Review: Sydney Underground Film Festival, Day 1 – South of the Border, Un Chien Andalou
UN CHIEN ANDALOU
Seeing as a variation on the above, unforgettable image from Un Chien Andalou is used as the Sydney Underground Film Festival’s logo, it is fitting that the festival begins with Buñuel and Dali’s surrealist masterpiece. This is a festival that has delighted past attendees with films that literally offend the senses such as John Waters’ classic Pink Flamingos in full odourama (disgusting on so many levels!!).
When viewing a canonical film such as Un Chien Andalou in a festival context, I find that the actual experience of the film in terms of the viewing conditions becomes more important to me than the film as a textual object. That is, I find myself thinking about what makes the film interesting/special in this time and place, rather than simply what it is about the film that intrigues me. However, in the case of this film and this festival, it is the combination of experience and film that makes it amazing. The film’s original score, that memorable music that propels the anti-narrative along so perfectly, has been replaced with a live remix of soundtracks from B-grade horror films.
Initially I thought that the film lost some of its charm with this removal of the original score. At times I could hear the familiar music in my head. The new score was eerie and disjointed and at times did not seem to fit the images. However, at these points of disjunction I found myself thinking about the surrealist principles of Dali and Buñuel — particularly the impulse to destroy narrative that is so prevalent at the textual level of this film. The remixed score thus added an extra level of complexity to the surrealist aesthetic, and the result was a different experience entirely.
Opening night feature: SOUTH OF THE BORDER
The festival guide describes Oliver Stone’s docu-journey through Latin America, South of the Border, as the most controversial film of 2010. This message is imposed upon the audience well before actually sitting down to enjoy the film, as members of activist groups roam the space outside the cinema distributing Socialist Alternative Green Left Weekly magazines, information about fundraisers, and flyers for upcoming demonstrations. Introduced by the journalist and activist Federico Fuentes, an ‘expert’ in Latin American politics, a man who openly admitted having not yet seen the film, but who asserted its controversial nature, stating that ‘this film is controversial because it tells the truth!’ The film is initially framed as a masterpiece that has received bad press because of its political content.
South of the Border opens with a condemnation of the bias and cluelessness of U.S news media. The object of the film: to powerfully reveal the role of mass media in shaping U.S perceptions and foreign policy. What transpires is the cinematic experience tainted by politics. This is not to say that the cinema should not be political, but that cinema as a medium should be enough to communicate its political message.
The content of this film is important and indeed politically relevant, but the television current affairs aesthetics are distracting. A lot of hearsay is portrayed as evidence, including reference to a private conversation between U.S president Obama and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez regarding the impossibility of future coups. Shots of Stone playing soccer with Chavez Bolivian president Evo Morales and questioning Argentinean president Cristina Kirchner about her shoe collection are unnecessary and irrelevant, despite the fact that their use as a filmic device is obvious. Closed questions coupled with a constant commentary from Stone limits the scope of interpretation of the film and leaves me expecting Naomi Robson to begin commentating at any minute.
Perhaps the initial confrontation took me off guard, but it seems that the experience of this film under these conditions would be better suited to an activist meeting than a film festival.
Emma Jane McNicol
11/09/10 - 2:58 AM
I wish I was there with you.
Cito
14/09/10 - 12:12 PM
Just to clarify a few things:
“members of activist groups roam the space outside the cinema distributing Socialist Alternative magazines”
Actually, they were *Socialist Alliance* members, distributing their newspaper Green Left Weekly. GLW, and Socialist Alliance supports Venezuela, whereas Socialist Alternative wouldn’t go anywhere near it. That is, in fact, where they were on opening night – somewhere else.
“Introduced by an ‘expert’ in Latin American politics, a man who openly admitted having not yet seen the film, asserted its controversial nature, stating that ‘this film is controversial because it tells the truth!’”
Actually, Federico Fuentes *is* an expert on Latin American politics, having worked for several years for a Venezuelan NGO studying the Chavez movement, coauthoring a book on the history and rise of the Bolivian governing party MAS, and having lived and worked as a journalist in Latin America for several years, covering the material featured in the film.
The truth of the matter is that the situation in Venezuela is controversial largey because – as Fuentes pointed out – the process unfolding there challenges the There Is No Alternative consensus of the post-Cold War years, putting forward a blatantly pro-poor and pro-worker alternative.
Add to this the fact that media coverage of this in Australia is limited to uncritically reprinting news wires from the US, rather than genuine journalism (for some time, Fuentes was the *only* Australian journalist actually based in the entirety of Latin America – I assume there are now *none*), and I think the statement ‘this film is controversial because it tells the truth!’ bears a ring of, well, truth.
