Screen Machine

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Andre can, we are told, “make love” anywhere. Now, in this film the antiquated term “make love” is at its most innocently darling. So he is allowed to kiss his wife, Colette (Jeanette MacDonald), in the park. This is of course made possible because the Hays Code had not yet been fully thrust onto the Hollywood ranks (the Code itself was written by Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America president Will H. Hays in 1930, but much of what was written was not enforced until Joseph L. Breen was appointed head of the Production Code Administration in 1934) ; Lubitsch was clearly having fun flaunting his violation of the agreement. Doherty documents some commentary from the time: in 1933, Variety declared that “producers have reduced the Hays Production Code to sieve-like proportions and are deliberately out-smarting their own document.” While such behaviour of course continued into the depths of the darkest Hays Code years, the pre-1934 years allowed filmmakers to most gloriously disregard it.

Australian filmgoers’ experience of the local film industry is generally one of short-lived hype. So often, the industry touts as ‘important’ films that a year later seem silly and naive. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, a rare truly inspired film gets made by a first-time director who then disappears from the cultural landscape. Samson and Delilah is a film whose ‘eventness’ may have ended for Australians in 2009, the so-called ‘banner year’ for Australian cinema of which Samson and Delilah was the poster child, but internationally it’s still reaching new audiences. This month Samson and Delilah opened in US theatres in limited release so Screen Machine writer Whitney Monaghan decided to check in with the film’s director, Warwick Thornton, as his film reached the American market.

“Grain of the Voice” is a new retrospective focusing on the impact of sound in the work of well-known Australian experimental filmmakers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill. The Cantrills have been, and continue to be, prolific contributors to avant-garde filmmaking and film culture in Australia; having created over 140 films, a successful journal (Cantrills Film Notes, 1971-2000), and appearing as regular speakers at universities, galleries and art events. The Cantrills began making experimental films in the early 1960s, a time when avant-garde movements began to flourish, both globally and within major Australian capitals, particularly Sydney and Melbourne. One of the great things about the Cantrills is the diversity in their approach to filmmaking. As Jake Wilson, curator of the season, said to me: “When you talk about experimental cinema, you can be talking about lots of things – a very austere, modernist thing, or you can be talking about something that is trying to get the spectator on an immediate, sensory level. With the Cantrills, you have both of those things.”

I recently endured While You Were Sleeping, a 1995 romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock. Sandy B. Bullock works at a toll booth at a grey Chicago train station; she is very lonely, and wears beanies because she is sad. Her day is brightened by the smile of an attractive businessman (Peter Gallagher, whom we now recognize as yummy daddy Sandy from The OC). One freezing Christmas morning, Bullock and Yummy Daddy have the station to themselves, until two muggers arrive. In awesomely incongruent Jersey accents (I do believe this film is set in Chicago): Mugger 1 taunts, “Noice Jaaaaket.” Mugger 2 corroborates, “Meeeeehhhry Krysmussss.” Yummy daddy falls on the tracks! Bullock saves Yummy Daddy’s life by rolling him out of the way of the oncoming train.

As Mad Men kicks into its fourth season, Zora Sanders keeps up with the latest happenings on Madison Avenue circa 1964.

A film festival is a curious time for the cinephile. The event (particularly in this cinematically dry city) is the most anticipated occasion of the calendar year. When it comes, life is put on hold for two full weeks – the highest priority is to absorb the audiovisual delights from the international film community. I find it a strange experience to anticipate pleasure; the hope of feeling repeatedly entranced by the moving image usually puts me in a weird mental…

Every cinephile is excited by the prospect of a film festival, whether it is Cannes, Venice, Rotterdam or the Kino OTOK festival in Slovenia: the coming together of movie lovers and a diverse group of films is a highlight of the calendar year. The first taste we get of the festival, in any case, is the festival program, the official guide to the event. Reading such a guide is like being a child again, poring over that tantalising showbag lift-out…

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).

