Postcards from Melbourne Film Festival 68.5
(from my living room cinema in Perth)
Friday 7 August 2020
Despite the coronavirus pandemic and the current lockdown in Melbourne, MIFF 68.5 made a brave decision to go ahead as a virtual festival this year and stream a reduced program online. Tickets were available at various prices including free events; most films were available for viewing throughout the festival, with some more limited viewing windows for special screenings.
There’s a difference between ‘watching’ and ‘seeing’ a film which is not merely verbal. The difference is not just between the small and big screen, but between being at home and going to the cinema, with all that the latter entails: going somewhere to have an experience at a certain place and time; having that experience under certain conditions, including specific interior architecture and seating, dimmed lights, and seeing a film as a continuous experience (or rather as an event that unfolds regardless of my coming and going or even my presence); and above all, the public and collective nature of that experience. All of these conditions make the cinema a kind of theatre, and a cinema screening a kind of performance (for the audience as well as the projectionist and other cinema staff); going to the cinema is more like going to a concert or play than listening to recorded music, watching TV or downloading content online.
I watched the opening night film Kelly Reichardt's First Cow in my hastily improvised home cinema in Perth (desktop computer screen on chair in front of sofa). Notwithstanding my previous reflections, and a certain amount of misgivings and even lowered expectations, the experience felt in no way diminished, only different, in comparison with being in Melbourne (as I normally would be) and seeing it with an audience (and possibly friends) on the big screen. Despite the limitations of the format, I felt grateful for being able to connect, however remotely, with a festival I love and a city I still call home. In some way it alleviated the strangeness (including a kind of survivor’s guilt) I feel about living free-range here in Perth, isolated (as ever) from the rest of the country, and the world – for the present, at least. What follows is therefore as much a review of this experience as of the films themselves.
My older daughter (currently living under lockdown in Melbourne) recently introduced me to Reichardt's work: quiet, simple storytelling with luminously restrained performances and a rigorous use of landscape, setting, cinematography and sound as essential elements of narrative rather than ornamentation. It’s based on a novel by Portland Oregon writer Jonathan Raymond (who also wrote the stories and screenplays for Reichardt’s earlier films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy) and set in the Pacific Northwest (where most of her films take place) during the early years of white settlement in the 1820s.
The story concerns an unlikely bond that forms between a shy Jewish cook (sensitively played John Magarro) and an enterprising Chinese immigrant (a more disciplined performance by Orion Lee) who defraud a local landowner (Toby Jones) by stealing milk from his cow to use as a secret ingredient for the small cakes they make and sell. As such, it’s a kind of buddy movie that also offers a counter-foundational myth about capitalism and colonisation which quietly celebrates tolerance and comradeship (as well as an alternative take on masculinity as not necessarily competitive or even sexualised).
George Roy Hill’s late 60s/early 70s revisionist western/gangster buddy movies Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting are obvious precursors, but Reichardt’s style is quieter and more minimalist; her historical and social reconstructions more scrupulous; and her protagonists more unassuming in their pursuit of ‘prosperity’. Like her other films (most recently the epic Meek’s Crossing and the more intimate Certain Women) First Cow speaks (among other things) of the importance of friendship: between human beings, across race and class, and between humans and other animals.
Watching online from my living room made me feel deeply connected with friends, family, colleagues and loved ones across the continent and even on the other side of the world. This will pass, I silently told them, and myself. This will pass.
Postcard 2
Sunday 9 August 2020
Yesterday afternoon at MIFF home-cinema I watched Boys State, an engrossing documentary by San Francisco-based filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBain about a civic program in Texas run by the American Legion in which teenage boys ‘learn about democracy’ by being randomly grouped into two political parties and then running for office. The film focuses on four boys (one Latino, one black, and two white – one of whom is disabled) who became its lead characters during the shoot.
Released in January 2020, it’s a tightly structured observational work with no editorial voiceover or soundtrack score but refreshingly candid direct-to-camera commentary by the four leads about their motivations, experiences and epiphanies (which makes them more revealing subjects than professional ‘adult’ politicians). It also presents a microcosm of pre-pandemic Trump-era America: the strengths and flaws of the two-party system; the polarising prevalence of guns, abortion and immigration as hot-button issues; and the micro-politics of popularity, class, race and masculinity. The arc of history may bend slowly towards justice, but the systems of power and privilege (as well as human psychology) also have a remarkable propensity to ‘snap back’.
