Screen Machine

Review: MIFF ‘10: The Strange Case of Angelica, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Caterpillar, Nostalgia for the Light

After two weeks of daily review publications, we finally caved in at the end of MIFF. These final reviews of the last two days of the festival have taken a while to come together, but they do represent our responses to some of the most interesting films of this year’s festival, and we hope they will still be of interest despite their delayed appearance.

The Strange Case of Angelica

Manoel de Oliveira has been thinking of this film, in one form or another, for many decades. As is often the case with the films in which he casts his grandson, Ricardo Trepa, Angelica has an autobiographical tinge: this story of a young photographer who is called upon by a wealthy family to take commemorative photos of the body of their recently deceased, very beautiful young daughter, is said to be inspired by Oliveira’s own experience as a photographer in the 1930s.

Of course, this story of a man who becomes so obsessed with the image of a dead woman that he brings her back to life is one steeped in the history of cinema, calling upon our memory of Otto Preminger’s Laura, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (the greatest story of obsession, the greatest story of cinema, that we have), and those immortal stories of the mania of photographers and cameramen, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Angelica is almost weightless on a certain level, gorgeous in the simplicity of its presentation like all of Oliveira’s late films, but the depth of this history of images and stories is always there, if we dare to look for it.

There seems to always be one moment in an Oliveira film at which I find tears coming to my eyes. In Christopher Columbus, The Enigma, it is the moment when a traffic light changes while the two protagonists are sitting in the back seat of a New York taxi; in last year’s Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, it’s when Oliveira’s camera begins to track through the rooms of a house and a character is heard reading some lines from a Portuguese poet. In Angelica, this moment happened near the end: after seventy-odd minutes with no camera movement, a sudden, remarkable shift occurs in the narrative, and our photographer, Isaac (played by Trepa), starts to run, as if moving towards his beloved, dead Angelica. As he does so, Oliveira’s camera moves with him, in a series of shots that follow Isaac running out of his house, down streets and alleys, towards Angelica. This sudden bursting into life, coming as it does just minutes before the second of the film’s two deaths, offers one of the few moments of absolute aesthetic bliss, of true cinematic jouissance, to be found at this festival. Oliveira has given us more of these moments than perhaps any other filmmaker; this is one of the many things that we thank him for.

- Conall Cash

Caterpillar

Koji Wakamatsu emerged in the 1960s, associated both with thepinku genre of softcore pornography and with the more artistically vaunted realm of the Japanese New Wave. With films like Vagabond of Sex and Ecstasy of the Angels (the latter of which screened at MIFF last year) he found ways to combine a fascination with sex and violence with the aesthetic and political avant-gardism of the New Wave. In 2010, Wakamatsu is still going, and whileCaterpillar sees him working in a considerably more restrained directorial style than his ‘60s classics, the same concerns about sexuality, violence, ideology and their interrelation are at the forefront.

This is an astonishing film, certainly one of the best of the festival. Restricted almost entirely to a single room, we witness the grim reunion between a returning soldier and his wife, Shigeko (Keigo Kasuya), some time during the China-Japan war, not long before Japan’s entry into war with America. The soldier, Lieutenant Kurokawa (Keigo Kasuya), has lost his limbs, his hearing and his speech – a caterpillar that can barely crawl, he requires Shigeko’s attention at every moment. She must give her life over to him, doing her part for the Empire of Japan.

As the true story of how Kurokawa received his injuries emerges, and as war with China leads to a full engagement in World War Two, Wakamatsu develops as searing and devastating a critique of the forces of war as any I can name. At the same time, he brilliantly limits the scope of his story almost entirely to these two individuals, Kurokawa and his wife, and the lifeless lives they each must continue to live in order to perform their required roles. Suicide, an act of bravery on the battlefield, would be a sin at home; and so there is no option but to continue to live, eating and sleeping, eating and sleeping. When Wakamatsu finally, at the very end of the film, ‘zooms out’ from this intense focus to a brief account of statistics detailing the number of lives lost in each battle and at each of the atomic bombings that ended the war, the effect of this combination of elements (a kind of Hitchcockian move, simultaneously zooming out and tracking forward) is truly overwhelming.

- Conall Cash
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Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

MIFF closing night didn’t share the pomp and ceremony of opening night at the Regent. It was screened in two lumpy-chaired Greater Union cinemas. The one I was in took a while to fill up, and even then it wasn’t a packed house. Popcorn and Choc Top rocked on their knees at the front of the cinema as John Safran opened the film. After pointing out that we were in the pleb cinema (the other one was for invited guests only), he went on a tangent about how someone at opening night told him that Richard Moore is an arsehole, but that Richard had always been a very nice guy to him, but maybe only because he’s on the telly. Then a Myer from the MIFF board got up and gave the obligatory boring but nice speech thanking the volunteers, after which a short, whimsical mockumentary of Choc Top and Pop Corn’s MIFF experience was screened. When that died down, the opening chords of Space Oddity sounded and the ‘Matter of Taste’ duo got up and did some interpretive dancing, and then walked around the cinema mingling with their fans. As they climbed the stairs near us, my cute friend waved at them frantically and told me “I love Popcorn, he’s so friendly!” The whole thing was bizarre, and the en masse, crazy-eyed fatigue of MIFF was absolutely salient.

