Bureaucracy rampant when direct Ministerial intervention is what's needed

After my last post, see below, I had a look at what's happening at Screen Australia. Is there to be any end of the bureaucratic bullsh-t going on which seems quite contrary to the plans for direct selection and investment set out in the previous post? First of all, the Minister, the Bald Eagle aka Peter Garrett, released his Statement of Expectations at to what Screen Australia will get up to. This to a statutory authority, a status which once upon a time a time conferred independence of judgement and freedom not merely from Ministers but also from the apparatchiks that increasingly crowd out Ministers’ offices and stultify any smart thoughts. Screen Australia has now released its draft Statement of Intent (SOI) for 2008/09, in response to that Statement of Expectations. Screen Australia advises that these “SOIs are formal commitments by Screen Australia to meet the expectations of Government.” Can you believe an alleged arts/industrial organisation participating sensibly in such nonsense. If you do then you will believe that huge box office successes, Oscars and Cannes entrants are a matter of weeks away and the tooth fairy will squire Nick and Russell down the red carpet on Oscar night. Who dreamed this up? Please step forward and identify yourself so that the nation can laugh at you. Screen Australia says its draft sets out preliminary thinking within the organisation on the shape of its future programs. And that it “will use the directions articulated in the SOI as the basis for developing the suite of programs to be offered in 2009. A second round of industry consultation regarding guidelines and programs will take place in October”. Those meetings should be, as the old mate Counihan used to say, a real hoot but, sufficiently prolonged, the process could take the Government and its befuddled film bureaucrats through to the next election without a single movie being made to reflect either expectations or intentions or even the achievement of KPIs or any other bit of new management jargon designed to ensure nothing really happens. The process will also have the benefit of allowing bureaucrats to hide fear of failure or acknowledge failure itself. I’ll bet some consultancy firm has been hired to handle all this if not dream it up. That company would have a chortling bank manager and in eighteen months or so it will be favourite, based on its experience, to supervise a whole new round of announcements and consultations as to how Screen Australia, under its new Chief Executive Officer, plans to refocus, restructure and concentrate on achieving commercial and other success. …

The debate about quality Australian film

The Sydney Film Festival recently made an interesting contribution to the discussion about how to get our best film-makers working. Here's what they published in their online site. I'm surprised that nobody took the matter up further

Question 5SFF: Federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett recently announced that he will be giving direct grants of $10 million each to twelve currently unemployed filmmakers. Informed sources have suggested recipients may include Ivan Sen, Jane Campion, John Ruane, Richard Lowenstein, Ray Argall, Jocelyn Moorshouse, Leo Berkeley, Scott Murray, Shirley Barrett, Rowan Woods, Albie Thoms and Brian McKenzie. If you were handing out the money, who would you pick - excluding yourself, of course?
Randall Wood (Rare Chicken Rescue): "Ivan Sen - He's got a big heart and that shines through in his films - He's a wonderful storyteller (but I don't think he's unemployed)."
Tony Radevski (Ephemeral): "Ivan Sen."
Lisa Matthews (Ten Pound Poms): "The majority of those above are mostly not unemployed. If such a welcome magic money wand was to appear - I would like to see the following filmmakers realise their next film: Curtis Levy, James Middleton, Lawrence Johnston, Jessica Hobbs, Samantha Lang, Ivan Sen, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Jeremy Simms, Andrew Dominik, Stavros Kazantzidis, Matthew Saville and Andrew Lancaster."
Michael Mier (The Sound of CRY): "Filmmaking is such a hard process I really couldn't decide who should get grants. It seems those that are determined always find a way to make their films and I really love helping others realise their projects so it would be too hard to select ten names."
Glen Hunwick (Mutt): "Lisa Hunwick, Jake Hunwick, and Taylor Hunwick, (no relation of course)."
John Evagora (296 Smith Street): "Rowan Woods - The Boys is still one of my favourite Australian films."
Stefan Moore (The Cars That Ate China):"I would pick Dennis O'Rourke and Susan Lambert (who is admittedly my wife) but unless any of the suggested recipients are proposing to use the grant to make a very good film or films, I would say that this is a shocking waste of money."
Tali Gal-on (Lucille): "Sarah Watt - because I love Look Both Ways, and I can't wait to see what she does next. Dee McLachlan - The Jammed was a horrifyingly powerful film. And some up and coming directors that I met at the VCA: Daniel Agdag, Rosalie Osman and Sam Bryant."
Alex Holmes (Ali and the Ball): "Emerging filmmakers... excluding myself, of course."
Keri Light (Wanderlust/Wonderlost): "Because he is talented, because he has been my mentor and because he is now one of my best friends, I shall say Richard Lowenstein. That's one. But if there is a conflict of interest in picking one's mentors and friends, I shall nominate Michael Cody so that we can make our film...which may be even more of a conflict of interest... hmm. Maybe Minister Garrett should do as is stated in the question and give $10 million to each of the 12 directors listed or $5 million to 24 directors. How very cool. How sweetly divine. Brilliant."

