Review: SUFF Report, Day 3
Life and Death of a Porno Gang
After the Rainbow (Soda_Jerk, Australia).
There is something about the idea of ‘recycled cinema’ that I really love. Recycled cinema is, to me, kind of like the rebirth of the cinema. To take a film or image that is the work of someone else, be it familiar or obscure or anything in between, and re-edit it into something original is literally an offering of new energy to a tired medium. There was one film in the recycled cinema session of SUFF this year that truly embodied this energy and reinvigorated my love for this particular type of filmmaking: After the Rainbow.
Through a re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz this latest offering from video artist duo Soda_Jerk investigates the temporal dimensions of cinema. This film re-edits the opening of Oz, which begins with a black and white image of the young, hopeful Judy Garland. As Garland returns home after a visit to the fortune teller, a twister approaches. In the foreground of these shots, Garland runs to the safety of the family home. But in After the Rainbow, the background of the frame, where the twister resides, is replaced by images of burning celluloid in a filmic gesture that echoes the detonation of an atomic bomb. This is not Kansas as we know it.
Following the narrative of the original film, the storm lifts the house and carries it to an unknown land. When the house crashes to a halt, we hear applause. As Garland tidies herself and walks toward the front door we expect to step into the technicolour wonderland of Oz with her, but we are instead faced with an image of Garland’s disillusioned adult self. This confrontation between the young, hopeful Garland and her older, cynical self speaks not only to the tragic lives of cinema starlets throughout time but also to a broader confrontation between the golden age of the cinema and the contemporary situation we cinephiles find ourselves in: an era when film, the object of our affections, is literally disappearing.
Flyscreen (Richard Tuohy, Australia).
8 minutes of experimental 16mm cine-cubism: what a glorious way to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon. The festival guide describes Richard Tuohy’s Flyscreen as an ‘abstract fly’s-eye-view of the world’, but although I tried to see it in this way I think it speaks to me best as a child’s-eye-view of the world. When I was a small girl I used to press my face up against the flyscreen on the windows in our house. I would try to be able to see through the gaps and use the black plastic lattice as a frame for my view of the world. I would look down at the green grass of the paddocks, at the imposing sheds that were constantly being erected around our house, and at the mountains in the distance through a seemingly endless number of tiny little black boxes. I could reframe these things with a single movement of my body. If I wanted I could focus on the little black frames and force the world around me into an unidentifiable blur. This was a powerful feeling.
As the seemingly endless black lattice slides across the screen from left to right, then right to left, then from above, diagonally, and any other way you could imagine it, it is this particular memory of the rendering of the familiar into a kind of blurry obscurity that is evoked from deep within my mind. As such, my experience of Flyscreen marks a momentary regression to a childhood where the smallest things can become acts and assertions of power. Perhaps my childhood experience of this flyscreen is why I remained utterly fixated on the cinema screen for the film’s entirety, while people around me were moaning with boredom.
Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Mladen Djordjevic, Serbia).
The second last film of the festival had been described to me as perhaps one of the most confronting films I would see all year. The festival director mentioned on a number of occasions that this film almost suffered the fate of L.A. Zombie, only narrowly being allowed the classification exemption necessary for it to be screened.
This film acts on some level as a sequel to Djordjevic’s previous film Made in Serbia (2005), a documentary about the harsh realities of the Serbian porn industry. Life and Death of a Porno Gang begins as a mockumentary about a filmmaker attempting to fund (and make) his first film, eventually becoming a porn director who sometimes ‘misuses’ the money of the porn company to make art/porn films. Think high angled shots of a desperate farmer fertilising his land with his own seed. The festival guide describes this film as one that ‘slowly descends into madness’ and I wholeheartedly agree. The filmmaker eventually becomes the leader of a ‘porno cabaret’ that travels from village to village across rural Serbia performing live sex acts as a means of sexual confrontation. These performances are popular amongst the locals but often provoke violent responses in the hours following. One particularly arresting scene sees the cabaret members simultaneously bursting into laughter as they are raped by rural Serbs.
The troupe are eventually approached by a foreign war correspondent who offers them copious amounts of money in exchange for filming theatrical or artistic murders of willing victims who no longer care about living. So the porno gang become the producers of snuff films, and continue on a downward spiral that eventually leads to them becoming the first Serbian ‘snuff cabaret’. One member of the cabaret eventually exclaims ‘I came on this journey to fuck, not to kill.’ So what began as a celebration of confrontational sex acts becomes a violent expression of desperation and ultimate exploitation. By the conclusion of the film it is initially difficult to unite these events of the second part with those of the first, despite the fact that the aesthetics remain the same throughout. It’s almost as if the film’s slow descent into madness transforms it entirely.
Life and Death of a Porno Gang is a visually confronting cinematic experience, with images of a goat being slain and a transvestite fellating a horse remaining in my mind for quite some time afterwards. But what is truly amazing about this film is that it was funded entirely by the Serbian government. In a Skype Q&A following the film, Djordjevic explains to the audience the importance of this film, that ‘it is a film about political pornography and social pornography, and also sexual pornography.’ However, he concedes that the government may not give him any more money in the future.
