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Matthew O’Shannessy speaks with the creator of the first narrative film put on the internet.
We can imagine an alternate ending to Cowboys and Aliens: The film would end with the alien proleteriat revolting against their masters and cooperating with the Apaches to throw the white men off their land.
Week starting Thursday 22nd September
New movies opening this week:
TABLOID is Errol Morris’ latest documentary, utilising his method of direct-to-camera interviews, he explores the bizarre story of a former beauty queen who pursued her Mormon lover to Britain leading to the famous “sex in chains” story that dominated tabloid newspapers.
CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (3D) is Werner Herzog’s documentary about the Chauvet Cave which features the earliest known cave paintings. Somewhere in the film there are mutant albino alligators.
Special events:
WORLD CINEMA NOW…
Week starting Thursday 15th September
Special seasons:
FIRE IN BABYLON is a documentary about the West Indian cricket team in the 1970s and 80s and their journey to becoming one of the greatest sporting teams in history. At ACMI, September 15-October 5.
The Melbourne Cinematheque presents ‘Tropical Maladies: The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel’, a retrospective of the Argentinian filmmaker who has directed only three features. This week’s films are THE HOLY GIRL (2004) about an adolescent girl who undergoes a sexual awakening and…
Week starting Thursday 8th September
New films opening this week:
13 ASSASSINS is Takashi Miike’s colourfully violent samurai film about a band of assassins sent to kill the murderous Shinzaemon who threatens to plunge the country into violent darkness. The extended fight scene that closes the film is particularly amazing.
SUBMARINE is a remake of Harold and Maude or maybe of Rushmore. In any case, it’s a coming of age story about a precocious teenager with whimsical affectations who falls in love with…
In an interview with David Walsh a few months ago for the World Socialist Website, Joseph McBride, film historian and author of a recent biography of Steven Spielberg, remarked scathingly:
“A great deal of the academic writing in the 1970s on film was just appalling. The field was taken over by people … it’s difficult to characterize them in one sentence … but, for example, I remember reading one book on film theory that after thirty pages hadn’t mentioned a single film yet. I stopped reading the book. In the introduction of another book on film theory the author said, more or less, ‘I don’t have time to go to movies anymore because I’m spending all my time writing about them.’ Film studies became a field populated by people who were not particularly interested in films, they were interested in something else, a fact that was not especially healthy for film studies.”
The statement intended by our publication of this series of papers on unseen films is, quite simply: Bring back those great, unhealthy days! In these five essays we explore the notion of the unseen film, and how questions of not seeing, seeing nothing (as in Dorian Stuber’s essay), writing without seeing (as in the essays by myself, Daniel Fairfax and Goda Trakumaite) or the unseen films that seen films produce (as in the essay by Josefina Garcia Pullés) allow us to pose new questions both of the cinema and of its others, the latter encapsulated in McBride’s scorned “something else”: the others of cinema, the thoughts it provokes, creates, distorts or obfuscates, whose pursuit may finally be of greater value than ’seeing’.
This paper is concerned with a gesture in film criticism so unabashedly perverse as to be perhaps difficult for us to take seriously: I’ll be talking about what it might mean for a critic to write about a film they haven’t seen. In considering some instances of this peculiar phenomenon in criticism, I hope to introduce a discussion of the (often untheorised) notion of experience as it is given to us in criticism, and to think about what it is…
First things first. This is not a piece about watching The Clock. Or rather, it is a piece about not watching The Clock. Or rather still, it is a piece about watching clocks. Let me explain.
Having carved out a couple of days free of in-semester duties at Yale, and with a number of engagements further enticing me, I had decided to embark on one of my regular (though not as regular as I would sometimes like) weekend trips down to…
About the extermination strictly speaking there is nothing.
—Claude Lanzmann
o how marvelous
to be able to watch what one can’t see
—Jean-Luc Godard
Less than ten years separate the births of Claude Lanzmann (b. 1925), Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) and Susan Sontag (b. 1933), three of the twentieth century’s most significant theorists of the image. Each was a child or adolescent during the war who avoided, by accident of circumstance and birth, its worst depredations; each would be profoundly affected by images—real and imagined—of…
Chantal Akerman’s D’Est (From the East) opens with a dark blue nighttime shot of a street lamp and some power-lines, an empty road underneath them. The title appears in the centre of the screen in bold white letters, some kind of simple and elegant font. This is followed, a few still minutes later, by a shot of another street, this one in daylight, framed by a window with a green or yellow curtain slowly flapping in the wind. Through the…
A filmmaker isn’t supposed to say
things; his job is to show them.
- François Truffaut
Our mission as spectators is to see films. But, what about those films that are impossible, or almost impossible, to find and see? Do those movies fit the category of the “unseen film”? Films impossible to see… Isn’t visibility the condition of possibility of any given film? So, won’t its “unseen” quality be momentary or, at least, exceptional?
In some countries (mine, for example) movies tend to arrive a…
Week starting Thursday 25th August
Old films:
DEVIL’S ANGELS is a Roger Corman-produced exploitation film starring John Cassavetes as the leader of a biker gang who get in trouble with the law after an incident with a beauty pageant contestant. At ACMI, August 26.