Sean Kruck (Summer Breaks): "It would depend on the project. I would look at established filmmakers but also take a punt and mix it up with some fresh blood. Australian films generally don't seem to make much money so why not take bigger risks on the filmmakers and the style of films?"

Good thinking in there and a ringing endorsement of direct ministrial intervention in an ailing industry!

A Short Note about the Best Australian Film of the Year

Nash Edgerton's rather fine debut The Square, initially took me by surprise for precisely the reason that it eschews the cheap shock tactics of the films on display in Not Quite Hollywood a film which to my eye and ear has attracted far more undeserving attention than any in recent years. I got the impression that the Edgerton brothers, Nash the director and Joel the actor/writer, have worked out rather well just what a crime story needs to get its audience engrossed – believably drawn characters, some sly satire (especially in the male hairdos), a sense of absorption of the lessons of some of the great moments in noir, most notably Double Indemnity. The film twists its way sinuously throughbthe sleepy suburban streets of Sydney's outer suburbs and peels back bits and pieces of iconic lifestyle along the way. The joke about the dog and the shark was so brilliantly irrelevantly unexpected I roared with delight. Regrettably it seems that my enthusiasm isn't shared by many and the film has flopped badly. Perhaps in a decade or three someone will make a doco about the flops of the two thousand and noughties

Romulus Returns

Romulus Films
No doubt stung by criticism that its late night roster of the complete J Arthur Rank film library was starting to show the strain of repetition, after some 20 plus years of faithful service, the ABC has gone out and acquired some more old British films. It appears now to be the proud owner of the Alexander Korda/London Films library and, more recently, has also been screening what would appear to be the entire output of the independent production and distribution company Romulus Films. In other contexts, presenting the entire out put of a significant producer like Romulus might be quite noteworthy. But then again there is nothing in the publicity material which suggests that we should treat this as a bit of a cinematheque moment as the titles are run through. And the copies are plain old pan and scan a distinctly ordinary effort which suggests that its all been acquired o.n the cheap

Romulus was founded by James and John Woolf. They were the sons of pioneer producer C. M Woolf who co-founded the J. Arthur Rank production empire. In 1949 the Woolf brothers set up a production company and the initial modus operandi was to attract Hollywod stars and directors to Britain to make quality pictures. The first is often claimed to be Albert Lewin's exotic Pandora and the Flying Dutchman with James Mason and Ava Gardner but the official lists indicate two films before it, The Late Edwina Black (Gordon Parry) and I'll Get You for This (Joseph M Newman). Romulus then had a couple of big hits directed by John Huston, The African Queen and Moulin Rouge, and kept trying intermittently with Hollywood casting in Beat the Devil, The Iron Petticoat and I Am A Camera. When the so-called British new wave came along in the late fifties Romulus produced a number of films that fitted into the category of working class drama, most notably the ground breaking Room at the Top, The L-Shaped Room, and Term of Trial. One of the brothers, John, was the discoverer of Laurence Harvey he of the finely chiselled cheekbones and the sporter of that alarming quiff of hair that seemed to stand up for several feet in front of his face. He was the first Leningrad Cowboy. Harvey appeared in more than a few of the Romulus films, most notably The Good Die Young, I am a Camera, Three men in a Boat, Women of Twilight (in which he has a cameo which requires him to sing in a deep baritone voice clearly not his own) and of course his defining part as Joe Lampton in Room at the Top.

