To-do: Week starting Thursday 9th September: Maggie Cheung, Alice Creed, This is not a Film Festival #2
Maggie Cheung in Jackie Chan's "Police Story," a film you won't be seeing at the Melbourne Cinematheque's Cheung retrospective
New releases opening Thursday include The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Despicable Me and Please Give. Other films to check out this week include Sunday night’s double-bill at the Astor of screwball classics, George Cukor’s Holiday and Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday. On Monday the Astor will also be screening Michael Mann’s Heat.
Those of you who made your first venture to 1000 Pound Bend the other week for the secret screening of L.A. Zombie will have a chance to return for another notable film screening on Tuesday, as the monthly This Is Not A Film Festival series kicks into its second session. They’ll be screening a selection of short films made by local filmmakers.
The Melbourne Cinematheque is finished with its Alain Delon season and is now immediately moving on to a Maggie Cheung retrospective (apparently they think nobody will go to their screenings unless every single one is part of a spectacular retrospective extravaganza focused on a director or actor – a decision that rather limits the possibilities for programming). Astonishingly, this three week ‘retrospective’ manages to skip over the entirety of Cheung’s career as a major star of Hong Kong action cinema in fifty-odd films, instead focusing solely on her appearances in reassuringly high-quality, auteurist films by Wong Kar-wai, Stanley Kwan and others. This Wednesday we have Kwan’s tremendous The Actress (aka Centre Stage), in which Cheung stars as silent film star Ruan Lingyu (and also as herself), along with Olivier Assayas’ much-loved Irma Vep.
Alifeleti Brown
12/09/10 - 1:16 PM
To be fair, The Melbourne Cinémathèque relies on retrospectives for a number of reasons that have little to do with getting bums on seats. By saying that we do retrospectives only because we think it will earn us popularity makes us sound like simplistic weasels, and is frankly quite idiotic. How and why the Cinematheque formulates its retrospectives is quite clearly much more complicated than your criticism suggests.
The principle and most obvious reason we do retrospectives is that it helps, of course, to foster appreciation of a film-maker/actor/producer/cinematographer by allowing a series of works to contextualise one another. While we often pitch our retrospectives as exploring a particular trend that characterises the style and career of a film-maker/actor/producer, we do try and evince things like range, digressions and aberrations where possible within the constraints of print availabilty, freight cost etc. Our aim is certainly not to limit ourselves to a film-maker’s most renowned and defining films, although we include these if they haven’t been shown ever/in ages, or if there is a new restoration, or if they too help contextualise the more overlooked works and vice-versa etc. Indeed when we can we will often isolate a particular phase or stylistic proclivity of a film-maker that has been overlooked, like we did with our Lang retrospective.
Secondly, compiling retrospectives with a distinct focus allows us to import films in bulk, as packages, from or in conjunction with organisations we have established, or are seeking to establish, a relationship with. As a non-profit film society this means we can, in a pedagogically relevant manner, import/screen more films on our meager budget. As well as the problem of finding and securing the rights to prints, one of our biggest curatorial problems with formulating our retrospective content concerns freight costs. If such-and-such studio/distributor/archive can send us three good prints at once, and we can make them fit into our programme, then we’ll happily take it.
Finally, we don’t do only auterist-actor seasons: we do retrospectives based on national cinemas, film movements, historical epochs etc (remember our Perestroika season a few months ago?). While it would be great to do more thematic and cross-cultural seasons like the “Teenage Wildlife” programme described in the recent edition of Rouge, these are logistically difficult to put together: you have to consult a separate studio/distributor/archive for each film, and have them imported separately. As far as time and money goes, that’s too difficult to do. This would be easy if we were a one-off festival per year, but we’re not: we have ensure we have content once a week for most of the year.
Let’s consider the case of the Maggie Cheung season in point. We are focusing on her key achievements as an actor. Her prowess as an actress was not realised in the action/comedy films of the 80’s and she only came to be considered an actress of ability after being cast in Wong Kar Wai’s “As Tears Go By”. I’d say the possibility ot getting at least one film from this phase of Maggies career was canvassed, but we probably couldn’t find a worthy print or afford the rights. We secured a pretty good deal with HKETO which meant we could afford actually afford the costs of screening more contemporary films like Centre Stage and Ashes of Time Redux.
Really, it’s a miracle that The Melbourne Cinémathèque is even feasible in this day and age.