Cinema Ramble

FIRST COUSIN, ONCE REMOVED

2013-08-04T00:45:00.003+10:00

(Alan Berliner; USA)

Quietly remarkable and devastating. The subject of the documentary, Edwin Honig, is fully within the grip of Alzheimers, and yet what is compelling is his lucidity in the face of a failing memory. A poet and translator, he still playfully engages in conversation while admitting that his memory has disappeared into 'a long endless thing.' Berliner breaks up the film by combining and tightly editing all conversations he had with his cousin, creating a simulation of sorts of memory itself. The recollection of conversations with others are often recalled not in chronological sequence, but in a fragmented re-ordered narrative that is never quite the same each time. Clearly the parallels between memory and film are obvious, but Berliner does a great justice to his film by not heavy-handedly jamming this to the forefront of its themes. The ides of this film, or film in general, as an archive or repository for memory resides in the margins, a quiet reflection that hums gently throughout as we see repeated shots of Honig grappling with the poet he used to be and that he no longer seems to be able to access. His past now a strange story belonging to someone else, Honig is horrifyingly aware of what has been 'killed off' inside of him.

Yet, this is not a maudlin or weep-inducing portrait of an illness. For starters, stories of Honig's failings as a husband and father slowly unfold through the course of the film, inducing an emotional distance from the man. But what really makes the film transcendent is how Berliner's own curiosity and observation bleed through the film and infect the viewer. Rather than aiming for the cheap emotional weight of the debilitating aspects of Alzheimers, Berliner desires to understand how memory loss affects one's humanity, how one remains a human while undergoing a gradual erosion of potentially all that makes up one's life. It is this deep and quiet curiosity that makes the film so rich and engaging.

THE END OF TIME

2013-08-04T00:08:00.002+10:00

(Peter Mettler; Canada/ Switzerland)

Starting with Joseph Kittinger's 31km skydive in 1960, this film moves gracefully from meditating upon the Hadron Collider, lava flows in Hawaii and the decaying city of Detroit, in order to muse upon the nature, perception and meaning of time.

In this meandering essay, time is viewed as inextricably intertwined with space, matter, death, and the mind, but Mettler does not simply jam together a gloriously haphazard collections of thoughts and images. In the final section of the film, it seems as if Mettler is folding all previous themes and images in the film into each other, creating a temporal palimpsest, a non-linear and looping exposition on time.

Beautifully shot (Mettler is majestic behind the camera - watch his 1994 film Picture of Light to see what I mean), and replete with geometric patterns, natural flows (wind, lava, sea, clouds) and quiet repose, this film is a delightful warm bath for the eyes.

But, as well as being visually rapturous, Mettler urges your mind to tick over, mulling on your own personal relationship to time, dwelling upon the mystery of your own life, long after you've walked out of the cinema.

VIOLA

2013-08-03T23:51:00.002+10:00

(Matias Pineiro; Argentina)

Pineiro is the new magician of talk-addicted film. Comparisons to the films of John Cassavetes are obvious, and probably occur with frequency, but the comparisons are perhaps apt. The pace, rhythm, and fire of talk and chat in Cassavetes' films urges intense focus, and the same holds true for Pineiro.

There is wit, deftness, clever puzzle-logic, and hidden layers to the barrage of words that abound in Viola, and this web of words creates a wonderful tension, a sense of not having firm footing, a feeling of constantly slipping. Not so much a feeling of losing a hold of the plot, but in not even knowing where the plot begins or ends.

This verbal trickery is wondrously matched by Pineiro's camera-work - by constantly focussing on faces, we lose grasp of surroundings and thus lose a grasp of whether a given moment is reality, dream, performance, or some odd limbo between all three.

In mastering this combination of verbal chicanery and tightly-framed cinematography, Pineiro has achieved more in 63 minutes than most directors can do in 120.

EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS @ MIFF 2013

2013-08-02T22:03:00.000+10:00

How the hell am I going to do this? Reviewing 10 short films in 15 minutes?

SECOND SUN (Joel Stern/ Pia Borg; Australia/ UK)

Angry screaming mega-pixels. Like a stroppy, industrial Jordan Belson in an arcade parlour. Not bad, actually.

WANTEE (Laure Provost; UK)

Nope. Nope. Nope.

THE STREAM 3 (Hiroyuki Sakurai: Japan)

Simple, short, shot on an iPhone, drizzly, stuck in a pipe, meh.

BY PAIN AND RHYME AND ARABESQUES OF FORAGING (David Gatten; USA)

Oh, yes, now THIS was the whole reason for being here. Soft, diaphanous, scrawling and trawling through text, grasping some but never all, the whole a blissful mystery but so beguiling.

IYEZA (Kudzanai Chiurai; South Africa)

It'd make a great music video. But ultra slo-mo as the be-all-and-end-all of the piece doesn't really cut the mustard for me.

RECONNAISANCE (Johann Lurf; Austria)

Wonderfully simple, yet by the end of this 5 minute piece, there's an odd sense of not being entirely certain of what you've seen. Ostensibly this appears to be various shots of a decommissioned torpoedo-site, but unless I was going nuts it seems that there was more to this than expected. Still haunting my head.

DOUBLE GRAFFITI (Paul Winkler; Australia)

A genuine revelation here. Shot on 16mm, this film is a flicker-fest of constantly-rotating segments of graffiti-laden wall. The familiarity of tags is channeled into a intense new landscape of constant motion. Rather mesmeric.

DAD'S STICK (John Smith;UK)

A paean to his dead father, through the objects his father obsessively re-used. Smith's humour surprisingly rarely grates, and this becomes a moving piece on familial bonds through the quotidian objects.

CRYSTAL WORLD (Pia Borg; Australia/ UK)

Trying to do too many things. If the film focussed purely on the crystallisation process of underwater figures and objects, the film may have been stronger. Including segments from Night Of The Hunter seemed to throw it off balance.

...BECAUSE SUPERGLUE IS FOREVER! (Johan Grimonprez; Belgium)

I'm not sure that this worked. I think I expected something tighter from Grimonprez. The collation of news items, re-used footage, and news stories, etc read/ played by two young girl felt a little like a haphazard collision of ideas - an archival version of throwing everything at the wall and hoping it will stick.

DIFFERENTLY, MOLUSSIA

2013-08-02T00:20:00.000+10:00

(Nicholas Rey: France)

I saw this last year, but not on the big screen, so to see it blown up big and proud is just one hell of an experience. This is truly Cinema. Shot in 16mm, which is touted by Rey in a trailer for his film as a dying medium, this exquisite film revels in own divine self. The grit, grain, pockmarks are all so alive - crunchy, gritty, it makes the film a truly haptic, synaesthetic experience.

This is kind of fake-ethnographic film, a faux documentary of a world called Molussia. The camera spins on a number of occasions, shaking up the actual world being filmed - the recognisable fields, streets, houses, workers - and inverting it, making it another world. With sporadic commentary, derived from Gunther Anders book The Molussian Catacomb, interspersed over the shots of fields, seas, workers, it becomes believable that the places we see, the workers we see, all belong to the fictional City of Molussia.

The soundtrack often splinters, shreds, disintegrates into crackling shards. It sounds like cinema eating itself. Or as if this film is actually trying to form itself, make itself out of itself.

This is an utterly epiphanous film that keeps singing and resounding long after it is finished. I could watch it again and again and again. I could watch it at least 362,880 times, to be precise.

COMING FORTH BY DAY

2013-08-02T00:01:00.000+10:00

(Hala Lotfy; Egypt/ UAE)

Fascinating fiction feature debut from this Egyptian filmmaker. A full day is marked out in the life of a mother and daughter tending to their ailing husband/father, but it is the slow torpor of caregiving and the quiet pressures it exerts that breathes wonderful life to the pace, rhythm and texture of this film. In an ever-increasing world of 'slow cinema', Lotfy makes a deep and rich impression by allowing plenty of time for the characters to reveal their life, their world purely when glancing at another, or most crucially when lost in thought.

Bold compositions, with remarkable interior shots set with angular crisp lines, and rich earthy tones - from sun-up to sepia-tinged sun-down, the film is bled into browns, greys, beige, murky white.

The final third of the film, while perhaps not as striking in visual tone to the earlier interior sequences in the home, is the most ensnaring part, as we see the daughter quietly undergoing a midnight revelation in private, moving from some kind of misguided selfishness to a deeper place of quiet repose, a place we can nearly surmise but not quite. We can read her thoughts, but can we really?

MIFF 2013

2013-08-01T23:36:00.001+10:00

Once upon a time I used to gorge myself silly on film during the Melbourne International Film Festival. For the past couple of years this has reduced to a tiny morsel, as fatherhood has imposed new routines and schedules. However, this year I'm hoping to pop along to at least ten films, maybe more, we'll just see how lucky I get with my time.

As I'm in a new realm of having to be very very picky about what I choose to see, I'm opting, for the most part, for films that have not, and most likely will not, receive future distribution in Australia. Being extremely selective is proving to be an unusually rewarding experience, learning to sift and sift again through the possible selections to find films most enriching to my little ol' soul.

As part of a promise I've kept, I'm going to write a brief review of each film seen. Well, 'review' is not really the right word - the aim is to write up any thoughts, feelings, lack of feelings, etc, on the film just seen - the review has to be no more than 200 words, must be completed within the day it is seen, and must be completed in ten minutes. If this doesn't happen, I'm doing the dishes every day for a month.

Right, better get cracking...

Top 10 Films of 2012

2013-01-15T23:38:00.002+11:00

(It took forever to get this post finished. I was worried 2013 would finish before I got this 2012 wrap-up done. Hastily written at any spare moment, I’m just happy that this little list actually exists, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Also, yay to me for breaking a 5-month freeze on this blog by actually posting something. Is the blog officially unfrozen? I’d like to say yes, but I’ve made loads of promises that have not come to fruition in the past, so let’s say for now it’s still thawing.)

