so. Otherwise Fracture is just a detective story with tricks aplenty, not dissimilar to a John Grisham story. It is entirely devoid of any sensibility that might suggest that it inhabits anything other than a fairy tale world of good guys and bad guys and princesses who's hand is to be won or rejected.

The difference between both of these films and a genuine crime story is the palpable difference where you get involved in the downj and dirty details of the locales and all the people. Admittedly lawyer's offices aren't conducive to such details. To put it bluntly these two are modern film's equivalents of Agatha Christie and what we, at least I, really desire is the modern film equivalent of Carl Hiaasen or George P Pelecanos. Unfortunately the cinema's one attempt to do Hiaasen, Striptease, was a travesty and as far as I know nobody has even attempted to do Pelecanos. I can see why. The details of their stories, the backgrounds, the encyclopaedic knowledge of locale and local custom are too hard to render in a movie where the main action involves getting you from point A to point AA quickly and with a modicum of violence on the way.

That's why the Die Hard franchise is so effective. It does what it does without any great pretension and is far more inventive about the details of its background than the other films. Of course it's all invented and you wonder how on earth a villain could finance the elaborate scheme devised to destroy America's computer networks. Actually you only wonder that afterwards because while it's happening you get a mountain of often ugly CGI effects showing much near incendiary and visceral violence. The Asian bad girl is a terrific villainess and the kung fu kicking she gives Bruce Willis is very good indeed. You actually dont have much sympathy for him at all while it's happening.

And Tommy Turgoose. Well he operates as a sort of mascot to a group of skinheads in the North of England. The group divides into two - one racist, the other not. The other however still thinks that having a good time destroying derelict aprtment buildings is a good thing and quite forgivable. Through Tommy's eyes he discovers the sub-culture that formed as Thatcher thrashed her way through the Fallkands and bands I've never heard of play something the ads called 80s classics on the soundtrack. It's funny to get a piece about this subject which seems to serve only as nostalgia though the moment when Combo and his racist gang, lead by young Shaun stride out in Leone-esque slow motion has a deal of droll fun to it.

Ingmar Bergman

As I sat down to write a Film Alert I switched on the radio and heard news of the death of Ingmar Bergman. News Radio was running a report from the BBC’s Arts Correspondent who gave a quick rundown on a career that lasted over fifty years making almost sixty feature films. For cinephiles I suspect that their individual discovery of Bergman, particularly if that occurred in the fifties, was a moment that opened eyes and minds to ideas far beyond what had previously been regarded as the norms of narrative cinema. Bergman’s stories were different and so were his methods of telling them.

A teacher at my high school gave me a copy of four Bergman scripts published in a single volume. I read Wild Strawberries and confessed my puzzlement at its mysterious combination of flashbacks and dreams. It was patiently explained to me but it was a year or so later, at a MUFS screening, before I saw the film and ‘understood’ Victor Sjostrom’s journey. That was followed by Smiles of a Summer Night, dripping with sex but as well with entirely uninhibited behaviour. There was the quite intense The Face a k a The Magician and then The Seventh Seal. That last seemed to be the most profound film ever made, grappling with death and God’s vengeance in an almost fearful way. His actors and his technicians, especially the photographer Gunnar Fischer, seemed to be in a different league to everyone else.

Yet fashions changed and we sated ourselves on directors like Frank Tashlin, Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann. Bergman seemed to be too po-faced, too serious. His comedies like The Devil’s Eye and Let’s Talk About Women weren’t funny. Not like Frank Tashlin’s anyway. Bergman became an occasional controversialist, only making a splash with films like The Silence which was deliberately obscurantist but heavily into carnal sex. We didn’t get to see such films in their entirety anyway. It took me years to ascertain for sure whether the rumour about the couple having ‘actual’ sex in the cinema was true or not. It wasn’t.

Bergman’s mature years seemed to be his greatest. The trilogy of Persona, Hour of the Wolf and Shame, made between 1966 and 1968 remains a landmark and probably will be his most enduring work. He was fifty when he completed those films and went on to make almost twenty more films including some of his most popular. He won Oscars. I thought he won for Cries and Whispers but the SMH today only mentions for Fanny and Alexander.

