Viewing posts written by: Screen Machine Staff
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Conall Cash reviews two of the major films of the festival, by veteran auteurs Manoel de Oliveira and Koji Wakamatsu, while Maggie Scott looks at MIFF’s closing night film and Ali Brown investigates Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia For The Light.
Alifeleti Brown encounters the travails of American drovers in the documentary Sweetgrass while Whitney Monaghan sees the workings of class relations in the animation My Dog Tulip.
Brad Nguyen explores the trouble with gay identity politics in I Love You Phillip Morris, Lauren Bliss finds a familiar story of corrupted youth in Robert Glinski’s Piggies, and Maggie Scott ponders the relationship between food and war in Cooking History.
Emma McNicol explores the middle class nightmare of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, Conall Cash attempts to come to terms with Abbas Kiarostami’s surprising new film, and Jessie Scott wonders what is really going on when a group of comedians attempt to satirize the North Korean dictatorship, in The Red Chapel.
Brad Nguyen reviews Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars, and Conall Cash looks at how the smoking ban in Hong Kong is affecting workplace romance, in Love In A Puff.
Alifeleti Brown provides analysis of the orangutan doco Nénette, Lauren Jayne Bliss champions the short doco Rabbits à la Berlin and Eloise Ross surrenders to the contemplative Honey.
Conall Cash explores R.W. Fassbinder’s restored 1973 telefilm, World on a Wire, Yoshua Wakeham enters the childhood world of Joe Dante’s Matinee, and Sam Chater looks at the cult of Berlusconi in Videocracy.
Brad Nguyen keeps track of Todd Solondz’s movements in his latest addition to a mediocre career, Life During Wartime.
Whitney Monaghan explores the odd experience of seeing one of Bresson’s masterpieces at MIFF, Lauren Jayne Bliss attempts to make some sense of Gaspar Noé’s “spectacular failure” Enter The Void, and Jessie Scott traces the rise of the greatest Islamic punk band in America, in Taqwacore.
Conall Cash explores the ’slowness’ of a new Vietnamese film, and Maggie Scott reviews the Australian “women’s film,” Little Sparrows.
Conall Cash sheds light on Wiseman’s 1974 doco on animal research, Alifeleti Brown reviews a transvestite drama and Jessie Scott is unimpressed by the second programme of Cities on Speed.
Conall Cash reviews Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s latest, Alifeleti Brown sees a border conflict drama, Samantha Chater writes on the latest mumblecore film from Andrew Bujalski and Eloise Ross compares 2 parts from the Cities on Speed program.
Alifeleti Brown encounters a quiet Korean film about mortality and poetry and Samantha Chater reviews a doco on the underground New York film scene of the late 1970s and early 80s.
Guest contributor Adrian Martin writes about the “terrorist family melodrama” The Day Will Come, Yoshua Wakeham reviews a doco on an eccentric Japanese inventor and Alifeleti Brown reflects on Godard’s latest.
Samantha Chater on Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, Peter Jacobsen on Romero’s most recent zombie film, and Jessie Scott on docos concerning the architect Norman Foster and environmental devestation in Western Canada.
Yoshua Wakeham reviews Sylvain Chomet’s animated homage to Jacques Tati, Lauren Jayne Bliss reviews the sci-fi horror of Splice and Brad Nguyen reviews the sex-doll-come-to-life fable Air Doll from Hirokazu Koreeda.
This year’s rapidly approaching (i.e., by the time you read this, IT WILL HAVE ALREADY STARTED!!) Melbourne International Film Festival is important to Screen Machine for all sorts of reasons. In a mediocre year for that puzzling entity called commercial cinema, we are more excited than ever to encounter new works by some of the old masters (Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme, Manoel de Oliveira’s Strange Case of Angelica, Jacques Rivette’s Around a Small Mountain, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, George Romero’s Survival of the Dead, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse), important new films from major young directors (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, Hong Sangsoo’s Ha Ha Ha, Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Air Doll), intriguing films that we know next to nothing about (Samantha Morton’s The Unloved, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Pang Ho-cheung’s Love in a Puff, Michael Rowe’s Leap Year) and older films that have been revived, resuscitated, brought back to us at the time we need them most (R.W. Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, Wiseman’s Primate, Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid).
Happy new year! Hope you spent a merry Kwanzaa eggnogging yourself into oblivion. 2010 marks Screen Machine’s second year in operation and what better way for a website to celebrate such an occasion than with a list! Here are the Top 20 Films of 2009 as chosen by the Screen Machine staff. Chosen from films that were released in Melbourne cinemas in 2009 or were given a festival screening here, we’ve tried to create a list that is more intriguing…