If 2011 saw a distinct drop in the number of films viewed, then in 2012 this pace dropped to a near standstill. What else could be expected with bringing up a new baby, undergoing a complete vocational about-face, and taking on full-time study as well as full-time work? I’m happy I got the occasional dollop of sleep last year, let alone the chance to watch a few films here and there.

I missed too many films last year, but I’m happy I managed to find ways to see a few great films. Below are my favourite ten films of 2012 that I managed to sink my eyes into.

10. FAREWELL, MY QUEEN (Benoit Jacquot; France/ Spain)

The anticipated tropes and style associated with the costume drama genre are briskly sidestepped in this take on the nascent days of the French Revolution as experienced within the enclosed world of the Palace of Versailles. Stateliness and grace is replaced with disorder, confusion, and feverish hunting for information. History is presented subjectively, through gossip, hearsay, and speculation, and is channelled through the perambulations of the Queen’s reader, from servant’s quarters to royal rooms and back again. Proximity is the key to this film, with the camera often bearing in on faces, arms, and legs and closely following rapid trots through the labyrinthine corridors of Versailles. The manifestation of dual worlds is fascinating, with the outside world barely shown and therefore a constant unseen threat, and the inner world of Versailles split between the ‘front’ of stately royal room and chaotic ‘back’ of servant’s quarters.

9. TABU (Miguel Gomes; Portugal/ Germany/ Brazil/ France)

There’s an intense complexity woven within this film’s fabric that is belied by the simplicity of an unrequited love story. Dream interpretation, story-telling, and re-living memories are recurring motifs that elide the two-part structure of the film. While initially feeling rigid and clinically precise, the film slips and melts with graceful sensuality. And, at its beating heart, the film aches for cinema’s own history, yearning for its own paradise lost.

8. STUDENT (Darezhan Omirbayev; Kazakhstan)

Omirbayev should be far more well-known than he is. This somewhat faithful rendering of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment sets the story in modern-day Kazakhstan as a means to critique the soul-less modernisation of his country. Although Bresson appears to be an obvious influence, the close-ups, gestures and quiet pace accumulate to form Omirbayev’s own signature which reflects the friction between the old socialist version of Kazakhstan and the new capitalist version. While the film may be bleak and unemotional, it is also extremely elegant and precise. It also has the simplest yet quietly haunting dream sequence I’ve seen in a long time.

7. KEYHOLE (Guy Maddin; Canada)

Embedding his ‘Maddin-esque’ style deep within the noir genre possibly makes for Maddin’s most accessible work yet. However, ‘accessible’ and ‘Maddin’ don’t exactly live on the same street, and this ties genre conventions in knots from the outset. Ostensibly the film focuses on a gangster boss and his mob returning to his family home to hole up for a while, in hiding from the police. However, the home is haunted, not just with yelling ghosts, but with memories, and boss appears to be committed to nothing other than working out how to remember his past through navigating not just the labyrinth of the house but the layers of memory that still live and breathe within its walls. Here, there does not appear to be mere life and death, or the living and the ghost traces of the dead, but instead a multitude of blurred varieties of mortality. Mundane objects take on a powerful resonance, as placement and movement trigger memory. The protagonist’s own being seems to ultimately be infused with the house, and the film projects not just a poetics of memory but also a poetics of space.

6. PATIENCE (AFTER SEBALD) (Grant Gee: UK)

Grant Gee’s film is an attempt to mirror W.G. Sebald’s ‘unclassifiable’ book The Rings Of Saturn, ostensibly a travelogue of the writer’s walk through Suffolk but also a meander through his thoughts on European history, literature, and culture. To do this, the film becomes almost book-like, with grainy images of many places along the route taken by Sebald indexed with a page number. The film thus becomes a travelogue of a travelogue, making a map of the book as much as mapping the places described within the book. The layered quality of Sebald’s work is emulated through an accretion of overlapping layers to the images – shots of quiet and lonely landscapes are inlaid with text, fading images of interviewees, pages from the book itself. And, at last, someone has the sense to score an entire film with music by The Caretaker – the ghostly sounds of records from yesteryear seem to perfectly match the spectral grainy tone of the film.

5. TOMORROW (Andrey Gryazev; Russia)

This is a deceptive documentary that transcends a mere portrait of the Russian art collective Voina. Gryazev apparently infiltrated the group and recorded their exploits in 2010. These exploits and actions at first appear to be utterly childish – organised shop-lifting and turning over cars make the group appear to be less of an art collective and more a bunch of immature pranksters using the ‘art’ tag to justify larking about. Constant bickering between the leaders, Oleg Vorotnikov and his partner Natalia Sokol, doesn’t help this initial impression. However, slowly the film reveals the group’s plans and plots to be far more cohesive than it first appears, and it leads to an organised action that has serious consequences for the group. As the film progresses, and the group are targeted for criminal conduct, a deep complexity arises in relating to these protagonists. On the one hand, having warmed to over the course of the film, it is easy to feel concerned, perhaps even outraged, at their plight. On the other hand, there is an ever-increasing concern that the leaders are putting their politics and art before being a cohesive family. Their 18-month old son is a strong focus of the film, and may possibly even be the motive behind its title, questioning the ‘tomorrow’ of this boy’s future. Although the leaders are depicted as loving parents, the exposure of this child to their antics is questionable (especially at the climax of the film, where the boy is present at a Voina-instigated riot, and potentially exposed to physical harm). The incremental movement of this film from its first impressions to deeply conflicted and unsettled feelings towards Voina make for an unusually powerful film that stays with you long after it is over.

4. BARBARA (Christian Petzold; Germany)

There is not a single superfluous moment in this film. Petzold has sculpted a lean, poised, and simmering work that is capable of exercising powerful contradictions. East Germany in the 1980’s is visually presented as bleak, cold, and clinical, but also replete with visual warmth, colour and softness. The eponymous protagonist vacillates from aloof to abrasive to cordial to vulnerable and then back again. Within an economically spare visual framework and script, Petzold has performed some kind of magic to engineer a constant push-and-pull of emotional attachment, while steadily tightening the tension to near vice-like proportions.

3. THE LONELIEST PLANET (Julia Loktev; USA/ Germany)

The most devastating split second on film in 2012. This blink-and-you-miss-it decision ruptures the supposed harmony between an engaged couple travelling through the Caucasus Mountains, but what makes the film so powerful is through showing this rupture via wordless treks, haunted expressions, and floundering gestures of rapprochement and mitigation. Loktev opts for having the characters thoughts and emotions locked deep inside their heads, withdrawing them to the loneliest place from each other but also allowing the viewer to make a deeper ‘there-but-for-the-grace-of-God’ connection. Because of this very spartan approach, this film is possibly the most tragic portrait of relationship to hit the screen in a long, long time.

2. HOLY MOTORS (Leos Carax; France/ Germany)

From out of nowhere, Carax pulls out his best and wildest film ever. This is a love poem to cinema’s own history, a vehicle for Denis Lavant’s powers of performative commitment and self-transformation, and a spectral journey through the streets of Paris all rolled into one. But there’s more, so much more. The act of performing takes on an incrementally elegiac tone, with Lavant getting wearier with each appointment. Is it the weight of expectation from an unseen audience, the same audience watching a film (or watching us?) at the beginning of this wild ride? You almost wonder if Lavant’s Mr. Oscar is always aware that we are watching him, that we demand these appointments be kept. Carax seems to portray cinema itself as loaded down with this heavy weight of demands and desires, and has attempted to craft a magnificent vehicle to try and shuck off the weight and fly to freedom.

1. DIFFERENTLY, MOLUSSIA (Nicolas Rey; France)

Rey’s full-length experimental masterpiece operates on totally different plane than any other film of 2012. Composed of 9 reels that can be played in any random order, it exists in a perpetual present, its trajectory never a foregone conclusion. This freedom seems to give the film a mesmeric quality. Rey’s work is an interpretation of a book he has never read (Gunther Anders’ 1936 novel The Molussian Catacomb), in a language he does not understand (German). Grainy and colour-drained footage of ploughed fields, sparse hills, highways, and industrial buildings are wedded with fragments from Anders’ book, but the spoken text is drizzled sporadically over the images, allowing for a hypnotic change in the way the landscape is viewed. The footage, derived from ‘our’ world, eerily becomes another world, the fictional city of Molussia. The novel’s dystopian city of the future is woven into our ‘now’, rendering time, history and verisimilitude as arbitrary concerns. This blending of contemporary Europe into fictional Molussia is almost hallucinatory, a vertiginous magic trick born from celluloidal grain and pockmarks. Truly spellbinding.

Experimental Films in the Sight and Sound Poll 2012

2012-08-20T00:31:00.002+10:00

Having been housebound this past week, and having my desired film festival attendance shattered, I have consoled myself in some small part by trawling through the full kit-and-caboodle of the Sight and Sound 2012 Poll. The list of the Top 250 films held brief interest, but it was trawling through the full list of films voted that has held the greatest fascination. To flick through the list and find utter obscurities, and then search for further info on these unknown potential treasures has provided a nest of joy and comfort in a current cinema-less phase. This, surely, is the true pleasure of these meta-lists – to come across yet more films and more directors that are completely unheard-of, then setting off in search of any scant information on these films, and then setting off once more to find the actual film itself. My personal list of ‘must-watch’ films gets more and more gargantuan by the hour.

Having a growing and abiding fascination for experimental cinema, I have been especially interested to see how this has fared in the polls. There has been a surprising quality and depth to the representation of experimental cinema in the polls, with some filmmakers popping up with alarming frequency (for example, Robert Beavers and Bruce Baillie have six films each on the full poll list). It would have been grand to have had films by Lawrence Jordan, Gustav Deutsch, Martin Arnold, and Lewis Klahr on the list, but perhaps if the pollsters had the opportunity to draft up a list of 20 films rather than 10, the story would have been quite different.

Born purely out of sheer curiosity, I have collated all of the experimental films found in the full poll list, and you’ll find the complete list of 127 films below. The list is not definitive, as there is a likelihood I’ve accidentally skipped a film here and there in my trawl through the poll list. But, hey ho, it’s good enough for now.

