Feature: MIFF ‘10 is upon us! A video interview with the festival’s head of programming Michelle Carey and a preview of the Joe Dante retrospective.
This year’s rapidly approaching (i.e., by the time you read this, IT WILL HAVE ALREADY STARTED!!) Melbourne International Film Festival is important to Screen Machine for all sorts of reasons. In a mediocre year for that puzzling entity called commercial cinema, we are more excited than ever to encounter new works by some of the old masters (Jean-Luc Godard’s Socialism, Manoel de Oliveira’s Strange Case of Angelica, Jacques Rivette’s Around a Small Mountain, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, George Romero’s Survival of the Dead, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse), important new films from major young directors (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, Hong Sangsoo’s Ha Ha Ha, Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Air Doll, Xiaolu Guo’s She, A Chinese), intriguing films that we know next to nothing about (Samantha Morton’s The Unloved, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Pang Ho-cheung’s Love in a Puff, Michael Rowe’s Leap Year) and older films that have been revived, resuscitated, brought back to us at the time we need them most (R.W. Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, Wiseman’s Primate, Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid).
More personally, this year’s MIFF is significant for us as it marks our one-year anniversary. Screen Machine was started in the immediate aftermath of MIFF 2009, which my co-editor Brad Nguyen and I covered while the site still went under the name Screener. In part because of the fun had reviewing last year’s MIFF, it became clear that a bigger, more usable site with more contributors would be needed in order to allow us to do the work we wanted to do as contributors to and participants in Melbourne’s film culture. Since then, Screen Machine has grown in a variety of ways, and now we find ourselves, a year later, ready to tackle MIFF 2010, this time with a large, talented staff of writers.
Our coverage of this year’s festival promises to be comprehensive, provocative and urgent – with mini-reviews of films published each day and a collective festival diary updated regularly, we hope to provide the most diverse, engaging and up-to-date coverage possible. The mini-reviews and diary entries will start rolling in tomorrow, but for now, please enjoy our MIFF preview: Alifeleti Brown’s interview with Head of Programming Michelle Carey (complete with some great visuals, courtesy of Ali himself) and Lauren Bliss’ preview of the Joe Dante retrospective that will be one of the festival’s special programs this year.
Enjoy, and see you all at MIFF!
- Conall Cash
INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE CAREY, HEAD OF PROGRAMMING AT MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Michelle Carey has been Head Programmer at the Festival since 2008. In this first part of Screen Machine’s interview with Carey (conducted at the Forum Theatre), she talks about the festival’s advertising campaign, Richard Moore (MIFF’s executive director), the Joe Dante retrospective and Germaine Greer’s involvement in the festival this year.
In the second part of Screen Machine’s interview with Michelle Carey, she discusses the film selection method, MIFF’s Program for 2010 (in particular the Not Quite Bollywood program), and her personal recommendations for the festival.
In the final part of the interview, Michelle Carey discusses controversies that MIFF has been involved with in the past including the furor surrounding The 10 Conditions of Love and Ken Loach’s withdrawal of his film Looking For Eric from the festival as a protest against Israel’s actions towards Palestine.
- Interview by Alifeleti Brown
PREVIEW OF THE JOE DANTE RETROSPECTIVE
Joe Dante
Film buffs take note: this retrospective features more than a simple smattering of Joe Dante’s better-known films. I challenge any hardcore B-grade film fan to stimulate themselves with as much super-size Coke as they can fit into their stomach (and bladder) and traverse the optical wonder that is Dante’s The Movie Orgy, all 280 minutes of it! The film is a brilliant collage of government advertisements, music videos, newsreels, commercials and B-grade films and television shows, edited together to produce the effect of channel surfing. Dante pioneered the exploitation of the televisual flow long before the producers of Adult Swim recognised the phenomenon. The full spectrum of emotions will be aroused from this brilliant work – from side-splitting laughter and intrigue, to mild lethargy and then … nirvana. Keep in mind it was edited from an original running time of seven hours! Do it, you know you want to.
After this intense, mind-blowing film phenomenon, make sure you don’t miss Piranha (my personal favourite) and a selection of short films, including Homecoming. Piranha takes you to that violent, brutal place you wanted to go to with Gremlins, but couldn’t because it was rated PG. The film is a parody of Jaws, but comes complete with a government conspiracy theory and the wicked suggestion that the waterways of the world will never be safe for innocent fun. Homecoming is Dante’s most recent film, produced as part of the Masters of Horror series for Showtime. The film is an explicitly political zombie thriller, its brilliance deriving from the refusal to curse the zombies with any kind of violent streak. It is another installation in his series of films on the subject of war, the others being Small Soldiers, Matinee and The Second Civil War (all playing at the festival).
Finally, the retrospective features those films which made Dante famous, which we might call the suburban-fantasy-turned-nightmare series. Anyone who experienced childhood in the leafy, isolated hellhole of suburbia will doubtless enjoy not only Gremlins (and its sequel) but also The ‘Burbs (like a scripted version of Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots, only starring Tom Hanks), Innerspace and The Hole.
- Lauren Jayne Bliss
Yosh
23/07/10 - 10:22 AM
It’s a pity the interview was held before the banning of L.A Zombie!
Alifeleti Brown
23/07/10 - 3:58 PM
I think ‘Nénette’ also deserves a nod here, as an important new work from a major contemporary director.
Anyone who’s seen Philibert’s “Être et avoir” (“To Be and To Have”) knows what I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen it then, of course, you must! :)
Alifeleti Brown
23/07/10 - 4:14 PM
I’m not sure Michelle would have had much to say on the banning of the film, other than to reiterate what is already being clearly reported in the Australian newsmedia. She likely would have agreed, like most left-of-center film-goers, that it was an unfortunate decision, and clearly hypocritical given that “wound penetration” – the point of line-crossing for the censorship board – featured in works by LaBruce that had screened in previous festivals. However it has also been become apparent that the censorship board might not have been privy to the content of previous LaBruce films based on the official synopsis being circulated.
The censorship board has some pretty interesting stipulations on wounds and penetration. A couple of videogames were recently banned in Australia because they depict eyes being stabbed/penetrated: albeit the eyes of zombies in one case, and aliens/predators in the other.
I wonder if the infamous slicing of the sheep’s eye in “Un Chien Andalou” counts as an exception, or has merely been overlooked by the board.