The film also made me think of Julia Gillard’s 2013 speech about ‘men in blue ties' and the cycle of leadership– a reminder prompted by a recent showing of #thatwomanjulia, an incisive dance-theatre work-in-development by local Perth artists Natalie Allen and Sally Richardson. Wherever we are, whoever we are, whatever medium we’re working in, we’re all on the same planet; even if – because of class, race, gender, age, disability or geography – we’re emphatically not ‘all in this together’.
Postcard 3
Friday 14 August 2020
Last night I watched the most remarkable film so far in my living-room experience of MIFF 68.5: Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s mesmerising Vitalina Varela.
Shot over the course of a year in a vanishing district of Lisbon, Costa’s stylised documentary-fiction is the most recent testimony to his long-term collaboration with members of a community of Cape Verdean immigrants playing versions of themselves. The bare-bones story concerns a woman arriving in the cargo-hold of a plane only to learn that her husband (who abandoned the home they were building together in Cape Verde and emigrated to Lisbon decades earlier) has recently (and mysteriously) died.
This lapidary narrative (briefly recounted in a monologue by Varela in her previous film with Costa) here becomes the mythic framework for a film that (even in its making) is a kind of ritual of failed mourning and the impossibility of reconciliation. As such, the film recalls Freud’s essay on mourning and melancholia, as well as Walter Benjamin’s thesis on Baroque tragedy as a form of ‘mourning-play’.
Costa’s camera never moves, and his shadowy, highly burnished images (mostly lit by refracted light) resemble carefully staged Baroque paintings – framed by an architecture of ruin – in which people are often motionless, like tableaux vivants or still lives, or from which they emerge and shuffle, stumble or drag themselves across the frame like zombies or effigies of themselves. (Jacques Tourneur’s 1940s B-grade horror-noir I Walked with a Zombie also came to mind.)
Nevertheless (unlike Tourneur, but more in the vein of Bresson) Costa gives his dispossessed characters a haunting beauty and dignity, like figures in a passion play, and grants them (on screen at least) a kind of redemption.
Friday 14 August 2020 (2nd post)
In an inspired piece of MIFF programming, Costa’s film has a fascinating counterpart in The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, Chilean surrealist Raúl Ruiz’s long lost and unfinished 1967 first feature, which I watched in my living room last Friday, but am only now coming to terms with.
Ruiz’s film is ‘about’ a man haunted by his dead wife – mostly in the form of mysteriously appearing and disappearing brunette wigs. It was shot in black-and-white without a soundtrack and abandoned after the director fled Chile following Pinochet’s military coup in 1973 and rediscovered in a theatre basement in 2016 (Ruiz himself died in 2011), but apparently no screenplay remains.
The film has been restored and ‘completed’ by his widow and collaborator Valeria Sarmiento. In an intriguing experiment, she added dialogue with the help of lip-readers and voice actors, as well as a score by Chilean modernist composer and fellow Ruiz collaborator Jorge Arriagado. Somewhat more controversially (but arguably in keeping with Ruiz’s surrealism), Sarmiento has also added another thirty minutes of footage so that scenes from what now effectively becomes the first half are replayed backwards in reverse order, thus providing a form of appropriately anti-narrative closure.
Having previously seen and loved two films by Ruiz on the big screen at MIFF over the years (his oneiric adaption of Proust’s Time Regained, and a labyrinthine four-and-a-half hour adaptation of a 19th Portuguese novel, Mysteries of Lisbon), I found this early work (and Sarmiento’s ‘completion’) a surprisingly moving relic for contemplation. In retrospect, after seeing Vitalina Varela, the two films echo each other (in almost Proustian fashion) in a complex interweaving of personal and political trauma.
Varela, Valeria. Time regained, indeed.
Saturday 22 August 2020
In another astute (and generous) piece of MIFF programming, Rolf de Heer’s Dingo and Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (both free to download for the duration of the festival) are two vastly different films that nonetheless also echoed each other when I watched them earlier this week in my living room cinema. This is not just because of their titles, or the fact that they were shot within a year of each other in the early 90s, but also because both are highly stylised small-town fables (or perhaps more accurately a fairy tale in the case of Dingo) set in remote landscapes with almost mythical qualities (especially in the case of Hyenas).
Dingo is a relatively early de Heer film from 1991 featuring a youthful Colin Friels, a luminous Helen Buday and Miles Davis in his only onscreen role as an actor. Shot in Meekathara and Sandstone in the mid-west region of Western Australia, the familiarity of the landscape (as well as some of the local cast members) also had a personal resonance for me.