Update: 11 September 2012 = It's taken me a while but I've added the votes from the Directors polls, released by Sight and Sound on 22 August. Any odds and ends that I missed out first time around have also been included. I've added the votes together for the Critics and Directors. And here's the updated list:

Chien Andalou, Un (1928) Luis Buñuel	24
Wavelength (1967) Michael Snow	19
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid	17
Chelsea Girls (1966) Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey	9
Région Centrale, La (1971) Michael Snow	7
Empire (1964) Andy Warhol	6
Outer Space (2002) Peter Tscherkassky	6
Aguaespejo granadino (1955) José Val del Omar	5
Flaming Creatures (1963) Jack Smith	5
Mothlight (1963) Stan Brakhage	5
Portrait of Ga (1952) Margaret Tait	5
Arnulf Rainer (1960) Peter Kubelka	4
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) Jonas Mekas	4
Unsere Afrikareise (1961) Peter Kubelka	4
13 Lakes (2005) James Benning	3
Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, The (1971) Stan Brakhage	3
Blue (1993) Derek Jarman	3
Hart of London, The (1970) Jack Chambers	3
Line Describing a Cone (1973) Anthony McCall	3
Little Stabs at Happiness (1963) Ken Jacobs	3
Movie, A (1958) Bruce Conner	3
Report (1986) Bruce Conner	3
Schwechater (1958) Peter Kubelka	3
Too Early, Too Late (1982) Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet	3
Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1975) Jonas Mekas	3
Zorns Lemma (1970) Hollis Frampton	3
Valentin de las Sierras (1967) Bruce Baillie	3
(nostalgia) (1971) Hollis Frampton	2
Adebar (1957) Peter Kubelka	2
Anticipation of the Night (1958) Stan Brakhage	2
Cosmic Ray (1962) Bruce Conner	2
"Diary" David Perlov	2
Ere erera baleibu icik subua aruaren (1970) José Antonio Sistiaga	2
Free Radicals (1958) Len Lye	2
From the Notebook of… Robert Beavers	2
Girl Chewing Gum, The (1976) John Smith	2
Human Remains (1998) Jay Rosenblatt	2
Images of the World and the Inscription of the War (1988) Harun Farocki	2
Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) Bruce Baillie	2
Outer and Inner Space (1965) Andy Warhol	2
Rose Hobart (1936) Joseph Cornell	2
Ruskin (1974) Robert Beavers	2
Scorpio Rising (1964) Kenneth Anger	2
Screen Tests (1965) Andy Warhol	2
Trade Tattoo (1937) Len Lye	2
verifica incerta, La (1967) Alberto Grifi, Gianfranco Baruchello	2
Way Things Go, The (1987) Peter Fischli, David Weiss	2
Window Water Baby Moving (1959) Stan Brakhage	2
1126 Dewey Avenue, Apt. 207 Creators unknown	1
23rd Psalm Branch (1966) Stan Brakhage	1
37/78 Tree Again (1978) Kurt Kren	1
Amor (2002) Robert Beavers	1
Arabesque (1929) Germaine Dulac	1
Assumption (1997) Peter Gidal	1
Ballet mécanique (1924) Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy	1
Beauty No 2 (1965) Andy Warhol	1
Begone Dull Care (1949) Evelyn Lambart, Norman McLaren	1
Behindert (1974) Stephen Dwoskin	1
Birth of the Nation (1973) Klaus Wyborny	1
Black TV Aldo Tambellini	1
Bleu Shut (1970) Robert Nelson	1
Blight John Smith	1
Bliss (1967) Gregory J. Markopoulos	1
Blow Job (1964) Andy Warhol	1
Carriage Trade (1967) Warren Sonbert	1
Casting a Glance (2007) James Benning	1
Castro Street (1966) Bruce Baillie	1
Clock, The Christian Marclay	1
Color of Love, The (1995) Peggy Ahwesh	1
Colour Box, A (1935) Len Lye	1
Dots (1940) Norman McLaren	1
Dresden Dynamo (1971) Lis Rhodes	1
Egyptian Series Stan Brakhage	1
End, The (1953) Christopher Maclaine	1
Eniaios Gregory J. Markopoulos	1
Eureka (1983) Ernie Gehr	1
Exodus (1997) Steve McQueen	1
Fire in Castile (Tactil Vision of the Wasteland of Fear) (1961) José Val del Omar	1
Flicker, The (1966) Tony Conrad	1
Fuses (1966) Carolee Schneemann	1
Gammelion (1968) Gregory J. Markopoulos	1
Geschichte der Nacht (1978) Clemens Klopfenstein	1
Gloria! Hollis Frampton	1
Ground, The (2002) Robert Beavers	1
Guns of the Trees (1961) Jonas Mekas	1
Hapax Legomena Hollis Frampton	1
Hardwood Process David Gatten	1
Himmler Project, The (2000) Romuald Karmakar	1
Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) George Kuchar	1
Hours for Jerome I & II (1983) Nathaniel Dorsky	1
In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (1978) Guy Debord	1
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) Peter Tscherkassky	1
Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) Kenneth Anger	1
Kitch's Last Meal (1978) Carolee Schneemann	1
Lamentations (1985) R Bruce Elder	1
Mirror Animations Harry Smith	1
My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure Robert Beavers	1
Nicht löschbares Feuer (1968) Harun Farocki	1
One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later (2005) James Benning	1
Peggy and Fred in Hell (2002) Leslie Thornton	1
Place of Work & Tailpiece (1976) Margaret Tait	1
Poetic Justice (1972) Hollis Frampton	1
Presents (1981) Michael Snow	1
Quick Billy (1968) Bruce Baillie	1
Quixote (1964) Bruce Baillie	1
Rabbit's Moon (1950) Kenneth Anger	1
Rainbow Dance (1936) Len Lye	1
Reassemblage T. Minh-ha Trinh	1
Reel Time Annabel Nicolson	1
Renaissance (1963) Walerian Borowczyk	1
Revolver (1994) Jonas Odell, Stig Bergkvist, Marti Ekstrand, Lars Olsson	1
Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) Maya Deren	1
RR (2008) James Benning	1
Seashell and the Clergyman, The (1928) Germaine Dulac	1
Seasons of the Year, The (1975) Artavazd Pelechian	1
Serene Velocity (1970) Ernie Gehr	1
Short Film Series Guy Sherwin	1
Shulie (1998) Elisabeth Subrin	1
Side/Walk/Shuttle Ernie Gehr	1
Sky Socialist, The Ken Jacobs	1
Society of the Spectacle, The (1973) Guy Debord	1
Song and Solitude Nathaniel Dorsky	1
Star Spangled to Death (2003) Ken Jacobs	1
Study of a River Peter Hutton	1
Tango (1980) Zbigniew Rybczynski	1
Text of Light (1974) Stan Brakhage	1
Textism Hirabayashi Isamu	1
To Parsifal Bruce Baillie	1
Trasferimento di modulazione Piero Bargellini	1
vallée close, La (2000) Jean-Claude Rousseau	1
Videograms of a Revolution (1993) Harun Farocki, Andrei Ujica	1
Visions of Meditation Stan Brakhage	1
What Goes Up? Robert Breer	1
Wildfire (2003) Amy Greenfield	1
Wind Vane (1972) Chris Welsby	1
Work done Robert Beavers	1
Aerial (1974) Margaret Tait	1
Allures (1960) Jordan Belson	1
Anthem Apichatpong Weerasethakul	1
At Land (1944) Maya Deren	1
Capitalism: Slavery Ken Jacobs	1
Christmas on Earth (1963) Barbara Rubin	1
Anemic Cinema 1926 Marcel Duchamp	1
Commingled Containers Stan Brakhage	1
Condition of Illusion (1975) Peter Gidal	1
Couch (series) (1966) Andy Warhol	1
Crossroads (1976) Bruce Conner	1
Entr'acte (1924) René Clair	1
Light Reading (1979) Lis Rhodes	1
Long Film for Ambient Light Anthony McCall	1
Lost Lost Lost (1975) Jonas Mekas	1
Ménilmontant (1926) Dimitri Kirsanoff	1
Nicht löschbares Feuer (1968) Harun Farocki	1
Roh-Film (1968) Birgit and Willhelm Hein	1
Soft Fiction (1979) Chick Strand	1
Stadt in Flammen (1984) Schmelzdahin	1
Standard Gauge (1985) Morgan Fisher	1
Golfball - Ode to IBM Mara Mattuschka	1
Weather Diary 3 George Kuchar	1
Super Dyke Meets Madam X Barbara Hammer, Max Almy	1
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1967) William Greaves	1
TV (1967) Kurt Kren	1
10 minutes older (1978) Frank Herz	1
2 minutes 45 seconds William Raban	1

THAT SUMMER

2012-08-16T01:00:00.002+10:00

(Phillipe Garrel; France/ Italy/ Switzerland; 2011)

(In order to review films seen at MIFF 2012 at a faster pace, I now endeavour to keep the word limit to 200 words or less. This limitation has been imposed by my beloved wife, who is wonderfully adept at drafting domestic legislation that enables me to actually get some semblance of sleep at a normal hour, as opposed to staying up half the night, falling asleep at my computer, and writing drivel).

Ah, Garrel. Surely it would be easiest to review a Garrel film by just writing ‘Garrel’ 200 or so times.

I have yet to work out why Garrel’s films appeal. His films seem occasionally morose, the characters sometimes need a good slap, the pace can veer towards lethargy. Yet everything works, it all hangs together perfectly. Garrel has spent a lifetime mapping relationships as they change, disintegrate, and bend over time, and he does not waver from this obsession in this film.

Usually the focus is on one sole couple, but this time he adds a second couple. An artist befriends a struggling actor, and when the artist and his actress wife move to Rome, the actor and his girlfriend move in with them and become observers to a falling apart of the marriage and the gradual disintegration of the artist. The reason for the marriage breakdown is introduced piece by piece, gently stirred into the froth of the film, and it all seems to hinge on one seemingly innocent yet intensely electric dance scene between the artist’s wife and her film director. This scene alone epitomises Garrel, mixing spontaneity, dynamism, and some kind of sublime, elemental zest.

