Feature: Festival Diary, Entry #2: Go Before You Come
A film festival is a curious time for the cinephile. The event (particularly in this cinematically dry city) is the most anticipated occasion of the calendar year. When it comes, life is put on hold for two full weeks – the highest priority is to absorb the audiovisual delights from the international film community. I find it a strange experience to anticipate pleasure; the hope of feeling repeatedly entranced by the moving image usually puts me in a weird mental state. For one, all bodily processes are ignored during the festival. The needs of the stomach must be sacrificed; dinner and lunch are scheduled around the festival timetable. I often won’t eat until 11pm. Our bladders and bowels have to quickly adapt; true cinephiles will not go to the toilet until the film is over. I find myself quickly exhausted from viewing so many films in such a short period of time. Like the relationship between the junkie and the dealer, the promise of a film to its viewer is not always a guaranteed good time. We subject ourselves over and over to reels of audiovisual stimulation waiting for that hit, that moment. Jean Epstein called it photogenie, Godard called it Nicholas Ray, Nicole Brenez calls it the undifferentiated night– whatever, but when it hits, we absorb it, take it in with a deep breath, and go back into the dark auditorium again and again until it hits us once more.
The lines for MIFF still wrap around Russell, Flinders and Bourke streets. The silent procession of the queue into the theatre is greeted by the bizarre (and annoyingly repetitive) onslaught of welcoming advertisements. Jennifer Keyte’s cold salutation, followed by the very grating Popcorn/ChocTop fight, makes for a startling opening to any film. God help us that we aren’t subjected to this crap next year. We can only hope and pray!
So far I have seen Splice, Rubber, Psycho (with a live orchestra) and The Ghost Writer. Rubber was an intriguing combination of postmodern cinema with the grotesque, visualised flesh of a Romero film. This motion picture elicits its audience to sympathise with the plight of a tyre, somehow alive and possessed with the desire to maim and murder. The film tells us there is literally “no reason” for this possession. Rubber is a creative combination of neo-Brechtian technique with what Philip Brophy terms ‘horrality’, a satirical celebration of the values of the horror genre. The film was intriguing, but did not provide me with the pleasure I was looking for.
Nearly everything I have seen so far was sold out, a testament to the enormous interest in the festival. Oddly, Psycho was only half full. I originally agreed to attend it with my mother as part of a weak attempt at Saturday afternoon mother-daughter bonding, cemented by what I assumed would be a kitschy experience. I was wrong. Psycho is back to its electric, volatile self, with the work of conductor Nicholas Buc and the Bates Motel Orchestra. The low lighting across the musicians produced long, haunting shadows, and the elongated dance of Buc worked beguilingly with the commanding Hitchcock.
The Ghost Writer was also sold out, proving that Roman Polanski isn’t dead and that his unfortunate criminal case hasn’t weighed down on his reputation. The film was a trip back to his old techniques: like in my favourite, Knife in the Water, he builds the narrative slowly – pacing the events and enslaving the audience with romantic shots, always at medium close-up. Polanski makes life look beautiful through the cinematic lens; even when we are slowly becoming caught within a tortuous situation, the world outside looks fantastic. The Ghost Writer is a cosy film; the torrential rain and frosted glass, highlighting the season in which the film is set, seem to add to this dichotomy. The punchline of the thriller, or what Oprah would call an ‘ah-ha’ moment, is narratively weak, but it doesn’t matter. I was lured in by the promise of pleasure and received my hit from this old master. Let the games continue!
jessie
28/07/10 - 11:36 AM
The food thing is a constant battle for me (I spend at least 50% of my day considering my next meal). Also, riddle me this, Batman: who are the people who leave half way through the film at MIFF? WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE, and WHAT ARE THEY DOING??? No matter what scenario I imagine, it doesn’t quite explain why so many people do this at MIFF. Where are they going? Why did they come in the first place? As someone who doesn’t take manners very seriously, I consider this the height of bad ones. Would love it if someone could explain that to me.