APOCALYPSE NOW: REDUX is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film about the madness of the Vietnam War. This version includes 49 minutes of scenes cut from the original film. At the Astor, August 25.
LORD OF THE FLIES, a 1963 adaptation…
Week starting Thursday 18th August
New films opening this week:
PINA marks another renowned auteur’s foray into 3D. This time, WIm Wenders has made a film inspired by the choreographer Pina Bausch who died in 2009.
COWBOYS AND ALIENS sounds like a movie that would get made if the characters of Pineapple Express became Hollywood executives. But this is a real movie directed by Jon Favreau and starring Daniel Craig. Could potentially be quite fun.
THE WOMAN is an excellently-titled horror film. That is…
Week starting Thursday 11th August:
Special seasons:
The Melbourne Cinematheque resumes programming post-MIFF with a three-week retrospective on the work of Masahiro Shinoda, one of the key figures of the Japanese New Wave. This season begins with THE ASSASSINATION (1964), a period film about a man sent by the government to combat rebel forces intent on restoring the rule of the Emperor, and YOUTH IN FURY (1960) about a young man bored with the drudgery of the student movement and daydreaming of…
I am writing this post a couple of days after the Melbourne International Film Festival for 2011 has ended. It has been a pretty good festival all in all but as with other years, I ended up an exhausted husk of a man in those final few days. This is a problem facing all cinephiles in Melbourne: 50 weeks of general mediocrity and when the film festival finally comes around, film-watching becomes something of a 2-week endurance test. The mania of a film festival doesn’t leave a lot of time for reflection which is kind of a crucial thing for the films that tend to be shown only at film festivals. The importance of reflection has made itself even more evident to me having this year committed myself to watching 60 films in 17 days and writing about them as part of the MIFF blogathon. Here’s one thing about filmgoing that no-one talks about much: A lot of cinephilia involves not seeing films. One also needs to think about films, read about films, talk about films and the time taken to watch films can actually get in the way of these other activities.
International film festivals, for all their smug self-congratulation, still operate in a (sub)culture which takes the majority of its cues from the mainstream. To wit, barely anyone goes to see a German crime trilogy by three of the most shrewd directors operating in Europe today, but there’s a line snaking around the block for a middling documentary about a goddamn restaurant (El Bulli). The effects of the current fetishisation of food, chefs and restaurants, particularly as visual pleasure, are evident here—but so too is a longer-standing logic in the film market and film audience: Germans make films about their traumatic past which are worth seeing, anything else they make, is not. Basically.
Reviews of new films by Athina Rachel Tsangari and Jan Svankmajer, and two films about children in peril.
Reviews of films by James Benning, Ivan Sen and the Dardennes.
Now seems just as good a time as any to bring up again the issue of “slow cinema” or “contemplative cinema”. (Conall Cash made mention of it at last year’s MIFF.) For those not up to speed with the debate that happened last year amongst critics online, Sight and Sound editor Nick James started by citing his apprehension towards slow cinema — there are good and bad examples of it, but if you admit to boredom, you risk the danger of unwarranted accusations of philistinism. Harry Tuttle accused James of anti-intellectualism and argued for slow cinema as a “new narrative mode, a different angle in storytelling” that should not be judged by the norms of mainstream cinema. Steven Shaviro sided more with James arguing that slowness is the least interesting aspect of today’s contemplative cinema — it either lacks the provocation of an Antonioni or Chantal Akerman film or otherwise the main interest lies in the ways the film departs from slow cinema norms.
Love it. Hate it. Just make sure you rate it!
Thus are festival-goers implored to give a rating of 1-5 stars to the films they encounter during the Melbourne International Film Festival. It’s a win-win situation for the festival, MUBI.com and Sony for whom this operates as a handy cross promotion. For a film critic, nothing could be more abominable!
It’s abominable because the star-rating system is the antithesis of the work that critics do. The star system represents the commodification of films, the reduction of the cacophony of signs that is a movie to an arbitrary numerical value. Criticism is on the side of meaning, working out how sounds and images produce meaning. Criticism enters into a dialogue with a film and it is only through this conversation that the film lives as art. A star-rating designates the moment we pronounce a film as dead.
Yesterday two friends independently told me about people they know who make it their business to watch only documentaries at the Melbourne International Film Festival and ignore the fiction films. This seems a bizarre idea for me because I find that the documentaries end up being some of the worst things about the festival, often coasting on the topicality of their subject matter with an often mediocre approach to film form.
What is the difference between fiction films and documentaries? Should we apply different standards of judgement to the two? My tentative idea on this is that we should not judge fiction films differently from documentaries and that values we hold about cinema specific to one or the other will uncover interesting questions about how we watch films. Take, for example, the importance placed on aesthetic beauty. With documentaries, it is not often that one is denounced for having ugly cinematography but with fiction films it is often a point of fixation. We could say this suggests that beautiful cinematography is overvalued in our appreciation of fiction films but we could also say that light and composition are under-analysed in documentaries. The main point I’m putting forth here is that our appreciation of one form will enrich our appreciation of the other.
