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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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.