Lauren Bliss
28/07/10 - 12:58 PM
A certain Festival director left halfway through HA HA HA last night. Oooo
I guess people get bored, or cbf committing to the whole film and leave to eat cheeseburgers instead. This is my explanation for the phenomenon.
jessie
28/07/10 - 1:47 PM
I think you might be right…they are off to get cheeseburgers with the people who answer their phone during a meeting (fie! fist raised to sky!)
Alifeleti Brown
28/07/10 - 1:57 PM
Get this: Guys wearing the Choc Top and Pop Corn costumes walked into the cinema halfway through ‘Film Socialisme’. They paraded themselves down the stairs and after evoking a few dumb giggles, sat themselves down in one of the front rows. They took off the tops of their stupid costumes and sat trying to watch the film.
After a while one the dressed as the Choc Top gets starts distractedly playing with his phone. Then he gets up and walks back up the stairs. After a while the Pop Corn, and some friend they had with them, followed.
I agree. Who the fuck are these people!?
Conall Cash
28/07/10 - 2:27 PM
I think there are a lot of people who buy festival passes and go around to several films a day, picking films mostly on the spur of the moment based on whatever information they glean from those 100-word advertisements (or “descriptions”) in the guide that Lauren was complaining about in her earlier column. These are people who “love movies” and are into the whole “MIFF culture” and the “Melbourne arts scene” – the exact people who are targeted by MIFF’s abominable advertising campaign each year. The festival’s message, with these insulting slogans like “Everyone’s a critic” and “It’s a matter of taste,” reinforces the idea in people’s minds that, if you’re not having a rollicking time, if for a moment during a screening you find yourself questioning, wondering about what the film is doing and how it is functioning (i.e., developing that dreaded thing called a critical sensibility), or for that matter if you just find yourself bored, hungry, tired or distracted, then this means THE MOVIE SUCKS! LEAVE NOW! ASSERT YOUR DEMOCRATIC PRIVILEGE OF CHOICE! GO SEE ONE OF THE OTHER 5000000000 MOVIES PLAYING RIGHT NOW! ALWAYS ACT ON YOUR CAPITALIST INSTINCT! YOU ARE RIGHT! EVERYBODY IS ALWAYS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING, AS LONG AS THEY DO NOT THINK! Lauren’s story about Richard Moore walking out of the Hong film last night makes sense in this regard – he is, after all, the prototypical, ideal MIFF spectator.
Brad Nguyen
28/07/10 - 2:34 PM
like
Alifeleti Brown
28/07/10 - 3:03 PM
Bang.
jessie
29/07/10 - 11:17 AM
This made me both laugh and cheer, but in earnest: it worries me that people reading this will immediately feel excluded by the mentality that some people (ie. us) “get it” and the rest (ie. everyone else) are just pie-eating heathens.
If it’s true that we want more people to develop a critical sensibility and engage with film, and not just gate-keep a special club of true film appreciators, I believe it is more effective to (try to) inspire them, rather than insult them.
I understand this is meant more as a critique of MIFF’s marketing strategies and the behaviour it encourages, but I feel the subtext (or maybe not so sub) could be read as “people are fuckwits”- people other than us, that is.
Lauren Bliss
28/07/10 - 2:36 PM
Also like!!
Ro-mac
05/08/10 - 4:31 PM
Some films aren’t worth staying for , critical sensibility or not. The guide can trick you into seeing some dubious choices due to effective copy. As there aren’t many reviews out for a lot of these films it’s hard to cross check. I don’t object to people leaving during a film as long as they do it discreetly, ie sit on aisle, pack up their snacks quietly etc. I actually find it interesting. I ponder why I’m enjoying it and they did not. Perhaps it engages my rudimentary critical sensibility.