It is sometimes hilarious how seriously some people take a film festival. In my diary entry for days 5 and 6 of the Melbourne International Film Festival I mentioned my experience with a man who was very vocally annoyed with all this sound I was making with my friend, chatting during the commercials. I can only imagine his reaction to the screening of Zhang Yimou’s Under the Hawthorn Tree which saw a couple of busloads of high school children piling into ACMI Cinema 2 to have a good old go at world cinema appreciation. As it turned out, their presence there was the best thing about the session as the film ended up another dud from Zhang Yimou, a director fallen from grace for, amongst other things, selling out to direct the Olympic opening ceremony. Zhang Yimou specialises in a kind of dog whistle cinema that plays with the sympathies of liberal-minded people naturally concerned for the lives of individuals oppressed under authoritarian rule without actually being a social critique of that authoritarianism. Under the Hawthorn Tree is no exception. The story of two young people falling in love during China’s Cultural Revolution, one can see that this film would have been unthinkable during Maoist China when films exhibiting a reactionary ideology of individualism were suppressed — In order to convince his lady love to take a break from hard labour to swim in the river, Lao San tells her, “Chairman Mao says one shouldn’t fear hardship or death. I say you should learn to have some fun!” But this tension is never really explored. Instead, the characters express a sunny optimism that the Party will change its policies and when the star-crossed lovers eventually part, it is not due to the Party but due to cancer, that old favourite of screenwriters looking to add a dumb tragic ending to a film. Zhang Yimou has said, “To create art, one must always remember that the subject of people in misery has the deepest meaning, the deepest resonance”. I can’t add much more to that.
One has to wonder to what extent Miranda July exists not as a real person but as a fantasy figure, a kind of Frankie Magazine fever dream made flesh. In two films now—Me and You and Everyone We Know and this year’s The Future—Miranda July has cast herself playing for all intents and purposes a constructed version of her real-life persona. How should we put it: A twee, whimsical hipster? If Miranda July really does exists as some aspirational fantasy (and I’m willing to concede this is up for debate) then one has to wonder about the ideals of her demographic. The Miranda July Type is spontaneous (contemptuous of the virtues of routine), childlike and politically naive (lacking in ethical convictions) and paradoxically affected and unaffected at the same time (to keep at bay one’s fear of being on the outside while maintaining the moral high ground of being on the outside). These are apparently the virtues of Generation Y and judging by the squeals of delight every time Miranda July did some spontaneous interpretive dance in her lounge room, they resonated with more than a few people in the audience at MIFF. The Future is both worse and better than her debut feature — It unfortunately doubles down on the magical whimsy (hello talking cat) but is thankfully less trying to be the Statement About American Suburbia that every second American indie film aspires to be.
Reviews of three more MIFF films from Whitney Monaghan and Lauren Bliss
Peter Tscherkassky: This is one of the things which I will explain during the masterclass. It’s a process which in my opinion could not be done with a computer. My example always is: I sit in the darkroom with my laser pointer, with the found footage in front of me, and I want to copy the face of Barbara Hershey [star of The Entity, from which Tscherkassky made two found-footage films, Outer Space and Dream Work]. So I sit there, and it’s nearly completely dark, with just a tiny bit of red light. And I know the face is in this spot. So I copy it, and then move on to the next frame, and I vaguely remember where it was, so I start looking around. Where is it, where is it? Ah, here. — So, I could never program a computer to go and look for Barbara Hershey’s face — but not immediately, to look around for it. This is one of the many effects, so to speak, where the manual process, the hand-crafted aspect, deeply informs what the film looks like. If you were to do that with a computer, it would look like an imitation of something, or I don’t know… I’m quite sure it would have its own beauty, but it would look completely different from what I’m doing. Besides, by that time [by the time I've found the section of the frame where Barbara Hershey's face appears], I’ve created three scratches. You spend months and months with the footage, with the films, and you don’t even start working until the material starts talking to you, asks you for something. And it’s constantly talking to you while you’re looking at it, for months. So, like in Outer Space, the sequence with the sprocket holes. This was something that came up just by chance. One day, by mistake, I copied one of the sprocket holes. So, OK, why not do it on purpose? And what happens if I lift it up, and what happens if I change the angle? There’s a huge amount of chance involved, which also could not be done with a computer. Of course you can put some chance effects inside the computer, but still it would be something completely different.
In Ozu’s final film An Autumn Afternoon, a character says with good-humoured resignation, “Solitary, sad — after all, man is alone,” and the film with similarly good-humoured resignation bears out the truth of his words. But of course the film carries its melancholic attitude with a warmth, humour and grace characteristic of all Ozu’s work.
Man may be alone, but one sometimes gets the feeling at the Melbourne International Film Festival that some punters would much rather prefer to be alone. Before a screening of Post Mortem, an old man sitting next to me crossly told the person in front of him to turn off his phone and then told me off for talking with my friend, all during the advertisements! I could partially sympathise with him though. I too get irritated by people talking in the cinema but it’s not immediately before the film starts but rather immediately after the film ends. It’s at this point while I’m still sifting through the complexities of the images and sounds I’ve just experienced that hearing people give their judgements so quickly seems so overbearing to me.