The sad news for all those enthralled with this information is that the ABC has already screened most of the films mentioned above and is unlikely to screen them again for a year or so. The good news is that there are still, if the Corporation has indeed acquired the company's complete output, more than a few films remaining to be screened. They may or may not include some of the company's later productions which were done with major studios, most notably The Pumpkin Eater, Jack Clayton's best film. The ABC may also have acquired Clayton's first film, a short adaptation of Pushkin's The Bespoke Overcoat, a film which I've never managed to catch

Manny Farber

It wont mean much to many but the saddest news of the week came on learning of the death on 19 August of Manny Farber one of the lions of film criticism and one of the most independent voices ever to turn his attention to serious analysis of the art of the film. Long ago, way back in the sixties, Farber wrote his still iconic piece “White Elephant Art vs Termite Art. It appeared in a 1962 Film Culture and I think I still have a copy somewhere. Back in the mid 60s, this piece turned us all around. It was as significant in its day as Andrew Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory” which also appeared in that very same issue of Film Culture. I’m going to cheat in my appreciation here by quoting at length from a piece by Jim Hoberman which was reprinted in last week’s Village Voice as part of Hoberman’s eulogy for the great man. Hoberman writes: “Farber's contribution, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," is the snappiest jeremiad I've ever read. Its target is films that are inflated, over-wrought, precious, "tied to the realm of celebrity and affluence" – white elephant stuff, in which the artist tries "to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance." Against this beast (personified by Antonioni, Truffaut, and the then modish Tony Richardson) Farber raises the red flag of termite art, a mysterious form that flourishes in dark corners where "the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence." Farber's termites include journalists, pulp writers, B-movie directors, and comic-strip artists – intuitive, unself-conscious professionals who have "no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything." Farber’s enthusiasms played into the hands of buffs, enthusiasts, auteurists and others who were seeking out byways of American film history and discovering the delights of noir and westerns. Farber directed us towards Don Siegel, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann and Raoul Walsh and they became the gods whose work was to be found nestling in ‘ranch nights’ at suburban revival houses, the programs of MUFS and SUFS and at independent cinemas like the Carlton Moviehouse where the proprietor would run all sorts of stuff if you just asked him to put it on. In his later years Farber became a highly regarded painter, as indicated in Hoberman’s note, and was able to forego the pleasures of meeting deadlines. Regrettably for Australians, his work appeared in all sorts of difficult to find magazines and I’m not sure, beyond the one book "negative Space", whether it has been collected in the same way that that the work of others like Sarris and Pauline Kael has. That’s a pity but maybe his death, in his nineties, will prompt a resurrection of some of the best writing ever on film….For a much better appreciation try here
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-08-19/film/manny-farber-1917-2008/ …

Dino Risi

I learned of the death of Dino Risi via the obituary published in the latest Cahiers du Cinema. Long time critic Luc Moullet devoted two pages to a eulogy on Risi and its career. It brought back some memories and made me ponder on just how many of Risi's films remain unseen.
Risi died on 7 June at 90 years of age and it seems to have passed unnoticed, at least in the mainstream English language press. His was a name that had largely fallen off the radar in recent years. Yet at his peak he directed a number of the most popular Italian films ever made, worked with some of Italy’s finest actors and had at least one of Hollywood’s accolades accorded to him, a remake of one of his greatest successes.

Risi was born in 1917 and trained as a psychologist. He got into the film industry as an assistant in the early forties and later took classes under Jacques Feyder while still interned in Switzerland during the war. He made documentaries and in the early fifties gave up his psychology practice and established himself as a feature film director. He specialized in the light comedies beloved of Italian audiences. The roots of these films trace back to neo-realism and the settings especially were always quite meticulous in their detail of everyday life. Few of them were exported for viewing by art house audiences around the world but in the 50s and 60s in Australia you could see them at the inner suburban cinemas which catered to the vast pool of recent Italian immigrants. Many, though not all, however were screened in copies without subtitles and it was hit or miss for the dedicated followers who lapped up the pleasures offered by Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni long before they achieved international success.

