Screen Machine

Feature: MIFF Diary, Day 2: On the value of film festivals, love, outcasts

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? Maybe the ideal goal of a film festival is to offer us the exact opposite of what distributors do. In the world of the “general release”, cinema-going can be a fairly narcissistic affair. We bring our wallets along, are confronted by several films, all different genres, and we make a choice, thus affirming our individuality. We don’t just go to see The Tree of Life. We are also saying I am a person who chooses to see The Tree of Life. To put it another way, going to the movies can be like visiting those online dating sites where the goal is not to date other people but to date yourself. This is why you have to include in your dating profile all your interests, all the music you like, what kind of books you read, all in the name of “compatibility”. And when the time inevitably comes and you realise the person you meet is not yourself, the romance falls apart.

Of course, real love is not strictly related to compatibility in this sense. Love doesn’t happen when you find your “other half”. (“You complete me,” says Tom Cruise to Renee Zellweger in Jerry Maguire and she concurs only to prove that she’s some kind of sociopath.) It happens when you are ready to open yourself to a person’s radical Otherness, to love that which is beyond you. I’m saying all this only to articulate what my ideal of a film festival experience is – the chance to be confronted by something that isn’t “you” and be taken by it. The multiplex is where we go to look in the mirror. A film festival is where we go to fall in love.*

Maybe this desire for something new is why outcasts have become a theme of my first day at MIFF, figures that stand outside the norm of my everyday existence. I started the day with Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983) which stars Robert De Niro, a celebrity stalker with dreams of doing stand-up on network television. It’s one of Scorsese’s most under-appreciated films and remains a brutal comedy about little people sucked into the machine of fame and spat out.

I followed this up with Tears of Gaza, a powerful documentary about Palestinians living under the Israeli’s reign of terror. I was on several occasions brought to tears, an involuntary reaction when confronted with images of children mourning and people crying over corpses in the street. But while the film retains a lot of power simply by being a witness to these events, it stirred a fair amount of reservations in me with regards to its construction. Tears of Gaza is a slick production whose manipulations are all too transparent. One scene loads foreboding music over an image of a boy in a classroom and cuts to over-passing military planes as if to give us insight into the boy’s thoughts. Another prefaces a bombing in Gaza with shots of a playground and children entering a school. Arousing sympathy for a worthy cause to be sure but one can imagine the exact same film being made about Israelis caught in a bombing by Palestinians. Sympathy is a funny thing, it can switch allegiances so haphazardly (as Hitchcock knew very well) and the Israelis have more resources at their disposal to gain our sympathy. What the situation requires is not just sympathy but thought, which is lacking in this film.

The problem with Tears of Gaza may have been its all-too-conventional style, but Aki Kaurismaki’s latest Le Havre turned out to be a great pleasure precisely because of its conventionality. Actually, that may not be right. It’s Kaurismaki’s ironic deployment of filmic conventions that make his films so watchable. Even that doesn’t quite capture it. This film, about an African refugee who finds himself in a French port town and needs to be hidden from the authorities, exists in that gray zone between irony and honest sentiment. It’s pretty much like Kaurismaki’s other films but when you make films as sweet, modest, funny and humane as Kaurismaki, progression can be overrated.

The day ended with a program of 3 shorts by the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian — We, The Seasons, and Our Century. How to describe these films? They were something like a cross between a poem and an essay, or ethnographic documentaries crossed with Eisensteinian montage effects. (Pelechian has differentiated his “distance montage” from Eisenstein’s apparently more linear montage but I think the comparison still holds somewhat.) Having only just come out of that session I’m not sure I can talk about Pelechian’s films in a very constructive way. But I was intrigued. You could say his images took me and it was something like falling in love.

*Of course, film festivals are subject to market pressures too. I’m romanticising film festivals here only so we might hold them to a high standard.

FILMS WATCHED:

• The King of Comedy – Martin Scorsese
• Tears of Gaza – Vibeke Løkkeberg
• Le Havre – Aki Kaurismäki
• Artavazd Pelechian Shorts

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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