Conall Cash
07/08/10 - 12:23 PM
My point is of course not that people who walk out of films are stupider than people who don’t, or that walking out of a film halfway through is a sign of an intellectual failing, or anything so ridiculous. I don’t even particularly care about the walkouts at MIFF except insofar as I see them as symptomatic of a broader situation that greatly troubles me; in my earlier comment I simply used the conversation that had begun about walkouts to introduce my real concern. There are plenty of good reasons for walking out of a film halfway through, and not only because the film is ‘bad’ – we may simply not be prepared for the experience they offer at the time we sit down to watch, no matter how wondrous and profound it may be. Appreciation and thoughtfulness cannot be forced on a person at gunpoint, and there may be plenty of circumstances where we do not want to experience what Antonioni or Bresson or Sembene are offering us, and there is certainly nothing illegitimate or ‘wrong’ about such a refusal in itself; and of course I cannot speculate about the motivations of each individual person who has walked out of each individual film, and whether they were acting on the “right” or “wrong” principles – that is not what I am concerned with here. Nor is there any universal validity to the convention we are familiar with, which says that the way to experience cinema is through watching an individual session from beginning to end, in relative silence. There are plenty of other worthwhile ways to show and to watch films.
So, to my actual point: At MIFF, I think that the commonality of walkouts (and again, this is not to make moral judgements about each individual person who chooses to walk out of a film, but to make an observation and hypothesis about a social phenomenon – a distinction that people seem unwilling to grasp or acknowledge) is one symptom of what I would call the relentless anti-intellectualism and commercialism of the way MIFF operates. The most immediately obvious example is the advertising campaign, not only this year’s (which is the most egregious of all), but previous ones as well, all of which follow the same basic model; the inescapable voting forms pushed upon us at every screening operate in much the same way, but I will leave discussion of that for another time. The ads very deliberately encourage and solicit thoughtlessness in spectators, telling us that our immediate consumerist response is always right, that the function of an arts festival is not to foster discussion but to simply confirm people’s prejudices and social/class positions (remember the 2009 campaign, in which we learn that emo kids will like the kinds of films emo kids like, and other such useful life lessons). So my point is not that ‘people are fuckwits,’ but that MIFF (and in saying this, I of course do not mean all the individual people who work at MIFF, many of whom are very intelligent and even quite socially progressive, but rather the institution as I see it operating) wants people to be fuckwits. This is why I find the charge at me of elitism and condescension quite unfair, because there is such egregious and appalling condescension at work in MIFF’s self-promotion, which seems to go totally unremarked. These ads are insulting not just to ‘cinephiles,’ those who might sneer at the mispronunciation of ‘Fassbinder’ in this year’s ad, but to all spectators. When your intellectual or personal or emotional ability to respond to art has been equated with the choice between two endorsed snack foods, you have been insulted by an institutional apparatus that wishes to reduce your existence to one of mindless, uncritical consumption and participation in the capitalist economy; I think that all people should respond with fury to such an insult.
jessie
07/08/10 - 4:31 PM
Firstly, why is it that whenever someone disagrees with you guys, you assume they haven’t understood?
I still believe your implication (perhaps different from your intention) is that “everyone else” is vulnerable to the advertising campaign in someway that you aren’t. The very fact that you are “concerned” about it, casts you already in a superior position to everyone else. It implies you don’t believe that they could possibly be immune to the heinous capitalist strategies of MIFF, that they are vulnerable and need shepherding.
I dunno. Films are a capitalist product. A film festival is also a market, and it is encumbent on the organisers to get bums on seats and audiences in front of films. Other wise no-one would submit their films to it, or bother sending them half way around the world for a screening at “the arse end of the earth”. The distributors, and the film makers want sales and exposure. Film making is labour, resource and time intensive- the people stumping up the cash for it wanna see something in return. You may be apalled by MIFFs advertising campaign, but you’re not the one who is answerable to that demand. I’m presuming they know more about what gets audiences in than I do, and if it’s a slightly dumb choc-top and popcorn ad, then I do what everyone else does- chat happily to the person next to me until it’s over and get on with my life.
There are many events in melbourne that truly are outside the capitalist system, that promote and showcase experimental art and film, that do it for the love and not the money. MIFF is what it is: know the beast. It’s like going to coles and complaining that they don’t sell single origin coffee beans. If that “troubles” you- don’t go to coles. Even better- start your own supermarket!
jessie
07/08/10 - 4:31 PM
You’re never gonna let me write for Screen Machine again, are you? lol