In the early 60s Risi became something of an art house treasure. His Il Sorpasso/The Easy Life (1961) was a huge hit with cinemagoers who appreciated its sly humour. Risi tapped into studies of that peculiarly Italian combination of traits - sophistication, street cunning, and a blithe disregard for the law. Few will ever forget the moment Vittorio Gassman blithely steals someone else’s parking ticket before placing it on his own car which in a flash establishes Gassman’s character. Gassman’s riotous sentimental education of the young and repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant in the ways of the world set the world laughing.

Risi’s other big critical success, and international hit, was Profumo di Donna/Scent of a Woman, made in 1973. Again it starred Gassman, one more of the sixteen very fruitful collaborations between the actor and director. The part of a blind man with a chip on his shoulder, a giant libido and an extraordinary nose for female scent was dangerous but riotous. Hollywood remade it with Al Pacino in 1992. Martin Brest’s film, incredibly long for a dramatic comedy at some 156 minutes, was also a critical and popular success. As usual however the original was a better movie.

As per usual with European films, the distribution of Risi’s work outside his home country was sporadic. Some of it popped up dubbed. Much of it was ignored. That hardly seems to have mattered to a director who kept working until well into his seventies. Today very little of his work is available. A check of the Time Out Film Guide doesn’t have a single Risi title listed as being available for TV or DVD in Britain and you suspect that the same would apply in Australia.

If his death causes anyone anywhere a tingle of nostalgia then it would be nice if someone got out a selection of his best and assembled them for an international tour. SBS could help with the subtitling for over the years the keen eyed viewer had the chance to see more than a little of his best work on that channel. (Alas no more those golden years have passed). One film especially would be welcome, the drama he made with Alberto Sordi in 1960, A Difficult Life. Whether it has ever been screened here is beyond me but in the European obituaries it is singled out for high praise. Otherwise I’d just be happy to see all sixteen of those films he made with the extraordinary Gassman, collectively probably the actor’s best work when his characteristic jauntiness, suavity, brilliant comic timing and unassailable ability to deliver dialogue at machine gun pace were on full display. Throw in the early Sophia Loren pictures as well and a bit of the cinema’s heaven would be there for all to see.

Risi’s two sons Marco and Claudio have followed him into the film business

Wajda roars back with "Katyn"

Every so often a film comes along which doesn’t merely intend to change the world’s political and social perceptions but actually succeeds in doing so. The numbers in the first group are large enough but the numbers in the second are small. I dont believe I'm over-exaggerating when I suggest we think of the effect that Rossellini’s Rome Open City or Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Pasolini’s Salo Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses or Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth had on society, on their own national cinemas and the cinema itself. You can go all the way back to the silent era and D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation or Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin, to find yet other films which shook the world or at least the part of it that stood to be deeply affected by such radicalism.

It may just be that the latest such transformative film might have been made by Polish master Andrzej Wajda. You might have thought Wajda’s battles, lasting forty years or so, against authoritarianism and Soviet communism had all been won. He had spent most of his adult life as a film-maker trying to bring the truth of the modern Polish nation to his own people and to the world. He had done it in an environment of suppression, censorship and fear. He had stood resolutely against the oppressing forces and Poland recognized his work sufficiently to give him latitude.

Using that latitude Wajda, like all of his colleagues, still had to develop strategies to outflank and out think the forces of a state dedicated to strait jackets of thought. Poland, like all of the satellites of the USSR developed a highly repressive police state structure. However, its people, especially its artists, spent much of their time seeking to undermine this apparatus, questioning its legitimacy and supporting dissent. The strategies that Wajda and the film industry used frequently involved the use of historical parallels or personal issues that reflected current political reality.