As it turned out, all the films I saw these last two days paid tribute to our ultimately lonely existences.
Reviews of Li Hongqi’s absurdist comedy, Vibeke Løkkeberg’s doco on the Israel-Palestine conflict and Takashi Miike’s crazed film of a dystopic Tokyo.
Last week I referred to the Straub-Huillet film Class Relations as a relatable film. However, this idea of “relatability” troubled me yesterday after seeing the terrific film Norwegian Wood, an adaptation of Murakami’s novel by the director Tran Anh Hung. Outside the Greater Union cinemas on Russell Street, I heard two filmgoers dismissing the film (about a 19-year-old’s fraught relationship with two women, something like a Japanese Some Came Running) as a 50-year-old’s attitude to life projected onto a teenager. It brought to mind fellow blogger Thomas Caldwell’s recent negative comments about the film:
“I’m not sure whether Norwegian Wood was too weighed down by its literary origins or if Tran was too self-consciously trying to make a worthy art-house film, but I lost interest after the first hour… [T]he long running time and lack of empathetic characters make it increasingly laboured for me.”
Here is the question raised by this comment: Are empathetic characters a prerequisite to a good film? In my opinion they are not. In fact, the very idea of “relatability”, our desire for “empathetic” characters always contains a cultural bias. The presumption is that what happens on screen needs to conform to our understanding of the world.
Though the duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are best known as intellectual filmmakers beloved by a small group of similarly intellectual cinephiles, their 1984 film Class Relations—an adaptation Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel “Amerika”—is perhaps the most relatable film I’ve seen at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, at least to those who know the special indignities of being an employed person. Its scenes of workers being hauled into managers’ offices and raked across the coals with absurd accusations and questions hit close to home in the most painfully funny way possible.
Another very relatable moment happens late in the film when the young protagonist is talking to a student who spends all day working at a store and all night reading books. When asked at what point he fits in sleep, the student replies that at least until he finishes his studies, he will simply be drinking coffee. Coffee gets a bad wrap these days what with the fun we make of latte-sipping yuppies. What we need to do is reclaim coffee as the beverage of the working classes! For it is caffeine which fuels the long shifts and late nights that drive our society. It is blessed caffeine that is fuelling me through the festival as I trudge along to that 60-film mark!
Slap me for passing judgement on the motivations of other filmgoers if you like but I do have to take issue with fellow MIFF blogger Glenn Dunks who recently commented (on Cerise Howard’s blog A Little Lie Down) about how he came to choose the films he booked for the festival:
“A lot of the 60 films I have chosen to see will be indeed released in some variety after the festival, but so many of those that don’t have distribution don’t have distribution for a very good reason. They just don’t sound all that interesting so I don’t feel too bad.”
Maybe the most wrong-headed idea out of all this is the idea that film distributors generally do things “for a very good reason”. While the individuals who work in film distribution may see themselves as doing the work of spreading “good film culture”, the reality is that the decisions of film distributors, from your giant companies to smaller art house outfits, are determined by the same thing: profit motive. Thus, distributors don’t pass over films because they aren’t interesting or good. They pass over films because they don’t fit what distributors calculate to be consumers’ tastes. Anyone with good sense knows of course that there is no strict correlation between consumers’ tastes and good art.
The question raised by Dunks’ comment is: If distributors can be trusted to sort out the “good” films from the “bad” films, then why the hell do we need a film festival? What does a film festival offer us?
Here we are at the start of another Melbourne International Film Festival and isn’t it exciting? No, it’s terrifying! At least for me it is, because I’ve decided to participate in this new MIFF initiative, the “60 Films in 17 Days Blog-A-Thon” in which I will watch a mind-melting 60 films during the course of the festival and be expected to process that experience into actual thoughts and then write something semi-coherent and useful about it to publish in this exciting new media format called Myspace or something.
So what is usually one of my favourite times of the year is starting to sound like a lot of hard work! That’s true of a lot of things in life though. (I love Christmas and that’s no walk in the park either.) But what’s equally true is that alcohol helps the medicine go down, which is why I present to you the official Screen Machine Drinking Game for the Melbourne International Film Festival which, if you’re over-indulging in cinematic madness like me, will hopefully mellow you out throughout the whole blurriness of these next seventeen days.
Week starting Thursday 7th July
Special seasons:
MUNDANE HISTORY is the award-winning debut of Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong. It’s a sparse family drama, focusing on the domestic rituals of a young paraplegic and his new carer and through that story a larger tale of contemporary Thai society is explored. At ACMI, July 7-10.
The Melbourne Cinematheque presents YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN: THE BALLAD OF NICHOLAS RAY, a three-week retrospective of the great director, held in high regard by the famous French New Wave directors. Jean-Luc…
You may have noticed a kind of critical debate going on at the moment about whether The Tree of Life is a masterpiece or a piece of pretentious wank. The real question is: Have we been able to talk about The Tree of Life in a constructive way such that it might be termed a “work of art”?