CORRESPONDENCE: JONAS MEKAS – JL GUERIN

2012-08-14T16:10:00.000+10:00

(Jose-Luis Guerin/ Jonas Mekas; Spain; 2011)

Akin to a series of letter exchanges, the correspondence between Jose-Luis Guerin and Jonas Mekas harkens to a nostalgic form of conversation, an antidote to the rapidity and ease of exchange afforded by social media nowadays. Digital technology allows these filmmakers greater immediacy to respond to their environment, thus allowing the exchange of filmed moments and reflections to occur more readily – yet paradoxically there is almost something a little blissfully archaic about these two men deciding to communicate via filmed fragments of their everyday worlds.

The contrast between Guerin’s still and stately reflections and Mekas’ happily chaotic visual-tumble seems to mark them as cinematic chalk-and-cheese. But their obsession is shared – the obsession to film their environment on a regular basis. Why? Mekas tries to answer this in lucid moment of unusual stillness, assessing his love of ‘taping’ the world as something he just needs to do, without knowing why. Whether we see Guerin’s crisp black-and-white framings, or Mekas’ manic and shaky whirligig-world, in both instances what emanates is a desire to ensnare a moment.

The film reminded me of the letter exchanges in Adrian Martin/ Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Movie Mutations, not just in the sense of an exchange occurring but in a joyful sense of camaraderie. Guerin clearly respects Mekas immensely, and the feeling appears to be mutual. But this is no backslapping club –this is simply a humble sharing of thoughts and reflections from two men who are driven to capturing brief moments of fleeting time.

One cannot help but wonder if the filmmakers may have become influenced by the other during their exchange. It’s possible to assess Mekas’ moments of stillness as mimicking Guerin, and Guerin’s shot of his own shadow on the footpath as he walks as being infused with Mekas. For some inexplicable reason, the almost-final scene by Guerin, of two ants trying to haul a large twig up the side of a tombstone in Ozu’s cemetery, feels as if both filmmakers could have been present when the shot was taken. Guerin may be shooting this, but Mekas is there, watching with him, pointing out where they are and telling him to just keep taping the ants to see what might happen.

MIFF 2012 - better late than never.....

2012-08-14T16:07:00.003+10:00

The hiatus is finally broken. Yay, some films at last. The Melbourne International Film Festival 2012 has been on for at least 11 days now, and due to work and study commitments I have missed most of these past 11 days. Ahhh, bugger. Still, I've seen a small handful so far, and have a bit of time up my sleeve to see a swag of films over the final 6 days.

I'll attempt to jot down a ramble for each film viewed, including the small amount seen so far. So, I have some catching-up to do. Better get cracking......

[a postscript, after film festival is over; Well, the whole festival did not pan out as expected, with a number of emergencies, issues, blah blah getting in the way of seeing any more than 6 films. Pathetic, really, considering i used to knock off between 60 to 70 films per festival once upon a time. Ah, the trials and tribulations of a cinephile with a wife and a bub. So, considering I only saw six, and only reviewed two, I can't be bothered reviewing the rest - better to chalk the whole event up as "crap, not what I wanted at all, sigh" and move on. Yes, now I have the joyful task of chasing up all the films i missed out on. Oh, frabjous day.]

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #10: Mothlight

2012-07-30T00:06:00.000+10:00

MOTHLIGHT (Stan Brakhage; USA; 1963)

[3.30 minutes]

Dear Lord, this blog has cobwebs.

So, in the past two months I’ve viewed next to nothing, which makes me cranky. Amongst the whirlwind that appears to be my lot at the moment, the one film that I’ve been able to view repeatedly that staves off total cinema starvation is Mothlight. Yes, Brakhage’s three and a half minute mini-odyssey seems to perfectly function as the equivalent of an energy-rousing tonic. Any tiny glimmer of free time that I can squeeze out of the day may often result in using Mothlight as a cinematic self-help boost.

Brakhage. The name alone sounds like some kind of feverish creative shenanigans, a distant cousin to bricolage. And, of course, Mothlight is definitely a filmic bricolage, born from Brakhage’s poverty and cobbled together by the arrangement of insect wings, twigs, and flora between two pieces of perforated tape. This is a truly earthy film, a pulsating representation of picking and sorting through forest-floor detritus.

Sure, you could say it’s about nature’s ebb and flow. And, sure, you could say there’s a birth/ death dynamic at play here, with shapes being constantly born from light and returned to the dark. But what is most appealing is the feeling that this is cinema as naked and primal music. The film may be silent but there is a constant rhythmic pulse constantly pounding over and over, as this seemingly chaotic concatenation of nature’s flotsam and jetsam flows in an uncanny harmony.

There is a fantastically mesmeric quality to Mothlight. Repeat viewings always reveal new shapes, new associations, new ideas. It is easy and thrilling to get completely lost inside the billowing leaves and beating wings. It proffers the nostalgic kick of the first childhood moment of viewing something under a microscope and marvelling at new ways of viewing the world around you. It gives off the electric frisson of being in close proximity to the natural environment. Best of all, you can freeze the film at any time, and always find a new image to play with, like looking for shapes and associations in the clouds. In the last couple of viewings of the film I froze the film a number of times and saw:

A river delta as viewed from a plane
A field of wheat
An art deco silhouette
A sole tree at night
Dried, discarded snake skin
The debris of an explosion hanging in the air
A close-up of bicycle spokes

Try it when you view the film. Stop it at any random point, and see what you find in the frozen frame.

You can view the film here and experiment with it to your heart’s content.

30 Unseen Directors

2012-06-15T16:31:00.000+10:00

God, I miss film. It seems my film-viewing has trickled to a near stand-still in the past few months. Through hair-tearing tracts of time mismanagement and a general blood-curdlingly hectic schedule, it feels like casting my eyes over some quality cinematic images is becoming some kind of mythic quest.

The only thing that keeps me going in these bleak times of my own GFC (Ginormous Film Crisis) is using any tiny snippet of time to stay plugged in the cinema world. I can either graze on a film magazine, sift through film news on the net, or draft list after list of films that could all be lumped under the heading “Films To Watch When Some Semblance Of Time Management Takes Hold In My Life.”

It’s odd, but lists of films to watch keeps the engine running. It keeps the desire fuelled. To cast my eyes over screeds and screeds of “must-watch” films provides a heady mixture of overwhelm and yearning.

One new list I conjured up, in between frantic bouts of just being me, is of directors who I’ve never seen. It’s alarming to find the gaps in my cinema viewing, amazing to see what slips between the cracks. Once upon a time I think I would have hidden this out of some dumb form of embarrassment at “not keeping up” with the cinephile world, but really why hide this? So I haven’t seen Louise Feuillade yet, or Mikio Naruse. Big deal. I have something to look forward to – and once I ‘conquer’ a few films by these directors, I’m damn certain there will be new names popping up to replace them. It’s great, really - there is always something new to pursue, always new epiphanies potentially around the next corner.

To be transparent, I’ve provided a selected list below of 30 directors who I haven’t seen yet, whose films frequent my “must-have-a-look-at-this-some-time” lists. Here’s to the future of film-viewing.

1. Louis Feuillade

2. Kira Muratova

3. Boris Barnet

4. Jon Jost

5. Nathaniel Dorsky

6. Jean Epstein

7. Alexander Kluge

8. Stephen Dwoskin

9. Jonas Mekas

10. Mikio Naruse

11. Werner Schroeter

12. Joao Cesar Monteiro

13. Guru Dutt

14. Sharunas Bartas

15. Marco Bellocchio

16. Bill Douglas

17. Sacha Guitry

18. Luis Garcia Berlanga

19. Marcel L’Herbier

20. Lav Diaz

21. Mark Rappaport

22. Alan Rudolph

23. Alain Tanner

24. Johan van der Keuken

25. Mario Monicelli

26. Alexei German

27. Jacques Audiard

28. Francois Ozon

29. Krzysztof Zanussi

30. Alain Robbe-Grillet

[pic: Louise Feuillade]

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #9 - Lyrical Nitrate

2012-06-03T14:43:00.001+10:00

LYRICAL NITRATE (Peter Delpeut; Netherlands; 1990)

[50 minutes]

Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate is a mini-archive, a visual museum of dusted-off nitrate relics given a chance to dance on screen once more. The snippets of film that Delpeut used date from 1905 to 1920, and were recovered from the collection of Jean Desmet, a Dutch cinema owner and film distributor who horded hundreds of films in an Amsterdam movie house.

Here, cinema's mortal form is firmly on display and in question, as the film is split into six parts that refer to cinema's nature and life cycle – 'looking', 'mise-en-scene', 'body', 'passion', 'dying', 'and forgetting'. These sections seem to mimic the function of categories in an archive, to assist with classification and archival location. Delpeut's use of images incrementally reveals a desire to present the heart and the history of cinema. The film is almost the mortal anthropomorphic trajectory of cinema as an entity, going from birth, living and loving, pain, dying, then finally death.

The film is 'born' with a series of iris shots, until we see a screen within the screen, and the black of the rest of the shot lights up to reveal an audience watching a film. This introduces a self-referential aspect that permeates the entire film, and sets off a chain of relations between scenes that suggests that the history of cinema is predicated on constant influence, mutation, and re-birth. At times it even seems like these films are watching each other, providing a haunted fantasy of what films might get up to in an archive when they are discarded, forgotten and unobserved.

Delpeut often retains the natural speed of the images he uses, but on occasion he employs variations to startling effect. During the 'mise-en-scene’ section, a scene of a man and a woman talking then moving apart in a drawing room is broken down into still shots. After these still images choppily describe their brief liaison, they finally kiss, and the film comes to life again as they embrace, a moment that is exquisitely similar to the blinking eye that occurs in Chris Marker's La Jetee. This sequence not only signifies the archival reduction of early cinema to still images through inaccessibility, but also of the metaphysical movement of early film from death back to renewed life again, through rediscovery, re-projection, and re-use.