Wajda was fortunate enough to start his career by making a trilogy of master works, A Generation, Ashes and Diamonds and Kanal, that still live on not just as films but as political documents produced by a society which has spent centuries involved in doomed attempts to repel invaders, and whose history is littered with failed national causes and disastrous revolts against tyranny. That history provided rich resources for a fearless film-maker and for those who followed in his footsteps. In the bleak cold war years Wajda and his acolytes and followers produced film after film that peeled back layers to show the true feelings of the Polish people. Communism slowly withered. Wajda and the film industry were at the forefront of its demise, especially by supporting the Solidarity movement. Wajda documented the progress towards democracy with two of his greatest films Man of Iron and Man of Marble. He also chronicled those issues more obliquely in his Polish/French co-production Danton. Since then Wajda has made half a dozen films, most of which don’t seem to have traveled beyond Polish borders.

It’s something of a surprise that, 25 years after Danton and at the age of 80 he has come roaring back into public, and political, prominence with one of his most ferocious and controversial films. The premiere of Katyn in Poland took place on September 17, 2007, the 68th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. It took place at the National Opera Theatre in Warsaw, was attended by the elite of Poland’s state and church and covered live by the major Polish television networks. Two million Poles saw the film within a month of its release. In an article in The New York Review of Books, Anne Applebaum reported that ‘for a few weeks almost every cinema in the country was showing the film, sometimes a dozen times a day.’ Its release started a national debate again and brought long-simmering issues out into the open. To some surprise, it has even re-opened debate about the Kaytn massacre in Russia as well. Almost two decades earlier, in 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev had acknowledged Soviet guilt about the events. Later Boris Yeltsin had ordered the Soviet archives to be opened, allowing research to be freely undertaken. A number of books were published in Russian and other languages which made plain the Soviet Union’s guilt and complicity. Notwithstanding this, in Putin’s Russia, nationalism has re-emerged and one major newspaper suggested that Soviet responsibility was ‘not obvious’. Such a view added to the continuing furore in Poland.

So, how should those for whom the Katyn massacre is an unknown byway of history approach the movie. There should be several things to consider. First there is the depiction of the massacre itself. It was a gruesome occurrence, endless cold blooded murders of the flower of Polish youth. Ruthlessness predominates as the anonymous, hardly noticed Soviet foot soldiers go methodically about the business of executing and then burying the dead in mass graves. No detail is spared.

More importantly Wajda leads us to the climax with a fresco of characters and incidents that fill in the details of Poland in 1939. In his statement accompanying the premiere, Wajda saw the film as “about individual suffering, which evokes images of much greater emotional content than naked historical facts. A film that shows the terrible truth that hurts, whose characters are not the murdered officers but women who wait their return every day, every hour, suffering inhuman uncertainty.” It takes him more than two enthralling hours to tell the tale and he starts by ensuring that we realize that it wasn’t just Soviet tyranny that was intent on destroying the intelligentsia of Poland. Early in the film we see the shocking round up by the Germans of the faculty at Jagellonian University in Cracow. Poland, its clear, is a nation jammed between two great powers. Faced with occupation there is resignation and rebellion. There is also stupidity and reckless courage. Small vignettes of Polish pre-war life finally build a composite image of a nation whose entire history has sadly been subject to constant invasion and repression by outside forces. That produces a quite aching sadness. Katyn is a film in which the great and powerful crush the small and weak.

For those outside Poland, Wajda has told the story of one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. His own father was one of the victims. Has he made a film just to settle accounts, to bring one of the key moments of Polish history still unresolved to the forefront? “Wajda himself says: “Let it spin a tale about the suffering and drama of many Katyn families. About the Katyn lie that triumphs over the grave of Joesph Vissarionovich Stalin which forced into silence about it for half a century the then allies, the western ones of the USSR in the war against Hitler, Great Britain and the United States.” Once again, perhaps for the final time, he has used the cinema to remind us that tyranny, oppression and evil have to be resisted at every step.

(NB. Some of the information in this article is drawn from “A Movie That Matters” by Anne Applebaum, The New York Review of Books, February 14 2008. Katyn had its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in January. It is being screened at both the forthcoming Melbourne and Brisbane International Film Festivals. Dont miss it.)