Screen Machine

Review: MIFF ‘10: World on a Wire (1973), Matinee (1993), Videocracy

World on a Wire (1973)

Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Fassbinder screenings have become a small tradition at MIFF in recent years – in 2008 we had his great masterpiece, Fox and his Friends; last year they screened Chinese Roulette as part of the Anna Karina showcase; now, fresh from its debut at Berlin in February, we have the exciting rerelease of World on a Wire, Fassbinder’s scarcely screened 1973 sci-fi telefilm.

It would be fair to say that Fassbinder’s take on the science-fiction genre is not entirely dissimilar to his take on the melodrama or on the gangster film – he takes the generic form, uses it to mould his story, his tone, his style, respecting its structural characteristics; but the whole time one feels that Fassbinder, and his film, are elsewhere. This is not necessarily, or not simply, the elsewhere of irony (an over-identified element of Fassbinder’s cinema, as it is of his master, Douglas Sirk’s), but the elsewhere of a mind at once too restless and too passionate to hold entirely to any set of conventions, or for that matter to simply, cleverly ironize them. The obvious point of reference is Godard’s Alphaville (a reference Fassbinder makes explicit by having that film’s star, Eddie Constantine, pop up in a cameo around the three-hour mark), but in this film it’s not nearly so easy to laugh or to feel yourself above its genredness – and if you do laugh, it’s impossible to know if Fassbinder is laughing along with you, or at you, or if he remains locked in his trademark scowl.

As every film student knows, Fassbinder cast himself in Fear Eats the Soul as the irate, racist in-law who smashes a television in rage at Brigitte Mira’s love affair with a young Arab man (El Hedi ben Salem, who pops up in a small role in World on a Wire). With this act he takes a moment from Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and hyperbolizes it in a gesture that is at once supremely melodramatic and beyond melodrama. The question lingers – in this act, is Fassbinder freeing Jane Wyman, twenty years on, from the prison of bourgeois respectability to which Sirk’s television confined her; or is he identifying himself with a violence that is beyond cultural regulations, attachments and passions, which will settle neither for an ironizing of genre nor for a utopian revolution of forms, but is destined to continually repeat its destructive act, taking each generic and cultural form as it seizes him, smashing its offer of resolution and clarity at the same time as it smashes the possibility for a legible, identifiable critique? This tension remains at the forefront, unresolved, in the troubling, unmanageable, fantastic mess that is World on a Wire.

- Conall Cash

Matinee (1993)

Dir. Joe Dante

Bathed in the eerie primary colours of Life During Wartime’s Florida, the most innocuous conversation topic becomes genuinely unsettling. The warm sunlight of Matinee’s Florida, by contrast, renders even the Cuban Missile Crisis manageable. Joe Dante’s film recreates a fondly-remembered childhood, a simpler world, and works both as a love letter to cinema-as-emotion-machine and as a meditation on the mechanics of fear and reassurance.

Matinee is in no hurry to get anywhere. Set in 1962 Key West, it follows the coming-of-age of a young man whose great passions are monster movies and not getting blown up by nuclear bombs. The film ambles along, introduces a few zany plot threads, wrings every last sweaty drop of greatness from an excellent John Goodman and builds to a fantastic climax in the local B-movie palace.

The narrative patterns are rote, of course, but this is an idiosyncratic and thoughtful film. It reflects intelligently on the ever-conquered menaces of Hollywood narratives, and the way they fulfil our deep need to externalise and conquer our objects of fear. There are the insistently blurred boundaries between the booming, shaking movie theatre and the dreaded boom of the atomic bomb, of course, but probably my favourite shot in the film is the gloriously self-reflexive movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie moment during the screening of MANT!

Of course, in the end Matinee’s own narrative menace is vanquished and everyone lives happily ever after and weren’t we all silly mugs for taking the Cuban missiles seriously in the first place! But Dante suggests that there’s nothing wrong with staging mock battles to reassure ourselves, as long as we keep our eyes open when it starts happening for real.

- Yoshua Wakeham

Videocracy

Dir. Erik Gandini

Videocracy is a film mostly about Italy’s celebrity obsession (not that Australia can really cast stones in that regard). It also examines to a lesser extent Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the unhealthy combination of Berlusconi’s 90% ownership of the media with his political power, including ludicrous (and poor quality) campaign propaganda in which women from swimming pools to supermarkets literally sing the praises of Berlusconi with the refrain “Thank God Silvio exists!”. The most depressing part of this is that according to the film Italians get 80% of their information from TV, which probably explains Berlusconi’s third term as PM (even after congratulating Barack Obama on his ‘suntan’). Filmmaker Erik Gandini lets Berlusconi off the hook somewhat focussing less on his gaffes and more on the media empire of mindless entertainment he’s built.

Although the film is an interesting surface snapshot of the ‘all T-and-A all-the-time’ nature of Italian media and its effect on Italian culture, it fails to really examine the obvious ‘why?’ when it comes to the clearly ingrained cultural issues of sexism and fascism. Instead we see only the media evidence and effects such as bizarre and humiliating auditions to be a silent-stripping TV showgirl (called a ‘velina’) and Italy’s most powerful media manager Lele Mora proudly exhibiting swastikas and Mussolini hymns on his mobile phone. Though the subject matter of media control and the cult of ‘looking good on TV’ is worthy, it’s frustrating that facts such as Italy’s low rankings in gender equality were merely presented and not fully explored.

However these complaints seem somewhat moot as Gandini’s documentary is hardly objective. No counter arguments are offered, nor any interviews or evidence that any Italian anywhere is at all critical of the media or at all self-aware and the tone of the film slips between sinister (with horror soundtrack to boot) and affectionately comical. There are points presented in Videocracy that should be taken seriously but it’s hard to do so in this film.

- Samantha Chater

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