In another section, Delpeut scientifically breaks down a scene where a woman is assailed with some kind of emotional trauma in a parlour room. He plays the scene over and over, first at normal speed, then slower, then even slower again. At this slowest speed, Delpeut zooms in on details in the scene – her neck stretched and taut, her arm flailing behind her, searching for support. Suddenly the spell of being immersed in pure unadulterated early cinema is broken, as this moment is scanned and analysed, like a specimen to be observed, dissected, and experimented upon. It is a moment of analytical re-photography akin to Ken Jacobs' work.

The final section of Lyrical Nitrate is a dream (nightmare?) of the death of cinema. The scene is of Adam and Eve, but most of the images are ravaged by decay. Images flicker determinedly through increasing barrages of haze and murk, as we see Eve converse with the Serpent, and then take a bite of the fruit that gives knowledge but takes away immortality. At this moment, the film is completely obliterated with decay, the only image visible in the final two minutes being the image of either Death or God, seated, in the sky. It is fitting that this final moment is part of a section entitled ‘forgetting’, which comes after ‘dying’. Here, alone in the archive, these films dream of their possible fate, and dream of their fear of death. But an even worse fate for these ‘lost’ films is the possibility of being forever forgotten, their existence slowly extinguished as the memory of them fades.

You can watch a small segment of the film here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #8 - Rumpelstilzchen

2012-05-11T23:19:00.004+10:00

RUMPELSTILZCHEN (Jurgen Reble; Germany; 1989)

[14 mins]

At face value, Reble’s work seems to play the same game as Bill Morrison, focusing on the beauty of decay in compiled fragments of found footage. But Reble’s films present a very different perspective on decay. Morrison’s films are nostalgic paeans to the fragile and crumbling meta-archive of film history, where decay signifies nostalgia and loss. Reble’s decay is intentional, borne from experimental manipulation of film stock via chemical processes and natural processes. Film strips are hung on trees and left to the elements for months, even years. In Reble’s films, decay signifies an acceleration of the mortality of film, revealing film stock as a living entity that is engaged with the natural world and undergoes dynamic and natural changes.

There is an intense tactility with Reble’s work. When viewing Rumpelstilzchen, there is a strong, palpable sensation that the film has been handled and mauled. Whether it’s been drowned in a chemical wash, scratched, looped, distorted or bleached, the entire film feels like it has had a pair of hands all over it.

Reble first worked as part of a collective in the early 80’s, called Schmelzdahin. The group appears to have been a think-tank for exploring as many methods as possible to physically alter film stock. Strips of film were attacked with sewing needles, sandpaper, carved and chiselled, and put through a multitude of chemical experiments. The disintegration and alteration of abused stock when projected was also an intrinsic component of their work.

Reble took his research from Schmelzdahin and continued his experimentations on his own. For Reble, the alteration of film stock is an alchemical process, transforming a once-inert section of film into a living organism. He even refers to himself as a “Film Alchemist”.

Rumpelstilzchen is one of his earliest films, along with the much longer Passion, made in the same year. The heart of this abused-footage film is the manipulation of a 1950’s German B-movie about the Rumpelstiltskin fairy-tale. Of course, it’s fortuitously perfect that the film is based on the story of a man who can spin straw into gold. The alchemical process at the centre of the fairy-tale is paralleled by Reble’s own version of cinematic alchemy, and Reble directly ties the fable to the cinematic process by using altered shots of a spinning wheel as a motif through the film and as a reminder of the spinning of the projector wheel.

From the outset we are introduced to a swathe of induced decay and discoloured film. These patches of indecipherable fungal blurs are dotted throughout the film, acting as a kind of punctuation point, or as a kind of rumination. Decay here acts as a meditative aid, a pause for (no) thought.

After this swathe, the other noticeable thing that occurs is a low, slowed-down voice drawling across the audio track. Reble uses audio as intently as the visual to draw out a sense of loops and cycles. Audio occurs in discreet chunks, often looped, back-tracked, and repeated. Both sound and visuals are used together to create a continual hallucinatory sensation of a story and a film being spun into a new shape.

There’s a wonderful sense of mystery to the images, in that it becomes difficult to work out whether all of the footage is from the one source or not. Some shots have a different weight and tone to the manipulated sections from the B-Movie version of Rumpelstiltskin. A man walks in slow motion, his outline often a hazy negative image, and he looks directly at the camera, making it feel as if this is amateur or home footage, perhaps shot by Reble himself. In another early section, a man seems to be doing chin-ups with a bar, which seems out of step with the fairy-tale. Then suddenly, half-way through the film, Reble pulls a hilarious stunt, including a shot of the vampire in Murnau’s Nosferatu, a clear signifier of ‘other sources’ and a screeching interloper from the historical realm of cinema. The audio is silent as the vampire turns slowly, and in a sublime moment of comic editing, we see what he turns to view – a group of ducks. He then slowly turns back and focuses on his prey. In this amusing moment, it is as if the ‘real’ historical stream of film has ruptured the skin of Reble’s alchemical creation, suggesting that Reble’s film has dreamed itself into an entirely new realm that perhaps flows separately but in tandem to the pre-existing realm.

The above may sound far-fetched, yet Reble’s film is an intensely immersive experience, and the sensation that one is viewing a living, breathing organism-as-film is almost hypnotically disconcerting. Reble ends the film with two minutes of a blurry image of a baby, both alluding to a key tenet to the Rumpelstiltskin story (remember the old goblin-creature spins straw into gold in exchange for the miller’s daughters future firstborn child), but also alluding to the birth of a new kind of film. Film entwined with nature. Film as living matter.

The film is viewable here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #7 - Ten Skies

2012-04-25T23:57:00.000+10:00

[Yes, there's been another brief hiatus, having been on a spontaneous roadtrip for the past three weeks. I'm back now, and blogging once more. Yay.]

TEN SKIES (James Benning; USA; 2004)

[100 minutes]

Ten Skies was made in the same year that Benning also made 13 Lakes, forever marking these two films as twinned companions to each other. Certainly these films have the same minimalist meditative resonance – 13 long shots of lakeside scenes, 10 long shots of the sky. However, 13 Lakes has the terrestrial anchor of a horizon line, providing a gravity-bound framework, while Ten Skies feels weightless and light, lost in the heavens.

Composed of ten ten-minute long shots of different skies in Val Verde, California, this is a celestial film that focuses on the texture and shape of clouds, sky, and occasional earthly intrusions of smoke and fire. More pointedly, the film focuses our attention on the meditative act of sky-gazing, a time to lose yourself in your own thoughts. Looking up to the sky can free the skygazer from their earthbound concerns for a moment, allowing their mind to drift in time with the slow-moving clouds, an act that is somewhat akin to losing yourself inside a film.

The choice and arrangement of each sky is clearly not random. The first sky we see makes us aware of how we use our attention, as there is barely any perceptible movement in the clouds and the viewer is constantly scanning the screen looking for signs of change or movement. There is also the expectation of seeing something other than clouds – perhaps a plane, perhaps a bird flitting across the screen. Yet the first sky is perhaps the most static, with changes happening so slowly it is barely noticeable. By the time a bird flies quickly across the screen during the second sky, we’ve grown accustomed to not expecting anything other than clouds to mark the skyscape.

Often, when applying all of one’s attention on one part of the sky in order to gauge any change, other areas change without the viewer noticing. Hard and focussed attention never ensnares the achingly slow dynamics of each sky scene, and over time it becomes easy to relax into the skies, allowing yourself to let your attention drift inside the clouds.

What is most fascinating about this film is the importance of sound. This is not simply a visual diary of the firmament – these skies are tied to an invisible world filled with highway noise, birdsong, buzzing, helicopter whirrs, human voices, and gunshots. The fact that we only ever see the sky and never see the source of the sounds provides a brilliant sense of dislocation and disorientation to the film, and provides a kind of mystery that surpasses mere visual stimulus.

You can view a segment of the film here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #6 - Necrology

2012-04-02T23:12:00.000+10:00

NECROLOGY (Standish Lawder; 1969-1970; USA)

[12 mins]

In a perfect world, Standish Lawder’s Necrology would be shown as broadly and as often as possible, and would be a widely-known and oft-heralded film that transcends its experimental tag. It is not only a succinct summation of the fleeting fragility of capturing images of people, but is also perfect proof that experimental cinema can indeed have a funny bone.

The film is composed of two distinct sections. For the first 8 minutes we see a succession of people, crammed into the screen, gliding upwards towards the heavens. It takes a moment or two to realise that these people are indeed filmed in reverse, and that Lawder filmed an elevator full of people in Grand Central station.

At first, there’s a distinct pleasure in casually watching the faces of these people as they drift upwards. There’s room to imagine that the look on their faces may reveal emotions commensurate with moving upward to an after-life. Some people seem to be very calm, casually chatting with others. Others seem pensive, some weary, some haggard, some impassive, some stoic, some resigned, some bemused. And, in an oddly uplifting way, no one is fearful.

After a few minutes, and after seeing many, many faces pass before our eyes, it sets in that we are only able to focus very briefly on these people. Their faces remain in light for maybe three or four seconds before they disappear into the murky dark. Their lives remain inscrutable, we have no idea who they are and we cannot “be” with them long enough to truly connect, to read their faces, to make up stories about them.

And so the title begins to make sense. A necrology is like an obituary column, a list of people of who have recently died. These images of people are dead images. It may well be the only record of these people on film, and their image is a fleeting record of themselves before they pass into the necropolis of archived film stock.