The closing night film itself was a musical biopic (directed by Mat Whitecross) about Ian Dury, a British new wave punk rocker. Dury’s songs are only familiar to me because of Australian ads of the 80s – the Samboy ad that uses “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” and that goddam Spray’n’Wipe ad that uses the rhyming couplet structure of “Billericay Dicky”. Besides being a unique artist who wrote catchy toons and toed the line between spoken word poetry and rock’n’roll, Dury is also known for his polio-induced physical disability and refusal to be moulded into a figurehead for the disabled.

There’s something about seeing a great musician reduced to a biopic that is really damaging – I was seriously burned by Walk the Line and its hideous soundtrack. I thought that because I wasn’t familiar with Ian Dury that this biopic wouldn’t be as disappointing. But it was. It has a great cast: Andy Serkis’ plasticky body and flexible face translate very well from CGI to real life; Olivia Williams is perfectly supportive as usual; and Gareth and Finchy from The Office are both a real treat. The opening credits are fun, punky and Python-esque, and utilised as segues throughout the film. There’s also an interesting narrative device whereby Dury performs elements of his own story from a stage. But style can’t hide the fact that this is at heart a generic biopic, even if it diverges visually from the form. It is like being shoved on a Disney ride and getting force-fed the homogenised formula of someone’s complex, artistic, messy, flawed and dignified life – the worst part of the ride being when the band gathers in a room, a few chords are strummed and suddenly, we segue on to a stage where the crowd is out of control over those humble strains which have now turned into their most famous song.

In my opinion, the only way to watch a generic biopic is at midday, midweek, on the couch, in my pajamas, about a decade after it was made.

- Maggie Scott

Nostalgia for the Light

Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the light draws upon the cinema’s unique power to evoke metaphor and analogy, as it documents and reconciles the ongoing activities of three separate groups of people working in the Atacam desert in Chile, providing an emotive and gently intellectual meditation on “the gravity of memory”.

The film establishes the Atacam Desert as the only place in the world with zero humidity, and therefore the clearest skies in the world. This makes the desert a key site for the international construction and maintenance of observatories that can ceaselessly operate, uninhibited by the distorting properties of rainfall and atmospheric moisture.  Throughout the film we see and hear from one of the Chilean astronomers as he casually muses on the grandiose scope of his work, which involves the processing of light and sound data received from deep space (and therefore the distant past) in order to elucidate fundamental problems and questions concerning the origins and nature of not only our being but time and the cosmos itself. Concurrently, we learn that the desert’s unique weather has allowed it to preserve some of the most ancient traces of human activity, including an array of sparse petroglyphs depicting abstract human and animal figures, as well as enormous, strikingly expressive faces carved upon cliff-faces.  It is therefore a key site for the practice of archaeology, and accordingly we see and hear from a wonderfully excitable Chilean archaeologist about his particular take on work that engages the materiality and spectrality of historical and cosmic memory.

Eventually the film begins to work in what is arguably its central concern, the legacy of the murderous Pinochet regime that also distinguishes and marks the Atacam desert. We hear from astronomers who were imprisoned in the concentration camps of the Atacam, who found solace in secretly studying the stars, as well as an architect who famously memorised the exact dimensions of his camp, and was able to completely reconstruct it in his writing and illustrations, after the regime had dismantled and destroyed it. Most importantly we hear from a remarkable group of women who are painstakingly scouring the desert for traces of the thousands upon thousands who went missing during the regime, or who never returned from the camps. Their activities are marked by their personal memories of the immediate past (which, the film implies, is in many ways more distant than the prehistoric past).

Formally, Nostalgia for the Light is relatively straightforward in its construction, with omniscient voiceover narration acting as a suturing device to string together talking-head interviews, shots of the interviewees and their colleagues at work and expressive montage sequences that act as a visual bedding to the spoken content. The film’s narration, however, is strangely personal in its address, related by a narrator who weaves reflections on his own life experiences into the film without vanity, and without detracting from the personal space of contemplation the film allows its viewers and its subjects. The narrator really only gently prompts the film’s exposition, despite providing reflections of his own on the various things he shows us.

What is interesting is that all of the narrators are plainly aware of each other’s existence, freely and casually drawing analogies between different sections of the film and between each other’s work. For example, one of the women says that she wishes their were telescopes that could look into the ground to help her find the bones of the missing. This segues to the scientists explaining how they use calcium readings to distinguish the birth of stars at the dawn of the cosmos. This takes us to the archaeologist delightfully reminding us that the calcium formed at the beginning of the universe is of course the same calcium that has found its way into our bones today.

Parallel to the kinds of work the film documents, the work of the cinema itself is also to examine, preserve and “deal with” the past – particularly the troubled history of the twentieth century, in which the cinema played such a central role. It is of course then the filmmaker himself, and his audience, who make up the fourth group given to traversing the Atacam desert to find a connection to the world and our shared past.

- Alifeleti Brown

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