So Sex and the City 2 is a “bad” film, sure. Yet there was something disturbing about the excessive vitriol aimed at the film by reviewers, bloggers, Twitter users, Facebook group administrators and whatnot. What disturbed me was not its connection to an old familiar phenomenon, latent misogyny (though that was undoubtedly one element of the vitriol), but its connection to a newer phenomenon: meme addiction. The Internet may have brought us a proliferation of independent voices offering their individual points of view, but it has also brought a certain homogenisation of discourse. There is less energy exerted in pursuing individual interests and more energy exerted in pulling out tired ironic witticisms on the lolcat du jour, the most happening video of Mr. T, the latest hilarious right-wing pundit on Q and A. The Internet pulled out all the stops to condemn Sex and the City 2 but much of this energy was not so much a case of genuinely wanting to critique culture in any serious kind of way, as it was a case of people wanting to be seen to be hating the right thing at the right time, to get that much lusted-after object of desire – the @reply – and, in doing so, to feel alive.

At the end of episode three of Treme, a group of Mardi Gras Indians gather in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans to pay their respects to one of their members who died in the flood. As they perform a traditional chant, a Katrina Tour Bus pulls up with a gaggle of tourists inside, excited to stumble across an example of “authentic” New Orleans culture. The Indian chief, played by Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon from The Wire) orders them away with righteous fury. The bus driver, embarrassed at this trespass, respects his wishes and drives the bus away. It’s a moment that forces the viewer to consider their own position as something of a televisual tourist. The televisual tourist trade is booming with such films as Slumdog Millionaire, District 9 and Sin Nombre utilising their exotically impoverished locations to find success in award ceremonies and at the box office. Yet with the television show Treme, creator David Simon proves himself (as he did with The Wire) adept at transcending such fare. And he does this by taking seriously the responsibility of representing the reality of the milieu that is Treme’s setting: the various suburbs of New Orleans, some months after the catastrophe of 2005.

In the aftermath of Avatar, we can most surely say that we are in the midst of a stereoscopic renaissance. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland 3D made a bucket-load at the box-office breaking the record for biggest March opening ever in the United States. And there seems to be no slowing up of 3-D releases in the near future with Shrek Forever After, Toy Story 3 and Tron Legacy on the horizon. However, the technology has not fared well with film critics. And admittedly there is good reason for this: Most films released in 3-D are simply not good films. But what is surprising is how critics have gone beyond their usual practice of calling out bad films to vehemently campaigning against the 3-D technology itself that is being adopted by filmmakers. The real problem, as I see it, is not that 3-D has nothing substantial to contribute to cinema. It’s that critics have not yet found the language to talk about the expressive qualities and the potential of 3-D.

Andrew Kidman and Aaron Curnow’s Last Hope is a feature length collection of short subjects inspired by the ocean, showing exclusively at the new venue Speakeasy Cinema. Kidman, a noted Australian surfing filmmaker and musician-photographer-writer-hyphenate, collected a posse of directors to make one or two short films each, all set to music from Curnow’s label Spunk – including tracks by such excellent artists as Sufjan Stevens, Dirty Three, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.

The end result is something like a Fantasia for surfing, with each film providing a seductive, and occasionally surprising, accompaniment to its chosen song – although the film itself is less like a concert-hall program than a really well structured mix-tape. I spoke with Andrew Kidman about the creation of the project, its distribution, and the life of an independent artist.

There seems to be a debate as to what kind of film Tommy Wiseau originally intended The Room to be. In my mind, there is no doubt that in 2003 he released a melodrama that he hoped would hit the big time. Instead, the film found more success in recent years after being discovered by a cult audience, and is now viewed as both a riotous comedy and the worst movie ever made. Kudos to Wiseau – who funded, produced, wrote, directed and starred in the film – for cheerfully running with this drastic change in marketing.

I went to see a late-night session of The Room at the Nova a few weekends ago. Plastic spoons were distributed outside and the atmosphere was bustling. But nothing quite prepared me for the phenomenon of cinematic hysteria that followed. The host of the evening said the Nova hadn’t ever experienced anything as loud as The Room audiences in their hallowed halls. It was an infectious night of whooping, spoon throwing, ball tossing and booing. Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I haven’t seen a cult film audience interact so rabidly with a movie since the mid-90s.