But, after the mass ascension has ended, Lawder throws a devilish spanner in the works, cranking out a three minute long cast list of the people we’ve just seen. It’s a list full of imagined vocations and amusing states of being – there’s “Deaf Mute Woman”, “Man Whose Wife Doesn’t Understand Him”, “Corvette Owner”, “Fugitive, Interstate”, “Former Disc Jockey”, and “Woman with Canker Sore on Inside Of Left Cheek”, amongst many others. As much as these imagined roles are often hilarious, it adds to the realisation that there is a gap between the image of the person and our understanding of that person. Lawder’s cast list highlights the impossibility of truly knowing who these people are, and forces the viewer into a game of reflection, trying madly to remember who “Tough Girl With Cigarette and White Handbag” was, and trying to work out from memory who “Embezzler (At Large)” might be.

You can view the film here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #5 - Light is Calling

2012-03-24T15:11:00.001+11:00

[After a month's hiatus, the continuing series focussing on snapshots of experimental cinema starts up again. Apologies for the time it took to get this up and running again, it's been a busy month].

LIGHT IS CALLING (Bill Morrison; USA; 2004)

[8 mins]

Light is Calling was released two years after Decasia, Morrison’s masterwork of recombined decaying film stock, and it can be considered as a capsule-sized appendage to the older film. Unlike the collation of assorted nitrate fragments that shape Decasia, Light is Calling is a decaying narrative composed entirely from the decaying stock of one film, James Young's The Bells, made in 1926.

Morrison sculpted not one but two films from a decaying copy of The Bells, having also made The Mesmerist a year earlier. Both of these films hone the issues of cinematic mortality that Decasia alluded to by zeroing in on one finite, singular decaying source and offering a positive and creative solution to the future decline of legible cinema by carving two narratives from the one text. Both films wear the hallmarks of the metaphors that circulate around archiving – mortality, the need to ameliorate instability and fragility, the hope of regeneration, the past's relation to the present.

Whereas The Mesmerist is a testament to the power of recombining previously used footage to create a new narrative, Light Is Calling is a furious, disorienting, swirling sea of bubbles, boils, fissures, and pockmarks. The Mesmerist has a sheen of decay that adds texture to the narrative, whereas Light Is Calling takes mortality to an extreme. There is so much obliteration of the image in this eight-minute film that it seems to suggest an imagining of cinema as already dead. The decay creates constant mist swirls, suggesting a haunted film, attempting to project itself from the archival grave. The title alone suggests as much – Light is Calling, as if the light of cinema is calling from its distant past.

What is fascinating about Light is Calling is how the decay becomes the central component not just of the film’s form but also of its narrative content. The decay helps to reinvent and revive the old film, concocting an entirely new narrative, and perhaps heralding the beginning of future decay-narratives. It becomes a character, a monstrous entity that pushes the story forward.

Through a miasmatic haze of constantly churning decay, a simple story occurs in fragmentary glimpses. A woman is trapped inside a morass of celluloidal mist, being constantly buffeted and pummeled by this sea of nitrate-decay. It is as if she is trying to survive the death of the film, like a drowning swimmer waving in the surf. Meanwhile, a group of cavalrymen search ceaselessly, travelling forested paths attempting both to find the woman and to find a way out of the decaying film. The leader of the cavalrymen finds the woman, and in a remarkable moment reaches into the boiling haze and pulls the woman out. They ride off together, decay-mist still surrounding and attacking them, to find a new life for themselves outside of their world of nitrate.

Thus, Light is Calling gauges a feeling of triumph rather than melancholy for the plight of decaying film. Rather than the doomed legacy that beholds the future of decaying nitrate film, Light is Calling shows it to be filled with potential for renewed, vigorous experimental beginnings, and thus this film is a clarion call for nitrate’s victorious survival in new forms.

The film can be viewed here.

KUCHAR, BELSON, BREER – quick notes on a tribute

2012-03-13T22:08:00.000+11:00

A few days ago I managed to catch an evening of films paying tribute to three experimental filmmakers who died last year – George Kuchar, Jordan Belson, and Robert Breer. This was a rare opportunity to see work by these three on the big screen, so the event was a must-see.

The evening started with a handful of films by Kuchar, starting with his most well-known film Hold Me While I’m Naked. Watching a series of Kuchar films is a little bit like listening to too much Wagner, black metal, or noise music in one sitting – in a small dose it’s fine, but too much and after some time your head begins to feel as if it’s dehydrating. Thus, after 70 minutes worth of constant intense orchestral music to back the lurid and comic faux-melodrama and by the end your head is kind of sore.

If anything, watching Kuchar is an opportunity to enter into the world of cheap shitty New York apartments from the 1960’s. In almost every film we get to see a grimy, mouldy, cramped bathroom, and focussing on the small details such as the horrid, dank atmosphere of these bathrooms becomes a small pleasure in its own right. This is unadorned filmmaking, dressed up through its overuse of melodrama to appear completely adorned. The most fascinating moments were observing the pockmarks and acne in close-ups on the face of the lead male character in Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, or the huge balls of dust gathered at the edges of the room in The Mongreloid.

The meditative unfolding of colour, patterns, and rhythm of Belson’s films come as an immediate antidote to the audio-visual bombast of Kuchar’s work. Belson’s films exude billowing calm. Of the five films presented, I’d only seen one before, Allures, as part of a compendium of 5 films released on DVD by the Center of Visual Music. Although a small-screen viewing of this was spellbinding, nothing prepares you for the journey experienced via the big screen.

The overarching effect of viewing Belson’s films is clearly stated in the titles – Cosmos, Meditation, Chakra, Cycles. The screen is filled with swathes and washes of gently-roiling coloured mist, smoke, water, and spiralling circles, and it feels as if the eye is being taught how to slow down. The effect is one of total immersion, a kind of submission to the constant drifting movement of colours and circular patterns. But this is not just a soporific experience – the films still have pace and energy, shapes constantly morphing from one state to the next, always in flux, never in stasis. The ‘real world’ even manages to break through into these films (a brief shot of a diver in Meditation; a naked figure, parachutists, and even what appears to be a cityscape in Cycles), but these fleeting images become a part of the seamless meditative fabric that Belson weaves.

Constant motion is also the heart of Breer’s films, although the pace is far more frenetic. Collaged scraps and scribbled drawings are constantly twisting and hopping in fits across the screen, appearing and being replaced by a new manic sketch in the blink of an eye. Yet, despite the pile-up of animated debris that Breer pumps out at a rapid rate, this is also an incredibly immersive experience, producing a different kind of meditation. If Belson is akin to meditating via the sound gently-chiming singing bowls, then Breer is like meditating via white noise.

The most fascinating part of watching this small program of Breer’s output (16 films over 80 minutes), is mapping the chronological progression of his filmmaking. His earlier films from the 1950’s seem more likely to use cut-ups of newspapers and magazines, and the pace is rapid, buzzing, nonrepetitive. Later films introduce rhythmic cycles (like the start of 69, with a simple geometric drawing rotating through the screen, over and over), and become more like diary films, with the soundtrack composed of recordings supposedly from Breer’s domestic environment. Throughout, the insistent theme pulsing through Breer’s films is pure unadulterated spontaneity, stringing together improvised doodles and creating an animated cinema of pure ‘now’.

101 FILMS: A JOURNEY FROM 1991-2011

2012-03-05T00:41:00.005+11:00

[Been quiet the past couple of weeks, due to dealing with a busy transitional phase in life, shifting vocational focus. I aim to get back on board with some regular posting this week, with the desire to get another experimental cinema post up and running in the next couple of days]

This is my 101st post. Obviously I’ve just realised this recently, as I would have been celebrating a 100th post as opposed to the 101st, but hey a post is a post is a post, as Gertrude Stein would never have said if she had been a blogger.

I can probably mark my first truly earnest year of cinema-passion as 1991, because that was the first year I recall heading off to the local international film festival by myself, poring through the festival booklet and trying to see as much as I could. So, seeing how the years 1991 to 2011 present a tidyish twenty year stretch, I've decided to celebrate my 101st post by presenting a list of 101 films that represent a journey of little epiphanies – moments that mark some kind of development in my understanding and appreciation of cinema.

Let's get this clear. It's not a 'best of' list. And these are not necessarily my favourite films of each director represented in the list (only one film per director, by the way - no reason why, we just need rules sometimes).

It's simply a journey, charting little boundary-pushing explosions of surprise.

It maps first encounters with directors I grew to love. It reflects films that allowed me to finally obtain a clearer understanding of a director’s work, made me think "ahh, now I get it", giving me the werewithal to re-appraise previous work. It charts films that lit me up, that had my head buzzing after leaving the cinema. It highlights films that sparked a whole new line of enquiry, a new understanding of the language of cinema, a new path of cinematic discovery.

Right, enough preamble. Here’s the list.