His last film Saraband was made for TV in 2003. It featured Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson and picked up on the characters from the earlier Scenes from a Marriage taking both of them through to a quieter, more contemplative time in their lives. As with all of his work however, it’s the woman who has gained a sense of repose, the man is still in a modest state of turmoil. It’s Josephson whom Bergman makes to bare not only his soul but his rather gnarled and knobby body. Ullmann provided Bergman with a continuous, near miraculous, portrait of woman in all her glory and you imagine that the director contemplated her beauty, her resolve and her strength with continual fascination over thity years or so. There is a sense about his films with Ullmann that no matter how often he did contemplate this Galatea he could never quite fathom all her mysteries.

In recent years the magic of DVD distribution has allowed almost all of Bergman’s work to be revealed again. This has included all the films made before 1955, the year that he made Smiles of a Summer Night. Those films are generally more straightforward, more melodramatic and, possibly for budgetary reasons, much more constrained in their locations and range of characters. They are still eternally fascinating and they include magnificent works like Sawdust and Tinsel, Secrets of Women and A Lesson in Love.

It’s hard to say that Bergman has been ‘an influence’. Perhaps the dark foreboding of much Scandinavian cinema owes something to him but really his stories were so much his own that they were never really absorbed into the mainstream method. Only Woody Allen, whom I’ve also heard paying tribute as I write this, seemed to want to go so far as both parodying and imitating him. The rest of the film world finally just stood back in awe at his continued exploration of his themes and his continued fascination with death, decay and the possibility that we might have to account for ourselves to a maker. His talent was unique and I suspect that for a long time to come his films will feature in all those lists of Ten Bests and Persona in particular will forever be regarded as one of the very few finest works of art produced for the cinema.

Oz Comedy

My thanks to the reader who rang to say that Clubland is the best Oz comedy since Muriel's Wedding. Indeed it is so I thought I'd share that with you.

Digital goodies

Mention of Jia Zhangke in Paul Martin's comment on the piece on Clubland makes me put up a quick note about him and his film which still has a screening at the Brisbane festival to come to complete its trip around the Australian festival circuit. Still Life is indeed a masterpiece, as are almost all of Jia's films. Since it premiered at Venice last year and initially got generally bagged or worse dismissed by a stupefied press contingent forced to watch it at midnight, it has gone on to great critical success. It has also been sold for commercial distribution in 66 countries. Jia Zhangke also produced a film, directed by Han Jie, a member of his production company, titled Walking on the Wild Side which I was enthralled by when I saw it last year at Vancouver. It's a ripping story of a trio of juvenile delinquents playing up big time in China's backblocks. I think only the Brisbane Festival has been smart enough to pick that one up and it screens there next week as well.

At Clubland I saw the future and started to fear

This note follows on from an earlier post about digital projection, which actually drew a few responses and you can find it below somewhwere if your curiosity is piqued. But start at the start. The Ulladulla Arcadia is a nice name for a cinema of the future and if you wanted to see Transformers or the latest Harry Potter or a couple of others you would have been served with a picture provided by a nice warm, comforting 35mm print. If however you choose to see Clubland you pay your money to see murky grey green yellow images, entirely lacking in definition or clarity, drained of color and with lines occasionally rippling up the screen. The image is far worse than you would have ever seen by hiring a VHS video of the film and playing it on a twenty year old TV set. That image was provided by some digital device or other and there was a screen announcement that it would be screened that way an instant before the film started. I feared the worst.

This was somewhat a pity largely because the film seems to be a very bright sparky comedy with lots of very knowing things to say about how young people start their sex lives, the sort of pressures they place on themselves, the fake mature analysis they put themselves through and, towering above some of them, the mothers from hell who can manipulate, manipulate, manipulate and manipulate and when they've finished manipulating start manipulating again. Brenda Blethyn does this act with scrupulous and hilarious intensity. Its quite amazing to see a Brit pro do this sort of performance and do it every inch and every second of the show. It's hard to see her being beaten for the AFI best Female Actor award. Similarly it's hard to go past the performances of the two kids for sheer winning qualities as well. Emma Booth as Jill is simply gorgeous as well as brilliant and she delivers a lot of those lines where she has to race through dialogue about her self-esteem, her image and her standing in her girl friend's eyes with great technical skill. Ultimately its's very funny indeed. Keith Thompson's script may well be the most funny ha ha script written here in a decade or more. Off the top of my head I cant think of anything that surpasses it. But.....