Vaughn demonstrates an innate understanding of the primal dynamics of action cinema, aided by a crack conductor’s sense of tempo and pacing.
Week starting Thursday 30th June
New releases opening this week:
THE TREE OF LIFE is Terrence Malick’s Palme d-Or-winning opus, a non-linear rumination on the meaning of life and a reminiscence of childhood.
THE TRIP is Michael Winterbottom’s follow-up to Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing versions of themselves taking a restaurant tour of northern England and talking about stuff. The poor man’s My Dinner with Andre?
Special seasons:
IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL: THE MYSTERY…
This latest Apatovian comedy is of an old comedy tradition – the tradition of Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, Chaplin’s Tramp and even Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean – that uses the figure of the “fool” to articulate the rules and customs of a particular space.
Week starting Thursday 23rd June
New releases opening this week:
SLEEPING BEAUTY is a “controversial” work about “female sexuality” released in unfortunate proximity to Catherine Breillat’s film of the same name.
MEEK’S CUTOFF is the latest film from Kelly Reichardt, the distinctive American independent director. The first period piece for Reichardt, this film follows a group of American settlers and their strained dependence on a Native American as they search for water in the Oregonian desert. Showing at Nova after its exclusive run…
The film’s shiny exterior masks the absence of any real thematic, critical, or even personal substance. The film’s slickness -the efficiency with which it delivers a stock-standard, well-worn cinematic experience – is actually the scariest thing about it.
In his role as Osama bin Laden in the imaginary film Terror in the Shadows, the actor Vincent Gallo asked his director at a pivotal moment in production that question oft-asked by actors: “What’s my motivation here?” Gallo’s director, George W. Bush replied, “You hate freedom”. Thus was a cinematic tendency spawned in which terrorists were assigned character motivations of the most dubious credibility: Hence The Dark Knight’s Joker (“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”) or Derek Frost in the more recent Source Code. The motives of terrorism need not be so obscure but there is a good reason for them to remain so. By keeping the motives of terrorists obscure, one avoids the danger of implicating the terrorised. You can’t talk seriously about the Weather Underground without also talking about the American government killing innocents in Vietnam. You can’t talk seriously about the National Liberation Front of Algeria without talking about the violence of French colonialism. I’m not, of course, implying that victims of terrorism deserve what they get. But motivations and interests do count for something.
Week starting Thursday 16th June
Film festivals:
The Melbourne International Animation Festival features 30 programs of animation over 8 days including new and old films. Highlights include a focus on contemporary Polish animators and a retrospective of UPA studios responsible for characters such as Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing. At ACMI, June 19-26. (site here)
Special seasons:
The Melbourne Cinematheque presents Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a retrospective of the iconoclastic German director. The 3-week season finishes up with The…
Week starting Thursday 8th June
Special seasons:
The Melbourne Cinematheque presents Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a retrospective of the iconoclastic German director. The 3-week season continues with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), the first of his BRD Trilogy dealing with the malaise of wartime defeat and post-war reconstruction, and Veronika Voss (1982) a film loosely based around the life of German actress Sybille Schmitz and the last installment of Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy. At ACMI each Wednesday, June 8-22.
Meek’s Cutoff…
Norma Pearse’s experimental films express ideas about the tensions and mysteries between the spirit and the body.
Week starting Thursday 2nd June
New releases opening this week:
Meek’s Cutoff is the latest film from Kelly Reichardt, the distinctive American director of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. The first period piece for Reichardt, this film follows a group of American settlers and their strained dependence on a Native American as they search for water in the Oregonian desert. Showing exclusively at ACMI until June 19. Check out Brad Nguyen’s review here.
Julia’s Eyes is a Spanish horror film about a woman…
Thankfully Reichardt resists any vulgar humanisation of the Indian. We are given neither the conservative certainty of the Indian as savage nor the politically correct version of the Indian as peaceful conduit to the spirit world. Instead we are given the Indian as the question mark that must nevertheless be treated as a full stop.
Week starting Thursday 26th May
New releases opening this week:
Get Low is a comedy set in old timey America about a hermit (Robert Duvall) who demands that a funeral director (Bill Murray) hold his funeral party while he is still alive.
Of Gods and Men won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year. It’s about a group of Trappist monks caught in a bind between Islamic militants and government authorities during the Algerian civil war.
A Beautiful Life, directed by Andrew Lau (Infernal…
Week starting Thursday 19th May
New releases opening this week:
Angèle and Tony is a French romance of some sort with a working class setting and lots of hand held cameras and passionate love-making. Could be good.
La Princesse de Montpensier is a historical epic directed by Betrand Tavernier which, according to Roger Ebert, has “awesome battle scenes”.
Snowtown is yet another gritty Australian crime film about violent working class yobs suffering with some sort of “masculinity crisis”. Yawn.