1.      LA BELLE NOISEUSE (Jacques Rivette; France; 1991)
2.      RAISE THE RED LANTERN (Zhang Yimou; Hong Kong; 1991)
3.      VAN GOGH (Maurice Pialat; France; 1991)
4.      THE QUINCE TREE SUN (Victor Erice; Spain; 1991)
5.      NIGHT ON EARTH (Jim Jarmusch; USA; 1991)
6.      NAKED LUNCH (David Cronenberg; USA; 1991)
7.      THE LEADER, HIS DRIVER, AND HIS DRIVER’S WIFE (Nick Broomfield; UK; 1991)
8.      CAREFUL (Guy Maddin; Canada; 1992)
9.      THE PLAYER (Robert Altman; USA; 1992)
10.   GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (James Foley; USA; 1992)
11.   RESERVOIR DOGS (Quentin Tarantino; USA; 1992)
12.   TIME INDEFINITE (Ross McElwee; USA; 1993)
13.   CALENDAR (Atom Egoyan; Canada/ Germany/ Armenia; 1993)
14.   SONATINE (Takeshi Kitano; Japan; 1993)
15.   NAKED (Mike Leigh; UK; 1993)
16.   THREE COLOURS; BLUE, WHITE, RED (France/ Poland/ Switzerland; 1993-1994)
17.   SATANTANGO (Bela Tarr; Hungary-Germany-Switzerland; 1994)
18.   THE KINGDOM (Lars von Trier; Denmark; 1994)
19.   CARO DIARIO (Nanni Moretti; Italy/ France; 1994)
20.   LONDON (Patrick Keiller; UK; 1994)
21.   HOOP DREAMS (Steve James; USA; 1994)
22.   BEFORE THE RAIN (Milcho Manchevski; UK/ France/ Macedonia; 1994)
23.   LA HAINE (Mathieu Kassovitz; France; 1995)
24.   FARGO (Joel and Ethan Coen; USA; 1995)
25.   HEAT (Michael Mann; USA; 1995)
26.   A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE (Mohsen Makhmalbaf; Iran/ France/ Switzerland; 1995)
27.   UNDERGROUND (Emir Kusturica; France/ Germany/ Hungary; 1995)
28.   LONE STAR (John Sayles; USA; 1995)
29.   CRUMB (Terry Zwigoff; USA; 1995)
30.   IRMA VEP (Olivier Assayas; France; 1996)
31.   DRIFTING CLOUDS (Aki Kaurismaki; Finland; 1996)
32.   WACO: THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (William Gazecki; USA; 1997)
33.   FAST, CHEAP, AND OUT OF CONTROL (Errol Morris; USA; 1997)
34.   PUBLIC HOUSING (Frederick Wiseman; USA; 1997)
35.   BOOGIE NIGHTS (Paul Thomas Anderson; USA; 1997)
36.   FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke; Austria; 1997)
37.   A TASTE OF CHERRY (Abbas Kiarostami; Iran; 1997)
38.   MOTHER AND SON (Aleksandr Sokurov; Russia/ Germany; 1997)
39.   THE INTERVIEW (Harun Farocki; Germany; 1997)
40.   HAPPINESS (Todd Solondz; USA; 1998)
41.   42 UP (Michael Apted; UK; 1998)
42.   THE THIN RED LINE (Terrence Malick; USA; 1998)
43.   FESTEN (Thomas Vinterberg; Denmark; 1998)
44.   BEAU TRAVAIL (Claire Denis; France; 1998)
45.   I STAND ALONE (Gaspar Noe; France; 1998)
46.   RING (Hideo Nakata; Japan; 1998)
47.   AFTER LIFE (Hirokazu Kore-eda; Japan; 1998)
48.   HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (Jean-Luc Godard; France; 1998)
49.   ETERNITY AND A DAY (Theo Angelopoulos; Greece/ France/ Italy/ Germany; 1998)
50.   ALONE, LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY (Martin Arnold; Austria; 1998)
51.   PONY GLASS (Lewis Klahr; USA; 1998)
52.   FILM IST. (1-12) (Gustav Deutsch; Austria; 1998/2002)
53.   ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Pedro Almodovar; Spain; 1999)
54.   ROSETTA (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Belgium/ France; 1999)
55.   RATCATCHER (Lynne Ramsay; UK/ France; 1999)
56.   L’HUMANITE (Bruno Dumont; France; 1999)
57.   OUTER SPACE (Peter Tscherkassky; Austria; 1999)
58.   SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (Roy Andersson; Sweden/ France/ Denmark/ Norway/ Germany; 2000)
59.   EUREKA (Shinji Aoyama; Japan; 2000)
60.   THE CIRCLE (Jafar Panahi; Iran; 2000)
61.   IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Wong Kar-Wai; Hong Kong/ France; 2000)
62.   YI YI (Edward Yang; Taiwan/ Japan; 2000)
63.   THE GLEANERS AND I (Agnes Varda; France; 2000)
64.   NINE QUEENS (Fabian Bielinsky; Argentina; 2000)
65.   PLATFORM (Jia Zhangke; Hong Kong/ Japan/ France/ Netherlands/ Switzerland; 2000)
66.   MULHOLLAND DRIVE (David Lynch; USA; 2001)
67.   BLOODY SUNDAY (Paul Greengrass; UK/ Ireland; 2001)
68.   TIME OUT (Laurent Cantet; France; 2001)
69.   PULSE (Kiyoshi Kurosawa; Japan; 2001)
70.   A MA SOEUR! (Catherine Breillat; France/ Italy; 2001)
71.   THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (Wes Anderson; USA; 2001)
72.   FEMME FATALE (Brian De Palma; France; 2002)
73.   THE CENTURY OF THE SELF (Adam Curtis; UK; 2002)
74.   DISTANT (Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Turkey/ Netherlands; 2002)
75.   TO BE AND TO HAVE (Nicolas Philibert; France; 2002)
76.   DECASIA (Bill Morrison; USA; 2002)
77.   BUS 174 (Felipe Larceda & Jose Padilha; Brazil; 2002)
78.   GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (Tsai Ming-liang; Taiwan; 2003)
79.   ELEPHANT (Gus van Sant; USA; 2003)
80.   THE BEST OF YOUTH (Marco Tullio Giordana; Italy; 2003)
81.   MEMORIES OF MURDER (Bong Joon-ho; South Korea; 2003)
82.   KINGS AND QUEEN (Arnaud Desplechin; France; 2004)
83.   OLDBOY (Park Chan-wook; South Korea; 2004)
84.   LOS MUERTOS (Lisandro Alonso; Argentina/ France/ Netherlands/ Switzerland; 2004)
85.   THE HOLY GIRL (Lucrecia Martel; Argentina/ Spain/ Netherlands/ Italy/ Switzerland; 2004)
86.   GRIZZLY MAN (Werner Herzog; USA; 2005)
87.   WORKINGMAN’S DEATH (Michael Glawogger; Austria/ Germany; 2005)
88.   SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Thailand/ France/ Netherlands/ Austria; 2006)
89.   12.08 EAST OF BUCHAREST (Corneliu Porumboiu; Romania/ France; 2006)
90.   COLOSSAL YOUTH (Pedro Costa; Portugal/ France/ Switzerland; 2006)
91.   SILENT LIGHT (Carlos Reygadas; Mexico/ France/ Netherlands; 2007)
92.   AT SEA (Peter Hutton; USA; 2007)
93.   IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (Jose Luis Guerin; Spain/ France; 2007)
94.   MODERN LIFE (Raymond Depardon; France; 2008)
95.   MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh; UK; 2008)
96.   LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Tomas Alfredson; Sweden/ Norway; 2008)
97.   DOGTOOTH (Giorgos Lanthimos; Greece; 2009)
98.   DISORDER (Weikai Huang; China; 2009)
99.   EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (Banksy; UK; 2010)
100. NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (Patricio Guzman; Chile/ France/ Germany; 2010)
101. LE QUATTRO VOLTE (Michelangelo Frammartino; Italy/ France/ Switzerland; 2010)

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #4 - Lapis

2012-02-16T13:46:00.003+11:00

LAPIS (James Whitney; USA; 1966)

[9 mins]

James Whitney’s body of work is notably small, having opted to devote more time to pottery than filmmaking from the late 1960’s til his death in 1982, yet his films Yantra and Lapis sit comfortably high in the ranks of well-regarded abstract cinema. While Yantra took ten years to complete, it’s intricate patterns being drawn entirely by hand on small filing cards, Lapis was completed in three years, the process being aided through the assistance of a mechanical analogue computer built by Whitney’s brother, John.

Yet Lapis doesn’t completely feel like a ‘computer film’ – the constant rhythmic movement of soft, tiny coloured particles give the impression of breathing, of life. The opening sequence provides the best example of this life-energy; the film gently fades into a white frame, not stark but soft, like the white of clouds. Within this pillowy texture, tiny grey dots begin to emerge, forming a circle on the outer edges of the frame, constantly shimmering. The circle deepens, as more grey particles swarm and shimmy towards the centre of the frame. Soon most of the frame is consumed with gently vibrating grey dots, forming the first of many mandala-like patterns through the film.

According to Gene Youngblood in Expanded Cinema, this sequence was achieved via a mixture of hand-painted and mechanical means. Youngblood states, “Whitney hand-painted glass plates with fields of dot-patterns that began sparsely and collected into high concentration toward the centre. These were placed on rotating tables beneath a vertically-mounted camera. The tables spun on their own axes while simultaneously revolving around another axis, and at the same time moving horizontally across camera range.”

What this reveals is an intense level of determination and effort that exudes through the film. This is not a hastily-arranged proto-screensaver – the constant movement of spiralling circles is created through fervent concentration, and this vitality pulsates through the film, inducing a reflective state in the viewer.

The title, Lapis, appears to have been carefully chosen to tap into this meditative mode – it refers to lapis philosophorum, or the philosopher’s stone, a core component of alchemy that assists in attaining enlightenment, immortality, perfection, and meditative bliss. The philosopher’s stone is created through an alchemical process that involves many colour changes and concludes in multiplication, which is perfectly embodied in the constantly evolving colour cycles in Lapis, and a concluding sequence where the mandala-circle rends itself into two separate circular entities. Whitney’s Lapis is thus an alchemical journey, symbolising the processes of life and universe and the desire to attain the highest forms of knowledge.

The film ripples with upheaval and dispersion, then reformation and unity, always constantly flowing from one state to the next. The opening sequence described earlier ends when the grey mandala is replaced with brown, yellow, and red concentric pattern that breathes and shimmers until it breaks apart, leaving a shower of dots to gently float into formation, creating the word “lapis.” This word explodes, and soon the dots form the same pulsing mandala we saw before. The colour switches to blue, the circles describe tightly-defined arcs and then the dots begin to grow, blur, and disperse once again. The film has a constant ebb and flow that alludes to the microcosmic atomic aspect of life and the macrocosmic infinities of the universe.

The centre is the key, it magnetically attracts the viewer’s attention. All movement appear to emanate from the flowing centre. It’s a reminder of the eye, of the sun, of the birth canal, of the nipple. And the constant changes of colour and patterns, while retaining a core concentric flow, attribute a sense of there being many possible centres, many possible universes.