I. I hate Don’s life but I want his suit.
In The Reality of the Virtual, Slavoj Zizek makes what at first seems an absurd claim: that the Sound of Music is a racist film. But, when put under analysis, his argument is hard to deny. Basically, Zizek makes a distinction between the narrative reality of the film (i.e. Mary Poppins and the seven dwarfs must escape the fascist Nazis) which only seems to appeal to an anti-fascist sensibility, and the…

(Jacques Demy, right, with his wife Agnès Varda. A Demy retrospective will screen at the Melbourne Cinémathèque in April. Varda’s film “Daguerreotypes” screens on March 24.)
This Wednesday, February 10, the Melbourne Cinémathèque will begin its 2010 season with a screening of two films by Max Ophüls, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image cinemas. The program for the year, which can be found at the Cinémathèque website and in paper form at ACMI and the other usual outlets, features…

If Avatar is an environmentalist fable, then it is a failure. And if you want to read it as such – a liberal allegory pleading for humans to respect nature and the indigenous peoples who live in a symbiotic relationship with it – then, sure, I can see how Avatar is a “bad” film. I can see how the journey of protagonist Jake Sully is a narrative badly cribbed from Dances With Wolves. I can see how the representation of…

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…

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. The time when we willingly succumb to mass-hallucination, and for one brief shining period we believe in the enduring strength of the human spirit. Concepts like peace and goodwill no longer seem like political rhetoric, but instead compel us to regain a mythologised compassion for our fellow man. Despite the fleeting nature of this illusion, for a few weeks in December we can believe it to be so. We can also believe…

Within the first five minutes of Where the Wild Things Are the protagonist Max is caught in a freeze frame, a moment of reckless, furious playfulness suspended in time. Perhaps a reference to the shot that closes François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, it’s a telling detail that indicates what a remarkable film Wild Things is, audacious even for a mainstream American film with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Certainly I can’t think of a Hollywood film…

Andrew Denton: ‘The Boy’. What’s it about?
Germaine Greer: The Boy is the male person who is no longer a child, but not yet a man.
AD: Mm-hm. And what… You admire this form very greatly. What is it that you admire?
GG: Well, no, the Boy has a kind of beauty which is not accessible to females or to younger or older men. There is a moment in a boy’s life when he is transcendentally beautiful.
The most striking thing about Twilight: New…

There’s a line in Down and Out in Paris and London where Orwell describes a friend of his as “the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him”. I think the Coen brothers would like that a lot. (Incidentally, there’s an interesting debate out there about whether or not Orwell was an anti-Semite. Consensus seems to be heading towards, yes, probably, a bit.)
Not that A Serious Man is atheistic exactly. You get the…

With the release of Roland Emmerich’s 2012 this month, the film industry’s (and society’s) fascination with destruction becomes ever more pertinent. Not to mention depressing. Margaret Pomeranz was on to something when she criticized 2012 for glorifying the end of the world, and for making it seem less-bad that thousands of people were dying as long as the hero survives. Guy Debord labelled the modern world a ’showbiz society’, and this is expressed without a doubt in Emmerich’s film. Everything…

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is the latest film from Terry Gilliam since Tideland. It’s about a travelling performing troupe that invites people to enter into a magic mirror and explore their imaginations. We learn that the reason they do this is part of a bet that the troupe’s leader, Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) made with the Devil (Tom Waits). Parnassus is to collect a certain number of souls, failing which, he must give up his daughter (Lily Cole). This…

When Kanye West, at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, grabbed Taylor Swift’s microphone during her acceptance speech for Best Video of the Year by a Female Artist, and pronounced the now infamous words – “Yo Taylor, I’m real happy for you and I’mma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time, OF ALL TIME!!” – there was immediate shock and astonishment, from both initial viewers and those who caught the outburst later on…

Woody Allen has never had a problem with the idea of himself in a relationship with a significantly younger woman, either on screen (Manhattan) or in real life. Yet his latest film, Whatever Works, might be the first of his films in which Woody Allen actively defends his position, that is, he addresses his ideas on intergenerational love relationships by satirising wider society’s uptight sexual morality.

Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm) plays Boris Yelnikoff, a former nuclear physicist who, following an…

What I am about to say is not a defence of Polanski. I will, however, say that there is a good moral argument for why Polanski should not go to jail. My argument may be considered a feminist stance. But mostly, it is a humanist stance. But first, let’s make some definitive statements:

In 1977 Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl.
There is no moral justification for this act.
Roman Polanski’s artistic achievements do not exonerate Polanski.