Despite a somewhat flimsy and implausible screenplay, the film also resonated because of a pervasive sense of alienation, frustration and yearning in relation to his environment on the part of the main character John (a jazz trumpeter and dingo-trapper energetically played by Friels). These feelings are first aroused in John’s childhood by the arrival of a charismatic outsider in the form of Davis, who makes his somewhat surreal first appearance emerging (along with his band) from a plane that lands in the middle of the desert just outside the town. They are temporarily assuaged when John (and the film) take flight in a final half hour of pure fantasy and he goes to Paris for a weekend to play jazz with Davis on a kind of artistic fling – before returning to outback small town married life in what must be one of the most unconvincing anticlimaxes ever committed to celluloid.
To some extent the film anticipates Shirley Barrett’s more understated and accomplished Love Serenade later in the 90s. Playing a barely disguised version of himself, Davis completely overshadows proceedings whenever he appears (apparently no one on the set knew what he was going to say or do from one take to the next). This is especially the case in the Paris scenes, where his sphinx-like pronouncements and almost inaudible rasping delivery reminded me strangely of Marlon Brando in the closing act of Apocalypse Now.
It’s also worth noting that Davis and his fellow musicians are the only non-white characters in a film that completely expunges any Aboriginal presence from the mythical version of Australia that the film presents. There’s something strangely poignant (and revealing) about the way a young white outback small town Australian boy responds to a Black musician (and Black music) from a European metropolis on the other side of the planet. It spoke to me deeply about how (and why) white Australian culture still yearns for a sense of identity and belonging.
Postcard 6
Saturday 22 August 2020 (2nd post)
Hyenas is a work altogether on another scale. Only the second (and tragically final) feature by Mambéty (who died in 1998 aged 53), it’s a Senegalese adaptation of Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit.
The play is about a wealthy woman who returns to the town she was once cast out from in disgrace, and who offers to put her money back into the community if they agree to kill the man who disgraced her. Mambéty’s version is set in a reconstructed and fictionalised version of the village where he grew up on the outskirts of Dakar; and the tragicomic tone and satirical reach of the play are amplified and extended to encompass not only bourgeois corruption and hypocrisy but the entire project of neocolonialism and global consumerism.
Alongside its politics however Hyenas is also an uncompromising and exuberant artistic statement, visually and sonically rich but as austere in form as a folktale or parable. It combines traditional and contemporary African and European sensibilities in a hybrid style that’s (possibly) only a heightened version of the contradictions of everyday Senegalese life and culture. Like Pedro Costa in Vitalina Varela, Mambérty used non-professional actors; but unlike Costa he insisted on only using them once, in a single film, so that they uniquely embodied their roles; he also had them play fictional characters rather than versions of themselves. As such his strategy resembles the way Pasolini used non-actors in his film adaptations of St Matthew or the Marquis de Sade, or Caravaggio used life models in his Biblical narrative paintings. Conversely, Costa’s use of non-actors is more like de Heer’s use of Miles Davis in Dingo; although unlike Costa’s non-celebrities, Davis was arguably always performing himself, onscreen and off.
I’ve not seen Mambéty’s other films, including his debut (and only other feature) the acclaimed Touki Bouki (made 20 years earlier); indeed, I’ve seen shamefully little sub-Saharan African cinema. Even without this context however Hyenas is an enthralling and ultimately devastating work by a clearly visionary artist, and I’m hugely grateful to MIFF for streaming this recently restored masterpiece.
Monday 24 August 2020
My MIFF living room experience came to a close on the weekend with two highly personal documentaries about art, politics and place made by two very different female artists.
German lesbian visual artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s Paris Calligrammes is a thematic assemblage of home-movie, archival and contemporary footage and images narrated in voiceover by Ottinger herself, and covering her years living and working in Paris in the 1960s. I watched it on the sofa with my younger Perth-based daughter; we visited Paris together ten years ago when she was in France on a high school exchange program (and stayed in the aptly named Hotel du 7ème Art).
The title of the film refers to the name of a bookshop in Saint-Germain-des-Prés which was Ottinger’s entrée to avant-garde intellectual and artistic life when she arrived in Paris in 1962. The bookshop was owned by Fritz Picard, a German Jewish refugee and collector, and frequented by an older generation of (mostly male) post-War artists and thinkers – including key figures in Dadaism, the movement that seemingly shaped Ottinger’s own aesthetic and politics most decisively. A haunting montage sequence early in the film accompanies a sound recording of German satirist Walter Mehring reading an acerbic poem aloud at the bookshop which commemorates writers who were killed or driven to suicide during the War and now ‘lie in German fields’.