Back to the image. Truly you have to wonder why it is that such a shoddy thing was shown at all. An enquiry to the very charming young manager, who asked as we left had we enjoyed the show, led to the following points being made. and I quote as near to verbatim as my memory permits: "Yes it was a very poor image indeed but this was the only film they were screening in digital. It was supplied by a "little distributor" and the cinema, deep on the mid-South Coast, could only expect to get digital copies from that source. More generally digital copies were supplied by one of two labs. One lab usually provided good copies. the other usually provided mediocre copies. This one came from the other. Yes, there were ripples, yes the color did bleed and spray out, yes the blues had turned to yellow on occasion. Sorry about that. Come back and see something else on 35mm."

Given the experience you have to wonder whether you might be wary of such future presentations. You also have to wonder whether equipping cinemas with digital projectors is worth the money. If patrons begin to instinctively sniff that certain films might be digitally projected and if those films include the best or near-best Australian film made this year then the expansion of access to these films via cheap digital copies may, thanks to distributor parsimony I suspect, turn counter-productive for those people, especially those in the backblocks who will only see the films under these conditions. People who sit through such images may eventually choose to wait for the DVD or worse, not bother to watch it all.

Book of Numbers

Black Book is Paul Verhoeven’s first Dutch film for over two decades. The half dozen films he made before he went stateside in the late 80s to shock the international bourgeoisie with Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Starship Troopers and Hollow Man were the work of a consummate vulgarian. He was, like Miike Takashi, a director whose vulgarities I prefer, utterly unafraid to show sex and violence in graphic detail. He reveled in and relished it. The best film of his earlier Dutch career Spetters, a film about unadorned teenage sex and casual violence, was, I thought, gut wrenching. After one more film, the carefully choreographed The Fourth Man Hollywood beckoned and he gave a lot of oomph to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career with Total Recall and Sharon Stone’s reputation with Basic Instinct. Showgirls, a film much derided in its day, and probably the most consummate of his consummate vulgarities, still has its admirers, most notably, here anyway, Adrian Martin and David of ‘Margaret and David At the Movies’.

I suspect that Verhoeven had lofty ambitions for Black Book but first let me digress into a little biography. An Australian soldier taken prisoner of war in Crete once confessed to me his dislike of the Dutch. ‘They would not fight the Germans” he said, and as well “They only organized a Resistance when it was clear Hitler was going to lose”. Verhoeven’s view of the Dutch Resistance has the same sour outlook. It was, he proposes, venal, self-serving, anti-Semitic and duplicitous. It’s key organizers walked both sides of the street and had an unhealthy interest in getting a share of Nazi treasure. The heroine of Black Book is a Jewish woman whose principles are put to the test and whose bravery is never questioned. She is asked to ingratiate herself into the affection of the head of the Gestapo, starts sleeping with him and falls in love. Nevertheless she never betrays those principles, even those exercised in the bedroom with her handsome Nzi lover, has a higher purpose. She is one of the few lead characters about whom this can be said. While for a long stretch you think this is a Boys Own adventure about outsmarting the Nazis in fact the Dutch 'Resistance' gets a right going over and the film ends with much bitterness and a very sour taste.

In Verhoeven’s usual fashion the violence is fairly explicit and there’s much female flesh on show. I wish I could remember the phrase someone recently told me about Verhoeven’s interests in displaying female breasts but I cant so I content myself simply with noting the frequency with which the female lead Carice Van Houten is required to take off her top is probably a record for a mainstream feature made in the prim years of the first decade of the 21st century.

But, notwithstanding the interesting subject and the sex and the violence, the film still plays too much like one of those derring –do Brit movies of the fifties rather than something has been made just last year. Maybe my taste now means that it needs a Ken Loach and Paul Laverty or a Paul Greengrass to give it gravitas and depth. It seemed to me just that bit mechanical and that everything was being done by the numbers. Maybe if Verhoeven had sought recapture the full frontal attack mode he used for Spetters or Turkish Delight it would have gripped me more.