Main Street is a film about…
Sometimes I wonder how much I really like going to film festivals. Of course, I enjoy getting to travel to foreign cities to watch exciting new (and old) cinema, meeting and hanging out with other foreign critics, all at the festival’s expense — it would be outrageous and ungrateful of me not to. But fun and exciting as it is, still the experience even of a good festival (and South Korea’s Jeonju International Film Festival, under review here, is, I think, one of the best) is often in some way unsatisfying. There are the obvious reasons, things many people who travel to festivals no doubt experience — the discovery that going to three or four films a day quickly starts to resemble work, with its regulated hours and repetitive tasks; the narrowness of the world you are limited to when attending a festival in a foreign city, only dimly aware of your surroundings as you shuffle from one screening to the next; the realisation that you are, at the end of it all, simply a tourist, and as such cannot escape the boredom and fragility that are the essence of the tourist’s experience. But there are two primary reasons for my ambivalence at attending film festivals — the first, entirely personal one, is simply that when I’m at a festival I have to pretend to be a journalist (because, after all, it is as a journalist that I’ve been invited to attend). Pretending to be a journalist means pretending to know what’s going on, to inhabit the contemporary moment (as Chris Fujiwara has written, “journalists work in the very factory of the contemporary, at its “heart machine”… They make the contemporary contemporary”), pretending to care about what the important films are this year and even about the awards; sometimes it even means interviewing and hobnobbing with filmmakers and other visiting artists, pretending to be a part of the festival ‘world,’ or of ‘film culture’. I find this all perfectly impossible, but still I simulate the actions of the journalist or travelling critic (however ambivalently), because the drive to seek out interesting films keeps pushing me on to more festivals whenever the chance to go to one appears, where I find myself facing the same situation.
Somehow this kind of adaptation simultaneously translates and eviscerates the original text, resulting in an anaemic, vacuous experience.
Week starting Thursday 12th May
New releases this week:
Your Highness is the probably very stupid and hopefully very funny fantasy film directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, George Washington) and written by Danny McBride and Ben Best (Eastbound and Down). The film is about two warriors on a quest to save a beautiful virgin from an evil sorceror who wishes to impregnate her with a dragon.
A Chinese Ghost Story (a.k.a. A Chinese Fairy Tale) is a wu xia film inspired…
Week starting Thursday 5th May
Short seasons
The Melbourne Cinematheque finishes its 3-week retrospective season on legendary French filmmaker Alain Resnais. This week’s films are Last Year in Marienbad (1961) about a man trying to convince a woman that they had an affair the year before; and Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963) about a woman who invites her lover from 20 years earlier to stay with her and her stepson. At ACMI, May 11.
Speakeasy Cinema presents Flooding With Love for the Kid, a…
Atheism is probably the philosophy least comfortable with the cinematic form. How to denigrate the faith of others when cinema itself is always, in a sense, an act of faith? How to cry at a film, feel anger or joy without acknowledging the beauty of an illusion?
Week starting Thursday 28th April
New releases this week:
Carlos is a film from Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours, Irma Vep) about the notorious terrorist that was voted as best film of 2010 in Film Comment’s annual critics’ poll. Originally a 3-part miniseries made for television, the version released in Australian cinemas is a much condensed one.
Force of Nature: David Suzuki is a documentary about the revered environmentalist that combines footage of his “last lecture” with his life story.
Mrs. Carey’s Concert is a…
It pains me to read review after review (from many of the so-called top film critics around the world) spouting the same old diatribe that Sucker Punch is all style and no substance. This is a phrase which Australian film critic Adrian Martin condemns as “the most old-fashioned thing any of us can ever say” because it reifies the “hierarchy of plot and character as substance, versus style as a kind of secondary, mere elaboration, potentially useless or ignorable.” This phrase reinforces the similarly old-fashioned notion that the form of a film — and by this I mean the colour, the shots, the editing, music, the rhythm, the mise-en-scene and the lighting — serves only to express the content of the film: that is, the story, characters and themes. Martin further argues that these phrases leave a lot of cinema “working with different economies (or relationships) of form to content out of the picture.” I have come to the conclusion that Sucker Punch is one of those films; that it works with a different economy of form to content, style to substance, from that which we may be more familiar with. Many of the reviews of the film condemn it for having no plot and shallow characters, but I think it is liberating to break free of these conventional ways of thinking about cinema. Why must all characters be three dimensional? Why must we always understand their motivations? Why must all stories flow logically? At this point we must all be questioning: can we ever break free of these semantic shackles?
Week starting Thursday 21st April
New releases this week:
Incendies is a Canadian film from director Denis Villeneuve about two siblings who search for the father they thought to be dead and the brother they knew not to exist following the death of their mother.
Potiche is a camp farce from Francois Ozon set in 1977 and depicting a submissive wife (Catherine Deneuve) who runs her husband’s umbrella factory after the workers revolt against their boss. Ozon said of his film, “I wanted…
Week starting Thursday 14th April
New releases this week:
Paul is the latest film from “Screen Machine’s favourite director” Greg Mottola, the guy who directed the “Best Film of 2009″ Adventureland, Superbad and the rarely-seen The Daytrippers (1996) which, according to Screen Machine Co-Editor Conall, is “good”. What’s this one about? It’s about an alien hanging around with those British guys from Shaun of the Dead.