Personally, I thought the film itself jumped around too much to do the topic justice, and it missed a few punches in both directions. But that’s a different story.
As for whether it’s better suited for an activist meeting, well, it was an *underground* film festival, was it not? There’s sightly more to “underground” than zombie porn and quaint dadaism.
Cito
14/09/10 - 12:13 PM
Also, Stone payed soccer with Evo Morales of Bolivia (not Chavez).
Jessie
14/09/10 - 5:36 PM
Insert joke about the Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea here
Whitney M
14/09/10 - 6:11 PM
Thanks for your comment, Cito. I’ll fix up those things that you pointed out. My point with the gripe about Fuentes’ introduction was that he made a value judgement of the film without having seen it at all. To pre-package the film in this way, as the controversial truth, is dangerous and immediately sets my alarm bells ringing. I begin to question whose truth it is that is being represented. Yes, the film may well tell the truth of the situation in Latin America but it does so in a way that makes me question the nature of this truth. I do understand the political importance of the film, however, I think that its message could have been delivered with more sincerity had it been produced more stylishly (i.e. with less today/tonight aesthetics).
As for my comment re: activist meeting, I referred to the atmosphere of the screening conditions: political information upon entering the festival+ political film+ assumed political discussion after the film. I attended because of my love for underground and experimental film, not because of any political inclinations that I may or may not have, and I felt dissatisfied. To me this festival is about a celebration of independent and experimental filmmaking, of films that are confronting and visually/emotionally challenging, and of underground film culture. The applause at the end of this screening seemed to speak to none of those things.
@Jessie: chortle, chortle.
Conall Cash
14/09/10 - 7:16 PM
Thanks Cito for those clarifications. The relevant sections of the article have been amended. Given our desire to put out these festival reports quickly and while the event is still running, this can unfortunately lead both us and our writers to overlook some necessary fact-checking.
I agree that an underground film festival, or let’s say any independent film festival, is an ideal forum for political discussion, a space where activist groups, as well as politically engaged film intellectuals and filmmakers, should be able to engage with spectators on questions both political and aesthetic; I certainly also agree that the hollowing out of the term ‘underground cinema’ so that it comes to mean ‘extreme’ genre cinema and nothing much else is an alarming development, one that we see here in Melbourne more than anywhere with MUFF. I do wonder about Whitney’s distinction in her final paragraph between what is appropriate for a film festival and what is appropriate for an activist meeting, though I don’t think her article entirely intends such a strong dichotomization. What I think Whitney is responding to there is the lack of attention, in both Stone’s film and in the rhetoric of its advocates (I say this without having attended the screening or seen the film, just following Whitney’s argument), to the question of the politics of form, the fact that a film’s politics cannot be reduced to its content or its stated intention or meaning, and that a political movement wishing to use cinema as a medium for furthering its cause needs to address questions of cinematic form; a film that carries a radical message while not in any way radicalising its own formal makeup, following established conventions of documentary realism that reinforce the spectator’s fantasy that what they see on screen is real and unmediated, seriously limits its radical capacity. (Many readers will perceive that here I am following a line of argument developed by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics of their great, post-1968 period, where they attack what they identify as ‘bad faith’ left-wing filmmakers like Costa-Gavras and Peter Davis on similar grounds; I am quite happy to acknowledge that my writing here is derivative of that work.)
More than anything I think that the whole situation – both the events surrounding the SUFF screening as Whitney describes them, and more generally the ways that Stone’s film has been talked about, advocated and abused – is indicative of the incredibly poor state of film culture’s relationship to radical politics, or let’s even just say left wing politics, today. You no doubt know of the murky right wing politics that MUFF is associated with, and perhaps also of the shameful stance of our main film festival, MIFF, on Israel-Palestine, a stance that has brought MIFF much adulation for its commitment to ‘diversity’ and ‘freedom of speech,’ so much so that the festival received the Voltaire Award for its efforts – here we find that a ‘commitment to freedom of speech’ is now equated with a ‘refusal of politics’ – which of course in fact means a refusal of any challenge to the dominant political system. These are just examples of film culture’s divestment from left politics; one can also look at it from the other direction, at the fact that filmmakers like Stone and Michael Moore are taken seriously by much of the left, for whom debates over cinematic form, over how films are working materially rather than simply what the films are ’saying,’ appear totally irrelevant to political concerns. There needs to be a reinvigoration of exchange between film culture and radical politics; the strangeness and disappointing results of the SUFF screening and of Stone’s film (according to Whitney anyway) make this need starkly apparent.
- The editors
Conall Cash
14/09/10 - 7:21 PM
(apologies for any redundancy, my comment was written before I read Whitney’s)