The last minute of the film involves a remarkable sequence, where the white screen with a pulsing grey circle returns, and is then reversed to a sharp black screen with a bright white circle, providing a kind of contrast of positive/ negative forces. This white circle begins to strobe and warp, pulling and tearing itself into pained ovals before finally breaking apart into two separate worlds. It’s as if we are witnessing a version of the Big Bang. Then the grey particles return once more, move quickly in towards the centre and out and number of times, disappearing one last time to leave a white screen, which fades to black. Thus it ends where it started, the transformations returning us to pure white then infinite black. Life, death, creation, and transformation all exist in this one small sequence. The alchemical journey of Lapis is also a manifestation of cinema-as-alchemy - the transformation of ideas into a greater whole, coming to life and then ending, but ready to come to life again at a moments notice.

Lapis can be viewed here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #3 - The Kiss

2012-02-06T02:00:00.000+11:00

THE KISS (Rafael Montanez Ortiz; USA; 1985)

[6 mins]

Sometimes films and filmmakers slip in between the cracks in the annals of experimental cinema. In the historical arc of found footage filmmaking, the work of Raphael Montanez Ortiz very rarely gets discussed, yet he has produced a body of work that is extremely rich both in size of filmography and intensity of content. It seems a steady growth of appreciation of his work is just beginning to emanate, even though his first forays into found footage filmmaking occurred contemporaneously with Bruce Conner in the late 1950’s.
Ortiz’s filmmaking career occurs in two distinct periods –the first during the years 1956-1958, and the second from 1985 to 1996. In between these periods he produced a wide array of performance art events, installations, and paintings, creating a multi-mediated manifesto based on destruction. The films from the first period were created under the auspices of ritual performance, with Ortiz chanting and punching holes into strips of film, then re-playing it, or placing segments of cut-up film into a medicine bag, shaking and ‘cleansing’ the film, then splicing the film into a new sequence based on its procurement from the bag. His second period involved corrupting short segments from a laser-disc copy of a film, usually Hollywood films, and manipulating these segments through a computer, advancing or reversing the film at varying speeds to create stuttering rhythmic cinema seizures.

The Kiss occurs at the beginning of Ortiz’s productive second phase, and is a remarkable reminder of Martin Arnold’s Pièce Touchée, although Ortiz made his film four years before Arnold. Like Arnold’s film, this is a pulsating intervention into an old black-and-white Hollywood film, with a section of film originally only a few seconds long being drawn out into a vibrating interchange between a man and a woman that lasts many minutes. Whereas Arnold’s magnificent film works on the sensation of reconvening space, creating a circular choppy rhythm that gently nudges the characters into a flowing staccato dance, Ortiz’s hypnotic film is a relentless barrage of opposing forces, as if time is attempting to move forward and back in the same instance. The result is a film rife with violence and passion, where a kiss becomes a brutal attack and the opening of a door becomes a furious infinity-loop that seems to rupture very surface of the film.

The film starts with the man in a corridor, clearly about to enter a room. Immediately the head of the woman enters from the left-hand side of the frame, superimposed on the man, shuddering repeatedly and appearing to chase the man. Time is disrupted here, for she seems to chases him into opening a door in front of her, creating a hiccup in chronology and instigating a repeated sense of attraction and repulsion. Her pulsing hand movements appear to both push the door shut and pull it open, which is mirrored later when her hand reaches to the man’s chest, both to embrace him and to repel him at the same time. The film emits a physical blizzard of tension and ambiguity, where opposing emotions occupy the same nervous-tic gesture. And as the film fades out rather than cuts abruptly to an end, there’s a sense that this stammering world continues into an infinite void.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Ortiz’s film is its palpability – the incessant throbbing movement alludes to intervening hands and tools shaking and hammering into the fabric of the film, creating a visual manifestation of the pliability of images.

You can view the film by clicking here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #2 - Sidewinder's Delta

2012-01-28T15:27:00.002+11:00

SIDEWINDER’S DELTA (Pat O’Neill; USA; 1976)

[20 mins]

This film is nestled within a rich vein of work that O’Neill pumped out throughout the 1970’s. A master of the optical printer, O’Neill’s overarching aesthetic, via re-photographing, re-colouring and shading images, has been to overlay images to create an unusually palpable version of dream logic. It’s not so much that we’re presented with a series of un-related images, as would usually befit the ‘dreamlike imagery’ tag – it’s more that we see a series of discrete aesthetic events, without any obvious relationship.

In Sidewinder’s Delta, the film starts with a flow of bubbling swathes of colour –pastel hues of blue, green, yellow, and white. Redolent of the movement of a river, or the curvaceous rippling of a snake, this start to the film is an embodiment of its title. But as these washes of colour are superseded by a layer of broken blackness, this event ceases, and is replaced by grass-like scratches drawn over a grey-blue image that is never fully seen. After two minutes of jerky angular greenish scratches, this event abruptly stops and is replaced with a shot of palm-trees overlaid on to an image of a hand, giving the hand the appearance of a mobile mountain. And then this is replaced with shots of coloured squares lying on a desert floor, a patch of grass, and a flower-rich meadow. As these squares move in the wind, the colours change. And so it goes, the film moving from time-lapse footage of the desert, to a hand-trowel jutting out of the desert like a monument, to fruit being manipulated by tuning forks to the tune of static-filled, between-channels radio, to a pendulum swinging around a house set in a barren landscape, to a cactus changing colour in harmony with colour changes from an adjacent light bulb, and so on.

As the late great writer on experimental cinema, Paul Arthur, has pointed out, O’Neill is constantly engaging in the texture and tectonics of the surface of the image. In Lines of Sight, Paul Arthur refers to “the notion of “surface” as a site of intense transactions, a realm where themes of regulation and disruption, the everyday and the fantastic, are intertwined in comic and menacing articulations.” Sidewinder’s Delta is replete with these surfaces, always combining quotidian objects and transforming them into something more fantastic. There are frames within frames (the paper squares in natural environments) and a tactility to the layering of images (stones, cacti, desert dirt, grass).

O’Neill is based in Los Angeles, and Sidewinder’s Delta is a paean of sorts to the environs that have become part of the mythical landscapes of his homebase. The desert landscape becomes a commonly-used backdrop through the entire film, and O’Neill appears to be pre-occupied with both acknowledging these iconic spaces as well as transforming them into abstract vistas. In fact, it seems that Sidewinder’s Delta was initially intended as an ‘indirect Western’, “a meditation on the myth of wilderness” (to quote Paul Arthur again).

O’Neill presents these fragments of odd aesthetic events with a great deal of playfulness, and humour is a crucial component to this film. It is the incongruous and inventive use of sound that often adds an extra layer to the already-multi-layered images. A serene time-lapse image of a desert is soundtracked with the sound of someone blowing into a mic, emulating the sound of wind. A block-shaped building layered on top of a hilly landscape is serenaded by the swamp-pop song “Breakin’ Up is Hard to Do”. It soon becomes clear that the song has an echoey resonance, as if played from a haunted ballroom, and as the scene progresses, sounds that appear to be squeaky doors and then gun-shots can be heard. Somehow O’Neill simultaneously conjures up amusement, nostalgia (swamp-pop was already a bygone musical genre by 1976, and the images and sounds also conjure up Westerns and radio culture), melancholy, and a slightly sinister tone, with unexplained creaks and blasts occurring while a large pendulum marks time across the frame. It is the ability to sustain all of these associations via the welding of seemingly incongruous objects and landscapes that makes O’Neill’s film a complex yet mesmeric experience.

"1001 FILMS" COUNTDOWN; #61 - ALI ZAOUA, PRINCE OF THE STREETS

2012-01-26T00:01:00.000+11:00

ALI ZAOUA, PRINCE OF THE STREETS (Nabil Ayouch; Morocco/ Tunisia/ France/ Belgium; 2000)

[deleted after the 4th edition]

The “1001 Movies” guide states that this film, about three street children who are trying to bury a dead friend in a manner befitting his fantasy of being a sailor, is “powerful” due to the “deft juggling of [the] character’s harsh lives with both humour and unabashed sentimentality.” In fact, it seems the director, Nabil Ayouch, “wants to break your heart, is determined to do so, and succeeds.”

Hmmm.

If heart-break is to occur, it would not be due to a harsh depiction of pre-teen homelessness in Morocco. It’s not completely sanitised, there’s still a layer of grime involved – sniffing glue to fend off hunger, suggestions of child prostitution and rape – but it’s easy to forget the dire world these characters are supposed to inhabit. Somehow, poverty and the struggle to survive seem to melt away from the story, leaving a more romantic residue based around the bonds of friendship forged between these boys. And perhaps that is where this heart-break is supposed to come from – the resilience and tenacity of friendship, all tied up neatly at the end of the film when the three boys all sing together in memory of their deceased comrade.

But why such a near-dirtless, ‘unabashed sentimental’ vision of homelessness in Casablanca? Was the potential for truly harsh ‘realities’ subdued because of funding from European sources, thus shaping a ‘cleaner’ story for fear of losing important financial backing? Compared to the bleakness and violence of Pixote, a Brazilian street-child film made 19 years earlier, this film has a remarkably saccharine flavour. It’s well-lit and brightly coloured, replete with big primary-coloured childlike animations of Ali’s dreams to cunningly tug at susceptible hearts. It’s interesting that animation was chosen as the vehicle for depicting a street child’s dream of escape – it provides a simplistic short-cut to convey the yearning for other places. Ayouch here has chosen to opt for a more pedestrian path to depicting the inner world of fantasies, blatantly painting these dreams of escape directly into the film, rather than relying on a potentially more complex approach where the desire to escape remains an inner world. Animation appears to be the only solution Ayouch could come up with to show the dreams of the deceased Ali entering into the minds of his friends.

In the same year, and not too far geographically, Pedro Costa was making In Vanda’s Room in Portugal. This film is a near-total interior film, compared with the bright streets of Casablanca, and the sense of poverty strikes a markedly different chord. However, for some odd reason, I can’t help wondering what Ali Zaoua might have been like if it had been shot with a rhythm and visual style similar to Costa’s. Hmmm.