Murundak: Songs of Freedom is a documentary about Aboriginal protest singers. Apparently Missy Higgins likes this movie.
Brighton Rock…
Hall Pass inhabits the world of the R-Rated Comedy, that contemporary genre in which anything, it seems, is possible – No joke is off bounds. Anything goes no matter how scatological or smutty. But like so many other films of its ilk, its air of anarchy belies a highly conservative attitude towards the family institution.
Week starting Thursday 7th April
New releases this week:
I Love You Phillip Morris is a comedy about a conman who falls in love during a stint in prison from directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa best known as the writers of Bad Santa. We gave it a positive review when it played at MIFF last year. Exclusively at Nova.
How I Ended This Summer is a thriller about the rocky relationship between two men living together in isolation for several years at a…
In denying that Ginsberg’s word is gospel, the filmmakers imbue Howl with a playful performativity, that is in fact faithful to its adapted source. The film has fun with Ginsberg’s words, as well as revising his immortalised cult status. As Franco convincingly reads personal admissions from original interview footage, his Ginsberg comes closer to us, and the distance of the cult icon slowly diminishes.
Week starting Thursday 31st March
New releases this week are:
Brian Eno: Another Green World is a BBC documentary on the renowned musician/producer/many other things, who has worked with David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2. Screening exclusively at ACMI, April 1-4.
Le quattro volte is a film from Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino that explores the philosophical idea of transmigration - the passing of the soul from human, animal, plant and finally mineral. Screening at the Nova after a short run at ACMI.
Never Let Me Go…
Simultaneously shedding inhibitions and donning some sexed-up wayfarer 3D glasses, some friends and I went to see Piranha 3D. Walking out of the cinema and swapping the glasses for lofty ideals, my friend pointed out the film’s “hipster scattergun” approach to costume design and mise en scène (I coined the term “hipsterectomy”, but not in time to use it). The male lead (Steven R. McQueen) wore a Pixies t-shirt and a Lou Reed poster was conspicuously plastered on his bedroom wall. I felt an anxious twinge because I had one of those two things and know multiple people who have both. I think I resented the film’s clear avenues for narcissism: either it was fawning for my approval, or it was too accurate and, by means I am yet to understand, repellent.
A sycophantic spectator-massaging approach to character psychology and narratology often goes unnoticed by me (because I’m a lazy filmgoer prone to napping), but I met this noisy aesthetic with resistance: the cultural worth of certain iconographies was implicated on screen, and I with it. These thoughts lay dormant while I rejigged my wardrobe, bought some new posters and contemptuously binned some old ones. Then I stumbled upon the thought that these motifs were speaking to a massive chunk of the audience, not just to me and, quite possibly, were being misconstrued by other people. I thought about the publicness of cinema itself and mass marketing. Increasingly confused, I was unsure whether I resented the film, other people, or myself.
Week starting Thursday 24th March:
New releases this week are:
Kaboom, a science fiction film from Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin, The Doom Generation) about a sexually promiscuous film student whose dreams become manifest in his waking life.
Biutiful is a sure to be dour film about “the state of the world” from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel, Amores Perros). The Village Voice’s J Hoberman remarked that “this blatantly artistic movie isn’t just awful but confidently so”.
Barney’s Version is a comedy-drama starring Paul Giamatti. Based…
Week starting Thursday 17th March:
The 21st Melbourne Queer Film Festival is running March 17-27. Expect films that are a bit more mediocre than usual but with maybe one vaguely arousing sex scene. Expect cringe-inducing program titles like “Cock Tales” (Get it? Males have penises lol). Website is here if you have money to burn.
The Melbourne Cinematheque has programmed a demanding night of cinema under the title “Urban(e) Visions: John Smith, Steven Ball & Terence Davies”. Films include John Smith’s Hotel…
As contemporary popular culture demands ever more shocking sexual spectacles, the contradiction in Black Swan becomes apparent: the film advocates for a liberated art but this can only be achieved by obeying the demands of the super-ego (embodied in Vincent Cassel’s domineering choreographer).
Week starting Thursday 10th March:
Opening this week:
Howl is the James Franco-starring film exploring both the Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of American poet Allen Ginsberg’s noted poem Howl. Matt Connolly of Reverse Shot summed it up as “leav[ing] one feeling informed but not enlightened, cognizant of artistic gambles but only recalling well-intentioned pieties: I’m Not There as directed by Stanley Kramer.”.
Rango is an animated film about a chameleon stranded in the desert from Gore Verbinski, that some-kind-of-genius who gave us…
With Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul once again reminds us that one can make a true break with the known into the unknown, a break that is key to our redemption.
Week starting Thursday 3rd March:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s masterful Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a cinematic poem concerning a man who in his last days finds himself surrounded by his loved ones including his dead wife and his lost son who has taken the form of a ghost monkey. The film was listed in our round up of 2010 at number 3. At ACMI until March 14.