The word ‘calligrammes’ comes from the title of a book of poems by Apollinaire (who was another habitué at the bookshop), and refers to the figurative arrangement of words, letters, punctuation marks, spaces and other elements of typography. Ottinger’s film is itself a kind of calligram or collage-portrait of 1960s Paris. It’s also a fascinating introduction to the work of the artist herself, including tantalising glimpses of her films, which she began making after her return to Germany in the 70s, and which appear playfully at odds with the (mostly male and generally dour) output of New German Cinema.
Above all the film is a hymn to – and lament for – a city and an era, in all its contradictions. Most telling for me was the section that dealt with the massacre of Algerian protesters by Parisian police in 1961 on the orders of Maurice Papon, the head of police who also participated in the deportation of over 1600 Jews to concentration camps during World War II. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. The massacre has never been formally investigated despite hundreds of protesters being beaten to death and thrown into the Seine, but I remember seeing a small commemorative plaque on a bridge over the river when I visited the city with my daughter ten years ago. Graphic footage and stills of the atrocity were followed by images of Genet in rehearsals for his play The Screens, which was produced at the Odéon Theatre in response to the massacre and the Algerian War (though not until 1966). The film also deals with the upheavals of May 68, which promised so much but were brutally crushed, disintegrated into chaos and ultimately delivered so little (it seems no coincidence that Ottinger left Paris and returned to Germany shortly afterwards).
Nevertheless, the film also conveys an abiding sense of excitement and possibility (the subtitle of Apollinaire’s book was ‘Poems of Peace and War’). There are wonderful sections on Paris nightlife, the explosion of Pop Art, and a tranquil reverie devoted to the Bibliothèque Nationale using archival and contemporary footage of readers and scholars having rare books and prints delivered to their desks and slowly turning the pages, lost in contemplation. There are also images of museums and galleries (not to mention the city itself) blissfully devoid of crowds in the era before mass tourism. As my father (himself an Austrian Jewish refugee who fled to Paris in 1938 before emigrating to Australia) used to say: Où sont les neiges d’antan?
Postcard 8
Monday 24 August 2020 (final post)
The Giverny Document (Single Channel) – which I watched alone on the final night of the festival, two hours behind Melbourne and with only a narrow viewing window remaining to me because of the time difference) – is very different kind of ‘documentary’, but one similarly informed by a highly personal and political aesthetic.
Ja’Tovia Gary is a Brooklyn-based African American artist and filmmaker from a younger generation than Ottinger. Her practise likewise involves montage but employs video, found internet footage and a startling use of direct animation (inscribed directly onto the surface of used or blank film). In this case, the work intersplices heterogenous elements unlinked by any narration. These include material from an earlier film, Giverny I: Négresse Impériale (in which the artist inserts herself both clothed and naked in HD video footage of Monet’s garden in Giverny); street interviews with black women in Harlem responding to the question ‘Do you feel safe?’; Facebook Live video and audio posted by Philando Castille’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds immediately after his fatal shooting by police when they were pulled over because of a damaged tail-light; archival footage of Black Panther Fred Hampton (who was also shot and killed by police while he was in his bed during a pre-dawn raid) talking about education and black sovereignty; unidentified military footage of a drone strike on a targeted vehicle; and (perhaps most unsettling of all) concert footage of Nina Simone at the Monteaux Jazz Festival in 1976. The last sees the great musician and activist delivering a tortured version of the famously cheesy and inarticulate pop song ‘Feelings’, in the course of which she variously sings in a robotic, broken or almost inaudible voice, bursts into furiously overwrought cadenzas on the piano, or stops and exhorts the audience to clap or join in – at one point exclaiming: ‘Goddam! I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like this!’
Gary’s film (like Simone’s performance) is not so much to be understood as experienced. Her use of direct animation (ranging from brightly coloured stains and scratches to leaves and flowers pressed directly onto the celluloid) repeatedly interrupts and defaces the found and original footage. In fact the entire work expresses an energy or force – perhaps even a creative violence (or counter-violence) – in response to the violence perpetrated against black bodies (and black women’s bodies in particular) not only by police, the military, capitalism or men in general, but by cultural history and even culture itself (or at least white capitalist patriarchal culture, however we choose to define that). The ‘safe’ enclosure of this culture is represented by Monet’s garden; Gary’s counter-invasion of this ‘safe space’ might be described (in all-too theoretical language) as an irruption of the real into the closure of representation.
Nonetheless, as with Paris Calligrammes, The Giverny Document is also shot through with beauty, and even (dare one say?) hope. In the end I found both films – like the entire experience of watching MIFF 68.5 in my living room – at once a window onto the past and present (with all their nostalgia and trauma, their reveries and atrocities), and a window into the future, which is always unknown, and therefore always pregnant with possibilities.