All that said, I am unwilling to…

When I saw that Suroosh Alvi, co-founder of Vice Magazine, co-directed Heavy metal in Baghdad, I admit I cringed. He squanders as little emotion as possible as he secures his bullet-proof vest and talks to the camera wearing aviator shades, telling us the enormity of the mission that he and fellow Vice media magnate, Eddy Moretti, are about to undertake when they enter Baghdad to track down one of the only heavy metal bands in Iraq:
This is risky, it’s dangerous,…

I have glimpsed hipster utopia. And I don’t mean that as an ironic statement.
So-called “hipster” or “indie” culture is often hard to embrace because to participate almost always feels like becoming part of a solipsistic, cynical marketing demographic. 5oo Days of Summer, American Apparel, Pitchfork: these are the icons of the culture within which I operate and I can only engage in this stuff by maintaining some critical distance, lest I become another mindless consumer. But it’s so damn tiring.…

The thing about Tarantino is that there is no subtext to him. I don’t say this to diminish what he does. He’s quite clearly an accomplished filmmaker. He writes engaging dialogue, directs actors well, shoots scenes well, has good taste in music and throws a million cinematic references into every film that you will never fully understand. But what you see is what you get. There is never anything more. Take the requisite violence that you find in a Tarantino…

Remember the first time you saw the now ubiquitous (and roundly loathed) iPod ad?
Remember how sharp, how snapped together the image and sound seemed, how simple and obvious, and yet totally new and now it was? The irony being that the building blocks which enabled motion graphics designers to put that together on their iMacs in the noughties, were first laid over 70 years ago by a New Zealand film maker working on an ad for the British Post Office.

Sometimes…

Miyazaki is more than he appears. Because his films are generally so positive, charming and cute I feel like he gets written off as a lightweight. Indeed some have written about Miyazaki’s latest film Ponyo as just for kids, pointing out the film narrative’s seeming disregard for cause and effect. But to watch Ponyo and insist on cold adult logic is to really miss the complexity of Miyazaki’s vision.

Take the theme of ecology which you find comes up a lot…

District 9 is seemingly many things: a thrilling science fiction adventure film, an awkward mockumentary, an innovative blend of cutting edge special effects with cinéma vérité aesthetics. But to me, District 9 is the tale of a tourist. I’m using the word “tourist” the way Jarvis Cocker used the word to describe that rich girl from “Common People” who had a thirst for knowledge and studied sculpture at St. Martin’s college.
You see, at the same time as you felt that…

Post by Conall Cash
I hope to write a more essayistic piece on my experience of the festival in the coming weeks, but for now, a general roundup of what struck me as the most significant things about this year’s MIFF. The best new films I saw, listed in the order in which I saw them, were

À L’Aventure (Jean-Claude Brisseau)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Paper Soldier (Alexei German Jr.)
Love Exposure (Sion Sono)
A Lake (Philippe Grandrieux)
Nymph (Pen-ek Ratanaruang)
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel…

Having established the general ineptness of Australian movie marketing, it’s kind of exciting when a film does something right in getting us interested in the film. I’m talking here about the forthcoming sci-fi film Exit. The film’s writer Martyn Pedler (a local media jack-of-all-trades) has posted some images from the production of Exit on his website. This is a great move, taking a page out of the whole ‘production diary’ phenomenon exemplified by the Lord of the Rings website and…

Review by Brad Nguyen
The synopsis for Adventureland sounds familiar enough, but writer/director Greg Mottola is not so much concerned with cliches as he is concerned with pop mythology. Adventureland is a film that has been filtered through a million Beach Boys songs, a million coming-of-age movies, a million Catchers in the Rye, a million OCs and Freaks and Geeks. I’m talking about the mythology of the teenager, or in Adventureland’s case, the early-twenties post-adolescent. While the idea of the teen…

[Observe and Report trailer here.]
Review by James Douglas
With Observe and Report, director Jody Hill cements his place as my new favorite American satirist. Previously known for micro-budgeted indie The Foot Fist Way, and HBO comedy series Eastbound and Down, Observe finds Hill with an increasingly sure grasp of the complex tonalities that marked his previous work, and a high budget, studio-sanctioned playground in which he can let them loose. There’s something excitingly transgressive about watching such subversive, disturbing material delivered…

Screener has been moving along nicely for a while now and has suddenly found itself among a bunch of other Melbourne-based film blogs, which to my mind is a great thing. The Internet can be a great space to build a community of film appreciation. But in order to distinguish itself from the crowd, or rather, to better define Screener’s identity, perhaps it is time to set out Screener’s mission statement, its raison d’etre, its manifesto, its Dogme 09 if…