The Water Magician is Japanese master filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi’s silent film about a female…
If the superhero genre is mainly concerned with how to tell the same basic story over and over again while finding endless superficial variations on its generic components, there is one thing that generally never varies: the moral authority of the paternal figure. Batman, Superman, Spider-man, Iron Man – their drive to do good in the world is always somehow premised on the saint-like qualities of their fathers (or sometimes uncles as is the case with Spider-man, whose Uncle Ben’s mantra “with great power comes great responsibility” echoes through each new installment of the franchise). Even a post-modern iteration of the superhero film like Kick Ass has its Big Daddy. One recent exception to this series is The Green Hornet, the critically maligned and somewhat under-rated addition to the superhero genre from Michel Gondry and starring Seth Rogen. What is the first order of business for the Green Hornet and his sidekick Kato when they first team up as crime-fighters? They visit the memorial statue of the Green Hornet’s recently deceased father – newspaper editor James Reid – and cut off its head.
Despite being in the minority when it comes to superhero films, The Green Hornet is indicative of a wider trend developing in popular film: an increasing obsession with the symbolic death of the paternal figure. In Tron: Legacy, a son is reunited with his long-estranged father only to be confronted with the reality of his father’s impotence; in The King’s Speech, the paternal figure is reduced to a neurotic with a speech impediment; in Inception, the heir to a huge energy empire hates his deceased father who failed in his paternal duties, having held nothing but contempt for his son’s perceived weakness. (Note the fall of the authoritarian father figure in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Iran and Bahrain for some real-life counterparts.) But the father’s death is not the whole story of course, for just as surely as the Green Hornet and Kato cut off the head of the father’s statue at the beginning of the movie, at the end they are shown soldering the head back to the body. Herein lies the full narrative pattern arising in popular cinema: the death of the father, followed by his swift symbolic restoration.
Why is Mary unhappy? Her specific dissatisfactions are not convincing as explanations of her misery, because she’s obviously not committed to resolving them. There is the suggestion, I suppose, that past disappointments may have damaged her appetite for self-awareness and personal development, but I don’t think Leigh is all that concerned with the whys and wherefores of her situation. Quite simply, people like Mary exist, people who define themselves by what they don’t have.
Week starting Thursday 24rd February
Opening Thursday:
The Way Back, Peter Weir’s follow-up to 2003’s Master and Commander, chronicles the escape of a group of prisoners from a Siberian gulag in 1940, and their epic journey to freedom. Stars Ed Harris and Colin Farrell. According to Ebert Presents At The Movies‘ Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Colin Farrell’s Russian pronunciation of the word for “sweater” is hilarious.
Conviction is about a working class woman, played by – who else? – Hilary Swank, who goes through 18 years…
The teenage narrator in The Virgin Suicides’ musings on the Lisbon girls could easily describe the parent-child reversal that occurs between Johnny and Cleo in Somewhere: “We knew the girls were really women in disguise; that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
Week starting Thursday 17th February
Opening this week: Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy. Kiarostami’s first film made outside Iran, the film concerns two people (Juliette Binoche and William Shimell) spending a day together in Tuscany. While love has brought them together the exact nature of their relationship becomes more and more difficult to concern. The film has generated some disagreement between us at Screen Machine. In his review, Conall cited Kiarostami’s problematic move towards a cinema of precision and directorial control while…
Week starting Thursday 10th February
Opening this week: Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours. The film stars James Franco as real-life mountain climber Aron Ralston who cut off his own arm after being trapped under a boulder for more than five days.
Also opening is Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. Scripted by Peter Morgan (The Queen), the film is a fantasy drama about three people living parallel lives who are affected by death in various ways.
Finally Ivan Reitman’s No Strings Attached. The film is about two…
This is not the Coens’ most personal film, but it’s the least permeated by that restless, cerebral energy which occasionally pitches their work over into empty cynicism.
Claire Denis’ latest film is dialectically split between the blindness of Western complacency and a crystal clear perception of white absurdity, providing a provocative look at the aftereffects of colonialism in an African nation split by civil war.
Week starting Thursday 3rd February
Apocalypse Now: Redux, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam war epic, is screening on Thursday at the Astor.
ACMI is screening Bluebeard from French director Catherine Breillat on Sunday. Though well known for such sexual provocations as 1999’s Romance, this film is for the most part a traditional telling of the traditional fairytale. Breillat’s authorial interventions (the deliberately artificial aesthetic, the film’s framing device) are subtle and take a little work to make sense of. Conall called…
If nothing else, this year’s list confirms that we at Screen Machine are big Jesse Eisenberg fans (but then who isn’t?). It perhaps shows other continuities from our 2009 list, indicating some of the approaches and prejudices we have as film critics and spectators. We hope that the pieces we’ve written on each of the twenty films that appear here are of greater use and interest to readers than the mock-suspense of learning what finishes in which position. Returning to these films now allows us to say things about them that we couldn’t when they first appeared, and we think that these reflective pieces on the films of 2010 will offer plenty to discuss as we begin the new year.
